#but also i like the idea of even the quote end quote villain getting a happy ending

[nenoname]

Gravity Falls DVD Commentary Highlights

(just a huge, and I mean huge, dump of random quotes that stuck out to me, which I sorta separated into characters+their relationships and it's probably gonna be obvious that Stan is my fave lmao

I dunno how to make this legible for anyone but whatever, just take all these rando character tidbits. Stan Twin pranks! Sonployee essays! The concept for a post-Weirdmageddon episode that Alex insists is just too miserable but I want it anyway! The Pines family making me cry!)

Stan

"We love the idea of Stan [in Boss Mabel] having a minute to uh, having a context where we want to see him be his worst self and seeing his big brash personality in like a setting that everyone can understand, because the Mystery Shack is a little bit ungrounded because he's in his world of his characters, but seeing him out in the outside world is funny weird."

We really enjoyed the fact that he's as awful as ever and he's rewarded for it. We like those anti-morals where Stan uses his terribleness to succeed incredibly well.

I think it was a little hard for people to understand in the writer's room at the beginning of the series was that, even though Stan is following a lot of these tropes of being a miser, he's not grumpy. Like he actually loves being himself. He really revels in it like even though he's got some kind of sorrow inside, his kind of day-to-day like he's more about just the uncle who loves to hear himself and make dumb jokes than he is somebody who's mean or cruel or cynical per se.

The [NWHS] storyboards managed to make Stan this awesome action hero while still keeping him Stan. Like I like the fact that he steals a wallet in the middle of it. He steals a wallet, he smashes somebody against the wall, he sasses him but he also has this just great Inception moment. And it's because we're building to a big question about “who is Stan?”, I felt a moment of seeing him be kind of awesome further increases your “who is this guy?” He keeps going back and forth between like “oh geez my back” and you're like “all right that's the Stan I know” and then like “whoa, he just did an awesome jailbreak! Is he some kind of super villain? Who is he really?

There's more of Ford in Stan than I think Stan realizes that I think only comes out in certain moments.”

Why did Stan keep a clipping of himself titled “grifter at large”? I think he thought he looked cool in that picture. “You know I kind of have a Clint Eastwood look in this grifter at large photo. I think maybe I'll use this as an About the Author one day. I gotta hold on to this one. You know what, I'm a criminal but I'm a nostalgic criminal! Loving the past is my greatest crime now!”

I know how Stan feels in this [Principal talking to his family] scene, when somebody comes in and says like “You know what? There was a race you didn't know you were running and you're already behind, way behind.” 

And you know even though Stan is a guy who looks like he's having a fun time, I always, in my gut, thought of him as somebody who is a huge well of sadness, a loss of human connection. And that need to please, that trying to get laughs from the crowd and constantly telling dumb jokes and you know putting on a big show in the Mystery Shack, he's trying to get from them the affection that he never got from his family and lost with his brother.

Stan has been waiting for years to have a reunion with his brother. He's always felt like a screw-up. Stan once again had an idea of how he thought things were going to go. He thought that his brother was saying “I need your help” for the first time. He's going to go up there, they're gonna have some drinks, they're gonna catch up and instead he ended up shoving his brother into another dimension and running out of food and money. It's sort of his worst nightmare. But this was Stan's entire character, from the very beginning of the series, was built around this idea that he's living with this tragedy. He's a guy who outwardly seems like he doesn't appreciate family but in fact wants it more than anything in the world and feels like maybe he's not worthy of it and would do anything to prove that he is.

Seeing Stan figure out what he's good at felt important to me. Like he's never been good at anything in his life and he makes a stupid hokey joke and it suddenly turns into a profit. I felt like without [showing how the Mystery Shack was created], I was missing something and understanding why he would do this, how this would be the solution to his problem.

We would like the idea that Stan appears to win through dumb luck, that it's sort of Intelligence versus Guts but Stan wouldn't actually bet everyone's life on a dice roll. He's a cheater! At the end of the day, I believe Stan has been thrown out of Vegas for counting cards and for weighing dies and I believe he could con his way out of any game, particularly for an obnoxious wizard like this. The idea that Stan would gamble everyone on pure chance is like no. No, he's got a plan. This is the guy who escaped prison using gravity leaps, he's got a way out.

The one big thing [The Stanchurian Candidate] does is really highlights Stan's inferiority complex compared to his brother. Part of what he's doing is he's trying to be an important man here and this episode is actually a pretty good setup in many ways for Weirdmageddon Part 3. When we see Ford they're all going on this rescue mission to rescue Ford and this episode shows you just how much Stan wants to be the hero like the reason that he can't shake Ford's hand when they're in that circle.  The cold open of this where he sees everyone loves Ford and now that Ford's back, he's the best. Stan's like “well, how about I run for mayor!” It's just to boost his ego and make him feel better about himself.

Dipper and Mabel

“Straight man protagonists are really hard to write because every other character had a comedic hook. We understand that Soos is kind of this weirdo, his brain is in another place. Mabel has this exuberance and sees the best in every situation and is very creative. Stan is a crooked conman. Dipper is… the normal guy and a character like that can often feel like they don’t have agency, start to feel just reactive.

Waddles is Mabel's only love that lasts the summer. Mabel is very prone to love at first sight and Waddles is able to love back with Mabel's degree of love.

[In Sock Opera] Mabel's in love with Gabe, Dipper's in love with the Author and they're both willing to do something crazy to get get closer to that thing

There kept being layers of adjustment to make it, “okay what would it take to get Dipper to make a deal with Bill?”  1: He would have to not understand the rules of the deal. He's been tricked, he thinks he's just giving a puppet, he didn't know was himself. Classic genie rules, you get what you wish for in a way you didn't expect.  2: There's a little ticking clock that just started, which if he doesn't do it by now, he's gonna lose all this.  3: Bill rightfully points out that Mabel has been kind of not sacrificing for him and he maybe needs another ally right now  4: He was sleep deprived and actually you'll notice that Dipper blinks right before Bill arrives and that's our way of suggesting that that countdown might not have even existed

I think Dipper and Mabel are of equal exact intelligence but Dipper's insecure. He sees his accomplishments as a way to make himself better and thus is motivated to focus on things that are accomplishment type things. And Mabel is very confident and likes having fun and when she's having a good time, she has a little tunnel vision for the people and the things around her. That's one of her biggest flaws. She's actually really, really sweet when she notices and understands your pain but not when she's doing a bit, when she's doing a scene, when she's doing a gag.

Ford

Originally [the fake Author] looked a little bit more like an oddball wacky inventor and I felt he had to be pretty idiosyncratic. There's certain color things about him you'll notice. He's more or less got the color scheme of the Journal, you know maroons and golds, so that you kind of feel instinctively like maybe that's him. A lot of these motifs though we would end up using in Ford's design, as well the gloves and the coat and all that but much cooler later on but preparing you, it's Ford Lite. 

Now this is there's no logical reason that Ford would break [the warnings about the portal] up into all these books this way but up until this point he's been shown as this sort of all-knowing mysterious Puzzle Master that it felt appropriate, even though it's not logical.

It works for the storytelling so when Ford wrote that, that's when he was super sleep deprived. He realized that Bill had betrayed him, he was starting to have a hard time differentiating between fantasy and reality, he was losing sleep and scribbling all sorts of lunatic serial killer looking stuff about the end of the world.

In Time Traveler’s Pig, we see what should be a young Stanford Pines even though again, the design's a little off but we knew big sideburns, bushy hair. Although that Stanford looked a little bit more swole than this guy and that's one of the what we thought were very subtle clues in season one that helped a lot of fans figure figure everything out way too soon.

[Using the memory gun on the agents scene] needs to show that Ford's really awesome and so we could get rid of the agents and show that Ford can pretty much handle anything that Stan can't and also call back to our memory ray all in one.

There was a lot of fan speculation when we first met Ford. Generally when television shows introduce a new mysterious character late in the game, they turn out to be a villain like 9 out of 10 times. They turn out to be a villain or they're there to get killed off to show the stakes of something and like we could have made Ford evil but I always felt that that would be less interesting. The point that I was trying to get to is that Stan and Ford had this relationship that fell apart and it was both of their faults and I thought that if I'm Stan, I'd be more frustrated if Ford is actually a good guy. It would drive me insane if he's pretty reasonable, pretty rational, better at me than everything.

So we've flirted with this brief moment where it seems like he's a villain and we worked really hard to make it so that like his eyes are being covered by the reflection of the light. His dialogue is ambiguous enough here that for a moment you believe what Dipper believes, which is “maybe he's possessed by Bill.” You just saw him shaking Bill's hand, what is he supposed to believe?

I like that Ford has this photo with him, he had for a really really long time all the way through multiple dimensions. And he's probably told himself- I almost imagined if McGucket found that photo in his coat while they were working on the portal or something, like “What's this here?” and Ford would say “oh yes, that's a photo of a very important moment! That's when I…  that's when I first decided I want to be an inventor!” There would be no reference to the real reason he's keeping it. “This is me and my brother.” It would be like, “oh yes I was thinking about science as a horizon, a frontier to reach towards– you know like a boat, like a ship, like science! It's about science!”

Soos

You choose family. That you create over the course of your life and if that somebody earns being your family, like the Mystery Shack. These kids and Stan, they’re Soos' family and he's happy about that.

I feel like Soos gained something out of [Blendin’s Game]. He gains the knowledge that like “I'm tired of thinking about this man who I'm missing, who doesn't care about me. I'm going to concentrate on the people in front of me, the people that are my true family.”

Soos is a fan of the show even though he's in it. He's a big fan of Gravity Falls and [NWHS] killed him.

I always knew what I wanted Soos’ end to be Soos running the Mystery Shack. I imagine that Soos is actually way better at giving tours than Stan is because he loves all that stuff truly and he believes it. That's part of the difference. Stan’s like “um, all right suckers, this stagnant puddle is the befuddle puddle!” while Soos is like “yeah, one time I looked in there, I think i saw like a cyclops dude. Like, I really think I saw one! Like it might have been a reflection combining my pupils, but like?” and people are like “Whoa, really??”

McGucket

They hired a bunch of people and then they erased their memory. That’s my explanation for why there's like such amazing inventions that would take whole teams of people. McGucket secretly hired a number of contractors and erased their minds. Like I think of McGucket as being like a really sweet nice guy completely in over his head who just like “oh well, once I've erased one guy's mind, I gotta erase ten more guys’ minds to cover it up” and it just sort of builds into like “I guess I'm kind of this kingpin of crime and I'm starting a cult I didn't mean to. Whoopsy daisy!”

When we get to Ford and see their backstory and see their relationship, it just makes all the stuff that happens with the portal and what happens with Ford and all that more poignant that he had someone there who was not only his friend but also a voice of reason and telling him to stop and that he wouldn't listen to him, as opposed to Ford being down there on his own with nobody to bounce off, anybody to say “hey wait a minute, is this a good idea?”

“McGucket was the assistant and he was maybe this assistant who was sort of put upon and Ford kind of brought a college buddy together with him. You know Ford as somebody who lost Stan, and even though he rejected his brother, he kind of needs that other person and he tried to find that in this kind of sweet prodigy and he just pushed him too far.

[The test scene] is meant to show sort of what it was that McGucket needed to erase, what it was that drove him to madness. It was partially seeing the Nightmare Verse and the way it messed with his head and also partly just realizing that this thing has apocalyptic consequences and he doesn't want to be a part of it. And if he can't destroy it or talk Ford out of something, he can forget about it.

Because If Ford's weakness is pride, McGucket's weakness is weakness. He's got a kind heart and he can't stop people, he can't destroy things. I mean he should have basically knocked Ford out with a wrench and take this thing apart piece by piece. He's the one who understood how to build it but I think he's kind of a follower and I think he's the kind of person who could get suckered in by a cult leader. He’s the kind of person looking for instruction and he really respects Stanford and can't bring himself to uh, he's like “I just got out of a bunker! I don't want to go work for another guy down in another bunker! This is my third doomsday cult this year!”

Stan and the kids

Stan and Mabel have such a different life perspective it seemed natural that at some point they would get to a major conflict

Seeing Grunkle Stan and Dipper bond like, I sort of believe that both of them are bad with women and both of them would rather believe there's a giant conspiracy than that they have they just can't get ladies 

Can this idea about Mabel's relationship with Waddles actually reveal a rift between Mabel and Stan where Mabel and Stan actually get along pretty well in the series you know? When they they're both such strong stubborn personalities that when they conflict, they conflict hard like in Boss Mabel. But this idea that Waddles is sort of a metaphor for what Mabel loves and Stan loves Mabel but he doesn't really think that anything she thinks is necessarily smart or right. He loves her like “guys she's my sweet niece but she doesn't know anything you know? She doesn't know anything about a pig” She forgives a lot with Stan but like Waddles sort of represents like the purity of her deepest love and the idea that Stan would threaten that is genuinely a shock

In the previous season it ends with Dipper giving up his journal and there was a lot of argument about “oh is it lame if he just gets his journal back?” Another thing we struggled with, we knew that Stan knows the importance of this journal he wouldn't give the journal back to Dipper so it was a bit of a convolution we'd written ourselves into a corner. We wrote ourselves out, we said “okay he's photocopied it. he's giving it to Dipper because he knows that Dipper's really precocious and he'll never stop asking.”

