#i’m personally against the idea behind (most) live action remakes

[ihavea-natural-curiosity]

me looking at the fact that the only disabled characters in the atla la were cast with abled actors (as far as i know):

it just really hurts to think about how actors who are in wheelchairs, and even actors who are like me (not in wheelchair but still are actually disabled and have trouble walking) feel about this.

like how many disabled actors auditioned and were so excited to finally have a chance and have a roll but some abled guy got cast instead, i don’t even have a wheelchair yet and im upset, i can’t imagine how they feel. (i’m not upset at the actors for this, im upset at the directors and other people in charge of casting people)

i probably shouldn’t have put so much faith in netflix to cast things like this well, but still. i don’t even have the energy to be upset about things like this anymore, im just. tired.

(also if either of these actors are actually physically disabled, please tell me, i really hope i’m wrong)

[frankendykes-monster]

Taking a look at Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) (and it's source material)

Prefacing anything related to this film with this: John Landis killed three people, Vic Morrow, Myca Dinh Le, and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, during the filming of his segment for the film.  I do not say “killed” lightly, all evidence points fingers at Landis, who was later acquitted and for the most part suffered no long term career repercussions in spite of the blood on his hands.  Fuck him.  Warner Bros as well decided that it was worth completing the segment and releasing it as part of the movie rather than scrapping it.  Fuck them as well.  The “Twilight Zone accident”, as it were, has overshadowed everything else about this film and its history, but the purposes of this post I will not be referring to it if it can be helped while I focus on the film itself.

Twilight Zone: The Movie is an “interesting” experiment in that adapting an anthology television series for a single live-action film is not clear cut as to how one would do it, but an anthology film seems like it would suffice as a template.  I have personally never been into anthology films for just lack of interest, so coming into this after having seen the four episodes it adapted as preparation was a relatively new experience for me personally.  I’m assuming had Rod Serling been alive for its production that all new material would have been written and shot for this, but as is the film remakes four episodes, each by a single science fiction or horror genre veteran; John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, and George Miller.  Twilight Zone veteran Burgess Meredith fills in Serling’s role as narrator.

Avoiding the obvious can’t be done for much longer: this film dearly suffers for the lack of Rod Serling, with the consistent harrowing tone and socio-political charge that was brought to the television series is somewhat wanting here.  If anything, it’s best to think of the material here as a set of fan films, interpretations brought on by film makers who were raised on the show.  The major difference you can tell between this film and the series is that this is a major studio production, so money is basically no issue, and any sense of restraint that the series had is thrown out the window (not necessarily for better or worse mind you).

John Landis writes and directs the unnamed prologue which isn’t bad mind you but sort of an indicator of the philosophy of this film.  Albert Brooks and Dan Aykroyd are two guys driving in a truck at night just shooting the shit before the subject shifts to The Twilight Zone, the television show, before ultimately culminating in Aykroyd’s character pulling a stunt on Brooks that involves turning into a monster and killing him.  For the five minutes it takes up it has a relaxing quality to it with just two guys and has some tension as you have no idea where this is heading, but the final gag as it where just kind of leaves you wanting for like, actual substance.  Like The Twilight Zone would give an actual point behind why someone is a monster.  Harbinger of things to come.

The first segment proper is also by Landis, being inspired by the episode “A Quality of Mercy.”  The original episode took place in The Philippines during the final days of WWII, with a berzerk Lieutenant Katell ordering his troop of American soldiers to make a seek-and-destroy mission on some Japanese soldiers hiding in a cave.  He is inexplicably thrust (by...The Twilight Zone...) into an alternate reality where he is a Japanese soldier being ordered to do the same thing against an American troop, and his realization and change of heart about how enemy soldiers are people too allows him to return home.  Okay, decent anti-war parable, told in the way that The Twilight Zone would do.  The film’s adaptation is more or less an original take involving the reality shift concept, wherein Vic Morrow plays Bill, a racist bigoted jackass who says a shit ton of racial slurs at a bar, and upon leaving is thrust into the life of a Jewish man in Nazi Germany, a black man about to be lynched by the Klan, and a Vietnamese man during the American invasion of Vietnam.

Morrow’s murder on set necessitated an entirely new ending be built around existing footage, here it’s Morrow returning to Germany, being thrust into a train car, and desperately shouting for his friends’ help as they walk out the bar and the train takes off.  Since Bill never actually learns anything, it’s a very one-note story of torture porn as he’s beaten and nearly killed several times, before being killed off screen.  The segment as a whole does an effective job at conveying how all encompassing the violence wrought by oppressor groups are, but it feels ultimately aimless.  Shifting the context of the story to be an anti-racist message (and this is the only politically charged segment of the film) really kind of strains the original episode’s message of “walk a mile in their shoes” by giving it new context.  The increase in production value is an assist.  The original episode was constrained to a single small jungle set, and Katell’s shift between reality was shown through a jump cut between him dropping his binoculars and then standing up after picking them up.  Bill walking out of the bar and then finding himself on a street he doesn’t recognize is a much more effect jump.  Ultimately the tension is obviously here given the subject but it’s ultimately hollow with no third act and no real takeaways beyond “it could happen to YOU!”

Next up we have Spielberg on “Kick the Can”.  Given all the coverage on the murder incident in A Quality of Mercy, I couldn’t find anything about the making of the other three stories aside from the fact that they were shot in order.  What I’m going to assume is that following the success of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Warner Bros wanted Spielberg to do something super sappy for the famiiiiliiieesss out there, and I wouldn’t put it past someone if they considered this to be the nadir of mid-career Spielberg.  The original Kick the Can followed a somewhat rivalry between two best friends, Charles and Ben, as they are living in a retirement home.  Charles desperately wants to be young again, Ben wants him to recognize his age and act accordingly, and Charles’ antics conclude with him getting the rest of the home to join him in a game of Kick the Can, the joy of which turns them into children, leaving Ben alone and old wanting to join them but no longer can.

Spielberg’s revisit of this story removes a good chunk of the conflict to make it, er, nicer.  The rivalry is played down, the cast of named characters we follow is expanded, and a more touching ending is given.  For as much as watching this as an adult is like eating a share size bag of Skittles, I can’t...really be wholly upset by something that says instead of yearning for youth, one should be excited and optimistic about being elderly, with the cast realizing they didn’t really *want* to be young again so much as they needed to be young at heart, their age not holding them back, but rather their dismal sentiments about it.  My major issue is the complete squandering of Scatman Crothers, who isn’t able to do much with the material and is instead reduced to the role of “magical black man” as Spike Lee put it.  Spielberg’s direction is rather flat as well, and it’s not going to ruffle any feathers when I say that this is definitely the least ambitious part of the film.  It doesn’t disrupt the parts of the film that are trying to be scary and more special effects driven, but that’s the best I could say about it.

Like many I sort of question why Kick the Can (and, honestly, A Quality of Mercy) were chosen to be adapted for this film over much more recognizable and iconic episodes such as “Time Enough to Last” or “Eye of The Beholder,” especially as we enter the back half of the film where two of the more “untouchable” episodes of the original series get the much more interesting treatment.  We’ve entered the part of Twilight Zone: The Movie that people think is actually good.

Joe Dante presents us with an adaptation of “It’s a Good Life”, through I use adaptation lightly because for all intent and purpose, this has almost as little to do with the original episode as A Quality of Mercy did.  The original episode is the most vomit-inducingly terrifying thing I’ve seen out of the show, following a kid named Anthony who can do anything, who has isolated his small town from the rest of reality with dwindling resources, and the adult population being forced to think “good” thoughts all the time and be on their best behavior, lest Anthony use his powers to change something again.  There is no “conclusion”, we are just presented with this nightmare and Anthony continues with this torture.  The segment follows Helen, lost while moving, coming across Anthony and taking him home after totalling his bike.  His “family” is a nervous wreck behind wide smiles and the house is a garrish nightmare, littered with random televisions playing animated shorts at all times.  The truth eventually comes out as Helen worries about if she can leave or not.

Dante feels like the first director involved to actually “get the memo,” you can remake a Twilight Zone episode as you see fit and have Warner Bros foot the bill.  While this version of the story lacks any of the tension of the original, it presents much more visually-oriented nightmare fuel.  The episode couldn’t show anything on screen like when Anthony made a three-headed gopher and then had it killed, or when he sets someone on fire, but this is allowed to have Anthony’s sister’s mouth be removed or giant monstrous rabbits be pulled from a hat.  There’s a reason why, if you ever come across screenshots of this film on the Internet, they’re from this segment.  Rob Bottin, who did the creature effects for The Thing (1982), gives us a Tasmanian Devil homage that’s just as impressive and legitimately more disgusting than anything in that film.  It’s like when people do live-action adaptations of cartoons now that accidently fall into the uncanny valley, except done on purpose, and for me is the highlight of the entire thing.  The zany take on horror done here feels like Dante’s dry-run on Gremlins (1984) and Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), except arguable even more unhinged at times with the neon colors and off-kilter camera angles.

The story is more “complete” here with Helen sympathizing with the fact that everyone fears Anthony in spite of his good intentions, giving us a happy ending where she takes him with her in exchange for him making everything right.  It’s more appropriately upbeat in the end than anything we got in Kick the Can, and more deserved after some of the shit you see.

George Miller finishes us off with a pretty direct remake of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”  It’s rather bold to settle on doing what may be the most iconic episode of the whole show, rather than embracing an axiom of what isn’t broken doesn’t need fixing and looking for a weaker episode that could be improved.  Well I’m glad they didn’t because this is, full-stop, an improvement on the original episode in every way.

The plots are identical, just switch out William Shatner with John Lithgow.  John Valentine is a nervous wreck who can’t handle being on an airflight, and as the plane passes through a thunderstorm, he grows progressively more unhinged as a gremlin on the wing that only he sees begins destroying the plane.  Okay, where to start: Lithgow is an interesting actor because he’s been in everything but rarely gets to show off.  Immediately he sells it with being a sweating, off-color, poorly shaven bastard that can’t keep it together, and everyone else on the plane is just a liiitle too loud and in his face as he reassures them he can make it.  The frenetic editing and fast camera movements really sell that the plane can come down at any moment and that, even if Valentine’s fears of a gremlin aren’t assured, he still has every right to be scared.  The gremlin in the original isn’t...a bad looking monster mind you, but it’s definitely an acquired taste.  You gotta let your guard down to be scared by something that has the same fur texture as a teddy bear after all.  You never get a clear look at the gremlin in this film, but it’s a sleek aviary reptilian monstrosity that makes me think we’ve found the missing movie monster link between the Xenomorph and Velociraptor.  The framing of the ending that shifts sympathy just enough away from Valentine to everyone else and make us question him even more is the perfect ribbon on top.

And I guess that’s Twilight Zone: The Movie, and I question, much like everyone else, why we couldn’t have gotten four solid segments instead of two and two middling ones.  I assume that’s what’s to be gleaned from anthology films, and partially why I referred to this as an experiment, as right now there hasn’t been another film adaptation of the series but rather more revival series in its place.  Ideally this film could have been more of what the back half represented: Rod Serling’s touch can’t be replaced, so why not let the directors have at it with their own take on the material?  We definitely got that with Joe Dante and George Miller, but as it stands, this film is mostly just an exercise in two directors who weren’t quite “names” yet showing up the more established talent.  I had been “will I or won’t I” with this film for literal years, but my conclusions are much the same as everyone else who watched this.

[k-comfyspace]

Reality

Star: Kim Minji (Dreamcatcher➶)

Idea: Yes

Love: Hi!! Idk If your taking requests but can your write a Dreamcatcher scenario where Jiu has a cute dream with 8th member reader and she can’t stop thinking about it until she realizes her true feeling? Fluff and happy ending plzz

A/n: I took a little but of a different turn, hopefully this is okay for you love, if not you can ask me to remake it, I gladly would!

Minji found herself washing the dishes, before feeling arms wrap around her waist, a smile already forming on her lips when she inhaled the familiar scent, leaning her head on the person’s own behind her.

She felt a warm pair of lips touch her cheek, followed by resounding giggles, the hand on her waist getting tighter as the person pressed herself closer to Minji,

"Do you need anything?" she asked, hearing the person hum before feeling their head shake,

"Nothing much, love, I just miss you."

‘Love,’ The nickname always made the older girl sigh, a warm sensation fluttering in her stomach as she heard it. Something about it made her happy, content that she was hearing it from the person she loves.

Minji chuckled, finishing the last plate and putting it away, drying her hands on the cloth. Afterwards, she placed her hand on top of the one on her waist, turning to face the culprit of the joyous smile on the leader's face.

"Why are you so cute, Y/n?" She earned a smile at the mention of your name, your eyes locking to her own before you cupped her cheeks. Minji relished the warmth that you spread to her, leaning against your palm, the distance slowly closing.

Minji could feel her heart pounding against her chest as the space gradually closed, and as her eyes closed, she was startled by a loud bang.

Minji jumped up and looked around, confusion written on her face as she tried to adjust to the situation. Rubbing her eyes, she focused on the person standing by the door, recognizing Handong.

"Unnie, time to eat breakfast," the younger called, making the other girl shake her head, nodding as she rubbed her eyes. Still shaken from her apparent dream.

It seemed so real to Minji, actually imagining herself in the same situation with her members.

It could be because you two were usually sweet with each other, oftentimes being shipped together because of your sweet and caring personalities, or it was already a feeling Minji has developed over the past few months.

Most would assume it would be the latter, but the leader knew her feelings well.

At least that’s what she thought.

Joining the others in the kitchen, Minji found her seat, everyone giving thanks before they ate. Normally, Minji would start off the conversation, though this time she kept silent, living in her own world as the rest started to talk.

She shifted her gaze away from the plate to side-eye your form, and seeing you smile and laugh while speaking with Bora made her entire body tingle. Observing your features.

The way your eyes would turn into crescents when you laughed, the dimples that would appear on your cheek while you smiled, the way our laugh made everyone else giggle.

Your energy was so positive it was hard for anyone to not radiate the same energy too. It was a clear representation of what happiness can be like in a physical form.

"Jiu unnie?" You called out for the older girl, seeing the way she flinched when you tapped her shoulder, shaking her head as she looked up and smiled, "Sorry, what was that?"

You clicked your tongue on the roof of your mouth, "Ah unnie, you’re getting too lost in my eyes again," you teased, earning laughs from your members while the older girl lowered her head to hide the blush on her cheeks.

While everyone teased the older, you made sure to place a hand on the lower back of your leader, ensuring she didn't have a bad start to her day.

Though even with the simple action, Minji’s blush worsened, the situation from earlier reflected in her head.

After breakfast, everyone went back to their respective activities, with half of the members sleeping and the other half spending the day off watching TV and using their phones.

Minji was busy in her room, playing with Cherry as the dog barked, enjoying the company of its owner. Which they spent throwing a ball around the room until Minji laid in bed, sighing as she closed her eyes.

She couldn’t stop thinking about it, even though she tried to forget about it, the situation never left her head. The absurdity of her mind creating the situation with the younger member was shocking to her.

She’d never once got into a situation where she dreamed about her members, at least not that type of situation. But deep down she did think about it. The thought of you two being that close appealed to Minji.

She always wanted that feeling, the feeling to be taken care of, the domestic type of feeling where you would feel butterflies in your stomach all the time.

In that dream was everything. In that short amount of time, she felt happy, content, and almost too comfortable seeing you with her. Like her whole body yearned for it.

As the leader kept her eyes closed, the room door opened. Minji paid no mind, knowing it was Siyeon.

However, when she felt the bed dip along with arms wrapping around her waist, she opened her eyes, meeting your smiling face as you pushed your head into the crook of her neck. Minji, as if automatically, wrapped her arms around your waist, pulling you closer and closed her eyes.

This was a routine for the two of you; almost every night, or whenever you had a break, you found yourself in the older's bed. Squishing yourself against her neck as you cuddle.

Minji would always let you hug her, whether it was because you needed company while sleeping or because you wanted to cling to the leader. She always thought it was because she took care of you ever since you were added to the group.

Because of the years you've spent together, you've developed a habit of clinging to her.

As Minji closed her eyes, she sighed, cradling your head in her arms, letting her thoughts be empty as she slept, comfortable in the position, while the butterflies fluttered continuously in her stomach.

--

The leader went down the hall, holding your hand while your group followed your manager, making sure to avoid the staff and bow to the other idols who were heading the opposite way. Your group just finished performing in Inkigayo, now it was back to the dorm for the rest of the afternoon.

You swung your hands together, a smile on your face as you walked down the hall. You resemble somewhat of a child, happily walking down while she held her mother’s hand, smiling brightly while you clung to your leader.

Minji was busy talking to Yoohyeon, though keeping your hand tight on her own. She tried to distract herself because for the past few weeks, there was nothing except you running in her mind.

Day after day, Minji would think about you, still the same dream and situation in her mind. She tried to think about it, force it out of her head, but eventually it became too big to handle, so now she only embraced it, knowing if she held it out any longer she was going to go crazy.

She was so busy talking to Yoohyeon that she didn’t notice your smile fading, failing to get her attention. You tried swinging her arms more, rubbing the back of your thumb on her hand, and even shaking her hand, but the older one was too preoccupied.

So with a huff, you let go of her hand. Walking faster and stopping with Yubin, locking your arm with your roommate who threw you a kind smile.

Minji only noticed when she got to the van, finding you already inside with the rapper, a small pout on her face when you didn’t even look at her. Did she do something wrong?

When they got back to the dorm, Minji still didn’t get a word from you. Watching as you went inside towards your room after announcing that you were gonna take a shower.

The older girl didn’t take it as a big deal at first, only believing that she was overthinking, but it was already late in the night and you still weren’t approaching your leader.

You weren’t as clingy as usual, and when she would call you, Minji only got short responses. During dinner, when you would usually sit beside the older person, you opted to sit next to your roommate this time.

It took Minji a few hours of contemplating, her conscience not feeling the best at the thought of her doing something to upset you.

With her mind thinking of nothing but you, she padded to your shared room, knocking briefly as she entered, seeing the rapper on the top bunk as she read. The older girl heard the shower running, taking the opportunity to get you alone to talk privately,

"Yubin-ah, can I talk to Y/n, alone?" she asked, pulling away from the younger girl, who nodded politely, not questioning the older girl and hopped off her bed.

Bringing her book along before showing the leader a kind smile, as if to say good luck. She took a seat on your bed, waiting as she tried to keep her nerves in check, hands fidgeting because of her nervousness.

When she heard the water stop, followed by the door opening, her breath hitched, waiting until you came out, drying your hair before noticing the older girl on your bed. You didn’t look at Minji, only putting away your clothes as the older girl pouted again,

"Y/n," she called, watching your back as you ignored the older girl, calling you several times yet never once answering or looking at her.

"I'm sorry, if I did something wrong, you know I wouldn't do it on purpose, Y/n," her tone softened, causing you to pause in your actions as you heard her, "Could you tell me what I could do to make it better?" she asked, sighing when she didn't get a reply.

She moved to stand and leave, though your words cut the older from doing anything,

"Am I unlovable, unnie?" The question surprised Minji, given the abrupt topic that she was struggling with as well,

"What do you mean, of course not," she answered simply, making you turn around to face Minji, concern spreading through her eyes when she saw the tears streaming down your face.

"Hey, what’s wrong?" She stood up, quickly cupping your cheeks and wiping away your tears.

You sniffled, pouting before you closed your eyes and breathed in harshly, "If I’m so lovable, then why can’t you love me back?"

You felt her hands stiffen on your face, eyes widening as Minji struggled to comprehend the words that came out of your mouth, "W-what did you say?" She stuttered,

"I kept trying, again and again to make you notice me. I get your attention every day, do sweet things with you, be clingy so you can feel a small amount of my affection for you... that you're more than just an unnie for me. I love you Jiu, "

A hot blush settled against Minji’s face when she absorbed each word of what you said, her insides suddenly celebrating, exploding in a mix of euphoria and excitement, the butterflies going wild as they fluttered in the walls of her stomach.

While Minji was too busy celebrating internally, you were still crying, nervous that Minji would be mad. Scared of losing the friendship that you both had, was it a mistake that you told her too early? What if she left? Ignored you, or started to hate you?

The thoughts of insecurity made you feel heavier, tears streaming down at an alarming rate as sobs started to escape past your lips.

The older girl was only breaking out of her joy induced coma when she felt your tears streaming down her hand, Minji blinked, focusing on your face as she wiped your tears before pulling you closer to her. Pressing your lips together as a gasp escaped your lips.

Minji made sure that she placed all her feelings into the kiss, making you know how much you’ve been inside her head, the countless hours Minji spent awake, thinking about the feelings of you being in her arms, having a relationship, a connection bigger than just friends, something a lot closer than siblings.

Minji will always keep you close, from this day on, until the end.

She’s seen what you could be like together, may it be in her dreams, or a vision of what was to come. She was excited because both of you are going to make it through, together.

"I love you too, Y/n."

[weirwoodking]

hi i was wondering if you would be interested in making a meta on the differences between show!sansa and book!sansa bc i know they changed a lot of her storyline but i don't understand why everyone hates on sophie turner? it can be short or inexistent meta if you're not up to it but i would be very interested to know what you have to say

I mean, the differences between the two are pretty simple. After season 4, D&D decided to cut Sansa’s book storyline, and replaced it with their own rewrite. This affected the plots of multiple characters, particularly Show!Theon’s and Show!Jon’s, but most of all, Show!Sansa’s, obviously. George himself has spoken on how much he hated what the show did with Sansa. He said in 2014 that he had “no idea what they were doing with Sansa or where they’re taking her storyline.”

I could go episode by episode and point out everything that’s wrong or is out of character, but it’s kind of useless. The show did not adapt books 4 & 5, it’s as simple as that, everything is different and feels like it’s out of character. For the first 4 seasons, I thought that Sansa’s story was handled fine (I haven’t watched GOT seasons 1-4 in over 4 years, so my memory is a bit foggy on the specifics tho). Sophie Turner isn’t exactly how I picture Sansa to look, but her acting was fantastic, especially for someone so young and for her first television role.

I personally haven’t seen people “hating on Sophie Turner”, but I’m not involved in the GOT side of tumblr, only the ASOIAF side, so I don’t see people talk about the actors that much. I do know that there are people in fandom (not just in the GOT fandom but in fandom in general) who will conflate actors with their characters. I have seen some toxic Show!Sansa stans do this with Show!Dany and Emilia Clarke (mostly last year). It seems to be more of a problem with female characters and actresses (‘cause sexism), and I think it’s really creepy and disturbing. Sophie Turner is not Sansa, so if anyone is “hating on her” because they didn’t like how the show changed Sansa’s story, that’s really fucked up. I don’t know much about the GOT cast, actually, I rarely watched interviews or behind-the-scenes videos. I don’t know if Sophie Turner has said that she likes the show’s ending or something like that, so if that was the case I could see people being critical of her opinion. But even if she did like the ending of the show and the way the writers changed her character after season 4, I still don’t think you should hate on an actor for that. Because the actors didn’t make the show, the showrunners did. It’s not on the actors to get everything right about their characters, it’s on the writers and directors to tell them the story and guide them through their acting. I don’t blame the actors for anything about GOT (no one should), I blame the writers.

