#I originally expanded this from the original tweet version

[about-faces]

I’m so fascinated by this panel of li’l Harvey Dent.

First, that he was so overwhelmed by noise that he had to run out.

Second, the movie itself: why choose that? For the title alone?

Third, that Two-Face keeps mistaking the distinction between him and Harvey, because the truth is they’re truly two sides of the same coin.

Finally, that he went to the Monarch Theater in Crime Alley, and he’s running off to the alley where his darker side will be born.

[can-i-make-image-descriptions]

Image Descriptions and Accessibility in General on Tumblr for New Users

What are Image Descriptions

Image Descriptions are text following a picture explaining what’s in that picture. They are primarily for blind/visually impaired people with screen readers and visually impaired people who can read text but have issues with pictures.

They also help people who have trouble:

focusing on/understanding a picture

reading text on images (ex low contrast, weird fonts, etc)

getting images to load

Without image descriptions posts are not accessible to many people, so if you can it's best to include a description or alt text every time you post an image.

Alt text vs image descriptions

Image descriptions are written in the body of the post itself, and have some kind of text before and after, to explain that what's coming up. They typically begin short and concise, but can expand to more detail.

Alt text is added to the image itself, and is what is read by screen-readers (which will otherwise just say "image"). There is no need to add any explanation before the description so you can just say "a description of the image". Alt text can only be added by the original poster, by clicking on the three dots in the bottom right corner of the image and clicking 'update image description.' It is typically short and concise.

On tumblr, alt text is currently available on web by clicking on the alt button (or via new xkit - accesskit - move alt text to captions below image). On mobile, alt text is available in some versions of the app through clicking on the alt text button. Image descriptions are visible on all posts, although if you put them under a read-more, that makes them less accessible. (Thanks to @911described for helping with this section)

How to Make Image Descriptions

Awhile ago I made this general guide. I learned from examples, so here are descriptions made by a bunch of different people. I've also made templates for a lot of common images you'll see on Tumblr.

Other Concerns

Gradient or all caps text make most screen readers read out the word one letter at a time. In addition, these plus text that is bold/italicized/underlined, in colors other than black, or in weird/fancy fonts are difficult for many people to read.

How Filtering Works

You can filter out both words/phrases and tags in the filtering section under the general section in the settings. When filtering out words from a post, it will look at both the text of the post/reblog chain and at the url of op and the rebloggers. When filtering out tags it will look at the tags of the specific post on your dash, and at the tags of the original post.

Tagging for Common Triggers

Don't sensor trigger warnings (for example don't tag suic!de) because then people who have them filtered will still see it.

Tagging for Flashing Lights

If you post a gif or video in a post that flashes, you should tag it with something like "flashing lights" and Not "tw epilepsy" because if any of the tags in the original post contains the world epilepsy it will show up in the epilepsy tag, which is dangerous. Check out this post from @photosensitive-despair for more info about tagging photosensitive content.

Tagging for Unreality vs Misinfo

Things that could trigger delusions/psychotic episodes/etc should be tagged with unreality. This includes:

content that has existential themes related to reality/things not existing (example: a philosophy such as solipsism, do not look up the term if unreality stuff is triggering for you)

extremely surreal content(example: sometimes content such as weirdcore/dreamcore aesthetics can fall under this umbrella but again this is very subjective)

content that reinforces or encourages common delusions(example: that one "im living in your walls" meme)

Things like rp blogs and fake/edited tweets should not be tagged with unreality, unless they contain triggering content. Consider tags like "fiction" or "misinfo." See this post for more info.

Edit:

Addition from @mindflamer

You can look through the reblogs of a post to see if someone's already written a description. There is a button to see just comments vs. comments + tags which makes it easier. Scroll through looking for brackets [], ID, or Image Description. This is great to do if you can't write your own IDs for whatever reason, so that you can at least spread the version of the post that's described if there is one.

If you're not able to write IDs consistently, some is better than none. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You can use the tag #undescribed to make it easy for those who need them to filter out those posts. Similarly, if you primarily tag triggers but can't for certain posts, you can use a separate tag on that to be filtered such as #untagged.

Please, if I forgot something, sound off in the notes and I'll update this post with it

[dragon-ball-meta]

Akio Iyoku And The Future Of Dragon Ball

Got a huge news drop last night, courtesy of @SupaChronicles on Twitter. I've linked the full tweet if you want to read his translation of the original article sans editorializing, but I wanted to attempt to explain a few things here. This is unprecedented for the franchise, and we're in untested, but very exciting times right now. The short version is this: Akio Iyoku and Capsule Corporation Tokyo have succeeded in gaining control of the rights to the Dragon Ball Franchise, in all but the manga side of things, for the next ten years. DAIMA is actually their first project. Now, some excerpts from the translated article: "Indomitable Dragon Ball, Inheriting the Mission: A Global Strategy to Reach the Next Generation" featuring Akio Iyoku, the President of Capsule Corporation Tokyo 'Dragon Ball' will celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2024. Dragon Ball is a unique and amazing work. Rather than thinking of the work in relative or uniform terms, the keynote is to think about how it should be done as a work of art. As the Executive Producer of a work with unprecedented longevity, my mission is to expand and convey what the original creator, Akira Toriyama, has created. I will continue to produce works, such as anime series, movies, and games, over the next 10 years. (...) Adopting what is popular at the moment does not increase the probability of success. I will not be swayed by the current trends, but will create works that I feel will be 'good enough'."

Iyoku is saying that, in his new capacity as the executive producer of Dragon Ball, he's doing this as a means of protecting the Dragon Ball IP as a work of art, and wants to release content that he feels upholds that integrity, rather than trying to use the IP simply to chase current trends and try to cling to relevancy. He says he also wants to keep the spirit of the series Toriyama intended. Now what's especially interesting to ME is this bit. He stops short of making any sort of direct confirmation, but this really, REALLY seems to lend credence to the reports that Shueisha was deliberately leaving Dragon Ball out to dry in favor of One Piece. "There was a time when the Dragon Ball craze, which had spread around the world over the past 40 years, had died down. When I became the head of Shueisha's Dragon Ball Room in 2016, I could not visualize what was really happening. 7-8 years ago, I went to a huge event in Brazil called "CCXP." I was told that Japanese anime were popular in South America, but there was a discrepancy from what I was told. The feedback from fans was weak. It may have been at the peak of its popularity when it was on-air in South America. (...) I also thought it was the result of relying on old-fashioned zeal. Therefore, starting with the 'Dragon Ball Super Broly' movie in 2018, we took steps such as actively participating in events. I felt concerned that Dragon Ball has not been expanded worldwide. Originally, we didn't see the strength and diffusion power of the work. We need to take a closer look at this and see if we can do more. We are not looking for a "one-size-fits-all" approach, but rather, we are looking for events such as the Dragon Ball World Championships, the expansion of games, creating facilities, and anything else that we can do. We will work on them in parallel."

And this bit: "Never before was there such a simultaneous worldwide reception of anime. (...) It can be said that we are now able to do things that we had not even considered before. From the beginning, I began to think about the overseas expansion of Dragon Ball. With 'Dragon Ball DAIMA,' which will be released in Fall 2024, we are taking on the challenge of creating an anime series with a completely original story. I am glad that all our works have been well-received overseas. 'DAIMA' was announced at New York Comic Con. The 'Dragon Ball' series is recognized around the world. It makes no sense to announce it somewhere domestic. Comic-Con is a great place to announce your work. People who understand the value of the culture are gathered there, to begin with, and we chose Comic-Con because of its ability to spread our work throughout the world. Overseas expansion is currently being considered as a necessary means of spreading the word about our work. If we compare the flow of manga titles selling in book format and then finally becoming anime to a river, the overseas developments were the ones that followed the river, meaning that in the past it was a "fan" (in the sense that the overseas expansion followed later.) I am convinced that Dragon Ball has pioneered many things as a Japanese anime. I have a sense of mission that if there is something that no one else has done, I must continue to challenge it." That sounds to me as if this was done at least in part because he felt the series was being mishandled, both on a promotional and quality control front. He also feels that there needs to be content created at least semi-regularly to keep the franchise relevant, as opposed to announcing something and then leaving long gaps of nothing, as almost happened after the Super anime went on hiatus. There's also some more implication about the series not being promoted to its fullest. "- The industry is over-competitive. It is tough to see the competition among anime (due to the emergence of streaming sites, etc.). Competition has become excessive. We must not create a situation where a manga becomes anime, and when the anime is over, the content ends as is. The ideal situation is to create a situation where the average viewer sees the content. We are in a cycle of consumption, and in some aspects, the cycle is becoming short-lived. I don't think it's good at all to have a boom that builds up and then burns down, which can be a factor in the content not lasting long. It will be tough if we do not create a place to compete differently from anime as content. It is advisable for works that are popular now to be distributed simultaneously around the world to repeat generations and reach the next stage of popularity. (...) In order to bring in overseas strength, a leading role is needed. In order for a producer to take on this role, they must transcend the boundaries of the corporate organization. There must be someone who has a "birds-eye view" of the work and is in a position to say to each company, "I think you should do this." I push myself to be a catalyst for this through various discussions. For Japanese content to continue, it is necessary to have someone who can say, "The status quo is not good enough."" So essentially, we're going to see more content. We're going to see more quality control ON said content. Both are being done to respect Toriyama's work, and to actually try to be competitive as opposed to simply relying on the legacy and the baked-in fandom to carry it in the sea of anime and manga franchises out there. He also feels that they shouldn't try to solely rely on adapting things, and create original content as well, while keeping it in line with the spirit of the series as opposed to just chasing whatever's popular. That's the intent, at least. Now we just need to wait and see how this all shakes out.

[kenyatta]

You thought the first page of Google was bunk before? You haven't seen Google where SEO optimizer bros pump out billions of perfectly coherent but predictably dull informational articles for every longtail keyword combination under the sun.

Marketers, influencers, and growth hackers will set up OpenAI → Zapier pipelines that auto-publish a relentless and impossibly banal stream of LinkedIn #MotivationMonday posts, “engaging” tweet 🧵 threads, Facebook outrage monologues, and corporate blog posts.

It goes beyond text too: video essays on YouTube, TikTok clips, podcasts, slide decks, and Instagram stories can all be generated by patchworking together ML systems. And then regurgitated for each medium.

We're about to drown in a sea of pedestrian takes. An explosion of noise that will drown out any signal. Goodbye to finding original human insights or authentic connections under that pile of cruft.

Many people will say we already live in this reality. We've already become skilled at sifting through unhelpful piles of “optimised content” designed to gather clicks and advertising impressions.

4chan proposed dead internet theory years ago: that most of the internet is “empty and devoid of people” and has been taken over by artificial intelligence. A milder version of this theory is simply that we're overrun with bots. Most of us take that for granted at this point.

But I think the sheer volume and scale of what's coming will be meaningfully different. And I think we're unprepared. Or at least, I am.

from The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI

[tomorrowxtogether]

TOMORROW X TOGETHER: 5 Things To Know About Band Performing At ‘Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve’

Tomorrow X Together will ring in the New Year with Ryan Seacrest. Learn more about the K-Pop sensations here.

K-pop fans rejoice! Tomorrow X Together is set to ring in 2023 with Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest. The news was announced on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2022 and people couldn’t be more excited.

