#LIKE THE PLOT ITSELF I SUPPOSE

[completeoveranalysis]

[3]

So, the time loop will immediately leave the narrative once we get inside the building.

I have to say Evil Wolverine REALLY is inefficient with his time magic. If one area is frozen in time but another area is in a constantly repeating timeloop for arbitrary reasons with no other obstacles to keep people from accessing it?

Like why BOTHER Evil Wolverine? 

What was the timeloop even for if you could also just freeze time if you wanted? 

The excess of this man!

Though if anything it is another signifier of the suffering he is happy and willing to put people through for literally NO REASON as long as he gets what he wants eventually. These people lived out the same fraction of a day WHO KNOWS how many times, living a cursed existence that wasn't really living, for... no apparent reason! And yet he was thrilled when he saw Lava Lamp do something he percieved as being the same level of ruthlessness that he applies to every other living organism in existence, as if anyone else has any level of choice at all in the matter.

But I DO love Lava Lamp with his hood up! I don’t think we ever saw this in Syaoran's original outfit! And Hoods + Desert is a nice visual callback to Acid Tokyo, which is exactly when the Lava Lamp/Syaoran plotpoint kicked off in the first place, so it’s a nice little note to tie it all together again here at the end. 

Also that last side panel on the left there? Where we see Lava Lamp’s hand, but the shadow it casts is being distorted by the angle of the building? GREAT imagery. They didn’t NEED to do that, but it’s a fantastic way to bring back all the distorted shadow imagery that haunted Syaoran from the very beginning of the manga - an imagery that in itself was hinting at Lava Lamp, his presence in the plot, and how Syaoran was created as an imperfect and twisted version of who Lava Lamp originally was. And NOW it’s a reminder that Syaoran (who WAS imperfect and out of balance, haunting the plot like Lava Lamp did) is still lurking ahead somewhere in the plotline, and we don’t know how that will resolve just yet. 

Bringing it all back together as subtly as possible!

[poebrey]

in retrospect while Discovery is incredibly plot and drama heavy I really appreciate how well it’s been able to hold onto the technobabble mystery of it all throughout. I know that the burn is widely considered to be a low point for the show but for a low Su’Kal as a stand-alone plot was really good? And s4 brought it back to a season long ethics and science exploration which was nice. It may have made sacrifices to be more serialized but whoever decided that it would do so on a ship focused on experimental science was brilliant because so far it’s been a good balance

[givemewallywestorgivemedeath]

Feeling very violent rn so here's a very controversial opinion:

Everything after season one of Young Justice sucked.

Look, I know I'm obsessed with the show but that doesn't mean it's good, it means that I'm too deep into it at this point to get out. There are good moments within the other seasons but in general? They were not good.

I'm sorry. I understand that they wanted to be creative and have a neat narrative and deep lore and all that. And they do! The narrative and lore is extremely deep.

But the plot? The characters??

Season one was an actual functional show that balanced character development, plot and dialogue with world building, lore and messaging.

The other seasons do not do that.

Season two bounced back and forth between like 16 characters. We got some development for some characters but even that was minimal compared to the character development in S1. And this isn't me complaining that the og group wasn't in S2 enough. That's not my issue. I would've loved to focus on a new group and I think that Jaime, Bart, Ed and Gar would've been super cool to focus on. I loved what character development they did have and I craved more.

But the problem? The problem is when you have 16 fucking characters that you are trying to develop and shove into a coherent plot and have actual meaningful scenes. There just wasn't enough focus on S2. Imo, S2 was meh because the characters got left by the wayside. The plot, dialogue, world building, lore and messaging was fine, there just seemed to be a lack of heart/warmth in the show because of the characters. It's hard to get invested.

Then holy shit. S3 introduced more characters. And the plot got more contrived and 'big picture' to the point that it started to abstract. It felt like nothing mattered. There were no stakes, you were just watching things happen. There was 50 fucking things happening an episode and 80% of it was lore/world building. It felt like I was studying for a fictional history exam.

I'm pretty sure the main character in S3 was earth 16. Just the entire universe. Because goddamn. We checked in on almost every living being and EVERYTHING was a plot point. Most of it wasn't even relevant to anything happening in the season. Man it was.... it was bad.

