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secretgamergirl · 2 years

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The Entire Plot of Final Fantasy 14, with all the expansions, and some serious analysis of how good it actually is. (Part 9 - Endwalker)

Last time, we had a lot of fun in a raid chain where our adopted daughter had some nice dates with her forgetful new girlfriend and helped us fight her sleaker, sometimes hornier reimaginings of old boss fights. Oh and we also spent a ton of time setting things up for this expansion, just clearing the traditional problems of political infighting, racism, and a seemingly endless cycle of responding to violence with religious zealotry and kidnappings. And this annoying turbo-dweeb Fandaniel doing poorly explained overpowered derivative crap.

Now before I get started, I feel I should just lay it out there a super strong theme of this whole expansion is suicidal thoughts, and I’m not planning to really dwell on it, but personally I found there’s a lot of stuff in here where just quickly and sort of lightly bringing up a particular flavor thereof got me into some real bad memories, so be ready for even briefer mentions I guess. The other two major thematic elements we have going on here are worshipful love letters from the whole staff to takeout food, and what has to be an intentional pattern of setting up exciting tension and then just completely defusing it. Plus the pacing’s kinda shot from trying to squeeze two expansions worth of plot into one. If only there were an in-game vista that summed this up...

Let’s see if I can get all this into a halfway reasonable word count. First order of business, we’re headed to Nerd Town, AKA Old Sharlayan, in hopes of working out why a bunch of eggheads aren’t willing to help the guy publicly announcing his plan to kill everyone in the world, or barring that, at least get access to their pretty impressive library. Nerd Town kinda sucks. Super bureaucratic. First thing when you show up you have to get processed and get your green card. Plan is everyone’s an assistant working for Krile who’s still very much a member of a respected research group, they aren’t terribly amused by the ridiculous things you can state when they ask for your name and occupation. Also while things look very Mediterranean it is firmly and repeatedly established that this place has just the worst, blandest food in the world. Oh and on the boat ride over you get a vision of a human-shaped Hydaelyn showing up to confirm that yeah, she and Zodiark are just summoned god like all the others, nothing special, and also she’s been weakening as more and more shard-worlds get reabsorbed via apocalypses and strengthening Zodiark... which doesn’t especially make sense since the whole reason she exists was to punch him hard enough to break things up in the first place. Maybe she got the drop or something.

Anyway, you get stonewalled by stubborn nerds like immediately, and have two leads to follow up on, so you split up and get a choice which to do first. Thancred Urianger and Estinein are going to test an experimental teleporter that doesn’t require you to personally unlock the destination crystal first to get to Thavnair, with its capital Radz-at-Han, which is just India, straight up. Everyone else is going to stick around here and try to sneak into Labrynthos, a whole underground archive/nature preserve/site for top secret experiments by researchers who aren’t beholden to the normal high council of nerds. This mostly involves helping a bunny boy carry crates and a brief foray with Y’shtola testing out the toad spell on you and the twins. You don’t really make a ton of progress. Krile gets kinda spacey, ends up briefly possessed by Hydaelyn to tell you this one mood ring flower they have growing down there is gonna be the key to everything and you should keep one on you, and then you’re all arrested by the science police for snooping around a high security research black site and put on trial. Mostly your party uses the trial to call these dumb jerk nerds out for being dumb jerk nerds, point out you totally are just legitimately working on your own research project, and G’raha points out some historical records marking when they shifted from just being a bunch of nerds learning cool stuff to improve society to a bunch of nerds totally restructuring their society to be isolationist weirdos archiving all the world’s knowledge in their creepy underground bunker.

It’s pretty clear that an archaeological team some years back found something. Like say a god who brainwashed everyone into fanatics or something, and they end up admitting to having this all-important “great work” where everyone has to submit to partial memory wiping and magical compulsion not to speak about it to preserve the important secret, and we are just absolutely setting things up where the nerd high council and who or whatever they’re serving as the real villains of this expansion. But like I said we are all about setting up big things and completely deflating them. Eventually it’ll turn out the thing they’re working on is actually totally benign, nobody’s evil, and they’re just a bunch of arbitrarily obstructionist bureaucrats who suck but are on your side. One member of their high council is enough of a reasonable person to have your back though so you don’t get expelled or anything. You’re still not allowed in the top secret lab though so it’s all kind of a wash.

So, experimental teleport to India because I guess they got sick of having so many expansion locations you reach by hopping a boat from Limsa or just taking an airship or something. Everyone’s super dizzy and nautious from the trip and staggering around, and has the terrible realization that Estinein is wandering around on his own in a big outdoor market desperate for tourist money. You’ve gotta get everyone a nice lassi to settle their stomach and stop that idiot before he blows all his money on kitschy knickknacks! Before you catch up he does manage to blow a couple thousand on a hair band to give himself a nice ponytail. I still don’t like how he looks without his helmet though.

The local population is all au ra and big elephant people.The elephant people have big Tribe Quest vibes, and you do eventually help some out in this sort of ridiculous setup where a bunch of delinquent elephant people using hippo-pulled chariots to drag race get into hot water for being a public menace, and turn over a new leaf opening a delivery service. Mostly it’s delivering takeout, but there’s also quests where you go around throwing Gulal at people, one where you are clearly conducting a drug deal (the second time this comes up at that, Heavensward has you helping cool bug pals harvest marijuana and sell joints to the other locals), and there’s one really unfortunate one where you’re asked to put on a ridiculous mascot elephant head and shout at some random person that you’re his god because people are sick of him praying constantly. All of this is actually post-Endwalker though, because we just arbitrarily gate all the tribe quests back there this expansion. What we’re actually here for now is helping some other elephant people who are actually doing very serious government-approved reseach on these big evil towers. Presumably since the first “tribe” unlocked are full citizens of a friendly nation, when these first went live they quietly went through the whole UI replacing “Beast Tribe” with just “Tribe.” Interesting that this didn’t happen earlier with the dwarves getting drunk and building tanks or something.

Anyway, their leader Nidhana, who’s just a real nice friendly nerd hanging out any time you’re in the area, has been working on these special “warding scales” that should in theory make anyone carrying one immune to godly mind alteration, not only letting random NPC military forces approach these towers safely, but also let the other Scions or any other noteworthy friends canonically tag along for future boss fights and so on. And they do in fact work perfectly. But oh no! There’s this weird creepy little kid showing up to deliver a fresh load of the secret ingredient they need. A huge pile of scales clearly ripped away from the belly of a dragon! Estinein, who’s come a long way on this sort of thing, is way sympathetic to dragons now (probably helps that he straight up turned into one for a bit) and confronts him, but again, we aren’t paying tension off. The Satrap who rules the country and his entire family line before them have just always had this big cool dragon friend Vrtra and he’s happy to help with stuff like this. Anyway, Nidhana decides to test one of these scales personally and heads off to the local tower, which people are locally calling the Tower of Zot, and while it does work, the second the door opens she gets hauled inside with huge chains, her scale gets lost, and she’s stuck in one of those torture walls.

We also get some attempt to retroactively make Fandaniel a character by establishing that before he was made into, let’s be honest, a fake Ascian, he was Amon, yeah like the optional FF3 boss who’s also in this, who we’re retconning into a clone of this guy, a horribly evil Allagan mad scientist who’s personally responsible for any sort of humanoid monsters walking around. Minotaurs, snake gals, nerdy bird people, all him just messing around. Also big into cloning. Hence everyone in the Crystal Tower raid. I don’t care, he’s still just the absolute worst and shallowest character.

You head off to give the Satrap a good news bad news report, and not long into the conversation Estinein gets annoyed and demands we pull back the big Wizard of Oz curtain and just directly talk to the secret ruler of the nation. Oh no! The Satrap and his whole family line are just political puppets and this country has actually been run by Vrtra the huge dragon and heretofore unmentioned additional child of Midgardsormr all along! Which... is fine actually. With the notable exception of Nidhogg every named dragon, especially the elder wyrm siblings here, has just been the absolute chillest nicest most understanding person, and Vrtra is no exception.Super nice even! And the creepy kid is just one of Vrtra’s eyes stuck into a totally indistinguishable from a normal au ra child android the local alchemists whipped up. Seems like the fact they can do that should be more of a big deal but it just never comes up elsewhere. Anyway you still need to keep this a secret from the general populace, because if they found out this cool friendly dragon who’s been known to be a trusted ally to the whole nation since it was first founded is actually the ruler, uh... everyone would be totally fine with that actually. I’m getting a little out of order but the next time you’re in the area the fake Satrap dies and Vrtra has to personally step up and for real not one single person has a problem with this, and really why should they? There’s a similar bit incidentally late in the last expansion where G’raha finally goes public with how the fabled Warrior of Darkness restoring the night sky is actually the protagonist, and this confused crowd of onlookers is just like, “yeah, obviously? This mysterious old friend of yours from where you’re originally from shows up, you’re ecstatic, and every time they take a trip somewhere we hear about the local Lightwarden being killed and the sky being fixed. This isn’t hard to piece together.”

So OK, big Tower of Zot rescue time. We just need to make a quick hop back to Nerd Town to merge these split progression options and catch everyone up. We’ve had too much lavish fan service for 5 and 6 so far, so now it’s really FF4′s turn to get some love. Inside the Tower of Zot we fight the three Magus Sisters, as the local gods being summoned by torturing elephant people in the walls. Who’d you expect them to worship in India, Shiva? Rama? No no no those were a historical white lady and a big beardo worshipped by plant-faeries. Clearly in India they worship that boss trio with the delta attack. Keep it straight. We even have Dr. Lugae and Barnabus for a sub-boss on the way! Oh and there’s a bit teased at the end about a severed hand in the core of the tower that feels like we’re setting up some sort of Golbez thing, but no.

What it actually is is that they kinda used the emperor’s corpse as a summoning base for the whole get people to worship Garlemald itself (have I actually ever mentioned that’s the official name of the Empire? I feel like I just keep saying “the Empire” since it’s just easier). It also makes for a convenient weakpoint for Estinien to jump up and stab, causing the whole tower to poof. Fortunately G’raha’s around and he knows float. Also fortunately Alisae’s around and she whips her hog out to start deprogramming tortured nerds, starting with Nidhana who notices the mood ring flower and talks about this obscure scientific study where not literally everything in the world is just aether related technobabble. There’s a secondary natural force/subatomic thing she calls Akasha and everyone else calls Dynamis later (and I think came up in the Sri Lakshmi fight as orbs of “vril” you need to grab before the big dance number). It’s basically impossible to measure so it’s an obscure thing, but yeah, mood ring flower. Anyway everyone heads back to Nerd Town as those scale talismans get distributed to your allies, which again at this point basically means like... 80% of the world give or take. And then you get woken up in the middle of the night because your friends are all sick of terrible Sharlayan food and decided to surprise you with takeout. Look at this cutscene. Watch G’raha make sweet passionate love to this enormous cheeseburger.

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The next order of business involves taking an airship and heading into the heart of the empire. Not because we’re back to the invasion though. At this point the empire is just straight up dead. All it really took was you proving they weren’t invincible in Stormblood and the extra unrest of the emperor himself being killed by his back from the dead deeply messed up son, and they just completely self-destructed on their own. This might actually be my favorite plot point in the entirety of FF14. They have this empire very clearly modeled after the nazis, and basically as soon as they lose their morale and momentum in a big way, they immediately collapse into infighting and tear themselves to pieces. As always happens in the real world. I’m less keen on how this, like so many other things, has nazi scientists actually making ridiculous cool stuff though. In reality nazi scientists have never actually existed, just a bunch of absolute suckers so hopped up on their stupid BS that they ask other people to do wacky comic book science for them and convince themselves the results are amazing. Here though, yeah, we get a ruined imperial capital crawling with death robots, demons called forth from hell, and freaky mutant monsters just crawling through the streets while a few desperate stragglers are huddled around space heaters starving to death by the time you show up, on what is explicitly a pure good will mission to help struggling refugees of their terrible civil war.

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It’s really visually striking, but kind of weird that the Imperial capital is (or really was) just straight up a major 20th century city with all the implied infrastructure. It’s not as shocking as the whole Evangelion thing from the dumbest side quest, but again, people use maps that are half cloud-cover and build stone fortresses guarded by archers all around here. There’s a bit of fighting against what’s left of their military forces when you show up, but you come in with a big huge international coalition that includes Sadu and I guess other people but for real Sadu has the rocks fall everyone dies spell so on the rare occasion you’re teamed up with her for a big plot fight she’s a win button you just stall to help. Resistance crushed, you head out with the twins to try and find some survivors to give supplies and good will to. After a while you find one group, they’re super paranoid and terrified, threaten you, and when your back is turned one of them just grabs her sick little sister and books it into a snowfield, because she’s so hopped up on imperial propaganda about you being dangerous savages they’d rather take their chances running into a snow storm with no supplies, and they absolutely freeze to death before you find them again.

The other major pocket of survivors you find are under the watch of what’s left of one of two surviving military units, holed up in a subway tunnel. You really try your best to just give them the supplies they need to live, but they insist on taking you hostage, putting shock collars on the twins, and forcing you to run around the ruined city to scrape up what little fantasy gasoline (ceruleum) you can syphon out of dead robots and the heater in a no longer functioning muck filled park fountain, and then their commander still kinda just decides the best plan is to attack your refugee aid party and seize everything, since reinforcements are totally coming from the only other surviving legion as soon as they get their radios working, honest. Speaking of, rather than embracing traditional linkpearl technology, the empire has straight up AM radios, and in what really is one of the sloppiest handwaves I’ve seen, turns out the reason there’s any survivors at all is that they were all clustered around their radios listening to news reports and the crackly vocal version of the Imperial theme currently playing on a loop. Anyway you’re about to go “OK screw humoring these idiots” and deal with that when you suddenly black out and we get one of these scenes where I really have to show before I tell so you know I’m not just writing weird slash fiction here.

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We hereby have to wave the right to make any future “at least buy a girl dinner first” jokes regarding Zenos’ whole kill-bang-die confusion. But yeah, this is the point in the plot of FF14 where the wormy little terrible new villain sucks your soul out of your body and sticks it in the body of some random imperial goon, so that you can have a nice dinner date with Zenos, and then he puts on your body, complete with whatever ridiculous gear you have on to go cause trouble and lure you into another date-fight. When I actually did this, tallest most musclebound possible orc gal in this outfit here, which made the whole thing extra kinky on his end.

Of course first you have to get to him in what’s actually kind of one of the most interesting set pieces gameplay wise. You’re still in this borrowed body, which is pretty low level, a fixed class, and has no natural regeneration of any kind, not access to your inventory, and you are just plopped kind of dead center in the middle of these horrible ruins and half to stealth/fight/scrounge your way out with no clear goal markers and a time limit. It’s actually fairly challenging and by the end you’re caught in an explosion so you’re literally crawling home to warn your friends that hey, that’s not you, it’s an undead murderous kinkster stealing your body for his elavorate sex fantasy, but you recover enough to tackle him at the last moment and then also the timer on all this and you’re restored.

So, I am just really conflicted. I maintain that bringing Zenos back from the dead was an absolutely terrible idea. He worked really well as a villain whose motivations take a bit to come into focus and eventually kinda make your skin crawl, the whole thing caps off with a truly excellent death scene that robs you of a nice celebratory vibe for your big victory, the resurrection is some really sloppy writing, especially given how the whole point is he was officially done with life, and they pretty clearly don’t know what to do with him while he’s back. He is literally just sitting there in the background bored out of his mind and actively ignoring the annoying main villain we actually have and his efforts to get him in on the evil scheming. AND YET, every interaction you have with him in this expansion is just such an entertaining scene and gives another fun glimpse into his really... unique frame of mind.

Anyway, that big attack fails, and the leader behind it finally gets word on the radio from his buddy’s unit that... they’ve actually surrendered and his like dozen surviving soldiers are kind of all that’s left of the big evil empire. Hearing this, he decides to go ahead and become the one good nazi we have in this whole thing. Yes that is a euphemism. Yes it does involve him putting down the mic on his radio, picking up a gun, and leaving a nice stain on the imperial flag he has in his little subway car makeshift office. I’m not going to post a screenshot, but seriously, 10/10, no notes. The whole Garlemald chapter of this expansion is great. Love seeing nazis literally being too stupid and racist to live. What little population is left then finally accepts defeat and lets you provide them with the free food, water, heat, and emergency shelter they need to survive. It’s finally time to head into that big menacing Imperial monster palace, AKA the Towel of Babel, find the bit of it that qualifies as a god, and kill it. Specifically what’s left of the old Emperor in the form of a rare FF10 tribute.

Then Fandaniel just kinda grabs Zenos gives a pathetic little speech and uses a big teleporter to flee to the moon. Which is... a bit abrupt but you follow. And uh... the moon sucks, actually? Like we have all this buildup and foreshadowing like it’s going to be this big enemy base and we’re going to do the whole Lunar Subterrane thing but no. Grey dust, annoying to navigate map, clear signs of cut content. You meet a palette swap of Emet-Selch’s recreated pre-fall Ascian ghosts who is... not some sort of phantom but a minion of Hydaelyn’s here to act as prison warden for what’s left of Zodiark, trapped inside the moon like it’s a giant prison (much like the other moon was for Bahamut). There’s this whole business with a ring of gargantuan swords scattered around to act as seals, one of which Fandaniel just destroyed because the whole bit with the towers was powering up a big death star laser to smash these, and you have to go around and pacify the ghosts of sacrifices made to summon Zodiark back in the day to power up the rest, with this helpful golden furred elegant moon dog ferrying you around as needed. Parthway through this though the whole thing gets cut short via Fandaniel’s BS sloppy writing powers, all the remaining towers get smashed, Zodiark is revived, do not pass go, go directly to big epic boss battle against basically Satan, and Fandaniel himself, believing everyone is now going to die, jumps into the big sort of chasm down to the center of the moon unleashing horrible magic energies to kill himself.That’s the end of that. Thank goodness villains always stay dead in this, right?

Anyway you kill Zodiark. Not even all that hard of a boss. But uh... oh right, you kind of weren’t supposed to do that, were you. He was kinda load-bearing. Summoned to avert an apocalypse and all. Which turns out was an ongoing thing not a one-time deal. As your friends catch up, you’re getting informed that The Final Days are now resuming, big ominous meteor showers, death of everyone in the world shortly. And as later exposition confirms, not just this version of this world. All those splintered off versions like the one we JUST saved from an apocalypse last expansion are doomed too. All because you, the main character here, have this legitimate self control issue where you just can’t not kill any god you see on the spot. But the chill moon dog, Argos, then leads you to a giant door to this massive high tech underground city with uh...