What I find is the biggest problem about post-season 4 Sansa is how little regard they had for her character, while simultaneously claiming she was their favorite. I believe their exact quote was “Sansa was the character we cared about more than anyone”. Okay… then why did you cut her storyline? I feel like their whole “she’s our favorite character” act was more to try to defend against the criticism of the cutting of her storyline. What bothers me most is how they just casually threw her into the Ramsay plotline without thinking at all about what that meant. If you’re going to have one of the main characters of the show get serially raped, you need to think about what you’re doing and how to handle that horrific situation. In the books, the Jeyne Poole storyline is handled very carefully. The acts committed by Ramsay against Jeyne and Theon are never really shown, only implied, alluded to, or very briefly described. The show, on the other hand, explicitly showed Theon’s torture scenes, and made Ramsay a much bigger character in seasons 5 & 6 than he is in the books. I feel like they just used him for shock value, because so much of Game of Thrones revolved around shock value and in-the-moment reactions. I think they just saw Ramsay as a character they could turn into Joffrey 2.0, which is why they put Sansa with him. They didn’t care to follow Sansa’s book arc, they just wanted to continue the whole “caged-bird” thing with her, for shock value.

And to deflect against criticism, that’s why they made her so smart and powerful in the final few seasons. There’s next-to-no build up, no character development, no focus on her growth, the show just tells us that Sansa is the smartest character, and the audience is expected to agree. Because D&D did not care about showing her development. There’s a line in season 7, when Sansa and Arya kill Littlefinger, where Sansa says “thank you for all of your lessons, Lord Baelish.” And that immediately stuck out to me, because that sounds like something Book!Sansa would say. The show cut out Sansa’s Vale storyline, where she spends much more time with Littlefinger, and so… what “lessons” is Show!Sansa referring to here? They didn’t spend a lot of time together in the show. I do think that Sansa will defeat Littlefinger in the books, so that line makes sense for Book!Sansa.

What they did was cut Sansa’s storyline, throw her into a horrific situation that they used for shock value, and then expected to be praised when they made her a “girlboss” later on. They basically said “hey, we know we essentially erased this character’s arc and development, but at least we did a feminism, right?” And that’s what really pisses me off. The blatant disregard for female characters, then saying “no, we do care about them! Believe us!”

Lindsay Ellis has a really good video called “Woke Disney” that touches on this. Basically, she talks about how Disney’s recent live action remakes tend to make each of the princesses a “#girlboss” in a very corporate, fake-feminist manner that is very easy to see right through. (I recommend just watching the video, she goes more in-depth into the subject.)

A similar thing occurred with GOT (the show only had one female writer after season 4, by the way, who was a staff writer for season 8. And before that, only 4 episodes were written by a woman). D&D wrote a lot of problematic, misogynistic, homophobic, and racist things. Then they tried to cover that up with (to use a line from Ms. Ellis) a coat of #girlboss paint. For example, I remember after s8e3 (when Arya killed the Night King) came out, that was when the big criticism for season 8 really started. People saw how bad the writing of that episode was, and how ridiculous and anti-climactic it all felt. However, when people criticized the manner in which the Night King was killed (i.e. saying that it would have made more narrative sense for Jon to do it instead of Arya), there was another group of people who called that criticism sexist. “That’s sexist! You’re just upset that a girl did it instead of a guy!” Which… ugh... do I need to explain how idiotic that line of reasoning is?

And that’s kind of how the HBO show tried to get away with its misogyny, not just the misogyny of Dany’s ending, but of the whole show in general. “Look, we can’t be misogynistic, we had Arya kill the Night King! Look, we can’t be misogynistic, we had Sansa become a #girlboss!” Bullshit, you’re just trying to hide your sexism and bad writing behind a facade of fake feminism.

… *sigh* ...

Anyway, nothing but love for Book!Sansa, and nothing but hate for the writers of Game of Thrones. I hate how the show turned Sansa into a very polarizing character, when she shouldn’t be. None of the child characters of ASOIAF should be polarizing, they’re children for fucks sake.

I’m very excited to see where GRRM takes Sansa’s character in TWOW, I feel like she’s got an awesome journey coming up (hopefully involving her discovering her skinchanging powers, taking down Littlefinger, and heading north for home). 

Uh, wow, this got really long… and I’m exhausted after thinking about the sh*w that much. Here, as a treat for reading all the way down to the bottom, have a Sansa WIP drawing that I haven’t finished yet:

[blackjack-15]

Ziplines, Blood Ties, and Colonavirus — Thoughts on: The Silent Spy (SPY)

Previous Metas: SCK/SCK2, STFD, MHM, TRT, FIN, SSH, DOG, CAR, DDI, SHA, CUR, CLK, TRN, DAN, CRE, ICE, CRY, VEN, HAU, RAN, WAC, TOT, SAW, CAP, ASH, TMB, DED, GTH

Hello and welcome to a Nancy Drew meta series! 30 metas, 30 Nancy Drew Games that I’m comfortable with doing meta about. Hot takes, cold takes, and just Takes will abound, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll all be longer than I mean them to be.

Each meta will have different distinct sections: an Introduction, an exploration of the Title, an explanation of the Mystery, a run-through of the Suspects. Then, I’ll tackle some of my favorite and least favorite things about the game, and finish it off with ideas on how to improve it.

If any game requires an extra section or two, they’ll be listed in the paragraph above, along with my list of previous metas.

These metas are not spoiler free, though I’ll list any games/media that they might spoil here: SPY; mentions of the “Nancy Games” (ASH-SPY); SAW; mention of National Treasure (2004).

The Intro:

It’s our penultimate meta, and this time, it’s personal.

In every way, The Silent Spy is the culmination of the Nancy Games. Ever since her trip back home in ASH, Nancy has been increasingly featured in the games, showing us more of her personality, her life, and her backstory — all in an effort to lead up to this story, where we actually delve into Nancy’s place in the world and what it means that she lives in it.

And the answer to that is a lot less wholly idealistic than the franchise would have given 20+ games ago.

I don’t mean to say that SPY is a cynical game — it’s honestly fairly neutral, edging on positive — but that SPY accepts the fundamental truth that all of the Nancy games have been leading up to: that Nancy, though talented, hardworking, and connected, is simply another fish when it comes to the sea of life. She’s not unique in any way that really matters – look at her foils in Alexei, in Jamila, in Deirdre, in Jessalyn — and yet she continues to work hard, to solve puzzles, and to right old wrongs.

At least for me, this is a hopeful message. The point of “Nancy Drew, Girl Detective” is not that no one could do what she does, it’s not that she’s the best, most experienced sleuth in the world, and it’s not that she’s the Last, Best Hope of those who call upon her for aid. The point behind her character is that she’s a relatively normal (if wealthy) girl who does what she can, and chooses to do it again and again.

There’s a wonderful part in the equally wonderful movie National Treasure when our heroes are reading a part of the Declaration — the part talking about the right of the citizens to throw off a despotic government like the British had become — and Ben (Nicholas Cage, actually in a good movie for once!) defines it in modern speech:

“If there’s something wrong, those who have the ability to take action have the responsibility to take action.”

In the beginning of the Nancy Drew games series, Nancy is merely an intuitive puzzle solver. She gets her cases through family connections, turns up at places where mysteries happen to occur, etc. etc. As time goes on and she practices, she eventually comes to the point where she’s being hired for bigger and bigger cases, more and more regularly — in short, she starts to live the truth of that quote. Nancy is, at her core, someone with the ability to take action against things that are Wrong. Throughout this series — and most especially, throughout the “Nancy” games (ASH-SPY), she becomes someone who recognizes her responsibility to take action.

And that’s what’s showcased here in SPY. Upon arriving and learning that she’s been led to Glasgow under false circumstances, Nancy is immediately and wholly over her head — but she’s still someone who has the ability to take action to right a wrong. When she’s working against Revenant, warning the scientist, or reading through secret memo after secret memo, she’s not doing it with the intent to Save the World; she’s finishing Kate Drew’s last task. Her loyalty isn’t to Glasgow, to Cathedral, to MI5, or any other player in this story — her loyalty is to her mother, and to the task Kate Drew died while trying to finish.

Which is, in my view, the best possible motivation in a game that’s all about family.

With that discussion behind us, I want to talk a little bit here about the other theme of this game — power. Revenant, as the terrorist group that they are, want to seize power; their goal is to run Glasgow (branching off from there into a wider sphere, of course) through seizing power during a (self-induced) state of emergency — aka, what’s referred to in-game as the Colony operation.

This is, of course, Politics 101 — whip people up into a frenzy, come in promising to Save Everyone, and entrench yourself in power that you can’t be moved from with any amount of ease. And while Revenant planned it for 2005, it would work even better in 2013, when social media and instant, 24-hour news cycles can keep the fear alive far more effectively than Revenant would have hoped for nearly a decade prior.

Both in 2005 and 2013, Revenant nearly succeeds, only to be foiled by a red-head out of her depth but who tries anyway (the difference between the two, of course, is that Kate was isolated and Nancy had backup). The most startling thing — and one of my favorite things about this game – is that it doesn’t end with Nancy ‘killing’ Revenant once and for all, or even stopping the Colony Operation once and for all. Nancy is, in every way, out of her depth here; she’s not used by either side as an agent, or even as an asset — she is, as Zoe reminds her, a tool, valuable for what she might know, not for her skills, not for who she is, or what she works for.

As the games from TOT on have worked hard to expand Nancy’s world and tie it together, SPY shows the benefit of having a wide-open world: that the world goes on, people live and die, and secretive organizations (ATAC, Revenant, Cathedral, MI5…) plot and scheme to remake the world in their image.

This, in my view, is also a great thing. The thing that Nancy Drew books (and a lot of the early games) get wrong is that Nancy fixes (or is party to fixing) all of the problems introduced. The piano-playing girl that Nancy meets ends up with a Grandmaster as a teacher; the inheritance goes to the Worthy Widow and Her Daughter; Nancy rescues her tied-up father AND solves his case for his client all in one brilliant masterstroke.

That’s not to say that every story should have all of its threads dangling by the end, but Nancy is simply a smart and resourceful girl, working (most of the time) with her own relatively meager resources. She shouldn’t be the answer to the world’s problems, and I think it’s lovely that, especially in the Nancy games, she really isn’t. Nancy is a helper, and that’s far more valuable than being an omniscient, all-powerful being who can magically fix everyone’s problems just by being there.

The last thing I want to talk about in this introduction is how good SPY is for Nancy’s own personal lore. There’s a lot of fuss every time SPY is brought up about how “Nancy’s mom actually died when she was three!!” which, honestly, tells me that the 60s re-writes (which, yes, if you’re pedantic, started in ’59) did more damage than I had previously thought.

The original Nancy Drew books were written in the 30s by various ghostwriters, and were a little different from the yellow-bound 60s rewrites that most people consider the “old Nancy Drew books”. 30s Nancy Drew was a little closer to our games-universe Nancy; brash, outspoken, punishingly independent, and incredibly capable. She’s also a bit violent and unruly, has graduated from school at 16, lost her mother at 10, and does as she pleases with the occasional call home to reassure Carson or (more often) to ask a question about the law.

Sadly, other than taking out a few racial and societal overtones that weren’t really acceptable after 30 years — mostly by taking out any non-white characters and including different forms of bias, note — the yellow rewrites weren’t an improvement to the stories or to Nancy’s character. Nancy becomes less bold, less independent, and far more focused on describing each meal in punishing amounts of detail. The words “kindly” and “sweetly” were increasingly added after “Nancy said”, she’s far more deferential to authority, and her mother instead passes when Nancy is 3, rather than 10.

In changing the form of the media to video games, rather than books, what would eventually become HER had a choice; they could align themselves with the newest Nancy Drew books — the Nancy Drew Files and Nancy Drew on Campus, both of which were known for being Hotter and Sexier (and, in the case of Campus, ridiculously stupid) — or choose what people called “the classics” — the yellow-spine 60s rewrites, as the once-famous blue books had been all but forgotten in the 90s. In the first (and still one of the last, honestly) brilliant move of the series, HER chose to mix and match the things that made for good game fodder from (nearly, given how much the Campus books suck) every written incarnation of Nancy.

And, to their credit, they chose an important fact from the 30s: Nancy’s mother died when she was 10, not when she was 3.

Losing a parent is a defining moment no matter when it happens, but the exact effect often changes based on (among other things) the age of the child. In order for Nancy to be the kind of person who is influenced by the mystery of her mother’s death, her mother had to have died when Nancy could remember — thus, 3 is right out, as Nancy might remember tiny bits and pieces of the events leading up to and right after, but nothing else.

By taking bits and pieces of contrasting (and often contradictory) lore and making their own out of it, HER (and I’m hat-tipping Cathy and Nik especially here, given Nancy’s characterization spike beginning around WAC/TOT) gives us a version of Nancy that’s similar to the sleuth we know and love from the books and movies (ignoring the 2007 disaster) and, occasionally, TV shows, while still keeping her mostly consistent and showing us a few new flashes that make this character stand out and win her place in the Drewniverse.

Now, with all of that said, let’s move on to this game in specific, shall we?

The Title:

The Silent Spy, as a title, is one that is wonderfully mysterious and really makes you want to know more — right up until the title drop within the game itself, at which point it shifts from quite alluring to desperately sad and foreboding.

After all, “the only silent spy is a dead spy.”

As the game really is about our resident Silent Spy — Kate Drew and her actions and legacy — this is really the only title that the game could have had, and it suits it down to the ground, both with its mystery and with its sadness.

In life, Kate Drew was silenced, and in death, she is obviously necessarily silent — but Nancy reads her words, remembers her speech, listens to her voice, and, of course, hears her song, whenever the world is quiet enough. And I think that’s a wonderful dichotomy for the title to introduce before the game has even properly begun.

The Mystery:

Summoned to Scotland by a mysterious message and guided by a photograph of her mother, Nancy arrives ready to retrace her mother’s steps — only to be thrown into a world of espionage, gadgets, untraceable phone calls, and deadly mishaps. Her luggage (and her best clue about her mother) having been stolen, the presence of an old family friend who refuses to talk, an evasive skiptracer, an excitable local, and a clever intelligence agent all work together to ensure that Nancy is off-balance the minute she arrives.

All, of course, is even less what it seems than Nancy is prepared for, and she spends to game gloriously off-balance trying to keep up with the larger forces pushing and pulling her. She needs to retrace her mother’s steps, escape from certain death, dig deep into the pasts and presents of the people she meets, and do some impressive sleuthing of her own to even make the change from tool to player — and even that might not be enough to keep her safe when the dastardly minds at Revenant come a-knocking…

As a mystery — or as a collection of intertwined mysteries, honestly — SPY succeeds at what a lot of other games tried (and ultimately failed, in one way or another), which is to link all the happenings in the game together under one cohesive plot that grows more and more horrifying the more you think about it. GTH has a fandom reputation for fridge horror, but SPY holds its own easily when you consider Kate’s fatal chase, Moira’s abduction and guilt, the threats that Ewan and Alec operate under, and the life that Zoe leads on the regular.

Every action that Nancy takes benefits someone — whether it be Cathedral, Revenant, herself, or an interested third (fourth?) party — without her really meaning to, and the game is great in including another question in every reveal.

The beauty of SPY’s mystery(s) is that it takes careful reading, paying attention, and honestly replaying in order to grasp the enormity of every action. No matter how many times you play or replay, there’s something new to find — a time-sensitive conversation, an implication in a note, a theory behind the presence of a clue or a piece of (what you previously thought to be) set dressing — it honestly is limitless, and it just helps to contribute to the feeling that this is a world that Nancy isn’t meant to truly be fully immersed in.

And speaking of people who are immersed in that world…

The Suspects:

We’ll begin, for organization’s sake, with our out-and-out (current) agents first, then tackle our other suspects, then our Nancy-related people, and finish off with — for the final time in this series, as this is the last “Nancy” game — Nancy herself.

A new, yet returning character, Bridget Shaw is one of the cover identities of Zoe Wolfe — aka Samantha Quick, who Nancy impersonated in VEN and who helped the Hardy Boys in Treasure on the Tracks.

Prior to SPY, I had money for a very long time that Samantha Quick would eventually come into the game, and I was absolutely delighted with her appearance in SPY — where else would she be so well situated? Zoe is snarky, disillusioned, cynical, and sometimes downright nihilistic, but she’s also someone who took up a job that, percentage-wise, no one wants to or is able to do, because she’s alone:

“I work in the field for two reasons: one, I don’t need any help. And two, because no one would miss me if I fell off the grid.”

I love watching the ND games subvert their own formula, and Zoe is a great example of the “helper”-type suspect who really isn’t like your traditional “helper” at all. She’s there to do a job, and if sticking with Nancy helps her to do it, then that’s what she does. But she’s not there to Right some Great Wrong for the warm fuzzies of it all, or even because it’s Just and Right. She’s there because it’s her job, and her job is to play the game.

“It’ll be brief, painful, and full of garbage…but that’s life, isn’t it? And that’s the metaphor I’m riding into the grave.”

Next is our (kind of) double operative and partial culprit, Ewan McLeod (real name Sean Kent Davis) is a clever operative of Cathedral who decided that he wasn’t valued or important anywhere near as much as he should have been, and reached out to Revenant to supply them with information. Summoning Nancy to Scotland, Ewan is easily able to gain a portion of her trust as the Watcher in the Wires and is her tie to the relative safety of Cathedral.

As a culprit, Ewan is — ultimately — pitiable. Not that he’s not an egotist with a victim complex a mile wide, but when you actually look at the situation he’s in, it’s hard not to feel bad for him, even though he did it to himself. Having contacted Revenant, he’s now attempting to hold a tiger by the tail, praying it can’t eat him — and his worst fears come true, as his loved ones are threatened (“trying to keep my friends and family alive”, remember) and he’s discarded and made a target by the terrorists that he tried to use to make himself important.

Given the rather chilling threats made by Revenant, I’m inclined to believe that when we find him tied up, he didn’t do it to himself. Nancy would have noticed if the knots were too loose to have been done by a third party, and we know Revenant told him several times that if he wasn’t useful, he’d be punished.

While Ewan makes terrible choices, he’s also a pawn being played by a larger force — like everyone else in the game — and that is at least worth pity, if not forgiveness.

Next up is our former Cathedral agent and all-around tough cookie Moira Chisholm. As one of the people responsible for the events that led to Kate’s death — though no one but Revenant is responsible for killing her, note — Moira lives with guilt, regret, and a powerful sense of loneliness that only the loss of everyone you hold dear can bring.

Moira’s guilty of nothing in the present-day calamity, and helps Nancy the very best she can in her own limited power, but is ultimately a character for whom the past looms larger than the present can match. She has her hobbies, but her house is filled with memories of days when people sat on her couch and broke her teacups, not of hours reading alone.

She’s an intensely tragic character, and an example of what happens when your need to know the “truth” can get in the way of doing right by those you love. Moira lost everything to her previous job for Cathedral (who is implied to have left her, an otherwise dangerous free agent, alive because they knew (correctly!) she would become stagnant and docile under the weight of her own guilt, ouch), and yet she risks life and limb to help Nancy —not because she thinks it’ll exculpate her, but because Moira, at her core, wants to help the world, no matter what it’s taken from her.

Our final suspect is Glasgow’s resident skiptracer and unwilling pawn Alec Fell, who, along with Moira, can be traced back to Kate Drew’s death. Originally, Alec investigated a mysterious car crash — the one that killed Kate Drew — and, when he didn’t stop after a warning, had his office ransacked and burned. In the few months before the game starts, he experiences another break-in and his sister is kidnapped, with a message informing him that if he wants to guarantee her safety, to comply with Revenant’s orders.

Unlike Ewan, when pushed into a corner, Alec does his best to raise a little hell while still trying to keep his sister safe. For everything that he does on Revenant’s orders, he also helps Nancy out, finds her suitcase, locates Moira, tells Nancy where the cards are, and does his best to push back in other, little ways.

Sure Alec is guilty of a few things — most notably the fake shooting scare in Nancy’s room — but he’s a very active character, riding the rails and searching for anyone who can help put an end to this situation. It’s not for nothing that he’s a fan favorite, both for this game for the series at large, and his excellent VA and charming dialogue only make up half of his appeal.

On our Nancy side, we’ve got a few returning characters and one (semi) new one, so let’s go through them before getting (for the last time!) to the girl detective herself.

Carson Drew, father and golf model extraordinaire, is here to ground (as in steady, not punish) Nancy as she goes through this mystery. As the other person besides Nancy who was most affected by Kate’s death, Carson is an invaluable source of Kate-related knowledge, but is concerned foremost with his daughter’s safety.

For my money, the most important thing we learn about Carson here is that, well…he married the wrong woman as much as Kate married the wrong man. It’s sort of simplistic to say that their story shows that, in some cases, love doesn’t conquer all, but it’s true all the same.

Carson was happy to jet off to Scotland on occasion to visit Moira and her husband, but being happy to take vacations is a very different thing from a life constantly shifting and changing. He’s a prosecutor, so he has a strong sense of justice, but also has a strong sense of stability — he chose a career with a set trajectory and clearly defined rules.

Kate Austin, however, was a journalist who occasionally consulted for a Spy Organization when life got a little too boring (it’s important to note that she wasn’t a straight-out spy like Moira — she was far too free-spirited for that). She had all of Nancy’s inquisitiveness but more people skills than Nancy will probably ever have, and made friends easily.

It’s easy to see how she would have been attracted to the All-American, hardworking, solidly intelligent, emotionally balanced man, just as it’s easy to see how the slightly flashy, clever, inquisitive, intuitive redhead would have attracted him.

If this is starting to feel like I’m describing two other characters here…well, longtime readers of this meta series already know what happens when I use a paragraph to describe characters without using their names.

Kate is important in the game in that we’re shown her differences from and —more enlightening — similarities to Nancy. Nancy’s actions in this game are reflections on what Kate did (and what she would have done) as much as they show how the daughter diverges from the mother. And while Nancy doesn’t have her mother’s people skills or ease of making friendships, what she does have is her mother’s – and I’m going to use this word purposely — flightiness.

At the end of the day, Carson couldn’t be with Kate when she flitted off around the world, and Ned can’t be with Nancy when she does the same.

(I also find it interesting that we deal in the games only with Carson’s side of the family, and never even have a mention of Nancy’s maternal grandparents. Yes, I know Kate could have been an only child and her parents could already be dead…but I do like the possibility that they blame Carson for Kate’s death (entirely undeservedly!) and thus cut off contact. But this meta is for, well, meta, not fanfic.)

