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madmadmilk · 3 years

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thinking about Black Widow's progression of outfits in the MCU;;

(disclaimer: these are just my thoughts and opinions lol i don’t know anything about anything. long rambly post AND SPOILERS ahead >>) 🔪❣️💥

^^^ i'm sure we've seen a million and one comic book covers for black widow, good and bad. empowering and demeaning. sexy and s-e-x-y. – we can love her story, character, strength, but we can't ignore how it's been visually portrayed to us. let's talk about how it's taken over a decade for the MCU (and artists AND fans) to let their [most] famous femme fatale stand on her own two feet. (even tho she's been kicking our ass in a circle the entire time)

we love a bombshell, dynamite, fury of a woman– but let's walk and talk through the uprising, downfall and redesign of strong ~sexy~ women in superhero movies >>>

⭐️ first appearance; 'Iron Man 2'

ok, i loved her first-ever entrance into the MCU– i love the modest white blouse and wide leg pants. i like the 'pretty' and mysterious approach. i loved that they showed her kicking happy's ass, and pepper and tony's delight/concern. i love her seemingly calm and cool composure. it was exciting to see a woman who never loses– and it wasn't even her own movie! but... as the movie goes on, the 'sexy' dial maxes tf out. immediately after she shows off her strength in the ring, tony finds a compromising photo of her..... she gets to be cunning, strong, focused... but unfortunately, this movie sets a precedence for all her appearances moving forward:

she gets to be a heroine who never loses a physical fight, but will ultimately lose her personal charm/character growth to fit the role of 'sexy, tight-laced super spy eye candy'.

>>while pepper is there sometimes, maria hill sometimes, and other female 'side' characters, she remains the only reoccurring heroine in the spotlight for many movies, and it's unfortunate that this is the role natasha played for several fucking movies.

(bad bonus: this scene makes me want to rip my hair out. pepper is established as a strong working woman, feminine and unshakable. she dresses professionally and composes herself as such– but lining these women up side-by-side like this makes me wanna break things... esp when they let nat wear pants earlier in the movie... UGH)

UGH! i know there's a layer of 'empowerment' to see working women looking posh and classy, but the lack of variety and awareness didn't age well IMHO. women are more than this.............. SIGH.

⭐️ let's talk super suits >>

^^ here is her first notable appearances in 'Iron Man 2' and 'Avengers'. they set the tone for her next outings, and for better or worse, most audiences will associate her with these looks in the forefront of their mind: curled red hair, black suit; unzipped, widow belt, and an unwavering stare. 👁👄👁

hmm, black is always good– practical, sexy, dynamic. i like that most of her skin is covered, i like the belts and holsters, and that her hair always changes in each movie. it's fun, and reflects how well she can adapt to her surroundings. i think how her hair stays untouched adds to show how composed and put together she is, no matter what situation. she's fighting aliens?? ok but her wig looks great. 💅 << personally, i like it. lol anwaysss....

the biggest problems lie with the material and fit of her fucking suit. i understand 'tight' and 'form-fitting' can be 'flattering' but both of these suits are JUST, latex or nylon or something. they shine on round girlish parts, then hike up cracks and crevices,,, ugh, while we can argue all day that we're not paying attention to that– it builds up and: it's demeaning. for the character, for the 26-28 year old scarlett johansson, for the young people watching their (1) piece of representation.... it's just insulting that it's happened more than once, and continues to happen in the series. natasha doesn't get to balance her appearance, and neither do we.

all lot of the men [in these movies] get capes to cover their ass, armor to make them look more beefy while covering them, or sweeping shots of their heroic ACTIONS– but black widow gets shots of her ass. her face being grabbed. hips swaying. and fan edits of her suit unzipped– AUGH! her suit (while not HER fault) made people feel like they could do whatever they want to her– and these movies didn't do anything to protect her.

💥💥💥💥💥 AND THAT'S FUCKED UP! 💥💥💥💥💥💥

like... look at her solo shots and how they 'market' her character:::

?????? at first glance, sometimes the suits look fine. but most times they bring me pain. the suits are already hella tight IRL, and then they go and tighten things even more in the editing process. (to look even more form fitting than the movie itself)

they taper her waist, they smooth out wrinkles– and while it makes a lovely 'silhouette' it's just so contrived. it make our unconscious mind go, hair, boobs, ass– and that's it. they don't give her an ounce of nuance until maybe the bottom row of both images

once they let her look away from the camera, let her change her hair to get more practical, and start to add layered designs, belts, and some fucking room to breathe to her suit, she starts to gain a personality outside of 'femme fatale'. (it's not perfect lol) but like!! look at how even the display of her weapons change in the bottom row!! that's dynamic, empowering, like she's about to kick down a door instead of seduce us!! her stance shows her confidence, her intimidation, her pride! she's PISSED. woo!!

but oh, jfc, the whole top row is just BW wearing legging material– no protection, no pockets, and if she bends over we can see everything. << so sadly relatable. but unlike us, she's not going to the gym or to get groceries or lounge around the house, she's fighting armies, aliens, robots??? sooooo, why is she wearing legging-material armor??? next to iron man?? thor?? a bullet-proof hulk?? what???

lol don't even argue that it's some kind of MCU-tech. because as more women show up [in other movies], gamora, nebula, the wasp, captain marvel, valkyrie, etc.... they get the nuance, the care, and the attention to their characters and ability outside of just their 'body.'

those women got to fight alongside the men (or on their own) and not be diminished in anyway, visually. (ik ik it's not perfect) and in the case of gotg and captain marvel, there were other women there to fit different 'shoes'. slowly, the 'burden' of being the sole female starts to feel like an 'dated' problem. ha ha ha.... >> jk, it's still a huge problem.

but black widow has been alone on the silver screen for so long. bearing 'the burden' of our expectation, as fans, as women, as casual viewers. completely capable, surrounded by her boys, growing stronger, but still totally alone.

⭐️ sooo let's get into the black widow movie and the simple solution:

JUST..... ADD MORE WOMEN. JUXTAPOSE. YOU KNOW... GIVE US MORE??

wowww it only took us from 2010 to 2021 to figure this out for her. black widow can have her sexy form fitting suit as long as you show us that there are other women who all have CHOICES. let us know that this is her CHOICE, not just a forced archetype onto the ONLY woman on screen. damn!!!

the widows, although under control of a grubby worm, still have a variety of suits. the material looks more substantial, there's more armor padding, there's a sleeved and sleeveless option. their hair is alllllll different– it's so simple.

like in real fucking life: we all dress and present ourselves differently..

even with movie magic, it's the most simple flash of representation. just show us MORE. give us sensitive, misguided, heroic, cowardly, strong women. give us things to look at! think about!! and wow, clothing can also be used to show character growth like this:

when yelena has 'no choice' she wears the standard widow suit. it's black, it's substantial, it's close-fitting. but once she's free– she picks up a vest. a vest with pockets! functionality, color, and a layer of goofy-ness. it's character building and also endearing. even the new suit she borrows is looser fit, it's still combat-ready and kinda mirrors the fit of many male heros; captain america, falcon, ant-man, hawkeye. it's flattering and dynamic without ONLY highlighting her 'body.' bro lol she is absolutely LETHAL

and!! she gets to be a contrasting point for natasha! (or them for each other)

nat gets to be all moody in 'typical' covert spy gear: black, leather, skinny jeans, heeled boots. while yelena has a henley tanktop, a huuuuge men's blazer and black jeans. her hair stays frizzy and lived in, while nat is pretty glossy. when you give us two women (or like-characters), you give us context! information on their personality, their preferences! their banter, their temperament! they get to play off each other, build, grow, glow!! it is so REFRESHING!!

we get to see nat's lazer focus, that she's still a huuuge threat even to her own sisters. she's a person who pretends to keep it all together even tho she's fractured inside. she has hiding places all around the world, she's not afraid to get straight to the point. giving her her own movie DID that. giving her other women and characters GAVE her that.

(can't add any more photos but some honorable mention moments):

young nat with blue hair. yellow baseball tee, long jean shorts, red converses – she's a bright young girl. she doesn't care, she wants to run around! she's a kid! she gets dirty, she's stubborn, she has a personality!

nat on the run; seeing her in a hoodie and 'normal' pulled back hair is so sweet. it's so non-engaging while being relatable and understandable. she's on the run, she's hiding. her wet hair in the RV, that's just so normal.

nat in the white suit; fits immaculately without being skin-tight like her previous suits. even tho white is MORE exposing, it was an awesome focal point and contrast to her hair. i love the two lil braids she had in the front. all of it felt tasteful while still highlighting how gorgeous and strong she is

nat in her black suit. the hair in braids again!! (all the characters had awesome bradied hairstyles). it's soo much personality! it's so much fun!! it's practical while giving a flair of femininity/ visual excitement. i fuckin love the designs on the suit too, it's engaging. it's not just a black latex sex suit lol. finally. wah!!

blond nat; lol ok i'm still not a fan of her blonde eyebrows but i'll forgive her cos she did alla that with damn box dye lol. and she's such a dork for wearing the vest immediately lol. but!! it shows us how sentimental she CAN be. don't forget that she's been wearing hawkeye's necklace the whole time!! she fucking CARES!

honestly though, giving her her own movie let us enjoy HER without even thinking of the suit/appearance. without giving her the weight of 'the ONLY female hero.' we get to just watch a bad ass spy be a bad ass spy. we resonate and relate to her story. we feel for her. we watch her win like she always has. like the boys always have. it's so simple.

while the respect and homage is long overdue, it is still welcomed. her suits and scarlett johansson are a bit of a sore point for me, but i appreciate the culmination of the efforts.

black widow, the character and concept, is another step towards progress of women in [action] films. bad ass women can have characteristics that don't circulate around their sex appeal or physical appearance. it just sucks it's taken a decade to drill that in.

that all being said, with optimism and excitement, i can't wait to support the new heroes that will rise from these changes!

clothing and costuming may seem frivolous, but in the case of the Black Widow legacy and Black Widow (2021) they've finally handled her with care. they captured the essence of a steely woman who cares more than anyone knows, only realized too late (thematically and to the fans). so tragically delicious, but only when viewed as a whole.

phew!

and that concludes my lecture for today. thank you for reading!! let me know your thoughts and feelings. tomorrow's MCU topic will be, "how not to fridge your female characters// how doing that does more harm than good."

#wow this one is long lol #let me know if you wanna see these for any other characters i have lots of thoughts #black widow #black widow movie #natasha romanoff #black widow spoilers #avengers #marvel #mcu #scarlett johansson #yelena belova #florence pugh #spoilers #spoiler #madwatch #personal #madmadmilk

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artist-ellen · 5 months

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Whatever could I be reposting these for? I guess you’ll just have to wait and see…

I would say it’s weird to look at the gap in years from there to here but 2022 was pretty fiercely dedicated to the Game of Thrones redesigns. Well, I guess there was also modern Belle…. But the Tale as Old as Time dress is the one that matters in reposting so… that’s the only hint you’ll get!

I am the artist! Do not post without permission & credit! Thank you! Come visit me over on: instagram.com/ellenartistic or tiktok: @ellenartistic

#beauty and the beast #redesigning disney princesses #redesigning heroines #ellenart #character design #costume design #digital illustration #historically inspired #historically inspired disney princesses #historically accurate disney #redesigning belle #the great belle redesign #belle #historical fashion

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tcm · 3 years

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Doris Day Was Far More Than Virginal By Susan King

Oscar Levant once quipped: “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”

The actor-composer-pianist-writer starred with Day in her first film, ROMANCE ON THE HIGH SEAS (‘48), in which she played a bubbly singer. And it is true that she played 30-something-year-old virgins beginning with PILLOW TALK (‘59), the first film she made with Rock Hudson. But Levant’s comment diminishes the former band singer’s accomplishments as an actress and ignores the fact that her characters were quite modern and progressive. In fact, you could call her an early feminist.

During her “Golden Age,” which I define as between LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME (‘55) and SEND ME NO FLOWERS (‘64), she played successful career women at a time when there weren’t that many being portrayed on screen. In the George Abbott-Stanley Donen cotton candy-colored musical THE PAJAMA GAME (‘57), she’s a worker in a pajama factory, a member of the union leadership who doesn’t take any guff from her bosses. In the delightful romantic comedy TEACHER’S PET (‘58), she’s a successful journalist and college professor; in PILLOW TALK, a flourishing interior decorator; and two years later in LOVER COME BACK (‘61), she goes toe to toe with Hudson as a rival Madison Avenue ad executive. And, in the often-neglected comedy IT HAPPENED TO JANE (‘59), she’s a widowed mother of two who takes on the meaner-than-mean head of a railroad (Ernie Kovacs) when the company causes the death of 300 lobsters she was shipping.

Day’s characters were also incredibly feisty. In PILLOW TALK, the only film for which she received a Best Actress Oscar nomination, she learns that the man she’s fallen for, the shy handsome Texas Rex Stetson, is actually the womanizing composer she shares her party phone line with, so she redesigns his apartment into a gaudy mess reflecting his lothario ways. Speaking of lothario, Day’s leading men often played long-term bachelors-serial daters, like Clark Gable in TEACHER’S PET and Cary Grant in THAT TOUCH OF MINK (‘62). Her characters fall in love with them but won’t become their latest conquests. It’s actually the men who succumb to her charms and give up their womanizing ways when they fall in love with her.

Still, the virgin quote harmed her legacy. “People don’t take her seriously,” said former L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan in 2012. “It was a lifetime battle for Marilyn Monroe to be taken seriously; that was a battle she won. Audrey Hepburn was taken seriously. People are reluctant to take Doris Day seriously. It’s too bad.” Cari Beauchamp, a film historian and writer who specializes in the history of women in film, told me in 2012 that when she talks to people about Day “they tend to say she played the girl next door. And you look at her movies, particularly at the time of those films and she wasn’t the girl next door. She always had a backbone.”

Day was a popular singer with Les Brown and His Band of Renown, scoring her first No. 1 in 1945 with “Sentimental Journey.” Hollywood soon came knocking on her door, and she answered in the Warner Bros.’ Technicolor musical ROMANCE ON THE HIGH SEAS, directed by Michael Curtiz, in which she introduced the Best Song Oscar nominee “It’s Magic.” Not only was she adorable and a breath of fresh air, Day seemed totally at ease in her big screen bow.

