#which iirc is all the ones shown on-screen

[thedarklinkfell]

RWBY > The moon guiding those escaping abuse

#rwby #rwbyedit #rwby parallels #Blake Belladonna #Cinder Fall #Mercury Black #Ozma #Salem #rwby gifs #not tagging weiss bc she doesn't appear but from top to bottom that's: #Salem; Mercury; Ozma; Cinder; Schnees; Blake #which iirc is all the ones shown on-screen #something about the moon almost always being in-shot as well #a guide for those who need it #I think there's a parallel here but if you disagree then it's a pretty gradient anyway

[bentosandbox]

Lappy fancam animatic blogging/production notes

now that wolfgirlyaoi is out on global its rambling time about my powerpoint presentation

Concept

Originally I wanted to do an (Tex & Lapp) animatic with the boss theme (broken wall/Signore dei Lupi .mp3) ever since the event dropped but I thought 1) by the time I finished anything someone else would have probably already done it first (lol, lmao even) 2) I remembered the song exists and how much i looped it then while listening to the group's new album drop and thought the lyrics fit Lapp a little too well and also doesn't end abruptly like the boss theme + was shorter so yea

initial stickman storyboard where i put down the lyrics with event dialogue/happenings that i felt would fit nicely together > hastily scribble the images that form in my head

storyboards were basically what i wanted to see (same rule as my comics) lol especially if they weren't shown in the event CGs, eg. there's a CG of the truck crashing into the courtroom so I didn't do that but they didn't mention her physical acting in that scene + the song I used has a bow/salute at that exact part in their live choreo with the very similar line so I wanted to do a homage even though-

-I was like it's going to be such a pain to figure out an economical hand twirl and bow but I have to do this I need to transplant the image in my brain onto the screen because official media did not do a—

Honestly still don't know if its a common phrase and action combo because I was having so much trouble finding external references that wasn't just scrubbing the live video over and over anyway

part of the storyboards were 'recycled' from comic drafts I did (of the chocolate scene because ofc) when the event was running on CN

Originally I wanted to draw Lapp feeding Texas for The Girlyaoi Funny but I wanted to reference the plaque you get which is a Creation of Adam reference right but I also saw people saying it's referencing the scene from Silence of the Lambs lol so...peel the layers to your liking!!

(The chocolate flavour choice was from asking my Columbian friends what the worst chocolate flavour they ever tried which was white coconut)

my sorry attempt at colour keys > final spreadsheet to keep track of progress and paste all the dialogue i put in

Art Direction

A bunch of shots/colour schemes are references to Måneskin's stuff or other media tehepero I'll just put a few here

At first I was going to limit red/blue to tex/lapp respectively but since Omertosa is blue I just did away with that rule and lapp gets to have both (and more!) these two colours have pretty obvious emotional readings I think but also

red = self blue = society Siracusa or: red = yaoi & blue = yuri

for the others:

Purple = Alberto/Saluzzo, its not orange like the fruit he keeps holding because see below; I needed the colour for something else LOL Also the Saluzzos are iirc nobility or whatever and they have purple hints in their clothes so I think it was a good fit anyway

Yellow/Orange = Its supposed to be representing the last word in the story which apparently, yostar went with 'Savagery' which is Correct I guess but (laments again about how nuance is lost in localisation because imo savagery has a more derogatory kind of connotation while I think 蛮荒 in context of the story also has a 'nature/untouched by civilisation' side to it) which is why Texas setting the house on fire was not (entirely) red but orange (and it complements the blues both visually and thematically) and it's yellow at the end when they're frolicking(?) in the wilderness lol

(these colour rules don't apply to the penglog shot and technically a few frames like the shot with shocked penance, the one right after and 'im just lappy' because...i forgor my own rules lol)

The greens/teals were just a reference to the shades in the 3DPV I think

The silhouette/general style was inspired from the 3D teaser thing they had at the beginning of the 3.5 anniversary stream and the card suits that I..forgot to move to the other layers which is why only the green one had them (supposed to be 1 per set 💀)

The clash bit is basically the same as the event CG but with a flipped camera/POV sorry for world's worst screenshot lmao. Couldn't imagine the poses in my head so I ended up posing 3d models in CSP pretty good posing practice

These shots got rendered extra because..they were the first frames I started on and I was still figuring out how much to simplify lol

I also posed the chairs shot for some inexplicable reason…my file was lagging so bad

Headcanon part (kind of)

The childhood flashback scene is probably the part I took the most liberties (headcanon) on since it's not explicitly canon like the rest...the sequence/how I connected the scenes itself to fabricate a timeline of her childhood was kind of inspired by some weibo post musing about how (iirc) texas's sweet tooth maybe came from when she was being fostered at casa Saluzzo and Lapp treating her like a pet essentially and giving her a lot of treats since...you know what happened to her actual pet hehe except maybe texas offered her a stick first and then Lappy just reciprocated endlessly because its one of the few 'acts' she knew that wasn't violence haha yeah this section was basically a stealth doujin sorry

It's mentioned that she was brought up as the ideal Siracusan or whatever and she does the cute doodle in the 3DPV so I thought she probably had the Forced Music Lessons as a kid (The music sheets are Bella Ciao and of course)

The bow choreo was the one thing i really wanted to animate but the music sheet segment (based on that one split second shot above) ended up being my favourite part even though compositing the motion was a mini hell on it's own (ended up compiling a long png to scroll by with the red doodles layered over)

Other things

I will never live down my (self-imposed) shame of misspelling the title (I fixed the title on youtube but its why the ending shot in the upload says ZittE e Buoni instead of ZittI e Buoni) don't rush your fancam in 10 days 😔

I didn't look through the entirety of the EN loc but Idk why they had Lappy say 'Then go.' to Texas when it's supposed to be more like 'Let's go.' as in, 'let's go together' as opposed to 'alright off you go to the greyhall alone' lmfao also her saying goodbye forever padre when addio is right there

I don't think I'm insane enough to do another ppt soon but man this pair really makes the 'imagines a whole music video while listening to music' part of my brain go wheee like first it was Starset's Manifest then Signore de Lupi then this and while working on this one i was thinking how Måneskin's Torna A Casa would be another good track

ok ty for reading #GIRLYAOIREAL

#arknights #Il siracusano #bentodraws #bentotexto #I was going to have this post as a reblog but tumblr broke my copypaste so here's a completely separate post #feel free to ask me about anything else i didn't cover in here

[akuma-tenshi]

tell me ur theories abt 100 epitaphs

had to go back to get screenshots bc i felt like i was going insane. so:

at the very beginning, during the lyrics "lay your emotions with them like a mourning wreath", there's a shot of kt's face on a headstone. which makes me believe she may have been terminated at some time during this whole thing and there's going to be a twist where yura gets into the facility with whoever the hell decides to join him only to learn she's been dead this whole time and all this was for nothing

my friend pointed this out when the video first came out but there's a shot of yura during the first chorus where he's surrounded by several mostly-unnamed characters when they say "another apathetic epitaph". iirc he's between kolya and nikita, both of whom are dead, and their faces are shown in frames, likely symbolising those photos that are displayed during funerals. which could very possibly foreshadow yura dying, probably during the mission to save kt.

olga being shown with flowers sprouting out of her does not give me hope for her. this is especially worrying considering the fact that she's shown in occam's razor during the line "but some ventures require a sacrificial lamb" - this could refer to her taking the fall for yura after the whole incident in the zone but it's still concerning. oddly enough i'm less confident in this than in my yura and kt dying theories bc it just doesn't feel like olga would die (wouldn't make sense or be satisfying from a narrative perspective) but it's still possible. if she doesn't die then she's definitely not coming out of this the same

this is not the last we've seen of sergei. this may just be wishful thinking (love that square......) and ik he basically just gave up on sanya. but anyone who's tried to help an especially difficult person will tell you it's not that easy to just let them go, especially considering that he's already done so much for her and still has skin in the game even if he does completely drop his sister (*gestures vaguely at that one drawing of him reading a book on "breaking your girlfriend out of jail" or smthn.... ik it's just a silly joke but i'd be fuckin hyped if we got sergei breaking olga out of prison). something tells me he's going to keep trying to influence things from afar without getting too invested; whether he'll keep trying to help sanya or just focus all his effort on olga, i'm not sure.

