#i have no idea if i intend to present a cohesive narrative

[gascreates]

So, in your AtLA Dino AU, do they switch back and forth or what?

that's the idea, yep! everyone can swap back and forth between their human form and dino form at will. the few worldbuilding rules i have in my head are that transforming takes energy and practice, dino forms can't talk, dino forms can still bend, and dinos are only known in the world as humans. there aren't raw dinos running around, unfortunately. that said, im very lenient on world building details here, it's not really a cohesive narrative at the moment. im literally just making art and jokes ahdjhsjf

alsoooo im fully on board with other interpretations or people using my dino designs for their own aus!!! i'd love to see other people's takes

[shredsandpatches]

Can you expand on Faust's final fate not being earned being central to all versions of the story? Because in the Goethe at least I couldn't agree more. Faust's salvation has nothing to do with Faust and that's the point.

OKAY SO. I do want to preface what's likely to be a horrible incoherent ramble that contradicts itself like five different times per paragraph by mentioning, first, that I haven't fully worked out an actual argument or Grand Unified Theory of Faustology, I'm just kind of turning it over in my head, and, that I recognize that the Christian framework of the original versions of the story isn't always intended literally in adaptations and doesn't always reflect orthodox Christian notions of salvation and damnation. I'm still grappling with what those concepts mean to Goethe, particularly, what the ultimate end of the "ever upward" approach might be. There are definitely multiple people likely to be reading this with far more in-depth knowledge of Goethe than I have (and MUCH better German). I do think, though, that that sense of undeservedness cuts across versions of the story--certainly the serious approaches starting with Marlowe--and I also think it's important because it makes us consider why it doesn't feel quite right. What moral standards are we using to consider either Faust himself or the version of the universe in which he operates?

(eta: put in a readmore)

Marlowe's version, for instance, is very much still informed by the Reformation-era context that originally produced the story, and is rooted in his own experience being a Cambridge student at a time when Calvinism was the hot topic of the day. He presents a sharp disconnect between the theological and moral arcs of the play: as an article I recently read puts it, the primary focus is on Faustus' sins against God, not against other people (most of his actions against other people are either dumb pranks, actions arguably taken in self-defense, or actions against targets that the original audience would see as deserving, like the pope). Faustus isn't a particularly good person, of course, but neither is he particularly evil, and the idea that one's reprobate status (or impenitence, it's ambiguous) would be reflected in one's actions is weirdly absent. He's at his least sympathetic before he sells his soul. The theological arguments for his damnation are pretty cohesive but I think it also doesn't feel right on a human level: does this mean we're meant to question our own sympathies, or Calvinist/general Protestant theology? And then with Goethe's version you have the opposite issue, where Faust's motivations as described are more sympathetic than those of Marlowe's Faustus--he wants happiness, satisfaction, youth--and at the same time he causes so much collateral damage with his massive self-absorption. He doesn't generally seem to act out of malicious intent and generally doesn't actively want to wreck people's lives specifically, but at the same time he doesn't pay heed to things like the obvious and foreseeable consequences of seducing a girl who lives in a strict patriarchal society or asking a demon to convince people to move out of their house for urban planning purposes and only really acknowledges them when it's too late. What does it mean, in this case, for him to be saved, for whatever value of "saved" exists in Goethe's universe? Or, since Goethe seems to operate on a strongly allegorical level especially in Faust II (I haven't even gotten into the whole cosmic-wager side of the story) what are the big ideas at work here? We have to tease those out instead of just passing judgment on the character, and we have to hash out how Faust-the-character is quintessentially human and what that means.

So, like. The tl;dr version is that I think that because the Faust narrative is a collection of stories about our standards, what we value and what we condemn, and our human limitations and where we stand in relation to (whatever concept of) the eternal, his ultimate fate is always unsettling because the idea of sort of weighing up everything about a person and finally defining them might be relatively easy from a distance but the more you think about it the harder it gets, and it's important that we sit with that. If that makes sense.

[voidaspects]

My initial thoughts on what we've seen from Little Nightmares III so far:

okay, first of all-

ohmygodohmygod it's happening this is the best day of my life I'm eternally grateful we get more of this oh my god I'm so happy-

okay, with that out of the way, I have more in depth thoughts. My overall feelings on the reveal are incredibly positive, but with the caveat that this is still visibly missing some elements from the initial LN formula. This isn't to say that this will be bad in comparison, just different, and I feel it's worth it to put a spotlight on that.

The most obvious example of a change in philosophy is the inclusion of multiplayer. To be totally honest, I was actually worried about the idea of them including it, because the addition seems to stand against the linear artistic experience that the series is recognized for, but the way they've pitched the multiplayer does sound pretty unobtrusive, so I'll bite my tongue on that. I do think it has a risk of making the experience less cohesive though. It's clear that the decision was inspired by LN2, but that undersells the amount of individuality that six has in that game. You can't recreate the volatile emotions of your interactions with her if there wasn't the moments where she's not there with you, and you couldn’t have the scripted moments where she acts of her own accord to serve the narrative, if she was meant to serve the dual purpose of being a vessel for another player. idk, I suppose we'll see.

The other visible element that branches out from the original philosophy is the very clear push towards grounded, overt storytelling. Little nightmares from the beginning has presented it's story in a very deliberately vague way. Typically, it pushes the story beats through implication, and let's your brain fill in the gaps to get the intended story beats alongside some lingering uncertainty of the conclusion you've come to. it's not a game that is meant to be explained (contrary to what some youtube videos might tell you lol). the truth of little nightmares story is, explicitly, what you personally take away from it. some people view six as sympathetic, some people view her as purely heartless, and neither conclusion is wrong (please don't fight about it ; ;)

anyway, point is... this new entry is distancing itself from that element that's been inherently baked in until this point. like in the initial development of the first game, they removed all references to real world language, there is deliberately no spoken language in the series. the only exception so far, out of every piece of media in the series, has been the comics, which were cancelled and decanonized (though those characters still exist in that universe somewhere, in my heart ; ;) and the press release material, which has been the backbone of all explicitly stated Little Nightmares facts. we wouldn't even have character names if it weren't for that stuff, there are no names stated in any of those games!

with that said, and while it is cool as hell that they exist... making the new announcement of additional story media in this universe be through audio drama is a bit of an odd choice, isn't it? like... inherently? with this in mind? Like I'm over the moon with excitement, I'm not complaining, but the change in philosophy is pretty visible, right?

also, speaking of the universe, another example of the shift to more overt and clear storytelling is that they've officially given the setting a name. this isn't strictly new, we have "The Maw" "The Nest" (still canon in my heart ; ;) "The Pale City" and the new game, in turn, has "The Necropolis"

and yet, another name in the marketing has been "the Nowhere," a name that has been exclusively described with language implying we are already familiar with it, e.g. "welcome back to the Nowhere" and "are you ready to return to the Nowhere?"

This name has never been used in any previous media, as far as I know, but I think it's pretty clear that the underlying implication is that "The Nowhere" refers to the entirety of the LN universe.

not to sound like a broken record, but... my reaction remains a simultaneous "this is cool as hell" and "this was made with a very different philosophy in mind."

I predict that LN3 will have a much more cohesive story, grounded in a specific and defined setting. We've lost the ambiguity present in the series' identity, but that could lead to some cool things in the future.

overall? I'm extremely excited and incredibly optimistic, but do think that we should go into this new experience with the understanding that it might be a different one. There is visibly a new team working on this one, and while they may not have put as much focus into the subtleties of this franchise's identity, they are very clearly trying to stay true to the overall identity. you can tell in the art style, it's borderline perfect, and it's very clear that the people working on this knew how important stuff like that was to this game, and to us. This won't be the same experience that Tarsier would have made, but Tarsier was content to not make any more of that experience, so a new direction is far from blasphemous. I'm overjoyed that we're getting this new experience, with all it's little differences, and I can't wait to see what they do.

(also, to anyone who's curious about the design philosophy of the original game, I highly recommend this presentation. I feel like not enough people have seen this, and it's so interesting. Its all neat, but since It was partially to promote the game while it was still being developed, a lot of stuff in it is just showcasing a demo of the game and showing the trailer. All the cool stuff you'll wanna hear starts around the 16 minute mark)

[greatwyrmgold]

One thing that's been in the back of my mind is the aesthetic component of great video essays. I don't mean the fancy costumes of ContraPoints or PhilosophyTube, or at least I don't just mean those. The video that got me thinking about this topic was The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse by Dan Olson. The video has a running motif that I can only describe as "the 90's".

(Perhaps inaccurately—I don't actually remember any of the 90's, and I think there are some aesthetc call-backs to the 80's, too? Or at least things that make someone who never saw the 80's think "the 80's"...)

At its most obvious, you have Dan comparing the Lindt Experience to the decade's FMV adventure games. Once you I notice that detail, I started to see this motif reflected across the entire video—early Internet gifs in the title cards, references to other 90's or 90's-adjacent media, slides presented in the style of ye olde analog projectors, period music, and so on.

Why does Dan keep referencing the 90's? Several reasons come to mind.

Two of the big metaverse-inspiring narratives, Snow Crash and The Matrix, were written in the 90's. All modern "metaverses" are building on ideas developed in that era.

At the same time, they are failing to learn lessons learned in the 90's. Website design streamlined into a consistent form, simple layouts of text and perhaps images, because anything more complicated just makes the website more cumbersome. Decentraland and other metaverse projects which "activate the trap card of falsifiability" go hard in the other direction.

The whole video has a running mall motif. There's the MetaGamiMall, there's the mixture of social and commercial elements which malls embodied in their prime, there's the fact that Decentraland and other Metaverse projects are directly compared to dead malls, including in the title. That golden age of malls was, or at least included, the 90's.

Whatever the intended purpose of the 90's motif, or even if it has no purpose on its own, it serves to make the whole feature-length video essay feel cohesive. It makes the whole thing feel less like a series of topically linked shorts or a meandering stream of consciousness, and more like a single entity, a single work, a single argument with a singular thesis. "The Web 3.0 vision of the future is a dead mall."

[thorraborinn]

Now that your stance on Valhalla is pretty established, I wonder what is your stance on Fólkvangr? (narratively the same as Valhalla but this time ruled by a less-realpoliticking goddess; with the bonus of being opened to certain women). Is it the same?

I don't think the scant information we have about Fólkvangr is really enough to use it to make claims as big as the ones I do about Valhöll. I mean, since Grímnismál is one of the main ways that we have to know things about Valhöll, yeah, some of what I said about that will naturally apply to Fólkvangr as well, but not all of it. I also want to point out that I don't necessarily have a problem with all the speculation about Fólkvangr that modern heathens do, I'm just not going to participate in pretending it isn't speculation.

Here's every single word that Norse mythology has about Fólkvangr, from Grímnismál (and repeated by Snorri, who through the mouth of Hárr adds only that it's a bær 'town' or 'farmstead' in heaven and that the hall itself is called Sessrúmnir):

Fólkvangr [er inn níundi/heitir], en þar Freyja ræðr sessa kostum í sal; halfan val hon kýss hverjan dag, en halfan Óðinn á.

Fólkvangr [is the ninth/it is called], and there Freyja chooses who sits where in the hall; half the battle-slain she chooses every day but Óðinn has half.

Not only that but it's contained within Grímnismál, a poem not widely recognized as the batshit (affectionate) poem it is, the thing is pure lore concentrate. When you consider the prose intro and outro are probably added much later, it has almost no actual internal story and it's entire purpose is probably to encode the hugest amount of mytho-/cosmological information possible into a format easy to memorize. What one thinks about Fólkvangr will be at least partially determined by what one thinks about Grímnismál, who it was composed and/or performed by, who its intended audience was, if it's a complete cohesive poem or a mish-mash of different things, etc. If you're interested in digging more into that there's a good article by Bo Ralph on it where he also discusses earlier research. The poem presents itself as highly-restricted knowledge; I have no suggestions regarding whether or not we should believe it.

