#I’m now obsessed with the evil old nerd robots

[aethira]

Trazyn the Infinite ✨

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So, I’ve been getting into Warhammer 40K, and I listened to the audiobook of ‘The Infinite and the Divine’ recently. It was really really good tbh

[vintagerpg]

Strongheart is a dweeb. Always thought so. He is one of two or three of the original LJN D&D toys I owned as a kid and dang, why couldn’t I have Warduke (my parents were a little sus of the toy line, but a friend of the family gave me Sir Uptight and either the Young Male Titan or Northlord as a Christmas gift; I promptly lost Strongheart’s sword under the radiator in the TV room).

Anyway, NECA’s D&D Ultimates was three deep on Evil Action Figures, so I guess we needed a good guy and I guess you aren’t going to really come across a more gooder guyer. Undeniably a nice sculpt. The original LJN design is still recognizable but has been improved in every way. For instance, he’s no longer wearing his underwear over his armor. His visor moves, so if you don’t want to look at his face or want to pretend he’s a robot or something, you can do that. But! Something cool about this incarnation of the do-gooder: he looks a little bit like Thomas Magnum.

Now, I can hear you say “But Stu, you have a weird micro-obsession with Magnum, P.I., could this just be your own biases coloring your perception?” And friend, I thought the same exact thing. But trust me, I have it on good authority that the initial inspiration for Strongheart (2022) here was Thomas Magnum. He isn’t Thomas Magnum, but is meant to invoke him in the mind. And it worked for me! And it’s appropriate, too, because Magnum is a big nerd. In the season five episode “Little Games” (1984) we see Thomas playing a (fictional) computer game called The Dungeon Master. Now, there is no evidence that Thomas, T. C., Rick and Higgins ever threw dice in a session of Dungeons & Dragons, but playing a videogame like that, I’m sure Thomas wouldn’t have turned his nose up at the possibility. And, you know, just to sell you on the Strongheart/Magnum connection a little more: in season three, episode thirteen, “Of Sound Mind,” there is a costume ball in which Magnum clanks around in a a particularly silly suit of plate mail.

Long story short: I’ve come around on the old knight in shining armor. In addition to a good mustache, he comes with a longsword, a short sword, a warhammer, a shield, six total hands and a wire-rigged cape that I don’t think is detachable, but is cool enough to merit mentioning.

[loopy777]

Nickelodeon gives you the task of writing a series based on Korra's earthbending successor with no limits on what you can do. How would you write his story?

Interesting that you say “his.” There’s no rule that the Avatars have to alternate gender, but at this point the fandom assumes it so much that I’d just go with it to avoid controversy.

Anyway, I’d probably turn Nickelodeon down if they wanted me to write Korra’s successor. I have no interest in the future that seems to be getting established in LoK. I want the franchise to stay in the past forever; there’s more than enough room, and I’d even be open to throwing away the concept of “canon” to tell stories that might merely be in-universe legends.

But, I’m going to try to answer the question in good faith. If I was a professional television writer/producer, and my career depended on saying yes to this and trying to do a good job, here’s what I’d do:

Working Title: The Last Avatar

Our star is a poor Earthlands boy. The Earth Kingdom collapsed years ago, Balkanizing into a bunching of struggling nations divided up haphazardly among various tribes, local cultures, and convenient geographical groupings. Our Boy is an Earthbender, but he hasn’t pursued any official training because it’s largely a waste of time and money. Instead, he’s been working his way through an education, learning about robotics and spirit-energy, because demand is high for that knowledge. He repairs old robots for spare money, and even has his own glitchy assistant -- who can transform into a van -- who he likes to trash-talk to show his love. He’s a huge nerd.

Actually, the only reason he can defend himself with Earthbending at all is because of a classmate and friend who’s passed on her own lessons. This girl is one of seventeen young adults who currently use the Beifong name. She’s a Metalbender using her ability to innovate with circuitry, very interested in technology and business, but she also values some of the old ways and thinks Bending is an important part of Earth culture that should not be ignored.

Our Boy knows he’s not the Avatar because the Avatar is a super-famous influencer, activist, pop-singer, and advertising icon. She lives in the Fire Nation and has green hair. You should picture Hatsune Miku for her. There are bigger celebrities, and none of her movies have been huge hits, but the Avatar still has enough culture significance that she was born famous and has managed to stay in the news.

By the way, Fire Nation culture is dominant. All the best stuff comes from the Fire Nation. Their movies, television, music, and video games are popular all over the world. Their technology is better. Their quality is life is better. They have the best doctors, the fastest internet, bigger apartments, the most prestigious schools, and the best jobs. Immigration is limited by law, in order to maintain their high quality of life.

The United Republic and the Water Tribes have seized some former Earth Kingdom territory, so their influence has expanded. The United Republic invested heavily in technology, and they’re now a dystopian cyberpunk nightmare with a government that just does whatever its corporations say. The president of the United Republic is a position that rich men use to become richer. The Water Tribes are a lot better, having managed to transition to a constitutional monarchy and maintain something like a balance between life and technology.

Note that I didn’t say “spirituality and technology,” because the two are one. All technology is spirit-powered. Spirits can meld with the internet. Spirits can inhabit robot bodies. Spirits and humans meet in abstract Virtual Realities where the difference between the two disappears.

And all of this orderly chaos is set to collapse when Our Boy accidentally Firebends during a dangerous action moment. He and Beifong Girl realize he might be the Avatar. But Hatsune Miku has demonstrated command of all four elements. On separate occasions she’s been seen and filmed Earthbending, Firebending, Waterbending, and Airbending, sometimes two at once. So how can Our Boy also do that?

Beifong Girl urges him to contact the Air Nation and the descendants of Avatar Aang to find out. Except, when he does with her family’s help, Dual-Benders -- warriors using two different elements -- try to kill him. He’s been betrayed by the Air Nation- and possibly the Beifong clan. His friend helps him get away, but she isn’t sure she can trust her family. They both go on the run, not sure what to do.

The mystery of what’s going on will drive the whole series. Here’s our cast:

Our Boy: The true Earthbending Avatar, completely untrained. He’s a poor nerd thrown into the deep end of a global conspiracy, but fortunately he has a robot who transforms into a van, so at least he has transporation.

Beifong Friend: Our Boy’s best friend. Not a love interest. She’s the youngest Beifong cousin, an Earthlands patriot who wants to raise the former Earth Kingdom out of its divided state using technology. She’s also far too gentle for her family of power-hungry vipers, but she’s still a great Earthbender and will become a Metalbender warrior before the end.

Fake Avatar Hatsune Miku: An artificial biological/spiritual construct of the Red Lotus, able to Bend two elements at any one time by swapping out a set of four spirits (all of whom are intelligent, devoted solely to her, and have different personalities), and the center of a conspiracy that she’s the Avatar. The Red Lotus built her and are using her to advance their plans. She joins the hunt for Our Boy, officially decrying him as a Disciple of a Vaatu cult trying to destroy humanity. However, she eventually begins to have thoughts of her own and resent how she’s used and abused as a tool rather than a person. She becomes our Deuteragonist, going rogue and having her own journey and arcs that intersect with Our Boy. Depending on fandom reaction, she might becomes Our Boy’s love interest, but might also become just another friend. She eventually frees her spirit friends, giving up all Bending powers.

Water Sage-Candidate: A young man who is training to be a Water Sage/Shaman. He’s a new-age hippie type who distrusts technology but likes people and spirits, wanting everyone to be nicer and more supportive to each other. He’s suspicious of what’s going on with this supposed Vatuu cult, despite his master (a Red Lotus infiltrator) telling him to trust in the true Avatar. When Our Boy and his friends come to Water Tribe territory, he joins up with them to help expose the truth.

Air Detective: An Airbender, a master detective and manhunter, who has been tasked with helping to track down Our Boy. It turns out she’s honest and completely ignorant of what’s really going on, so as she hunts Our Boy, she realizes the greater conspiracy at work- one that seems to have set its sights on the Air Nation back during the height of Avatar Korra’s influence. She’s older than the main cast and largely separate from them, but she does spend a lot of time with Fake Avatar Hatsune Miku and becomes something of a mentor to her. She struggles balancing Airbender ideals and her own cynicism about humanity, and is probably the best fighter in the story.

The Red Lotus: Our villains. They have infiltrated every level of every government in the world, and have figured how to replicate what Raava did with Wan- use a melding between spirits and humans to swap out Bending powers. They have managed to get up to a human/spirit combo being able to actively use two at a time, but they’re hot on replicating the full Avatar experience. The idea is that they eventually want to give everyone full Avatar powers, ruining the office of the Avatar and empowering everyone with the strength to topple governments and businesses. Any single person can knock over a building and kill thousands. And for those who are incompatible with the melding process and explode- well, those are necessary losses. Red Lotus foot soldiers will often have, as one of their two elements, Firebending.

Red Lotus Traitor: A NonBender history nerd from a Red Lotus family. The more he sees as he’s initiated into the family business, the more horrified he becomes, but he successfully manages to hide it- which is good, because recruits who balk tend to wind up dead in ‘accidents.’ When Our Boy comes to the Fire Nation, he and his friends encounter the Traitor, which brings them to the Red Lotus’s attention, but the Traitor finally breaks free and gets the group out, joining them.

Boss Red Lotus: The leader of the Red Lotus. A NonBender. She and her family -- siblings, a father or mother we can maybe tie to a character in LoK, and maybe a kid or spouse -- are running the whole show and have inherited the plan that the Red Lotus are executing. What separates Boss Red Lotus is her personal investment in Fake Avatar Hasune Miku. She thinks of herself as Miku’s mother, and has become more interested in creating a higher form of life than merely giving humanity Avatar powers. She grows more obsessed when Miku goes rogue and commissions a more advanced clone.

Fake Love Interest: A love interest for Our Boy who is a little bit weird and a little bit cool, very pretty in a vaguely gothy way, and fond of bugs. This is actually Koh in disguise as a human, and the romance doesn’t work out. It will be awesome, trust me.

The bulk of the series is Our Boy and his growing group of friends tooling around the world in their robot-van, chased by Fake Avatar Hatsune Miku and the Airbender Detective, slowly uncovering the Red Lotus conspiracy and eventually rising up to save the world with the help of everyone who isn’t evil. The setting is dark and inspired by science-fiction, and there’s a theme of rediscovering the past, but the past doesn’t always hold the solution. Sometimes, the past merely contains the mistakes that led to today’s problems. The redemption of the world usually comes from getting in touch with the culture of the past, and mixing that with the wondrous new technology available today.

The ending I’m envisioning is a kind of embracing of the Red Lotus’s plan, but a non-destructive form. Everyone gets all four elements, but no one is killed by it, and the power level is completely normal. The Avatar, though, is the sole person to be able to Energybend, and it’s this role -- being able to explore the limitless potential of humanity -- that makes the Avatar important going forward. The significant Red Lotus are all sucked into hell or the Fog of Lost Souls or something, except for those who die outright, with the rest being rehabilitated.

Romance will be downplayed, aside from the fakeout with Koh, but if any of the recurring characters show some chemistry, there’s room to develop it. The Fake Avatar Hatsune Miku should be designed to be the audience’s tortured, angsty, badass waifu.

The next level of development for these ideas should come from the Concept Artist team, especially focusing on the weapons used in this setting. This will be followed by a more detailed revision by me with major plot points, and then going to the writers’ room for development of the first season. Entire characters or concepts may disappear or be added during that time.

Merchandising should emphasize the Tron Lines on everyone’s clothing that glow when Bending. Also, the Robot Van can be expanded to a whole line of transforming robots toys, although the word “transform” should not appear in any official material. We see video games as a major licensing opportunity, with a possibility for “canon” stories set in the same time period, intersecting with the cartoon’s main plot. To this end, final character designs should perhaps be modeled on voice actors, so that face scans or motion capture can be employed for AAA video game appearances.

