#NEW DUCK DUCK GOOSE CHARACTER REVEAL

[camping-with-monsters]

Common descriptors of foxes may include cunning, clever, and tricky. And all would be true for the impeccably intelligent mister Vin Dictive!

Vin believes himself the epitome of knowledgeable when it comes to his kind. A clever specimen as he is, adorning such advanced abilities not many normal animal-kind bare like speaking aloud, he finds himself a high and mighty monarch ruling over wherever he treads. Of course, following behind his tail is a line of trickery. Vin likes to make others react to his crimes, and they usually will. This fox seems to have grown far too comfortable slipping away from the consequences of his actions.

Being such a selfish and careless creature with a knack for fooling the less fortunate has landed himself a pretty hefty bounty for his head. It’s apparently held up by a certain pair of ruthless twins. And those twin bounty hunters who seem so keen on his defeat… oh, how he despises them so! Wearing his own subjects like intimidation tactics! How fickle, and how rude! Whoever would place such a resilient bounty for his execution!? But he knows he’s always bound not to let himself be bound. After all, he’s no ordinary fox like any other he’s called upon before. He’s a gray fox— one complete with a feature not many other canines have: retractable claws, perfect for things like climbing and scampering away, or even more casual things like scaling trees to collect fruits where the usual, lesser canine could only dream to reach.

And to display such impressive divinity and vanity, Vin wears his cape, headdress, and bracelets of leaves, vines, and grapes with pride. He doesn’t even have to tend to them or replace them! Because… well, they’re not real grapes along him. Just his own craft to give off a kingly approach. But he won’t tell you that. It’s possible that the falsified nature of his inauthentic gear could allude to the devious demeanor of this divine deviant. And recently, he’s heard from the grapevine that there’s a strange newcomer woman in his neck of the woods… a perfectly pathetic candidate for action in his eyes.

But don’t quote him on that… it’s only a little birdie that told him.

———

Several weeks ago, me and my friends had an unexpected “character creation convention” that revolved around the possibility of a potential fox character, who would then take major inspiration from The Fox and the Grapes. Admittedly, I’ve slipped in just a little bit of Evil Queen (from Snow White) inspiration in there as well.

Vin’s name is also interesting as well; taking from the term “Vin”, which means wine, “Dictator”, as he’s a rather headstrong guy who sees himself as a feared leader, and “Vindictive”, which means to have an unreasonable desire for revenge.

Though there’s a bit to unpack about Vin, I should also note that he’s planned more as a side character with his own brief moment of plot. In terms of the whole story, he’s not the most important character, but will certainly have his importance when it’s his time to shine :)

Credit to @aggresively-doesnt-know, @vinesoy, @menthum-mint, @pazam, @shroingushour, @pizzabits, @agent-plaguemask, and @barnowlblu for helping a lot with the original idea and design concepts of Vin! Whew that is a lot of people! I hope I didn’t forget anyone! Sincerely hope y’all don’t mind that!

[houseofmouselove100]

Clarabelle's Big Secret

Clarabelle wants to find some new gossip and some character secrets for her segment but everyone there is afraid of being teased and put down

When rafiki and the queen from snow white hit timon with the staff imagine makini from the lion guard and evie from descendants hitting bunga from the lion guard with the staff in case they laughed at some joke he made about them

I don't know if donald will be a duck or a goose because of a photo donald showed Clarabelle

Chernabog is afraid of the dark but it is impossible he is a creature of the Night

¿What a secret Pluto must have told Clarabelle because I speak in her dog language?

It seems that Clarabelle finally shut her up, she also regretted her segment and thought of others so as not to hurt some feelings and it was not to reveal the secrets

Daisy is the only one who likes Clarabelle's segment to have someone cover her duck lips

She could not resist in horace

[j4gm]

TOGETHER AGAIN SPOILERS

A thread of lore, Easter eggs, episode connections, and background details from Adventure Time: Distant Lands: Together Again! Let me know if I missed anything! This is adapted from my original Twitter thread.

Keep reading ⬇️⬇️⬇️

1. I was expecting them to perhaps do a classic style title sequence for this episode, but I wasn't expecting them to straight up use the original title sequence. The only difference is this final screen saying "Distant Lands".

2. The background of the title cards is also the hill from the title sequence.

3. The ice cream having "50 flavours" and having an image of an enlightened soul is an obvious reference to the 50th Dead World as we see it later in the episode.

4. Continuing with the metaphor, the dirt in the ice cream could be a parallel to the fact that Jake's Nirvana actually wasn't perfect, because his inaction was allowing for injustice to perpetuate.

5. This whole scene feels immediately slightly off. Finn has his Scarlet sword and is out on a classic Ice King adventure, but he speaks in his grown voice and all the slang feels much more forced than it did in the real season one. Turns out this was deliberate.

6. The snow golem speaks with a baby voice like it did in the pilot episode, even though in canon it has a deeper voice. This further hints that something is not quite right.

7. The first major break in continuity is these snow golems resembling Uncle Gumbald and Peace Master, who Finn didn't meet until later in his life.

8. LSP sitting on Finn's head like this is reminiscent of Pen Ward's piece for the 2018 Ble crew zine.

9. Finn being given the choice of helping somebody but ending up helping everybody reminds me of "Memories of Boom Boom Mountain". It's the kind of resolution that wouldn't happen so much in the late seasons of the show, which helps make this scene feel even further out of place.

10. Jake is half frozen by Ice King in pretty much the exact same way as he was in "Prisoners of Love", and even has a very similar line.

11. The Snail is seen here. The crew have said that the Snail has been deliberately left out of previous Distant Lands specials, so its placement here is another very deliberate hint that this whole sequence is "trying too hard" to be like the early seasons.

12. The book "Mind Games" appears a couple of times, as seen in several previous episodes of Adventure Time. The first is as Finn is approaching the library in his dream. It also appears as one of the items in Finn's backpack later.

13. Jake is hurt when Finn fist bumps him with his metal arm, revealing that this scene is not real. This is also a callback to the title sequences of "Islands" and "Elements".

14. A whole bunch of familiar skeletons are seen in the bird's nest: Dirt Beer Guy, Abracadaniel, Me-Mow, Lemongrab, Mr. Pig, and the Snail again. This doesn't necessarily mean that all these characters are dead, since this scene is just a hallucination.

15. Old Man Finn! He's still got the chest tattoo of Jake, and this time we know that Jake is dead, so the theory that Jake died before "Obsidian" seems pretty likely. He looks similar to his old man design from "Puhoy", with the same facial hair.

16. There are several cameos of familiar characters who apparently died at the same time as Finn. The first is this duck, who previously appeared in "Ocarina".

17. The second is Donny, from the episode... uh, "Donny".

18. This goblin guy is an unnamed background character from “The Silent King”.

19. This old lady first appeared in "The Enchiridion", way back in season one. Old ladies are a species in the Land of Ooo, so I guess she wasn't actually very old back then, given she just about outlived Finn.

20. This is the cobbler who first appears in "His Hero". Amazing that he lived so long given all the trouble he got into in that episode.

21. Land of the Dead! This place was first seen in season two's "Death in Bloom", and now we are finally learning its actual purpose. It's a sort of gateway and hub to all of the other dead worlds.

22. There are some more minor cameos at the gates: a house person from "Donny", a soft person from "Gut Grinder", and a wood person from "When Wedding Bells Thaw". And, of course, the gate guardian himself from “Death in Bloom”.

23. Finn completely ignores the gate guardian in the same way he did in Death in Bloom. This also has the convenient effect of not having to reveal how Finn died, leaving it up to the audience's imagination.

24. Mr. Fox! We already knew he would die at some point because BMO had his skull in the finale.

25. Finn has his design from the first Distant Lands poster in this scene. Turns out it's young Finn in old Finn's clothes. But they gave him a shirt in the poster so you wouldn't be able to see the tattoo.

26. The clapping that Finn does while he's looking for Jake is a callback to "James Baxter the Horse", when Jake tells Finn to listen for that same rhythm if they are killed and need to find each other in the afterlife.

27. Mr. Fox talks about a "past life quotient", suggesting that there might be some kind of limit to how many times somebody can reincarnate. Finn's reincarnations are also seen in this scene; a callback to "The Vault", and confirmation that reincarnations share the same soul.

28. Boobafina, the goose who Mr. Fox was in love with in his debut episode “Storytelling”, apparently reincarnated into a tugboat. We've already seen that objects can have souls in the episode "Ghost Fly".

29. Finn is initially assigned to the 37th Dead World, which is the same one that Jake went to when he died in "Sons of Mars". We can only guess at what the other numbers on the ticket mean ;)

30. Tiffany! Despite several lucky escapes throughout his life, Tiffany has finally died. I like the use of this imagery to express Finn's conflicted feelings about him.

31. The 50th Dead World has long been established as the "highest" dead world, and the one synonymous with Heaven within Adventure Time's universe. It was first mentioned in "Ghost Princess" back in season three.

32. It's unclear what happens to souls which are destroyed within the dead worlds. It is a similar question to asking what happened to the ghosts that were killed in "Ghost Fly".

33. Death doesn't speak at all in Together Again because his voice actor, Miguel Ferrer, passed away in 2017 long before production began.

34. Finn phases through New Death when he tries to attack him, just like what happened way back in "Death in Bloom".

35. The 30th Dead World contains Tree Trunks as well as many of her love interests; Mr. Pig, her alien husband from "High Strangeness", Danny and Randy who first appeared in "Apple Wedding", and several more who we don't recognise, including at least one who presents as a woman.

36. Literally yelled when these two showed up. Joshua calls Finn a crybaby, which is a callback to "Dad's Dungeon".

37. The wall of weapons in Joshua and Margaret's house includes the iconic Demon Blood Sword, which was broken in "Play Date", as well as Margaret's auto-loading crossbow from "Joshua & Margaret Investigations".

38. Jermaine is sidelined a few times through the episode, in reference to his attitude in "Jermaine" where he feels that Finn and Jake were always their parents' favourites. I would have hoped things would be a bit better by now.

39. Fern gets name dropped while Finn and Jake are reuniting. A shame he doesn't actually show up in the episode.

40. In this scene, Finn says "What time is it?" This is a very subtle reference to the 2010 cartoon "Adventure Time".

41. In a couple of shots during this fight scene it looks like Jake might have a tattoo. It seems like it only becomes visible when he stretches out his arm.

42. New Death's amulet in this scene resembles parts of the Lich's cape, foreshadowing his influence on New Death.

43. There are several more cameos in the 50th Dead World: Booshy from "High Strangeness", one of the Marshmallow Kids from "Scamps", and Ghost Princess and Clarence, who were seen ascending to the 50th Dead World in "Ghost Princess".

44. Finn didn't interact with Booshy in "High Strangeness", but it seems they must have met at some point before they both died because Finn knows his name.

45. It seems like people in the 1st Dead World are slowly melted away until they become part of the landscape. Nasty.

46. Lots more cameos in this scene: a gnome from "Power Animal", a gnome from "The Enchiridion", a Bath Boy from "The Vault", Blagertha from "Love Games", Maja the Sky Witch, a troll from "Dungeon", Chocoberry, Choose Goose, Wyatt, a spiky person from "Gut Grinder", and possibly more.

47. Tiffany's insults are consistently nonsensical and amazing, as they were in the original series.

48. The Candy Kingdom looks extremely different. Peppermint Butler is wearing the crown so he might be in charge now, which is supported by the kingdom's very magical-looking augmentations. It’s not clear whether Finn and Jake were expecting to find Princess Bubblegum or Peppermint Butler, since both have the initials “PB” and both could be going by the title of “Princess”. Perhaps Peps and Bubblegum share the princess duties now that PB is living with Marceline more of the time.

49. Peppermint Butler has a "Boss" mug, although it's not the same colour as the one from "Obsidian".

50. Jake's ghost has the same design as he did when BMO killed him in "Ghost Fly". I also absolutely love Finn's ghost. This scene establishes that ghosts are just visitors to the mortal plane from the dead worlds.

51. Life has only appeared in animated shorts before now. Namely, "The Gift That Reaps Giving" which establishes her relationship with Death, and "Frog Seasons: Winter". This episode gives her a concrete place within Adventure Time's pantheon: she is in charge of reincarnation.

52. A translation of Life’s angry French dialogue by Shado: “After all I did for that boy. After all I did for him. No, it's not possible. It's not possible no, that... that makes me so mad but it's not possible.”

53. We finally have in-universe confirmation that Shoko's tiger is a previous life of Jake. This was previously confirmed by one of the writers, but wasn't canon until now.

54. I feel like Finn pulled off Shoko's look even better than Shoko did. I wonder whether Finn has gained the memories of his past lives now that he’s dead.

55. No Easter egg here, just want to appreciate this image.

56. There is an elemental symbol on the wall here, as seen in "Jelly Beans Have Power".

57. Tiffany's dramatic internal monologue is a recurring gag, as is his habit of nearly dying from falling into holes.

58. The Jake suit makes a cameo in the fight against New Death. It was last seen in the episode "Reboot”.

59. Finn's backpack contains a few familiar items: the t-shirt with the pocket from "It Came from the Nightosphere", Finn's underwear from "Little Dude" and other episodes, and a copy of Mind Games as I've already mentioned.

60. The Lich's Hand is present in the background of Death's... death scene. This is probably the unseen "friend" who New Death keeps talking about.

61. The Lich's menacing monologues often begin with a single command. Previously they have included "Fall" and "Stop". This time, the command is "Burn".

62. Jake uses the word "boingloings", which is a callback all the way to "Hitman" in the third season.

63. Jake's blue shape-shifter form from "Abstract" appears very briefly during his fight with Finn.

64. Finn's lumpy space person form also makes an appearance. This design was last seen all the way back in the second episode of the entire show, "Trouble in Lumpy Space".

65. Jake steps on the Lich's hand in a very similar way to how he stepped on Ash in "Memory of a Memory", which is itself a Monty Python reference.

66. The credits include a dedication to a few AT cast and crew who have passed away. Polly Lou Livingston was the voice of Tree Trunks. Miguel Ferrer was the voice of Death. Michel Lyman and Maureen Mlynarczyk were both sheet timers on the original series. Rest in peace.

67. The message that Finn and Jake write out on the ouija board is "BUTT", which Peppermint Butler takes as a distress signal. This message is also used as a distress signal by the Hot Dog Knights in "The Limit".

68. Peppermint Butler's reversed dialogue from the scene where he makes contact with Finn and Jake is "Kee-Oth Rama Pancake", the spell from “Dad's Dungeon” for banishing demons.

69. That appears to be President Porpoise with all of Tree Trunks’ other lovers.

70. In this scene, Life is humming part of "Lonely Bones", the song which Death tried to record for her in her debut short "The Gift That Reaps Giving". It's hard to notice because it's so brief.

71. Finn and Jake's cover is blown while in the Land of the Dead because Jake loudly farts, which also happened in "Death in Bloom".

72. The place where Mr. Fox explains the perception mechanics of the afterlife is the exact same location as the River of Forgetfulness from "Death in Bloom", which, as it turns out, was imaginary.

These are sort of out of order at the end because I was adding stuff to the Twitter thread as it got discovered. That’s all for now!

