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I cannot stand the parodies of modern major general, they're overdone and simply not as good as the original. They've done them about everything, whatever topic, big or small.

And when i notice one of them my eyes will always start to roll.

The diction's always slurry when they rush the complicated words, and adding many fricatives will turn it so cacophonous. The slanted rhymes are silly and they keep just making more and more, please someone stop the parodies of modern major general.

The scanning of the lyrics in the meter is unbearable, they emphazise the syllables in ways that are untenable, in short in matters musical, prosodic and ephemeral, i cannot stand the parodies of modern major general!

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oooohhhhh, thinking about something I haven't thought about in detail before for Flood, which is -- what do the people (particularly the rebels) in the districts think about Steve Rogers, especially in the present day? because the thing is -- the propaganda about him was so successful that pretty much EVERYONE bought it (even Peggy more or less talked herself into it). even though Careers didn't exist in his day, because he's from a Career district and he was a volunteer, he is generally assumed to have been a Career and we know how the other districts feel about them. who knows how much past Games are aired in the districts, but probably very few people in the districts have actually seen his Games, and they got mythologized fast. and the serum itself, well, sixty-four years later what do people even really know about it? it helped him win, but what did it actually do? he's six feet tall and blond and blue-eyed and handsome. he stayed in the Capitol after his Games and may or may not have had an affair with the girl who later ended up running the Hunger Games for half a century, who probably cheated to help him win, he didn't go back to his district. he made the modern Games. he created the volunteer system. District 2 has specific mythology about him because that's his district, but that's a whole different thing than anywhere else.

from the point of view of anyone in the districts not from District 2, Steve Rogers, the winner of the 10th Hunger Games, especially sixty-four years later, was a Career whom his mentor cheated to help him win and was the darling of the Capitol who's directly responsible for the current Hunger Games system. yeah, he should have been assassinated. what do you mean he's back.

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Like how the corgi keeps checking back to make sure he still has horsy

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i like sailing myths and superstitions because most of them can be boiled down to "if the ocean doesn't like you it will chew you up and spit out your bones. and if it really loves you it will swallow you whole and keep you forever. good luck 👍"

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I think Fugitive Telemetry is pretty funny from Indah's perspective. There's a murder on the station. You alert your government leader, and they bring their bodyguard/corporate-spy-and-murder-construct with them to the scene of the crime. Turns out it's also Sherlock Holmes. It alternates talking like it's in a TV show, and making various ominous statements, including things like "if I killed them, you'd never find the bodies." It refuses to elaborate on that one. Well that's comforting. It does go on to show that it couldn't have done the murder. But did it just confess to murder? Why did it just confess to murder? It goes on to save your officers lives (wait, did it just hack the system it promised not to hack? Eh, we'll let it slide this time.) and then mount a solo rescue mission (extremely successful, except for being shot by the people it's saving), and still hasn't killed anyone. So far. It already forgot that someone got murdered and that you were actually trying to solve a crime. Anyway, once you give it full access to your security system, it solves the crime within an hour or so. Turns out it was your coworker of 43 years. Who was actually a corporate-spy-and-murder-robot this whole time.

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natasha romanoff + captain america's shield

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this august do whatever you want and stay up late

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Raven Steals the Sun a glass collaboration sculpture by Tlingit artist Preston Singletary and David Franklin.

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give your characters exes.

give them a variety of exes. give them relationships that shaped who they are but did not last. give them people they tried very hard to love but it didn't work out. give them situationships that taught them things. give them something deep that was real but could not endure. things that hurt. things that ended amicably. people with whom hot passion cooled to warm affection and became undying friendship.

no more first and only. give me the context of what made them know the next or one after was final and right.

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crazy how every time a female character gets cliche misogynistic writing we have to explain to people again that fictional characters are not real and do not choose things for themselves.

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Do you think TV episodes should...

be released all at once

half be released first then the second half later

one episode be released once every week

one episode be released daily

something else

I don't know/see results

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okay I'm done with the Star Wars posting now

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Man, my fic-writing brain is fine with comprehending being in an essentially self-contained closed canon where the chances that new canon will affect it are slim.  My fannish audience brain, on the other hand, is essentially in CONSTANT VIGILANCE mode, because what I care about could come back at ANY TIME without ANY WARNING except a WHISPERED RUMOR, but it will probably be TWISTED and BARELY RECOGNIZABLE and everyone will say THIS IS THE SAME THING THAT YOU’VE ALWAYS LIKED, WHY ARE YOU MAD and then I’ll feel like I’m losing my mind.

