#i think the rest of urban legends is good so far. its an arc i think jason needed but

[legofemme]

Me: i love comics :)

THAT issue of urban legends:

Me: no not you.

[filthyjanuary]

7-12 and 16-20 for the asks!

7. What do you dislike about your favourite season?

i think season 2 is the best, but as i’ve said before, my favourite is 4 solely because the first few eps i watched were from s4. i think season 4 is very solid and even though it’s a season that HURTS BAD because of everything happening between sam and dean, i think the show earns the conflict for the most part. the literal only thing that still haunts me is that the STUPID VOICEMAIL THAT GETS ALTERED IS NEVER ADDRESSED. like i hate more than anything that sam still thinks dean said those things. like i know jared’s said that sam knows dean loves him but i don’t care!!! sam /and/ dean deserve to know the voicemail was changed.

OH also literally everything with anna milton. she deserved better <3 sorry the fridged you and gave part of your arc to a man, queen.

also sam and dean should’ve found out cas let sam out of the panic room.

8. Thoughts on Sam’s demon blood arc

i love sam’s demon blood arc. his hot girl summer! in all seriousness, it makes perfect sense. mystery spot sets it up that sam goes dark when he doesn’t have dean, and s4 is the natural progression of that. i love sam being hellbent on revenge, and the blood drinking was hot sorry not sorry. like obviously the end result wasn’t stellar and the handling of the demon blood as an addiction was handled rather shittily in the show, but overall this arc is near and dear to me and if i couldn’t have the boy king, i’m glad i got this instead. and it brings up some really interesting concepts that get explored really well in fic.

9. Thoughts on the Moc arc

i hate this arc mostly because like dean was terrible...which makes sense, but even after the mark was gone it’s like... he never /really/ pulls himself out of that place. it also just dragged on for FAR too long. like it didn’t need to be like 30 episodes or however long. i do like that it gave us demon!dean being like sexythreatening, and that scene of sam cradling dean’s face and begging him to tell him that he had to kill all those people and just the general sam is dean’s colette of it all. also the end of s10 with sam on his knees and dean telling him to close his eyes is deeply fucked up and i love it for that reason and obviously that happened bc of the MOC storyline.

10. Fave underrated ep

i am highkey obsessed with 1x04 phantom traveller, 2x07 the usual suspects and 4x19 jump the shark and i feel like most people don’t really care about those episodes or bring them up much. phantom traveller is just interesting bc i think the character moments are fun and i am obsessed with plane crashes for some reason. the usual suspects i just adore because it’s really a great exploration of HOW WELL sam and dean know each other and just how alike they are. and unfortunately i really like the cop lady in this one. jump the shark was the second episode of supernatural i ever saw and for some reason something in my brain latched onto adam and never let go. i love him so much (i know it’s not really him in the ep but ukno) and i love how much you learn about sam and dean through it too.

11. Thoughts on BMOL

boring. like...the actors were not good at their accents. they wanted what bela talbot had in s3. i just didn’t find ‘the british are evil’ a compelling storyline in a supernatural show.... like girl i live in real life you don’t need to preach to me about the british. also like they set up ketch to be evil like worse than toni who i already hate because she tortures/sexually assaults sam by having him kill magda i guess? but then they end up redeeming him and he survives longer than both mick (affectionate) and toni (derogatory), like seriously one of the worst Big Bads they’ve ever had.

12. Thoughts on Mary

to be honest, i think bringing her back was kind of a stupid idea in the sense that the ENTIRE SHOW starts because of her death. but i felt like HAVING DONE THAT, trying to deconstruct her image as like this nuclear housewife was compelling and the whole clash of sam and dean who just want their mom versus mary who left her kids as a an infant and a small child and now has these grown men who are older than her needing things she doesn’t know how to give was very interesting. and i wish they’d done more with that. 

16. Any criticisms of their world building/lore

well i think everyone’s said it better than me that they can’t seem to get their stance on monsters straight at all and the show suffers for it. i also hate how like the later seasons especially just blatantly retcon so much. the prime example is the garden of eden in s5 vs s15.... the s5 version was so much more interesting and i hate that they brought it back just to destroy their own lore. the whole concept of the abrahamic god being like the ‘real’ god vs other gods just being minor annoyances didn’t like...make sense or feel good either. i also would’ve loved more exploration of like what the fuck it means to be a vessel and also exploration of other monsters/urban legends. like ok we get it ghosts/demons/vampires/werewolves sure w/e but there’s so much to pull from. it got repetitive and there’s so many other things they could’ve tried. hell the SECOND EPISODE of the show mentions black dogs and we never actually encounter one. or like chimeras... like there’s just plenty to dig into and they just get lazy.

17. What did you like about s15?

15x20 <3 also just...jack....that’s my son! MICHAEL/ADAM IN 15X08!!!! i think there were a couple moments i liked in like...the gambler and last holiday, and i thought belphagor was funny. oh! also sam’s nightmare visions were kinda fun even tho they led back to lucifer :/

18. Thoughts on Lucifer

he was a really excellent and intimidating villain in s5.... and frankly i enjoyed hallucifer as well because sure he was presented comedically but he was a deeply dark presence hanging over sam as a reminder of what he suffered. everything after that...sucked!!! it sucked!!!!! overstayed his welcome, letting him out of the cage again totally nullifies sam’s sacrifice and frankly he lost every smidge of intimidation factor he ever had. he was just annoying and whiny and pointless and sam should’ve killed him <3 fuck that guy.

19. Most uncomfortable moments throughout the show for you?

answered here

20. Define the different eras in a few lines or words (s1-5, s6-7, s8-11, s12-15)

this was meant to be short... and then it wasnt... sorry.

kripke: PEAK SUPERNATURAL. racist AND sexist but like i frankly do not care because the actually storytelling is so GOOD. COHERENT. i long for what could’ve been had the strike not kneecapped s3 and we’d gotten boyking, but hell the arc we DID get... so good. so fulfilling. aesthetics go off the charts. character dynamics so good!!! conflicts are earned!!!! there was a fucking vision here and it was unique and interesting and the show was COMMITTED TO IT. literally iconic television i love her so much. eric kripke needs a therapist but i’m glad he wrote this show instead of going to see one. 

gamble: sera THEE gamble.... overarching storylines kinda weak, but SO FUN! i had fucking fun! soulless sam is a comedian, godstiel was the last time cas was remotely interesting, like!!!! she gave us everything!!!!! gets slandered way too much by this hell fandom like yes the leviathans were stupid but the were FUN and the character moments in s6-s7!!! so good!!!! lots of excellent MOTW eps as well, which... as we know...i love. when the show lost gamble, it lost something great, i’ll die on this hill. i love u #girlboss.

carver: there’s a lot of good here and a lot i despise. dean steadily grows darker throughout the show but there’s like a real VEER into being awful in s9 that the show never recovers from. it makes dean very unlikeable for the rest of its run, mostly by virtue of the show not realizing how unlikeable it’s made dean because it needs him to always be right so the fact that he’s basically turned into john is never like....addressed in any meaningful way. some storylines (MOC!!) dragged on for too long, while others were way too short (TRIALS!!!) but ultimately i think there were some good ideas here and moments i��m fond of. season 11 is Beautiful. i love her so much. there’s some really excellent eps in s11 and the character moments are good.

dabb: i literally hate it here (jack sweetie you are not included in this assessment you’re doing great). it was just stupid. the characterizations of EVERYBODY sucked and fell flat. way too obsessed with pandering to the loudest faction on twitter. took the wreckage of dean that carver left and full destroyed him. like straight up could’ve done something meaningful if they’d bothered to address it at all but they literally didn’t ever make dean be accountable for his actions??? can’t tell u what cas was doing it was so forgettable he obviously had no purpose literally the only scenes i remember were a couple where he’s being cute with jack and that one ep where he and sam go to that old-timey town and sam gets brainwashed. sam like... exists, and his character is intact but it’s only intact because the writers that were left didn’t want to bother giving him anything meaty to do to so the were like *spins wheel* leadership arc that goes nowhere, and he just exists being kind and compassionate and putting up with too much shit. BUT HE HAD REALLY FUCKING EXCELLENT MOMENTS WITH JACK and that alone is why i think it’s worth the slog. sam/jack is my favourite dynamic on the show following sam/dean so...unfortunately based on that.... i can’t just burn the whole dabb era but seriously... way to make every character a hollow, one-dimensional shell.

send me supernatural asks

[natsspammityspamspamham]

Dino Watches Anime (Jan 13)

With the snow outside and cancellations everywhere, I have more time to kick back, relax, and not do anything. Seriously, playing out in the snow and being an absolute bum is my specialty.

Dropped

Darwin's Game 

It just seemed like Mirai Nikki but updated to smartphones instead of flip phones and with a new interface and system. Seriously, it’s like someone watched Mirai Nikki and went “I can remake this and rake in the money”. The animation wasn’t good (according to our local sakuga geek, there were less than 10 animators who worked on the 40 min premiere because of the inhumane conditions of the studio which adds to the yikes), the soundtrack was great (but I won’t watch a show just for the soundtrack/seiyuu cast), and overall, I felt like I didn’t want to put myself through a show like this.

Uta no Prince-sama

I couldn’t do it fam. I watched two episodes and nearly cried on the inside because it felt like Kiniro no Corda but with a new bland face with new bland characters. I never watched either of these fully. I tried to watch just for the seiyuu (*ahem* Miyuki Sawashiro), but imagine having your life hobbies made into an absolute joke by a character who can’t even read music and is in the composition department while her main song of choice is “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and the ikemen around her and swooning over it and writing their own songs for her. The guys all have the same faces too! They’re triangle heads that can only be differentiated by colour palette. I’m telling the difference based on voices at this point. I don’t want the ikemen, but I would like people to be into my music too ya know! You may think that I’m dropping this anime purely out of spite for the story and characters, and you’re damn right I am. 

Seasonal Stuff

Pet

This is this close to being dropped, and I don’t mean for the strong BL vibes. It’s a little cringy but not that bad (I’ve watched a lot of cringe straight romance and to me it’s all the same). It just feels so poorly constructed right now. The universe just hangs by a thread with characters I feel ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for. Everything in this anime feels so cheap. I’m giving this one more week before I give it the axe.

Rikei ga Koi ni Ochita no de Shoumei shitemita 

Okay, this anime is stupid, but we all went in knowing it was going to be very stupid. You’ve seen the screencaps. You’ve seen the cliches. Now get ready to have a pretentious science spin on it as if you haven’t seen these scenes a million times before elsewhere, and the characters (at least one of them) know it. The art... it’s present. I mean, character designs are giving the guys of Reddit what they want (especially with Sora Amamiya being really popular and singing the OP along with voicing the main character). Yuuma Uchida is also there. Nothing really worth noting here except “stay in school kids so you can become a pretentious science kid with no people skills!”

Dorohedoro

I might just watch this anime in place of “Pet” because this anime has a much brighter outlook and despite being CG genuinely looks better anyway. It’s the horror that I wanted to fill the void with (since Pet genuinely isn’t scary or innovative). Everything was pretty good with the first episode! I’m looking forward to seeing more!

From here on out, the rest of the seasonal list are the ones I look forward to the most! Get that head lizardman!

Runway de Waratte 

At first, this doesn’t seem like something that would come out of Shonen Weekly, but it inspires a good message about being who you want to be even with limitations if front of you. You have a girl too short to be considered a model and a guy who designs fashion without having the money to pursue it further. I know nothing about style, but I do know things about being short! Maybe that’s why I have such a soft spot for it...

ID:Invaded

This anime gets more interesting as we go along. I’m all into murder mysteries and things like that, and with the sci-fi mixed it, I checked to make sure I was up-to-date with this one. Each episode gives a new mystery with more details outline our jaded and imprisoned detective’s motives and backstory. I wasn’t sold on the character designs at first, but once you get over that hurdle, it’s all good. I like the psychological aspects of it too!

Kyokou Suiri 

Ever wish you had a female protagonist who was upfront about her romantic motives? Ever wanted to watch a show involving youkai? Here’s the show for you! Plus, her character design is so cute. Mamo sang the ED for this anime too. The animation is great, the story looks amazing (read ahead a few chapters in the manga), and this is one of my most highest anticipated anime for the season!

Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun

Here’s one of my favourite pilot episodes! This anime left such a strong impression on me that I went straight to my non-otaku friends going, “You’ve gotta see this guys”. The art style is consistent with the manga, and according to the not-so-quiet manga readers, we’re in for a really good anime. 

All the characters in this anime are also adorable and really simple-minded on the surface. Hanako-kun being a boy is a really funny twist on the local urban legend (I’m one of those kids who never dared to say “Bloody Mary” in the washroom so what can I say?)

Recently Completed

Hana to Alice: Satsujin Jiken

Remember Aku no Hana? This is what happens when rotoscoping has a bit more budget. This anime was slow, a little cringy, but it felt really real. The voices felt real, the characters felt real, and the story felt... mostly real. I don’t regret watching this movie art style and all because I think it captures a bit of the exaggerations of being a teenager (rumours blow up like balloons)

Sennen Joyuu

Satoshi Kon really has a certain way of telling stories. I’ve watched Perfect Blue, Paranoia Agent, and Tokyo Godfathers, and while this didn’t have as strong of a punch as the latter, this film was still strong. It shows a story of a young maiden’s resilience, perseverance, and undying love... all things I can’t relate to... but it was good!

Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo

This show was a trip. You thought it was a fanservice anime until things got really heavy. This anime was funny, it made me feel things with the themes it took on, and it made me remember that the best girl doesn’t always have to win to be a good anime. The art was cute and sweet, the voice acting was so fricking funny (according to the cast, the improv wasn’t always included but the ones that were left along with the dialogue were pure gold), and the story was exceptional for an anime which seemed to have no base whatsoever. And plus, this had something a lot of anime don’t... A CONCLUSIVE ENDING. Give this anime a watch if you haven’t. It’s melodramatic comedic romantic teen drama at its finest.

Orange

Speaking of melodramatic romantic teen dramas, here’s another one that fits that bill! Minus the comedy, more suicide, and far less cohesive plot. Imagine throwing letters into the Bermuda Triangle and having your 16-year-old selves really reading those letters. I was wondering how they were going to explain sending their letters to the past, but they should’ve come up with better BS than that. Aside from really bad plot holes, this anime was alright. It was slow... really slow. I finished this whole 13 episodes plus the movie in about 2.5 hours after trimming the slow recaps. 

The art was alright. The story was slow, but near the end (excluding the last episode and the movie) it got really heavy. It hit close to home. I struggled with suicide for years, and I felt what this character felt. Certain lines of that dialogue just hit hard. It was depicted in a way that didn’t feel as romanticized. He wasn’t saved by just one person, his trauma didn’t go away just like that, it took a group of friends and planning to help him realize that there was more to life then just regrets.

