#i think (hope?) its a deliberate character choice to show a guy can be kind and likeable and still hold implicit biases | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sepublic · 4 years ago

Text

Through the Looking Glass Ruins!!!!!

…

SO! Onto other things first…

WRATH IS BRAXAS’ FATHER!??!!? HOLY SHIT, Wrath is a canonical dad, I’d always expressed my… OH MY GOD WRATH IS DAD! And of BRAXAS, that sweetie… How is Braxas such a sweetie with a father like HIM, also-

Wrath was in casual wear? Either he has a day off, or he got fired by Belos/Kikimora after drawing Luz a map to Eda in Young Blood, Old Souls! Either way this guy has a sudden new level of NUANCE that I am reeling from, and yes I checked, that really is Wrath according to the credits! Dang this puts everything in a WHOLE new light…!

AMITY HAIR OHMIGOD IT LOOKS SO ADORABLE SHE’S SELF-ACTUALIZING I AM FUCKING SCREAMING HOLY SHIT OH MY GOD!!! OH MY GOD OH MY GOD, it’s PINK and not green… They acknowledged it, Emira did! And they CHANGED IT I AM LOSING MY FUCKING MIND OVER THIS-

She looks so BEAUTIFUL and I love the kind of foreshadowing with the bookends of our first shot of Amity having her hair down, and now it’s changed! And she looks adorable and EMIRA AND EDRIC BEING GREAT SIBLINGS I LOVE IT SO MUCH! This… THIS is everything I wanted! I was resigned to not much of them but HELL YEAH they’re being good siblings and we get a look at their rooms, we see them doing MAKEOVERS together this is everything from my favorite fanon content and MORE,

Also Edric has a date?! Emira says ‘their’ mom… Unless the Golden Guard has a mom, DARN! Not gonna lie, I half-expected a big twist at the end that Edric was dating the Golden Guard, who was doing some sort of reconnaissance as his unrecognized normal self and/or screwing around with the Blights even further, but in a GENUINE sense… But then who knows Kikimora could be posing as GG’s ‘mom’, this is a stretch anyhow-

JUST HELL YEAH Blight Twins! Blight Twins being sweet and mischievous and supportive of each other, Blight SIBLINGS being siblings, Emira being an older sister and giving advice! And AMITY, Amity mentioning how much Luz has changed stuff, I love that they acknowledge it openly how her life has completely shifted, and now… NOW…!

No necklace! Red leggings! PINK HAIR?! Is this why Amity in the intro hasn’t been updated yet… She was getting TWO updates, so the animators decided to only animate a change after this final update?!

King and Gus are also friends it seems, and they even recorded some fun together! I’m surprised at how much Bria and the others mock Gus’ illusion skills… Obviously Belos is kinda terrible but like; I don’t think he’d set aside an entire subset of magic into Illusions without reason! Also that nightmare trip… I LOVE IT, I love Gus applying the creativity of illusions in their ability to completely warp and distort someone’s sense of reality! And I called that dragon-thing being an illusion!

A graveyard… I wonder if the Gallderstones (is that how it’s spelled) have any relevance or if they’re just neat? I hope Mattholomule and Gus help hide the Looking Glass Graveyard… Damn, that’s another Death reference with Gus, huh! Is it culminating in his respect for the dead, or will it continue further with Gus being a necromancer, or an Oracle who can commune with the deceased, and he has their respect as someone who treats them properly?!

Also not to get dark but… What if all those Illusionists are dead because of Belos? I’m JUST SAYING…! And not gonna lie, every time someone insulted Illusions, I kept imagining the Illusion Head just suddenly waking up and feeling like there’s a disturbance in the force, as well as a weird compulsion to beat up some Glandus kids. It’d be even funnier if he had beef with the Construction, Plant, and Abomination Heads as well!

Speaking of which, more confirmation on Construction Magic being related to earth! Glad to see Bria give us a look into that, which furthers my idea of Belos using construction magic… Also dang, Bria and the Glandus Kids really are the parallels/foils to the Detention kids! You’ve got the short ‘nice’ girl, the tall lanky kid, the furry… But the Glandus Kids start off looking nice and cool, but turn out to be rather nasty!

Meanwhile the Detention Kids seem like bad news and delinquents, but no! They’re just demonized and actually very kind and chill! The Detention Kids are looked down upon, the Glandus Kids are appraised… The Detention Kids are dual-track, the Glandus Kids are singular; Glandus Kids from, well, GLANDUS, Detention Kids from Hexside… One’s ‘mischief’ is actually very neat and cool, the other’s is literal grave robbing.

I guess that’s how the bleeding statues got past the censors- It’s technically just an illusion! Also more insight into how Glandus works with its Survival of the Fittest mentality, I wonder if we’ll get confirmation on which coven heads came from there, how that might influence them as adults…

What is Glandus like, is it more whole-heartedly accepting of Belos’ rule, hence its harsh ideals? Was it made after Hexside? Does Bump hate it for being so cruel like that, or is it just school bias? And dang poor Mattholomule, I always had a feeling he sort of felt and knew that he wasn’t much, so he accepted and compensated by deliberately doing whatever he can for power…

They confirmed he’s from Glandus, and I appreciate this new look at him! This new leaf turned… Hot take but he’s honestly not as bad as Boscha, his stint with Gus was a one-time thing that Gus was able to live with! And that seems pretty good to set them up as friends! Speaking of Boscha, Willow was injured by pixies? And the last time we heard of pixies, they belonged to Boscha and caused the school to get shut down… Did BOSCHA DO THIS I SWEAR SHE IS DEAD TO ME-

(Also she’s mentioned in the credits for this episode but I don’t remember hearing her? I might’ve gotten distracted with so much other things.)

Gus! I like the insight into his relationship with Illusions, and I appreciate how he’s considering other forms of magic… But this hesitation might just serve to reaffirm his believe in Illusions, which is okay! It’s all about choice… And yeah, it seems Gus also has a case of impostor syndrome like King, no wonder they get along so well! I love the glimpses into Gus’ house and the confirmation that he has a library card, no Perry though alas…!

I appreciate how Gus feels overlooked, like he has no real substance, which is how his Illusions reflect a desire to draw attention, but also the idea that there’s nothing real beneath them… Again, very much like King! And Gus, he’s not a powerhouse like the rest, he’s SKILLED and smart, but strength isn’t his forte, it’s not brute force he operates on, but cleverness! Trickery, I like it…! It’s a nice callback to his last A-plot episode, SVSF, where instead of fighting Mattholomule physically, Gus’ solution is to think outside the box and pull the alarm!

You go kid, not relying on brute strength but showing that some clever tricks and thinking are just as valid! Kinda wonder if this episode is lowkey a discussion on masculinity for young boys, especially with Gus growing older with puberty, though the latter is mostly because his actual VA grew… But maybe the writers rolled with that and incorporated it, or it’s just a very neat coincidence! Also, it is me or did Mattholomule’s voice change? And the gag that Gavin’s dad looks identical to him, even moreso because he’s NOT supposed to have a moustache… That’s great!

Malphas! Love this reference to a classic demon, I wasn’t sure if Malphas was the librarian with glasses whom I’ve always headcanoned as a father figure to Amity… But maybe it’s actually this bird dude! He seems adept in Bard magic, and I love the reveal of his true crow appearance… Guess those theorists were right that the one-eyed figure is from the Forbidden Stacks! Also Malphas NOT COOL with Amity, but I’m glad Luz changed his mind, and I wonder how that adventure looked…

Which- DAMN, the RSD with Luz! She looks so UTTERLY BROKEN when Amity mentions doing stupid things, and she didn’t mean it like that, but Luz just looks so completely shattered and you can tell she wants to cry but instead she bottles it up and tries to take it in stride, and that plays into her trying to overcompensate for her mistakes AGAIN… SOMEONE GET IT TO HER HEAD that she doesn’t need to! I’m scared for Luz, and I was SO scared this episode would end on a bad note…

BUT DOAHLDdFAEONDKFHN LUMITY KISS LUMITY KISS! ONE-SIDED BUT THEY FINALLY FUCKING KNOW AND AMITY IS LIKE WHAAAAT AND I WAS WAITING FOR IT AND I COULD FEEL IT HAPPEN AND GAY KISS! GAY KISS ON-SCREEN!!! And the way Luz just FLOPS to the ground on her knees AAHJJFFKHGGK and no Alador nor Odalia to ruin this, UTTERLY PERFECT and the twins WATCHING OOOHHHHGGGG YYYEEAAAAHHH-

This is EVERYTHING I ever wanted!

What an AMAZING episode with wonderful characer beats and reveals! Again, Amity’s growth as a character, that brief insight into how Luz as a person is very chaotic and sometimes frustrating for Amity and forces her to reevaluate, but ultimately it’s good and Luz DOES try her best, and Amity clearly wanted to make things up for Luz and apologize, they’re BOTH doing things, just the little moments!

Also, Alex Lawther voices Philip Wittebane! He has long hair and a vaguely british accent, he’s… He’s Belos isn’t he? And they got a new VA because having him voiced by Matthew Rhys would be really spoiler-y right? He’s got the long hair and he’s a nerd… And with how he talks of finding a way back home, maybe Belos really DOES just want to return home, after all? He talks of making a way back home…

And we see a glimpse of the Portal, so it might’ve brought him there? Or did Philip succeed in making it, and that was his blueprint designs? Did he arrive by Titan’s Blood? What happened to the portal if it brought him there, or if he made it? Why the scar, why near Eda’s house, partially buried?

Was it lost before he could finish his work, and Philip got side-tracked into something else… Perhaps going on a crusade, on behalf of a curse/demon that possessed him? A demon that killed King’s father…? Was the portal broken and he had to discard it, but then it naturally healed- Or did it just need to recharge, maybe Philip DID make it back home, WHAT IS THE ANSWER?! Is there some sort of doppelganger for Philip, is BELOS his doppelganger?! What is THIS WHAT-

WHAT AN EPISODE!

142 notes · View notes

moonlightreal · 4 years ago

Text

This is the “author’s note” I found on the amazon pages for the pretty hardcover Night World books. My memory is that it was just there, the book-blurb at the top by the cover picture, was this.

Like a bonehead I just copied the text without grabbing a screencap or noting the date. The amazon page now has the publication date is December 2016 so this bit of optimism was just before Ms. Smith vanished. Of course we don’t know when it was written or whose idea it was. Was Strange Fate really finished or was someone just feeling hopeful?

NIGHT WORLD Dear Readers, It’s hard to tell you how much the re-release of the Night World books means to me. It has allowed me to come full circle, to complete a cycle that began with Secret Vampire. It has allowed me to finish Strange Fate, which grew into an epic that included roles for almost every Night World character. And Strange Fate allowed me to show the origins of the Night World, the apocalypse that threatens to destroy it, and even a possible future in which the evil side of the Night World prevails. I am often asked how I conceived the idea for the Night World series. It began when I wanted to write stand-alone novels that would combine horror and romance. But I wanted more: I wanted to do a series in which this Night World—a vast, secret world that exists within the everyday world—would slowly reveal itself to readers. That’s why the first book is called Secret Vampire: the inhabitants of the Night World, composed of vampires, shapeshifters, witches, and other supernatural creatures I wanted to invent, are hidden from humans. A vampire is necessarily a secret vampire … because of the laws. I also wanted to write about a new kind of forbidden love. That’s not easy—most good forbidden love topics were old by Shakespeare’s time. But with this series, I could create the possibility of forbidden love simply by saying that the laws of the Night World prohibit a Night Person from falling in love with a human. But I still needed one more ingredient. I needed the rise of the soulmate principle to actively force Night People to fall in love with humans, no matter how hard they fought against it. Voilà! Then it was just a matter of making up interesting characters and setting them loose in my head to see what they would do. I often begin like that: sitting in a quiet room and searching for a sparkle in my mind that could become my new heroine. Sometimes it’s easy and a whole character shimmers before me. Sometimes I only get the faintest firefly glimmer of a new girl, and I have to hold my breath and see if that glimmer will materialize into a three-dimensional person. Heroes and anti-heroes are easier. It’s just a matter of picking one that will be a true soulmate for my heroine. I have a whole collection of these characters in my mind, all trying to crash the party. And they’re usually bad boys. The settings and in-depth plot development are another layer of work. But often the characters just run off and do what they want, and I have trouble keeping up with their antics on my keyboard. One thing I always do is look carefully at my characters and plot from all angles to make sure I’m not plagiarizing a book or series that I may have read before. That’s just normal procedure for ethical authors: we make sure our stories aren’t too much like another story we might have read. Of course, there are many ideas that have been around since the Babylonian myths, and many characters that are archetypal. But, really, it’s almost impossible to take many things from the body of another author’s work—say, someone else’s character(s) or plot or story device—without actually intending to do so. I can’t imagine wanting to do that. I wish I could say every author felt the same. Poppy North is a character I examined very carefully. I wanted to make sure she wasn’t too much like Bonnie McCullough, another petite character of mine from The Vampire Diaries. I didn’t even want to plagiarize myself ! But Poppy convinced me that she was a tough little squirt who by high school had already planned out her future, which is very unlike Bonnie. Poppy was going to marry her mysterious friend James—she just hadn’t informed him yet. Also, unlike Bonnie, she had a fatal flaw in her small body. In Secret Vampire, I knew I was dealing with a serious issue: terminal cancer in a high school girl. So I did a lot of research before deciding on a type of cancer that would be truly inoperable and give Poppy only a month or two to live. I went to several hospitals to talk to nurses in oncology wards. I always brought toys for the hospitalized children, but the whole subject was so heartbreaking I was almost afraid to tackle it. Once I did, though, I found that Poppy was even stronger than I had imagined. In the book, she makes the only choice she can to go on living, and she never looks back. Poppy is one of my favorite girls, and she ushers in Ash Redfern, who quickly became one of my favorite bad boys. Ash has a murky past of womanizing and … well, more womanizing. Ash returns in Daughters of Darkness because he has been ordered by the leader of all vampires, Hunter Redfern, to bring his three runaway sisters back to their cloistered vampire island. But when Ash locates his sisters, he runs straight into the human stargazer Mary-Lynnette, and the sparks begin flying—literally. Mary-Lynnette is a character I made up when I was a kid, and I’m always surprised by how many people like her and Ash together. Mary-Lynnette spends most of the time expressing her feelings for Ash by kicking him in the shins, but their dialogues are some of my favorite passages in the whole series. Ash, in turn, escorts Quinn into the series. And Quinn (who does have a first name, though he rarely uses it) is one really scary guy. A vampire since 1639 A.D., Quinn is sharp, cold, humorless, and heartless. Unlike Ash, who is mainly guilty of an incredibly long series of one-night stands, Quinn enters the series as a human slave trader. That is, he provides vampires with young girls, and he doesn’t ask questions about what happens to the girls afterward. This led to a problem: How on earth was I going to redeem this villain enough to make him someone’s soulmate in The Chosen? I really sweated over that. My first task was to make Quinn more sympathetic. The best way to do it seemed to be by telling a bit of Quinn’s own tragic story: how he falls in love with sweet Dove Redfern, and how her vampire father decides to make Quinn his heir. Dove’s father is Hunter Redfern, one of the most important vampire leaders in Night World history. This is the same Hunter Redfern who, nearly half a millennium later, sends Ash to drag his sisters back home. The same Hunter Redfern who sends his daughter, Lily, after Jez in Huntress. The same Hunter Redfern who tries to turn Delos into a merciless killer in Black Dawn. But, as a boy, Quinn doesn’t know anything about the Night World, and he is deeply in love with gentle Dove. When Hunter makes him a vampire by force and then when Quinn can’t save Dove from being killed, Quinn’s heart freezes over. For four hundred years it accumulates ice—until he meets Rashel. That’s another favorite scene of mine: when Rashel, a dedicated vampire hunter since (guess who?) Hunter Redfern killed her mother, encounters Quinn. A group of Rashel’s fellow vampire slayers have captured Quinn and plan to torture him, and Rashel is left alone to guard him. Quinn, feeling old and tired despite his youthful appearance and great power, gives himself up for dead—and is a little glad to do so. Rashel, however, can’t stomach the idea of torture. When Rashel talks to this most-hated vampire and hears his story, she deliberately sets him free. And that astonishes him. But it’s the soulmate principle working its magic. I loved making two such strong-willed enemies succumb to the silver cord that connects them. I especially loved hearing Quinn warning Rashel not to let him go—and then protecting her when her comrades arrive back in time to see that she’s let him loose. I really loved writing about Quinn and Rashel’s soulmate sequences. As Rashel enters Quinn’s mind, she sees “thorny scary parts” but also “rainbow places that were aching to grow” and “other parts that seemed to quiver with light, desperate to be awakened.” She begins to think that people ask so little of themselves. If the mind of a slave trader can look like this, an ordinary person must have the power to become a saint. It is with this revelation (and much penance on Quinn’s part) that Quinn is redeemed. That’s the thread that binds all the novels together: redemption. The possibility of a second chance. Everyone has choices to make, but even the most evil of vampires can choose to atone and be redeemed. It may not necessarily stave off punishment in this world or the next, but redemption is possible. I’ve been asked who my favorite characters are, and the answer always changes because it depends on the book I’m writing. Right now my favorites are three characters from Strange Fate. As for my favorite couples in the published books? Morgead and Jez—I suppose. Who would find themselves at greater odds than a vampire gang leader and his onetime superior, a vampire who finds out she is half human? I learned some cool martial arts moves as a bonus for writing about them. Then there is Keller, one of my all-time favorite heroines, and Iliana, the beautiful Witch Child, and Galen, ruler of the shapeshifters: the love triangle in Witchlight. Keller starts out seeming brusque and businesslike, but the love of Galen and of the unselfish Iliana help to heal her inner wounds. And I can’t forget Thierry and Hannah, and Circle Daybreak. I created Circle Daybreak because the Night World witches had only two clans: Circle Twilight and Circle Midnight. Those, like Thea in Spellbinder, who belong to Circle Twilight are not-so-wicked witches (that is, they don’t want to exterminate all humans like the darkest witches, those who belong to Circle Midnight), but they are still wicked enough. So what was to be done with all these new soulmates, when Night World law said that they must be put to death? Someone had to make a place for them where they would be safe, and I decided it was Thierry, one of the oldest vampires, and Hannah, his Old Soul soulmate, who has lived hundreds of lifetimes without ever reaching the age of seventeen. They are the ones who revive Circle Daybreak, where humans and Night People can forget about past tragedies and concentrate on a brighter future together. Although Thierry is an old vampire, he isn’t the oldest vampire. There is one older, the one who Changed him. She provides another thread that binds the series: the pitiless Maya. Maya is the first vampire, the witch who finds the secret of eternal life—and chooses to use it for evil. But there will be plenty more about her, including a look at the young Maya, her sister Hellewise, and their mother, Hecate Witch-Queen, in the upcoming Strange Fate. And so now I’ve come full circle, back to Strange Fate. But I can’t finish until I add the other joy that the re-release of Night World has brought me. It’s brought me into contact with you by e-mail. Night World fans write so many intelligent, articulate, courteous, exciting e-mails! I love to get messages from “old” fans, who say my works “got them through high school.” Thank you for them! And messages from new fans, who say they have just read all my reissued books—and are impatient for more. Thank you! And the messages that simply demand: “When is Strange Fate coming out?” Thank you, too! With a full heart, all I can say is thank you, thank you, and thank you again! I never thought I would have a chance to write an open letter to all Night World fans, and I can only wish that you knew how grateful I am … for this second chance. Sincerely, (LJ Smith signature image) P.S. I love to get e-mail, letters, and messages. Visit me at ljanesmith.net!

