#are there other human cities in ultra space or is this literally it? I always feel like it is

[pandorias-box]

I have heard a lot about the Ultra Recon Squad. What is Ultra Megalopolis like? Is it true that it is far developed than our world?

( @just-some-kalosian )

Ultra Megalopolis is described just as it sounds: a vast city home to tens of millions, with buildings that mimic the shape of crystal and the great spire of Megalo Tower shining as a beacon within the darkness in its very heart. Each section of the city can be identified by the various sectors that compose it, such as the biotech sector and engineering sector among countless others. And this is not accounting the residential districts either. By your definition, we are more advanced than human civilizations in terms of technological prowess.

The city prides itself by being a beacon for other realms across Ultra Space, both literally and metaphorically, with its advancements in technology that transcend hundreds of years of human innovation.

However, we were not always so prosperous. This newfound peace we now have was only possible due to human intervention that quelled the Blinding One’s pain and rancor that it had harbored towards our ancestors for millennia. Even now, we still wait for our lightless realm to be radiant again even if it may take lifetimes.

[yellowocaballero]

ok so im not very far into trigun (which. you convinced me to read/watch) but ive seen you talk about vash as a christ/messiah figure which. means im kinda obsessed with how you described his impact on the world in no name on the bullet (christ healing the lame, christ feeding the thousand... christ delivering his people from evil.) did you have any specific biblical references you kept in mind while writing?

i also think its super interesting how the fic seems to focus more heavily on healing as opposed to how (what ive seen of) trigun is a lot more gunman focused - is part of that influenced by how knives is a pacifist in a "cold turkey" way, or a choice on your part? i think it makes an interesting dichotomy, christ the gunman and satan the physician

I've gone my entire life without recommending Trigun to anybody, because I always felt it was too weird and ultra-violent and love-it-or-hate-it to actually ask people to watch it. Look at me now. Getting at least 3+ people into it. Boo boo the fool. Also I'm sorry that this response is so long skull emoji.

I'm ex-Catholic so you have asked the right question lol. Vash is very inspired by the Old Testament God. I have a strong mental image of him obsessing over the Noah's Arc story in his cute children's Bible. Sodom and Gomorrah is brought up again much later, in an extremely important way. Garden of Eden and Paradise, as the show does. The Plagues where every firstborn son dies. These is all imagery that Vash specifically evokes on purpose. Vash...uses the Bible to understand his own experiences and feelings and desires (that's the most neutral way to phrase it), but like a lot of people he uses the Bible/God partly as justification for his actions. God destroys cities for being sinful, and Vash is the closest thing to God this planet has, so he's entitled lol. God Complex McGee up in here.

And Vash's cult has no Jesus, because there is no forgiveness for humanity, and no way for them to be saved. Which is how you know that Vash's Jesus-ey actions as described in the story are very deceitful on a lot of different levels. Kind of like regular Vash lmfao - as I said earlier, he's VERY much also a messiah deconstruction. Vash is a pacifist partly because he needs it - he needs to be believed that people can be saved, that the world can be good, that nobody has to die, because otherwise the world is nothing but an endless parade of misery and death and his own suffering. It's about saving his own soul, and the memory of Rem.

For me, on a writing level: Cain and Abel, obviously. 'My brother's keeper'-ass mofo lmfao. It's more themes for me, though - redemption, salvation, forgiveness, original sin, sin in general, guilt, fate. Knives is pretty obsessed with all of these topics. I make fun of him for it. None of it's healthy. But Knives embodies a few other Christian ideals that I don't make fun of him for, such as the importance of good works and good actions, and dedicating his life towards helping others without the desire for a reward. There's also some subtle 'shepherd and his sheep' stuff going on later.

Re: the gunfights: can you IMAGINE Knives carrying a gun. He is WAY too proud of his own #biologicalsuperiority and #ultimatelifeform and #impenetrabledefense (literally Shadow AND Gaara-ass mofo) to rely on cheap human trinkets like guns lol.

The plot has more action than my usual (yay! - that was what I was working for lol), but it's based off the skeleton of the Stampede plot, which is genuinely a lot more space opera than Western and as such its action looks different. Turns out that when you remove the Gung Ho Guns from a story, there are a LOT LESS gunfights, lmfao (I don't know what kind of errands Vash sends the GHG out on, I am afraid to find out). So partly there's less gunfights because a) Stamp plots don't require too many gunfights, and b) without a Gunman (TM) there's no reason for the group to use guns to solve their problems if at all possible.

It's also just that, basically, Vash's plots are partly man vs self and partly man vs other. When a character is level 99, the tension of the fight scene isn't if they'll win the fight - it's if they'll win the fight under their self-imposed conditions. In Vash's case, the Q in every gunfight is 'can Vash win the fight and save people without compromising his principles?'. For Knives, he is so ridiculously OP that it's impossible to write a fight scene with genuine tension, and he doesn't care nearly as deeply about casualties. So the most engaging plotlines for Knives are entirely man vs self, which tends to shake out into a lot of trolley problems lol. That's the answer to your Q from a writing perspective.

So it's mostly a choice for plot/writing reasons. But YUP the dichotomy is SUPER JUICY, and the fun part of the story is reading the Ultimate Killing Machine be forced to do literally anything else than Ultimate Kill - to do the only thing he wasn't meant to do. Because doing what he was meant to do reduces him to a biblical figure instead of a person - it makes him just a devil, who's never exercised the free will God gave him, and as such can't be called sentient. It's not what Rem would want. And it's a very juicy juxtaposition to somebody who interprets his own meaning in life as a Christ figure as a divine compulsion to brutally murder orphan.

[moon-ursidae]

it’s time for session #2!

THERE WILL BE SPOILERS FOR BOTH OF THE LAST OF US GAMES UNDER THE CUT!!!!

these notes are so scattered if you read them without context and i am SO SORRY lmao. i’m typing them so fast trying to keep up with my brain that’s going 700 mph and the game. ANYWAY, we’re getting a very late start tonight bc i was helping my friend learn guitar for a few hours haha

total play time: about 2 hrs and 40 min (there’s not much story progression here just exploring seattle!)

okay so we last left off with ellie and dina in the woods on horseback post joel’s house. i have not gotten farther than the woods bc i was super ultra mega tired. so let us continue!

okay sooooo this section is called the gate cool cool cool

this is fucking gorgeouuusssssss

omg dina listing off all the people that joel crossed

i’m sure there’s more before that bro

oh my god the LIGHTINGGGGG in the woods so so good

we’re so close to seattle i’m scared

so much happens here man

map acquired✅

CARD BABYYYYYY

jesus christ i L O V E the aesthetic of nature reclaiming land and man made structures. it’s sooooooo pretty

oh shit QZ!

i’m looking through ur journal ellie hope you don’t mind haha

dina seems to be sick? well. i know why but ellie doesn’t yet so shhhhhh

it’s so sad to me that every drawing of joel so far that ellie’s done, she hasn’t been able to draw his eyes. that was the last thing she saw of him while he was alive. like she wants to get them just right but everytime she draws it that means she has to look him in the eye again. and maybe she’s feeling too guilty to do that rn. ugh idk i know neil always does shit like that but maybe i’m reading too much into it haha. ANYWAY that is one of the most heartbreaking parts about her journal dude. UUUUGGHHHHH 😭

“i really love her.” 😭😭😭😭 ELLIE TELL HER PLEASE

we just got a letter, wonder who it’s from🕺🏻

kieran?? kieran duffy??????

haha wrong game

also lemme just say, i fucking love dina

she’s so sweet and empathetic, but will cut the fuck out of a bitch when needed

I HAVE TO PARKOUR?? UP HIGH?? IN THE LAST OF US?? OVER A GATE??

this is some nathan drake shit bro where’s nolan north

FUUUUUCK I THOUGHT SHE WAS GONNA FALL BRO OH MY GOD

hoooooollllyyyyyy fuuuuuuck this is a big city jesus christ

LMAO her wobble before she fell down to the platform below

this game is so gorgeous. holy fuckin shit i’m gonna say that a lot huh?

THE SOUND DESIGN??? WHEN GOING DOWN THE LOOKOUT TOWER AT THE GATE OF THE QZ??? WHEN SHE FALLS AND IT ECHOES?? THAT SHIT WAS CRAZYYYY

guys i’m gonna be honest. i’m team brick.

i LOVE being able to break windows this is so fun

oh god i have a horrible memory plz don’t make me memorize these gate codes

side note: i love ellie’s hair here. i’m gonna have to try a lil half up half down situation

i saw someone on twitter point out that it looks a lot like tess’s hair🥺

“well, we believe in you” shimmer and dina? or baby and dina? hmmm things to consider

totally unrelated, but i can’t not hear ashley johnson going “babyyyyyyyyy” with an s.o. since the mighty nein reunion lmao

ellie seeing dina and going “babyyyyyyyy” like yasha LMAO

ANYWAY

fuck i hope i can pull out that page of codes dude

THANK GOD

oh shit another hotel

i’m traumatized after the last on dude you can’t make me go back

H O L Y. S H I T.

THIS IS SO OPEN I’M GONNA SPEND SOOOOOOOO MUCH TIME HERE

FUCK DUDE

this is fucking crazy

there’s so much small shit everywhere oh my fucking G O D

omg joel was definitely reading that space book for ellie she just talked about an early moon mission at this tank

DINA’S JOKE “she’s sounding a bit hoarse” they’re literally made for each other

OH MY GOD I JUST FOUND THE DR. UCKMANN CARD NO FUCKING SHOT

damn is this his way of addressing the crunch work hours at naughty dog?

“once a well respected researcher… questionable experiments in the realm of pushing human limits saw him ostracized from the scientific community… Laurent Foucault of SPARK Laboratories found his work dubious…”

the music is hauntingly beautiful in this area oh my god

OH MY GOD THE SCANNERS THAT DETECT THE VIRUS FROM THE BOSTON QZ IN THE FIRST GAME

i miss the first game LMAO even though i JUST finished that

THERE’S A FUCKING PEARL JAM POSTER IN THE MUSIC SHOP😭

IF I EVER WERE TO LOSE YOU, I’D SURELY LOSE MYSELF😭

i feel like this is supposed to be hank williams which would be fucking sick bc “alone and forsaken” and all that jazz haha

“guitars starting at $49.99” BRO SINCE WHEN I FUCKING WIIISH DUDE😭

as a drummer, i can confirm dina is a fucking natural

“i love you?” A H H H H H

ANUTHA CARD WOOO

Das Wort is my favorite card so far. he just like me fr

WAIT THIS IS THE TAKE ON ME SCENE

i will cry

SHE’S PLAYING FUTURE DAYS😭😭😭😭

BARRE CHORDS??? ellie i could literally never wtf

the chords are all accurate too holy fuck naughty dog

ashley has such a nice voice oh my god

i’m gonna fucking cry bc they put this in the hbo trailer

AAAAHHHHHHH😭😭

this is why i fucking love music dude. it transcends everything and always will. it’s the one thing that connects everyone. and it’s connecting people in this game too and i UGGHHH i love music holy fuck

the way dina looks at her🥹

and also knowing that joel was the one that showed her all of these songs and artists bc ellie wasn’t even alive to hear take on me and future days, and literally everything else. GOOOOODDDDDDDD😭😭

“you should have kissed me then.” “i wanted to.”

god i love dina and ellie they sound like an old married couple already

first dawn of the wolf poster i’ve seen!!! WOOOOO

i’m gonna come back to the nutrition distribution center bc i feel like that shit is gonna be bad news bears

“wasn’t joel all about coffee?” as he should. i’d be all about coffee too if i didn’t have it for years

ANUTHA CAAAARD

i really like the Big Blue card too

THAT FUCKING INFECTED IN THE BATHROOM SCARED THE FUCKING SHIT OUT OF ME MY SOUL LEFT MY BODY OH MY GOD

so many fucking side quests oml what do you mean “barko’s”

oh my god there are so many fucking alleyways to go down

THERE’S SO MUCH TO DO I AM SO BUSY FINDING SECRETS AND STUFFS

BARKO’S LOCATED

it’s too dark in here i don’t like it

“they think we’re sheep! BARE YOUR FANGS.” what in the fuckin trump train “sHeEpLe” is goin on in here

i feel like i’m gonna get fucking jumped by infected again in here

THIGH HOLSTER ACQUIRED

omg plz “we can get a little creature to take care of” AND THEN THEY HAVE A FARM AT THE END😭😭😭

STUN BOMB ACQUIRED

i have already spent 2 hours in this fucking QZ holy shit

i just wanna explore rn i don’t wanna progress story atm

i am secret hunting

ANUTHA CARD BABYYY WEST GATE 2

it doesn’t even look like i’ve done that much😭

i also have a bad feeling about this bank

oh fuck this shit. it goes underground

they are ALWAYS underground bro

dina this is not cool, this is scary

i don’t fucking trust this shit

HOW DID I FUCKING KNOW

infected or whateva🙄

SHOTGUN ACQUIRED

FUCK this bank dude i’m GONE

dina said she’d get a farmhouse with the money😭😭

okay i think i’m gonna stop here bc it is literally 5am and i am sleepy haha. no story! but got some goodies and secrets out of the way! i will continue maybe tomorrow? not sure bc i am quite busy but we’ll see!

having a really good time so far and i love watching ellie and dina’s dynamic! still lots of buildings and secrets to loot! i’m excited >:)

[ghostypetrainer]

How would Elesa and Emmet fare in the Ultra Megalopolis? Even though Elio/Selene seemed fine in USUM I imagine it would realistically be as much of a shock as the other way around, considering the people of that world have literally genetically adapted over generations just to survive

I think the first thing that hits them is just how dark it is.

Like. They knew it was going to be dark. Ingo's told them all about the place, how there's no actual sunlight and all the light is provided by one massive, central tower in the middle of the city. They've seen Ingo's aversion to sunlight firsthand, so they shouldn't be surprised that it's dark.

It's just. darker than they were expecting.

The next thing that hits them is that its COLD. Ingo never mentioned that one, probably because he didn't fully realize just how cold it was. And in hindsight, that makes sense too- Ingo hates the heat now, and it should be obvious that a world without a sun is not exactly going to be getting any real heat. They have to bundle up, but thankfully the insides of the buildings are a little better.

And it really is strange, after seeing Nobori stick out like a sore thumb back home because of his blue skin and weird eyes to suddenly be the ones sticking out for their peachy skin and black-pupiled eyes. People keep giving them odd looks. There's no Pokemon here, just the odd Poipole and Naganadel here and there. Suddenly they're the interdimensional travelers, and Nobori is just home.

And honestly... yeah, they kind of miss the sun. It's fine for a few hours, but after awhile its absence just becomes so noticeable. I can't imagine either of them can stay in Ultra Megalopolis for long, but they do try since Ingo's toughing it out back in Nimbasa! I think it really does give them a whole new understanding of just how much he was toughing it out there, especially before Solgaleo gave him his blessing to help him deal a little better with sunlight.

