#i also feel like i skipped being edgy as a teenager and got to it now or something

[yrlocalghost]

chara being The Favourite is so frustrating because in this silly little haha game with so many goofy, endearing characters 15 year old me decided that the favourite should be God’s Most Suicidal Baby who's entire story exists near entirely as subtext and surroundings

[nocturnalazure]

Character Focus: Carmen (Part I)

Carmen is an old character of mine. :) She is the daughter of Felipe, one of my very first self-created Sims (I rarely create additional characters, especially at the time). I needed Felipe to be a temporary boyfriend to one of my other characters. Once they had broken up, I thought it sad for Felipe to be single and forgotten, so I paired him up with a pre-made: Katelyn Missoni. Yes, you read that right: Erik's grandmother is Katelyn Missoni.

So obviously, Carmen is Katelyn and Felipe's daughter. I got interested in her when she became a teen. She's feisty and she knows what she wants. (oh, and fun fact: Tim's father was also a singer and she was a fan of his. She even stalked him to his home, haha...)

But mostly, she was involved with Seth.

Carmen gets interested in the rebels of her class, Seth and Adrian. See, they're rebels because they smoke and skip school and drink beer. And they think they live in a shithole. Very edgy. Very teenage-y.

But she puts her foot down at bullying. She stands up to Seth when she realizes that he's been picking on Julian (this actually has been going on since elementary school).

Seth is not the easiest boy to get along with. He's standoffish, uncommunicative, and he picks up fights with anyone he doesn't like. He doesn't seem to care about anything and he scares other people. Carmen knows he's got some issues to deal with, and she'd like him to open up a bit. But he's definitely a tough nut to crack.

When he ends up inevitably grounded, she comes to see him and they almost kiss. But Seth pushes her away, just saying "Not now".

In the meantime, Carmen's best friend Daisy is dating Adrian, Seth's sidekick. And Seth's rejection hurts. So Carmen snubs him.

And just after she tells him to go to hell, this happens. Because hormones.

Seth is the type of guy who thinks that now is never the right time, but Carmen is the kind of woman who shuts him up by proving that there is never a right time. This will end up being one of the many times in their whole relationship in which Carmen gets her way with him. Because from then on, they become inseparable.

It doesn't take long for them to get physical with each other, but they get caught by Seth's uncle (he has lost his parents and lives with his aunt and uncle). They plan getting away together, leaving their town forever as soon as they become adults.

Which they do. Away to Lucky Palms, to live the big life!

Which turns out to be mostly shitty motels and badly paid jobs.

Carmen works as a waitress while Seth is (officially) a bouncer at the casino. Unofficially, and unbeknownst to Carmen, he also does odd jobs for the local mob boss.

Seth proposes to her out of the blue.

And so they get married at a random wedding chapel. xD Like you would, in Lucky Palms!

But they quickly get down from their high as money runs low and Seth suddenly announces that he's quit his job. It doesn't help that Carmen's father has finally tracked them down (she didn't exactly say where she was going...), and demands that they return to the Anne Arbor region.

Penniless and with only Seth's vague assurance that he knows someone who can give him a job in the city, they go back to where they had started. But also reconnect with their friends, Daisy and Adrian.

Life's not easy as they live in a trailer. Carmen complains a lot and gets jealous as Daisy has her first child. Carmen would also like a baby but once again, Seth tells her that now is not a good time and that she has to wait.

But Carmen is not one to wait patiently. She takes the matter into her own hands and stops using birth control. And of course gets pregnant. Seth is not exactly happy at the news...

Carmen feels guilty for a while. Until she realizes that Seth has bought a whole lot and has proposed a financial arrangement to Adrian to rent part of it to him and his family (Adrian and Daisy are not exactly cautious with money). She still doesn't know what her husband does all day for a living and where the money is coming from.

He just tells her rather cryptically that he "follows his father's footsteps".

New house, new life!

Carmen and Seth are now parents to a little boy named Erik. You may have heard of him? ;)

Carmen hates getting wrinkles. She'd like to stay young forever!

But more importantly, she gets more and more annoyed at Seth's late working hours and confronts him about his so-called job...

Yes, that is a shock, but Carmen is a practical woman. She takes it in her stride. At least, now she's got an explanation, which is all she was asking for.

On to Part II!

[sealrock]

WoL Inspo Chart

I was tagged by @airis-ray for this, ty for the tag! this chart was fun, and challenging, to do because I had to look beyond heather as paris' main source of inspiration yes I cheated and added two characters from the same source material shhh

I'll be tagging @ahollowgrave @withheartsaligned @archaiclumina and @shroudkeeper (feel free to skip if you've already done this!)

get the template here!

without further ado, and in no particular order, I will explain under the cut what each character means for my wol:

james heller of prototype 2: like james, paris became cynical and developed a grim outlook on life after being the warrior of light for as long as they have. they both also have a similar one track mind: getting back at the source that caused them grief (alex mercer for james, halmarut for paris). besides this, paris has the mouth of a sailor and will curse up a storm when angry or irritated

dabi of boku no hero academia: I haven't read this manga in quite a while and I've only got back into it via leaks, but dabi has always been my favorite well after I dropped the manga. dabi is here purely for aesthetic reasons, for the 'cool & edgy factor' if you will. but some of dabi's more intimate traits and motivations are reflected in paris as well, especially with regards to endeavor (which, in turn, relate to andromache). I won't go into much detail because of spoilers and that it's not finished yet, but if you know dabi's whole story you'll know what I mean

heather mason of silent hill 3: like I said above, heather is the linchpin to paris' whole state of being. paris has a lot of heather's traits and personality baked into them, which I explained a little better here. paris, to me, is much like a survival horror character since their personality doesn't seem to fit the overall hopeful and happy tone of ff14. I imagine if you put paris in silent hill nothing would change; in fact, their own otherworld dimension may be no different from any of the other characters

tommy vercetti of gta vice city: paris tends to have a violent streak, which directly comes from tommy. tommy is also here for the cool factor, but paris is also intelligent, sarcastic, and cunning. paris tends to work alone like tommy and rarely asks for help. and like tommy, paris has little respect for authority and goes out of their way to antagonize authority figures (i.e.; their grandfather, political leaders and allies, etc.)

hitoshi shinso of boku no hero academia: they both have eyebags and are roughly the same height, what can I say? when paris isn't caught up in rage, they're stoic, distant, and sometimes petty much like hitoshi. they also fight dirty when the situation calls for it, and they will use anything to get the upper hand on their opponent

asuka langley soryu of neon genesis evangelion: while heather is the main inspiration, I would call asuka the secondary inspiration. paris in their teenaged years was much like asuka; arrogant, immature, aggressive, and stubborn in order to hide the still raw and vulnerable side of themself left behind from their parents, especially andromache. like asuka, paris refused to cry or show any sign of weakness in front of anybody and resolved to become self-sufficient to an almost obsessive degree, but this only served to damage paris' self-esteem growing up. despite having grown jaded and subdued in some ways, paris is still haunted by an inferiority complex like asuka: instead of it being centered around a love interest, paris' inferiority complex is based on their mother and paris' perceived lack of strength and fortitude against her as an opponent

[squicky-fannish-discourse]

bad kaihil au for @citruscloudsandmoon since she’s been missing it and i haven’t done this ship in a loooong time

It’s like one of those ships I struggle to write lol 

this relationship takes forever to set off 

LIke I’m fond of the idea of mid-20s Kai and Hiromi getting together, but it’s hilarious and fluffy and cute. 

Kai sold the family business and starts his own small company which makes top tier beyblade parts. 

Also his office allows stray cats. Cats. Cats everywhere. 

He’s fond of overworking ayyy gooo to sleep, you lil twerp. 

Hiromi actually loses touch of the Bladebreakers for a bit, like she wishes Takao for his birthday. He got married. He invited her for the wedding. She cried buckets because it was amazing, and then laughed as she talked about all his embarassing moments she had to put up with. 

In any case, she’s like probably working at a high position in a company 

Kai and Hiromi find out that they literally are working across the street from each other. 

She also finds that he skips meals

Hiromi is SO PEEVED. 

Kai is very sheepish.

This man is a mess. 

Hiromi brings meals for him, and tells the secretary that if he’s not eaten it by the time she comes back, she’s going to force feed him. 

Kai sends her chocolates and flowers. For no good reason.

Everyone’s like ???

Hiromi goes over and whacks him over the head with the flowers, and he chuckles and says “I just had got those today from someone we do business with, and I thought, oh Hiromi liked flowers and she liked chocolate right?”

“So they were gifts for you, and you just hand em over to me.”

“I can get you fresh flowers and chocolates?” he asked her with a grin. She slapped the bouquet on his head. 

Kai as a teen was a weirdo, looking back. But he was understandably going through a lot. Kai as an adult just can’t give a damn anymore. So she must certainly irritate him into giving a damn  about his health.

She writes threatening notes on his lunch. “Eat this or I’ll take your beyblades.” “Eat this or I’ll take your cats.” 

He drops her off home. She invites him over.

Oh, look? They ended up being friends. 

Hiromi is in a bit of a bind. She’s been catching accursed feelings. 

This is KAI. She’s giving herself a pep talk as she walks to work. Like it’s KAI. Yes, he’s not hard to talk to. She’s not seventeen. He’s not a teenager going through stuff. They are friends. He’s actually kind of lost his edginess. But that doesn’t mean you have to catch feelings for the guy who you were crushing on when you were 14. 

She nearly runs into Kai, because she’s giving herself this pep-talk, and he makes fun of her. It’s like not anything mean. “Watch it! You’ll ruin my crisp suit!” 

She holds her nose. “I think I hurt my nose. Gee! Outta my way!” 

“Sorry sorry.” His tone shifts to concern. “Are you okay?”

She can’t show him his face because she’s beet red. Hiromi gives him a hard nod. 

He stares after her as she scurries away. 

The office friends tease Hiromi brutally about the CEO who keeps sending her flowers and chocolate. 

EVERYONE knows about it.

They all think Kai is trying to woo her.

Everytime she tries to explain. Nope.

Hiromi just eats her chocolate grumpily while everyone snickers.

“Gonna need you to stop sending chocolates.” 

“Why?” 

“Because I’m watching my weight.” 

“But you’re perfect.” 

He did not just smoothly slide that in there, Hiromi thought. At her silence, because she doesn’t know what to say. He just looks at her. She pokes his cheek in the awkwardness. 

“Thanks. Didn’t know you could be sweet.” 

This tension is weird. 

“I can be sweeter.” 

“A real charmer huh?” Hiromi is blushing again.  

Now if there’s one thing Kai Hiwatari does not do, it’s being patient. He’s a largely impatient person. 

“Hiromi,” he asks her. “Would you like to see a movie with me... as a date?” 

Hiromi freezes. If there’s one thing Hiromi Tachibana doesn’t do, it’s subtlety.” 

“Yes!” she says way too enthusiastically. “I mean No.” He blinks. “I mean yes.” She coughs, smooths out her skirt and awkwardly darts her eyes towards him. He’s grinning.

“Yes?”

She wilts. “Yes.” He’s smirking. “You’re terrible. Why do I put up with you?” 

“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”  

He’s teeeeerrrible. 

They end up getting together. And she’s at her place cooking for the pair of them, and he’s like “By the way, um. Those flowers and chocolates were not gifts for me.” 

Hiromi throws a cushion at him while he’s snorts. 

[otakween]

I'm Standing on a Million Lives - Volume 14

Woohoo! New character and a new arc. I like new girl's shaggy hair and her black and white outfit is cute too.

Ch. 65

A nice, strong start to this volume. Very surprised to see COVID incorporated, but I guess it's set in present day after all. Interesting that the mangaka decided to use the 2020 situation for commentary/character development.

The idea of sorcerers being unable to produce viable offspring is super interesting. It's always good to give big debuffs to OP characters (unless they're child free and don't care lol).

Malita moment with Yuusuke was nice, but I feel uncomfy seeing him so wholesome all of the sudden. He's definitely developed as a character, but he still spews stupid, self-righteous BS so it's like...has he changed though??

Hakozaki confronting Yuusuke about his weirdo misanthropy was satisfying, especially the "you're no better than those who commit genocide" bit. You tell him! His "I'm just doing what seems right from my perspective" seems like a weak excuse...

Kinda yikes for a manga character to be "on the side of COVID," but at least he says "but the innocent lives being taken thing isn't cool" lol. Edgy, but not "get the mangaka cancelled levels of edgy."

Glenda based as always with her "teenagers say dumb shit because their brains aren't fully developed" observations (paraphrased haha).

Kinda hilarious how Glenda was like "Oh, by the way feminism is a thing" to Jangani and he was like "that will never catch on." Cue it immediately catching on a panel later LOL. I was surprised to see Yuusuke say "Japan is pretty behind" when talking about gender equality in the US vs. Japan. Love that a Japanese writer acknowledged that. (Not to be all rah-rah USA though).

The goblins IRL being labelled "Chupacabra" is genius.

Ch. 66

Yuusuke helps Keita rehabilitate his dad who just got out of prison. Good to see some more 1 on 1 character time.

Yuusuke's such a smartass. It's a good thing he was taken down a peg last chapter because in this one you'd think he was smarter than everyone (although I guess the bar is low with Keita's dad and his goons)

The revelation about how dragon bishops are created was interesting. I'm a little confused about the dead fetus thing. Does that mean the younger dragon bishops were that way from birth and then just grew normally?? That would be an interesting story to follow. Are they evil as little kids or does that come about during puberty? lol

Keita's dad just conveniently doesn't notice Keita and Yuusuke using magic right in front of him. Also isn't surprised by two teenagers easily beating up 3 grown men.

I was relieved that Yuusuke acknowledged that Keita's dad isn't "healed" and that he'll most likely relapse again. We don't need anymore talk-no-jutsu insta redemption

Ch. 67

Hmmm that chapter was kinda weird. All over the place in tone. Excited to have a new character and a new arc though!

New girl is Taiwanese, I like her design and air-headedness, but like a lot of the other characters, I was kinda annoyed by how quickly she got used to the idea of being in another world. Also, I rolled my eyes when she brought up feng shui (like: "geddit?? She's from Taiwan!")

Not sure if it's clever or lazy to have the fantasy world mirror the politics of ours. I guess for me it makes things more interesting because it's more relatable and cool to hear the differing perspectives the characters have on things like dictatorships and imperialism. (We get another nod to America in this chapter). Interesting to think about Japanese people keeping up with American politics (although I guess that's only natural considering America's place in the world).

Yuusuke has an existential crisis because they've time-skipped another 85 years. I feel like a big jump like that makes things less interesting because they won't be able to do as many callbacks to older characters. Will we get a resolution to Malita's story?

I liked that Hakozaki called out the fact that the Master only reaches out to Yuusuke and no one else. I really hope they continue to develop her skeptical side. It'd be cool to see her take on Yuusuke in a fight one day.