Since there is exactly one word telling us who goes to Fólkvangr (valr 'battle-slain') I don't infer any different distribution of gender than in Valhöll. The assumption that Freyja is more likely to choose women who die in battle than Óðinn is is, in fact, an assumption. It also doesn't say that Freyja gets first pick like everyone thinks. You could make the argument based on this stanza in isolation that Freyja "chooses" (kýss) while Óðinn gets the leftovers, but in stanza 8 it's Hroptr who kýss. The idea of Óðinn building some human protégé up for years and then turning the tide of battle against him in order to claim him and then Freyja going "mine" is very funny to me but we never see it happen.

I don´t think that Þorgerðr Egilsdóttir's line about how she wasn´t going to eat until she did so with Freyja is evidence she expected to go to Fólkvangr. All that tells us is that 13th century Christians thought 10th century pagans expected to see their gods when they died (I am not phrasing it this way to imply they were wrong, nor is this disclaimer to imply they were right).

The whole thing generates more questions than answers and that's really what its value is. The question of why it isn´t mentioned anywhere else may be less salient when you consider how little lore there is about Freyja in general, but still isn't trivial.

(Wild speculation to follow).

My shot in the dark is that there was a trajectory in late pre-Christian paganism of responding to concerns brought on by contact with Christianity, namely increasingly complex view of afterlife and a more generally skyward and universalist (in the real sense of the term) orientation. This might not take much actual invention, just a little switch of emphasis, because if my guess is right there may not have been a cosmic complex of afterlife abodes, but highly complex otherworld geographies probably did already exist without them necessarily being thought of as afterlife locations. For some reason, as often as Fólkvangr is mentioned by modern heathens as an alternative to Valhöll, everyone seems to miss that there is even better evidence for an afterlife place governed by Þórr, mentioned in passing (easily dismissed as a joke, even) in Hymiskviða but then likely actually described here in Grímnismál.

There may be something of an ecumenical impulse; we expect that the poets who contributed to the creation and spread of Grímnismál were probably devoted to Óðinn as he is both the narrator/protagonist and the god the poem has the most information about (oh yeah and also the specifically saying flat-out "Óðinn is the highest god" in stanza 44), but there seems to be an attempt at some kind of totality, even if it falls short. It features Ullr and Forseti -- two gods we know (or at least strongly suspect) to have been extremely important but in a contextually limited way that normally doesn't extend into the main body of myth that we still have access to.

We might be looking at a poem meant to prepare skálds to be able to operate with a variety of audiences but also in a de-facto way it codifies a sort of pantheon that we (finally, and mostly rightfully) have gotten used to denying was a real recognized thing, and also pushes toward a codified and universalist paganism, even if only as a utility for skálds. And to be clear, I don't rule out the possibility of it being intentional, an attempt to demo a universalist paganism that could go toe-to-toe with Christianity. I'm just saying that it doesn't necessitate that; an oral poet who grows up in one area but needs to be able to operate in others with distinct customs would benefit from a sort of "higher" stratum of myth that is more all-encompassing than that found in any specific place.

But some of these ideas, including Fólkvangr and Bilskírnir, may have only ever been half-finished and either remained so regionally-specific that they never spread enough to be seen in the sagas, or were created in the supra-regional context I'm proposing and never actually took hold in a local community, either because the conversion to Christianity happened before it had a chance to spread; or because this general trajectory wasn't actually popular to begin with.

There are more questions to ask (e.g. why is Freyja creating a reserve of warriors if she's never mentioned in connection to Ragnarök?) but I've probably gone on long enough to get the point across that considering Fólkvangr in any way a settled, secure, well-understood idea is cheating ourselves.

[essayonskills]

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[nopefun]

Interview #494: Ryan Frigillana

Ryan Frigillana is a Philippine-born lens-based artist living and working in New York. His work focuses on the fluidity of memory, intimacy, family identity, and visual culture, largely filtered through the lens of race and immigration. Embracing its plasticity, Frigillana explores photography’s relationship to context as a catalyst for thematic dialogue.

His first monograph, Visions of Eden, was published as two editions in 2020, and is held in the library collections of the MoMA, Getty Research Institute, and Smithsonian among others.

We spoke to find out more about Visions of Eden, his love for photobooks, and photography as a medium for introspection.

Lee Chang Ming Ryan Frigillana

Thanks for agreeing to do this! As we’ve just arrived into the new year, I want to start by asking: how did you arrive at photography and how has your practice evolved so far? Your earlier work was anything from still life to street photography, but your recent work seems to deal with more personal themes.

It’s my pleasure; thank you for having this conversation with me! Wow, looking back at how I’ve arrived at this point makes me feel so grateful for this medium, and excited to think of where it will lead me from here. I came to photography somewhat late. I was initially studying to become a nurse and was set to start a career in that field, but I found myself unhappy with where I was going. My mother was a nurse and I know what goes into being one; it’s not an easy job, and I respect those who do it, but my heart wasn’t in it. I found photography as a creative outlet during that stage of my life, and I’ve clung onto it ever since.

My first exposure to photography (no pun intended) came in the form of street and photojournalism. I would borrow books from the library a lot, consuming works by Magnum and other photographers working in that tradition. At the time, it was all I knew so that’s what I tried to emulate. Even early on in my undergrad career, these modes of creation were reinforced by curriculum and by what I saw from my own peers. My still-life work branches off of that same sentiment: the only names that were ever thrown around by professors were Penn and Mapplethorpe, so that’s who I studied. Thankfully over the years, I’ve been able to broaden that perspective through my own research. Though I don’t necessarily pursue street or constructed still-lifes anymore for my personal work, I’d like to think my technical skills (in regard to timing, composition, light) owe a debt to those past experiences.

I suppose now I’m starting to explore how photography can be used as language, to communicate ideas and internal conflicts. I’m thinking more about the power of imagery, its authorship, its implications, and how photographs have shaped, and continue to shape, our reality. That’s where my work is headed at the moment.

I liked how you mentioned photography as a language, which calls into question who we are speaking to when we make images and what kind of narrative we construct by putting photographs together.

In your work “Visions of Eden”, you trace your family’s journey as first-generation Filipino immigrants in America. I was quite struck by how you managed to link together original photography, archived materials and video stills. To me, with the original photography there was a sense of calm and clarity, perhaps in the composition. But with the archived material it was like peering through tinted glass, and the video stills felt like an unsteady memory. What was the editing process like for you and how did you decide what to include or exclude?

For me, editing is the hardest part about photography. Shooting is the enjoyable part of course because it can feel so cathartic. Sometimes when I shoot it feels almost like muscle memory in the sense that you see the world and you just react to it in a trained way. But with editing, it’s more of a cerebral exercise. More thought is involved when you have to deal with visual relationships, sequence, rhythm, and spacing, etc. The real creation of my work takes place in the editing process. That’s where the ingredients come together to form an identity.

When creating this identity, I not only have to think about what I want to say, but also how I want to say it. It’s like speaking; there are numerous ways you can communicate a single sentence. How are images placed in relation to one another? How large are they printed, or how much white space surrounds it? Are the images repeated? What’s on the following page? The preceding page? Is there text? How are they positioned on the spread? All of these little choices impact the tone of your work. And that’s not even mentioning tactile factors like paper stock or cover material. I think that’s why I have such a deep love for photobooks because 1) they’re physical objects and 2) someone has obsessed over every aspect of that object.

I’m aware that my photographs lately have a quiet, detached, somewhat stripped-down quality to them. I think that’s just a subconscious rejection of my earlier days shooting a lot of street where I was constantly seeking crowded frames and complexity in my compositions. As I’ve grown older, I realize less is more and if I can do more by saying less, that’s even better. Now, the complexity I seek lies in the work as a whole and how all these little parts can form something fluid and layered, and not easily definable.

For Visions of Eden, I wanted the work to feel somewhat syncopated and wandering in thought. That meant finding a balance between my quiet static photographs and the movement and energy of the video stills, or balancing the coldness of the illustrations with the warmth of the family snapshots. The work needed to be cohesive but have enough ambiguity for it to take life in someone else’s imagination. Peoples’ lived experiences in regard to immigration and religion are so complex that they can’t be narrated in any one definitive way. Visions of Eden, hopefully, is a rejection of that singularity.

Yes, there’s definitely something special and intimate about flipping through a photobook! For your monograph, you recently released a second edition which is different from your first (redesigned, added images, etc.). Why did you decide to make it different? Was the editing mainly a solitary process?

The first edition was a partially hand-made object. Illustrations were printed on translucent vellum paper and then tipped into the gutter of the book. When you flip through the pages, those vellum sheets would overlap over certain images, creating a collage-like effect. That was my original concept for this book. Doing this, however, was so laborious and time consuming, and not to mention expensive! Regretfully, I wound up making only twenty copies of that first edition. I wanted the work shared with a wider audience so that’s why I decided to publish a second run.

The latest edition is more of a straight-forward production without the vellum paper. With this change in design, I had to reconfigure the layout. I took liberties in swapping out some images or adding new ones altogether. Also, a beautiful afterword was contributed by my friend, artist, writer, and curator Efrem Zelony-Mindell. I still feel so fortunate and grateful to have had my work seen and elevated by their words in my book.

For the most part, yes editing is quite a solitary process for me. But there does come a point when I feel it’s ready, where I share the work with a few trusted people. It’s always nice to have that outer support system. Much of Visions of Eden was created during my time in undergrad school so I had all sorts of feedback from peers and professors which I’m grateful for. But in the end, as the author, you ultimately have the final say in your work.

Given that Eden is a starting point and metaphor in the work, I was thinking about ideas of gardens, (forbidden) fruit, and movement of people.

How do you view yourself in relation to your place of birth? In your series, I see the most direct links in the letters, old photos where tropical foliage is present in the background, and the photo of the jackfruit (perhaps the only tropical fruit in this series).

I came to America when I was very young, about five years old. For my family and for many other families still living in the Philippines, America is seen as a sort of ideological Eden: a land of milk and honey, of wealth and excess. We all know that’s far from the truth. Every Eden has a caveat, a forbidden tree. Which leads me to ask: as an immigrant living in this country, what fruits were never intended for me?

I honestly don’t remember much about my childhood in the Philippines aside from fleeting memories of my relatives, the sounds of animals, the smell of rain and earth, the taste of my grandmother’s cooking. The identity that I carry with me now as a Filipino is not so much tied to the physical geography of a place but rather it is derived from a way of life, from shared stories, in the values we hold dear, passed on from generation to generation. This is a warm flame that lives on in me to this day as I write these words thousands of miles away from where I came.

Photographs have a way of shaping our memory and our relationship to the past, which in turn affects how we engage with the present. The family photographs and letters used in my book act as anchors in a meandering journey. They serve as landmarks that I can return to whenever I feel lost or need assurance so far away from “home”. They give me the comfort and affirmation that I need to navigate a space where I never really felt I belonged. The spread in my book­­ that you mentioned—the jackfruit on one side, and the Saran-wrapped apple on the preceding page—was a reference to my duality as both Filipino and American. It’s a reminder and an acknowledgment that I am a sum of many things, of many people who have shaped me. If I flourish in life, it’s because my roots were nourished by love.

I like how you mentioned photos as anchors or landmarks. Isn’t that why we create and photograph? To mark certain points in our lives and to envision possible futures, like a cartographer mapping an inner journey. Do you feel like you and your relationships with those you photographed changed through the process of making your works?

When my parents took pictures of our family, it wasn’t done solely in the name of remembrance; it also served as an affirmation of ourselves and our journey—a celebration. Every birthday, vacation, school ceremony, or even the seemingly insignificant events of daily life were all photographed or video-taped as a way of saying to ourselves, “Here we are. Look how far we’ve come. Look at the life we’ve made. And here’s the proof”.

Now, holding a camera and photographing my family through my own lens still carries all of that celebratory joy, but with so much more possibility. Before I really took photography seriously, I never realized its potential as a medium for introspection, but that’s ultimately what it has become for me. In taking pictures of my family, I not only clarify my own feelings about them, but the act of photography itself informs and builds on my relationship with each person. The camera is not a mere recording device, but a tool for understanding, processing, and even expressing love...or resentment. Though I may not be visible in my pictures, my presence is there: in my proximity, my gaze, my focus.

Does all of this impact my relationships? Absolutely. Photographing another person willingly always demands some degree of trust and vulnerability from both sides. There’s a silent dialogue that occurs which feels like an exchange of secrets. I think that’s why I often don’t feel comfortable photographing other people unless we’re very close. Usually my family is open enough to reveal themselves to me, other times what they give can feel quite guarded. That’s a constant negotiation. After the photograph is made though, nobody ever emerges the same person because each of us has relinquished something, no matter how small.