Ned Nickerson plays an important role in SPY in that he tries to help Nancy the best he can, even to the point of breaking and entering in her house (though really, it’s just entering, since he has permission) to find a document for her.

Ned comes off brilliantly in this game, but it’s important to note that his big, impressive (yet charmingly understated) speech isn’t to Nancy, but to Carson. And it doesn’t sway Nancy, it sways Carson. Because, at the end of the day, Carson can relate to lots of the pieces that make Ned what he is, and the situation that Ned finds himself in.

He’s wonderful, as boyfriends go; he calls her, encourages her, offers oddly prescient hints…but he doesn’t go with her. It’d be easy enough to make that a point in the series that, though we don’t see it happen, Ned often accompanies Nancy on her escapades, but instead we’re told — often through contention — that the exact opposite is true.

Ned is solid, true, intelligent, emotionally balanced and kind, but above all, Ned is stable. He’s enrolled in college — in an honors frat — and plays sports, attends his classes faithfully, remembers important dates…the list goes on and on. These are all wonderful characteristics for a boyfriend, but he, like Carson with Kate, ultimately isn’t what Nancy needs out of a relationship — and she is certainly not, like Kate with Carson, what Ned needs out of a relationship.

At the end of the day, both would need to compromise — Ned would need to set off with her sometimes, and Nancy would need to stay close to home sometimes — in order to make the other happy. And, well…nothing we have in any of the games says that either one would do that in the long term. Sure, Nancy returns home after the fight in CAP for ASH…but is in Egypt the very next game — immediately followed by Colorado, Georgia, and Scotland.

And honestly, this is the basis on which I disagree with Ned/Nancy as a couple. It serves neither one and, as we see in quite a few games where they squabble, they can make each other worse.

And speaking of our resident sleuth, let’s talk about Nancy Drew before wrapping up this character section.

In SPY, Nancy is — as mentioned above — a tool, used by both sides to get what they want without caring how it personally affects her. The big thing we learn about Nancy in this — and one of my favorite characteristics about her — is that Nancy is pretty ruthless. To me, it makes sense that, to get the information she wants, Nancy does what a terrorist organization tells her to because 1) it’s not her home immediately at risk, and 2) most importantly, Nancy has done bad things in the name of a good end in pretty much every game.

Lying, stealing, breaking priceless artifacts, endangering others — none of these are really new to Nancy, and what SPY does is brings that to the forefront. Sure, you as the player have the option not to do what Revenant tells Nancy to do…but then you miss out on big parts of Kate’s characterization — and, more importantly, a big part of Nancy’s.

In an unprecedented move, I’m going to reference National Treasure again, and quote part of Ben’s speech before he steals the Declaration:

“[A toast] to high treason…here’s to men who did what was considered wrong, in order to do what they thought was right — what they knew was right.”

To me, that shows us why Nancy does what she does — in SPY, and in every other game where she lies, cheats, and steals her way to the truth. She does it because, at the end of the day, Nancy is a person who is ruthless in her pursuit of her goal. And that’s a valuable trait.

Especially when one is dealing with spies, terrorists, and shady government operatives.

The Favorite:

I love most of SPY, so I’ll stick here with the things that especially stick out to me.

As covered above, I love: what this game does for the lore of the ND world; ‘Samantha Quick’; the many motivations of our suspects, and the emotional resonance that this game has.

Beyond that, there are a lot of little things. I absolutely love that they got the relative of the guy who plays Carson to play Nancy when she was little — that’s adorable to me. I love the cookie-making minigame, the outfit swap for Bridget/Zoe, the voice work for all of our suspects and helpers, and the beautiful locations (especially the spy cabin, both exterior and interior).

My favorite moment in the game is a sad one, but I’m a mercurial kind of person, so you should have really expected that. It’s actually Moira’s log/diary/letter to Kate (it functions as all three) after Cathedral deactivates her as an agent. I love a lot about it — the sad, almost desperate feeling to the words, the pen color changing as the seasons do — but nothing is better done than Moira’s last entry:

“It’s winter. It doesn’t matter that it’s winter, does it?”

My favorite puzzle is probably the zip-lining one. Sure, it’s easy, and sure, the animation makes me a little motion-sick, but it’s just….zip lines are just cool. That’s all there is to it. It appeals to the spy-loving idiot in me, and I think big-woosh-go-fast is stupid cool.

I also have to give a hat-tip to Kate’s letter — turning a fandom meme into a heartwarming story? Nik, you mad genius — and Nancy’s letter to Kate at the end. Both are beautifully written and are the perfect centerpiece to their respective characters, and both always put a smile on my face (and, at times, a tear in my eye) when reading them.

The last thing I really do have to mention here is Logan’s quasi-reappearance. I mentioned this in my “Top 5 Surprising Moments” meta, but I love, love, love that Logan is a Cathedral operative, and that he reported on Nancy during SAW. Not only does this continue to open up Nancy’s world, but it also shows that there are consequences to Nancy’s actions. She’s in rare form as far as rudeness goes in SAW, and SPY weaponizes that against her, giving Cathedral (and Revenant) a way to weaponize her feelings about her mother’s death and her — to be frank — inability to let things lie as they are.

The Un-Favorite:

There are a few things that aren’t quite my favorite in SPY, so let’s run through those as well.

First, in the common refrain of “small visual distinctions are difficult for me personally”, I didn’t like that there wasn’t enough contrast between a plain (on the bottom half) cookie and the orange/purple jelly. The shadow on the screen makes it kind of difficult to tell them apart, especially if there’s sprinkles and/or frosting on top of it, and I found that mildly frustrating, even though I love the minigame itself.

The second thing I don’t like is the option to skip the dialogue. Yes, this is present in most of the newer games, and I don’t like it in them either, but it’s especially egregious in SPY and LIE. Both of these games really rely on hints given in the dialogue (and of course, in the written materials hidden around the game) in order to get a full, clear view of what’s going on. The option is great on repeat plays, but I really do wish that it was disabled if it was your first save file on the game.

The last annoying thing is the Jabberwocky puzzle — or rather, the percentage of the jabberwocky puzzle that the player actually has to do. The puzzle as it stands feels very confusing, and the “hints” you get are quite unintuitive.

The record tells you basically how to create the encrypted message — it’s the first letter from each green word, the second from each orange word, etc., arranged in the order they appear in the poem — but when you start the poem, Nancy has already basically completed this step, and it’s up to you to do the actual decoding just through process of elimination.

It’s a puzzle of letter deduction, like in TMB and the minigame in ASH — and these are normally my favorite puzzles! — but it’s cloaked in the disguise of an encryption puzzle, and for that, it’s incredibly irritating.

The Fix:

So how would I fix The Silent Spy?

The first thing I’d do, which you can probably guess based on the above section, is to fix how the Jabberwocky poem is presented. Even a bit of dialogue establishing what the player actually has to do versus what Nancy does for the player would be helpful in working through it without bothering making the encrypted message oneself, and would set the player up to actually know what they’re doing, versus the mass of confusion that comes with the puzzle.

The only other change I would make would to put in one more flashback — that of 10-year-old Nancy’s perspective shortly after Kate’s death, perhaps after the funeral. We spend a lot of time in flashback seeing Kate before her death, and I think it would add to just a little bit more of seeing Nancy’s relationship with her mother if we could see the Drew house with her recently gone.

(And perhaps, see or hear Hannah? Please?)

The Silent Spy is a game that I find, on the whole, to be one of the best that Nik penned, and certainly a fitting end to the series of “Nancy Games” that gives us a little more perspective on our teeth sleuth. There are as many moments of joy as of sorrow, but in the end the player is left with the feeling that Nancy’s world is a little better for knowing more about her mother, and that whatever else Kate did and was, she left behind a world (both in game and breaking the fourth wall) that was better — and had ways to become even better than that — than it was when she lived in it.

[codevassie]

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What You Can Stand by manyfandomsonelog

Status: Incomplete, Work In Progress

Summary:  Virgil tried so, so hard to avoid becoming a supervillain. He really did. But when your superpower is literally manifesting a person's worst fears, it's a hard thing to avoid. Still, he really, really tried. Even when his own parents feared him. Even when the whole school feared him. Even when he hated himself and his Propensity so much that he wanted to give in. He might've succeeded, if he hadn't met him- Roman Reyes, AKA Roman Spectacular, AKA The Prince, AKA the worst thing that has ever happened to him (which is saying something).

Relationships: Prinxiety, Logicality 

CW: Psychological stuff, nightmares, bullying, physical harm, spiders, panic attacks, suicidal thoughts, brief discussion of racism, self-hatred,  bomb, explosion, blood, injury, bad/abusive parenting, imprisonment, fire,  homophobia, pedophilia mention, discussion of child abuse, evidence of physical abuse, sexual innuendo, anxious thoughts, death, funeral, flashback, reference to sex, fairly aggressive arguing and yelling, public speaking, secondhand embarrassment

My thoughts: My quarantine savior!!! I started the fic like a week into quarantine, so I really mean that literally. The characterization is absolutely fantastic--I love seeing all of them interact. It’s so natural and fun and interesting. The plot is also just wonderful--one thing keeps happening after another and these guys just cannot seem to get a break. The pacing is awesome, and whether it’s a character or plot chapter, you just can’t look away. Log is such a fantastic writer and a wonderful person, so if you like awesome prinxiety, superpowers and secret identities, trust and betrayal, humor and angst, you really need to read this one! 

Rewind by ravenclawicecream 

Status: Incomplete, Work In Progress

Summary: When a group of superheroes show up to kill him, it's just another Wednesday for Virgil Messana. After five years of being on the run, he's used to the idea people want him dead. That fact is just an unfortunate side effect of having the power to destroy everything you touch. What does surprise him, however, is when he finds himself agreeing to join those superheros and become part of the team. It's not long until Virgil learns that all the heroes have chapters of their lives they'd rather keep unpublished, along with events they'd rather not relive. And, as he spends more time with the team, he realizes that he may know certain members much better than he'd originally thought. Virgil longs for a moment to figure everything out but by then it's too late. He's already caught up in a bigger scheme; one where they no longer have the power to control their own destinies. With every movement monitored and every action proven to be calculated, the lines between allies and enemies blur, leaving Virgil caught in between. When the stakes are inevitably raised, the remaining heroes must do all they can to change the future of the world. But time has always been a cruel master, and sometimes the only answer is to rewind.

Relationships: Loceit, Logicality, Prinxiety, Remile

CW: Major Character Death, Murder

My thoughts: Gosh, I wish this one got more love. It’s probably the MCD tag, so understandable, but also take into consideration the time travel tag and perhaps give it a chance? I feel like this fic is setting up for so much, and I cannot wait to see how it all goes down. I have so many questions for this fic which is always a good sign (so many that I may have freaked the author out with my WALL of questions on chapter three don’t worry about it /j). Please. Read. This. 

Powerless by patentpending 

Status: Complete

Summary: “People like us,” Logan had once remarked to Virgil. “Are statistical anomalies.”(Almost) Everyone in the world has powers. As for those who don’t, well, they’re such a small part of the population - only 0.04% - why would anyone care about them?Ever since he realized what people mean when they call him Powerless, Virgil Sanders has tried to fight back against the system that oppresses people like him, Patton, and Logan. When Patton’s bakery is targeted in a hate crime, he finally snaps. With the help of a mysterious sponsor, Virgil becomes a villain, ready to remake a broken society. The only thing standing in his way is the world’s most Powerful (and infuriatingly charming) superhero: The Prince, who is hiding the fact that his gilded life isn’t as perfect as it may seem.

Relationships: Prinxiety, Logicality, Roman/Female Fanon Character 

CW: Classism, Unreliable Narrator, Thinly Veiled Criticism of Society,  emetophobia, violence, gun mention,  implied suicide attempt, dub-con, mentions of blood, graphic depictions of a riot, non-graphic description of a wound, possessive and abusive behavior, kid being kicked out of the house by parent, kidnapping, kinda torture (?), body horror, gore, graphic descriptions of injuries, emotional abuse, police brutality, pain and injury, burning building, swearing, vomiting, murder, panic attack, dysphoria, misgendering, minor character death, major character death, self deprecating talk, mentions of suicide

My thoughts: Well, doing a TS superhero rec without Powerless is just treason. I don’t know--I’m trying to figure out a way to describe it and instead launching up to pace around the room with an instant replay of different scenes in my head. I mean, the grocery store chapter?!?! This stuff lives in my head rent free. The characterization, the banter, the tension, the motives--I can’t describe it y’all. Just, if you love yourselves (love yourselves, please <3) then just go read it. Or reread it. Do that for yourselves. 

Waterspout by Greenninjagal

Status: Complete

Summary: "Hail!” The boy says all smug smiles that Virgil immediately hates. “You’re Recluse aren’t you?”As if there was some other spider themed weirdo who clung to buildings in their free time.“No,” Virgil says, because he can. *** Virgil finds himself stuck on the side of a building in a rainstorm and is helped by an annoying-admittedly attractive-guy.

Relationships: Prinxiety

CW: Mild cursing, storms

My thoughts: This one is very cute. Virgil is a spiderman-like hero who went up a waterspout, and down comes some rain trying to wash him out. Roman comes to help, they banter a bit, and, maybe, there’s a little surprise at the end. I would not mind more of this AU. In fact, I would love it. But that should not discount how wonderfully made a oneshot it is either. The author wrote it perfectly for the length it is, presenting the charm of the characters, great plot and symbolism, and left me wanting more at the same time. Definitely go check this one out. 

Technically. It’s A Secret by supervillain 

Status: Incomplete, Work In Progress

Summary: Virgil Storm, the adopted son of a reality TV star with telekinesis was born without a power. That's been a problem for him all his life. His only friend is Patton Vega, his only chance at romance the irritating Cros Corson--until he gets a job at a top-secret facility, playing babysitter to a bunch of kids with dangerous powers and even more dangerous minds. Kids who happen to be exactly his age.Yeah, this is going to be a piece of cake, especially when the enigmatic villain Believe (aka Roman Torres) takes a liking to Virgil. And even worse, when Virgil starts to more than like him back. Pull in some evil mad scientists, a plague created to decimate the world, a murderous villain, an obnoxious stalker, and the greatest Kinetic the world has ever known, and you're in for a hell of a ride.

Relationships: Prinxiety, Logicality 

CW:  Anxiety attacks, arson, murder, minor character death, blood, spiders, being eaten alive, falling, death, sleeping, fighting, cop mention 

My thoughts: I’m behind on this one, and I wanted to catch up on it before I posted this rec list. Today is the last Friday of the year though, so I decided to just go ahead and do it. I love this fic a ton so far, and I can’t wait to read more. I can tell the author put a lot of thought into writing the world and characters, and that the plot is interesting and deliberate. There’s mysteries unfolding which intrigues me So Bad. It’s a super interesting one, so I’d say go read it!

[splatterchatter]

Resident Evil Village  AKA Ethan, for the love of God grow a personality the same way you grew a hand, I’m begging you

Now, I am sure that anyone who has been on the internet the last couple of months is aware that there is a new Resident Evil game due to one Lady Dimitrescu in the promotional material for the game. Now, don’t get me wrong, a giant middle-aged vampire woman is worth the internet’s admiration, but it turns out that there is a lot more going on in this game, which I feel wasn’t advertised as much. So I am here with a review of all things that you missed while pledging your undying devotion and loyalty to Lady Dimitrescu, or one of her daughters. While I will attempt to make this a spoiler-free as possible, I can’t promise I won’t give things away so read on at your own risk if you haven’t played/watched the game yet.

Resident Evil Village, or Resident Evil 8, starts with a fairytale about a little girl who gets lost in the forest and receives gifts from a bat, a spider, and a sea monster before she takes a gear that is not a gift, leading to her to be confronted by an evil witch. Before we get to the end of the tale, we are transported to Mia and Ethan Winters' living room where Mia has been reading to their 6-month-old baby Rosemary. It is established pretty quickly that Mia and Ethan’s relationship is a bit strained since the events in Louisiana, which is understandable, and have been relocated to Europe by Chris Redfield in hopes that they can put the past behind them. As you can imagine, given that this is a Resident Evil game, the calm family scene doesn’t last long and once again Ethan is thrown into horrors beyond his imagination to try and save his child. Ethan, oh Ethan, you are by far the most boring video game character that I believe I have ever encountered. While his confusion and overall horror didn’t bother me too much in Resident Evil seven given how bat shit crazy that situation was for a man who was in IT before that all started, I could give him some leeway. However, after one bat shit situation, when your child is kidnapped and there are lycans running around a small European village, you eventually stop saying what and why all the time and start getting a bit of a personality other than screaming “WHERE IS MY BABY” over and over. Also, Ethan, you have fought enough people to know that you don’t have a whole conversation with them because that always ends poorly and yet on THREE SEPARATE OCCASIONS you have a whole dialogue before getting thrown into some sort of trap or almost killed. I mean you have a character who just reattaches his hand multiple times between 7 and 8 and he is still supremely boring and has no character development. Sliced white bread is more interesting than this protagonist, even with the twist. Now, did I get emotional at the end, yes, but that wasn’t because I gave a shit about Ethan so much as Chris Redfield's reaction to the whole thing. I mean, the character introduced in the after credit scene is more interesting in seven seconds than Ethan was in two entire games. While Ethan was terribly boring, there were several interesting characters, both protagonists and villains, that were underutilized in this game. To start with, a much more interesting game would have been to have the main character be Mia, post her life of lies and their consequences, having to track down her child and come to terms with what she did that led to the events in 7. While I also found Mia getting on my nerves in this game, it was mostly because she was sidelined to snipping at Ethan, not telling him the truth (because that went so well last time), and constantly shrieking questions. Mia was an operative and could have been fleshed out to be a super badass character if they had given her more purpose and screen time. However, you didn’t even need to flesh out Chris Redfield because he has been a staple in the Resident Evil games since the first one. There is already this rich backstory and he was more interesting in the half-hour we see him in the game and I felt for him more than Ethan who I’ve been with for two games. This is a man who's seen the carnage of Umbrella for years at this point and it’s wearing on him. Show me the story of Chris and his team, who were interesting in their own right, going god damn feral on an Umbrella facility. Basically, give me a main character with some sort of personality, I'm begging you. Hell, Beneviento’s little doll was more complex than Ethan.

  Speaking of Beneviento, while I felt that all the villains were pretty well-rounded, I didn’t think that we have enough time with any of them. Lady Dimitrescu is in the game for a surprisingly short time for all the hype she was given. Now, I don’t blame the developers for this as her castle is the first area of the game and therefore what they had completed first to show off to the world. However, I feel that each of the four houses could probably have been their own games, but instead, we were given just enough to get interested in them, and then they were dead. Lady Dimitrescu wanted to live with her daughters, Beneviento wanted to be left alone with her dolls, Moreau just wanted Mother Miranda's approval and Heisenberg wanted to kill Miranda for what she did to him. Heisenberg especially, I wanted to know more about and his history before Miranda. What did he lose when she brought him into her experiment? What did they all lose? There are enough questions there that I felt every section, besides perhaps Moreau’s, ended far too quickly to feel satisfying. At this point, you probably think that I hate the game, which is not the case. I actually found it really entertaining and a pretty good video game. However, I am a huge story person and while no Resident Evil game is a piece of storytelling genius, it doesn’t mean that I’m not going to talk about the things that bothered me. One thing that this game did exceptionally well is the visuals. This game is absolutely beautiful and all of the areas have their own distinct atmosphere and look. If you are a fan of Resident Evil Four, which most people are, the beginning of this game is going to give you the same ambiance with much better graphics. God, what I wouldn’t have given to have Leon kicking people down ladders in this game. While Lady Dimitrescu is far more interesting than Ramon Salazar, don’t get me wrong he is the one Resident Evil villain that I have never forgotten, they have the same thoughts on interior design. Then the Beneviento house and Monreau’s sections were more like 7 and the factory was a new and very beautiful set piece. An utterly stunning game. Resident Evil Village is also in the same vein as Resident Evil 4 in that it is much more action-horror than survival horror. While the Beneviento house is properly scary, the rest of the time you know that you’re going in shooting. I feel as if her house also has the scariest monsters, though there are only a couple. Don’t get me wrong, the lycans look cool and Heisenberg’s monsters are solidly in the realm of body horror, but you get a gun early and use it often. Resident Evil 7 was far more tense, even with weapons, because you have no idea where the family members were and usually they could easily kill you until you got into their boss fight. Again, it’s a fun game, but if you expected the same tension as in 7, you will only have it in a small area of the game. Overall, this is a fun and beautiful game, but not without fault. I am still craving the game with Mia as the main character because I feel as if that would be a much more interesting story. Nothing against Ethan, he was just written that way. I am really hoping that if there is a Resident Evil 9 it follows Chris just laying waste to an Umbrella headquarters because the man deserves it if anyone does. I mean, my dream is a Chris Leon team-up, but that is just the fangirl in me. Chris and Claire would be fun too. Basically, anyone with a personality. I would say that this game is worth the money, but not without fault. Now I am just crossing my fingers for a Resident Evil four remake because I need to see my boy Leon again as well as the president’s daughter popping out of a dumpster like a gopher with stunning graphics.

[skamamoroma]

WTFOCK Season 3 Analysis- Touch and Distance - (Sander focused)

First of all, this will be long. As in, VERY long. If you know me and you followed me at ALL for Skam Italia or WTFOCK ‘analysis’ posts (which I WILL finish) then you’ll know the length to expect… so if you get even half way, you deserve a medal. 

So, I have been promising this for a LONG time. I think I first said I’d write this when the reunion clip was released and I just… haven’t but seeing as we’re all in quarantine and I’m doing anything and everything to stay sane in my flat alone and we could all do with stuff to cheer us up, I’m offering this to fandom and I hope it makes you smile.

I think the reason I fell in love with Skam, the format and the intense character focus is because I love just that. I have always had an obsession with strong character driven TV shows/movies and even when I was tiny, I wrote an essay about Mary Poppins because I found her so mysterious and amazing. Shows like Skam and its remakes, when they’re GOOD they’re really really bloody amazing, mainly because they hone in on character detail and really use it for that perfect Skam-esque “show not tell” format. I’ve always found that kind of stuff so interesting and over the years have held this little collection of couples/characters/friendships from allsorts of shows/movies/theatre dear because they celebrate nuance… and Skam just spoils me!!

I have been MASSIVELY impressed with WTFOCK have done with Sander. He feels so fleshed out and dynamic as a character and in SO MANY DIFFERENT WAYS too. I think one of the things I was so giddy about was the way they still managed to keep the mystery there while also making it seem like we knew him so well. And we do. But I think that’s the reason it’s so cool because a lot of the things we know about Sander, he hasn’t really TOLD us. We’ve learned it through his actions or from reading into his words, from his reactions to people and the way he lives his life. That, to me, is like crack hahaha. I live for that stuff and for analysing a character and so I became a bit fixated on the way they used touch in season 3.