[derevitive]

Important lore stuff from today’s Tales of the SMP : Masquerade!

WOW. WOO BOY MAJOR SPOILERS AND INTENSE LORE, TIED INTO THE MAIN S3 ARC HERE, BUCKLE UP!

Note : Dream does not appear in this episode because he's sick. His masquerade skin was a reference to his original mc skin; he was supposed to play the other butler (Hubert). _______

Karl arrives at a beautiful mansion estate owned by Technoblade's character, Billiam. Billiam has a butler played by Ranboo. The butler is not allowed to talk unless Billiam says otherwise.

Billiam leads them around the mansion. He's obssessed with being rich. Soon after, the others arrived - Lord Sebastian (played by BBH), James (played by Sapnap), Drew P Weiner (Quackity), Liaria (Niki), and Oliver (Fundy).

Sebastian is uppity, James is an alcoholic, Drew is a nudist (classic Quackity), Liaria is put together and Oliver is a weird old man.

The group talks a bit and makes pleasantries, drinking and looking around the mansion some more. The mansion build is AMAZING, check the vod later if you haven't seen the episode yet.

They play a game of Duck, Duck Goose before the shenanigans begin.

The lights go out and the rest of the group scatter around in the darkness. Karl hides in a hidden crevice and sees what appears to be Niki walking around with a sword.

The lights turn back on and after a regroup, they realize that Drew is missing. Looking around the mansion they found his blood and head sticking out of a hidden part of Billiam's bookshelves.

The group doesn't care much because Drew is "poor", though they want to know who the murderer is.

After some looking around, the lights go out again. When they come up again, they find Liaria's dead body face down on some boxes. But didn't we just see her with the sword?

After some deliberation and talking in the group, the credible suspicions are on Lord Sebastian as the killer. Sebastian claims it wasn’t him, but that doesn’t make sense either. Karl decides to stay with Sebastian to see what happens when the lights go out again. They do, and the two hide in a cabinet.

This doesn't stop the killer though, who kills Sebastian next to Karl. When the lights go on, they find his body in the cobwebs of the hallway. What? Wasn’t it Sebastian?

More hidden tunnels and locations in the mansions are found as they look around. Billiam and Karl pair up while Oliver and James do to prove who the killer is. They decide to leave the butler alone, his life not mattering much to the group. James is the next to die after the lights go out, leaving Oliver as the next credible suspect. Oliver claims he didn’t do it though. 

Each death confuses the viewers more and more, as we can see who is doing the killing through the way their skins look. However, each time the lights come up they have no recollection of killing, they claim to have been elsewhere, and they end up dying soon after.

Finally, Karl and Billiam decide to leave the butler and Oliver together. Whoever dies is not the killer. The lights go off, and they hear the butler claim that Oliver died of a heart attack. The two run off, realizing it has to be the butler and Billiam leads Karl to an underground lair in another secret crevice.  

A familiar red is covering the walls and parts of the floor.

It's the Egg.

Karl is immediately put off by the Egg, while Billiam claims he is its protector. It’s clear he’s enamored with it. 

It is revealed that Billiam had brought the people he invited (who were not "even rich") there as "nourishment" for the Egg.

The Egg had been influencing the visitors to kill each other, explaining the confusion about who had done it in the murder mystery.

The Egg has control over Billiam and the butler as well. They try to get Karl towards the egg again but he decides to make a break for it.

The butler tries to kill Karl, but he blacks out. He wakes up in a white room, lined with white halls that appears to be a castle. He is now in a white hoodie.

Karl finds a book labeled "The Inbetween". The book tells him he has been here before. It is his home away from home.

He finds another book behind a familiar swingset (remember the one at Mizu) titled "Knowledge 1". He learns he doesn't choose when to time travel or return, but that he also should know this.

He also learns he can solve the problem of his memory loss.

However, to do so he must explore the castle to figure it out.

He finds a book titled "A Warning". He learns he does not have a choice in the matter (time traveling). He will keep time traveling and regroup in the Inbetween afterwards. He is told to keep writing stories. They are important.

He learns that he should lead the others to a new land, but he can not tell them about his abilities. This is likely to tie in to the new server/server reset lore once the updates come out.

How will Karl lead them there if he can not tell them about his abilities?

Karl arrives back on the SMP. He writes the Masquerade tale and later about his experience in the In Between, saying he feels like he has been there before. He claims there might be more to it that he is unaware of.

He needs to move the library and preserve it and says he will make sure to bring happiness to these lands.

End stream. FANTASTIC episode, even bigger than Mizu as Karl said! Please check the VOD if you didn't get to watch it live. More lore on Karl's character, and what is likely to happen next with the server's future. Also the tie in to the main egg plot reveals how Karl knew to keep Quackity away from it during one of the previous lore streams.

This also reveals the egg’s true intentions - to bring enough people under its influence so it can keep being fed. 

[vavuska]

TINA AND HER LOVE FANTASIES

1 - Tina dated a ghost in Tina and the Real Ghost (Season 5, Episode 2)

The basement storage space of the restaurant has a bug infestation and Bob has an exterminator come to check it out. However, the exterminator claims the basement is haunted and refuses to treat the infestation, claiming they need to make contact with the spirit to get rid of it. Linda and the kids decide to use a Ouija board to communicate with the ghost and trap it in a shoebox to get rid of it. Using the board, they learn that the ghost is a 13-year-old boy named Jeff, which piques Tina's interest. After "trapping" Jeff in the box, Tina refuses to throw "him" out and brings him with her to school. Tammy, Jocelyn, Zeke, and Jimmy Jr. taunt Tina about the box, until Louise has them all use the Ouija board to communicate with Jeff. They become convinced Jeff is real, and through the board, learn that Jeff is cool and that he has a crush on Tina.

Tina and Jeff begin going out, earning her attention from her friends, though she has some doubts about whether Jeff is real. However, Tammy takes the box and claims that Jeff left a message written in steam on the girls' bathroom mirror that says he's breaking up with Tina and is now dating Tammy. Tina is heartbroken. The family tries to decide how to cheer Tina up and Louise reveals to the rest of the family that she controlled the Ouija board and made Jeff up, but did not anticipate that Tina would fall in love with him or that Tammy would one-up her by stealing Tina's popularity with a similar ruse.

Louise and Gene resolve to get back at Tammy by scaring her on Halloween night when the older kids plan to enter a mausoleum in the nearby cemetery. Tina surprises them by joining the group and they head into the mausoleum, which immediately shuts and traps them inside in complete darkness. Louise takes this opportunity to steal the box and fill it with bugs from the restaurant and gives it back to Tammy to open. The kids light a candle and are frightened to find a message written in blood on the mausoleum walls, allegedly from Jeff, condemning them all to Hell.

Scared, Tammy confesses that she wrote the fake breakup message and throws the box away, causing the bugs to swarm them all. Tina calms everyone down by revealing that she pretended the mausoleum door was locked and wrote the message before they arrived in ketchup to scare them, having realized long ago that Jeff was not real.

She explains that they all believed in Jeff because he was able to give them something they wanted: Tina wanted a boyfriend, Zeke wanted to believe in the afterlife, Jocelyn wanted another way to conform, and Tammy wanted Jeff as a status symbol. Tina states that they can get these things from themselves, though they all agree that Tammy is terrible. Louise is impressed that Tina pulled such a great Halloween prank on all of them.

2 - Tina dated a duck in Every Which Way but Goose (Season 9, Episode 14)

When Jimmy Jr. cancels their school dance plans, Tina, discouraged by not being asked to prom by Jimmy Jr., forms an unhealthy attachment to a goose from the nearby park.

Tina's story revolves around her theme "Dance of the Living Dead" being chosen for the school dance. She goes berserk when Jimmy Jr. won't ask her to the dance (which was due to an embarrassing injury) and ends up forming a bond with a goose - she named Bruce - at the local park. This leads to the goose disrupting the dance when it followed her to school.

This is one of the rare episodes where we see Jimmy Junior being bashful of his feelings towards Tina.

During the dance, Gene and Louise find out why Jimmy Junior didn't ask Tina. While dancing, he injured his buttocks. He felt embarrassed about what Tina would think of his injury and not being able to dance with her.

“I pulled my butt muscle doing a very difficult move from Save the Last Dance. There. I said it. (sighs) It feels good not to hide my butt stuff anymore. Anyway, I can't really dance, but I'd like to try. With you.”

He later sacrifices himself to save the trapped goose.

3 - Tina fell in love with a character from a Spanish audio course.

In Y Tu Tina También (Season 11, Episode 16) it’s school fair time again, and Gene and Louise are training hard on throwing skills to at last put Mr Frond smack in the dunk tank. Meanwhile, Tina is suffering crippling ennui, but is lifted out of it when she is forced to listen to Spanish audio lessons in the library to improve her grade and developed an infatuation with a spanish teenage boy – or rather, the voice of a 15 years-old boy named Rodrigo recorded on a 1980s Spanish language teaching cassette someone donated to the school.

Jokes about Tina obsession for love and boys:

Also producers made a joke about Tina's very developed ability to made up romantic stories with every single boy or object she saw.

In O.T.: The Outside Toilet (Season 3, Episode 15) Gene finds an expensive talking toilet out in the woods, he falls in love with it and he and his friends decide to protect it against an evil toilet hunter who calls himself Max Flush.

This is remarked in Just One of the Boyz 4 Now for Now (Season 9, Episode 1).

A news report on Boyz 4 Now shows that they're having auditions for a 4th member after a new album sells poorly. While Tina is taking napkins out of the car, she bumps into Damon, a boy going to the tryouts and says it's love at first sight. Convinced she's met the love of her life, Tina decides to disguise herself as a boy and sneak into the Boyz 4 Now auditions to find him, since girls aren't allowed to go to them. Tina struggles to keep focused due to other boys at the tryouts, so she understands that she doesn't love Damon because of all the boys she fantasized about.

Part 2

>>>>>

[harmonytre]

OC List

Toyhouse

Bonus folder

*

Index:

Sans

Papyrus

Other UT

UT OC

Other AUs

Sonas

D&D

Feral

Pokemon

Other OCs

Among Us

(--- means an AU version of that character)

(some have the same name within the AU, but I use a separate name to keep organized)

*

*Sans*

Chameleon (asks OPEN @flicker-of-a-neon-soul)

---Veil (University AU)

---Aru (Mermay)

Indigo (asks CLOSED @prismtale, ref finished)

---Prisans (University AU)

Tundra (Skeleflock AU, UT Sans)

---North (University AU)

Casey (Skeleflock AU, US Sans)

---Seed (Universty AU)

Razor (Skeleflock AU, UF Sans)

---Ferru (University AU)

---Hissor (Cat Cafe AU, can’t reveal yet)

Orion (Skeleflock AU, OT Sans)

---Hoot (University AU)

Messier (Outertale Pink)

*

*Papyrus*

Pear (asks OPEN @flicker-of-a-neon-soul)

---Callery (University AU)

---Peurr (Cat AU)

---Emerald (Mermay)

Paprisargle (University AU)

Sunny (Skeleflock AU, UT Papyrus)

---Speckle (University AU)

Pumpkin (Skeleflock AU, US Papyrus)

---Cranberry (University AU)

Void (Skeleflock AU, UF Papyrus)

---Andy (University AU)

Jay (Skeleflock AU, OT Papyrus)

---Stellar (University AU)

Spark (Savepoint AU)

*

*Other*

Flicker (Gaster, asks OPEN @flicker-of-a-neon-soul)

---Fleon (University AU)

---Fir (Fantasy AU, no official ref but the comic works)

---Flipper (Fish AU)

---Delta (Mermay)

---Flixer (Xtale, ref unposted)

Cadet (Grillby, Flicker of a Neon Soul)

Flaxen (Lesser Dog, Flicker of a Neon Soul)

Brick (RG01, Flicker of a Neon Soul)

Teal (RG02, Flicker of a Neon Soul)

Napstablue (Napstablook, Flicker of a Neon Soul)

Bobby (Bob, asks CLOSED at Prismtale, ref finished)

Kindle (Fuku Fire, asks CLOSED at Prismtale, ref finished)

Milo (Monster Kid, asks CLOSED at Prismtale, ref finished)

Louis (Ficus Licker, asks CLOSED at Prismtale, ref unfinished)

Sammy (Scarf Mouse, asks CLOSED at Prismtale, ref unfinished)

Flint (Frisk, Savepoint AU)

*

*OC*

Deja (Flicker of a Neon Soul)

---Cichlid (Mermay)

Enti (Fantasy and University AU)

Cookie Dough (smol-spoopy’s Candletale)

Havana (asks CLOSED at Prismtale, ref finished)

Vinca (chinchilla, Magusverse)

Spencer (Soriel child)

Lissa (Soriel child)

*

*Other AUs*

@taffyandstevenuniverse (finished Steven Universe AU)

Taffy

Neo

*

@griffenuniversesuau (cancelled Steven Universe AU)

Griffen (Steven)

---Wolffen

---Merman AU

---Watermelon AU

Pazelle (Pearl)

Gosprey (Garnet)

Amelyn (Amethyst)

Pink Diamond

Heidi

Mr. Potai

*

*Sonas*

Honey (Pokesona)

Harmony (Persona)

---Quack (Goose Goose Duck version)

Wisp (Skelesona)

Thyla (Monstersona)

Lime (Fursona)

---Sus (Among Us version)

Denali (Fantasy AU)

Nixie (Mermaid Pirate AU by kiokodoodles)

Sunrose Tourmaline (Gemsona)

Kya (Kirbysona)

Berrina (Yogurtsona)

Joy (Swap AU)

Sass (Fell AU)

Wonder (Outer AU)

Regret (Error AU)

Spunk (Bird AU)

Gloom (Horror AU)

Charity (Farm AU)

Zippy (Fresh AU)

Disdain (Nightmare AU)

Echo (Dance AU)

Inspire (Ink AU)

Faze (Lust AU)

Eager (Gaster Blaster AU)

Grace (Slumber AU)

Tranquil (Fallen Flowers AU)

Teagan (DR pre-death)

Ray (DR post-death)

Bean and Buddy (Among Us)

*

*D&D*

Star (anthro, tabaxi)

Lokoko (kitsune, anthro, needs new ref)

Aoki (fox, needs new ref, apparently never posted???)