And that’s my pitch.

[dragonkeeper19600]

Someone on this site (I don’t remember who) pointed out how little screen time Fawful shares with Mario and Luigi in Bowser’s Inside Story. For most of the game, Bowser is Fawful’s main nemesis, with the Mario Bros. working behind the scenes. There are only two scenes where the Bros. and Fawful encounter each other: the scene in the sewer where Fawful grabs the Dark Star and the very final boss. At all other times, the Bros. are either inside Bowser (giggity!) or in a location without either Fawful or Bowser. At first, it seems kind of weird how the main villain of a Mario game barely sees Mario, even when taking into account Bowser’s prominent role as a protagonist. But, when I gave it some thought, I realized it wasn’t weird at all. It was all according to design. That is Fawful’s design because all through the game he's deliberately going out of his way to avoid the Mario Bros. 

A huge part of what makes Fawful so dangerous is his intelligence, and I don’t mean just the technical genius that allows him to build vacuum helmets and laser-shooting robots. I’m referring to his cunning. He’s able to spot the counterfeit Beanstar right away in Superstar Saga, he comes up with the plan to have Bowletta impersonate Bowser in Minion Quest, a gambit that succeeds in getting Captain Goomba to shift his focus from Fawful to Mario, and he came up with a pretty effective Plan B in case Bower survived the cage match with Midbus. This careful planning makes him a direct foil to Bowser, who always (always!) charges headfirst without a plan, relying solely on the strength of his own awesomeness. Bowser never learns from his mistakes, but Fawful does. He was introduced as Cackletta’s apprentice, and even after her death he is ever the vigilant student, using his experience to avoid old failings.

And one thing his experience has taught him is that he cannot beat Mario and Luigi.

He fought them twice in Superstar Saga, the second time much more heavily armed than the first, and was beaten so badly that Partners in Time implies that he’s traumatized from the experience. When the babies encounter Fawful in the sewers, he’s clearly obsessed with the Mario Bros., flying into a frothing-mouth rage at the mere memory of their clothing.

He also uses mustache-related metaphors even when not directly referencing the Bros., including one point before the babies ask for his backstory, meaning that Mario and Luigi are always on his mind.

The Mario Bros. left a deep impression on Fawful, specifically several on his skull and all over his body. When he returns in Bowser’s Inside Story, he is no longer concerned with conquering his home country and is instead fixated on the Mushroom Kingdom. Perhaps he’s motivated by revenge? Either way, he knows he’ll never be able to hold onto his power without dealing with Mario and Luigi.

But, Fawful has a problem. He’s a wimp.

Armed with only his vacuum helmet, Fawful is so weak that he’s fought during the tutorial stage of Superstar Saga. When he speaks of his previous defeat in Partners in Time, he uses a lot of pain-based imagery “jumping on my head,” “hammers,” “my brain aches,” “headache,” etc. Bowser’s description of Fawful as a “little babbling nerd” may be harsh, but there’s some truth to the fact that Fawful is tiny, out of shape, and not used to physical strain. The Mario Bros. dished out one hell of a beating, and he is not eager to experience that again.

I usually hear Fawful’s Vacuum Shroom scheme explained as an attempt to cut off the head of the Mushroom Kingdom’s government in one fell swoop by containing them all within Bowser. While I do think there is some truth to that, I would argue that his primary targets in that plan are the Bros. 

Fawful knows he cannot beat the Bros. With Mario and Luigi contained inside Bowser, his biggest threat is removed. Bowser, of course, is still free, and Fawful makes no real effort to contain him once the Bros. have been inhaled. But, at the beginning of the game, Fawful doesn’t view Bowser to be much of a threat. His own experiences with Bowser in Superstar Saga had convinced him that Bowser is a bit of a pushover. At the beginning of that game, Fawful lays Bowser low with a single shot from his vacuum helmet. And, when Fawful comes across Bowser much later, he’s already unconscious.

Unlike with the Mario Bros., Fawful had no reason to fear Bowser. He’d learned that Bowser was dumb, weak, and easily dealt with. It’s quite a nasty surprise when Bowser rises again and again to throw off Fawful’s schemes. 

But even now, when Bowser has risen as the biggest threat to Fawful’s new world order, who does he still think of?

After all this time, the Mario Bros. still weigh heavily on his mind. Does he suspect that Bowser’s newfound strength is because of their meddling? Perhaps. The remake of the Dark Star Core phase of the final boss added animation of Fawful pointing at the Bros. before transforming to his titanic size.

After being reduced down to the Dark Star Core, Fawful’s mind seems to be in a simplified state. His only dialogue is to repeat his catchphrase in a confused tone before scurrying away, and during the final boss fight, he doesn’t speak at all. But even with his mind in a fog, he still recognizes the Mario Bros. He revels in sadistic glee when toying with them by tossing them into the air or chasing them down a dark, evil corridor with his gleaming teeth like a demonic Pac-Man. Even that point at the beginning at the fight is multilayered. Is that an “Ah ha!” point identifying the cause of all the trouble Bowser has been causing? Or is it a sadistic taunt? “Now, you’ll see who’s tough!”

Fawful is fully aware of his own physical weakness, the weakness that led to his painful defeat and may have cost him his mistress’s life. Was his obsession with absorbing the Dark Star into himself an attempt to finally make himself stronger? To no longer be the little nerd? To finally be someone the Mario Bros. couldn’t hurt?

In any case, it didn’t work.

Fawful feared Mario and Luigi. He did everything he could to get them out of the way without having to face them. He trapped them inside Bowser, and when he saw them underground, as soon as he’d grabbed the Dark Star, he shot at them and quickly fled behind a magical barrier made of thirteen impenetrable walls (I counted). Once he’d absorbed the Dark Star, he thought he was finally strong enough to beat them. 

But when the Dark Star was gone, and his mind cleared, he’d found that he’d lost everything, and the Bros. stood triumphant yet again. He would never, ever win.

I guess, when we take all that into consideration, it should be no surprise what he did next. 

[sammysdewysensitiveeyes]

I was just thinking about the villains that I obsess over, and how I would rank them in terms of morality, because I think a lot of my faves are the “not so bad” guys that sometimes show a little potential for goodness (but are still basically jerks).  And then there’s Maximus who is just a chaotic asshole. 

But if I was going to rank from best (as in nicest) to worst (most evil), it would go like this:

Pied Piper/Hartley Rathaway: Angry nerd musician, uses mind control and sonic waves to commit robberies.  Born into a wealthy but abusive family, he later becomes concerned with issues of poverty and social justice, and starts helping the homeless.  The one Flash rogue who has reformed and stayed reformed, he was even close friends with Wally West in the 90′s. (I so miss this friendship and wish DC would let them interact again.)  Tries to kill Flash during the Silver Age (all the Rogues did), but to my knowledge has not murdered anyone in his crimes.  (He did kill Desaad and blow up Apokolips during Countdown, but Desaad had it coming.)  Given that he’s been reformed for years, I think it’s an absolute waste that he’s never gotten onto some kind of Justice League auxiliary team or something.  Put the boy on a team book, he’s got potential!

Trickster/James Jesse: Wacky bank robber and con man who enjoys the thrill of tricking people more than he really cares about the money.  Over-dramatic little shit who sometimes acts like a smooth con man and sometimes acts like a cartoon character, often in the same comic.  Is good friend with Hartley (or at least he used to be, but I think their friendship has fallen into the DC continuity garbage pit).  Tried to kill Flash during the Silver Age, but to my knowledge has not murdered anyone.  He did push his parents off a building in the his latest arc, but Flash saved them.  He’s a selfish jerk who is capable of goodness occasionally and flirted with the idea of reform, but much less sincerely than Hartley.  I’m kinda protective of him because I’m afraid DC will push him in a dark direction to match the CW version, who is Doing Trickster Wrong.  Like, it’s okay to just let him be silly bank robber, they don’t all have to be edgy.

Pyro/St. John Allerdyce: Punch clock villain - always the lackey, never the leader, small time evil.  I think he’s similar to Avalanche and Blob in that he’s basically an ammoral, selfish mercenary type.  He looks out for number one first.  He’s definitely killed people, and probably enjoys burning things a little too much.  I don’t think he necessarily gets his jollies from killing at random (like he’s not a serial killer type), but if you meet him on the battlefield he’s gonna be a nasty, vicious piece of shit.  He’s actually kinda affable evil - if you meet him at a bar, he’ll probably just hang out and drink with you.  He seems to bond with his team-mates, and has been a pretty good team-player in Marauders (even referring to them as his friends last issue).  He also seemed to regret his past actions when he was dying of the Legacy Virus, and tried to make up for it by saving Senator Kelley.  Now he’s back to partying and burning things in Marauders, but at least he seems to be on the X-Men’s side now? 

Riddler/Edward Nygma: I actually think he doesn’t really enjoy killing, but I rank him worse than Pyro because he’s arguably caused more damage over the years.  Riddler is determined to show up Batman and prove that he is the bestest, smartest boy in all the world, and he doesn’t care who gets hurt in the process.  He kills people mostly as pawns and side casualties - if they weren’t smart enough to escape (or Batman didn’t save them quickly enough), hey, that’s not his fault, right?  Depending on the writer, he can range from a silly, slightly pathetic villain with a goofy schtick to a cold-hearted, terrifying criminal mastermind.  He reformed briefly and worked as a detective while he had amnesia, but went back to crime again pretty quickly.  I like the idea of PI Riddler, trying to show up Batman through legal means, competing not as criminal vs. detective, but as two fellow detectives.  I wish we’d gotten more PI Riddler, but oh well.

Maximus: Okay, this dude is just the worst.  Sometimes claims to be doing things “for the good of the Inhuman people,” but he’s generally just wrecking shit for his own selfish purposes or because he wants to cause chaos and tear everything down.  I can have a little sympathy for him for his obvious mental illness, and because he grew up in a pretty dysfunctional family/society, but he’s still pretty terrible.  And I generally don’t consider the mental illness to be a reason for his villainy - like, he’s a villain who happens to be mentally ill, not a villain because of his mental illness.  He’s caused plenty of death in his uprisings, generally treats people like disposable pawns, and is willing to sell out his people to the Kree if it means he gets to rule.  Sometimes he works with his family against a common threat as the token evil team-mate (and I generally enjoy him most in this role), but he’s always got his own agenda.  The closest he came to a redemption arc was probably when the saw his own horrible future in Royals, and seemed genuinely distressed at what befell the Inhuman people.  He’s a lot of fun, though.  Snarky, hilarious, chaotic, and utterly brilliant.  He can be the mad scientist or the manipulative political advisor, or both depending on the story.  I just want him to build giant robots and wreck things. 

Honorable mention: Loki.  I don’t even know where to rank him.  He used to be a monster on par with Maximus, Doom or old-school Magneto, now he’s a sarcastic, angsty hipster that pops up to annoy Thor or help Thor in an annoying way.  He’s fun! 

Second honorable mention: Fabian Cortez.  In terms of intentions, he’s really just as bad, or maybe even worse than Maximus.  But since his debut in the 90′s, he’s gone through so many stages of villain decay that now he’s basically the X-Men/Quicksilver’s Team Rocket.  Not even remotely a threat, and probably gonna get his ass kicked quickly.  For that, I might put him somewhere between Riddler and Pyro, or between Riddler and Maximus.  He’s hilarious, and I love him.

Obviously, this list is entirely subjective and my own opinion.  People are free to disagree about where people belong on the list.  There’s probably not much point in ranking comic characters this way, given that any of them can get pushed in darker directions or towards redemptive arcs based on writers, and many comic characters have committed atrocities that have gotten swept under the rug.  There’s also the question of motive vs. actions - is Fabian really less bad because he’s incompetent?  Who knows?  This is just something I was thinking about, and wanted to write out in terms of my faves.   