Would I recommend this? I mean, it was recommended to me, but I’m not forcing this anime on anyone... not because of the themes but because it was darn boring and cliche 70% of the time.

Still Watching

Darker than Black: Kuro no Keiyakusha

Same things apply as previous entries

Hunter x Hunter (2011)

My brother expected me to finish this a while ago but I put it on the back-burner because the number of episodes seemed daunting. Everything else is good though.

Sousei no Onmyouji

I only watched the first episode.

Boku no Hero Academia Season Four

Same things apply as previous entries. It seems like the Overhaul arc will end in the next episode or two (depending on how much they milk this).

Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu

Groundhog Day but isekai. Seriously, this is a pretty big staple in terms of big isekai. Everyone’s fighting over who’s the best girl meanwhile Subaru is trying his best not to die every five minutes. Seriously, Subaru is a champ and what I’d want out of a Mary Sue isekai protagonist. Get em Subaru. Prove to me you’re not a car.

This will be me for the next few days because it’s getting colder where I am so watch me slip on the ice and die!

[wahbegan]

Red’s Retro Reviews - Condemned Criminal Origins

Hello and welcome to the tag where I use my otherwise useless and time-consuming habit of taking very old classic games that I’ve wrung all the enjoyment out of like a troubled child with an injured bird and turn it into entertainment! Maybe one day the editor of some chic magazine will hire me to talk about how much I know about Batman: Arkham Asylum and how much I hate myself for it.

Anyway, this week I thought I’d start off with an overlooked little gem that had a bit of cult notoriety and good critical reception, but which otherwise nobody gave an ounce of rat shit about: the Condemned series. More specifically, the original game.

Now, when I ask you who started the extremely lucrative habit of live-streaming themselves hilariously over-reacting to horror games, you might be tempted to say the Game Grumps, or Markiplier if you’re younger, or Pewdiepie if you’re the kind of person who unironically uses the phrase anti-white racism. But you’d all be wrong and stupid. Also possibly nazi sympathizers, but I digress.

NO! The first college-age white boys who decided it would be a good idea to beam them fucking up a video game to thousands and thousands of people online are..........lost to history because archiving of the exact history of internet trends is such an enormous clusterfuck that for years people were convinced, and some still are, that Slenderman was a real urban legend and not something some dickhead made up for a photoshop competition circa 2009

But ONE of the first was the 4 Players Network, or 4 Players Podcast, or 4PP. I know very little about these guys, so if they all turned out to be nonces and serial killers please don’t @ me, but what i DO know, is that they uploaded a video that changed my life forever. This video was “Holy Crap That’s a Bear !” Certainly not a name that would stand out in today’s massively oversaturated Let’s Play market, but this delightful video documented these two dumb assholes losing their shit over a game. The game of course, being Condemned 2: Bloodshot. Specifically, the level in which you are chased through a hunting lodge by a rabid bear. As an aside, I looked it up, having never heard of the phenomenon, and apparently it’s very rare, but yes bears can and do get rabies, usually with just about as fatal results as you would expect. So sweet dreams!

Anyway, watching this couple of dipshits get jumpscared and mauled to death by a poorly rendered bear again and again as they were repeatedly outwitted at every turn by an entity with a few lines of programming instead of a brain was, in y’know the year 2008,  the absolute most fun a 14-year-old boy could have. Clearly it still is, but you always remember your first time, particularly when the only LPs i have watched since were a handful of markiplier videos with a girl in college who liked to get me very stoned and then put them on because she thought that counted as courtship.

A n y w a y, apart from the unfortunate and definitely a mistake innovation of streaming video games, the sequence of being chased through a claustrophobic environment by a bear which can rip down doors, break through walls, run faster than you, shrug off 15 shotgun blasts to the face without so much as sneezing, etc. seemed incredibly tense and original, an amazing concept for a game. Once again, this was circa 2008 before “Run for your fucking life” had become the norm for horror games.

So then why the fuck are you not reviewing that game?? You might be thinking if you’re still reading this which someone clearly is or my narrative voice would have ceased to exist by now in that tree falling in the woods kind of way. Well, dear reader, while Condemned 2 was better than the first game in a LOT of ways, it’s always worth taking a gander at the one that started it all. Also, Condemned 1 is, if only slightly, probably better known. Also, Bloodshot commits the cardinal sin of over-explaining the first game’s mystery and a result making it kind of goofy and ridiculous see also the entire history of the Halloween franchise, and as a result the ending is....well, a bit shit, to be honest. Finally, and most importantly, it’s not on Steam for 3 dollars, so shut up

The thing about Condemned is that while Let’s Plays and seemingly inanimate objects moving only when you’re not looking at them and unstoppable juggernauts of wanton death have now become the norm for video game horror (and thanks a fucking bunch, Doctor fucking Who, for always being what people say started the inanimate object fuckery even though Stephen King did it in The Shining in the FUCKING 70s and let’s be honest it’s just a primal universal fear and i’ll be in the cold fucking ground before that bloody show sees one ounce of credit where it isn’t due), Condemned as a whole has remained remarkably unique. Not wholly unique, the developers have heavily borrowed from genre-straddling crime horror movies like Silence of the Lambs and Se7en and in fact almost beat-for-beat stole the most infamous jump scare from the latter, but if it still ends with shit in my pants, and it does, I can’t really call it a failure.

Most of the creativity the game DOES have is in the gameplay itself, or rather one aspect of the two aspects of the gameplay. It’s the combat I’m talking about the combat, seeing as that’s basically all there is. Let’s just get this out of the way first, the forensic investigation shit is........well, it’s a bit shit. Oh yes, there’s a couple crime scenes you have to “solve” in a cursory almost a cutscene sort of way, where you have helpful premonitions about where you’re supposed to look and, as your lab tech helpfully informs you, “the system will choose which tool you need for you, so don’t worry about that!” Well, Christ kill me, thank God YOU know between the three fucking tools I have, one of which is an everything sensor and one of which is just a fucking camera which I’m supposed to use, God knows I wouldn’t have liked to have solved that mystery myself. It’s a shame because some of the crime scenes are quite intricate and yes, I would have liked to have put together myself that “wait a minute there’s a handprint in the paint here that matches the killer but the UV light shows an old blood spatter on the wall right above where he’d be sitting to make it, THAT MUST MEAN-” but nope. No you just have a premonition of the guy getting clobbered over the back of the head because the game is so terrified you won’t be able to put two and two together that it points out both the twos and hands you a multiplication table and nudges you and looks meaningfully at four every few minutes if you hesitate.

Anyway, that’s all the whingeing about the gameplay out of the way, because the rest of it is just delightful. Condemned is the rare first person game that focuses almost solely on melee combat and the almost unheard of one that does it well. In fact, it is the only example I can think of that’s not shit. Weapons all have individual stats to do with their heft and how far they can reach and how much of a man’s skull you can cave in at once with it and you have to choose between the plank with nails sticking out of it you can swing three times a second but you have to beat a man so badly with it it’s tiring just to watch and the sledgehammer, which demands a two weeks’ notice in writing if you’re planning on hitting someone with it, but will basically render every living thing in its considerable swing arc sent to the fucking Shadow Realm upon impact.

Something about the sound effects and the way the weapons in this game control really gets under my skin, I was killed by a 300-pound Subway-dwelling crazy survivalist wielding the aforementioned sledgehammer, and when I went down, I was sure I was familiar with the sound effect that played when it struck my skull, a sort of distant, muffled ringing of bone hitting metal. Wait a minute, I thought, I know I’ve experienced this in real life, how did they get this sound effect? Did they kill a man with a hammer to get this sound effect? Was I killed with a hammer in a past life? Killing people is equally fucking unpleasant as even the most vicious and inhuman looking ones don’t go down easily, and you can see them spit gobs of broken teeth and blood and god knows what, hear the lovingly researched impact noises, and almost feel the impact as you necessitate years of reconstructive facial surgery with one swing of your mighty chunk of concrete attached to a rebar. Then some of them have the gall to shakily get to their knees, not quite dead, trying to mumble something and you’re required to hit them AGAIN, which is always harrowing. To quote another underappreciated piece of media about the joys of gruesome murder: Why won’t you just die?! This is hard enough for me!!

The guns you do get are absolute balls, generally having about three bullets in them, you can’t reload them even if you find the exact same type of gun later, you can’t hold them in your inventory, and if you want an aiming reticle you have to actively turn it on in the options menu, and you can almost hear the game laughing at you for being such a shameless pussy.

Well, you now might be thinking to yourself, cheers for making the effort, but I’m not an insane person and therefore do not think the idea of a brutally beating people to death simulator sounds very enticing, but that’s the thing, it’s not really supposed to be. It does have a strangely addictive quality after a while, but for the most part it’s panicky and harrowing and grotesque and you really don’t want to do it but you have no choice, which is absolutely the best kind of survival horror. See, the combat in survival horror is always a bit of a sticking point, isn’t it? Because if you give the player too much firepower it just becomes an action game with spooky set pieces, but if you give them none at all, as is chic today, you better have loads of other surprises in store buddy boy, because the sheen on that trend has died and now you’re just likely to get slapped with the dreaded WALKING SIMULATOR sticker.

No, the best kind of combat for a horror feel is exactly the kind Condemned delivers, so of course they never FUCKING did it again. You leave every fight low on supplies, exhausted, badly wounded, and a bit sick at what you just reduced a human being’s skull to. Too often, the combat in games is, even that word “combat” it’s clean, it’s cold, it’s detached, it’s a very unique euphemism for butchering God knows how many people. I play this little game in my head when I go through games sometimes trying to keep track of how many unique, thinking, feeling entities I’ve just reduced to a mess for the janitor to mop up, and I always lose track around the third level. Condemned isn’t like that. Its violence is violence: horrible, awful, terrifying violence, and it doesn’t let you forget it. 

The graphics also add a lot to the horror if you can get past the dated polygonal weird-ass xbox 360 at launch faces and cutscenes, which is actually pretty easy once you get used to it. The level and character design is fantastic, and really adds a lot to the whole feel of the game. Everywhere you look is dark and labyrinthine, crumbling with rebars jutting out and exposed paneling and plumbing beneath holes rotted in the walls and grime and blood and god knows what just staining everything. This game is really nihilistic in tone, and you get the sense just from the graphics that you’re somewhere nobody gives a shit about, in a part of a city that’s just been left to die and rot. One almost gets the feeling moving around the fourth or fifth condemned (ohhhhh I see what they did there) building that the whole city is just a ghost town full of nobody but violent lunatics, and also that if you keep playing for too long you might get hepatitis just from exposure.

Plot-wise, I could fill another twenty paragraphs with petty gripes. It’s a bit Kill List which i’m sure is a reference you all understand in that it starts as a crime thriller about catching a serial murderer and ends in some bizarre insane bullshit halfway between Hereditary and Hellraiser, and leads you into it gently enough that you never really notice a sudden lurch.

You play as Ethan Thomas, a very boring and generic FBI Agent called in to investigate a serial killer case by two cops who are REMARKABLY blithe about murdering people, and it’s a bit jarring in today’s political climate. Though distrust, fear, and hatred of the police isn’t exactly new, and violence amongst police officers is brought up at one point, albeit in a loading screen, so honestly I can’t be arsed to speculate on what level of self-awareness we’re operating on here. Regardless, it’s bothersome.

“Oh yeah, this place is full of addicts, hopped up on something, I think, just shoot ‘em. What? Lost your gun, eh? That’s fine here’s a fire axe go nuts, kid, we’ll deal with the paperwork later”

Anyway, you are ambushed by a man you believe to be the killer for.......no real reason, really. He was spying on you checking out the crime scene, but we just established this place is full of squatters, what if one of the 8 people I murdered on the way into this ambush was the killer??? Case solved! 

Anyway, needless to say, without wishing to spoil, the dude IS the main antagonist the yellow eyes are a helpful giveaway, and he takes your gun and swiftly shoots Generic Beat Cop and Generic Dick with it, then throws you out a window, whereupon some other asshole whose main role in the game is to be enigmatic and plot-convenient, you know, one of THOSE characters, spirits you away from the scene, making it look like you just killed two cops and fled.

Now, in real life, as we all know, a cop can’t be indicted for murder even if 50 people saw him do it, but in this world, it means you have to go on the run from the FBI (not your lab tech, though, who is somehow assisting you from the lab and sending confidential data to your phone unnoticed??) while trying to solve the murder.

Meanwhile, in the background, in an “I’m sure this isn’t important and will in no way inform the last level of the game going batshit bonkers” kind of way, all of the people, including the cops, in certain dilapidated and neglected areas of the unnamed City City appear to be going what is medically known as balls-to-the-wall kill crazy, and birds are dropping dead from the sky by the thousands. Even you, protagonist, are prone to horrible screaming nightmare visions coming right the blazing blue fuck out of nowhere and that you never feel the need to comment on or go take a lie-down. I’m sure it’s nothing.

The voice acting is what you’d expect from this era of video games i.e. not good and the writing has an absolutely DESPICABLE habit of having characters tell Ethan things he should already god damned well know for the sake of gameplay or exposition, leading to my current theory that Agent Ethan Thomas has some kind of horrible head injury and can’t remember anything from over 2 minutes ago like Guy Pearce in that pretentious movie where he accidentally kills his wife and then runs around for two hours terrorizing random-ass people about it.

The game never full-on plays the AND THE MAN YOU’VE BEEN PLAYING AS WAS CRAZY THE WHOLE TIME card and leaves things a bit ambiguous, but after caving in the 15th vagrant’s head and the 7th vision you’ve had of being murdered by some Cenobite-looking motherfucker while conducting an unsanctioned investigation during a suspension prompted by you presumably murdering the shit out of two guys, you start to think this may not be standard FBI protocol. 

It’s all a bit hard to swallow is me point, a bit hard to sympathize, and a bit muddy if we’re supposed to or not. But you know what? It certainly isn’t boring, and I’d be lying if I told you it wasn’t effective. This game is now one of only two to have genuinely given me nightmares, and I think it’s rather telling that after I played the hallucination part I had the nightmare about, I was having genuine trouble remembering if something happened in my nightmare of it or in the actual version.

Condemned is batshit crazy, hilariously easy to write off as “that game about killing hobos”, and very, very dated. But it is genuinely harrowing and unpleasant, and was clearly genuinely made by artists with the intent of saying.....errr i’m not exactly sure what, but SOMETHING! It’s about as far a cry as you can get from the Triple A crawling with microtransactions like your MCM is with crabs milk-you-for-money-until-your-udders-bleed look-at-how-shiny-we-are games, and even a lot of indie horror games who think it’s a measure of a masterpiece being able just to constantly trigger your fight-or-flight response again and again and again so you can make a hilarious Let’s Play out of it not to name any names Five Night’s at Freddy’s. It’s a relic of a different and i think a better time in gaming history, where big-name publishers were still taking chances and hadn’t quite yet worked out the formula for how to distill games into their most skeletal, malnourished, corporate, addictive, glorified gambling form.