Now, it’s not just with Sander but with Robbe too. Touch was an ENORMOUS part of the season and we never really EVER had either of them talk about it. Robbe never really expressed verbal discomfort with touch early on but we saw it and Sander never expressed how important touch was to him but we witnessed it...and now we’re watching wtfockdown with Sander specifically struggling with lack of touch. Safe to say, I knew I had to write this eventually and after quite a few messages (you lovely lot), I am doing this for you. Enjoy!

SANDER FIRST...

SANDER.

When it comes to Sander, I feel like I have SO MUCH TO SAY but I think, the most important thing, is that touch is a cornerstone of character in terms of what calms him, what makes him happy, what makes him feel connected, what soothes him, how he expresses love, how he wants to show love, how he flirts… ALL OF IT, and distance is what plagues him. 

I re-watched each clip in turn and I’m still obsessed with how they layered his character with this idea. No other Even and not even Even himself has this element so strongly emphasised. Yes, they all like touch and some of the parallels have specific things that form part of their character like Eliott and Lucas and the whole touch of skin thing and Cris/Joana with the hair/cheeks thing and Even always loved to ground himself in touching Isak ETC… but with Sander, it’s such a narrative and it’s woven in so beautifully. ABOVE ALL, what makes me smile and what is so meaningful is that as Robbe grows and opens up and learns about touch himself (see my Robbe post to come), we see that Sander is gifted this really sweet boy who LOVES to touch and who is incredibly affectionate and finds himself learning that he is INCREDIBLY good at providing comfort. So their love story also becomes a story of touch and navigating distance from those perspectives.

I guess writing it out helps to see it so I’ll go chronologically. 

The first time we see Sander use touch is when he’s in the kitchen with Robbe. The entire scene is practically choreographed it’s so fluid but the lack of space, the shuffling around each other and the general ‘oh my god this person makes me feel things’ vibe makes the fact that when Sander purposefully touches Robbe for the first time, it’s a THING… that hand on his back. They do kind of brush up against each other a few times but that little linger of the camera on Sander’s hand on Robbe’s back makes me GIDDY because it’s all so intentional. It’s Robbe’s face that does me in. You don’t need his words because he does this sort of glance behind him and a bashful sort of dazed stumble… it’s so obvious that being touched like that by Sander got to him in an overwhelming way. It’s all electricity and that kind of giddy new love thing in the kitchen but that moment KILLS me because it’s touch that Robbe WANTS but doesn’t feel able to have… but Sander gives it because he’s SANDER. He’s demonstrable and purposeful (I will use that word a lot!) with touch.

Sander does stuff in a way that’s bold and purposeful (told you) and touch is part of that. ALL THE WAY OR NO WAY - right? So many times, you can see Sander decide and then act immediately. SO MANY TIMES. In the supermarket, feeding Robbe, in the bar when he decides to take Robbe off on an adventure, at the swimming pool ETC. SO MANY. And touch is a thing all wrapped up in that sense of purpose and spontaneity. His actions are mostly not overbearing or unwanted though which is so key. People seem to feel comfortable with him even if he is a little forward and NOBODY more than Robbe. Robbe doesn’t recoil, he lets it happen and not in the passive way we see him do early on but in the OH WOW HE TOUCHED ME way that can only come with attraction and early feelings. BUT THEY HAD KNOWN EACH OTHER HOURS. Hours, and Robbe was fine with it. 

Sander and flirting... HE IS SO OBVIOUS and touch is part of it every single time. That whole ‘oops I rolled into you in the sand’ is just textbook, man! Hahaha. I laugh at him early on because he is genuinely adorable with how obvious he is. Same can be said for the “oops I just need to grab this bottle that just happens to be right next to you which means I need to stand so close to you and wrap my arms around you’ - hahahaha. Not to mention the ‘oh let me teach you to turn on the oven and lightly touch our fingers’. Purposeful. 

Then you get the first time they’re together alone for their bike ride. I mean, we all know Sander is giddy. It’s what makes it so sweet to watch because he’s just SO HAPPY to have Robbe by himself and to go off on this adventure together. I LOVE the way he holds Robbe’s hand after they high five…. BOY. He takes advantage of stuff while he can. But when they get to the pool, it’s obviously an Even move and we all know how it goes but the first time he touches Robbe is to kiss him. We know it’s all he wanted, we know it was his plan, we know he’s been wanting to do it a long time but I LOVE that they kept in the recoil from Robbe because it is absolutely NOT a gradual progression for Robbe when it comes to Sander… it’s ALL IN and scary and overwhelming and Robbe’s instincts kick in but the second Robbe kisses Sander back, we get the start of seeing Sander and touch being a HUGE DEAL. Robbe is still learning and faced with the way Sander acts first, thinks later, the differences between them in this moment are STARK. It’s why it all goes so catastrophically wrong afterwards but why I understood what Robbe did even if it was so very wrong. 

Sander is SUCH an Even and I’ve always said he reminds me of Even the most of all the parallels but especially when he kisses. He’s a passionate dude! He kisses with meaning and with all he has and it’s little wonder Robbe described it as his head exploding… poor guy! You get that first glimpse of Sander acting on his feelings and he’s overwhelming. In that pool, he grasps and holds on and Robbe’s hair becomes a total THING for him. 

For me, I get most interested in touch from Chernobyl onwards. THAT CLIP. The stuff in it that’s so subtle but AMAZING when it comes to Sander makes me roll around in it, in the way it MEANS so much and says a lot about who he is. The DISTANCE he keeps from Robbe is not something we’ve seen from him yet. It’s clearly not comfortable for him but he deserves to keep it until he feels comfortable and I LOVE LOVE LOVE that he only moves closer but DOESN’T touch Robbe yet. And this next moment is what sparked my obsession…. The “i’m going to nearly kiss you and then not kiss you” moment. He uses touch to make a point. Purposeful. He stands close but they don’t touch and then he teases with it… tests Robbe’s response with it to see what he’d do. Robbe doesn’t move and allows it. He then clarifies how Robbe feels about stuff now and the second he gets his answer … fuck all of that noise and fuck all the issues I had in my head (a sentiment we KNOW Sander understands and grasps onto eventually - Chernobyl being the way he himself describes the effects of his bipolar disorder) he goes all in and closes the distance. KILLS ME. That use of touch to make a point is Sander ALLOVER. Never without purpose.

They don’t STOP touching AT ALL… until it’s used AGAIN. This time, this huge focus on pulling apart. It’s gradual. They disconnect from their bodies then they disconnect from lips and then that lingering shot on their hands and the whole holding on until the very last second…COME ON. It’s so perfect. So intentional and so meaningful. The fact that Sander holds on purposefully for so long until he absolutely can’t anymore, it makes him STUMBLE…. If that’s not a whole metaphor for who he is as a character then I don’t know what is! He WON’T allow that distance until he absolutely has to… and that fact characterises their ENTIRE story right up until wtfockdown!

Onto the cuddle scene and again, from Chernobyl, it’s full of poignant moments. It’s an overload in terms of seeing Sander respond to touch. There’s a lot of touching in this clip, a lot of playful stuff and kisses and cuddles but I think there are a few specifics that are in there for a reason that say so much. The first is the hair stroking. Now, we know Robbe and Sander LOVE touching each other’s hair and there’s a fair amount of pulling involved too… haha… but it’s so telling the way that Sander relaxes under Robbe’s touch. He spends most of that scene with his eyes closed. It relaxes him, makes him sleepy and comfortable and Robbe clearly realises it because when Sander seems distressed, Robbe goes straight to do it again. It’s all part of Robbe’s journey wrapped up in there too, learning how his touch can be soothing.I love that Sander barely moves from his position upside down on the bed. He allows Robbe the ability to do ANYTHING. He lets Robbs move around him, lets Robbe touch him and climb on top of him. He just basks in it and please go rewatch it and watch his eyes even when Robbe is talking… he closes them constantly like it’s making him fall asleep. He’s so comforted by it. When Robbe climbs on him, his eyes are even closed! He’s just VERY VERY happy allowing Robbe anything when it comes to moving around him and in his space. He lets Robbe koala himself on his back without a flinch, is so comfortable with the affection and clearly soaking it all in. I think the other moment is when Sander realises Robbe’s jealousy/upset and goes to very purposefully lie down against him to tuck his head under Robbe’s chin. The purpose in it, at the time, seemed kinda sheepish but we know better now. We KNOW Sander had tried to distance himself from Britt but she wasn’t allowing it and this is Sander purposefully closing that distance, taking it back and seeking Robbe’s touch again. It’s like he’s had that comforting touch now and, without it, it doesn’t feel right so he closes the distance the VERY SECOND he can. He does this a few times from here on out too… that lack of ability to stay apart from Robbe, the wish to keep that comfort coming. 

There’s this struggle we see from him AGAIN and AGAIN. When stuff with Robbe suffers because Sander’s truth gets in the way (with Britt texting in the cuddle scene, with their distance before the reunion where Sander tried to leave Robbe behind etc)... he CANNOT wait to remove the distance as quickly as he possibly can. The only exception is when they’ve been apart post hotel and Sander is unwell… but we know he’s frightened, embarrassed, worried about hurting Robbe and we know that he’s trying to keep Robbe at arm’s length to protect him but… and I’ll get onto it later but it’s PERFECT to me that the second he has touch back, the second Robbe kisses him, he crumbles. It means THAT MUCH to him. It’s such a pattern with him and it starts here, with Sander crawling across the bed, not allowing Robbe to be too far away while he still has him. 

For me, it epitomises that idea of “i don’t know if I’ll find someone like that, at least not someone who loves me”. Because, for Sander, he WANTS so badly. He wants to be in love and to find someone special and be able to show love but he’s terrified. For such a purposeful person, someone who acts on instinct, that is clearly so hard for him. He WANTS but he has to force himself NOT TO for all of the reasons he gives and for all of the reasons we can read from his behaviour. Those moments he stays away - aka post assault, post hotel - are all for a good reason and yet the second he realises that the worries that lead to his belief that he can’t HAVE are unfounded or resolved, he closes any and all distance and holds on for dear life. “I’m never ever letting go of you”. ALL THE WAY OR NO WAY. He either allows himself everything and that ‘all in’ sense of falling head over heels and clinging on for dear life or he cuts and runs… and the cutting/running part honestly must have hurt so badly for him. We know how much Robbe means to him and how much touch and comfort he gets from their relationship… to leave that behind when he can’t remain over the other side of the bed from Robbe normally must have been so hard for him. 

ANYWAY. The date. I’ve talked about this endlessly but the first minute or so of this clip is some of the best chemistry I’ve seen in the SCU and, in general, to be honest. It hit me like a freight train when I first saw it. For LGBT+ folks, seeing stuff like this is impactful. Mainly because it’s shown as so natural and normal and given the same respect and focus on desire and sweetness and simplicity as hetero love stories have been given for millenia! 

They touch constantly throughout this clip but I just LOVE the focus on it. The camera lingers. Every shot is there for a reason. Sander’s touch goes from playful to casually affectionate to passionate to suggestive within seconds and he drowns in it! It’s mesmerising to watch. Again, it almost feels choreographed. The moment that kills me is Sander just running one finger across Robbe’s collar bone. WHOEVER decided to include that --- director or writer or even actor --- it’s just perfect. It’s so Sander. He doesn’t stop touching and that little focus on the fact that he always wants to show how he feels through touching Robbe...the fact that it is on his skin when Robbe is wearing a full on sweatshirt shows how much Sander seeks intimacy out. It’s so purposeful once again and yet so simple… but the main thing is that Sander uses touch to keep that connection going. The music change at that exact moment is what does it for me. It’s dream-like, swoony and mesmerising. You can feel the dazed sense of love and adoration, the intimacy of the fact that Sander can’t help but hold onto Robbe’s hair again and even when he’s whispering to him, can’t help but chase it with kisses. Sander uses every thought and feeling he has inside and translates it directly into touch. He communicates with it! 

Which leads pretty nicely onto the reunion… because the next time we have Sander able to reach out physically is SO MUCH LATER. The assault, the distance Robbe enforces (for good reason because of what he believes happened at the party) and then the confusion about the mural creates SO MUCH DISTANCE.

The start of the reunion clip is one of my all time favourite SCU moments from any remake. The acting is near perfection. I’ve posted tons about it before but GOD. I love that, to this point, after that intense, hazy kind of love they were starting in the bar… everything was torn away from them. As I said before, Sander is either ALL IN or not at all. When he’s in, he’s REALLY in and touch is fundamental. 

So it KILLLLLLSSSSSS MEEEEEEE (Yes, I am being dramatic but GOD) that the first thing he does when he walks in the foyer of Robbe’s building, without explanation and after so long apart and so much mess existing between them is… close the distance between them physically. 

This scene reminds me of the La Grotta scene from Skam It s2. Every touch and movement in that scene with Marti and Nico is a form of communication and it’s the same here. I guess it’s why I love both scenes so much because ‘show not tell’ is precious and intelligent and so so much more meaningful for a viewer. The way Sander just stands there and then without words, kisses Robbe and tries to do what he can normally do so easily and communicate through his touches is heartbreaking. But too much has gone on. It’s not possible to communicate that way after so much hurt and confusion. 

Then that forehead touch. GOD. I remember watching it and being so bowled over without how much was SAID by both of them. The way that Sander leans into it like he KNOWS he can’t use kisses to sort it all out but just NEEDS comfort and Robbe’s touch… and the way Robbe lets himself have it for a moment but then makes genuine crying noises of frustration to get Sander to stop. The “I want this so much but stop, it’s not fair what you’re doing” is so obvious in his actions. It’s all because it’s how they communicate. BECAUSE touch is their love language, the fact that they can’t give into it is PHYSICALLY painful for them both. They both just stand there with their eyes closed. Sander looks exhausted, devastated but also so deeply comforted by Robbe’s presence and the fact that he can be close to him again in equal measure. Robbe lets out this big sigh and it screams “I know, I feel the same, this feels so right and I miss you so much but I can’t let you forget everything that happened” - YET THEY DON’T STOP TOUCHING. I love that regardless, they stay connected and cannot physically part themselves. It’s written all over Sander’s face how much it means to have Robbe so close and Robbe’s little nose rub is plain adorable. They are literally standing there comforting each other while at the same time trying to communicate through nothing but touch… and the RELIEF in those touches too. 

It’s little wonder that what happens next happens in the way it does. Those few words from Sander and the touches between them are enough for them to just KNOW. Their connection is so fundamental that it’s worth fighting through and relying on that gut instinct for them. 

Sander is then able to do what he’s good at and be purposeful, firm and to throw himself into it. ALL THE WAY. Once he knows he is ok again, that he has permission and is allowed to let his heart go, he just falls into it and it’s ALL TOUCHING from then on. Every kiss is so meaningful and there are a few specific moments that are really meaningful to me. 

The first one is Sander’s smile when he lands on the bed. He is never happier than when he’s able to be free like this. He revels in the ability to throw himself into his feelings. He’s ridiculously enviable tbh. The next moment is the whole clawing, clinging thing he does. Yet again, poor Robbe’s hair gets yanked every which way but I love that we get that glimpse of ‘never letting you go’ mentality he has to keep Robbe as close as physically possible and the way he closes his eyes, smiles and loses himself in those moments. They’re so close to Sander POV it’s crazy. It reminds me of during the cuddle scene when he closed his eyes. Touch grounds him in the most astounding way! I LOVE that the lyrics during this as “take it how you want it, take all my love”. PERFECT, man. That idea of give and take is SO IMPORTANT for them, for Sander especially. The ALL THE WAY mentality he has means that he could only EVER fall in love with someone who is able to counter it, someone who is able to GIVE IN to Sander the way he needs and lose themself too the way he likes. He could only ever fall in love with someone as willing to give and take the way that he is with comfort… and Robbe fits the bill, which is obviously as much of a surprise to him too! I think that’s where their connection comes in. That spark between them and the way they feel for each other is one of contentment so they’re quite happy taking what they need from the other person because the other is SO GIVING. Robbe is so affectionate which is what Sander craves and Sander is so purposeful and bold in his ways which is what Robbe needs. The last moment is the hand holding. Again, Sander is grounded by that physical connection. He clings and holds on and receives so much comfort from it. The knowledge that they’re in something together is clearly huge for them both.

The morning after scene is most meaningful in terms of touch when they get into Robbe’s room. I LOVE how natural it all is. Sander is very happy letting Robbe do what he wants again and it’s almost seamless for Robbe just to sit on his lap. But he’s completely incapable of reigning himself in. The purposeful side of Sander comes out in full distraction mode with Sander genuinely incapable of keeping his hands to himself. The whole playful kind of sexy “I’ll throw you around” thing is not only them at peak comfort with each other but Sander’s way of physically showing he’s not going anywhere, of reminding Robbe that he’s all Sander’s attention is on and all he cares about and that he can DO this now, just toss Robbe onto the bed and crawl all over him - hahahaha. He treats Robbe like he’s precious and completely focused on but also treats Robbe perhaps the way HE wants to be treated… those promises followed by touching with a little possessiveness, that reminder that he won’t be left alone. He gives it all to Robbe and in true Sander style, tries to communicate through touch as much as he possibly can because words mean honesty and they mean a risk of losing it all. 

The next notable moment is YET AGAIN, Sander playing with touch when he arrives at the flat. The “nope, Robbe, you’re not getting what you want until we do this fun thing I want to do with you to create a tradition”. He does it twice, playing with denying Robbe touch and physical contact. He has a task to do and he needs Robbe focused on it so he uses touch to keep that focus sharp… and then the fact that the VERY SECOND that task is done, Sander literally walks straight into Robbe’s arms and kinda carries him off towards Robbe’s room makes me laugh. He’s like “ok touching is allowed right this instant” … he knows himself. If he’d have allowed them to touch before he did his task, there’d have been ABSOLUTELY NO SHOE PUT OUT! He’s self aware ;)

Then the hotel… and oh my heart breaks and is soothed in equal measure because this evening was HANDS DOWN one of my most favourite Skam watching experiences. It is gut wrenching in real time and so beautifully acted, I can’t handle it, especially from Willem DS. That kid can act rings around most professional Hollywood actors. They both can. Yet another Skam remake showcasing young talent at its most special and honest. Anyway, I digress!

The shower scene has to be talked about. The show runners etc explained why they included it where the original didn’t (although planned to!) and I get why some found it a little too much but, for them, it worked. I mean, I’m not the person to talk about sex scenes but I definitely CAN talk tons about them when they’re MEANINGFUL and layered and this one is. It’s complete and utter trust. I love so much of the camera work here because you can see they tried to be as respectful as possible while also getting the meaning across and it worked so well… especially as the stuff that clicks for me is Sander’s behaviour. He’s so lost in it. Again, he’s someone who acts on instinct and needs someone who will respond to him with understanding. If someone’s not on the same page then he’s THROWN (and this is why the whole cyber sex things is killing me with its meaning for him!).  Again with Robbe’s hair being pulled all over the place but Sander allows himself take and be taken and it’s so important to who he is that it’s ALL THE WAY kind of love and that he’s allowed to be both in control and also completely vulnerable.

The way they segue into the shot of the bed and sander is completely wrapped up in Robbe’s arms kills me. There’s no one right way for them. Touch comes to Sander in his ability to be DEMONSTRABLE and also to RECEIVE. In these moments, he just snuggles into Robbe and takes and takes and takes and takes… but only because Robbe is so perfectly willing to provide. It’s why they work. That balance is what is so key about their relationship. Sander feels ok to suddenly go from firm and handsy to extremely vulnerable and the shot when the camera closes in on his face so serene and at ease, happy to be kissed repeatedly on the forehead by Robbe is just incredibly meaningful and emotional. He is allowed to be himself and to fall into it without worry even when he’s at his most vulnerable. He basks in it and it’s so comforting to watch. I love that he plays with Robbe’s necklace because not only is it him looking at a guardian angel around Robbe’s neck but it’s like a tick to ground him and comfort him right back. A touch to something so fundamentally Robbe.

The segue into the second clip where Sander is even MORE wrapped up in Robbe’s arms breaks my heart. I remember seeing the og Skam cuddle clip all those years back and realising that my god, I’d never seen affection from an LGBT+ couple before in that innocent, gentle, normal way! It’s sad that this was the case but it’s why Skam got under my skin and why the s3 storyline is always so precious to me. This is yet another example but throw in the respect shown to mental illness in a really human and raw way and I’m gone. I love that Sander is able to be so cuddly and open without worry. He’s going through it, struggling and when this clip aired I remember almost every post in the tag was about his eyes, the frantic eyes showing that so much is going on inside his head while he lies there still, soaking up the comfort Robbe is willing to provide. The antithesis is insane but works so well. Robbe has no idea that he’s effectively holding Sander together. He’s clinging on. He’s doing what he always said he would and never letting Robbe go.

The night time switch into Sander’s struggles hurts because he’s still trying so hard not to let go but his brain is struggling, he’s panicking, he’s not in control of himself and he’s scared. You can see it all over his face, in his eyes and body language that he WANTS to stay with Robbe and when Robbe asks him to come back, tries to pull him back to cuddle, Sander goes because he ALWAYS DOES. He tries so so hard till he can’t try anymore and that distance is forced upon him. It was devastating to watch in real time because we all KNEW what was going to happen (we’d seen it all before) but, for some reason, the way Sander was and what we’d learned about him made him being separated from Robbe in this vulnerable state really upsetting. He was so happy in Robbe’s arms, so comforted and then all of sudden it was gone. 

The fact that the cycle happens again to lead us into the next time we see Sander physically WITH Robbe is just crazy meaningful because this time, Sander’s truth is not able to be hidden. He can’t use touch to distract and to ignore his thoughts and reality. Everything about the way he acts is out of shame and embarrassment and fear of not being loved for who he is - flaws and all. When I eventually finish my analysis posts, I have SO MUCH to say about this but my goodness, Sander is the only Even aside from Eliott who doesn’t reach out and they both have that same feeling of shame in common. The difference is that Sander actively tries to hide away, to push Robbe away and ACTS on what the other Evens said aka I’ll hurt you, it won’t work, I should leave… he physically does that. The thing that makes me a little misty eyed is the fact that he also provides Robbe with information to help find him. He desperately wants Robbe to be the only one to find him while also simultaneously wanting him as far away from him as possible. He’s done it before with the mural, that “I love you and I need to show you but I can’t be with you”. It’s that desperate pull they have that just ends in mess but at the core has such love and comfort. Sander has run away from everyone, hasn’t reached out to any of them except Robbe and it’s his way of closing that distance even if he’s so sure Robbe is better off without him. Why else would he send Robbe that message, effectively using their history and experience to suggest where he is. Robbe was all he wanted, was all that comforted him (hence the drawings all over the walls) and the fact that when Sander is found, he kept pushing and pushing and pushing and resisting and falling apart through grief and pain and shame and every other negative feeling that overwhelms him… but STILL follows when Robbe asks. He’s trying so hard for the NO WAY of it all but it was never going to work. The fact that when Robbe properly touches him, he falls apart is just about the most obvious thing for me. Robbe is comfort and safety. He may not have all of the answers but just being close is so clearly and viscerally affecting for Sander that he collapses and lets Robbe take the weight of him both literally and metaphorically. That touch is all he needs to fall back into ALL THE WAY and let himself believe.