sanya is becoming another yura. she's getting more hopeless and desperate, not to save kt but to protect / help yura. she's doing crazier and crazier shit and has managed to stay in contact with him even though sergei tried to stop them from meeting. the shot of her laughing surrounded by candles, the shot of her sitting so nonchalantly against the wall talking to dima, the shot of her standing up to sergei to protect yura... she feels very yuracore and it worries me. also the shot of her strangling her past self, the one that was much more optimistic and bright yet sheltered.. any writer will tell you that having a character literally harm / kill their past self is the number one way of indicating that they're completely cutting off their past and moving on.

this is a very stupid theory but kolya isn't actually dead. he plays way more of a role in 100 epitaphs than he ever did before. and yes nikita has content too but there are just.. so many shots of kolya (the one that stands out most to me is of him sitting in the center of the screen with headphones on). he may not be the same person but like. what if the grinder didn't kill him?? what if he's alive, just far away from all this?? what if he comes back?? changed and injured but still kolya. ((god i hope i'm talking about the right person here if that isn't kolya i'm going to look like such a dumbass))

also the title "100 epitaphs" and the prominent presence of two (supposedly) dead characters.... it doesn't inspire confidence in a lot of these characters' chances of surviving.

sorry if some of this is incoherent or just downright weird, i've been up for a while. but i will always take up an opportunity to rant about this video it's had me positively ill. i was literally fucking shaking while typing this

#happy one month to 100 epitaphs #came out at a time i really fucking needed it tbh #rambling #thanks for the ask!! #pafl #parties are for losers #pafl theories #100 epitaphs

[givehimthemedicine]

some of the footage the lab is feeding El in NINA is of a MIRRORED Rainbow Room.

continuing off my recent post about why NINA has 4 cameras inside of it watching El. some more realizations:

those six screens around the sides are actually just the same three video feeds doubled. the only unique feed is the center one.

which gives us a total of FOUR feeds in NINA even though there are seven screens.

and one of them is backwards.

in reality, if you're standing at the mirror, the benches-and-drawing-tables side of the RR is on your right - as it appears, correctly, in the red feed and green feed. their footage makes sense coming from the cameras I've circled here (not the events within, I'm just talking about the angles these cameras see)

but the yellow feed has been flipped horizontally:

if we are SEEING the drawing/chess corner of the room in the yellow feed, that means it was filmed by the camera in the other corner - over by the plinko/puzzle table. that is the camera circled in this shot of El playing plinko. except we're seeing the wrong side of the room behind her.

"oh Nat, that's all so normal. I wish this was harder to understand." I GOTCHU

we get another shot where the yellow feed IS oriented correctly! like, in the shot where you see all the NINA screens at once, the yellow is wrong. but in the subsequent shots where El is looking woozy at individual screens, that version of the yellow is correct. that is what this camera should see.

and both are the same footage flipped horizontally.

well. the same footage except one of them is a wider angle where you see a lot more of the plinko board on the right but shh I'm too tired to think about that

anyway maybe this helps explain the moving bodies/blood locations, specifically the cases where I swear the sides of the room keep getting conflated.

the live massacre scene is unreliable because it's poor El's brain's mashup of the doctored / contradictory footage she's being shown. El doesn't know which way the RR really was. she doesn't remember it at all. so all footage is given equal weight, rather than her brain autocorrecting the wrong ones.

the RR is so hard to mentally map because it's a mind-numbingly-almost-symmetrical room, and we're frequently shown it via its mirror reflection, which confuses our perception further. El is canonically just as confused.

(I need to dive deeper on the details of this idea when I get more time. @aemiron-main iirc you're the lead investigator on the changing bodies/blood thing so you'd know better off the top of your head - would you say a room mirroring accounts for many more of the discrepancies? certainly not all)

finally, back to the center feed -

I believe this is correctly oriented (you can see a sliver of the mirror on the extreme left, which tracks with where the plinko game is situated, and Little El(?) is operating it right-handed which is consistent with Big El.)

BUT, don't worry, there's still a weird problem with this footage!

this is a close-up low shot behind El(?) which was not filmed from any of the corner-mounted RR surveillance cameras like the other feeds. it would've had to be filmed from one of those tripod ones.

and they do keep a tripod camera in that area of the RR, but it's visibly not where it would've had to be in order to film this footage which causes El to "remember" One in the plinko scene.

btw, why is this the only footage filmed in portrait mode? if it was landscape, we could have seen One sit next to her. as it is, he wouldn't be visible in it at all. maybe that's why.

so why are they flipping just that one feed?

well, since they showed right and wrong versions of the yellow feed, I suspect they sometimes flip the other feeds too. I just only caught them once. they only seldom give us glimpses of what's going on inside NINA.

is the center feed important because it's unique?

the lab hasn't made sure El is watching that one right-side-up. you can see in the reflection in her eye that she's watching the center screen landscape.

which means the one and only of seven screens El is actually watching right-side-up is this one:

why wasn't NINA designed like this, with all the screens the same way, if you just want the viewer to watch and comprehend all the footage?

because NINA isn't for remembering or comprehending.

having all the screens side by side and right-side-up makes it easy to compare footage and spot discrepancies between them (is that why Brenner is watching multiple screens of the same event?).

the NINA weird screen angles is exactly what stopped me from spotting the mirrored RR problem until right now, and I've been scrutinizing this, and I'm not drugged like El is. with a bunch of screens of boring, redundant-looking footage at random angles, your brain tends to just kinda be like "eh, I don't feel like mentally righting that, I'll take your word for it. seems legit."

what's on the center screen when El banishes One?

they don't want me to know. I wish I did.

every time we see El in NINA, her body breaks the water surface in such a way that prevents us seeing a reflection of the center screen. which apparently tends to display the only unique feed.

is it fair to call this footage-flipping onscreen proof of NINA being not merely a memory-viewing machine but a memory-altering / memory-implantation / machine? so, a brainwashing machine?

which has major implications for the Henry and Victor Creel contradictory memories situation, as long suspected by folks smarter than I.

so the "memories" we experience live with El are actually a meshing of either: A) real events and doctored / fabricated elements B) real events but from 4 different timelines C) por qué no los dos?

not sure whether this "creates" a new timeline in any way besides in El's mind, but even if it were just that, that is valuable enough - to make arguably the strongest superpowered person on the planet remember whatever events you want them to.

but just that doesn't explain the 4 cameras inside NINA, does it?

El using her current mind in past memories

don't forget we have a whole scene of Big El, while immersed in a NINA memory, conversing with current Brenner about the events she's experiencing being a memory and not real.

which means Big El is talking while floating in the tank, or else current Brenner wouldn't know to respond by microphone.

and if she can access her current mind/knowledge and apply that inside of past (real or fake) events.... doesn't that mean she can also use her current powers in past events?

YES. HERE SHE IS DOING IT:

El very very rarely bleeds from both nostrils. two-nostril jobs are very strenuous in relation to her current power level (killing the cat guards and closing the gate are the only other times I remember).

which indicates she's doing something HUGE even in relation to her newly HIGHER THAN EVER power level.

I just find it funny that she also bled from both nostrils in the exact event she was remembering while bleeding from both nostrils.......

also Brenner and Owens see her EEG spiking at that moment, which they've shown us repeatedly throughout the show reflects power use. she's DOING SOMETHING.

so.... Iots I need to chew on.

did the massacre go down wrong and the lab needs to trick El into remembering it differently, and using her current powers inside of the "memory" to somehow actually either change the past, or switch/unswitch timelines, or merge timelines, or something?

is there a timeline where One kicked Little El's ass, or killed her, and the lab needs her to go back and win in that one instead? did little El banish the wrong guy and the lab wants them switched? something like that?

there's something more time machiney going on with NINA even beyond just brainwashing, I swear.

#why yes I am wild-eyed and messy-haired pacing my office talking to myself. thanks for asking #lab stuff #nina stuff #mine #givehimthemedicine analysis #analysis #(Brenner into the mic) One has Eleven on the ropes.. show's over folks- WHAT'S THIS! BIG ELEVEN WITH THE STEEL CHAIR!!! OHH AND HE'S DOWN!! #<- this is a joke. but also completely my real theory I just can't prove it all the way yet #also standard disclaimer apologies to those of you who have already said some of this as is usually the case

[nalyra-dreaming]

Love your blog!! hopefully this makes sense⬇️

Do you also find it frustrating that people don’t understand or ignore the interconnectedness of the relationships in iwtv? I keep seeing people say they fear relationships are being shoehorned into season two specifically Lesmand and DM.

But it’s confusing to me that people only want a Loumand season because both characters in that relationship are heavily influenced by their relationships with Lestat. So to me, it’s kind of impossible to understand those characters in the Paris and Dubai timelines without seeing flashbacks and revisiting scenes. Armand’s past deserves to be shown, as it will influence his relationship with Daniel and Louis. Which means that we need flashbacks to DM and Lesmand (even Marius).

