#i dont think i ever fully watched the entire main series finale? so i wouldnt really know all too well

[snakesinsocks2005]

My 1(one) contribution to the adventure time fandom. You guys are real troopers

[langst-wins]

the last thing i'm gonna say about voltron, unintentional queerbaiting, and major s8 plotholes, and then imma shut up and let y'all be free from my long bitch ass s8 posts so we can get back to regularly scheduled klance fanfics & fanarts

yes, they queerbaited us with shiro as rep. not in the sense that he wasn't queer but in the sense that they hyped us up for his relationship with adam, made us think we were gonna see an adashi reunion, and we ended up getting like 90 seconds top of LGBT content over the entire series.

no, I highly doubt they did it intentionally. yes, they did admit they fucked up and apologized several times. yes, I appreciate the apology and I understand that they're human beings and people make mistakes and overlook things sometimes. like they said, they never meant to make anyone feel baited. they really thought they were going to get a good response. lauren called voltron a "learning experience" in the open letter to the fandom after s7. I think she meant learning experience in general ofc but I think she also meant they've learned how to and how not to do LGBT rep in a show.

but I will absolutely be taking any promises of LGBT rep from lm and jds with a grain of salt. i will absolutely be watching their future works from afar and not getting myself too invested until the series ends and I can watch it as a whole while knowing what to expect.

I dont think they MEANT harm but y'all...they fucked up. they know it, and they apologized. it shows maturity that they apologized in that open letter after s7 and at the final nycc panel, and again, I appreciate that.

but I would rather they have not said anything about LGBT rep, ever, and just let gay shiro be a nice surprise. then, the minimal rep we received would have been wonderful and a nice warm surprise instead of a huge disappointment. it was only a disappointment because it didn't live up to the hype they made for it. and I know the hype was partially due to marketing they had no control over, but it was absolutely partially them, too.

they didn't promise LGBT content in LoK and canon korrassami ended up being a nice surprise even though it was minimal. that was how they SHOULD have done shiro's sexuality if they knew it was going to be a small thing. I would rather they have kept their lips zipped about LGBT, not announced gay shiro ahead of time, and just it be what it was when seasons 7 and 8 came out.

again, I dont think the bait was intentional, but it was bait all the same.

you are not crazy or too sensitive if your feelings are hurt/you feel baited by this show. you are not a shitty person if you just dont trust them right now. dont let people tell you otherwise. it's okay to take a step back from their work and wait to see how their next show plays out before you get involved.

i really do love voltron, even though s8 was confusing af, seasons 1-7 were LIT. I enjoy bits and pieces of s8 but mostly it was a let down. not only because of rep, just because a lot of things didn't make sense to me and a lot of the problem solving just felt way too convenient.

like I feel like every conflict in the plot was resolved way too easily and/or in ways that didnt make sense. and I feel like most of the characters' futures in the credits didnt really match up to those characters personalities. specifically lance, hunk, and keith.

lance staying on earth with his family, spreading allura's message to carry on her legacy? makes perfect sense, valid af. lance becoming a farmer? not so much. I feel like he would have been better suited as teaching classes as a pilot instructor at the garrison or smth similar. altean lance still gave me whiplash and left me confused af but he looks so damn 👌👌👀👀🙌🙌😭 with his cute ass altean marks that I'm just gonna let that one go for the sake of aesthetic.

hunk becoming a chef? not ooc necessarily but I feel like he would have been better suited as a diplomat. y'know. ambassador to earth sort of thing.

keith aiding in recovery efforts and being a humanitarian (...alien-itarian...? idk). okay let's be real we all knew this edgy boi has a soft ass heart. I think hes just mature enough now to let his walls come down and not be afraid of caring ig. which is sweet and nice and all. but I feel like he wouldnt...JUST be doing that. like he would still want the battle and the adrenaline and the badass mf fight sequences. that's kinda his Thing.

shiro marrying a rando? I would have preferred adam to not die and them end up getting back together once shiro returned to earth. i just feel like there was no reason to kill off adam? shiro has already suffered so much, what was the point? but i'm not gonna hate on curtis bc we dont know jackshit about him and for all we know he could be a bombass dude. shiro looked happy tho and it's better than him being forever alone so I can hesitantly accept that ig. but on one condition and one condition only: their ship name must be shirts. if their ship name is not shirts then I dont want it

allura's death was pointless. i havent seen anyone disagree with this one so far. her life was full of suffering and then she died. like can we all just agree she was done dirty and it was entirely unnecessary.

dont come @ me with "you just dont like s8 bc your ship wasnt canon"

that's not it at all.

