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stardustizuku · 11 months

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Part 4: The New Team

The first moment I said “This is bad” at Miraculous Ladybug...the first moment I realized this was going downhill – was when they introduced …Sighs, Rena Rouge.

(To be fair, it started with Lila and her weird necklace but that could have just been fixed easily)

I knew the moment Rena came that this was gonna get bad. I felt it in my bones that THIS was the sign of something insidious and awful boiling in the back of the show. This character marks the beginning of everything downhill in the show - it’s a glaring reminder of how awful the writing in this show is.

Don’t get me wrong I love Alya. I love the character design of Rena and I don’t think that - in a vacuum - her existing is bad. But her appearance signified that something far worse happened behind the scenes.

They were trying to add more heroes.

As I’ve stated in Part 2, where we talk about the Love Square, there is a very delicate balance between Chat and Ladybug’s dynamic. And throughout Season 1, which is meant to be the introduction to the series, we are given no indication that it will focus on anything else. There was more than enough drama with just those two superheroes to last you a very solid arc. But that arc never got developed neither as forefront, nor backstage, as far as seasons 1-3 is concerned.

Again, because the writers are idiots, who believe that developing the story might lead the Love Square to be concluded, which means having the creativity to develop it beyond what the 1 minute trailer told them to do.

So? What do we do? How do we develop this story further, without bringing in the complexities of its own premise?

Easy, you add useless heroes and McGuffins to sell more toys. They add nothing in terms of narrative cohesion, character development, or character relationships.

Like, Season 2 was 25 episodes long. And in those 25 episodes, it introduced a grand total of 3 potential superheroes. Of what are now

11 SUPERHEROES.

By the end of Season 2, a little less than halfway through the currently aired episodes in the USA, we had…3/11 of the entire team.

A team, by the way, that slowly took the emphasis away from what we were even watching this show, to begin with: The Love Square. Ladybug and Chat.

They were the core of the story. And the blatant addition of a new team, proved to me nothing more than a desperate attempt to distance themselves from it. For what reason? Either a lack of confidence in developing their main characters, or plain incompetence to detect what your show even is about.

As I stated in Part 3, in regard of theme, there’s nothing of the sorts connecting ANY of these superheroes together.

The new heroes have different powers – with absurd power balances.

The most powerful superheroes are supposed to be Cht and Laadybug, but I would argue that time travel is a biiiiit more powerful. Like, Garbiel could very easily time travel to save Emily or steal the miraculous before they're given to Chat and Ladybug. But sure. Whatever.

In regards of theme.

Chat and Ladybug have good and bad luck symbols as their animal counterparts. Then there’s Rena, the Fox; Carapace, the turtle; Hawkmoth, the moth; Queen Bee the bee…?? I’m not following that decision at all. If someone does, please do enlighten me.

And then there’s the newest superheroes, introduced in Season 4, and still being currently introduced…

The theme is the Chinese zodiac, but that’s only (checks notes) Excuse me, Paris? Uhm, yeah, Paris. So in Paris they have the Chinese zodiac, but in the USA and Beijin they have completely different powers not tied to the miraculous. And, I get it, you want new merch. Fine, all magical girls are thinly veiled ads for kid’s toys (I will buy the sailor moon blush one day, or so help me god) But, should you at least – try to make it make sense-

New superheroes or new powers should all connect to your theme.

Sailor Moon has planets, so introducing new Sailor Scouts it’s as easy as getting new moons, or suns in the galaxy. Something I find really cute is that Sailor Chibimoon has subordinates CereCere, VesVes, PallaPalla and JunJun. These were the asteroids once thought to be new planets in the Solar System before we knew of the AsteroidBelt and realized they were little rocks.

Mermaid Melody introduced new mermaids through the seven seas. There were only a finite amount of them. But even so, the only way to introduce Seira was through the death of Sara.

And Tokyo Mew Mew’s endangered animals allowed us to have Mew Ringo and (we don’t talk about brunononono, we don’t talk about brunooooo) Mew Berry.

Even Kamichama Karin WHICH I HATE so it goes to show how badly MLB messed it up – has a theme (sort of). It fumbles it extremely badly. Insulting to a degree how bad it does it…BUT IT DOES IT.

It’s greek gods. That’s it. You may have a new power, a new transformation or a new characters but you bet your ass it’ll be a Greek god. It may have no connection to the character’s personality or relationship to each other, but hey. At least it stays consistent on its terrible use of Greek Gods as nothing more than aesthetic.

So, your characters have no narrative weight behind it to justify why they’re here. You have no actual theme to tie all 19 of your superheroes (HOLY FUCK THAT’S A LOT OF THEM) aside from…animals? I guess.

(I swear to god PreCure puts more thought into their themes than this)

But at least, you would guess, your new heroes show interesting dynamics with each other that allow you to understand better either Chat, Ladybug, or each other?

No.

The team is bad.

They ditched the “Magical Girl” formula and decided to go for a bit of a “Super Seitan” feeling. I mean, Power Rangers type of show. More gender neutral, more focused on the villain of the week, and an emphasis on a big team.

Just. A bit of a problem.

But they did this, so into the show that we ALREADY had a sense of their character as a side character, so bringing them to the spotlight was uncomfortable.

Like suddenly making Molly a sailor scout or giving Tomoyo clow cards in the middle of the second season.

That’s not their purpose in the story.

And they’re introduced so haphazardly that there’s hardly any time for them to hang out with each other.

Rena first appears in episode 37, Carapace in episode 44, and Queen Bee in episode 49.

AND NONE OF THESE CHARACTERS INTERACT WITH EACH OTHER.

Not until Mayura. Which is episode 52, which just akumatizes them or gets them out of the way one way or another. Meaning, they do absolutely nothing for the plot, bring nothing to the table, and makes you wonder why even waste air time bringing on-screen characters that do not matter.

In any other show, yes. The characters slowly leaving the protagonist alone because they get trapped, killed or maimed is a good way to up the stakes of the finale.

Here’s the thing, though. I care about them. And they care for each other. They know they’re not losing just a teammate, they’re losing a friend.

I cried like a baby when Makoto died and Usagi only recognized her rose earring – because I love Makoto to death. I cried when Rei sacrificed herself to save Usagi, because I knew how much they bickered. I was upset when Mint and Zakuro fought, because I knew how much Mint idolized Zakuro.

Their failure meant something to the each other. Aside simply, “we lost manpower”. Because these people were, before superheroes, before their later egos – they were friends.

HOWEVER. This does not happen in MLB. Since they don’t GET to keep the kwamis, they don’t get to participate in every episode. We never get episodes focused on how they interact with one another. Which means there’s no sense of a “team”. Which makes you wonder why they’re even considered a “team”.

This is such a horrible decision it genuinely makes me wonder if these people KNOW how to create ANY story !!!

I feel like I keep comparing MLB to many decent and genuinely good magical girls animes. Which feels unfair, EVEN THO IT ISNT, because these are iconic anime’s that have left a print in media

So fine, let’s get this show to a level you all can understand how bad it is

DC superhero girls. And it’s GOOD, check it out if you can. It’s something to turn on and enjoy, with little overarching plot.

But get this, the entire focus is to watch the team girls Interact. A lot of the comedy comes from watching these girls having fun and watching them come to terms with their own superpowers. Watching them get in trouble as they hide their identity, and how they bounce from one another. Who helps who, who are besties, who kinda hate each other, who brings them together and who keeps them strong.

I especially love Barbara and Harley's dynamic, as well as Kitana and Wonderwoman's friendship. The episodes that focus on either of them make me really happy. And even if there's little overarching plot, because I know their situation, I wanna see them happy and have fun.

But because they all have to hide in MLB, you don’t see something like this. Which, btw, THIS is the foundation of both Magical girl GROUPS and Seitan. And I would argue you would get more leeway abt secret identities to one another in MagicalGirls that in Seitan. Seitan’s bread and butter IS team dynamics. The fact that we don’t know how two superheroes that ladybug and chat aren’t would behave around each other is an INSULT to the genre.

And to be fair, they could still keep their identities secret. Just. Have them interact every single episodes, without the need of Ladybug or Chat doing a 10 minute break to give them their Kwamis. It would have been fun to see Queen Bee chat with Ladybug, maybe hate Chat and fight with him to get Ladybug’s attention. Maybe, have Viper and Carapace make music references and vibing in the background. Have Ryuko and Queen Bee bicker. Have Rena and Chat make jokes at Queen Bee’s expense.

You could have amazing drama out of the team trying to find each other’s identities, but having Ladybug threaten them to take away their miraculous (MAYBE she’s paranoid about it since the events of Chat Blanc let her traumatized and will take away miraculous from them). Hell, maybe she took away Chloe’s miraculous not because “she’s unfit” but because she spilled the beans. And Chloe’s resentment is not just from losing her great title, but losing the first true friends she had.

And it would make the fact that Marinette is allowed to CHOOSE her teammate…a bit more bearable. Because honestly, THAT’S a terrible concept.

Most teams DONT get to chose who their partners are, and that’s what makes it amazing.

Because it’s a bunch of people who are forced to be together, slowly learning to open up and depend on one another. Which creates amazing and profound bonds that one originally wasn’t expecting.

Take for example Usagi. She didn’t CHOOSE her team. Instead, she found it. They found her. While Ami and Makoto are kind to her, she’s always butting heads with Rei, and playfully competing with Minako. They don’t all coddle her, or think she’s amazing. They see her as a friend. A crybaby, clumsy but kind-hearted friend who will help them out.

Tokyo Mew Mew has the same. Ichigo isn’t in perfect terms with Mint and they butt heads. Zakuro is a loner that isn’t integrated fully even in later episodes. But they’re a team. They work together.

The fact that Marinette gets to pick, creates issues like…Queen Bee.

Which.

Leads me.

To Chloe.

A God, Chloe.

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#miraculous ladybug #sailor moon #mlb #mlb salt #mlb critical #magical girl essay #magical girls

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the-conversation-pod · 6 months

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On Time And Memory

AND WE'RE BACK!

This week we're doing a thematic comparison about how our memory of the past impacts how we perceive our present. In a surprise for us both, we had a lot of positive things to say about Krist Perawat. We're talking about trauma and how we connect to wounded characters this week with Tokyo In April Is... and Be My Favorite.

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

00:00 - Welcome 01:16 - Intro 03:10 - Tokyo In April Is... 11:01 - TIAI: Comparisons with the manga 14:15 - TIAI: Strength of execution 26:23 - Be My Favorite 34:00 - BMF: The time travel mechanic 44:47 - BMF: Dings 52:57 - BMF: Jittirain and Gawin and Krist 01:00:58 - Outro

The Conversation Transcripts!

Thanks to the continued efforts of @ginnymoonbeam as transcriber, and @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader, we are able to bring you transcripts of the episodes.

We will endeavor to make the transcripts available when the episodes launch, and it is our goal to make them available for past episodes. When transcripts are available, we will attach them to the episode post (like this one) and put the transcript behind a Read More cut to cut down on scrolling.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

01:16 Introduction

Ben

And we're back.

NiNi

Welcome, welcome, to our On Time and Memory episode. And why are we calling it On Time and Memory? Well, we're back in the second chance romance space. And when we're in second chance romance space it always ends up somehow being time fuckery versus head fuckery. So [laughs] what are we talking about this episode? We're gonna talk about time fuckery in Be My Favorite, and headfuckery in Tokyo In April Is…

Ben

I think for both of these shows you have characters who are emotionally stunted by their feelings for each other that they don't deal with for years. In Tokyo In April we have a story about two boys who were very close in high school, and a troublesome event separates them, and they don't run into each other again for…ten years. And there's a lot to unpack in the trauma between the two of them that we'll get into in the episode. With Be My Favorite, we have a young man who, approaching 30, isn't really doing anything and is still caught up in his bullshit from when he was in college. Until a magical McGuffin allows him to go back in time to college and re-experience some of these events—with a very strict time travel mechanic that I really liked how it was used.

Both of these shows offer us some interesting things to talk about with how we perceive the events around us, and how that tends to linger with us and inform who we become.

NiNi

Okay so let's dive right in.

03:10 - Tokyo In April Is…

NiNi

And now we're going to talk about Tokyo In April Is... Ben, what is Tokyo In April Is… about?

Ben

Fundamentally, at its core it seems to be a show about nostalgia? But the description of the setup is, this young man named Takizawa Kazuma is returning to Tokyo after being away for ten years. He left at the end of middle school, finished his studies in America, and is returning to Japan as a pretty well-trained human resources professional and is joining some sort of company that's got office space in a tower. There he runs into another guy who's his age named Ren, who was his friend when he came back to Japan originally when he was a teenager, and they haven't seen each other in ten years. We learn over the course of the show that they were each other's first big loves, and they were each other's first experience sexually. But that encounter ended on a rather sad note for them as Kazuma ended up sick—had to be rushed to the hospital. The relationship became public knowledge to their families, and then Ren was summarily disowned by his family, kicked to France, and forgotten, only to eventually return to Tokyo.

The two of them have a difficult way to go because Ren doesn't want to talk about what happened when they were 15, and Kazuma—who had a horrible bout with pneumonia and I believe meningitis?—he ends up not really remembering what happened after that night. He and Ren end up in an intimate situation, and Ren establishes a friends with benefits arrangement for them. And Kazuma decides to be patient with this so Ren can work through what he needs to as the two of them become closer.

Ren also gets involved in a very Me Too era storyline with his work, where one of the women that he works with discloses that she was a victim, and that another member of the team was recently victimized. That the perpetrator has been preying upon the female staff at the company for over a decade. Two like really big threads in the show and I got a little bit lost towards the end there. But, the core of the show is about the…I guess it's sort of a second chance romance? Between Kazuma and Ren.

NiNi

I think we came down on opposite sides of this one, so I want to let you go first. How did you feel about it? What was your take on the show?