The fact that the next scene starts with Sander, completely wrapped around Robbe, their skin touching and Robbe stroking Sander’s hand just goes to show how much he allowed himself to use that touch again not only as comfort but as belief that he doesn’t need to mask things anymore. He doesn’t need to pretend and hide his reality, he can be open and vulnerable and also have the ALL THE WAY too. Robbe is that solid warm weight and reassurance. The purposeful Sander is still buried there, it’s just the vulnerability is too overwhelming and so he relies so much on Robbe here to provide what he needs. And god BLESS Robbe’s enormous affectionate heart because he’s perfect with him. Sander clearly meant the words from the day before, signifying he really expected Robbe to change his mind in the morning...those really quiet questions in the dark to Robbe are just heartbreaking because he needs reassurance. Robbe closes the distance to him, gets so close, kisses him multiple times, presses their foreheads together and doesn’t judge… and Sander is completely comforted enough to be able to fall asleep.

THEN… one of my ultimate favourite moments of Sander and touch. It’s like a culmination of EVERYTHING we’ve learned about Sander (and also it’s the same for Robbe but I’ll leave that for my Robbe post!!). He’s still vulnerable but getting back to his usual self a little playing games with Milan and you can see the spark in his eyes, the way he uses his words again to assert how he feels but, above all, it’s that contrast between him asking for a kiss and leaning back into Robbe in this purposeful way that’s perfectly softened by the fact it’s him receiving and seeking comfort too. It’s then that both sides of Sander come together and the fact he’s found what he seeks it in one person is so special. Robbe is EVERYWHERE. He’s all hands in Sander’s hair, legs either side of him, resting his chest against Sander’s back, holding his head gently, kissing everything he can get his lips on (mouth, nose, head, hair) and then settling with his arms around Sander’s neck. It’s EVERYTHING. Sander has shown from the start in most things he does how much touch is important in terms of asserting himself, seeking comfort and showing love and in this tiny little scene it has ALL THREE and is why they are both so dear to me as a pair. It’s INCREDIBLY romantic and very reassuring for anyone who has ever struggled in the way Robbe or Sander has… because it confirms that it is possible for people with specific needs and people who have been shaped by their experiences and come out of it with certain needs and vulnerabilities are able to be loved completely without judgement.

“In good time, you’ll come to know, when you release, when you let go, you can find yourself where you belong”

The best thing though is the way that Sander responds in this moment. He shakes his head and smiles to himself like he’s coming out of a trance. That little ‘yeah’ is adorable. That moment is enough to say all there is about what touch means to Sander as a human being and a partner. For a moment, Robbe helps him forget, sends him a little dizzy with love, gives Sander overwhelming comfort that Sander disappears into it and, as cheesy as it sounds, they fit. It’s exactly what all of the Even and Isak parallels had, that ‘i save you, you save me right back’ love story. They all did it in different ways but with these two, I was stunned with how much they put into the unspoken, especially with Sander. We don’t see him as much, we don’t get inside his head like Robbe’s but we still understand him, possibly more than any other Even parallel by the end of season 3 and this is the season closest to the original for unanswered questions! It’s why I don’t at all mind questions left unanswered and a lack of exposition and clean cut resolution because if the emotion is there and the nuance is there then it does half of it for you. 

I love that the final scene of the season, for Sander purposes, is him wrapped in Robbe’s arms! It’s kinda poetic.

I love his character so much. He’s insanely expressive and complex and he’s fascinating to me and to have WTFOCKDOWN is a total gift...because not only does it give us insights we’d never have gotten otherwise, we get this continuation of Robbe and Sander’s relationship and what is it about…. TOUCH. Hahaha. I mean, I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect topic for exploration of who they are together as a starter for ten, not to mention it’s so Sander focused too!

When it comes to Wtfockdown, we get to see Sander operating in enforced distance. We KNOW that when distance has been a thing in the past, he has tried everything he can to make up for it (murals, drawings, reaching out to Robbe cryptically). That compensation for the distance never ever worked. It always made it so that when Sander eventually had Robbe close again, he threw himself back in head first and touch was HUGE when it came to that. Now, Sander has Robbe completely and vice versa and no doubt knows fully what it is like to have that comfort and touch all of the time… but now it has been taken away. For Robbe, he’s an affectionate koala of a human but his relationship with touch has been a journey of discovery and of self but he doesn’t depend on it like Sander does. He communicates with it but, for Sander, it’s a vital part of who he is. I love that the first clip has Sander asking to meet up… hahaha. I remember being so giddy reading that because OF COURSE. He’s trying everything he can again. Then he broke my heart because this time, his form of compensation is to take Robbe with him on his walks. It’s yet ANOTHER form of compensation to try to fill that void where touch once was! 

Clip 2 starts their face to face journey and GUYS. I mean, Sander flat out saying that the thing he misses most about Robbe is his touch just about broke my heart and made me giddy once again! They really did that. He’s so happy to see Robbe, to spend time with him but over and over again he’s repeating ways to stop the distance like swapping places with Robbe’s mamma…! Bless his heart. The fact that he says “there’s nothing better than you”, he REALLY does mean it. We’ve seen a whole season of why that’s the truth! We’ve seen him reach that conclusion! Also, that compensation once again on dreams and daydreaming… ANY WAY HE CAN to stop the distance. He breaks my heart. 

Clip 3...ONCE AGAIN. “The endlessness of this tunnel symbolises the physical distance between them”. He cannot cope with it. This one made me a bit emotional when I first saw it. They’re not just words for his fairytale; he means them. The distance is DIFFICULT for him.  You can see it on his face when he says those words, he frowns. He’s speaking the truth even if he’s making it seem a little light hearted. Then that little private moment where it says he just wants to be with Robbe. It’s genuinely incredibly hard for him to not have Robbe nearby. For someone who thrives and depends so much on touch, the distance is painful and a genuine loss. It’s not just ‘i miss my boyfriend’ because there’s a real nuance there, a real part of who Sander is that prioritises touch and closeness so significantly. 

Clip 4. It took me FAR too long to get through this clip the first time around because I SHOULD NOT BE SEEING THIS but hey ho. I watched it again for you, dudes. Sander’s on the quest for compensation for the distance again, this time trying something new and yea, it’s a risk but he means it. It’s something he wants to try because it’s Robbe and it’s fun and he loves him and misses him and feels like it’s another way to feel like the distance isn’t so vast. The moment Robbe tells him he’s not into it, Sander looks a little crushed but immediately understands and lies down. Now, for me, I might be reading so much into it but because we have seen what touch means, as a stand in for it, and Sander now feeling so comfortable with Robbe, that moment of ‘I’ve gone too far’, ‘we’re not on the same page’ is huge for them. Sander can’t find what he’s looking for during the distance and you can see he feels so embarrassed but the moment he laughs at himself, tells Robbe that just lying together is enough and respects Robbe, you can see him trying to get back on that even plane. He loves Robbe so much and would never want to make him feel uncomfortable but for that split second, the comfort they have built wavered and Sander’s ability to be completely vulnerable was questioned… until it wasn’t and all was well for the moment because they talk and love and try. I love that they did that. I love that Sander’s inherent need for closeness was brought to light and Robbe’s need to GIVE affection was shown to be so true… only in person. Robbe thrives off that honest touch whereas Sander is grounded by it, comforted by it and finds it necessary...so without it is left floundering. THE LAYERS, guys. Rolling around in them!!!!

Clip 5 and we see Sander questioning himself. Sander still hasn’t quite felt ok since the other night and  he’s letting it affect him. That questioning himself is the same stuff we saw pre-final reunion where he allows his issues to cloud his judgement and he spirals a little when left to his own devices. It’s that insecurity that Robbe managed to settle in him, that push and pull they have but Sander is human and he’s struggling and Robbe’s not there to provide that settlement. He doesn’t RELY on Robbe so much as WANT him because he makes things better. The fact that all the while, Robbe is learning how far his own ability to provide affection and closeness from afar is able to go by seeking advice from Milan makes me want to weep… because the writing is perfect! Of course he is. Everything we know about him tells us he’d do this!

So we’re in present day and I can’t wait to see what they do next. The way they write these two separately and together shows so much understanding of who the characters are, what they mean to each other and this great respect for honouring what they’ve created with so much gentle nuance and emotion. If the past 50000000000 words didn’t suggest it clearly enough - I love what they’re doing so much!

If you’re still awake after all that, you’re super human. Thank you for reading and this post is LONG overdue but it’s here and as rambly as you’d expect. Robbe’s specific post will be along soon! <3

[littleeyesofpallas]

Okay so maybe making a big long post just as a lead up to this was too dramatic and I’ve hyped myself up for nothing, but here we go...

I think the Hollows are actually a natural reincarnation process that the Shinigami disrupt by slaying Hollows.

That has a lot of implications that I’m trying hard not to try(and fail) to wrestle all at once....  But at the broadest level of context: Kubo pretty frequently references Buddhist myth and cosmology, in particular some of the Naraka, which are a little more specific than generically deity figures like Enma or Guanyin, showing that he is specifically familiar with the Buddhist penance cycle of reincarnation where bad karma is basically worked off by living and dying lifetimes in different rings of afterlife, being reborn more pure each time, until becoming human again.

Note that it’s the souls of evil humans, even after they’ve become Hollows, that specifically go to hell.  That’s why Zanpakutou only “purify” Hollows, and not actually kill them, because the Hollow’s aren’t actually innately bad people.  And we do briefly touch back on this with Zommari’s dying rant.

And of the characters that we can infer are/were introduced as Vastlord, they do all share a kind of innocence: Ulquiorra is clearly the model of the silhouette of the Vastlord in exposition when explaining the 3 Menos Grande levels, and his overall character arc shows him as being the most sympathetic of the Espada.  We see Wonderweiss’ creation and his humanoid size and shape as a Hollow, we see his distinctly childlike (if eerily so) demeanor, and Tousen calls him “Pure.”  Nel appears as distinctly childlike, with unusual status outside the ranks of Aizen’s army, and is foreshadowed to be much more powerful that she appears (and the twist we do get for that wasn’t remotely satisfying, but I’ll get to that later...).

I think as the Menos Grande change forms as they eat more human souls and other Hollows, they become not just more humanoid in shape, but more human-like in moral quality as well.  The Vastlord have never threatened Soul Society or even the human world before, despite their immense power level, because they have no intention to; and they are difficult to find because they are actively avoiding conflict and hiding because they don’t want to fight.  This particular attitude is reflected in Nelliel, Ulquiorra, and Starrk, where they all have a kind of default position of non-violence, and even when they do fight they do so with minimal investment or enjoyment.

And Zommari’s dying protests about the Shingami, and his praise of Aizen in relation to it, as well as Aissingler’s dying words about Hollows being born from fear and drawn to Aizen for his defiance of the fear of death further lend to the idea that Hollows, as ghosts of the dead consumed by the negative emotions surrounding their own deaths, ultimately just want to be alive again.

Under these terms, Nel, Ulquiorra, and Wonderweiss I think were all meant to be Vastolords when they were introduced —the intent behind Starrk is harder to place because of how early yet little he appeared before any real information was given to us— and all share the trait of being essentially “good,” albeit dangerously powerful, people.

I think the original plan with Nel (if there even was real “plan” at all) wasn’t actually for her to be a “former Espada” I think Kubo was going to reveal her as one of the coveted Vastlords and make her one of his new Espada, alongside the likes of Wonderweiss.  I think Kubo salvaged part of that plot to put into the awkward round 2-of-3 of the Nnoitra fight, and that what we got was just what a hastily truncated version of that whole dynamic looked like.  (The entire delay on bringing up the two of them makes the eventual confrontation seem like an afterthought.  The reveal itself seems like nonsense and requires way too much exposition just to justify.  The transformation itself isn’t actually explained.  The fight doesn’t even go anywhere or forward the plot.  And the transformation back isn’t explained either.)

So, on this basis, Nnoitra being been sent to track down Vastlords and senselessly slaughtering hollows in the process was something i think Kubo wanted from an early point, but that was also back when looking for the Vastolord was still an actual plot hook. (Consider that by the time the Nel fight was happening, it hadn’t been mentioned in forever and never would again either.  So, if it wasn’t wrapping up the Vastlord plot, and wasn’t developing it toward anything, why bring it up?  Because it wasn’t written with the future plot in mind, it was written with the past plot in mind.)

But in his mix of arrogance and insecurity Nnoitra wouldn’t bring any Vastolord back to Aizen, he’d strike them down so they couldn’t be made into Arrancar that would be more powerful than him. And you can see how this idea and what we actually got share all that same basic shapes of character dynamic and even plot beats(as crudely outlined in the assortment of Nnoitra’s dying memories), even within the context of different narratives.

But Aizen’s plans also clearly meant to make use of Orihime’s Rejection powers, though we never really learned how. One hinted at option was that his method of forcing the Hougyoku out of hibernation was damaging it, and that he intended to have Orihime undo that damage. Or alternatively to have her just undo the sealing process that forced the Hougyoku into hibernation in the first place.  Either way, putting the full power Hougyoku in his hands before the projected deadline of “Winter” that Soul Society was planning for.

But another consideration in that he could have had her Reject the imperfect Arrancar process of Mock-Arrancar like I assume Nel was meant to be, like Starrk was (I assume unintentionally) shown to be, and like Ulquiorra was kind of established as out of core continuity, so that he could remake them more completely with the Hougyoku.

I think this is where Nel’s adult form was actually going to come from, (rather than randomly turning into a woman and then given an even less explained transformation into a child in the first place) and also why Kubo had a second Resurreccion for Ulquiorra fully prepared as a design (remember he only used his first resurreccion for like 2 chapters before busting out Segunda Etapa) and yet never bothered with an in-world explanation for what or why it even was.

Speaking of Ulquiorra, I don’t feel like I have a lot to add about his particular character development.  It didn’t quite have what I’d call a “satisfying” conclusion, but it seems like we got most of what Kubo was aiming for from him: that he’s kind of the ideal model of an Arrancar, an empty vessel —A creature without a heart given human awareness— slowly being filled up with emotional understanding as he watches Orihime never give up on her friends.  Even without a more dramatic turning point for it, plot wise, he did basically complete his process, at the very last minute, of being won over.

Going back to the Nel part of this rewrite: If Aizen had Orihime revert her to a Vastlord so he could make her into a more powerful Arrancar himself, while the plot development would inevitably have a menacing tone to it, there’d be the fun exploitable loophole where, because Orihime’s powers are abstract and not time based, reverting Nel from a Mock-Arrancar to a Hollow wouldn’t actually erase any of her memories or experiences, so she’d still be fundamentally good and herself and loyal to Ichigo.

So to bring this back around to pt.1 of this big rant, if the Winter War scenario had been able to play out under these circumstances, it would stand to reason that when Aizen arrives with the Perfect Espada, taking the Gotei 13 by surprise and overpowering them completely the first “twist” of the climactic battle would’ve been the Visored —with complete training Ichigo— would arrive to fight Aizen, and subsequently reveal that they aren’t actually allies with Soul Society just because they’re also fighting Aizen, they steal the Hougyoku for themselves, Orihime tries to spring her Rejection plan into action before it’s too late, and the new shuffle leaves Ichigo and Orihime and their personal circle of innately good Arrancar, against (at least some of...) the Visored.

And I honestly I kind of figure that Tousen’s whole science-experiment hybrid form was something that Shinji probably would’ve wound up with instead, with about the same heel-face-turn tone as Ginjou stealing Ichigo’s Fullbring.  Which would’ve just ended with Aizen taking the Hougyoku back, probably gloating about his experiments, and then just roll right into his god form ascension, not actually all that dissimilar to what we wound up with anyway.

I don’t really know that there was a coherent conclusion to this.  it started with wanting to get the Vastlord and Arrancars as good guys thing, and collecting the surrounding evidence and logic for that, but talking about kinda necessitated outlining its function in the broader plot and themes, which meant my headcanon... so here we are.... but I dunno what else to get into about this whole thing without just derailing into a whole other offshoot of rants... so I guess we’re done here.  for now...

[traincat]

Hi traincat! Hope you're doing well. I figured since you have an extensive knowledge on all things Spider-Man, you would know your way around his rogues! I wanted to ask if you have a favorite or one that you find most compelling and why. Thanks a million!

I think my answers for which rogues are my favorites and which I find most compelling and which are widely viewed as the best and why are all pretty wildly different. I do think the popular assessment that Spider-Man has one of the best rogues galleries in Marvel canon is true. Like, I think the absolute best Spider-Main villain story -- the one that gives you the best sense of the villain as a character and also the one that works best at uniting villain and is Kraven’s Last Hunt, which is just incredible on every level. (Content warning for suicide.)

(Web of Spider-Man #32) Also, like, in terms of design, Kraven is great. Love a big Russian game hunter perpetually bare chested and wearing leopard print cropped leggings. That’s not something you get sick of. Only Kraven Sr. for me, though -- I’m less fond of his son, although I think the whole family affairs in Grim Hunt and Scarlet Spider v2 are pretty fun.

On the other hand, though, I think that some of the biggest villains in Spider-Man’s gallery, namely Norman Osborn and Doc Ock, are overused, although I know why they’re overused and it’s because they’re really good villains. (But also you can only make people pay for the same story so many times with only minor variations before it starts to get old.) I think Norman and Peter are pretty perfect opposites, whereas Otto and Peter are mirror images -- although I think generally Norman stories pull off that opposite nature better than Otto stories reveal him as a mirrored image of Peter. 

I think it’s interesting that Otto is kind of the first “big” villain Peter encounters -- he makes his debut in ASM #3, so there are villains that come before him, but they’re like, the Vulture and the Chameleon. And there are great Vulture stories -- love that flying octogenarian -- but like, I would not put the Vulture in the absolute top tier Spider-Man villains. And the Chameleon is a freak.

Same, girl. (Web of Spider-Man #65) 

More villain talk beneath the cut.

By comparison, Otto is the first villain to actually serve Peter a real defeat, the first one to humble him. So I think it’s interesting that they come from very similar backgrounds -- both geniuses, both lonely as children, both people who were in danger of becoming very solitary, isolated adults, which Otto did and which Peter did not. They had a mother figure who verged on at times or was actually smothering in her affections, and a salt of the earth type father figure. And Otto gains his powers after suffering an accident with radiation much the same way Peter does. It’s one of the things that disappoints me about Superior Spider-Man, because I don’t think it plays into the idea of Otto and Peter as mirrored images of each other nearly as much as it could have. Even Otto’s Parker Industries originally showed up in a “bad” version of Peter’s life, where he never got bit by the spider and instead becomes a CEO:

(Sensational Spider-Man #41) “You prove yourself to everyone -- except yourself.” Which is what Otto is continually trying to do, and which is what he always falls short of. So it’s interesting that there’s kind of all this set up here and that the actual comics sort of continually fall short of it. 

Green Goblin stories live up to their rep a little better, in my opinion, and they’re better at playing into those parallels. Norman and Peter are both self-made men, but Norman is rich and Peter is not. Peter accepts responsibility and fault; Norman does not. Norman’s life is devoid of women, while Peter’s is full of it. If Norman and Peter are both studies in masculinity, then Norman’s is toxic and Peter’s is not. Peter is capable of growth; Norman is entrenched in this role he’s made for himself -- he is not capable of sustained growth beyond the role he’s made for himself. There’s a reason I think Norman gets used so much and it’s because it’s a heady dynamic to kind of play into -- especially when you go with the relatively more recent angle of things where Norman kind of views Peter as the perfect heir, worthy where Harry is not. Honestly, it’s a good time whenever you’re involving Harry in the mix at all, as someone caught between these two very powerful figures and how the tug-of-war there for ownership of him is just completely soul destroying. 

(Spectacular Spider-Man #180)

But I do think Norman is overused, and it’s gotten a point where in Amazing Spider-Man #800 it was like -- oh, what, he’s going to kill Flash? He’s going to kill someone else Peter loves? He’s killed like half the main-main cast at this point. He’s behind the murder of Peter and Mary Jane’s baby, he’s responsible for Ben Reilly’s death, he killed Gwen Stacy, Harry’s death goes directly back to him, he’s kidnapped May and Mary Jane and Flash and blah blah blah it’s JUST TOO MUCH. It can’t always be this one guy! You can’t just bring him back every 50 issues like “this time Norman Osborn’s gone too far” when he went too far in the ‘70s. Everything since then has just been trying to recapture the moment he threw Gwen Stacy off the bridge. It’s exhausting. I’m begging Spider-Man, as it starts hyping up yet another Norman story for ASM #850, to do something new.

In comparison to Norman, I think Harry’s run as the Green Goblin is fairly flawlessly executed as far as villain stories go, especially in its final hour. Spectacular Spider-Man #200 is really one of my favorite single issues of all time. Harry has the pathos that Norman really never does -- you can feel for Harry in a way that you can’t feel for Norman. And it’s because Harry loves Peter -- really, truly loves him -- that his acts of villainy take on that special edge of cruelty. It doesn’t just hurt Peter that these things are being done; it hurts Peter that these are being done and that it’s Harry doing them and that, in a lot of ways, they both blame Peter for why Harry is doing them, even if at the end of the day it’s in no way Peter’s fault. And then there’s the utterly perfect moment as Harry dies in Spectacular Spider-Man #200, that his act of triumph is that he can’t bring himself to kill Peter, because he loves him too much. It’s perfect. I live in fear they’re going to make Harry a villain again and try to replicate it only to fall painfully short. 