“We knew that we wanted everything to come to a head when the kids are going to discover Stan's secret and they're going to discover it in such a way that they only get little bits and pieces and they have to decide for themselves based on the limited information. Is Stan's a good guy or if he's a bad guy? Ultimately that decision will be a decision of heart versus mind. And Dipper's mind, Mabel is heart and they're fighting with the scraps of information they have.  Should we trust our heart about how we feel about this guy over the course of the summer and everything we've been through or should we trust the clues? That seemed like a believable way to get Dipper and Mabel to begin a rift between them that is resolved by the end of the series.”

The way Stan acts in [NWHS] is like, to me part of what feels so grounded about it is like I'm a child of divorce and like I know that when parents or parent figures know that hard times are coming for the kids. They kind of lay it on thick they're like who wants ice cream you know what I mean? Like Stan being extra nice to them at the beginning is like it's kind of a realistic thing that that adults do when they know like big changes are coming.

I felt it was really important that we added the scene where they're at maximum bonding. They're up on the roof, they're shooting firecrackers. Stan knows in his heart that when his brother arrives everything is going to change in ways he can't predict and he's really savoring this moment because he knows, even if things goes completely smoothly, which they don't. the kids are still going to be mad at him, especially Dipper for basically lying.  They had this big meeting after the end of Scaryoke where of course Dipper also crossed his finger but Stan crosses his fingers and says “oh I'm telling you everything” and he knows that the kids are not going to be happy about the fact that he's been keeping this all from them because they've done amazing things together already and he should have trusted them before now. 

This act break is them saying, “wait, Stan might be a random grifter who maybe killed our real uncle!” That's pretty heavy for any show let alone a cartoon show.

What that would mean for them if all this stuff is true is so much further than just like, “oh he lied to us about a couple things.” It's just like, “no he's straight up just some random dude that we don't even know uh and the guy that I've been pining for this whole time is dead!”  We really try to stack the deck so it's like Mabel's perspective and Dipper's perspective are both kind of racing to see who gets in front and there'll be a moment where it's like yeah you kind of buy with Mabel she feels good about about Stan and then this scene is the most you’re ever with Dipper where we discover this huge crazy curveball and this feeling that you have looking at this newspaper and looking through these fake IDs this is how Dipper feels all the time.  If you want a window about what it's like to be Dipper, this moment where a giant conspiracy reveals itself out of little pieces and seems to suggest that no one is trustworthy like that's that's where Dipper lives and this to him confirms every bit of suspicion and every bit of paranoia he's ever had and he's willing to run with it. 

I love these characters so much that, for me I was like “I need to see Stan saying goodbye to the kids at that bus. And I don't want him to be some guy who isn't Stan, who doesn't even remember the kids.” That would be really dramatic. It might make you cry more but to me it doesn't actually mean anything. Their relationship which they've built, he was willing to sacrifice his memories to save them. That's how much they meant to him but because he was willing to do that, I think he deserves to get him back.

Stan and Ford

But I think Stan's hope is, that in Stan's mind this is going to play out one way which is that; he's going to free his brother, his brother's gonna come out of that portal after 30 years. Stan's probably imagining that Ford is weak, emaciated, wrapped in a blanket, that he'll stumble forward, through a beard. through blurry eyes, he'll be “my brother, is that you?” He'll embrace Stan, he'll hug him, he'll say, “all these years I thought I was goner but you saved me! I was wrong to mock you, I was wrong to call you the stupid twin! Dad was wrong about you! You're the greatest man and let's be friends again and who are these niece and nephew?” Like that was what Stan was kind of hoping. He knows it's there's a million things that could go wrong, including potentially the destruction of this dimension, but he so desperately needs to believe that he can make up for the problems of the past. He's hoping for this but he knows that things are going to change

When I started the series, I always knew Stan had a twin but all I knew about Ford from the jump was that he's everything Stan Isn't. So Stan is a guy with a huge chip on his shoulder, he's kind of a loser at life. There's somebody who is a winner at life or at least was a winner in all these ways that Stan wasn't.

We realized that in order to bring out the maximum amount of frustration in Stan, [Ford] needed to have a bit of a heart. Like here we see him being kind to the kids, he's not he's not all bad which is what's so infuriating to Stan. The idea that he would quickly get along with the kids when he can't get any respect from them. Ford is designed for what would bring out the most amount of conflict in the family. What would be Dipper's hero, what would be Stan's rival and who's somebody that we could empathize with. I mean, it’s  hard to empathize with a character that comes out and punches one of your characters in the face, basically before he almost says anything.

You see that at this age, that all the stuff [in their room] that would cross over, that would appeal to both of them. It's not just like “there's science stuff here” and then there's “what Stan would be into.” but no, they both like all this.

There was also a version [of ToTS] where early on, they'd rigged the school water fountain. They did sort of like a caper, it was science and a scam together when they were in elementary school but we decided to save the science for the science fair stuff.

We played around with the idea that you would see them working together doing little science games or pulling little pranks. There was actually a scene that some of it was even storyboarded where they're in a treehouse together and Crampelter and his friends have tracked them down and are begging for their lunch money and Stan and Ford have used their jerkiness and geniusness to rig up like a water balloon throwing machine that knocks Crampelter in the head. I remember him saying, “oh no, my old-timey paper crown!” We were really hanging a lampshade on all these sort of Little Rascal cliches.

Ford's not a villain. You know he's getting in Stan's face and saying “I want my life back” but hopefully by the end of the episode even though you don't root for his perspective, you understand his perspective where it's like Stan ruined his science project, Stan shoved him into the portal, Stan took over his house. He’s not completely unreasonable to want it back and he's not completely unreasonable about his request. He says “okay you've got till the end of the summer” and Stan's little look there tells you everything you need to know about how he feels about the situation.

We needed pressure to be at the point where Stan and Ford recognize their lifelong rivalry and Ford does a sincere apology to Stan and almost more importantly, he acknowledges Stan's intelligence. He says “you wouldn't have fallen for Bill's nonsense.” He recognizes that his brother has a kind of intelligence he doesn't.

I always imagined that as kids, Stan and Ford were like this dynamic duo. They were getting into scrapes and like planning pranks and with Stan's creativity and Ford's genius that they were an unstoppable awesome team, before life turned them against each other. I imagine that as kids they were always swapping glasses and tricking their parents so that they could get double presents. And this is a move they did back in New Jersey constantly. We had to figure out who's gonna make a sacrifice and how and even though it's Stan who agrees to be “I'll be the one erase my mind, it's fine, it's worth it”, it's a sacrifice for both. Ford at this point is willing to get his brother back and he has to lose him again. 

Stan and Ford, when they can finally work together, do bring out the best in each other. They just have been missing it for so long.

Post-mind return, Stan and Ford get along and that scene where they both threaten the bus driver gives a hint of what would happen if their powers were combined. We've never seen them working together as adults, they would be a really formidable duo.

Pines Family

[The Blind Eye has] such a great scene between Mabel and Wendy. We don't have a lot of scenes that are just them hanging out and she can kind of be like the cool older sister. Mabel's so obsessed with boys and Wendy's just like "yeah, whatever. They're a dime a dozen."

“in the storyboard, the postcard that Soos is holding up from New Orleans actually said Vegas and at the last minute we got really worried that people were gonna see that and think that that was a clue that Stan was Soos's deadbeat father. And because like our audience, we've trained them to look for clues and to connect dots, they start connecting dots that are not connected. And I called a late retake because, and I see people be like, “wouldn't that be cool if Stan was actually Soos's father” and I hate that headcanon. Whoever's listening and you think “that's a great idea!”-- that's a terrible idea!! Because it means that Stan ran out on his kid and then came back in his life. And weirdly pretends to not be his dad. It flies against the moral of this entire episode which is like, you know this guy who is Soos’ blood relative like cast him out and didn't come back and didn't make time for him and all these people did. These people are Soos’ real family and to say “Stan would be Soos' real father more if he was genetically–”, I'm like “no, no forget that!” Like relationships are about what you do. To me friendship is thicker than water and family is something you can create so I really didn't want anyone to think that we were suggesting that because to me, it actually wasn't just the wrong idea, it was like thematically against what the show's about.” "

"[In NWHS] Every character faces their worst possible choice, which is “Mabel must choose between Dipper and Stan” and “Soos must choose between Stan and the kids,” like ���guard that thing with your life. I'm not going to explain to you why.” I believe that Soos would do anything to guard Mr Pines's secrets and these are the only two characters that could possibly make him doubt Stan, these two kids that he loves so much."

"For [DD&MD], you want to set it up as being like [Ford]'s like the coolest toy that's down in the basement that Dipper really wants to play with and he is not allowed to play with him."

"The first three quarters of the series are sort of about Dipper's crush on Wendy and this final quarter is sort of about his crush on the Author. He's such a fan of this guy and he's so used to being denied that which he's a fan of and he's never found anybody who cares about his nerdy stuff. Mabel doesn't care, Stan doesn't care, Soos cares but on a different level. He's so hungry for the approval of somebody like Ford This idea that they would bond over a nerdy board game felt like sort of the way to do this big idea in a sort of grounded way that I like better than like Ford presented Dipper with the Five Trials of the Genius Boy. “I passed these when I was your age! Can you do it too?” and it's like nope he just likes the same dork game that he does."

"The arrival of Ford is creating the two sets of twins starting to pair off between the Brainiacs and the Maniacs"

"Actually I enjoyed that [Ford putting the die in a cheap plastic case] got a little bit of a reckless side because it shows you the Stan part of him. The Stan part of Ford, the little bit that likes a little bit of danger, he likes a little bit of risk. If he would show that side, it would be in when he feels at ease, with a kindred spirit. Around Dipper he’d be like “isn't this pretty cool?” He'd never be that irresponsible around Stan.  I like that Dipper is sort of a little bit of a Achilles heel for Ford as well. Ford has certain blind spots and Dipper exacerbates some of those just because he's willing to encourage, he's willing to “yes and” Ford towards whatever dumb idea he might have."

"Dipper, Mabel, Stan and Ford, they're all characters who need each other. Without Dipper, Mabel's just in a fantasy land. Without Mabel, Dipper is just sort of just spiraling into misery, spiraling into his own neurosis and not being pulled into those social situations, not growing as a person."

"You want [Stan] to be true to our various awful grandfathers, so I feel like for the most part you know that [being shitty to women] a plausible thing for Stan to do, that you only forgive because you know he's not a role model. Nobody wants to be like Stan. The kids never look up to him. The only person who looks up to Stan is Soos and Soos is enough of a comedy character that you understand the joke is “oh this guy thinks the worst way to live is good.” And then at one point you realize why. We made it clear why Soos looks up to Stan is because he gave him his job. He gave him a father basically, he’s essentially Soos’ father. And of course Stan who's had a life of just chaos and disappointment, the only person who would be a surrogate son is [Soos] but also Soos has the biggest heart in the world. So only the biggest heart in the world could forgive all of Stan's many flaws and also if Soos can love Stan, then maybe there's something in there worth loving, then maybe we can too."

"Stan, even when he's sweet, he still has to threaten to murder his niece and nephew."

"I do think the value of [Stanchurian Candidate] is that we're learning just how important it is that [Stan]’s seen. At this point, the kids have become a surrogate family. At the beginning of the show, they were just kind of a little nuisance and then he kind of tried out getting the family from them that he never got from his brother and the idea that he would lose them to his brother is his greatest nightmare and the only way he can really express that is by trying to be impressive to them and trying to be his brother's rival."

"Ford offers Dipper this apprenticeship because Ford sees Dipper as somebody who's special like himself. That Ford's great flaw is arrogance. He believes that there's special people and everyone else and that you can be held back by your siblings. That human attachments are actually weaknesses. The song and dance that he's giving Dipper right now is the exact song of dance that he gave McGucket back when they were younger which is like “sure you could continue working on your job and computers but you and me are different. We're better than everyone else, we have a path that no one else can understand. Only us can do this.” And it’s a very seductive idea for Dipper but he starts to be a little insecure here. He’s kind of “I can't believe it” and he's sort of right to be suspicious because Dipper is a smart kid but Ford's projecting. Ford loves Dipper because he sees someone who tell him yes to everything. He'll never challenge him and if Dipper had taken Ford's apprenticeship,Dipper probably would have gone the way of McGucket, turned into a kind of insane paranoid hermit with no friends, just kind of losing his mind. Like it's a seductive offer but also ultimately Dipper needs to learn not to try to grow up too fast."

"This entire time Dipper's been having this journey of self-discovery and seeing his future as this wonderful thing that he can't wait for. Mabel has been, piece by piece, seeing her idea of the summer fall apart."

"As Ford and Dipper's relationship grow stronger, Stan and Mabel also find much more sort of connection. They both feel like the sibling that's getting kind of sidelined."

