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mahou-furbies · 5 years

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On the teams in Magical Girl Raising Project : Restart

When reading MagiPro Restart I paid attention to how different the dynamics in each team were and how fun it was to read about them, so here’s an appreciation post. (note that this is based on just the two Restart novels; I haven’t read most of the side stories about these characters).

Team Daisy

The team whose dynamics most resemble the more common magical girl team where there is an upbeat, friendly and supportive vibe going on. When reading from the POV of a character in this group I get the feeling that they all enjoy being together, and don't have any major disagreements. Especially the enthusiastic and outgoing NyanNyan and Genopsyko get along really well and behave like longtime friends even if they only just met, and being invested in Genopsyko's well-being becomes a very defining character trait for NyanNyan as the story goes on and even causes her to act irrationally and recklessly. And the young and unassuming Nokko-chan inspires protectiveness from everyone, but she still manages to hold her own in a pinch.

There is more to the team dynamics than just everyone being nice though. The former magical girl celebrity Magical Daisy had been living a lonely and dull life after the anime in which she starred ended, and now finds herself enjoying the fact that she ended up as the group leader and has people depending on her again. I feel that her relationship with her team is a bit shallow, and that she sees them in the role of an audience to some degree and doesn't form that close friendships with them as people. There is also some charming childishness about her; like she often thinks about how she wants to use her flashy beam attack for the sake of it, and her reaction to being forced to compete in a game is not only that she wants out but that she would also like to win.

This is not to say I think Daisy is an egoistical or arrogant person; like sure she cares about her team and never thinks badly of them, and the narrative doesn't show her in a bad light either. I also find her enjoying the attention very human, like she's been alone and starved for validation for long, so it's understandable that meeting fans who gush about her show would be flattering. She's like a little skewed version of your typical pure and heroic magical girl lead in that she knows what a good magical girl is and consistently acts upon the expectations, but isn't quite committed to the spirit. Which shows in the way everyone sees her as a mature and competent leader, but the readers get to know that she likes that the game lets her use lethal force on the AI enemies without moral repercussions.

Team Clantail

Team Clantail has a lot more conflict than Team Daisy. Rionetta and Nonako aren't afraid to voice their opinions, and that causes constant quarreling. However they aren't identical in their bitching, with Rionetta being more confrontational and snippy while in Nonako's case it's more like she just says what's on her mind without caring how insensitive it might be. Meanwhile Clantail is the calm and reliable leader who gets stuff done, but she remains distant and doesn't do much to mitigate the drama. Finally there is the timid and anxious Pechka, who has low self esteem and is useless in battle. At first Rionetta and Nonako don't even try to hide the fact that they're only letting her be a part of the team out of social obligation and wouldn’t mind seeing her leave, and Clantail does nothing to make her feel better either.

However the team dynamics drastically change when Pechka reveals her magical cooking ability, and the delicious meals together greatly boost the team's morale. The more competent fighters start to see how Pechka is valuable in the team in an unexpected way, and the tension mitigates and the arguments turn into friendly bickering. As the story goes on, Team Clantail starts to feel more like a tight group of people who care about each other and does well in the game with their teamwork, but the little quarreling and Pechka's self esteem issues keep it from becoming boring and stale.

Team Bell

For the most part these guys come across as having a more practical and business-like relationship and working together just because it's useful, rather than the typical magical girl squad where everyone is best friends and ready to protect the others with their life. They do work well enough together though and advance well in the game, but they have fundamental disagreements to how much they should progress at the expense of the competing teams. At one point Detec Bell even hopes her own team would lose a contest so that they would get better along with the other players.

Detec Bell doesn't have the fighting skills or the required charisma and appears to only be the leader nominally, since ultimately the proud and mysterious Melville does what she feels like and the childish Cherna Mouse only takes orders from Melville. Detec Bell is one of the more mature characters in the book though, and does her best to maintain her team's cohesion and relationships with the other teams. However Team Bell starts to fall apart when suspicions of the unknown killer arise.

All the talk about a dysfunctional team of course doesn't apply to Lapis Lazuline, who is ten times as chummy as the other three put together. She is super cheerful and friendly with everyone and acts enthusiastic and emotionally about everything. Thus she acts as the glue that makes Team Bell stick together and feel like an actual team and not just a bunch of people who happened to stand close to each other when it was time to team up.

Team Pfle

I feel a lot of negative energy emanating from this team... As the story goes on we discover that there's deception in the other teams as well, but in this case we get to follow it closely from within. Pfle is very smart and manipulative, and the first thing she does after being thrown into the game is fake injuries in order to gain empathy and get others do her dirty work. I really like the contrast between Pfle maintaining a friendly and co-operative public image, while we get to read Shadow Gale's narration where she constantly roasts Pfle for being self-absorbed, arrogant or even sadistic.

As a fine lady and her long-suffering friend/servant, Pfle and Shadow Gale are the only girls who knew each other before being transported to the game, and the trust and familiarity they have really shows. While Pfle often doesn't tell what she's planning and sometimes is outright pretty rude towards Shadow Gale, and Shadow Gale's thoughts towards Pfle are often pretty unkind even when her behaviour is polite on the surface, when reading about them I feel secure that they can count on each other. Also in Pfle's defense even if she manages to keep her emotions well in check, she can go to great lengths for those who she considers a part of her in-group.

