#It makes their characters look so much blander

[dna-d2]

So I just realized something that’s total bullshit with the post-timeskip character designs in One Piece.

Everyone’s pissed about how everyone got like ten shades lighter, so Toei or whoever goes “Oh well the dark-skinned thing was just a design error that we couldn’t just stop for no reason, so we waited until timeskip to properly fix it”

But I realized that that is BULLSHIT

And that’s because of ROBIN

So pre-timeskip Robin looks like this, right?

She has the kinda darker skin and blue eyes

While post-timeskip Robin looks like this

Still with the blue eyes but now the way lighter skin, like everyone else

Like I said before, this is because APPARENTLY, back in the day, the anime’s designers didn’t know the official color scheme for Robin back when she first appeared, so they made her look the way she did. Apparently that sorta thing just happened a lot. (Like with Vegeta in that one filler episode of DBZ) So they made her lighter skinned with the intention to “fix” their mistake, along with a few other characters, to properly match the manga

Except it still doesn’t match the manga

In the manga, Robin’s eyes

Are brown

Maybe her skin is a little lighter, but she still doesn’t have blue eyes, which Toei deliberately kept for Robin’s post-timeskip design

And there’s even at least one movie where they also use Robin’s original color scheme, Strong World

Where they keep her brown eyes and not QUITE Caucasian skin tone. It’s definitely still lighter, but it doesn’t seem quite as light as post-timeskip

In conclusion, while I can’t say for sure what the motivation was behind this, I can certainly think it pretty loudly, and I think that it WASN’T just to fix their “animation design errors”

So TL;DR is that Toei really just wanted to make a bunch of the characters lighter skinned for WHATEVER reason and tried to use “manga accuracy” as an excuse and that excuse is bullshit

[lettersregardingjeeves]

My Man Jeeves vs. Carry On, Jeeves: A Choice On the Basis of Charm

So as I was having a go at putting the letters together with Mr. Wooster, I realized that the versions of the early New York saga on Standard eBooks, where I sourced the text, were taken from the 1919 collection My Man Jeeves, rather than Carry On, Jeeves - the latter being how I presume the majority of fans read the stories. Naturally, I figured that I really ought to get the most recent public domain versions of the stories, to best represent the current nature of the series. So I had a look at Carry On, Jeeves, curious about the differences therein. And the ones I found were... kind of disappointing.

So, if you haven't read the stories, or just aren't bally interested, then I'll just say that I think the versions present in My Man Jeeves are an awful lot more fun than their rewrites, and am making the executive decision as Woosterian Substack Secretary to use the old instead of the new. For those who are bally interested, I'll chat a bit more under the cut.

All in all, the differences aren't extreme. None of the plot elements have changed, most of the lines haven't changed, and really, if you know one version of the story, you won't have trouble conversing with someone who knows the other. But I find the changes made in the nature of baffling. Some are very tiny changes, but odd nonetheless. Here's Bicky in "Hard-Boiled Egg", talking about why he doesn't want to go in for ranching, in the original My Man Jeeves.

And here's the same passage in Carry On, Jeeves.

Why cut the line about Bicky hating horses because they bite? It gives a more interesting context to why he doesn't want to ranch than the one in Carry On, Jeeves. He doesn't just not want to do the work out of laziness - he's afraid of horses! It's an unexpected and interesting thing for him to say, and it builds a sort of unique speech pattern of short, snappy sentences that fire one after another. It's such a tiny thing that I'm not even sure why it was deemed necessary to cut, unless there were length requirements, but it sands Bicky down a bit.

However, some of the other changes are much more considerable. Take the intro to "The Aunt and the Sluggard" in My Man Jeeves...

...and compare it to the intro in Carry On, Jeeves.

Not even close! What possessed anyone - Wodehouse or editors - to make this sort of cut? On some level I suppose I could understand it if it were purely for the sake of not needing to introduce the character partway through a book, when you'd certainly need to in a magazine, but clearly My Man Jeeves didn't see a problem with having Bertie repeatedly introduce Jeeves this way - and as a reader, neither did I! It's a very charming paragraph full of Bertieisms, and the nervous sort of hesitation upon wishing to call him a friend is even more endearing. Sure, the "guide, philosopher, and friend" quote is later used in the first chapter of 1923's The Inimitable Jeeves, so I can see why Wodehouse and/or editors might have thought the sentiment too repetitive to stick in a collection published afterwards, but the two are subtly different. Here, Bertie is unsure that he can call Jeeves a friend, but in The Inimitable Jeeves below, he says it with surety.

It's especially sweet with the knowledge that My Man Jeeves was published before The Inimitable Jeeves, because that shows this as growth! He's more willing to let himself acknowledge their friendship, and that's a wonderful thing! And even without that linearity, it's just so much weaker of a start. You aren't as drawn in by the significant blander intro as you are by the acquainted birds of poet Johnnies, or the "guide, don't you know" that Bertie relies on at every turn. It's more conversational, engaging, and just plain fun.

But that's not even really the most egregious removal. No, the biggest difference is the excising of the entire intro to "Leave It to Jeeves".

This whole section, which later segues into a sum-up of the events of "Extricating Young Gussie" and a description of New York, is just plain gone in "The Artistic Career of Corky", which this story has been renamed in Carry On, Jeeves. No "Melonsquashville, Tennesee", no horses named Banana Fritter, no Bertie trying to give Jeeves racing tips because he's fond of him. It's peak Bertie silliness, and I remember that I really loved reading it. And yes, again, maybe it was cut just because it follows "Jeeves Takes Charge", which already introduces the character, but I certainly don't see a reason why none of it could be kept - especially since the conceit of the series tends to read as if being told aloud to someone else, and thus it makes sense to repeatedly introduce the character in such a way to new listeners and audiences. Instead, we are given this by way of introduction.

This goes straight into the "Gussie" sum-up and the description of New York, as well as the subsequent description of Corky. All that fun before, reduced to a paltry bit of introductory exposition before the exposition that already happened in the original. Was it cut merely for length? Why else could this possibly have happened? Why remove all that delightful humor and prose in favor of something so much weaker and less interesting? It boggles the mind - boggles it.

In short, I've decided to keep the My Man Jeeves versions of these stories as they are. While some of the changes I saw weren't bad - saying that Rocky's poem went on for "three more verses" got a chuckle out of me, I will say, and the connective tissue with the other stories wasn't bad, either - it was not enough to sacrifice all this. Bertie's narration is always a delight, and I think that delight should be preserved. But if anyone has rebuttals as to why they think the Carry On, Jeeves versions should be used instead, I'd honestly love to hear them!

Thank you for reading!

[ameliarating]

Three episodes in and I'm very much enjoying the AtLA live action on Netflix. I agree with some of the criticism I've seen, though that's mainly critique of shows in general being produced today (not enough time to breathe, no filler episodes, sometimes the lighting is bad and it's hard to see things) and so far Katara is sadly blander as a character.

But other than that, I find it genuinely good at keeping the tone of the original series, including what I was most worried about - making Aang too serious and angry, since a lot of adaptations now shy away from happy-go-lucky characters and emotional expression.

Aang is a delight, Sokka, despite the unfortunate decision to cut the sexism out of his character, is still very much Sokka and has a lot of growth that he's showing. Zuko is a zero-chill ball of conflicting emotions that he only knows how to process as anger. Azula looks fourteen and has a truly chilling scene with her father. Again, Katara is right now a disappointing factor. Her rage isn't showing through. Could change though!

I'm aware that most of the people I know seem to hate this adaptation and I'm not writing this to be contrary or to dismiss what they're getting (or not getting) out of the show. I'm just happy to be enjoying it!

[kendrixtermina]

Another thing where Chibnall fucked up is that unlike previous showrunners, he never really tried to sell us on the companions as important deuteragonists who have cool stories in their own right.

I mean the classics sometimes had the problem that they would come up with cool character concepts but then under-utilize them / not think of anything better to with them than having the villains kidnap them again, but still it was attempted to have them be interesting & contrasting, for example they would follow up a sour snarky character with a cheerful one.

And in the pre-chibnall new series in particular, they've always had distinctive dynamics planned-out arcs. You couldn't swap one new series companion for another & still get the same episode. They were damn near the main characters.

With most of the companions we've had so far you could say what they'll do if you throw them at a given situation:

Donna would stay grounded & look for the common sense solution, Rose would usually comfort someone who's upset & discover crucial info that way, Martha would keep a cool head, start trying to puzzle things out and try to help, Clara would take charge & try to get the situation under control, Amy would just charge into it based on intuition, Rory would remain unfazed, tag along but also point out the danger, Bill would be curious and voice some unusual question or observation...

What do Yaz, Graham, Ryan or Dan do? Mostly just make corny jokes & follow the Doctor around, defaulting to whatever she does... You could swap 90% of their lines with none the wiser cause it exists mostly to prompt exposition while failing to imbue it with meaning & stakes..

They rarely ever act of their own accord, make important, plot-changing decisions or even react much to what happens to them. Nor do they really get one on one scenes with the Doctor or bond emotionally (except Ryan and Graham, sometimes, in the stiffest, corniest way possible), and no just having the characters TELL us they like each other is no substitute.

And if the characters don't seem to care, well, the viewers won't care either.

Even the Yaz having a lesbian crush thing which you'd think would be a really big aspect of her character, was apparently a suggestion by Mandip & Whittaker themselves, which means that Chibs had absolutely no plan for his characters expect just being... there, until it was time for them to go. So little plan he could just throw in a major thing like that. I mean I'm glad he did cause else it would have been ever blander, but still.

You'd think that with a big group of characters you could flesh them out by having them disagree about what to do, play different roles and react in contrasting ways, but that idea never occurred to Chibnall.

Let's compare the introduction of the "fam" to... not even the new series, but the very first serial from the 60s. Some aspects of it seem dated in hindsight, I could've done without the screaming & the Red Indian line, but still all four main characters are distinctly established & make meaningful decisions. The story would not turn out the same without any of them present:

Barbara is introduced as being worried about a student & shown to be responsible & intuitive. She decides that they should check on Susan, and later that they should save the caveman rather than just escape, more or less setting the story in motion.

Ian is introduced as brave, unflappable and inquisitive. He's the one who proposes taking bold action, moving the plot forward, but he is also more calm about it the whole time & continues to do so in a scary unfamiliar situation.

The First Doctor is introduced giving nonsense answers and trying to bullshit his way out of a situation. We see that he is quite cocky & guarded, but also tends to think his way out of situation. While he tends to respond to fear & pressure by bluffing, we see that he is still frightened underneath. (it is when he admits this that we get the first bonding moment between him & Barbara) His contributions to the plot are to take off with the teachers on board (half to avoid being discovered & half cause he's offended they don't believe he had a spaceship), and then later he solves the caveman murder.

Susan is shown to be quite smart, but also very timid, and she describes her time hiding out on earth as the happiest in her life, showing that she would maybe prefer a quieter, more stable life than the one she leads. She's probably the most passive character, seeing as she's the youngest, but since she likes and trusts both the teachers and the Doctor, she's essential to keep the group together until everyone else starts trusting each other.

Note that at no point does anyone say "Ian is brave & unflappable" or "Barbara is responsible & intuitive", rather we are shown, not told.

Now, what are we told about the fam, and just as important, how are we told?

Yaz wants more challenges than her job offers. We are told this because she just states it out loud.

Ryan & Graham don't get along, but Graham would like them to. We know this because Graham explicitly tells us.

Ryan is frustrated because despite ppl's encouragement, his disability presents real limits. We know because he tells us so.

..okay? Kinda unsubtle delivery, but it's a start. All of this could have potential if it's developed more, especially the last thing. You could make interesting characters with these basic points.

But what happens then?

The plot is advanced not by character decisions, but by a bunch of random coincidences: The Doctor just crashes into them, Ryan just happens upon the onion, Yaz just happens to be on duty when he calls etc.

The main characters learn that they've been implanted with bombs... and barely react. Ryan reacts more when his phone is erased for the sake of a "phone obssessed millenial" joke than to learning he's about to die.

Imagine if they had Ryan complain about how he'll die & that is yet another unfair thing in his life, or: Graham chooses at this moment to act protective on Ryan. Or: Yaz tries to keep a cool head & control the situation, maybe having some friction with the Doctor's attempts to do the same but also impressing her. Just gimme any character/emotion, Chris!

Notice how they show Ryan having a youtube channel... and it's the blandest, most generic thing ever. This was THE opportunity to characterize him: What videos does he watch, what videos does he make, does he have a distinct username? No, it's just his name with some numbers. They just wanted the video framing device, so he has a youtube, but they don't think about what it says about him.

Remember for example, how Clara picked 'Oswin' as an username (short for Oswald for the Win), & how this shows that she is confident and a bit vain.

Now imagine if they had Ryan pick something with a relatable downtrodden millenial vibe, or had him reference internet culture. Just anything that characterizes him in any way.

When we get character scenes at all they feel sort of tacked on & removed from the plot, like the plot stops 5 minutes for Ryan & Graham to have a scene, and while the plot is happening everyone becomes a plank of wood walking from location to location.

That's the worst thing to do, especially in sci fi when you have wild fantastic things happening! The plot and the characters should always be connected: The plot is made to challenge the characters, and the characters reactions give the plot weight.

Any time a Dalek showed up in RTD's run, everyone panicked, even the normally level-headed characters - and that's how they sold that these pepperpots are a big deal. Donna being needed to save the universe is designed as a counterpoint to her self-esteem issues. Martha has a problem with prioritizing herself, so the plot throws her in taxing situations untill she realizes that she can't keep doing this.

We care about River meeting the Doctor out of order because she emotes about it. We would care much less about the puddle person if she wasn't Bill's girlfriend trying to keep her promise. We wouldn't care as much about the timecrack if it hadn't eaten Amy's fiancé. As phantastical as the impossible girl thing is, on the character level it has a pretty simple meaning: The Doctor owes clara a debt & wants to thank her but is also suspiciou cause he's jaded from past losses, and we then explore how his character responds to this situation.

