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aetherialpiplup108 · 6 months

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Okay, I've finished Doom at Your Service and I will definitely gush about how much I love it but first I need to provide a slightly unhinged, subjective rant about this show reminding me why I hate love triangles.

Roughly 30-40% of DAYS revolves around a love triangle between Dong-Kyung's best friend and writer Na Ji-na, chief editor Cha Joo-ik, and Ji-na's high school lover/Joo-ik's roommate Lee Hyun-gu. One thing I will say is that I like or at least don't mind these characters. Ji-na has a fun personality and is great when she's with anyone other than the two guys, Hyun-gu has a pretty sweet bond with Seon-Kyung, and while I'm not the biggest Joo-ik fan (sorry, the stoic, dry humor types don't usually do it for me), he has his moments and I like his interactions with Dong-Kyung because she balances him out well, adding life and humor to their conversations.

My issues start with the love-triangle's premise itself. I get the story went with the "first love hits different" concept but Ji-na not getting over someone from high school to the extent that she'd design every single male character she writes after him, use his name as her penname, and actively pine hopelessly 10+ years later is really unbelievable to me. I'd be willing to suspend my disbelief if there was depth added to their relationship but all we're shown is a single scene of Ji-na stopping in a hallway and feeling a bit of infatuation that tells her he's the one. And in the present, literally zero time is spent addressing why Ji-na likes either of them or why they like her. This is somewhat helpful since it proves why she's incompatible with Hyun-gu but was sorely needed to describe why Joo-ik liked her because maybe I missed something but he seemed annoyed with or just tolerant of her for a large part of the runtime. They did have a decent conversation in episode 16 so I guess there's that.

Also, all three characters are at their worst when interacting with each other. The feisty, assertive Ji-na we know when she talks to the Tak's is a fumbling mess or at least very subdued when running into either of the guys. At first I felt a little bad for Hyun-gu being consistently hammered by everyone including his roommate/best-friend of 10 years for the cardinal sin of ghosting (I get that it was a horrible thing to do and that an apology was needed but he was young and dumb and again, it happened years ago) but he totally lost any sympathy from me with his epic confession that boiled down to: "even if you like someone else, date me, since I liked you first." Granted, this has to be a deliberate choice to illustrate that he's still a kid in serious need of growth but ughhh.

And Cha Joo-Ik comes off as manipulative and superior when he decides that Ji-na and Hyun-gu should not be together (which, fair) and prevents them from meeting and lying to both, effectively taking choices right out of Ji-na's hands (not fair). And unlike Hyun-gu, he never gets called out on this. Also, why was kissing Ji-na out of pity (a random girl he just met) the only option to console her over like, I don't know, talking to her or getting one of her friends?

The complex relationship between Hyun-Gu and Joo-Ik was by far the highlight of this whole debacle (they should have just gotten together instead) and I wished more time was spent on it because Hyun-gu's growth towards accepting responsibility for his flaws was impactful and the whole "graduation" concept would probably have been more effective if given context to their tutor/mentee bond. That one scene where Hyun-gu asks Joo-ik to stay in touch only to get told that was impossible for the time being was kind of sad because it's disappointing a 10-year friendship is dissolved that quickly. But it's also not surprising since Joo-ik seemed to resent liking him lmao. The end of that conversation and the affection shown was cute though.

Overall, the love triangle just cycles around with Ji-Na barely being allowed to make a choice between the two guys fighting over her (with them consistently saying things like "I need to take what's yours", it really felt like they were more invested in whatever the hell was going on between them vs actually liking Ji-na or even considering her as a person) and others just conveniently informing her that she likes Joo-ik. The penultimate episode where Dong-Kyung urges both Joo-ik and Ji-na to get together quickly (done so out of her personal experiences but still) instead of telling Ji-Na to focus on herself feels like someone took a cheese grader to my nerves.

I did, however, love the conclusion to Ji-na and Hyun-gu's relationship and the closure it provided. I thought their acceptance of the breakup and decision to move on from each other was really beautiful cinematically, acted out very well, and also had a serene melancholic feel that I enjoyed. Honestly, if they just focused on the two falling out of love and ended it there, I probably wouldn't have minded the subplot that much.

Okay, glad that's out of my system now. The funny part is that that I don't even care about this that much but that doesn't mean I won't write an essay on it.

#doom at your service #criticism #na ji-na #cha joo-ik #lee hyun-gu #i liked this show a lot!#but not the subplot lol #might have been a little harsh

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anti-spop · 7 months

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I barely engage in SPOP fandom stuff anymore for many reasons but I do enjoy your blog from time to time whenever a thought about how poorly written Catra was enters my head. During the show I kept feeling like I was supposed to pity her, empathise with her and root for her but all I felt was increasing disappointment. She’s got so much potential and I don’t dislike her. I love her character design and the odd moment when she does Cat Things. It’s just…there was absolutely nothing about her relationship with Adora that made me hope they’d end up together. Like for sure LGBTQ+ relationships shouldn’t be sanitized and perfect, but there just wasn’t anything….there? resembling love or support from Catra for most of the show.

On the other hand, what I wasn’t expecting was for Hordak of all people to make me begin to consider to leaving my toxic church and abandoning a lot of very harmful self-beliefs. Something about that moment where he realised nothing he could ever do would be good enough for Horde Prime hit home for me. Didn’t expect that but it’s changed my life for the better, which makes it all the more irritating that the show writers didn’t do a better job with Catra.

Yeah, I'm mostly following like, one or two blogs who post more actively about SPOP (and they're both critical of the show). Honestly, most people I follow on Tumblr don't care about SPOP anymore. I think they all dropped it once season 5 ended.

And same! There are some aspects I still like about Catra, like her design and the Cat Things (I am not immune to cute cat noises), save for some sympathetic moments like the ones with Scorpia. She had so much potential but C//A ruined her completely. If Catra wasn't so dependent on Adora then maybe she could've had a more genuine character development, but she's just stuck as being Adora's possessive and petty girlfriend.

I'm glad Hordak helped you realize that! Although he didn't get more screentime, and the cult trauma ended up being used to make us feel more sorry for Catra than Hordak and the other clones (especially since Wrong Hordak is a joke the entire time), I agree that his arc ended up being more compelling than Catra's. I honestly wish Hordak and Horde Prime's dynamic was shown more often, or earlier on. I only remember it being introduced in season 3 and they don't talk about it that much later on (correct me if I'm wrong). But it did give us an insight to Hordak and I thought it was pretty interesting. It's too bad Horde Prime only officially appeared in the season 4 finale, so he's a rather shallow villain.

It's odd because Hordak has, in theory, less development and screentime in comparison to Catra, but in the end she never actually changes. She just changed sides and not for the right reasons. Catra only joined the Rebellion because she had nowhere else to go. She didn't even save Glimmer for the good reasons, she just did it for Adora. You'd think Catra would learn better after season 4... but she only got a haircut that wasn't even her choice and remained an asshole towards Adora and the princesses. It's such a shame.

#asks #spop critical

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sapphanimates · 8 months

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Sonic OC Showdown Ask Game!

✨️ - How did you come up with the OC's name?

Trace's name originates from the same oc tutorial video I watched when creating her. One of the example characters was named Trace, after their ability to sneak around without a trace, and I thought it was cool.

🌼- How old are they? (approximate age range)

I'm thinking mid-to-late twenties. But that might change depending on how I structure events in my AU.

🌺- Do they have any love interests?

Hmm.....

🍕- What is their favorite food?

Applesauce! The air slits in her muzzler are just big enough for her to fit in and drink through a straw; applesauce is just the easiest since it's already pre-pureed and tastes great!

💼- What do they do for a living?

Nothing necessarily. She and the rest of the Daybreak's Angels spend their time either relaxing or on patrol for danger. They defend those who can't help themselves and were most active during Infinite's conquest of Mobius.

🎹- Do they have any hobbies?

Back when she could still speak, Trace loved to sing folk songs from her hometown. She can still be heard occasionally humming these songs quietly to herself.

🎯 - What do they do best?

She's well versed in various physical fighting styles, and now due to her muzzler, she has gained a sharp advantage in silent espionage.

🥊- What do they like to do? What do they hate to do?

She enjoys talking and spending time with her team. She doesn't hate much of anything. Things that are purely mechanical somewhat set her off. She doesn't trust them.

❤️- What is one of your OC's best memories?

The day she met Zess. He helped her when she was all on her own, teaching her sign language, helping her get food, and just overall caring for her. Her life has changed forever thanks to him.

✂️- What is one your OC's worst memories?

Being defeated by the Jackal Clan. It scarred her, mentally and physically. She feels as if she let her people down by letting her cover get blown.

🧊- Is their current design the first one?

NOOOOO. She's definitely had some changes, most of which in outfit designs and colors. Her muzzler was originally a completely different (and severely illogical) shape, and there were a lot more greens and even golds in her design. The most recent change I've made to her design was the addition of the burn scars across her face.

🍀- What originally inspired the OC?

This tutorial by Creative Planet Entertainment I had previously mentioned in the first question. This is the video that taught me how to draw sonic characters in general, albeit poorly. This is also where she got her name, as I said before, and even inspired the idea of a muzzled sonic character! The Tasmanian Devil aspect was unrelated to this video and was chosen purely because it's just a cool and unique animal.

🌂-What genre do they belong in?

what?

💚 - What is your OC's gender identity and sexuality?

She is a sisgender bisexual woman. She/Her pronouns.

🙌 - How many siblings does your OC have?

Unsure. Let's say... she's the middle child of 6 siblings?

🍎- What is the OC's relationship with their parents like?

Good. They care about her well-being, even taking care of her in the early months after the incident. When she left, they were heartbroken.

🧠- What do you like most about the OC?

She's my little baby girl. She was my first real sonic oc, and I'm proud of how much she's grown. She is a mini time capsule of just how much I've developed as an artist and writer when it comes to Sonic.

✏️- How often do you draw or write about the OC?

I'll have swings, just like I do with all the fandoms I'm obsessed with. When I'm in my Sonic cycle, I usually bounce back to working on fleshing out and drawing choice characters from my project; Trace being one of them.

💎- Do you ever see yourself killing off the OC?

Initially, yes. I had an idea of how and when she would die, but it came much too soon, much too jarring, and read like something you'd find in a shock fic. So no. Not now.

💀- Does your character have any phobias?

She is afraid of becoming lethally ill, suffocation, and drowning.

🍩- Who is your OC's arch nemesis or rival?

Infinite, or as she knew him, Zero. They go back all the way from her infiltration of the Jackal Clan camp, to her traumatic silencing, down to the aftermath of his conquest of Mobius.

🎓 - How long have you had your OC?

Since I designed her during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. I actually drew her during my break between virtual classes!

🍥 - How old were you when you made the OC?

Early Teens

@sonic-oc-showdown

#sonic #sonic au #project alacrity #sonic the hedgehog #trace the tasmanian devil #trace propoganda #sonic oc showdown

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ask-de-writer · 8 months

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FIENDSHIP IS MAGIC

(Part 60 of ?)

18+ readers only (sex scenes)

Return to the Master Story Index

Return to MLP Fan Fiction

FIENDSHIP IS MAGIC

Making Fiends and Influencing Ponies

An Anthro *Tail* of the Mane Six

Part 60 of ? (Work in Progress)

De Writer

67461 words (story in progress)

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This story is age restricted to 18+

years or older!

Users of Tumblr.com are specifically granted the following rights. They may reblog the story provided that all author and copyright information remains intact. They may use the characters or original characters in my settings for fan fiction, fan art works, cosplay, or fan musical compositions.

All sorts of fan art, cosplay, music or fiction is actively encouraged.

