#anyways both episodes are good but also have flaws so stop acting so black and white about this

[agrebel18]

maybe I just need to rewatch “thanks to them” and “for the future” soon because. DAMN.

[mk-wizard]

Optimus Prime is always the hero...?

Hello, fans. If you recall, a while ago, I brought up that in the IDW comics, Megatron tried to stay on the straight and narrow, and actually succeeded at it. So much so that even burying the hatchet with Optimus was on the table. In short, we have seen in the comics and in War for Cybertron that Megatron has what it takes to be a good guy because he is complex and not black or white.

In the midst of that, I got asked by a random person a while ago in a passing comment that I feel I still need to answer because it was just that interesting and worth giving thought. I warn you that this question may seem controversial and the type of thing that you would only expect to happen in wish fulfilment fanfiction, alternate universe or the Shattered Glass series, but trust me when I say it does merit thought because Transformers has become a very vast universe over the years and the characters have become very complicated. If it is possible for Megatron to go good, then is it possible for Optimus Prime to go bad?

I admit that if you asked me this question five years ago, I would have flatly told you “no” and kept it at that, but after writing an adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde my way that delves into the complexities of morality and how it affects our actions for better or for worse, it got me seriously thinking how it could possibly play out. After giving it some thought, I have come to the conclusion that it is not only possible for Optimus Prime to be an antagonist in a story, but a very compelling one.

To understand this, you need to be aware that an antagonist is not necessarily a villain or malicious. In fact, some of the most iconic and possibly destructive antagonists meant well, but did terrible damage either because their vision became an obsession that blinded them or because they had unresolved issues that caught up with them. In the case of Optimus, as good as gold as he is, it would be a bit of both. In both Prime and War for Cybertron, we see a very serious flaw in him that is too great to be ignored. Optimus is both incredibly stubborn and very set in his beliefs which can has proven to be both a disadvantage and a danger to those around him. He has a lot of trouble accepting facts if they conflict with his ideals or morals of how he believes things should be. It is a flaw that Wonder Woman also struggled with except unlike her, he is not as flexible when it comes to accepting that he is wrong. Optimus is so stubborn to the point where he will burn himself with up to ten packs before finally accepting even only the possibility that maybe he should stop playing with matches. This also reveals that Optimus has an egotistical side and while it is one that is with good intent in that he wants everyone to be happy and safe, but he is not willing to admit his vision just doesn’t work and in fact, hurts people. 

For example, he believes Cybertron and its solar system would be a happier and more peaceful place if all Transformers were Autobots which I think everyone can agree with me when I say that this vision is not realistic nor true. Being an Autobot will not automatically make you a safer person to be around and swearing allegiance to the Prime doesn’t mean you will actually live by your oath. Also, for a lot of bots, the Autobot lifestyle was the source of a lot of pain and hardships such as for the slaves, gladiators or poor. To them, switching to another faction was their salvation. You cannot expect to go back to being Autobots when another lifestyle was how they got out of the hole. Another thing to consider is that some Transformers are law abiding and good, but just don’t want to be Autobots because honestly, why should you stop being who you are in order to prove you’re a law abiding citizen? Imagine going to a new place, having a clean record and wanting only a quiet life, but you’re denied entry simply because you refuse to renounce the faction you were born, raised and created an identity behind. This is essentially what Optimus did to the youngling Wedge who was initially a Deceptcon and while Wedge was too young to realize it then so he did without seeing the gravity of what he was asked to do, but imagine what is going to sink into his head when he realizes what he’s done. 

Then you’ve got Transformers like Junkions, Maximals, Predacons, Insecticons (more recently), Pretenders and possibly more where being the faction they are is rooted into their CNA (Cybertronian DNA). They can ONLY be what they are and even they change a symbol, everyone will still see that these bots are not Autobots and will inevitably have an impact on society. Not to mention it is pretty darn cruel for the law to command someone to wear a mask or pretend to be something when their own biology screams that they are something else. The implications and oppression behind such a notion is just harrowing. Before I digress any further, the point is that Optimus’ spark is in the right place and on paper, it sounds like the ultimate Utopia where nobody feels the urge to conquer anyone because everyone thinks, looks, acts and believes the same, but... that is not the way the real world works. In the real world, evil is not an event you can just prevent. It exists everywhere even within the Autobot faction and being different is not just a basic right of all people it is nature and evidently, the will of Primus. This makes Optimus Prime famous quote “freedom is the right of all sentient beings” all the more ironic because deep down, his own view of the free world isn’t really free at all.

This brings us to the next point which also has a huge influence on Optimus that we have to consider and how it opens up the possibility can you could play an antagonist role in general. He is very traumatized by the war and this comes up subtly in Prime and in the Rescue Bots. Optimus uses the term “Decepticon” as another word for “evil” and he isn’t the only bot who has been through the war to do this. It is a realistic type of trauma that even the noblest of heroes will exhibit and just the fact that he would not even welcome a child like Wedge into a loving home unless he converted to Autobot is telling at how extensive this trauma is. This means that Optimus has a stigma towards Decepticons that is so severe that affects his judgement and even his actions. Chances are, it has also affected the way he sees factions and Decepticons. I highly doubt he would be willing to be friends with one even if they were harmless which is something that does get explored in the IDW comics a little. It is also only a matter of time before he starts having other episodes, PTSD and other things that will set off his paranoia further. This has nothing to do with him being good or bad. Optimus is a good person, but he isn’t perfect and war changes a person.

As the evidence and character development suggests, I think Optimus can make a very good antagonist for the right story and maybe, just maybe, there should be a series where is. Keep in mind, I say antagonist not bad guy. Optimus should never be painted as a bad guy not even when he makes bad decisions. He is not Unicron who has malicious intent and he isn’t Megatron who solves everything with hostility. Optimus Prime is a guy who has been scarred emotionally and physically, and doesn’t want that to happen to others to the point where he will inevitably go too far at times. That is normal and actually, to be expected. However, unlike most TF antagonists, he would eventually listen to reason and want to make a compromise, but not without some conflict. After all, learning to adapt after the war and remake Cybertron is a battle within itself and it is only now that Optimus along with other bots have a chance to finally begin healing. That will take time and work.

Since Hasbro is doing a prequel series, it is possible that they will do an epilogue series that deals with this and I don’t think it is a bad thing to show kids that war leaves scars. Learning to stop reacting to every bit stress with hostility is a real struggle for veterans.

Anyway, all of this is just my opinion and I would like to know what yours is. Do you think Optimus Prime being an antagonist could be possible?

Thank you for reading and as always, stay safe.

[rachelbethhines]

Tangled Salt Marathon - The Alchemist Returns

Strap in folks, cause this is going to be a long one. In truth, there are very few flaws in this episode, but in order to explain them I have to really get into some character analysis first. 

Summary:  Varian comes to Rapunzel for help in finding the remnants of the mystical golden flower, which may hold the key to stopping the Black Rocks. Working together, they venture through the old tunnels beneath Corona. Meanwhile Cass and Eugene work together to figure out who drugged the castle’s populace with a truth serum. 

Behold! The One and Only Time Frederic is Called Out on His BS; and Nothing Comes of It. 

Rapunzel finally, finally stands up to her dad and points out both his abusiveness and his poor leadership. It doesn’t affect the narrative in anyway. Neither character learns anything from this nor changes their points of view. This conversation might as well not have happened given how the characters behave in later episodes/seasons. 

The only reason this scene exists is to give Rapunzel motivation for stealing the flower within the episode. A goal that she changes her mind about towards the end. Thereby walking back on such motivation and putting us back at square one with her development. 

Rapunzel Isn’t Being Truthful With Herself Nor the Audience 

So people aren't always one hundred percent truthful about what they want and their goals. Especially if it involves admitting something about yourself or a loved one that you don’t want to acknowledge. Fictional characters are meant to give the illusion of being real so they can sometimes mimic this behavior.  

Throughout the episode Rapunzel keeps on assisting that she’s doing this ‘for Corona’, but we’re given context clues along side that to tell us that her real reasons are about her relationship with her father. 

Unfortunately, the show has a bad habit of not communicating information clearly and also has a history of expecting the audience to take what the characters say at face value. Ergo, it’s easy to miss Rapunzel’s true motivations and thereby fail to fully understand her actions and decisions throughout. 

Once Again, These Prophetic Dreams Go Nowhere 

Dream Varian mentions Rapunzel has a ‘destiny’ but the show never spells out what that destiny actually is nor why she needs to fulfill it. Sure there’s a big quest for the moonstone in season two, but the rocks stop being a threat by then so really, she doesn’t actually need to go on that quest. In fact, she would save a lot of people at lot of trouble if she did nothing at all. That’s poor storytelling. You need something driving the action; a reason to motivate the hero.  

Secondly, we never get an explanation for why she randomly has these dreams in the first season but for none of the others. Nor why Varian is at the center of the them when it’s other villains she needs to actually be warned about, like say Zhan Tiri. 

No, the real reason why this dream sequence exists is just to reiterate Rapunzel’s internal conflict. She wants a relationship with her Dad, but he’s a male Gothel, and she’s now caught in the middle of his and Varian’s conflict because she failed to take responsibility when she needed to. And is still failing because she doesn’t want to shatter her illusions about Frederic. 

Shoving the main protagonist’s driving conflit into a subtextual dream sequence is lazy. Especially since we get no official resolution to said conflict. Rapunzel never acknowledges the problem here, never follows up on any type of action, and she never faces any true consequences for ignoring the issue. 

She carries on believing in her fantasy version of Frederic, even as he continues to do harmful things, and the narrative just rewards both her and him for it. 

There Should Have Been an Episode Showing the Audience Varian’s Side of the Story 

What happened to Varian in between Queen for a Day and this episode is told only through context clues. Nothing is stated outright, meaning the audience has to rely too heavily on inference and are left to piece together what happened on their own like a puzzle. That’s poor writing. 

Even something as simple as ‘how much time has past’ (its three months btw, S1 is six months long and QfaD is the meant to be the midpoint) is left up to the viewer to keep up with rather then being clearly stated. This is made even harder to do by the marketing team showing most of the episodes out of order. 

You need to clearly relay information to your audience. That means repeating said information in a variety of ways over the course of the story. Have those context clues, but also have more overt hints, and direct reveals interspersed along with that. Especially when dealing with the motivations and goals of the character driving the main plot. 

Even if you attribute the lack of a Varain episode to the ‘twist’ in this one, (a twist that was revealed in QfaD anyways) there’s still no excuse for why we didn’t get a flashback episode afterwards to fill this hole in narrative out.  

Don’t Pretend Ignorance Rapunzel 

Nigel literally repeated the rumor to her face last episode. She knows her father is lying about the rocks and attacked her for the scroll. She knows from the letter that those same guards were chasing down Varian for said scroll. She knows about Corona’s laws and what would happen to Varian if the guards caught him. 

There is zero reason for her to be acting like this is new information. Let alone have any right to feign concern after three months of ignoring his plea for help.

That’s what I mean about the series not communicating clearly and wanting the audience to take things at face value. The show deliberately has the characters say things that contradict established events to try and get the audience on their side. 

The episode is trying to telling us, ‘See! Rapunzel is innocent in all this cause she didn’t know, but she’s trying to make up for it now’. Yet, if you’ve been watching and paying attention to the details, you know that’s not the truth here. 

Good writing is about communicating ideas to your audience. But this show can’t decide on which idea to communicate. Is Rapunzel at fault or no? You can’t have it both ways. Either she screwed up and thereby caused the conflict in question now or she didn’t. If she didn’t, then events shouldn’t progress like they do. If she did, then it needs to be acknowledged and she needs to held accountable by the narrative.  

More Hints into Rapunzel's True Motivation 

I can’t stress this enough. Rapunzel’s reasons for stealing the flower has nothing to do with Corona. That is an excuse. It’s about trying to find out what her Dad is hiding from her and why he’s lying to her. This comment right here is what compels Raps to go along with his plan.  

Also...

Varian Isn’t Lying Here

I also want to make it perfectly clear that Varian is being upfront with Raps. He tells her his plan is to steal the flower and why. She’s the one that makes the assumption that this entails them only taking one petal and the assumption that ‘all our problems’ only means saving Corona. Even though saving Corona and saving Quirin are the same problem. (more on this later) 

It’s important to understand Rapunzel’s thought process and her true motivations in order to make sense of her actions later in the story. 

Rapunzel’s internal conflict is her need for autonomy versus her fear of rejection. The ‘for Corona’ and ‘one petal’ excuses are used because she thinks they’ll play well with her Dad. In order words, they’re reassurances to her that should she get caught and have to face her father’s disapproval then she could counteract his arguments with his own belief system about ‘putting the kingdom’s needs first’ and ‘following your own inner voice.’ 

And yes, both Rapunzel and Frederic are big fat hypocrites for this, but Rapunzel hasn’t acknowledged that fact to herself and is trying to convince herself throughout the episode to believe in her own excuses. 

Why Do You Care About Treason Rapunzel? 

For context, treason is the highest crime in any country. It’s punishable by death, even in the real world. Now each country has its own legal definition of what constitutes as treason. Here in a America, in Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution, treason is specifically limited to levying war against the US, or adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. And only during a time of war. Legally, a time of war has to be approved by the US congress. Technically, congress hasn’t declared war since World War II. This is why certain people haven’t been convicted of treason like acts both in, and out of, later US conflicts because the definition is arguably too narrow and specific. But it’s intentionally that way to help prevent false accusations and to keep people in power from murdering their political opposition. 

Before the US, treason just meant opposing the ruler of the land in any way. The founding fathers committed treason just by signing the Declaration of Independence. They all would have been executed had the US lost the revolution. Here in Corona, that old definition still stands. Simple theft of royal property, a non violent act, is considered treason and we already know it’s punishment. Eugene stole royal property and was almost hanged for it in the movie. 

Now Rapunzel though, she is royalty. This stuff she’s stealing is technically her own property. She’ll inherit all of these things once Queen. Moreover, we all know that Frederic wouldn’t harm Rapunzel let alone kill her. She’s not in any real danger here. So why does she care? 

Remember that Rapunzel’s internal conflict is personal autonomy versus her fear of rejection. She only hesitates in her pursuit of answers when reminded of Frederic’s possible disapproval. That’s why she stops under his frowning picture to say this. “Treason” only means possible rejection or disapproval from her father. The worst thing she faces is another argument with him.   

Meanwhile, Varian’s life is very much at stake here. He is risking everything, quite literally, to save his father. But his life was arguably forfeit as soon as Frederic decided he wanted the scroll. What’s to prevent the king from claiming that as his own property even when it’s really not? If he’s already sent guards after Varian and the scroll then that’s precisely what he’s already done. 

The series is acting like Rapunzel is the reasonable one here because she questions stealing, but the reality is she’s being selfish and willfully obtuse. Multiple lives are at stake here, including the one of the person she is talking to right now. Breaking the law, defying her father, in order to save those lives shouldn’t even be in question at all. 

Corona and Quirin Aren’t Conflicting Interests. 

Quirin and Corona are both facing the same problem. Solving one will inevitably mean solving the other. Any distinction between the two is solely created within Rapunzel’s own mind. 

She does this to to hide her true motivations and conflict from herself. The show does this to try and villainize Varian over Frederic. 

There’s a clear bias in who the series wants you to root for and so it skews the perception of what’s actually at stake by creating a non-existent competition between Quirin’s life and the country’s safety. Even though Quirin, Varian, and Old Corona are all apart of the kingdom. They’re all Rapunzel’s and Federic’s responsibly too. Saving Quirin’s life should be more than reason enough to steal the flower on it’s own. 

But this is ‘Rapunzel’s show’ and according to the creators, that means that her personal feelings are more important than actual human lives. Not really, but that’s their mindset and approach to conflicts in the show.

Rapunzel’s True Motivation is Revealed

So we’ve followed the hints, but here it is stated outright. This was never about Corona, the rocks,Varian’s safety, nor Quirin’s life. This is about her need for autonomy. Her own personal quest for assertiveness. She’s been bullied and abused by two steprate parental figures now and she’s growing tired of it. Which is understandable and valid, but it shouldn’t be made more important than everyone else’s problems. Everytime Rapunzel says ‘for Corona’, she really means ‘for herself.’ 

Rapunzel Shouldn’t be the Only Person Solving the Obstacles Here

Varian is just as smart as Rapunzel, if not smarter. This has been established throughout the show both before and after this episode. Meanwhile, Rapunzel is more physically adept than Varian. This whole sequence in the tunnels should have been both Rapunzel and Varian teaming up and complementing the other’s skill sets. They need to be on equal footing in order to sell their conflict later on. But the show deliberately down plays Varian’s competence in this episode in an effort to make Rapunzel look good.  

‘Girl power’ shouldn’t mean making the character perfect. It especially shouldn’t mean making other characters weaker in comparison. Women want equality. That means we want to see female characters treated as people. That means we want female characters to be flawed while still contributing to the plot same as the male characters. That doesn’t mean we want to be paraded around as the only competent person in the room. We want to be on the same level as the boys not above them.    

Over idealization and glorification of ‘strong’ female characters is just as problematic as damsels in distresses.

Writers like Chris Sonnenburg grew up during the heyday of Third-wave Feminism. Right on the cusp between second-wave and third-wave points of view as women really started to challenge Hollywood’s portrayal of themselves as homemakers and love interests. They wanted to be the heroes for once. Starting in the 60s and reaching pick popularity in the 70s and early 80s, film makers responded by making female characters who could physically fight but either failed to give them any sort of depth and/or made them the only archetype available.   

Chris, and several other male writers who lived during this era, have internalized this approach by default without actually examining how it came into existence nor why women would no longer be satisfied by this portrayal of them, if they ever were. All we’ve done is trade one stereotype for another, as male creators fetishize what was once meant to be an attempt to empower ourselves.       

Had Chis actually brought more female writers onto the show and listened to the criticisms from his female crew, he could have better avoided problems like the one above. But instead he dug in his heels and insisted that he already knew what we wanted. He doesn’t. 

Why Would You Assume This Eugene?

Varian hasn’t actually done anything wrong yet. His worst crimes are drugging people with a magic potion, which is what Xavier did without consequence only two episodes ago, and attempting to steal a magical healing flower that the king has been hoarding from his subjects anyways. A king who has been persecuting Varian unfairly and they know this because of Quest for Varian. 

Eugene of all people should be sympathetic towards Varian’s plight. He’s been there himself. He should also know that the rumors about Varian attacking Rapunzel are untrue because Raps told him about the events of Queen for a Day herself. 