“I wanted to be in films,” she told me in 2012. “I wasn’t nervous. I just felt ‘I’m here. I am supposed to be doing this.’ I was so lucky to have such terrific actors and directors. Everything was different and everything to me was great.”

Her films at Warner Brothers were a mixed bag. She got to demonstrate her dramatic chops reuniting with Curtiz for YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN (‘50), starring Lauren Bacall and Kirk Douglas. And I also loved the Booth Tarkington-inspired musical comedies ON MOONLIGHT BAY (‘51) and BY THE LIGHT OF THE SILVERY MOON (‘53). Turan loves her musical-comedy CALAMITY JANE (‘53), in which she has a field day as the famed Wild West heroine, because “her energy is kind of irrepressible.” Day also introduced the Oscar-winning song, “Secret Love” in the freewheeling classic.

But she really came into her own when she went to MGM to do the musical drama LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME, in which she gave a tour de force performance as torch singer Ruth Etting, who has a particularly volatile marriage to a gangster (James Cagney). But she was totally ignored by the Academy and the Golden Globes. The film was nominated for six Oscars, winning for Best Motion Picture Story, with only Cagney, brilliant as Marty “the Gimp” Snyder, getting nominated for his performance.

Turan described LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME as a “provocative film. It almost defines a kind of thing that you would say: Doris Day would never do something like that. But when we say that we are thinking of the cliché Doris Day, not thinking of the actual actress who made interesting choices and interesting films.” Day also counted the hit, directed by Charles Vidor, as a career highlight. “I really loved working with Jim,” she said of Cagney, who had previously appeared with her in the disappointing THE WEST POINT STORY (‘50). “The wonderful thing is that when you have someone like him to play opposite, it’s very exciting. You just feel so much from a man like that.”

She didn’t do research into Etting’s life but went by the script and “just how I felt and what I listened to. You react. It was so well-written. It just comes out of you. I don’t know how to explain it.” But it probably wasn’t hard. Like Etting, who endured abuse at the hands of her husband, the four-time married Day was mercilessly beaten by her one husband, musician Al Jordan, the father of her only child, Terry Melcher.

Mastering drama and musicals, Day was also a fabulous comedian. Just look at her expression when Gable, as a seasoned newspaper editor, kisses her for the first time in TEACHER’S PET. She crosses her eyes and is literally weak in the knees. Or when she realizes in THAT TOUCH OF MINK that Grant wants her to share his bed when they go to a resort. It’s brilliant. And of course, she and Hudson had a chemistry few actors get to share on screen. Ironically, Day admitted she didn’t know who Hudson was when they were cast together in PILLOW TALK, even though he had been a major star for most of that decade and earned an Oscar nomination for GIANT (‘56). “Isn’t that amazing?,” she said laughing. “I thought he was just starting out. I didn’t know about the films he had made. I just loved working with him. We laughed and laughed.”

The quality of her films declined after SEND ME NO FLOWERS. Her third husband and manager, Marty Melcher, put her in poorly received comedies such as DO NOT DISTURB (‘65) and CAPRICE (‘67). He squandered her money and signed her up to do the CBS sitcom The Doris Day Show without her knowledge before his death in 1968. The series ran from 1968 to 1973.

After the series, Day went to Carmel, co-owned a pet friendly hotel there and concentrated on animal welfare. In 1985-86, she did the pet-forward TV talk show Doris Day and Friends, best remembered for guest Rock Hudson, who was suffering from AIDS. She admitted Hollywood never lured her out of retirement. “No one really said that – ‘Oh, come back.’ I was just here.’”

#Doris Day #feminism #female sexuality #musicals #comedy #James Cagney #Rock Hudson #TCM #Turner Classic Movies #Susan King

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vgdensetsu · 3 years

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Former Namco programmer Yoshihiro Kishimoto (Pac-Land, Baraduke, Family Stadium, Mappy MSX, Toy Pop) talked about his career with Florent Gorges. Here is a quick summary

Earlier today (July 3rd, 2021), video game historian Florent Gorges talked for almost 2 hours with former Namco programmer (and sometime graphic designer) Yoshihiro Kishimoto / 岸本好弘 about his childhood, Namco and some of the first games he developed there, namely the MSX version of Mappy, Pac-Land, Baraduke and Family Stadium. Since the video is 1) full of interesting information 2) in French 3) not yet subtitled, I decided to make a quick summary. Of course, if you speak French, you can watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMGi2tWIA0E Yoshihiro Kishimoto studied programming at a time when it was still uncommon and in high demand in the job market, which gave him the luxury of being able to choose between different companies. He applied to Casio, Nintendo (which was not looking for programmers at the time, but rather hardware engineers) and Sega (which was willing to hire him), but chose Namco because the people there seemed more relaxed (Namco employees wore jeans and T-shirts instead of the traditional suit and tie). He joined the company in April 1982.

Pac-Land (Arcade) Kishimoto believes that, following the success of the Pac-Man TV series in the US, it was Bally Midway who asked Namco to develop a game for the American audience. The anime was not broadcast in Japan. So videos of the series were sent to the developers for inspiration. Namco developed a powerful hardware to have a visual close to the series and to be able to display elements in the foreground, which is also present in the series (trees that are displayed in front of Pac-Man, etc.). The game was apparently very successful in Japan. It was Kishimoto's idea to allow the player to go back and fly. He programmed these elements without asking the planner first. It was the planner who decided not to use a joystick, he thought it was easier / more fun to use buttons to vary the speed (Track'n Field may have had an influence on this). The game took a little over a year to develop, which was pretty long for that time, but there was a break in the middle.

Mappy (MSX) The development of Pac-Land was stopped for 2 months because the hardware was changed in between. Between version A and version B of Pac-Land, the developers had some free time and Namco had started to develop for MSX. Kishimoto chose to make a port of Mappy, alone, in one month. He presented the project to Namco when it was finished. The game sold very well in Japan (for an MSX game), was number one in MSX games sales for 3 months with about 20,000 copies per month for a total of about 100,000 copies. The game doesn't use a real scrolling, Kishimoto redesigned all the parts of the backgrounds by shifting each of them by 4 pixels.

Baraduke (arcade) Namco had the reputation of making cute games but Takahashi, the game planner, was tired of making cute games. So the developers tried to make the most disgusting graphics possible. The game was inspired by movies such as Alien and Nausicaa (both for the heroine seen in the ending but also for one of the bosses, inspired by Ohmu). One of the monsters is inspired by Pac-Man (roughly speaking, it was a "bad version of Pac-Man"). The names Kissy and Takky (for Takahashi and Kishimoto), used for players 1 and 2, were not meant to remain in the game. The developers used them during the development and thought that they should replace them with "1P" and "2P", as it was customary at Namco. But when Kishimoto's superior saw the game with the names Takky and Kissy, he didn't ask to remove them. The game did well, but not much more. Takahashi did work on Baraduke 2, Kishimoto didn't.

Family Stadium (Famicom) Toy Pop was the first game of its director, who didn't have much experience and the development of the game didn't progress very fast. Kishimoto was also working on Toy Pop, but sometimes he didn't have much to do at his workplace and spent his free time playing Baseball (Famicom), Great Baseball (Mark III) and other baseball games (including one game released on Intellivision) with his boss (Nagashima). He complained about what was missing in these games and his boss then told him that he should develop his own baseball game. After the development of Toy Pop was finished, Kishimoto went back to Nagashima to make this game. The decision to develop it on Famicom was made naturally because of the popularity of the console. In addition to the programming part, Kishimoto had designed almost all the graphics and the logo of the game, which was originally called Fine Play. His boss told him to change its name to Family Stadium because Namco had started a line of games called "Family something" (Family Tennis, etc.) for 2 player games. The first Family Stadium was developed in almost 6 months by the ピッカリ (Pikkari) team, founded on May 10, 1986. The game was directed by Hiro who had worked on Family Tennis before that. The team scouted the Kawasaki stadium because Kishimoto was having trouble animating the batters from behind. He was the one who paid for the tickets for the matches. He was inspired by what he saw to create the players' statistics. The Computer Vs Computer mode amused the developers and allowed them to spot bugs. One of them suggested that this mode be kept in the final version. During the development of the game, more and more Namco members came to play it. An internal tournament was organized but the shouting of the players bothered the developers around them. The management then forbade to play Family Stadium in their workplace. The game was first released as an arcade game on Nintendo’s VS System before being released on Famicom a week later. This was probably a request from Nintendo. A bug related to the VS System hardware caused the game to stop during the game. As it was impossible to correct this issue on all the systems, Nintendo asked Namco to add a message that appears when the bug occurs. The message in question said that "the game was interrupted due to rain". The Famicom version quickly sold out, with an initial run of 300,000 units (which wasn't huge). It is said to have sold nearly 1.1 million in total. Kishimoto received a diploma from Namco's president Masaya Nakamura (who wrote it in his own handwriting), to thank him for his contribution to the prosperity of the company, as well as an envelope of 1 million yen in cash. It seems that Kishimoto was the first employee of Namco to receive such a diploma. His boss Nagashima as well as his colleagues didn't receive one so he shared his envelope with them.

Tengen released the game in the US under the name of Atari RBI Baseball. Kishimoto worked on this US version. To change the names of the players, a planner from Atari came.

Kishimoto then worked on all the episodes of the series from the Famicom to the Nintendo 64.

Kishimoto didn't talk too much about his job when he was working on arcade games, as arcades didn't have a very good reputation. He started talking about it during the Famicom era, which had a better image. Namco's developers were not allowed to put their real name and were not kept informed about the success of the games in general. About the games that the developers themselves couldn't see the ending, there was the case of Xevious where players could play endlessly (the game loops all the time) and the fact that, according to Kishimoto, the players at that time were very good. So, the developers at Namco thought that the players would manage to finish the games even if they couldn't.

#Yoshihiro Kishimoto #Pac-Land #Baraduke #Family Stadium #Mappy

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mahou-furbies · 3 years

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It is time for

Last year the Dazzling Pink Precure were supposed to host the event but were unavailable due to being redesigned, but this time they are ready for the job!

Here is the magical girl (and related) media consumed on this blog this year:

(you can read my closing thoughts on them here)

Anime: Kaitou Tenshi Twin Angel & the 2 OVAs, Twin Angel Break, Pretear, Happy Seven, Ojamajo Doremi (started), Healin’ Good Precure (most of it that’s out now), Magia Record (also following the game news though I don’t play), Myriad Colors Phantom World, Re:Creators, Concrete Revolutio)

Movies: Fresh, DokiDoki, Happiness Charge, Go! Princess, KiraKira & Star Twinkle Precure season movies, Spring Carnival & Miracle Universe crossover movies, Magical Sisters Yoyo and Nene)

Manga: Magical Girl Site (finished), Zodiac P.I. (reread), Sugar Sugar Rune (reread), Nogi Wakaba is a Hero, Puella Magi Suzune Magica (reread), Puella Magi Tart Magica (reread), Can You Become A Magical Girl, Colourful Macchiato)

(revisits to old familiar stuff don’t qualify for an award unless I had forgotten everything about it, Doremi is ineligible since I've only seen 1/5th so far)

Unexpectedly I managed to finish quite a lot of stuff on my last year's "plans for 2020 list".

As for blog stuff, this year the Precure Chibi Project was concluded for the designs that exists so far, but obviously it will continue when more are released and I'd also like to draw some more of the civilian clothes too. But this year over 400 chibis were drawn...

Then we of course had the Precure Dress Tournament, with Cure Magical emerging as the winner. Hosting it was a lot of fun since I like graphs and numbers, as the fact that I keep a google sheet that documents the dates when I draw the chibis (it also calculates useful data such as how many percent I've finished).

(Also Megumi's heart dress should totally have won the tournament)

The Precure positivity posts were also a thing this year. Usually the franchise is bitched at here at Mahou-Furbies so I tried to say something nice about each Cure that I had seen. Which was a major struggle in some cases but hopefully they don't come across as too much damning with faint praise. I plan on writing similar posts for the Cures from the other seasons too as I watch them, but also because I managed to write an entire post about Mana without complaining I take that as justification that I get to write a huge bitchy "the flaws of the Precure franchise" post later.

And then now at the end of the year the Dazzling Pink Precure finally managed to emerge again with their new designs. I hope I'll be able to post more about them in 2021!

And now, the Mahou-Furbies 2020 magical girl awards!

Let's start with Best Henshin Design: Megumi Moka from Magia Record! I always love a good sweets theme and I can't get over how cute she is.

(Kikko from Concrete Revolutio was also a strong contender)

Best Team Design goes to Nogi Wakaba Is a Hero, I've always loved the YuYuYu henshin outfit design.

The Best Powerup Look award goes to Lala's Cancer form in the Star Twinkle Precure movie! I just really like the fresh colour palette...

Runner-up is Nagisa's MagiReco Valentine's outfit which I like for being sweets themed but I guess it's more like an alternate form than a powerup?

There weren’t that many contenders for Best Civilian Design but let’s say that since I like the casual outfits in KiraKira Precure in general, The Movie was also good at this. So let’s reward Ciel’s look, it’s nice to see a more muted colour palette in Precure every now and then!

Oh, right! Also everyone from the Star Twinkle Precure movie! Love all their outfits.

Best School Uniform is the one from Sukoyaka Middle School, from Healin' Good Precure! I like the colour palette, and the cut of the dress.

The uniforms from the Twin Angel franchise are also fun with their cherry ribbon.

Best Hair award goes to Kikko, from Concrete Revolutio! The "rectangular" cut ends are fun.

Best Magical Item is Mamika's wand from Re:Creators! There's really nothing special about it, I just think it looked nice enough with the candy cane and the heart crystal (and also not so merchandise driven since this isn't a kid show).

The Best Henshin Scene award goes to Sudachi from MagiReco! I don’t like how detailed all the body curves are drawn in the few seconds before her outfit appears, but otherwise there’s great backgrounds in this, starting from the space theme, twinkling stars, beautiful blue sky and then ending with cute hearts.