In a tweet, the Gen-Z band revealed they will be playing their hits “Good Boy Gone Bad” and “0X1=LOVESONG (I Know I Love You)” from Disneyland for the celebration. Other New Year’s Rockin’ Eve performers will include Ciara, Fitz and the Tantrums, Maddie & Tae, Billy Porter, Shaggy, Ben Platt, Aly & AJ, Halle Bailey, Wiz Khalifa, Finneas, and more, according to Billboard.

Fans of the group may be well acquainted with the South Korean crooners, but many others are wondering who exactly they are. The band is made up of Yeonjun, 23, Soobin, 22, Beomgyu, 21, Taehyun, 20, and HueningKai, 20, and they’ve been singing together since 2019. In that time, they’ve become giant stars, with huge crossover vibes.

Ready to learn more about rising stars Tomorrow X Together? Find out everything here.

They debuted in 2019

Plans for TxT were teased in 2017 by their record company, Big Hit Music, but the band didn’t debut their first EP, The Dream Chapter: Star, until Mar. 2019. According to their website, their name refers to five individuals who “come together under one dream in hopes of building a better tomorrow.”

Since their start, they’ve only gotten closer. Talking to NME in 2021, HueningKai said, “Our teamwork is certainly one aspect that continues to further improve with each month and year that we spend together. We can see eye-to-eye and support one another on our journey of growth both as a team and as individuals, and I think it’s really a great thing! We’re brothers.”

TxT made Billboard history

The band’s lead single “Crown” was a big hit and it even made Billboard chart history for a time. The track entered the US Billboard 200 at number 140, making it the highest-charting debut album by a male K-pop group to that date. The song also debuted at number one on the Billboard Emerging Artists chart.

They perform in multiple languages

TxT’s first two studio albums, The Dream Chapter: Magic (2019) and The Chaos Chapter: Freeze (2021), were written and sung in Korean. They expanded their reach with 2021’s Still Dreaming, which is sung in Japanese. It consists of six Japanese versions of previous Korean hits, two new instrumental tracks, an original Japanese titled “Force”, and the band’s previous Japanese release “Everlasting Shine.”

They’re on the same label as BTS

TxT is on Big Hit Music, the same label behind BTS’s success. They were the first boy band that the label debuted since BTS’s blockbuster run began back in 2013. The project was a long time coming. Big Hit founder Bang Si-hyuk hinted at plans for the group all the way back in 2017.

The group made it clear they’re not a “little brother” band to BTS in a 2021 interview with NME. “We’ve always told our own story from our debut till today and it’s a story that many have been able to relate to precisely because it’s a very real story of people living within this generation,” they said. “We’ve worked with many genres to enhance our musical capabilities and hone our sound, and through this sound, we tell stories of our generation, a generation at the crux of growth.”

The band announced plans to release the album The Name Chapter in Nov 2022. It follows their earlier EPs The Dream Chapter and The Chaos Chapter.

They teased the album with a dreamy concept trailer in early Dec. 2022, seen on Billboard. In the teaser, TxT floats around freely before being pulled up by a demon via marionette strings. Left stranded, they’re forced to take a leap of faith.

[curator-on-ao3]

Director's cut for Autobiography of Kristin Clancy OR a Voyager of your choice (of the 72 of them!!?!)

Whoa. I’ve written 72 Voyager fics? That’s … wow.

I so much appreciate this opportunity, @nab999, and I think I’ll talk about my girl, Admiral Kirsten “Sheer Fucking Hubris” Clancy. 💪 ❤️

Some quick facts:

After key aspects of The Autobiography of Kirsten Clancy burst into my mind like the Kool-Aid Man through a wall, I sat on the ideas for more than a year because I didn’t want to put in the time and effort the story would require.

Writing an entire-ass autobiography (not even a memoir) for a character who has, generously speaking, three scenes, is a bit much, even for me.

After I wrote this story that I hadn’t wanted to write, I wrote maybe a dozen ficlets spread across five other AO3 stories, plus a multi-chap (Kirsten Clancy/Katrina Cornwell) set in the same universe.

I am so damn glad I wrote this fic.

Look at this bookmark:

And this comment from a professional author (I don’t know how she found the story):

And this tweet from the actress who portrayed Clancy (whom I didn’t tag or try to attract attention from in any way but she somehow found out about the autobiography I wrote for her character):

And I’m gonna drop the link for my Women at Warp blog post about this story, too: https://www.womenatwarp.com/a-story-worth-telling-kirsten-clancy/

Writing this story changed me — for the better. The tight, self-aware point of view was a delicious challenge. Tracing the arc of most of a lifetime was an exercise in patience, even though parts of the story flowed as if the protagonist was whispering in my ear. And what a protagonist! Kirsten Clancy is flawed, foul-mouthed, and absolutely ferocious in her love and protection. She helped hold together the Federation that Jean-Luc Picard could have squandered in his dangerous optimism that led to the attack on Mars. She’s right, except when she’s not. And when she’s wrong, she sometimes she pays mightily for it.

Things I took special pleasure in:

A large, loving family (of origin and of her own creation) because those are under-represented in Trek.

A Starfleet that is not just accommodating but in fact truly helpful when it comes to marriage, family, mental health crashes (sometimes), mentorship, and other needs.

Expanding other minor characters like Sonya Gomez and Edward Jellico. The canon-nameless captain of the Melbourne who dies in Wolf 359 was critical for this story and I love her to this day.

Worldbuilding Mars, a planet we know relatively little about in Trek as opposed to Vulcan or planets in the Bajoran system. I used most of the little canon we have, then built from there.

The flaws in Clancy’s parents. I wrote them as American-style “patriots” who are baffled by their daughter but love her and work very, very hard to open their own minds to understand her and help her reach her goals.

The first original character that occurred to me for this story was Great Aunt Vivienne.

The first image that occurred to me for this story was Kirsten Clancy beaming home after the attack on Mars and crumpling into a loved one’s arms.

The last idea for this story as I outlined was the chapter with the Breen. I actually had two versions of the story for a while, one with the Breen and one without. I’m glad I kept that in.

A part that was painfully rewarding to write was Starfleet Command’s response during the attack on Mars. I modeled that after accounts I’ve read about US airline command center responses during 9/11. One of my “favorite” parts is the admirals arriving from their First Contact Day parties unprepared, out of uniform, running, running, running, Nechayev with her high heels dangling from her finger as she runs barefoot.

Oh, and on the other end of the funny-serious spectrum, Roux, the pilot of the first ship Clancy commands, the Barrie? He’s serial-numbers-barely-filed-off Gordon Malloy from The Orville. Because I can.

Thank you again and again for giving me a chance to talk this story that means so much to me, @nab999. ❤️

Want more information about a fic I wrote? Send me an ask.

[breadedsinner]

i do believe og da2 writers could have made something cool with envy demon and sebastian and the whole thing about not possessing but replacing the victim. but Everything Is About Demons is certainly getting old you are right and fandom reaction just never disappoints lol. Lol. lmao. sooo sorry yall dont have taste

gonna start saying that the exalted march version of anders returning to wardens is the only way to make him interesting just to feel something

Well said. Again, I don't think the concept is wholly unsalvageable, and it was just a tweet, but it could be read at face value like the character--a playable character and a love interest--might have just been done away with. She didn't expand on it and it didn't come to pass anyway, I would HOPE there would have been an alternate scenario where we free him from Envy.

Still a little perplexed by Envy. It makes SOME sense but if you told one "one of the new demons was originally created with Sebastian in mind" I think I would have sooner guessed the Sorrow Demon.

And I don't agree that it's "poetic", I suppose there's some tragedy in that all this grief and trauma simply begets more and becomes a cycle... but she didn't really word it that way. It was hard not to read it as a punishment. Obviously I am biased, but I previously covered all the ways Sebastian expressed his concerns before the Chantry Boom, so for him to constantly be put in the wringer this way is unsatisfying. There's no catharsis, no release, it's just constant misery.

And then yknow... Fenris gets to escape that cycle. Cullen does, Blackwall does, Leliana does... I don't like the idea that Sebastian doesn't because he cared about someone and didn't handle the loss well.. When people talk about how he SHOULD have acted, it always sounds like someone who has never experienced loss, quite frankly.

That said, there are a LOT of companions, including those listed above, who can befall a terrible fate. We've even seen early concept Inquisition art of what shows a ragged Anders in a cave. And I believe there was talk of Varric dying in the Exalted March DLC. It's very possible this DLC could have included some brutal paths for all the companions, who knows.

I guess I just wish it had been made clear that Sebastian could also escape this future as well. Him being unpopular doesn't mean he doesn't deserve closure.

Pfft I have no feelings about Anders going back... it'd be funny if the HoF was just like "I don't want him anymore" or "Welcome Home Cheater".

[uozlulu]

Fic. IwtV AMC. The Gifts We Give. PG-13.

Character(s)/Relationship(s) Claudia, Louis, Madeleine; Claudia/Madeleine Genre Femslash/Horror/Romance/Vampire Rating PG-13 Word Count 1,956 Disclaimer As this is fanfiction, I do not hold copyright to the source material(s) nor do I claim that I do. This is for free entertainment purposes only. Summary Claudia arrives in Paris and finds herself drawn to the doll maker living across the street. The feeling is mutual. For the I Can’t Wait for Season 2 event week 1: Relationships/Pairings. Warning(s) spoilers for Interview with the Vampire, thwarted assault attempt, brief vampire attack Notes When I saw IwtV Daily’s tweet, I immediately started brainstorming. I decided to do one fic per prompt and make them a series. I’m not sure I’d say I want all the little details to happen in the show, but the bigger things I want to happen were my inspirations for each fic.

The first week’s theme is relationships and pairings. I chose Claudia/Madeleine because I want to see Madeleine’s function in the narrative change when it comes to Claudia to reflect the changes made to the show version of Claudia. I originally wanted to make this fic shorter and just focus in on one scene to keep things easy, but during the first edit I realized that the fic really should span the course of their potential romance instead, so I expanded it accordingly.

AO3 link

or read below

         The Gifts We Give      

When Claudia and Louis arrived in France, the first undead creatures they encountered roamed the countryside, neither vampire nor zombie. They seemed unable to understand any known language. Mortals told tales that the creatures were remnants of the trenches augmented by Nazi experimentation. When Claudia and Louis arrived in Paris, the hoards no longer roamed and there were vampires just like them though seemingly much older. Louis fell in love and once again, Claudia was an afterthought.

Claudia and Louis took up residence across the street from a doll shop. Claudia only saw Louis as he left to explore his new fling and returned to escape the sun. Claudia left their home a little after Louis would, her gaze always finding its way to the window above the doll shop where short auburn hair reflected lamplight as the doll maker worked on her craft. Sometimes Madeleine’s gaze seemed to drift down to Claudia, lingering a bit before Claudia vanished on her hunts.

One evening Claudia looked to the window to find it empty. A strange disappointment settled over her. She took a new path through the city and soon heard scuffed footsteps, raised heartbeats and sinister words. She rushed forward, finding Madeleine cornered in an alleyway by three men. Claudia did not think or hesitate. She barred her fangs and dug her nails into the men’s flesh. She sent them to their knees and then turned to Madeleine, commanding in French, “Run!”

Madeleine’s eyes widened and she immediately fled. Claudia feasted on the men’s blood and hid them with the trash. When she returned home in the morning, she looked up at Madeleine’s window. It was dark as it always was before dawn.

When Claudia prepared to leave the next evening, she paused at her front door before opening it. A quick, excited heartbeat pounded nearby. Claudia opened her mind and Madeleine’s thoughts spewed forth. She wanted to see Claudia. She worried her flowers might be the wrong gift. She wore the only pretty dress she owned but it might be too shabby. She had not been this excited about a woman since before the war.