#nightworld #ljsmith strangefate #strange fate #LJ Smith

30 notes · View notes

im-the-punk-who · 4 years ago

Text

----

@rnmmarchformeta Day 1: Tonight’s theme is: Themes

Malex and Music: Tracing a relationship through music used in the show - Part 1

----

Given that both Michael and Alex have a personal connection to music, I wanted to go over some of the intricacies of what the music choices and lyrics/stories behind the songs used might tell us about Malex. The music choices in Roswell New Mexico are deliberate and often incredibly pointed. Particularly in the case of Michael and Alex there are elements of their relationship that are not so much underlined as written about only in the lyrical choices that play under their scenes. This choice for me made rewatching the series a lot of fun because as I discovered the lyrics to some of the more obscure song choices I kept discovering new intricacies and motivations for each of their decisions. Below the cut for length.

(Author’s note circa 2007: (rawr xD) I’m focusing specifically on the parts of these songs that play over or in direct correlation to scenes where Michael and Alex are both present. I would love to explore this theme in the wider context of the whole show and how their interactions with other characters might change some of these but...this is already like 6k and that’s just how the peas and carrots cooked. That said I will be referencing other characters and relationships as relevant, particularly, I will be talking at some length about Milexa and the airstream scenes in 2x06. I personally have a favorable reading of the scenes and what they mean for Michael and Alex. I also talk briefly about Milexa in a few other spots - they’ve been marked as ‘Milexa’ or ‘Miluca’ if you wish to skip them, although I don’t know if this will make sense as a whole without them. But, should you wish. Proceed accordingly. <3)

----

Posted on AO3 here.

Sedona - Houndstooth (1x01)

The first song we hear in relation to Malex is ‘Sedona’ by Houndstooth. The song plays during the reunion as we see Alex confront Michael about the chemicals found around his airstream. The verse that plays underneath the scene references how, due to its scenic beauty, the town of Sedona was once a highly sought after filming location but had fallen into obscurity when cowboy movies went out of style in the late 70′s.

Similarly, Alex tells Michael that he is ‘wasting his life.’

“Does the macho cowboy swagger thing ever get old for you?”

“Did it get old for you?”

For me, this scene is as much an introduction to the past between these two as their present. Gone but not forgotten, their interactions are a ‘script’ that the two of them play off of. In other words, Michael and Alex don’t so much interact as play off of what the other expects from the other. This becomes especially clear when in 2x05 we learn that Alex has at least once before warned Michael about ‘wasting his life.’

When The Truth Hunts You Down - Sam Tinnesz (1x01)

The next scene is this one, in which we see Alex contemplating an old picture of himself. We then see Michael watching him.

Later, the last line is overlaid with Jesse telling Kyle about the existence of aliens.

The truth about Michael’s alienness is quiet literally hunting them, but so is something about Alex’s past. As we get to know him, we learn just how much his father is interconnected with all of the worst moments in his life and everrything he has buried and tried to run from in order to avoid it. Michael, Roswell itself - Alex ran halfway across the world to try to run away from the trauma of his youth, and yet here he is.

“Nostalgia’s a bitch, huh?”

“You know I thought when I got back from Iraq you would be long gone.”

“Is that what you want?”

“We’re not kids anymore. What I want doesn't matter.”

We also find out something of the nature of his and Michael’s relationship and that there are clearly still feelings between them - no matter how much Alex is trying to deny it.

Give Me The Night - Des Rocs (1x02)

This is one of my personal faves from the Malex soundtracks. It just *slaps* okay?

Aside from the obvious nod to Michael’s alienness, this song underscores the divide still between Michael and Alex despite the passionate kiss they shared at the reunion. Michael is initially flirtatious and full of swagger - until Alex shuts him down.

The fallacy of Alex’s rebuke and his dismissal of the feelings behind the kiss are underscored by his refusal to even look Michael in the eye as they talk. Even if he tries to deny them, the truth of his feelings hunts and haunts him because he feels he can never act on his own desires. And in turn when presented with the about face, Michael turns bitter as the push-pull is reinitiated. Michael falls back to the script they’ve been rehashing to save his feelings - ‘puts on a show’ as it were, and Alex falls for it hook, line, and sinker. He is still unwilling or unable to see the truth that lies beneath the surface.

“Isn’t there some law about building on a historical site?”

“A historical - oh you mean because the UFO crashed here? Yeah, we’re not supposed to build on Santa’s workshop either.”

For Michael, who at least to me was obviously hoping things would change this time around, this must feel like a bucket of cold water, especially in the face of Liz Ortecho’s knowledge and seeming easy acceptance of the aliens’ existence. While Max might get his happy ending, Michael is left to keep hiding from the person he loves, never being seen and wondering if Alex’s feelings are even real.

Two Princes - Spin Doctors (1x02) (Miluca)

In rapid fire we have the next three songs as Michael and Alex spend some time at the Wild Pony. This verse plays under the interaction when Alex comes in the bar and spots Michael.

“Though he got kinda hot. In a ‘sex in a truck, smells like a river, never introduce him to your mama’ kind of way.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

My boy. My child. My bluntest instrument in the tool kit. Has no one ever told Alex Manes that saying you hadn’t noticed an objectively hot guy is hot is basically code for ‘I haven’t stopped staring at him since I walked in and my brain is not functioning at a high enough level to mask that fact’? Son, please, this is a drunk Wendy’s.

(Also this is huge foreshadowing for Miluca - Michael and Maria don’t have sex *in* a truck but it’s pretty close, we find out later that Michael/the aliens smell like rain, and she tells him he’s not meeting her mother at one point. The angle of this shot is also, for me at least, a hint that Michael is going to become the object of these two ‘princes’ affections, at some point.)

Anyway this is basically poking fun at Alex Manes, repressed disaster, for having no clue what love is and trying to express his affection through like, everything except anything anyone would understand as romantic love. (And we will see this in the flashbacks as well as present day - that Alex mostly uses his station or advantages as a way to show the people he loves he loves them, rather than using words. When he offers Michael the shed, brings him the guitar, uses his military connections to find out about Michel’s mom, hacks into Maria’s computer...listen I got more.) But that isn’t enough, as we’re learning. If only there were some way Alex could also learn that lesson.

And seriously, “This one said he wants to buy you rockets?”

How’s It Going To Be? - Stephen Edwards (1x02)

“Is there really nobody in this world that you wouldn’t risk everything to save? Sad.”

Oh Isobel, if only you knew.

So, aside from returning the kiss Michael initiated at the reunion, Alex has soundly rejected every advance Michael has made for a relationship. Despite that Michael seems to have been harboring some hope that things might be different not that Alex is back more permanently. But now with Isobel bringing into question what he’s willing to sacrifice, I think he might be realizing that toll has been extremely steep already.

(Also truly obsessed with how both Alex and Michael have positioned themselves so that they can casually glance over at each other without arousing suspicion. *Boys*. It’s not that complicated what is this middle school?)

We know that Michael doesn’t like having to keep secrets, and again I have to wonder if he’s regretting not telling Alex he’s an alien, or wondering how that conversation would have gone.

From the previous scenes we can tell something in their relationship is coming to a head - maybe Michael is hoping it’s that he can finally stop keeping secrets from Alex and show Alex who he really is - that Alex will stop misreading him. That Alex will change.

But there is also the expectation that if that happens, Alex will likely leave again. Not just because that’s what Alex’s trauma makes him do, but also because that is how Michael frames all of his relationships. As ‘until you leaves’. He is shown to have a habit of catastrophizing because he doesn’t believe himself to ‘belong’ anywhere(HA) and this is one of those times we’re shown that.

Come With Me - Gold Star (1x02)

“Home can be a person.”

And here we have Alex “thinking about who he was” as Maria closes up the bar. Given where this scene leads with him and Michael, I think the rest of the lyrics to the song are incredibly poignant.

Tell me what were you dreaming? Tell me who were you trying to reach? Gimme something real to believe in Or gimme a reason to leave So i left her standing under shining stars in the Silver moonlight by old Borough Hall - whoever you are

We know that after this evening Alex attempts to rekindle his relationship with Michael, still thinking about who he was, and maybe for the first time trying not to run from what he wants. He’ll be unsuccessful this time, but it’s the first clue that Alex is attempting to break a pattern that has held him in place for ten years.

While he may have been misreading Michael’s stunted growth, we’re starting to see Alex contemplate change in himself. This is the start of Alex’s two season long journey to break out of the fortress he’s built around himself. To ‘put his weapons down’ in an effort to be with Michael.

(She lets her guard down on her way back//to close her eyes and fall asleep - “It was late....I was tired.”)

God of Wine - Third Eye Blind

So clearly the writers were like ‘how can we hurt Milo specifically’ because these lyrics are *so good* as we hear malex talk about the way they view their relationship for the first time in the show.

The music starts just as Michael picks up the old photographs, first of the pod squad, then of himself and Alex playing guitars in the desert. As he packs up the airstream to move it off Foster’s Ranch, Michael is also thinking about the past.

Throughout the series, we’re given a bunch of musical lines about how Michael and Alex can’t go back to what they were, that they have to move forward. And it’s true - as we’ll see over and over again the dynamic they’ve had has been incredibly unhealthy for both of them. But they also cannot avoid the other’s orbit. And when Alex comes to talk to Michael it’s the first time we see him actually decide to initiate - to try and take what he himself wants, rather than waiting or hiding from it. But it is also very much Alex falling back into the ‘madness that holds a truth he can’t erase’ of Michael’s really, very, super, incredibly obvious feelings for him. Our boy is not subtle.

But Alex is still hunted by the past - before we know his history we assume that when Alex references ‘who he was before he went to war’ he means Iraq. But Alex’s war is his father. As much as combat can absolutely be a traumatizing experience, for Alex I never really read that as his main source. As he’ll tell Forrest later - “My PTSD triggers are a little more complicated”.

And so when he tells Michael he’s been thinking about who he was “before he went to war” for me that’s more a callback to who he was before Jesse found the two of them in the toolshed. “When this started.”

As Michael tells him “From where I stand nothing’s changed” the words “I know, I know, I know” repeat in the background because WE KNOW. We all know, except Alex.

“And that’s a problem for me, Guerin.”

And the siren’s song that is your madness

“Because every time you look at me, I’m seventeen all over again.”

holds a truth I can’t erase

“- and I forget that the last ten years even happened. And then you look away and I remember all over again. And it almost kills me every time.”

All alone on your face

“I never look away. Not really.”

For Michael this is basically confirmation of what he’s been realizing over the last few days - that Alex has been totally misreading him and that yes, Michael, you’re going to have to use your words on this one.

To which we see Alex’s brain 404-blue-screen for a minute as he realizes what Michael means. Which I personally really appreciate.

And especially since we’ve just learned that a lyric of this song was written on Rosa’s hand the night she died, I can’t believe it’s a coincidence in this being the song that plays underneath this scene - where Alex says he was thinking about who he was before. Everything changed that day for everyone - including Michael and Alex. Michael had gained a terrible secret he couldn’t share, that meant he changed his whole life and started needing to hide and lie and act out, and Alex - not knowing the truth - assumed that it was Michael’s way of trying to push him away and end the relationship. Which leads to the decades long miscommunication of Alex seeing Michael do that over and over again.

For the last ten years, Alex has been seeing Michael as the boy who looks away, then looks back. A Michael whose focus shifts to and away from him and who he sees as wasting his life; directionless and aimless. But as he realizes what Michael is saying he has to recalibrate everything he’s thought their relationship is.

This is possibly the first time Alex has realized that his view of Michael has been wrong. That he really doesn’t know Michael at all.

And we know this interaction has a profound impact on Alex in terms of how he views their relationship. I feel like this is one of those things that becomes a mantra for Alex, later down the line. He repeats it to Michael at Caulfield, and in his song as well, “You never looked away, now I won’t look away” to express his commitment to breaking down the walls he has built up for himself.

Even though we know the relationship is doomed at this point, it’s the first time a stone falls from the walls Alex has built around himself in a decade.

Here - Chance Peña - 1x03 (Alternate title: “Home”)

Okay I would like to petition to make it illegal to have unreleased songs in episodes, Chance Peña help a bitch out. I had to watch a *fish show* to hear the full lyrics because they’re edited in the show! ( I will also note the next lyric is ‘goodbye, my dear’ which. rude.)

Anyway, we’re given these lyrics as Michael wakes up to seeing Alex has stayed the night. I took the editing, with the previous song choices, to be a reaffirmation of this being something new to Alex, but not necessarily to Michael. Michael knows what he wants from a relationship with Alex - even if he’s put the hope aside from time to time the want is always clear.

For Alex though, a relationship with Michael is something that scares him because of his fear that it can be taken away. (”I just thought that I could be happy, and not be afraid that if I loved anything my dad would destroy it.”) He is trying to make it work - “drawing near” to Michael - but he knows that in order to do that he is going to need to be uncomfortable. To face the fears that have held him back and kept him in comfortable limbo for so long.

I’m also going to flail about how, while RNM has the song listed as ‘Here’, the producer of the other show(Battlefish) identified the song as ‘Home’. I hope I don’t have to yell at y’all, other Roswell New Mexico fans, about how often that word has snuck up on me and knifed me in the back regarding malex. Especially since Alex *is* currently - well, here. With his home. Kill me please it would be kinder.

But then of course we see the old insecurities pop up again as Isobel arrives. Even if he is trying - Alex is nowhere near ready to jump out of the closet yet.

Fast Aint Good Enough - Inkwell Echo (1x06)

I debated adding this one because it’s a little bit reachy, but I thought it was significant in that even when they were seventeen, the thing Alex is ‘afraid of’ is his feelings for Michael - not necessarily of being gay but of what people like Kyle and his father do with information like that.

Wish I’d found the words when we were seventeen-

Kyle asks

“What are you so afraid of?”

-just as Alex catches sight of Michael.

(“I wanted to be the kind of person who won battles. It felt good.”)

Aside from Alex’s general need to protect Michael in any and all situations, I feel like the lyrics of this song - about the singer’s attempt to leave an abusive relationship - underscore that even before the toolshed, Alex was fighting. Even before the toolshed, he has been fighting to this cycle he is trapped in.

While he and Michael build their relationship he starts thinking seriously about leaving and not just surviving but he will ultimately choose to trap himself for years in order to hide his love for Michael.

Like so many gay kids, Alex is fighting a system that deems him guilty of sin - and takes his fighting back as a sign of his guilt. And in order to actually be able to love Michael, he is going to have to figure out how to put down the weapons and the hurt and break the cycle.

First Day Of My Life - Bright Eyes (1x06)

Are they serious right now I swear to god.

So obviously, we’ve got the origins for everything we’re told about Michael and Alex’s lives changing based on their feelings for each other in like two and a half verses of song. Forget the entire second season we have everything we need right here.

“It was the first time I liked our hometown, though.”

“Alex made me believe there was a place for me here.”

We know that for both of them this is really a moment of self discovery as much as it is a discovery about each other.

For Michael in particular, who doesn’t know why he’s here or who he really is, and who previously had no plans besides leaving the planet, this is the moment that he realizes what he wants - to be with Alex.

And for Alex, to me, this moment is a brief glimpse into what his life could be like. We don’t have any confirmation if Michael is his first kiss with a boy or not, but we do know that this moment is significant in that it’s the first that makes Roswell feel like a place he enjoys being.

And as he is realizing that, the lyrics echo it -

But I realized that I need you // And I wondered if I could come home

(Screeching from the background: WOULD YOU COME HOME)

But of course, as the song says, these things take forever because...well....

(It’s because Alex is dumb. My poor dumb emotionally stunted child. Please go to therapy.)

In essence, this is the moment that sets Michael and Alex on their entwined path. The path that Alex will have to fight to get back to - the path Michael will lose faith in before he later starts to regain the hope that it exists. I also like to think about the link between the last lines:

Remember the time you drove all night // Just to meet me in the morning?

and the line from ‘Would You Come Home’

Would you meet me in the middle // Could we both stop keeping score?

I like to think about the parallel here, about meeting people where they’re at, and the love and care and effort it takes to be willing to drive all night to meet someone. Listen a bitch is soft and gay don’t look at me.

You Can’t Love Me - Novi & Tyler Blackburn (1x12)

(*Whispers and rocks back and forth* this is fine it’s all fine)

Once again we have a song whose lyrics give us a tailor made road map to Malex, and will pop up later in ‘Would You Come Home’. We’ve already seen the implosion of the way Michael and Alex have been orbiting each other for a decade, but now that Alex knows the truth, he actually has the ability to understand Michael in ways he hasn’t been able to before. (Something we’ll see later in Season 2 when he talks with Maria.)

And because of that, we see the true beginning of the journey of Michael and Alex back to one another in a healthier way.

But part of that journey is going to be realizing that what they’ve been doing and the way they have loved each other in the past isn’t sustainable - and maybe isn’t even the way they want to love each other.

“They’re my family, Alex!”

“Alright, maybe! But you are mine. I don’t look away, Guerin.”

“No. We’ve been holding onto this thing. And it’s gotten us nowhere. Just let it go.”