Ben

Overall I ended up liking this show a lot—and I tend to like shows that hearken specifically to things that I think are distinctly queer, also distinctly very male queer, because despite how femme our friend group is [laughs] and how many femmes are on Tumblr, I watch BL because I am a gay man who likes stories about gay men. And so I really connected to the youth portion of the story, where both of them were in love with the other, but couldn't conceive of a reality where the other boy also liked them back. And I really like how earnest that felt? Maybe I'm projecting a little bit of the manga onto this, I think it's a little more explicit in the manga, because we get more internal monologues? But I really like how that felt. The reality of that being snatched away from them at 15 was also something I connected to, having something really special and then having it basically ripped from you. In my case by circumstance, but them by being literally outed.

And then when they get together as adults again, I really appreciate Kazuma’s patience with Ren. I think it's very difficult sometimes to care about someone who's clearly suffered—and you'd like to help but it isn't necessarily your problem to solve or your angst to unpack? Sometimes you just have to love someone very firmly, until they start to settle down a little bit. And I also really liked Ren's friend Ryunosuke, who he met when he was in Paris. I really liked in episode…7? Seven, when he reads Kazuma for filth—because he can't conceive of a reality where Kazuma doesn't understand what happened to Ren. It's less of a thread in the show, but Ryunosuke and Ren identify as gay, which carries political connotations. Kazuma doesn't necessarily think of himself as queer in any way, and so as a result he doesn't seem to consider the social, economic, and political ramifications of being gay, and how that impacts his feelings for Ren. Ryunosuke has been with Ren for ten years, has cared about Ren, has tried to be more than just friends to Ren, unsuccessfully, multiple times—that's text. And he hates Kazuma because this is the person who is the source of this huge knot that's got his friend locked up. And when you meet Kazuma, you understand instantly why Ren likes him. If I were Ryunosuke I would hate Kazuma even more [laughs] because he's so likable.

NiNi

[laughs]

Ben

You would almost want Kazuma to be a selfish prick who didn't appreciate what Ren gave up for him. But the fact that Kazuma is so earnest and gorgeous and naive and kind, makes you hate him even more because you can see what Ren may have been trying to protect. And he succeeded! Oh, I would hate that so much!

[both laugh]

Ben

And so I really, genuinely loved Ryunosuke’s confrontation with Kazuma about that. I also really liked their domesticity. Because Japanese BLs are always using food as a love language. Food is love is a very common theme, especially when you have so many tsundere seme types, or even ukes who can't necessarily say the things that need to be said, but they can make a mean souffle. Ren doesn't have cooking skills. He's so stunted by what happened to him that he is missing love languages. The only thing he can really do is quality time and physical affection, but even then he's super restrictive about it with his rules.

I enjoyed a lot of the gay shit in this that sticks with me.

11:01 TIAI: Comparisons with the manga

NiNi

Okay, so here's a question. I did not read the manga, manga's not really my thing, but you read the manga before you went into the show. Do you think that that influenced your experience of the show in any way?

Ben

The simple answer is yes? It's kind of hard not to…when you know the story, you're watching it differently. And that's true for anybody who read source novels watching adaptations, or saw the original work when it's been adapted to another language or something. Your prior familiarity does impact your viewing experience. I will say in the case of Tokyo In April Is…the show is better, significantly. Whatever I would rate the show, it is a full point higher than I would rate the manga. The manga…is, one, way more erotic, and it uses eroticism kind of poorly sometimes? And there's one particular one that is extremely distasteful. There's other really tactful changes they made to the source material. Some of it was just moving the reveals of certain information around for better coherence.

I think the show is significantly better than the source work. Not in a way that makes me want to say the source work is bad, but very much when they were adapting they were like, [laughs] ‘we have to move some of these pieces around and restructure some of this.’ Some of the stuff when they were kids is far more explicit. They have to say it because they're not relying on the actors to deliver it. So Kazuma being as in love with Ren as Ren was with him is far more legible in the manga I think? And, like that scene on the roof where they're talking about having girlfriends: Kazuma in his own internal monologue in the manga says he's just going to say what straight people are supposed to say, because he thinks it would be embarrassing to admit how much he likes Ren. I don't think that's as legible in the show. Unfortunately.

NiNi

Yeah, and it's strange because the show does use internal monologues, so I'm not sure why it wouldn't have used internal monologues to get those bits across.

Ben

There's this weird dynamic with trying to be a little bit subtle about certain things? Less explicit sometimes about the queer stuff—with the main couples—that I don't know what the party line is on this, because they didn't have a problem doing with Ryunosuke, but he doesn't have any romantic potential, so they can say it for him. He can say the thing, because he's not getting anybody's booty in this show, so whatever. But like there's a whole thing with Kazuma and Ren that was only alluded to in the show.

I think the young actors are fine, but I don't think that they necessarily conveyed on their own, the missing bits of the internal monologue that I think should have been voiced over.

14:15 TIAI: Strength of execution

NiNi

Yeah. And that's kind of my whole thing with the show? So, Ben and I, I think, fell on opposite sides of this particular one. I thought that this was written really well; I am not sure that it was performed well. Or performed in a manner that grabbed me, let's put it that way. Intellectually I feel the tragedy of the story, but I'm not feeling any of it? And I think the performances had something to do with it, and I think a little bit of it was the staticness of the direction. This is the same team that did Our Dining Table, which is also based on a manga, but that show does not feel as static in the direction as the show does. Sometimes the whole manga styling, it works for me—they linger on a shot and it's very clear that that was like, a full page panel, or something like that? Sometimes that works for me with Japan, and sometimes it doesn't.

Some of the times that it's worked for me have been, like, Our Dining Table and What Did You Eat Yesterday? But then there are times that it didn't work for me, like here, and The Pornographer. It's the same kind of like static direction, but the acting is not coming through in the same way as it did in Our Dining Table and What Did You Eat Yesterday? I felt at an emotional distance the whole time I was watching the show. It was very clear what I was supposed to be feeling, because the writing's very good. It's partially the staticness of the direction, but it's really the fact that the actors aren't acting through that direction.

To be fair, when I'm talking about Our Dining Table and What Did You Eat Yesterday? I’m talking about Iijima and Inukai, talking about Uchino and Nishijima, these are top tier actors. These actors are very new. They've clearly been through the training, but they didn't bring out, for me, the emotionality that I would expect to get in a story like this—because this is a very tragic story. It's a tragic story with a happy ending, which is nice, but I neither feel the tragedy nor the joy. I can see that I'm supposed to feel it. The writing is telling me that I'm supposed to feel it. But I'm not feeling it, it's just not hitting for me, I wasn't getting enough of the inner from the performances. And it wasn't coming through in any other way. So if I'm not getting the inner from the performances I have to get it in some way, through a dynamism in the direction, or something in the set design, and I didn't get it through any of those means that I would normally use to soak up a vibe from a show? I wasn't getting that normal kind of pull that I would that I would usually get, that would suck me into something. Objectively it's good, but it didn't touch me? The production did not capture the depth of the story, for me.

Ben

I like Japanese static framing, because sometimes I think you have to just sit in whatever situation you're in. And sometimes that's really fun, like all of the fun eating around a table in What Did You Eat Yesterday? or Our Dining Table. Sometimes it's not fun. When you're watching Kazuma respect Ren's boundary, not asking a question that needs to be answered in a show like this. I totally see what you mean with the set design, about how things feeling kind of generic and bland. But I also feel like that's sort of the point, like, Kazuma is recently back in Tokyo. And the very first thing I thought about his place was that it was too big. But I feel like that's also the point. Missing part of himself because Ren has been gone for so long, and he's willing to provide so much space for Ren. I liked the use of earth tones in the few things that he did have, to ground his place and make it feel more alive than Ren's own place, which was so forgettable.

NiNi

Yeah, this is what I'm saying: normally in Japan, the set design, it pulls you in, the sets say so much about the characters.

Ben

But I feel like that's the point here! The lack of definition from their physical spaces is part of the point, that they're both so ungrounded. With Kazuma’s space in particular…the whole domestic episode of theirs, we kept calling it the What Did You Eat Yesterday? homage episode—but that also feels like sort of the point. That Kazuma is trying to model what he hopes will be helpful for Ren.

NiNi

I just feel like, if it's intentional, then when things shift between them, that it should then change. Because I could have bought the sterility of both of their places at the beginning of the story as intentional, and demonstrating how stuck they both are, that they can't even extend themselves to their surroundings because they're stuck in this moment that happened ten years ago. I could buy that as an argument. But then when they become unstuck, I feel like I want to see that reflected in some way. The story doesn't get there, because when they're moving in together, we only see like the barest bit of their place, and it just looks the same.

So I can take your point and buy your argument, but then to me, they missed a trick towards the end of the show by not making it clearer that now they are unstuck, and their lives can begin, and their lives together can begin, so their surroundings should start to match the new vibe that they're building together, to me anyway.

Ben

I do get that, I just don't know that I want them to do that in either of their apartments. Because both of their apartments look and feel temporary to me. And I'm really okay with the show starting where we began, with Kazuma on the street reminiscing about Tokyo, with the reveal that now he's with Ren and they're walking off together, and now they can casually talk about their time as teens. I'm okay with them completely starting over.

Like I take your point. It just didn't bother me because of how it instantly read to me. Like everything seemed off, and that felt intentional.

NiNi

When we were talking about this a little bit earlier you brought up pulps. Because you know how I feel generally about the pulps. I'm most familiar with the Thai pulps and the rhythms of the Thai pulps, so I can point to a Thai pulp and be like ‘that's a pulp.’ But normally you have to like, guide me into realizing that something from somewhere else is a pulp, because I don't have the same familiarity with the rhythms. This now, you described it as a Japanese pulp, and I had to sit with that for a minute, because I'm like ‘oh okay, is this what it is, is this what I'm feeling?’

Ben

We talked about this a little bit. This is not me reading you, don't take it as such.

NiNi

Why would I ever? If you're going to read me, you're going to tell me you’re reading me.

Ben

I will read you on this podcast, but I’m not reading you here. I just think, like one of the things that I've gotten used to as a queer cinema viewer is: we don't get big budget money, we don't get big actors in our stuff. And if we do, it's like, ‘this is their formative work! Look how bad they were in 1992!’ I get used to a certain raw quality or newness with these actors? And I am not put off by it. I appreciate that they were willing to do the work, and I appreciate when they take the work seriously. Like at no point do I think that Sakurai Yuki and Takamatsu Aloha are afraid of each other. And afraid to play two men who are into each other. And I have felt that from Japanese actors…we get the sense that they're not necessarily comfortable working with their male co-star. I did not feel that here from these guys, I just felt inexperience. And I don't begrudge people the experience they don't have. I care about the work that they're trying to do.

This is a very poignant story about a very specific kind of relationship, that I think is fairly familiar for a certain type of queer viewer who has dealt with familial homophobia and the consequences of being discovered at a young age? Something else the show did that the manga didn't—the manga doesn't do much develop Kazuma’s despair at Ren leaving, and it's one of the things that I really like in the show, because he was very strictly adhering to Ren's rules…about not asking questions that Ren didn’t want to answer, obeying the rules about their intimacy, even though Ren was modifying them, breaking them or changing them on the fly. And you can see how he turns into this shell of himself because Ren's gone. That was so well done, the manga does not develop that at all.

NiNi

Ben's like, ‘inject the sadness directly into my veins!’ [laughs]

Ben

I need to know these gay boys have been through the suffering! And the knowing, it's my favorite part. There's also the mom. The mom is way better in the show. There's a bitterness about the whole resolution with the mom, that is correct in the show. In the manga they make it seem like…it's almost comedic that she separated them for ten years? The conversation she has in the show with the other woman, about how strong their love is and how special it is and why she separated them? Yeah, she has that with the boys in the manga. I hated that shit. I'm so glad she had that conversation away from the boys.

The show is better. I gave the show a 9, I would have given the manga like an 8.

NiNi

It’s hard for me to talk about this show because intellectually I got it, but I still felt mid about it. It is well done. It's well written, it does not look cheap. They put work into the show. It's very clear that everybody from top to bottom on this production put the work in. But it didn't hit me.

Ben

It’s okay, I think, for a viewer to recognize the quality of a story, the intent of a story, but to not necessarily personally connect to it.

NiNi

So you gave it a 9, I would say…objectively it's a 9 show, I would agree with you there. It just, these are two different 9s, let's put it that way.

Ben

[laughs] I get that these are not currently the most compelling actors you've seen. But we're seeing a lot of people early in their careers, when it's cheaper to maybe hire them for these things. And I'm okay with this being some of the first work that people do.

NiNi

So Ben gives it a 9, I give it a 9, that's a 9 for Tokyo In April Is…

26:23 - Be My Favorite

NiNi

Ok Ben, so let's talk Be My Favorite. We, well I, had no intention of watching this, you were going in hostile…Ben, tell the people, what is Be My Favorite about?

Ben

Be My Favorite is about Krist Perawat’s redemption arc. No, Be My Favorite is about this young man named Botkawi, who is thirty years old and still stuck in all of his mess from when he was still a student. He is invited to the wedding of the girl that he has had a crush on for ten years—who he has never really spoken to—has an entire crisis about it, then a magic uncle gives him a plot device to travel back in time to try and change his future. Along the way he ends up realizing that he didn't really understand any of the relationships in his life, and because this is a BL, ends up with the guy who Pear, the girl he was into, was going to marry.

Honestly, describing the show's plot is going to make it sound really silly, but fundamentally it was a show about the importance of kindness, and just choosing to be a little bit decent to people, even when it didn't feel like it benefited you at all. And how that can have transformative effects in the lives of everyone around them.

NiNi

I think that's a good descriptor, and I think you're right that if you just dryly explain what the show is about, it seems like it's a little silly—but it was really really affecting, I found it quite deep and quite emotional in a lot of ways. Kawi is a loser, but he's a loser because he chose to be. He got into his head that he was a loser and he just cut himself off from all the people in his life, and sort of manifested his own loserdom. When we meet Kawi, like we can see that, because people are trying to be his friend, people are trying to be close to him, people are trying to socialize with him and have him as part of their crew, their group, their whatever, and he is just not having it. He's stuck in his own head and his own sadness and his own perception of himself? And the way that his life has gone? And he can't seem to unstick himself.