And then there's of course the third member of the group, Masked Wonder, who is exactly the kind of pure hearted defender of justice who falls for Pfle's fake injury act and becomes the group's muscle. Her straightforward and altruistic behaviour looks even more heroic next to Pfle's scheming, and she also pairs up really well with the equally enthusiastic Lapis Lazuline for some funny scenes.

In conclusion I really like how different every team is in terms of internal relationships and how they relate to the other teams, and handle being forced to compete in the game. And then there's also the fact that when the characters start dying, the survivors form new groups both permanently (like someone whose entire team has been killed gets adopted by another team) or temporarily (when a common goal needs more manpower), which gives even more team dynamics to read about.

Of course the fact that this is such a dark series affects the mood, so a lot of the interaction involves deception, doubt, fear, and violence and death. But I find that the starting point is striking enough that the characters would be interesting to follow even if you put them into a family friendly series, where the point really is just to clear a video game and those who are initially uncooperative learn the power of friendship by the end (and everyone lives). So I really wish more magical girl shows would utilise character writing like this; like obviously I don't mean that next year we should get Murder! Battle Royale Precure<3, but that there are other options besides everyone being best friends from the moment they join the team.

#magical girl raising project #wow this has been in my drafts for months #I remember very little about writing it but here it is anyway #now I've done everything I can with restart and am able to move forward to limited #magical girl raising project: restart #my stuff #ramble ramble

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davetheshady · 5 years

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🌟 how about chapter 4 of waiting for the bus in the rain 🌟 and only partially because i showed up to yell about the last few paragraphs when it first dropped. also just because i love Julie content and it's the very middle of that fic

::blows dust off inbox:: So! Now that I’ve back from traveling through three countries and recovered from trying to leave most of my arm skin in one of them (PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: don’t go so fast you flip over on the Alpine Slide, particularly if you’re in the actual Alps) here’s some DVD commentary on Chapter 4 of Waiting for the Bus in the Rain! It’s chock full of my stylistic hallmarks, i.e. way longer than I expected.

(Note to my sister: THIS IS FULL OF SPOILERS. GO READ MY STORY FIRST YOU LOSER)

There’s a Sheriff’s Secret Police officer outside Julie’s window. Considering she’s in her office on the second floor, this is fairly impressive. But when they scream and scrabble against the glass after accidentally kicking over their ladder for the third time, Julie’s had enough.

Even when they’re not under suspicion of using the scientific method, Julie has to deal with WAY more (attempted) surveillance than Carlos ever does. This is partially because she doesn’t have amazing hair, but also because Cecil doesn’t narrate large chunks of her life over the radio that the SSP can copy down and submit as a report.

vulnerabilities include fire and cold iron

and according to the literature high velocity cheese wedges but i’ve never seen anyone test that

My hand to God. Probably my number one complaint about fantasy as a genre is that everyone takes stuff from Celtic mythology so seriously when half of it is just. Completely bonkers.

Originally, most of the relevant exposition about fairies was provided by a different character entirely: Carlos-f’s misplaced smartphone, an AI who Julie called Hex (yes, like in Discworld, hell yeah science wizards) because she refused to give Julie her name. Hex provided such ringtones as “Dark Horse” and “Double Rainbow” and would occasionally get distracted by lists of numbers. Hmm…

I changed it back because 1) it was a detour and this chapter was long enough already, 2) Julie and Carlos’ friendship is one of the main throughlines and having them talk to each other was better for the story, and 3) him texting during the middle of a battle is hilarious. But as far as I’m concerned, Hex is still canon.

Andre yawns on the other end of the line and asks, “What time is it?”

“Quit whining, it’s only—” Julie looks at the clock.

Shit.

“—3:00 AM,” she finishes defiantly, because she still has her pride. Embarrassment pricks at her like flying embers settling on bare skin, because now Andre knows she was so out of it she didn’t even bother to try keeping track of the time, and he’s going to think she couldn’t sleep because of feelings, which is both correct and incorrect, because she wasn’t even trying to sleep since distracting herself by going over the minutiae of their data while the Sheriff’s Secret Police scream and fall in the bushes is better than listening to her cats prowl around while lying in her quiet apartment by herself, and any moment now he’s going to feel bad and decide to humor her and answer her in a voice filled with cloying pity and say—

“Would Hiram McDaniels count as one respondent, or five?” He yawns again.

A good chunk of Julie’s inner turmoil just, like, boils down to a recurring loop of that Tim Kreider quote about “If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.” She doesn’t consciously WANT the rewards of being loved, it just kind of… happens… and then she’s stuck with incredibly loyal life-long friends… and now she not only has to deal with her own feelings but theirs too, which is pretty much her worst nightmare…

Fortunately, since she’s already gone through the mortifying ordeal of being known, they do frequently pull through and offer the kind of support she knows how to accept.

“Give TV’s Frank a kiss for me.”

“I’m not kissing my cat for you,” says Julie.

I mean, she’ll kiss the cat. Just not on request.

And yes, all her cats are named after the Mad Scientists’ sidekicks on Mystery Science Theater 3000. ~foreshadowing~

When she opens the door of her workshop later that morning, she finds that someone has been by to leave her a breakfast tray. Well, “tray”, in that it’s a textbook, and “breakfast”, in that it’s a French press, a stale churro, and her blood pressure medication. But the French press is completely full with still-warm coffee, so overall she’s going to count this as a win.