They’re called lopporits. They’re based on Namingway from FF4. The look like the sort of little figurines your great grandmother might collect, and they are here because the entire moon doubles as an emergency escape system to load the whole population of the world onto in the event that some idiot comes along, kills Zodiark, and dooms everyone. They’re also so distractingly adorable your whole party just kinda goes slack-jawed, forgets everything they were doing, and the plot just stops dead in its tracks while you spend kind of a weirdly long time just humoring them and trying to give positive feedback to all the amenities they start showing off. They’ve got all your food needs covered with, and this is the official quest item name, obscenely long carrots, described in detail as being particularly girthy. They’ve build everything to perfect human scale... based on an assumption that the average person is still like 30 feet tall like they were back in Ascian times, similarly all just assuming your whole party is a bunch of unsupervised children sent up in the first wave of evacuations. They have to improvise on clothing when it turns out universal dumb black robes are out of fashion, and have some really interesting ideas.

Once again we tease the idea that they actually have super sinister motives and are trying to trap you here with constant distractions, but then no, turns out they’re just really horrified because they’re pretty good at reading people and can clearly see that none of you are actually impressed with any of their stuff. Except Urianger. Urianger loves cute little weirdos and dressing eccentrically. This leads to a big speech to cheer them up, talking about how their self-chosen names all convey their strength of character. Like Mappingway, wanting to chart out all the unexplored secrets of the world, and Livingway just wanting to keep life going for everyone. And then turns out one is named Puddingway, but, you know, everyone likes pudding? And I guess I have to link the comic don’t I.

Anyway, checking back in on things on things down on the planet, which only NOW are we formally establishing is called Aetherys, ending years of confusion where people thought the whole world was either called Hydaelyn or Eorzea. Side note a checked and “Eorzea” is officially the term for the westernmost continent, Aldenard, if and only if you are also counting in the nearby islands. But yeah things are going bad. Especially over in Thavnair, AKA India, where the sky is stock on apocalyptic red with constant meteor showers, and seemingly at random people are turning into rad palette swaps of the freakiest looking monsters we already had models lying around for, which we’re arbitrarily calling blasphemies. There’s reports of this happening in other places too, and a lot of people seem to turn into these things just from the pure terror of seeing them. Y’shtola’s weird vision deal also reveals that rather than similar stuff where someone’s soul/aether gets tainted with some element or other, here it’s just literally rotting and crumbling away to nothing so when these monsters die and leave a sickly black splash on the floor, that’s it, do not go to afterlife, do not pass go, you are done. Sucks for them. Especially since unlike the whole becoming a sin eater deal we are so painfully cribbing from with this, it seems totally arbitrary who it happens to and why.

Anyway they kinda dance around this and kind of offer up extreme fear or hate as alternate causes but by the end of the expansion it’s abundantly clear that you turn into a monster from suicidal ideation... which makes a lot of the panicking crowds popping in the ensuing panic scenes feel really clumsy, writing wise. Also there’s this whole bit where a guy’s worried about his wife and new born baby in the chaos, gets chased by a monster and injured, turns into one himself, tries to kill his wife, she panics and jumps off a high ledge with her baby and dies on impact with the water, forcing you to dive in after to rescue this now orphan baby and hand them off to someone. Here’s the thing though, this doesn’t happen in some instanced thing. This is just your standard, on the overworld, here’s someone giving you your current active quest, here’s where you go to do the next step chain. So you could totally like, wander off with this baby at the bottom of the well, go do sidequests, maybe some that mention “days later” in them, before rescuing this baby. Or do the rescue, but not the hand-off, and just have this inventory baby for a good long while It’s paced excitingly enough this only stuck me after, but it amuses me that it’s technically possible.

This is where the fake Satrap dies, and eventually where we set up our fresh set of Role quests. Each of the five basic combat class types has a lead about a big blasphemy in a different part of the world to look into... and none of these really go anywhere interesting. Healer is probably the most interesting, since it involves checking in on Fordola who is having a very hard time keeping it together and not turning into one of these. The rest are just kinda whatever. Gosetsu shows up again briefly to call out a charlatan medium in the ranged attacker one. Offensive magic has the one that hurts my suspension of disbelief because you deal with the ONE blasphemy in Ishgard and like... it’s Ishgard. The whole place should be a crater right away. As is though yeah there’s like... five people suicidal enough in the rest of the world combined to become blasphemies, and then like half the population of Thavnair. Hell a little later you go back to Garlemald and have to deal with a bunch more of this, but it’s because Thavnairian refugees are coming through on the way to somewhere less terrifying as the red sky spreads to the area and a bunch of them lose it at the thought of nowhere being safe. These people are just kind of this game’s punching bag. My best guess between that and the way there’s no real connection on the map, which is also a bit less filled with interesting details than most, is a lot more was planned for the region but there were cuts and/or delays and the focus of all this ended up there just to flesh things out, but still.

Oh yeah and while dealing with the attack in the Imperial ruins, Zenos shows up randomly to take a big blasphemy down with his cool new scythe... and complain about how bored he is and ask if you can pretty please fight him to the death again soon as soon as you stop getting distracted by this whole thing. He was also pretty polite about this on the moon, but Alisaie wasn’t there to call him out. Another really fun scene here.

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I love how he gets called out for being a weird hedonistic kinkster here, and I love how he responds to Jullus the one Imperial soldier who grew a clue before successfully getting himself killed, barely, with this “wait would you seriously be OK with me destroying the whole country here if I was doing it for some kind of good reason? That is seriously messed up dude, get help.” And then that eye roll at the end.

So turns out the big secret of the Nerd Council is they found the actual embodied true form of Hydaelyn in a cave and she broke down all the details on Zodiark being a load-bearing boss someone would probably eventually kill, and they should really coordinate with these moon rabbits on a plan to evacuate the whole world just in case. And like, OK, but A- they’re really terrible at this. Didn’t even communicate the physical needs of people or population estimates. B- this is really the sort of thing where being less coy and explaining things to the protagonist in particular would maybe help avoid the whole problem because who else do you even have to worry about accidentally killing a god in the heat of the moment? Maybe Estinien? Tell him too. Oh and C- the nihilistic weirdo wanting to end all life and largely doing so by covering the world in mind-control towers kinda seems like a barrier to getting everyone out safely. Same with the deadly biochemical weapons from earlier. Point is the twins’ dad really sucks. Their mom is cool though. She helps Alphinaud switch classes to Sage, the healer that gets a set of flying laser cannons. Also it eventually turns out she’s quietly been THE source of funding for the Scions forever through anonymous donations. Who’s gonna tell these kids their parents are probably getting a divorce?

Getting things back on track, your only real lead is the cryptic hint about the flower. It doesn’t go much of anywhere, except a name for it that dates back to Ascian times. So with all the rest very dead, you go check in with Elidibus who’s not technically dead, just, you know, soul trapped in the crystal tower. Which is also essentially a giant database of Allagan science notes. Turns out while he’s been in there he’s mellowed out a lot and is willing to rework things and send your soul back in time to get info from before anything of note on the whole millennia long timeline happened. Specifically to a research facility called Elpis where people used to send the dangerous monster designs they came up with because they’re bored weirdos with world shaping powers to test and make sure they’re viable and would fit in an ecologic niche somewhere. Problem is you come through all ghostly and also I wasn’t kidding about the 30 foot giants. Fortunately someone eventually notices the weird tiny ghost and convinces his boyfriend to shove some aether into you so you’re solid and properly sized.

If it isn’t our old friend from a few thousand years from now Emet-Selch and his boyfriend we’re at least on good terms with some kinda recreated imaginary semi-ghost version of Hythlodaeus. They looked real dorky back forever ago. Anyway they assume from the matching color of your soul that you’re the familiar of their friend Azem, which, sure, technically distant future reincarnation of slightly more than 50% of said but close enough. So they let you hang out on this business trip. They’re here to offer the position of Fandaniel to this guy here whose real name is Hermes since the previous one just retired, and he’s all mopey about it because when people retire they kill themselves so they can get reincarnated. Except for the previous Azem, she just figured she’d keep hanging out. It’s totally a voluntary thing, not an enforced Logan’s Run sort of thing but there’s still a weird social stigma if you don’t do it so like, hey, Emet-Selch, I feel like you were overselling this place. Everyone’s a workaholic nerd who off themselves when they’re out of ideas for new research grants, and things are looking decidedly more ancient Greece and less extra art deco New York than previously suggested.

Turns out this Hermes kid is really depressed and fixated on death in general. Which is kinda weird when everyone is officially immortal. He’s particularly bummed about how it’s literally his job to snap his fingers and reduce terrible terrible monsters that would like end all life if allowed to exist in the world to their component elements, and fair enough. Maybe work on getting people to stop making horrible ravenous death beasts in the first place though? Anyway he’s proud of himself for making this weird little psychic bird girl who much like these mood ring flowers is also super empathic and gets all sad and mopey with him whenever he gets sad and mopey, which is a lot. In fact, he made a whole bunch. They’re psychically networked, and all called Meteion. Like meteor. Because he’s sending them all out to explore space and try to find some kind of meaning of life thing out. Also they’re based on this Dynamis stuff. Apparently 60% of the mass of the universe is made up of Dynamis. It’s just kinda weaker than Aether so nobody cares, but he’s pretty sure he’ll be able to untap its potential and activate it all like, as he says, a river breaking free of a dam. You can totally see where all of this is going here, right? It’s exactly as blunt as I’m making it sound.

Anyway you hang out a while dealing with this depressed kid and his weird bird girl, and eventually she gets an update that hey, the rest of her sisters have finished that task Hermes sent them out on forever ago after making them apparently some time ago and never formally submitting the design or the plan he had for him to any of his superiors. Specifically the plan was to take his super empathic socially needy bird girls, have them all fly through the supernaturally soul crushing void of space, find whatever aliens might exist and ask them what to him is the ultimate question, apparently some variation on “if everybody just dies in the end what’s even the point of going on living!?” and like... hey, I get it. Someone explained heat death to me when I was like 12. I had a similar breakdown about it. But as Emet-Selch starts tearing into him about as the report comes in, it is really just a terrible idea for all sorts of reasons to try and establish first contact with alien races by having a bunch of depressed bird girls show up and start trauma dumping on them out of the blue.

The results are pretty grim too. They just start going through planet by planet with these little stories about finding formerly inhabited planets where literally everyone is dead, and researching all the various ways this happened. These people had a apocalyptic war. These people got all spiritually enlightened, ended all suffering, and got too bored to keep going. These people had a godlike ruler who got in a bad mood and killed everyone, and hey, talking to us made him suicidal and he killed himself on the spot. This also happened when we contacted this planet where two factions were in this tense cold war setup... Everyone including Meteion really wants to cut the feed on this depressing stuff but Hermes insists on hearing the whole thing and goes off with her to do so.

In the middle of all this though, that aforementioned retired Azem shows up. Her name’s Venat. She’s more on to your weird deal than these others, mostly because she notices you have magic wards on you that seem to have been put there by her, plus she’s visibly that human form of Hydaelyn you got a quick vision of, so, yeah. Pre-deity Hydaelyn here. And she’s nice enough. Eventually the others kinda work out that you two have some weird secret thing going and you end up explaining the deal to the others and Emet-Selch basically responds with, “hey, screw you? Assuming you’re not just making all this up, you’re telling me I just become an absolute melodramatic flouncing asshole in the future, and I refuse to believe that. Like especially the part about me recreating the whole city and everyone in it to mope in? There is no way I would ever become such an over the top drama queen” and like, he keeps going for a WHILE with this. It’s great.

So you all go to confront him about the whole thing, and he arranges the showdown to be at this uh... big computer clock thing on hand that can do time warp things and also erase people’s memories and give them new ones. Seems like a bad thing to have around! Very easily abused! He totally supports his depressed bird daughters in the conclusion they draw that all life in the universe should be eliminated so there’s nobody left to be sad and die, so he’s going to wipe everyone’s memories and just play dumb about the pending bird-girl driven psychic suicidal apocalypse. Your past pals play some head games and Emet-Selch in particular pulls a big switcheroo so you and Venat get teleported out at the last minute. She goes on to become Hydaelin eventually and avoids technically having a villain turn by way of doing the whole Shiva style transformation, there’s precedent, but let’s be real she still kinda sucks and turned the worst Scion into a hand puppet for a bit in there. Anyway, now you know why the world’s ending. A depressed bird girl out in space somewhere. Oh and it’s not like the Fandaniel you know and hate has the memories of this Hermes loser, just his soul, the memories of the main reason Allagan was awful, and the body of the genocidal viceroy’s somehow even worse villain. Just a turducken of guys who really suck.

Back in the present you go find Hydaelyn in the magical god flesh to compare notes on your big stable time loop here, and she’s polite enough to challenge you to a fight to make sure you’re prepared to face some horribly depressed bird girl. And really goes all out so you “tragically” have to kill her. And definitely don’t feel super smug and relieved that in the end you really did get to go and kill literally every god anyone ever summoned. That you know of anyway.

You talk all the nerds in Nerd Town into letting you borrow their secret evacuation spaceship if you can find nerds able to increase the engines’ efficiency because as is, even the moon evacuation plan would take too long. That bits easy because you know a ton of nerds and a ton of people willing to drag over chunks of Dalamud, the whole Bahamut prison moon which are all over the place and make good scrap for this. Then the only problem is loading in enough Aether as fuel to get to the far edge of the universe. If only there was a really good way to condense a whole massive pile of crystals into something nice and compact. Say the size of a boss fight. Oh right summoning gods! The lopporits, who totally ended up coming down with Urianger to get firsthand knowledge of day to day planet life to build better stuff for people and also just dig it, just so happen to know an alternate summon ritual that bypasses all the greedy syphoning of all the world’s aether and mind controlling everyone in the area. That’s... absurdly convenient. So you get a bunch of reformed priests to resummon every god up through Stormblood with the safety on, and just... load them into the fuel tank of this spaceship you kinda low key stole from some terrible nerds. Actually at the very last minute Cid shows up to “help” and honestly the work is all done literally all the guy does is add a coat of paint with his logo on it, and insist on naming the thing. Kind of a dick move, Cid. So he kinda steals it from them and you steal it from him.

So... I feel like I’m due to break text up with something and the end of the universe, AKA Ultima Thule, or as I like to call it, Space Hell, is super visually interesting but it photographs terribly so have this but honestly this dorky power ballad is NOT playing when you show up here. Nor are silly mounts until you’re done with the plot, like every area basically.

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Space hell is built out of the random chunks of various dead worlds Meteion found just kinda brought together into a depressing collage. Technically some of these still have inhabitants, kind of. One is the dragon homeworld, and as we know dragons don’t really die properly, so, they’re all dead, but still hanging out being super depressed about the intense pollution not letting them have kids who aren’t monster freaks. We’ve got people who became beings of pure thought and then got depressed about heat death, and then realized they need to have bodies again to kill themselves, we’ve got the race of horrible death robots who destroyed dragon planet, and honestly a hell of a lot of other planets. Backstory is they were really wimpy and paranoid about being killed by space horrors, so they built death robots and also went full cyborg and transfered their minds into death robot bodies and upgraded those further and built Omega and kinda got real carried away on the proactive defense and realized they kind of had killed like half the life in the universe and could totally take the other half in a fight even all at once. So then they had a big existential crisis because what were they doing before going to war again?

So again, this is after the credits roll and you come back here in the patches, but after you finish this whole existential threat to the universe thing you come back here with a now retired lopporit and they’re still all what do we even do now, so you just toss it out there that one of the other worldlets was this like coffee shop from a planet where the bird girls couldn’t even work out how everyone died it looks like they just got raptured or whatever, so why don’t the death robots just like, move in and open a nice little cafe. Make coffee and soup and stuff for all the other last survivors of civilizations. And they go for it and it’s probably my favorite of all the tribe quests.

But we’re not here to help death robots research soup recipes YET. We’re here to recreate the original first season Sailor Moon finale. Marching across a horrible field of total desolation where all of our friends make big heroic sacrifices one by one so we can continue. And honestly the framing is weird because basically it’s a chain of finding a nihilistic alien representative, hear why they think life’s not worth living, someone steps up with a counter argument, they sort of explode and form a bridge to the next area. It’s all about the emotional arguments because this is all made of Dynamis, so everything operates on pure vibes. These are vibe-ranium bridges if you will. Anyway what I initially thought was going on here is you land in like pure depression land and people keep vanishing because they talk themselves into better head spaces and are ejected. I feel like that’d make way more sense, but no, all your friends are in fact explaining reasons to go on living then promptly dying.

Eventually you run out of friends as you hit the cafe here, and can only advance by talking to the depressed bird girl herself about all your personal trauma and stuff and how you get past it, which creates a very long stairwell to the surface of the dead sun she’s keeping everyone’s souls in so they can’t reincarnate, and THAT’S when the power ballad in that earlier clip kicks in, as you walk up to have a boss fight. And you know, it’s a pretty good JRPG final boss fight. Big weird woman, lots of wings jutting out all over, really over the top throwing planets at you attacks. The classic stuff. And then halfway through the fight freaking Zenos just literally comes crashing through the 4th wall and goes “hey, this who you’re fighting? She doesn’t actually seem tough, you want to hurry it up? I stopped by the bar you scions hang out at and someone said you were here, so I turned myself into a dragon again so we can finally have that proper rematch as soon as you’re done here. Do you need help or anything to finish up faster?”

Tumblr’s not letting me add any more movies but NO REALLY THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENS it’s hilarious. And here’s the comic version.

I have a line I really want to go out on here, so, again, here’s my Patreon. I hope I’ve entertained and educated you with all this over the course of the month. And here’s what I have to say on what post-game currently exists for this. Also here is the actual proper 10th part of this whole project I later wrote after the Endwalker patch cycle finally finished.