Opal (dragonborn, anthro, dnd)

Jearhha (elf, dnd)

*

*Feral*

Noah (canine)

Chloe (canine, needs new ref)

Racket (canine, needs new ref)

Shelby (feline, wings)

Trixie (vulpine, needs new ref)

Spectra (vulpine, oldest fursona, now an OC)

Rosa (original species)

Zazo (lemur)

Jade Dreambubble (pony, unicorn)

Nebula (canine, wings)

Harmoni RENAME (old possum fursona)

Zeruko (dragon)

Dottiel (possum, dragon)

*

*Pokemon*

Lolli (pokemon, shiny Mewtwo)

Jaz (pokemon, shiny Oshawott)

Miracle (pokemon, Eevee)

Daffodil (pokemon, shiny Bellsprout)

Minnie (pokemon, shiny Rattata)

*

*Other OCs*

Rigel (Fantasy AU, skeleton, wings)

Collin (skeleton, upcoming comic)

Okami (human)

Carlie (anthro, rabbit, otter)

Fifi (anthro, rabbit, bat)

Mercy (human)

*Among Us*

Rosie

Rosie -Human

Sweet

Pea

Caleb

Caleb -Human

Jaidan

[ducktracy]

188. porky’s poppa (1938)

release date: january 15th, 1938

series: looney tunes

director: bob clampett

starring: mel blanc (porky, porky’s poppa, narrator), bob clampett (duck)

it’s safe to say that 1938 was porky’s best year. speaking in terms of solo cartoons, that is. his cartoons were genuinely funny, stimulating, and he looked great appearance wise. 1939 the porky burnout started, and he was slowly reduced to a smiling stock character whose adversaries and costars were much more alive than he was.

as daffy (and later bugs) rose to popularity, porky slipped into the sidekick role, paired primarily with the duck. with that said, the porky/daffy cartoons are some of the funniest around, and i firmly believe the best cartoons for the both of them are the ones where they’re paired together—with a few exceptions, of course.

however, let’s not get ahead of ourselves: a great year of pig stardom awaits. porky’s father, who made a few appearances during the joe dougherty era, makes his final return. in a story that has loose similarities to the premise of porky’s railroad, porky struggles to convince his father that their cow, bessie, is a much better fit for the farm than the newfangled mechanical cow his father has his eyes on.

the introduction is one of the funniest aspects of the cartoon itself. a hand erases the title credits, scrawled on a blackboard, and fills in “PORKY’S POPPA... HAS A FARM”, mirroring the underscore of “old macdonald” (with substitute lyrics) below it.

a layout of the farm cuts to our pint-sized hero, grinning at the camera as the vocals sing “...and on this farm he had a pig: porky pig, you know.” bobe cannon animates porky struggling to sing along with the lyrics, his “oh buh-beh-boy!”s lagging with the beat. the music halts just in time for porky to pump his fists in frustration, not stuttering once as he grumbles “oh, skip it!”

repeatedly cutting back to the layout of the farm in conjunction with the lyrics is practically a gag within itself. the song grows increasingly absurd, with a goose honking horns, a cow showing off her legs as the vocals sing “with a little calf here, with a little calf there...”, struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of the song. bob clampett lends his own voice to a random duck (no relation to daffy!), following a hand pointing at certain areas of the farm and quacking (”with a little quack here, with a little quack there...”) 

finally, the duck in his psuedo-donald duck voice instructs “EVERYBODY SING!”, complete with some fun and unique typography. the entire song falls to pieces--before, the cutting back to the farm’s layout added an incongruous feeling of calm to balance out the wacky antics of the animals and the song. now, everything happens at once. the duck zips across the screen in a quacking frenzy, the mother cow shows off her baby calves, thrusting them to the beat of the music, the goose is a one man band of assorted horns, etc. blissful chaos.

things slow down as we cut back to porky, who smugly whips out a phonograph behind his back. the record is just him saying “oh boy!”, playing correctly to the beat of the music. he’s got this song number figured out... or does he?

even technology can’t conceal his stutter. the record begins to skip, mimicking the sound of his stutter, and porky smashes the phonograph to pieces as he slams it against the ground. the wordless yet furious stare he gives the audience as the dying record croaks out a distorted “oooooooh..... boooooooooy....” is nothing short of priceless. though he didn’t say a word himself during this scene, his motives, thoughts, and emotions are clearly visible. you can FEEL his pride at his solution, as well of the subsequent fury of his solution blowing up in his face. a wonderful end to a hilarious song sequence. 

“but on his farm, he has a mortgage... woe, oh woe, oh woe!” the score turns in to a mournful, minor key dirge, with anthropomorphic mortgage papers posing proudly on the farm. some very clever posing and metaphorical play as we fade to porky’s dad, moping around on the farm, the mortgage aligning with his silhouette and becoming a physical weight on his back. more playing with typography as the narrator reads aloud the words on the screen:

this is a parody of the march of time, a radio program who would often announce the death of a notorious person by declaring “and so, today, as it must to all men, death came to [name], [age].” even without the context, the gag is rather amusing, bringing a different change of pace to the cartoon with the addition of a narrator and the typography. knowing the source of the gag makes it hit just the right spot.

porky’s dad mutters about ruination, how he has no milk and no money, etc. mel blanc does a fine job of mimicking joe dougherty, maintaining the stutter and the low voice--in the dougherty cartoons, porky’s father was just dougherty’s natural speaking voice, whereas porky was sped up considerably. you can hear both at once here for comparison. 

we pan over to the cause of one of these stresses: their cow, bessie, has been quarantined (how timely!) for “hoof ‘n mouth trouble”, a play on hand-foot-and-mouth disease. clampett opts to take things just a step further--we truck inside the stall to see bessie posing for the camera, grinning with her foot INSIDE her mouth, batting her eyelashes and all. the “bull bontana” (bull montana) poster  plastered inside of her stall is a clever touch. 

after seeing that bessie’s production chart has dipped overwhelmingly into the negatives--a roll of paper unfurling at porky’s father’s feet, indicating just how poor the farm is doing--he places an “out of order” sign on the stall door.

suddenly, porky’s father grows aggravated. “i need to send you to the hamburger factory!” cue a close-up of bessie tearfully picturing her fate--a pile of burgers and hotdogs make up her figure. clampett would reprise this gag (albeit in a much more cruel manner) in porky’s last stand 2 years later, where daffy eagerly envisions a steaming hot hamburger in place of an innocent little calf. 

this is the second cartoon to make an ACME reference, the first being buddy’s bug hunt back in 1935. porky’s father phones up ACME mail order company, asking for “one cow--airmail”. context clues are just as important to the gag than the reveal itself: porky, his father, and bessie all become alert to the sounds of an airplane making a cacophony overhead. suddenly, a package bursts through the barn ceiling, floating to the ground with a neatly tied parachute. the animation appears to be the work of john carey, from the tall, pill-shaped eyes to the slow, drawn out way that porky blinks.

norm mccabe takes over to animate the grand reveal. lots of wonderful little subtleties: porky and his father are timed slightly differently, giving them both a natural sense of interaction and movement. there’s a lovely little accent on porky’s father opening the package by pulling a string--he jerks his head up slightly as he plucks the string, allowing the audience to feel the physical impact and snap of the pluck. it’s subtle, but very well done. 

instead of a flesh and blood cow, a mechanical hunk of metal slowly unfurls to life as the package opens. as porky’s father reads the label (The New 1938 CREAMLINED COW), porky himself objects to the new addition. “aww, eh-the-there ain’t no such animal!”

indeed there is: porky’s father loads a pile of hay into a chute, pressing down on the cow’s paintbrush tail. the cow pumps along to a brassy score of “old macdonald”, churning out milk from its metal udders, the milk pouring straight into an assembly line of bottles below. bob clampett’s puns are plentiful in this cartoon (notice how there’s no writer’s credit--he often said that he would write some of his earliest cartoons himself. i assume he wrote this one as well? i wonder how much input chuck jones had in the story?), but delivered nonchalantly, so they can actually be enjoyed. the cow caps the milk bottles by putting literal newsboy caps on top of the bottles, the paintbrush tail painting “cream paint” to the outside of the bottles and forming the illusion of cream. interesting business practices!

bobe cannon animates a delightful scene with porky. fun animation and fun dialogue make for a great combo. some very fluid, light, and fun animation of porky giving his pep talk as he hops around, swinging his arms, nonchalantly pushing his hat out of his face after getting so excited. “c’mon, eh-beh-beh-beh-bessie! we won’t let that old eh-neh-nuh-new fangled eh-ceh-co--heifer beat us. you just eat your uh-wuh-wee-weh-whea--eh-ha-hay, and show that eh-teh-eeh-eh-tin-can cow who can make the most...”

porky lowers bessie’s foot from her mouth by climbing on it, preparing to shovel a forkful of hay into her mouth, however, she shoves her foot right back in it, much to porky’s annoyance. “aww, every time you open your muh-mee-muh-me-eh-mou--kisser, ya put your eh-feh-eh-foot in it! eh-bee-bessie, you gotta eat! you eh-deh-dee-eh-don’t wanna be eh-seh-seeah-seeah-smothered in onions, eh-do ya?” 

treg brown’s sound effects of doors creaking as her leg is lowered is the perfect touch to the gag. porky struggles to feed bessie, eventually getting stuck in her mouth himself as he attempts to hold both legs down to no avail. he frees himself, just in time to hatch an ingenious idea.

his plan works: porky places the entire pile of hay onto bessie’s legs, who swallows it up whole, her mouth comically huge as she attempts to swallow it. porky is overjoyed, clapping at her efforts before rushing off to give her some privacy.

instead of porky just milking her like a regular farmer, clampett pushes the entire scenario further. porky paces around in the manner of an expectant father, accompanied by a soft score of “lullaby on broadway”. the sound of a baby crying prompts porky to do a gorgeously animated head shake of surprise--bessie hands him a milk bottle, which porky carefully swaddles and places in a basket. 

the charade continues, with clampett lulling us into a false sense of security with an already absurd gag. cue a gag that would have been incredibly risque in 1938: at about the fifth bottle, porky reaches out and finds that bessie hands him a bottle labeled “CHOC. MALT”, accompanied by an underscore of “i wish i was in dixie”. porky and bessie both grow bashful, but porky’s nonchalant whistling is cut to a half as bessie delivers yet another bottle. “gosh--eh-ceh-ceh-quin-eh-qui-eh--quart-tuplets!”

porky rushes over to his farther to share the good news. however, dad is too preoccupied with the fancy mechanics of the cow to pay bessie any mind. he shows porky a barrage of dairy-related puns churned out by the creamlined cow:

cottage cheese (cheese in the shapes of houses--and an outhouse for good measure--don the conveyer belt), limburger cheese (cheese slices with clothes pins pinned to their “noses” to ward off the stench), and swiss cheese (a cuckoo bird pops out of the cow’s mechanical side and sprays the cheese wheels with bullets, which turn into yodeling mouths). interestingly, mel’s voice for porky’s father changes in this scene--it’s still him, but the nasally undertones are absent. i wonder if he did this on a different day?

nevertheless, the staging of the next gag is genius. the majority of the screen is black, save for a small window revealing porky holding onto bessie’s udders. “c’mon, eh-beh-bessie! hurry eh... hurry eh... step on it!” the window expands to reveal bessie pouring a bucket of milk into a line of funnels (rather than udders), which are then evenly distributed to the bottles. “’ats a guh-geh-gee-eh-girl!”

mechanical cow seems to be doing just fine, plopping cherries on top of elaborate ice cream sundaes and milk shakes. the only fault in the system is the cow’s own personal whiskey bottle rolling down the assembly line, which it confiscates promptly. 

porky, on the other hand, is making do. with an ice block on her head, bessie churns out ice cream cones to the best of her ability. as the cones grow smaller and smaller in size, porky orders her to eat more hay, which she happily does so.

now, it’s cow vs. cow. the mechanical cow opts to play some dirty tricks on bessie, pouring a jar of vanishing cream it produced onto the hay bessie is eating. and, thanks to the law of cartoon physics, the milk bottles she hands porky disappear by the minute. though the effect of the bottles disappearing may not seem like much today, for 1938 the ink and paint department did a wonderful job of demonstrating the illusion that the bottles suddenly disappeared.

with the rest of the hay now gone thanks to a hefty glob of vanishing cream, porky and bessie engage in a wild goose (cow?) chase to find more hay. the mechanical cow gobbles up every square inch of hay in sight--at one point, bessie heaves a dubious shrug to the audience. i love how they made her hooves look like hands, but still remain identifiable hooves. the scramble animation she does as she dashes out of frame (with porky clinging to her like a horse) is wonderfully done as well.

both porky and bessie and the creamlined cow exit the barn, chasing each other around the farm. the mechanical cow physically turns into a vacuum cleaner, threatening to suck up the last remaining pile of hay. in a gag that’s reminiscent of the harman-ising days (is it the inclusion of the outhouse?), the cow-turned-vacuum rushes into a shed filled to the brim with hay. the audience merely watches the shed itself shrink in size as the cow gobbles up all of the hay, the final result a puny little outhouse. 

at last, the enemies reach a face-off. the last pile of hay--or, as porky puts it in his punny little way, “eh-thee-the-thee-that’s the last straw.” in a relatively tashlin-esque maneuver, clampett makes some fast cuts to heighten the suspense of the action. cut between porky and bessie to the mechanical cow to the pile of straw (facetiously labeled “MILK WEED”). the cuts grow quicker and quicker, the music crescendo-ing... 

until BLAM! in a loose parallel to the finale of rover’s rival, everything explodes at once. nuts and bolts rain in the sky, as do neat little bundles of hay. however, clampett doesn’t allow the audience to rest just yet--with bessie nowhere in sight, the mechanical cow continues to charge forth, seeking refuge in a hay to release a humongous pile of milk bottles. so high, in fact, that the shed (and cow) are elevated several feet into the air. porky’s a goner.

porky’s father, who had been absent for the past few minutes, reappears to declare the tin-can cow a winner, much to porky’s visible dissatisfaction.

yet it’s not a clampett cartoon without a twist! bessie pokes her head out of the mechanical cow’s mouth, mooing the ever popular catchphrase from the ken murray show: “mmmmmmwooooooooooah, yeeeeaaaaaah!” porky gives a celebratory “oh, boy!” as we iris out--the goose and duck from earlier poke their heads into the scene just before the iris fully closes.

this is an early porky cartoon that’s just plain fun. bobe cannon’s animation of porky serves as one of the many highlights, from porky getting aggravated with his phonograph to his excited pep talk towards bessie. corny as the opening number is, it’s a lot of fun at the same time--the intensity in increasing chaos is a prevalent theme to clampett’s cartoons. just look at the climax/ending of baby bottleneck!

i don’t have many complaints towards this cartoon, if any at all. it’s not my favorite porky entry, sure, but it’s most certainly an enjoyable watch and one of his better cartoons of the ‘30s. the visual puns aren’t nearly as hamfisted as ben hardaway’s (as we’ll soon discover), making them more enjoyable than some of the jokes present in, say, daffy duck & egghead. regardless, there are a lot of unique gags, fun animation, and amusing dialogue to constitute a watch.

the cartoon is up on HBOmax, but you can also watch it here!

[popculturebuffet]

The Legend of the Three Caballeros: Mt. Fuji Whiz and Thanks a Camelot Reviews: Thank God, No Daisy (Comissioned by WeirdKev27)

Saludos amgios and welcome to the final sprint of THE RIDE OF THE THREE CABLLEROS. If your wondering if this is a bit soon.. that’s because it is. While I planned to do the episodes as is before.. this bottom half of the series so far has been so good I couldn’t bare waiting days to get to the next episode just as things are getting really good, especially after the last episode’s cliffhanger. So today, I intend to FINISH the series, with an epilogue next week for my look at the cabs as a whole via a top 12 moments list. Plus i’m already excited for the next retrospective, so there’s that. And yeah Kev’s funding ANOTHER one and you can too.. serioulsy just shoot me an ask for any solo episode or arc you wan’t covered. But now’s not the time for shameless plugs, it’s the time for adventure and to sew up a cliffhanger! So come with me after the cut for some ghouls, ghosts and arthur won’t you?