This appeared pretty early in my drafts: it’s just such a funny mental image to me and also encapsulates Julie and Gary’s relationship pretty well, i.e. a string of question marks who somehow get along.

The naturally suspicious part of her wonders if he deliberately provoked her reaction to the flamingo to gather more information about it. The naturally analytical part of her points out that Carlos is more likely to gnaw off his own hand than put someone in danger, especially when he could just put himself in danger instead.

Julie is just a tad cynical, so she’d definitely think of potentially negative interpretations of her friend’s actions. But it’s not actually a possibility she dwells on in any real sense, and every time she interacts with Carlos-f (not to mention Carlos-0) she trusts him implicitly. She wouldn’t admit it in a thousand years, but she considers Carlos one of the few genuinely good people in the world: not because he never makes mistakes or creates personal disasters, but exactly because of those things. She knows he’s a flawed person, and that everyone is flawed, so that makes him genuine – which means every time he’s tried to do the right thing at personal cost, over and over, that was genuine too.

Basically, there’s a reason why in the last chapter she automatically references “scientist means hero” with “Fuck, I’m turning into you!”

“So,” she says. “Nilanjana. Do you need new pronouns, or anything?”

“Does anyone need any pronouns?” asks Gary contemplatively, which Julie takes as a ‘No’.

“Should I drop ‘Gary’ entirely? Do you want me to change your name in our paperwork?”

He thinks about it for a moment. “I don't know, man,” he concludes. “I don’t really believe in labels.”

Gary has galaxy-brained from “gender is a social construct” straight to “identity is a social construct” and beyond.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asks Julie.

“I think so, Dr. K,” says Gary. “But how will we get three pink flamingos into one pair of capri pants?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-xrnIXQ3iQ

What happens when the wave function ψ is the same as the physical system it describes, and what happens when that physical system collapses?

i.e. what would happen if common misperceptions of the Observer Effect were actually the correct perceptions?

Julie can’t help it: she snorts. “Passionate? Me?”“Well, yeah,” says Romero. “You really care about the things that interest you. You get really involved and angry and never quit or back down.”“Oh,” says Julie, then blurts, “You like that I’m angry?”“I… don’t like it when you’re unhappy?” says Romero. “But – it’s part of you, so… yeah, I guess I do, because it’s how you are. Why? Is – is everything okay?”She’s spent a lifetime having people tell her to stop being angry. No one’s ever told her she’s fine the way she is.

There have been many, many, MANY thinkpieces about how women are socialized not to express anger, often even to themselves. That was never going to work for Julie, who after all is powered by constant low-level rage, but that just means she had to deal with the backlash from not adhering to social programming instead (on top of additional backlash from being a woman in a male-dominated field). Of his own free will, Romero not only rejects that social programming, but also clearly spent time thinking about her empirically to determine that her anger is a positive force instead of a random and horrible personality trait.

He’s a Good Dude.

When she was in elementary school, her third grade teacher had been fond of saying, “If you’re bored, it means you have no imagination,” at least until Julie had decided to deal with her boredom after finishing her science assignment, her homework, and the rest of the textbook by seeing what happened if you jammed a paperclip into the electric socket. (The answer was certainly not boring and, in fact, probably the most exciting and practical thing they learned that year.)

That used to be my aunt’s favorite saying. I personally did not copy Julie’s response, but it is based on research done by one of my friends. (It’s okay, he was very careful about safety and made sure to use rubber-handled scissors to poke random bits of metal into the outlet. Apart from a classmate’s socks catching on fire, everyone was totally fine.)

She wakes to the sound of Cecil talking about the other week’s marathon, which may or may not have been mandatory, whoops. Carlos has texted her an emoji of various hadrosaurids gathered around a campfire singing “We Are the Champions”.

PREVIOUSLY IN NIGHT VALE:

EXT. - THE LABS

Thousands of citizens stream down Main Street, driven relentlessly forward to the Narrow Place. The Harbingers of the Distant Prince hurl themselves towards the building again and again, only to be rebuffed by the wards. Charred corpses lay scattered around the perimeter. Green storm clouds gather overhead as their anger grows.

INT. - LAB ONE

ANDRE

Did you hear something?

JULIE

[not looking up from her welding]

No.

Carlos, meanwhile, has NO idea his emojis are not in fact standard.

“I liked him,” says Josie. [...] “He was trying to do… something, I forget what. I hope he figured it out.” At Julie’s incredulity, she says, “Some people, they’re rough around the edges, but they try. They hope for something better and keep going. That’s important.”

“What if you go where you’re not supposed to?”

“Then you come back and fix what you can,” says Josie.

“What if you can’t?”

“Then you find someone to help you,” Josie replies. “Oh! I love this song.”

She turns up the volume of the radio and treats everyone to the aria from Shastakovich’s Paint Your Wagon.

Vocals by L. Marvin

Angels chilling at your house are, of course, part of the standard retirement package for former Knights of the Church. Old Woman Josie used to carry Esperacchius and passed it on to the Egyptian, after which it went to Sanya. She and Shiro were buds and saw Elvis in Vegas (and also, interestingly, several times in the Ralphs).

Anyway, if you want to suggest that a character is subconsciously mulling over an issue, I recommend having them ask some leading questions without describing their reactions and then change the subject.

