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chaifighter · 5 months

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Rewatched Pacific Rim Uprising the other day with my sister and god. Just. What a masterpiece of funnybad cinema. Mako’s never-mentioned-before brother is the main character alongside a girlboss teenager whose homemade jaeger curls up in a ball and rolls like Sonic. Mako dresses like a flight attendant now. Drift compatibility is no longer a measure of your connection to another person, instead it’s something you’re ‘good at’ or not. Raleigh died offscreen of cancer years before the movie but this is only addressed in the novels so when you’re watching pru you’re just wondering why no one even mentions him. (There’s a moment after Mako’s death (she died bc her never-mentioned-before brother’s jaeger fumbled the pass on her helicopter lmaooo) where you see a memorial with her, Stacker, and… one of the Russians? Not Raleigh? Why did they not put Raleigh’s face there to at least communicate that he’s dead?) The Jaeger program inexplicably still exists even though there are no kaiju. The government was trying to defund Jaegers in favor of the sea wall even when the kaiju were still around and tearing through the wall like tissue paper on a weekly basis, why are they still funding them when the only demonstrated use case is as oversized cops that can barely navigate a city street. Anathema Device is there just to be the pivot in the world’s blandest love triangle (semi resolved by a winky implication of a polycule? Okay sure I guess). There’s an evil black Jaeger which exists for no reason conceivable outside of Doylist apologia. One of the Cool New Toys Jaegers is just a normal big robot with a spike ball on one arm it looks so fucking stupid. Charlie Day is eating up every scene he’s in and Burn Gorman is having the time of his life elbow deep in kaiju guts. (The two of them and their scenes are genuinely great zero complaints but they’re living in a different movie than the rest of the characters.) (Okay for real I have to address it Newt and Hermann are genuinely so good in this movie 1) for what and 2) fucking how? Why is Hermann mucking around in kaiju entrails He Would Not Fucking Do That but Burn is having so much fun it works somehow. Newt’s wretched fashion sense bad mandarin and shitty plastic sunglasses have bewitched me utterly I need to study him. Elevator cane beatdown. Hermann they’re in my head. The breathless little smile on Newt’s face when he sees Kaiju Voltron (yeah three kaiju turn into one bigger kaiju. Like Voltron. Don’t worry about it).) The monster is trying to blow up the earth by throwing itself into Mount Fuji???

#pacific rim #pacific rim uprising

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ragecndybars · 2 months

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AO3 tag game :3

thanks so much for the tag @mvshortcut !!!!! much appreciated, this was a blast to fill out :D

How many works do you have on AO3?

86! Damn, that's more than I remember 🙀 I have been writing pretty fervently since I was pretty young, though, and I transferred all my old fics from fanfiction dot net to AO3, so it's a long stretch of time. All my old wattpad fics are still rotting somewhere though lmaooo I can't even access them anymore bc I forgot my password and I can't reset it bc I used a school email 😔

What's your total AO3 word count?

443,734! When I get to half a million I'm gonna have to throw myself a party. With boba and everything

How many fandoms have you written for, and what are they?

Oof, okay, here we go. A lot of the fandoms I have tagged on AO3 don't really "count" because they're just aggregate tags for the same fandom, so even though AO3 says the number is 48, I'm gonna count the TRUE number as 17. (It got cut down so much because of how many video game series have different games with different fandom tags on AO3, lmao)

Here's the breakdown of the list:

Persona (Mostly Persona 3)

Fire Emblem (Mostly Shadow Dragon and Blazing Sword)

Legend of Zelda

Pokemon

Professor Layton

RWBY

Kid Icarus: Uprising

Earthbound/MOTHER

Red vs. Blue

Voltron Legendary Defender

Naruto

Final Fantasy XV

Harvest Moon

The Mysterious Benedict Society

The Avengers

Animal Crossing

Care Bears (despite having never actually consumed any Care Bears media to my knowledge)

The worst part is that this stupid list would be much, much, MUCH longer if I finished even a quarter of my WIPs 😭 Hell, even just my "Video Games" subfolder in my "Fanfiction" subfolder has more than 17 subfolders in it...