Meanwhile Cassandra was actually there. She knows Varian’s problems and is supposedly his ‘friend.’ She has even less reason to be hostile towards him. 

But once again, the series has the characters respond to things that contradict established events in order to create a bias in the audience. “See, Eugene and Cass doesn’t trust Varian and neither should Rapunzel. See, how evil he really is?” It tries to tell us. In order to convince us to excuse Frederic’s behavior so that when the series does just that through Rapunzel choosing his side we’ll be on board with it. You know, unless you have been paying attention, already have a developed moral code, and the reasoning facilities of an adult. 

Rapunzel Lacks Empathy     

Keep in mind, ‘for Corona’ really means ‘for herself’. The only competition between Quirin and the kingdom is one that she’s fabricated in her own mind. Varian not caring about the island punctures holes into her excuses. Even though Varian is a fourteen/fifteen year old who holds no responsibility for the safety of a whole country. Especially one that’s mistreated him. Of course his father’s life is going to be more important to him. 

What Rapunzel is really asking here is, “Why don't you care about what I care about?” “Why aren’t you concerned about my feelings over your own?” 

Which makes sense for her character. She’s a woman who has been trapped in a tower her whole life. She lacks the experience needed to be an empathetic person. She’s never had to grieve before. The only permanent death she’s known is that of her abuser. Her trauma over nearly losing Eugene and Pascal was the fear of loss, not the actual process of living without someone. Rapunzel has no framework of reference in order to truly understand what Varian is going through. 

Sympathy is feeling sorry for someone. Empathy is understanding how a person feels. Rapunzel may be a sympathetic person but she’s not an empathetic one and there’s a difference between being ‘nice’ and being kind. The show presents to us a woman who needs to learn that difference. The problem is that she never does. 

This is actually a brilliant conflict and point of characterization. It’s taking what we already know about a character and expanding upon it to give us believable flaws that impact the story. I actually like this conflict. I like this portrayal. I initially preferred the series over the movie because of this. 

I want Rapunzel to be flawed. I want her flaws to to inform the plot. I want to like her as a character. But I can’t. Because the show never acknowledges these flaws, never has her grow as a person. She remains unempathetic and selfish till the end even as she gains more experience, and the show acts like she is justified in hurting others.  

This exchange is the quillivant of  a rich person who donates money to environmentalist causes trying to shame a poor child for daring to ‘waste water’ in order to take a bath, even while ignoring their own factories spewing pollutants into the local river. The show tries to claim that classism is okay so long as it’s perpetuated by the creator’s favs. 

Varian is in the Right   

First off he never claimed that he was only going to take one petal. Rapunzel just assumed that. Also, he’s right there is no difference. Once again Rapunzel has fabricated a distinction in her mind in order to have an excuse to sell her  dad. She only hesitates now because taking the whole thing means there’s more risk of getting caught and less possibility of weaseling out of punishment through deniability. 

Never mind that Frederic doesn’t own the flower anyways. He stole it from Gothel first, outside of his land’s borders. Never mind that him taking the flower actually causes harm to others while stealing it back does not. Never mind that breaking a law to save a human life is not only justifiable but preferable. Never mind that the king is essentially hoarding medicine from the populace, thereby breaking the social contract of a leader towards his people and becoming a despot instead.       

No, Varian hurt Rapunzel’s feelings so he’s evil don’t you see? He placed his needs above the main character’s wants and desires, ergo the series treats him as a villain. 

Look, I’m not saying that Varian is without fault nor that everything he does is justifiable. But the show (and certain fans) goes out of its way to demonize the character even when he’s doing what’s actually morally right. This isn’t the point when Varian falls to the darkside, that’s yet to come, but it is the point where the series starts to play favorites with its characters at the expense of teaching coherent lessons. 

Inconsistent Messages 

Yes, how dare he do the exact same thing as Pascal and Max did two episodes later. Don’t you know, he’s the villain; even though he actually has more reason to use the truth serum than they did the mood potion. 

The problem of centering so much of the conflict on Rapunzel’s personal feelings means that Rapunzel and the show has double standards for how characters are treated. Friends of Rapunzel gets free passes. Lack of friendship means you’re now the enemy and can’t be excused. Even though in real life that is what we call nepotism and an abuse of power.   

Authoritarianism Vs Consequentialism   

When you mention the word authoritarianism to someone they automatically picture in their head armed men in uniforms marching in the streets attacking innocent people on behalf of a dictator’s orders. Yet, that’s not what authoritarianism is. That’s fascism, which can spring forth from authoritarians gaining political power but it’s not the only manifestation of this philosophy.  

Authoritarianism is the belief system that the ‘authority’ is always right, even when wrong. An authoritarian will find any excuse to follow and believe in their chosen authority even when that authority has failed them or others.

The opposing philosophy here is consequentialism. That’s the belief that right and wrong are directly linked to consequence. To their minds something is morally wrong if the action has a bad outcome for others. 

To illustrate the difference let's look at a near universal rule. 

“Murder is wrong.” 

Now both the authoritarian and the consequentialist will normally agree with this. But the ‘why’ to them couldn’t be any more different. 

To an authoritarian ‘murder is wrong’ because the authority has deemed it so. That authority can be anything that the anthoritian has personally chosen; God, the government, their parents ect. It’s completely arbitrary and subject to change on a whim. The authoritarian lacks consistency and conviction and will often have multiple chosen authorities that will contradict one another. If one of those authorities came out in favor of murder then there’s a strong chance that the authoritarian will change their position or belief as oppose to denouncing their chosen leader.     

Meanwhile, ‘murder is wrong’ to the consequentialist because there are clear irreversibly bad consequences for doing it. It removes a life from the world. All possibilities for that person are now forever snuffed out. It hurts those left behind. ect. The consequentialist is consistent in their beliefs so long as the consequence remains the same. They can’t be swayed by mere orders. That’s not to say that consequentialism is incorruptible. A consequentialist can easily become a knight templar if they are forced to weigh consequences against each other. Then it becomes ‘murder is still wrong unless it achieves this arbitrary goal’.  

In truth, morality is a sliding scale for most people and you normally hold more than one ethical belief system. However history has proven that authoritarianism is the more often dangerous and corruptible philosophy as it relies heavily on peer pressure, groupthink, and yes, abuse. Most authortians don't come from healthy loving homes. Either they were abused or are abusers themselves. When conducting studies on authoritarianism psychologists and sociologists use questions about parenting in order to pinpoint who is and isn’t an authoritarian as most people aren’t going to just come right out and claim we should go back to feudalism and the divine right of kings. 

An out of control authoritarian is a bully with power. An out of control consequentialist is just a vigilante. 

Frederic and Varian are the representatives of the two sides of these opposing belief systems and the representatives of what happens when people with those belief systems become corrupt. By having the main character choose between the two of them and siding with the her father, the authoritarian, the show is now validating this philosophy. 

Breaking an unjust law shouldn’t be presented as a bad thing here. Blindly accepting Frederic’s rule shouldn’t be the end result of all this. Excusing his abusive behavior shouldn’t be the finale outcome of the story. There’s not a single thing that Frederic, and by extension Rapunzel, does that hasn’t been done by corrupt governments in the real world. Their reasons for doing so be damned. 

Given the current political landscape and the increasing push to give real life anthortirans more power, this was absolutely the wrong message to put into a children’s show. It’s not that children will grow up to become authoritarians themselves by just watching the show, but it can condition them to go along with authoritarian abuse if they are now familiar the excuses abusers use to validate their actions. Especially, if they are already trapped in an abusive environment and are being fed these excuses by their current abusers. 

I've already seen this toxic thought process played out by younger members of the fandom who are only just now forming their moral codes. “Accept what’ve you’ve been given.” “It’s okay, your parent (the authority) loves you and knows what’s best” “Hurting people is alright because they’ve been hurt you need to ofter up understanding” 

NO!

Theses aren’t good lessons. These are the lies fed to you by abusive people. And the show repeatedly validates, justifies, and excuses both abuse and political corruption. Whether the creators believe this philosophy or not, they just  approved of it anyways through their own incompetence.  

Varian has Every Reason to Not Trust Rapunzel

This the third time in three months that Rapunzel has backed out of helping him. All for increasingly flimsy reasons. She’s making a lot of promises here but not offering up any concrete solutions. Remember she’s not ready to confront her father yet, and neither of them know that she’s the sundrop herself. So what is her plan here? How is she suppose to recuse Quirin and prevent Varian from being unjustly punished if she can’t stand up to the one person who is responsible for causing these problems in the first place. 

Can you really blame Varian for going through with what he does here given how she has treated him thus far and would most likely continue to treat him? Yet that’s precisely what the show wants you to do because ‘stealing is wrong’ even though in this case it actually isn’t. 

This is Out of Character

Once again, both Cass and Eugene have no reason within the current narrative to be so hostile towards Varian, yet. They’re only doing so now to create bias in the viewer. For Eugene this is especially out of character. I mean we’ve already seen Cass place her ambitions of above others people’s needs both before and after this, but Eugene is constantly written as the heart of the show. He’s suppose to be the most empathetic and caring person in the group, and yet here he is trying to arrest an orphan who’s only stealing to survive. Sound familiar? He of all people should be the first to defend Varian not attack him.

Excuse You, Raps!

You know very well what he is. He’s a child. A lost, lonely, grieving, and desperate child who’s been let down by everyone who is responsible for him including yourself. But far be it for the show to actually point this out by stating it plainly and show you for the self centered ass you really are. 

Scenes Like This are Why Varian Should Have Been the Deuteragonist

His story maybe connected to Rapunzel’s but it doesn’t revolve around her. He has his own stakes and conflicts that happen to intersect or oppose with Raps given whatever point in the narrative we’re at. As such we gets scenes like this one in his lab where he is the sole focus and is pushing the story forward. No other character actually gets this. 

Eugene’s arc has little to no bearing on the overall plot and Cassandra’s solo scenes in season three do nothing to further push the story nor give new insights into her character, as her given goal and motivation is too dependent upon Rapunzel herself to be shown separately.  

Out of all the main characters, Varian’s conflict is the only one that holds enough tension to maintain a separate story line. He needs this focus in order to make sense of what's going on with the larger picture and to resolve his conflict in a satisfying manner. Had the the creators been smart enough to follow through with Varian’s story till the end instead of dumping it at the last minute in season two and hastily rewriting a half-arsed resolution it in season three, then we’ve could have gotten the Disney equivalent of a Zuko vs. Aang, Loki vs Thor, or even Duck vs Rue/Fakir arc. As is, we’re only left with the table scraps of several loosely connected stories none of which are very satisfying to watch. 

Conclusion

I still like this episode and Varian’s arc overall but I can't in good conscience call it well written knowing now where it all leads to. Nor can I in could good conscience recommend the show knowing the awful morals it touts. And that makes me angry. Angry that I was fooled into thinking that this show had depth and maturity. Angry that I ever once held this show up as being good. Angry that I invested myself into believing that this show would finally give me a decent Disney anti-villain that I could like. Angry that trusted the creators not to be raging arseholes who made poor creative decisions based off of ego and questionable ethics...

I started this marathon so that I could vent my feelings and gain some closure, while also opening up a frank discussion about how bad creative decisions can lead to bad lessons in children's media. This show has many of the same problems as a lot of current tv series do but all condensed down into one place and there are things to be learn from that.However after this series of reviews are over I doubt I’ll ever watch the show again. It’s honestly not worth the time. 

[kitkatt0430]

the flash and the problem of the pointless sacrifice

It starts at the end of season one. Eddie Thawne picks up his gun and shoots himself, dying to protect Iris, Barry, and the rest from his dangerous descendent Eobard Thawne.

Season two ends with its reversal, Barry creating the Flashpoint Timeline that, though its eventually set back to 'normal-ish', leaves a time remnant of Eobard Thawne alive and well (if running scared from the Black Flash/Hunter Zolomon as a speed zombie) to wreak havoc once more.

And I get it. The Reverse Flash is one of the Flash's most iconic villains - killing him off in season one couldn't be permanent. But apparently Eddie's suicide could be and the message that sends is... unfortunate.

Eddie is an extremely kindhearted person and we see that about him again and again throughout season one. He always has a smile for the people he cares about and he's an absolutely terrible liar. But we also know that he was bullied as a child/teen and since he never brings up the subject of his own family, it's likely he doesn't have a support structure outside of Central City. And the support structure he does gain in Central City was Barry's support structure first. There's not a single person we see Eddie spend time with in season one that didn't know Barry first.

And that's a big part of what wears him down over the course of the season. When both Barry and Eddie need support, Barry gets it first. Barry's secrets are treated as something Eddie has to prioritize over his relationship with Iris. Barry's loved Iris longer than Eddie's known her and while Iris loves Eddie, she also loves Barry and she's infatuated with the Flash - not realizing he's Barry's alter ego. Over the course of the season, Eddie constantly tries to connect with Barry and Barry constantly holds back. Their relationship is never equal. And that's what leaves Eddie open to Eobard's manipulations with the future news article.

And Eddie tries to make his own future with Iris anyway. But even with Iris accepting his proposal, Joe makes it clear he'll never truly accept their relationship and Eddie's sense of self worth is at an all time low. And that's the state of mind he's in during the fight in the pipeline. When Barry chooses not to let Eobard go after all, it puts them all in a position of potentially having to deal with this fight between the two speedsters just... never ending. It puts Iris in danger because Barry cares about her and because while Eddie is Eobard's ancestor... Iris isn't. From Eobard's point of view, Eddie's the only one who isn't expendable and from Eddie's point of view... he's the only one who is expendable.

His answer is suicide. And his death immediately erases Eobard from the timeline, but its also implied to have contributed to the re-emergence of the singularity. But at least Eobard was dead.

At least, until Barry created Flashpoint at the end of season 2. Presumably Eddie was alive in Flashpoint, but we never see him. Maybe he stays in Keystone instead of transferring to Central City. Never meets Iris. Never gets worn down to feel like he's not good enough. Never kills himself.

When Flashpoint is reset, Eddie's dead again but now his sacrifice has been rendered moot because Eobard's still alive as a time remnant.

It sets a rather nasty precedent for the show.

Season two also ends with a suicide. This time it's Barry's.

Much like Eddie the year before, Barry's been worn down. He had his place in his family's come into question, with Henry leaving at the start of the season and Wally's arrival midway through the season. His back is literally broken by the stress of fighting Zoom and despite everything he's suffered for the city, his honor is called into question the instant a different speedster takes to thievery. He has to give up his speed to protect Wally only for that to immediately put Caitlin in danger. His colleagues are brutally murdered by Zoom to teach him a lesson. His father finally comes back for good, only to be murdered in the same place as Barry's mother.

Honestly, there is no question (to my mind anyway) that Barry's suicidal at the end of the season. And because Barry his time remnants are fundamentally the same person at the moment of their split, the time remnant Barry creates is suicidal as well.

That time remnant tears himself apart to stop Zoom's plan to destroy the multi-verse. His very existence also lures in the Time Wraiths that take Zoom away, transforming him into the mindless Black Flash. All at the cost of a version of Barry killing himself, going unlamented and forgotten. But at least the multi-verse was safe.

Until the Red Skies Crisis when the multi-verse is actually destroyed and rebooted.

Another sacrifice rendered pointless.

HR does not kill himself in season three. But he deliberately places himself in a position to be killed in Iris' place. He arrives on the heels of a scandal on his Earth where he's been revealed to have been taking credit for someone else's work - with that person's blessing, but its still ruined his reputation. He comes wanting to reinvent himself, but from the start he's not the person the team really wants. They want Harry. Cisco wants Harry. He gets it hammered in that his strengths aren't appreciated by the team because he's not a scientist. His efforts to help STAR Labs are dismissed entirely. The only reason any attempts to help his museum venture succeed are because changing the future might save Iris.

It's not that HR is disliked, but he's left acutely aware that he's considered 'a bit much' and that he's always going to come second to the people he puts first. In fact, Tracy's probably the only one who truly and completely appreciates HR as he is.

So HR swaps places with Iris, knowing that he's going to die when he does. And while HR doesn't kill himself, there's an argument to be made that what he did was still suicide by proxy.

And this is a sacrifice that sticks, because Iris West is the love interest. She's never going to be killed off for real.

Three seasons ending with a suicidal sacrifice. And only one of them doesn't have that sacrifice reversed or nullified. Unfortunately, that's not the end of it either.

Harry leaves his Earth at the start of season four. His relationship with his daughter, which was shown to still be strong in season three, has somehow deteriorated to the point where she's thrown him off her support team and he comes to Earth-1 to reconnect with the found family he forged during season two. He's in the midst of a crisis and his understanding of himself as a parent is unraveling. And then DeVoe calls the other pillar of Harry's self identity into question, because Harry's genius isn't enough on its own anymore. He's not smart enough to out think DeVoe and his Earth-1 family is suffering. So Harry creates his own downfall, burns out his own brain trying to be the smartest. And he sacrifices his last moments of lucidity to find the answer to stopping DeVoe. In doing so, Harry puts Barry in the position to save Ralph's life.

But DeVoe still gets the last laugh when he causes the STAR Labs satellite to come falling down, nearly destroying the city and creating Cicada in the process.

But unlike previous seasons, Harry doesn't die. He gets some of his intelligence back and immediately gets exiled by the writers back to Earth-2 due to the massive problems with ableism this show has. But that's a different conversation.

Season five is probably the only season not to include a suicidal character who's kills themselves. Nora dies when she erases herself from the timeline by accident, but we know now she'll be back in the back half of season seven, along with her new brother. But one out five seasons not taking a suicide (or similar action in Harry's case) and painting it as a noble - but ultimately useless - gesture is rather... bad as far as track records go.

Season six has the alternate Barry Allen - implied to be the Barry from the 90s show - who dies in place of this show's Barry. To save the multi-verse and let this other Barry go home to his wife, something he'll never have with Tina again. And the multi-verse is destroyed anyway.

Season seven opened with Nash Wells, whose usual method of investigating mysteries and hoaxes led to the Anti Monitor's freedom and the multi-verse's destruction. His home Earth destroyed so he can never go home. He's confronted with an alternate version of his dead daughter, who can barely stand his presence. He begins to hallucinate alternate versions of himself and is possessed by the Reverse Flash and all his research on how to create a new Speed Force - to try to make up for some of the damage he's caused - points to a single conclusion. The only way to make things better is for him to die.