Also it’s 3 dollars on Steam and you can finish it in like ffffffffucking...two days? So really why the fuck not. I have no idea how to assign numbers to things i’d probably give ir a 7 or 8 or 4 out of 5 stars but i’m bad at systems like that, just play it if you give a shit. If nothing else, a bunch of people snapping it up out of nowhere will really fuck with marketing, which is always a noble pursuit

[thingsareswinging]

Shine on: ⭐

For your audacity, and since the reaction to this chapter in particular has been unusually positive, you get: the entirety of chapter 9 of Red Hand.

I Should Have Got Up To Stand

The title of this chapter, as with every title of every chapter, comes from a song I happen to have been listening to at the time, and not bothered to think any harder about. In this case, Elton John’s Kiss The Bride.

Like 70% of my Katara/Ty Lee playlist is Elton John songs, do not even think about @ing me.

Mai pushed her broom across the immaculate floor as her boss had his breakfast. He got a lot of mail, and liked to read it with a cup of tea. He read the interesting bits out loud, which was convenient, as it saved her the trouble of learning to pick locks.

“Admiral Zhao’s armada has begun its siege of the Northern Water Tribes. Barring anything unexpected from the Avatar, who has apparently taken refuge in the city, the attack is expected to be decisive. Zhao expects to proclaim victory before the end of the week.”

He turned to his next little message, and paused, delivering his second piece of news with a degree of seriousness that had been entirely absent when he’d been discussing the imminent annihilation of a sovereign nation.

“Princess Azula has been killed, or so the Navy is reporting.”

Mai didn’t miss a beat. “A just reward for traitors to the Fire Nation.”

Master Piandao set his cup down with deliberate care, frowned slightly to himself, and fixed her with a tired look. “Mai. I killed one hundred firebenders rather than go back to the military.”

“Yes, Master.”

“I am the most wanted man on Fire Nation shores.”

“Yes, Master.”

“I know you know this.”

“Yes, Master.”

“So I know you know you don’t need to keep acting like the Minister for Propaganda in my own home.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Because, and I honestly don’t know if this matters to you at all, I find it exhausting.”

“Yes, Master.”

“As long as we’re clear.”

Master Piandao was … not what she’d expected, when she’d gone to him for employment. What she had expected wasn’t totally clear, but if she’d been pressed, she might have admitted to anticipating a dead-eyed sociopath, or an open revolutionary full of plots. What she’d been confronted with was a slightly effete weirdo who complained of headaches a lot and didn’t do much of anything, except the occasional bout of calligraphy. Though to be fair apparently the headaches thing was only when he talked to her for too long, and to be much fairer than Mai had ever been in her life she deliberately wound him up for no reason other than to stave off boredom.

She couldn’t help it, although honestly she’d never tried to. He was just so… safe. There was no menace in the man at all. She’d never even seen him pick up a sword. Maybe the real Master Piandao had been dead for years, or was an urban legend or a regular legend or a mass hallucination, and this guy was just taking advantage of a terrifying reputation. Mai could live with that. He at least made sure she kept up with world events, and she’d been careful to never ask how he knew the things he did.

Speaking of, Azula was dead, was she? Mai would reserve judgement until she’d seen a body, and even then she’d only be moved to a solid maybe.

The Zhao thing was frankly a lot more of a concern, because while nobody deserved things to be going their way less than Fire Lord Ozai, Admiral Zhao was a close second, as far as Mai was concerned.

She didn’t regret leaving, after Zuko’s fateful Agni Kai, but she occasionally wondered if she should, if only for Ty Lee’s sake.

I’ve said it elsewhere, but this scene really only exists to dilute the grim nonsense that is most of the rest of the chapter- I did like using it as the way to signal It’s Siege Of The North Time, though. Also as the way to indicate that maybe the audience shouldn’t take the fact that Azula  got drowned a couple chapters ago too seriously.

It does demonstrate a weakness in my dialogue- when I come up with these quick back-and-forth exchanges, I tend to completely drop any kind of staging.

I also like using the phrase ‘effete weirdo’ as a way of describing Master Piandao.

–

Yue knew that her life was measured in heartbeats. Had known for so long she didn’t even always recognise the odd tightness when it twisted in her chest for what it was, what choked her breathless in the dark when she couldn’t help but think of all the things she’d never do.

So it hadn’t mattered much to her when her betrothal had been decided. And probably she should hate Sokka for making her realise, making her notice how desperately, smotheringly unfair it was, how miserably unhappy she was-

-But he was so insistent and vital and trying so hard to impress her, like her opinion mattered, like she- a girl that did nothing but stay in her room every second she wasn’t reciting lines other people had written for her- was someone he had to impress.

He’d shown her the sky and he’d made her laugh and she wanted to kiss him and he didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t know she mustn’t think what he was planting in her brain when he showed her the horizon and offhandedly insinuated how easy it was to leave.

She’d almost believed him, before that horizon had suddenly been ringed in iron.

It was a bit of a challenge to try and a: give Yue a character arc in one chapter, especially considering b: I knew I was going to try and give her an internal motivation that is only barely suggested by canon, and c: she’s a naturally (or has been turned into a) passive person. First Draft Yue was markedly different, in that she was Mad As Hell. This version of the character basically didn’t survive into the actual chapter, but she gets a couple lines here and there. She mostly ended up just really resigned, which I think works better but does make me quite sad.

–

“I’ll go.”

When the plan was announced, and volunteers were asked for, she didn’t hesitate, shooting to her feet, demanding they recognise her, but she knew it was pointless the second the stunned silence fell across the hall. Of course. Of course.

She’d had to fight this whole city from the moment she’d arrived, snap and bite and claw every shred of the respect she knew she’d earned, that had been handed to Aang and Sokka without a thought, and she knew nobody in this city was going to stand up for her, and Master Pakku was going to shake his head and that was going to be that and angry tears were pricking at the corner of her eyes- 

A hand landed on her shoulder. She hadn’t noticed Sokka standing up, beside her, glowering out at the assembled crowd.

“And me,” he affirmed, daring anyone to say anything, eyes locking on to High Chief Arnook and Katara could feel herself starting to grin as to his left the Princess started to shake and Pakku scowled in irritation and Arnook blinked.

“Very well.”

It wasn’t until later, the warpaint prickling against her forehead as it dried, that she realised what she’d gotten them both into. The way Aang had looked at them, like he’d thought he could spare them any of this, had made Katara’s chest ache and wish for time enough to talk, to tell him how it had been killing her to watch him launch himself beyond the walls all day while she sat and watched, but there was work for them all to do.

She’d make time, afterwards. For now, she and Sokka had a job to do.

Did anyone notice what happened here? I had to add an entire extra day of fighting and have Arnook declare what the mission actually was about before he got volunteers (you know, like how volunteering is supposed to work, go fuck yourself, Arnook), in order for this to make sense- Katara only wants to volunteer for the mission because that way she gets a shot at either murdering Zhao, or getting a second crack at persuading Ty Lee to abscond. In canon, this scene happens before the armada arrives.

Normally I obsess over justifying how things like this deviate from canon, but I couldn’t do it here, so I just hid it behind a [and so]. Nobody appeared to notice, or at least care enough to mention it.

And Katara will always, always assume Sokka has her back.

–

These morons were all going to die, and it’d be hilarious if they weren’t also going to drag Katara down with them.

He’d thought, at first, that now he was around real warriors from a tribe that seemed to actually have thrived in the last century rather than get whittled down to a handful of idiots too stubborn to die, that he might learn something, see professionals at work.

But their chief was an idiot trusting this mission to a worse idiot, and although the embarrassment and anger still rolled around his stomach he would still consider breaking Hahn’s nose one of the more righteous things he’d ever done.

Sokka does better in the fight against Hahn than in canon. It’s not just because Hahn deserves to get his nose broken, I promise. Sokka’s escalating violence is something I’m doing on purpose, for reasons discussed below.

Except it’d gotten him kicked off the mission. Which would have been okay, because, again, they were all going to die because their idiot leader couldn’t even pronounce Zhao’s name and they were going to try to blend in-

Except Katara was still going.

He couldn’t protect her. But that, it turned out, had been true all along.

He exhaled slowly, and tried not to notice the way Yue deliberately didn’t look at him.

It was fine, it was okay, he’d deal with it the way he’d learned to deal with everything: crush it up small and wedge it somewhere it wouldn’t get in the way of doing his job.

He followed her gaze, out from the balcony of the palace, across the city, out towards where Aang had catapulted himself into the Fire Nation armada for another day of putting off the inevitable.

There wasn’t anywhere to run to, after this. That worried Sokka. This was the first time they’d been forced to stand their ground for more than an hour, and they were not doing too good at it.

Aang was just… he was so small, so disarming, everything about him screamed vulnerable and Sokka had been trying and increasingly failing to hold the kid at arm’s length all winter, not because he didn’t trust him still, but because the alternative was worrying himself sick over this kid who was currently, at this exact moment- he could see the smoke rising up over the battleships- trying to fight an armada completely by himself without hurting any of them too badly.

Katara called him a pessimist for the things he said out loud. He didn’t know the word for the feeling he got when he looked at Aang and saw a corpse that had just gotten lucky so far, but he wouldn’t voice it for all the money in Ba Sing Se.

Aang and Sokka’s relationship is so great in canon, because they have radically different opinions about the things that matter, but they get along so well all the same. But by this point, outside of Avatar State Berserk Rage, Aang hasn’t done all that much to convince Sokka he might, you know, live. This is one of the few things Season One Sokka is willing to think honestly about.

–

There wasn’t a lot to do but sit around and wait for sunset. They’d wanted to start their infiltration in the daytime, and even after Katara had explained why that was ridiculous, they hadn’t actually backed down until she’d pointed out that the full moon would make her that much stronger. Which let Hahn, in a way he probably thought was subtle, frame it like they were all waiting for her.

Sokka had hated this guy from the second he’d started talking, and Katara was beginning to trust her brother as a judge of character.

“So,” she said, offhandedly, as Hahn diligently set an edge to his machete, the rest of the men doing some other similar activities to make them look like they weren’t just killing time, “when was the last time you fought a firebender?”

It wasn’t a totally cruel question, she told herself, even as his head bent over his whetstone and his ears started to flush. If, somehow, the answer had been anything other than never, that would have been good to know. She’d seen her brother learn how to fight, in a rough kind of way, on their trip north, learned herself, but she knew she had an advantage he’d never have, and he’d learned the hard way not to charge a firebender with a spear, not if you didn’t have a fantastic plan.

But it wasn’t just Hahn that was looking uncomfortable, Katara noticed, with growing discomfort. All the men were suddenly looking a lot busier than they had a second ago, like they were afraid she was going to ask them an uncomfortable question next.

Katara suddenly had the awful realisation that she was probably the veteran in the room.

“Hahn,” she asked, more seriously than she probably meant, “was Sokka breaking your nose …the first fight you’ve ever been in?”

His lack of an answer was answer enough, but he didn’t even have the good sense to look scared, just annoyed, possibly because a girl was having an opinion where he could see it. Like all those times he’d sparred with someone who would pull him up off the ground when they won and congratulate him on a fight well fought somehow counted. Honestly, Katara and her brother had at least hunted their own food before Aang had showed up- Hahn looked the kind of pampered that only had only ever thrown spears at practise dummies.

Oh, oh this guy was going to die. He was going to die and get them all killed. If she didn’t do something about it.

Another ‘light’ scene, continuing the theme that Katara Gets No Respect In the North. Also marks the point at which Katara determined that Hahn had to live, which still irritates me. But if he died, there’d never be a point at which he realised Katara was right about everything.

–

The sun set early this time of year. Sokka guessed they should all be grateful that Admiral Zhao had been stupid or arrogant enough to attack in winter at a full moon. Firebenders got a lot less impressive at night. Not not-dangerous, but… less dangerous.

Aang had come back from beyond the wall, now the sustained assault was more manageable. Which was a result. But he’d looked even more ragged than he had at sunrise, and as Sokka fussed around making sure the kid at least drank some soup, he tried to not make a big deal out of the way Aang’s head bobbed down to his chest before jerking suddenly upwards again.

He should probably let the kid sleep. He should probably do all kinds of things.

He stood to one side, as much a part of the scenery as he could make himself, as Yue sat next to Aang and started to speak.

Sokka: oh man Aang’s going to absolutely die, so I won’t bother getting attached

Sokka, also: Aang drink some soup and make sure you go to bed on time

–

Zhao spared a cursory glance at the distant ice wall, and the soldiers being repelled from it, clearly visible under the moonlight. He wasn’t too concerned. Most of them weren’t even firebenders, only needed to keep the pressure on the defenders, keep them tired, hold them in place for the true assault.

He pulled his cloak around his shoulders, but not so close that it wouldn’t billow appropriately, and made his way carefully to the front of the small landing craft, as his hand-picked men filed in behind him. They were the best he had, for now. He’d have better soon.

He wasn’t amazed that his plan had never occurred to anyone before, but he was smugly reminded that victory was so often a matter of audacity.

Zhao grinned, and cracked his knuckles, to set the right tone. He’d originally had a longer speech planned, but Pouhai Fortress had been instructive in a lot of ways, and so he’d boiled it down to the one sentence that mattered.

“Gentlemen,” he announced, to the crowded landing craft, turning back to face his men, one foot rested dramatically on the prow in a way that would be easy to replicate for the portrait later, “prepare for infamy.”

If he had waited, coincidentally, about as long as his first draft speech would have taken, his strike force would have collided with a series of sleek Water Tribe canoes heading in the exact opposite direction. Which would have been embarrassing all round.

Zhao’s first appearance in canon has him getting beaten up by a teenager that has already been established as Not A Credible Threat. Zhao’s last appearance in canon has him getting beaten up by a lemur. Zhao gets no respect, and this is an important aspect of his character.

–

Yue sat on the warm grass, and watched Aang’s knees fold underneath him, as the tattoos on his head and peeking out beneath his sleeves filled with soft light, like one of those strange fishes that lived in the deepest parts of the ocean where the sunlight never reached.

At least this way, she’d had some part in it. If she was doomed to die to save the moon, at least this way she’d been the one to get the Spirits involved. That didn’t matter, except to her, possibly.

Across the pond where Tui and La chased each other endlessly, by the only entrance to the grotto, Sokka was standing, awkwardly, trying not to look at anything, and yeah, she got that. She-

She saw him look up suddenly, head cocked towards the entrance, and pull his machete free from its sheath with terrified urgency, as the sounds of fighting reached her ears.

Oh no.

Angry Yue makes a small appearance here, deciding that she’s going to get at least a little agency, in a way that isn’t about trying to live.

Yue makes me very sad 100% of the time.

–

“He’s not here?” Hahn proclaimed, indignantly, as Katara’s grip tightened on the front of the crewman’s coat. The crewman looked appropriately intimidated, as the ice that pinned him to the wall began to crawl up towards his throat.

“He went out, took a few landing craft with him,” he elaborated, shallow-breathed, and Katara could feel the dissonance radiating off of Hahn, the confused relief clashing with the disappointment that he had somehow managed to live this long.

“Back to the boats,” Katara snapped, turning to face the huddled warriors in their out-of-date armour. “Go. Maybe you can still catch up to him.” They couldn’t, not without Katara there to speed the canoes along, and speaking of: “I’ve still got something to do here.”

If Katara had expected Hahn to seem conflicted at the thought of leaving her on an enemy ship with no obvious way to escape, she would have been disappointed. But she hadn’t, so she wasn’t.

In the silence left in the wake of fifteen men trying not to look like they were running for their lives, Katara turned back to the gentleman who had been so cooperative earlier. He flinched under her gaze.

“I’ve already told you, the Admiral isn’t-” he protested, but Katara let her teeth show.

“I’ve got a couple other questions, actually.”

Katara’s interrogation techniques are questionable and would constitute torture in a world where frostbite exists, but I get to indulge in a little rank hypocrisy and just not talk about that, since it’s not the point of the fic. Presumably she let the guy out after asking him for directions, at which point he was killed by a fish monster, so nobody learned anything here.

–

When they told this story, in the years and decades that followed, he would ensure they got this scene right, as he burst into the grotto, the home of two Spirits that had dared come where they were not needed, his remaining soldiers at his back-

He got three strides onto the grass before there was a commotion behind him. As he turned, he saw one of his lieutenants go down, blood spraying from his neck, a young savage bearing him to the ground teeth bared in a snarl typical of his kind, but before Zhao was forced to interrupt his moment of triumph, another of his soldiers took initiative, knocking the boy to the ground with the butt of his spear, and impaling him through the stomach with the blade of it in one smooth motion.

Right. Where was he? Ah, right, triumph.

A native girl with startling hair screamed as they approached, but that was only as notable as the colour of her hair- as she was tackled to the ground before she could come within ten feet of him, Zhao’s eyes were suddenly fixed on an unexpected development.

The Avatar, lit up in pale fire like he’d been the night he’d torn Pouhai Fortress apart, cross-legged on the grass, apparently insensible. For an instant Zhao couldn’t breathe, but as the seconds ground on, it occurred to him that if the boy couldn’t hear the screaming, then he was probably safe to approach.

“An unexpected bonus,” he mused, for the benefit of- no, his lieutenant was dead, wasn’t he?- for the benefit of posterity, then. “We’ll take the brat with us. He’ll be a useful hostage, and killing him would just reset the cycle anyway.”

“Admiral, what about the girl?”

Zhao turned to see that two (it had taken that many? He despaired, he honestly did) of his men were holding the girl on her knees, one with his knife to her throat. Apparently they weren’t able to figure out the last step on their own.

“Kill her,” he instructed, hoping to convey with tone alone how much he resented them wasting his time with this kind of triviality.

As the blade flashed across her neck, he turned, satisfied that there would be no further interruptions, to the pool.

Zhao does not care about our heroes, or about his men dying, or really anything other than how cool this is going to look in the press release.

I deliberated a lot on how bloody to make this- at one point I was considering reversing the injuries, and leaving Sokka with a permanent speech impediment from a slit throat- but in the end that felt just barely more gratuitous than I was willing to go with.

–

Koh was curling around him and telling him everything he didn’t want to hear- the Spirits couldn’t help, they were in danger too, and Aang couldn’t even think about that because he had to concentrate on playing the game, keeping his temper and his face slack and suddenly the spirit howled, louder than Aang could contemplate, more sound than a mind could hold, and he was flung backwards with the weight of it and a long, impossibly strong black-and-white hand was reaching into the hollow and grabbing Aang by the scruff of his neck and wrenching him backwards, flinging him towards himself and back towards his body in a rush of wind and light and he opened his eyes.

Zhao, looming over the pool, eyes glinting with dark joy, the lifeless body of Tui dropping from his opening hand, flopping back into the water, the screaming still echoing in Aang’s head, the black and pulsing rage overtaking him as his eyes rolled over the red-armoured men filling the grotto, to Yue-

Blood spilling from her neck, falling forwards. The screams grew, welling up from the ground, the water, drowning everything else in the world.

Aang surrendered.

As he unfolded, fast, faster than he’d ever moved before, as though he could make up for being too late, Zhao turned to look, jaw dropping, and there was something in his eyes that Aang never wanted to see again. And then his arm was grabbed from behind, wrenched upwards, exposing a gap in his armour, just below the armpit, and Aang recognised Sokka just as he jammed his long knife into Zhao’s side once, twice, and pulled it back bloody before plunging it into the Admiral’s throat.

One of Sokka’s fists was black with blood, and he let the knife stay with Zhao’s body as it toppled, and Sokka sank drunkenly to his knees, hands screwed up over the hole in his stomach.

Aang didn’t remember much after that. Not until later.

A lot here.

1- Aang’s rampage getting deliberately tied to the fact that he thinks he watched Sokka die is a deliberate twist, and sets up the epilogue for this book.

2- Zhao very nearly lived to be a threat in book 2, but I nixed that almost at the last minute. In the first draft it was Katara that killed Zhao, as he tried to flee the city, in a scene that much more closely mirrored Zhao’s canon death. After that, he, as I said, almost became an antagonist in book 2, but the problem there is that a: it’s only possible to have Zhao be a semi-credible threat when he’s up against book 1 Gaang and their low levels, and also b: it futzed with Ty Lee’s character arc in ways you can probably figure out

3- This, currently, is the peak of Sokka getting his Old Ultraviolence on. I didn’t want to make it… ‘unrealistic’, and have him winning fights due to him being So Cool And Strong, You Guys, but, and I don’t think I’m surprising anyone too much here, a lot of this fic is about the expectations placed on what, in our society, would be considered children, in the context of a hundred years of no-holds-barred war. Sokka has always been kind of the Boromir of the group, doing what he thinks society needs him to do, so, knifemurder.

Season One Sokka is a much more serious cat than Season Three Sokka becomes, and that’s not a bad thing- admittedly, the humour wasn’t always to my taste, but there’s a reason it happened- by Season Three, Sokka isn’t under the same kind of (largely but not entirely self-inflicted) pressure he is in season one. He’s come to terms with letting other people share the work, and so is freer to relax a bit.

–

Yue had reduced the world down to the ten feet between her and the body of Tui. There was light, and sound, and pain, too much of all three to understand, and all she could do was drag herself forward by her fingertips and hope that she was heading in the right direction. She thought she was, but it’d be embarrassing to die crawling away from her destiny.

She couldn’t breathe but she had to force herself up and her heart rattled in her chest but she was so close and there was Sokka, sunk on his knees, unmoving, surrounded by bodies, eyes wide and white and agonised and she needed him now as she dragged herself forwards and she thought she saw him look to her but she had to drop down again, the grass against her cheek and her neck screaming across a jagged cut.

She gestured, muzzily, waving her hand towards the pool, no longer able to lift her head up off the grass, desperately hoping he’d understand, somehow.

I wanted to thank you, she thought, blearily, as the world went dark, you made me feel like a person.

His hands tangled in her coat, pushing her forward with a screech of agony- this stupid corpse she had to drag around- but her hand was trailing in the pool and if she could just find the body before her heart realised she was dead-

The final burst of Angry Yue! ‘This stupid corpse she had to drag around’ is a nod to blatantly stolen from one of my favourite fics of all time, but it’s a Homestuck fic so I figure the Venn diagram is disparate enough that I can get away with it.

Also, Sokka figures out what Yue’s trying to do pretty quick. The reason for that is because he knows the pool’s water is super good at healing. He thinks she’s trying to save herself.

–

Ty Lee was jerked out of fitful sleep by a hammering on the door, ringing iron echoing through her tiny box that Zhao still thought was a prison.

For a few blissful moments, she ignored it, buoyed up by the vague knowledge that Zhao had other things on his mind right now, but as the seconds wore on and the sounds of fighting, muffled, drifted through the outer wall, she knew it was only a matter of time before- the banging started again, quicker, and Ty Lee swung her legs over the side of her bed, and stood up, bare feet sticking slightly to the cold metal of the floor.

She slid back the peephole and blue eyes stared back.

Ty Lee was backed up away from the door in an instant, but there was a voice-

“Hi, uh… I just realised I don’t know your name?”

A voice Ty Lee recognised. She slipped back to the door, with less caution than she should, because this couldn’t be happening, right? This kind of thing didn’t happen. Not to her, anyway.

“It’s you,” she breathed. “The waterbender.”

“Yeah. I’m here because you didn’t say no.”

She hadn’t said yes either. Saying either would have required more courage than she could muster.

“I guess I didn’t,” she replied. But that didn’t make sense, nothing about this made any sense at all. She was in the guts of a battleship in the middle of a siege, and this girl was somehow here, and she was supposed to believe it was for her?

Was this about the kiss?

The thought screwed Ty Lee’s stomach up in knots, but before she could even imagine how to approach that, the girl tried the handle. It didn’t give.

“It’s locked,” Ty Lee pointed out, hopelessly. “I don’t have a key.”

“That won’t be a problem, trust me,” the waterbender responded, without a second’s hesitation, and that was it, that certainty in her voice, the same certainty she’d used to offer to take Ty Lee away, in the festival, when she’d had a real chance to get away. She’d not taken it. “You coming?”

Now? She was at sea, with Zhao on the verge of an overwhelming victory, and nowhere to run. Running now would be a terrible idea. Ty Lee was pretty sure that everything she’d ever done had been a terrible idea, though, so that balanced out?

“Okay,” she said, quietly enough that she wasn’t sure the waterbender had heard, that she could still take it back-

“Alright stand back,” -okay never mind apparently the girl was very ready to go, and as Ty Lee took half a step back frost blossomed on the hinges and they cracked and screeched and snapped, the door dropping downwards, revealing a sliver of torchlight, and a proffered hand.

Ty Lee has never been good at turning down a commanding voice and the promise of Adventure. 

I considered doing a bit where Katara couldn’t bend and didn’t know why, but that would have killed the pacing, and also made Ty Lee’s decision to go with her seem even more of a bad idea than it already looked. We all know that no moon= no waterbending, so there wasn’t a need to explain why Zhao killed a fish anywhere in the chapter.

I won’t be able to pull that kind of trick forever, assuming that at some point we will jump the rails of canon, so I’m making full use of it while I can.

–

The absence of pain was jarring, or would have been jarring if she was still alive enough to understand pain, or surprise.

Sokka was on his knees in front of her, slick with blood, eyes shining as he looked at her like a drowning man staring one last time at the sky.

I like this simile for a lot of reasons.

If he was looking at her, that meant she was real after all. She’d not been sure. But he was looking at her, had been looking at her the moment she’d met him, and that kind of constancy was reassuring. It’d been so intimidating, at first, the attention of this strange young man who’d been places and fought monsters she could hardly imagine, who’d showed her the sky and acted like there was nothing wrong with her wanting to leave, like there was nothing wrong with her wanting.

A thousand fractal futures splayed in front of her, and he was hers in none of them. If she’d still been human, she might have been disappointed.

There were… words, words she should say, but she’d never been good at marshalling them on her own and she didn’t have any now, as he looked up at her through tears and blood with an expression on his face fit to break her heart again and the part of her that was-had been-human couldn’t stand it any longer and she leaned in and kissed him before she learned why she mustn’t.

There was an awful sound in his throat as he leaned into her, and it occurred to her that he was dying. Well. If she was meddling, she might as well do it properly. Through his breath into her mouth, she concentrated.

Pull, she instructed, and his ruined organs began to thread themselves back together, blood flowed, muscles knit and skin folded back and when she was done he was as whole as she could manage. She pulled back, smiling, letting him know it’d be okay, there was nothing he could have done.

He didn’t look like he believed her. Possibly it was too much to try and tell him with a smile.

Originally, Yue got a lot more temporal in Spirit Form, but honestly it was too disorienting and not really supported by canon and, most importantly, not relevant, so it mostly vanished. The only line that survived that draft was ‘A thousand fractal futures splayed in front of her, and he was hers in none of them.’

That line survived because, real talk, it’s a contender for Favouritest Line I Ever Did Write.

An idea I wanted to get across is that Yue is now both more and less than human- she’s kind of blissed out on immortality, and doesn’t have a connection to her emotions any more. In a Discworld Death kind of way, she Thinks Sad, rather than Feels Sad.

I have no idea if Yue can heal, but I don’t care.

–

The sea was rolling, the ship was lurching, salt water was being flung across the deck, there were firebenders running this way and that -thankfully too busy to pay attention to her right now- and in the middle distance the sea had risen into the form of a giant monster that was smashing the Fire Nation fleet apart like so much driftwood, which Katara couldn’t even begin to figure out.

Katara had officially run out of options.

“Hey!” she yelled over her shoulder as she turned. “You ever fallen in freezing water?”

The girl’s eyes were saucers, terror blazing from them, fixed on the glowing titan. “What? On purpose?”

“Ever! Do you know how-” the ship convulsed, and okay, no time- “never mind! Just hold on!” she ordered, pulling the girl close, wrapping one arm around her waist, gratified to feel her arms lock around Katara in return. Good. She needed a hand free for this.

The little Sokka that lived in her hindbrain was telling her that this wasn’t the ideal moment for testing out new ideas, but it was probably this or drown or pray. Katara wasn’t good at praying, and she wasn’t keen on learning how to drown.

As the ship bucked in the wake of the monstrosity slamming a fist on a ship half a mile away, Katara sprang, launched through the air by the momentum of the rolling deck, and she felt the girl’s arms tighten around her as she reached out towards the rolling blackness of the sea and-

-and the sea reached back, and grasped her hand.

I kind of wish I’d done more with Fishmonster, but honestly, again, it would have messed up the clean parallels between Yue and Ty Lee, which I was proud of and didn’t want to risk knocking over.

The visual rolling around in my head the most here was Luke at the end of Return of the Jedi, hauling Vader to the shuttles while stormtroopers run around, not paying any attention to the main characters.

[twatd]

6,000 Years of Murder – Part Six: Things Fall Apart

Tim: The Wicked + The Divine #36 finally gave us a definitive list of every damn Recurrence that has occurred since Ananke first started exploding heads, so we thought we’d take a walk through the annals of history and provide some context for what was happening at the time. Welcome to 6,000 Years of Murder.

Our sixth octet of Recurrences bridges the gap between BC and AD, and sees two great powers rise, in the form of the Han Dynasty and the Roman Republic, only for them to crumble into bloodshed and chaos. Feels like an appropriate arc for WicDiv, no?

188BC – Eastern China When we last left China, the Zhou dynasty was starting to crumble back into a series of smaller territories, but since then, the Qin imperial dynasty has reunited the country. Now, we’ve begun the Han dynasty, considered a golden age in Chinese history, with China’s majority ethnic group still calling themselves the ‘Han Chinese’ and modern Chinese script often referred to as ‘Han characters’. 188BC sees Emperor Hui of Han die aged just 22 (maybe he was in the Pantheon?) and his domineering mother Empress Dowager Lü take the throne, having already been the power behind it.

Also occurring since we last checked in on China? The birth, life and death of Confucius, one of China’s most influential philosophers. His teaching, which emphasised personal and state morality, justice, sincerity and social harmony, will form one of the central schools of thought for the rest of China’s history. It emerged during a period called the Hundred Schools of Thought, a time of great cultural and intellectual expansion that occurred during the Warring States era. Alongside Confucianism, important Chinese philosophies like Taoism and Legalism were also developed, and their interplay will shape China for centuries to come.

96BC – Etruria The Roman Republic has been chugging along for around 300 years at this point, so we should probably pay some attention to it. As the name suggests, Rome is still a republic at this point, controlled by a Senate and giving at least the tip of a hat towards the notion of democracy popularised by the Greeks. However, little Julius Caesar, currently four years old, will soon put an end to that and transform the already successful republic into an Empire that will conquer much of Europe, the Middle East and beyond.

It’s worth noting that this Recurrence doesn’t take us to Rome itself but Etruria, the cradle of an earlier culture in Northern Italy that was assimilated into the Roman Republic around 300 years earlier. I couldn’t nail down a concrete reason for this choice, but my current working theory is that, as one of the first cultures absorbed into Rome, Etruria represents the way that the Empire will go on to suck in and process so many of the surrounding civilisations.

4BC – Judea When a series is focused on humans ascending to godhood throughout history, cultivating great followings and bringing about change before dying young, it makes sense that we ended up in Judea in time for Jesus’ birth (yes, contrary to what you’d think, Jesus was born between 6-4BC, to allow Herod to be King upon his birth). As you can imagine during this period, despite travelling almost 1,500 miles from our last Recurrence, we haven’t outpaced the Romans, who annexed Judea in 63BC, shortly before transforming from a republic into an empire.

Herod was designated “King of the Jews” shortly after the Roman conquest, gaining military control in 37BC. He dies just as we visit, in 4BC, and will split Judea up amongst his sons, who are largely inept and rejected by the people in favour of more direct Roman rule. Even then, Jews living in the province still maintained some form of independence, able to judge offenders by their own laws. This independence was also the root of several rebellions that brewed in the area over the next 150 years, eventually resulting in the Romans renaming large areas to try to erase the historical ties Jewish people had to the region. That didn’t really go over very well.

88AD – Teotihuacan We’ve crossed over into Anno Domini - the numbers start going up from here! To celebrate, let’s take a trip to the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas and the sixth largest city in the world: Teotihuacan. Located in a sub-valley of the Valley of Mexico, and just 25 miles from modern-day Mexico City, this metropolis boasted advanced building techniques including multi-storey residential blocks. Like other Mesoamerican sites, the urban planning was incredibly precise, oriented to the progression of the sun and stars, making the entire city a living calendar.

Quite who constructed Teotihuacan is unknown. Archaeological evidence suggests it was a multi-ethnic city, with distinct quarters occupied by the Otomi, Zapotec, Mixtec, Maya and Nahua peoples. Originally, it was presumed that the Toltecs were behind initial construction, based on colonial-era texts that quote Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs. However, the Nahuatl word “toltec” means “craftsman of the highest level”, and so might not refer specifically to the Toltec civilisation. It’s now generally assumed that settlement began around 300BC by the Totanac people, with the city reaching its zenith around 450AD.

181AD – South East Asia So far, our dalliances in Asia have mostly been centred on modern-day India and China, but that leaves large areas unaccounted for. Merchants throughout the region are busy establishing the Silk Road to China, but trade is also occurring via sea, taking you close to the Mekong Delta in present-day Vietnam. Right now, that area is part of the Funan network of states. Like Teotihuacan, modern understanding of Funan and the people that founded it is heavily debated. A lot of evidence, including the name we give it, comes from a single report by two Chinese diplomats, and given that China was often trying to conquer this part of the world, should be taken with a pinch of salt.

There’s a boss-ass folktale surrounding the region’s founding which involves a genie, a magic bow and a snake princess, but we can probably (unfortunately) also file that under “dubious”. What we do know is that Roman, Chinese and Indian goods have all been excavated in the area, suggesting a truly powerful trading centre. The Mekong Delta was perfect for both rice cultivation and fishing, further helping the area’s economy, and tactical conquests and colonies meant that at points, the kingdom controlled the entire trade route from Malaysia to central Vietnam.

271AD – Eastern China The Han period in China may have had a massive impact that continues to today, but it had to end at some point, that point being around 220, not long after the awesome Battle of Red Cliffs (see the great John Woo film starring Tony Leung for more details). Prior to this, there was already considerable infighting between various kingdoms and warlords as the Han dynasty weakened, and with it dissolved, we reach the Three Kingdoms period - a slight misnomer given that each of the states (Wei, Shu and Wu) had an emperor claiming the right to rule over all of China. By 271, the Shu have already conquered by the Wei, who shortly afterwards are usurped by the Jin dynasty, and in 280, the Jin will conquer the Wu, reuniting China.

While the Three Kingdoms period may only less than 100 years, from the Han Dynasty weakening to the Jin emerging triumphant, this period is the most bloodthirsty in the country’s history. As much as 60 per cent of the population may have been killed due to high conscription levels, brutal massacres and widespread famine. Despite this, the period also saw considerable advances in technology, include improvements on the repeating crossbow, mechanical puppet theatres and non-magnetic compasses that used differential gears. Still, Ananke’s visit seems remarkably tranquil for such a period of upheaval.

364AD – Eastern Europe The Roman Empire is still doing its thing, but change is on the horizon. Constantine has ended the persecution of Christians after converting, and has shifted the Roman capital to New Rome AKA Constantinople to be closer to his rivals the Sassanid Empire. Meanwhile, out in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe, a number of nomadic warrior tribes have formed a loose confederation called the Huns. While their best known leader Attila won’t be born for another 40 years, they are doing their best to disrupt things for both the Sassanids and the Romans, attacking settlements across Eastern Europe.

The Huns attacks didn’t come out of nowhere - it’s likely that the El Niño Southern Oscillation caused a megadrought in Inner Asia, causing them to migrate to the edges of their own lands. Whatever caused their sudden attacks, they terrified the Romans, who associated them with the Antichrist and Gog and Magog (whom Alexander the Great had captured behind mountains, according to legend). Those superstitions probably weren’t helped by a massive earthquake that hit the Eastern Mediterranean the year after our visit, destroying parts of Crete, Greece, Egypt, Libya, Sicily and Cyprus.

454AD – Germania Our first Recurrence that we’ve seen before, in the 455 Special. Persephone’s death takes place the year before the Roman Lucifer went all “meat-harpy”, and her placement in Germania suggests she may have been part of the Vandals, who we see invading Rome in the Special, rather than a Roman citizen like Lucifer and Bacchus. By this point, the Roman Empire has split in two following the death of Theodosius I, with the Eastern part to remain going as the Byzantine Empire, and the Western part (where we are) soon to fall.

Rome, as we find it, is beset on all sides. In the East, our old friends the Huns are attacking, Attila having just died and divided the Empire among his sons. The Visigoths are sometimes allies and sometimes enemies, depending on what they can get away with. Anglo-Saxons are settling Britain, and in Germania, tribes including the Suebi, the Alans and the Vandals have been ransacking towns and establishing their own kingdoms. The Vandals, led by Genseric (who also appears in the Special) establish a kingdom that includes Corsica, Malta and parts of Africa, and while originally thought to be part of the destruction of Rome, are now thought to have acted as inheritors of many Roman traditions. They’ve certainly inherited Ananke’s efficiency at disposing of heads.

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[lotrewrite]

8/12 Chat Recap

Only a week late, but here's the recap from last week's chat! Since it was a lot of positive commentary rather than suggestions, I've mostly copied and pasted the comments themselves, albeit with removing the names attached. So know that people really liked it :)

Question for the hivemind:

Intro:  we should probably make a standard for how we do the intro - both who it is, and WHAT it is (though obviously episodes will have variations). Thoughts?

General Comments: each and every single episode I read so far I was like OMG THIS IS MY FAVORITE EPISODE, and then i read the next one and was like NO WAIT THIS IS THE BEST ONE EVER and so on I want to give a shoutout to Stephanie Fisher for playing test audience! does anyone know who she is on tumblr? I want to, like, send her hugs; it's so nice to see someone who doesn't know what's going on comment everything is wonderful? *raises hand to say exactly that* i think overall there's less tweaking than I thought and also i'm super happy with the concrit i got one thing I'd like to say is that the style is largely consistent, except for a couple outliers each episode is legit good fanfic AND good TV i'm loving everything. it's not just better than the show, it's all really great on its own And I think we've managed to get consistent characterizations as a maybe off topic note, I'm super happy with the commenting because I actually felt super awkward about my episode, but having people comment how awesome it was helped so much with self esteem I'm super happy with the commenting because I actually felt super awkward about my episode, but having people comment how awesome it was helped so much like, people are so good at spotting things that don't make sense or that aren't consistent it was actually the first time i wasn't disheartened by getting crit, since it was actually really useful and pointed out valid stuff (btw I want official statistics of how many beers Mick drinks and how many people he headbutts) we have SO MANY awesome women btw are we sending the showrunners a link or sth? to show what you can do when you really care about the show and the fans? when we're done? I'm all for it

just something I forgot to mention earlier re: Stein and his perspective on changing time - he goes from ep 1 where he wants to change it for personal reasons and goes to this point where he's the opposite (which is the perspective I followed in ep7); I would blame that on episode 2, i.e. episode 1: let's change things, episode 2: I changed things, things went wrong, after that, he's all "we can't change things, look at how bad I screwed it up", as an echo to Sara's arc If we do a season 3 rewrite wishlist: go back to visit Ching and the Chinese pirates, a Nate cameo, Austria episode, French Rev episode, Israel episode

Episode 1: Nate is wonderful; he's a history nerd, he's well-meaning, he interacts well with the rest of the team; omg he hasn't met Len yet! like, if we weren't bringing in so many guest stars, we could have had him stay for the entire season and I wouldn't have a problem with it about ep1, did we ever resolve the issue of the nazis having the knowledge and the material to blow up NY? It was provided by Eobard. Is there anything stopping him from giving them more? The fact that he's a speedster with the attention span of a gerbil? yeah, I think the key thing is that he left no more Eobard, no more disruptions

Episode 2: before anything else, BAMBI WAS AMAZING. <3 BAMBI.  I think we all love Bambi. can we keep her on the Waverider next season? team mascot! i really thought those Ray scenes were so good. btw, I noticed over the course of the episodes that we have a really fantastic Ray arc going on, starting here. His emotional isolation and struggles with identity are just spot-on every episode. Like, I'm remembering why I actually liked Ray in season 1. Seeing Ray (rich white Christian privileged tech guy) have to deal with basically Mick's storyline is so much more emotionally satisfying.  It doesn't feel like punching down, you know? yes, Ray's isolated, but it's not because the other Legends are dicks. it's because he went through trauma and identity isuses What did people think of the Crusades arc in episode 2? So far so good :D I like the argument about faith vs logic

Episode 3: The JSA is awesome! god, yes. They have so much more character! I love Amaya and Rex' relationship. I was just about to say I actually ship it this time re Ray: him having pulled up pictures of the Bamibiraptor species because he misses Bambi? MY HEART GOD YES and THAT FIRST GLIMPSE OF LEN that was such a cool moment with Nate XD Nate and his grandfather was a fantastic moment.The Nate and his grandfather scene was ON POINT and also Nate's hemophilia was handled so much better too. like, I REALLY liked Nate by the time we were done with him Amaya was done really well, I think. it's kind of funny; we all, working mostly separately, gave Amaya a more coherent personality than the actual show did Amaya and Sara are awesome together too! Amaya and Sara had a real honest budding friendship everything made /sense/ and you even threw in a historical woman for us For a possible title: Heirlooms? Stein is on team "don't change things" in ep3 because of the consequences in ep2. Connection can be made clearer.

Episode 4: YOU MADE ME CRY. gooood title. very good title indeed! I thought maybe Sara was a bit very trusting of Eo in the bar scene, even though she knew there was an evil time traveler out there, but maybe she was a bit drunk? yeah, drunk and depressed was what I was going for

Episode 5: VIKINGS! YESSS! I LOVE IT SO MUCH all the viking myths being undercut, with Ray as the audience proxy! it worked so well! I knew from the moment Ray gave Mick the horned helmet Mick would headbutt someone with it XD I was so looking forward to it I really liked the Jax-Gunlod relationship in ep 5 – same - yeah, that felt really natural to me. JAX IS SO DAMN GOOD. they? actually seemed to like each other? Jax and Gunlod were so sweet - if we can revisit her too I would be delighed! also I CRIED THIS EPISODE TOO, the bonfire scene :) it was so well done; it was the send-off to Len we all deserved the singing magic was awesome oooooh, and Jax using the football terms!!! and Mick finding viking friends :D And Lisa! (Forever in the Lisa Snart fandom over here...) YES LISA IS SO AWESOME

Episode 6: speaking of awesome Lisa I thought the heist was basically perfect one comment, kickingshoes drew Dr Metcalf as a woman, but in the episode they seem to be a man LEN *heart breaks* that scene where Mick and Len are talking, and Mick is like he should've known he'd see Len since that's where Len belongs..............;_; the "it's where he belongs" scene was PERFECT That was the only crit I had, really - he shouldn't say he's alive so soon I loved the worldbuilding so much I also really liked the Sara-Amaya relationship, Yeah, I know we agreed to keep things ship-neutral for the most part, but I think if people are into Sara/Amaya they are going to be REALLY happy with this rewrite. XD also, it felt properly cyberpunk?? VERY AWESOME one last thing @ ep6: LOVE THE TITLE

Episode 7: my personal little wish is that maybe we could have a line of dialogue in episoed 7 where Amaya tells the Nerd Squad about time travel side effects and maybe mentions what happened to her? I liked that you added in the other supergirl folks, and you made mention of the green lanterns and Alex and Mick getting along! that was all so fun!! XD I think there's a few points that could use some more dialogue like, where it just says Felicity says X and Cisco feels Y i want to SEE those scenes I loved the Green Lantern nods! And I agree, putting into more of a script format would be good I think. oh, I loved Barry's "NOT AN URBAN LEGEND!" yelp for the dominators, their motivations kept changing! I think just stick to the first "they're evil expanders" yeah, keep it simple "Now we’ve got aliens, and time ships, and – uh, whatever you deal with, Oliver –” “Ninjas,” says Oliver, wearily. NEEDS TO BE ON A TSHIRT

Episode 8: I love Constantine And Zed!! ? I feel like once it'll be more fleshed out, it'll be easier to comment I did like Queen B's intro. I was really excited by the, kind of, cinematic image I got during the Queen B scene? Like, I think she has such a Look and is so powerful that we can really make her intro visually gorgeous, since this is supposed to be a visual medium

[b4kuch1n]

The Half Cat

TW for animal body horror; mild spoiler alert for mogami arc

general warning for weirdness and length. srsly dont expect anything going into this. honestly how has this thing become so fucking long I am delirious

also you can read this on AO3 just fyi

There was one point in those months when Shigeo welcomed any kind of change.

The TV was out of question: it had to stay downstairs, there wasn’t much on at that time of the day anyway, and he didn’t want to wake his family up just because he wanted to hear the statics. The big tuner was in his parents’ bedroom, so he couldn’t use it either. He contemplated saving up for a small radio, but with how frequently his power acted up lately during mealtime, his pocket money would have to go towards compensating for silverwares first.

Ritsu saved him from worrying over that, first of all by returning the spoons to their original shape whenever an accident like that happened, then by teaching him how to listen to radio on his phone. “The quality’s not too good, but it’s an alternative while we’re saving up for something better,” he said after pointing out to Shigeo the way to change the stations. “I think the pro-wrestler league has a website too, all of their podcasts should be there in case you need to find an older one… If that comes up I’ll help you with it. Don’t worry, nii-san.”

The pro-wrestler podcasts weren’t totally a lie. Everybody in the Body Improvement Club was at least mildly interested in them, after Onigawara introduced them to Musashi. Of course Shigeo wasn’t as familiar with the sport itself as Onigawara or Kumagawa, so in the end the podcasts became not much more than white noise to him; but as they were, they suited him just as well as a blank station sounding nothing but statics, so there wasn’t anything he could complain about.

He put his phone under the pillow the first few nights, the volume on as low as possible, then Master Reigen gave him a pair of headphones after their next venture. “Don’t listen to music for too long,” he told him, his tone spoke of someone who had made that mistake before. Shigeo believed him. There wasn’t any reason not to.

He listened to the podcasts through the night. The night was longer than what he used to remember of it.

There was something in the district. Something new.

It wasn’t the bus stops. The bus stops were pristine clean but always smelled of presences. Somehow presences made everything a bit older, a bit more private to an anonymous party outside of his knowledge. No trace stayed at the bus stops for too long; winds chasing after the last buses of the day always carried them away before any night lurkers cared to pursuit them.

It wasn’t the lampposts. They were like dust piled up, and people saw through them most of the time. The part that would ever attract attention to them was far enough above eye level to avoid scrutiny most of the times. They couldn’t carry indications of something new.

The bushes thrived and the tree kept standing quietly. Doors opened and closed. Pen scratched on paper.

There was something new.

Shigeo had gotten into the habit of listening to the radio while walking home. He started off looking for something cheerful, but then he realised he wouldn’t pay much attention to it anyway, so by this moment anything was good to him. The headphones Master Reigen gave him couldn’t keep out much of the noises around him, so as long as he still paid some attention to the road, there wasn’t any real risks.

Kurata had been talkative recently. Shigeo was glad of it, mostly. She came into club meetings with brimming enthusiasm for some urban legends said to be rather popular recently, convinced they were aliens in disguise. “We need to find a way to communicate telepathically as soon as possible,” she said to Shigeo, then put another chip in her mouth. She continued after swallowing. “We just gotta establish communication. Then it’d all work out fine. Just tell them they’re welcomed here with open arms.”

Her enthusiasm didn’t lead to a breakthrough in their ‘researches’, but it had to run its course before dying down. Shigeo was okay with hearing voices he was familiar with, so he didn’t stop her. For the rest of Telepathy Club, it was already par for the course.

When there wasn’t any clients at the Office, Shigeo put on his headphones. He could hear the keyboard and the cup of tea being put down on the desk every now and then through the music. It suited him just as fine.

His power kept acting up during dinner. That shouldn’t be something new.

“You shouldn’t listen to music that late at night,” Ritsu told him one day on their way to school.

It really shouldn’t have come to Ritsu telling him this, really; he hadn’t been replying to people as fast as he used to do. He hadn’t noticed Ritsu being disturbed by the sound at night - these headphones didn’t work too well anymore. Good thing he put the volume on low anyway.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Must’ve been keeping you up.”

“No, it’s fine for me,” Ritsu said. “It will disturb your sleep, that’s all. Putting music on while sleeping like that isn’t good for you.”

What he thought at that moment was it’d still be an improvement, but that seemed to be something people might worry over. So he said “I’m okay like that, don’t worry” instead.

He put the volume on even lower that night. Ritsu still worried. That was just him.

Kurata told him about the urban legend she was still interested in lately.

Shigeo could imagine it.

It was a cat. Well, half of one, if they could go by what the footages and the articles online said. White fur, chopped off tail, tiny human hands where paws should be. A stomach full of fireflies still lighting up feebly, if what the article said about that sagittal anatomical plane that should’ve stayed hypothetical was to be trusted. Usually spotted running down dark alleyways, the witnesses (four in total) having only two or three seconds to observe.

Some people had been digging up alleyways and crossroads to find the source of the legend. “Fools,” Kurata said, scrolling down the blog currently opened on her phone leisurely. “This can’t be a haunting. This description fits an interdimensional being too well to be anything else. Just you wait and see.”

Shigeo just thought the creature shouldn’t be disturbed like that. It wasn’t harming anyone, even if it was an urban legend. At least not until people started thinking it brought death or misfortune, like the human-faced dog. Beliefs were powerful stuffs.

He forgot most of it by the end of the day. It was hard to retain things nowadays. Almost like his brain was set on a monotonous track towards silence; if he didn’t actively try to remember details, they’d fall away as easily as dust. He didn’t want that - details should worth more than dust - but his wants wasn’t much to the rest of this show either.

Between that venture and the day he started listening to the radio, his dreams typically went like this:

He woke up alone. The streets he walked were quiet. The punches and kicks landed, but he didn’t feel them. People’s faces were muddled and faded. Some of them laughed, but he didn’t hear it. He was always on the ground sooner than he anticipated - or maybe his perception was just warped, this wasn’t real, and the road here was just too uneventful and too quiet to remember, this wasn’t real, and it broke out too quick, and it wasn’t real-- and someone pulled out a knife, and it ended up in his hand. So he swung it.

Then he woke up. Alone.

He didn’t remember much of his dreams since he started using the headphones.

Dimple came in through the window while he was putting his notebooks away. “There’s something new in the district,” he said, floating idly near the desk lamp. “I don’t know what, but it sure leaves a strong smell.”

“You haven’t seen it?” Shigeo asked him. He shrugged.

“Haven’t run into it yet. Might just be a new kind of pest - you gonna meet it the moment it causes a ruckus, knowing you and your ‘master’.”

Shigeo pulls the zipper on his school bag closed. “Maybe it’s the new urban legend. It seems pretty popular lately.”

“Oh, you’re interested in those things? Didn’t think you’re that kinda kid.”

“Kurata-senpai tells me about it everyday.” Shigeo didn’t know what the kind of kid the spirit spoke of was. “People’ve been seeing it around a lot more frequently. Kurata-senpai said someone in her class saw it yesterday on the way home.”

“Don’t tell me you believe all of that,” Dimple said.

“It doesn’t matter if I do or not,” Shigeo told him.

“Yeah, well, guess you’ve got a point there. Maybe that’s the thing I smelled, if that’s what urban legends smell like. Can’t tell. It’s been quiet around here.”

That reminded Shigeo - the Office hadn’t had a venture in a while. Most of their problems now were Master Reigen’s specialty more than his, and he had had a lot of opportunities to listen to the radio while in the consultation room. That wasn’t very usual, considering their record streak before.

Maybe that was the something new he had been feeling. Maybe.

There was a stray cat near their house. It started coming around recently.

Shigeo had seen it around before, in other parts of the city. At least he thought so - it looked and acted like the same cat, but it never stayed near him long enough for him to actually get a good look at it. It always appeared a bit ragged and roughed up, and it could act really difficult, but he liked to think it trusted him somewhat.

The cat was just a rustle in the bushes near his window at first. Soon it showed up near the pipes outside his window sill, looking inside with a wild look. It would run off the moment someone went near the window.

Shigeo made a bowl with an old plastic bottle. He put the milk he couldn’t drink outside for the cat.

It came around for the milk, but never stayed.

Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night, startled by something. Might be his dreams, might not. He didn’t remember enough of them to tell.

What he remembered of them usually went like this:

He woke up alone. Statics filled the air. The streets buzzed. The punches never came, and he just walked the streets until he was on the ground, in front of an alleyway. The dusty lamppost stood between him and the entrance. The light flickered the way usual household light bulbs did, but slower.

Then he woke up, alone, the newest podcast playing on loop in his ears. The light was always off.

It really wasn’t much to go by.

“Whatcha listening to?”

Shigeo blinked slowly. It took him a moment to look up again. Master Reigen was looking at him from the desk, intertwined hands propping up his head. Music was still playing on the phone.

“Mob?” Master Reigen called again.

Took another beat for his mouth to work. “It’s just… music, shishou.”

Master Reigen stood up from where he was sitting. “You’ve been really into that lately, huh. ‘S gonna hurt your ears if you wear those headphones for too long. Put them away, we’re going out for something. How does oden sound for you?”

Took him a moment to answer. “It’s… good.”

The evening didn’t feel real without his headphones on. He ended up home, under his blanket, staring up at the ceiling before he knew it. Maybe his perception was just warped.

Kurata showed him another footage the next day. It was low-quality and shaky, and the only thing they could make out from the whole two minutes and thirty-seven seconds of it was a yellow-green-glowing white feline-looking small figure dashing past near the end.

“It’s awful fast,” Kurata remarked. “Even cats aren’t that fast.”

Shigeo and the club let her go on with her researches. By now she had filled up a whole notebook with citations, descriptions, images she printed out, notes, and drawings. She read them what she had collected, and somehow her enthusiasm was just a bit contagious. It kept the club’s spirit higher than usual.

In the end Shigeo ended up spending more time with the Telepathy Club than the Body Improvement Club anyway. While he was present for training, they talked about the podcasts in passing words. Onigawara and Kumagawa liked the same wrestler. There were more than 70 episodes of those podcasts by now.

Shigeo didn’t really listen to them anymore. It was now an unending track of mismatched sounds playing whenever he put on the headphones. It matched the noises outside well enough to blend into the environment whenever he stopped paying attention. And since the sounds didn’t make any real sense anymore, he was always inclined to do that.

“You haven’t been listening to the radio,” Ritsu said to him on a day when they went home together.

Shigeo was a bit slow to answer, “I… haven’t.”

He had. The headphones were always in place when he woke up.

Ritsu worried anyway. Shigeo wished he would stop worrying, but his wishes weren’t much to this show anyway.

After a night of rain, Shigeo put the makeshift bowl of milk on the window sill instead of near the pipe.

The cat was a bit wary, but soon it jumped up on the window sill to get its usual meal. Shigeo sat at his desk while it lapped at the milk. It looked dirty and malnourished, its tail (the tip chopped off crudely and healed just as messily) kept near its legs, as if it was trying to stop it from swishing around nervously.

When the milk had been finished, the cat looked up at him, body still as a statue. It dashed off the moment he stood up. He filled up the bowl again anyway.

The cat was back again while he should be sleeping: in the morning, the bowl was empty.

“I think I saw the Half Cat just now,” their dad told them over dinner. “When I came across the convenient store on the way home.”

That was what the urban legend was called now. Shigeo found that name a bit more amusing than scary. Ritsu wasn’t into urban legends in general, so he didn’t care much.

“I can’t believe you actually believe those stories,” their mom said with a sigh. “I’ve had enough of the neighbors telling me about that thing. It’s like the whole city had run out of things to talk about.”

“Well, it’s big.” Their dad shrugged. “The story, I mean. Not Half Cat. Still bigger than the normal half of a cat, but not huge.”

“How’d you know? All it does is running past people, it seems. They can’t even tell if it’s a cat or not.”

“Well it didn’t move when I walked past it,” Dad said, absentmindedly tapping his chopsticks against the bowl. Mom scowled at him to make him stop. “It just lie in the alleyway, glowing like a bunch of fireflies together.”

Ritsu’s face told Shigeo that he didn’t much like that image. “Don’t say that during mealtime,” Mom scolded Dad. He just shrugged. “Sounds so gross-- Shige!”

Shigeo looked down at his hand to see the spoon twisted into a knot. He blinked, then it seemed to vanish from his hand and into Ritsu’s. Another blink, and it was back into his grip again.

“Sorry,” he said, hazily, and wiped the spoonful of soup off the table with a piece of paper towel.

Statics woke him up.

He could barely catch the end of the buzz, but he remembered it even when his eyes had opened. Taking a deep breath, he held onto the memory of that sound, the rattles of empty sounds, so similar to rain he could almost lose it again in memories of downpours instead.

When he looked to the window, the cat was sitting there. It held itself awkwardly, as if it could tip out of balance at any moment, the short, ragged tail pointing straight up. Warm light from the lamppost outside made its ribcage look almost transparent. The bowl of milk sat in front of it idly.

The cat jumped off into the night the moment a knock sounded on his door. “Nii-san?” Ritsu’s voice cut through the wood, through the statics from the headphones. He took them off before standing up to open the door.

Ritsu looked inside. “I heard statics flaring up.”

Shigeo blinked. “My phone has never done that before.”

“I don’t think it can, actually… You’ve been listening to the radio while sleeping again?”

“I… have.” He didn’t know how else to answer. “Just to fill the silence. I sleep better when there’s noise.” He slept more when there was noise.

Ritsu looked at him. The silence seemed unreal after the buzz in the air died. After a moment Shigeo said, “Let’s go back to sleep,” and Ritsu apologized for waking him up, and he said he had been woken up by the statics anyway.

He checked out the bowl of milk after Ritsu had returned to his room. It was still as full as when he refilled it earlier. When he woke up again in the morning, it was empty.

Master Reigen bought a pair of speakers for his computer at the Office. When Shigeo arrived that day, a music station was playing.

“Oh, Mob, you arrived,” Master Reigen said as he walked in. “We’ve got a client in twenty minutes.

The music playing in the Office that day was probably the same as what Shigeo listened to on his phone everyday, but somehow it sounded different. He could actually hear the notes. They went through the shift without him putting on his headphones.

When he was about to put them on again for the way back, Master Reigen stopped him. “Let’s go out for some takoyaki. It’s been a while.”

It might really have been a while. Shigeo couldn’t recall.

“Weirdly clear night, don’t you think,” Dimple said while he was doing homework. He couldn’t concentrate enough on his homework or the spirit’s word to put his effort into either of them, but he tried anyway.

“Mm-hm.”

“Yeah, usually by this time of the year pests are already crawling around everywhere.”

“Maybe it’s the urban legend,” Shigeo replied, almost automatically, after a beat.

“You seems really for that huh.”

Shigeo was lost somewhere between his homework and Dimple’s voice; his head filled up with statics.

The cat came early. Statics flared right before it jumped up on the window sill.

Shigeo sat up, statics roaring from the headphones covering his ears. The cat stood under the light of the lamppost, dust floated up from its fur, glowing under the light.

Unplug it, a voice sounded hazily through the pouring buzz. Shigeo did what it told him to.

The statics stopped.

The cat stared at Shigeo, tail swishing around lazily. Then it looked down to the plastic bowl, and blinked slowly.

“You can drink it,” Shigeo told it. It tilted its head in a strange angle. “It’s milk.”

Something sounded in the headphones, like a person trying out a mic by tapping on it.

Shigeo stood up and went to his desk. The carton of milk was in his bag. He took it out, went back to the cat, tore open the corner carefully, and made the motion of tilting it to pour milk into his mouth. “It’s drinkable,” he told the cat.

It only stared at the already in the bowl, then at him again.

Taking a deep breath, Shigeo tilted the milk carton into his mouth again. Statics were picking up in his unplugged headphones as the taste washed over his tongue. He swallowed. His stomach didn’t seem to agree with what he just did.

The cat looked at him again, then jumped off the window sill into the night, leaving him standing there with an opened carton of milk in hand. For a moment the wind seemed to pick it up, but before he could register that sight, it was already gone.

He left the milk carton on the window sill. The bowl was empty by morning, and the carton nowhere to be seen.

“I heard statics again last night,” Ritsu told him on their way to school.

“I did too,” Shigeo said.

“Do you have any idea where it can come from? It’s just weird for it to happen like that in the middle of the night.”

Shigeo almost answered the urban legend by default, but then he thought twice about that and replied, “No idea, sorry, Ritsu.”

Kurata was quiet today.

Shigeo didn’t like it, but his will wasn’t much to this show anyway.

Inugawa told him while Kurata scrolled furiously down the blog opened on her phone, “Some sick assholes harmed a cat to set up for fake evidence on Half Cat. They’re all cuffed and hauled back to the police station by now, but President was still upset. Understandable, really. Who would even do that?”

Shigeo couldn’t say anything, even though he had the answer.

“At least they can’t do it again,” Inugawa said thougthfully. “There aren’t many stray cats on the street anymore. I haven’t seen one in a while. I don’t know where they’ve gone to, but if it means those kinda people can’t get their hands on them, I say good for them.”

After their first venture in a while, Shigeo found himself across the table from his Master, a half-eaten okonomiyaki in front of them. The TV of the store was on; the current show sounded like a period drama.

The store wasn’t as quiet as he thought it to be.

“You should sleep more, Mob,” Master Reigen said through his mouthful, pointing the chopsticks in his hand at him. “It’s important for someone your age.”

“I’ll try,” he replied.

The cook turned the TV off, and everything fell off his memory along with the sounds.

The cat didn’t drink the milk.

Shigeo drank it instead.

“Somebody in my office got into an accident,” Dad told them during dinner. “They were chasing after Half Cat. I think the thing doesn’t wanna be found.”

Shigeo soon found himself looking down that the mess his twisted spoon make, and Ritsu doing the same.

At this point of the months, Shigeo welcomed any kind of change.

His first dream without the headphones in a long while went like this:

He woke up. Alone. Statics filled the air. The streets buzzed with a jagged beat. The punches and kicks landed, and statics bursted out every time they collided with his body. Laughters blended into the background noises so well, they could almost be mistaken one for the other. Soon he found himself on the ground, and a knife in hand, and it weighed down on his hand like statics did on his mind. And he swung it.

And then he woke up. Alone. Statics roared in his ears.

The cat stayed just long enough for him to look at it, then it dragged the milk carton off the window sill and into the night.

He didn’t know if he slept any more that night or not. He couldn’t tell.

He came by a cat laying on the ground near a lamppost on his way home from the Office. Its fur was splattered with something like white paint and fluorescent powder. The tail was clipped short in a crude manner.

He stayed to look at it until it could stand up and walk away.

He didn’t dare putting the headphones on again.

Master Reigen let him sleep for a while on the Office’s couch. Or, to better recap the situation, he nodded off while listening to the music sounding from the speakers and Master Reigen let him be.

“You can’t be of any help like this,” he said when Shigeo woke up, startled by a burst of statics. “Go home, have some sleep. We have a big case tomorrow.”

What he wanted was to stay here, in this music, where there was noise - the right kind of noise - but, his wants… they aren’t much. They really aren’t.

“Go, before this music grates on your mind like it’s grating on mine right now,” Master Reigen said. Shigeo knew he was right. “They play these kinds of crap on the radio nowadays. A high trafficked road would sound better than this.”

Ritsu came by his room late into the night. Neither of them wanted to sleep.

“The statics didn’t came tonight,” Ritsu said. Shigeo didn’t really have anything to say to that.

When they both had settled against the wall near Shigeo’s desk, Ritsu pulled out his own phone to put up a podcast. It was one of the pro-wrestler league’s. Shigeo heard the mentioned wrestler’s name for the first time in… as long as he could remember.

They didn’t have any sleep that night, but Shigeo didn’t forget it.

“A kid from Saruta’s class almost got his head crushed while trying to follow Half Cat to the back of the Salt Factory.” Inugawa said, flipping through his comic while Kurata tapped on the table agitatedly. “He’s in the hospital now. They say he’s gonna recover, but if you ask me, it’s kinda scary.”

Master Reigen’s case led them to the other side of the city.

They skidded to a halt when the spirit they were after took a sharp turn into an alleyway. Statics filled the air as Master Reigen bounced forward to follow it suit, but the look on Shigeo’s face probably was what held him back.

“What’s it, Mob?” He asked. “Wait, I hear statics.”

His voice blended into the buzz.

Shigeo went into the alleyway after a burst of statics. His vision almost fizzed along with the air. The light at the end of it flickered like a household light bulb, but slightly slower.

Their client’s treasured ring lay on the ground. Shigeo picked it up.

The light approached them before they came to it. Out of it walked the cat, paws looking too much like human hands firmly on the ground, mouth opened wide, showing the jagged jaws.

Statics roared.

Master Reigen noticed the milk carton on the ground the same time Shigeo did. “Let’s get out of here,” he said to Shigeo, before statics drowned out everything else he said, and the steel balcony right above them creaked slightly. It didn’t fall until three days later, when someone else was under it to take a picture of the alleyway.

Shigeo drank his milk carton. He didn’t remember the dream he had in the morning, when he saw the bowl of milk still stand on the window sill, full to the brim.

Master Reigen brought back to the Office a cat bed covered with old rugs and tree barks and filled with milk cartons. “Can you feel anything from this thing?” He asked Shigeo.

There was nothing to feel. The cat bed was empty and silent. The sour milk smell was overwhelming.

Master Reigen found a way to burn it.

He wasn’t sleeping when the cat came into his room.

It was white under streetlight and moonlight, and even though there was nothing keeping its intestines inside, they stayed in their place perfectly. Its stomach buzzed with feeble light.

He was silent when it dragged the headphones to him. He was silent as he put them on and it jumped back onto the window sill, he was silent when he followed it into the night.

The street was quiet, even though statics buzzed in his headphones. His foot didn’t touch the ground - he shouldn’t soil his socks, they’d be hard to wash - as they moved deeper into the city.

They stopped at a bus stop. Shigeo could smell the spilled milk.

The cat looked around for a while, then sooner than he anticipated, it came back to him. It jumped on the bench, trying to get his groggy attention, and when it did, it opened its mouth to let a burst of statics out.

Shigeo remembered the cat bed. He almost couldn’t find the words to form the sentence he needed to say, but he did it in the end. “They’re... gone.”

The cat yelled a silent high-pitched mic noise. It hurted his ears.

“They’re… dead. They’re dead. There’s nothing…”

His voice was drowned out by the statics.

The cat nudged on his hand. It was shaking. It was vibrating with the lamenting buzz.

Please, he heard through the headphone. Someone tapped the imaginary mic. Please.

“I don’t want the other one to be all there’s left of you,” Shigeo said, not really sure where he got the words. Statics flared up.

But of course…

The cat nudged on his head again, and this time he rubbed what was left of its head. Like a zipper bag zipped open, light flowed out of it with his hand. When he took his hand off the tip of its tail, it had already dissolved completely.

The light from the lamppost flickered slowly.

He went home. The streets were quiet.

He woke up alone.

He left the headphones at the Office. Reigen put them away.

Ritsu came by his room again.

They slept.

The Half Cat came by his window one more time, and this time there was a carton of milk waiting for it. He watched as it wrapped its hands around the carton and lifted it up, then threw him a dark look before running off.

People learned to stay away from the urban legend before long. Kurata’s enthusiasm dried up just as quickly. “Maybe it’s better for it to stay away from people,” she said one day, while reading something on her phone. “Can’t trust the welcoming open arms of some folks.”

Sounds returned slowly to him, and with them memories. He couldn’t remember his dreams anymore, but the rest he did. He could keep himself from spacing out again. Ritsu worried a bit less.

The stray cats returned to the streets when they didn’t pay attention. So did the pests. Dimple was happy.

He drank his milk again eventually.

The cat never came back.

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4 Lazy Character Shortcuts Hollywood Can’t Stop Using

The best movie characters are usually the ones whom we sort of identify with. Whether they’re a simple middle-class teenager or a grizzled Matthew McConaughy playing a nihilistic detective trying to find aliens from the future inside a black hole, they work because when they make decisions, we get it. We learn who they are and understand them. Sometimes, though, writers don’t really have time for that shit. Instead, they use some kind of shorthand which (they hope) will have the same profound effect with far less effort. This usually doesn’t work at all. Particularly when …

4

Sudden Sacrifices Are A Substitute For Heroism

What is more powerful than one human being sacrificing their own life to save others, usually to the accompaniment of an orchestra that sounds like it’s about to parade through the screen? You could probably base a whole religion around it. In the world of Hollywood screenwriting, sacrifices can also be written in not to provide a satisfying end to a character’s arc, but to add instant heroism to a character we barely know.

Read Next

Why We Can't Take Our Eyes Off The Things We Hate

Kong: Skull Island (which I think is a great movie) includes a bunch of dispensable soldier characters who are tailor-made to be ape food. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m a fan of slasher films, so I have an appreciation for characters who only exist to say “Hey, guys, what was that noise?” But then, while under an assault from mutant reptiles, one of the soldiers, Captain Cole, pulls out two grenades and stares down one of the beasts. The rest of the cast does the typical “NO! DON’T DO THIS!” thing, like the audience is expected to. No, don’t do it, guy with literally two personality traits.

The guy’s plan goes awry and he ends up being a bloodstain on the side of a cliff, but that’s beside the point. The point is … well, what is the point? The sacrifice doesn’t add a dimension to his character, nor does it say anything poignant about him. Instead, it just makes him look like he’s very bad at thinking through decisions. You’re stranded on an island with a monster ape and ubiquitous leviathans, and your plan is to waste yourself and two precious grenades with your patented “Stand there and hope” maneuver?

Of course, they also did this with Superman at the end of Batman v Superman, in a Hail Mary effort to give us some reason to care. They did the same in I Am Legend, in which Will Smith sacrifices himself to maybe blow up some of the zombies, which is such a pointless act that the director’s cut has Will Smith not do that.

And remember Chappie, that Black Mirror episode, but with more decapitations? At the end of that, Ninja — played by Ninja of the rap group Die Antwoord — tries to sacrifice himself in dramatic slow motion, as if the movie is under the impression that we liked his character. He just spent two hours cursing and emotionally abusing a childlike robot. Sacrifice away, idiot.

If they want us to care, they need to scroll backward a few dozen pages in the script and write the character as someone we’ll either be sad to see go or happy to see redeemed. Oh, and the character needs to stay dead.

3

Making A Character Suddenly Badass (In A Way That Makes No Sense)

There’s nothing better than when a badass character gets a badass payoff. My boys in the Dragon Ball franchise are constantly training so that when the time comes, they can triumphantly punch holes through people. This is immensely satisfying because you, the viewer, get to anticipate seeing them use their skills. There is build-up. So it’s baffling whenever “badass” characters either get that way out of nowhere, or are assigned badass traits that don’t fit their progression at all, like if The Karate Kid ended with Daniel challenging Johnny to a snowmobile race.

Take Arya Stark in Game Of Thrones. A big point is made that she’s not built for swordplay. Her cranky travel companion Sandor Clegane points out that her tiny frame and flimsy sword is useless in a gritty fantasy universe full of giant men in armor. Thus, she learns how to work with poisons and magic disguises, leading us to believe that she’ll be pulling off some rad espionage tactics to fool bad guys who could crush her skull like an egg. Instead, within a couple of seasons, Arya becomes Jason Bourne Lite, shrugging off stabbings and doing sweet parkour. Later, she faces off in a practice duel with giant sword master Brienne and outmaneuvers her easily, smirking the whole time.

Regardless of the fact that she is never shown acquiring that level of skill, the problem is that this character is now superhuman and is in no way someone you can identify with.

Writers can’t resist this, even when a lack of combat training is the entire point of a character. This happens in the recent Death Wish remake, in which Bruce Willis, a surgeon, suddenly becomes a mix of Jigsaw and Rambo, all because he lost his family … and he’s a surgeon? This movie had a lot of problems, but at the very least, it could’ve made sense. I can’t claim to know what they teach you at medical school, but I sincerely doubt it involves target practice. I mean, not yet, anyway. But they couldn’t think of any other way to have him beat the bad guys.