That Chinese dragon design was so cool! I hope we get to see more of that monster.

Ch. 68

The corruption of the local government and strategies for solving this arc's goal are discussed. In other words, mainly a world building/team work heavy chapter, which I always enjoy the most.

I feel like this writer is actually pretty good at explaining politics/government in easy-to-digest ways. Could they help me understand IRL stuff too, please? lol

Interesting use of the revival mechanic here where they use Hakozaki as live bait. I like that their "immortality" has a lot of clear cut rules so they can't really abuse it too often, but it's still a nice advantage to have.

Yuka getting abruptly eaten by a sea serpent was pretty funny. Hope she's not just absent for the rest of the chapter now.

I found it weird that the refugees were like "oh that money? Worthless." but then they say "it will keep the 8 of you fed for a month." So...not worthless? That still sounds like a good chunk of change to me!

Ch. 69 (nice)

Holy shit! This chapter was so, so good. First of all, Iu finally gets some long-awaited focus and second, there was just so much intrigue jam packed into this between the revelations of how the new city's religion/culture works, the different characters reactions to that, and that cliffhanger ending with Iu being suddenly acknowledged as a messiah! Only problem is...the next volume isn't out yet so I gotta sit here in suspense ;-;

The oppressive theocracy being portrayed here is clearly supposed to mirrored after the Taliban. Pretty heavy stuff for an isekai manga, but a fair target I would say. I thought it was interesting how Iu and Keita went back and forth between "well, it's a different culture we need to respect that" and "fuck that! This is inexcusable." Obviously, when it comes to the Taliban, the "fuck this" attitude is probably the "correct" one, but sometimes other cultures/religions skirt that line and you need to judge on a person-by-person basis...if that makes sense. Like how there's a difference between women who wear head coverings because of an oppressive regime (fuck that!) and those who wear them as a personal choice (different culture, let's respect it). I feel like philosophy fans would like this manga...a lot to discuss.

Iu stepping into the leader role but being insecure about it ("what would Hakozaki do?") was interesting. I kind of thought she was more confident than that, but she has so little screen time I guess I didn't really know her after all lol

Iu being like "lol kay, ready to die now" when she gets sentenced to death but knows she'll just revive was great. Imagine facing a firing squad with that kinda swagger. Kinda badass.

I've never seen Dr. Stone, but the kind of old timey engineering Yuusuke and Kusue did in this chapter (fashioning rope out of sea serpent scales to build a rope/pulley system) reminded me of that series (based on what I've heard). Fun seeing Survivor stuff like that.

[coll2mitts]

#28 Hairspray (2007)

Welcome to Hairspray, where a well-intentioned, woke, white teenage girl singlehandedly ends segregation in 1960s Baltimore.

Y’know, after watching Cry-Baby, I wasn’t super keen on revisiting Hairspray, but I figured it deserved a fair shot.  I hadn’t seen the original since I was in high school, so I booted up HBO Max and settled in for a long night of old-timey dance moves and racial inequality.  Guys... the 1988 version of Hairspray is flippin’ great.

The cast is just to die for.  Ricki Lake, who I only knew as a talk show host in my childhood, is a great Tracy Turnblad.  My favorite devious sea witch Divine is her mother, and Jerry Stiller is her father.  Goddamn Debbie Harry and Sunny Bono are her rival’s parents, and Amber Von Tussle is motherfucking Colleen Fitzpatrick.  As someone who has a vested interest in all famous Colleens, I was stoked to see that Hairspray was Vitamin C’s first acting gig.

FUN FACT: According to Wikipedia (which is never wrong), Graduation (Friends Forever) charts on iTunes at the end of every school year.  Colleen is also the VP of music at Nickelodeon, so she’s doing just fine.

Anyway, the original Hairspray is campy, edgy and hilarious.  If I were Miss Soft Crab 1945, I too would bring it up every chance I got.  The story really boils down to two horny teenage girls trying to claw their way to the top, but the charm of Tracy is she’s trying to pull everyone else up with her.  The way they handle segregation and racial inequality is over-the-top ridiculous, but somehow more realistic than its updated counterpart (put a pin in this).  I mean, a racist white woman shoved a bomb in her hair to own the libs and it gloriously explodes on her head.  I haven’t seen the musical adaptation of Hairspray, so my opinions of how true it is to its source material won’t be explored here, but the 2007 movie adaptation, to me, left a lot to be desired.

Hairspray might be the most popular in a recent trend of non-musical movies being adapted for Broadway.  I remember back in the 90s when Beauty and the Beast hit the stage - it was so successful Disney now has the movie-to-Broadway pipeline on speed dial.  But now we’re getting a shitload of movies with no musical elements being fast tracked to Broadway, like Kinky Boots, Bend it Like Beckham, Mean Girls, Beetlejuice, Heathers, Waitress, Legally Blonde, fucking Groundhog Day with music written by Tim Minchin, just, so goddamn many of them.  I love musicals, but to say I didn’t want to see The Heathers threaten Veronica in 3-part harmony would be an understatement, so I’m immediately skeptical to the quality of this content and hesitant to consume it.  Unfortunately for me, Hairspray is one of the few who had their *corny* musical adaptation also committed to film, and it is a neutered, earnest, high school choir translation of the original and it made my teeth hurt.

The two positives I’ll give the remake are the sets/costumes are great, and the cast serve their roles well, although I will never be OK with someone wearing a fat suit as a costume.  The songs are... fine.  Again, this era of music is not my favorite, so I’m never going to get excited over “It Takes Two” or “I Can Hear the Bells”.  It’s just the tone is so different from the original, and by the end of the movie I was exhausted and very glad it was over.  Writing about it now has required several breaks and side-tangents and I can’t even get to the fucking synopsis of the movie... ugh let’s just do this.

Tracy Turnblad is a “pleasantly plump” teenage girl living in 1960s Baltimore whose sunny disposition makes her oblivious to the reality of murky situation she is living in.  We’re quickly introduced to her obsession, “The Corny Collins Show”, which features a number of far-out teens that love to dance, including multi-year winner of Miss Teenage Hairspray and miss Pitch Perfect herself Amber Von Tussel.  Her mother, Velma, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, is the station manager at WYZT, and uses her power to keep Amber featured front and center.  

After a girl on the show gets knocked up, an audition is held to replace her.  While Tracy’s mother Edna, regrettably played by John Travolta in a fat suit, is afraid that Tracy’s weight will prevent her from landing the gig, her father, puzzlingly played by like a 60-something Christopher Walken, is generally supportive.  True to Edna’s feeling, Tracy is fat shamed by Amber and Velma and doesn’t make the cut.

After getting detention for skipping class for an audition that didn’t pan out, Tracy makes friends with a bunch of black students who are all excellent dancers.  Turns out her new friend Seaweed is the son of Motormouth Maybelle, the sometimes-host of "The Corny Collins Show”, played by Queen Latifah.  Velma, in addition to being a massive bitch, also segregates the station’s black talent from the main show, only to be featured one night a month on “Negro Day”.  While Tracy is boogying down, Link, Amber’s boyfriend and one of the stars of TCCS, peeps at her ass and tells her if she shook her rump in front of Corny at the Hop, he’d have no choice but to put her on the show.

In the original movie, Tracy Turnblad fucks.  She moves in on Link and devours him whole, with no mind given to her size.  She is a kind of bratty, confident young teenager that isn’t afraid to reach out and grab what she wants.  Tracy in the 2007 version is the most innocent cinnamon roll that has ever been baked.  Link gives her one compliment and she drifts into fantasies of marrying him.  Part of me is annoyed by this, but the other part of me appreciates misguided optimism played as humor.

At the Corny Collins hop, Tracy steals borrows Seaweed’s dance move and lands a place on TCCS council.  After declaring she wants every day to be Negro Day, the head of the station declares he wants that “chubby communist girl” off the show.  Corny, played by a dreamy James Marsden, sticks his neck out for Tracy and furthermore, says the show should be integrated.  As Tracy’s popularity skyrockets, the station shows more leeway to her size and her look, but to maintain some semblance of control, Velma works to completely edge out Negro Day.

Meanwhile, Link is clued into how fun it is in detention, and him, Tracy, and Penny all dance their way to Motormouth Maybelle’s record store for a potluck.  When Seaweed introduces his new white friends to his mother, Penny delivers my favorite line of the whole movie, “I’m very pleased and scared to be here.”  Amber rats out Tracy’s activities to her mother, and Edna arrives to Motormouth’s with the intention of dragging Tracy home until she realizes that black people are OK because they eat brisket.

After Edna shoves a bunch of food in her face, the gang finds out that Negro Day on “The Corny Collins Show” has been cancelled.  Tracy has the great idea to protest the television station, and all the black people are like, “Why didn’t we think of that?”  Link decides to bow out of the march because there’ll be talent agents at the Miss Hairspray Pageant, and he doesn’t want to give up his big shot at fame and glory to fight for a entire race of people’s basic rights.

The next day, Tracy and her mom are the only white people in a sea of black people to march to the station.  Queen Latifah sings a very earnest song about the resilience of her community, because this is the Serious Portion TM of the musical.  Tracy assaults a police officer without giving any mind to what it would do for all the black people she’s marching with, and runs away to let them handle the consequences.  The movie doesn’t show any police brutality because Reasons, and a bunch of protestors are arrested and immediately bailed out by Tracy’s Dad.  Tracy eventually ends up back at Motormouth Maybelle’s record shop so she can hide there without considering how dangerous it would be for Motormouth to harbor a fugitive of the law.  

The next day is the Miss Teen Hairspray competition broadcast at WYZT, and with Tracy being wanted by the police, they have to sneak her into the station.  She bum-rushes the set to sing a song with a now-enlightened Link about not stopping progress, while also inviting Motormouth Maybelle’s daughter, Little Inez, on stage to dance.  Everybody calls-in to vote for her because the only racist people in Baltimore run the television station, and Little Inez is crowned Miss Teen Hairspray.  Amber is like fine with it even though her mom isn’t, and everyone dances and sings to celebrate that “The Corny Collins” show is now integrated!  Meanwhile, I’m left wondering why Amanda Bynes was forced to wear a dress that she can’t move her legs in, even though they knew she would participate in the show’s closing dance number.  The end.

Oh, and there’s also a whole B plot where Velma tries to fuck Tracy’s dad and Tracy’s mom finds out and gets upset for like 30 seconds.  This is immediately resolved by a song and dance number among a bunch of laundry.

This movie is fine and competent or whatever, but for some reason it just rubs me the entirely wrong way.  Tracy constantly says that the 1960s are changing for people who are different, implying that an overweight white teen also knows what it’s like to be discriminated against in the same way black people are.  The movie does roll its eyes at some of her most tone-deaf “I’m an overenthusiastic ally” moments, like “I wish every day was Negro Day!” and “This is afro-tastic!”, but it also goes out of its way to talk about how much Tracy has helped the black community.  Like, by doing what?  Being fat and on TV?  That being said, she does use her privilege to feature black dancers on a major television broadcast, so by the end of the movie she becomes the person everyone says she is.  Also, I’m a dumb, overweight, white, middle-aged woman, so I’m not the right person to get all indignant about a well-intentioned feel-good Broadway musical.

Final thoughts: If you love bright colors, cheese, and sincere, glossy reflections of the 1960s civil rights movement written by a bunch of white dudes, this movie is for you.

[akwardlyuncool]

Without Consent (1994) - Review

TW/CW: This movie features talk of mental illness and suicidal-ideation in ways that I feel teeter on a very fine line. There is use of straight jackets as well as bed restraints, among other antiquated medical practices, including unecessary sedations. Yes this movie was made in the nineties and not 2021, however recognizing context of the time period doesn’t free it from not being triggering.

I also acknowledge that there are several real life conversations going on at the moment surrounding youth treatment facilities, not so far separated from this fictional one and how traumatizing that are. (Paris Hilton and Bhad Bahbie are just a few of the voices talking about them.)

I’ve been on a teen Lifetime Movie kick these last few days and this one always seemed to come recommended right after the others that I watched, so I figured why not give it a shot. Now it wasn’t technically a Lifetime movie, from what I can gather, however it was a made-for-tv film, so I’m gonna just lump them all together, cause the shoe fits and this movie is gonna wear it.

Laura (Jennie Garth) is slipping down the wrong path. She’s flunking out of school, making out with boys while her parents are out for the evening and she’s even failing to fill out her college applications. She has a dismissive attitude when she talks to just about any adult figure in her life. Home isn’t great either and the relationship she has with her parents, especially her mother is a rough one. Needing to be anywhere else, she goes and has a few drinks with her “boyfriend” Eric, but since he’d rather hook-up than be the friend she needs, Laura leaves his place intoxicated and drives drunk. After the accident, her school and her parents feel like they have no choice but to send her to Meadowbrook, a teen treatment facility for troubled teenagers.

We know how these movies go, we know how overdramatic and sensationalized they make them on purpose and we know that even at their wildest, for some reason we still continue to watch. Maybe the early 90′s had that edge to them, but I feel like this movie in particular was a bit less cringe than the other one’s I’ve seen recently, that were made in the early to mid  2000′s. Maybe this one had more depth or something cause I was just so engaged the whole time. Even when I saw parts that could have been fleshed out more or things that I thought were trash altogether, I still thought better of Without Consent as a whole. In the genre, this one was for sure decent and actually had me on the edge of my bed for a moment. (I’m telling y’all that I literally went from laying down, chillin, to sitting all the way up, ready to see some ish go down.) Definitely want to dive more into the 90′s era of this edgy, teen, made-for-tv (Lifetime movie) genre, cause apparently as much as I liked the 2010′s, this one has them “newbies” beat.

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Spoiler(esk) Thoughts and Gripes Below:

My first main gripe with this film or rather the story progression of the movie, was the ending. You know I sat up cause ish got real and then they just decided to skip past everyone’s favorite scene. You know the part, the one where they usually handcuff all the dirty, crooked bad guys and we watch the wild look they get on their faces as they’re being placed in the back of the squad car, headed for many years of hard time to be spent behind bars. It would have been far more satisfying had it ended that way.

My second main gripe, which wasn’t the fault of the movie, but more of the times themselves, was the fact that a lot of these places, were over-diagnosing kids like Laura. It wasn’t just the doctors either, it was parents and other adult figures as well. Like first she’s alcoholic and then she’s depressed and then I think at the end they tried to say she had a personality disorder. Specifically to this movie, there was just so much, but we also know that wasn’t uncommon back then. It was easier to medicate and diagnose a supposed problem, then to actually talk to these kids. It was so gaslight-y.