"I think [amnesiac!Stan] would be hardest on Soos, second hardest on Ford but Soos would show it. Probably third hardest on Mabel, fourth hardest on Dipper just because where their hearts are. Dipper's not heartless, that's a testament to just how heartbroken those other characters are."

Series goal+ The Finale

"So our idea was; the memory gun can erase a concept as designated by the dial. It stores it. It records you and it keeps that recording and that if you watch that recording things start to come back a little bit, that it hasn't actually completely erased it from your mind. It's more sublimated somewhere where it's really really hard to reach and in the series finale, my concept of Bill is that; if he hadn't gotten in all those forms and fought Stan, Stan is the one that destroyed Bill. Were it just the mind eraser itself that he would be sublimated somewhere but he was weakened in the mindscape and destroyed in the mindscape. But Stan's memories were being sublimated and by looking at the scrapbook in the same way that McGucket's memories come back, they start to come back to the surface."

"I think part of what makes [NWHS] work also is that it has the strongest ticking clock. Yeah, I mean. it has a literal ticking clock. Also the sun is going down it's also, the town is starting to drift apart as the characters are starting to drift apart. There's just such a sense of Doomsday and even though we have like a three-part apocalypse, to me nothing feels as apocalyptic as this episode now."

"The entire purpose of [ToTS] is that Stan and his brother have had this huge rivalry that remains to this day and threatens to tear apart Dipper and Mabel and briefly does, and then Dipper and Mabel are able to find their way together, which is meant to repair Stan and his brother's past."

"Here we're teeing up the rest of the conclusion of the series which is just “whoa this is different. The status quo is shifted and is it going to shift us?” and that was the mission of this entire story was shift. Shift things such that it pits Dipper and Mabel against each other so that they can ultimately make things right and fix their uncles’ trauma in the process."

"“Let's try to set things into motion such that all of these characters who we love, who love each other are placed at maximum odds”. So Ford's entire existence in the series is basically a wrench in the relationships between Stan, Dipper and Mabel, that Stan has had a sibling who he didn't get along with and they've grown up having this horrible rift. Dipper and Mabel are these two twins who love each other but are very very different and are at this sort of volatile growing up moment where if something goes wrong could they turn out like Stan and Ford."

"[The convincing Gideon] scene works for me because it sort of represents the full completion of Dipper's Wendy Arc. Even though he's talking about Gideon and Mabel, he's really talking about himself. That idea that you can't force someone to love you but you can strive to be someone worthy of loving. It really does come down to like be the best you, you can be and the right person will see and feel that."

"It was gonna be W1, W2, W3 and then some kind of goodbye story. I remember it being something vaguely about some sort of other time travel. Bringing Blendin back because he just kind of vamoosed in the middle of this big story. There was that discussed like time traveling back to the first day when the kids arrived. The challenge was thinking of a valuable arc. So like each episode needs to have like a new problem and a new resolution and I was trying to brainstorm what's something that could feel valuable for like a final episode after the apocalypse, after Stan's mind has been erased and he's in the process of getting it back. "

"The thing I remember I wrote one out it was it's the last day of summer. Dipper and Mabel are packing uh they're planning to go home, they're feeling like nostalgic, they kind of don't want to leave. Blendin shows up and he explains that there's all these time bubbles left over, these weird anomalies because of all the time business and what Bill has done and just to watch out and be careful. Then Dipper and Mabel actually accidentally trip into one of these bubbles that are sent back to the very first episode or actually beyond the first episode, their first day in Gravity Falls um and somehow this was meant their character arc was to go from being like a little sad that they're going to leave Gravity Falls to seeing what it was like on the first day. When they were scared to be in Gravity Falls. The idea is like their first day they're like “oh Grunkle Stan, he's this weird old man and we hate living in this house and like we missed our place of comfort back home! And this is a kind of scary new adventure that we don't like.”  The kids see their own growth and realize like “the way we felt about going to Gravity Falls like we don't think we can handle it, is how we feel about leaving.” That feeling of going into a new experience means that something new and exciting is going to happen you're going to grow. There was some thought that maybe over the course of that episode, Stan would get his memory back and something that the kids had done in the past would help him in the present, get his memory back.

"What's supposed to be happening here isn't that Stan's entire memory reappears in an instant. It's supposed to be a couple days of work and we see the beginning of that process when he looks at the scrapbook and then we're kind of jumping ahead a few days. maybe a week of just intensive memory therapy with Stan before he gets there."

"When we were trying to crack the half hour episode after Weirdmageddon, it felt like we were just kind of wallowing and Stan not having his memories. It was a very depressing thing. And we didn’t get to have Stan for the last episode, which was like “it's a great it's great i think you get the emotion like in this episode. It tears you apart when you see it. You could last a little bit longer on it. But going much longer, then you just feels like well what are we doing? Why are we just kind of wallowing in our own sorrows for no good reason.”

"When we had discussed the idea of an episode beyond this episode, a fourth episode, it was basically 20 minutes of [amnesiac!Stan]. This is so intense, you might think you want it but good lord, this is enough."

"Bill singing “We’ll meet again” was something that just felt like the perfect reference because this is kind of an ending about endings in a lot of ways and we know we know Bill's going to be defeated. We know that people like Vill and have grown attached to him and for him to sing “We’ll meet again” is sort of the perfect mysterious way to say like “I might be going, I might not be going.” It’s a reference to Dr Strangelove, a movie that famously ends with nuclear apocalypse and the song “We’ll meet again” so it's for those pop culture savvy. It's already tinged with a kind of a fear and an irony and the apocalypse built in, so it's perfect on a number of levels."

"The concept of the Zodiac as existing in our current canon is this idea that the prophecy was that friends and enemies would need to come together, seemingly impossible alliances would need to be made to stand up to Bill for this prophetic moment. You know that characters like Gideon who was who used to be an enemy, characters like Pacifica, like Robbie, that we've reached the point where thanks to the kids’ kindness and growth, they are now friends with Pacifica, they've resolved Robbie's jerkiness, they've helped McGucket with his memory. They've even overcome this issue with Gideon in W1 and so it seems like friends and enemies have all been restored, leaving only one thing which is Stan and Ford have to shake hands. And their pride once again is what dooms the entire world but they get so close."

"It's clear Stan, even though he's being stubborn here and holds things up, he's ready to do it.  He clasps Ford's hand and then Ford can't help but correct his ignorant brother with something that doesn't matter at all after professing how important all this is and how important it is to put pettiness aside, he's the one who ends up being petty in the end."

"I like that Stan [during the deal] is just thinking “all right, think white, think white, think white.” He's like “think about nothing but sitting on your lazy boy.” "

"Stan and Bill had never interacted in the series up until this moment  because he had just been taken over when he was asleep. We'd seen a lot of Ford and Bill, but Stan and Bill has never happened. And Bill sort of represents all the mystery and weirdness, and Stan is the guy who just wants to have a good life and protect his family. He's the one who never invited Bill in but he's willing to take Bill out."

"If Mabel's going home with a pig, Dipper's going home with this symbol of his friendship with Wendy. And even Stan he's wearing that Mabel sweater. That's a visual symbol of; he's softened up, he's embraced family, he doesn't need to be the tough guy all the time."

[mourninglamby]

I don’t know if you’ve seen it or if you’ve already talked about it but do you know that one video “Dream isn’t the villain dream smp” from like two years ago. You’ve probably have talked about it but it just popped up on YouTube for me and I’m reading the comments and some said and I quote “Tommy is the reason everything went to shit” and I about I LOST MY SHIT. Anyways, your thoughts? (Side note but I feel some people didn’t watch the same dsmp that I watched)

I will never waste any of my precious, finite time on earth to watch something so stupid. I don’t care to debate or engage with something or someone so harmful and obtuse. It’s not worth my time and frankly makes me panicked because I feel a wave of hopelessness for my fellow man and peers. Sorry if that’s dramatic but I literally refuse to entertain those people because they are so aggressively missing the fucking point that I don’t even know if they understand what theyre saying. I’ll elaborate on why in the following paragraphs.

Victim blaming is serious, even in the context of fictional characters, and affects the real world. People who believe that a teenager is responsible for their own abuse, stalking, torture, and murder doled out by an adult are fundamentally wrong. Point blank. I lack the skills or patience to fully convince someone who is conscious of this and still approaches it with a victim blamer mindset to think any differently. You have to not see children as developmentally and cognitively different from adults to think this way. You have to deny a power dynamic that is inherent to the child-adult relationship. Which is something that child abusers use to excuse their abuse. So fucking watch it.

C!tommy was abused. C!dream is the main antagonist because of his incessant, malignant desire to cause him harm over anything else. These are truths that are undeniable unless you are completely delusional or lying about the events of the story. Or you are in Clayton ray huffs cult where apparently he himself comparing his character to JOE GOLDBERG from You doesn’t mean anything. God help your absent minds.

Just because the word “abuse” is not said aloud to explain this dynamic (which might be covert victim blaming in itself) does not excuse apologism. I urge anyone still “on the fence” about this to read about abusive relationships, the signs of abuse, and how it affects child victims. Please. And also get the idea of a perfect victim out of your fucking heads - abuse, especially in childhood, alters your brain chemistry and interrupts your development. I’m essentially just saying you HAVE to be sympathetic when discussing the power dynamics of dsmp and you have to be somewhat informed on power dynamics and the dialectics of trauma when discussing the dream and tommy shit or you WILL say something that is a talking point in abuse apologist rhetoric. I don’t care how many times Clayton or even Tom Simons downplays it. This was abuse, c!Dream is a serial killer stalker child abuser, and c!tommy is his victim. The end.

[penaltyboxboxbox]

i love ur charlos parents au sm!! im not requesting art or anything if u dont feel like drawing (tho youre a phenomenal artist!!), but i was wondering if you wanted to share any more details abt the au? i thinks its so cute haha and would love to know more. also hope ur having a great day!

I LOVE THIS AU TOO i do want to draw more i always have ideas for it.... but i will gladly ramble about my lore ive developed

1. is this an mpreg au even i do not know or care to know. yes these are their biological children who look like them and share their genes but how did we get here ill leave that to you to assume. either way both of them definitely wanted big families and even tho i draw them with 2 kids i think they want at least 4..... charles wants a daughter and carlos says the same but secretly he only wants sons. hes picturing a future football team and also doesn't understand women conceptually

2. i actually think carlos3 was an accident child and charlos get shotgun married over it. its part of the reason why theres a bit of a gap between their first and second child. they had to like reassess and settle stuff after kind of having to get their shit together and make honest men of each other.

3. they get divorced at some point during all this mainly due to SAINZ SENIOR PRESSURE. probably while carlos3 is like highschool age. charles talks so much shit and then proceeds to get emotional like I SHOULDNT TALK ABOUT YOUR FATHER THIS WAY vs carlos like. bro tries to just act like they are normal regular friends now like man thats not how this works....charles always plays cool irl but is annoyed as hell underneath. very good coparents though....always at all the events together. when the kids stay at sainz family evil mansion for the summer they come back to charles so villainous and feral. he has to go supernanny on them...

4. charlos DO get back together after like 10 years of being separated lol. and yeah there were lots of messy nights out and not quite reconciliations throughout that time. very confusing family dynamic but theyre happy at the end

5. carlos3 grows up to be a guy who just kind of piggybacks onto whatever business endeavors his dads are doing. ultimate nepotism hire. hes not bad at what hes doing he just never really found that passion. his passion is like.....posting peaky blinders quotes on instagram. hes kind of a failson but hes also the perpetual baby for charlos so they just...coddled him too much his whole life djhdksndksbs.... younger son herve becomes a FASHION MODEL!!!! hes beautiful gorgeous and also a perfect nepo child so he's ripe for this career....he walks runways in paris

thats all i can think of for now thankssssss ily

[hamaonoverdrive]

How to get into Hokuto no Ken, A Guide

Hokuto no Ken, localized as Fist of the North Star, is the wildly popular and influential series penned by Buronson and drawn by Hara starting in 1983. It is a timeless tragedy about the power of love that taps into imagery from both Catholicism and Buddhism, while also being an homage to a variety of western 80's pop culture from Mad Max to Blade Runner to Rocky.

In the current anime fanscape, HnK is perhaps best known for being one of the key influences behind Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and Berserk, however it should be known that the series' influence permeates the entire Shonen genre. Traces of the tropes and dynamics that it popularized can be seen throughout Shonen today, from Naruto's drive for love and friendship that contrasts with Sasuke's rejection of the idea and desire to sever any bonds of love, to the implementation of Haki in One Piece.

So with all that in mind, let's get into the specifics.

The place to start with this franchise is very straightforward: read the original manga or watch the anime adaptation. There are a number of movies that retell parts of the original story, but they all have different downsides and cut important aspects of the source material and thus are a bad place to start.

This primary canon is broken down into two (three) parts, as follows:

HnK or "HnK1" is the core of the series, starting at the Shin arc through the originally intended ending at chapter 136/episode 108. Most of the time if someone is referring to HnK, this is what they are talking about. The beginning of the series is a bit of a slow start, bouncing between villains of the week before actually kicking off the primary conflict (especially in the anime, more on this later). This is somewhat typical for the era-- these early arcs were written while the authors had no idea if they were going to get dropped from Shonen Jump. For this reason, I highly recommend sticking with the series until the Fang Clan Chieftain and Jagi arcs even if the beginning hasn't clicked with you yet.