Even though the words are said in anger, there is some truth to what Michael says. Their relationship so far hasn’t been a good one. Where Alex is trying to repeat the words that Michael said to him that made such an impact on him, Michael is (well, a, trying to save his dumb boyfriend from getting flambayed) using the opportunity to reveal how little faith he has in their relationship. To say that no, this doesn’t feel like love.

But as much as the song lyrics are about loving someone who isn’t good for you, they’re also about changing and growing, and about a commitment to be better.

(Sound familiar? Brb, I’m gonna go jump off a cliff.)

Love is messy, and especially for Michael and Alex, love has always been something that hurts. “Home is where the hurt is” - and a really important part of their journey is realizing that, and realizing there is a different way of loving each other.

Additionally for Alex, this is when he starts to realize the full extent of his family’s involvement in hunting and hurting Michael’s family. It isn’t just his dad - his entire family line has been involved in this since before Alex was born. And still is. This is really where he starts realizing the roots of the guilt and shame he’s going to have to deal with in order to be anything to Michael - not even a partner but a friend.

This is the first step in that journey. Not just the commitment that yes - I want to build a home for you - but that first, I don’t know, maybe I need to put down these weapons and pick up a different set of tools?

ON TO SEASON TWO

#rnmmarchformeta2021 #roswellmarchformeta2021 #rnm meta #Alex/Michael #alex manes #michael guerin #maria deluca #sort of? shes mentioned #1x01 #1x02 #1x03 #all episodes #Day 1 Themes #meta #malex #tw ptsd #tw injury #tw queerbashing #tw flashbacks

17 notes · View notes

nerdyfangirl67 · 5 years ago

Text

Supposed to Be Easy - Criminal Minds Reader Insert

Pairing: Tony DiNozzo x reader, Spencer Reid x reader

Warning: language, angry!Spencer, brief moment of cheating

Word count: 1700

Requested: @that-damn-clown-movie

A/N: I hope this is what you were looking for darling! This story is a continuation of the Everywhere But On one-shot. It can be read as a stand-alone as well. A beautifully tragic moment for both NCIS and Criminal Minds fans. Guys, I don’t like the ending very much but was struggling to end it with either one or another character. As always, requests are open!

Six months, that’s how long it took for your life to completely change.

You had become an established member of the white-collar crimes task force and had helped in the apprehension of major fraud criminals, famous art thieves, and bank robbers. You had been such an asset to your new team, with your background from various different FBI units, that you were being fast-tracked to become the next unit chief.

You had become a mom, not to a child, but to a stray cat that had wandered into your apartment through a window you had left cracked open by the fire escape after a near oven fire during a frigid, fall day. The next morning you had taken the cat to the vet for a microchip check, as well as a health check, and after finding nothing, you had not so reluctantly brought him home with you. The cat had come in and never left, quickly becoming attached to you, and you to him.

You had moved out of your crappy, three-room (the room count of which included the kitchen and bathroom) apartment into a posh, chic apartment that felt more like a house than an apartment. It was clean, the building manager was prompt with answering service calls, and the kind lady next door checked on your cat, whom you called Agent (for obvious reasons), and baked you sweets.

You had gotten a completely new hairstyle, one you’d been wanting for months but you’d been too scared and stuck in your look (because changing it meant leaving behind a part of you that was connected to Spencer, the love of your life). After much deliberation and a few mimosas, you’d booked the salon appointment for the next day and had forced yourself to go through with it. You were glad you had because you loved it.

-----

And on this particular day, a late Friday evening in the dead of winter, you were enjoying the fact that you had the weekend off by curling up on the couch in your favorite pajamas, wrapped in your warmest blanket, a mug of (possibly spiked) hot chocolate on the coffee table in front of you as you binge-watch your favorite TV show. Despite knowing you should have been to bed over an hour ago, you couldn’t bring yourself to be anything but content.

A knock on the door bursts the peaceful bubble you had built around yourself. You let out a soft groan of displeasure, knowing a visitor at this hour would only mean trouble. You heave out a frustrated sigh before climbing out of your warm cocoon on the couch.

As an FBI agent, you should have thought to look through the peephole on the door, but you didn’t. Instead, you pick up your standard-issue from where you keep it up on the coat rack, pull it out of its holster, and while holding it in one hand, use the other to open the door. Out of all the possibilities that had started circling around in your head since the knock, this was not one of them.

You were so surprised by him arriving at your door, that you hadn’t realized the grip on your gun had loosened, sending it clattering to the floor. After jolting you out of your stupor, you pick up your weapon, reholster it and place it back where it belongs. You grab his wrist, knowing if you twined your fingers with his you would lose your resolve, and pull him back out into the hallway, leaving the door open just a crack behind you.

“Spencer.” You say, hating the way your voice cracks and makes you sound, just as much as feel, vulnerable. You squeeze your eyes shut for a moment, hoping to either calm your now frayed nerves or make this horribly painful and confusing mirage go away. Upon reopening your eyes, you know that you succeeded in doing neither of those things. So instead you focus your attention on the man in front of you.

His slender, lanky figure feels smaller somehow, almost as if he has decreased in height, which you know isn’t right. His shoulders are hunched together as he unconsciously leans his body towards you. The next thing that catches your eyes is the way the material of his button-down dress shirt strains slightly across his chest and over his arms, in a way you hadn’t ever seen. His hair is just as unruly as it always is, and regardless of you wanting to card your fingers through it, it isn’t what was keeping your attention from what he was saying. Your eyes were currently fixated on the scruff that covered the lower half of his face.

You had never seen Spencer Reid with anything more than a five o’clock shadow and the very obvious beard on his face now was making it hard for you to concentrate. And being the genius that he was, he could tell that you hadn’t heard a word of what he said. He halted his talking, for how long you weren’t sure, because after what felt like hours, you finally realize that the low hum of Spencer’s voice in the background had stopped. Your intense scan of his appearance abruptly stops as you lift your eyes to connect with his.

Still, he was silent. Pent up feelings of frustration, hurt, rejection, and sorrow come to the surface as you snap at him. “What do you want Spencer? You said all you needed to say all those months ago.”

“I thought I did too. But after not being able to see you every day or talk to you like we used to, I realized that what I said didn’t match what I felt.” His voice is filled with something akin to guilt.

You clench your teeth together to prevent yourself from spitting out a few choice words, followed by a long buried truth. You chose to instead ignore his words and asked him the question that’s been running around in your head.

“How did you find me? I explicitly asked Garcia to not tell you.” As much as you loved your friend, she did have a knack for spilling secrets if she deemed it was for the ‘greater good.’

His face fell at your blatant neglect of his words before he answers, “Garcia didn’t tell me. After I went to your apartment and, after a few midnight visits found you weren’t there, I begged Garcia to tell me. When she wouldn’t I desperately tried to run into you at work. Finally though I went to HR and made something up so they’d tell me.”

Your heart squeezes painfully as you hear the despair and hopelessness in his voice. Again, you don’t answer because you know your facade would crumble if you did.

“Well if that’s all you came to say, I think it’s time for you to go. I am not in the mood to have the ‘friends but also I love you’ conversation with you Spencer. Now if you’ll excuse me.” You turn back towards your door, a hand on the knob when his voice stops you.

“We weren’t meant to just be friends and you fucking know that.” His voice is deeper and louder now, and you know you got under his skin. You don’t turn because you know if you do, you’d be in his arms before you could stop yourself.

“Look at me Y/N and tell me you don’t feel the same and I’ll go. I’ll leave you alone but I need to know if you do.” A hand on your waist has you spinning around into his chest. You move to shove away from him and suddenly his lips are on yours, kissing you passionately and fast. And not only are you enjoying it, a lot actually, but you’re kissing him back, just as intensely.

You can’t keep track of your hands, as they are rapidly roaming his body. Fingers through his hair, which is just as you remember, a hand on his chest, which is far more defined than you thought, a palm dragging over his beard, tickling your hand in the process.

You pull back when your need for air takes over your thoughts. His eyes are blazing, but with something other than anger, as he stares at you.

“Why didn’t you do that months ago?” You question brokenly, your heart pounding hard in your chest.

His eyes search yours as he runs a gentle thumb over your cheek. “I wish I had.” His words have tears collecting in your eyes, which you roughly brush away as you step back. You had to clear your head because the way this “conversation” was going, you knew it could become something more if you let it.

“I-I...I can’t do this Spencer. I lived a life that was so entwined with yours, I couldn’t see where mine ended and yours began. I’ve finally made a life that doesn’t focus on you and here you are, wanting in.” You answer, your voice cracking as you stare at your feet.

Neither of you say anything for a while before you lift your eyes to his. He is staring directly at you, a sea of emotions swirling in his hazy brown-green eyes. A few you can name, disappointment and love, but also a few you couldn’t.

The spell is broken when a voice sounds from deep inside your apartment, causing the two of you to rip away from each other's gaze. “Doll, where are you? You said you were going to come to bed an hour ago and I need you in my arms.” The voice of the man you’d come to love, albeit in a way entirely different than the way you loved the man in front of you, calls out to you.

You give Spencer a small shove, pushing him out of your doorway. “That’s Tony. You have to go Spencer.” Another hand pushes him away, although it lingers slightly as you release him. You return to the apartment, closing the door behind you. You didn’t know if that was the last time you’d see Spencer, causing your heart to squeeze tightly.

110 notes · View notes

gamesception · 5 years ago

Text

So, the Infinity Train is bad, right? Not the show, the show is great, but the train itself within the show.

Spoilers, below.

Including spoilers for the end of season 3.

Like, ok, it's trying to help people work through emotional problems and maladjusted/antisocial personality traits. Benevolent intentions, at least when humans are concerned, seem sincere enough. And sure, it worked for Tulip & Jesse. But while maybe not deliberately malicious, the train is trying to serve a moral function with an automated, amoral system that doesn’t work and is fundamentally inhumane.

Especially to the denizens it creates. However artificial they may be, seasons 2 and 3 especially make clear that they are fully realized actual people, and the train just makes them up on a whim and suborns their entire existence to the passenger's personal growth. Life for a lot of denizens is pretty horrific. Not just Lake being hunted, but kick-me toad, the wind guy, several denizens seem created to suffer an existentially nightmarish existence so that their suffering can teach some passenger a moral. Even the ones that aren't created to suffer still face perpetual risk from ghoms, passengers, & other dangers of the train, and are still trapped in a single car, or risk being forever separated from that home by the movement of cars if they ever leave it. Even if the system works to help humans, creating an entire subordinate class of fully sapient creatures and then treating them as expendable tools in furtherance of that goal is kind of horrific & bad?

And that's before you consider that therapy train isn't even very good at what it does. Like, looking at the memory tapes we've seen, the things that land people on the train aren't that bad? Like, they're bad and all, but they're still things that people can and do work through and overcome in the plain old regular ass world. None of that shit seems like stuff that would be easier to work through with the help of isolation from human contact and regular mortal peril. The success rate among characters we've met isn't especially high, and one one himself has admitted that, statistically, passengers are more likely to die than they are to get their numbers to zero and get off the train.

Which would be bad enough if the passengers were adults, but most of them are little children! Which, like, of course. Because whatever inhuman system is choosing the passengers seems to key in on self centered behavior and uncontrolled emotional outbursts as criteria for passengers, and sure those are signs of maladjustment in adults, but they're also just normal conditions of children and young teens who are still developing socially and emotionally?

In season one, it could be readily imagined that the train only picked up people who were otherwise going to die. Tulip ran off into the snowy night in Wisconsin & easily could have frozen if not picked up by the train. Amelia, standing next to the tracks before the train even appeared, seemed like she could have been contemplating suicide. And based on that reading, the risk of death is slightly more forgivable. But implied in season 2 and explicitly in season 3, the train can pick up anyone at any time, so yeah, you could easily imagine a kid lashing out from some traumatic abuse they can’t process ending up on the train to become monster food when without the train some teacher or counselor could have intervened to actually help them.

We don't get to see Simon's backstory before the train, but according to the numbers, it wasn't as bad as what happened to Grace, and wasn't all that far removed from Tulip's issues with her parents. Could any bad thing he did before entering the train have justified the traumas he was subjected to from the moment he got there? Did he really have a better chance on the train than he would have had off of it? Yeah, he made his choices, I'm not saying he "didn't deserve" his fate, but how did any of the stuff he went through constitute helping him? Not all of this can be blamed on Amelia’s usurpation of the train. Even without One One, Tulip shows that the train was more or less working as normal outside of the cars Amelia directly tampered with, and even after One One was back as conductor, the dangers of the train - from flecs to ghoms to laval moles - were still very real.

And if the train wasn’t helping Simon, that only makes all the suffering that it allowed various denizens to experience at his hands by abducting him in the first place all the more unforgivable, since there was never a point to him being on the train at all. Unless he was only there to serve Grace's growth? There’s not a lot of reason to think that, but it is a possibility since without Simon reflecting her worst actions back to her, Grace might never have grown in the way she did. Was that an accident, or intentional on the train’s part, with Simon’s fate an acceptable cost of Grace’s redemption? If it was that would only be worse, since then the train then wouldn’t just be failing to recognize that it's own creations matter as much as humans that exist apart from it, it's also actively choosing to damn some humans to save others. Either the train is dangerously incompetent, or actively malicious here.

Or consider the flecs, the ‘mirror police’ antagonists for most of season 2. I doubt many felt bad for them when they died. After all, they chose to become flecs, and chose to repeatedly try to murder Lake just for wanting her own life. Unlike Simon we don't see a string of humanizing traumas driving them towards those choices. But did they actually choose any of that?

In s2e8, Mace questions not just Lake's existence, but the entire existence of the mirror world, implying that their memories and personalities are as artificial as their bodies, constructs created by the train to teach a passenger a lesson. He drives the questions at Lake, but the same reasoning could be applied to him. Did Mace become a flec after his prime died, or are those memories fake, and he was always a flec, created by the train to be a villain in a little morality play for Tulip's & later Jesse's benefit? Did Mace ever really have the choice to be anything other than the monster he was? And even if he did, would that absolve the train of a measure of guilt in creating Mace to be that monster in the first place? Did the train intend for him to catch and kill Lake after Tulip & Jesse had returned home, cleaning up loose ends? One One seemed to jump at the chance to let Lake off the train once her trick of reflecting Jesse's number provided an adequate excuse, but before that he also seemed perfectly willing to go with Sieve's suggestion of resolving the conflict by just killing her.

Again, that’s not to say the flecs didn’t deserve their fates, or that it was wrong of Lake to kill them. Mace in particular questioned the entire purpose and reality of the mirror world, which means he had the self awareness and philosophical insight needed to question and reject the role the train had created him for, and even while dying he instead chooses to use that insight as just another way to vindictively deny Lake’s person-hood. He chooses to be every bit the monster he was created to be, and Sieve makes the same choice even seeing the fate that it led Mace to. They didn’t “deserve better”, but them choosing to embrace their predetermined villainous roles doesn’t reduce the train’s accountability for creating them to fill those roles in the first place.

So yeah, Trauma Train is a fantastic show - imo s2 is still the best, but s1 and s3 are both very solid. But within that show the train itself is a dangerously negligent therapist and a willfully unjust deity, and if Infinity Train does get future seasons I hope that aspect gets further explored and deconstructed. And I think it will be. Like, I don’t think any of this analysis is an unintended edgy dark reading for the heck of it. Season one could have left you with a neutral or positive impression of the train, but the fundamental systemic injustice of the train is, like, the explicit text of season 2, and while Lake managed to trick her way free, the underlying system she fought to free herself from is still in place in season 3.

That said, I kind of hope one way or the other that the show is done with grizzly on-screen deaths. There's a lot of good lessons for kids in the show, important stuff about handling life changes, dealing with grief, the importance of self identity & self determination. And much like the train is a bad therapist for trying to traumatize its victims into self improvement, the show becomes a bad vehicle for the lessons it's trying to teach if the scenes of shocking violence are what stick most firmly in younger viewers memories.

#infinity train #spoilers #infinity train spoilers #call out post #for a fictional mass transit system

59 notes · View notes

inkdemonapologist · 5 years ago

Note

Okay but I do actually want to know both the things you love and the things you could rant about from DCTL?

OH BOY UHHHHHH okay lets see, I'm gonna see if I can do the "add a readmore after you post it" thing and see if that'll keep it stable.......

But also, much like Sammy, I am incapable of shutting up unless you strike me in the head with a blunt object, so uh, forgive my wordiness:

THINGS I ENJOY:

- DCTL gave us Sammy's ink addiction and like, if you had asked me before all this "what would you most like to see in a franchise?" I would not have answered "one of the characters drinks ink accidentally and then discovers that he can't stop" but boy that sure is my favourite concept that I LOVE to see handled literally any other way than how the book handled it!!!

- I like what it added to Tom and Allison and Norman!! Like, it's not big twists on their characters or anything -- we already knew Tom felt he was doing the wrong thing, so getting to see his CRUSHING GUILT over creating the machine isn't New Information, but it's nice to see and understand more of him; for all of them I feel a lot more attached to them after getting to see more of them as people.

- Like 90% of the "I LOVE IT" category for me is how the book handled Joey, and Buddy's relationship with Joey. The way Joey isn't a Sinister Mastermind Who’s Just Screwing With Everyone but just manipulative in a more mundane way -- someone who thinks of himself as just the guy with the vision to call the shots; he wants what he wants and this is how he's learned to get it; he exploits people not through devious schemes, but just by offering them something that they want or need and asking too much in return, expecting their loyalty for his favours. And the way he interacts with Buddy, making Buddy complicit with him and keeping Buddy off-balance and insecure while making him a favourite and treating him as Special is just PERFECT -- gives a lot of content to kind of extrapolate off of when pondering what must've drawn the others in and convinced them to ignore the red flags. I was initially frustrated with the idea of Buddy not being an artist and jUST DECIDING TO LEARN TO ANIMATE ON THE SPOT ("I've never done this before but I'm sure I can just do an artist's job" is a weirdly common throwaway thing in media and as an artist iTS A PET PEEVE) but actually the way they use his plagiarism to make him trapped in a lie in ways Joey doesn't even realise ends up being a neat echo of other employees (coughTOMcough), who were involved in much graver sins but suddenly felt they couldn't object or they'd lose their one chance, just like Buddy. There's a lot here that I think is really great.

