miraivan

[miraivan]

I barely use Tumblr anymore as it is, but I’ll probably move over to pillowfort once it gets off the ground, if anyone wants to keep in touch. I certainly don’t feel safe here anymore, and don’t want to support a company that treats its users so shittily. So far as I can tell nothing I’ve posted has been flagged, and most of the stuff I follow seems unaffected, but still. The way this has been done is absolutely appalling.  Like, I lived through Livejournal’s collapse and this is way worse. On to the next big thing.

[miraivan]

I finally got around to posting a couple of new Unico cels to my cel gallery today. Two from the Island of Magic and two from the Fantastic Adventures of Unico, including this absolutely wonderful one of him smiling. :D

[miraivan]

Zero complaints from me or Eugene. A++

I’ve sketched this and then I realised that Raps wears a long a skirt and to make the pose work I’d have to drape it scandalously high above her knees. Oh well :D

[miraivan]

I suck at relationships. I know they can’t be perfect, but it’s like if it’s not perfect then why bother I might as well just be alone right? I mean it’s nice to have someone to do stuff with sometimes but the stress of dealing with shit. I dunno, like it’s cool we have some similar interests, but sometimes I just wanna play a video game for 12 hours and not talk to you at all for two weeks and how can anyone be okay with that.

[miraivan]

Really cute new Rapunzel figure I got the other day. This one is released by SEGA and is surprisingly large and pretty high quality. It is called a Premium figure, but it was like 1000 yen, so I feel it was really nice for the price. Quite happy with it, though I dunno where to put it since I’m out of shelf space.

Pictured with my Nendoroid for scale. And yes, it’s January 8th and my Christmas tree is still up. What’re you gonna do about it?

[miraivan]

It would figure that I’d finally start feeling fannish about some media that a bunch of my friends are also fannish about... but I hate all the things they’re excited about, and they’re not interested in all the things I’m fannish about.

Story of my life.

[miraivan]

I may’ve bought something childish, but it’s not like child-me could’ve ever afforded this. W/E. Totally gonna get the Return of the Jedi one releasing this summer, and... maybe a Leia or two... fuck.

[miraivan]

I’ll never understand people who are like “I’m so bored at home, I almost can’t wait to go back to work.” Like, son, do you know about the internet. Because if I never had to go back to work again I’d be so happy. I don’t ever particularly hate my work. I’d just rather be home.  There’s that guy who’s like “It’s 2pm why are you still in your pajamas!” and I’m over here like, “I made a pledge to myself last night that no matter what I wouldn’t go outside today, I wouldn’t get dressed, I wouldn’t stress. It’s my vacation, I’m not doing anything.”

I wonder what it’d be like to be one of Those People. It sounds so exhausting.

[miraivan]

sorry, but i don't really stay up to date with media or anything. I'm a star wars fan and i'm pretty excited for the new movie! in that meme you reblogged with the same reaction for fans/non-fans... i don't quite get it. Did the company do something bad? do other people just think it's not gonna be good? sorry for all the questions but i just wanted to stay informed xoxo

It’s a reference to the fact that a significant number of fans are dreading TLJ based upon their disappointment in the wake of TFA - and honestly, it’s not just limited to the major, outstanding offense of the OT characters’ arcs and achievements being backpedaled and undone.  There have been other strange and upsetting things concerning Disney’s marketing and stewardship of the franchise, rumored plot choices, etc. that have marginalized characters like Finn and Rose in favor of Emo Band-Aid, or excluded Lando despite the longest running film time in the saga’s history and a plot that could have easily accommodated him, etc. etc.

I’m no cranky old gatekeeper looking to ruin everyone else’s genuine good time, and many of my dash peeps have explained this in much better fashion; I also prefer not to air my personal opinions too often to minimize Drama™ but given that we’re literally on the threshold of the film’s release, I’m a human being with feelings and I’m going to voice some of them if I feel like it.

I sincerely started out enjoying TFA and I do love the new characters.  Just given where the new trilogy has gone, though, I would have preferred a different storyline or total separation between the old and new gang.  As my fellow dash peeps have said countless times, there was absolutely no necessity - other than to follow today’s current depressing “everything must be awful to be interesting” trend - to craft a tale completely obliterating the happy ending of the original trilogy and the sensible character arcs of Han, Leia, and Luke:

Han Solo: selfish nerd with a deeply buried heart of gold who’d obviously seen and been through a lot of shit who needed the right people and encouragement to listen to his conscience again and stop being afraid to commit himself to both a good cause and a wider set of friends.  Goes from “Better her than me!” to “[The temperature’s dropping too rapidly.] Yeah, and my friend’s out in it - I’ll see you in hell!” to “I’m sorry” to “When he comes back, I won’t get in the way.”  His arc is about finding companionship, belonging, and emotional openness.  He’s found a home and a family with these beautiful ragtag misfits.