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Luke and Leia?

two problems: one, I think when they made the ST the writers and directors swayed closer to Mark Hamill’s and Carrie Fisher’s personalities rather than what Luke and Leia would have been like thirty years on -- for me, this is more noticeable with Leia/Carrie than Luke/Mark, and there’s some knock-on of this in the books/comics.  (This is probably true for Han and Harrison Force, too? But I feel like they were closer together originally, and then having Alden!Han balanced some of it.)  Which is not to say that there shouldn’t have been any Carrie in Leia, obviously, but for me there’s a big disconnect between EU Leia and current canon Leia, bigger than just different writers and different canons should account for.

two...these are somewhat messy feelings, and they are very, uh, I have a feeling. not that these other thing isn’t, obvs, but this is also very I Have A Bias And It’s Called Rebels.  I really am resentful of the fact that Rebels decided to sideline its main Jedi characters for whatever reason -- yeah, there’s the oft-cited “you’re the last one!” or whatever the actual line is from the OT, but that’s something that’s easy to handwave away in the ancillaries.  Even Yoda’s cameos in Rebels show him as kind of waving off Kanan, Ezra, and Ahsoka (god, I really hate Henry Gilroy’s take that Yoda controlled everything in the Jedi temple in Shroud of Darkness, he might be the writer but I disagree); I’ve always gotten the vibe that Yoda in this era was completely focused on the Skywalker twins as the solution to the Sith problem, and everything else was essentially extraneous.  Which, tbh, works for Yoda, because Yoda.  Obi-Wan in Twin Suns...honestly, doesn’t feel right for Obi-Wan?  And Obi-Wan comes out and goes “this is not your story!” wow, way to make the subtext text, Dave.  (He and Gilroy wrote the ep, which I just realized when I went to check the writer, and wow, that explains a lot about my problems with it.)

I think there was a chance to do something really interesting with Rebels by presenting an actual rival to Luke as ~savior of the Jedi, or ~future of the Jedi, or however you want to frame that.  And honestly, S1 seemed to be going there.  And then Rebels started leaning away from it -- slowly at first, and then faster and faster, until we get to the “we’re making the subtext text” part in Twin Suns and then straight-up killing off Kanan and flinging Ezra into space in S4, along with whatever the hell they’re doing with Ahsoka.  And I don’t necessarily mean “rival to Luke” in terms of “Ezra and Luke have to fight” (though I do genuinely believe that Ezra’s and Luke’s approaches to Jediness and how to be a Jedi are so different as to be essentially incompatible), but in terms of “is this actually Luke’s Destiny?”  Is the role that Luke played in restoring the Jedi to the galaxy (ST and whatever went down prior to that aside) actually something that only he could have done, or was he the only option?  Rather than actually deal with that question, SW went the (in my opinion) lazy route and went with “he had to do it because he was the only option.”  (And honestly, not dealing with whatever the hell Ahsoka was doing between Malachor and the Rebels epilogue and/or Mando, which is still at minimum a good ten years, actually makes this worse.)  If your means of dealing with a character’s role in a story arc is to get rid of all the rivals before they can actually be rivals (and again, I mean, like, thematically, not literally), then to me that says that role is not something that they could have been able to accomplish otherwise.  For me it really weakens Luke as a character, and that’s to the detriment of both Luke and honestly the entire saga story arc.

okay actually there’s a third thing about Luke and Leia -- I said this on Twitter before the Mando finale aired and because it was many moons ago I now can’t find it, but honestly?  Star Wars is weakening its main story line by no loner telling big name stories about the OT trio.  These are supposed to be big name famous characters who have all accomplished extraordinary things, and yet as far as Mando is concerned, they might as well not exist.  Up to the finale there was not a single piece of evidence that Luke or Leia actually existed, and even the Luke cameo...they can CGI Mark Hamill for that because it’s not going to have lasting consequences.  If it was going to have lasting consequences, they would have recast.  (I mean, if he’s got a recurring role next season we can revisit this in 2022, but until then.)  These are saga characters!  These are people who have RESHAPED THE GALAXY.  They should have an impact in Star Wars’ big name ongoing projects in one form or another!

