#but honestly I don’t hate the finale

[acesammy]

Idk I’m just thinking about how chuck started as a stand-in for kripke, and de facto the writers on whole. Meaning that every plot contrivance from the writers really was an act of god in the canon of the show itself..

as much as I really don’t feel that strongly on the finale one way or the other, they reaaally should’ve ended the show with 15x19 because if chuck is no longer writing their story for his own amusement we as an audience should also not have access to the story for ours. Like they should’ve been able to completely break free of the narrative both in and out of canon. I think that’d’ve been cool

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

i guess it’s less that they Completely Understood each other and more that . just. they met each other at the perfect time . they had a bond that could never be replaced . they could be their true selves around each other, even if it only lasted for a year or two . but it still meant so much to the both of them !!! those two years alone meant so much more than the ten years they spent apart and that completely fucking Destroys me . they had something that neither one of them would ever find again and if it’s not Total Understanding then i truly believe it was unconditional love . soulmatism. the feeling of finding your other half . they had each other for two little years and it was the single most vibrant blue spring of their lives

[reminiscentreader]

tryna defend Gigi and savannah being in the game with my life rn 😭

[whydotheycallmechimney]

elijah is one of my favorite tvdu characters ever, but I will never pass up an opportunity to drag him

[oblivious-aro]

I remember you saying you had some thoughts on Morro being a less effective version of Tai Lung from the Kung Fu Panda movie. Do you have any more thoughts on that :o

Quick introduction, both Morro and Tai Lung are students who turned evil much to the of their old teachers (Wu and Shifu respectively). If you watched Kung Fu Panda 609 times as a child like me, you probably caught on that Morro's character was taken whole cloth from Tai Lung.

Now let's get into the details!

So Tai Lung and Morro have two parts to their character: the threat/villain aspects, and the tragic relationship/falling out with their mentor.

As a villain, Morro works pretty well. Possessing Lloyd establishes him as a threat both emotionally and power wise, since he's taken someone the ninja care for deeply and robbed them of their most powerful member in one swoop. I always kind of thought of him as the dark version of Lloyd, but he’s really more of a “What season 1 Kai could've been”, further supported by Kai's unyielding determination to protect Lloyd this season, contrasted against Morro literally using Lloyd as an actual meat puppet and casually threatening to kill Lloyd to get what he wants.

He’s threatening, hateable, and thematically appropriate as a villain.

As for his “tragic” relationship with Wu, well…despite general fandom opinion, it's actually pretty weak.

Tai Lung's screen time is dedicated to building up how powerful of a threat he is, outside of two key scenes that establish and build on his relationship with Shifu. The first is a flashback that happens somewhere around the half point of the movie. Reveling that Tai Lung was groomed to work his entire life for a role he ends up being denied point-blank recontextualizes the audience's feelings about Tai Lung. Up to that point he was presented as just some dangerously power-hungry villain, but now that the audience knows that Shifu has a personal connection to Tai Lung, and that changes their feelings on both of them.

The second relationship-focused scene is the penultimate fight between Tai Lung and Shifu. Before the combat, the two of them have a conversation that is just loaded with tension, and that tension stays prominent for the rest of the fight. The audience obviously doesn’t want Tai Lung to win, but watching Shifu attempt to take down the child he raised with his whole heart doesn’t exactly feel all sunshiny. Everything from the dialogue to the dark and rainy atmosphere (later heavily contrasted against Po’s triumphant fight in the rising sun) is meant to emphasize the heaviness and tragedy of the fight, building the flashback and Shifu's character growth to twist the knife in the audience's heart.