HnK2 is the continuation of the series, where the authors were pressured to continue working on the series because of the money it was raking in. This naming convention comes from the title of the anime for this portion of the story, chapters 136-210/episodes 110-152. Quite frankly, the fact that this is past the originally intended ending is very evident; Buronson has been quoted as never re-reading it after publication.[1] It's very much worth checking out at least once if you enjoyed HnK1-- there are absolutely memorable characters and fights, as well as some of the best art in the series-- but be prepared for a general drop in writing quality.

"Post-Kaioh HnK" or "HnK3" is the last leg of the original manga, which has never been adapted elsewhere. Chapters 211-245.

Content Warnings

Explicit Sexual Assault

The elephant in the room when discussing this series is that some social aspects of it are very of-the-era. There are two instances of explicit sexual assault, which get dismissed as "well the perpetrator didn't have the best execution, but he did have the right idea..." The pages/timestamps to avoid this are:

Manga volume 02 pages 287-289; volume 03, pages 063-066 (Ultimate Edition numbering)

Anime episode 24, 13:04-13:53; episode 26 08:29-09:22

Mild Gore

I almost feel like it goes without saying, but this is famously the series where the protagonist makes baddies heads explode. While this is never depicted in graphic detail, HnK as a whole is going to be a bad fit if this distresses you in any way.

An early example of the aforementioned head asplosions.

Photosensitivity

The anime makes period-typical use of flashing lights in nearly every episode. If you are photosensitive (and can't take measures to mitigate the flashing), you should read the manga instead.

If you want to read the manga...

The manga is the way that I personally recommend getting into the series due to Hara's absolutely gorgeous art.

The manga is also generally seen as the true 'canon'; For example, colorschemes used in subsequent works typically draw from colored chapter/volume covers rather than the Toei anime. For this reason, this version of the series is what the Japanese audience usually thinks of when they think of HnK.

I know some people are very passionate about redhead Mamiya and crest toothpaste-head Rei, but the Toei colors functionally exist in their own separate continuity.

Reading the manga in English is far better now than it was even three years ago, as there are multiple English versions now available.

The official VIZ release is the defacto highest quality out there (support the print copies if you can). While there are a few odd translation choices and the SFX have been replaced with English ones, it has the highest fidelity copies of the original art and even has the original color pages that have not been published since the original Shonen Jump release.

To think that these wonderful colored pages were completely inaccessible, even to JP audiences, until Viz started rolling out the English volumes.

However, the Viz release is ongoing and only covers until volume 11 at the time of writing. If you want to read the rest of HnK2 (or highly value the original SFX and a smoother translation), you should seek out the official eOneBook release. This is sometimes labelled as "Digital - 2018" and is a rip of an official English translation that was released for a specialized eReader, copies of which been floating around online since about 2020.

There is also an older set of scanlations out there, which I would not recommend reading; The image quality is low-resolution and muddy, and there are a number of edgy translation choices such as inserting a homophobic slur that was not in the original text. I only mention this translation because it's the one on many online manga sites. Please love yourself and look elsewhere if you realize that you are reading these scans.

(left) English-language scanlations (right) Viz release from 2022. I distinctly remember first reading these pages and then immediately scouring the web to find a version of it that didn't have the contrast blown out, only to discover that this quality was all that available. Now, newcomers to the series don't have to worry about this at all.

There are two different versions of the complete manga, the original tankobons (27 total volumes) and the Ultimate Edition (17 volumes).[2] Both the Viz release and the eOnebook release are derived from the Ultimate Editions while the old scanlations are from the original tankobons, so this can be an easy way to identify which version you are reading.

As to what makes these versions different aside from chapters per volume, the Ultimate Editions clean up some of the art in the last few volumes and also includes "Last Piece", a one-shot by Buronson and Hara inserted between HnK1 and HnK2. This was written as a part of the 30th anniversary celebration, and Hara's art looks quite different 30 years down the road, making the abrupt change in style rather jarring-- consider this your heads-up.

TL;DR Read the Viz version for volumes 1-11, and the eOnebook rips for the rest.

If you want to watch the anime...

The 1984 anime adaptation of HnK is an all-time classic. It's often what western fans will think of first, between the manga being legally inaccessible in English until very recently and constant anime reruns in some markets (especially parts of Italy and France).

Toei has a tendency to copyright-strike anime clips on Youtube, so hopefully this clip of the opening will stand the test of time.

The anime genuinely excels in a few departments, namely: music, sound design, and voice acting. Even if you don't decide to watch the anime, I highly recommend looking up the OPs/EDs and putting on the OST while reading the manga.

That said, there are definitely some downsides to the anime, a lot of which were typical for Toei animations of the era. Character models and direction are all over the place, some of the animation itself aged like milk, flashing light effects make the series difficult to get through for photosensitive viewers, and stock footage gets reused many times. There also isn't a complete English dub of the show, as it got cancelled after episode 36.

And the biggest caveat to the anime: Filler episodes. Oooooh boy, early HnK filler episodes are baaaad. They don't match the rest of the series tonally and completely botch any sense of pacing. Remember how earlier I said that the series takes a while to get its footing because of early bad-guy-of-the-week format? The anime drags this out for about twice as long by adding new bad guys of the week.

The infamous "Nanto Cannonball Fist", where users are launched from a cannon and descend on their opponents with a sword. Yeah, I don't know how this counts as a school of martial arts, either. [img source]

For a first watch through, I highly recommend following a filler episode guide to skip these episodes in the Shin arc and get a better feel for what the series is about. Post Shin-arc filler tends to be a lot better, as these episodes match the manga's original tone and often fix pacing problems in the source material rather than worsening them.

That said, there are a few early filler episodes that are well-liked by fans for one reason or another, which I will detail here.

Episode 17: A (non-canonical) view into the internal politics of Shin's army.

Episode 18: In which Kenshiro fights a tank.

Episode 19: The goofiest of the goofy filler episodes. If you want to watch one filler episode to get a sense of what they are like, watch this one.[3]

Episode 21: A continuation of some of the conflicts from episode 17.

Episode 38: Features one of the best-written woman martial artists you'll see in this franchise. (This is after Shin arc, but I had to point her out. Watch this one.)

Rage Quitter 87's fansite also has an excellent episode-by-episode guide covering anime and manga differences, which can be very useful for highlighting some of the more subtle differences between the two.

An anime remake that more closely follows the manga has been announced, but we have no further details on it at the time of writing. (I wouldn't hold my breath for this, it could be several years before we know more.)

TL;DR skip the episodes listed here under "Shin arc".

So I got through the main canon, what next?

The sheer amount of secondary content for HnK out there can be overwhelming. It's one of the most profitable IPs of all time, with the bulk of those profits coming from pachinko machines that will never make it to the west outside Youtube phone clips and asset-flip games (more on this later). When the series isn't being used to sell soap, there are a number of supplemental works that are absolutely worth checking out. In this guide I will focus on works that are currently available in English.

The Official Gaidens

A series of manga with different protagonists and created with different creative teams, the Hokuto side-stories fill in some of the gaps in the primary canon. Most of them are very loving additions to the continuity and are a good place to go after finishing the primary material.

Toki Gaiden: Silvery Savior follows Toki starting from the founding of the Village of Miracles and ends after his climactic final fight, providing his lens on the events of the series and his relationship with Raoh. This gaiden does a good job of understanding what fans like about the series, and has a lot of secondary character interactions that were missing in the original work such as conversations between different Ken-oh underlings.

Jagi Gaiden: Flower of Carnage follows Jagi through his childhood, interspersed with the events of canon. This gaiden does a lot to explain why Jagi ended up the way he did, provides additional context to what the Hokuto children's training looked like, and how the world changed when the apocalypse happened. cw: rape

Yuria Gaiden: The Affectionate Mother Star follows Yuria before the apocalypse happens, giving us a snapshot of domesticity with Kenshiro, a better understanding of her abilities, and illustrating how her life was always influenced by those who had fallen for her.

Juza Gaiden: The Wandering Clouds follows Juza as meanders around canonical events, giving insight into what he was like as he shifted from wandering without drive or purpose to becoming a sworn guardian to the Last Nanto General.

Rei Gaiden: Bloody Wolf's Darkness is one that I wish I could leave off of this list, but that I will include for completeness' sake. It follows Rei before his appearance in HnK as he goes through the exact same character arc that he has in canon. The city that he wanders into has a setup directly out of a porn plot, thoroughly justifying the manga's ecchi genre-tag. cw: sexual assault. repeatedly.

Souten no Ken and Souten no Ken: Regenesis

Souten no Ken, otherwise known as Fist of the Blue Sky, is a prequel series that follows Kenshiro Kasumi, 62nd successor to Hokuto Shinken and uncle to the Kenshiro from HnK, as he has martial arts adventures and tumbles with gangsters in 1930's Shanghai. The series revisits many of the character archetypes from HnK and plays around with the same plot points in different contexts, ultimately dealing with themes of friendship and fate.

Souten no Ken is a complete manga, drawn by Tetsuo Hara with plot supervised by Buronson. Souten no Ken: Regenesis is a direct sequel that is currently ongoing, drawn by Hideki Tsuji and written by Hiroyuki Yatsu. Regenesis has been on hiatus since 2020 due to Hideki Tsuji's ongoing health problems.

While there are animes with both of these names, here I am referring specifically to the manga-- neither anime is worth your time.

There. Now you've seen the only things that matter from both animes.

Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise

Released in Japan as "Hokuto ga Gotoku" (Like a Big Dipper), Lost Paradise is an action-adventure game from the studio behind the Yakuza/Like a Dragon/Ryu ga Gotoku series. Fans of the RGG franchise will immediately recognize the game structure and mechanics, which balance advancing the main story thread with a semi-open world where the player can stumble into comedic sidestories and play assorted minigames.

Bartending is just one of the jobs that Kenshiro can take up in Lost Paradise.

The core story of the game features an entirely original cast, but most of the main characters of HnK show up for just long enough to have fights and cutscenes full of loving references to the source material. It's pure fanservice, in the non-horny sense of the word.

Team RGG really knows how to nail dynamic fight intros and epic QTEs.

Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage and Ken's Rage 2

Even though some of the character design choices for this game are painfully mid-aughties (looking at you, tribal tattoo pattern Ken), this intro still goes hard.

For many years the Ken's Rage series were the definitive HnK games, and with good reason. A Musou game much like the Warriors series, you can play as most main characters from the series and mow down waves upon waves of bandits. Some may find the gameplay repetitive, but it can also be relaxing depending on how you look at it. (If you've played a Warriors game before, you know what you're getting into.)

Ken's Rage 2 in particular brings "Dream Mode" to the table, which is a "what if" story mode told from the POV of each playable character. This gives us a lot of interactions that we didn't get to see in canon (such as the delightfully shippy Jagi story featuring Amiba) and also expanding on some characters that should have gotten more screentime in the original material.

Hokuto no Ken (1986 animated movie)

It's the movie produced by (largely) the same team as the anime, created simultaneously to the show. If you want to know what the anime would look like if it wasn't trying to stretch every yen as thin as it could, this is your ticket.

That said, there are some odd choices made to carve a 110 minute long arc out of the early manga. The movie starts with Ken receiving his iconic scars, and ends with the first confrontation with Ken-oh.

DD HnK

This officially kicks off the "HnK comedy series" part of this list. I feel like comedy in particular can be subject to personal tastes, so keep in mind that each of these projects approaches the series from a different angle and that some may resonate better than others.

DD HnK is a comedic take on what the Hokutobros would get up to if the world didn't end. They end up working at a convenience store managed by Ryuken (voiced by Akira Kamiya, the original VA for Kenshiro), where hijinks ensue when other characters from the series show up.

It's worth noting that there are two animes and a manga with this name. The first anime is a Flash-based ONA (which is hard to find nowadays, for understandable reasons) and the second anime is the TV anime; Both of these series as well as the manga are very largely different. All series are complete, although the English fan translation for the manga is ongoing.

DD stands for "Design Deformation", evidently.

Ichigo Aji (Strawberry Flavor)

An average day with the Holy Emperor.

Ichigo Aji follows Souther on his quest to make some good friends. :) No really, that's more or less the premise of this spinoff.

While there are animated IA shorts at the end of every episode of DD HnK2, the meat and potatoes of this series are in the manga. The manga is ongoing (albeit on long-term hiatus) and the English fantranslation is currently incomplete (also on hiatus). Each volume of the manga also has a serious chapter following different characters from the series, serving as "mini gaidens" of sorts.

Genius Amiba's Other World Overlord Legend - Even If I Go to Another World, I Am a Genius!! Huh? Was I Mistaken...

In what originally started as an April Fool's Joke, the Amiba Isekai is perhaps one of the most unexpected additions to this franchise. The story begins after Amiba's death at Kenshiro's hands, where he finds himself transported to a fantasy realm where magic and creatures like dragons are real. He decides to use his self-proclaimed "genius" to learn magic in lieu of the martial arts that he studied earlier.