Instead, Nash's death immediately makes things worse. The artificial speed force is flawed and Barry destroys it in the very next episode. And while one could argue that Nash's death allowed Barry to save Iris and ultimately restored the original Speed Force, it doesn't negate the fact that Nash's suicidal state of mind wasn't addressed by the people who called him friend. And his legacy was immediately deemed a failure and destroyed.

While I wouldn't say the show is glorifying suicide, there's a subtle and incredibly troubling repetition in the story telling on the show that frames suicide as the right decision in certain circumstances. Even though what's being sacrificed for often comes to naught. And it's incredibly uncomfortable, seeing it all laid out like this.

I'm still really not sure what to make of it all, but I've got no doubt it ties into the show's ableism with regards to mental health issues. Because every time its someone whose mental health has been brought down to a low point who commits these acts of 'sacrifice' and while the team grieves these losses... they don't seem to learn from them either. Because it just keeps happening.

(Think I missed something? Please, by all means, add on.)

[iaintyourbro]

Imo Tifa is Cloud’s real catalyst. Some people say it’s Aerith... yeah sure... she is in some way, but only on soldier Cloud in OG. Like, in the first place he wanted to be someone strong hence why he became soldier, cuz of Tifa. She saved & brought real Cloud back in the lifestream. She vented and knocked some sense into him to bring him out of his misery. Why does everybody sleeps on Tifa’s efforts like 🤷🏻‍♀️

Hey anon.

I honestly have a very difficult time comprehending it myself. Generally when I play these games the first time, I take them at face value. I think most people do that. From a logical standpoint, the first time a person plays OG, they probably do think that Aerith is meant to be the love interest because she’s pink and cute and a white mage type of character. 

This is the fun thing with stereotypes... Whether or not there’s any romantic interaction between Cloud and Aerith, people automatically assumed the moment he wakes up in that church that she’s the love interest. I think this was also done on purpose to further the whole illusion thing. It used people’s preconceived ideas about romance against them.

In Remake, they make it much more obvious that Cloud has an issue with his memories and personality, and that his subconscious is heavily attached to Tifa. He stares at her constantly.  

Aerith then dies. In real life we do not continue to pursue dead people that we knew for a very short amount of time. That seems... ridiculous. They also don’t really dwell on it in game. After her death, she’s not mentioned again until they’re trying to figure out what to do with meteor. This is well past her death. 

You first go snowboarding and through all of the Icicle Area, then up to the Northern Crater where you’re slammed with the line from Cloud that Tifa’s opinion is the only one that matters to him, then Cloud falls into the Lifestream. Then we get Tifa who is very upset about everything, almost gets executed, has to slap a bitch a few times, gets back on the Highwind, and her number one priority is to save Cloud. You get him back and go on some more Huge Materia missions, can do side quests, and then when you actually start to go down the what to do with Meteor path, is when she’s brought up because of Holy. 

But for the whole Lifestream thing...

Tifa is mostly selfless throughout the game. She puts others before herself constantly. I honestly thought her turning to what she felt and what she wanted was a good character building moment. I think her one desire to find Cloud was the most selfish thing she did during the entire game, and it was about her feelings. And about Cloud. She knew nobody else was going to look for Cloud - she didn’t want him alone. 

When they do find him, she’s done. She’s staying there no matter what. At this point I think she’s already lost everything else, and finding Cloud somewhat alive, the last thing she really has from her past, she’s not letting it go. She sticks by him. She helps him find himself. She continues to stick by him. 

She almost dies sticking by him. She saves him from himself by helping him rebuild who he truly is. All is revealed, it’s obvious he has feelings for her that go way back, and that’s that. At this point, I think most people who played the game with no preconceived ideas realize what’s mostly going on. I do think FFVII requires multiple playthroughs to get everything, but the jist of things is there. 

So most people don’t question this - Cloud loves Tifa, okay - let’s mosey. 

The ending I think is where people start to argue, even though it’s not supposed to be romantic, I don’t think. He says the line “I think I can meet her there” which people take as he’s going to meet Aerith there. Tifa doesn’t react badly to this. This is after the Lifestrem, after the Highwind, and then suddenly he’s just gonna drop her? No. This is about them realizing they’re probably going to die. 

Some people couldn’t accept she died, they can’t accept what happens after that, so they shit on Tifa. They know she’s the catalyst for him, she’s the reason he wanted to join SOLDIER (he tells us this himself), she’s the reason he finally snapped at Sephiroth in Nibelheim (after everything else), she’s the reason he comes out of his first bout of severe mako poisoning, and ultimately she’s the reason he survives the second bout. 

After all the shit that happened, after almost killing their friend twice, ultimately causing Meteor to get summoned, after it all, she still stuck by him.

Then we get AC. Now AC is interesting because people think Cloud acted like he did in AC the entire two years after FFVII ends. He doesn’t. He’s happy - the devs came out and made sure people knew that he was very happy with Tifa and the children. He runs from Tifa for a week or two. People think he took off for months. He runs off due to getting Geostigma, and can’t bear to have Tifa and the children watch him die. He knows what happens to Tifa when people close to her die - she starts doing really stupid, drastic things. So you have Denzel dying already and now Cloud has the same problem. He ran, but it wasn’t to go find Aerith or get away from Tifa because he didn’t love her - he ran because he did love her, and in his mind.. well... he couldn’t deal with the fact that he was going to ultimately hurt her. Badly. 

Cloud realizing Tifa is injured and knocked out in the church shows how much he cares about her. The second Tifa that he yells is fully of emotion. Geostigma also acts up when he has high anxiety or an emotional event. Right after this, he has a major Geostigma episode and passes out. You can’t say he doesn’t care - deeply - about Tifa. He’s scared out of his mind here. He thinks she’s going to die. And he blames himself because she came to the church looking for him.

Cloud sees Tifa is alive in the simulation here.

After he thinks she dies.

A lot of people think that Tifa is attached to Cloud and useless without him, but I think it’s the other way around. Tifa could live a normal life without Cloud. Cloud wouldn’t be able to live a normal life without Tifa with the story of the game. You can’t say what if he didn’t get experimented on, because he does get experimented on, he’s injected with Jenova cells, and has severe mako poisoning. Which she can at least get him out of to function. Tifa was literally created for Cloud so he actually has a shot at life and doesn’t die in the gutter of the Sector 7 train station.

FFVII had a main theme of life and death and learning to live after death.

And that learning to live wasn’t just about Cloud.

It was about Barret who lost his wife, hometown, and ultimately ends up losing his best friend when he thinks he found him. He deals with his loses by channeling his passion for revenge. He vows to care for Dyne’s daughter. He does blame himself partially for the entire thing even happening, since he agreed with Shinra, but ultimately doesn’t let it consume him. He goes back during AC to help rebuilt Corel to make amends.

Tifa also learns to live after heavy loss. Tifa loses her mother as a young child. Her entire hometown is burned down, her father killed, she’s almost killed. In both cases of her parent’s death, she makes very irrational decisions to cope with it. She thinks going up Mt Nibel will allow her to see her mother. She thinks she can take on Sephiroth after he kills her father. She also does this after she thinks Cloud dies. She decides she can go to a brothel and question a crime lord to give her info... Not a good choice. I’m sure at this point, most of the folks reading this have had to deal with somebody they loved dying. The first few days really is bizarre. You’re in a daze. Your decision making skills are shit. You’re tired. Tifa ignores the fact that she’s in a daze and makes decisions anyway to cope with it. But she lives. She rebuilds her life in Midgar, she has a job, has a place to live, and then decides to go the Barret route and get revenge.

Vincent is the most similar to Cloud in how he deals with loss and guilt. He sleeps. For 20 years. Vincent goes from Turk Viincent to Eternal Sin Vincent. He blames himself for all that happened to Lucretcia. He’s alone. Sleeping. For 20 years. This probably would be a good example of what would have happened to Cloud if Tifa wasn’t there. He would have spiraled in to guilt and - ultimately - would have died. Vincent couldn’t die, so sleep it was.

As for Tifa and Cloud, specifically. Cloud probably wouldn’t have joined the military if Tifa never fell down Mt. Nibel. He probably would have stayed in Nibelheim (or followed her wherever she went, he did have it pretty bad for her) and then they all would have perished. It’s to be assumed that Sephiroth would have still come to Nibelheim and burned it down. Cloud and Tifa had nothing to do with him doing that. All of the catalysts for that were from before those two were even born, so nothing was going to stop that. 

Without Tifa, Cloud probably would have died at the Sector 7 train station. I think the flashback with Zack in the OG (even though its optional) is to show how bad of shape he was in. The guards say to leave him because he’s pretty much done for. Somehow he does make it to Midgar, but I don’t think he would have lasted much longer. Zack got him 90% of the way back. Tifa did the rest and ultimately brought him back to “human status” even though it wasn’t really him at this point. 

People start to shit on Tifa because she doesn’t come out and tell Cloud right away that somethings wrong with him. She doesn’t correct him about the flashback in Kalm. She keeps it going. The thing is, she admits this was wrong. That it’s a character flaw. Literally right after Cloud falls in to the Lifestream after giving Sephiroth the Black Materia, she tells the story of finding Cloud at the Sector 7 train station, and how she’s always been this way... She’s non-confrontational. She didn’t want to upset him. I think she thought that something bad really would have happened to him. 

And ultimately, she saves him again. 

Nobody else could have helped Cloud rebuild himself. Nobody.

Tifa is the only person in the world at this point that knew Cloud prior to the events of the Nibelheim Incident. She is the only one that could guide him. She’s one of the only survivors from the Nibelheim incident. Nobody else could have done it. Cloud’s subconscious is almost entirely made up of things about Tifa. The Promise, Tifa’s mother’s death and the Mt. Nibel incident, the reactor and how he hid from her because he was ashamed he didn’t make First Class SOLDIER. Every piece of his subconscious has to do with Tifa somehow. 

[dreamylyfe-x]

heyo i've been watching the eps in real time, but i only got around to watching the gallavich hall of shame today and i loved all of it except the beg which i was really hoping you could help me with cuz i've been extremely upset by it (literally crying oops). so, why would the writers possibly use the phrasing "piece of my heart" and act like what ian felt for his other bfs is in any way comparable to mickey, only on a much lesser level? cuz we've seen it play out that that's just false [pt 1]

Hey! Sorry about not getting to this right away -- real life has been extreme today -- but I wanted to make sure to reply to this ASAP because it clearly bothered you a bunch. This ask has several parts and I’m going to pull the questions from the others so that I can best answer. And I may sound a little glib because I know this really, really bothered you, so I want to make it clear: I completely respect your feelings about this... but I don’t think the show was thinking about how people who love Gallavich would feel about that line. Because they had a brief and it was “write a clip show.” 

First: why would the writers make ian flat out tell mickey that doesn't have his whole heart WHEN THEY'RE MARRIED for god's sake.

So that they’d have a fight through which they would introduce themed clip packages that had already been decided on. 

Second: i'm just so confused and upset about what the writers were trying to accomplish with this?

Completely understandable that you’d be confused by it, because the primary thing they were looking to accomplish was to have snippets of conversation that would introduce themed clip packages. 

Third: why'd the writers chose such vague flowery BS wording for this? plz help me get it

Because nothing in the Hall of Shame episodes can actually add up to anything significant, because they’re clips shows that were put together entirely because Showtime needed to fill time while the show -- which is still shooting -- finishes up. 

A few things about the Hall of Shame episodes. The first and the most important: It’s pretty much impossible to write a good clip show. They are creative black holes. I shudder to think how much time the writers were even given to do these things. They all -- All! -- exist solely to fill time.  So it’s always “The Golden Girls sit around a table and eat cheesecake and then reminisce about all the times they ate cheesecake.” One of the very worst episodes of Star Trek: TNG exists solely because they ordered another episode at the last minute and it’s -- you guessed it! -- A clip show. The best -- and I use that term loosely -- clip shows are the ones where the have some Voice of God narrator say “Mickey and Ian are the romantic heart of the show, but they don’t always get along! Cue clip package where Mickey and Ian fight about stuff. Voice of God: “But they sure do enjoy making up!” -- Cue clip package of Ian and Mickey making out. 

That still sounds pretty terrible. The best idea for a Shameless clip show is to do some sort of Frank-at-the-bar-talking-shit thing and I’m sure they thought of that and then I'm sure they were like “Fuck. We can’t spare Bill for that kind of time.” -- and then they had to do this. This whole thing is born of scarcity -- of time, of means and of new things to put on the tv -- And given the choice, having seen what came out of it, I think I opt for what they did because I truly do believe the Mickey gifs that the Fiona one produced have restorative properties and I am very grateful that they exist. 

The Hall fo Shame episodes giveth, and they taketh away. So my advice, in how to approach them is just this: 

They aren’t canon

Nothing that happens in them matters

But the parts you like can be as real as you want them to be

So take what you like and throw the rest away

But again, this might be easier said than done, so let me dig a little deeper into what bothers you so much about this line in the context that it happens. 

The 87% line is patently ridiculous and I reject its premise. Love is not finite. You do not divide it between people. You love the people you love, the way you love them, and if someone else showed up you’d love them in whatever way you love them and that would not lessen the love you feel for anyone else. You do not suddenly love your child 50% less because you had another child. That is insane. You just love the other child also. 

That said, the 11 seasons in which we have seen Ian love Mickey more than he loves anything -- his freaking words -- cannot be undone by one line of dialogue in a clip show. First, because clip shows are innately flawed, but also because 11 seasons are more important than one line of dialogue. Even ONE episode of Not a Clip Show is more important than what happens in a clip show. Every single episode of Shameless is trying to do something much more valid and important with the characters than introduce a clip package. 

This problem is also not restricted to the Gallavich episode -- People do a whole bunch of stuff in the HoS episodes that they’ve never done on the show. Carl and Debbie don’t punch each other in the face. Lip doesn’t completely and totally discount every single thing his sister did to keep a roof over their head. Mickey doesn’t act like Ian’s sexuality is a lifestyle choice and Ian is smart enough to know that Mickey Milkovich -- who he loves more than anything -- doesn’t want hear about the mathematical breakdown of how much Ian cares about Other Men. 

now i desperately need the writers to fix this and say mickey has ian's whole heart. 

This is probably not going to happen because I don’t think Actual Shameless considers that to be a thing that happened. On Actual Shameless Ian watched Mickey beat Ned up and then ran away with him when the cops showed up looking DELIGHTED that Mickey had beaten Ned up. On Actual Shameless Ian can barely stand to have Kash touch him once he’s been with Mickey, because Mickey is all he wants. On Actual Shameless Ian’s most viable non-Mickey relationship crumbles the second Mickey shows up because there’s just no comparison for him. Ian loves Mickey. He doesn’t stop. If something happened to Mickey he wouldn't look vaguely disconcerted and then get into an argument with some third party about whether or not it’s valid to be weirded out when someone you had sex with dies. You know that line, “show, don’t tell”? There’s reason that’s considered better storytelling -- because the stuff you show is the stuff that the audience feels and experiences. If Ian had said he loved Ned in any capacity I would have laughed out loud, because what I was shown was Ian mostly hanging out with Ned because he was missing Mickey, wanted a distraction, liked room service and the occasional nice gift, and... it made Mickey jealous. None of that was about Ned. 

And in the end: Ned’s dead, baby. Long live Gallavich. 

(it would of course be very nice if Ian would tell Mickey he has his whole heart, partly because it’s true, but also because Mickey deserves to hear these sorts of things, and we all want Mickey to be happy. And I do think Ian probably does tell Mickey that, after the clip show is over -if we acknowledge that this happened at all- because ultimately Ian’s whole life is about Mickey. Mickey is all he ever talks about. Even when he’s being pissy it’s all about how things are going with Mickey and how they are GOING to be going with Mickey. How he feels about his job, how he feels about himself, what his life plan is -- all depends on what is up with Mickey. Mickey is everything to him, and I’m going to assume Ian both shows and tells Mickey that in key ways, because Mickey sure seems happy in the Fiona HoS.) 

Anyway -- I don’t know if that helps at all, but that’s my take on this mess. Thank you for asking! 

[sanstropfremir]

Okay, time for my weekly rant so buckle up. The vocal stages were okay-I cant really remember them well because I watched them only once so take what I say with a grain of salt. Well I watched the Spark one once and I only got through half of the other one because I can’t stand ballads especially when there’s no interesting movement on stage to keep me engaged. Like it’s no fault of the members themselves or the song (I actually think their singing was incredibly beautiful and Eunkwang always sings like his wife just left him with the kids which is how you know he’s good) but I physically could not pay attention. That’s why I liked the spark stage a bit better-there was enough movement that I was able to focus on it. I really liked the use of the fire and the way they were walking in and out of the frame trading off parts so there weren’t too many awkward moments where the other members where on stage but not doing anything. The opening was gorgeous with each members being lit by the spotlight as they harmonize. So stagewise, I prefer Spark but vocally I think the other group was stronger. I love Spark and Taeyon is such an incredible vocalist (I mean the song is great because of her) so I don’t get why their delivery was, I don’t want to say weak, but subdued might be a better word. The only one that really stood out was Junhoe (but also that man couldn’t not stand out even if he tried, not with that incredibly rasp) and even he seemed to be holding himself back a bit. Though it was a bit slow it built up well to the two last choruses but still the first half could have been stronger. I know they were trying to draw it out to a strong pay off but I don’t really know if it was enough. And yes the suits were *chef’s kiss*. I think at this point in their career the FNC stylist has put SF9 in so many suits they’ve got it down to a science. Also I’m a sucker for those shirts with the triangle cut out and we got not one but two of them here.

Okay moving on, I’m not sure which group was next but I’ll talk about the Ikon stage. It seems like they finally realized that they’re on a performance based competition show so they decided to pull out the big guns. Love the little skit at the beginning (making sure people don’t forget that they’re YG), it was cute and refreshing. I really appreciated how they leaned into the campy acting in this stage (Stray kids did it too-just adding to the similarities between their stages). The song was meh but I also don’t really like BP especially not their recent stuff so it’s not a big deal. I would have preferred if they had gone with another song maybe Whistle or As If It’s Your Last or if they’d done a 2NE1 song like Chanwoo mentioned some point in the episode. I also think the stage would have been way smoother if they’d let Ikon and Lisa interact. Like if the boys appeared in her set after her section and then they all moved back to the first jungle set and then the whole thing turns gold and they did a dramatic outfit change (but with better jackets because theirs look like they came out of Party City). I also get what you mean about the dancers outfits not being that great. I actually really liked the outfits of Lisa’s dancers in isolation but they didn’t match with her or the set so they threw me off a bit. At least with the ikon members they were going for a modern look so the dancers outfits didn’t look that strange in comparison. Do you think it would have been better if they were white? How would you have improved then? The best way I can describe this performance was that it was a stage, stuff happened, I enjoyed myself but I don’t plan to revisit it anytime soon. Oh and we also have to give points for them cursing on national television not once but twice (at this point Jinwan deserves to say fuck).