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Best Fan Creation award goes to Marighoul’s comic “First Hunt”! (read it here) It was a fun little story and the colours were amazing!

Best Relationship is Hikaru and Lala with the alien in the Star Twinkle movie! I would never have guessed that I’d enjoy Precures raising a “baby” mascot this much, but it is true! I love how much role their bond had in the story, and the conclusion was more epic than anything Precure has managed to offer elsewhere.

The Best Mascot of 2020 is... the aforementioned alien UMA! Unusual design for a girl show, doesn’t have an annoying voice or speech pattern (or in fact doesn’t talk at all), and has an interesting role in the story.

Second place is Nyatoran from Healin' Good Precure, he pairs well with Hinata and I love the scene where she records cat videos of him with her phone.

As for Best Supporting Character, this is a joke character, but I have to say Mayune from Pretear. I'm sorry I just like this kind of dumb diva characters (with the o-ho-ho laugh!) and always had a good time when she was on screen.

Discount Tuxedo Mask from the Twin Angel franchise was also fun, he had nice chaotic energy to him.

Best Visual goes to Kikko's magical effects from Concrete Revolutio! We always get the standard sparkles so I was so happy to see something different for once.

Best Audio award goes to Pretear OP! The song feels a bit dated but in a good way, this is just the kind of music I like.

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The Best Scene award goes to Healin' Good Precure attack!

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Usually in Precure I really don't care for the stock attack animation and instead just focus on the henshins, but in this one I really like the bit where the giant hands rip the element spirit out of the enemy. The music is so good in that part, and the huge hands compared to the tiny spirit feel majestic.

I also liked Re:Creators scene where the (in-story) writers create a powerup for their character by getting their audience excited about it by tweeting. It was dumb how a tweet from some ranobe author goes viral in a matter of seconds, but I still thought the scene was fun and worked well.

The Innovation Award for doing something magical girl related I haven't seen dozens of times already goes to Happy Seven! I thought it was fun how the main character wasn't on the magical girl team at all and instead was practically the Muggle friend for most of the story!

Re:creators is the runner up here with its "fictive characters show up in our world" story, but I think it could have done more with the idea, and I think Happy Seven is commendable for doing something that feels refreshing without having to be all smart and self-aware about it.

Then the Golden Mana Award for one thing that I really didn't like this year.

The questionable honour goes to Meguru's unbearable behaviour at the start of Twin Angel Break, when she keeps pushing her friendship on the blue girl who has made it very clear that she'd rather be left alone. And of course the blue girl is secretly lonely and ultimately caves in so Meguru faces no consequences for being selfish and entitled and having zero respect for other people's boundaries. Stuff like this fuels my rage at the Friendly-And-Energetic-Stock-Magical-Girl-Heroines.

For Best Character I want to pick Lala from the Star Twinkle movie but she won Best Character last year so let’s pick someone else. To be fair nobody (else) this year made me super excited, but leaving such a broad category as this completely empty would be really stupid, so the winner is Himeno, from Pretear!

She had a lot more multifaceted personality than I initially predicted, had interesting and different relationships with many different characters, and of course had many unique henshin!

And finally, Best Work of the year... I know I picked Star Twinkle as the best series last year (award has been renamed now) so this feels somehow redundant, but I still can't get over how enjoyable their film was and as you may have noticed it has been mentioned in plenty of other awards already so it deserves the spot. On principle I liked that it wasn't centered around the pink Cure for once, and additionally it was about Lala who is my favourite Cure, and also since there wasn't really a villain the plot was more interesting than the same old "bad guy wants to take over the world". Also great visuals.

And that’s it for 2020! It has been a weird year, but that didn’t really show on this blog.

Plans for 2021:

Also once I finish drawing the chibis for the Madoka girls, expect a Madoka themed character tournament in 2021!

#blog stuff #annual wrap up

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iwritesometimes · 4 years

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so i was telling @poemsingreenink earlier today about my thesis for my master’s degree in publishing design. i think i posted these here not long after i got my degree, but that was years ago and sometimes you just have to trot out your own work to validate your existence, you know?

so anyway, my thesis project was to redesign some covers of books that had either main characters of color but whitewashed or ambiguous cover models, OR books with main characters who were not described so explicitly that it precluded models of color on the covers, but their publishers used white models anyway. (the thesis itself was on whitewashing in publishing design.) i think i ambitiously started with seven but ended up getting five done; below are the original covers and the redesigns.

note: i wanted to show specifically that it wouldn’t really even have been that difficult to diversify the covers, so i used only assets that were free and licensed-for-reuse under CC, including photography. the idea was that if i, with no budget, could make more diverse cover choices (even if the designs themselves were only so-so because, hey, i’m an amateur and wasn’t getting paid for these), then publishers didn’t have any excuses.

1. The Immortal Rules, by Julie Kagawa

the main character’s name is Allison Sekemoto; her book cover looked like this.

this one was dead easy; i specifically tried to just redo the exact same concept with this one, only using a Japanese model.

2. White Cat, by Holly Black

this was a weird one; it came out right at the height of the publishing whitewashing awareness shitstorm, so it actually underwent a redesign before it was published to keep the image more in line with the character’s described “tan skin and dark hair.” the ARC cover is on the left, the published cover on the right.

this is a pretty small concession; i love the composition of the photo, but they could’ve done more, in my opinion - since the main character isn’t ever very explicitly described except to say he has “tan skin and dark hair,” why couldn’t he be explicitly not-white?

3. The Girl of Fire and Thorns, by Rae Carson

this one fumbles in two fabulously shitty ways: the main character is meant to be both dark-skinned and fat (at the beginning; apparently by the time she gets to the end she’s skinny, which i could write a whole other thesis about but i’d get thrown out of school for the profanity alone).

i think the above may have been the ARC; the one i worked from specifically had at least obscured her image so it was hard to tell what color her skin was, and had cut the rest of her body away entirely.

since my thesis was on whitewashing, i focused on just finding a model of color instead of trying to find a model that was also fat. as i recall, the story setting was sort of middle eastern or western asian-flavored, so i tried to find a model from that general geographical area.

4. The Water Rat of Wanchai, by Ian Hamilton

the original cover of this one wasn’t so much whitewashed as...nothing-washed. you’d never know from the cover that the heroine was meant to be Chinese-Canadian. i also just found it kind of boring, lol.

i wanted to keep the original color scheme (it’s an action thriller and takes place in Hong Kong), while making it EVEN MORE action thriller-y and getting a woman of color on the front. i really liked how this one came out, it’s my favorite of the bunch.

5. The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin

of course this one was getting redone - it’s my favorite book, and until the last decade or so hadn’t had what i would have called a really good cover except maybe the first edition, which i have a soft spot for. over fifty years of publication, some of the lowlights include:

weird inhuman looking but still decidedly anglo faces!

generic fantasy wizard!!!

castles, for some fucking reason!

(the great gatsby called. it wants its ominous floating eyeballs back.)

and, finally, ICE CAUSE IT’S ON AN ICE PLANET YOU GET IT? DO Y--DO YOU GET IT??? ICE??????

*meryl streep voice* groundbreaking.

ANYWAY. i might be SALTY. so i spent like half the time i spent on the entire project trying to manifest my ~vision~ for an LHoD cover done a) in BLACK, and b) with an actual black man and an actual alaska native person on the cover. it’s not great and thank god the new folio society edition exists to right the last half-century of bad book covers for this book. but i still like the color scheme i picked!!

#i draw sometimes #it's my all-purpose art tag and hey i did do SOME drawing on these!!!!#publishing #whitewashing

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twitchesandstitches · 4 years

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Monster Goddess Raven and the Cultists

Commission of a continuation of the Raven stories, detailing an extreme where she has mutated into a completely inhuman body; for the framing, i set it up as her pestered by an alien cult that has mistaken her for a malicious goddess willing to smite on their behalf; now, she has to figure out a way to satisfy their request without actually hurting anyone, and getting them to stop bugging her.

Contains taruic bodies, multiple branch bodies, hyper boobs and butt, multiple quasi-indepentant heads, multiple eyes and limbs, multi boobs, general monsterization, the universe’s absolute most useless cult, and one super stressed cult leader.

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On a distant world, far from the affairs of the great meta-powered planets and far from even the gaze of the likes of Apokalips’ beachhead into their reality, a great ritual was, at last, commencing.

A hunched figure in a dark robe stood over roughly a few hundred others of his kind as they chanted, the whole of the crowd shifting like a tide with their swaying around a very large open space, a complicated summoning circle between them all. Dancing didn’t come naturally to them; they had large, round shells beneath those robes, which didn’t translate to dancing very well. He looked very tired, with the slumped over look of someone about to try something very dangerous out of sheer cosmic frustration.

“Raise up!” He commanded, raising his arms high. Not too high; it was clear from the distinctive swell of a shell beneath his robes that his arms really were not built for that kind of movement. It suggested some sort of hybrid between a tortoise and an ape; the simian posture of the latter, forelimbs as much an extra pair of legs as they were used to manipulate things, and a heavy snapping beak extending out, just poking through the hood.

The ritual paused. The spell continued to amass its mystical energy, and it looked something like an eye, floating in the middle of empty air, slowly opening. Light shone forth from it, into some other world. It outlined the underground temple of the cult, curling around pillars in serious need of polishing, outlined an altar that had clearly been hastily reshaped to look like a different entity altogether to suit the requirements of the summoning spell. It was an ugly temple, and not deliberately created to be unpleasant; it was just badly designed, and the misty depths of the temple suggested it didn’t get any better further in. Somewhere, architects were shuddering in distaste, aware of a truly ugly building in need of redesign.

“Raise what?” asked a cultist raising a hand.

The first figure leaned out from the railed balcony over which he oversaw the ritual. He didn’t really see the point in it, but he felt there were certain things you just went with. “What the hell are you talking about, man?”

“You said, ‘raise up!’. What are we raising up?” he looked around nervously. “Is there some kind of special ritual thing we throw in?”

The ritual leader, who was technically the leader of their desperate cult, scowled. “No,” he started to say, before being interrupted.

“I hope it’s not a sacrifice,” another said, mournfully. “The only thing we got to sacrifice is each other and I don’t think any of us is good enough for a real sacrifice!”

“I am!” Boasted another. The cultist next to her smacked her in the head. “Ow! What was that for?”

“Don’t be bragging before the Mistress arrives!” scolded the smacker. “That’s very rude of you!”

“You’re one going around slapping people!”

“Yes, for being incredibly rude!”

The leader banged on the rail. “Hey, stop arguing!” The light from the spell flickered indistinctly going dim in places. On the one hand, it was good to see that light fading away, and it was starting to hurt his eyes, but that was part of the point. He banged again. No one listened. “Focus, damn you, the summoning is going wrong!”

“Do we have a table we could raise?” asked another cultist hopefully. “Like… does the mistress like tables?”

“I should hope so,” another said primly. “I wouldn’t want to serve a mistress that didn’t like tables. I carve them for a living, being disrespected by her would make me feel so very sad.”

“You’re going to feel a lot worse when I shoot you in the face with a cannon!” The cult leader yelled, finally getting their attention. They looked up, and to his resigned satisfaction, they gasped. “Now shut up and do the dance! Get it wound back up!”

“But what do we raise up-”

“I just meant to start lifting your arms and dancing in place at that sequence, by the Mistress DID NO ONE ATTEND REHEARSAL!?” The cult leader banged on the rail. The robed followers yelped and got into position, and began to move counterclock-wise around what looked like a magical eye, but was in fact a portal.

Thrice they circled around it; thrice their robed shapes moved, the light renewing itself. A sickly, faint glow arose from the center of the portal, and it seemed to him that if it was an eye, then that eye… was opening.

It seemed beautiful to his many eyes. The universe was a vast place, and to some, what was ugly or repulsive elsewhere was beautiful to other eyes.

Around and around, they danced. “Faster!” He cried. “Faster!”

They were whirling around it now, hopping in a rapid, jumping dance, almost frenzied as some of them really got into the spirit of things. Some had bells tied to their waists, so as they leaped, mournful chimes rang out, growing louder and louder with the echo. The pillars began to shake slightly shifting in their bases, and some unknown musical instrument within them was stirred to life, so they rang out with a massive, almost deafening clang.

The noise shook the room, and it spoke to the portal, and something in the growing spell woke completely.

“Raise up!” the cult leader cried. “And no stupid arguments, just finish it!”

In staggered pairs, the dancers awkwardly came to a stop, the clanging of the pillars still loud and demanding, and they raised their arms up high. They all began to chant. What they said didn’t actually matter; most of them just mumbled whatever nonsense came to mind. The words didn’t matter, but the intent mattered, and together, the sound took on a magical weight, and interfered with that specific part of reality that was defined as the there, and bound it up into the here.

The portal rippled.

Slowly, it opened wide. There was a glimpse, through the other side; for a moment, they saw gleaming towers of shining metal, they saw skies crowned by clouds (and in all their subterranean lives, they had never seen such a thing, and it badly frightened them), and for a moment, they were stunned at the sight of this strange, other world. Some of them began to doubt that it was a good idea, perhaps, to have meddled with beings so mighty as to come from such a nightmarish place.

And then, the spell found it’s target, and invoking certain magical rules that were the price of power enjoyed by the truly mighty, grabbed a hole and pulled her right through.

Now, when a spell summons forth a truly powerful entity, something beyond mere gods and heroes of legend, there ought to be a dramatic sound effect. So it was rather disappointing when the spell did not erupt in a mighty pillar of burning light, nor did it explode into a shower of sparks to reform into its target. Instead, it simply inverted itself, and dropped its quarry into the summoning circle between the dancers.

Inside the summoning circle, something, or rather, someone, opened her eyes.

Quite a lot of eyes, in fact.

(On the world of Earth, the dread world-destroyer Trigon had sired a daughter. He’d intended her to be his vessel, to end another world.)

They became aware of a gigantic body confined within the circle. It wasn’t shaped like them; they knew this at once, but it wasn’t humanoid, for lack of a better term. Oh, there was a suggestion of arms like tangled tree roots, and a massive bulk below, and a host of other features all shrouded in a hooded robe adapted for its body shape, but things got rather more complicated once you looked for any details.