Being self-reflexive in photography is so important. I agree it should be a constant negotiation, but it’s something that bothers me these days – the power dynamic between the photographer and photograph, particularly for personal and documentary projects. More significantly, after the photograph has been made, who is really benefiting. But I guess if we are sensitive to that then perhaps we can navigate that tricky path and find a balance. 

Right, finding that balance is key and sometimes there are no clear-cut answers. That power dynamic is something I always have to be mindful of. As the photographer, you are exercising a certain role and position. At the end of the day, you’re the one essentially “taking” what you need and walking away. There’s an inherent violence or aggression in the act of taking someone’s picture, no matter how well-intended it may be. This aggression carries even greater weight when working, as you say, in a genre like documentary where representation is everything.

I remember an undergrad professor of mine, Nadia Sablin, introducing me to the work of Shelby Lee Adams—particularly his Appalachian Legacy series. Adams spent twenty-five years documenting the disadvantaged Appalachian communities in his home state of Kentucky, visiting the same families over a long period of time. Though the photographs are beautifully crafted, they pose many questions in regard to exploitation, representation, and the aestheticization of suffering. He is or was, after all, an artist thriving and profiting off of these photographs. Salgado is another that comes to mind. This was the first time I really stopped to think about the ethics of image-making. Who is benefitting from it all?

I think the search for this balance is something each photographer has to reckon with personally. Though each situation may vary with different factors that have to be weighed, and context that must be applied, you can always ask yourself these same ever-pertinent questions: am I representing people in a dignified way, and what are my intentions with these images? Communication (listening), building relationships, acknowledging your power, and respecting the people you photograph are all foundational things to consider when exercising your privilege with the camera.

Well said! The process of making photographs can be tricky to navigate yet rewarding. Any upcoming projects or ideas? What’s keeping you busy these days?

Oh, let’s just say I’m constantly juggling 3-4 ideas in my head at any given time, but ninety percent of the time they don’t ever lead to anything finished haha. This past year has been tough on everyone I’m sure. I’ve been dealing a lot with personal loss and grief and the compounded isolation brought on by the pandemic, so for months I’ve been making photographs organically as a subconscious response to these internal struggles. It’s more of an exploration of grief itself as a natural phenomenon and force—like time or gravity. Grief is something everyone will experience in life and each of us deals with it differently, but in the end we have to let it run its course. I see these photographs as a potential body of work that could materialize as a zine or book one day, so we’ll see where that goes.

Other than that, I’ve been working on an upcoming collaboration project with Cumulus Photo. Speaking of which, I saw your photograph featured in their latest zine, running to the edge of the world. Congrats on that! It’s beautiful. But yeah, just trying my best to keep busy and sane, and improving myself any way I can.

Thanks! Looking forward to your upcoming projects! Last question: any music to recommend?

I feel like my answer to this question can vary by the week. I go through phases where I exhaust whole albums on repeat until I get tired of them. So I’ll leave you with the two currently on my rotation: Angles by The Strokes, and Screamadelica by Primal Scream.

Thank you for your time!

Thank you for a lovely discourse. I had a lot of fun!

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[clarenecessities]

As my followers may have picked up from my long, spiraling rants, I’ve undertaken a new research project, courtesy of the death grip She-Ra has on my brain. And guess what? It’s finally at Disseminate Information Stage! So I’m going to lay out all of the gods, demigods, and godbeasts of the Masters of the Universe. With sources!

This table is more of a cheat sheet. We’re gonna tackle this god by god, with a section on Actual Lore & a meta section to help you decide how valid you think they are, because frankly some canons are more canon than others.

Asklepia, Benevolent Snake Goddess

Lore: Asklepia is one of two snake goddesses, the benevolent twin sister of Serpentia. We know very little about her abilities, but the Snake Clan (a clan of human warriors) were said to worship her, and they were famed for their architecture and healing. She had the ability to curse and deform people--to what extent is uncertain, but she’s known to have condemned a fallen priest named Ka, whose disfigured likeness now adorns Snake Mountain.

Behind the Scenes: First appearing in the 1987 comic “Il Nero Cristallo Del Potere“, Asklepia remained nameless for over 30 years, until Masters of the Universe Classics (MOTUC) released a few choice bios. For the unfamiliar, MOTUC seeks to reconcile the often contradictory canons into one overarching narrative, which is great in theory, but in practice is kind of like putting ice cream on a hot dog. And calling it a Chilly Dog ® as if that makes it taste better. But I digress. In 2019 they released a bio for the Staff of Ka which finally put a name to the less-evil Snake Goddess, in an obvious nod to Asclepius and the asklepian (that staff+snake icon people put on medical stuff).

Sharella, the Green Goddess and/or “Avatar” of Asklepia

Lore: Contradictory

Long Version: Okay I’ve put avatar in quotes because it is... contentious. Basically, and you’ll see here why I felt the need to make this post instead of relying blindly on the wikis, Sharella was introduced (in the ‘87 licensing guide) as a tribal leader who had joint custody of Gray, the original name of He-Ro’s alter ego, while he was growing up. This was further developed by Emiliano Santalucia’s concept work, wherein she was the leader of the Green Tiger Tribe (GTT) specifically. While the comic concept was not run through licensing & is thus not “canon”, the idea of her leading the GTT persisted. This teeny tiny image of her from Tytus and Megator’s 1987 Italian box art was all we had until 2008, when one of He-Man’s accessories described her as the “warrior woman ally” of Queen Veena, “who had been changed into the immortal green-skinned avatar of the Goddess Asklepia”. In 2009, MOTUC released a figure for The Goddess, apparently forgetting they’d done that shit the year before because the packaging did say “K’yrulla” was her real name. They had to cover it up with a sticker. 

So who’s The Goddess? Way back in the days before Mattel solidified any of the lore around MOTU, there were mini-comics released with the toys. Initially, the Goddess served a similar function to the Sorceress in the cartoon, and was in fact sometimes called the Sorceress. She facilitated He-Man’s transformations, gave him missions, was generally magical and mysterious, etc. If you know who the Sorceress is, and you can picture Teela, but green? That’s about it.

Back to Sharella, though. The Third Ultimate Battleground rolled around in 2015, and for the first time since some packaging in the 80s, we saw Sharella in action! She was shot through the heart with a poison arrow. Yeah. But don’t worry, she received a blood transfusion from Moss Man (who we’ll get to later), and was transformed into the Green Goddess! She’s immortal now. How Asklepia figures in here is sort of unclear, which is weird since this is still part of the MOTUC line, but whatever. Whatever! Queen Grayskull (the aforementioned Veena) received a bio in 2015 as well, which described Sharella as her apprentice who became “The Goddess”.

Horokoth, Aspect of the Mother Goddess

Lore: DC went a little batshit (pun intended) with the lore for the Eternity War. Here the Goddess is three combined aspects, “Serpos” (Serpentia) for the Snake Men, Zoar for the human “Eternians”, and a third, invented deity called Horokoth, who represents the Horde. Horokoth is “the coming destroyer. The darkness at the end of days.” and is represented by a bat.

Behind the Scenes: That last link has a clearer picture of her, it just didn’t crop well. Also, I confess I couldn’t bring myself to read Eternity War. As thrilling as the prospect of a cohesive narrative is, if I wanted to see Adora slit her brother’s throat there’s the edgier side of deviantArt to peruse. Therefore I know little of Horokoth outside of a few still images of Hordak. The bat was almost certainly selected for the Horde’s vespertilian emblem.

Hordeous, God-Beast of Horokoth

Lore: A “primordial”, bat-like godbeast of Horokoth, created in response to the god Saz’s feline races. Their face was “forever infused“ on the surface of Horde World by Horde Lord (Hordak and Horde Prime’s father in the MOTUC canon) to grant their family power and immortality.

Behind the Scenes: Yes they’ve used some words wrong, but they’ve got the spirit, right? Hordeous was (allegedly, this is secondhand) an invention of the MOTUC crew in answer to Horokoth. Now, the Horde Supreme bio predates Horokoth’s introduction by about 3 years, but obviously the comics were in production already. There’s an undated sketch of Horokoth Hordak from an undated interview (thanks for nothing you useless website) but in that same gallery there’s an orko sketch labeled 2012 so. We’re good right? That makes sense, timeline-wise. Anyway the comics slam dunked Horde Prime out of existence and combined him with Horde Lord so it’s contradictory anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Serpentia, Malevolent Snake Goddess

Lore: The evil counterpart of Asklepia, Serpentia is the goddess of the Snake Men. The priest Ka of the Snake Clan forsook Asklepia in her favor, destroying Asklepia’s sacred orb and stealing the Serpent Ring (an artefact capable of transforming humans into Snake Men) from the Ophidian Spire with King Hsss. In DC’s triune interpretation of the Goddess, Serpentia (here ‘Serpos’) is blood, passion, and desire. A primal and primordial force appearing to the Snake Men in their own image.

Behind the Scenes: Okay yes I’ve reused the Asklepia pic but in my defense they are twins and this is the easiest one to crop. So here’s the thing about Serpentia: we only got a name for her in 2019. We knew there was a snake goddess, and she was pretty evil, or at least hostile towards mammalian life (see: the source of the pic I chose for her). Where Asklepia references the asklepian, ‘Serpentia’ is a much more heavy-handed snake reference, even though Anguis was right there. Those Masters Mondays came through for us, though, with the shield and staff of Ka, Ssssylph, and of course MOTUC’s Dark Despot Skeletor, which is. something. Though only recently named, Serpentia has been a shadow over Eternia since the Snake Men’s introduction in 1985 (or, depending on how much of the presented backstory you accept, even sooner in the form of Skeletor’s lair, Snake Mountain).

Serpos/Sarcedon, God-Beast of Snake Mountain

Lore: Contradictory, but the gist of it is he’s a very large snake with elemental magic and a grudge, that was turned to stone and became Snake Mountain.

Long Version: Snake Mountain was conceived of towards the end of 1982, but wasn’t revealed to the public until September of 1983, with the debut of the Filmation cartoon. For another year, the snake coiled around its summit was simply a carving, its mouth hollowed out for Skeletor to stand in and loom. But in 1984 the Snake Mountain toy was released, completely discarding the Filmation design in favor of the hewn face of the figure we now call Ka. Instead of a snake carving winding its way up the peak, the Mattel toy featured a ‘striking serpent’, alive and attached to the mountain itself. From there, it was an easy leap to make to ‘this carving comes alive’. So easy, in fact, that they did it twice!

First attempted in 1985 in the newspaper storyline “Vengeance of the Viper King”, the snake was here called Sarcedon, the World Destroyer. At the dawn of time, he was said to crush Eternia within his deadly coils. He burrowed deep into the ground, causing fearsome storms that nearly destroyed the planet. Only a fearless hero (implied to be He-Ro) could defeat and imprison Sarcedon. Using a macguffin called a Mirror of History, He-Man forced Sarcedon to behold his own reflection in a reference to the Medusa myth that kind of missed the point of it being reflective. Sarcedon was sent back in time, Snake Mountain was restored, the good guys win, blah blah blah.

That was the last of it until the MYP cartoon in 2004. Serpos as a name was actually first invoked by Mer-Man in a 1982 minicomic, but like it probably wasn’t about the snake. Anyway in the MYP cartoon the Snake Men get this thing called the Medallion of Serpos that lets them un-petrify the snake around Snake Mountain, grow two more heads, and unleash his godly wrath. He breathes fire, trashes Eternos, beats up He-Man, then turns his attention on Castle Grayskull to consume the Orb of Power (containing the strength and wisdom of the Elders, who had first trapped him in stone). He-Man cuts off Serpos’s extra heads with a sword upgrade, the Elders are somehow magically restored to life, and they re-petrify him. Snake Mountain is restored, the good guys win, blah blah blah.

Zoar, the Fighting Falcon

Lore: Contradictory, but it sure is a bird!