I think the Jackal is actually underutilized because he is in my honest opinion the scariest Spider-Man villain, or at the very least the creepiest. Where Norman can only dream of remaking Spider-Man in his own image, the Jackal actually does that with Ben Reilly -- and, to a lesser extent, with Kaine, his first damaged clone. He’s a good lurker, too, less show-y than either Otto or Norman. He lurked in the background for a while. And in a series where I think you can pick a lot of the villains apart as men who take advantage of their power, having the Jackal be a college professor whose villainous career stems from his obsession with one of his students fits right in. And he’s just creepy. He’s upsetting! The things he does to the clones -- both the Peter and Gwen clones, although I think the comics are not so great at letting the Gwen clones shine as individual characters, which is something I wish someone would actually do something about -- are very upsetting, especially since you can extrapolate from a lot of Kaine’s stories and the things we know bother him and how he’s consistently paralleled against Janine Godbe, that both Kaine and the Gwen clones were sexually abused by the Jackal. (Spider-Man’s not typically shy about examining darker subjects, and while we can only extrapolate from canon with Kaine, it’s extremely there on the surface with the Gwen clones. I mean, he married one.) And honestly, the villain who’s whole schtick is cloning makes more sense as someone who can repeatedly come back from anything than Norman’s deal of Corrupt Businessman Surprisingly Hard To Kill. I’ve said before that Peter appears to have a bit of a loophole in his personal moral code when it comes to violence that either has no consequences or lessened consequences, like when he cuts loose against Wolverine, someone who has a healing factor, or when he buried the Juggernaut, supposedly indestructible, in concrete. The Jackal as someone who could and has clone himself repeatedly opens up similar doorways -- what’s to stop Peter from cutting loose if the Jackal isn’t confined to this one body? There’s a lot to play with there and a lot more interesting spaces to go than, say, having to invent increasingly poor excuses for why Peter hasn’t taken more permanent action with Norman if Norman is always going to return to do harm to someone beloved to Peter.

Finally, I’m in a weird spot with personal favorite villains because honestly my instinct is to say the Lizard. And that’s an issue because of one fairly recent storyline and everything that’s spun out from it: Shed (Amazing Spider-Man #630-633), the storyline where Curt Connors loses all control over the Lizard, kills, and partially devours his son Billy. Like, I LIKE grim dark Spider-Man comics, and Shed is honestly too much for me -- not because of the Lizard’s actions, but because in the story Peter fails to save Billy. And I say not because of the Lizard’s actions because I think, as fun as a giant lizard man in purple pants and a lab coat can be, I think Curt Connors makes for one hell of a supervillain metaphor for domestic violence. 

(ASM #365)

(Spectacular Spider-Man v2 #13) And it’s very compelling. There’s a lot of things to explore down that alley. But once you actually go as far as having the Lizard kill his son, you can’t take that back. And the problem is, that’s what Spider-Man comics have tried to do post-Shed. It feels weird and deeply out of character to have writers assume that Peter could forgive the murder of any child, let alone a child he knew, and have him continue his relationship with Curt Connors. It’s a weird message to go “yeah, he ate his kid, but he wasn’t in control, and he made up for it via cloning, so we’re all good now.” Like imagine trying to spin that in any horror movie. It doesn’t work -- that your villain kills his kid and then clones him and pretends everything is okay now would be the plot of the horror movie. Spider-Man is a series fundamentally built on the fact that actions have consequences, and sometimes those consequences are utterly unfixable. Peter can’t go back and intercept the burglar to prevent Uncle Ben’s death. He can’t clone Uncle Ben and wipe that incident out of history. So to have a story like Shed in continuity as something that doesn’t alter Peter’s perception of Curt Connors forever doesn’t work.

Anyway that’s why my favorite villain is the Shocker. Love that quilted bastard.

[giant-sketches]

Guardian Naga Chpt. 4

 I have come to deliver on my word of a longer chapter with more sketches attached! Plus, a fun surprise! We’re getting into the good stuff now my friends!!! If you have yet not read the latest, or any chapters thus far please do check out the links below. Also if you would like to be added to the tag for this fic please don’t hesitate to ask. :D

Chapters: 1/2/3/

   Another two weeks had passed as Roman continued to visit the Naga with sweets and converse with him about his day. Only two months remained before Remus’s return, but despite this fact Roman found himself looking forward to his meet-ups at the caves. He shared stories of his youth and about many harrowing adventures he’d experience due to his mischievous brother. He spoke of the wonderful people in the kingdom and about his childhood friends. The plan was progressing smoothly, but Roman couldn’t help wanting to learn more about the Naga. He only talked about himself while there and the Naga would remain silent and listening. Thus, during his free time he read any books he could find relating to his new friend. 

   Sadly, not much was written about the Naga besides the one fairy-tale he vaguely remembered before. After an unsuccessful search the solemn King was about to give up when an anomaly caught his eye. Two books set beside one another displaced an unusual amount of darkened space between them; as if there was nothing attached to their bindings. Taking a chance Roman removed the two false coverings to reveal an enlarged space hidden behind. Inside lay an old journal with the name of the first king inscribed on top, Virgil.   

“What in the world is this and why was it hidden away?”

   Checking first to see if anyone around, Roman quickly returned to his personal quarters in order to further inspect the journal. He took additional precautions not to damage it by wearing gloves as he proceeded to flip through. The journal appeared to be a sort of day-by-day log the first king wrote in to keep record of the kingdom’s progression. For the first few years not much was written besides the occasional conflict among lords, complications with trading overseas, and a six month long famine. The famine records were particularly interesting as it seems to end abruptly with entire fields filling up with crops overnight and rain washing over the land for three whole days. Something so unreal, it was like a miracle!

“What if…was it the Naga?”

   Roman paused for a moment to contemplate this train of thought that popped into his mind. What if this was the Naga’s doing? If it was then why did the Virgil not write anything down about meeting him? As Roman continued looking through the journal he found not even one mention of the Naga. Yet, more miracles kept occurring: from alliances being formed with decade long enemies, a pandemic being cured in less then a month, and the appearance of magic itself in a select amount of people, including the past King. It was well known in history books that King Virgil was a fan of dark enchantments and had complete mastery over shadow spells. 

“Wait! What if this journal is also enchanted? If that’s true then there must be some kind of trick to it…hidden text maybe? How would I get it to reveal itself though? If I remember correctly dark enchantments dealing with paper included elements like spit, ash, and blood being placed on the paper to reveal anything hidden.”

   Still, Roman was unsure of which to test out first. True enough he could try all three, but because of how old the journal was he was afraid of damaging it if his attempts failed. He’d have to decide on one and hope for a good result. As he scoured his brain for any hints as to which component to use a peculiar thought came across his mind; blood, the King’s blood. Was it possible that the first King would only want those of royalty to see what was hidden inside? If it was about the Naga it would make sense.

“Blood it is then.”

   Without hesitation Roman placed his hand underneath his desk and pulled out a small dagger. Swiftly, he placed the blade against his thumb and pressed until blood trickled out. He pulled the journal towards him  and cautiously placed his thumb at the corner of where the entry about the famine began. Instantly, the blood spread rapidly across the page and dyed it a deep crimson red. Blackened cursive rose up from the stained pages and wrote out the first King’s meeting with the Naga and his conversations with him afterwards. Near the end Virgil spoke of building a shrine for the Naga to live in and be with the people it protected. Yet, the final passage cased Roman’s blood to run cold:

To my dearest friend, I am sorry that I was unable to keep you safe and happy as I had promised when we first met. The people who once worshiped you as a guardian deity and depended on you have been blinded by their fears of the unknown. As I write this I am gravely wounded and I cannot come to see you as I had hoped in my final moments. I wanted to protect you, but in the end I couldn’t bring myself to harm my countryman, this mistake has cost me my life.

However, I fear it has cost you an even greater punishment that you are undeserving of. You are not the deceitful monster they think you are, yet despite my greatest efforts to convince them they fell to their own anxieties. I can only hope you can forgive their foolishness. As for me I’m sorry I couldn’t give you what you wanted in the end. I could only remain your friend as I had fallen for another. I hope one day you’ll find your destined one as well my friend.

Now, if this message is ever found by one of my descendants who has become the next King, please grant me my dying wish. Seek out the Naga wherever it may be dwelling and tell him how sorry I am. As the current King I want you to apologize on behalf of the entire kingdom and mankind. Please do this for me so I can rest without any regrets.

   Roman’s tears were overflowing as he kept trying to wipe them away, but more continued to appear. All he could think about was the loneliness, pain, and heartbreak the Naga must have suffered for the past 500 years. Roman felt he was no better than those foolish humans of the past as he thought back to their first encounter. He had to go apologize immediately, even if today wasn’t a meet-up date there was no time to waste. He needed to grant Virgil’s dying wish no matter what.

   Usually Roman came to visit every other day in the morning or evening, but he was now in front of the caves midday. Though out of breath from sprinting towards the forest he began calling out into the caves for the Naga.

“Naga! Are you there? It’s me Roman. Naga!” There was no answer. Was he not inside the caves?

   Roman had no idea where else to look as they had never met anywhere but at the caves. As he began to worry that he may not be able to meet with the Naga today his ears perked up at the sound of leaves rustling behind him. Unsure of who or what might be lurking inside the brush he spun himself around quickly in preparation. However, before he could even think about taking further action he froze at the sight of the Naga emerging from the forest. 

   This was his first time laying his eyes upon the massive creature when not covered in shadows. The Naga’s frame was lean with smooth skin covered in emerald colored scales. He had his chest loosely wrapped by a grey cloth. His ears were pointed outwards and decorated with a single gold earring. The Naga’s hair was a deep black and most spectacular sight was his tail that was covered in an array of gold and green scales that glittered in the light. Overall, only one word came to mind as Roman continued to gaze in awe,

“Beautiful.”

   Startled, the Naga finally noticed Roman standing still outside the entrance to the cave. It was obvious he had missed Roman’s remake as he sheepishly began backing up into the forest in order to hide himself. Panicked, Roman called out to him,

“Wait! It’s okay, you don’t need to hide anymore.” The Naga was surprised at Roman’s remark and hesitated.

“Are you truly alright with my presence?”

“Yes, please. I want to see you.” The Naga was lost for words as he slithered his way out into the open. 

   Roman was still amazed by the sight and as he reflected back on their first meeting he found it hard to believe he was ever afraid of someone so lovely. What an utter fool he had been, he thought as he turned away in shame. Then, without warning, Roman felt two large hands wrap around him. He had failed to notice the Naga had leaned down towards him and was now gently picking him up. Despite the scales his touch was soft as he pressed his pointer finger up against Roman’s face and lightly stroked it. Roman was unsure of what was going on, but he felt no discomfort and actually enjoyed the uncommon sensation.

“I’m sorry if I frightened you little one. Know I will not harm you, but I noticed that your eyes were reddened and grew concerned for your well-being. Have you been feeling alright as of late?”

   Was the Naga worried about him and trying to comfort him? This Naga was beyond considerate, how could he have not seen this all until now? As Roman was about to lose himself in another burst of tears he could feel the hands surrounding him begin to stretch and expand.

“Wha-”

“Ah, no need to fear. It’s just that my body shifts in size throughout the day as my body heat rises. It will stop soon enough, so please endure it until then. I promise not to let you fall.”

“O-Okay.”

   Roman had become flustered at the sight of this already massive creature growing even bigger right in front of him. He was embarrassed to admit he enjoyed the view as he gave the Naga a soft smile. It did not take long for the fingers surrounding him to quickly outgrow his tiny frame. Once the growing stopped Roman was small enough to roll around the Naga’s palm freely if he wanted. The creature had become gigantic! Concerned over Roman’s possible reaction to his growth the Naga whispered,

“Are you not frightened by my new stature?”

“Oh course not, yo-”

   Roman stopped short as the gaping hole on the Naga’s face, where his other eye should have been, caught his attention. He shivered at the realization that the people from 500 years ago must have done that to him. The Naga, however, took this reaction differently and instinctively used his free hand to over it up. Roman jumped at the sudden movement and fell backwards.

“Hideous is it not? I apologize for scaring you Roman. I’ll let you down now so you may leave.” A sad smile shown on his face.

“What, no I’m not afraid and I don’t want to leave.”

Instantly, Roman could feel the sadness reflected in the Naga’s now enormous eye permeating through his body.

“You must be a wonderful King. To have such courage when standing face-to-face with a monster such as I. I’m sure you are dearly loved by your people, but while here with me you have no need to hide your fear. You can be truthful with me.” 

A sharp pain ran through Romans’s heart. “A….monster? Do you really see yourself as a monster?”

“What else would I be? Even now my size is large enough to crush you between my fingers. Are you trying to convince me that you see me differently?”

“I-I do.”

“I’m sorry, but I find that hard to believe.” Roman gritted his teeth as he grew increasingly agitated.

“I found Virgil’s journal!” 

The Naga was shocked. “What did yo-”

“I said I found Virgil’s journal from 500 years ago. For some reason it was hidden away in the royal library and the text about you was locked away with a dark enchantment. Despite that I was able to read his final words and dying wish.”

“Virgil’s dying wish…what was it?”

Roman was now sobbing, but he cleared his throat in order to give a clear answer. 

“He was killed while trying to protect you from the people who had formed an uprising. He wrote how sorry he was that he couldn’t see you in his final moments or return your feelings of love for him. His dying wish was that one of his descendants would find the journal and seek you out in order to formally apologize on behalf of the kingdom and humanity. That’s why I came here today in such a hurry.”

“So it wasn’t just because you wanted to see me then?” 

“Wha-no, of course I wanted to see you. I’ve always looked forward to our meetings.”

   Roman couldn’t help, but blush at his sudden remark. The Naga too found himself blushing lightly. An awkward silence fell between them both until Roman decided not to delay on his mission anymore. 

“Anyway, I wish to fulfill the first King’s dying wish and wholeheartedly apologize for the kingdom’s sins against you for the past 500 years. Even if you chose to never forgive us humans that’s fine, but I personally would like you to know that I truthfully do not see you as a monster. If anything you’re undeniably beautiful in every way.”

“Beautiful? You find me beautiful?”

   Roman struggled to answer as his head had overheated from embarrassment. Had he just confessed to the Naga? The Naga noticed how woozy Roman looked and believed it was best for him to call it a day. 

“You needn’t worry little one, despite all the things humans have taken from me I still have a heart. Thus, I accept your apology as the current King. Thank you for taking the time to come deliver it in person after all this time.”

Roman collected himself and responded, “You’re welcome!”

“I think for now you should return to the castle to rest. You appear exhausted and I’d hate to see you come down with something.”

“Yes I think you’re right. I’ll take some time to rest, but I promise to return shortly.”

   The Naga only smiled as he gently placed it’s hand onto the ground to let Roman off and then quickly slithered back into its cave without a word. Roman casually walked back to the castle lost in thought as he found himself confused about his feelings for the Naga. Had he actually fallen for him, or was he simply just mistaken?

End Chapter 4

@soviet-speck​ @valentin0vkc @legendsgates​ 

[amandaklwrites]

Movie Review: The Mask of Zorro (1998)

Genre: Action/Adventure

Rating: 10/10

Movie Review:

ZORRO! Let me tell you, I love Zorro. He’s probably my favorite of all the action heroes and vigilantes, like superheroes, Lone Ranger, Indiana Jones, etc. I have always been interested in him (I remember my mom watching The Legend of Zorro on the tv one time, when I was a kid, and I was enthralled though I had no idea what was happening).

So, I have gotten back into the Zorro stories. And it started with a rewatch of THE MASK OF ZORRO with my mom.

As someone who has gotten into the stories of Zorro itself, I can tell you that this movie isn’t a remake, not at all. It’s actually cleverly done, on the writers/creators’ part. It’s a continuation, a new series taking after all the original movies. These movies slip right into the storyline, as if it would be what happened after Diego won it all. Since the beginning of the story of Zorro (stories written by a white man, which sucks, like seriously), everyone played Diego de la Vega. Now, in these movies, Don Diego is handing off the torch to a new man who will take on the mask and rapier, Alejandro Murrieta, the fictional brother of the very real Joaquin Murrieta (which fun fact: is one of the men they think the writer based Zorro off of). So, as someone who has learned more of the original lore of these stories, I can sprinkle in some fun catches in these movies that fans of the original will find.

I will take a moment to share my thoughts on someone “new” coming in to become Zorro: I THINK THAT’S FANTASTIC. I like to think that a hero like Zorro can be anyone, someone just taking on the persona. Plus, it makes it more interesting. Then maybe, we can stop getting constant re-dos of Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, and all the rest? Let someone else be Batman. It gets tiring when it’s the same person, especially when the personality has already been created (sorry, but not sorry, that’s how I feel about these situations in movies). Zorro, like Batman, is a title, not the person’s actual name. So let someone else have a try. This isn’t Jack Sparrow, where no one else can be him.

Now, onto the movie itself.

This movie has some good historical background. Spain did control California—well, stole it from the Native people, actually—and they were in talks of becoming part of the United States. The viewer is immediately thrown into the turmoil of this 1800s California that isn’t discussed a lot (unless you are from California, like me, or someone who likes history and goes to a mission regularly, also like me) in films/tv. This was stuff I even didn’t know when I first watched the movies, but now I get it. I can find my place in the film’s world.

I liked that we got to see Diego de la Vega as Zorro at the beginning of the film. He was older, a married man with a daughter, but he still wished to help the people. It gave us an idea of what Diego is like as The Fox (El Zorro means The Fox in Spanish—I learned this recently, because I’m lame), before we move onto someone new to take over the title. Which I think was fun for this story—let Diego have his last laugh before someone else comes. We can see the distinguished characteristics of these two different Zorros, their personalities making the vigilante fresh and different, much like their own people behind the masks. Now, I love Anthony Hopkins, and I think he did a great job in the movie, but I do agree with others that someone else should have played Don Diego. I know he was supposed to be Spanish, whom can look very white, but I would have liked to see someone from Spain play Diego. And he didn’t even bother to try a Spanish accent. That bothered me. But he is a talented actor, so I did enjoy him in the role.

His loss, his need for revenge, after his wife is killed and Elena is stolen, brings a whole new look at Diego. From the original films, he wasn’t one to fall into passion and react in such a notion. Yes, he believed in protecting the people, but he knew acting brashly wasn’t what helped. So, his rage and need for revenge makes sense, and after years in prison and hiding, waiting to get it, I think dulled him down. I liked that we saw Diego with a calm revenge, knowing he had to take his time, and not blow up in someone’s face. It matched his personality, honestly.

And then enters Alejandro. There was a real bandito named Joaquin Murrieta that would travel through California, so I liked that they made Alejandro his brother (though, according to the history of the movie, he was made up for this story, and didn’t actually exactly), so it could be someone who had no connection to the stories. Yes, it was a Spanish actor who played a Spanish-Mexican character, but I think Antonio Banderas was the best for this role. Flat out, I LOVE him in this role. He made Alejandro brash and wild and so charming. Which is always the characters I seem to love the most. The ones who can made you feel pissed and charmed at the same time, while making you laugh. (Fun fact: Alejandro is the name of Diego’s father in the stories as well.)

What I enjoyed most about Alejandro and Diego together was the opposites they played for one another: they had found each other in the worst times of their lives, they were both dwelling in grief and rage, wanting revenge. But they couldn’t be so different. Diego was calm and smart, letting his revenge slow burn through time, while Alejandro wanted to drink himself to death and didn’t give a damn about anything. I thought it was interesting that Diego knew he had to let go of his time as Zorro, and found a part of himself in this young man—though, personally, I think Diego saw a spark in Alejandro that he respected and thought that spark would bring Zorro back to life—and he wanted to help him. To me, the two of them saved one another. Diego brought calmness to Alejandro, gave him purpose instead of blinding rage, and made him feel like a hero when he needed it most. And Alejandro became like a son to Diego, someone who could be saved when Diego couldn’t save his daughter. They understood each other, and they worked together for different things, but they were at one another’s side. They respected, and even cared about, each other. They became a team.

Catherine Zeta-Jones as Elena was… magic. I loved her so much. She was strong and independent, and though her “father” wanted to create a cage around her, she fought against those bars and fought for herself. She had a voice and she knew it, and she would use it. Though, you could tell from the beginning, she was a naïve young woman who had grown up in Spain, with a rich father, and she didn’t have anything to worry about. But she gets thrown into this world of turmoil because of her fathers and her dead mother, while falling in love with Alejandro/Zorro (honestly, who wouldn’t have the hots for a funny man covered in black clothes, who was mysterious and sexy—I’d be tempted too). By the end of the movie, she’s a strong woman questioning everything in the world and learning that she has much more to learn and grow. I liked that though she had learned that her father wasn’t her real father, but this strange man she had barely known, she protected each man from each other. I couldn’t imagine finding out your whole life had been a lie (the man you knew as your father had killed your mother—accident or not—and this other man is your real father), but her fierce strength and caring heart kept her from choosing sides, because she still loved the man she had considered her father her whole life, but finding some newfound love for the man she had briefly spoken to that was her real father. She was a fighter all on her own, with a bright flame that set her on fire, making her interesting from the beginning because she spoke out, but then creating her into a marvelous woman who learned to fight for what she believed in herself, despite what everyone told her.

(Fun facts here: #1) Elena was the name of a character from a TV series and a couple of movies, so I would feel like, in the continuation of the story of Don Diego, he had named his daughter after a friend of his from the past. #2) From this same series and movies from Disney, Diego had a manservant named Bernardo. Which is interesting, because that’s the name Diego gives himself in this movie when he pretends to be Alejandro’s manservant. It makes me think, along with the tv series, he remembered his old friend and took that name for a reason.)

The love story between Alejandro and Elena is wonderful. I liked that Elena had feelings for two different people, who ended up being the same person—wouldn’t that be wonderful! More so, she had lustful feelings for Zorro, the masked avenger whom is just too damn attractive, and intriguing feelings for this Don she had started to know. One of my favorite scenes is when Zorro and Elena are having the sword fight in the barn—it’s so hot and fun at the same time. You can tell they are having a blast with each other, the sword fight more like their dance at the party honestly, but are so filled with heat that they keep kissing each other because the lust is too strong. That entire scene, to me, shows their entire relationship (even after she knows who he is and they get married) and why they get along so well. They like the fire in one another. But they are opposites as well—Alejandro had come from nothing, and Elena had come from everything. But they find the common ground in their love by believing in helping the people, having that fire in their personalities, and just enjoying pissing one another off.

I must talk about one of the best people in the cast—ZORRO’S HORSE! I can’t remember if Alejandro’s horse is named Tornado (Diego’s was), but he was just great. Funny as hell, with a personality of his own. I liked that they had a love/hate relationship. Like that moment of the horse moving out of the way so Alejandro hits the ground was hilarious. Of course his horse is there when he truly needs him, but the horse will keep messing with him in the meantime. It just adds the best part of humor in it.

Stuart Wilson as Don Rafael Montero and Matt Letscher as Captain Love were great villains. Though Don Rafael was somewhat boring in the sense that he was a villain from jealousy of Diego with Esperanza, the way he took their daughter to raise as his own made him a real mastermind. Captain Love was great in the sense that it made me laugh how upset he would get when his ego was hurt—he was like a kid with a tantrum. So that was entertaining. But the terrible things they were doing—forcing the native Mexicans work for them, and then trying to blow them up so there were no witnesses made them truly evil. I liked the metaphor that they were killed by their own greed—killed by gold they were trying to get.