The ghost of Emet-Selch and his boyfriend show up for a last minute sappy pep talk, and to remind you that while it might seem like we’ve literally wrapped up every single loose end, there’s some islands you’ve never been to. A whole southern continent to explore. The rest of those dimensional shards. You never got around to fighting The Twelve. So yeah title cards and NPCs and E-S narrating this expansion have been saying the whole time this is the end of the story, but we’re not DONE done. So you beat this bird girl down, the dead sun hatches and blue sun yolk drips out restoring life to the universe, your friends all get to come back, you activate their emergency teleporters and chuck yours so you can go in for the finishing blow, and then well, here you are. Just alone at the edge of the universe in a big empty space behind a random diner. Zenos just finally got the message and came and did something good to help you out, and he’s really giving you those puppy dog eyes. So after a set of dialog choices for exactly how you want to begrudgingly admit you honestly do also enjoy a really over the top boss fight, you begrudgingly agree to have a big duel with him, you know, just this once, fully aware he gets off on these, and it honestly goes on for a really long time, including a bit where he flat out kills you and teaches you the boss encounter trick to just pulling out a second health bar through sheer force of will, and the whole thing ends with you just tossing your weapon aside and running up to give him a big ol’ punch right between those weird never quite focused eyes of his while he has this blissed out grin.

So the conclusion, for now, of the whole long epic story of Final Fantasy 14 which I have explained to you this month is, I swear before this whole mountain of dead gods, that you make sure none of your friends are looking and give Zenos a pity handjob in the back lot behind a diner in the middle of nowhere.

#mic drop #final fantasy 14 #ff14 #final fantasy xiv #ffxiv #there's flying and humanoid sharks in elpis and hythlodaeus says they're big now and I know I know plenty of furry artists don't tell me...

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hibiscusangel15 · 6 years

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//Shooting Star - A Tobecky Playlist

Mindy Gledhill - I Do Adore

Kiesza - Cannonball

Youhna - Houkiboushi (Comet)

Eyeshine - Afterglow

Aqua Timez - Sen no Yoru wo Koete (After a Thousand Nights)

Gorillaz - To Binge

Future Islands - The Fountain

Far East Movement - Rocketeer

Vancouver Sleep Clinic - Sleeping World

Madeon ft. Passion Pit - Pay No Mind

Ed Sheeran - All of the Stars

#i picked a bunch of songs that at least vaguely hint at some form of astral body lol #some mention stars outright though #Tobecky #tobeckyweek #WordGirl #Tobey McCallister #Becky Botsford #Day Three: Shooting Star #i hope this has a nice thematic progression...kinda

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a-student-out-of-time · 4 years

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Twisted Sister Arc Review Part 3

Prison Break

And with this we are finally coming to an end here. Again, apologies for breaking this into 3 parts but I doubt you guys wanted to read about 5k words in one sitting so it’s easier for you to digest. I also feel like I’m not doing a review like this in a long time. Anyway, time’s a-wasting let’s get back to where we left off as we left the demonic guitar child to be mind gutted and to catch those criminals that got out!

With all the criminals running around the one question that is on everyone’s minds is ‘where’s Iroha’? Did she go back to Makoto or did she head home? The answer is, she went back to Makoto and the two having been making it out ever since. Their intense kissing session was interrupted by Nikei and Emma catching a bad guy that got too near the house, and not only does this mean that Nikei gets the confirmation that Iroha is alright, but also Makoto gets to meet Emma and Nikei for the first time. Emma and Makoto meeting went just as I suspected, given that Maku was cool with Makoto and due to how close Emma and Maku, there was little doubt that Emma was gonna approve of Makoto. Nikei though, his reaction shocked a lot of people. I’m guessing since that one dream got posted of Nikei putting a gun to Makoto’s head and threatening him, not helped with how trigger happy he still is, and also all the threats he’s made about Makoto already, for Nikei to be like ‘Sup bro, I’m cool’ means either Nikei was just joking all those times he threatened Makoto (likely) or Makoto’s just that pure of a person. Remember that in Class 78, Makoto was able to befriend literally everyone in his class, and Class 78 had a lot of people who were anti-social and had severe trust issues, so it says a lot about his character that he was able to connect with so many people, and the one person he didn’t connect with, he STILL tried to safe, it’s just Junko didn’t want to be saved and you cannot help someone who refuses it. And given that Nikei’s pretty good at reading people for who they are, he would have realised that Iroha would be in safe hands with him, and that all that worrying was unfounded. Also, Komaru, as expecting is 100% on board with Iroha’s relationship with her brother. When we Anons were suggesting for Iroha to hook up with Makoto, part of us worried how well Komaru would take it but seeing how well they got on, once Komaru finds out that Iroha thirsts for her brother, and I do mean thirst because you are very dirty minded girl, especially given that Komaru won’t be befriending Toko in this timeline so she needs a friend who has indecent thoughts, she would be like ‘yay go sister!’. At some point the other girls will get involved so let’s see when Makoto decides to create Cuddle Puddle 2.0. And even if that doesn’t happen, I can see Makoto by extension of him dating Iroha, hanging out with the Voids in general and giving them the Hopeness energy that he just emits which once Mikado decides to get involved, he is going to have a very hard time doing what he is doing.

That leads me to a thought experiment, what would happen if Makoto meets Utsero? If he starts hanging out with the Voids, and once Makoto becomes relevant to the ‘Saving teh world’ then, then the hunt of Utsero will commence at some point, and while I feel like Utsero won’t give a rat’s arse about his ‘children’, he’ll be quite interested in Makoto as Makoto is basically someone who is the complete opposite of him. Makoto has extreme bad luck rather than extreme good luck and while Utsero‘s entire life is derailed because of it and making him miserable and death seeking, Makoto has one of the most well-adjusted lives out of everyone in Danganronpa, both canon and fanon. Granted I could see Hajime and others screaming if it happens as they fear the world imploding from the sheer luck energy, but while Hajime and Utsero’s talk would be interesting, from a thematical standpoint, the talk between Makoto and Utsero would be more compelling. Also, another way Makoto could spite Mikado.

Anyway, moving Makoto and Iroha’s make out sessions aside back to bad guy wrangling where the QC, assisted by Fuyuhiko and Peko, start to assist the police with arresting all the criminals. This leads to a standoff between an arsonist and Tsurugi who mentions he has planted bombs somewhere…. oh dear…oh dear indeed. Recall the incident when Sasaki loses his life which was the triggering point for Tsurugi’s morality to go down…worrying paths. Now of course that wasn’t caused by a prison break but at this point, we have changed so many things timeline wise that the event could be caused by this, and the QC cannot afford to take any risks. So, when Hajime decides to tackle the bombs, he goes in with Tsurugi and the rest of the QC bar Sasaki from entering. And then shit hits the fan as the bomb goes off and Tsurugi and Hajime get hurt, though thankfully Hajime’s injuries are minor and while Tsurugi’s more severe, he’ll live. This is going to a major event for Tsurugi as before then he was very anti-Kasugano and wanted to arrest him on the spot, and would have done so earlier had the Prison Break not been a bigger concern. But now, Kasugano saved his life, had he not listened to him to hide, the bomb would have killed him. Sasaki is also probably going to have to talk to him about Juu, who is the bastard behind this whole thing. I feel like this isn’t over because not only does Tsurugi have to recover, he and Sasaki need to talk about what Sasaki feels about Juu, but also, I see a massive re-evaluation of values towards Kasugano as if Kasugano is a hypocrite like Tsurugi claims, why would he save his life? Sasaki did sort of guess almost accurately that the police is so corrupt that he has to take matters into his own hands. Shinji makes an appearance here as well and that’s glorious as seeing our Fire Daddy is always a nice thing to see. Mikan getting freaked out over Shinji’s lack of indoor voice is quite amusing as well.

And with that Hajime collapsed into a deep sleep due to all the smoke and everything that has occurred. It’s unknown how successful the QC are with dealing with the criminals, though the lack of mention of Storm concerns me because well…it’s the same prison he was held out and ever since Kyoji mentioned him, I’ve grown concern about him being relevant to the plot. Kyoji might keep telling us he won’t break out but I’m too savvy, when you mention a villain like that, they’re gonna escape it’s just a question of when. Kinda curious to see how Storm is handled as he is essentially a Villain OC. Sure, Junyu and Juu are but they were characters that appeared in canon or fanon, it’s just they weren’t fleshed out, but Storm is an original creation. Can’t wait to see when he shows up and how much I want to strangle him with his purple tie.

And thus, that’s the Twisted Sister Arc over and done with! Easily the most plot tense out of ALL the arcs that have been done as we had bad timelines, villains getting upgrades, serious questions getting answered and the character developments of some characters concluding and others showing they need progress. I will give this Arc an A. And its tied with Concert Arc as my overall favourite Arc, the only reason it doesn’t exceed Concert Arc is because of the whole ‘Yasuke-Multiverse-theory’ which knocks it down some points, though I do kinda blame the fact that Yasuke is generally that much of an arsehole anyway. Don’t expect my reviews to be this intense going forward and with the next arc, I hope I can cram all I want in a single submission. Until then, bye bye! - Review Anon

#a student out of time #submission #review-anon

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b-listbadboy · 5 years

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Castlevania Season 3 was disappointing

(Spoilers for Castlevania Season 3, if you haven’t seen it yet it’s out now on Netflix. I suggest watching that first before reading this review)

I won’t say it was an awful season by any stretch of the imagination but man was it a drag to get through.

Almost nothing of significance happens for the majority of the season and the things that did happen felt extremely off and weird. 10 episodes, 25 to 30 minutes each, and every single one except for the fucking TWO LAST EPISODES were spent dicking around with a mystery that had little to do with anything from season 2 beyond a really out there twist that I’m sort of iffy on. Top that off with a lackluster arguably stupid ending to leave us off on a needless cliffhanger, and that’s the magic remedy that will leave me feeling pretty damn frustrated.

The best parts, in my opinion, were with Isaac’s massive undead crusade he was waging throughout his journey for revenge, and Trevor and Syph’s interactions with each other as well as with the little villagers. Isaac’s arc going from a servant of Dracula to slowing evolving into the master of the damned felt genuine, intriguing, and badass! I really wish he was the next main villain instead as it makes sense thematically. He carries out Dracula’s nihilistic views of humanity in a similar but now more direct way and that can lead into something really intriguing. However, for some reason, this season left him and his whole journey on a back burner, and virtually everything else that is implemented into main villain role fell flat on its face execution wise.

For example; The new vampires of this season are Camilla’s three other empress sisters, and while they do have a plethora of personality at the very least, that kind of comes at a cost of the main threat being extremely diluted. We go from this hurting sympathetic undead overlord with the power of an anchent GOD, to a couple of wicked sassy sisters who just wanna eat people forever? It’s a bit lame of a progression from what we once had, we know Vampires like to eat people that’s nothing new or exciting. There’s no real twist to it besides it being “led by women in the dark ages” and granted that makes sense here since it IS the dark ages, but come on we literally just had arguably the BEST adaptation of friggin’ Dracula! This shouldn’t be all they got moving forward from that.

Now, I have ZERO issue with the main antagonists being female or even two of the four sisters (not by blood don’t worry) being a lesbian couple. I hate that I have to emphasize this, hell I often defend Cinder Fall in RWBY more than anyone in the fandom at all despite her issues as a complex and sometimes flat out badly written character. However, The four of them in this season have the most basic of plans that it seems arbitrary status quote fluff at best. It felt like just because it’s Castlevania, we HAVE to have the vampires as the villains. Even though in the games the Belmont’s were literally fighting werewolves, dragons, skeletons, and the GRIMM REAPER??

Therefore, the sense of urgency and tense calculating plans of ‘survival vs extinction’ is completely gone. And yknow in a way, I can kinda initially SEE that working in a sort of “Empire Strikes Back” esque plot. Yknow, with Alucard and the gang go around cleaning up Dracula’s leftover horde only for Isaac or even Camilla to have this huge vengeful comeback of dominance? But there’s no one exactly “striking back” or even taking any kind of immediate initiative after Dracula’s death. It’s been MONTHS after the whole event and no one seems like they really care about that world changing event from the last two season’s. Everything is fine and dandy, no one has a single worry in the world! How enthralling...I miss Godbrand 😑

Besides the plan the four empresses have as well as Issac’s revenge, which I hope will both be more explored in season 4, no one really has any goal to warrant THAT kind of length of a season. This is more of a Netflix problem that I have with most of their shows and it’s one of the reasons why I don’t like watching them. Almost every singe show Netflix produces now, feels the need to overstuff itself with needless filler that gets us really nowhere until the very end where it SUDDENLY all comes together. But because of the nature of binge watching and considering how Netflix wants to desperately keep their subscriptions in fear of intimidating competition, they make these shows 12 episodes long with HALF HOUR OR MORE amount of filler content that’s supposed to satisfy us cause it’s “cute”?! No, stop this shit! Granted, Castlevania wasn’t nearly AS bad as the live action shows, but honestly, what exactly was shown to us that couldn’t have been reduced to like 5 solidly paced episodes focused on one or two plot lines ONLY like before? It worked perfectly back then, why change what ain’t broke?

As much as I don’t like the immediate rush of Trevor and Syph’s out of nowhere sexual relationship, I didn’t overall mind it too much since they still somewhat felt consistent. Their characteristics play off very nicely with one another and it’s pretty easy to see the chemistry between the two....HOWEVER I’M STILL GONNA COMPLAIN ABOUT IT SO HERE WE GO!

I get that they were setting them up as an endgame ship of the series, there’s no denying that, but they start fucking for what feels like (to the audience) two days after and I think that’s a bit ridiculous! Even if Alucard states that it’s been at the very least a month worth of time since the events of Season 2, there’s no real physical signs showing that statement to be true. Hell, Trevor’s beard and hair remains the same despite a HUGE passage of time where it would naturally grow out to indicate said time passing by. But both him, Syph, Alucard, and damn near everyone else looks the exact same as last season. So for all I know it could have been like a week since Season 2 and that to me doesn’t feel exactly earned. The Season 2 finale didn’t explicitly leave off Trevor and Syph officially a couple, they felt more like partners in crime more than anything else. Not to say that there wasn’t any chemistry there to develope INTO a relationship GRADUALLY, but going from a little spark of interest to the immediate jump of them sleeping together naked all comfortably as if they’re a goddamn married couple is a STRETCH! Even Trevor himself thinks so too so don’t jump down my throat about not being immediately swooned by the shipping fanservice given to us. I don’t dislike them as a couple at all, in fact I think their dynamic is cute! However, I would have also liked to have this couple feel natural and earned. They most certainly do not feel earned this way, at least to me.

Oh god, then there’s this out of nowhere sexual tension between Alucard and his new two recruits from another region hinted at in the previous season? Mind you, Alucard was doing literally NOTHING throughout the entirety of Season 3. Yep, literally the ONE DUDE WHO BASICALLY KILLED DRACULA gets about fuck all story progression afterwards out of the three. But what they DO give him are these two new vampire hunting student’s who look identical to one another (no racial they just literally look like fraternal twins) so I assumed they were either siblings or a couple, which makes it REALLY WEIRD WHEN THEY BOTH FUCK ALUCARD OUT OF NOWHERE?! I’m NOT making this shit up I promise! What makes even less sense is that it was really just a ploy for them to steal the Belmont knowledge of killing vampires to show to their people who have been enslaved. Which of course ends with them being killed so it really makes this entire conflict in his character damn near pointless besides “sad vibes check”, but here’s the thing...why didn’t they just keep doing training with Alucard?? There were virtually no downsides to having him teach you how to kill Vampires to save your village from being enslaved, he was teaching you both very well and gave you like the eternal knowledge of how to kill literally EVERY MONSTER and even let you live in the castle FOR FREE, food and wine included! What was the turning point for them to want to kill him all of the sudden? Cause he’s a vampire?? THEY FUCKING KNEW THAT ALREADY!!! Why was is suddenly not a problem at first but then coincidentally a problem now? If they wanted to use this to somehow depict this notion of “Oh my dad/Dracula was right humans are the worst” mindset, trust me, it was better conveyed with Isaac. These twins side plot not only made no sense, but also felt unjustified for Alucard to be an emo boi. I get that it’s supposed to be symbolic of him going through the same issues that both of his parents went through, but none of that really showed how bad human’s are. Just that those two twins didn’t think things through apparently. So the point of Alucard having this odd character convenience shift feels by the numbers cliché, and most importantly CHEAP.

It really makes no sense to me why they’re adding so much of this filler for such a long time, especially with some of this filler being oddly sexual. I don’t mind honest depiction of sex between consenting adults of course, but it just felt so misplaced and awkward at parts where it showed itself. I felt like I was reading a mediocre fanfic of Castlevania instead of the actual show itself! Granted, Season 2 had somewhat of a similar dilemma but the lull in between was still showing the character specifically doing things to further the story along. Towards the end, it gave us a way more satisfactory closure of that saga with Dracula that felt natural and well earned. This season however, felt like they were scrambling with different ideas here and there and didn’t know which to go with. Alucard training new recruits in his castle, Trevor and Syph figuring out an estranged (and BORING/GENERIC) cult of Dracula’s plan, Camilla setting up an army with her fellow sisterhood of evil vampires to gain ultimate power, Hector surviving captivity by using his wit and charm, Isaac raising up the dead for revenge on his deceased master, a new character introducing an all new world to the lore of Castlevania as we know it, all of these interesting concepts and ideas that could easily make up for a good season alone! And instead of focusing on one or two ideas to develope into something natural, they ended up saying “FUCK IT! Fucking I dunno what to- WE’RE DOING ALL OF IT I DUNNO!” and mixed the whole thing in a blender of different flavors that don’t necessarily blend together well enough for a tasty satisfactory meal. It just ends up being a mesh of okay at best, and gross at worst.

IN CONCLUSION, Castlevania Season 3 had a rocky start, an okay middle, and a kind of cool end. There was definitely some cool and exciting ideas implemented in here, but not enough to warrant that lengthy amount of time that Netflix seems to love to give to most of their TV shows. Sometimes less is more, and all that shiny cool glitter isn’t necessarily going to turn out to be gold. I’ll give this season a 5/10. It’s not the worst I’ve ever seen but it certainly could’ve been a lot better.

P.S. “Who Do Ya Voodoo” from Dead Island is Isaac’s new theme song, you can’t convince me otherwise.