In Chibnall's writing, this connection is absent, and so neither the plot nor the characters manage to really land emotionally. So much ppl stopped watching cause it was just bland flavorless & not exciting anymore.

[somekidnamedkai]

So I got potion permit a while ago and have been playing it.

And it just makes me see how spoiled I am with all of my other farming games like Stardew and Story of Seasons

It’s not that its a bad game, it’s just that there’s only a few romanceable characters, one of who is practically as a child. She’s 19 apparently but she looks and acts like the literal child characters.

And then the characters have like no dialogue. They have 9 dialogue pieces total, 3 per friendship stage.

I love it but you can’t make characters with 10 sentences. Some of these are the blandest characters I’ve met. Some of their personal stories and quests are good, like Cassandra’s.

But some just make their characters even more blander.

Idk, it’s a fun game. You’re a chemist and make potions and heal people, and you forage for everything and are restoring the area to its former glory. But if you’re looking for friendships and romance it definitely isn’t something I’d suggest.

Also, you have to grind SO MUCH for everything. And your energy goes down fairly fast, especially at later stages, so it takes a long time. I make jokes that TWST is grind central but this game takes that to an extreme.

You spend more time collecting materials than actually having a story, and not in the way that oh you get a quest and have to grind. You have to grind, get 5 sentences of dialogue then have to grind even more.

It’s like all the collecting you do is the story and the dialogue is a side part. Like how the friendships are.

Also another part I was spoiled with is the actual friendships taking part in the game. Friendship doesn’t do anything in this game except for unlock 3 more sentences of dialogue for the character.

And maybe I’m pointing out all the obvious things that are different from stardew because Stardew is one of my favorite games, BUT I have seen multiple people saying “its like Stardew Valley but better”

Where is the better?? Or the like Stardew Valley? It’s an Indie game with foraging and “romance” but that’s where the similarities end.

There’s not even seasons in the game. Like you’d think if someone says a game is “like” Stardew there’d be seasons, but no.

3/5 stars.

The three stars are for

1. Doctor Strange enemies to lovers. I will bash on the crap ass romance, but I love Matheo, so yeah.

2. I really enjoy being a chemist and making potions

3. From what little story we do actually have, I’m enjoying it. There’s a lot of good lore behind all that grinding.

[audioroleplayconfessions]

I'm sorry to the Redacted fandom but I lost so much respect for Erik as a writer when I saw just how easily he gives in to pressure from his fandom. Him deleting the Frederick/Brighteyes playlist because it was mildly controversial was ridiculous, especially since it left so many plot holes behind. His event stories have zero tension because you already know from the outset that no one will be harmed if they're a popular enough boyfriend roleplay character.

Anything angsty gets watered down because he's afraid of fan backlash, and people will blame this on the fandom. They carry some of the blame, but they're not the ones writing the stories, he is, and it's his fault that he doesn't have the spine to just write what he wants to write instead of constantly bending to their whims. He does so much to please them (despite the fact that they complain anyway) and now all he makes is blander and blander stuff, with his fans still finding reasons to freak the fuck out.

I really can't stand the popular consensus that Erik is one of the best (if not the absolute best) boyfriend ASMR writer. That might have been true like 3 years ago when boyfriend ASMR with actual lore and storylines were a newer concept, but since then he's gotten worse as a writer and other VAs/Writers have surpassed him by miles and people are still out here looking at his mediocrity in amazement.

.

[cleveradjacent]

live action opinions!

tl;dr: sometimes fun, mostly underwhelming

has tone/pacing issues that stem from runtime restrictions, and also from it being setup for the show first and a movie second. it prioritises action + exposition over the character moments that draw you in at the start of the manga, so the film loses a lot of flare and heart.

this could have only been a good adaptation (read: an independently and equally amazing artwork) if it were some weirdo's passion project, just like the source material, if you catch my drift. but as it is, it's not a good story. it's a hasty, toned-down recap of a good story that shines in some places but falls flat in most.

that being said, there are some things i did love. buncha lists under the cut!

things i liked:

SHIRAISHI. he carried it. love him to bits. cheering and yelling every time he's on screen

nikaido too. the makeup, the voice, the mannerisms, everything

sexy well-choreographed action. the sled scene was crazy

tsukishima looks perfectly cast and eminates his signature exhaustion, 10/10

the way they hype ogata up only to show a few minutes of him eating shit in a fight and getting hypothermia and never appearing again

the parallel they added between sugimoto throwing toraji to the ground and then toraji throwing sugimoto to save him. a neat detail. i don't agree with the choice of putting ALL (or any) of sugimoto's backstory here, but at least there's that

things i disliked:

asirpa and sugimoto are too serious - asirpa especially. they also don't spend enough screentime with each other to warrant the bond that the plot insists they have. see start of post

tsurumi. the acting feels off, more erratic and embarassing than threatening. the cool shots of him from the back feel unearned and made for the trailer. and because the movie went for a blander, more serious tone, his canon behavior really sticks out here. what's camp in the manga turns cringe in the movie. rip

to that, asirpa's funny expressions don't translate well into live action. but just because i love them so much, i'm still glad they tried with it

the score was so so forgettable. as a musician who goes insane for movie scores and how much weight they pull i am HEARTBROKEN.

silly stuff that isn't criticism, i just wanna mention it:

someone feed ogata's beard

someone feed tanigaki

sugimoto's hair is top tier

they omitted the pencil wiggle scene. what a crime.

they're all so neat and clean. a friend of mine's said that this makes the whole thing feel like cosplay, and i agree. someone blow some dust over the actors

tsurumi's plastic headplate 😭i swear i'm not one to nitpick budget restrictions but this was the one part i found distracting

that baby bear was so ugly. my ugly cat looks like that sometimes. adorable

i think that's it! so yeah i mostly didn't like it, won't be rewatching it, but i have hopes that the show will get the chance to find its footing and take its time. thanks if you've read this far :)

[jaskierx]

I’m so sorry this is going to be a long one!

I watched season 2 all by myself, without dipping my toes in fandom spaces before I was done. It gets overwhelming, so I only look for fans perception after I’m done watching the whole thing because I don’t want to be swayed in my opinions. Can I say I was a bit shocked by the fan reaction to Izzy?

As someone who was distanced from it, this was my take on him.

I consider myself neutral-positive when it comes to him, I don’t hate him at all but he’s not my fav, and I appreciate him because I’ve always liked the unique energy he brought to the show. He was a fantastic antagonist in season 1, and whilst I like his redemption arc in season 2 as a narrative, I wasn’t 100% sold on it on screen because it felt a little too forced on the writers’ part and frankly felt a little too much like sweeping his past behavior under the rug.

Don’t get me wrong, it made complete sense that Ed’s erratic behavior was more of an immediate concern for the crew, but the lack of acknowledgement from Izzy, after things calmed down, of what he himself did to the crew and to Stede left me a little unsatisfied. He let Ed take the brunt of everything although he played a hand in it. He was aware of how he had facilitated Ed’s spiraling though, which I can appreciate, even if the apology came only at his very last scene. The crew didn’t realize what was happening between Ed and Izzy (Jim saying Izzy was Ed’s friend made me roll my eyes, I get it, but I didn’t like them talking about things they don’t see the whole picture of, but it does illustrate their obliviousness about the situation), and they didn’t know Izzy was pushing Ed’s buttons constantly prior to him snapping. They couldn’t have known at all. I guess Izzy decided to make amends through his actions rather than his words, which is great and commendable (although it felt a little like they glossed over said actions), but the lack of acknowledgment is still there.  

Apart from this main gripe, I still liked his arc this season, he made me laugh, I felt for him at times, and I was bummed that he died. But most of all, I didn’t linger too much on Izzy when watching the season because his presence didn’t feel that big to me. He was nicer, had some great and funny moments but still very much felt like a supporting character popping up here and there.

So, you can imagine how surprised I was when I started seeing so many posts about him, what these were about, and certain things have since then kind of stuck with me.

The one I’ll talk about here is how bizarrely nerfed (as in blander) AND buffed Izzy is in a lot of takes I’ve seen. Like… Izzy is manipulative and twist things around a lot to make himself look better (we’ve seen him do that with Stede so many times). Like when he mentioned Ed cutting his leg off because he said he loved him. I don’t remember those things happening as he told them but go off Izzy. Interesting how Ed pulled the trigger but is considered to have cut Izzy’s leg off himself (when we know Jim and Archie did) but Izzy triggering Ed constantly until he snapped to the point of trying to take his own life multiple times is nothing at all in the mind of some fans, don’t you think?

It’s not a bad thing for Izzy to be manipulative at all, I genuinely think it’s great that he has this trait as a character, but takes after takes willfully ignore that and take his words as face value (but in the same breath ignore when Izzy used the shark metaphor to recognize that he fucked up and deserved to be confronted with just how much he fucked up). It’s such a disservice to Izzy. Let him be manipulative! Stop making him out to be this great guy who does nothing wrong! Is it this much to bear to acknowledge that he does shady things? He’s a pirate! Not a precious angel. That’s one of the best part of his character!

As for the buffing part… I can’t lie, I’m bothered that the show planted the seed that Izzy was the brain behind Blackbeard and taught him everything he knew, especially now that I see fan reactions to it. I don’t think this was what they meant to do at all, but it felt like a way to make Izzy this selfless hero which he never was. I think Stede was trying to butter Izzy up so he would help him, and about Izzy being the brain of the operation, who gives a fuck what Rick thinks? Izzy certainly didn’t take the bait and didn’t give a shit, but some Izzy fans took it very seriously apparently.

If anything, it reeks of racism because in his mind of course a brown man can’t think for himself and needs his white first mate to come up with plans for him. It’s really insulting, and I’m really annoyed when I see that some fans ran with it, rewriting Izzy has this badass pirate when his ego and condescending attitude actually exposed him to be the opposite (being outplayed by Stede in 102, losing the duel on a technicality, but still losing it in 106, being such a terrible captain that he gets mutinied right away in 110). It’s been established very early on that Ed is an amazing sailor and a really competent one at that! His instincts are top notch and he’s a great fighter! I don’t know, this rubs me the wrong way. Seeing his accomplishments brushed aside in favor of making Izzy look better is not it. Let Izzy's ego and rage be an obstacle to his growth!

I don’t know, I feel bad for on-screen Izzy. He’s an interesting character but the way people overinflate his importance in the story and turn him into something he’s not, is sad to see.

I’ll stop there because this ask is way too long already and I’m sorry about that. All this to say, I think the writing on Izzy was a little dissonant in some parts, with some attempts at making him more likeable that were successful, and others that could’ve been less shoehorned. For a supporting character though? I’m happy with what they did with him, just bummed out that his fans don’t really want to see him as he is.

don't apologise for sending long asks. i love getting a lil essay in my askbox have no fear

i agree entirely about s1 izzy vs s2 izzy. in s1 he's a great antagonist. he's in the wrong genre of show, he's incredibly repressed, he gets off on being forcefed his own toe, he has bad middle manager energy, he is the human incarnation of wile e coyote, his entire life goal is to split ed and stede up but he's absolutely incapable of stopping himself from accidentally helping them get together. he fascinates me. terrible person. i hate him. great antagonist

and your perspective as someone who did not spend significant amounts of time reading the worst takes you've ever seen during the hiatus is really interesting! like it confirms stuff that has been brought up before about how for example the season feels incredibly izzy-heavy if you're e.g. me but feels a lot more balanced if you're watching without any kind of fandom-related brainrot.

he's an unreliable narrator. we know this and we've known this from day one. the show makes a point to show us that when he's telling ed that stede didn't want to meet him and he misrepresents what he told stede. and yet the lengths some people in this fandom will go to to insist that everything that comes out of his mouth is gospel. like people just accepting at face value that 'izzy has always managed ed's erratic moods' etc when the only evidence for this is [checks notes] izzy himself making that claim. people will go as far as to handwave and assume that things must have happened off screen in a way that backs up izzy's account.

and your point about how all of izzy's flaws and harmful actions get dialled down while he also gets credit for all of ed's successes is spot on. everything harmful that izzy does is handwaved away as 'oh he was acting in ed's best interests' 'he thought he was doing the right thing' 'it doesn't matter that he threatened ed bc what ed did in response was way worse' etc. and then everything that ed achieves is attributed to izzy having taught him all he knows, having been the brains behind the idea of the blackbeard character. and these are inextricably linked - because in this wild fanon version of the show, izzy is fully responsible for all of blackbeard's intelligence and skill, and he and the crew's ability to earn a living completely relies on ed continuing to be blackbeard, so as long as izzy is supposedly acting with the goal of ed continuing to be blackbeard, he's actually being benevolent and looking out for the crew. even if he's selling them out to the navy. even if he's telling ed that he's better off dead than pining for stede.

btw the way folks go on about the duel in s1e6 is the funniest fucking thing. 'but stede cheated 😤 here's a 20 page essay on why izzy actually won' bestie it's a pirate ship not the supreme court, the winner is whoever the crew decides is the winner. (also stede won based on duel rules so. go off i guess)

but yeah i completely get what you mean. and it's a very common feeling. there are plenty of people who liked canon izzy and really want to be able to enjoy him but that enjoyment gets overshadowed by the amount of shite that comes out of the canyon that completely woobifies him and restructures the entire story to fit around their idea that izzy is the protagonist and a longsuffering victim

anyway. if you agreed with this post please send takes to @canonizzyhours 🌻

[scattered-winter]

yeah i’ll bite what’s ur more correct hoo? 👀

for friends who have not yet read the series this is gonna spoil pretty much ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, everything. heroes of olympus, trials of apollo, etc etc so on and so forth. i am full of Opinions and by god's big green tits i'm gonna make them Heard.