Season one is slightly different because Loustat is the relationship which introduces us to the characters. They got the main focus because you don’t want the first season to feel overwhelming showing loads of timelines and relationships to casual viewers. The end of season one introduces us to Loumand and season two will show their story which means Lestat being shown as he’s vital to their past.

Maybe it’s just the hardcore shippers worried about this stuff? I understand people wanting their favourite couples having screen time. I trust Rolin Jones he will do them all justice. I just want to see vampires being absolute freaks in every era no matter what the ship.

I don’t know if I articulated my point properly but I hope you get what I mean.

I think I do :) (And glad you like!)

The thing is... this show is not like the others. In a good way. It's color-conscious, it's not shying away from the difficult stuff, it puts its proverbial fingers into wounds, and it clearly, obviously does not simplify the relationships.

Said it yesterday, but who would've thought we would get this. Honestly.

So... I can understand why that is something that needs to get used to by "casual show only viewers". I get it.

And on top of the show and its approach you have a source material which does not shy away from anything either. Like, Anne Rice was ... something. Definitely not unproblematic, but also fucking fearless.

And the combination of this... dense and vivid source material in combination with this kind of approach?!

It's just something that's not really been on screen before, imho.

Show of the decade, and all that :)

This combination is also why the show may be so hard to grasp for many more casual viewers, or even book readers who have maybe "only" read the first few books. Because the show is not doing only the first few books. It's doing the big arcs. It's putting in hooks, "seeds" as Assad called them iirc, to be taken up later, to come fully into play only much later.

There is a plan behind it all.

And I think that's amazing.

So to come back to the "shipping" - I have ranted about this before^^, but all the "ships" are valid in the VC. That is another thing that sets it apart from other medias and shows I think.

And that is something fandom in general might not be quite "used to" either. Because a ship does not usually need to be canon or valid in the source material to be shipped.

But here?^^

There is no need to fight or defend, or establish or justify.

They just are.

Yes I do find it frustrating at times, especially with the time that has past between seasons... but I also understand it.

It's just not like (in) other shows and that will take getting used to.

I think the show will let them be the "freaks" in every era though, and I think that's very, very beautiful :)))

#Anonymous #asks #ask nalyra #amc iwtv #iwtv #amc interview with the vampire #interview with the vampire amc #iwtv amc #iwtv 2022 #interview with the vampire #shipping #ships #relationships

[the-resurrection-3d]

@glitteronin activated my autism trap card so I decided to expand on my "the poison song in Hazbin ep 4 feels like rape porn" hot take.

I'm kidding. My actual hot take is that the episode is pretty alright anyway.

So this originally was going to be a reblog of someone else’s posts about how Angel’s characterization "makes it obvious [Viv] doesn’t think abuse is bad,” but I decided to just leave that person alone. I’ve also revised this quite a bit, because I want to present ways of thinking about representation of trauma that aren’t just “graphic = bad” and “metaphor/off-screen=good,” and preserve my own attempts to think through this conflict. So don’t expect a definitive thesis or anything too prescriptive—I welcome other perspectives here!

It is also worth noting that someone with a rape kink DID help storyboard the Poison montage. Last I heard, they are not a survivor and just grew up very repressed. I didn’t bring this up before because the Instagram post I saw from them only said they helped “choregraph” the dance, so I wasn’t sure if they has only storyboarded the dance sequences or if they’d done the entire thing.

Anyway.

Based on the latter part of episode 4 and what Viv has said in the past about being a survivor (IIRC) and Angel Dust being her comfort character, I feel like she does care about abuse, but there are a ton of little different points of friction that are all coming together to undermine Angel Dust's arc as a part of a larger anti-abuse project for many people.

I want to say I’m coming at this from the perspective of someone who largely appreciated what the episode was going for, and was not triggered by the montage. Not to say that people who were triggered are wrong in their criticisms – just that I’m not coming from a place of immediate emotional distress, and I’m not judging Angel’s reactions to his trauma against my own.

I’ve said elsewhere that the Poison montage has the same energy as a lot of rape porn—meaning it has the same focus on the heightened emotional states but none on the real physical toll of these events. Specifically, the scene made me think of this quote from Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman, which is a book-length academic work on the rape porn of the Marquis de Sade:

It follows that prostitutes are favourite heroines of the pornographic writer, though the economic aspects of a prostitute's activity, which is her own main concern in the real world, will be dealt with only lightly. Her labour is her own private business. Work, in this context, is really dirty work; it is unmentionable. Even unspeakable. And we may not talk about it because it reintroduces the question of the world. In this privatised universe pleasure is the only work; work itself is unmentionable. To concentrate on the prostitute's trade as trade would introduce too much reality into a scheme that is first and foremost one of libidinous fantasy, and pornographic writers, in general, are not concerned with extending the genre in which they work to include a wider view of the world.

Of course, this does not perfectly map onto Hazbin Hotel: indeed, the project of episode 4 (however successful the individual viewer found it to be) is to introduce a lot of reality into Angel’s facade of a Being A Walking Hole.

Still, to me, a lot of the episode still works on a similar wavelength as the porn author’s “libidinous fantasy,” as even the parts of his story we are supposed to find upsetting and painful are still the parts that are sexualized in conventional rape/non-con porn, and follow the same fantastical logic. By which I mean, Angel can be shown briefly in pain or tired from being attacked for hours, but never for too long, and he certainly doesn't get too tired or high he stumbles in his high heels, or so tired or sore he messes up a take and they have to stop and redo shots (something that is very common in the production of even regular ass porn, btw). Hell, his bruised eye from Val slapping him is gone by the time the montage is over.

Indeed, the montage revels in forcing us to become not merely witnesses, but spectators to Angel’s victimization: the song is energic, the cuts frenetic, with tons of small shots that can easily be clipped out and used as regular pornography—the shots of Angel and Val fucking being probably the most obvious example, as without context, there’s nothing to suggest that Angel is being coerced, even as he is bitten. Part of this is intentional, since Angel Dust is supposed to be "addicted" to the lifestyle—the song itself is clearly supposed to have the energy of something like "Toxic" by Britney Spears, which Viv said in a Q&A was Angel's audition song.

And despite our culture’s increased awareness of and (lip service) empathy to survivors, it is truly daring to be portraying this kind of reaction to abuse. I saw multiple people on my timeline say this made them feel seen, and I am happy for them.  

 But then we have Husk calling Angel a loser over being abused a few scenes later, and them singing a fun, jazzy song about it. Sure, we now have a good grasp of Angel's character motivations—and I wouldn't be surprised if this pacing decision was in response to Angel getting blasted for years as an offensive caricature of gay men—but would someone who just got gangraped for hours really be receptive to THIS message from someone they were just fiercely arguing with? Furthermore, on a purely character level, why is Husk doing this and not Charlie, who is the one Angel was having actual conflict with earlier in the episode? The scene itself is fine, and it's completely understandable why they would want to end the episode on a lighter note, but the way the story is being paced makes it feel like Viv wants to just rush through to get to the HuskDust stuff.

Revising this essay, I revisited an old essay by Will Harris that I frequently cite when discussing ethics of representation, wherein he points out that the “I”/eye of the [there poet, here viewer] is not ethically neutral:

Witness carries no moral imperative in itself; the act of seeing is not inherently virtuous. Or you could say, its moral charge lies less in the “evidence” it provides than in how it’s rendered in language. The viewing “I”/eye is a fiction, inasmuch as it cleanly separates the subject from the object. So the job of the writer is not just to choose what to look at, but to work out how to represent the complex relationships embedded in the act of looking.

The paragraph before this has Harris cite Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, wherein scholarSaidiya Hartman refuses to reprint Aunt Hester’s beating from the first chapter of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. “It’s too easy to put such horror into words and so think that you’ve faced up to it,” as Harris writes. “Accounts of extreme hurt may prompt indignation, but Hartman argues that they eventually “immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity.” That in some sense, to demand “suffering be materialized and evidenced” is more “obscene” than the original torture.”

Of course, placing this quote here in this essay about a show that is currently being lambasted for portraying graphic rape at all, in an online culture that often conflates representation with endorsement or some secret moral deviancy on the author’s part, would be to suggest that portraying rape on-screen is itself an issue, when representations are always bound by their historical and social contexts. Sometimes you do have to be that graphic, but like Harris says, it’s easy to think just showing the horror in itself is meaningful — and I think we all are a little too blackpilled here on Tumblr to think that just Showing The Horrors is enough to produce meaningful change within the average person.