Y'all don't understand how many random fics my ADHD spares you from ever seeing I have no focus

Top five fics by kudos:

Ash and Emotion (Zelda) - Not surprising, I knew this was my most popular fic. It was for a ZeLink zine full of beautiful work :)

Resemblance (Naruto) - bro I always forget people really liked this one. Literally an unedited drabble I did in an hour for a "pride month drabble challenge" which I immediately abandoned. Trans rights I guess

Always Wanna Play (But You Never Wanna Lose) (Persona 3) - This one isn't surprising either, and I'm very proud of this fic so I'm quite chuffed to see it get so much attention... thanks everyone :')

The Beat of Your Heart (Zelda) - Now this one surprised me a lot. This was just a little piece for ZeLink week... Another unedited one, I literally was writing it on the toilet in church so I could get it out in time 😭

Comfort (Zelda) - Another ZeLink week piece, but I knew this one was popular. Also unedited, lmao. I was writing it on the day of my AP Calc finals and I rushed through the exam so I could have more time to work on the fic 😭 I made some Choices that year

Do you respond to comments?

I try to! But I get very anxious about it and tend to work myself into a tizzy, so I often put it off for later and then forget, haha. Then I'll go and respond to all my comments from the last few months and feel even weirder about it... T_T

What's the fic with the angstiest ending you've ever written?

Oof. That's... a hard one, haha. I've written a couple of fics without happy endings, though I typically don't. At least three fics which end on a canonical character death, for instance. But I'd say the ending which made me the most emo writing was Butter, a Mother 3 fic. It ends with Lucas, who's like 9, recently lost his mother, then lost his twin brother (and thinks it's his fault), and is now being neglected by his father, crawling into bed and crying. So yeah, pretty bleak, lmao... but at least he doesn't die I guess?

Do you write crossovers?

I do, but I haven't posted many yet. I'm not always huge on writing them, but I do think about them a lot. I was working on this one Persona 3 x Fire Emblem Awakening crossover but I lost steam on it, and now there's a really lovely crossover on AO3 with a similar premise that I was SO delighted to come across!!! Hope y'all don't mind me taking a break from linking my own work to shill for this one, hehe

Have you ever gotten hate on a fic?

Unfortunately, yes, about six times, I'd say. Even more unfortunately, most of those times happened earlier on in my fanfic writing career, and I was pretty sensitive to hate back then, so I deleted many of the relevant fics, and some of them I don't even have access to myself anymore.

Not gonna talk about the ones that are still upsetting, but I will talk about the funny examples: on a (since deleted) RWBY fic, I said in the author's note that I "wrote them as platonic, but the fic can be read as WhiteRose", and then I got a glowing comment gushing about how good the story was which ended with "but then you had to ruin it by shitting all over WhiteRose, how about you [long suicide bait]". Third most baffling comment I've ever received.

The two most baffling were on different fics, but both were making the same weird accusation??? One was on a ZeLink fic (actually, on Comfort, my fifth most kudos'ed fic of all time now), and y'know I think I'm just gonna show you the comment in question:

The other one was on a long-since deleted fic which focused on both a romantic ship, as well as a fatherly relationship between one member of the ship and the other member's father. I guess having a fatherly relationship with your father-in-law makes your boyfriend actually your brother (and therefore you can't date him anymore). IDK man people are crazy. (tbf the commenter in question thought I was setting it up so that he'd get adopted by his boyfriend's parents, which would give them more of a case, but like... that didn't happen in the fic and wasn't going to. they just guessed at a future plot development and got angry about their guess)

Do you write smut?

I do, but I've never posted any. I've posted one fic that was very suggestive, I'd even call it "NSFW" in a sense, but never anything explicit. Maybe I will in the future? We'll see if I can ever finish anything smutty, lmao.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Yep, I had Ultimatum, my longest chapter-fic (and by far my most popular fic in the ff.n days) stolen and posted on another site by somebody. I reported it but never checked back up to see if it got taken down.

I also feel that I've had my work plagiarized pretty damn blatantly in another fandom (I was browsing a certain AU tag and read one which contained all the exact events and sometimes word-for-word dialogue from a fic of mine, just very very slightly rewritten) but the poster had no other works and their writing was definitely extremely juvenile, so... I figured they were a dumb kid and just decided not to raise a fuss. Checked back later and they deleted it, hopefully because they realized they shouldn't do that, so I figure there's no need to start shit over it. Honestly, if that person used that experience as a jumping-off point to write their own fics, then I'm glad it happened, imitation being the highest form of flattery and all.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

No, though I had someone reach out to me on fanfiction dot net a long time ago and ask permission to translate An Unheard Goodbye, which was super exciting! I agreed, but I don't believe they ever got around to it, or if they did, they never posted it. Still very flattering, and I think about that a lot, hehe.