OKAY THATS THE GOOD STUFF, LET'S COMPLAIN ABOUT SAMMY:

- Uncomfortable Bigotry Vagueness that we all knew was gonna be in this list -- I dunno man, a guy committing a microaggression and getting startled and defensive when he's called out for it doesn't necessarily completely ruin his character I GUESS, but the way this was handled is just SO WEIRD AND VAGUE that it's uncomfortable and it doesn't seem to serve any real purpose. "Is Tom black?" is a question I actually have to ask because the text sort of implies he is while also dancing around it and apparently Word of God said he's not??? which makes Buddy's comment nonsensical???? And I mean, you could go that route, since Buddy wonders to himself if Sammy talks to everyone like this -- HE ACTUALLY DOES!! Even within the text of the novel, he uses "Joey" instead of Mr. Drew, which is consistent with his audiologs in the game -- but that makes the writing suggest "this character THINKS this guy might be racist but actually they're reading too much into it and it wasn't racially motivated at all, he's just a jerk!!" wHICH IS SOMEHOW EVEN MORE ICKY??? Anyway like yeah I guess it's not inconsistent with his character that while Sammy Lawrence may not have any specific grudge against minorities he has probably not checked his privilege or done the work to challenge his own internal biases, but “Your Fav Probably Contributes To Systemic Racism In Ways He Hasn’t Considered, As Do We All When Our Assumptions Go Unchecked” is still a wild thing to wade through in a fun story about demonic cartoons

- but yknow so is T H E H O L O C A U S T

- Sammy's voice is wrong. I'm actually okay with him being a weird awkward asshole, I already kind of assumed he was and that's part of why I like him!! but there's so many places he doesn't quite... talk like himself? And not just in terms of word choice, like -- so in his monologue at the end, he's described as talking so quickly that his words are "tumbling out faster than he can speak them," which initially seems fine; like yeah, that's a Standard Scene we're familiar with, the person who's been Driven Mad With Insight becoming more and more manic as they try to convey it -- until I tried to imagine it and realised that Sammy doesn't talk like this. That's a really consistent quality I always notice about his voice; whether he's almost giddily excited in prophet mode, or he’s his irritated and overworked human self, or he's violently angry and his voice has that echo effect -- he always speaks very deliberately. He enunciates carefully. There's some circumstances where I'd buy this as showing that he's Not Himself, but I feel like those would kind of need to be in the middle of his transformation, not at the end of it.

- In fact a lot of the scenes with Sammy kind of have this feeling -- that it's not necessarily an exploration of Sammy as a character, but that he is filling a trope or archetype role here. Once he's fully transformed he excitedly describes the process as more of a mental compulsion, which is in contrast to his weird yeerk-infected behaviour when trying to get ink from Miss Lambert. Both of those scenes don't seem wrong on their own because they fit tropes we know -- but they feel weird when you try to fit them together.

- I also just in general am not a fan of the ink acting like a weird yeerk. It can be a parasite I guess but when it starts overwriting and puppeting people and crawling around to enter their body that's just a completely DIFFERENT kind of supernatural story and it’s not what im here for!!!

- THE FREAKIN!!! HE WILL SET US FREE!!!! WHY????????? SAMUEL LAWRENCE WHAT IS HE SETTING YOU FREE FROM??????? Sammy has No Motive for any of what he's doing, other than just Ink Made Me Do It. The whole thing that was INTERESTING about Sammy as a character is the contrast between this frustrated, ornery musician with no specific love for the cartoons he works on, and the manically devoted cultist he becomes. What happened in the middle there? What made him desperate enough to shift his mindset so much? "Something supernatural made him do things that don't benefit him in any way" is a very boring answer to this question!!! Susie was a victim who implies that her transformation has forced her to do things she didn't want to do, but we can still see her motive -- she wanted to be Alice, so she took a sketchy offer to try to get what she wanted. Even now, her violence echoes that goal -- to be a more perfect Alice. What did Sammy want? WHO KNOWS. Even in his ink-addled state at the end, we don't understand what he hopes the Ink Demon will even do for him, and in fact he seems to be responsible for creating the very scenario he's begging Bendy to reverse in the game.

- [sighs loudly into my hands]

- Overall I'm left wondering if the author just..... didn't like Sammy Lawrence? And I don't mean that in the sense of him being a rude jerk -- like, Joey is not a good person, but the author seems to be interested in him and in what makes him tick. There doesn't seem to be that same interest in Sammy. Sammy's role in the story is that of a monster, transformed into something murderous, unable to prevent or choose it. He's not a victim of anyone but the ink, no one had to manipulate him or figure out how his brain worked or what he wanted or what he feared or give him any reason to do the things he does -- ink got in his mouth and overwrote his personality. And we don't even get to see that change, not really. He starts out angry and defensive and continues being angry and defensive up until his very last scene, denying his ink-stealing but not really much else. We see all his prophetic sketches but we never see hints of this in him, we never see him start to act more excited and hopeful, we never see him seek out the demon he desires to please. Why do we never see Sammy struggling between his dismissive angry front and a building religious fervour he can't quite suppress? We don't get to see any of the in-between. There's no interest at all in why or even what it looked like as Sammy became what he became, when, to be honest, I suspect interest in precisely that is one reason he's such a big fav.

- It's funny, in a "cries into my hands" kind of way, when Sammy is just knocked in the head while monologuing and immediately removed from the story without further mention, like...... that sure is the pattern with him, isn't it, he just tries very very hard and never actually gets to matter, but it also fits right in here, too, in this book that doesn't want to think about his motives -- he rambles nonsensically, explaining nothing, gets one trademark phrase, and then is hastily removed so the story doesn't have to think about him anymore.

...................I think that's most of it.

...

Y'all............ I'm not ready for Sent From Above.......... I'm just not.... I'm not emotionally ready...... like..... Sammy has to be in that right..... he’s Susie’s boss and she has that big crush on him..................................... I’m not ready

#i know you have questions you always do #we all write on the walls #hopefully I have not gotten completely confused on any of these points but LMAO ITS POSSIBLE

77 notes · View notes

botwstoriesandsuch · 5 years ago

Note

Hi I was hoping to ask for your advice on writing. I’m trying to write from headcanons to little short fics (like one shots) from the readers pov but I’m finding it difficult to do so smoothly. Any idea how to do the transition without it coming out as a fanfic readers worst nightmare?

Well, I cannot guarantee the quality of my “advice” but I will give it a shot!

Apologies for you folks that hate my big essay length posts, but I do love infodumping about the writing process :P

So just click “J” to skip the post (if you’re on mobile...sorry just exercise your scrolling finger a bit more)

- - - - - - - - - -

So I’ll start with the distinctions between a headcanon and a fic. On one hand, you got simpler sentences, that summarize a broader idea or scene. You might have visualized the entire thing in your head, but at the end of the day all you do is write down a few sentences or pieces of dialogue that give the broader basis of an idea and/or scene. That’s not to say writing headcanons is easy, but it is, bluntly, the simpler method.

Writing, obviously, is more complicated. Not only are you trying to convey a more abstract idea to your reader, but you’re doing so with more layers and complexities, given that what you are trying to write is generally more detailed. You have to not only account for what your basic premise is, but the method in which you convey it. So, in a “good” fic, it typically doesn’t just focus on the basic “what is happening right now” in a scene, but can give subtleties and intricacies with its tone, themes, point of view, connotation, foils, imagery, symbolism, sentence structure, diction, context, figurative language, narrative, foreshadowing, setting, irony, character arcs, and the thousands and thousands of other layers that go into constructing story.

And I say “story” there deliberately, as I think the best way to summarize the differences is that a headcanon is a plot, while a one-shot is a story. Your one-shot has the ability to tell different messages, details, and themes, and give several points of interest to your reader, while your headcanon is limited to the structure of its initial premise.

[And before you English nerds bash me for my definition of story and plot, please know that I am using my film teacher’s old definition, which (to quote this quizlet I found) is “Story is all of the elements of a narrative that are involved, both shown and un-shown on screen. Plot is only all of the elements of a narrative that are shown on screen.” So yeah, it theoretically could be rewritten as a headcanon is a scene, and a one-shot is a story, but I’m just nitpicking at this point half of you don’t care and want me to move on anyway, apologies!]

So how do you transition between them? Well, in honesty I don’t exactly have a sure fire way for you, saying I do would be very hypocritical. However, what I can do is point out the “gap” between headcanons and fics, and perhaps from there you might be able to forge your own path..?

Chances are, if you’re already familiar with writing headcanons, you’ve already knocked out half of the work. See in a story, specifically in our case, fic, you have eight elements that construct it. You’ve got

Plot

Setting

Conflict

Character

Point of View

Tone

Style

and Theme

With a headcanon, (assuming it’s slightly more specific than “Headcanon that this character likes peaches!”) you’ve already got plot, setting, conflict, and character down.

Plot: being the actual premise of your story. What happens, why things happen, how other characters react, the beginning and ending, etc.

Setting: Being the location and time of your scene/plot. The setting might be a contingency to your story, such as a prison break that takes place in prison, or maybe it is the time that is essential for your High School AU fic

Conflict: Typically goes hand and hand with your plot, although not always (obviously, plot and conflict aren’t essential when talking about fics, *winks at the nsfw side of tumblr*) But if your headcanon does have a basic plot, then it probably has some sort of conflict whether external (The Calamity kills everybody) or internal (you’re character is going through grief)

Character: This whole aspect is practically already done for you. Whether by canon from the video game or media you got it from, or perhaps by fanon, with the collective fandom agreeing on certain traits about your character(s) in question. Obviously, if you got an OC, that’s another thing, as you have to create their traits, and construct a believable way that that character reacts and makes choices throughout your plot, depending on how you characterized them

So congrats! In writing up your everyday headcanon, you’re now halfway there to making a full on fic! Obviously, 50% is still a lot, which is probably the reason you were seeking advice in the first place, so now we should move on to the other half, and arguably it is this other half of elements that give the entire distinction between a headcanon and a one-shot. So in theory, if you get these elements down, you’re on your way to writing that much faster!

Quick additional note: Another way to think of your headcanon is as an outline. While not in every case, a good way to jump from your headcanon to a fic is to stick with the major elements of your headcanon, and weaving your writing style in between. Think of the headcanon as your skeleton, and the story being the meat and muscle. Idk if that makes sense, blame my old English teacher for the metaphor

Alrighty, so for demonstration purposes I’m gonna use the very first headcanon I’ve ever written as a basis. Bear with me for a moment:

“Zelink Headcanon: Zelda Just Wants Some Snacks

Everyone always jokes and adores about how Link eats so much and cooks great food in the game (he’s gotta carbo load guys, he walks like 9 miles everyday!)

However I propose, equally hungry and feral Zelda

After Link and Zelda defeat Ganon, one of the first things they do is stop by the nearest cooking pot and eat

She hasn’t eaten for 100 years!! She’s gotta be starving!

Link just cooks up some meat skewers

“…wait I forgot the Goron spice, gimme a sec…”

But Zelda just immediately snatched it off the fire and eats the whole thing in two seconds

Link keeps trying to go out of his way to make really nice food but Zelda is just like “I DON’T CARE RIGHT NOW PLEASE LINK”

So yeah, their first date is basically just Link cooking Zelda a buffet until his inventory empties out”

Again, this headcanon has already given us half of the answers.

We got our plot: Link, a talented chef, is cooking food which Zelda scarfs down without fear and hesitation

Setting: They are by a cooking pot, perhaps in the wilderness, away from the prying eyes of nosey villagers. This takes place sometime after the initial defeat of Calamity Ganon.

Conflict: Link keeps trying to cook “good” food, but despite the Princess’ royal upbringing, she has no care for the whole “show” of cooking with spices and garnish. She is starving, willing to eat anything

And Characters: Link and Zelda. You know... (Today unfortunately is not the day in which I construct a thorough character analysis of the two...perhaps one day...)

So, now that we have this, we start adding the meat and muscle of our story with point of view, tone, style, and theme. These elements, could be summarized as your writing style. Yes, writing style is more intricate than those four elements alone, but they do fit in with its broad definition.

So, in essence, a way to transition between headcanon and fic is to find out what kind of writing style you’re comfortable with.

How do you do that? Well... shocker, I know, you gotta write.

Write first, plan the elements of your one-shot later!!

Allow yourself to write complete utter garbage. I know you said that you don’t wanna create a “fanfic reader’s worst nightmare,” but if you become more concerned with the quality of your content before you even start writing, you will never ever ever get anywhere. You’re gonna be stuck in writer’s block for eternity, so just let the garbage and nightmares out and write. You’ll never improve if you don’t have something to improve from, you feel me?

So, now that your mind is open and ready to write anything, whether garbage or gold, let us dive in to the parts of your writing style.

Point of view: Do you prefer writing in third person? First? Second? Each have their pros and cons. Second person is good for your “x reader” inserts. First person is good for your narrator’s characterization. Third person is good for describing elements of your surroundings that might not be inherently obvious to your characters or audience. There are hundreds of other pros and cons to the different POVs that you can search up online, but it’ is ultimately up to you to decide which method you like best.

When you find the method you like best, make sure you use it to it’s full potential! Use foreshadowing with your third person POVs. Use connotation, and diction to further characterize your narrator in first person. Elevate the mood and senses of a scene when in second person.

Tone: Now, this element is often confused with another literary device, mood. The difference being that you as the author have more control over the tone, than the mood. The tone, is the attitude that you as the author (or as a character/narrator, depending on your POV) have towards something. For example, your tone might be suspenseful if you withhold information from your reader, or if you have a certain choice of diction. It is typically better to look to the type of genre you’re writing for to identify what kind of tone you want.

Mood is the feeling that the reader experiences from your writing. It’s really much more simple, a beloved character dying give a depressed mood. A cute couple hanging out will give the reader a happier mood. This is your angst and fluff feelings, if you will. (Although, please remember than mood and tone are not a binary thing, it is a spectrum, as broad and diverse as the capabilities of human emotion)

Style: Ok yes this is a bit meta, me explaining how to use style to help you construct a writing style. Blame the bendable definitions of the writing world. So just think of this as the face of your writing. The more obvious and apparent part that is unique to you and your personality.

Think cake. Your story is a delicious cake, it is a chocolate, Zelink cake. Now, your style is the way that you present this cake. Pink frosting? Yellow? A full cake or just a slice? Chocolate ice cream cake? Chocolate lava cake? Five tier cake? Cake pops? These possibilities are the infinite ways your style will present the story.

Style, sometimes called voice, is the combination of your use of tone, mood, POV, syntax, diction, and other literary device that you commonly use in your writing. This isn’t something you learn, it’s just something you do naturally when you write. It’s what readers will like about your fics, because they like the way that you use this or that, or the way you describe this thing or that person. It’s something that can change and improve over time, but in essence, it’s what readers can read and identify as you, without even looking at the username.

Style isn’t something you have to remember, per say, like other literary devices, but it is something to be aware of as you should try to keep it consistent through your whole story. Sometimes have people have different writing styles depending on their own mood, or what they’re writing about. That is fine, so long as you keep it consistent through your whole work. A good trick for this is to listen to music that fits with the style of your writing. Use that one catchy love song whenever you’re writing cute headcanons or fluffy one shots. Use that anime opening theme for your adventurous fics and fight scenes. This way, you are keep in a consist atmosphere and your brain will be in the “Oh! It’s time to write ____ stuff!” mood.

So just be aware of when you’re in a descriptive style, a narrative style, argumentative, or whatever style you like using. You style might even derived of the way you already create headcanons!

Theme: This is a big one. Have a cohesive theme can easily bring any story from good to great! I like to think of it as you’re story’s destiny, or reason for existence.

Theme is an outlier for the other elements in that not only is it not necessary for your fic, it is also not necessary for your writing style either. It’s really not necessary... at all. Yet, people always use theme in their writing, even accidentally.

Theme is your story’s underlying message, or lesson. Yes, yes, if you paid attention in your basic English class you probably already knew that, but this is a big pet peeve of mine.

The theme of your story isn’t “true love,” the theme isn’t “innocence”, or “failure”, or “trauma”, or whatever. Theme isn’t a broad idea, it’s a specific question and an answer.

For example: The theme of Breath of the Wild isn’t “exploration” or “time”. The theme is there is always something to seek and find, so long as you have the curiosity and courage to find it. The theme is despite the eternities of time, we still found each other.

Your theme shouldn’t be a broad, one word answer. What about love are you trying to convey? What specifically about failure are you saying?

Theme is the entire reason why the entertainment medium exists, because artist found a way to create something compelling and interesting while also connecting them to real life things.

When you give your reader something to really chew on, even days after they finished reading your fic, then you did a brilliant job. Essentially, you want to use theme in your story because it is what will stick with our readers even years after they’ve read your work.

While that’s all sentimental and sappy, that’s still not your biggest problem, is it? You still need to practice, you still need to learn how to use the things you’ve learned to actually write. So, a summary of what I advise you should do.

Look over and improve your old headcanons, and keep making more! Keep making headcanons and litte prompts, and let them grow bigger and bigger, and more desprictive. This could help you ease into actually writing paragraphs a bit more

Find out what you like to write. Yes, you probably already have a fandom in mind, but think back to those first four elements. What types of plots are you comfortable with, what settings, characters? Genius is only the work of enthusiasm, if you don’t like what you’re going to write, you’ve already failed

Write, write, write. Practice, practice practice. Let yourself write complete and utter garbage and nonesense. Then read it over. See what you don’t like about it. Then change it and write again. I MEAN it when I say you should write garbage. Write a completely terrible, nightmarishly cringe scene. See what you don’t like. Then rewrite it again. Repeat, repeat, repeat. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be a scene or something from your fandom. Let it be your description of a shirt, let is be some cringy poem from 7th grade. Just write and learn how you like to write. It will be so much easier in the long run

Read stuff. The stuff you read usually seeps into how you write. When you get used to reading things a certain way, you usually unconciously try to imitate it when you write. So, got a favourite fic writer? Read their stuff over and maybe even analyze the elements you like (again, think back to those eight elements I talked about) and hey, writers like it when you analyze their stuff so maybe even hit them up and talk? We like book reports we swear, most of us don’t bite.