My third main gripe lol, is that we don’t really know who Laura is at all. I can make the assumption that she might be a little burnt out and depressed on life, but beyond that I don’t know much about her actual personality. So yeah it could have also been a more well rounded movie, had they given her anything really. Does she like candy or walks in the park? Maybe she’s really into songwriting? ANYTHING? Just give me something because everyone finds themselves at some point realizing that they don’t know who Laura is or what she actually wants, but they still don’t stop to even ask.

All the adults were hella creepy and there were a few times were I thought old Dr. Winslow was going to inappropriately touch Laura, especially when he was talking to her while she was drugged and restrained to the bed. I know they wanted to keep people sick so that they could make more money off of them, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if that kind of assault took place as well.

I’m glad she didn’t move back home after being “freed” from the second trip to Meadowbrook. Laura’s parents did “rescue” her, but they were never great at listening to her in the first place and chose pawning her off somewhere to get help instead of once asking her anything legitimately real that wasn’t tied to her 5 year plan.

The whole treatment facility was gross, but her parents were straight trash for not even touring the place or asking real questions before sending Laura away. Like you could find a way to believe that this is the best place to get your daughter some help, but at least walk the halls first.

Laura’s roommate at Meadowbrook was also trash for selling Laura out in the escape and for that snake attempt at the end there too. We knew snitching got you points, but acting like you’re all tough while doing it is shady.

[phoenix-downer]

This is a both a genuine question and rant of sorts: Does it bother you how some fanfiction writers flanderize Sora as someone who is apparently so innocent/ignorant that he doesn't recognize romantic cues or feelings despite the games showing the contrary? I know that Sora isn't the sharpest knife in the kitchen and is our sunshine boy, but he's proven to be emotionally intelligent when it comes to picking up on the nature of others' relationships and even sexual innuendo.

Yeah, if I’m being completely honest, it does bother me. Sora has a lot more complexity to him than people give him credit for, especially in terms of emotional intelligence. And he’s been that way for a long time now, but people tend to reduce him to “dumb, clueless boy with a big heart who can’t tie his own shoes” when there’s a lot more to him than that. A careful playthrough of the series that doesn’t skip through cutscenes or blaze through dialogue will show that, but memories fade, fanon displaces canon in people’s minds, and  Sora being “dumb” gets played for laughs in fandom circles, thus encouraging people to do it more for likes, reblogs, and retweets. And sometimes people have some other beef with his character that they want to criticize, which all too often boils down to, “He’s not like Roxas and Riku, who are cool and edgy, therefore he sucks, so let’s find every aspect of him we don’t like and blow it way out of proportion to harp about,” so I think that plays a role too.   

DDD didn’t help matters either IMO, some of Sora’s lines were kind of cringey and only played into this idea, and unfortunately, that was the only new Sora content we got for five years until 0.2 rolled around, and even then we didn’t get a full Sora game for another two years after that. So I think that left an impression on people, and not a good one. 

But I also see people do this all the time to characters from multiple fandoms, so I don’t think it’s an issue with the KH fandom only. And it’s especially common in fanworks. Nailing characterization of pre-existing characters is hard and takes a lot of time and practice, plus familiarity with the source material. A lot of people who are creating fanworks are young and/or still honing their skills, or they’re just doing it for fun and don’t really care about improving, they just want to imagine their favorite characters hanging out. 

Heck, sometimes even canon works that have been going on for a long time have this issue, especially if humor plays a role. A good example of this is Kevin from The Office; he starts out kind of dumb and clueless about some things but savvy about others, but by the time the series is over, "haha Kevin’s dumb” has overshadowed just about everything else about his character. TVTropes even has a trope for this called Flanderization, which was named after Ned Flanders from the Simpsons.

And in Sora’s case, I think another aspect plays into it. As the KH fandom has gotten older overall, Sora and the other characters have remained roughly the same age, so now the older fans see them more as younger siblings or like their own children instead of as the heroes they used to look up to. As a result, we get this sort of “awwww look at my sweet child” effect, and no “parent” wants to think of their children doing normal teenage things, lol. People are uncomfortable with the thought of Sora being... well, a teenage boy, with everything that entails, because they don’t want to think of their “son” that way, so they cutesify and babify him to account for their discomfort. That all plays into the flanderization as well, IMO, and results in him being portrayed as “useless” and “helpless” in fandom works when he is pretty competent and capable of taking care of himself in canon, Xehanort’s attempt at screwing with his mind and possessing him aside. 

Anyway, this got long-winded, but yes, it does bother me, but I also get why it happens. So long as Sora is still portrayed complexly in canon, I can live with fanon being a flanderized version of him because that’s just what tends to happen in fanworks. I think KH3 and ReMind were steps in the right direction in terms of maintaining Sora’s complexity, and they fixed my issues with how he was written in DDD, so I feel good about his characterization going forward. 

Thanks for the ask! 

[purplesurveys]

1055

surveys by lets-make-surveys

1 - Surveys aside, do you use Tumblr for any other reason? Not anymore. I used to have a main blog, but it’s been years since I opened it; this is it (excuse the bad word in the URL lol, I thought it made me look like an edgy teen) but as I got older I used it less and less frequently until I no longer remember the password to log back in. These days I stay on Tumblr precisely because no one really uses it anymore, so it’s the perfect spot to hide this blog in.

2 - Do you have a lot of social media accounts? Do you update them all regularly? Depends on what you mean by a lot; I have all the basic ones - Twitter, IG, Facebook, YouTube, hell I still even have my Snapchat alive lol but I haven’t used it in like three years. I use YouTube the most but I don’t update it per se, like I just use it to watch videos. Facebook I’ve used a lot less often since the breakup, but I’ve shared a handful of posts since September. I’m probably on Twitter the most, but even then my usage hasn’t been the same.

3 - Does it bother you when your socks don’t match? What about your underwear? I don’t care for either situation, especially for underwear. Why would I care about something no one is ever going to see and even think about?

4 - How many times a year do you go on vacation? Do you tend to go to the same places each time? My family plans at least two trips, at least in non-Covid circumstances. We will sometimes repeat provinces but we never repeat hotels or sites, and we seldom repeat cities. The only places I remember visiting more than once are Baguio, Tagaytay, Albay, Subic, and Baler.

5 - How many times did it take you to pass your driving test? Just one. I could not afford to fuck it up; I was at the LTO for 8 hours and was not willing to go through that shitty long wait, so I absolutely had to pass that exam and do my best with the shitty car I had to work with.

6 - When you’re in trouble, do your parents ever “middle name” you? Nah they never used my whole name. My mom’s trademark is to add an -ah sound to my name when I’ve done something wrong though, as in Robina lol. That’s a sign I should know I shouldn’t have done what I did, whatever it is.

7 - Which family member do you look like the most? Which one do you resemble the most in terms of personality? People are always shocked to hear my mom is actually my mom and not my sister, because 1) we look very much alike, and 2) she looks young for her age. As for my personality, I’d say I’m a perfect split of my mom and dad. I exhibit an equal amount of traits they both have and I can’t tell which one I act like more.

8 - Have you ever been arrested? Never.

9 - Do you prefer Apple or Android? Apple. Would rather pay more than be stuck with an interface, camera, and emojis that I personally don’t like.

10 - Does getting sweaty or dirty bother you at all? If so, has it ever put you off doing exercise? I don’t sweat a lot, so I really do hate it when I feel beads of sweat on my temples or when the back of my shirt starts to feel damp. It doesn’t have anything to do with my feelings about exercising; I don’t like working out, period.

11 - Have you ever broken a bone? What were the circumstances that led to this happening? Never happened, hope it never happens.

12 - If you could change one thing about your appearance, what would it be? I wish I didn’t get the hairy gene so that I didn’t have to shave too much; my hair to be a little livelier and bouncier; and my front teeth to be straighter.

13 - When was the last time your computer crashed or froze? is this something that happens often? It must’ve been around a month ago. It just got too busy, so it froze for a few seconds. My laptop’s a trooper and doesn’t crash/freeze a lot.

14 - Do you ever have problems with your sleep? It’s mid-sleep I’ve been having issues with; I get nightmares almost every night. I don’t have a problem falling asleep as I’m able to do so pretty quickly.

15 - What was the last thing you ate for breakfast? Is this a normal breakfast meal for you? Angel sent over a small box of chocolate chip cookies as a Christmas gift so I’ve been enjoying that :) I’m currently having it with warm coffee. My normal breakfast is no breakfast, so this is a treat for me. Before this I also had to eat my leftover Chapaghetti that I couldn’t finish last night.

16 -  Have you ever thought about how you want to spend your retirement? That has not come to mind a lot, actually. I think more about death than I do my retirement...but this question tells me I should probably take a few steps back. I’d simply love to live in comfort with the person I end up growing old with. For now, that’s all I see myself wanting.

17 - When was the last time you got a new tattoo or piercing? Do you have any plans to get either in the future? A little less than 22 years ago; my mom had my ears pierced when I was a few months old. Haven’t gotten any new ones, nor tattoos, since. I’d love to have a couple of tattoos. Some of my ideas are two pawprints for each of my dogs, a plate of nachos, and lyrics that are personally meaningful.

18 - How would you describe your personality? Oof, what a loaded question. Hmm, I guess I’d generally label myself as hardened until I get close with someone? I’ve always kept a wall up and as friendly and extroverted as I can be, I don’t enjoy letting just anyone in. I value my personal and private space, and it’s important that I don’t lose it. 

From another angle, I also like to keep doing nice things for other people, even at the expense of my own happiness and comfort. I have to keep making people happy to keep me pleased with myself and the world. Maybe it’s rooted in the fact that I’m the eldest daughter in an Asian family? Idrk, but all I know is that I’ve never had a problem putting other people first.

19 - Have you ever heard of “hygge”? is this something you enjoy or participate in at all? I have no idea what this is and I’ve never come across this word before.

20 - What colour was the last vehicle you travelled in? Does this vehicle belong to you or someone else? White. It’s the car that was given to me for college, but when all is said and done it’s not mine.

21 - Would you describe yourself as healthy? Why or why not? In some senses yes, in other senses no. I don’t exercise or actively watch my diet, and I certainly eat too much junk; so proactively speaking, I’m not super healthy. But generally, my gene pool has been pretty fortunate with health. Other than heart conditions that run in certain branches of the family, we’re relatively a healthy bunch.

22 - Would you describe yourself as messy or organised? Is this something you would like to change? It’s a balance of both. I’m very organized at work so I allow myself to let go in my personal space, like my closet and car. I do clean up from time to time and I still like my space to be neat, but I’m not as neurotic as I normally would be with my workspace.

23 - Do you miss anything about being a teenager? If you are a teenager, what’s your favourite thing about it? The innocence. It was a period of being ideal, being a dreamer, being as romantic about life as I wanted to be. It was also a period where you were allowed to make mistakes, because fucking up when you’re younger lets you off the hook. These are the biggest things I miss, but I don’t really find myself pining for my teenage days. I still like where I am, even if things are realistically a little duller in adulthood.

24 - Are you patriotic at all? Why/why not? No. It’s hard to be when your country is shit.

25 - Have you ever had to wear a white lab coat before? Was this in school or for a job? Yeah we had lab coats in Lab class in high school, but they were green. We also needed safety goggles, and if I remember correctly if we had neither of these things we had to sit outside and skip out on the session.

26 - Would you ever want to do the same career(s) as your parents? I can see myself going down somewhere in the secretarial path like my mom as I’m good at organizing things and keeping internal affairs in order, but I don’t know if I would find it fulfilling. But in general, I wouldn’t want to be in the hotel and restaurant industry. I don’t have any attachments to it and I’ve always felt like I belonged in media and communications.

27 - Do you believe in aliens? Is there a reason why (or why not)? Yes. For the most part, it’s more comforting to think and believe that we’re not the only beings around.

28 - Which animated film would you most like to live in? Does it have to be a film? I’d love to be in the Fairly OddParents universe and have fairy godparents of my own.

29 - When was the last time you got into an argument? Have you made up with that person yet? Gab. I don’t know. She’s ignoring me.

30 - What are you going to do now this survey is over? Take another one.

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1 - Have you ever had your computer or e-mail hacked? Did anything bad happen as a result? No but I had bad viruses on all of my Windows laptops before. The worst virus I got involved my laptop typing out some long-ass Vietnamese paragraphs for me at the most random times. It was like a horror movie lmao. Every time I Googled the text I never got any leads from it, so I never knew what it meant or what the virus was. 

2 - Do you prefer the company of people or animals? I don’t really have a preference when it comes to these two because their companionships are individually different. I like that animals can be playful and sweet; but I also like cracking jokes and having meaningful conversations with people.

3 - Are you a religious person? Were you raised in that faith or did you discover it a later date in life? I was born and raised Catholic, and still legally am. I never saw the appeal of the idea of being saved or of reading the Bible or anything that has to do with Christianity; and the idea of praying was weird to me even from childhood. A lot of Christians/Catholics I know are hypocrites anyway, and to me that says a lot about their mindset when it comes to religion.

4 - When was the last time you went to the beach? What did you do there? August 2019. My friends and I had a day trip to Nasugbu so we could have some fun before the semester started; we mostly swam and caught up with one another. August is a low season so we literally had the beach, the pool, and the poolside bar to ourselves.

5 - With all the COVID restrictions in place, would you feel happy/comfortable travelling abroad right now? Why/why not? I’d be happy, but not comfortable because of the swab test I would have to take hahaha. The selfish part of me is itching to go to other places already. I know my parents would put a million roadblocks to keep me from getting on a plane though, so me traveling is purely theoretical.

6 - How would you describe your dress sense? I like wearing flattering pieces but nothing too flashy or bright. I get items that are currently in style and make sure they match with the rest of my wardrobe, but at the end of the day I still like to blend in with the crowd and avoid neon colors, flashy labels, or whatever it is that would make me stand out.

7 - Do you wait until the sales start before you buy non-essential items? I never really pay attention to sales. It’s led to some pleasant surprises, like the other day when I was looking for a gift for my aunt. There was an H&M purse that caught my eye and it was so pretty, but way above my budget. I decided to get it anyway because that aunt throws amazing Christmas parties over the years and gives us lots of money, so I thought it could would be my way of giving back (especially since her company got hit hard by Covid). Once I got to the cashier the register showed it was like 60% off, even though there were no stickers on it and there was zero promotion anywhere in the store.

8 - What kind of milk do you prefer to drink (if you drink it at all)? I don’t drink milk, but I’m able to consume it in other dishes. I haven’t tried any types other than whole milk.

9 - Do you prefer blonde hair or brunette hair on your preferred sex? I don’t have preferences when it comes to hair color. We’re not really conditioned to consider this factor, since Filipinos have black hair.

10 - Would you be embarrassed to own the same clothing as one of your parents? No. I borrow stuff from my mom all the time. My sister also borrows some of my dad’s t-shirts, at least the ones that can fit her.

11 - When was the last time you wore some kind of fancy dress? Like...a gown? I’m not too sure. It must’ve been Alena’s debut three years ago since that’s the last fancy party I went to.

12 - Do you enjoy dressing up (ie. in suits or smart clothing)? When was the last time you did so? I like dressing up and making myself look cute, but dressing up formally not so much.

13 - What’s worse - being overdressed or underdressed? Personally, underdressed. I’d rather look too prepared than looking as if I didn’t care to look decent for whatever event I’m headed to.

14 - What do you think would be the worst thing about being stuck in solitary confinement? Not having any options or activities to do.

15 -  Have you ever owned an unusual or exotic pet? Would you want to? Nope. I would not want to have one. Unusual pet is just a euphemism for animals that shouldn’t be pets.

16 - How old were you when you learned to tie your shoelaces? I was 5 and had to learn it for a test in kindergarten.

17 - Do you enjoy decorating for the holidays? Sure, it makes me feel festive :)

18 - Would you rather go into a restaurant or just go via the drive-through? These days it’s more wise to use the drive-thru, but to be frank I’ve missed dining in. I would opt for the restaurant but make sure to follow safety protocols in the area.

19 - Do you like having your teeth cleaned at the dentist? I’ve actually always found trips to the dentist soothing, even as a kid. The only time I ever really freaked out was when I went last year to have a tooth removed and I was told that I needed an anaesthesia shot on my gums; even then, I didn’t even feel anything when it finally happened.

20 - Have you ever had a gun drawn on you before? Maybe? My cousins and friends and I doodled on each other a lot as kids.

21 - When was the last time you went to a petting zoo? I’ve never been to one and idk if I can go to one.

22 - Do you bite your nails? Could you physically bite your toenails if you stretched enough? Sometimes I’ll gnaw at my nails and then scrape them off. I’ve found it more satisfying than biting them all the way off. I could definitely bite my toenails, but I choose not to.

23 - How old were you when you first started using Tumblr? Have you had the same blog all that time? It wasssssss 2010, so I was 11 at the time. Nah, I deactivated that blog only after a year of using it and then I shifted to a wrestling blog.

24 - Are you a fan of practical jokes? If I’m watching celebrities pull it on another celebrities, yeah. Most of the time I get anxious that the recipient would react negatively, so I don’t watch a lot of pranks.

25 - How many years older and younger than you would you consider dating? Is this a concrete thing or would you make an exception for the right person? It will still depend on the latter condition, of course; but theoretically I would like to keep seeing people my exact age. No more and no less than the year 1998. Growing up with relatives in such close age to me makes me feel like I’d be dating an older cousin if it was someone a year older, and my sister if it was someone a year younger.

26 - Who did you vote for in the last US elections? If you’re not in the US, who would you have voted for? I don’t live in the US; I would have voted for Biden.

27 - Are you a fan of reddit? What are some of your favourite subreddits? Sure. I don’t visit it as much as I used to, but I still go on there when I’m bored and in need of entertaining or educational content. r/AskReddit is a classic fave of mine, but I also go on r/interestingasfuck, r/todayilearned, r/mildlyinteresting, r/dataisbeautiful, r/SquaredCircle, and r/goodmythicalmorning. Sometimes I’ll visit the r/AmItheAsshole sub as well to have some fun lol.

28 - Have you ever watched those YouTube videos of people popping their own spots or zits? Do you find them gross or fascinating? Not those, but I’ve looked up earwax extractions and blackhead removals before.

29 - What’s a food you hated as a kid but love now? How about vice versa? Chicken curry is probably my best example because I’m obsessed with all kinds of curry now, whether it’s Indian butter chicken, Thai green curry, or Japanese curry. I didn’t understand the complex flavors as a kid, but I’m got to appreciate more and more as I got older.

30 - Do you prefer socks, shoes or going bare foot? Idk, I feel like all these choices are useful and convenient in their own different situations? I’m barefoot when I’m at home but put on socks when it’s chilly, and I wear shoes when I’m outdoors.

[benisasoftboi]

Unorganised thoughts on Silver Snow:

When I finished Golden Deer, I said that it had felt like a more traditional Fire Emblem story than Blue Lions. Silver Snow is that but even more so (though GD is still the most trad-FE cast, IMO)

Having already played those two routes, it felt very much like a whirlwind tour of them both, plus another battle thrown in at the end - a battle that probably should have been harder, but I (completely accidentally) built the bulkiest Byleth imaginable, especially resistance wise, plus high magic - and so, by pairing high defensive stats with Nosferatu, I tanked every attack that came my way 

Gaming, for me, is just doing whatever the hell I feel like, stumbling into good results, and then pretending that I did it on purpose

I spent the whole battle with the Dragon Tales theme song stuck in my head. Kind of killed the mood

I really enjoyed that after wrapping up both the Edelgard and TWSITD plots, they basically Persona 4 you by trying to convince you that the whole game’s done now and all that’s left is to chat with everyone - though unlike in P4, there’s very obviously something left to do because they give you a whole month of prep time, rather than just one day

I felt the same way about this on Golden Deer - none of the characters are appropriately shocked by Rhea’s highly questionable actions 

Also - she says she’s going to explain the whole truth! And she doesn’t! Only the Byleth creation stuff! The other revelations from Golden Deer are missing! Rhea! Why! Are! You! Like! This!

This is actually a problem I have with this game as a whole - they want to keep certain lore and secrets exclusive to certain routes, but it results in every story feeling in some way incomplete. Like, Fates gets a lot of crap, but at least you did get a full story from your half (third? never played Revelation) a game for the price of a whole one. Blue Lions gets the worst of it, I think 

Plus, when you know some of said secrets, it makes characters who refuse to share them in other routes seem weirdly (and sometimes, contrivedly) cagey about things they really do not need to be cagey about. See: Claude refusing to tell Dimitri and Byleth in Azure Moon that he wants to End Racism, and instead vagueing about ‘achieving his dream’. This is not Edelgard wanting to conquer Fodlan and dismantle the entire social structure, Claude, your ideals really are not so controversial that you need to be this coy. Dimitri and I are cool, we getcha 

My one sentence review of the whole game is basically: Great characters, great world building, great gameplay - but really, really frustrating plot structure

I’m also really upset that Seteth does not have a dragon form

Speaking of Seteth, I married him this time around. I mostly decided to do it for laughs, but while Byleth/Dedue is still my number one Byleth pairing, I came to really, genuinely like them together. Seteth is one of my favs, now more than ever

It helps that romancing Seteth feels a lot less... creepy than romancing most of the students. I like Linhardt, but romancing him felt very weird to me because I couldn’t get over Byleth having first known him as a 16 year old under their care. Dedue, for the record, doesn’t elicit this response  because he doesn’t really feel as much like a student to me? Role-wise he feels a lot closer to the knights, and it’s just that he's been enrolled as a student for convenience’s sake, which makes him and Byleth feel more equal than they do with most of the other kids. Helps that he’s also on the older end

Anyway, Seteth and Byleth would be the nerdiest couple ever, is the impression I got from their ending. The confession scene made me laugh in how ‘oh we’ve got a lot of work to do - btw wanna get married? - sweet, now let’s get back to work’ it was. Mark Whitten is a gem

It’s also the the first time I felt like the game was actually shipping me with a main lord (Seteth taking that role in the absence of the box lords on this route). Haven’t done Crimson Flower yet, so no opinion on the Edelgard/Byleth relationship yet, but regarding Claude and Dimitri my (pretty damn controversial, possibly a bad idea to put out there) opinions on them with Byleth are that

Claude and Byleth are platonic bros, regardless of Byleth’s gender. I just don’t get any feeling of romance from their relationship at all, and so pairing them off feels weird (to me, personally - I don’t hate the ship or anything, though)

Meanwhile Dimitri 100% had a crush on his teacher at school, but after more than five years of enduring trauma after trauma, and then half a year of beginning to heal (whilst fighting a war culminating in the execution of his step-sister), Dimitri is nowhere near ready for a romantic relationship. And when he is, I wouldn’t want him with any of the main cast, Dimitri x Village Girl OTP. I guess if it has to be anyone, I’d be okay with Mercedes, maybe Marianne - hell, maybe even Claude - but really, I just want him to get a fresh start. I think that’s the healthiest option for him, in the end

I do think it’s a pairing that could work in an AU where Dimitri doesn’t have any of the experiences he has in canon, though 

And again, this is just my personal reading

I’ll also admit that I may be influenced by the fact that his two most popular pairings are with Byleth and Dedue, who I greatly prefer with each other. Mostly because I love Dedue with all my soul and his ending with Byleth is by far his happiest, in my eyes at least. It’s the only one where he puts some distance between himself and Dimitri and evens out the power balance in their relationship, which makes me happy because oh boy, the Dimitri/Dedue relationship is super interesting and compelling, but also (again, by my reading) all kinds of unhealthy as it’s presented for most of the game - power balance issues like I say, the fact that they tend to indulge, even encourage, each other’s worst instincts and behaviours, mutual guilt complexes - like I say, it’s fascinating, but damn screwed up. IMO, they’re one of the best examples I’ve seen of how unhealthy relationships aren’t always the result of one bad person, and how two good people can end up being very bad for each other

Though it is, again, a pairing I can see working (and actually being incredibly cute) in an AU where they’ve lived less horrible lives

And it’s not like I don’t want them to be friends, I just want them to also develop healthier boundaries and equal levels of respect

oh my god none of this has anything to do with silver snow what am I doing

But hey, speaking of Dimitri - I flip flopped on whether I thought his death was handled better or worse here than Golden Deer. It was given, I felt, more appropriate gravitas, but again suffered from ‘Dimitri’s dead! No, Dimitri’s alive! Oh wait, now he’s dead again’ in like, three successive scenes. And then you see his... ghost? I guess?

Dimitri really seems to get the short end of the stick on routes outside his own. Claude’s non-Deer roles were, in both cases I’ve played, much stronger and more fitting, and Edelgard is Edelgard

Maybe he’ll be good in Crimson Flower. Please. I miss Dimitri mattering. He’s probably my favourite of the three

There’s a point - obviously I don’t fully know Edelgard yet, but from what I got from the White Clouds section, above anything else she strikes me as an incredibly realistic depiction of a slightly edgy, extremely idealistic, but also highly naive and short-sighted teenager

Her whole goal, it seems, is meritocracy. She hates the crest system and the nobility, and she wants to create a system of equal opportunity. I can get behind that, but I really hope she’s prepared to accept the fact that true equal opportunity is basically impossible without recreating The Giver, as inequality is always more complex than one single factor being to blame for everything. Has Edelgard considered other limitations that make true meritocracy difficult to achieve? Has she been working on, say, a comprehensive benefits system? Or is she more of a libertarian type, and so primarily all about negative freedom and removing direct oppression? I hope Crimson Flower goes into detail on this, I’d be genuinely interested to know

I also find it interesting that she gets very angry about the fact that people hurt her and her family as a means to their own ends, so she decides that her own ends are to eliminate the system that lead to that happening - and she doesn’t care who she has to hurt in the process

This isn’t a CinemaSins *ding* plot hole observation, I genuinely think it’s interesting, and not actually that unrealistic

I also suppose her goal is no less naive than End All Racism By Being Nice To People, but Claude isn’t killing and persecuting people in attempt to achieve that, so it invites less scrutiny

I do wonder if I would have felt more strongly positively about her if she’d been my first playthrough. I do believe she’s a person that sincerely means well, and she’s certainly sympathetic, but - hmm. I’ll make my mind up when I finish CF

Anyway, paired endings. A few that I got include Raphael and Bernadetta (by far my favourite Bernie ending so far, seriously, what is that Caspar ending), Shamir and Leonie, which was cute and goofy (as Leonie’s endings tend to be, I notice, I do like that girl), Felix and Dorothea (not my favourite for either, but cute), Sylvain and Mercedes (the same but even cuter), Cyril and Petra (which felt wrong, partly because I love Cysithea a hell of a lot, and also because despite knowing there’s only about a year between them, Petra looks so much older pre-time skip), Ferdie and Marianne (super wholesome and sweet), and Linhardt and Caspar (my boyyyyssss that I refuse to ever separate again)

Not sure what I’m going to aim for on CF aside from keeping those boys together and also Ferdie/Hubert, as I’ve Heard Things

Flayn and Manuela have an A support so I figured they had a paired ending and it turns out they do not, which means Manuela was alone forever and Flayn ran away because apparently she hated having Byleth for a step mother I guess, rude

My Byleth (Myleth?) was prepared to be the best step mother in the history of the world, so offended

I realised ‘Javelins of Light’ is one of my absolute favourite tracks in the whole game. Mostly because it sounds like something out of Danganronpa, which made me nostalgic

I also like ‘Guardian of Starlight’ for somehow managing to sound like a Danganronpa/PMD: Explorers crossover track

I love how out of nowhere the Immaculate One fight is. It really does just feel like they needed something to distinguish the route from Verdant Wind outside of Claude not being around, so they just had a map that was less cool in every way except for the dragon

Is there an explanation for why Nemesis doesn’t show up on this route?

Also - I didn’t mention this in Golden Deer thoughts but I also found that final battle way, way easier than it was probably meant to be because I’d made everyone into a flier and so the floor damage hazard was meaningless

Which I totally did on purpose and not so I could make a stupid joke post about my all-wyvern team 

Anyway, in conclusion, Silver Snow was a good route, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would (I’d kind of thought it was just going to be GD without Claude, which isn’t... totally wrong, but it’s got some other stuff going on too), I liked Seteth getting to have a bigger role, I thought it had the best final boss (if not the best final boss map), and I liked that I got some more Dragon Lore (never a bad thing)

please don’t yell at me for my controversial shipping opinions 

[missmeikakuna]

The Girl Who Cried Gay

Rated: T-M (It's something I can see a teenager reading and enjoying but could be given a more mature rating due to the swearing and the edgy jokes the characters make.) Fandom: Original story Relationship type: F/F Description: Edgy teenager Jimena's idea of a joke is coming out to her classmates every day. The thing is, she actually is gay but is too chicken to come out for real, playing off her numerous attempts as a joke. But this time she's going to tell the truth and confess to her best friend, the equally edgy rebel Vinciane. Her plan? Write an entire song in two weeks and perform it in front of everyone. Should be easy, right?

Right? Notes:

I want to thank Tyler, the Creator for inspiring this story. Your numerous jokes about you being into dudes before coming out for real was a source of fascination for me, which is why I wrote this story. Also, Igor is a great album. Congrats on the Grammy.

For my readers, keep in mind that my opinions do not always match those of the characters. These girls say things I never would. I hope you find them entertaining.

CONTENT WARNING: There is a mention of suicide but no actual suicide, just the characters being edgelords and joking about the topic.

Jimena picked her teeth with one of the spikes on her boots, which she had shaken off as the school day drew to a close. Before that afternoon’s teacher had the chance to chastise her for her choice in outfit… again… she stood on top of the table. 