alright listen. I have so much beef with heroes of olympus because like. the things it could've been. I'll list all my grievances first to get it all out of my system before telling you about my more correct version. if you'd like to skip the salt and get to the good bits, scroll down to the bolded text xox

gaea was a weak-ass antagonist with no real motivation outside of "she's trying to destroy humanity because she's evil." arguably, kronos was the same way, which when you look at him from a mythological standpoint it makes sense because his whole thing is trying to overthrow the gods (and really, the same could be argued for gaea; mythologically, she tends to cause some shit on occasion). but kronos had the lesser gods/demigods on his side, which added a fascinating aspect to the conflict in the og series, especially since, in the end, percy realized that they were right. everyone who had fought for kronos had justification for it. the gods used them, abused them, and abandoned them, and they were tired of being tools. and percy realized that, and changed the status quo so it would never happen again.

fast forward to heroes of olympus. gaea and the giants are destroying the world...........because they want to. there were no other arguments. there were no other motivations/antagonists to add a more interesting aspect to it. it was a classic good vs evil conflict with little to no grayness which,,,,isn't a bad thing, but it just wasn't as compelling.

camp jupiter. boyyyyyyyy howdy do i have a ramble for that. it's so insane to me that the camp was defended by kids and teenagers when an entire city full of adult demigods was literally just a short hike away from the camp itself ????? like. I get it was because camp jupiter was meant to be camp half-blood's opposite force or whatever but come on. one could argue that camp half-blood is similar because chiron is training kids to go on quests, but like......that's his mythological role. in the myths, that's what chiron does. and without an established city/safe place other than a summer camp, the greek demigods are child soldiers by necessity, but the roman demigods are child soldiers for literally no reason other than that the plot needs them to be. which ,, i'm not saying that's bad. i'm just saying it's not as good as it could be.

also the 7!!!!!!!! THE 7!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! honestly, I think their whole deal is boiled down to a classic case of TELLING, not showing. we were told all throughout the series that the 7 are all best friends ,, a family, even. we were consistently told that. but there was very little actual instances of this being shown. group interactions were uncommon, and relationship dynamics were limited almost exclusively to romantic relationships or surface-level friendships that were explored only as an opportunity for quips and funny moments, but nothing deeper than that (percy and jason, for example). even the romantic relationship that preceded the series, percabeth, was broken down into a blander, flatter version from before, and both characters suffered for it. piper/jason was also flat and flavorless for most of the series, and frank/hazel is just. a mess. a 13 year old dating a 16 year old is squeamish in any context, and throw leo into the mix to make a weird, unnecessary love triangle, and it's just. even more of a mess. throw in the fact that every single character was motivated purely by romance and romantic relationships, and that every character ended up in a romantic relationship, and well. y'all know I'm aroace, so that's fairly self-explanatory. nothing worse than a piece of media claiming to be found family but focusing only on romance. kill die die die maim tear.

also about the 7, but it seemed to me that.......rick was trying to mimic percy's inner monologue with all of them--the sarcasm, the dark humor, etc. we all fell in love with percy in the og series, and I think he was trying to make us like the new characters in the same way, but in doing so he just made them all mini percys while also sandpapering the real percy. give each member of the 7 a different sense of humor/personality is what I'm saying. come on.

calypso. the only reason she was even in the books was to give leo a love interest, because apparently the single worst thing that can happen to a character is to not have someone to kiss (sarcasm intended). the gods not freeing her from the island just threw literally everything won from the og series out with the trash, and like. we know the gods are just Like That sometimes but look me in the eyes and tell me percy jackson, the boy who had just fought for so long and lost so much to get the gods' heads out of their asses, would just assume they followed through and not even check to make sure that another person wronged by the gods, someone he was very close to, got freed from her prison. that's right, you can't. my percy would never.

in that same vein: caleo. not only was the relationship kinda shaky in the first place because it was only there to give leo someone to kiss, it's also....not very good. calypso spends all her time belittling, talking down to, and sometimes even hitting leo, a character who canonically grew up in an abusive household. idk about y'all but.....an abused character already being thrown into a relationship for no reason, and then having that relationship be abusive?? and portrayed as the height of romance????? not a good vibe. I also really hated how, on top of all that, leo left his found family (canonically the only people who have ever made him feel loved/like he belongs) to go travel the world with calypso. which. another classic instance of familial/platonic relationships always, constantly being on a tier lower than romantic relationships. and y'all know how I feel about that.

the poc characters. I'm not the best resource on this one, since I'm not a poc, but there are plenty of people in minorities who have spoken out on this point, and I urge you to listen to them, because those arguments are all valid ones. (here is a good post that provides a good overview). I also remember seeing a really good post about piper's indigenous heritage as well, but unfortunately it's been lost to the void of tumblr.

aphrodite cabin. rick riordan seems to have this complex where the only female characters he can write about are tomboyish, tough, and badass. which isn't bad, of course, but it becomes a problem when all the more feminine female characters are portrayed exclusively as bullies/wimps. smfh there's more than one type of character in this world, richard

octavian. I get it, I hated him, everyone hated him, but I really can't deny that he had the potential for a compelling story. being manipulated by the oracle spirits into playing right into gaea's hands????? it COULD have been sooooo good, but octavian had hardly any development/focus, and I think him being manipulated only came up once or twice. storywriting equivalent of "he a little confused but he got the spirit."

now, for my more correct version :]

gaea's whole deal is completely different. instead of destroying humanity just because she Can, gaea is destroying the gods because she's furious and grieving her children, the titans. kronos was chopped into pieces and cast into eternal oblivion by the gods and demigods, and the other titans were forced back into subjugation, and gaea, who's been dealing with the gods' shit for thousands of years, has had enough*. so she rallies her other children, the giants, to bring down the gods and western civilization to avenge the millennia of heartbreak and injustice. which, yeah, fair enough. the gods suck and they've done some shitty things.

*this was actually touched on in the books when piper was using her charmspeak on gaea during the final battle. and I don't own physical copies of the books and tried everywhere to find the exact quote but it eluded me so I'll do my best to paraphrase from memory, but piper was sympathizing with all the grief and loss gaea has suffered over the centuries. tartarus banished, kronos defeated twice, etc etc. and I feel like that had potential for gaea's motivations but it was literally only brought up that one time smh

bonus points if there was some nuance to both sides. a few monsters who fight alongside the protagonists because they rely on western civilization just as much as the gods/demigods do, or even some gods or demigods who fight alongside gaea for one reason or another (like octavian, if he had been better developed). something to add some new facets to the conflict, because that was part of what made the conflict against kronos so damn compelling.

the 7 would be a found family FIRST, and a group of individuals w romantic relationships SECOND, if at all. percabeth can stay, as long as it's. actually the percabeth we all know and love, not whatever the fuck we actually had. piper/jason is on thin fucking ice, and only happens with the caveat that both their characterizations are my more correct versions (see below). hazel/frank is NOT a thing. piper, annabeth, and hazel have on-page interactions and friendships, and they have conversations about shared trauma and bonding over their common pasts in abusive households and shit like that, instead of talking about boys every fucking time. there are complex and multifaceted interpersonal relationships within the entire 7, and each friendship/dynamic has a chance to shine.

jason and percy. oughhhhhhhhh I have sooo many thoughts about them. they're character foils. percy had to fight for respect. jason had to fight to be treated normally. they're sons of arguably the most powerful gods of all time. they're opposites in nearly every way, but in the very same breath they're mirror reflections of each other*. I'm all for them being best friends, but the "sharing a braincell" himbo thing they had going on? that was played off purely for humor? hell no. they have a very deep and complicated friendship because they recognize themselves in the other and yet they're so completely different that they're on opposite ends of a spectrum. sure, they can hang out and have fun, but at their core, they have both a deep-seated understanding for each other but their personalities also grate a bit because they're so completely different. maybe there's a sideplot of them learning how to get along/be amicable with each other because they're both very traumatized TEENAGERS with so much pressure and stress to deal with, which, combined with the inherent complications of their relationship already, would make them a powder keg ready to blow. and I'm here for that. *the groundwork for their relationship being "two sides of the same coin" was already laid with hera switching them, and even with some characters stating how similar they were in some ways, but of course it was never expanded on so that's why it's here in the more correct version :]

piper. sooooooooo many complicated feelings about her. at first she was a generic Not Like Other Girls type, which. felt soooo cheap to me and is probably why piper/jason felt so. meh. because they were BOTH very flat and one dimensional at first. but in my more correct version, piper and drew were able to bond over being underestimated/ignored as daughters of aphrodite and as women of color, and I also hold the concept of piper being more feminine soooo close to my chest. I love characters who are so tough and badass who aren't allergic to dresses and makeup. her sexuality is also explored/brought up before she suddenly has a girlfriend.

jason doesn't DIE right when I start to actually LIKE him. smh (I'm sorry but it felt SOOO cheap to me. like it was purely for shock value. killing and biting). I do, however, love the concept trials of apollo introduced of jason being much more relaxed and comfortable with himself both as a greek-leaning demigod and as a kid who no longer had to deal with all the weight and pressure of being a Leader (tm). and jason acting more like a greek demigod vs percy acting more like a roman demigod can be another aspect of them being mirror reflections of each other. as percy begins to pick up more roman traits (because i LOVE to study how trauma/circumstances can change a character), jason starts to pick up more greek traits. it's another facet to their very complicated, very deep relationship with each other.

i ALSO love the concept of jason having a villain arc. he was a mirror to luke in so many ways; child soldier, abandoned by his godly parent, huge responsibilities on his shoulders, etc. I'd even argue jason had it worse than luke since he was a son of jupiter and thus had the constant pressure accompanying that. I think he deserved to go a little apeshit instead of that "high priest of the gods" bullshit

leo started out as my favorite, but as the series progressed, his character development stayed right where it was in the lost hero. I would have loved to see him change and grow as a person; maybe having a sokka-style arc where he grows out of his misogyny and sexism, and also gains some maturity (I liked his jokes, but come ON.) he would also have a different sense of humor, because as I said earlier it felt like rick was trying to make everyone into a mini-percy. I would also have loved to see a character not end up in a romantic relationship, since leo canonically had a lot of complicated feelings about family; it would have been great catharsis for me, someone who also has a lot of complicated feelings about family, to see a character I could relate to be able to find a family all of his own, with people he genuinely cared about and who loved him back.

hazel gets more development in how she was literally from the past. she died. I want more development and focus on that smh!!!!!!! how much is different in the modern age?? how many times does she walk down the street and do a double take because something's so completely different??? how many nightmares does she have about dying???????

frank stays chubby throughout the entire series. he does Not have a sudden glowup where he's No Longer Fat. he also doesn't date a 13 year old godbless

NICO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! nico. first of all, him being gay is built up from day fucking one. maybe not said outright for a while, but it's at least CODED. it's not suddenly flung out of nowhere. for that matter, him being forcibly outed against his will is talked about more!!!!!!!!!!!! yes, jason was probably one of the best people he could have been forcibly outed to, but STILL !!! the trauma of having the choice taken away from you!!! especially for someone like nico, who was 1) raised in the 1940s where being gay was practically a death sentence and 2) sooo slow to trust. I need him to have some focus on that shit because it was fucked!!!!!!

in that same vein, solangelo is sooo much different. will solace gets some characterization in the pjo series to build him up beforehand, and he and nico interact a few times on-page in pjo as well to give their relationship some foundation as opposed to just. throwing them together for no reason. I would've really loved seeing them working together during the battle of manhattan!!! nico canonically has an admiration for will's bravery during the battle, and I would've loved to actually. ya know. see them work together on the page. I also think their dynamic has SOO much more to it than "sunshine bf/goth bf" that everyone+rick have turned them into. one of them is the son of death. one of them is a healer. will's probably lost so many of his friends because he was unable to save them. nico's lost so much of himself. they're soooooooo <333 by the time blood of olympus rolls around, they're already good friends, and almost losing each other in the battle only brings them even closer <3

annabeth and percy are still the same fucking couple/characters that i fell in love with in the og series, not the watered down romance we got

the final battle is much longer with much higher stakes (I want the camps having 24 hour watches while waiting for the enemy to attack again!! I want makeshift hospitals!!!! I want!!!!! a war!!! not a battle!!!!!!!!!)

the greeks are actually. taken seriously. on god. they're a highly competent force of fighters, not a bunch of immature idiots. rick riordan i am biting you (derogatory)

[ahoppingmagician]

More Helluva Boss ranting

Alright so the new episode was blander than porridge.

Blitzo being an annoying fool as usual.

Loona is acting way to immature to Queen Bee (I’ll get to that design soon)  who was treating her relatively nice just making me hate this furrybait pretending to be a character even more

The relationship between Voxter? Voxtel? Voxil? Hunky Hound guy and the queen of gluttony failed world building 101. Hellhounds are lower than imps but apparently it’s fine to smash them but a little red guy no no no.

Oh hey Mille and Moxx- well at least we will see them next episode...wait next is Barbie Wire...so Blitzo’s sibling rivalry again but this time with a girl.

Alright time to get to Kesha’s Fursona, if you got here let me first say that I believe that Viv is talented and that she will probably accomplish more success and that I'm more than overjoyed for her, that being said I'm not going to hold back any punches.

The design is way too much to look at, the yellow fur blends in with the background along with her hair that is completely unnecessary, Why is Beelzebub a fucking fennec fox shape shifter, just here me out...why not make her a fly...like lord of the flies...I know crazy absolute balderdash of a idea hell even a bee like queen bee or BEEzlebub. I’m tired of seeing a skinny character with a big torso. Doesn’t give gluttony at all or even greed. What I'm trying to say is that IT IS A SHIT DESIGN in a shitty show with shitty characters that are also horribly designed in my opinion of course.

With that being said, if you enjoy the characters show, or creator then please don’t let me a stranger on the internet change that, I am generally happy that you found something that I cannot see, as the saying goes another man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

[headspacedad]

the Sea Beast (no spoilers)

Okay, so thank you Netflix for diversity and being willing to throw money at all kinds of strange ideas to see them made.  Kudos for you and that’s why you get my money and Disney+ doesn’t.

