#the movie has a lot of inconsistencies about certain events that were in the book for a reason

[enypneon]

just in case there's ever someone writing with murtagh based on their knowledge of the movie 'eragon', here's a disclaimer:

both have different versions of murtagh. here, murtagh is nothing like the one you know. he descends from aristocracy, he grew up at court, stood at the heart of intrigues and snobby people pleasers, etc. hygiene is written BIG in his schedule. dirt-covered face? no thank you. i get that some of the things were impossible to know for the movie creators but there's also a lot of material they ignored/left out/altered. on purpose? i sure hope so or the situation would be even more grotesque.

under the cut, you can find some details, which might as well be interesting for those wishing to write with him in the future.

murtagh ...

... is not first seen by eragon in duret (where angela is). angela does mention eragon's future meeting with murtagh, though (i believe).

... did in fact see a dragon before. he might not remember morzan's but i am almost 100% convinced that he must have seen shruikan at some point. he technically lived with a dragon. and while he was surprised to see saphira take off, it might be simply for the reason that he had just never seen a dragon take flight so close before. shruikan is massive in size, bigger than the movie showed. hard to miss, you know? however, hardly seen flying around.

... wouldn't have held zar'roc with amusement and gawk at it (in case you've seen the deleted scene where he takes the sword while eragon is sleeping). trust me.

... did not shrug it off and was like 'alright gang, let's go to the vardens.' in the first instance it was mentioned. murtagh initially wanted to leave eragon once they were close to the vardens. well aware that the whole depth of his true identity is likely to be revealed there and he'll risk being dragged back to galbatorix which unfortunately does happen in the end.

... doesn't know the location of the vardens, he's not one of alagaësia's tour guides ready at your service. not long ago he pretty much spent every of his living seconds behind the walls of galbatorix' estate, not allowed to leave. how is he supposed to know about the varden's exact location? an alliance opposing the king.

... was there when brom died (who did not get wounded by the shade in gil'ead btw, which is also a city, and not the fantasy version of alcatraz). murtagh came to the camp while brom was still there at the brim of death ─ and assisted in tending to brom's wounds.

... helped saphira rescue arya AND ERAGON (after brom's passing), who were both held captive in gil'ead. arya stays in a self-induced coma from the moment they escape until they reach the vardens and neither eragon nor murtagh know she's an elven princess. she first mentions this in the second book!

... shot that arrow into durza's head, he hit the shade's shoulder then landed an arrow between his eyes. eragon didn't do that. brom can't tell them they need to pierce his heart, since he's already dead by the time.

... carries a physical scar. a reminder of his father striking him with zar'roc, it stretches along the ENTIRETY of his back, and it's not just a small curve over his hip bone (as is shown in the movie). the few people who get to see it are usually taken aback by how gruesome it looks.

extra info dump:

despite of what the movie suggests thorn will not die by default if murtagh were to die before him. yes, most of the dragons die shortly after but it's due to the emotional and mental repercussions their rider's death causes. losing their rider can drive them into madness and they may act in a haphazard manner, meaning their own actions would lead to their death. like achilles being so blinded by the thought and urge for revenge that it eventually kills him because he's defeated as a consequence of his recklessness. there are records and sightings of riderless dragons. galbatorix current dragon is such an example. shruikan is not the one that hatched for galbatorix.

dragon and rider are equal. the way eragon speaks to saphira in the movie commanding her to do this and that does not work! murtagh can't tell thorn what to do, and neither can thorn force actions on murtagh. the rider is not above the dragon. so don't go complaining to murtagh when thorn's being mean to you.

#disclaimer:murtagh. #i'm giving you this small list because i'd rather write in a verse made up between me and my writing partner #than dive into the world of this insult of a movie #i know comparing books to their movies never is right BUT this one was a violation OKAY?? #and yes this is a 'small' list there's much much more and i'm happy to share it all with you if needed although it pains to think about it #also i won't despise you or whatever should you enjoy the movie IN FACT the movie actually made me read the books because i loved it! #the movie has a lot of inconsistencies about certain events that were in the book for a reason #so that the story progression of the next books makes sense and because murtagh is based on the books i can't portray him as he is shown #in the movie... otherwise he'd appear “out of character” in the canon storyline that is portrayed on this blog... #° › OOC ‹ 𝐑𝐄𝐏𝐎𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐋𝐈𝐕𝐄 * out of character ╲ MUN .

[this-acuteneurosis]

Part of the reason Anakin's characterization is so varied is probably because the clone wars had a bunch of different writers who all wrote Anakin differently but it is safe to say that your Anakin is one of my favorites! Can't wait to see how things go with him!

I mean, multiple writers certain can explain why TCW Anakin is internally inconsistent.

But I don't think we can dismiss the influence of the Cold War and Vietnam War on shaping the Empire and its military, and Darth Vader's character, in comparison to TPM being released in 1999, and AtoC coming out the year after 9/11. Like...geeze, where do I even begin. I am not a history buff, but having lived through 1999-2002 and the culture shift that happened then, uh. Yeah. I'd argue that Anakin's path to evil, and the shape that evil took, was strongly impacted by the world events that were going on. (Anakin killing the Tuskens has received a lot of critique generally, but uh, yeah. That? In 2002? Correlation is not causation, but...)

And that's before I swallow a repeat rant of adding "The Chosen One" to Anakin's backstory in the PT.

Which was always the risk of telling the story backwards. Consistent characterization is hard enough in linear, forward moving stories.

As a result, in much of the fic that I've read about Vader, there are lot of interpretations of the character with a compulsive lack of control, and a delight and interest in violence and pain, that doesn't ring true for me personally. The first example I can think of where someone deliberately and successfully reconciled the active, aggressive, impulsive Anakin of the PT to the cold, looming (but still kind of impulsive) Vader of the OT is @chancecraz in Of Queens, Knights, and Pawns, where (spoilers for fic) events from the PT and Rebels were used as a through line to get Vader to a point where he had sort of burned himself out into being suicidal. (Double Agent Vader starts with a still pretty young, already burned out, depressed, apathetic Anakin, so while I love it, it's not a good example.)

I didn't like RotS initially because I didn't see a strong connection between the Anakin/Vader of that movie and the Vader/Anakin I remembered from a pre-PT era. And I know there has been a bunch of back filling of those years, but every time I'm reminded there are games and books and additional shows I could consume that would "fix" it, I just...

I remember that I'm really an outsider to this fandom. And that was a huge worry for me when I started writing fic for it.

(Kinda still is, so I'm glad you like this Anakin, anon.)

#I don't belong here. #They aren't going to like when I do this next bit... #people keep leaving comments about canon #(most of them nice) #about things I'm missing #or things they think I'd like to know #or asking questions about characters they want to see #and I just feel over and over #it's a personal problem I know #but writing for big Old fandoms is scary guys

[mischas]

oof that mischa interview. it's funny some ppl thought she was being inconsistent with her allegations last year when mischa's been harping on about how unhappy she was since c.2006 with the same consistent messaging! it was interesting that tate was on the pod this week and basically put the entire core four on blast for showing up late, not knowing lines. now that's a totally different narrative than what was being told in 2006

I think any interview given during that time period of their (the core four's) lives was subject to stretching the truth. I spent all day reading Mischa interviews from scans that French fansite still has up from 2005-2007 and there's a lot about her that turned out... differently. Like her hating the party scene, crafting this really wholesome image, talking about the close relationship she has to her mom, etc. Many of the interviews were written almost exactly the same, shining a light on her as this green girl next door who hates partying and detests being compared to Marissa who's a mess of a character. Like damn. She's had those lines memorized for years, apparently. She's always, at least from 2005 on, parroted the line that Marissa is a strung out party girl. It kind of floored me to read that over and over. I can only guess that the show's publicity parroted these lines through subtext or it was the direction Mischa was given on and off screen. It's hard for me to reconcile the person reducing Marissa to what the message boards wrote about her with playing this extremely kind and vulnerable character with addiction issues and trauma. I know I'm hella biased, but damn.

Now that we know that Mischa was fired from the show, it's easier to see how she and her PR tackled press in the aftermath of her exit. We can see the strategy. Frankly, it was laid out in her interviews for years leading up to it. Mischa knew she was playing the drama magnet. She knew she was the amalgamation of what the show was trying to convey ie. there's a mess under all the glamour of Newport. During mag interviews, Mischa seems accepting of all this. For her to do some self reflection over the last two decades must be a lot. I mean, you're told you're the linchpin of the series, you are who's bringing it the most press, and you're also the one acting out drama to the extreme without a second of recompense for your character. Oh and by the way you're fucking fired. Bye. Jesus, it's a lot. Obviously every core four actor wanted to be a movie star. But Mischa was doing indies on summers off from doing this show. She was booked, even if it wasn't the shiny roles in bigger movies that shot when The OC did. She'd signed a five year contract apparently! I do wonder how she was compensated for Fox breaking that, and if there was ever an NDA signed concerning certain things. (I know nothing about that at all, maybe there's no repercussion for a broken contract in the event of a firing.)

In that interview I posted, she said, "It was like high school. I became so accustomed to seeing the same people day in and day out. I didn't want it to end weirdly, and it did, a little bit. It was bittersweet." I feel like this is the only thing I've ever heard about Mischa actually leaving set and her cast mates. Ben said it was "odd" and others have hemmed and hawed. This is mostly irrelevant to your message but I'm so goddamn intrigued by this whole thing.

Re: Tate. What a dick. Like damn dude they were dumbass kids. He even said in his last pod ep that he remembered what it was like to be a young actor/star. He's already roasted them once. We get it! That said... I do like tea. I know I know I'm a freakin hypocrite. The gossip in me likes hearing that kind of shit. Especially how you point out that clearly every core four member was over the material by s3. Which is so sad when you see how bright the show's star shined in the beginning. I like the little digs we can infer about how the actors felt about the writing. That's the tea I really want!

#ask #anonymous #mischa barton #mb exit tea #this got long lmao

[out-of-this-dimension]

Hypothetically Rewriting Assault’s Story + Some General Assault Opinions

There’s a game my husband and I like to play when we watch a movie, play a game, or read a book that has a story that we don’t really enjoy or we enjoy certain parts of but not others.  We look at things we’d keep and things we’d change and we build a story from there-- sort of like an AU but we don’t really go into the writing part, we just stick to theorizing and mapping a general story.

I decided to play that game with Star Fox.  Not because I think Star Fox has a bad story but because sometimes I think the stories could have been handled better.  Note: for the rewrite game, I only really look at story, even for video games, I don’t really look at gameplay mechanics, but I do understand those have a lot to do with story potential so I do take it in as a factor... I just don’t bother to “rewrite” the mechanics, if that makes any sense at all.  Some of my list today will include boss encounters but I wouldn’t necessarily say those are mechanic-related... more like “event-related”.

I’ve mused a bit in the past about rewriting Adventures and Command and I do have plans to do a mock up of an Adventures remake eventually.  However, today I was thinking about how I would go about handling an Assault re-write in particular.  Much like Command and Adventures, I don’t have any beef with the core story but I do think there’s a few things that could’ve been better about Assault’s storyline-- like they had good ideas rolling but they didn’t quite refine them.

Under the cut because SUPER long.

My basic feelings on Assault are pretty positive.  I think the game is generally just fun and I like that it feels like the natural progression from SF64.  I liked getting to see planets we haven’t seen since the N64 era in better graphics and I liked seeing Star Wolf return.  I also just thought the aparoids were neat enemies. 

Generally speaking, though, when it comes to Assault, I think it suffers from the thing it tries to push the most-- the story.  I think a lot of people get caught up in thinking the story is better than it is because it’s the first game since SF64 that really follows the same Star Fox vibe without retelling the Lylat Wars.  Don’t get me wrong, the overall plot is great but the execution and pacing are... wonky.  Certain characterizations also take a hit in some regards but no one really talks about that when Command exists. That’s something we’ll talk about later on with this post.

That being said, Assault really does have a lot good going for it.  An absolute banger of a soundtrack, some great dialogue, a neat story synopsis, the introduction of cool characters like Panther and Beltino (who existed but was always off-screen), and just good levels.  

So, here’s what I would add, I suppose, if I were to somehow have the ability to rewrite Assault.  Originally I had this in paragraph form, but I’ve made it into more of a list under topic segments with main points bolded for your viewing pleasure.  Some of these points might be considered nitpicky and while I do understand that yes, this is a game about space animals, I do hold the developers in high enough regard to make a game with a continuity that makes sense.

The Story Changes

- Reduce Pigma’s storyline in Assault.  This is the biggest one for me because a bulk of the plotline feels like a giant chase to just get at Pigma and it feels like it derails from the actual plot with the aparoids.  We only go to Sargasso because of Pigma.  We only go to Fichina and then back to Meteo again, because of Pigma.  That’s 3 levels in a 10 level game devoted to just tracking down Pigma and chasing him.  While it makes the build up to fighting Pigma kind of nice, I personally feel like the plot could be reduced to 2 levels.  If Assault overall was a longer game, I could see them making it 3 levels.  Overall, though, in its current state, I feel like the side plot overstays its welcome and the aparoids promptly get shoved to the side in favor of “Oh no, we gotta get to Pigma!” And I get the main motive here is to show how the aparoids affect people and because of the build up, it does a good job at showing how utterly terrifying the aparoids are.  But it’s still too long given the length of Assault’s story. The only alternative to this is make Assault longer, which... honestly, it should be.  

- Revise the scene with Tricky.  I’m obviously not well-versed in dinosaur biology but I’m pretty sure dinos didn’t grow that fast from what studying I HAVE done.  And why is he suddenly king now?  Did his parents die?  He seems not affected by this at all?  Like it’s a funny scene with him, Fox, and Krystal, but it’s odd if you really look at it.  Give us, as players, more context because I’m still not even sure what happened to make Tricky suddenly the leader and... big.  As a note, you’re gonna hear me gripe a lot about the Sauria level in this post.

- The Star Wolf + Peppy sacrifice is a low effort way to raise tension/stakes and then cop out.  Oldest trick in the book, imo, is to act like you’re going to kill off important characters only for them to be alive miraculously.  And let’s face it, as an audience we all know they aren’t going to kill those characters because it’s Nintendo and those characters are too beloved.  I would’ve forgiven them for only doing this with Peppy or Star Wolf, but when you tack them both together and throw in the fact they make it seem like you’re going to have to kill General Pepper too... yeah, it’s just a bit much of the same trope over and over again.  I wanted to put a note in here about how I’m fine with the Great Fox being “sacrificed” but overall, it needed to return to the series because of it’s icon status, but I think that’s more of a gripe at Command instead of Assault.

- Keep Pigma alive.  This will conflict with a point I have later on about the game consistently having characters cheat death for easy drama points but with Pigma, I would’ve kept him fully alive... but maybe with some physical damage from the aparoids.  I understand he’s semi-alive in Command and tbh I don’t know where I stand on that.  Why keep Pigma alive, you might ask?  I feel like his character has a lot more potential than being “just the greedy guy”.  Like he’s got good potential future villain material for future games and... if I’m honest?  I just don’t see Nintendo wanting to keep Pigma dead so why even bother killing him off?  They couldn’t even commit to him being dead in Command anyways so it seems very moot.

- Bring Bill and Katt back.  Assault is acts a bit like a big reunion of all of our SF64 favorites but our two favorite side characters are suspiciously missing.  Wouldn’t Bill be out on the front lines fighting against Andrew in the beginning?  Or maybe back in Katina?  And wouldn’t Katt inevitably show up in the midst of the invasion, maybe to pointedly check in on Falco?