“It’s come to my attention,” she begins, then has to stop and clear her throat again. “It’s come to my attention that we have a pretty good thing going on. So I was just wondering if you’d like to keep doing this, you know. For the indefinite future. With me.”When he doesn’t say anything, or look at her, or move at all for that matter, she removes her hand from under her thigh where she’s been sitting on it and points at the lease. “I highlighted where you have to sign,” she says, somewhat unnecessarily. “If you wanted to.”

I think this is the only time we see Julie nervous about anything when her life is not actively in danger.

You can’t write a romance arc without including some degree of emotional vulnerability – it just wouldn’t be satisfying. On the other hand, how that emotional vulnerability manifests is REALLY dependent on the person, and if you don’t base it firmly in their character it wouldn’t be satisfying, either. (I’m REALLY picky about romances in part because of this.) Julie’s not the type to pine or swoon or be filled with self-doubt*, but she is bad at feelings, and unfortunately, she’s determined that an equitable relationship with Romero requires some kind of tangible, committed expression of them. So she does that as best she can. It’s not actively harmful to her, but it does require a stretch out of her comfort zone.

* ::cough::Carlos::cough::

Yes, Julie has technically registered their equipment with City Hall, in that they’re listed as alternatively “electronic abaci” and “databases” and she’s claimed they only use the internet for checking email. Until now, they’ve coasted on general good will towards Carlos/his hair and the fact that all authority figures have been functionally electronically illiterate since the Incident in the community college’s Computer and Fire Sciences building.

Look, I could have SWORN there was an Incident at the Computer and Fire Sciences building specifically mentioned in canon. Can I find it anywhere? No. Did I listen to an episode that was subsequently erased from history? Possibly.

This time, someone picks up. There are a few seconds of sleepy fumbling, followed by “Hello?” in more vocal fry than voice.“Cecil!” she says. “Is Carlos there?”“Are you in fear for your life from the long arm of the law?” Cecil mumbles.

her current ringtone

“Julie, I said hold on!”“I am holding on,” she snarls as the rumbling stops. “It’s a diagnostic. 75% efficiency? Am I the only one who cares about proper maintenance in this town?”

This combines two of my favorite things: people focusing on hilariously inconsequential details during a stressful situation, and Julie lowkey engaging in supervillainy. Nikola Tesla did not design earthquake machines so Night Vale could install shitty ones they can barely use. STANDARDS.

“I probably wouldn’t have destroyed Weeping Miner,” she says eventually.

“I know,” says Carlos.

“I could have, though,” she says.

“I know that too,” says Carlos.

[...] Carlos shifts. She looks over; he briefly catches her eye and says, “So could I.”It’s not the same. Carlos would probably feel bad about it, for one. But she feels some of her anger dissipate anyway. At least she’s not the only one dealing with this bullshit.

Subconscious concern --> conscious concern! Getting back to Julie’s cynicism: she doesn’t think there are very many good people in the world, and that excludes her too. Sure, she’s risked her life to save others, fight baddies, and make sure the dangerous technology she’s developed doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, but she knows she has selfish reasons to do them, like protecting her friends and making sure the town/world isn’t destroyed so she can keep doing her research.

But at the same time, the fact that she has been dwelling on the ethics of her situation ever since Chapter 19 of Love is All You Need, that she is genuinely bothered that she’d consider destroying a neighborhood, and that she’s talking about this with Carlos, who considers them to have a similar dilemma, suggests that deep down she is dissatisfied by her cynical model of the world because the data isn’t quite matching up. Which, of course, means she needs more data in the form of Chapters 6 and 7.

On one side is a large picture of Carrie Fisher giving everyone the finger

I think Space Mom is mandatory at protests now.

This whole section (especially the rain) was heavily influenced by the March for Science, which both Ginipig and I went to in 2017. You too can make a difference and also give yourself writing material!

“Any more words of wisdom, Usidork?” she asks instead.

USIDORE, WIZARD OF THE 12TH REALM OF EPHYSIYIES, MASTER OF LIGHT AND SHADOW, MANIPULATOR OF MAGICAL DELIGHTS, DEVOURER OF CHAOS, CHAMPION OF THE GREAT HALLS OF TERR'AKKAS. THE ELVES KNOW HIM AS FI’ANG YALOK. THE DWARFS KNOW HIM AS ZOENEN HOOGSTANDJES*. HE IS ALSO KNOWN IN THE NORTHEAST AS GAISMUNĒNAS MEISTAR AND HAS MANY OTHER SECRET NAMES WHICH YOU DO NOT… YET… KNOW.

* Hoobastank

He blinks at her in polite incomprehension. “I don’t want to miss the Life Raft Debate,” he says. “It’s important to support your department.”

Several universities hold yearly Raft Debates, where representatives from the different disciplines have a debate about which of their respective areas of study is the most vital for humanity and thus should get to take the one-person life raft back to civilization from the desert island they’ve all gotten stuck on.

I should inform you that at my alma mater the Devil’s Advocate, who argues that none of the subjects are worth saving, has won multiple times.

Without taking her eyes off her opponent, Romanoff thrusts out her hand. Dr. Aluki Robinson (Associate Professor of Ornithology) passes her a harpoon, its ivory barbs almost glowing in the dim light.