Claudia opened the door and stepped out. She looked to her left on purpose and then to her right. Madeleine smiled immediately. Her dress was blue with little flowers. It looked old but it fit her well. She held up a bouquet of lavender. She spoke in a rush of French, “I’m Madeleine. I own the doll shop. These are for you. Thank you for last night.”

Claudia accepted the flowers, her nose able to pick out each flower’s unique scent. The bouquet had its own little pot so they could keep growing. “Thanks. I’m Claudia.”

“A beautiful name for a beautiful woman,” Madeleine said. “I don’t want to keep you from your supper – er – breakfast? Have a good night.” She returned to the doll shop.

Claudia smelled the flowers again as she watched Madeleine disappear. Claudia smiled and then rushed the flowers to her windowsill before leaving on her first hunt of the night.

Every evening after receiving the lavender, Claudia would arrive at the doll shop after her first kill of the night to go on a date with Madeleine. They wandered the streets, sat on rooftops, told each other secrets, and grew ever closer. Each night Claudia returned Madeleine to her shop well before she needed to go on her next hunt. Tonight, Madeleine turned to Claudia and asked, “Would you come inside? I have something for you.”

Claudia listened to Madeleine’s heartbeat increase with every word. “I can’t stay long.”

“You won’t have to,” Madeleine said. The front bell jingled as she led them into the shop. She turned on just enough light to see.

Dolls and accessories lined the walls. All were handmade by Madeleine and other artisans in the area. She retrieved a wrapped box from behind the counter and brought it to Claudia. “For you, ma belle.”

Claudia accepted the gift and tore the paper away with a sharp nail. She opened the lid to the box and found a doll nestled inside soft packaging. The doll’s skin was a deep, warm brown. Her eyes were amber like Claudia’s vampire eyes and her hair black and full of curls. She wore the same type of yellow dress that Claudia wore the night Madeleine gave her the lavender and fashionable heels. Her body was cloth but her limbs were porcelain. She came attached to a stand for display.

Madeleine tried to swallow any outward nervousness, inwardly worried Claudia might not like it or find the gesture too strange. She told Claudia during one of their rooftop dates that she liked to make her loved ones dolls as gifts.

“She’s beautiful,” Claudia said. Especially the skin, which looked more real than other black dolls that Claudia had seen. Claudia closed the box. “Thanks.”

Madeleine’s heartbeat calmed. “I’m glad.”

Claudia set the box aside and leaned closer. Madeleine leaned closer in response and they kissed. One kiss became two kisses. Madeleine’s lips parted. Claudia’s hands rested on Madeleine’s waist and Madeleine’s arms wrapped around her shoulders. After a third kiss, Claudia felt her fangs ache and thirst stir within her. She reluctantly stepped back. “I must hunt.” She took the box. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” She left the shop, the bell ringing in her wake.

Just as the door closed, a voice that would have been too quiet for a mortal to hear through the door said, “I wouldn’t mind if you bit me.”

Claudia licked her lips and disappeared into the night.

The next evening, Claudia stepped out onto the street at the same time Louis did. Louis followed her gaze to the window above the doll shop. Madeleine had her head down, sewing with her machine. The pedal and gears seemed to echo throughout the street.

Claudia’s gaze shifted to Louis. “What?” For a moment, she thought she heard a voice that was neither of theirs whispering in his mind. It was not the first time. Sometimes the voice would whisper terrible things to Claudia in her own mind. It put her ill at ease.

Louis looked at her. “Never thought you’d pick an artist.” He snorted. He stepped towards the street that lead towards a theater run by vampires. “See you tomorrow.”

Claudia watched him go and sighed. She headed in the opposite direction. She did not like venturing into the theater’s territory.

When Claudia returned from her hunt, she found Madeleine waiting for her on a bench. Madeleine hugged her tight and took Claudia’s arm. They wandered the streets and settled atop a building where they could see the lights of the city. The wind blew their hair away from their faces.

Claudia frowned and watched the lights change across the city.

“What is it?” Madeleine asked.

“I don’t like the Parisian vampires,” Claudia said. “I want to leave.”

Madeleine sat up a little straighter. “Where would you go?”

“I don’t know,” Claudia said. “The first city I can get to by train probably.”

Madeleine licked her lips. “Could I go with you?”

Claudia looked at Madeleine, her face illuminated by the moon. “What about the shop?”

“People need dolls wherever there is money,” Madeleine said. “There’s always money somewhere in a city.”

“And the blood drinking?” Claudia asked.

“It seems like a kindness. There are so many worse ways to die.” Madeleine’s lips pressed into a thin line as her jaw tensed.

Claudia did not look away. She was not adept enough in the Mind Gift yet to see the images in Madeleine’s mind, but she did not have to see Madeleine’s thoughts to know that there were horrors far worse than vampires in the world. “We could go together. I could give you the Dark Gift. We’d only have to stay in Paris until you figure out how it works.”

Madeleine leaned forward. “I’ve seen Dracula. What’s there to figure?”

“When you turn, you become something else,” Claudia said, “something horrific. You have to learn to breathe and eat all over again. You’ll be trapped in your body for eternity, but there will always be food once you learn how to bite.” Claudia paused. “There’s also a chance, I can’t turn you.”

“What happens then?” Madeleine asked.

“You’ll die without becoming a vampire,” Claudia said.

Madeleine continued to lean forward. She studied Claudia in the moonlight. “I believe you’ll turn me. We can live above the shop and use the blackout curtains to block the sun. I can make everyone believe that I’ve taken ill. Then, when the time is right, we can leave on a train and never return.”

Claudia held her gaze. She leaned over and kissed Madeleine. Madeleine returned the kiss. They left the roof and wandered Paris until they parted at the shop.

The next evening, Claudia was not certain if she could hear Madeleine’s heart beating rapidly in anticipation of their choice or if it was her own anticipation creating an illusion in her ears. She fed quickly and then took her bags to the shop along with her lavender plant. Madeleine waited for her at the bench and swayed on her feet when she stood.

Claudia caught Madeleine’s arm. “You’re really pale.”

“I didn’t eat all day,” Madeleine said. “I thought about what you told me about your transformation when we were on our first date, and so…”

Claudia steadied her. “You could just wear clothes you don’t care about.”

“I want to be a cute corpse for you,” Madeleine took Claudia’s arm.

They took the back stairs to the apartment above the shop. Once inside, Madeleine let go of Claudia and turned on a lamp. Claudia set her bags by the door. The apartment was four rooms spanning the size of the store below. The largest room was mostly open space with a desk at the window for sewing and painting and a small kitchen tucked into a corner. Opposite the kitchen was an old radio cabinet. On the other side of the room were doors for two bedrooms and a small bathroom. All of the blackout curtains shut out any external light.

Madeleine took Claudia’s hand. “How do we start?”

Claudia licked her lips. Her eyes glowed her fangs descended. “We start wherever you want, however you want.”

Madeleine pulled her towards one of the bedrooms. The ecstasy of the bite and the sharing of blood gave way to the reality of transformation. Once Madeleine found her legs, Claudia ushered her out into the city. Madeleine took to killing easily, feasting on those who abandoned the city before its occupation. They disposed of the bodies in the trash and returned to the doll shop before dawn where they consumed each other’s blood and fell asleep in each other’s arms.

Claudia woke before sunset. She sat up in bed while Madeleine slept by her side. She needed a better strategy for tonight so she would not have to chase Madeleine through the streets. It reminded Claudia of her own early days when she rushed forward to targets of her ire with Lestat and Louis calling after her.

Claudia felt the sun disappear from the sky just as Madeleine opened her eyes. Madeleine sat up and rubbed her face with a groan, “Starving….”

Claudia snorted. She ran her fingers through Madeleine’s hair and paused.

“What is it?” Madeleine asked.

“Not sure.” Claudia got out of bed and threw on her yellow dress since it was the closest article of clothing. “It feels kind of ominous.”

Madeleine put on her blue floral dress and followed Claudia. The bell attached to the shop door rang downstairs. Chaos descended upon them. They would never leave the city.

   The End  

[the-plot-blog-thing]

(originally published on 8/25/20)

WDAS TAGTEAM TWEET-ATHON MOVIE #36: MULAN (1998) 

This movie is such a fun time, and more people should watch it. Review over.

Okay, okay, but seriously, this movie is really good for a lot of reasons, so much so that I know I’ll forget something, but I’ll try my best.

Fun Fact: This is the first of three Disney animated films made entirely at the now defunct Florida branch of the studio at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. I just think it’s funny that people were making a big budget animated film a few feet away from the Tower of Terror.

First, the animation. I love this film’s visual style. It works extremely well for both slapstick comedy and serious action. The way that this movie animates smoke, water, and snow is really cool.

Next, the characters. I like em all. Mulan is a very strong and likable protagonist, and Shang is a bisexual icon. Mushu is pretty fun too, even if Eddie Murphy is just doing a proto version of Donkey from Shrek.

The best character is probably Mulan’s grandmother. She doesn’t have a lot of scenes, but every single one is comedy gold. The only weak character is probably the villain, as he’s pretty forgettable in terms of the greater Disney villain pantheon.

The story is pretty epic too. The action balances out pretty well with the comedy and songs. I was surprised that there weren’t as many songs as I had initially thought.

I know the live action remake is going to be mostly focused on action, but if anything, I feel they should’ve expanded on the songs. Despite the short song list, all of them are beloved. I’d love to see a full musical adaptation of this movie.

The score’s great too. It knows when to be epic and when to be haunting. I’d expect nothing less from the late great Jerry Goldsmith.

So yeah, Mulan is great. Go watch it already! 

9/10: Watch this deleted extended version of Reflection and feel bad about what we could have had.

https://youtu.be/2XX1ZvT8aHg

[brn1029]

Time for your Rock Report

The Beatles recently released a new animated video for their 1966 classic "Taxman." The video drops ahead of the expanded special edition release of the band's classic Revolver album, which hits the shelves on October 28. The animated video was directed by Danny Sangra, who previously worked with the band on a series of animated birthday messages from "Taxman" writer George Harrison to John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. The Beatles announced the expanded edition of Revolver in July and released a demo version of "Taxman." In the special edition, the album's 14 tracks have been newly mixed by producer Giles Martin and engineer Sam Okell in stereo and Dolby Atmos, and the album's original mono mix is sourced from its 1966 mono master tape.

Ringo Starr has canceled the rest of his North American tour after he was diagnosed with COVID-19 for a second time. "I'm sure you'll be as surprised as I was I tested positive again for Covid the rest of the tour is off I send you peace and love Ringo," the Beatles legend tweeted. The latest update comes as a surprise to Starr's fans, as the musician and his band got back on the road just earlier this month after his first COVID diagnosis. He was forced to cancel several shows in Canada, as well as in the Midwest, after initially testing positive.

"Ringo hopes to resume as soon as possible and is recovering at home," an announcement on Starr's website said at that time. "As always, he and the All Starrs send peace and love to their fans and hope to see them back out on the road soon."