[mychemicalaromanticism]

things ive already established r on this post

besties this got so fucking long but heres a giant ramble about cherri

okay so. there are huge differences betwn cherri as a hyperviolent drac hunter and cherri as a friend of the four and cherri as the girls mentor. with the first one he was 17 and desperate to distance himself from his upbringing so he went all in on Being A Killjoy. he was always one of the first ppl to rush into a fight and he fought hard. he blew up his fuckin hand with that attitude. and all the while he was just racking up more unaddressed trauma and eventually he ran away from that, too. giving himself radiation poisoning was more appealing than facing his problems.

so as a teenager/young adult hes kind of constantly in a panicked state. hes scared the people from his past are going to find him and drag him back with them. so he lashes out and he runs away over and over again.

i said in another post that he has some past life shit goin on which usually would give him a connection to the witch that manifests early in life, but with all the stuff hes gone through he has been Preoccupied. he can become oblivious to almost anything that doesnt apply to whatever hes focused on. not in a hyperfocus way its likeeeeee. when u live on survival mode during prolonged periods of stress. hes immune to magic bullshit bc hes too tired and scared.

anyways around his mid-20s he finally has a little more stability (as much as the average person living in the zones can have, that is) and he finally notices that Weird Stuff happens around him. basically: out of my list of Powers People Connected To The Witch Have he has the prophetic dreams/enhanced intuition as well as a form of sensing ghosts where he can see auras and kind of like, echoes of past events in ppls lives. that look like auras. itz complicated and not of utmost importance so im leaving it at that.

anyways thats what makes him start writing poetry. just 4 funsies he'll describe his weird experiences and embellish them to make em pretty. just as a casual hobby n all that.

he would forget fun ghoul in between the times they ran into each other but its pretty easy to be reminded of who fun ghoul is. the most insane 10 year old cherri has ever met. cherri isnt a brother figure to ghoul. hes just. his friend that happens to be more than twice his age. its whatever lmao

to cherri, ghoul is kinda like a stray animal he keeps seeing. which is hilarious. ghoul actually goes and finds him to introduce him to jet when they start running together, and cherri meets party and kobra (spark and birdie at the time) when he drives the four of them to a party. because he has a truck hell yeah. so now instead of one stray animal he has, like, a feral cat colony that he drives around occasionally. i have no real-life human relationship equivalent to them because irl if some guy that is not related to any of you and isnt even a childhood or family friend and theyre hanging out with you? they are usually not a safe person lmao. but this is my fantasy land and im too stubborn to change anyones birth years even though ghoul being born in 2004 makes everything really hard to make not creepy.

so yeah hes a casual somewhat friend of the fab four. hed probably get more and more concerned as they got famous. the beginnings of any sort of protective feelings, awww :) that sets him up for becoming the girls mentor.

OH FUCK. THE GIRL..... i think if i was in my late 20s and i heard that the gang of 13-17 year olds had adopted a 5 year old kid i would go bananas. what the fuck. it is a LONG while before cherri meets her. but he has the strongest affection for ghoul (if you could even call it that) and ghoul absolutely adores the girl and swings her around under her arms like a cat to show her off to cherri and its very endearing and the girl is sweet and funny so its easy to be around her. and (unfortunately) she is somewhat used to interacting with weird easily agitated people so she kinda gives him space. cherri isnt quite the uncle figure the fandom usually makes him (i luv uncle cherri sm but he simply cannot exist in the universe ive created, f), but hes a little similar.

and then the four had to go and pretend to die. lol.

when the girl was kidnapped, fucking everyone who knew her was ready to storm the city then and there. like regardless of how little you knew her, if you had ever met her you would fucking die for her. she is pure childish charisma and shes precious. i love the girl. so cherris immediately on board with whatever plan the four make to get her back. ive already talked abt how it fucked up the girl tho; there was no way to tell her that the four werent actually dead, she sees the building collapse and she shuts down. and cherri has to fight against his instinct to leave the radio station and never come back when he sees an eight year old girl sitting dissociated on the couch. that fucks everyone up.

i just realized i havent talked about literally anyone else at the radio station. i think cherri started lingering around the station bc it was safe and sheltered while also not being a popular spot. there are less kids there (people pass through but its not a hangout spot). he was kind of just hanging around to get away from the heat and noise and dr d took notice. because that man can see ur soul and no one knows if thats literal or not. so theyd chat a few times a day and show pony was the one 2 get him out of his shell a little and also was the first one he mentioned his poetry hobby to. im making this all up right now as im writing bc i dont know anything about LITERALLY any of the ppl associated w the radio like im not even going 2 try with chimp n newsie i do not have the willpower to tackle all that. justttt. cherri pony n D become bros and live 2gether there.

back 2 the regular timeline. the rescue mission happens in 2019. the girl lives at the station until 2023. during that time she is very much depressed and withdrawn and is only happy when the four come to visit. none of the Adults know how to help her so they just keep her safe and cared for and hope she'll open up to them.

she does not. she takes the weird cat thats been hanging around and she runs away.

cherri does not see her for three years. shes still worse for wear in the mental health department and he can see all kinds of visions of what shes been through since the last time he saw her and he fucking hates the ultra vs bc they remind him of his past. he does not want her going down that path but its obvious that she isnt crazy abt the ultraviolence thing either so thats a relief.

they have a kind of tense relationship throughout the comics. he feels like he failed her and that spirals into feeling like he failed the four for not being a good adult to them and fun ghoul for not helping enough when his commune was bombed and all kinds of shit and that irrational thinking mixed with plain old, yknow, caring about the girl, is what makes him take a bullet (laser. whatever) for her.

i was trying to figure out the timing of each of their ghost experiences, but i want both of them to talk to the witch and im just gonna make it like dreams where a whole buncha stuff happens but irl its been like seconds. so its like barely a second while the girl has her Witch Convo and cherri FINALLY gets a straight answer, yes there is weird shit going on with him having powers. he doesnt have any story-significant past lives because im lazy, hes just an old soul. like really fuckin old. the amount of latent life experience and stuff his soul/energy/whatever has picked up along the way makes him VERY noticeable to gods n stuff. he fuckin lights up all the alarms like what the FUCK is that over there. she wasnt rly able to get to him or even properly notice him while he was a kid and a young adult so shes happy to finally see him again. he has a STRONG sense of familiarity with her. they know each other on a wild ass level that he cant really comprehend.

welp thats some more lore I'll have 2 think abt. anywayz

post canon is when he and val get to have the most awkward spiderman meme moment of realizing that they have the same trauma SOOOOO thatz fun lol /s sorry kings i thought it would be fun to give u something fucked up to bond over <3

not much changes in his personality. he has a better understanding of Weird Magic and delights in freaking out the ultra vs but for the most part he returns to his life at the radio station. i love him

THIS GOT SO CRAZY LONG I DID NOT MEAN 2 GO THROUGH EVERY PART OF HIS LIFE LIKE SOME WEIRD CHARACTER STUDY but here we are. this is basically a first draft like almost all of this is subject to change but u gotta start somewhere. so heres my start i love this guy. its probably obvious but i have not read ANY twitterverse killjoys stuff </3 maybe i will someday idk

[thesunwillshineonusagain757]

Reasons why I don’t like Beward/ Bedward/ Bellward

Not my gifs

Disclaimer: My intentions with this post are to expose what I thing about this ship . In no way, shape , or form do I intend to offend those who ship it . If you like it , who am I to tell you that you are a bad person for it , right ? But I wanted to put out there some of my thought so here it goes . ( and sorry this is a giant of a post )

He is old and she is underaged :

I know what you are going to say . But she isn’t underaged for the whole saga . But still he fell in love with a high schooler and he is safely more than 80, seeing that he says that Carlisle transformed him when he had got Spanish flu, and let me tell you . Spanish flu had three major waves , and the three of them were during the First World War so he was probably 20 when he was turned and he was turned in between 1914-1918 , that makes him at least 110 years old , and he is in love with an underaged school girl ... Let’s just say if he looked his age people would assume he had far different intentions with her .

Bella emotionally toys with both of the guys :

Then we will enter in this part of the conversation, Bella is a girl who literally has two supernatural beings at her feet, two men who claim themselves to be attracted to her, and Bella clearly decides very early on in being with one of the guys by the end of the first book, however, several times during the narrative of the series, she oscillates between the two even going so far as to ask that the other romantic interest kisses her when she is clearly in a serious relationship with the other man. I font know about you but for me she is coming across as quite shady and not in the good way .

Edwars is always jealous:

It is no secret that half of the conflicts in the twilight series revolve around the love triangle, and the ultra-ciumese attitudes of vampire Edward. If I had to count the amount of times Edward expresses his extreme jealousy towards Bella because of her relationship with her friends , but specially mister Jacob the wolfboy , I wouldn’t have enough hands . In my opinion a good relationship is based on trust you trust your partner , you must trust the people you love . “If you love it set I free”. But that is quite the opposite what mister Cullen does . He is overbearing and seems to not know th definition of boundaries. You may thing it’s him just being old school but for someone who has been around for so long , he might have to change his mind a bit. You also may justify that by saying it’s just because he love her , but let me tell you many of the approaches he takes to ensure her “ safety” are very in line with the actions of abusers .

The lack of respect :

Edward stalks Bella, he breaks into her room unbeknownst to her and follows her to the city when she goes out shopping, clearly not respecting her personal space or respecting her privacy. His justification is that she is so hopeless that she cannot look after herself, showing that he doesn’t even respect her judgement as poor as it may be, he literally treats her as if her brains of made of gummy bears. True, he ends up saving her from being assaulted but that doesn’t justify the stalking in the first place. If anyone breaks into your house to watch you sleep, you fucking call the cops! That’s not romantic, it’s creepy as hell and motherfucking terrifying.

Edward makes decision Bella just tags along:

Talking about gummy bear brain , Edward makes some big ass decision without even consulting Bella first . For example he end their relationship , without an explanation , and totally ghosts her after that . But not limiting himself to that he also shoved her into a car on the first movie and drove away with her because he put her in danger in the first place . She couldn’t tell her family where she was , she couldn’t go home because he would let her and she was scared . That is some major red flangs you don’t do that because you love someone you do that because you see them as your property.

The need they have for each other :

Listen healthy relationships are based on the affection that you have for someone , but that affection cannot be as crippling as the one they have . That is not love it’s callled obsession and is as far from healthy as it could be . The line where he says “ you are my life now” just comes to show that those two do not have a healthy relationship where they can distinguish themself from their significant other. Where they have a personally that is fully developed and being in love with each other is not personally trait .

It is the perfect example of a toxic relationship being disguised as a romance story:

Let’s face the music , this relationship has to many signs and red flags , to be considered anything but a toxic relationship . Bella, the main character, displays three characteristics common to victims of violent relationships. The first and perhaps most obvious trait is her consistent low self-esteem. Bella constantly reminds herself that she's uncoordinated, unsocial, and unattractive, is that she is particularly attracted to men who are forbidden, she is thus drawn to the “ bad boy” , and third, and most unfortunately, Bella is simply excited by violence, aggression, and danger; she finds it all thrilling. Bella's attraction to anything dangerous is clear in many cases through her human life. She rides a motorcycle because of the danger. When Edward tells Bella that he'll literally kill anyone who tries to hurt her, she get’s attracted to the violent nature he has. She is exactly the type of person a abused or even worst a sexual predator would look for and as we already noted that Edward’s does not help his case , I kind of see a pattern here .

In conclusion :

I used to like this paring as a young , naive teen but as I grew old I came to see the treacherous nature of this type of relationships where , so many red flangs are so apparent. I’m not saying you are a bad person for shipping it , I ask that you try to read into the subtext and the clear and alarming signs, of this ship . I’m not asking for you to stop shipping it , only asking that you have more of a critical mind when you read , watch and dive into fandom .

[superman86to99]

Superman #82 (October 1993)

REIGN OF THE SUPERMEN! The climax of this 19-part storyline, the entire "Death and Return of Superman" saga, and seven years of long-ass plotlines. And it only took this blog a mere six years and six months to get here! PREVIOUSLY: After Superman’s death, five different Supermen popped up to reclaim the mantle, some more convincingly than others. The front-runner, the Cyborg Superman, kinda ruled himself out of the competition when he nuked out a whole city and replaced it with a giant engine. Now the other would-be Supermen converge in that place...

The Last Son of Krypton/Eradicator finally arrives on Engine City, having set off from the Fortress of Solitude two weeks ago. We noted back then that he suddenly looked like an old man, but he's back to Superman's age now. If this storyline had gone on any longer, he would ended up Benjamin Buttoning himself into a grumpy, ultra-violent baby.

Superboy also flies in from Metropolis. It's the fourth time he makes the Metropolis-Coast City trip in a few days (not counting the time he got a ride on a missile), so he's gotta be pretty bored of it by now.

Steel, last seen getting crushed by some giant cogs, emerges from the bowels of Engine City with his armor in tatters but his body intact. Dude’s a tough nut to crack.

Supergirl and the powerless Man in Black continue making their way through Engine City. Supergirl's like "Wanna step out and let those of us with powers handle this one, chief?" but the Man in Black ain't having it. Wow, that's pretty heroic. Maybe... maybe he's actually the real Superman?! Nah, that's crazy.

And Green Lantern Hal Jordan is also there, because this whole issue takes place on top of the ashes of his old city and childhood memories and all. We see the end of his fight with Mongul from Green Lantern #46.

The Cyborg watches as the Super-People invade his fortress from his control room, but he's a glass half full kind of guy, so he's choosing to focus on the fact that he (apparently) gets to kill Superman again.

After the Eradicator joins the party and the Cyborg reveals his true identity, the Man in Black finds himself in the awkward position of having to team up with one of Superman’s worst villains (the one who wanted to turn Earth into Krypton) to fight a good guy driven crazy by space travel (and who once looked like Johnny-5). It's only after the Eradicator goes on a two-page exposition dump about how he brought Superman back to life that the Man in Black goes "alright, guess you're cool".

The Man in Black and the Eradicator follow the Cyborg to the center of Engine City, where a giant chunk of kryptonite powers the entire fortress. The combined powers of the Eradicator's Eradicator-ness and the Man in Black's punching (OK, mostly the first thing) seem to be winning -- but then, in a desperate move, the Cyborg shoots a blast of concentrated kryptonite at the Man in Black. The Eradicator, however, heroically jumps in front of the blast...

...which has the unexpected side effect of restoring the Man in Black's Superman powers, allowing him to dispatch the Cyborg with a swift "broosh". What's a "broosh"? You know, a "broosh":

After Supergirl uses her convenient clothes-shifting powers on the Man in Black's costume, it only takes one second of him in the classic red and blue tights to convince everyone that HOLY CRAP HE'S THE REAL SUPERMAN AND HE'S BACK FROM THE DEAD! (Side note: I like how Green Lantern goes "We'll mop up here! Not like I have anything better to do, what with all my friends being dead and stuff. Haha. I-I’m okay, seriously.")

It's him! It really is him. I knew it all along. Never doubted it.

Character-Watch:

The Eradicator is this issue's real MVP. His whole arc has been about slowly turning him from an emotionless robot into a sentient being through his interactions with people (Lois, Steel, even Loose Cannon and Guy Gardner), and it pays off when he jumps in front of that kryptonite blast yelling "I WON'T LET YOU DIE [AGAIN]!".

Also, when he tells Superman "We have always been linked, you and I", that's true. While their psychic connection influenced Superman negatively for a while (the Day of the Krypton Man saga), it looks like it also worked in the other direction and some of Superman's goodness rubbed off on him. By the way, it might be a stretch but the climactic shot of the kryptonite blast always reminded me of the Day of the Krypton Man's climactic shot, with Superman finally overcoming the Eradicator’s influence with Pa Kent's help.

Anyway, sorry, Superboy and Steel. The Eradicator had the best sacrifice scene in this storyline, hands down. Of course, they eventually brought him back again and turned him into a lapdog for the Cyborg and then Zod, but let's enjoy his dignified retirement while it lasts.

Plotline-Watch:

I'm not kidding when I say that this issue represents the convergence of seven freaking years of storylines. Let's recap (strap on, this is gonna be long):

John Byrne's Man of Steel #1 (1986) introduced Superman's birth matrix, the flying artificial womb that took him from Krypton to Earth. When young Clark sees the matrix for the first time he feels weak, because there's some kryptonite lodged into it. In Superman #1, a few months later, we find out that a crazy scientist stole the matrix and used it to build Metallo, so Superman decides to leave it suspended in orbit to prevent it from being used against him again. Three years later, the distraught mind of a disembodied astronaut called Hank Henshaw jumped into the matrix, and he made himself a tiny little spaceship from its technology, then sped off into deep space. Eventually, he went mad, hooked up with Mongul, and used the DNA information he got from the birth matrix to make himself a half-Kryptonian body. Hence: the Cyborg Superman. (As for that kryptonite rock, it ended up in Lex Luthor's hands... soon to be "hand".)