Nauja and Aluki are both from Cold Case, because no one deserves to be stuck in Cold Case where we’re apparently supposed to be deeply concerned about the main character’s sexual experience but only vaguely perturbed by the powerful white and white-coded women stealing Native American children to brainwash them to their culture so they can be fed to the system seriously WHAT the FUCK Jimbo

ANYWAY, in this universe the Winter fey of Unalaska are discharging their obligations to help the Winter Court against Outsiders by sending some of their people to monitor the prison in Night Vale. This also gets to highlight the fun of an unreliable narrator! Julie is generally not one of those, because she’s a smart and observant person who will happily question everything, but even she has her limits when she’s out of her element. In the case of this story, there are several minor details to suggest there is some Winter and Summer court drama going on in the background (the chlorofiends, an entire academic department of shapeshifters, Molly and Mab personally overseeing bus routes) and most of it just goes completely over her head.

During his undergraduate career, Gary had elicited a considerable amount of interdepartmental discussion about his desire to be exempted from lab regulations for wearing appropriate – or any – footwear in the lab, which evolved into a considerable amount of interdepartmental discussion about whether wrapping your feet in duct tape immediately before said lab time constituted appropriate footwear.

This was based on one of my mother’s students, who eventually resolved the situation by commissioning a handmade pair of moccasins he placed on his feet immediately before entering the lab.

“The scientific method is four steps,” says Carlos with a cheerful inevitability as the officers start shouting panicked instructions into their walkie talkies. “One, find an object you want to know more about; two, hook that object up to a machine using wires or tubes; three, write things on a clipboard; four, read the results that the machine prints.”

This is a direct quote from the book. Was this entire subplot about the scientific method ban designed just to come up with a plausible retcon for why someone with actual scientific training would announce this over the radio? It sure was!

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD:

1. “Step one, cut a hole in the box,” calls Wei.2. “No, step one is collecting underpants,” says Gary.3. “Step four: make a searching and fearless moral inventory,” says Julie.4. “And then step five, acceptance,” Andre finishes.5. “You see, the first level is ennui, or boredom. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific – nostalgia, love-sickness… At more morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for. A sick pining, a vague restlessness. Mental throes. Yearning. And at the scientific method’s deepest and most painful level, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause.”6. “It’s how you decide whether to fix the problem with duct tape or WD-40,” says Julie.7. “I think,” says Osborn, “that it’s a divine machine for making flour, salt, and gold.”

8. “Don’t be absurd,” says Galleti. “The scientific method is two vast and trunkless legs of stone standing in the desert!”

9. “And they say the scientific method is—”

“—the quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality associated with sitting around a fire in the winter with close friends,” puts in Dr. Chelsea Dubinski, Assistant Professor of Chemistry.

10. “Or is it the special look shared between two people, when both are wishing that the other would do something that they both want, but neither want to do?” asks Galleti.

This section was also a chance to write about the rest of Night Vale’s scientists, of whom we still know so very little. There’s enough of them that there’s a whole science district, and the community college seems pretty well staffed, but the fact that Carlos made such an impact when he rolled into town suggests that they were either pretty lowkey or indistinguishably weird from the rest of the town.

“I don't feel alone,” snaps Julie. “I feel like shit, and I know why I feel like shit, and the thought of outlining that in excruciating detail is, oddly enough, not making me feel any better!”

One of the things I wanted to address in this story (inspired by Ghost Stories, which I uhhhhh did not care for) was the shortcomings of a lot of narratives about grief. Because many of them are not only oversimplified, but also not everyone processes grief in the same way. It’s not necessarily a linear narrative of where you go through the five steps and then you’re totally over it: it might take a long time, or you might be fine until some other, unrelated setback triggers you, or it might be a cyclical process as anniversaries roll around. Grief lingers. Related to that, helping people deal with their grief isn’t always as simple as sitting down with them and offering a sympathetic ear. Some people don’t process their feelings well verbally, and the emotional labor of formulating all your grief for another person’s consumption can be nearly as traumatizing as grieving in the first place, and VERY difficult to do when you’re already feeling down.

On top of that, I think general American culture is just. Real bad at dealing with grief. Which means we don’t have many positive models to base our responses on, either as grievers or as people supporting the grieving, and if you don’t fit those models at all it just makes the process that more difficult because everyone’s stumbling around in the dark.

“Does it always feel like this?” she asks.“Which part?” asks Carlos.“We won,” says Julie. “Methods have lived to science another day. We can do our work without interference. All we did was lie about what the name meant, but…” She taps the lab table with a pencil. Another secret violation of the law. “It still feels like we… lost something.”“We did lose something,” says Carlos. “It was just a name, but names are important.”

One of the reasons I love writing Carlos and Julie’s friendship so much is because it’s such a relationship of equals. They’re both hypercompetent, pragmatic, and a little ruthless; their skill sets don’t have much overlap (at least, not yet) and their personalities aren’t at all similar, but they get each other and it’s so sweet. When they wander out of their respective areas of expertise, or stumble across some kind of dilemma, they feel comfortable asking each other for guidance – they can admit their ignorance and drop their public facades of Having Their Shit Together because they trust each other.

“I want—” Her mouth opens and shuts again, wordlessly. Her scowl deepens.Then she narrows her eyes and says, “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.”

Molly being a huge Trekkie is pretty much my favorite thing from Ghost Story (not to be confused with Ghost Stories)(although thinking about it, swapping their plots would be kind of amazing??), so of course I wanted her and Julie to interact in a way that showed off what huge nerds they are.