So Sea Beast.

I’m going to start off by saying I really enjoyed it.  The world building is super amazing and the design of both the world, the ships and the people is SO far above what I’m used to seeing from CG animation.  These designers went to TOWN on creating their human characters!  There’s amazing diversity in almost every angle of the ship’s crew and you can just tell that every single character on the ship has a whole ass story going on with them that we’re not being told.  There’s a real attention to detail with how people that hunt sea monsters would dress, what their prosthetics would look like, what kinds of varied body builds they’d have.  The first mate alone - phenomenal!   And it caries over into their interactions as well.  There are different personalities all working with the other personalities to keep the ship going and the crew really cares about each other - there’s a scene toward the end where two of them bolt for the Jacob to save him and its automatic and small and beautiful.  Good stuff and you really feel like they’re a family.

Second - oh my WORD!  Someone REALLY did their research and put some thought into how hunting sea monsters would go.  I spent a lot of my summers on Nantucket Island which, once upon a time, had been the whaling capital for the world and there was so much in this movie that just rang true on small detail levels for me.  Hell, they even put in a version of a Nantucket sleigh ride!  But they mixed it up too, because these aren’t whales, they’re city sized monsters of the deep and hunting them would be entirely different in some ways.  The mesh of ‘old’ and ‘new’ ideas for this really was probably my favorite part of the world building.  Just so top notch, someone really put some THOUGHT into this.  Also the touch with the sea gulls was awesome!

As for visual beauty, absolutely.  This movie KNOWS what its doing when it hits you with underwater scenes or monster attacks or overhead visuals.  Its beautiful and often properly ‘horrors of the deep’ terrifying and even, at least once, deeply sadly quiet.  The overhead view of the capital city is dramatic and tells a story all its own.  In fact, there are so many little details in here that tell you there are layers and layers of stories waiting to be discovered.

Which is why I found the actual story a little disappointing.  Don’t get wrong, its not a bad story.  In fact, its a very predictable story and it, for the most part, carries itself along without any real bumps until close to the end.   You know, the second you’re introduced to the precocious child exactly how her story is going to go - and you know, pretty much, how Jacob’s is going to go as well once he gets introduced to the precocious child.  Even the ‘twist’ of the story isn’t really a twist at all if you’re even the slightest bit familiar with children’s movies.  Its a route story that’s set in a very clever new setting and the clever new setting really is the strength of the story and carries it for the most part. 

The sea monsters also felt very - route.  The first two have a lot of promise.  In fact, the very first one we see at the very opening (which I haven’t found a picture of) is the most fascinating and then the quality of the sea monster just seems to go blander and blander as we go.  The main sea monster is so bland that, if it were colored properly for its water environment it would have been entirely unnoticeable.  The amazing detail work on the rendering of the humans and the ship in fact make the main sea monster look even - cheaper?  It’s not a deal breaker but in a world with the kind of detail that puts beads in the first mate’s hair and badges on the main pillar in the captain’s office I was hoping for some serious kid-friendly nightmare fuel for the sea monsters.   There was a crab monster at one point but even then - eh.  I stand by my assessment that the very first sea monster we see is the best.

Still, the story’s a very solid story to me up until the last act.  I’m not a big fan of ‘kid that shakes things up and is right’ but it worked for this and Maisie was pretty cute (and beautifully done - like the animation of her hair was WOW!).  Things got a bit shaky when they introduced the ‘sea witch’ that was a knock off Into the Spiderverse Dr. Ock but I’ve got no complaints about how they built up to her introduction with the crew voicing what a Bad Idea this was even before we got to her island with the kind of delicious foreshadowing I love in stories.  You could really feel the crew bracing up to end up another Flying Dutchman.  And the ‘witch’s’ ‘gift’ really was properly terrifying (and familiar) looking.  Except her price was never collected, even if it was built up to be something terrible.  Yes, in a way what she warned was the price did come true but it wasn’t so much a cause of dealing with her and more a cause of a personality who would have done what they did anyway.  So the ‘cursed crew’ vibes never paid out and while I’m happy for the crew and it wouldn’t have fit in the story, the build up was still there. 

The other villains, the king and queen, were paper thin villains.  Granted that worked out fine for the first two-thirds of the show, you only needed them to be arrogant and greedy.  But one of the main reveals that popped up at the very end really fell flat because - why?  The ‘why’ part was never really answered.  Okay, so Maisie figured something out and brought it to light and everyone went ‘Ooo!’ (and it was probably a good lesson to give kids about paying attention to where their sources of intel are coming from).  But - for all the build up, we never found out why it had been done in the first place.  We can guess but the villains looked as shocked as everyone else and there was no moment of ‘and I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for you pesky kid’. 

Likewise the whole ‘and our heroes lived happily ever after’ ending seemed pretty flat as well.  It probably works great for kids and we did get Maisie and Jacob ending up in their found family so that was nice but - that’s it?  You instigated their huge structural shake up of the system and - that’s it?  Absolutely no hint of all the repercussions the watcher knows have to have happened after that kind of conclusion.  We’re just gonna - sit on a dock and pretend that’s life now?  Huge discoveries were made about the sea monsters and the government and basically the core structure of at least the ocean going part of this world and - nothing?  And that’s not even bringing up the fact that neither Maisie nor Jacob seem the type to be content to just futz the rest of their life away on a dock somewhere.  For a show about ships going out into the deep waters to hunt monsters and honestly a whole mess of really great ‘morals’ the story brought up and pointed out and used to make kids watching it think - the ending just felt - bleh. 

That said - would I recommend watching the show? 

Absolutely!  It’s only two hours long and it is visually beautiful.  The voice-acting is all top notch.  The characters are all interesting.  The story is pretty solid if comfortable most of the way through.  The emotional atmosphere when the movie brings it on is tight and rich.  And the world building is delicious and deserves an adult TV series of short stories set in it or at very least a lot of fanfiction set in that world.  All in all, good ride, great visual depth, decent story, soft ending, delicious world building.  Good way to spend two hours and get all the writing cogs in your head going with ideas.

[cannedbabs]

Maybe headcanons for a Jack Horner x reader, but the reader was the original Little Miss Muffet, and turns out she was bffs with Jack when they younger, and it’s good to know, she’s also very evil too!

I feel like her whole thing is that she has an army of spiders, and she had a huge spider that’s like really big that she can ride on, and it’s the spider from her story, but the spider was the same one as the itsy-bitsy spider- so she calls for Itsy to beat someone’s ass, and you expect a small spider, but then you see a big ass spider that could crush you.

DANG THAT IS SUCH A COOL CONCEPT!!! Idk how y’all are so creative I am absolutely nothing of the sorts 😭😭 if this is an oc btw ABSOLUTELY AMAZING but sorry if I don’t get her in character with some of these!! Jack x Miss Muffet alrighty lets go‼️I also read somewhere that her name is possibly Patience? Thats neat!

(ALSO: so sorry i haven’t been answering these like every day!! Been putting most of my energy into my homework and my fic as of now! Hope thats alright ❤️ but pls still feel free to send me hc requests!)

•Despite being evil, given her rhyme she is very much a scaredy cat? This has been known to Jack since back when, so when reuniting I imagine there’s a whole scooby-doo bit where she jumps into his arms bridal style when she gets scared. Also may or may not be an excuse to be held 😎

•They met/reunited via crime. She probably intersected a deal he was making and there was actually a brawl before either of them noticed who the other was. Jack has Itsy pinned down via something magic and finally is able to get a good look at Muffet and his shoulders stiffen before he starts laughing At the situation (but also still being equally pissed at what she did)

•Gives me very independent woman vibes. She always is the one to get shit done, but Jack just has to put on this fake suave tone and dance his fingers along down her back and she becomes putty in his grasp. He does this to get what he wants, of course (they both pluck each other’s strings and manipulates the other to do what they want)

•Jack is no stranger to arguing, and even though they’ve known each other for a long time Jack still gives her shit. This Absolutely triggers the fight in Itsy, which happens to knock Jack down or even comedically throw him across the room (which scares the shit out of him because no one has been able to do THAT). Lets say only due to that damn spider does she gets what she wants 90% of the time.

•Since they knew each other hes more inclined to be softer with her. If something is genuinely bothering her he is the type to scoff but hold his arm out so she can hug his side.

•They SO bicker about who’s nursery rhyme is better. Jack is so ashamed of his but shes on equal footing in a no magic sense, so he always has to one up her. Though, she always has one point that makes Jack fume. “I got Itsy from my rhyme! What did you get, pies?”

•Jack’s whole nursery rhyme means he has the whole pie theme, so I can imagine Muffet has the worst taste imaginable. Curds and whey? She can’t handle anything too tart, spicy, etc. The blander the better. Jack HATES IT! He offers a slice of pie and its never to her taste. “You said our signature plum pies were… ‘too tart’ for you? What about this one, apple?” “Too cloying!” “Well, what DO you like?!”

This one was a bit challenging doing a much more specific character, but I hope I hit it somewhat close!! And I hope you enjoy these!! ❤️❤️❤️🥺

[mcsm-confessions]

Hot take but MAN I really wished there were more artists or just members in general who did more with the female characters from mcsm, and not just all of them just even a handful would be nice because I’m sorry to say this but aside from like a few of them, I really just do NOT care about the male characters in the slightest and that includes male Jesse (except for yellow suspenders, he’s done nothing wrong) like I’m sorry but even if I were to dissect them under a microscope at the end of the day they’re just, there to me.

But the female cast in the other hand, asides from just hating ONE of them, most of them have SO much potential to be used in stuff like AUs or even Fan Art but for most people to blatantly ignore that is INSANE. I think with my mindset being this way since I am in other fan bases (mostly as an observer) where most fans actually pay attention to the female characters (Genshin, Honkai Star Rail, PreCure, Love Live, Idolmaster, or any media with a large amount of female characters in it) and going here is WHIPLASH LIKE EXCUSE ME?

And to bring up shipping, why is that aside from Jesstra most sapphic ships are blatantly ignored for (I’m sorry to say this) Jesskas, the ship that’s the equivalent of stale bread with a glass of lukewarm tap water, not even filtered and crispy. Like the fandom treats the pairing as the holy grail of “perfect” (by making Lukas blander than saltine crackers because we can’t possibly have his sassiness corrupting the innocent green suspenders Jesse (aka making it actually interesting) oh, no, no, no! Thou shan’t be!) like god forbid y’all see someone Maya and Fem!Jesse, Olivia and Petra, Nell and Emily, Harper and Ellegaard (look I know Harper and Ivor are a thing and love them but Harper x Ellegaard is a thing), hell even het ships like Fem!Jesse x Axel, because it’s not your stale white bread of a ship. Like sorry if my insulting this ship but it’s true and cannot hold back anymore.