(The daughter’s name was Raven. She became a mighty heroine on that world, and forged such close friendships that when her father came to lay claim to her, they fought on her behalf.)

The enormous body stirred. It was gray and red, unevenly and at random, the soft skin nonetheless textured like scales, with sharper spikes here and there like spiked piercings built into her body, so that much of her bristled. From a top-most pair of shoulders (and it was important to make the distinction, they saw as she slowly rose up, mountainous globes distending out from her front), several heads rose up, a hood around each one.

(She bested her father, with the help of her friends, banishing him forevermore from that world.)

Each of the heads was different; there were perhaps five of them, and the first of them looked the least altered from whatever she had originally been. A massive red crystal dominated her forehead, growing outwards into a horn of sorts, and around it about half a dozen eyes (splayed apparently at random) gazed down at them. Little else could be seen of her face; enormous lips puffed out, bulging to the tip of her nose to below her chin, and as her gaze tilted downwards, the cultists shifted back from the alien entity they had called forth. Long, purple hair fluttered down them all, luxurious and shining, and longest around this first head.

(In time, Raven had grown stronger, mighty in the ways of magic and battle. As a grown woman, she tracked down her father, to end his threat once and for all.)

The other faces twisted about; one, to the left of the first head, had but four red eyes, but all were narrowed in suspicion, and at once, curled into a dark and instant fury; most of her face was a massive set of horrific mandibles and gnashing, flesh-ripping teeth, a puffy pair of black lips between them. Anger, irritation and aggression radiated from the sharp curve of her jawline, to the dozens of nasty spikes upon lip, eyebrow, nose and pointed ears that looked very much like piercings.

Mirroring that face, at the other side of the main head, was one beautiful by the standards of her people, though to the cultists it was fearsome indeed. A single pair of pink eyes blinked down at them, a third such eye upon her forehead, like the crystal of the first head. Her lips were even larger, moist with some exotic, alluring venom, and there was a hint of a massive tongue within her throat from the swell of it. She gazed at them with keen interest, excitement welling up, though restrained for the moment.

To this happy face’s other side, away from the other heads, was the fourth. This head was calmer than the others, and was so stoic and reserved it was nearly a blank face; a smooth and glassy surface covered it, with a few faint suggestions of features that would have been ideal upon a porcelain sculpture. Faint images upon it conveyed hints of response, but not emotion per se. This head, as best as they could tell, was simply very reserved, and shrouded in thick hair like a hood.

And finally, the last head was on the other side. This face was downcast, its features gloomy, and while it had many eyes, they were all on one side of her face; perhaps gazing outwards forever, in constant fear of a potential threat. Her mouth was almost nothing but staggeringly enormous lips, puffing outwards into something that might have been called a tube if they weren’t so round; they looked ideal for suction, dipping low and trembling faintly. A stir of pity touched the cultists; there was a deep, terrible misery from that face, and it completely took them off their balance, coupled with the expressions of the others.

The entity began to rise, casting off the dizziness of a summon.

(Raven fought her father, in a mighty battle of wills and magic.)

Slowly, she began to stand up. Legs pushed against the ground, and not the usual pair of a biped. The cultists dimly realized that she had not the single pair of legs (if a very tangled and unusual sort) but many pairs of legs with the hemline fluttering around them.. They rose up, and not having seen hominids before, they were puzzled at the shapes of her knees. Granted, a human would have been as well; her legs were more like a horse in terms of general shape and knee structure, to account for running like a quadruped.

(For many days, and for many nights, they battled. Without mercy and with the certain knowledge that whoever lost would be worse than dead.)

In fact, the lower part of her body was very much like a horse. Or perhaps a centaur’s, with the additional quirk that past her ample waist, her body split into three separate sub-bodies, each with enormously wide hips collectively about as wide as she was tall. It was daunting for the eye to work out, and it wasn’t until she had fully stood up, rising perhaps fifty feet above them now, and her legs sorted themselves out that they saw the leg-train of her lower body. Or bodies, spending on how you looked at it.

(And in the fullness of time, Raven triumphed. Trigon lay beaten, and at last, he was at her mercy. For him, she had none left.)

On feet more like hands (if thicker of palm, the better to run on hard ground), she turned. Each leg segment of her tauric halves continued into another such segment, so that each one had eight legs in total, the thighs enormously plush and wide, and each set of legs had a massive butt, rising up like pair of fleshy domes. Another butt grew atop it, perhaps a consequence of specialized muscle masses and fat to control the set of her hips. Her genitals were likely located under there, to boot, but they could hardly make anything out past the draped fabrics hanging down atop her, and quite a lot of roundness bulging from her thighs like some manner of livestock.

(She devoured him.)

She tilted herself towards the crowd now, her many legs moving with an oily speed that was uncomfortable to watch. They did not look away, regardless; after so long toiling to summon her here, they could hardly turn away simply because she was less akin to them than they might have imagined. The cult leader held the air of someone who had known this beforehand, and he could only hope that his followers didn’t make a lousy first impression.

(Perhaps she consumed him literally, swallowing him whole and ending him in her belly. Perhaps it was a more metaphorical digestion, and she absorbed his power until there was not even a shadow of the fiend that had been Trigon.)

She moved about, and her robes fell into place. More of her unique body was visible now, and the robes over her top half presented a plunging neckline down to where her belly button would have been if it had been visible. True, she had a fairly solid gut, perhaps a sign of her previous accomplishments in literally digesting various artifacts of dark magic otherwise too dangerous to be disposed of, but it was covered by her breasts.

(As he digested, his body and spirit consumed completely and fueling her growth, Raven… changed. Already, for many years, she had been gradually changing over time, becoming more a blend of human and the monstrous traits of a demon, and with her corrupt father’s power added to her own, that process leaped ahead many steps, so that in but a moment, she transformed.)

It wasn’t just that they were large. Indeed, all her breasts were unusually massive, each one broader across than her torso (and possibly, for the cultists, each big as a small house from their perspectives). It was just that she had so many; there were four breasts alone in the top most set she had started out with, and another three below that, and then a very large pair below that pair, and so on, all the way to her waist.

They followed the outward curve of her body, and her belly, making her even bigger than she seemed at first glance. From the sides, below her, her breasts extended out by at least four feet relative to her own scale, for the largest sets. Her nipples swelled at her fabric; some appeared to just be very large and engorged, but others suggested the shapes of breast-mouths, others clusters of little writhing tentacles. And from the shape of all those breasts, it was understood the roundness between her leg-pairs were perhaps also breasts, slung below her like udders.

(Raven returned, then, far transformed, and though they were surprised, her friends welcomed her as a family, and in time, Raven grew to accept her new form as well.)

She appeared to adjust now to the circumstances; her many eyes across her multiple heads blinking, she braced her many arms against her body. She had almost as many arms as she did legs; firstly, each breast set had its own set of arms, following down her arms, and some of these branched out at the shoulder joint for an additional arm. Others branched at the elbow into two arms; these were coupled with the additional mutation of all her arm joints mutating into the same kind of joints as her shoulders, so that fingers and elbows alike could rotate about with an uncanny degree of flexibility.

(And so she learned, in time, that she had also gained possession over her father’s realms, his demonic armies, and occupied the same mystical position as him, and so, she was now as susceptible to summoning as he was. And, in time, her power would draw others to learn the ways to summon her, making use of the same rituals that had once called down avatars of her father, and she would learn to be displeased with this.

But, alas. Such are the restrictions placed upon the mighty.)

Raven blinked, each of her many eyes, on her many faces, blinked in the dusty and underground air. It was stale to her, and to her senses attuned to psychic and ethereal influences, it also felt like old and drab hopes, without much expectation or interest. Hope for what, she wasn’t sure.

“Lady Mistress!” The cultist leader called out. “We beseech thee-”

Another cultist cupped hands around her beak and interrupted, yelling up at what they called the Mistress: “Yo! You’re kinda weird looking!”

He stared at her in horror, with that specialized expression of ‘we’re going to be smote by an angry goddess’, and cupped his paws to his beak. “Oh, goddammit. Please stop being fools for, for a single second, please…!”

She ignored them both. From the multitude of her arms, one extended outwards, and gently leaned out towards one of the pillars. It encountered resistance where she met the edge of the summoning circle. Raven’s faces reacted in various ways; the wise one raised an eyebrow in its reflection, the happy one just giggled at the tingling sensation, the sad one covered its face in horror, the angry face snarled, and the middle face simply raised an eyebrow.

“Really wish these summonings would call before actually pulling me out,” they all said together, but with different inflections depending on the face. The middle one said it calmly enough, but the others were dispassionate, excitable, dour and irritated in turn.

The cultist leader balked at this remark, calm as it was. He closed his eyes, briefly regretting his life choices with some very choice words for his congregation, and waited for perhaps a very sudden and terminal smiting.

Below him, the cultists were chatting. Some of them were, surprisingly enough, disappointed. “I was imagining something… I dunno. Not this.”

That particular cultist was nudged by the one closest to her. “How? She’s big and all! She’s gotta be powerful!”

“Yeah, but. I was just expecting something prettier. You’d think a goddess would give herself a real nice shell or a shiny beak. She doesn’t even have a shell! And her face is way too rubbery for a beak.”

Raven’s sad face turned towards her summoners. Or captors, as this particular one thought of it. “I’m sorry to disappoint,” she said sadly. The other Raven faces ignored her.

The tone of the crowd began to turn against the disappointed cultists. “Now she’s sad!” One said, stamping his feet down and crossing his arms. “I can’t believe it; you summoned an unstoppable goddess and you made her upset! God, you’re mean.”

“I wouldn’t say unstoppable,” observed the most reserved and calm of Raven’s heads. “Mighty, yes, a proper titan, if you will, but unstoppable is a BIT of an exaggeration.”

“Oh,” said another. There was something of a long, and uncomfortable pause.

One other cultist, apparently mulling this over, spoke up. “Please don’t kill me for saying this, Mistress, but you’re not selling your aura of power too well.”

“I’m not your mistress!” snapped Raven’s angry face irritably. “And it’s not MY problem if you can’t handle a little honesty! Do I look like a salesman to you?”

The happy face giggled cheerfully. “Oh, imagine us? Doing door to door sales stuff? That’s amazing, I love it.”

Another cultist shouted up to their leader. “Hey! How come you didn’t tell us what to expect! I didn’t think we’d fish up an alien!”

The cultist leader, aware that his expectations of horrible death were not to be brought here today, opened a beady eye. “How did you not know?”

“Sorry, sir, but do I look like a scholar of spooky elder goddesses?”

“I’m not really a goddess,” said Raven, speaking with five voices. “And I’m not that old. At least you got ‘spooky’ right, though.”

For answer, the cult leader pointed irritably at a statue of the idol; it was a perfect image of Raven herself, though the sculptor had underestimated how big some of her body actually was. “There. Right THERE! The statue! The damn icon we worship on our sacred days SHOWS what she looks like! You see it all the time! How can you not realize what she looked like before hand!?”

The cultists who hadn’t worked out this detail shrugged. “I figured it was, what do you call it, artistic interpretation,” one volunteered.

The cultist leader sighed, a deep and gloomy sound very indicative of the general competence level of his congregation. Raven was drawn by that sound and curled her body around the summoning circle, testing its defenses with a thousand tiny unraveling spells to find a weakness. Aloud, she said, “I suspect you’re a bit frustrated.”

He responded calmly enough, though clearly unsure how to reply to the entity he worshiped as a goddess speaking so casually to him. “A little bit, my Mistress. Yes.”

She thought about saying that she wasn’t their mistress, but a few years of dealing with religious followers of this sort had convinced her that it was wasted effort, and generally considered mean. She contented herself by asking, with her happy face, “I don’t s’pose you just called me up to say ‘hi’, right?”

The cult gazed up at her, perhaps baffled to see her dropping the otherwise formal tone the other faces were employing. “...No,” one cultist said. “Definitely not. Seems a bit of a waste of magical ritual, honestly.”

Raven tapped at the barrier blocking her from just leaving the circle. True, she could tear it down, but that tended to be destructive and she doubted the cultists would survive. She felt it weakening, nonetheless. “I don’t suppose you’d just take down this barrier and let me leave if I asked very politely.”

The cult leader shook his head. “I am afraid not, no.”

“That seems kind of mean,” a cultist commented.

“Please shut the hell up already,” the leader replied, not even looking away from Raven. The cultist he addressed pouted.

“Fine, then.” Raven’s more detached face, which she regarded as her wiser self, studied some growing weak spots in the barrier, watching them grow and the summoning circle’s geas to remain starting to fail. “What do you want of me?”

The cultist leader faltered, at such straightforwardness. “I am… I’m sorry.” He fumbled at his robes. “I had a whole speech prepared, but I think it needs a bit of a rewrite.” He smiled weakly at her. “I hadn’t anticipated you being so blunt.”

“Sorry. Don’t really know any other way to be,” Raven’s sad face said, bowing her head low so that her hair covered her eyes.

The cultist leader cleared his throat. He started to speak when another shouted out, “Tell her to blow up those asshats that won’t leave us alone!”

Raven frowned. Ah, she thought, lips curling with distaste. “I was GETTING to that!” The leader said impatiently. “Now… well. Damn. Gone and spoiled the surprise…” he shook his head, and rifled through a few pages he managed to fish out. He frowned at them, and then he spoke. “Great and noble Mistress! I call upon thee, I ask of thee! For too long have we persevere in maintaining a land of our own!”

“Mm hmm,” Raven said, carefully applying magical pressure to a weak point in the barrier’s magical field; a thread, of sorts, maintaining the spell’s cohesion. Remove it, and the whole thing fell apart without causing any real damage.

“We ask of you; slay our enemies, whose tactics and power we’ve little recourse against! On behalf of my failing people, I tell you; we cannot win, as we are, so we plead of you. Smite our foes on our behalf, we who revere you!”

Raven sighed five-fold as she finished her spellwork. “Sorry. I will not kill for anyone. No matter what.”