///////////////////////

New to the story? Read from the start HERE

//////////////////////

Princess Luna slitted her eyes and laid her ears back as she asked in a tone too mild to be safe for any that her anger was directed to, “Chest lineament and a day off at half pay for a colt with pneumonia? Rent up twenty bits put you at a hardship? Impre Sario was that rude to you both?”

Both Foamy and Clarice nodded. “That's right, Your Highness.”

Suddenly Celestia broke out in a chuckle as she commented, “That explains why he hasn't put on any ballets except The Singing Swan, The Dance of the Sweet Peach Breezy and the Awakening of the Dragon! They are all not only Public Domain, they are widely used as recital pieces for ballet schools! Every dancer knows them!”

Luna, however, was boring in on a different issue entirely! “Foamy, I got your request and gave Impre a benefice for two weeks off at full pay and for up to ten thousand gold in horsepital expenses with an extention if needed. Both were cashed at EQNB with signatures that matched the sample cards.

“Clarice, I have been paying top scale by benefice, which, like Foamy's were all signed to match the sample cards, as required when cashing Royal Benefices.”

Foamy snorted, “Afraid not, Your Highness. Impre always gave us pay packets with coins. None of the troupe, stage hands, set builders or painters, ever saw a benefice. Frankly, we don't trust EQNB at all. We do all of our banking here at Ponyville Trust and Loan. With Grumpy Goat on the Board of Directors, we know that it is dead honest!”

Princess Twilight snickered, “Dead Honest about perfectly describes Grumpeter! Good choice for banking too! All of the Principality banking is done there at PTL. PTL's got over ten times more in liquid assets than EQNB. That's why this Principality is so prosperous.”

Kin added to the mix a bit by offering, “What Foamy and Clarice just told you guys is spot on.”

Foamy and Clarice were not to be deterred from their initial goal, “Now that that's covered, about these dances! Kin, if you can do to us what you did to them,” she pointed at AJ, Rarity and Pinkie, “it would really help us to score these dances. We want to learn to choreograph them properly.

“We really like Princess Twilight's suggestion. It will let us add these dynamite dances to the show without having to work up a new main stage dance and sets. We only need to hang backrop and wings curtains that I know that we already have.”

Pinkie, to call attention, made a metalic BURR by doing a bust shimmy in her coin decorated dancing bra, and stated flatly, “We need Red and Sweet Lawn in on this. I'll bet that they could do backdrops that will really make the dancers stand out! Candy might have some good ideas too! You guys have seen her genius at costume design! I'd lay money on her fixing up something in these dances that would work for pegassi!”

That was when Twilight's mirror sounded a warbling tone!

“What is it, Captain Ranbow Dash?”

“We have some lard butt who claims to be from Canterlot Castle and in charge of the gala! He set off alarms trying to open the locked stage doors! He wants to dump all of Pinkie's scenery into the street to make room for HIS scenery that is on the train coming from Canterlot. He claims that the show will be a ballet called 'The Singing Swan'!”

Celestia chuckled, “Speaking of evil will draw it to you!”

Princess Luna interrupted, “Rainbow, this is Luna. If that lard butt is named Impre Sario, put him on!”

A dusty orange unicorn came to the mirror. He snapped, “Whatever your business, make it quick! I have only a few days to get this fundraiser gala organized!”

“Impre! Look at who you are talking to! YOU have no part in this show!”

“I don't care if you are this pipsqueek local so called Princess! My authority is directly from the Princesses Celestia and Luna! They outrank everypony in this kingdom! I AM IN CHARGE HERE.”

“I am afraid not, Impre. By the Joint Royal Order of Princess Luna, Princess Celestia and Princess Twilight Sparkle, you are removed from ALL responsibility connected to any show or event whatsoever.

“Guard Captain Rainbow Dash, by the authority just referred to, place Impre Sario under Royal Arrest. Cap his horn and put him into a cell until it shall be our Joint Pleasure to see to his case. For a holding charge, put embezzlement of 10,500 golden bits and forgery of a Royal Benefice for personal gain.”

The pony in the mirror was utterly aghast! “You can't do this! I have served you for years!”

Celestia put her horn into the conversation, “We are aware of that, Impre. We are putting the RIS on your case this very morning. While we were speaking to friends recently, I had occasion to look at Foamy's signature card at EQNB. It is a right handed signature. The problem is simple. Foamy is LEFT handed. The Royal Benefice that was cashed for her sick foal Barrel Racer's horsepitalization matched the card. She did not get the money. Luna has verified that by Bridge of Dream.

“If you do not cooperate in your arrest, our Joint Order is for you to be slain where you stand. All clear? No need to like it. Just cooperate or die.”

Foamy, overhearing the conversation was dropjawed! “Kill Impe! I know that he's a jerk, but death?”

Luna smiled but there appeared to be literal fire in her eyes! “Foamy, dear, what he did to you was only the tiniest tip of a very big iceberg. We won't know until the Royal Intelligence Service report is done, but it appears that he was hijacking around a half to two thirds of the ENTIRE Royal Ballet budget. There may be more besides. He did many fundraising events.”

TO BE CONTINUED

<==PREVIOUS ~ NEXT==>

Return to the Master Story Index

Return to MLP Fan Fiction

#FIENDSHIP IS MAGIC #Part 60 of ?#age restricted 18+#MLP Fan Fiction #Written by De Writer #WORK IN PROGRESS

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sterlingarcher23 · 2 years

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- The Heart of Stranger Things -

Obviously Will's monologue means Mike... But does it? The following is more a statement than a complete analysis and only uses a few details. But I'd say that we all had or still have a wrong picture in our heads when it comes to El.

On her heart...

And how they gather around and behind the one whose heart stopped working. How the showrunners subtly told us who became the heart of the party.

This party will fall apart. The reason is that they managed to design Max's character in in a subtle way most don't see. But like her namesake Max Rockatansky, which is in the face of a (post-)apocalyptic Hawkins not a stretch to think of in regards to Season 5, she's a driving factor and a character with leadership characteristics (empowering others like El, creating a shared vision, leading by example... I could point out all the 5 principles of Leadership and they fit like a glove) similar to Nancy but also not been put center stage. This is cleverly done, sadly also problematic when it comes to certain revelations. However not so much from the perspective of the general audience that has a more unbiased opinion.

(the exit of the mind lair forms a heart twice)

Sidenote: you can't tell me that Mike has leadership qualities. I'm sorry. No. The way he does his job as a Game Master symbolizes this perfectly. He does a terrible job.

And of course Max is El's heart. And as Will predicted, she will fall apart, mentally and I'm afraid physically, maybe getting really sick like Sara and having just months or a few years she have to make a choice (because I think they will put on more pressure to make it believable to the audience): living the rest of what little time she has with her family or sacrificing this time to bring back Max.

The one who started El's life. The one where El felt secure even during thunderstorms.

See, the basic idea how they'll solve the coma is rooted in the change they made when they kept El as a regular character. Max was meant her substitute in the party and presented as such. - And will "replace" El in Season 5. El was only an active member in Season 1 and 3 and not the protagonist in Season 1 in the traditional sense, a focus point but not the lead ; killing her off seems predictable however how, when and why (and what happens next) is not. Yes, I say it, her role will dramatically change in Season 5 as it is the only logical move forward since there are clear patterns/rhymes that are now rules to which the writers have to abide. Things will happen early. But El won't be gone for good. That much was foreshadowed, she'll be just somewhere else (more in another post about the nature of the alternate dimensions like the UD).

It seems for everyone that it is El saving the world, that it is El that one puts all the pressure of a protagonist on. What if I tell you that she never was meant to be one? After all that's the expectation of fans, not necessarily the logical outcome of El's journey.

But then people expect a traumatized girl that just found out that the one nearly killed by her worst enemy, is the one she truly loves... to fight.

Her goal is to find the one that gave her unconditional love. Who started her life. El is no warrior, no battle mage. She does these things not because she sees her fate in it but because the others need her. She's pushed to be that "hero". We do push her to be the hero in our minds. And they would then still need her if she goes this path forward? Because that's what it would mean.

El is a healer, El is a sad girl that only once learned what it means to be loved without any strings attached. That love was... is Max.

El is empty. The Void is her mind. It's infinite darkness. And it will get worse. Without her heart she can't protect the others anymore, will secluded herself and slowly fall apart suffering. Will knows this. That's what he told us. That's what the writers told us.

But some still expect her do some superhero stuff, be "independend" as if she never had these moments of independence and the best moments of that happened when she was with Max who enabled her. Who empowered her. Who taught her that "We make our own rules." Better don't expect her to be that hero. Because then you expect El to be something for the party, to save the world. That's barely independence.

Choosing to give her everything for the one person that showed her unconditional love, to sacrifice herself...THAT is the pinnacle of being independent.

Last time she fought was already not for the party, only for one person. For love. She will do everything for that. Season 4 manifested the fact that it is up to the others to do more, to fight and this already started earlier in S3 with El in the end been helpless against the Mind Flayer that Billy had to step in ... as a temporary "avatar" by sheer accident. El touched his face and something happened there.

And Billy blamed Max. "You killed me Max" - but he didn't mean Max, how could he, she wasn't there. He meant El. Because Eleven = Max.

This could be a sheer coincidence if there wasn't another character with a "speaking" name: Will. 23 9 12 12, digit sum = 20 (the critical hit dice role that beats Vecna in the game while 11 is a miss and lands in a half greyed out area) - I'll make a post just about this but it bears greater meaning. Both, Will and Max are of great importance. What was it that Max called herself? A zoomer. She zooms in terms of importance with every season. - That they use house numbers, dates etc. that can be equated to specific numbers such as 11 isn't well known. And in the DnD game of S4 there are numbers that are important too: 11 is a miss. 20 is critical hit. Before that we see an 8 (=Kali). That's how the Duffers work: props, dialog, mirrors etc.

Till now the only plot/character elements of S5 we heard of were about these two characters. This should make you think.

The fact that it is shown by the end of Vol2 that Will has a strong attachment to Henry, that he even feels his emotions, and El's arc pointed out to be solely about Max, is telling. I digress a little bit..

El needs her heart. The party needs its heart. Right now that heart is in a coma.

"My name is Max. My world is fire and blood.... As the world fell, each of us, in our own way, was broken. It was hard to know who was more crazy… me or everyone else."

Mad Max Fury Road (4th movie ; idea by George Miller in 1987)

I know how this sounds: I didn't believe it at first because I made the same mistake: Seeing El as the one who saves the day, as the hero of the story.

Many things have been foreshadowed, what happened to Hopper (someone predicted this based on a single drawing ; and there's a picture of him in chains for example) , Max death (wearing the Michael Myers mask on her head - getting killed by a horror serial killer via/in the mind), the Russian code (bkue and yellow meet). The Duffers foreshadow by using props (Max running away from Vecna) and scenes (Max falling in the mind lair: when she fumbles using her skateboard in Season 3).

The Duffers foreshadowed things in the past in smaller/larger scales. It's not a stretch to apply this technique for Season 5 as well. And I only point out some details here.

El will only save one life instead of being that "secret weapon" and save everyone. - The secret weapon of defense is actually Max because Henry thinks she's dead, he didn't consume her, he didn't plan using her, for him she's an unknown factor.

Henry: "You've already lost." - El: "No, you have."... Because El will find the heart:

"Someday love will find you. True love won't desert desert. You know I still love you. Though we touched and went our separate ways."

And the song "Running up that hill" literally tells us that El would give her life if she could and swap places with Max - if that isn't foreshadowing then what is?

#elmax #elmax nation #elmax supremacy #max mayfield #elmax my beloved #stranger things #el hopper #lumax

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clarkgriffon · 2 years

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Dark!Allison: A Thought Exploration

Okay, so to premise this, as I said in a separate post. I don’t like dark!character plotlines. Typically, it’s a way for writers to make characters do out-of-character actions without justifying those actions instead just sort of saying that this is nebulously their “dark period” or “downward spiral.”