But besides that I really wish there was more content of the female characters even if it’s just two others and it doesn’t even have to be serious or canon abiding content! Do silly shit, do shit like idk them at the beach, self insert POV or just in different situations whether it’s just for fun or an AU.

~~~

[hybbat]

🔥 pokemon!

I have... a few...

There's nothing wrong with trubbish and vanillish as concepts, and unlike many pokemon their designs are still very good and cute and just the right balance of concept and design.

Gen 5 had almost nothong but banger pokemon designs and you cannot complain about them "just being replacements for other pokemon" when 1) pokemon has always had regional versions of the same concept, 2) newer games who only put out like 50 pokemon are also making blander clones of older pokemon, 3) regional variants exist and are far and wide a massive mistake, and 4) gen 5s takes on similar concepts were fully fleshed out into their own pokemon with their own place in the story and region and often did the concept and design better than the pokemon they are ecounterpart to.

Too many of the recent pokemon in the last two generations are too simple and just the animal theyre based on with a halfhearted gimmick or type slapped on in a way that usually ruins the design. This includes pokemon i like like wooloo, who is adorable and one of the few gen 8 pokemon I actually like, but it has no excuse for how simple and boring it is when flaafy exists.

Most regional pokemon force concepts onto older pokemon that would have been better as their own pokemon, but its easier to edit an existing pokemon. Most modern pokemon are designed to be easy to model rather than have good designs. There's a reason simple pokemon like diglett and pyukumuku have so many regional variants/similar pokemon and a lot more pokemon have patterns as their detail or simplified design concepts.

Raihan and Piers are some of the ugliest character designs in pokemon history, Marnie's character is nonexistent and her design is cowardly, and Leon is a nothing character with a bad design who has exactly one character trait (no sense of direction) which they go beyond tell dont show and have him actively contradict in his very first major scene (finding you in a foggy forest and guding you out)

The mainline pokemon games haven't become open world. They just became open field, and have less fun gameplay, less interesting locations, and worse visuals for it.

A 3d pokemon game is not inherently bad, even if it absolutely looks and plays better in 2d and 2.5d, and XY proves as much, as its only flaws could have been smoothed out entirely by a third entry the same as DPPt. The problem is the switch from tiling, the artstyle shift to more realistic, and switch to the switch which has done nothing but ruin all the portable consol games forced onto it while also making them more expensive. They problem is less content for your money, the simplification and reliance on nostalgia pandering to retain old fans, the poor modeling incapable of capturing the artstyle, and the refusal to give more time to make a game that requires more time to make due to the 3d. And the problem is the clmplete shift in focus and mindset that came with the onset of 3d games starting with ORAS and new management both in the pokemon company and nintendo.

Most fanmade pokemon games have terrible balancing and think increasing the levels and giving trainers bigger parties will make the game more fun. Imo gen 5 had the best balacing of any pokemon game, even on b2w2's hard mode, and I wish both official and fanmade games would take notes.

Pokemon went downhill when it took away HMs, because it also by extention took away most of its puzzle and exploration gameplay that was important to making grinding and travel fun. HMs had their annoyances, but they had an integral part of the gameplay that pokemon never truly bothered to replace, with the sole exception of ride pokemon in XY and Let's Go.

Pokemon sleep would be amazing and more than any company I trust pokemon to make games that have good intentions, and if it came out 10 years ago I would trust it, but I know it just exists to harvest data and track people.

I've gone on this rant before but rotomdex is the worst thing ever to happen to the emersion of pokemon. I hate having a smartphoen or tablet instead of a pokedex and poketch/pokenav/cute scifi device that could be made into a marletable toy.

Pokemon does not have any right to be a full price game on the switch, let alone package the postgame as DLC they also charge for.

[aquaburst3]

So...season 2 of Shadow and Bone just dropped last month. And because of the new content drop, I've seen a fair amount of video essays on YouTube comparing the Crows to the ones in the original Shadow & Bone novel. The TLDR version for these videos is that the S&B characters tend to be more cliched good/evil archetypes while the SOC characters tend to more morally grey and nuanced, so people are naturally drawn more to the latter and don't care about the former. It makes sense. While I ship Darklina like hell, even I admit that it's just a overdone "chosen one" narrative with black and white morality and there could've been more of a spin on the story to make it more refreshing (like actually making Darklina endgame and Baghra/the monarchy the villain). The Crows are the exact opposite. They're street level crooks, who have to earn their accomplishments instead of relying on powers. While they do some fucked up shit to accomplish their goals, especially in the books, they are still good people and have each other's backs. I feel like same thing applies when comparing a lot of the Disney Princes, especially the old ones, and the NRC characters.

A lot of the older ones aren't interesting characters, only existing to give the heroine a happy ending. While a lot the later ones are great characters, they aren't suitable love interests thanks to either being too cookiecutter nice or just having an unbelievable romance with the lead. The only real believable romances for the princesses are Belle/Adam, Eugene/Rapunzel, Kristoff/Anna and Mulan/Shang if you don't count the squeal movie.

Take Aladdin. He is a fantastic character on his own, but his romance with Jasmine just doesn't work. Because when you take that movie out of context, Aladdin meets Jasmine only once, and decides to change himself just to get into her pants. That sounds like something out of a stalker movie. Instead of earning her hand, he's just rewarded it. He lies to her constantly, and he's never called out for this, even in the sequel media. Let's face it. A relationship like that would never work out in real life.

The NRC characters are a lot more akin to the Crows. None of them are moral paragons. Most of them are fleshed out and interesting characters that are fun to follow. All of them have backstories that give them a lot of potential as characters, even some of the blander ones. Like the Crows, while they do fucked up shit, they are still good people who will do anything for those they love. Plus, these more fucked up actions are called out by the narrative...most of the time. (Looking at you endings of Book 2 and 4.)

Take a look like at it like this. What sounds more interesting love interest to you? A cookie cutter prince that does nothing but slay a dragon with the help of three fae or a powerful dragon prince who everyone fears, but longs for friendship and wants someone to talk to other than his retainers? Probably the latter. While I think Malleus is a bit of a Gary Stu sometimes, especially in the latter arcs, the idea of his character is far more interesting that he blows Philip out of the water.

It's the same with a lot of the other NRC boys. I think Jamil is a much more suitable love interest for Jasmine than Aladdin, since he matches are intelligence and wits and I highly doubt he would ever lie to her about important things. Azul is a much more suitable love interest for Tiana than Naveen thanks to their aligning life goals along with him being a far more compelling character than Eric. While I don't ship this, Vil is a vastly more compelling character than Florian (the prince from Snow White). The list goes on and on.

I think that's also why there's so much self shipping with these boys in the TWST fandom, and I'm still shocked about the lack of content shipping these boys with the princesses—they are just more well rounded characters that are fun to play around with in romance stories. If and when Disney adds romance into their movies again, I hope the love interests are more like the Crows and the TWST boys than the past ones. Because if that's the case, I think they would be amazing.

[truthseekerthedragon]

Thoughts on The Flames of Hope

TW: references to abuse, minor body horror, references to violence, brief reference to drugs

And here… we… go. 

So, the book was dumb. Like, in my opinion, worse than TDG levels of dumb. How is it possible for someone to set a bar that low and then trip on it? Like how? I must know how Tui fumbled writing a climax this badly. Tui, you already set up an arc, the payoff was right there, and you still missed it by around two million miles. Somehow. 

I’ll be analyzing The Flames of Hope from a storytelling or “troper’s” perspective, meaning I’ll be examining the story in terms of plot, characterization, and how well it tells the story it wants to tell. I’ll be looking at how well characters like Luna are written and dissecting why I like or don’t like certain characters or plot points; I won’t judge the story by whether my favorite character died or if a ship I liked worked out, because that would be silly, although expect my personal opinion on things to slip through every once in a while. Expect a lot of sarcasm. 

This has been stewing in my mind for some time, so prepare for a lot of thoughts. Trust me, there is a lot to unpack here. 

If you disagree with anything that I say, I wholeheartedly respect your opinion. These are just my personal thoughts, of course, and you hold the right to like/dislike this book or any of the characters in it. 

There’s a prologue, I think, but it isn’t important. Who was the PoV in it again? 

The story begins with Luna thinking about how she’s some kind of glorious Chosen One and how she wants all the HiveWings to die. Is this supposed to be the good guy? Well, it doesn’t matter, because after the first chapter she will lose all this personality and become blander than cardboard! Tui will, of course, prop up an illusion of a personality by making her think about tapestries a lot. This gimmick will be fun the first couple times it shows up but will wear thin very, very quickly. 

Speaking of illusion of personality, pretty much everyone on the secret stealth team has, uh, lost their character traits. Not counting those who had no personality in the first place, of course (Sky), or lost it earlier in the series (Moon). Seriously, I can’t think of a single personality trait of anyone on this team other than “annoying.”

So Luna thinks about everyone on the team or whatever, to maintain the illusion of personality, and at one point she remarks that Bullfrog, the MudWing, has a personality that’s “buried deep inside” or whatever. This is Tui’s excuse for not giving him an actual personality. Seriously, what does Bullfrog do except be dumb, dull, and think about cows? He’s a walking MudWing stereotype. And Tui, being stoic isn’t the same thing as having no personality. You have to show something beneath the emotionless surface, otherwise the emotionless surface is the personality. 

The team sets off toward Pantala with the magic items they have. Now let’s go off on a tangent and talk about expectations, and I swear this is relevant to the conversation, so stick with me here. 

Before this book came out, fan theories and speculation was wild. Tui had released a few tidbits of information thus far, and we were hungry for more. There was a lot of wild mass guessing about what was going to happen in the book. For instance, there was a lot of talk about the possibility of a cure to the othermind being found, or Monarch being restored to the SilkWing throne, or an “I know you’re in there somewhere” fight between Luna and Blue. Standard fare like that. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a mediocre, tropey writer like Tui T. Sutherland. 

Heck, I even wrote a parody of the story based partially on what I thought was going to happen! You know, the usual fare: Sky does something dumb and gets the entire team captured, Wasp keeps prisoners instead of, you know, killing them, Pineapple and Bullfrog dies to establish how dangerous Pantala is, and a few jokey things like a Batman reference and a Wasp redemption arc. *sigh* And an othermind redemption arc, too. It was supposed to be a joke. *sob*

No one honestly believed there was going to be an othermind redemption arc, and no one thought Wasp would get randomly taken out by a side character. Heck, in my parody—which I wrote to be intentionally bad—Luna confronts Wasp directly! There was the occasional joke about the othermind getting redeemed or secretly being a scavenger, but no one took these ideas seriously because no one expected Tui to pull something like that. 

And… well, Tui did exactly that, thus subverting audience expectations and sacrificing the story for the sake of shock bait, but I’ll explain that in more detail as I go. 

Anyways, back to the story. So the team goes to Pantala. They immediately encounter a HiveWing force before they even reach the main continent, because Tui has to establish how dangerous Pantala is, and—gasp—Moon, who is the most useful member of the team by virtue of being able to read minds and see the future, is captured! Oh noes! Pantala is super dangerous, y’all! Oh, and Qibli and Pineapple get captured too, I guess. And Tsunami.

Also, we see a mind-controlled SilkWing, yada yada oh no everyone’s in danger now! Didn’t we already establish this two books ago? Anyways, the mind-controlled SilkWing uses their spidey-sense—wait, I meant lateral line—wait, I meant antennae—to try and find the invisible protags, but the good guys stay still because that’s totally how “air vibrations” (read: sound) work, so they only grab Moon, Qibli, Pineapple, and Tsunami. That’s actually a lot of dragons.  

Oh noes, we need to save Moon now! Speaking of her, you know what makes me sad other than her personality vanishing after MR? We never see her read the minds of the mind-controlled dragons and remark how blank they are or use them to predict Wasp’s movements. We never see her get a vision of the future about anything. We only see her use her powers, like, twice, and once in an incident that doesn’t make sense when you think about it for two seconds, but we’ll get to that later. 

So Sundew and Lynx decide to go off and rescue Moon—offscreen, of course, because nothing interesting is allowed to happen in this book—and everyone stays invisible. This is gimmicky for a while, but the novelty of it wears off very quickly, and eventually it just comes off as silly. 

The team runs around underground and meet the nonbinary representation character, Axolotl the scavenger! They will only be there to be a cave guide and then will fade into irrelevance, only to reappear in the epilogue where they treat Cricket like a pack animal. Hooray. 

What? I’m not salty about the scavengers gaining relevance in this series at all, or the fact that they ride sentient dragons like they’re horses or something! I’ll probably explain this scavenger nonsense in detail in a later post, and why usually-standard fare like scavengers riding dragons is especially egregious in this series. 

So anyways. Axolotl the nonbinary rep. I was kind of hoping that a) they would get to assert their gender in the story and b) they would get a lot of screen time. We got neither; Wren just heard their pronouns offscreen. Oh well, at least there isn’t an awkward misgendering moment. Oh, and I wanted the nonbinary representation to be a dragon instead of a hairless monkey, but we can’t have everything, I suppose! No, I’m not bitter at all! 

Okay. To be fair, I understand the enby rep getting minimal screentime; Tui’s hands were probably tied due to executive mandates. But I digress. 

Tangent: How do Wren and Axo understand each other perfectly even though their societies have been separated for five thousand years? Language drift exists, you know, and given that Tui’s first written work was Shakespeare fanfiction she really should know that. This is like if an English speaker could understand someone speaking Swedish or Dutch, except it’s worse in this case because Pyrrhia and Pantala have been completely isolated from each other, meaning zero loanwords or any of that fun linguistics stuff. The thing with dragons is slightly less egregious, because they’ve been separated for two thousand years and Tsunami describes Willow with a strange accent, but it’s still egregious. This is basically the field of linguistics being set on fire for the sake of plot convenience. And honestly, wouldn’t it be more interesting if dragons struggled to communicate with one another to tell each other things like how dire the situation is? 

Anyways, Luna and co get led to a group of other dragons also hiding underground, where we meet a few characters, like Pokeweed. Pokeweed is consistently described by the narrative as slow and dull, but his dialogue is actually quite snarky. This is a problem Tui has in general; she relies too much on tell instead of show, leading to disconnects like this and Bullfrog supposedly having a personality when he doesn’t. Oh, and she overuses said bookisms and adverbs in dialogue tags, which is another symptom of the tell-not-show disease. 