PREVIOUSLY ON LEGEND OF THE THREE CABLLEROS:

And now the conclusion...

Mt. Fuji Whiz:

First off... let’s talk about the episode titles for the series since I don't think I have yet. 

It has bothered me for the ENTIRE run of the series how terrible most of them are. There all a pun of some kind on something involved with the episode.. but out of 13 episode titles the only ones I like are World-Tree Caballeros, No Man is an Easter Island, Stonehenge Your Bets, Nazca Racing and Thanks a Camelot. And most of them fit the theme of the episode with the exception of Stonehenge: World Tree is a clever pun they couldn’t NOT use, no man fits the theme of the episode as bad as that episode is, Nazca Racing is just another good pun and fits the race at the end, and thanks a Camelot while a very simple one, fits the story of that episode, i.e. everyone's dissatisfaction with Arthur’s training. More on that later. Point is the rest are just.. really cringe inducing puns. And I do LOVE a good pun.. but that’s a GOOD pun, not obvious ones about a “pyramid life-crisis” or a play on gee whiz in 2018 for god’s sake. And the finale title is just.. really awful as they gave up entirely and named it after square dancing for HOPEFULLY no adequate reason. And look the series is a comedy first with the action second, pun titles would be fine.. their just so bad it sucks all the pun out of them. See what I did there? THAT’S a pun. And not even a great one, but it’s still better than this. It feels like the titles were an afterthought and it’s obnoxious. and frustrates me every time I have to type them out. And with only four episodes left I had to get it out sometime. 

So moving onto the actual episode we pick up with the ending of last episode: Death killing the Cabs and Team Sheldgoose. And as we see shortly. he wasn’t bluffing. We pick up with them in the underworld in a dmv line. My god.. it’s even worse of a beaurcrcy than Beetlejuice. Feldrake informs the cabs where they are and Donald, being Donald, dosen’t have the patience to wait in line with the bilions of souls down there, especially since the take a number thing gave them a number that needed to be printed on both sides.. and their at 4. Good gag though. So Donald storms out the moment he sees and exit and our boys head into the city of the Damned. Sheldgoose meanwhile decides to do his best Karen and demands ot speak with the manager.. whose another Sheldgoose it turns out. Uh-Oh.  After the credits our boys explore the city and hoping not to get hit with more ghost cards, find shelter in a little tavern owned by none other than Clinton Coot, Donald’s Great-Grandpa and father of his grandmother Elvira Coot. Clinton initally mistakes the boys for their ancestors, and is disapionted in meeting donald, but once he learns their the ones that inehreted his Cabana, he’s exastic to meet and learn about them. We also learn he had a collection of fragile frontiersman figurines.. which cleverly, are all various versions of Scrooge from life and times. His second cowboy outfit from the side story “The Vigilante of Pizen Bluff”, his prospector outfit from “Terror of the Tranysval”, his klondike prospecter outfit and him finding the goose egg nugget from “King of The Klondike” and him bitterly hauling a sack of his loot into town from the same story. Also some palet swaps of all but the last one because animation is expensive. Panchito.. destroys them all while putting down his pIzza. “NOTHINGS BROKEN”. Clinton then invites the boys to have a sip of his memories, literally he drains some out and despite their relcutance the cabs take a chug.  They reveal prettty much.. every nagging question about the cabana. Clinton, after finding out about his ancestor Duego Duck, the original cabs version of donald, Clinton traveled the world and the 7 seas, everybody’s looking for something.. and he was looking for every trace of the cabs, and their mysterious ally, who we know as Xandra. He gathered all of it, hence the massive collection of books and magical treasures in the cabana, eventually finding their hidden lair and building his cabana on top of it, founding New Quackmore with Sheldgoose’s own great grandmother.. who betrayed him and took the institute from him. His consolation prize was finding Ari and the atlas but he couldn’t open it like the boys and is curious what they found. I absolutely love this and while I feel Clinton’s history would’ve worked better as an overaching mystery, there were seeds for all of this planeted throughout the season, with Sheldgoose being in charge despite the name and Clinton being involved, Shelgoose’s mention a sheldgoose has always been president, and the tease last episode. Still would’ve liked MORE exploration and build up to this , but what we got was facenating upgrading Clinton from a footnote on the duck family tree, to a throughly loveable character: A guy who was so fascenated by his ancestor’s adventures he became an adventurer himself and who lovingly catalogued eveyrthing the guy and his friends ever did.. and had some heartrending reasons why we’ll get to. 

 As Jose leads in with not what but WHO, and likely tells clint about their adventures, a clever way to get that exposition out off screen, we cut back to the world of the living. Xandra is beating herself up, if not literally over things, and while the girls just suggest going to the underworld via zoom point, Xandra points out that won’t work. There’s only one way in: Charon, the greek ferryman of the dead.. and she realizes that’s exactly how, while the girls try a seance.  I’ll just cover the séance stuff now. The girls hold a séance to summon the boys, finding some unfinished business (A piece of said pizza) and having ari dress like a fortune teller because eh why not. There’s some good gags and stuff, but it’s mostly plot irrelvant, only hurting Panchito’s brain at first, then summoning him just as their about to fight a Tengu, with humphrey eating the pizza finsihing the buisness. Not a bad plot at all and certainly refreshing after all the Daisy nonsense last episode, but nothing really important.  Meanwhile let’s also get to Xandra’s subplot, which is both mroe relevant and funnier and again i’ll be covering all at once for convience. Xandra finds that the horn to summon Charon... is now a sax.  Huh so THAT’S what pamela anderson’s character CJ was doing when she was introduced on baywatch. 

Anyways turns out Charon’s reinvented the old boat and since Xandra’s an immortal he offers her a free ride. It’s now a cruise ship with him as the captain, voiced by voice acting legend Jim Cummings who does a fantastic job. The reasonings also brilliant: he wasn’t getting many WILLING souls with his creepy old setup, so he reinvinted things and now has a packed house, plenty of coins and a nonstop party. He even gives us an add for the buisness... this whole thing is fucking amazing and deserves to be praised and is the series at it’s best: taking something mythic and giving it some wacky but still clever tweaks. Xandra eventually gets annoyed as he isn’t going into the city so she can’t look for the cabs and takes the wheel, cursing her to be the captain now, but she just uses that to get in and finds clinton who agrees to guide her to the boys... we’ll get to where he guided them in a moment. 

And that moment is now, Clinton tells the boys there is a way out, but it involves fighting the Tengu, which is misdentified as a falcon despite, even as someone with only a surface knowledge of yokai, I knew it’s modled after a crow, or at least some versions are as it turns out.. and so is the one here so how did they screw that one up?

Point is they need to get past it, and are on a timer as when the Creepy combination of jack skeltington and that moon from Majora’s mask that’s in the sky sets and night ends, their stuck. But first they run into a guard who says they have to fill out paperwork.. and his superior is intend on that, his superior being unsuprisingly sheldgoose, who got the gig since his family runs the afterlife. Oh goodie the rich also somehow run death....

But Donald decides FUCK PAPERWORK, throws it in the air and they run for it with Sheldgoose sicing the tengu on them, which looks awesome by the way. Panchito disappears as mentioned before just as they get a plan but returns in time to free his friends and they triumph.. only for Sheldgoose to not take this lying down and summon his entire family to kick their assses. So both sides power up: having learned the trick from clinton earlier, the cabs inflate.. part of their bodies while sheldgoose forms a voltron style fusion made up of his ancestor’s heads.. with the caveman as the crotch. 

So a fight insues that’s fluid and beautifully animated, and Xandra even arrives to provide backup, with Charon relieving her because he’ could loose his five star rating. I hear you man I struggled just to get my island up to a four. So it becomes a gorgeously animated and awesome fight with Clinton joining inn, finally able to be one of his heroes. He also reitarates something he told donald, that it’s not the journey.. it’s who you take it with and part of his love of the cabs was never having companions like that. Donald takes it to heart and our heroes take their leave, Clinton finally having achieved his lifes’ work. They decide to see japan because why not. Maybe they’ll run into hannibal there. 

And to tie things off, Shelgoose and Feldrake, whose spent the etnire epsidoe still in the staff depsite being dead and...

And find.. a demonic version of Donald in a devil costume, from that short with the devil and angel Donald's.. okay I have some questions. 

He sends them back and we’re out

Final Thoughts for Mt. Fuji Whiz: One of the series best. It’s well paced, has an amazing concept and both sideplots have some form of relevance while being utterly hilarious, especially the charon one. Seriously best bit character of the series calling it now. Already headcanon him as part of the ducktales universe. Along with a lot of this actually. IT’s good stuff and despite the series falts episodes like this prove why it really needed, and still needs, a second season. 

Thanks a Camelot:

Our heroes return to the land of the living with Xandra and to the Cabana, and while Donald wants to relax a bit, Xandra being an ass shoots that down. Though her reasons are valid: Feldrake has been stepping up his game with every scheme.. which is true. HIs last two schemes, not counting his post mortem one, only BARELY didn’t kill them and actually did kill them, and him too but that wasn’t on purpose. They need some good old fashioned hero training so Xandra’s taking the to king arthur and camelot, which of course are still around, to get it and since his training involves leaving everything behind, they leave htier weapons and other stuff behind including their amulets.. which haven’t come up since but are now since their important to the finale i’m guessing and they’ve been wearing the whole time. The girls are tagging along too as they want to document things because the plot says so but their entertaining so fine and leaving Ari and the Bear to guard. And the barrier.. more the barrier.  So with our heroes off Feldrake decides they need to strike and Sheldgoose has a plan to get around the barrier to get Humphrey’s spark: hide inside a cake and have humphrey so overcome by his desire for cake he comes to them. Feldrake is unimpressed but it works.. and even better as he drags them in.. but apparently while Feldrake’s protections are keyed to our heroes bloodline.. coot’s only extneded to feldrake. Which makes sense: he was friends with a Sheldgoose and probably didn’t consider her an enemy till he’d already set the spells, and cleverly, and i’d forgotten this till writing this review: Sheldgoose has already BEEN on the Cabana grounds once and to the doorstep, in the first episode when he visited the yardsale and in the finale of the second when he showed up to give Donald his check. So the show even showed it.. we just didn’t think about it or assumed having the ring meant he couldn’t now. But nope Sheldgoose is inside and Humphrey’s knocked out. 

Back in merry old Camelot, I apolgoize for having a deficit of spamalot and Monty Python refrences, our heroes meet King Arthur, voiced by former star of said spamelot John O’ Hurley, who I was going to give a good treatment and go into his career.. then I found out he’s VERY conservative, pro trump even post riot and generally kind of an ass in how he conducts himself soooo instead a hearty

Does a good job here, still a weasel fiesta. So King Arthur trains our heroes.. via motivational statments, trust falls and what not with his knights who get the same traning, one of which is Gallhad, a frog voiced by the same guy who viced Kermit on muppet babies. Yayyyyy. The girls wonder off, finding Merlin, whose busy with spells and such and clarfying which one is which. They give him june’s phone as Merlin has a video game addiction but Arthur forbids it because well. he has a problem why wouldn’t he.  Ruined Todd Chavez’s life it did. I mean it’s exceptional now but it took a bit of living on a drunken horse with serious issues couch. 

Anyways, Donald soon gets fed up because.. hes Donald. And because.. Tony kinda leans on the more classic constantly angry donald in this one, since he DID help write the lines. It’s not BAD mind you.. but I prefer the melding of his comics and shorts self other works did, the smug ego and everyman desperation to be noticed and liked from the comics mixed with the ego but also tons of rage of the shorts. Kinda like how Daffy had his own egotistical smartguy version merged with his screwball version for the Looney Tunes Show.. which i’ve been rewatching lately. Even better than I remember, highly underated. 

My point is this Donald, as we approach the end .. isn’t for me. He’s just not as intresting as the cloudcuckoolander panchito or the smootha nd wise jose. He ballances them well, being the more direct angry one to panchito’s unpredicablity and Jose’s smooth compemplation. He’s not BAD, and i get why some would prefer this one over Ducktales, as he’s more in line with his classic characterzation.. but I just prefer a more nuanced Donald and this one isn’t it. He spends most of the series either complaning, pissed off, or pining for an ungreatful she demon. There’s not a lot of notes compared to Jose or Panchito, as Jose isn’t just a ladies man or a charmer but a fairly smart guy who has pretty damn good plans and Panchito isn’t just spacey but, kind brave and with his own moral code. They just got more fleshing out as things went and Donald didn’t and it’s disappointing. 

So Donald gets fed up with the training, and calls out it’s only motivatoinal, with the other cabs agreeing, if more tactfully, and the knights.. also agreeing, pointing out King Arthur dosen’t even do his own goofy self motivational exercises and abandon him.. at the worst possible time as the girls conjur up a super powerful magical dragon. So the knights leave him to it and Arthur is too cowardly to face it. So the Cabs do what he won’t and charge in to defend the holy grail, called the grail of immortality here for ..r easons, and fight the dragon.. and Arthur joins them, inspired to finally get his groove back and gives the knights a rousing speech and even reconclies with donald. So our heroes fight the dragon and nearly die, before the rest of the round table pitches in, and the girls find the dragons scroll and impulsively burn it.. which destorys it. So the day’s saved, and Arthur apologizes to everyone and decides to give the boys proper combat training as thanks. Also we get a really funny bit with Merlin, who throws the phone into the fire.. and much like the dragon, apparenlty it was tied to the employee who activated it because he suddenly and horrifcly burns up. PFFT. Dark but beautfiul

But of course what about the Sheldgoose subplot. Well I saved that for now to cover it all at once SO: Sheldgoose pokes around, being annoyed by a dart board of his face and what not and tries to find something to fish the spark out with... but Ari finds him and proves to be entirely useful, beating Sheldgoose down into the treasure chamber and getting inot a fight with him. Sheldgoose holds pace.. until Humphrey wakes up and with the odds against him they throw him out. Meanwhile Feldrake zaps a dog that was going to get peed on him but when sheldgoose is ejegted is surronded by dogs and clearly didn’t escape as he dosne’t want to taklk about why he smells to sheldgosoe. He is ABOUT to berate him for failure again.. but Sheldgoose points out he swiped something more important: The amulets. 

Proving once again Sheldgoose is the real power in the team. 

Final Thoughts on Thanks a Camelot:  This was a fun one. While finding out about John O Hurley was... unfortunte.. he does a decent job and the episodes a fun take on camelot with, as usual , really excellent gags, pacing and a hell of a fight scene with a dragon. Good stuff as usual

NEXT TIME; It all ends! It’s a visit to some yeti’s before one final dance betwen good and evil and one last set of episodes for this retropsective! Be ready! 

[that-shamrock-vibe]

Movie Review: Captain Marvel

Disclaimer: Alright so this is my non-spoiler review for the movie posting the day the movie is released in the U.K. and the spoiler review will be posted over the weekend. Very light spoilers may be ahead so if you do want to see this movie clear-minded then don’t read on until you have.

General Reaction:

I have very mixed reviews about this movie. I am speaking as a guy, a Marvel fan and a die-hard fan of the MCU who has supported it since Phase 1. I need to emphasise all three facts there because I am going to be very conflicted in my thoughts of this movie.