But yet another element I wanted to include in this story is the background detail that ~the masquerade~ must be maintained because it’s too dangerous for humanity as a whole to be fully cognizant of the supernatural – which tends to get a little lost in the sauce, because the supernatural is consistently super duper powerful and our heroes (most of them pretty supernatural themselves) generally avert disaster by the skin of their teeth. But here’s Julie, just a regular human who’s capable of producing terrifying technology, has no concern for the rules and traditions of ancient regimes unless they’re inconveniencing her, and who would be perfectly fine with upending the status quo just to see what happens. Regular humans just aren’t more flexible about change than the supernatural, they’re even curious about it sometimes – which must be terrifying to something like the Winter Court, which has been devoted to maintaining the same strict balance since forever. Regular humans can do stuff like tell a story so well it inspires the Winter Lady to subvert her magical restrictions and remind her of her own humanity.

Julie grumpily emails him a rough summary of her thoughts on Troy Walsh and her conversation with Molly and heads up to her office to pull up everything she has on both the bus garage and the man in the tan jacket.

Bullshit secretkeeping (“I can’t tell the other main character this important plot point, it’s better if they don’t know”) is one of my least favorite tropes and I avoid it at all costs. It’s such a stupid way to add tension. It can maybe work once, but after your character has inevitably watched it backfire spectacularly, you can’t repeat it ever again unless you want to imply they’re a dumbass who never learns from their own mistakes and apparently doesn’t care that it clearly puts everyone in more danger. ::looks pointedly at a certain book series::

Also, it’s almost always much more interesting to have characters try to share important information. If they don’t succeed, it coats everything in ironic horror as the outcomes one person tried to avoid happen despite their best efforts. If they do succeed, it means everyone is fully cognizant of the potential danger even as they are still prevented from acting on it properly, like because they (e.g.) get kidnapped in the middle of the street.

King City is not in the correct dimension. The man in the tan jacket seems to know something about this, but up until a year ago he wasn’t drawing attention to it. He was busy poking his nose into everyone’s business, ingratiating himself with the powerful and the influential, dealing with them in secret…basically, the SOP of your typical Night Vale authority.Like the Night Vale Area Transit Authority, with its bus route to… King City.They had a job and they chose to keep it, Molly said.“Fuck,” says Julie. “He was working for them!”

In retrospect, it’s hilarious to me how much of this fic was powered by spite. Ghost Stories and Cold Case both really bothered me. The resolution of the Man in the Tan Jacket storyline, meanwhile, felt pretty underwhelming – not because what Finknor came up with wasn’t interesting, but because it barely engaged with the few plot points they had already established. Like, when TMITJ shows up in the podcast he interferes with the Mayor, he’s connected to the city under Lane Five, he surfaces during the Strex Corp arc, he interacts with a whole bunch of series regulars in an ominous fashion… Yeah, that probably came from Finknor dropping him in more or less at random, but the end result was that during the first several years of the show it seemed he was an active driver of whatever his plot was supposed to be. In WTNV: The Novel, though, he’s much more reactive and impotent. This wouldn’t necessarily be bad if this change was acknowledged as part of his storyline, but… it’s not…

(And I get that it can be difficult to come up with a plot for an element you didn’t intend to be plotty at all, but like: there wasn’t THAT much material they had to account for. I should know, I had to look it all up to write THIS story.)

I think this was especially frustrating because it ends up feeling like a “have your cake and eat it too” on the part of Finknor: it’s not automatically bad when fans care more about the show’s continuity than the creators (creators have different concerns, and a lot of time that means they’re using the creative latitude to do something neat), but the novel was very much presented as “finally, a resolution to that one mystery you find cool!” which is… pretty much a direct appeal to the fans’ care about the continuity. So to then ignore or retcon so many aspects of the continuity without any story payoff for it feels like a cheat.

(Ultimately, though, my inspiration to actually sit down and write mainly sprang from 1) all the lovely comments about how so many people loved my OFC, which as someone who started lurking in online fandom in the early 2000s was both mind-boggling and heartwarming, and 2) lol those ladies have the same name. I learned nothing.)

She gets the call at 21:27. She goes to the hospital, although there’s not much point. The human mind is the most powerful thing on the planet and it's housed in a fragile casing of meat and bone.

I’ve mentioned a few times (possibly more than a few)(probably more than a few) that I didn’t like the WTNV live ep Ghost Stories, and that’s because the ~big reveal~ is that Cecil’s story was actually about a personal family tragedy, and once he’s able to admit that, everything is hunky-dory. As I recall, it went something like this:

WTNV: hey remember that time your mom died and your family was thrown into chaos

ME: WELL NOW I DO

WTNV: and on that note, good night everyone!

Needless to say, everything was not hunky-dory.

But on top of being emotionally compromised for the whole following week, I was also professionally annoyed. Prior to this live show, we’d had a few cryptic references to Cecil’s mom and could reasonably infer that his relationship with his sister was strained. Critically, though, neither was their own clearly-defined character (compare to the treatment of Janice or Steve Carlsberg), these were not frequently recurring elements that would suggest they weighed heavily on Cecil’s mind, and it wasn’t even obvious that their backstory WAS particularly tragic. So the emotional lynchpin of this live show was mostly new information about Cecil regarding characters the audience had no connection to.

