#i changed my original plot a bit so it’d be less like the musical

[cupcakes-and-pain]

For the fake fic title: roller coasters and tarot cards (im so sorry)

(Why are you sorry?)

I’m imagining something like a middle school paranormal book. A bunch of kids go to an amusement park and get their fortunes read. Apparently, there’s something going on with the roller coaster and now they have to solve the mystery

[popculturebuffet]

Of Moons, Millionares and Mothers Part 2: The Ballad of Duke Balloney or “I’m Flintheart Glomgold and I Always Will Be!” (Commission for WeirdKev27)

Hello all you happy people. I”m Jake, I review stuff and today continues my look at Ducktales season 2 story arcs, of Moons, Millionares and Mothers. And while this arc as a whole is paid for by WeirdKev27, due to the Arc’s length, 17 parts including 15 episodes and 6 comics (2 of which will be in the same review), this one’s special as he’s using his patreon review every month to do so. If you too want me to review something of your choice simply hit up my ask box or join my patreon at patreon.com/popculture buffet. You get access to my discord, to pick a short when I do a group of them for characters birthdays, help me hit neat stretch goals like my next which is reviewing a darkwing duck episode a month, and best of all EXCLUSIVE REVIEWS. And I just added one this saturday of a carl barks story centerting around wigs, legal battles and attempted murder, both by our villian.. and by our heroes...

I will never get tired of that panel nor the boys inexplicably finding a blowgun. Point is it’s there if you want it at THIS LINK, but enough plugging so I can help pay the streaming bills and keep doing this... let’s get to the meat of things shall we?

This episode begins the second arc of this retrospective, The Glomgold Arc. And this arc was inevitibly going to come to this blog for two reasons. The first is that I have made no secret, in fact i’ve shouted it as loud as I can the neighbors are concerned, that I fucking love the 2017 Version of Flintheart Glomgold. 

Glomgold is Keith Ferguson’s best role, tied with Lord Hater obviously, but it is indeed a tie. No one but Keith could’ve pulled off glomgold’s combination of ego, ham, and batshit insanity. He just makes the utterly stupid and wonderfully ludicrious things that come out of the mans mouth sound so damn natural with such an unearned confidence. It’s very clear that Frank had Keith in mind when putting this version of everyone’s faviorite South African Billionare pretending to be a Scottish Billionare and wisely built the characcter around him and his immense talent. I was not familiar with Keith at all, wasn’t even aware he voiced hater before this show but damn if that hasn’t fully changed. 

Glomgold was also just in general a brilliant update of the character: While I know a lot of duck fans weren’t happy with this version at least at first. As the action figure sitting on my shelf that once road in a car with my david hasslehoff baywatch funko pop I have entirley due to my love of baywatching,  this insane music video hoff did in the early 2000′s, and just in general how gloriously rediculous the man’s life is when you stop and think about it for a second from a pay per-view concert that ended up falling on the same night as The OJ Chase,  to his kung fury cameo , to his weird insetence they never had sex on baywatch desspite mounds of video evdience and the fact the show was buit around the bulk of it’s cast’s sex appeal, to the fact the model of his pecs used for the spongebob movie was sold in an auction and on and on... I was going somewhere with this...

Oh right as the action figure, and previous praise, shows I am not one of these fans: The original isn’t bad, in fact one of my faviorite life and times chapters that i’ll be covering this week and talking about later in the review has him as the main antagonist and a pitvitol figure in Scrooge’s life in the worst way possible. Rosa GETS what’s needed for Flinty to feel specail: to have him be an evil mirror to scrooge, what he could’ve been had he kept down the path he started down in Africa. A ruthless, amoral asshole who will do ANYTHING to get rich. 

It’s just often that isn’t emphasised enough and he’s instead just another one of the millions of generic assholes trying to get scrooges money sometimes with hired goons...

Not only that but Frank really COULDN’T have him at full effectivness. See an arch enemy in the Silver Age, which STARTED the same year Glomgold Debuted no less, wasn’t a big deal. They were still considered your deadliest foe but they’d often, much like Flinty be shuffled into the rogues gallery, show up for an issue to meance the hero, then either escape, get thrown in jail only to escape from that easily later, or be presumed dead. The last one I bring up because it happened to Magneto a LOTTTT pre-claremont. For Fuck’s Sake Charles have those teenagers train to look for a body once in a while!

Original Flinty was built for that, and brilliantly so as Barks had a talent for it , as seen by the fact The Beagle BOys, Flintheart and Magica have stuck around ever since and even in comics overseas where Flintehart is replaced.. it’s by Rockerduck who Barks ALSO created. The 87 Show followed the same formula, which was just as standard for 80′s cartoons. It’s why Megatron took until his toy was canceled the movie to shoot starscream in the face. 

The problem is villians evolved and the expecation became more that a true arch enemy had to be a true threat. While Frank and Matt COULD’VE made Flintheart a real and honest threat, he also would’ve had to make him a Big Bad. The probelm was those seats were clearly taken: while i’m pretty sure some ideas came as they went, the main story beats were clearly planned out well in advance: Webby being a clone was always the plan, as was FOWL, Darkwing being a fan of a fictional Darkwing who became the real thing, and Della being on the moon. So he presumibly carefully choose each season’s big bad... and thus Season’s 1-3 would be full up wise. Season 1 had Magica, who he made into a TRUE threat, yet left the door open for her to return as she did, Season 2 had Lunaris who even if they hadn’t fully thought him up, they probably had thought up the moonvasion, and Season 3 was what they’d built the series towards with FOWL. 

Details probably changed, it’s very clear to me they were likely going to have all three buzzards be important and ended up deicding to pivot to it just being Bradford over time. But given how well they though tout the general framework, I highly doubt Flinty was ever considered as a seirous big bad.. and I know i’m saying this in an arc that tried to set him up as one, but i’m getting there simmer. 

So they could wait for a season 4 that might not happen.. or make him a recurring villian. So Frank and Matt decided to do that and leaned into comedy. Centering him around keith who Frank worked with previously on Wonder and thus knew he could play a hammy manchild like no one else, they simply leaned into the goofier aspects of his personality. His being similar to scrooge became him being an intentional and blatant knockoff. As Scrooge himself perfectly summed up in episode 1 “The poor man’s version of me.. which to be fair still makes him insanely rich”. 

It’s another reason to really love this version as while yes, they did make him a bafoon.. he’s a wonderfully, redicuously layered bafoon: He still contrasts scrooge perfectly, manically hammy to Scrooge being calm, especially around flinty, blantatly crooked to Scrooge’s died in wool honesty, and wasting money on revenge instead of spending it on his actual company. There’s more obviously but some i’m saving for the review. 

Not only that but his insane schemery has a rhyme and reason to it: He attacks Scrooge every week like the saturday morning cartoon villian he is, but his schemes are always unwieldly and massively stupid, and he always goes with the first draft. It’s something the team enforced: the first version is what they role with because that’s how his sad brain works. He also is obssed with sharks and explosives, the former being given a suprisingly heartfelt and unsuprisingly insanne origin story towards the series end, and works them into every plot no matter how much itm akes no sense. He’s pure ego, pure stupid and pure fun. 

So yeah circling back to him being the big bad, I felt he was made one for this season for two reasons: the first is while a lot of fans (raises hand) enjoyed this version, some didn’t like how inept he was, so this would give them a breif bit of Flintheart being a genuine threat again. The other was frankly... they didn’t want to play their hand. Lunaris WAS the big bad... but fans would get supscious if there was seemingly no true threat on the horizon. Magica popped up in episode 4. We didn’t know her full plan yet true, but all we needed was lena SAYING HER NAME and fans of any other version of teh Disney Ducks would instantly go “Oh shit there she is”. So fans would now have the expectation of a main antagonist.. but would be instantly supscious of Lunaris and Penumbra if there wasn’t one for the first third of a season it took to them, and it’d leave a gap in the story to not have someone driving the plot on earth. 

So Flinty got an upgrade.. a slight one and we’ll talk about the eb and flow. And thus he got a proper origin. Now granted they could’ve planned this too, but this one’s harder to tell as the curse you me gag could’ve been a clever setup or could’ve just been a one off gag they somehow turned into an entire episode. So Flinty got an arc.. and a comedic foil, the other reason this was inevieble, and Kev’s faviorite character, Zan Owlson. So how did it work out for them? Well we’ll begin that journey under the cut. 

We begin our story a few months ago.... on every level really: the months ago shadow war aired when this episode originally good, the months ago I reviwed Shadow War (which via counting I found out was my 200th episode not counting Patreon. Nice), and most importantly for this story, the four months ago before the present day of Season 2. 

Glomgold saying curse you me as he fell into the bay during the Shadow War.... only for once in his life he dosen’t somehow get out of it unscathed and instead passes out, almost drowning. He’s found by Fisher and Mann, two fisherpersons... Mann is specific about that due to being a woman despite the obvious irony. It’s a good gag. Flinty acts like he normally would.. hostile, demanding that they know who he is.. and while they don’t.. neither does he. 

Cue credits and cue present day. Via a newscast with Roxanne we learn what I mentioned earlier: It’s been four month and Glomgold’s been missing. The general mood.. has been about what you’d expect. 

Yeah Roxanne turned on him real fast. I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if it was because he later openly bragged about stealing scrooge’s money during the shark thing on live tv at some point, making Roxanne look terrible for enabling him and for blatantly supporting him earlier. I mean.. how else do you get a corrupt journalist to do anything decent. 

But with Glomgold gone SOMEONE’S gotta replace him.. and that someone is Zan Motherfucking Owlson. Top of her class at Mouseton Univesity, Owlson is the show once again updating things: previously they added Mark Beaks to the Rogue’s Gallery as he contrasts the 50′s (scrooge ) and 80′s (glomgold) idea of billionares from previous versions of the property being a modern tech weasel. Though instead of just one thing Owlson represents a few: The most obvious is she’s a woman of color: Having a black woman in such a high position of power is something disney would’ve outright vetoed in the 50′s and 80′s. Here it’s well accepted as it always should have been. It also feels like a delebrate move on Frank’s part: There weren't’ any major african or african american coded characters in season 1, despite the show being very open and accepting, so that needed to change. The other is frankly outside of Brigtaa MacBridge, whose also weirdly absent from this series for some reason and has taken Fethry and Rockerduck’s place as the most major overseas duck character to never get adapted, there are hardly ever any females on Scrooge and his richer foes level. He’s had the occasional female rival or suitor, but only Brigittta had staying power and while I love the idea of her, another person as rich as scrooge whose willing to spend more and has a crush on him, she badly needed an update as she’s essentially Adventure Era Amy Rose in a grown ass woman’s body. 

Owlson also provides a diffrent dynamic in that she portrays the ideal of what we’d want from a ceo: She’s honest, works hard, earned her way as square as scrooge did, gladly donates to charity and is extremely charismatic and intelligent. Granted most CEO”s are nothing like this but still, she’s what we WANT them to be. Using the money not for themselves or taking big paychecks but to help people. She also provides something Glomgold needed: a straight man. While he has one in Scrooge at times, Owlson unlike both of them is a fully functional resonable human being. Scrooge, while a good person deep down, can be reckless, impulsive and greedy, and Glomgold had a tarzan like experince with sharks, goes on to name his dummy son sharkbomb, and tried to murder Scrooge on live television twice that we know of. She’s the calm, snarky, put upon sane person trying to reign in the crazy shark explosion man. 

Owlson dosen’t get a ton to do here, but that will change and she does get a decent amout in the final scene. But what she does here establishes who she is and how sh’es FIXED Glomgold industries; She’s shut down the vast number of money sinking scheme related departments, set ups everal charities, and is even setting up a new one with Scrooge, Dimes for Ducklings. In short she knew exactly what was needed to fix the company and it’s image and did so in FOUR MONTHS. Probably even less given they had to be sure Glomgold wasn’t coming back right away. I guarantee he’s faked his death like 10 times just to try and kill scrooge. They have to make sure it’s real first.  As one last note before we move on, Owlson is played by Natasha Rothwell, a producer and writer who i’ve only seen outside of this in Love, Simon and Sonic the Hedgehog.. that is a weird combo of things that mean a LOT to me I haven’t been able to bring up here again. 

We find the tv this was all playing on on the docks with a non-anthro segull pecking it while a bunch of fisherpersons go about their day. We also get this guy. 

Add him to the list of spinoffs I want THE LIST OF SPINOFFS JAKE WANTS: 1. Darkwing Duck 2. Donald, Daisy and the Kids 3. The Sabrewings 4. Tailspin Reboot 5. The Flintheart Glomgold Show 6. A Sequel Movie 7. This Guy Punching A Fucking Fish 

So you might be wondering when any of our main cast are going to show up.. and why the fish puncher isn’t in said main cast. Well that’s about now as Webby and Louie are fishing. Well okay more acuratley webby is fishing because she genuinely enjoys it and Louie is tagging along so he can nap on a boat while Webby paddles him around. That plan is threatnned by her spear fishing and he suggests using rods instead, but they need bait for that. 

Naturally, given we need to get this plot going our heroes run into Duke Baloney, aka an amnesiac Glomgold. Understandably, both of htem think this is some sort of scheme at first because waiting for someone related to Scrooge to stroll by his fish stand for some sort of shark themed trap, especially since he’s right near the water so he dosen’t have to worry about keeping them hydrated like that time he dropped one from a plane onto scrooge’s board meeting with two chainsaws strapped to it. But .. it’s not. While we the audience saw him amnesiac, and at first I thought that spoiled the episode... it really dosen’t. He still ACTS like himself on instinct, so your not sure if he faked it as part of some elaborate scheme or is really gone till this scene shows that, no he really isn’t there. And the how is simply in knowing the guy: Glomgold is not good at subtley. He has disguises and such, but their never remotely convincing. He could NEVER pull off  actually being a humble fish monger nor have gone four fucking months without yelling at scrooge or remotely contacting him. There’s also the fact Fisher and Mann 100% belivie in duke and back up his very real story of being dredged out of the bay. There’s also his south african accent, which actors including David Tennant himself have admitted is one of the hardest to pull off but Keith does swimingly, which is a hint.. but only on rewatch or for those who know his comics origins. 

Louie isn’t convinced which is fair: even if Glomgold isn’t good at this sort of thing, he’s still tried it a lot. Webby however correctly figures he has amensia. So the two simply try talking to him. Fisher and Mann do get a bit dickish laughing off the idea he’s possibly Glomgold.. despite the fact you know you dredged him out of the fucking water 4 months ago.. and if you actually looked at the news, would see Glomgold disappeared around the exact same time you found Duke. It just annoys me because otherwise these two are great characters: Friendly loveable fisherpersons who love their job, have no comeptiviness and genuinely want to help their friend duke. The encounter does have them seeing a fancy money clip Duke has but with no other options they leave for now. 

But while Duke has forgotten who he was... bits of glomgold still stir within him. And that starts when Duke spots the McDuck Industries fishing boat, the best fishing boat on the sea, something his friends are okay with.. but Duke naturally isn’t. So while Duke was a calm sane fisherman before the true glomgold in him is on full display as he comes up with insane schemes involving fish and explosives, before presenting a rather insane scheme to his friends involving getting engineering degrees and other stuff.. it’s as poorly drawn and wonderful as you expect from him. But what’s telling is that he reigns it in when his friends show obvious concern with his actions... something Glomgold would NEVER do. For one he dosen’t have friends. For another, he doesn’t care about anyone else’s feelings or thoughts. 

By now Webby is also championing that Duke is a diffrente person.. which is true. Duke is Glomgold stripped of his hate and resitment towards scrooge. He’s who the man COULD’VE been had he not sworn eternal vengeance on Scrooge. Louie is doubtful that he’s amnesiac still.. but neither can quite figure out the full story so it’s time for research.. and for Webby to accidentally knock Louie into some lobster traps.. which given he’s spent the entire episode assuming an amnesiac man isn’t that despite all the evidence to the contrary, he earned that. That said these two were the perfect choice for it: All of the boys have a bit of skeptic in them, and we already had a plot with Huey being skeptical.. and even he would’ve given up by now as would dewey since he only has a pinch at best. Webby.. has none. She can question motives and stuff sure, but at her heart she’s a kind forgiving soul who belives the best in everyone. And.. its’  paid off fo rher. Look at the whole Lena situation, she believed in her, even while Lena was actively manipulating her,.. and it truly changed her, convinced Lena to do the right thing despite the cost, to choose love over the abusive monster who made her. It’s the only missed opportunity in the episode for me. Character wise it has exactly the 8 it needs to tell the story and focuses heavly on the five it truly is about. But not having Webby bring up Lena when we don’t hear her mentoined AT ALL during her absence (though to the shows credit they did a good job showing Webby still had never remotely given up), and it made the wait more agonizing and would’ve made her motivations hit even harder: that she belives in duke because she believed in lena and it was real. And while this thank christ isn’t remotely romantic, the point does stand: She wants to see the best. 

Louie is a conman by nature so he only sees the worst, the weakest in people, the things he can use to take htem down or take hteir money. He can’t fathom someone doing good because he can’t fathom HIMSELF being good. And that.. says a lot.. but he’s accepted himself as a shady conperson who cares only for himself.. even if that’s not the truth. His inclusion here enhances his own arc much like Huey’s role in quack pack enhanced his. It shows that deep down Louie dosen’t think much of anyone.. and probably not himself. That he has to be shady and greedy to survive when that’s not tru. Sharper than the sharpies yes but also square.