- Bring Andrew back for the final fight. I think Andrew being defeated early into the game is fine overall but I think bringing him back in for a reunion final fight against the aparoids would serve to really solidify that it’s really everyone vs the invading aparoid force.  It would show that not only is Star Wolf willing to put aside their differences but so is basically everyone in the Lylat System in the name of survival.  Imagine the Venomians and Cornerians working together against an aparoid fleet, giving Star Fox and Star Wolf time to attack the queen?  I just think it’d be neat and it’d open up the potential for some fun banter mid-mission.  I do understand that quite a few people consider Andrew canonically dead after Assault but personally, I feel that his defeat left his fate questionable (I’m a staunch believer that unless there’s a body, they’re probably alive, especially for Nintendo games because, again, they never like to kill people off) so him returning in Command never really bothered me.  

- In general, reconsider some of the character portrayals.  Unfortunately, when a series has a different studio for each game, character portrayals will inevitably have inconsistencies.  While I give Namco a lot of credit for putting in oodles and oodles of detail into the game (particularly the levels), I think they failed in their portrayal of Fox, at the least, and Wolf is a considerable offender as well.  While it’s obvious that Fox in Adventures was effectively modeled off of Sabre even in terms of personality, Rareware was at least able to justify Fox’s newfound jaded attitude with the passing of many years and a distinct lack of steady income, resulting in the team being in disarray.  Assault’s Fox is a stark contrast to his cynical interpretation with seemingly no explanation other than maybe “Oh, I have more money and a gf, maybe I should behave myself”.  As if the sudden change in personality wasn’t random, Fox also just seems very blah, like a blank slate stereotypical shooter game protagonist dude with little to no emotion.  Wolf is less obvious but gets slated into a mentor-like role midway through the game and ends up in a respectful rivalry with Fox... which there’s nothing inherently wrong with that except for it happening abruptly (and, I mean, Peppy is right there).  But I take less issue with this and more of an issue with the fact that there’s an entire level establishing that Wolf now runs a crime den with effectively what seems to be an army and no one bats an eye at this.  He doesn’t even call on them to help with the aparoids.  Did they all die when the aparoids attacked Meteo?  Are they safe somewhere else?  Where do they go?  How was Sargasso able to operate without the CDF being on their doorstep with warrants for arrests?

- Don’t kill all the dinosaurs.  A bit of a dramatic statement but the ending screen that showed all the damage to Sauria really bothered me.  While I understand that the dinosaurs had less of a chance against the aparoids than a more technology-focused society like Corneria, I was a bit disappointed that the decision was made to just state that a lot of tribes had been wiped out.  I know this could easily be retconned in a future game and I feel like it should be.  “But why, Amalia?  Why are you disappointed by that?”  1) It’s a little too grimdark for my tastes.  2) The fact it all happened off-screen felt very hand-wavy.  And 3) It brings into question the entire point of Adventures.  Why did we bother to save this planet if it was going to be reduced to rubble and ash 1 year later?  Where were the Krazoa in all of this?  Why did they not make an appearance at all to try to stop the invasion with their alleged powers?  It just raises too many weird questions and I feel like Namco didn’t think it through too much.  Which I mean, sure.  Family, kiddo game.  I’m not asking for bigbrain plot and lore but I’m squinting at this bit because it does feel very contrary to the lore from the previous game.

- Make the aparoids more relevant.  As nice as it is to have a random bad guy from another galaxy, I feel like there was more that could be done with the aparoids in terms of their origins.  Tiny things, mind you, not huge revelations.  Off the top of my head, they could have been tied into Krystal’s backstory to help alleviate some of the complaints that she was too random to be added to the series’ main cast.  Alternatively, they could have been a product of Andross or even a weapon prototype from Corneria that fled the lab (I actually thought the game was leaning in that direction for a bit then just Nothing Happened).  I get that the vagueness of their origins leaves room for people to speculate and speculation is nice but... when you leave too many things unknown, it starts to feel less like giving fans room to interpret and more like just doing random things for the sake of it.  I think a lore tidbit here or there would work wonders for the aparoids instead of leaving them as just borg/zerg clones.

Level-Based Changes

- Add either Aparoid RedEye or Aparoid General Scales as a boss to Sauria.  Given that this level mysteriously lacks a boss, which is just weird compared to the other levels, I think that they had the opportunity to add something cool to go along with the cinematic feel they were going for with Assault.  Assault’s cutscenes do play in a movie-like fashion and it’s clear they’re trying to make the game as epic as possible.  It’s a shame they had so much fodder for a great boss here but they failed to go through with it.  Alternatively: Add a Krazoa-Aparoid fusion.  Why?  Because Star Fox is about cool epic sci-fi and that would be cool epic sci-fi incarnate.

- Add a boss to the Aparoid Homeworld Level, aka the penultimate level.  Another one I felt was personally weird that there was no “final defense system” to challenge the team.  Would be cool to do an aerial battle over the aparoid planet with some giant flying aparoid.

- Be kinder to Sauria.  The level had some good homages but overall was incredibly small and incredibly short.  It felt like a bone tossed to Adventures fans but was not entirely true to the setting built by Rareware.  I’m... not even sure where the Sauria level is supposed to take place?  I presume it’s Walled City but it doesn’t really have the same color scheme or aesthetic?  Also where is my revised Adventures music?  Why do all the other levels get it but Sauria doesn’t? 

- Put some of those funky items from the multiplayer into the main campaign.  I don’t know why some of these things, items especially, were omitted unless it was purely due to time constraints.  I remember having missile launchers and jetpacks in the multiplayer and was a bit sad that they were not in the main campaign.  Retuning the levels and adding those in would be a nice breath of fresh air for the more tedious on-foot missions.

- More levels.  Self-explanatory.  Still sad we didn’t get the Zoness or Titania levels in the single-player mode.  

I think all of the above changes would improve the game, though I recognize all of this is being said 16 years later after lots of time to contemplate Assault’s weaker points.  I’m not entirely certain how long Star Fox Assault took to develop but given that there’s obviously quite a bit scrapped from the game (an entire arcade mode was scrapped as well), I’m going to assume that the studio felt pressured to shove the game out the door and into the hands of customers.  It’s a shame, really, because I think a little bit longer in the oven would have done a lot of good.  Still, the product we got was good in its own right and a game that many people look back on fondly.  I haven’t gotten to replay it in years but I hope to quite soon.

You might wonder why I bothered typing this all out and I guess my point was this-- Assault was great but it wasn’t perfect, and while a lot of other games fall under a crushing amount of scrutiny, Assault seems to dodge it.  And don’t get me wrong-- I adore Assault.  But given that not many takes exist out there about rewriting it, I decided to give it a shot.  For variety’s sake.  

I do want to a mock up of a revised Assault story, which I think I will get to work on after completing this while all my ideas are still fresh in mind.  So stay tuned for that sometime in the near future.  I will also be doing my Adventures mock up at some point but probably not for a little bit as I do wanna focus some of my free time on actual fic-writing.

Anyways, if you stuck around this long, thank you for reading!  Have any changes you’d like to see to Assault if you could time machine your way back to the early 2000s?  Feel free to post in the comments, I’d love to read your ideas!

#star fox assault #starfox assault #super long #queue'd

[shihalyfie]

"Canon” and “not canon” in the Adventure/02 universe

This is something I want to talk about, because it has a certain degree of relevance to the question of what I choose to take into account in my analyses and what I don’t. I write a lot about Adventure and 02 because both series are ridiculously consistent over their 104-episode runtime, but there are times when things contradict or don’t quite track together, and I have to figure out how to best rationalize them -- which means I need to make arbitrary decisions on what to count and not count, and when one does make those kinds of decisions, you’re very liable to get the complaint: “but that’s not canon!”

Which always makes me think: who decided that? And in the end, this is something that I think extends beyond just Digimon; every fanbase for everything always wants to believe there’s a clear-cut answer to things that everyone’s supposed to follow in a canonical timeline, and things that fall outside it. And sometimes, for some franchises, that is doable, because official staff will actually say outright that “this counts, and this doesn’t.” But that’s not how Toei and Bandai work, and their modus operandi has always been to toss a bunch of often-contradictory stuff at everyone and go “figure it out yourself,” and I think at some point the fanbase really needs to acknowledge that this so-called clear-cut boundary of “canon” and “not canon” doesn’t actually exist at all. Or in other words, any assertion of something being “canon” or “not canon” in the Adventure and 02 universe is purely something arbitrarily defined by fans, and was never determined by official - which, conversely, has actually encouraged you to take as much as you want and figure out the rest yourself.

Before we begin, I do want to make clear that this is not about one’s personal canon based on one’s own preferences -- that is to say, if you’re going “I don’t consider this canon because I don’t like this/don’t want to work with this,” then that’s entirely your right, especially if you’re doing creative work and need to decide what to apply and to not to apply. (Although, as always, one must be conscientious and respectful of those who do like it and consider it canon, because everyone’s going to differ on this.) What I am talking about is when people take a substantial part of the franchise that they otherwise like, such as a movie or drama CD, see one detail that’s contradictory in terms of the timeline or lore, and take that as evidence of “yep, the entire thing’s not canon. We’ll just throw the entire thing out, then.” It just makes me think -- you threw out a perfectly good work for that?! That’s such a waste!

First of all, Toei and Bandai don’t work that way

In general, a lot of the contradictions in the series have a “right hand is not talking to left hand” problem, because as much as we would like to believe that a Digimon series is written by a single consistent entity, the franchise itself is a huge trade-off between Toei and Bandai, and a lot of things from Bandai -- spinoffs, crossover material, games, what have you -- don’t exactly have a stellar track record of being vetted by Toei anime staff. It’s pretty well-known that game portrayals of certain characters can be really off or have misleading info, and even V-Tamer’s somewhat guilty of it. So this is going to happen no matter whether you like it or not, and it happens with any long-running kids’ series that involves a collaboration between multiple companies like this.

Moreover, the traditional custom for Toei “side movies” (in this case, meaning things like the original movie, Our War Game!, Hurricane Touchdown, and Diablomon Strikes Back) is that they’re produced with minimal involvement from the original series’s core staff -- at most, the producer is lightly involved -- and are sometimes even worked on simultaneously with the start of the original series, so you often end up with a movie that’s impossible to fit anywhere in the series timeline because there wasn’t any communication with the two sides. And for that, it’s all too easy to dismiss those movies as “non-canon”, with the fanbase arbitrarily deciding that canon ones are canon because they fit -- but Toei itself has never taken this stance.

The other thing is that, given that Adventure/02 is famous for its ridiculous level of worldbuilding consistency thanks to its director Kakudou’s conscientious efforts on it, it means that as a result, anything not made by him was prone to running afoul on it, and it’s not like the stance back then was to just reject all of it wholesale. “Doesn’t comply with the lore” is so often equated with “not canon”, but Kakudou, the author of that lore, not only made no indication of invalidating or disliking those non-compliant things, but also conversely made an active effort to make those things relevant in spite of that! (See: Our War Game! below.) The official stance is to not deny those works for being noncompliant -- it’s just that Kakudou seems to be the detail-oriented kind of person who personally prefers to work with things that have a high level of consistency (he’s very quick to say “I wasn’t involved on that” whenever someone brings up something from said external materials, not in any condescending way, just “I wasn’t involved, so don’t attribute that to me”). In fact, one of the reasons there wasn’t initially a third Adventure series was that he had difficulty finding a way to adhere to the higher-ups’ pressure to keep all of these contradictions consistent -- so the official stance itself is to try and maintain all of those side works, and that it would be better to end the series itself than to have to do something like deny them.

Which makes things very frustrating for the fans, of course, but nevertheless, that’s how it is -- even back in 2000, the right-hand-not-talking-to-left-hand phenomenon was this significant! And it would have been easy for official to step in and go “okay, we’ll put a statement out here that these don’t apply,” but no, the stance was be that it would be better to stop dragging it out longer and cancel a whole series than to deny those works, which leads us to the current situation. (Plus, think how insulting it would feel from a PR perspective if someone got attached to one of those “non-canon” materials only for official to come out and outright say “yeah this doesn’t count anymore”; we can name examples of this happening in other franchises that have understandably gotten a lot of people upset, and it would be especially offensive to do this right after said material had been released.)

Bolstering the concept of official staff’s very loose opinion of “canon” are the Adventure novels, which were supervised by Kakudou himself and written by Digimon episode screenwriter Masaki Hiro, and are non-compliant with Adventure timeline by design, because it’d be bad for the format to try and depict every single detail in the anime in the form of three novels. Several events are condensed or shuffled out of order, or even sometimes completely different (Koushirou’s incident with Vadermon goes very differently from the anime version). Despite that, this is said directly to be intended as a series of novels to help people understand Adventure and 02 better, and several details in Two-and-a-Half Year Break and Spring 2003 are incredibly consistent with it (namely in the sense of details meant to retroactively connect Adventure to 02, and other background details like Daisuke’s backstory). So you are supposed to do some kind of mental leap where you don’t take the contradictions around the actual events too seriously, but still accept the spirit and the background information you learn from it and retroactively apply it to Adventure and 02 -- and, presumably, that’s probably what you’re expected to do with everything else, too.

And this isn’t even getting into the fact that the anime itself has occasional contradictions and errors due to things like animator error or simply different writers writing different episodes -- the Adventure and 02 staff were certainly very detail-oriented, but they are human and of course inevitably slipped up here and there. How seriously do you take honorifics shifting from episode to episode in ways that don’t seem intentional, or the fact every background material refers to Osamu and Ken having a bunk bed and yet the actual episode with both of them fails to depict it? How do you deal with the fact that the Animation Chronicle is one of the most extensively useful post-02 reference materials with tons of production background info not revealed in the anime, and yet is infamously full of suspected typos that would cause some pretty massive implications if true, or all of those other Bandai and Shueisha-commissioned “side books” and other pieces of media meant to entertain the kids while the series was airing but clearly had no input from Toei staff whatsoever? 

In the end, frustrating as it is, the answer seems to be the same as ever: figure it out yourself.

The standards for what’s “canon” and “not canon” are way too arbitrary

Let’s look at a handful of things that have been historically dismissed as “non-canon” by the fanbase:

The Adventure mini dramas and Armor Evolution to the Unknown: Drama CDs that were generally dismissed as non-canon because they’re “too crack” to be canon (their writing style is of the “it’s okay to push the boundaries of characterization for the sake of comedy” sort, and it wouldn’t be until later when we finally got some more serious drama CDs). The latter is full of honorific inconsistencies, most prominently Daisuke and Ken still being on surname basis at a time they’re not supposed to be (due to the fact that it was released while the series was still being produced). But official word is that you’re still supposed to consider them canon -- and yes, that’s Kakudou himself giving official sanction to a drama CD that involved a massive amount of fourth wall breaking and a completely unexplained reunion between the Adventure kids and their Digimon sometime between 1999 and 2002 (apparently this wasn’t the only one, either). How is this supposed to work? Figure it out yourself.

Hurricane Touchdown: The funny part is that up until Kizuna validated Wallace’s existence, there was no actual consistent agreement on why this movie shouldn’t be canon (the Western side being “evolutionary form timeline violations”, the Japanese side being Wallace’s status as a Chosen Child prior to 1995), which really goes to show you how arbitrary all of this is. It also has a sequel drama CD in the form of The Door to Summer, which is also contradictory with Hurricane Touchdown’s ending, so we’ve got two layers of “it can’t be canon because...” -- and yet it has a lot of interesting Daisuke characterization, and, heck, the whole character of Wallace himself, that would all be rejected if you throw this out wholesale. Then Kizuna came along, and there’s a general sense of hesitation against easily denying officially-sanctioned “main” entries like that, which retroactively forced people to somehow skip past all that and accept it, just for the sake of Kizuna’s notability.