The catalyst for him starting to unstick himself is when this wedding invitation arrives. That's when you start to get the full story of how Kawi even landed up here. You get to go back in time with him to the point in time when the decisions that he made landed him here. He thinks of it as nothing having worked out for him for twelve years, but what it really is in actuality is that he hasn't tried anything in twelve years. He's just allowed himself to become this sad sack of a person, and just told himself that he was a loser.

The show is very…it delves into the idea of how you can turn your perception, however misguided it is, into your reality. It's a lot about not being able to see the good things that are in your life, only being able to see the bad. There’s a few threads in there that are interesting that the show runs with: threads on alcoholism and binge drinking, threads on decentering yourself from other people's stories. There is a lot the show says about being an active participant in your own life. I thought it was a really interesting show, and well done. Well written, well produced, well directed, and very well acted, I think. I did not go into this as a Krist fan, because I did not think that he was a good actor. And I was very surprised and quite pleased with his chops in this. I love Fluke Gawin, I think he ascended to another level in this particular show. I think he put more of himself into this show than he has into some of his other roles, and I was impressed already with some of his other roles.

Ben, what did you think about it?

Ben

I went into this show…ambivalent? Many of us in the BL-sphere had fallen out of favor with Krist, and I'm also really hit or miss with Jittirain's work, because I don't like how much lying is a big part of her stories. I was really surprised by how much lying was not part of the story of this. This show cared so much about earnestness. It was very determined for people to say what needed to be said to each other, and begged people to treat each other kindly.

One of the things that I really liked early in this show was that three different characters confessed to each other in this love triangle. Pear has a crush on Pisaeng, Pisaeng has a crush on Kawi, Kawi has a crush on Pear. They all reject each other, and it ends up improving their friendships, because now that nobody is withholding their feelings for fear of rejection, they can treat each other properly again. They did the thing that Korean stuff does a lot, which demands that people confess, but they did it in a way that showed that it's actually beneficial, and it can get better for people after you confess, even when you're rejected. I thought that was really really lovely. The show just begs you to choose kindness, to be a little bit nicer to people. To not be so selfish.

And I was not expecting that [laughs] from a Jittirain adaptation with such an unlikable character in Kawi? Because Kawi was not an easy character to like on the front end of the show. It felt very…calculated in the casting, to use an actor that had such a complicated relationship with the BL community? Who starts off so unlikable, and then to make us like him over the course of the show, by letting him grow and change, and letting us grow along with him. Like that was really restorative, in a way that I am genuinely floored by. We didn't want to like him in the beginning, but I genuinely cared about him by the end of the show.

34:00 BMF: The time travel mechanic

NiNi

Let's talk a little bit about the time travel, Ben, because I think that the time travel mechanic is kind of important to the story. So, let's break down a little bit how they do the time travel.

So like you said, there's a McGuffin object that they use, one of those little music boxes thingies? And when you turn the music box the first time, nothing happens. But then the next time that you turn the music box, you are taken back in time to the first point at which you turned the music box. From then on, you're slingshotting back and forth between two points in time, which is the last time you turned the music box in the past, and the last time you turned the music box in the future.

Ben

The big thing with the time travel mechanic is that you're not in a Groundhog Day story. You're not reliving the same day over and over again. This is not about Kawi having to keep retrying the same moments over and over again. The big thing with the time travel mechanic is that you create a checkpoint in the future and a checkpoint in the past, but every time you go back to one area or another, you're still moving forward. So he comes back to when he first buys the snow globe. He goes back the first time to when he bought it and he tries to give it to Pear, but once he tries to go back to the future after the first jump, whenever he goes back, he's back to wherever he was after he attempted to give it to her. So he has to keep moving forward; he gets one redo of what he did before. And so he's still forced to live with the consequences of his choices, he can't just keep trying over and over again. That's also kind of a metaphor? You can maybe mess up something once, and try again with people? Before they're like, ‘okay well this is who you are,’ and then they leave you alone.

I really liked this particular time travel story, because so much about jumping forward for Kawi represented where he was in the moment. So the first time he thinks he's accomplished all the things he came to, to do, like save his dad, become friendly with Pear, etc, and he jumps forward—his life is a mess. Because he was overindulgent when he was last in the past, and that played out to him becoming an alcoholic in the future, who was not great in his relationship with Pear, because he hadn't really committed to being in the relationship with Pear, he just wanted to have the relationship. And this caused friction with all the other people in his life. Particularly Max, his gay bestie, who was one of the first relationships he fixed. Like, he had stopped hanging out with his gay bestie because people were like ‘are you guys, like, homo because you guys are besties?’ So he avoided Max to avoid conflict with other people. But he fixes his relationship with Max, and Max ends up staying by his side through most of the timelines that we get to see in the future.

But a big part of the way this time travel mechanics works, by like—you move forward in both the future and the past—it forces Kawi to be present in either place while he's there. And he eventually learns the theme of the show, which is, live a life that you won't feel like you need to change. We get a great use of this towards the end when Pisaeng, in a moment of fear about Kawi potentially dying, jumps back to the past to try and somehow fix it. Kawi clocks him as a time traveler right away, but they end up revisiting like their first proper date? And end up facing each other as two time travelers trying to fix their past. Kawi really rises to that moment, and tells Pisaeng, ‘don't worry about it.’ I found that in particular to be really satisfying. That for somebody like Kawi who could only see the world negatively, by the end of the show he's able to give his partner—who is incredibly optimistic as an individual, who's facing a really terrifying loss in potentially losing him—the courage to face that eventuality, and say that our lives are still worth living and enjoying even if they might be a little bit short. Which is…kind of a heavy theme for the kind of upbeat Friday BLs that GMMTV likes to do.

So. I was really impressed with the way they handled the time travel mechanic in this. I think it offered a lot to the storytelling, I don't think this show works as just a relationship show otherwise, I think the fact that it's a time travel show is the only reason this particular story functions. And that makes me very fond of it as a result.

NiNi

Yeah, I like all of the time travel mechanic work specifically because one of the things that it makes you think about is that every time Kawi jumps forward to the future, there is a sense that, almost in a way that time stopped—obviously not, because time has kept going—but more that he stopped developing or he got stuck at the point in time where he jumped forward. So when he jumps forward to the future, he's still the Kawi that jumped forward from the past, he has not grown, has not evolved, has not anything like that. And it feels like all the people around him are stuck too? So it's almost like at the point in time that he jumps forward he freezes everybody in amber, which I really appreciated as a metaphor for, you can't fast forward through your life. You have to live it. Which is one of the themes of the show that I think was executed really well, utilizing that aspect of the time travel mechanic. Every time he tries to short circuit and just go from the past to the future without living through the bits in between, the future doesn't go well, it doesn't end well for him. I really did like that about the way that they use the time travel mechanic.

I like how this team deals with science fiction mechanics, because this is the same team that did The Gifted and The Gifted: Graduation, which are probably two of the best Thai dramas that I’ve ever watched, and the way that they think about the genre implications and the genre aspects of the shows that they do—they put effort into it, they're not lazy about the genre work that they're doing. And they deeply integrate it into the story that they're telling otherwise, so to to your point about how this story wouldn't have worked if it wasn't a time travel story: completely agree about that. The time travel is absolutely necessary to the emotional core of the story, and to the core of who the characters are and how they move through their lives. It's really…critical aspect of it. If Kawi hadn't already lived through to the version of his future where he's a sad sack, he might not have been motivated to fix his past. And then if he hadn't jumped forward to a point in time that he thought he fixed everything, and realized that he just made it worse, he wouldn't have, again, tried to go back and fix it properly. And then in going back, decided to live his life rather than trying to fast forward to the end.

One of the things that it really forces him to do as well—because there are rules to the time travel mechanic—basically there are some things that you can't change? There's some things that you can't avoid, there are some things that you can't fix. And this is shown in the person of Kawi's dad. One of the things that Kawi tries to do when he goes back to the past, is he tries to prevent his dad from dying? And he thinks that he's succeeded, because he knows when his dad is gonna die. He knows why he's gonna die. He succeeds at getting him medical help, but he dies anyway, because death is one of those things that you can't avoid, you can't change, it is what it is. Between the discussions of alcoholism and that fact of there being things in the timeline that you just can't change, it led me to the serenity prayer as a reading of the show. You have to know what you can change. You have to have the courage to change that stuff that you can change. You have to have the serenity to accept the things that you can't change.

So for Kawi, he knew he could change things about himself, things about the decisions that he made in the past. Those were the things that he had to change, and he had to discover the courage to change those things, which he did. But he had to also accept the things that he couldn't change. He couldn't change his dad dying. He couldn't change the fact that Pear did not feel the way about him that he felt about her. He couldn't change the fact that Pisaeng felt the way that he felt about him, or that he felt the way that he felt about Pisaeng. He had to accept those things. And then he had to determine, he had to learn, the difference between those two things—because that's the basis of the serenity prayer, right? You have to accept what you can't change, you have to change the things you can, and you have to have the wisdom to know the difference between those things, which is also what the whole time travel thing is giving him.

Ben

It's the kind of show that makes the audience feel smart because they were paying attention to what was happening. It doesn't require the audience to notice a bunch of things in the set design or the costuming, or easter eggs that are planted all over the place. It just rewards the audience for leaning in a little bit and participating in the themes. Recognizing the kind of story that they're telling, and they're very up front about it, they're very clear that kindness, even small amounts, is transformative. And that just choosing to be nice to someone and not be a dick to them, in a critical moment—even if it's a small moment for you—can affect the way that they view themselves and their life.

44:47 BMF: Dings

NiNi

Because we always have to talk about our dings: what are the elements in the story that you were hoping that they were going to deal with that they didn't deal with?

Ben

So I wrote a post about Pisaeng's mom, and how she is engaged in some of the worst kind of evils that queer people have faced. Pisaeng’s mom is a wealthy woman pursuing a political career, and you get the sense that his being out is inconvenient for her. Later they tried to recontextualize this as, ‘she was just concerned that his life would be harder if he chose to be out.’ But one of the things that's revealed in around episode 4, I believe? Is that her employees are spying on Pisaeng, and reporting on him when he goes into queer spaces. She jacks him up about that, and then tries to manipulate him into going back into the closet now that he's trying to push the door open. He knows who he is; this is not a discovery story for Pisaeng. And it was frustrating for me that with all of the evils about her trying to manipulate her own son back into the closet—they also have Max, who's presented as wise in the story and woke as shit, admire her for the things she said when Pisaeng feels some kind of way about her because of the way he treats her. And that is never dealt with in the show. Irked the shit out of me. It raised my hackles when it came to the mom so much, that her resolution with Pear’s dad, to just let the kids sort their lives out, was not enough for me.

On the other end of things that were frustrating for me…I don't like the resolution for Knot. I'm really glad that he got his ass handed to him by Pear and Kwan, because he was a dick. But in a show so much about kindness and change, it feels kind of weird that we leave Knot when he has basically hit rock bottom, and then don’t talk about him or acknowledge him. He just appears at graduation, and he appears at the wedding, and seemingly is a novelist—no matter what history we're in, Knot will be a successful novelist. Max wasn't allowed to have an on-screen boyfriend, but Aou was serving.

NiNi

You talked a little bit about episode 10, and Pisaeng and Kawi's first time, and how it felt like somewhere in there, between them getting together and that moment happening it felt like there was a conversation missing. Now I definitely agreed with you with that, I think a lot of people agreed with you with that. But I do also want to talk about Kawi’s journey with intimacy. There were a lot of people who were reading Kawi as ace-coded throughout the show. I don't think that I ever bought an ace or aspec read on Kawi—well, I wouldn't say not aspec, because I feel like maybe a demi read would be a read that I could get down with.

But I never bought an ace read on Kawi, and there was a lot about the ways that Kawi was discovering his sexuality, not just in the sense of…sexual identity, of being gay or of being a man who likes men, but also in terms of the fact that, when we meet Kawi in the original timeline, Kawi is a 30-year-old virgin. It's sort of put together as part of his whole loser aura that he never got it together enough to be with anybody? So in going back in time, he's going back into his 18-year-old self as a 30-year-old virgin. So this is somebody who has not experienced any sort of intimacy: emotional, physical, any sort of intimacy in his life. The lift that he's lifting, in terms of discovering who he is as a sexual person—not just as a queer person, but just as a person discovering his sexuality period—that was the read that I bought?

Ben

I guess I'll disclose a little bit before I pooh-pooh on the ace Kawi read. I identify as demisexual, and I don't like the ace read of Kawi. Kawi is almost very much in the BL space of, he's happy if they just cuddle and hold hands only. Which is the space some of the readers of BL and yaoi like to put these boys in. The reality coming from Max to Kawi is that Pisaeng is a gay man, who knows he's gay, who's into you. You must face the reality of male-male intimacy if you're going to be in a long term male-male romance. Which—all I think the point they were trying to make with Kawi and Max. By seeing Kawi choose to face that, in the episode with the amusement park about how Kawi needs to face some of his own uncertainties, and go on the ride that might be a little bit scary for him, ha ha, they're getting that particular point across.

It's a little bit muddled, but I'm not a fan of the ace Kawi read, because it feels that we project asexuality onto prudish characters or chaste shows. And that's not always what's happening. I don't want to claim Kawi for the ace side of the board? Because while I do think that a demiromantic, demisexual read is totally valid for him? You must respect that that is a read on the character from the place where you're sitting: don't think that is part of the canon of this show. I think the show is making a different point about male-male intimacy, not trying to make a point about ace spectrum existence.

NiNi

I agree with you that the show muddled that point. But it tried to pull it back by having the do-over of the amusement park beats.

Ben

And that's the really muddled part, because by going back to the amusement park date and doing it better the second time, but not taking us to that moment because they didn't want future Pisaeng to take that moment from their past selves, I think it still leaves the audience hanging. It's okay for them to say that that moment is between them, but it feels like we didn't follow Kawi's arc through that big step. We've been with Kawi for so many personal and really ugly moments, that it was kind of surprising that they would slam the door on us right there.

NiNi

They did show us the first time, and they showed us the aftermath of the first time, and whatever they did, Kawi seemed pretty happy with it. It's not that the arc wasn't complete, it was that a piece of the arc felt like it was missing.