Also during Byrne's run, Superman briefly visited a "pocket" universe inhabited by a Silver Age-type Superboy, who died by the end of that storyline. Months later, the pocket Earth had turned into a hellhole thanks to three Kryptonian criminals. They too died by the end of that storyline... by Superman's hand. Feeling guilty over killing those killers, Superman exiled himself in space, was captured by Mongul's Warworld, and found an ancient egg-shaped relic created by his ancestors: the Eradicator. Superman brought the Eradicator back to Earth and it built him a nice Fortress of Solitude, but it also took over his mind and turned him into the emotionless Krypton Man -- who became an entity of its own after Superman overcame it. After Superman's death, the Fortress' robots rebooted the Eradicator so he could follow his “preserve Kryptonian life” directive and restore Superman back to life, but he got a little confused and thought HE was Superman. Hence: the Last Son of Krypton.

Another concept introduced by Byrne was the idea that Kryptonian DNA is too complex to be duplicated by Earth scientists, which led to the creation of Bizarro. Byrne's World of Krypton miniseries also established that Kryptonians used clones as spare parts to extend their lifetimes, and the conflict over clone rights literally tore the planet apart. So when Superman learned of a cloning facility near Metropolis called Project Cadmus, he immediately felt uneasy about it. After his death, Cadmus got hold of his body so they could create a replacement, but, again, you can't clone a Kryptonian... so they simply created an approximation of Superman's powers and features using human DNA. Hence: Superboy.

As for Steel, he's just Steel. Hence: Steel. Incidentally, if you’re wondering why his armor has been reduced to just some metal shorts by the end of the issue, here’s the answer. Pretty self-explanatory.

The only major plotline left dangling after this issue (aside from Dr. Stratos, of course) is Lex's own death/return/cloning misadventure, but the Super-Squad will deal with that in a big way pretty soon. Oh, and then there's the mess they left for Green Lantern, but that's another creative team's problem. (SHAMELESS PLUG: Follow my new Green Lantern '94 to '04 blog to see how that mess turned out.)

Believe it or not, there's even MORE stuff to talk about in this issue, so don’t miss the great Don Sparrow's section after the jump:

Art-Watch (by @donsparrow):

In the first place I have to say that this issue is an all-time favourite of mine, probably in my top three of this era of comics we’ve been so dutifully covering.  The excitement at my local comic shop for this issue was incredible, and already being the Superman fan that I was, I felt like I was on the ground floor. [Max: I also remember the excitement when I first saw this issue in my cousin’s hands after he showed it to me the day he bought it... then didn’t let me touch it, so I read it years later.]

We start with the cover, and I got the deluxe edition, with the chromium cover.  Back when this issue came out, I had a love/hate relationship with Image comics.  I wasn’t interested in the dark & gritty characters like Spawn and the like, and generally thought the Image books favoured flash over substance and storytelling.  BUT, man, did the colouring and paper they used at Image ever look cool!  So I was a bit torn about DC using a “gimmicky” feature like this—it looked amazing, but I also felt it was leaning a little far in the direction of sizzle over steak.  But I didn’t mind that much, since this had been such a great story to this point.  Aside from the metallic 3D look of the cover, the drawing is great, too.  It was the first look at the returned Superman in the full suit, and also with the long hair present.  DC must have thought that the long hair was a gamble on some level (even though we’d seen it for months in the actual issues) because they hid it from the covers for so long. [Max: This was also the cover they used in both the Spanish and Mexican editions I have, so that’s what I went with for the top of this post. The “normal” cover looks like a historic oddity to me.]

Inside the issue, we jump in with another splash page—there are a lot of these, and it really calls back Superman #75, as most of the pages have one main image, with a few small panels laid overtop.   This one features another interpretation of the Eradicator, with short, non-spiky hair—it’s interesting to see these characters reinterpreted week to week.  This opening page also commits the unpardonable sin of demanding that we stop reading the issue until AFTER we read Green Lantern #46.  Being a naïve 13 year old when I read this issue, I of course complied with the demands of DC editorial, and read Green Lantern first, not realizing it has a near identical plot (albeit from a different point of view), right down to the “broosh” at the end, very much spoiling what is about to come in Superman #82.  I remember being pretty steamed that my first glimpse of a returned Superman didn’t come in a Superman book.  While I appreciate the coordination, I do find the caption misleading.

Also similar to Superman #75—it’s very hard for me not to talk about every panel or page, because this whole book is just gorgeous.  The badassery from the last issue continues into this one, as Superman with his tough-guy attitude and giant gun is pretty cool.  One quibble I have with this team is that when they bury Superman’s eye’s in shadow, it can have a sinister or tired look, which I don’t think is the intention.  Some panels it’s more prominent than others, but in one panel on page 6 where it makes Superman look pretty rough, and a lot less handsome.  We get more big gun Superman later when he starts taking it to Engine City in general, knowing it is connected to the Cyborg.

The Cyborg taking different shapes is done pretty effectively here, particularly when he forms himself out of what must be a lead-like metal to accuse Superman of a bunch of nutty stuff. The reveal of the Kryptonite heart of engine city is very well done, in part because of Eradicator’s bulging red eyes.  It is a bit weird to imagine a lipless robot saying “mmm, hmm” though.

We get another great full-page splash as the Eradicator goes all-out in his effort to defeat the Cyborg.  The captions here always confused me though, where it says “(The Eradicator)  was built to kill…the other (the rocket that brought Superman to Earth, which the Cyborg used to create his new body) to bear new life.  The victor would be obvious.”  But to me, it’s not obvious.  I would think that in a Superman comic, a vessel of LIFE would be the big winner over ancient weaponry, but I think the caption intends the inverse. I guess it’s saying a gun would beat a baby crib? It’s one of those passages that sounds cool, until you think about it.  Or think about it excessively, as I clearly have. [Max: To be fair, a gun WOULD beat a baby crib. It would kick that baby crib’s ass.]

Superman’s haymaker knocking off the Cyborg’s jaw is an incredible visual, and there’s a subtle set-up for the great cape visual call-back that comes later.

The entire sequence of the Eradicator taking the blast of Kryptonite is well done, in particular the panel when we see Superman through the vanishing Eradicator.  I’m a bit confused as to just how the Kryptonite suction thing works here—the Kryptonite meteor is shrinking and shrinking, but nothing is attached to it except for that one hose.  

Jurgens and Breeding do a great job of showing the physical cost of Green Lantern going toe to toe with Mongul.  It also sets up for my all-time favourite Superboy quote, one I think might be seen on this site from time to time in meme form, “Check it out! The Lantern looks so totaled it makes me want to hurl!”.  This entire saga has been worth it, to get to that line.  Just magnificent. [Max: I think Hal went evil because of that one comment.]

The glimpse of the burnt-out husk of the Eradicator is also incredibly well drawn—and painful looking—but even by the end of this story he seems a lot more recovered.

The scene of the returned-to-full-power Superman decking the Cyborg is a stand-up-and-cheer moment, and I love the detail that Superman is holding the cape for this whole scene. It’s interesting that as the Cyborg starts to get damaged in the fight, we see how little organic material there is. Metal seems to poke through the skin on his face, as if only a thin sheet were laid over the metal.  and when Superman punches right through him, there’s really no blood or anything, just a dry, cracked crater.  I had thought, up until this issue that the cybernetic parts were beside real skin and bones (as if to replace the damaged parts of Superman’s body from his fight with Doomsday), but this issue seems to posit that he’s all robot, with only a veneer of Kryptonian flesh overtop.  

The normally merciful Superman is pretty blood-thirsty here, vibrating his arm fully in the knowledge it might kill Henshaw (who helpfully reminds us, he’s survived before).  [Max: That moment kind of rubbed me the wrong way, and I think Jurgens himself felt uneasy with it too. One of the highlights of his recent “Rebirth” run was that Superman deliberately decides to jail Hank instead of killing him to at least give him a chance to be rehabilitated, which would be cool to see happen one day.] I love the little glimpse we get of the restored, and re-costumed Superman before the full reveal, and as a character moment, I love that he would think to show gratitude for the heroes who filled in when Superman was dead.

The next few pages are pure joy, as it’s such a treat to see our Superman soaring around in the sunshine, even with the new Tarzan haircut.  It’s such a show of restraint that they didn’t pack a reunion with Lois into this issue, instead allowing a different superteam to tell that story, which very much deserves its own issue.  Overall, though, I just remember feeling such a sense of joy, and relief that Superman was back, and back to full power. [Max: SPOILERS: And then some...]

STRAY OBSERVATIONS:

I do love this era of comics before swearing (or even censored swearing) was a thing, because they have the weirdest phrases. John Byrne would always have characters saying “blast” instead of “damn” to an absolutely ridiculous degree.  In this issue, I don’t know for sure if “crud” is a stand-in for another word, but it does strike me as downright odd for Green Lantern to use it as a noun against Mongul.  The concept of “a crud” just amuses me, though I suppose it could be meant in the same vein as “scum” or something.

Is it me, or does Jeb look like Ricardo Montalbon here? [Max: Oh crud, I forgot Jeb was in this issue! Jeb was in this issue, everyone.]

I love they don’t even give the Cyborg a moment to be cool.  Just as he’s about to reveal his true identity in a villainous speech he gets clocked by Superboy, in one of my favourite moments with the character (but not my very favourite, as we’ve seen.)  I also like the low-level burn that Henshaw assumes that Superman must already know who he is, but Superman’s like, nope.

I do like that this issue goes to great lengths to explain that Superman can’t just keep returning from the dead, even going so far as to say it would never work again.  My pet theory is that the Eradicator’s Resurrection Matrix only worked because Pa Kent’s spiritual journey in Adventures of Superman #500 really did happen. [Max: I might be misremembering, but I think the upcoming issue of Action pretty much confirms that.]

I’m glad to see him recovered, but I kinda think Eradicator spoiled the moment a little with his observation about Green Lantern.

[Max: Blast it, Sparrow! You’ve done it again!]

[bluerosesburnblue]

MMMMMMMMmmmmmmm I’ve been rewatching a playthrough of Pokemon Sun and one of Ultra Sun back-to-back (just to try and gather my thoughts about what went wrong with Sword and Shield’s writing) and hitting the end of Ula’ula Island and the mini-arc after that just made me mad again about how the Ultra versions just completely butchered the emotional core of the original Sun and Moon’s plot and also how poorly the Ultra Recon Squad were implemented (which sucks because I like all of the URS members as characters, but the plot does them no justice)

Edited with two points that I forgot to include last night

So, alright. In the original Sun and Moon you have our lovely villain, Lusamine. She’s an awful human being. She acts sweet, but the second you don’t conform to her standards of beauty and perfection, you’re worth nothing more than utter disgust. Those standards? How willing you are to conform to her control and let her decide everything

Her goal? Open up an Ultra Wormhole and go to the world populated by the Ultra Beast Nihilego, the subject of her affections. This is worth enough to her that she’s willing to torture and kill an innocent baby Pokemon to do it. A Pokemon that her own daughter has bonded with, while said daughter screams at her to stop. But because Lillie stole that Pokemon in the first place and ran away, defying Lusamine’s control, then she’s ugly and not worth listening to

Everything makes sense and is treated with appropriate tone. Lusamine doesn’t care about getting back to her original world, so Cosmog dying while she summons a wormhole? Way more wormholes opening up than she intends? Not her problem.

The player and Lillie having to gather information on other ways to traverse worlds by summoning the Legendary Pokemon? Lillie’s primarily doing it for her own sense of closure. She’s choosing to be a bigger person than her mother by trying to save her from being stranded in another universe, but she also needs to air her grievances for everything her mother’s done to hurt her. And there’s also the matter of Guzma, who went in with Lusamine out of a manipulated sense of loyalty. While he’s a troublemaker and a jackass, he doesn’t deserve to be trapped in a dimension with hell jellyfish for the rest of his existence. So Team Skull begging you to save him? Warranted

And the postgame reveals that Nihilego venom make people act out their natural desires uninhibited in an effort to protect their species. They’re parasites. Lusamine was always a controlling, beauty-obsessed perfectionist (though these traits may not have started manifesting until she lost her husband to a wormhole), but her obsession with interdimensional jellyfish and the lengths she was willing to go for them was induced. The ending makes it obvious that she doesn’t think she was wrong, but she may be able to be rehabilitated

The game never tries to force Lillie or Gladion to forgive their mother for the abuse they suffered at her hands. Gladion pointedly never calls her “mother,” always “Lusamine” or “the president” and he still doesn’t later on. Lillie wants to rehabilitate her mother, but after the whole scene where she calls Lusamine out on her bullshit it comes across more as Lillie trying to be a good person by helping an obviously sick person and it still leaves open the possibility that if the rehab fails, Lillie may just leave. No matter what, their family will never go back to what it was. It can’t, because they’re all different people. But Gladion and Lillie now have Hau, Hala, the Player, Kukui, and Burnet as family to fall back on. People who care about them for who they are, unconditionally

And then...

There’s Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon.

And I was honestly enjoying watching that playthrough up until the Aether arc hit. It was interesting to see how the trials were changed up and weigh the two versions against each other. I liked seeing the added dialogue for my boy Hau that really fleshed out his character. But the Aether arc...

So, alright. We have our lovely villain, Lusamine. She’s an awful human being. She acts sweet, but the second you don’t conform to her standards of beauty and perfection, you’re worth nothing more than utter disgust. Those standards? How willing you are to conform to her control and let her decide everything

Heard this before, haven’t we?

Except now the Nihilego venom is gone from the equation. Lusamine, in no uncertain terms, still tells Lillie that she has no children, “certainly not any wretched children who would run off and reject my love!” And then mocks her own daughter for wanting to save Cosmog while stating that she’s too worthless to even hang around the player character

And the game plays it off like she’s still a good person because her motivations have changed from “I wanna live with the toxic space jellyfish” to “yo if a light-eating inderdimensional monster destroys the world then it’ll fuck up my collection of cryogenically frozen Pokemon so I’m gonna kill it”

No, seriously. Lusamine’s now a good person because her daughter will be tangentially saved due to her trying to protect things she actually values

All plausible deniability she had is gone because there is no Nihilego venom in this version. Lusamine really is just that abusive and there’s no real possibility that she might’ve just had bad tendencies that she was keeping in check that got overridden by venom. She’s an abusive mother and there’s no getting around it. She still forced Lillie to dress like a Nihilego, except this time it was entirely about the control and not because she was being influenced by a glass parasite. Gladion still felt the need to run away with Type: Null because she was going too far, Lillie still felt the need to run away with Cosmog for the same reasons

The scene in the cryo-room just pisses me off so, SO much. Gladion calling her “mother” and begging her to let him take her place? And yet he still calls her selfish and still has his line about how “she’s real nice... as long as you mean nothing to her,” but also I guess loves her and wanted to protect her this whole time and that’s why he left? Fucking what? And it’s not like she didn’t show herself to be just as abusive as in Sun and Moon where he never forgave her! They’re forcing Gladion to excuse her abuse because she missed their dad I guess

Even if she calls them “good kids” in the very next scene, it still comes off of the heels of her verbally abusing her timid daughter for trying to stand up for herself! It just comes across like they’re only “good kids” because she expects them to go back to how they were before they left. She doesn’t care about who they’ve become at all

EDIT: And I forgot to bring up how stupid the thing with Cosmog is in that scene! Last time we got the impression that Nebby nearly died and was forced to evolve because Lusamine overtaxed them and forced them to open up way too many wormholes, because as long as she had one that went to the world of the Nihilego, she didn’t care what happened to the Pokemon world. Now she opens up one to a specific place... but still feels the need to torture Nebby to do it? And despite opening way less wormholes, Nebby’s still overtaxed and evolves? And Lusamine doesn’t bring Nebby with her, why??? Before, she didn’t care if she came back, but this time her goal is “beat Necrozma and come back to my collection.” So why does she jump through the wormhole with no way to get back? After intentionally screwing over the baby Pokemon that she would have needed to get back home???