One last bit before we moved on  I just found out though: The Crew originally had this as a straight up origin story: no kids, none of the rest of the duck family, except presumably Scrooge’s parts here, just Glomgold’s struggle with amensia and his past leading to who hei s now. Honestly I think that version could’ve worked, but likely given disney seems TERRIFIED of making a show starring an adult without a chlid and had to be talked into the child light Golden Lagoon, that was a non starter but I think it still works fine. I also foudn this out via a twitter thread of Frank’s rewriting history that goes in deep on teh production of each episode. Had I known this existed before writing this one, I would’ve used it for the other two arcs and most dangerous game night, but I intend to read through it so I have everything on the table from here on out. 

For only the second time in her long career of researching stuff though, Webby has hit a dead end. Mostly because she couldn’t find anything on Duke.. and NOTHING on Glomgold’s past pre-Duckburg. The most she has is his visa...

I want to frame this on my wall.. and someone is actually seling id cards out there, so I want this one at some point. It’s not Disney because they don’t care about fan merch like this, but then that just means they don’t get the money because they didn’t think of it or put the work in then huh. 

But yeah with nothing else our heroes go to the only person they know who knows him well...  Scrooge. 

Meanwhile Duke has .. this... I just.....I can’t put words to this truly bizzare surreal dream sequence.. it involves Glomgold going insane, the kids dancing on a bagpipe, and owlson is there.. despite the fact that Glomgold should have zero idea whot hat is. I think the kids mentioned here but even then, he somehow knows exactly what she looks like.

Otherwise good stuff and it’s raining hard as Duke goes in. Fisher and Mann have formally added him to their sign, and warmly welcomed him in and Duke says “this is the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me I think” which is probably true. and makes what’s coming all the more heartbreaking. 

But before what’s coming Duke has another thing coming.. Scrooge who the kids brought to talk to him. The two talk casually, the kids watch not knowing.. and then Scrooge comes back to them. Turns out Webby was, unsurprisingly right on the money, Flinty does have amnesia, and unlike what Louie thought.. he isn’t inherently evil. Duke is just duke.. and Scrooge has no intention of fixing the amnesia. And while that SOUNDS bad.. his intentions are noble: Glomgold.. was a throughly miserable person. He was never happy and never would be till Scrooge was dead by his hand and that was never going to happen.  It isn’t even taking an enemy off the board: Flinty is only a threat on occasion. Scrooge clearly ENJOYS their conflict: it may annoy him from time to time, but he clearly enjoys upstaging the guy. And as he points out, it’s not a brain injury or anything: Glomgold is practically immortal as Louie put earlier, and Scrooge outright mentions Glomgold’s taken a LOT of explosions to the face. So he’s in no real danger physically or emotionally.. he’s happy. He has friends, a calling he truly enjoys. There’s another reason too but we’ll see that in the final scene. 

So Duke is finally happy... but it doesn’t last... the kids go out but a storms a coming, and Duke selfleslly heads out to save them.. only to get hit on the head and fall in the ocean again. 

It’s here we get the 2017 version of Glomgold’s origin story. We did kinda get one with life and times, as we saw his first meeting with scrooge and why he hated him, long story short with the long story coming later this week Glomgold left Scrooge for dead and Scrooge’s response was to come back, kick the fuckers ass, tar and feather him and utterly humilaite him, leading to Flinty swearing vengance. 

But while I love that version..t his one is just as awesome if not better. And it’s without having Scrooge ride a lion. Here we instead meet Flinty as a child Scrooge’s age... and as a shoeshine boy. Yup just like Scrooge Duke, Glomgold’s birth name, was an industrious young boy with big dreams. He also had unwieldy schemes from minute one, but Scrooge saw in this lad the same fire he had and tried replicating his own origin. 

The problem was... the different context ruined it. Scrooge was paid by an equally poor ditchdigger the us equilvent of his pay: still useless in scotland, but a good lesson in hard work and not being swindled. Scrooge tried that... as the richest duck in the world and without giving flinty the same amount of money. 

So Duke/Flinty took umbrage at this yelled at scrooge.. and pick pocketed his money clip. In the only bit taken from the rosa version of their first meeting, Scrooge never realized he’d met flinty already. There and then duke came up with his first true, and first insane scheme: Save the money and use it to mold himself into a richer, more scottish version of scrooge dedicating his life to one upping him and killing him. A “single white female” type thing as Frank put it. 

It’s.. utterly brilliant... taking Glomgold being a knockoff as mention and just running with that... making Glomgold a LITERAL knockoff. This was indeed the plan all along: A way to have him be both south african and scottish and it was brilliant. It also gives him more depth and more tragedy: He COULD’VE been the next scrooge.. but instead of being his own man or learning any of the hard lessons scrooge did he doubled down on never learning anything and getting vengeance on an old man’s well meant but accidently classist gesture. 

So Glomgold reawakens and while it first looks like he’s going to save the kids... he instead throws Webby into the raging sea, and steals their fish. Webby is heartbroken and Louie asks him “what about duke.” His response is heartbreaking as it is character defnting

“I”m Flintheart Glomgold and I always will be!” the lightning shot, the cackle..i t’s just such a damn good moment that underscores the tragedy of the episode as Glomgold’s new friends are horrified by what he is now and what he was always meant to be and Glomgold leaves to go stalk scrooge once again. He indeed is Flintheart Glomgold and always will be.. because he threw the decent person he could’ve been away. He’s miserable.. because he can’t let go of his rage or ego and just move on from something that happened to him when he was ten! He has to be in his 60′s now! Glomgold may think Scrooge is his worst enemy.. but it’s really Flintheart Glomgold.... and it always will be. 

So naturally his first actoin is to storm into his company and scream at scrooge. How he found him there... honestly not a huge suprise it’s his company and he likely knows how to find scrooge anywhere because he’s a creep like that. Scrooge and Owlson’s reactions are both worth a look at:

Given Glomgold bursts into an already annoying meeting of Scrooge trying to get the dimes part knocked down to nickles (and likely lower before that given he mentioned Pennies earlier), to accuse Scrooge of trying to trick him by appearing as a boat in his dreams her bafflement is both understandable and hilarious. Like she probably HEARD what Glomgold was like but gennuinely didn’t belivie it and her face is just now frozen in a look of “oh my god they were not exagearating what fresh hell is this”. 

She tries to be professional and introduce herself but he just brushes her off and yells at Scrooge blaming him for being forgotten (”You literally forgot yourself), with Owlson also considering calling security. She only dosen’t because Scrooge points out he’ll tire himself out eventually and as usual for their jousts, is not remotely threatened or worried. He’s just..sad. And getting back to his reaction.. that’s what’s telling about his plan. He probably KNEW this would happen. He in his heart knew Duke Balloney would be gone soon, and he’d have to deal with Glomgold again. It helps soften the implicatoins: it wouldn’t last and fraknly if it did Scrooge would probably have people check on him regualry to make sure he was okay. He’s not a monster.. he just wanted Flinty to be happy for five minutes and to not ruin that out of some misplaced sense of right and wrong.. when the right thing was to simply let the man be happy till it inevitably blew up. 

Glomgold however, furious at being forgotten and cast aside has decided to take a huge poorly thought through gamble and challenges scrooge to a classic Scrooge comics trope between the two, but with higher stakes: A contest to see who will be the richest duck in the world by the end of the year.. and given Christmas happens right after this i’m just assuming he means a year from now. Winner gets both companies and fortunes. Scrooge scoffs at this.. till Flinty pulls out the clip, taunting him with how he did it and “If I can beat you once scrooge i’ll beat you again”. And this, Flinty revealing he stole from him and he NEVER KNEW it or realize it, enrages scrooge enough to agree and to take him seriously... meanwhile Owlson.. just tries to get actual work shit done and just forges their signatures. Look she is a woman of color in the business world with genuinely good motives... she’s probably used to using white nonsense to get things past two idiots having a peeing race. 

Final Thoughts:

This episode is truly excellent and like Most Dangerous Game Night! i’d forgottne just HOW good it was. The pacing, the comedy, and the character work is all on full blast and i’ve gushed plenty enough about how great an origin story is. it’s a character piece that explains why this doofus is the way he is and that is what holds him back. 

Next time on MMM: Louie’s back as he pulls a ghostbusters to make quick money and Storkules starts rooming with Donald with predictable results. 

If you liked this review consider joining my patreon and i’ll see you at the next rainbow. 

[elyvorg]

What would you think of a talentswap au? I know we all love kaito in all his wonderful spacey self, but ive seen some really interesting concepts for ultimate assassin kaito, as well as ultimate astronaut maki, ultimate detective kaede and ultimate pianist shuichi. Some very interesting things could be done with their histories and how they affect their present, especially if the changes are minimised. (Say, Shuichi's uncle being a pianist rather than a detective.)

I dont think the original character arcs could be pulled off as well, what with how the character's pasts affect how they react to the situations they're thrown in during the killing game (for example i doubt maki would have gone directly to murdering kokichi when she's convinced he's the mastermind if she hadn't been raised as an assassin) but i think there is some interesting potential in what would and wouldnt change about them

I know talentswap AUs are a pretty popular thing in this fandom, and I do enjoy looking at people's ideas in terms of the creative aesthetic redesigns of characters they can come up with. As a narrative thing, though, the concept just doesn't really do it for me.

I agree with your point that it can be an interesting exercise to imagine how a character we know might have diverged from the same starting point through slightly different circumstances in their life, and what would and wouldn't change about them. But I'm just not especially interested in the end result, because ultimately, whether by a little or by a lot, they going to end up as a different characters.

Obviously, as you can tell from my blog, I like thinking about AU scenarios. But, for me, they need to be plot AUs, not character AUs. I enjoy plot AUs because I like imagining how the characters I already know and love would react in interesting ways to new and different situations not seen in canon. I'm much less into AUs where the characters have been changed such that they only superficially resemble the ones that I'm a fan of.

For the most obvious example of this, let’s take Maki. The reasons I love her, the things that really make her Maki to me, are the trauma she suffered in being forced to be an assassin, the issues and self-loathing she has today because of that, and how amazing it is that she still manages to be a good person at heart despite everything. A Maki who was literally anything other than the Ultimate Assassin wouldn't have any of that, and then she's just... not really Maki any more. It's not just that she obviously wouldn't try to kill Kokichi; none of her story would be the same at all.

The same also goes for anyone else who's talent-swapped into being an Ultimate Assassin, because that level of trauma is going to significantly change anyone. To take another example, because this is a hypothetical I have actually thought about a bit, let's try to imagine an Ultimate Assassin Kaito.

With the caveat that I don't actively seek out every talent-swap out there, I've happened across an assassin-Kaito concept or two that basically looks like the same Kaito: he incidentally murders people for a job, but then he also still has sidekicks and looks after kids and is his usual optimistic Kaito-y self when he's not doing a murder. That's a cute idea; I understand the desire to keep Kaito recognisable, but I just... I don't think that would be possible. I don't think anyone, no matter how resilient, could still be like that after going through what Maki went through and being forced to kill so many people. Maki didn't end up the way she did because she was weak; far from it.

(And it's obviously even less possible that Kaito wasn't forced and traumatised into this just like Maki was, because he'd never choose to kill people for a living. Perhaps we could imagine that Kaito was at one of the cult-run orphanages (for minimal changes, maybe his grandparents weren't there after his parents died? oh nooo) and got scouted, and/or volunteered in order to protect someone else because he's exactly as selfless as Maki.)

After going through all that, especially since he started from the same point of someone fundamentally very selfless and caring, an assassin-Kaito's issues would end up very similar to canon-Maki's. He'd still care about other people beneath it all, but it'd be hard to notice that when he'd also hate himself and feel like he doesn't deserve to be around anyone, let alone help them, because who'd want advice from a killer?

The only really different part would be his outward personality. Kaito's general personality is nothing like what Maki's was pre-trauma, so he'd have ended up with something quite different from Maki's cold aloofness. Specifically, if you'll bear with me on the out-of-left-field example here, I think he might have ended up looking something like Axel from Kingdom Hearts. (I once hyperfixated on Axel, okay, so I've thought about this a lot.)

In short, Axel used to be a good kid, a bit of a cocky attention seeker but with a heart of gold, until he was forced into doing horrible things for an evil organisation against his will. He pretty much coped with that by accepting that he's A Bad Guy now, and owning it, carrying out his evil missions in a stylish, badass sort of way, like a twisted version of the cocky kid he used to be. This also conveniently gives him something he can focus on to avoid thinking about all the things he hates and never wanted about this. Given that Kaito was a vaguely similar kind of kid to what Axel used to be, it seems possible that he might cope in a similar way if put through the child-slave-assassin wringer.

But, while the end result would definitely be a very fun and fascinating character, my point is that it still wouldn't be Kaito as we know him at all. It'd be an entirely new character. He'd have Kaito's name and face and pre-assassin-training childhood, but those details would be the least interesting things about him.

(I would recommend checking out Axel's storyline to see a character along these lines, but honestly the required untangling of the Kingdom Hearts lore-spaghetti is not necessarily worth your while. That and all this stuff about his issues is pretty subtle and I only really noticed it at all because I happened to like him enough to hyperfixate for a while.)

Even putting aside the extreme example of an assassin talent, a lot of Danganronpa characters are as great as they are specifically because their personality and their talent make such a good combination. Take Shuichi, whose issues and character arc and potential as an interesting protagonist revolve around the fact that he's an Ultimate Detective who starts out weak. A pianist Shuichi would just be a somewhat anxious and insecure pianist, which wouldn't be especially interesting or important to the progression of a killing game. Meanwhile, a detective Kaede would be way more confident about her detectiveness than Shuichi and would probably look something like a more optimistic and trusting Kyoko; again, less interesting. [Edit: or would she?] To bring in some other combinations of these four, a detective Maki would look very similar to Kyoko, because she'd have similar trust issues from her orphanage days.

As for a detective Kaito, sure, we can imagine a Kaito who's the same kind of person but with a passion for solving mysteries (which he’s also actually good at) instead of space. He'd still do his sidekick thing, of course, because the only thing that'd make him lose that central part of himself is loads of childhood trauma. But then this Kaito is just genuinely every bit the hero everyone needs, solving the cases and supporting the others in one package... and, whoops, there goes all of his issues and character arc. At best, he'd still struggle a little with the Gonta situation in trial 4, but that struggle wouldn't be actually about Shuichi and so it wouldn't be nearly as fun. (A detective Kaito still wouldn't struggle as much to accept Gonta did it, either, because he'd be someone who's used to trusting the facts and logic alongside his instincts about people to intuit the truth.) And he’d still struggle a bit with dying if we gave him the virus, but so much less so, because at least he’d be obviously managing to be the hero he wants to be before the end.

An astronaut Maki would pretty much just be a regular astronaut who happened to be an orphan. She'd need to have taught herself to be good with communication and teamwork because that's necessary to be an astronaut, so she'd mostly just be a little bit like Kaito but extremely toned down. (Again, Maki without her assassin trauma kind of just becomes a fairly ordinary competent person and not really Maki as we know her.) Even then, it's a huge stretch that someone pragmatic and cautious like her would have been willing to risk losing everything just to take the astronaut exam as a teenager. And an astronaut Shuichi doesn't even seem possible; he'd have been way too insecure to apply to astronaut training early like Kaito did, no matter how badly he'd hypothetically love to go to space. Really, Kaito's reckless personality is a necessary part of having an Ultimate - as in, teenage - Astronaut. Pretty much all of these kids' talents are intrinsically tied in some way into who they are as a person and as a character in this story.

The only talent-swap within these particular four characters we're talking about that I think would work in terms of keeping them basically themselves is between Kaito and Kaede. That's because they were both written with the talents they have to help enhance the kind of people they are, and they're such similar people in the first place. Both of them are selfless and optimistic and all about working together and helping others; Kaede plays music to make people smile, while Kaito's astronaut training requires him to be someone who values communication and co-operation. I can just about see a talent-swap between these two making sense while still retaining everything important about who they are as people and keeping their stories roughly the same. You'd have a space-flavoured Kaede and a music-flavoured Kaito, but their personalities would still be very recognisably them.

(Though, still, I dunno if I'd have loved a pianist Kaito quite as much. There's just something about that space theme that helps get across how bombastically over-the-top he is in a way that a more down-to-earth talent simply can't quite match. Also, that execution.)

...The problem with this, though, is that the new music-Kaito and space-Kaede wouldn't be all that meaningfully interesting to explore compared to their original versions. Which I guess is kind of the unavoidable catch-22 I have with character AUs. Making big changes to a character can be an interesting thought experiment, but it ultimately results in them no longer being the characters I've grown to love any more, while changes that keep them still recognisably the same people are inherently going to be pretty superficial changes that aren’t worth exploring very much.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Disability and James

@zarohk asked for my thoughts on a Disability Studies/Media Studies perspective on the disability depictions in Animorphs.  [PLEASE NOTE: I am nondisabled, so if I err, please tell me so.]

I’ve mentioned before that James is one of my faves, and possibly my favorite minor character who isn’t a yeerk host.  His introduction pulls off a seemingly impossible feat through not only creating a likable Sixth Ranger, but creating a likable Sixth Ranger who comes after David.  James is also a complex, nuanced character whose disability is a feature but not a summation of his personality.  Plus, he’s a masculine boy who is all about about nurturing others, which always makes me happy.