I really like Carol Danvers in the comics, I think her progression from girlfriend of original Captain Marvel Mar-Vell to superhero in her own right is very well told and shows a lot of depth in the different identities she’s taken on. Not just Captain Marvel but also Ms. Marvel, Binary and Warbird. So for her to be the MCU’s first female superhero to lead her own movie is not only right but earned by her. I do overall believe Captain Marvel as a movie justifies this decision because, in an almost saturated comic-book movie market which seems to have outgrown origin movies, for such a landmark character and movement it is very much a needed point.

For anyone preaching that this movie bleeds feminism, I have to disagree. It’s a female-led movie with only a handful of male characters so of course it will be dancing on the edge of feminism and there are decisions made, both in production and in the actual movie, that could be make-or-break choices for anti-feminists and one I have a massive issue with which I will talk about in my spoiler review. But again, it’s nothing too bad that can distract from the quality of the movie and the two main messages/themes can be learned by anyone rather than just women.

Maybe it is due to the saturated market or the writing of the movie, but most “surprises” in this movie have already been revealed or assumed from the trailers. There are a couple of shockers that I think are controversial and do in fact hurt the future of the MCU particularly when this movie does absolutely nothing to setup or allude to Phase 4, but I really wanted to be surprised in this movie. Mind you, after the Infinity Snap I don’t think anything can shock me anymore.

In terms of actual story and character, yes Carol Danvers is overpowered as hell particularly in the third act. Also she, like many female heroes these days, seems to take to her new powers like a duck to water without the movie allowing time for her to learn or adapt to her new power play. It does seem to be an MCU formula where they want to throw in all the powers and special effects for the third act battle without considering consistency in story quality,

Where I would rank Captain Marvel in the MCU is somewhere in the middle just above Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man and just below Doctor Strange. There is a lot of good in the movie which is either faithful or in homage to the comics but also there are places to tweek and grow as the characters and movies go on.

Cast:

Brie Larson is the star of the movie and fortunately for her, none of her supporting cast pull too much focus from her. She is able to carry the movie and introduce this version of the character to the MCU while also taking us as the audience on the journey of her herself making these discoveries. There is something off about her performance when trying to match the likes of Samuel L. Jackson in comedic moments that comes across as trying to be like actors that have come before her in the MCU...namely RDJ and Chris Hemsworth in Thors 1 & 2 but then her quieter and more emotional moments, which I was waiting for and wasn’t disappointed in, showed glimpses of Chris Evans and Scarlet Johansson. To sum up I do believe the key to Brie Larson’s portrayal of Carol Danvers is growth an exposure as the movies go on but it isn’t a stop-start origin.

The supporting cast is as fabulous as they needed to be again without outshining the star. Samuel L. Jackson gives, what I believe to be, his best and definitely meatiest installment as Nick Fury. Really combining his natural comedic charm with being great field support. Again the de-aging on Fury is fantastic and the stark contrast we see from Glass in January to now here is just brilliant.

Jude Law is also, as always, very compelling to watch. I do think he is basically just being him with fancy contacts but as with Jackson and James McAvoy I cannot fail to be entertained by his performance.

Gemma Chan, Lashana Lynch and Lee Pace all give very good performances and the latter, for me, bests his portrayal of Ronan in Guardians of the Galaxy.

Ben Mendelsohn and Anette Bening both give very compelling performances that offer surprising layers to their characters that I do not believe were originally intended to be there and certainly weren’t there in the comics.

Then there’s Goose the Cat portrayed by several different cats in the movie. I am not taking the mick when I say this but Goose is one of the breakout stars of this movie, the other one being Akira Akbar as Monica Rambeau.

Recommendation:

I can understand where the dislike for this movie comes from because, as my fiancé said, this is probably the first MCU movie where I have described an aspect of it using the word “hate” but I will go into the reasons why in my spoiler review. However, I do not think the movie deserves the overall hate it is getting because in total it is a good movie. As a precursor to Avengers: Endgame it possibly isn’t the strongest lead-up but it isn’t the worst either.

So that’s my review of Captain Marvel, what did you guys think? Post your comments and check out more MCU Reviews as well as other Movie Reviews and posts.

[my-soul-sings]

Prompt by @patient-blossoms on @dailyau​: 

This is pretty normal for us but you look terrified, you’re not from around here are you? AU

When Jim asked me to cover a report for him in a small, quiet town, I expected to find quaint little shops and homes, old ladies feeding the pigeons on benches, and young people sipping on tea and eating pretty cakes at quiet cafes.

I thought he was doing something nice, maybe as a sort of early birthday treat for me, though it’s two months too early. I kind of brushed that detail aside at the time, because I just really needed a break from frequent late-night stays in the office churning out articles and getting pushed around to do other people’s work. You could say I was desperate to have an excuse to get out of town for a bit.

I guess I should have known better than to trust someone who gave his blind mother a furry pillow for her birthday and told her it was a cat.

I inch backwards slowly till I hit the grimy wall of the small alley I’m in. I hastily take a step forward, grimacing and hoping it doesn’t leave a stain on the back of my favourite denim jacket.

“You okay?”

My head snaps up, and I meet the hazel brown eyes of the man who just saved me. He’s panting, with droplets of perspiration running down the sides of his chiselled face and neck. Aside from a cut lip, he looks like he just finished a 2-kilometre jog and tripped at the end of it. You wouldn’t think that he just won a fight bare-handed against four relatively big thugs who could barely manage to bust his lip.

To be fair, this guy isn’t exactly petite either. He looks like he works out a lot. He has big shoulders, huge pecs that rival the size of my own chest and a rounder butt than mine. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had an eight-pack hiding underneath his tight black shirt. He’s a full package deal.

He gives me a once-over to check that I’m not wounded when I don’t offer an answer. I’m fine, aside from the bleeding scrape on my temple, and potential bruises on my arms. He, on the other hand, has bleeding knuckles, though I’m not sure if they belong to him or my attackers.

A groan sounds from the side, and I notice one of the thugs lying on the floor struggling to get up on shaking arms. If he didn’t just try to rob me, I’d actually feel a little sorry for him. All those bruises have got to hurt.

He utters a profanity directed at us as he slowly attempts to get up. In the next second, he receives a hard kick to the face and rolls over till he hits the opposite wall, before he finally stills again. I turn away, unable to stomach any more violence for the day. A wave of nausea washes over me and I do my best to keep it in.

Hopefully the guy isn’t dead, or I might be an accomplice to a murder.

“Damn, I just washed these too...” The man clicks his tongue as he peers down at his white sneakers that are now covered in dirt. His right shoe has some blood on the top now, and I’m guessing that belongs to the thug he just kicked. “Guess this is what I get for helping someone out.”

Well, he could have picked a better spot to kick if he really didn’t want to ruin his shoes.

“Is this your first time getting robbed?” he asks casually, leaning his weight on one foot and cocking his head to one side. He’s acting as if we’re meeting for the first time on a Tinder date instead of standing in the middle of a dark alley that smells like a garbage dumpster, with four men lying unconscious on the ground.

“Yes,” I reply, not meeting his gaze. I don’t know if I can trust him, after all the things I’ve witnessed in the span of fifteen hours in this small town. Everywhere I’ve been today feels like a scene out of a movie. There were druggies and alcoholics walking the streets, yelling profanities to the air and shattering glass bottles on the litter-covered ground. Someone flipped over a table in a small shop while I was having lunch and then a fight broke out between what seemed like mafia gangs. I didn’t stay for long to find out more, in fear of earning a knife in my chest or a chair to my head.

He might have just saved me, but this guy might be another shady character with other motives in mind for keeping those guys from robbing me. Maybe he’s going to sell me off to some underground human trafficking business. Or maybe he’ll try to rob me instead. Multiple scenarios cross my mind, which makes me break out into even more cold sweat as my heart palpitates.

All I want to do is get out of this town, drive all the way to Jim’s house and bash his head repeatedly with his favourite camera. He’s going to pay for making me go through this just to cover some silly story on their new goose mayor.

“You don’t seem to know any self-defense moves either. You’re not from around here, are you?”

I shake my head. So knowing self-defense is normal here? I guess that’s not too surprising, considering all the things I’ve seen today. Gang fights, drug deals and daylight robberies... What’s next? A serial killer?

...Probably shouldn’t jinx myself. I’m only heading home tomorrow. I need to find a way to not get knifed in my sleep tonight.

“You don’t talk much, huh?” he questions, raising a curious brow. “Still scared?” Amusement gleams in his eyes as he leans in slightly to get a closer look at my face.

I duck down to avoid having him get too close, picking my bag off the ground. I pat off stray specks of dirt. Or maybe it’s dog poop. I try not to think about it.

“Thanks for the help,” I say curtly. “I should go.” Better get out of here while he’s in a relatively good mood. Maybe he’ll let me go without asking for anything in return.

I turn on my heel, ready to hightail it out of there, but his hand wraps around my wrist before I can take a step away from him.

“What’s your name?” he drawls in a deep voice.

Swallowing thickly, I do my best to hide the trembling in my voice. “Why- Why do you need to know?”

“Because I want to?” He sounds amused. At least he’s not angry. Good. “The name’s Dustin.” He releases my wrist when I turn so that I’m half-facing him.

“Oh. Hi.” I cringe at my flat reply. Better think of something fast. I don’t want to reveal my real name, lest he uses it to track me down or something. What’s a good girl name to use? Uh... Um...

“So what’s your--”

“J-Jenga. Name is H-Hannajenga.”

There’s an awkward pause.

“Your name is... Hannajenga?” he repeats.

“Y-Yeah. Parents were a big- big fans of the card game.”

“Right...” he mutters, not bothering to ask further. I guess weirding him out is one way to get him to not target me. Good going, Anna.

“So... Hannajenga, are you in a hurry to go somewhere?”

Crap, I am so screwed.

“My great-grandfather passed away today and we burying him so I’m leave now bye.”

I’ll admit, I’m not the best at coming up with excuses on the spot. Not to mention, my brain forgets that grammar exists when I’m panicking as much as I am now. In my defense, Dustin can probably break my neck with one hand if he wants to so my fears are a hundred-percent justified.

“Too bad then. It’ll have to wait.” With one sharp tug, he grabs my arm, spins me around and I stumble, nearly slamming straight into his chest. Instinctively, I grab at his black bomber jacket to steady myself. He reaches for my other arm and holds me in place, before his face slowly leans in closer towards mine.

Oh no. Ohhhhh no. This isn’t happening. I haven’t even had my first kiss yet. I may not know any self-defense moves, but there’s nothing stopping me from inventing some.

I dig my heels into the ground and raise my knee, aiming for the spot where the sun doesn’t shine. I’ve seen enough shows and read enough books to know that this is an effective way to immobilise a male attacker.

Unfortunately for me, Dustin is too fast. He steps to the side, and my knee only finds air. I’m not about to give up though. I lunge for him, forming fists with my hands and attempting to throw a punch to his nose. He catches my wrists easily with his big hands, and pushes me back, causing me to lose my balance and fall to the ground clumsily like a rag doll.

“Firstly, I don’t fight girls.” I hear Dustin’s voice and his footsteps as he steps closer. The asphalt crunches beneath the soles of his shoes, muffling the sound of my dismayed groan as I find a new scrape on my elbow, along with dirt on my jeans. "Secondly, last I checked, punching someone isn’t how you thank them. And thirdly,” he squats down next to me as I get up. “That’s not how you form a fist, Miss Hannajenga.”

I back up till my back hits the wall, and I curl up instinctively. My eyes go to his shoes, where the blood stains still remain. This is it. I’m going to get beaten to a pulp just like these guys on the floor next to me. Maybe worse. Tears spring to my eyes as terror seizes me. There were so many more things I wanted to do with this life, and so many things I wanted to say to my family. Guess time’s up for me.  

If I die today, I’m going to haunt Jim for the rest of his miserable life.

Screwing my eyes shut, I brace myself for the first kick that will crack my skull open, but even after counting to five, nothing comes.

I hear him squat down, and I press closer against the wall, a whimper escaping me before I can stop it.

“Wait. Are you- Are you crying? What the hell? Why are you crying?”

“P-Please don’t kill me,” I plead in a tiny voice, my shoulders beginning to shake with sobs.

“Fuck, I just said I don’t fight girls.” He sighs exasperatedly, taking my hands gently and lifting them to reveal my face. I probably look like a mess. My mascara isn’t waterproof, my hair is a mess from the scuffle with the thugs earlier, and I’m an ugly crier. At least snot isn’t running down my nose yet.

I take a chance and look at his eyes. He’s telling the truth. There’s no malice in them. I only find traces of guilt and worry in his frown.  

“I wasn’t going to attack you. I was just gonna say that you should get that wound on your head looked at. They hit your head against the wall pretty hard earlier.”

Most of my suspicion and fear clears. If Dustin really wanted to attack me he could have done so earlier. He wouldn’t have let me attack him and let me get away with it with nothing more than a rough push to the ground. Even that was just in self-defense.

He extends a hand towards me to help me up. It doesn’t seem like he means any harm. Warily, I accept it, and he grips it firmly to pull me to my feet.

“I feel fine,” I tell him honestly as I wipe my tears away. “Thanks for saving me. And... sorry for trying to hurt you earlier.”  

He waves it off. “Don’t worry about it. You wouldn’t be able to hurt me even if you tried anyway.”

True.

“Are you heading back to wherever you’re staying? I can give you a ride. It’s getting late and it’s dangerous for you to walk along on the street at this time. Lots of bad guys are roaming the streets and pretty girls like you won’t escape their notice.”

My cheeks warm at the compliment, and at the devious smirk he throws my way. He’s cute, but still, there must be a reason why he’s offering to do all this for me.

“Why are you being so nice?” I ask.

His smile widens. “Do I need a reason to help a pretty girl who’s in distress?”

So... does he want to get in my pants or something? Because that’s definitely not an option.

“I’m not trying to get in your pants,” he laughs, as if having read my mind. My face burns and I avoid his amused eyes. “I mean, I wouldn’t mind,” he pauses to wink, “but I’m really helping you out just because. It’s not cool for guys to team up against a girl like that.”

“So... you’re the only good guy in this town?”

He chuckles. “Not the only one, but I guess sober people like me are rare to find here.”

“What’s a guy like you doing here then? You look a little out of place from all the,” I gesture vaguely in the air, “drunkards and druggies here.”

“I grew up up here,” he replies. “Long story short, my parents got a divorce and I moved away with my mom. I come back occasionally to visit my dad.”

“I see. And you happened to be passing by when you saw me getting mugged?”

“Pretty much,” he shrugs, placing his hands in his pockets. “So, do you want a ride back?” he offers a second time.

Normally I would say no to getting a ride from a stranger, but he did just save me like a knight in shining armour and he is kind of cute...

“Just promise not to kill me or threaten my life in any way?”

“Promise.” He flashes me a charming grin. Damn. That’s not very good for my heart.

“Okay then. Follow me, Hannajenga.” With that he turns on his heel and walks off, leaving me with my lips parted and staring dumbly at his broad back.

First things first, I really should tell him my real name.

[fly-pow-bye]

DuckTales 2017 - “The Golden Lagoon of White Agony Plains!”