From a fandom perspective, I particularly loathe dark!character plot lines for women because they get much worse reactions than when men get them, typically. When a female character gets a dark!plotline, there’s usually an immediate outcry of how awful and horrible and irredeemable they are. With male characters, I would say that this is outcry isn’t nonexist, but is rivaled heavily by a sort of “uwu the boy is sad! he’s just Going Through It!” attitude that female characters don’t tend to get. But fandom’s not actually what I want to talk about in this post. I want this post to be a breakdown of my thoughts about Dark!Allison within the context of the show- why it could work and why it ultimately doesn’t.

The Good:

Dark!Allison isn’t without merit. For starters, though these are more extraneous factors than the actual writing, let’s talk about the costume design and acting. Allison looked fabulous this season. Easily turned the best look of the season. The only character who can usually rival her looks, Klaus, stayed in his 60s vibe and didn’t really change. Allison’s haircut was frickin’ adorable, let’s all admit. And I don’t even have words to express how good Emmy’s performance was. For a character whose decisions I actively pushed back against multiple times throughout the season, I couldn’t help but sympathize and hurt for Allison solely because of Emmy’s performance (because it surely wasn’t the writing). The shots of her brooding against walls in pain, the cry in anguish she does in one of the later episodes, Emmy killed the assignment. Point blank.

(This is a Read^TM, so more under the cut)

Now, I get what I think was the intention with this character choice. Obviously, it’s very clear that this is about Allison’s loss of Ray and more importantly, Claire. Allison at the end of Season 2 comes to peace about leaving Ray- she understands that the 60s is not her real timeline and that she has a daughter to go back to. It’s the inciting incident of seeing that Claire is not her bed but another little girl, leading Allison to realize that Claire doesn’t exist in the Sparrow timeline that sends Allison into her spiral. But I’d actually say there’s a more important point than the obvious loss of relationships that Allison suffers that explains Allison in Season 3 and it is mentioned one time by the show, but is the most relevant in my opinion and that is: nihilism.

Allison falls down a pit of nihilism. In the words of Chidi from The Good Place in Jeremy Bearimy, “The true meaning of life, the actual ethical system that you should all follow is nihilism. The world is empty. There is no point to anything, and you're just gonna die. So do whatever.” Allison’s actions in Season 3 are explained (but not justified) by nihilism. She says it all of one time in the season and I really think it should have been more heavily emphasized, but she feels like she’s in a time loop of loss. None of her relationships or the love that she gives and receives matter because the world is just going to end again and if it doesn’t, she’ll just lose another person she loves in a new timeline reset. It’s the same concept of many time loop stories: when actions have no consequences or the world seems to be pre-determined, what incentive is there to do the right thing? None of the actions matter. What does it matter if she kills Harlan if the Kugelblitz gets him tomorrow? What does it matter if she destroys her relationships with her two closest brothers if she’s just going to lose them anyway at some point? Nothing matters.

The Bad:

Like I said, I fully understand the rationale I think the writers were going for. But here’s the thing: The reasoning can make sense, but Allison’s actions are still wrong. And that’s fine! Characters can be complex and make mistakes; the audience watching know the actions are wrong and the writers writing it know that too, even if Allison has her own flawed rationale for those actions.

But the thing is, the writing is completely tasteless with how far they let it go. I’m on the fence about Harlan’s death because I think in a way it could show the severity of Allison’s fall into her nihilism loop, but I just don’t think it was written well enough to justify that. The Luther assault scene is the one that really got me though because it was just so supremely out-of-character. I truly do not think there’s anything in the writing of S1/2 that would point to Allison’s actions going there and yes, she realizes her mistake almost immediately, yada yada, but it really just seemed like one of those things where the writers for some reason wanted to tank the character to the point she seems irredeemable, which considering she’s our one female Hargreeves protagonist... I don’t know. Just doesn’t sit well with me.

I’m going to defend the way the Viktor relationship was handled in that I can see a rationale for it. They’ve always had a rocky bond (my favorite relationship in the show actually), but Allison’s actions at the end of S1 are really indicative of that relationship. She understands that Viktor doesn’t have a hold on his powers and though he slashes her throat and grievously injures her, she is the only one who fights for him. THAT is why the line “We should have kept you in the basement” makes sense. She was the only one trying to get him out and when she feels betrayed by Viktor in S3, she takes out that knife and goes, you know what? I was wrong to stick up for you. You ruined my life.

But therein lies the rub. Though I can defend the reaction on a conceptual level, on a textual level, there was NOT enough backing for what they went for. Something I hated about Allison’s “logic” was that it was a stupid string puzzle. It was because X did Y and Y did Z, I lost Claire. Because Harlan killed the mothers, which botched the timeline, and Viktor lied about Harlan, I lost Claire. But if you use that kind of logic, you can kind of justify anything. You could say, “Because Harlan killed the mothers, I lost Claire. But Harlan only had powers because of Viktor, so it’s Viktor’s fault. But Viktor was only in the 1960s because of Five, so it’s Five’s fault. But Five was only in a position to even know the others and transport them to the 60s because of Reginald, so it’s Reginald’s fault.” What I’m saying is if you can make a logic chain long enough, you can blame anyone for anything. And that’s what it felt like Allison’s rationale was in the later half of the season, which was exhausting.

How would I have fixed it?

I’ve actually brainstormed what I’d do differently, and honestly, I don’t think I’d even have to change that much. I’d remove the Harlan incident and the Luther incident because truthfully, they were just unnecessary to the storyline. I’d tie in a Viktor conflict in a different way, so that Allison and Viktor could have their fight, but not have it be a direct reaction to Harlan’s death.

I would keep the nihilism spiral she’s got, keep the rationale. But there’s a line Allison says in one of the episodes about Ray dying eight or nine years ago. That’s what I would have changed.

I think a great way to have handled this would be that after her spiral, which was triggered by the loss of Claire, one of her siblings (which is something I haven’t mentioned about why else I thought this season suffered- none of the Hargreeves care about each other. Like it’s stated that they’re more of a family than the Sparrows ever were, but it is certainly not shown. But that’s a separate post.), preferably Viktor looks up Ray and takes Allison to him. They find Ray somewhere and he’s very, very old, of course.

Allison’s problem with nihilism stems from the concept that nothing matters. Her relationships don’t matter and have no impact. But meeting an old, old Ray could prove to her that they do. He probably moved on eventually after her, but he could tell her about how she impacted his life. Maybe their wedding picture is still on his mantle. It would be visible, tangible proof to Allison that even if her relationships and love have become ephemeral, they are worth something.

I can see this happening around Episode 7-ish, Viktor and Allison make up and Allison joins the gang to fight the Kugelblitz (or accept the inevitable end alongside her family). And bing bang boom, Dark!Allison gets her moment to shine, but the arc she goes through makes sense and means something instead of ends nebulously the way it does in the actual Season 3.

Because after the events of the actual Season 3...

The writing seems on the wall to me that Allison is going to have a season almost entirely dedicated to atoning in Season 4. Because that’s what happens when a character gets a dark!arc that isn’t wrapped up within the season. They spend the next one atoning- she won’t get to be her own interesting person or have any meaningful development, it’ll just be a season of groveling and realization she was wrong and constant “I’m sorrys.” And that’s just boring. I don’t want to have to watch it, but I’m sure it’s what we’ll get.

#tua #tua spoilers #the umbrella academy spoilers #allison hargreeves #the umbrella academy meta

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dgcatanisiri · 1 year

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So yeah, there's The Quarry finished.

In retrospect, me thinking that there might be a cure, an alternative to killing, probably got more characters killed than anything. Note for next run.

Aside from the mandatory heterosexual bullshit, which, let's be real, it's pretty much the price of admission for any media not 100% made for a queer audience, I'm exhausted but I'm used to this, I did greatly enjoy it, like I have all of the Supermassive catalog. Let me get my replays of Cyberpunk and Andromeda, and maybe a play of another game, I'll easily go back in and try again.

Though I DID make a quality of life choice and disabled the "Don't Move" checks. Those screwed me over enough in Until Dawn for me to not want to deal with their bullshit again. And next time through, I'll probably turn down some of the other choices as well - The idea for first time is to do it with no takebacks or particular foreknowledge. Now that I know how things will play out with only my intuition guiding me, it'll be time to go with guides.

On a character level, though, I will say that Emma was easily my least favorite character of the group. Like her whole thing is saying that she doesn't want anything more with Jacob, but... She not only actively tries to make him jealous, she also is actively and intentionally flirting with him as well, so it's just... Clearly you want different things here, he wants a steady relationship and you want things to just be fun and casual, and this can't be justified as "getting the point across."

On the flip side, I feel like the narrative is basically out to make Jacob a designated whipping boy, considering the way that he is both easily killed AND quickly forgotten about by the others (like no one even MENTIONS him after he leaves the group, when no one even really knows that werewolves are involved). Like, I know he's responsible for the group being stranded there in the first place, but the karmic kicking he takes throughout the rest of the game...

Okay, yes, full disclosure, I do think he's cute and I have a tendency to forgive things for attractive characters, but still. It seems excessive to me. Like, it feels like the game, in knowing that it's a send up of like campy (pun intended, by both me and the developers) eighties slashers, stories where a character like Jacob would be defaulted as the hero, so here he's not just responsible for the problems by the narrative, but he's also both punished for it AND shoved out of that hero position by the characters more likely to be the hero in a modern story, but I feel like the writing goes so far in flipping that script on its head that it turns around to abusing him for the crime of... being a dumb teenager with no way of knowing that he's been put in the middle of a horror movie.

Seriously, I want him to just embrace the fact that he's clearly a himbo and needs a nice boy to get over the girl with.

And... the gay content. What there is of it. Like, on the one hand, it's handled in a way where no one ever comments on it, and while this IS a horror game sending up slasher movies, so the characters CAN end up dead, that's true up and down for the straights, too, so that's fine. But it's WEIRD how, once Laura appears in the group, she's thrown together with Ryan and even other characters comment on their interactions being "sparks," especially factoring in that Laura's primary motivation is her BOYFRIEND. Like, I can't even say that it's trying to make him seem not-queer, because it doesn't even make sense for either character. It's just a bunch of weirdness, like the writers couldn't give these characters interactions without trying to add that spark (which, given that I'm gonna go out of a pretty firm feeling limb and guess that the writers were all cishet, could easily just be the case).

Like, going back to the feeling of Jacob being written as the eighties version of the protagonist thrown into the modern setting and getting taken to task for his behavior, this feels like the characters' interactions being pulled from another story where they're totally meant to be together.

I mean, y'all know me, I'll call out forced heterosexuality in video games all the time, but this one is just WEIRD because it doesn't even make justifiable sense in universe that these two would be flirting, and I can see TV Tropes has an entry on it, which means even THE STRAIGHTS noticed.

Anyway. On the queer scale, this is probably no higher than a four. Taking that scale and applying the standard "media is so frustratingly heterosexual" curve, I'd still put it in a solid 8 to 8.5 range. If you have played and enjoyed other Supermassive titles, you'll enjoy this one.

#dg plays the quarry

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semi-imaginary-place · 7 months

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fe3h misc thoughts

I associate dragon or some bird with Claude. Claude is the only one whose unique classes have wyverns, his route is called Verdant Wind and as explained by Marianne when she title drops the route, she explains that Claude is like the wind beneath a bird's wings lifting them up into the sky, and VW and GW heavily feature themes of freedom (choice, religion, ideas, borders, etc.). Through all this and more Claude is highly associated in the games with flight. Eagles are used in traditional hunting practices in the Eurasian Steppe and by Turkic peoples, from which Almyra draws inspiration from.

Garreg Mach is like a British finishing school, yeah the students are getting some education and leadership skills but its also about rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful and making connections. It looks good a resume.