Leia Organa: a fervently duty-bound young woman forged by trauma and pressed upon by staggering responsibilities into an icy diamond; she is hard and unyielding and unstoppable, and very emotionally repressed.  She has lost so much and can’t afford to lose more.  Yet a fluffy farmboy and a scruffy nerf herder worm their way into her heart.  Goes from “We have no time for our sorrows,” and “[Well, Your Highness, I guess this is it.] That’s right.” to “I love you” to “…Hold me.”  Her arc is also about emotional openness and embracing the hope and then reality that she can find love and gain a new family in spite of the destruction of her homeworld and the seemingly impossible war she helped lead.

Luke Skywalker: idealistic (yet pragmatic, in some ways) softboy who infectiously inspires everybody he comes in contact with to find the good within themselves, and has both a normal, down-to-earth bedrock upbringing and the strong personal moral compass to keep doing what he feels is right.  Goes from “I guess I’m going nowhere” to “Take care of yourself, Han; I guess that’s what you’re best at” to “[I feel like I can take on the whole Empire myself!] I know what you mean.” to “I’m looking for a great warrior” to “You want the impossible” to “They’re my friends, I’ve gotta help them” to “You’ll find I’m full of surprises” to “Ben…why didn’t you tell me” to “I warn you not to underestimate my powers” to “I can’t kill my own father” to “I’ve accepted that you were once Anakin Skywalker, my father…Come with me” to “Soon I’ll be dead, and you with me” to “I feel the good in you, the conflict” to “NEVER!!!” to “You’ve failed, Your Highness - I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”  He needed his dreams shattered to get a proper grasp on how to prevail in his circumstances - and the important part here is that he was already shattered in this trilogy, and put himself back together - but despite this, he kept on believing.  He chose to see the humanity in his father and defy the Emperor, the ultimate representation of the Dark Side, by a moral rather than physical victory.  He transcended the intentions of his teachers and became a Jedi in the truest sense by disputing his mentors and refusing to relinquish his devotion to his friends and an undeserving father.  Although he lost said father, he had the satisfaction of saving and freeing his soul and finding reconciliation with him, along with gaining a twin sister and a whole lot of new friends in comparison to his former, lonelier moisture farming life, and was equipped to carry on the knowledge of the Jedi with his own experiences to renew their doctrines.

In the new trilogy:

Han is implied to be a restless ne’er-do-well who could never escape the impulse to take off and not be around for his family, rather than being grateful and satisfied to finally have a stable life and a loving wife and friends who deeply cared for him.  He’s also painted as much more of an outright idiot and useless as a smuggler rather than a clever guy who just often finds himself in shitty situations

Leia is not allowed to hold on to anything in her life.  She must not only bear witness to even more planets being ruthlessly and callously destroyed, her own child grows up to commit patricide and it’s heavily implied that his genocidal tantrums are her and Han’s fault for being neglectful parents, as though being a woman with a demanding career automatically makes it impossible for her to raise a child properly, and never mind the fact that less-than-perfect-parenting from two people who still clearly loved their son is the flimsiest excuse for anyone to commit any level of murder

Luke is also not allowed to pass on his knowledge and bear any fruit for his hard-won labors.  His efforts to restore the Jedi go up in a flaming ruin, pointlessly bringing about a second shattering into his life for the express purpose of turning him into a grieving and bitter shadow of his former hopeful self who now abandons his found family rather than cleaving to them for support and encouragement as he always did before

The new films transform the OT into an ultimately hollow story in where there is no happy ending and nothing is learned and taken to heart.  The characters are doomed to suffer forever and not grow logically from their experiences.  This happens while we’re meant to get accustomed to the new team and watch them struggle to clean up the mess that apparently the older characters couldn’t fix after all.  It fosters a sense of nihilism - no one will ever get it right, and each new generation will just keep wading through another war and another war while making the same mistakes their elders did.

It sounds a liiiiiiiiiitle too much like reality for a story that’s supposed to be a space fairy tale.  If I want to be depressed, I’ll read the news.  If I want to be happy, I’ll go watch a star war.  Except oops, now I really can’t.

I’m well aware that plenty of folks don’t see it this way at all, and yes, duh, my response is biased.  Like I said, if you love the new movies, more power to you; it’s still a (mostly) free world.  But you asked, so I answered.