Now to Stray Kids. So I feel like I need to preface this with the fact that I am actually a stray kids fan (I won’t call myself a stay because I don’t associate with the fandom) and though I’ve been really critical of them and their stages tend to be my least favorite I still have a soft spot for them (I got into this show because of them after all). I loved, loved, loved the intro with Felix (and yes his biggest flaw is that he’s Australian but I forgive him for it) and the way it immediately transitions into the chorus of DDD-the abrupt transition does fit really well with the Deadpool theme and I guess it is the closest they’re going to get to the feeling of yeeting themselves into traffic like in the movie. Interesting choice to start with the chorus. Now that I’m rewatching it I do really wish they stuck with the comic theme. I think that’s my gripe with SKZ-they have a lot of good ideas but they move on too quickly from them. Just pick a handful of things and sprinkle them throughout instead of cycling through them at breakneck speed. Like okay they’re doing Deadpool and he’s a comic character so keep the comic styling (it would have been a good thing to put in the projection behind Seungmin’s scene), maybe in the subway they could have had some fight choreo so the guns coming in at Lee Knows part aren’t out of nowhere (also someone please tell me they were trying to recreate the meme with the cat and the knives, please I need to know). I absolutely agree that them having a goal or an antagonist would have really helped the story along. I mean they literally have a spoken intro so why couldn’t Felix just tell us who they were fighting (and I’m pretty sure in the movie Wade tells us he’s trying to kill Francis in that scene sooo). As always they put more focus on the rappers (please can we get less Changbin and more Seungmin, Jeongin, or Lee Know or at least give Felix more parts). Seungmin was the real mvp of this stage and he had the best outfit (I think it qualifies for Hanya’s best gay little outfit list). Personally I with they hadn’t gone with Gods Menu again. I’ve been hoping that they would perform My Pace (and maybe remix it with their B-side TA off their Go Live album) because that would be such a fun stage. Again, I enjoyed myself but I won’t revisit it anytime soon. At this point the only groups I actually look forward to are BTOB and SF9 (they’re doing fucking Move and I don’t know whether to be excited or terrified-there’s a clip of Taeyang covering Move from a variety show or interview and I think he does it really well so I know at least one of them can pull it off). Again thanks for creating space where I can info dump and I hope I said something of interest to you!

i think you wrote more than me!! i love this, im gonna put my response under a cut im not being super obnoxious on the dash.

i get that the mayfly stage would be not as visually stimulating for people and usually i would count myself in with that crowd because i love a good spectacle but i think because i watched the spark stage first and my colour perception is sometimes weird so when there's a lot of movement with very little colour variation my tiny pea brain loses track of whats happening really quickly. especially with red. so it was kind of difficult for me to pay attention to the spark stage in the second half. also i absolutely HATE watching people flub on stage because it brings up such visceral secondhand feelings that i couldn't even watch the stage when i started the full episode today.

i love a good suit but you know what i would also love: sf9 in more costume variations. tbh im just getting nitpicky about it because im a costume designer down to the core and i got trained by a designer who specialized in doing avant garde costuming so i tend to skew more towards wild than reserved. it looks like the move stage wont be be suits so ill take it, but oh man to do i want to see some really crazy stuff. which i know they'll never do because idols have to be pretty at all times or the fans get mad but oh i want it so badly.

do you mean how i would improve ikon's backup dancers outfits or lisa's? here why dont i do both. for lisa's dancers i would have just done away with that harness shape all together, its almost exclusively a military style. the jackets by themselves would have been fine but really what they should have done was put them in something that matched the gold but contrasted enough to give them shape. by having at least her dancers in all black on a gold stage there was a lot of "haha look at me do a duck walk because lets throw in some voguing for spice." they could have gone with a mesh bodysuit idea similar to what she was wearing or even just different colour coats. as for ikon's backup dancers, firstly pants. not black. or even a longer skirt. genuinely a part of the reason why i dont watch girl group content is because i HATE the hem length of the shorts they make everyone wear. words cannot describe how much i hate that cut. kpop is so obsessed with showing off women's bodies and especially their legs but they do it in the LEAST flattering way possible because it "can't be too risqué," just shoot me now. i hate it. i hate it so fucking much. yea yea everybody was on cocaine in the 80s whatever but at least they were all wearing french cut bodysuits so their legs looked fantastic. stop interrupting the lines!! anyways. pants so the only section of skin showing is thigh to mid calf, especially because they weren't even doing any fun legwork! if they really wanted to keep the full sleeve bodysuits they shout have done them in a fabric with a texture or external embellishments, like a patent/vinyl or sequins/rhinestones. something to catch the stage lights so we can actually see the shape of the limb. but the easiest way to fix it is literally just cut the arms off the bodysuits. stages are lit to show off skin, sometimes the best way to have something be seen is just to have it bare.

i agreed skz cycles through ideas way too fast, they need to just pick a couple and stick them out through the stage instead of just adding more and more different ones throughout. also ok good someone else noticed that there is just...so much changbin. we don't need that much changbin. i know there's other boys in the group let them do something! also im pretty sure theyre not recreating the cat knife meme but actually the promo image from john wick chapter two, which i also could have sworn i saw a deadpool version of as an instagram ad back when movies were happening, but now that im looking for it it doesn't exist so i might be crazy.

im excited for the move stage but im also trepidatious because...its move. i have NO clue what the concept is from the previews so i just hope its weird enough to take it enough out of the taemin context for me to enjoy it.

[butterfliesinthenightsky]

hi sweetheart !! may i please req an ateez and bts personality ship ?? my description was SUPER long (I GOT CARRIED AWAY </3) so you can cut my request at the personality part when posting my ship! tysm in advance <3

I’m an ‘03 liner that’s 5’9.5 (basically 5’10) with dark skin, jet black hair (currently in long twists rn!!), and i’m on the curvier side (esp hips and my thighs) !! some of my favorite features are my plump lips (and i have a beauty mark near the inside of my bottom lip!), my long legs (they’re 40.5 inches long and look so good in dresses and skirts <33), my kempt and pretty fingernails, and my eyelashes !!! i’m a virgo (and surprisingly i get along with all the signs, i cant think of a sole zodiac sign i DONT mix well with but i love cancers and virgos <33) ! i’m also an ambivert all the way! i often come off as cold/shy/quiet when meeting new people (one of my closest friends avoided me for a month before meeting me because i looked so intimidating LMAO), but once you get close to me i turn into a goofy (heavy on the goofy im never not laughing) bundle of warmth and love: i will never stop texting them the <3 emoji every morning or buying my friends/s/o their favorite starbucks order when they need a little cheer-me-up. also, lots of people say i’m mature and carry myself well, but around my friends i’m one of the most goofiest people ever (probably bc my face will literally be 😐 one sec and then 🥰 the next second when someone makes me laugh <3)

tysm in advance!!! Have an amazing day/afternoon/evening!

@anpanseok DARLING! I hope you love your ship <3 I'm actually really proud of this one, you'll have to let me know what you think! <3

In ATEEZ, I ship you with one and only demon San!

(I thought you'd like that gif ;) )

Okay, when you were describing all of the things that you would want in the relationship, I thought of San due to how clingy and affectionate he is with the other members of ATEEZ. He is a Cancer, which is good because that is one of the star signs that are compatible with yours. I don't believe that the age difference of four years would be that much of an issue, especially since San acts younger than he is most of the time anyway. I feel like most men are intimidated when their female significant other is tall themselves, but he is tall himself and I feel like the fact that you are taller is kind of one of his favorite things about you? One of his other favorite things about you are your curves, he always puts his hand on your thighs during movie night at the boys' dorm or in the back pocket of your jeans when you two are walking into KQ Entertainment together. When you wear dresses when all of you go out to fancy dinners together, he has to hold himself back because he ADORES you when you wear dresses! You said you're am ambivert, I feel like he relates to that in some form of way, like I feel like there are certain situations where he feels a bit more introverted about. Sometimes Hongjoong has to scold him because he texts you so much, but he can't stay mad at you when you pop into the building with their favorite Starbucks drinks and hand-made lunch boxes for them. Just as you always support his creative endeavors, he always returns it for you tenfold and when you are talking about issues you care deeply about, he gives you his full attention and stares at you lovingly. Not just San, but all of the boys, come to you whenever they are dealing with stress and they just want someone to talk to because you are so amazing at giving advice and supporting them. There was a time when a sasaeng approached you, San, Wooyoung and Jongho when you were doing some late night grocery shopping when another ATINY stopped her, causing an argument and nasty words to be exchanged. Let's just say, you shut that sasaeng down REAL quick when you heard some of the things she said. One day you woke up and found a present that San made for you, a mixtape of all of your favorite songs from all your favorite genres of music, along with a little keychain that had tokens of all of the states you had visited. He wholeheartedly loves you and he makes every effort to support all of your dreams. When he has days off from work, the two of you make a blanket fort in your living room and watch old episodes of Forensic Files and Law & Order: SVU, whilst surrounded by fluffy blankets and a couple of his favorite plushies. His life an idol doesn't afford him much down time, unfortunately, but he always makes time for you and you always have the craziest adventures with not only each other, but all of the other boys as well. Squishy San will want all of the cuddles, have you SEEN how affectionate he is with the other members?! Also, him in all black outfits.... YES, PLEASE AND THANK YOU. One day he was visiting your apartment and he surprised you with matching beaded pearl bracelets and he never takes it off, not even for performances. The boys don't really think nothing of walking into the bathroom to brush their teeth whilst one of the others is showering, that just comes with their busy schedules and their dorm life. Let's just say this: Mingi wasn't able to look you in the eyes for two weeks because he did just that, not realize that you had snuck in and stayed the night, and were currently going to the bathroom whilst San was in the shower. Your camera roll is not only filled with silly pictures of San that you've captured, but of the most magazine worthy, model pictures you have ever been lucky enough to take. He accepts you for all of your flaws, and helps you to try to work on them, however that may be and you do the same for him.

In summary: You both are simps for each other and I AM HERE FOR IT.

In BTS, I ship you with Namjoon!

Another tall boy for you, I got you! You both are Virgos, but I looked it up worried that two Virgos would clash, and it said that they would be very intuitive with each other and would understand each other! The age gap is quite large, I don't know how okay you are with that? I know everyone has different preferences. He approached you first when he saw you at the mom & pop coffee shop/cafe around the corner from your apartment, and he thought you were the most beautiful person he had ever seen. Another man who I don't think would be bothered by your curves (men can be shallow dicks), I think that is his favorite thing (same as San) about you. Not even in a sexual way, I feel like his hands would always end up on your butt without him even noticing. Most of the time, one of the other boys will point it out when all of you are hanging out together, and he will be proud that he has a significant other like you, but he almost might become a shy mess about it I feel like. I feel like he can get jealous, just because you are closest to Jungkook in the group and you often pull pranks on the other members together. There is never a shortage of laughs when all of you are together, pure crackhead energy if I've ever seen it, just non stop jokes and banter between all of you. You were able to get time off from work and were actually able to join them (their managers were surprisingly chill about you tagging along? CONFUSION?) on their tour around Europe and you had so many memories. You actually brought along a Polaroid camera that you found in a little store one day when the two of you were shopping, and you ended up having to buy an extra suitcase on the trip because you took LITERAL hundreds of pictures of all of your adventures and the tour shenanigans. He has childish tendencies, I feel like he would love to play Roblox with you? I feel like he would take a very mathematical approach to building things, that's just the vibe I get from him. He often stares at you when you're doing your makeup in the morning, he finds it fascinating and he even asked you to do his makeup for some of his shows. His makeup artists weren't angry, luckily, all of their staffs absolutely adore you two together. He is all up for adventures, I feel like he would chicken out at the idea of skydiving, though lol. You keep stealing his sweaters, which he low-key highkey is SO happy about because he loves the way that you look in them. The size difference is only three or four inches (I've seen people say he's 6 feet, but then others say he's 6 foot 2, WHICH IS IT?!), so it's pretty easy to sneak kisses from him whenever you want them when you're together. If he sees you struggling to stay awake whilst studying, he'll softly close your book and drag you over to your bed for a couple hours so you can take a quick nap to regain the energy. I don't really know his temperament that well, he has to be rather even-tempered to deal with those hooligans he calls the rest of BTS, so I feel like you wouldn't have that many fights. You both are always striving to help each other to be the best versions of each other you can be. You joined the boys on vacation at a lake house and one night you were having dinner and he blushed after you said something cheeky to him, causing you to say to him, "You look like a cute tomato when you blush, my cutie pie." in front of the other members. Needless to say, he turned even more red and the boys teased him mercilessly for the rest of the night. Don't know how the cooking would go (this boy is a DISASTER in the kitchen), but you would have fun learning new dishes. He would brag about getting a dish right, and you quickly praise him but also say, " and that's why you a big ass head.", causing him to die laughing. He is the very definition of a hard worker, and I feel like he would love being praised and doing the same for his significant other, so I'm glad that you said that you liked the words of affirmation love language, because GET READY. He's definitely been buffing up (I SCREAM WHENEVER I SEE PICTURES OF HIM NOWADAYS), so

his hugs would always be the best things, so warm and comforting. Don't know how you feel about children? We've all seen that VLive where this idiot literally bought baby shoes because he thought they were cute, so I think he would definitely want children down the road in your relationship if you were both comfortable with it. Best father and husband award goes to him.

In conclusion: SIMP. SIMP. SIMP. SIMP. SIMPPPPPPPPPPPP.

[kinetic-elaboration]

December 2: 1x26 Errand of Mercy

Errand of Mercy is truly a trip. I’m swiftly losing my ability to be coherent because I need to go to sleep but here are some attempts:

First of all this is, of course, a straight-up, pure, unfiltered Kirk/Spock episode with a tiny bit of unrequited Kor/Kirk on the side. Like, we’re not even going to pretend to find stuff for the rest of the crew today. I see you, Gene Coon.

This is the first Klingon ep. I just... the actual Klingon-centric episodes ARE good, but the Klingons in general are pretty boring and I legit don’t understand why they became the standard Star Trek villain. (DC Fontana apparently thought that it was because their make up was simpler v. the Romulans, acc. to Amazon trivia and....I’ll buy that.)

Is the “cultural scale” called the Richter cultural scale? I seem to recall another scale with the exact same name....

I get why there would be such a scale but they are dead wrong about where the Organians fall on it.

Anyway not to harp on this yet again but @ fanom this isn’t the military right?? Lol

Oh, no, it’s Code One! No idea what that means but the music tells me it’s a big deal and it’s bad!

“Curious how often you humans manage to obtain that which you do not want.” He’s talking about war but I can think of some other things that fall into this category.

I think it’s pretty funny that Kirk records his Captain’s logs in public.

CAPTAIN SULU.

“There’s a war happening, so Mr. Spock and I will just leave the ship... together.”

“You’ll get out of here, Sulu, and leave Spock and I... alone.”

“You’ll fall back to rendezvous with the rest of the Fleet in the Laurentian system.”

Why do these people show no interest in us beaming down into their village? Hmmm, I wonder. If the Organians really were what K and S think they are, beaming down in that way would be uh a bad idea.

Spock seems much less awkward at gesturing than Kirk does.

Finally, by the end of the season, they’ve figured out the context for the Enterprise: Starfleet, the Federation, etc.

I wish the Organians were our alien overlords and taylor.

So the Klingons are a military dictatorship.

Kirk finds them so frustrating. I feel like this ep falls into the genre “Kirk is frustrated by hippies.” All this generic peace talk and faultlessly chill attitudes are just not him.

“I’m a soldier, not a diplomat.” That’s why Spock likes him so much.

The Organians are trying to follow the Prime Directive but Kirk is making it SO HARD.

“Space vehicles.”

I know the Klingons are actually supposed to be in yellow face but you know what it looks like black face to me and I RE-ALLY wish they had not done that.

They look good in those Organian outfits. Love that they kept their command and science colors lol. I feel like this is the sort of outfit AOS Kirk wishes he had in that boring ass closet of his.

Mr. Spock does not look like an Organian.

I MUST know more about these “not uncommon” Vulcan merchants. “Dealing in kevas and trillium.”

KOR IS SO INTO KIRK. This flirting is the least subtle. “You’ll be taught to use your tongue.” “Where is your smile?” “You’re a ram among sheep.” “I need your obedience.” “You seem to be in command.” Is all of this supposed to sound sexual or...?

Right up there with “a stallion must first be broken.”

Whereas Kirk is so not into this. That expression says, “Don’t even think about talking about Spock’s tongue.”

The mind sifter is actually a crazy advanced sci fi machine and STID wanted us to think Klingons don’t have warp usdfsf go fuck yourself.

Kirk is so turned on by Spock’s mental strength.

Every spare moment of this ep is given over to K/S flirting. They legit act like an old married couple. “I thought you were going to fight that guy.” “I just might.” Or whatever.

I love that Kirk’s method of fighting is to literally launch his WHOLE BODY at enemies.

Whereas Spock’s there just running awkwardly in the background. He is Not coordinated friends.

Kirk’s speeches ARE admirable. He is lacking context here but in general if they WERE an oppressed people, this should be inspiring.

“For some reason, he feels as though he must destroy you.”

This Kor and Kirk scene... Kirk literally canNOT stop himself from flirting. His default smile is Charming. “Nothing...inconsequential [was destroyed] I hope...” Flirty smile, wink.

GO CLIMB A TREE I MEAN WHAT THE HECK WAS THAT.

We are the same species...tigers...hunters

Is this not the same cell they always use?

I feel an “and there was only one cell” fic coming on...

The Organians are actually kind of hilarious. They’ll basically let these rando aliens do whatever they want, as long as they do no violence. That’s it, that’s the one rule.”Your captors planned to do violence to you, and to that I said...naw.”

THIS is real Pacifism @ Commander Spock.

Kirk ready to go out in a blaze of fire for a bunch of annoying hippies like “I’m going to white savior you now, ungrateful Organians.”(I say this with love; I love him.)