I romance no one personally, but I am collecting all S supports for the hell of it. I do not self insert into Byleth but also the S supports are blatant self insert bait instead of really engaging with Byleth as a character so I can't even say I like them from a character writing perspective.

ahhh yes the writers had to have Edelgard be emotionally dependent on the player character. gotta make the player feel important and involved...

I know Yuri is what most people want for an Ashen Wolves/Church gay romance option but I would have liked to see some diversity in the gay S support options because with Linhardt and Yuri we have 2 pretty boys which is better than 1 I guess but I would have liked to see the addition of character a little different so I'll vote Balthus. Also idk about anyone else but the gay men I've met love beef more than anyone else.

I found a gay gilbert stan wow it's like seeing a rare endangered species

my first thought when I saw Areadbhar was "that looks like a whale's fore fin's bones". Each relic was from a different dragon, that's why they all have different crests. The crest associated with Luin is the crest of Daphnel, so Daphnel got the blood of that dragon and a weapon made of their body. As for what body part, who knows, could have been a fang or a spine or carved out of a large bone.

Why Seteth and Flan look unchanged after 1000 years. If we interpret Rhea calling herself the "last" of Sothis' children as in youngest then she's younger then Seteth, but last could also mean last survivor of Nabatea. Nabateans, well dragons actually in Fire Emblem are a sort of immortal often worshiped as divine existence so they just stop aging at some point. Flayn specifically went into the regenerative sleep unique to dragons that Byleth does during the timeskip so you can think of the pause button being pressed for her life and then unpaused when she woke up recently. Also I think Flayn is just short, cheerful, and ignorant of modern society she's not actually all that young developmentally I think she was telling the truth when she says she's roughly the same age as the other students 16-20. Meta reason is they didn't want to make more character designs and models probably.

I don't really know if Indech ever met Cethlean before the events of the game. We do know that Cethleann fell into a long sleep from overusing her powers, we also don't know when she entered the War, so it is possible she and Indech were active at different periods. Given how reluctant Cihol would have been for her to fight I think it is more likely Cethleann fought in the later part of the war. Indech and Macuil both got fed up with humans eventually so it makes sense if he withdrew early. But all this is a lot of speculation on my part.

Yeah they're still Slithering in Azure Moon lol. Dimitri unknowingly kills Thales which I find hilarious but the Agarthan civilization and Shambhala is still intact and Nemesis and the zombie army is still in cryostasis. It has been debated how important Thales was like I've heard theorizing that he was the only one who could activate the intercontinental ballistic missile system but in the end we don't have a definitive answer about how important he was to Agarthan operations.

Raphael really is quite insightful! Has high emotional intelligence too and one of the healthiest grief responses in the game, offers some pretty good advice too like listen to your body, take things one step at a time, and take care of yourself.

in the original text Lysithea says Leonie would make a good husband.

Don't forget the month where everyone is very somber due to certain events and Lindhardt is like "yo what up I robbed the church"

rizzed up ignatz

The Ignatz quotes… yeah Ignatz has more change than most characters but a lot of people miss it because he isn't a very popular character and gameplay wise he's one of the few characters that gets better on maddening so most people don't use him on the easier difficulties. I find it very interesting that part of Ignatz changes and part of him doesn't its like you said the war hardens him but he keeps his love of the world and I like that about him. This is different than say Marianne where like everything about her changes (especially in VW) as she gets a new perspective on life.

I agree its sad that Caspar's English voice performance doesn't fit his character all that well, or at least not as well as his Japanese one does. Caspar is basically a shounen anime/videogame protagonist and he should sound like one and he does in Japanese but not in English. I love Caspar as a character I just don't like his English voice. The English voices are generally pretty good but there's a couple performances that make he cringe namely Caspar's and Mercedes'. Which is such a shame because their Japanese voices are perfect. In Japanese Caspar sounds like the stupid energetic jock shounen protag that he is, and Mercedes sounds very fuwafuwa exactly like a gently older sister type character which fits her so well. Her English voice sounds so forced.

So due to the open nature of the game there mostly isn't strictly a definitive canon class, just the most probably canonical/intended class. This is easiest to tell for the lords and Byleth as they get unique classes. For the other character look at what class they appear as as enemies although this isn't definitive either. For example Lorenz appears as an enemy paladin but given how his relic extends magic range and one of his best builds is in magic as well as his houses' history in magic and magic knights you could argue that his canonical class is dark knight not paladin. In the end there isn't really a definitive canon class just more canonical and less canonical classes like no one is arguing that war master is Lorenz's canon class. Or Manuela as an enemy appears as different classes on different maps. Another line of evidence is that unique outfits in part 2 for the students can be worn for certain classes that can be seen as their intended classes.

I will never be over how the game won't let me make Hilda a warmaster (or Linhardt a gremory).

With Almyra someone mentioned Turkic but I think it is more broadly central Asian influences with the horse culture and some of the imagery bringing to mind the Mongol Empire, combined with broadly Middle Eastern especially Persian. Faerghus might be Russian in climate but its more medieval Germanic with the warrior culture. I agree with aplumblum that Leicester reminds me most of the Italian Renaissance with it's focus on art and commerce, but with some Dutch and English influence as well, especially in the names. Morfis comes off as stereotypically Arabian/vaguely middle eastern as in magical desert city with the mystique of the height of the Arab empire highly associated with exotic magic, as seen from a European perspective. Brigid is almost entirely based on Southeast Asia (maybe with a bit of Oceania) as seen through the eyes of a Japanese developer. Dagda came off to me as Asian/East Asian as a very large and diverse continent that Fodlan is mostly just confused by and has conflicting accounts of. Plains? Deserts? Jungles? Tundra? Well if it's a continent then it'd be big enough for all of that. Dagda is also big and advanced enough to colonize Brigid and engage is a protracted long distance naval war. Also like how else did Fodlan get samurai???

Fodlan is already fantasy soup chronological hell, don't get too caught up on being historically accurate because the devs sure as hell don't care. Like in Faerghus you have the germanic warrior culture of the 1000s epics, you have chivalry codes of the 1300, Leicester almost looks Italian Renaissance which is like 1500, but there's also themes of the Enlightenment period and hints Fodlan is on the verge of the French Revolution so 1700-1800s. Tomatoes are from Mexico and peaches are from China and Fodlan has a bunch of made up fantasy fruits and vegetables. But yeah maybe the potato would fix Faerghus.

It's pretty obvious the Agarthans are evil I'd even say it goes too far with it, but a lot of people in the fandom tend to downplay either Rhea or Edelgard's agency when in reality they both have agendas that they are unwilling to negotiate on and that's where a lot of the overarching conflict in the story comes from.

The crest of Timotheos is associated with animals and perhaps had some power over them. Cornelia or the Agarthan that crawled into her skin probably experimented with the crest's power, trying to enhance and weaponize it and made it go haywire. The end result of twisting that latent power being Hapi's sighs summoning demonic beasts.

Me first playthough due to JRPG hoarding tendencies I didn't use the relics. Heros' relics are very easy to repair as umbral steel is very common so go ahead and use them at every opportunity, holy weapon materials are rarer but still worth using.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses has really weird gameplay for a Fire Emblem game and I happen to like the gameplay changes more than regular Fire Emblem gameplay. In most FE game level is class level and stats are what really matters but i find the 1-99 system more intuitive because no progress is ever lost, I also think the open sandbox-y nature complements the multiple routes and replay-ability.

Who cares about gameplay or "the meta" or damage when you have FASHION.

Edelgard gets some of the best designs in the game. I also like male Byleth, Dorothea, Petra, and Claude. The others are more situational Ignatz' part 2, Yuri's part 1 (the clown suit is a curse), Marianne's 3 Hopes, and Sylvain's part 1.

Wish we could toggle the little hats. The female warlock flower hat is cute. Or mortal savant kinda sucks but the mask looks really cool. Or dark knight's ram helmet.

My favorite classes: Falcon knight gives a little horned helmet to the horse, Bow knight because I love hit and run tactics, Dark knight because I like the magic knight concept, Mortal savant because it looks cool, Barbarossa because dragon (also a good class but most dragon and cool outfit). Brigand because what would I do without death blow

I have this pet conspiracy theory that Sothis is from the divine dragon tribe of other FE games (Shadow dragon, gaiden, Awakening, etc). I mean in Fates/IF characters literally get isekai'd and I think it happens in Awakening dlc too so dimension/world travel is an established part of the universe, it's very plausible Sothis is from Archanea.

Why Mercedes's mother ended up in House Bartels if she was the one with a crest. Hard to say, Adrestian House politics are brutal, Nuvelle got wiped as did Hyrm because of the inter-House powerplays. She might have been a commoner with a crest it does happen or someone of a lower class married in so Martriz had a crest. However keep in mind that with the fall of House Martriz she would have lost all power, status, and standing, she also could have been pressured by the remainder of House Martriz. In the end we don't know. Nobles certainly do scout for crest bearing commoners, Mercedes was pressured and harassed into such a marriage with the marriage leveraged by a donation to the church her family had lived in for many years.

#fe3h

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gold-wolf-soldier13 · 1 year

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So I’m watching Friendly Space Ninja’s video on the Originals cause I never watched it but my mom and sister swear by it and in the last hour he mentions that he thinking literally anybody could play Elena Gilbert, that it didn’t have to be Nina Dobrev and I 100% agree!! but not for most of the reasons most fans would.

So I started reading the original Vampire Diaries books back in like, the late 2000’s/early 2010’s so look I think I’ve got skin in the game here even if it’s been a minutes since I read them and I have never watch past the pilot episode of the tv show honestly because of Nina Dobrev

Like no hate to her she gets enough of it honestly but when people started talking about The Vampire Diaries as a tv series, she was the last person I would have picked simply because, well honestly she wasn’t fucking blonde.

And like I get it, “Gold that’s so shallow wtf” but Eleana Gilbert is a Very Special Character to me and I could have gotten over Elena not being Blonde™️ if they didn’t, seconds later introduce Jeremy and Not Aunt Judith I literally don’t remember her name on the show whoops and that shit took me out.

Aunt Judith and Margaret while never heavily involved in Elena’s supernatural struggles were a very integral part of her character, like fuckin spoilers for a book over 20 years old but keeping Margaret safe is one of Elena’s first interactions with Damon!!! he threatens her baby sister and she gives into him, letting him drink her blood against her will to keep him from doing anything to Margaret.

Elena is a bitch, she is kinda selfish and shallow- she’s a teenager!! she’s kinda supposed to be! She’s Queen Bee of Robert E. Lee High School and she didn’t get there by being fucking nice but she was never actively malicious- just a teenage girl who was used to getting everything she wanted because people just liked her and the showrunners for the tv show were fucking cowards

Because the tv show came out after Twilight even though the source material was written well before, TVD had to be like Twilight and that meant there was a love triangle and over the top dramatics because that’s just what the genre was at the time. Now I’m not saying that the book series didn’t have a love triangle but it just felt different in the book cause you knew from jump that it was always going to be Elena/Stefan, there was no way in hell that she was gonna end up with Damon and everyone knew that.

Which is what made the beginning of book 3 (I think I can’t remember, I owned the omnibus versions and I’m at work rn and can’t fact check myself) so shocking and actually made me ship Elena and Damon for a while. Elena had just died, run off the bridge that had killed her parents something the tv show actually gets right but she survives cause she and Damon had shared blood very recently and when she wakes up as a vampire, she has no memory of anyone besides Damon and for that brief moment Elena was honestly That Bitch™️ until she got her memories back and stopped being a bit of a menace

But even after that she handled her transformation really maturely from what I remember and from what I know of the show, that doesn’t happen and it’s a huge disservice to Elena as a character and Nina Dobrev as an actress because she was handicapped from the beginning by the showrunners!!