What’s your all-time favorite ship?

HOW COULD I POSSIBLY ANSWER THIS. UM. UM UH. UHHH UM UH I. UM.

I'm.... gonna say Zelda/Link? I haven't written it in FOREVER but it was such a huge part of me coming into my own as a fanfic author, so I have to give it credit for that.

What’s a WIP that you want to finish, but don’t think you ever will?

.......all of them 😭 god I have so many of these damn things. But for the prime example, I'd point to Ultimatum, an old Pokemon fic that I started in middle school. I got all the way to the climax and I feel bad leaving my readers hanging, but... at this point, if I did continue it, I would honestly have to rewrite the whole fic first just to be in line with my current understanding of the characters.

What are your writing strengths?

Y'know, I think I get character voices down extremely well in a way which elevates my dialogue and narration. That's probably the thing I'm most proud of in my own writing, at least.

What are your writing weaknesses?

BREVITY. Or the utter, glaring lack of it. I have also been known to muddy up my writing with an overabundance of A) adverbs, B) unneeded clauses tacked onto perfectly good sentences, and C) em-dashes 😭

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fics?

I think it's dope as fuck, but I currently can't really accomplish it because I'm monolingual (NOT FOR LONG IF I HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY ABOUT IT, I'M COMING FOR YOU, JAPANESE FLUENCY!!!!). I will also say that I don't like when authors will write characters having a story-important conversation in another language, then put the translations in the end notes or something, requiring you to either read the chapter confused or else keep scrolling back down and back up.... I think even that's totally fine to do if what's being said isn't plot-relevant, though.

What was the first fandom you ever wrote for?

Naruto. I hadn't read or watched Naruto btw, I had only read other Naruto fanfics. I have spoken on this topic many times, but it remains hilarious to me. Also, so many of my old Naruto fics are lost to the Wattpad times, but I will take this opportunity to once again share a quote which I recently managed to unearth from my long-lost unsung magnum opus:

Never ever will I intentionally attain the level of comedy gold that I managed while writing completely dead serious Naruto fanfiction on Wattpad in 2012.

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written so far?

See above. How could I ever top that fic.

In all seriousness, this question always makes me sweat, but I think I'm gonna say Oil, a slightly older fic from my EliHec days which I absolutely obsessed over for months before finally managing to finish. And, unlike most of the fics that I obsess over, I think the obsession actually made it come out better rather than worse, haha.

thanks again for the tag!!!! as for me, I'll tag uhh, hm, @wizard-finix @dreamedge @misty-wisp @flyfish1999 and any other AO3 writers who see this!!! (idk how many of you use AO3 and most of the MBS authors I know have probably already been tagged hehe but anybody who wants to should absolutely feel free!!!!!!!)

#Lee Speaks #tag game #god this is long. i love ranting about my writing thank you again for the tag

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yellowjavkets · 5 months

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Brackets of FICTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS THAT I, RJ YELLOWJAVKETS, THINK ARE NICE. IT SEEMS LIKE YOU GUYS ARE HAVING FUN WITH YOUR BRACKETS AND EVERY TIME I SEE ONE FOR ONE REASON OR THE NEXT I WANT TO SHOOT A HOLE THROUGH MY LAPTOP. I WANT TO HAVE A FUN BRACKET

BLOCK THE TAG RJ BRACKET IF YOU HAVE NO WISH TO SEE THIS FUCKING HORSESHIT

FAQ: Q: RJ I HAVE NO EARTHLY IDEA WHO MOST OF THESE FUCKING PEOPLE ARE

A: IMAGINE HOW I FEEL

Q: RJ THIS IS SOME CRINGE ASS TASTE YOU HAVE

A: I CALLED THE LEG FACTORY AND THEY SAID U DON'T HAVE ONE TO STAND ON

Q: IS THIS A JOKE

A: MAYBE. I'LL DECIDE AFTER LUNCH

I AM NOT ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS AND IF I HEAR SUPERNATURAL OR STRANGER THINGS OR VOLTRON EVEN ONCE I'M TAKING A SHIT ON YOUR COMPUTER!!!