[miraivan]

Ever since reading @peradii’s seminal masterpiece “Have you heard” I have loved the idea of Finn sparking a stormtrooper uprising, so when a couple of days ago @thatlightsaberlesbian posted an amazing alternative plot idea for Episode VIII, I decided to try and draw a scene from her post (+ a few embellishments because my shipper’s heart couldn’t help it :D).

I never thought I’d be drawing so many stormtroopers and I know, the armour should be much more clunky but aw well. 

[miraivan]

Wow, didn’t know this either. MORE CELS TO KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR :D

My Unico blog has almost 500 followers and I am so proud of it

[miraivan]

Is... was there another contender?

me w a boom box standing right outside rain j’s window:

[miraivan]

here you go, your dash is snowing

[miraivan]

I think, without a doubt, this is officially the cutest piece of Tangled/Rapunzel merchandise I own. It’s so cute! The details are so nice, too. I didn’t take pictures of all the different ways you can swap her faces/arms/etc., but there are a lot, including her paint brush/easel and frying pan. The crown has a tiny magnet in it so it’ll stay on her head. Ugh, it’s so cute!

[miraivan]

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), a mood

[miraivan]

Hi, I just saw your post about having legitimate complaints about TLJ... I haven't seen it yet, but was wondering what your complaints were (and whether it's worth me spending my money going to see it). I'm not bothered by spoilers.

good evening dear! to make things easy, i’m just gonna make one hugeass post and do a bullet list.

no consistency to story-telling

you wanna add new force powers? fine! great! but keep them consistent!

yoda appears to tell luke that the jedi are garbage & should end ( yoda???? of all people???? instead of someone who would actually think that given personal experience, like, y’know, ANAKIN )

also somehow yoda can call down lightning and cause real-world damage to a tree by setting it ablaze? why hasn’t yoda or obi-wan or anakin literally just come down and stop the order by doing something like this if they can literally control nature from the afterlife????

someone ( leia )…. with no proper force training…. can somehow defy…. dying in space? and also project themselves through space while barely conscious?

rian seems to want to keep this narrative of ‘evERYonE caN HAve ThE foRCe’ but when given the chance to make one of three kids force-sensitive, one kid being a black boy, one a white girl, and one a white boy, in a series where we have leading white female and black male protagonists and a white male villain………. somehow rian decided it was best to give the white boy the force? in a trilogy where the leAD CHARACTER IS A FEMALE AND ONE OF THE LEADING MALES IS A BLACK MAN?????????? GROUNDBREAKING

snoke connected rey and kyle via force skyping, but if his whole goal was to just……….. get rey to come to the supremacy after he manipulated her to believe in kyle’s redemption, like….. why do all that shit. why not just….. read her mind. clearly he can influence people and affect people from long distances so what the fuck why would he bother with that weird force bond shit. like if vader can fucking force choke a guy over a video conference, i don’t see why it’s that much more of a stretch to just have snoke read rey’s mind or manipulate her without using kyle

luke fucking astral projecting himself onto crait, despite not knowing they were on crait, after shutting himself off from the force like 10 years prior to tlj– somehow he’s able to hold a long-term projection of himself to taunt kyle and buy time for the fleeing resistance? and then, at the end, he just….. gives up and dies? becomes one with the force? ???????

lame foreshadowing/repetition

so, when kyle and rey’s first skype session goes live, kyle makes a point of asking rey if she was causing this, this almost astral projection skype convo from light years away, only to say ‘no….. the strain would kill you.’ cue the end of the movie, where it’s revealed luke was just projecting himself all along, and…. he dies.

there’s also this scene where luke asks rey what the force is, and being inexperienced in it, she makes a comment about it being about making things float. luke says no, everything you said is not-true– its not about making rocks float, ( which is then brought back as a concept at the very end of the movie, when rey has to float rocks to free the resistance from the caves they ran into, again, bad foreshadowing. ) this is then brought back later when astral luke is facing off with kyle, and kyle says something about destroying the resistance and the jedi…. only for luke to, verbatim, say what he said to rey about every word he said being not-true.

this almost bashing it into our heads notion of ‘kill the past, it’s only holding you back’ that’s mentioned by kyle, that seems to be the central thread– the past is just that, the past. it’s time to completely ignore it and never look back. it’s time to wipe away the misty-eyed wonders of your hero worship of your childhood… the reality is that people fuck up and your heroes are nothing and in the end we all die, jan. ( what a fun, hopeful message. )

but with this message, this idea of all your heroes are dead and don’t even think of people as heroes because that’s just unrealistic and you’ll be disappointed when they fuck up because we’re all human :))) – with that message we’re then meant to leave the theater somehow emboldened because luke took up the mantle of being a legend in the end…. even though there’s no reason he should be considered one when the only people who witness this astral fight technically are kyle and the first order– the resistance didn’t watch because they were trying to escape through the base’s tunnels with the time luke was buying them. so we’re supposed to treat luke as a legend now….. or are we supposed to hate this idea of hero worship? i’m getting mixed signals.