Story by: Francisco Angones, Madison Bateman, Colleen Evanson, Christian Magalhaes, Bob Snow

Written by: Bob Snow

Directed by: John Aoshima

Storyboard by: Jean-Sebastien Duclos, Mark Garcia, Tanner Johnson, John Ramirez

I wouldn't call this a creek, either.

This episode starts with Scrooge and the boys paying a visit to a Gala dedicated to a newly opened Glomgold Wing at the Natural History Museum. The joke is that all of the exhibits are just whatever he can salvage from Scrooge's past adventures, and some outright falsehoods. Dewey even talks about how he's trying way too hard. Dewey's right...in maybe too many ways.

Scrooge, obviously not a big fan of this duck who tries to murder him any chance he can, is only there to support Duckburg's cultural institutions as an upstanding citizen. Oh, and to steal Glomgold's cocktail weenies and teriyaki skewers. The irony is that it's Louie that calls him out for this. That seems out of character for him, though it might be due to his suit giving him a rash.

As the boys follow Scrooge's lead in taking a bunch of buffet food, one of the guests of honor walks in the room. Scrooge drops his bag and gasps at the sight at this familiar-to-him face. The nephews ask him if his gasp is about a curse, a villain, or a villainous curse, but it's even worse than that.

Scrooge: ...it's my ex! (gulp)

🎵Life is like a hurricane...🎶

Well, that's one way to do a cold open.

Specifically, it's Goldie O'Gilt. He clarifies that she's an ex-rival and ex-partner, but the boys do not buy it. Scrooge gets the boys, and anyone in the audience who hasn't heard of this legacy character, ready by telling them to watch their wallets. They trade insults to each other, Scrooge saying that she has cloven hooves, and Goldie calling him a tightwad. Well, it is a fitting name for someone who takes hors d'oeuvres from a buffet. I learned just now that’s how you spell those words.

While the insults both disturb and intrigue Dewey, Glomgold shows up to tell Scrooge that Goldie happens to be his date. Even before she says anything, her body language clearly indicates he doesn't want anything to do with this man. Once the music starts playing, Scrooge and Goldie start dancing. He tries a second plan: dancing the same kind of dance with Dewey. I don't have a comment for that one.

After that, Glomgold decides to reveal the main attraction: a skeleton of a "Glacial Klondike Monster" his oil crew managed to dig up in the Yukon. Unlike the Glomasaurus Rex, which was clearly made up of random dinosaur bones, this exhibit is legitimate. The lights go out, and the mammoth's head disappears. No, it's not another mystery story, or another ghost story for that matter. Scrooge looks around and finds a certain someone missing, and he hot-tails it out of the gala.

While Launchpad drives Scrooge and the boys to the Mansion, it will make sense to how he would know about where she went later, the boys want to know more about "Scrooge's new old giiirlfriend", while they all make literal duck-lips. Yeah, that's their only real character trait they have for the rest of the episode. While DuckTales 2017 gave the boys far more distinct personalities, this episode is not a good example of that. Wait, Huey, Dewey, and Louie acting identically? No way!

They do get to be the audience of another Scrooge McDuck flashback to a time long before Donald or Della. We’re getting into “The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck”-like material here. From what I've read, it's a very loose adaptation; no Goose Egg Nugget here.

They go into a cave in the White Agony Plains to find the titular Golden Lagoon. Suddenly, Goldie, in her scheming ways, decides to steal the map to find the lagoon for herself. Scrooge manages to catch her, but the map gets torn in half. Suddenly, the "Glacial Monster" shows itself, being what might be the last of the Wooly Mammoths. Goldie’s part of the map ended up stuck in the mammoth’s teeth, and over a century later, that same mammoth's skeleton ended up in Glomgold's Gala. We get a shot of the skeleton with a map sticking out of its teeth, which wasn't shown before when we got a shot of it before, but never mind.

Yes, I really mean a century later. While they don’t specify the exact year, Scrooge is definitely referring to the Klondike Gold Rush in 1896. Huey, in one of the few times he gets to show off his personality, starts counting on his fingers and outright asks how old Scrooge is. He obviously does not answer that question, but this episode gives a rather decent explanation beyond "it's just a cartoon, so just relax".

While running from the Wooly Mammoth, Scrooge and Goldie jumped into a freezing lake, causing them to be stuck in an ice cube for 5 years. In fact, this episode confirms this isn't the only time they've been in situtations that made them age slower. The dance scene from earlier shows them talking about a fountain of youth and several timeless demon dimensions. In an unrelated note, Goldie also offhandedly mentions a necklace that prevents burns, which the camera zooms into for a few seconds. I did not think much of this on my first viewing.

After the story that was captivating that even the driver got too interested in it, Scrooge finally reaches his Manor to find that Goldie barged into his house, and she immediately asks where his half of the map went. One may wonder how she managed to get past Mrs. Beakley, all but shown to be a super spy with great combat abilities, and her trained-in-similar-arts granddaughter.

Well, she did. As the rest of this episode will prove, she's just that awesome. After Scrooge throws a chair at his own nephews after they do the same "Scrooge loves Goldie" shtick, yeah, don't anger Scrooge, Goldie realizes that it must be in Scrooge's top hat. When Scrooge wrestles her down for it, she offers the adventure. Scrooge asks why.

Goldie: Because it's gold, because it's a treasure you never found, and because you're Scrooge McDuck.

Scrooge, Goldie imitating him: You think you know me sooo well!

They decide to go on the adventure. Speaking of the map, we later see it, and it's one of those "dotted line with the X on it" maps. I'd imagine the one that has the X on it could have at least tried to extrapolate the path. I guess I could assume that half was in that skull, but wouldn't Glomgold take it? Whatever.

Goldie puts on her old outfit, and they go into the cave. The entire episode essentially follows a similar path: throughout the adventure, they both accuse each other of trying to sabotage each other. They are totally doing that. Scrooge finds an arrow trap, which he activates by throwing a pebble at it, and accuses Goldie of doing it. Scrooge then stops Goldie from getting stuck in a giant bear trap that he totally didn't set up. Notice the difference there.

They end up at a pulley-controlled elevator, built for one. Not willing to let one person go and get a jump on the lagoon, they have to share the elevator. Of course, this leads to her complaining about his sweat. It's a funny scene.

Not speaking of particularly funny scenes, Glomgold is slowly following them. I'll be honest: his scenes don't really do much for me. All he really does is get hit by all the traps, cuts the rope of the aforementioned elevator, and talks about how Scrooge is taking his girl. He seems to disappear after this scene, because it's better to focus on the scenes with Scrooge and Goldie trying to mess each other up.

One scene has Goldie lighting a trail of gunpowder behind Scrooge, taking both halves of the map with her while he's chasing. In this universe of ducks and dogs that walk upright and talk, this trail of gunpowder leads to a bear. Not a relative of Baloo, but a bear just like in real life. I wonder how that works.

Unlike in real life, Goldie gets cornered by Scrooge riding that same bear. He even reveals that he speaks bear. This show now has just as much talking to non-language-speaking-animals as that other reboot. How can he do this? Because he's Scrooge McDuck. Yeah, that’s a running gag throughout this episode, and it does have a good payoff at the end.

They eventually reach a dead end, which happens to be right next to the frozen lake where they spent 5 years of their lives. This leads to even more backstory. After 5 years of being forced into staring at each other, their frozen scowls slowly turned into smiles. Aw, they really do love each other. While it's certainly romantic to see this, it is a horrifying thought that they were conscious in there.

Of course, there's a caveat: as soon as Goldie's half of the ice melts, she immediately leaves Scrooge behind. Scrooge realized that she loved gold more than him, and Goldie...agrees. Fitting.

They do get to the waterfall made of molten gold, thanks to the help of erosion over a century. Scrooge gets Nanook, the bear, to break the wall they thought was a dead end open in something that would have looked cool in trailers. However, as soon as they bask in the glory, a twist happens. I debated whether or not I should even have these ellipsis, to be honest.

← JAW$! 🦆 Day of the Only Child →

...

...

...

...

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...

Big shock, she was going to betray him in the end, just like Scrooge repeatedly accused her of doing! There is one surprise on top of this: Glomgold decides to show up, after stumbling down a hill because he's Glomgold, and reveals that he teamed up with her to do this ruse! Unlike the last time he tried, this turned out to be true.

Scrooge, telling himself he should have expected this, asks Goldie why she did this after all she did for her. He talks about how he untied her from Nanook...which he happened to tie her to himself. Again, fitting. Her response?

Goldie: Because I'm Goldie O'Gilt!

See, good payoff.

Regardless of what I feel about Glomgold’s involvement in this episode, I do like the flashback scene he describes, which is in this 50's romance comic book-like style. It even ends with him smooching the air. He sure loves that Goldie, he even came up with the shipping name: Glomgoldie.

There's a pickaxe fight that mirrors the dance scene down to certain lines, and a rather shocking scene that does give Glomgold a little more purpose in the plot. I don't want to give away everything, but I definitely questioned whether they would really do what they did.

I only have one thing I will say that will add to this review: the necklace I talked about earlier does become a plot point. What necklace? Well, that was my first impression of that ending, too; it took a second viewing for me to realize it didn't just come out of nowhere.

How does it stack up?

Promising a big adventure that happens to be a huge reference to the original comics, and the return of a classic character, DuckTales 2017 took a huge risk with this episode. As someone who hasn't really read the original stories, I can't judge whether or not it's a good adaptation.

I debated what rating I should give this. It's an entertaining adventure, sure, but it's a little repetitive, and Glomgold just became a third wheel that was more tiring than funny. This one slightly misses the mark for me. In a worse reboot, this would be one of the best episodes, but after Jaw$, it's just merely above average, which is a very high neutral for this show.

Next, the return of another classic character...whether you like him or not.

← JAW$! 🦆 Day of the Only Child →

[camping-with-monsters]

New Duck Duck Goose Character Teaser… have any guesses as to who this could be? Or… what this could be?

Maybe it’s obvious… maybe it’s not…

[madly-handsome]

The Gang’s All Here Chapter 1: Just a Dad in his Thirties

After this chapter I’m going to make a masterlist so it makes everything so much easier. 

Prologue / Chapter 2

Notes are below the tags <3

Word Count: 2952

Pairings: In the tags 

Warnings: Angst, Fluff, kind of dystopian and sci-fi esque, Patton had a thing for a girl, mentions of minor character deaths, implied suicidal thoughts/attempt at the end of the chapter (If there are any more please let me know)

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“Dad guess what happened at school today?”

“It was so cool! Liam did something BIG!”

The yellow, cheddar cheese bus roared back to life, rolling along the unbeaten path. Patton was excited to have his kids back home, and he enjoyed listening to their excited rambles over their days’. His face lit up like the sun, heart beating erratically as it pumped paternal love through his veins. God he loved being a dad! “Ooh what happened?”

“So we were playing duck duck goose at recess,” his son recalled, adjusting his glasses, “And I got picked as the goose from the fastest kid in class AND I CAUGHT HER!”

“He was so fast Dad! The fastest ever!” Fiona gasped, eyes sparkling over her brother’s victory. Patton’s heart melted. His children were the cutest and nobody was allowed to say otherwise or he would physically fight them.

“Aw that’s amazing! And nobody got hurt?” he asked.

Fiona smiled brightly, “Well this other boy tripped and fell and scraped his knee, but Liam didn’t do it, and I got him a bandaid. It had strawberries on it.”

“That’s good to hear. I’m proud of you both!”

Patton pulled his children in a loving embrace, his heart soaring out of his chest. He was so proud of them! And how could anyone not love his little chickadees? Of course, nobody could love them like he did, but just look at them! Their cute ‘lil smiles, their beautiful and loving hearts...agh! He loved doting over them! He didn’t understand how parents could just abandon their kids, especially precious little ones like his own. It sickened him just thinking about it. Every child should be loved, and that love cannot be bought with money. That love is created through memories, happy and sad. It’s being there.

The ivory door revealed their home like Vanna White revealed prizes on Wheel of Fortune, enveloping the family of three in warm tan walls and soft yellow glows. Afternoon sunlight streamed through the open windows, reflecting through the sheer white curtains cascading from their respective curtain rods, the ends glistened with golden knobs. They used to be his mother’s curtains, but she got new ones and Patton practically begged her not to throw them out. Her and Roman found it ridiculous, but it was the little things in life Patton wished to hold onto. The little details nobody wished to pay attention to...he wanted to hold onto them forever. These curtains were included.

The house itself was spacious, the kitchen and living room were the largest rooms of the house. There was a soft, dark sectional and dark wooden coffee table in the living room, the hardwood floors fun for sliding around. The television was hung across from the couch, connected to the wall just below the stairs. The kitchen also had hardwood floors, and a center island. There was plenty of granite counter space, which Patton never took for ‘granite.’ The first thing anyone saw when they first stepped inside was the carpeted staircase leading to the bedrooms. The small bathroom upstairs had a cute shower curtain with ‘lil baby fish, and the mirror was the perfect size for both children to use at the same time.

The kids immediately sat on the floor, pulling off the shoes that confined their socked tootsies for so long. Patton did the same, placing his shoes on the rack along with theirs. With the spring air getting warmer, it was almost time to switch out the winter boots that had been dormant since their last snow storm. He’d save that for later. There were more important matters to address.

“Uncle Roman’s going to be visiting tonight.” he said, “I know you’re my perfect little darlings, but please be good for him.” A light smile dusted across his cheeks, “Be the sweet angels I know you are.”

“Sure thing Dad!” they cheered in unison, practically slipping up the steps to the hallway connecting all of their rooms together.

“Bless them both.” he chuckled to himself, sighing as he pulled his phone out of his back pocket. The satisfying click of unlocking his phone made his heart warm, seeing that he was still wanted to someone, even if that someone was his twin brother. Oof! Roman was obviously very excited to watch the little ones again. He tapped on his messages, smiling at Roman’s name at the very top….but there was another number he didn’t recognize….followed by two messages from…..

Virgil? He...hadn’t seen him in years.

He opened his brother’s book of texts first.

Roman: I shall arrive at four. I have so many plans Patton I’m so excited!

Roman: We shall have a slumber party in the living room, possibly watch all the Disney movies you own.

Roman: Ooh I might bring my own too. Too late I am.

Roman: ANYWAY so we’ll most likely start out with Moana since that’s Fiona’s favorite at the moment, and then Liam still liked Toy Story right?

Roman: Or did he change his favorite? It’s been a year and usually children change their minds very often so I’m just wondering. <3

Roman: Either way we’ll watch all of our favorites and then we’ll watch the others that we admire greatly but aren’t exactly our favorites. You’re really missing out Pat.

Roman: But.... I shall be the best knight for your prince and princess! And if you need me to stay the night I will.

Roman: They are in good hands, and I will always be here for you.

Roman: Also I will most likely bring more blankets because I know you have plenty already but you left a few at my place last time you came over.

Roman: They are of the softest fluff and I wish not to steal them

Roman: Yet~ ;)

Roman: With your permission? Perhaps? If not then it is inevitable for they are still in my custody!