#castlevania #season 3 spoilers #spoilers #unpopular opinion #review #netflix castlevania #critique

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quixoticrobotic · 5 years

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I wish to ask about your cool and very interesting hadestown swap au

aaaa ok, fuck,,, shit, gimme a sec [trips over my dozens of notes] ok, so, to understand the formation of this au you need to understand everything i know about greek mythology that isnt from hadestown is from Between The Lions or like. Disney’s Hercules. and like some dashboard osmosis but basically i know jack shitand one day i stumbled across a list of things like, the OG Hermes was the god of and I thought “...so like, thematically, shouldn’t be be Eurydice’s dad?” and the natural progression of this thought process was “Wait does that mean Orpheus is just a rando Lonely Orphan Boy that The Fates just sort of bully?”and then i was like “Well fuck i guess i just have this swap au now”its called the Retrograde AU bc i did a google search for the term when the wind starts blowing in the opposite direction and i didn’t feel like fact checking so BAM thats the title So in this au Eurydice is a Plucky Orphan that Hermes kind of keeps an eye on. Since Eurydice had like, a stable source of emotional support in this au shes less “world weary vagabond whos given up on the prospect humans being decent” and her worldview is more “No bro, YOU live in a society, I live a life of freedom and adventures, riding the rails and rejecting conforming to capitalism in favor of being gay and doing crime”Obviously hermes kept a much closer eye on her when she was smol because human children require that but she grew up into his lil badass. By the time shes an adult hes p much

but like. while giving a thumbs up And then Orpheus is. Orpheus is trying his best. Like the thing about Orpheus is hes a really bad pessimist???? Like yeah being constantly bothered by three scary ladies assuring him that like every anxiety and negative thought he has is Definitely 100% True and that messes with his self esteem A Lot and hes prone to ending up in situations where he ends up self sabotaging because he feels like he doesnt deserve it or because hes sure things will end badly its different from the end of the actual musical because like

canon!Orpheus just kind of has his lifetime supply of hope just SHATTERED BY BEING THROWN AT THE GROUND. retrograde!Orpheus has just kind of had this negativity in his life the whole time, like he grew up with it just constantly there. And hes not ok, not really, and he makes bad choices and ends up in bad situations but. hes like a flower that managed to grow through a crack in cement. like hes at rock bottom but at least he still has a view of the stars when he looks up? if that makes sense? Hes a nervous vagabond with a guitar lyre who just kinda travels around since he doesnt have anywhere to go. Also getting to see new places is nice, at least. He and Eurydice keep running into each other over the course of their gradually more and more intertwined adventures Idk what Hades and Persephone are doin, hopefully being happy together, this au doesnt have canon’s plot or like any plot because im not mean enough or organized enough to do shit like that. I wanna write just short little vignette type things about this au and im not even organized enough for thatBUT YEA THERE IT IS: THE RETROGRADE AU

#words to people #prince-kraehe #retrograde au

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pilferingapples · 6 years

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Les Mis BBC: First Episode First Impression

Well, the actors are as excellent as I hoped they would be!

Cut for Spoilers or whatever term applies here

I really really really wanted to be wrong in all my misgivings about this series. I wanted to be blown out of the water by the whole thing, and have to make repentant posts about the error of my ways.

Alas, this is not a Repentant Post.

I liked some things! The set and scenery and props were all genuinely lovely. I enjoyed the animals everywhere? and the nigh-omnipresent beggars in Paris? Nicely done! And I really, genuinely, appreciate the constant background French; I know just enough to recognize it when I hear it and it does add something to the atmosphere of the piece.

The actors! What great performances! I want it clear that NOTHING I have to say in the way of character critique is down to them. Oyelowo is as good as I’d hoped he’d be, and that is saying a lot; Collins is doing a wonderful job with Fantine’s shyness and defiant hope; and the bit-part characters like Magloire and Nicolette are really standout.

I really appreciate the inclusion of the Pontmercy Family situation, and Gillenormand being placed in this first episode makes his social relevance more clear IMO; he feels less like random comic relief than he sometimes can. Really, the whole Pontmercy-Gillenormand family conflict is a standout in the episode; Gillenormand’s emotional manipulation of Tiny Marius and general domestic tyrannizing was very effectively shown (the scene with the toy soldiers!!!), and my heart was broken all over for Marius and for Georges. And Tholomyes is an amazingly perfect skeezeball; his PUA approach is clear and skin-crawling from the start.

*** Real quick Basic Plot Rundown: this episode covers roughly the era from Waterloo to Fantine being abandoned by Tholomyes. I say roughly because it weirdly changes the timeline of Fantine’s life to sync up more with Valjean’s;he gets released and goes through the silver theft with the Bishop when she’s getting dumped. The issue with that is of course that in the book Fantine is dumped in 1817 (the year 1817, when it was 1817); Cosette should just about be getting born around the year of Napoleon’s defeat and Valjean’s release, and now I guess she’s about a year old? This doesn’t necessarily have to be a big issue for chronology if the show’s just going to have Fantine and Cosette suffer for an extra two years (though: D:D:D:D: ) , and heaven knows Hugo is shifty on personal timelines, but...Les Mis *does* have certain unavoidable historical events it has to sync up with, so I’ll see how it plays out.

Besides Valjean’s last little while in prison and Fantine’s courtship and abandonment, this first episode covers the Georges-Gillenormand-Marius family situation, with Georges limping home from Waterloo only to be refused access to his son. The show cuts between the three ongoing stories so they all progress more or less in sync. We get far enough along to see Georges watching his son in church without Gillenormand knowing (thanks to Nicolette, who’s the only woman in the Gillenormand house so far), Fantine holding Cosette in their apartment and wondering what they’re going to do after Tholomyes leaves them, and Valjean curled up in the road after robbing Petit Gervais.

Okay, Actual Commentary time! Please assume a Personal Opinion disclaimer for things after this point:P

***

Several of the people I was watching with felt the constant cutting between scenes was jarring or hard to follow; I don’t know if that was the issue but I do think, overall, it just didn’t work as well as it might have. The individual scenes were very brief and the constant bouncing back and forth prevented them from building up any emotional momentum. I think..conceptually, I can see where it would be interesting to twine Valjean, Fantine, and Georges together, in many ways, but none of that thematic connection really came through either (Maybe most disappointingly to me, Valjean’s family is never mentioned, so the potential to connect all three of them as families torn apart by social inequality is lost). It really felt like just Three People Having a Bad Time in France. it really is hard to follow, because it starts to feel...kinda dull , just a collection of sad anecdotes for no purpose.

The dialogue doesn’t help. When the show leans heavily on Hugo’s writing (sadly, mostly with Tholomyes) , it’s fine, of course. But the original dialogue is clunky, pedantic, and weirdly flat throughout--and utterly lacking in nuance. It just aggressively clunks at points.

Valjean and Javert suffer the most for this. Javert basically states aloud his share of the Confrontation while lecturing a bound Valjean for ...reasons?? It’s never really clear. But hey, here you go, Valjean, have Javert’s entire backstory! ( I should say that Oyelowo almost sells it. He is incredible , and does a great job making Javert feel both his adamant self and humanly affected by the world around him. Just. some of this dialogue. Geez.) This is also one of those episodes with a weirdly more unpleasant Valjean; he doesn’t assault the Bishop, but he does much more consciously rob Petit Gervais, laughing as he scares the kid away and grinning as he first examines the coin. He also just...yells at people a lot? and argues with the Bishop and asserts his hatred of mankind very bluntly. I found it hard to believe this Valjean had any of the original’s internalized self-hatred or sense of being lower than a dog; he seems solidly outraged by his treatment, and confident of the injustice of it all. Which is definitely fair and all, but just...isn’t quite Valjean.

(Also, as I mentioned above, we don’t really get any of his pre-prison backstory; not an unusual adaptational move, but it sure doesn’t add anything to his motivation.) He seems both more casually violent and less emotionally deep than I’d expect a Valjean to be; I can’t believe , at least not yet, that he’s actually felt the Bishop’s forgiveness as a challenge in any way, even though the Gervais scene ends with him curled in the road--it just doesn’t feel connected.

Fantine does get more time--unfortunately, and unavoidably, much of that involves Felix:P . There’s also some brief conversation with Favourite about the general situation of grisettes. I think it’s a good addition, and puts in some useful context. (That said, I’m deeply uneasy about the attempt to portray Fantine and Favourite as actual friends-so much of Fantine’s story comes from her being really truly isolated. If she’d had real friends to help in the crunch, it would change things-- and if she thinks Favourite is a real friend and then Favourite fades on her, that’s even worse than canon and makes Favourite worse than in canon. Hence, Unease.)

Visually, there’s ..I won’t say nothing wrong, and certainly I can have fun for ages going over the details of this or that outfit or hairstyle (and I really do find the weird combos of Looks to be very distracting; if I knew less about the period it wouldn’t be,no doubt, but I do know a lot about How It Should Look and the fact that it doesn’t Quite sometimes makes it all feel like it’s happening in a generic Fantasy 19C) . But there’s no BIG thing wrong, it’s...fine?

It’s just ... it’s just fine. There’s no particular strong visual feel to it, nothing really striking-- unless you count the weird 60s-Acid-flashback-looking timeskip moment. It really does feel like LM 2012 in its more visually striking moments, and outside of that, it’s just very much a competently filmed period drama made in the last ten years--but that’s all. Without the specific characters, I don’t think there’s a single frame of it I’d recognize as being necessarily Les Mis and not any other random BBC Period Drama.

I guess this is really my problem with the characters and the story too-- it’s...Fine, it’s technically there , but too often there’s no sense of depth or specificity to it. Part of it’s the dialogue, part of it’s the weird pacing/ story jumps , part of it is because no one ever seems to be given a moment to respond-(Fantine crying for all of thirty seconds after being abandoned before the show decides we need her up and talking and dry-eyed was really actively jarring to me)--

There are a hundred little details I could go through but the overall effect for me was just a whole lot of Underwhelming. Yeah, there’s the Pee Scene and the (correct and fitting) visceral discomfort of Everything About Tholomyes (he ,at least, really is a Triumph of Skeeze). But the real problem so far is just that it feels like a visual outline of a story; it’s not pulling together into feeling like a lived world. It’s not taking my heart, even though, despite my surface grousing, I really want it to. It’s here, it’s fine, it’s Whatever; but all my really strong emotional reactions either Cringing or Cooing (over the very excellent babies). My heart didn’t break but the once, with Tiny Marius, and it really really should have been in pieces by the end of the episode.

I’m of course going to keep watching, as much of it as I can find a way to see; it’s Les Mis and I really am impressed with the actors. Maybe next episode, when the various stories start to come together a little, it’ll all feel more solid and more memorable. Right now, though, I’m sitting at a solid “ meh” about it.

#Les Mis BBC Talk #Les Mis BBC Spoilers #Long Post #Les Mis BBC Salt #this is not the Fun Outrage Post some people are probably wanting #it's an Actual Considered Reaction post #but Lighthearted Outrage shall no doubt be very present again soon:P

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orionsangel86 · 6 years

Text

Season 14 Wishlist

Alrighty then! As per the last few season’s, each autumn before the season premier I will write a wishlist of things that hopefully will happen in the coming season, which I will then go through once the season is over.

For those of you curious:

Here is my wishlist for season 12 and here is my season 12 wishlist review

Here is my wishlist for season 13 and here is my season 13 wishlist review

Now as a slight disclaimer I need to stress that this isn’t meta, or me promising anything to happen (since I’m not a showrunner nor psychic) and is purely meant for fun - having said that most of the items on my wishlist are at least somewhat realistic wishes and within the realms (at least in my opinion) of actually happening.

So without further rambling here we go:

A decent arc for Michael!Dean. Yes, we all expect it to only last 3 episodes. which I find deeply disappointing. I would prefer if things are not as they seem and it turns out to last far longer than that.

Scenes inside Dean’s head. Like we got with both Cas and Sam when they were possessed, I really want to know where Michael has got Dean stashed away inside his head - and exactly what kind of experience that is for him. I can think of a whole bunch of different ways that could go - will Michael put Dean through hell? Or will he distract him the way of the Djinn with his idea of heaven? I am extremely excited by this idea and hope they don’t pass on the potential.

The missing scene from 13x23 when Dean said yes to Michael. There was definitely more to that and I hope so much we will see it - though I don’t think this is particularly likely.

Cas’s grief. Obviously. Last year I was all about Dean’s grief arc. This year, I need Cas’s to be just as bad. This is 10 years since the original story. Stopping Michael and changing allegiance to stand with Dean was Cas’s origin story - Remember how he reacted in season 5 when Dean was thinking about saying yes to Michael? Oh ho ho I can’t even begin to imagine how this will affect Cas. I want this to be a mirror of last year, and far worse than season 10.

Sam’s continued leadership role. Now where I want to see Cas absolutely broken with grief over Dean’s possession, what I think would compliment it perfectly is Sam’s fearsome determination and functional leadership. It would be a great way to show how far the brothers have come to breaking the toxic codependency which has bound them to each other - that Sam is capable of functioning without Dean and without immediately trying to sell his soul or give his life for his brother.

Sam and Cas working together. One of the things that I really hated about the start of season 10, was that without Dean around, Sam and Cas’s relationship just fell apart, and Sam was made to look pretty much like a douche by the show implying he had kicked Cas out of the bunker and blamed him for breaking his shoulder?!? (I found the whole thing very out of character for Sam but then destiel’s continued refusal to become canon tends to make Sam look occasionally douchey - but that is a meta for another day). Give me Sam and Cas as a team. Supporting each other in their grief and acting like the brothers (in-law) that they are.

Jack and Cas father/son bonding time - I mean I saw the promo and it looks like Jack is gonna be grounded for a little while... >.> but once he has written 100 lines of “I will not suggest killing my dad in front of my father” I think Cas will forgive him. I’d like to see Cas trying to teach Jack human things or mundane tasks with Dean watching them with a fond expression!

Addressing Dean’s abuse trauma - this one has been going around on tumblr recently so I’m latching on to other wonderful meta a bit here, but since last season explored Sam’s Lucifer trauma (and to an extent Cas’s Naomi trauma), it would be fitting if this Michael!Dean arc is followed up with an arc of recovery for Dean, not just from Michael, but from everything he has suffered since the apocalypse.

More seeing “behind the mask” with Dean. I think he has already massively grown into himself and out of his fathers shadow, but I’d just like more examples like with the chick flicks and the cucumber water.

Cas truly breaking free from heaven. Now I think that the ideal situation would be that Cas is the one to fix heaven, and that he leaves the angels by choice, and with them all respecting him and being thankful to him. But Cas needs to start to break free from that duty and obligation that he still feels to heaven. Even in season 13 he carried that guilt, and whilst this is more endgame stuff, I desperately want to see more progress on this.

More hints towards Cas desiring human things and human feelings and basically desiring humanity for himself (no jokes guys, this time I DON’T mean Dean). I am a staunch human!Cas endgame girl after all. The show spent a lot of time in season 9 and 10 building on this for Cas and then it went a bit quiet. I’d like to see those threads picked up again.

In fact, when it comes to Cas, how about he starts answering some of those hundreds of unanswered questions that have been thrown at him since Carver era? How about he finds his place, where he belongs and AS WHAT in general? Cas, you have a home now and a family. Stop lingering in doorways.

Sam showing us more of his personality. I think now that his Lucifer trauma has been somewhat addressed, Sam should be a bit lighter and more carefree. I’d like to know some more about him other than his obsession with serial killers which is frankly a worrying hobby Sam!

Mary and Cas bonding - in fact I just want to see all of the rest of Dean’s family bonding with Cas more. I want more knowing looks from Mary and even a conversation about the topic - oh wouldn’t that be a dream!

Dean coming out of the closet. Yes yes I know I know. Every year... But it is 20gayteen and next year is 20BITEEN and dammit the world is full of rainbows right now - Bert and Ernie made it official... Why can’t Dean Winchester? I’m totally cool with someone slipping THIS to Dabb. I won’t even ask for credit. ;)

Last year I wanted Sam to build on his relationships outside of Dean and we did pretty well last year with that. But of course, I want more. Maybe some Sam x Rowena? I’m game.

On that note WITCH!SAM. I am still a huge lover of Sam practicing magick. It’s a story line with so much potential.

More badass ladies kicking ass. Aww man we were kinda blessed with this last year weren’t we? Keep it up show. Please keep it up.

Billie continuing to play a large role as Death. I find her captivating and want more.

Wayward Sisters returning. It still hurts, but we need to know what happens next.

JODY AND CAS NEED TO MEET GODDAMMIT. Also I want Cas to reunite with Claire again.

As per last year: The return of the mixtape. BRING BACK THE MIXTAPE (yup I’m gonna wish for it until I get it).

Please dress Cas up. The closest we got last year was the cowboy hat and the dreadful nazi uniform of AU Cas. Why can’t we have him in plaid? PLEASE.

Absolutely no Lucifer, Lucifer vessel or any hint of Mark Pellegrino. Plus no Kentucky fried chicken pantomime villains either. I’ll be happy if season 14 is free from this nonsense.

Saving the best for last, what do I always wish for above all else? You guessed it - DESTIEL. Do I want it to be canon? Well yes eventually of course. But in season 14 my wish is for their story to continue as it did in early season 13. More obvious destiel content, more of destiel built into the narrative and ideally, made explicit. A love confession? Even if only to a third party? That is undeniably romantic. Zero “no homo’s” would be nice. I just wish for further development on the destiel narrative. That is all.

As always feel free to add to this with your own wishes!

BRING ON SEASON 14!! :D

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brandxspandex · 6 years

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What did not you like Unicron # 6? I loved the issue. I agree that they treated the relationship of Bumblebee and Starscream horribly, but I did not see any regression in Starcream at the end of Optimus Prime and Unicron.

I would think that it’s reasonably uncontroversial to saythat in the grand finale of a story one expects to receive some sort ofemotional payoff and closure regarding the major emotional and thematic arcsexplored throughout the narrative. The story’s climax is where the major themesof both its plot and character arcs get reiterated in a way that sort of sumsup everything that’s come before and provides a tremendous emotional punch.It’s where the main points the story has been building up to get made in a waythat evokes the most powerful emotions.

Over the 13 years IDW Starscream was developed as acharacter he became fascinatingly multi-faceted; his morality, his motivations,his personality and his relationships were all shown to have multiple layersthat could be explored. When it was announced that the IDW continuity was comingto an end the opportunity to fully explore all those layers was lost becausethere was so little time left, which made that little remaining time all themore precious. Not everything could be explored, but there was still some timeleft to develop Starscream a little further along the trajectory he was alreadyon, or at the very least reiterate the most important things about hischaracter that had already been established.

Instead most of that time was just wasted. I don’t think theway that Starscream was written after TAAO ended was necessarily out ofcharacter; he’s undergone a lot of character growth, but said character growth didn’terase 4 million years of being a dick, so it isn’t out of character for him tobehave in dickish ways. However, there is a difference between being written incharacter and written well. Being written well is a subset of being written in-character;at any point in a story there may be a number of things a character could dothat would be consistent with what’s been established about them up to thatpoint. However, not every one of those options is going to be emotionallysatisfying or progress the story in an interesting way; a good writer should beable pick the in-character behaviours that doadd to the story in this way.