[morlock-holmes]

@flakmaniak

Timmy Turner and Finn aren’t from ensemble casts though, right? I mean, there are recurring other characters, but they’re The Main Character, with one or two nonhuman sidekicks along for the ride.

Well, yes, but that’s kind of my point, actually.

Maybe I’ll just try writing out that essay...

Early on in the run of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, series creator Lauren Faust wrote out a short article for Ms. Magazine laying out her goals and intentions for the show. I think it’s a very interesting article, so much that I kind of want to quote the whole thing, but one thing Faust said that really stuck with me was,

There are lots of different ways to be a girl. You can be sweet and shy, or bold and physical. You can be silly and friendly, or reserved and studious. You can be strong and hard working, or artistic and beautiful.

I think the show is quite successful at that, depicting many different kinds of people, er, pastel ponies, with different strengths, weaknesses, and interests without denigrating any of them.

Faust also talks about being mostly completely alienated by the girls shows of her youth, which is interesting to me because I was extremely into at least a couple of girls shows. As a little boy, I was obsessed with the My Little Pony cartoon, and then, later, Sailor Moon.

Around the late 70s and early 80s, kids shows in the US kind of bifurcated, with shows becoming very explicitly “for girls” and “for boys”. This was especially true during the 80s, and this division wasn’t just about whether you had angular, primary color robots or soft pastel horses, the characters and story structures were very different as well.

I liked the boys shows, but I also liked some of the girls shows, because they addressed feelings and ideas I had that just weren’t going to be addressed in the boys shows. I especially liked the original My Little Pony series.

Now, the 80s version of My Little Pony has a lot of flaws. Particularly, the animation is terrible even by the standards of the 80s and the voice acting can be grating. But rewatching it, I still see what I liked as a kid, which was that it paid a lot of attention to motives and feelings. Like, here are some of the motivations for villains in the show:

I remember when my villainous boss used to be nice, so maybe if I stay with her I can keep her from causing too much trouble and help her go back to how she was.

I was kidnapped by a weird monster and he’s threatened to hurt my loved ones if I don’t do his evil bidding.

I made a deal for fame and fortune with a genie and now I know he eats souls but I’m afraid if I reject him I’ll go back to being poor.\

Our Queen stole a magic rock to revitalize our frozen country, and even though she’s overbearing I have to do right by my country.

These are fairly complex motivations for a kids show, especially when you compare them to, say, Transformers or Ninja Turtles. Shredder or Megatron are just bad because they’re bad, and so are most of their minions. Even if you have somebody like, I don’t know, Jetfire, the story there is that he discovers that his old friend Starscream is bad, at which point neither character has any further compunctions about blasting his old friend with laser guns.

Meanwhile, villains in My Little Pony would be conflicted, have divided loyalties, and be genuinely unsure what the right thing to do was. Even as a very small child, I thought that was more interesting and more honest then other shows were being.

Later, I had many of the same feelings about Sailor Moon. Hell, I still do. Even in the bowdlerized American version, I could still relate to Ami wondering if being a nerd meant she wasn’t properly into the things girls are “supposed” to be into and Usagi’s complete loathing of schoolwork and studies.

Even though these shows weren’t “for” me I really loved them, because the shows that were “for” me, the boys shows, never really expressed the kinds of ideas I’m talking about here. Like, especially during the early nineties, the answer to the question, “Does being a quiet, studious nerd make me less of a boy?” was, “Yes.”

I actually remember, as a child, constantly wishing I had been born a girl, not because I had some inner girl nature, but because girls (or so it seemed from outside) were allowed to be quiet, to be studious, to talk about feelings and to like predictability and calm. The idea of a boy wanting those things was largely foreign.

So... put a pin in that.

Okay, I want to describe a young boy to you. 

He’s energetic, but a bit scatterbrained. He isn’t bookish at all; trying to sit still for long periods of time makes him antsy, and he’d rather be out in the world doing physical things than reading or thinking. In fact, he tends to act without thinking things through, and this gets him in trouble. 

Despite being energetic and physical, he isn’t really into sports; he chafes under authority so teamwork isn’t always his strong suit, even though he cares deeply about his friends. 

I would argue that I’ve just described pretty much every adolsecent male protagonist of every cartoon released over the last 15 years or so. Aang. Danny Phantom. Timmy Turner. Ben 10. Finn from Adventure Time. I’m  sure more will come to mind later. 

This character shows up again and again in boys cartoons, and he’s almost always depicted as the default, with other characters understood through their relationship to this default boy.

Okay, I’m going to get into representation politics, and specifically I’m about to criticize Adventure Time, so I think a disclaimer is in order. One of the problems with talking about representation is that you end up criticizing broad patterns, but the same people aren’t in charge of the whole media landscape, and any single instance of the pattern is probably actually extremely defensible.

So. Okay. I haven’t seen all of Adventure Time, but I’ve seen the first couple of seasons, and they are very well written, and I think Finn in particular is a very well observed character who is very true to life, and in order to change what I’m going to complain about you’d have to rework the show from the ground up. So it’s not that this is a terrible decision, but...

Okay, something that bothers me about early Adventure Time is that Princess Bubblegum is a science nerd only because Finn isn’t. Princess Bubblegum kind of represents, to Finn, the mysteries of adulthood and sexuality. She’s part of this mysterious world of women and adulthood that Finn longs for but hasn’t grown up enough, or had enough experience with, to really understand.

And so to hammer that home her personality and life are also full of things that Finn can’t understand... Like sitting still, and doing meticulous, complex experiments and researching in books.

It’s not that the show denigrates this, not at all, it’s just that it’s positioned as incomprehensible and distant from the audience stand-in character. The Boy doesn’t like to sit still and study, he likes to go on dangerous, physical adventures! And he certainly couldn’t ever prefer to sit still and study over going out and having a physical adventure. Doing that would be incomprehensible.

She’s well-written and I’m sure lots of kids relate to her, but fundamentally her nerdiness is portrayed as foreignness.

A lot of the shows I mentioned above aren’t even really ensembles, but those that kind of are, e.g. Avatar: The Last Airbender, or Ben 10 give The Boy special powers that differentiate him from the rest of the cast.

Go back to the early episodes of My Little Pony and Twilight Sparkle is kind of the viewpoint character; the framing device of the early episodes is letters she writes, but she doesn’t really have, like, one special power that the others don’t, and structurally she’s a tertiary character in a lot of episodes. 

Contrast that to Aang, who is central to the story of Avatar, the Last Airbender. Like... you can have episodes that aren’t really about him but he has a special, important power that no other character does or can have, and the fate of the whole plot rests on his shoulders. Like, if the Avatar dies the natural order is upended and the Fire Nation almost certainly wins; you could kill off any other supporting cast member and then replace them without completely upending the world.

This is not to say that any of the shows I have called out are bad or harmful, but, to go way back, I remember being genuinely upset as a child not to see boy characters who had the feelings and struggles I did, and if anything, I think the situation might be slightly worse than when I was a kid. Go back to that Lauren Faust quote up there. How many cartoons feature a boy who is “Reserved and Studious”? Dexter’s Lab... Maybe Invader Zim... How many with a boy that is “Sweet and Shy”? Have you ever seen one about a boy who is “Artistic and beautiful?”

What about a show with all those boys portrayed as friends and equals, rather than one for you to relate to and a bunch of sidekicks and side characters?

Like, one of the only male, American cartoon characters who has ever made me go, “Yeah, that’s what it was like for me as a kid” is fucking Butters from South Park.

[couch-house]

Howdy! What's sbp?

howdy!!!

the short answer is that it’s my friend @thestupidbutterfly ’s oc-verse that all those furries I keep drawing come from.  it at least used to stand for “stupid butterfly productions” but i think at one point she mightve decided it doesn’t mean anything. it’s mostly just the name of the ‘verse and the abandoned building the protag kids live in

but i mostly gave that short answer already so I’m ? guessing you want a long answer?? even if you don’t, i love talking about these characters and sbub said i could so I’m gonna go wild under the cut for a bit

Protag kids! They live in an abandoned building they named SBP. Theyre all 15 except for Lox whooo used to be 10 but might be 12 now? It’s been a while

Elizabeth is the main protagonist. she’s aggressive and standoffish and before finding sbp didn’t really have any friends besides fang. she’s a gamr grrrrl but with this whole obsession with antiques that lead to her only playing atari games. she likes classical music and watching old horror movies too.

Fang started out as a self-given nickname when he was like 7, but elizabeth thought it was so stupid she exclusively calls him that. also everyone else does too. he’s very meek and skittish and a big weenie. he also has a big crush on elizabeth tho she only Tolerates him at best.

Lox is like. he’s gir. thats what he is. he’s loud and cheerful and weird. most of the other characters have like actual full names and backstories and families but lox is just. lox. fang and elizabeth found him living in sbp. he’s got big hoards of random stuff in the warehouse that he likes to use as props for LARPing, usually with fang because elizabeth just has No interest.

we’ll…. come back to willy. all the kids live in sbp together as like a fun clubhouse situation, except they never go home bc for various reasons they can’t or don’t want to.

Antagonists! Kind of! they live in an abandoned shack in the woods outside town. it’s gross there. the conflict mostly comes from w doing freaky botched cyborg experiments on forest creatures and attempting to do them to the sbp kids, I think

W started out as an actually evil and menacing antagonist but now he’s just. kind of just a sad 33 year old man with this childish innocence and big enthusiasm about robots and making robots and making himself into a robot. he’s having a really rough time of it because he’s been manipulated and controlled kind of his entire life by the actual antagonist

X-1 is the actual antagonist. he was w’s first spiderbot, which he made as a child to be his only friend :(. except since he made x-1 only to love him, but also made him like actually sentient, x-1 is pained to be away from him and Very frustrated about it. he’s nasty. he’s been manipulating w and controlling every facet of his life for like 20+ years. he’s got big plans for w that won’t end well. 

EIlle was supposed to be a clone of elizabeth used to fuck with her life or something, but since she’s like one of those perfect cartoon clones, she also does not give an single fuck about doing that, so instead she hangs around as w’s “assistant” but mostly just eats chips and complains that it’s cold in their shack in the woods

w’s full name is william daniel truehart, which is. also willy’s full name. idk if this was ever changed but the original forum rp story for willy is that elizabeth got ahold of some time travel device and thought “o fuck if we go back in time and just smash x-1, then w won’t be so messed up and trying to like attack a bunch of children” so she did that, but time doesn’t work like that and it just made a splinter timeline. 

so, willy is w from ~20 years in the past, who has been removed from x-1′s influence and is now getting the opportunity to have a semi-normal life and recover from Everything. he’s kind of an anxious kid but he keeps up with elizabeth’s snark and has fun with his friends. he’s an excitable little nerd that likes math and science :) he’s my favorite and i love him so much

there’s also like. minor characters at the kids’ school, and in their families and backstories and stuff. i draw them too sometimes. EDIT ALSO THE FAN CHARACTERS, I FORGOT ABOUT THEM AAAA

[myassbrokethefall]

Do you have any favorite scifi shows? Or any recommendations?

Well! This is a fun ask. Let me see…

So, I really like sci-fi, but sometimes I also don’t like sci-fi. I overdosed a little bit on spaceship stuff after my years of Star Trek obsession and then BSG (and like, I hear The Expanse is great but I just…haven’t been in the mood), and these days my favorite sci-fi is talky, high-concept atmospheric mystery stuff in a fairly realistic world where something is a little bit weird. What I really DON’T like is violence/shooting/chasing/action, and a lot of sci-fi, unfortunately, is that. (Westworld, I am looking at your ass.) I also am a LITTLE bit over sci-fi as sledgehammery social parable, again a la Star Trek. Even though I’ll always love Star Trek (and will get around to watching Discovery one of these days). 