Luna also meets a bunch of dragonets, because Tui really likes her dragonet characters. I get that she’s a mother of two, but can we not bog down the narrative with useless tiny sidekicks, please? 

One of these dragonets is Dusky the orphan SilkWing from the horrendous Bloodworm Hive, because we need to establish sympathy points for him ASAP! Luna gets attached to him, or something, and later she will do arguably the dumbest action ever undertaken in the series for him. My friends, we call this type of character a plot device. 

Some people on Discord also brought up that Dusky's backstory only seemed to be there to justify the Bloodworm Hive burning, so there's also that, I guess. Ugh. 

Tangent: I’m still angry that Bloodworm Hive’s burning wasn’t addressed at all. Like, the LeafWings probably killed a bunch of HiveWings, and even if no one died—which is unlikely—that’s still a ninth of the HiveWing and SilkWing population displaced plus all material goods in the Hive lost. Why is no one talking about this? I’m pretty sure this qualifies as a war crime and it wasn’t even brought up in this book. I mean, if the HiveWings did something similar to the LeafWings, we’d hear no end of it, but hey, the good guys did it, and that makes it okay! Remember, kids, if you’re fighting for freedom and the oppressed, that gives you the green light to do whatever horrible things you want, because as we all know, the ends always justify the means! Uh, that got a bit racy there. Let’s go back to the book. 

Several chapters go by in which pretty much nothing happens, and then Luna decides to go exploring with Dusky. They come across a mural or something, and Luna thinks about the Scorching and how scavengers took something dragons had or something, according to the myths. 

Okay, time for another tangent. Fans have been begging Tui for information on the Scorching since the beginning of time, so Tui decided to hand it over, apparently. This book felt a lot like fanservice at points, and so did the previous book. There’s nothing wrong with blatant fanservice (see Spider-Man: No Way Home), but in this case it felt like a monkey’s paw situation, where we technically got what we asked for, but in the worst way possible. Here, the fanservice itself was bad and hurt the story overall. I’ll dissect this later. 

Around here Luna meets that random scavenger we saw in the epilogue of the last book… why was she in that epilogue again?… Anyways, this random scavenger we don’t care half an iota about, Raven, appears here and then disappears for the rest of the book. So what was the point of her appearance—wait a second. Why does she have a raven feather in her hair? Doesn’t she spend, like, all her time underground? Speaking of underground, where do the abyss humans get their food? Do they exclusively eat lichens and mushrooms or something? Why is the worldbuilding in this series so broken? 

Oh, right. The thoughts post. Ahem. 

So then Vole runs up and kidnaps Dusky, and Luna is like, “Oh no!” And she runs after them. 

Short tangent: Vole made an appearance earlier in the story, and Luna described him to have a scraggly beard. I must ask… is there a word in draconic for “beard” now? How does Luna know what a beard is when so far she’s only met female scavengers? Why does Luna distinguish a beard on Vole as opposed to, you know, describing him as hairy and scraggly in general? Questions! 

Another short tangent placed here because I don’t know where else to put it: This is a problem pervasive throughout the whole book and the series as a whole, but this book was filled with cheap chapter cliffhangers. You know, like, “The monster turned toward them! Want to know what happened next? Go to the next chapter!” And in the next chapter it turned out to be not a threat. (1) It’s cheap, it’s transparent, it’s annoying, and it’s used as a hook to keep the reader in the book when the plot or characters can’t sustain the reader’s interest. Please stop using them, Tui, or if you have to use them, please make them lead into something interesting. 

Anyways, Vole jumps into the glowing green abyss—which, by the way, is near Lake Scorpion as opposed to the sinkhole that appeared in TLC. Oh, you thought that random hole that appeared in the beginning of the arc had to be a Chekhov’s Gun? Nope! It wasn’t important, which pretty much relegates the sinkhole to a random thing that appeared and amounted to nothing. It wasn’t even set up as a red herring. 

And here… *sigh*

Here Luna does the dumbest thing anyone does in this entire series. 

She YEETs herself after Dusky, plummeting toward certain doom and mind control, to rescue a dragonet she’s only known for a few days. 

Who cares if she gets mind controlled! What will the team do without her? Who cares! And it’s not like she’s guaranteed to get mind controlled since she’s literally entering the lair of the othermind. Nope, she’ll risk everything, the entire world even, to rescue a random dragonet. 

Now to be fair, someone on Discord pointed out that this actually ties into Luna’s character arc of struggling with her bystander status. But it’s pretty telling that I don’t remember any of that character arc stuff, isn’t it? Shouldn’t something as important as the protagonist’s character arc be remembered by the audience? Oh right, Luna doesn’t have a character arc because she has all the personality of a piece of cardboard. You can’t multiply by zero. 

Maybe, just maybe, instead of giving Luna a proper character arc Tui was only paying lip service to it to justify Luna’s monumentally stupid decision. 

Now here’s a point you might bring up: Luna was a hero! Of course she had to save Dusky! 

Uh, no. Luna had no personality to speak of; we never saw her do anything heroic, we just saw her walk around and act stupid for the entire arc. She’s basically a walking plot device that Tui’s using to further the plot. Luna complaining about the treatment of SilkWings even though she grew up in the system and we, the audience, can clearly see SilkWings being discriminated against? She’s just there to explain things to the audience! Her deciding to leave the caves to use her newfound wings even though it was extremely dangerous outside? She did it so she could get attacked by HiveWings! Her deciding to use her silk while being attacked by HiveWings and being unable to stop spinning silk for some reason while she gets blown away like a chump? She did it so she could get whisked off to Pyrrhia and found by Jerboa! 

I’ll bring up a counterexample of someone doing something similar to what Luna did: Peter Parker rescuing the kid in the burning building in Spider-Man 2, and I’m using that film because I’m assuming everyone has seen it, not to mention that it’s brilliant and anyone who says otherwise can zip it. And hey, both Peter (in the Raimi films anyway) and Luna have organic web-shooters and were trying to rescue a kid at huge peril to themselves, so it fits!

At this point Peter has given up his responsibility as Spider-Man after a) being a superhero interfered too much with his normal life and b) he lost his powers. At one point he sees a burning building and, upon hearing that there’s still someone trapped inside, he immediately runs in to rescue the kid at risk of him dying a horrible death, and it’s especially risky since his powers are on the fritz. So why does this work? Because Peter has been previously established to be heroic—it’s part of his backstory of not standing by while something bad happens—not to mention that at this point in the film he’s given up his responsibility as Spider-Man, so to him, he can afford to die. 

Does Luna have either of these points going for her? No. She has zero characterization because she’s a walking plot device, and she’s probably the only non-mind-controlled flamesilk at this point and she’s on the secret stealth team—there’s a prophecy, remember? Talons need to unite? That includes Luna. Ergo, she’s important, and she should know it. 

Short tangent: I am so tired of these either/or prophecies in these arcs. Did this arc need a prophecy, even? The prophecy just undermines tension, because look, the prophecy said the team would succeed if we did this thing! If we need a prophecy, could we make it ambiguous or easily misinterpreted instead? “You need to do X or Y will happen” wears thin after a while. 

But no. Luna YEETs herself after Dusky the plot device even though she really shouldn’t have, and don’t try to pretend it’s anything but Tui using Luna as a puppet for plot reasons. 

So she enters the abyss and gets mind-controlled, because of course, but before that she sees a room… with a scavenger husk and a dragonet husk, but with plants growing out of their heads. Gasp! Body horror! Whatever, I’ve seen way worse on the SCP Foundation. 

And here we get to the point where the book stops trying to make sense, or even form a resemblance of sense. 

Because here, Luna is subjected to three chapters of flashbacks! Hooray! It’s not like that got old in the last book. 

Yes, you heard that right. Flashbacks. And to pre-Scorching times. How does this work? It’s never explained! When I was reading this, I initially thought the flashback took place on Earth because the descriptions were confusing. And in case you were wondering, the flashbacks take place on the good ol’ dragon planet. Which still doesn’t have a name, by the way. 

So in the never-explained flashbacks, we learn that humans used to rule Pyrrhia, but at one point someone named Cottonmouth decided to steal a bunch of dragon eggs to use as weapons of war, which essentially makes this a poor dragon’s Temeraire. As revenge, the dragons flew out and destroyed human civilization. How the dragons defeated the scavengers during the Scorching when previously they’ve been pushed to the fringes of the wilderness by those same scavengers is never explained. Maybe their rage gave them a powerup or something. 

To escape impending death, Cottonmouth and a group of followers set out with a dragon egg, making it to Pantala, finding the breath of evil, somehow connecting it to Cottonmouth’s brain—this is also never explained, by the way—and then Cottonmouth connecting the dragonet from the egg to his brain also. And then they died but their consciousnesses remained alive in the breath of evil. Somehow. 

“Animus scavenger” would’ve made more sense. And it would’ve been less convoluted. 

Short tangent: People keep asking, so I’ll answer: A cottonmouth is a kind of snake, so named for their white mouths. Because in this series, everyone with a snake name has to be evil or at least be very, very nasty. 

It really feels like Tui here was like, “Oh, you don’t like the othermind being a sentient plant? And you want to know what happened during the Scorching? Well, here you go! Might as well kill two birds with one stone!” And we ended up with the othermind being a scavenger and a dragon. Plus a bunch of flashbacks that padded out what was supposed to be, you know, the climax of this arc. Can’t we save this Scorching stuff for a Legends book or that dragon field guide Tui’s working on? 

You see, monkey’s paw. 

After the flashbacks are done, we’re introduced to two new characters, both of whom I absolutely despise: Cottonmouth the scavenger and the proto-LeafWing-RainWing he has with him, then called Lizard, now called Freedom. I’ll be calling her Freedom throughout this even though she’s technically called Lizard until near the end of the book. 

Why do I hate these characters, you might ask? What has Freedom in particular done to earn your seething hatred? 

Cottonmouth is obviously meant to be hated, but I don’t hate him because his character is despicable, I hate him because of how he’s written. He’s obviously meant to be the Worst Big Bad Ever in the series, even worse than someone cool like Scarlet, and Tui keeps trying to tell us how obviously dangerous he is. Look! He controls, like, everyone on Pantala! He’s been around since the Scorching! In fact, he started the Scorching! He’s so bad and dangerous, y’all, fear and hate him! 

Unfortunately, his execution falls flat. He just comes across as a mean old guy with no real character substance, nor does he have villainous panache to make up for it like Scarlet. I don’t know why I should respect this guy, much less fear him. He kind of reminds me of Hush from the Batman comics in this regard: the OMG Most Dangerous Villain Evar who’s just… blah and boring. And also an annoying jerk. Who’s also gimmicky. Look, folks, Cottonmouth is an old guy who’s dead and his consciousness can mind control things, and he started the Scorching! Look, folks, Hush is a doctor dressed up in bandages for no reason who spouts Plato, and he’s Bruce’s childhood friend and he nearly killed Batman the first time they fought! (2)

There is nothing less cool than an author desperately trying to convince you that their character is cool. 

Similarly poor execution afflicted the other character who appeared here, Freedom. She’s obviously meant to be pitied because of her backstory, but she has a terrible personality and it’s hard for me to sympathize with someone like her. She’s abrasive, whiny, selfish, sadistic, and 100% willing to help Cottonmouth, none of which are good character traits. It doesn’t help that she unironically says things like “I BARF at you” and “you bozo,” nor does it help that the narrative is desperately trying to get us to sympathize with her. No one calls her out on her actions; instead, everyone is all, “Oh, poor baby! Cottonmouth abuses you and it’s so sad! Here, have some happy memories!”

And this is coming from the person who sympathized with Winter on account of his abusive family backstory, even though he was a jerk—albeit one who was fundamentally good. Cricket, too, even though she had a less nuanced personality than I normally prefer. I sympathize with characters with abusive parents at the drop of a hat, so you have to be impressively nasty or badly written for me to hate you with a backstory like that. 

Now, if Freedom had been instead been written as a terrified dragonet, horrifically traumatized from millennia of abuse from Cottonmouth, afraid to speak most of the time but willing to help Luna out of the goodness of her heart, that would give her way more sympathy points than someone who only helps Luna because it will give her memories and enjoys puppeting dragons. 

Hmm, let’s do another comparison. Take Anfang the gryphon from The Gryphon Generation, a self-published series that by all evidence has been read by a total of, like, three people, myself included. This will require a bit more context. Anfang is a nasty character. He toys with his murder victims, he eats people, and yet he still comes off as sympathetic due to a combination of factors: he was a lot nicer before the military experimented on him as shown in flashbacks and Thyra’s thoughts; his horrific crimes, horrific appearance, and lack of societal knowledge make wider society reject him, with Thyra being the only individual who still thinks there’s good in him, and even that can get dubious; Anfang wants to be accepted by Thyra and actually tries to be a better individual, which feeds into his character arc; there’s also the fact that pretty much everyone calls him out on his terrible actions. It helps that he has a nuanced and interesting personality, with differing perspectives on things like love and religion allowing him to foil off characters like Thyra, the protagonist, and Matthew, the big bad. 

Both characters have been taught that humans/dragons/whatever are fundamentally selfish and horrible, they’re both controlled by nasty bad guys, and they’re both sadistic, but Anfang isn’t a Karma Houdini—he faces actual consequences for his actions, such as rejection by characters who otherwise might have given him a chance. Freedom, though, is, and no matter what she does, she will be given a free Authorial Get out of Jail Free card, because she’s supposed to be sympathetic, look at the babey! Hey, I think I found the biggest reason why I dislike Freedom so much. (3)

Oh, and how many people expected the othermind to be a scavenger? No one. There were jokes, sure, but no one expected a scavenger othermind for real; again, Tui is pulling twists from thin air because it’ll surprise the audience and subvert expectations. Because what we clearly needed after a plant was revealed to be the twist villain was a second twist villain where we learn that the big bad is actually a scavenger! How thrilling! It’s not like this is gimmicky or cheap or anything. Heck, even Disney dropped the twist villain thing after a while because it was getting old. 

Is it possible to write a good villain twist? Yes. Pretty much every Brandon Sanderson story has a twist villain in it. However, these are good twists, and always feel like an extension of the story, where the twist makes sense in hindsight and doesn’t feel gimmicky. Unfortunately, Tui does not have Brandon’s skill in executing plot twists, so her villain twists feel shallow and flat. 

Anyways, back to whatever the heck the plot in this book is. Luna, Cottonmouth, and Freedom are chilling in a “mindspace,” which also makes zero sense. Where did it come from? How does it work? Very good questions that Tui will never answer, because details are for suckers. Anyways, using the mindspace, the group telepathically views a scene where Wasp tries to get Pineapple and Qibli to get mind controlled by her or something. Where’s Moon, you may ask? She got busted out earlier by Lynx and Sundew in a daring infiltration scheme that happened entirely offscreen. We will never see this scene, by the way. Nor will we hear a recounting of this story by any of the participants. Instead, we get to listen to Freedom whine, because that’s way more interesting than a retrieval mission! 