And that’s not even the complete... just... dumbassery of the “we have to track Lusamine down” stuff. Because now instead of going to a world inhabited by only parasitic jellyfish and opening extra wormholes in the process, she and Guzma open one wormhole and go to a highly populated interdimensional city to piss off the local god, intentionally. And at that point, it’s less of a matter of saving them and more of a matter of cleaning up their mess

So you’d think the Ultra Recon Squad, interdimensional travelers who came to Alola because a hungry, furious legendary being was about to escape its prison and they didn’t have a way to stop it, would want us to get down to their homeworld as fast as possible to stop the local god from getting pissed off by two overconfident dumbasses. And what do they do?

“Yeah, if you play a flute you can summon a legendary Pokemon. We rode one here. Should be fine. What, no, we won’t help you look for the flutes.” But also, ten minutes later, “Stop! It’s our job to save our world, not yours! Lusamine betrayed us how can we ever trust you to help???”

The writing can’t keep straight throughout the game whether they just want to find strong trainers to take out their local deity before it goes on a cross-dimensional rampage or if they want to train themselves to be strong enough to take on the local god. But beyond that!

What’s the point of going through all this trouble to summon the legendary Pokemon when the URS already befriended the opposite version legendary and can just call it whenever? Especially since they do just that when Necrozma immediately absorbs the one you just awakened

No, seriously? What? We lose Nebby, who we have an emotional attachment to, immediately and have to rely on this other legendary that’s just... here??? I guess????????

One of the only things we know about the world of Ultra Megalopolis is that they don’t do the Pokemon thing, they just compensate for everything with extremely advanced technology! So why the fuck are they pals with a legendary Pokemon? Especially one that has lore in Alola, but not in Ultra Megalopolis?

And how the fuck do they know about the Alolan legend of summoning the legendary Pokemon, which they would never need to research because they have one already?

Literally why does Necrozma open like ten extra wormholes when it shows up. There’s no reason other than to have the extended “fighting Ultra Beasts” cutscene that no longer works because the Ultra Beasts aren’t important anymore now that they cut their postgame story out. And I know they go “Ah, Necrozma pulled in the villains from other universes! That’s why Rainbow Rocket...” Rainbow Rocket was just shallow pandering with no substance and wasn’t particularly fun to play. It wasn’t worth making the main plot nonsensical to have it in there. I would’ve much rather had a rewritten International Police postgame that includes the Ultra Recon Squad and has you traveling to the new Ultra Space areas to either return them to their natural habitats or just learn more about them to take care of them

EDIT: And why does Lusamine need Nebby at all, when the Ultra Recon Squad just had a legendary that they were gonna bring the strongest trainers to Ultra Megalopolis with? What makes her think they wouldn’t take her, their closest ally at the time? In the original, Nebby was the only way to get to other worlds. But they’re not in this version, so why does she go and hunt Nebby down instead of working with the URS or trying to steal their fully evolved world-hopping beast?

The whole climax is just tied together by utter nonsense. And it’s such a shame because I legitimately love the concept of the URS and Ultra Megalopolis and the general personalities of the four characters in it. It’s such a wasted opportunity because I guess they felt obligated to hit the same basic plot beats? Even at the detriment of their new characters?

And it’s such an easy fix, too. Just have the two URS members in the game be stranded on Alola. Their technology for dimension-hopping was experimental and based on their studies of Necrozma, who can hop worlds and who they have easy access to. But the inaugural trial is rushed because Necrozma’s looking to break free. Two members stay behind to monitor, two end up stranded in Alola with broken tech desperately looking for a way to get home in time to stop Necrozma

And that’s how they end up partnered with Aether, who have the most advanced tech in the region. It’s something they trust and understand, and Aether has the resources to help and a president who seems very interested in ways to get to other worlds. She’s even performing experiments already!

Unbeknownst to them, though, Lusamine’s only looking for ways to get to Nihilego as she still came into contact with their neurotoxin during experiments trying to find Mohn. Nebby’s kidnapped, several wormholes opened, Lusamine jumps into the Ultra Deep Sea to be with the Nihilego. Except this time, a wormhole opens up to Ultra Megalopolis where Necrozma is. It’s not long enough for Necrozma to get through, but long enough that it sees the light of Alola and knows exactly where to go when it breaks free...

You awaken Nebby and save Lusamine as in vanilla Sun and Moon. Then Necrozma breaks free, chases Nebby’s light through Ultra Space back to Alola, steals the light, bam. Back to where Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon kick off the climax. Maybe add in a section where you have to get the Dimensional Research Lab and Aether to work together to fix the Recon Squad’s dimension-hopping gear to break up the pacing. Save Ultra Megalopolis and Nebby. Now you’ve got something a little closer to Platinum’s additions to Diamond and Pearl instead of the butchering we actually got, complete with two climactic moments. One for Lillie, one for protag

Everything about and surrounding Necrozma’s addition was just so sloppily done, which is such a shame with how good both the base game and the ideas for expansion were

Also, move Mina’s trial and put Hapu’s back in its spot. I like having a trial for Mina, but why place two trials after the Necrozma climax? We just beat a god and you expect me to do trials? The original Sun and Moon understood that at that point you’re at the falling action of the story, may as well keep it succinct and only have it be the Pokemon League. And also, the Dragon trial is supposed to be this big, ancient final trial. Oldest of them all, the final task before being allowed to the Altar, Alola’s most sacred point. But now we have another trial and a Grand Trial after it?

Just have Mina’s trial as soon as you hit Poni Island and have the justification be that her trial takes you to the sacred sites of Alola where you can gather info on the legendary Pokemon. Bam. Lore opportunity. And if her trial’s also necessary for getting into the Dragon trial in a “you must prove your worth to the captains in a gauntlet for permission to enter the sacred final trial site” way, then even better. And Necrozma likes Z-Crystals, so you’d have even more stockpiled, further justifying its interest in you

And with Hapu’s Grand Trial back where it was, Lillie can have her Exeggutor Island fun. Which she could’ve had anyway and seriously why did you replace her with a nameless NPC in USUM?

I’ve had way too long to think about all of the ways I’d fix USUM’s story. And the sad thing is, if the story was better it’d be my favorite Pokemon game because the gameplay additions, new locations, and the fact that the game has sidequests make it near perfect otherwise and are the reason I always come back to Ultra Sun over Sun. But the abysmal climax to the story just doesn’t offer any incentive to replay the game at all

[autobotmedic]

{ So I have seen things in posts while browsing for queue today that claimed Ratch picked cybertron over earth/humanity twice (once when he has a breakdown in Darkest Hour and second when agreeing to help Megatron in s3). And I disagree strongly with that so I’m going to ramble fOR THE INTERPRETATION OF HIM ON THIS BLOG which means talking about canon but also giving my own HCed analysis based on canon so pls DON T RE.BLOG I am not going to get in a debate with anyone okay here we go--

     Before I even get started I’d like to say that Stronger Faster would have been ideal for Ratch to have made some kind of argument about Cybertron over Earth. Despite his super heightened aggression with 0 filter, when Optimus states he will not endanger human lives, Ratchet’s response is ‘yet ours are endangered.’ He makes a comparison, nOT a statement that they are more important.

     In the pilot, Ratchet asks if there is another solution to destroying the space bridge, because it may be their only way home. Optimus assures he has no other options, and thus Ratchet does not hesitate to help destroy it, saving Earth from an undead bot invasion. He doubled checked first, as he OFTEN does with Optimus throughout the show, even before they often mutually agree. He is basically second in command without Ultra present, and Optimus never discourages his voicing opinions or observations, because he appreciates his council.

     Now, in Darkest Hour, Ratchet again makes A COMPARISON. He never. Once. Says. They should not. Have saved. Earth. Or the children. He is having an emotional break down, BUT HE DOES NOT SAY THAT. He does not say the children should have died. He says ‘what about our home.’ He says ‘there had to be another way.’ Ratchet was completely unaware of exactly what took place, unlike the pilot, communications were down. He did not have the whole story, and his emotional overwhelming after waiting so long without word of aNYTHING that was happening and questioning it afterward is peRFECTLY UNDERSTANDABLE. And just a few moments later, after he is calmer, Ratchet does not even object to remaining with the human children to protec after the day they have already had.

     In the end of S3, Ratchet does not know WHAT Megatron wants him to help with when they first interact. But he will not help voluntarily. In every other instance we’ve seen the Cortical Patch used, both parties were awake afterward. Ratchet is not. We do not know how long Ratchet fought Shockwave psychologically, but he did so until he was entirely exhausted, and has been left unconscious from it. 

     Since that failed, Megatron tries to convince him, including threatening family, which fails because Ratchet knows his fam does not go down easy aND HE WILL LIKELY ATTACK ANYWAY SINCE HE KNOWS THEIR LOCATION, which he does. If he had had the children, he would have shown them to Ratch, not a photo of them, so he brushes it off (pretty badly, I might add, his voice cracks quietly [also, in the prime video game, when Megatron actually dOES have two of the children and shows them to him, Ratchet gives in immediately to protect them]). The entire time, even after Megatron resorts to trying to persuade through guilt and ‘look you can help rebuild our home,’ Ratchet listens, because he’s a science nerd and he can’t help some interest (and to store knowledge for the future, sUCH AS KNOWING HOW TO GET TO THE OMEGA LOCK RECONSTRUCTION AND BEING ABLE TO NAVIGATE THE SHIP BECAUSE MEGATRON HAS ALREADY SHOWN HIM AROUND), but he still isn’t buying it, argues constantly, and knows he will die anyway if he cooperates. 

     He also knows that after Megatron had tried everything else, if he still did not help, it was likely that capturing or destroying random humans/cities would be next. STARSCREAM LITERALLY SAID ‘HUMANS. ALWAYS THE WEAK LINK.’ IN FRONT OF HIM. That was the last logical blackmailing possibility, simply because Ratchet was already refusing to help, partially on alliance and morals, but also partially for the sake of not harming humanity. He has the same Autobot ‘weakness’ of valuing life as the rest of the team, and he knows that, hence why he states ‘but you already knew I would end up doing this.’ So, once Megatron gives his last dramatic display of the rebuilt Omega Lock, a form of finale, Ratchet knows that’s probably the end of his patience in persuasion. He finally agrees, but until then he had delayed assisting for quite a while, gathering a ton of info for later, and even once he does agree, it’s NOT WITH THE INTENTION OF LETTING THEM KEEP THE FORMULA, NOR DOES HE GIVE UP ON PROTECTING EARTH:

Ratchet tried and ALMOST SUCCEEDED in escaping on his own, AFTER leaving SCRAMBLED INCORRECT DATA instead of the completed Syth En formula in an attempt to prevent the Decepticons from being able to use it, JUST LIKE ORION TRIED TO DELETE THE DATA HE DECODED. Both failed, but they tried.

Ratchet states he does not wish to live with knowing he had a role in destroying an entire species when Predaking damn near kills him, but even then, despite how hurt he is and feeling as though he has betrayed what he stands for, he encourages Predaking to think for himself. If he is going to die, his last effort is going to be take Megatron down with him, and perhaps still save humanity.

This same medic, now battered and bruised, does not rely on that though. He is not dead, therefore he will not stop. He contacts the Autobots and gives the ship’s location. When they arrive, he directs them where they need to go, because again, he’s already gotten a tour. T H E N he goes after Shockwave. THIS DOC IS HALF DEAD and yet takes on science bot who is twice his size and in good health and takes eVEN MORE OF A BEATING trying to protect Earth, or at least delay so the Autobots can.

When Bee is on the way with the sword, Ratchet tells Optimus mid battle, “You must use the saber to destroy the Omega Lock. It is the only way to save Earth.” This time, he was here to see the decision and limited options, unlike Darkest Hour. And this time, he lets Optimus know he supports the same decision, now, so he will not hesitate... which doesn’t happen but still that is REALLY important.

     Ratchet misses his home, Ratchet is proud of his roots (as shown in his building things for the kid’s science projects that would have gotten them honors; he was trying to help, but he got so absorbed in it he did not stop to consider these needed to be things made by human children not advanced cybertronian mechanics). But when in situations where he has ALL THE FACTS, and any control over the outcome, and can see no alternative, he does everything he can to save Earth. Every. Time. Because unlike his home, there is still LIFE here. Because he supports Optimus, and values the friendships they have formed. And because, by the end of S3, it has become a second home for them, even to him. A second home where he does not mind staying when his own has been restored, to ensure the child partners to his family are safe and grow up and live their much briefer lives, in case there are any remaining Decepticons or other threats, and so that the other bots do not have to worry about them while they rebuild Cybertron. Ratchet does not mind waiting a few more decades to remain at his own home, that time is incredibly small for beings who live millions of years.

     uhh I think I’ve gone on long enough thank u that is all have a good night

[say-im-your-homie-blog]

Maybe We Shouldn’t Trust the Demons, Though

Their pattern seems pretty consistent. And it’s not good or trustworthy. While all of one of them has been “nice” to Kaz, their methods are clearly evil and in line with those of demons in literally every other piece of media.  Removal of Agency (i.e. Possession) 

Deception 

And let’s not forget... HUMAN FUCKING SACRIFICE 

Yeah, team, remember that time when the “not so bad guys” demons wanted Kaz to be sacrificed to achieve their goals? 

They’re not good and the only reason we’re tricked into thinking they might be is that the people we see in Neo Yokio are so fucking terrible. 

I think the point is and has always been that the vanity and consumerism is a weakness that the demons exploit. They’ve basically said this before. 

But now it’s grown so bad that there may be people who feel so hopeless they are willing to throw in with the demons to destroy the city because there is no point in them continuing to live lives of eternal servitude. 

It’s not as if the demons in Pink Christmas (or at any other point) are offering any real solutions to the problems of the city. Their solution seems to be “destroy the city and return it to pink space.” 

Only in the sense that you can technically eliminate poverty by killing all of the poor people. "We’re all equal in death” is just about the laziest solution to the problem of income inequality I’ve ever fucking heard, but the problems in Neo Yokio are so bad that it seems like that solution may have some appeal.  And I think that’s the point. If the demons want to destroy the city, they’ve wanted that for over a century. Long before the consumerism became what it is today. If anything, the consumerism helps them by making the city vulnerable. 

The demons aren’t forces of anti-consumerism that want to save the city. They’re forces of evil that want to use the consumerism to destroy the city.  And at this point the society is so toxic that the very forces and alliances that once kept it safe are in shambles. The Corellis started the alliance with the magistocrats. 

And at one time, together, the Corellis and Magistocrats led an army to defend the citizens of Neo Yokio from a demonic invasion.

But by the start of the show, the most powerful Magistocrat in the city and the heir to the Corelli family are too busy arguing over who is prettier to even get through a fucking field hockey match.

...Much less work together to lead an army to defend the city from a demon attack.  The point isn’t that the demons are right. The point is that these two young people with power and privilege should be using that power and privilege to help everyone else, but they’re too shallow and materialistic to understand that their power comes with responsibility. 

And we haven’t even gone into the fact that Kaz only helps rich people fight demons because Agatha has turned what should have been their civic duty into essentially a protection racket for the ultra-rich. 