Some sci-fi TV that I’ve enjoyed recently includes:

(hey surprise, this got very long! so it’s under a cut)

Dark. There’s just one season of this on Netflix right now, but I LOVVVVVED it. Talk about atmospheric. It made me want to move to Germany and live in a forest where it rains all the time. It’s in German – this isn’t a bother to me because I like subtitles, but it’s available dubbed as well if you prefer that. It takes place in a small town and starts with a missing child, and it quickly becomes clear that something strange is going on. Time travel is an element. A central part of it becomes about the way all the characters in the town are interconnected and how the events of the past affect the future. It’s part Lost, part Stranger Things, part Back to the Future. 

The Returned/Les Revenants. So there’s an American show called The Returned as well, and this is not that one – the one I’m talking about is in French (sorry…I swear some ones without subtitles are coming) and was on uh, IFC or something like that. One day in a(n extremely attractive and cinematic) French town in the mountains, a girl comes home from a class field trip��except she died on that field trip years ago, in a bus accident, and her family is completely shocked and freaked out. The same thing is happening all across town. Includes one (1) very creepy child. Very spooky and also super atmospheric. (One reason I loved Dark so much was that aesthetically it reminded me of Les Revenants.)

The 4400. I binged this show and had a window of time in my life where I was super obsessed with it. Premise is similar to The Returned, actually: A bunch of people (4,400 of them to be precise) who were believed to be the victims of alien abductions – across many years – are returned to earth all at the same time, all at the age they left. So you have a man who was taken in the 1950s (Mahershala Ali!) and a little girl from the 1930s, etc., all dropped back into modern-day America – and most of them (all of them? I forget) have mysterious powers of various kinds. Two police detectives (am I predictable or what) investigate. Things escalate from there. It is a little XF-y in a way I appreciate, while also being totally different (and much less arty than something like Les Revenants). 

Stranger Things. I might as well list it…everyone knows about this show but it really is pretty great. Season 1 especially. Huge ET vibes, creepy/Spielbergy, not a cop-out where it’s all a metaphor or something (pet peeve). 

Fringe. This isn’t so recent (well, neither is The 4400), but if you like sci-fi and you haven’t watched it, you should! It starts out being a liiiiiiittle bit of a less-hooky ripoff of XF (a group of FBI folks, including a retired mad scientist basically, investigate paranormal cases), but after a few episodes it finds its groove and it becomes its own weird and wonderful thing. It was a show I really enjoyed and it ended satisfyingly. John Noble as Walter Bishop is fantastic, and one thing I really loved about it was that it was not afraid to make things happen and shake up the premise if needed. 

Jessica Jones. I really, really am not into Marvel or any of the superhero stuff, but I like this show a lot. It puts the idea of having “powers” in a very grounded kind of gritty, cynical, noir-y setting and I enjoy that. It’s also woman-focused, which is nice, and it’s just different from other stuff on TV. I dig it. 

Orphan Black. Man, I loved Orphan Black. What a fun show, and – not necessarily the most important thing to me in a show, but hugely refreshing nonetheless – it’s also very woman-centered. The premise is that a woman named Sarah sees someone who looks exactly like her – right before the doppelganger throws herself in front of a train. And in unraveling the mystery, Sarah learns that she’s a clone and she has a bunch of “sisters.” Tatiana Maslany is FREAKING AMAZINGGGGG as all the various clones. It is definitely sci-fi, but it’s also a lot of fun and just a fast-moving, action-packed (but not in a way that makes my eyes glaze over) cool-ass show. 

Grimm. Grimm was a pretty silly network-y show, but my affection for it really never waned (though it also never really went too far above “mild”). Premise: Basically, that fairytale monsters (broadly speaking) are real and walk among us (disguised for the most part), and there are these people called Grimms who can see them and are supposed to fight them. Lots of ancient documents, old books, mysterious keys, etc. This one dude who is a police detective in Portland (it was shot in Portland and is basically the second Portland-iest show after Portlandia, as far as I can tell) finds out that he’s a Grimm, and he meets this guy who is one of these monsters but also a delightfully civilized clock nerd who becomes his friend and helps him learn about this hidden world, and it’s pretty much monster-of-the-week episodes every week (though there is a mytharc of sorts involving an evil cabal of European royalty or something, snore). I think it’s the people who did Angel (which I never watched; I’m not a Buffy person). It also started the same year as Once Upon a Time, so it was the “other” fairytale show.

The Leftovers. Technically, it’s sci-fi. It’s also just very imaginative storytelling, and is a good example of what I mean by high-concept and atmospheric and something being a little bit weird in an otherwise contemporary setting. (This is a post-Lost Damon Lindelof, and Damon Lindelof has learned from his Lost mistakes, with wonderful results.) The central premise is a sci-fi one (2% of the earth’s population mysteriously vanishes), but aside from that there are also just a lot of kind of fantastic imaginative leaps and surreal settings and…ah, The Leftovers. My standard intro/warning: Season 1, while really good, is VERY depressing; Season 2 becomes marginally less depressing while also changing things up considerably and in my opinion becoming much better; Season 3 is even better than that. Love you, show. 

Lost. I suppose I should mention it even though it’s another obvious one. I have rarely been hooked as hard as I was by the pilot of this show. It doesn’t necessarily deliver on everything it promises, and it’s interesting to think of it in terms of it being one of the first shows to, basically, cancel itself – to choose to end so that it could pace its story effectively and lead to a deliberate ending instead of just vamping forever and trying to keep sucking the audience in for one more season until that stopped working and it was canceled. However, before that happened there was some time-killing, and I think that maybe contributes to people’s perception that it didn’t know what it was doing half the time. A divisive ending that I did not have a problem with. If you watch it in the spirit of being taken on a ride and enjoying the feelings that the twists and turns give you in the moment, you’ll find it more satisfying than if you’re trying to solve every mystery and trying to make it all work out perfectly with every loose end tied up.  

The OA. This was a weird-ass motherfucking show on Netflix and I still don’t know what the fuck it was about. I feel like I dreamed it. It maybe involves angels? And stuff. 

Carnivale. Lord, talk about atmosphere. This was an HBO show several years ago now about a creepy traveling circus in the 1930s. Being on HBO, it’s very violent and dirty and twisted and stuff. I was obsessed with it, and loved watching it although I vaguely remember the ending being not super satisfying? I should rewatch it, really, because I have forgotten a lot about it beyond impressions (it started in 2003). It’s not that sci-fi, but it has kind of mysterious portents and shit like that all over the place. Anytime I see anything remotely carnival-y I’m like AAAHHH CARNIVALE

Westworld. Sigh…I’m having a lot of trouble connecting to the season of Westworld that’s currently airing (Season 2, on HBO). I loved Season 1. My opinion is that they blew their premise too quickly and now they have nowhere to go – it’s just been violent chaos of the sort that puts me to sleep. Literally – one episode a couple of weeks ago I tried to watch and fell asleep during TWICE – two evenings in a row – before I finally got through it on Day 3. Because it was just a bunch of shooting. But the premise is cool – in the undetermined nearish future, there is a giant elaborate theme park where extremely realistic robots interact with the superrich guests who pay to come and basically be super destructive and violent (this show doesn’t have a particularly high opinion of humanity) in an Old West-themed setting. Like Disney World if your dream was to fuck and murder everyone in the Hall of Presidents. It’s made by one of the Nolans so there are lots of twists and also you don’t know what the hell is going on half the time. But there are some high-budget groovy sci-fi set pieces in it, and if you like amazing piano covers of popular songs (sometimes but not always in the in-show context of the player piano in the saloon), that is a fantastic bonus (the music is terrific overall). ROBOTS.

Battlestar Galactica. Speaking of robots. I loved the hell out of this show, although I have my issues with it. I felt when I first saw it (this is the 2000s remake I’m talking about, not the 1970s original) that it was like Star Trek had grown up. It gets more and more high-concept the longer it goes on, and some people weren’t fans of where it ended up (I, again, was fine with it), but it starts out with a hell of a premise: Cylons (humanlike robots originally created by humanity, which then evolved) destroy almost all of the human race except for a few stragglers in a few scattered ships, who have to pull together and somehow survive. Great acting, great writing, big themes, Laura Roslin. 

Black Mirror. This is an anthology series, meaning each one is a short story basically, with different characters, a different near-future setting, and a different premise (often having to do with technology going wrong. In the words of Mallory Ortberg: What If Phones, But Too Much?) Some of them are better than others but if you can take some upsetting conceptual stuff, it’s really a super interesting show. Your bingeing tolerance may vary, but I personally could not handle more than a couple of episodes a night.

Roswell. Holy shit I was so into this fucking teen soap opera about aliens. Also not recent. They might do a remake of this I heard?? MAX + LIZ 4EVA

Millennium. Yes…Chris Carter’s Other Show. I’ve said this before, but in a weird way I feel like this show is…CC’s best work???? Without the chemistry supernova of Mulder and Scully dimming everything around it, the “scary stories” he’s always talking about actually have room to be kind of interesting. It also works with his inclination to do what is essentially an anthology series loosely connected via recurring characters that are almost more narrators/observers than participants. In XF, this makes me want to break things when it results in stagnated character growth and no continuity and endless reset-button-pushing. In Millennium, Frank wandering grimly through the show universe encountering fable after fable (grimmer than XF – less on the stretchy mutants and fat-sucking vampires and lake monsters and Reticulans and spooky green bugs; more serial killers and cults and angels and apocalyptic stuff) actually worked pretty darn well for me. It’s not that the characters aren’t good, but they are VERYYYYY archetypal (kind of like how M&S could have been if not given such aliveness and humanity by David and Gillian, and Morgan and Wong and Vince Gilligan at that). Frank Black is the tormented detective, he has a beautiful kind wife and an innocent young daughter and they live in a beatific yellow house and he has to keep them safe from the evils out in the darkness. You might say this is hammered home a lot. But: the kind of mythic tone of it is a much better fit here than on XF. Lance Henriksen is perfect as Frank, and some of the stories are really absorbing and emotional. I cried during WAY more Millennium episodes (I can think of three or four off the top of my head that I remember WEEPING openly over, one of which stars Darren McGavin) than I ever have at XF. 

Everything changes in Season 2 when Morgan and Wong take over as (I believe) showrunners – things lighten up considerably versus S1; there’s even a Darin episode! With Jose Chung! And the Spotnitz Sanitarium! – and then everything changes again in S3 when they leave. The show does suffer from a lack of cohesion in that sense, and frankly the “mytharc” parts never did a lot for me (loosely, the world is going to end in the year 2000 and a cabal of mysterious dudes something something). But there is a lot of cool shit in this show. There really is. Every few years I attempt a rewatch and never finish; I should try again. In late fall, which is the only time Millennium should be watched. 

 BONUS

Face Off. This isn’t sci-fi per se (it’s a reality competition show, on Syfy), but if you’re a sci-fi person you might love it. The way I describe it to people is very simple: It’s the exact same premise and structure as Project Runway, except instead of fashion, it’s FX makeup. The best thing about it is that everyone is NICE and HELPFUL to each other. It’s a bunch of creative nerds making monsters together and the competition element is there but no one is a dick and there’s no fighting and drama. Michael Westmore, who did the makeup on Star Trek: TNG among many other acclaimed projects, is the mentor (and the dad of the show’s host, McKenzie Westmore), and he pops in to give dad advice to all these starstruck dorks. The new season just started and it’s just a fun show. I have, at times, thought of it as my FAVORITE show on TV. 

Well, that was probably more than you wanted, anon! I feel like I’m missing some, too. TV! I like it. 