This manga series started in 2021 and is is still ongoing, although the English fantranslation is incomplete and has been on hiatus.

End of the Century's Drama Shooting Arc

The End of the Century's Drama Shooting Arc, more colloquially known as the Actor AU, is a retelling of the series as though it was a live-action TV show, covering the efforts and foibles of the actors and production crew as they struggle to produce the series.

The manga for this series started in 2021 alongside the Amiba Isekai and is ongoing, although the English fan translation is currently incomplete (Noticing a reoccurring trend here? a12 and Sakura Leaves, if you're out there, we really miss your work 🥹). If you can navigate the points system (new chapters are free within a few days of release) and use Google Lens, you can get a rough translation from the official Comics Zenon website.

The Winckler Dub

While not intentionally a comedy spinoff, I'm including the Winckler Dub in this section. There are apocryphal stories about this dub being produced as a means to teach Japanese schoolchildren basic English, interviews point to this dub being a sincere project to create a version of this series palatable to an English-speaking audience.

Please, just unmute this series of clips.

The only editing I did here was to append the files. They just. Speak with pauses like that.

With several downright bizarre directing decisions (Raoh is a pirate now, evidently?) and some of the strangest line-reads I've heard in an anime, this relic of an older localization industry can easily fall under "so bad it's good". Watch this with a group of friends after having a few drinks or late night at an anime convention, ideally.

The dub does not cover the whole series, instead bundling sets of 4 episodes into a series of 6 movie-length "sagas": Shin, Ray (sic), Souther, Toki, Raoh, and Kaioh.

Hokuto no Ken: Legends ReVIVE

I feel like it would be a bit disingenuous to finish this list without mentioning Legends ReVIVE, the current ongoing gacha for the franchise. (Worth noting: I am the admin for the unofficial discord server for this game, which is also the largest and most active English-speaking community for HnK.[4])

This game is possibly one of the biggest lovenotes to the franchise as a whole, with character releases that reach into the most obscure pieces of fiction, from Last Piece to (formerly) Pachinko-only Gento practitioners. Early character models and story cutscenes were entirely asset-flips from pachinko models, but things have grown far past that in the game's past 4.5 years.

As a part of the 40th anniversary celebration for the manga, it was mentioned that there would be a new continuation of the manga's plot featured in-game, but at the time of writing we have little elaboration on this.

For a gacha, the game is relatively F2P friendly and doesn't ask much of your time on a day-to-day basis. But at the end of the day, it is a gacha that relies on predatory monetization and exploitation of gambling addictions. Caveat emptor.

But what about [x]...?

Legend of the True Savior: this movie series is another adaptation of the manga's plot, but this one doesn't really bring anything novel to the table. The same caveats about making a movie out of the manga apply, in that some odd choices get made to get arcs to fit in a movie timespan. It's there I guess, if you can stomach the artstyle.

Shin HnK/New Fist of the North Star: is victim-blamey rape apologia. There really isn't any reason I can recommend watching it, outside maybe looking up the final fight (where Junichi Hayama's direction really stands out) and the closing song (Oasis by Gackt).

Animated Gaidens (ex Ten no Haoh, Kenshiro Den, etc): these are one of the few things I haven't seen, and for the most part they don't come up in discussion. They're probably fine, but I just don't have the knowledge to comment on them.

Live Action Movie: don't. It's not even so-bad-it's-good, just don't.

In Conclusion

I hope this guide helped take the edge off of trying to figure out how to navigate such a sprawling series, and that it was genuinely informative about both what each work entails and the general context around it. This franchise is something I've really enjoyed digging into over the years and I did my best to convey that love and enthusiasm in this guide.

I may write more meta about HnK in the future, because I absolutely have a lot more to say. There's a lot for me to go on about regarding what the series means to me and why more people should pick it up, as well as putting together standalone character analyses from assorted ramblings on Discord.

Thanks for reading!

References

[1] From running the provided link through DeepL:

Buronson: By the way, I don't read much when a work is published in book form. As far as Fist of the North Star is concerned, the second part has never been published. Interviewer: What? Not even once? You didn't read it at all? Buronson: That's right. But I read the whole book from the beginning the other day.

[2] Not to be confused with the unrelated Master Edition, which was the first attempt to bring the manga to the English market. This version is a full-color version of the original tankobon release, of which only the first 9 volumes were completed. It can be a neat novelty to check out once you're familiar with the series, but the non-Hara colorings can be a mixed bag.

[3] There is a story that this episode was so goofy that it made Hara and Buronson visit Toei in person and tell them to cut that shit out. This claim comes from the book "Our Favorite Fist of the North Star" , which is a fanbook that featured some interviews with members of the anime studio staff, with absolutely zero input from Hara and Buronson themselves. Between the fact that Hara and Buronson were both stated to have been incredibly busy with producing HnK and did not have time to watch the anime and the fact that this claim directly contradicts how they barely met in-person during the production of the series, it seems likely that this bit was made up as a gaff and/or hyperbole by the interviewee.

[4] There are also smaller, more fandom oriented, centers for discussion-- but I'm not about to link them on a post that gets recirculated publicly.

Special Thanks

@/KiliHito (discord) for helping me source the interviews, digging into the truth about the fabled Nanto Cannonball episode, and giving me context for some of HnK's influence in modern shonen.

@takis-breathing-dragon for having the Winckler Dub clips on hand and spotting some typos.

[snowblack-charcoalwhite]

One thing I don't understand is why they took time to build up Aemond in part 1, with its complexity and ambition. And then ss2 turned him into a villain so quickly? And why did they choose Aegon to be the one who suffered cruel treatment from family members to gain viewers' sympathy, while they turned him into a rapist in ss1? The sudden change in the approach of the two characters in ss2 left me scratching my head.

Good day/night!

IMO the reasons for it are the same ones I mentioned in this post (I hope you don't mind if I quote it, here and below):

"... IMO we need to take into account two things: 1) HotD writers apparently have received a commission to create a show with a clear as day feminist agenda to regain the audience's favor lost after Daenerys business in S8 of GoT; 2) the most important - they are fucking incompetent, and so they could ruin the characters they "love" just as effortlessly as they do with those they "hate" (sometimes they even fail with the latter - because they are kind of supposed to ruin them but, once again, are incompetent)".

On the one hand, the goal there was to make the show as popular and as appealing to the audience (including general audience, of course) as possible; on the other hand, it was supposed to be done in a certain way.

On no account was a TG character (i.e. the one from anti-feminist side), and a male one at that, supposed to become (or to end up, at least) as an absolute fan favourite. It is not a secret that after season 1 Aemond's popularity reached nearly cosmic levels (according to some surveys, he was the third among the best-liked characters, after Rhaenyra and Daemon - and not that far from them) after the little screen time he had. Imagine what could have been if Aemond got proper development and was presented as a complex, well written character with amount of screen time that he was due as one of the main characters of season 2. There would be a risk of him overshadowing Daemon or even the one true heroine - Rhaenyra. The HotD team couldn't have that - so they reduced Aemond's screen time to bare minimum. As for him becoming a villain, here I go back to the post mentioned above:

"... I really don't know whether Condal and the rest of HotD team are ruining Aemond on purpose - or are just trying to legit create a compelling arc for him by presenting him as a bullied kid with a fuckton of issues who one day just snapped and fully went into a psycho killer mode. Both options are possible - and actually both of them might be true because (and here goes yet another HotD problem) it really feels like the writers who work on the show have trouble communicating and coordinating their ideas. One pushes for one thing, another - for another, and as a result we have characters who act like they get a personality/brain transplant every episode (Daemon and Alicent in S1 are the prime examples of that)".

As for Aegon, the way writers go about his development is (or has turned out to be) quite messy as well. In season 1, he was made a canonical rapist (and the writers just had to know that such a character won't be received well by the audience) - yet Sara Hess tried to explain how it was because Aegon just never knew what consent was. In season 2 he is being presented as a dumb, reckless boy - but one deeply unhappy and in constant suffering. It's like the audience is supposed to roll their eyes at his poor decisions but also to pity him. And it seems to work exactly like that! Why did they do it? My guess is that HBO people want to improve their chances at the Emmys - and characters like Aegon are just the right material for it. Exploitation? Absolutely. But thanks to that, at least Tom was given a chance to actually demonstrate his talent. And at the same time, once again, a Green character can't be better that the Blacks in everything, right? So show!Aegon is being dumbed down and forced to make some questionable decisions (but still manages to have the most consistent character arc out of all the Greens - which says something about the writing level for this season).

P.S. A little off topic: the thing is that the sympathies towards Aegon from the audience might prove stronger than the writers predicted (actually, from what I've seen for the past week, the same goes for Aemond - he is not hated nearly as much as could have been expected, at least for now). And I think the actors are to thank for that: Tom has been absolutely smashing it this season (his Aegon really is a livewire) and Ewan manages to save every second of screen time he gets to remind the audience via his microexpressions and scene presence why so many people were enchanted by Aemond in the first place. Legends.

[goamu-blog]

Want to say I wanted to like SJ and YQY as a ship, I tried to like them as a ship, I read fics and saw arts but it just didn't work for me because I can't get their canon selves out of my mind, which is a first for me when it comes to shipping. These are my thoughts on them and from talks I had in a fic comment section with the author.

Firstly, their innate personalities would not match well together in a romantic sense. YQY is much too passive in regards to SJ. Its because of their brotherly bonds that YQY is so passive towards SJ and would not make a good match for SJ.

It feels like YQY wouldn't be able to handle SJ. Especially SJ more conniving sides. YQY would tolerate but still disapprove of some of SJ's personality sides. The books show that SJ tried to reach out to YQY, but because of broken promises and their brotherly bonds, YQY always took on a passive stance and is not suited to be with SJ in a romantic sense.

There is no reciprocation in their acts. SJ tried to reach out many times, YQY does not, YQY never tried to reach out to SJ in any way that mattered, so they never had reciprocation.

Not saying YQY wouldn't have his own issues with his past, but YQY always cared more about keeping his secrets and wallowing in self-pity and guilt than he did about SJ. He is mainly responsible for SJ turning out the way he did. If YQY didn't want to tell SJ the truth, fine, but he should have told SJ the way he treated some of his disciples was unacceptable and not allowed it to continue. If YQY did the bare minimum, then SJ story wouldn't have turned out the way it did. YQY is a toxic enabler and wilfully ignorant.

He completely enabled SJ'sworst tendencies, which made SJ go down the route he did. YQY is willing to let SJ go and allow him to drown in his own loneliness, resentment, and despair. YQY would watch, allow it to continue, and do nothing.

YQY had to have an idea of what SJ went through and even then he told SJ to adjust himself for other when they were disciples, to try to get along with the other disciples when none of them tried to reach out to SJ and spread rumors about him. It was always SJ that was the problem and needed to conform to fit in, never anyone else.

YQY never openly defended SJ from all those rumors or anyone else in the sect. When others asked YQY why he treated SJ nicely and why he would want SJ memories to return when SY took over, all he did was vaguely smile.

YQY never tried to openly defend SJ or try to restore SJ memories. YQY, like everyone else, preferred SY over SJ. To me, YQY affection/trust for SJ seems a bit surface level, I think he mostly felt obligation and guilt. He also doubted SJ innocence when LQG died. It doesn't matter if YQY would have tried to help SJ, he still doubted SJ and believed SJ could do that.

YQY actions when it comes to SJ aren't proactive. They are always a belated reaction. Only asking/acting when it's the point of no return. In the water prison(he let SJ be taken there), he asked about LQG, and he asked if things would have been different if SJ treated LBH better (it was YQY that allowed SJ to treat LBH that way). SJ knew that it was pointless to question those things because it was already too late.

YQY only decided to act when SJ legs got torn off. When SJ was literally being torn apart, then YQY decided that was a good enough reason to act. When it was far too late and irrevocable damage had been done. Didn't forget about the red string.

Had a talk about that in a fic comment section and liked the authors thoughts on it, will quote them: "The red string thing is funny because it broke in the end, and if as everyone says, the bleeding in PIDW extra shows that their 'fate is broken so it must be the hint for their red string', then the red string broke because of LBH(og), then wouldn't it actually mean YQY and SJ's so-called 'red string' was meant to be broken, because SJ was (as og villain) destined to encounter LBH. If the og story as meant by Airplane-bro was supposed to be 'as it was fixed by Shen Yuan', then the so-called red string was not meant to last. It was meant to be broken, because YQY is ultimately a passer-by in SJ's life. Very influential presence, but a passer-by nonetheless. Comrades, brothers, each other's support in the toughest times of their lives even, but never romantic." : end quote.

In a relationship, YQY would not take initiative and would be spineless, never stand up to SJ. He would let SJ self-destruct, drown in resentment, and self-hatred. YQY is too passive in regards to SJ, and there is no reciprocation on YQY side. YQY wouldn't openly defend or speak up for SJ against others and their rumors. YQY would never act until irrevocable damage has already been done.