Ben

I'm not necessarily mad about it, but it's why I did not give this show a 10. It's one of the reasons I did not give the show a 10.

52:57 BMF: Jittirain and Gawin and Krist

NiNi

You talked a little bit in the beginning about Jittirain stories, because we were both not feeling Jittirain. I am a known non-fan of Theory of Love. I skipped, and Ben did not enjoy, Vice Versa. Ben likes 2gether for reasons, I have never been particularly interested in it. Jittirain is not particularly my cup of tea, I don't really think that you are a great fan of them either? So why does this story work for us?

Ben

Because the show is not about lying. The show is about telling the truth. And almost all of her stories are built on a core lie underpinning the show. I was waiting for some huge lie to upend this show around the midpoint and it really doesn't. This show was about being earnest and forthright with people. And it was fascinating to see an adaptation of Jittirain work—because I understand that very many liberties were taken with the source material—to tell a story that was not about withholding for some sort of power play over the other person. It was very much a show about how our lives are better when we're earnest with each other. I don't know how much Jittirain's original writing had to do with that or not, because I have not read her books? But this particular story really worked for me!

NiNi

I was so surprised that the Krist and Gawin pairing ended up working. The chemistry was there, the emotional resonance was there between the two characters which I really liked. A lot of time when we talk about chemistry in these shows, we end up talking a lot about the physical chemistry or the sexual chemistry, but something that gets sort of thrown to the side a lot is the emotional chemistry between the characters, and the way that the actors play that emotional chemistry. I really enjoyed the emotional chemistry between Kawi and Pisaeng, and I really enjoy how Krist and Gawin played that emotional chemistry and emotional tension.

Ben

I believe that one of the directors talked about this, that Gawin and Krist are kind of playing against type. They had to really push Gawin out of his shyness to play the Pisaeng character, and they talked about how they struggled in some of their early cues trying to get Gawin and Krist to fall into alignment.

I wasn't worried about Gawin, because Gawin is always playing the emotionally repressed gay man who is sad, because he can't be gay the way he wants to be, in the world he finds himself to be in. That's what he's good at! He's done it three times now! He did it with Mork in Dark Blue Kiss, he did it with Dan in Not Me, and he did it again here with Pisaeng. As soon as they’re like, ‘he's been gay the whole time’ I'm like, ‘there it is! I knew there was a reason we cast Gawin!’

[both laugh]

Ben

But Krist was a real surprise for me, and there were a bunch of interesting callbacks to SOTUS that a couple of us caught along the way, with the way some of the shots are set up, some of the way some of the moments were reconstructed…definite callbacks to SOTUS asking us to compare who Krist was in, say 2016, to who he is now in 2023. And I liked the show giving us all the chance to move on from how we felt about who Krist was at the beginning of BL.

NiNi

It's deliberately done. The creators of the show, they chose Krist deliberately for this role, and part of it was about his public persona; this was a rehabilitation role for him. They've talked about that, and he talked about how hard he worked, because he wanted to change the way that people in the BL fandom thought about him. And I thought that was really neat. I didn't get too much or give too much to whatever the controversies were? My issue with Krist was always that I didn't feel like he was giving 100% in the role that he was playing? And I can't say that I knew why, but there was an eau de homophobia around it, I do have to say. I didn't get into the behind the scenes stuff, and the, whatever he said on the IG live, and, like, that wasn't my thing about it. My thing was that, if you're going to act in a role, play the role, no matter what the role is. So that was always my issue with Krist, I felt like he didn't put his all into the role. I can't say that about him here. Whatever happened back in the SOTUS days, Krist was really young, he was new to acting in general, he was new to this particular industry. Did he make mistakes? He might have, he must have, he probably did. But he put, like, whole pussy into this role, I cannot say that he left anything on the table, and that is definitely the opposite of the way I felt about him when I watched the five episodes of SOTUS that I managed to get through before I quit.

Ben

I'm okay with it! Krist, you may have a plate, sir. You can sit with us now.

[both laugh]

NiNi

I feel like you have done the work, sir. You have earned this plate that you're getting. Good job. So, ratings for Be My Favorite? You said that you rated it a 9, and you had some specific dings on it.

Ben

The mom stuff bothered me, the Knot stuff felt like a thematic misstep, and I don't really think that Aou's character has an arc in the show, he's just there as the wise gay—who has great pants, and nice legs. And like these things are fine. I think the show is fine, but I don't think I'll be rewatching it, and I don't think it's my first recommend. It's a 9, you can have it.

NiNi

I gave this show a 10.

Ben

This show does not get to sit next to La Pluie, Moonlight Chicken, and My School President this year!

NiNi

My 10s are unrelated to all of my other 10s.

Ben

Mine are inherently related to each other.

NiNi

All my 10s are very different 10s! And I gave Be My Favorite a 10 because it nailed, for me, its core premise, like absolutely nailed it. There are, to me, no holes in the core. There are some wobbly edges…there are some little tweaks and stuff that could have been done around the sides, but to me the core of the show is absolutely solid. I got myself a nice few emotional moments, there was nothing about it that bothered me so significantly that I had to ding it. For me, it was a 10.

So 10 from me, 9 from Ben, so that leads us to a 9.5, which I think is a good place for this show to sit personally. Ben, I think, feels a little like ‘ugh, 9.5 is giving it a lot!’

Ben

It's a 9.

NiNi

Yes, but we have a rule.

Ben

I am weighting the average down a quarter of a point.

NiNi

That is…not how maths works, but okay, I will let you have it. 9.25 instead of 9.5, even though that is not how mathematics work, it is fine. [laughs]

1:00:58 - Outro

NiNi

So, Ben…now that we've got some distance between us and these shows: what are some of the things that are sticking with you? What's lingering?

Ben

Tokyo In April Is... was really really gay, and that was preserved from the manga adaptation. Like I was listening back to it and my love for Ryunosuke holds firm. I really liked that this show and Be My Favorite has a very self-affirmed queer character holding the line on the bullshit. In Ryunosuke’s case, he doesn't like Kazuma, because Kazuma should know better, and he doesn't like what that did to Ren. I like that he's in a position to call that out and it's like, ‘we are gay; that means something in this world.’

I really like that both of these shows are pushing past the boundaries of the BL bubble, and reminding the genre and the people who enjoy it that queer people matter, that their lived experiences matter, that there are consequences to the things that queer people experience, that don't go away just because they got some dick. So I ended up, even further away from these shows, like, I find myself thinking about Ryunosuke a lot, and I find myself thinking about Max a lot. I like that Max told Kawi that he does need to reckon with the physical realities of being in a relationship with someone. Felt like very specific shade about BL itself not really considering the physical realities of two men being together.

NiNi

For me, the further away I get from Tokyo In April Is... the less it sticks with me. But I'm having the opposite reaction to Be My Favorite. The further away I get from it, somehow things are popping up in my mind and I'm finding myself thinking about it.

Ben

I'm on the opposite side of that. I thought Be My Favorite was solid, but I watched like 22 things this season: Be My Favorite is not on my ‘I'm thinking about that motherfucker’ list at all. And it's not like [laughs] it's bad in any way. It's just not the show I'm thinking about.

Like I really like the way they handle grief, I really like the way they handle people having unrequited feelings for other people, I really like that show's messaging about how unrequited love is still good, and it should be expressed, because it can help that relationship become a more healthy balanced version of itself. I like how that show says that telling people you love them is one of the best things you can do. Like that's a pretty cool message! But this is not the show this year that makes my, even top 10, in terms of things I'm going to be thinking about long term.

NiNi

I think while you were talking about it I figured out what it is. It's the thing about having to live your life; that you can't short-circuit it, that you can't fast-forward it. That you can't even really go back and do it over, in the way that you might want to. ‘The only way out is through’ is one of my mantras, and I feel like that was also one of the mantras of the show. You can't avoid things, you can't circumvent them, you can't jump over them: you have to go through them.

Ben

I think, as always, Be My Favorite was not gay enough for me.

NiNi

We're going to be talking a lot about that, I think, over the course of the next few episodes and the next few seasons, because I think we've hit a point in BL where it kinda has to shit or get off the pot on being queer rep, and what they are deciding to rep for queerness?

Ben

I don't know how exactly to describe it. For me…Max is pretty gay in a way that I found really accessible. Pisaeng is gay in a way that I found mostly accessible? Kawi's queerness was…a bit difficult for me to grasp. I'm not necessarily keen on the ace Kawi read, because it feels like a cop out. I don't like calling characters ace because they are sexually inexperienced and/or repressed. Either make a story about the complexities of asexuality or shut the fuck up. I don't like the way the cutesy shit reads for me these days.

With Tokyo In April Is... I like how specifically queer their story feels. That you had two boys who loved each other in high school; did not believe the other boy could reciprocate; they have one night together before everything goes horribly wrong; and then one of them tries to take on all of the suffering for the other one, and mostly succeeds? And then they run into each other again, because of course they do. Particularly because the boy who was saved™ never got over the other boy, and has been trying to get back to him for ten years. And that just really works for me. I get the way that both of them are wounded. It doesn't have to be explained to me. Even if the actors may not have consistently landed the performances? Tokyo In April Is... hits for me because it's the kind of experience that I am unfortunately familiar with! And that's the kind of stuff that's going to stick with me more.

NiNi

In winding up here: we talked about second chance romance in the spring, and I feel like we had a lot to say about why we like it? And I just want to get a sense of…how you’re feeling about second chance romance coming out of these two particular shows.

For me, I was really happy with what these two shows said about second chance romance. In both of them there was in some ways a forgiveness of self that needed to happen, in order for these two couples to get their shit together. And it was a forgiveness of self that needed to happen on both sides of the couple? So it wasn't necessarily that one had done something wrong to the other, it was more that…these are people who were living half-lives. In some ways beating themselves up about something that had happened in their past? And I liked that these two shows really put an emphasis on self healing as prerequisite to love. These people had to find themselves to find their love. I like that message.

Ben

Like I said last season, second chance romance is important for me as a gay person. Our youths aren't easy; I'm feeling a whole lot better about myself in my 30s than I did in my teens or my 20s. I do think that second chances are important for queer people, because a lot of people didn't figure it out until they were away from their families and in school and stuff, and a lot of us who did figure it out early did not talk to anybody about it, or did not have a great time with it, or were interested in people who hadn't figured it out yet. And so second chance romance in BL remains super important for me. It's probably the current style of story that most appeals to me.

NiNi

That is going to wrap us up on our On Time and Memory episode. We out! Say bye to the people, Ben.

Ben

Peace!

#podcast #lgbtq #tokyo in april is...#be my favorite #the conversation #ben and nini's conversations #on art #fall series #fall 2023 #thai bl #bl series #season 4 #s4e3 #shigatsu no tokyo wa...#Spotify

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aragarna · 22 days

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Summarize my wips badly

tagged by @penna-nomen, thank you!! :)

In no particular order of advancement:

The one where Zorro gets unmasked. But then, I gotta fix it, somehow. It got a bit out of hand. 12k words and don Alejandro still hasn't come back.

The one where I have Alejandro finds a mcguffin and travels back in time to save Diego from those 20 years in jail, because my heart bleeds thinking about Diego enduring 20 years of jail. So that one would be a Mask of Zorro fic. Sort of Mask of Zorro/Disney Zorro crossover cause I can't picture a young Diego other than as Guy Williams.

There's that old WC/Forever WIP that I will finish one day. It's such a brilliant idea. I mean, Mozzie and Abe have to be BBF, don't they? They're not the focus of the plot though. Plot revolves around a dead body, and a missing flintlock. The ending is missing, too.

Oh remember that Four Season ficlet series? One day I'll figure Summer, and they'll all be home. Not the Vivaldi fandom, no. White Collar. Obviously.

Ah and that fic focusing on Zorro's granddaughter. Or maybe just daughter, cause he'd be quite old otherwise. And I need him retired but not that retired. This one's been eating my brain recently. But that's quite a mess in my head. Why can't I figure out easy one shots?

But I'll probably end up posting first that Mask of Zorro short story about how Diego met Esperanza.

Unless I pick up that silly Zorro/Person of Interest fusion where don Harold and his manservant Joan go back to California

God I think I actually have notes for 2 other fics, on top of those. That. That's 5 officially opened WIPs plus 4 with notes. ARGH. Okay, that's it. No more time wasted on social media booping and answering silly memes. I have WIPs to P.

forgot to tag! tagging @theancientvaleofsoulmaking @amalthea9 @stingalingaling @detective-fiasco (can never remember your main, H, sorry!) @donfadrique and whoever wants to play :)

#a meme!#you know i can't resist a meme #thanks for the tag!#me and my growing list of unfinished businesses #believe it or not #there was a time where I worked on one story at a time #what happened?!

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amarriageoftrueminds · 2 months

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hopefully short rant:

I'm tired of pretending that Sam is in any way an interesting character. And I'm not just talking about he consistently spends most of his early pre-CapCrowning appearances in every medium as a mixture of a Magical Negro trope and the wise-crackin' Black BFF trope who says things in a "funny" way at key moments — most of the time the humor is just derived from the Black character suddenly using Ebonics dialects for a white audience and by white writers, which has centuries' of history in racially voyeuristic media tropes, but i digress. — But even Post-CapCrowning, the basis for his character is to bring down existing central characters to make this NPC Sidekick *** seem interesting by comparison like the proverbial Industry Plant, as if that's ever been compelling except to the newcomers who started with the Industry Plant character

And before *** *** savefacers try to insist this isn't true: How come hyping up Sam and his rise to prominence means that Steve gets turned into the backwards fuddy-duddy stuck in his ways old-timer, to the point that they break the rules of time travel to age Steve into a geriatric?

Why did Bucky have to be labeled as culpable/morally damaged/dangerous due to being tortured by Nazis in order to make Sam seem like a more moral and better character and Bucky evil/duplicitous/disposable in need to be put in check by compariso?

Why does Steve get rewritten as someone who somehow made his allies' lives harder and someone with moral deficiencies and a ghost of an inadequate predecessor to make Sam look better/slighted by the former guy?