Can you believe Kirk and Spock are about to die in an unwinnable fight of 2 against Lots of Klingons, and they’re using their last moments to FLIRT AGAIN?

Gene Coon loves writing dialogue in which Spock calculates statistics and Kirk is turned on.

Also can you BELIEVE he just pulls Spock along by the arm? Any excuse to touch him.

Okay the Organians are officially tired of your bullshit.

Too hot! Hot damn!

“We find interference in others’ affairs most disgusting.” Prime Directive! Like I said!

This is basically the plot of A Taste of Armageddon except in that ep Kirk was the Organians.

“People have the right to handle their own affairs.” Is he wrong though??

The Organians are like “okay, we all had our fun here, now get out. Seriously.”

Can you imagine how fucking weird it would be to just randomly see this alien dude materialize in the White House, or, like, Starfleet San Francisco HQ, or wherever the “home world” of the Federation is supposed to be? Just a little throwaway line in there.

By the end Kor is just straight up hilarious. He’s giving off real Ian McKellan in Vicious vibes when he says “I can handle them.”

“I guess that takes care of the war.” Yep! Very efficient!

The “it” in “It would have been glorious” is DEFINITELY not the war lol.

Good game, good game.

“I was furious with the Organians for stopping a war I didn’t want.” I’m sorry but could not THAT have been the plot of STID?

“Spock, your math was wrong the whole time.” And now Spock and Kirk can BOTH sulk lol.

Those were all of my liveblog thoughts and it’s late but.... I had so many additional thoughts on this episode... Like a lot more.

First, I love when humanoids turn out to not be humanoids, that’s one of the best things.

Second, I think this is a very gutsy episode to air at the time, and that it would still be a gutsy episode to air now. I feel like it’s one of the peanut gallery’s favorite criticisms of ST nowadays to say it’s “colonialist” but this ep makes it pretty clear it’s not--that’s the opposite of the lesson of this story.

To attempt to explain better: I completely and unironically love Kirk but I do recognize that like all 3 dimensional characters he has flaws. In this ep, I thought that while his speeches and general point of view and strategic plan were definitely right for situations a population is oppressed--that people do have the power to fight back against dictatorships, even when the odds are bad, and that it is worth it to have the courage to fight back against such oppression--he was ultimately shown to be wrong in this instance because he wasn’t actually coming into that situation. He didn’t understand as much as he thought he did. He thought he was going to be the savior here: taking control for peoples who didn't know better, saving them from oppression, and then gifting them with technology and advancement as he understood it. The Federation wouldn't have enslaved them, but the Federation did want to use them. But the Organians really truly didn't need help--the native people understood their own needs better than the outside people. That's the lesson I took from the episode. Your intentions can be good but if you're coming into a foreign situation looking to control it, without understanding the actual people involved, you’re not being a true friend or ally, and you're likely to do no more harm than good. Opposition to tyranny has to come from the source, the oppressed peoples themselves.

When he refers to “weak, innocent people” standing in the way of superpowers in the beginning--he’s not attempting to derogatory, but that is a pretty demeaning characterization.

I also thought it interesting that the Organians can take any form they want and put their society at any stage of "advancement" they want and they chose a basic agrarian aesthetic. Cottagecore rights.

Kirk really had a confirmation bias when it came to the Organians. He had an image of them--innocent, weak, oppressed--and he only took information that fit with that characterization, rather than listening to them and what they were saying.

My mom and I also discussed whether this was IC or OOC of Kirk. I’m of two minds, myself. I think Kirk at his best is much more open-minded than this. His core morality is good faith, peace, friendliness, and care for all life forms, and there are plenty of examples of this (Charlie X, Mud’s Women, and The Corbomite Maneuver all immediately come to mind.) But he does have a blind spot that I think comes up often enough to be canonically part of his character: if something is threatening or killing his crew, or his people more broadly (the Federation), then ALL he cares about is neutralizing the threat. Rare alien? Possible scientific discovery? Might not have the full details of the situation? Doesn’t matter. I’m thinking The Man Trap, The Devil in the Dark, Arena. He wants to protect aliens, but not if the alien is killing his crew. He wants to make overtures of friendship, but not if the new being has already been aggressive.

I mean like I said... a part of me is like "no he is better than this!" but another part is like... well he does have that 'soldier' side of him, he is intensely loyal to his people. The “evil” Kirk of The Enemy Within. I think he just sometimes gets these blinders in certain situations when he's just sure he's right, which is very human.

Also although he's between McCoy and Spock on the continuum of "an objective right thing exists for all people and in all situations and we should always follow that morality" and "morality itself is relative, we should be respectful of alien ways of living even when we don’t understand them" I think in general Kirk and the show is more like McCoy. There IS a right morality here. (I’m thinking of The Apple or even A Taste of Armageddon.)

I also maintain that to say in 1967 "the very personality trait of being warlike is a common denominator between enemies at war" is a dramatic statement.

My mother suggested that Kirk was “strangely appealing” in his desire to save the Organians, with or without their help, and I do agree... I think that’s the complexity of the episode. The overall thrust of the plot is that Kirk was wrong--he’s left embarrassed at the end. I stand by what I said above. And they certainly go out of their way to show that the Klingons and Federation have something in common--namely, as I said, their very capacity to wage war, and interest in waging war.

BUT, as much as I get the point that they have certain similarities with the Federation--and I think this concept of 'these war-worthy disagreements seem trivial to an advanced and neutral species' is interesting, and even more so in comparison with A Taste of Armageddon which, as I said, is this same scenario from the Organians' POV essentially--at the same time it's a bit irritating to hear the democratic Federation compared to the oppressive dictatorship of the Klingons. Like yeah, okay, none of them are light beings and they both wanted to destroy each other--point taken. But would the Federation park itself on a random planet and kill 200 people the first day? I think not. So in this sense Kirk IS right. The Klingons are an adversary worth fighting, just not over the Organians.

I don’t know what I would think of his position if the Organians were being harmed but were also just...actually sheep. Like I guess I would say "well they have to have a reason.” And in fact they did--their bodies cannot be harmed, so they really don't care if the Klingons pretend to harm them. But I just can't comprehend people being like really honestly okay with that level of oppression, as opposed to too scared or too beaten down or too brainwashed to fight it, which is different.

...And from there we went into a discussion of curative v transformative fandom and yet more on what’s wrong with AOS sdfasfjsaldf it’s past 1 am I can’t be stopped BUT I SHOULD BE STOPPED.

[marinetteplztakeabreak]

I love every side of the love square don’t @ me

With that said, here’s why I cannot take Ladrien salt seriously

Some idiot who hates Ladrien: The love square will only work if Marinette learns to love The Real Adrien

Ladrien hater: and The Real Adrien is Chat Noir, not the mask Adrien wears in his day to day life

Ladrien hater: Marinette’s crush on Adrien Agreste is nothing but shallowness and lies

Ladrien hater: because, as we all know, Adrien has never shown any flaws around Marinette

Ladrien hater: Getting into a huge misunderstanding with chewing gum in their very first interaction? Didn’t happen.

Ladrien hater: The umbrella scene, aka the moment that Marinette fell in love with Adrien, was because Adrien admitted to having flaws and being lost? I don’t think so.

Ladrien hater: clearly Adrien’s never shown any fears around Marinette or Ladybug

Ladrien hater: like, for example: he’d never tell Marinette or Ladybug about his irrational claustrophobia, or bring up his sadness and confusion about his mother

Ladrien hater: and he certainly wouldn’t talk about his terror that he’ll be locked away from human interaction to the point that Marinette was willing to sacrifice a super valuble book to help him stay in school because she knew how badly being stuck at home would effect him

Ladrien hater: also Adrien would never let her know about his crippling fear of messing up his friendships by just outright telling her that he’s lost and doesn’t know how to be a good friend and that it’s scary for him

Ladrien hater: because those are all examples of things that would make Marinette immediately hate Adrien. I mean, clearly, her attraction to him is surface-level only and would shatter if she found out Adrien was anything less than perfection

Ladrien hater: she desperately needs to stop fixating on the cardboard cutout version of Adrien and instead love The Real Adrien

Ladrien hater: you know, the version of Adrien when he pretends to be a cool hero who has a normal life for a teenager

Ladrien hater: The Real Adrien

Ladrien hater: because loving someone who’s smooth all the time and pretends to not fear death and is super hot and a superhero is totally different from having a crush on a pretty model

Ladrien hater: this is all black and white and any version of Adrien who’s isn’t 100% genuine is invalid and unworthy of love

Ladrien hater: and it’s fine because Chat Noir always tells Ladybug when he’s having a bad day, and would never do something so silly as hiding his hurt so that he’d look better in Ladybug’s eyes

Ladrien hater: Chat Noir, unlike Adrien, is a completely open book, who shares all of his feelings and likes and flaws with Ladybug

Ladrien haters: also, on the flip side, Adrien having a crush on Ladybug is even more shallow than Marinette’s crush on him, he needs to start pursuing Marinette instead of Ladybug

Ladrien haters: I mean, when has Ladybug ever shown flaws around Chat Noir?

Ladrien haters: Can you even imagine? How crazy would it be if Ladybug was frequently at her weakest around Chat Noir and he still loved her? Sounds fake.

Ladrien haters: when has Ladybug ever outright told Chat she’s confused or scared or in any way less than perfect? Not in Origins. Not in the every single season’s finale. Not in like half of all episodes. When has she actually shown any weakness around Chat Noir?

Ladrien haters: never. That’s the answer. From what Chat Noir’s seen, Ladybug has never been anything but strong and perfect

Ladrien haters: it’s so sad that his love for her is shallow and if he ever saw her looking anxious (Miracle Queen, Puppeteer 2, Gamer 2, Chat Blanc, etc.) or acting irrationally (Evilustrater, Vulpina, etc.) or in anyway callous (Glaciator, Vanisher, etc.) or just exhibiting any Marinette-typical flaws, then he’d just stop being infatuated, but that’s just how it works

Ladrien haters: and anyway, both Marinette and Adrien WANT the love square to flip, they WANT to be loved for their true selves

Ladrien haters: can you imagine how heartbroken Adrien would be if he found out that Ladybug was rejecting him for some fake version of himself? He’d be livid (*subtley kicks Chat Blanc under a table*)

Ladrien haters: and Marinette... hoo boy

Ladrien haters: if she found out that Adrien wasn’t interested in her because he was Chat Noir and he liked Ladybug?

Ladrien haters: I mean, of course she’d be devastated

Ladrien haters: what other possible response could she have to realizing that her crush was someone who had been supportive to her in times of need while also courting her in a super cheesy way and that he was more in love with the version of her that he met first, spent more time with, and had seen weak, than the version of her who he barely ever spoke to?

Ladrien haters: what would it even imply if he loved her more when she was just doing her best to save the world than when she was tripping over herself to impress him

Ladrien haters: I can answer that, it would mean that love is dead

Ladrien haters: I know I’d be upset if it happened to me

Ladrien haters: seriously Adrien needs to grow up

Ladrien haters: devotion to his best friend is so boring, he needs to start flirting with his other friend who he thinks is uncomfortable around him and who he’s been purposely keeping healthy boundaries around because he doesn’t want to make her uncomfortable

Ladrien haters: consent is for losers I want True Love

Ladrien haters: and even if this was a working ship, it would still be super boring to write about

Ladrien haters: I mean, two teenagers frantically hiding their secret identities from each other while trying to make a relationship work right under Hawkmoth’s nose? Idiots who are so in love they go through crazy schemes to protect the other? Where’s the plot in that? Nothing would ever happen,

Ladrien haters: and that’s why Adrien is a problematic and unhealthy ship even though the rest of the love square is perfect and has absolutely no flaws just as any good relationship does

Ladrien haters: because idealizing one facet of something to the point where you can’t see any of its flaws is unhealthy and-

Ladrien haters: wait a minute this sounds like it relates back to my argument and maybe I should think more before judging Ladrien

Ladrien haters: nah Ladrien just sucks

(you’re allowed to have your own opinions and if you don’t like Ladrien you can just block the tag or whatever but if you’re publishing your own opinions loudly and attacking people for liking Ladrien then I’m going to make fun of you because your arguments are dumb. Also happy new year, 2020 is the year of Ladrien rights)

[cisthoughtcrime]

just watched the latest Westworld episode (s3e5) and want to braindump some thoughts about this season as I continue to procrastinate, so spoilers under the divide. if any of y’all watch westworld, would be interested to hear your thoughts too.

ok gonna try to keep this short and not overcritical but probably gonna fail on both counts.

I’m still definitely enjoying watching it and I’m likely gonna keep going until it ends, but it doesn’t feel like it’s the same show anymore so much as a spin-off. At first i thought it was just the fact that so little of it is taking place inside the park and the cast has been decimated, but this episode made me realise that s3 has been so unoriginal compared to the original premise. (again: still enjoying it, still watching on it, not shitting on it for the sake of a superiority trip. There are a lot of derivative shows I really enjoy but Westworld isn’t usually one of them).

the original premise’s underlying subject was subtle and existential and imho was very good about laying out the ingredients for the viewer to draw their own conclusions about what the show was trying to say (from the big philosophical questions like “what is humanity/consciousness/free will anyway?” to the implicit societal critiques like “morality is performative and when no one’s looking humans act different”).

I think what’s bugging me about s3 is that we finally broke out of westworld and we’re in a futurescape i’ve seen a thousand times before in scifi.

The downtrodden ‘different’ (white male) outcast disillusioned with The System and omnipresent surveillance who meets the sexy motorcycle-wearing black-leather-clad badass woman who saves him from his mediocrity and validates his disillusionment and recruits him to help dismantle the system and free the sheeple? Check.

The reclusive European gazillionaire who owns an island, has a seemingly-self-contained tragic backstory that will no doubt have one or two vestigial elements that come into play at pertinent times to blindside the audience and/or main character, and espouses his dream of a utopia derived from his trauma but that isn’t really a utopia? Check.

Everything is automated but people are still empty inside so everything the rich do to poke their ennui with a stick is the same ol’ combination of colourful hypersexualisation/orgies/prostitutes, sadism, and synthetically-made drugs that do whatever tf the writers think will play best visually while brushing off the chemistry of it all with whatever the newest version of ‘flux capacitor’ is? Check.

That’s not to say these tropes are all necessarily scorched earth. I mean, worked for The Matrix and Altered Carbon and whatever. I’m gonna try to wrap this up by synthesising what it is that actually bugs me about this in Westworld S3 specifically:

i said earlier that previously Westworld was good about talking around the core concepts and plot, leaving us to infer the patterns and parallels (which tbh is kinda what i credited for the show’s popularity, ie the fact that there was so much to discuss and so many connections for the audience to make in such a creative world of philosophical and moral questions that ofc people would latch onto it and hypothesise wildly). But eg in this episode, when Dolores sends everyone their profiles, the human-host parallels spoke for themselves and seeing people’s reactions in the streets reinforced so much (base human nature, free will, the validity of the hosts’ emotional reactions, flawed attempts to standardise reality at the expense of individuality) but Bernard softballs it in with “they’re breaking their loops,” which hamhandedly shoves the “ooooooo humans have been the automated drones all along, that’s wack man” down our throats as if that hadn’t been a staple of speculative fiction since before Aldous Huxley and as if it weren’t the sort of blatantly fucking obvious thing you or the person watching with you would gasp aloud after a twist or reveal. Not saying I disagree with the criticism of complacent routine, it’s just... we get it already and we got it since whatever grade school essay we had to write on Orwell or The Giver, no? There’s also the “human over-reliance on tech” critique which has been there since S1, but until now it was kinda baked into the background of the main satirisation of hubris in the face of mortality and self-knowledge; now ‘human over-reliance on tech” is the exact weakness that the show keeps overexplaining has opened the door to human extinction.

sidenote: twice so far they’ve alluded to the human ‘real world’ being a simulation (Maeve in War World and Liam’s stoned friend on that rooftop bar), so if this season’s big twist is that the real world is just one of the ziptillion simulations run by the Serac’s machine I might just stop watching and pretend it ended after s1, esp if part of the twist is that Dolores or Maeve somehow merge themselves into the fabric of the simulation/become one with it. don’t even get me started on if serac is a host bc what a cop-out that would be.

I’m setting aside some of my other issues with the show to focus on how weirdly narrowed/streamlined/hemmed-in this season has been. i really want to like caleb but ffs his whole arc so far is simultaneously far too recognisable and far too self-insert-gratifying when the only new thing added to his stock character is the fact that Aaron Paul is playing him now instead of Sam Worthington or Jake Gyllenhall or whichever from the parade of recognisable-action-actors who are Misunderstood and Pouty until sexy miss unreadable fulfills his call-to-adventure fantasy complete with kiss/sex either during or immediately after a big fight scene.

Now that the rich intriguing world we started in has been largely explained and almost entirely killed off, we’re left with loyalty to a few fave characters in this (admittedly aesthetically pleasing and coherent, but still) standard vision of the future, where we already know Dolores’s story and motives and are kinda waiting for Caleb to catch up, and the only questions left really are kinda linear by Westworld standards (what’s Dolores’s plan, what’s gonna happen to each of the characters, like basic unanswered questions in any plot), and they keep recycling the same plot points (’oh they’re a host too?’ or ‘this host can’t trust their own thoughts/memories/actions because they’ve been damaged or tampered with’ but now kinda cheapened bc the setting is different and no one in the show expects them to be hosts but everyone in the audience does).

TLDR

There is nothing special or specific about this future-world that connects it to Westworld. A futuristic theme park of hyperrealistic humanoid AIs designed to facilitate the consequence-free catharsis of the stunted rich elite could be transplanted into any technologically-advanced future where extreme wealth-disparity and omni-surveillance are still problems, but that describes basically every scifi show that isn’t about space or apocalypse. But that’s part of what made the park such a strong concept, and also why i expected/wanted them to have come up with a more original outside world. If the park can fit anywhere, why did they choose such an uninspired world? It just feels like these creative interesting characters left this creative interesting world, took a wrong turn at Albequerque, and ended up in an extra-preachy Black Mirror fan script.

and again: i don’t hate this season, i’m still watching and enjoying, but i’m really disappointed by the reveal of this world.

[gtgrandom]

Where Young Justice: Outsiders went wrong

(And before you tell me to just stop watching if I don’t like it - I’ve been supporting the show since 2011 by creating a significant amount of content and giving back monetarily. I have every right to critique the writing, thank you).

Honestly, I think they pulled their act together in the finale, and this season left me much more satisfied than I anticipated. That being said, there are some issues I want to address.