Rock legend Neil Young has announced plans to release a 50th anniversary edition of his popular 1972 album, Harvest, on December 2 via Reprise.The 50th anniversary edition will feature a previously unreleased documentary and concert film, three outtakes from the sessions, and more. The reissue will be available on 3xLP and 3xCD sets, with including hardbound photo book, posters, and liner notes by photographer Joel Bernstein. Harvest was Young's fourth studio album and was released on February 1, 1972 by Reprise Records. It topped the Billboard 200 album chart for two weeks and spawned two hit singles, "Old Man," which peaked at No. 31 on the Billboard Hot 100, and "Heart of Gold," which reached No. 1. It was the best-selling album of 1972 in the United States. In 2015, Harvest was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

[bao3bei4]

fan language: the victorian imaginary and cnovel fandom

there’s this pinterest image i’ve seen circulating a lot in the past year i’ve been on fandom social media. it’s a drawn infographic of a, i guess, asian-looking woman holding a fan in different places relative to her face to show what the graphic helpfully calls “the language of the fan.”

people like sharing it. they like thinking about what nefarious ancient chinese hanky code shenanigans their favorite fan-toting character might get up to⁠—accidentally or on purpose. and what’s the problem with that?

the problem is that fan language isn’t chinese. it’s victorian. and even then, it’s not really quite victorian at all. 

--------------------

fans served a primarily utilitarian purpose throughout chinese history. of course, most of the surviving fans we see⁠—and the types of fans we tend to care about⁠—are closer to art pieces. but realistically speaking, the majority of fans were made of cheaper material for more mundane purposes. in china, just like all around the world, people fanned themselves. it got hot!

so here’s a big tipoff. it would be very difficult to use a fan if you had an elaborate language centered around fanning yourself.

you might argue that fine, everyday working people didn’t have a fan language. but wealthy people might have had one. the problem we encounter here is that fans weren’t really gendered. (caveat here that certain types of fans were more popular with women. however, those tended to be the round silk fans, ones that bear no resemblance to the folding fans in the graphic). no disrespect to the gnc old man fuckers in the crowd, but this language isn’t quite masc enough for a tool that someone’s dad might regularly use.

folding fans, we know, reached europe in the 17th century and gained immense popularity in the 18th. it was there that fans began to take on a gendered quality. ariel beaujot describes in their 2012 victorian fashion accessories how middle class women, in the midst of a top shortage, found themselves clutching fans in hopes of securing a husband.

she quotes an article from the illustrated london news, suggesting “women ‘not only’ used fans to ‘move the air and cool themselves but also to express their sentiments.’” general wisdom was that the movement of the fan was sufficiently expressive that it augmented a woman’s displays of emotion. and of course, the more english audiences became aware that it might do so, the more they might use their fans purposefully in that way.

notice, however, that this is no more codified than body language in general is. it turns out that “the language of the fan” was actually created by fan manufacturers at the turn of the 20th century⁠—hundreds of years after their arrival⁠ in europe—to sell more fans. i’m not even kidding right now. the story goes that it was louis duvelleroy of the maison duvelleroy who decided to include pamphlets on the language with each fan sold.

interestingly enough, beaujot suggests that it didn’t really matter what each particular fan sign meant. gentlemen could tell when they were being flirted with. as it happens, meaningful eye contact and a light flutter near the face may be a lingua franca.

so it seems then, the language of the fan is merely part of this victorian imaginary we collectively have today, which in turn itself was itself captivated by china.

--------------------

victorian references come up perhaps unexpectedly often in cnovel fandom, most often with regards to modesty.

it’s a bit of an awkward reference considering that chinese traditional fashion⁠—and the ambiguous time periods in which these novels are set⁠—far predate victorian england. it is even more awkward considering that victoria and her covered ankles did um. imperialize china.

but nonetheless, it is common. and to make a point about how ubiquitous it is, here is a link to the twitter search for “sqq victorian.” sqq is the fandom abbreviation for shen qingqiu, the main character of the scum villain’s self-saving system, by the way.

this is an awful lot of results for a search involving a chinese man who spends the entire novel in either real modern-day china or fantasy ancient china. that’s all i’m going to say on the matter, without referencing any specific tweet.

i think people are aware of the anachronism. and i think they don’t mind. even the most cursory research reveals that fan language is european and a revisionist fantasy. wikipedia can tell us this⁠—i checked!

but it doesn’t matter to me whether people are trying to make an internally consistent canon compliant claim, or whether they’re just free associating between fan facts they know. it is, instead, more interesting to me that people consistently refer to this particular bit of history. and that’s what i want to talk about today⁠—the relationship of fandom today to this two hundred odd year span of time in england (roughly stuart to victorian times) and england in that time period to its contemporaneous china.

things will slip a little here. victorian has expanded in timeframe, if only because random guys posting online do not care overly much for respect for the intricacies of british history. china has expanded in geographic location, if only because the english of the time themselves conflated china with all of asia.

in addition, note that i am critiquing a certain perspective on the topic. this is why i write about fan as white here⁠—not because all fans are white⁠—but because the tendencies i’m examining have a clear historical antecedent in whiteness that shapes how white fans encounter these novels.

i’m sure some fans of color participate in these practices. however i don’t really care about that. they are not its main perpetrators nor its main beneficiaries. so personally i am minding my own business on that front.

it’s instead important to me to illuminate the linkage between white as subject and chinese as object in history and in the present that i do argue that fannish products today are built upon.

--------------------

it’s not radical, or even new at all, for white audiences to consume⁠—or create their own versions of⁠—chinese art en masse. in many ways the white creators who appear to owe their whole style and aesthetic to their asian peers in turn are just the new chinoiserie.

this is not to say that white people can’t create asian-inspired art. but rather, i am asking you to sit with the discomfort that you may not like the artistic company you keep in the broader view of history, and to consider together what is to be done about that.

now, when i say the new chinoiserie, i first want to establish what the original one is. chinoiserie was a european artistic movement that appeared coincident with the rise in popularity of folding fans that i described above. this is not by coincidence; the european demand for asian imports and the eventual production of lookalikes is the movement itself. so: when we talk about fans, when we talk about china (porcelain), when we talk about tea in england⁠—we are talking about the legacy of chinoiserie.

there are a couple things i want to note here. while english people as a whole had a very tenuous knowledge of what china might be, their appetites for chinoiserie were roughly coincident with national relations with china. as the relationship between england and china moved from trade to out-and-out wars, chinoiserie declined in popularity until china had been safely subjugated once more by the end of the 19th century.

the second thing i want to note on the subject that contrary to what one might think at first, the appeal of chinoiserie was not that it was foreign. eugenia zuroski’s 2013 taste for china examines 18th century english literature and its descriptions of the according material culture with the lens that chinese imports might be formative to english identity, rather than antithetical to it.

beyond that bare thesis, i think it’s also worthwhile to extend her insight that material objects become animated by the literary viewpoints on them. this is true, both in a limited general sense as well as in the sense that english thinkers of the time self-consciously articulated this viewpoint. consider the quote from the illustrated london news above⁠—your fan, that object, says something about you. and not only that, but the objects you surround yourself with ought to.

it’s a bit circular, the idea that written material says that you should allow written material to shape your understanding of physical objects. but it’s both 1) what happened, and 2) integral, i think, to integrating a fannish perspective into the topic.

--------------------

japanning is the name for the popular imitative lacquering that english craftspeople developed in domestic response to the demand for lacquerware imports. in the eighteenth century, japanning became an artform especially suited for young women. manuals were published on the subject, urging young women to learn how to paint furniture and other surfaces, encouraging them to rework the designs provided in the text.

it was considered a beneficial activity for them; zuroski describes how it was “associated with commerce and connoisseurship, practical skill and aesthetic judgment.” a skillful japanner, rather than simply obscuring what lay underneath the lacquer, displayed their superior judgment in how they chose to arrange these new canonical figures and effects in a tasteful way to bring out the best qualities of them.

zuroski quotes the first english-language manual on the subject, written in 1688, which explains how japanning allows one to:

alter and correct, take out a piece from one, add a fragment to the next, and make an entire garment compleat in all its parts, though tis wrought out of never so many disagreeing patterns.

this language evokes a very different, very modern practice. it is this english reworking of an asian artform that i think the parallels are most obvious.

white people, through their artistic investment in chinese material objects and aesthetics, integrated them into their own subjectivity. these practices came to say something about the people who participated in them, in a way that had little to do with the country itself. their relationship changed from being a “consumer” of chinese objects to becoming the proprietor of these new aesthetic signifiers.

--------------------

i want to talk about this through a few pairs of tensions on the subject that i think characterize common attitudes then and now.

first, consider the relationship between the self and the other: the chinese object as something that is very familiar to you, speaking to something about your own self vs. the chinese object as something that is fundamentally different from you and unknowable to you. 

consider: [insert character name] is just like me. he would no doubt like the same things i like, consume the same cultural products. we are the same in some meaningful way vs. the fast standard fic disclaimer that “i tried my best when writing this fic, but i’m a english-speaking westerner, and i’m just writing this for fun so...... [excuses and alterations the person has chosen to make in this light],” going hand-in-hand with a preoccupation with authenticity or even overreliance on the unpaid labor of chinese friends and acquaintances. 

consider: hugh honour when he quotes a man from the 1640s claiming “chinoiserie of this even more hybrid kind had become so far removed from genuine Chinese tradition that it was exported from India to China as a novelty to the Chinese themselves” 

these tensions coexist, and look how they have been resolved.

second, consider what we vest in objects themselves: beaujot explains how the fan became a sexualized, coquettish object in the hands of a british woman, but was used to great effect in gilbert and sullivan’s 1885 mikado to demonstrate the docility of asian women. 

consider: these characters became expressions of your sexual desires and fetishes, even as their 5’10 actors themselves are emasculated.

what is liberating for one necessitates the subjugation and fetishization of the other. 

third, consider reactions to the practice: enjoyment of chinese objects as a sign of your cosmopolitan palate vs “so what’s the hype about those ancient chinese gays” pop culture explainers that addressed the unconvinced mainstream.

consider: zuroski describes how both english consumers purchased china in droves, and contemporary publications reported on them. how: 

It was in the pages of these papers that the growing popularity of Chinese things in the early eighteenth century acquired the reputation of a “craze”; they portrayed china fanatics as flawed, fragile, and unreliable characters, and frequently cast chinoiserie itself in the same light.

referenda on fannish behavior serve as referenda on the objects of their devotion, and vice versa. as the difference between identity and fetish collapses, they come to be treated as one and the same by not just participants but their observers. 

at what point does mxtx fic cease to be chinese? 