When you finally think you’re comfortable with your writings, maybe think about what kind of themes you’re into, or what kind of messages you want to say. It doesn’t even need to be that complex. Could be as simple as “I love this ship because it shows that you can still have flaws and be loved” Again, themes are the rEASON for eVERYTHING in the entertainment world

For further demonstration purposes, I’m going to come up with further elements for a hypothetical fic I would write based on that Zelink headcanon. So I’ve got the plot, setting, conflict and theme down. Hmm... I’ll probably use a third person POV as that is what I’m most comfortable with. With third person, I can better highlight the descriptions of Link and Zelda’s surroundings taking in the atmosphere and the aromas and and tastes. The tone will be more happy, focusing on the fun of Zelda and Link’s banter, I’ll try to create a mood in which the reader is laughing along with them, and enjoying the scene. My style will be more descriptive, again with the tastes and smells and other senses of the scene. However, I might go into a more narrative style for Zelda and Link’s banter and dialogue. While typically some people don’t want to use two different styles, I am personally familiar with the styles and know how to write them so as to blend them together more seamlessly. I might have a hint of angst at the end of the fic, as a little climax, given that the setting of the fic is after the defeat of the Calamity. I might through in some themes about how it wasn’t the material power of Hylia or the Master Sword that saved Hyrule, but the courageous and wise bond between Link and Zelda. Then...idk, a little romatic kiss for resolution because this is a fic and I can throw in some fanservice because my writing my rules.

Babam! I just converted a headcanon to a fic.

So yeah, go write your headcanons. Then maybe next a paragraph. Then next a scene, and then you’re well on your way to one-shots and chapter fics. Happy writing and good luck!

#writing #botw #breath of the wild #botw headcanons #zelink

61 notes · View notes

cherryblossomshadow · 4 years ago

Text

Wonder Woman 1984 review

Long, rambly, and spoilery. You’ve been warned.

I saw WW84. I had thoughts. Let's talk about it.

I want to preface with the fact that it's amazing that we have another female-led superhero film! I loved Patti Jenkins' work with the first Wonder Woman (and this one too) and I'm so glad she's back for this one. There's obviously a lot to pick through, but first, a couple reminders.

No film will ever be "perfect."

Not every film is made specifically for you.

It is okay to vibe or disvibe with something. But that does not make it trash.

Also, please, keep in mind, what I'm expressing are my opinions. I'm entitled to mine as you are entitled to yours. I hope you have a lovely time on the internet, and I hope you wish the same for everyone you interact with.

Oh, and spoilers obviously.

Okay, with all that out of the way, let's dig in.

My overall experience with the film is positive! I had a great time watching it, it got me emotional, and I definitely want to watch it again. That said, I don't think it's better than the first one (although that would have been quite a feat), and that's ok. It's a continuation of a story we've already started, and it doesn't need to outshine the first.

Okay, after all the hyping up and disclaiming I've done, let's dig into what I didn't like about the film.

Number one is pacing. The storyline felt very erratic to me? Part of that, I feel, is because we have three (four?) main characters, and we jump between them pretty abruptly.

Number two is the themes. Now I do like the themes of WW84 (truth and sacrifice), I just don't think they were worked into the film as cohesively as I would have liked?

Number three is perceived character changes to Diana. And really, some of this is kinda circumstantial, I just thought it deserved its own bullet point. You'll see what I mean.

So, on Pacing.

We jump between Diana (and Steve), Barbara, and Maxwell pretty frequently. And before I talk about that, I have to talk about my view on the characters.

a. Now, I love the Mandalorian, but I was not personally invested in Maxwell's arc at all. Again, this is my take, and I know people disagree. Many people feel like Pedro Pascal carried the film on his shoulders. That's cool. He's a great actor. I'm glad he was in it. I just kinda checked out of every scene he was in (when he wasn't with his kid) because I wasn't invested in him. He played a sleazeball on purpose, and it worked. I was sleazed. So the movie kinda dragged for me whenever the camera panned to him.

b. I loved the focus on Barbara. I don't know Cheetah from the comics, so this is from a movie-only perspective. But I know one of the criticisms of the first film was that Diana didn't really talk to women after she left Themyscira (even though there was a perfectly good villainess sitting right there for her to converse with and have morality debates/fights with! Even Steve Trevor got to talk to Dr Poison!), so I thought it was great that 1) they set up a villainess for her to fight and 2) it was a villainess that she knew, she had talked to, she had formed a relationship with. It honestly surprised me that Barbara was helpful for so long (bc I had seen the trailer and got spoiled that she would become a villain), but I love that she genuinely did want to help Diana, up until she hit her hard limit (giving up her powers). Now, that being said, the Nerd Girl Makeover has been done a thousand times. I knew what her vague trajectory would be from the second she appeared on screen with frizzy hair. I did like that her motivation was not solely "pretty people are mean to me, and I want revenge and/or for this hot guy to like me," but specifically, "I want to be like this really cool girl" and then "I don’t want to be like anyone else; I want to be the best/number one" for myself." But I felt like the absolute inattention that she was shown at the beginning and the absolute worship Diana and later Barbara would get was ... highly exaggerated? And I know this was another criticism of the first film, that yeah "Diana did so well in the real world because SHE'S HOT and that's actually not empowering to women" or something. But like. Watching that part made me uncomfortable instead of seen. Pandered to, instead of impacted. Showing how looks change how society treats you is important, but not to this caricaturized degree.

c. (and d?) And lastly, Diana and Steve. Or more accurately, Diana and Steve's soul or memories or ??? that has been transplanted into some random man's body with absolutely no one's consent (I don't believe that Diana "consented" when making the wish, because she didn't know 1. That it would even work or 2. HOW it would work.). So ... Yeah. The first problem with this (chronologically, not by importance) is that it's really unclear what's going on? Some rando is reciting Steve's lines from the first film, then all of a sudden he turns into Chris Pine? (Fun fact: my aunt actually recognized the actor from Hallmark 😂 Could you imagine being the guy who gets replaced by Chris Pine for half the movie? Like "yeah, I played Steve Trevor, but they had Chris Pine do all the important parts" 😂😂😂). So, Diana and Steve finally figure out that he's inhabiting some engineer's body because of the wish she made. And then they bang. Or do they bang before they figure it out? Either way, yikes 😬. Not a good look.

To be clear, the yikes part is that Steve is inhabiting Engineer Dude's body without their consent (without his own either tho so that part's not really his fault), but then he chooses to do things sexually with that body that Engineer Dude didn't consent to (because he's like, literally not home. Whether he's been subsumed into Chris Pine or taken out or dormant or whatever). Oh, and then like, probably doing death-defying stunts with his body is also yikes. I'm not really sure what the rules around body possession are. Cuz you know.

Anyway, that is a huge issue that is literally not addressed. At all.

Again, I think they may have been trying to address some criticisms from the first film about Diana "getting rid of the dreaded V-card so quickly in Wonder Woman and then pining after Chris Pine (lol) for the rest of her long life" and how that sets back female sexuality and stuff. Which I get. They actually lampshaded it in WW84, how Chris Pine wants her to move on because "the world deserves her." Which I know what they were going for in the scene, but I feel like they didn't flesh out the journey from Hippolyta's "the world doesn't deserve you Diana" to Steve's "the world deserves you (to date them)" enough. But I digress.

I'm gonna talk a little bit more about the possession and that "the world deserves/doesn't deserve you" line in my Themes section, but honestly? From the previews, I assumed that Chris Pine was revived from the dead via time travel or something. Body possession was NOT in the the trailers. I think the Dreamstone could have created a body for him out of nothing. Or like "time-traveled" him into the future. So like. Why didn't they? Why introduce body possession at all? So they could make fun of the dude's clothes?

Okay, back to the pacing part of the pacing section. These three (four?) characters have completely different things going on in their lives (I actually forgot to talk about Maxwell, but he wants to "be the best," and he's gonna do it by giving people what they think they want (maybe) and then taking from them whatever he wants. Yeah idk). And all three do interact at the beginning (brownie points) even if the attempted seduction of Barbara by Maxwell makes me want to throw up. But the themes aren't worked in as cohesively as I would have liked, and the tone changes were jarring, as the film switched between them all.

Another facet of the movie is that the Dreamstone is kind of a mystery. And that was a deliberate Choice™, not a mistake. We're guessing at what the rock is doing and how and why and by who and all that stuff, and that's on purpose, but that makes for a confusing experience. Their approach is to throw something confusing at you and then explain it later. Which is great for worldbuilding. But not always for the Movie-Watching Experience™. So to recap, we're switching tracks and characters with their own separate stories while also setting up several confusing plot points that take a while to unravel. This all contributes to the Experience™, good or bad.

Honestly, I wonder how much Covid affected this movie? My dad felt like a lot of scenes probably got cut for various reasons, and it probably affected the flow of the movie. If so, it could have affected thematic coherence, too. Speaking of...

So, Themes.

The themes that I got out of this film were Truth and Sacrifice. Maybe I missed some; I'm not an experienced Media Critic™. But these are the ones I noticed.

And actually, these themes are really strong. Universally applicable, and used in all three character arcs. It's just tied in a bit ... erratically?

So working backward, knowing that the Dreamstone is giving you a lie, you need to renounce your wish and accept the Truth™. This is echoed in Diana's flashback, where she needed to accept that she didn't win.

Working backward again, Sacrifice was a big part of the story for all three characters because Diana was willing to sacrifice her power to keep Steve, but he wanted her to sacrifice him so she could save the world. Barbara was willing to sacrifice her "humanity" or "empathy" or whatever she lost for the power and influence she got by emulating Diana, and she was unwilling to sacrifice that to save the world. Maxwell was willing to sacrifice time with his son to "become the best," but he did sacrifice that to save his son's life.

And then, full circle, he confessed to his son that he wasn't the best, he's actually a filthy liar. Which, yes, kudos for the themes, be honest with your children, but you can still sanitize it a bit. That speech alone would have traumatized the kid.

Speaking of speeches, Antiope's speech confused me in a similar way? Like, she stops Diana from "winning" the tournament after cheating, and goes on this weird rambly rant which goes from "accept that you're not a winner" to "cheating is bad and so is lying." Which yes, cheating is bad, but it's weird that she wouldn't have been disqualified at this point for not shooting that last target? Like, did she need to be tackled? Idk, I felt like they came up with the line they wanted Antiope to say first, and then just made her say it. (And also, in other stories, Diana would have been praised for being "clever" and "never giving up without a fight." So like, I needed a bit more preparation for which take they were going for, because the anti-cheating spiel felt jarring to me.)

And again, I wonder if this is a response to a criticism of this first film. (Warning: WW17 rant gearing up)

When Diana has her big motivational flashback during her fight with Ares, she thinks about Steve, this dude she just met a week ago, saying he loved her. When she could have been thinking about literally any of the women who had raised her. I personally think it would have been cool to hear some of Antiope's words at that point. Since they set up Hippolyta and Antiope to have conflicting ideas over whether Diana should fulfill her humanity-saving destiny, it might have been cool to see her saying something about humans and how they need her or how she should help them or something. They could even have done the whole thing with not being able to hear Steve's last words, but with Antiope since she dies earlier in the film and doesn't finish speaking. I also think it would have been cool for them to expand Hippolyta's earlier line about "They don't deserve you, Diana," here to like "They need you, Diana," or something. And then Steve's line in WW84 could have been something like "They're with you, Diana," or "They could get to know you, Diana," and her character arc could have been about actually living among society and maybe getting to know these humans that she's saved so many times (which they kind of alluded to when she and Barbara had their little date at the beginning of the film). But I digress.

So, yeah, I found both of these speeches to be ... Not great? Like I can tell what they're going for and how they tie into the themes, but they're so heavy-handed and they don't actually fit in too well to the moment they happen in. Like as soon as the speech starts, you realize that they started going meta on you. The character isn't really speaking to the other character, they're speaking to us, and they're telling us how this scene ties into the greater themes of the film.

Oh and they have this great quote from Antiope "greatness is not what you think" and then Maxwell's son wishes for him to be "great." And they do nothing with it :(

As promised, I want to talk about the body possession a little bit more. So again, one of the recurring themes is Truth™. Which is a great choice for Wonder Woman, what with her Lasso of Truth.

But it's tied in a bit haphazardly. They force it into a conversation about cheating in a flashback at the beginning of the film. And then they talk about how you need to accept the Truth™ in order to defeat the Dreamstone. I already talked about the cheating, and how the "accept that you're not a winner" was kind of a weird path to take to get your point across to a ten year old girl.

But the Dreamstone. Oh, the Dreamstone. I said before that the movie is a mystery. It shows you things but doesn't explain them. Well, this is a bit of a problem. Because they never actually explain that the Dreamstone is giving you lies. To my eyes, the Dreamstone is changing reality. Steve is back, Barbara is powerful, and Maxwell is doing whatever he wants with the powers of the Dreamstone. THIS DOES NOT LOOK LIKE A LIE TO ME. THERE IS NO "TRUTH" TO ACCEPT, JUST YOUR NEW REALITY. And that made the film less thematically strong (to my eyes, anyway. Other people probably picked up on stuff I didn't). But I feel like this might have been an easy fix? Like you already have Chris Pine in someone else's body (oh! So that's why they chose body possession! Because he's a Lie™! ... Still don't like it) I still think he should have manifested his own body or something but whatever. Barbara's appearance hardly changed at first. If they had people reacting to her as if she was hot when she really looked the same as she always does, then I would have bought your "but the Dreamstone only gives you lies." Instead, Barbara gained the power to walk in heels and then hotness and then the literal power of a God™ (a la Diana) which makes me think the Dreamstone is changing reality. Not bringing lies.

Oh, also, they could have had Diana's Lasso of Truth stop working for her. I thought that's what they were going for at first, but it turns out that Diana is just losing her powers. They also started with "the Dreamstone will give you what you want most," but then Maxwell started using it to clear traffic? Which by the way, is NOT an illusion. That is reality-bending.

There were just so many ways to make it obvious that "the Dreamstone is giving you lies," but they didn't use them. Or at the very least, they didn't commit. I felt like they used a little bit of "be careful what you wish for" (mostly on randos that Maxwell is duping), a little bit of "what are you willing to sacrifice," and a little of "you can have what you want, but it won't be real." All of which are valid ways to take a Dreamstone kind of story, but if they wanted to rely so heavily on Truth™ as the main theme, then I feel like more of the wishes should have been showcasing that. Instead, it felt like a jumble of all the kinds of messages we're used to seeing with Wish-Granting Objects, with no emphasis on specifically the "it's all a lie" part.

Ugh, I'm actually mad now, because I'm trying to think of a story I've heard where this magical thing is granting wishes but they're Explicitly Not Real. Like all the money gets turned back to leaves or whatever (kinda like Cinderella's pumpkin lol). Oh, Aladdin does this, too, because yeah Genie is granting wishes and changing reality, but not permanently? Like, almost all of the stuff he uses magic to do dissolves as soon as we're looking away from it or gets fixed by the end of the movie? And the film is very very clear on the fact that Aladdin is not factually a Prince.

But this film doesn't do that. They make it seem like the Dreamstone can change reality, then berate the characters for not Accepting the Truth™ about themselves. Maybe if they had made a bigger deal out of Steve coming back in someone else's body, it would have been 1) less confusing, 2) less icky (provided they don't do the sex in Engineer Dude's body), and 3) more thematically coherent.

Lastly, Diana's perceived character changes.

This one is probably the most subjective. Diana, as a character, in the first film was very morally grounded and motivated. The Diana in this film felt ... different. Again. Subjective. And also circumstantial.

Diana is still morally grounded in this film. But she's also willing to sacrifice the world to keep Steve Trevor around. Which feels like a jarring change from her characterization in the first film. She was so idealistic and optimistic in that first film, I couldn't imagine her making that choice. It just felt like such a tone change for her character. How did we go from "Who will I be if I stay?" to "Why, for once, can't I just have this one thing, Steve? ... I can't give you up. I can't. So I won't."

Also, her motivation in this film seemed to center around her loss of Steve Trevor and wanting him, and less around "save the world." Which, to be fair, I'm all for women being selfish in film. Give me women of all motivations and desires. I don't want Diana to be Perfect™. I just want her to be consistent. And I didn't think this characterization was as consistent as I expected. Was her life so terrible without Steve (even though they only knew each other for a short time)? Not to say this couldn't be a valid take on Diana (reminder: I haven't read any comics, so maybe it's not in character at all 🤷‍♀️), but if that's what they were going for, they should have developed the journey from naive idealist to jaded romantic more in order to justify this character change.

Also, the body possession thing. She's really okay with her boyfriend possessing somebody else's body. I did like the "All I See Is You" line, since it's romantic, but up until that point, we as viewers aren't really sure why Chris Pine and Hallmark Dude are both playing this guy. Then we find out in a romantic line that Chris Pine is just Wonder Woman's view of him. He still looks like Engineer Dude because he is Engineer Dude. At first, I thought that they used a different guy for the first meeting because Diana didn't recognize him. That this was her perception of him until she realized who it was. (I thought this was supported by Chris Pine's more rugged look in this film. But actually they were probably matching him to the body he was inhabiting, since the character really didn't look like himself). Leverage does a similar thing in the Rashomon Job. All the characters saw each other at the same event, but they didn't know each other back then, so they had different actors play their parts until it's slowly revealed that actually the random people at the event were the characters we know and love. It's great. Anyway, that's not what they're going for here, and the ambiguous framing along with Diana and Steve's chemistry is supposed to make you forget that he is possessing someone else’s body! Against their will! (Again, Steve and Diana didn't consent to the initial possession either, but they absolutely consented to what they did together. Engineer Dude did not.)

Yikes 😬

I will say, she didn't kill innocents this time. One of my critiques of the first movie was that she was so willing to kill Germans. And I get it, Nazis are usually an "acceptable" target in American media. But as a character, she believed that they were innocents who had been manipulated by Ares. And yet, she was slaughtering them en masse. But, in this movie, they're really careful to make sure that she's nonlethal.

And yeah, that's it.

Asteria was of course awesome. That bonus credit scene was 👌

I'm glad they got Linda Hemming back for costuming after the disaster of Justice League. Unfortunately, being set in the 80's, the outfits are not quite so modest as the first movie. But the important thing was the lack of male gaze in those shots.

The movie definitely hit me in my emotions. I cried three times: first during the tournament, watching the Amazon's being awesome. Then during Diana and Steve's fight, and when Steve convinced Diana to let him go. 😭

As I said, I definitely plan on rewatching. It makes me sad to see how much negative press that the movie is getting when it's one of so few female-led blockbusters. A lot of people are comparing it to the original or to the comics or TV show, when those are just not valuable comparisons. Comic books and TV shows are completely different mediums. And a successful sequel CONTINUES a story, instead of rehashing it. And also, not all films are created specifically for YOU. A lot of the 80's references went over my head, but that's ok. They weren't for me. I don't begrudge their existence just because I don't vibe with them.