they could have made this season so amazing and still not have made klance canon. they could have left me disappointed in no klance but still happy because the finale made my heart go dynamite BOOM. I could have ended the last episode with no canon klance and still been smiling because the plot was bitchin' and the characters were all alive and happy.

but they didnt, so I wasnt. it just...wasnt a good season. it had good aspects, yes, but as a whole? meh.

season 8 was poorly handled. it really was. it had so much potential to end with EVERY character having a positive ending and still have an actual satisfying conclusion to the war. I know they wanted to show how heavy and serious and heartbreaking the war actually was, but you can make an emotional, heavy finale without killing off a main character and leaving her main character love interest lonely and grieving. like im sorry killing allura and leaving lance sad and lonely was not necessary at all to the plot it just flat out wasnt. they did those characters dirty and they did allurance shippers even dirtier.

allurancers cheered seeing their ship canon then had it ripped out from under them and my heart honestly grieves worse for my allurance and allura stan fam than my klance fam. they did y'all so wrong and i'm sorry it had to go down like that.

sheith shippers got fucked over when all that development and relationship and growth culminated into basically nothing in the final season. like as a broganes stan even i was taken aback by the sudden radio silence between them so I cant imagine how let down actual sheith shippers feel.

us adashi shippers? obvious. adam's death was not necessary. and dont tell me it was to show the heaviness and realness of death in war because vld does NOT have a track record of dead characters staying dead. they could have at least gave us some mild development with shirts (lmfao im so sorry but shirts) and let us see more of curtis as a character. like...literally just two 60 second scenes would have been nice. they could have easily fit that in.

us klancers got fucked over by unnecessary parallels to canon ships. they could have made it a cute platonic friendship in s8 and let us enjoy it and proceed to enjoy fanon klance without all those blatant parallels to shay/hunk that just left us confused. and the parallels in earlier seasons. like why did you have to make so many parallels to romantic moments and romantic tropes if it was platonic. why did you have to go and do that. what was the point.

s8 could have ended in such a way that shippers of every ship in the fandom were satisfied with the finale because their faves were treated right and the plot was fire. it had so much potential in the first half and could have been so damn good.

it wasnt though. the entire thing was so confusing and nothing about it felt like vld. It feels like a spin off or a reboot. I dont like s8 as a whole and I doubt I ever will. it might grow on me in time but I'll never fully like it, y'know. everything about it felt so tilted and off and just wrong.

but it really just be like that sometimes ig.

[pikapepikachuu]

How Josh Wakely landed the Beatles, Dylan, Motown and more

Could I please have a knife and fork, he asks the waiter as we take our seats in Mr Wong, a bustling, upscale modern Chinese restaurant in a converted warehouse in Sydneys CBD. Even as the words are leaving his lips, he knows theres a good chance theyll end up in print. I knew the risk I was taking, he says. He pulled the same stunt on his first date with the woman who was to become his wife. Shes a human rights lawyer and I was a semi-employed screenwriter and I went for the knife and fork. And how did it turn out? I got a second date, but it still burns her, he says. At least it wasnt a spoon. Wakely is quite happy to tell stories against himself. Hes proud of what he has achieved that his success allows him to order the spectacularly good salt-and-pepper Balmain bugs at this restaurant whenever hes in town, for instance and he has ambitions to achieve a lot more. But as a boy from Newcastle, he also knows it doesnt do to get ideas too far above your station. His parents were, comparatively speaking, quite posh his mother was a social worker, his father a teacher but the town in which he was raised was dominated in every sense by the steel plant, at least until it closed in 2000. Everyone was employed in BHP and then everyone wasnt, he says. It was a very working-class world and thats still the world I feel most comfortable in. And yet the one thing I could do was write, though I didnt really know what to do with that.

The salt and pepper Balmain bugs are a highlight.Credit:Louise Kennerley He lasted just five weeks in an arts-law degree at Newcastle Uni his brush with torts was cut short when he rocked up to class dripping from the surf, only to have his tutor tell him, I dont think youll be a lawyer before decamping to Sydney with dreams of making it as a writer. Some good reviews for his 2002 play Woomera in which he also starred as a young detention-centre guard helped earn him a place at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, even though acting wasnt his primary interest. So I rang up the head of WAAPA and said, Ill come to your drama school, but I want to be a writer and director, he recalls, laughing at his own chutzpah. He says Im the only person whos ever rung up and negotiated. The tyro writer did all the acting and dancing expected of him even though he wasnt particularly good at it. Then he would go home and write for four or five hours, every night. By the time he left he had enough work under his belt to convince a series of producers to pay him to write screenplays none of which ever made it to production, he says, because they were just too ambitious for Australian budgets.