--------------------

finally, it seems readily apparent that attitudes towards chinese objects may in fact have something to do with attitudes about china as a country. i do not want to suggest that these literary concerns are primarily motivated and begot by forces entirely divorced from the real mechanics of power. 

here, i want to bring in edward said, and his 1993 culture and imperialism. there, he explains how power and legitimacy go hand in hand. one is direct, and one is purely cultural. he originally wrote this in response to the outsize impact that british novelists have had in the maintenance of empire and throughout decolonization. literature, he argues, gives rise to powerful narratives that constrain our ability to think outside of them.

there’s a little bit of an inversion at play here. these are chinese novels, actually. but they’re being transformed by white narratives and artists. and just as i think the form of the novel is important to said’s critique, i think there’s something to be said about the form that fic takes and how it legitimates itself.

bound up in fandom is the idea that you have a right to create and transform as you please. it is a nice idea, but it is one that is directed towards a certain kind of asymmetry. that is, one where the author has all the power. this is the narrative we hear a lot in the history of fandom⁠—litigious authors and plucky fans, fanspaces always under attack from corporate sanitization.

meanwhile, said builds upon raymond schwab’s narrative of cultural exchange between european writers and cultural products outside the imperial core. said explains that fundamental to these two great borrowings (from greek classics and, in the so-called “oriental renaissance” of the late 18th, early 19th centuries from “india, china, japan, persia, and islam”) is asymmetry. 

he had argued prior, in orientalism, that any “cultural exchange” between “partners conscious of inequality” always results in the suffering of the people. and here, he describes how “texts by dead people were read, appreciated, and appropriated” without the presence of any actual living people in that tradition. 

i will not understate that there is a certain economic dynamic complicating this particular fannish asymmetry. mxtx has profited materially from the success of her works, most fans will not. also secondly, mxtx is um. not dead. LMAO.

but first, the international dynamic of extraction that said described is still present. i do not want to get overly into white attitudes towards china in this post, because i am already thoroughly derailed, but i do believe that they structure how white cnovel fandom encounters this texts.

at any rate, any profit she receives is overwhelmingly due to her domestic popularity, not her international popularity. (i say this because many of her international fans have never given her a cent. in fact, most of them have no real way to.) and moreover, as we talk about the structure of english-language fandom, what does it mean to create chinese cultural products without chinese people? 

as white people take ownership over their versions of stories, do we lose something? what narratives about engagement with cnovels might exist outside of the form of classic fandom?

i think a lot of people get the relationship between ideas (the superstructure) and production (the base) confused. oftentimes they will lob in response to criticism, that look! this fic, this fandom, these people are so niche, and so underrepresented in mainstream culture, that their effects are marginal. i am not arguing that anyone’s cql fic causes imperialism. (unless you’re really annoying. then it’s anyone’s game) 

i’m instead arguing something a little bit different. i think, given similar inputs, you tend to get similar outputs. i think we live in the world that imperialism built, and we have clear historical predecessors in terms of white appetites for creating, consuming, and transforming chinese objects. 

we have already seen, in the case of the fan language meme that began this post, that sometimes we even prefer this white chinoiserie. after all, isn’t it beautiful, too? 

i want to bring discomfort to this topic. i want to reject the paradigm of white subject and chinese object; in fact, here in this essay, i have tried to reverse it.

if you are taken aback by the comparisons i make here, how can you make meaningful changes to your fannish practice to address it? 

--------------------

some concluding thoughts on the matter, because i don’t like being misunderstood! 

i am not claiming white fans cannot create fanworks of cnovels or be inspired by asian art or artists. this essay is meant to elaborate on the historical connection between victorian england and cnovel characters and fandom that others have already popularized.

i don’t think people who make victorian jokes are inherently bad or racist. i am encouraging people to think about why we might make them and/or share them

the connections here are meant to be more provocative than strictly literal. (e.g. i don’t literally think writing fanfic is a 1-1 descendant of japanning). these connections are instead meant to 1) make visible the baggage that fans of color often approach fandom with and 2) recontextualize and defamiliarize fannish practice for the purposes of honest critique

please don’t turn this post into being about other different kinds of discourse, or into something that only one “kind” of fan does. please take my words at face value and consider them in good faith. i would really appreciate that.

please feel free to ask me to clarify any statements or supply more in-depth sources :) 

[felassan]

Some DA trivia and dev commentary from Twitter

There’s a lot of different tweets, so I’m just pasting and linking to the source rather than screencapping them all or making several different posts or something. Post under cut for length.

User: Was dragon age 2 your favourite in the franchise?

David Gaider: DA2 was the project where my writing team was firing on all cylinders, and they wrote like the wind- because they had to! Second draft? Pfft. Plot reviews? Pfft. I was so proud of what we all accomplished in such a brief time. I didn't think it was possible. [source] DA2 is, however, also where the goal posts kept moving. Things kept getting cut, even while we worked. I had to write that dialogue where Orsino turned even if you sided with him, because his boss battle had been cut and there was no time to fix the plot. A real WTF moment. >:( [source]

Mike Rousseau: I remember bugging that! And then being told it wasn't a bug, and being so confused. Doing QA for DA2 was an experience. Trial by fire. [source]

DG: So I think it's safe to say DA2 is my favorite entry in the DA franchise and also the sort of thing I never want to live through ever again. Mixed feelings galore. [source]

User: (I personally blame whoever it was for ruining most romance arcs in other games for me; they don't live up to Fenris's romance storyline)

DG: I wrote Fenris, so uh - me, I guess? Or maybe his cinematic designer, who put in the puppy dog eyes. [source]

User: If DA2 had just been an expansion, do you think it would have been better received? There was a lot of great stuff in there, and I think my initial dislike of it was because of the zone reuse. If it hadn't needed to be a full game, would that issue not have arisen?

DG: Hard to say. It was either going to be an over-scoped expansion or an under-scoped sequel. If it had stayed an expansion, it might never have received the resources/push it DID get. [source]

User: I'd love to visit the universe where you had an extra year or so to work on it. You did a very good job as it stands, but it definitely had rough edges. Not just the writing team either. The whole game had hit and miss moments, that just a little more dev time could have fixed.

DG: On one hand, DA2 existed to fill a hole in the release schedule. More time was never in the cards. DA2 was originally planned as an expansion! On the other, if we had more time, would we have started doing that thing where we second guess/iterate ourselves into mediocrity? [shrug emoji] [source] 

Jennifer Hepler: This is what I love about DA2. Personally, I greatly prefer something that's rough and raw and sincere to something that's had all the soul polished out of it. Extra time would have helped for art and levels, but it would have lost something too. [source]

DG: Right? I think we could have used some time for peer reviews (and fewer cuts), but I think the rawness of the writing lent a certain spark that we usually polished out. [source]

JH: Definitely. I think the structure (more character-driven) and the tightness of the timeframe let each individual writer's voice really come through. Polish can be very homogenizing. [source]

DG: I should add I'm not, by any means, against iteration. Some iteration is good and necessary. The problem that BioWare often had is that we never knew when to stop. Like a goldfish, we would fill the space given to us by constantly re-iterating on things that were "good enough". [source]

Patrick Weekes: I appreciate your incredibly diplomatic use of the past tense on "had". :D [source]

User: DA2 was my gateway into the series and I’m so happy it is. I love the game the way that it is. It’s one of my favorites of all time. But I am also aware of everything that was said here. If it were remastered, do you think it would change?

DG: I'd be surprised if it was ever remastered. If it was, do you really think they'd change things? Do remasters do that? No idea. [source]

User: Both sides got undercut as I recall. Didn't that whole sequence also end with the mage leader embracing blood magic? It was very much "a plague on both your houses" moment, at least for me.

DG: Yep. Orsino was supposed to have his own version of Meredith's end battle, which only happened if you sided with the templars. That got cut, but the team still wanted to use the model we'd made for him. So... that happened. [source]

DG: I would personally say that DA2 is a fantastic game hidden under a mountain of compromises, cut corners, and tight deadlines. If you can see past all that, you'll see a fantastic game. I don't doubt, however, that it's very difficult for most to do that. [source]

PW: I love DAI with all my selfish "I worked on this" heart, but DA2's follower arcs and relationships are probably my favorite in the series. [source]

User: As I've expressed many times, I love the game, especially it's writing and characters but, for me, the most impressive aspect of it, in consideration of it's lack of time for drafts and revisions, is the 2nd act with Arishok.  What amazingly complex character and fantastic duel

User: Just played it again and I have to agree. Though he is bound by the harsher tenants of the Qun, he makes valid points about free marcher society. Though it is obvious that he and Hawke will come to blows eventually, the tension builds gradually and understandably

DG: Luke did such a fantastic job with the Arishok I found myself sometimes wishing the Qunari plot had just been THE plot. [source]

User: What do you think would have changed, story wise, if you had more time for DA2?

DG: I would have taken out that thing where Meredith gets the idol. It was forced on me because she needed to be "super-powered" with red lyrium for her final battle. Being "crazy", however, robbed her side of the mage/templar argument of any legitimacy. I hated hated hated that. [source]

User: I deeply lament that there wasn't/couldn't be some sort of DA2 equivalent of Throne of Bhaal's Ascension mod.

DG: I'd have done it, if DA2 had allowed for anything but the most rudimentary of modding. ;) [source]

User: I mean, and I think I understand where you were trying, but how much legitimacy did the Templars and her as top Templar have after they're keeping the mages locked up against their will in the old slave quarters? Feel free to not reply.

DG: I think it's the kind of discussion which requires nuance, and which discussions on the Internet are not prone to. [source]

User: Was a compromise that the quest lines don’t branch? It felt like it was supposed to be that way but then you end up in the same place later regardless of what you pick. Like I hoodwinked the templars so good to help the apostates escape but in Act II they were caught anyway.

DG: I remember us having a lot more branching in the initial planning yes. Most of this got trimmed out in the first or second wave of cuts, in an effort to not cut the plots altogether. [source]

DG: "If you could Zack Snyder DA2, what would you change?" Wow. I'm willing to bet Mark or Mike (or anyone else on the team) would give very different answers than me, but it's enough to give a sober man pause, because that was THE Project of Multiple Regrets. [source] I mean, it's the most hypothetical of hypotheticals. It's never gonna happen. I wouldn't be surprised if EA considered DA2 its embarrassing red-headed stepchild. We'd also need to ignore that in many ways DA2 was as good as it was bad BECAUSE of how it was made. But that aside? [source] First, either restore the progressive changes to Kirkwall we'd planned over the passing of in-game years or reduce the time between acts to months instead of years... which, in hindsight, probably should have been done as soon as the progressive stuff was cut. [source] I'm sure you're like "get rid of repeated levels!" ...but I don't care about that. All I wanted was for Kirkwall to feel like a bigger city. Way more crowded. More alive! Fewer blood mages. [source] I'd want to restore the plot where a mage Hawke came THIS close to becoming an abomination. An entire story spent trapped in one's own head while trapped on the edge of possession. Why? Because Hawke is the only mage who apparently never struggles with this. It was a hard cut. [source]

User: I would LOVE to hear more details about this! I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a short story?

DG: I don't even remember the details of the story, sorry. There was a fight, and you caught the bad guy and then realized none of it was real and woke up idk [source]

DG: I'd want to restore all those alternate lines we cut, meaning people forget they'd met you. Or that they knew you were a mage. Or, oh god, that maybe they'd romanced you in DAO. So much carnage. [source] I'd want to restore the Act 3 plots we cut only because they were worked on too late, but which would have made the buildup to the mage/templar clash less sudden. Though I don't remember what they were, now. Some never got beyond being index cards posted on the wall. [grimace emoji] [source] As I mentioned elsewhere, I'd want to restore Orsino's end battle so he wouldn't need to turn on you even if you sided with him. And I'd want an end fight with the templars that didn't require Meredith to have red lyrium and go full Tetsuo. [source] Heck, maybe an end decision where you sided with neither the mages nor the templars. Because it certainly ended up feeling like you could brand both sides as batshit pretty legitimately, no? That was never planned, tho. No idea how to make that feel like an actual path atm. [source] Maybe an option to go "umm, Anders... what are you DOING?" 👀 [source] And, of course, a Varric romance, because Mary took that "slimy car salesman" character we'd planned and did the impossible with him. I can feel Mary glaring at me for even suggesting this, tho. [source] Lastly, the original expanded opening to the game which allowed you to spend time with Bethany and Carver BEFORE the darkspawn attacked. And, um, that's about it off the top of my head. Zack Snyder, WHAT PANDORA'S BOX HAVE YOU OPENED. [source] Shit, I remembered two more things: 1) Restore the "Varric exaggerates the heck out of the story" at the beginning of every Act, until Cassandra calls him on it. Yes, that was a thing. 2) Make DA: Exodus. Yes, I am still bitter. [source] God damn it, I meant "Make DA: Exalted March". The DA2 expansion, NOT Exodus since that was DA2's original name and makes no sense. Because the expansion ended with Varric dying, and that will always be on my "things left undone" list. [source]

User: Whaaaat?