Long Version: While Sharella’s backstory is fraught because of the comics couldn’t decide what they wanted her to be, Zoar was similarly tangled up by the toyline. Initially male, he went through several color schemes, some prettier than others. Though there was a vague association with the Sorceress before the cartoon (recall that pre-Filmation, the Sorceress was just the Goddess), Filmation made them literally inseperable by designating Zoar as the Sorceress’s falcon form, to which she was confined when leaving Castle Grayskull.

Some of the comics and Golden books showed Zoar as being flipping enormous & ridden into battle as a steed by Teela and Man-at-Arms. Pre-Filmation, Zoar was always referred to as male, but post-Filmation, always female, as an incarnation of the Sorceress.

The Eternity Wars comics describe Zoar as the third aspect of the Goddess, the ‘Great Preserver’ whose light would shine through the universe for eternity. They pull off a sort of tripartite priestess thing where it’s Serpos/Zoar/Horokoth represented by Teela-Na (the Sorceress)/Teela/Evil-Lyn.

MOTUC, of course, had to reconcile all of these contradictory canons. How’d they do it? “In the folklore of Eternia, the golden falcon symbolized the godhead Zoar, a powerful deity of Preternia. As a god, Zoar could appear in both male and female guises and while the blue-tipped female falcon was associated with the Sorceress of Grayskull, the golden falcon represented Zoar's masculine nature.” So Zoar is genderfluid now, and the Sorceress is merely borrowing their form when transforming into a falcon. This bio also established that Zoar had anointed the first Sorceress, Veena (Queen Grayskull), which explains why she has wings for no apparent reason.

Also it’s not offically MOTUC but the scultors of the line, Four Horsemen, made a single anthro Zoar for Power-Con 2013. In case you need that for some reason.

Glorybird, Emissary of Zoar

Lore: Many millennia ago, there were three siblings, who were very poor and mistreated by their stepmother, but had hearts filled with kindness and love. Zoar, recognizing their resilience and desire to help people, sent an emissary named Glorybird. Glorybird bestowed upon each sibling a divine gift, but as they used their new powers to fight for good, their stepmother revealed herself to be a Celestial Witch & attempted to sacrifice them to Zoar’s “greatest enemy”, Horokoth.  

Backstory: Okay, so the Star Sisters (and Glorybird) were in exactly one episode of She-Ra, primarily to set them up as new toy designs. While prototypes were made for these, the figures weren’t actually produced until MOTUC released figures for them in 2012. Though they were referenced in Princess Prom, and we saw a brief cameo in a background, Glorybird was absent until the introduction of the Star Siblings in Season Five.

That’s right! This bird is a god, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Saz, God of All Felines

Lore: One of the “Gods of the Multiverse” (he is the only member named explicitly), Saz was a blue-furred, feline deity responsible for the creation of all cats, humanoid or otherwise. He transformed himself into an enormous cat-beast to defeat Serpos and Hordeous, whose progenitors created them in envy of his children. Though Serpos was defeated, Hordeous escaped into the cosmos, and Saz himself vanished mysteriously.

Behind the Scenes: “By the whiskers of Saz!” is a fun pseudo-swear made by various cat races throughout MOTU, first in He-Man’s “The Cat and the Spider” and later in She-Ra’s “Magicats”. That was the only real mention of him until... okay, so MOTUC bios aren’t always attached to the product. Starting in 2018, they did this thing called Masters Mondays where they put unposted bios on the org forums. So while we’ve had the sword since 2010, we didn’t get the background on it until March of 2020. And then a couple weeks later, the Cat Mask of Catra bio referred to him as a “mystical being” instead of a god, but the mask was from 2011 so. He may not have been a god yet. It really depends on when the bios were actually written.

Saz wielded a blade probably best described as a falchion, whose quillon & langet formed a vaguely triangular shape around a deep red gem. I want to be clear that while it looks totally rad, this sword would be very impractical and have poor structural integrity were it not made by a literal god. Do not make swords like this. Also it’s almost certainly riffing on the Sword of Omens from Thundercats (affectionate).

Sabe-Or, Son of Saz

Lore: A green-furred, orange-striped paladin, Sabe-Or is one of the only named Ancients. He inherited his father’s blade upon Saz’s mysterious disappearance, and lived for centuries more. Upon his death, he transferred his “heroic essence” into a group of Eternian tigers, forever transforming them into the Green Tiger Tribe, whence both Granger (steed of King Grayskull), and Cringer, steed of Prince Adam.

Behind the Scenes: So “Battle Cat Man” is a concept that’s existed since they decided to make their hero ride a wicked tiger into battle. If you show a kid a superhero, and a supertiger, apparently the natural inclination of most children in the 80s was to combine the two. There are so many custom action figures. So, so many. Sabe-Or is visually a clear reference to this concept, and canonically seems to be the closest we’re going to get outside of the Thundercats crossover, unless you count Cowarros from 4H’s Mythic Legions line (I do, because it means Purrrplor is also canon and I fucking love calling him that).

Moss Man, Ancient Eternian Nature God

Lore: An ally of King Grayskull, Moss Man was something of an Eternian cryptid in the centuries leading up to He-Man Times. He has control over all plant life, the ability to meld with plants, and apparently can imbue sentience to said plants.

Behind the Scenes: Moss Man wasn’t featured in many episodes, because he’s a little... incredibly over-powered. He’s literally Bigfoot from 5000 years ago with magic powers. And like, since I don’t think the writers appreciate how long 5000 years is, you know what happened 5000 years ago? Stonehenge. This bitch is Stonehenge-old. But sure, you can trace a direct line of descent from his contemporary. smh. Anyway according to MOTUC his real name is Kreann’Ot N’Norosh so make of that what you will. Also his toys were pine-scented. I just love that.

Evil Seed, Rebellious Creation of Moss Man

Lore: Created by Moss Man to help fight in the Great Wars, Evil Seed betrayed his master and turned to evil (who could have foreseen this...), finding joy in corrupting all forms of plant life for his own amusement. Moss Man imprisoned him in enchanted chains, keeping him restrained for many millennia.

Behind the Scenes: According to MOTUC, his real name is Sero Malustro, clumsy New Latin for “(to) plant evil-burnt“. Why his name is New Latin and Moss Man’s is... whatever that is, I have no idea. As you can see from the image I included, he originally had an artichoke head, which was upgraded for the Mike Young Productions (MYP) cartoon. Personally I think the artichoke rules.

Volcana, the Fire Goddess

Lore: Canonically, she’s a fire goddess, and the mother of the Volcano Magus. Together, they are a rising force that seeks to conquer Etheria in the wake of Hordak’s defeat.

Backstory: Volcana has taken a long a twisted journey, but was first revealed to fans at Power-Con 2016 in a panel revealing previously unseen concepts and characters. After the first wave of She-Ra toys, a second wave was planned with a snow focus, to bring more attention the Filmation-neglected Frosta. This began with the introduction of a fire villain, an “evil lady that glows with heat” who would attempt to melt Castle Chill. That concept actually refers to a character named Amber (not Ember, as one might assume) who was reworked into a benevolent counterpart, Volcana’s twin sister.

Volcana was later fleshed out to be a Fire Goddess with flame-red hair, x-ray vision, and arms sculpted with flames. Her cape flew up with flame detail that rose up to control the volcano (of Volcanica, a proposed toyset that seems to have been reworked into the Crystal Falls). She was emphasized by Mattel to not start fires, which, honestly, is probably why they scrapped the character. He-Man couldn’t use his sword as a sword; a woman made of fire was basically doomed.

Now, though, we’re several decades in and lines made for collecters that are largely in their 30s and 40s can say whatever they want! So she’s canon, even if Amber isn’t. Yes there’s only one mention of her. Amber technically was mentioned in an unproduced episode titled “Amber Waves of Flame”, but as it was unproduced, it’s noncanonical.

Volcano Magus, Sinister Son of Volcana

Lore: Living within a dormant volcano, the Volcano Magus of the German audio plays was the source of most of Catra’s power and all of her evil intent. He supplied her with magic for spells and schemes with which to assail the Crystal Castle, but neither she nor Clawdeen were aware of the dark influence he held over them.

In the MOTUC canon, he’s specified as the son of Volcana, a demigod from the “Region of Volcanoes” who craved the nature magic of the Whispering Woods. When he learned the Twiggets were inextricably linked to that magic, he used his powers to petrify the former Rebels (this was after the Horde's defeat) and kidnap three Twiggets to drain the magic from their souls. Twiggets, for the uninitiated, are like purple tree-elf things. According to MOTUC, Razz is a Twigget, though the ‘real’ name they assigned her doesn’t fit their naming convention. She is purple, I guess.

Kowl, who avoided petrification, read Razz's spellbooks to find a way to save his friends, and learned of an Entrapment Gem that she hid in a shoe, for some reason. He confronted the Volcano Magus, spoke in the ancient tongue of the First Ones, and sucked him into the Gem.

Backstory: Admittedly this stuff is second hand, as I don’t speak German & they only have transcriptions/translations for the He-Man tapes anyway, but if anybody can find me an audio file I will do my best to verify. The MOTUC stuff at least I can confirm 100% because it’s from 2019 & I do speak English, for better or worse.

Oak, the Jackal God

Lore: Oak was the terrible Jackal God worshiped by the denizens of Zhar, an ancient civilization that once existed in a remote, forested region of Eternia. Long ago, Oak was imprisoned within a statue which could be found within the Temple of the Jackal. When Skeletor removed the statue from the temple, Oak broke free of the enchantment which imprisoned him and wreaked havoc on Eternia. Although the Jackal God was immensely powerful, he could be weakened by the elements of nature and was ultimately foiled by a rainstorm conjured by the combined powers of He-Man's sword and the magic of the temple's guardian priest.

Backstory: I have lifted this from a He-Man guide word for word as I cannot for the life of me find a copy of the Brazilian Editora Abril comic he came from, O Templo Do Chacal (1986). The description is like, suspiciously similar to the plot of the He-Man episode The Cat and the Spider, except the Grimalkin was never described as a god. The rest of it--statue, Skeletor, storm defeat--plays out almost the same. True pity I can’t find the original source, but I do trust this guidebook. You may be interested in Ceres from the UK comics--another dog-slash-statue who frankly might as well be a god himself, but as he’s not called one in canon he’s not going on the list.

The Bitter Rose Goddess

Lore: As Man-at-Arms told the legend, “Every day, a woman climbed Rose Mountain to look for her husband to return from the war. Alas, he never came back. Her tears poured from her cheek and entered the ground. One day she disappeared, but where she stood was a single, solitary rose. It’s the only thing that grows on Rose Mountain.”

The Insect People, who lived at the base of Rose Mountain, believed that the Bitter Rose is all that held the mountain together (and when it was picked, they were proved right). After the flower was restored, it transformed into the Bitter Rose Goddess herself, who explained that she had been a prisoner of her love's sorrow, so bitter that she refused to allow anything else to grow on Rose Mountain. She blessed the surrounding area, blanketing the jagged peaks with roses, and disappeared.

Backstory: She’s kind of... barely a god. She showed up in one episode and no other media & has objectively less power than like, every single demon they ever brought in. I almost didn’t put her on this list.

Mask-Ra, Goddess of Masks

Lore: A goddess who created the magical Masks of Power.

Backstory: Mask-Ra was first mentioned in 2019 and like, look, I’m gonna be real. I don’t respect her. She’s an invention of MOTUC (unless they were drawing on this concept art of Maska-Ra, which I doubt bc he was a Man-E-Faces precursor) and they retconned her into having created Catra’s mask, which is kind of redundant given the entire episode Magicats. This mask did not need two bios. There are no other mentions of her in any canon.

Potential other Masks of Power: The Deemos and Tyrella masks from the He-Man episode “Masks of Power”, lizard and canine masks from the mini-comic “Masks of Power”, Lord Masque’s Demon Mask from the He-Man episode “House of Shokoti, Part 1″, and whatever the hell Red Shadow has going on.

Procrustus, Giant Guardian of Magic

Lore: During the creation of the various dimensions (5 in MOTUC canon but demonstratably higher everywhere else), the gods installed the four-armed, immortal giant Procrustus to guard their secrets at the heart of Eternia. There lay the Starseed, from which the entire dimension was created. It still held immeasurable power, and could be used to conquer entire universes. Hordak, in an attempt to access the Starseed, cracked Eternia in two with the Spell of Separation. Though he was (mostly) thwarted, from then on Procrustus was forced to hold the two halves of Eternia together from within, lest the planet break apart and the Starseed be exposed.

