#Making clone characters is fun

[breakingdownsomebarriers]

Meet one of the first members of Shatter Squad: Bombshell!

If his name didn't already give it away, he is the demolitions expert of his squad. Which is kind of funny, given that he is blue-yellow colorblind and he sucks at remembering which color is which.

He can disarm bombs pretty easily even with his visual impairment. Though, there have been times where he arms one of his bombs for training with his squad but forgets which wire is which because he (for some reason) uses blue and yellow wires to arm it.

Also, when he was first painting his armor, he accidentally painted it the 212st yellow instead of the 501st blue. Rex was over it, Cody was unimpressed, and his squad will never let him live it down.

Personality wise, he's pretty snarky and playful, but he'll quickly drop that to be completely serious when he needs to be. Deadly serious. The switch left his squad speechless the first time they were out in the field.

Text on Screen Reads:

*Attempting to disarm a bomb* "Which wire do I cut?"

"..." *Trying to remember if it was blue or yellow*

[chiliger]

Caught in places a clone shouldn’t be.

(Aurebesh translation: Upper left - “Inhibitor undetected.” Lower right - “ARC : CT-0317 . . . Knows too much. Terminate.”)

[postobjects]

a can of coke and an 8 ball

you know what the reference is don’t lie

Cola Can and 8-Ball From BFB From BFG

[is-that-sand-in-my-waffles]

Me: "Maul is such a deeply tragic character. The circumstances of his life did not allow room for love of any sort. He only knows pain and how to inflict it upon others. His Sisyphean quest for vengeance led to nothing but misery and loss. The only moment of peace he had was as he lay dying in the arms of his enemy."

Also me: "TOP 10 TIMES THIS WEEK MAUL WAS THE GALAXY'S MOST CRINGEFAIL LOSER"

[stars-n-spice]

Silly Squad Wrapped

Since Spotify Wrapped recently came out and it sucked I decided to have a little fun with my OCs and the Bad Batch!

I created some profiles on Canva (my beloved) of what my OCs' Wrapped might look like. They include a little picture I drew of them, their top five artists (aka artists I think they'd listen to and enjoy), their top five songs (which songs from the character playlists I think fit them best), a Spotify code to said playlists, and just a silly little character trope to summarize them!

Jung-Myn's Playlist Viram Cossa's Playlist Khea Nultez's Playlist Tay'kaa Marr's Playlist

In addition, I made a list of the Top Five songs that best fit each Silly Squad pairing and a little drawing of em dancing and being happy because they deserve it!

Hunter x Jung's Playlist Echo x Viram's Playlist Wrecker x Khea's Playlist Crosshair x Tay'kaa's Playlist

Bonus TechPhee!

[benevolenterrancy]

Hii. It's been so long since I've opened Tumblr that I didn't even know you posted MDZS fanart. And let me say, I love it! I originally followed you because of your Cybersix fanart, and I love that now you also draw MDZS. Could you maybe draw Adrian/Cybersix and Lucas making googly eyes at each other? There are not enough Cybersix enjoyers in the world, and even less artists that have watched it. Love youu

adrian and lucas unknowingly fuel a not insignificant part of the school rumour mill

(and tell me about it, i wish more people understood why they should love this series T0T if the comic wasn't absolutely intolerable we'd be unstoppable!!)

[mamawasatesttube]

psa again because i saw someone being wrong on the internet again. kon was originally not created in any way shape or form by lex luthor!!! this was a retcon. his original form was a fully human clone of some random dude (specifically a cadmus scientist) named paul westfield, who was then genetically engineered and modified to be as similar to superman as possible, using the ttk metagene to emulate superman's powers; later iterations simplified him into an actual clone of superman, fully kryptonian with a small amount of stabilizing human dna, still with the ttk metagene.

then geoff johns came along and went "hey! what if i throw out all of this and also all of his existing characterization to turn him into my own superboy oc who's half luthor?". this is unfortunately the most famous iteration of kon because geoff keeps shoving his version everywhere, but it is Not the original. it is not inaccurate for people to call kon a clone of clark; this is canon in [later] superboy 1994.

[cryptocism]

I love the comic book writing sensibility that Frequency has, like how Three and Five's ending is great for the story being told but if it were a published comic it would still leave them on the table for if a future writer wanted to use them.

whats funny is that despite doing my best to keep in line with dc comics/comic writing sensibilities throughout the fic (staying as comics-accurate as possible in terms of continuity/tone/characterization/story elements etc) that particular comic writing reality was one that was like. kind of a genuine anxiety that i didn't know i had until i started writing this thing.

ive said before that in the original concept for Frequency all of the clones (besides Thad) were going to end up dead. whether it was via killing each other or unintentionally being the instrument of their own demise (disney villain style). obviously it changed because creating an entire narrative about this one character's redemption arc and then not allowing any of the other villains to have a shot at redemption felt hypocritical and like. mean. not to mention antithetical to the whole ethos of the story.

but the reason why killing off all the other clones was my first instinct is partially because i had this kinda subconscious recoil to the idea that any of them would actually continue on after the story was over.

like, because i was trying to stick to canon so much, while figuring out the story a thought came up a couple times that basically went like, "okay, well, if this was a real comic, then...". and inevitably i had a realization that if this WAS a real comic, my original clone characters would be canonized, and therefore available to any future writer who wanted to yank them out of their respective endgames and inject them into other stories. which i Did Not Like the Idea Of.

classic "making up a guy to get mad at" except it was more "making up a reality to get anxious about". because obviously no matter how much it sticks to canon, Frequency still exists in a fan-created space.