DG: Well, you know that scene in Wrath of Khan where Spock goes into the dilithium chamber because he's a Vulcan? Well, imagine that but with Varric and red lyrium and because he's a dwarf. ;) [source]

John Epler: I distinctly remember referencing the bit from MGS4 where you crawl through the microwave corridor in the split screen, while cinematic battle rages on the other half. [source]

DG: It would have been glorious, John. Glorious. [source]

JE: I don't think I've ever been so certain what a shot should look like as I did Hawke coming in and finding Varric in the broken throne, just like when he was telling Cassandra his story. [source]

DG: It would have come full circle! Auggghh, it still kills me. [source]

User: Lord, you folks are a little too good at this.

JE: The true secret behind videogame narrative is knowing how to make yourself seem a lot more clever than you actually are. [source] 'Oh, we TOTALLY planned that.' [source]

User: Ok, this thread [the DA2 regrets thread, which is the big chunks above] but Inquisition.

DG: My regrets about Inquisition are, more or less, the normal kind. Nothing so dramatic, I'm afraid. [source]

User: You can keep your Varric romance, I want a Flemeth romance goddamnit!

DG: I would allow for one flirt option, and then a recording of Kate Mulgrew laughing for three minutes straight. [source]

User: I had a hypothesis about the repetitive caves in DA2. They're repetitive because it's Varric telling the story and he didn't consider them important.  They're like sets in a play.  (Okay, I really suspect it was a time/money/resources thing but I like my fake explanation better.)

DG: Hang a lampshade on it, maybe? Cassandra: "But that's the exact cave you were in last time?" Varric: "Whatever. They all look the same, I'm not THAT kind of dwarf. Can we move on?" [source]

User: that makes sense, hypothetically to make Varric romanceable and keep his arc—that had to happen for the main plot—I imagine you would have to make double the content (or more)? which would've been a tall order given the time/budget constraints the game was under

DG: Right. When it comes to "romance arc" vs. "follower story arc", we generally only had time to do one or the other. Never both. Romancing Varric would have meant not getting the story of his that you did. [source]

Mary Kirby: The one exaggeration I really, REALLY wanted, that we never got to do was Varric narrating his own death scene with Hawke weeping over him, then cutting to Cassandra's pissed off glaring at him. [source]

DG: Haha! The one I wanted was Varric's plot where he takes on the baddies single-handedly, sliding across the floor like Jet Lee, action movie-style, until finally Cassandra gets irritated and he has to admit Hawke & the rest of the party showed up to help. [source]

MK: We did that one! (He didn't do any Jet Lee moves, though.) Jepler gave him letterboxing to get The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly showdown vibes while he shot a ton of mooks single-handed. [source]

DG: Wow. Shows how much I remember. [source]

JE: I found it! I remember seeing this sequence as my treat for doing a bunch of much more challenging work. It was fun to see how far I could push our limited library of animations. [link] [source]

DG: Heh awesome. I could have sworn it was cut, honestly. I think I was even in that meeting. [source]

User: no disrespect but that’s surprising and rich of Mary “Hard in Hightown” Kirby to think DA2 shouldn’t have had a Varric romance when she wrote an entire book of Varric’s self-insert character pining over his Hawke insert character… HIH is the reason we had VHawke Summer 2018

DG: I can't *really* speak for Mary, or how she feels about it now compared to back then. I only know how she felt about it back then, and I'm not sure it was as much the concept of the romance but that Varric's entire story would be bent to "romance arc" ...a very different thing. [source]

JH: I remember pushing to have the first DLC start with Hawke having an option to ask Varric, "Did you tell Cassandra about us?" and if you picked it, Varric would answer, "Of course not, baby. I told her you were sleeping with X..." and then proceed as if you had had a full romance. [source]

DG: I still wonder how that would have gone over. x) [source]

JE: Okay, one more DA2 thing. Putting together the cinematics for this scene was a blast. [link] [source]

MK: These lines are my greatest legacy. I want "Make sure the world knows I died... at Chateau Haine!" inscribed on my tombstone. [source]

JE: I was so glad no one said 'no' to the crane shot. [source]

MK: It needs that crane shot. It's the perfect icing on that cake made from solid cheese. [source]

DG: The designers were all "we need more combat" and I think we were all "I think you underestimate just HOW interesting we can make this dinner party". [source]

JE: And finally. I think @SherylChee wrote the one-liner. I think we had a collection of like, 20. [link] [source]

Sheryl Chee: Yeah! Something like that! I remember submitted a whole bunch and Frank said you only needed one. Wish I'd kept the other fifteen. [source]

JE: A random chooser where, each time through the scene, you get a different one-liner. [source]

JE: DA2 is the project I'm the proudest of. I also absolutely get that it didn't land for a lot of people. But I don't think it's inaccurate to say that, in a lot of ways, DA2 defined my career. [source]  Everyone spent a year working at their maximum ability. I was a fresh cinematic designer and was given all of Varric's content, as well as the Act 1 Finale mission. It was a lot for someone who had been doing the Cinematics thing for literally 6 months. [source]  There's some stuff in there I can't look at without wincing. And there's some stuff I'm genuinely proud of. Not to mention, it was my introduction to most of the writing team. Several of whom I'm still working with today! Albeit in a different capacity [source] Also, weirdly, one of my most enduring memories of Dragon Age 2 is how much Bad Company 2 we'd play at lunch. It was a LOT. [source] Every game I've worked on has a game I played attached to it. ME2 is Borderlands. DA2 is Bad Company 2. DAI is DayZ. I, hmm. There's a progression there. I don't know how I feel about it. [source]

User: Is DA4 going to be tarkov then?

JE: I've kind of churned out of Tarkov for now. Probably Hunt Showdown, at least right now. [source]

User: I think people also don't take nuance into consideration -- like I FULLY acknowledge the flaws in my favorite games and will openly criticize them, but that doesn't mean they're not my favorite games anymore??? You can like and thing and still be critical of it.

JE: A lot of my favourite shit is deeply flawed! I acknowledge it and I think it's interesting to dissect the flaws. [source]

User: I still wish Justice was an actual character in DA2 rather than a plot point.

DG: There was a moment during DAI where we *almost* put in you running into Justice with the Grey Wardens, and he's all "Kirkwall? I never went to Kirkwall" [source]

User: Does that imply that Justice was shoehorned in to DA2?

DG: Nah, it was an in-joke where we thought it'd be fun to suggest that "Justice" was simply some demon that tricked Anders in DA2. Wooo those tricky demons! We didn't do it, though. [source]

User: [about templars]  except, I don't think it had very much legitimacy to begin with. keep in mind, we interact with other characters with the same argument. The one that comes to mind is Cullen, a sane templar in power. The templar's side of the argument is inherently flawed.

DG: I don't doubt that many people agree with you, and yet people can and do argue on behalf of the templars as well. My place isn't to pick a side, but to provide evidence that players can interpret for themselves [source]

User: Can you shed some light for us on how DA was able to do multiple same-sex romance options for different genders but the Mass Effect team treated them like the plague? What process existed for your team that just wasn't their for the other tentpole franchise?

DG: Different people making the decisions, almost different cultures. I don't know what it's like now, but for many years the Mass Effect team and the Dragon Age team were almost like two different studios working within the same building. [source]

User: It truly boggles the mind. Kudos for doing demonstrably better on consistent queer representation than the ME teams. Y'all never needed us to make petitions to try to get the studio's attention and ask them to do better by us. That's the fight we're once again embroiled in now.

DG: Honestly, I don't feel like tut-tutting the Mass Effect team. They did their part, and if they were a bit later to the show than the DA team they certainly did more than almost every other game out there -- and willingly. [source]

Updates begin here

User: So what was the reason for naming Dragon age 2 "Dragon age II" and not using a subtitle?

DG: As I recall, that was purely a publisher decision. I think they wanted to avoid the impression it was an expansion. [source]

User: Is there no chance of ever remaking DA2 under better circumstances? -Somehow remove the repetitiveness of gameplay by making changes and updating the tech and adding much more to the storyline. It could almost be a new very exciting game.

DG: I'd say there's zero chance of that. Let's keep our hopes up for the next DA title instead. [source]

User: I am a little confused here, help me out here please! How exactly was the cut boss battle with Orsino supposed to work out? How it would've kept him from turning against the player?

DG: It means that, if you sided with the templars, the entire boss bottle at the end would have been against Orsino and the mages. No fight against Meredith. The end decision would have been more divergent. [source]

User: I do remember that one of the reasons going around for that, was that resources were going to the transition to Frostbite. I'm still not fully sold on that having been a good choice. I felt that more time should have been given for that transition considering it was made for FPSs

DG: We didn't transition to Frostbite until DAI. Given our time frame for DA2, I don't think we *could* have transitioned to a new engine. [source]

User: Since your talking about the what could have been for DA2. Could you say what your script was for Anthem? Cause I remember reading that you wrote the plot on that game.

DG: I created a setting for Anthem and scripted out a plot - but, as I understand it, almost none of that ended up being used. So it's a bit pointless to talk about what I'd planned, as that'd be for some completely different type of game. [source]

User: [in reference to the exchange above where DG said “Being "crazy", however, robbed her side of the mage/templar argument of any legitimacy. I hated hated hated that.” re: Meredith] except, I don't think it had very much legitimacy to begin with. keep in mind, we interact with other characters with the same argument. The one that comes to mind is Cullen, a sane templar in power. The templar's side of the argument is inherently flawed.

DG: I don't doubt that many people agree with you, and yet people can and do argue on behalf of the templars as well. My place isn't to pick a side, but to provide evidence that players can interpret for themselves. [source]

If I missed a tweet, got the wrong source link or included a tweet twice, feel free to let me know and I’ll correct.

Edit / Update: Post update 22nd April

[causeiwanttoandican]

Harry, Meghan and me: my truth as a royal reporter

I've covered elections and extremism, but nothing compares to the vitriol I've received since I started writing about the Sussexes

By Camilla Tominey, Associate Editor27 March 2021 • 6:00am

It is probably worth mentioning from the outset that I never, ever, planned to become a royal reporter. I mean, who does? It’s one of those ridiculous jobs most people fall into completely by accident.

I certainly wasn’t coveting the position when I first found out how bonkers the beat could be after covering Charles and Camilla’s wedding in 2005. Desperate for ‘a line’ on what went on at the reception, journalists were reduced to flagging down passing cars in Windsor High Street and interrogating the likes of Stephen Fry about whether they’d had the salmon or the chicken.

Watergate, this wasn’t.

Yet when my former editor called me into his office shortly afterwards and offered me the royal job ‘because you’re called Camilla and you dress nicely’, who was I to refuse?

Having planned to get married myself that summer, and start a family soon afterwards, I looked to the likes of Jennie Bond and Penny Junor and figured it would be a good patch for a working mother as well as being one I could grow old with. Unlike show business, when celebrities are ‘in’ one minute and ‘out’ the next, the royals would stay the same, making it easier to build – and keep – contacts.

So if you’d told me that 16 years later, I would find myself at the centre of a media storm over a royal interview with Oprah Winfrey, I’d have probably laughed in your face. First of all, only royals like Fergie do interviews with Oprah. And since when did journalists become the story?