[blessuswithblogs]

On the anti-imperialist roots of the Super Robot genre

Tadao Nagahama is probably not a name you're familiar with. I won't reproach you for it, it's been a while, I had to look it up myself to help me remember. However, Nagahama is an extremely important person for my current subject of discussion: the anti-imperialist, anti-war roots of the Super Robot genre. Shinzo Abe, the current prime minister of Japan, probably most widely known in the west for wearing a Mario hat to promote the next olympic games, has been in his own quiet (and not so quiet) way contributing to the rise of hard right nationalism, historical revisionism, fascism, and a whole bunch of other nasty isms that have found traction in today's sociopolitical climate. Recently, I saw in passing a tweet about how the ever-popular, ever-mystifying Kancolle had an episode where Japan ended up winning the battle of Midway. Propaganda in media is nothing new, but that was quite egregious, even by my desensitized standards. It got me thinking a little bit about my own niche anime interests and how the common perception of the mecha genre is probably one either of random Gurren Lagann bullshit or simplistic, thinly veiled pro-Japan ideology packaged in a kid friendly, larger than life veneer. In a lot of ways, early Super Robots shared more in common with classical American Super Heroes than actual Japanese Super Heroes like Kamen Rider, which evolved into their own tokusatsu genre quite distinct from either paradigm.

I cannot rightly dispute these preconceptions as wrong, but I do want to at least bring up that some early, influential franchises rejected this narrative. One of the first of these, of course, is Mobile Suit Gundam. While now we have the distinction between Super Robot (robots that are like larger than life super heroes) and Real Robot (robots that are presented in a realistic context as weapons of war using standardized technology employed by military and paramilitary forces to project force) for tedious nerds to bicker over indefinitely, in the days of the original Gundam, that distinction did not exist. Indeed, to play for ratings, Yoshiyuki Tomino, famed creator of the Gundam franchise, had to make many concessions to his sponsors and make Amuro Ray's Gundam more like its more popular contemporaries, with goofy mid-season combination upgrades and some extremely anachronistic weaponry like a beam trident and a huge, MS sized ball and chain. On the back of his later success, Zeta Gundam and the seemingly never ending number of side-stories like War in the Pocket and Stardust Memory, Tomino would actually go on to revise the original series in a definitive movie compilation that cut out a great deal of filler and blatantly unrealistic (or at least immersion breaking) elements. This version is extremely good by the way. Give it a watch if you're interested in the genre's history or if you just like old sci-fi.

The reason I bring this up is sort of my roundabout way of arguing that while the Gundam of today is made of entirely different stock than Super Robots, the original article deserves a space in this discussion. The discussion being, of course, the distinctly anti-nationalist bent of a lot of early Super Robot shows. In all of its many incarnations, good, bad, and inbetween, Gundam is a story about war really sucking and how tragic it is that we fail to understand one another because it's easier to just kill one another instead. Now, of course, a lot of fans are either too thick to understand this subtext (and text-text) or simply willfully disregard it because they like cool robots that shoot lasers. Basically think of Dan Ryckert's relationship with Metal Gear. While certainly not all Gundam series have been good, they have always been faithful to these ideas, which is laudable. In broad strokes, anyway. SEED Destiny was pretty weird in spots.

Mobile Suit Gundam 079, which chronicled the One Year War, was not at all shy about this. The One Year War began as a movement for Spacenoid (a slightly ridiculous term for a person living in a space colony or on the moon) independence from the hopelessly corrupt Earth Federation. Naturally, the Federation did not take kindly to this and moved to suppress the movement, but found itself overmatched by the Principality of Zeon's advanced Mobile Suit weapons. To keep an even footing in the war, the Federation resorted to using nuclear weapons and other atrocities on largely civillian colonies to buy time as they developed their own brand of Mobile Suit. In retaliation, Zeon counterattacked with an even more devastating new weapon: dropping space colonies on earth. All told, the One Year War was not a good time to be alive, and nearly half of the Earth Sphere's total population died in one way or another. While all this was happening, the original founder of the independence movement died under suspect circumstances and power was seized by the Zabi family, who were Really Bad News. The Federation, meanwhile, turned to conscripting child soldiers in a desperate bid to keep pace.

This all culminated in the creation of the Gundam by Tem Ray, Amuro's emotionally absent father. Due to Circumstances, Amuro finds himself in the cockpit and becomes the most important soldier in the war overnight because the Gundam is several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything Zeon can field. The character of Amuro is explored most fully in Char's Counterattack, when he is a fucked up adult instead of a fucked up kid, but from the outset, Amuro is defined by forces completely out of his control and his fatalistic acceptance of his own lack of agency. Despite his nigh legendary piloting skills, Newtype powers of precognition and telepathy, and status as hero of the One Year War, Amuro might actually be the most passive motherfucker in the god damned galaxy. This puts him immediately at odds not only militarily but interpersonally with the dreadfully overambitious if mostly well-intentioned Char Aznable, his lifelong rival. Their entire history of conflict is based entirely upon the simple irony that they both want the same thing but, despite being Newtypes, lack the ability to understand this. The One Year War's violence and brutality defined them and their relationship to another, because of a petty twist of fate that put Amuro in the Gundam's pilot seat instead of some other sap.

Gundam uses many more overt methods of conveying that the One Year War is not glamorous or cool or just. Characters die regularly on both sides of the conflict, oftentimes for no real reason other than "this is war, sucker." Tomino developed quite a reputation for this style of storytelling, earning the moniker Kill-'em-all Tomino, especially in some of his non-Gundam works like Aura Battler Dunbine and Space Runaway Ideon. The entire continent of Australia got rendered uninhabitable by colony drops. The White Base, the federation battleship housing the Gundam, is crewed and staffed almost entirely by people who have yet to reach 20 years of age and they've got a pack of prepubescent toddlers running around on the ship because they've got nowhere else to go. I personally find the interpersonal conflicts acting as microcosm for ideology and war to be the most interesting, and most intrinsically Gundam thing about the franchise, but you don't have to go looking between the lines to find evidence of the show's ardent anti-war, anti-nationalist proclivities. The intensely nationalistic Zeon is surreptitiously usurped by a power-mad dictator without anyone even catching on after Ghiren Zabi uses a giant ass space laser to kill both his father and an influential Earth Federation general while they're trying to broker a peace deal. The death of that general, in turn, allows the worst elements of the Federation government to run amok and eventually create the deeply fascist Titans in Zeta Gundam, who make it a point of policy to oppress spacenoids as brutally as possible.

So Gundam, at least, has profound roots in the denunciation of military power as a metric of moral superiority. That's not really news to most people. Oddly enough, it's the most obsessive of fans that tend to miss the memo because they're presumably too busy making sure Mobile Suit measurements are exactly as documented and all character motivations are completely rational and logical, like them. Let's dig a little deeper for some more surprising examples of this kind of ideology in unlikely places. It should be noted, of course, that I am not heralding Gundam as some sort of bastion of progressive thought. Tomino's sexual politics are located roughly in the Stone Age until about 2000's Turn A Gundam, where they progress to about on par with inudstrial revolution social mores. Progress, I suppose. This is a problem with a distressing amount of media, especially in the 70s and 80s, but I'm trying to look at the bright side of things. At least it's not Cross Ange, right?

Moving on, when we look at the genesis of Super Robots as a genre of animation, we will invariably look to Go Nagai. Though a number of shows about large robot men fighting evil like Tetsujin 28 and the live action Giant Robo came first, the seminal Mazinger Z had the popularity and iconic staying power to define everything that came after. Though I could write a great deal about Go Nagai and his Dynamic Robots, they don't really pertain to my particular topic of discussion today because Go Nagai was about as progressive as a sack of bricks. His work was largely apolitical, at least in the sense that he did not intentionally make his stories about contemporary political issues, so at very least Kouji Kabuto never waxed nostalgic about the time Japan was allied with Nazi Germany. In fact, one of the show's major villains, Count Brocken, is a reanimated SS officer cyborg who carries his head around with him because of a decapitation in a previous life. Generally speaking, not a good or sympathetic guy, despite his protests to the contrary. Go Nagai focused on themes of brotherhood and being outcast by society for just being too damn hotblooded and having sideburns that were just too damn thick, though these mostly manifested in his manga. The TV adaptations of Mazinger, Getter Robo, and Grendizer were largely sanitized and inoffensive.

I mentioned Tadao Nagahama at the beginning of my piece, and it is now with him we come to a very important point in the genre's history. Nagahama was the director of three particular Super Robot shows: Combattler V, Voltes V (here the V is treated as the roman numeral, so it's really Voltes 5), and Toushou Daimos (roughly, Brave Leader Daimos). Colloquially, these three are known as the Nagahama Romantic Trilogy, and they are denoted not only by the iconic designs of the robots themselves, towering, blocky things made out of many constituent parts in a fairly sensical way (as opposed to the famously Unpossible Getter Robo), but also by the injection of genuine interpersonal and ideological drama into the proceedings. They were also super popular in other areas of the world, much like Go Nagai's Dynamic Robots. Voltes V in particular was popular in Southeast Asia. Combattler V was instrumental in cementing the notion of The Honorable Rival in the genre, a character aligned with evil that still conducted themselves with decorum. While you would find few such characters in the ranks of Dr. Hell's armies or King Vega's invasion force, in the Romantic Trilogy, they were critical to the show's success. Combattler V was not especially revolutionary, but it laid the groundwork for Voltes V, which in many ways was.

Voltes V is the tale of the Boazan Empire, an interstellar civilization with an expansionist streak and a highly stratified caste system. Unlike previous villainous organizations, the Boazans are noteworthy for being three dimensional and not painted in shades of black and white. The Boazans invade earth for the purposes of annexing it to their growing empire, with the crown prince Hainel leading the charge. Their battle beasts are too much for earth's military (and the militaries of many other planets), but the super electromagnetic robot Voltes V, piloted by a team of five headed by Kenichi, appears to beat them back. Things become interesting when we learn about Kenichi and his two brother's lineage. Their father, the brilliant scientist behind Voltes V's construction, is actually a Boazan expatriate. Not just any expatriate, but former royalty, no less. Boazan's strict caste system is based solely upon whether or not a citizen has horns. If they do, they're nobility. If they don't, well, uh, sucks to be them. Such a system, already untenable, is exacerbated by the fact that the vast majority of Boazans don't have horns. It's a rare genetic mutation. The whole Boazan war machine is powered by a gigantic underclass of slaves-in-everything-but-name. Kenichi's father believed that this was morally reprehensible and that reform was necessary. Unfortunately, this was not a popular opinion among the nobility, and he was disgraced, de-horned, and ousted for his ties to rebellion movements.

Complicating matters even further, he had a son while on Boazan, the aforementioned Prince Hainel. After relocating to Earth to escape persecution and devise some way of bringing change to the empire, Kenichi's father settled down and had a family. Now bereft of horn, he was largely indistinguishable from the average earthling. Parallel evolution is a concept emrbaced heartily by old sci-fi in both Western and Japanese media, probably because people thought alien babes were hot. Fair, honestly. At any rate, Kenichi engages in mortal combat with his half-brother's forces on a regular basis, which creates interpersonal tension mostly lacking in earlier shows. Sometimes Duke Freed got snippy at Kouji for being all love and peace at the Vegans but that was usually resolved at the end of the episode. Hainel himself gradually changes, too, starting out as arrogant, dismissive, and openly ashamed of his connection to a disgraced expatriate and his sons but gaining more depth as time goes on. The end of the show takes place on Boazan itself, with Voltes V spearheading a hornless revolution while Hainel turns on the emperor, vengeful and disgusted by his cowardice. Or maybe it was a movie. Look it's been a long time and I'm going from memory give me a break.

For a kid's TV show at the time, this was honestly pretty wild. Voltes V was not shy about displaying its moral core: people are not defined by the circumstances of their birth, and systems of government based upon the oppression of an underclass deserve only to be destroyed. Voltes V is not as morally complex as Gundam, but it is leaps and bounds ahead of many of its Super Robot contemporaries. Nagahama believed in a sort of fusion of genuine human drama and moral complexity with the more simplistic, bombastic style of storytelling common to his predecessors, and it resonated with viewers all over the globe. At the time of airing, a number of Southeast Asian countries were under the thumb of repressive dictatorships, and the final episodes had to be heavily censored and edited so as not to promote seditious ideas. That, more than anything to me, is the mark of something that is genuinely anti-nationalist in nature. Who would know better than fascist dictators themselves?