literally everything built up in tfa…. rey’s parents/backstory, snoke’s history/why the resistance even knows about him, why kyle became evil, why rey was able to call the lightsaber over him, why luke exiled himself but left a map………… so many questions to be answered! and tfa laid out a beautiful table for johnson to sit down at and serve dinner.

only johnson decided to say fuck you, fuck your dinner, fuck everything you thought about this movie because it doesn’t matter

rey’s parents? nobodies– drunkards. sold their daughter into literal slavery for drinking money.

snoke’s backstory? doesn’t fucking matter if we hyped him up as more dangerous than vader or palpatine– he’s dead now because he apparently couldn’t sense kyle about to kill him. the man can bond two people across light years of distance, but he doesn’t notice the lightsaber that’s slowly being turned towards him? hm.

why is rey so strong with the force? because it belongs to everyone and not the elite skywalkers who literally came from slavery so fuck you for that too

luke’s exile? because he felt bad about considering killing his nephew when he probed his mind and felt he was completely evil. luke skywalker considered killing his nephew, the son of his twin sister, son of his best friend– let that sink in.

kyle’s evil…. but he’s good, right? there’s good in him? or not. for someone who rian says we can all relate with ( sorry but i don’t relate with fascists :/ ) he made it pretty clear that he wanted kyle to be the end all be all villain by the end of 8. so ??????

also why is kyle so obsessed with vader? what the fuck? guess what? you don’t get to know. fuck you again.

character assassination / regression

luke was……… not luke. clearly. mark hamill has said it’s not luke. that’s more than a bit telling.

rey’s whole story literally revolved around following luke around ahch-to while learning jack shit only to then follow kyle around trying to say there’s still good in him. ( another fun fact rian……… luke only was willing to forgive vader when he realized that was his dad. why would rey feasibly trust her abuser / han’s murderer / man who put finn into a coma so quickly unless maybe they had a prior connection, particularly familial? )

finn was turned into a joke, called a coward, called selfish, tased by rose, slapped by hux……. like finn had literally no character progression at all.

poe went from well-decorated commander of the resistance, former officer with the new republic, to hot-headed flyboy who doesn’t take orders and just needs to learn from his white superiors :)))) like……………… do i even need to say it

leia was practically non-existent, and when she was, she slapped poe and later shot at him, stunning him. which, she…. y’know………. never did to han.

chewie and r2 were literally there as props, don’t even try and tell me otherwise. r2 showed luke leia’s hologram back from anh as a means to like…. spur him into action, but??? luke literally did nothing as well even after that?

lack of lando. can i include that? rian said he ‘wanted’ to include lando but he ‘wouldn’t work’ so i think rian just owes me money for having to even try to comprehend his bullshit

hux??? y’know, the fascist general with that terrifying speech before he decimated an entire star system? that hux? he’s just comic relief now. :)

he even has a ‘your mom’ joke thrown at him which is super funny when you remember he’s a bastard and never knew his birth mom so like #goodwriting

kyle is redeemable now!! even though he’s shown no remorse and has already been offered the chance to redeem himself but he took the opportunity to say ‘fuck you’ and kill han so…. ignore all that, ignore the fact that he’s a fascist leader and massacred children and countless others………….. his uncle tried to kill him so he must be in the right :)))

phasma…. you liked phasma? strong villain woman? yeah, well, watch the most unsatisfying fight that ends in finn winning purely by luck because she falls down into a firey pit. mmmmmm that sure was satisfying? :/

regular star wars rules need not apply?

bombs can just be dropped in space because gravity exists in the vacuum of the stars apparently

but a body on a blown-open bridge can remain on the bridge instead of getting sucked out into space….?

a slow-speed ship chase where one ship is running out of fuel? cinematic gold, apparently

for some reason the first order ships chasing the resistance couldn’t have just….. sped up their ships a bit and plowed them over / took them out with tie fighters for no other reason but….. it wouldn’t be convenient that way?

there’s a lot more than this but i’m tired and should have gone to bed hours ago, so i’ll probably just reblog this sometime tomorrow and add more, but here’s this for starters!

[miraivan]

Just got an email that my Rapunzel Nedoroid shipped. It’s sad how excited this has made me, but it’s probably going to be the most exciting thing to happen to me all month. I live a sad, lonely life lol. Well, that and everything else I’ve been looking forward to has left me disappointed.