Diablomon Strikes Back: Similar to the above, it used to be constantly dismissed as “a non-canon fun movie” because of the evolutionary forms that appear in it, despite the fact that 02 itself established that it wasn’t that hard to restore evolutionary forms if you figured something out. Somehow, a ton of people treated it as such an impossibility that “they figured it out in the first three months of 2003″ would be a viable explanation, and yet official word is that of the second through fourth movies, this is the one that had the most amount of initial consultation with the TV anime staff! And then tri. and Kizuna came along and clearly had high-level evolutions in play too, and dismissing DSB on these grounds meant dismissing those by proxy, and a lot of people were too intimidated to do that and decided to retroactively validate DSB instead, after years of having dismissed it for this reason. Again: look how arbitrary this all is.

The tri. stage play: Mainly because its timeline of events doesn’t fit tri. at all (in regards to the reboot and part 5). This is a fair assessment to make in light of the fact that it doesn’t seem to work very hard to be compliant with the very series it’s branded with, but, funnily enough, it’s actually more lore-compliant with the original Adventure and 02 than the tri. anime series is, and yet the few minor contradictions it makes with the tri. anime series are sufficient to consider it completely kicked out of canon, yet those same people who declare it so aren’t as willing to hold the anime to that same standard just because it holds a more prominent “main” position.

On the other hand, let’s look at some of the things that have been more likely to be accepted than the above:

Our War Game!: Reading this is probably going to make everyone go “whaaaaaat?”, but yep: according to Kakudou, the second through fourth movies were all made without his supervision or involvement and thus have lore contradictions (although he also made sure to say that they’re very fine movies, too). We still haven’t figured out what the lore contradiction is, and so the fanbase considers it canon, and even 02 itself makes multiple references to “the Diablomon incident” in 2000, so you can’t consider this non-canon in the slightest...but yes, according to the official side, it’s actually got a contradictory incursion somewhere in there. There is one hypothesis as to what it is, and it’s such a minor thing that no fan or even official member of staff would dare deny the movie for it, but it still contributes to how arbitrary this entire concept is: Kakudou didn’t want to give anyone (except Miyako, who’s based off a real person) canonical birthdays or blood types for the sake of preventing horoscoping, but Sora’s birthday is portrayed as being around March in the movie. And yes, Kakudou himself refers to this as being something that only happened because he wasn’t involved. (Remember what I said about him historically being quick to disclaim involvement on anything he wasn’t involved on, regardless of how much of a minor detail it is, yet doesn’t necessarily intend to deny the work entirely due to it?)

Tag Tamers: A very vital part of Ken’s backstory that establishes a lot of context behind the Dark Seed and the elusive Akiyama Ryou, which also does not make sense with 02′s timeline and characterization at all, presumably because Bandai and Toei weren’t properly communicating on what kind of details they needed to iron out for this. But of course, all of us would like some explanation to Ken’s backstory, and we have to apply some kind of logic as to how that makes sense, and I’ve yet to see people declare Tag Tamers (or any of the other WonderSwan games) as entirely non-canon as a result.

tri.: For obvious reasons, it’s a “major entry in the franchise”, so people are generally more averse to dismissing it so easily (or, at least, for reasons that aren’t related to pure preference), but I find it rather ironic that Kizuna’s the one that got all the attention for apparently being lore non-compliant, when the exact same lore points mentioned in Kakudou’s reasoning as to why it’s non-compliant (along with a ton of things that actually were in Adventure and 02′s text) are gone against even more regularly and prominently in tri., whereas Kizuna still goes out of its way to adhere to most of these and only seems to have incurred a contradiction in terms of originally intended ideology, and, possibly, its extensive use of the aforementioned movies. (Recall that this got brought up for Kizuna specifically because Kakudou was initially consulted for it; he wasn’t involved in tri. to begin with at all.) See above on how people’s unwillingness to write this one off so easily despite everything ended up retroactively dragging DSB into “accepted canon” territory; that’s how arbitrary this entire thing is.

Then, tied to all of this and making it even more confusing is Kizuna, which, again, putting all issues of personal preference aside, is basically being torn back and forth between all of these whenever you try to apply one of the above arbitrary standards. It’s allegedly lore-noncompliant with Kakudou’s lore and thus lacks his involvement, but it does have the involvement of original series producer Seki Hiromi who was known to be responsible for the series’s original human drama themes (including the premise of 02 itself) and personally vetted the scripts so that everyone could be properly in-character and the original themes still intact; it’s supposedly a “main” entry to the point where people will stop denying older works’ canonicity because of it (see Hurricane Touchdown above), but, legally speaking, is actually classified in the same “gekijouban” category that the first four movies and things like the Tamers through Savers movies are; the staff will say to hell and back that the 02 epilogue still holds (and the movie makes abundant retroactive references in both worldbuilding and themes to it), but many people out there will still insist that the movie ending that way means that (like with DSB above) “they figured it out” between the movie’s ending and the epilogue is apparently some kind of impossibility, and either the movie is non-canon or the 02 epilogue is invalidated now. (My personal stance on this is that the epilogue itself provides the answer to how they figure it out if you look closely at the movie’s themes, but that’s a tangent.)

The point I’m trying to make is that regardless of whatever stance you take on all of the above points, this is all extremely arbitrary, and these fanbase rationalizations on why this and that isn’t canon are constantly contradicting each other, shifting, and occasionally based on really meaningless things. And, again, it’s fine if you’re saying that you don’t consider this or that canon because you personally dislike it or where it went, or you find it difficult to work with, or between two contradictory things you prefer one or the other (I certainly have my fair share of strong opinions in this regard) -- but it would be better if we all admitted this and went “I just don’t consider this canon” instead of acting like there were ever some universal consensus or official backing.

"It didn’t happen this exact way, but something resembling it still happened”

So, we’re in this uncomfortable situation where we’ve been handed a ball of knots and have to work with it (a very frustrating situation especially for fanfic writers), and I have to personally say that I think all of this comes from people having far too inflexible of a concept of “canon” and “not canon”, especially to the point of rejecting a full-on perfectly fine entry just because of one timeline issue. I honestly think it’d be better if we could rather take a certain stance close to the Pixiv dictionary wiki’s view of how Wallace can appear in Kizuna: “(some version of) Wallace exists in the timeline of the main story.”

Right, so: Hurricane Touchdown is contradictory. The evolutions don’t work at that point in timeline, and Wallace shouldn’t be able to be a Chosen Child from before 1995. Those things don’t work with Adventure and 02′s timeline and lore. However, let’s look at the following story: let’s say that, between 02 episodes 14 and 15 (when the movie first screened), while school was on break, Daisuke and his friends went on a summer adventure to the US and met a boy named Wallace, who had a struggle regarding one of his partners losing his sanity, and bonded with him and helped put his partner to rest. No part of this contradicts 02 at all. There we go! So we can safely say that some story that mostly resembled Hurricane Touchdown happened in the canon timeline. Some of its details weren’t exactly the way they happened in “the movie we, as the audience, saw” -- but something that substantially resembled the movie still happened in the universe of Daisuke and his friends. And you can apply that same logic to Tag Tamers, or any other vital canonical but ostensibly contradictory material -- the media that we as the audience got may not accurately reflect the events in universe, but there’s absolutely nothing saying that some more timeline and lore-consistent alternate version didn’t happen in canon instead.

Moreover, even Adventure/02 itself gives you a bit of precedent for this concept -- namely, the fact that the final episode of 02 reveals that the entirety of Adventure and 02 is part of Takeru’s novels. It’s a pretty common theory that there might be differences in the way “the story we got” was presented, versus how they actually happened in the world Takeru lived in -- of course, Takeru certainly went out of his way to remove as much bias from the situation as he could, but you can hardly say that he, as a human, would be completely free from it, and he himself even admits that everyone he consulted had differing opinions on the events in question. And not every single piece of Digimon media has the Hirata-Hiroaki-as-Takeru narrator, which means that perhaps it’s not entirely out of the question that the different takes on the stories that the Tokyo Chosen Children went through in their youth would not be entirely consistent with each other, depending on who’s telling it. But that doesn’t mean that those events necessarily didn’t happen at all, just that some of the details were different from what we as the audience saw.

In the end, I leave the rest to everyone else to figure out -- as I said, I think this is a decision everyone will have to make for themselves, whether they’re a fanfic writer picking and choosing what to include for the sake of a coherent fic, or whether they’re just expressing a preference to not have to think too hard about or work with something they’re turned off by. (And in the case that there is someone who expresses their dislike of working with something and doesn’t want to consider it canon, I think it’s very rude to give them grief for that, and conversely, if you don’t want to consider something canon but encounter someone who doesn’t have as much of a problem with it, it’s very rude to try and expect them to change their opinion to yours.) But I do think it would do well for all of us to have a bit more of an open mind and a creative attitude towards these kinds of things before trying to shove everything into a “fully canon” and “fully not canon” binary.

#digimon #digimon adventure #digimon adventure 02 #shihameta #kizuna spoilers

[joandfriedrich]

Little Women 2019 Review

I finally watched the 2019 version of Little Women. I’ve got quite a lot to say.

The Good:

The cast is good, I think everyone in it is a good actor but there’s a few hiccups, more later. Louis Garrel was a good Friedrich, Eliza Scanlen and Florence Pugh were good for their roles (Please note, this is my first time seeing any of these actors so I was still up in the air of how they would have performed these roles). Timothee Chalamet is such a good Laurie, you like him and you understand why Amy would fall for him, but you also see why he wouldn’t have been good for Jo. And I do agree, the apron scene is pretty hot. 

There were a few moments that were chuckle worthy and did hit home, particularly, once it was put into context, the moment when Jo is talking about possibly accepting Laurie’s proposal and talks about how she is tired of people saying that as a women is is expected to be made for marriage, but ending with how she is lonely. I felt that. 

The Meh:

I wasn’t exactly a big fan of the jumping back and forth, but it wasn’t too terrible. I know there were a lot of people who didn’t like it but it wasn’t the worst thing. There were moments where I was confused and worried we weren’t going to get to certain scenes, but it was neither the worst thing nor the best thing about it. Also, was anyone else like not digging the weird speaking to the camera while writing a letter? Friedrich, Jo and Mr. Dashwood all did it and it felt really out of place, like that style belonged more in a documentary rather than a film.

The Bad:

I know I am going to get some hate, but here we go. I didn’t like this one. It is certainly better than the 1970s BBC version, I give you that, but this. Let me sum it up in one sentence: It was trying too hard. It was trying to hard to make the story feel modern when it’s not supposed to be, it’s set in the Civil War era and obviously not everyone is going to be as forward thinking as we are. Also it tried too hard to be feminist. The novel was already a feminist novel, and I will stand by that statement even beyond death. So the scenes where you get characters who go on these speeches about how difficult it is being a woman or talking about the war and what have you just felt very contrived and unnecessary. 

I stand by again this thought: Amy must be played by two actresses, one a child and one an adult. Amy is such a good character and Florence Pugh played older Amy very well, but she is much to old to play a child and so her scenes do not feel genuine. I watched it with my mom and my mom said “This was the first time I had really thought ‘Amy that was childish’, and it caught me off guard because Amy is supposed to be a child. You don’t get the same sense of sympathy or understanding of her in this movie.” And I agree. Also, can we stop using the trope of sticking bangs on a grown woman and say “Boom you are a child.” I personally never thought of bangs as being childish but this is something I have seen modern media do to try to convince us that an actress in her 20s is supposed to be a girl in her early teens. Let’s stop that. Florence Pugh has a naturally deeper tone of voice, so to hear that while looking at “young Amy” was jarring and unbelievable. Edit: yes, there are some children who have deeper voices, what I mean is that she sounds very womanly rather than a small child. Another thing that made her being a child not believable.

I was hugely disappointed when we didn’t get to see or utilize certain actors. Louis Garrel and James Norton were hugely downplayed and were barely in the movie, which is a shame considering that 1, they are good actors and 2, their characters are so good as well, and having them in the story more would have made the movie feel more fleshed out. It strangely felt condensed and not fully fleshed out which is odd because there were moments I went “Oh look, they included that from the book”, but thinking back, it was the small things they added and seemed to shortened the bigger things. The film really downplayed Meg and Beth to make Jo and Amy the more prominent sisters, so it felt less like it was a film about sisters and more about certain sisters who’s stories are more interesting than the other two. That was the vibe I felt when watching it.

I didn’t like the way Jo was presented here. Saoirse Ronan is an amazing actress, and she acted her heart out, but I didn’t like Jo in this. Particularly the scene where she and Friedrich are discussing her writing and she pretty much throws a temper tantrum when he says he doesn’t like it. I totally get her being upset, any writer would feel hurt, but she pretty much was like “You big meanie, you are not my friend because you big meanie!” So it didn’t make the supposed happy reunion feel right with me, it almost made me feel as though Friedrich could do better, and that is saying a lot coming from me. She reminded me of Katherine Hepburn’s version of Jo but not the good parts, the over the top bits.

I hated the ending. I know that Jo does canonically write a story about her sisters in Little Men, but the lines being blurred about whether or not it all was real or not wasn’t my favorite. Especially when it felt as though her being with Friedrich wasn’t real. It almost made me think, why bothering to even include Friedrich if it wasn’t going to have a good payoff? And the film had some really great Friedrich and Jo moments, but it was all for naught when she left New York after her fight and her dismissive attitude towards him during the visit. I don’t know, it felt very inconsistent and thus made me feel as though the ending wasn’t real, and in general, the film made me wonder if any of the events of the story were real at all.

Some people felt that Greta Gerwig was robbed of a nomination and some think that if the movie is nominated so then should the director. I disagree. I was not too pleased with the direction of the film. I hated how it felt like they all were screaming, toppling over each other and acting so wild especially when they have no reason to act so out of place. It made me cringe and did not feel as though we were getting a proper sense of family, of them working and loving together when all they did was shout and not listen to each other. There was no sense of them growing with each other. It didn’t feel like Little Women.

In short: 2 out of 5 stars. Not the worst Little Women adaptation, but not the best, and certainly not my favorite, it was just trying too hard. If you disagree, please discuss it peacefully and kindly. I am open to hear other people’s opinions, but let us all be civil about this.

#little women #little women 2019

[funkymbtifiction]

Seeing as people are still mistaking Ne for non stop brainstorming i.e. recent ask: what is the equivalent for the other functions? Like Se being constantly physically active etc. I'm thinking this probably stand in the way of accurate self typung a lot.

Let me clarify Ne for a moment. It does not work, without something activating it. How mine works is, I will think I have no ideas. Nothing on my mind. Let’s watch something new. I pick an old Film Noir thriller, and various things that happen on-screen trigger “ideas” in my head. “I could write a story similar to this, but running with this idea instead.” The idea floats away. Two minutes later, another idea comes to me. “What if instead of this, that happened?” I keep watching. “Hey, I could use this old movie to talk about ____ in a blog post.” And so on, the bottom line being I can have various ideas related to the subject at hand in a couple of hours of watching a movie, but my brain lets most of them go. It’s like my Ne is entertaining me just as much as the movie, because part of the enjoyment of the movie is being “stimulated” in a Ne way. It stops just watching the movie and starts playing with Ne thoughts instead.

Let me give you an example. A family member died last week, who had been estranged from various other family members. My Ne-dom idealism thought, “Maybe this will show the family how precious and short life is, and get them to reconcile,” while my more literal, realistic Ne interpretation was, “I doubt it, in fact I doubt these people are invited to the funeral.” They were excluded, and that came as no shock to me – just a disappointment, because I hoped for better even though I was realistic about the situation and the people involved. That’s how my Ne works – a realistic big picture focus that went from news of a death to the potential in the situation (reconciliation

Make sense? That’s how intuition works. It’s big picture focus, it assumes it knows the motives of what is going on “behind” things (and is often right, if it has the right information), and it moves away from a sensory event (in this case, a person’s death) into an abstract realm (potential outcome) instantly.