Why did Bucky get his portrayal changed from the only other old supersoldier who's not only comparable but even strong than Steve and beat him in a fight twice, to a character who's just regular human-strength so that he could get a bunch scenes of being mogged by characters much weaker than Steve, just so that Sam can get a million more wise-crackin' quips about both of them being logged by the same opponent?

Why did both Buck And Steve have, in the movies, their screentime chopped and their storylines effectively cut short/placed in unresolved limbo after still not getting a sequel to the only, rightfully so, critically successful Cap installment whose story left off with a cliffhanger/promise for future development, only to get backburner-ed by half a decade of intrusive crossovers and a pandemic?

To be fair to Sam I guess...🙄.. a lot of these problems would've happened anyways with the combination of 1 · Marvel's refusal to let the story develop beyond circling around thr same Cap flag-wavin' ad nauseum to let Steve and Bucky move beyond that & 2 · a slew or creators in both mediums that all but admit that they hate Buck & Steve and would've/have watered down their characters to hype up a different proverbial industry plant instead. But still… not once but twice these changes keep happening just to hype up Sam and render the other 2 into unrecognizable Flanderizations at best, McGuffins at worst

Why should I have to like him? Even on his own merits, he's a loser, but also his presence exacerbates the aspects of the franchise that negatively affect characters I do like. And beyond that, his entire character on a larger scale is about the historical settler-colonial process to bring about an image of Patriotism for the settler state whilst donning a colonized face. His whole thing rebranding the USA's genocidal imagery with a Black face, the same reason Hollywood drastically over-represents Black cops & military on-screen to push the colonized subjects to sympathize for organizations that systematically engineer their deaths. The same reason why bringing in Sabra is consistent ideologically with the thematic purpose of Sam's character: to launder empire with a familiar face.

His character's purpose as propaganda is meant to target me, but I'm not swayed just on the mere basis of morals & politics, but also just as a character he pisses me off bc detracting/redirecting focus from storylines I was invested in to try to get me to like the character that stole that focus from my investment... that will never work on me, I will always hate on the industry plant character the writers are trying to force me to like, just like I hate on **** *****, duh, and also *********** from ******* ******

ok it wasn't a short rant, but in my defense it sounded only 3 sentences long when I said this to myself out loud

Posting under cut 👇👇👇

the wise-crackin' Black BFF trope who says things in a "funny" way at key moments — most of the time the humor is just derived from the Black character suddenly using Ebonics dialects for a white audience and by white writers

There definitely is a recurrent problem of black characters only being allowed to appear as comedic sidekicks in white-lead movies, which is cast into even starker relief by the comic book movies that simply avoid doing that altogether. (Thinking of the animated Spider-Mans). Even when the MC isn't white... but is lighter skinned? (see: Kevin Hart as the Scrappy-doo to The Rock's- err- Scoob??)

I think CATWS did a pretty good job mitigating those issues with Sam's unique-to-him skillset / intelligence and plot-importance, from the off (admittedly I am biased cuz I love the movie).

Though it would've been further mitigated if they hadn't also had the only other black guy in the movie getting yelled at for not doing enough to stop Nazis.

(Victim-blamey, even if he is the only authority figure available to yell at, which Captain America should always be doing IMO. 😌)

Kind of bizarre to have the confluence in CACW where you suddenly have more black characters than white. But only because the main white heroes have brought their black sidekicks along. 😬

Why couldn't their Spidey have been black, too? 🤔

Hell, why stop at that, switch the genders too! They already have Zendaya onboard!

At the same time there is an opposing problem where black characters are presented in a way that is totally divorced from blackness. As if they're just white people who happen to be black. Like the writers wanted the cache of diversity but only, ugh, a very mild hint of chocolate in an otherwise vanilla concoction.

It can be a delicate balancing act, for a white writer to avoid both these pitfalls- PSYCH. No it's not. Just hire someone who can do their fucking job, Disney. Even, god forbid, hire black writers who can do their job!

Let black characters do and say and reference things white viewers won't understand and don't have to because it's not for them!

(Could even provide a nice teachable moment where Steve could ask about it only to be told to mind his business, and take it good-naturedly?)

🌈Imagine! ✨

I feel like MCU Sam had potential to be a good character, with unique qualities... but we really haven't seen That guy since CATWS, AKA the best Cap movie.

(In fact, it almost feels like they cherry-picked the worst traits of CW Sam, kept only those, and then exaggerated them with each subsequent appearance. It's like they think what made Sam unique was... his wing jetpack. I was genuinely surprised when TFATWS had Sam go and talk to Karli/Flagsmasher, alone... because up until that point they had done absolutely fuck all to portray him as a man with empathy or counselling skills??)

A whole show of Sam where there's no mention of his pararescue experience, losing Riley, disillusionment with the military-industrial complex, medical training... only 2 weak uses of counselling skills...

(One where he espouses fuckin horeshoe theory, and the other where his advice to Bucky is villainizing / victim-blaming, disastrously dangerous, as seen in CW, and comes immediately on the heels of him saying... Bucky shouldn't be looking to other people for input... and yet he keeps talking??)

...Probably something else I've forgotten?

They stripped away 99% of the things that made him non-basic. 🤦‍♀️

TBH I think, a lot of the time, the reason we find a character annoying is because they're being written annoyingly. What we perceive as annoying is actually the weakness of writing working on us. They grate on our nerves without us really being able to put our fingers on why... 🤔 Funnily enough, I was just talking about this re: a female character in my other fandom, Hannibal. Of course, anyone who is conscious of this and actually dares to mention it is labelled a m-🤐-ist by the 'it's not that deep' casuals. Sometimes it feels like people on twitter have an instinctive distrust of cleverness. Very Elon Musk of them…

This can be fixed.

But Disney seems to actively seek out writers who don't understand very basic tenets of writing, and have no familiarity with the characters (and don't intend to acquire any). Since they have no skin in the game, they won't have inconvenient Opinions about how said characters should be properly written, or any power to enforce them.

There's a definite correlation between what you're saying and the way Peggy is written, too, where the writers don't seem to be aware that you can't make a character look competent just by making everyone else around them incompetent.

Or: you can't make a character look like the best person for a job if they are literally the only option in a pool of one (1).

Having Steve only hand over the shield once he's too old to physically carry it himself... is not a compliment.

In the comics, Steve handed it over while still young himself, because Sam was the best guy for the job (not just the only guy), even when Steve himself was still around.

He would even correct people who called him Cap, to point out that Sam is Cap, and he's just Steve Rogers.

Now that's a compliment!

Sidenote: I must point out, Steve definitely wasn't character-assassinated into an old guy (who abandons his entire characterisation), for the purpose of making Sam look good. It was definitely for the purposes of force-feeding us a comphet ending / burying the gayness of Steve and Bucky. But, it definitely feels like they saw Steve's physical incapacity to continue to be Cap as a perk, rather than a problem, when it came to him passing on the shield. (They are bad at their jobs.) The fact that the writers chose not to have young!Steve be the one to hand over the shield. That definitely was a deliberate ignorant snub to Sam. Sadly, Bucky being villainized and treated like shit (by Sam and others) predates tfatws, and was definitely more about making Steve look straight, making the 'has Bucky blown up the Accords??' subplot seem feasible, and making Spider-Man and T'Challa look good. Not about making Sam look better than him. (Which it didn't, anyway, since him being a dick just makes Bucky more sympathetic). Only the nerfing of Bucky in tfatws was about making Sam look good, IMO. And probably about setting Bucky up for whatever rancid clusterfuck of a characterisation they have in store for Thunderbolts. 😖

Villainizing and nerfing Bucky doesn't actually make Sam look better than him (as any halfway competent writer would know.) 'Better than a weakass villain' does not equal 'good.' It just equals 'average'. (Also why bringing Batroc back was pointless.) It's like the anti-Worf Effect.

(So you're saying Sam would only look cool relative to Bucky if Bucky was made drastically worse?? Wow. Okay...)

In fact, if they had portrayed Bucky (and/or Agent Whatsisname) as a person who also has the qualities that could make a good Cap... That, would've made Sam look great; since he was chosen not only over one great guy, but over multiple great guys!

(Ditto with Peggy: introducing multiple great potential female love interests for Steve would make her look good for being chosen. But having no other female characters allowed near Steve when she's around. In fact, not allowing Steve to even mention his own mother as an important figure in his life?? That. Does not.)

Perception is relative, but if you have someone who's a 5 out of 10, you can't make them an 8 just by making someone else a 4.

All that accomplishes is making a 5 who's still a 5 but who now looks very slightly better if the 4 is standing next to them. Which is just pathetic.

Including Isaiah in the way they did also does a massive disservice to both him and Sam.

Firstly, because they erased crucial aspects from Isaiah's story in the comics.

Those weren't just done for no reason -- those were important. (Of course, inept writers wouldn't recognise that!)

It actually was necessary, for example, that comics!Isaiah have mental disability. Because it explained why he wasn't just turned into another Winter Soldier like Bucky, why Hydra didn't re-develop serum decades ago, why Isaiah didn't appear in the public eye post-escape and seek vengeance for himself, etc etc.

It was important!

And, ironically, the very criticisms that the comics came under fire for, which were proven unfounded when the comics did the job properly... have now been proven correct of this version of Isaiah, because the writers erased all the fixes.

(They're like untrained construction workers, ignorantly knocking down internal structures without understanding what the term 'load-bearing' means. 🤦‍♀️)

Secondly... Isaiah's inclusion is a problem because they didn't even adapt that comics run (Truth) properly, but half-assed it in a way that A) makes Isaiah (a main-character) now subordinate in his own story, B) makes Sam subordinate in Isaiah's story, and C) makes Sam look less righteous than comics Steve.

Comics!Steve found out about Isaiah and waged absolute warfare on the people responsible.

But TFATWS Sam didn't get to do that.

(Instead he just. Arranged a statue and got to save a bunch of status-quo-protecting politicians in suits. Oyvey.)

Maybe that will be the plot of the next Cap movie...

But if so, they ought to have introduced Isaiah in Cap 4, and not in TFATWS, because the net result is Sam just Not getting to do the cool and righteous thing that comics!Steve got to do immediately.

Thirdly, how could any other black character compete with Isaiah's story?? It kicks the leg out of any other story that isn't as powerful.

It feels like the writers just wanted to give Isaiah a cool speech. and were so wrapped up in the idea that they could they never stopped to wonder whether they should.

In practise, all they've done is written a Sam-as-Cap show where Sam's first Cap speech isn't even the third best speech of the show. (Isaiah's preemptively blew it out of the water.) And where they've introduced a black Cap, only to immediately introduce a second, much more compelling black Cap.

Way to undermine, guys!

Fourth, they completely erased Faith; a cool black 'hijab-wearing-cuz-fuck-you-post-9/11-America' Muslim character from the comics. She was a professor and the wife of Isaiah, responsible for getting Isaiah free after campaigning for it for decades.

What even was the point of this erasure??

And they replaced her with... nothing. Just a reference to a character type lazily ripped off from the Luke Cage show. 🤦‍♀️

. Sidenote: It was also poor writing to reduce Sam and Isaiah's connection to one, singular, similar dimension of life experience, rather than many. Eg. they were both voluntary soldiers, from the south, both defined by rescuing other soldiers (Sam was pararescue, the-show's version of Isaiah risked it all to rescue soldiers) and protecting others at personal cost as civilians / outside of a warzone (both forced to become fugitives). They have much more to connect on, and that should be recognised, AS WELL AS (not 'instead of') how important being black also is to their experience. That is deeper, intersectional characterisation. Meanwhile, Bucky, literally the only person on earth of the same-ish generation as Isaiah, who was also forcibly injected with superserum by Hydra, and then tortured, by the very same people as Isaiah, and they're both punished / demonized by the state and get no credit for doing the right thing. But none of that connecting trauma is allowed to be acknowledged because Bucky is... white? Victim-blamed? Huh?? On the surface, Isaiah hating Bucky on sight, as a kind of PTSD surrounding whiteness, is a plausible characterisation choice. A prejudice based on conflation of Bucky with his abusers, (both inside and outside of Hydra, personal and institutional) albeit incorrectly, since Hydra are not Bucky's people. It doesn't have to be changed or fixed. Characters don't have to be nice to each other to be good characters. 🙄 But: 1) don't pretend it isn't incorrect, in Bucky's case. 2) It's still ill-conceived. Because it's a very basic, first-step level interpretation of how Isaiah would think. Yes, of course, 'A' black guy of Isaiah's generation could have this kind of whiteness-triggered PTSD response... But Isaiah isn't supposed to be just any old black guy. He's supposed to be Different. Made of Special Stuff. It's the difference between characterising him as being a generic black guy for his generation... or a T'Challa. So he shouldn't act the way just any old black guy would react. Just as Sam, of all people, as a counselor of vets, should be the most likely to empathise with Bucky, not mock or demonize him. So should Isaiah, of all people, be the last to judge a person by their race, because of the horrifying effect that that very thinking has had on him, personally, as an individual, arguably even more than on an ordinary black man of his time. (Here they fall into the plothole of MCU's refusal to overtly portray Hydra as fascistic. Can't acknowledge that that was why they didn't make Isaiah a WS, to 'represent' them... which then opens up the further plot hole of 'so... why didn't they make this non-disabled spare supersoldier a WS??') So IMO Isaiah should've felt connected to both Sam and Bucky (the only other man on earth to survive the exact same thing as him!) because he has so much in common with both of them. It shouldn't have been treated as only an either/or. (And if you meant Isaiah's stance on Bucky as a white-and-therefore-white-privileged man to be seen as based, don't have Bucky pulled off the street by the comically 'harmless' police, ffs. It undermines the assertion that his circumstances are different/better than the black man's, because he's white, if Bucky is immediately experiencing the classic black man's treatment in America. Your obvious 'switching the oppressors around' power fantasy has got you acting stupid, screenwriters... 🤦‍♀️) Btw, what would the writers have done if it was Gabe Jones all this had happened to, instead of Bucky? What would be the basis of Isaiah's hostility, then? 🤔 (Oh, yeah, that's another thing: how are you going to do a story about black Captains America and not even mention Gabriel Jones??)