Tragic narratives are powerful not only because they evoke intense emotions, but also because those emotions are supposed to go somewhere and do something: provide catharsis, reinforce the artist’s philosophy, make the audience ponder the meaning of life... In using a tragedy as a plot twist, your ability to give it the proper emotional arc is very limited, because you have to misdirect from its existence while building it up, and then quickly progress from upsetting emotions to those more appropriate for concluding the story. That’s not impossible, but Ghost Stories immediately throws a wrench in the works by splitting the audience’s emotional journey away from Cecil’s: he already knew about the tragedy and the people involved with it, so the plot twist acts as his emotional catharsis... but only his. When the twist itself is the first time the audience realizes there ARE emotions, and that the first 85% of the show was completely unrelated to them, there’s simply not enough time for the audience to have them, process them according to the story’s weird ramblings that kinda imply fiction based on real life is more important than genre fiction like horror (PS: that’s a WEIRD take for a fictional horror podcast), and reach their own kind of catharsis without it being horrifically rushed. Particularly when they’re having a WAY more emotional response than the character due to their own personal tragedies which they were not expecting to have to think about during a fun podcast live show about ghost stories.

As stuff like this points out, you can’t just sprinkle in character deaths and expect quality entertainment to sprout: there has to be a purpose to putting the tragedy in the story (even if that purpose is to highlight how purposeless tragedy can be in real life). I’ve always been VERY critical of the assumption that tragedy is ~more artistic~, both in historical lit and modern pop culture; sad emotions aren’t inherently more meaningful than happy ones. Merely including tragic events isn’t deep; you have to do the work and make it deep, in its context and development.

So: on to ::gestures proudly:: probably the worst thing I’ve ever written!

From an aesthetic standpoint, I leaned into the Night Vale house style in this section because I found it to be really effective at conveying the enormity of the tragedy for Julie: it’s pretty blunt, just like her, but the focus on oddly specific details, the narrative distancing, and the lurking sense of existential horror seemed a fitting demonstration of how badly the emotional gutpunch disrupted her narration/life.

And I really wanted it to be an emotional gutpunch. (But not a surprise: even if I hadn’t warned for it specifically, Julie mentions Romero dying all the way back in Ch. 10 of Love is All You Need.) This is in part a story about grief and mourning, so the loss that caused it needed a central place. I wanted it to be powerful enough to retroactively fit in with how upset Julie is in the opening chapters and to add real tension to the devil’s bargain the feds want to make with her in the next chapter. But most importantly, I wanted it to be so significant to both Julie and the audience that the end of the story has an impact. Loss doesn’t get “cured” – but it seems to me like it’s not supposed to be. Loss is a part of life; love, in whatever form, helps give you strength as you grow and change from the experience into someone new, and this is also a story about the love in friendship.

I think a lot about the ethics of writing tragic stuff, because when you get right down to it, ultimately art boils down to poking your fingers in someone’s feelings and stirring them around. People get really invested in the stuff you are responsible for creating, and making someone feel bad for no reason isn’t being an artist, it’s being a dick. But I’m very happy with how this turned out, and hopefully didn’t traumatize anyone who didn’t want to be traumatized.

(I do feel bad for everyone who was reading as I posted that had to wait an entire year for the next chapter, though. I wanted to get something up sooner, but I had to wait until I sorted Chapter 6 and Chapter 6 was just. The worst. WORDS ARE HARD. People who read WIPs are braver than any Marine.)

hmu for more dvd commentary!

#muggle-the-hat #love is all you need to destroy your enemies #ask dave #welcome to night vale #the dresden files #fic #writing

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pxiao · 5 years

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Yeah I pretty much agree but if I want to say my general feelings. I hate Jud//ai the least of the three and if given the chance would beat him to death along with Yusa//ku. I mean Yu//ma is just a kid so he gets some more leeway from me.

Ok essentially Ju//dai is at the end of the day a selfish prick and he has always been a selfish prick. He’s ok in BBT but that’s because he’s the least focused of the three protagonists. And I’ll be honest I don’t think Ju//dai is gay or straight or any sexuality really because the only person he loves IS HIMSELF. He barely has enough care to think about his friends and even then if it doesn’t align with his desires, he doesn’t care. He doesn’t have it in him to pay attention to others enough to be physically attracted to anyone and I don’t mean that he’s asexual. No that’s insulting to actual asexual people as they still care about people! Ju//dai never grows up despite what GX likes to tell us. Ju//dai is a selfish jerk that doesn’t care enough of his friends to help them if it doesn’t benefit him and he ENDS the show that way. Doesn’t help that he seriously hogs the screentime in his show. His biggest flaws is his hero complex, his self-centered nature and just how lazy he is as a person and I don’t mean schoolwork either. The fourth season he was supposed to be researching Darkness and he SAT ON HIS ASS THE ENTIRE TIME TILL THEY ATTACKED! Au///stin DID ALL THE WORK! Season 3 is all about how he needs to grow up because everything comes to easy to him which is just faux-philosophy at the end of the day. Essentially they’re saying his flaw is HE HAS NO FLAWS! But at the end of the day Judai is just an aggreving character and doesn’t do any real harm. While his fandom worships him, they mostly stay in their own lane. So he’s easy to ignore.