So, when you reduce Ne to stuff like “brainstorming, scatterbrained, etc,” you are missing the point, because that isn’t what Ne is. What Ne is, is what I just described to you – abstract big picture thinking the minute things happen. Instant revision of expectations based on new information. My perspective shifted about four times with additional information as the events unfolded but it only “proved me right.” And because it’s Ne, I was right “faster” (like, instantly) in predicting what would happen next than the NJ in my life.

Now, Ne is the function I most “understand,” since I’m using it all the time and aware of doing so – but I can only conclude that if descriptions of Ne that much miss the mark, the descriptions of the rest of the functions (including my own) are shallow interpretations. So, when considering functions, you have to look at the descriptions as a baseline and consider them “a fictional equivalent,” with you potentially being the “real” thing – like reading about a toy bike and you recognize it as a bike, but then you put your hands on a REAL bike.

Various stereotypes:

Se always being active (someone who goes skydiving and shark diving and is always courting danger) – no, a Se can lay on the couch and daydream or play video games or do nothing all day long, and still be a Se, because Se is about sensory awareness and a focus on hands-on experience and learning. I read in one book that Se believes experts learn through hands-on experience, and are ten times more likely to listen to someone who “has done it, and knows what it’s like” than someone who is just lecturing about it. Why? Because THEY learn by DOING IT. Getting hands involved. Feeling it in the moment. Being present.

Si being about the past and memories – no, it’s about learning systematically and through experiences, by stockpiling information and sensory experiences. It’s almost instant in its form of comparisons – like facial recognition software but for everything it encounters on a daily basis. Si can be eccentric in its interests and a lot of Si’s become “experts” in whatever draws their fascination, from costuming (inaccurate or accurate?) to stamp collecting. It’s not about wanting to do the same things all the time, or family, or anything like that, it’s about accuracy of sensory recognition.

Ni being psychic or knowing everything instantly – no, it’s an internal filtering process a lot like Ne, only it happens inside the head and with a delayed reaction to external information, since it’s filtering it against what it has already predicted as forthcoming. Just like Ne, it operates on the assumption that it knows what is “really going on here” and it can be incredibly accurate, but it’s often more specifically accurate in its predictions and slower to change them. (Ne’s process of “This is what I think is going on, but this information contradicts it, so I’m going to re-calibrate a bit…” vs Ni’s “I think this is going on, and am going to wait and see, since I suspect the evidence will bear me out”).

Ti being about analyzing all the time – no, it’s about creating an internal and consistent logical framework by which you compare the outside world and use to determine what is, to you, rational or not rational. It’s about the desire to understand something (people, computers, clocks, systems) from the inside out so that you can hack them and create solutions to any problem.

Te being only about the end result or making money – no, it’s about objective factual knowledge and the resolution of problems using baseline approaches. It’s about streamlining and seeing the quickest way to reach the end. It’s about tangible goals and measuring yourself through external means. It is literally the “DUH” logic. I do not mean it is stupid, it isn’t, but that if it sees a problem with an obvious instant rational solution, it looks at you like, “DUH, SHUT IT OFF.” There’s no ifs, ands, or buts, dude… facts are facts, and the facts are these.

Fi being about selfishness and not thinking about others – no, Fi is often kind, compassionate, and empathetic, but it is all about defense of the self / remaining true to the self, even if it means defying others’ expectations. It has an inconsistent internal process of some things upsetting them and other things not, which makes no sense to an outsider. Fi knows it cannot compromise on certain things, and that those things set off a NOPE reaction, but it rarely knows these things in advance, because it must encounter them to recognize them as a “no crossing zone.”

Fe being about unselfishness and morals contingent on the situation, rather than having things they will or will not do – no, Fe can be just as selfish as Fi, but it manifests in another way, and they also have lines they will not cross, like a Fi, but they are more willing to discuss these lines. Fe is about seeing yourself as responsible for the feelings of someone else or as inseparable from others. The focus lies “outside self” on the emotional dynamics of the situation, in an impartial manner. Fe’s often appear to others to be “speaking for others and not on their own behalf,” but in reality, they are speaking on their own behalf, because emotional harmony matters to them.

- ENFP Mod

#question #mbti #enfj #infj #enfp #infp #entj #intj #entp #intp #estj #istj #esfj #isfj #estp #istp #esfp #isfp

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

Spider-Man: Far From Home Thoughts Part 1 a.k.a. MCU Chapter 23

As I did for Homecoming I’m going to split my thoughts on the film up based on looking at it as a film unto itself/part of the MCU and then separately looking at it in terms of being an adaptation. 

However in trying to write the former section I soon realized it was more practical to further partition coverage of the film.

Because MCU films can be looked at not merely as part of a film trilogy/quadrilogy (or as the latest chapter in a specific character’s arc) but as installments in the wider MCU story. Spider-Man: Far From Home is in essence simultaneously ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe Spider-Man 2′ and ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe Part 23′. And those two lenses do affect how you evaluate the film.

So as such I’m going to have three sections across...however many parts it takes. These posts are something of a stream of consciousness so I’m aiming for 3 parts but we’ll see what happens.

Let’s start with how this stacks up as the latest installment in the MCU Saga.

On a scale of Iron Man 3/The Dark World/Captain Marvel to Winter Soldier/Civil War/Endgame, Far From Home sits comfortably in a middling position, much like its predecessor.

Like Homecoming it’s a mostly entertaining time killer, decent popcorn fun...just not quite as high quality popcorn fun as say Avengers 2012 or Iron Man 2008.

Speaking of Iron Man his post-humorous presence in the film illustrative of a strength and weakness of the MCU’s narrative style, hence I’m going to talk a lot about it here.

Whilst the MCU is often touted (even by Disney themselves) as replicating the comic books’ shared cross continuity nature, in truth it doesn’t.

In Marvel comics one can mostly follow Iron Man or Spider-Man or Avengers runs on their own. The shared universe is there and comes into play at times, but really you don’t need to follow everything.

With the MCU, whilst a lot of the films are accessible you really couldn’t just watch the Iron Man Trilogy and call it a day because Tony’s arc plays out across other films too, it climaxes 5+ years after his last solo film. In essence the MCU is like a TV show wherein you get 2-3 episodes per year and the season finales are the Avengers movies.

This is relevant to Far From Home because, despite what anyone tells you, this is the start of Phase/Season 4 and it feels that way (it more or less states that to you at the start of the movie). As such the film acts as MCU Spider-Man 2 but also MCU Chapter 23/MCU Book 4 Chapter 1 and HAS to address the fallout of the last episode/chapter/season finale.

Thus Peter’s arc in FFH gets hijacked as a kind of Endgame/Tony Stark post-mortem...sorta. We’ll talk more about that in another post, but understand that in so far as Tony’s post-mortem does hijack the movie it undermines Peter’s personal narrative.

However, in regards to the post-Endgame state of affairs it is rather unsatisfying, almost disrespectful.

And by disrespectful I mean that as the Marvel Studios logo opens up we have a rendition of ‘I Will Always Love You’ (the Whitney Houston version I believe) over poorly picked out, low res stills of all Avengers who died or didn’t come back in Endgame; to the film’s credit it does look like something a high schooler would make. That is followed by the first of two clunky exposition drops played for laughs and repeating the unrequited romance joke between Betty and Jason from Homecoming, complete with a focus upon Jason’s bewilderment over now being older than his little brother. Oh and let’s not forget the gag about the high school band turning to dust and then reappearing in the middle of a basketball game to wacky effect. The film even makes a point of not  addressing if the Avengers are even around as a team anymore, which is likely a meta commentary as well.

I’ll give the movie this, it made it’s intentions clear. It was not going to really treat the aftermath of the biggest MCU movie with much weight, it was going to be a superfluous, light, fluffy funfest. That’s a stupid direction to adopt after Endgame but at least it didn’t try to trick the viewers that it would be anything else.

Now in spite of that tone and approach the film could still explore how the post-Endgame world has changed. Maybe we won’t get anything dark or dramatic per se, but at least we’ll get some information right?

In fact, as much as I had disdain for this film going in, seeing the post-Endgame MCU was what I was really interested in. And the film delivered on that...initially...in the very same clunky exposition drop played for laughs.

We don’t talk about the blip again apart from 3 or 4 quick references, one of which explained who Mysterio was and why he could’ve duped Fury.

As for how this affected Peter, it didn’t. Many speculated Aunt May might’ve survived the blip but no, we’re told very explicitly she disappeared too.

This is very much a mixed bag for FFH as an MCU film and as a Spider-Man movie (yes I know I said I was separating those two things but it’s more efficient for this next part).

On the one hand for those who want to follow the broader MCU story FFH gives them answers but brief ones. It’s the equivalent to simply googling the answer to a murder mystery rather than experiencing the story unfold towards that answer. We had a huge opportunity to examine the ramifications of such a globally changing phenomenon but we simply acknowledge it happened and then press on as though it didn’t. The same opening exposition makes that clear too when it says that they’re moving on.

On the other hand were the film to properly explore the ramifications of the blip it would hijack the whole movie, even more than the Iron Man post-mortem already was.

On the other other hand having everyone of relevance to Peter’s life (sans Happy and Tony) die and come back, keeping them all ‘synched’ with him basically, is extremely convenient.

On the other other other hand it’d derail his narrative in a huge way if MJ or Ned or May (who’s still not ‘Aunt May’ btw because fuck this movie) were suddenly in their 20s.

On the other x4 hand the presence of such a massively fantastical event like death and resurrection (along with aliens and space technology) has already derailed the verisimilitude of his solo films which began by painting themselves as comparatively more down to Earth and ‘friendly neighbourhood’ even in spite of alien tech being repurposed. The same applies to having him go on international adventures; yet another inconsistency between this and the last Spidey movie.

So it’s very much a case of pick your poison.

Getting back to this film as a Tony Stark tribute, when viewed as part of the ongoing MCU saga it’s presence and handling succeeds more than it fails.

As I said Tony began the MCU and along with Cap was one of the twin pillars holding it up, so his death demands examination. On a metatextual level we need a film grieving Tony Stark before we can move on to the next step.

So in this regard the film giving so much attention to the hole left behind by him and how that’s really the impetus for the entire primary plot of the film is incredibly fitting.*

This applies to Mysterio in a sense.

I’ll talk more about his place when compared to certain other villains in a future instalment, but in the context of this movie his role as a kind of evil Iron Man/pretender to Iron Man’s throne works well. In fact he’s an exceptionally great villain...for Iron Man.** You see where I’m going with this, but that’s for another post.

Lets switch gears a little and discuss another wider MCU element, Nick Fury. At certain points of the film I felt Fury was out of character and a huge jerk. But twist at the end that it was actual Talos mitigated all that, it made sense. It also addressed another huge problem I was having with the movie up until that point, the absence of other heroes.

Like in the trailers the movie takes strides to address why Thor, Captain Marvel and Doctor Strange can’t help out against the Elementals. But of course this leaves the huge problem of literally everyone else. You could make a case for Falcon and Winter Soldier being of little use against such seemingly powerful foes like the Elementals, but what about Scarlet Witch, Black Panther, Valkyrie, etc? Thankfully the Talos reveal addresses this as Talos is ultimately not Nick Fury so wouldn’t have access to all those heroes.

It also sets up for future films, implying the Kree/Skrull War is far from over and that we will soon be seeing S.W.O.R.D.

Really that’s all there is to say about the movie moving forward into the MCU.

We get answers but they’re underwhelming and unsatisfying whilst getting a movie grieving Tony Stark and making the audience feel his loss.

If only Spider-Man himself seemed to feel as upset...

*Too bad all the comedy and light teen drama crap undermines it.

**In fact the entire villainous crew and villain scheme revolves around Iron Man’s legacy. I guess that makes this film also a.k.a. Iron Man in Memoriam 

#Spider-Man #Spider-Man: Far From HOme #MCU #marvel cinematic universe #peter parker #tom holland #Nick fury #iron man #tony stark #mjwatsonedit #Mary Jane Watson #Mary Jane Watson Parker #mj watson #mysterio #quinten beck #Aunt May #May Parker #Ned Leeds #Betty Brant #Molten Man #Hydro Man #Sandman #zendaya #Avengers #Avengers: Endgame

[rosecorcoranwrites]

When a Plot Hole is Not a Plot Hole (or, at Least, When It Doesn't Matter)

Much like 45 million other people, I have recently viewed Bird Box. I also watched The Ritual and re-watched A Quiet Place. All of this got me thinking about the horror genre, yet again, but it’s too soon for another “Thoughts on Horror” post. Thankfully I also watched a Youtube video about world building in the Divergent series, which gave me an idea for a more far-reaching analysis not just of horror, but of genre and plot holes in general.

A Matter of Genre

The fact of the matter is that Bird Box, A Quiet Place, and Divergent have gaping plot holes (The Ritual doesn’t. The Ritual is great… but freaking horrifying, so watch with caution). These plot holes, however, are only a problem in one of those stories, and this is due to genre, and I will climb onto my genre-soapbox for as long as it takes for people to realize that different genres work differently, and need to be read or watched differently.

Let’s step back a minute, and I'll explain what I mean. In my senior year of high school, we read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. My class loved it, not least because it was a welcome break from all the depressing literature foisted on us throughout our high school career. I was also a student aid in another class that read the same book and got to eavesdrop on their class discussions. I sat in the back, filing papers, and heard the students say they didn't like the book because, quote, "It was so unrealistic." The Little Prince? Unrealistic? You don't say! I'm not sure I have ever heard a more idiotic critique of a book. Yes, The Little Prince is unrealistic. It's a children's-book-esque fantasy/fairytale about a prince from another (tiny) planet who's in love with a rose. It's not supposed to be realistic!

A similar phenomenon happens when people—both Christians and atheists—treat the entire Bible as one genre. It's not! It contains poetry, myth, history, genealogy, letters, biography, parables, apocalyptic visions, and law codes. If you read poetry like you would read a law code, or a letter the way you read a myth, you're probably going to miss out on most of the meaning.

Back to my point, different genres require different ways of being read or watched. There are varying amounts of belief one should be required to suspend. Fantasy requires more suspension of disbelief than sci-fi, because the audience needs to accept that magic and magical creatures exist, whereas sci-fi only needs them to accept that humans have advanced to some future scientific point. Both genres, however, need internally consistent world building, no matter what other wonders we are shown. Otherwise, the audience will be taken out of the story, and the point of these genres is to immerse the readers or viewers into a believable, if fantastic, world. If magic works a certain way, it always needs to work that way. If smaller spaceships can’t use FTL, then no little ships should be shown using FTL unless you make a point of saying they have some new type of FTL drive. There is some wiggle-room in this, since "fantasy" and "sci-fi" are big labels that cover a lot of things. Fairytales or magical-realism stories tend to be a little looser about what is and isn’t allowed. These stories still shouldn't break their own rules, but they also don't have to explain themselves as much as other fantasies. Sci-fi that bleeds into fantasy, such as that which incorporates time-travel, other dimensions, or robots with kokoro still needs internal consistency, but don't need to be as scientifically accurate as hard sci-fi.

On the other hand, genres which rely on audience reaction can get by with much less in the way of tight world building and well-thought-out backstory. The two genres to which I am referring are comedy and horror. Obviously, these can intersect with fantasy/sci-fi, but taken as their own thing, they are a different species of genre altogether. They rely not on immersing the audience into a believable world, but on eliciting a reaction from the audience. A comedy is only a comedy if it's funny and horror is only horror if it's scary. Those are the requirements. Thus, a comedy or horror doesn't need unassailable world building to be a successful comedy or horror. Comedy, in particular, often relies on pointing out or playing with plot holes in whatever genre it's in. Horror, on the other hand, often focuses on the scary situation at the expense of backstory and world building.