She gave the spell just a slight pulse, and a shimmering curtain appeared around her, at the edges of the summoning circle. And just as soon as it appeared, suddenly, it was gone. It cracked, frayed and broke apart around her.

And with that, Raven extended the foremost of her legs out; six hand-like feet moved over the cultists below, and she moved above them, her massive butts eclipsing all below her, a soft noise silencing any sound. Multi-ton breasts smacking together at such a short distance have a way of distracting the mind, even at just the level of ‘okay what the heck was that sound’.

“H-hey!” The cultist leader yelled as around them, people protested and pleaded with her to come back. “Stop, please! You can’t go yet! There hasn’t been any smiting!”

“I just said no killing,” Raven’s angry head said, the others nodding sternly. Well, the happy face tried to nod sternly, but started absently headbanging. “No matter how hard you pray at me.”

“Please?” The leader almost begged. “You are our last option! We’ve been driven out from too many worlds!”

Raven gave him a brief look at her many arms fanned out, dark mist streaming from her fingers and inscribing a circle in the air around her. “Sorry. But no.”

The spell inscription was completed. She stepped into it,and with a brief syllable of great mystic power that took on its own shadow-life as a roaming inspiration for a while, she activated the teleportation spell. A portal opened up around her, and closed with a loud bang; not from the spell itself, but from such a massive being as her suddenly vanishing so fast.

A few solitary sparks of magic fluttered down. Raven was gone.

There was a long, awkward pause. The cultists stared at the circle, and where Raven had gone. The same undercurrent of thought moved through them all, and they eventually glanced at the cult leader.

“What do we do?” One person asked, apparently deciding to be the spokesperson for the whole group.

The cult leader was still staring at where she’d gone. He stroked his beak; not sadly or dejectedly, but with the air of someone who was feeling challenged.

“We try again,” he said. “And we keep trying, until she aids us.”

“But what if she gets mad enough to kill us?”

“Considering she refused to kill just now? I rather doubt she will view it as an option.”

“So… what?” The spokesperson gestured angrily. “We just keep summoning her, again and again, until she goes along with it? Is your plan to annoy her until she goes along with it just to make us stop bothering her?”

“Why not?” The cultist sweeped majestically away. “It worked with you nitwits, didn’t it?”

It took them some time to work out the insult, which proved his point well enough in any case.

-----

The summoning was not the first Raven had to deal with, since her ascension to becoming a demon queen superheroine.

It was not going to be the last, either in general, or as she found out in dismay, from that specific cult in particular.

(Raven’s five heads coughed as the dust of materialization wafted around her, and a soapy mist from her hair. Given her significantly bigger scale, it was worse for the cultists, who coughed and complained loudly beneath her; a few broke formation to breath some air that wasn’t choked with the weird-smelling mist.

“What the hell!” All her heads shouted, or whined, or asked indignantly, as appropriate. “I was just getting out of the shower!”

“Mistress, we weren’t to know!” the cult leader protested. “Ah. Perhaps this was a bad time?”

Raven rose up on her rear most legs, her taur sections spreading themselves out so they made an effective support beneath her. She loomed tall and threatening in this way. “Is this about the smiting thing again?”

“Erm. Ah. Well, yes.”

“Answer is still no. Quit it.”

She just frowned at them until she worked out the barrier’s weakness, and once again, teleported out.)

Raven didn’t actually get to fight many villains these days; inconvenient as they were, the summonings were… an entertaining diversion. Jump City, her hero turf, was apparently now considered a very bad place to do villain jobs, which is a sad consequence of a major heroine being an incredibly large and absurdly super-powered force to be reckoned with. She was able to move planets around; news of power got around!

Admittedly, that was probably part of her problem. And it wasn’t like it was easy for her, either.

(She sighed at the second summoning occasion. By then, she was getting used to that particular summoning spell, and she made a point to not look directly at the hopeful ranks of the cultists.

“Again?” Her happy face asked, pouting.

“Mistress, it is but a small boon I beg of you!” The cult leader pleaded. “Destroy our foes, that we might be free of their threats of violence and devastation!”

“No, absolutely not.” Raven crossed her arms, many times over, so that her front looked like a ridged yarn ball. “I will not kill for you. That’s the end of that.”

“We don’t need them dead!” the cultist leader yelled out, in the tones of someone trying hard for a course of action they personally don’t think is that wise, but saw little alternative. “We just… we need them defeated! I beg of you; please, tell us what course you would prefer!”

“The one where you stop trying to drag me into your wars!” Raven said firmly. And again, around her, the barrier dissolved. “And quit with the barrier, it’s starting to get on my nerves.”

“Mistress, you are really our only hope! Please, just, consider it! For a moment!” But his cries were in vain. Raven was gone before he even finished speaking.)

For a time, at least the next four summonings or so, she found it a fun distraction from her daily routine.

(They worked out enough of her schedule, from the last few summons and the degree she got annoyed depending on what time of day or night they summoned her. At one point, they summoned her while she was still asleep, and politely sent her back in dread of how enraged she’d be at being woken up in the middle of the night.

They fetched her when she was reading a book. She glanced around, shrugged with a long-suffering gesture, and said, “No.” She had learned by now how to break the barrier without even trying, and as it crumbed, she teleported away.

And after that, they summoned her during dinner. She paused,the contents of an entire buffet for each mouth filling up her mouth. They looked at her hopefully, begging with big puppy eyes - a strange thing to see on turtle aliens with multiple eyes themselves - and she just shook her head. She teleported away, after gulping down her food.

The next time they summoned her, what popped out into the summoning circle was a small dummy roughly shaped like Raven, with a polite little note reading ‘SORRY, TRY AGAIN LATER’. It was a fun little game of wits, she supposed, even as she suspected they weren’t going to give up any time soon.)

The next three summonings after that, and the novelty began to wear off very quickly.

And eventually, in due course, she had enough of it.

(Into the circle she appeared, her arms already crossed, and in a five-fold voice she bellowed, “No!”

“I ask only that you do as the texts read!” the cultist leader said, and she had to admire how firm he was. His legs shook and his shell was shedding plates in his fear, but he still talked back to something that he believed capable of mass destruction. It gave him some leniency, she supposed.

“And,” Raven’s wise face said archly. “What texts would that be?”

He said nothing, at first. He looked mildly surprised that she’d asked. “The ones written in the tomes of summoning you forth.” He produced a textbook, one that looked copied out.

“Let me see that.” She summoned it from his hand without waiting for him to actually hand it over to her. She flipped through it, and it being so much smaller than her did not present any great barrier to actually reading it.

It was partly an instruction manual for summoning her, and the rituals for it were encoded in various mythologized accounts phrased as short stories detailing some adventures she had supposedly had. She felt a moment of respect for the cult; it had to be a great effort to even understand them, let alone decode the hidden messages, as they were mainly ciphered with cultural details and phrases that were totally alien to them, lacking any context.

There was a lot of discussion of blood being spilt, though. FIre raining down from the skies, of arminies and mighty foes being laid low, and the other sort of talk you expected from mighty conquerors, and she realized she had been approaching this from the wrong direction, as they had.

“Where did you get this book?” She asked, sending it back to him.

“Bought it off a black market magic stall, if you pardon the lowly way I acquired it,” the leader said humbly. “From a man named Constantine, I do believe.”

Raven’s eyes twitched in brief, impotent fury. She was going to have a word with the man. Oh yes. “You have the wrong idea about me,” she said gravely. “The-” she almost said ‘the book is completely wrong’, and halted.

The pitiful gazes and naked, gloomy hope of the cult surrounded her, sucked at her so that it was almost humid with want. She stared down. And she thought that they had kept summoning her, over and over, even though it was going nowhere and such a process was not cheap, and she thought: would they keep doing so, if they had any other alternative?

Something in her rebelled at the idea of just telling them they were wrong to hope for help from her. She continued, “The book’s translation is in error. I am not a destroyer; I do not kill anyone. No matter the reason, purpose or goal, I cannot and will not kill anyone ever.”

The cultist leader stared back levelly as the groaned softly moaned out its discontent. “I have gathered so. But that is not the same as saying you will still do nothing?”

“What is it you actually need?” She raised a hand to forestall immediate remarks. “Not the destruction of your enemies. What does that get you? What do you really, actually want?”

And here, the cultist leader was truly stalled, the internal script he’d run and modified and desperately tried to adapt finally failing him at last. She felt the honesty off him when he finally said, “We require a land of our own. For too long we have been chased away by our foes, who bested our ancestors in a war. But that was a long time ago, and they will not rest until we are truly gone. If they are destroyed in turn, or if we are given a new land away from them… that is all we truly want.”

“I see,” Raven said with all five voices, now troubled and feeling bad. She wasn’t entirely sure why, at least for the moment. “I will think upon this,” she said. “I will… return to you.”

“How?!” A cultist pleaded desperately. “At least give us an estimate!”

One face turned levelly in her direction. “You’ve already given me a way in whenever I want,” she said plainly.

The cultist leader nodded, after a moment, and then he bowed low. “I can accept that, my mistress.” He waved a hand, and the barrier faded on its own.

Soon after, Raven did as well, with a heavier weight on her than she had expected.

----------

In a sea of red, clouds of nebulous void obscuring all before them, with a dim sun shining down upon the mystical realm and a wide pavilion of black stone, Raven stood upon a throne of sorts suited for her unique body.

Her tauric portions lay upon three great seats, also made of black stone; in deference to the fact that no one outside of demons (who tend to have a strange dislike out of anything with positive connotations) like to rest on hard stone, it was altered to be squishy to the touch. Combined with her tremendous weight and the leverage from how long those parts of her actually were, they were bent low to the ground and she looked more like she was reclining on pillows.

Oh well. She did go to some extent to avoid the whole ‘queen of the hells’ vibe some of the outer entities she had to deal with believed she might become in time. Not only had she assumed her father’s powers and titles, but also something of his metaphysical weight; the role he had assumed for himself. It was a nuisance finding ways to subvert them.

At least the realm that was now the seat of her power fitted her aesthetic. Raven hadn’t imagined, as a younger woman, that she would one day rule over a demi-plane of an amorphous red landscape responsive to her thoughts, beneath a void-stricken sky and from a vast black citadel covered in spikes and what looked a lot like blood rivers pouring out, but she would have thought it sounded really cool. It was such a realm that all gothic vibes aspired to one day reach, the very personification of Goth as a visual aesthetic.

Suiting such an aesthetic, four other figures stood not on thrones, but perched on high spikes in a dramatic fashion. Red lightning periodically burst from the air, through misty regions that looked appropriately like clouds, to highlight their presence.

To them, Raven cleared her throat. Something of her faces had changed; physically, they were the same, but the distinctive attitudes (the gloomy downcast of her sad head, the serene detachment of the wise face, and so forth) were gone, replaced by the same attitude of her middle head.

To the others, Raven said, “Okay, so I may have promised to help someone in a way that I’m not sure how to actually do.”

From one spike, red light issued from deep within, and the figure atop it growled.

“You have got to think before you do something like that!” It, or she, snarled. It was Raven.

Or rather, an aspect of Raven. This realm was as much a product of her mind as it was a physical place… if you could really call any magical realm physical. It was the seat of her power, and her sense of self expanded into it, and so, just as how she had expressed the extremes of emotional experience and ways of thinking into semi-independent figures within herself as a heroine, she could summon them forth here to converse with.

And outside, as well, but that wasn’t as easy as it was here.

This Raven had the same look as her angry face, though she was no longer a taur-type. She was humanoid now; her body bright red, her shoulders broad and her hips amazonian, even as her legs twisted into something like the avian talons of a gargoyle, and heavy antlers grew from her forehead. She growled, and looked disconcertedly similar to Trigon when he had lived. The muscles, the size… even her hair was a pale white.

But then, Raven had always hated anger. She’d always tried so hard to contain it, to channel it and keep it away. It was the part of herself she loved the least, and imagined to be most like her father. And so, it took on a similar image to him, try though she might to avoid it.

“Don’t make promises we can’t keep!” Anger Raven declared, with a growl, and then crossed two pairs of arms over breasts larger than her torso. “Do not lie to people who have nothing left but you.”

“It is not Raven’s fault that these beings are in such a sorry state,” retorted Wise Raven. She was not so much an emotion or a thought as a state of being; a detached and calm thing, what she had always aspired to be in her youth. She appeared now as a cloaked shape, apparently shadowy… but ah, perhaps then you noticed the writing tentacles beneath, the breasts growing out apparently at random. No arms to be seen, simply a tall and statuesque shoggoth of a woman, curvaceous and refined. She was dissolute of form, but held herself together, and that was an aspiration Raven had always wanted.

She paused, for a moment, and continued. “We could help, if we can. Raven is a superheroine, after all, and if there is help to give…” She trailed off, feeling this spoke for itself.

“It did kinda become her problem when she made that offer like she did!” said Happy Raven, the incarnation of her ability to experience joy, and the pleasures of the flesh, from fine foods to more carnal matters. She was… angelic, in the old meaning of the term. Great sparkling panes of light fanned out to create the image of vast wings, over a body with no joints at all; where there might be a waist, or elbows, or something else, there was only empty space, her body parts simply floating near each other and connected by tendrils of shadow mist. More segments and sections defined a curvaceous body, apparently plush to the touch, but it was in such constant motion it wa hard to see where anything began, ended, or even what it all was.

Finally, Sad Raven made her own remarks. She was Raven’s sense of despair, the negative aspect of acceptance; her sorrow and all her pain, but also her ability to feel the pain of others, to understand that everything bled as she had done once. She was a liquid mass, almost a living blob or perhaps a fleshly slime; colors shimmered slowly on a heavy-set, pudgy body, a beating heart visible between breasts big enough to touch the ground and nipple-mouths softly weeping sorrowful songs to herself. Her hair was low over her face, her many arms crossed over in a complicated self-cuddle, and below the waist, her body was a thick trunk like a slug.

She spoke thusly: “We can help them. So… shouldn’t we?”

Putting things as plainly as this made the others uncomfortable. Anger faded a little, Happy paused in her ringing, and only Wise seemed to not be taken aback. Raven herself couldn’t deny it. There was the question, plain and simple.