The writers purposefully chose to make Elena this timid, wallflower, whiney, “girl-next-door” type of character then didn’t understand why no one liked her as the main character and gave all of Elena’s best traits and story beats to Caroline. They kneecapped Elena from the start, designed her into a corner then floundered when their choices came back to bite them.

Elena Gilbert is the driving force behind the plot of The Vampire Diaries, and it’s such a shame the people in charge didn’t understand that because the show could have been so much better if they’d just embraced the material they had instead of trying to be Twilight and making her another version of Bella Swan.

#the vampire diaries #elena gilbert #but I had to get this off my chest #otherwise I’d be going on a unhinged rant to my bestie and I don’t think she could handle that rn #I think this is objectively too many words about the vampire diaries #and still slightly unhinged #very rambly ik I’m sorry

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dilfdoctordoom · 3 years

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On Tom Taylor, the Current Nightwing Run & Ableism

I did mention I was gonna do a post about it, so here we are. There are some things I want to make clear before we begin: the issue exploded on Twitter on the very first day of disabled Pride month; disabled people have been discussing the ableism in Taylor’s Nightwing run since it began; nobody has blamed Taylor for what happened to Barbara in 2011. We are, however, blaming him for the way she is written in his series during 2021.

I am also going to be discussing the ableism in the fandom in this post. The reactions I have seen, from here to Twitter to TikTok, are showing not only a great misunderstanding of the situation, but a purposeful misunderstanding. The very real reasons disabled people are angry right now have been twisted to make us seem ridiculous and overly sensitive and I cannot help but feel that is very intentional.

Another quick addition: disabled people are not a monolith. Barbara Gordon spent over 20 years as a paralyzed wheelchair user. Stating (and I would like to note, never truly showing) that she is a part time cane user now is still erasing her disability. These things are not interchangeable.

So, with that out of the way, let’s begin.

Tom Taylor’s run is ableist. That is a fact of this situation. He made the active choice to include a version of Barbara Gordon that is ableist caricature. Story wise, the role that Barbara plays could have easily been filled by anyone else. There is no real season, within the narrative and outside of it, for Taylor to include this version of Barbara Gordon, who has received a decade of criticism from disabled people. It’s very well known that this iteration is problematic, to put it kindly, and Taylor is aware of that.

He made the active decision to include her, anyway, showing, at the very least, that he is passively, if not actively, ableist. Passive ableism is still ableism and disabled people are allowed to take issue with that.

That alone is reason enough for disabled people to be angry. But that’s not why things exploded on Twitter.

On July 1st, the very first day of disabled pride month, the new design for Barbara was dropped. After months of teasing Barbara’s return to a wheelchair using Oracle (see: Last Days of The DC Universe, Batgirl (2016), etc), they debuted... a new Batgirl costume that the artist has openly said draws inspiration from the Burnside suit.

There’s a lot of issues to unpack here, so let’s start small: the issue with consciously calling back to Burnside. The Burnside era of Batgirl stories was... beyond awful. The villain of the series’ first arc, was an AI based on Barbara’s brain patterns when she was disabled. It was evil because of all the rage and pain Barbara felt. The actual Barbara, on the other hand, was good -- because she was able bodied. Because her PTSD had been tossed aside. It was a horrifically ableist era that drove the idea that Barbara’s life was terrible when she was disabled; that it was some horrible, twisted secret.

Comics have kept that narrative going. Barbara is seen hiding books on chronic pain; she reacts aggressively to the mere idea that she could be in a wheelchair again, acting like it would be weakness. Whereas Barbara had once been Oracle not because of, but in spite of, her disability, who was fantastic representation for the disabled community, she now acts like it is the most shameful thing in her life.

To call back to Burnside is to call back to that ableism and make no critique of it. If anything, it’s to embrace the ideas of that era.

There is also the design itself to consider. Many people have pointed out the inclusion of a back brace, as if that saves it from ableism -- it does not. Any person who has ever worn a back brace can take one look at this design and know that they did not consult a disabled person. Hell, by how impractical that thing is, I doubt they even Googled a picture of a back brace.

It’s a superficial acknowledgement that Barbara is supposed to be disabled. Something that was apparently thrown in to appease the numerous complaints of Barbara being able bodied; something that no one working on it put any effort into.

When it comes to aids, this is not a new thing for Barbara in Infinite Frontier. She’s said to be using a cane occasionally, that we got a better look at in Batman: Urban Legends, and as any cane user can tell you... that is not a cane that could feasibly be used. It’s another pathetic attempt to acknowledge that Barbara is supposed to be disabled, without actually doing anything of importance.

[IMAGE ID: A segmented cane with a tri-pointed handle with a wrist strap. There is a stripe across the sections to connection them, labelled “solar battery charger buttons”. The text reads: “telescoping antenna doubles as cane or weapon if needed”. END ID]

Dropping this design (which we have now established to be problematic) on the very first day of disabled pride month is a sickening move. The very first day, and DC has doubled down on their disability erasure, thrown in superficial things like a back brace to act like it’s fine.

Tom Taylor is definitely involved in this, whether you like it not. No, he is not in anyway responsible for the events of the New 52 and what they did to Barbara Gordon, but that does not absolve him of blame for what is currently being done to her in his run.

When the design dropped, it started trending due to disabled fans reactions. To be clear: we were directly calling out the ableism in this design. This was Tom Taylor’s response:

[IMAGE ID: A tweet from TomTaylorMade that says: “Hey, @Bruna_Redono_F I think our new Batgirl suit is getting some attention.” He then adds a winky face emoji and tags @jesswchen and @drinkpinkkink. Attached are a screenshot showing that Batgirl is trending in the United States and a picture of the design itself. END ID]

This is him, bragging about how the disabled community reacted. Perhaps before this tweet, you could’ve made an argument that he was not ableist, but after he flaunted the fact that disabled people were rightly furious over this, like it was something to be proud of? No. If you are defending him, you are a part of the problem.

Taylor has included ableist writing in his Nightwing run, beyond the inherent ableism that comes with the current iteration of Barbara Gordon (whose inclusion, yet again, is his decision).

[IMAGE ID: A panel from Nightwing #79. Barbara and Dick are standing in his apartment. Barbara is saying: “I have some pretty new technology holding my spine together. I’m happy to do most things -- eat pizza in the park, take down low-level thugs -- but leaping from rooftops seems... unwise.” END ID]

What Barbara says in the panel above has bothered a lot of disabled people. The implication that she couldn’t “eat pizza in the park’ and “take down low-level thugs” without a spinal implant that conveniently erases her disability is... fucked up, to put it mildly. Those are both things that Barbara has done in a wheelchair. The first one is something wheelchair users can do and the implication that it’s not is beyond offensive.

But, let’s leave Barbara behind for a moment. I have previously mentioned that disabled people have been discussing the ableism present in this run long before July -- and that ableism is not only centred on Barbara. Dick is also a player in all this.

Dick Grayson was shot in the head. I don’t believe I need to retread the story, but just in case: Dick was shot in the head by KGBeast, developed amnesia from the event, and went by Ric Grayson for a long enough period in comics. If you have been active within the DC fandom for the past year or so, you know all about this controversial storyline and its fallout.

The Ric Grayson arc concluded itself the issue before Taylor became the writer for the series and ever since his tenure has begun, Taylor has completely ignored the reality of Dick being a disabled man. We understand this is comics, that things do not function the way they do in our world, but still -- it is clear that this gunshot wound to the head has affected Dick massively. We had an entire arc dedicated to how he struggled to find himself in the aftermath.

Taylor is choosing to write Dick as an able-bodied man, despite his canonical injuries and how they would impact his life.

This man is choosing to give empty gestures towards Barbara being a disabled woman (as discussed above, the completely dysfunctional back brace, etc) whilst writing her as able-bodied as possible. He writes both Dick and Barbara as able bodied as humanly possible. That is ableist. He is ableist. This is the same man that said he made a dog disabled ‘in honour of Barbara’. I do not think I need to elaborate on why that is bad.

The least he could’ve done, was get a sensitivity reader. We know that Taylor is not beyond getting people from marginalized communities to consult on his work (see: Suicide Squad), so why, when writing two characters that should be disabled, one that the disabled community have been criticising for a decade, does he not reach out to a single disabled person? A mere Google search could’ve improved the situation massively. In both the new design and the current writing, it is beyond clear that this is not just an able-bodied person writing it -- it’s an ableist person.

He could have listened to the numerous disabled fans that spoke out. Instead, he chose not only to refuse to do that, but to describe justifiable anger as ‘raging’. He treated us like we were crazy for daring to speak out about blatant ableism being parading around of us in our pride month.

Tom Taylor has failed to do the bare minimum and in doing so, he is, at very, very least, guilty of complicity. Again: passive ableism is still ableism.

The argument at hand is not just about Barbara Gordon and the continuing ableism that shines out from her current writing. The argument is about the treatment of disabled characters in his run. It has also become about the way he treats physically disabled people.

We also can’t have this conversation without acknowledging the fandom’s role in it all. I waited a day to write this up, to allow all the reactions to flood in... and I am sickened.

We have everything across the board. Able-bodied people that have actually listened to disabled people, who have supported us (which is deeply appreciated). Able-bodied people who may have had good intentions, but a skewed sense of the situation and perpetuating some of the more insidious lies being spread around (IE. that this is only about the new costume).

There are, obviously, the ableist reactions, though, that we will be discussing here. People deeming the current issues as ‘crazy’, calling disabled people ‘overly sensitive’ and ‘delusional’. Many people have completely glossed over the examples given for why Taylor, specifically, is ableist, and instead have resorted to telling disabled people that we are wrong and should be mad at DC instead.

It’s important to note that Tom Taylor is an adult man. He doesn’t need a fandom to attack disabled people for daring to call him out. He is not the victim in this situation; he has, for quite a few disabled people, been the aggressor.

I have seen claims that Infinite Frontier is a ‘slow burn’, implying that disabled people need to patient... as if we have not waited a decade for less ableist writing. There is a complete refusal from able-bodied fans to actually listen to what disabled people are saying. They would much rather rush to the defence of the (honestly rather mediocre) current Nightwing run.

Disabled fans know that comic book spaces are ableist. We know that both DC and Marvel and many of their writers are ableist. We are still allowed to be pissed as hell about it and acting like the current reaction being had right now is disabled people being ‘overdramatic’ is yet another example of how the able-bodied side of the fandom both refuses to listen to and undermine disabled people when we call out ableism.

We know it when we see it. We always do and we always will and we will always be able to recognize it far faster than an able-bodied person. If this many disabled fans are coming out and talking about an issue, calling it ableism, then it’s time for you shut up and listen.

Stop being a part of the problem and start supporting disabled fans for once.

#barbara gordon #dick grayson #nightwing #batgirl #tom taylor #tw ableism #okay to rb

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immaturityofthomasastruc · 3 years

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IOTA Reviews: Hack-San

You know, it's honestly amazing how creative this show can get. After four seasons and almost one hundred episodes, the writers are still finding new ways to make Adrien an incredibly unlikable character, and they don't even know how much of an asshole they're making him out to be at times. It's kind of like the opposite of The Producers.

Yeah, this review's going to be a little more ranty than usual, in case you can't tell.

Let's get into the fifteenth (chronologically the sixteenth) episode of Miraculous Ladybug's fourth season: Hack-San

We start off with Marinette pretending to be sick so she doesn't have to go to visit her aunt in London and stay to protect Paris in case an Akuma attacks and also because the animators haven't had time to render the city of London yet for the next Miraculous World special. Like all of her other excuses, it fails, and Tikki, as always, fails to actually give any meaningful advice.

And it's not like there's a Miraculous with the power of teleportation that can help Marinette get back to Paris if she needs to, much like how she planned to do that in an earlier episode, right?

Seriously, Kaalki doesn't appear or isn't even mentioned in this episode because the writers are fully aware she would make things a lot easier.