EXPANDED INFO AND FULL LIST UNDER THE CUT

Jackie Taylor & Shauna Shipman from Yellowjackets

Faith Lehane & Buffy Summers from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Kimmy & Octus from Sym-Bionic Titan

Kirk & Spock from Star Trek: TOS

Princess Bubblegum & Marceline the Vampire Queen from Adventure Time

Dewey Riley & Gale Weathers from the Scream Franchise

Mae Borowski & Bea Santello from Night in the Woods

Tara Maclay & Willow Rosenberg from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Miles Morales & Gwen Stacy from Spiderverse

Mike Chilton & Julie Kapulsky from Motorcity

Paige & Beck from Tron: Uprising

Bonnie Bennet & Damon Salvatore from The Vampire Diaries

Taissa Turner & Van Palmer from Yellowjackets

Sarah Connor & Kyle Reese from Terminator

Lucifer Morningstar & Chloe Decker from RJ IS NOT IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA

Rory Gilmore & Logan Huntzberger from Gilmore Girls

Mickey Milkovich & Ian Gallagher from Shameless

Jocelyn Carter & John Reese from Person of Interest

Peter Parker/Mary Jane Watson/Harry Osbourne from EXCLUSIVELY THE RAIMI TRILOGY

Samwise Gamgee & Frodo Baggins from Lord of the Rings

Finn & Poe Dameron from I WISH I COULD DIE SO I COULD STOP THINKING ABOUT THIS FRANCHISE FOREVER

Agent Six and Rebecca Holiday from Generator Rex

Vriska Serket & Terezi Pyrope from EVERY SLUR LISTED IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

Xander Harris & Cordelia Chase from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Root & Sameen Shaw from Person of Interest

Rex Salazar & Circe from Generator Rex

Gwen Tennyson & Kevin Levin from Ben 10

Anthy & Utena from Revolutionary Girl Utena

Razer & Aya from Green Lantern: TAS

Jake Long & Rose from American Dragon: Jake Long

Caroline Forbes & Stefan Salvatore from The Vampire Diaries

Natalie Scatorccio & Misty Quigley from Yellowjackets

I'll probably do a week instead of a day for each poll and post them in very small batches so nobody has to drive to my house and kill me. i will post them at whatever time of day and I'm sorry in advance. you have no idea how difficult it was to think of 32. i had to go back in time and converse with myself at ages of all prime numbers and multiples of 3 to get a clear picture

#monster growl #rj bracket

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fouralignments · 11 months

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Does anyone remember Dragon Booster from the early 2000s? Its a good show and I found on Tubi; a shit ton of old shows. I know in the era of streaming that animated shows get screwed over. What I would give to go back to that era of so much adventure, daring, and experimentation so much original shows, though there was franchise shows like Teen Titans, Static Shock and Star Wars: The Clone wars and they were good shows and still are. It makes one appreciate it even more. Don't get me wrong I love me some Vox Machina or Voltron.

And then we have shows like Velma and Miraculous Ladybug, one is getting a second season and the latter is fucking getting renewed for a 6th season. I don't get it. Like there were shows that were killed before their time like Tron: Uprising, Sym-Biotic Titan, and Green Lantern: The Animated Series that would have killed to have six FUCKING seasons. For ML that show SO MUCH POTENTIAL and it wasted it! And there are no excuses left to give for it: it's incompetent as every level saying its a dumpster fire of show is being too kind. I wouldn't be so angry and disappointed if ML just went along its way being a 'monster of the week' type deal and by season 3 it being off the air, but it strived for being better than what it was. There are just many good examples of shows that started off episodic and became more serialized and more darker; changing the status quo of both the characters and the world as a whole much better. I could rant on but what I'm getting at why can't we have reboots or another chances for premises of older shows to be given a second chance? Like Dino Squad or Class of the Titans etc.

Another thing, I believe that kids shows despite their limitation in rating means that you have to write to both a kid and adult audience in mind.