However, I think the more useful idea of Harris’s is “withness.” Harris writes that in these more ideal poems,

Subject and object are no longer distinct from one another. In such a state, the self is implicated—emotionally and ethically—in the other. It’s impossible to conceive of “being” without “being-with.” Hopkins writes: “With witness I speak this.” In my head that line always reads: “With withness I speak this.”

I think this is what the episode was attempting to do—to force us into the uneasy position of a spectator before moving us into witness (as Husk is asking the same kinds of questions we would be asking about Angel’s behavior, reacting with concern as we would even as we see through Angel’s facade) and then withness. Literally, two characters dueting about finding comfort in their core similarity. This is why it had to be him and not Charlie: Husk is in a much better position to produce withness than Charlie, given how the episode clearly parallels his deal with Alastor to Angel’s contract with Val.

Still, this kind of emotional-logic-driven storytelling leaves out any viewers who don’t resonate and does not offer them anything else to latch onto. It also does nothing to satisfy the structural questions raised earlier (couldn’t Charlie have sent Husk to deal with Val for some reason? It probably would be a dumb reason but at least the episode would have symmetry).

I still hold the big problem with the episode is that we are directed to think—indeed, are told directly—that Angel is “addicted” to this lifestyle, but we aren’t given a real origin point for this behavior: the trauma and addiction to said trauma are a closed loop. Val is such an obvious piece of shit, to the point of even sexually harassing the literal Princess of Hell the very second he meets her, that we get no sense of what drew Angel in. Sure, we can make inferences that he likes sex, likes drugs, liked fame, but if Val has always acted like an obvious psycho, Angel blaming himself for his abuse is, in a very cruel way, completely justified.

But in real life, even people who get with obvious shitbags often have reasons for this laid in their past: it’s rarely the case that a normal, well-adjusted person is just so fucking stupid they end up marrying Mister Rape.

This disconnect between what I’m being told to think and what I’m actually being shown is where this attempt at withness failed for me, and the lack of attention to reality and general indulgence of the montage is probably what people are picking up on when they say it gave them kink vibes.

But still! Looking at the montage in context, I can appreciate what Viv was trying to do. The real sickening thing, to me, is that the internet is so unwilling and unready to engage with Viv’s work and with this type of representation in any type of good faith, so even if it were a 10/10 absolute masterpiece, it wouldn’t have mattered. Can’t wait for the next Angel episode so we can have this discourse all over again!

#rape mention

[stilldancewithyou]

I really think they’re not gonna do J cheating in s3 which on one hand I’m fine with since they made him bi and as a bi person myself I don’t want to see that awful stereotype on screen for the billionth time (granted I also feel like it was so tokenized because it was such a blip and I don’t think they’ll ever mention his attraction to men ever again or explore that in a meaningful way but hey maybe they’ll surprise me since I have low expectations when it comes to TV and bi representation; personally I think Gavin has great chemistry with Sean but I’m not sure they’d ever explore j/s since people may find it weird he’d bounce between the Conklin siblings and as of now Steven is straight in the show iirc) but also I read that s2 follows the book very closely according to some extras on set and it would make me mad if they show Conrad’s very human mistakes and then sugar coat j’s so he still looks like the “nice” guy…

I can’t say j is my favorite but I also liked that the books kinda went beyond his nice guy persona and showed how this behavior can be a red flag (bc there’s too many shows that romanticize the guy who definitely sees the girl as the prize and let them end up together and like sorry to Jere who I know loved belly in his own way but his romantic intentions with her started off wrong since deep down it was about getting back and stealing something from Conrad and that just turned me off to them romantically (I do like their friendship)) but then also show him overcome it (I.e. letting belly go at their wedding day and presumably finding happiness since he was mentioned to have a plus one at the b/c wedding) I think this would be nice to see on tv but idk

granted I feel like they have shown in s1 the darker sides of J already and people ignore it (ex. The firework scene like no jeremiah physical violence is not the answer to your problems😒 and him yelling and projecting at Conrad saying he only sees belly as a competition and then scheming to separate them) but idk I don’t know what other problem aside from the cheating that they could throw between b/j to have them on the brink of a breakup that leads to their sham engagement happen for s3 (my worst fear is they’ll make belly the cheater to take the heat off of J since many of his Stans always say belly was projecting when she claimed him to cheat bc “technically” they were broken up and she was still in love with C and this would will further villanize her relationship with Conrad and thus prop up j… and that would remind me of how dirty the second to all the boys movie did LJ by not showing the very real mistakes Peter made in their relationship and making it look like she just freely bounced between John and Peter for no reason)… anyways this is a ramble but I’ve just been thinking about it since s2 is nearing (and in my heart I need it to be s3 already lol)

okay I have thought long and hard about this specific topic and I hear what you're saying. but I still firmly believe the cheating thing is going to happen in the show. I just...idk. there's just no way around it tbh. It's kind of like having Susannah miraculously live...the story wouldn't be the same. I think the cheating went a lot deeper than the surface level people are stuck at, at least in my interpretation of the book. The whole thing about it is that Jeremiah found out that Belly saw Conrad in Cousins in December and she never told him, and Jere spent months secretly brooding about that and being angry (somewhat rightfully) and the way he says things in the books I feel like Jeremiah thought/assumed that something happened between Conrad and Belly (cause they were alone at the beach house!) and he thinks that's why she never told him she saw Conrad. So I feel like after the whole fight about Cabo and Belly not wanting to go (bc she wanted to be in Cousins instead!) Jere went to Cabo pissed and jealous and slept with what's her face out of spite, to get back at Belly. at least that's my interpretation. But he obviously ended up realizing it was messed up and tried to make it better with the engagement. And then as a double whammy to Jeremiah, because of the engagement, Belly ends up spending the summer alone in Cousins with Conrad planning the wedding which probably made Jere even more angry (it's just so ironic lol).

I'm also with you on the point about Jeremiah being portrayed as the nice, perfect guy up until the 3rd book, and I really hope the show captures what the book did. Because they have worked overtime showing how perfect Jeremiah is and how he's the better option and trying to sell him as the best person. I think the way you get to see his flaws and mistakes (which are very human but also he was a jerk for a lot of the 3rd book outside of the cheating thing and ppl are blind to that I feel, like everyone is stuck on just the cheating). I also think it was super important for Belly to see Jere's flaws. She never truly appreciated what she had with Conrad and the person he is because she couldn't see past his very human mistakes (which all happened when his mother was dying and immediately after her death!!!) and she got so stuck on what Conrad did wrong she looked over and felt like Jeremiah was perfect and seemed so much better, funnier, happier, etc, etc, it was very much a "the grass is always greener on the other side" type of situation. The show definitely did show a lot more darker, more flawed sides of Jeremiah pretty early, but I still think they also worked really hard making him look perfect like in the books (up until book 3). I also think that's partly intentional, part of the point is that Belly had very idealized and romanticized ideas of both boys and what dating them and being around them all the time would be like and her bubble needed to be burst by reality.

anyway, all of that is to say that I still firmly believe the cheating thing is going to happen in the show. So prepare yourself while you have time. There's just nothing else that could compare to that to create not just the sham engagement but the angst, the jealousy, the anger and everything and then the way Conrad finds out about the cheating and immediately runs to Belly, all pissed off at Jere...I don't think anything else could get us there.

also as a side note: Jere and Steven did have good chemistry, but also I LOVE THEIR FRIENDSHIP TOO MUCH TO GO THERE. The friendship between Steven, Jere, and Conrad is so important and special and I feel like in the books they're presented as being like brothers. I don't think I could handle another lifelong friendship being ruined tbh (cause Belly and Jeremiah also had a great friendship and I loved it in the books but the show kinda fastforwarded over it). And I don't think it's something that could ever be explored because it gets too close the whole premise/storyline of Belly dating the Fisher brothers. But there's no harm in shipping! I personally thought Jeremiah and Taylor had really great chemistry as well (Taylor and Steven were also good together and I do love them) and I wanted to see more moments with Jere and Taylor. I am also still salty that the show basically erased Jere and Taylor's whole brief dating thing and some of the best flashbacks from the first book. But they're clearly going in the Steven/Taylor direction for now so I'm not getting my hopes up.

#tsitp #the summer i turned pretty #it's not summer without you #we'll always have summer #tsitp season 2 #tsitp season 3 #tsitp spoilers #belly x conrad #belly x jeremiah #jeremiah fisher #ask #sorry it took me so so long to answer this!