The final entry in the Romantic Trilogy, Toushou Daimos, continued the trend of creating morally and politically complex circumstances in which the karate robot made of transforming trucks must punch bad guys. The aliens of the day are the Barmians. The Barmians, however, buck convention and come to earth in genuine peace. Their story is a tragic one - their planet was destroyed in a catastrophe, and the survivors were evacuated on the aptly named mobile space city Small Barm. Due to severe space and resource constraints, a billion Barmians have to remain in cryogenic sleep while a skeleton crew of nobles and military officials keep Small Barm afloat as they search for a place to live. Naturally, they find earth to be a charming place as any to settle down (as it must have seemed in the early 80s before the environment started collapsing) and initiate negotiations with the governments of earth to try and accommodate their people. Expert martial artist and principle protagonist Ryuzaki Kazuya is the son of a brilliant scientist who created the robot Daimos and the special Daimolight energy that makes it so scary strong. Said scientist is part of the diplomatic delegation sent from earth to Small Barm (in some universes alongside the illustrious Rilina Peacecraft, but that is a story for another time entirely) and is a major proponent of the Barmian's request for peaceful integration into earthling society.

Regrettably, this all goes awry when the Barmian hardliner military faction assassinates the King of Barm during the meeting with poison and blames the earthling delegation on it, engineering their own perfect casus beli for a war of domination against Earth. Fascists are remarkably bad at sharing and getting along with others, as has been demonstrated. Prince Richter, the honorable if somewhat dim and hot tempered son of the King wasn't too hot on the assimilation idea because of his prideful belief that the superiority of Barm's culture and technology should allow them to dictate more favorable terms, but was ultimately loyal to his father above all else and acquiesced to the idea. When his father is assassinated, of course, he flies into a rage and declares earth to be the enemy of Barm and kills Kazuya's father. So there's a lot of bad blood between the two of them. Kazuya and Daimos stand up against Barm's battle beasts and prevents the invasion from progressing. He eventually meets and falls in love with princess Erika, Richter's sister. Where Richter is brash and hasty, Erika is intelligent and patient, and much more compassionate. These qualities allow her to see that the circumstances of the King's death, and any motivation the Earthling's might have had to assassinate him, were extremely suspect. They part ways, but Erika eventually joins a resistance faction on Small Barm against the military hardliners who had assumed power. Richter continues to dance to their tune, too consumed by misplaced anger and vengeance to see what is really going on. Erika's relationship with Kazuya only makes him more unreasonably mad.

Of course, Earth has its own hardliners, and in his battles, Kazuya not only has to contend with Barm's battle beasts, but General Miwa, an odious Earth-supremacist convinced that all Barmians, regardless of their disposition, must be eliminated immediately and without mercy. If we want to talk about more alternate universe scenarios, for reference, Miwa was a fucked up enough dude to cast his lot in with the Blue Cosmos organization after his Barmian extermination ambitions never panned out. He really fucking sucks. Ultimately, Kazuya and Erika manage to uncover the plot to assassinate the King, defeat the military holdouts, and bring the peace their fathers wanted about. Where Voltes V presented a scenario of a civilization run by ultra-nationalists needing to be restructured from the ground up, Daimos offers the inverse: a peaceful, tolerant civilization in a time of crisis gets hijacked by a few selfish, warmongering fascists and nearly destroys itself. Coming to understand and love one another, even when from different planets entirely, is an even bigger theme in Daimos than Voltes V, and is in many ways a more personal story. A romance, if you will, for a romantic trilogy.

Nagahama's Romantic Robots were well loved around the globe and left a lasting impact on their genre, encouraging those who came after to experiment with more complex themes and characters, even in the larger than life universe of Super Robots. While not all (or even very many) of these successors live up to this high minded ideal, it's an important part of the history of Japanese animation, proving that drama and politics were not just for Gundam or more "serious" shows. We can see the legacy of Nagahama in a number of more contemporary titles. Evangelion is so much more about interpersonal conflict than actual robots that the final episode of the TV series didn't even have any fighting in it (albeit mostly due to budget constraints). People hated it, of course, and Hideki Anno went on to make End of Evangelion to either appease or piss off further the angry fans, but it happened nonetheless. Gun X Sword represents an evolution of the genre into that of a pseudo-western, where heroes and villains are separated by the thinnest of ideological margins despite the fantastical robots and setting. Gurren Lagann briefly flirts with political complexity before promptly imploding on itself (maybe this one is a bad example). Even Shin Mazinger, an unabashed love letter to older Go Nagai properties, managed to create a surprisingly affecting and compelling character (dare I say, Protagonist?) in its reimagining of Baron Ashura.

The Mecha Genre used to be, and still kind of is, one of my big guilty passions in life. This essay is more personal in nature than a lot of my others, because from time to time I feel like I have to justify to myself why I like this garbage even when it's weird regressive shit. I guess the compromise I have found is that, in certain circumstances, it can be weird progressive shit, too.

[romaniassexdungeon]

No to conformity and yes to spoilers, a RoBul romance

I was having one of those phases where my desire to write was a little… lacklustre, so I thought I’d have a go with a little one-shot to get my inspiration back also I quite fancied writing a bit of RoBul again. This really is… well and truly ridiculous.

This is based on a conversation with, and therefore dedicated to @phyripo because I know how much you looooove soulmate AUs. Some adult humour but not a lot by my standards. Everything about the humour in this is completely and utterly stupid, I can guarantee. 

It’s also four in the morning and I cannot English.

Tsvetan – Bulgaria

Alin – Romania

…

 “Man, I can’t believe Dumbledore dies!”

Like with many people’s tattoos, it had taken a while to figure out the meaning of that curious string of words.

Even his parents had no explanation for it when he asked, as a pudgy little toddler, barely three years old and wanting to know why there was an omen of death written in black ink across his wrist. They were stumped. What the hell kind of name was Dumbledore anyway?

As a child, Tsvetan Borisov had been panic-stricken over the thought of meeting his soulmate possibly at a funeral, possibly over a dead body. What if he became an undertaker or a priest? No wait, how could he become a priest if he had a soulmate? Maybe a serial killer? Or maybe he just knew a strange man with a strange name who met an untimely death. The fact that his death was being referred to in the present was an added layer of confusion and worry. His family and handful of friends tended to blame this dour tattoo for the boy’s gloomy disposition.

Tsvetan felt it was too much of a burden for his young shoulders to bear.

As he grew older, he usually either found out or worked out the meaning of people’s tattoos. His mother’s, for example, was pretty simple: hey gorgeous. His father’s, on the other hand, was the more worrying: slap my butt again and I’ll put your head through that window. Given that Mr Borisov not only carried no broken glass related injuries but was married to Mrs Borisova with a son, Tsvetan was willing to bet he’d done the smart thing and not slapped her butt again.

He did, however, have to wonder how many butts his father had slapped in his quest to find his soulmate.

Then the Harry Potter series came into the world.

Something Tsvetan would forever kick himself for was the fact that he paid no attention to the books when they first came out. He didn’t pay attention as more and more people began reading the books, even though a few friends and classmates sent strange glares in his direction on occasion. He tried it once, but couldn’t get past the first few pages. It was a dull book, as far as he was concerned, and not worth his time.

A few books later, and the whole world seemed to be reading them, even reading in English because they couldn’t wait for the Bulgarian translation, and Tsvetan was now refusing to touch them out of spite. He was annoyingly stubborn at times, especially when it came to the petty things. And yet, it just seemed to make his friends insist all the more vigorously to read the damn things. When he asked why, they remained vague, something he took to mean that the books weren’t very good and they were just reading them because everyone else was, like every other dodgy trend to come out of the 90s and early 2000s. Harry Potter would soon fall into obscurity, just like Betty Spaghetty and those annoying square robot dogs that would not shut up for a good 10 minutes or something after you pressed the button on top of their heads.

It wasn’t until he found himself watching one of the films that his friends’ words all made sense.

He didn’t mean to. It had been Christmas 2004 and, after a filling dinner, the family had just been lazing on the sofa. His dad had turned on the telly and not bothered to even flick through the channels, despite Tsvetan protesting that he was boycotting the series for absolutely no reason other than pettiness and yes, father, that was a perfectly valid reason to cut something out of your life.

But his dad could not be bothered to change the channel. He was full and just wanted to stare blankly at moving pictures, and Tsvetan didn’t have the energy or will to get up and snatch the remote.

So he finally got a dose of Harry Fucking Potter.

And it changed his life forever.

Sure, there are many people in the world who claim Harry Potter changed their lives, but for none was it so true as for Tsvetan Borislavov Borisov. The moment Dumbledore rocked onto screen with his twinkling eyes and ridiculously long beard, Tsvetan felt relief like he’d never known wash over him.

Dumbledore was a fictional wizard in a fictional book about wizards.

That explained so much, he realised as he lay there and watched little Harry Potter do his magical thing. The glares, his friends begging him to read it, that one specky nerd yelling ‘fuck you!’ on the bus when they read his wrist.

He couldn’t help himself.

He laughed.

He laughed until he was on the floor in stitches, and his parents laughed too. It was such a ridiculous way to meet a soulmate! And such a ridiculous thing to have permanently tattooed on his wrist! But, hey, at least a real man wasn’t going to die before he found true love.

But Dumbledore didn’t die during the film. The two-faced turban guy, and some old bastard named Nicholas Flamel did, but not Dumbledore. He could well have, though, Tsvetan noted. He was certainly old enough. There were five books out though, if he could recall correctly, and this Dumbledore character seemed pretty important. Okay, he was going to stick around for a few more books/films then.

Something Tsvetan realised a few days later did put a dampener on his good mood: he’d have to read the Harry Potter books himself.

If his soulmate apparently liked them enough for it to be the first topic they discuss with him, then he might as well be able to hold a proper conversation with them. And so, with a heavy heart, he bought his first copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. But hey, he’d only been half-paying attention to the film and it seemed alright.

And, once he got into the books, they were alright too. Not the best, but the world was certainly interesting and the characters not bad. And maybe he wondered what it would be like to go to an ancient castle to learn magic. No wonder all his classmates had been obsessed.

He liked the second book better, and by the third he was hooked. Tsvetan actually liked fantasy, so once he got into them found they were very easy to read. He hoped his soulmate did actually like them, and wasn’t just going to mention one spoiler at a party or something and be done with it.

His newfound interest in the series was actually why he found himself standing in line at midnight on the 16th July 2005 outside some high-end bookstore in London with hundreds of other nerds waiting to get his hands on a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. He heard murmurs from those around him, debating who was going to die, many suspecting Dumbledore but others throwing in their own suggestions. Tsvetan didn’t really care so long as it wasn’t Viktor Krum. He did try to keep his wrist hidden under a sweatband, just in case.

And then it hit him.

His soulmate, the hypothetical love of his life, his long lost other half, was about to walk out of this bookstore and spoil the end of a long-awaited book to about a thousand sweaty, tired hardcore Harry Potter fans.

And it was his, Tsvetan Borislavov Borisov’s, duty as soulmate and one true love to not only forgive this colossal asshole but presumably rescue them from being stabbed with one of the many fake wands in sight.

Why couldn’t he just spend his life slapping butts like his father?

When midnight came and the doors opened, Tsvetan waited with growing nerves as he watched every person leave with their copy.

...

Tsvetan had a fair idea it would be him who spoiled it.

Him. The weird one. The man with scraggly long hair and black painted fingernails. The idiot wearing a moulting fur coat and leather trousers. With more rings than fingers, feather earrings and a t shirt saying ‘it’s only illegal if you get caught’. He was going to do it.

Tsvetan dropped his cigarette, stubbing it out with his heel in anticipation.