Roman: I am on my way! See you soon puffball <3

Patton’s smile grew after scanning through each message, thankful for his brother’s playful antics. He did very well watching children, but his love of performances and entertainment drove him into the magnificent man he is today. Sure they didn’t always get along as kids, especially when they were young and still trying to learn what sharing was, but after that they were the perfect duo. Patton overshared his toys with Roman, and Roman would always protect him from the bullies at school. Anyone who touched Patton got a plastic sword to the head. His brother always wore prince costumes when they were youngsters, even to school, and he’d get made fun of for it. It hurt Patton to remember those unkind words, but Roman stood strong and said, “If I like it, then why does it matter to you?”

Roman was his hero.

Even as teenagers, when Patton would wear his favorite cat hoodie and pastel pink jeans, slurs and insults would fly through his ears. He could handle it alone, but Roman would always be close by and ready to pick a fight anyway. He got into so much trouble back then, and every time Patton would say he was fine and Roman shouldn’t risk his education for him. The other would always laugh and say “You’re my other half puffball. We were supposed to be the same person at some point, remember? I love you like I love me. You’re worth more than you think.”

Needless to say, Roman had been his best friend since they both came out of the womb.

Patton was grateful to have him in his life.

With a nostalgic sigh, he lightly tapped out of their messages. He’d express his gratitude to Roman while he wasn’t driving. He knew how his brother could be with texting and driving every now and then, and if he could somehow prevent any potential crashes he would.

The unknown number and Virgil’s name blared through his eyes, and he couldn’t tell which one was scarier to open. The unknown number wrote an elaborate paragraph, while Virgil had sent him two messages. Virgil was...well…

They used to be best friends...but they hadn’t seen each other since the incident.

He had to be strong. Strong for his children, strong for Roman, strong for himself…and if Virgil was finally and officially calling it off after so long then...honestly what took him so long...but Patton didn’t blame him. He could see why Virgil would want an official goodbye...in text.

His eyes darted across the small phrases, his fear turning to...a different kind of fear.

Virgil: sup dude, been forever. Miss you and all that mumbo jumbo….

Virgil: Listen, i know things are still hard, and today’s the worst day for something like this, but Logic took my phone and your number. Got the phone back and this is me but...you know... thought I’d warn you. Said something about one final match or whatever but...your call dude. I’ll get the gang set up if you need me to.

Memories of his glory days made him chuckle.

He hadn’t seen his emo right hand man since...wow. Had it really been five years since that fateful day? Patton found himself missing the makeshift family he had associated himself with for years, his eyes stinging with potential tears at the memories that flooded his mind. It’s been way too long and...maybe it was time he paid a visit.

Me: I’ll be there. Old hangout. Just like old times :)

“Uncle Ro-Ro’s here!” Fiona called, her knuckles rapping against the hollow wooden door that led to Liam’s room.

Patton immediately pocketed his phone, running towards the front door that was merely steps away from him. Peeking through the small window that viewed his driveway, he couldn’t help but smile at Roman’s bright red sports car. It was hysterical how different the two could be at times. Patton never bothered to learn a stick-shift, feeling safe and comfortable with automatic cars and taking an instant liking to the hybrid, eco friendly ones, preferably his Prius. Roman took the road by storm, living on the edge with the top down at all times.

The kids bound down the stairs, giggling as they stood behind their Dad. He moved back to kneel in front of them, hugging them close. “Remember, be good.”

“We wiiiiill,” Liam huffed.

“If he isn’t good I can tell you,” Fiona added.

“W-Well I can tell you when she isn’t good either Dad! ‘Cause I’ll be gooder.”

She shook her head and crossed her arms. “Gooder isn’t a word Liam.”

“It is now. I just made it up.”

Patton’s smile didn’t waver, yet he gave his tone just a tad bit of firmness. “Ah ah! Be good!”

“Yes Dad.” They both deflated, shoving their hands in their pockets.

Opening the door, he was immediately greeted with bright white teeth and a wide grin. The kids ran to him immediately, hugging at his hips. “Uncle Ro-Ro!” They giggled, both squealing as Roman somehow picked them both up at the same time.

“Your knight in shining armor has arrived~!”

“Welcome your highness!” Patton giggled, stepping to the side and bowing extravagantly. “Please make yourself at home.”

The kids scrambling out of his hold and ran back upstairs, probably getting all of their Disney toys and movies out for Roman. The thought made the dad feel a bit guilty for not being able to stay...but...

Roman unzipped his knee high boots, pulling out his feet with grace and placing the shoes on the rack with the others. “As I have been doing ever since you bought this house.”

With a hearty laugh, he maneuvered into the spacious living room so he could drop his bag unceremoniously on the couch. Immediately after doing so, he gave Patton the tightest hug he’s ever experienced. Warmth seeped out of him, comforting Patton immediately. “It’s been a while.” Roman whispered, the woeful expression making him look older than he was. “How are you fairing?”

“After all these years?” The father smiled sadly, thankful he was still in Roman’s thoughts. “It’s not as bad as it was. I um...well….here’s the thing…”

“Changing it up this year, aye?”

Did he...how did he know? Roman knew he was a part of the gang but…?

“Virgil hit me up,” he chuckled, holding his own phone up in response, the sparkling gold case making Patton smile. The man changed his phone case every week, and every one was so Roman.

Patton awkwardly fiddled with the sleeves of his cat hoodie, picking off the little fuzz balls that accumulated there. “I’m surprised Logic still remembers me after all this time honestly. It’s been so long since our last battle.”

Something glinted in his brother’s eyes, but Roman quickly glanced away as soon as he’d noticed. “It has been a while hasn’t it? Look Patton I….you know how I felt about the gang. I never liked the idea of you potentially getting caught. The authorities caught a bunch of big name gangs recently. Thankfully you haven’t been meeting regularly for a while but...you always seemed so happy. Spreading good in an ungodly fashion? And you say I’m the role model in the family! I...I’m proud of you Patton. Even if I didn’t say it out loud in the past as much as I should have...I really am.”

“So...you want me to go?” Patton asked, mouth gaping at the confession, “You...you want me to reconnect with them?”

A soft smile dusted his face. “Why not? I got the kids and your number. Everything will be okay. And hey! It’s one more time. If things aren’t okay, you can always back out. I’m sure your other family wouldn’t be mad at you.”

Patton sprung into his arms, all feelings of sadness and doubt immediately escaping him. If his brother, his hero, felt that it was right to go? He had to, and he was excited about it. “I love you so much Ro. Thank you for always being there for me. Even if you weren’t always physically there, you still went out of your way for me and...I’m the luckiest brother ever.”

He chuckled, “You say that now, but just you wait. You’ll be missing those blankets and I’m not giving them back. Ever.”

“You can have them if you want them so badly.”

Roman pouted, “You’re supposed to get angry about it, not agree with me.”

For the first time since...the incident...Patton felt at peace with himself, happy that he can meet his old pals and...slightly scared but he’ll jump over that hurdle when he’s ready. To speak with his brother like this...and to be able to see the gang again? This was the best feeling ever!

Roman hesitated, pulling back to hold his twin’s shoulders. “Be safe on the roads. The cops are getting fishier than usual. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do...which is a small list so you really shouldn’t have to worry and I know I shouldn’t have to worry, but I’m your big brother! By four minutes I know but still! Just...please...”

Warmth enveloped around his heart. Roman was the best brother ever. “I’ll call you first if anything happens.”

With a flourish of the hand, Roman gave an overly elegant bow. “Then I bid you adieu~!”

Patton rushed upstairs to his room, adrenaline surging through his veins. His mind and heart raced, reminiscing over the jokes and clever comebacks he’s shared with them. Thoughts of Logic suddenly filled his brain, remembering the awful jokes and teasing banters between the two of them, watching as their gangs molded together perfectly. How they’d still try to remain professional, but it was just so hard whenever Logic crumbled over his punishments.

He missed the simpler times.

Apparently Logic did too.

Speaking of odd things, he never did read that last text. Virgil said it was him so...what could it be?

He changed into one of his old red polos and black dress pants, reminiscing over the old days. The shirt was a bit tight though, so he settled for the pastel pink one instead, sliding his arms through the sleeves of his trench coat with ease. The familiar weight released a sigh from his chest, calming him in ways he didn’t think he needed to be calmed. It still smelled like his old cologne too, causing nostalgia to wash over him yet again.

As an older man nearing his thirties, he’d come to realize how often he looked back to the past. Whenever he thought about the gang, which was practically the beginning of his life. Or when he thought of the birth of his kids. When he’d think back to the happy times he shared with...her…

No. None of that today.

He had to be happy pappy Patton!

He was going to do what he did best, meaning he wasn’t allowed to sulk over her lack of existence. With a broad smile plastered over his face, he thought of the good times so he could produce the sunshine.

It was going to be okay.

……..

Five years ago he...he nearly….

Ready as he’d ever be, or so he thought...because he thought he was ready...finger resting against the trigger like a child nestled in it’s parents’ arms, feeble and weak. A baby bird incarcerated in the nest within its mind for far too long.

The broken cries of their death sentences ate at his chest like acid.

Hot. Wet. Hurt.

“It’s the only logical thing to do.”

“S-Sir?”

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Tags for this fic:  @not-so-innocent-bi-sander @pattonwillfight @nightmarejasmine @adfandertime @panic-at-theeverywhere @cloudchaser7 @sander-sideblog @creepyfloof @wrenweasly  @logicallyanxious-morallyromantic @bloodropsblog @cconstantregret @chaosgaminggirl @toujours-fidele @lala-the-rebel @darandomfandoms @purplepatton @broadwaytheanimatedseries @royallyanxious @am-i-heaven-or-am-i-hell @ab-artist @theclassifiedjackass @imnotverycareful @blubblubfishy @hissesssss @patton-loves-coloring @highfivegirl404 @paxtonlovestea

Creators of the original post: @sandersfanders @sanderssidecanons

A/N: Can’t believe I’m actually keeping up with a schedule. I’m so excited to see how this all turns out! I also just saw Love Simon yesterday and I can’t stop loving it agh <3

Thank you all for the support! It really helps with my motivation with everything. You keep me going, and it might not seem like much, but you really do. Thank you for being you <3

[trashcandroid]

some highlights from webby’s board of stuff! (sorry for not-so-high image quality, i literally took a photo of my tv lol) i tried to post this HOURS ago but tumblr mobile wasn’t working so i had to wait until i had access to my computer.. so sorry if i’m late to the party lol.

explanations/ideas about each highlight under the cut!!

22+1400=87?

i’m not at all sure what this could mean. it’s not even mathematically correct (but maybe that’s why there’s a question mark at the end?) i mean.. the 87 might relate to the year the original ducktales was released, 1987, but that’s really the only thing that relates to anything

friend or F.O.W.L

FOWL stands for Fiendish Organization for World Larceny, and is the main organization of supervillains in Darkwing Duck. they also appear in the episode “double-o-duck” of the original ducktales, but a lot of DWD stuff is from that episode

Scotty McDuck -> Alternate Timeline? ???

scotty mcduck was included as scrooge’s father in the family tree created by carl barks (writer of the old duck comics, created many of the characters). however, he was never really called by this name, and in “the life and times of scrooge mcduck” he is called fergus mcduck, and is a prominent character. so it would make sense that webby would think scotty and fergus were different people from alternate timelines

the Traitor

this is right above the list of names of other relatives, but i really have no clue what it could be about. very interesting though…

Nerther (?) World War II / Who is D.B.? GiGi?

hm. well, donald duck originally served in WW2, but i don’t think that’s canon in this new series cause he’d be really old. as for the “nerther” part (if that’s even what it says), the only thing i can think of is if it has something to do with the netherlands??

for DB, i did some research and some characters in the disney duckverse with those initials. the only one i could find is derek blunt from DWD, who appears in one episode and is mentioned in a comic. however it’s worth mentioning he’s a top agent of SHUSH (it’s never revealed what this stands for but it’s the organization that fights against FOWL) so that might be relevant?? maybe??

and i spent a long while looking but couldn’t find anything about “gigi” >:(

Good for the Goose [+ picture of gladstone gander]

the reason why this sparked my interest was because gladstone is preeetty far away from all the other relatives, and the phrase “good for the goose.” gladstone is a (part) goose who is extremely lucky, so that could explain the phrase (”good” meaning just.. good stuff), but i don’t think that’s it..

The Last tREASURE

this is blocked by webby’s head in the original shot i got but i managed to get another one where it’s less blocked! i couldn’t time it quite right but believe me that’s what it says (yes, it’s not plural, i checked). anyway once again.. not quite sure what this might mean. maybe it has to do with the last treasure scrooge got before he became a “has-been” ??

[entergamingxp]

Half-Life: Alyx review – a legend returns in elegant form • Eurogamer.net

The Strider is the greatest of all Half-Life’s creations, if you ask me. Sure, you could argue that it’s just another spin on HG Wells’ tripods, but seriously, look at the thing! Those legs, so horribly long and horribly jointed, that hideous hint of poultry flesh and machinery spliced together, all pain and wrongness. In Half-Life 2, I watched one of this awful lot stoop to duck under a bridge, and the thing about the Strider is that it never reminds you of just one thing, always a horrible bodging-together – almost a flamingo as its joints worked, yet almost grandparent nipping up into the attic for something heavy too. An internal life: that sense of self-preservation and cruel intelligence they have, of seeing only their own priorities. That sense of being autonomous in the moment, but also deeply mission-driven. They give me goose-bumps because it’s so entirely clear that they can probably get goose-bumps themselves.

Half-Life: Alyx review

Developer: Valve

Publisher: Valve

Platform: Reviewed on PC with Index

Availability: Out 23 March on PC

I had been waiting for this moment, then. Half-Life: Alyx, set five years before the events of Half-Life 2 and delivered sixteen years – is that possible? – since Half-Life 2 and thirteen years since Episode Two, the last installment. (How we had talked at the time about that gap between the first two Episodes. We had no idea.) Suddenly, City 17 lies before me once more. I am on a rooftop somewhere: Alyx Vance, 19-year-old daughter of Eli Vance, on reconnaissance for the resistance.

The metropolis is a mess of alien cables, black and heavy, draped thoughtlessly and sagging over honey-coloured European architecture with its weary finials and tiles and crenelations. It’s VR, so a moment or two to look at the creamy skybox dithering into distant mist, then another moment to delight in a nearby radio, fiercely analogue tech, that can be picked up and heaved around, the dials turning and moving a little marker along the display, an aerial that properly extends and everything.

Behind me, inside a little conservatory, there is a video call from Dad, and more importantly there’s a range of felt pens that have been used on the dirty glass to map Combine movements, but which can also be used to – what? – do anything really. Graffiti, Killroys, my daughter’s name in my own instantly recognisable handwriting, somehow captured inside a video game space. I’m on the move, so I heave back a hidden door and explore a few dingy Winston Smith bedsit rooms. Then out again onto a different ledge and, do tell me, what in the world is that sound?

That sound is a strider, horribly large and horribly close, heaving its carcass body up the side of a building, stepping where it wants because the crumbling world of human things is not really a concern for an alien invader. It stops. Has it seen me? I stare up – because it’s VR, I’m actually staring up – at this awful, wretched thing that I have always loved, and which is now here more fully than ever before, its knotty joints bolstered with servo-motors and shards of the Combine’s black-slate tech. It hasn’t seen me. It doesn’t care. It turns and unplugs a clump of cables from a nearby building – the human world is its junction box – and then it’s off into the distance. And yes! I had been waiting for this moment. And this moment did not let me down.