Diego dies, but he leaves behind a legacy—Elena as his daughter, Alejandro as the new Zorro. By the end of the movie, these characters had grown so much. Elena learned the truth of her life and what horror truly looked like, and that she had the drive and care to help the people. Diego had at last gotten his daughter and loved her from afar and learned to let go. And Alejandro had found himself amongst fighting behind a mask, that though he had wanted revenge, he truly wanted to fight for the people. Alejandro as Zorro grew to be cocky and funny, while enjoying the hell out of messing with the bad guys at the same time (the best vigilantes, honestly).

Everything about this movie was great. The themes, the commentary on the conditions people were treated during this Spanish rule. The music was fantastic, the sets were wonderful (they filmed in Mexico City!), the action was packed full in this movie to make it entertaining. Humor was strung throughout the story to keep everyone laughing along with the other strengths of this movie. I loved the effects, with the explosions and fight scenes, everything was on such a grand scale that it took my breath away.

This is a movie about a man finding himself, an older man fighting for his daughter, and a young woman finding her own voice and strengths in a world ruled by men. Though the main character could be said to be Alejandro, I think it was equally all three of their stories. They all came together to help the people, while learning about themselves as well. Which makes for great storytelling, in my opinion.

I loved this movie.

Plus, I just really love Zorro.

[smokeonshadows]

Jasmine x Jafar Headcanons

Telling you all rn- I haven’t even watched the Aladdin live action yet and most likely won’t until it’s out on Netflix, but I’m all aboard this Jasmine x Jafar ship because I’m trash.

So here are some headcanons I have based on what I pieced together about the live action remake from looking through the tag:

- Jafar started out as an orphan who was surviving on the streets as a pick pocket. One day, when he was still quite young, he picked the wrong pocket and ended up condemned to getting his hand chopped off, but the Sultan happened to be around and pardoned him. Maybe the Sultan saw a spark of something special in Jafar, maybe he was trying to fill the void of never having had a son, or maybe he was just feeling particularly charitable, either way, that day, the Sultan took Jafar in to be raised in the royal palace (hence why he calls the Sultan ‘baba’). While Jafar was being educated, he showed a lot of intelligence and talent and was eventually groomed to be a royal vizier.

- I’m imagining Jafar and Jasmine being pretty close in age with Jafar being ~5-7 years older. Supposing that Jafar arrived at the palace when he was about 9-10 years old, it’s safe to assume that they grew up together. Assuming that Jafar had absolutely no educational background upon arrival at the palace, I’m thinking they were also educated alongside each other.

- As a highly sheltered princess, the few interactions that Jasmine had with other kids her age were not very satisfying. She wasn’t allowed to play sports and any games she played, everyone would let her win. She was treated very delicately and formally because no one wanted to be the one to offend the princess or make her cry. And Jafar, due to his rough, common background, other children of the royal court were either scared of him or were strongly discouraged from hanging out with him. Because of this, most if the time, Jasmine and Jafar would only have each other to play with (assuming that Dalia doesn’t come into the picture until later), which was something that neither of them was very happy about. Jafar, being older, felt that he had better things to do than entertain the little princess, and Jasmine just thought that Jafar was too serious and no fun at all. Nevertheless, Jafar would treat Jasmine normally and Jasmine wasn’t afraid of Jafar. Even though they were never best friends, they are the ones who know each other best.

- The reason why Jafar shuts Jasmine down so much isn’t because he thinks that she’s incompetent or incapable, but the very opposite- he grew up with her, studied alongside her, he knows her better than anyone else, he’s witnessed how strong and brilliant she really is and that threatens him and all that he’s been working so hard for. Which brings me to my next points...

- The real rivalry at the heart of the story is (or at least should have been) between Jasmine and Jafar. A lot has been made about Aladdin and Jafar being set up as foils to each other, but I could also see parallels between Jasmine and Jafar, mainly that they’re both misfits in the palace and despite being the most qualified people, they’re both being passed up for the throne.

- That said, I like to think that they struck up some sort of alliance/partnership against whatever suitors are asking for Jasmine’s hand. Jasmine finds one reason or another to reject them and Jafar would be quietly complicit either by sabotaging the suitors or occasionally raising his own objections. It’s in both their interests that Jasmine not marry because her future husband would just be one more person standing in their respective paths to the throne. This, however, doesn’t stop Jafar from turning around and making Jasmine out to be unreasonably difficult and obstinate when she does reject a suitor (as with Prince Anders).

-...But then you get moments like when they exchange glances when Prince Ali comes around. The look that Jasmine gives him can’t be described as anything less than saucy. There’s mischief and complicity in that look. You know that they’re on the same page and they’ve been through this before. You can just see them, every other time before, coming back together after rejecting a suitor and just laughing about it.

- In fact, I could even picture one such moment when Jasmine and Jafar have been left alone after dismissing a suitor and they’re laughing their little heads off together and Jafar looks at her and half-jokingly says something like “At this rate, Princess, I’ll be the only one left to marry you.” And Jasmine, very seriously, replies “No, baba would never allow it. I’ll only marry a prince, or a sultan.” She says this not because it’s true but because she’s afraid that it isn’t. She fears that maybe this had been Jafar’s plan all along, she fears that if the Sultan somehow gets it into his head that Jafar could be a suitor, because of his favored position the Sultan would definitely marry her off to him and she doesn’t trust Jafar to not use it as an opportunity to take all the power for himself. Jafar, on the other hand, realizes in that moment that 1) marrying Jasmine could actually be the solution to all his problems 2) he wants to marry Jasmine even if the throne wasn’t part of the deal 3) Jasmine doesn’t want to marry him and not only does that hurt, but he thinks that it’s because of his impoverished background (which is something that he’s always been insecure about, and it also explains the bitterness behind what he said to Aladdin about Jasmine just toying with him like she does with all commoners).

- So of course he becomes fixated on this idea. When he actually forces Jasmine to marry him, there’s no real logical motive behind it. He’s already the sultan so theoretically he had no use for Jasmine, but instead of having her killed or locking her up and throwing away the key, he chooses to have a full on wedding, imam and all and vows to protect and look after her always. The only explanation that makes any sense is that he wanted to marry her for love (as confirmed by the actor). And also, I’m headcanoning that it was important for him to have the Sultan witness this as a big fuck you to what (headcanon) Jasmine had said about the Sultan not allowing Jafar to marry her.

Welp, sorry for the long post. That’s all for now! I’m not much of a writer but if there are any fellow shippers out there who want to take these headcanons for fanfic or whatever, I say, go for it!

[satoshi-mochida]

Square Enix has released new information and screenshots of Final Fantasy VII Remake highlighting the Turks, Avalanche, more of the battle system and materia, the Chocobo & Moogle summon, and the church and Aerith’s house in Sector 5. Additionally, Square Enix revealed two new visuals featuring Aerith and Barrett and shared 11 developer comments.

Get the details below.

■ New Visuals

■ The Turks

The Investigation Sector of the General Affairs Department of the Shinra Electric Power Company. A small, elite organization that carries out special operations, the Turks operate behind the scenes and handle everything from scouting out SOLDIER candidates to protecting VIPs, intelligence activities, and even assassination.

Reno (voiced by Keiji Fujiwara)

A member of the Turks, the Investigation Sector of the General Affairs Department of the Shinra Electric Power Company. With fiery red hair and a cynical smile, he always does his own thing. He is agile in battle and uses a specialized weaponry to unleash a multitude of attacks.

Rude (voiced by Taiten Kusunoki)

A member of the Turks, the Investigation Sector of the General Affairs Department of the Shinra Electric Power Company. A giant with a shaved head and sunglasses. He is not one for mindless chatter, and faithfully handles his duties. He does not carry a weapon, but rather fights using only martial arts that put his strong body to work.

■ Avalanche

An anti-Shinra group acting to protect the planet. Mako is the life energy of the planet, and Avalanche alleges that Shinra Company is draining the planet’s lifespan. There are currently several factions within Avalanche, and the group that oversees Midgar, which consists of Barrett and company, is a dynamic one that does not hesitate to use force.

Biggs (voiced by Shuuhei Sakaguchi)

A member of the anti-Shinra group Avalanche. The sharpest and most capable person on the team, he is in charge of strategic planning. He calmly follows Barrett, who has habit of going wild one way or another. He has a tidy personality, and loves taking showers and cleaning.

Wedge (voiced by Takayuki Asai)

A member of the anti-Shinra group Avalanche. He uses his connections and charm to gather information and conciliate with opposing forces. He also plays an important role in taste-testing new menu items for 7th Heaven. A mood maker, he is the indispensable lubricant of the team.

Jessie (voiced by Satomi Moriya)

A member of the anti-Shinra group Avalanche. She is in charge of procurement for Avalanche, getting everything necessary to carry out its operations, from explosive to fake IDs. She is also a skilled engineer, and manufactures and sells things such as water filtration devices to earn income. She is caring and has a weakness for handsome men.

■ Battle System: Classic Mode

By changing the difficulty level to “Classic,” you will switch to “Classic Mode.” In Classic Mode, characters automatically take action while the ATB gauge accumulates. Players can battle by selecting commands such as “Ability,” “Magic,” and “Item,” which consume the ATB gauge, similarly to the command-based battle system of the original Final Fantasy VII. While in Classic Mode, you can switch back to action-based gameplay at any time.

■ Battle System: Cloud

Cloud can “Attack” with his sword at close range with the Square button and build up combos by repeatedly pressing Square. By holding Square, Cloud can unleash a radial attack.

Unique Ability

Pressing the Triangle button activates a character’s unique ability. Cloud’s unique ability switches him from his balanced “Assault Mode” to the attack-specialized “Punisher Mode.” In Punisher Mode, Cloud’s movement speed is reduced, but his attack’s become more powerful.

—Assault Mode: “Attack.”

—Punisher Mode: “Strong Attack.”

Abilities

—Triple Slash

Cloud slashes surrounding enemies with three consecutive strikes. Its power increases by hitting multiple enemies.

—Blade Burst

A long range attack in which Cloud fires a magic burst from his blade.

■ Weapon Enhancement

By unlocking the abilities of the core materia in weapons, you can upgrade them to increase their power.

—Cloud’s Buster Sword. You can also increase the character’s stats and increase the materia slots.

Weapon Abilities

Each weapon has a dedicated weapon ability that increases in proficiency each time it is used. By increasing a proficiency to the maximum level, you can learn the weapon ability to use at any time, even when that weapon is not equipped.

■ Materia

Fire

Materia that enables the use of flame-attribute magic such as “Fire.” It evolves from “Fire” to “Fira” to “Firaga.”

Sense

Materia that enables the use of “Sense.” By using Sense on an enemy, you can see that enemy’s traits, resistances, and weaknesses.

■ Summons

When equipped, summoning materia adds an additional gauge that, when filled, grants you the ability to call forth otherworldly entities to fight alongside you for a limited time. These summoned beings possess a will of their own and will engage enemies independently, culminating in a devastating attack they execute before departing the battlefield.

Chocobo & Moogle

A world-traveling moogle riding atop his partner chocobo. It is cute on cute, the simple sight of which provides healing.

—Ability: “Mog Bomb.”

—Ability: “Stampede.”

■ Locations

Locations from Final Fantasy VII have been faithfully recreated in high quality. Several locations that could not be explored in the original version have also been added.

Church in the Slums

The old church at the edge of the Sector 5 Slums. The building is old and houses the crashed test rocket launched by Shinra. One of the few places where flowers grow in the ruined slums, Aerith takes care of the garden there in her spare time.

Aerith’s House

A house located in a corner of the Sector 5 Slums. Aerith and her mother Elmyra live there. They grow a variety of colorful flowers in their garden, and every day Aerith delivers them to the residents of Midgar. Clear water flows down from the cliff behind the house, which coupled with the loveliness of the house itself, make for a beautiful scene unseemly of the slums.

Screenshots

—Playing darts in 7th Heaven.

—A bike battle against Shinra with Jessie on board.

■ Developer Comments

Yoshinori Kitase (Producer)

In the several years following 2009, when I was running around all over the world promoting the Final Fantasy XIII series, I had opportunity to speak to many fans and journalists. The question that I always got as we got up to part ways was, “When are you making the Final Fantasy VII Remake?”

It was to the point where it almost felt like an alternative way to say goodbye, so eventually I started pre-emptively giving my response to the question before they’d even asked it. “If we were to create a remake of that now, it would be an enormous amount of data, and who knows how many years it would take. But, if the ‘right time’ comes along, we might just do it someday!” This is how I’d respond back then, who knows how many hundreds of times. To all the people I had a chance to meet with back then, the “right time” has finally arrived.

For the Final Fantasy VII Remake, developers who worked on the original game have come onboard once again as core members, including myself as Producer, Tetsuya Nomura as Director, Motomu Toriyama as Co-Director, and Kazushige Nojima on Story & Scenario.

Additionally, we also have people like Co-Director Naoki Hamaguchi who are now part of the core development team, who was just a fan of Final Fantasy VII back then. And, to my delight, creators from younger generations all over the world have come forth upon hearing news of Final Fantasy VII Remake’s production. While ensuring that the spirit of the original game is kept intact, these members are adding to it the power of a new generation.

As a result, the game that is about to be born surpasses even my own expectations as the one who voiced the desire to take this endeavor on in the first place. In fact, the one who’s looking forward to playing this game the most right now might actually be me.

Tetsuya Nomura (Director / Concept Design)

I started up the Final Fantasy VII Remake project around the time of Compilation of Final Fantasy VII. We’d gone through Advent Children, Before Crisis, Crisis Core, and Dirge of Cerberus, and I was planning this by myself for about a year as the fifth and final entry in the compilation.

Since that initial plan and my first ideas, other projects took-shape and I became very busy as they moved forward, but I never stopped thinking about VII. As such, I feel like I’m looking forward to the release as much as anyone, as I’ve been carrying around these ideas for a long time.

Opportunities for discussing our true intentions are few, but with regard to the size of the game that many are asking about – there’s no reason at all to worry. Even in this Midgar portion alone, the density and volume are so great that I had to give directions to lighten them.

With regard to new characters, of whom I said during past interviews that there would be “none” – though they aren’t main characters, their numbers ended up growing considerably in the process of creating a rich depiction of Midgar. When you think of Midgar’s final boss, you probably think of the M.O.T.O.R., but in this game new bosses will appear and add to the excitement of the story even more.

We’ve already begun working on the next one as well, but I’m confident that playing through this title will expand your expectations just like the world that extends beyond Midgar.

Until next time.

Kazushige Nojima (Story / Scenario)

It must have been in the very beginning stages of developing Final Fantasy VII Remake that I got to see the Remake version of Cloud for the first time. It wasn’t post-Advent Children Cloud, with kindness brimming from within. Rather, here was a young man with fiery features, looking straight at me through the screen with aggression in his eyes. I knew right t hen: “Oh, this is it.”

This time, it was this Cloud that I needed to depict. When Cloud came to Midgar and was hired by Avalanche, this was the sort of look that he would have had on his face. So I revisited the experiences that he’d had in his life so far, thinking of the effect that each individual event would have had on him. His attitude toward his childhood friend Tifa. How would he act toward Barret? What sort of distance would he keep while interacting with passers-by on the street? I picture the scene of Midgar in my mind and imagine Cloud moving through it. Write new lines of dialogue to add for him. This is how Cloud in the Remake Version came to be.

It was an exciting task to introduce a new current of wind to Final Fantasy VII, but at the same time, there was some fear. The original game used cartoon-like, stylised art, and the story was completed by players using their imagination to supplement portions that couldn’t be depicted as a result. Even if they were seeing the same scene, the information they took away from it and how they interpreted it differed depending on the viewer. Perhaps it’s what might be considered a narrative form of storytelling nowadays.

In Final Fantasy VII Remake, there will be much less room for player imagination. This fact will probably change the feel of the story considerably. People who know the original might not know quite how to take it. Such is the fear that I have. But I also have conviction. It should be possible to feel a much deeper connection to Cloud as you join alongside him. It would be amazing if you could feel that fiery flame together with him.

Naoki Hamaguchi (Co-Director / Game Design / Programming)

When the original Final Fantasy VII was released, I was just another student who dreamed of being in the gaming industry. I of course played the game, but I also re-read the guidebook over and over again, my heart stolen by the engaging universe. I remember wishing strongly that I’d be able to create a game like it someday.

Twenty-two years later, that student who dreamed of Final Fantasy VII is now involved in developing the remake. I can’t help but feel like it’s fate.

In this title, I handled overseeing the development team overall, such as deciding development milestones, constructing a workflow using Unreal Engine, and taking responsibility for game design.

Here, I met staff members who were involved in the original game, who entered the industry with childhood dreams of Final Fantasy VII just like me, and those who were drawn by the allure of Final Fantasy VII and joined the dev team from overseas. It was a gathering of amazing creators with passion and ambition towards the game. All I have is gratitude for having the opportunity to meet this team.

With all this in mind, I’ve considered the following phrase important: “respect for the original.” Final Fantasy VII Remake takes on the challenge of creating something that’s created specifically thanks to the technological power and entertainment quality that matches the current generation, while treating the captivating elements of the original game with respect.

For those who’ve played it: “new but familiar.” For those who haven’t played it: “experience the charm of Final Fantasy VII which moved the hearts of many, now created with the most exciting modern technology available.” I hope you enjoy it!

Motomu Toriyama (Co-Director / Scenario Design)

For the original game, I joined the project as a planner who was just starting out on my career, and I worked on Sector 7 slums and Wall Market.

In producing Final Fantasy VII Remake, the thoughts and feelings I had when I was just starting out back then were revived, and at the same time, I took on the challenge of new methods of expression that I’m able to execute now that I have the experience.

The original version was a forerunner when it came to RPGs that used 3D CG, but the characters were made of polygons, the dialogue was in text only, and cameras weren’t able to be used for cutscenes.

In Final Fantasy VII Remake, we’re using the newest visuals, voice acting, and character facial expressions to redesign the Final Fantasy VII universe to be more realistic. By increasing the realism of the universe within the city of Midgar, which is made prosperous by mako energy, we of course also reimagined the characters who reside there, like Cloud and Tifa, more vividly as living and breathing human beings, depicting their daily lives and feelings in a more in-depth manner.

We took care to remake not only the main characters, but also characters like Johnny and the Shinra Middle Manager who I created back then. Please keep your eye out to see how they make their new appearances. Additionally, when remaking the Honey-Bee Inn at the Wall Market, we revived it is as a pantheon of entertainment, which couldn’t be realized back then. Here, the scene that many of you have been eager to see, where Cloud disguises himself. Please enjoy.”

Shintaro Takai (Graphics / VFX Director)

I created the effects for the original Final Fantasy VII. Back then, the scope of development was so exorbitantly massive that I just threw myself into the tasks for which I was responsible, without even fully understanding what sort of game we were creating.

Near the final stages of development, when I finally tried playing the test version, I remember being surprised by the graphics and the depth of the story, as well as how fully realized it was, and I remember enjoying the game as a player. It’s been 22 years after that, and I’m participating in the Final Fantasy VII Remake project as a developer, and today, I’m able to experience the impact and fun similar to that of the previous title.

For the remake, I’ve mainly directed the effects section, while also crossing over into other sections for decisions and directions on overall graphics.

Among the many major games that are celebrated for their photorealistic graphics, FINAL FANTASY VII is a little different. Not only is it realistic, but I believe you’ll notice that it incorporates “playfulness” in the design and colours for an originality not found in other games. Effects are an area that is particularly conducive to expressing various elements of “playfulness.”

I hope you’ll enjoy various effects that are not only beautiful, but also convincingly portray realism and magic!! Various elements of game design and graphic design have been packed into every corner of the vast Midgar. I hope you enjoy it!!

Teruki Endo (Battle Director)

When I played the original version, I wasn’t on the game creation side of things, and I remember enjoying it as a player and feeling constant surprise at the evolution of games. The three-dimensionality of the stage and the dynamism of the battle scenes have left a strong impression on me. Back then, I never even imagined that I would someday be on the side of creating games, or that I would be able to be involved in that game.

Speaking to my own personal experience, I had mostly been creating action games thus far, so for this title, I took on the challenge of remaking a system that was not of an action game originally and incorporating action elements into it.

Production was completely different than that of a pure action game, and the need for new design philosophy often arose. Production involved constantly searching for the best balance between action and command elements, but I believe we’ve managed to do this in an exciting new way.

In order to create battles that are surprising and never boring, we worked hard to create a variety of strategic elements for each boss and enemy. Also, in constructing battle systems for each character, we wanted to respect the image of the original version while additionally introducing many new abilities. I hope you’re able to find your own style of battle by combining those abilities with Materia.

Takako Miyake (Environment Director)

For Final Fantasy VII Remake, the graphics team worked to the theme of “how would Midgar look if it existed in real life?” As such, as the environments team, we examined those portions that were once left to the players’ imaginations, fell outside of the on-screen area, or were between scenes, and tried to supplement them in detail.

For all the fans out there, we worked our hardest in hopes that you’ll be able to relive an experience that also surpasses your memories.

For all of you who are playing for the first time, we worked our hardest with the sole hope that you’ll experience this amazing universe that has remained beloved by so many for 22 years, and to be able to convey its charm.

Additionally, in order to create a fitting backdrop for the drama unfolding around the main characters, and in order for it to be a stage where the various characters living in Midgar can be their vibrant selves, all of teams, including the environments section, came up with ideas and worked collaboratively. Midgar is a closed city. However, I would be very happy if by experiencing the drama unfolding around its residents and the main characters who go through it, you feel as though Midgar actually exists.

I am a Final Fantasy VII fan, so being able to take part in the Remake was something that made me happy but also nervous. It’s been an unforgettable development experience. I truly hope that everyone enjoys it.

Iichiro Yamaguchi (Lighting Director)

Final Fantasy VII, for me, at the time when I was in school, was a very impactful game. It really pierced my heart as I was at such a sensitive age, with not only a rich story, but charming characters, world setting and music, not to mention that it was the first in the series to be in 3D polygon format. This was the piece that really brought out my interest in CG in general.

When I was able to join the Final Fantasy VII Remake team, I started by thinking back to how I felt when I first played it. Midgar, with its’ abundant mix of different elements and original characters like Cloud, became something unbreakable and the “standard” for me in Final Fantasy VII.

In the world of the game, just like in real life, if there is not some form of light then you won’t be able to see anything. So when putting up lights just anywhere, Midgar could lose its token Midgar-ness, and Cloud wouldn’t be Cloud anymore. I’ve taken as much care as possible to recreate the world that I had saved in my mind and attempted to remake it to a fresh and modern standard.

The positions of the few lights that illuminate the entirety of Midgar, the adjustments made to each and every voluminous cut-scene… it’s all a lot of work to do! However, alongside the rest of the wonderful lighting team we feel that we’ve brought something great to the table. We’ve left in the elements that will have you going “Ah, that’s what it was like!”, and yet you’ll still be able to enjoy the world of Final Fantasy VII in its new and fresh style!