[applecherry108]

Hmmm…. Okay. One last post. My final verdict of Netflix atla is:

7/10, it’s not bad. It’s best viewed as supplementary to the original, not your first introduction to the series.

Did it make some questionable choices? Yes. Was it a one-to-one adaptation? Obviously not. But ffs, it’s not the end of the world. After going off the rails about Yue last night, I’m giving y’all a readmore this time bc I actually know it’ll be long.

I’m going to try to split this up into categories, so here we go.

The pros

Casting. Excellent casting. 10/10 no* notes. Everyone sounded the part, which, when adapting an iconic animated series imo, is the most important aspect. Think of the tmnt. Different cast each time, but the vibe of each turtle’s performance/voice remains consistent.

Costuming & set pieces. Again, fantastic visuals with just the right amount of realism.

Consolidation choices. I’ll say it. I thought they did an excellent job of condescending 20 22-minute episodes into 8 ~55-minute episodes. I thought centering so many different plots in Omashu was insanely clever and worked really well.

Azula. I liked the choice to have the audience meet Azula early. Letting us get a sneak peak into Ozai’s manipulation of her, as well as the overt reference to the Mother of Faces makes me think we might get Azula’s redemption shown on screen.

Children. Those Are Children. Those are children witnessing the horrors of war, which can be easily forgotten watching animated characters, but holy fuck those are CHILDREN.

Death. We’re straight up killing people on scream. Burning them alive even.

Iroh. I specifically want to shoutout Paul Sun-Hyung Lee. Mako made the role of Iroh legendary, a performance that’s difficult to follow and harder to capture correctly, but I think Lee absolutely crushed it. He wasn’t trying to perfectly imitate Mako, but that was the correct choice imo. He made it his own and successfully captured the essence of the character.

The mids/“that doesn’t make sense”

Bumi. Why’d they make him so cynical? Like, he was the opposite of how he should be. It’s not supposed to be up to Aang to teach Bumi that hopes still exists, it’s Bumi’s job to teach him that! Like that is the whole point of him being the one (1) person still alive that Aang knew.

Secret tunnel. An interesting enough solution to get Katara and Sokka to Aang, but at the same time…did that not move the tunnels into Omashu? Like it’s not a way in, it’s now a way into the heart of the dungeons? And sure, having it be a sibling bonding moment for Sokka and Katara was nice, but also…fuck you? The crystals ARE the answers. Iirc the badger moles didn’t sense emotions, they vibed to the music. I know I’m a kataang fan but even I cringed at the lights out kiss. But lights out should’ve still been the answer.

Did…did Aang never placate the forest spirit? Sure he planted the acorn but that didn’t like…do, the same thing this time. Speaking of spirits, they didn’t make Aang all that spiritual. He mentions having spiritual training with the monks plenty of times but he’s not actually like, attuned to them

Homeboy did not learn an OUNCE of water bending. Didn’t even try. I know he’s not on a time crunch (yet) but jfc practice with Katara at least??

Everything about Yue. I already went off on this, and it’s not really that bad, but it’s definitely mid. From her wonky wig, to her nonexistent ethereal moon eyes, to all the small changes that take the wind out of her tragedy—I’m a huge Yue fan. And while these changes are nicer for her, they’re a detriment to the overall narrative.

Wan Shi Tong. Having him just sorta…be there, and making it so only Aang can understand him is one hell of a choice, and does not fill me with faith that they’ll include the library in season 2, which is like…so pivotal on so many front, it’s truly the lynch pin of everything in book 2.

Ty Lee and Mai. They should not have been there. It’s one thing to show Azula getting manipulated by her dad, but legit why are the girlies here? Is it super funny to see these literal children and know they’re just a middle school mean girl clique? Absolutely. But the narrative purpose of Ty Lee and Mai is that they’re NOT there to support Azula.

The fucking… War tactics? Make no sense. You can’t “distract” from Omashu by laying siege to the North. These things are not connected or even associated. They are not allies. Forces were not diverted. Your logic isn’t logicing.

The cons (I’m super mad about)

None of the characters are angry enough. They nerfed Katara’s rage at being denied being taught by Paku. They striped Aang’s righteous spiritual fury (and placed it all on the ocean spirit? Hello??), and ohhh my godddd how did they take out most if not all of Zuko’s anger?? Where’s the brashness? The hotheadedness? The getting so worked up he stops thinking? He’s too fucking mellow. Did I enjoy him getting to be soft with Iroh? Yes. But god, at what cost? I know we as the fandom like to flanderize him as a soft autistic king, but that’s at least post book 3! Book 1 Zuko is a mess and a tragedy!

Speaking of Zuko, holy fuck they fucked up the Agni Kai so bad. I know I went off about this in a previous post but it bears so much repeating. He’s supposed to grovel for his father’s forgiveness, not be given and take the opportunity to fight back. So much of Iroh’s guilt is meant to come from not stepping in to stop his brother, not making a halfhearted attempt. OZAI IS NOT MEANT TO SHOW EVEN AN IOTA OF REMORSE. NEXT POINT—

OZAI. Let me just say, perfect casting. I love Daniel Dad Kim and I think he was the perfect choice, but it’s not his fault how Ozai was written/directed. WHY DOES HE LOOK REMORSEFUL SO MUCH? WHY DOES HE ACT LIKE HE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT ZUKO? WHY ON GODS GREEN EARTH DID THEY TRY TO HUMANIZE THE NARCISSISTIC MACHIAVELLIAN GOD COMPLEX VILLAIN! Part of what makes his downfall so perfect is that he’s shown mercy! That Aang DOESNT kill him! That he’s so thoroughly and remorselessly evil that literally everyone is saying “he needs to fucking die” and Aang spares him. He does not get to go out in a blaze of glory, he goes slowly, with a whimper! And all the poetic justice of that decision gets sucked out of you allow him even an INCH to show regret. A character willing to burn his son’s face off for being disrespectful is not a character that would regret that decision.

The gaang are barely coworkers. The heart of this show is the bonds between the core cast, and I never once felt like Aang and Katara/Sokka truly meant the world to each other. They say it. A lot of but they don’t show it. That chemistry is not there. It’s like watching goddamn Voltron and getting to the final season and thinking “this found family doesn’t even like each other.” The show spends so much time reinforcing the peripheral bonds of Aang and Zuko, and Katara and Sokka, that it drops the entire ball of Aang/Sokka/Katara.

*gestures vaguely to making everything about the moon spirit so fucking convoluted*It didn’t have to be a series of conveniences. You’re allowed to just fire punch a fish to death.

That’s all I can think of for now. I know there’s some HUGE cons but the worst of them are spread out. This is by far not the worst adaptation Netflix has ever put out. It’s certainly not OPLA (*chef’s kiss*), but it’s not Death Note either. It’s fine, really. It’s a pretty good watch. I do hope they finish out the series so we can finally, FINALLY have a live action Toph, but also because I’m so curious how the changes will compound. How differently these choice will go, and what new plots we could get from that. I could even see how we could get to fucking zukka from here, and while I absolutely do not think they’ll do that, it’s a fascinating possibility that’d be totally plausible from where we are. I want them to divert even further if they continue. I want this version to justify its existence in some significant way, even if it’s just “actually let’s redeem Azula during the conflict.”

But not Ozai. Fuck that. If they redeem Ozai, we riot.

#and now I get to go watch the og series again #apple talks #Apple reacts to Netflix atla

[lighthouseborn]

i'm gonna say something i want to say on a post moving through the non-rp po.tc fandom space but i don't want the smoke. yes i'm a coward. yes it is also a thing i have said in different shapes before.

tl;dr the problem with dmtnt isn't what they say about elizabeth, it's what they don't say about elizabeth (i.e. literally anything.)

honestly the biggest flaw in the entire "should elizabeth have left piracy" conversation is that the movie never asserts that she did. she's just literally not part of the narrative of dmtnt at all.

(which makes sense, to a degree, as it's a next gen story; one of its bigger flaws (imo) is jack's (largely mischaracterized) over-presence. he's not necessary or even all that influential to the plot, he's genuinely just there. mostly to the effect of annoyance or occasional hinderance. henry and carina could go for the trident and have a perfectly reasonable adventure without him, and nothing necessitates salazar's motivations being about him at all. in fact i think it's coincidence, in the nathanson draft? captain brand, iirc, hates jack, but it's not actually what makes him a part of the story, he's actually a figure tied into the myth by hades. jack's only there because he's the franchise pull and the people who wrote the movie had nostalgia for him but i'm digressing--)

"elizabeth stopped sailing" is a version of the story that people don't like — but they invented it to begin with so the whole conversation around it -if it makes sense, if it changes or ruins her character, if someone can find reason in it for themself- is a big pointless circle! nothing canon says definitively comments on what happened to elizabeth except to say she raised her son in a lighthouse that might be near port royal. that depends on how completely the word-of-god you think a prop map shown on screen exactly once is. even then, there are a thousand reasons she could be living near port royal. 'she retired' is easily the most boring of those possible reasons, i agree, but it's still not what the movie says about her.

the ultimate fact is - the movie never says anything about her, because it doesn't think to say anything about her. sure that sucks for other reasons (pushing her out of what was, really, her story to begin with) but it doesn't actually unstitch her character it just leaves things frustratingly ambiguous. it's lazy and uninspired writing but not nearly as much of the big betrayal it's made out to be. no one broke elizabeth, they just weren't interested in writing more about her.

which, again, sucks! but for completely different reasons than the (for some reason) still ongoing conversation about 'she could have retired after her trauma gauntlet'.

she could have retired! she could have not! she could have built a pirate empire on untamed seas! she could have became a heartless evil pirate king who killed for sport! she could have gone mad! she could have found another husband or four! there are lots and lots of open ended possibilities with a character so complex. the movie doesn't actually infringe on any of these, because it just doesn't care about her at all. it doesn't even care enough to say for fact, she retired and lives a horribly wealthy lifestyle, or she didn't retire and turned port royal into a new pirate haven-- it doesn't care. it doesn't. the movie says nothing because, other than Henry's Mother, elizabeth is nothing to the version of dead men tell no tales that we got.

—which, further, if you sit with that for a couple of seconds, isn't that surprising or even different at all from the rest of the franchise. which does not care about elizabeth's mother, or will's mother, or jack's mother, or angelica's mother--- all of these characters are nameless. the one non-appearing mother (from the movie universe. yes i've read tpof, not i'm not acknowledging it here, it's a different beast) who has a name in this list of ignored women actually also comes from dmtnt. magaret smyth, however, has a name that has been established in the franchise as meaning no one. ("Welcome to Port Royal, Mr. Smith.") carina's mother is magaret no-one, the aptly named madame not-appearing-in-this-film. so, once more with feeling, elizabeth being pushed into the background as Henry's Mother And That's All fucking! sucks!! it's! lazy!!! and! boring!!! but what is isn't is some big surprising upheaval. they didn't give you a stranger, completely 180'd character with a familiar name, they gave you a big empty place in the narrative who doesn't speak a single word and only shows up to be kissed. those are different things! by all means complain about the big empty spaces in this story (i hate them!) but stop, please stop, repeating the same bullshit that isn't even what happened

"i hate how they treated elizabeth" me too! "they changed her" wrong! it's worse, they did nothing because they didn't even care enough about her to try! which is a big shame because what they got right about henry and will and gibbs is SO right. carina is SUCH an interesting heroine in her own right but also as a foil for henry - and the fantasy of the series in general. barbossa is THAT BITCH who gets a full run of character arcs for no other reason than he's fun to explore and keep widening, he has the range. a 'down on his luck, washed up' sparrow is an brilliant and unique concept! unfortunately, at almost every turn the writers missed the lynch pins and the places where gravity fit into this franchise. so it turned out a big crumbly, unfinished-feeling mess. and that really starts to make sense when you consider; they didn't think elizabeth was worth writing about.

the dmtnt team's* nostalgia for pirate adventure and grand chaos blinded them to how essential elizabeth, the heart of the trilogy, was. and they got very close! by scrapping the Yet More New Characters (a big complaint of on stranger tides) in order to tie them back to where we started. they just tripped a few feet in front of really, really getting it. but failing to get something is not the same as picking it up and ripping it in half. it's bitter tasting, and disappointing, and frustrating, but it's not an act of spite or malice or even misunderstanding. they just never picked it up. didn't even see it.

*the rossio version of the script is also sorely lacking in this regard. true enough philip and syrena reappear, but people didn't find them all that compelling to begin with, they go through more or less an identical, ambigious arc and end in the same place they began, and the script even directly notes they could easily be replaced with unrelated, new characters. his version is even less connected to the heart of what made the trilogy good, imo. i'm forced to assume ted e.lliot is elizabeth's champion, and that while rossio is very good at the grand concepts and mythical atmosphere, elliot must have brought the grounding elements tying character together and giving them real substance. without both, the rossio script is empty adventure, like on stranger tides, and the nathanson script follows down a similar road. joachim and espen as the directing team were fans enough to bring their nostalgia in and i think is what led to to looking back toward the trilogy more, which was great, they just -again- tripped and fell short of a full return to spirit.

ultimately, the whole problem with elizabeth isn't "she was ruined" it's that she was abandoned. forgotten, or ignored. they killed all her loved ones and left her on a beach and when someone thought to go back to that beach, to that moment, it was to wonder "what about the kid" and never even ask "but what did She do?". I'm fully convinced you could ask that team "what did elizabeth do in that time" and they'd all collectively shrug at you. it's fucked up. but it's not the same as being unwritten. whether elizabeth sat on a beach for 20 years or not is left up to you, the viewing audience. and while that is just so... annoying. they still didn't tie her to that beach themselves. fandom did that. they filled a space and then blamed the writers for the thing the audience filled it with, instead of for leaving a big gaping hole in the heart of their story. it's very vexing.

("then why is henry in the navy at the start?" why is the govenor's daughter a pirate? shit happens. he's 20, a lot could have put him there. if the first thing you think of is boring as hell, make something else up. the movie has fuck all to say about henry's background, too. this is the big gaping hole in the writing that i'm talking about — by overlooking elizabeth, henry's entire history is likewise a big non-statement. sure, you can choose to infer certain things, but you're still inferring. you're still inventing. the movie doesn't care. all we know is everyone on the monarch thinks he's a "landsman" - but if that's true, where has he learned so much about pirate flags and oceanic mythology? what was he doing, between age ten-or-twelve, when he sank himself, and when we see him again in the triangle to be so self-sure and impulsive? the movie doesn't care, it just wants you to see that he is. this is both a strength and weakness, because it invites you to play. unfortunately it invited a fandom who had long ago decided what the future of these characters must be, who then were angry and disappointed when what they got didn't match a mess of a thousand visions that couldn't possibly be matched. so the movie decided "we'll let them decide", removing all the hard and fast statements, and the fandom assumed the worst and decided that was what they were given, instead of empty spaces. and now everyone calls the movie something it isn't. and it's all because the writing forgot that the heart in the chest wasn't actually the heart they needed to be focused on.)

anyway. i think that's out of my system now i'll try to shut up about it going forward.

#i'm just sighing into my hands about how people keep saying the same things again #which also means i am saying the same thing in response to it yeah #the circle spins on or w/e #genuinely about to haul off & start biting ( ooc. ) #tbd(?)

[thyandrawrites]

Is the leagues bar hideout an active place for civilians to go out and drink or is it Just a place for the leauge to hide at? I was having a discussion with my bf and we were talking about how AFO has businesses that he can benefit from (kinda like how Garaki has his own hospital which is technically a business that him and AFO can benefit from) and we were debating if the bar hideout is really a actual public bar for people to go to or just secretively for the league.

* I’ve asked this question to two other meta writers to see what different opinions I get :) *

Hi! I think it just has the aesthetics of a bar, but it's not an actual business. Only a hideout. My reasons for thinking so are the following:

We never actually see any customers inside, like you'd expect from a proper business. Not even fellow criminals / lowlives. In fact, the two other people aside from the League who ever enter the building are Giran (their broker) and Stain, that one time he wanted to talk to Shigaraki, and likely requested a meeting.

When the heroes are tracking down the bar, they speak with a civilian who works nearby that mentions the building has no tenants:

and while of course it's possible that in the case of a shady business there was no paperwork trail, the hideout was also in a busy area, presumably in the middle of Kamino ward. So I think they would've noticed movement around the area, and customers going in and out. In fact, the League probably entered and got out thanks to Kurogiri, or they sneaked in covertly because the raid is kickstarted by Dabi accidentally drawing attention to the fact that the building was occupied.

3. Last but not least, and this is mostly speculation on my side... Shigaraki has his own room in that hideout, and iirc, it's the same one he grew up in. Looking closely, you can see that the wall shelves and the desk are in the same place. It's implied that AFO raised Tenko in isolation, to stunt his growth and make Tenko emotionally dependant on his master. This is shown in how early!Tomura struggles to regulate his emotions around others and is very volatile and quick to anger outbursts when things don't go his way. AFO limited Tomura's interactions with the outside world and with other people, all to make his control on the kid stronger. So for example we only see young Tomura go out when AFO wants him to kill lowlives. Otherwise he's a shut-in with no friends until the League comes around. He only has his games, TV and the occasional newspaper to keep him company and give him glimpses of the world outside his small room. Even his interactions with AFO are always through a screen. All of that is reminiscent of how AFO abused his brother, locking him up in a dark cellar, waiting for Yoichi to submit to his authority. He was fine keeping him there forever if Second hadn't come to free him. So it's entirely within his methods to use isolation as a grooming technique.

So. Since it suited AFO's goals to keep Tomura as far away from human contact as possible, and to keep his existence a secret to be unleashed on his nemesis at the right time... I don't think he would've "raised" him amongst people. Pretty much the opposite. A real bar with real people coming in and out would've exposed Tomura too much and too early, and AFO couldn't have that.

I hope this offered some new points for your debates, and good luck on getting other responses!

#ali replies #bnha #my post

[minthe-lover]

This is kinda dumb but why are Artemis, Apollo, and Zeus purple. Like I know purple is suppose to represent a high sex drive. But they are never really shown to have one. Like in mythology Artemis is aroace (Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite). I'm not saying that ace people can't have sex drives but myth Artemis is never in a relationship. The best piece I can come up with is that Eros says she is lying when she says she has never been in love. Apollo does sa Persephone but that doesn't have to do with a high sex drive. Sure he lusts after Persephone the moment he sees her but so does every other man. IIRC Zeus only has one on screen affair. I'm pretty sure they say he as more. But they only show one. But what am I to think rs knows show don't tell. He also touchs some girls butt too. Him might do more but that is all I remember. Which is the first one to point too an actual high sex drive. But is it really enough to literally show on his skin?

well.. I don't really think rs put that much thought into it.. if any at all. At most I think she mades zeus (and maybe apollo) purple for the high sex drive connection... and then decided to write in the whole apollo and Artemis surprise zeus kid thing. So then added artemis to the whole purple colour without thinking about the other connections.

#anti lo #lo critical

[valkyrieandstrangeridingaragorn]

If Gorr is a God Butcher, shouldn't he go to Omnipotence City? 🤔

I agree but I have a theory why they showed Gorr killing only one god (and only because he had personally hurt him and gotten his daughter killed).

With this obsession with finding "problematic" aspects in every single story that is released nowadays, I can imagine that even though a butchering montage would have been pretty awesome to watch... you think it would be welcome well if he was shown killing certain gods?

I can imagine as writers/producers/directors/what have you, it can't be easy to handle certain things in this new era where every movie/series is potentially "oppressive" in one way or another instead of being an instrument from which to tell a story. It wouldn't have been Gorr just murdering this or that god, we would have a crazy number of posts complaining that he attacked a certain god from this or that place, who looks this or that way and is a revered god from this or that culture.

Iirc Taika said he almost included Jesus Christ in Omnipotent City. We can all guess why he didn't. Same reason he would never treat him the way he has handled Thor, for instance. You can make fun of Zeus, sure. But Jesus? Can't anger certain people. Just mock Thor instead.

I get the feeling that maybe part of the concern was that if Gorr was shown killing a bunch of gods, some people would list them up and try to find some hidden meaning behind the choice of killing that particular group of gods... and so Taika and co. thought it easier if they just went with one on-screen murder of a god who was very obviously evil (laughing at Gorr, not giving a damn about his daughter's death, etc) and then called it a day.

I could be completely off the mark, though. It's just a theory. I do agree, more Gorr and less Korg (and more Valkyrie and more gods and more lore and more of Asgardians and Thor actually taking centre stage because this was supposed to be his movie) would have been pretty cool.

[lilyginnyblackv2]

Hikari no Ou - Episode 1 - Thought Post - SPOILERS!

This first episode did a great job of balancing it's exposition. There was just enough showing through moments like Touko looking at the goddess statue or Rin wearing the mask and watching Touko leave. 

But at the same time, we got told about certain aspects, which explain more of the "rules" of the world they are living in. They knew which things needed to be shown and which things needed to be told to give us a good balance, and then we also got excellent moments like when Touko had the lantern, and Rin tells her she is wasting the "fire" that she had. That scene also had Rin stating quite bluntly why she hates Touko. 

Both of these bits of information are then reinforced through later scenes, like when we see the machines arrive with the fuel and the abovementioned scene with Rin and the mask. It helps reinforce the world building, adding proper layers.

I also really enjoyed the small detail stuff like how this society has started naming their children using fire and red related terms as a way to bless and protect them from real fire. That just seems really realistic. Also, the narrator makes it clear that the past used to be more "modern" and we can still see remnants of this in things like Koushi's umbrella and a girl in the city wearing a more Western style outfit.

When it comes to the visuals, mood, and atmosphere, I almost got a bit of an Ookami vibe to it. The music, I think, really helped in this area to provide a feeling of a modern day folktale or lore, but with touches of more modern technology, which is an interesting mix. The art style also has this slight sketchy look to it, which also fits in with that whole atmosphere and really does make the series feel like a novel, which this is based on (iirc) come to life. The imagery in the ED really highlights this as well (the visual and colors almost remind me of Mononoke (the 2007 TV anime series) too:

The use of light and weather to set mood is very nicely, and subtlety done. As are the simple transitions and small moments dedicated to the nature and scenery. They all help with the world building and setting the appropriate mood:

The short, brief black screens with the name of the focused character (first Touko and then Koushi), combined with the OP imagery like this:

Makes me think that we are getting a dual protagonist approach, with one male and one female. I really like approach (that’s an aspect of Fruits Basket that I always enjoy). I look forward to seeing if their two stories will end up meeting. I feel like they must.

The voice acting is also great in this series. Very natural sounding, which I personally tend to enjoy more over more...animated voice acting. The more produced and fake sounding stuff found in most anime series, tbh. After having lived in Japan and hearing natural spoken Japanese, the way Japanese is often acted and spoken in anime bugs me a bit more nowadays. I can ignore easily enough when I really enjoy a series, but finding one that doesn’t rely on that too much or often is a breath of fresh air.

The last thing I want to comment on is the character writing. This first episode did a very good job of simply establishing the characters. From the way the papermaker talked about Touko, we can get a sense of how the village, as a whole, likely feels about her right now. From the grandmother's brief words about Fire Hunters, we can get an understanding of how the world these characters live in view that line of work, and from the two men's brief interactions with Touko on the machine we can see their difference in approaches to Touko (a gentle, soft touch approach vs a hard love type of approach).

We also have some extremely good female character writing with the aunt. She has a stern look about her and knows how to use that, as well as her knowledge of the world, to get the paper that Touko would need from her journey. She is never shown being intimidated and is very intellectually bright. But, we also see her being very understanding and gentle with Touko over the mistake Touko made. 

This is a great level of complexity for a female character, especially for one that may not even being a returning and major character. It leaves me feeling very hopeful about Touko's future growth and development as a character too. It helps that I also think they did a good job of showing how she is a nice and kind girl - respectful - but she is determined to make amends for her mistake and won't back down or show fear, even when it is made clear that she may die on the way to the capital. There a solid foundation for her character, with room for her character to grow and develop a more distinct personality along the way. I am really excited and interested in seeing that!

#Hikari no Ou #The Fire Hunter #Winter 2023 anime #anime #thought post #long post #Hikari no Ou spoilers #The Fire Hunter spoilers #HnO spoilers #TFH spoilers #image heavy post

[nalyra-dreaming]

Thank-you for sharing that old interview! It was very interesting…

This quote by Bailey:

“I think what’s wonderful though, is that there’s really no protagonist or antagonist. It changes through every scene in every episode, because these characters are so specific and complex, and Rolin Jones, the writer of the show, did an incredible job of explaining in depth why we do what we do. There’s a reason why we kill the people that we do, why we hurt each other. And because of that, the viewer kind of feels bad for the person hurting the other, but then also feels bad for the person being hurt.”

It’s funny how different the cast thinks of the show and characters compared to the fans because I don’t know how many viewers would have that opinion with how people talk about Claudia, Louis and and lestat in the final episode. Do you think the writers intended for it to be more ambiguous than it turned out on screen?

Glad you liked! I also found it very interesting!

Mhhhh. I'm not sure they think so different of it. Or, at least than some fans think of it. Some other fans of course... ^^

So... They think "different" of it than what we were shown.