On the surface, Morro works similarly, spending the majority of his screen time being built up as someone that needs to be stopped, outside of two scenes that focus on his relationship with Wu. While Tai Lung's flashback happens in the middle of the movie, Morro's is told in the second episode of the season. Changing the timing of the flashback changes the effect it has on the audience. Instead of establishing an evil scary guy and then going ‘oh wait, there’s also this other important aspect to him’, we see the more human (literally) side of Morro almost straight away and then spend the remaining 80% of the season showing how evil he is. If Morro’s backstory garnered any sympathy from the audience, it will inevitably be overshadowed by the proceding 8 episodes of Morro doing nothing but make selfish choices. Doing Morro's flashback earlier has the exact opposite effect that Tai Lung's flashback had on his story.

Also worth noting that while a large part of Shifu’s characterization comes from his hand in Tai Lung’s fall (his cold relationship with his new students, his need for control, etc), Ninjago shifts the fault more so onto Morro as a person:

Wu: After I told him he could be the Green Ninja, there was a hunger unmatched.

Morro: (He kicks some of the other trainees, making them fall. Aggressively) Get up. Get up!

Wu: Enough.

Morro: But Sensei, I'm gonna be the Green Ninja. I need greater tests.

Wu: I said, enough!

Kung Fu Panda meanwhile feels no need to shy away from the idea of Tai Lung's actions being the result of Shifu's failure as a teacher. In fact, it embraces it:

Tai Lung: Not your fault!? Who filled my head with dreams? Who drove me to train until my bones cracked? Who denied me my destiny!?

...

Shifu: I...I have always been...proud of you. From the first moment I've been proud of you. And it was my pride...that blinded me. I loved you too much too see what you were becoming...what I was turning you into...I'm s-...I'm sorry...

Ninjago doesn’t completely kill the vibes, it’s still understandable that Wu would be sad a student of his didn’t turn out well, but lessening the responsibility Wu’s bears for the way Morro turned out gives their relationship a lot less weight than Shifu and Tai Lung’s, and lessens the impact their relationship had on Wu’s character compared to Shifu’s. They do retroactively imply Morro's reaction was the reason Wu never told his new students about the green ninja prophecy, which is kind of neat, but Wu doesn't really seem to be affected by his relationship with Morro beyond that.

They're not showcasing Wu being affected by the soured relationship, or building up any kind of emotional conflict about having to oppose his old student. The fact that this season's antagonist is Morro doesn't make Wu behave any differently than he would with any other run-of-the-mill Ninjago villain.

Shifu's character, as I mentioned earlier, is felt in pretty much every moment he's on screen. You can feel his fear of history repeating itself in everything from how frugal he is with praise for his students, to the sheer panic in his voice anytime he and Oogway talk about Tai Lung returning.

In fairness to Ninjago, Shifu was a character made entirely for that movie and nothing else, so his character was built from the ground up with his relationship with his student in mind for the whole process, while Wu is an already existing character in an establised franchise (that's also on a much smaller budget than a Dreamworks movie *ahem*), but they aren't really trying to build up the relationship between Wu and Morro outside over the course of Posession at all, outside of the two specific scenes I mentioned.

Speaking of, there’s the final scene between mentor and student that both charaters share. For Tai Lung, this was a fight, and for Morro, it's a redemption, and I don't think the writers considered how that key difference would affect Morro's story very deeply. Morro and Tai Lung follow the same structure of building up how evil and threatening they are until their ultimate defeat, and since Tai Lung’s story wasn’t building towards redemption, neither does Morro’s. This is fine for Tai Lung, because the emotional climax of his story is acceptance of the tragedy that his and Shifu’s shattered relationship is completely and totally beyond mending. Not only that, but it mainly takes place over a fight. It makes sense to just continuously ramp up Tai Lung’s threat level.

Morro on the other hand, completely switches sides at the last possible second of both his life and the season. With no buildup, his redemption feels very sudden and insincere. This guy who’s been plotting around the same obsession he had as a child for decades, kidnapped and possessed a child, put in the work to literally rewrite destiny, and made deals with satan/hell herself just decided “Actually I’m good now okay byeeeeeee!” in the space of two seconds?

Tai Lung and Shifu’s fight crushes your soul a little. Morro’s redemption just leaves you going “I guess that happened?”