A few places where I commend the depiction of James:

He leads a social community of disabled kids who help each other.  It’s a big part of third-wave progressivism to emphasize sub-communities and various identities helping each other out: women supporting women, queer pride, Latinx-American culture, etc.  That’s what we see with the Auximorphs, especially James.  James’s motivation is somewhere between 99% “help my roomies” and 100% “help my roomies.”  His initial response to Jake and Cassie explaining the war is “so what, a bunch of ableds are gonna get taken by yeerks, not my problem.”  It’s only when Cassie points out that the yeerks are eugenicists who murder disabled humans that he switches to “okay, I guess we’ll go fight in your stupid war.”  He insists on even the kids who won’t be fighting (Pedro, Tuan) getting the power to morph, and tells Jake that he’ll take suggestions but not orders.

He emphasizes his own and Pedro’s bodily autonomy.  James actually goes so far as to throw Jake onto the floor when Jake tries to grab his wheelchair — a move that emphasizes James has the right to move his own body around, and that that includes prostheses.  Everyday ableism too often involves random strangers taking charge of the bodies of disabled people, attempting to guide blind pedestrians or push wheelchairs around without asking permission to move a person’s body like that.  "My body, my business” is obviously a huge motif in Animorphs, and James pretty explicitly extends that to prostheses as well as fleshy limbs.

He’s nobody’s sidekick, and nobody’s fool.  When the Animorphs first tell James that they’re alien-fighting shapeshifters, he assumes that they’re here to prank the disabled kids who they think must be desperate for attention.  He barely gives them the time of day even when they prove themselves, and he doesn’t “play nice” even when they add him to the team.  James defies the cliché of the disabled kid desperate for the approval of nondisabled peers, and specifically calls it out.  He’s the leader of a semi-independent unit who has his own agenda, rather than being at the original Animorphs’ beck and call.  Like Toby and her hork-bajir, he’s here to make sure that his group and his loved ones don’t get left behind when the war ends and intersectional identities threaten their rights once again.

He kicks ass.  James is competent, tough, skillful, and self-confident with or without the Animorphs.  There’s a fairly realistic period where he has to learn the basics of morphing along with the other Auximorphs, but once he learns he’s highly effective.  He saves Jake’s life during the Air Force battle (#53), rescues the original Animorphs from Tom’s yeerk (#50), and helps Ax and Cassie escape a mob of morph-controllers who have them cornered in a subway tunnel (#52).  He’s agentic and powerful, something we don’t see enough of in disabled child characters.

He emphasizes that the more-privileged communicator has to be the one to do the work of meeting in the middle.  Cassie notes in #50 that James puts in a lot of work to communicate with Pedro (who is paralyzed) and Timmy (who has a speech disorder).  James is the one who can hear/speak in a fairly normative fashion, so James often “translates” for Timmy — but he always does so by letting Timmy finish a sentence rather than cutting him off by trying to guess what he’ll say next.  James is the one who can work the stereo in his and Pedro’s room, so he makes sure that he always lists genres and waits for a blink of confirmation before he changes the music.  James also defers to Pedro’s request for country western in spite of being a punk rock fan himself, because James remains conscious of the fact that if he doesn’t like the music he can always leave the room, while Pedro doesn’t have that option.

He’s thoroughly individuated.  James likes Blink 182 and dislikes reality TV.  He uses his morphs for agility — peregrine falcon, lion — more than firepower.  He spends a lot of time on his hair, and he treasures privacy as much as he values his friends.  He repeatedly calls Cassie and Jake on their bullshit, in spite of being visibly scared to do so as the new kid on the team.  One wouldn’t necessarily think that these are huge accomplishments (and to be clear, they’re not) but there are way way too many minor characters in wheelchairs, especially sci-fi stories, that don’t get characterized beyond their various emotions and thoughts that directly relate to their wheelchairs.

A few places where James falls into the common traps of implied ableism creeping into fiction, as written about in Narrative Prosthesis:

He gets “cured”.  The fact that James’s body is, however implicitly, depicted as a “problem” that must be “fixed” suggests that the theoretical ideal point is the nondisabled body he would have had if not for the car accident.  Like I said, it’s 100% fine if a disabled character gets written as preferring to be nondisabled, but if the series offers the unquestioned assumption that the “correct” body is the nondisabled version, then that’s... not great.

His disability is presented as a mystery that needs solving.  Like Loren, James gets presented with an implicit frame of “why are you like this?” that assumes his body is “abnormal” and therefore begs a question.  In James’s case, it comes in the form of Collette explaining why he’s disabled (a car crash) before we ever even hear from James himself.  Again, it’d be fine if this was the only time this happened, but the fact that the series “explains” almost all of the disabled characters (Taylor, Loren, Mertil, Kelly, Pedro) suggests that disability is something that needs explaining because it’s aberrant.

Some of the physical descriptions of James are a bit eugenicist.  After he first demorphs, Cassie says “standing over the group now, steady and strong, was James. He was taller than Jake, broader-shouldered... long and muscular” and describes how James helps to carry the other Auximorphs as they acquire battle morphs (#50).  James gets presented as a contrast point to the Auximorphs who remain disabled, because his body is presented as “correct” while theirs are not.  If it was just Cassie, that’d be one thing, but Ax says “unlike James, the others are physically helpless” (#50) and later Jake describes the contrast between James being strong and the other Auximorphs being “weak” and “faintly pathetic” (#53).  In the process, the descriptions tie together the ideas of being masculine, being independent, being physically strong, and being worthy of respect.  American rugged individualism, especially as it applies to white men and boys, has a dark side in that it often regards physical dependence on others as a sign of cowardice or weak will or moral failing.  That assumption underwrites some of the way that James gets described by the other Animorphs.

He gets killed.  By killing off James and his fellow Auximorphs, the series falls into the “kill or cure” narrative that Mitchel and Snyder trace throughout history for the overwhelming majority of disabled characters.  Disability is too often presented as being necessary to “solve” through death or cure, to the point where the Fries Test (designed to be a minimum threshold for disability representation, like the Bechdel Test for women) requires that disabled character(s) make it to the end of the story without being eradicated through cure or kill as the bare minimum condition that a story be somewhat less ableist.  Animorphs does not pass the Fries Test, because it eradicates its disabled characters through a combination of cures and kills.

Specifically, he gets killed to manipulate the emotions of a nondisabled character.  When Visser Three kills James, the moment is presented through Jake’s point of view, and it leads up to Jake’s decision to flush the Pool ship.  Maybe my biggest frustration is that that moment only serves to cause Jake pain and help push him off the rails.  It doesn’t change the plot of the final battle the way Tom’s death does, it doesn’t stop to give James a conscious choice the way Rachel’s death does, it just makes Jake sad and mad and reckless.  It’s the same dang dynamic as women in refrigerators: the less demographically privileged character becomes a prop for a more-privileged protagonist to have emotions about.

Anyway, to say it again: none of those individual elements of James’s story — death, cure, urgent backstory — would be necessarily problematic if there were equally-major disabled characters in Animorphs who didn’t demonstrate those elements.  It’s the fact that James demonstrates all of those elements and so do most of the other disabled characters that makes me wish the series had done better.

[thegirlwholied]

Paris (the Planet) Book! I would read based on the name alone.

thank you so much @aurorawest​​ for your interest in my Paris the Planet idea (& @aliform I’ll give double the answer on this one as I received a double ask ;D) this is probably the idea I’m most likely to talk someone’s ear off about at the moment, as I’m very into it but it’s also still very nebulous. 

back during post-apocalypse novel YA popularity, I, an American, was very tired of all the post-apocalypse stories being in America, and had a floating, missing-a-story opening line that went something like ‘Protagonist’s father had always promised her mother that he’d take her to Paris someday, and so, when the world ended, that’s where they went’. (the actual line was better but I could not for the life of me find it & protagonist’s name has changed like 6x since then). 

In my Art History studies I spent a lot of time studying Impressionism & also I have a Les Miserables addiction so this is very much a Certain Aesthetic of Paris I had in mind & also thinking of people who have been drawn there because of the Idea of Paris which is obviously distinct from & in an interesting dance with Actual!Paris

& somewhere along the way of leaving that idea on the backburner, it attached itself to a We’re In Outer Space now idea instead. In a distant future where humanity has colonized other planets, and Earth is the Old World, all the planets in the solar system have names both drawn from mythology AND aligned with actual current cities. The only one locked in stone besides Paris is Atalanta, & I think I’m going with that original spelling, but there may be a planet Ithaca, etc

There’s a night-market vibe to planet!Paris (more in my other answer on Paris night!); think Pre-Haussmann Paris, the narrow, winding alleyway side, but with string lights & with flea markets & barter, in both Old World and other-planet goods, as primary currency. Crystals from the Old World are a big one, & while I’m still tossing around the rules of this concept, their associated healing properties here may work more dramatically under other stars. We’re in more fantasy than sci-fi here, in the Star Wars v. Star Trek since, but the fantasy’s going to be more astrology & crystals turning out to be both Legit & Dramatic in space. 

(my pile o’ notes tend to be full of dialogue bits, many of which will go nowhere, but one such is:

“I’ve only got the sign I was born under.”

“You weren’t born under it. That was in another solar system, and besides, that calendar’s dead.”)

Music on vinyl is also still-cool & something of a commodity. While the entire plot is intended to take place strictly on Paris, the one character who had a spaceship named his ship Astral Weeks. Cars *are* a thing but less so on the ramshackle arty side of Paris where my protagonist (currently Lu, short for Lucina) lives with her four housemates. & the story starts with her slightly-complicated friend showing up with vinyl & a car. right now my Paris the Planet folder only holds chapter 1, chapter two, & a notes folder labeled ‘I don’t understand these Parisians’, quoting Gigi. 

chapter 1 ends like:

“You’re angry,” Art observed. Only as he said it did she realize she truly was, this time, furious with him. Long-simmering, it’d be at the bubbling point any second. “You think you’re mad now, Lu, wait till you see the dead man in the trunk.”

 His delivery was so deadpan that Lu felt a grin sneak up on her, if something of a teeth-bared one.

Even as his expression remained sober, even as he turned around to pop the trunk, Lu was sure he was kidding until she saw the body.

chapter 2 starts like:

Lu had once murdered a man and gotten away with it. The body in the trunk had wrinkled, papery skin and a shock of white hair; it took her a second to recognize lean muscle and dark roots, to place the traces of addiction and hair dye rather than age. The body looked nothing like Hale, but she thought of him anyways. Dead men always made her think of Hale.  

(Hale happens to be the guy who named his ship Astral Weeks.)

I usually have in mind more of a plot arc than I do with this one. It’s a mystery! We’ll find out!

[violetwolfraven]

modern day (Like highschool) Spirit animals headcanons?

Mkay let’s see what I can come up with. FYI this is kinda gonna be Meilin-centric because she’s my fav. Also this somehow turned into a drama club AU? But I think it turned out okay???

...

Meilin is a straight A student and is really good in every class but doesn’t have any friends because tbh she’s kinda a bitch.

And she’s okay with that I mean who needs friends right?

But her dad thinks she does so when she hits high school he tells her she has to join one club.

She’s not happy about that but she does.

She figures she heard the theatre club’s production of Mary Poppins was good, not that she bothered to go see it, but she decides to try that out because acting is easy right?

Wrong. Meilin finds that theatre is not as easy as she though it’d be and even just the choreography calls are hard.

Then on top of that there’s her fellow freshmen and Conor seems okay but Abeke is competition for female leads and Rollan is just plain annoying. Nobody else really even talks to her.

Rollan hates Meilin because she seems like just some rich entitled bitch who doesn’t even care about theatre which he finds super annoying because Rollan loves acting more than anything.

Even before the 4 of them make friends with each other, they end up friends with a college kid named Tarik because Tarik is really nice and is the club advisor but the members refer to him as Theatre Dad.

Tarik and his girlfriend Lishay starred in everything when they were younger but now they just mentor everyone else.

Also they run a website that partners young actors with professionals for anonymous mentoring. The kids get to ask questions and the pros get to give advice to without anyone getting too excited because the kids don’t know who their pro is and the pro doesn’t know anything about the kid beyond their audition tapes. Not everyone gets picked but a lot of people do. The 4 freshmen get signed up as soon as possible.

Conor gets picked first by someone who uses a wolf as a profile pic. He doesn’t know this, but it is basically that universe’s equivalent of like Chris Evans.

Abeke gets picked second by like Lupita Nyong’o, who uses a leopard profile pic.

Meilin gets picked by someone like Lucy Liu with a panda profile pic.

Much to his annoyance, Rollan is the last to get picked but he does eventually, by a less-known actress. (In my mind she’s like Mizuo Peck {the lady that played Sacajawea in natm})

Basically these actors advise them throughout the AU but moving on.

The next musical is Into the Woods.

Many of the older kids don’t have the advantage of mentoring so all 4 get cast in main roles.

Conor is Cinderella’s Prince.

Abeke is the Witch.

Rollan is the Baker.

And Meilin, much to her annoyance, is the Baker’s Wife.

Also Maya is a year older but she’s short so she plays Little Red.

But basically they all run into a little dilemma here because Rollan and Meilin really want these roles but they also fucking hate each other and while they can get through the scenes where they argue fine they can’t act like a couple for more than 5 minutes to save their lives.

Tarik is the director so he puts them in a room and tells them to figure it out or he’s going to have to move them to different roles.

And Rollan does not want to be Jack for some reason. Maybe because that insinuates that he’s small and dammit it’s not his fault he hasn’t gotten his big growth spurt yet.

Meilin doesn’t want to switch either so they argue talk and eventually work out their differences.

Rollan finds out that Meilin is guarded because she doesn’t have any friends. That she’s never had any friends.

Meilin finds out that Rollan thinks she doesn’t care and he’s defensive because he’s an orphan and theatre is all he’s got.

And maybe they’re not exactly friends after that but they definitely aren’t enemies anymore.

Tarik doesn’t ask what they talked about but he knows that their character dynamic is a million times better so he doesn’t really care.

But Abeke is curious and she drags Conor into it when she tries to investigate but it is Conor who comes to the (wrong) inevitable conclusion which is...

Meilin and Rollan had one decent conversation and now have crushes on each other.

So now Abeke and Conor are trying to get them together, when in reality, Rollan doesn’t have a crush on Meilin (yet) and Meilin is just learning to think of him as a friend.

But besides that, there is a sinister plot going on.

2 weeks before opening night, Maya is caught on the edge of an explosion because someone planted a bomb in her car. She’s alive but she definitely can’t perform so a girl named Drina gets the role. Oddly, she doesn’t seem to feel any sympathy over what happened to Maya.

The police don’t want to scare the kids so they don’t tell them but of course they all find out why Maya’s car blew up.

Meilin starts getting a little paranoid, knowing whoever it was will likely come after other main actors, too.

Sure enough, 3 days later, Finn, the guy who plays the narrator, gets a set dropped on him and is lucky to be alive. His understudy, Zerif, takes his part.

Over a series of ‘accidents’ that badly hurt a lot of actors, most of the remaining ones quit, leaving their understudies in their place. The 4 freshmen kind of close ranks, figuring they can’t trust anyone but each other.

Abeke drops her guard when Shane, the guy who plays Jack and the only other actor who hasn’t gotten off the cast one way or another approaches her and asks if he can stick around their group.

When Abeke asks her friends, Conor is willing to try to trust him, but Meilin and Rollan are pretty sure there’s something... off about him.

She should’ve just ask, but being a dramatic little shit, Meilin breaks into Tarik’s office and finds that Shane wasn’t going to be Jack. The guy who was originally picked was in a car crash before the cast list was even released.

Unfortunately, Meilin is caught in there, making everyone think she’s the one who’s been masterminding the attacks to get people who pay her on the cast. It does not help that one of Shane’s friends plants cash in her locker.

Rollan, Abeke, Conor, and Tarik are the only ones who believe she didn’t do it besides her own father, but none of them can prove it was actually Shane, who Abeke is feeling hella betrayed by.

Also it’s like 2 days to opening night and most of the original cast is incapacitated and Meilin is very possibly going to juvie and if she doesn’t get out Rollan is going to have to act alongside this basic bitch called Ana who he hates.

As a last ditch effort because he has faith in his kids Tarik tells the cops he did it and framed Meilin and he feels guilty for that but he was behind the attacks.

Of course nobody from the school believes it but it’s good enough for the cops and Tarik gets fired and Meilin gets her role back.

But at this point the 4 freshmen want their roles just a bit less than they want revenge.

So at like 4 hours to curtain Meilin confronts Shane because she knows he framed her and figures he knows she can’t prove it.

Little does Shane know Meilin has a recording device on her and she’s recorded his entire confession.

She goes back to the others with all the evidence they need to send Shane packing. Abeke is about to take it to a teacher when Meilin is like:

“Wait. We’re not going to reveal this just yet. Rollan is going to have it in his pocket the entire show and he’s going to play it in a microphone for the whole crowd to hear after finale.”

Rollan is s h o o k.

Like he met her like... a few months ago and she’s trusting him with her revenge and she’s like an evil genius?

He gets overwhelmed and kisses her.

*gasp!* Rollan apologizes but Meilin... doesn’t mind.

Fast forward they do the show without a hitch and the 4 of them are great and Abeke pulls off her quick change from an old lady to a beautiful witch flawlessly.

Conor and Meilin agree never to speak of the Any Moment scene.

When Meilin dies and her ghost is singing to Rollan he actually like... sheds a few tears??? Because the two of them are hella good and Rollan forgot she’s not actually dead.

Then they get revenge on Shane, who goes to jail and gets what he deserves.

So do all his friends.

So happily ever after.