Short tangent: Why does Wasp always want to mind control dragons and leave them alive for them to be rescued instead of just killing them immediately? Sure, she likes mind control, but she literally has thousands of dragons. She doesn’t need two more drones or puppets or whatever. Oh right, I forgot, she’s a villain in the Wings of Fire series, where intelligence isn’t required for villainy. 

At least Malachite is in this scene. He wasn’t forgotten or anything, so kudos to Tui for remembering that he exists. 

So Qibli and Pineapple attack Wasp. Oh, right, Tsunami was in this too, I forgot. There’s a fight scene here, except it isn’t very exciting because Luna, the protagonist in her own book, is relegated to a passive bystander while she watches Pineapple defeat Wasp with magical death spit. 

Yes. Pineapple, the random side character who was introduced in the last book, was the one who defeated Wasp. Not Luna, who is the protagonist, nor any of the other third arc protags. Pineapple. The random side character. Defeated Wasp. 

*sigh*

Again, this is Tui trying to surprise the audience for the sake of a surprise, because who cares about things like payoff? Basic narrative structure is for suckers. It’s not like this undermines the story or anything. And as we all know, The Last Jedi and the eighth season of Game of Thrones are beloved for being pure shock bait! 

Oh right, the rainbow blood. For some reason, Wasp has green blood in this scene, and Tsunami’s blood is blue. I have zero idea why Tui made this decision, and it’s even more inexplicable that the editor and beta readers failed to catch this, but whatever. Fandom made a big deal out of it, but I have much bigger problems in this book to dissect, so I don’t really care. It was a mistake on Tui’s part, no one has not-red blood except for IceWings, move on. 

Short tangent: By the way, Malachite gets his face set on fire in this scene. But the next time we see him, he’s perfectly alright. Tui does realize that getting your face set on fire is potentially lethal, right? At the very least he should have second-degree burns, which are extremely painful, and facial burns need emergency medical treatment immediately to prevent infection as well as prevent or mitigate a potentially deadly inflammatory response. At the very least Malachite should have some facial scarring and/or be seriously traumatized from the experience. But he’s fine, don’t worry about him! 

So anyways, Wasp is defeated by a side character, and Luna wants Freedom to help her friends, but Freedom is selfish so Luna has to trade her memories. The friends escape, but Cottonmouth says he has already infected someone on the team… it’s obviously Pineapple, because Tui displays blatant favoritism towards characters who used to be protags, especially Qibli, and it would be especially undignified for him to get mind controlled! Her boi is too smart for that to happen to him! It would be similarly undignified for this to happen to Tsunami, so by process of elimination the mind-controlled dragon is Pineapple. 

After that we see Cottonmouth superimpose himself over Pineapple’s body while he’s flying, which kind of reminds me of that Spider-Man: No Way Home meme. It makes me smile. Seriously, it does. 

Now, where was I? Oh, right. It’s pretty clear at this point that Freedom is going to be redeemed, otherwise Luna will be stuck in the abyss forever, and there’s no way Tui’s going to let that happen. I wasn’t looking forward to the redemption arc then and I still hate it now. 

So Freedom demands Luna to give her her memories. Oh, right, Dusky was in this too, and she wants his memories as well. So they give her their memories, she sees them, and whines about how boring they are because instead of fighting, she sees… gasp… friendship and family! And Luna starts thinking about how she can manipulate this five-thousand-year-old dragonet into helping them. 

Is anyone getting a feeling of deja vu? 

Because this is a retread of Snowfall’s character arc in the last book. 

A whiny dragonet with immense power and sorely lacking in compassion is shown a series of flashbacks, memories, visions, whatever by a plot point outside her control. This causes the character to reconsider her compassion level and perspective on life and becomes better, or something, and does something that says she’s good now. 

It’s almost the exact same thing as the last book. The exact same thing, because… I dunno, because Tui liked what she did with Snowfall and wanted to repeat what she did? Did she consider TDG her best book before TFoH came out, even though it was her worst Wings of Fire book by far at that point? What was Tui thinking here? 

Short tangent: Around this time we see a bunch of trees near Lake Scorpion or something like that, meaning Wasp was either too lazy to do her job properly or was a liar. 

Oh, and Moon appears in the mindspace, even though she isn’t mind-controlled. This is explained by the fact that she can read minds, but… she listens to dragons’ thoughts, she can’t project them or anything. She’s like a mind radio (does anyone still use radios?); she can pick up transmissions, but can’t broadcast them herself. 

But, you may ask, what about in MR when Moon and Darkstalker talked to each other? 

Darkstalker was a highly trained mind reader; he was likely taught a method to amplify his thoughts so Moon could hear them more clearly. He can’t project thoughts, and neither can Moon; they were two mind readers conversing with one another by reading each other’s minds. In fact, according to Tui, only a NightWing telepath hatched under a blood moon can project thoughts. 

In other words, Tui forgot her own rules about mind reading. All for the sake of plot convenience, because poor babey needs memories because she’s so sad y’all, pity her! 

So everyone shares happy memories with Freedom, because there’s nothing sweeter than manipulating an ancient dragonet into helping you while not giving her the full picture of what dragonkind is like, because dragons can’t be vicious at all. Aww! Did Tui and I even grow up on the same planet? 

As if the “you’re more than your parents” thing in previous books wasn’t bad enough. Subtle, my a—I mean, uh, subtle, my bucket of worms. Right. Hmm, we’ll shelf the theme discussion for now and talk about it later. 

Moon uses her mind reading powers to find out that Pineapple is mind-controlled. Everyone freaks out, Pineapple gets frostbreath to the shoulder, something something. At least the end is near, y’all. 

Short tangent: I needn’t mention how the frostbreath to the shoulder is possibly deadly, due to the large amount of important blood vessels, nerves, and muscles in the shoulders, and should’ve incapacitated Pineapple, right? But he’s fine! It’s like nothing happened to him at all! He can still move and fight. It’s like no one can get hurt in this book or something. 

Oh, and Freedom gets “redeemed” sometime in this horrendous mess of a plot, because she’s nice now! She thinks all dragons are wonderful and warmhearted. How she missed all Luna and Dusky’s memories of HiveWing oppression is beyond me. How does the memory sharing thing work, anyway? Who cares! Explanations are for losers. (4)

There’s some problems here. 

So first, the redemption happened way too quickly. It happened in what, a day? Does Tui expect me to believe that a dragonet who has lived with a certain mindset for thousands of years will just change said mindset in a single day or two because she saw some warm fuzzy memories? I know Tui is the queen of unrealistically quick character development, and it’s always egregious, (5) but it’s the worst here. 

Freedom’s actions here are also deeply out of character. She has been selfish for thousands of years; having her suddenly decide to help Luna is deeply out of character and just doesn’t make sense. 

Oh look, more examples to contrast this book with! I’ll go back to works everyone’s heard of. Take Anakin Skywalker, for instance, particularly his portrayal in the Clone Wars TV show (the 2008 one, although I’d recommend everyone watch the 2003 miniseries as well). He has a key character trait demonstrated again and again throughout the show: he will sacrifice a lot of things, put himself at risk, and go against orders to save those he loves, like Ahsoka and Obi-Wan. The show highlighted this trait a lot better than the prequel films did, and makes Darth Vader’s sacrifice in Return of the Jedi retroactively better, because fundamentally Anakin never acts out of character; it’s just that the circumstances under which he acts changes. He’ll kill a spy/saboteur to save Obi-Wan and a ship full of politicians, he’ll kill a bunch of kids to save Padme… eugh… and he’ll kill Palpatine to save his son Luke. 

I’ll use another example from Spider-Man 2 because I feel like it; you’ll just have to deal with it. Early in the film, Otto Octavius tells Peter that intelligence is a gift, not a privilege, and that he should use it for the good of mankind, establishing that he likes science but prioritizes helping humans. He tries to build a fusion reactor specifically to help humans obtain a source of cheap energy. However, after the reactor experiment goes awry and the tentacles fuse to his spine, the tentacles’ AI start whispering into his brain like tiny metal psychic raptors, influencing him to become a supervillain with no regard for human life; he decides to recreate the failed fusion experiment despite the very real possibility of the reactor going wrong again, this time wiping out a good chunk of NYC. 

During the climax, Peter even has to reteach Ock that "intelligence is a gift" lesson from earlier in the film. Ock then demands the tentacles to listen to him, and the metal raptors—I mean tentacle arms—cower and stop influencing him, very clearly demonstrating that Otto could've stopped listening to the tentacles at any time. While events such as the failed fusion project and his wife's death did make him more suscetible to the AI, he still chose to listen and do what the raptor arms said. After that, Otto opts to destroy the out-of-control fusion reactor by dragging it into the river, sacrificing himself in the process and preventing NYC from being destroyed by a miniature sunball. In other words, his "help mankind" nature kicked in, and he did what he had to do. 

Why did I use these two examples? Because they’re both examples of the “redemption equals death” trope and their heel-face turn itself occurs at the climax of the story, which is also Freedom's whole deal. I was going to use Zuko as an example of how to do a redemption arc, but didn’t because a) he doesn't fulfill either of the above criteria, making him less relevant to this conversation and b) don’t get me wrong, I love Zuko, but there are roughly two million thinkpieces about what makes him so awesome, making anything I say very redundant, and if you want to compare him to Freedom it wouldn’t be hard to dig up one of those thinkpieces. But I digress. 

Is Freedom like either of these characters, where her redemption results from a natural extension of her character? No. She’s been selfish for five thousand years, but will suddenly become selfless because the book demands that you feel bad for her right now!

Some people will argue that Freedom changing her mind makes sense because she’s been exposed to new information, but in my experience, people do not change their minds easily; a conspiracy theorist would rather continue believing a lie than admit they were wrong, even when faced with all evidence to the contrary. A shift in mindset, such as Vin in Mistborn slowly learning to trust and open up to others, only works if it occurs over the course of months or even years. Tui does not do that here. 

Also, this redemption wasn’t earned. Characters have to actively work toward their own redemption—they have to strive to be better people. They have to realize what they did was wrong, atone for it, and work to be better, making up for their past decisions. Freedom, though, just suddenly decides to be better because warm fuzzy memories. She doesn’t apologize, much less atone, for thousands of years’ worth of mind controlling who knows how many dragons, because all that happened offscreen and no one cares about those dragons anyway. She doesn’t have to work for her redemption, either; she’s handed the warm fuzzy memories on a silver platter, and she has zero self-doubts or internal struggles. She doesn’t have to work for anything, because look at the babey, isn’t she cute! If you don’t feel bad for her, you are a heartless monster and therefore all your criticisms are invalid! 

Take the previous redemption examples I brought up. Anakin had to choose between ol' Palps and his son, and Otto had to fight the AI. There were, you know, actual hurdles to overcome in these moments. 

And here's another thing. Notice how Anakin brought down the Empire he had helped found, and Otto dismantled the fusion reactor he had built? They were atoning for actions they had directly taken, a sort of 1:1 "I did this bad thing, now I'll fix it" scenario. Freedom, though? She shows how to destroy the othermind, even though the othermind's establishment wasn't her fault; it was all Cottonmouth, that dastardly, evil, mustache-twirling goateed villain. She's atoning for something she didn't do! Tui was so desperate to show how amazing and innocent her super speshul babey was that she forgot to give her something to atone for, and the atonement process is important in a redemption arc. Well, I guess her jerk behavior could be atoned for. That should've been what Freedom did. 

You could argue that her atonement came in the form of her willingness to die to save the continent, and that’s a valid interpretation, but I personally think death isn’t as big of a deal for immortals compared to regular mortal people, because they’ve been around for so long and suffered so much that they usually see death as a kind of reprieve; in fact, I'm pretty sure Freedom hated Cottonmouth and wanted to get away from him as fast as possible, and was tired of her life. And I’m usually lenient toward the “redemption equals death” trope, because I see death as the ultimate atonement of sorts, but only for people who are actually scared of death and see it as a bad thing, especially so if resurrection or a fakeout death isn’t a viable option. Not to mention that a bad immortal did a lot more bad things than a bad mortal by sheer virtue of being around for way longer. But I digress. 

And here’s another thing. A lot in a story hinges on whether we care about a character or not, one of which is whether we care about their journey and personal growth through the story. We are given zero reasons to care about Freedom, and thus zero reason why we should care about whether she’s redeemed or not. Sure, she has a sob story, but her personality is so loathsome that, by all accounts, everyone should hate her. Well, I certainly did, but Tui must’ve sacrificed her firstborn son to cast some sinister black magic spell that made most of fandom like Freedom or something. My point is, if a character already starts off horrible and unlikeable without any redeeming qualities, such as Freedom, then the author shouldn’t waste their time trying to “redeem” them, at risk of making the character seem like they were too easily forgiven or they got off too lightly for their crimes or the like. In fact, this is exactly how I think of Freedom, if my earlier thoughts were any indication. 

Okay, back to the story. Freedom tells Luna how to kill the othermind, though it’ll get rid of her and Cottonmouth as well. Somehow Luna manages to escape the mindspace and wiggle toward where the plant is connected to the husks, intending to sever the connection. 

Meanwhile, Cottonmouth has used a bunch of dragons to attack the team, intending to inject them full of breath of evil using a dragon named Carabid. He talks about this fight like he’s a sports commentator or something, except it isn’t any fun because we can’t even see the game—I mean fight. 

So while the main action is somewhere else, Luna decides to sever the vine from the husks with a strand of silk. So to defeat the big bad, the protagonist has to do essentially some garden trimming. 

This… is such a pitiful anticlimax that it puts the other anticlimaxes in this series to shame. I shouldn’t have to explain why this is bad. Shouldn’t there at least have been a large battle between the team and a mind-controlled army, or a confrontation with Wasp, or at least one explosion? Haha, no. Instead the protagonist spends half the book not doing anything except passively watch stuff happen, and in the end it’s Freedom who tells Luna how to defeat the othermind. We can’t have the book be interesting or even at least follow basic narrative structure like having a decent climax! That might lead to people actually liking the book! 

Luna tries to sever the connection between Cottonmouth and Freedom because she doesn’t want Freedom to die, and I actually expected Tui here to have her cake and eat it too. I wouldn’t have put it past her. Surprisingly, though, Freedom actually has to die, because… something about how the breath of evil is semi-sentient or whatever. 