Even if they cleared up the misunderstanding between them, they still would not be suited for a romantic relationship because of their innate personalities. YQY would always be passive, and SJ needs someone more challenging and passionate and has a personality that can match his.

To me, them being together feels like settling. They would have a passionless/lukewarm relationship, neither of them would have fun in it or enhance their lives. I don't feel like there could be a romantic spark/chemistry between them. It feels like a tepid relationship.

I think the best relationship between SJ/YQY is a brotherly one. With SJ being a grumpy lil bro to YQY doting older bro. SJ telling YQY not to be reckless, YQY wanting SJ to have friends, being proud when SJ gets along with others.

So, yeah, those are my thoughts on SJ/YQY. Not trying to hate on that ship or anyone that ships them, and I hope it didn't come across that way.

This is the first time I had a strong no for a ship and not just a casual no, and I wanted to get my thoughts in ordering as to why.

Not that a reason is needed to not like a ship, but this one is different for me. Also, I'm a bit sad that SJ/YQY is the most popular Shen Jiu pairing when LBH is right there. BingJiu gets so much hate when SJ and LBH have inherent compatibility in their personalities that makes them a great match.

When developed properly, they(BingJiu) can have a beautiful relationship. As for YQY, read a fic that made me think YQY and LQG would be good for each other, and they are just a side pair in a BingJiu fic.

Want to be clear that I'm not hateing on SJ/YQY or anyone who ships them, apologies if it came across that way. These are just my opinions, and I'm a little disappointed that I don't like them as a ship. Because it feels like a ship I should have liked, but because of how my brain interpret them, I can't enjoy them as a ship.

Its disappointing because there are a lot of great fanworks for them that are out of my reach. Anyways, I'll stay in my Shen Jiu/Luo Binghe corner. Its small, but finding happy BingJiu fanworks is the best.

[chuckduckling]

I know it feels natural to compare Shen Jiu and Shen Yuan, since they both end up occupying the same body, but comparing SJ and Luo Binghe (Bingge) makes so much more sense to me.

SJ has baggage that directly parallels LBG’s baggage: they both had abusive childhoods, they both hate themselves and feel unloved, and they use their trauma as an excuse to lash out.

SY, on the other hand, comes from wealth and modern comforts. His baggage is that he’s a transmigrator dealing with knowledge of the original book (also The System) (also a big case of the not-gays).

It’s why I can’t get behind the idea that SJ was born a monster while LBG gets acknowledged as a monster created from abuse. Saying that all of the original LBH’s crimes here were just SJ’s fault...it feels as dismissive as saying LBH’s abuse was Qiu Jianluo’s fault, you know?

(SY can be an unreliable narrator, but remembering details about PIDW is consistently one of his strengths. Projecting those details onto Bingmei, on the other hand...)

More ramblings and quotes under the cut…

(edited to replace MTL analysis with the official translation)

This little excerpt from the 100 Questions extra makes the parallels between SJ and LBG even more interesting, since SJ is rumored to be a lecher (with doubts thrown on those rumors as we learn more about him) while LBG is confirmed here to have assaulted multiple women.

SJ is the villain, so his lechery is a signal to readers of his depravity. LBG is the stallion protagonist, so his lechery is just him fulfilling his role as the male readers’ power fantasy. Doesn't this feel like commentary on stallion novels…? Just me?

Anyways, it seems like SJ gets the vice of child abuser, while LBG gets the vice of serial rapist. Both SJ and LBG share a killer bodycount for their own reasons, though LBG’s is probably much higher.

I sorta wonder if it can be easier for fandom to overlook because:

some of what we learn about LBG is from the untranslated extras

the people who suffer are nameless nobodies

his protagonist halo protects him from all consequences (for example, nobody whose family was killed during one of LBG’s massacres gets to throw Ning Yingying’s bloody ribbons in front of LBG's face and laugh about it while torturing him to death) (just typing that out upset me Yingying baby I’m so sorry!!!)

Even SY comments here on how the Bingge from PIDW feels more alien to him after experiencing the world of Scum Villain and learning to understand Bingmei as his own person.

However, even with his flaws and crimes and whatnot, LBG is still complex, tormented, and sympathetic. He has traumatic reasons for growing up into someone who has done bad things, and he has more to him than just those bad things.

Which is also exactly what SQH says about SJ.

SJ and LBH are both influenced by self-hatred, which acts as another parallel between them. But that self-hatred, that belief that they were born inherently unlovable, doesn’t make them better people. In fact, if anything, it makes them worse.

Self-hatred is not ennobling in the Scum Villain universe. It is self-destructive, and it destroys everything that surrounds it as well.

Thus, I’d argue that these two have both truly earned the title of “poor little meow meow”.

In contrast, I feel like the Huan Hua Palace Master is the one who earns the actual “scum villain” title for SVSSS? He crosses off pretty much everything on the list:

a righteous cultivator who turns out to be a two-faced asshole

a lecher who lusts after his female disciple

has no tragic backstory to explain anything about him, nor any redeeming qualities nor relationships

gets turned into a human stick

dies horribly and painfully for the catharsis of the audience

Of course, this means that there’s a universe out there where someone’s gonna transmigrate into the HHPM and—okay okay I’ll stop.

As always, I'm curious to know other peoples' thoughts...

[sanddusted-wisteria]

Doodle Dump, 1/2024 - 4/2024 (part 1)

So uh...I haven't posted as much on here ever since like, the beginning of this year. Instead, I've been doodling like mad over on the OTAS server and have completely neglected to post any of that over here alsdkjalk. So here's most of the doodles I've done, oldest to newest :> (with wild variations in quality,.,,, a lot's changed in my art skillz in 6 months)

[VERY long post below]

A staring contest, ft. @florisam 's Onyx and @illusidy 's Aerie...queens of the death stare.

Thank @/florisam for this one lol

After a body swap AU where Wis swaps with Qi...Wis has to do manual labor with Qi's wimpy wet noodle caffeine dependent body and Qi's def not taking proper care of Wis's body either... probably doesn't put her hair up if he works with a burner or corrosive chemicals aldkfjl

from a superhero/villain AU, wis is neither hero nor villain...she's the civilian that somehow ends up at the epicenter of every super battle and takes advantage of that by becoming a hero/villain accountant 😂

started drawing some more outfits for Wis, but I never finished them. Will probably get back to these a bit later.

and ofc she's gotta try on Qi's disaster outfit asd;lfkdjlrk

I made Wis a logo! Combined a sprig of wisteria with a pine cone, for her workshop, Fresh Pines. Also made a possible combo logo for her and Qi. Y'know, in case they ever make that multistage rocket + launchpad they've been dreaming about...

Wis would be stoked to get her new stamps :>

Wis as a butler in a maid cafe AU...that I do not have the space or time to fully outline the extent of the chaos within... (inquire in the OTAS server for more info asdlkjlrkadf) Also the first time I drew Wis's clone sisters (which I am aware that I haven't introduced at all on tumblr...I wouldn't blame you if you forgot that Wis is a clone 😂 but SOON I promise)

Ft. @spookemsdukems 's "Builder", it's the mystery gorls! No one really knows where they came from. Well, they know. But they're sure as hell not gonna tell you... (ehhh well wis might tell you about herself if you're friends lol)

asdlfklj based on a quote from an incorrect quotes generator

Initial concepts for one of Wis's clone sisters, the one that ended up in Duvos! Eugh the attempt at a waist up in the bottom right corner still haunts me asdlkfjlkjd Also note that that's not what a real prosthetic AK peg leg would look like, I did these without any real research 💀

Ft. @sunstream7 's Val...no explanation needed i think alsdkfja;sdlkrj

An idea I had about a romance/post-marriage gift that Qi could give you: a necklace with dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin that he managed to synthesize...the neurotransmitters of love <3

Love is the Solution: A special necklace given to you by Qi. The little vial contains a mix of neurotransmitters--the mixture of love. Even though they're trapped inside the vial, when you put it on, you swear you can feel them surging through your nerves all the same. Stamina +15

And I've hit the image limit so this is the end of part 1 a;sldkrjlkjlakfj

[skkpaws]

rant but i feel like the fandom’s whole issue with “death baits” and the obsession with a character dying is a little odd. (open to continue :3 , manga spoilers)

first , i just feel like with most of the “death baits” (i keep quoting it because some of them i don’t consider real death baits but more moments where you just question the status of the character. ‘are they alive or dead? both a very possible’ but i digress) are either a little obvious simply because they’d be generally bad endings for those characters.

sure , sometimes characters die and there isn’t some world changing impact or affect on the story or characters. but especially since there hasn’t be really any main character deaths, including ones without a real purpose just feels cheap to me, for example dazai’s.

as for fyodor , having a villain that has always been in the background or as the mastermind for years be killed off without a real explanation of his character such as his abilities , his true motivations and where they come from or anything about his past would be such a waste of character in my opinion.

and sometimes ppl are just dramatic with what they call a death bait. no , fukuchi was not “death baited” he’s still heavily injured and would have liked died eventually even if fyodor didn’t show up. it’s not to crazy for him to not die immediately to a single stab, and i don’t think giving him one final comment to show his desires and be willing to sacrifice himself to protect the others hurt the narrative at all (also .. he’s probably dead now)

now we have bram likely dead and it still seems like that wasn’t enough for people? i’m not 100% sure, maybe i’m misjudging but from my point of view it feels like the fandom wants someone from the main cast dead which i just haven’t seen any moments where that would benefit the story. i get the idea of having stakes and consequences but it’s always conditional for the fandom. it has to be a character that they’re not too attached too but they like enough to give a fuck about and get feel something for and that’s just never going to be the same for people.

anyway , i’m not saying im at all against a main character dying, hell , with the new “tripolar singularity” threat i do think it would make sense for someone (whether it be main or side cast) to possibly die, but i want it done properly. i understand others opinions on the past arcs but im just not sure if people truly think their changes would have improved the story or if their own bias is skewing this. feel free to let me know your stance or dm so i can understand better :D

[queer-ragnelle]

hello!! i am pretty new to tumblr so still finding my way around, and part of my current project was going to be looking into fandom space to see how some of the word of mouth and online space mimics oral storytelling. i am especially looking at villains in arthuriana and fan interpretations and headcanons for this, so any advice of where to look hereabouts would be really lovely!! ty for your time and hope you have a great day!!

Hi anon! Welcome!

Honestly I'm at a bit of a loss where to even begin. The scope of Arthuriana and what constitutes a "villain" is so vast. There are the obvious Black Knights and usurping nephews, but even those characters have more than their fair share of morally gray/nuanced portrayals depending on where you look. Medieval literature in and of itself was varied even before we get into modern interpretations and the far reaching corners of fandom. I think in regards to this, it might help to narrow your scope to specific "villainous" characters—Morgan le Fay, Sir Mordred, False Guinevere, Sir Meleagant, and the mysterious Knights of Green and Red and Black.

There's also the matter of where you intend to make the cut off. What constitutes "canon" character interpretation? Where does "canon" end and fan extrapolation begin? To my mind, personally, anything after the Middle Ages falls into the "modern" category, which would include Alfred Lord Tennyson's The Idylls of The King on our end of the divide. Speaking for myself, I don't devalue any interpretation based solely on the era of it's inception. If Sir Thomas Malory wrote in Le Morte d'Arthur that Sir Gareth married Lyonesse, then it is so. But when Tennyson claims that, no, Sir Gareth married the Savage Damosel Linet, then he is also correct. Each iteration is it's own self-contained world and anything is possible within that framework. So it is for "villains," as well.

But that said, the beauty of Arthuriana is that each new addition to the literary tradition (and I include films, TV shows, video games, comics, and every other conceivable medium) builds on what came before. I don't necessarily enjoy or recommend them all, but there's definitely a connection from one retelling to the next. In John Boorman's Excalibur (1981), Percival is first revealed as a strange boy wandering the forest who happens upon Lancelot sleeping. Percival is captivated by him. He endears himself to the knight by waking him with the smell of meat he hunted and roasted especially for him. From there, he's brought back to Camelot to begin working under Kay in the kitchens and eventually rises to knighthood. When I first saw this, I was elated. "It's just like in The Adventures of Sir Lancelot!" Go back thirty more years. In The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956-1957), there's a character named Brian, a kitchen boy. After Lancelot helps end the siege that was threatening the castle Brian worked at, he begins following Lancelot around, and one morning, cooks breakfast for the knight. By the end of the episode, Lancelot has all but adopted him, and enrolls him in lessons to begin his squiredom, and eventually, achieve knighthood. Sound familiar?

Could it be that John Boorman, as a child, watched The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, saw what they did with their Brian/Gareth hybrid, and said, "I like that idea, I think I'll use it for Percival." To me, Boorman drawing on that 50s show for his own work is no different than Tennyson building on what Malory had done, who in his own turn wrote from the Post Vulgate.