Plot Holes in Horror

Thus, we come to Bird Box, or A Quiet Place, or Signs, or any other horror that, frankly, doesn't hold up if you think too much about it. People critique these movies by asking things like, “Why doesn't everyone in the world just blind themselves to be immune to the phantoms?”, “Did no one else in all of society think to use sound against the creatures?”, and “Why don't the aliens wear waterproof suits?”. These are valid criticisms for sci-fi or fantasy stories, but… these stories aren’t really meant to be sci-fi or fantasy. They are meant to be horror. Specifically, survival horror. For this genre, backstory is utterly irrelevant. In survival horror, a person or group of people are put into a deadly situation and need to use their wits and whatever they can find to survive it. The end. That's it. Are Sandra Bullock, the family in The Quiet Place, and the family in Signs put into a deadly situation? Check. Do they attempt to survive it? Check. Is it scary for the audience to watch? Check. All three movies pass the survival horror test. They aren’t trying to be good sci-fi/fantasy; they’re trying to be good horror, and do a pretty good job.

As a side note, I’m not some Bird Box apologist. Of the four horror movies I’ve mentioned in this post, it’s my least favorite. But the issues I take with it are not with the world-building (unlike some critics, I thought the rules regarding the phantoms were fairly well spelled out), but with the choices on how to induce horror. (SPOILERS INCOMING: SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU CARE) From the beginning, we know the rest of the people in the house don’t survive because only Sandra Bullock and the two kids are alive in the current time; that undercuts most of the tension in the house. Also, I thought the first phantom-acolyte they encounter, at the supermarket, was horrifying, as he appeared to be stuck forever in his place, doomed to coax unsuspecting souls to their death. One character even commented, “How is that guy still alive?”, so I wondered if he even was, or if he was sort of an undead thing controlled by the phantoms. Scary! Unfortunately, the rest of the acolytes (aside from the one in the house, who we knew John Malkovich would kill because how else would Sandra Bullock and the kids be alive in the future? The structure of the narrative seriously undercut the tension!) are pretty much your run-of-the-mill murderers in any post-apocalyptic movie. Not scary! Finally, I took issue with the last few minutes, after their boat capsized; I felt it was unnecessary for them to run around in the woods. It would have been scarier if she reached out of the water to feel a person’s foot, making the audience think it’s an acolyte, until he taps a cane on the ground and it’s revealed he’s blind. But, I digress. I don’t mind that the story has a few plot holes; I do mind that it wasn’t as scary as it could have been.

Plot Holes in Dystopia

Where, then, on this spectrum of genre does dystopia fall, and why do so many YA dystopian novels seem to fail? Could not "dystopia" be a sort of parable, requiring little explanation and thus little scrutiny, in the same way that comedy and horror and fairytales can get by on little to no explanations of what, exactly, is going on? Yes. I'll say it again, yes. I think dystopias absolutely could get a pass on world building... if they wanted to. The problem with books like Divergent or Hunger Games is not that they explain too little, but that they explain too much. If they simply set up their messed-up situations—everyone is sorted into a Hogwarts House faction, innocents must fight to the death for the enjoyment of the rich—and left it at that, I think it would be fine. The problem arises when these authors, usually in subsequent books, attempt to hash out the reasoning behind these horrible societies which... kind of couldn't arise for any real reason, or if they did, wouldn’t last very long. The explanations we are given don't make sense, or are at least are very, very full of holes and inconsistencies.

To be fair, other dystopias also offer explanations for why the world is the way it is, but they don’t dwell on it. 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451 offer lip service for how society got so bad—whether that’s due to government rule or human complacency—but then move on. We don’t need to think too hard about how Eastasia or Eurasia were formed; we need to care that the government keeps switching which one we’ve “always” been at war with. We don’t need to know who’s running the world in Fahrenheit 451, because they’re not the ones who caused Montag’s wife to O.D. or who hit Clarisse with a car or who made Beatty hate books; the society of that book is twisted because individual people are twisted. Though they contain sci-fi elements, these stories are not sci-fi books. They are much closer to horror, in that their events are supposed to provoke a sort of cautious fear in the audience. The idea is that this could happen here, and maybe it’s already happening.

Again, YA dystopia’s could do this, but that’s clearly not what they’re going for. If Hunger Games was only a nod to the dangers of media and decadence, I could get behind it. Instead, it decided to become a story about revolution, with a somewhat Chosen-One-esque figure. It went the sci-fi-fantasy route, following the epic story of a hero who attempts to save society. If Divergent only concerned itself with the idea that humans are sorted into groups based on a single personality trait… well, I would still think that was pretty silly, but I could see a skilled writer making it work. It goes beyond this, though, into this whole backstory involving genetic engineering and human experimentation. It’s a sci-fi. And because both of these stories have decided to be sci-fi, rather than only dystopias, they fail. Because sci-fi stories require a somewhat believable backstory and set-up and current world building, and the worlds of Divergent and Hunger Games could not happen, or at least would not happen like that, even if there were rebellions and mutations and human experimentation. There are too many inconsistencies and plot holes that strain belief, and sci-fi needs to be somewhat believable.

With that, I hoped I’ve converted some of you to my genre-focused cause. Before you criticize a story for having a plot hole or being unrealistic, first consider the genre. Consider what the story is trying to do, and if it does it well or not. The plot holes might not be as big of a problem as you thought.

#dystopian fiction #horror fiction #writelr #writeblr #writing analysis #plot holes #writing #genre #bird box #divergent #dystopias #a quiet place #hunger games #writing critique #world building #worldbuilding #writing problems #plot hole #plotholes #long post

[peace-coast-island]

Diary of a Junebug

Fall book recs!

Swear to Me by Rose Madison An old classic, a book I never get tired of reading! I met Rose in college and she’s a super talented writer! She wrote this, her debut novel, back in high school and it still holds up pretty well. I love the characters, especially Tux. I don’t know why, but I have a soft spot for well meaning and adorkable dumbasses. I also have a soft spot for characters like Rina, also an adorkable dumbass who’s a sweetheart most of the time and internally screaming half the time, usually over minor inconveniences.

The book is silly, heartwarming, and action packed. I think it could make a great manga adaptation if done properly - I’d definitely read that! A fairy quick read - about 160 pages, and the pacing is quick so the only issue is that it feels too short. But a lot happens in that short time!

Portal to the Past by The Livy Aubree Company I pretty much love almost everything by Livy Aubree. I’m also loving the new show, Orla and Ozzie, which is based on this graphic novel. I was always fascinated with the history behind the classic characters Orla and Ozzie, mainly Orla. Up until recently, Orla has been put on the wayside and aside from the graphic novel, she hasn’t really had time to shine.

I love the character dynamic between Orla and Ozzie, which is the strongest part about this story. The sequels are worth looking into, but they’re not as good. There’s some strong points but overall the sequels are inconsistent in terms of plot and character development. The show, which is finishing up its first season, is definitely worth the watch! 

Orla is one of my faves and I’m happy with how they handled Ozzie as his character has become a bit stagnant over the years - mainly because he’s the company’s mascot and all. What I like most is how the book and the TV show didn’t shy away from his flaws. Instead of making him a perfect goody two shoes (even when he’s clearly in the wrong - something that always annoyed me) they addressed the consequences of his actions and fleshed out his personality more so he wouldn’t be one dimensional. He was one of those characters who I always felt had a lot of potential to be interesting so I’m glad for this novel and the show.

An absolute must read! (Also I’m happy to say that my copy was signed by the show’s producer Levi Romero when I visited the island earlier this year!)

Wilde Louie by Jimmy Mathieson I enjoyed Postcards a lot so I looked into more books by him. This one is his second most popular book so I bought a copy at a second hand store when I found it. The Fairweathers is full of talented people and Jimmy has a knack for writing! 

Back at Concert in the Stars, Jimmy told me he’ll send an advanced copy of his latest book a week before it comes out - which will be around the end of the year - so I’ll be doing a review on that for my winter book reads!

So the story was really interesting! I love Louie and Shep’s relationship - the found family trope has always been one of my favorites! They both may be shady con artists but underneath they’re also good and caring people. Shep tries to act tough and all but the truth is he’s a father figure who ends up unintentionally adopting a bunch of misfits. And Louie turns into the exasperated big brother who’s like 10000% done when everything goes wrong. The humor and fast paced dialogue are the book’s strongest points!

Blizzards by Chuck Wortherly A book full of poems relating to snow and blizzards. There isn’t really much to say as that’s as straightforward as it can get. They’re short, one page poems and it’s a very fast read. I love the imagery and the brevity, which is really effective.

My top favorite is Freshly Fallen Snow, which to me reads like a song. It’s quiet and a bit sad, the imagery makes you feel alone and small - but not in an entirely bad way. Sort of like a quiet melancholy that settles into you. Another favorite is Ashes and Ice, which provokes striking and powerful imagery. There’s also Snowball Fights, which is about nostalgia, and Howls, which tells the story about a wolf lost in a blizzard.

Serena and the Cracked Sapphire by Shion Yuki One of my favorite mangas! It’s basically a magical girl type story, which I enjoy. I started reading the series in middle school and it still holds up really well. There’s twenty books in the series, which takes place in a span of five years. There’s a TV adaptation in the works that is planned to be released next year so I’m looking forward to that! Based on what I’m hearing, I have high hopes for the show.

So there’s the main character Serena, who’s a reincarnation of a princess. Her weapon is a wand with a cracked sapphire and most of the time she’s pretty OP as hell. There’s her team, a band of friends known as the Jewel Shards who fight alongside her. And there’s Celestia, who’s a reincarnation of a princess from a disgraced family, and she and Serena are soulmates. Serena’s like any other typical magical girl protagonist - clumsy, badass, sweet, stubborn, and optimistic. It can be cheesy and silly and it can be dramatic and sad. 

The first book in the series was and always will remain a classic. If you liked the first one, then you’ll enjoy the rest of the series. My favorite main arc is Team Crystal Shards because that’s when Serena’s team really comes together to fight the big boss. It’s basically the turning point in the series where Jewel Shards finally win the trust of the Crystal Stones and work together to fight the Shattered Diamonds. My favorite side arc is Apartment Hunting, where Serena and Crystal learn how to adult and fail epically at it. 

Shockwave by Rose Madison Rose’s first sci-fi book and it was a wild ride! I’ve never really got into post apocalyptic stories so I was intrigued to see how this would play out. I tend to like slice of life stories so this was nice. In the story, the apocalypse already happened so now it’s based on the characters living normal everyday lives - well as normal as it can get.

What I love most about this book is the storytelling. It’s third person narration through three main characters and the chapters are structured a certain way. Jenna’s chapters are focused on the present. She’s an inquisitive character who’s naive and easily impressed by everything. And there’s Swan, whose chapters starts out in the middle of the event going - sort of like that freeze frame moment where the narrator is trying to explain something by going back to the beginning. She represents the past and present, the one who provides most of the backstory behind the Shadow Wars. Finally there’s Lina, who represents the future as she’s always getting ahead of herself. Her chapters are dialog heavy and fast paced. The three characters are what carries the story and it intertwines together so well!

Unlike most stories about the apocalypse, this one is quite optimistic and lighthearted. There’s a lot of funny moments in the book like poor Swan who’s unable to catch a break as she winds up falling into all her cousin’s traps. Or Jenna mistaking a giant spaceship for two pyramids because she overslept and forgot her glasses. And there’s a running gag of Lina’s inventions always going haywire and turning evil, including the notable Project Shockwave. This book could make a really interesting sitcom!

Bumblebees and Lavender by Margie Shen Another poetry book, and it’s become one of my favorites! I’ve heard about Margie Shen for a while on social media but I was a bit hesitant to check her out at first. The last few popular poets I checked out were underwhelming, to put it nicely. I liked some of them but overall they were overhyped and the books were mediocre at best.

As for this one, I was throughly impressed. What I liked about this book is that the poems had substance. They’re not super short and simple - instead they’re complex and descriptive. My favorites were the ones that told a short story like Nutmeg Tea and The Beekeeper. There’s profound and thoughtful poems like Flora with Lavenders in Her Hair and Bittersweet Chocolates. I love A Touch of Honey, which made this book easily one of my favorites. I’m definitely going to look for more books by Margie Shen and keep an eye out for her next one, due out next year!

Seventeen and Counting by Eldred Emerson This is a ridiculous book and I love it! Sure some parts area bit too silly but it’s a wild ride from start to finish. There’s a movie adaptation that’s pretty faithful to the story and just as funny. It’s about this guy, his growing collection of cats, and their everyday misadventures. 

What I like the most is the names he gives his cats as he likes to go for the unusual. My favorite character is a black cat named Whiskercheeks, who goes by Whisk. His twin brother Wyn, short for Llewelyn, is considered the evil one and has the worst luck. Moneybags, aka Mon, is the baby of the family and causes a lot of mischief for the twins. There’s also Cotton Puffball, who’s always done with everything because everyone she knows is a mess. And there’s Rake Chewer, who likes to chew rakes and is a big klutz.

Overall it’s a really funny and cute book about a bunch of cats and their dorky owner.

#animal crossing #animal crossing pocket camp #Diary of a Junebug #headcanon ramble #Daphne Primrose

[kingofthewilderwest]

Hello! I was wondering if you've seen The Last Jedi and if you have, any opinions on it. Thanks!

I have seen it! Thanks for asking! :) Heads up, in case people missed my first comment on it the day it came out, I don’t have an enthusiastic perspective toward The Last Jedi. I don’t dislike the film, but it also didn’t grip me. It’s “okay”. So for those of you who are looking for an excited buddy to scream with, I am not your person. But if you are looking at having a fun, thoughtful discussion about the pros and the cons of the film, I am happy to do so with you.

In truth, I think one of the things I enjoy most about the new Star Wars trilogy is the discussion coming out of them. I was at a party a few days ago where we all got into such a long, deep, fascinating, and passionate discussion that we had to pass around a key, and whoever held the key could talk, and everyone else had to listen; we all had that many opinions on it, and it was cool to hear. There were many things we agreed with, other things we didn’t, but everyone’s perspective in the conversation was uber cool. I love that. I love to discuss the new SW movies more than watch them!

I can’t go into every thought I have on the movie now, but I’m happy to share some overarching thoughts! Ya’ll are free to ask for more specifics or opinions on certain things with TLJ, of course! 

Note: there are spoilers in the commentary below!

Plot in TLJ

Personally for me I felt as though the plot were strangely scaffolded. Maybe I’ll alter my opinion following a second viewing. But what I felt was that the plot was more cartilaginous than something with good backbone. Rather than having sound structure, with clearly defining points, it had a strange flowing, river-like structure that didn’t altogether convince me.

There were also some unnecessarily long parts to the plot. I’ve seen this mentioned two billion and five hundred sixty three point four times already, but I do agree with it: the casino run with Finn and Rose, while having some charm, was unnecessarily long compared to how it needed to be told. Technically story-wise you could have cut about ninety percent of it and lost little of what needed to be overarchingly told. 

I also think the drama with Holdo was unnecessarily complicated and tangled. Simple communication could have solved three plot twists. While there is totally feasible reason to withhold information, the writers never demonstrated that reason, thus leaving it all contorted.

Another big plot gap is something people have talked about a lot: Snoke dying without us knowing anything about him. Some of my friends have talked about how this can have a deep philosophical meta meaning, how it illuminates that we as viewers expect villains and villains of a certain vein, and get caught off-guard when it doesn’t happen that way, etc. But personally for me I feel as though it’s shaky writing. Viewers shouldn’t come away with so little satisfaction about a character who was meant to be a contending force; if the viewers leave like that, it means the execution - whatever the intent - was unsuccessful.