‘I’ve got something to tell you all. I…’ She wobbled a little on the table. ‘Woah, this is pretty difficult.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’m gay.’

Everyone, the teacher included, rolled their eyes and resumed their in-class tasks. Vinciane leaned back in her seat as she looked up at Jimena. She watched this grand reveal with a smirk on her face that would make a lawyered-up business mogul jealous. 

Her short, dyed red hair in a sidecut was a constant source of frustration for the teachers. Jimena tried to copy it with her black hair but settled on a faux sidecut with braids. In fact, she tried to copy every aspect of her appearance, a feat made difficult by their differing body types, with Jimena being tall and thin and Vinciane being short and curvy. Both wore dark and heavy makeup, also causing a stir among the teachers. 

Vinciane almost dropped her smirk when she saw Jimena’s hands turn into trembling fists. Almost.

There was little point in being concerned since it wasn’t long before Jimena laughed and applauded herself.

‘You should have seen the looks on your faces! Get wrecked!’ She plopped back down off the table and nudged Vinciane in the ribs. ‘Lezzies for life, Vinny?’ she said, holding out her pinky finger and rivalling her smirk with her own. ‘We’ll get our own U-Haul and argue over who makes the sandwiches.’

Vinciane tied her pinky around Jimena’s. ‘Wouldn’t have it any other way. By the way, I’m making the sandwiches.’ Her accent was lightly French.

The two laughed loud enough to cause another quick lecture on manners from the teacher. Then it was Jimena’s turn to roll her eyes. Being the rebellious girl she was, she flipped the bird at her teacher… under the table.

That night, Jimena held her pillow in between her chest and her knees, slouching against her bedframe. She lifted her pinky and stared at it before bringing it to her lips in a gentle kiss. She looked at the acoustic guitar at the other end of the room, romantic lyrics flittering in her head.

The punk text tone on her bedside table sent lightning up Jimena’s spine. It was Vinciane’s favourite song. The text was accompanied by a poorly shot photo.

I put a gold bath bomb in and now the bathwater looks like piss. FML. Gonna kill myself, brb.

Jimena responded a little later than she had hoped, taking time to craft her text.

Is that a toaster in your bathtub or are you happy to see me?

Vinciane’s next text pushed Jimena’s heart up to her throat.

¿Por qué no los dos? Btw, you almost had me fooled today. Almost convinced me your verbal coming out shitpost was real. Excellent job, my love 😉

Oh, yeah. Shitpost. 

Jimena pulled her numerous blankets on top of her body and rolled around until she was caved in by warmth. It did little to bring a smile back to her face, but at least she could bury herself and perhaps never come out.

The pity party was crashed by her mother calling her to the dinner table. She had no choice but to crawl out of her blanket cocoon and enjoy a nice meal of… supermarket tacos.

Two thoughts battled for prominence in Jimena’s mind. The first was wondering how her parents could have possibly come from Mexico when they had the most Americanised tastes. 

The second was the reopening of the recent wound caused by her friend.

¿Por qué no los dos?

Her mother heard her sigh and asked her how school was. Jimena shrugged, using the beef and lettuce in her mouth as an excuse not to talk. Her mother didn’t buy it. Not that she ever could, what with Jimena resting her feet on the table and scowling at no one in particular.

After lecturing her on keeping the table clean, she asked, ‘Why must you always wear those shoes? Is this because of that girl?’

As Jimena managed to prove, swallowing food in an unambiguously angry way was something humans could do. A light clink hit everyone’s ears as she kicked the salt shaker, causing it to collide with her mother’s plate.

‘Leave her out of this,’ Jimena said in the clipped voice of someone who wanted to yell but knew she would receive a yell in return.

Her father tried to speak calmly. Emphasis on ‘tried’.‘We’re just a little concerned that you’ve, well, been acting differently since befriending her. You used to be such a bright girl. And why won’t you wear the dresses I made you?’ His voice cracked a little at the question.

‘Well, maybe you should make clothes that I actually want to wear.’

‘I don’t appreciate that tone, young lady,’ her mother chastised her, raising her voice even louder. There it was: the yell.

‘Well, you’re going to hear that tone a lot longer if you don’t shut the hell up!’ 

Jimena shouted, getting out of her seat and storming off to her room. She then went back into the dining room to retrieve her tacos and brought them to her room. 

She took her phone out and texted with one hand while holding one taco in the other.

My parents can step in dog shit while stuck in a time loop. Shit on their shoes for all eternity.

After a few minutes that felt more like fifty, Vinciane responded in an almost insultingly short text.

Mood

Rather than take the length as an insult, Jimena held her phone to her chest and giggled. She was unsure whether it was the heat from the phone or something else that made her heart feel so warm.

That sensation didn’t last long when she remembered that Vinciane lived with her aunt. She immediately texted an apology. She didn’t have to wait long before getting a message back.

Don’t sweat it. If I lived under their house, I would have to live under their rules. My aunt gets me better anyway. She’s even okay with my nose ring.

The two continued texting through the night, and not once did Jimena admit to looking forward to going to school the next day. 

The day that followed involved Vinciane skipping class and, without even asking her, being followed by Jimena. Vinciane sat by the pond, a place students weren’t allowed to be within ten feet of, and took out a cigarette. Upon seeing the horrified look on Jimena’s face, she chuckled and lowered her eyelids until they were half-closed.

‘You worried these will turn me from a dyke to a fag?’ she asked in a strong Cockney accent. ‘Don’t worry, love, I would never leave you.’ She took a drag of the cigarette and opened her eyes fully, returning to her original accent. ‘Oh, speaking of which, any guys you think are cute?’

‘None as cute as you,’ Jimena murmured, then gulped when she saw that Vinciane heard her. The stone she was sitting on started feeling mighty uncomfy.

‘No, but seriously. No one? There’s a guy who’s got my eye- what’s wrong?’

Jimena was looking down, focusing her eyes on the hem of her plaid skirt as she fiddled with it. Anything to stop tears from falling.

‘I’m gay.’ A laugh came from Jimena’s mouth out of habit. 

Vinciane joined in. ‘Yeah, yeah. So which guy do you like?’

Jimena shrugged. ‘No one at this stupid school.’

‘Fair point.’ Some of the smoke reached Jimena, who couldn’t help but cough. This earned a snicker from Vinciane. Jimena pouted and reached for the other girl’s cigarette packet. Vinciane guarded it with her free hand. ‘I don’t think you’re ready for that. Wait ‘til you stop sounding like you’re dying of tuberculosis.’

‘No way. If I’m going out, it’s gonna be human mad cow disease that takes me down.’

‘Or AIDs.’

Jimena smiled and gave Vinciane a finger gun. ‘Or AIDS.’ The two were silent for a moment as Vinciane finished her cigarette. She squished the butt into the ground and stood up, stretching her arms and yawning. 

‘Um, why exactly do you go to school anyway if you’re going to skip class?’ Jimena eventually asked.

Vinciane brushed her fingers through her hair. The sight took Jimena’s breath from her. ‘I mean, you’re here. And where else am I going to go?’

Jimena didn’t know how to respond to that, not that her airless lungs would have allowed her to respond at all. All she could really do was look away from Vinciane’s plump lips and pray that she would soon be able to breathe properly again.

A decision managed to get air pumping through her veins again. She was going to come out for real, and she was going to make it as convincing as possible.

At home that night, she jotted down ideas for this ceremony onto her notes app. The following morning, she gave Vinciane vague details about an announcement she planned to make and a song she would use to do it.

‘Is this another one of your coming out ceremonies? This might be your most over the top one yet. Looking forward to it.’

‘No, no, it’s quite different. Okay, so for the announcement song, I will sing it to you and you’ll sit there all surprised.’

‘What will you be announcing?’

‘I have to make sure you look surprised.’

‘You saying I can’t act?’ Vinciane asked as she crossed her arms.

‘That’s not what I mean! I just want the song to be a surprise to everyone, including you. I may dance around you, by the way, so don’t be surprised by that. Focus on the content.’

‘So where are you going to say… er, sing this announcement?’

‘The cafeteria at lunch, two weeks for now. That should be long enough to write and rehearse a song, right?’

‘I guess. So are you going to play the song on your acoustic guitar?’

‘I was thinking of asking the music department to borrow one of their electric guitars. I think the song would be cool with a punk edge.’

‘Good luck getting one in two weeks. And an electric guitar kind of needs a band with it, so you’ll be spending a lot of those two weeks trying to get bandmates. Won’t the song be more, I don’t know, sincere sounding if it’s acoustic?’

‘You think so? You sure it wouldn’t be fake deep? I don’t want to sound like some hipster dude trying to pick up a girl at a coffee shop.’

‘If the lyrics are sincere, an acoustic guitar will highlight them. I doubt you’ll sound pretentious.’ 

Jimena took a deep breath and put her fist in her other hand as she exhaled. ‘Okay, I’ve got this.’

Vinciane stroked Jimena’s hair, not noticing the warmth radiating from the other’s cheeks. ‘I know you do.’ 

Instead of hanging out with Vinciane, Jimena spent lunchtime putting lyrics into her phone. Vinciane kept walking up to her and trying to sneak a glance, but Jimena’s screen-covering reflexes were way too good.

At home, Jimena continued typing on her phone, even during dinner. Cue the nagging from both her parents, whom she ignored.

As she lay in bed, she tried to continue typing away but the claws of doubt picked at her brain. She sat on her side, listening to the scarce sounds surrounding her. Her ears picked up the whir of a sewing machine, a sound that pulled her up like the strings of a marionette. After listening for a while with her eyes closed, the familiarity of the sound lulled her back down onto the bed.

She knew exactly what was going on and was tempted to tell her father not to bother, but the sound softened the pillow she lay on. She let it play in the background like an ambient album full of rain sounds.

Before she could fall asleep, and boy was she tempted to, an idea popped into her head. She sat up again and grabbed her guitar, playing riffs in time with her father’s sewing. The plucking of her guitar mirrored the sound of the needle.

She made a new note on her phone and wrote new lyrics referencing the sewing terms she could remember her father mentioning. Half an hour later, she put the phone down and got into her pajamas. 

The first thing Jimena saw when she woke up was a finished dress hanging from the doorknob. A piece of paper was taped to the hanger, saying, ‘For when you perform your next song’. She smiled until she received a text from Vinciane. She pictured Vinciane scrunching her nose at her and tossed the dress next to the bin tucked in the corner of her room.

The following lunchtime, it was Take Two for Vinciane’s attempts to uncover Jimena’s lyrics. Once again, she failed.

‘Come on, can’t you show me a little bit?’

‘For the last time, no!’

A pout stayed on Vinciane’s lips for the rest of the day. 

When she dropped her backpack by her bed, Jimena saw the dress her father had made neatly folded on the bed. She sighed and threw it back towards the bin, narrowly missing it. The next few days were a pattern of the dress appearing folded on the bed and her throwing it in the bin. Each day, her father’s shoulders drooped further and further until he looked like a caveman with depression.

During those days Vinciane didn’t pry any longer and instead spent the time sitting next to Jimena and offering words of encouragement as the girl silently edited her own lyrics. She reached for Jimena’s free hand but Jimena wriggled out of her grasp to start typing with two hands.

Once again, Vinciane pouted for the remainder of the day.

Jimena practised over and over again at home, at least until her mother yelled at her to knock it off. The ‘knock it off’ point was at 10 o’clock at night. She gave her mother the middle finger but did indeed knock it off.

However, she continued adjusting the sheet music and playing the song in her head well into the night. Naturally, this led to her coming to school with bags under her eyes and little patience for Vinciane’s gestures of friendliness. Apparently a quick, non-invasive question about how the song was going was enough to set off an atomic bomb.

‘Shut it, Vinny!’

Vinciane blinked and stepped back. ‘Sorry.’

Jimena almost apologised too but couldn’t bring the words out. Vinciane made sure not to bother her until the two weeks were up.

Having her muse not by her side made it both easier and more difficult to practice the song. On the one hand, more time to herself without worrying about the secret getting out. On the other, no words of support and no one to look at when she needed a boost of inspiration. Doubt’s claws scratched at her psyche again.

That night, she sat in the dark, Vinciane’s verging-on-tears face playing over and over in her head like a scratched CD. 

The morning of the performance day was the same as usual, complete with the neatly folded dress on the bed. Jimena groaned as she shoved the dress into her backpack.

Vinciane didn’t show up at class. Alarms rang in Jimena’s ears. What if the most important audience member wasn’t there for the performance?

After changing at the beginning of lunch, she wasted valuable rehearsal time searching the school for Vinciane. She wasn’t at the pond nor behind the gardener’s shed where the druggies usually hung out. 

It was five minutes before the end of lunch by the time she found Vinciane in a classroom. The same classroom Vinciane would have been in that morning had she not skipped class.

Vinciane’s eyes popped out of their sockets upon seeing Jimena in the dress. Its colour was not unfamiliar- black, as always. However, it was frilly and lacy and buoyant, paired with knee-high socks and a little bonnet. It was utterly adorable.

As soon as the shock wore off, she glared at her. ‘Come to tell me to shut it?’ Jimena tightened her grip on her acoustic guitar. ‘Or maybe you want to take me to the cafeteria so everyone can hear the song you refused to show me.’

Jimena stepped closer and began playing the guitar. She breathed in, then out, then in again. 

‘You pull me in... like a thread caught in a sewing machine.’ She pronounced the last syllable of ‘machine’ pretty weakly to get it to rhyme with ‘in’.

She continued. ‘I don’t know where this is going. This sin.... gives me pins and needles, you’re giving me the feels. Now I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.’

She strummed the guitar rapidly, sending a warm sound to a smiling Vinciane. ‘I’m really sorry if I’m bursting at the seams. It’s so hard standing next to the girl of my dreams. When you’re edgy, I keep folding like a hem. It’s so hard to admit that you’re my favourite femme.’

Vinciane’s cheeks went red while Jimena’s playing slowed down. ‘Your jokes leave me in stitches but my foot’s in my mouth. I want to tell you how I feel but I don’t know how.’

Jimena circled around Vinciane’s chair, speeding up her strumming. Her heart was beating faster than the song but, for the first time, she wasn’t going to back out now.

She returned to the tune she started with. ‘Well, I’m as straight... as the hem of a big swing skirt. Don’t hate, I’m not looking to get hurt. A date... would be wonderful, don’t judge. My feelings simply won’t budge and I feel like this might as well be fate.’

It was time for the outro. ‘No, this is no joke. No this is no prank. I’m gay as fuck and with some luck, I got you in my ranks. This is the real me and yes, my heart is true. I’m not that tough, it’s all a bluff. Just know that I like you.’

Vinciane looked into Jimena’s eyes and saw the sincerity in them. She stood up and whispered in her ear, sending tingles down her spine.

‘You didn’t need to act tough, you know. I’d have liked you either way.’

‘Um, so about that guy you have your eye on-’ Jimena asked.

‘Oh, that?’ Vinciane’s smirk returned as she put her index finger against her own lips. ‘That was a lie. Just wanted to test the waters, plus I didn’t know how to tell you. You won’t get mad at me for that, right?’

Jimena shook her head and then rubbed the back of her neck. ‘So, uh, how does a date sound?’

‘Make it two. Then we can get a U-Haul. I’m still making the sandwiches, by the way. I’ve seen you in Home Ec and you kind of suck in the kitchen.’

Jimena giggled and grabbed her hand as the two walked out of the classroom. ‘Sounds like a plan. But for now, we should just focus on how to convince everyone else that we’re a couple for real this time.’

Vinciane shrugged. ‘Does it matter? I know and you know. Who cares what the others think?’

The bell rang and Vinciane followed Jimena into another classroom. During class, they spent less time listening to the teacher and more times sneaking glances at each other. Vinciane played with the ribbon attached to Jimena’s bonnet, twirling the pretty fabric around her finger. Jimena ran her kitten-heeled shoe over the spikes on Vinciane’s boot, smiling at the rough sound.

[animebw]

Binge-Watching: Happy Sugar Life, Episodes 1-3

And so we begin! In which we start what promises to be one of the most fascinatingly weird experiences of my blogging career, and I see hope that it’s going to turn out well in the end.

Well, Shit

Going into Happy Sugar Life, I had pretty much no idea what to expect. I knew the general premise, that it was about a high school girl in love with an elementary school girl and their struggles to keep their love safe in a world that sought to tear them apart, but in terms of what kind of experience it was going to be, I might as well been stumbling about with my eyes closed. I’ve heard a lot about this show over the course of my time as an anime fan; hell, it pretty much aired exactly a year ago, and while it’s far from the most popular anime of Summer 2018, there’s been a near-constant, subtle rumble in the fandom about the confused, conflicted reactions people had to it. It’s the kind of premise that on its face feels like it should be a Future Diary-level disaster, with everyone tearing it to shreds for how stupid and edgy and immature it is, but it’s also got a surprisingly large contingent of fans who legitimately respect it. It’s one of those shows that the community at large just can’t seem to get a grip on. And going into it, I was greatly intrigued to see the source of this confusion for myself.

Well, three episodes in, I can safely say that while I’m just about as conflicted as everyone else in regards to whether Happy Sugar Life actually works or not, I am fascinated by the way it tells its story. It’s no wonder this anime has proved such an object of intrigue; it sets about telling what should feel like a disaster of a narrative in ways I’ve never really seen that kind of story told. It’s a edgy, bleak thriller where everyone and everyone is out to get you, but it’s also a sickly-sweet, utterly sincere treatise on the redemptive power of love to light the way in that darkness, while also making the subject of that love an incredibly problematic relationship with so many potentially uncomfortable undertones, yet one that also feels about as justified and honorable as something of this nature possibly could. It’s a mess of contradictions and unexpected left turns, perfectly exemplified by its flash-forward opening scene, in which our central couple of a teenager and a prepubescent child plunge off a burning roof to their presumed death as the world sparkles in crayola-colored patterns around them and visions of sweet candies dance in their heads. If I’m being honest, I have no idea how much of this stuff actually works. I feel like this is gonna be a show where I’m constantly re-assessing and questioning its efficacy up until the end, where I’m never quite sure how well it all holds together until I can finally see the big picture it’s going for. But if nothing else, the process of trying to figure it out is never going to be boring. So let’s dig into these first couple episodes of Happy Sugar Life and try to piece together some semblance of sanity inside this whirlwind of madness.

Trust No One

It’s worth noting that I normally despise shows of this nature with a burning passion. I’m someone who believes in the fundamental goodness of humanity, so stories centered around awful people being awful to each other tend to seriously grate on me. I don’t buy into the worlds of Future Diary, or Elfen Lied, or Skip Beat, or Guilty Crown, or any other cynical dumpster fire you could add to the pile. A world where everyone is awful and mean and cruel just isn’t a world that makes sense to me. So Happy Sugar Life must be doing something right, because despite pretty much every character being some level of severely fucked up, I found myself not disgusted and repulsed, but intrigued and even invested. I am fascinated by these characters’ pathology, by how intimately familiar they are with their own trauma. And I think a big part of the reason why this ends up working for me is that, unlike any of those other edgy, cynical shows I named, Happy Sugar Life feels purposefully removed from reality. Yes, this is generally speaking supposed to be the real world (as far as we know, at least), but the way everyone talks to each other suggests that this show’s internal universe is a different context than our own. Consider, for example, the way everyone wordlessly turns against Satou in the first episode, the sinister smiles of her fellow wait staff serving as prelude to the manager’s own massive breakdown. In any other show, this scene would be presented with the protagonist shocked and horrified by how ugly and awful the writhing sea of humanity around them is, an “oh the humanity” moment that’s supposed to make the audience marvel at how “real” and “gritty” the story is for showing people at their ugliest.

That’s not what happens here.

What happens here is that instead of being thrust into a world of darkness she has no way of comprehending, Satou meets this darkness head-on. She silently processes the information around her, bottles it up inside, and moves on. And then when she faces down the manager, she isn’t the least bit surprised when she starts tearing into her for being the supposed villain in this scenario. She’s ready for that level of inhuman, unnatural cruelty. She’s prepared for it. And she’s equally prepared to exert her own madness over the manager just as casually, meeting her challenge not as a descent into poetic darkness, but as a banal, petty matter of course. This isn’t an edgy world where the point is to drive home how fucked and nihilistic out reality supposedly is; this is an entirely separate reality that goes by its own rules, with inhabitants that respond to madness and mania as easily as breathing. It’s a lived-in, omnipresent feeling that permeates everyone’s lives, influencing how they go about their days and how they respond to adversity. The stalker teacher comes right out and confronts his prey when called out on it, because in this world, the foul and fucked-up is something to be faced head-on, not hid from or deified. Likewise the matter-of-fact way its characters respond to the traumas they’ve suffered; Blondie’s PTSD panic attack following his sexual assault is taken in stride by pretty much everyone involved, including the victim himself. In most shows of this nature, these moments would be these big, bombastic exclamation points, where the story flexes to the heavens and screams for you to take it seriously for including such gruesome material. Here, though... they’re just part of life.

My point is, this just isn’t a world seeking to present itself as a 100% accurate representation of grounded human psychology. It’s a world seeking to supercharge and play with the emotions behind that psychology by letting all this supposedly taboo darkness roll around in broad daylight as if it were the most natural thing in the world. This is a universe where trauma, mental illness, darkness and cruelty isn’t something shocking, or horrifying, or meant to make itself appear more superficially mature. It’s a narrative sandbox, a playground that lets all this madness spill out and make a mess on the pavement so it can tinker with the scars it leaves behind. Hell, the way its aesthetic is presented, with wispy background art and background character models that feel like plexiglass versions of themselves, it almost feels like this entire hazy reality is just Satou’s warped perception of how the world around her operates, colored by the bitterness inside her that makes everything feel just a little dreamlike and out of step. And because it lacks that level of pretension, it’s able to be far more effective in how it explores the fucked-up material at the core of its story. Because we’re operating from the basic understanding that this isn’t the real world, the characters are able to more honestly embody the extremes they represent without feeling jarring in the extremes they go to. It’s a very subtle difference, to be sure, but it makes all the difference in the world when it comes to stuff like this.

Bitter Sweetness

And with this level of vague dream reality established, Happy Sugar Life is able to frankly examine the dark, uncomfortable intentions at the core of its narrative, bringing these messy concepts right to the forefront without it breaking the in-universe reality. And hoo boy, is there already a lot to unpack here. In case the aforementioned first scene wasn’t enough to tip you off, the first scene after the OP in the first episode drives home the central symbolism even further: a guy confesses to Satou in a matter typical of flowery shojo romances, but upon her rejection he quickly turns to bitching to his friends about not being able to fuck her. This juxtaposition of anime-esque cutesiness and dark, psychological angst is the single biggest driving force in the entire story. It. Shows. Up. EVERYWHERE. Satou herself is constantly judged by the people around her for her cuteness, both by friends and enemies alike. She’s seen as desirable because she’s cute, the manager hates her because she’s cute and pure and pretty, the teacher essentially tells her she’s “not like other girls” to justify his obsession with her, her friends are always praising how pretty she is... the fact that she is, in fact, a cute anime girl is the biggest factor that shapes the way people see her.

Of course, Satou on the inside is nowhere near the perfect, pristine image she presents herself as. Even beyond the obvious mental trauma and “in love with a seven-year-old” complex, she breaks the reality of the pure waifu so many people see her as in so many ways. She’s had many boyfriends in the past, and from the way the guys in that opening scene talk about here, it’s possible she’s even had some sexual experience. And that’s not a source of derision for her; she and her friends are perfectly comfortable talking about how they “fool around” with boys. But she can also be cruel and callous and hypocritical. She mocks her friend’s weight gain with overly specific comments that feel designed to torment her, she partially blames Blondie for his assault by telling him to “be more careful” around women, and pretty much every danger to her and Shio’s relationship comes in the form of someone’s trauma manifesting in a way that’s very much like her own. It’s very telling that her epic put-down to the pedophile manager is that she “shouldn’t go after underaged kids”, when that’s very much what she herself is doing. Meanwhile, Blondie’s creepy possessiveness towards Shio is just an extension of Satou’s own feelings, believing this “pure” kid can “cleanse” him of his inner darkness., and it’s only because we don’t know him as well as Satou that we don’t trust him to not cross any unforgivable lines. The show doesn’t call explicit attention to these contradictions, but it’s clear from how similar these situations all are that Satou’s biggest demons are all extensions of her own inner darkness

Make Me Pure

More than that, though, what makes Satou so fascinating is that she is obsessed with the idea of purity, especially when contrasted with the dark thoughts that cloud her head. She talks about her relationship with Shio like she’s “finally stopped fooling around” (read, stopped being such a slut) and found a pure, true love for the first time. She sees Shio as her restoration point, like a video game save point that restores her “purity” HP after long days of wallowing in darkness, frustration, and fear. She’s not pure by any standard, but she desperately wants to be, and the only way she knows how is to project the responsibility of “saving” her onto this perfect little girl who doesn’t know any better than to accept this situation at face value, no matter how dangerous it could actually be in real life. But that same desperation is also what keeps her from causing Shio any actual harm, at least physically. Shio is everything to her; she’s the sweetness that balances the bitterness of her world, that literally makes flowers sprout before her eyes and fills her with delight and hope and good cheer. Without her, the bitterness swallows Satou up. It devours her from the inside, influences her to rend and tear until she finally sees that speck of light again. It’s in her best interest to keep this kid safe however she possibly can, because without here, we’ve got another Yuno Gasai on our hands.

And it’s a testament to how damn good this show’s cinematic storytelling is that you can feel the relief whenever she staves off the darkness with thoughts of Shio, to the point where you completely forget about the uncomfortable age gap. The way Happy Sugar Life captures the tension riding on her shoulders is palpable, with intense sound design, sharp editing, chaotic shifts into sketchy, savage art styles and linework (the way her eyes, in particular, convey how deep she’s sinking into the pits of her own despair is really damn chilling), and fantastic voice work by none other that the legendary Kana Hanezawa putting in yet another top-tier performance. She feels like a girl on the verge of cracking, like every second she spends in the dark shadows and deep blues of the outside world is one more second she might pick up an axe and tear someone’s guts out (which she almost does on at least two occasions). And it makes this show so unbelievably tense. Not gonna lie, that moment where she confronted her stalker teacher in the alleyway, I was fully expecting for the mounting cacophony of noise and bitterness inside her head to climax with her slaughtering him on the spot, instead of just pulling a rape alarm. That’s how overwhelming and oppressive it feels to be inside her head. And, of course, that only makes the moments where we return to the light and safety of home and Shio all the more gratifying; we survived one more day without going off the rails, and now, we get to indulge in so much sweetness that it almost hurts to take in. I still have no idea if I actually want Satou to succeed in keeping this relationship alive, but I’m sure as fuck glad she’s got it to keep her stable. Because the alternative is too terrifying to imagine.

Aching Darkness

And that brings me to what’s ultimately so fascinating about Happy Sugar Life; it manages to actually engender a degree of empathy for these broken, dangerous, fucked-up people. Because of everything I’ve talked about over the course of this post- the exaggerated reality makes the exaggerated emotions feel more real, the strong visual storytelling makes you feel the consequences of these characters breaking, the intense light/dark pressure wearing down on everyone- you actually get the sense that a positive change in these characters’ lives would mean something. It feels like they’re all trying to be stronger than their darkest impulses, that they’re legitimately trying to fight their worst selves and keep themselves afloat, even if the actions they take in pursuit of those goals can be controversial, to say the least, As possessive as Satou is of Shio, she genuinely wants to keep her safe, and she genuinely wants to be a positive force in her life, to be someone capable of stability in the presence of this person she deeply loves. Even Blondie, despite the agonizing creepiness of his pedophilic freakouts, is always pulling himself back from the edge, always trying not to hurt this girl who’s come to mean so much for him. And Shio herself is dogged by a traumatic past that cuts very close to home, rendered in even more crushing pressure that Satou’s own trauma, making the inside of this little girl’s head feel like a terrifying, agonizing place to be in. She’s clearly got severe abandonment issues stemming from her abusive upbringing, and the moments where the intense stylistic flourishes of stark coloring and heavy, bassy sound effects dramatize that spiraling anxiety, I could almost feel myself shaking. It’s not often than a show’s able to remind me just how terrifying blood can be to someone who isn’t a super-soldier badass, or that a simple scratchy voice filter can make me catch my breath so unexpectedly.

That, above all else, is what’s got me excited to see where this show goes from here. Despite the cruelty of its world and characters, it feels like a fundamentally sincere story. It has genuine empathy for these damaged people and their desire to escape their pain, to make something better of themselves instead of succumbing to their worst impulses. And as a result, I can’t help but care about their struggles. I get anxious when a stresses Satou feels the bottle inside her start to break, releasing Shio’s sweetness from her bosom and leaving her cold and bitter. I hope that Shio’s brother is able to find his sister and give her the comfort she desperately needs, comfort that Satou can’t provide all on her own as just one person. I breathed a sigh of genuine relief when Satou was able to contextualize the jealousy she felt over Shio’s sister looking for her, stopping herself from going over the edge at the last possible second. I have no idea if this level of trust will hold until the end; I recall enjoying the first couple episodes of Elfen Lied before it all went to shit, after all. But I desperately want it to. Because if Happy Sugar Life manages to succeed at what it’s trying to do, we may have a genuine horror classic on our hands. And if nothing else, I don’t think I’m going to get tired of watching it try.

Odds and Ends

-”As long as nothing troublesome happens.” Very next scene: “I love you. Will you go out with me?” Welp.

-And what better image to end the first episode on than Satou sparkling with purity and love, sitting beside the bloody bags of the people she slaughtered to get this apartment. Welcome to the happy sugar life, indeed.

-Ooh, the way the window bar cut her eyes off... yeah, that was good.

-”I love you!” See, I just know I would be in the crowd of guys applauding in the background here, and I don’t know what to think of that.

-Interesting thought: Shio’s brother gave her to Asahi (possibly older sister?) for safekeeping from their abusive father, but Asahi appears as a faceless demon to Shio. So something went seriously wrong somewhere in this chain.

And with that, we are on our way. This is gonna be one heck of a show, and I look forward to seeing what else it has in store. See you next time!

[deuxesse]

songs of my decade

2010/2011: Anyone Else But You by the Moldy Peaches

Towards the end of my convent years, my school was beginning to resort to the weirdest methods to ensure we get some semblance of effective Sex Education without compromising on the values of the catholic instituition. In efforts to make us abstain from sex in the most entertaining way possible, they sat us all down in a stuffy school gymnasium and made us watch a censored version of Juno from a tiny projector screen. This plan fell flat on its face because the film turned out to make us empathise with teenage pregnancy rather than fear it, although not all of us fathomed this. Eventually, the things most talked about was the bemusement we felt when she yelled the entire vocabulary of english profanities while in labour pains, and the gentle & sweet folk songs that made the OST. Amongst which was Anyone Else But You, by the Moldy Peaches, a song off the soundtrck that caught on most well. I remmeber how Nat and I would break out randomly into song while hanging out around our Hougang hood after school, with the lyrics all memorised to a T. It was one of the first songs I learnt on my own during guitar ensemble practices. I performed it for my friends, family, hoping the song's feeble lyrics & uncomplicated chord progression would easily capture adoration. AEBY became one of my most remembered songs of my teenage years, and opened me up to indie folk musicians that i would come to love. It represented the tame, boyless youth of my convent years. It makes me think of blue coral sweet talk slushies, nun-white sneakers, and running away from finger-wagging discipline mistresses. AEBY is innocent - like the comfortable cocoon of my teenage years, where my self-esteem hinged upon the affection drawn from friendships, the length of my ankle socks, the seeming eternity of vacuous girlhood

2013/2014: Breezeblocks by Alt-J

This song is a fucking masterpiece and the only thing Spotify got right - it did indeed come out tops on my most played songs of the decade. I remember listening to it on a shared earpiece with Nina when in JC, then later on throughout year 1 & 2 of uni when i was trying to be edgy with my identity crises, and the weeks following the legendary moment of seeing Alt-J play the song live at Genting. Everytime i hear breezeblocks i hear the manifestation of my (currently unconfirmed) ADD condition - if i'm not just being the hypochondriac i am. Whatever the song expresses, my inner mind is - it's my gross inability to stay on the ground, my never ending attempts to both subdue yet express myself by going from excitement to excitement, my train of thought repeatedly disrupted by the trigger-happy da-da-da-das. Breezeblocks’ shuddering background hi-hats combined with Joe Newman’s lazy drawls is this precise sensation felt daily - the slow, swirling haze over my mind i cannot navigate, the overtures of energy my body transmits back and forth from fidgeting finger to shaking feet. And yet, the emotion that runs through its sounds is one of both love and fear - the slowed & sugary strums that leap suddenly into hyperactive, crashing drums. Coming to terms with this condition in adulthood, especially when it's been disrupting my work life, has been precisely this: a messy experience of both loving and fearing myself; putting up with the constant pandemoniums in my head, and knowing it's the very reason i'm uniquely who I am. Breezeblocks is that constant paradigm shift - a frustration at my inability and an endearment of my brokenness; a resulting schizo-desire to both quell and expel.

2017: J-Boy by Phoenix

To be honest, there's no true connection to what the song's trying to convey to whatever 2017 was to me. All i know is that when this song was on full-on repeat mode, it was when i was experiencing for the first time an unsettling combination of two polar feelings: the feeling of falling in love again, and the feeling of heart-wrenching grief. Layered atop was the actual taste of independence for the first time in my life, being 22 and alone in Spain in the company of strangers that felt so familiar to me. J-Boy occured when i lost my grandpa, when i began my relationship with Matt, when i travelled alone all by myself for the first time. Everytime I play J-Boy I open a portal to spanish hillsides and castles, the sounds of murcia's rolling brooks, the sensation of wrapping my arms around my lover’s body in the midst of the icy mediterranean sea. I step insiside the idyllic, temporal limbo of summer 2017 - before returning to the reality of an emptier home, to a a life that mercilessly moves forward. You feel trapped in a vault, in an empty aquarium If suddenly you're out of the woods Then inside of an alley, you're out of words Well, I thought it was radium at first

2018/2019: 20 - Something by SZA

Self-explanatory. When SZA desperately sang Praying the 20 somethings don't kill me? I felt that 100%. The 20's are pretty much already becoming the hardest times of my life, and any more it's giving me could easily tip me over the edge. It makes me wish I could fast forward to being 30 and being grown enough to live in my own house, to make my own damn decisions, and be taken seriously enough in the corporate world. and yet? I also never want it to end, these are, after all, the final years of licensed irresponsibilty, and where you'll never be faulted so hard for your failures. The 20's are so far, a penrose staircase that you have to keep walking and walking - not knowing if there'll ever be a resolution or progress - and i've already fallen off it a couple of times from trying to skip a few steps or run too fast. Then the getting-back-on is so confusing because you no longer know if you're on the right step from where you've fallen off from before, and whether you'll have more certainty of an end from where you're getting on again. It's the most ecclestiastical season of my life, but it's also so fuckin beautiful. And that honest, aimless stream of consciousness in 20-Something’s verses express this determination to pin down the fleeting years, to define its pressure points - of trusting recklessly, of adventurous first-times, of heartbreak and hope - that seem to promise yet confound..

[rorykillmore]

idk a lot of my ask ideas are about villanelle but. what are her thoughts on like? ruby and weiss right now?

i was gonna wait til after this most recent icc to answer this one for convenience and currency’s sake

if you told me when i’d first picked up villanelle that she’d bond really strongly with two traumatized world-saving teenaged girls i’d be like. well okay, that’s panfandom, i guess!

no but it’s funny because her relationships with both of them really just started out more like... humor-based, like, hunter and i really just initially threw ruby and villanelle together because we thought it’d be funny, and weiss and villanelle were initially mostly fun because weiss is one of those few people who can get away with just absolutely DRAGGING villanelle

but then they... started falling into doing some more serious rps, like ruby and villanelle’s truth compulsion glitch icc, or the stuff weiss and villanelle got involved with with masky which dug into a lot of core issues, and a certain point me hunter and jay (and fate, because fate and i already had a groundwork of a plot with fox and villanelle) were just like. why not do a super tragic plot with these guys! it’ll be fun!,

anyways, skipping ahead a bunch, her relationship with both girls now is obviously very different than what it started out as. and that’s certainly surprised villanelle as much as anyone. she has a stunted ability to form attachments the way regular people do, not just like edgy loner characters who take a while to trust but like, from an actual psychiatric standpoint it’s harder for her to bond and feel those bonds even when she wants to. if she had healthy resources to like, learn about that and understand it, maybe it’d be easier, but she doesn’t sooo meaningful progression kind of often boils down to interpersonal... conflict and trauma challenging her relationships with people and making her really FEEL things. healthy!

anyway that’s veering off into a ramble a bit; i was just trying to say that villanelle has learned to love ruby (and she and weiss haven’t been as close, but i think villanelle certainly feels a legitimate attachment to her too at this point) in the span of like. a few months, and everything kind of fell apart and went to hell in those same few months. and while she’s definitely learned and taken some important things away from how to function in... any kind of relationship and how to care about someone else, it’s all still very kind of new and (because of the circumstances) dire and like. frankly, if you’re someone like villanelle, you don’t just get GOOD at loving another person over night, and there’s a lot she doesn’t know how to navigate.

so since graceplot she’s... for the most part, kind of kept her distance! not just because it would have been dangerous for her to just go back and resume a normal life or whatever, but because obviously ruby and weiss have both had serious cause to question how much they trust villanelle, and villanelle... doesn’t know how to reconcile that. like... some form of interpersonal redemption might be feasible to villanelle’s character in her learning how better to treat and reach out to the people close to her, but she still has such limited empathy for the ordinary people around her, and such an easy capacity for effortless violence and killing.  so how do you reconcile that with two people who have dedicated their lives to protecting others? even if they’re not actively in conflict, there are just things about each other that they will never be able to understand, and villanelle is so used to defining her relationships in terms of “how much are they like me, how much can they understand me, how much do i understand about them”

so while she’s been grappling with... that, ruby and weiss have been dealing with their own fall out post-graceplot, and some of that has nothing to do with villanelle and more to do with ruby and weiss as people and everything they’ve already been through. but. i think last icc, villanelle kind of realized that... keeping her distance just seemed easiest for her, and also seemed like the thing that would be easiest for ruby and weiss. whereas meanwhile, ruby and villanelle have had an entire conversation about how ruby feels about the responsibility of leadership and why she can’t burden other people with her problems, and she also knew that GRACE had done something to ruby that ruby couldn’t remember, and maybe her being around to kind of keep an eye on both of those things could have! helped prevented this! at worst she could have just told weiss, and weiss could have approached things from a clearer angle

but self-reflection and self-criticism are very much still things villanelle is... just getting her toes wet with, so she doesn’t necessarily know how to express them or how to be constructive with them. so going forward from here we’ll see how her relationship with both girls evolves -- she might at the very least make clumsy attempts to be more present, but that involves... probably having a serious talk about Things at some point. and she and ruby still have the upcoming mess with felix to deal with, so i’m sure how THAT plays out will affect things too.

but yeah overall i do really enjoy her relationships with both of them and how far they’ve all come on denny!! villanelle has this really expressive unexpected... softness to her that’s explored a liiittle bit in canon, but only in a romantic context, so it’s always interesting to explore what that means for her when it comes to platonic love and what she’s capable of learning from it and also how ruby and weiss themselves feel about and react to their relationship with her because it’s just.... it’s really complicated, at this point! for all of them. but that’s when you know you’ve built up a really good, meaty character dynamic

[thedreadvampy]

So Love, Death and Robots...

Ok, like the first 4 were all, in different ways, really pretty good, and there are a couple of other good offerings in the mix, although a lot of the otherwise good ones fumbled the landing a little and left me feeling slightly unsatisfied.

Sonnie’s Edge was a solid opener, not my favourite in the world (and the accents felt really fake if I’m honest - if you say they’re from Newcastle give your characters Geordie accents, you cowards, none of this ‘generic working class Brit’ bollocks), but the twists were good, the characters had some life to them, and while I am a biiit eeehhhhhh about the Rape As Backstory element, it wasn’t egregious and the story was well put together and rattled along at a fair pace. I would have liked a bit more information about where her anger came from, since she shrugs off the idea that it’s from her Traumatic Backstory, but that’s really my only criticism. Animation-wise I’m not the biggest fan of photorealistic scifi animation, and the monster designs are fine but not mindblowing, but it’s doing what it does solidly (although I don’t know why that one character has her tits all the way out in her regular costume, it’s a bit Teenage Boy Scifi but it’s still a cool costume and I like the blacklight effects). The theme for me here is competent - nothing in the story or the animation was stand-out exciting for me but it was all done well, paced well, animated and designed very well, but it all sort of hit a “good but not great” note for me if I’m honest.  4/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖🤖💀

Three Robots was fun and engaging, if a bit superficial - it’s more of a series of stitched-together vignettes than a story, and other than the central characters, the world, and the cat very little connects the scenes, but that’s fine, it’s a worldbuilding exercise and it does what it’s doing pretty well. I really dig the character designs, especially the big blocky triangle robot - I’m a sucker for highly variable robots existing in the same world and I always appreciate effective non-humanoid character design. Also I did really enjoy the closing twist, that gave me a giggle. 4/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖🤖💀 