Yet as I have experienced since the arrival of Meghan Markle on the royal scene in 2016 – a move that roughly coincided with Twitter doubling its 140-character limitation to 280 – royal reporters like me now find themselves in the line of fire like never before.

We are used to the likes of Kate Adie coming under attack in the Middle East, but now it is the correspondents who write up events like Trooping the Colour and the Royal Windsor Horse Show having to take cover from the keyboard warriors supposedly defending the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s ‘truth’.

Accusations of racism have long been levelled against anyone who has dared to write less than undiluted praise of Harry and Meghan. But even I have been taken aback by the vitriol on social media in the wake of the couple’s televised two-hour talk-a-thon, in which they branded both the Royal family and the British press racist while complaining about their ‘almost unsurvivable’ multimillionaire lives at the hands of the evil monarchy. And all while the rest of the UK were losing their loved ones and livelihoods in a global pandemic.

Having covered Brexit, general elections and stories about Islamic extremism, I’ve grown used to being sprayed with viral vomit on a fairly regular basis, but when you’ve got complete strangers trolling your best friend’s Instagram feed by association? That’s Britney Spears levels of toxic.

Having a hind thicker than a rhino’s, it wasn’t the repeated references to my being ‘a total c—’ that particularly bothered me, nor even the suggestion that I should have my three children put up for adoption. At one point someone even said it would be a good idea for me to drink myself to death like my mother, about whose chronic alcoholism I have written extensively.

No, what really got me was the appalling spelling and grammar. I mean, if you’re going to hurl insults, at least have the decency to get my name right.

Yet in order to understand just how it has come to pass that so-called #SussexSquaders think nothing of branding all royal correspondents ‘white supremacists’ regardless of who they write for, or sending hate mail to our email addresses, offices – and in some cases, even our homes – it’s worth briefly going to back to when I first broke the story that Prince Harry was dating an American actor in the Sunday Express on 31 October 2016. Headlined: ‘Royal world exclusive: Harry’s secret romance with TV star’, the splash revealed how the popular prince was ‘secretly dating a stunning US actress, model and human rights campaigner’.

Despite my now apparently being on a par with the Ku Klux Klan for failing to acknowledge Meghan as the next messiah, it was actually not until the fifteenth paragraph of that original article that the ‘confident and intelligent’ Northwestern University graduate was described as ‘the daughter of an African-American mother and a father of Dutch and Irish descent’.

Call me superficial, but I was genuinely far more interested in the fact that Harry ‘I-come-with-baggage’ Wales was dating a former ‘briefcase girl’ from the US version of Deal or No Deal than the colour of her skin. A ginger prince punching well above his weight? This was the stuff of tabloid dreams. Little did I know then that covering the trials and tribulations of these two lovebirds would turn into such a nightmare.

The online hostility began bubbling up about eight days after that first story, when Harry’s then communications secretary Jason Knauf issued an ‘unprecedented’ statement accusing the media of ‘crossing a line’.

‘His girlfriend, Meghan Markle, has been subject to a wave of abuse and harassment’, it read, referencing a ‘smear on the front page of a national newspaper; the racial undertones of comment pieces; and the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comments’. Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, had apparently been besieged by photographers, while bribes had been offered to Meghan’s ex-boyfriend along with ‘the bombardment of nearly every friend, coworker, and loved one in her life’.

Suffice to say, I did feel a bit guilty. Although I hadn’t written anything remotely racist or sexist, I had started the ball rolling for headlines like the MailOnline’s ‘(Almost) straight outta Compton’ (referencing a song by hip-hop group NWA about gang violence and Meghan’s upbringing in the nearby LA district of Crenshaw), along with her ‘exotic’ DNA (which I subsequently called out, including on This Morning in the wake of ‘Megxit’ in January last year).

Omid Scobie, co-author of Finding Freedom, a highly favourable account of the Sussexes’ departure from the Royal family, written with their cooperation last summer, would later insist that the couple knew the story of their relationship was coming out and were well prepared for it.

I can tell you categorically that they weren’t, since I did not even put a call into Kensington Palace before we went to press for fear of it being leaked. (I did later discuss this with Harry, when I covered his trip to the Caribbean in November 2016, and to be fair he was pretty philosophical, agreeing it would have come out sooner or later. But that was before the former Army Captain decided to well and truly shoot the messenger, latterly telling journalists covering the newly-weds’ tax-payer-funded October 2018 tour of Australia and the south Pacific: ‘Thanks for coming, even though you weren’t invited.’)

The royal press pack is the group of dedicated writers who cover all the official engagements and tours on a rota system, in exchange for not bothering the royals as they go about their private business. It was a shame this ragtag bunch, of which I am an associate member, was never personally introduced to Meghan when the couple got engaged in November 2017.

I still have fond memories of a then Kate Middleton, upon her engagement to Prince William in November 2010, showing me her huge sapphire and diamond ring following a press conference at St James’s Palace with the words, ‘It was William’s mother’s so it is very special.’

I replied that she might want to consider buying ‘one of those expanding accordion style file holders’ to organise all her wedding paperwork. (Reader, I had given birth to my second child less than four months earlier and was still lactating.)

Not meeting Meghan did not stop royal commentators like me writing reams about her being ‘a breath of fresh air’ and telling practically every TV show I appeared on that she was the ‘best thing to have happened to the Royal Family in years’.

As the world followed the joyous news of the Windsors’ resident strip billiards star having finally found ‘the one’, the couple enjoyed overwhelmingly positive press culminating in their fairy-tale wedding in May 2018, which we headlined ‘So in love’ above a picture of the bride and groom kissing. I tweeted the wedding front page, along with the original story breaking the news of their relationship with the words, ‘Job done’. Yet, as Meghan would later point out in a glossy Santa Barbara garden, that was by far the end of the story.

According to the Duchess’s testimony before a global audience of millions, the seeds for their royal departure were actually sown by an article I wrote in November 2018 suggesting she made Kate cry during a bridesmaid’s dress fitting for Princess Charlotte.

Claiming the ‘reverse happened’, the former Suits star railed, ‘A few days before the wedding she was upset about something, pertaining to, yes, the issue was correct, about flower-girl dresses, and it made me cry, and it really hurt my feelings.’

She then went on to criticise the palace for failing to correct the story – suggesting that royal aides had hung her out to dry to protect the Duchess of Cambridge.

All of which left me in a bit of a sticky situation. As I told Phillip Schofield on This Morning the following day, ‘I don’t write things I don’t believe to be true and that haven’t been really well sourced.’

Having seemingly been completely bowled over by Meghan’s version of events, Schofe then went for the jugular: ‘I have to say, though, that’s all addressed in that interview, isn’t it, because she [Meghan] couldn’t understand why nobody stood up for her?’

Yet someone had stood up for her, on that very same This Morning sofa: me.

As I told Phil and Holly on 14 January 2019, as more reports of ‘Duchess Difficult’ started to emerge, ‘I think she [Meghan] is doing really well, she looks amazing, she speaks well. She has played a blinder.’

So you’ll forgive me if I can’t quite understand why Meghan didn’t feel the need to correct this supposedly glaring error once she had her own dedicated head of communications from March 2019 – or indeed when she ‘collaborated’ with Scobie, who concluded in his bestselling hagiography that ‘no one cried’?

Moreover, how did the Duchess know a postnatal Kate wasn’t ‘left in tears’? And if she doesn’t know, what hope has the average troll observing events through the prism of their own deep-rooted insecurities?

It appears the actual truth ceases to matter once sides have been taken in the unedifying Team Meghan versus Team Kate battle that has divided the internet.

Make no mistake, there are abject morons at both extremes spewing the sort of bile that, ironically, makes most of the media coverage of Harry and Meghan look like a 1970s edition of Jackie magazine.

It perhaps didn’t help my case that the day before the interview was aired in the US, I had written a lengthy piece carefully weighing up the evidence behind allegations of ‘outrageous bullying’ that had been levelled against Meghan during what proved to be a miserable 20 months in the Royal family for all concerned.

The messages – to my Twitter feed, my email, my website and official Facebook page – ranged from the threatening, to the typical tropes about media ‘scum’ and the downright bizarre. Some accused me of being in cahoots with Carole Middleton, with whom I have never interacted, unless you count a last-minute Party Pieces purchase in a desperate moment of poor parental planning.

Another frequent barb was questioning why the press wasn’t writing about that ‘pedo’ [sic] Prince Andrew instead – seemingly oblivious to the fact that no one would know about the Duke of York’s links to Jeffrey Epstein if it wasn’t for the acres of coverage devoted to the story by us royal hacks over recent years.

It didn’t matter that I had repeatedly torn the Queen’s second, and, some say, favourite son to pieces for everything from his propensity to take his golf clubs on foreign tours to that disastrous Newsnight interview.

Contrary to the ‘invisible contract’ Harry claims the palace has with the press, royal coverage works roughly like this: good royal deeds = good publicity. Bad royal deeds = bad publicity. We effectively act as a critical friend, working on behalf of a public that rightly expects the royals to take the work – but not themselves – seriously.

So when a royal couple preaches about climate change before taking four private jets in 11 days, it is par for the course for a royal scribe to point out the inconsistency of that message. None of it is ever personal, as evidenced by the fact that practically every member of the monarchy has come in for flak over the years.

If Oprah wasn’t willing to point out the discrepancies in Harry and Meghan’s testimony, surely it is beholden on royal reporters to question how the Duchess had managed to undertake four foreign holidays in the six months after her wedding, in addition to official tours to Italy, Canada, and Amsterdam, as well as embarking on a lengthy honeymoon, if she had ‘turned over’ her passport?

While no one would wish to undermine the extent of her mental health problems, could it really be true that she only left the house twice in four months when she managed to cram in 73 days’ worth of engagements, according to the Court Circular, in the 17 months between her wedding and the couple’s departure to Canada?

And what of the ‘racist’ headlines flashed up during the interview purporting to be from the British press, when more than a third were actually taken from independent blogs and the foreign media? The UK media abides by the Independent Press Standards Organisation’s Code of Conduct ‘to avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual’s race’, as well as by rigorous defamation laws. And rightly so – the British press doesn’t always get it right. But social media is the Wild West by comparison, publishing vile slurs on a daily basis with impunity.

Some therefore find it strange that such a litigious couple would claim to have been ‘silenced’ when they have made so many complaints, including resorting to legal action, over stories they claim not to have even read. There is something similarly contradictory about a couple accusing the tabloids of lacking self-reflection while refusing to take any blame at all – for anything.

In any normal world, informed writing on such matters would be classed as fair comment, but not, seemingly, on Twitter where those completely lacking any objectivity whatsoever are only too willing to virtue signal and manoeuvre.

As the trolling reached fever pitch in the aftermath of the interview, veteran royal reporter Robert Jobson of the Evening Standard called me. ‘Don’t respond to these freaks,’ he advised. ‘It’s getting nasty out there. Watch your back!’

Yet despite my general sense of bewilderment at the menacing Megbots, I can’t say it didn’t appal me to discover a close friend had received online abuse, purely by dint of being my mate. After discussing the lengths the troll must have gone to to track her down, she asked me, ‘Do you ever worry someone might do something awful to you?’ Er, not until now, no.

Of course it’s upsetting, even for a cynical old-timer like me. Worse still are people who actually know me casting aspersions on my profession on social media. Often these are the same charlatans who would think nothing of sidling up to me for the latest gossip on the Royal family, while publicly pretending that reading any such coverage is completely beneath them.