So the truth is, Snoke died without us knowing ANYTHING about this character. Where did he come from? What were his motivations? What’s his background, his… anything? He’s just this vague villain bad Sith guy that Kylo has killed and that’s it. Is there more to this villain that we can show without getting into the books and extended universe material? They really should have given us more by this point in time in the story. They can rectify it through Episode XI, but at the moment, it’s shaky plot-writing ground. 

Originality of TLJ

One of the big criticisms of TFA (something I constructively criticized myself) was that it rehashed the plot of A New Hope. Lots of people now seem disjointed because TLJ seems so original - or at least, that’s what I’ve heard from many people. TLJ being more original was refreshing for me.

I would say that it is original enough and that is good. Nevertheless, it’s still not as out-in-the-blue as I’ve seen some other companions of mine claim. In both TLJ and Empire, we have: 1). A rebel base being cornered; rebels having to fight; rebels having to flee, 2). A powerful, Force-sensitive young individual seeking out a Jedi recluse for training and assistance, 3). That Force-sensitive individual receiving some training after resistance, but ultimately making choices the Master finds questionable, 4). Characters being chased by ship by their enemies while the good guys’ ship(s) are in poor quality and need repairs, fuel, etc., 5). The characters go to a well-to-do location to find someone to help them in their rebel efforts, but that assistant turns out to be a traitor and turn them in to the Empire/First Order, and…. yeah. There are still lots of parallels to be made between TLJ and Episode V.

Another thing one of my friends pointed out is that many audience members might feel confused because TLJ ends in an analogous point to not The Empire Strikes Back… but Return of the Jedi. For ROTJ is when Luke is tempted to join the Dark Side and Darth Vader kills his master. We see that parallel with Kylo Ren and Snoke and Rey. But if we’ve already had that big plot event from ROTJ in the middle chapter of the new series… what’s next? That could be a reason why many people are thrown off by what was done in Episode VIII.

But personally for me, the ending material in Episode VIII was the best. The three scenes that stand out to me are: 1). The silent moment, 2). Luke being a badass in front of Kylo, and 3). Kylo killing Snoke, Kylo and Rey fighting together, but Kylo stilling holding onto the Dark Side and taking Snoke’s position. Those were all good moments that I quite like.

Oh. And the visuals. I loved the visuals throughout the movie. Very aesthetically well-done film.

Characterization in TLJ

Characters ranged from really well-written to… the writers randomly flapping hands. 

Poe and Kylo Ren were great highlights to me. I found them to be very well-written, founded on good motivations and well-established character. I do feel as though Kylo Ren is one of the more complex characters, who has layers of reasons and emotions, so every decision he makes is well-founded with who he is. And every scene with Poe was one that I appreciated.

Rose was good and what they did with her writing-wise works, and technically you don’t need more background or anything with her… but I would have liked more. I have seen some criticisms on Rose and understand the validity of those; I moreof am saying that Rose as a character is written consistently, with fun personality, and with some fun interest. I liked her on screen. Sniffed out the romance plot a while away and don’t think it was necessary-necessary, but don’t mind it either, because of course that happened, like it does with every other movie out there.

Finn’s characterization was… like the last movie… very rough. Poorly defined. Haphazard. Inconsistent. Wild writer hands flapping willy nilly. John Boyega’s good acting covers that up as well as it can, and makes Finn “feel” like a consistent character. But if you actually look at his choices and motivations across the two films, there is very little pattern, rhyme, or reason to it. Finn is a nice character when you don’t analyze him, though, so I wish that they’d done a better job with his personality and personality arc. That character deserves to be written well.

Now. For Luke. I agree with Mark Hamill on this one. Luke’s characterization was given justification and reasoning, and I get what they were trying to do, but… I don’t think it works. One reason it doesn’t work is that Luke has already learned the lessons he was struggling with in TLJ: he was tested by Yoda for the Dark Side and failed, he saw that someone turned to the Dark could be restored, he saw that giving up would never lend good results, and on and on and on. These aren’t just lessons that he’d need to relearn, but things smashed into the core of Luke’s personality and philosophy and core. And Luke’s struggle is very obviously working against a lot of common sense, which Rey delivers in a few sentences, and then Luke starts being turned to being convinced (there is a slow turn for him, but still). And lots of this goes against most of what we know about Luke’s established character, even when we consider how peoples’ personalities and views change over time. Last.. Luke’s internal conflict felt very unrealistic for his age and maturity. That sort of struggle he was going through I’ve seen lots of people in their mid twenties already have a firm grasp and understanding of. I shouldn’t be out-wising Luke Skywalker. I’m twenty-five.

That said, Mark’s acting was altogether fun and compelling to watch. He delivered very well.

Overarching Opinion

Personally I never felt “caught up” in the excitement of the movie - not that there wasn’t action, but I couldn’t get invested enough to worry or be pulled in. There was never a point where I was grumpy or angry at the movie… just didn’t get dragged into the adventure. It’s one of those movies that I came out of feeling it was “okay” but not astounding. I don’t dislike the movie and I’m not in the wave of complainers or haters or anything. It’s just not something that clicked greatly with me. There were some scenes I quite liked, some elements I quite liked, and lots of things that I’ll always love to debate about. It’s just not the movie that was made-made for me.

#long post #non-dragons #SW #TLJ #tlj spoilers #The Last Jedi #Star Wars #analysis #my analysis #ask #ask me #awesome anonymous friend #anonymous

[terramythos]

Review: The Prestige by Christopher Priest

Genre/Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Split Narrative, Unreliable Narrator, Memoir, Journal, Stage Magic, Historical Fiction, Horror

Warning(s): Child death, miscarriage (unrelated), suicidal ideation, self-harm

My Rating: 3/5 (Somewhat Recommended)

**Minor Spoilers Follow** (Unusually long review!)

“I step forward to the footlights, and in the full glare of their light face you directly.

I say ‘Look at my hands. There is nothing concealed within them.’

I hold them up, raising my palms for you to see, spreading my fingers so as to prove nothing is gripped secretly between them. I now perform my last trick, and produce a bunch of faded paper flowers from the hands you know to be empty.” -Alfred Borden

An Aside: The film The Prestige (dir. Christopher Nolan) was based off of this book! The movie is honestly one of my favorites ever and certainly my favorite Nolan film; it’s a concise and harrowing tale of obsession and revenge and how it consumes the two main characters, all wrapped together with a strong cast, interesting twists, and a good nonstandard setting. Definitely my kind of story.

Obviously it’s impossible not to compare the two, and I know some of that will come across in my review. That being said, I strongly believe that adaptations are different for a reason and should be judged on their own merits, so my base review will only cover the book and my impressions of it. You can probably tell, however, that I preferred the film purely from the rating. I will write more about how the two compare near the end. This review is a bit longer than usual for it. 

My Summary: An investigative journalist named Andrew, adopted at a young age, is sent to research a local cult holed up in an abandoned estate owned by the Angier family. In doing so, he meets a woman named Kate Angier, who recognizes him from childhood. It turns out their ancestors, Rupert Angier and Alfred Borden, were two feuding stage magicians in the late 1800s, and the bad blood between the two families has spilled out into modern times. While Andrew doesn’t particularly care about the family that abandoned him, he gets the sense that his long-lost twin is calling out to him from somewhere and compelling him to stay, and he learns the history of the feud.

From there the narrative shifts to a memoir by Alfred Borden which exposits notable facts of his life, including what got him into stage magic and an immense secret which influences everything he does, including how he pulls off his most famous trick, The Transported Man. He also documents an ongoing rivalry between himself and fellow magician Rupert Angier, and the latter’s constant attempts to one-up him, leading to a climactic and uneasy final encounter between the two, with supernatural elements to it.

An interlude narrated by Kate comes in the middle which reveals an Uncomfortable Detail about her childhood and connection to Andrew. Some supernatural stuff is implied.  Then, the story shifts to a narrative from the point of view of Rupert Angier, this time in the form of a journal. Similar to the first half, it goes over Rupert’s life and history, and the circumstances the rivalry between him and Alfred. It documents his attempts to surpass The Transported Man, a trick he obsesses over. It is also noteworthy in that mutual scenes between the two are not the same, implying unreliable narration on part of one or both men. Their rivalry eventually comes to a head.  

The Good:

Features a strong voice. It felt like both halves of the story were solidly rooted in their time period and I never felt “taken out” by the phrasing and language of the two protagonists. It ultimately felt interesting to read.

Parallels between the two halves of the story are interesting and satisfying when they occur. It was interesting to flip back and forth between certain scenes and see what was different between them, and try to piece together who was telling the truth. I haven’t run into many books that do that.

The story is obviously well-researched; Priest has a working knowledge of stage magic and the general economic climate of late-1800s London (and, to my surprise, Colorado history, which I’m familiar with). When the characters describe their acts, it has a lot of depth which makes them come across as convincing professionals.

The core concept itself is really quite interesting; it’s an odd conflict and time period to pick, but it pays off in a lot of ways. The choice to use unreliable narrators in a story about stage magic is brilliant.

Of all things the story reminded me heavily of Frankenstein, particularly the way the book describes the supernatural/science-fictioney elements and how it plays into the lives of both men. I could appreciate the references it dropped.

The choice to do a pure half-and-half split narration was risky, but I think it paid off and ended up more effective than just threading the two stories together in alternating chapters. As I mentioned above, I liked that I had to flip between the two. You take what Borden says in the first half for granted– after all, why lie about it?– but the inconsistencies between him and Angier are an intriguing and come much later. (I’d prefer it if the book DIDN’T mention this directly, but unfortunately…)

The Mediocre:

While I liked the split narrative, having the halves be purely autobiographical or journalistic ultimately bogged the story down. By its nature a journal contains a lot of fluff that doesn’t necessarily connect to the story. It felt like Priest was trying to be “authentic” by including a lot of life details that end up… ultimately irrelevant? It detracted a lot from my experience because I had zero reason to care about those things and they served no purpose to the story.

As a result of the above issue, the events of the story felt episodic and disconnected, not a part of some overarching and connected feud. Especially in a story that relies on subterfuge and deception, things that might seem irrelevant should reflect in a new light as the story progresses. The first half accomplishes this in some ways, but it falls apart in the second half.

It had an annoying tendency to foreshadow a twist, reveal it, backtrack and reveal the twist to be “impossible” then… go back to it? Just kind of an irritating bait and switch, generally. Twists work with this type of story due to the whole stage magic thing but that gimmick completely goes against the attitude of it.

The framing device with the modern characters seems ultimately pointless. The story would have been fine without it. It would also prevent that… ending. See the final point under “The Bad”.

The Bad:

The characterization was lacking. There are a lot of people that come into the story and leave virtually no lasting impression on it, which isn’t a good sign. The big problem here is with this type of story, characters SHOULD be the driving force, and they simply aren’t. I get that the story focuses on the main two, but it shouldn’t be to the exclusion of all else.

And I really hate to say it, but the main characters were not especially interesting. A memoir and a journal by nature have a laser focus on one specific person, and while that was true enough, the characters don’t really change all that much. Both Borden and Angier are self-important assholes. That’s fine. The problem is they stay that way the entire story and refuse to examine themselves or develop in any concrete way until the very last second. Even when a character has a moment of reflection, like “this feud is stupid we should just end it”, something contrived keeps it going and neither character grows or matures from the insight. If this is intentional, it’s a frustrating position to put your reader in.

The conflict ultimately makes no sense. The feud is founded on stupid reasoning, and the way it sustains itself seems unrealistic. Even when a spoiler event happens that gives a character EXCELLENT motivation to push the story along and solidify the feud (possibly justifying this story built, ultimately, on miscommunication), it gets resolved in three pages and then the feud just… continues for no reason? If the feud is intentionally pointless, then play that up more! Show it through the side characters, or the modern framing device, or something. It feels bad otherwise.

I’m just going to say it. The ending is stupid as hell. Just really fucking dumb. Yeah, let’s turn this into a supernatural horror story… randomly? It makes no goddamn sense with the rest of the book. It felt like a joke ending. Nothing really set it up beyond the science fiction elements of some of Tesla’s stuff and even then it went in a way different direction. If the rest of the book had been like that, sure, but it wasn’t.

Final Thoughts: The Prestige is a book that features a fascinating core concept. Rival stage magicians at turn-of-the-century London trying to one-up each other and how they ultimately go too far? Frankenstein style science fiction? Nikola Tesla features prominently? But to me it fell short– it’s the type of book that could be great with a stronger editorial hand clipping out unnecessary fluff and bolstering the characters. The movie accomplishes this! It’s just a shame it couldn’t happen with the… book it’s based on.

That doesn’t mean the book is bad– far from it. It obviously came up with the framework that made one of my favorite films, and I liked seeing connections between the two. Again, I have to stress that it’s well-researched and an interesting idea, and the writing quality is good even if it falls short on storytelling. The idea of having unreliable narration for a story about stage magic is goddamn brilliant and I’m glad the author went for it. I just think he jumped the shark.

A lot of my complaints with the book are solved in the movie adaptation. It’s ironic that a book that has so much more time and space to develop characters falls flat, but the shorter movie version doesn’t. A story about obsession, one-upmanship, and how revenge destroys a person when they go too far should be character-driven and the movie understands this. The feud between Angier and Borden is caused by a stronger and more personal event, and you start off rooting for Angier. However, as the story progresses, Angier’s willingness to go to further and further extremes switches sympathy to Borden. Even more important are the side characters, their arcs, and seeing how they react to each man’s obsessiveness, and how it tears everyone apart on an interpersonal level. It’s raw and it’s structured well; everything is relevant, which makes the twist at the end all the more satisfying. You get a more concise and philosophical story overall, and I feel it’s way more appealing that way. The ending is also much different and much, much less stupid– I cannot stress this enough.

So ultimately I’m glad this book exists because it gives us an excellent story– one that only reaches its full potential in the adaptation. If it weren’t for that egregiously bad ending then maybe it would be a 3.5 (I’d penalize it more based on that but… ehh). You can certainly read it if you want to for the good aspects of it, but you should probably just watch the movie. If you want a story about rivalry gone too far, I’d recommend Vicious by V.E. Schwab or Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, both of which are character-driven with fascinating (and consistent) premises.

#Taylor reviews #books #3/5

[thegirlwholied]

So I've been reading your posts about Rebel Rising and the inconsistencies are driving me crazy. I just can't see her having been adopted by a family and her NEVER thinking about them after they're killed. And of course they had to give her a love interest. I literally can't imagine her having romantic feelings for anyone before Cassian, or even having an emotional connection to anyone until she meets the R1 squad. Does she actually fall in ~Love~ or is it just a passing attraction?

Very Telling here is that I didn’t even mention that Jyn’s Temporary Found Family dies… but you immediately Knew It To Be True.

And it is.

Here’s the rub with Jyn never thinking about them after they’re killed, though-

RebelRising!Jyn thinks about them again. Plenty.

Novelization!Jyn doesn’t, and we’re fully in her head, but she maybe wouldn’t have reason to.

Movie!Jyn, our only insight into her thoughts is the acting, the dialogue and how it’s delivered, and how of course we then take it. There’s more backstory-room.

But STILL there’s inconsistencies, which I’d describe as:

RR!Jyn’s characterization doesn’t feel in line with movie!Jyn and comes closer to directly contrasting Novelization!Jyn.

Small but specific example of what I mean:

RR!Jyn has a “bit of luck” in that the stormtroopers inspecting her mistake her kyber crystal necklace for a bit of glass.

Novelization!Jyn ‘managed to keep’ her necklace, smuggled into the prison when she should have ‘been worried about weapons or a comlink.’

Movie!Jyn has the necklace; we don’t know why; either works but the two are pretty incompatible as presented, both Factually and Characterization-Wise.

More overall example:

RR!Jyn, while she of course has her canon combat skill set, avoids fights whenever possible, after Saw leaves her. She never starts one.