Backstory: First appearing in the mini-comic “The Magic Stealer!”, Procrustus is a lot more tangible than most gods. We know where he is, at all times, and he seems confined to one size. His powers appear to be largely physical, as he had to burrow out of the ground to investigate in the mini-comic instead of teleporting or like, magicking the dirt away. This was his only appearance until MOTUC released a figure for him in 2012. He also showed up in the Subternia map the next year, holding Eternia together.

Standor, Cosmic Creator of Power

Lore: “Before time began, the great Gods of the multiverse convened in the Hall of Power to create all that was and all that will ever be. Head architect of this great task was Standor. A cosmic being of unlimited imagination, Standor helped lead his fellow deities by fueling their energies with raw creative force.”

Backstory: Released for Comikaze 2013 to celebrate the partnership of Mattel and Pow! Entertainment, Standor is literally just Stan Lee But a God. The prototype was called Standar--idk why they changed it, but I think it’s because it’s too easy to confuse with “Standard”. They made a bio for his sunglasses. I don’t want to talk about it.

Bash-Or, Slain Mystic God-Beast

Lore: Very little is known of Bash-Or, the Ram. His last remnant was sealed within the Ram Stone by the ancient sorceror kings of Zalesia, imbuing it with his divine power to overcome any barrier, magical or otherwise.

Backstory: Bash-Or was revealed in the bio for the Ram Stone, September of 2020, but his spirit (previously referred to as ‘the Spirit of the Ram Stone’) was twice utilized by Skeletor in the MYP cartoon, to great effect, before the stone was destroyed.

[dizzydennis]

My ideas for Sonic Riders 4!

Title:

Sonic Riders: Drift Dimension

I have a lot of ideas for a potential Sonic Riders sequel and I hope you can enjoy what I have to say. I am very passionate about the Sonic series and would love to see the Babylon Rogues again. I wrote a lot, but any comments or feedback would be wonderful! Check it out under this cut!

Story:

I would like the story mode to continue to split between Team Sonic and the Babylon Rogues. For the sake of making this cohesive, I will write out the narrative linearly.

Set a few years after King Doc’s tournament, Wave has convinced Jet to allow her to continue to investigate Babylon Garden even more under the promise that it would improve their Extreme Gears. The 3 Babylon Rogues go deep within the ruins of Babylon Garden by using their gravity modules (from Zero Gravity.) Wave is still worried about the black hole that could occur, but her calculations assure her that it won’t be a problem. However, while in the heart of this floating island, the gravity modules float into the rocky ruins and activate a bright light as Babylon Garden powers up.

Tails pilots the Tornado with Sonic, Knuckles, and Amy in tow. He detected the massive energy surge that cause Babylon Garden to light up. It seems like the garden is warping reality around it, but with their courage, they enter into the void.

It seems that Babylon Garden has teleported to another world. With their airship being grounded due to the warp, the Babylon Rogues hop onto their Extreme Gears to explore. Before long, they encounter a massive airship that completely dwarfs their own. Upon being captured, they learn that Jet’s father, Kaze, is the leader of this group known as the Babylon Legion. The Rogues have been reunited with their ancestors and family. Naturally, they’re overjoyed! Especially Jet who has been longing for his father for years.

Shortly after, Sonic and his friends encounter the airship and are reunited with the Babylon Rogues. Their fun meeting soon turns dire as the Babylon Legion surround and arrest Knuckles.

Later, Jet inquires about why they apprehended Knuckles. Kaze explains that years ago when they crash landed on Sonic’s planet, they had encountered a terrible Echidna Clan who were power hungry to conquer others. When the Babylon Legion refused to give their advance technology to the Echidna Clan, they were seen as enemies. When there were murmurs that the Echidna Clan had awakened a god of destruction, the Babylon Legion tried to get reactivate Babylon Garden to allow them to leave the planet.

Instead, Babylon Garden was stricken deep into the planet and the Babylon Legion was warped to parts unknown. Jet was baffled by what he heard, but he trusted his father. Upon meeting with Sonic and the others, they discuss what happened and that there were plenty of holes in Kaze’s story. Jet, upset that others would accuse his father, argues with them. However, there was one point that Storm brings up that cannot be ignored. How were Jet, Wave, and Storm on Sonic’s planet if the Babylon Legion were teleported to this planet?

They learn that when they were younger, Kaze had volunteered the three for an experiment to see if they could return, but in doing so, the 3 Babylon Rogues were stranded on their own with no real memory of what had happened.

The Babylon Rogues have to choose between siding with Team Sonic or the Babylon Legion, but they soon find out that Kaze intends to use his technology to convert Babylon Garden into Mecha Babylon. Having learned from the Echidna Clan, power needs to be met with power. Therefore, Kaze wants to teleport back to Sonic’s planet with Mecha Babylon being the ultimate weapon; a fortified island with weapons and a metal shell.

All the heroes band together to stop Kaze from reaching the inner ruins of Babylon Garden to allow it to teleport back to Sonic’s planet. During the climax, Kaze activates the portal only for Sonic and Jet to work together to knock him off of it. Torn between going with Sonic or staying with Kaze and the Babylon Legion, Jet ultimately decides that he must go back with Sonic. He claims that “The Babylon Legion had their chance,” as Sonic grabs his hand and the two dive into the portal.

Cut back to Sonic’s planet, Babylon Garden continues to float around the planet, perfectly reflecting Angel Island. Here, Knuckles and Storm reflect that the Echidna Clan and the Babylon Legion were a lot more similar than they were different. Wave notes that it isn’t one’s lineage that defines who they are, but what they do to better that lineage for future generations. Jet and Sonic use that as a means to claim that they’re the fastest as they race across Babylon Garden. Kaze’s words echo through Jet’s mind as he overtakes Sonic and the two ride off into the distance.

Stages:

Tundra Peaks / Frigid Avalanche – A snowbound stage high in the mountains that mixes canyons, rocky hillsides, and snow. The former stage features nice, mountain villages while the latter stage takes place with massive avalanches falling around the player.

Future Mall / Shopping Calamity – A futuristic city that leads into a massive shopping mall. Players would weave in and out of stores while making their way to a large building outside. The latter stage would be at night where a certain band of robots might be trying to get away with a robbery and chase.

Tubular Coastline / Hurricane Seaboard – A gorgeous beach that runs along side an advance city. You can choose to ride along the sand or take to the waves to get some boosts by performing tricks on the water. Be careful of the storm coming in the latter stage that alters the stage in a crazy way!

Thrill Park / Cursed Midway – A theme park with roller coasters, log flumes, and plenty of other rides. Be warned though, the haunted house gets a bit intense at night and changes the entire park!

Neon Woodland / Forest Illumination – A forest hidden within a valley that glows with luminous mushrooms and vines that glow as they are touched. This place really comes alive late at night when a rave party is going on!

Babylon Garden / Mecha Babylon – While not a remake of the original Sonic Riders track, this version would start on the outside of Babylon Garden as you go deep within the floating island. The mechanized version of this stage is far more dangerous with lasers and robots about; players would fire themselves across the island via giant turrets. Mecha Babylon would be the final boss fight against Kaze.

Dimension Hops / Nostalgia Trip – This is a bonus track where you hop between dimensional pockets of Metal City, Aquatic Capital, and Dolphin Resort. It’s a celebration of the Sonic Riders series. Nostalgia Trip sends players through Green Hill Zone (of course it’s here), Final Rush, and Sunset Heights. This one celebrates the Sonic series. These two tracks would not share music.

SEGA Heroics / SEGA Darkness – Much like the other SEGA fan service stages in the series, this one instead separates the two stages between the heroes of SEGA’s rich history and the villains. Lots of fun to be had here!

Playable Characters:

Sonic the Hedgehog, Miles Tails Prower, Knuckles the Echidna, Jet the Hawk, Wave the Swallow, Storm the Albatross, Amy Rose, Kaze the Hawk, Shadow the Hedgehog, Rouge the Bat, Cream the Rabbit, Blaze the Cat, Silver the Hedgehog, Vector the Crocodile, Dr. Eggman, NiGHTS, Kazuma Kiryu, Arle Nadja

Gameplay:

The gameplay would avoid the failings of Sonic Free Riders. Motion controls have been pushed since Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity and they’d be mostly dropped here. The game would implement the AIR system, but with the multiple routes with the gravity modules. Due to plot reasons, the gravity modules themselves can’t be used, so this mechanic would just be a movement of the Extreme Gears. Speed, Fly, and Power routes would still be available based on the characters and not the gears... and would hopefully be better balanced. The springs would be taken out as they were so painfully contextual in previous games. One thing from Sonic Free Riders would be certain items to change the course of the races including missiles, ink traps, and a few others. The grab mechanic to reach out to the left or right can be brought over too as it holds a lot of potential. Also, the vibrant visuals from Free Riders should be carried over! Moreover, the boost from the original game would be present. Lastly, the game would feel faster. Drifting, much like Team Sonic Racing would be emphasized more in this game.

Typical features would include the Story, Grand Prix, Battle Mode, Time Trials, Character Profiles, Gear Shop, Gear Gallery, Online Multiplayer, and Options. Let’s have alternate costumes for the characters too! Also, the Grand Prix mode would have character specific endings that would be simplistic, but still a treat and motivation to play through it with each character!

That’s basically it for my ideas. I know it’s just a pipe dream, but I would love for a Sonic Riders game to really get into the old stories and characterizations of the original two games, while adding some heart for the Babylon Rogues. It doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel, but rather just create a fun racing game that focuses on these amazing characters.

[the-dead-sea-trilogy]

a major update on the series

i have news that is both good and bad.  [the fic is not getting cancelled, don’t worry].

after a lot of deliberation - and i mean going back and forth for over a year now trying to write Icarus and the Blistering Sun, the prequel to The Devil and the Dead Sea - i have made the difficult (but i think really important, for reasons i will get into) decision to postpone Icarus and rearrange the order of the series.

Mother Earth and Her Infinite Sky, the sequel to the Devil and the Dead Sea, will be the book to be released next.  NOT Icarus, as I have previously been stating.

This is good because I think it is a better, more cohesive choice for the series from a narrative standpoint.  This is good because we get to see our boys being in love on a team right away once it’s out.  This is good because I am excited about writing a story about our boys being in love on a team to immediately follow DATDS.

This is bad because it means I have to put the prequel on hold (again) and full publication will be pushed back, again.  My life is super hectic rn, so at this current time, I’m not able to offer an estimate on when Mother Earth will be released, but I do have the first few chapters written already.

Read below the cut if you want to know some more reasons, both from a narrative and personal standpoint, on why i made this decision and why it was actually really hard for me to do.

if not, all you need to know is the series is not getting abandoned. the order is just getting rearranged, which means publication is being delayed again.

i intend to help this along and keep you guys interested (and myself accountable) by continuing to occasionally post WIP updates and writing updates like these, as well as a tiny one shot compilation like i’m doing for my Legend of Zelda series, if you follow that.

until then, stay safe, love yourselves, and two wishes remain.

-jirachi (silv)

Narrative and Personal Reasons The Dead Sea Trilogy is Getting Rearranged

I work really hard on making a cohesive story with thought, poetry, and themes that I can hand to you guys, and I want to use this time to give you some insight on that and why it’s taking so long.  The narrative reasons are the easiest to explain and kind of go hand in hand with the personal reasons, so I’ll approach it from that angle.

The Narrative:

Ever since I started writing Icarus in November 2019 after DATDS, once NaNoWriMo was over (yes, I tried it), I just kept hitting walls.  And stopping and starting.  And I couldn’t understand why I was hitting so many walls, and I realized it maybe had to do with the narrative structure of the series not being as cohesive as it could be yet.  What I came to realize is that:

A big thing in this trilogy is the idea of the cycles of Birth, Death, and Rebirth.

“And y’know, that’s like, the nature of the beast, inn’t it?” Archie said. “Night and day. Water and fire. Land and sea. Birth, death, rebirth—”

“And we’re in the death stage right now…”

“Then one day we’ll be reborn.”

There was a pause. Archie was right.