but! i'd never made up original characters to put in my own fanmade stuff before and was definitely feeling protective. because all those original clones i made had yknow: a story purpose and narrative function to facilitate the actual key characters, Thad and Bart. the idea of them being removed from that context in any capacity, even if it was in the hands of a good writer, made me have this gut "no STOP you're ruining it!!!!" reaction.

they were all made for Frequency, and to foil Thad as a character, i didnt like the idea of Three being brought back as a one-note villain or Jude and Nathaniel getting folded into the wider Flash cast of allies. and none of them were made to be main character material. plus the character roster at DC is already uhh Extremely Stacked i genuinely did not want the takeaway to be "and here's the nEW ADDITIONS TO THE FLASH FAMILY!" because that wasnt the intention

anyway i got over it lol. i still did my best not to leave any loose ends, and have each ending be wholly satisfying on its own, and ideally the oc clones basically continue on offscreen while the true adventures are based around Thad and Bart. but yeah it felt right to leave off on that note (and served the story much better than killing everybody off)

[lovesodeepandwideandwell]

Someone should study the way I have experienced season 7 of smallville

[crosshairs-dumb-pimp-gf]

If it sucks watching military movies with Crosshair then it sucks watching Moulin Rouge with Tahny.

[acrobattack]

i don’t know if this is a hot take or not but the rr/b skew more neutral than evil to me

[akkivee]

i am once again getting excited over stuff that isn’t even confirmed lmao but what if hypdream has a similar story format to arb s1 where it’s split into six separate stories centred around the divisions where the final boss of each story is the evil version of the division so you have to strategise how to defeat the divisions with the characters you have unlocked like what if i have to beat bat with bat would evil kuukou have priority and his ability might go off before i can seal evil kuukou’s myself idk how jyushi’s ability works but can i negate the damage he supposedly can heal by reflecting his attack phase back at him with hitoya’s would the three of their attack stats combined be enough to beat them if evil kuukou’s ability can be used more than once—

[corellianhounds]

It’s “sabacc”

No it ain’t

[bmpmp3]

tomodachi life really went off with those bonzi buddy ass voices. win xp type text to speech. all character creation focused games should have this.

[klerothesnowman]

The Acolyte was really good but I'm kind of exhausted by it

This one's more about The High Republic than it is about The Acolyte.

In a previous ramble I talked about how the Jedi being what they were supposed to be didn't make for a good movie. But you know what it was REALLY good for? Making a massively successful franchise with a billion entries for nerds to buy up obsessively. The New Republic and Luke's Jedi Order was an absolute narrative gold mine, there was so many stories that were told in that era that people remember fondly. Sure there's a lot that were total trash too but you could forgive one book being Not Great when it was fairly disposable and you had another book next to it which was a really good adventure.

There was just so much room to tell stories in a post Galactic Civil War setting. Political dramas about the New Republic, Luke struggling to find his feet as the new grandmaster of the Jedi Order, skirmishes with the remnant of the Empire, people just trying to live their life in a whacky galaxy, new Jedi finding themselves. It was hopeful, it was exciting, it was a setting that sparked your imagination and let anything be possible.

But it didn't make for good movies, so when Disney decided they wanted to make more movies they threw out all of it and made a new post Galactic Civil War galaxy. This time it's one without a new Jedi Order, the New Republic is wiped out in the first movie and the Imperial Remnant is defeated in the backstory.

I don't think it is at all a coincidence that there just isn't really any expanded universe material set in that era, there's a lot set before The Force Awakens, where this stuff still kind of exists, but there's significantly less freedom to do anything with it as it's all going to end with The Resistance and The First Order doing the original trilogy again.

Since Disney took over expanded materials pretty much solely concern themselves with times between movies, where everything has an inherent time limit attached to it and concepts can't be too big.

And I think LucasFilms really recognized that, because they made The High Republic.

I have a few problems with The High Republic. It seems a little hyper focused on Jedi, I think dividing everything into "Phases" is MCU brainrot that just sets yourself up for failure and having a single threat for an entire "Phase" kind of narrows the scope of what you can do. More importantly by shying away from having Dark Jedi there's significantly less opportunity for swashbuckling sword fights, which is what Star Wars is all about when you think about it.

But it's still a great idea. give all the Star Wars writers a playground where they can do whatever they want. Even better, set it when the Jedi are at their peak, show everyone what an Average Jedi Adventure really is, without being dragged down by the metanarrative context of the Clone Wars or Galactic Civil War.

It was just classic, Star Wars pulp. Adventure, and fun. It had a teenage Jedi Knight who had a cool lightsaber whip!

And what a breath of fresh air it is, right? Because is it just me or has Star Wars just been really grim lately? Everything always seems to be about how the Jedi suck, or the unfortunate reality of existing within a tyrannical fascist dictatorship, and don't get me wrong I enjoy it, but I would kill for some good old fashioned pulp adventure, which is why it frustrated me a little extra that I wasn't vibing with The High Republic as much as I wanted to.

And now we've got the Acolyte, which is really good. But, man... it's really grim isn't it?

And I get it, I get that the idea is that this is the "End" of the High Republic. I get that one day the upbeat and hopeful Jedi Order needs to get bogged down with institution and lose its way and then get manipulated into self collapse.

I really want to know what Justina Ireland, the writer who created Vernestra, thinks of the direction they took her character. I understand the thematic weight of taking one of the central focuses of The High Republic and showing how even she compromises and becomes part of the problem with the Order, but... Again, it's just really grim isn't it?

I guess I'm just kind of bummed out that the first Jedi focused media we get in so long is about how the Jedi suck.

[shuvva]

tfw you keep accidentally making your characters plural-coded through different forms of transhumanism, multiple timeline, and supernatural/possession shit