Of all the things Barber could have done with Starscream atthe end of the story, it seems that the point about his character he was mostinterested in making in the precious little time that was left was: he’s stilla bit of a dick. I have no idea what emotional reaction he was going for withthat. In an ongoing story, repeatedly reminding readers that Starscream isstill a bit of a dick is certainly worthwhile, but this was the end. As I’ve said, at the end of astory you typically want to evoke deep and powerful emotions, and there were so many ways that could have been donewith everything that had been established about Starscream up to that point.Petty scenes of pointless bickering do not make deep, emotionally affectingstatements about a character.

I think the most glaringly obvious instance of this is inissues #3 and #4 of the Unicron series; issue #3 ends on a promising note with Starscreamdeciding to put his faith in Windblade because she’s believed in him in thepast. That builds nicely on the character and relationship developmentestablished in TAAO, and could have been built upon further in the subsequentissues of Unicron to showcase how his character had grown. After all, the firstcouple of issues of the mini-series had already established that he’s still adick, so surely the rest of the time could be spent exploring the ways he’dchanged. But no, the most significant Starscream scene in the following issueinvolves him just whinging about some petty bullshit, with the closest peoplehe has to friends then getting pissed at him, before he gets clocked in theface.

I’m not saying that Starscream whinging about petty bullshitwas necessarily out of character, but out of all the possible in-characterthings Barber could have had him doing in that moment, why the ever-loving helldid he decide to go with that? What kind of emotion was he trying to evoke inhis emotionally climatic grand finale with that moment? It wasn’t just wastefulfor Starscream’s character arc, it was wasteful for the book itself. Cybertronwas just destroyed; surely thatshould have been a sombre moment. That scene could have been used to underline asense of sadness and hopelessness felt by billions of beings at the loss oftheir home, and then maybe establish a sense of defiance in the face of thathopelessness. Instead the time was used for…that. What the hell was that? What werewe as readers meant to be feeling in that moment exactly?

In the following issues we had Starscream agreeing to ferryOptimus to Unicron, and then deciding to sacrifice himself to help stop Unicron.That’s good right? Isn’t that showing his character has developed? But by thatpoint it all felt lacking in any emotional substance because hardly any ofStarscream’s scenes in the lead up explored why he’d be willing to do thesethings. Instead most of his scenes involved him getting alienated from the characterswho helped him change into the kinda person who would be willing make suchsacrifices. The emotional build up was completely off; because Barber spentmost the mini ignoring that aspect of Starscream’s character growth, the way hetacked it back on at the end made it feel as though it came out of nowhere. It basicallyfelt like he was only acknowledging Starscream’s character development in themoments it was convenient for the story, but ignoring it otherwise. Also, whileTAAO established that Starscream is capable of sacrifice (which I think madehim sacrificing himself in the Unicron mini pretty redundant by the way), I don’tbelieve he would sacrifice himself that easily. He didn’t even take a moment toconsider alternative options; Arcee and Optimus ran up against an obstacle andsuddenly he was like “guess I’ll die”. As I’ve said, it honestly read more likea suicide than an act of heroic self-sacrifice.

And then yes, Starscream and Bumblebee’s relationship wastreated horribly, and that’s not someminor point I can overlook. Their relationship arc has been developing for years, and involved some veryemotionally significant moments, interspersed with some funny, sweet andcharming scenes. It was given many moments of significance and felt reallyimportant to the development of both characters. Then the only acknowledgement wegot of their relationship after Bee returns to life was Bee saying “Well…”after watching Starscream die. That’s just…unspeakably horrendous writing. Idon’t understand how it’s even possible to write that badly.

The only way I can wrap my head around what’s been presentedis if emotionally significant scenes involving Starscream and his relationshipswere left out of the Unicron mini because they’re all being saved up for thelast issue of OP. If that’s the case then I still don’t think it’s very goodwriting because by failing to have those scenes in Unicron it severelysubtracted from the emotional impact of that series. Also there’s more thanenough interesting things that could have been done with Starscream to fill outimpactful scenes in both the Unicron series and the OP epilogue. But at leastif we get something worthwhile in thelast issue of OP it won’t be atrociouswriting anymore. The only way I can see it being anything vaguely approaching good writing is if the last issue recontextualizeswhat we got in Unicron to show it was all building up to something emotionallymeaningful in the last issue. Also, there will have to be something at least somewhat decent between Starscreamand Bumblebee for me not to write it off whatever happens; after everythingthat’s happened between them they deserve that.

The fact that Starscream didn’t appear in the montage of thedead might mean that he’s still notdead so there might still be somehope on this front, but otherwise it means that not only were his character andrelationship arcs butchered before he was predictably and needlessly killed,but they even failed to acknowledge him after his death, and I am…revolted.

#Starscream #Bumblebee #Transformers IDW #Transformers: Unicron #John Barber #unicron spoilers #meta #asks #Anonymous #suicide mention

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elizabethrobertajones · 7 years

Text

13x13 watching notes

*goes to sit at the unpopular table*

Went to bed at 10, up at 7 for the ole watching Supernatural grind... *offers you all a chocolate biscuit*

*waves hi at Michael* *and Kevin*

All the PoC are shoved in an AU... Thankfully now Rowena is back I can't say with the SOLE major female character but

Oh gosh they're using Yockey's dialogue to explain everything, I don't know if I should laugh or cry

IS CAS OKAY?

Why are you spitting blood... You weren't stabbed THAT badly were you?

*remembers stabbing Lucifer*

You know in AtlA where Zuko made a good decision and prompty collapsed in an angst coma at the inner turmoil of doing the right thing?

I have no clue why that all happened except to allow Lucifer to leg it.

Which, I mean, at least something happened to explain why Lucifer legged it.

WHIMSICAL MUSIC.

OTT HETERO NONSENSE

I guess Dabb era means they're allowed to destroy expensive wedding cakes again now no one can tell him off for it

Is that an Observer?

Oh, creepy cupid

It can not be good for Lucifer to eat cupid grace even more than normal grace because it's probably a Voldemort thing about love hurting him blah blah blah

Marghe was talking about this episode being a potential 9x03 parallel and I agree - and Lucifer's already messing up by voluntarily stealing grace just to keep himself alive for his own wanting to be alive purposes at the first opportunity. And we have cupids instead of reapers

and also I guess Cas wants to go back to the Bunker and no one's gonna boot him out if we're lucky :P

Poor cupid. You only looked creepy as a circumstantial thing to watching these people fall in love with a besotted smile, no one understands your work :<

Omg we didn't even see if Cas stole a car to get back... I must KNOW

Anyway here's the sneak preview scene

Oh it gets worse; Cas is like "I met with Lucifer" instead of "Lucifer showed up and I had to hustle him off to a bar to stop the angels coming back and killing us, and then when I tried to contact you he stole my phone, and btw thanks for coming to my rescue in time."

Aka Cas can only be on the backfoot in this argument by his own social ineptitude at describing it/because the writers want him there

"She's alive. That's all I know, sorry." Yes, good. Because Jack's with her so he'll make it all good and honestly the fact we haven't seen what's going on there since 13x09 is kinda weird because this is all time passing that Jack is with Mary and they only have one clip to show us of that - this is stretching the dramatic irony writing of the season to breaking point by not revisiting them sooner, as it's a loose end that would have IMMEDIATE pay off aka they aren't just sitting there staring at each other for months, and we know off-screen since BEFORE CHRISTMAS that Jack would help Mary and whatever delays are keeping him and idk his new BFF Kev from busting back to our world are manufactured to fill these weeks. I mean not like they can't have delays and problems, especially as Jack is out untested learning what's up with himself away from all his parental influences, as his big test, but the storytelling in the main part of the show is relying on what's happening in the AU for tension and Lucifer telling Cas she was being tortured is like, the last time HE saw her, and WE know Jack is with her so things are probably different, and now Cas is lying to the Winchesters about Mary so as not to upset them while unintentionally perhaps backing up whatever is going on with Jack. Or not! Who knows! It's been long enough the one glimpse of them staring at each other is starting to wear thin to give us any meaningful dramatic irony in these moments and they really ought to have had at least a teaser in the AU in 13x11

Yep here's the parallel to the street scene in 9x03, except that Mark P is such a ham that he's doing a pantomime version of "I'm cold" complete with the directing showing us some warmer winter coats in case we didn't get the message, and then he starts staring at food... He can't be human so idk why without headcanoning hard about why it's affecting him so much when Cas immediately stopped caring about food when he stole grace.

Maybe, I headcanon, being stabbed was bad enough that all the grace he had and stole went to repairing himself but it's a finite supply and he's already to the stage Cas was in in 10x01

Oh now he's miming being hungry. "Hungry? Ew!"

The fact he was looking at burgers as a Cas parallel and not a fried chicken joint for immediate emotional pay off is honestly the biggest failing of this episode so far

Asmodeus is like "shit they got away as soon as my back was turned" Ketch is like "lol (but posh)"

They have a weird staring each other down moment which Ketch either wins or Buckleming think that Asmodeus won but Ketch still won because Asmodeus admits to being monumentally stupid before giving Ketch his orders.

I literally can not tell what the intent was here which is the most meta commentary on their dialogue I have ever witnessed and if it was not 7:30am and still mostly dark I would be howling with laughter. As it is, I feel a tear appearing in my eye as I take another chocolate biscuit.

Now HERE is a surpringly good use of dramatic irony from Buckleming which unfortunately is not actually betrayed anywhere in their dialogue (e.g. "I stabbed him but he seems to be fine") when Asmodeus tells Ketch an angel blade to the heart will down Lucifer at this point. Basically relying on that this happened at the end of last episode (and the directing reminds us in flashbacks & recap) to confirm the dramatic irony and with these writers I'm only like 63% sure they meant to do this because I have a strong nagging doubt that they don't even read anyone else's scripts.

If Asmodeus/Ketch becomes this fandom's Kylux I'm outta here

*Lucifer fails to learn basic human decency from the homeless man* I'm really hoping this is a metaphor which they actually stick to - that he's self-serving and mean and refuses to even adapt his behaviour as a guise to benefit from human decency by pretending to be nice to get what he wants then...

They could just be showing him to be hopeless now and then use a stronger inciting incident later - Jack is a motivator for him like basically nothing else, but none of this *so far* indicates we should actually care about him as a person regardless of what he might do for Cas's son later in the season

I also thought he might offer to heal the guy for food that didn't come from a dumpster but instead he's getting a tip off about Sister Jo

(Honestly, I've never dumpster dived but the stats about throwing perfectly good food away are so horrific that this seems like really misrepresenting dumpster diving, mostly because it implies the restaurant would keep food around long enough for it to go slimy and smelly, rather than throw it out while it's still completely good but no longer something they can sell, e.g. unclaimed pizzas, mishapen stuff, slightly burnt things, etc.

The fact that Buckleming seem unaware that "Next day pizza" is literally a thing and not gross and that fast food doesn't immediately expire but that you can eat left over pizza the next day without incurring any wrath of god speaks a lot to their privilege and Hollywood's impression of poverty, and this utopia where there's no waste and you can just throw out last night's pizza which is now skanky and rotten, and eat something better >.>)

Huh, Dean and Cas appear to be alone and Dean is apologising for not knowing he'd been kidnapped which is literally the sort of scene which I'd hope would mean no one is in my inbox saying he doesn't care this time around.

"I-I-I-We should have known it wasn't you."

Sooooooooooooooooooooo close. SO CLOSE. SOOOOOO CLOOOOOOOOOSE.

Awww they're making excuses at each other. "He's a shapeshifter. I got myself captured." "but if Sam and I knew..."

"I'm fine Dean." "You sure about that?"

in 100 years when I get here THAT's going in the "Dean n Cas are in love" meta series.

"I told Kelly I would protect HER son. I intend to keep that promise."

Interestingly, we're halfway through the season and Cas appears to have no idea Jack thinks Cas is his father, or any inclination to do more than protect him out of the goodness of his heart and another promise to look after someone in need of protection, making no positive affirmations to suggest he thinks of Jack in a fatherly way. Noted last episode, feeling the urge to comment this episode :P

I am not implying this is an entirely bad or ominous thing or whatever, but 1: Cas barely knows him so this is perhaps more healthy, 2: I am still dubious about how Jack originally nabbed himself a guardian angel and Cas has made NO comment on this scenario or, 3: discussed what it felt like on his end of what Dean has been accusing Jack of "sockpuppeting" Cas... I think it was much more grey area than that and Dean's mostly stopped accusing Jack of it, but it leaves massive questions. And 4: it means Cas is still doing this as a duty to Kelly rather than personal investment/parent feelings as his outwardly stated motivations, and it plays into the grey area of 5: we still thematically have Cas with a guardian angel burden just like I thought after 12x19 that this is what Jack wanted from Cas and after the presentation of how it was so bad for Cas to be the Winchesters' guardian that season, coming to a head in 12x19, I still think that his relationship with Jack is offering an alternative to directly critiquing that relationship anymore without damage between himself and the Winchesters, but still allowing some exploration of duty and the guardian angel burden, and perhaps the show is in no rush to have Cas leap into fatherhood when this parallel serves his arc so much better. Which also means 6: that nothing is over despite the progress he's made towards personal growth recently and all his old trauma and burdens are still hanging from him, he's just in a better place than he was with various new hopes and directions.

Dean says nothing, and Moose Interruption Occurs.

I have been wondering since the first promo clips revealing Donatello returning if they'd try and have a prophet-off with the AU and use his powers to either connect with Kevin or the AU... I wonder how right I'm about to accidentally be now we know a bit more about all this

"... Now, it's gonna be harder than it sounds"

you think.

So this is Dean completely ignoring Billie's warnings and going full steam ahead huh

*pulls out the demon tablet as well*

Oh boy you guys are really getting into the bad decisions

Not mentioning what happened to the angel tablet is a pretty good swerve around reminding us Cas destroyed it "all for one man" because he's "in love with humanity" but you can't get past me that easily *taps nose*

... this is a good time to remind everyone that Gadreel left all of Kevin's notes on the table when he walked out with the angel tablet.

You know

the notes where Kevin translated the entire angel tablet including the footnotes into ancient Sumerian

you know

a language

that maybe

someone who's been around

since ancient sumerian times

might be able to read

you know

Cas

*points at him for emphasis*

https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/170677457313/i-i-hit-a-wall-translating-the-tablet-into

Also seriously why would the same spell be on both tablets. I'd be extremely Buckleming disappointed if it was, and much much happier if 13x12 was an ominous warning about going around reading strange tomes and tablets and just doing whatever freaking spells you half understand that you find on them.

Remember, Kevin is a super-genius Princeton applicant who even in the AU was nurtured by Michael to be super smart like his freaking COURT WIZARD, and did a lot of maths and theory to make it work that apparently even Michael couldn't. (Obligatory throwback to the intro of the tablets and the reminder that human creativity and genius can do what super-smart monsters can't, via Charlie, Kevin's narrative pair.)

Chicken wings, huh

(37 buckets tracks with how many bad hotdogs Kevin ate and gave himself a stroke over while translating the demon tablet the first time, I suppose.)

I mean we knew it was coming, because set spoilers, but you KNOW how much happier I would have been if it had been the Lucifer thing. You know.

Meanwhile: the extent to which I don't trust Buckleming is that I am wondering if the director cut an anvil line when they're like "who's killing angels!?" and it just cuts to the next Lucifer scene wordlessly

I also would have no clue how intentional the "who's killing angels" connection is to 4x16 where that was the line of interrogation on Alastair and it turned out the first angels to be killed on the show were by Uriel for Lucifer, meaning that question still at the end of the day is answered by "lucifer"

Hi Danneel

Query: if she is an angel, what does SHE need the cash for? :P

I assume that "for the fallen" sign is high irony about her being a fallen angel and she's pretending it's a charity donation in exchange for healing

I suppose she can buy nice outfits with it

*exposition crime scene*

tiny redeeming factor about Dean talking about how boned they are and Cas turning to look at him and agreeing "epically"

Also for the first time they're all in long coats together praise the lord

Okay I think her name is Eliel? I am not sure how to spell that at all, I'm just guessing because it sounded like "L I L" and then I angel-fied it, so tl;dr I'm gonna keep calling her Sister Jo and/or Danneel :P

Oh good some exposition. Well at least she has literally explained the money is for the nice outfits XD

I like her. She's not scared of Lucifer, and she's one of the angels who slipped notice after the fall and started living her life as she wanted.

"So... Ca-ching!" I really like her now :P

This puts her in direct opposition to Cas not just at the start of season 10 when he was rounding up fallen angels and sending them back to Heaven with Hannah - when his heart wasn't really in it anyway - but more directly and importantly with 9x22 where he had sent a large amount of his army out to local hospitals to perform miracles on the DL for no reward except, you know, angels should help people. Their hearts are in completely different places, with completely different understandings of what angels can and should do on earth if they are to be here.

She bargains for her life with the same thing the wraith was going to do with Patience in 13x03, and how we've seen some monsters feeding in the past - notably the grigori angel that was eating soul energy in the place of grace but was essentially the same set up.

Lucifer's also found someone smart enough to help him who he might actually listen to (since the homeless man would have helped had he listened but he wouldn't respect what a human says vs another angel maybe giving him some pointers for surviving down here).

Sam, being the good wingman, leaves Dean n Cas to interview someone together while heading off alone

Sam's hair is ENORMOUSLY fluffy

Which reminds me, it's pouring with rain outside so I'm not going to get away with leaving my hair a day after getting it dyed, I sort of need to wash it BEFORE the sky does it for me and turns everything I own purple :P Idk if I'll be able to finish the episode before I have to go to yoga... hm. It's finally daylight-ish

Oh of course they have creepy sexy grace eating going on because this whole grace vampire concept wasn't sexy enough when it was bald little cupids.

*Dean casually in the foreground pulling out an angel blade*

That is your WIFE, sir

And you should hear what she and Lucifer were doing

Cas goes first :D

LOL Ketch

"Oh it's only you"

How DARE

the original flavour TFW line up has just busted into the room with you, you are in the presence of GODS

"Isn't it possible that I'm simply trying to strike a blow for the good of humanity?"

"No, that's not possible"

Listen Cas's snark is weaponised now. How did Ketch not crumble into ASH

no one says Huzzah

Thanks Cas

Listen however many gifs there are of that move (omg Cas looking at Dean, Dean nodding to him, Cas Doing The Thing) there are not enough so I'm gonna just... make one...