#4alignment rant #I could go with ML rant but mark my words that show will go down in history as a cautionary tale of NOT to write a children series #ITs not even so bad its good but not so bad that 's horrible #however its like bemusing entertaining just watching repeatably as that it becomes unintentionally hilarious as I watch it try and fail to #fix one thing but winds up making the situation worse over and over repeatedly as the disaster becomes bigger and bigger that #tragedy becomes hilarity #One can't help but watch it as it unholds

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demenior · 1 year

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⛔

I forgot I reblogged that emoji ask game and I spent TOO long wondering what I'd done that finally got me cancelled sldkfjslakjdf.

⛔ Do you have a fic you started, but scrapped?

Oh buddy I have so many. I've gotten better over the years at curbing my enthusiasm, but I'm like a popcorn maker of ideas. I start slow as I get into something, and then they're firing out of me at an unstoppable rate, and then as I wean out of a media they slow down. This results in everythng from good to bad to hilarious to great ideas.

Lots of them I try to incorporate into stuff I'm already writing (like a throwaway line, or a small scene as a personal nod to a concept I liked) just to get it out of my system.

Here's a sample:

Critical Role

Werewolf au

An entire story just about Fjord's parents and who they are/were when they met. The story would have ended when Fjord was born so it would have been like 100% OCs.

Uk'otoa Fairy Godmother

A whole story about Fjord meeting one or both parents

Supernatural

Back in 2010 I had a post s5 finale fix-it story where Sam had returned from The Cage as a sum of Lucifer and Sam, who was a little brother and wanted big brothers' love. And so brought John and Mary back to life while lurking around watching Dean like the worlds' creepiest stalker. This would be from Dean's pov as he navigated suddenly having his parents back, as they tried to figure out who brought them back, and the three of them trying to be a family. A sub-plot would be that Mary and John wouldn't approve of Cas, because he's Not Human, and so Dean would be sneaking around to see his bff and somewhere along the way it turns into Dean sneaking around with his boyfriend and trying to figure out how to admit to his parents that he's queer.

You can see where a lot of this got poached for the The Love It Takes series <3

Kingdom Hearts

I have like 15k written of the KH3-era Heroes of Light trying to learn how to cohabit and learning how to be human. There's a lot of intense codependency.

Voltron

I have like 15k of Shiro-Atlas shenanigans and being mysteriously magical and slice of life of living in the sentient Atlas

A 'Shiro is the White Lion' story

A fantasy au where Shiro and Ulaz are an arranged marriage to form peace between their kingdoms

Culture clash where Ulaz wants to perform a sacred Galra soulmate ritual on Shiro to make Shiro spiritually Galran so they will go to the same afterlife when they die, and all the pushback he gets for that. Including that the afterlife isn't very important to Shiro.

A pre-dating Keith is Posessive of Shiro story (it's for laughs at Keith's expense. He gets it from his mom)

A whole future story where Rahjim gets assassinated by the Galra which kickstarts a whole rebellion uprising that turns the tide in the Galra war. A few months down the line it turns out Rahjim is still alive, lost an arm, and has decided to stay "dead" to be a martyr for the cause. He's living his fantasy of being a wartime pilot/fighter but he also hates not having money or power and he and Shiro eventually reconnect and it's an interesting new dynamic

All that and more!

#asks #replies #ty for the ask!#and for the unintentional laugh

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makeshift-moth · 2 years

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I’m going to do an art style challenge for the next little while. This is mostly for fun, but I think it will also help me learn other drawing styles.

Below is a list of my favorite animated female characters (A-Z) I made a rule that I could only use one character for each show, so some of them aren’t my overall favorites, just ones that fit the alphabet.

Every time I do a drawing, I’ll randomly generate a number between 1-26 to determine the character, then the style they’ll be drawn in. If I feel like doing this challenge again, I also have a list of male characters!

All finished drawings will be tagged with, “moth art style swap”.