Not my only encounter with a strider in Half-Life: Alyx, but I’ll honestly try to spoil little more than that. What I should say is that for the last few days I have been a bit of a strider myself, strangely focused on a private agenda, strangely blind to the finer details of the human landscape around me, as I have navigated City 17 with a VR headset covering my eyes – two worlds, one laid over the other. All this, as I’ve taken on headcrabs and Combine troopers and all the rest, all this as I have puzzled and rewired and upgraded – while simultaneously bodging around my own PC set up by my desk. House cats and scarves dumped on the backs of chairs startled me when I brushed against them at the wrong moments – generally moments involving headcrabs. My daughter, moving a doll’s house behind me one afternoon, almost finished me off in a boss fight when we bumped together. “When you’re behind me, tell me you’re behind me!” I said. Five minutes later, when I was deep in the horror of the underground somewhere, she obliged, having snuck up close before announcing, “I’M BEHIND YOU, DADDY.”

In other words, Half-Life was always going to work in VR. But what’s fascinating is how it works. If you’re expecting an explosion of let’s-try-anthing creativity a la Boneworks, a game in which every conceivable kind of physics interaction is gleefully gimmicked together as you tumble through its wonderfully scrappy campaign, you’re going to be a bit disappointed. Half-Life would rather focus its ambitions – and in turn rein-in the scope of what you can do – than risk breaking the illusion or frustrating the player. Something is lost in that decision, certainly. It’s Alyx’s way or the highway. But a lot is gained too.

As a result, Alyx is marked by restraint. Which is to say, I think, that it understands that VR itself is still such a continuous gimmick for many people that it can play things straight, paring the Half-Life concept back closer than ever before. Yes, it has radios to play with and the inevitable VR piano to prod out a Goldberg Variation on, but it’s not one of those VR games that serves as the equivalent of those early 3D movies where people were forever throwing knives at the screen. Most of the time, it uses VR to steadily put you deeper and deeper into the fabric of this grimy, flaking Victory Gin world.

This is a simple story, direct yet consequential, studded with wonderful set-pieces, most of which are pitched towards a sort of sci-fi-tinged survival horror: you, a gun, ammo scavenging and them lurking all around as you slowly inch towards your next destination. VR is used to continue the Half-Life ambition, begun with that tram-ride back at Black Mesa and extended via the Gravity Gun and the magnifying glasses and the facial animation tech of Half-Life 2 to truly embed players in its reality. Cats, children, scarves and bookcases aren’t just victims of this approach. They feel like an important part of it.

The basics are straightforward. All I’m going to tell you of the plot is that you’re trying to meet up with your dad and figure out what big strange thing the Combine’s currently so excited about. Events zip along quite briskly and objectives are always clear. If there’s a problem, it’s that the game is hemmed in a little, in terms of narrative, because it so clearly has one specific job to do.

The controls are as clear-headed as the narrative. Playing room-scale or simply standing with a more confined space, you can choose one of four movement options, two of which work brilliantly as teleport jobs while the other two offer continuous movement guided by either the hand or the head and seemed to me pretty clumsy and nausea-inducing. Whatever movement you choose, one hand generally holds a weapon or gadget – switching them is as easy as pressing a button and waving your arm up and down – while the other is always free for interacting with the environment, opening doors, grabbing ammo clips from your backpack and ramming them home, priming grenades before lobbing them.

Both hands wear gravity-gloves, a cobbled-together precursor of the gravity gun. They’re beautiful things. Hold your hands up and it’s like some addled genius has built mittens for your out of diodes and Technical Lego, while little displays show you your health and ammo levels. These things are not for pulling sawblades out of walls and firing them into crowds of zombies, though. They’re precision affairs, a little flick of the wrist yanking a highlighted object out of the environment and bringing it into your hand with a neat little slap.

The gloves have been created by a new character, Russell, played by Rhys Darby, who despite being cast as a genius, stays wonderfully close to Murray, the dim and easily bruised band manager from Flight of the Conchords. Because Alyx also speaks – a performance from Ozioma Akhaga that is forever revealing different facets of personality, while being wonderfully alive to graveyard wit – the game is essentially a two-hander, Alyx out in the world while Russell monitors her progress from a distance, cowardly, prideful, tender and quirky by turns. I love this combination. Beyond anything else, following up the biggest video game in the world with a Rhys Darby simulator is a total power move.

The texture of the game these two travel through is relentlessly – and gloriously – practical, pragmatic and down-to-earth. This is a game about navigating space and killing everything you meet, but it’s all so carefully wrought. A nervous skittering on the soundtrack is ultimately the buzzing of an old fluorescent light tube. Puzzles are made of gravity, stacked boxes, and wood used to prop open windows. These challenges can be maddeningly clever, but Newton always keeps them honest at the same time. Elsewhere, a vaguely celestial sounding clue in the main plot turns out to have a very mundane solution, while car posters you pass on the remains of the subway show boxy Soviet saloons accompanied by ad-talk that’s even more oppressive than usual: Reality Defined. This is science-fiction with both feet on the ground.

This works because the interaction, enlivened by VR, is tangible and playful. It elevates everything, from wiring puzzles – a real theme of this game, using both a gadget that allows you to see electricity flowing through gates inside the walls, and a bit of good-old-fashioned cable-following – to hunting for ammo and other supplies, including the worm-eaten hockey pucks of grey stuff you use as currency in the machines that allow you to upgrade your weapons.

Weapons are real presences because of VR. It’s not just that you have to change clips and pull that slidey thing at the top of the pistol before you can shoot the zombie that’s already groaning towards you. It’s that they have a complex, weighty, rattly presence in your hand. You can sense these guns are each one thing made from many smaller things working together. Valve has always been good with this stuff, and the upgradable weapons of Alyx are very special. From that pistol and a shotgun to something a little more exotic, they’re filled with character and a sense of power, even before you start adding laser sites and bigger clips.

Gun management as well as gunplay, wiring puzzles as well as hacking challenges, traversal with physics hurdles so nicely weighted that you can predict the outcomes in your head: all of the various aspects of Alyx appear simple, but they all work together to bed you deeper and deeper into the game until you reach the point where, if you’re like me, you’re talking back to Russell out loud as you catch up after each fight.

Oh man, but never forget: at the very center of it is all is those incredible gloves. The gravity gun has always had a habit of working its ways into other games for me. Not directly, of course. It’s just that I’ll be playing Gears of War and I’ll see a grand piano or a panel truck and think: I wish I could just lob that somewhere. The gravity gloves have already gone beyond that. They have a habit of getting into my head. I’ll be lying on the sofa and thinking: I wish I could just flick that book from the other side of the room into my hand. At the front door I’ll wish I could turn around and grab my keys from the stairs. The things I could do with Jaffa Cakes, mate.

The gloves are a less ostentatious kind of magic than that offered in Half-Life 2 – again, you won’t be chucking a car at anyone with them – but in some ways they’re a more startling kind of magic. I was half an hour in and pausing mid-reload to pull an interesting bit of set design off a distant shelf and inspect it. The levels are filled with bits and pieces to pick up and examine: cutlery, pipes, video cassettes. Chuck in the reloading and this is stuff you can get good at – you can master it until you’re fighting through the apocalypse and foppishly checking out the detailing at the same time. Half-Life has always sought to startle, which is probably why the last instalment came out in 2007. The right material, the right opportunities, take time to present itself.

What detailing that lost decade or so has allowed for! This is a game that has been allowed to percolate. City 17, strangely noble in its ravaged state, a faded relic being steadily eaten by alien technology, is still one of the great locations in video games, even if you tend to just see bombed out apartment buildings, train yards and subway stations for a lot of the campaign. But the greatest details this time around are the Combine tech, which has never been so monolithically grim. Outside it’s grey sheeting and stark angles: designs that could give you a nasty cut. Inside, though, it’s often big chunks of offal instead of circuitry, as if Darth Vader had teamed up with Fergus Henderson, the man behind the nose-to-tail eating movement. Health stations, pretty much unchanged from the first game, are so much more visibly present in VR. You inspect the squealing white worm that is squished to make the lurid Mountain Dew healing substances, and then you have to pull down a plate and rest your hand on it, enjoying the dancing jabs of a dozen little syringes while you scan the surroundings for oncoming threats.

All of this stuff comes together with wonderful set-pieces. Due to the exhausting nature of VR combat, massive pile-ons like Nova Propsekt are out of the question, ditto the open-world ram-raiding of the White Forest. Instead, troops are dropped in surgically – their strangled tannoy barking giving you a moment to panic and hunt for ammo and hopefully come up with a plan. As for the bestiary there’s a shocking new enemy who I won’t spoil, but even the old guard return and bring a vivid kind of enhanced fear with them. I had dreaded VR headcrabs, and then the game not only introduces them but immediately loses the first one in some pipework. That was a nice two minutes. (I regret to inform you that there’s a new kind of headcrab now too, even if its design can’t quite match the queasy supermarket horror of the original.) Elsewhere it feels like a testament to the brilliance of the original creature design on this series that you feel dread rather than nostalgia whenever one of the classics turns up again. Or maybe it’s another sign of the sheer weight of immersion Alyx can conjure: there’s a real sense of apprehension when the game leads you out of the light and back underground for a spell. You live in these spaces while you move through them.

There are ingenious set-pieces, increasingly piling up towards the end of the campaign, but I’m so struck through by the sheer thrift of a lot of it. It’s that restraint again: make the VR work, get a handful of killer things out of it, and then repeat and remix without breaking the spell. There are Hollywood moments that will stick with me, but I also remember being in a room filled with oil drums while a tank of explosive gas was being winched up towards the mouth of one of those horrible limpet things that sit on the ceiling. That’s the kind of clock Valve likes to put in a scene to add suspense. Hitchcock would be proud: you can see all the moving parts and yet the magic is still there.

And the more I played of Alyx, the more I thought about how VR and Half-Life were made for each other. And the more this left me thinking about the G-Man, the shadowy figure in a suit who turns up at crucial moments throughout the series and does intriguing stuff. The G-Man is the focal point for a lot of lore conspiracies in Half-Life. Who is he? Is he human? Is he Gordon Freeman himself?

Let’s not worry whether he makes an appearance in Alyx or not. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Because throughout the course of this game, I think I worked out who he really is. He’s Valve. Think about it: inscrutable Valve, a company that seems to see further than most, that seems to have a separate agenda to that of most developers – and who, granted, doesn’t always seem to be entirely benevolent. The G-Man disappears for long periods of time, but then turns up just as events have caught up with his intentions. It’s his way or no way at all. He waits for the right pieces to appear, and then he makes the most of them with little apparent effort.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/03/half-life-alyx-review-a-legend-returns-in-elegant-form-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=half-life-alyx-review-a-legend-returns-in-elegant-form-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[vegas-glitz]

Fun Spring Activities for Infant Boomers

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Who isn't going to like spring when for a longer time times brighten the sky, birds sing joyfully, and trees get started sprouting vibrant new leaves? Even in this article in the California desert wherever I live, wildflowers bloom, jacaranda trees explode with purple bouquets, and cacti burst with flowers in outstanding hues.

Since a absence of sunlight throughout limited, wintertime days can adversely have an impact on more mature adults' moods, usually are not you newborn boomers completely ready to celebrate this magnificent time of year? I have shown 6 enjoyment spring activities child boomers can appreciate as temperature permits, no issue your age.

Consider A Spring Break

Who suggests faculty students are the only types who can choose a spring break? We baby boomers get itchy ft also and there are tons of sunny spots to check out. U.S. News' list of prime five cheap spring split destinations included Puerto Vallarta, Cabo San Lucas, New Orleans, South Padre Island, and Vital West.

This is the great time to go to one of the Nationwide Parks right before the summer crowds hit. In accordance to a research, baby boomers have found extra national parks than other generations - on average 14. But because there is 58 in the U.S., there's a lot far more to see!

Require to keep closer to household? A weekend trip to a local seaside or lake could be just the ticket. Or merely delight in a Sunday push on a street you've got by no means taken before. Hire a convertible for further pleasurable and wind your way to a close by town or park you have been meaning to check out.

Plant a Backyard

A person of my favourite pursuits is finding out seeds or vegetation at the yard centre with my grandchildren and planting them when we get property.

The joy of strolling outdoors, having fun with the splendor of greenery shining in the sunlight, the sound of bees buzzing nearby, plopping an irresistible strawberry in your mouth, and then gathering vegetables and deliciously fragrant herbs for a recipe - what improved way to celebrate spring!

If you really don't have room for a garden, go to a Farmer's Market place.

Consume Al Fresco

Spring is eventually here and we have that precious excess hour's daylight. Head outside the house, have a picnic at the park or some other scenic space, and delight in ingesting fresh new food items with a look at.

Or merely toss a brilliant and cheerful tablecloth on your patio table, add some clean-cut bouquets into soup cans painted in spring colors, and a few floral napkins. Then love a magical spring meal with...relatives or close friends outdoors to welcome the time.

Emotion lazy? Take in exterior at a nearby cafe. Or invite some mates in excess of, get out your fantastic china, and get pleasure from an afternoon tea celebration on your patio.

Carry the Outside In

Transform out your curtains with a sheer, billowy, or normal cloth. You may possibly even want to paint a place a lively spring coloration or deliver new existence to previous furniture with a coat of fresh new white paint. If you are undertaking some spring cleaning, be confident and wash your home windows so you can love your look at outside.

Set up some window packing containers and plant some herbs or brilliant spring bouquets. Get some showy tulips or daffodils with their vibrant, cheery colors or clip some spring blossoms and display screen them in your dwelling.

Be certain and open up your home windows to listen to a spring shower or just take pleasure in a mild spring breeze. Choose a few calming deep breaths and delight in all that fresh air.

Perform Outside the house with Your Grandchildren

Oh, the pleasurable you can have with your grandchildren all through springtime! Trip bikes, enjoy tennis, or soar on a trampoline. Take pleasure in some gardening or have a fancy picnic in the park.

Explore the neighborhood with a butterfly net in hand. Establish a chicken property collectively and draw in wildlife you can get pleasure from looking at with each other.

Or introduce your grandchildren to some previous-fashioned outdoor games like Kick-the-Can, Red Rover, Purple Mild-Green Mild, or Duck-Duck-Goose. They will enjoy it!

Consider a Hike

This is a no-brainer, but put on your climbing boots, pack up some water and treats, and go find out the wonderful outdoor. We all know that newborn boomers will need to preserve going to stay wholesome and this is a fun way to do it.

No surprise, a new analyze reveals that walking or climbing in character can provide you internal peace, pleasure, and happiness. My partner and I have had several nice afternoons making an attempt out some community hiking trails. I'd really recommend it!

If your health and fitness does not make it possible for a vigorous hike, choose a light stroll on a deserted beach with your cherished a single or acquire a stroll all-around the block. Just get out there and enjoy the sunshine!

These are just a number of suggestions, I am sure you can appear up with much more. Whatever you decide on to do, get rid of that winter coat as shortly as the climate enables, seize a pair of scandals, and get out there and delight in the fleeting glory of spring!

Supply by Julie Gorges