Yu//ma is also a dumbass douche like Ju/dai but like ten times stupider. His main issue is he’s just static so instead of maturing and growing, he just makes the same mistakes over and over. Despite the show saying that he’s nice and kind, he’s got a lot of douchey moments for no other reason than for bad comedy. Like he made Ko//tori get off from the rollercoaster control ride thing to have a serious duel and promises to get her when the duel is over and legit forgets about her. Leaving her stranded in an amusement park and only remembers when he’s eating dinner. After two of his friends, one of which is his BEST FRIEND no less were traumatized by a duel they had which HE SAW, Yu//ma went about the next day not giving a shit and walking around. And for As/tral when he gave up one of the Number cards for a kid that needed luck for an operation, he IGNORED As/tral’s worry that Yu//ma wasn’t going to get it back. Considering each number card is part of As//tral’s MEMORIES, it’s rather cruel to essentially ignore his reasonable fears about losing part of his identity FOREVER. But he is a 13 year old and yeah we can all be jerks and idiots. So I’m not going to be AS hard on Yu//ma as Jud//ai. But Yu//ma’s still an asshole. The issue is he has a legit flaw to him that the show just tries to say is really a strength. His naivete. There is a BIG difference between optimism and naivete and Yu//ma is very much the latter. Yu//ma honestly believes that if you DUEL with someone you’re friends now. Even if a duel is a conversation, I don’t become friends with everyone I talk to. See how dumb that idea is. Yu//ma also believes in everyone EVEN IF THEY HAVE HURT YOU AND INTEND ON HURTING YOU. Like wth Ve//ctor whose first real interaction with Yu//ma was trolling him to break his friendship with As//tral and very nearly killed him and his friends. And since then Ve//ctor has continued to be a sadistic freak that keeps trying to murder him and then he tries to save Ve//ctor and after Ve//ctor revealed it he was planning on letting Yu//ma die to save his own skin, Yu//ma was FINE WITH IT. And then the show KEEPS ON PRAISING HIM FOR HAVING A HEART THAT TRUST OTHERS WITHOUT ANY QUESTION. AND THAT’S FUCKING STUPID. I don’t think we should automatically think everyone in the world is evil and wants to harm you but going the exact opposite is just as dumb. Not everyone is kind and wants what’s best for you and if you aren’t careful, you will be used and be hurt. I hate Yu//ma more because he teaches a HORRIBLE lesson to kids about overly trusting. And it’s not fun watching him as his dueling is stale. He use his monsters just to power up Hope and if that doesn’t work, he cheats a card with Shinin//g draw. And his fans are also annoying thinking he’s better than Yu///ya, which is 10000% wrong but in general they’re not a big issue due to Yu//ma mostly being rather unpopular.

OH YU/SAKU or PM. I LOATHE HIM WITH EVERY FIBER OF MY BEING. Like you said, he’s bland and that’s the nicest thing we can say about him. At least Ju/dai and Yu//ma had personalities, PM doesn’t even have that. He’s just PSTD kid with no background or interests. He’s at best character traits of stoic. His “comedy” isn’t funny and more just sudden shut ups. Everyone in the show worships him, that’s a literal fact of the dumbass show. And the worst part of it is, HE DOESN’T DESERVE ANY OF THIS SHIT. He’s honestly not that good of a duelist since he didn’t actually make his deck and even then he rarely wins duels with just the cards in his deck. THE VAST MAJORITY OF HIS DUELS ARE WON BY CHEATING A NEW CARD. His strategy is basic power up my monsters and try to get my LP lower than 1000 to use my skill. His PM design is ugly, everything goes his way and his deck is pure shit. The only decent card is Firewall and that’s banned so he doesn’t even have that anymore. He’s not that smart as he’s gotten into PLENTY of TRAPS because he rushed in head first. He’s not active at all with him being at best reactionary to threats even in season 1 despite him wanting revenge. THE ONLY THING HE DID OF HIS OWN INITIATIVE was storming SOL and even then nothing came out of it as he couldn’t decode the Ignis code. Narrative there is no reason to like him as he RARELY CARES ABOUT OTHERS. When G//o first turned against him, he didn’t care at all and went about his mission. Great way to show he cares about the people he worked with. HELL the next time he sees G//o, he brings up that they used to work together SO WHY DOES HE SUDDENLY CARE???? BUT THE WORST THING HE DOES IS SEND THE WORST MESSAGE TO PEOPLE SUFFERING FROM MENTAL SICKNESS. He says after his trauma, he got counselling but it didn’t work and he gave up on it and allow me to say this. FUCK YOU YOS//HIDA! As someone that had to take treatment due to mental illness that means Yu//saku is a wimp. My therapist told me this, “the treatment only works as well as you try.” I’m not saying all therapists are good but since Yu/saku apparently only tried ONE THERAPIST, he concluded it didn’t work and stopped. HE’S GIVING THE IDEA THAT THERAPY DOESN’T WORK. AND LET ME TELL YOU FUCK THAT SHIT, HE’S TEACHING PEOPLE THAT THERAPY DOESN’T WORK TO A COUNTRY THAT ALREADY DOESN’T LIKE THERAPY, WRITTEN BY A MIDDLE AGED MAN WHO PROBABLY DOESN’T GIVE A SHIT. THIS IS A SHIT LESSON AND PLENTY OF HIS FANS USE YU//SAKU TO NOT GET BETTER AND STAY MISERABLE! HE’S A HORRIBLE CHARACTER AND TEACHES THE WORST LESSON EVER AND HE CAN GO DIE IN A DITCH FOR ALL I CARE.

Also his fans are annoying, they cuddle him and act like he’s great when he’s really nothing but a projector. And if anything his fandom is shrinking just to them realizing how boring he is. I would say about 90% of his fans are Data/storm/shippers and they’re their own bag of stupidity.

#genex damn it #zxl damn it #vr damn it #yoshida damn it

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