Favorite character alphabet:

1. Ashi (Samurai Jack)

2. Breach (Generator Rex)

3. Chiyo (The Disastrous Life of Saiki K)

4. Dororo (Dororo)

5. Eclipsa (Star vs the Forces of Evil)

6. Fuyumi (My hero Academia)

7. Garnet (Steven Universe)

8. Hana (Wolf Children)

9. Ilana (Sym Bionic Titan)

10. Johanna (Hilda)

11. Kashima (Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun)

12. Lake (Infinity train)

13. Miwa (Jujutsu Kaisen)

14. Nana (My Roommate is a Cat)

15. Olivier Armstrong (Fullmetal Alchemist)

16. Paige (Tron Uprising)

17. Quin (Final Space)

18. Rayla (The Dragon Prince)

19. Scorpia (She-ra)

20. Tuesday (Carole and Tuesday)

21. Uzoi (Somali and the Forest Spirit)

22. Valerie (Danny Phantom)

23. Willow (The Owl House)

24. XJ-9 (My Life as a Teenage Robot)

25. Yor (Spy x Family)

26. Zethrid (Voltron)

Show Style Options:

1. Over the Garden Wall

2. Motorcity

3. Gravity Falls

4. Avatar the Last Airbender

5. Sym Bionic Titan

6. Generator Rex

7. Detentionaire

8. Hilda

9. She-ra

10. Tron Uprising

11. Final Space

12. Star vs the Forces of Evil

13. The Owl House

14. Dead End Paranormal Park

15. Danny Phantom

16. Amphibia

17. Infinity Train

18. Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts

19. Steven Universe

20. Adventure Time

21. Bojack Horseman

22. Young Justice

23. Samurai Jack

24. Phineas and Ferb

25. The Hollow

26. The Dragon Prince

#I’m mainly making this post so I can link everything back to one place #style swap #art challenge #animated characters #I think there will be some fun combinations in here #it was honestly super hard to make this character list #I was constantly changing things out #every time I wanted to add a new character I had to switch everything around #stupid 1 character per show rule… that I made up #anyway I think this will be fun!#moth art style swap

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voltron-intergalactic-uprising · 1 year

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POV: You’re stranded in space with no hope of reaching contact but that doesn’t stop you from celebrating the holidays

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the-lightning-strikes-again · 3 years

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Pacific Rim (2013) and the Chance to Try Again

So I re-watched Pacific Rim (2013), per an anon’s request that I write a Pacific Rim-based Voltron AU. And I know this movie is clearly a love song to mecha genre as its ultimate goal. But in re-watching Pacific Rim in 2021, an odd moment really spoke to me. It was how badly Mako Mori struggled in her official debut in Gipsy Danger, how dangerous her triggered reaction was to other people around her, and yet how Raleigh Becket had an empathetic reaction that helped Mako get back up, resulting in her ability to reclaim her agency against a reputation as a traumatized failure.

I guess a little background to explain further, and why this meant so much to me:

So here’s this Asian woman who’s been asking for years for her chance to prove herself. She’s been told by her guardian, Marshall Stacker Pentecost, that she will fail to function in a drift setting because of her inexperience with reigning in emotions/a need for vengeance. But Mako Mori finally gets the chance to be a co-pilot, finally connects to a very real drift inside a very real jaeger…and then, oop. Becket has a negative reaction to his own memories and falls out of phase. This sets up Mori, who is unexperienced in handling this situation, to “chase the RABIT.” She has a genuinely traumatic breakdown that nearly kills her own comrades in the Shatterdome. She unintentionally activates Gipsy Danger’s weapons to protect herself from the ghosts of her own memories.

The team has to actually shut down the jaeger to protect themselves from being annihilated.

Upon shaking out of the drift, Mako Mori knows she has validated Pentecost’s fears and judgements about her. She is pretty sure she’s lost her chance to achieve her goals.

And clearly, her father figure Stacker Pentecost—who does love her and is as such overprotective—has been struggling the whole time with accepting Mori in a jaeger. The standard Toxic Masculinity figure of Chuck Hansen has a hissy fit that Mori is too inexperienced, and he actively tries to get her pushed out too, even accusing Becket of standing up for Mori only because he thinks Raleigh has romantic interest in her.

But it’s Raleigh…this very masculine dude with the somewhat over pronounced man-strut in his step lol, who does something that I really appreciated seeing.

After everything, Becket fights for Mori’s reinstatement when Mori has lost faith in herself and is trying not to break down in shame. And then he sits by her and actively tries to empathize with her about how rough a drift can be.

And Raleigh doesn’t do this because he thinks she’s pretty, or because he’s trying to take pity on Mori as some kind of male savior for her weak emotional constitution. This is the guy who is most likely to die first if Mori screws up in real-time, and this is the guy who can acknowledge that he helped set Mori into a no-win situation.