Lol, just throw him in the trunk.

"I like that plan."

Oh the wall dividers from the fake 5x04 set are on the stage too. It's DEFINITELY being used for performances of Supernatural The Musical in between healing sessions

Aniel? Eniel?

Danniel

Stop putting Cas in the backseat to moodily stare into the middle distance between the Winchesters! He's earned shotgun a million times over! He was in PRISON and you DIDN'T KNOW

A neon sign where all the letters are out except "AU" in "Restaurant"

At this point I'm assuming Danniel is seducing Lucifer for her own purposes and honestly whatever go for it I guess, if you win, and this isn't any creepier than it already is

The fact he ate a cupid and all that is probably relevant

Tbh them flopping onto the bed after is still somehow the least weird of all the weird crap Buckleming have made the characters do and I don't know if I'm numb to it or because it's Lucifer I have negative investment in his character anyways but you know, whatever floats their boat :P

"It's always so strange, that final moment, when I've lost just enough grace that I'm almost - " "Human." "I feel... emotions. Sensations. Things they must feel."

Honestly she's sounding more like Cas or Hannah than Lucifer going through his experience, almost like being a more generic angel, as soon as she loses grace she gets more affected than he does in the ways he's been affected where he cares only about being cold and hungry. And lonely. Bleh :P A concession to emotional weakness - he does love to be adored and surrounded by people who'll tell him how great he is.

He says he can't see how they go on but she says she sees how there can be pain, "but also hope. Love even. Angels can only imagine."

She's reeeeeally getting back to that Cas in 10x01 dialogue where Hannah was confused about human things, and Cas described to her what they were and that they were good things to feel on earth.

Ow.

She envies humans, because they can "Be anything."

it's like we've come full swerve back to the stuff from the start of season 10 that was so exciting for Cas exploring the intricacies of humanity... Yikes.

Wow her job sucked :P I can see why she went and asked for change when facing an eternity of that... More suggestions that Heaven is not really something that can or should be restored, never mind how volatile it was and how the angels engineered the original apocalypse. The entire system is pointless and just makes dangerous bored angels... The kind of angels who hop on the Lucifer bandwagon as soon as it comes into town because being righteous on behalf of Heaven is pointless to them. Why take a stance against Lucifer in the first place if your moral alignment was always to Heaven first and Heaven sucked that much.

"Goodness" is not an inherent alignment for angels... Looking to a leadership they trust to be good is what they were built to do, and assuming their causes are good because they're on them is another pitfall of that. The other is just all the angels who turn against Heaven entirely >.>

Lucifer says he's "going to be a father" which, uh, seems like this episode was written last year and then re-written for THIS year because he really ought to be talking about how he IS a father and he's looking for his son...

He starts maybe feeling feelings, and hastily gets up to start posturing, at which point he does actually say he's going to find his son.

Lol, HERE'S Casmodeus in a scene that doesn't have anything to do with anything.

Donatello casually tells Casmodeus that he has the demon tablet. Honestly, they probably ought to have, you know... explained everything that happened to Kevin to him... Like oh hey btw this is one of the most desired objects in the universe being the word of god n all and wowweee we've had some problems with people stealing it and our prophets in the past. Maybe sit tight and don't answer the door?

Or go out and get huge buckets of chicken and chat to any of us who isn't where you think we should be

Please don't start talking about the ingredients for the spell in public

dear god the worst bit is they made a character plausibly dumb enough to drop the idiot ball for them to the point where Asmodeus is probably best served to just leave Donatello where he is and walk him back and forth from the chicken place every day

They become unexpected friends and at the end of the day he can't bring himself to kill his goofy prophet buddy

"I'm the only person on the planet who can read the thing"

Budddyyyy.

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuude. Now he's just telling Casmodeus that Jack's in the AU and

*takes his chicken away* You're grounded. Just. Go to your room.

Asmodeus's voice coming out of Cas is wrong and bad.

Asmodeus is unimpressed with your offbrand chicken

aw crap I have to go

Last 10 minutes drama when I get home... They'll open 100 portals and it will be a Mess.

it never bodes well in a Buckleming episode when there's 10 minutes to go and TFW get out the car to go confront Lucifer.

Danniel is like "Castiel, what are you doing here?" like it wouldn't be blatantly obvious :P

I am pretty sure she's tricking them into thinking she's more of a hostage than she is but it's hard to tell tbh, given these writers and their history of writing sexy encounters between characters which should not have sexy encounters, and that sort of tension in the writing is not particularly where you want the ambiguity to be resting in character dynamics :P

I think maybe she is after telling Lucifer that she told them how weak he was, assuming that he's actually strong enough to take them out and has been snacking on her grace non-stop somehow

Okay yeah she is betraying them for love, and I add a confused "phew" onto the end of that thought. I have no idea how I feel about them tbh and I never worked it out on the bus ride around town >.>

Ketch really wants them to stab him, huh? He hasn't said anything this conversation to de-escalate the situation, used a demon bomb on a room full of angels, including Cas so if it had worked it would have hurt him but it didn't even work so he just wasted something expensive, and then he's like, fine, let's all work together and Sam's like dude no and Ketch is like, fine, will you trust me if I tell you I'm working for Asmodeus?

Dean's like "... they don't let me say fuck on this network but how the fuck does that help??"

Ketch offers to pass information BACK to them from Asmodeus, which absolutely does not patch up the leak of their prophet wandering off to get fried chicken and coming back with KFC

"I'm the lesser of at least three evils" that isn't really very reassuring either mate

Also with the terrible sales pitch: Lucifer trying to convince the angels to let him run Heaven with Danniel as his queen

I can't even work out if he's pretending he can make new angels or not, but I sort of feel like he totally can't and it would go about as well as the Plum sisters trying to resurrect their mom, who in this weird instance stands in for God

"How would you like your wings back" baaaaad idea

Cut to Donatello munching a million chicken wings

How is he not dead

*Cas side-eyes the enormous pile of chicken wings too*

"We need him" Yeah, being needed still sucks and even if you need someone you can still want to shoot them as soon as they're not useful >.>

Oh dear, Lucifer got what he wanted. And Danniel is his queen, exactly as SHE wanted.

And Ketch and Asmodeus are back to sharing a drink like THEY wanted since they were on a holiday cruise together when Cas escaped and are apparently just an item now

Oh no apparently he was going shopping getting some artefact

An archangel blade which doesn't look anything like any sword we've ever seen any archangel ever hold before and also no one has ever stabbed an archangel with

uuuuuuuuuuuugh

I don't like this at all and it's entirely because Gabriel had such a good story in the first place and I really really LIKE him. And whatever they explain is going to have to be stupid by neccessity, they're not gonna bring Raphael back which is only somewhat mitigated by bringing Michael back in a black vessel but whatever, if you have all 3 of the others running around and never give Raphael another go, it just looks bad because now we have a forgotten archangel just chilling down in season 5/6 being completely ignored for another go around when all the others do >.>

ALSO HE DIED GOOD and 9x18 was great and all but uggghh it was good because he was safely still DEAD

I mean I guess since Lucifer got free again his sacrifice was pretty much in vain anyway so maybe he should get another crack at killing him but uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugghhhhhhh

I'm going to guess I'm the biggest killjoy at the party right now, which is weird because I actually like 99% of this episode as not being terrible and for Buckleming one of their best non-rapey non-racist, only a few random dropped idiot balls episodes... And I'm assuming the Gabriel decision comes at a higher level, or at least needed a lot of approval and working into other plots.

But uuuuuuuuuuughhhhhhhh. That just means I disapprove all over this place and this isn't a criticism of a Buckleming thing, it's the fact that I've had lukewarm to tepid interest in Gabriel coming back the entire time and now he's back and I'm gonna have to live with this >.>

#13x13 #season 13 spoilers #my stuff

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feeling-foreign · 3 years

Text

john mayer discography faves

EP - Inside Wants Out (9.5/10)

this ep is absolutely brilliant. i came knowing nothing about his discography so listening to a debut project i was not expecting what i heard. it’s so fantastic and portrays his brand so perfectly. like coming with a debut acoustic was amazing bc he really showed his incredible lyrical potential and genuine talent in guitar. his guitar abilities are out of this world in this record. i hope he did it all by himself. i’m shook by this ep but it definitely got me thinking how he made these songs on his own and how they could’ve sounded with more production. still, so beautiful and so good.

- Victoria

- Back to You

- No Such Thing

Room for Squares (8/10)

great debut album. he def did what i wanted him to do bringing back some songs from the ep and working on them. but it all sounded too much of the same thing so i got a bit bored and felt like i was listening to the same songs over and over.

- Your Body Is a Wonderland

Heavier Things (8.5/10)

couldn’t really pick a favourite song bc i was listening while cooking so I didn’t pay attention to the song titles and shit. but overall I was super pumped and impressed with the versalitity of the songs. something that i felt a lot in Room for Squares is that it was too guitar-driven so most of the songs kinda sounded the same but in this one he def improved sonically wise but still remained very cohesive. loved it!

Continuum (9.5/10)

am i too biased to say this has been my favorite album so far just because it’s also shawn’s favorite?! lol it’s truly a brilliant album though. generally the first thing i thought was that it was a different frequency from the rest of his discography so far. it’s more jazz-y, slower, calmer and yet deeper. sonically it’s very mature and soothing and so it is thematically. initially it reminded me of Jack Johnson but the comparison faded as the tracks got way more profound and unique than i expected. ooh, and his vocals are sooo good. definitely see shawn getting his vocal inspiration from this record.

- heart of life

- vultures

- stop this train

Battle Studies (9/10)

as the first track started i instantly thought: this is U2-ish. but it actually wasn’t. i loved the titles of the songs playing thematically with the album title. listening to the album i noticed how john found his genre, his sound and his way of making sonics that are guitar-driven but with great drums behind supporting it. then i noticed he really doesn’t have many collaborations on his discography. half of my heart starts playing and a familiar voice starts backing up his vocals. it gets more and more familiar and as i expected it’s taylor swift’s vocals. apparently she was featured but not anymore lol i like the concept of the track in relation to their relationship and both of them singing it. cute. as the album progresses i feel cool about it. i hear a hint of country music but it is not. assassin is a very interesting song. very different from a “normal” john song with its rock inspirations. crossroads reminds me of old maroon 5 stuff. honestly i think a lot of old taylor swift sonics were inspired by john’s sound. overall, the album truly surprised me. i didn’t have high expectations and thought it would be more of the same when i played the first two songs but i genuinely was surprised. it’s a very good album and beautifully executed. assassin might be one of my new favorites.

- heartbreak warfare

- half of my heart

- assassin

Born and Raised (7.5/10)

this is definitely john’s folk-country era lmao the songs are very well produced but i feel like it’s a more chill and grown up record. oddly it reminded a lot of niall’s first album ‘flicker’. each song is unique still. ‘walt grace’s submarine test, january 1967′ and ‘if i ver get around to living’ are such beautifully smart songs. the songwriting, especially in the first, reminded me of taylor swift again. at the beginning i was sure i wouldn’t vibe as much because of the genre but honestly it’s a great album to enjoy and chill out. it’s his harmonica album.

- shadow days

- speak for me (i connected)

- if i ever get around to living

- love is a verb (it’s the message for me)

- walt grace’s submartine test, january 1967 (good good storytelling)

- a face to call home (love the drums in it and electric guitar in it)

Paradise Valley (6.5/10)

yeehaw johnny! i read beforehand that this would be a more country album so i didn’t come unprepared. love the bridge of ‘wildfire’ (the only part that doesn’t sound like a country song lol) and the frank ocean version is nice. i also appreciate how he incorporated his signature guitar style into these country-ish songs. although it fits the genre they still have a little bit of john in them. again, a very very chill album.

- who you love ft katy perry (one of my favorite jm songs ever <3)

- i will be found (lost at sea)

The Search for Everything (8.5/10)

this album was a pleasant surprise. initially it was a big wonder, because i didn’t know any of the songs beforehand and it seemed like it was going to be an unremarkable album. first few songs in, a country sonic demotivated me and my early assumptions were apparently becoming true, so it didn’t really excite me. then, the songs started getting more jazz-y and upbeat (something that i was terribly missing and DYING to hear in john’s discography). the whole record flipped and the songs got really interesting. i even remember listening to one of them aka ‘still feel like your man’. i loveee the interlude track ‘theme for search for everything’ and it bothered me a little bit the title ‘emoji of a wave’ in a track that is so beautiful lol anyways, i ended up loving more than i thought i would because he finally brought back some groove into this discography. to sum it up, i felt like watching a movie soundtrack. that’s how i would describe this album as.

- helpless (soooooo goooddddddd)

- in the blood

- you’re gonna live forever in me

- still feel like your man

#music is my passion

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paradiselostbythedashboardlight · 7 years

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So in honor of me finally rewatching The Last Jedi, I thought it might be fun to do a little retrospective and also rewatch the Force Awakens just to see how they flow together etc. Here is a rambling list of my thoughts

The Force Awakens rewatch:

1. It really has to be said, but Finn objectively has a much better part in this movie. He’s so funny and so charming and so relatable. But one of the things I think fan fiction made me mentally edit out was that he really is a super reluctant hero! Like, he legitimately never has any interest in joining the Resistance, most of the help he gives to them is motivated by quid pro quo for helping rescue Rey. Basically, I think this sets up his TLJ plot line a lot better than I had initially thought, because Finn is super uncommitted to the cause.

2. Finn and Rey are a fucking delight. One thing that this movie does so well is keeping them almost constantly in peril and they are just electric when they’re bouncing back and forth off of one another. Also I’d kinda forgotten (again, the perils of fan characterization) but Rey is actually very prickly to everyone at first and seeing her warming up to Finn and eventually even hugging him when he inadvertently does the most powerful thing he could (coming back for her) is absolutely precious. I ship them hard. And yes romantically, but I also feel like I won’t be mad if it doesn’t end romantically in the movies as long as they still are the most important people in each other’s lives.

3. Rey is also pretty unnerved by her Jedi powers and I think that subtly sets up a lot of her reactions to Luke’s training. She really is trying to play it like she knows what to expect and she’s ready to be trained, but she’s basically just putting on a brave face when her powers actually really confuse and overwhelm her in TFA. Also I TOTALLY forgot Kylo Ren being a weirdly elitist dick the whole time about her like “what? some girl? some rando scrapper???” like calm down there is meritocracy in this universe.

4. There are a lot of good jokes, to whoever says that Star Wars shouldn’t be goofy and have a lot of tension ruining humor, I raise you the scene where Finn is trying to put a bandage on Chewbacca and BB-8 hears him roaring and literally screams and runs away. Also Harrison Ford having the best two lines of his career essentially back to back with “that’s not how the Force works!” and then immediately “what do you mean you’re cold???”

5. I know he doesn’t have a lot to do in the second half of the movie, but the pure gleeful joy I feel when Poe is shooting down TIE fighters and there’s this huge pan shot and Finn goes “THAT’S ONE HELL OF A PILOT” will rectify any sins.

6. Seriously note, but this also gave me a better sense of how Leia’s storyline was meant to progress. She’s the one who has hope in TFA that her son can be redeemed and not just that, he can be brought home and everything will be fine. It takes Han’s death and all of the events of TLJ before she is finally ready to admit to Luke that her son his gone and he can never come back. I think by the time I saw TLJ I’d forgotten just how wildly hopeful she was and how crushing it is to see her abandon that.

7. Additionally, Kylo Ren is super fucking creepy in this movie. Like, I think again that the fan culture has made me forget that, but he’s legit terrifying. And that’s great, I really like how scary he is and he’s a great villain. But one thing I noticed is that everyone sorta portrays him like this super emotionally volatile explosive screaming guy, but he actually spends the majority of TFA speaking in a very creepy flat monotone. Essentially the only hints of anger you ever get are in his violent actions, but his voice is always calm. It’s only at the end when you see him really come apart at the seams and start screaming at people. Anyways, I think that was very telling for how accurate Snoke really is when he says that killing Han kinda made him snap. ALSO DAMN THE SOUND EDITING OF THE FORCE INTERROGATIONS IS GREAT.

8. Rey’s theme fucking goes. That’s all I have to say, it’s dope.

9. The stormtrooper screaming TRAITOR is exactly as funny as I remember it being.

10. Hux is a lot more... competent here? Or at least, he’s not a cartoon character. I don’t really feel strongly that one or the other is better though because I got enjoyment out of both.

11. This movie is a lot more of a World movie than a plot movie. I don’t know how else to put it. I think that’s why some love it and some felt cold while feeling completely differently about TLJ. But this movie is trying to get you hype for the world of Star Wars whereas TLJ is really focusing in on a particular plot and thus narrows scope and focus a lot.

The Last Jedi rewatch:

1. So switching from one movie to the other rapidly, I definitely felt a bit of tone whiplash at the beginning. Particularly the Poe and Hux dialogue is just super goofy and Hux’s face is making really campy expressions the whole time. But as I continued, I think I realized that actually the tone of this movie isn’t that much sillier. Yes it has porgs (and you can pry them away from my cold dead hands) but the majority of the scenes are actually pretty grim. Overall, this movie has a lot more death and destruction. No one but Han really dies in TFA and we barely notice when the Resistance loses a ship. The tone of this movie is actually pretty bleak for the most part, which is why I think the humorous sections seem more jarring.

2. Canto Bight. Ah Canto Bight. The part no one likes. It bothers me less with each rewatch because I can see how it sets up so much thematic material that I really do like. For example, DJ is a great foil to Finn in that he is pretty much what Finn could have become if he’d continued on his path from The Force Awakens without Rey. Disillusioned with both sides, motivated only by survival, no hope in something better. Also I really think it does give you complexity that TFA lacks with its pretty vague description of what exactly the Resistance is and what is happening in the galaxy.

3. You know actually, I think the reason people don’t like the Canto Bight sequence is because it’s basically the prequels! Hear me out: full of wacky aliens, showing the rich and powerful part of the galaxy not the gritty part, moral ambiguity for the good guys, dialogue is HIGH camp (”this lousy beautiful town” lol Rose plz no), CGI chase scenes. There is even a small boy yelling “woohoo!” at a race. It is the prequels.

4. I still love Luke’s plot and I don’t see how it could have gone any differently and still worked. There is literally no better reason for Luke to have randomly gone away to enjoy #islandlife alone when the Resistance needs him. Like... The Force Awakens sets up that he’s disappeared mysteriously and even Leia can’t find him with the Force so you’re expecting something bad.