-Epilogue, DATDS

Icarus was always intended to be the Birth story.  Archie and Maxie meet, have their first sparks of inspiration, first sparks of their relationship, and first sparks of their rivalry.  It’s all supposed to ignite there, I mention a couple times in DATDS there being a “spark” in Maxie.  That was intentional.

Devil is the Death story.  They literally say this in the Epilogue.  Archie and Maxie purge all the bad blood between one another, die to their pretenses of themselves so that they can kickstart the process of building things new.  In dying to their own egos and having an exorcism of sorts (oh you mean a literal exorcism?) they saw into one another and realized how much they really loved one another the whole time. 

Mother Earth is the Rebirth story.  Archie and Maxie build their new team, learn about what it means to love each other and what they need to do to make their relationship work.  (Among other things that have to do with rebirth).

The issue:

When I started writing DATDS many, many years ago, I never intended/anticipated there to be a prequel, let alone a sequel.  But I fell in love with this story, fell in love with these characters, and it just kept growing and growing and I love it so much.  However, this means, as it stands currently,

I started the cycle with Death.

That isn’t a bad thing - DATDS works as a beautiful introduction to this story.  However, this means in order for the cycle (and narrative) to make any sense, it just flows so much better to have Mother Earth be next.  Because otherwise, I’m going

Death (Devil) -> Birth (Icarus) -> Rebirth (Mother Earth)

And that just.. doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense when you look at it like that??  Having two “birth” moments in a row seems really wonky, and this is probably the source of one of the (many) issues I was having with it.

Not to mention the strange time jumping that would be happening between

ORAS Canon PRESENT (Devil) -> 15 years PAST (Icarus) -> 1-2 Years FUTURE (Mother Earth)

The solution? Simple

Death/Present (Devil) -> Rebirth/Future (Mother Earth) -> Birth/Past (Icarus)

It loops back around from both a timeline and a narrative/symbolic standpoint.

The bottom line:

Devil set up a rebirth story beautifully.  The stage is set for Archie and Maxie to walk down from the mountain and start their new lives.  It just doesn’t make sense for me to put that on hold.  Especially when things in Mother Earth will end up making it easy to loop back around to Icarus.

And, as much as I didn’t want to end the series on a “sad” note, the fact of the matter is Icarus ends in a moment of “Death,” where Archie betrays Maxie and sets up the spiraling chain of events that lead up to Devil, closing the cycle and making it all a complete circle.

That, and it will be incredibly easy to end Icarus with another Epilogue where things suddenly aren’t as sad anymore, even though they ended sadly once long ago, and it can all come together in a reflective way.

There are other reasons I was hesitant to remove Icarus from its second slot, ranging from “I didn’t want to end on a ‘sad’ book” to “I took a lot of creative liberties with Colress as a character and throwing him in at full force in Mother Earth without any sort of warning is gonna be.. strange, to say the least, and at least introducing him slowly in Icarus wouldn’t make him seem like a complete psychopath” but also Colress is.. just kind of like that.

But also ultimately, even though I love Colress as a character and he does have an arc I’m interested in, this ain’t about him.  Much to his dismay, I am sure.

[he already robbed me of valuable covid writing time once by holding me hostage and forcing me to write 120,000+ words about his Team Plasma hot girl summer so he can die mad about it i guess]

What I’m trying to say, ultimately, with this, is that I put a lot of thought and work into what I do.  I’m putting so much effort into this story because I care about it, and I want to give you guys (and myself) the best story I can possibly make.  That is just, now gonna require more time than I anticipated, especially with this change.  And I wanted to give you guys some insight into why delays are happening and why such changes are being made.

Because to be completely fucking transparent, I was really struggling with Icarus.  And once I made this realization, it all kind of made sense why.  And I think once Mother Earth is complete, things in Icarus with start coming together for me.

In the meantime, stay posted, keep an eye out for the other updates, and I absolutely cannot wait to share Mother Earth with you.

[libermachinae]

For the directors cut meme, I would love to hear anything at all about chapter 5 of We Forget the Names Not Written Down. (That preface by Rewind, btw, has stuck with me so much, gosh.)

Thank youuu ;u; I was really hoping someone would ask about that one. Under the cut because *spoilers*. (here's a link to the fic in case anyone hasn't checked it out yet)

Okay, so, to start with, the name: "Preface" is the last chapter of the fic, as a final nod to the fact that the fic really doesn't conform to a linear sense of time. Even the chapter itself is spread across different time periods: the dedication was a collaboration between Rewind and Prowl, the Forward was written by Prowl after Rewind's death, the Preface was written while Chromedome was still alive, and the chapter as a whole is being read at some point in the future, after The Complete History has been published. My purpose there was to pull the audience into the story: there is no present but that of the person reading it. Each section represents a crystalized version of who its author/s was/were when they wrote it, and then these disparate moments link up to form a single cohesive text.

The other reason I put "Preface" at the end of the fic is because it is an end, for both Rewind and Prowl. For Rewind, it's the last chance he has to "write" (and I'll go more into that in a bit) and say exactly what he's thinking. It's the last opportunity he has with his own voice, and he uses it to say goodbye to the world and wish it well with a future he won't get to see. And for Prowl, it's the last step he takes before sending the manuscript, anonymously, to the publisher. They're his last words, too, before he disappears to the unnamed planet mentioned in the fic's summary. "Preface" is a series of goodbyes.

The other structural thing I would want to mention in this chapter is authorship. The definition of an author is a theme that I was exploring throughout the fic, and chapter 5 is where Rewind has a chance to address it head on by talking about the assistance he's receiving from Chromedome.

Now I’m a writer, and even that’s in only the barest sense of the word. I can get most of the important words down, but I need Chromedome to connect the dots for me.

The idea that Rewind is the author of The Complete History is never brought into question, because I personally think it's more interesting to consider how this then affects our definition of authorship. Delta's Malady has started to degrade his ability to generate and interpret language. It's not necessarily deleting words, but it's becoming more effort than it's worth for Rewind to come up with every single one. Before Chromedome's work, I imagine these two sentences read more like this:

Writer barely. I important words, Chromedome connect.

It's possible to understand Rewind's intention, but there is a lot of space that needs to be filled to make it read correctly. If someone other than Chromedome (like, for example, Prowl) were to take a stab at interpreting it, they might come up with the following:

I barely write. I generate important words, and Chromedome makes the connections.

By changing "writer" to a verb, the focus of the first sentence shifts from being about Rewind's identity and onto a task he struggles to perform. The latter instance could also be interpreted as Rewind simply not writing often, rather than his ability to do so being poor. The focus is further shifted from Rewind's perspective by going from "the important words," which imply personal stakes, to "important words," which is a more general sense.

The point I'm trying to make with all this is that even if all Chromedome is doing is connecting the dots, it still matters a lot and affects how Rewind's final goodbye will be read. Even if Chromedome knows Rewind better than anyone else, the fact that he participates this way at all impacts the way readers interact with the text. Rewind is still considered the author, but authorship doesn't guarantee that he intended everything exactly as it was written.

Which, to be fair, is true for everyone. I'm constantly using words that don't quite fit but are close enough to replace the ones I want but can't remember. Reading itself is an interpretive act; it's impossible to write something that will be interpreted the same way by everyone. But I'm getting super off track now oops :P

Within the Preface itself, I knew I had to talk about Functionist Cybertron (or, as Rewind calls it, Cybertron) because the fic would have been incomplete without it. Not only is Rewind dying because of it, but it's his creation as much as the manuscript is: just as complicated, but still important. He feels a sense of responsibility to it, the same way he feels a responsibility to finish The Complete History, so it can be passed down to future generations. Another ending represented in "Preface": the transition of one generation of Cybertronians to the next. The two Cybertronians cited in chapter 2 were an MTO and a spark forged within Trypticon, neither of who were present for the start of the war. The galaxy is trying to heal from the effects of the Great War, and that means moving on from the people who helped start it (even if only tangentially, as in Rewind's case).

After spending a few paragraphs talking about that Cybertron, though, Rewind intentionally switches back to talking about his Cybertron and the war he was part of. As with the text as a whole, it's a final act of rebellion, Rewind fighting for control over his narrative even as it's drawing to a close. The important note here is that it's out of a sense of responsibility, not of pride.

It is not a proud story. I don’t think anyone walked away from it without some amount of shame, despair, or rage. But it is ours, for as long as there are Cybertronians left to remember it.

Rewind is trying to take ownership of something he has little claim to, because someone has to and he's in a position to do so. It's this same reasoning that Prowl struggles to articulate in his letter to Bumblebee in chapter 4. Both of them see something that must be done and decide that they're going to do it.

And the thing is, they do it poorly.

Rewind can't write on his own. His databanks are being corrupted by Delta's Malady (in chapter 1, Prowl concludes the corruption is so widespread Rewind is no longer capable of making meaningful contributions to the text) and he struggles even to find the way to his memories, if they still exist at all. And Prowl is a terrible editor. There is only one section that he writes without any prior input from Chromedome, and he struggles so much that he ends up reusing Chromedome's wording anyway, to the detriment of the text. Neither is in an ideal position to perform the task they set out to do, but they choose to do it anyway. Because someone needs to.

The last paragraph was kind of where I figured out what I wanted this fic to be and how I was going to get it there.

Because that’s all any of us end up becoming: the words and the stories we leave behind. I spent my whole life trying to capture as many as possible, even as I watched so many fall through the cracks. So, a final dedication: to those who exist in echoes. Though we forget the names not written down, they form the spaces between every word, every letter. It was their collective story that I aimed to tell, and if I’m left with any regret, it’s that I still failed to catch them all.

To be completely, entirely transparent: in regards to the title, I was trying to pull a "Without Love." It starts off by saying that we lose the things we don't intentionally record, and then finally Rewind reveals that actually, they've been there all along. Prowl's name only appears once in the fic, as the last word of chapter 4, where I meant to imply that it had been deleted before he sent his letter to Bumblebee (not sure if that idea actually got across). Prowl's is the name not written down, but he's everywhere in the fic, constantly influencing both the text and the story of its creation. Though I still consider Rewind the sole author of The Complete History, in the context of the story, he and Prowl are partners, working to create something that will outlast them both.

[bloodraven55]

Would Monty have hated Bumbleby?

I see Monty’s name get disrespectfully and disgustingly thrown around like a hot potato by a lot of so-called “critics” of the show regarding many different aspects of it. Whatever it is they want to shit on next, they’ll find a way to try and claim that it “isn’t what Monty would have wanted,” or that it “goes against Monty’s vision,” or any number of similarly morally bankrupt statements.

How do they know Monty’s vision or what he would have wanted, you might ask. And of course the truth is that they don’t. They certainly don’t know it better than the countless people who did know him working at Rooster Teeth, including some of his closest friends and his own brother. They just want to make their “arguments” immune to criticism by invoking a dead man’s name so that no one will dare to disagree.

Using Monty’s name in any context to trash the show that was his very own beloved creation is undeniably a terrible thing to do. And really, the only valid way to bring up Monty when discussing RWBY is simply to present things he actually said and did, and let people draw their own conclusions.

So I’m going to say right now: the short answer to this question is that none of us can know for sure.

With this established, I want to look at all of the evidence available to see whether it’s reasonable to assume that Monty would have been against Bumbleby becoming canon, since that’s one of the most common parts of the story that people use his name to complain about.

First, there’s the fact that he had already produced an animation which featured LGBT+ representation before RWBY, in the form of Haloid. It isn’t directly relevant to Bumbleby specifically, but it already destroys the idea that he was inherently against having LGBT+ characters and relationships in his work.

Second, there’s the fact that he outright stated in an interview that he wanted there to be LGBT+ characters in RWBY in the future and that “maybe they’re there now, because they’re kids, and we’re on a path to try to help them discover themselves.”

Again, this isn’t necessarily referring to Bumbleby/Blake or Yang in particular, but it’s more proof that he was totally supportive of the idea of having LGBT+ characters in his shows, and it also proves that he could easily have meant any of the main characters. It’s unlikely that he was referring to Ilia or Sappron and Terra since they weren’t introduced until Volumes later, after all, and he specified that some of the existing characters at that point could be LGBT+.

Thirdly, there’s the fact that he, along with Miles and Kerry, created the entire set up for the narrative arc that brought Blake and Yang closer together. The very first trailer for the show in which Blake and Yang are introduced with a direct reference to Beauty and the Beast to counter Adam’s allusion of Gaston, Yang losing her arm to Adam, etc. all have Monty’s hand in them.

We also know that Barbara knew that Yang would lose her arm before Volume 1 even began airing, because Monty himself told her, and her trailer flat out foreshadows it as well. Which brings me to the next point, since it’s very much related to this one...

Fourthly, there's the fact that he talked openly several times about how much he liked Blake and Yang’s heart to heart in Burning the Candle, a.k.a. the scene which actually gave Bumbleby some real weight and made it seem like a possibility, albeit a small one at the time. Now, none of this proves that he planned for Blake and Yang to end up in a romantic relationship of course, but it shows that he liked their connection nonetheless.

All of these Tweets were made within a couple of days either side of when that episode came out. For added context, the sequence he is referring to is the flashback while Yang tells Blake about Raven. It’s the most he ever appeared to Tweet about one specific part of the show that I could see, and well... it might not mean anything, or maybe it does. Either way, it’s safe to say he was a fan of that bonding moment between Blake and Yang.

Fifthly, there’s the fact that he actually Retweeted this art.

Now a lot of people working on shows like and share art that they like. It doesn’t make anything canon or hold too much significance overall. But it’s another nail in the coffin of the idea that he was against the concept of romantic same sex relationships within Team RWBY, including between Blake and Yang.

Sixthly, and last but not least, there’s the fact that he himself outright stated that he wanted Blake and Yang to have a shared arc together here. 

“I have some fight scenes where it’s good storytelling, but it might not be good storytelling right now. But I really want this for the two characters. I want Blake and Yang to do something together, to show them as a cohesive unit. I’m like, I’ll do this now, but I have more for it later. Later might be episode 12, later might be two years from now.”

So that’s yet more evidence that the whole narrative thread that ends up tying them together was not only planned from the start but part of Monty’s vision for the show.

“bUt hE sAiD tHaT tEaM rWbY iS a siSteRhOoD”

This is about the only point I’ve ever seen that could actually support the idea that Monty would have been against Bumbleby. Except that it’s complete nonsense.

For a start, I’ve never actually seen or heard this supposed quote in all my time in the fandom, so I have to question whether it actually exists since I’m not going through every single commentary and interview that he’s done to try and find it, but let’s assume that it’s true, and he did refer to Team RWBY as a “sisterhood.”

Here are two of the definitions of the word according to the dictionary:

1. an organization of women with a common interest, as for social, charitable, business, or political purposes.

2. congenial relationship or companionship among women; mutual female esteem, concern, support, etc.

Now tell me, do you really think that it’s more plausible that Monty intended to say that all of the intra-team relationships were literally like actual sisters than that what he meant was either of those much more fitting meanings? Because I don’t.

And that’s without even mentioning that Nora has flat out referred to her team as her family but she kissed one of them in the latest episode, or that the White Fang is called a “brotherhood” in the show but no one ever says that Ghira and Kali’s relationship is wrong and that Blake shouldn’t exist. Because newsflash, even if he did mean that overall the team has a familial bond... romantic relationships are part of a lot of families.

Combined with Arryn having always been a vocal supporter of Bumbleby, and Barbara answering the question of why people like the relationship by saying that it’s “because [the show] is written that way,” and in a different interview commenting when asked about Bumbleby specifically that “some things are planned from the beginning,” and when you consider that both of those people were close to him from the start, it seems unlikely that they would support something that they knew he actively disliked.

Hell, that applies to CRWBY as a whole. A good number of these people were dear friends of Monty’s, and I highly doubt that group of people who worked with him all this time, including his own brother, would allow something that they had a reason to believe “went against his vision.”

So the long answer is that while we can never know for sure what his exact thoughts on it were, the evidence speaks for itself. And whether he planned it himself or not, there is nothing to indicate that Monty would have disapproved of the idea of Bumbleby becoming canon. It’s a nonsensical and hugely disrespectful thing to use a dead man’s name in vain just to try and validate your dislike of a fictional pairing.

[darkarchercatalyst]

All right, rant time, and the theme... is themes. (The other theme is Mirai Nikki. We’ll get there.) Quick disclaimer that I’m far from having any sort of expert opinion on literature, so there are likely people who will disagree with me or say things in a much more precise manner. That aside, here we go.

One of the core elements in whether or not I find a piece of fiction satisfying is whether or not it can maintain a consistent theme throughout. Thematic elements exist across a wide range of moods, goals, genres, and so on, and generally reflect on the driving philosophy of the narrative work. They are the parameters that create the framework in which a fictional world exists, much like the laws of physics in reality. When characters and plot move along with respect to the laws that govern them, it provides a cohesive experience. This doesn’t necessarily mean the story is good, but it is coherent. If characters and plot actively subvert the themes of their setting, then it creates a jarring or dissonant experience in the viewer (I’m looking at you, Gurren Lagann).

Sometimes this can be used to great effect. A “twist” ending or sudden change often relies on a thematic shift to move the story from one paradigm to another, with the jarring nature of that transition intended to create emotion of some sort in the viewer. However, to do so effectively requires for the secondary theme to be present throughout the first theme, but simply hidden or not acknowledged. Whether a second theme that enables the twist was properly set up is often seen in whether an audience feels like the twist “came out of nowhere.” Well-executed thematic shifts reward their more perceptive and invested viewers.

The other important part of themes is that they provide a vector along which the story and characters develop. This doesn’t mean that all characters and story beats evolve in the same way, nor should they, but the theme of the work provides the boundaries for the trajectories each element takes. We ultimately want the end state of the characters we like to be somewhere along the thematic route from where they started. Whether the net movement is positive or negative doesn’t necessarily matter as long as we felt that the character’s path had meaning. This is the predominant reason that most people find the endings of shounen manga disappointing, since often the trajectory of the characters’ stories get narrowed down into some sort of textbook feel-good ending that doesn’t reflect any complexity of the plot that came before.

Now then, for the core of the rant. The reason that I hate Mirai Nikki’s ending is that it completely breaks with the thematic elements of the series in order to provide not even a feel-good ending but a self-serving ending on the part of the author. The core element of Yukiteru’s character from the beginning is that he is a passive observer of the world around him. He is highly perceptive and precise in his observations, but it is entirely outwardly facing without regard for himself. This is stressed multiple times throughout the series, as is Yukiteru’s passivity in the face of ongoing events. It is only when he is thrown into a life-or-death situation where his own survival is paramount that this self-neglect becomes a critical flaw, which is then supplemented by Yuno’s character of being entirely centered on Yukiteru. In a messed-up way, their views of the world are necessarily complementary for both of them to survive. This is a good thematic hook to start off on, and intersects with the other diary holders and the ways they each in turn view the world around them.

Mirai Nikki also deals strongly with the ideas of justice and personal codes of honor. The moral perceptions of the contributing characters and the way that each action is justified against those morals is as important to the themes of the story as their preferred method for recording the events of the world. These morals are often intentionally skewed in the sense that it takes an outside morality, often in the form of characters uninvolved in the battle royale like Nishijima or Yukiteru’s friends, to provide a baseline against which the dynamic personalities involved are measured. So far, so good. Throughout the series this served as a decent dynamic and reference point for just how far afield the characters go.

A two-fold problem arises with the way these thematic elements, and we’ll work backwards through them. First, the baseline that the series relied upon for grounding its moral code is broken in response to the event where Yuno kidnaps Yukiteru and holds him hostage. Eventually Yukiteru is saved and released, only to turn around and decide to stay with Yuno anyway because she loves him and the only way he can “save” her is to stick with her. This alone isn’t a breach of Yukiteru’s passive nature despite being frustrating to the viewer, but the problem is the more meta context in which it is portrayed. The characters serving as the moral basis for the series rightfully are disturbed by Yukiteru’s decision, but contextually they are depicted as being wrong for attempting to convince him otherwise. This initial point of fracturing in the theme of the story carries forward in the sense that the series reorients around Yukiteru’s actions becoming deterministic. He simply does what he has to do without regard for exactly where on the moral spectrum that falls. That could have been handled effectively if the moral backbone was maintained. However, it is cast into doubt by the author’s decision to portray a bad decision (with respect to the story so far) as unilaterally good rather than simply reasonable within the context of the story.

This draws a direct line to the second big fracturing point of the thematic elements of the story, which is the ending. Even after the aforementioned breach in the moral core of the story, there is some attempt to regain it by coming back to Yukiteru’s friends and bringing in Akise as an off-kilter moral foil for Yukteru and Yuno’s actions in the last arc or so. This never quite lands aside from having a plot device by which to force Yukiteru’s “character development” at the very end, but more on that in a moment. The core issues it that by the time the series ends, both Yukiteru and Yuno are “bad” characters not just from a reader perspective but from the baseline morality that pervaded the first half of the series. Yukiteru sacrificed his personal morals and Yuno was revealed to have almost none for the sake of winning the war, and the only reason they are still the protagonists by the end is that Yukiteru at least is still “better” than the other bad guys. However, due to the themes of justice pervading the series there is at least some need for consequence for all of the “bad” characters. Except... this doesn’t happen. Yukiteru ends up winning the war and Yuno dies, at which point the thematic conclusion would be that Yukiteru must suffer some consequence of note or at the very least come to a realization that his behavior should change to atone for the actions he took even if they were out of necessity. Instead, he mopes around until Yuno from the next universe was brought to him and they live happily ever after.

This also creates a problem in that it breaks Yukiteru’s character arc and catapults him back to how he was at the beginning of the series. Yukiteru starts from a passive observer to a more active element, but all of this continues to be outward-facing. He behaves within the story as a response to the stimulus around him, but most personal senses of motivation or responsibility are only cursory at best. Only in the final arc, in order to escape being Reality Marble’d and stop Yuno, does he realize his own responsibility for the state of the world around him and acknowledges that he must be the one to take action out of his own motivation. He gains resolve to do not just what must be done in response to the current state, but the “right” thing. Until... he doesn’t. He certainly does the first step in resolving things by winning the war, but then it stops there. Any personal sense of responsibility is immediately torpedoed because he lost his love interest despite being realizing that it was necessary to correct things. Only when she comes back does he regain motivation. This becomes a direct contradiction to the development that Yukiteru took into becoming an active character. He devolves immediately into his dependence on Yuno for motivation.

You could compare this to NGE, which seems to be what the author wanted anyway since they both have a depressed protagonist who “grows up” in the course of messy relationships with girls and authority figures set against a background of apocalypse. They both even have the silver-haired homoerotic male friend with divine knowledge who shows up late in the series as a character motivator for the protagonist. Anyway, whether or not you like Shinji Ikari as a character (I do not), his story follows a linear progression toward the end. He starts as someone with little sense of purpose or belonging and dependency on the affirmation of others, but ends up with the ultimate position of “I want to live in this world.” That final state is a powerful statement of just how far the character has come. Mirai Nikki doesn’t have this. Instead it moves past the character’s resolution and completion of the thematic progression in favor of doubling on the codependency that necessitated the early character state. The protagonist’s development was taken back so that he could still need the yandere girlfriend and they could be together in the end.

So what would have been the proper conclusion to Yukiteru’s thematic progression? It would be the role of an active observer. Throughout the story he becomes privy to the trauma of his friends (especially Yuno) and the many evils of the world that led people to act horribly. Then he was given the power of god by winning the battle royale. The natural progression then would be that he recedes into the background as before but now with the knowledge and influence to fix the problems that burdened the world around him. Instead of shutting down and shutting out things, he would return to his original position of being unseen and only seeing others, yet now with the maturity and capabilities to do something in that role. This carries his resolution from the final arc forward into the epilogue with satisfying consistency. Maybe then after he does all that you could justify bringing Yuno back, but honestly it would be better if she wasn’t even aware of what he does behind the scenes at that point.

That’s a long-winded way to fully articulate why I felt that Mirai Nikki just completely fell flat in the end. This wasn’t even failure to execute, but it was an active deconstruction of what the story seemed to be trying to achieve. All in favor of maintaining the OTP or whatever.