Again, no film is perfect! I think I talked through a lot of its weaknesses pretty thoroughly, but I still think it's a strong film, and I want it to succeed.

Anyhoo, I hope you had fun watching the movie (even though it's not perfect) and I hope you had fun reading my commentary.

(Fun fact: I actually ran out of space in my notes app and had to stretch it across two notes)

8 notes · View notes

macgyvertape · 5 years ago

Text

50 or so hours into Cyberpunk 2077

This should be roughly the correct amount of time, ive been leaving the game running as I get up to get food or do stretches. Quests are roughly in order I did them

non spoilers above cut:

i haven't found a single hat/helmet i like, and since you can't hide them I just am not wearing any. It matters that much.

I posted the other day about bugs, every few hours I play I find new bugs. some require me to go back and reload a save others I honestly can’t tell if it’s a bug or just really poor development

there are several perks that don’t quite do what the description says, like the Anamesis perk. Based on reddit and trying it out it seems to just not do anything.

sometimes in car chase segments the passenger will say “look out” as cars spawn in my path and hit me. Can’t tell if that was deliberate or a pop in issue

Yeah I’ve just totally given up on doing pacifist things unless required by a mission. Given up on doing stealth too unless a mission objective, except for sneaking around to set up a fight.

:readmore:

the delemain car quest is fun. From the shock of the one going "beep beep motherfucker" and doing a hit and run to start it off, to the GLADOS car i see a lot of people talking about. It was fun to explore the city when i might have missed places like the landfill apparently there is follow up on T-bug's death if you go back to the quick hack shop in Kabuki. It's not much but better than nothing I made the pass with Panam of "what if the room just had one bed". I know she won't do a wlw romance, which is fine since I wouldn’t have chosen her. I enjoy her as a character, don’t get me wrong, my V considers her as a friend, but it seems like theres always drama going on which would be tiring. I would have gone for a fling, i like her leotard-pants combo with all the straps

but also her questline was buggy as hell. Multiple cases of having to reload due to clipping into objects, including her in a driving section, or just insta-dying when collision physics with some rocks broke "your neural network can no longer function independantly of the chip" me slapping my desk: s y m b i o te!!! come on lets have some s y m b i o s i s

in the scene with hellman i really liked how Johnny moved around the room. It made him feel like he was really there. it was hard to follow the convo as I left the room, i would not have understood it without subtitles. But i guess Takemura fucking waterboarded hellman. :|

lol I hope the dialogue is different b/c i refuse to smoke for Johnny

i am level 18 and still can't beat the first opponents in the fist fighting quest. ffs

I looked up the romances options so I went to do the I fought the law quest as soon as i got it. ACAB, but like I literally just met River Ward 2 minutes ago, and I really like him. His earring and cyborg eye, his big fluffy coat. I'm definitely gonna sleep with him Ok i like how when River Ward is dealing with the tiger claws if you interject it leads to a fight. It goes better if you follow his instructions and let him deal with it. Seriously I enjoy that sometimes its good to not pick a dialogue choice.

during the red queen club part, there was no dialogue over the phone. So i reloaded a save and got myself spotted and attacked. Then River showed up to help me <3 and it was more enjoyable having him there. I honestly am not sure if him not going to the club level is bug or not.

then uuuuuugh the worst of irl police "cops are my family" from Detective Han. Again ACAB "FRATERNITY OF CITY COPS RESEMBLES A [Nomad] CLAN NOT AT ALL" ok a few minutes ago i was complaining about bugs, but the character modeling in this game is good (when they're there). You can see body posture, characters jiggle their legs when they are nervous. Like I though character A was just throwing a cigarette on the ground, but then character B flinches back; I realize Char A threw it at B as a fuck you

I'm honestly curious if "I fought the Law" quest will have any impact later on. My choices were that I thought there was more going on than Holt being the only person behind this (based on how complicated the main questline heist is, and keeping an eye on some of the in game news), and told him not to take it to internal affairs, and I loved his response of how he doesn't give a shit what we think, he's doing it anyway.

In the elevator to report in, Johnny said "this muck is deeper than you think, tell them nothing", so i just said that the case was complicated. anyway i love how much of a sarcastic asshole V is

I thought i was being nonlethal with the monk quest, but it seems i accidently killed someone. RIP, but thats kind of the problem with this game. Like when i do the non lethal cyberpychosis quests I equip my non lethal modded gun and hope for the est. I like how a go here kill things quest led to Charles the ripperdoc. He's getting all his parts from scav gang members so I felt obligated to take him out. I got a police bounty for it but w/e.

I merged the Delemain fragments with the whole. Guess he's the meta now. (Side note: some of my favorite rvb fanfic plots are Ai consiousness/memory merging with the humans, so I’m having fun with this game and look foward to introspective fanfic)

Honestly Jonny made some good points, the fragments didn't deserve to die; but also destroying the core and freeing the fragments, they couldn't really function alone.

I was able to rescue Saul fine with stealth. Using cameras and the synapse overload really made it easy. Can't use the sniper rifle reward b/c I don't have the stats for it, and while it has a silencer the fact that it's a ricochette weapon and not a shoot through walls weapons, makes it not as good imo; and theres a legendary one that is stats free for only 100k.

Lol made a pass again at Panam, and she immediately shut me down. I then did Mitch's quest and I love every time someone tells V they area good person.

I hacked the operation carpe noctem shard, and wow the corporations are using ai to make people have cyberpsychosis, or something like that. What a shocker /s, I've played Deus Ex HR before

lol driving through the unifinished interstate, past the fight from Panam's first quest I found a "batcave" with a very nice car, and a manifesto written by "muckman'. But here's my complaint about the loot, there is a legendary top, but it had 16 armor. My current top has 84 armor, like why would i switch?? then later i found a bunker with soviet spies in it. Wild

Doing River's second quest, love the timing of as soon as you ask, why are we breaking in, someone shows up to tell you he got kicked off the force. It's funny how Johnny comments how maybe River's into you, and V just doubts Johnny's words. Love how the first kid asks River if I'm his girlfriend. also wow like oof both the second parts of Judy and River's quest are SUPER fucked UP!! oof like i stopped doing first person mode on the braindances for those quests as soon as i could, just made me too uncomfortable seeing that in first person.

DRIVING IN THE GAME IS BAD! nowhere is it more apparent than the sinnerman quest, which took me 3 times to get the driving section done, as cars spawned out of nowhere to hit me. Then when you restart, there is a bunch of dialogue it doesn't let you fast forward through. The rest of the Sinnerman questline is interesting. My V took every option to tell the dude that he was messed up, and what he was doing was wrong. idk, I was surprised how much dialogue there was that let you buy into his whole "forgiveness thing" and how there wasn't any real dialogue to call him the fuck out, that in seeking forgiveness he continues to do harm both emotional to the mother of the man he killed, but also that he got the husband killed via cop. The later follow up quest, I told him that what he is doing is crazy, studio is just going to profit off this vid. Then I refused to join him prayer, and told him fuck no i wasn't going to hammer him to the cross, or even watch. Yes, the man is scared of dying, and the corporation is exploiting him, but he keeps creating burdens for others. I think the discussion on this quest will be interesting to read, it's definitely my own personal experience with religion coloring my view. Anyway back to a main quest, yeah i don't trust Placide, especially in that scene where he grabs my hand, then jacks in. I ran off to do most of the sidequests here and got some criticism from him. I do love how in the cinema the western movie switches to a mission brief as the netwatch agent talks. its a fun enviromental detail. I took the netwatch offer, i don't think he's being fully honest with me, but he didn't put a virus in my head. As I told Placide later, I didn't pick a side. I like how you can then talk with the agent, who is a fan of Western movies, b/c they show "a simpler time where all good guys carry badges" :eyeroll:, and then V recommends Unforgiven, which from the wiki summary goes against that theme.

Looks like the Voodoo boys all got killed by Netwatch, but I as revenge for them trying to set me up I'm fine with it. Honestly after speaking with ai!Alt I don’t believe their plan of trying to be on good relations with AI would work.

doing the johnny flashback 2, and wow Johnny really is an asshole. Like I had gotten so used to him in side missions I forgot how self centered and unlikable he was.You constantly get prompts to drink or do drugs, which I ignored. But i do love the goth/punk love Rogue and others have.

lol i called it, when Hellman said that the engram would seek to override the host, put V on the engram. I really like how as the relic malfunctions, you wind up in the chair with a cigarette, which you can either smoke and say you are turning into Johnny or throw away. My dialogue "your problem is the ends justify the means", which is true!!! He and Rogue detonated a nuke downtown, does anyone know that, and like ask Rogue about it????

(Funny you can ask Rouge about Johnny silverhand, over the phone, then the game bugs out and spawns her npc where you are. She doens't say much about the nuke, but she does say no one trusts you for jobs). The line of no one trusting you for jobs is pretty funny at level 46 street cred where im at “respected” status. really loving the family atmosphere at River's 3rd quest. Also his big strong arms, and the fact he is no longer a cop. I totally let the kids win, and wow the family dinner where they GRILL YOU over the relationship and try to set the two of you up, then the water tower scene!!!!! I don't love the first person sex cutscenes but they do have personality. I'm glad afterwards you got to tell River about the biochip and that you might die. Because he's so far removed from your personal plot. So I took that option to back out of a relationship.

I do love that you wake up with "river's tanktop" that says "fuck the police" It actually has extremely good armor stats, so thats what I'll wear now.

panam 3rd quest, when shes like why did you help me, I'm like "because it's important to you". Basically the closest you can get to "when a friend asks for help you help them", which as an ex-nomad backstory I really choose the nomad options when ever i can Paralezes quest part 2! I love the piano song but I always think of it as ocean's 11 music. It's also fun to see the computer and see Judy recommended you for the first quest. The emails talk about "forgetting" to hire a staffer, on the balocony a strange antennia was scannable, the color of the roses was remembered wrong... lol guess i was right with those giant wall screens. Its fun environmental details that spell things out before you can notice, and it ties into some other quests where people's behavior is being altered. Actually, this quest "Dream On" I love it! For a while I've been like "wheres the illuminati conspiracy! Here it IS! I chose to follow Elisabeth's wishes and not tell her husband he was being brainwashed. In best case they program him to forget again, in worst case he ends up dead. The gaslighting Elisabeth described is CHILLING, her husband describes a vacation she can't remember and she doesn't know whose memories have been messed with. On your way to the plaza you get a call from someone/something that says the know exactly WHAT you are, any you black out!!! It's such a great feeling of helplessness that you're just one person in a world so big that you can't fight every power. As Johnny said, could be a corporation, could be a rogue ai, either way Jefferson is fucked (and so are you).

#cyberpunk 2077 #mac plays video games #a lot of this journaling i do #so in a few years i can look back #and see my first impressions

6 notes · View notes

bigskydreaming · 6 years ago

Text

Lilith Clay is one of those characters that I never ever would actually want to be friends with, because she would be EXHAUSTING.

But as a reader? I adore her, because she is amazing and when allowed to be, hilariously entertaining.

For the record, I have been maintaining for decades....forget your headcanons about Donna being like a big sister to Jason in his Robin years, or all the back and forth about Kory and Roy as Jason’s friends now instead of Dick’s.

No. The true potential....and the true danger....has always been if Lilith had decided to take Jason under her wing.

(On a whim, no doubt, as that’s how she decides most things. including whether or not she feels like getting up and superheroing today or if she’s going to just sleep through the alarm indicating intruders in the Tower and trust the others to handle it. Like if they can’t, they’re probably all going to be killed by the intruders anyway, whether she’s in bed or out of it, and no one’s going to care at that point. Whereas if she doesn’t get at least three more hours of sleep, she’s going to be cranky all day and she absolutely will take it out on everyone. So really, trusting in her friends’ capabilities and ensuring she’s not a cranky bitch at them all day after they’ve just fought off intruders in their own home - when you think about it, really, isn’t this the most noble choice available to her right now?

Welcome to the mind of Lilith.)

So yes, I maintain the real Titan to worry about Jason catching the attention of, is and always was....Lilith.

Like, the very first time Dick brought Jason to the Tower and introduced him to everyone, it would have been perfectly in character for her to wander into the room deliberately late, managing to somehow look like she was gliding, because she practices that the same way the Batfamily practices walking without making noise. And then ignore everyone else and just zero in on Jason, point a finger straight at him, and intone in the same ringing inflections she uses to tell the team she’s had a vision about the end of the world:

Lilith: Him. I see his potential, just waiting to be unlocked. The Bat knows not what he has there, but I will mold this young man like the Clay from which I take my name, and he will be. A legend.

Jason: ....huh?

Dick, throwing up his arms: This! This is why I didn’t want to bring Jason to the tower. This is exactly what I was afraid of. Bruce just thought I was being a jerk because I’m mad about the Robin thing still, or that I was just being possessive of my team but no. I KNEW putting the two of you in the same room was a bad idea, and it was going to bite me in the ass big time. I even told Donna this was going to happen.

Donna: Its true, he did. I can confirm.

Lilith: Look, Dick, I just really really think he has a lot of potential and there’s a lot I can teach him and I promise I’ll be super careful with him and I won’t break him...

Dick: See, its the fact that you think “I won’t break him” is a legitimate reassurance to make about being around a thirteen year old that concerns me. Along with fifteen million other things.

Lilith: Ugh. Fine. Well if you’re gonna be a little bitch about it, I might as well tell you I’ve seen a great calamity coming, and he’s going to play an important role in it and only I can make sure he’s prepared in the way he has to be, or it could mean the end of everything! Now is not the time to be all Neurotically Overprotective Bat Big Brother, Dick, the fate of the world is at stake!

Dick: Well when you put it that way....I don’t believe you.

Lilith: Great, so now you’re calling me a liar?

Wally: You lie all the time, Lil. Just last week you told me I was going to die before the end of the year because you were mad I recorded over your Real Housewives on the DVR.

Lilith: Stay out of this Wally or I’ll prove myself right.

Dick: Nooooot helping your case, Lil.

Lilith: Okay fine, but I only lie about stuff I don’t care about. This is obviously different!

Jason unobtrusively sidles over to Garth, whose usual calm face alongside the chaotic back and forths of his teammates makes him stand out as the clear island of sanity in the room.

I mean, Jason’s totally wrong on that count, Garth’s as ridiculous as the rest of the OG Titans and Lilith. He just has a really great poker face.

Jason: I think I just figured out why Dick labeled the bottle of Ibuprofen in his bathroom “Lilith Pills.” So is this like...should I be worried about her uttering some Chosen One prophecy sounding shit, or is she just full of shit like Dick’s saying?

Garth, considering the matter gravely, so as not to give Jason the wrong idea. Just. Its hard to know what would be the wrong idea here.

Garth: The problem is, with Lilith, those things aren’t as mutually exclusive as one might hope.

Jason: Oh. So she might be for real? I knew one of Dick’s teammates was a psychic and had visions sometimes, but Bruce’s face did that twisty thing when he mentioned that. Like, where he looks like he just took a shot of some bad vodka and that means he doesn’t believe someone’s for real but he can’t prove it. But also, sometimes he only looks like that because he just doesn’t like that someone’s for real and he can’t prove otherwise.

Garth: Good eye. If you’ve picked up on that already, you’re clearly insightful. That’s very good. You’ll need it, in this place. And yes, Lilith is legitimately a precognitive and does have visions of the future sometimes. Its just...

Jason: Its just what?

Garth squeezing out the words reluctantly because he doesn’t like speaking ill of his teammates, even though Lilith absolutely knows her own reputation and sculpted it with zeal as she says remaining unpredictable is the key to never being taken for granted...

Garth: Its just that Lilith is a bit like Cassandra of Troy....if Cassandra had prophesied the Trojan War and nobody believed her but the reason was not because of some divine curse, but because Cassandra had a bad habit of saying things like “We should invade Greece first or else they’re going to invade us,” because she was bored.

Jason: ...gotcha.

Garth: And I’m not saying Lil is....I don’t mean she does it on that kind of scale....so much as just...an example of that kind of thing. So to speak.

Jason: So listen to everything Lilith says, but take everything she says with several grains of salt, and as soon as you’ve got some free time, maybe examine those grains of salt under a high-powered microscope just to be on the safe side.

Garth: Exactly. Congratulations, you’re now as prepared to survive Lilith as anyone can be.

Jason: Survive, huh?

Garth: We’re all still kind of hoping she’ll grow into being responsible with her powers while accepting this might just be her version of being responsible with her powers.

Jason: I am maybe no longer as jealous of Dick being the leader of his own team.

Garth: Hey, then you’ve already got your big brother beat. It took us three years before he’d admit regretting he ever volunteered to be team leader.

Anywho....

Buckle in, because I’m in a Lilith mood this week, so am gonna get lengthy about her and her appeal as a character to me, lol.

Like, the first thing you gotta understand about Lilith, is she is the uncontested reigning queen of drama. And don’t even try and come for her crown. She will destroy you. Dramatically.

This is a woman who repeatedly makes herself costumes that have a full on cloak - not a cape, but a CLOAK - so that when she flares it dramatically, its not like a sheet of fabric that’s normally hanging from her back but now swishes around her front, no, she’s got a full on CLOAK that when it flares dramatically, the whole damn thing is moving and swishing and flying every which way.

And because that isn’t enough, she also makes a point to have a hood - and not just a cast shadows covering your face hood, a full on DROWN EVERYTHING WITHIN THAT HOOD IN TOTAL DARKNESS Hood. The kind of Aesthetic that doesn’t just happen naturally with hoods. You have to have that shit custom made.

And does she need this hood for any particular reason? Is her secret identity super top secret? No. It is not. She barely ever even has one. Her civilian name is no big deal if it gets out.

Look, she just really needs the hood, okay.

And sure, one time she came back after being away from the Titans for a few years, and pretended to be a complete stranger who didn’t identify herself as ‘your old pal Lilith” and refused to divulge any personal details, or like....go anywhere without her full cloak and hood identity-shrouding regalia.

And did she need to hide her identity and be super secret hush hush for any particular reason? No, she did not.

Look, she just really didn’t want to tell anybody who she was, cuz then it’d be a whole thing and everyone would be like omg where have you been, tell us everything, and can’t a girl just wanna fight bad guys and save the world and just show up and then clock out and keep it professional? Like, she was just having that kind of a week, is all.

If that week lasted about two years, well that’s the calendar’s fault, not hers.