Kaz giving in to what the demons want is just him giving in to his own hopelessness and despair and general sense of not giving a fuck about what happens to anyone, including himself. The demons aren’t right just because the people of Neo Yokio are wrong. There’s a better solution here than “fuck it just destroy the city and kill everyone.”  And obviously that “better solution” is for Kaz and Arcangelo to admit they’re both the prettiest, get married and fight demons together.  (Edit: Because the subtitles were wrong about the spelling of “ magistocrat” and thank god too, that spelling looks HORRIBLE)

[solitaire-dreams]

What’s Your Type? : Pokespe Fire/Water/Grass Dexholder Analysis

DISCLAIMER: Honestly, I've only read RGB, RS, DP, BW, and SM arcs in full; and parts of the Yellow and B2W2 arc. So, any information outside of these arcs is coming from Bulbapedia and is liable to be incorrect.

When it comes to the world of Pokespe, rather than the anime where we follow the never aging Ash Ketchum, we now total about 21 dexholders (our protagonists).  Each dexholder is fairly unique from one another, yet one thing always tends to be in common between them. The same thing that's always common when we pick up our consoles to start a new Pokemon journey. Picking our starters.

In the world of Pokespe, the standard starters aren't guaranteed to be the first Pokemon they will receive—quite the opposite actually—yet they will always gain one of the traditional starters at some point of their evolutionary line on their journey. (The only two exceptions are Yellow who was created for the Yellow games where Pikachu was the starter, and Whi-two or Whitley because they ran out of Unovan starters). This often has us classify the dexholders into grass, fire, and water varieties. Though this categorization goes deeper than a Pokemon in their party, but plays a large role in their characterization.

Each of the dexholders in each category share a trait that connects all of them, and will provide useful for other predictions (skip to the end if you just want to know what the other prediction is). This post is focused on breaking them down one by one.

Note: Since I was tempted enough to reblog an incorrect pokespe quote where green was the name given to the male character, for the rest of this blog, Green is the male character and Blue is the female. Got it? Good.

First off, we'll start off with the fire type dexholders. Most of you might notice some obvious similarities:

Yet, there is also one very obvious exception:

Green here doesn't tend to shout, especially as much as the other fire type dexholders. So, then what is the factor connecting them? All of them still have a very fiery spirit, and more accurately, is their strong determination towards achieving whatever goal they have. They will pursue it no matter whatever or whoever lies in their way; often leading to causing chaos or bad relationships with other people in their wake.

Green is extremely focused on becoming a strong trainer. Upon his first appearance, he is battling Mew with Charmander to train it and shows no remorse when Red tries to battle it and his Pokemon faints; rather looking down on him for not “noticing anything” during the fight. This determination continues throughout the first arc, as further demonstrated when he tries to force his way into Saffron City after Team Rocket attacks Pallet Town and takes his grandfather.

Gold has the notable trait of having a one-track mind, where he focuses on something so much he will pursue that relentlessly, and ignoring anything else that doesn't pertain to that. Though, this trait manifests itself most when Gold pursues “pretty girls” such as the Kimono Girls, gym leader Jasmine, or even Crystal upon first discovering her.

Though it still can translate in the pursuit of Gold's goals, where he initially receives a Pokedex because he wanted to use it in battle, and urgently attempts to gain a unique specialty during the GSC arc.

Sapphire's dexholder title is specifically “The Conquer” in reference to her earning 8 gym badges in 80 days. She unrelentingly goes around the region to defeat the gym leaders—causing her to start off on the wrong foot with Ruby. And she turns it into a bet to reach their respective goals in 80 days all because it stemmed from a promise she made with her childhood friend to beat the record of Red when it came to the Pokemon League.

Pearl's title is the Determiner, one he received after bonding with Azelf—the lake guardian of Willpower. He managed to bond with Azelf because he completes whatever he starts; as clarified by Diamond in the arc. Determiner, willpower, completes whatever started...yeah, this screams dedication to a goal. Especially when you consider the focus Pearl gives to Dia's and his comedy routine.

For Black though, no matter how well I could paraphrase it, I will just quote this article (bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Black_(Adventures)): “Black is a young man who aspires to be the Champion of the Unova Pokémon League. He has been dreaming of this since childhood, nine years to be exact. However, these dreams fill his head to the point where he cannot think about anything else and any attempts to cause him to pass out from mental exhaustion...Due to his dreams causing him to forget about other things, Black has the tendency to do things without considering the consequences of his actions and their effects on other people.”

I think the above proves the point well enough.

Also, I would like to briefly mention Y. While Y isn't a fire type dexholder (she's a water type), since there is no fire type dexholder in Kalos (Malva doesn't really count), she is a kind of water/fire dual type with her personality. Y shouts more than most of the other water dexholders and exhibits a more solid determination to pursue her goal of becoming a Sky Trainer, even when this runs into direct opposition with her mother's ideas for her.

Lastly, we wrap up the fire dexholder with our latest protagonist, Sun. Sun has the goal of collecting 100 million yen. Acheiving this goal has been Sun's whole time in Alola in the making. He relentlessly pursues money, even prioritizing reaching his personal goal than helping the Alola region against the Ultra Beast invasion, leading him to get sucked into Ultra Space with Solgaleo.

Next up is the water type dexholders, which personally I found the revelation most interesting. It would be difficult to derive a personality solely from the type this time. Unlike fire which is associated with offensive battling, or grass which tends to be connected to defensive, water is viewed as the balance between the two. But, this doesn't really provide any clues into what is the common thread between all these dexholders. My findings, however, were that they all tend to be secretive.

Miss Con Artist (Blue), our first water type dexholder, is literally a con artist. Her whole livelihood is based of lying and keeping the truth about her real intentions to trick people into doing whatever she wants. Plus, she has her own secrets that only come to light much later into her appearance in the first arc and beyond. Her pathological fear of birds is only hinted at during the Team Rocket battle and confirmed during the Pokemon League when battle “Professor O”. Even more shocking was her childhood under the Masked Man, who trained her because of the promise she showed as a trainer.

This transitions nicely to our other dexholder who was raised under the Masked Man, Silver. And he so happens to be a water type dexholder as well. While Silver does not purposely keeping his life before the Masked Man close to his chest, it is revealed that Silver was the son of Giovanni, an insanely big secret that heavily impacted his character.

Ruby, in order to pursue his love of contests and oppose the beliefs of his father, refuses to battle at the beginning of the RS arc. This in turn hides his amazing battling skills (plus the fact he has a FREAKING CELEBI). Additionally, when it comes to the climax of the arc, he hides from Sapphire the plan he had to team up with Courtney to control Groudon and Kyogre. While still intended for her safety, it is still another massive lie and withholding of the truth on his part.

Platinum may not be thought of as being secretive, but the speech she makes after learning Dia and Pearl weren't her bodyguards begs to differ. Most of the lies she reveals in that speech were white lights told to make her not seem inferior and were obvious to the reader, but it still goes to show that she lied a fair amount. Her wealth and connection to the Berlitz family were also discovered rather than told by Platinum. And most obviously, she hid her real name of Platinum until this time! This whole journey, her companions didn't know what her true first name was!

Lack-two or Blake is another dexholder who has lying built into his occupation. Blake is with the International Police and working undercover during the B2W2 arc (Please give us some form of closure! #freeblack2k19). He literally has to keep his true intentions of hunting down the remnants of Team Plasma from his fellow classmates. Additionally, his true personality isn't shown to others either; he puts on a womanizing and flirtatious front when he truly an emotionless officer.

Y is honestly the least secretive out of the water dexholders, but that can also be attributed to her odd Volcanion (a fire-and-water type) fusion. It may not be obvious, or not in a way you expect, but Y does hide something—her feelings. Dealing with the human depression that is X and three of her other friends while trying to all live on their own and dealing with fallout from her mother on top of one of the most cruel evil teams yet? You think she would break down, or someone would help her; but none of the characters we follow demonstrate this concern! theviolenttomboy made a short post that summarizes all the sh*t Y goes through (theviolenttomboy.tumblr.com/post/146359425406/figured-out-why-i-cant-ship-y-with-absolutely), and how she has to deal with it all on her own. In order to keep the group alive, she has to hide her emotional distress. A problem not even resolved by the end of the arc.

Finally, we arrive at the grass type dexholders. Honestly this was the most tricky for me to pin down. Mostly because we have dexholders like Dia and X who have personalities that couldn't seem more different. So, I had to take a look back, and that's when I realized something. Both of the previous characterizations centred around how they achieve their goals. Fire type dexholders barrel through whatever obstacles are in their way and water type dexholders hide information as they pursue their goals. This gave me the clue of what to analyze for the grass type dexholders and this is my conclusion:

The way grass dexholders approach their goals is the most “healthy”. They are able to self-intrinsically motivate themselves when life discourages their goals and try to achieve them in a way that doesn't tend to hurt others as much as the other two dexholder categories (most of the time).

Honestly, this probably reminds you of a generic shonen protagonist, so it is fitting that the dexholder who started this characterization was the most shonen like character of all: Red. Red is able to convince himself to keep working towards his goal of becoming the strongest trainer, despite the obstacles he faces in the form of Team Rocket or people like his rival discouraging him from developing into a stronger trainer. The way he aims to be the strongest also doesn't harm many people, if people are affected, it tends to be accidental.

Crystal manages to stay firm in her goal of catching all the Pokemon even if the other Johto dexholders just see her as a girl at first. She can motivate herself to keep working towards it, and with the caring and give-back nature of Crystal, she is certainly not harming anyone on her path to reaching her goal. Minus a few face kicks to Gold.

Emerald certainly faced a lot of adversity that pushed him down. Becoming an orphan at a young age and made fun of for his small height, initially actually causing him to go against the foundation of grass dexholders being able to motivates themselves by resulting in a dislike of Pokemon and his stature. However, he develops this grass mindset as the Emerald arc progresses, finding what he enjoys, what makes him unique, and cultivating the confidence needed to be himself—even if life is still against him. Plus, while I can't speak for much of his actions in the Emerald arc (because I haven't red FRLG yet, and I know the events are directly connected), his title of the Calmer which stems from his ability to help Pokemon feel relaxed means he is at least not harming Pokemon much during his adventure.

One of the biggest character moments for Diamond is him managing to self-intrinsically motivate himself to pursue a goal despite opposition. In this case, the goal being to stop Team Galactic and his opposition being his best friend Pearl. Regardless, he succeeds in standing up to him and working towards thwarting Team Galactic, with the worst harm caused probably being Pearl's shock at Dia standing up for himself.

White seems to exhibit a peaceful way of pursuing her goal surrounding her talent agency for Pokemon. When her goal switches after Gigi leaves her for a bit, White's new focus on getting stronger at battling is still approached in much the same way. One where she convinces herself to keep working towards improvement and does not negatively affect people along the way.

Then we have the enigma of X. X doesn't seem to follow things of “motivation” or not inadvertently bringing down others with him, but that's only when his goal isn't clear. When we start with X in the XY arc, his goal is to stay in his room; locked away from the outside world. In this context, he meets all the criteria: he ends up convincing himself to work towards his goal of staying a shut-in, despite all the pleas to change this from his friends; and most of his protest to stay inside is silent and doesn't directly or physically harm his friends.

Lastly, our final dexholder is Moon, who also conforms to this characterization fairly well. Moon is able to pursue whatever she considers a priority, unaffected by outside influences. Whether it be praise from her work early on in the SM arc, or not listening to reason before chasing after Sun in the wormholes when he is taken away; leaving Alola to face the Ultra Beasts alone.

tl; dr : Each dexholder approaches their goals differently based on the type of their starter. Fire dexholders have strong enough determination to barrel through all the obstacles to their goal, knocking down everything and everyone in their way. Water dexholders are secretive and hide important information as they work towards their goal. Grass dexholders have the “healthiest” way of reaching their goals, managing to motivate themselves to keep working towards it when life tells them otherwise.

This information may be touched on again in other posts I'm planning: a follow-up talking about the “Bronze-age” progression of dexholder characterization, one about predicting what the Gen 8 protagonists of Pokespe will be like, and another discussing trio characterization.

~Thanks for reading and I'll be back soon!

[purkinje-effect]

The Anatomy of Melancholy, 20

Table of Contents Go to first. Go to previous. Go to next.

Drug culture and human experimentation tw’s.

...This track out of time is coming full circle.

To the East end of Lexington, the remains of Mystic Lakes lay under the ruins of the Route 3 overpass. Angel had assisted ‘Choly in bathing in the water of the Mystic River, both by providing a lookout and getting his back for him. He wished more than anything that he could have simply laid back and soaked, but the area was neither secure nor private. ‘Choly dried himself off just enough to comfortably put on his surgical corset, then with bated breath requested the garment bag from Angel’s storage.

It felt like a step backwards in every sense to be in uniform again. The khaki slacks, dress shirt with US lapel pins, and tie tied precisely. Grateful for impeccable tailoring, he’d have to wait for his suspenders to dry. He toed into his dark brown dress shoes, then affixed his wrist and ankle braces. The Pharm Corps overcoat, complete with its twin caduceus lapel pins, the double silver shoulder bars to mark his rank, and over his heart all the bars from nearly ten full years’ service. His hands went over them in guilt. For the first time since he stepped foot in Lexington, he questioned what he was doing.

Self-agency was a bitch.

The sound of laser fire behind him jostled him from his moment of remorse, and he jumped.

“What! What was it--!”

“There was no saving those articles, Sir,” the Handy Bot elucidated, unable to hide its relish at dispatching with them in such a way. “No amount of Abraxo could have gotten out those stains. You’ve worn them an entire month straight. Today was simply the last straw. Ha Ha!”

‘Choly frowned at his robot meaningfully, forced to commit to the wardrobe change long-term.

“I... suppose it’s for the best,” he ultimately dismissed. “Abraxo is better served for just about anything but cleanliness.”

With a long, distant pause, ‘Choly stared out over the water, able to see Medford from where he stood. Finally putting his PipBoy back on his right wrist, he faced Angel with an odd smile.

“It’s going to be dark soon. We should get back. I have... work to do.”

He sat in the wheelchair as Angel unfolded it again for him, and they were off again through the heart of the city.

“Forgive me for saying so, Sir, but it does my servos such a delight to see you in uniform again. I’ve... missed circumstance.”

“I suppose for lack of anything else, for better or for worse, one can always fall back on the familiar.”

Angel served ‘Choly a small dinner of Cram and a sweet roll, to recover what nutrients he’d lost that afternoon. Once it was dry enough, ‘Choly brushed his hair back into a fresh french twist, then he excused himself for the night, to sort out his own demons. With the Merrick Index and a fresh holotape loaded, he made his way up to his garden office.

As night fell, the incandescent lighting from the office’s wall sconces soothed him, but he still supplemented their illumination with two candles on the edge of the desk in the middle of the room. He stood, and folded up the wheelchair in the corner. Makeshift planters framed the outer edge of the floor and filled the shelves lining the opposing walls, and he had even coaxed a melon plant to take to a hanging planter in the far corner. He smiled as he tended to each bedpan, each wash basin, each bucket and pot in which he had cultivated some manner of strange postapocalyptic life. The delicate pale lavender flowers with their dark foliage, the shallow muddy pan in which he’d revived a cutting from large red water lilies, the handful of tiny glowing stalky mushrooms he’d transplanted from one of the bathrooms in the place. And then his most endeared project in the room, his successes in transplanting the brain fungus from the break room refrigerator.

He then took a seat in the swivel bucket chair at the desk. For some time, he sought mental quiet staring out beyond the overpass outside his accidental window. He opened a fresh can of purified water at the desk and nursed on it in favor of alcohol for the evening, then popped a Mentat under his tongue and got to skimming the leaves of notes he’d tucked into the front cover of the pharmaceutical reference.

There had to be some way to distract Jared from seeking out cyclomorphine as his wonder drug. Now knowing Jared’s means and motives, he could prepare all necessary phrasing with care.