So if the plant is semi-sentient and Cottonmouth was keeping it at bay, then wouldn’t getting rid of Freedom just make the plant problem worse? Or is it only semi-sentient when it’s connected to a mind? How does that work? Even without a mind making the plant semi-sentient, then isn’t it still a parasitic mind-affecting plant, as shown in the flashbacks? Why does getting rid of Freedom fix the problem? How does this make any sense? 

But then, it means Freedom dies, so I’m not complaining much. 

However, since *checks notes* Dusky has skewed priorities and wants to give this dragonet a name instead of, you know, saving the world before something bad happens, everyone’s all, “Oh, you sad poor babey, you need a name other than Lizard!” And she picks… Freedom. 

Why, out of all things, did Tui have to pick a word so closely associated with ‘MURICA!? Because Tui loves ‘MURICA! and wants everyone to know it. It’s not like a childish yet cute name like Destroyer would’ve been good. Nope. Had to be a word that was associated with ‘MURICA! Tui wants to proclaim her ‘MURICAN! patriotism to everyone who might listen; it’s not like this is distracting and puts off all non-Americans and a lot of Americans reading this story. 

Someone argued that Freedom picked this word because she was now free from Cottonmouth and the breath of evil. Fair point, but why didn’t Tui pick one of the numerous synonyms of the word “freedom” that doesn’t remind the reader of ‘MURICA!? You know, such as independence, liberation, or amnesty? Because, again, ‘MURICA! IS! THE BEST! AND TUI WANTS YOU TO KNOW IT!

And then Freedom dies and it’s supposed to be sad, but I didn’t feel a thing except relief this book was nearly over. Gasp! I’m such a heartless monster! 

And now for the ending. There are so many problems with it I don’t even know where to start. Warning, it might get a bit racy here. 

So first, Wasp and her sisters are dealt with offscreen while Luna makes out with Swordtail. What. The. Ffffffffudge. Why why why why why is the bad guy we're first introduced to in this arc and made to be a big deal in the books handled by Sundew offscreen, instead of by the actual protagonist? You know what, I already talked about this when Pineapple defeated Wasp, so I'm not going to repeat myself. You know how bad for the story this is. 

For contrast, I'd like to add that Brandon Sanderson's decoy antagonists, despite not being the big bad, aren't tossed aside like garbage after the true villain reveal. They still have a large impact on the story as a whole and are dealt with accordingly. I'd list examples, but Brandon Sanderson isn't well known in the Wings of Fire fandom, probably because he mainly writes adult fantasy, and I don't want to spoil. (6)

In addition, we're told that all Wasp's sisters except Jewel were locked up in the flamesilk cavern. We were given some lip service to Bloodworm's cruelty, sure, but what about the other sisters? We're never told, much less shown, why these other sisters are terrible. We're just given Tui's word for it. I would've appreciated at least a comment or two about what the other sisters did to warrant a punishment as bad as the one given to Wasp and Bloodworm. 

Anyways, in the epilogue we see a bunch of Pyrrhians coming to Pantala. Uh, why are they coming here other than because the author wanted a nice visual image? Are the Pyrrhians coming because they intend to move here? I mean, from what I've seen throughout the series the Pyrrhians in Possibility and the like live pretty cushy lives, and as for places like the Scorpion Den, if the way Tui thinks about queens is any indication, such places will probably be improved in the near future. So why would Pyrrhians risk their prosperity and happiness to move to a continent they had never seen before? I mean, unless everyone was told that Pantala was like 'Murica, aka the land of opportunity, then it could've made sense, but we never see that. It's just, "Oh, a bunch of Pyrrhians are here now and Luna is making a tapestry, hooray!"

Or maybe they're just tourists and I'm overthinking this, but you probably came here to see me overthink things anyway. 

Sundew's replanting trees on Pantala, meanwhile, using… Pyrrhian trees. Okay, no. Just no. Those trees will either die because the soil composition, climate, etc is different, or those trees will become invasive and harm the growth of native trees by way of stealing resources. The Pyrrhian trees will be bad for the Pantalan wildlife, too: they may have defense mechanisms such as poisonous leaves or thorns that Pantalan animals just aren't accustomed to. All in all, terrible idea. There is a reason why trees planted in, say, the Northwest Coast are native to the region. And since according to this very same book, non-jungle trees are still present on this continent, maybe use the seeds from those? And even if there weren't, Cricket literally found a tree seed on a field trip. Those things are probably everywhere. Why use invasive species? Just… why? 

Short tangent: Cricket's tree turns out to be from the fig family, even though when we were first shown the sapling, it was a conifer. But I digress. 

Luna has the wonderful idea of splitting the SilkWings, HiveWings, and LeafWings into two separate nations, with the SilkWings and LeafWings living in some kind of forest paradise called the LeafSilk Kingdom; the SilkWings, LeafWings, and three good HiveWings in the entire tribe are going to live there. Putting aside the fact that Luna could have, you know, called it anything, this is a terrible, terrible idea. Splitting up the historical oppressors and oppressed isn't going to make things better, it'll just make them worse, because now interactions between the groups will be more limited, allowing more ignorance, and more hatred, to fester. And what about things like the fact that SilkWings made up, like, half the HiveWing empire's work force? I'm not saying that SilkWings should stay at their menial jobs, mind you, although they need a pay raise at the very least. What I'm saying is that the HiveWing economy will collapse if the SilkWings move to a separate country. But who cares! The HiveWings are the bad guys, so we don't care about their livelihoods. 

Also, the HiveWing kingdom and the LeafSilk kingdom will fall into a cycle of warming relations and a violent war. How do I know? Search up India-Pakistan relations. It isn't a perfect 1:1 comparison, but they both involve ethnic groups that hate each other moving to different countries. And you can't say that the HiveWings and LeafSilk kingdom will never have a disputed territory. Luna and friends are carving out a whole new country from an old one, there's bound to be a border dispute. 

The HiveWings, meanwhile, get a new queen! It's Jewel. You know, the dragon who literally has objectified SilkWings in her Hive? The one who throws parties all night instead of taking care of her Hive and probably has terrible crime rates as a result? Yeah, she'll make a good queen, all right. At least they don't call her "Jewel the Illiterate" or something because they think she can't read. 

We're also told that some HiveWings want Wasp back, mind control and all. Gasp! This is obviously Tui trying to make a statement on white privilege (note to self: make a post talking about why the racism metaphors in Wings of Fire are… bad), but let's put that aside for a moment and look at it from the HiveWings' perspective. 

For your entire life, you've been told that LeafWings are terrorists that need to be stopped. You think it's all propaganda and LeafWings are actually extinct, but around this time, a bunch of rebels steal the sacred text of your religion. Wouldn't that be scary? You don't even know why they stole it; for all you know they plan to burn it. Oh, and then it turns out that LeafWings are still alive, and they burn down an entire Hive. Maybe you were from that Hive and barely escaped with your life, losing all your belongings, or maybe you had a friend or loved one who barely escaped or died, or maybe you keep hearing about all the horrible eyewitness accounts of the stampeding panic and thick, choking smoke and the flames as they crept closer and closer. 

As retaliation, Wasp gets everyone and sends them to attack the LeafWings and wipe them out once and for all in a decisive strike. You think this is justified, of course; they hurt the country, and you want them to get what they deserve. There's maybe a battle and it's confusing, but Wasp seems to think she's won, and everything kind of goes back to normal. 

And then a bunch of strange dragons, from tribes you have never seen before, show up out of nowhere and throw Wasp and most of her sisters into prison. They get all the SilkWings to live under a separate government, the LeafWing terrorists return to your country's lands, the lands which Wasp pushed them out of, and now Jewel, whom you've always viewed as the most incompetent of the sisters due to her constant throwing of parties and neglect of crime rates in her Hive, is queen now. And those new dragons? Well, even more of them are coming to your country now. Maybe they're tourists, but maybe they're here to take over your country and subdue you. For all you know, these new dragons collaborated with the LeafWing terrorists and SilkWing traitors to take down your queen, and they probably did, in fact! Maybe they want to carve up your country and take the pieces for themselves! You don't know! 

What I'm saying is that I'm surprised there aren't any HiveWing rebellions or resistance or separatist movements. Oh, and the "good guys" automatically dismiss these HiveWings as "evil," because this is a message about white privilege or something. Why do authors keep putting bad racism allegories into their fantasy books? Please stop. Just… stop. 

So there's all this, not to mention all the things that weren't wrapped up and were seemingly forgotten by Tui. What happened to the flamesilks? Were they freed? I'd assume so, but we're never told what happened to them. How are they doing in actual society? Did Blue make amends with Admiral? What about the underlying and systemic oppression of SilkWings? Is anyone working to dismantle the system while the brand new separate kingdom is being planned? How did the HiveWings react to the arrival of Pyrrhians? Do they see Moonwatcher as the reincarnation of Clearsight? What about the fact that HiveWings learned that everything they were ever taught is propaganda? How are they dealing with the LeafWings returning? Speaking of LeafWings, did the PoisonWings and SapWings ever reconcile? What about the Pantalan refugees who moved to Pyrrhia? How many of them came back, and how many chose to stay and why? How are the queens handling the new scavenger law? Is anyone actually following it? How is Snowfall handling the IceWing nobility now that she destroyed the most important aspect of their culture and traditions? What happened to Pineapple, Bullfrog, and the other Pyrrhians? Did they go back to their continent, or are they staying to help run things in Pantala? Oh, and why is the burning of Bloodworm Hive still not brought up? 

Absolutely none of these questions are answered, because the book was rushed and was probably only half done when Scholastic published it. 

And now, let’s talk themes. They’re not as important to me as plot and character, but they encompass the overall work, so I’ll talk about them here. 

Tui has gone on record saying that the theme of the third arc is empathy vs resistance. To quote an interview, "Arc 3 is about empathy and resistance - Tui wants her dragons to get along and understand each other, but at the same time there’s a point where you have to stop trying to understand the bad guys and just stop them." 

It's a nice theme that allows for some nuance, although I would've preferred more of a gray area. This is clearly the theme, the central message, of the story in the first two books in the arc: how far should you go when fighting a dictatorship? Should we reach out to the citizens or attack them? Accomplish goals or empathize? 

But then the thirteenth book rolls around, and the bad guy is revealed to be a sentient plant this entire time! And if you inhale its smoke, you'll get mind controlled!

Okay. The breath of evil is weed. We get it, Tui, don't do drugs. That's the theme now. Don't do drugs. 

But then we get to this book and we learn that the sentient plant is actually a scavenger, and that scavenger stole a dragon egg once? Is the theme of the story now "don't steal dragon eggs?" 

And thus, the original theme is discarded in favor of drugs, which is discarded in favor of… this. I mean, what? I am so confused. Where did the empathy and resistance stuff go? 

Oh, and the title of the book makes zero sense. Tui was probably mandated by Scholastic to put the word “hope” in the title, but at this point this is just extreme nitpicking, so I'll stop. 

All in all, this book was a complete dumpster fire. It is terrible and I will never reread it, even if I'm offered a million dollars to do so. Okay, then maybe if I’m desperate, but otherwise, no. This was Tui’s worst Wings of Fire book, and she should admit to mistakes made and learn to improve her writing in the future. 

Unfortunately, Tui actively avoids criticism of her books. I understand that criticism can hurt an author’s feelings, but many authors have coping mechanisms to deal with this—Brandon Sanderson, for instance, reads one-star reviews of Terry Pratchett books, since Pratchett’s his favorite author, to remind himself that there will invariably be people who dislike even the best authors. One suggestion I have for Tui would be for her to request her friends or family members to read negative reviews of her books and summarize them to her; this would minimize exposure and reduce the sting of the reviews. 

However, since Tui avoids criticism, she can’t learn to improve her writing. She continues to make the same mistakes: clumsily written characters, telling instead of showing, flailing around with the plot, prioritizing characters she likes over telling a good story. In fact, the second half of the third arc seems to be her worst work: the characters are bland or straight-up unlikeable, she tries too hard to please the fans and sacrifices story as a result, the pacing is a mess, there are too many poorly handled plot twists, and the anticlimax is worse than in the previous arcs. 

And here’s what I’ve concluded from all this: Tui is tired of writing Wings of Fire. 

She’s been writing the series for about a decade now. That is a long time to be writing a single book series without any breaks, and her writing quality near the end has taken a turn for the worse. She’s clearly rushing the books, trying to finish the series so she can move on to other projects. 

And I get it. Writing is hard, and writing something for long periods of time even more so. Tui needs to stop writing the series, even if the fans won’t like it, even if Scholastic won’t like it. She needs to stop, get away from the laptop, and book a trip to the Bahamas or something. Her mental health probably isn’t the best for the aforementioned reasons above, not to mention the death of her pet and longtime companion Sunshine, which occurred while she was writing TDG. 

Tui, I know it’s unlikely that you’ll ever see this. You actively avoid social media and actively avoid fan reviews. However, if you do read these words, I’ll drop the sarcasm and directly tell you this: 

If you need a break, take it. If writing has become tiring for you, stop for a while and work on something else. Learn a new hobby. Dust off an old hobby. Find a TV series to watch. Go for a walk. Find a therapist if you’re still struggling over Sunshine’s death. Wings of Fire isn’t the totality of your existence, and don’t let it be. 

Sincerely, a fan, 

Truthseeker

(1) My brother likes to use a hook in the Warrior Cats book Fire and Ice as a prime example of a bad cliffhanger: “These half-starved WindClan cats were ready to attack.” Turn the page. “Fireheart realized they would follow the warrior code and wouldn’t attack.”

(2) I would use the term Villain Sue here, but the term Mary Sue and its constituents have been so overused that they’ve lost their meaning at this point. 

(3) It doesn’t help that Freedom is mollycoddled by the fandom, and I seem to be the one of five people on the planet who don’t like her. And to me, there are few things more annoying than a character I dislike being widely liked by the fandom for some inexplicable reason. To me, it seems that Freedom is widely liked despite her jerk tendencies and authorial bias toward her due to her backstory and status as a dragonet. If you like her and want to tell me why, feel free to elaborate; I’d genuinely like to know why people like her so much. 

(4) At this point I checked the wiki to clarify some points, and according to the wiki, Freedom has a high, clear voice. In other words, she sounds like Tui! Jeez, no wonder Tui loves her so much. 

(5) Pretty much the only circumstance where I will accept character development occurring over a period of time less than a week is if it occurred in a film, simply due to medium restrictions—plot events in a film can only occur over a short period of time, so by necessity things like character development need to be speedrun. A novel, though, can take its time. 

(6) I'd suggest reading Brandon Sanderson's books yourself if you want to know more, although you should be reading them anyway. They're that good. Don't worry, they're clean but it's adult fantasy so expect a lot of potentially triggering content. Brandon also has a few YA and middle grade books if that's your cup of tea; they tend to be less existentially heavy, with less potential triggers as well.