Major flaws:

Overabundance of characters

Undeveloped Relationships

Lack of Continuity

Problematic Representation (getting better)

Weak Dialogue 

Lower Quality Animation

The Message

Overabundance of characters

I think we can all agree on this one. There were far too many characters in season 2, but season 3 is laughable. It’s hardly a story anymore. Instead it’s an episodic series featuring new heroes each episode to appease niche comic fans.

There’s a formula for a superhero show (and any group-oriented tale in general), and that’s having a central team of five or less. Then you can introduce one or two new characters max per episode as side characters or villains. But you always circle back to your main team. YJ did a nice job of this in season one. So did most CW superhero shows before they made the same mistake of expanding their cast to make their writing task easier. (Yes, easier - new characters means you can stop developing old ones, especially with time jumps).  YJ started to narrow down the team by the end of the season, but it still left many mains as side characters / aesthetics. 

It’s great seeing these characters brought to life - I won’t deny it. But you can’t delve deep if you have this many. You can’t focus on character development or meaningful relationship development (hence why nearly every ship was established off screen). Furthermore, you frustrate fans when you focus on one group more than another. With a smaller cast you can always count on appealing to your audience because their "fave” is always present in some way. In many ways, fans feel like they’re being dragged along simply waiting for their character to pop up because of a one time cameo. It’s not fair to the audience.

The relationships

I think the only romantic relationships we’ve seen develop on screen are:

Violet/Brion

Spitfire

SuperMartian

Robin/Zatanna

sort of Roy/Jade

- and all but one were introduced in season 1. 

The others were simply introduced as a couple with little to no previous interaction. Like:

Tim/Cassie

Dick/Babs

Jaime/Traci

Bart/Ed

Kaldur/Wyynde

Gardita

M’gann/La’gaan

Mal/Karen

That is not how you write romance. You don’t stick it in there for the sake of it. You have to show us why they work, how they got there, and why we should care.  I’m not saying there HAS to be romance, but if there is, it still has to be written well. 

Continuity

This begins to overlap into the next issue, which is continuity.  I understand that Outsiders is not necessarily a new chapter to Young Justice, but if you are going to call it Young Justice Season 3, then I expect story lines to bleed over beyond just villainous deeds.  

Let’s look at Dick Grayson, for instance.  He’s one of the only mains who has had a very consistent, though shallow, character arc throughout the series.  First he wants to lead, then fears it because of the sacrifices he would have to make - because he didn’t want to be Batman.  In season 2 though, he becomes his worst nightmare.  He risks the lives of his friends, lies to his team, and ends up losing his best friend anyway.  And in season 3, we actually get a little bit of continuity here with Dick mourning Wally and being afraid to take on another team after season 2.  It could have been expanded upon, but it was still present, and I applaud the writers for that.  Especially for driving home his leadership qualities at the end there.

Now, what about the other characters, specifically those introduced in season 2?  This season is called “Outsiders,” and yet, it seems to only focus on the original team and Violet’s new group.   

What about Bart’s entire arc of coming back, stopping the apocalypse, and then losing Wally, his mentor?  What about Jaime’s home life and the lasting effects of being turned into a villain who nearly killed all his friends?  What about TIM and his role as the new leader??  Where did that plotline go?? Why is the unfamiliar Beast Boy now the leader of this Outsiders group?  How did Ed overcome his anger issues and repair his relationship with his dad?  How did Jade go from being a supportive wife and mother into the opposite?   

The writers tried to avoid all these problems by giving us a time jump.  But that’s just lazy writing if you don’t take the time to answer how things have changed!    

Also, I’ve said this before, but continuity isn’t simply having characters mourn a dead character.  You can’t keep using that plot device to give heart to the narrative.  If that’s your only source of true pathos...and that character is dead...then you’ve got a problem. 

The representation

Okay, I’ll admit they saved their asses with Kaldur. I love my wholesome pansexual rep. Would I have preferred to see his relationship occur with a character we’d already been introduced to outside the comics? Yes. But I’ll take it.

Disappointed with Ed/Bart and Bluepulse. They could have shown us more, but they didn’t. They could have given us a story, but they didn’t.  And don’t hit me with “this is a children’s show - we’re lucky to get what we get” BS.  Because it’s not anymore.  This show is literally written by adults for adults.

I really don’t want to talk about the whole Halo/Harper kiss because it was just so wrong in so many ways, but it needs to be addressed. So, first of all, if you excuse cheating in any capacity, shame on you. I don’t care what the characters are going through or how old they are. You don’t both recognize that you have significant others and then proceed to make out!! Second, what the hell?? You’re going to have the first lgbt content be a bisexual stereotype of two girls cheating on their boyfriends (and two characters who have only interacted in one episode before??) Not to mention, underage drinking and gun use? That sends the wrong message to the audience, even if the teens were reprimanded.  

Also, Halo is supposedly non-binary, and yet they explained it away by technology, so idk, I’m hesitant to count it as legitimate rep. I still think it was a good discussion to have. But yeah...

Finally, Halo is not Muslim rep after all.  She’s a hijab wearing character, but she does not identify with her faith or her culture. She outright rejects it in her scene with Harper. So...what? Is she diversity points that you can continue to violently kill off over and over?  Not a fantastic way to treat POC. I don’t think the creators meant any harm by it, but it’s something they need to consider going forward.

(I do appreciate the number of POC characters that have been introduced however. Especially the Latinx and black characters. This show has improved its diversity. But without proper characterization, they’re sort of just...there).

Dialogue

I can’t be the only one who cringed through entire episodes this season?  Some episodes had stellar writing. But the bad ones were very, very bad.   Obviously, not every joke is going to stick the landing, but if you’re going to kill off your beloved comic relief character, you have to have a better backup plan.   

Like, do you guys remember how witty some of the lines from the pilot were?  The whole “Speedy” vs. “Kid Flash” debate in the opening sequence?  You can tell how much effort went into those scenes.  How much love was given to those characters. Because they knew that was their only chance to hook the audience, to get a green light for a full season.  So they put everything into character development and plot - and now they’ve lost so much of what made the show precious in the first place.  (It’s still precious, but it’s tainted in many ways for me now).

Animation

It’s gone downhill. That’s really all I can say without being mean.  Some episodes seem slightly better than others, but if you compare the animation from 3x01 to an episode like Failsafe...there’s just no comparison.  I could hardly watch Wally’s scene without frowning at the frame rate.

Message

I don’t understand what the show is telling us anymore (or I didn’t, before Black Lightning gave a very “on the nose” speech about what it is that we were supposed to take away from this season).

I mean this has always been an issue with the show, but at least it was a little clearer in season 1.  Then, we had several themes:

Found family (+ Actions speak louder than heritage)

Don’t call us sidekicks (AKA the kids can make a difference)

Secrets are poison (They can tear a team apart. Trust in friends)

Season 2 was a little convoluted...and sort of just recycled material. 

Secrets are poison (dammit, Dick)

You are in charge of your own destiny (Jaime/Connor)

Sacrifice (Kaldur, Artemis, Wally, Bart...they all gave something up for the greater good).

But what is the message of season 3?

Secrets are still poison (Tara, Violet, Batman v. Wonder Woman team)

I suppose it’s about healing and letting others in?  Like how  Brion and Victor have both worked through their anger?  Artemis and Jefferson and Dick and Gar sorting through their grief...somehow...off-screen...(except for the episode devoted to Artemis saying goodbye to Wally.)

Perhaps...accepting yourself?  (Victor, Violet, Brion, Connor?)

Do you see my issue here?  How much harder it is to see what I’m supposed to take away from the show now?  I’m not saying there aren’t any good messages being told, but they’re difficult to interpret.  Sometimes that can be good.  But this time I’m on the fence.

Conclusion

I love many of the characters from this show, but the fandom acts as if the writing is impeccable, and that’s just not true.  Not everything is bad.  Some of it is still miles beyond other animated television (looking at you vld).  And I genuinely enjoyed about half of the episodes this season. But I think it’s important to recognize the flaws in media, as a writer myself, and as a consumer of these shows.  

Plz be civil in the comments, and understand that this is only my opinion. 

[rachelthompsonauthor]

The past two quarantine months have been like nothing I’ve ever experienced in my lifetime, and I turned 56 in January. So rather than regurgitate what you’ve likely read in the news or on social media, I’ve decided to share how I’ve spent my time these past two months along with random thoughts. I hope you’ll continue along with me as I share what I’m doing each week.

Books

Oh, how I’ve missed reading! With my business so insanely busy (for which I’m truly grateful) these past few years, I’ve barely had time to read little more than Slack, emails, texts, and social media updates. Not exactly satisfying for this lifelong, avid reader. This quarantine has allowed me a little bit of extra time, which I’ve put to good use.

In no particular order, here’s what I’ve read: 

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow is fantastic. Read it in one sitting because I didn’t want any of the details of this lacy, incredibly intricate work to fade. I highly recommend it. A mix of fantasy, drama, and a love story (because in the end, aren’t all stories love stories?), anyone with a working brain will love this novel.

  Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng is also superb. I’d heard about this book for a while, yet only got around to it because it’s also now a mini-series on Hulu (which I watched afterward – also very good, though the character arcs and the plot changed in crucial, at times startling, ways).

Curious if you’ve read the book and watched the series, what your thoughts are? I could write an entire post about it, yet I’ll only share this…

As a child, my parents hire a housekeeper. My folks both work full-time and we are not in any way rich or well-off. Neither of my folks has college degrees – Dad is an assistant manager at a chain drugstore and Mom has just completed x-ray tech school and works nights at San Bernardino County Hospital. We live in a small house on a long street in the smoggy Inland Empire of California.

There are two of us, my older sister and me. Then my mom gets pregnant when I’m nine and has my baby sister when I’m ten. My folks advertise for a housekeeper and Miss Louise answers. She’s African American and willing to work for the little they can pay her. She smokes a lot (outside only, so as “not to hurt the babies”), insists on wearing a uniform though my mom tells her it isn’t necessary and comes looking for us in her big old white Caddy if we aren’t home from school exactly 20 minutes after it lets out.

(Miss Louise’s husband’s name is George. If you are alive in the 70s and watch The Jeffersons, you understand why this is an endless source of amusement to my sister Caren and me.)

Being that young, neither Caren nor I understand what privilege means. We didn’t get whatever we wanted because my parents are always strapped, yet there is food on the table, and the lights are always on. Except for the occasional venture to Disneyland or Knott’s Berry Farm that one time (mom hated it), our vacations consist of driving to visit our Zayde (great-grandfather) in a nursing home in Santa Cruz, or some other relatives we don’t know somewhere in L.A. (I remember one great-aunt who drank. A lot.) We’d always stop at Cantor’s for a soup and sandwich (the highlight for us), and be back on the road. We don’t mind because it is anywhere but home.

Anyway – my entire point is that in Little Fires Everywhere – the show – Kerry Washington’s Mia is an artist who takes a maid job with Reese Witherspoon’s Elena Richardson’s family to keep an eye on her daughter Pearl, who is quite taken with the teenage Richardson clan. The racial and financial dichotomy is blatantly obvious: a rich family who’s seemingly got it all vs. a seemingly poor black single mother, which adds to the ‘fires’ mentioned in the title.

The book really made me think about my own privilege and despite how well my folks treated Louise, and how much we loved her, and she us, there would always be that wall. Granted, it was a business arrangement and my folks paid her for her services, and in truth, anyone could’ve answered the housekeeping ad. The fact that she was African American and we were white created a racial divide that’s undeniable.

The third book I read is Certain Cure by Jennifer Valoppi, also excellent. It’s the first in a series (parts two and three aren’t out yet, darn it). The novel chronicles the life of three generations of the Cummings family; Claire, a woman in her 70s who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Helene, her television journalist daughter and Justin, the teenage grandson whose adoration of his “Grams” leads him to discover the dark secret behind the miracle technology that is not only curing Claire of her cancer but tempting his mother with eternal youth, as traditional medical industries wage war against the mysterious doctor from China who threatens them all.

I had no idea what to expect with this one, and I’m glad I read it. Valoppi is a former TV journalist from NYC so she knows her stuff. I’m not particularly religious (or scientific), yet I didn’t find either the science or religious stuff bogged me down.  Fascinating read. I highly recommend it.

Movies and Shows

Gosh, so many. With four of us in the house (and two teens), it’s worth it to me to pay for Hulu and Netflix, Amazon Prime Video comes with my Amazon Prime membership already, plus my internet plan comes with AT&T Direct, Showtime, HBO, and other premium channels. For the amount of entertainment, it’s worth the money.

I watch movies and shows on my iPad at night, once I’m finally off my computer. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like a super loud TV with stereo surround-sound barking at me after a long day of noise and stress. So I go upstairs to my cozy bed, surround myself with blankets and pillows and cats, and snuggle in for a few hours to watch a movie or a few episodes of something I enjoy.

Another note: not a big ‘reality TV’ watcher, mostly because, as a writer, I prefer well-written shows. I also don’t like the negativity and yelling normally associated with those shows. That said, I do watch Vanderpump Rules (on Bravo) with my daughter (age 20). We bond.

Shows

Here’s what I’ve binged these past few quarantine months, show-wise (no links because you can Google):

Ray Donovan – ggggggreat! Heard it was wonderful, yet truly had no idea how awesome. Liev Schrieber is captivating as Ray. Flawed, human, sad, and, in case you don’t know, a childhood sexual abuse survivor (church abuse). I had no idea going in this would be a theme of the show, yet it was handled with care and truth. The entire supporting cast is also amazing. Every season is great. Watch it all. I hated to see it end.

Homeland – the first four or so seasons were mesmerizing. Then, I got bored. This last season had me falling asleep and then WHAM! that ending. Worth it.

Hunters – Good, not fantastically great. The twist in the last episode will get you, though.

Upload – Loved it! Thought it would be silliness (and in some places, it was, but that’s okay – we need a little silliness right now). Had a ton of heart which I love.

Bosch – come on, it’s Titus Welliver. He’s fantastic. This last season didn’t draw me in as much as the entire rest of the series, though. You?

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel – terrific, all of it. Every season, every episode, every character.

Tales From The Loop – amazing. Anything having to do with time-travel or the bending of time, I’m a total sucker for. This hurt my brain in a good way.

The Feed – weird but good and thought-provoking.

Dark – by far, my favorite show year. A German show dubbed in English (you get used to it – don’t let that scare you off), this time-bending, decade-moving hit show spans two seasons and every episode is worth watching. And the music – my god. Amazing. Here’s a Spotify playlist link.

Movies

Parasite – thought-provoking. Took a while to get into it and then boom! It just goes full-on insanity. Well-written, well-acted, and the message of the movie is just, wow. No spoilers in case you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.

Hustlers – loved it. Whatever issues people have with strip clubs and ‘dancers,’ get over it. These girls are amazingly talented, are in amazing shape, and work hard to make money for their families. What I loved the most about the movie is that it’s all about the women; the men are only there as a plot device. It’s a movie entirely shot through the ‘female gaze’ (though of course, men will enjoy the dance scenes which are sexy, yet not unclothed). How many movies can say that?

Memento – I think I’m probably one of the few people who had never seen this neo-noir psychological thriller starring Guy Pearce looking like Brad Pitt (who was originally considered for the role). It was great, I think? LOL. My brain still hurts.

Call Me By Your Name – Lovely, sad, gorgeous. (And I will not make a juvenile peach joke.) And the music! Oh, my.

Zombieland – I hate zombies, I hate horror movies. I hate gore and squishy sounds. This movie was cute. (Not ready for the sequel, yet.)

Music

As mentioned above, the music in Dark sent me off on a ‘who are these talented musicians?’ lark. I’ve discovered so many. Here is who I’m listening to right now (all free on Spotify) and links provided here:

Apparat (you’ll recognize the opening theme of Dark and stay for the rest).

Agnes Obel – wondrous. I’ve played her entire catalog repeatedly since discovering her music on Dark. She’s become a commercial favorite as well now. Familiar is the song used in the show that’s received the most play.

Alev Lanz – otherworldly. I’ve not heard anyone like her. Her songs on the Dark soundtrack and Black Mirror are what she’s most noted for (May The Angels, and Fall Into Me, respectively), however, I love all of her work. Her harmonies are like nothing else. One song is layered with her voice and African throat singers – it’s gorgeous (May The Angels). She’s active on Twitter and we’ve interacted a few times. She’s beautifully transparent about her love of music and it shows in all her work.

Patrick Watson – I heard this song, Good Morning Mr. Wolf, on the Ray Donovan soundtrack and immediately clicked my SoundHound app. Who is this talented being? This song, in particular, sounds so large and cinematic – I wondered – is he is a film composer? (yes). A band? (yes). And so much more. I cannot get enough of all of his music, and still, I play this one song on repeat – repeatedly.

London Grammar – I discovered this band a few years ago and still adore them. Strong is still my favorite song, though Rooting For You is a close second. Hannah Reid’s vocals are big and beautiful.

Hilary Woods – ethereal and lovely. Especially the song Kith.

Sufjan Stevens – many of us just discovered him from the movie Call Me By Your Name soundscore, however, he’s been a working musician since the early 2000s. Talented beyond.

I could go on and on, but I’ll stop here. I made a Female Rockers list on Spotify which you’re welcome to.

Thoughts on Quarantine

My Business

Living in California, I’ve barely left the house in two months, with the exception of going to the pharmacy for meds or for the occasional physician appointment for me or the kids, because of the quarantine restrictions in place. And I’m okay with that.

I’m fortunate that my business is primarily online-only: I work with authors and small businesses on their branding, marketing, and promotion, so given that all real-life events are off the table, I’ve been quite busy working with my clients to ensure their products and services are still viable.

This doesn’t mean I don’t need help as a small business. I applied for an SBA loan and couldn’t even get onto the website the first time – it was pretty ridiculous – like the end scene in Beetlejuice. You all know who those first small business loans went to, right? Not small-potatoes people like me. So the second time around, it went much smoother, and I’m grateful to have received a small loan which will definitely help me keep going with rent, insurance, and other expenses.

I still did my annual non-profit initiative for writers, NaNoProMo (National Novel Promotion Month) this year over on my business site, BadRedhead Media, yet only for two weeks instead of the entire month. Daily blog posts from experts on everything publishing-related plus amazing giveaways. It’s always exhausting, yet I find enormous gratification in helping writers.