Beat Bugs marries the songs of the Beatles with computer-animated critters.Credit:Netflix Thats why his credits pre-Netflix are, to put it mildly, rather thin. But if he was guilty of thinking too big back then, Wakely has zero regrets. There is great power in being wildly naive, he says. Unquestionably, though, his most pie-in-the-sky idea was to go after the rights to the Beatles catalogue with an eye to turning their songs into an animated childrens series.

The bill, pleaseCredit:Karl Quinn Beat Bugs has recently produced its third season for Netflix, won him a screenwriting Emmy, and spawned three albums of Beatles covers by the likes of Sia, Pink, Rod Stewart and The Shins. Next year, a live version is set for an 80-city tour of the US and Canada. It's fair to say it's been a hit. But for a long time after Wakely and his wife moved to Los Angeles about a decade ago, it was just another wildly ambitious plan seemingly destined to go nowhere. One day, Wakelys worried father-in-law, visiting from Australia, tapped on the door of the garage where he wrote and asked what his back-up plan was if he didnt manage to land the Beatles rights. Ive got a good idea for Bob Dylan, came the reply. His father-in-law closed the door, shook his head in despair and walked away. Now I look back on it, he was the sane one, Wakely says. I was insane. When he finally got a chance to put his idea to Sony/ATV, which holds the publishing rights, Wakely rocked up with a demo recorded for $200 by his old mate Daniel Johns in one hand and a pitch document hed put together at a local printing shop in the other. The meeting didnt go well. For some reason, he was made to stand on a cushion, and its very hard to keep your status on a cushion. Then one of the executives fell asleep while Wakely was talking. Worst of all, when he hit play on the stereo it didnt work. And I just remember thinking, I am f---ed. It could have been a fatal blow, but as I left one of the guys there said, Hello, Goodbye would be a good song for children. That was enough. For Sony/ATV, the appeal of Beat Bugs lay in exposing the music to a generation that might otherwise never hear it. It refreshes their catalogues, it keeps them pertinent and present, Wakely says. If you refresh it, it stays in the culture. Presumably there was the small matter of a significant sum being handed over too? To be clear, I think the Beatles were fine without me, he says. I dont think it was ever about the cash. They made the cash long ago. Once he had the rights, everyone wanted to talk to Josh Wakely. In the weeks after, it was all expensive cars coming to take me to meetings at Disney and Dreamworks, he says. But while being feted was nice, he realised that if he signed with one of the majors hed get the bungalow and the credit but he wouldnt be making the show himself. So instead he went with Netflix and the Seven Network in Australia. I came back to Sydney to set up an animation company, which was its own epic journey. It was as hard, really, as securing the Beatles rights. Wakely is a restless spirit, though, and long before the first season was in the can he was onto the next thing. I kept saying to them, You know when I get the Beatles rights then Ill ask for Motown, because that will be electrifying for children. They just thought that was part of my stand-up act. And then Beat Bugs had success and I went back and reminded them. [embedded content] He landed the Dylan catalogue too he even spent a couple of hours in the presence of the great man, an experience he describes as sacred and Universal has given him access to its entire repertoire as he looks for ways to tell stories about the songs, or the stories behind the songs. Because that, really, is his thing. For now at least. When he got the go-ahead to do Beat Bugs, he says, Id never directed a frame of animation and Id only written one childrens script. But I get how music works with storytelling and I took a lot of confidence out of that. Now his slate also includes projects with Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, and a project called 27, based on the mythical age at which so many rock stars have died. What if one of them survived, and you get this alternative history, he says. You can watch it linear or you can watch it interactive.

The dining room in this converted warehouse is buzzing.Credit:Louise Kennerley Despite his success with Beat Bugs and Motown Magic, Wakelys main interest is in adult-oriented drama and comedy. He wants his company, Grace, to develop into a fully fledged production house, ideally based in Australia. The creative talent is here, he says. Its just a question of whether the resources and infrastructure are here and if youd get the blessing [from the studios in LA] to do it here. Theres no knowing how much of this he will be able to bring to fruition, of course. But on the evidence to date, youd be mad to rule out the possibility that he might just pull it off. At any rate, all he can do is ask for the chance to try. The odd power I take into those rooms is a sense that I shouldnt be there anyway, the kid from Newcastle says. So what have I got to lose? Follow the author on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin Karl is a senior entertainment writer at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. Most Viewed in Entertainment Loading https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/how-josh-wakely-landed-the-beatles-dylan-motown-and-more-20190408-p51c3z.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed