#i’m guessing this will be an expy situation

[h-worksrambles]

Takahashi bringing Fei into Xenoblade by any means necessary be like:

[leeexists]

I need to start yapping about my Senti expy or else I’m going to implode

Here’s her lore

Sentience is a strange woman who was born on a now nonexistent planet. This planet once inhabited an advanced telepathic society that put all of their resources on studying and destroying the boundaries of the mind. Sentience is the reason why the planet is no more. She basically unlocked a part of her mind that she wasn’t supposed to, which led to the erasure of the entire planet.

She then was floating in space for a bit before ending up on a Xianzhou ship. She then (eventually) met the Marshal, who sympathized with her, gave her food, shelter and a position in the Xianzhou Alliance. Sentience, not knowing how to handle this, immediately fell in love with her and considered her hospitality as a marriage proposal.

Nowadays, no one really knows what she is or what she does for a living. But, she’s gained infamy for her hobby of physically and psychologically torturing those she dislikes. She’s also known for being a very unpleasant person.

Fun facts:

Design:

-the spikes on the side of her head are horns. They appeared randomly after the planetary incident.

-She’s MASSIVE compared to most Xianzhou residents. Not only is she pretty tall (like 6’4) but she’s also buff.

-She covers one of her eyes to avoid any accidental mind reading or mind control.

-She constantly has a thousand yard stare. She is unaware of this and cannot control it. Speaking of her eyes, she actually doesn’t have any. Her “face” is actually some sort of mask. Her real face has been obscured by the Enigmata.

-Her hair has been tied back because her luscious locks can get in the way of combat I guess

General:

-She hates a lot of people including most of the generals. Feixiao in particular because she’s allegedly a copycat.

-She’s good friends with Yunli. They bond over their liking of weapons. She often asks her about how her weapons feel.

-Speaking of weapons, Sentience has an entire arsenal at her disposal. She usually uses a sword, a spear, a whip, chains and a brick. (Along with her telepathic abilities, of course)

-Shes the type of person who resorts to violence when any situation pops up. In combat, she can easily get carried away due to her bloodthirsty nature.

-She calls and flirts with the Marshal every once in a while. She loves her a lot

-She has her own domain expansion thing going on. (She calls it her sentient space.)

-Despite the outfit and name, Sentience is far from ladylike. She manspreads when she sits, she yells a lot, she’s impatient as hell, I can go on.

-Finally, she’s married to the Marshal. They have a bunch of pet chickens.

Here’s a meme (cw for suggestive)

Feel free to send me asks about her I

[nehswritesstuffs]

Getting the hang of things: 12, Clara and the kids try to take a normal human family vacation together and things don’t go as planned.

Happy Twelve Day, everyone! It’s still 12.12 where I am, so meh this is going up.

2190 words; one of my favorite inconsequential personal headcanons for Coal Hill if Clara continues teaching there is that the Eleven expy coworker eventually becomes headmaster, because why the fuck not; makes mention of the very angsty ch.33 (tumblr/FFN/AO3); sorry I’ve had severe OP brain rot the past half year please take this in penance (though I’ve got a lot more for it than DW coming sorry not sorry); friendly reminder to not interact with wildlife unless you are with an expert and the Doctor does not count as an expert; not really thoroughly beta’d, but if I find something egregious I’ll fix it for now I’m just tired

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

All Clara really wanted was to go to the seaside. Just a seaside holiday with her husband and children… was that too much to ask?

The first reason it was deemed unattainable, it was because she had her time off request denied. She went directly to the headmaster’s office, as she was not in the mood to do anything else, and confronted him directly. She had the available time, there was no testing or other things going on then, her husband already had his time approved at his work (though, she did not mention that his time was automatically approved being as one saved the ability to tell a minor cosmic deity “no” for special occasions), so what was the problem…?

“Sorry, Clara,” the headmaster apologized. “I thought you knew.”

“…knew what, Adrian?”

“That’s the week of the Year Sevens’ class trip.”

Everything came rushing back to her in a rush of mortification. Yes, the Thursday and Friday she requested was when the Grade Sevens were going to Loch Lomond for a camping and culture excursion. She even was going to chaperone, since her “step-children” were on the trip this year. How in the bloody hell did she forget…? Wracking her brain quick as she could, she tried to think about when she could have possibly volunteer and then immediately forget the entire thing…?

Oh.

“Did you get me to agree to this… say… late September, early October…?”

“October 3rd, actually. I’ve got the paperwork here.”

“Adrian… you know I’m out of sorts around then,” she groaned.

“I had to get the list of adults ready, you know that,” the headmaster defended gently. He was one of the few who knew of her… particular family situation and all the intergalactic implications involved, and had known from the start. “Any other empty long weekend is yours, no questions.”

“Then I guess I’ll talk with the Doctor when I get home,” she sighed. She rubbed her temples as she felt a headache coming on, her attention stolen when the headmaster placed a couple stacks of papers on his desk. “Adrian Thomas Davies, what the bloody hell is that?”

“Not much,” he shrugged. “Since you mentioned him, we do need to discuss the Doctor…”

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

The second reason that a regular family holiday was perfectly unattainable was due to the fact that… well… screw it, there was a lot of reasons, and they all kept piling up at a rapid pace.

Missing his tobacco habit for the first time in nearly two millennia, the Doctor stood surrounded by five dozen tweens who were wound up and excited for the fact they were on a trip away from home. He looked over at a pair of fathers who had also come along, envious at their excuse for a smoke break, the act of which brought them more than a few yards away at a designated stand at the edge of the carpark. It wasn’t even something he could magically pick up again for the duration of the trip, because one puff and Clara would be absolutely livid. Instead, he was surrounded by his children’s classmates, nearly all exuding a sort of energy he was not used to encountering, all because Clara accidentally volunteered him.

“Dad?” He glanced over and saw Alison staring up at him. “What's wrong?”

“I don’t know,” he lied. What was wrong was that he was currently risking a lot in order to be there for the trip. He was still taking the time off at the end of the week, but at the same time, he was also currently at the office, helping disassemble some extraplanar tech thanks to the scientific wonder that was the TARDIS. “How’re you holding up, Aly? You and Jim alright?”

“Yeah—he’s over with Auntie Nellie and Mum,” the girl said, pointing vaguely behind him. He turned and saw Clara and an Osgood—the only reason he was able to get away with a normally-contract-breaching use of time travel—as they attempted to corral some of the more energetic students. Although there were still other adults there to help out, there was not much being done to help the general chaos of sixty London-raised children getting ready to spend a week camping in Scotland. James was almost clung to Clara, which made his father chuckle. There was so much happening that it was a bit scary even for him.

“Dr. Oswald-Smith?” The Doctor looked and saw one of the wee terrors staring at him curiously. “When did you move to London from Scotland?”

“I moved to London from Gallifrey about two thousand years ago, in 1963,” he grunted. The tween scowled and looked at Alison.

“Is he going to be like this the whole trip?”

“He gets better,” Alison assured. The student shrugged and went off to another cluster, allowing the girl to glare at her father. “Don’t ruin this for us!”

“Ruin what?”

“Friends!” At that, he knew precisely what it was she meant: they needed to be able to interact with their new peers with little judgement. They had not yet been with these classmates for a year—as “transfer students”, they were on thin ice. That explained her outburst and irritation.

“Don’t worry, kiddo—I’m not looking to ruin anything,” he assured. The Doctor watched as she stormed off and joined her classmates. A pang of guilt struck through him—she was embarrassed by him.

“I see that look on your face.” He glanced over and saw Clara standing there, having abandoned Osgood to be devoured by rabid tweens or whatever was going on over on the other side of the carpark. “Don’t act like you’re surprised or anything.”

“Some normal family holiday this is turning out to be,” he noted. She just shook her head and sighed. “That’s what we wanted, right?” He bent down and they pecked their lips together—can’t show too much affection, after all.

“For the time being, anyhow,” she replied. She handed him a copy of the itinerary; it was decidedly packed with activities for the kids, which meant few breaks for the adults. “Think you can handle our group for the time being?”

“If our group isn’t stolen by the meme master over there,” he said, gesturing over towards Osgood. She and a small child looked like they were having a dance-off, with other adults watching carefully on from a distance. Clara made a note to invite Osgood back if they were running short on chaperones in the future—she was surprisingly good with the kids. “Let’s just get this over with, and then we can go on as normal. It’s only fair.”

“…to whom…?”

“Neither of us, I can tell you that.” Something over on the other side of the carpark caught his eye and he groaned internally. “None of these pudding-brains should know what the mechanics for trimonoclyde fusion is, correct?”

“Considering I have no idea what you just said…?”

“I’ll be right back—watch Osgood’s pockets. I think we’ve got thieves in our midst.” The Doctor went off to where there were some children huddled around a rock in order to confiscate something.

This was going to be a ride, that was for certain.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

As it turned out, camping with so many tweens was not a wise idea, both the Doctor and Clara found out. Their children? They weren’t being the best, but they were manageable. It was many of the rest of the children—not to mention a couple of the adults—that grated on their nerves. Between students attempting to run off into the woods and the adults’ inane banter and members of both groups attempting to wander off at different points to find a town (and therefore, wifi), things were beginning to get complicated.

“Remind me to throw your boss into a supernova when we get back,” the Doctor groused as he sat down next to Clara. The pair of them were taking the early watch in their half of the camp, making sure that no one decided to sneak off. All of the tents opened towards them, which admittedly was a big help, but it was still a two-person job at the very least. With the loch to their backs and the other watch pair further off, it could have nearly been considered private.

“You will not be doing anything to Adrian… and no calling in favors on him,” she warned. She poked the fire in front of them with a stick, agitating the logs so more could catch fire properly. “This part’s nice, at least.”

“I thought you hated bonfires.”

“I do—I’m talking about the quiet.” She leaned back and looked up at the stars, the fact they were even there an incredible thing to see for someone who normally lived in London. Smiling, Clara continued to stare as she leaned against the Doctor’s shoulder.

“What are you looking at?” he asked.

“Stars.”

“You see them all the time when we’re out in the TARDIS.”

“True, but I don’t often get to see them while on Earth,” she reasoned. “Even now, the village is close enough that we don’t really see everything.”

“It’s a shame, because everything looks amazing from here.” She turned her head to see that he was looking directly at her, without any regard for the sky above or the tents they were supposed to be minding. He leaned down and kissed her tenderly before wrapping an arm around her and tucking her head under his chin. “We’ll have to do this on our own when we’re feeling up to camping.”

“A camping permit for just the four of us?”

“I was thinking a little something pre-permits.” Clara could then feel the Doctor tense. “Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“I think I saw something over by the back tents.”

“A wildcat, I bet.”

“Possibly, but let me see.” He grabbed a torch and stood, heading back over towards the rear of the encampment. Shining the torch around, he didn’t catch anything. “Huh. Nothing. I guess it was my imagin—”

At that, a wildcat did indeed jump out from behind a tent and hissed at the Doctor. The Time Lord stared at it, unimpressed.

“I’d change your attitude if I were you,” he said. “No one’s here to steal your kills.”

A yowl and a hiss escaped the cat, the hairs on its back standing on-end.

“They’re a bunch of kids—kittens, if you will—and although yes I admit some of them are losing that thing that makes them cool, most of them are rather brilliant.” The wildcat did not yield. “Aren’t you the pleasant one?”

“Doctor? Should I get Osgood?”

“Naw—it’s just a cat,” he said.

Soon as the words left his lips, the wildcat attacked. The feline jumped at him, meowing loudly. Other cats then started popping out from the wood, all of them attempting to climb at him and bite or swipe at his ankles and knees. He tried to shoo them away to no avail; they kept coming, somehow all swarming him. Students and other chaperones alike began poking their heads out of their tents to see what all the commotion was about.

“Dr. Oswald-Smith, are you alright?” one of the chaperones asked blearily. The wildcat nearest her hissed violently, forcing her to retreat back into the tent.

“It’s always you getting into trouble like this,” Clara groaned. She suddenly appeared at his side with the broom left to them by the parks people, trying to bat the wildcats away without hurting them. A few got the hint, but most kept attacking. The Doctor made a run for the loch, wading into the shallow bit before the cats began to rethink leaving him alone. One, however, lunged up and at him, knocking him fully over into the water. By now their entire side of the camp was awake and staring at the scene, along with some from the other half, with James and Alison looking on in horror.

“This is an absolute disaster,” James squeaked. The cat that knocked over his father jumped back to shore and bounded through camp and into the wood, disappearing as silently as it appeared.

“Disaster doesn’t even cover it,” Alison groaned. She looked at the three girls that she was sharing a tent with and scowled. “Would you believe me if I said this wasn’t the weirdest thing I’ve seen happen to him?”

“I believe it, Ozsmith,” one of them replied. They watched as the Doctor dragged himself out of the loch, absolutely sopping wet. “Maybe that’s the story behind the monster up in Ness?”

“Knowing Dad? Probably had something to do with it.”

If they asked, then yes, of course he had something to do with the sensation up in Loch Ness. To be honest, he’d had Victoria and Jamie take turns recording the whole thing. Yet right now? In front of most of his children’s Human classmates? In the cold? Under the scrutiny of half a dozen torches? He was just lucky that the TARDIS was able to tone down his cursing over such a long distance.

[ot3]

Same anon as a second ago who was asking about Han suyeong and orv - or if you have any headcanons about yoohankim I think they’re neat

yesss lets talk about yoohankim

all i want for them after the epilogues is to write a book together. like kdj is already long overdue for beta-reading and yjh has been tricked into being an editor once and can be tricked into doing it again. any chance to correct these miserable shrews he lives with <333333 

but the thing is like hsy like completely wrung herself out writing ORV and now she wants to do something the complete fucking opposite she’s like guys. i’m sick the death of fucking themes and catharsis and shit. we’re writing slice of life. give me ideas what’s some stuff that people do

and yjh was like i dont fucking know what anyone does in their spare time.

and kdj is like. i also don’t know anything that people do. hope this helps.

and hsy is like god damn it. me neither. oh my god we are so bad at this. 

this is all definitely pre relationship because theyre stupid enough to rewrite time and space for each other but still try and friendzone about it. “yeah they threw themselves headfirst into the spokes of fate’s wheels and doomed countless lives in countless worlds just so all of us could meet, again and again, but, like. what if i’m reading too much into things?”

absolute incompetence. 

anyway hsy just starts working tossing in whatever sort of contrived high school hijinks she can think of and bouncing off yjh and kdj as sounding boards, reading them snippets of her drafts, and eventually they just end up just essentially co-authoring it with how much of the plot and character theyre giving her, theyre doing everything she’s doing except typing the damn thing up.

only at this point it’s really just a weird tangential larp of them all deciding what they imagine a fun childhood would have theoretically been like and not so subtly just making these characters live it out on their behalf. yjh still feels pretty weird about writing stuff that didn’t already happen for obvious reasons but hsy is like ‘stop being fucking paranoid this is so different this is made up for real’ and kdj is like ‘im abstaining from this conversation’ and yjh is like well i guess im probably safe from any cosmic comeuppance as long as this is a happy story. so it really is just like peak good feeling slice of life antics the whole way through

anyway obviously the main characters are Very Poorly Concealed Yoohankim Expys. i say poorly concealed but that’s onyl to people who arent them. yhk themselves are VERY convinced these are extremely original and compelling characters. 

it doesn’t hit until after they write some shit where hsy has to be like ‘look this is so stupid there’s no reason these people wouldn’t have gotten together yet in this situation how can we work with such a flimsy premise of miscommunicated feelings. surely they have to know theyre in love.’

and then she’s like [brain loading symbol] oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck

and theyre like What stop being dramatic and just fucking tell us.

and shes like ‘ive figured it out im the sexiest and smartest woman alive. you guys are gonna love this’ 

and theyre like just fucking tell us we hate you so bad you act like this every time

and she’s like we need to kiss. ohhh i am so smart. 

and theyre like [dial up modem noises] oh god wait we are supid and embarrassing motherfuckers huh. wow. 

and then they kiss

[bronyinabottle]

MY LITTLE PONY: A NEW GENERATION (G5 Movie) THOUGHTS

It’s finally here. The beginning of Generation 5. Though before I get into the movie in some detail I’m going to reiterate one more time what G5 means for my content and a non-spoilery summary of the movie.

Again, I will say that the movie nor will the G5 series coming later have much of an effect at all on any of my blogs. The revelation in Secrets of the Dragon’s Tear that life itself is also magic means that a world that implied to have no magic for years would mean the extinction of all life (Perhaps resulting in the wasteland we saw in the Season 5 finale). There may be something I’ll probably do at some point on a certain different blog. But even then, that may likely be a one-time thing and probably come around the time the series is starting to air.

That said, just because I’m continuing with mainly G4 content doesn’t mean I disapprove of G5. In fact, my non-spoilers thoughts on the movie is I think it is a good start for this new generation. There are questions I have that I’m not sure will be answered (Though many of those questions are the same ones I had in my Trailer/Preliminary thoughts) quickly enough. But the movie is structured well enough, in fact it’s probably a better movie as a whole compared to any of the movies G4 had (The 2017 movie, Rainbow Roadtrip, and all 4 Equestria Girls movies). As the 2017 movie was fun, but it jumped around a lot, sometimes scenes transitioning too fast. And while Rainbow Roadtrip may have been this on purpose, the entirely slice-of-life story taking up a long length… made it something of a less interesting plot to follow. It feels like some of that special could of been cut to at least a two-parter length and keep the same beats they hit. And while i have a soft spot for the 3rd and 4th Equestria Girls movies, I’ll always say a full-length pony adventure feels better suited for what I want to see out of MLP then spin-off movies with high school movie cliches and weird pony/human world shenanigans.

So movie-wise I’m not a G4 purist. It’ll take some time to see how Gen 5 compares to Friendship is Magic when we get to the series. As I feel it’d take a lot for it to surpass G4 in my mind. But I’m going to try to be as fair as possible and judge on it’s own merits. The implied connection to G4 by referring to G4 being ancient Equestria is going to naturally get the staff and hasbro pressured by fans to tell us what happened in-between the generations. Because that’s the trap they put the writers in when they made it so they want to try to say it’s in the same universe. That’s the double-edged sword Hasbro chose to have, trying to appease the G4 fanbase and keep at least some of them around. But at the cost of questions both nitpicky (Such as character design being inconsistent) or actual honest questions that need to be known (Why did magic disappear, and what happened to the Alicorns) for some of us to truly see this as the same Equestria.

After the break, I’ll have more spoilery thoughts

Even for a brief moment, it was nice seeing the Mane 6 and 2D animation. The former because of course those are the ponies many of us that saw all of G4 loved. And the latter, because while the animation wasn’t bad in this movie. I’m one of those who’d prefer to have 2D animation in an animated film. As in most cases aside from Pixar, it’s just a strong preference of mine. If this had the animation of the 2017 MLP movie but otherwise everything else was generally the same here, I feel that would of have been great.

I wish they didn’t have to have Sunny’s dad die off-screen, as he seems like he could of been a compelling character. And not to mention if perhaps he has any connection the “ancient” days in any fashion. But *sigh* I get it, it’s an old trope where part of the character’s offscreen growth is not having their parent(/s) around.

On a side note there’s quite a few times during the beginning of the movie that somewhat foreshadow what happens to Sunny later. 3 times where she had a fake horn and wings on her. Once in the flashback, then 2 separate times when she’s doing her protest where she has her own costumed wings and horn. As well as the helmet and mechanical wings.

Also, there’s no way around it. Some of the discussions this movie are going to get quite political. (Namely one part of Sunny’s song that could be seen as having a double meaning of a jab at Trumpsts regarding “Building your wall”) From the very premise in the early times, we know that the inspiration for the story was last year’s Black Lives Matter protests. Which honestly, I do support the message they’re going for. Having an anti-racism message to tell kids from the very beginning and making a focus on it is important when in G4 it only got briefly touched upon in Bridle Gossip and the Heath’s Warming Eve play. Although it certainly rose up to some form of prominence with Season 8 and onward. Still, while you can argue if G4 executed the anti-racism message well. it does come with something of a problem that the series finale left Equestria in the least divided it’s ever been.

And personally, I feel it’s a terrible interpretation of time to say “Well, it’s a realistic take. Racism has existed for years in our world. Same should go for the ponies” and while yes, racism is still rampant in today’s world. That said, that ignores that if we went from The Last Problem to the start of G5. There’s a huge difference between our world and Equestria. There is no ancient civilization that we look at like “Yeah, those were the golden days of world peace” when normally the “Golden age” was reserved for the high classes of Ancient Greece or Rome. It was most decidedly not perfect, with slavery rampant and wars for the sake of expanding an empire. While if you look at The Last Problem’s Equestria, you not only have peace between the three main types of ponies. But you literally have non-pony citizens in Equestria. You can see a dragon handing off a flower to a pony which can imply cross-species romantic relations. With the Friendship school still going strong, and was the reason that the world was saved in The Ending of the End. While perhaps it may be too glowing to say that future is perfect for everyone even in-universe. It’s certainly a hell of a lot better outlook then comparing to how we view even the so called Golden age of ancient civilizations. The Last Problem’s Equestria implies it looks to ally with every country outside of Equestria, not conquer them.

So it should still be a valid question on just how this world collapses to the point it gets to where G5 is at the start. I at least assume that it’s not the fault at all of any of the Mane 6 nor Twilight. Or at least I hope it isn’t, as I’d rather the MLP fanbase not have to deal with a The Last Jedi Luke Skywalker situation. (Where after the joyful end of the original trilogy, things go wrong as Luke almost murders the son of one of his best friends and his sister despite trying to hard and succeeding at redeeming his father who at that point in the canon was a galaxy-wide known ruthless mass-murderer.) I assume we’re at a point where everyone of the Mane 6 sans maybe Twilight are presumed dead. And even in Twilight’s case, there’s a chance that G5 decides to say that G4 overestimated the whole Alicorn immortality thing. Though I wouldn’t put it past Hasbro to have some event where the Mane 5 of G5 meet the Mane 6 in some special event whether that’s a a Season finale or a sequel movie/special. Where either the Mane 6 return in a limbo situation similar to the Pillars at the end of Season 7 or Time travel gets involved. They may even string us along on answering just what in the heck happened until they involve a meet-up with the Mane 6 in that way. Though I hope they don’t, I’d really like the beginning of the series (Or I guess this supposed special coming up in Spring supposedly?) starts to answer some questions. G5 should get a chance to stand on it’s own, but I hope the writers are actually well aware there will be so many questions people have and address them in the show. A cynical part of me feels like they’re likely to string us along until at least the Season 1 finale.

Onto the characters for a bit. I think Izzy Moonbow was absolutely the most stand-out character in the whole movie. She was energetic, funny, and aside from “The pegasi are bad news” she along with Zipp and Sunny were the most averse to the way the world was. She was already the most popular due to the tennis ball memes. But now it feels like she legit stands on her own and most certainly deserves to be the most popular character of G5 thus far. Behind her in a bit of a surprise to me was Zipp, who I thought would be mainly a Rainbow Dash-expy. Though she really helps out Izzy and Sunny in Zephyr Heights. Despite having Twilight be my favorite pony from the very beginning of G4 all the way to the end, I didn’t feel as strongly about Sunny for some reason. So she’s in the middle of the pack, she could grow on me later. I just don’t know if I click with her as much as I did with Twilight. As for the last two, while I don’t hate either of them. Either one could be the lowest of the 5 for one reason or another. Pipp (Although I will say she's probably my favorite character design out of the 5) feels like she doesn’t do a whole lot in the movie and it takes until she’s forced to be an outlaw because the other choice was to get imprisoned like her mother was. So she may come off as quite pretentious, though it’s arguable Rarity was the same way early in G4. But she definitely grew later. Could be the same case for Pipp. And as for Hitch, he has shining moments in the film. But what might hurt him is the fact he was such a bad friend to Sunny up until the campfire scene. “I’m the last real friend you have. You really want to lose me too?” is not a healthy friendship. Hitch may have been Sunny’s friend the longest, but it definitely feels like Izzy connected immediately. I don’t know if this show will get into shipping any of the main characters between each other mid-show, but if they do. I hope it’s between Izzy and Sunny currently, cause Hitch and Sunny just gives bad vibes even with Hitch getting better later.

None of the songs I felt were particularly too special. Though I think the closest was Sprout’s “Danger, Danger” song that has similarities to Smells Like Teen Spirit in some parts of the song since I tend towards more rock/metal-esque music.

I touched upon it earlier, but there’s perhaps a stand-out reason for why the G5 movie outdid the 2017 MLP Movie. They have the typical “Our heroic group splits after a sad moment before coming together again for the climatic good end” in Sunny seeing that that the two crystals don’t instantly bring magic back, and when Twilight left the group after an argument that happened with Twilight trying to take a pearl. They perform the same purpose in the movie. But the crystals not working, crushing Sunny’s hope for a little while works better into the story. Where as Twilight’s part frustratingly brought the sea pony scene to an end too quickly and/or doesn’t feel right of Twilight to have done that. It felt forced in the 2017 movie, but works out in the G5 movie. Especially since a part of it is that it’s not the crystals themselves capable of bringing magic back. But it’s the journey going after the crystals that brings the ponies themselves their magic back.

Just a small note on dictator Sprout, he tries to cause a war. Though admittedly the film seems to treat him as a joke the entire time despite his seriously evil ambitions. With the only repercussions is he gets a wishy-washy answer on if he was a good sheriff from his mom. I don’t quite know how I feel about that yet, but I wonder what they’ll have in mind for Sprout given his actions. He and his mom are the only ones that feel like a true antagonist. Though they seem to be ok with things fast when the magic comes back.

But anyway on to the ending, we see that Sunny becomes an Alicorn. Which I guess with no other real Alicorns around, I guess it makes sense to alicornify her since she’s the real leader behind what united the leaders of each type of pony again. Though there is of course this weird thing where her horn and wings don’t seem like as much a part of her body compared to very obvious connected wings on Twilight when she got hers. Sunny keeps her horn and wings to the end of the movie, and has colored streaks in her hair. Though I do wonder if that;s truly permanent. If it is permanent, I suppose at least they got to have a headstart and have it established at the end of the introductory movie rather then have it shock people at the end of a shortened 3rd season. I still feel like Twilight had well earned her alicornhood considering that besides what she did in the series. She has a whole childhood and time as a teenager learning under Celestia. Which had to mean something, and I’m not sure Celestia just leaving her to live the rest of her days with her friends in ponyville was that. Sunny has no doubt been trying countless time to try to spread friendship throughout her life even after the tragedy of her father’s passing. So there’s no doubt she’s been through a lot, and may indeed be worthy of being an Alicorn at this point. Though in terms of screentime before Alicornhood it's definitely a lot less then Twilight had. And it is at least nice to see that it is possible for non-unicorns to become one. (The only case of that we sort of got was a children's book that may or may not be canon that implied Cadence was a pegasus before she ascended)

Though you have to wonder if the visual differences such as Sunny’s alicorn horn and wings, the cutie mark only on one side (Yes I know that’s how it was normally in the MLP generations before G4. But a distinct visual difference between shows is still noticeable even if the context of G4’s cutie marks on both sides of the flank was about it being easier on the puppets for Flash), and how animals can have wings or weird round shapes such as those bunnies when G4 has normal looking animals. There’s enough striking visual differences for any nitpicky G4 to say “This isn’t the same Equestria”. And if someone tries to say maybe some sort of evolution happened. That’s still trying to put a little too much real world logic on this fantasy world. And evolution tends to take millions of years to have such dramatic changes. Not 1000 years or so, there should still be normal looking animals at this point and time. And these small details are probably going to be the things most ignored but nonetheless can build a case that this isn’t the same Equestria. Even if they touch on the important questions like how magic disappeared and what happened to the Mane 6, there will be details they make different that will add to the case that this is it’s own universe if it doesn’t quite matchup with what was remembered about G4. There will be fans who will be that nitpicky to call G5 out of continuity for small details like that. That is again the trap they put themselves in when they decided to try to say it’s the same Equestria.

All-in-all though, I think that’s at least a good enough chunk about my thoughts on the movie to end off here. If there’s something I missed or something from the movie you’d like me to give a particular opinion about or elaborate on something feel free to ask me here. G5 is indeed off to a good start, just I will be along the many hoping some questions get answered sooner then later. And I’m not sure I’m confident in getting anywhere until a Season finale or a 2nd movie. And it’ll be a year before the series starts proper (Though again I guess there’s a 44 minute special coming in Spring to try to hold us over). But I could definitely see G5 finding it's own following, now there's just the inevitable clashes between some of the more vocal fans of each generation bickering at eachother. But hoping there will be enough that take the movie's lessons on divisiveness to heart and be able to enjoy both even if there may be preferences.

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Gou Ep21

Ciconia? In MY Higurashi??? It’s more likely than you’d think :)

Thoughts under the cut. Also apparently Ciconia spoiler stuff because that’s the world we live in now I guess lol

It’s kinda funny how over the course of Gou thus far I’ve seen people go from ‘there’s no way this is even going to reference Umineko, people are just reading into things’ to ‘wow I can’t believe Ryukishi’s going out of his way to tie literally all of his visual novel lore together in Gou :/’. It feels weirdly vindicating to see Gou just go the whole nine yards with bringing up unprecedented levels of When They Cry Lore [tm], lol. 

I know people basically thought [or hoped] that Ryukishi was just going to be trolling people who wanted this kind of lore stuff, but I always felt like it was going to be more straightforward and sincere than that, considering that he seems to genuinely enjoy this kind of writing, and I guess I ended up being right. If anything I underestimated just how explicit he’d be with this stuff.

Considering that they tweaked Featherine’s design a bit to be more Higurashi-y, and they avoided using that name for her, I figured they’d commit to having her fit more into the existing framework of Higurashi to avoid bringing up other When They Cry lore stuff, but then she literally just has the exact same personality as Featherine and immediately started talking about Ciconia stuff, so that was unexpected, lol.

The Umineko stuff is one thing, since we’re more or less dealing with a character who came from Umineko in the first place, but the Ciconia references throw like five different wrenches into things and make this way more confusing and interesting.

At the very least, I guess it cements the idea of Satoko being a Lambda expy, if not literally Lambda herself. It’s kinda hard to tell exactly where they’re going with this, in the grand scheme of things. If we’re going full Ciconia lore with this, then it’s possible that there’s basically just one original person who’s now a brain in a jar, and they’re basically being used as a ‘template’ for characters within simulations, which all end up looking similar to each other. 

It also raises the question of what this implies about how the timelines of the different VNs intersect, if Featherine is bringing up stuff from a story set in the future, but if we go with the whole simulation theory then they probably just all exist at the same time.

And on top of all the over-arching lore stuff that’s now being raised, this episode also gets into confusing time travel logic now that Satoko’s officially starting to do her own loops, and we all have to wrap our heads around how that meshes with Rika’s own powers and her personal timeline of events.

My best interpretation of the timeline here is that after the scene at the start of this episode, Featherine directly reset the timeline to an earlier point, rather than moving Satoko to a different fragment entirely. And because of that, the Matsuribayashi fragment played out like it did originally because Satoko was just sent back to an earlier point in that timeline, and Rika didn’t have her consciousness carry over because only Satoko got sent back, so the Rika in the next loop was basically just Matsuribayashi Rika again, and things just played out exactly the same with her.

We’ll have to see how the next episode goes, but since this loop ended with both Satoko and Rika dying, I think this will be where Rika’s consciousness also starts getting sent through the loops along with Satoko, although we know that until Nekodamashi she can’t remember how she died.

I’m really curious to see if Satoko and Rika immediately get thrown into the Onidamashi loop after that, or if there’ll be a whole series of loops that we haven’t seen yet before that. Satoko’s actions in the earlier arcs seem to imply that she has knowledge of how the original question arcs went that she shouldn’t have by this point in Gou, so maybe she spends some amount of time going through the same types of loops Rika did before Onidamashi happens, but it seems like from Rika’s perspective, she goes straight from this episode’s loop to Onidamashi, since she talked to Hanyuu about how the last thing she remembered was being at St. Lucia’s in 1988, and considering how this episode went, I don’t think Satoko would have allowed any loop after this to get to that point again in the first place. So if there’s any loops that happen between this and Onidamashi, they’d have to be ones that Rika retains no memory of. Or maybe her consciousness doesn’t start getting sent to those loops until Onidamashi.

Either way, it would imply that some sort of change might happen in the mechanics of Satoko’s looping. Which I could see happening, since she clearly doesn’t just keep repeating the same Matsuribayashi loop, so maybe at some point she also starts going to different fragments instead of just resetting the same one over and over again. Or maybe she just goes back early enough in the loop to completely change how things play out, but that’d basically just be the same thing as going to a different fragment.

I still think that Satoko’s exact motives and methods throughout the earlier Gou arcs changed over time, but this episode goes a long way to show how she’s already at the point of being willing to kill Rika. But at this point she’s only done it as a way to reset a failed loop, so I don’t think she’s progressed to the point we see in Nekodamashi where she’s literally torturing Rika as a way to try and convince her to stay in the village in the first place.

With just three episodes left [as far as we know, at least], I think we’re probably going to skim over the earlier Gou arcs to explain their individual mysteries before we go back to the end of Nekodamashi and see how that confrontation played out. One way or another it’d have to be pretty fast-paced to cover four arcs worth of answers, so they might just shove the answers all into the next episode and end it by going back to Nekodamashi.

It’d be kinda anti-climactic to spend such little time going over the answers to the earlier arcs, but at this point there probably isn’t much we need to know. We now know the ‘who’ and the ‘why’ of the mystery, so all that we need to be told is the ‘how’, and I think that’s going to end up being relatively simple. At the very least, I think Satoko used the same methods in basically every arc, so just going over one set of answers would solve most of the mysteries in each arc at the same time, and the individual mysteries in each arc would take less time to go over at that point.

Even at this point I’m still not entirely sure about a lot of this, mainly since there’s still the question of how much Satoko actually knows about the pre-Matsuribayashi loops, but I think the general answer to how she did basically everything in each arc was that she just raided the Irie Clinic to steal the syringe that makes people go L5, and then she just made people go L5 in the background of each arc.

In Onidamashi, I don’t think there’s even that much to answer. She presumably ended up doing a murder suicide with Rika at the end of the arc to reset the loop, and maybe she injected Rena with the syringe, but I still think that Rena could have easily just been doing all that without any interference from Satoko. Since that was the first Gou arc [unless there were other loops between this and Onidamashi], maybe Satoko hadn’t started injecting people yet, and only started doing that in later loops. The only other real mystery in this whole arc is what happened to Takano and Tomitake, and that was probably just them fleeing the village like we ended up seeing in Nekodamashi, which is also something that they might have done without any involvement from Satoko. I guess there’s also the question of what exactly made Takano abandon her goals, but that also might not really be directly caused by Satoko. My best guess is that, on the meta level, Lambda revoked her blessing from Takano, and she got given memories of Matsuribayashi, which ended up making her lose certainty in her goals, and choose to just give up and flee the village.

Watadamashi is still kinda confusing, but this might also just boil down to her having injected either Shion or Mion to trigger the same general scenario as Watanagashi. I don’t think it was her that killed Rika, but I think her suspicion of Keiichi was probably an act. Now that we know that by that point she was in the middle of her loops and knew exactly what was going on, I don’t think she’d genuinely suspect him of that, or that she’d even care that much. The Takano and Tomitake situation was probably just the same as all the other arcs, with them fleeing the village. I think a lot of the background stuff was basically just the same as Watanagashi, except for Mion ending up as more of a culprit this time. My biggest question about this arc is probably just why Satoko even bothered going to the Sonozaki estate at the end of the arc. Now that we know more about her motives and her level of meta knowledge, it just seems really weird that she’d bother doing that. If anything you’d think that she’d just immediately kill herself once she found out about Rika dying, since she’d have no reason to continue the loop after that.

I still like the idea that she ended up making Shion into her accomplice to help carry out a lot of the stuff she did in each loop, so that might play into the whole mystery of this arc. And maybe it’d explain why she bothered going to the Sonozaki estate.

Tataridamashi is still kinda strange and confusing, and more than the other arcs I think it really depends on how much she knows about the pre-Matsuribayashi loops. The whole situation of whether or not she was being abused by Teppei in this arc, and how much of an act she was putting on, is still pretty unclear. The stuff with Ooishi at the end of the arc is also still kinda strange. Maybe it was all intentional and she had basically just given up on that loop and used him to kill Rika, but I’m not sure. I kinda like the idea I’ve seen that maybe she was tempted by the idea of just letting the Tataridamashi timeline continue, and that she had genuinely come to some sort of peace with the events of that loop, but then Ooishi went crazy and forced her to reset the loop. Either way I feel like this arc is a turning point of some kind for Satoko, since it’s immediately after this point that her methods seem to get much more desperate and violent.

So I think that maybe she had basically ‘given up’ in Tataridamashi and was willing to just stay in that loop and let it play out, but Featherine decided that would be boring so she forced the game to keep going by making Ooishi go on a murder spree. And then Satoko realized that she’s just as trapped in this loop as Rika is, and is going to keep going through pain and misery until she can properly succeed with her original goal, and so she becomes much more desperate after that point. There’s also the fact that this is the point where Rika is also given the ability to remember her loops, so that might be another aspect of Featherine meddling with the game in order to keep it interesting.

I get the feeling that Satoko maybe ends up having another meeting with Featherine around this point, where she gets it spelled out to her face that she’s going to have to keep looping until Rika ‘loses’, whether Satoko likes it or not. For one thing, Satoko’s talked about how she became Oyashiro-sama’s new miko, but that didn’t really come up in this episode, so maybe she has another meeting with Featherine later on where that comes up. It’d also make sense if maybe Satoko gets told by Featherine at this point that Rika is also a looper who remembers each timeline, since the way that Satoko straight up starts murdering and torturing Rika seems kinda counter-intuitive to the idea of making her choose to stay in the village, but it’d make sense if she learned about Rika’s looping and changed her methods to ‘I’m going to torture her across multiple loops so that eventually I’ll get to a loop where she’s already chosen to give up and stay in the village’.

Maybe she could have found out about Rika’s looping as early as the end of Onidamashi, though, if Rika talked about it before the murder suicide. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t.

Either way, even once we eventually get back to Nekodamashi, I’m not really sure if we’ll get a happy ending or not, lol. It feels like the only way for this to end peacefully is for Satoko to just give up, but like I said above, I think Featherine is actively interfering with things, and is refusing to let Satoko give up before she wins. So I just don’t see that happening. This is also really feeling like an origin story for both Lambda and Bern, and their violently possessive relationship, so I kinda feel like the story might just commit to them going off the deep end and embracing their unhealthy desires. I wouldn’t be surprised at this point if Featherine gives Satoko the ability to become a witch in order to achieve her goal of staying with Rika forever.

There’s also the hanging plot thread of Satoshi still being alive, but with how singularly focused Satoko seems to be with Rika, I’m not even sure if finding out that he’s alive would go much to sway her if she can’t also get Rika to stay in the village. And, again, there’s the whole potential mess of Featherine wanting to be entertained no matter what.

Of course we also might get a whole second season or something, which would open up it’s own whole list of possibilities, lol. I’m not really convinced about it yet, and I’d rather keep my expectations low, but it really does feel more and more like there’s just not enough time to wrap everything up in just three more episodes. I know they can probably go over the answers for the previous arcs in like one more episode, but this whole extended flashback has been going on for way longer than I expected, and we haven’t even gotten to Onidamashi yet. I know that once we get back to Nekodamashi there might not even be that much more that needs to be done to wrap up the story now that everything’s laid out on the table, but it might still just feel kinda rushed to only get one or two episodes of content after that.

Though on the other hand, even though everything with Satoko is being laid out in a way that makes it feel like there’s not much more we need to do to wrap up the story, it’s possible that the story will just shift to having Featherine herself be the new antagonist, so to say. If I’m right about her not being willing to let Satoko just give up and make peace with Rika, then they might have to work together to stop her, but who knows. Maybe she’ll be willing to go along with a happy ending this time.

There’s also still the possibility that this is setting up for some sort of new Umineko anime, which at this point might have it’s own original story that continues on from Gou’s story in addition to Umineko’s, so that might sort of serve as a sequel to Gou in it’s own way, depending on how they spin it. It still feels like a pipe dream, but considering how bluntly this episode threw out references to WTC lore, it’s possible that this is going to be some kind of multi-part cinematic universe thing that’s going to go all the way with tying everything together across multiple new anime projects.

Also, before I forget, we finally got the visuals for the new ED, and I was right about them choosing to wait until now to show it because it had spoilers, lol. They’re more minor than I expected, but it still spoils the chandelier scene, and I guess it also shows Featherine, but in a very subtle way.

Either way, I think the visuals they went with were extremely good. I’m not sure if I like the song itself more than the first ED song since they’re both great, but I definitely prefer the visuals for this one over the visuals for the first ED. The art for them is both great, and they’re done by the same artist so they’re not that different to begin with, but the visuals for this ED feel way more dynamic in terms of their composition and editing. The first ED’s visuals were basically just a series of still images with some slow panning effects, but this one had way more complex images that were designed to feel like 3D panoramas being spun about. So there’s just a whole lot more going on with this one, so I really liked it.

Anyway, now I’m gonna go back to being sad that Ciconia Phase 2 got delayed, lol.

[autoplaysdigimon]

Top Five Main Character List

#5 Gatomon

Idk man, if I’ve got any sort of Buttons in good characters it’s ones who defect to the Good Guys, and Gatomon filled that role pretty nicely. (also oh man am I excited for 02 for reasons that may or may not be related to this) Not only is there the whole thing about introducing a new character (or pair of characters!) into the group, therefore having a fresh pair of eyes on the situation and new inter-character interactions; there’s something fantastic about a character who gets to show both antagonist and protagonist shades to them.

Unfortunately, Gatomon didn’t really have time for much development after this all went down - she went from being a cool and interesting villain, to the star of an arc, to yet another Digimon in the pile of protagonists. Just another symptom of the large cast, I guess, but it was still disappointing. Even her voice acting was better as a villain - she had this kinda silky, purring inflection to it that she kinda lost as a main character.

Still, though, kitty cute :3

#4 Tentomon

Alright so I may or may not be cribbing off my favourite Digimon list for this buuuut

and also to be fair the Digimon who make this list might be some of my favourites because they were the best characters in the show but ANYWAY

Tentomon! I mean, come on, he’s an electric ladybug who’s also some kind of robotic insect thing??? He’s the perfect foil to Izzy, he gets some of the best lines that are just stupid jokes but they’re so dumb they’re hilarious, he’s got an interesting voice that seems to be somewhere between a stereotypical “insect voice” and a goofy robot but also without being artificially synthesised, Medabots style (which is also cool, but it’s neat that they didn’t for Tentomon, I think).

Also, his VA Jeff Nimoy was on the writing team for the dub, which is neat but also he’s one of the ones to blame for the Everything about the dub.

#3 Joe Kido

Man, I never expected to empathise with this dude as much as I ended up doing in this rewatch, but hey! Dude’s got a good head on his shoulders, he’s got that Anxiety Relatable Feels, he’s a nervous wreck and he’s also got a surprising amount of great lines. I never appreciated him as a kid, but as an adult... hoo boy. Also his partner is a little seal man and that’s just :3

I’ve come to the conclusion that, if I were to go to the Digital World myself like these kids did, I’d react somewhere between Joe and Mimi. Nooo nothing’s clean enough and I’m tired and hungry and shouldn’t we at least have some cover while we sleep in case we’re attacked and it’s too hot here and we’re all gonna die and and and...

And then I’m booted off the island.

#2 Mimi Tachikawa

Oh hey, speaking of which!

Despite the dub team’s tendency to give her the most shallow, stereotypical lines in the show, Mimi’s fantastic. She’s kind of a boss-ass bitch and I can’t help but respect that, and also pink cowboy aesthetic??? YES PLEASE.

There was also that phase I went through as a kid where I rejected traditional femininity, and being a Sora fan over Mimi was definitely part of that. Nowadays I don’t really have any strong feelings about Sora one way or another, but I’ve really grown to like Mimi. Is this just me over-correcting from my kid views? Who knows! She’s got a pink cowboy hat!

#1 Palmon

SHE’S A LITTLE FLOWER LADY AND SHE’S PRECIOUS.

Her voice acting was some of my favourite in the series so far, having little voice cracks and just generally being so full of character. She’s an amazing foil to Mimi, not only in occasionally challenging her views and ideals but going along with them at the same time, when they’re not actively harmful. And then that one time when they were. Plus her in that little dress that one time! And wearing Mimi’s hat??? Truly the fashion icon we need in these trying times.

Honourable Mentions

Gabumon and Matt Ishida - They were pretty cool, I liked their whole Friendship thing (especially the Inspiring Crest Emotion being inspired by the Digimon partner and not one of the other kids for once!) but I couldn’t really get behind their reasoning for attacking Tai and going off on their own.

Gomamon - his face goes :3 and that makes me go :3

TK Takaishi - For a little kid, he sure steps the fuck up when nobody else will, huh? There’s something endearing and naive about the youngest one, knowing the least about the situation and the world at large, adapting the best because he’s just not as experienced in the Real World as the other kids, so he’s got less of a frame of reference to place it in. Actually, this all applies to Kari Kamiya as well.

Dishonourable Mentions

Hoo boy, this is gonna be controversial.

Tai Kamiya.

I don’t hate the guy, really. I’ve got his Funko Pop* and everything! But he’s got that Anime Protagonist Syndrome down pat, including centering his own problems over all others, taking the lead when nobody really asked him to, and being kind of a dick. I’ve definitely touched on that before, but come on, Tai, punching is not the solution to all your problems. At least he (sometimes) learns his lesson about it, like with the Skullgreymon thing.

I’ve really got nothing against Agumon either, I like his voice acting as well. But he just wasn’t as interesting to me as the others were, or as much as some of his expies in the future will be.

Hint. Hint.

*I’ve also got Spyro and Sparx, Gay Batman, and Tiabeanie in a wedding dress :)

[gffa]

spectral-musette replied to your post: Scattered Star Wars Thoughts: - One of the things...

     Hm, I did really enjoy Alliances, but at this point I feel like Treason might just be sticking with me more (I apparently really love Ar'alani???). I can definitely see your points about Alliances: my big complaint was that it didn’t have enough Anakin/Padme romance. I took it for Anakin being task-oriented, but now that you mention it, he probably SHOULD’ve been thinking about Obi-Wan more (I guess I was doing that enough for everyone?).       (continue re: Alliances) - But I didn’t take the Padme POV stuff about Duja to mean that she was particularly closer to her than any of the other handmaidens, just that their friendship was prominent in her mind due to the circumstances.

shadowsong26x  replied to your post: Scattered Star Wars Thoughts: - One of the things...

      i was talking about this a while back–i overall liked alliances, but it did kind of fall flat for me, too; in part for the characterization issues you mention (though i have more issues with vader than anakin/padme, but i can def. see where you’re coming from); but also bc someone pointed out to me that thrawn is kind of a sherlock holmes expy? and in alliances there’s no real watson analogue, so that dynamic is missing. and holmes sans watson can be insufferable. (cont)       whereas in treason, while it’s not quite the same as in other books, he has *way* more compatible people to bounce off of, so…idk, that’s part of it for me at least?

Oh, no, I apologize for this in advance.  XD  I just really have a lot of feelings about these books!  I loved that first Thrawn book so much, even knowing that Zahn had a tendency to write his OC as the most special ever, I was feeling pretty charitable towards the character because he was obviously going to lose on Rebels and I loved Eli in the book, and it was a nicely balanced book re: everything that frustrated me about Alliances. The thing that got me about Alliances is that I don’t think it achieved a very good balance about how to use characters like Anakin and Padme.  When Zahn writes more minor characters (like his OCs or like Arihnda Pryce) it works out because we’re not coming in with those characters having a huge established story already in place.  But Anakin and Padme have these connections that should have been coming up--this was set not that long before ROTS, right?  Why isn’t he thinking more about Ahsoka?  Why does he literally only even think about Obi-Wan like twice in the entire story?  I can buy that Padme’s thoughts were focused on Duja because she just died, but the way none of the other handmaidens ever seemed to be part of that tapestry just didn’t fit with how Padme handmaidens have always been a group.  Even Sabe’s relationship with Padme is littered with the other handmaidens being in and around them! And the final insult came when the book tried to kind of imply that it was Thrawn who got Padme to start thinking about how the Republic was maybe actually kind of terrible, which was mean to be a lead-up into her line in ROTS, “What if the democracy we thought we were serving no longer exists and the Republic has become the very evil we've been fighting to destroy?”  Thrawn’s supposed to be absolute shit at politics, that was well established in Thrawn (which takes place many years after this one!) but suddenly he’s canny enough during the Clone Wars to:  "Maybe what really troubled here was his suggestion that the Republic and Separatists all played by those same rules." In theory, it’s a neat connection to the events of the movie, something I wanted more of!  Connection to the rest of the established GFFA and the events in it!  But it gave me this really sour taste of how Padme’s story, her entire arc, as a politician who has an arc across the entirety of the TV show that’s at least somewhat hers, is actually inspired by Thrawn instead.  Thrawn, who’s supposed to be shit at politics. Add that together with how Zahn built up that Padme was a character who was about diplomacy, about talking to resolve issues, and in the end her big climactic scene was still shooting a droid with her blaster. Add all that together with how lackluster Anakin felt to me and I just was disappointed with Alliances.  I think @shadowsong26x really put it into clarity for me with those comments (THANK YOU FOR HITTING THAT NAIL ON THE HEAD), that Thrawn works for me when he’s the Sherlock in a Holmes & Watson dynamic, but then that follows that you just cannot put ANAKIN SKYWALKER into the Watson role because that downplays the competency of his character. Like, yes, look, I make fun of Anakin and point out all the ways in which he is a dumbass (largely because this helps me forgive him for all the monstrous shit he’s done, but also because it endears him to me and makes him so relatable to me) but when you write a serious novel and have Thrawn explaining electronic stuff to Anakin Skywalker?  No, get out of here with that.  Not unless Anakin is either geeking out on exactly the same level (NO, MAKE HIM GEEKIER BECAUSE HE IS!!!) or is like, “Yes, we all spent a semester in comm tech class, I get how it works just from looking at it.” or Zahn went even harder on the authority kink.  Because I do not believe, for one single second, that Thrawn knows more about machines than ANAKIN SKYWALKER. Thrawn works for me with Eli, because there’s a genuine sense of exasperation there, a genuine and justified sense of “what did you just fucking do?” when Thrawn gets him assigned to the Blood Crow, there’s an organic sense of growing affection between them, and Eli works as someone who is good with his own thing, but isn’t THE CENTRAL FIGURE OF THE SKYWALKER SAGA AND ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL JEDI EVER.  I can see Eli being the Watson in that dynamic! I liked the hints of something really delightful going on there--that Anakin and Thrawn clashed with each other, that Anakin’s flying by the seat of his pants kind of style clashes with Thrawn’s need to control an entire situation to get the outcome he desires, that there were moments of hilarity when they snarked at each other (”Do you make a habit of getting captured?”  “NO!!!” was hilarious) or when Anakin’s authority kink was on display, but there wasn’t enough of that to balance out the other problems I had with the novel. (As a side note this is why I’m hoping that Zahn isn’t the one to write “what happened after Rebels with Ezra and Thrawn?” story, because I’m not sure I trust him to not try to put Ezra in the Watson role, when I don’t think that would suit his character.) Whereas, in Treason, Thrawn is being put in situations where the people he’s pinging off him can take more of a second fiddle role, where I can take enjoyment out of Thrawn outplaying them (which, yes, Anakin is not a great political player, but he has enough sheer raw power and enough tactical brilliance and mechanical brilliance that I need that to be respected).  That’s where Zahn’s Thrawn works best for me and why, when I went back to reread the first book, it still really worked for me even after I was crabby about Alliances.

[lazywhaler]

Serious actual Dishonored 2 Thoughts

I played through Dishonored 2 completely for a second time and paid a lot more attention this time around and as promised here are some thoughts under the cut (some 1700+ words of thoughts). This post is primarily meant to be like a journal-type thing for my thoughts, but I’ve tried to organize it as best I can with my minimal writing skills:

I was initially disappointed by Dishonored 2: I didn’t play this game at launch in 2016 because at that point I had a laptop that could only run Dishonored on low graphics in low chaos. I watched a bunch of walkthroughs on Youtube, read people’s thoughts on the comments in the wiki and all the meta here. I thought, and continue to think that mechanically, and gameplay-wise it’s vastly superior to the first game. 

I was disappointed by the story which was basically a retread of the first but somehow even more simplified. (which even though I love with all my heart, come on, Dishonored doesn’t have a groundbreaking story). The Daud DLCs were so much better in that regard, that I blindly trusted that Arkane would continue to move in that direction.

The characters in this game felt a little more one-dimensional. It felt like almost all the targets were expies of characters from the first game in one way or another, and the Clockwork Mansion level seemed to say that they didn’t care.

Apologies to Stephen Russel, but Corvo’s voice acting is not good at all. Corvo just sounds like he’s staring down a long Monday at the office with a hangover. I might said that maybe that grizzled raspy voice just doesn’t work for Dishonored but Michael Madsen’s performance of Daud pretty much assassinates that argument.

Don’t like what they did with the Void or characterising the Outsider, but this one’s just a personal preference. I can see why people would like it or not care, even if I don’t. 

The story also felt much much lower-stakes than the first one. Dunwall really felt if you pushed it with a feather, it would fall over the edge. Karnaca, in contrast felt like a vibrant, ascendant city being held back by gangs and corruption. Even the bloodflies aren’t that much of a calamity.

Having paid closer attention to the story, and other peoples’ readings of this game, I’ve realised that the ‘low stakes-ness’ of Dishonored 2 is intentional.

Arkane could have chosen to show Karnaca as a city on the brink of utter collapse. The bloodfly epidemic could have been bad enough that instead of buildings, entire streets or districts had to be blocked off. I haven’t done a high chaos run, but in my playthroughs, I’ve never seen Nest Keepers in groups of more than two, in stark contrast to the pant-shitting Weeper hordes from the first game.  Dunwall was literally blockaded, so there was no escaping your fate. The docks at Karnaca are wide open for anyone who wants to arrive. This is all intentional. 

So, the stakes are low. But why would Arkane intentionally make that choice? I think they intentionally lowered the stakes so that all the instances of corruption that you encounter or hear about are thrown into starker relief

In the first game, against the backdrop of a cataclysmic plague that made life very hard for non-aristocrats, it’s pretty easy to see why the City Watch would turn to crime. The plague if not excused, at least justified, a lot of shady behaviour from characters up to and including Sokolov experimenting on healthy people. In contrast, without the threat of the city descending into utter chaos hanging over everyone’s heads, when you try and pull the same shady crap that people did in the first game, now you just look greedy. And I think this game tries to bring that theme right to your doorstep, by letting Corvo/Emily participate in making things worse.

Robbing people’s houses in this game feels a lot worse than it did in the first one. The majority of the apartments that you rob don’t belong to people who are outrageously wealthy and haven’t been abandoned. These are people who are already getting screwed over and you can help make it worse. In Lower Aventa, you get a whole cutscene with the Lady Gaga Black Market woman being threatened by the Howlers and you have the choice to rob her (very likely) after witnessing that. 

Dishonored 2 focuses more on repairing damage done rather than avenging it

A bulk of the problems that happen in this game can be attributed to Corvo and Emily not being good at their jobs and more importantly, not being a good rulers. The game highlights the moral failures of Corvo and Emily to turn a blind eye to Luca Abele’s antics and the problems in Karnaca. They fucked up and they can’t really take revenge because they played a part in it too. That’s why instead of the poetic justice fate-worse-than-death types of nonlethal eliminations from the first game, we have more, for lack of a better word, corrective, options. The Crown Killer is cured. Breanna Ashworth can’t do witch stuff anymore. Knocking out Stilton improves so much stuff and literally heals Billie Lurk. Even Delilah gets an ending that kind of rewards her for all the crap she’s been through, without letting her hurt other people. Kirin Jindosh’s elimination comes across like this, but it’s emphasized that we’re taking him out purely so that we can stop him from mass-producing clockwork soldiers, not out of revenge, For my money, the only poetic justice-type nonlethal elimination is Luca’s even if he’s not really going to be in a situation where he’s better off dead. 

But here’s the thing: even though I ‘get’ Dishonored 2 a little better now, I still think they did a terrible job of trying to convey a lot of this!

I said that I think the low stakes nature was intentional and I think there’s reasonable evidence to support that claim. But there’s also evidence to contradict it. The Outsider keeps talking about Karnaca being on the brink of collapse. So do a lot of NPCs (I’m looking at you, beggar near the Aventa District Black Market). Am I supposed to take that at face value, ignoring what’s being shown to me in favour of what’s being told? Am I supposed to be like ‘Classic emo drama queen Outsider’ and slap my knee, and marvel at humanity’s propensity to make things out to be worse than they seem? I don’t know????

People being squeezed dry by the Grand Guard on the left and the Howlers on the right, with a light garnish of Overseer harassment? Definitely something in the game. When you rob them, and especially the Black Market shopkeepers? It’s Bad. But I guess a twinge of guilt and judgement from me is all you get, because the game isn’t going to punish you. They could have really committed and made robbing the Black Markets an action that increase chaos, even if you don’t kill anyone, but that Did Not Happen.

What about Emily (and let’s not even pretend anymore that this story holds together with Corvo as the protagonist) confronting her failures as a leader, realising she’s Not So Different from Luca Abele? Well, she gets called out on it a grand total of, maybe, 3 times by Billie and Sokolov, who immediately go ‘Well anyway, here’s the next thing I want to say’ and then at the end of the game, she’s like “My time here living as a Poor has given me Perspective. I deserve to be Empress now because I Want it”. Combined with how low-stakes this game is, it feels a lot like Emily took a gap year to find herself, except that the whole thing evidently took two months. I don’t think they executed any of this stuff well. The fact that I have to question these decisions were intentional or not doesn’t bode well.

Emily kind of faces some reckoning for her moral failings, turning a blind eye to the crap going down in Karnaca, but what about her incompetence and utter lack of interest in being a ruler? Or Corvo’s failings as a Spymaster (like seriously dude, how did you not know how any of this shit was going on, so much of it was an open secret). But she barely gets called out on her disinterest in ruling and IIRC Corvo pretty much gets away scot-free with not doing his job. 

Or maybe I’ve just gotten it wrong. I study computer science. Media criticism is way outside my wheelhouse and so maybe I’ve grossly misinterpreted what this game was going for. But the one thing I’m absolutely, 100% certain about is that this game shouldn’t have been about Corvo and Emily.

Even back when we started getting details about Corvo and Emily, I was a bit...iffy about the whole thing. Their stories wrapped up pretty nicely in the first game. “Emily lived to be a wise, just ruler and things were good” or “Emily is a Murder Empress”. The end. And now suddenly it’s not. I hate it when sequels override the endings to previous concluded arcs, and I think there needs to be good justification for doing it. Arkane didn’t do a good job of it and after the wet hork of spit they lobbed at Daud’s arc in Death of the Outsider it seems to be a problem they have. Their story was completely concluded in the first game. No sequel hooks. This game shouldn’t have been about them.

I feel like Arkane were trying to tell a story about corruption and the decay and damage caused by simple human greed, but felt like they had to shoehorn in Corvo and Emily or we’d lose interest. I think the game would have made way more sense with someone from Karnaca’s underclass as the protagonist, maybe a Mindy Blanchard type. Maybe her plan to craft the Mark works, or maybe the Outsider gives her a little push and then she foils the conspiracy to bring Delilah back, kind of like The Brigmore Witches, except Delilah doesn’t actually come back. The main villian in this game could just be people’s appetite for corruption and Emily’s apathy. 

I don’t know. It’s too late for any of that kind of speculation. My faith in Arkane took a huge hit with the one-two of Dishonored 2 and DOTO. It makes me optimistic that Dishonored 3 would have a completely different protagonist, but I’m not going to be blindly trusting, like I was after Brigmore.

[cromulentbookreview]

Spurlos Verschwunden

You know how you read an article online about scientists trying to find a ways to open portals to other worlds/parallel universes/the Upside Down/etc. and you immediately think: haven’t these scientists ever seen any movie or TV show ever made? They know that’s going to end badly, right? Right??

And by that, I mean: Before I Disappear by Danielle Stinson!

Seventeen-year-old Rose Montgomery, her mom Helen and her little brother Charlie have been living on the run for a long time. Rose and Charlie’s father disappeared when Charlie was still a baby and after that, things fell apart. Helen became depressed, and entered into a relationship with an abusive piece of shit referred to only as the Monster. Rose, Helen and Charlie fled the Monster, but he kept pursuing them farther and farther West. At the beginning of the novel, the Montgomerys are lying low in Nevada when Charlie, who has always been a bit strange, insists that the family move West to Fort Glory, Oregon for reasons Rose doesn’t quite understand. When she sees that the charity Hands for Hearths (a definite Habitat for Humanity expy) has an affiliate office in Fort Glory, she decides to go for it. All Rose wants for her family is a permanent home - someplace better than the ramshackle trailer in which they crossed the country. Hands for Hearths is her best hope.

Fort Glory isn’t just your average town on the Oregon Coast - it’s the site of DARC, the Deep Atomic Research Collider, Oregon’s answer to the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. The facility had been shut down, until three weeks ago when it was brought back online...at practically the same moment Charlie started telling Rose that they needed to move to Fort Glory. Spoooooky....

While the Montgomerys adjust to life in Fort Glory, including the influx of tourists, journalists and conspiracy theorists drawn in by DARC, weird things start happening in the town. Crime rises. People randomly go crazy. Rumors are that the DARC is messing with things it shouldn’t be messing with, like poking holes into other dimensions. Because it worked so well on Stranger Things.

Rose just shrugs all this weirdness off - she has bigger problems, like earning a paycheck, helping her family get a house, keeping their ancient truck running and making sure there’s enough food to eat. Charlie, who is clearly some sort of Kid Hero capable of seeing things most other people can’t, tries repeatedly to warn Rose that something bad is about to happen, but, again, she just brushes it off. Rose drives to the nearby town of Maple to the Hands for Hearths office when the whole world goes crazy. The sky turns green, people start attacking each other, even Labrador retrievers turn against their humans! (You know things are truly bad when a Labrador retriever turns against you).

So Rose heads back to Fort Glory as she can as fast  only to find that the road literally stops just outside of town. There’s nothing beyond it except old growth forest.

The whole town is gone, along with everyone in it.

Rose, desperate to find her mom and Charlie, runs into the woods. After some shenanigans, she feels this weird tugging...suddenly she’s yanked sideways into a place known as the Fold. The Fold looks like the woods around Fort Glory, but something is wrong. Really, really wrong. Rose quickly teams up with four other teens who have found themselves stuck in the Fold - including the hunky ex-con Ian, whose dark past has made him an outcast in Fort Glory, but as Rose gets to know him, he really doesn’t seem so bad...plus it’s nice to not be alone in the Fold, where the laws of physics don’t apply and your inner demons can physically hurt you. But wormholes and darkness monsters be damned, Rose is going to find Charlie, damn it!

Oh, and her mom. Her, too. It’s not like she forgot her mom was missing, too...

Before I Disappear is a quick, exciting read - it’s also a standalone, which, having read nothing but the first of serieses for a long while, is very refreshing. I love the setting - as a native Oregonian, I am a sucker for stories set in my beloved, bizarre home state. The fictional town of Fort Glory, Oregon seems to be a mix of Fort Clatsop, Fort Stevens and, possibly, Fort Vancouver - you know, all those weird forts they had on the Pacific coast (except Fort Vancouver, which is way down on the Columbia, but the Columbia is how you get down to the coast in a boat so...). All wee little Oregonian children - or, at least, those of us who live west of the Cascades - are forced at some point to go to Fort Clatsop, as it was where Lewis and Clark hung out once they reached the Pacific. I distinctly remember being made to visit Fort Vancouver, too, even though it’s in *shudder* Washington. Fort Glory could also be any of those teeny little coastal towns they have up and down the coast, like Cannon Beach or Seaside or Tillamook or Garibaldi or Nehalem or Manzanita or Netarts or Yachats or Depoe Bay or Newport...ok I should stop because now I’m just naming towns I’ve been to (they’re all very nice. Well, except Newport.The aquarium is cool, but the rest of the town can get sucked into a wormhole for all I care). 

Needless to say, I am familiar with the Oregon Coast, it’s where Oregonians go when the sun comes out. (Well, when the sun comes out in the rest of the state. On the coast, the sun only comes out three days a year and it’s always on the days when you aren’t there). So I can speak with some authority when I say the Oregon Coast would be a terrible place to build a fancy underground atomic energy research facility-type thing. I mean, there’s the risk of tsunamis, earthquakes, lingering radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi Power plant Disaster of 2011...

See, this is why we shouldn’t have research facilities dedicated to punching holes into other dimensions situated on the Oregon Coast. Especially not right on top of a town. Put that shit out in the desert where if you poke a hole and let in a Demogorgon or a Darkness Monster, there’s not much around for it to eat. Except desert.

Also, I’m fairly certain any contact with other dimensions will go something like this:

But back to the book: character-wise, the one character we get to know best is Rose, which makes sense as the novel is written from her first-person perspective. Unfortunately, we don’t get to know the side characters as well - Blaine, Becca, and Jeremy aren’t nearly as well-developed. Charlie, aside from being a mysterious child who can see into other dimensions, doesn’t have much of a personality. He’s just an odd kid and Rose absolutely adores him. Rose’s mom falls by the wayside entirely - most of the novel has Rose laser-focused on finding Charlie, while her mom is a bit of an afterthought. But, again, that’s the limitation of the first-person perspective. Aside from Rose, the most developed character is Ian, who apparently has starburst eyes.

Both he and Rose are on the run from their pasts, and being in the Fold is forcing them to confront some pretty harsh truths about themselves and their lives.

My biggest complaint concerning Before I Disappear would be the ending. The story just ends. I would’ve loved a denouement or an epilogue or something where we could see what happens to the characters after the end of the main action...but instead we get action action action action end. So many stories end that way, I wanna know what people get up to when they get home after the adventure, damn it! I’m guessing lots of people, as soon as the adventure is over, just go home, shower, stuff food into their faces and then sleep for the next three straight days. Or maybe go to a hospital. Or immediately get arrested, like in Keanu. Either way, I wish we could’ve gotten more than just “hey it’s over!”

RECOMMENDED FOR: Anyone just fresh off a binge of season 3 of Stranger Things and are desperate for another cool inter-dimensional teen drama involving mysterious research facilities, wormholes and disappearing towns. Also fans of YA genre stories and Oregonians.

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR: non-YA fans, anyone currently living on the Oregon Coast, scientists currently working at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

RATING: 3.99/5 (0.1 point removed for the abrupt ending. I wanted more! *cries*)

RELEASE DATE: July 23, 2019 (Ha! I got this review done on time!!)

THE GORGEOUS OREGON COAST:

FOR ANYONE CONFUSED ABOUT THE TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: Learn some German.

[perfectackeracy]

“When the story stops sucking...”

Ok so you’ve probably noticed my lack of reviews and activity in general. Even the anime didn’t make me raise my voice more than usual lately. 

I’m gonna make it short: my lack of activity on meta and theories is mostly due to a lack of passion and interest regarding the manga events. It’s been since April that I haven’t written anything globally consistent, and it was mostly because the chapters were devoid of an interesting topic to elaborate upon. Everything I wanted to say was scattered in my asks and I had no motivation to sum everything up.

When I first started this blog, I mostly held theories about what was going outside the walls, what were the enemy’s true motivations and how the story could end. Even after the dull battle that was RtS, there was still something to elaborate upon: who was Zeke? What’s going to happen to Reiner and Bertolt from now on? What’s located inside the basement? What is the truth behind the world? Back in the day, I was more passionate on character analysis and what lies behind their motives.

The first major ragequit I’ve experienced was two years ago: two of my favorite characters died for some cheap, unnecessary drama (that wasn’t that unnecessary when you analyze Isayama’s words). At that time, when the basement’s secrets were revealed, I was more interested in how things can turn dark on Paradis than attachment to what’s left of the characters, since my favorites were on the other side of the ocean, dead or dead inside. Still, the prospect of a dark Eren following the wrong path because he can ws interesting enough to keep me interested.

Then we’ve got the Marley arc. An arc I was more than happy to follow, with an exclusive point of view from the fighters located on the other side, a team which has my favorite and a bunch of kids I came to appreciate. Naturally I would deliver as I’ve always delivered up until a certain point. You had Reiner dealing with the pain and the guilt accumulated through these years, the interactions between the group of warriors, an empire on decline, Zeke’s questionable motives, Eren’s presence that will ultimately cast doom, not only on Marley but also on the rest of the world, including Paradis. 

Then the SC came and things weren’t as interesting anymore…

It’s almost as if the SC’s reintroduction brought anything I didn’t want out of the series: we’ve got the same dull fights since RtS, the same plot-armored cast, the same sob comedy we had an arc ago and Zeke’s character who currently looks like an expy of Light Yagami and his 456138D chess consisting in anticipating everybody to accomplish his goals. The entirety of Vol. 26 was more a deception than a satisfactory volume.

We’ve transitioned from a geopolitical festival to a full-fledged battle with a twist at the end, as well as some flashbacks, and the whole thing was either dull or laughable. Let’s review this point by point to show you how disappointing this whole mess was.

The action sequence

To summarize the whole battle: Eren transforms into the Attack Titan, the Warhammer had him cornered, Mikasa saves him at the last minute, Jean and co. barge in and defeat the Marleyan troops, Warhammer has more resources but Eren can put two and two, Porco comes to Sister Tybur’s rescue but overestimated Paradis, Porco was saved by Pieck, Zeke comes in, Zeke has to act, Armin nukes the harbor, Porco gets distracted and fucks up, which leads to Zeke being captured and Pieck fucking up, as Pieck was about to be finished, Falco and Magath interfere, the kids hide Pieck, Porco fights against Eren but panics in front of the zeppelin, screw up and allowed Eren to use him as a nutcracker, Porco almost dies but is rescued by a suicidal Reiner, everybody boards up safely and fuck off from Liberio with Zeke, another titan power, and the last remaining cadets, one of them successfully killing a soldier who had death flags on her for a long time.

To be frank, I’m not sure how people can think it’s a good battle overall. On one hand, you have a bunch of soldiers in gear with titanium plot armor and on the other hand you have a team of warriors who need to be ridiculed through and through and pass for incompetents as Eren does his job without suffering any consequences during the battle. The most active, Pieck and Porco went from careful to suddenly disoriented, being put down by their enemies just like that, not making this fight even equal. It’s not even close to RtS’ sense of battle, where the SC was backed against the wall before returning the situation with crappy tactics. Here, we’re witnessing an emergency plan working rather well. Too well even. 6 deaths in total? Really? On the other hands, you’ve got Marley depleted from two more titan powers, Pieck’s panzer unit and a couple of soldiers.

Concerning titan fights, Porco and Lady Tybur held their own against Eren but were wrecked not so long after they gave their best. Porco in particular is a huge contradiction, who went from prideful (vs. Levi) to careful (to Pieck) to outright rushing everything (seeing the Colossus and seeing the blimp). It was a bit embarrassing on his behalf.

The battle also recycles some common elements that are quite tiresome to watch: Mikasa saving Eren when he’s getting backed in a corner, Armin’s basic plans -that nobody could ever guess-, always working while everybody acts like a clueless moron around him, Jean being contradictory… For an arc supposed to illustrate the divergence of the main trio, there wasn’t much to show except both Mikasa and Armin being disappointed in Eren’s actions.

Even the major deaths of this arc were neither shocking nor impactful. The most shocking deaths I can recall were Udo and Zofia’s because they were kids, but they weren’t painted as prominent characters in the cadet batch unlike Falco and Gabi. Next we had Willy Tybur, whose death was expected in the same chapter he died in, his sister, who had a fair chance to only serve as a placeholder to be eaten, and Sasha, who not only had red flags being painted all over her (killing the guards in front of Gabi, being the only one not wearing a breast plate), but was the subject of Isayama’s planned death (from Oita’s Q&A, March 2018). Sasha was already a non-character at this point, and him spending a whole funeral (when no other character got this privilege) was just plain obnoxious.

The characters

I’m still amazed -and not in a good way- by how bland the main staff became. Supposing it was remotely entertaining to make me root for them, my thoughts would’ve been something other than “Jesus fucking christ when will someone die already Gabi please shoot these fuckers”.

In simpler terms, Eren is by far the most entertaining character of the SC so far. While I understand the need to oppose Eren to his comrades in terms of ideology, his opponents are either uncaptivating or uninteresting to watch.

Armin is, of course and by far, the biggest offender. From the victim of Eren’s actions, he’s the one who opposes Eren’s individualistic views, but his character -or rather, his lack of- makes it hard to sympathize with. Simply speaking, a simpleton like him would’ve been better if he didn’t enjoy himself like an idiot after not only inheriting the CT, but also living at the price of Erwin. His unexplainable mastery of the CT at the same level than a natural like Bertolt, as well as a poor copypaste of the sad giant who never wanted this feels at the same time forced, redundant and bent over for the character’s convenience. The way a gary-stu would. To add more on the injury, Hange, the commander, passes as a complete buffoon in front of him, going as far as to praise his basic plans and compare him to Erwin. When you combine Isayama’s interviews and his position in the story, the way he comes off as a special snowflake feels unwanted. Even more when he got to live at the expense of two -potentially- more interesting and more popular characters.

In the end, we’ve got an amalgamate trying to narrate the story to Annie, who wasn’t seen for six years, but who was used as a confidence pillow. Considering Armin is a grown man who, in the end, chose to go with Eren and used gary stu nukes against Marley, am I supposed to sympathize with this? You know, it’s a good thing Armin tanked in popularity. His character was borderline insufferable in the former arc, and in this one, you just wish someone would mercy crunch him.

Fortunately Armin is by far the worst, but other members have their characters suffering post-timeskip. Special mentions to Hange and Levi. Hange either switched between the eccentric clown and the serious commander. While I’m ok with them being less competent than Erwin due to the pressure, they’re also a vet losing all their team members and yet displaying the personality they always did before timeskip. It’s no longer the squad leader specializing in research, but the commander, sometimes incapable to maintain a serious side, like when Yelena introduced the anti-Marley soldiers. While there’s a certain pressure coming from Zeke’s directives but also Eren’s decisions, their whole character is somewhat lackluster. Going from almost leaving the strategies to Armin to outright try and be friendly with Eren while he’s, once again, jailed, right after scolding him.

Moving on to Levi, while he held his promise for later I’m under the impression he became a meme without convictions more than anything. All he does in these chapters is threatening Zeke, which can be fun the first time but quickly becomes annoying, since we’re getting back in the old ways where Levi lacked development and was simply the clean freak, who also happened to be Paradis’ strongest soldier. He doesn’t have much usefulness in the story except being the sharp razor cutter of the group. Considering what Isayama said in the character directory it had to be expected, but it’s still annoying.

The character I’m feeling sad for so far are Historia and Reiner: Historia because she still doesn’t know what she really wants and bends again to someone else’s demands, even giving her body to fill the conditions of a potential savior, all at the expense of her freedom, pride and happiness. I’m surprised she agreed with Kiyomi’s conditions so quickly, however. Meanwhile Reiner was feeling suicidal up to the point of letting himself die. Had it not been for Gabi and Falco calling him, Porco would be dead. Still disappointed the volume didn’t end on his point of view. Besides, I was expecting him thinking about Bertolt during his coma, since Eren picking him up was similar to how Bertolt picked him up as they were kids. Yet another blueballing moment for Bertolt’s closure… Oh well.

Jean is more or less okay. His character is consistent, but he feels to much like an underdog in comparison of other characters who have been put in front. He’s still the same guy who acts tough but still has a moment of hesitation. I still don’t get why he’s used for convenient survivals, especially when he decided to not toss Gabi and Falco away from the blimp. Gabi, a trained soldier, killed Sasha, who was one of your besties for a long time? Ok let’s not throw them out and blame Eren on this whole fiasco!

I’ve said my mind about Floch, but him becoming a fanboy of Eren was unexpected and I’m curious to see what role he’s going to play in the future. Connie’s reactions to him teaming up with the man who was responsible for his village being devastated is too lackluster. Still, him describing Sasha’s loss as a part of him dying was touching.

Sasha was practically a non-character whose death would’ve been more impactful if it was set on for earlier. Isayama let her not only for the sidelines for way too long, but she ended up being the only “major” death on Paradis, with a couple of death flags on her. The result was not only predictable, but quite obnoxious with the over-extended funeral. Her character never got past the food jokes and Isayama is adding another layer of grief and mourning. Layer that could be shortened and used for something else. If there was another one I’d say ok, but this extra mourning is just really unnecessary. No character, not even Erwin, had this treatment before. Is it happening because Sasha doesn’t require much plot significance like Marco?

Gabi deserves my appreciation however. Her motivations to become a warrior were touching and understandable if you’re a member of a minority who strives to be accepted among other folks who sees you and your upbringing as inferior.

Zeke is a complete enigma. His actions are the ones impacting the plot the most and I really don’t know what to make of this. His movies are clear and at the same time they aren’t. Clear in the sense that he plays everybody like a fiddle to reach some goal. Unclear in the sense we don’t understand precisely what this goal is and what pushes Zeke to do this. Whether it’s for the common good or his own safety. The keikaku master exposition is becoming old if we keep exploring yet again what’s happening on Paradis on the third year. It’s cool Zeke is at the origin of both solutions and conflicts, but nothing is really explained.

The current plot

Or more accurately, monkey shenanigans 2.0. They’re not really the most compelling but they’re interesting enough to follow the series monthly. Despite that, we’re getting more questions than answers with all these chapters. If Zeke sides with neither camp, what is he fighting for exactly?

Since vol. 26 was mostly battles, not much questions have been answered to, and in the end, we’re spending more time with Paradis’ cast, getting more and more unlikeable with each chapter, falling into their own ways, rather than finishing with Marley, a cast we’re accustomed to since vol. 23. It would’ve been much better to end the battle of Liberio on Marley’s point of view first, then explain the flashbacks after. Engaging on an exposition dump was a clumsy move, and ending the battle to see a bunch of soldiers attacking another nation like terrorists acting like a bunch of clowns feels off compared to the settled tone.

Plus, so many scenes could’ve been shortened or skipped to insert other character moments instead. Sasha’s funeral comes to mind. You could’ve cut it half and have Historia thinking about Ymir when Kiyomi made her a proposition. The food jokes are outdated anyway and they make the story feel more embarrassing to read than comical. Same thing as Levi threatening to make a sopa de macaco. Still a tier better than food jokes, but still annoying.

The sudden transition to Paradis really makes me wonder, overall, why I should care about these fucks while the Marley arc started with another perspective? You just can’t let things unfinished and have an exposition dump in the meantime.

[whetstonefires]

d gray man liveblog part 5! (part 1)(part 2)(part 3)(part 4)

Love the amount of personality Allen conveys by code-switching into different formality levels. the translators here are doing an excellent job conveying that, though i suspect the foul language there could have been legitimately punched up.

asserting that his oath to mana and the love that underlies it are his even though he can’t know that is...what makes Allen main character material i guess.

XD I want to ask when ‘being a total maniac with a personality whose internal contradictions are never entirely resolved’ became the shounen protagonist standard but i’m paging through mentally and it basically goes all the way back.

Ashita no Joe was like this. it’s always been like this. only the details change.

I will give Cross Marian .3 points for the possibility he predicted that offering Allen no mercy would inspire him to pull out his hardshell rage against the whole situation rather than crumpling under the weight.

stg allen walker is composed of 93% layered trauma like fine lacquerware and 4% mental invasion. the remaining 3% of his personality is what’s subject to contest. when XIV exceeds 7% encroachment is when shit is going to get real.

oh woo there is Politics afoot and Bookman is...actually intimidated by them, that scares me.

also he and Lavi keep conversing through thought bubbles and i can’t tell if we’re meant to understand they have a telepathic link or this is just an idiosyncratic method of indicating whispers.

lavaliere thinks allen is funny. or that komui’s attempts to reframe shit in allen’s favor are funny.

he’s not actually wrong that the XIVth can’t be trusted, but you want to insist he is wrong somehow because he’s already demonstrated that his standards for treatment of people who even might be compromised are inhumane as fuck.

i want to keep making Pope jokes but the recurring phrase ‘the central government’ just. it really does emphasize how much this organization is modeled on a modern Japanese concept of hierarchy rather than an early-modern European one.

...i am reminded that early European accounts of Tokugawa Japan recorded the shogun as the Emperor and the Emperor as the Pope.

labubibir just smirks when komui asks if his unilateral ‘we’ll tell everyone all about this in the morning’ decision has the pope’s imprimatur behind it.

srsly if we get to a twist that the current Pope is like. an animated corpse or a stuffed bear or a wooden statue or something run by a committee, i’m not even going to be shocked.

oh look it’s Link in that outrageous papal magic ninja getup. XD the role of Timcampi in this story is so weird. and great. he’s like. magic floating R2D2 stg, only if Luke threw R2 at Yoda’s head at some point.

...the point would be when Yoda actually explained about Vader before Vader could, but did it in the most assholish and unhelpful way possible

which you know i would believe would have happened.

Cross Marian it is so completely in character for you to turn up dead and thus useless at such a politically vital moment i almost don’t believe you’ve actually been killed.

only the fact that you actually shared significant information last night makes it seem reasonably likely this is not a fake death.

the disappearing body is a good trick. the guards sleeping and not dead is suggestive either way.

i like the juxtaposition that made it look link Link was blowing shit up by playing chess. (instead it is the marginally less ridiculous ‘playing chess at the site of a battle while ignoring the fighting’)

are those things even akuma? they’re fighting them in a graveyard and either the fight is non-serious enough or the chess is important enough that Miranda’s multi-tasking...

if she needs to use reverse on the board then presumably it...got spilled? but then they could just memorize the positions and let her let it go...

lol yeah okay allen scold the monster for its lack of manners toward a lady.

lmaoooo okay the chess was to win an Innocence-infused ring back from the ghost of its chess-master previous owner! normal duties have resumed in spite of the massive loss of personnel and allen’s identity issues, and apparently Link is now contributing to team efforts. this won’t divide his loyalties at all of course.

the chessboard didn’t decay with the ghost, so i still don’t know what Miranda was reversing time on it for.

+1 sassy old lady.

wow they’re actually building Order operations around use of the Ark, which only Allen can pilot. i guess anyone can use the doors he’s established so once he’s got a solid network running they can axe him but....

...Miranda it is rude to crush on a priest, though he has very pretty hair. (i mean, i’m assuming he’s catholic, since he’s with the Order, which works for the Pope. all indications really are that England is a catholic country in this universe.)

...it’s also a country where the Noahs are installed at high levels of government I don’t understand how no one in the Order has noticed that.

‘even if only for the moment’ ffffffffs link shut the fuck up.

...if anyone is inexplicably reading this without familiarity with the media property involved and picturing the hero from Legend of Zelda when i yell at link, please continue doing that, it’s basically correct except for being wrong in almost every particular.

oh good grief. So, they actually agreed with me about ‘can’t get rid of Allen’ for all the reasons i stated! they just announced to everyone he knows that they have an ongoing mission to kill him if he goes rogue.

that’s entirely reasonable, really, though depressing, but they had to be so viciously dehumanizing about getting there! wtf. “our very own pet noah” imma wring your throat.

...ten years has made Miranda Lott so much more relatable but never more than in this moment where she’s reminding herself she’s the only actual adult in this group.

also really feeling Allen’s “I don’t understand anything, but time keeps moving on.”

Holy shit the guy who knew Kanda when he was a small person now counts as foreshadowing of horrible things to come.

...how long have they left the bloodstained shattered window unrepaired so Rebeliel can sit here staring at it?

i don’t know whether i’m more focused on how absurd it is that this man does fancy baking (19th century! powerful! man!) or how terrifying it is that he’s offering Allen a slice of cake.

lmao apparently Reever is not a typical example of his role, probably because Komui isn’t. in fact, i don’t think i previously realized the ‘section’ he’s ‘chief’ of is the hq science section, because Komui acts like he’s Head of Mad Science and leaves Reever to be his chief minion.

also, this poor woman. her brother got horribly murdered working with these people and it traumatized them and now they’re treating her as a replacement goldfish because she looks just like him. that’s messed up on so many levels, though presumably she’s at least moderately okay with being misgendered or she’d dress differently. it being the 19th century and all.

...also i can’t tell if she’s meant to be a very pale black woman or if hoshino just did a ‘fat person’ character design around racist caricature visual tropes, but she’s got the blackface lip outline and a dreadlock ponytail, so welp.

wow Cross’ disappearance just gets more mysterious even as the evidence of his death mounts.

oh never mind Lebubble says it was definitely his bosses but he’s concerned because he was left out of the loop.

hmm okay that’s two women getting instant crushes on pretty boys and two relatively minor cases of sexual harassment in three chapters, all four times intended as humor, do not like this trend.

hmm now a trans woman being used as a visual gag. i’ve seen worse uses of this trope, but ugh.

the Ganimard expy is funny, tho. the amount of personality conveyed in a few pages is reliably high.

...i feel like he’s pointedly not given his prisoners any changes of clothes in order to maintain the illusion that it makes some kind of sense for there to be an entire gang of phantom thief that gets caught every single time.

that doesn’t actually explain why they’re all still wearing the outrageous hat.

aaaaand back to allen’s identity crisis.

wow, on the one hand cross is pressuring him from beyond the grave not to rely on Mana’s memory because that’s not his real self, but on the other hand he has to seriously consider that his recent lapses in the formality adopted in imitation of Mana were even less himself and in fact the result of a hostile alien consciousness breaking through.

haha this heist scenario is so exactly like a Magic Kaito one I’m guessing that’s a deliberate allusion and not just shared Phantom Thief tropes. (Though how do you tell in a genre like this, Ganimard-Nakamori-Galmar lmao.)

...the thematic element of speech-mode equating identity is really nicely used but lmao sticking out the tongue has sufficiently different connotation in Japan to make this possession sequence weirder than intended. which was already pretty weird.

daaaaamn link’s papal ninja moves are finally seeing some use. also way to signal your real identity bodysnatcher kid, allen’s like sixteen, an adult would definitely not call him niichan.

wow you can even use his papal ninja paper magic! somehow! that is a really high-tier bodysnatching skill. also lol of course kanda can recognize a papal ninja crow by skillset.

i am a huge fan of allen’s capacity for headgames.

oh my goodness is he seriously donating all the money from his thefts to an orphanage? specifically the orphanage where he lives?

and again with the boob grab.

...allen walker weeping that he’s bleeding is quite the hilarious sight but come to think of it if he can’t hold off one random crybaby bodysnatching kid his odds against XIV don’t look that hot, eh?

oh no evil undead nun.

oh that’s a great idea, ask komui for advice about what to do in the situation that an exorcist and his guardians are rejecting summary kidnapping. it’s not like he devoted his entire life to regaining contact with his sister after the Order kidnapped her.

oh no it’s another hideous potbellied angel monster and they’ve figured out how to jam allen’s curse radar. that curse was a present from his dad you bastards!

...mana was a really weird person.

you know link, i’m pretty sure from you that was protectiveness.

oh! a twist! the nun is evil without being an undead monster!

meanwhile the nice nun and all the orphans have been turned into puppets.

daaaaamn the Papal Ninja Paper Magic is good stuff! why don’t they teach it to more of their staff, maybe they wouldn’t have such high turnover.

...Kanda just referred to Noise Marie as ‘she’ but I’m pretty sure that’s a translation error based on the fact that his surname is ‘Marie’ and ‘Noise’ sounds like a descriptor based on his hearing-based power rather than a first name.

it would frankly be awesome if Noise Marie were a woman, but considering the only two not-conventionally-boobalicious and also not elderly female characters we’ve had were minor visual gags (plus i guess Miranda during her initial nervous breakdown), and that hoshino was genuinely startled people thought Jasdero was a woman, presumably because of the lack of visible breasts, i reallllllllly think she would be unlikely to design a huge bald muscle woman, let alone treat her with this much casual respect, let alone while writing her as gay.

regardless, if Noise Marie actually dies imma be so mad. not that me being mad has had a perceptible affect on the death rate--though Kanda and Krory did survive the Ark Battle Arc so maybe i do have power. or rather we collectively as readers do.

hah he cut his own fingers off with wire, badass.

allen’s talent for inspiring compassion claims another victim in Bodysnatcher Timothy and holy cow Emilia The Nice Middle Class Girl is here with a handgun to menace the giant monsters, nice.

i mean, they’re not very menaced, but she’s shooting them anyway, because fuck you.

...holy shit that’s a powerful ability. the fact that it leaves his real body vulnerable is kind of a major drawback even with good teammates, but wow. also for some reason his Innocence has its own consciousness???

which can pilot his body for him while he’s walkabout, how helpful!

Bonne the the translady prison boss has joined the count of girls who see a cute guy and get an instant crush recently, but for some reason she’s really into Reever? I mean, he’s good-looking, sure, but he’s not one of The Pretty Boys.

Just realized that part of what’s vibing so weird is, this is a shounen series, but the specific way it juxtaposes elements of extreme shittiness with elements of brilliant concept and execution is more shoujo in style.

sameface isn’t normally a big issue in this series but Link-with-his-bangs-blown-back looks confusingly similar to Timothy’s Innocence Spirit, whom Timothy identified as his adult self with startling ease.

kneeling there out of options thinking you’re going to die and you dedicate your last thought to revellier, link? really??? that’s extremely sad. did he actually do anything to earn your loyalty or is this just brainwashing?

I feel like last time through I failed to absorb the political implications of the Order having managed to put together agents who can stop a Level 3 akuma with their hands and then eat it. with their hands. i think they’ve been spliced with akuma, because ‘nothing human can get through this barrier.’

Lenalee going one-v-one on a Level 3 was a nigh-self-destruct big deal a couple of months ago. This isn’t just sloppily managed shounen power creep this is the obsolescence of the excorcists.

which in theory would be a good thing, but the way these guys are made has to be awful and our main characters were already disposable enough in the eyes of their masters.

At least Allen’s getting Power Creep too! New tactic: drop sword. Stab enemy in the back with it while standing in front of them because it’s still part of your body somehow.

oh good grief allen you saw what happened to tiki myk! how did you not see this coming. ughhhhhhh. i know why. your current life plan is to Denial so damn hard the universe breaks your way. this is your god letting you know she’s not going to indulge that touching optimism.

i think it shocked me the first time, but i’m not sure anymore.

yeah, deeply counter-productive course of action.

...i’m now used to the way XIV uses Allen’s face but the akuma seeing him as a flaming skeleton monster i had forgotten about. wut?

with kanda it’s not a question of did he count on allen being able to dodge or did he not care if he stabbed him too, it’s both.

the cognitive dissonance of the story trying to treat Timothy joining the Order as a Good End to this episode, the same way it did back in early days when they recruited Miranda, when the prevailing atmosphere of the story has become one of institutional cruelty and corruption wherein the Order is a hellish slave-taking death trap that eats its people alive is just...fucking me up big time.

am i actually expected to accept the content here at face value?

...i mean, it’s a good end in that our heroes are spared having to forcibly kidnap him into indenture, but Emilia joining to look after him is just. It’s not funny or heartwarming or empowering.

we’ve recently gone over how komui doesn’t want lenalee to see his joining the Order for her as self-sacrifice even though it was, and also how much it fucks him up being accountable for how evil this organization is.

and not to be awful but lenalee’s his actual family and actually sweet, whereas timothy is a horrid brat with a habit of sexually harassing Emilia.

And that was before the war reached a point where we’re seeing 90% mortality.

don’t do this emilia. nooooooope.

on the upside, the nice nun and all the children survived somehow!

allen’s relationship with Link is weird.

i wonder if i was meant to be disturbed by how similar Mana’s body language was to the Earl’s for a second there?

okay so can we talk about how in this moment of extreme drama where Allen has sat up in bed possessed by evil, timcampi (who never communicates except via body language and is a floating orb) gets a speech bubble containing a picture of a toilet?

because it was really important to let the readers know that the little golem theorized that Allen needed to have a pee, in between cutting from the unsettling Symbolic Dream to the terrifying murder face.

and the thing is, it even kind of was! it contributes to the pace of the whole scene, it reminds us that timcampi is a conscious being with opinions even if he can’t communicate much, and is witnessing this incident. and yet. toilet.

the entire storytelling style of D. Gray Man revolves around creating cognitive dissonance and it does not suit my brain.

...i honestly don’t know what to think about Link being uncomfortable sharing a room with Lenalee flashing that much thigh, but i know i like him better for the fact that he let her drive him out of his own room by falling asleep on his bed, and just stood around in the hall like a chump waiting for her to finish her nap.

and he escalates from threatening allen with a formal complaint to threatening to tell komui he’s alone in a room with lenalee lmao.

he really is fitting right in.

oh hey. it wasn’t just timcampi who saw.

yes okay thanks for the tyki myk update good to know there are long-term consequences for running a noah through with Crown Clown.

aaaand North American Boobs Lady didn’t seem half this menacing last time she came up, but now she’s flanked by Hungry Hands Dude and his partner and komui is looking freaked out.

he does that a lot lately.

[360degreesasthecrowflies]

AndromedaWatch 01 - first reaction to the series

So, it’s been a brief break from my Farscape first watch/reaction series (which you can find entries in HERE or HERE), and during the off period, I’ve decided to do something a little different! By chance, I came across another late 90s-early 2000s sci-fi/space opera show I’d never seen before, Andromeda, so I decided to do a first watch reaction to it as well!

Without further ado, here’s my thoughts on Andromeda 1.01 ‘Under The Night’!

1.01 UNDER THE NIGHT

Spaceships! and a written brief intro. Semi conspicuous CG.

A crew! Lots of people. Red and blue uniforms. Antigravity harnesses. Andromeda is the ship and our lead is the captain, fun.

Everyone running about! But seems like it was a drill.

First leads appear to be two white dudes, one with the look of Buffy's Riley, the other Firefly's Mal. Longer haired dude is getting married. As this is the first episode this is probably going to be horribly wrong.

Also, the ship Andromeda has a female voice.

We are far future or maybe just alien; there's robots and lots of tech. We're leaping STRAIGHT into action too! Great opening.

Right, they're off to rescue a ship from a black hole after a distress call and we're less than 5 minutes in. Hyperspace jumping too, gotta get those tropes in.

Side characters we've seen so far include a black technician guy, feminine robot and a smallish green alien guy. Andromeda has hologram avatar too, an Asian woman.

Captain makes the call to try and save as many as possible, evacuation...but they're firing on them! Andromeda says that it must be a trap!

OPENING CREDITS time. There's a voiceover, and now an instrumental futuristicy theme with credits introducing our characters. There's the lead, male-bob-haired Captain Dylan Hunt, a blonde badass lady, dreadlocked black dude, a purple skinned Chiara-looking expy, and some others. Quite a big cast from the off.

Into the episode; now everyone actually IS running to battlestations, no drill this time. They're under assault right away, imperfect shields. They face 10k ships. Second in command guy suggests deploying extreme destructive bombs, but Captain refuses, aww, he's a good guy. (How long will that last?)

Second in command guy (Starscream?) notes that the attackers are his...race? ethnic group? nationality? so, as a precuation, recommends that he and all others aboard of that trait should be locked up just in case. Seems a little odd tbh.

Captain concurs and a bodyguard looking guy does it.

They aren't doing too well in the battle; outnumbered and can't maneuver. Also next to a black hole, they can't do their hyperspace jump again due to gravity pull.

Well, damnnn. 9 minutes in and the black guy dies. Eep. There was an explosion in Control, hull breach apparently. They're still pinned down for the next ten minutes too.

Captain orders that everyone abandons ship on escape pods. Ah, this will be the cast paring down, good, I hope they don't all die. The green alien elects to stay with the Captain in Control and may be female? Androgynous looking and shamefully I assumed it was not female.

Shot of everyone abandoning ship through some appropriately sci-fi +/ 90s style pods and passageways.

Well daaaang. We cut to Starscream and he kills the guards sent with him; a double-bluff! Ask to be locked up so he can get away from the captain and co, and just after offering his congratulations to the captain on his upcoming marriage too. Utter bastard. That's some Kill Bill shit.

He has a plan. Cutting between him and Control, where a female robot has stayed too. Captain decides to go INTO the black hole, fine, okay.

They're not strong enough to fight their way free, they need to use the black hole's gravity to slingshot themselves free... now, I'm not sure when this aired, but that sounds a LOT like the resolution of the first episode of Farscape. I hope this doesn't turn out to be a straight AU rerun.

Bug lady is the pilot. She does seem to ACTUALLY be an alien bug, and I quite like this. I hope she doesn't die. (She probably will, characters I like rarely last long, RIP PK lady lieutenant in Farscape). She speaks a bit of her langauge which Andromeda translates (her avatar's still here), good touch, saying that she's willing to sacrifice and risk herself for the ship's survival.

Oops Andromeda's frozen, avatar dropping out. Power freezing. Starscream is still doing things, Andromeda has noticed now but he blows out the camera. Andromeda is able to alert the captain to sabotage just as Starscream walks in and... yup, bug lady gets (quite graphically) killed, her chest front explodes out when she's shot (or blasted, didn't get a good look at the weapon). Eesh.

Captain spins around to engage. Starscream reveals his people are designed to be perfect. They all live within a Commonwealth, but Starscream's people want to take it over now. There's an issue with the Magog, who seem to be horrible people, who the Commonwealth have made peace with. Starscream's people want instead, revenge.

FIGHTSCENE. Starscream is a bit of a karate boy, this is more phyisical than I anticiapted, not just a shootout. Captain holds his own too though, flipping off a wall in slow-mo, which is revealed to actually be a time distortion, nice nod to the Matrix surely given the time this was made.

The two run back for their blasters and the Captain is hit first, but returns fire as he falls and may hit his opponent more critically.

He runs over to him, possibly saddened, and there's a 'what have you done' moment. Then they all freeze in time, Starscream possibly already dead on the ground, and we cut to the ship, already on course before its power was cut, dipping straight into the black hole.

Cut away. We open on blonde lady from the credits. We;re on another ship now, presumably. Blondie is a Captain too, Captain Valentine. Her coworkers are a wookie-faced dude and an expy of Wash from Firefly and Oz from Buffy in one character. They've found the Andromeda, but it seems a looong time has passed, years at least.

Seems we might have another Starscream situation here as Mr Wookie already is proud that HE - uh, THEY - have found the ship. Not a happy family, methinks.

More new characters! A scabby faced grumpy dude from the credits and purple lady, something bad might be about to happen to Wookie because I didn't see him in those credits and all these characters will be sticking around. Ms Purple has a tail too, because why not, it was the 90s, we didn't have weaboos yet.

So it seems these guys are salvagers - thieves, essentially. Already I can see this potential clash, immoral guys vs Mr straight and narrow. They were after this ship as a prize haul with big cash value and big rewards for them all.

The guy on Team Valentine is very much A Dude, we get it. He wants to spend his money on slave girls! Lovely. Neither Valentine nor Purple are impressed.

Valentine is apparently pretty strongly in debt, so that's what she'll use her share of the money for.

So, I'm slightly reminded of Alien, the original 1979 film now. These guys all work together, but don't seem to particularly LIKE each other and are just in it for the money. I actually quite like that, coming off watching a few shows where everyone ends up bonding unreasonably fast to an unbelievably close level.

Scabface wants to make amends with his share of the money. "Trying to buy absolution" as he puts it. He plans to build a hospital on a world he - or his forbears - killed many people.

Team Valentine are all technicians, nice, another nod to Alien.

So it reveals that Valentine, despite being the captain, was hired by Wookie. He's come along with them for this salvage mission. The Andromeda is stuck in time still, so Valentine will need to retrieve it without getting HER ship stuck in time too.

Valentine wishes to jettison their existing cargo before beginning the operation so the ship is more maneuvarable, but Wookie objects and has to run down to 'check' something in the cargo hold first; second Starscream confirmed. We don't get to see what he does but music cues are shifty af.

OooOoo seems his 'cargo' was people - some of original Starscream's kind of people, it seems, identifiable by their spiked arms, again, a nice visual cue to save them spelling out expository text the way many shows in early episodes find themselves having to do or resorting to. We get a shot of them emerging from fridge-like coffins (or coffin-like fridges, I guess) with THE MOST ominous music.

Right, operation go. Nice parallel right away to the other ship as Valentine intiates the operation with "okay everybody, just like we practiced", given the Andromeda's crew were practising too before the real thing. Valentine so far seems competent, no-nonsense and determined, with a wry sense of humour and strong sense of duty. I would expect nothing less from the female lead.

The irony as well that the Andromeda went to rescue and is now itself being 'rescued'.

So instead of going in, Valentine is very sensibly hooking it and reeling it in with grappling hooks.

Operation seems to be successful until three of the hooks seem to fail. Wookie immediately advocates cutting the cables and letting the Andromeda go, which Valentine laughs off and turns to Purple and Dude to see what solutions they might have.

Despite some of the cables failing, Valentine with Dude's help (focusing the engines into one blast of energy) is able to retrieve the ship and tow it away tractor-style.

Unfortunately, nothing lasts that long, one of the engines starts to fail off the bat. Dude seems to have it under control though.

RIGHT, cut back to the Andromeda. Andromeda's avatar is checking Captain Hunt too. Andromeda is immediately aware they MAY have experienced severe time dilations.

Annnd there it is. They've been frozen for 300 years. That'll be our main drama between Captain and our new characters, makes sense because I was feeling he and Valentine were actually quite similar despite the devil-angel dichotomy. Also... RIP Hunt's wedding, and I guess everyone he knew. That's gotta suck in the worst way. 10/10 for getting me to feel empathy for this guy in under 30 min, show.

Right, Valentine and co are all off to board the ship, leaving Wookie on board their own ship, presumably. Purple is the newest crewmember, it's revealed.

Donning space hazmat suits, they board. Dude appreciates the ship like an art form.

Cut back to Captain and Andromeda. The acting is good here and the music helps. They are in mid crisis given how much the world will have changed, maybe everything they were fighting for has gone. Andromeda detects Valentine and co, intruders!

Oops, it seems Wookie has boarded too, or are they back? (Ships look a little similar). He insists they have a deadline and need to work faster, while Dude maintains it will take weeks to get the ship going (presumably up to their future standards, too).

Valentine's crew split up (with comms) to search the ship for more clues about it and how it works. This will end well.

INTERESTING. So within Valentine's crew we have humans and the evil - in Hunt's time Magog, though, who can say which one of the aliens that is, Dude and Valentine are probably out. Andromeda has started to snoop on them through cameras and other concealed computers and comms and brings them up for Hunt to see.

So seems the Magog is Scabby. Andromeda also notes that Dude seems to be sick - with an easily-curable disease from their time. She wonders at the implications of that, a kind of reversal of progress perhaps? I should take the time to say that I do like Andromeda, despite her roboticy AI nature she has a charm to her and her competence and intelligence and calm are all positives to humanize such a character.

Hunt decides to engage the new team. He comes upon Dude first and calmly engages, quickly overpowering him without needing to fight, and addressing him measuredly.

Oops. So Dude doesn't seem to even be aware of the Commonwealth, three guesses says they lost then?

Nope, there's no High Guard, no Commonwealth, they lost, and not recently - 300 years ago! Possibly even straight after that battle, oooh we're going to have DIRECT angst then, that's an interesting direction and element to give your (presumably?) lead.

Additionally, having Andromeda here to talk to saves us having monologues, thought intrusions, or (the trope I disliked a lot in early Farscape) the lead, fish out of water, near-immediately latching on to someone he's just met and telling them everything about his feelings, using them as a sounding board and emotional support. Because honestly, who takes that from a stranger?

Andromeda and Hunt decide that they will search for remnants of the Commonwealth, even though its 300 years on. Back with Valentine, they are debating what to do. Purple advocates just asking Hunt to give them the ship. Valentine feels he owes them something anyway for pulling it out of the black hole. Scabby feels they don't deserve anything.

Hunt addresses them over comms; an ultimatum, he will not give it up to be looted, so they can leave, or he will bring force upon them. Valentine and co are still aboard Andromeda. They move to engage, then, Valentine doesn't like to be threatened, but Wookie intercedes. He's brought backup, and it's our dreadlocked Saracen warrior from the opening credits, along with a small army of extras, notably, none with the telltale arm spikes that we saw earlier, so what's his game? Was it a double-bluff? And that's where it ends, on a cliffhanger!

--

Well, I have to say, that was actually VERY good, by the standards of the time especially. Some obvious flaws due to tropes and what's become standardized over time passing in between this airing and me first seeing it, but in general, a very well written and acted pilot that established world, plot, tensions, potential tensions, character inter-relationships, and, impressively, seven main characters with an eighth just out of focus, a primary antagonist, and possible secondary antagonist, while also worldbuilding TWO timezones and political setups. Not too shabby for 42 minutes!

Other points; great character design and costumes - though I'm 75% sure there'll be a coincidentally justifiable reason why Purple has to be wearing a sports bra and hotpants and nothing else. Interesting spread of lead characters, two white guys, two women, a female AI, a black guy and a non-humanoid alien, just about what you'd expect from the time. The character archetypes are a nod to others in the genre and broadly into fantasy as well, and sketch out broad strokes for where I can see later characters being sourced from, e.g. the characters from the later Firefly and rebooted Battlestar Galaxica, even the Dr Who reboot which came several years after.

Valentine is, predictably (if you’ve been following my other review series), my favourite off the bat. Andromeda second, Hunt probably third - he's a very typical hero archetype, but convincing. The others come together in a bunch right now, Dude seems to be a Chaotic Neutral, Purple probably a Chaotic Good, and Scabby perhaps a Neutral Good, these are good balance for what may be a Lawful Good and Lawful Neutral lead - although Valentine shows potential to veer into True Neutral territory.

All in all, a great opener. I'll give it an 8/10, really starting strong.

What did you think of the show? Should I keep going? Let me know in comments or reblogs ;)