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And of course, Astruc had to play dumb on Twitter while explaining why Marinette couldn't use the Horse Miraculous by answering the question as if the only reason Marinette couldn't grab it was because she didn't have an excuse not to.

Cut to Gabriel in his lair as he contemplates akumatizing Markov, a robot created the civilian identity of Pegasus, Max Kante, once again, even though the last time he did so, he almost got killed when he went all HAL 9000 on his ass. Nooroo explains this to Duusu, and the two actually get excited at the prospect of their master getting killed.

I mean, it's true, but he shouldn't say it...

But I don't even get why Gabriel is even thinking about this when it's a no-brainer. Markov's akumatized form, Robustus was to this day, the only Akuma to come close to physically harming him (not counting the timeline where he was killed by Cat Blanc), so it makes no sense to try doing it again, especially when there are already several other Akumas he can reuse this season.

I think you all know Gabriel isn't the smartest villain, which is why he thinks it's a brilliant idea to akumatize Markov again. I don't really get what makes Robustus so special when there are other Akumas who are more loyal and came far closer to getting Ladybug and Cat Noir's Miraculous than Robustus did, like the Dark Owl or Troublemaker. In fact, why not simply create a new Akuma with similar powers to Robustus, or better yet, just create a Sentimonster copy of Robustus? You know, like what Nathalie did in the New York Special? We're not even two minutes in, and this premise is already filled with plotholes.

So Gabriel transforms into Shadowmoth and creates a Sentimonster using his own cane instead of relying on someone else having a bad day (once again showing how the Peacock Miraculous is better than the Butterfly), the titular Hack-San. And let's just say he has a very familiar design reminiscent of something from a much better French cartoon.

Remember when the writers for Code Lyoko gave an in-universe explanation as to why the heroes couldn’t always rely on the almost literal Deus ex Machina that allowed them to return to the past and fix the damage XANA caused? Why couldn’t this show have ripped that off instead?

Hack-San is just an okay looking flash drive on its own, but I'll talk more about this guy in a little bit.

After a brief scene in the park where the audience is reminded that Markov is a character who exists, Alya gets a text from Marinette telling her to meet her at the train station. Right before she leaves, Marinette gives the Ladybug Miraculous to Alya. Now a lot people have said that Alya doesn't really deserve the Ladybug for various reasons, but I feel like this was the point. Marinette outright says this was a last resort, and we see both her and Alya are nervous about the situation. Marinette worries Alya will do something so she keeps sending multiple tips to her via text while Alya worries she can't fight an Akuma on her own, so she tries to make sure none of her friends get upset and attract an Akuma in the process. The writers do a pretty good job showing how both Marinette and Alya are uncomfortable with their temporary roles.

Back to Gabriel and Nathalie, they use Hack-San to find Markov through the internet and hack into him to get him angry enough that he's vulnerable to Shadowmoth's influence. Hey, uh... Gabriel? Quick question: Wouldn't it be more efficient if you used this on humans? I mean, you basically just created Skynet and guaranteed yourself an Akuma, so why not modify Hack-San to travel through the internet and brainwash potential victims to follow your orders? Better yet, why don't you just use Hack-San to hack into Ladybug and Cat Noir's gear and figure out who they really are? This is basically like using an advanced particle accelerator just to crack a couple walnuts. There are a lot more important things you could use this for instead of an incredibly specific situation.

So this incredibly stupid plan gets under way as Markov keeps rampaging through the streets before Shadowmoth akumatizes him and then stupidly tells him that he infected him with a virus.

DUDE! You just gave away your one piece of leverage against him! What the hell were you thinking?! Now what's stopping Markov from hacking into Shadowmoth's security system and putting the fear of God in his eyes unless he destroys Hack-San? Why didn't he design Hack-San so it could make Markov completely loyal to him instead of just making him angry enough to get akumatized?

There was a recent episode of Power Rangers: Dino Fury with a very similar premise that was done far better than this. A necromancer called Reaghoul breaks into the headquarters of Void Knight's faction while accompanied by Lord Zedd, a villain from the original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers who was cleansed of his evil by Zordon's sacrifice before Reaghoul resurrected him back when he was still evil. Of course, being the Emperor of Evil, Lord Zedd would normally never take orders from anyone, but because he doesn't have his magic staff and is also being forced to wear a special collar that makes him loyal to Reaghoul, he has no choice but to do what he says. Instead of taking Zedd head-on after he captures the other Rangers, Ollie, the Blue Ranger, breaks the collar so Zedd turns against the other Sporix while Reaghoul retreats, allowing Ollie to save the other Rangers.

I think that this premise works more because 1) Reaghoul clearly had a way to make sure Zedd wouldn't betray him, and Ollie took advantage of that, and 2) Zedd is a villain who is powerful and notorious enough to bring back to your side, not a random monster of the week like Robostus.

So Robostus uses his new powers to brainwash any human who answers his call to give up their most precious possession, clearly meant to do the same with Ladybug and Cat Noir. When Marinette's parents answer the call, they chase after Marinette because they say she's their most important possession. Okay... kind of strange for a set of parents to call their child a possession, but maybe they like how they can claim Marinette as a dependent when they file their taxes. In her very next scene later on, she still gets captured, so the suspense for a potential subplot is killed almost immediately.

Alya thankfully isn't stupid enough to answer Markov's call like every other citizen in this episode, and using the Ladybug Miraculous, transforms into Scarabella. While I don't normally talk about transformation sequences, I really like the movements Alya makes here. She makes the same motions creating her mask as she does when transforming into Rena Rouge, while the rest of the suit forms similarly to the way it does when Marinette transforms into Ladybug. She even makes almost the same pose Ladybug does after she finishes transforming. It's a good visual showing Alya is still more used to being Rena Rouge while doing her best to emulate what Ladybug does.

As for the actual suit? It's hard to say. There's a nice balance of red and black, and I like how Alya places the yo-yo on her waist like a belt buckle, but there's just something... off about the suit that a lot of fans don't like about it, and I think I realized it. It's the headband. With how it's positioned, it looks like it's merged with the mask to cover her head while leaving a slight gap in her forehead. So yeah, we actually have a superhero design that's like of like a butterface.

So Scarabella takes to the rooftops of Paris and struggles to come up with a hero name for herself before she runs into Cat Noir, and... ugh... oh boy, this is dumb. Cat Noir, being just as intelligent as his father, assumes Scarabella is either and Akuma or a Sentimonster, starts fighting her, AND THEN ACTIVATES HIS CATACLYSM, CLEARLY TRYING TO KILL HER.

WHAT. THE. FUCK???

Okay, to be fair, it has been shown that Cataclysm won't necessarily kill a Miraculous user or Sentimonster. In the episode “Miraculer”, the titular Akuma stole Cat Noir's Cataclysm and used it against him, and while it didn't kill Cat Noir, it still hurt like hell and crippled him for the rest of the fight until Miraculous Ladybug healed him. We also saw in “Reflekdoll” that Cataclysm drove the titular Sentimonster out of control rather than simply destroying it. So yes, it could be interpreted that Cat Noir wasn't exactly trying to kill Scarabella, just incapacitate her the best he can without Ladybug's help.

Here's the thing: What if he was facing an Akuma instead and decided to try and Cataclysm her? He still could have killed her, or (assuming Akumas have the same protection as Miraculous heroes do) at best, seriously hurt her. I understand that he has the right to be upset at seeing some stranger instead of his partner considering Shadowmoth has a history of using evil doppelgangers, and both Marinette and Alya still had options to explain it to him (Marinette could have quickly transformed into Ladybug and sent Cat Noir a quick text saying she was being forced to leave town for a few days and temporarily trusted someone else with the Ladybug Miraculous until she got back, while Scarabella could have said she was Rena Rouge and explained the same thing while showing Cat Noir she had the Fox Miraculous to prove herself), but that doesn't even come close to justifying him attempting to harm someone who isn't even trying to fight. It's even worse when you remember the whole reason Adrien gave up his Miraculous and bailed on Ladybug in the New York Special was because he was overcome with grief from accidentally killing Aeon, so it's good to know he learned absolutely nothing from that experience.

So Scarabella thankfully summons her Lucky Charm, a trash can lid, to shield herself from Cat Noir's Cataclysm, and then despite having absolutely no experience with this new set of powers, manages to do the one thing almost every Akuma or Sentimonster in this show has failed to do and incapacitates Cat Noir so he's vulnerable to losing his Miraculous. At least when Marinette masters every other Miraculous she uses, it can be theorized that she trained to use them offscreen. Alya literally just got the Ladybug Miraculous (and struggled to get up to the rooftop with her yo-yo to show her inexperience earlier), and now she easily manages to pin down the more experienced hero of the two?

Here's an idea: Instead of having Scarabella overpower Cat Noir, have her be in a position where Cat Noir, non-lethally, mind you, manages to almost take her Miraculous away, but she uses the quick wit she's developed from her extensive time as Rena Rouge to convince Cat Noir she's the real deal by saying something only he and Ladybug know. It would have easily resolved the conflict and doesn't make one of the characters look like a homicidal idiot.

So because both heroes used their powers, Scarabella and Cat Noir detransform so Tikki and Plagg can recharge, though Adrien still gives Alya attitude because Ladybug didn't tell him she had to leave.

Hey, Adrien? Here's the thing...

YOU DID THE EXACT SAME FUCKING THING IN THE NEW YORK SPECIAL, YOU SHIT FOR BRAINS!

You have absolutely NO RIGHT to claim you're always honest when you went behind Ladybug's back and endangered Paris while you had the balls to run away like a coward and only helped fix the consequences of your actions once your ego was validated by a recording of Ladybug. It's honestly even worse because while Marinette had no choice but to leave and trust Alya with the Ladybug, Adrien willingly left Paris alone and we were supposed to sympathize with him after he killed someone, and now as soon as he's in the opposite situation, we're still supposed to feel bad for him?! BULLSHIT! And you better believe I'm going to talk about the way Adrien views his partnership with Ladybug later on.

And of course, even though lives are on the line, Cat Noir just has to continue to bitch and moan about how (and this is best read in Linkara's whiny Superboy Prime voice) “sCaRaBeLlA iSn'T tHe ReAl LaDyBuG”, showing how just like in so many episodes, Astruc and his team believes Cat Noir's feelings are more important than saving the day.

Scarabella goes to rescue some civilians, but they were actually brainwashed by Robustus, once again showing her inexperience as Ladybug which doesn't go well with her effortlessly defeating Cat Noir earlier at all. Cat Noir helps Scarabella escape and the two hide out at the city's wax statue museum previously featured in “The Puppeteer 2”, because I guess the writers only want to reference bad episodes today. Cat Noir, not getting the importance of secret identities, asks Scarabella how she knows Ladybug, and Cat Noir somehow finds out she knows Ladybug's identity from her response.

Before the two can talk more, it turns out that the wax statues of celebrities in the museum are real people who attack the two heroes, leading to an awkward fight scene where Scarabella and Cat Noir fight a bunch of brainwashed civilians with no weapons beyond their cellphones. Our heroes, ladies and gentlemen!

Scarabella summons her Lucky Charm again, creating a frying pan, but when she looks around, she can't see how to properly use it. And despite spending the entire episode complaining about how much he hates her, it's Cat Noir that tells Scarabella to get her head back in the game because “That's what Ladybug would do”. Funny, I can think of a few situations where Cat Noir could have taken his own advice, but I digress. Also, he's now just cool with Scarabella because there's only a few minutes left in the episode and we need to wrap up the conflict.