5. Rey’s parents. I realized this time that she never actually clarifies in TFA whether she knows her family or not. So it does actually make sense that she remembers them from being like a 5 year old, felt horribly abandoned when they sold her, and hangs on to this naive belief they probably gave her about returning one day to save her. She’s not really searching for their identity so much as their whereabouts.

6. I know this is controversial, but Poe really does have a better plot line in this movie. I’m sorry, but he doesn’t really even have a storyline in TFA, he’s just like... a chill guy they meet. You don’t have to like the storyline, but you should admit that it is nice that he got one this time. I also noticed some really nice details/transitions where his dialogue mirrors Leia so it’s really clear that this is all a setup to him assuming command of the Resistance.

7. So... right... I don’t want to delay this any longer, but this movie does have some... awkwardness. The random scene with Maz. How coincidental it is that they find DJ. Holdo holding the idiot ball a little and being randomly suspicious around Poe. It isn’t quite elegant with its plot, but I do respect that it is due to the fact that the movie is trying to convey a much more complicated series of events. And TFA isn’t without some of these contrived moments, it just covers them a little better (I’m looking at you Rathtars and jumping to light speed whenever Han damn well pleases and Phasma in the trash compactor).

8. Kylo Ren is like way crazier in this one, but much less frightening. In fact, I noticed that while I previously mentioned this movie is way darker and more upsetting, the villains are actually much less scary. Snoke is like... super not scary. Hux is a loony toon now. Kylo Ren is somewhere between sympathetic character and petulant walking tantrum. I think that serves to put the focus of the story less on defeating some evil guy, and more on the evils of systems and organizations. The threat isn’t a guy with a mask or a gross face in this movie, it’s the endless consumption of war that ultimately makes human life meaningless. I like the message, but I also like scary guys in capes so... conflicted.

9. I’ve watched this movie three damn times now and I still can’t tell if I like Rose because she’s a good character or if Kelly Marie Tran is just That Charming.

10. I still really like this movie and whenever something doubtful happens, the movie immediately follows it up with something so mind bogglingly awesome you can’t even think about it anymore. The highs are high even if the lows are more obvious.

11. They should have fucking kept that Phasma deleted ending.

#star wars #The Force Awakens #the last jedi

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jessejackreyes · 7 years

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A rant about the state of Overwatch Lore or Why I don’t really like the new comic very much

The new comic Blizzard put out has left me really ambivalent. On the one hand, I like Akande and I kind of want things to happen and the comic gave me those things. On the other hand, I have a list of things that this comic either did poorly or actually ruined/damaged by its existence. I’m going to try to make this rather exhaustive, but I don’t know how much I’ll be able to put in this one post. I'll probably forget a bunch of stuff.

It's difficult to pick where to start here when there is so much that I want to say, but I suppose I might start on why I think the comic both had the villains do something, yet do nothing at all.

I have wanted something significant to happen in regards to the plot of Overwatch for a long time, but this comic only teased me with something that might happen instead of actually doing something. The conflict solved in this comic, a minor power struggle within Talon itself, that I can’t care about, exists only within the context of the comic itself. What this means is that the comic made up a problem unrelated to established lore and then resolved it and that was it. That was all of the forward motion other than stating Akande’s end goal which we already knew from other sources.

It’s not a problem that the comic only really existed to show off some nice art and sort of introduce us to Akande, but the way it teased me with the potential of actual progression was a bit of a let down. At least we know something will probably happen at some point.

One of the most upsetting things to me is the way this comic subtly ruins Sombra’s animated short, which really sucks because I like that one a lot. It accomplishes this by doing two things. First it sets up not killing Katya Volskaya as a good thing for Talon, retroactively making Sombra less of a badass rebel by making it so that even when she betrays Talon for her own ends she is helping them unknowingly. That's just fan-frickin-tastic, but that's not the worst part.

The second thing it does is casually and quickly let you know that Reaper knows what Sombra did. He doesn’t suspect something, he knows for a fact and that fucking sucks. The animated short set her up as a dangerous and competent agent who was out for herself, her alliance with Talon seemingly one of convenience while she pursues her own goals. In this comic we find out that she is nowhere near as competent as we were led to believe, everything she does helps Talon regardless of her intentions and she is helping them start a new world war style crisis for reasons… Good…

Now let’s talk about Reaper for a bit. Reaper says that he managed to steal part of the Overwatch database and has already killed some people on it. Overall this is a fairly bad writing choice for two reasons:

One, it actually destroys a great opportunity for a meaningful and direct conflict. Right now the “good guys” of the cast are at best passively in conflict with the villains of the story, they respond to them but are not really fighting them. (Jack and Ana withstanding) By not ignoring the Recall short they could have forced Talon to go after the database again in order to use the information and therefore drive a direct conflict with them that would get the good guys actually involved in the story.

Two, It reinforces the fact that few of the rest of the cast have anything to do with Talon and are ultimately just doing nothing. A bunch of exOverwatch agents start dying and nobody does anything? People don’t start responding to the recall or at the very least trying to track down the people responsible? This reminds me of a scene from the English dub of Sailor Moon where the scouts are watching the news talking about a school bus full of children going missing and one of the scouts says “That's the tenth one so far,” or something like that and I’m like, “Why have you waited for ten buses full of children to disappear before you did something about it!?”

This leads me to another question though. Reaper is Gabriel Reyes, former commander of Blackwatch. Why the fuck does he not know a bunch of this information already? It seems weird to me that he wouldn’t have either known this already, planned ahead and gathered it near the end of Overwatch or had some way of tracking them other than hacking an AI in a pseudo abandoned former military base. It just seems like Gabriel didn't think this through at all. This is especially bad because this comic really heavily implies that Reaper has been working with Talon since significantly before Zurich so he had plenty of time to plan things.

I mean this is to say nothing about why Athena has up to date location information about all of these Overwatch agents that the world’s most powerful shadow cult Hydra thing couldn’t manage to keep track of. These people were public figures/employees essentially. It shouldn't be hard to track most of them down. I mean Torbjorn just lives with his wife and 100 children, how hard is it to find him? I guess they all kept their communicators on their person for the last five years or something.

Akande knows who Gabriel is and I want to say that the ramifications of that are considerable, which they kinda are, but I’m not here to speculate on the clusterfuck that is Reaper’s timeline too much. It could mean a lot, or it could just be Blizzard’s weird thing about having Ana Amari, Jack Morrison and Gabriel Reyes be “undercover” or whatever, but everyone figures out who they all are instantly. I don’t know why Blizzard does that, but it is a recurring thing.

On the plus side I like Maximilian.

An additional plus, I love that the thematic/philosophical rival to Akande is eleven year old Efi Oladele. Overwatch already had some degree of generational conflict and this is a continuation of that trend which I appreciate, but also I kinda want to see an eleven year old girl kick Akande and Reaper’s asses.

The costumes were pretty awesome. I’m 90% certain that the comic existed mostly so that they could show off those designs.

I hope we get a comic/short that gives us some information about what the good side of the cast is doing. I remember that we are Overwatch advertisement, which was sort of a lie because we have only two confirmed characters in Overwatch as of present, three if you count Athena. So much of the cast is doing jackall while the bad guys scheme to bring their comic book plot to completion.

On the plus side they did not derail Hanzo’s story by having him join Talon.

This is about the short, not the comic, but do Tracer’s guns not shoot bullets or does she have the worst aim in the universe? Alternatively, is Akande bulletproof?

I do like how a big part of the comic is basically Akande saying “I am a bad guy, but I’m not a fucking capitalist” That is pretty hilarious.

We have some villains to do villainy now, so Blizzard just needs to actually have some conflict happen between characters now. Our heroes need to actually be heroic, like at the museum, but more characters with bigger stakes.

Also, since the Omnics are going to be an important part of the current story(they are extremely important to the backstory) can we have some more Omnic characters please?

I was going to rant more, but I figured I should keep things somewhat focused on the comic instead of more general. I should also probably follow this up with a post about things I like about Overwatch so I don’t seem like I’m just hating on it.

#Overwatch #akande ogundimu #rant #lore #canon #comic #I may be reading too much into things #or expecting too much #its not five pages #but its more focused

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lilietsblog · 8 years

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Strike Witches episode 1: first impression

so im gonna try strike witches: the unknown anime i chose to not familiarize myself with the premise beyond 'something like fighter pilots i think?' that i picked up by osmosis

oh hey look a discarded doll. def war is hell vibes here

cant say im a fan of the visuals from the first several seconds, the color scheme and everything seems kinda bland? the only reason im making this observation is bc i had to pause to let it load tho

oh look Very Noticable CGI

(i have a headache and am vaguely nauseous and basically am Very Cranky as a result)

man, there aren't even characters yet. it's been almost two minuets and there still aren't people for me to relate too that's a crime by which i dont mean that literally but just 'this might not be the thing i want to watch right now'

oh hey monsters okay this is better than just straight up war is hell between humans omfg in 1939 subtle 'we wanna play with ww2 era toys but without bringing up the fact japan was on the side of nazi germany' i assume sure im onboard if thats the premise

magitech??? magitech!!!

that's. their legs. in those things. are they evoking Baba Yaga and her travels in a stupa bc thats okay panty shots i think imma quit at the end of this episode

oh i. just realized this is the movie that actually makes it a bit better and gives me more hope lets try the actual first episode first

ok the first shot is of the sky and not a discarded doll that's already better

holy shit whatever this video player is it allows to load external captions from pc or url. technology progresses at an incredible pace

i love that the fighter planes are clearly shown attacking the vortex first 9u9

opening has so many girls wearing shoes but no pants. im just. this entire device's entire point is clearly to fanservice that does not mean this is bad character-wise yet ofc. i watched and liked fucking rosario+vampire. this show has a chance yet. lets see what its got

the op song is nice its also very straightforward about aesthetic of this show being 'girls without pants in absolutely non-sexual situaitons' and i can respect that

and oh look it actually does start with characters interacting right after exposition that's what im talking about

okay so now might be a good time to mention that the first context i heard of strike witches was uh. misogynist porn. like the kind that doesnt go for 'look at these relatable characters being kinky' but for 'consider: what if powerful girls got hurt instead'. so thats the context in my brain and i want to fucking overwrite it

military uniforms+panties are definitely an aesthetic and im incredibly amused by it okay every single girl here doesnt wear pants sure that actually looks like a swimsuit rather than panties and thats nice

also they are characterizing the protagonist! like i know thats not much to ask for but im going into this straight off blogging about madoka and this is just such a relief! she is kind and brave and plucky and talks gently to a scared kitten and I love her also she Does Not Think Things Through shes like the typical shonen protagonist but a girl. im in

Yoshika her name is Yoshika

and her motivation is her dad but eh sure whatever I kind of like the touch of 'it was classified military information' not sure why

theres nothing about Yoshika that qualifies her other than her personality and magic powers huh

yep thats a swimsuit aww shes a healer!

I love that the military observers rush to help as soon as they see something is off theres work and then theres helping emergencies

oh!!!! her mom and grandma are around!!! and teaching her!!! im happy!!!

Yoshika why is all that a 'but' to 'you should learn to control your power' i dont think there was any subtext of 'you shouldnt even try' there? or was it? maybe i should just trust her for now

awww Yoshika actually doesn't want to go to war <3 but this woman thinks she will because she wants to help people and she'll help people the most there I I like this ;~; I'm so happy I like this I love Yoshika's 'fuck war' instinct I love her drive to help everyone and in fact the trope of magical healer almost killing themselves to help a patient (despite it being professionally inadvisable) is actually the thing i made my very first rp character sooo :> you know. stuff something is fishy about that letter. its no coincidence it was sent just now... I love Sakamoto and her A+ social skills HA HA HA HA HA also huh... she's not in on whatever's up with that letter

Yoshika so uh alright she'll take her without enlisting her huh interesting but uh what about school I guess military and witches can override all that and it kind of makes sense to me thematically

'Britannia' gee how familiar that name sounds and i dont mean geographically

so hm could Yoshika be a military doctor without actually enlisting? how do the formalities work there i like that Sakamoto doesnt question her dislike of all things military like its unexpected but mostly bc Sakamoto's got a one track mind that has a hard time expecting anything other than what she wants to happen and beyond that its like 'sure ok a conscientous objector got it' even though its weird how there would be conscientous objectors to fighting MONSTERS its not like theres an alternative to not fight I mean also clearly Yoshika is a kid and theres room left for that in other characters' treatment of her opinions and I love that they dont get Offended that she doesn't understand and Have Proper Respect well Sakamoto doesn't at least not sure about how other people will react

man that raccoon on the road sure was convenient though. like i first thought it was Sakamoto's deliberate tactic to gauge Yoshiko's powers. she was opening her eye to i guess do just that visually and then the raccoon appeared and it just felt very natural that one follows from the other? is this foreshadowing or are the writers of this anime just unfamiliar with the concept of 'subtle' i dont mind if its the latter tbh

(im writing a ton of reflection bc the episode broke after i tried to rewind a little and i decided to download it after all, and its doing that)

so far, this show seeems nicely straightforward and fast paced. like, really straightforward. yoshiko's introduction? saving a kitten. making a ww2 era anime without difficult shit? monsters attacked in 1939. motivations and revelations are handled with all the subtlety of a hammer to the face, from the raccoon to the letter. even fanservice has the same charming quality that makes me actually be okay with the entire point of their outfits being gratuitous panty shots. making sense and having pretense is for the weak. this anime knows what it wants to be and is going straight for that. i respect that approach

also its p clear that what it wants is to be character driven and its been Delivering on that since its only half episode one and i already Love two characters personally and also some supporting cast (Yoshiko's entire family)

and like you know that in some other show GASP MIGHT MY DAD BE STILL ALIVE would be a reveal saved for like. the halfway point. but here its literally the starting point spurring everything into action bc all other motivation was just too slow to get the character where she was supposed to go. good job yo

there's this trope where the main character doesn't want to go into the main conflict (Refusal of the Call)... and very often it's handled by either 1) letting them wallow until everything goes to shit showing how wrong they were or 2) immediately conveniently wrecking everything so they have no choice now I uh. am really glad this show went a different way if just joining the conflict isnt a good enough motivation GET A BETTER ONE and IT DOESNT HAVE TO BE ANGST (and it doesn't have to be romance, either!!! why are those two the only things writers seem to be able to think of jfc)

...okay I was more like two thirds through the episode rather than half but my points stand

okay so I think what just happened was Yoshiko realized the parallel between herself and her dad leaving and got scared and her response was to comfort other people and I love that <3

I love that Sakamoto doesn't have a doubt in her mind that Yoshiko isn't going to be useless and will definitely help and also comes to her to discuss this explicitly <3

man I love Sakamoto and her absolute lack of social graces and sense of when enough is enough

and the fact that Yoshiko is working chores now and seems to enjoy it too <3

and it's when it's established that she's part of the team that Sakamoto starts showing off <3 she clearly has a dedicated well thought out campaign of convincing Yoshiko going on and its borne out not of manipulation but of clear conviction that she is right and she just has to show the girl what she doesnt know yet <3

ahaha of course showing off worked <3

so I paused and imma make a bet with myself on whether Sakamoto is going to tell her 'if you liked that you can join' right now or leave that unsaid subtly my bet is that she is, bc subtlety is an entirely foreign concept to this wonderful human being, and if i lose im going to make my bed right now not even waiting for the end of the episode let's see

oh she starts with education huh, this is not widely known? i had no idea anyway lets see if she says the thing

I love that it's her dad and it's this kind thing of 'this is what he said he was going to do, and he did' <3

huh so that was slightly more subtlety than I expected, she offered her to try them rather than trying to recruit her directly so I lost the bet gotta go make the bed now

BAM DONE YAY GOOD SELF CARE

hey more main characters!!!! I love all of you already!!! you have personality and discuss things that make sense!!! including their outfits!!! I love them!!!! the parasol girl is my favorite but also the tiny girl and the red-haired girl they are all my favorites!!!

omfg a month of travel and half a day early Yoshiko gets impatient I love her

YOU ARE A NONCOMBATANT she said with the steely confidence of a commanding officer <3

I love so much that Sakamoto respects Yoshiko's boundaries re: fighting???