[joekabox]

I just watched Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution Kizuna

I’m writing this while my thoughts are fresh, so I just want to say these may not be my final thoughts on the film. Sometimes a film takes a little while to fully hit me, and this is just my thoughts immediately after watching said film.

Spoilers below, and a lot of text. I had a lot to say, sorry. I also apologize if its a little rambley, that’s kind of just how my brain works. Anyway...

Going into the film, I heard mixed reviews from various sources. From some, I heard the film was bad, from others, that it was good, but from most, that it was just okay. Nothing horrible, nothing great, but an okay film. 

I’m not sure where I sit, presently, but perhaps I’ll come to an idea by the end of this review.

The film is very well put together. Unlike Tri, and arguably the last bit of Adventure and a good portion of Adventure 02, Last Evolution felt like a cohesive plot, beginning to end. It knew what it wanted to be, and it did it. There wasn’t a point where I felt confused about what was happening, and unlike Tri, it didn’t throw in random elements that went unexplained from 02 and proceed to leave them unexplained. I think the closest we get is a shot of Sora, alone, with her Digivice turned to stone with little explanation as to what happened, but honestly, I think we can all agree we know what was happening, just putting together the scenes the film showed us earlier of her and Piyomon together. She was hit first, and while the film didn’t hold our hand on her journey, her journey acted as a vehicle to drive us towards the ending of this film, and I appreciate it.

Every emotional scene hits, every action scene is well executed. The animation is fresh and new, but evokes the original style in a way that isn’t exact but certainly close enough. I think that was maybe a good choice, given the theme of the film itself. 

In tone, it isn’t just a sad waterworks of a story the entire way through like Tri tried to be, but instead one loaded with emotional weight but enough pep and action to keep it feeling upbeat most of the time.

Overall, I liked watching this movie. I felt compelled to keep watching, and the opening scene of the film is just a love letter to Adventure as a whole. I honestly forgot it was only an hour and a half long as I got engaged with the story, as it never feels slow but every scene has weight and depth to it.

This film seems to care far more about the characters and drive of the story than Tri did, and by that I mean it didn’t try fixing all the flaws of the original, but simply let them rest. I think that might have been intentional, as this movie really felt like a ‘good bye’ to the series. The entire plot was about putting Adventure to rest, after all.

Now for the bad stuff.

This film really missed the chance to introduce Biomerging to the Adventure mythos via Taichi and Yamato, and while it gave that honor to the antagonist of the film, it didn’t seem to bother with the protagonists, probably because people seem to cringe when some fans even mention the concept of humans turning into Digimon.

Tamers gave us the concept of Biomerging to drive home the idea that a tamer and their Digimon partner had a bond beyond just friendship, and while perhaps ham-fisted, was a great visual metaphor. Last Evolution seemed to have a subtle buildup to this same core idea, but when push came to shove, we have Agumon and Gabumon becoming very humanoid versions of their Greymon and Garurumon forms respectively, meanwhile Taichi and Yamato just sit on their shoulders and pantomime their actions. I’m deeply curious if the initial idea was to biomerge them, but they bailed last second, but I digress.

This film also seems to continue the trend of just not caring about 02, but less so. While I will 100% give this film credit for not only including the 02 cast but also giving them a plot within the film, they didn’t really feel connected to the rest of the characters, not even towards Hikari or Takeru, who they spent the entire length of a show with. They just sort of feel like sidekicks to the Adventure cast, and not their own characters. We never even get Imperialdramon, despite Imperialdramon being shown to be at least on par with Omegamon in abilities, if not slightly surpassing them.

And, my biggest complaint, and one that probably isn’t a surprise: the time limit on having a Digimon partner makes little sense when looking at the rest of the mythos. In 02, we are shown the character of Oikawa, who’s entire narrative is a lifelong goal to go to the Digital World like him and his late best friend always dreamed of, and relies on children to aide him because he’s a grown man (if I recall correctly). From that alone, it seems like the ‘adults can’t have Digimon partners’ angle makes sense...except it doesn’t, because in the last bit of the show, Oikawa finally does make it to the Digital World, and what awaits him on the other side? His chosen Digimon partner, who waited this entire time to meet them, having dreamed of the day Oikawa would one day visit the Digital World.

While I suppose the ‘grown ups don’t have Digimon’ bit isn’t necessarily unsupported, it feels like an unnecessary plot device. The only saving grace I think it has, beyond making for an engaging and emotionally impactful film, is that several points of the film suggest this may not be the final say. Gennai makes an off handed comment about the possibility of delaying it, and there’s a constant message of “well see each other again.” While that may be just a hopeful thing to say in the face of sadness, much as one often says such things to a dying loved one, a producer of Last Evolution has stated that the film does, in fact, line up with the established Adventure canon, including the ending of 02, which specifically states that not only do Taichi and Yamato have their Digimon partners, but that everyone gets a Digimon partner. 

If this film really is intended to be canon with the finale of 02, and that Agumon and Gabumon will one day return, then I feel this film simply cared more about its narrative of growing up and moving on than anything, and honestly...I don’t think that’s horrible, in retrospect. This film, as mentioned, had a very cohesive plot, and a very strong story it was trying to tell, and it did it well. At no point did I feel anything was done to punish the audience or throw a kink in the hose, if you will.

The worst aspects of Tri (which I keep comparing this film to, sorry), were its insistence to cut away from 02, correct things done wrong in the lore of Adventures past, and tell an ultimately disheartening and sad message of “sometimes bad things happen and it sucks and there’s no good side about it, but we must move on.” Last Evolution has a similar message of “sometimes bad things happen and it sucks,” but it goes on to say “but that doesn’t really matter, given all the good times we had, does it?” It doesn’t make you feel bad for having invested time into people and things you care about.

While Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution Kizuna was not perfect, and not the sendoff I wanted, it was okay. It was a love letter to the series, and it had a great deal of depth to it I’ve not seen in an Adventure story since my childhood, and at no point did it make me wish it hadn’t happened...and honestly I think that’s exactly perfect. That is exactly the message it was trying to convey.

At the end of the day, perhaps Agumon and Gabumon are gone, for now, but just because they left, it doesn’t mean they took their memory with them.

To quote the translated lyrics of Butterfly, by the late Koji Wada, which began each episode of the original Adventure:

“After an endless dream, in this miserable world That's right, maybe not using common sense isn't so bad after all Even with these awkward wings, dyed with images that seem to stay I'm sure we can fly, on my love”

[beautybranding55]

Artistic Beauty Branding

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Our strategic course of and shopper insights turn the usually subjective creative process into an objective one. The results have been award-winning, attention-getting, and revenue-generating for our purchasers. Each of our shoppers involves us at a different stage in the brand development course of.

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[metalmiamiclouds]

De-Composing Solange’s Cranes in the Sky

It’s a breath of fresh air on a balmy day--looking up to blue skies and seeing fluffy, white clouds drift along to wherever their destinations may be. The refreshing, directionless wind blows against our bodies just as it does for everybody else. We wonder how everyone else experiences this breeze amid what could be a scorching hot day. We ponder the way which we all have our destinations and focus on our directions, yet all experience similar events in this world due to our nature of being human. So is the feeling of listening to Solange’s 2016 hit, Cranes in the Sky.

Released in an era of maximalist pop music, Solange broke into the 2016 music scene with her album A Seat at the Table, a stirring piece of art which still remains relevant and refreshing nearly four years later. Cranes in the Sky remains Solange’s most listened-to song in all of her discography despite being written long before A Seat at the Table’s release--eight years before, in fact.

The album presents the listener with Solange’s experience of life in America as a black woman. Deeply personal and having strong narrative, the album brings to life Solange’s story filled with instances of racism, micro-aggressions, death, love, culture, politics, and all else encompassed in being black. Narrative, atmosphere, and music are all cohesive in this piece and creates an elevated work of art which remains available and relatable to the masses. Solange demonstrates her artistry in finely balancing contrasting ideas throughout the album. An ethereal and musically ambiguous atmosphere prevails all while supporting very poignant and personal poetry. Decisiveness and tone of narrative also fall within the realm of clear vision which Solange had for this album. In an interview with her older sister, Beyoncé, Solange speaks freely on her ability to know what she wants and how she wants to present herself and her work. Crafting this album, selectivity is evident in the stories which she decided would be told and which vocal techniques she would employ to produce a controlled, sweet tone.

Cohesive yet juxtaposing ideas dominate this album which make it all the more intriguing. Most noticeably is the album’s aural presentation. Focusing on the hit Cranes in the Sky, musical ambiguity sets the atmosphere with the soft and steady non-tonal percussion which opens the song and continues throughout the end. Beneath that percussion lay several layers of bowed stringed instruments which play stacked chords, rendering a lack of certainty in tonality and grounding. Only with occasional interruptions of instruments such as piano, bass, and guitar, does the listener get a sense of tonal or modal centering. Mostly, we rely on Solange’s voice to guide us in the grounding of this piece. Other instruments which occasionally interject (piano, bass, guitar) gently comment back to Solange’s vocal lines, rather than acting independently. The song’s freedom and lack of tonal restraint give way to an experimental sound which allows the musicians to experiment with different modes and colors. 

Moving to the text, the song--as well as much of the album--is set up in a way which is very vulnerable. Little layering occurs in the instrumentation which gives way for the poetry and the voice to shine. Conversely, the poetry relies on the instrumentation to set the intended mood. Solange’s voice enters clearly with the very honest line of “I tried to drink it away.” From there, she lists all the different things she has tried in order to feel whole after a hard breakup from a long-term relationship. In the previously mentioned interview, Solange speaks of the song’s meaning. While she was in Miami to clear her mind, the skies were filled with cranes constructing new high-rises and apartment buildings. It was an eyesore for her. Yet she managed to turn a heartbreak and eyesore into a masterful song.

Continuing to list the things she has done to once again gain her sense of self, the dreamy atmosphere of the music manifests itself in the text as she begins to sing sentences such as “I tried to keep myself busy / I ran around circles / Think I made myself dizzy / I slept it away, / I sexed it away / I read it away.” She then sings “Away” numerous times as the melody ascends and the children’s toy-instrument play high-pitched moving lilting pentatonic chords--adding to the song’s ethereal sonics. When the following text comes “Well it’s like cranes in the sky / Sometimes I don’t wanna feel those metal clouds,” the piano chimes in and stacks open chords like building blocks over the voice and lightens as the pitches ascend. The stacking resembles looking up at a skyscraper--the lowest part is the largest in our eyes and as our eyes move up, the building seems to become narrower and more fragile. So, too, is the sense of sound created by the piano during that phrase to compliment the poetry. A certain firmness and sense of stability seems to be present in the first parts of the piano--when looking at the ground of the building, but as we look up, we become more uncertain of what we’re looking at. Though greatness seems to be built before our eyes, in reality it can all crash down very easily. Similarly, as in Solange’s experience, it seems the more with which we distract ourselves to run away from our problems, the more out-of-touch we become with ourselves and reality--to the point where our heads are aimlessly wandering in the clouds, high above the skyscrapers.

Lastly, Solange assembles this art together in its visual presentation. In the album’s cover, bareness is key. Solange’s portrait dominates the photo without any clothing, in front of a beige wall, with hair let down filled with clips. Compared to her previous work, this new cover shows her focus on minimalism. Keeping this idea cohesive, the music video for Cranes in the Sky maintains Solange’s new-found minimalism. All clothing is kept very simple and highlights the human body and natural scenery which surrounds Solange and her occasional background dancers. Scenes change frequently and differ greatly from each other--perhaps closely following her lyrics of “I traveled 70 states / Thought movin’ round make me feel better.” Yet what unites all these clips together is the emphasis on the smallness of the individual when compared to the greater landscape. Though we all have our own stories to tell, we are all very small parts of this large world in which we abide and experience together.

Solange’s presentation of the song Cranes in the Sky and overall work of A Seat at the Table remain poignant and honest. The pithy narrative and emphasis on minimalism in every facet--musically, poetically, and visually--are what make this work stand out in an overly-saturated and overly-commercialized music scene. This song reminds us that not all of our running and building will pay off. Much of our work will fail, but that is all part of the human experience. Instead of feigning success, honesty and vulnerability shine in this song and bring light to the listener’s mind. The albums quietness are what make it so loud and an overall breath of fresh air.