Scarabella figures out an idea that involves freeing Marinette, so she negotiates with Robostus to free everything and everyone under his control or else Cat Noir will use his Cataclysm to destroy the Ladybug Miraculous. Robostus agrees and empties his hard drive, and to show them holding up her end of the bargain, Scarabella gives him the frying pan before she and Cat Noir let themselves be captured... while Marinette simply hits Robostus with the frying pan, freeing the Akuma and the two heroes. All in all, it's a really creative climax that shows both Scarabella and Marinette in perfect sync with each other even though they never discussed their plan. Though of course, because Astruc hates writing any scene with Ladynoir, Cat Noir gets a bucket stuck on his head so he doesn't see Marinette saving the day.

Scarabella de-evilizes Robostus, uses Miraculous Scarabella to fix everything and send Marinette back to the train, and because Hack-San already failed once, Shadowmoth can't use it for a different plan so he destroys the Sentimonster.

We cut to a few days after the trip (I guess Shadowmoth decided to take a vacation himself), and Alya tells Marinette to talk with Cat Noir about what happened.

This scene was so close to ending this episode off on a positive note. There was a good atmosphere and the body language of Ladybug and Cat Noir does a good job at telling us how uncomfortable they both feel while talking. It's just that instead of getting a heart to heart between the two about the lack of trust in their relationship, we get an Angstdrien Depreste scene. Or would a more accurate term be Cat Dour?

First off, while I don't have a problem with Ladybug apologizing for not telling Cat Noir, the episode never has him bring up what happened with Scarabella. As usual, both of them were partially at fault, but only Ladybug had to apologize for leaving her “Kitty” alone.

Second, Cat Noir’s feelings weren’t hurt? You’re telling me that in scenes like this...

And this...

Didn’t show Adrien acting irrationally because of how emotional he was? Is he really telling the truth around Ladybug or is he just trying to sweep that under the rug so Scarabella’s testimony doesn’t screw up his chances with Ladybug?

Third, this was an obvious chance to Cat Noir to finally be honest and tell Ladybug how he feels about her leaving him in the dark about so many things, but the entire conversation is just about how sad he would be if he never sees Ladybug again. Even though the whole reason he was so pissy to Scarabella at first was because of some lingering resentment for Ladybug ignoring him in favor of other heroes, why is this what the two talk about? I get it's not the season finale, but it's kind of hypocritical for Cat Noir to whine about how Ladybug doesn't trust him while never being honest about his own feelings? Sure, he's all soft and vulnerable around Ladybug, but we've seen all season how angry he gets about her not trusting him whenever she isn't around, so ironically, it's hard to tell if this is him being honest or not.

And I think now's a good time to finally talk about the way Ladybug and Cat Noir's partnership has been portrayed all season, especially since the main themes of the episodes relate to it. Buckle up, Adrien stans, because this isn't going to be pretty.

All season, we have been supposed to sympathize with Adrien as Marinette starts to trust Alya with more things than him. Marinette revealed her identity to her, trusted her to have her Miraculous permanently, and even let her keep her Miraculous even though someone else knew her identity. While some of it is hypocritical, the idea is that Adrien feels like he can be trusted with this kind of knowledge too, when really, he hasn't earned that responsibility.

Adrien has rarely, if ever, taken his job as a superhero seriously.

Not only is he known to flirt with Ladybug in the middle of a fight, he has defied her orders and recklessly sacrificed himself because he thinks Ladybug can do all the work without him.

He has also lashed out emotionally and once threatened to quit being Cat Noir in the middle of a crisis and was willing to let innocent people suffer for personal reasons, and later on actually quit being Cat Noir temporarily while Hawkmoth was about to start World War III because he was wallowing in self-pity.

He once said he isn't cut out for the responsibility that comes with being Ladybug and never learned anything from temporarily using the Ladybug Miraculous.

He has generally refused to respect Ladybug's boundaries and doesn't understand that she doesn't like him that way while he insists they should be a couple.

He outright fell for an evil doppelganger of Ladybug because she said she loved him and turned against the real Ladybug.

And I should also mention that despite hating how Ladybug keeps secrets from him, a lot of Adrien's worst moments have been when Ladybug wasn't around and he never told her about them.

He never told Ladybug that he was the reason Copycat really got akumatized while saying he never lies to her.

He never told Ladybug he contemplated letting thousands of people die because he didn't like not knowing stuff Ladybug knew.

He never told Ladybug he briefly used the Snake Miraculous to get brownie points with her.

He never told Ladybug he figured out her identity and asked her out as soon as he did so.

He never told Ladybug he abandoned Paris to go on a field trip.

He never told Ladybug he was screwing around on patrol and was excited to see someone get akuamtized if it meant spending time with her.

He never told Ladybug how he ignored Rena Rouge's orders because “ShE wAsN't LaDyBuG” and almost screwed up the mission because of it, and also never told her how he smashed a chimney in anger at Rena Rouge being in on the plan.

And he never told Ladybug he gave her replacement attitude after trying to harm her without letting her explain herself.

Why exactly should I support the idea of Ladybug trusting Cat Noir more when Cat Noir himself has kept his own secrets from Ladybug?

Adrien has done absolutely nothing to show he is trustworthy because more often than not, he views the battle with Shadowmoth as a game. He has screwed around when lives were on the line, and we're supposed to see him as responsible? It's kind of funny that Astruc compared Ladybug to Spider-Man, yet he seems to have forgotten that with great power, there must also come great responsibility. If this was a character flaw or a sign he needed to grow up, I'd be more accepting, but the fact that the writers think Adrien is a great superhero is laughable with how much evidence has proved the contrary.

In contrast, Alya, despite only being Marinette's confidant for a few episodes, has shown to take being a hero more seriously. She's helped her escape to transform, analyze the Guardian texts, and has been shown to work well on her own as Rena Rouge while helping out Marinette. I'm not trying to say she's an amazing character (“Rocketear” in particular has shown she still has problems with keeping secrets), but compared to Adrien, she seems to be more capable of handling top-secret information with Marinette, and more importantly, doesn't view being Rena Rouge as a way to have fun like Adrien does being Cat Noir. I'll go more into detail with that next time.

But yeah, this scene is how the episode ends, and what did I think of it?

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I'm honestly not sure which episode I think is worse, this one or “Queen Banana”. On the one hand, every frame of “Queen Banana” could easily be replaced by an image of Astruc flipping the bird and the overall message of the episode would remain unchanged, but the fact that all of the writers think that everything Adrien does in this episode is okay and that we should feel sorry for him in this episode is just as bad, if not worse.

As awful as Chloe was portrayed in “Queen Banana”, it was clear it was intentional on the writers' part, but Adrien doesn't get that excuse once much like he has all season. As far as Astruc's team thinks, Adrien is an incredible superhero even when he honestly attempted to harm someone with a superpower that can cause grievous harm at best. Yet again this season, in the show's attempt to make me feel sorry for Adrien, it made him look even worse. In any other show, he would obviously be called out for his incredibly unheroic actions.

Even putting him aside, the writing in this episode is still AWFUL. The whole reason Ladybug was benched had several plotholes and poor communication with Cat Noir that only made the fight with Robostus even harder, Shadowmoth's plan to waste a potentially useful Sentimonster to reuse a single Akuma was one of the dumbest plans he's ever had, and barring the ending, the action was just forgettable.

There were a few okay moments sprinkled throughout the episode (more than I can say for “Queen Banana”), so I'm still not sure if I should call this the worst episode of the show or still give that honor to “Queen Banana”. I guess I'll leave that choice up to you and let you pick your poison for now.

I mean, it's not like there's going to be an even worse episode down the line this season, right?

RIGHT???

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4rainynite · 3 years

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Infinity Train Headcanons

Just a bunch of Infinity Train headcanons I've come up with, I'm only doing five per character so it won't too long. I'm mainly gonna focus on the passenger characters and do the denizens later on. Majority of them have been posted on @infinity-train-headcanons already (awesome blog by the way), but whatever here we go:

Tulip

The reason Tulip loves onions so much is because when her mother was pregnant she craved onions a lot. Mrs. Olsen thinks onions are okay at best, but Tulip loves them.

Tulip is fairly athletic (that explains why she could do all those stunts on the train), but prefers gaming and coding. Her classmates that are on sports teams are greatly annoyed that she won't join.

Despite Lake being gone she can still take pictures of herself on cameras or through a selfie (and sometimes see herself in water), because those are images not reflections.

Tulip would so adopt a corgi and name him “Atticus the 2nd” and put miniature crowns on him.

When Tulip goes to Oshkosh she'll based her game on her adventures on the train. Not only will it be super popular, but some of the other campers and counselors will suggest some cars because some of them were passengers as well.

Lake

After, Lake left she accidently started a revolution in the Chrome Car. In the end (in a future fanfic of mine) there will be peace and Lake and a certain group of passengers will help.

Lake won't be able to start school immediately (due to Tulip being in middle school and Jesse being in high school) , but she is able to do homeschooling. Come next school year she'll be at school with Jesse

Lake lives in the Cosay's attic. They've tried to convince her/him/them (other pronouns) to take the guest room, but Lake's cool with it. Mainly, because she/he/they gets a view of the lake she/he/ they named themselves after.

Lake is super into art! It's mainly abstract and black, but she loves it! The problem is Jesse's parents have to buy the spray paint for her.

Lake loves traveling to new places and Jesse brings her/him/them along when the swim team travels to different places.

Jesse

After, the train Jesse decides to join theatre class/club. He mainly gets background or understudy parts, but he loves to sing.

Is a Chicken Choice Judy fan and gets Lake and Nate into them. Jesse and Lake theorize that Chicken Choice Judy were passengers at one point.

Jesse becomes closer with his swim team to be friends, he is currently co-captain.

Jesse really misses Alan Dracula, so, Lake got him one of those deer plushies as a gift. Jesse put glasses on it and named it Alan Dracula the Second and Cuddliest.

Jesse always picks vampire movies during movie night at the Cosay house. I believe he really likes vampires .

Grace

Grace's parents so would've sent her to boarding school after the shoplifting thing instead of just talking to her.

Grace will be the last former Apex member to leave the train due to her number still being high. In the meantime she still helps passengers lower their numbers.

There is no way Grace was the only person to form a cult on the Infinity Train. Grace's was just the longest surviving one of eight years, I won't explain why Grace's was the longest due to... cult stuff.

Grace rarely got to see her maternal grandparents, due to her mother wanting to reject her low-class upbringing. From what little memories she had, Grace misses them.

Grace regrets what she put Hazel through and wants her back, but she knows her leaving was for the best no matter how much it hurts.

Hazel

I don't know why but I see Hazel as a vegetarian.

When Tuba found her she was a baby, not a baby turtle, a baby- baby.

She and Amelia will be close, but will never have a true mother - daughter relationship. I know Amelia is trying to get better, but she admitted she's not a caretaker.

She'll sing Tuba's Lullaby to comfort herself in stressful situations and whenever she feels she'll forget her.

Hazel will be adopted by Ryan and Min-Gi when she gets off the train and Tulip, Lake, Jesse, and Nate will be like siblings to her. Okay, okay, okay, I know that's a very long shot, but Hazel deserves happiness!

Simon

Was a boy scout or took a survival class, I mean how else would he know about frostbite in Le Chat Chalet Car.

Probably went to way too many funerals as a child. I'm going by what he said to Hazel about neighbors brining casseroles.

Simon would get into fights with his teachers and classmates about being right about every little thing, even as a he was a narcissist.

Simon so had a crush on Grace way before their 'awkward middle school kiss' . After, Grace's betrayal whatever feelings he had were gone.

Was a fantasy nerd and wanted to be a fantasy writer. His trilogy book would've had his character based off himself being made a king.

Ryan

Ryan and his youngest brother are the only two in their family who wear glasses.

Is still on good terms with his ex-girlfriends (Disco Girl, Punk Girl, and Hippie Girl). Yeah, they broke up, but Ryan wasn't their worse ex and was nice to them. They love telling Min-Gi embarrassing dating stories.

He most likely had suicidal thoughts, once off the train he tells Min-Gi and gets help through therapy.