[wits-writing]

Ultraman Z Ep. 18: “Rechallenge from the Year 2020” (TV Review)

(Original Airdate: October 24, 2020, Director: Takanori Tsujimoto, Writer: Jun Tsugita)

When the show that kicked off the Ultra Series, the 1966 black-and-white sci-fi anthology Ultra Q, has an episode literally called “Challenge from the Year 2020”, it’d be ridiculous not to pay it tribute in the 2020 produced season of the show.

A fight between STORAGE and the monster Pagos gets interrupted as the monster mysteriously vanishes, the team is lead down a path of human disappearances that follow a similar pattern. All these events are connected by the appearance of a woman named Kaori whom Haruki met while investigating the initial disappearances. We soon learn that she’s a victim of a plot by the alien Kemur from fifty-four years ago, her body possessed by a member of that species. Leading to a tense situation dealing with whether Haruki can stop Kemur without hurting Kaori.

[Full Review Under the Cut]

I’ve gone on a lot about Ultraman Z as an action-centric show in these reviews. Even when it’s slowed down to be thoughtful and character-focused, it’s done in service of or as consequence to that action, like Haruki’s crisis of conscience about killing monsters. A focused move away from that in service of the Ultra Q tribute at the core of this episode starts as soon as the monster Pagos disappears before the theme song plays. Like the show itself is saying “we aren’t focused on fighting giant monsters this week” to get the audience adjusted for how the rest will play out. Even when Kemur grows to giant size later in the episode and Zett fights him on that scale, it’s not about the action but the dilemma Haruki finds himself in to save Kaori. Anyone who’s been following these reviews knows I’m all in favor of a focus on action if that’s what a show is going for. However, a change of pace like this can be engaging and keep a singular tone from becoming monotonous.

A lot of the style this episode is more subdued than usual. Background music takes either a more lowkey form or is absent entirely for much of the runtime. I caught myself noticing a lot more ambient noise in the sound design of the episode, including rain falling on Kaori’s umbrella and the sound of stomping feet as Haruki and Yoko are investigating the disappearances. One piece of sound work that stood out especially was the diegetic music from the Ferris wheel during the fight at the end as an unnerving extra touch. The visuals follow suit as there’s less dynamic moving camera work or composited effects shots and more lowkey but highly effective shot choices. Not to say effects are totally lacking from this episode, like a shot during the fight at the end from the perspective of a STORAGE camera that gets blasted by Kemur’s liquid and gets teleported away, but even that’s a less bombastic example than the norm for this show.

There’s not much I can say without having seen the Ultra Q episode this is follows up on about how they compare, note any specific callbacks, or if these tonal touches are good at invoking that anthology series. I saw a YouTube premiere set up for it on the official Ultraman channel the same day this episode went up, but any links to it I’ve found since are region-locked in the United States at time of writing. I would’ve loved to go more in-depth about that the way I did about the original Ultraman when Bullton showed up a few episodes ago, but I can’t right now. Though this episode does make me more excited for when I do eventually dive into that classic series.

What I can talk about is how well the main thrust of the story is handled with Haruki trying to save Kaori from possession by Kemur. This is probably one of the strongest episodes for him as a character in the show, focusing in on his empathy towards Kaori’s plight. From when he first meets her by the old Ferris wheel to discovering her presence at all the disappearances in the city to learning about Kemur, he wants to understand and help her. When he gets the opportunity to cut her off from Kemur so she can have her life back, it’s a welcome relief at the conflict presented. Though there is a bit of a problem in Kaori’s part of this. She lacks any internal sense of her identity beyond being a victim of Kemur. We know she was possessed fifty-four years ago by the alien as part of his species plot to prolong their lives and that after she got back some control of her body, she tried to kill herself only for Kemur to stop her. I’d say “well, there’s only so much you can do with a side character in a one-off plot”, but I’ve seen other Ultra series do great things with one-off characters. Making the hollowness of Kaori’s character harder to look past. Though I did love the note they gave her to end the episode on, claiming amnesia of everything but meeting Haruki this episode, only to look towards him and say “Thank you, Ultraman” as he walks away and can’t hear her.

Even with my limited frame of reference for Ultra Q and the weakness in the story I brought up, “Rechallenge from the Year 2020” makes a strong notable episode of Ultraman Z. The dedication to making this have a unique feel in the production is felt throughout and I enjoyed what it did with Haruki as a character.

Next time, we have another tribute to look forward to as a classic hero makes his return.

If you like what you’ve read here, please like/reblog or share elsewhere online, follow me on Twitter (@WC_WIT), and consider throwing some support my way at either Ko-Fi.com or Patreon.com at the extension “/witswriting”

[smores100]

Yes, 100% agree with everything you said and your tags in that post about wtfock being like a group project patched together by 10 people trying to make it unique but still retain elements of the original. At this point I’m honestly just feel like I’m along for the ride and it’s not necessarily a good one but I’m here for it lmao. The two willems’ chemistry is holding the whole thing together for me. The cast is doing a great job. It’s just the writing that’s so frustrating and inconsistent.

It’s also frustrating because I feel like some of their ideas were good and had potential — I like the setting of the trip they went on, I love the whole art school thing, and I loved Noor so much and was really hoping they’d have Robbe open up to her. The flat share dynamic is so fucking cute, and I thought the buildup to the pool scene was also beautiful. It just makes me sad that they’ve gone so wrong with the drama. Idk why they packed so much shit in in such little time :( disappointing

exactly! i pretty much agree with all of this. the situation is so frustrating bc it’s not all 100% bad ideas, it would’ve been much easier to say it sucks and dismiss it completely if it was. but that’s not the case, there was some real potential here!

there have been some good ideas executed well - the flastshare ‘found family’ dynamic, for example, is the highlight of the season imo; the willems are believable to me as teens, their (great!) chemistry is what made the robbe/sander relationship seem less underdeveloped than it was, and when they’re allowed to be cute and loving with each other, they SHINE (this latest clip, for example). 

there have also been some good ideas executed badly tho - the week at the beach??? i will never understand why they waited TWO WHOLE EPS to introduce sander, the character who’s basically the catalyst for s3′s storyline - it made the first two eps feel repetitive and slow, it messed up the pacing of the whole first half of the season (first slow, then fast af when packing so much sander content all at once), it cut out one of the best things about the evak development (the slow burn! isak seeing him for the first time, the nerves when he talks to him a few days later, seeing him around school and the lowkey stalking him trying to find out everything about him and becoming even more enamoured, *more* nerves when he asks him over to his place and they spend all afternoon together getting to know each other….ahhh, lovely), and it made their relationship feel underdeveloped and rushed (an almost kiss after 6 days of knowing each other in which they interacted twice, kissing naked in a pool after a week and a half…..etc etc. realistic? maybe. good storytelling? less so). which brings me back to the week at the beach - they took away two weeks of sander, ok, at least make up for it by featuring him A LOT during that week at the beach??? use that week to focus on robbe and sander making eyes at each other, getting to know each other, talking, hanging out, listening to music….unlike all the other evaks they were on vacation TOGETHER, they were in the SAME PLACE together, it was such a ROMANTIC setting, the opportunity was RIGHT THERE. but instead that whole week was sander/britt and robbe/noor nonstop, with a bit of sad pining on top. which speaking of noor!!! yeah, the way she was introduced seemed like she could be one of the better emmas, i’ve seen people say they loved how they built up their relationship and the development they got, and like…..what a waste that ended up being?? if he’d ended up coming out to her and they’d become friends (since his own friends were being blah), then ok, i get giving them all this focus. but that didn’t happen. she ended up being like every other emma, confronting him about being gay and telling him to get out of the closet. so why did we spend so much time on her and robbe??? was it really that important to show them making out numerous times, even trying to go all the way twice….?? being gay and fighting your true self is sad, we get it, we got it watching og s3 without seeing isak force himself to make out with emma numerous times (and without lashing out at even accusing him of taking advantage of him and calling him a slur….and without watching him and even get gay bashed….and without one of his friends being homophobic to him when he came out….).

……i’m rambling. but basically, this could’ve been a good season, if only the writing was (much) better; if the writers concentrated and followed up on their original additions to the season instead of trying to stay with og’s timeline and follow its plot; and if the writers cared more about telling a good, hopeful story than they did about doubling down on the drama. s3 had enough drama without all this extra stuff, it didn’t need more! there needs to be a good balance b/w angst and fluff, and wtfock just didn’t have that this season. and again, it’s not *all* bad, and i do get why so many people are going gaga over robbe/sander - they’re pretty together, they have great chemistry and ust, and they’re super cute and fluffy with each other! but the writing, man…..i just can’t ignore it? if this were any other show, i probably could, lord knows i’ve watched (and still do tbh) shitty shows just for that one cute couple i loved and believed deserved the best. but it’s not just any other show, it’s skam, and og s3 was SO MUCH MORE than just a love story b/w two guys. there were so many layers, so much depth and symbolism and big themes throughout the season, the cause and effect and how everything that happened was important and everything was connected and had a big effect on isak’s story (e.g. the isak and sana friendship - apparently some people think robbe’s and yasmina’s friendship is better bc it wasn’t based on the weed plot? which is….listen, they’re hella sweet together and it’d have been nice to have seen her more this season, but *none* of the remakes have managed to fully recreate this friendship, bc *all* of them have failed to understand what was so great about it - i could write an essay on this, honestly). ANYWAY, my point is - i get why people are loving robbe/sander, they’re cute and sweet. but the writing hasn’t done them any favors (in fact it’s done more wrong by them than right and it’s really the willems holding all of this together, so good job boys!), and even if it’s all perfection from now until the end, it just feels like too little too late for me, like, the damage has already been done. i’m keeping up with it bc i’m curious to see how it ends, but it’s not what i was expecting and i’m disappointed. and to each their own ofc, but i can’t say i’m not baffled when i see people saying they like robbe/sander better than evak or how this season is much better than og s3. i just don’t see it??? especially the latter (the former is more of a personal preference, i suppose? but like i said, the writing for evak >>>>> the writing for them, so), which is to me one of the best seasons of tv EVER. it’s literally flawless. there’s not a single thing i would change about it (force me and i might change a couple of things, but nothing *too* major). but again, to each their own! 🤷‍♀️ just don’t disrespect the og when praising your favorite remake, and i’m good, idc. it’s when i see people disrespecting/belittling/diminishing etc etc og that i get into Fighting Mode, otherwise agree to disagree!

[quarterfromcanon]

27-29 for the get to know my favorites game

Hello, lovely! Thank you for these. :) Trios turned out to be a surprising challenge (I apparently have more favorite groups of four than three), but I’m pretty happy with the ones I remembered after giving it some thought. The final picks are under the cut! <3

Top 5 BROTPs

1. Paula Proctor & Rebecca Bunch (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) - Naturally, this was the immediate choice that sprang to mind. It’s the first relationship on the show I really fell in love with, and it’s the one friendship in the series that consistently tugs on my heartstrings. It’s flawed, complicated, and messy but the genuine connection underneath it all is strong enough that I’m hopeful they can work through their problems. I would’ve preferred to see more emphasis on that effort in the fourth season (and a lot more work on Rebecca’s friendships with Heather and Valencia as well), but I want to believe things improved between them after the finale. 

2. Steve Harrington & Robin Buckley (Stranger Things) - The general public opinion of Steve Harrington has been on such a journey since Season 1, bringing him now to a status of common fan favorite. As such, I think a delicate balance needed to be struck in finding a suitable match to team up with him on adventures. This person needed to:

A) Have good chemistry in their interactions with Steve

B) Bring a new dynamic to the table that he didn’t already have with an existing connection 

and most importantly 

C) Be a unique and engaging character that the audience would care about individually, so they didn’t get lost in simply being an offshoot of Steve’s story. They couldn’t be relegated to perpetual sidekick with little else to define them.

As far as I’m concerned, Robin Buckley fits the bill on every account. She’s artistic, resilient, loyal, and - especially endearing to me - a movie buff. She has a quick wit, a sharp mind, and a big heart. Being friends with Robin helps Steve take the specter of his high school self less seriously so he can put it behind him, and she helps him more fully embrace the person he’s becoming in the wake of that lost status. Having Steve for a friend helps Robin resolve some lingering emotional scars from school as well. It gives her an opportunity to share her authentic self with a peer and - to her relief and ours - find acceptance after revealing a pretty important secret. I can’t wait to watch the two of them be adorably nerdy and goofy bros at Family Video in Season 4, presumably with some daring fights against dark forces when they’re off the clock. Does saying I hope Kali comes to Hawkins somehow and bonds with one or both of them mean I can speak that into existence? I’m doing that now. It’s worth a try. If it happens in some capacity when the time comes, know that I will throw a One Blogger Party of epic proportions. 

3. Wynonna Earp & Nicole Haught (Wynonna Earp) - I had to use this specific screencap because it perfectly encapsulates the chaotic energy that makes me loves these two together so much. Their separate approaches to their shared work environment are at pretty much polar opposite ends of the spectrum, but they make a pretty solid team when they play to each other’s strengths and communicate. They also both love Waverly most of all, so it feels like they were bound to work out their differences eventually since neither would want to make her feel torn between her sister and her girlfriend. The hijinks they get up to in each other’s company are just top shelf. I look forward to at least a little bit of fun like that from every season. If I wind up having a lasting partner later on down the road, it’d be cool if their personality balanced well with my sister’s on this level. I’d also be really happy if I ultimately gelled with her person in a way that sounded unlikely at first but worked. Fingers crossed for both outcomes, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

4. Emily Thorne [Amanda Clarke] & Nolan Ross (Revenge) - I have two things to quickly clarify for those who are unfamiliar with this show.

#1 She has two listed names because she was born Amanda Clarke but goes by Emily Thorne for most of the series to hide her true identity. 

#2 Despite the impression this picture may give, Nolan is not marrying Emily; he is simply walking her down the aisle. 

These two are there for each other through so much - the looming threat of discovery, jail time, capture, near death experiences, heartbreak, the passing of loved ones, etc. - and they make it to the other side with a deep bond the likes of which they’ll never experience with another person. It is at times heavily one-sided because of how much drama Emily deliberately dives into, but it’s something that she tries to make up for during her more self-aware and less self-involved times. There’s genuine love and mutual respect there by the finale and it’s really gratifying to witness the journey they’ve taken together. 

[~Slightly spoiler-y closing statement after these brackets~] I was pretty sure I knew where the show was going with romantic ships by the end. I knew for certain it wasn’t my personal OTP for her because they’d already killed that person off quite some time ago. There was a part of me that could’ve found some contentment in leaving the story with these two as a couple. After all, one of my favorite ship dynamics is Reluctant Acquaintances to Best Friends to Lovers, but it was not to be. That being said, the platonic friendship they shared was a big part of the heart of the show and I cherish it for that. Nolan was a rare exception for Emily, a genuine bond formed in the years when she was tried to operate like her heart was made of stone. I also think working with Emily gave Nolan a sense of purpose and let him flourish in his area of expertise. I’m not sure how either of them would feel about the musical reference but, to slightly paraphrase from Wicked: because they knew each other, they have been changed for good.

5. Penelope Stamp & Bang Bang (The Brothers Bloom) - I have seen Rachel Weisz and Rinko Kikuchi in more roles since this movie than I had prior to watching it for the first time so, if anything, my fangirling over this friendship has gotten worse rather than more manageable. x) This post classified the film under the subgenre whimsical noir. It turns out that’s a style I instantly adore every time I stumble upon it. One of the titular brothers, Stephen, lives so deeply immersed in the variations of the world he writes for their heists that even those closest to him are essentially characters he can interact with on a daily basis. His feelings for them as people can get very muddled with his feelings for them as interesting OCs to move through narratives. A big trouble with this is that his living archetypes can often get reduced to clichés. He’s not always mindful of their nuances or allowing for the full range of their autonomy. Penelope is selected by Stephen to serve as the “manic pixie dream girl” who will be his brother Bloom’s forever love and Bang Bang is essentially presented as a “dragon lady” stereotype. I haven’t done a rewatch in years so I may be giving the movie too much credit here, but I remember this choice feeling at least semi-deliberate. It could be interpreted as a way to illustrate how Stephen warps real life to fit his vision. At least, I can definitely remember scenes that felt like they debunked the one-note assessments of these two. What I genuinely love, though, are the little moments when Penelope and Bang Bang are able to just spend time together with little to no interference from Stephen or Bloom. They share their hobbies and teach each other new skills. It feels like they truly perceive one another as whole human beings on a level that neither guy is capable of doing since they’re both so immersed in the drama of the plot. When the women are with each other, they get to be more than an extension of the men who maneuver them; they get to be themselves. Penelope is the only one Bang Bang clearly wants to maintain contact with once the heist is finished. I think that says a lot. Honestly, this is another BROTP that could slide to OTP. If someone wrote fic of them completely severing ties with the brothers and going off on their own - romantically or platonically - I wouldn’t be upset at all. 

Top 5 Trios

1. Luke, Leia, & Han (Star Wars Episodes IV - VI) - Oh dear, I’m overwhelmed just looking at a picture of them together. Star Wars has been a part of my life since childhood. Getting to watch the original trilogy felt like a rite of passage (when I was really little, Mom used to find things for us to do outside the room while Dad watched because she was afraid some of it might scare me). Princess Leia resounded with me on a level that almost no other fictional royalty has ever quite matched. Han’s wardrobe is still some serious #aestheticgoals and I would 100% wear replicas of his jackets and vests if I had them. I also remember thinking that Luke’s new look in Return of the Jedi was SO COOL with the all-black wardrobe and green lightsaber. Wow, imagine that, an edgy costume change that shared vibes with the common Disney villain color palette called to me as a baby fan of antagonists and antiheroes! Who ever could have foreseen that sudden spike in appreciation? :P Anyway, one of my lingering sorrows about the more recent trilogy is that we never got to see all three of them as aged adults in each other’s company. I still wanted our new cast to get their time to shine, of course, but I do lament the absence of at least one little trio reunion.