There is another glaring issue with the way they write Isaiah which is, funnily enough, echoed in how the MCU has written Sam and Steve.

Isaiah said he didn't want to be brought out (i.e. made public) because he'd be dead in a day if Sam did that.

And then Sam just. Ignored that. And did it anyway.

And Isaiah for some reason acted as if he was happy about that, when he specifically warned Sam he didn't want it because it was dangerous to him.

Now he's a footnote in Steve's Captain America exhibit and doesn't even get to be mad about his own story any more cuz Happymontage Ending! ✨🌈🙂

The parallel?

Well, in AOU, Steve specifically said he didn't want the white picket fence life that hetero-conformist Tony (mouthpiece of the writers??) assumes he must want.

(Steve, in fact, never expressed any interest in that life at all in the first place, which makes it absurd that he had to claim to've moved on from wanting it. It's so heteronormative, that it's just treated as a foregone conclusion that Steve must have wanted a suburban apple pie life with 2.5 kids and a dog, when he never said anything about that, anywhere. Instead, his canonical longing has always been for home -- which he always defined as Bucky and New York. Just because Steve belongs to the same Generation that white-fled to the burbs, that doesn't mean Steve is like Them?? (Echoing my thoughts on Isaiah again.) He's not like anyone typical from his own time! That was kinda like... the Point? 🤦‍♀️)

But Endgame just... Ignored that. And did it anyway.

In AOU, Sam specifically told Steve that he wasn't interested in Avenging because that was Steve's world.

And then at the end of the same movie. They just. Ignored that.

And had Sam as an Avenger anyway.

(Why did he change his mind? Did he, in fact, change his mind? Was he happy to be there, or was he a reluctant convert? If he was reluctant, why did he stick with it? How can he take on this new job when he was supposed to be the one chasing up Bucky leads? Does this mean Steve just gave up on that, or took it on himself??)

(Hey writers! There appear to be several fucking scenes missing?)

To me, it feels like they were never really committed to the idea of SamCap and so didn't do their basic due diligence in showing the progression from 'I don't want to be an Avenger' to 'I want to be an Avenger' to 'I would pick up the shield.'

Sam's characterisation on this issue is so inconsistent it makes him look fickle -- first no (AOU), then yes (AOU), then yes (EG), then no (TFATWS).

Which is fine, if they actually fucking address his zig-zagging instead of ignoring it.

(Or, what's worse, simply not knowing about it, since that would require actual familiarity with canon outside of some shitty scenes in CACW.)

Even in TFATWS it seems more like Sam is only picking up the shield to stop a worse person having it, and not because he's enthusiastic about doing the right thing himself, or temperamentally incapable of not doing the right thing (like Steve until EG.)

It echoes CATFA's inept attempts to give Steve a motive that the male writers think makes him more relatable.

(ie. not fighting Fascism because he's enthusiastic about it, but because being 'one of the guys' will finally bag him a girlfriend. Which he must want, right guys?? with a white picket fence?? RIGHT??)

fellas is it gay to want to punch Nazis??

"he pisses me off bc detracting/redirecting focus from storylines I was invested in to try to get me to like the character that stole that focus from my investment..."

That is certainly annoying.

It definitely did feel like CACW was trying to make sure Steve and Bucky were never truly alone together.

(Their reunion is rushed, with no great emotion as it warrants given its importance in the 2nd film, and Sam's voice is constantly intruding over Comms so they have no privacy. Scenes where they are in the same place, Sam (or someone else) is always there too. They're kept physically far apart in the same room (or even in car parks ffs!) while Bucky is excluded from conversation. Sam and Bucky rush off in the same direction during the airport fight, when that makes no sense cuz Bucky is supposed to be trying to flee with Steve, and Sam has already been a dick to him. The only protracted period where Steve and Bucky were alone together ..... they just cut the entire fucking scene out, etc.)

But outside of those instances👆

I don't think it's accurate to describe Sam as stealing a disproportionate focus, from Bucky in particular because:

The same people who brought you Steve's amazing homophobic vomitorium of an ending were never going to let Steve and Bucky be alone together for any length of time, anyway. There was always going to be someone intruding to make sure that never happened.

Sam as Cap was always going to happen. It was always going to be the natural progression of the story as soon as he was introduced in the MCU. WBK.

he's supposed to be the co-lead of TFATWS.

In practise, he didn't actually get much focus?

(And neither did Bucky).

Because other characters did. Ones the writers transparently wanted to write more than him and Bucky. Characters they could be given free reign to write, since Madam Hydra, WalmartCap, and Zemo are new-ish, and/or not particularly precious. So the Execs Upstairs have no reason to interfere about them / and we don't care (much) if Zemo is suddenly a comic relief white supremacist mansplainer. The problem is, they fucked with Sam and Bucky's characterisation as if they, too, were not beloved characters and put them through this creepy 1980s toxic-masculinity locker room homophobia filter. 😬 (Based on said shitty scenes in CACW.)

It's been well-documented that ingrained unconscious prejudice means people will perceive certain groups as taking up more space than they actually do, just because they're present. (IE. 40% women in a crowd is perceived as 75% or sth like that; women are judged to be talking too much because they have spoken at all (measured against silence), whereas men are only deemed to have spoken too much if they've spoken more than other men.) Dislike of any character just Because is valid. But it's also possible that you / we / I / anyone might perceive Sam as taking up more space than he actually does, just because he's taking up... any space at all. 🤔 I guess it wouldn't be possible for me to know...

Really, when it comes to tfatws, it's squabbling over crumbs because neither Sam nor Bucky really got to eat.

Which in turn makes every tiny speck of screen time seem even more precious, and worth jealously guarding. 🤷‍♀️

Ingrained bias aside, Anon, I bet you wouldn't perceive Sam as taking up too much focus if Bucky got a load of focus too.

"Why should I have to like him? "

You shouldn't. You shouldn't have to like any character.

Nothing kills character quicker than a sense of obligation; when you feel as if 'liking X' is a compulsory rule you must obey, enforced by a rabid fandom police. Just because they are, for example, female, when female characters are under-represented and poorly written.

coughPeggycough

Ends up making you feel like you've the lone person in a fandom who must have taken crazy pills not to like X character.

"Even on his own merits, he's a loser."

Okay, that is not canon.

When we meet him he's a good guy: smart, good-natured, empathetic (albeit not to Bucky but logically there are reasons for caution, at least in CATWS.) He has his shit together. Has his own house, has accomplished things in life (see meta here), he has a steady job, helping people, etc., even if he does ditch it pretty quick.

And becoming an Avenger, helping to bring down Hydra, and taking up the mantle of Cap aren't the acts of a loser.

It would be wildly hypocritical of me to like Steve (who did a lot of that) and Bucky (who, also did a lot of similar things to Sam) as much as I do and call Sam a 'loser.'

If you are going to dislike Sam (which is allowed!!) it should be on the basis of what he actually is, and what he actually has done. Not on the basis of headcanons.

(For me, if I'm going to dislike him it'll be for his double standard in how he treats blorbo 99% of his screen time. Not some imaginary traits.)

I do think it would be very easy to write Sam out of this unfortunate rut. *fingers crossed for Cap 4? Like, one scene (lampshading previous writers' ineptitude) of Sam, eg. recognising the fucked up-ness of past behaviour -- even if he didn't apologise for it -- would be so much more complex characterisation. Giving him x negative trait for an actual character-arc reason in order to show him outgrowing it, etc. Better than just keeping him as the 'person who quips about Bucky being a braindead murderer' guy. 😬 As a stucky mono-shipper(?) I usually avoid fics where Sam is a part of the romance. But one of the most impressive fics I can recall re: Sam was one where he was Steve's ex before Bucky. And it actually addressed the fact (!!) that part of Sam's resentment of Bucky was based on jealousy / hurt over being passed over by Steve. 😱 Brilliant! A black sidekick who isn't happy about it?? Immediately fixes some of the problems of that trope! Much more interesting than flat two-dimensional persistent unprovoked dickheaded-ness. When it's Steve who should be apologising for -- perhaps -- unwittingly giving Sam false hope? (Not to mention abandoning him to handle everything, which is so exactly and precisely OOC for Steve that it's hard to believe these writers have seen a single fucking Steve film.🙄) The way Bucky was made to apologise for Steve's behaviour in tfatws... That is a nonsensical, blood-boiling writing choice. The sheer lack of self-awareness in the writers. It was so cringey. Like something Generic White Guy would do in a Key and Peele sketch. (Hmm... Perhaps it was self-aware??)

Also: a character being a loser doesn't mean they're unlikeable.

Look at Luis in Ant-Man. Ex-con with nothing to his name but a van, when we first meet him. Or Ant-Man himself. Ex-con who can't keep a job at Baskin Robbins (those bastards.) Or, shit, even in Cap movies you've got Aaron the Apple Guy! Or Thor in EG! You can't any of those guys of being unlikeable!

And being-likeable does not equal you having to like them.

"His whole thing rebranding the USA's genocidal imagery with a black face, the same reason Hollywood drastically over-represents Black cops & military on-screen to push the colonized subjects to."

I can't speak to the veracity of this in the comics because I haven't read them.

The only thing I can say is that... tfatws does have Sam fighting against the black-run ethically-based Flagmashers (yet another black-progressive villain for Disney) to shield status-quo-protecting white politicians in suits.

Which is antithetical to what Steve's Cap got to be about, even in the MCU, where Steve goes against the authorities in every movie (broke the law in like his third scene, even!)

Outside of one scene in CACW, where Sam correctly deduces that the State will abuse the Accords to lock them up like criminals without trial, he doesn't get to proverbially yell ACAB the way Steve did. 😟

It feels like Disney is too scared of BLM to let him do that, as a black man. That's something only the Killmongers get to do.

In a similar vein, the Sam who grimaced when he asked if Steve misses the 'good' old days... didn't get to be like 'dude, seriously??' when Steve contradicted himself to go and live in the past.

Instead he endorsed it.

So, yeah, you could say that is Disney 'using' a black character to paint a stamp of approval onto, for example, a rigidly comphet / amatonormative conformist ending that annihilates Steve's characterisation by pretending the 1950s (of all times!?) was some kind of Eden.

Pretty insidious... 😬

It reminds me of the way Fury is used as the front-facing black face of SHIELD, and the only authority figure who gets called out for its infiltration by Nazis, despite him immediately taking steps to fix that when he found out.

And when Peggy is right fucking there??

(This interpretation of mine is not canon, but: Fury coming from Huntsville, Alabama -- AKA, Nazi rocket scientist central -- smacks of him being groomed (without his knowledge) to one day take over SHIELD, and be the assumed-trustworthy face of a Fascist organisation. Alongside totally-lesbian second in command Maria Hill.)

But here we bump against the problem of tfatws -- the same problem you often see when people discuss Steve Rogers, without knowing anything about him other than what he looks like.

They see the stars-and-stripes suit, and assume that Steve Therefore must be the physical embodiment of American Imperialism.

But that isn't the case, and never has been.

(It annoyed me beyond belief that the show writers make this same basic casual-fan's comprehension error, banging on about what the shield represents as if it has a problematic history when, no, bitch, AMERICA has a problematic history, that shield's history is that Steve Rogers used it for twatting Nazis on the head.)

In Steve's case, Cap is the representation of what America should be, not what it is. (As I'm forever pointing out: the 'Captain' in 'Captain America' is a verb, not a noun. A doing word.)

Or, as another famous immigrant to America put it:

"America is what you do [ ... ] America is what we choose to make it."

Sam may have been given a speech where he says he believes 'America' can do better... but so far he hasn't actually got to 'do' yet.

But he has been used as a public face for something he shouldn't be seen as representing -- in a way that Steve wasn't made to, and Nick Fury was.

(Because Steve is white, and Nick is black? 🤔 And anything a black characters say is treated as disproportionately more 'political' than when a white character says it. In fact, a white character would be practically Canonized for doing the same basic good thing, and not called out at all for doing a Much Worse bad thing. Again: Peggy. And this is something they could have lampshaded and addressed in the show: by eg. possibly acknowledging that Sam isn't being as leftwing as Steve, because he feels as a black man he cannot afford to / Steve's white privilege let him get away with being radical but being perceived as merely moderate, whereas Sam doesn't have that luxury, etc? 🤔 If they wanted to keep Sam more milquetoast - which, egh, whatever - this is one way they could've done it, better?)

Hopefully all this will change in Cap4, but the inclusion of Sabra doesn't exactly inspire confidence. 😬

(Again: they erased the Muslim wife from Isaiah's story but inserted Sabra for Cap4. Fuck me. Read the room guys??)

Based on what has gone already, I don't think we're ever going to get to see a Hobie Brown-esque 'fuck the police' style Sam-Cap that he ought to have been. 😥

It's a damn shame!

#antisam #antitfatws #tfatws critical #antisambucky #cacw critical #antiendgame #mcu meta #toAyourQ #hey nonny #dat's me #endgame steve is a skrull #mcu #meta #tbh anon this message scared the shit outta me #because ppl are NOT nice when you critique this character #yet each man queues the thing he loves #antipeggy

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jq37 · 1 year

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I'm really glad you've seen Starstruck, because it means you have the context for this. Every disastrous decision made this episode, were THOSE the stupidest things these people have ever done? I thought 'my farts smell awesome' was the lowest they could go, but look at that, they collectively found another layer beneath that. This has to be the biggest L the Intrepid Heroes ever took. Outside of a TPK, losing a Mcguffin is as rough as it gets. The RNG giveth and the RNG taketh away.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

OK, now that I have that out of the way, holy hell that last episode took a full year off my lifespan I think. Murph saying that it was like Fabian's Bad Day on a loop was right. I've never watched an episode of a ttrpg and thought, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" so consistently. Even after watching the Adventuring Party I'm not 100% confident I understand what some of those moves were about. I am going to try and break down by thoughts on each interaction, roughly in order from least to most baffling to me.