The Witness was also really good but missing something. I loved the animation and character design, the comic book sound effects were occasionally a little clunky and distracting but the Comicsness of it was really working for me. I liked the story - it telegraphed part of the ending very deliberately but kept you guessing about the details and then pulled a pretty effective twist at the end anyway - and the characters managed to convey a lot of personality without a lot of explanation. There was a pleasing sense of inevitability to it, and while I kind of wanted a bit of explanation I think it was probably the right decision to leave it ambiguous. I did leave it feeling a little unsatisfied in an indefinable way, but looking back I think it would not have been made better by being any more explicit about what it was trying to convey.  4/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖🤖💀 Suits, the one with the redneck mecha pilots, was far and away the tightest and most satisfyingly put together in the whole show for me - I liked the animation style a lot for it, it was funny and emotionally engaging, and while it wasn’t breaking much new ground it was beautifully paced, kept you invested and made you care about the characters, and was probably the only one which I had absolutely no complaints or lingering disappointments at all with. 5/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖 .........aaaaaand then it all went wrong a bit for me because the episodes I genuinely solidly enjoyed got much fewer and further between as the bulk of stories got increasingly adolescent and superficial (I know, I know, it’s called Love, Death and Robots, it was always going to be a bit Teenage Boy, but the first 4 were all solid enough that I was feeling positive about it) Sucker of Souls was...fine. Characterful animation, uptempo pace, good character design (although GOD those ACCENTS, please stop and hire Actually British and Actually Irish voice actors if you’re planning on having British and Irish characters). It just felt completely hollow, though. Like, why do I care about this happening? Most of the characters are reasonably likeable if pretty stock, but the actual protagonist has nothing to him except Gruffly Macho Mercenary #4518B, and the plot is paper-thin and utterly unsatisfying. Monster exists, hubris of man raises monster, monster does something gratuitiously gory (if well-animated), people run away from monster, kill monster with guns and explosions, oh no what a twist we’re still in trouble, cut to black. And there was just nothing added to that, nothing clever or imaginative or unexpected, and the only twist they managed was that their Big Triumphal Moment was totally pointless. I thought they were going somewhere interesting with the cats thing and then it just got dropped and we went back to guns and explosions. I get doing something like this as a character piece but a) the characters just aren’t interesting enough to prop it up and b) the stakes aren’t balanced right for it to work (heh, stakes). It feels like this was just ‘I have a cool character design for Dracula and a couple of setpiece ideas’ and the whole short was just a vehicle for that, but while those things were cool they weren’t cool enough to make half an hour of TV feel worth it. It’s nice to see 2d animation but the animation style is only really ‘fine’ to me. This episode feels like someone really liked Hellboy but is not nearly as good a writer as Mike Mignola. 2/5 robots 🤖🤖💀💀💀 When The Yoghurt Took Over was fun enough. It didn’t have much more to it than ‘it would be funny if yoghurt took over the world’ but sometimes that’s enough. The animation’s cute and the idea is original enough to be funny and indepth enough to keep you engaged - I like a lot of the visual gags, even if they were a bit on the nose, and I enjoyed the vibe of it. It felt like a really odd fit with the rest of the show, though, and I’m not sure what tone the ending was trying to strike. Overall, 3.5/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖💀💀  (imagine I can emoji half a robot) Beyond the Aquila Rift, like Sonnie, is wholly competent and also pretty rote. The twist was telegraphed from a mile off, and imo the episode only manages to fill a full 15 minutes because like 3 of those minutes are just sex scenes without much substance. Again, photorealistic animation isn’t my bag, but even that considered the faces were carefully-textured enough that mid-tier animation made it all feel a bit Bioware and got in the way of me empathising with the characters. The story is an absolute off-the-rack sci-fi classic, and there’s no real twist on it - if I’d never seen this story played out before it might have worked, but I have seen approximately 20000000 versions of it and this just wasn’t bringing anything new. I liked the navigator character, when she was in it, and the design was competent, but it just did nothing for me because it all felt deeply generic and so the episode just dragged on with nothing new or exciting. 2.5/5 robots  🤖🤖💀💀💀 Good Hunting is another one where I liked bits of it but felt like it didn’t really go anywhere with its premise. I like the idea of contrasting traditional fantasy tropes with scifi, and I do like to see steampunk that legitimately grapples with the colonial baggage, but it just felt like it didn’t have much room to grow. The mechanical animation was really pretty - I especially liked the scene with the automatic hare - and the story was solidly paced, plus I do like when stories have a go at recontextualising traditional Seductress Monsters, buuuut to be honest it felt like a bit of a letdown. Where it hit, it hit solidly - I liked the throughline about how she felt like she’d become what he had thought her mother was, and the parallels between his experience of working for the British and her experience of sex work for them - but I think the issue for me is that, while I liked Liang and felt like he was well fleshed out, this felt like it should have been Yan’s story and it just wasn’t, really. Also I’m not very clear on what the point of the robotics work was - symbolically it works on some levels but I don’t know if it actually helps along the core theme, although the more time I spend with the idea the more it’s working for me. Still, I think we could have done with cutting the wuxia-ey scene at the beginning in half to make room for a little more meat at the end. 4/5 robots  🤖🤖🤖🤖💀 Ugly Dave. It’s fine. Nothing to write home about. The gag is pretty clear from the off, and doesn’t really build up into anything other than the obvious, but the animation is nice, the character design is strong and the jokes are adolescent but well-delivered. 3/5 robots  🤖🤖🤖💀💀 Shape-Shifters. I don’t know how this one was because it bored and annoyed me so much that I skipped to the next episode after 5 minutes. Ugh. Yeah. They’re werewolves and their squad is mean to them even though they’re real good at war. I assume that the only reason this isn’t called Dog Soldiers is because there’s already a film called Dog Soldiers about werewolf squaddies which the target audience of this short film, edgy teenage boys with a hardon for modern military propaganda, already like (side note: I didn’t get to the bit where presumably they eventually transform. but I flicked through a few frames on the tracker bar and they looked like incredibly generic wolves). My guess is that probably at the end they a) save their squad despite being discriminated against or b) the more annoying one gets killed by his own side. probably both. idk, I noped out because it was just wanking off the concept of the modern military and our two protagonists were two obnoxiously macho army men talking about how unfair it was that nobody appreciated how GOOD THEY WERE AT KILLING FOR ‘MURICA mission accomplished etc. Oh, and the animation style was another incredibly uninteresting photo-realistic but video-game animated pile of boring. 0/5 robots, too bored to actually watch it  💀💀💀💀💀

However, luckily just as I was getting Very Bored of Shooty Shooty Bang Bang adolescence, there were a succession of really nice character pieces

Helping Hand was a great small-scope short story. A lot of the episodes are really bombastic but Helping Hand is small and contained and character-driven and I liked it quite a bit. The animation is once again photorealistic, but to be honest that works well for me here because the movements are really believable, there’s a good reason to use animation instead of live actors (because it’s a situation where you’d either need a really expensive shooting setup or to mostly animate it anyway), and I think that the personal struggle would have had a lot less impact if the animation was more stylised. It’s a bit gross but beautfiully paced and tense (and the character’s Irish accent isn’t ear-burningly awful this time!) I will also say that of all of them, this character design feels the least male-gazy and the most like an actual person.  4/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖🤖💀 Fish Night was unexpectedly gorgeous! I really don’t rate the animation style of pseudo-cel 3d with heavy lineart, and I was all set to find this episode ugly, but it’s honestly stunning. It feels like some of the best Nobrow comics, I can almost smell litho ink and feel heavy paper. It’s just got such a beautiful artistic sensibility. Storywise it’s a little weak - the characters are solid and the wonder is real but it just doesn’t really go anywhere, and it just sort of ends, it could really have done with a few seconds of closing scene because it felt like it just cut itself off  - and I’m not sure it’s anything meatier than a beautiful piece of visual work, but it’s allowed to be that and it does it stunningly!  4/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖🤖💀 Lucky 13 isn’t really up my alley (although Samira Wiley puts in a great performance and I love her) and it’s another one where I sort of think, you know, why is this an animated piece if you’re just going to mocap everyone and set most of the action in cockpits and in a hangar, but it rattles along well and does what it wants to do, which is to be a solid Hero Pilot And Ship story. I just don’t actually want to be watching military dramas, but at least it’s much, MUCH better executed than Shape-Shifters both in terms of animation and storytelling, the characters are likeable, and the pacing is good.  3/5 robots  🤖🤖🤖💀💀 Zima Blue. LOVE LOVE LOVE this story, brought down only by the fact that I, uh, kind of hate the art style? A lot? It’s a matter of personal taste but that angular, geometric, leggy thing does nothing for me, although the environments are really nice. But the actual story is clever, original and a little bit silly in all the ways I like my scifi to be, plus it explores some interesting themes of consciousness and happiness. And the twist in the tail is really nice and fairly unexpected.  4/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖🤖💀 Blindspot is dull, dull, dull, desperately dull and generic. We’re back on the adolescent Shooty Boom Boom bullshit, with poorly established stakes that never really get resolved, uninteresting and unpleasant characters, and a completely textbook story. The female character is apparently only there to make brain-itchingly bad Sassy Oneliners and have one scene where she shoots some guys, all of the characters have taken their personalities from the 15 Year Old Boy’s Guide To Being A Cool Rude Badass, the character designs are cluttered and not amazing, and there’s nothing original or exciting happening, it’s just a series of different shaped guns. The ending at least has a strong idea of what it’s doing, and almost works, but it’s dragged down by the fact that it relies on me being sad that these characters have got stomped, and I’m afraid that’s a lot to ask with characters as annoying and unpleasant as these. 1/5 robots  🤖💀💀💀💀 Ice Age. It’s a fun little concept. I’m not sure it really goes anywhere much but it’s quirky and very nicely put together, and it gave me a chuckle.  3/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖💀💀 Alternate Histories feels like something I’d see on Newgrounds in 2004, but slightly polished up and expanded on. Ha ha ha Hitler gets killed in various ways, which was definitely hilarious when I was 12. It’s much more interested in coming up with funny ways Hitler might die than it is in exploring any alternate histories that might result, despite the framing device (and also weirdly seems to imply that Nazi victory would be a good thing in one scenario?). I’ve used the word adolescent a lot here but this one isn’t even really adolescent in its sensibilities, it feels aimed at 10-13 year olds. 2/5 robots  🤖 🤖💀💀💀 The Secret War closes out the series in a way that feels consistent with the overall sense I got from Love, Death and Robots, in that it’s solidly made and not particularly original. But I did like it - the animation is stunning (although I stand by imitation not being the point of animation, it is aiming for realism and it does that almost flawlessly) and it’s surprisingly emotionally engaging. It keeps its focus on the experiences of the soldiers as people rather than on the concept, which is for the best as the concept is pretty generic, and it produces something with a bit of genuine emotional weight and stakes. It’s basically the exact same base story as Suits, even down to a lot of elements of the monster design, but set in a very different place with very different core characters, and as both Suits and Secret War are really character pieces, they make two very different but very strong stories out of it. This one is really hammering the GRITTY button as hard as it can, but it pulls it off, and while it still felt very pointed at teenage boy sensibilities it was a genuinely engaging and immersive story. If Soul Sucker desperately wanted to be the Hellboy comics, Secret War solidly evokes the Hellboy films but certainly isn’t just trying to be something other than what it is.  4/5 robots 🤖🤖🤖🤖💀 Overall thoughts - like all anthology shows tend to be, Love, Death and Robots is very hit and miss. A lot of episodes are really, REALLY rooted in a teenage nerd boy idea of coolness, and it doesn’t have much interest in criticising or examining what that means, but when it manages to get away from that a lot of these short films are fantastic. I will say that like a lot else, it’s dominated by both white male writers and white male protagonists and/or Strong Female Characters, and again, the best episodes tended to be ones that broke that pattern. From the title and trailer, I was worried about it being a lot more sexualised and gratuitous than it ended up being (although it definitely had its ehhhhhh moments), and I was honestly pleasantly surprised that of 18 episodes, only 2 featured rape-revenge plotlines, and none (maybe one?) were about Evil Seductresses, because given the title I had Concerns. However, it is still overwhelmingly white character-wise, which is a shame - I counted 2 episodes with Asian protagonists and 2 more with Black protagonists, which is relatively good, but there were probably only about 10 named/centred characters of colour all told. I dunno. I’d recommend taking a punt on it but I have Criticisms of the show overall. The good episodes are REALLY good though and I will definitely be rewatching 2 or 3 of them.

[lndenmeres-a]

💘 blue/gansey

send me 💘 + A SHIP and i’ll tell you…   ╱   accepting

( also asked by @histcires & @glendowr​. y’all love bluesey HUH )

where they first met and how: oh you know, just the classic boy-meets-girl, boy-implies-girl-she’s-a-prostitute. CLASSIC!how long their ‘flirting’ phase was before feelings got involved: this question honestly confuses me especially in the context of an actual canon pairing so let’s ignore itwho fell for who first ( if applicable ): o damn. was it gansey? i think it was gansey?where their first date was and what it was like: they took a drive and almost kissed and there was a pretty neat metaphor about pulling a tablecloth from a table. and henry was there. (‘and henry was there’ is the tagline for bluesey’s relationship)who asks who out and how ( with a sign? spelled out on a cake? just a simple ‘will you go out with me’? ): i don’t??? remember???? they just like got together without ever doing that i guESS? who proposes first: blue does it bc a) fuck gender roles b) it’s so CUTE to picture her on one knee giving gansey a ring WOW. if they keep / kept their relationship secret or let everyone know right away: can i just skip these questions? we all read the bookswhere the proposal happens and how ( kiss cam at a baseball game? on a hillside surrounded by ducks? at a disney park? ): ok scratch that whole ‘blue on one knee’ thing because let’s be honest it’s extremely spur of the moment. they don’t even HAVE a ring. they’re just like at a gas station or an airport or god knows where and then bing! idea!if they adopt any pets together: i’m leaning towards no but i’m not sure why. i guess they’re too busy travelling to have petswho’s more dominant: blue ;)where their first kiss was and what it was like: gansey died.if they have any matching couples stuff ( mugs? sweaters? pillowcases? ): no offense but blue would die if she had to share gansey’s personal style.how into pda they are: nottttt super into it. they hold hands or hug but that’s about it.who holds the umbrella when it rains: blue. gansey like, tries? bc chivalry? but the third time blue gets water dumped right on her head bc gansey was talking & gesticulating enthusiastically she’s like OK NOwhere their usual ‘date spot’ is ( if applicable ): i don’t know. gansey’s car? as in they go on drives, not that they just sit there. maybe both thowho’s more protective: blue!how long it is before they sleep together ( can be as in ‘had sex’ or as in ‘shared a bed’ ): they prob share a bed (or a backseat of a car) TO SLEEP U DIRTY BIRDIES during their roadtrip. and the other kind .... ima say around 6 months inif they argue about anything: gansey’s shoeswho leaves more marks ( lipstick, hickeys, scratchmarks etc. ): we all know blue has lipstick in a range of shades including black, lilac (her fave) and orange (gansey’s fave). and it gets Everywherewho steals whose clothes and how often: predictably blue borrows gansey’s least-objectionable tshirts to sleep in, but gansey steals some of blue’s.... baggy weird cardigans? because he is a HUGE sap and they smell goodhow they cuddle ( spooning? facing each other? ): facing each other. THEY’RE IN LOVE!what their favourite nonsexual activity is: EXPLORING. that wasn’t supposed to be in capitals but okhow long they stay mad at each other: not very long, but blue sometimes forgets she’s supposed to be annoyed at him and then remembers a day or so later and is like Wait....fuckwhat their usual coffee / tea orders are: gansey likes (peppermint!) tea, but will also drink coffee. cause what else do u drink at 5am when you’re staring at another 40 hours of being awake? idk about blue. is she one of those teenagers who forced themselves to drink coffee to be ‘edgy’ and now genuinely likes it?if they ever have any children together: yes, at least three. two were older teens when bluesey adopted them.if they have any special pet names for each other: i HATE to put jane here but what else reallyif they ever split up and / or get back together: @glendowr and i have discussed blue breaking up with gansey to find her own Something More (while gansey’s Found his in henrietta) but that’s like.... sad? so no. what their shared living space is like ( messy? clean? what kind of decor? ): oh it’s cluttered as Hell. blue will scold gansey for being messy bc of all his books and gansey’s like *stares at the camera like jim from the office* and then the camera pans to blue’s side of the room which is all empty yoghurt pots and three sewing machines and enough fabric to make a 10-person tentwhat their first christmas / hanukkah / etc as a couple was like: there was probably Pressure for them (or at least gansey) to go to the gansey’s for christmas so that like. is awkward as best and sucks hard at worst. but then they spend the rest of the holidays at 300 fox way which is way betterwhat their names are in each other’s phones: ‘jane’ & ‘gansey’, which blue sometimes changes to ‘dick’ when she’s extra annoyed at himif they have any ‘couple traditions’ ( buying a new mug for their collection every year? baking every friday evening? ): i’m so bad at thinking these up. so sorry. hmu if u have any ideas.who falls asleep first and who wakes up first: blue falls asleep first. gansey wakes up first.who’s the big spoon / little spoon: blue is normally the big spoonwho hogs the bathroom: ganseywho kills the spiders / takes them outside: blue, but hdu imply she kills them! she releases them into the wild :3