This is a woman whose base powerset has always been telepathy with a side of apocalyptic visions, but beyond that has gained additional powers at various points over the years.

Like telekinesis. Which she legit, literally had, spelled out definitively in canon as an ability of hers, which she had and could use.

But that she only ever used to levitate.

Thus allowing her to hover. Dramatically. In her cloak and hood. At all times. For no reason.

To be perfectly, abundantly clear: she could fly, but did she fly? Nah. Instead she’s like “is it not enough to just use one’s telekinesis to merely hover in place above everyone else? Dramatically?”

Or teleportation. That was another power she acquired randomly at one point. Mostly inexplicably.

And which she only ever used to teleport into a crowded room so she could impart Urgent Tidings of DOOM. Or to teleport out of a crowded room when people got a little too noisy with the whole “can you give us any more details? A time frame, a context, a guest list for this particular doomsday?” She’s like, look, I just had the vision, its not like I took notes, I’m not some kind of nerd. UGH.

And then dramatically teleporting out of the room with a dramatic swirl of her dramatic cloak.

There were hardly any limitations given for her teleportation, given that there was hardly any context ever given for her teleportation, but there was no sign of any particular limit to how far she could teleport or if she could take anyone with her.

Was this ever explored as a possible advantage for the whole team to make use of in some way? No. But given that its Lilith, its actually NOT a plothole that noted strategist and master tactician Dick Grayson at no point is ever shown asking Lil if they could try seeing if she could teleport with someone else.

See, because Lilith doesn’t LIKE when people know exactly what she can do.

Because then they have the pesky habit of like....asking her to do them.

That, she does not care for.

So those conversations would probably have gone something like this.

Dick: Lilith, do you think you could teleport with someone else? If you could teleport the whole team, that would be very useful to know.

Lilith: So what is it about me, exactly, that makes you look at me and think: this is a soccer mom van? Is it my hair? My posture? Or do I just give off a certain vibe?

Dick: That wasn’t....*sigh* Never mind.

Or....

Dick: Lilith, do you think you could teleport from the Tower here to Gotham?

Lilith: I’m sorry, do I work for you? Am I getting paid? No, no and no to the power of I’m trying to take a nap here. You can take an actual cab home like any normal person, I do not come in shades of yellow and I never go beep-beep.

Dick: I wasn’t asking you to...look, I’m purely trying to establish a baseline for your teleportation.

Lilith: And I’m purely trying to establish a hard line for respecting my right to privacy. You don’t need to know every little thing about me and my powers just so you can jot that down in your little Bat Trapper-Keeper notebook where you anally note every other thing nobody actually needs to know, like a record of your poops.

Dick: I don’t do that....no. Nope. Not doing this.

Lilith: Well is there a reason you’re keeping me from sleeping then? Some of us actually need a certain number of hours of rest to function. We don’t all hang upside down in coffins once a week while our Bat-butler tops off our tanks with IVs of blood.

Dick: Its the middle of the day, you’re in the common room, and you’ve been watching a Real Housewives marathon for the last four hours.

Lilith: Oh, so now you’ve been spying on me this whole time? Where does it end, Dick? Where. Does. It. End.

Dick: Never mind. I just realized I’m not getting paid for this either. I’m gonna go do something productive, like bang my head against a wall.

And then he’d leave while regretting everything, and Lilith would settle back onto the couch smirking because she’s not actually a terrible person and refrains from doing shit like that in actual high stakes situations, but at any other time, successfully running out the clock on Dick Grayson’s Bat-tier patience is like, Peak Entertainment in her book. Wally meanwhile has been sitting on the couch unacknowledged the whole time.

Wally: Why are you like this.

Lilith *shrugging*: I blame my mother.

Wally: You don’t even know who your parents are.

Lilith: Way to rub it in, West! You wanna go? Huh?

Or one more for good measure....

The Titans could be in the middle of a battle far enough away from the Tower they had to take their jet to get there....and out of nowhere, Lilith would teleport in mid-battle, hovering just overhead, and conveniently appearing right between Roy and a villain who’d been sneaking up on him but now was stumbling back in shock and then is backhanded through a building all the way on the other side of the street by Donna, who also only noticed him when Lilith’s arrival drew everyone’s attention there.

Lilith to Roy, whilst hovering (dramatically): I just saved your life there. You’re welcome. You owe me now, but in a few years you’re going to have a super hot brother and if you get him to go out with me, I’ll call us even.

Roy: ....I don’t know what to do with that.

Lilith: There’s a good chance he’s gay, but he could just as easily be bi. Hard to say. The spirits aren’t big on outing people years ahead of schedule.

Roy: Yeah that doesn’t help any.

Lilith: That sounds like a you problem then. Well, my work here is done.

Lilith then proceeds to teleport away. The battle is not actually over yet.

And then of course, we can’t forget that time she got light and fire powers.

Which.

I feel like by this point, I probably don’t have to spell out the hazards of pyrokinetic Lilith.

That of course, led to what at the time was thought to be the culmination of Lilith’s lifelong quest to figure out where she came from and who her parents were.

Because of course Lilith’s backstory has to be as dramatic as everything else about her, this quest took the whole team to Mt. Olympus itself.

Where it was established that Lilith’s development of light and fire abilities were because she was finally coming into her true power...as the daughter of one of the Titans of old....the Titaness of the sun, who had conceived Lilith as a weapon she intended to use to kill all the Olympian gods so she and the other Titans could reclaim their thrones.

Y’know. As one does. Some parents have kids to continue the family name, some for the tax breaks, and some to assassinate their other kids, the Greek gods. No big deal.

Anyway. There is a case to be made that ridiculously high parental expectations are a big part of why Lilith is Like That.

Granted, she was Like That long before she even knew who these parents were, let alone their expectations, but perhaps parental expectations this ridiculously high transcend the usual ordering of time and space. Who can say, really.

Of course, despite how dramatic and difficult Lilith can be at times, and the zeal with which she occasionally torments others whose only real crime was Existing Within Her Vicinity And Thus Totally A Valid Target....

Like, her heart has always always always been in the right place. She is a hero through and through, and has never wavered from doing the right thing when it really matters, or protecting people.

So needless to say, she wasn’t exactly on board with her long lost mom’s life plan for her. Even if that argument did veer more towards “You made me grow up on Earth and think you still get a vote in how I live my life? Hah! Do you have any idea how much Earth sucks?”

Her teammates, who all live on Earth: Hey!

Lilith: What? Oh shut up, you all know its true. Don’t @ me, I’m right.

(Another missed opportunity that I maintain would be perfectly in character for her...I like to imagine that Lilith’s visions sometimes let her glimpse memes and pop culture references years before they become a thing, and so she’s always making references no one else gets and when they call her on it, she insists they’ll get it someday, its not her fault she’s a trend precursor rather than a follower. And of course, the references she makes are only actual memes from the future some of the time. The other times she’s just pulling them out of her ass to see if she can get them to catch on with anyone).

Anyway, Lilith’s overbearing mom, who absolutely is one hundred percent the source of her daughter’s Drama, if that is at all something that can be passed down as a hereditary trait....of course tries to make Lilith play ball.

Dick, flopping down right on the spot, wishing he had popcorn: Oh my god, someone who isn’t me trying to get Lil to do what they want her to do and with not a chance in hell of succeeding. You have no idea how long I have waited for this moment. Nobody talk during the movie, I need to savor every second of this.

Of course, everyone who’s ever been in a room with Lilith already knew how that movie was going to end, so ultimately Lilith’s evil Titan mom and her nefarious plots were defeated by her daughter’s Obstinacy.

That didn’t mean, however, that repercussions of Lilith’s newly revealed origins didn’t linger.

Dramatically.

Lilith: Anyway, so that’s what I think we should do next. So hop to it, Titans! Let’s get a move on.

The rest of the Titans sit around their living room eating breakfast and watching the TV and just in general not budging.

Wally: And you suddenly think you’re in charge because...why? Exactly?

Lilith: Our team is the Titans? I am an actual Titan? It’s literally right there in the name. C’mon, Wally, look alive. Irony isn’t a good enough reason for you to be this slow on the uptake.

Wally: Anyone else wanna field this one?

Roy: Lil, don’t take this the wrong way, because I love you to pieces despite your lifelong commitment to playing Devil’s Advocate on behalf of all the reasons we shouldn’t....

Garth: Great start Roy.

Roy: But the day you’re calling the shots around here is the day I tender my resignation and leave a Roy-shaped hole in the wall as I flee and seek sanctuary with the JSA, the JLA, the Green Lantern Corps....hell, even Bruce.

Lilith: How dare you say such things to me, a celestial being.

Dick: Lil, in the interest of saving time and getting you to move so I can actually see the TV, now would be a perfect occasion to look into the future and see what the chances are of us actually putting you in charge.

Lilith, flopping down on the couch: Oh never mind, I already knew that, and its not like I even actually want the stupid job anyway. Look how grumpy it makes you, and you have way more patience than I do. I just wanted to see how far I could push it. I’m booooooored.

Garth: You do know our TV is rigged to get reception from even other planets, right? We can watch pretty much any entertainment program in the galaxy with this thing.

Lilith: Yes, but none of them have me, so its like, what’s the point, y’know?

Wally: Well do you mind letting us keep watching it at least? We do have lower standards, after all.

Lilith: Fine, whatever. I’ll just...exist, I guess.

Two minutes later...

Lilith: Hey, Donna’s an Amazon and I’m a Titan so that still makes me Donna’s boss at least, right?

All of them, in unison: NO.

And then of course, ultimately it was revealed that all of that backstory was a lie and Lilith’s real parents are both normal humans and she’s just a psychic.

Wally: You mean we went through all of that for nothing? And put up with Lil lording being a demigoddess over us for years?

Lilith: Hey, you still got a free all expenses paid trip to Mt. Olympus out of it, so you’re welcome, and you still owe me. Don’t make me sabotage your meet-cute with the woman you’re gonna marry. I’ll do it. I’ll do it so hard, she’ll think she’s allergic to you.

Wally: ...wait, does that mean I’m not going to marry Frances?

Donna: Oh Wally. You didn’t really ever think you were going to marry Frances, did you?

Wally: No, I guess not. She never really clicked with the rest of you, and to be honest I don’t think any of us would ever work out with someone who didn’t get along with the group.

Donna: ....that was a dig at me, wasn’t it.

Wally: What? No! I swear. I literally just forgot Terry existed for a second there.

Roy: Lucky bitch.

Yes. Lilith wears the title of Drama Queen with PRIDE. Its the entire basis of her claim to being royalty, after all, and no, that’s not at all how that works either, but do you want to try telling that to the woman who can and will get the Lamb Chop’s sing along song stuck in your head until it drives you insane?

One does not simply cross Lilith and get away with it, much in the same way as one does not simply walk into Mordor.

No, one should stock up on Plot Armor, magic rings and immortal wizard companions before even making the attempt, expect to be spotted by the all-seeing, all-knowing Eye of Sauron Lilith from the moment you even try and pull some fuckwittery within her domain, and make peace with the 90% chance this will ultimately all end in a slow motion fall to a fiery demise in a volcano with a super ominous name anyway.

Like, speaking of ominous, let’s note the fact that this is a woman whose psychic powers are at best 10% precognition, comparative to their being 90% telepathy. When picking the only codename she’s ever used, did she decide to go with something that focused on the majority shareholder of her powerset, her status as one of the most powerful telepaths in the DC universe? Something like Esper or Psyche or Brainstorm or like, idek, Sir Thinks-A-Lot?

No. No she did not.

Instead she went with Omen.

(And even that was probably only because the other Titans wouldn’t let her just flat out call herself something with Doom right in the name, on the grounds that would make most people assume she was a supervillain. To which she probably replied something like “Well that’s because most people are dumb and that’s why I don’t like most of them. Why am I even a superhero again?” She’d frame it like a real question she was asking, fully expecting an answer, but then she’d wander off while they were still trying to come up with a response to that because she’s bored now and also she doesn’t really care. Being a hero for her wasn’t always a vocation or calling like it was for the other Titans. It was more like she figured “Eh, I have superpowers and no other major life ambitions, might as well be a superhero. I guess.”)

So yeah, screw the telepathy, she’s like, “Call me Omen.”

An omen for whom, people often want to know? Just how exactly is that name meant to be taken? Is she an omen for the people the Titans try and protect, meant as an aid, to help avert some terrible fate that would otherwise befall them? Or is it meant as like, she’s an omen of doom for the bad guys they fight, a forewarning that thirty seconds from now, the Titans will be kicking their asses?

Or maybe its meant to indicate she’s an omen as to the fate of the world, and her career as a superhero is really her attempt to avert one of the terrible apocalypses she foretells every time she pops back up after a superhero sabbatical and says “Hello, valued friends and comrades. Tis I, the unfortunate bearer of grim tidings. The fate of the world once more rests in our hands, and if we are to have any hope of saving it, we gotta take a road trip. I call shotgun.”

Donna: “You know Lil, you don’t actually have to show up with an apocalypse we have to avert, whenever you get bored or lonely and want back on the team again. You could just say hey guys, I’m back, what’s for dinner.”

Lilith: Wow Donna, I guess you don’t care about the fate of all humanity, since I am trying to prophesy here and you’re totally killing the ambiance and its ticking the spirit world off and messing with my connection to it.

Donna: You don’t have a connection to any spirit world, you drama queen. You’re a psychic who has precognitive dreams sometimes which means whatever you came here to warn us about, you already saw and definitely won’t have an update until you, y’know. Go to sleep again.

Lilith: Umm, excuse you Miss Know It All, that’s not even remotely how my visions work.

Donna; That’s literally what you told us about how they worked.

Lilith: Well I was lying, obviously.

Donna: Why would you have lied?

Lilith: Because I do that sometimes. Are we really at all unclear on that by this point?

Donna: Right. And, you do that, why again?

Lilith: I don’t know, Donna. There you go again, always expecting me to have an answer to every single one of life’s little mysteries. Maybe some things just aren’t meant to be understood, did you ever consider that? Like, why is Dick so inexplicably drawn to redheads and yet he’s never once hit on me, a Known Redhead? If a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s around to hear it, does anybody honestly care? God, is the universe allowed to keep a little of its mystique? Is that okay with everyone?

Dick: If I could cut in for a second. Lil, just to clarify, you’re not lying about this apocalyptic vision for any mysterious reason that’s of course, undoubtedly beyond our ken. Correct?

Lilith: Obviously. I never lie about the end of the world, Dick.

Dick: Great. And just for clarity’s sake, the difference there, that makes that a no-lie zone would be....

Lilith: These end of the world situations always end up involving a lot of work for me, and would I do that much work for anything less than the end of the world?

Wally: Yeah that checks out.

Lilith: You’re going to ski straight off a cliff and win a Darwin Award for how stupid your death is.

Wally: Hah hah, joke’s on you, you already tried using that one on me and I’ve made my peace with it.

Lilith: Dammit.

Dick: Okay. And since we just established you’ve made up so many fake deaths for Wally over the years that you’re actually recycling old ones at this point, I gotta ask, one more time, just for complete clarity....so the intel about your vision is one hundred percent down to the letter accurate, to the best of your recollection?

Lilith: Oh. Well if you’re going to be technical about it, I might have embellished a little here and there. But that’s just about the aesthetic.

Dick: ....the aesthetic?

Lilith: Just because Destiny decided to make me its glorified secretary and insists on me reading off the minutes of each and every celestial meeting about “Should we end all existence yet, yay or nay,” that doesn’t mean I have to be boring about it.

Dick: I miss your fake mom.

237 notes · View notes

twentiethcenturymoviesandtv · 5 years ago

Text

The Twilight Zone: Genre and Themes

The Twilight Zone is a show that features alien invasions, the afterlife, haunted dolls, ghosts, existential crises, deals with the devil, and horrible, horrible endings. It’s a show about the worst of humanity, and the things that can happen to us if we make wrong choices. It’s a show that, if we think about it, can be pretty scary.

And yet, it is not a horror show. At least, not exclusively. To be honest, it’s kind of hard to pin down.

Like I’ve mentioned in other ‘genre’ articles on this blog, the genre of a work is tied to the characters, chiefly the protagonist, of any given television show or film. Luke Skywalker is the defining reason that Star Wars is a fantasy. Jack Burton makes Big Trouble in Little China a comedy (We think). The Addams Family is a comedy due to the interactions of the ‘creepy’ family.

But The Twilight Zone? It’s an anthology. In other words, we don’t have a consistent protagonist. It changes from week to week. This means we have to look solely at the style of stories. The bad news?

The stories change from week to week as well.

The good news?

The stories may change, but something does unify them: the style.

As I mentioned in the ‘story’ article, the basic story beats of a traditional Twilight Zone episode remain largely the same: an ordinary protagonist finds themselves in a horrific situation that forces them to come to terms with their own humanity and the world they live in.

Well, that settles it, you might say. It’s clearly a horror show, isn’t it? Why do you have to make everything difficult?

To be fair, The Twilight Zone does have quite a lot of elements also shared with the horror genre. The horrible, hopeless scenarios that the protagonists typically find themselves in have quite a lot in common with equally bleak horror film endings. The terrifying end of The Dummy, The New Exhibit, or the episode Number 12 Looks Just Like You are classic examples of the ‘horror’ of The Twilight Zone, but elements of most episodes can seem to be classified that way. From the eerie events, to the slow build of dread-filled atmosphere, to the sometimes terribly unhappy conclusions, The Twilight Zone was excellent at preying on the things humanity is the most afraid of, and using them as excellent methods of storytelling. These elements, while ‘unrealistic’, showcased our greatest fears: loss of personhood, isolation, death, the Unknown, and many other things that keep us up at night. While sometimes the heroes would get away in the end, often, the conclusions were bleak and dark as our protagonist faces their fate, be it eternal imprisonment, a life of isolation in the fallout of a nuclear holocaust, trapped as a wax figure, or total insanity.

So yes, The Twilight Zone is a horror series. But it’s more than that.

If the stories were merely horrible things happening to undeserving people, The Twilight Zone would indeed be purely a horror show, but they’re not. Remember the whole ‘coming to terms with their own humanity’? That’s where the science-fiction comes in.

More than the aliens, future-set episodes, and alternate universes, a science-fiction story has a lot to do with exploring humanity from the outside. That way, controversial topics can be covered in a way that doesn’t seem close to home, instead taking place in totally unbelievable circumstances. Since the beginning of science-fiction, the genre is heavily focused on what makes us human, and how it relates to things we aren’t used to dealing with, and that’s what The Twilight Zone is all about.