He guessed right.

The One Who Did Not Conform had flicked to the end of the book, then with eyes as wide as saucers, puffed out his chest and gave a bellow.

“Man, I can’t believe Dumbledore dies!”

…

“Quick, follow me into this alleyway!”

As a child, Alin Radacanu had found his soulmate tattoo exciting. “I’m going on an adventure!” he would exclaim. His soulmate was someone magical! His soulmate would whisk him away from his mundane life to go save the world and fight evil! Or even become evil masterminds themselves!

As he got older, and puberty left him a perpetually horny mess, ���adventure’ eventually changed to a hopeful ‘getting blown in an alley’. And then taken on an adventure like the ones in those YA novels.

He eventually realised that, in order for the first thing his soulmate to seriously say be ordering him into an alleyway, he’d probably have to be in some sort of danger, presumably on the run from something.

And with that thought in mind, Alin Radacanu then set out to cause as much trouble as possible. From that day on, he did everything in his power to constantly be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Or right time, hopefully.

It was that concept that freed him from the Confines of Conformity. The weirder the outfit, the more he’d stand out and therefore the more likely he’d be to get into trouble. It also freed him from following a lot of laws, and over the years he was arrested for everything from rioting to arson to public indecency, but none of those things lead him to his soulmate, only a weeping mother and a slim chance of ever making it into anyone’s will.

On the plus side, being a masochist certainly helped deal with the number of people who ended up punching him in the face for things he’d said or done. He hoped his soulmate wouldn’t mind that. Or his missing, broken teeth.

Maybe fixating on his soulmate tattoo was technically still making him a slave to conformity, as a lot of sad romantics tended to base their lives around what they could do to find their soulmate. Should he renounce his soulmate and the whole stupid tradition?

No. He already had a suspended sentence because of this hypothetical person. He certainly deserved an adventure after the lengths he’d gone to find them.

His stupid, self-destructive path was what lead him, on 16th July 2005, to proudly stride out of a high-end bookstore, flick to the end of the latest instalment of the beloved Harry Potter book series, and loudly exclaim “man, I can’t believe Dumbledore dies!” to a horde of furious nerds.

And this time, he was greeted with something other than pain or a police chase.

A figure pushed past the mob lurching forwards to tear him to shreds, a man with tired eyes and a resigned air about him. His one true love? His completer?

Yes, completer is a word.

“Quick, follow me into this alleyway!”

Alin was so stunned he could only let the man drag him away, this wonderful stranger that smelt of stale alcohol and cigarette smoke and wore a worn, brown leather jacket. The man who would apparently lead him towards a gritty, urban fantasy adventure, judging by the look of him.

He could dig. So long as one of them had magic powers.

And this knight in vegan-unfriendly armour did indeed lead him into an alleyway. And another. And another. Until a screaming stitch cut through Alin’s rose-tinted vision and eventually the angry shouts stopped.

The stranger stopped soon after, doubling over to hack tar out of his choked lungs as Alin leaned against the brick wall of the alley they found themselves in. What now? Was Tsvetan going to take him to a nightclub full of modern wizards? A vampire coven? Would they now go off around Europe to hunt evil spirits?

“So you – you’re,” the man huffed, “my assholemate then?”

Alin was in love.

“It seems so,” he agreed, “Alin Radacanu, a pleasure to meet you.” He held out his hand, which the man took.

“Tsvetan Borislavov Borisov.”

“So what now?” Alin looked around hopefully, giving a cheeky grin.

Tsvetan shrugged. “How ‘bout a dri-“

“We gonna blow each other or what?”

“I mean... I’m down for that too.”

[reds-revenge]

im feeling evil so ALL THE LOCATION ASKS

>:( probably Josie anon, do you know how many times I gotta switch pages now? I’m kidding you’re cool mobile just sucks.

*deep breath* here we go

Amsterdam: yeah, I think so. I’ve always been the weird one, usually in a nice way but I’m still the weird one. I kinda sound like a robot when I’m tired, or trying to accomplish something, and I guess that’s not how all people think?? Anyway.

Athens: ahaha I’m not a perfectionist, I’m the PLATONIC IDEAL OF A PERFECTIONIST. Listen okay I will sink as much time as I need to get it perfect, that’s happening less with the depression bc I just can’t get it up to my standard, I’m trying to make this a Growing Opportunity and learn to set Attainable Goals, but it usually ends with me panicking instead. Ah well

Belgrade: my mother had a loooong list of names and my dad tried to mock them all, they only kept ones that you couldn’t really make weird nicknames for, one of my friends took that as a challenge and called me Kira the Mirra (like mirror) for a year, it was interesting

mom called my kiramodo dragon bc of some noise I made when I was a baby. I thought my name was baby for a while bc they called me Baby Kira my Deara. Then I decided I wasn’t a baby and dubbed myself Kira my Deara the Kid.

Berlin: well for that I’d have to KNOW what I what. I can usually do whatever, but I would really like is absolute certainty about things like do I exist, am I hurting people by existing, etc. and that’s just not something we get in this life. It’s :) so :) fun :) :) :)

Bratislava: it doesn’t have a firm genre, there’s a lot of oddly philosophical themes for something that’s mostly sci fi/ comedy, but there’s also bildungsroman elements bc life amiright, and what’s science besides a mystery?

The protagonist is Done™ with everyone including herself, there’s cephalopods.

Brussels: I’m not fluent in all the languages I borrow from but yeah I do this a lot, I’m a language nerd. I did it more often when I was younger and still liked learning Latin.

Bucharest: NOT ON PURPOSE OKAY, WE’D KNOWN EACH OTHER SINCE WE WERE FIVE SO ALMOST TEN YEARS AT THE TIME, I THOUGHT OF HIM AS MY BROTHER, WHY THE FUCK IS HE WRITING EMO STORIES ABOUT KISSING ME WE WERE S I B L I N G S.

I don’t think of him as family anymore but not bc of the ~*drama*~, I learned some Things and grew Wise. (Well, wisER)

Budapest: maybe, I was five, my love was unrequited. We ended up being friends bc in such a small class whatcha gonna do? We didn’t talk about that fiasco for ten years, turns out that whole declaring my love to the class thing was pretty awkward for him. Whoops.

Copenhagen: outside of old, distant relatives, no. I haven’t actually kissed someone romantically before at all, and I don’t have a desire to. I’m not saying I wouldn’t ever someday, I just haven’t sought that kinda thing out.

Dublin: between being a minor and being an obsessive rule follower, that hasn’t happened. I doubt I ever will, losing even the slightest bit of control over myself terrifies me

Helsinki: now this is interesting. I’m guessing this is referring to romantic love, but it doesn’t SAY that.

Look, I wanna be a scientist. Like really really wanna be a scientist, always have, always will. This sounds cliche but I feel like I was made for the sciences, I really do.

but I gotta go with love. Not romantic necessarily, just in general. And this isn’t a “well I’d better choose the Virtuous thing.” Like, I feel made for science, but science doesn’t mean anything if you’re not using it for something. Neither does art for that matter. Idk, but without love–for my family, my friends, for squids, for God–i just don’t see the point of this whole life thing. So yeah, I’m going with love

Kiev: YES AND FRANKLY I’D CHOOSE THE KNIFE EVERY TIME. I’m not gonna tell you EVERYTHING EVER THAT WAS SAID TO ME bc that would take way too long but yes, yes I have even when they weren’t trying to be knife words

Lisbon: I’m honestly not sure, like I like Hamilton’s America but I hate Trump’s, also I’m really drawn to the British isles and honestly France and Polynesia and India and Russia are all cool, so like I don’t feel like I belong but I might not belong anywhere if that makes sense? Idk tbh

Ljubljana: not really, I sound like my mother over the phone and if you look at baby pictures without the hair showing Greta and I get mixed up (not by family by friends) I have kind of distinctive hair, so.

London: Google says this is thinking vs feeling basically so I gotta go sense (thinking)

Luxembourg: I REGRET EVERYTHING and I often regret things deeply, like really stupid things bc of ~*damaging theology*~ but now mostly because ~*Ocd*~ (I think idk I guess maybe knocking that board over really will send me to hell, I’ve been spinning over this for YEARS)

Madrid: ALL THE TALENTS but maybe speaking fluent French, juggling, and playing guitar if you want some specifics

Moscow: No. I mean when else would I do all the thinking? Not during the day when I’m half asleep, surely.

Nicosia: whenever I’m nervous or exhausted which is most of the time now tbh

Oslo: HAhahahahaha this is hilarious. I’d like absolute 100% certainty that everything is 100% okay, always has been, and always will be. I don’t know what okay even is here but I know that 100% certainty does not exist and also everything probably isn’t okay, and EVEN IF I KNEW THIS I would still be nervous for some hellish reason, I don’t think I’ll ever actually have peace of mind :/

Paris: I mean yeah, but not more afraid than I am of most things. I guess I’m more scared I’d mess it up somehow

Podgorica: HELL YEAH. I mean, I’m curious about death and franklyitwouldntbeterribleifigothitbyasnipertomorrow @ the government, but setting that aside I’ve been raised on stories of people dying, dying for good or evil but for what they believe and I was kinda scared when I was little that I’d chicken out and surrender to the fascist government or whatever but I won’t, I’ll just do the thing, follow the rule same as any other. And even if my beliefs are wrong we’re all gonna die anyway, so

Prague: not really, no. I’ve got a good family, a good church for once, I’m heading to running start next year to study what I want, I don’t really have something to be jealous of.

I mean I’d like my brain to work but I’m not *jealous* of people who’s brains do the thing, I’m happy for them I just would like to be like that too

Reykjavik: A TINY FLOATING ISLAND COUNTRY I COULD PARK WHERE I WANTED I MEAN I DOUBT I’M GONNA MOVE PERMANENTLY OUT OF AMERICA BECAUSE THAT SOUNDS HARD AND MY FAMILY’S HERE BUT I DON’T LIKE ABSOLUTE RULES WHERE I DON’T NEED THEM

Riga: I would take as many selfies as I had to to get one I only kinda hate, I would post that one. (Yeah this is specific but I’m waiting for the technicality police over here, I totally would tho I don’t really care)

Rome: yeah but not romantically. I mean this is gonna sound weird I’m sorry but once in a blue moon I get an overwhelming sense of God and His love for me, that sounds cheesy or fake or something but I’m too tired to not be painfully honest rn

Sarajevo: TO INFINITY AND BEYOND. I wouldn’t do whatever they asked me to, I’m not gonna sign my mind over bc they’re human too and not always right and maybe the stakes are high etc, but if they need something I'ma do the thing at any cost of time, resources, sanity, etc. to myself I’ve got no boundaries here

Skopje: I honestly don’t know?? I’ve been called a lot of sweet things by a lot of sweet people and I remember EVERY SINGLE ONE and honestly I don’t think I could choose one, they’re all sweet in different ways, you know?

Sofia: not in a physical way, women are shockingly treated differently from men in Puritainville, but most people were fine with me in general if I didn��t touch certain buttons. Everyone had different buttons but never said what they were until whoops! It was fun :)

Mental health is also a super fun topic in Puritainville if you were wondering, someone told my mom when I first pulled out of school that I didn’t need a doctor, I just needed a book on Grace, because clearly my theology was why I couldn’t talk and slept fifteen hours a day

Also being Anglican was interesting, I tried explaining the whole icon thing and Lent and via media but it fell on deaf ears

I dunno if this is prejudice related or not but some guy called me a Pharisee when I was seven bc I told him off for making it impossible for me to follow the rules, he was trying to make us scared to teach us about God’s grace, you can imagine how well tiny Kira handled that

wow okay well I guess that’s a yes then

Stockholm: UNFORTUNATELY

In middle school everyone wrote stories about their thinly disguised classmates, and then in ninth grade creepy mcbadideas wrote stories about me saving him from his life basically and then him saving me from depression with a kiss, it was weird

and then Mom has used the whole family for story ideas

Tallinn: I can’t recall a rumour I’ve heard about myself, I’m very open. There were certainly rumors about me being ~*liberal*~ but that was actually true so idk.