Now we come to the present day. Bloggers share these stories. We quote the texts. I stream movies and TV shows every weekend in the Arthurian Theater Server. We make connections from one creation to the next. You can see the web of inspirations all interconnecting. Then we branch off into our own new interpretations based on the foundations of these creations that came before. I don't know how popular an opinion this is, but I think that goes beyond "head canon," because there is no canon. Arthuriana is a continuously flowing font made up of tiny beads of details. The stories can only function with the existence of the others. It's not derivative in the same sense as one drawing a little too heavily from their favorite childhood fantasy novel. This tradition dates back hundreds of years. We're just continuing it with the technology of our time.

You want to focus on "villains." But I wonder—Is Morgan le Fay's character beholden to a specific source? How do we determine what that is? If one chooses to write Morgan le Fay sympathetically, or even outright benevolent, is she still a "villain?" Is she still Morgan le Fay? Personally, I think we should respect what came before us, and consider how that impacts the new addition we intend to create. Change Morgan too much and she ceases to be recognizable as Morgan, and I'm here to read about Morgan! I think it's important to maintain the same resonance which has kept us interested for so many centuries. And yet the basis for sweeping changes is all around us. Just as Morgan plotted to kill Arthur and seize his throne, she also rode by his side in the boat to Avalon, where he sleeps still. The range of possibilities is vast beyond imagination. So go wild and get creative, I'm not your mom.

I don't know if that answers your questions or not lol. You're welcome to send me another ask or a private message if you want to talk more.

I also open up this question to my followers for a larger sample size—What do you guys think?

Thanks for the ask and have a great day!

[soleminisanction]

What comic issue did the whole kon v steph showdown happen? In which he basically called her a poser? I’m wondering what the rest of the young justice teams reaction to her was. I think greta tried to kill her at one point? I don’t think she’s very well liked among that team, but it also makes me wonder if she’s very well liked in the wider hero community at all besides her small group of vigilantes she’s enmeshed herself with through getting involved w Tim and to a lesser extent Batman? What are your views?

Teen Titans (2003) issue #13:

That's it in its entirety. The bit with Tim and Conner is very much the story's B-plot, the A-plot is focused on Beast Boy and the rest of the Titans back in San Fran.

As for Steph and Greta -- it is true that Greta is the one member of YJ that Steph ever truly interacted with during that time period. I actually wrote up a whole thing here about the arc of those interactions, but it was kind of off-topic with your question and also long enough that it really deserves its own post, especially because lining it all up together without the multi-year gap between plot points gave me a revelation about how the story actually went.

I'm going to try to get that post up in the next day or so to prove my point but the summation here is: the first time they met, Greta explicitly didn't try to kill Steph -- but afterwards, Steph framed it as "she tried to kill me in a jealous rage" and people took Steph's side because part of Greta's story was that her "good people bad powers" thing made her kind of sus and that's what eventually drove her to join Darksied.

So while Steph did get mentioned in YJ, including getting brought in to help as part of the invasion of Zandia in issues 50-52, her only significant contribution there was a very brief stand-off with Greta and getting stuck in a bubble with a several other 90's characters who I'm pretty sure don't exist anymore.

The only other person I recognize here is Lagoon Boy. The pink filter doesn't help.

Other than that, the only interaction Steph's had with any member of Tim's friend group is the one issue of Teen Titans (2003), #66, where they're doing this membership drive thing and Steph (recently back from faking her death) tags along so they can pretend that maaaaybe she's going to join the team, but actually she's just there to have a very brief interaction with Traci 13 and Bombshell.

And an even briefer, awkward stare-down with Cassie that's only there because she and Tim's budding romance had been awkwardly cut short just so he could back to Steph the very instant she got back from faking her death no matter how little sense that made.

And then Steph wasn't even interested in joining the team anyway she was just there for quote, "moral support" as Tim told Cassie he needed to take a break for a while and focus on the pre-Final Crisis chaos going down in Gotham.

Stephanie has never spoken to Bart, Anita, Slobo, or Ray so far as I know. She's never even met Cissie because the Arrowette who went to Zandia turned out to be Bonnie in disguise.

Pre-Flashpoint, the only other people she'd met outside of Gotham are Supergirl (whom she met in World's Finest (2009)) and Squire, who's still technically a Bat even if she lives in England. Stargirl and Miss Martian show up alongside Bombshell and Supergirl towards the end of Steph's solo series but they come out of nowhere only because BQM had wanted to make them part of Steph's entourage at some point but didn't get the chance, so I don't really count them. Nor do I count her showing up in a group shot at the end of the Gail Simone Wonder Woman, since that was just a line-up of cameos from every female hero she could get at the time.

So with all that as the preamble, to answer your second question: no, I don't think Steph is very well-liked by the wider superhero community. I also don't think she's disliked. I think the vast majority of heroes and villains have no idea who she is.

If they know her at all, it's probably as, "That girl in the purple that Cass is always hanging out with" or "Robin's ex-girlfriend who faked her death that one time" or maybe even as, "There was a girl Robin at some point right? I feel like I heard that somewhere," particularly since there was a big media shake-up after War Games. Heck, they might even know her as, "Cluemaster's daughter; she runs with the Bats, yeah? Heh, sucks to be Arthur" since he's actually gotten around more than her just by virtue of being on the Suicide Squad.

But as Spoiler, as Batgirl, as a hero? Basically unknown outside of Gotham. She's always been too much of a supporting character to develop those kinds of connections.

[sasukesun]

How do you think Naruto views the curse of hatred and Sasuke’s darkness?

oh i think i already gave you a hint about how naruto views that in my curse of hatred ask.

actually, i don’t think naruto knows about the curse of hatred itself, the one that comes from tobirama’s bigoted views, since tobirama only voices that when sasuke is talking to the hokages, and naruto wasn’t present there. but well, do i think naruto believes sasuke is genetically predisposed to evil? lol.

like i said in the curse of hatred ask, something that seems to be very solid in naruto is the idea that people grow “positively” when they get support from others, the good place quote and all. well, naruto himself seems to be the character that understands this idea the most.

naruto understands that he and sasuke could be in each other’s places and he does explain why he thinks that, because naruto got external love from iruka and sasuke (the positive support that allows him to grow) while sasuke didn’t. despite him feeling at ease because of naruto (and naruto doesn’t quite know that), sasuke didn’t get the same support before he left konoha, thanks to orochimaru’s curse seal actively triggering him and itachi coming back and retraumatising him. naruto understands that sasuke did everything he did because he loved his family very much, it’s quite interesting how when sakura brings sasuke’s criminal status, naruto talks about sasuke’s love for his family instead of his anger.

i guess that would be enough to show that naruto doesn’t think sasuke is genetically evil, right? i will talk more, though. another thing that i criticised about kishimoto in that ask is the fact that he uses the narrative to frame sasuke as wrong in a way. that happens in the sage of six paths moment too.

what i think it’s important to say here is that those chapters are shit. seriously, they are retconned and badly written. every time i write posts like this, i reread everything, so let me tell you that i reread the chapters of the sage of the six paths and they sounded worse than they did before, and i don’t know how to express myself here without sounding like “source: trust me bro”, and maybe i shouldn’t worry about it that much since you asked for my opinion, but still, i’m gonna try to be objective and make you look at them critically so you understand why i find them shit.

just starting by the simple fact of how retconned the naruto ending is. chapters 670 and 671 especially are used to introduce kaguya as the new and final villain to the readers, that to me is already iffy as hell for one basic reason: naruto has 700 chapters, do you think it makes sense to introduce the supposed most important villain of the whole story with 30 chapters left for the ending? don’t you find that a little bit rushed? a little bit pulled out of nowhere? take madara in comparison, his first mention as a possible personality able to influence the story (and i mean madara, not obito pretending to be madara) is on chapter 370, a little bit over the half of the manga. and madara’s presence exists even before that, hence vote1 or kurama talking about him in reunion, for example. that is how far his influence on the plot goes, he is a ghost haunting everybody else. and another thing we have to take into consideration is why kaguya even exists? i could give you two reasons: (1) kishimoto wrote himself into a corner when he made madara so damn sexy powerful, to the point he didn’t know how to defeat him and (2) to build the new setting for boruto (since it’s villains are all from her clan), so yeah, pardon me for not taking kaguya’s entire existence in this story seriously.

and it’s not only about that retcon, it’s also about the other retcon that makes her existence so off from anything else in the manga. those chapters also introduce us a new idea which is: power corrupts people and it drives them mad. this isn’t about political power or anything, just raw power. those chapters push for the idea that the problem wasn’t with the shinobi structure or how villages ended as military fortresses, the problem is actually when people are too powerful, the problem is in the ninjutsu, which is different from the “ninshuu”, even though the manga never develops this idea, or explains how they are different and why, it just throws us vague affirmations from a supposed reliable source, since we are talking about the most powerful ninja in history, with no explanations whatsoever. this is a way to build a narrative, and i’m surely not saying that the narrative in question is good or reliable, you have to look at it critically.

so i guess let’s forget any political aspect of the shinobi world, whose worldbuilding started in land of waves, the very first arc of the manga, because the actual problem is that… there is a fruit that turns people powerful and therefore evil, huh? well, that’s not the narrative i’m buying, it’s far from enough to convince me.

and finally we get to how the fuck does that involve sasuke? well, the story tell us that indra was born naturally strong and believed that with power anything was possible, while ashura was only able to reach the same level through hard work and cooperation… so if sasuke has indra’s chakra clinging onto him… do you see where the narrative is trying to go? i have already talked about how it’s bullshit that sasuke was a natural prodigy, so the narrative can’t even get that right, but here they are also hinting that sasuke is corrupted by power. it’s not enough that the narrative is trying to make us forget about the shinobi system problems — and the uchiha massacre and sasuke wanting justice is a very relevant one of those problems — it’s also trying to push for the idea that sasuke is wrong because he is corrupted by power, while centring the morality around naruto. it’s not a “curse of hatred” that sasuke “suffers” from here, but it’s also the idea of power driving people mad and making him irrational and therefore, they are stuck in this cycle of hatred.

now, the narrative and the character are separated entities, a character can be used to build a narrative, a narrative can reinforce the credibility of a character, but i can’t blame naruto as a character for a narrative that tries to frame him as good. besides, what naruto actually thinks of this?

kishimoto made sure to emphasise it at least four times… in less than 30 chapters.

and what is even more ironic is that, even though the sage of the six paths himself is used to build this narrative, he is also used to push for the idea that naruto and sasuke are different from the ones that came before them, that they are their own people. not only the sage of the six paths btw, hashirama as well… who was used to talk about sasuke’s “soul consumed by darkness”, like i said in the curse of hatred ask.

isn’t it just messy?

now, about sasuke’s “darkness” and how naruto views it. another thing i said in the curse of hatred ask is that i don’t think the darkness used in a derogatory way to talk about sasuke wanting justice for his clan is the same darkness of sasuke’s desire to isolate himself. the latter is a darkness that manifests through sasuke’s final plan: a darkness that is about bearing everybody else’s “hatred” (which would be anger against an enemy) all by himself.

i think that’s pretty objective, actually.

and obviously, another thing that is very objective and explicitly stated is that in order to sasuke’s version of hokage to work, he must cut naruto off, he must be alone so he will be able to endure all the hatred himself.

and then we go back to what i talked about in the beginning of this ask. naruto understands that people grow positively with the support they receive from others.

don’t you think it makes sense of naruto to try to give back the love sasuke gave to him in the beginning of the story, since he himself admits that sasuke and iruka changed his heart? well, that’s pretty much textually supported.

“rather… i pray they’re able to reclaim the love they’d lost… not just naruto… but sasuke as well”

even naruto’s explanation of what “friend” means to him is related to not being able to turn his back to sasuke when sasuke is hurting, and he knows sasuke’s isolation is just a way to hurt himself, it is also textually supported that naruto’s issue is with sasuke being alone.

he just can’t turn his back on sasuke, knowing sasuke is perfectly capable of good, like- is there any doubt to naruto that sasuke is good and deserves the positive support (love) like anybody else? sasuke is the one that doubts himself (because of itachi’s influence on his mindset), but naruto doesn’t even hesitate.

i really hope you were able to get my train of thought and understand that even though there is a narrative trying to frame sasuke as wrong one way or another, not every character believes it, nor you should believe it just because it tells you so. i myself can’t take it seriously when i look at it critically.

[that-ari-blogger]

What is the point of the Horde? Part 1

Ok. So, why does She Ra and the Princesses of Power begin in the horde? Why go through all the trouble if in the second episode, Adora switches sides? What is the point?

Obviously, the in-universe answer is "Adora was raised in the horde, so she starts the story in the horde" and that's a perfectly fine reason. But I'd like to delve into the thematic significance of that choice. What does Adora's connection to the horde do to the story?

SPOILERS AHEAD

I'm going to start by establishing some themes, so if you disagree with my takeaway, here is where it went wrong. In my understanding, She-Ra is about family, morality, freedom, and trauma.

So, what does the horde represent?

The horde is a dysfunctional family unit. The mother figure is manipulative, the father is distant and uncaring, and the children are used as weapons. Even if you don't read this as a family unit, this isn't the healthiest of dynamics in any situation.