Movie!Jyn, on a covert mission, when somebody just bumps into her:

…That is not the face of someone who is not looking for trouble, but okay. It’s not… factually incompatible.

Novelization!Jyn, chapter 1, as we’re introduced to Jyn on Wobani and who she is as an adult: considers rising a second time ‘solely to irritate’ her cellmate (who is threatening to kill her), but decides against it only because “If she was going to pick a fight, better be awake enough to enjoy it”.

“It’s not a problem if you don’t look up” - Novelization!Jyn explicitly says this just to hurt Saw. Felicity’s acting suggests the same in the movie- and maybe partly that she’s trying to convince herself, but her heart’s not in it.

RebelRising!Jyn legit comes to believe this and stews a lot about the Rebels drawing the Empire down on people who might otherwise be left alone…

The Inevitable YA Love Interest is honestly the least of things I took issue with, my friend. But let me break it down for you, so as to answer your actual question, under the cut:

We make it 213 pages - over half the book! - without a love interest.

This was refreshing, and I say this as someone fond of a strong flavor of romance in my plot (Empire Strikes Back style, say, or Raiders of the Lost Arc - childhood favorites that probably set the tone of Things I Like).  

Attraction was largely not even on Jyn’s radar. She was busy, being Saw’s surrogate daughter, training to trying to be included on missions - not that she ever gets sent on many, for the ‘best soldier in his cadre’ - working on her forging skills (the development of Jyn’s forging skills was my favorite part of the book by far)…

But this is YA, a YA book fully intended to be a bestseller and have all the bestselling YA things, so I was waiting for it.

Every single newly introduced character near Jyn’s age, I considered like I was playing mental Clue.

-Could it be young Rebel group leader Reece Tallent with his YA-romance-ready name and blue eyes?

-Could it be one of the Partisans Jyn asks after in the novelization, who all show up here?

(Note: the YA-sounding scene referenced in one line of the novelization, Codo trying to kiss her and then not speaking to her when she refused, is Not In This Novel.)

-Could it be the Imperial Lieutenant Colonel with the perfectly chiseled face Jyn “felt inexplicably drawn to” and is struck that he doesn’t say the “Empire was already wonderful, just that it had the potential to be”?

(Note again: I thought he might be the novel’s central villain when he again shows up on a news report, now missing an eye. No, this is just a character introduction that goes absolutely nowhere but is just kind of episodic.)

-Could it be the young man Jyn grabs to get off a planet under bombardment, since she’s got the forged clearance codes to get by and he says “I work transport; I can fly anything”?

…Who immediately opens a potentially interesting Rogue One esque dialogue by saying, racked with guilt, “We could have saved someone other than ourselves”?

(A Note of Nope: …don’t get your hopes up on this dynamic. They might scrape through near-certain death together but Jyn never even learns his name.)

I was pretty pumped by Jyn’s first post-Saw team-up. She gets a temporary job with a woman freighter pilot who ships for the ‘little guys’, family-run mining companies, not corporate or goverment…

…But winds up just moving into this woman’s house where she immediately meets her son, the first character all book described as:

“a boy about Jyn’s age.”

Anddddddd before I even made it to the next line, I knew, we have a winner.

His name is Hadder Ponta, and he’s fine.

And yes, I’m sure he’s “fine” as in “hot”, though the writing’s solid enough we don’t need that kind of direct descriptor, we get, “same dark brown skin with red undertones that [his mother] had, and the same black hair, though his was cropped to chin length”; later we get that Jyn’s attracted to him because it’s “very distracting” when he runs his fingers through his hair and the “silky locks fluttered around his ears. He needed a haircut…”

But I mean “fine” in the general sense. He’s just a boy, who really likes Jyn.

…I mean, his mom brought home a cute mysterious girl and put her in their house one wall away from him, and then just the two of them hang out while his mom’s off-planet doing her job; if other people their age are around we never meet them, so…

The most interesting thing about him is probably his dead sister, and I don’t mean that in a mean way -

Tanith Ponta, the real Tanith Ponta, died because she had bloodburn, a new!canon disease that impacts pilots, and actually, she overdosed on the addictive treatment for it. This is… a lot of interesting information, for a plotline that is otherwise irrelevant, but, tangent, odds in favor that bloodburn is what  killed Shara Bey? I’m not aware of any other diseases existing in the Star Wars universe likely to carry off a young fit pilot when her son is six.

The purpose for this is that Hadder’s mom is afraid it runs in their family and won’t let him fly, though he and Jyn secretly take out a shuttle together.

in other words his main personality characteristics are

wants to be a pilot but parental figure won’t let him

thinks being a Rebel sounds like a good idea but has no concept of the fight/gray areas

just wants to get away and see the universe

admires strong women

… wait why does that sound famili-

…I’m actually fine with this, but the execution of the concept was a little lackluster.

Book-wise, it wound up being not quite I was Here For - I was hoping for some more of the ‘disorderly conduct’ and ‘escaping custody’ and ‘creating a public nuisance’ promised by her charges in the Rebel Dossier (I still thought that would be coming, but uh, yeah, that never happens)…

But here we get about 100 pages of Jyn trying to live a settled life in a nice place for ~ a year with these nice people who remind her what the word family means again, obviously both the Empire and Rebels show up and there is crossfire and the Inevitable again happens…

But, while Hadder’s kind of boring, he’s fine, and I *can* see Jyn going for someone naive and genuinely caring at this point in her life, and part of me is like, whew, okay, it’s nice to see Jyn grab ANYTHING nice for herself, especially for her strongly implied first time and when Rebel Rising is drilling home that her life is A Series of Unfortunate Events.

The word ‘love’ is never thrown around, except once, by Hadder: he goes “Copy that, love” and I mentally go… “wait my default America reading accent may have been a mistake here”. The word “forever” is, in Jyn’s thoughts, and I was pretty bummed we never get older her reflecting back more cynically on how likely that would have been, even if he lived…

But no we don’t get that, and this becomes her big losing hope/’maw in her heart’ event/feels she doesn’t deserve good things and then the remaining 100 pages of the novel have so many Imperial collaboration issues, still seeming sixteen when she’s supposed to be her movie-age now, that I barely had a groan to spare for Hadder being something of a Lost Lenore.

But yeah he is, so it teeters pretty close to “L” on that scale you were asking about- but still, for me, fell pretty evenly in between “Could’ve Been Worse” and “Could Have Been Better”.

The big question, for me, which pushes it more one way:

Is that line I’d seen circulating Tumblr before I read Rebel Rising - of Cassian seeming “familiar” but she can’t place it- meant to imply, as we’re finishing the book, that he reminds her of Hadder?

(Hadder does have a “We need to do something” line at one point, she sees something “steely and fierce” in his dark eyes that Jyn thinks would make him a hero in the Rebellion, he’s the only character I can think of getting a laugh out of people… this is not a book with much in the way of humor…)

…so while that’s thankfully left open, there really isn’t much in the way of other in-book contenders she might be thinking of, that is a solid “probably” on intent there.

In summary of my whole long explanation: believe me when I tell you, even though there are some really good scenes in this book and aspects I like a lot… when I say Mistakes Were Made, Jyn’s teenage love interest and how important or not he remains to her, not even registering on my scale of frustrations. 

#jyn erso #star wars #rogue one #rebel rising #rebelcaptain #look there is absolutely no blame for the author here and I'll probably check out her other books #but WHERE WAS THE STORY TEAM ON THIS #aren't there supposed to be a whole team of people maintaining canon consistency #isn't that one of the reasons they got rid of the EU #Imperial collaborator Jyn Erso okay sure #that's... #sure #situation normal #I'm fine #I'm fine here now thank you #how are you? #who decided this is canon #what's your operating number #(just saying i'm really glad i checked this one out of the library rather than buying) #(i still drove ONE TOWN over to get it during my lunch break on May 4) #(and i've been so busy i have not let myself read an Actual Book since... well probably since the Rogue One Novel) #(so this was a combination fulfilling-my-curiosity and treat to myself of reading over writing) #(whoops) #(...no blame may not be 100% accurate because I just don't understand how we could have watched the same movie.) #(but mostly I blame the oversight)

[stiles-wtf]

Classic Cartoon Debate: Is Goofy a Dog?

The post Classic Cartoon Debate: Is Goofy a Dog? by Melvin Peña appeared first on Dogster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren’t considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Dogster.com.

Since his creation in 1932, the Disney character Goofy has become a part of our shared cultural heritage. Like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, Goofy has long since transcended his appearances in any specific cartoon, series or animated film to become a global icon. Through numerous minor tweaks and adjustments over the decades — variations in costume, voice, personality and even family — Goofy’s laughter and essential charm endures after 85 years. One question about him, though, has lasted just as long: Is Goofy a dog?

Is Goofy a Dog? First, the Basics.

The question of Goofy’s species has bothered folks for decades. Photography via Pixabay.

Is Goofy a dog? The question got stuck in my mind when I saw it took second place among Google’s Year in Search as one of the top dog-related queries of 2016. It seems like a strange question, maybe even counterintuitive. In the vast majority of his film appearances, Goofy’s got long, floppy ears and a recognizably canine craniofacial structure.

Even if it is clearly exaggerated for the purposes of comedic anthropomorphism, Goofy is clearly a dog, right? Hold on, if you sort of squint your eye, he could be a cow … or a wolf, maybe! The longer I thought about it, the less certain I was. Is Goofy a dog … really? Let’s investigate his history and these perennial points of contention surrounding the question, “Is Goofy a dog?”

The Goofy family and his dating life

What kind of dog is Goofy? 

The Goofy and Pluto quandary

Goofy’s life and times

As we start to answer the question, “Is Goofy a dog?” let’s examine his backstory. The brainchild of Walt Disney house animators Art Babbitt and Frank Webb, Goofy’s history began about a minute into 1932’s animated short, Mickey’s Revue. Originally named Dippy Dawg, the character began as an older, bearded bumpkin, whose lack of theatrical etiquette is a source of humor. Within two years of his debut, Goofy developed quickly, shedding first the beard, then his original name. From 1935 to 1940, Goofy began a run of classic cartoons with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck that would cement his status.

In the 1940s, Goofy experienced another pair of adjustments. Pinto Colvig, the original voice actor, abandoned the role for several years, during which time, Goofy went mostly silent. He starred in a series of “How to” cartoons featuring an omniscient narrator or recycled dialogue. These films were meant to have a broad, instructional appeal, and his name changed again, to “George Geef,” a kind of “John Smith” among cartoon animals.

The Goofy and Pluto problem complicates matters. Photography by Loren Javier on Flickr.Some modifications may have been made to fit the specifications of this site. Used with Creative Commons License.

By the 1990s, his name had settled in as “Goofy G. Goof,” which is no help at all in determining what sort of creature he is. In hindsight, if the creative team at Disney had kept a species designation as part of his moniker, we might not still be wondering whether he is a dog at all!

Goofy family values

One major source of discord when it comes to the question, “Is Goofy a dog?” — and to defining Goofy’s species — is his inconsistent relationship habits. When you start giving funny animals human characteristics, including personal and romantic lives, this kind of confusion is bound to follow. In the 1940s films, for instance, he had a wife and son, who made things more complex by looking almost entirely human themselves.

The 1990s iteration, featured in the “Goof Troop” cartoon and “Goofy Movie” series, had a son, Max Goof, who at least bore a family resemblance. During a run of comic books based on popular Disney figures, things fell into further confusion for the fan community when Goofy began dating a cow. Clarabelle Cow, who predated Goofy in animated films dating back to the late 1920s, was a love interest for Goofy.

Goofy’s inconsistent romantic life raises further questions. Photography by Jennie Park on Flickr. Some modifications may have been made to fit the specifications of this site. Used with Creative Commons License.

She would return as a potential romantic partner in Disney cartoons that aired between 1999 to 2003.  For most of her history, Clarabelle was linked to Horace Horsecollar. However, her on-again, off-again dalliances with Goofy through the years have led many fan conspiracists to speculate whether Goofy’s own heritage might be bovine as well.

What kind of dog is Goofy?

In thinking, “Is Goofy a dog?” the next question is, “If Goofy is a dog, what kind of dog is Goofy?” Most of the iconic Disney animated characters avoid this species confusion, either through naming or very distinct physical features. Turn your mind to Mickey Mouse, Scrooge McDuck, or Jiminy Cricket; if the creature that provided the template for each of these wasn’t completely obvious, Disney’s naming practices really ram it home. The official Disney site is no help, referring to Goofy only as “he.”

According to the fan-curated Disney wiki page, Goofy is a “tall, anthropomorphic dog,” so fandom, at least, is settled on its canonical interpretation. Beyond these official and semi-official references, the rest is left to our speculation and theorization. Physically, the length of Goofy’s ears and muzzle would suggest, along with his body size, the model to be a medium- to large-breed of dog. From a personality standpoint, his curiosity and willingness to try new things, along with his clumsiness, point toward a dog in the hound family.

The Goofy and Pluto quandary

Another question that pops up when thinking, “Is Goofy a dog?” … If Goofy is a dog, what about Pluto? If there’s one thing that sticks in the craw of Goofy conspiracy theorists, it’s the confusion that arises at what we might call the Goofy/Pluto nexus. Most sites that dwell on the ambiguity of Goofy’s breed or species spend a great deal of time on this. At the crux of the issue, people point out inconsistencies in the ways that Goofy and Pluto are treated as characters.

For his own part, Pluto has no opinion. Photography by Ashley on Flickr. Some modifications may have been made to fit the specifications of this site. Used with Creative Commons License.

If Goofy and Pluto are both supposed to be dogs, then why is one an English-speaking biped while the other barks and walks on all fours? Walt Disney himself provided all the clarity we could ask for when it comes to Pluto, having referred explicitly to Pluto as a “bloodhound.” As you might expect from any long-running character, this specific breed designation was later retconned as a “mutt” by Mickey Mouse himself in 1941’s Canine Caddy.

Goofy is a talking animal! Does it matter what kind?

One one level, anthropomorphized cartoon animals are pure wish fulfillment. If a magic fairy appeared before you, say, Merryweather from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959), among the first things you’d ask for is that it grant your dog the ability to talk. Add in a down-home personality and a dash of regional dialect to your dog’s speech patterns, and you’d instantly be the hit of the neighborhood listserv, if not a viral sensation and talk-show staple. Long-lasting cartoon characters become life-long friends; sources of delight that you experience through the years and pass on to your own children.

On the other hand, four score and five years of people trying to pin down Goofy’s species is a little troubling. You’d think a definitive statement would’ve been issued by this point, or that there’d be a global consensus among his adoring fans that would’ve caused the question to have long faded into obscurity. Why is the joy of having Goofy, in all of his incarnations and iterations, not enough? Why is it so important to pin him to a specific binominal nomenclature?

To be honest, I spend a lot of time thinking about cartoons. Photography by JD Hancock on Flickr. Some modifications may have been made to fit the specifications of this site. Used with Creative Commons License.

After all, cartoons offer us worlds of limitless possibility. In animation, animals wear clothes, have nuanced relationships, drive automobiles and hatch all manner of hare-brained schemes. When they’re very lucky, they also get theme songs that stick in our minds forever. In the attempt to be a latter-day Linnaeus, the drive to classify and delineate a character like Goofy is also an effort to restrict and compartmentalize him. So, is Goofy a dog? Who knows! Maybe. Let Goofy be Goofy!

Thumbnail: Photography by JD Hancock on Flickr. Some modifications may have been made to fit the specifications of this site. Used with Creative Commons License.

This piece was originally published in 2017.

Read more dog news on Dogster.com:

Dug Up at Dogster: February 2019 Dog Events

Separation Anxiety Study Shows Petting is Beneficial

Reese’s Law Enacted in Florida

The post Classic Cartoon Debate: Is Goofy a Dog? by Melvin Peña appeared first on Dogster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren’t considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Dogster.com.