Perhaps, he could shift all focus imaginable on synthesizing the most potent Jet possible. Ultra Jet, fermented to be extra concentrated. It’d probably require a substrate to the mix, to boost the cultures. Jet Fuel, a heterogeneous mix of flamethrower fuel. A literal attempt at lighting up the third eye, it could plausibly take the form of an inhalant, injectable, or edible. Buff-Jet, as Berries-Carey had once proposed, an attempt at throttling pineal uptake of the entheogen. He could provide an entire veritable candy shoppe of chems to the raider outfit.

Anything but cyclomorphine. Surely, the constituents had died with civilization. He didn’t want to think about the finite morphine stock in the lab downstairs, if even in the context of how once it ran out, Psycho might be impossible to synthesize ever again.

Owing to the source of his hypothetical Buff-Jet recipe, he eyed the brain fungus mounding up in the pan along the wall. The most psychedelic mushrooms he knew of, they all tended to grow on dung, or on other fungi. He wondered whether the secret to infusing Mentats with Jet would either be found in feeding brain fungus to brahmin... or cultivating brain fungus in brahmin manure. He annotated these ideas, in the hopes of running them by Jared. He never wanted to sample Jet again in his life, if he could help it... and yet, the fingers of addiction crawled at the fringes of his personal space.

Of course that acute an exposure would have rendered dependency. Revolted to be reminded again of the afternoon’s experience, he squirmed in his seat and eyed the bottle of whiskey on the desk. He shook his head of the compulsion and drank more water, then did his best to focus on his task.

Flipping through the Index, he browsed the various formulas for synthesizing saucier chems like Daddy-O or Daytripper. They required patent-protected precursors, for the most part, and he sighed in nuisance that recreating these sophisticated synthetics was beyond him in his current capacity. He wondered... Perhaps, in other branches of the pharmacy warehousing, he might put his hands on pharmaceutical precursors such as these. For as much as he endeared himself to the sublingual facility of Mentats, barring Berries there was no crisper clarity than that bestowed by Daddy-O. Chasing the injection with Daytripper... usually smoothed out the resultant short temper and social clumsiness of having your brain run faster than your mouth. No contraindications existed strong enough to deter the intent from stacking Daddy-O with Mentats, either.

Though, as far as mode of dosage went, if ‘Choly had to pick how he took a chem, he far preferred to eat or drink it. Needles had such a high rate of injection site necrosis, depending on the chem, and regular Daddy-O abuse was right up there with Psycho in terms of that risk. He trusted Berries, no matter how clinical and exact the cholinergic high of Daddy-O felt. He didn’t much trust inhalants, either. Alimentary uptake was the safest, in his clinical and personal opinions both, and that left him right back at Mentats.

He eyed the brain fungus again, and sniffed pathetically. Perhaps the night that had birthed Melancholy from Berries and Jet Carey might have gone differently, had the Berries and Jet been compounded for compatibility. To his knowledge, drug culture hadn’t determined the means to marry psychedelia with nootropics, possibly for the best, and yet... in his desperation to find something, anything, better and more appealing than Psycho, he found himself seriously deliberating the means to precipitate Jet-Tats. The chemist fell asleep at his desk, scrawling chemistry notes.

“Sir, it’s time for breakfast,” Angel chirped from the office doorway.

‘Choly picked up his head and looked to the Handy, then nodded and followed in the wheelchair with his half-can of water. Once in the break room, Angel offered a box of Sugar Bombs and a mug of black coffee, which he greeted. After some time, he cleared his throat.

“Call it nerves if you want, Angel, but I would like to store a few things in you for safekeeping. You’re the safest place I have to hide just about anything. You’re... holding something very valuable right now, in fact. Could you...”

Angel had a blind spot just about where its owner had installed the false bottom in its storage, so it swerved and dilated its ocular lenses curiously before turning its back to 'Choly so that he could take a look inside himself. He pocketed the revolver, and tucked the Merrick Index inside along with all his notes. While he was in there, he counted only five bottles of Melancholia.

“Here, follow me around for a bit and add to your stock as indicated. All the Melancholia... And all the morphine and cyclomorphine... and all the barberine... Toiletries...” The list went on for around an hour before Angel insisted he be on his way to work.

“Things will be just fine, Sir. You were most ragged when you came home yesterday. Today will go so much more smoothly, I assure you!”

“I certainly hope you’re right.”

Jared already manned the Jet rig by the time Angel parted ways and ‘Choly wheeled across the assembly line floor to meet him.

“Ah, chemist. I expected you to be late. Yesterday must have done a real number on you.” Jared glanced at him, then got a better look when the initial glance didn’t add up. “You changed clothes.”

“You’re certainly chipper and compassionate today.” ‘Choly watched with a thoughtful frown as the black raider finished loading the bucket of manure into the spigot. Suddenly, in proximity to the rig, he felt utmost gratitude to port an ensemble with head-to-toe military grade water and stain repellent. “Yeah, after yesterday, the clothes I had were done for. What’s on the agenda?”

“Well, if your memory didn’t conveniently lapse, you should have brought me something very specific. Do you remember what that was?”

Deadpan, ‘Choly produced the Nagant from the hip pocket of his military jacket and held it out for him handle first. Jared looked it over, then checked out the rudimentary sight on it. With a low, impressed whistle, he aimed the thing at 'Choly. The chemist flinched despite knowing the firearm had no bullets.

“So this is a Russian pistol. I’ve been thinking. Little verbal slips here and there. You being able to confidently identify the make of this thing. Supposing you are a man out of time. That you really are from before the War. You were a Commie, weren’t you?” He laughed darkly at 'Choly, who straightened in his seat.

“I’m Russian. That’s right.”

“From the look of that uniform, you didn’t fight for the Reds, though. You defected. Betrayed your country.” The raider walked to the other end of the assembly line with the revolver in hand, forcing ‘Choly to keep up to sustain the uncomfortable conversation. At a workbench, he began to tinker with the thing to get acquainted. “What made you do it?”

‘Choly trembled, not sure whether he was more indignant or threatened.

“You have to know? Same reason I plied for your graces. Money, at first. Asylum. Opportunity. The Chinese were already vying to subsume the Motherland before the United States military approached me and offered me a pardon of my nationality in exchange for my service. They could overlook that I was Russian, as long as I did what they needed of me without question. I’ve...” He swallowed. “I’ve always followed anything that looked like security, and... this... this outfit is the most secure I’ve felt since I thawed out.”

He bit his tongue before tacking on a not that it’s a good frame of reference.

“An answer I both did and did not expect from you. I’m strangely pleased with you, chemist. Lacking your brains, I wish more people in my outfit had your sensibilities. You have your priorities straight.”

“Do I? I just handed over your capacity to administer whatever chems you want, to whomever in the room you want. Tell me I haven’t just fucked up. Promise me I didn’t just make the second worst mistake in my life.”

“And what, pray tell, do you say takes the cake?”

“Not being more adamant with my commanding officers, as to the side effects our experiments were having on the soldiers. We lost lives just through gross clinical negligence. I nearly lost my humanity in all my years of service, forced time and again to prioritize results over the safety of the test subjects. And... and you’re asking me to stand by while you do exactly what I did two hundred years ago.”

“A... military chemist.” Jared’s eyes went wide, and he turned from the dismantled gun with a wild grin as he gripped Melancholy by the shoulders. “You’re a fuckin’ Deenwood chemist. Holy fuck-in’ shit. I knew I struck gold when I laid eyes on you. You’re going to cook Psycho for me. The Jet ain’t cutting it.”

‘Choly’s head swam hot and his extremities numbed. When his left leg began to spasm, he clamped his elbow down on it forcefully to glare at Jared.

“The hell do you know about the Deenwood Compound.”

“I know that these experiments you’re doing your best not to describe were perfecting Psycho. Don’t play stupid with me. You can take credit for all your fine work. God!” The raider let go of him to throw up his hands in delirious disbelief. “I’ve got a fuckin’ Deenwood chemist right in front of me. And you’ve wasted all this time dicking around with Buffout, and Jet... when you could have been making my outfit the good shit! God--!” He cackled, and suddenly the gun itself paled to everything else transpiring.

“I, I can’t entice you with literally any other chem on the planet, can I.”

“Barring X-Cell, you’re the best thing I’ve ever had in my sights.”

The mention of the highly experimental drug boxed ‘Choly’s ears, and he did his best to ignore just how much Jared seemed to know about ‘Choly’s employment.

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the precursor for Psycho is extinct.” Another worst possible remark, at the receiving end of Jared’s instantaneous glower he choked down errant saliva despite a dry mouth. “Cyclomorphine is a morphine analogue. Painkillers. Opiates. Morphine comes from a plant called opium. Without it, Psycho can’t exist.”

“Painkillers...” Jared crooked his tongue in the corner of his mouth a moment, and stared a hole through ‘Choly. “Painkillers, like hub?”

“What.”

“Hubflower. Those dark purple plants with the light purple flowers. What else could you have wanted them for? Wastelanders keep the petals to chew on when they’re hurting. Makes the whole tongue go numb.”

“Are you trying to tell me... that there’s a good chance my office contains potted descendants of the poppy.” His heart clung to his throat. Jared had sidestepped every possible objection he could have to the prospect. “I have potted plants... in my office... the flowers of which--” His voice broke off in a sweating squeak.

“Cool it, you little Nimrod. Don’t blow a gasket. What’s the matter with doing for my outfit what the government had you do? You know it pays well. How did you put it? All the money, asylum, and opportunity you could ask for. You're not in a position to turn me down. Fuck this shit. We’re done with the Jet. We’re going for the gold. You’re going to test hub to confirm it’s a match for the chem you need. And you’re going to be my Psycho cook.”

“I... certainly look the part, don’t I.” Shakily, he raised his right hand to his forehead and saluted him to the best of his abilities. “Captain Alan Carey of the Deenwood Pharm Corps, at your employ.”

Go to Next »»»

[whatever-whims]

a new challenge with a throwback!

Ever miss the days where all your favorite cartoons would come on every Saturday morning? Me too! Why not relive some of the goodies with the TV Throwback Legacy Challenge?

Overall Rules:

Try not to cheat! ONLY cheat if Traits: (aka if you don’t have enough money for bills, cheat enough money to pay them then go back to the original amount of money.)

You can use the freerealestate on cheat for each generation once!

Each generation is to start off with 1000 simoleons (once the previous generation dies).

If you cannot complete a goal because of lack of Expansion Packs, Game Packs, or Stuff Packs, complete an additional skill in its place.

Have fun and share your journey! #tvthrowbacklegacychallenge

“Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends is a wonderful, funderful imagination habitation. We provide food, shelter and a warm heart for imaginary friends looking for a place to call home. So if you know of or have an imaginary friend that desperately needs a home, then come on down to Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends, where good ideas are not forgotten.”

You always felt like you wanted to have a big family, so you started up your own, what would you call it, an “orphanage,” per say. You took in many kids, and they treated you like you were their own guardian.

Traits: Family Oriented, Ambitious, Neat

Aspiration: Big Happy Family

Career: Management (Business Branch)

Goals:

Complete the Management career.

Complete the Big Happy Family Aspiration.

Complete the Parenting skill.

Adopt four kids.

Never marry but have romantic swings every now and again

“Sugar. Spice. And everything nice. These were the ingredients chosen to create the perfect little girls. But Professor Utonium accidentally added an extra ingredient to the concoction... Chemical X! Thus the Powerpuff Girls were born! Using their ultra-superpowers, Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup have dedicated their lives to fighting crime and the forces of evil!”

Option One: BLOSSOM

Traits: Genius, Self-Assured, Good

Aspiration: Renaissance Sim

Career: Secret Agent

Goals:

Complete the Renaissance Sim Aspiration.

Complete the Secret Agent Career.

Become “Best Friends” with both of your sisters.

Complete the Logic skill.

Marry and have 2 kids.

Option Two: BUBBLES

Traits: Childish, Cheerful, Good

Aspiration: Friend of The World

Career: Secret Agent

Goals:

Complete the Friend of the World Aspiration

Complete the Secret Agent Career

Become “Best Friends” with both of your sisters.

Write in a journal regularly.

Complete the Writing skill.

Marry and have 2 kids.

Option Three: BUTTERCUP

Traits: Goofball, Hot-Headed, Materialistic

Aspiration: Chief of Mischief

Career: Secret Agent

Goals:

Complete the Chief of Mischief Aspiration

Complete the Secret Agent Career

Become “Best Friends” with both of your sisters.

Complete the Mischief Skill

Marry (or don’t) and have 2 kids

“Out of my way, babies! The prettiest, smartest and bestest girl gets the front seat!”

Your family was a big one. All your life you were surrounded by people, and mostly babies at that. Being the only one your age, you were almost forced to hang out with the children for fun, and it did take a toll on you. Another thing that came with being the oldest is that your parents never really had the time for you. They tended to only the baby(ies) and nothing else.

Traits: Hates Children, Self-Assured, Mean

Aspiration: Business Savvy

Career: Politician

Goals:

Complete the Business Savvy Aspiration

Complete the Politician Career (If you have City Living)

Have only one best friend.

Have one child out of wedlock

Never become more than friends with your child.

Live in the city. (if you have CIty Living)

“Oh, Daph. What's wrong with you? Don't you ever eat?”

You’re a food connoisseur with a love for anything edible (and that includes edibles if ya know what I’m sayin’). You and your doggo would rather eat and chill under the stars than truly take on anything too serious.

Traits: Lazy, Glutton, Dog Lover

Aspiration: Outdoor Enthusiast OR  Freelance Botanist* (ONLY if you don’t have the Outdoor Retreat GP)

Career: Food Critic

Goals:

Complete the Outdoor Enthusiast OR the Freelance Botanist Aspiration.

Complete the Food Critic Career.

Become companions with your dog.

Never marry, but have a child with an alien and have them live with you.

Master the Herbalism OR the Gardening skill* (ONLY if you do not have the Outdoor Retreat GP).

Live away from as many people as you can.

“But... invader's blood marches through my veins, like giant RADIOACTIVE RUBBER PANTS! The pants command me. Do not ignore my veins!”

Your parents were from different worlds. Literally. You were half alien and you were kind of embarrassed about it. Well, the human part. You wanted to do everything you could to get back into space and see where you came from. Oh did I mention you despised humans?

Traits: Self-Assured, Evil, Insane

Aspiration: Public Enemy

Career: Criminal

Goals:

Complete the Public Enemy Aspiration.

Complete the Criminal Career.

Build a rocket ship, but don’t go into space until an Elder.

Have a child by “accidental adoption”.

Never be friends with any human, other than your one human parent and child.

“Create” a dog and name it Gir.

Master the Rocket Science skill.

“Yum, it's been light years since you programmed synthetic brownies!”

Your parent’s obsession with space and all things science must’ve rubbed off on you, because now you want to be an astronaut! Luckily, since your parent already built a rocket ship, you already have one to traverse the never-ending beauty of space.

Traits: Family-Oriented, Creative, Ambitious

Aspiration: The Curator

Career: Astronaut

Goals:

Complete the Curator Aspiration.

Complete the Astronaut Career.

Explore Space.

Complete the Elements collection.

Travel to Sixam at least ten times.

Master the Handiness skill

Marry and have 3 kids.

"Just because I like to have fun doesn't mean I'm stupid Dexter! I may not understand all that scientifical, mathematical stuff; but I know how to dance, I know how how to pet a kitty, and I know how to tie my shoes Mr.zipper-boots!"

Unlike your parents who were always so caught up with work, you would rather have fun and enjoy the cooler things in life. So once you were old enough, you up and left, moving into the city for the most fun!

Traits: Dance Machine, Goofball, Clumsy

Aspiration: Party Animal

Career: Social Media

Goals:

Complete the Party Animal Aspiration.