She was a superheroine. Changed as she was, mighty as she had become, she still fundamentally helped people.

“They’re annoying, they’re whiny, and they have no idea what they’re doing,” Anger said. “But… they asked for help.”

Happy shrugged, with her wings. “I’m not denying that! But…” She looked aside.

Raven herself spoke. “So how do we actually do that?”

“Well, I have a few ideas…” Wise began, and the debate started as well.

For a time, they argued about this, and most strenuously on it. It was not as much of a circular debate as might have been imagined. They were largely of the same mind on the matter, and they WERE the same mind; they disagreed on the execution of it:

Happy suggested simply hitting the people of the rival nation with the sad feelings of the cult, so they would understand the problem and leave them be; Raven and the others felt this didn’t address the central issue of long-standing internal conflicts between the two. (Also, mind-whammies were ethically dubious.) Anger’s plan, among others, was to frighten away this ancient enemy of the cult so badly they’d never come back; Raven felt very uncomfortable with that one. Sad offered no suggestions, but pointed out the flaws in the other plans. Wise suggested more ideas than the others, and Raven liked those ideas enough that she disliked arguing against them.

Nevertheless. The debate went on. Many of the ideas suggested seemed to suggest the wrong message even if they worked, for they had no desire to spread the idea that Raven was a wrathful destroyer like her father, even if pretending to be one got the job done. And others felt risky, or would require a long preparation to actually pull off, or were otherwise impractical.

“We could move them to Earth!” Happy said.

Raven rose her heads up sharply, and her eyes widened in realization.

Sad shook her head. “I don’t think people would be happy if we just plopped them down there… and there’s probably a lot of them. Would they even adapt to Earth?”

Raven ignored the comments. She was getting an idea.

Happy sighed. “Yeah. Just an idea…”

“Hold on,” Raven said slowly. “We could move them. It would get them away from their enemies, let them start over, and they’d stop bugging us every five seconds.”

“But Earth doesn’t have any room for them,” Sad repeated.

“Not Earth. Somewhere else.” Raven tilted her head up, thoughtfully.

“Not here!” Wise said, aghast. “I dare say no mortal could ever live here! The energies alone might prove corrosive; it’ll take years before we can realign this realm to us completely, and the essence of our father would kill them so horribly!”

“I wasn’t thinking of here either,” Raven said. “What if we get them their own planet? A new one; unpopulated but alive, free for them to take on?”

She pointed upwards. The others looked up.

Above them, floating as a sort of trophy, was a planet, but so distantly that it looked like a small marble off in the distance. A magical barrier surrounded it, protecting it from this realm’s deadly effects on living things, and there were signs of plains beneath the barrier; of rolling forests, wetlands and mountains, and oceans spreading wide.

Raven had no idea why there was a living world, though completely unpopulated and the animal life upon it frozen in stasis, in her father’s hoard. She supposed he had grown curious at some point, and tried creating his own world to study the things he routinely destroyed. She’d left it alone after determining it was completely harmless and didn’t have any nasty traps.

Well, it seemed some work of her father’s would be good for something.

------

The cultist leader had a vision shortly afterwards.

Bring all your family and friends. All your people. Bring them to the temple, and you shall have your freedom.

He spent a good portion of the day after calling in everyone (and making sure they actually listened to him) poring over the book of the mistress, looking for any loopholes or hints that she might have an unfavorable definition of ‘freedom’. By her own words, the translation wasn’t ideal, so he wasn’t entirely confident in what it had to say by now.

Well, he thought as the day arrived and the ritual was performed beneath him. He felt surprisingly cheerful, really. Either the Mistress would deliver them what they wanted most, as she saw it, or she’d destroy them all out of pique. She had repeatedly said she wouldn’t smite them, but he had certain iron-clad expectations of entities of her scale.

The dancers did their work, ringing and leaping with skill and practice from the many attempts to bind the Mistress; the enthusiasm had been refined into respectable skill; a solid 4.5 on the efficient ritual measurements. Around them, the temple was packed, thousands of their kin standing around them with dread and a faint suggestion of hope in their eyes, waiting for one end or another. All of their people were here, and all they could do was to watch, and to wait.

(In a backwater, peaceful arm of a galaxy no one bothered with, Raven flew without need of oxygen. In the distance, around the curvature and clouds beneath them, she sensed the presence of her emotional avatars, summoned forth in physical form as duplicates of herself. She commanded them to begin the ritual, and wait for her signal to finish it.

She received a positive from Anger, Happy, Sad and Wise Ravens, and she waited for the now familiar tinge of a summoning.)

The cultist leader breathed in. He prepared himself, for one last rite. “Raise, up!” he bellowed

The dancers landed, lifting up their arms.

“Raise what up-” A small child began to say, before being silenced by a cultist on stand-by.

“Please don’t,” she told it sternly. “We do not want to go over all that again!”

The portal widened and pulsed with power.

(Ah, Raven thought as she felt herself being pulled. There we go. She let herself be pulled, this time.)

And once again, Raven materialized many worlds away, and she did not crash into the summoning circle, but gently landed upon her foot-fingers. She looked calmly down upon the crowds, cringing back from her in fear, and perhaps a little awe. In deference to the fact that her hyper sexed body was perhaps inappropriate around some, she wore very heavy robes to be more modest, and it had the effect of making her almost shapeless, a dreadful sight gazing from them from many hoods.

The cultist leader bowed low. “My mistress. I have done as you commanded me. Our people, oru families and all that is left of us, we are here.” He rose his head up. “What is your bidding?”

Raven sent a mental signal, and across the universe, a grand portal working piggybacked on the lingering traces of the summoning. “First. Come close, and lower the barrier.”

The cultists did so, circling around her, and as they did, the barrier appeared, and wound away with their dance. Raven felt a certain pressure abate, and a magical field appeared around the whole of the temple, invisible to their senses. This would be a bit… imprecise.

Then, all the people around here (rather like turtles, she saw now) approached, some cautiously, others just quick enough to be brave.

(And, above a distant and green world, Raven’s emotion avatars allowed the spell to rise, its power circulating and harnessed. They waited.)

Raven snapped a finger.

(They received it, and now, they all cast their spell.

A reverse summoning, you might call it; the spell raced down the trail left behind by Raven… and yanked it wide open.)

Beneath the cultists, the floor shimmered. Raven’s eyes glowed, in their multitudes.

“What-” Someone started to say.

And then all was darkness.

If you slowed down the exact process, what you might see was a black mist of sorts rising right out of the floor. All at once, in a massive tidal wave coursing straight up, curling around them, and then rushing out. It was cool to the touch, with just a hint of force, so it was rather like water.

But for them, it happened so fast, and so violently, that you just saw everything go out.

Vast wings of blackness rose up in a room suddenly without any light, torches blown out, the people suddenly pulled up by a mighty force, right off the ground. They spiraled up, arond Raven, and she remained still as they wailed and cried. Beyond them, the blackness spread throughout the temple, into every room and into every chamber, racing out.

Clinging to a rail by his claws, and almost drowned out by the screams of the crowd, the cultist leader cried out: “My mistress! What is this?! What are you doing!? Please, stop it!”

“Calm down, it’s not bad,” Raven said as the darkness covered her, and spread through every room in the temple. “It’s just my aesthetic.”

And the shadow appeared around the temple, rising up over it; for a moment, the temple was just barely visible, a sinking structure caught in a black sea, and then it was gone too. The black mist shimmered, spreading out two vast shapes like massive wings, and it took on a new form as the spell waxed.

It looked very much like a gigantic raven.

And then, it flapped it’s wings, and it was gone.

All was still, upon a solitary mountainside.

There was no temple. Just an empty crater.

----

Raven remained still as the temple rocked, for a moment, the screams around her making her gravely uncomfortable, and she was relieved when it stopped. She spread an arm out, casting telekinetic bubbles around those still flung up by the force of the spell, and they gently floated down.

As one, the crowd breathed in, out, hyperventilating and their beaks clicking.

“Is that… is that it?” Someone said, tucking a hood down behind their heads.

“Are we… dead?” Another wondered. “Not quite what I’d want for freedom…”

“No, you’re alive,” Raven said.

“That’s reassuring,” the cultist leader said, still stubbornly grabbing onto the rail and refusing to let go. “So… what has happened?”

Ravened grabbed him with one hand, the rest of the arms on that side of her body fanning out. “Go and take a look outside,” she said, and teleported out with him.

After a few minutes of waiting for her to come back, the crowd slowly shuffled out. It didn’t seem like staying in the temple would do much good.

The first thing they saw was the sunlight, from which they covered their eyes.

The second thing they saw, was the vast open sky, that had never known suffering despite the best intents of its maker.

And the third thing they did, was they felt a calm rain. The first rain of this world, freed from its stasis, now falling upon the shells of its people.

And for a long, long moment, all they could do was stare up, onto this quiet world, and they waited in trepidation.

“I told you, I would not kill for you, or anyone,” Raven said firmly. “And so, I have given you your own world, free from those that persecuted you. Care for it well.”

They gaped up at her.

After a long tense moment, perhaps of them waiting for her to demand a sacrifice, she added, “It’s yours. This is your new home. You’re free.”

People do not, when set free from a terrible burden, normally jump and leap about for joy. The main sensation is… a weight falling from your shoulders. A sudden realization that the worst is past, not to be seen again. And in times like these, people just… fall apart, but in a good way.

The worst is past, again. Nothing more to worry about.

And the crowd fell over, and she felt the soft sigh from them all. She smiled, faintly, and placed the cultist leader down. He started up into the rolling grasslands, wonderingly.

“The horrible light is new,” he said, trying to cover his face, noticing his people starting to retreat towards a nearby cave. “...But we can always dig deeper.”

Raven smiled, again. She clasped each of her hands together; however mutated or multiplied, each one found a partner, and came together in a refined pose.

“This is really our own world?” He asked, just to be clear. “We are… we are finally free from war?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You made us a world? Really?”

“I have brought you a world, yes,” said Raven, who preferred not to lie but didn’t mind misleading people.

He sighed, sitting back; by chance, it was into a nearby stream, and his hood fell away. It revealed a long and worn beak, scarred and pitted by age, and four tiny eyes blinked myopically in the sunlight. He stared up at the clouds, beyond which Raven’s emotion avatars were even now quietly dematerializing, and now he didn’t bother to pull the hood of a desperate cultist back up.

“I thank you, my mistress. I. I…” His voice choked with emotion, and his beak snapped shut.

She justi nodded. “No need to say anything. I get it.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

Now Raven turned, a complicated emotion requiring her legs to pivot and twist her around, her flexible waist acting as a kind of organic turnstile. “Now… it’s time for me to go. Other things to do, and so on.”

He nodded. “Yes, mistress. Right, of course!” He hesitated, and then plunged on. “Have you a command for me, before you depart?”

“Not a command per se, but a request.”

“I listen, my mistress.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but… for the love of whatever deity you guys might worship that isn’t me, never summon me or try to get me again.”

He chuckled. “Fair enough, my Mistress. Well, okay. Not my mistress, per se, but… I suppose its clear enough.”

“That it is,” Raven said, and quietly departed for home one last time, and to fix that summoning spell to not work on her anymore, and then have some very pointed words with Constantine.

#/#//#///#////#/////#my writing #commissions #twitchy!raven #fics #twitchy!dc #this was honestly a lot of fun to do #it got me kind of intrigued by the body mutations suggested in this fic #also i love the cult here #they're just so earnestly buffoonish

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allgirlsareprincesses · 5 years

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Why Jasmine is the greatest Disney Princess

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while and I wanted to do more research before I did, but then the new Aladdin (2019) came out and HERE WE ARE. So this is me winging it with what I hope is still a pretty convincing case for Jasmine being the greatest Disney Princess so far.

What makes a great Disney Princess? Well, you could argue they all have something to offer: Snow White rocked some impressive sarcasm for a 14-year-old, Cinderella was pretty bold for her time, Sleeping Beauty was a dreamer with epic hair, Ariel is spunky and brave, Belle is bookish and kind, Pocahontas is regal and self-sacrificing, Rapunzel is sweet and empathetic, Tiana is passionate and hard-working, Merida is independent, and Anna is loving and faithful. There are others I didn’t include, of course, but the point is that there’s something to admire about every princess, and they all represent the modern woman in their own way. But did they need to be princesses in order to be these amazing characters? With the possible exceptions of Pocahontas and maybe Merida, I’d argue no. These stories would hardly be different, for the character at least, if she was any non-royal woman. And yes, I know Cinderella and Belle only became princesses by marriage, but even then, their stories could have been the same with any powerful man. It didn’t have to be a prince.

Of course, historical princesses and fantasy princesses are not the same thing, and we’re definitely talking about the latter here. Except for a few incredible and very unique ladies, most historical princesses were property whose carefully-preserved virginity was sold for a treaty, land, or a lot of money. They often lived and died miserable, their spectacular portraits notwithstanding. Fantasy princesses are, on the other hand, unabashed wish fulfillment for centuries of women who had little to hope for. These are the beautiful, powerful women we wish we could be, how we might see ourselves if our circumstances were different and nothing prevented us from realizing our potential. Fantasy princesses live the lives we want, and Disney princesses live the most flawless, perfect, clean version of that life. So by that metric, the greatest Disney princess might be the one who lives the most fully realized life that most girls can aspire to.

Jasmine in the original 1992 film

So, let’s talk about what we know of Jasmine (animated by the brilliant Mark Henn) from her introduction in the animated film. The first we see of her, she’s just rejected a suitor, so right out of the gate, we know she’s got no time for egomaniacs. A great trait, but not necessarily unique just yet. Belle also had zero tolerance for pompous douchebags. Next, we get some exposition setting up her conflict (and Aladdin’s) in that she’s legally bound to marry a prince, and she has a deadline. Naturally, she wants to marry for love, which is again sweet but not really original: Aurora wanted to marry for love, too, despite her betrothal. Then, Jasmine mentions that she’s never done a thing on her own, never had any real friends, and never even been outside the palace walls. This seems to be a hint that she might be spoiled and naive, if still sympathetic and appealing.