[daddyslittlejuliet]

Classic Cartoon Debate: Is Goofy a Dog?

The post Classic Cartoon Debate: Is Goofy a Dog? by Melvin Peña appeared first on Dogster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren’t considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Dogster.com.

Since his creation in 1932, the Disney character Goofy has become a part of our shared cultural heritage. Like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, Goofy has long since transcended his appearances in any specific cartoon, series or animated film to become a global icon. Through numerous minor tweaks and adjustments over the decades — variations in costume, voice, personality and even family — Goofy’s laughter and essential charm endures after 85 years. One question about him, though, has lasted just as long: Is Goofy a dog?

Is Goofy a Dog? First, the Basics.

The question of Goofy’s species has bothered folks for decades. Photography via Pixabay.

Is Goofy a dog? The question got stuck in my mind when I saw it took second place among Google’s Year in Search as one of the top dog-related queries of 2016. It seems like a strange question, maybe even counterintuitive. In the vast majority of his film appearances, Goofy’s got long, floppy ears and a recognizably canine craniofacial structure.

Even if it is clearly exaggerated for the purposes of comedic anthropomorphism, Goofy is clearly a dog, right? Hold on, if you sort of squint your eye, he could be a cow … or a wolf, maybe! The longer I thought about it, the less certain I was. Is Goofy a dog … really? Let’s investigate his history and these perennial points of contention surrounding the question, “Is Goofy a dog?”

The Goofy family and his dating life

What kind of dog is Goofy? 

The Goofy and Pluto quandary

Goofy’s life and times

As we start to answer the question, “Is Goofy a dog?” let’s examine his backstory. The brainchild of Walt Disney house animators Art Babbitt and Frank Webb, Goofy’s history began about a minute into 1932’s animated short, Mickey’s Revue. Originally named Dippy Dawg, the character began as an older, bearded bumpkin, whose lack of theatrical etiquette is a source of humor. Within two years of his debut, Goofy developed quickly, shedding first the beard, then his original name. From 1935 to 1940, Goofy began a run of classic cartoons with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck that would cement his status.

In the 1940s, Goofy experienced another pair of adjustments. Pinto Colvig, the original voice actor, abandoned the role for several years, during which time, Goofy went mostly silent. He starred in a series of “How to” cartoons featuring an omniscient narrator or recycled dialogue. These films were meant to have a broad, instructional appeal, and his name changed again, to “George Geef,” a kind of “John Smith” among cartoon animals.

The Goofy and Pluto problem complicates matters. Photography by Loren Javier on Flickr.Some modifications may have been made to fit the specifications of this site. Used with Creative Commons License.

By the 1990s, his name had settled in as “Goofy G. Goof,” which is no help at all in determining what sort of creature he is. In hindsight, if the creative team at Disney had kept a species designation as part of his moniker, we might not still be wondering whether he is a dog at all!

Goofy family values

One major source of discord when it comes to the question, “Is Goofy a dog?” — and to defining Goofy’s species — is his inconsistent relationship habits. When you start giving funny animals human characteristics, including personal and romantic lives, this kind of confusion is bound to follow. In the 1940s films, for instance, he had a wife and son, who made things more complex by looking almost entirely human themselves.

The 1990s iteration, featured in the “Goof Troop” cartoon and “Goofy Movie” series, had a son, Max Goof, who at least bore a family resemblance. During a run of comic books based on popular Disney figures, things fell into further confusion for the fan community when Goofy began dating a cow. Clarabelle Cow, who predated Goofy in animated films dating back to the late 1920s, was a love interest for Goofy.

Goofy’s inconsistent romantic life raises further questions. Photography by Jennie Park on Flickr. Some modifications may have been made to fit the specifications of this site. Used with Creative Commons License.

She would return as a potential romantic partner in Disney cartoons that aired between 1999 to 2003.  For most of her history, Clarabelle was linked to Horace Horsecollar. However, her on-again, off-again dalliances with Goofy through the years have led many fan conspiracists to speculate whether Goofy’s own heritage might be bovine as well.

What kind of dog is Goofy?

In thinking, “Is Goofy a dog?” the next question is, “If Goofy is a dog, what kind of dog is Goofy?” Most of the iconic Disney animated characters avoid this species confusion, either through naming or very distinct physical features. Turn your mind to Mickey Mouse, Scrooge McDuck, or Jiminy Cricket; if the creature that provided the template for each of these wasn’t completely obvious, Disney’s naming practices really ram it home. The official Disney site is no help, referring to Goofy only as “he.”

According to the fan-curated Disney wiki page, Goofy is a “tall, anthropomorphic dog,” so fandom, at least, is settled on its canonical interpretation. Beyond these official and semi-official references, the rest is left to our speculation and theorization. Physically, the length of Goofy’s ears and muzzle would suggest, along with his body size, the model to be a medium- to large-breed of dog. From a personality standpoint, his curiosity and willingness to try new things, along with his clumsiness, point toward a dog in the hound family.

The Goofy and Pluto quandary

Another question that pops up when thinking, “Is Goofy a dog?” … If Goofy is a dog, what about Pluto? If there’s one thing that sticks in the craw of Goofy conspiracy theorists, it’s the confusion that arises at what we might call the Goofy/Pluto nexus. Most sites that dwell on the ambiguity of Goofy’s breed or species spend a great deal of time on this. At the crux of the issue, people point out inconsistencies in the ways that Goofy and Pluto are treated as characters.

For his own part, Pluto has no opinion. Photography by Ashley on Flickr. Some modifications may have been made to fit the specifications of this site. Used with Creative Commons License.

If Goofy and Pluto are both supposed to be dogs, then why is one an English-speaking biped while the other barks and walks on all fours? Walt Disney himself provided all the clarity we could ask for when it comes to Pluto, having referred explicitly to Pluto as a “bloodhound.” As you might expect from any long-running character, this specific breed designation was later retconned as a “mutt” by Mickey Mouse himself in 1941’s Canine Caddy.

Goofy is a talking animal! Does it matter what kind?

One one level, anthropomorphized cartoon animals are pure wish fulfillment. If a magic fairy appeared before you, say, Merryweather from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959), among the first things you’d ask for is that it grant your dog the ability to talk. Add in a down-home personality and a dash of regional dialect to your dog’s speech patterns, and you’d instantly be the hit of the neighborhood listserv, if not a viral sensation and talk-show staple. Long-lasting cartoon characters become life-long friends; sources of delight that you experience through the years and pass on to your own children.

On the other hand, four score and five years of people trying to pin down Goofy’s species is a little troubling. You’d think a definitive statement would’ve been issued by this point, or that there’d be a global consensus among his adoring fans that would’ve caused the question to have long faded into obscurity. Why is the joy of having Goofy, in all of his incarnations and iterations, not enough? Why is it so important to pin him to a specific binominal nomenclature?

To be honest, I spend a lot of time thinking about cartoons. Photography by JD Hancock on Flickr. Some modifications may have been made to fit the specifications of this site. Used with Creative Commons License.

After all, cartoons offer us worlds of limitless possibility. In animation, animals wear clothes, have nuanced relationships, drive automobiles and hatch all manner of hare-brained schemes. When they’re very lucky, they also get theme songs that stick in our minds forever. In the attempt to be a latter-day Linnaeus, the drive to classify and delineate a character like Goofy is also an effort to restrict and compartmentalize him. So, is Goofy a dog? Who knows! Maybe. Let Goofy be Goofy!

Thumbnail: Photography by JD Hancock on Flickr. Some modifications may have been made to fit the specifications of this site. Used with Creative Commons License.

This piece was originally published in 2017.

Read more dog news on Dogster.com:

Dug Up at Dogster: February 2019 Dog Events

Separation Anxiety Study Shows Petting is Beneficial

Reese’s Law Enacted in Florida

The post Classic Cartoon Debate: Is Goofy a Dog? by Melvin Peña appeared first on Dogster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren’t considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Dogster.com.

[buynewsoul]

Classic Cartoon Debate: Is Goofy a Dog?

The post Classic Cartoon Debate: Is Goofy a Dog? by Melvin Peña appeared first on Dogster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren’t considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Dogster.com.

Since his creation in 1932, the Disney character Goofy has become a part of our shared cultural heritage. Like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, Goofy has long since transcended his appearances in any specific cartoon, series or animated film to become a global icon. Through numerous minor tweaks and adjustments over the decades — variations in costume, voice, personality and even family — Goofy’s laughter and essential charm endures after 85 years. One question about him, though, has lasted just as long: Is Goofy a dog?

Is Goofy a Dog? First, the Basics.

The question of Goofy’s species has bothered folks for decades. Photography via Pixabay.

Is Goofy a dog? The question got stuck in my mind when I saw it took second place among Google’s Year in Search as one of the top dog-related queries of 2016. It seems like a strange question, maybe even counterintuitive. In the vast majority of his film appearances, Goofy’s got long, floppy ears and a recognizably canine craniofacial structure.

Even if it is clearly exaggerated for the purposes of comedic anthropomorphism, Goofy is clearly a dog, right? Hold on, if you sort of squint your eye, he could be a cow … or a wolf, maybe! The longer I thought about it, the less certain I was. Is Goofy a dog … really? Let’s investigate his history and these perennial points of contention surrounding the question, “Is Goofy a dog?”

The Goofy family and his dating life

What kind of dog is Goofy? 

The Goofy and Pluto quandary

Goofy’s life and times

As we start to answer the question, “Is Goofy a dog?” let’s examine his backstory. The brainchild of Walt Disney house animators Art Babbitt and Frank Webb, Goofy’s history began about a minute into 1932’s animated short, Mickey’s Revue. Originally named Dippy Dawg, the character began as an older, bearded bumpkin, whose lack of theatrical etiquette is a source of humor. Within two years of his debut, Goofy developed quickly, shedding first the beard, then his original name. From 1935 to 1940, Goofy began a run of classic cartoons with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck that would cement his status.

In the 1940s, Goofy experienced another pair of adjustments. Pinto Colvig, the original voice actor, abandoned the role for several years, during which time, Goofy went mostly silent. He starred in a series of “How to” cartoons featuring an omniscient narrator or recycled dialogue. These films were meant to have a broad, instructional appeal, and his name changed again, to “George Geef,” a kind of “John Smith” among cartoon animals.

The Goofy and Pluto problem complicates matters. Photography by Loren Javier on Flickr.Some modifications may have been made to fit the specifications of this site. Used with Creative Commons License.

By the 1990s, his name had settled in as “Goofy G. Goof,” which is no help at all in determining what sort of creature he is. In hindsight, if the creative team at Disney had kept a species designation as part of his moniker, we might not still be wondering whether he is a dog at all!

Goofy family values

One major source of discord when it comes to the question, “Is Goofy a dog?” — and to defining Goofy’s species — is his inconsistent relationship habits. When you start giving funny animals human characteristics, including personal and romantic lives, this kind of confusion is bound to follow. In the 1940s films, for instance, he had a wife and son, who made things more complex by looking almost entirely human themselves.

The 1990s iteration, featured in the “Goof Troop” cartoon and “Goofy Movie” series, had a son, Max Goof, who at least bore a family resemblance. During a run of comic books based on popular Disney figures, things fell into further confusion for the fan community when Goofy began dating a cow. Clarabelle Cow, who predated Goofy in animated films dating back to the late 1920s, was a love interest for Goofy.

Goofy’s inconsistent romantic life raises further questions. Photography by Jennie Park on Flickr. Some modifications may have been made to fit the specifications of this site. Used with Creative Commons License.

She would return as a potential romantic partner in Disney cartoons that aired between 1999 to 2003.  For most of her history, Clarabelle was linked to Horace Horsecollar. However, her on-again, off-again dalliances with Goofy through the years have led many fan conspiracists to speculate whether Goofy’s own heritage might be bovine as well.

What kind of dog is Goofy?

In thinking, “Is Goofy a dog?” the next question is, “If Goofy is a dog, what kind of dog is Goofy?” Most of the iconic Disney animated characters avoid this species confusion, either through naming or very distinct physical features. Turn your mind to Mickey Mouse, Scrooge McDuck, or Jiminy Cricket; if the creature that provided the template for each of these wasn’t completely obvious, Disney’s naming practices really ram it home. The official Disney site is no help, referring to Goofy only as “he.”

According to the fan-curated Disney wiki page, Goofy is a “tall, anthropomorphic dog,” so fandom, at least, is settled on its canonical interpretation. Beyond these official and semi-official references, the rest is left to our speculation and theorization. Physically, the length of Goofy’s ears and muzzle would suggest, along with his body size, the model to be a medium- to large-breed of dog. From a personality standpoint, his curiosity and willingness to try new things, along with his clumsiness, point toward a dog in the hound family.

The Goofy and Pluto quandary

Another question that pops up when thinking, “Is Goofy a dog?” … If Goofy is a dog, what about Pluto? If there’s one thing that sticks in the craw of Goofy conspiracy theorists, it’s the confusion that arises at what we might call the Goofy/Pluto nexus. Most sites that dwell on the ambiguity of Goofy’s breed or species spend a great deal of time on this. At the crux of the issue, people point out inconsistencies in the ways that Goofy and Pluto are treated as characters.

For his own part, Pluto has no opinion. Photography by Ashley on Flickr. Some modifications may have been made to fit the specifications of this site. Used with Creative Commons License.

If Goofy and Pluto are both supposed to be dogs, then why is one an English-speaking biped while the other barks and walks on all fours? Walt Disney himself provided all the clarity we could ask for when it comes to Pluto, having referred explicitly to Pluto as a “bloodhound.” As you might expect from any long-running character, this specific breed designation was later retconned as a “mutt” by Mickey Mouse himself in 1941’s Canine Caddy.

Goofy is a talking animal! Does it matter what kind?

One one level, anthropomorphized cartoon animals are pure wish fulfillment. If a magic fairy appeared before you, say, Merryweather from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959), among the first things you’d ask for is that it grant your dog the ability to talk. Add in a down-home personality and a dash of regional dialect to your dog’s speech patterns, and you’d instantly be the hit of the neighborhood listserv, if not a viral sensation and talk-show staple. Long-lasting cartoon characters become life-long friends; sources of delight that you experience through the years and pass on to your own children.

On the other hand, four score and five years of people trying to pin down Goofy’s species is a little troubling. You’d think a definitive statement would’ve been issued by this point, or that there’d be a global consensus among his adoring fans that would’ve caused the question to have long faded into obscurity. Why is the joy of having Goofy, in all of his incarnations and iterations, not enough? Why is it so important to pin him to a specific binominal nomenclature?

To be honest, I spend a lot of time thinking about cartoons. Photography by JD Hancock on Flickr. Some modifications may have been made to fit the specifications of this site. Used with Creative Commons License.

After all, cartoons offer us worlds of limitless possibility. In animation, animals wear clothes, have nuanced relationships, drive automobiles and hatch all manner of hare-brained schemes. When they’re very lucky, they also get theme songs that stick in our minds forever. In the attempt to be a latter-day Linnaeus, the drive to classify and delineate a character like Goofy is also an effort to restrict and compartmentalize him. So, is Goofy a dog? Who knows! Maybe. Let Goofy be Goofy!

Thumbnail: Photography by JD Hancock on Flickr. Some modifications may have been made to fit the specifications of this site. Used with Creative Commons License.

This piece was originally published in 2017.

Read more dog news on Dogster.com:

Dug Up at Dogster: February 2019 Dog Events

Separation Anxiety Study Shows Petting is Beneficial

Reese’s Law Enacted in Florida

The post Classic Cartoon Debate: Is Goofy a Dog? by Melvin Peña appeared first on Dogster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren’t considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Dogster.com.