2. Luna, Neville, & Ginny (Harry Potter series) - The Silver Trio, pictured here with the first set of three that comes to mind when thinking about the books and movies. I do still love Harry, Ron, and Hermione, but I’ve found a growing appreciation for this other team-up over the years. They’ve been through a lot too, even if they are not always present where the main action is. Bullying, loss of parents, manipulation of the mind and body, abuse at the hands of authority figures - they’re all left with internal (and probably external) scars to bear. There’s also something to be said for how strong they all were in the school year set during Deathly Hallows, when the Golden Trio wasn’t around to inspire and unite those who wanted to stand up to ever-increasing tyranny. It can be easy, unfortunately, for them to get written off based on the oversimplified stereotypes that have gotten associated with them. People remember Luna as being weird and spacey, Neville as awkward and hapless, and Ginny as bland and lovestruck. They’re all far more nuanced than that, and they accomplish great things while fighting for and beside their friends. I’m planning on doing a re-read of the books at some point, and I really look forward to revisiting these brave kids.

3. Irma, Marion, & Miranda (Picnic at Hanging Rock) - Ah, yes, my very recently discovered darlings. I have many thoughts about them all. I’ll try to keep this as condensed as I can while still making sense. Some spoilers will follow, although those won’t answer every question the story poses. There are audience members who ship the above characters as a throuple, which I totally get, but for me it’s like soulmates of a different kind. These three have met at a point in their lives when they all burn with compatible intensity. They long for the same dream version of youth, for a way to begin life free from the confines of a world that won’t accept all their hearts contain. While the people that surround them may not be willing to bend the rules, nature itself appears to show them mercy. How often do we see a story of girls who just... love other women so much that a sacred location goes, “Y’know what? I’m gonna help you escape your restrictive society. Permanently.” This miniseries definitely depicts the setting as being involved in messing with the investigation, as a mystical place that befuddles unwanted intruders. I love the way these three fortify each other in times of pain and fear, and there’s something deeply moving about how standing side-by-side helps them defy the odds.

4. Sarah, Alison, & Cosima (Orphan Black) - Okay so, technically, when I picture our core team in this show, the net is a little wider. My mind tends to also include Felix, Mrs. S., Kira, Helena, Donnie, Delphine, and Scott. However, I think you could kinda argue that those characters have a stronger connection to one of the above three than they do to the other two. Thus, this ends up being the central triangle. They’re all such solid performances and the fact they’re all played by the same person is incredibly impressive (not to mention the, like, twelve other clones Tatiana brings to life throughout the series). Watching them go from tense strangers to sestras was wonderful. I’m glad they had each other through the increasingly complicated web of lies and schemes they had to unravel and survive. 

5. Galavant, Sid, & Isabella (Galavant) - Remember how James Marsden was in Enchanted? If you dialed down the deliberately cartoonish quality of that performance and allowed for more not-so-G-rated humor, I feel like you’d have a general sense of what Galavant is like as a character. Sid is his squire and Isabella is a princess whose mission happens to combine with Galavant’s, albeit fueled by different driving motivations. They find themselves involved in a lot of shenanigans because of Galavant - even in his own universe, he’s into the whole dashing knight thing more than is strictly necessary - but they make a fun little team to follow through the world of this musical television series. I’ve gotten fuzzy on the details since I watched it air live four years ago, but I remember the series being enough of a summer feel-good time that I’d be game to revisit the show again someday.

Top 5 Family Relationships

1. Stevie Budd & The Roses (Schitt’s Creek) - The whole fish-out-of-water setup for this series was already pretty fun in and of itself, especially given how outlandish their lifestyles evidently were before the show begins. The thing that makes it special, though, is how the absence of all their expensive distractions finally helps them prioritize being a family. The Roses do a lot of work to reconcile who they were with who they find themselves becoming in the present. It’s sweet to see them collectively conclude that growing closer to each other is one of the few things they do not regret in the slightest. They also silently agree to adopt Stevie along the way and, boy, does that give me a lot of Big Feelings, particularly in the later seasons.

2. River Song & The Ponds (Doctor Who) - I think it’s been like seven years or so, give or take, since I watched Doctor Who with any regularity. These three have resurfaced in my mind many times since then. They all love with such fierce and unwavering devotion, spanning lifetimes. It’s fascinating - and often heartbreaking - to learn about the things they’ve experienced and endured. Oh gosh, and once the show reveals how River’s story overlaps with theirs, and you pay attention to how she looks at them, IT HURTS but it’s so engaging to watch. The emotions are all flooding back just remembering them now. Argh, what great characters... </3

3. The Tico Sisters (Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi) - Rose appears in two installments of the third trilogy, but this is the episode that has both Tico daughters. We never get to see them interact onscreen in the film, but I still feel the bond between these sisters so intensely. I found out later that Kelly was present for the filming of Paige’s death scene (which happens so early in the movie that it doesn’t feel like a big spoiler - please forgive me if it is). I’m glad that was something they decided to do behind-the-scenes, because it definitely informs Rose’s grief. She’s sitting in the dark, picturing her big sister’s final moments with such horribly vivid detail that it feels like she was there, and yet she can’t do anything to change how it ends. The shape of the sisters’ necklaces immediately establishes that they were a unit even when acting independently, that they felt like two halves of a whole - all they had left of their family. Now there is only one, and that fact is a weight around Rose’s neck both figuratively and literally. It serves as a visual reminder of how she carries Paige’s absence always, trying to discover and embrace who she is on her own while still honoring the memory of a relative she loved so deeply. I think she reaches the end of Episode VIII feeling like she’s someone of whom her sister would be quite proud. I’m very proud of her, too. 

4. The Tyler Siblings (Wonderfalls) - Jaye is comically different than the rest of her family, and the show establishes that right out the gate when we learn that she’s the only one whose name doesn’t rhyme with the rest (left to right, the others are Karen, Sharon, Darrin, and Aaron, respectively). Her relationships with her parents could certainly lead me off on some analytical tangents but, predictably, it’s the sibling stuff that interests me more. I think it could be said that all three do more living inside their heads than they do out in the world, and that they’ve all grown up to be borderline loners (Ironically Jaye, who is considered the most troubled, is the only one I remember being shown to have formed and maintained a friendship). Aaron’s a very philosophical and analytical person, so you get the sense he talks to himself more than to others, although he still manages to resurface from those deep contemplations so he can goad and tease his sisters from time to time. Sharon is high-strung, competitive, and brings that “disaster lesbian” energy to basically every social interaction she has. Jaye’s standoffishness seems to stem from both the difficulty of fitting in with people and the fear that connections will fall apart once they manage to form at all. They’re all just messes trying to make the best out of the situations they face, and I appreciate that. I also enjoy how prominently the Jaye and Sharon sister bond features throughout the show’s only season. It starts out on pretty rocky ground, but they grow a lot in regard to how willing they are to communicate and express their love for one another. 

5. The Brothers Proctor (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) - The family dynamics in their house are in need of some serious work, without a doubt. I’m just really touched by how close these two have become without Paula’s notice. It’s possible they always were, in that we-fight-but-we-care way that siblings can often be, but the supportive side of that really moves to the forefront as they get older in the series and it warms my heart. There’s such a glaring difference between The Household As Paula Views It and Things That Are Happening While She’s Not Paying Attention. I can’t help using fic as a way to explore that. I happily find excuses for her sons to make pop-in appearances, just to check up on them. I'm so pleased that, as of Season 4, they seem to have become fairly well-adjusted in spite of everything. Oh, and I am still not over the revelation that they attend renaissance festivals together, in character, for fun. What precious cuties who would no doubt dislike me referring to them as such! Paula, please give them an extra hug from me! 

[damnprecious]

1, 6, 13, 14, 29, 37, 38, 44, 50 - sorry about the number of questions, there were too many interesting questions to choose from x)

Thank ya!! There were many very good questions in the list ^^ This ended up pretty long so gonna hide it under a read-more

1: What book did you last finish? When was that? Return of the Kings as an audio book a couple of weeks ago, and so many fics since then, all the fics. Pretty sure the traditional book I most recently read was a reread of the Heroes of Olympus series by Rick Riordan some couple of months ago. Except for Lost Hero, I wasn’t feeling that one I needed some good ol’ Percy in my life

6: Which book was the last one you really, really loved? I answered this here but I’m going to give another answer that is the Invisible Library series by Genevieve Cogman, although I’m a few books behind at the moment. I love the concept of a library agent traveling between parallel worlds to get a rare, parallel version of a book that has a slightly different plot. And it has fey AND dragons. It does have some like relationship’y things I don’t really care for but the world is worth it so far. 

13: Name a book with a really bad movie/tv adaption The Hobbit. It didn’t need to be three films!!! The first one was still Good!!! The last two just slid down a slippery slope and crashed and burned. And just when I thought they couldn’t get any worse the extended cut of the last one still somehow managed to make it worse.

14: Name a book where the movie/tv adaption actually was better than the original  I’m not going to go as far as claim it is Better, because it isn’t, but it’s Very Good and might just be the favorite movie adaptation of any book that I’ve seen, and that goes for the Lord of the Rings. The choices of what’s been included in the movie and the changes make sense by the most part and ugh I just love it so much it’s so good. Like I do have some beef with how certain plot lines were done but as a whole the movies are very good. 

29: How do you sort your shelves? (i.e. by color, author, title etc.) By author, and the books I have both in Finnish and English I also sort by language so that the Finnish set is together and English together. And there’s also some form of a thematic sorting going on so that like fantasy books are in one end and then the dystopian ones and whatever kinda go around the same topic fit together. At the moment my space is really limited so the thematic arrangement has been put aside by ‘oh god these need to go somewhere’ a bit but once I have more room I’ll return to that style, it’s much easier to find shit that way. 

37: How many books are actually in your bookshelf/shelves right now? If my math was correct, 199 books and 66 mangas, which I believe count. I might have two more tucked away in my dresser but it’d be too much effort to dig through it to make sure, I can’t remember if I’ve gotten rid of them or kept them. One of the books is also my brother’s copy of the Lord of the Rings that I borrowed once upon a time that hasn’t been returned yet so it’s technically on my shelf but it’s not actually mine. 

38: What language do you (most often) read in? That’d be english

44: Do you like to listen to music when you read? Depends on the book and also the style of music. I generally like to listen to instrumental music while reading because it’s less distracting but gotta fill that silence. So like random ambiance music type things are often my go-to reading music. If I do end up listening to non-instrumental stuff I usually try to stick to a language in which I’m not reading in and songs I’m really familiar with and don’t really pay that much attention to anymore, so it’s most often English book with Yö or Juha Tapio playing in the background, but with Finnish books it’d likely be music in English. 

50: Why do you love to read? I just love the stories and the characters and the worlds and also books as objects. It’s exciting to go on the adventures with the characters and sometimes notice a bit of foreshadowing and look at them being dumbdumbs with their supportive friends. Nowadays I read more fanfiction than published fiction which I believe is because I already know the characters and seeing what people do with them is just. so good and comforting because they’re your boys and they’re being supportive and loving and ugh reading is just so good. Also, doing it for that Found Family trope. 

*Gollum voice* Ask us

[fuse2dx]

June '20

Trials of Mana

Maybe not the highest profile remake Square-Enix have put out in recent memory, but one that was pretty exciting for me. I played a fan translation of the Super Famicom original some 20 years ago, so while it's not particularly fresh in my head, there's just enough there to enjoy some infrequent little pangs of nostalgia. The move to 3D has made for some welcome changes to to combat - jumping adds a vertical element to combat that wasn't present before, and enemy specials being clearly telegraphed and avoidable puts a little more control in your hands. There's still a good amount of 16 bit jank though - combo timing feels unreliable, the camera's often a pain, there's plenty of questionable hit detection, and you definitely wouldn't want to leave your fate solely in the hands of your party's AI. Willing to put most of this aside, what actually mattered more to me was that it still had the kind of playful, breezy nature, it looks and plays nicely, and that it progresses at a nice clip. Party selection will change the way you fight moment-to-moment, but only provides minor and very brief deviance from the main storyline, most of which is the kind of schlocky cartoon villainy that will have you looking for a skip button before it would illicit any kind of emotional response. But you know what? Overall, I still enjoyed it a lot.

So while it may not be revolutionising the action RPG, what it does show is that Square-Enix is capable of acknowledging their history of previously untranslated works, and that they also now have a pretty good template for getting a B-tier remake of such titles out in a reasonable timeframe. Where do I send my wish list in to, team?

Sayonara Wild Hearts

As a one-liner found on the back of the box, 'A pop album video game' is about as on-the-nose as it gets. The old "it's not for everyone" adage is definitely applicable, and its defiance of traditional video game metrics is not in any way subtle. How sophisticated is the gameplay? Not particularly. How long is it? Not very. But how does it make you feel? Now you're talking. It presents a simple but deeply relatable story of a broken heart, and leads from there with a catchy tune into a fast and colourful onslaught of new ideas, perspectives, and concepts. That is to say: it has the potential to make you feel all kinds of things. 

One especially celebratory note was how well the game is structured to fit into the album structure it boasts about. Stages flow quickly into one another, and while shorter, more compounding numbers are often about introducing new ideas and themes, moving on to the next is a few simple button presses and a brief, well-hidden loading window away. Inevitably there are more standout stages, those that feel like the hit singles; the longer, verse-chorus-verse type joints that grant the space for more fleshed out visual story telling, and that smartly synchronise their percussive hits, soaring vocals and the like to appropriate beats of play. A lot of the gameplay can easily (and cynically) be reduced to "it's an endless runner", but to liken this to a cheap re-skin of a confirmed hit-maker is to wilfully dismiss so much of what it does better and so much beside. You can play it on damn near everything, and for the time it takes, it's well worth doing. 

Twinkle Star Sprites

I've meant to play this countless times before. I've almost certainly passed it by while strolling through arcades, the Saturn version has never been hoovered up into my collection, and the PS2 collection this particular version belongs to - ADK Damashii - is no longer a cheap addition to anyone's library. The digital version of it for PS4 however was however recently on sale at a point that saw me receive change from a fiver. David Dickinson would be proud.

Having now credit-fed my way through the game's brief arcade mode, there's no doubt in my mind that the nuance of its systems are going to be glossed over in this rather ham-fisted appraisal. At least at face value, there's plenty of character and charm to appreciate in its colourful and cutesy style. As a two-player, vertically split-screen title, its a pretty clean break from a lot of a shooter's typical characteristics - rather than 6(ish) stages of hell, its a series of one on one battles - and all the better suited to 2 players for it. As enemy waves come at you, taking them out in chains can generate attacks to the other player; however if these attacks are too small then it's entirely possible they'll be killed off again, and an even bigger attack will come straight back at you. Think of a bit like competitive Tetris, but with shooting rather than puzzling. It's a neat and curious little game, that's likely best experienced properly, with a friend on the other side of the sofa to hurl abuse at. 

Blasphemous

Let's get the lazy-but-effective description out of the way: it's a 2D MetroidVania Souls-like. You've got "that" type of map, definitely-not-bonfires and definitely-not-Estus Flasks. You are encouraged to return to your body upon death, the combat system is very reliant on parries and dodge-rolls, and there's even a dedicated "lore" button to use on every item you pick up. 

While this likely sounds dismissive, it's more about addressing the elephant in the room. To give some context, these are both types of games that I love, and the end product here has done a pretty good job of bringing them together. The exploration is pleasantly open - gatekeeping is typically done less by specific items and abilities, and more by just which areas you're brave enough to poke your head into. It's a little bit of a shame that most of the new abilities have to be switched out for others rather than adding to a core arsenal of moves, but at the same time its base setup gives you plenty of ways to deal with any number of combat scenarios. This is of course best demonstrated by the boss encounters, which are wonderful affairs - big, gruesome, thoughtful variations on approaches to combat, which drop in at a nice pace to keep you from ever getting too cocky. The theming in general is wonderful, and the name is certainly appropriate - there's a lot of deep catholic inspiration in its gorgeous backdrops and environments, but then layered on top are some chilling elements of religious iconography, along with a cast of disturbing devotees and martyrs to sufficiently unsettle you. It's arguably a small intersection of the gaming population that it'll appeal to, but if you're in there, it's a real treat.

Death Come True

The first thing you see upon starting is the game's central character breaking right through the fourth wall to tell you directly not to stream the game or to share anything that might spoil the story. The first rule of Death Come True, and so on. I consider myself fairly well versed in such etiquette, so to then have the screenshot function entirely disabled for the whole game felt a little like being given a slap on the wrists for a crime I had no intention of committing. I don't envy the team trying to market it, that's for sure. 

The reasoning behind this is clear at least - it's a game that is in total service of its plot. Consider a mash-up of a 'Choose your own adventure' book and a series of full-motion videos, and you're mostly there. Unless you were to walk away from the controller or perhaps fall asleep, there seems very little chance that your play time will deviate from the 3 hour estimate - which will certainly put some people off, but is understandable given the production values, and personally, quite welcome in the first place. In terms of replay value, there are branching paths that a single route will obviously skip: as an example of this, in looking up a screenshot to use in lieu of taking my own, I found a promotional image of the central cast, only to not recognise one of them at all. One thing that such a short run-time does ensure though, is that minute-for-minute, there's plenty of action; without wanting to speak about the story itself (rather than in fear of reprise for doing so, I might add), it kicks off with plenty of intrigue, shortly thereafter switching to full-on action, and then strikes a pretty fine balancing act between the two for its run time. It doesn't get quite as deep or as complex as I would've hoped given the team's pedigree, but I do like it, and think it'd actually be a pretty fun title to play with folks who normally don't concern themselves with games. By the same token, it's probably not for the 'hardcore' types looking for something to string out over dozens of hours. 

Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight 

After the generous main course that was Persona 5 Royal, I figured that I'd follow up with dessert. I did however wait until a weekend where I knew my girlfriend would be away, so as not to trigger any unpleasant flashbacks to looped battle themes, and the chirpy, indecipherable voices of Japanese schoolkids that made it so painful to endure as a non-gaming cohabitant.  

Immediately, it's clear that very little has changed since Persona 4's take on the rhythm action genre. The core game, while still functional and fairly enjoyable, hasn't changed a lick. Perhaps the most notable improvement to the package as a whole is in scaling back on a dedicated story mode, and instead just having a series of uninspired but far less time-consuming set of social link scenes that pad things out. The biggest flaw is repeated wholesale though, in that trying to stretch out noteworthy tracks from a single game's playlist into a dedicated music game leads to repetition - and there is a much less prolific gathering of artists involved in remixes this time. I'd be willing to wager that it's a very similar story once again with Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight, but I'm not about to ruin a perfectly good dinner to start with the sweet just to find out, if you'll excuse a second outing of the metaphor. Still, again compare these to Theatrhythm though - where Square-Enix plundered the Final Fantasy series in its entirety, along with spin-offs and other standalone titles to put together a library of music worthy for the one single game. Cobble the tunes from Personas 3-5 together into one game, and you're still coming up very short by comparison.

[popculturebuffet]

Life And Times of Scrooge McDuck Retrospective: The New Laird of Castle McDuck! “And I’ll Remember It Poppa! There’s Always Another Rainbow!”

Hello all you happy people! And welcome back to my look at the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck! And to make up for lost time im’ doing two instalments this month, and with luck and my schedule holding out I plan to finish the main series in September, doubling up again for the last two months to finish this up. 

Background wise there’s honestly not a lot this go round, as it’s less rooted in history and more Don Rosa’s need to settle an annoying flaw with continuity. Man oh man do I relate to that and having read comics for at least half my life, i’ve seen writers do this by the bucketload to fix decisions from other writers. Sometimes for the write reasons and sometimes because EVERYTHING WAS BETTER ON MY EARTH. Don Rosa, like most writers.. has done both. 

Here though it’s for the good and for understandable reasons: Barks had Scrooge’s origin as a poor shoeshine boy from Glasgow.. but also had a rather famous and awesome story, the Old Castle’s Secret, that also gave them a giant ancestral castle. Rosa fixed this by having the McDuck’s having lost it due to a combination of being driven off the land by a fake ghost dog and poor turns of fourtune meaning they coudln’t pay the taxes to live there and were behind on taxes on it, hence the Whiskervilles having taken it over in part one. 

But obviously the Whiskervilles coudln’t KEEP the castle as Scrooge owned it in present day, thus this chapter explains how he got it. It was a stroke of genius plot wise too as it allowed him to open each act in Scotland and using the castle to measure where Scrooge is in life: As a boy dreaming of getting it back, as a young man who while not a success succeeds at this, and as an older hardned man who realizes he simply doesn’t belong here anymore who has to leave his family’s legacy here behind to start a better one in America. 

The only other real story is that a sequence here was based on the film A Matter of Life and Death, and Rosa detailed in his notes his quest to get a copy as the distribution rights here were a nightmare at the time. Thankfully that’s clearly changed as a quick look on Amazon shows both a standard DVD release, mentioned by rosa in the book and a snazzier release by the Criteron Collection are both easily available. He ended up getting a copy from Canada, and while he didn’t get any insight at least got a neat addition to his collection. Admittedly this dosen’t add much to the story, I just thought it was neat. So with all of that settled, join me after the cut as Scrooge tries to buy back his family’s legacy.

And Scrooge has already arrived in Scotland, having reunited with Downy and Matilda, who as a refresher is more responsible and straightlaced here versus the 2017 incarnation.  Part of me DOES wish they hadn’t glossed over the reunion especially since this chapter is the last time we’ll see Scrooge and his Mom together before her utterly heartbreaking passing a few chapters down the road. But I get why we opened here instead: it’s a captivating open, with Scrooge speeding to the castle, his mother and sister trying to stave the rain off and time clearly of the essence. It sucks you in as we don’t know WHY Scrooge was summoned last time, only that it was bad enough he needed to come home, and thus ratchet’s up the tension until we find out shortly. 

It turns out the back taxes on Castle McDuck are up and the castle is being sold., doing so with some glasses, foreshadowing his iconic specs wearing as the snow and brightness of the praries in various seasons mean his eyes are all done fucked up like mine.  The Whiskervilles are naturally not only the prospective buyer but already trying to take the property prematurely, with Fergus and Jake holding the line, because love isn’t always on time. But Hortense is and when the Whiskervilles mock her daddy and uncle, planning to tear down the castle out of spite, her response reminds us why donald is a ball of rage and badassery...

Have I mentioned she’s my favorite part of this story? Because she is. Her response to scrooge being back is also just pure adorable. 

Scrooge does get a big reunion with his dad and uncle, getting a big hug from Fergus, if squshing his cream cheese sandwitch... and yes that’s apparently a real thing. I mean I do love me some cream cheese don’t get me wrong, but it just feels weird to put it on bread as the only thing, but I guess i’m a bit spoiled with crackers and bagels in my day and age or putting it on tosat with salmon and.. saying all of this both makes me very hungry for cream cheese. So I guess i’ts not all bad it’s just weird to me, especially since I don’t think it’d keep all that well unregrigrated but I also don’t know the times that well. Or maybe when your that poor and hungry, it dosen’t matter how good it is and maybe i’m just spoiled by my upper middle class existance. I dunno. The point is i’m going to go get me some cream cheese be back in a minute. Here have some music. 

For all two of you that didn’t clear out, Fergus naturally for the time, turns out to be sexist, insisting Jake get “The Women” home.

Though Rosa gets a great joke out of it by having Jake wonder if he can even reign Hortense in. And I do love Hortense’s character. Whlie i’ts simple, she’s simply an angrier version of her son without the penchant for half-assed schemes, it works and makes her stand out against the more subdued rest of the McDuck family outside of Scrooge. 

Fergus explains HOW it got so bad to Scrooge: While the McDuck ancestors pooled resources to automatically pay the taxes, eventually only having two poor old men who could barely keep their family fed and a slightly less poor pulp fiction writer somewhere in America meant the taxes piled up and the Whiskervilles are within a whisker’s reach of gettng the castle, something mentioned in part 1. 

It also provides a great payoff to the first part of Scrooge’s journey: while the boy bemoans only having gotten the 10,000 dollar check from the mine sale, and that will only just about cover the castle’s taxes, he feels disheratned as it’s ALL he’s accomplished.. but in a nice moment from Fergus he points it WASN’T all for nothing: Thanks to his work they get their home back. His family can move from the cramped confines of Dismal Downs back to their ancestral homeland like they always deserved. While he may of not achieved his goal of being rich yet.. he still achieved his goal of buying the castle back, the very thing that set him on this path in the first place. It’s telling though that it takes a reminder of that, that Scrooge is loosing sight of the very human, for lack of a better term, reasons he set out: while he’s finally built a better life for his family, if just so.. all he can see is that he’s not RICH. The money is starting to cloud his judgement.. and i’tll roll over him entirely before the series is over. 

The Head of the Whiskervilles shows up with the Sheirff.. whose also a Whiskerville lest you thought unfair and crooked policing was a strictly american thing. But Fergus points out their too early.. and Scrooge flashes his check. And when the Head Whiskerville scoffs at a mcduck having money... Scrooge points out he didn’t believe in ghosts either and brags about his awesomeness in the first chapter, revealing what he did and leaving The SHierff pissed and the older whiskerville ready with a plan: he decide......

Sadly not with children’s trading cards but with swords, and gets past the legality issue by simply challenging Scrooge’s pride and angering him into accepting. Argus, the head whiskerville whose name I just got from the comic, reveals his plan to the Shierff: While he’s dueling Scrooge Sheirff can snatch the bank statment.. though why Scrooge didn’t you know, cash it before coming and how an american banks tatment is valid in early 1900′s Scotland...

So the Duel is on.. and like the money he’s made, the Duel is another Marker of how far Scrooge has come and how despite still not having made his fortune yet he’s rich with EXPERINCE. His experince fighting cattle rustlers and pirates means he has the reflexes to easily outfight his opponent.. though him saying he learned how to fight “Injun Style from Buffallo Bill”, i.e. learned how to fight like a native american from a white guy and beat Sitting Bull with it just makes me feel like i’m watching that episode of Saved by the Bell where Zach has to learn not to be racist but then thinks this outfit is acceptable. 

Scrooge also tracks the guy using the tracking skills he learned from the blackfeet which again feel like the picture above , but send Argus running.. only to lure Scrooge into a fight on the castle battlemnt in the pooring rain and disarming him. Luckily the spirit of Sir Quackly gives the lad his sword back and Scrooge wins the fight.. but promptly gets hit by lighting while celebrating Caddyshack style. 

No really Scrooge is.. or close as he got knocked into the water and is now in heaven. Sir Quackly naturally doesn’t want to see the last hope of the Clan McDuck dies and goes to talk to the tribunal of McDucks to sort it out hence the Matter of Life And Death connection. 

The Tribunal is made up of former McDucks.. it turns out Scrooge is here because of Quackly: the lighting was SUPPOSED to hit the tower, distracting Argus, and they prepare to write Scrooge off because their more concerned with golf than the fact that their whole clan’s future is on the line.. which I do not get because unless you are Tiger Woods or the Film Caddyshack, golf usually is the boring garbage water of sports and this is from someone who dosen’t like sports to begin with. I do like the Missing Links of Moorshire though so there’s that. And golf episodes of shows are usually good.. the sport itself is just incredibly boring. And I sat through Mank. I know boring. I know wanting hours of my life back. Golf is the Mank of Sports. 

What we get is a pretty tiresome sequence honestly: Quackly points out the tribuanls faults while their just dicks who only care about golf. Which again, Mank of sports. Or if you prefer the Cloud Atlas of sports but with SLIGHTLY less untetionall racisim and sadly much less Tom Hanks and Hugh Grant. The point is golf sucks and while I ilke the REST of this chapter this bit just dosen’t work for me and was clearly funnier in Rosa’s head, with the assholes not thinking much of Scrooge’s achievements and only liking him when they find out he’ll be a tight wad, the only funny joke in these draggy as hell three pages, not counting the start and finish of the sequence which arnet bad, as they send him back to earth with Quackly mentioning the dime, but not giving out WHY it’s important. That he has to figure out on his own and all that good stuff. 

So Scrooge uses his dime to unscrew the bolts and back at the castle while Argus TRIES to pawn it off as Scrooge being a coward and depart with the bank draft.... 

Damnnnn that’s badass, he gets the bank note back (only knowing because one of his ancestors mentioned it, though with his memory of the dying dream gone he dosen’t know WHY), and has Fergus run into town to pay the taxes tonight before any other shenanigans happen while he keeps the two scheming dogmen captive long enough for Fergus to get too far for them to catch up.  Argus plans to go with plan “Do a murder on Scrooge”.. but fines Scrooge is far from unprotected and not the only badass in his family.. I mean Hortense exists but I mean that ther’es more than two... you know what jut look at the ghost heads. 

So the two run for their lives..... also they forgot you know Hortense exists.. she’d revenge murder all of them and they both know it. 

So with the land safe and the taxes paid so the Family can implicitly move in, we end on a beautiful sunrise as Scrooge prepares to leave soon. Despite all the setbacks and hardship Scrooge is deterimend to still make it and knows he won’t fail forever. When Fergus mentions Gold at the end of a rainbow, Scrooge takes that, and the golden dawn as a sign. WHen Fergus understandably asks if he’s sure he’ll make it this time.. we get a nice nod to Bark’s best and most notable painting “always another rainbow to close us out”

It’s a beauitful and inspiring statment.. no matter what you face.. there’s always a light at the end of it. Always another opportunity, another goal to reach, another hill to climb.. and life to live... and it’s one i’ve taken to heart and always will.. and one that will land Scrooge his fortune yet. 

Final Thoughts: This chapter is alright but like I said the two page sequence in heaven dosen’t really work for me. It’s just not funny enough and really shoudl’ve been trimmed down a page so we could get more character stuff with Scrooge and his family> Otherwise it’s a tightly paced thrilling chapter in Scrooge’s life, showing just how far he’s come and how far he has left to go. The DIsmal Downs chapter serve as a good marker of where Scrooge is and where he’s heading as I mentioned earlier, with this one showing that while he’s not hit his goal yet, he still got his family their true home back, beat his enmeis and is a legend to be. Ther’es always another rainbow.. and he just needs to find it. All in all a decent chapter outside those two pages, and a good setup for the next three glorious chapters. 

Next Month on LIfe and Times: One is Scroogey and the other is FLINTHEART GLOMGOLD, as Scrooge meets his arch enemy and rides a motherfucking lion. And if “rides a motherfucking lion” doesn’t make you come back I do not know why you read this.  Next Time On This BLog: What is that, that Freaky Thing? It’s A naked Mole rat as we return to Kauai this time with Kim Possible and Co as Drakken tries to capture stitch and Jumba wonders if Rufus is one of his or not. 

See you at the next rainbow

[shogikappa]

Rockin’ Pretty (Nintendo DS)

Rockin’ Pretty (Japan: Happy Star Band; Europe: Diva Girls: Making the Music) is a Nintendo DS band/music/rhythm game published in 2009 where you can choose between any of the 4 instruments the band members play and work your way through the different stages which offer new songs that can be unlocked.

I really love this game and there are several unique things about it. I’ve been looking for a game that lets you play as the various instruments in the band and this game delivers that, as well as music that’s instrumental (although the endings hint that the band isn’t actually an instrumental band, though throughout the game the music that’s played is all instrumental). Besides those, it also differs from conventional rhythm games that are in the style of say Guitar Hero, Synthesia (if you could call it a rhythm game), and Bang Dream where, instead of the music coming down as dots/bars down onto the horizontal line where you’re supposed to press buttons, the equivalent of “lines” in this game is spread out at various distances to mimic playing the actual instrument. The gameplay is played entirely using the stylus, and no buttons are used (though you can use the buttons to navigate menus and options, etc.).

The 4 members of the band are Mai (Japanese: Mahiru) on guitar, Kara (Jp: Kanami) on bass guitar, Mio on keyboard, and Reena (Jp: Riko) on drums. Although the US localization changed most of the names, at least their biography and looks remain intact, unlike the previous game, Princess on Ice, which, during localization, had the appearances of all characters completely redesigned for a “Western audience”. Anyway, onto the gameplay.

Just as a note, for each individual song, you can always choose between any of the 4 instruments to play (as well as the characters to dress up/equip instrument skins), so you aren’t stuck with 1 instrument throughout the game and can play the same song using all 4 before you move on to the next song, if you so wish. You get to choose between 3 difficulty levels for each song/instrument. Each song/instrument also has an autoplay mode where you could just watch the song being played.

The Instruments

Mai/Guitar

If you choose Mai, you get the guitar game. You’re allowed to choose your preferred hand so that the game reorientates. Anyway, there are 2 lanes which the music notes come diagonally down on. As you can probably already tell, depending on the colour of the blocks, when you actually pick will be different, so if the block is blue you need to pick when it reaches the blue zone on the lane, and so on. This creates a desirable (IMO) challenge that requires a little bit of calculation when a bunch of blocks of different colours come down in succession, which can happen more frequently when you get to higher stages. To pick, you place your stylus on the double-diamond-shaped thing between the lanes and slide it towards the side the block is on. Getting the precise angle can take minimal practice when you need to tremolo-pick (picking alternatively between the 2 lanes back and forth). The 6 possible zones reflect the 6 strings on an electric guitar, at least in my mind.

Kara/Bass

The bass is similar to the guitar game, except you have a single lane of 4 possible colour zones, reflecting the 4 strings on a bass guitar. Here, the main move, instead of sliding your stylus, is to simply tap the colour zone when the music block hits it, but there are also special blocks that require sliding, which the game calls strumming. Again, same calculation is needed when multiple colours come down.

Mio/Keyboard

Like Synthesia, but, a bit worse. I think this instrument can get quite unfair but good thing this is really just my main complaint of the game (otherwise I do quite love it). Lines come down and well, you tap the keys when the lines hit them. The unfair bit comes from how the lines often, in later levels, cover up lines that are below them (so you actually need to tap the key 2 times in a row but because the top line obscures the bottom line, you miss the 2nd tap). This becomes a game where you probably need some memorization to ace the song, although you don’t need to ace a song to complete it. Sometimes you’ll see multiple lines coming at the different keys simultaneously, which is when you need to slide your stylus across all the keys, similar to playing a glissando sweep on a keyboard.

Reena/Drums

Possibly my favourite to play and the one I do most well in, although I do prefer the guitar one for its creativity. The 4 circles essentially semi-simulate the crash cymbal, the bass drum, the snare drum, and well, that green one is rarely used so I don’t quite remember, might have been the high-hat/ride cymbal or so. Anyway, the notes slide in from the opposite side so that they always take the long way to get to the circles: the yellow and red notes always come from the right. Again, a similar calculation challenge presents itself when multiple notes of different colours come from both sides, although it’s easy (for me anyway) to get the hang of it when you focus more on the rhythm of the drumming than just looking at the notes. Some special notes require you to slide the stylus rather than just tapping.