OMG THE ENDING SONG I LOVE IT

I love the upbeat and airy tone this show manages to have despite the premise??? like I had trepidations at the start bc I dislike doom&gloom-heaviness of 'war is hell' narratives and I'm not a WW2 affictionado. but instead of shiny boom boom toys and angst it's all character adorableness and so much sky??? even the lack of pants ends up feeling like freedom this is the anime we all deserve

#strike witches #anime #liliet watches strike witches

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megacarapa · 3 years

Note

What are your thoughts on the recent manga developements? Like the climax of the vs stanley arc and the suika mini arc etc, idk ive just been loving the recent chapters and wanna hear more talk about it and your rants so far have been really entertaining ^^

ANON FCGB;;;😳

WELL i did make an entire playlist based off those 3 suika chapters so i guess you could say i’ve been enjoying the current arc gfgfh. ok here are my VERY extended thoughts on the last 10ish chapters under the cut (manga spoilers obv) (LUCY DON’T READ THIS ONE FR) (also cw for like.. discussion of diseases and stuff tho i dont go too much into detail, i’m not an actual doctor obviously dfgdfg)

this ended up being way longer than i expected so i tried breaking it into a few sections and adding images to make it easier on the eyes, i’ve really loved the south america arc as a whole but these last few chapters have been especially amazing

vs stanley climax

first of all, i gotta love how you called it the "vs stanley fight", and i mean, you're technically right since he is the antagonist of this arc, but it's interesting how they never have a direct faceoff with stanley, it's more like stanley and his troops attacking super one sidedly in a way the kos can't really fight against, so they use communication between their different teams to trap stanley & co in a situation they can't run away from and win in the long term

i love that dr stone "fights" are most often won strategically rather than in a straight up 1v1 brawl, in fact those more standard fights are most often used as a way to keep the enemy at bay until senku & co can figure out a way to actually win, also it's just really cool that the team that delivered the final blow was thousands of miles away from where the actual fight was taking place, or even hundreds of thousands if you count whyman as the "person who delivered the final blow"

stanley theorizes at the end that the kos will probably keep his statue as a hostage to make xeno work for them on the rocket if he wants stanley back (lmao gay), but considering their track record of letting past enemies join the crew, i have a feeling we’ll have both xeno and stanley (and the rest of the americans) back rather than just xeno

the only antagonist so far that hasn't been redeemed is ibara, who is just being kept as a stone statue somewhere, but you could tell that would be the case based on his design alone, he just screams *irredeemable villain*

xeno and stanley, while antagonists, are also clearly designed to be likeable characters, so i don't see them getting the same treatment

the only problem would be keeping a constant watch over xeno to make sure he doesn't do any Side Projects™ and develop firearms again, but it could also be that xeno was actually convinced of senku’s philosophy in their last talk before the beam hit, so maybe he will be willing to help even without having stanley be a hostage, but i guess we’ll just wait and see

as a side note, whyman periodically sending the petrification command was basically a chekhov's gun now that i think about it, so it makes sense in a meta way that a second worldwide petrification would happen, why establish it if it wont come into play later in the story? i actually felt kinda dumb for not seeing it coming fgdfg

aftermath/suika chapters

the first strategy they had for defeating stanley was a good one, but it wouldn't really make for good storytelling if it just Worked and they won just like that, it would be pretty anticlimactic after running from him for almost 20 chapters, so it makes sense then that what they had to go with in the end was the same strategy, but on a much bigger scale

suika being the one to be depetrified first and have to save everyone is also a good choice both thematically and to make sure the victory isn't too easy

having someone like senku or chrome who understands the platinum method to make revival fluid and then have it done in less than a day, or having suika simply find some extra revival fluid lying around like she was initially planning would, again, be anticlimactic, it would've lacked impact after everything they've been through

these 3 chapters also nicely bring back the theme of science not being exclusive to the “pros”, everyone can use it as long as they have the proper steps to follow, the most impressive example before this was the corn city crew managing to make a diamond by following senku’s instructions despite not having any scientists on board (and before that, gen and the villagers making a telescope)

and now suika is even more impressive, being a literal child and all, even though she wasn't able to understand the more complex methods, there was still a way for her to succeed, all she needed was to be patient and diligently go at it step by step, i adore these 3 chapters and i love suika so much now it's insane

suika being the one to get revived serves another purpose as well...

honestly, already around 188/189 i was starting to get really worried about how the story would handle the emotional aftermath

shonen jump manga has a tendency to just gloss over the psychological consequences of traumatic events (one moment i remember finding really frustrating was in bnha, when kirishima gets really fucked up during the overhaul arc but the next time we see him he’s just joking around about looking like a mummy because of all his bandages🙄), so i was worried they wouldn't treat the aftermath of an event like this with the gravity it deserves, (i think LITERALLY DYING could be considered a traumatic event but i'm no psychologist🤔)

suika’s time alone shows a nice contrast to senku, while senku is definitely not emotionless, during his time alone before taiju was revived he is still very cool and collected, not showing any emotional weakness like the king of repression he is

suika is a whole different story, she’s a kid, she doesn't repress her emotions like senku does, so during her time alone she is scared and lonely, especially at the beginning, we see her breaking down into tears multiple times, imagining her friends statues talking to her, hugging kohaku’s statue for comfort etc

this really provided the emotional catharsis i was hoping for, through suika, the audience is genuinely able to feel the gravity of what has happened

i do wish more of the older characters could be allowed to show emotional weakness like this, but i guess having suika serve as a proxy for everyone works well enough

on that note, senku was alone for only 6 months and even then its implied in treasure island that he may have a problem with loneliness

suika on the other hand was alone for YEARS, i can only imagine how that affected her mental state, tho honestly i can't say i expect the story to delve into something like that too deeply (or at all) since this is a shonen manga after all..

immortality

i’ve seen some people interpreting hyoga’s resurrection in 197 as “they can revive somebody that died from an injury, but people will still die eventually due to old age”, but i don’t think that's really the case, people don’t just die from “old age” by itself, they die because their body slowly degrades over time, which makes it harder to fight against numerous diseases, one of which will eventually get you and kill you

but dr stone (aka the combination of medusa+revival fluid) can nullify that degradation and bring your body back into a healthy state, we’ve already seen this with kaseki on treasure island where senku explains that dr stone healed his arthritis, a disease which probably would have lead to his natural death sooner or later

while we already know kaseki was in better shape than most people his age, it’s still surprising to see an old man like him jumping around so energetically, thats how much the restoration improved his health

we also know it healed mirai who was brain dead before being revived, so i think it's a pretty safe bet that it can heal other brain related diseases such as alzheimers

if so, then dr stone can heal injuries, diseases and even death as we’ve seen with hyoga, i think it’s pretty accurate of senku to say that humanity has gained immortality with it

honestly this development has been a long time coming, the idea of dr stone being able to bring back the dead was introduced as early as the first arc when tsukasa killed senku but taiyuzu were able to bring him back, but it really does seem like such an out there concept so i’m interested to see how they will base it in science... (and also how they will handle the whole… moral dilemma of immortality but i ain't ready to even attempt to think abt any of that)

my favourite theory that has sprung up from this is that if people really can live forever thanks to dr stone, it could be that whyman is actually a normal human who has been continually petrifying and reviving themself to live for 3700 years

wat will happen nixt?

back when 196 came out it kinda dawned on me just how much the crew has been set back in the progress they've made so far that it was giving me anxiety for real gfgdfg

seven years have passed, and in that time a lot of the tools they've made must have degraded, along with that, everyone they've revived so far has been turned to stone once again, there was nobody to upkeep the wheat fields and sundial and basically everything they've left in japan, and after all this time even the perseus must be in bad shape and in need of repair, as chrome suggests

how long will it take them to repair the ship? to repair all the tools they've lost? their original plan was to go around the world building cities where they can get all the materials to work on that rocket they’ll be making eventually, they already kinda started up corn city, but that has been out of commission for a while now, they were planning to build superalloy city in south america and have barely started on that

so they need to keep building these cities but also need to go back and revive everyone if they don't want their progress to go to waste, how will they go about this?? will they just tackle it one by one or split into teams, so one team can stay behind and work on superalloy city and the other can go back and revive everyone? who knows?? ryusui certainly made it sound way easier than how i've been imagining it dfgdfg

other than that, i gotta wonder are the kingdom of science really the only humans left on earth now that there's been a second worldwide petrification, or has some other group revived somewhere during the timeskip, OR maybe there might be another group out there who also devised the revival formula and was able to escape the 2nd petrification, which would then give them 7 more years to develop while senku n co are just stuck in stone 🤔 dr stone has always had some human antagonist so i wonder who’s next now that xeno and stanley have been dealt with

honestly my favourite arc has always been age of exploration precisely because it doesn't have any human threat and the characters are just left to craft and work on rebuilding society without the pressure of a looming war or a crazy american hunting them down, so honestly i'm hoping we will get another arc like that now, i think the crew definitely deserves it dnjd

random bonus ramblings

-using poop and shells to create nitric acid and it being a process that would take a long time is something that has already been mentioned multiple times in the series, so it’s really cool to see it actually utilized in the story rather than being random throwaway info

makes you wonder what other seemingly throwaway lines could actually be foreshadowing...

😬😬😬

-since joel managed to fix a medusa im very excited for him to be revived so we can learn how he did it and how the petrification works in the first place!! (and for joel and kaseki to finally meet in general)

-drst has a habit of introducing a character in one arc and having them be Just kinda There for some time until they finally have their time to shine in a later arc, examples being minami and of course yuzuriha, so i'm wondering if the same will happen later on with some of the americans, charlotte seems like a good contender for this (the girl that suika saved in 185, i gotta wonder how she felt having to shoot down the people who saved her life)

-on that note i feel like matsukaze also still hasn’t had his time to shine or contribute in any unique way yet (other than exposition gdvdj)

-i was also really liking dr brody as a character so i was kinda disappointed that he just blindly decided to kill everyone in corn city instead of talking and trying to come to an agreement w them like he has been up till then (though i guess it was necessary for the plot🙄), interested to see what they do with him as well

-i wanna see stanxeno on screen makeout sesh 🙄!

-will senku not losing his petrification cracks be explained? if he still has them, will xeno, stanley, luna etc still have theirs too? (honestly i hope so, i don’t wanna have to stare at xeno’s big shiny forehead for the rest of the series gsdhgfd)

ok i feel like i've finally exhausted all the numerous thoughts i had sdfdfd thank you for giving me an excuse to ramble on for so long and congratulations if you've managed to make it til the end <3

in conclusion

#it's good stuff!#sorry i really used this ask as a springboard to rant abt whatever tf i want huh #asks #anon #deadass it took me 2 days to write this finally i can go back to my diys #dr stone #drst #long post #VERY long post #come closer i am a normal drst fan #drst rants

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theworstbob · 7 years

Text

yellin’ at songs, week forty-three

11.1.1997 11.3.2007 11.4.2017 still doin’ this, still not sure why

11.1.1997

19) "I Don't Want to Wait," by Paula Cole

whoever did the drums for this song, y'all did some work. thanks for that. um, i don't know. i guess i never would have realized that this song was about how paula cole's grandparents were too stressed or too afflicted with PTSD to appreciate their lives and their blessings so she's gonna seize the moment, given that i associated this song with a teen soap opera i never watched, but i'm not sure it really engages with those people on a substantive level. "yeah, my granddad had shellshock, and that taught me i should carpe a whole bunch of diems before i, too, experience a horrible event from which i can't come back." is that, help him! talk to him!

26) "My Body," by LSG

"Gotta call you up and let you know just what I'm feelin', baby/911 0 0 24/Baby, it's an emergency, I'm callin' 'cause I gotta have some more." *ring* *ring* *ring* 911. What's your emergency? OPERATOR I'M HORNY 12415 Hyperion Street? YES! The Whambambulance is on its way. I just realized that's a pager code and I should probably make fun of the sexy pager codes, but I just came up with Whambambulance so this stays.

29) "Feel So Good," by Mase

Hm. There's an interesting juxtaposition at the heart of this song: you see, Mase is a bad boy. You know this, as he is affiliated with the Bad Boy record label; they are not in the business of hiring good boys there, I'd imagine. But despite his inherent badness, he is still capable of engendering good feelings in the young women with whom he "hangs" (popular late-'90s slang for 'copulates'). This thematic complexity is the thing we have come to expect from Mase, and he has delivered unto us yet another intellectual treat.

56) "Phenomenon," by LL Cool J

"I was looking at her in the limelight, pearly whites" LL Cool J I sincerely doubt you go to the club to scope out nice smiles. Come on. "Behind every playa is a true playette" I never would have realized the word 'playa' needed a feminine form. I don't see why this needed to be a gendered term, but then again, I'm looking at this with 2017 eyes, where we're all just people who enjoy fucking to various degrees and we kinda stopped caring about gender. They probably did need a female form of 'playa' in 1997. "You beefin, yellin on the cell of my 6/You reach it, then you hear the cordless click" THIS IS A BOAST ABOUT A CORDLESS PHONE

66) "I Do," by Lisa Loeb

I listened to this song yesterday and then I got distracted because there was some hot LttP rando tourney tie-break action and some listen to and read other things and now it's the day after and I'm pretty sure this song was OK but I'm extremely sure I got everything out of the first listen. It's a fun female singer/songwriter jam about love or whatever that wasn't completely shallow but also wasn't really captivating. It was. It existed. It was a song I listened to and thenI moved on with my life.

69) "So Good," by Davina ft./Raekwon

This was dope! Because this capsule is being written immediately after I listened to the song, one would think I have more to say, what with it being fresh in my mind. Hey: guess what: it was good! It was low-key and had a nice clip and it pleased me! It pleased me greatly. I am not making fun of this song even though it's basically the same thing as "So Good" because I'll take something that sounds like Lauryn Hill over something that sounds like Mase.

72) "Dream," by Forest for the Trees

"I wanna make a hip-hop song!" "I wanna make an alternative rock song!" "I wanna engage in psychadelia!" "I wanna play the bagpipes!" "Fellas, fellas, fellas! No reason we can't ALL get out way!" And that was the episode of Forest for the Trees when they learned how they could avoid conflict by seeking out compromises.

75) "I'm Not a Player," by Big Punisher

For some reason, on the album Capital Punishment, "Still Not a Player" comes well before "I'm Not a Player." This seems like a grievous error in sequencing. Like, someone should have done something about that, unless Big Pun was way ahead of the curve on the whole "this album should be played with the track listing reversed." "Still Not a Player" even references the hook for "I'm Not a Player." Missed opportunity for a killer reprise. I would also like to note that there is an Intermission in track four of a nineteen-track album. He makes for a fun listen, but Big Pun was absolutely garbage at actually making an album.

11.3.2007

68) "Shadowplay," The Killers

The Killers named themselves after a fictional band in a Joy Division music video. In the video for "Mr. Brightside," The Killers also have a fictional band playing; the kick drum bears the insignia for The Genius Sex Poets. The top YouTube result for The Genius Sex Poets is a band from Denmark that makes somewhat sloppy mopecore rock, they tried their best and I'm not here to make fun of the little guy but also wish I hadn't spent four minutes with them, but the enh makes sense. Joy Division's fake band had a dope name. It was brisk, to the point, and let you know what that fake band was about. I'm surprised that no band had taken the name The Killers before The Killers, or even before whatever Joy Division video I'm not gonna watch because I don't care enough. The Genius Sex Poets is the name of your college's worst a capella group. It's a bad name for a band, and that The Killers wanted to influence as they have been influenced by giving their fake band that name is why I never could get into them. They wanted their legacy to be a band called The Genius Sex Poets. What a trash thing to want.

94) "Love Like This," Natasha Bedingfield ft./Sean Kingston

"We were cool back in high school/Ooh, I really liked you!" Earlier this year, we praised Mariah Carey's "I Don't" because it was a song in which a 40-year-old Mariah Carey had a 28-year-old YG rap about how hot he thought Mariah was. It's a lovely subversion of the Hollywood thing where John Legend and Ariana Grande sing a love duet for a Disney film and people don't see anything wrong or squicky about it. The age gap here isn't quite so drastic, Natasha Bedingfield is 26 and Sean Kingston is 17, but still, this is as close to progress as anyone who isn't Mariah has ever made. The people DO demand a film where Channing Tatum goes down on Meryl Streep, though. I think we're due.

96) "The Hand Clap," Hurricane Chris ft./Big Poppa

this is literally just an over-produced song where hurricane chris only says he wants people to clap their hands. like that's it. that's all there is to this song. just hurricane chris listing reasons you should clap your hands. "Well, I hope you ain't tired of clappin' yo hands/'Cause we just got in the club." Does. Does Hurricane Chris expect me to clap my hands the entire time in the club? 'Cuz I'd do it, but it'd be quite silly. Picture me in the club constantly clapping my hands. Bangin' beats, slammin' honeys, and me just fucking there getting my seal on. "Drop that beat/Turn it up/That's too loud, man!/Turn it down/Now turn it back up" FUCK'S SAKE CHRISTOPHER MAKE UP YOUR MIND DON'T CONFUSE THE DJ THE DJ CLEARLY HAS ENOUGH TO WORRY ABOUT

100) "Just Fine," Mary J. Blige

That Mary J. Blige isn't in Decade Dance is the harshest referendum I can offer on music in 2017

11.4.2017

82) "High End," by Chris Brown ft./Future & Young Thug

nope!

84) "Yours," by Russell Dickerson

oh so he’s country. goddamnit. and it's even the fake-deep ballad bullshit country. this is the song that plays during the first dance at your aunt's third wedding, but it was her first church wedding, the first time they eloped in vegas and the second time, well, you know, uncle jim was never one for crowds, so this her first chance to really have HER day, you know? she hasn't had HER day yet, and you know what, she's 46, she deserves her own day. it'll be a cash bar and you'll spend every second worrying the hot person from the groom's side of the family is technically your cousin now.

87) "Let You Down," by NF

from the cursory research i've done, there appears to be actual emotion behind this song, this isn't just sadness as a substitute for substance there's a backbone to it, so i'm not gonna giveit too much heck. i'm whelmed, but it'd also feel like an insult to say "i didn't like it," because it sounds like a song that wasn't made to get people to listen to nf, it was a song that was made because nf had shit to say, and i respect that.

95) "Stunting AIn't Nuthin," by Gucci Mane ft./Slim Jxmmi & Young Dolph

The AZLyrics page for this song contains five instances of [?] in Gucci Mane's verse. Even the people who like Gucci Mane enough to post his lyrics to the Internet know the lyrical content of a Gucci Mane song isn't worth listening to hard enough to figure out. I paid extra close attention. The blanks are as follows: Don't leave it to BEAVER, just leave it to me (this line is actually borderline clever) I'm at MAD CHRIS' every day of the week (this is a guess, but there's gotta be an ATL strip club named Mad Chris) A FOOL WITH THE CHEWIN' SHE'S chewin' the D (can't say I like it when people bite my dick but to each their own) THAT SOB got me weak in the knees (ok i can't figure this one out, Gucci Mane is trash) Give her THE TROPHY for throat of the week (her parents will put it on the mantle next to her diploma and the participation award from sixth grade gymnastics)

96) "Your Broke Up With Me," by Walker Hayes

MY DUDE. MY. DUDE. YOU. CAN. ABSOLUTELY NEVER. PUT WHISTLING IN YOUR SONG. IF YOU CAN'T WHISTLE. What is this trash? Why are you breathing into the microphone like that? Is this, what, did you accidentally mix your ASMR with your country song and were too lazy to fix the track? I hate this. That whistling sounds so bad. How are people buying this song? This is the most baffling thing I've ever heard.

97) "Mayores," by Becky G ft./Bad Bunny

oh good. a song where a 20-year-old says "i like them older." ...where did i fall on hey violet's "guys my age?" i think i was okay with it then, but man, you think about it now, and you think about this song, and you think about that paula deanda song where she sang "I may be a teen but that doesn't mean I can't party," and man, it's gross. i don't like that this happened.

98) "Ask Me How I Know," by Garth Brooks

barth grooks

Who won the week?

Well, somehow, the white Christian rapper took 2017 Song of the Week honors, so that’s already out. And in a battle between Mary J. Blige and a host of songs that ranged from Neat to Neat!, I’m gonna go with 1997 here.

Current standings: 1997: 17 2007: 12 2017: 14 1997 seems to be building an unassailable lead with the clock running down on a year that ends with 7, though if we’re being real, the last two weeks have been really week. Next week, though, we get a clash of the titans. 1997 enters “Kiss the Rain.” 2007 enters “Low.” 2017 is throwing a ton of Future + Young Thug spaghetti with a side of Tay Tay at the wall. Who will win? ...”Kiss the Rain”’ll prolly take it, like be real it’s “Kiss the Rain,” but we’ll see if 2007 has enough for an upset! (It doesn’t, 1997 has win 18.)

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