Complete the Social Media Career.

Master the Dance and Charisma skills.

Join 3 clubs (or create your own with at least two other members) (if you have Get Together).

Have a kid with a ghost!

Marry or not is your choice.

(You need THIS mod to be able to have a baby with a ghost!)

“Wow! Isn't this great? We just caught three ghosts tonight!”

“No, actually, you've just caught one ghost, three times, all of them me!”

Your parent was a wild spirit, and that’s not a joke! You’re part ghost. How? Because one of your parents decided to get a little too drunk and conceive you with a dead person. It’s hard to really be normal as many people are scared of ghosts!

Traits: Gloomy, Unflirty, Clumsy

Aspiration: Super Parent

Career: Your Choice

Goals:

Complete the Super Parent Aspiration.

Complete the Career you choose.

Master two skills of your choice (try to do something you haven’t mastered before!).

Adopt one child.

Never marry, but attempt to date.

“That’s not Santa, you stooge. That’s the Grim Reaper.”

You were adopted, but not just by anybody. Your parent was a ghost. Not a surprise, and they definitely didn’t act like the spooky undead. Your ghost parent gave you a bit of interest in the supernatural, like the Grim Reaper, Vampires, and Ghosts. This led to documenting your findings and a bit of an obsession, which included stealing from Vlad’s place...

Traits: Bookworm, Genius, Kleptomaniac

Aspiration: Master Vampire

Career: Journalist

Goals:

Complete the Master Vampire Aspiration.

Complete the Journalist Career.

Master the Vampire Lore and Writing skills..

Have a child before you become a vampire (or adopt).

Marry the Grim Reaper.

“Oooh, I know I’m not gonna like this..”

Unlike the two generations before you, you hate anything creepy crawly and are pretty much terrified of a lot of things. No vampires. No ghosts. No reaper. Even if he kinda was your dad..

Traits: Squeamish, Good, Loner

Aspiration: Nerd Brain

Career: Tech Guru (Choose the branch)

Goals:

Complete the Nerd Brain Aspiration

Complete the Tech Guru Career

Master the Handiness and Programming skills

Never be more than acquaintances with the Grim Reaper

Never be more than friends with your other parent

Never associate with anyone supernatural (other than the heir of the previous generation)

Get married and have a “normal” family.

REMEMBER TO HAVE FUN! I CHECK THE TAG DAILY BC I REALLY LIKE SEEING MY CHALLENGES GO PLACES! <3

[eth-an]

Modern Love and Broken Promises: Romance in Edward Yang’s Cinema

Around halfway through the runtime of Edward Yang’s 2000 film Yi Yi, the audience is given a portrait of a pitiful man reaching one of his lowest points. A-Di, brother-in-law to the film’s protagonist NJ, is shown lying half-naked on a mattress in his ex-girlfriend’s apartment, portly and slothful, engrossed in a porno playing on the television at the foot of the bed. As Yun-Yun turns off the bedside lamp and the space goes dark, the scene recedes with nothing but the reflection of the TV’s glare on A-Di’s glasses and the moaning of porn stars reverberating around the room. A-Di attempts to ask his ex- for help with his money troubles; she ignores him, leaving him talking to himself. In Edward Yang’s oeuvre, characters are often left conversing with themselves, hearing the echoes of their own voices, constantly talking past the ghost of their partner rather than meeting them on an intimate common ground. As Franz Kafka wrote in a correspondence to his lover at the turn of the twentieth century: “writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts” (230). Edward Yang, a key player in Taiwan’s New Cinema at the end of the century, then could be said to extend Kafka’s formulation to match the new material technologies present in a globalizing city. While Kafka remarks on the letter and its inability to consummate a human connection, Yang replaces ink and notepads with more timely motifs: the TV screen, the fax machine, the tape recorder, the film studio, the business card. As A-Di lies with his limbs sprawled out, made agog by the material on the cassette tape, the television screen erodes the boundary between private intimacy and public spectacle. Critic James Tweedie has commented, “the television exists at the threshold between those two social spheres” (14), making the divide between the personal and public more porous than ever before. While giving the illusion of connecting A-Di to a richer outside world, we can see how the television only serves to further alienate him from Yun-Yun; from an active, embodied experience of his own sexuality; and from the conversation he halfheartedly prolongs. Yang’s films then are instructional in understanding how modern media technologies have turned the traditional triumphant romance narrative into an “intercourse with ghosts”—perpetually frustrated, mired with failure, and unconsummated. While this may seem like a cynical indictment of modern love, I hope to show through an analysis of Yang’s films Yi Yi and A Brighter Summer Day that Yang’s characteristic melancholia opens up new potentials for making meaning out of romance in an era of increasing fragmentation. As Fatty deftly comments before his murderous rampage at the end of Yi Yi, “we live three times as long since man invented movies” (1:51:18). Yang’s films live up to this charge, offering their audience three times the intricacy through their characters’ ultra-mediated relationships.

One of the most compelling romantic arcs in these two films is the rekindling of the long-lost flame between NJ and his first love, Sherry. Although NJ and Sherry are both married when they come across each other unexpectedly in the gaudy lobby of some Taipei hotel, circumstances give them a chance to temporarily forget their spouses and reconnect. However, their new intimacy is spurious. Rather than offering either of them closure from the thirty years since their last meeting, their connection is mediated through shadows and fleeting impressions. At first, their reconnection is facilitated by nothing more than the exchange of flimsy business cards. Sherry hands off one of her cards—a symbol of the professional success she has found since moving to America—to NJ, who does not reciprocate the gesture. This scene marks their relationship at its most obviously superficial, but as the story progresses and their interactions become more and more frequent, their reliance on flimsy forms of mediation persists. NJ misses several calls of Sherry’s, only to dial her number and pour his heart out on her answering machine. Technology, rather than making the world a globalized paradise, then offers NJ and Sherry little more than the ability to talk to strangers they used to know. Yang then problematizes the supposed forward march of global communication, showing how it causes NJ and Sherry to miss each other’s messages just as often as it lands on the mark. The context and location of their phone calls also plays a crucial role here. Walter Benjamin has commented on the “sanctuary” (171) of private living spaces in opposition to its “complement” (154) of the office workspace, but in Yang’s film this dichotomy is collapsed as well: Sherry and NJ are only afforded the opportunity to speak to each other in the context of a business trip, NJ always reaches out to Sherry through his office’s phones, and the details about meeting up with Sherry at a Japanese hotel are routed through NJ’s secretary. The office phone, just like the television screen, then refigures private intimacy as one more piece of a larger global loneliness.

Even once NJ and Sherry end up meeting each other in person, the damage has been done so that they are seemingly doomed to speak past each other. NJ meets Sherry along with Ota in the lobby of yet another hotel, and they briefly converse in English, a language which none of them grew up speaking. No matter how technically proficient they are in speaking this foreign language to each other, this adds yet another level of mediation to their conversation. Throughout the trip, NJ and Sherry go on walks together, each monologuing their discontents from their long-gone relationship to the air around them, as if the other was not even present to comment. “I wouldn’t know how to live on!” Sherry yells, to no reply (1:53:03). She later breaks into tears and screams at NJ in his hotel room, only to realize that she has missed the mark and that her yelling was out of turn, directed at a vision of their relationship that no longer exists, or perhaps never existed in the first place. In these scenes, Yang represents their lost young love not as a monument worth rebuilding, as might be the case in a more traditional romance film, but the crosshatching of faulty memories and miscommunications underwritten by modern technologies. In a 2000 interview conducted between Edward Yang and the magazine Cineaste, Yang comments that his stories try to deal with “the universality of being human” (Sklar 6). While it is difficult to pin down a specific meaning from such a broad and totalizing claim, surely the increasing “connectedness” of the world under globalization is one such universal feature of being human at the turn of the millennia. While many take this connectedness as an a priori feature of modern life, Yang remains critical of those media and communication practices that ambiguate meaning in our relationships. In a concrete way, the trains and planes that connect Taiwan, the U.S. and Japan—the modern transportation that brings Sherry and NJ physically closer together—only serves to ultimately push them further apart. Focusing again on the boundary between the personal and the outside world, Yang shows a shot of Sherry’s reflection in a train’s window: her face is contemptuous as NJ sleeps, unaware next to her.

In addition to those features of globalization like mass-communication and transportation, Yang builds in a reflexive critique of the proliferation of video as well. The porno that A-Di watches is likely a specific reference to the increasing production of Taiwanese porn films at the end of the 1980s, which made up over half the country’s video output at that time (Zhang 242). Likewise, Taiwanese news media makes up an important expository narrative device at the end of Yi Yi, when Ting-Ting learns of Fatty’s unfortunate demise by watching the television hanging in the police station. The seriousness of the situation is brought down into an almost humorous register by the TV program, which illustrates exaggerated CGI visuals of the way the crime may have occurred. While the viewer is able to experience some much-needed comic relief from this scene, a certain darkness underlies its motivation. Ting-Ting, who is as personally acquainted with the situation as anyone could be, learns of the attack the same way as the rest of the public. The boundary between personal and public is collapsed, and her formerly innocent crush on Fatty is plagued with the same failure the other relationships in the film suffer. If critic James Tweedie is to be taken literally in his claim that CGI animation is “staging in its purest and least encumbered form, without the limitations imposed by photography” (15-16), then the news media’s recreation of an animated murder is nothing less than pure spectacle, absent of substance. In terms of Ting-Ting’s own romantic arc, this form of media represents an emptying out of meaning from an incredibly impactful event: though her former lover is going to jail for life, she can (almost) safely feel that it is some distant event happening to another person, in another time. Fatty becomes just as much of a ghost by the end of the film as the lost romance between NJ and Sherry, and no trace of him remains save the hand-shaped blood stains on the front of their apartment complex.

While this emptying out of meaning is the most common effect of modern media technologies in Yang’s films, this does not necessarily make Yang a pessimist in the face of globalizing technology. Yang himself, who attended “the newest and hottest program” for engineering at the University of Florida in the 70s, could hardly be accused of rejecting the adoption of modern technology (Sklar 8). Instead, his films try to explore these technologies’ effects on human life and romantic relationships, rather than tackling their broader structural, societal causes. Yang himself claims that he attempts to portray the events of his films as “neutrally as possible” so that his audience can make any moral judgements for themselves (Sklar 6). This neutral exploration is perhaps best exhibited in his 1991 epic work A Brighter Summer Day, which masterfully portrays the young love and hate between two Taiwanese teens, named Xiao Si’r and Ming, in the dangerous Taipei streets of the early 1960s. Si’r and Ming’s initial introduction is made wholly possible by a chance encounter at a film studio, without which they would not have forged a bond of friendship. One day, as Ming and Si’r are wandering outside their school grounds to spy on the production of a film in the cavernous building next door, they are caught trespassing by the film director. The director, so taken with Ming’s beauty and fitness for the lead role, asks her to come by the next day for a camera test, so that she might take over the position from the previous actress. In many ways, this occurrence is the genesis of Si’r and Ming’s romantic relationship, which grows more fruitful as they pass each other in the halls of the night school.

In one of the film’s most beautiful scenes, the camera cuts to Ming’s face, covered in tears. Yang does not give this scene any prior context. The preceding scene features Ming in a hospital overhearing her caretaker haggle with the doctor about her mother’s medical expenses. As the camera cuts to Ming’s crying face, the viewer expects that she might be crying about her mother’s asthma attacks, or possibly about her boyfriend’s disappearance. Then, a disembodied voice simply asks: “Are you thinking about something sad? Can you tell me about it? Maybe you don’t know where to start” (1:07:58). Soon after these questions are posed to Ming, the camera broadens out, and Yang’s audience sees that Ming was crying during her camera test in the film studio. On the one hand, Ming’s performance could be cynically read as yet another of Yang’s demonstrations of the falsity of meaning in cinema. Although Yang’s audience is initially led to believe that Ming is crying due to some tragedy in her life, it soon becomes clear that she is simply acting. Like so many other instances in Yi Yi, the personal affective labor of Ming is then appropriated by a objectifying public medium, in this case the film camera. However, a more reparative reading of this scene offers a new understanding of how the boundary between personal and public can be recast in spite of modern media. Although the director’s assistant asks Ming to reveal her personal thoughts that cause her tears, she refrains from giving the audience insight into her most intimate thoughts and feelings. Ming’s obstinacy shows that there is still a final frontier of the personal that cannot be captured in written letters, animation, 35mm film, or phone calls. This boundary is preserved in this scene, and Ming refuses to become another ghost for the audience to empty out and recreate to their own liking.

This also becomes evident in Ming’s romantic relationship with Xiao Si’r. The sound stage of the film studio is also the literal stage for the beginning of their romance, and Yang shows how the stage can possess both of these meanings without compromising these characters’ intimacy. When the studio’s cameras are off and the lights are dimmed, Ming and Si’r share their fears and hopes. Ming calls Si’r “honorable” and says that it will get him in trouble (1:00:59). Ming does not leave Si’r with an overly picturesque view of herself, and willfully tells him about other men who flirt with her. In a world that could easily subsume Ming into empty spectacle, she remains an strong example of how intimate and open communication can continue to exist. Ming discovers a modern love that is able to work within both the public and the private without letting one destroy the other through their collapse. She is flexible in finding love not necessarily in a single monogamous heterosexual relationship, but variously works with and against the contingencies of her life in Taipei to maintain and consummate connection with others. When her lover Honey is tragically murdered, she finds generative dialogues with Si’r reconstituting to her self, and this allows her to find a stability in modern love where other characters fail.

Ming does not give herself over as a passive subject to modern love, chasing after Honey’s ghost (in this case, his ghost would be literal), but instead finds a way to move forward and make new meanings in life. In A Brighter Summer Day, Yang offers several other notable features of modern romance that employ a similar ethos, each making meaning in spite of the collapse between public and personal brought about by new media and globalization. The popularity of Elvis’s music among the Taipei gangsters in the film is one such example. Although the gangsters do not speak fluent English, and can only sing Elvis’s songs through phonetic transliterations, they still find deep personal meaning in this global phenom. Although it may seem campy to a contemporary viewer when a Taiwanese child with greased back hair and a white tee starts singing songs by the “King of Rock,” the teens in the movie take this mass-media sensation and make it re-signify in their own community. Even though the film’s title, “a brighter summer day” is a misheard lyric meant to be “a brighter sunny day,” this hardly seems to matter as it makes meaning for these characters personally. The divide between a public, globally recognized rock star, and the individual, personal (mis-)interpretation of that music is then shown to be a generative process that nevertheless allows for new bonds to be made and new relationships to be formed. In Yi Yi, while Ota and NJ sit together in a parked car, they commiserate with each other and agree that music has a unique ability to bond people across time and place. In A Brighter Summer Day, music is another valuable site for modern love to make meaning, as teen lovers lean against each other’s shoulders on the dance floor.

In both A Brighter Summer Day and Yi Yi, romance seems to be perpetually, invariably in the throes of failure. NJ and Sherry, Ming and Si’r, Ting-Ting and Fatty, even A-Di and Yun-Yun: these films offer no shortage of romances ending in spectacular violence or dissipating in dispassionate indifference. As such, it is hard to see how Edward Yang could ever be seen as a romantic filmmaker in the conventional generic sense, or an optimist when it comes to new, modern modes of connection. However, I argue that this unashamed willingness to deal with failure on its own terms is just one of Yang’s many virtues. As critic Jack Halberstam has said, “failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd” (187). In addition, “failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior” in modern society (3). Under the strictures of NJ’s soul-sucking office job, or the angry disciplinarians at Si’r’s night school, or even the covertly violent interrogation practices of the Taiwanese nationalist government, perhaps failure is a viable alternative that ought to be explored. Yang’s romances do not usually offer a happy ending, but their exploration of love does offer something else: an alternative to the rigid and confining norms of modern life that threaten to empty us out and turn us into ghosts.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing. Schocken Books, 1986.

Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011.

Kafka, Franz. Letters to Milena. Schocken Books, 2015.

Sklar, Robert, and Edward Yang. “The Engineer of Modern Perplexity: An Interview with Edward Yang.” Cinéaste, vol. 26, no. 1, 2000, pp. 6–8. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41689311.

Tweedie, James. “Edward Yang and Taiwan’s Age of Auteurs.” Oxford Handbooks Online, 2013, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199765607.013.0023.

Yang, Edward, director. A Brighter Summer Day. The Criterion Collection, 2016.

Yang, Edward, director. Yi Yi. The Criterion Collection, 1999.

Zhang, Yingjin. Chinese National Cinema. Routledge, 2010.

[siodymph]

Science Bros Day 1

Finally! I’ve been looking forward to this week ever since the one last year lol! And here’s my take on the first prompt “light”, where Bruce thinks back on his first week in Stark Towers after the whole New York fiasco.

Also I'll be taking requests for this week, so if you have any ideas don't be shy! (I think my cut off date will be the 21st)

And as usual, you can read this story under the cut or over on my AO3!

word count: 1578

Bruce still remembered the first week he’d stayed in Stark Towers. It certainly had been a jarring change for him. In the span of one week he’d jumped from a sleeping bag in India to the clinical, almost cell-like workspace with SHIELD. And then just as quickly he was moving into one of the most coveted places in New York where he had an entire floor and laboratory all to himself.

Back on the helicarrier, when Tony had been pitching the idea to him he’d called it candyland. And now that he’d stupidly agreed to move to the city he found the nickname very fitting. His workspace was better stocked than anything he’d ever had before, even when he was with the university. And if he did ever need anything else for research or experiments, it could be shipped in within hours. Not to mention his apartment space either, which had been partially tailor-made to his own requests. All calm down-to-earth colors that seemed out of place in the rest of the chrome, futuristic tower. He could have anything he asked for at just the drop of a hat.

Yet even having so much independence, privacy and power he felt extremely out of place.

For years he’d been avoiding major cities and crowded areas. A way to try and ensure he didn’t hurt so many people. So being at the center of one of the most stressful places in the country had him worried. But Tony always seemed to insist that everything would be fine. Even with his near-constant assuring Bruce couldn’t help but worry, he’d done so much off-hand damage to the city during the fight, and that was when he was mad at hordes of face-less aliens. Imagine what he might do if he directly sent that unbridled rage towards humans, the people who actually lived there?

Another factor came from his room. Even while he had the walls and floor reinforced doubly, just in case anything happened, he felt so conscious of the fact now. That below soft carpets and wood floors were nets of high-grade steel-titanium-adamantium alloy. Sure the big guy would still be able to break through if he really dedicated himself, but it still didn’t help the fact that he could feel so caged. His own confinement always came as a mixed-feeling for Bruce. On one hand he knew it might be safer for humanity if he were contained, but on the other hand he knew deep in his heart that there was next to nothing in the world that could keep the Incredible Hulk down and any attempt to hold him back would be fruitless. Even with that said the thought still sent chills down his spine. Being locked in a box, buried underground and never seen again. Or worse yet, being on display... He doubted Tony would ever do something like that, but that inkling of paranoia seemed to always follow him. From the reinforced walls to the bed that felt a bit too soft. He wondered if that feeling would ever go away completely.

And then there was Mr. Tony Stark himself. Even before the accident Bruce hadn’t been the most social person. And after the development of his giant green ultra-ego he’d gone into a self-imposed isolation, moving from place to place to stay ahead of the army, never getting close to anyone. And now here he was living with relatively close quarters with the one of the biggest names in technology, weaponry. Suffice to say he was nothing like the handful of friends he had in college who were quiet and reserved much like himself. Tony was loud, demanding attention even when he was working alone.

When he’d first met Tony he’d been a curve ball in every meaning of the word. Throwing him off. Catching his guard down. When he’d first met with SHIELD he was surprised when the man directly approached him without any sign of reservation and began excitedly talking with him about the physicality of the tesseract. He had an ease when around Bruce that he’d never seen anyone who knew of his true powers have. And he’d been right when they’d first met. It was nice to finally meet someone who spoke “English”. He didn’t even realize how much he’d missed talking facts and figures until he was talking with Tony. Bruce thought that would be the end of that casual, friendly attitude towards him but as they began to work closely together he only seemed to warm up to him even more. Even while trying to help save the planet from the god of Chaos as well as crack the mystery that was SHIELD’s own suspicious activity, Tony found time to crack jokes, make small talk. And yet even for how much the man seemed to purposely avoid doing any real work, the results he got from just a few hours on the helicarrier were impressive to Bruce to say the least.

Somehow in the end, all that charisma and friendliness must of won him over because here he was living and working alongside Tony Stark, billionaire and engineer extraordinaire, in a city he’d once vowed to never step foot in. And all those feelings and uncertainties seemed to all come to a head and make his first week living in New York his own personal hell. He barely got any sleep. The closest he got to relaxed was in attempted meditation, but even then his concentration was weak and never felt anything deeper in his mind than his concentrated breathing and forced motions.

One night he couldn’t stand staying in his bedroom, the feeling of being caged felt so strong it was enough to drive him out of the room, out of his own apartment, and he headed up to the shared living space Tony had made for the whole Avengers team to enjoy. No one else had completely taken Tony up on his offer besides Bruce so he expected it to be empty. Even if he was still alone he hoped at least being in a different space might help dislodge the panicked train of thought that kept going through his head whenever he tried to go to sleep in that room.

But as he stepped out of the elevator and onto the floor, he was surprised to see light shining out from the community kitchen.

There, making a microwaved burrito and a pot of coffee in near-complete darkness was Tony.

The only sources of light were the pale yellow from the microwave and the stronger blue light hat constantly radiated from Tony’s chest. He turned over when Bruce walked in, he looked dead on his feet. The weak lighting only accented the bags under his eyes, making his whole face seem worn.

“Hey you.” It was probably the quietest Bruce had ever heard Tony.

“Hi? I didn’t think you would still be up.” Bruce said, unsure if he should be here or if he should just go back to his room and suffer through the rest of the night on his own.

But Tony didn’t seem to mind, he just shrugged and slowly looked back at his burrito. “Eh, probably. I’ve been doing some suit upgrades.”

“At two in the morning?” Last time Bruce had checked a clock it was a little past two, and that was back in his bedroom.

“Time’s an illusion.” Tony replied, completely unfazed.

Bruce couldn’t help but snort at that. “Ok, then I guess it’s pointless to ask when you started if time isn’t real. What upgrades are these exactly?”

Just like that, it was like they were back in the laboratories on the helicarrier. Despite looking like he was going to pass out Tony began going through the improvements on his latest suit in between bites of his burrito. Eventually Tony invited Bruce to his workshop to keep talking over his fresh pot of coffee.

Even now after everything Bruce still remembered that night fondly. It was one of the first nights where Bruce felt… Where he could pretend, even if only for a few minutes, that his accident never happened. That he was just a physicist and biologist, not a ticking time bomb one stressor away from destroying everything he touched. Tony treated him like the equal he was, respected his intellect and ideas, even enjoyed working with him. And he didn’t see as anything less. Anything to be feared.

They’d spent that entire night testing out Tony’s suit and talking about nearly everything from the laws of physics, to mundane gossip among their new team. And all the while the arc reactor glowed softly from under Tony’s shirt.

Sometimes Bruce found he missed the reactor, even if it was a necessity for Tony’s health. The way it shined out in a dark room. How it had glowed in kitchen that night, and for many nights afterwards. Or how nights even further after that it could just illuminate their bedroom when completely unblocked.

There was also a much less literal light about Tony Bruce had learned way back then too. The way his eyes would spark from a new idea, or how his face would light up when he got excited. And Tony’s old arc was nothing compared to the light he’d brought into his life.

He’d tried saying something that sappy to Tony once, but neither of them had been able to keep a straight face and burst out laughing.

[rhetoricandlogic]

Revelation Space - Alastair Reynolds

I first posted a review of Alastair Reynolds' fearlessly ambitious Revelation Space, what was to become the first book in a trilogy, in 2002. And while I acknowledged most heartily that Reynolds "has more imagination in two brain cells than perhaps the entire populations of several small towns," I was, in the end, disappointed, giving the book two stars and labeling it "a colossal bore." Reynolds' adventure, I thought at the time, was simply crushed under the weight of his verbose, detail-obsessed prose.

But something kept nagging at me in subsequent years, in a way that I am almost never nagged after disliking a novel. No, it had nothing to do with the fact that mine was a minority opinion among critics, most of whom were tossing out "Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year" clichés as fast as their fingers could type. I try never to let either popular or critical opinion influence me if I can help it. My thinking is that going into a book as cold as possible will result in the most honest opinion.

What was nagging me was that, despite my disappointment, images and bits and pieces of the novel simply would not get out of my head. This is saying something, since, with the volume of SF and fantasy I read, I do not exactly retain an eidetic memory of everything I've read that I can call up in a second or two unless the book literally bowled me over. But in the case of Revelation Space, two and three years later I still could remember the opening scene in the archaeological dig on the lonely planet of Resurgam with remarkable clarity. The dark, eerie corridors of the vast starship Nostalgia for Infinity still brought haunting images to mind. Had I just missed something? Perhaps I had read Revelation Space at a time that I was not very receptive to epic SF. (I suspect that having since gone on to read the work of Peter F. Hamilton and Dan Simmons, SF of this monumental scale has become more appealing to me now that I've seen it done well.) Or was this all just wishful thinking, and the book truly a soporific snoozefest?

There was only one thing to do: re-read the book. And while re-evaluating something you've originally panned isn't a common practice among critics, we should be open-minded to doing so when the occasion warrants. (And it doesn't always, so don't expect a new review of The Eye of the World.) Often works of art are released before their time, like Blade Runner. Or their qualities are only evident to some audiences right away, while other audiences have to warm to the work over time.

Well, upon re-reading Revelation Space, I will say that to a large extent I maintain some of my original opinion. This is an often ponderous epic. Reynolds has so many Big Ideas to communicate to his readers that he falls into the hard SF writer's most commonplace trap: the infodump. Passages go on at g-r-e-a-t length to elucidate some aspect of Reynolds' extravagant future. But there's nothing anywhere that could be called bad writing. The complaint is more akin to that hilarious line from Amadeus: "Too many notes!" Clearly Reynolds' universe is more important to him than his characters. So not only does the cast never fully reach the point of perfect reader identification/empathy, it seems that Reynolds knows it and couldn't care less. It's the big picture that matters to him. But if, in a manner of speaking, Reynolds can't see the trees for the forest, you can't deny that it's an astonishing forest.

The story revolves around the quest to discover what led to the extinction of the Amarantin, a pre-technological race that once inhabited the bleak world of Resurgam, orbiting Delta Pavonis. Resurgam is now a human colony wracked by political upheaval. Dan Sylveste is the son of one of Resurgam's founders, the infamous leader of the Eighty, the unwitting victims of a bungled immortality experiment. Sylveste is on the cusp of a crucial discovery — an Amarantin obelisk with engravings that hint at technologies this species should never have had — when he is unseated from power in a coup. He is only released after 20 years when his former rival, Nils Girardieau, requires his help in understanding the dazzling discovery that the obelisk has led to: a buried Amarantin city, encased two kilometers beneath the surface of Resurgam in a black sphere.

Two other groups of players enter the stage. From the rather Ridley Scott-ish Chasm City, on a planet in the Epsilon Eridani system, we meet assassin-for-hire (this seems to be the job du jour of hot chicks in the far future) Ana Khouri, who is hired — well, conscripted, actually — by a mysterious wealthy dowager named the Mademoiselle to travel to Resurgam and, for reasons cloaked in obscurity, take out Sylveste. Through plot machinations that, it must be said, are a bit clunky, the Mademoiselle forces Khouri to work for her with the aid of a rather implausible twist concerning Khouri's long-lost husband. Then, Khouri infiltrates the crew of the Nostalgia for Infinity, an unimaginably massive ship ("unimaginably massive" seems to be the only level at which Reynolds will even deign to consider an idea) whose skeleton crew of cybernetically enhanced human "Ultras" are journeying to Resurgam also to find Sylveste. But they aren't looking to kill him; they believe Sylveste can help combat a mysterious viral plague attacking the ship's systems and endangering their captain, Brannigan, who's been in suspended animation at near absolute zero at little better than "brain in a jar" status. But why, Khouri wonders, is the ship looking for a gunnery officer? And where did it get all its gargantuan WMD's, some of which could probably take out whole stars?

Before the characters all come together, Reynolds shows a deft hand at building cosmic mystery while slowly weaving thematic threads together. The Nostalgia's previous gunnery officer went mad, raving to Ilia Volyova (one of the ship's triumvirate of commanders), before she was forced to kill him, about some being he calls the Sun Stealer. And Sun Stealer appears to be the name attached to the sculpture of an enigmatic winged deity, not previously known to be part of Amarantin religious traditions, found within the buried city.

Tied into all of this is an even more bizarre enigma, that of the unspeakably alien Shrouders, who maintain areas of distorted spacetime — the Revelation Space of the title — which are rumored to protect vast repositories of wildly advanced technologies. Dan Sylveste is the only human to have ventured into Revelation Space and returned alive. And what he learned there is a key mystery of the plot.

All of these riddles wrapped in mysteries inside enigmas sometimes, not surprisingly, overwhelm the narrative. It will be the patient, not easily daunted reader who will find Revelation Space most rewarding. (For one thing, we're nearly 200 pages into the book before we get anything resembling action.) The narrative is non-linear in a way that sometimes lacks clarity, popping forward then back again over gaps of decades, and there are odd hiccups in plausibility such as the one I mentioned before. Most readers who choose to tackle this book may find it's best read in small chunks. The meticulous, nearly obsessive attention to detail in this huge narrative results in a story that can be as daunting and difficult as it is compelling.

Still, you'll find a lot to like in those details, including hints at Reynolds' disparate influences. Khouri's career choice in Chasm City — she stalks clients who pay to be stalked, and it's all captured by the media — has echoes of Robert Sheckley's The 10th Victim. And there's something about that buried city (not to mention the Shrouders themselves) that's more than a little Lovecraftian.

Finally, the reason this book satisfies where similarly overwritten epics don't is that Revelation Space does have a focused storyline that Reynolds is driving towards a climax. (And what a climax!) Too many books like this commonly leave several unresolved plot threads gaily swinging in the breeze, leaving readers with the forlorn hope that all will be tied together in some distant future sequel. Revelation Space leaves plenty open for its sequel, too, but it doesn't do so in such a way that it's a letdown in its own right.

Given that this trilogy's second and third novels are even longer than Revelation Space, I don't get the impression that Reynolds' self-indulgence is a thing he's felt any particular compunction to rein in. But I have confidence he knows how to smooth his rough edges. And as writers like Simmons, Martin, and Hamilton have proved, there are ways to do Bigness well. This debut reveals a powerful imagination straining at the leash to explore the Biggest Ideas it can tackle. And as we all hopefully would agree that SF ought to be, at the best of times, a literature of Big Ideas, to criticize a novel too harshly for attempting to excel at what this genre is all about — as opposed to falling back on the same overworked tropes — seems churlish. As Reynolds' career evolves, I suspect it's more likely that, rather than make his stories more accessible to readers who've long cut their teeth on undemanding work, he'll expect readers to evolve to his level, just to keep up. That's not a bad thing, and it might even prove a revelation.

Followed in the trilogy by Redemption Ark, as well as Chasm City, a stand-alone novel set in the same future.

The Nostalgia for Infinity