Which brings us back to the "tale" - and the fact, that they did different versions, and then the director? producer? decided what would be put in (like here, wrt the broadcasting):

There were a lot of micro-rewrites that were happening as the scripts were coming out, and I knew this was the plot twist from quite early on because I needed to know when Lestat knew. We did multiple options, and usually they put in that I did know.

"They" obviously know the story they want to tell. They have spoken about it. They know Memory is a Monster, and that there was "tinkering". Etc. The writers, directors and producers decide how they tell it. I'm not going to go into all the interviews referring to the tale being a tale and being influenced now (I only answered an ask with a few links yesterday^^), so just wrt to the final episode...

I do think that it actually shows a lot of the things Bailey was referring to there.

The hurt in the balcony scene, the weaponizing of the "my love". The usage of "idiot" as a weapon, thrown and hurled back. The betrayal through Antoinette not being dead. The desperation and wanting that love and being unable to get it. The need to be free, and to utilize anything to reach it. Who they are killing at their feast.

*shrugs*

For me that came across :)

But then I come from the books, and I... have a different view on the characters as show-only viewers obviously do, because I know what is to come still. The show does its own thing... but then again not really, it's all "there", they reach all the important bits, and nothing we know of season 2 yet indicates anything different to me here... and it is always good to remember that we have "only" seen a very specific tale right now^^, told for a purpose. A purpose we do not know yet.

The tale will shift in (the end of) season 2 - and the show will shift with it.

So no, I actually don't think they see them that differently... just that the "show view" (to call it such) is a rather restricted one right now.

If the writers intended it to be more ambiguous? Maybe.

But then AMC had to tone down Rolin's initial script re Lestat iirc, so who knows just how many of those "micro-rewrites" pertain to which direction, character-wise. We know these writers don't pull their punches, right *laughs*

#Anonymous #asks #ask nalyra #amc iwtv #iwtv #amc interview with the vampire #interview with the vampire amc #iwtv amc #iwtv 2022 #interview with the vampire #micro rewrites #different #ambiguous

[animalinvestigator]

hello coda >:] riddle me this. i dont actually have a riddle i just came to ask as a newer petscop enjoyer if u have any fun petscop trivia? i literally just finished watching it a few days ago and i keep thinking abt it..on my mind..smoke the shit that made the pets scop

Hello! Wow welcome to the world of petscop. Sure, I'm not exactly sure what qualifies as trivia but here's a few things you might not know if you're new to things.

Something I find neat: Interestingly the majority of petscop's characters have existed for 10+ years across a variety of different projects. I mostly keep from talking about them because the guy who made these things buries at least one of them on purpose, but care& her immediate family has existed (albeit in a very different story with very different lives) since as early as 2009, while rainer and mike have existed since as early as 2012! ...we don't really know anything about the 2012 iteration of these characters other than it was mentioned but i always find it really fascinating that the majority of the characters are just one iteration of concepts that have shown up a bunch of other times. Paul, lina, and belle all appear to be new characters though! Which is neat.

Relatedly the symbols in the background of even care and that reoccur throughout the game are also old imagery from a former project, nifty (Which is for sure the reason why the nifty function in petscop is called nifty LOL)

Nifty's a fun little game, extremely old though, it's really surreal to see the pscop tiles showing up in it retroactively. This game actually played a really big part in people finding out who made petscop; its common knowledge now but was purposefully obfuscated until ~episode 22 iirc, i was amidst the group of people who were the first to find out haha, it was the same night that pokemon sword and shield released LOL Chaotic times

Oh also, the song from petscop "explore" also showed up first in nifty! i like this version a lot because it is just grating as fuck. This song is like, 15 years old.

Ummm here's paul leskowitz trying to say pieces of paper

Jeez what else. Oh petscop is made very strangely. It's something like a "digital puppet show", where inputs are recorded and then played back and layered over eachother recursively to create scenes in pretty much every case where multiple characters are on the screen interacting. These inputs are also often reused, which results in a phenomenon where movements across episodes sync up in perfect unison really often, which is thematically powerful, sometimes relevant to the literal story, and other times just really weird. Here's a neat video demonstrating a couple of these. (this is only from the first half of the series so there's a lot missing.) It's a pretty powerful demonstration of how intricate the entire thing is.

That's just a couple neat not-immediately-obvious things that don't really concern actual story or game mechanism stuff , which is kind of what i took you to mean when you said trivia. hoepfully that was what you were thinking of? maybe you learned something : )

[starthetripledevil]

Mario Legacy Challenge: 1979

Last year, Jumpman quit his job as a basketball player. He is working in retail for now but is still looking for other possible jobs. His wife, Lady, has a much more successful career as a stylist. The two are living in the city of Brooklyn (which is in a completely different dimension and not in New York) with their daughter Pauline, currently a toddler.

One night early in the year, Jumpman reads his daughter a bedtime story about aliens.

At some point in either early 1979 or before, Lady makes this drawing as a decoration for Pauline's room. (Iirc this was made with the sketch pad which came with her job.)

Jumpman goes fishing and after some time, he starts thinking... maybe this could be a good next job. He joins the fisherman part-time job while still also working in retail (since the game allows 2 part-time jobs at the same time as long as the schedules don't clash).

With Jumpman having two jobs, he will have less time to spend with his family. But he at least gets to spend breakfast together with his wife before leaving for work.

One day, Jumpman returns from work feeling not so good. And so close to his birthday too! Now Jumpman doesn't really hold big celebrations for his birthdays, but this one is particular is included in the series since it's him aging up into an adult with my custom lifespan.

Fortunately, Jumpman recovers before his birthday and is able to invite his neighbor Emmalyn to celebrate with his family. However, there won't be more guests than that.

It's time for Jumpman's 35th birthday in May 1979! (Also looks like Lady is still wearing her work clothes.)

And of course, we have cake. (And some leftover cake for later.)

Some time after the party ends (and Mario has come back home from his job as a fisherman, based on the outfit), Lady goes to talk to Jumpman about her fear on unfulfilled dreams (something which started shortly before the birthday). She feels dissatisfied with how life is going, though she doesn't quite know how to improve things. However, after a conversation, she no longer has the fear, even if she isn't really making any notable changes to her life.

Jumpman gets promoted in his retail job and feels happy about it, so he might not be quitting soon after all.

In around Q3 1979, a festival is happening near the Mario family's home, so Lady decides to go there and order some food.

Among the people attending, there's also Tony Arthur, her brother-in-law. Lady and Tony used to not get along back when she first moved in with him and his wife/her sister (more about that in earlier posts of this legacy), but now they're good friends.

In fact, for the rest of this post, the focus will be on the Arthur family. Tony's twin daughters Marianne (left) and Luigeena Jr. (right) will be turning 6 in December. (That being when Sims age up into children, so again, that's why the birthday party is shown. Other birthdays can be assumed to happen off-screen.)

But before that, it's the 35th birthday of their mother, Luigeena. Like Jumpman, she doesn't have a big celebration.

And some time later, it's time for the twins' birthday. This is a bigger party with family members invited. Lady aka Aunt Pauline is the first guest to arrive.

Then we have Uncle Jumpman and Grandpa Nico.

And the youngest guest, 4-year-old Pauline. Apparently Luigeena doesn't want her to eat on the floor so she places her in a high chair.

(That's not what actually happened, since in reality, I think it was Lady who placed Pauline there. But I think, considering Luigeena's snob and neat traits, she probably wouldn't like toddlers eating on the floor.)

They're having this winter themed cake for the party since it's also close to Christmas. (I'm not sure how close exactly.)

Here we have the aged up twins, sitting at the table with their dad and grandpa. They both have the Social Butterfly aspiration and outgoing trait, and already completed the first stage simply by knowing all the people at the party and talking to them (apparently it counts as meeting even if they already knew them as toddlers).

The twins then spend the rest of the party playing with their cousin.

Meanwhile, Jumpman and Lady are still eating.

Marianne and Luigeena become best friends.

Following Marianne and Luigeena's birthday party, the Marios go back home. Soon, it's the end of not just a year but a decade. Though this time, Jumpman doesn't spend the beginning of a decade at a New Year's festival.

For Jumpman's experiences in 1980, see this post.

#mariolegacychallenge #sims 4 legacy #sims 4 #sims4 #the sims 4 #thesims4 #generation 1 #ts4 city living #the sims 4 city living #ts4 gameplay #ts4 #ts4 legacy #ts4 simblr #ts4 screenshots #jumpman mario #pauline mario #ts4 birthday #sims 4 gameplay #1979 #sims 4 screenshots #sims 4 birthday