The things we’ll do for money. The terrible things we’ll sink to when we’re afraid. The show was more about the ‘scare factor’ of being invaded, of being identical to someone capable of destroying our lives, of facing down death. The show was about us. People. The Twilight Zone is speculative fiction at its finest, forcing us to think about our identities as human beings. Many episodes of the show were about prejudice, nuclear fallout, or the Red Scare, concepts that the audience could understand without immediately feeling like the show was trying to tell them something about society, even though it was. Rod Serling’s Aesop of the episode was typically pointed out in the ending, but after the audience had time to think about what they just saw.

Okay, so it’s a sci-fi/horror anthology, we’ve gotten that narrowed down. Most people usually categorize The Twilight Zone that way, so, if we wanted, we could call it a day right away. But there’s a little more to it than that.

Like I’ve said in previous ‘genre’ articles, every work of fiction is a blend of elements of more than one genre. Alien is science-fiction/horror (more on that in the next edition of The Legacy of Sci-Fi), Buffy the Vampire Slayer is action-horror-comedy. The same holds true for The Twilight Zone, including more than the two genres we’ve already settled on above. There are even some elements that, while not being large enough to use as grounds to categorize it in certain genres, are worth taking a look at.

The Twilight Zone, like I’ve mentioned numerous times, is focused and centered on people. On humanity itself, sure, the idea of people, but there’s also a focus on individuals, and their experiences. Their fears, hopes, successes and failures, their interactions. These are elements of drama, even though I’d be hard pressed to categorize the show this way. The aspects of drama as used in this show, while not using them in the same way as a traditional drama would, does rely on them to further the audience’s ties to each protagonist, making the horror affect us considerably more than if we were watching a blank slate.

The odd events that happen to the characters are rarely explained right-out. Often, the protagonist has to figure out whether they’re going insane, or in some other way getting to the truth of the matter. This is an element of suspense and mystery, tactics which feed directly into the horror aspect, by drawing the audience in further.

These other genre tactics, as you might have realized, are deliberately set up to bring the audience closer to the action. As an anthology, there is no ‘unifying’ setup or characters for the viewers to be familiar with, and as a result, each episode must use different tactics in order for the audience to relate to and care about this new character and scenario.

Then, of course, there is the final genre, one that can perhaps be the most loosely connected with the show: that of fantasy.

Fantasy typically brings to mind sword-and-sorcery stories like Conan the Barbarian, or epic tales like The Lord of the Rings, but in reality, ‘fantasy’ is, to quote the dictionary, ‘a genre of imaginative fiction involving magic and adventure, especially in a setting other than the real world’. By that logic, there are more than a few episodes of The Twilight Zone that fit that description.

A World of His Own, A Game of Pool, and Walking Distance are just a handful of the episodes that seem to have more ‘magical’ qualities than horrific. There are plenty of storylines in The Twilight Zone that, not only (sometimes) ending happily, but have a distinct ‘whimsical’ feel to them rather than the dread of something terrible happening. (Of course, sometimes something terrible does happen, but again, a different type of horrible than Living Doll.) Episodes like The Hunt or The Night of the Meek don’t sacrifice the ‘twist ending’ that The Twilight Zone is so well-known for, but does it in a more whimsical, fantastical way. No aliens, no futuristic settings, just the human imagination making for some unique storytelling.

Science fiction. Horror. Drama. Mystery. Fantasy. The Twilight Zone is all of these, and sometimes, a little more. By mixing these genres in unique blends with equally unique storylines, Rod Serling’s scripts came to life with fresh ideas and story styles that hold the show up as a genre-buster, even to this day. It’s a show that can appeal to almost everyone who doesn’t mind being kept up at night, a show that makes you think, as well as jump at things that go bump in the night.

It is this element, this clever combination of various storytelling styles and ideas, that has made The Twilight Zone an unforgettable chapter in television history, even to this day.

Thank you guys so much for reading! Don’t forget that my ask box is always open for conversation, suggestions, or questions. Stay tuned for the next article, where we’ll be looking at the character styles of The Twilight Zone. I hope to see you there!

#The Twilight Zone #TV #Television #TV-PG #50s #Fantasy #Horror #Sci-Fi #Science Fiction #Mystery #Rod Serling

4 notes · View notes

easilydistractedbyfanfic · 5 years ago

Note

You think Shiedheda will go after Raven to hurt Murphy in the near future?

Hi! Happy prequel day! I know not everybody is excited about this ep but mannnn I cannot resist the LORE behind this show! So I am looking forward to tonight! I hope you are too!

Been trying to think about this situation a little more, but ultimately - YES.

Last week, right after the ep, I posted some immediate thoughts that you can read here if you missed it. In it, I said that the chess game between Sheidheda and Murphy seemed to really be foreshadowing what could happen. Murphy plays very early with a move called the Queen’s Gambit (same as the ep title), and it’s a risky choice, putting his queen in danger - which we know was literally happening in the ep as well, because Em0ri was in danger because Murphy made the choice to play chess to begin with instead of going to her party. Of course, he didn’t KNOW this was Sheidheda’s goal and he was absolutely manipulated right into doing exactly what Sheidheda wanted.

During the game, we don’t know it at the time and neither does Murphy, but Sheidheda is deliberately drawing the game out. There is a move Sheidheda makes that isn’t especially aggressive and Murphy says “You could have taken my castle.” Sheidheda then replies “Oh, I’ll get it soon enough.” and I don’t know, maybe some of you heard me scream at that line! LOL!

Because “castle” is an older chess name for the ROOK piece. And rooks are also a name for ravens/crows. Castles=rooks=ravens=Raven. There’s already been a lot of chess speculation in fandom that Raven as a character may represent the rook piece anyway, but now IMHO, it’s pretty much a given for me based on these few lines.

In addition, there is a helluva lot of subtext happening during this game. Kudos to JR & Richard for this scene, seriously. Sheidheda TELLS Murphy something bad is about to happen from his (Murphy’s) perspective, and insinuates that Sanctum’s queen (clearly Em0ri) is enjoying the role of being on a pedestal - enjoying being WORSHIPPED. We’ve already seen hints of this in both this ep and previous eps and Sheidheda’s comment tells the audience that he is not only aware of what Em0ri has been doing/saying, but he knows it’s a comment that will get to Murphy. And it does, because Murphy then tries to put the focus on Sheidheda instead.

Listen - y’all know I’m not interested in Memoraven. I’m just NOT. There’s been no evidence whatsoever in any season that Raven & Em0ri are attracted to each other or want anything beyond friendship, and anyway, I think Raven deserves to be picked first and I don’t like the idea of her coming into something that’s been established for years. I will never think that’s fair to her. However - I can absolutely see how Memoraven fans could take this conversation from Sheidheda as foreshadowing too - like... uhhhhh, wow, dilf demon (stole this term off a lovely twitter and now it’s how I think of Russheda in my head oops) really did tell Murphy that he knows it must be hard to settle for one woman when he could really have as many as he wanted as a god. And note that Murphy does NOT say he’s not interested in that - he says “you don’t know Em0ri” like the only reason he doesn’t have more than one partner (girl OR guy, IMHO) is because that’s her choice, not his. The insinuation here, good lordt.

Sheidheda wants Murphy’s queen and his castle aka he’s going after Em0ri and Raven - this is ESTABLISHED in the chess game as far as I’m concerned. Sheidheda takes Murphy’s queen piece in another move on the board AND we know that Em0ri is captured in the ep as well. Sheidheda also says to Murphy that how he will respond to the LOSS of his queen will tell him (dilf demon) whether Murphy is a leader or a follower. Murphy objects, saying he’s neither, and Sheidheda immediately scoffs & labels him as a REBEL. Then there’s all kinds of more subtext about Murphy’s motivations and Murphy makes another move and takes dilf demon’s piece and Sheidheda comments that its an avenging move and predictable, and how chess is about strategy and choices blah blah. Anyway I recommend watching it all again, it’s hot. LOL.

Also, I know there has been a great gifset done of that last awesome transition (yay Lindsey) by @wolfheartgirl where she shows how Em0ri the person is placed on the chess board and what ramifications this position has based on Murphy & Sheidheda’s other pieces. I will reblog that gifset after I post this.

But in my VERY typical VERY wordy way - oh heck yeah, I think Sheidheda is holding a grudge against Raven. Don’t forget that scene in s5 where Murphy, Abby, Raven, Em0ri, Jackson, Miller, Gaia and Madi are all locked in the Sanctum jail and Raven’s putting some puzzle pieces together about the commanders in Madi’s head and Sheidheda is literally saying to Madi don’t tell HER anything. He KNOWS Raven is a threat to him, and it’s Raven who takes out the Flame. I don’t know if Sheidheda knows all the details but Raven has been closely linked to Becca throughout the series and I think there have been some hints in canon that Becca in the Flame was one of the things that could have been holding Sheidheda back before now. We know the Flame has been degrading over time. Lots of spec on that but I don’t think it’s out of line for Sheidheda to want Raven specifically OUT of the game.

IMHO I hope Raven gets back to Sanctum in 7x09 for this to start unraveling!

Thanks for the ask, friend! What do YOU think??

#the 100 s7 #my inbox #asked and answered #the 100 theories #my meta #raven and murphy and sheidheda oh my

9 notes · View notes

benisasoftboi · 5 years ago

Text

Gushing time.

Rune Factory 4 Special arrived a day early, so my entire day has been consumed in nostalgia. The original Rune Factory 4 was the first video game I ever bought on release day - I remember saving up all my money and making my mum drive me to like three different shops trying to find one that had it. I was already a fan of the franchise - before then, Rune Factory 3 had been my favourite video game, across the board. Aside from a playthrough of the first game last year, I haven’t played a Rune Factory game in a long time, certainly not RF4. But just starting up the game and hearing the music again, it was like it was suddenly seven years ago. Running around Selphia and seeing all the characters again - I love JRPGs, have played a lot of them, and I can think of very few that have characters that have stuck with me this long. And the aesthetics - the best thing about the Rune Factory franchise has always been the aesthetics, the music, the scenic and character design, just the general world. It’s a beautifully whimsical balance of urban and fantasy, and it’s the only JRPG world I think I’ve ever come across that I would genuinely want to live in. Rune Factory may no longer be my favourite game franchise - but I don’t think there has ever been another series that has felt so much like home to me.

Here’s a very long selection of personal highlights from the art book (by which I mean photos of the art followed by my rambling opinions):

Yeah, see, here’s the thing - Rune Factory 1 is not a good game. I could write an entire essay on why it’s bad (I actually started and got pretty damn far before realising no one’s interested in my two thousand word review of a game that came out over a decade ago - the short version is ‘Misty Bloom-fucking-Cave’. Anyone who’s played RF1 knows exactly what I mean). Don’t get me wrong, it has good qualities - excellent boss fights, for one, and also, as with the rest of the franchise, it is aesthetically wonderful. But ultimately, it feels less like playing a video game, and more like playing a proof of concept for a game. Which I guess it kind of was - and I can’t hate it because we wouldn’t have the rest of the series without it.

But it literally ends with a dragon spewing plant breath on a tank to make a turnip grow out of the gun. ‘Profound’, my arse.

It’s Raguna! The “master sowrdsman!” (that is not a typo on my part that is a direct quote from the ending of Rune Factory 1 this game’s script had so many issues-). And Mist! My favourite of the ‘canon’ love interests!

Best girl! When I was a kid, my favourite love interest in RF1 was Rosetta. As an adult, it is Tabatha. I don’t know what it is about her that I find so likeable (she’s as lacking in personality as any other RF1 character), but... idk, I just like her a lot.

Camus’s big ambition is to leave town like even once. He will never achieve it

Fun fact about Melody is that she’s extremely depressed, a fact that comes up once in an optional side quest and is never addressed again. It’s incredibly dark for an RF game

Fun fact about Lukas is that he sucks (he’s one of those ‘obsessed with talking about how hot all the girls are’ characters, an archetype that thankfully doesn’t show up again in these games). But also, interestingly enough, thanks to one of RF1′s many, many script errors, if you marry Rosetta (the girl Lukas is the most obsessed with), he’s supposed to express disappointment that he lost her to Raguna - but instead, he implies that he’s disappointed to have lost Raguna to her. The translators typoed their way into giving him a sexuality change. Which is honestly kind of amazing.

LOOK AT THIS SLIME THIS IS SUCH A COOL SLIME LITERALLY EVERY OTHER JPRG SLIME GO HOME DRAGON QUEST GET FUCKED (jk I like Dragon Quest a lot and its slimes are cool too). Wish you could see in-game that this is what they’re meant to be like.

I just generally love the monster designs, they’re really charming

Rune Factory 2! The RF game with the most weirdly mundane protagonist name (Kyle. In the main four games of this franchise we’ve got Raguna, Micah, Lest, Frey... and Kyle). The two generations thing was actually very cool, but when they say ‘each chapter captures a different lifestyle’, what they really mean is ‘the first half is a weak Harvest Moon I’m sorry, STORY OF SEASONS game, and the second half is a pretty good Rune Factory game’

lookit this little fuck

Yue Yue Yue! I love Yue so much, she’s great. She’s kind of like a much chiller version of Anna from Fire Emblem.

It’s really cool that we got to see grown up Cecilia (she was in RF1). I have this silly headcanon that if Kyle doesn’t marry Mana, Nicholas (her friend in 1) comes to visit Cecilia one day in the hazy-post game future, and meets Mana, and they get together. While Yue is my favourite, I do genuinely like Mana a lot, and I just want her to find love, I guess.

Here’s original Barrett! There’s a reason he was popular enough to make a reappearance (well, aside from the whole grumpy pretty boy thing he’s got going on) - he was a great character in this game. His and Dorothy’s relationship is also definitely the most compelling of the rival romances. Bonus Max, who also has a little shout-out in RF4 (check the diary in what will become Dylas’s bedroom at the start of the game)

Ray is male, but apparently he was originally going to be a female character, as he has an unused portrait in a wedding dress. My friend and I agree that this makes him a Trans Icon

Monster designs remain excellent. Especially the goblins

Skipping over Frontier (and also Oceans later), as I never got to play it growing up due to not having a console, and still haven’t got around to it - might try this summer. Except I do need to point out that these guys should be memes. I don’t know in what way. But they should.

Rune Factory 3! My first RF game. The transformation thing was very cool, even if it was basically useless outside the main story. My friend and I spent hours mucking about in the WiFi dungeon. I loved the desert settlement and all of the dungeon designs in general, and man, RF3 is just great. I hope it gets a remake one day.

Raven Raven Raven! I LOVE Raven (as do most). Her story with Micah is the first time I can remember getting genuinely invested in a video game romance. I’m so glad she cameos in RF4. I love her. She’s wonderful.

I have an odd fondness for Marian. When I was about twelve, I decided to do a playthrough where I deliberately romanced the least popular bachelorette. After poking around on forums, I determined that character to be Marian, and did a run with her. And... I actually came to really like her. I find her endearing. I get that people find her annoying and don’t like her... unethical medical practices, but doing that run has still made me a pretty protective of her. It’s been a long time since I played RF3, so maybe I’d change my mind if I replayed now, but currently, as far as I’m concerned, Marian’s a good’un.

I think I also used to low key ship her with Collette lol

Pia’s official art has always been super weird to me because it’s so not what her character is like in-game. She’s a ditzy airhead. This makes her look so serious

RAINBOW! Another character whose art makes them look way more serious than they actually are. Daria is great and would be a meme if this game was more popular. I think she’s also implied to be a relative of Margaret.

I’ve always been super confused about what Kuruna’s skirt is meant to be. Is it fur? Is it part of her shirt? Is it even a skirt at all?

Check it out, it’s the guy everyone would ship Micah with if this game was more popular

I want Zaid to make a reappearance and interact with Doug. Pretty sure it’s canon that they’re from the same clan? Think it would be very interesting.

RF3 definitely had the coolest farm. Also, still love the desert settlement.

This is from Oceans, so I have no context, but it’s just so cool that I had to share

Rune Factory 4. Culmination of the series is right - when I was playing it for the first time, I remember being blown away by just how much it is a true love letter to the franchise. I have never come across another game series that so consistently grew and improved from entry to entry. RF4 was a perfect ending.

Not that I’m complaining about getting RF5. Quite the opposite.

But if it had been the end (as we all thought it was until about a year ago), well, like I say. Perfect.

Well. Aside from soda can nipples. Can’t believe they didn’t fix those. Though in some ways, that would have made me sad too

Dolce has such a cool design, in both human and monster form. I’ve always kind of crack-shipped her with Margaret, for no real reason at all

Vishnal! I love Vishnal. Vishnal is pure as heck. Marrying him this time around.

Doug! My choice from last time around. Another character who looks more serious in his official art than he is in-game (well... most of the time)

And then there’s Dylas, who looks much happier here than he does most of the time. Kind of looks like he and Doug swapped bodies, actually. There’s a fanfic prompt for you.

Their ship name is Dyldo. I love them

Leon is nostalgic for me mostly because my friend and I used to get into a lot of arguments about whether or not he’s the hottest character in the game. She maintains that he is, because muscles. I maintain that muscles aren’t actually that attractive. It is a rift that divides us to this day

(He looks oddly... younger in this art though? Weird)

Sechs Empire is such an unfortunate name. Seriously. How rushed was RF1′s localisation team? All those script errors, and then this (the Sechs were the antagonists in the first game, and were only referenced in passing in the rest until RF4 - so it was a bit of a ‘sins of the father’ situation by then).

Seriously, try saying ‘Sechs Emperor’ out loud and tell me you can take this man seriously

I??? Love??? Them???

I??? LOVE??? THEM???

Still confused as to why Kiel, Xiao Pai, Arthur and Margaret are on the cover now. Don’t get me wrong, I like them, but... Amber, Dylas, Dolce and Leon made way more sense? Even the Archival Cover makes more sense (Vishnal, Clorica, Forte), as those three are all kind of Lest/Frey’s servants (well, Forte for the whole town, but still). Of those first four, all but Arthur basically lift right out of the game with little-to-no impact on the story

NO HAT TABATHA NO HAT TABATHA

I’ve always really loved this Raven picture

And I am thankful for you <3

#rune factory #rune factory 4 #rune factory 4 special #rf4 #rf4s #rf4srelease #i love these games <3

34 notes · View notes