And unlike Pentecost (who initially wants to protect Mori at the cost of her own agency) and Hansen (who believes Mori is too incompetent to function above reproach), Becket knows what Mori was capable of. He believes in her 51 drops, 51 kills simulator score. He believes in her physical and intellectual capabilities based off his interactions with her, which are things that both Pentecost and Hanson immediately forget when Mori fails her first real drift and endangers people.

Becket knew what Mori could do if people just…invested in her and gave her a chance, now that she knew what drifting was like. He saw his own struggles in her and empathized with her as a human being. He takes some responsibility even over the fact that she was not simply made aware of/prepared for what she could face in that drift while also being hooked up to a weapon of mass destruction. Because as we see later in the film, once Mori knows what to expect, she can function very well as a co-pilot.

Had Raleigh not believed in her, had Pentecost tried to permanently ground her out of fearful love, and had Mako Mori herself accepted a reality where she was only a failure—the kaiju would have absolutely decimated multiple cities. Because Mori did not remain tied to her initial failure, the resistance lived to fight another day.

The more I thought about the fall and rise of Mako Mori in this 2013 film, the more I really appreciated those moments.

Because if a woman makes a mistake and big-time screws up their debut, it’s usually a death knoll, and even more so if that woman is already living in an environment that makes her a second-class citizen to begin with. People often act like a Chuck Hansen and write her off as incompetent/dangerous, or they pull a Pentecost and assume her to be too weak/too emotional to be of use. There’s not a lot of forgiveness for a woman. Whereas, there’s generally a lot more forgiveness for a man to screw around on the goodwill that he has potential. So it’s pretty rare to see a woman mess up as Mori did, especially in an emotional, traumatized way with such potential consequences…and to see someone still fighting to reach out to her. To empathize with her. To offer her the second chance they knew she could handle.

So it hit me that when the computer in the movie asked, “Drift sequence terminated. Would you like to try again?” and no one answered, Raleigh Becket didn’t have to. Because he had already answered yes, and he had been saying yes for every second he was trying to reach Mori.

And as the movie unfolds, yeah it might be redundant that Raleigh talks to her out loud while they’re fighting. But he takes actual time to warn and prepare her for what they’re facing—because he’s been here before in the real world, and she hasn’t. He’s trying to keep her in the present and to keep himself grounded too so he personally doesn’t bog her down. And it’s in this environment that we see Mako Mori absolutely bloom into one of the best jaeger pilots the world has ever seen, not including that she’s part of the first team to ever single-handedly take down two category four kaiju in one night. And furthermore, we see a Mako Mori who doesn’t just internalize her emotions. She uses those emotions to carry on the fight and to rally Becket to another charge, even when he believes they’re out of options.

So I guess to wind down this rambling meta, I felt that this wild and fun movie contained some content that, whether intended or not, spoke to me today in a new way I hadn’t seen it as before. I thought it was pretty cool how in this movie, women can rise above a failure and try again, successfully even. The message that men can feel empathy with a woman or understand their struggles is still wildly progressive in today’s world, where it’s more acceptable for women to empathize with men than the other way around. The message that trying to understand helps everyone rise together is lit. And I didn’t really expect to be flailing over this movie and this concept in 2021, but here we are, lol.

#Pacific Rim #Mako Mori #Raleigh Becket #Stacker Pentecost #Chuck Hansen #fandoms #mechas #empathy #failure #gender dynamics #I watched to think about a Voltron AU but got caught up in how I felt Pacific Rim did some pretty cool stuff #some things that i've been craving being in fandoms where if a female character isn't perfect then she's trash #it was really refreshing to return to Pacific Rim because it canonically grapples with that concept and rejects it #it says that a triggered and traumatized woman or an angry woman is valuable #she might even be the one to help save the world #I think Mako Mori and Princess Allura would get along well #BUT ALSO PACIFIC RIM UPRISING DOES NOT EXIST #I REFUSE TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT MOVIE AS ANYTHING MORE THAN A TERRIBLE FANFIC #but yeah so anyway back to mecha movies and encouragement to try again even if you fail #that sometimes we can't help failing or are set up for failure #but that you can get back up #and try again #and that a failure or a trauma doesn't have to define a person's identity or capabilities #that's how this movie read to me today

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