They ripped off Tai Lung and only got him half-right.

[tsuchinokoroyale]

Was soooooo happy with this phase 1 which is what made it so much funnier that I was immediately clapped by his phase 2 😂

[k1ttygam3r]

and every day the list of blocked words/phrases grows longer

[draculasstrawhat]

Every time a much admired celeb does/is accused of doing something shitty I want to scream that IT’S NOT ABOUT THEIR WORK! IT’S NEVER ABOUT THEIR WORK and whether you thought it was bad or problematic or over-hyped or over-exposed! It’s not about whether you were sick of them, or wanted them punished for a perceived decline in quality! We don’t need to know that you “never liked them (as a celeb/artist/whatever)” or found them annoying.

It’s not even about whether you found their personal life “cringe” or “boring”, or “suspect”, their public presence facile. It’s not about ANY OF THAT.

You are not the main character! Your aesthetic choices do not confer virtue! Equating them with actual harm done to real human beings is EXCEPTIONALLY SHITTY and conveys the exact opposite of the effect you’re attempting to capture!

Fucking stop it!

[catastrophicarts]

new sketchbook same bs

[star-scrambled]

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[woahjo]

everyone is fighting wars and shit and then bran is on some mystical journey and chatting with a man in a tree LOL

joke’s aside, i like bran’s story a lot. it’s super connected to the lore of the GOT universe and that makes it interesting, plus, i care about him as a character (gotta love the starks). all that being said, i think where it falls short is that it can feel SO disconnected from what everyone else is doing. i mean ofc he’s connected (three eyed raven and all that), but his journey feels very independent to sansa or arya or jon’s journey. he encounters comparatively fewer characters in the story, so we kind of lose that really cool sense of “everything is connected” for a while.

his personal journey is interesting for sure and learning about the magic present in the north through him is a good way to introduce the history of the godswood and magic and stuff, but there’s a distinctive lack of the “game of thrones”, if that makes sense. in fact, i’d argue that he’s the only stark who isn’t obviously playing it for the majority of the show (this isn’t to say that it isn’t revealed in the later seasons that he IS), which disconnects him almost entirely from the main narrative.

bran makes his journey north, becomes a greenseer, and manipulates the past to preserve himself (and his family), but his story feels largely disconnected from the main arc until he discovers the truth about jon snow’s parentage (among a few other things).

all this being said, i’m only at the end of season 4 of my rewatch, but this is just what i’m noticing about it the second time around after many years. and i DO remember liking the payoff of realizing bran has had a hand in his own fate (and the fates of those around him) the entire time, so i’m not knocking that (and maybe i’ll change my mind when i see it again). i can appreciate the build of suspense as he makes his journey north and then the satisfaction of finally understanding the specifics of what has happened.

anyway, all this to say that i think what i feel is missing in bran’s story, at least through the middle, is the sense of interconnectivity the character’s actions tend to have. the whole series has this “butterfly effect” sense to it through practical means, but bran’s actions throughout the beginning of the story and on his journey seem to happen largely within a vacuum (when compared to the other characters). it isn’t until there is an ACTUAL butterfly effect that we begin to feel just how interconnected bran is to the rest of the story, which has great payoff but can kind make you furrow your brow when we see his group trudging through the snow again towards the middle of the series (to me, even the bolton’s going after him felt super disconnected for some reason lol).

anyway those are my two cents on this very very old subject even though no one asked. take it with a grain of salt though, i’ve forgotten a LOT of the main series since i haven’t watched the show all the way through since the finale aired on cable haha

[sasquatchandleatherjacket]

.

[raiiny-bay]

i thought of an ending to the monster boyz AU but i hate it

[luvt0kki]

idk where to dump this but I’ve been really going through it

[soft-serve-soymilk]

Bitches be fighting (it’s the head children 😘☺️)

[stephaniejuhnay]

So because the Paley finale event was (rightfully) cancelled, they sent this as an apology gift.