And at that point it just wasn't enjoyable at all to watch. I probably should've stopped watching but at that point the sunk cost fallacy had already kicked in. I knew it could be good. Maybe it could be good again. And people were constantly praising it as cinematic genius so I was like 'okay well maybe I'm missing the point? Maybe you aren't supposed to enjoy shows? Maybe this is fine?'

But season four broke me.

The creators heard that people were frustrated by the lack of character focus and the episodes following 72 characters and the episodes switching between 50 different subplots every episode and their solution? Their solution was to take allllllll the different unconnected plots and, instead of evenly spreading them throughout the season, jam them all into 'arcs'. So you had a bunch of mini seasons consisting of 3-5 episodes dedicated to a cast of ~5-8 characters (some of them new). And each of these episodes had unconnected a plots, b plots and c plots.

THAT IS NOT A SOLUTION

Holy shit that is not a solution.

Not to mention the overarching plot of the season, in which we had no fucking clue what was happening until the final episodes where everything became a speedrun to wrap everything up. We literally had no idea what the main plot was until it was ending.

Good god it was bad. It's bad writing!

I know people liked it and good for them. You should like what you like and you don't have to justify it. But for me it was insanity. I'm sorry I actually don't want a season long subplot where Beast Boy is depressed and sleeps all day. I would be cool with it if it had anything to do with the larger story but, surprisingly, spending five minutes watching Beast Boy sleep every episode didn't make for compelling storytelling.

I'm still not over how we didn't even know who the main villain was until the end of the season. And then all of a sudden he does a villain monologue to tell everyone his evil plan and his motives. Super cool actually. I love it when I have no idea what the stakes are for the majority of a show. It's incredibly good storytelling when you leave the audience in the dark about a major player in the plot for all of the plot. And then doing an info dump evil monologue in the final episodes to rush through the explanation??? Fucking fantastic and not a sign of terrible pacing at all.

I'm just so frustrated. The show isn't about being a show anymore. The show is an entire cinematic universe shoved into 20 something episodes. It's desperate to tell every single story at once, audience, pacing and good writing be damned.

I'm so tired of the constant praising of Greg. His whole 'i don't write endings because life doesn't have endings' and 'i don't write cliffhangers, I just leave things open ended' thing is pretentious bullshit. I'm tired of pretending it's not. A good story has an ending. Stories are not life! Some of the best shows I've ever watched had planned endings. And oh my god. The cliffhanger thing... that's just semantics my guy. Greg you write cliffhangers. You can insist they aren't but I'm going to call a spade a spade.

It's also.... I'm fine with explaining things, in fact I love it because it's an excuse to talk about the stuff I love, and I have a fairly decent knowledge of comic book lore. So, I could not only understand what was happening in the show but I was also super enthusiastic about explaining it to people. But hey Greg? Hey buddy? If 90% of your audience doesn't know what the fuck is going on and needs to be familiar with super specific obscure comic characters from the 70's then you might have a problem.

I think I realized halfway through s4 that the most enjoyment I got from an episode was when an obscure comic character would cameo in it. But then I realized that a) they generally weren't explained at all and b) 50% of the time they weren't just hanging out in the background and they were vital to the plot. So to understand who the fuck they were and what the fuck was happening you had to be familiar with... well all of DC comics actually.

Anyway this rant is getting long and unhinged and I don't think there's a point so I'm going to cut myself off even though I have so much more to say on the topic. I think my general point is just that I didn't enjoy watching the later seasons and it's chill if you did and we should all respect each other's opinions ✌️

[scopophobia-polaris]

Arn seeing Timie on the street: aw what acute lil guy sure hope he isn't tormented!

Bro absolutely messed up, wanted to be a good boy and help someone because this mirrors shit that happened to him but instead found out that Timie is filled with 10thousand problems and somehow knows Arn to a weird degree withought ever really talking to him and he cant...figure out why..... can you really meet someone in a dream?

And now poor Arnold got a little guy that wants to cling onto him when they're sad

[misterbaritone]

Aquaman 2 is like… Thor Ragnarok crossed with a Step Brothers/Rush Hour fusion spliced with the first Aquaman movie. Could’ve been worse but it could’ve been a lot better too. Solid 7/10. 6/10 on its worst day.