This year, however, getting writers to comment to win amazing, FREE giveaways was like pushing a house up a hill. I get it – people are focused on putting food on the table instead of commenting on blog posts, even if the giveaways were worth $500. That’s why I wanted to do this initiative this year – to help writers who are in a jam – yet only a smattering of writers participated.

I’m seriously rethinking if I want to do it next year given the financial cost as well as the personal toll. My first therapist, who I started seeing after I gave birth to my daughter Anya (I was terrified to leave her to go back to work, given my history with childhood sexual abuse), gave me this tip whenever I had trouble deciding whether to do something:

“If you ever aren’t sure if you should do something, ask yourself this question: Is this good for Rachel? If the answer is yes, do it. If the answer is no, don’t. It really is that simple.”

Self-care, y’all.

Social Media

I’ve stopped interacting with the crazies on social media (and who knows, maybe you’re one of them so truly, no offense), but I’d rather stay safe and keep my family safe by working exclusively at home – which I mostly do anyway – than venture back into face-to-face meetings with clients. I support four people with my business and if something happens to me, four people are doomed.

So the answer is simple to me: stay home, work from home, and don’t risk dying from this virus.

I don’t buy into any of this ridiculous conspiracy crap. Sorry, not sorry. You can if you want to. Spending time arguing with people online about it takes away time from my business, my kids, my guy, and my own sanity. Speaking of which…

Mental Health

There were a few mix-ups with my meds when this all started, and I couldn’t get my prescriptions filled and delivered before I ran out, so I ended up having about a week of insomnia which I’ve never had to deal with. I was a zombie (the non-squishy kind) and it sucked.

If you have insomnia, I’m sorry. I feel for you.

It’s all straightened out now, thank goodness. My son Lukas and I donned our masks and drove to the local CVS the other day because I couldn’t wait two days for my meds to be delivered. It felt like walking into a dystopian future walking in there: everyone in masks, tape six feet apart for the waiting line, plexiglass between us and the cashiers.

I’m thankful for these measures, of course, and wonder how long we’ll need them, or if this is our new normal?

My Writing

I finished the final edits on Broken People and sent it back to my editor. She’s had some health issues, so the delay is understandable. To be honest, I’m not in a huge hurry to launch a new book right now. Here are the questions that run through my mind:

Do people have money to purchase a new book?

If they do, will they want to read my new book?

If they do want to read my new book, will they take the money they do have to read mine, and then review it?

Does it even matter in the grand scheme of life? 

I’m an author just like any author – I want to get my work out there so people can read it, engage with it, connect with me. I hope they’ll like it, feel something, reflect on their own lives, learn something new, particularly about being a childhood sexual abuse survivor. It’s a weird limbo to be in right now.

Our New Normal

This phrase is bandied about quite a lot yet let’s face it: it’s life as we know it, now. The anxiety is real, too. I haven’t hugged or kissed my elderly parents who live two miles away in two months. I bring them toilet paper and cookies from our favorite bakery (drive up and trunk drop off, pay online only) and drop it on their porch.

All these scenarios run through my mind: If I go to do this, what happens if? I know I’m not the only one. And yet, we can’t predict anything. So I sit here, writing this post, safe inside my little house bubble, grateful I can pay my rent, put food on the table (delivered by Instacart, thankfully), and everyone around me is healthy.

What’s your new normal? What have you been reading, watching, and listening to? If you’ve stuck it out this far, I thank you. Would love to hear your comments! Safe hugs, y’all. 

***

Read more about Rachel’s experiences in the award-winning book, Broken Pieces.

She goes into more detail about living with PTSD and realizing the effects of how being a survivor affected her life in

Broken Places, available in print everywhere!

                The post This is How To Spend Quarantine With Me appeared first on Rachel Thompson.

via Rachel Thompson

[rachelbethhines]

Tangled Salt Marathon - Under Raps

My feelings on this episode are pretty neutral. It’s not anything amazing, but it’s not the worst thing ever either. It’s just there, I guess. 

Summary: During a love festival, Corona displays a book full of signatures of lovers in honor of an old ruler's falling in love with the leader of a rival kingdom. Cassandra suddenly turns very secretive; Rapunzel learns it's because she's been seeing a guy named Andrew. Cassandra doesn't want Rapunzel's meddling, but the princess suggests a double date and they all go off in a hot air balloon. However, Andrew turns out to be part of an old faction that didn't like the unification of Corona and wants to steal the book.

This Backstory Doesn’t Add Up

So we open up with Big Nose narrating about the history of a war between Corona and a group of people called the Saporians. This is important for two reasons. First, because the Saporians are reoccurring villains in the show, and secondly, because it reveals where the underground tunnels running between Old Corona and the Island Capital come from. These tunnels are a reoccurring plot device in the show, along with the book that maps them. 

The problem is that what the story tells us doesn’t match the other information we are given. If it was only the Saporians who invaded then why does an Old Corona, with its own castle, exist to begin with? Why do the tunnels extend from both if King Herz Der Sonne made them? What purpose did they serve if he was only defending the island? Why are the Saporians led by a general and not a ruler? Why would marrying only a general unite the two kings and where was the Saporian kingdom to begin with? Why did they invade? Why are there still Saporians who haven’t accepted the merger centuries later and why do they live on the go outside the kingdom? If  Herz Der Sonne is such a good guy then why did he curse his grave with a zombie apocalypse? Ect. 

We keep getting hints throughout the show that Herz Der Sonne isn’t all he was cracked up to be, and you keep expecting a reveal that it was the Coronaians who started the war and oppressed the Saporians and then rewrote history, but it never comes. The show wants us to accept this very black and white conflict at face value even as it constantly undermines itself and muddies the waters. 

Pointing Out That Something is Stupid in the Show Itself Doesn’t Make it Any Less Stupid

As I stated back during Rapunzel’s Enemy, the show has a real problem with tone. Constantly showing us festival and holiday after festival and holiday only undermines the more serious elements in the ongoing story and creates mood whiplash. Also anything that reminds me of Cinderella 2 is not a good thing. 

Ahh Friedborg, You’re Such a Wasted Opportunity 

So she actually first appeared in Cassandra V. Eugene but I forgot to bring her up there. My bad. Friedborg is something of a fan favorite in the TTS fandom, and I like her too, but she adds nothing. She’s a joke character in a tv show already oversaturated by joke characters. More over the joke is actually offensive on some level since it all hinges on her being less conventionally attractive then the other female characters and the mains finding her weird because she never talks. 

The show tries to justify her existence by making her Big Nose’s girlfriend, but she’s not who he ended up with in the movie. And once again it’s kind of offensive to imply that only people who don’t match society’s contrived beauty standards can only find love with those that look like them. Thereby completely missing the point of Big Nose’s character arc. 

I’ll say it right now, Friedborg should have been Zan Tiri, or Demantius. Take your pick. I think ZT makes more sense, but etheir way she should have been a setup for something more important to the plot rather then just be being a vauge oddity that just pops up from time to time. 

I Miss This Version of Eugene

Throughout the first two seasons, Eugene and Cassandra were willing to point out Rapunzel’s BS. Forcing her to confront her flaws and re-examine her positions.I would argue that the show could have pushed this even further but at least it was there. By the final season no one was doing this. Rapunzel is allowed to be as awful as she wants to be without consequence. Meaning she never learns anything and stops growing as a character and the show acts like this a positive thing. It is not. In fact, it is the biggest flaw of the whole show as it fails to achieve the one thing it originally set out to do; which is to tell a coming of age story with Rapunzel. 

It also has the added effect of making Eugene a doormat to Rapunzel’s bulling, thereby regressing his character as well and presenting an unhealthy relationship as a goal to be achieved to younger viewers. I can not stress enough to young girls and young men in particular, that Rapunzel and Eugene are not ‘relationship goals’ in this show. Not after season 3. 

Xavier Doesn’t Get a Proper Introduction 

So Xavier is actually pretty important to the ongoing plot. He’s more or less the exposition fairy for the show, but he’s not really established. He just suddenly appears here with no prior meeting and he just so happens to know what the main characters need to know with no explanation as to how he knows. 

His part here is so forgettable that I legit forgot who he was when he reappeared in the mid-season finale. I had thought that the writers just threw in a random character for plot purposes. And to be fair they did. Just they did it here instead of in Queen for a Day. 

If the showrunners wanted Xavier to be historian who knows everything and tells stories, then he should have been introduced as the narrator of the history of Hearts Day instead of Big Nose. 

Another Lesson Not Learned 

We get this big heart to heart moment of Raps and Cass coming to an understanding, with Rapunzel promising not to intrude and Cass promising to being more honest about her feelings. This is walked back on several times and made part of the core conflict of the last two seasons. 

Once again, any problem that can be solved in less then five minutes of talking isn’t a strong enough conflict to drive multiple seasons. If this had been a show without an ongoing narrative, like say The Rescue Rangers or even Batman the Animated Series, then the repeated lessons wouldn’t be a problem. We expect characters to be static and to reset after each episode since they’re not shows that you watch in order. 

But if you do go the overarching arc route for a story, then people expect lasting character development. Even in shows like Gravity Falls or Steven Universe, where the change is more gradual and the characters do repeat mistakes occasionally, there’s still a marketed change by the end. One that indicates improvement by the characters, and the inter conflicts are never exactly the same each time with exactly the same lesson over and over again. 

 Oh Look, Cassandra Once Again Achieving her Goal of Validation 

Cass is awarded a medal by her father for stopping Andrew. Don’t expect her or the show to remember this. 

Also more Cass and Cap interaction that we don’t get to see. 

Can We Not Imply That Cassandra Still has a Crush on the Guy Who Lied to Her and Then Almost Killed Her, and Can We Not Act Like This is a Good Thing?

So this flower was given to Cassandra by Andrew and her keeping it makes zero sense. 

First off lets not have one of our few strong independent female characters crushing on the show’s stereotypical ‘nice guy’, okay? That’s all kinds of gross. Secondly, if the intention was to show that Cass was now more willing to open up about her feelings, then wouldn’t her keeping one of the gifts Raps made her earlier in the episode make more sense? After all, that’s the relationship that actually matters to Cassandra and is the basis of the whole show. 

But this all boils down to the fact that the creator sees Cassandra as straight, always has, and thinks her crushing on the guy who manipulated her is somehow better than ‘no-homo’. Now you can headcanon Cass as whatever you want and ship her with whomever you want, as canon doesn’t matter. But I find it hilarious that most of the head showrunner’s biggest supporters are mainly Casspunzel fans and yet he’s the one who made them ‘sisters’ and sees them as such.

Like I hate to break it to you guys, but a Cass led spin-off headed by Chris won't be the lesbian rep that you’ve always dreamed of. You’re better off just watching the She-Ra reboot. 

But things gets even worse when Rapunzel approves of this stupid ‘crush’ ...

Don’t Ever Tell Someone That You’re Proud of Them For Going On a Date

Dating is just something some people choose to do together and some people choose not to engage in that. It’s not an accomplishment and it shouldn’t be treated as such. This is insulting to both people who don’t date, for whatever reason, and to women who hate being being defined by their relationships, which is most of us. 

Even if you’re being charitable and try to make this about Cassandra self esteem and her learning she’s worth ‘loving’, which is the reason some people have offered up for this scene, it still falls apart when it’s not established that Cassandra ever had such self esteem issues to begin with and was not looking for romance anyways. And if that is what the show is going for then it’s still problematic to suggest that being found as attractive by someone else is need for self esteem. In fact, that’s kind of the opposite of what self esteem is.    

Conclusion 

Overall this episode was ‘meh’. Like most season one episodes the problems stem from the ongoing narrative and lack of follow though in later seasons. However there’s enough stuff in here on it’s own to rub me just the wrong way that I can’t actually call it good either. 

It doesn’t help that I don’t see the appeal of Andrew at all. Watching the character is just a cringefest for me. He’s too similar to real life men I’ve unfortunately met and therefore sends alarm bells ringing in my head. And I agree with Eugene; he’s not all that handsome. 

[mannatea]

Not That Deep: A Psycho Pass Critique

This post is not spoiler-free, and is the result of multiple rewatches over the span of five years. If you remember any of my old Psycho Pass meta, please toss it straight into the garbage. I swear I’m better at conveying my thoughts now. (Joke’s on you if you think I’ve learned to condense my posts, though.)

Disclaimer: all opinions expressed within this post are mine and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts and opinions of my followers or friends. I welcome discussion/debate.

Psycho Pass (abbreviated to PP for simplicity’s sake from this point forward) is an anime in that very specific genre that belongs to societies that are portrayed as Utopian but aren’t. For the record, the setting can’t really be described as ‘dystopian’ or ‘futuristic hellscape’ either. The series calls itself “cyberpunk.”

In the year 2112, Japan has closed itself off from the world and implemented the Sibyl System: a judgment oracle. Citizens of the country are monitored by the system and have a “psycho-pass” assigned to them. This “psycho-pass” measures their stress levels, brain activity, and potential to commit a crime. When a person’s crime coefficient (CC) exceeds 100, they are considered a latent criminal and put into isolation to receive mandatory therapy. If they do not recover, they remain in isolation. The story follows the main character, Tsunemori Akane, as she joins the series’ version of a police force.

Trigger warnings for this series include gore, violence (sexual, emotional, physical), and an obscene amount of philosophy.

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Again, below the readmore/cut will be spoilers.

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Worldbuilding/Craft

I feel like it’s important to get into the meat of the discussion as quickly as possible with this series, especially considering the title of this post: Not That Deep.

I’m not going to bother ‘rating’ the different facets/aspects of the show because I don’t think it’s necessary, and this isn’t really a review so much as a discussion/critique. Either you liked the series or you didn’t. If you’re reading this you either have an open mind or you want to get angry, and both reasons are at least a little valid.

PP is a series that REALLY wants to be deep, but falls flat in almost every conceivable way. I’m saying this as someone who enjoyed it enough to write fanfiction about it the last time I watched it, and who not only recommended it to multiple friends, but screenshared the entire series with one recently so that she could see it.

I think the general concept of Sibyl and Akane’s futuristic society is presented in a digestible way. I appreciate the attempts to integrate cool future tech into the show, but I’m especially impressed by the way they go about it. It’s all stuff that your average person living right now would adopt and use regularly if given a chance (auto driven cars, drones, AI secretaries, holo clothes/outfits). Without those specific scenes, I feel like the worldbuilding would almost collapse in on itself; these little details made it easy to imagine living in the world, and gave a little personality to the characters as they made use of them—like little glimpses into their personal taste.

It also helped to take the focus and pressure off of the less-nice aspects of the Sibyl System. No wonder people are generally pretty happy/content in this world: they can wear sweatpants and just holo something else over it! (Sign me up!)

Unfortunately the worldbuilding beyond that isn’t great, but I also don’t think it’s fair to say that it’s bad. It’s just...kind of mediocre...while still managing, at least for the first season, to feel coherent.

We have hues and crime-coefficients. They are not the same thing, but they might as well be because one isn’t bad without the other being bad: EVER. Ginoza’s CC rises as his hue darkens throughout S1. Togane’s hue is black and he has the highest CC on record. Makishima’s hue is clear and his CC is 0 (when he wills it to be). What’s the point of having both, then? Is it just for a fun color-coding system? It’s never explained in any way that makes sense. The one character likely to have a high CC and a clear hue is Makishima (a sociopath), but he has both a clear hue and a low CC. (Kamui is another anomaly, but he can’t be measured at all, so he doesn’t really fit into this specific discussion.) Basically, having hues and CCs both exist just feels a little bit too much like “it sounded cool so we included it” instead of: “These both serve serious purposes in the world.” They want really bad to fling philosophy at the viewers, but seem to neglect this really large aspect of the world where it would be perfect to latch on.

Technology is advanced to the point of having cybernetic arms that function effortlessly and people can almost achieve full cybernization if they have the money/will to. Kamui was 184 people stitched together lol... And yet Akane has just one living grandparent (who apparently can’t even move on her own). I’m not really put off by this, but you’d think the technology/health debate would be a much bigger part of the story beyond the news broadcast that was shown.

I think the biggest niggling little worldbuilding issue is the fact that the implementation of Sibyl happened ~20 years ago. I like the detail for what it gives us for some characters (Masaoka and Ginoza specifically), but I find it mostly implausible. Maybe it was fully implemented 20 years ago, but the framework was another 20 years in the making. It just doesn’t work otherwise. The second it was implemented families would have been shattered and that shattering would have put even more people into isolation due to their CC rising. I mean, if someone took my 5-year-old away from me, I’d be in isolation REAL QUICK, ‘cause that’s the kind of trauma you don’t just Get Over or Move Past.

Speaking of five-year-olds, in the boarding school episodes, they mention a law that protected minors, which feels out of place because Kagari was not protected by that law...which means it couldn’t have been around very long in the first place. If the scanners can flag a 5-year-old child and take him away from his parents, high school students aren’t exempt either. The mention of the law would have been a nice touch if it had only recently been appealed/removed, but it was only around for a few years ~20 years ago, so it feels awkwardly placed/silly.

Again, not everything worldbuilding/craft-related is bad. Like I said earlier, the world in general feels pretty cohesive and the characters belong there. The issues mostly sit with the fact that they tried to include a lot of ‘neat’ or ‘dramatic’ (or even ‘dark’) things...without stopping to consider if they actually fit within the narrative they were trying to construct.

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Plot/Storylines

This is where the series shines. Or at least, this is probably the strongest point in PP’s favor.

The biggest criticism I have: it doesn’t actually do anything new and exciting.

That said, I don’t think every bit of media out there needs to flip the script to be enjoyed, and I liked PP just fine for what it was.

Season One was definitely stronger in this department than later material.  What made S1 feel strong was having enough time to actually move the plot along while also developing the characters. S2 was comparatively rushed and had a lot of really unnecessary plotlines and gore. The movie was...eh, but I think it was an improvement over S2. (I haven’t seen Sinners of the System yet, so I can’t comment on those installments.)

I can find fault with a lot of S1 stuff, but for the most part I think it did a pretty good job and any faults I’d bother to point out would just be me nitpicking. The storylines melded into one another, everything was connected, et cetera. Unfortunately this comes at the cost of character relationships/development, but I’ll talk about that later. Besides, I’d rather have a cohesive series than not, so this isn’t exactly a criticism so much as an observation. The production team(s) did an excellent job of making the most of the screentime they had to work with.