The impression I get right now from the current slate of upcoming projects is that Star Wars is gambling that their viewership is, by and large, more interested in the greater Star Wars universe than it is in established Star Wars characters.  They may be right; Mando is certainly very successful.  The upcoming character spin-offs -- Ahsoka (yikes), Andor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Lando project -- those are all main characters but they’re not the main characters.  And honestly, we’ll see how this goes.  It may go well.  It may go poorly.  It may be all over the map.  (this is the most likely option.)  I did love Solo, but as far as Lucasfilm’s concerned, and a lot of the mainstream audience, it was a flop.  The post-RotJ EU and the post-RotJ new canon have varied in that the new canon has, with a few exceptions (which are not ~mainstream, with the exception of Battlefront II), mostly shied away from telling stories revolving around the OT trio.  The longer they go without doing that, without showing the impact that these people have on the galaxy, that they have right now -- the more they’re weakening the impact that Luke and Leia ought to have.  Yeah, I came in from the EU, I do think that Luke and Leia should be, to some extent, living myths.  The problem is that Lucasfilm wants to do live action TV and frankly, I think they’re wary about recasting Luke and Leia after Solo.  (Even though Alden is a great Han, imho.)  This is honestly the perfect time to do a post-RotJ animated series -- use Mark Hamill’s VA skills! he’s not going to live forever! that gets around the Carrie Fisher problem! the weird Force shit works REALLY well in animation in a way that it does not in live action, and come on, don’t Luke and Leia deserve to deal with the weird Force shit too? WOULD YOU NOT ACTUALLY LIKE TO SET UP FOR THE SEQUEL TRILOGY sorry it’s star wars dumb question

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this whole thing about the Ahsoka show just makes me existentially sad in a way that's hard to articulate without sounding like a lunatic, and I think it's also the reason that I eventually had to leave Star Wars.

like, yeah, Star Wars had been making me angry for years and I hadn't been having a good time for a very long time by that point (June 2021), but NOTHING fucked me up like the way they were just aggressively rewriting canon while openly pretending they weren't. I could deal with it when it was just the films, because those teams weren't really related and that sort of thing is normal anyway, not to mention that I came out of the PT-era EU when TCW was just treading gleefully over the EU. that's fine. the books and comics doing things? not great, but like. the EU's always been that way. (though even before 2021 it was messing me up because Lucasfilm was swearing -- and is still swearing -- that everything is equal levels of canon. it is blatantly untrue.) Mando made me feel like I was being gaslit, made worse by the fact that it was a lot of the same team that had done TCW/Rebels, but there was still the live action/animation distinction. TCW S7 and then finally TBB was the thing that finally made me snap, because then that live action/animation distinction had collapsed and they were still doing it, and it was worse. it made me feel like I was going insane.

I'm aggressively avoiding everything about the Ahsoka show because it brings all of that up again, only worse and more hurtful, because it's just...this thing I really loved chopped up and made palatable for someone else because ~it wasn't good enough. look, I don't know what's going on in this show, I don't want to know, I won't watch it, I don't want to hear about it, but everything about it, the overwriting of everything that came before on every level, MESSES ME UP. it's wildly destabilizing. it's not a logical reaction, I'm well aware of that, I'm not having fun with it either.

(I have everything related to That Show blacklisted, but things about it sneak through on various socials, so I still know a fair amount and I've seen stills and such-like.)

there is something existentially horrifying and destabilizing, and downright cruel, about the canon itself, the cast and crew, telling you that the story they told, the thing you loved, isn't good enough as it is. I can't get over that.

(this is about Star Wars but the MCU isn't immune to it, it's just honestly better at handling it. it's one of the reasons I find the Time Heist in Endgame and portions of Phases 3-5 unbearably sloppy, but by and large it doesn't feel as abjectly cruel as Star Wars does. there are exceptions, of course.)

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have you heard my theory about Star Wars' and the MCU's convergent evolution over the course of the past fifteen years and do you want to.