In Shadowweaver's first scene, we get this shot, which is a fantastic visual metaphor for Shadowweaver's influence, the shadows claw at Catra's face, covering one eye and distorting her vision as a result. Interestingly, the shadows don't directly touch Adora, but the general dimness that Shadowweaver gives off does, and her expression makes it clear that Shadowweaver's influence does have consequences on her as well by proxy.

This is a neat representation of the rest of the series. My reading of this story was as an escape from abuse story. Adora gets away physically, but Shadowweaver follows her, while Catra can't leave.

"She's just bitter that she doesn't have any real power that doesn't have any real power that doesn't come from Hoardack, and everyone knows it."

The above quote is from Catra talking about Shadowweaver and I'd like to take it apart.

Niccolò Machiavelli is the namesake for the word Machiavellian in reference to a manipulator or schemer. A lot of people cast him as a historical villainous character, and while that isn't entirely true, the reason for this word is primarily a book called The Prince. In it, he poses the idea that "It is much safer for the prince to be feared than loved, though he should avoid making himself hated." Shadowweaver embodies this mindset.

Catra is wrong here. Shadowweaver does have power, and its being demonstrated right here in this single shot. Shadowweaver has the same power that certain people in real life have, she can control people. In this case, she can turn best friends against each other with barely a thought.

Shadowweaver has cultivated fear in her children, but she has taken care to not distance herself from Adora too far. She considers one of her children superior and diverts all of her affection into that child while shunning and demeaning the other to no end.

Interestingly, Shadowweaver's approach to love is also toxic. When Adora questions her judgement even slightly, Shadowweaver's immediate response is two things. I took you in and you want this. This is emotionally manipulative, she's making Adora feel guilty for wanting her friend to be recognised, and she's telling Adora what she wants, imposing her own will and ambition onto her.

Here's the kicker, The Prince was a satire. It was a callout to the leadership of the time that their actions were unjust and unkind. It was a statement that this method of leadership, while effective to this point, was doomed to fall.

So, why does She-Ra begin in the horde?

I think it's to show the trauma more acutely. It's to show the effect that Shadowweaver has on Adora and Catra and to explain, thematically, what this story is about. This isn't just a story about good and evil, but freedom, and love, and the story is going out of its way to show what the characters are running from. To show what, despite their best efforts, the characters cannot escape from, and will not escape from, until the final episode.

Part 2 is going to discuss episode 2 in detail and why Catra can't leave. It'll be an interesting discussion, I hope.

Next

[queseraone]

Writer’s ask game: anything you haven’t already been asked or answered

😘

4. How do you channel characters' voices and personalities? I watch scenes over and over again, and honestly I find reading other fic helpful. This sounds awful, but reading examples of something that isn't in their voice or matching their personality makes it clearer when it's right.

6. Do you prefer writing shorter, standalone fics or longer, multi-chapter stories? I definitely lean toward one-shots. (And let me just call myself out here... I've written one multi-chapter fic and it's been sitting unfinished for 5+ years 🙈) So if I was to try to tackle another multi-chapter idea, I'd need to have a clear vision for how to have it play out.

8. Do you have any rituals or habits that help you get into the zone? No, but I really should try to create some lol.

9. Have you ever collaborated with someone else on a fic? Yes! It's a fun challenge and I'm excited to do it again!

13. What's the most challenging aspect of writing fanfiction for you? Feeling confident in my ideas. That feels like a stupid thing to say, but I struggle with coming up with ideas for stories. If I have a vision, I can (usually) execute it, but so often I find myself questioning if an idea is worth writing or not. (Also summaries, they're a bitch!)

16. How important is it to you to stay true to the original creator's vision while writing fanfiction? It's extremely important to me. To me, that's the whole point of fanfiction - you love the characters enough that you want to play with them! If you throw their original characterizations out the window, you're just writing original fiction and plugging in the characters' names. [steps down from soapbox]

17. What's the most memorable comment or review you've received on one of your fics? Oh man, can I say all of them??? I truly cannot express how much joy a comment brings, and I absolutely go back and re-read them when I'm feeling down about my writing. My favourite is when someone quotes my work back at me, I swear it makes my face hurt from grinning so hard!

19. What's the most unusual or unique setting you've used? I guess the ski cabin because it's so far removed from Los Angeles?

20. How do you approach action sequences or intense moments? Action scenes are scary, and I'm not super keen on tackling that again - but I will say what helps is (I sound like a broken record on this point) having someone you can bounce things around with, and (as stupid as this sounds) blocking it. I mimed kicking my husband down the stairs to figure out where Lucy's foot would connect with her attacker (and good thing I did, because it was way higher up than I'd guessed!)

22. What role does humor play in your writing? Do you enjoy adding comedic elements to your fics? I don't consider myself a funny person. I try to inject humour into my writing sometimes (depending on the situation), but I'm not sure it's super successful!

23. How do you write endings for your fics? Do you prefer open-ended or conclusive conclusions? I hate endings. Hmm maybe this is my answer for #13. I think sometimes you go into a fic knowing exactly how you want it to end (sometimes even down the closing line), and other times I find myself circling the drain, totally lost on the right way to close it. The story never really ends as far as I'm concerned, so I lean more open-ended I guess? Especially since I tend to write more missing moments.

24. What advice would you give to someone who wants to start writing fanfiction? Don't be afraid to ask for help. Check your grammar (little things like your/you're go a loooong way). And please make sure you're spelling characters' names correctly... But truly just go for it. There's an audience out there for pretty much everything!

26. How do you approach plot twists or surprises in your fics? So I'm absolutely evil and absolutely live for this kind of moment. I still feel a sense of (villainous) pride over the plot twist I threw into the end of the opening chapter of an old fic. It's fun keeping people on their toes!

27. What two (or more) fandoms would you like to see a crossover for? Would you ever write it? Do I have to pick? Because I'm truly not a fan of crossover fics, especially between fandoms! And I don't really watch many other shows right now, so it's hard to say. Chenford getting called in to break up a fight between queens on RuPaul's Drag Race? That's the best I can come up with!

29. Are there any characters, relationships, or general character dynamics you've never written about but would like to try? Nearly everything I've written in this fandom is jut Tim and Lucy. Other characters' involvement has ranged from minimal to nonexistent, so I think it would be fun to play with that more. Top of my list would be to write more Tim and Angela moments, because they're my favourite relationship outside of Chenford.

30. How do you handle writing multiple storylines or subplots? I've never tried!

31. Do you prefer writing from a single character's perspective or switching between different viewpoints? I think I prefer picking a single character and writing from their perspective (still in the third person though), but I'm certainly not opposed to switching back and forth.

32. Have you ever participated in fanfiction contests, challenges/fests? YES! @chenfordsecretsanta, we'll see y'all again next year! And I participated in Chenford Week for the first time last summer!

33. How do you incorporate world-building elements into your fics? I haven't really done this, I tend to just stick within the show's universe.

34. Are there any fic writing tips or tricks you've learned along the way that you'd like to share? If you're unsure about dialogue, say it out loud. It's weird but highly effective. And for the love of god, if you wake up in the middle of the night with an idea (because that's always when it happens) make the note. No, you will not remember it in the morning.

Now I need a fucking nap, holyyyyyy. If you've made it to the end, congratulations, you deserve a trophy 🏆

[primreaperstuff]

I've had this silly idea in my head for awhile and I feel like I need to get it out.

I've been speculating on what Ford's impact on the other dimensions he visited would be, and I can't help but feel like he'd end up on some other dimension's version of Cops at some point. Probably blasting triangles off the side of a building at 2 in the morning with a weapon that's illegal in seven sectors.

The police order him to stop and he calmly, but sternly explains that he can't because the triangle symbols are access points for an evil greater than all of them. The police are unimpressed, but he keeps arguing with them. They end up having to space-taser and tackle him to arrest him. Somebody photoshops a screencap of the footage so it looks like he's blasting a pretentious sculpture by Knish Karich (no relation to Anish Kapoor we swear!) instead. It goes viral and becomes a meme to photoshop "the suspect" blasting things the photoshopper dislikes. The meme gains some controversy because some netizens think it glorifies police brutality and mocks somebody who is obviously mentally ill. Other netizens think "the suspect" is awesome, and quote catchphrases from the footage ("you can't shoot me, I'm right!" in particular).

Gravity Falls is a nexus for the weird, and sometimes TVs there pick up signals from other worlds. Stan's TV happens to catch a documentary series about the other dimension's version of Cops. Stan initially is only watching the series because changing the channel would require him to Get Up and he's not doing that. Plus he shouted for Ford to change the channel and Ford refused. But then it starts talking about the series's biggest contribution to pop culture in that dimension and Stan realizes that he recognizes "the suspect." He shouts for Ford again, this time telling him that he's got a really, really good reason change the channel for him.

Ford had no idea they were even recording him for a TV show. Stan, being a typical brother, is teasing him mercilessly about it. Ford is horrified yet morbidly curious about what kinds of reality TV exist in other realities.

Ford's lucky Stan only got the other dimension's version of Cops, though. There's at least one Law and Disorder villain based on him in a dimension that conflated his actions with those of a glass-armonica-loving serial killer. He was also featured on Geonaz's Least Wanted, the true crime dating show that captures fugitives and their hearts.

[dynared]

New York Comic Con 2023 and the Energon Universe panel is in the books

And while the room wasn't COMPLETELY full, there was a big crowd for said Energon Universe panel. Daniel Warren Johnson, Robert Kirkman, Joshua Williamson, and others came to the panel to announce that their plan involved making all these disparate parts work together as a series, including Void Rivals, which Kirkman specifically said was aiming to feel like it could have been a sister line with the Joes and Transformers (and considering Hasbro owns the property, probably means if it is successful they'll get toys of their own).

Some highlights and spoilers -

Daniel Warren Johnson knows people are upset at Bumblebee dying and frankly, does not care. "I feed on your tears", was his quote, which got a big laugh. Specifically, he didn't want to draw Bumblebee, hence his death in Issue 1, a death that he and Kirkman have confirmed will stick and Hasbro was totally cool with. With Bee dead, the panel concluded that there's more freedom to work with other characters and a lot more tension about who will live and who will die, since plot armor due to Hasbro demands is not a thing in the Energon Universe.

There was a big focus on GI Joe and how it will connect with the Transformers since the idea is that the Transformers' appearance causes the world to shift in a major way. The Duke miniseries will focus on how a traumatized Duke deals with the fallout of his fight with Starscream in the upcoming Transformers #2, and how Joe is founded specifically to combat them. Rebranding the Joes as an anti-alien strike force/international crisis team also seems to be a way to deal with getting away from the "jingoistic army toys" stigma that hasn't played as well since the Reagan years (even if most Joe fiction like Larry Hama's comics condemn blind jingoism). Interestingly, the initial lineup includes the Baroness, who's traditionally a high-ranking Cobra member and romantically entangled with Destro.

3. Cobra meanwhile is shown to be what is specifically described as a horror comic about Cobra Commander using the discovery of the Cybertronians to fuel his plans for world domination, and how Cobra Commander brings together a lot of disparate elements that otherwise would never have worked together to join his quest for world domination. More fuel is thrown on the "Cobra Commander's Luger is actually Megatron" fire, but of course, nothing is confirmed.

Another surprise for the initial lineup is the big guy in the back is Mercer, a character introduced in the GI Joe movie as an ex-Cobra officer who had "seen the light". Whether he does this time is another matter.

4. Back to the Transformers. The running idea (besides a minor but notable undercurrent of "Screw IDW") was that this is using the cartoons as gospel rather than the comics, but it will eventually expand beyond that initial concept using other characters. Specifically, during a quick Q&A at the end, someone asked about the Japanese characters, and Kirkman said while he had no immediate plans for them, he was actually a big fan of Star Saber, while Johnson mentioned liking the Japanese openings. A far cry from IDW making them all villains and losers.

5. Johnson is a big fan of wrestling. Kirkman, not so much. This led to some funny banter on stage about Johnson's tendency to fill fight scenes from the initial script (which will often just say "Character A and Character B fight") with wrestling moves like Optimus Prime introducing himself to Starscream with a Rainmaker Lariat before giving him a German Suplex. Despite Kirkman not being a fan, everyone on stage and the crowd seemed to agree that it gave the fight scenes a dynamic look that is new to the Transformers.

6. Void Rivals has not been forgotten in all this. While after Issue #6 it will be taking a five-month break, the series will continue to serve as the backbone of what's going out outside of Earth.

Including the teased appearance of the Quintesson Judge. Kirkman also promised more backstory, like possibly getting to see the Skuxxoid's family and other species that are part of the cartoon lore as part of his efforts to build out the universe while still making Void Rivals its own thing that is engaging without the other series.

7 The main goal of everyone is that while all the various series are part of a big story that is the Energon Universe, the reader can read just one and get a full experience. That being said, it's clear that the ultimate goal is for them all to work together.

And those are the highlights of the panel. Fun times are ahead if you're a Transformers fan, and after years of mismanagement and neglect, it sounds like the GI Joe-related stuff will be very interesting to see. Still, the focus right now is the comics, so my pie-in-the-sky theory about this being a dry run for a big animated show in the vein of Invincible will have to wait for another year.