Plot

Mai is a newcomer to this band Starlight that’s looking for a guitarist because their previous one dropped out. Mai and Kara are schoolmates, although they had never actually talked before. It looks like Mio and Reena are from the same school, but it’s not explicitly mentioned. Mio and Reena though don’t go to the same school Mai and Kara do.

Anyway, now a 4-member all-girls rock band, they start playing at different venues and enter the annual music contest Rockin’ Pretty (RP).

As you move one step closer to the finals, a new venue/stage is unlocked and 2 new songs become available, and you get a bit of progress on the little bit of story, if you wanna call it that (it’s pretty much dialogue presented in a visual novel style about them moving on but hey, it’s nice to see).

Music

The band plays a number of songs throughout the game. These are given by stage number below:

1. See You Again

2a. Heaven

2b. Prayer

3a. Good Morning

3b. Ambitious Ladies

4a. Your Eyes

4b. I Love You!

5a. Fluttering Heart

5b. Happy Sunday

6a. Fiery Glance

6b. Boyfriend

7a. Summer Fun

7b. Fight For Your Love

8. Rockin’ Nova

The music feels a bit mediocre. The tunes are not anything great, but I do enjoy this game enough to want to go back to listening to the music, but less so because the tunes are that great. The gameplay though, I think, makes up for it. The music ranges from softer pop-sounding music to something in the mid area. I wouldn’t say anything in this game falls under hard rock. Maybe a bit hard, but nothing too much.

Endings

There are 3 endings to the game. A good ending (which I unexpectedly got the first time round), as well as 2 normal endings. There’s no bad ending. There’s been various sources talking about how you get the good end. One page claims that you need to beat all songs on hard and do well in the finale which I can attest is not true cause I only played and beat 1 song on hard and yet I got the good end anyway. What is sure is that you need to ace the song in your finale (as any instrument), and just a normal performance would not do. And apparently the clothes/instruments that you bought also affect it, according to another source, but by that point I’ve really bought everything that you can buy so I couldn’t test it out. It’s a good idea to anyway, since your score caps at like 50000 or so. Your score is used to buy the girls new outfits, hairstyles, and instruments. Simply play a song and you’ll earn some points again, depending on your performance. The same source also mentions how you need to “get used to playing on Normal/Hard rather than just Easy”.

So I suppose the best bet is to warm yourself up on Easy, then move on to Normal (which is what I did), and buy outfits and instruments as you progress. After that, you can see all the endings depending on if you ace the finale or simply do average, and you’ll see the 3 endings. Maybe play one song on Hard like I did but I can’t say if it really changes anything.

If you only perform average, you’ll get 1 of the 2 normal endings at random. Good thing about this game is that you’ll see an ending each time you play the finale song, so you can check out all 3 endings at any point, but it does mean you’d have to sit through the credits every time you just wanna play the song.

Well of course the normal endings are well, you don’t win the contest. But as a character points out in one of the endings, making it all the way to the finals still means you put on a great show, even if you aren’t the best! After all, do you ever just listen to your favourite piece of music of all time and think your second favourite piece of music is not worthy? Another quote from the anime Sound Euphonium: music wasn’t originally intended for competition. And really, not to downplay the excitement of winning a music contest, but it’d have been lots of fun just to play music all around the city and make it to the finals, having your music be enjoyed by so many.

Anyway, even the normal ends aren’t too bad and they continue to play and keep on rockin pretty so hey, things are still good.

You unlock a photo studio where you can “take photos” of the band after you beat the game but the 3D models don’t exactly look that impressive. I’d rather have preferred a gallery for the endings I’ve unlocked but oh well.

Overall

Well I do very much love this game, especially since I came across it while on my music craze, hunting for band games and shows. And I got to live the fantasy of playing music with others a bit. My only complaints are that the keyboard game feels especially unfair and that the game’s a bit too short. If you enjoy a unique rhythm/band/music game, I’d say this one is worth checking out. Heck, I don’t really enjoy rhythm games but even I love this game because of the band atmosphere and the simulation (kinda) of playing different instruments. So maybe give it a go even if you don’t like rhythm games but want to play a game relevant to music bands.

[afternoonpoppy]

OH WHAT HAVE I DONE.

I meant to write a short little thing with a pair of new characters of mine and hiccups, and I wrote, uhh... A whole bunch of lore and character focus. And then some hiccups later on but mostly character focus. I’m so sorry.

Featuring the very good boy Allister, and Wolfram, a spellcaster from another world who got reverse isekai’d who has found himself stuck in this strange little world called Earth thanks to magic shenanigans. (Maybe I’ll write the actual story of how these two met at some point but it’d probably be pure plot and no hics sooo I’ll probably make note of that if I do it)

The sun had already faded for the day, the approaching winter leaving no light even in the evening sky. Allister shut the front door behind himself quickly to preserve the warmth inside his small home as he entered. Taking off his coat and scarf, hanging them up on the rack by the door, he surveyed the interior and saw no sign of activity on the first floor. He left his boots at the door as well, not wanting to track dirt inside, and made his way to the stairs at the back of the house to find the second floor - consisting of a simple hallway and doors leading to two rooms - to be almost as quiet as the first.

The presence of another soul in the house was betrayed, however, by a faint musical tune originating from behind one of the doors. Allister stepped up to the door and knocked gently first, waiting for a response.

"Come in," the response came after a moment, muffled by the wooden door and walls. Allister opened the door to look inside what had once simply been a spare storage room.

Small motes of multicolored light hovered about the room, occasionally shifting from a simple spherical shape to vaguely resembling different animals. Some were perched on the eclectic bookshelves Allister had recently furnished the room with, grabbing at different books and journals from the slowly-growing collection in the room and depositing them on the desk that sat at the room's back wall.

Seated in a chair by the desk, facing away from the door, was the highly-occupied, slim-framed young man that had requested the room be converted into a study, to begin with. He was positioned leaned over the desk, focusing his attention on furiously scribbling notes over sheets of paper and flipping through the books. Allister's old portable radio seemed to be the source of the music, sat atop the desk.

"Wolfram?" Allister addressed gently, feeling unsure if his presence was welcome in the room.

Wolfram turned, placing down the pen he'd been writing with as he looked at Allister. "You're home early, aren't you?"

Allister wondered just how long Wolfram had been caught up in his work. "I'm actually a bit late getting back - it's almost six."

"Oh." Wolfram glanced out the window of the study's back wall, furrowing a brow in thought.

Allister stepped into the room, taking care not to get in the way of any of the motes floating around. "Is the radio working out well for you?"

Wolfram nodded, idly turning down the radio. "It's easy enough to operate." He didn't say much else though, still staring out the window.

"Well... I'm guessing you didn't make as much progress as you wanted?" He gestured to the notes and scattered books on the desk. He didn't honestly understand what any of it was, but he did gather that it was a complex arcane matter.

Wolfram continued to stare out the window. "No. No, I suppose not." He sounded tired, and... disheartened.

Allister didn't care to hear his unorthodox roommate sounding like that, and found himself wracking his brain for some way to help. "Well, in that case... How about dinner? You must be exhausted, I'll bet the break and food will do you some good."

Wolfram's gaze lingered on the window a moment longer, then turned back to the desk, leaning over one of the books and letting his red hair hide his face from Allister's view. "It's fine, I am not hungry." At that moment, however, it seemed Wolfram's stomach was quite ready to disagree, letting out just loud enough of a growl to be heard by the pair. Wolfram visibly tensed up, likely hoping his stomach's complaints weren't so easily noticed.

Allister opted not to address it directly, instead softly reiterating, "A break will be good for you, Wolfram."

Wolfram responded with a tired sigh, but gave in and looked to face Allister. "Fine, but I want something freshly made, none of that packaged 'instant' meal nonsense you have in the pantry."

Allister shrugged. "They're not so bad. Besides, they're faster to make."

Wolfram shook his head, giving a look of disdain and repeated, "Something fresh tonight."

"Alright, alright, if you insist."

---

Per Wolfram's request, Allister went exploring through his refrigerator to find ingredients for a home-cooked meal, coming to the realization he had just enough for a sweet & sour chicken recipe. It would take a bit of time to make, but that did give him an excuse to keep Wolfram away from the study for a bit longer.

"So... What exactly are these little guys, anyway?" Allister asked, shooing a curious light-mote-rabbit-bird away from the chicken cooking in the pan.

"They are spirits, as I believe I mentioned once before," Wolfram answered rather unhelpfully from the kitchen table where he sat. He did seem to enjoy watching Allister cook.

"No, I meant, what... what are they? Like... If I ask 'what's a cat' and someone says they're animals that eat mice and purr and knock things off of tables."

"I see..." Wolfram thought on that for a moment. "Apologies, I often forget most humans don't interact with them often. In short, they are the product of magic in the environment that has gathered in a comparatively dense concentration and spent much time interacting with a particular natural aspect, such as a plant or a pond. From there, the dense magic that has gathered forms into one entity and gains a will of its own, which is now a spirit."

Allister glanced over at Wolfram with an expression that was uncertain at best.

"Hm, alright... Think of it this way; if you crack an egg onto that pan and expose it to the heat, it would change, yes?"

"You would have a fried egg."

"Yes. If magic gathers together and interacts with an aspect of the environment instead of heat, the same concept happens."

"You get fried magic?" Allister couldn't help but grin at his own joke if you could call it that, while Wolfram stared back with an eyebrow raised.

"It changes," Wolfram said, "and becomes a spirit."

"I... think I understand." Allister didn't understand, unsure if for his own faults or if Wolfram was simply a poor teacher, but moved on to a new question. "Are they intelligent?"

"About as much as an animal. They can follow simple commands, so I call them to my side for basic assistance."

"So they're... Sort of like your familiars?" Allister asked, calling on what little terminology he knew from pop culture.

"Similar in concept, yes. Though they have poor attention spans so it is best to have multiple around rather than relying on one and hoping that it does not grow bored." Wolfram absentmindedly placed a hand over his stomach as it growled once more for food. Allister wondered if the poor thing had remembered to eat lunch while he was away, as he was noticing Wolfram tended to ignore such things when wrapped up in work like he was today.

"Dinner will be ready soon."

---

Once the promised meal was prepared, a hearty helping of rice and chicken, Allister placed a plate on the table in front of Wolfram who immediately perked up at the sight and smell of the food. Allister sat down in the other chair with his own plate, idly asking, "So... You can cast magic?"

Wolfram was already shoveling forkfuls of food into his mouth by the time the question was asked. For someone with such small stature, he had displayed a voracious appetite when presented with food he liked, which seemed to be any of Allister's home-cooked meals. Though Allister couldn't quite tell if that was more due to Wolfram's tendencies to neglect the need for food.

Before taking another bite of food, Wolfram paused to answer the question with a confused tone. "Did we not establish this when we first met? The day you found me in your cellar? Having been transported to your world by magic? I have experience with the subject, yes."

"I mean, yeah, I know," Allister said in defense. "What I mean is... I didn't know magic was even a thing until then. And, well, you showed me that light spell you can cast, and I see the spirits..." Allister paused, suddenly second-guessing if he was about to overstep a boundary. Stories always talked about responsible usage of magic, was there some sort of magic etiquette he was ignoring?

Wolfram, on the other hand, seemed far less concerned, commenting between bites of food, "You want to see me cast a spell?"

"Is - is that alright?" Allister couldn't deny how curious he was about magic and what Wolfram could do with it.

"Well, I suppose, given how helpful you've been, some demonstration of my skill is a reasonable request." Wolfram exaggerated his tone as if the request were plain and tedious, but even Allister could tell Wolfram was playing it up. The young spellcaster clearly liked the attention.

Wolfram pushed aside his plate, which he'd already almost emptied completely, and began tracing a finger along the table's surface. As he did, he whispered a quiet string of words which Allister could not understand but had come to know to be the spell's incantation - the 'magic words' that made the spell work. Following Wolfram's finger along the table was a sparkling trail of light formed, leaving shapes and patterns on the surface of the table. Allister watched, mesmerized by the glow of the lines.

"It's a simple spell," Wolfram said, pausing in the spell's incantation, no new trails of light being drawn as he spoke. "The lines will eventually fade on their own if not refreshed, or with my command -" he whispered another spell phrase and waved a hand over the lines, causing them to vanish, " - which makes them ideal for writing if I want to keep it private."

"Or if you don't have a pen and paper," Allister chimed in. "What else can you do?"

"Hm... Ah, yes." Wolfram turned his focus to a small clock hung up on the wall, accompanying another incantation with a hand motion that the clock responded to by levitating off of the wall on its own accord.

"You can do that?!" Allister watched in amazement as the clock floated through the air at Wolfram's command. "I always thought things would be so much easier if I could move things around with my mind. Uh, or magic, in this case."

A slight grin began to spread over Wolfram's face. "Naturally, the use of magic makes numerous tasks quite a bit - hic!"

With a sudden hiccup, Wolfram's spell was interrupted and the clock clattered to the floor, startling Allister.

"Are you alright?" Allister asked, seeing that even Wolfram himself looked surprised by the abrupt interruption.

"Um, yes, I -" Another 'hic!' cut off Wolfram and jumped through his body, and he clasped a hand over his mouth, cheeks tinted red from embarrassment.

Allister held back a smile - seeing Wolfram so flustered was endearing in a way, but he didn't want his reaction mistaken for teasing by the younger man. "It's alright, Wolfram. You did eat a bit fast, didn't you?"

"I..." Wolfram kept his hand over his mouth, muffling another hiccup, then admitting, "Your cooking is quite good." He moved his hand to his stomach and added, "Perhaps... Perhaps you are not incorrect, however."

Allister frowned. "Does your stomach hurt?"

Wolfram didn't answer, sheepishly avoiding eye contact as he struggled and failed to quiet his hiccups. The way he shifted uncomfortably in his seat, however, told Allister that he was also 'not incorrect' about that guess as well. "Would you like to lie down for a bit?"

Wolfram hesitated, then said, "No, it's - hic - it's fine. It will pass soon, I'm sure, and I should be getting back to wor - hic!" After that last hiccup rudely forced its way into the conversation, Wolfram did not bother to finish the thought and sighed with frustration instead.

"Wolfram, I think you've been working hard enough as it is. It's fine for you to take a break for the night if - "

"It is not fine, Allister!" Wolfram suddenly shouted, causing Allister to flinch at the abrupt change in attitude. "It is not - hic - it is not..." Wolfram slumped over the table, defeat in his tone as he spoke now. One hand remained protective over his stomach, the other gripping the side of his head through his hair.

"Wolfram?" Panicked with concern, Allister found himself standing up from his chair and rushing to the other side of the table before he knew what he was doing. Gently rubbing Wolfram's back in an effort to calm him despite a hiccup or two fighting against the contact, Allister spoke softly, "Hey, hey, what's going on? You can talk to me, Wolfram, it's alright." Once Allister noticed what he was doing, he feared the contact would be inappropriate but was surprised to see Wolfram not only accept it but lean towards Allister.

"I'm... I'm sorry," Wolfram suddenly said.

"What? What for?"

"For lying." Wolfram lifted his head from the table to meet Allister's gaze. "I'm not - hic - I'm not the powerful wizard I wanted you to think of me as. I was still an apprentice in training before - hic - before all of this."

Allister was taken aback by the confession. It wasn't so much Wolfram's status as apprentice that surprised him, Allister hadn't really thought about how powerful Wolfram was, but surprise to hear Wolfram thought this image of himself was so crucial. "Wolfram, I.. I don't think any less of you for that. I still think it's amazing that you can do these things."

"Of course you do, you're amused by simple light and - hic - levitation spells."

"I'll try not to take any offense to that," Allister deadpanned.

"I've spent this time in your home focusing so much on my magic. Yet I cannot - hic - I cannot levitate a clock without dropping it from something as minor a nuisance as - hic!"

Allister nodded sympathetically, switching from rubbing Wolfram's back to gentle pats, unsure which would be more helpful at the moment. "So, um, if you don't mind me asking, what have you been doing in the study?"

"You recall the books we found in the cellar?"

Allister nodded. The day the pair had met, they had also located several tattered books hidden away in the cellar which Wolfram had claimed to hold some value and added to his growing book collection upstairs. "You said they were some sort of... arcane records?"

Wolfram hiccuped. "They were remaining journals from the mentor I studied under. I've been attempting to read through them to continue my studies. Unfortunately, it - hic - it is no simple matter, so doing this without a mentor is not an easy task."

"I see... And I guess it's not exactly easy for you to just find someone else to teach you, huh?"

Wolfram sighed, leaning to the side and letting his weight rest against Allister's chest. "Is... this alright?"

Allister felt warmth rushing to his cheeks at the contact. "Uh, yeah, that's fine. You sure you don't want to lie down, though?"

"I suppose," Wolfram answered. He stood up, allowing himself to be guided to the living room couch by Allister. Allister felt bad that the only bed he was able to offer in his modest home was the couch with some spare pillows and blankets, but Wolfram had insisted the meager accommodations were fine. That seemed to hold true here as well, as Wolfram wasted no time in making himself comfortable, one arm still draped over his stomach and hiccups jolting his body every few seconds, and yet, he was able to lie down suitably well.

"Do you want some medicine for your stomach?" Allister asked.

"I do not - hic - care for medicine." Wolfram tucked his legs in just enough to allow space for someone to sit on the other end of the couch. "If you'd like, however, I... I do find your company helpful." He buried his face in one of the pillows as he spoke, hiding from eye contact.