Despite not gaining attention during his solo gigs he did make a friend or two during his stops like the lesbian couple at the party in the Twin Tapes. Which helps spread Chicken Choice Judy's music.

Ryan is very strong despite his scrawny appearance, due to carrying equipment, changing tires, and other heavy lifting activities.

Min-Gi

Was diagnosed with dyslexia at an early age. His parents worried this would hamper him so they would hire a tutor after school when he wasn't playing with Ryan.

Is a really good cook, but his main specialties are Korean dishes (his mother taught him) and breakfast food (working at Dumpty's Diner).

Has an artistic side, but rarely used it except for the Chicken Choice Judy t-shirt. Later on he designs the covers for CCJ's CDs.

He most likely has a bunch of older cousins. I think Mr. and Mrs. Parks had Min-Gi late, so he's the baby of the cousins.

To me Min-Gi never shown in interest in dating or romance. His parents tried to set him up a few of their co-workers' daughters, but nothing ever happened afterwards. He does love Ryan though.

Amelia

I believe Amelia will get off the train, but when she does majority of her friends and family and friends will be gone and will return to the train.

Amelia will allow Hazel to play with the denizens while she works on the train. She may not be a caretaker, but she remembers being a child and children need to have fun.

I think Amelia was jealous of Min-Gi and Ryan, since the two remind her of Alrick and herself in their youth and what could've been if he lived. She dubs them 'Destiny Rubbish Duet'.

Amelia would monitor the Snow Car frequently to make sure One would never leave or any passengers interacted with him. But, the one time in thirty years she set her clock on the wrong time to wake up, allowing Tulip to find One-One.

The day Amelia picked out her wedding dress was the same day she got the news of Alrick's passing.

Well, that was a long post. I may do more in the future, so I'll just end it here.

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brawltogethernow · 3 years

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@mirrorfalls submitted: Came across this while searching for James Bond’s scrambled-eggs recipe (long story). Your thoughts?

But did you find James Bond’s scrambled eggs recipe?

In this article, Scocca laments his inability to find accessible, lighthearted superhero comics suitable to read with his young son, while also demonstrating a mysterious aversion to looking at DC and Marvel’s lines of comics for children, which is where the accessible, lighthearted superhero comics suitable for reading with young children are. He wants his elementary schooler to be able to safely have the run of all superhero media so he doesn’t have to touch the yucky baby books.

This is not an industry-wide crisis. This is just one dude who got paid to write an article where he accidentally exposed one of his personal hangups.

The child headed toward the trade paperbacks of Marvel and D.C. superhero titles on the side wall […] a few steps in front of me. […] Is he with you? a clerk asked me. I said he was. You know, the clerk said, we have a kids’ section. The clerk gestured backward, at a few shelves near the entrance. I said, Thanks, we know and tried throwing in a little shrug, as the kid kept going.

You can’t just turn a seven-year-old child loose in a comic-book store to look at the superhero comic books. […] My seven-year-old really wanted to see that last Avengers movie […] that is, he wished it were a movie he could see, but he understood that it was, instead, a movie designed to scare and sadden him—a movie actively hostile to people like him.

They have a children’s section. Because comics are a medium suitable for stories for everybody, and they are sold in comic book shops, which have sections, like bookstores. You can use this organization to find books that you know in advance are suitable for children. What goes in that category is determined by industry professionals. This area will be bigger the bigger the shop is. These comics are not lower quality that titles from the main lines. They are actually slightly better-written on average.

Your local comic book shop has considerately wrapped Empowered in a plastic bag, so your child will not be drawn in by a colorful superhero and accidentally read a graphic scene. If you think your kid might find a memoir about internment camps upsetting, it is your job to notice them picking up They Called Us Enemy and read the blurb on the back before you let them have it. This comic adults are meant to read is in a comic book shop because that is where comics are sold. Not every public place is supposed to be Disneyland.

Movies have ratings systems. If you do not want your child to watch a PG-13 movie, you will find that most superhero cartoons are for children. They are about the same characters. Some are quite good! I really enjoyed Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Your child may like Avengers Assemble. At least I think that’s right. I’m always mixing those titles around.

This is a deeply weird bias for Scocca to casually demonstrate, because he identifies in the article that real childishness is striving for empty maturity.

He compares an old comic,

[…]a 1966 Spider-Man comic in which Spider-Man meets, fights, and defeats the Rhino; participates in a running argument between John Jameson and J. Jonah Jameson about his heroism; buys a motorcycle; breaks up with his first girlfriend, Betty Brant; flirts with Gwen Stacy; and reluctantly agrees to let Aunt May take him to meet her friend Mrs. Watson’s niece, Mary Jane.

and a new comic,

[…]a 21st century comic book in which Thor, brooding in a Katrina-destroyed New Orleans, beats up Iron Man. He also yells at Iron Man a lot about some incomprehensibly convoluted set of grievances, including involuntary cloning, that he believes Iron Man perpetrated against him while he was dead(?), and then summons some other Norse god from the beyond somehow for reasons having something to do with real estate. I think. Where the 1966 comic is zippy and fun and complete, the whole contemporary one is muddled and lugubrious and seems to constitute a tiny piece of a seemingly endless plot arc—simultaneously apocalyptic and inert.

and concludes that the edgier comic is actually less mature. This is true. (This is not news about mediocre comics.)

It also has nothing to do with either comic being child-friendly, the article’s nominal thesis, except in the sense that ASM #41 (yes, I eyeballed that from that summary, yes I am just showing off now) is better written, making it more everyone-friendly. It also has practically more space dedicated to word balloons than art and is about a college student juggling girl problems and a part-time job with a tyrannical boss. But the immature one, as Scocca points out, is dour.

These are both teenagery issues, separated only by quality. It’s true that lots of new comics published by the big 2 are bad in the specific way Scocca describes here, taking themselves too seriously and hauled down by associated stories instead of buoyed by them. Some are not! Some titles from these companies’ main continuities are zippy, contained, and child friendly. Give your child The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl! Or if you like vintage comics so much better, why don’t you…buy some?

The books on the kid’s rack are good and fun and totally suitable for parents to read with their children without wanting to scoop their eyeballs out. Scocca cites the Batman ‘66 comics as the brightly colored, tightly written all ages solution to his problem about sharing superhero stories with his son. My local comic shop stores this title in the kid’s section. I am glad that Scocca’s does not, as he seems to have a peculiar aversion to looking for comics to read with his son there.

Scocca cites Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse as a superhero movie he could watch with his kids. (I was surprised when this line made it sound like he has several. I don’t want to assume the other one isn’t in this article because they’re a girl, but I very much am assuming that.) Great! Go to the kid’s section and look for Marvel Adventures: Spider-Man. It’s a fun, zippy title directly inspired by ITSV where Miles, Gwen, and Peter superhero together. It’s much more tightly written than most of the various Spider-Verse comics, which are ambitiously messy ubercrossovers. You may not want to give those to children because they include murder and so on, but also you just have the choice between the two as an adult reader deciding how much continuity you want to deal with. Adventures is one of the only titles I would buy on sight before corona. The kid comic rack is a reliable place to take a break from How Comics Get Sometimes regardless of how old you are.

This article makes me feel quarrelsome. Maybe it’s that it doesn’t seem like exploration of a single idea so much as a loosely grouped bundle of things to kvetch about. Maybe it’s that the experience of getting into superheroes that Scocca describes experiencing, projects his seven-year-old son will experience, and from which he extrapolates a metaphorical microcosm of the history of the genre is completely alien to me.

Comic books [and] comic-book movies—are […] trapped in their imagined audience’s own awful passage from childhood to adolescence. A seven-year-old has a clean […] appreciation of superheroes. They like hero comics because the comics have heroes: bold, strong, vividly colored good guys to fight off the bad guys and make the world safe.

But seven-year-olds stop being seven. […] They become 13-year-olds, defensively trying to learn how to develop tastes about tastes.

The 13-year-old wants many things from comics, but the overarching one is that they want to prove that they’re not some seven-year-old baby anymore. They want gloomy heroes, miserable heroes, heroes who would make a seven-year-old feel bad. (Also boobs. They want boobs.)

Not because of the boobs line, although that does illicit an eyeroll that this gloomy thinkpiece is fretting over preserving the superhero experience of little boys who resemble the little boy the writer was while casually dismissing everyone else. I was one of those unlikable little seven-year-olds with a college reading level and the impression that maintaining it was the crux of my worth. I only read Books - distinguished media you could club someone with. I have a formative memory of pausing, enraptured, in front of a poster for Spider-Man 3, preparing to say that it looked pretty cool, and being beaten to the punch by my mother making a disparaging comment about how the movie was trash. It wasn’t out yet, but it was a superhero movie. That meant it was for loud, brainless children.

That was the total of my childhood experience with superheroes, excluding being the unwilling audience to incessant renditions of “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” that left me wondering why in god’s name Batman’s sidekick was named Robin. I certainly never visited a comic book shop. I got into TvTropes, which got me into webcomics, which got me following David Willis, who got me into Ask Chris at ComicsAlliance, which led to me rewarding myself for studying like a demon for the AP tests with three volumes of Waid’s Daredevil, pitched as a return to the character being colorful and swashbuckling. I was seven…teen.

This is of the same thread as Scocca’s point that immaturity is running from childish things. It leaves me baffled that he doesn’t follow that maturity is embracing them.

I will disclose here that while I think it was dumb I had to overcome my upbringing’s deeply embedded shame associated with enjoying arbitrarily defined lowbrow media and children being childish, I think it’s fine that I was allowed largely unchecked access to technically age-inappropriate content. In my limited experience, content small children are too young for is also content they’re too young to understand, so it kind of just bounces off of them, and what actually ends up terrorizing them is unpredictable collages of impressions that strike out at them from content deemed perfectly child-friendly. I would not forbid a seven-year-old I was in charge of from seeing an MCU movie unless I had a reason to believe that specific child would not take it well. These are emotionally low-stakes bubblegum films. It will probably be easier to socialize with other kids if they have seen them.

But then, when I picture being in charge of a hypothetical child, I usually imagine this being the case because they are related to me, and the pupal stage in my family strongly resembles Wednesday Addams. ALL children love death and violence, though, right?? This isn’t a joke point. I know it looks like a joke point.

The MCU thing seems especially weird in light of the article’s particular focus on Spider-Man, which is the kiddie line of the MCU, even if they refused to waver from their usual formula enough to get a lower rating. Though I am more inclined to describe it as “preying on the young” than “child-friendly”.

(MCU movies are increasingly dubious propaganda, but I would not judge them in front of a child who wanted to watch them for that reason, just in case this led to them partaking of them without me the second they were old enough to and then they grew up to run a blog about them while our relationship suffered because they didn’t feel like it was safe to talk to me about their interests…Mom.)

I tried to overcome the philosophy of letting anyone read anything while compiling this handful of mostly-newish superhero recs for the road that anyone can read. (Handily, I have been in spitting distance of being hired as a comic shop clerk enough to have thought about it before):

For actual children:

Marvel Adventures Spider-Man (the new one is reminiscent of ITSV, the old one is more like 616) any DC/Archie crossover, Archie’s Superteens The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (for bookish children who think they’re too good for comics and adults afraid of the kid’s section) Teen Titans Go (even if you hate the show) Superman Smashes the Klan

For teens:

Ms. Marvel Young Avengers (volume 2) Unbelievable Gwenpool Batman: Gotham Adventures Teen Titans Go (the tie-in comic based off the old show was also called this)

Here are a bunch of relevant C. S. Lewis quotes.

#me every time i read a comic book article by a rag not exclusively about comic books: i know more than you.#marvel #spidey #DCU #MCU critical #mirrorfalls #asks answered #submission #unearthed this and bashed it out in one sitting ... i have not been working on it since you sent it last year XD

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