S2 feels flawed almost from the start. Rather than build off of what we already learned in S1 and further develop the characters, it chose to rush headlong into a half-assed plot featuring an unbelievable antagonist. Yikes. I think it brought up an interesting question in “WC?” but instead of striking a believable balance they really just made an antagonist who was 184 people’s bodies stitched together. I can’t get over how stupid that was. Honestly, it was straight-up foolish of the writers to go through with that concept. Makishima might have been a pretentious pile of shit, but at least he felt like a human being. Kamui as a concept was just too overblown to work.

Also working against S2 was Togane. That whole plotline was completely unnecessary and throwing Akane’s grandmother under a bus on top of that was just the icing on the idiot cake. S2 was the Break the Cutie trope tenfold, but there was no danger and therefore no sense of urgency or fear. It was just gross for the sake of being gross, which was disappointing. I’m not saying that Togane isn’t the type of person to beat a crippled old lady to death, because he is, but I also never thought he was an idiot, and the progression of his attempts to blacken her hue jumped straight to the moon instead of progressing at a pace that felt more natural/reasonable. If the guy hasn’t been eliminated by an inspector after blackening many of their hues, he’s not the kind of dope to take silly risks. He could have tried any number of things to ruin Akane that didn’t involve her poor old granny (who had no real screentime and whom the audience had no connection with anyway).

S2 also gave us Ginoza doubting Akane’s sanity early on (acting like she might have written WC on her own wall), which not only feels incredibly out of character for S2 Ginoza, but never amounts to anything/goes anywhere anyway.

Hungry Chicken was an interesting touch, but SO MANY PEOPLE DIED that its impact was diminished. Division 3 had such a non-appearance in the series anyway that them being there at all just felt stupid without more lead-up.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think S2 is irredeemable, but I feel like it missed the mark consistently from start to finish. A shame, because the concept of a ‘plural’ psycho-pass might have been nifty if, say, Kamui was made up of 5 or 6 people’s bodies. Then the holos would feel meaningful. Then each ‘part’ of him would feel like a different person with different feelings and motives and skills. 

Anyway, I think S2 muddied the waters too much with Kamui and the body doubles and Shisui all that nonsense, too. At a certain point if your plot gets too complex, especially with overblown concepts thrown into the mix, it just feels silly. That’s basically what happened to S2.

Again, S1 wasn’t perfect. Makishima was exhaustingly boring. Cool, so you can quote a bunch of crap you’ve read. Great. So can I. Who are you as a person, though? That Guy in my Philosophy 101 class who argued with the professor? Yeah, I could picture that! 

People love waxing poetic about how amazing an antagonist Makishima was, but the dude was a hollow shell quoting things other people said 100+ years ago. It felt like he didn’t even have his own thoughts, and as far as I saw, there weren’t even any fake philosophers mixed in with the rest to make us feel a little extra immersed in the world (and/or give us another philosophical spin on the situation).

Hey, maybe that was the point, but I’ve never seen that criticism leveled fully at the character/plot in general, so here we are.

It was just too heavy-handed. By the end of the series I wanted him dead just so I could stop listening to his mini-lectures.

Still, it may as well have been amazing compared to 184-People-Stitched-Together being the main antagonist. 

I think the movie jumped in face-first and was perhaps a little too...all over the place? But I didn’t have to endure 184 people as a single person, or ears in boxes, so... I consider it a win.

The bitter reality when it comes to Psycho Pass and the plot is that...the plot is its greatest strength, but it’s Not That Deep...even though you can tell that it’s consistently trying to be. Oof.

I think if they’d shot for something less complex, especially in S2, they’d have at least met their goals of depth/consistency. Instead what we ended up with was having a fairly decent plot devolve into one of the worst second seasons I’ve seen.

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Characters & Character Development

For such a small cast, I think PP did a pretty piss-poor job with most of their characters, but the series as a general rule is so plot-heavy that it’s not really surprising.

I can’t help but expect a lot from a series that only has a few ‘main’ characters. In this case, Akane is the Big Main Character, and is flanked by Kogami and Ginoza. In S1, there was a decent balance (with Masaoka and Kagari thrown in). In S2, it was mostly just Akane and The Bad Guys, which would be fine if the plot was incredible, or The Bad Guys were super duper interesting, but as discussed previously, the plot was akin to liquid cat barf and the characters weren’t treated much better. It was a little insulting to be handed characters who could be really fun in the right hands (literally everyone) only to see them used as plot vehicles/hallucinations/memory thoughts. Kogami randomly appearing for long boring scenes wasn’t fun or cool; it was uninspired. It’d be way cooler if it was for five seconds and felt like a...memory, almost...a passing thought. For more screentime, it could even happen more often. But no, it’s gotta be like two minutes long. 

How about the scene where Saiga talks to Koichi who just keeps turning into Kamui and he talks for like five straight minutes? UGH. Is this supposed to feel deep and meaningful? It doesn’t.

Shion sleeps with Yayoi so she can monologue plot things while Yayoi is getting dressed. Can I add that Yayoi doesn’t matter at all at any point, and Shion conveniently can do anything that needs to be done because Reasons?

Togane isn’t around long enough to feel like a worthwhile villain. Nobody cares about Shisui because we honestly don’t even know who she is! Oh, were we supposed to feel bad for Division 3? We’re supposed to feel gross about Akane’s grandmother but the writers took one line in S1 and used that to try and break the character (while also knowing full well it wouldn’t have any effect on her). Let’s not forget Mika, who is remembered as being incredibly annoying...while everyone forgets/doesn’t notice that she’s the student from the boarding school who didn’t die (and we never see her outside of work doing her own thing, which adds to her just being a pain).

Ginoza seems a little like he’s supposed to fill a spot his father left, but he doesn’t, and he’s pushed to the background to...not really do anything of import. Hinakawa is a worthless character who exists just for one plot-specific purpose. Saiga exists so that more dialogue can happen and not seem too out of place.

I’m not saying the character writing overall is trash, but it definitely ain’t good, and I think S2 is where it really struggled. S1 gave us a really interesting character in Kogami. Akane was learning and struggling to fit in at work and do things well, which was somewhat relatable. Ginoza was struggling with his mental health throughout the entire first season and had a lot of character development. But then S2 happens and the development kind of...stopped? Akane didn’t seem to really learn much because she was too busy always being right? Kogami noped out of Japan so I didn’t expect anything with him specifically, but why couldn’t Yayoi have moved into the limelight? Shion? One of the new guys? ANYONE?

Don’t get me wrong. I still have characters I like, and I can see potential in the others. I just wish I was seeing more than potential is all, especially with characters like Yayoi that have been around from Day1 and still haven’t really done anything noteworthy.

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General Criticisms/Other Thoughts

There’s a lot of shock-value violence (SVV). I guess you could say I ‘get’ the purpose of it, but there’s literally no reason that helmeted person couldn’t have beat a man to death with a hammer instead of a woman, especially considering that we have to see Spooky Boogie’s corpse looking grotesque and plenty of other crimes against women.

I feel like S2 was especially guilty of SVV, but it existed in S1, too, pretty much to the point that it started to anger me. It might not have bothered me as much if some of the violent acts were cases that stood alone, but they were all linked to the main plot and that somehow seemed to make it worse.

I also wasn’t a fan of Akane constantly being naked/near naked, of Yuki being in her underwear/negligée, of every crime against a woman ending up with a woman’s clothes being removed, and (the list goes on). One of these things? I might be able to overlook. All of them? Come on. Don’t pretend these creators weren’t doing this for their own purpose.

(I know the scene with Aoyanagi gave us the men getting undressed too [This is your natural self!], but then they showed her with all these action scenes, legs spread wide open, coordinated lacy undies/bra... C’MON. All the butt-shots of Professor Saiga and Kogami don’t make up for this or cancel it out. I KNOW WHAT YOU GUYS ARE DOING AND I DO NOT LIKE IT.)

The music was mediocre but acceptable/fitting. 

The animation is nice. 

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Overall

This isn’t a series I’d recommend to just anyone. It has a lot of issues, and they range from being petty annoyances to straight up offensive. If you can ignore the misogynistic undertones and general lack of consistent attention to the characters, there’s a decently interesting plot waiting for you.

Unfortunately the series just feels...lacking, in the end. There is a S3 coming out (apparently featuring other characters), so the creators aren’t done playing in this world. Maybe S3 will fix some of the consistency issues?

I’ve seen a lot of people make comments about Psycho Pass being a ‘genius’ work, ignored by the general public despite its godliness. I agree that it doesn’t get the attention you’d expect a series of this caliber (nice animation, decent soundtrack, likable main female character who isn’t some moeblob) to have, but I think I hit upon all the reasons it’s not everyone’s cuppa in the first place...and while it is open for fanfiction and so on, the lack of attention to the characters by the series itself makes it less likely to appeal to the sort of people who write fanfiction. So there you have it: a pretty decent, mostly coherent series that’s terribly violent and misogynistic. Definitely not everyone’s cup of tea, but worth a watch if you can get past those pesky negatives.

[randomthingsthatilike1]

You know, sometimes the things I see on this website about Lena just make me go ???????? (and here is going to be some constructive criticism. Key word here! This is not bashing or hate but genuinely thoughtful and sincere critique about a character I love and often seen wobified by fandom)

Because Lena isn’t her family and she’s not responsible for their actions, but at the same time Lena is a billionaire. With a B. I am reminded a bit about what I’ve seen people say why they don’t like the modern day royal family, the Queen especially—sure they didn’t quite play a role in some of the atrocities their family committed and are innocent of those acts, but because of those acts they are still benefiting—and Lena is still benefitting from plenty of pretty damning things that her family did.

It would be one thing if like. Lillian and Lex and Lionel were just straight up murderers and she was suffering by guilty by association, and therefore didn’t actually derive anything from that, but she benefits from the profits made by their anti-alien technology—she’s not a self-made person suffering from mere stigma. She wants to be better than her family, and I genuinely do think she is better! But this is about how she can grow!

Lena is a billionaire and that has implications, but I think I’ve only ever read one fic that really explored that? Because if she is a billionaire, and knows that the former head of security is a xenophobic murderer, and she has in her possession several devices that can be used as weapons against humans and aliens alike, as we see with the anti-xray glass, with Kryptonite, with the device she made at the gala, with the Lexo suit, and god possibly the most dangerous and most innocuous looking one of all, the alien detection device (a device that outs you to any business or place of employment or residence or friend that requires you to take it, while also selling something meant to conceal your identity as an alien as well? Not great moral optics there). The actions of her family are not her fault, but the subsequent actions she takes are her responsibility.  

Now, someone was going to take over LuthorCorp, and I do agree that it is better Lena, who does genuinely care about being a good person, than one of Lillian or Lex’s cronies. Bad shit could have happened. You can’t just get rid of a multibillion corporation overnight either without very bad consequences—jobs lost, stock market in tatters, etc etc. But, Lena’s still a billionaire. Funding this out of her own pocket if she absolutely had to—and she probably wouldn’t, since bad security looks really bad to the public and clients and the board would not want to have inventions and prototypes stolen.

Lena’s a billionaire. Let’s explore that.

This is a corporation. A corporation is, despite Citizens United (fuck that ruling), not a person. The first security breach wouldn’t be her fault, or even maybe the second, but consider that Metallo was able to steal Kryptonite, Lillian’s goons were able to throw her off the balcony in their attempts to get the information they wanted, and now this with Mercy—a pattern is being established.

Yeah, Lena, you may not use it against Supergirl but that is irrelevant if your security is so bad that the xenophobic people who would use it against Supergirl can easily enough break in and steal weapons. If it can’t be kept safe from the people who would use them to cause egregious harm, then it shouldn’t exist!

(this is one of the main arguments for gun control. If you can’t keep a gun securely in your house where other irresponsible people can find it and use it accidentally or on purpose that shouldn’t, then it should not be in your house.) Sure, that may seem unrealistic, and you may be then bringing up examples in your head of people and companies and organizations that don’t do this, but then ask yourself—are they good people? And if your argument is why Lena as the CEO of LCorp can’t do this without risking profits, then again, this ties back into Lena being a billionaire has interesting moral ramifications and they should be explored.

And yes, I am including the DEO in this answer. So many times I see oh what Lena does vs what the DEO does, especially regarding Kryptonite but they can both be wrong.

Sure, you may be saying she can’t guarantee that—well if that’s the case then do not make any life ending weapons. Lena is not a starving scientist type with a gun to her head; Lena Luthor has billions of dollars. She can completely afford to redo her security, and as long as others will be harmed if she does not then she has an obligation to do so.

The DEO is also her employer and a government agency who’s also tortured her aunt—they don’t have any obligation to listen to Kara, and she probably thinks she’ll be ignored. Lena is her friend, who’s life she’s saved several times—persuading your friend vs. persuading the US government? Yeah, I would go with trying to change the mind of the friend.

The DEO is a black ops government program started about 14 years ago originally headed by a very xenophobic man who hunted down not just Fort Rozz aliens but also J’onn and probably countless other innocents and is the reason why Alex grew up without a father. The only reason why J’onn took over is because he had to, and even still had to play the part of Hank Henshaw, a known xenophobe. Also, for a government organization, 14 years isn’t all that long to be working there—there are definitely people who have been a part of the DEO since the beginning still working for that organization, especially since it is nationwide, possibly even worldwide considering Alex in the first ep was on her way to Geneva. Shit happened at the DEO. (To quote James from season 1, the DEO is “a secret Guantanamo, and it’s not just for aliens anymore.” They torture aliens, hold them without parole, without trial, without a lawyer, definitely not complying with Geneva standards for holding and for bringing them in. What part of the DEO is not Guantanamo?)

And these are the people who recruited Kara’s sister and shot her out of the sky and are trained to take her down and tortured her aunt in front of her as Kara begged them for mercy. I wonder why she didn’t protest too much oh yeah IT’S BECAUSE KARA HAS VERY LITTLE INFLUENCE WITH ACTUAL DEO POLICY BEYOND WHAT SHE CAN CONVINCE J’ONN AND ALEX OF. AND GENERAL LANE CAN AND HAS TAKEN OVER WHEN HE WANTS.

The DEO has always been bad. It’s just been less bad with J’onn and Alex at the helm. But anyway. Back to the main point

Do you know how many times I’ve seen on this website “eat the rich”—and I am not at all saying you can’t like Lena because she is a billionaire. This is a fictional show. It is not real life. But it should be talked about.

With CatCo, they had one security breach, and it turned out to be an internal one. The consequences of that were on the shoulders of Cat Grant alone, and she was fully willing to pay the consequences herself and the only reason why she didn’t step down from CatCo is the last-minute save from Kara and friends. CatCo is a media empire built from the ground up by Cat herself, who’s talked about the consequences of her actions shaping her future direction—she thinks about the actress with the abusive husband every day, knowing that it wasn’t her fault but it was her responsibility as a reporter to say what she saw—and she didn’t. Inaction in itself has consequences.

They’re both willing to face the consequences of their actions–but Cat is the one who is a well known Democrat, who left her multi million dollar company to pursue public service, the whole: “ that’s why we do what we do. That’s why we’re driven to tell the truth. Not only because we want to be good journalists, but because we also want to be good people” and yes with Kara’s help, trying to elevate the conversation, valuing loyalty and integrity beyond just what it could potentially bring to CatCo (that video of Supergirl letting that Fort Rozz escapee go could have brought so much traffic to CatCo, but that wasn’t the point. Compare with the alien IDer. And. Well. We’re getting to the pretty damn grey area).

Cat is willing to do things that are for the benefit of National City and potentially the world at the expense of her company. That isn’t the case with Lena. Lena wants to be a good person! She does! But her motivations for being a good scientist haven’t, even as a kid, been “I am doing this directly because I want to be a good person”—we have seen time and time again that Lena’s main priority is LCorp, and doing what is in the best interest of her company. I am not going to stop harping on the alien identification device because it is horrific and this is something Lena, not her family but Lena, has done in an attempt to increase LCorp’s bottom line.

I am not at all saying Cat is perfect and without flaws and Lena is not, since I just finished detailing one of Cat’s past mistakes (and I’m not going on to detail Cat’s flaws and mistakes, which I have done in the past, because this is about Lena and I’ve counted this now--it’s a total of 2.1k and I’m tired) but when shit happens at CatCo it’s usually something that only affects Cat and her employees, or something unexpected—like really, having one of your employees spontaneously develop superpowers? Unexpected. You really can’t get security for that shit—and there are very few cyber security breaches (Winn is brilliant, but he’s also just one person. There are plenty of people L Corp could hire to deal with cyber security issue, and they have one if they were able to be hacked from the Cloud—and that hacking was human, predictable, and preventable.

I really did appreciate the single Lena/Kara scene past episode, because I keep seeing as well “oh but the DEO has Kryptonite and that’s fine”—clearly, as we saw this past episode, it is very much not fine that the DEO had Kryptonite since Kara almost d i e d. Lena very well have been asking herself this question—and we see this episode that for Kara it is equally bad. This is not a witch hunt because her last name is Luthor but as we see this episode there are very bad things that can happen when people can steal Kryptonite. Kara is the only one who suffers. Katie’s acting choices were great—she was genuinely shaken and concerned as she sees the scenario that Supergirl was most afraid of happening concerning Kryptonite happen—and happen only to her. Everyone else was fine—but Kara lay seizing in the hospital bed from the device that she created (although let me be clear—this one is completely on the DEO. They were the ones who were supposed to be guarding the device, they were the ones with the stolen Kryptonite that was entered into the atmosphere, it was their agent and their security breach that caused this, they were the ones who took responsibility for the device—and dropped the ball).

Lena sees Supergirl on a hospital bed, and hell if she didn’t realize Supergirl was Kara before Lena almost definitely did, staring as she watched the person she loved more than anyone else in the world fade away before her eyes and this is what she was talking about before. This is what she was worried about—it’s an understandable fear. They took the Kryptonite from the DEO, but if they didn’t get a mole, would they have turned to L Corp? Would they try to break in, and succeed?

Would this be because of her? She wouldn’t have deployed the weapon the used herself but she would have created everything they used to do it. Kryptonite isn’t used for anything except as a weapon. This isn’t about Lena “going evil,” or becoming like her family. This is about how just because Lena is willing to be the one who pays the price for her actions and the risks that she takes doesn’t mean that someone else wont.

Tl;dr the 2.1k word monstrosity: Lena is not her family and she isnt evil but oh my god shes the CEO of a multibillion dollar company that makes weapons and still benefits from the actions of her family, and who's main priority has always been her company. Shes not just a perfect ideal who can do no wrong or cant improve--shes done a lot of good but just look at the alien detection device--shes done a lot of wrong too.