[fatherramiro]

ive got so many thoughts about origin character playthroughs in bg3 as i go into act 3 of my wyll origin run, and while a majority of them are "wyll and lae'zel co protagonists of the game by a large margin" there's also some moments where im like "ooh id have done that differently if i were writing the game"

[bibiana112]

I like this happiness can be found in any world speech putting the focus on the fact that being able to compare between a hypothetical less tragic version of events is in itself what causes unhappiness and dissatisfaction sure for the characters it's literal timeloops but real things like anxiety and ptsd often trick you into losing focus of the good things in the now and to lose yourself in the what could have been

[goatsandgangsters]

the good news is that I finished a book and it got me out of my reading slump where I would start things, not finish, switch to something else, not finish

the bad news is that "yes daddy" by jonathan parks-ramage is one of the worst written books I've read in a whiiiile. bland expositiony prose, flat characters, a bunch of weird plot detours. Written like a 200-page Wikipedia summary instead of an actual book

the worst news is that it has such intensely favorable gushing reviews on goodreads, and the people who hated it mostly hated it for a different reason, and so I'm left alone like oKAY BUT THE PROSE WAS SHIT, HOW DO YOU NOT SEE THIS

[selfcontainedunivcrse]

thinking abou t. my silly axolotl and its silly interpersonal relationships. Seventeen from heathers isn't not cvwoop

[multishipper-baby]

I finally decided to try out character AI and it was honestly such a good decision. Not because of the roleplay aspect, exactly, but to gauge how far AI is when it comes to writing. And I can safely say it's still a while until it can make things on its own.

[harrowharkwife]

i am SO fucking exhausted by mainstream media opinions lately and i don't understand why they're frequently SO different from my own? like i genuinely don't think i am approaching anything from that unique of a perspective as a viewer? maybe it's just that i'm too easy to please when it comes to stories or something but like. how is the mainstream, widely accepted consensus on yellowjackets season 2 is that it's "bad" and "doesn't work as a season" and is "riddled with problems." literally what the fuck are you talking about. this is the most fun i have had watching television uhhhhh literally Ever? you're telling me people hated Burial? how? why? like i don't...i just don't GET it. and i'm not playing dumb for kicks here im like genuinely honest to god confused. that was the single best episode of television I've ever watched in my life. like i get that people have different opinions about things and that's fine but HOW am i in the minority here what am i missing

[widowshill]

bigger spoiler warning than usual on this for character death and also major plot points. but occasionally ds will show me a death scene and i ... feel a little bit like i'm watching something else. you know?

[thelawsofdaylight]

watching the bbc series with my mum has really reaffirmed how weird the pacing is. she's about halfway through the brick so i said cool we can watch the first 3 episodes probably! but it's now the end of episode 4 and we're still not up to where she is in the book!!!!!

[tyrantwombat]

*deep sigh of frustration*

MTL

[kadoodles-on-ao3]

Sickness update: Still coughing, but it's (mostly) dry coughing now, and my headache is gone! But I'm not at 100% back-to-normal mental capacity yet either :(

Writing update: I've been hard at work on my angsty longfic! I was going to work on something lighter (especially with my cold) but all of a sudden more and more ideas to add to my AU kept popping in my head and I just had to jot them down.

Before long I was finally organizing my outline by putting all my previous bullet-point came-to-me-at-random-times-of-the-night-and-put-in-an-equally-random-order concepts into plot-chronological order as they should be, and making headings/sections for the major location changes to find stuff easier, and getting down how exactly series-and-collection-wise I want to go about categorizing the fic and its sequels, and finalizing their titles (which are all names of songs on The Glitch Mob's Drink the Sea album, give it a listen with good headphones if you haven't before, it's great background music!!) and oh yeah I needed to go over the h2hs again better open that doc, and I definitely need to have the game's script and cutscenes on hand for reference as needed (which was very frequently) and now baby I've got a stew going

I'm having so much fun writing characters I haven't gotten to write before, and (minor/vague Xenoblade spoilers) digging into the details of the lore about Face Mechon and expanding on my take of what was happening on the Mechonis before the party got there, and fitting lots of little puzzle pieces that the game gives you but doesn't directly tell you they belong together which is why I love it so much, and getting into such a nice flow state with it all and gjshfhskfh I love Xenoblade 1 so muchhhhhh!!!

So all that is to say I will hopefully be posting the prologue tomorrow or the day after! :) No promises as it's gotten much longer/more-detailed than I planned for (although I really should have expected that, it's always how it goes with me when I'm having fun writing I just can't stop haha) but it is most definitely on the way to being published soon!

[lopez-richter-fangirl]

Guys I fucked up