"Oh, I..." Allister was unsure of what to say, feeling that warmth return to his face. He was starting to realize, despite this perhaps being a poor time for it, that he did also enjoy Wolfram's presence. Allister accepted the invitation and sat down. "If, um, if you want, I don't mind if you stretch your legs out again."

Wolfram unburied his face from the pillow to look at Allister, gauging if he should or not, then stretched his legs out over Allister's lap. "This is fine?"

"Mm-hm." Allister nodded. "Hey... I know you're worried about the magic thing, but I think you'll do fine."

Wolfram hiccuped and autopiloted a nod.

"But, I don't know, studying on your own can be really hard, so... If I can help at all..."

"You want to help me - hic - study magic?"

"Well, I - I know I have no idea how any of this works or anything, but -"

"I might appreciate the help," Wolfram mumbled, sounding notably drowsy. "For now, I... think some - hic - some rest... sounds..."

Wolfram failed to finish the sentence and Allister noticed the poor thing had already fallen asleep. Allister watched the steady rise and fall of Wolfram's chest, which was occasionally interrupted by stubborn hiccups that amazingly failed to wake him. As Allister's gaze lingered, he realized something else about Wolfram - he was cute.

Allister grabbed a blanket from where it lay on the back of the couch and did his best to spread it out over Wolfram while trapped under his legs. It wasn't the best job Allister had ever done, but Wolfram didn't seem picky at the moment. Softly, Allister whispered, "Goodnight."

[hearthhhh]

✧Hello! I'd love a matchup! INFJ,Panromantic Asexual,Female, Virgo. I'm incredibly awkward, because of that I tend to mess myself up a lot. I have a stutter which I myself find annoying. I tend to be shy when meeting people but when I open up I'm frankly a whole other person. I don't have much of a filter with my friends. I enjoy Artsy things, and I tend to be highly critical of mostly everything involving art and generally anything I'm interested it. I'm quite picky, not to mention obsessive.

I pair you with...

🥢 Spoilers for V3 ahead! If this is a problem feel free to leave another ask!

🥢 This ask was a bit more difficult because of the whole V3 plot and the ending and all that. I thought about it and just decided I'd write this ask as if you were a member of the trials as well.

🥢 Kaito is really uplifting and loves getting along with introverts, and originally gets closer to you due to your shy nature! He likes trying to bring up your mood, and is really supportive of your insecurities. Kaito would even try to pay attention to things you're insecure about so he could come off as encouraging as possible.

🥢 Once you start opening up to him, he’s pleasantly surprised, and really excited that you’re feeling more comfortable around him.

🥢 Both you and Kaito rarely have filters around each other. You speak your minds, and enjoy the honesty you two share. It helps that Kaito basically runs on his moral compass, which is pretty sound and easy to understand and agree with.

🥢 You and Maki would get along well! Instead of her becoming Kaito's love interest, you and Kaito would become one of her very good friends! You're less violent and also an introvert, so there're aspects of you two that are pretty similar and could lead to a pretty solid platonic relationship.

🥢 You two stick together pretty close. Kaito is very attuned to making plans, and tries to understand people and their emotional capabilities as well, trying to take off as much emotional loads as possible. So he'd come up with several ways to hang out with each other, seeming as innocent, but really just a way to keep an eye out for you. He's really scared something will happen to you, but he doesn't want to come off as possessive or stress-inducing.

🥢 He really likes your obsessive nature, because Kaito is the same way! When Kaito likes something he's got it set in stone, even if it's just a small whim, he pursues all his goals and wishes really passionately. So Kaito likes seeing people who are just as passionate as him, and is really supportive of your art and will listen to you rant for hours if you'd like, maybe even debate if you need to.

🥢Kaito wouldn't ask you out. He knows he's dying, he can't put you through the emotional turmoil, it'll crush you. As much as Kaito wants to distance himself, he can't, and he thinks it's selfish of him.

🥢 You have to ask him out. It's scary, but so are the killing games. You never know if one of you will die and you need him to know about your feelings.

🥢 When you tell him I'd imagine your stutter taking over. Your shyness takes over but Kaito understands exactly what you're trying to say. He's torn but on cloud nine at the exact same time.

🥢 The days before Kaito's death you spend cuddling and spending time alone, distancing yourself from the others as much as possible. But he disappears into the bathroom for extended periods of time, sometimes Kaito would even leave you alone in one of your rooms claiming to be getting food but coming back empty-handed and forgetting entirely why he'd left in the first place.

🥢 There's a high level of trust in your relationship, there has to be when you're dating in the middle of a killing trials. So you wouldn't expect him to be a killer, only worrying about his safety.

🥢 Then there’s the whole trial business, and the only person you have left is Maki.

I pair you with...

🥢 The Victorian Era was very well known for its artistry, so you'd be able to get by easily as an artist. Especially because you're so critical, I'd imagine it'd make you pickier about what you'd paint, and you'd be able to grow renown pretty easily. Artists that are introverted also create a sense of mystery, so people would become more intrigued.

🥢 Also, I researched career paths for INFJ. I actually found that there are many people with that personality type who run non-profit organizations.

🥢 I got this idea that you'd have an auction for some of your paintings, then give a portion of your earnings to people in need.

🥢 This auction would make you even more well known. So I'd imagine you're a spectacle in the artistry world.

🥢 Because you're so important, it wouldn't be surprising for you to have some pretty high up contacts. That would include Earl Ciel Phantomhive.

🥢 You'd meet Prince Soma at one of Ciel's parties. It's a small get together between others of higher positions, and it's pretty great.

🥢 Except the music's loud, the people there aren't that entertaining, and you don't really want to take to them. You only came to keep up appearances, and you kind of felt like you had to.

🥢You meet Prince Soma and Agni in one of the hallways trying to make it outside for some fresh air. He's really nice, and you two get along very well. After he shows you the doors, the two men stay with you for a bit to talk.

🥢 Prince Soma enjoys being of use to others, and is excited he's able to help you even if it's something as small as showing you the exit. But he's also easily intimidated. So he'd seek comfort in your timid nature, and would try to see past your introverted shell and try to make you more open.

🥢 Once he gets to know you more he's thrilled! Prince Soma loves people with a sense of humour and seems to like yours a lot.

🥢 You two meet more along the streets and stop to talk whenever you see each other. Until you give Soma your address, and tell him he's able to stop by anytime. He takes the invitation up eagerly, and is over almost daily.

🥢 You're surprised he didn't know you were an artist. When he sees several paintings around your larger than average house he's immediately intrigued. And when you tell him of your fundraisers, that's when Soma starts to grow feelings for you.

🥢 Soma really admires you at this point. He'd always seen himself as the mediator of your friendship, a guide. But now he respects you as someone equal.

🥢 As you two start going out more, Soma asks for Agni to accompany him less and less. Then it gets to the point where Soma and you would always spend time with each other alone, usually in the comfort of your home.

🥢 Eventually, Agni has to tell Soma to tell you about his feelings. They're pretty obvious at this point. Soma actually hadn't even realized he'd liked you until it was pointed out. He just really liked being around you.

🥢 I feel like there would be like… a whole system to get into a relationship. Prince Soma was probably the type to be expecting an arranged marriage, maybe even to meet his bride on their wedding day. So I'm not quite sure what traditions would be in place, if this makes sense.

🥢 But anyway! I feel like Soma would be the type who's really excited to get into relationships, so he'd tell you very soon after his realization, if not immediately. He's like a fucking puppy in the best way possible.

🥢 You know exactly what he's trying to say before he even opens his mouth. He asks you in your kitchen as you're making breakfast.

🥢 Being in a relationship with Prince Soma is great. He'd spoil you silly, and Agni would be like a big brother to you. While Prince Soma loves alone time with you, it's important to him that you and Agni get along well. While he wouldn't say it aloud, Soma is always really happy when he sees you two interacting.

🥢 Soma is one for cuddles! He loves to have an excess of pillows and blankets, and builds the best pillow forts.

🥢 You find a lot of your time would be taken up by Soma. He really likes being around you and gets lonely really quickly. While you paint he likes to talk to you, but sometimes gets restless sitting down for too often. He admires you for having the patience to paint for so long.

🥢 He'd be really goofy! Your senses of humour would minimize uncomfy things like getting sick or being sad, and would create the baseline for trust and vulnerability! Basically you two would just be so comfortable around each other and you wouldn't feel like there are any barriers between you two. You'd feel like extensions of yourselves.

🥢 Okay the fluff here made up for the angsty Kaito matchup woo!

I pair you with...

🥢 So aside from Zen's obvious immediate flirtatious nature, I feel like he'd become interested in things that you're insecure about! Zen's all for being uplifting and encouraging self-betterment, but feels bad when people are downright self-deprecating. He just wants people to be the best versions of themselves they can be, but things you can't change about yourself are fine just the way they are. They make you unique in Zen's eyes.

🥢 Zen loves your art! Send! Lots! Of! Pics! He's the cheerleader everyone needs honestly. Zen also loves when you talk about art, and admires how passionate you are. He'd even compare your passion for art to his passion for acting. In short, Zen really respects your talent and passion.

🥢 When you start to open up to the chat a bit more Zen is super excited and really supportive!

🥢 I feel like after you start opening up to the chat more is when Zen starts to develop real feelings for you. He'd show this by flirting a little more, but other than that there isn't any indication at first. It's just the same old flirty Zen.

🥢 Zen's always saying how he'd like to meet you in person, so eventually you do! You two send lots of pictures to the messenger, going shopping and to dinner or lunch afterwards. You two have a lot of fun, and later go on more outings together.

🥢  You and Zen go on outings as friends, though. Even Yoosung tags along sometimes, and you three are constantly trying to get Jaehee to come out and have some fun. Seven and Jumin usually decline your requests if acknowledging them at all.

🥢 Zen's feelings grow the more time you two spend together. It's almost unbearable to be so close to you, not being able to hold your hand yet be able to say such sweet things without your suspicion.

🥢 Eventually Zen invites you out for lunch over call, very different from the public planning you two would do on the group chats. But you don't think too much of it because it's Zen, and you've always been closest to him.

🥢 He really wants to make you feel special! But he doesn't want to make you uncomfortable with too much attention. So he takes you to a secluded café that gives off a really homey yet romantic vibe. He asks you out over hot chocolate and cookies, and spoils you rotten that entire day.

🥢 Zen's very clingy but certainly not as clingy as Prince Soma. He loves being around you and cherishes your outings, probably having a huge folder full of aesthetic pictures of you. He'd also definitely screenshot every picture of your art you send and keep it in a folder. He mentions it to you casually one day on a date, showing that your art style has improved pretty well from the first piece you sent to the group chat to the most recent.

🥢 Zen is all for really cheesy and mushy romantic stuff. He texts you a lot throughout the day to tell you that he misses you, is thinking about you, loves you, etc. He's just so sweet and really cares about you and needs you to know.

🥢 Zen loves how shy you are. He finds it cute and endearing, and fondly mentions it many times. You also notice he speaks very softly to you, and his tone is so much different. It's almost as if he's trying to pour every once of love that he can into every syllable. 

[curseofstrahdxeli]

Inverting Stereotypes in Curse of Strahd

Originally from this reddit thread by JimCasy

Modules

While looking for some art to post in my Curse of Strahd group, I ran into this interesting article on racial stereotypes in this long-time classic D&D adventure. For the sake of this post, I won't be debating the observations or stereotypes the article covers. Instead, I'll be taking these at face value, and seeing how one could work the story in a way that inverts these stereotypes in ways that actually enhance the overall story and experience of Curse of Strahd.

A Note on Stereotypes and Storytelling

It's been my experience thus far as a DM that stereotypes need not always be avoided. Indeed, many players come to the table to live out some of the common tropes of D&D. At the same time, I've also found that bending these tropes, working in more variable gender roles, and generally subverting players' expectations has made for much better storytelling.

The Vistani

Though the campaign begins likely with the party trusting the Vistani, if you play it by the book, they're likely to hate these wandering Romani-counterparts nearly as much as they hate Strahd himself. While the twist is good, I think we're served better by dishing out a more intricate picture of these people.

This one is very easily addressed! Some of my plans:

Rather than mostly thieves, bandits and thugs, we can throw in a bunch of different stat blocks for Vistani, which also have corresponding personal traits we might expect.

Bards. Vistani are all about music and entertainment! Every Vistani camp should have a musician or two, and perhaps every other camp has a particularly magical one (aka Bard). This character can use Song of Rest to help characters recover, and perhaps even be recruited to help the party out on their many missions. This character would be mostly interested in uplifting spirits, gaining renown, and is a perfect source for humor in this very dark setting.

Druids. Vistani have to eat, care for animals, hunt, and obtain fresh water on their many travels. It only makes sense that a Vistani Druid or two wander around Barovia helping the various camps make ends' meet. These would be more of a neutral bent, more interested in the state of the land and its creatures than the politics of the Vistani and Barovians. They would likely be willing to grant insight to the characters on the creatures of the land, and serve as temporary guides.

Guards. While the book states Vistani aren't allowed in Vallaki, I think throwing a few Vistani guards into the mix shows that this prejudice is pushed back upon and not always tolerated. Rather than assuming that this kind of segregation has won out in Barovia, it creates more tension to have character which break the mold. Vistani guards would be more willing to turn a blind eye to characters trying to do good - such as feed or even release prisoners. They may also cause distractions for the players or assist them in town in other ways, provided it doesn't get them into too much danger. These guards would be respected and appreciated by some Barovians who can't provide much entertainment or soul-ful light on their own.

Craftspeople. The Vistani have tons of trinkets, instruments, weapons, leather armor, and other supplies that all need to be made and cared for. This is an important stat-block or character type to subvert the typical criminal stereotype, as it shows these are a people who work and create for themselves (though some still resort to thievery and deception!).

Some others would be Scouts, Priests, Archers/Hunters, Knights, and Veterans.

Alignment changes: have more Good Vistani in the mix.

We have a couple of options here. We can maintain the overall structure of the story and the alignment of the main Vistani characters (who are mostly in line with Strahd one way or another), OR we can flip these on their heads and change up the core story to account for that.

If we do the former, we can simply throw in more Vistani NPC's (per above examples) that break the mold and are actually Chaotic Good like Esmerelda. While she is most likely to join the party on their adventures, the other Good Vistani will serve as temporary helpers and guides along the way. They may even hint at the underhanded plots of other Neutral and Evil Vistani.

Madam Eva is a central figure to the story, and she's said to be chaotic neutral. However, I'm likely to play her more as Neutral-Good, as her ultimate aim to free Strahd from his curse is definitely good. The means by which she attempts to do this may stray into grey areas, but particularly in the story with our players we can highlight her inner tension (once they learn more of her history), and not simply cave to allow her to be a more neutral and sometimes evil character.

With Madam Eva as a central leader of the Vistani, this inner-tension she has would be shared among her people. While some can be played as a bit more opportunistic and villainous, the story gains a great deal more depth if most Vistani are chaotic-neutral or neutral-good. They're primarily a very creative, poetic, passionate, musical, talented and charismatic bunch, with some bad apples who use their talents for their own gains.

Drunkenness

This one is easy - not all Vistani need to turn to the drink. It's a cop-out and overplayed stereotype! However, to play up the Vistani's love of the party we can throw in other types of recreation and creativity. Depending on your group, this could include more herbal remedies, druidic magic, competitive hunting games, card games, duels (physical or poetical), and lots of romance.

Prime example: rather than the party stumbling upon a wagon filled with 4 drunken, unconscious Vistani, I think it'd be far more interesting that they stumble into a wagon filled with 4 sleeping Vistani lovers.

Lying

Break this trope by having some Vistani actively abiding by a code of honor to never tell a lie. This would include telling things straight even if it means harm to them at times!

Theft (of children and otherwise)

Vistani can be providers not only to themselves but also to lonely Barovians struggling under the oppression of Strahd. Many Vistani don't see Strahd in a more tragic light - so too would they see the listless souls wandering about his realm. They may even see it as an important spiritual exercise to soothe the suffering of these empty vessels whenever they can. Perhaps some even believe that the souls of Barovians can be rekindled, and it's their life challenge to try to do so.

"The Evil Eye"

I'm likely nixing this entirely from my game, as I don't believe it adds much at all and plays into a very negative stereotype. This is D&D! Loads of characters have magic, including the Bestow Curse spell. Play up other types of spells that some Vistani can have, as well as Divination magics.

The Mongrelfolk

I'll be referring to them instead as the Fael-Iasg ("Fail-y-as-ick") which means "wolf-ish" in Gaelic. This avoids bad stereotypes, and also adds some culture and flavor to them.

In our game, I'm not going to play them as idiotic or unable to speak. Instead, they'll be susceptible to going into "wolf-mode", at which times they'll become more animal than human. However, when they're in their humanoid mood, they'll be able to communicate. Just not super well, since they're not the most sociable of folk.

In my view these are not a whole lot different than Kenku, and so I'll be playing them in a similar way. They're the result of a curse laid down centuries prior, and while there is some tragedy to their story, they do their best with what they've got. They can be incredibly strong, fast, and sneaky.

Ultimately I'll be playing them a bit as a different genus of Werewolves, though less powerful.

To maintain the horror elements of some of the encounters with these folk, it's fairly simple - some of them have been possessed by a spirit of the land that has corrupted Barovia. This would be Baba Lysaga - not Strahd himself. These Fael-Iasg are known to get out and attack villagers at times, and is a big reason why they've become more isolated.

That's all for now! Thanks for reading.