*Red and the Beast*

If this was as crazy as things went, it would have been a pretty normal episode. I fully understand why Ylfa would want to talk to the Beast being a monstruous princess and all. And Emily's side-motivation of wanting to maybe get some potions that would help them travel without freezing to death made sense as well. Sure it was a little awkward, but in the way that all pre-teens are sort of awkward around people who they think are cool. She didn't spill any serious beans or burn any serious bridges. This one gets a pass from me.

*Ger and Elody*

It probably feels like I'm ranking this pretty low. And I am if we're talking in pure terms of cause and effect. Because loudly and weirdly spilling the beans the way that he did was a TERRIBLE move tactically and DEF alerted the princesses to their plan. BUT I wasn't CONFUSED about why it happened. Ger had a thing to do that made sense--find out if his wife was in on the erase everything plan and fill her in if not/try to convince her to switch sides if so. He had a reason to get frustrated and do something stupid. This was, in my eyes, a good plan that went poorly because of bad dice rolls and Murph's commitment to character. So while it was VERY unfortunate, I'm not actually confused about why the desperate frog man who is known for being awkward was weird and awkward to his wife in a dire situation so it didn't really frustrate me in the same way that some of the other scenes did. We also got one of one only pieces of new information in this episode--that it doesn't seem like Elody is in on the plan (though with his trash Insight rolls, who even knows). I wish he'd taken Roz with him to back up his story right away (and give him advantage of dice rolls). I also wish he'd brought Roz with him so she wasn't able to do her own solo mission. Speaking of...

*Roz and Snow*

This is not a conversation that needed to happen tactically. I was like, why is this going on? Just because everyone is having a little chat doesn't mean you have to have a little chat too. I will admit that by the time I got here, I was feeling so much second hand cringe that I missed a bit of the conversation. But I do know that Roz told Snow that she told the entire group about their chat and that they were fine with it. WHY TELL HER THAT??? The plan was clearly told to Roz with the understanding that it was for her ears only. Why immediately be like, "So I talked it over with the squad..." You're showing your hand! You're telling Snow you're not really aligned with the Daughter's of the Crown. If you were going to talk to Snow, why not try to figure out what the actual plans are wrt the erase the world endgame? They really don't know anything about the specifics of the plan. Just some nebulous talk about spilling ink. Why is no one asking questions about this? How are they supposed to stop a plan they don't understand? Anyway, I think this conversation didn't need to happen and while it wasn't as disastrous in effect as Ger's convo, his had a good reason for happening while I don't think this one did which is why it frustrated me more.

*Pinnochio and Cindy*

OK so this one frustrated me a TON because it had so much potential for getting information and moving the story forward but that's not what happened at all! As a sidenote, I was surprised but excited when they showed up at the castle and the Snow Queen fight was already over offscreen because I was like, "Man! We're going to get so much good information next episode!" Haha, nope! This conversation started off really strong with Pinnochio saying that they're kinda step-sibs which I thought was a great opener and something I hadn't really considered. I thought he was going to maybe bring up how the stepmother's goal seems to be fucking with stories (in a similar way to what they want) and seeing how she reacts. Or maybe following the thread about how she ALSO feels like she doesn't have agency in her story because she's a puppet of a narrative without even a name. And I don't want to assume but seems like Brennan was giving him the opening to go there like when Cindy was talking about "her own story" and Pinnochio was like, "She doesn't have one" Cindy seemed willing to talk down that thread but it was dropped really quickly. And this whole conversation had such a dissonant vibe where it was like Cindy was in Crown of Candy and Pinnochio was in Fantasy High or even Starstruck in terms of seriousness. Which, from a comedy standpoint, was extremely funny but from a narrative standpoint was like, Pinnochio...I'm begging you...please...ask her one direct question. Lou said he was playing up Pinnochio's childishness because he's a child in a weird situation which, sure I guess. But man. It was a very funny scene but not very narratively fulfilling.

*Pib and Cindy and a Window*

Pib readying the horses? The most competent move of the session! Pib unilaterally deciding to try to push her into her book? Why???? Like, OK. I wouldn't have told her about the book if I was Pinnochio--at least not without consulting the group. BUT once the proverbial cat was out of the book, why not let her have it? It might give her some perspective she doesn't already have and you might be able to sway her into being an ally. I feel like Cindy and Snow while true believers in the plan, aren't beyond reason. They don't strike me as gung ho about the entire situation. They give me the energy of people who are exhausted and on their last resort. I honestly feel like there is a world where this is all salvageable if they'd let her have her book without going full hostile. Maybe it's not the most LIKELY option. But I think there was a chance. But nope. Initiative. Even if they'd gotten her in, what's the next move? You're in a palace full of her allies and none of you have rolled more than a ten all session! Were you going to hold her hostage and run? Like, bruh. If they wanted to leave, they should have just left! Why did they make a whole production about it? I swear, they stayed in the castle the exact worse length of time. Not long enough to get any info, but too long to leave gracefully. Anyway, I thought this was a wild decision to just make.

*Princess Interlude*

This isn't a part of the breakdown. This is just something I wanted to talk about. We really don't know how much the princesses know about The Situation and that's a big piece of the puzzle for us to know how BAD of a plan this is with the info they have. Because one of the few things we learned this episode is that Cinderella is surprised that the Stepmother doesn't have her own book. If they think that each person has their own book and they can write themselves out of existence without it affecting anyone else then this is actually a suicide pact and not a murder-suicide pact which still isn't GREAT but it's not WORLD ENDING which is decidedly less selfish. I still think it's an insane thing to try without having a full understanding of their world but if you're only playing with your OWN lives, then that's your right.

And wrt to the PCs, since they were spilling the beans left and right, why not be like, cool. Ink spilling. Great plan. Now what about the Auroratory? Because their stories don't just exist in ink. They're oral tradition, baby. I'm sorry you don't like your lives but ink spilling isn't going to solve everything.

Finally, I need to go back to past episodes where the princesses are lamenting to be sure, but I'm honestly not 100% sure what it is they're so distressed about. There is an element of fighting for free will but I'm not sure what it is they think they don't have control over. Because surely if they had no free will, they wouldn't be able to fight their stories at all, right? And if it's just that they're stuck with all their memories from all their lives, Witches do that all the time, right? Can they just not handle the Everything, Everywhere, All At Once lifestyle because they're not inherently magical and they're cracking under the pressure? From what I remember from the previous episode, it sounded like Cindy and Snow were distressed over the *existence* of dark versions of their story which is why they wanted to destroy everything completely. But also, isn't darkness just a thing you have to accept if you're going to have free will? And also, I don't know that it makes sense to destroy the entire world just because there are timelines where bad things happen (especially when the worst things don't even happen to them). Who awakened these princesses in the first place? Based on the introductions, we're led to believe it's Cindy and Snow who were the first ones, but now that we've met Rapunzel, I have my doubts. And speaking of her, back to the list.

*Tim and Raps*

Tim what were you THINKING?????????

God, where to begin. Ally said they weren't sure if Raps was in on it or not two APs in a row which is baffling to me because I thought Brennan telegraphed it pretty hard that Raps was both very clever and very fake. We first hear about her trying to deceive the Baba Yaga (one of the SCARIEST NPCs who even DEATH doesn't fuck with) and getting away with her tongue intact. Then, on a really high insight check, the party learns nothing about her, except that she's so shiny you can't really read her. Suspicious as hell. THEN, we learn that she has hair that's everywhere that can potentially be used to spy on people. And when she describes murdering the Snow Queen, she says it in the most politician-y, obfuscate-y, side-stepping culpability way possible. YEAH. I THINK SHE'S IN ON IT. I am floored that it wasn't obvious that she was full team nuke everything. The twist to me would be if she was secretly GOOD. I was wondering if the was the actual mastermind, I didn't even realize we were discussing whether she was IN ON IT.

But like, OK. That aside. Whether you are going in thinking she's good and misled or fully in on it, THIS WAS AN INSANE WAY TO HANDLE IT.

DIRT IN THE SHORTBREAD???? TIM!!!!!!

If she's GOOD and just awkward from how she was socialized you're being weird and aggro to her.

If she'd BAD and being manipulative you're being super clumsy and antagonizing her.

AND THEN SHE STOLE THE BOOOK!!!!!!!

My heart SUNK when Brennan revealed that. Like, GOD I didn't think that could have gotten worse and then it did.

And it's made worse because this is 100% a conversation that didn't need to happen. If I walked in and Raps was there, at most I would ask her about how her hair worked so we maybe knew for tactical reasons. That's not a crazy question to ask a person with magic hair that's everywhere so she wouldn't necessarily have a reason to be suspicious. And then guess what? I'm GONE. Just, based on second hand embarrassment and mechanical effect (LOSING THE BOOK), this is by far the worst conversation all episode and that's saying something.

(Also, RIP Mira who's going to wake up to a VERY different situation than when she went to sleep.)

The last thing I want to say about this episode is I kind wish that either Roz or Ger or both had died in their rescue plan. Not as a punishment mind you. While it was a tactically bad move, I think it's totally in character that Ger would have tried to go back for his wife and that one of his friends would have joined him. But we haven't had that many deaths this season and I feel like some more death exposition might give us more about what's going on. Because I feel like we only have a small piece of the puzzle, and there's not that many eps left to go. You know how in Stranger Things, the plot always ends up split between three groups and none of them actually know what's going on until they all communicate in the penultimate episode? That's how I feel right now except it's the PCs, The Princesses, The Faries, and the Librarians.

It's also potentially illuminating for Elody if the princesses are willing to kill Roz and Ger (I assume they'd bring back at least Roz). And if they were split up from the main party, that's an interesting place for them to be story-wise. (Also, if they brought back Ger but were like Elody he's in the dungeon, don't talk to him he'll fill your head with lies. But she visits him anyway, just like when he was a frog at the pond...but I'm just writing mental fanfic now.) My point is there was potential there for us to get interesting info (and story beats) there which is why I was kind of rooting for it. This whole episode was a big bust with regard to moving towards any sort of goal and they really just made their situation severely worse to no real end. And now the princesses who want to end the world have the most powerful device in all of story.

Yay.

(Coda: Where is Scher with her "We're real enough" energy to talk the princesses out of their spiral? For the love of story, I am losing my mind here.)

#dimension 20 spoilers #dimension 20 #neverafter #neverafter spoilers #d20 #d20 spoilers #asks #farmer 10 #this turned into a whole ass essay #did not mean for that to happen #for the record I'm not mad at the players or wagging my finger at them or anything like that #i've done my fair share of dumb shit in dnd #ask any of my partymates and they will tell on me #I'm just looking at it from the POV of wow they did not go how they planned #i can't resist a good dissection #i do not know how they're going to solve this #they mentioned the baba yaga but I don't think they can handle her lol #scher would be a better option if they could reach her #or maybe they could do an enemy of my enemy with the fairies?#we'll see #'my farts smell awesome' is one of the funniest things that happened in d20 #i would take ten of those over one of these any day

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dpkronmiller · 9 months

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COME ON BARBIE LET GO PATRIARCHY

Something was different.

Yes, here is a huge hit, female directed, female written and female starring - breaking just amazing records. The first live action comedy to break the top 20 biggest opening weekends. First female directed, written and focused film in that top 20. 162 Million dollar opening weekend. Indiana Jones by comparison only did $60 million domestically and that was cherished cinematic IP with a male protagonist. Mission Impossible didn't crack 100 million and it too had a male protagonist. And it wasn't a holiday weekend. Just another weekend dead in the middle of summer with a huge iMax sized competitor in the Nolan film Oppenheimer - which probably did benefit more from Barbie than Barbie did from it in large part thanks to the genius double feature marketing of Barbieheimer. And some people apparently only saw Oppenheimer because Barbie was sold out.

But wait - so the male starring films all under performed? And Barbie DOUBLED Oppenheimer's take??

And worldwide - it's made over $400 million dollars! Surpassing Jones and Impossibley beating Mission Impossible. Already. In it's first week of release.

Every male driven movie this summer, aside from the testosterone filled mustache of Mario, had weak turnout. Yet the narrative from the industry has been that female centered films don't have enough demand. That people won't turn out for a movie about women and girls and for women and girls.

Yet...here we are...Barbie.

But that's not what I mean by different.

The film is unique. It wasn't what I expected. I thought it might be a fish out of water story in the real world like Enchanted. Or have some quest component whereby Barbie would need to find the hidden McGuffin golden slipper or devise some magic potion to stop some great evil from shooting a laser in the sky, again.

Instead I was met with fantasy.

A film structured and written as if kids were playing with their Barbies but not just kids - as if kids were playing Barbie with their Moms and their Moms were using the toys to educate their kids on the suffocating yoke of the male patriarchy.

But entire film felt like one long playdate with the truth.

From how Barbie magically moves to the ground or travels in between worlds - there's an active surreal quality where one action doesn't necessarily need explanation - she just is now on Venice Beach. She's just now in a white void. She's just now in Ben Shapiro's crawl keeping him from his precious beauty sleep.

But that's not what was different.

And though the film was almost a movie about Barbie AND Ken equally, with both having large arcs and equal screen time, where Ken wasn't just a supporting player but seemingly as much of a center of the movie as Barbie - with performances from Robbie and Gosling that were anything but plastic - but that's not what struck me as different...

Something happened in the theatre.

As the credits started to roll...

...normally everyone sits and maybe waits for an end credit scene quietly or simply slips out in silence...

...this time...

...as soon as the credits rolled...

...the whole theatre started talking, chatting, excitedly with each other, there was such a roar that you couldn't hear Billie Elish's whisper singing during the final song in the credits.

I've never really heard that before. That was different. Not Billie Elish’s whisper singing - will somebody please get that poor lady a throat losenge.

The chatter. The audience was awake.

There was an excitement. An eagerness to digest what they just saw. A glee.

And it was mostly a female audience.

Well I did hear one man explaining what he thought and say the word existential just a lot - there's always one Ken.

But it was different. This film managed to do something new. And it's honesty and straight forwardness and clarity was refreshing. It didn't just speak in metaphor - it at times just out right said the thing that needed to be said - that men needed to hear. And said them several times. Why? Because, speaking as someone who walks between both worlds, sometimes you have to tell a man something more than once for him to get off his ass and take the damn trash out.