I’d like to hear some though, I’m so out there already it’s gotta be entertaining

Tirana: no??? I’m honestly not sure what sexy is but everyone else seems to? Mom swears boys look at me–she’s usually telling me how not to die at a bus stop when this comes up– but I don’t notice anything

Valletta: thankfully no, at least not a big one. The worst I’ve injured myself was when I kinda timed a jump over a brick wall wrong and took out a chunk of my shin.

Vienna: I gave this one A LOT OF THOUGHT but I don’t think there’s like one song that totally captures my life, I definitely identify with songs but there’s not one single song in part because I’m still trying to process my life, you know? Fit things into the correct slots. Until I do that–if that’s even possible–i won’t have just one song. Sorry!!

Vilnius: yeah, why not? If it’s not like a permanent thing bc I have issues with permanency then it’d be cool, if only to get another point of reference for how things are done

Warsaw: i AM a depression lol. I thought two years was about as long as major depressive episodes lasted but I guess not, or maybe I was misdiagnosed idk

Zagreb: I’ve certainly given my TRUST to people I shouldn’t have, I’ve given my FRIENDSHIP to people I shouldn’t have, but I don’t think I’ve ever given someone my heart when I shouldn’t have.

Zurich: not at all. It’s a means to an end, you need it for college and food and stuff, but outside of that I really don’t care. I’ve been trying to figure out how we could restructure society without money and keep it fair and not suppress individuality and keep everyone taken care of it’s an interesting thought experimentTHERE I’M DONE I hope you appreciate that that took me a couple HOURS JOSIE I love you but WOW am I glad that’s over

[generallyspecificblog]

  I watched episodes 1 & 2 of the new season of Stranger Things on Netflix this weekend, its been a long time coming. I’ve been waiting patiently for this season since the last one ended. The show grew on me in a big way, i did not like it initially. Something about it is mysterious and innocent and this season looks to have more of a suspenseful and scary vibe. I’ve only watched two episodes thus far so this is an incomplete project but I felt I needed to write about it because i haven’t blogged a long one in a few days. What follows are my hot takes, conspiracy theories, and honorable mentions of “Stranger Things” Season 2.

Ah, the ’80’s, things were slower back then i’m sure, i wouldn’t know though because i was -10 in 1980. The fact that in one of the opening scenes the boys are scrambling for quarters to go play arcade games just tells me that those were the good days. Reminds me of the movie/documentary, “The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters”, if you haven’t seen that i suggest that you stop reading this blog and go watch that documentary, you will not be let down, you will also have your masculinity tested by a man named Billy Mitchell. Also that is probably the only time i’ll suggest that you stop reading the blog so you know its worth it. Anyways, quarters are king and Mike robs Nancy of her piggy bank which i think is just great, but also i feel like Nancy is a bit too old for a piggy bank.

So the boys (Will, Mike, Lucas, and Dustin) rally at the local arcade room, Those for sure were only around for laundering money i imagine, and get to playing. At some point Will hears something and wanders off and somehow he is pulled into the upside-down place, his home pretty much the whole 1st season, and sees a dark sky with red lightning and a shadow demon thing with tornadoes for arms and then snaps out of it. First off i would like to say that i do not completely understand what the show writers are going for with the existence of the “Upside-down” place. I guess the easiest way to explain it is an alternate dimension that’s evil and terrible, but i just don’t know how it all works. I will admit that i think that if i were to somehow be instantly teleported to a place like that, i would for sure only be able to cry and close my eyes until i inevitably died because that place, and that monster thing seem completely terrifying. With all of that being said i think that calling it “The Upside-Down Place” is a rookie move and who ever came up with it needs to go to prison. It’s like calling it “Creepy Avenue” or “Elm Street”, how about a better name for the place that your main characters fear and where pure evil resides. As a matter of fact i will no longer refer to it as the “Upside-down” place and from here on out it will be called the “Thunderdome” or “Satans Basement” or “Oklahoma” ANYTHING but “Upside-down” place.  So, Will snaps out of it somehow and his excuse to his friend for being outside is that he needed some air, I found that funny because this show is set in the 80’s and no chance kids were as messed up and snowflakey as they are now. “Needing some air” in the 80’s was just something you said when you wanted your 3rd cigarette from your 2nd pack of the day, i assume. Be more dramatic Will.

The cameos in these first two episodes were very interesting and i didn’t hate them, i’d actually be excited if they all stayed on as regulars. First we have Brett Gelman playing Murray Bauman, aparrently some kind of private investigator with suspicion of Russian assistance in the events that transpired last season. Gelman is killing it lately with the cameos and honestly is just a really funny guy, i will never forget him in The Other Guys as the Arnold Palmer obsessed wanna-be swinger who begs Will Ferrels character to bang his wife.

Next and my favorite so far is the incomparable Mikey Walsh, the lovable Samwise Gamgee, Rudy HIMSELF, Sean Astin playing Bob “The Brain” Newby. Sean Astin is top 10 in my favorite actors, all around good dude, and just as lovable as they get. His character in Stranger Things is Joyce Byers’ new love interest it seems, and he does a fantastic job. The dynamic between him and Joyce is weird but i am fully invested after 2 episodes. Sean Astin nerding out about video cameras and radio shack is grade-a television folks.

Other than that there is a new pair of sibling characters in the show, Billy and Maxine AKA MadMax, that i just don’t know about yet. Billy is an absolute psychopath that resembles a younger Zac Efron who is fond of younger Zac Efrons who drives like a bat outta hell. This Billy dude is like a cross between Kurt Cobain on a bender and Jack Nicholson from The Shining. Pure crazy, but an entertaining character. His sister, i’m assuming, Maxine (or Max as she so rudely corrected the zany teacher at the school) is a very boyish little girl who is apparently good at arcade games and skateboarding, possessing some of the same crazy traits as her aforementioned brother. Some subtle yet understandable misogyny is featured in a scene where the boys are spying on her and say something along the lines of “girls cant play video games”. There is a new psychiatrist guy that talks to Will too but he is very boring and on the bad guys side so i don’t particularly care for him. Out of the new characters i mentioned above i would rank them accordingly: 1. Bob 2. Murray 3. Billy 4. Maxine 956. Doctor Boring D.O.

As for our returning characters a lot has changed in good ole Hawkins and its nearing the one year anniversary of the finale of last season some time around Halloween, obviously. The iconic Reagan Bush ’84 Campaign signs make an appearance in these episodes a couple of times in peoples yards and i love it, shout out Rowdy Gentleman.  The boys are still up to their nerdy shenanigans riding around on bikes and talking on their giant walkie-talkies. An exciting part is that they dress up as Ghostbusters for Halloween and being the season is set in 1984 i give 1,000 kudos to the kids for being such trailblazing fans of the film, and 2,000 kudos to their parents for making the costumes from scratch. There is a pretty comical argument between Mike and Lucas on who gets to be Venkman, Bill Murrays character, with an awkward reference to the only black Ghostbuster, Winston Zeddemore played by Ernie Hudson, being lame because he was late to the team.

  Mike is emotionally invested in 2 boxes of toys for some reason and misses the hell out of his superhuman girlfriend, 11, just being an emo little baby pretty much the whole time. Will and Mike make some weird pact while trick-or-treating where Mike says “If you’re weird, I’m Weird” kind of like Ryan Gossling does in the Notebook (If you’re a bird, I’m a bird). Lucas and Dustin fight over who is gonna date Maxine.

Our guy Will, who spent the majority of last season in the Thunderdome, has turned into a monster in the eyes of the kids at school. He gets bullied a bit, being called “Zombie Boy” and getting notes put in his locker saying the same thing, thank god Twitter or Facebook didn’t exist back then or this dude would of 13 Reasons Why’d his way through the rest of this season, probably. He takes it with stride though, animating his new nickname pretty artistically, wouldn’t be surprised if he creates a comic book about his Zombie alter ego and becomes a millionaire.

Steve and Nancy are still an item, probably my second favorite couple behind Johnathan and crippling loneliness. Nancy has become annoying because out of the clouds she starts actually caring that her friend Barb is dead, probably because she feels guilty, i mean you’d have to be an idiot to not blame Nancy for the demise of our homely heroine, Barb. There is a scene where Nancy and Steve go have dinner with Barbs parents and enjoy some KFC #fingerlickingood. Barbs parents are delusional at this point, in denial that Barb is dead. They are not in good health, mainly because of the fried chicken, and have plans to sell their home to fund a wild goose chase led by the wacky ex-journalist, P.I. Bauman. That should be successful. R.I.P Barb. Some how Steve has become more likable. Probably because of his hair which has some how become bigger, the higher the hair the closer to heaven, i see you Steve. Nancy and Steve go to a Halloween party together where she gets tipsy on some jungle juice, or as the raging toga bro, who is later seen yakking his brains out, calls it, “Pure Fuel”. Nancy, in typical white girl wasted fashion, says “bullshit” 9 million times after getting a cup of hunch punch spilled on her and brings up the past (Her and Steve basically murdering Barb, gone but never forgotten). Surprisingly Steve peaces out instead of taking advantage of Nancy like he did last season. Johnathan, in typical lonely guy fashion, swoops in like a sad pigeon and saves the day by taking her home and tucking her in. I feel it is necessary to say that i think Johnathan looks like an anorexic Bill Hader from SNL and i hope other people see that too.

  My favorite character, 11, or Elle as Chief Hopper adorably calls her, has taken up residence in a cabin out in the sticks. Chief Hopper is my 2nd favorite character in the show and he has become some type of father figure to 11 letting her stay in his cabin and is keeping her safe from the Russians or whoever is trying to get her. 11 is still a super hero and controls stuff with her mind. She has grown her hair out lookin like a jerry curl gettin real high up there, watch out Steve. Hopper is still whippin around in that dope ass Trailblazer and totin that 6-shooter like a rootin tootin cowboy, they should call him Sheriff instead of Chief. The interaction between Sheriff Hopper and 11 is perfect and comical. 11 is still very robot-like and says “five one five” instead of 5:15 at one point alluding that she hasn’t become much more normal than the first season. There are a few flashbacks to season one including one where 11 is breaking through some gooey womb-like substance out of Thunderdome and it reminds me of Jim Carrey being born from a rhino in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. In another scene 11 kills and begins to cook a squirrel to eat and then beams it at some hunter dudes face in the woods because i guess that’s what Russian cyborgs do. Sheriff Hopper misses hanging out with Elle for Halloween and that broke my heart, do better man.

As usual the soundtrack for the show is the absolute best, the beginning credit song that sounds like Daft Punk time traveled back to the 80’s is up there with Game of Thrones intro song. So far the show is fantastic and there are a lot more witty references and noteworthy things to say but i have just realized that i have written 2,000+ words and most of this was just mindless stammering on and so with that i give my superlatives and predictions thus-far:

Most likely to die alone: Jonathan Byers

Worst Father of the Year: Sheriff Hopper

Most likely to Smash for sure: Hopper and Joyce

Most Improved: Barb

Best Hair: Steve

Probably Gonna Finish Last: Bob “The Brain” Newby

Most Athletic: The Bike Boys

Life of the Party: Yoga bro

Most Likely to Become President: Reagan Bush ’84

Biggest Twist: Barb is alive!

Token Black Guy: Lucas

Least Likely to do Anything, Ever: The dumb psychiatrist guy

Most likely to end up in jail or an insane asylum probably: Billy

Most Likely To Confuse The Millennium Falcon with the Starship Enterprise: My Fiance while watching the show with me.

      Stranger Things: Season 2 Return of Barb, Maybe. I watched episodes 1 & 2 of the new season of Stranger Things on Netflix this weekend, its been a long time coming.