Finally, we get the line about “Maybe I don’t want to be a princess any more!” Ah, now that’s new. What does this mean? Is she declaring her ultimate goal, to reject her title and birthright, and become something new? Or is this setting up a lesson she’s going to learn about embracing her role? We don’t know, but suddenly we’re paying attention, trying to figure out if this is a spoiled brat or a girl on the verge of becoming a fully-realized woman. The next time we see her, Jasmine follows through on this thought, escaping over the palace wall to take her future into her own hands. We know now that, foolish or not, this is a woman with agency, who’s going to move the plot forward through her own actions rather than sit around and be an object for the hero.

In the market, we see Jasmine’s wonder at the world she’s never seen, but more importantly, we learn that she’s not just a self-absorbed teenager: she has a kind heart. She notices a hungry child and gives them food. True, she doesn’t understand that she needs to pay because she’s never had to do that, which is a consequence of her tremendous privilege. But, for someone who apparently had never before had direct contact with her people, simply recognizing hunger and instinctively seeking to correct it is encouraging. Importantly, this is also the first time we see her actions mirror Aladdin’s: we saw him offer food to a child only a few scenes before. The audience is starting to recognize that this girl is our hero’s equal (if not more).

Now, we come to the inevitable Damsel in Distress moment, and this is where Jasmine really shines. Caught off-guard by the abrupt cruelty of the outside world, she’s not quite able to talk her way out of having her hand chopped off for stealing, but thankfully Aladdin steps in to help. Jasmine, rather than being rattled and afraid, is intrigued and doesn’t miss a beat when her savior whispers “Just play along!” She follows his cues and immediately gives an Oscar-worthy performance as his insane sister, getting so into the ruse that she gives a glassy-eyed greeting to a camel as if it’s her doctor. To my knowledge, this kind of quick thinking is totally unique among the Disney princesses, certainly at the time. Even better, as we’ll see, Jasmine uses her smarts and acting ability several more times in the film, so this scene isn’t just a contrived meet-cute.

On the rooftops, we learn more about Jasmine: she’s genuinely grateful, she can graciously take a compliment (her blush when Aladdin tells her she “stands out” is adorable), and she is, in her own words “a fast learner,” at least when it comes to imitating Aladdin’s street sense. Finally, they arrive at his hovel and she’s entranced by his apparent freedom. Upon hearing how impressive he finds the palace, however, we see her sink back into her own problems, focusing on what she doesn’t have rather than her extraordinary wealth and luxury. From the audience’s perspective, this is definitely a flaw, but one that makes sense given her life experience up to that point. Once she and Aladdin connect over their mutual feeling of being “trapped,” Jasmine completely succumbs to his clumsy charms, and they nearly share a kiss UNTIL….

They are surprised by palace guards and the iconic “Do you trust me?” exchange takes place (this will set the tone for their entire relationship throughout all of the animated content that came after, but more on that later). Aladdin is captured and without a second thought, Jasmine reveals herself and in a commanding, regal tone, ORDERS the guards to release him. For a girl who declared only a few scenes ago that she didn’t “want to be a princess any more,” she changed her tune FAST when it suited her. In fact, from this point onward, she embraces her power and wields her position like a weapon, never again seeming to question her role as Princess of Agrabah. When the guards try to question her, she tells them her actions are “not your concern” and when they tell her she’ll have to take her complaint to Jafar, she gives the most menacing glare of any Disney heroine, ever (fight me), with a sinister “Believe me, I will.”

A quick note before we continue our recap of Jasmine’s epic badassery: during production of the animated Aladdin, the crew had a bit of a crisis with Jasmine being so amazing that she completely overshadowed the hero. Studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg (a horrible human who nonetheless brought a few nuggets of wisdom to the Disney Animation Renaissance of the 90s) is on tape saying he understands why Aladdin would like Jasmine, because she’s fantastic, but that he doesn’t understand why Jasmine would like him. At the time, Aladdin was written and drawn younger, scrawnier, more boy than man and more befitting his “street rat” title. There was a song about his mother, which also contributed to the impression of him as a child, and it quickly became clear that the hero was not really worthy of the heroine, as written. Aladdin was completely redesigned by supervising animator Glen Keane to have a more adult, heroic physique (despite the fact that much of his animation had already been completed), the mother character was removed, and Aladdin’s personality was patterned after popular film stars like Tom Cruise. To further “age up” the cast for this new, more adult take on the story, Jasmine voice actor Linda Larkin was trained to record all her lines in a lower register than her natural voice, making Jasmine sound more like a woman than a girl.

So, back to the palace (which, remember, she’d left because she didn’t “want to be a princess any more”) and Jasmine marching right up to Jafar to get in his face about the boy he took from the market. Still with that same commanding tone she used with the guards, the princess wastes no time on pleasantries and invades Jafar’s personal space, demanding answers and admitting no resistance. When he accuses Aladdin of kidnapping her, Jasmine doesn’t hesitate to tell Jafar she ran away, clearly more concerned about the boy’s freedom than any consequences she might suffer for her actions. But when she hears that Aladdin was executed, Jasmine mourns…. Not only for the kind young man who helped her, but for the damage that her selfishness caused. Though she blames Jafar when speaking to her father, Jasmine reveals to Rajah that she feels Aladdin’s death was “all [her] fault.” It’s not supposed to be her story, but we’re clearly seeing the princess learn a powerful lesson about the consequences of her actions. This is why we see Jasmine continue to mourn for multiple scenes, really right up until she realizes that Prince Ali is Aladdin: the guilt she feels is devastating. She’s reaching a new level of moral maturity even as the object of her affections is constructing an elaborate lie to win her back.

When Jafar is chastised by the Sultan for executing a criminal without consulting him first, he makes a silky and obviously insincere apology to Jasmine, who utters possibly her best line of the film: “At least some good will come of my being forced to marry. When I am Queen, I will have the power to get rid of YOU!” And then she marches off. DAMN, GIRL. And the best part is that Jafar takes her seriously. He knows that was no empty threat, and he discusses with Iago whether Jasmine will have him banished or simply beheaded. Tell me, when has a truly menacing Disney villain ever been that TERRIFIED of the heroine? That’s power, people, the kind that most women can only dream about. Jasmine has it and she’s going to USE IT. Jasmine, First of Her Name, Queen of Agrabah….

Sorry, where was I? Oh yes, Jasmine scaring the sh*t out of Jafar like the badass b*tch she is. So anyway, Jafar realizes the only path open to him is to marry Jasmine (and then kill her, of course), so we see that plot being hatched just as Prince Ali comes to town. Unsurprisingly, Jasmine is even less impressed by the princely pomp and circumstance than usual, if that’s possible, and she literally ignores the parade when she realizes what it is. Then she overhears Ali bragging to Jafar and the Sultan that he will “win your daughter” and she snaps with undisguised fury: “How dare you! All of you! Standing around deciding my future? I am not a prize to be won!” And again with the storming off (there’s a lot of that, I mean she’s nearly 18, after all). But seriously, this woman is my feminist icon. She literally just took down a potential suitor, her own father THE KING, and the second most powerful man in the kingdom with one line.

Finally, Ali shows up at her balcony and Jasmine is blunt: “I do NOT want to see you. Just leave me alone.” Of course, when Ali takes off his turban, she recognizes him immediately. She doubts for a moment when he lies to her, and then he starts attempting to impress her. This is the second time we see Jasmine turn to her considerable acting skills, and the first time she uses her considerable powers of seduction to fool a man: she stalks toward Ali like a she-wolf, telling him everything he wants to hear. She takes his compliment about her beauty (and remember, we’ve already seen her blushingly accept that same compliment before) and turns it into a weapon against him, drawing him in only to put him in his place as a “swaggering peacock.”

Naturally, Jasmine is intrigued by the magic carpet and the opportunity to taste freedom again, but it’s Aladdin’s ultimate tell of “Do you trust me?” that finally draws her into his arms and out into the night sky. Love, for this princess, is an expression of her desire for freedom: it’s what she chooses to do with that freedom, more than an end in itself. And both the music and lyrics of “A Whole New World” speak to that freedom as much as or more than romantic love. For two people who feel “trapped,” this song is the ultimate anthem. And as they soar, Aladdin tosses an apple to Jasmine with his signature move, and she’s again certain that it’s him. Rather than confront him directly about his lie, she again uses her smarts and performing ability to entrap Ali into admitting he’s Aladdin. She really lets loose on him once he realizes he’s caught, asking if he thinks she’s stupid. Then, Jasmine demands the truth…. And of course she doesn’t get it. Though this naivete could be viewed as a flaw, we know that their early relationship was built on trust, so it makes sense for Jasmine to bestow this on her suitor without reservation. We’ve seen so much of her harsher side ever since Aladdin was dragged away a prisoner, so this glimpse of her soft heart is refreshing and reminds us of why she is so extraordinary.

Back at the palace, Jasmine is in full teen-girl-in-love mode, having her first kiss and then dreamily humming as she brushes her hair (this is the only time we see her hair unbound in the film, signifying her achievement of freedom through her love for Aladdin). Upon discovering Jafar’s plot to marry her, Jasmine of course refuses forcefully, declaring without hesitation her love for Prince Ali. During the ensuing confrontation, Jasmine is a bit more the object for Aladdin than his equal, unlike in the rest of the film, but this doesn’t last. We next see her excitedly preparing to introduce her betrothed to the kingdom, even as he tries to confess the truth to her. While this analysis focuses on Jasmine, it’s notable Aladdin respects her enough to attempt to admit his lies and reveal his true identity, however belated. This shows how worthy she is, that in spite of the risk of losing her, Aladdin wants to be honest and be her equal partner. This is another theme we’ll come back to later.

When Jafar steals the lamp and makes himself Sultan, he demands that Jasmine and her father bow to him. Once again, she defiantly refuses, even as her own father begins to bend in submission. When Aladdin’s identity is then revealed, Jasmine is understandably startled, but there’s no indication she’s deeply hurt or angry, especially as she’s confronted with a much greater immediate threat in Jafar, and that Aladdin is obviously attempting to protect her. Alone with Jafar and reduced to a slave girl in chains, Jasmine still tries to fight back in any way she can. She pleads with Jafar to show mercy to her father, then throws a goblet of wine in his face when he suggests she marry him. Understandably, she’s terrified when Jafar uses a wish to attempt to force her to fall in love with him. Again, since giving her love is Jasmine’s ultimate expression of her desire for freedom, to be forced to love against her will is the greatest possible threat to that freedom. It’s not just that it’s a heinous thing for any woman or person, but that it’s the worst for Jasmine, specifically, because of what we know of her character.

A quick note here about the similarity of Jasmine’s situation to another princess who has recently joined the Disney family: Princess Leia. Like Jasmine, she is captured and chained by a villain (Jabba the Hutt) and dressed in a “sexy slave” outfit meant to demean her as a sexual object. Also like Jasmine, Leia keeps fighting back, and eventually finds an opportunity to turn the tables on her lascivious captor and use the conditions of her captivity (literally, her chains) to destroy him. In both cases, there tends to be undue audience attention to how sexy the character looks (hello, Male Gaze), rather than how she uses her strengths to defeat the villain.

So then, Jasmine spots Aladdin creeping up the steal the lamp, and this is where she cements her place as the greatest Disney princess, IMO. Just as she has several times before, she uses her wits and her Oscar-worthy acting skills, and makes Jafar believe that his wish has been granted. In a startlingly mature turn for a G-rated film, Jasmine uses her sexual appeal as a weapon against the villain, to enable her lover to defeat him. All undulating hips and shoulders, a sultry purr, and excessive flattery, she slinks toward Jafar, distracting him as Aladdin draws closer to the lamp. When it seems Jafar might suddenly notice his enemy, Jasmine takes the drastic and self-sacrificial step of pulling him in for a passionate kiss. What’s notable about this moment is that Aladdin, in a classically male possessive moment, becomes just as distracted as Jafar, and misses the opportunity Jasmine gave him. It’s another example of how, though Aladdin has many wonderful qualities, the princess really is still out of his league. The filmmakers made her so brilliant that it’s tough for the “diamond in the rough” main character to measure up.

Her ruse having ultimately failed, Jasmine still tries to fight back physically against Jafar, but of course she can’t. But Aladdin can, so he yells to her to get the lamp and she nearly does, until Jafar traps her in a massive hourglass. At this point, she’s back into Damsel in Distress mode since it is after all Aladdin’s story (I guess), but thankfully our hero uses his own cunning to trap Jafar in time to free Jasmine. To his credit, the first thing Aladdin does when he faces his lady after the battle is apologize for lying. Her response is perfect: “I know why you did.” She doesn’t say it’s okay, she just expresses empathy for him, because she doesn’t doubt his feelings for her. His judgement, maybe, but not his love. And then, she doesn’t hesitate to express her love for him, directly. And finally, when Aladdin tells her he must do the right thing and “stop pretending to be something [he’s] not,” she says “I understand.” She accepts that him making the right decision means they can’t be together. It hurts for sure, but she has the moral fortitude to cope with it. Seriously, Aladdin doesn’t deserve this goddess.

So Aladdin makes the right choice and frees the Genie, and then the Sultan changes the law so Jasmine can marry him. Her father’s justification for this decision is that Aladdin “proved his worth,” rather than that his daughter has the right to choose ANY suitor she likes, which is kind of unfortunate. If anyone has proved their worth at this point in the story, it’s Jasmine, who has defended herself, her family, her city, and her lover throughout the film. Fortunately, this is something the creators of the 2019 film recognized and corrected…. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As far as we knew at the end of the original film, Aladdin and Jasmine had married, and I believe that even if you considered ONLY this movie canon, the point that Jasmine is the greatest Disney princess stands on solid ground. But as we know, that was NOT the last we saw of these characters, and all the content since then has only reinforced how uniquely awesome Jasmine is.