And yet it didn't end on women taking control. The goal wasn't vengeance or domination - the goal was acceptance and ultimately...equality. We just aren’t there yet. Huh...a realistic ending to a plastic world.

#barbie

#barbie #barbiemovie #barbieheimer #barbenheimer #mattel #lgbtq #standup #comedy #blog #fyp #plastic

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samueldays · 3 months

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Sam Reviews: H. Beam Piper

I bought a fat collection of short stories and novels by H. Beam Piper, a sci-fi writer of the 50s and 60s. It holds up quite well, I think, as I reread the whole collection recently. There's a variety of content, from alien first contact to space-pirates and time travel, and a "thick" setting base for much of it with elements like carniculture or the veridicator that pop up in several stories without being the basis of one. Piper uses a pair of shared universes for many of his stories where you can see connections without needing to have read the previous. I think there's also less showing off wiseass references than in a lot of contemporary sci-fi, though I might simply have missed some.

The odd pair out is Graveyard of Dreams and its quasi-rewrite The Cosmic Computer, which belong to the first shared universe. Both books have the same start: Boy comes home to frontier colony planet after having studied at prestigious university in the core worlds, receives welcome as hometown hero, is now expected to solve planet's problems of being a run-down backwater after the space war, also find the allegedly war-winning supercomputer that's rumored to be located somewhere nearby and could be dug up like it's pirate treasure. Boy has learned at university the computer is probably imaginary, but it would break the community's hearts to tell them.

Graveyard takes the view that the population has been thinking too much in terms of blaming the war and hoping for the plot-device computer instead of doing anything, so the boy tells his dad the computer isn't real, and they start a conspiracy to reform the planet as part of the computer hunt: The computer might be on the moon, or another planet in the same solar system, so we'll need a spaceship. We can't search the whole planet in one go, so we'll need regular refueling and resupply and a spaceport here. We'll need radars and scanners and drones and other things bought from Earth, so we'll have to invite trade ships to our spaceport, and produce things to sell for Earth currency. Implementing the computer's economic plan once we find it will no doubt require infrastructure, which we should build up in advance. And so the colony gets better, ostensibly as part of looking for the computer.

Through all this, I never felt like Piper was dunking on people who put all their hopes and dreams in a problem-solving magic supercomputer, or on fellow sci-fi writers with their plot device computers. There's very little vitriol. Characters had simply built up their hopes too high. (If he had written it sixty years later, though, I might have thought it was a dunk on people going "crypto fixes this! put vegetables on the blockchain!")

The story is in one sense hard sci-fi, because it limits itself to realistic known capacities of computers, and in another sense, not sci-fi at all, because the computer is a pure McGuffin and the moral of the story is that people should work on solving their problems and improving their community instead of hoping for a McGuffin to fix everything.

The Cosmic Computer starts the same way with much the same plan, and a "salvage company" double-bluff that's supposedly supposedly for picking up other things while hiding the secret supercomputer, but supposedly actually for getting the computer, but actually just for looting abandoned military bases from the war as a way of revitalizing the economy.

Then they find the computer for real, and things get odd.

---

Uller Uprising is one of his earliest stories and the first I read that hinted at the specific timeline mentioned above, branching off from the era when he wrote, that did not come to pass but is an interesting speculation to read. The dating system is AE (Atomic Era), counting from 1942, when mankind first harnessed nuclear power. Most of the Northern Hemisphere nuked itself (or each other) in great power conflict in later world wars that timeline; the rebuilding of Earth and colonization of the stars was mostly done by Southern Hemisphere states such as South Africa and Argentina. The story features a pair of ships named Paul Kruger and Jan Smuts.

Oh for the South Africa that was! Piper saw a country that would reach for the stars once the US and SU had ground each other down. South Africa once had a nuclear power program. Now it can't keep the lights on. But I digress.

The scene for the Uprising is a Terran trading colony, in the 'colonialism' sense like the British India Company, on a world populated by aliens. Piper's aliens are polylithic*: among them is joy in prosperity, and resentment at colonists, and desire to learn, and factional infighting, variety "I want those fancy gadgets the Terrans have so I can crush my rival", and variety "I want to manipulate the Terrans into crushing my rival for me". They have personality of their own, rather then being mere foils or subjects of history. One can say that such infighting is the often the downfall of colonized people, but that begs the question of calling them "a people" in the first place, rather than two peoples who fought until they both lost to a third.

*I would have said "diverse" but that has other connotations these days.

There's an angry mob of Ullerians that's been inflamed into simply going out and murdering Terrans, and there's cunning Ullerians who have signed on for a term of work on Terran ships going to the uranium mines, to learn the secrets of nuclear power. There's also awful smut that's relevant in-universe. Quite good stuff.

---

Little Fuzzy is also set in the Atomic Era timeline. The Terran Federation is spreading across the stars, and on the planet Zarathustra, the prospector Jack Holloway stumbles across an odd creature:

He turned quickly to see two wide eyes staring up at him out of a ball of golden fur. Whatever it was, it had a round head and big ears and a vaguely humanoid face with a little snub nose. It was sitting on its haunches, and in that position it was about a foot high. It had two tiny hands with opposing thumbs.

He thinks it's cute, and adopts it to live in his house, and the critter brings its family, and he sees they're smart enough to use tools when eating some of the other local wildlife.

This raises a question of whether they're smart enough to count as native sapients and should have rights to the planet. We hear about the "talk and build a fire rule" which is the precedent of a future court case deciding that those two activities are sufficient proof of sapience, but not necessary for it, as shown in another court case when a woman murdered her infant baby and tried to plead that the baby couldn't talk nor build a fire, and was convicted of murder anyway.

Jack Holloway, of course, is all in favor of getting his cute adopted fuzzball recognized as sapient. The antagonist of the story is the Zarathustra Company which holds a Class-III legal charter for the settlement of an uninhabited planet; recognition of the Fuzzies would make it an inhabited Class-IV planet and void the corporate charter and make a lot of rich people lose a lot of money.

Again, there's a lack of dunking. The ZC is wrong, and commits crimes in an attempt to maintain its position, kidnapping the Fuzzies, fabricating evidence, and so forth. But I don't hear commie sneering from Piper as the ZC loses in court and one of its corrupt cops is put to a veridicator.

It's a very sci-fi piece of technology: an advanced mind-reading (brain-reading?) lie-detector helmet with the finesse to identify technically true but misleading statements.

There was a bright conical helmet on his head, and electrodes had been clamped to various portions of his anatomy. On the wall behind him was a circular screen which ought to have been a calm turquoise blue, but which was flickering from dark blue through violet to mauve. That was simple nervous tension and guilt and anger at the humiliation of being subjected to veridicated interrogation. Now and then there would be a stabbing flicker of bright red as he toyed mentally with some deliberate misstatement of fact.

---

The veridicator pops up again in Space Viking, farther in the future. The Terran Federation is disintegrating.

"Nifflheim, no! There aren't a dozen and a half planets in the Old Federation that still have hyperdrive, and they're all civilized. That's if 'civilized' is what Gilgamesh is," he added. "These are homemade barbarians. Workers and peasants who revolted to seize and divide the wealth and then found they'd smashed the means of production and killed off all the technical brains. Survivors on planets hit during the Interstellar Wars, from the Eleventh to the Thirteenth Centuries, who lost the machinery of civilization. Followers of political leaders on local-dictatorship planets. Companies of mercenaries thrown out of employment and living by pillage. Religious fanatics following self-appointed prophets."

The viking-esque privateers of the Sword Worlds are raiding the Federation worlds for loot and machinery and personnel to build anew on their own planets; this situation is already so far advanced that one character bemoans the Sword Worlds themselves sliding into decadence and barbarism as their best and brightest leave to outright conquer Federation worlds and live there. All this is the backdrop to a hunt for vengeance and a grudge to be settled between one Space Viking and another, which in the process results in taking over a world and becoming King, and watching another world collapse.

---

Some of the minor stories:

Naudsonce is about first contact with an alien species and the attempts to establish communication when the odd aliens make sounds, but do not seem to have language. They can gesture enough for trade, though, and sell off some of their spare livestock. The brass provisionally file it as Domesticated Type C. The enlisted men, wanting to discuss the barbecue, cut this down to "domsee" and the name sticks.

Lone Star Planet is rather comic: there's a planet settled by exaggerated Texans, the most Texan ones who wanted to live in Space Texas specifically, and they brought the Alamo with them on a spaceship. They breed dinosaur-like "supercows" on their ranches, their cowboys need tanks for herding the supercows and implicitly constitute small armies, and it's legal to kill politicians for the crime of attempted taxation. Our protagonist is a nervous new ambassador sent to this planet after his predecessor was killed, suspecting that his government wants him also killed as casus belli. (Partly inspired by H.L. Mencken's The Malevolent Jobholder.)

A Slave is a Slave concerns the imperialistic abolition of slavery on a planet where slavery has been the order of the day for so long that it's becoming an in-name-only matter: the "slaves" are the ones who operate everything important, while the "masters" spend their days in petty feuds with each other. The imperial potentate sent to oversee abolition is a first-timer, learning on the job how to administrate foreign planets. This does not go entirely smoothly.

Hunter Patrol is a time loop. A present-day soldier is drawn to the future to help overthrow a tyrant that has conquered the world and conditioned people into servile pacifism. Returning to his own time with a bit of loot and papers from the tyrant's office but without future memories of what they are or why, he uses the future knowledge to become rich and powerful, aims to establish world peace, and ironically becomes the tyrant murdered by his past self.

Null-ABC depicts a future where "Literate" has become a profession; most people aren't literate and look down on the concept. Instructions are usually pictographic, or you hire a Literate to read it for you. Data storage and messaging is commonly audio. TVs and videos are still around, naturally. This because Literacy is associated with propaganda pamphlets and hell-tomes like Mein Kampf and Das Kapital, and the four world wars they caused. This is the one story where I recall Piper does get in some cheap jokes, in the world news report of items such as,

"The Central Diplomatic Council of the Reunited Nations has just announced, for the hundred and seventy-eighth time, that the Arab-Israel dispute has been finally, definitely and satisfactorily settled."

unrelated to the plot of the story, which involves political strife about the status of Literates and literacy.

That joke has aged very well, I must say.

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Piper's second shared universe set of stories is the Paratime collection. In a future without interstellar travel, as Earth's resources run dry, mankind has instead developed the technology of visiting alternate timelines and parallell universe Earths. On the uninhabited ones, futuremen mine resources directly; on the inhabited ones, futuremen buy from the local miners.

This gives the protagonists reason to get involved pretty much anywhere in history or alt-history as they have to cover up the Paratime Secret, or stop a time crime, or catch the Venusian Nighthound that some dumbass let loose in a 1950s America before the cops ask too many questions about the unusually mutilated cattle. It is a really great Excuse Plot for whatever time period, technological level, and/or cultural group the author feels like writing about today.

It could easily have stopped there, and become a series of disconnected anecdotes and shiny distractions, but Piper executes it well and gives it context. Home Timeline has people and places and customs and strife, although some of the bits feel clunky to me.

Tortha Karf fingered them and nodded. Then he became as visibly angry as a man of his civilization and culture-level ever permitted himself. "What does that fool think we have a Paratime Code for?" he demanded. "It's entirely illegal to transport any extraterrestrial animal or object to any time-line on which space-travel is unknown. I don't care if he is a green-seal thavrad; he'll face charges, when he gets back, for this!"

It's very hard to make future ranks sound appropriately important while staying foreign, and "green-seal thavrad" falls short, IMO. (Also clunky: "We'll blow them to Em-See-Square!" elsewhere in Piper's writing.)

Most of the Paratime protagonists are time cops of some sort, though with a major exception: Calvin Morrison, a man from our time's America, gets sucked up in the wake of a paratime travel vehicle. Falling into a timeline where America was colonized by an eastward Indo-Aryan migration and the technology level is late medieval, he becomes Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, protagonist of his own novel by the same name and several sequels by Piper's peers.

(A time cop stops by to check whether the Paratime secret has been leaked, and is very satisfied that Calvin has told everyone "a wizard did it" and is helping to keep the secret.)

In this alternate timeline, America is divided into kingdoms worshipping the Wolf-God and the Sky-Father and the Earth-Mother and other interpretations of ancient Aryan deities as filtered through 1950s historiography and then cultural drift as imagined by Piper, which makes it an interesting sort of foreign place. But the supreme god of the time is Styphon, whose priesthood alone holds the secret of making fireseed (gunpowder). This monopoly is the main source of their power, and Calvin is about to break it.

The plot outline "Contemporary man falls into the past/fantasy world and introduces gunpowder" has been recycled a thousand times by worse writers, and I wonder how many of them would trace their literary ancestry back to Piper if we could see who they'd copied. I know it's more than zero: like with Journey to the West but less famous, reading Lord Kalvan made several things click into place as I recognized elements other authors had been copy-pasting that made sense in the original but were weirdly out-of-place in the flimsy knockoffs. Literary cargo cult.

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In closing, Piper was an original writer, and I recommend his stories.

No man is entirely original, one can locate him easily in the late golden age of American scifi with peers and influences, but he stands out to me as the sort of person that others were copying a great deal. Lord Kalvan I mentioned above, the Sword-Worlds of Space Viking went right into the Traveller RPG, Little Fuzzy was rebooted by John Scalzi as Fuzzy Nation, Star Trek's "tribbles" were originally "fuzzies" before Legal got involved, the Paratime series was an inspiration for Charles Stross's Merchant Princes, the list goes on.

And it looks to me, as with several other of my favorite and respected authors, that this is partly because he could draw on a wide set of life experiences outside of the incestuous 'literary class'. (Vague, I know.) He worked on the railroad, he studied engineering, he collected firearms and helped compile a collection of archaic ones. His short story Omnilingual turns on the fact that science has a shared true referent: the Periodic Table of the Martians must refer to the same elements as on Earth, and so the long-dead Martians' language is deciphered.

I might say: he was a shape rotator. :-)

#all #literature #sam reviews #longpost #h. beam piper

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