Most pernicious of all though – not least after Piers Morgan’s departure from Good Morning Britain following a complaint to ITV and Ofcom from the Duchess – is the corrosive effect this whole hullabaloo is having on freedom of speech. When you’ve got a former actor effectively editing a British breakfast show from an £11 million Montecito mansion, what next?

I cannot help but think we are in danger of setting race relations back 30 years if people are seriously suggesting that any criticism of Meghan is racially motivated. It’s the hypocrisy that gets me. When Priti Patel was accused of bullying, the very same people who willingly hung the Home Secretary out to dry are now the ones defending Meghan against such claims, saying they have been levelled at her simply because she is ‘a strong woman of colour’.

Of course journalists should take responsibility for everything they report and be held to account for it – but Harry and Meghan do not have a monopoly on the truth simply because the close friend and neighbour who interviewed them in return for £7 million from CBS took what they said as gospel.

If she isn’t willing to probe the disparity between Meghan saying someone questioned the colour of Archie’s skin when she was pregnant, and Harry suggesting it happened before they were even married, then someone must. There’s a name for such scrutiny. It’s called journalism.

The public reserves the right to make up its own mind – with the help of the watchful eye of a free and fair press. But that press can never be free or fair if journalists do not feel they can report without fear or favour. I’m lucky that a lot of the criticism I face is more than balanced out by hugely supportive members of the public and online community who either agree – or respect the right to disagree. Along with the hate mail, I have had many thoughtful and eloquent missives, including those that good naturedly challenge what I have written in the paper or said on TV, which have genuinely given me pause for thought.

I am more than happy to enter into constructive discourse with these correspondents, who are frankly sometimes the only people who keep me on Twitter. I mean, let’s face it, I wouldn’t be anywhere near the bloody thing if this wasn’t my day job.

With the National Union of Journalists this month declaring that harassment and abuse had ‘become normalised’ within the industry, never have members of Britain’s press needed more courage. As Winston Churchill famously said, ‘You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.’

Who would have thought that the preservation of the fundamental freedoms that we hold so dear should partially rest on the shoulders of those who follow around a 94-year-old woman and her family for a living?

If I’d known then what I know now, would I still have written the bridesmaid’s dress story?

Yes – doubtlessly reflecting sisterly sobs all round. But after two decades in this business, I am clear-eyed enough to know this for certain: whatever I had written, it would still have ended in tears.

[theculturedmarxist]

The Bucha Provocation

The Bucha 'Russian' atrocities propaganda onslaught may have worked well in the 'west' but it lacks evidence that Russia had anything to do with it.

The former Indian ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar calls it an outright fake:

An indignant Moscow has angrily demanded a United Nations Security Council meeting on Monday over the allegations of atrocities by Russian troops in areas around Kiev through the past month. Prima facie, this allegation is fake news but it can mould misperceptions by the time it gets exposed as disinformation.A Tass report says: “The Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday that the Russian Armed Forces had left Bucha, located in the Kiev region, on March 30, while “the evidence of crimes” emerged only four days later, after Ukrainian Security Service officers had arrived in the town. The ministry stressed that on March 31, the town’s Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk had confirmed in a video address that there were no Russian troops in Bucha. However, he did not say a word about civilians shot dead on the street with their hands tied behind their backs.”Even more surprising is that within minutes of the “breaking news”, western leaders — heads of state, foreign ministers, former politicians — popped up with statements duly kept ready and only based on the videos, seconds-long videos and a clutch of photos, ready to pour accusations. No expert opinion was sought, no forensic work was done, no opportunity given to the accused to be heard.

I had yesterday, at 15:09 UTC, posted a timeline of the events in Bucha on Twitter. Here is an expanded version.

Mar 30 - Ru troops leave Bucha

Mar 31 - Mayor of Bucha announces town 'liberated', makes no mention of atrocities.

Bucha liberated from Russian invaders – mayor - Ukrinform The mayor of Bucha in Kyiv region, Anatoliy Fedoruk, stated that the town had been liberated from Russian troops.

Fedoruk said this in his video address posted on Facebook, Ukrinform reports.

"March 31 will go down in the history of our Bucha community as the Day of Liberation. ..."

Apr 1/2 - Azov Nazis enter Bucha

Scenes of desperation and death as the Russians retreat from suburbs outside Kyiv. - New York Times

Ukrainian soldiers from the Azov battalion walked through the remnants of a Russian military convoy in the recently liberated town of Bucha on Saturday, just outside the capital after the Russians withdrew.

Apr 3 - Ukr MinDef publishes video of 'Russian' atrocities

Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine. - New York Times, Apr 3

Footage posted by Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and photographs from news agencies showed the bodies of men in civilian clothes on the streets of Bucha, a town northwest of Kyiv. Images showed some corpses with hands bound behind their back.

A screenshot of the original NYT piece was attached to my tweet. It included the sentence:

The New York Times was unable to independently verify the assertions by Ukraine's Defense Ministry and other officials.

The above tweet went viral with more than 3,000 retweets and nearly 5,000 likes. People obviously recognize the importance of the above timeline for the question of who killed whom, when and how.

Gonzalo Lira, who is in Karkiv, has previously directed a professionally made movie. In this video he asserts that the main 'Russian' atrocity video, which shows cars driving down a street strewn with dead bodies, is of a professional high production quality that can only be achieved with high end equipment. He also remarks on additional evidence from the scenes that points to a false flag operation.

Lira comes to the conclusion that the Azov Nazis have killed some people in Bucha that had been too friendly with the Russian 'occupiers' and are now blaming Russia for it.

Azov gangs are known for such atrocities. Based on the above timeline I concur with Lira's conclusion.

[roppiepop]

Fandom discourses are inherently messy bcs it concerns how ppl interpret text and media, but i feel like when it concerns mainstream cape comics character accuracy, at the base of it, you can’t really win.

Theres a conversation to be had about mcu adaptations and the motives of streamlining characters to fit ur multibillion dollar franchise under the evil mouse corporation, fucking over the aspects of representation they try to sell to you then having these mangled versions end up being the defining incarnation to the general public.

But for my purposes this is mainly concerning dc.

The nature of the serialization for these comics being a collaborative effort of ever-changing writers in an ever-expanding universe mean that for the most part, every decision made would disservice at least one character, and consequently piss someone off.

Having books where most of its supporting characters are fully developed with their own runs seem to be a double-edged sword where there should be plenty of material to draw from and build plots around, but only under the assumption that the writers read the comics of the characters they write about.

And then in the events that a character long neglected gets brought back and remolded to be a tag-a-long in someone else’s series, or a reboot nerfs a character real bad, with whatever trickle-down effect it causes, if said characterization ends up being adopted in canon longer than their original incarnation,

At what point does that first personality become the one actually considered ooc? How much consistent appearance of what you consider ‘bad writing’ has to be there before u have to accept that making them not be like that is the deviation?

Current decisions in dc of soft reboots and having all their characters remember what happened pre-new52, but not erasing the aspects readers hated from said reboot, and not at all exploring how that knowledge would affect the characters, coupled with how they dont seem to keep track of character developments in other books, make trying to keep up with continuity itself feel like an exercise in futility.

You might get runs with the intention of repairing damages that might fix characterization issues to a point, but also feels like a regression of all the development they should’ve had.

Depending on your comic entry point, your blorbo, and what aspects of said blorbo you connect with, how you interact and which canons you adopt would be wildy varied, and like, you probably wont be wrong for it.

Its also very understandable when regarding characters that have so much history and adaptations people end up going off more accessible and streamlined incarnations, like say, a free webtoon on a big platform or other fanworks.

Is it annoying when larger fanon doesnt fit how you perceive those characters and dynamics? Sure. Are they wrong? Well??? Again, thats free game.

Fandom has always been drawn to exploration and extrapolation, and the way mainstream superhero comics are written dont tend to linger on big character/plot beats. Theres plenty of play room and its easy to headcanon someone one way or another.

Sometimes it can end up creating a more in-depth and nuanced version of a character you’d probably never see in the hand of canon writers, other times they get flattened in all the wrong angles.

But being a fan of mainstream cape comics is so rarely rewarding, the nature of it really is to just pick and choose whatever parts of it brings you the most joy. No one wins in this dnsnsnsns.

That tweet that said ‘the best way to enjoy fandom is to keep it between you and 3 or 4 likeminded friends’ really is the best way to keep u sane in these things.

[madara-fate]

Hi madara, I hope the link I sent you clarified the questions you received about kishimoto and the jump festa. Since I trust your judgement and you give very argumented responses with a reliable source, I hope you can clear my doubts.

So the boruto movie was written by kishimoto like you said and apparently that was one of the firsts (or the first) movies he fully wrote. You also said that the current boruto story follows kishimoto's draft. Can you explain that a bit further? About the draft and when he said that? Did he make an outline of the events happening right now in the manga? That would mean Kishimoto structured the story of the boruto manga but another person is writing it, right? An official tweet from november 2020 said that kodachi was the scriptwriter of the manga to that date. I might not be explaining myself too well, sorry.

I ask this because I saw that the novelization of boruto the movie came out 2 years after the movie was released so I thought that was weird. And also because the boruto movie didn't introduce the karma or whatever is going on in the story right now. I think it was meant to cover gaiden's point about sasuke's mission about the other ootsutsuki's coming to earth like kaguya feared. And studio pierrot ended reanimating the movie and adding the plot they wanted to continue another story.

The thing is, I don't follow any content of boruto because for me the manga ended in 2015 along with gaiden but I respect that the series have been expanded. Anything plot wise doesn't fall into place with me but I just ignore it and move on.

With all this drama about sasuke retsuden coming out, the novels not being canon, the jump festa and blablabla I thought that maybe Kishimoto is actually not interested in boruto. It gives me the feeling that he doesn't want to be involved with it and just wants naruto to finish once and for all. Also people say he drew a sketch for Bleach but ignored Boruto.

I don't know why Kodachi announced one year ago that Kishimoto would be writing Boruto from chapter 52 and on if that information, for now, is wrong. This is all a bit confusing.

Sorry this ask is a little long but I wanted to give you some context. What do you think of this situation so far? Do you think Kishimoto just resigned? Or do you think boruto might be cancelled or something? Have a good day!

Yeah the link you sent helped, thanks. Kishimoto hasn't resigned, Boruto won't be cancelled, and he definitely cares about Boruto. It's still his story, so I don't see why he suddenly wouldn't care about it. I also don't see why people are apparently saying that Kishimoto "ignored" Boruto in favour of Bleach, despite the fact that he's still more involved in Boruto than he is with anything else. Furthermore, SP mostly followed the plot of the Boruto movie from the manga, and the Verses Momoshiki arc in the anime aired two years after the manga chapters from the same arc were published. So SP were just following the plot from the manga version of the movie's events.

I don't want to get into a discussion regarding what's canon and what isn't, but the Boruto manga following Kishimoto's draft was stated by the Naruto franchise's Twitter account, shown below:

But again, I'm not sure what exactly that means, because the thing is, Kodachi himself explicitly said that he was leaving Boruto in the hands of Kishimoto and Ikemoto:

So that, combined with the information of how the story is now following "the original draft of Professor Masashi Kishimoto", and the fact that no other writer for the series is currently being credited, means that I can only reasonably assume that most (if not all) of the current story is still coming from the mind of Kishimoto himself, regardless of whether he has the official Writer position or not, right? Because what else could all of that mean? This way just makes sense.