Jasmine in the animated sequel content

After the smash success of Aladdin in the theaters, and the Little Mermaid TV show, Disney read the tea leaves and decided to create the first of its direct-to-video sequels. These cheaply-made, poorly-written debacles (often derisively referred to as “cheapquels”) would be a staple of studio income for some time, and were an intense topic of debate as well. That’s a tale for another day, but the point is that the first of these was The Return of Jafar, in 1994.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this film simply because it’s horrible and I have zero desire to watch it again, but I remember Jasmine being a lot more damsel-in-distress and less badass than she was in the original film, right down to her voice being higher than the carefully-crafted and mature vocals she had in the theatrical release. The film was mostly designed to set up the TV show, by removing the obvious remaining threat of Jafar, rehabilitating Iago for additional comic relief, and bringing back the Genie. It did all of these poorly, but the show afterward was better for having these issues resolved before it began. And the series, whatever its faults, had lots and lots of great Jasmine moments.

For example, in only the second episode of the entire series, Bad Mood Rising, Aladdin and Jasmine are sent on a diplomatic mission to a neighboring kingdom, to establish trade. Interestingly, there’s no indication that it’s Aladdin’s mission, merely that the two of them are “the delegation from Agrabah” and the episode starts with Jasmine giving Aladdin crap for his lack of diplomatic experience. They find the kingdom devastated by famine, and discover this is because the king, a young child, is enchanted such that his moods determine the weather. The kid’s boredom and tantrums are causing his people to suffer, so our heroes attempt to entertain him. Only Jasmine succeeds by telling him a story, in a delightfully direct reference to Scheherazade from the original 1001 Arabian Nights. The boy king is so fascinated by Jasmine’s storytelling, he commands her to stay with him forever.

At first, Aladdin and Jasmine try to escape, but when confronted with the suffering of the people, Jasmine agrees to stay with the king. Aladdin of course protests, and Jasmine utters my absolute favorite line ever: “I was raised a princess, Aladdin. And a princess knows: the needs of the people outweigh her own.” Like WHAAAAAT? I was about nine when I saw this and I swear it blew my tiny mind. I loved princesses, but the idea of them having a responsibility to their subjects had never once crossed my mind. Hearing Jasmine declare herself a servant and protector of the people completely changed my perspective on mythical (and to some extent, actual) royalty, and influenced my opinions of fictional princesses forever.

Jasmine freely chooses to go with the young king, even refusing to accompany Aladdin when he comes back for her again, but we see her mourning the life she lost. Even in a cheap and immature kids’ show, it’s clear that she’s made a real sacrifice to save the people. Thankfully, our heroes are able to teach the boy king that being kind feels good, and he releases the princess back to her city. I noticed when rewatching this episode that Aladdin’s first instinct is always fighting and physical aggression, whereas Jasmine turns to diplomacy. This is both a trend throughout the series, and also a setup for Aladdin’s eventual maturation. The show nearly always casts Aladdin’s aggressive stance as mistaken, which is an interesting commentary given the time.

In a much later episode, called “The Ethereal,” Jasmine has a dream foretelling the destruction of Agrabah. She is, of course, extremely disturbed, especially when events from her dream start occurring in sequence. Eventually a sort of Angel of Death called The Ethereal arrives to pass judgement on the city. We are made to understand that this is a very serious threat, as this same being has already destroyed Atlantis, Pompeii, and Babylon. While Aladdin attempts to make a magical spear that will destroy The Ethereal, Jasmine and her father take her on a tour of Agrabah’s wonders, to convince her to spare the city. They show her the fine library, the marketplace, and works of art, but The Ethereal is unimpressed. She begins to rain fire down on Agrabah in a fairly Biblical vision of the apocalypse, complete with smoking rubble and screaming citizens.

Aladdin attempts to use his spear to nullify the Ethereal’s powers, but his efforts fail. Our heroes come to accept that the city will be destroyed, so they turn their attention to saving as many of Agrabah’s people as they can. Jasmine sees a child about to be crushed by falling debris, so she uses the same pole-vaulting move Aladdin taught her at the beginning of the theatrical film (nice continuity, Disney TV writers!) to leap over the rubble and push the boy out of the way. She is then crushed by the falling tower. Just in case you weren’t SURE that they just killed off the princess in a Disney property, they have Aladdin finding her body in the rubble and saying in a devastated whisper, “She…. she’s gone.”

Holy sh*t, Disney, did you just DO that??? What? Keep in mind that this is at least two years before Hercules was released in theaters, in which Meg was also crushed by a falling column when she pushed Herc out of the way. So not only did Jasmine sacrifice herself first, as far as audiences were concerned, but she did so for her people, not just her lover. This is not to say that Meg’s act was selfish, of course, but it’s notable that Jasmine’s sacrifice was for someone she wasn’t particularly close to, yet she acted without hesitation all the same.

As the people of Agrabah visibly mourn their princess, The Ethereal floats down with a smile and says “I have seen what I needed to see. Your princess’s sacrifice makes it clear: she understood.” She restores Agrabah, then resurrects Jasmine, who tells Aladdin “It’s the people. The people make Agrabah great.” The Ethereal then warns them not to forget this lesson, and leaves.

Though these are the two episodes that most stand out in my mind, they clearly demonstrate that Jasmine thinks of herself not as Aladdin’s girlfriend, but as a public servant, a political figure with responsibilities to her people and a genuinely empathetic heart for them. It makes very clear that when the Sultan’s reign ends, Jasmine will absolutely be the ruler of Agrabah. While this is never stated explicitly to my memory, it’s obvious that Jasmine would be the wisdom and power behind the throne, as there is no clear arc built around preparing Aladdin for any kind of leadership. Despite the Sultan’s proclamation in the original film that Aladdin will be Sultan, it seems he’s really more of Jasmine’s consort, which appears to suit both of them just fine.

This leads me to my last point about the TV series, and one that segues well into the “threequel” that ended the animated content: Aladdin and Jasmine’s relationship is treated in a surprisingly mature fashion. What I mean is, though the writing on the show is often cheesy and a little cringeworthy, this is also a kids’ show that uniquely features a committed, long-term adult relationship. They often reference their plans to marry, and frequently say “I love you” to one another. Though there are ups and downs in their relationship, they remain committed and mostly very honest with one another, consistently demonstrating that their bond still rests on that trust that was so heavily emphasized in the 1992 film.

One episode in particular demonstrates this deep commitment, called Eye of the Beholder. In it, recurring villainess Mirage transforms Jasmine into a snake, to test Aladdin’s love. Aladdin determinedly sets out to find a way to break the spell and change Jasmine back. When they are unable to find an antidote, a devastated Jasmine tells Aladdin to leave her, believing that she will be a snake forever. Instead of leaving, Aladdin eats an enchanted fruit that also turns HIM into a snake, declaring to her “If we can’t be together as humans, then we’ll be together as snakes.” A furious Mirage screams “No, this was supposed to tear you apart, not bring you closer together!” And of course the episode ends with them being transformed back into their human forms.

While this is definitely more of an Aladdin moment than a Jasmine one, it’s important that her lover is shown being committed to her, because it demonstrates that he is truly worthy of her. Remember that in the original film, it was a major problem during production that Jasmine overshadowed Aladdin, so seeing him grow and become an equal partner is tremendously important to keep the audience invested in their relationship. I appreciate that instead of forced breakup plotlines, the writers of the series chose to show Aladdin and Jasmine growing even closer over the course of the show’s run, making them excellent romantic role models for kids.

Eventually, Disney chose to bring Aladdin and Jasmine’s story to a close, creating Aladdin and the King of Thieves in 1996. Blessedly, this film again featured Robin Williams as the Genie, and some much better animation than what we saw in Return of Jafar or the TV series. The story started with an obnoxiously-Westernized wedding, which was then interrupted by the appearance of the legendary 40 Thieves. We see here the return of Badass Jasmine, who punches out one of the thieves as payback for “ruining [her] wedding.”

Consulting an Oracle, Aladdin learns that his father, whom he had presumed dead, is still alive. There next follows another of my favorite Jasmine moments. She sings a beautiful song to Aladdin, about why she loves him and how special he is to her. The key line is “People like you don’t just come out of thin air.” Aladdin also has a verse trying to describe his painful childhood, including the wrenching line “Your father’s a man who taught you who you are; mine was never there.” I love the acknowledgement there that the Sultan, despite his faults, has been a good father to Jasmine, and that in particular, he shaped her and made her understand her place in the world. At the same time, Aladdin spoke to a generation of lonely kids with Daddy Issues, and there was Princess Jasmine, listening sympathetically and offering support.

The song ends with Jasmine encouraging Aladdin to go find his father: “Our wedding can wait. I think it’s worth a small delay. And won’t it be great to have your father see our wedding day.” No bridezilla here! Jasmine is happy to support her partner and put his needs first. When Aladdin learns that his father is “trapped within the world of the 40 Thieves,” Jasmine tells him “Take as long as you need.” Wow. He really, really doesn’t deserve her.

Aladdin goes off, finds out his dad, Cassim, really did abandon him and his mother, and confronts him about it. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie, but I remember being fascinated by how Aladdin didn’t let his father off the hook, but told him that his family had needed him. In an attempt to rehabilitate him, Aladdin brings Cassim back to the palace, where of course temptation gets the better of him and he gets caught stealing (again). Out of a sense of grudging loyalty to his family, Aladdin frees his father, but at the border of the kingdom, refuses to continue on with him. Cassim points out that Aladdin is a criminal now for helping him escape, and tries to convince him to leave Agrabah together. It’s at this point that Aladdin finally becomes a real man, defiantly shouting at his father, “I won’t walk out on Jasmine!” and turning his back on Cassim. DAMN RIGHT BOI, YOU TELL HIM. And as his father rides away, Aladdin returns to Agrabah to face the consequences of his actions.

Of course, they forgive him immediately and Jasmine even helps Aladdin rescue his dad later, but how great is it to finally see our hero show that he really is worthy of the princess’s heart? After this whole story has been told, this is where we end up: with Aladdin reaffirming his commitment to Jasmine, because homegirl is a damn QUEEN, thankyouverymuch. So Aladdin and Jasmine win the day and are finally married, and while we don’t hear anything of their lives together afterward, it seems like they probably had a wonderful life together, and that Jasmine was a wise and fair ruler with a supportive consort who always put her first. Or at least that’s the headcanon I’ve developed over the years.

Jasmine in the 2019 Live-Action Film

So this brings us to the latest of Disney’s live-action remakes…. BUT FIRST! Some context: I’m pretty lukewarm on this film. It’s fine, but IMHO it doesn’t hold a candle to the original animated version. That said, this rant isn’t about critiquing the film as a whole, so I’m going to set all of my nitpicks aside and focus just on the treatment of Jasmine, and whether she is STILL the greatest Disney princess in her newest incarnation.

Short answer: Yep, she is. While I can’t be certain that the writers for this movie had watched any of the TV series, I was struck by their choice of arc for Jasmine: whereas in the original film, her goal was simply freedom (expressed by loving whomever she wanted), her goal here is to literally rule Agrabah. That’s incredibly bold and of course anachronistic, but remember that we’re talking about a fantasy princess here, not an historical one. As in the show, Jasmine demonstrates an understanding of statecraft when she urges her father to maintain peace with the kingdom’s allies. Since she is interfering with his plans for a coup, Jafar insists she remain silent and enchants the Sultan into agreeing. This leads to an “I want” song for Jasmine, which she did not have in the original, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

While this Jasmine is missing some of the endearing traits of her animated predecessor, like the quick thinking and the acting skills, her ambitions to leadership create a similar problem to that of the original film. Remember that the 1992 filmmakers never quite solved the problem of their Jasmine overshadowing the hero, and now, with a new arc of her own that really has nothing to do with Aladdin, this Jasmine doesn’t really NEED him. Unfortunately, this leads to their two stories happening in parallel, rather than as part of a clear singular plot. Worse, it means that the climax of the film downplays Jasmine’s role in favor of Aladdin, robbing her of that wonderful moment from the animated film in which she tricked Jafar to help her lover. In the end, Jasmine’s achievement is her father formally declaring her his successor, and marrying Aladdin is more of an incidental bonus.

Issues with story structure aside, this Jasmine is much more academic than the street-smart girl from the animated content. She’s clearly well-studied in geography and diplomacy, which is why she has no patience for doltish princes like the one she rejects at the beginning of the film. She even has the self-awareness to recognize how being cooped up in the palace makes her an unfit leader, which is why she’s in the market the day she meets Aladdin. Whereas 1992 Jasmine left for selfish reasons - she wanted to be free of the royal pressures she faced - 2019 Jasmine left the palace specifically to learn how to serve her people. This is a level of maturity that the animated princess does not reach until fairly late in the TV series. While I miss the feisty, sharp-witted girl from my childhood, I have to admit that I love the compassionate, driven, calculating woman depicted in this new film, as well.

Which brings me back to the new song, “Speechless.” First and foremost, it’s fantastically performed by Naomi Scott, who has easily the strongest set of pipes in the cast. The musical style is out of place with the other songs, and the scene itself is a weird music video dropped into the middle of an otherwise tense moment nearing the film’s climax, BUT! It’s such a great girl-power ballad that it really doesn’t matter. Honestly, the lyrics don’t really even reflect Jasmine’s inner struggle THAT precisely, but this is because the song isn’t really about her, it’s about the audience, specifically the young girls in the audience. Disney understands that girls will project onto Jasmine as they do all the princesses, so they’ve given us the new “Let It Go” to belt out when we need to get psyched up about anything. I mean, I could easily hear this being played at a Women’s March or similar event. It might not make a lot of sense in the film, but Jasmine is definitely the perfect character to deliver this manifesto to the young women of 2019.

Point being, the only must-have on my list for the 2019 remake was that it not ruin my beloved Princess of Agrabah, and blessedly, they didn’t. And I think she still holds a solid first place among the princesses of the Disney lexicon, as the only one to seriously treat her role as a head of state. Pocahontas, Merida, and Moana all had moments of service to their people as well, but none with quite the boldness, cunning, and selflessness that Jasmine achieved in all of her many incarnations. I assume that Disney is seeing dollar signs and will put out another live-action sequel at some point, and it will probably be terrible, but honestly I don’t mind seeing more Jasmine as long as she continues to be the example of a powerful princess.

So thanks for reading my first unnecessarily-long Tumblr rant, and if you made it all the way to the end, please comment or reblog and let me know what you think!

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