And look, I love Harry Potter‘s Neville Longbottom, but the whole point of him is that he’s a clumsy, nerdy boob. He continues to be that for the first seven and a half movies, until his arc completes with him … cutting a giant snake’s head off in slow motion with a sword? Why? At no point in the series are we clamoring for Neville to be the guy who decapitates magic serpents. He’s shown as having talents — specifically, using magical plants — but all of that goes out the window because in the end, being a hero only means being great with traditional fighting techniques.

I’m not saying that Neville should’ve been watering the shrubs while Voldemort was attacking, but maybe give us something more in line with his character. He can be cool without being Conan. Hell, Breaking Bad spent its whole run inventing ways for a sickly chemistry teacher to defeat drug lords who are stronger and more well-armed than he is. They didn’t simply make him suddenly good at ninjutsu.

2

Gritty “Realism” Is Conveyed Through Ceaseless Cursing

People curse in real life. They do it in the car, they do it in the bedroom, they do it when they’re in line at Gamestop and GODDAMN, RICHARD, THE TRADE-IN VALUES ARE NOT GONNA BE THAT GOOD NO MATTER HOW MANY “PRO” POINTS YOU HAVE, SO GET THE FUCK ON WITH IT, SHITLIZARD. But since lots of movies are shooting for PG-13 and network TV shows usually try to be family friendly, they have to keep it clean. When creators find themselves without those restrictions, they tend to go hog-wild.

So I get it, prestige TV dramas. You get to put on your HBO/Showtime Big Boy Pants, and you naturally want to curse a lot because Mom and Dad aren’t around to tell you no. But do so many characters absolutely need to do it like they’re auditioning for a Rob Zombie film? For example, the sister character Debra is the heart and soul of Dexter, considering the show reminds you at all times that the titular character lacks a heart and soul. But there are ways to illustrate that she’s deep and troubled other than peppering all of her dialogue with curses that make her sound as if she’s just discovered Urban Dictionary. You know, like actually giving her an important role on the show? That’s just my two cents.

It comes up in Game Of Thrones, which desperately wants to be Definitely Not Lord Of The Rings, and Boardwalk Empire, which desperately wanted to be Definitely Not The Godfather, or Deadwood, which desperately wanted to be Definitely Not Renewed For A Fourth Season. I love you, Deadwood. I live and breathe you, Deadwood. But holy shit, it’s hard to market a cowboy show, much less a cowboy show that constantly plays like a Greek tragedy and includes an errant dropping of “fuck” every six seconds.

Compare that (again) to a show like Breaking Bad, which was only allowed one or two F-words per season. When they come, they actually have impact. When Skyler reveals to Walter that she’s sleeping with her boss, it’s “I fucked Ted.” Not “I’ve been messing around with Ted,” or “I let Ted play on my slippery dulcimer, if ya’ know what I mean.” It’s a gut punch. The fact that, realistically, she’d probably say it that way is just icing on the cake.

Some of you might say that these shows use gratuitous nudity in exactly the same way (that is, because they can), but at least beautiful naked people is a selling point. Who’s out there saying, “Man, I’m not crazy about the plot of that show, but some of the cursing is amazing. It gave me a full erection.”

1

Geeky Characters Are Defined Only By Their Ability To Spout Pop Culture References

A lot of people in the world are geeks. Not me. I only talk about Digimon when I’m drunk. But a lot of people are. And you’d think that since “geeky” interests are so commonplace, we’d get more great geeky characters in pop culture. Characters that we see aspects of ourselves in. Sadly, what we do get are shows like Big Bang Theory, or characters like Steve Urkel from Family Matters, Ross Gellar from Friends, Morgan from Chuck, Noah from the Scream TV show, and about 75 percent of the denizens of Kevin Smith movies. These are characters who don’t make geekiness look fun. Instead, they drag it around like a cross, burdened by their own existence.

I would probably relate to more “geeky” film characters if the writers knew how to identify them as geeks without having them bleat like farm animals about Star Wars or Dungeons & Dragons. Either that or they’re like Spencer from Criminal Minds, who refuses to shut up about how his special, powerful, super computer brain works differently from the average brain. He’s supposed to be likable, but I’ve never met a single likable person who went into detail about how much smarter he or she is than most of the population.

It’s like they’re so afraid that we won’t get it unless they crank it up to cartoonish levels. The “funny” control room employee in Jurassic World wears a Jurassic Park shirt with the original movie’s logo on it. That’s great! It builds his character and it adds to the theme of the movie that you probably shouldn’t recklessly commodify prehistoric beasts. But he then explains why he wears that shirt and how much it costs and how much he loved the first Jurassic Park, and any chance we had of identifying with him goes out the window. If I buy a Spider-Man shirt, I don’t go around the mall asking people about their favorite Doctor Octopus moments; I just wear the shirt.

It’s so strange because you’d assume that most writers are themselves geeks, the ones who have to borrow clothes to attend a red carpet premiere and then are kept far away from the cameras. You have to imagine them toiling away on their sitcom pilot thinking, “Hmmm … what would a geek say in this situation? It’s so hard for a cool, sexy beast like me to put myself in their mindset. I know, I’ll have them suddenly speak Klingon.”

Daniel has a Twitter, which he uses as a platform to yell about Pokemon.

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4 Lazy Character Shortcuts Hollywood Can’t Stop Using

The best movie characters are usually the ones whom we sort of identify with. Whether they’re a simple middle-class teenager or a grizzled Matthew McConaughy playing a nihilistic detective trying to find aliens from the future inside a black hole, they work because when they make decisions, we get it. We learn who they are and understand them. Sometimes, though, writers don’t really have time for that shit. Instead, they use some kind of shorthand which (they hope) will have the same profound effect with far less effort. This usually doesn’t work at all. Particularly when …

4

Sudden Sacrifices Are A Substitute For Heroism

What is more powerful than one human being sacrificing their own life to save others, usually to the accompaniment of an orchestra that sounds like it’s about to parade through the screen? You could probably base a whole religion around it. In the world of Hollywood screenwriting, sacrifices can also be written in not to provide a satisfying end to a character’s arc, but to add instant heroism to a character we barely know.

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Kong: Skull Island (which I think is a great movie) includes a bunch of dispensable soldier characters who are tailor-made to be ape food. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m a fan of slasher films, so I have an appreciation for characters who only exist to say “Hey, guys, what was that noise?” But then, while under an assault from mutant reptiles, one of the soldiers, Captain Cole, pulls out two grenades and stares down one of the beasts. The rest of the cast does the typical “NO! DON’T DO THIS!” thing, like the audience is expected to. No, don’t do it, guy with literally two personality traits.

The guy’s plan goes awry and he ends up being a bloodstain on the side of a cliff, but that’s beside the point. The point is … well, what is the point? The sacrifice doesn’t add a dimension to his character, nor does it say anything poignant about him. Instead, it just makes him look like he’s very bad at thinking through decisions. You’re stranded on an island with a monster ape and ubiquitous leviathans, and your plan is to waste yourself and two precious grenades with your patented “Stand there and hope” maneuver?

Of course, they also did this with Superman at the end of Batman v Superman, in a Hail Mary effort to give us some reason to care. They did the same in I Am Legend, in which Will Smith sacrifices himself to maybe blow up some of the zombies, which is such a pointless act that the director’s cut has Will Smith not do that.

And remember Chappie, that Black Mirror episode, but with more decapitations? At the end of that, Ninja — played by Ninja of the rap group Die Antwoord — tries to sacrifice himself in dramatic slow motion, as if the movie is under the impression that we liked his character. He just spent two hours cursing and emotionally abusing a childlike robot. Sacrifice away, idiot.

If they want us to care, they need to scroll backward a few dozen pages in the script and write the character as someone we’ll either be sad to see go or happy to see redeemed. Oh, and the character needs to stay dead.

3

Making A Character Suddenly Badass (In A Way That Makes No Sense)

There’s nothing better than when a badass character gets a badass payoff. My boys in the Dragon Ball franchise are constantly training so that when the time comes, they can triumphantly punch holes through people. This is immensely satisfying because you, the viewer, get to anticipate seeing them use their skills. There is build-up. So it’s baffling whenever “badass” characters either get that way out of nowhere, or are assigned badass traits that don’t fit their progression at all, like if The Karate Kid ended with Daniel challenging Johnny to a snowmobile race.

Take Arya Stark in Game Of Thrones. A big point is made that she’s not built for swordplay. Her cranky travel companion Sandor Clegane points out that her tiny frame and flimsy sword is useless in a gritty fantasy universe full of giant men in armor. Thus, she learns how to work with poisons and magic disguises, leading us to believe that she’ll be pulling off some rad espionage tactics to fool bad guys who could crush her skull like an egg. Instead, within a couple of seasons, Arya becomes Jason Bourne Lite, shrugging off stabbings and doing sweet parkour. Later, she faces off in a practice duel with giant sword master Brienne and outmaneuvers her easily, smirking the whole time.

Regardless of the fact that she is never shown acquiring that level of skill, the problem is that this character is now superhuman and is in no way someone you can identify with.

Writers can’t resist this, even when a lack of combat training is the entire point of a character. This happens in the recent Death Wish remake, in which Bruce Willis, a surgeon, suddenly becomes a mix of Jigsaw and Rambo, all because he lost his family … and he’s a surgeon? This movie had a lot of problems, but at the very least, it could’ve made sense. I can’t claim to know what they teach you at medical school, but I sincerely doubt it involves target practice. I mean, not yet, anyway. But they couldn’t think of any other way to have him beat the bad guys.

And look, I love Harry Potter‘s Neville Longbottom, but the whole point of him is that he’s a clumsy, nerdy boob. He continues to be that for the first seven and a half movies, until his arc completes with him … cutting a giant snake’s head off in slow motion with a sword? Why? At no point in the series are we clamoring for Neville to be the guy who decapitates magic serpents. He’s shown as having talents — specifically, using magical plants — but all of that goes out the window because in the end, being a hero only means being great with traditional fighting techniques.

I’m not saying that Neville should’ve been watering the shrubs while Voldemort was attacking, but maybe give us something more in line with his character. He can be cool without being Conan. Hell, Breaking Bad spent its whole run inventing ways for a sickly chemistry teacher to defeat drug lords who are stronger and more well-armed than he is. They didn’t simply make him suddenly good at ninjutsu.

2

Gritty “Realism” Is Conveyed Through Ceaseless Cursing

People curse in real life. They do it in the car, they do it in the bedroom, they do it when they’re in line at Gamestop and GODDAMN, RICHARD, THE TRADE-IN VALUES ARE NOT GONNA BE THAT GOOD NO MATTER HOW MANY “PRO” POINTS YOU HAVE, SO GET THE FUCK ON WITH IT, SHITLIZARD. But since lots of movies are shooting for PG-13 and network TV shows usually try to be family friendly, they have to keep it clean. When creators find themselves without those restrictions, they tend to go hog-wild.

So I get it, prestige TV dramas. You get to put on your HBO/Showtime Big Boy Pants, and you naturally want to curse a lot because Mom and Dad aren’t around to tell you no. But do so many characters absolutely need to do it like they’re auditioning for a Rob Zombie film? For example, the sister character Debra is the heart and soul of Dexter, considering the show reminds you at all times that the titular character lacks a heart and soul. But there are ways to illustrate that she’s deep and troubled other than peppering all of her dialogue with curses that make her sound as if she’s just discovered Urban Dictionary. You know, like actually giving her an important role on the show? That’s just my two cents.

It comes up in Game Of Thrones, which desperately wants to be Definitely Not Lord Of The Rings, and Boardwalk Empire, which desperately wanted to be Definitely Not The Godfather, or Deadwood, which desperately wanted to be Definitely Not Renewed For A Fourth Season. I love you, Deadwood. I live and breathe you, Deadwood. But holy shit, it’s hard to market a cowboy show, much less a cowboy show that constantly plays like a Greek tragedy and includes an errant dropping of “fuck” every six seconds.

Compare that (again) to a show like Breaking Bad, which was only allowed one or two F-words per season. When they come, they actually have impact. When Skyler reveals to Walter that she’s sleeping with her boss, it’s “I fucked Ted.” Not “I’ve been messing around with Ted,” or “I let Ted play on my slippery dulcimer, if ya’ know what I mean.” It’s a gut punch. The fact that, realistically, she’d probably say it that way is just icing on the cake.

Some of you might say that these shows use gratuitous nudity in exactly the same way (that is, because they can), but at least beautiful naked people is a selling point. Who’s out there saying, “Man, I’m not crazy about the plot of that show, but some of the cursing is amazing. It gave me a full erection.”

1

Geeky Characters Are Defined Only By Their Ability To Spout Pop Culture References

A lot of people in the world are geeks. Not me. I only talk about Digimon when I’m drunk. But a lot of people are. And you’d think that since “geeky” interests are so commonplace, we’d get more great geeky characters in pop culture. Characters that we see aspects of ourselves in. Sadly, what we do get are shows like Big Bang Theory, or characters like Steve Urkel from Family Matters, Ross Gellar from Friends, Morgan from Chuck, Noah from the Scream TV show, and about 75 percent of the denizens of Kevin Smith movies. These are characters who don’t make geekiness look fun. Instead, they drag it around like a cross, burdened by their own existence.

I would probably relate to more “geeky” film characters if the writers knew how to identify them as geeks without having them bleat like farm animals about Star Wars or Dungeons & Dragons. Either that or they’re like Spencer from Criminal Minds, who refuses to shut up about how his special, powerful, super computer brain works differently from the average brain. He’s supposed to be likable, but I’ve never met a single likable person who went into detail about how much smarter he or she is than most of the population.

It’s like they’re so afraid that we won’t get it unless they crank it up to cartoonish levels. The “funny” control room employee in Jurassic World wears a Jurassic Park shirt with the original movie’s logo on it. That’s great! It builds his character and it adds to the theme of the movie that you probably shouldn’t recklessly commodify prehistoric beasts. But he then explains why he wears that shirt and how much it costs and how much he loved the first Jurassic Park, and any chance we had of identifying with him goes out the window. If I buy a Spider-Man shirt, I don’t go around the mall asking people about their favorite Doctor Octopus moments; I just wear the shirt.

It’s so strange because you’d assume that most writers are themselves geeks, the ones who have to borrow clothes to attend a red carpet premiere and then are kept far away from the cameras. You have to imagine them toiling away on their sitcom pilot thinking, “Hmmm … what would a geek say in this situation? It’s so hard for a cool, sexy beast like me to put myself in their mindset. I know, I’ll have them suddenly speak Klingon.”

Daniel has a Twitter, which he uses as a platform to yell about Pokemon.

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