Masaaki Kazeno (Character Modeling Director)

I was among those who bought the original game on the day of its release and played it constantly, clearing it in under a week. Those that also have cleared it will understand this, but I also wasn’t quite satisfied with the locations, so I continued to play it after clearing in the same places as well.

And so, my memory of Final Fantasy VII was how I actually started studying CG, after being left with the strong motivation to want to create a Final Fantasy game when playing it and truly being moved by it.

So I just made my mind up and bought a PC to help me study – something that I had never even touched before. So for me, someone who had been so strongly influenced by the original, to be working on the characters of the remake, I want to do everything I can to make them in a way that shows both a charm and freshness whilst keeping that nostalgia.

So I want them to reflect in a fresh way that that also allows players of the original to remember the time that they played the original, as well as make them detailed and charming enough to give first-time players the understanding of just how charming they are.

I’ve ensured to arrange things like hairstyles and outfits to re-create the design from the original, so I encourage anyone to take time with their camera angles when playing to take a look. Also, there are several characters that stand out other than just the main characters that you’ll find. So please see for yourself as to what kind of appearance and characteristics they have! Other than that, we’ve got enemies in there perhaps too close to the original, and there are many surprises coming in the Remake for you to all look forward to! Keep your eyes out!

Yoshiyuki Soma (Animation Director)

When Final Fantasy VII came out, I was actually more of a Sega Saturn fan, so I didn’t play it straight away. However, when it was decided that I was to join SQUARE, I was put on the development of Final Fantasy VIII, and so I thought to myself “I’m screwed if I don’t know about Final Fantasy VII!”. That’s when I bought a PlayStation and played it so much.

Those memories feel like only yesterday. So I can’t say this too loudly, but I actually started it out of obligation rather than as a fan. However, I was absolutely enthralled by the world and lore as soon as I picked it up!

For the animations; each and every member of the team – from those responsible for battles, fields, simple events, cut scenes, mini-games, facial expressions, to swinging things in the background, actual behavior settings—have all worked together to improve as one.

We’ve done our best to ensure that whatever you do, it feels like the characters are alive there with you. We really hope you enjoy the story of Midgar on a huge screen, with Cloud and his friends.

Final Fantasy VII Remake is due out for PlayStation 4 on March 3, 2020.

View the screenshots at the gallery.

[thetravelerwrites]

Rantha (Minotaur)

Rating: Teen Relationship: Female Human x Male Minotaur Additional Tags: Exophilia, Monster Boyfriend, Minotaur Boyfriend, SFW Content Warnings: Abandonment, Physical Disability, Congenital Myopathy, Muscular Dystrophy, Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy, Focal Muscular Myopathy Words: 5116

A young disabled woman is abandoned at a cabin in the middle of the forest with no way to take care of herself, until a mysterious benefactor begins leaving her food and supplies while she sleeps. Please leave feedback!

The Traveler's Masterlist

Your mother was taking you to a cabin for, she said, some fresh air. She had bought it for next to nothing and spent weeks going on about how good it would be for the two of you to get away for a while. You were excited, too. You’d only ever lived in the city, and to be honest, you hated it there.

You were born healthy, but as you aged, your right arm began to wither. Every healer in the city had been consulted, but no one could tell your parents what was wrong with you. By the time you were ten, the arm was completely immobile and permanently curled up against your side, skeletal and gnarled.

You knew they resented you. At first, you didn’t realize it, because you were a child and it happened gradually. But as their friend’s children grew up and got married or started apprenticeships, only for you to remain uselessly at home, you could see it on their faces. They knew they’d have to take care of you forever, and they loathed the idea.

You spent all your time reading because no one trusted you to do anything else. You insisted you could still do basic chores, like sweeping floors and dusting, but they heard none of it. It was confusing to you; you were asking to help, and they were refusing to let you. It wasn’t your fault you were growing weaker and more infirm since they never let you leave your bed.

You read all your books a hundred times, played all your card games, cleaned up after yourself until there was not a speck of dust in your room, but nothing could dispel the crushing boredom and madness of being alone all day.

A lot of the time, you lay in your bed and stared at the ceiling, dreaming of a life you could have had if your body hadn’t betrayed you. You could be married by now. You could have a wonderful job as an artist’s assistant or a alchemist. You could have children, or not. You could have had a choice. There was no choice now. You were what you were, and nothing would change it.

That was why this getaway sounded so amazing. You and your mother would spend a few months living in the fresh air in the country. It would be so freeing. You could go outside! You could feel grass beneath your toes. You could try and take a run for the first time. You found yourself daydreaming about how lovely it would be.

You were going to pack up your things, but your mother insisted the cabin would be fully furnished, including clothes; all you would need was a single change to wear on the trip up. You took a small bag of books and a few of your treasures anyway.

Mother had hired a carriage to take you both, a fast, bumpy thing with an impatient groom. Your mother had told you to wear your cloak to hide your arm until you had gotten out of the city, despite it being high summer and extremely hot, but you complied. You didn’t want people looking at you, either.

The journey was several days ride by carriage, and you slept most of the way, stopping only to sleep at various inns along the way. Your mother insisted you wear the cloak at all times despite the heat, and though you felt a little resentful, you complied.

On the fifth day, you were dozing in the carriage when you heard your mother call out to you.

“Wake up,” she said. “We’re here.”

You opened your sleep-glued eyes to find yourself staring at a vast expanse of forest. As you stepped out, you saw a small shack in the middle of a tiny clearing. It wasn’t exactly the luxurious cabin your mother had described, but it was well-built and charming and you were determined not to judge it too harshly.

You stepped down and followed your mother toward the shack, looking back at the carriage and expecting it to leave, except it stayed where it was with the groom tapping his foot sharply. The ground underneath the horse and carriage was all grass; you weren’t even near a road of any kind.

Your mother unlocked the door to the shack and it swung open, and you peered inside. It was sparsely furnished with a bed, a table, and a single chair, all plainly made and well worn. There was a table with a water basin and an iron stove with a neat stack of firewood sitting next to it. It was a little drab but cozy, and you thought all it needed was a few personal touches to make it feel like home.

“What do you think, my dear?” Your mother asked, watching you look around the shack.

“It’s nice,” you replied. “A little small, but I think we can make do.” You smiled at her, and her returning smile was strained.

“I’m going to go into the nearest town and buy supplies,” Your mother said. “Why don’t you stay here and start getting this place livable?”

You smiled brightly. “I will!”

Your mother smiled again, gave you a quick hug, and left the key on the table before striding out of the door and stepping back into the carriage. The groom snapped the reins and the horse jumped into action, pulling the carriage away.

You spent the next few hours doing what you could to tidy up. One handed, you managed to remove and shake out the bedclothes and remake the bed, which seemed a bit narrow for both you and your mother to share. The larder was a bit sparse, with only a bag of dried beans and a turnip or two, but your mother would bring back food. Oddly, your mother had insisted that there would be clothing waiting for you here, but you found none. There wasn’t even a closet or a dresser in which to keep clothes.

After you had done what you could do comfortably to make the shack presentable, you went out onto the small porch to wait for your mother to return.

Hours passed. The sun began to dip behind the trees and the air, while still warm, dropped in temperature. You began to worry about your mother’s well-being. Perhaps that groom was a nefarious highwayman who’d brought harm to your mother. You were twitching with nervousness.

You were being paranoid. She might have just gotten held up. You decided to go to bed. She’d be there in the morning, you assured yourself.

She had not returned by morning. It took another two days of waiting for you to realize she wasn’t coming back.

She’d left you there to die.

You sat on the steps and cried, knowing that your family had finally washed their hands of you. It wouldn’t be so bad if they had taught you even the basics for taking care of yourself, but they had always made you stay abed, never allowed to interfere with the workings of the house. You wept bitter tears at their betrayal. What had you done wrong besides living in a broken body? Was that all it took to condemn someone to death?

You were running out of water and you were scared to leave the hut, afraid you’d get lost and never find your way back. It was your only shelter. You rummaged around until you found a flint and stone buried in a toolbox, so you were at least able to built a fire in the stove and cook a handful of beans each day to keep yourself fed, but those, too, would run out soon. You had no skill for living on your own, let alone living off an unfamiliar land with no one to help you. You truly were going to die.

A week on, just before twilight, you sat on the steps, having eaten your daily rations of beans and taking the last swallow of water, and you broke down again.

“Why?” You sobbed into the empty air of the forest. “Why did they do this to me? Was I such an imposition? Did this,” You gestured violently at your useless arm. “Make me unlovable? Have I no value at all? Surely I could have been taught. I could have learned. Was that too much trouble?”

You thought you heard something, a deep lowing, answer you far in the distance, but you convinced yourself that it was merely the wind. Sniffling, you went inside and lay down in the bed, crying yourself to sleep.

The next morning, you went out with a bucket in your hand, determined to find some water. It took about an hour, but to your surprise, you found a hidden well under a trapdoor in the ground near a rock just out of side of the cabin. It was camouflaged with overgrown vines and moss. If you hadn’t tripped over it, you might never have found it.

Now the dilemma of getting the water up. This was definitely a two handed job. You went back to the cabin and found a length of rope hidden in a basket under the bed, managing to tie a knot on the bucket handle, though it took nearly thirty minutes to do so. You had to be careful about this; this was your only bucket and rope. If you lost either of them, you were screwed.

Praying the knot didn’t come undone, you dropped the bucket into the well and was relieved to hear a splash. Then you began pulling it up, carefully gripping the rope between your knees every time you tugged up the bucket. It was grueling work for you, who had little muscle tone and no experience with any sort of manual labor, but you did it.

Well, you had water. That was one thing in your favor, but you were still running out of food and had no way of finding more. Anxiety about how much you had left ate at your mind, making the skin of your back crawl.

“Don’t panic,” You told yourself out loud. “Don’t panic. You’ll find food. You found water, you’ll find food. You can do this.”

You fired up the stove and threw the last handful of beans and final chunk of turnip into a pot of water and waited for them to cook. Tomorrow you’d have to find something or you were going to starve for sure.

The next morning dawned, and you were awakened by a knock at the door. Your heart hammered in your chest as you got up, hope that your mother had returned for you welling up in your chest, and you threw the door open to find no one there.

Confused, you looked down at the steps at your feet and blinked. There lay two largish rabbits and a basket of potatoes.

“Wha…” You gaped at this sudden gift from no one and looked around you, trying to find the generous soul who’d left them. The forest was empty.

“Uh… thank you,” you called. No one answered.

Now you had to figure out how to skin rabbits one-handed. Well, no sense in dallying. You went inside to retrieve the only knife you had and set about trying to free the meat from the fur. It took some doing, and eventually you ended up washing your feet and using them to hold the animals steady so you could strip them. You were a bloody mess halfway through, and the porch wasn’t looking too pretty either, but you were doing it.

A few hours of trial and error later, you had done it, and now needed to find a sharp stick to spear them on. There was a metal rod in the back of the hut and you stuck the meat onto it, deciding to build a cooking fire outside. You took the flint and wedged it between your toes, striking the stone against it into some dried leaves for kindling. Then you brought out the firewood out, one log at a time, and built up the coals, placing two of the potatoes in the iron pot whole and sticking the pot in the embers at the edge of the fire to allow them to roast.

You almost laughed with giddy relief as you sat there on the ground, watching your gifts cook in the fire. You fully expected to go hungry today. There were some potatoes left in the basket, so you were going to have to ration them and the meat to last as long as possible, though the urge to wolf it all down at once was strong.

A tear dripped down your face as you ate your slightly burnt rabbit meat. You wished the kind person hadn’t run off so quickly. You wanted to thank them. You wiped your face and stood, cleaning up the gory remains of the rabbit and looking for something to store the rations in.

The next morning, another knock on the door woke you. You shot out of the bed and unbolted door, hoping to catch whoever was there, but they were already gone. This morning, they had left you a cured ham steak, some corn cobs, and two apples.

A smile spread across your face and you laughed, a little of your anxiousness ebbing away, but at the same time, you tried not to take the stranger’s generosity for granted. If your family was any indication, people could decide they didn’t want to deal with you anymore and throw you away with no warning.

Well, all wasn’t lost, then. You decided to straighten up the hut and make it nice after breakfast. You went out to the forest not far from the house and began to pick wildflowers. You were feeling more at ease than you ever had, as fleeting as you knew it would be.

You spent the rest of the day airing out the hut, placing the flowers here and there, using water you’d pulled up from the well to wash the bed linens and the curtains, laying them on the railing to dry. It wasn’t too warm, so you sat on the porch and read from your favorite book for a while. If you were going to be living here, it was best if you started trying to make it feel like home.

It went on this way for weeks, with a charitable offering laid on the steps of the porch for you every morning and no one there to receive your thanks. Their selfless benevolence baffled you and left you emotional, especially in contrast to your family’s begrudging tolerance of you.

Once, you had even ripped your dress rather badly on a jutting nail and, after crying over it and wondering what you could possibly do to fix it since you had no needle or thread, you had left it on the railing of the cabin overnight to deal with it in the morning. Only to find it mended perfectly when you rose from sleep the next day. There was also a new pale green dress waiting for you, as well as a plucked pheasant and a large bushel of beans.

There had to be something you could do for your mysterious benefactor, some way you could repay them. The only thing you had that was of any worldly value were your emerald earrings, a gift from your grandmother before she died. One evening, after more than a month of this big-hearted caretaker looking after you, you took them from your ears and laid them on the steps of the porch, hoping they were watching.

“I want to repay your for all your kindness to me,” You said to the empty evening air. “These are all I have, but I hope that they’re worth something. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.” Then you went inside and prepared for bed.

The next morning, when you woke up, you immediately went outside to check if your caretaker had accepted your payment. Shocked, you saw that not only were your earrings still there, they were now joined by a pendant on a silver chain that complimented them perfectly.

This had been weird before, but now it was on an entirely new level. This wasn’t food or clothing or mere survival. They were leaving you real gifts now, trinkets of worth that served no purpose out here, because… why?

Enough was enough. You needed to know who this person was. You needed to be able to thank them face-to-face, at the very least. You took up the earrings and the pendant, then walked back into the house. You lay the jewelry on the table and found your knife, slitting the skirt of your dress to the hip where it had split before. You pulled it off and threw it aside, pulling on the new linen dress that your caretaker had left for you that’d you’d yet to wear. It was wonderfully soft, light, and comfortable.

After waiting a good amount of time, you took the dress you had torn out to the porch and laid it over the railing, sighing dramatically. You were overacting a bit, but you hoped they could see you. You’d just have to wait and find out.

That night, you waited anxiously for the sun to go down so that you could dowse the lights and wait out your caretaker. You sat with your back to the door and listened hard. If felt like you waited for hours, but eventually you heard a soft, careful thump as someone or something stepped up onto the porch in a way that told you they were trying very hard not to make any noise. There was a fwip as the dress was snatched off of the railing, and muffled thump as the person stepped down from the porch and back on the ground.

You scrambled to your feet and waited a minute before trying to look out. Pausing for a moment to put on the pendant, you carefully opened the door so that it wouldn’t squeak and saw a large, black mass escaping into the woods. Just as their large form disappeared behind the trees, you silently slipped out of the cabin, leaving the door open, and followed.

Looking around the first tree you reached, you saw the black shape moving steadily west. It was fast on its feet and you followed as quickly and as quietly as you were able. It was far ahead of you, and you were beginning to lose sight of it, but after a few minutes of moving straight, you saw light that you guessed was from a fire and approached it cautiously.

You crept carefully through the underbrush, trying your best not to make a sound, as you heard the crackling of the fire grow louder. You reached the edge of the circle of light, and looked around a tree that was large enough to hide you. You had to clap your hand over your mouth to keep from gasping.

It was a camp with a large canvas tent set up between two trees and a few wooden crates containing food and tools. There was a bow and quiver propped against the tree on the far side, and a spear and short sword hung on a rack. Everything looked completely normal, except for the person who occupied the campsite. There, sitting on an upturned log in front of the fire, was a gigantic minotaur.

His horns were long and flared, and black fur crowned his head and adorned his neck, fading as it went down his torso, though the skin was as black as his fur. Whether he had fur on his legs, you weren’t sure, as he was wearing a sturdy pair of trousers, though you could see hooves at the end of his legs, which were as big as serving trays and just as black as the rest of him. The only thing that wasn’t black were his eyes, they were as deep a green as the forest around him.

He had your dress in his hand, inspecting the tear closely, and in the other he held a tiny needle, already threaded, and seemed ready to set about mending the dress himself. You watched him begin to stitch your dress back together, carefully pulling the needle through with his tongue caught between his teeth, concentrating hard on his task.

You felt like you had forgotten how to breathe. You’d never seen anything like him. Granted, you’d spent most of your life in your bed, but seeing this huge creature, with his raw, colossal strength, bent over a dress as he meticulously repaired it, was something straight out of a fairy tale.

You watched him stitch in silence for a good while, completely captivated. As he tied the thread off and bit it, you stepped out from your hiding place and walked slowly toward him.

He didn’t notice you immediately, but when a twig snapped under your feet, he jumped to his with a surprised bellow. He backed away, trying to flee.

“Please, wait!” You cried, reaching out with your good arm. He halted, but stared at you, wide-eyed and apprehensive.

Slowly so as not to spook him, you walked up and stopped in front of him, looking up. He was breathing hard, as if afraid. How absurd that someone like him could be afraid of you. You looked at his face, his chest, his arms, his hands, one of which still clutched your dress. You looked around the campsite and saw crates of the same vegetables that had shown up on your doorstep. You saw furs from the meat you had been given on drying racks. There was no doubt that this man had been the one who had been looking after you, asking for nothing in return.

You rushed forward, letting out your breath, reaching out with your good arm and wrapping it around his waist. You held him as close to you as you could, weeping into the fur of his chest.

“Thank you,” You sobbed. “Thank you so much. I thought I was going to die. You save me. Thank you. I owe you my life.”

He dropped the dress and threw his arms around your shoulders, holding you to him. “I couldn’t just let you starve,” He said, his voice like stones tumbling inside a spinning barrel.

You wept hysterically for quite a long time, and he simply held you, stroking your hair and patting your back. After a while, you sniffed to a stop and he released you. He kicked up another log to the fire and sat you down on it, sitting beside you.

“I’ve been wanting to introduce myself for a while,” He admitted, taking your good hand in his. “My name is Rantha.”

You told him your name, and he repeated it.

“How is it you’re out here all alone?” He asked.

You told him your story, about how your arm suddenly stopped working and gradually withered away, how your parents hated taking care of you and made you stay in bed all the time, how your mother had told you that you’d be coming to the cabin to get away from the stress of the city life, and how she had left you behind with no intention of returning.

“What a sad tale,” Rantha said, still holding your hand, running his thumb over your knuckles. “Your family is full of monsters.”

“I was… burdensome,” You said regretfully. “I don’t blame them for resenting me, but I never thought they’d actually abandon me.”

“They’re monsters,” He repeated sternly. “You are their family. How could they do something so cruel to their own child?”

“Taking care of me was hard for them. I’m not good for much,” You said, shrugging your useless arm. “I can’t contribute or work like this. They’ve been pouring resources into me for years and getting nothing back.”

“Nothing except your love and trust, you mean?” He replied flatly. “Anyway, taking care of you is not hard. I’ve been doing it for weeks now, and it’s been no trouble at all.”

You blushed and looked away shyly.

“Your value is not derived from how useful you are to other people,” He said seriously. “You deserve to be happy and loved regardless of what you can do for the rest of the world. What have they done for you, anyway? You don’t owe anyone anything, and especially if they have no concern for your well-being. Besides, you can do plenty. I’ve seen you do all sorts of things on your own.”

“Because I had to, I didn’t have a choice,” You argued.

“What difference does that make? We all have to do things because we don’t have a choice.”

“Still, if it weren’t for you, I’d have starved weeks ago.” You fixed him with a shrewd stare. “Why did you start taking care of me in the first place? Why did you come to the cabin at all?”

He chuckled. “It’s my cabin. I built it. I went traveling to sell some furs and someone seems to have sold the cabin out from under me while I was away.”

Your mouth fell open in shock. “Oh, no! I’m so sorry!”

He shook his head and laughed. “Don’t be. It’s not your fault. I will admit I was startled to find that a young woman had taken up residence in my house, but once I realized someone had cruelly left you to fend for yourself, I couldn’t just throw you out. But I was also hesitant to reveal myself. You were already frightened. I did not wish to frighten you further.”

“Still, I feel bad for forcing you to live out here while I just took over your home.”

He squeezed your hand with his. “I don’t mind.” He reached out his other hand to caress your face, and you surprised yourself by leaned into it. “I hadn’t intended to start a courtship ritual. It just sort of… happened… because I couldn’t let you starve. And then, once I saw how determined and resourceful you were in spite of all the adversity you faced, how could I not fall in love?”

Your jaw dropped and you picked your head up from his large palm. “Love…” you gasped. “You were… courting me?”

“Not at first,” He said ruefully. “It was compassion that compelled me to help you when I first saw you weeping on the steps. It just kind of… turned into a courtship over time.”

“You meant what you said? You actually… love me?”

“Is that so shocking?” He asked, a playful laugh in his voice.

“It’s just that… I’m like this…” You shrugged your arm again. “And you’re so…”

“Big and strange?” He asked, chuckling.

“Beautiful,” You replied, avoiding his eye.

He was quiet, and you looked up to see him staring down at you, his mouth open.

“You think I’m beautiful?” He asked.

You nodded, placing your hand in the fur of his chest and carding it upward toward his neck, making him shiver. “And a little strange, too, but that’s not a bad thing.”

“I can’t believe you’re not afraid of me,” He said, nuzzling your shoulder as if to test if you were being truthful.

You leaned into him and pressed your face into his fur. “Trust me, I’m having trouble believing that myself. But I’m not. You rescued me. How could I be scared of you?”

“I didn’t rescue you,” He said softly, his arms around you again. “I only dropped off dinner every day. I just was the delivery boy. You did everything else on your own. You’re so much stronger than you think you are.”

“I’m not,” You said, shaking your head and pulling away. “I’ve never been strong in my entire life. If I was, I wouldn’t have been such a burden to my family.”

“You are not a burden,” He insisted. “It’s not your fault you think that about yourself; you’re family has been lying to you your whole life.”

“I wish I could believe that,” you said sadly.

He rubbed a hand down your back. “Maybe one day you will.”

You looked at the crates of food settled around the campsite. There was a significant amount. “Where did you get all this food in the middle of the forest? I don’t see a cart anywhere.”

“There’s a farm nearby that a friend of mine owns,” He explained. “Him and his family are very kind people. I trade with them all the time. It’s where I got the dress.” He motioned at her attire.

“The necklace, too?” You asked, patting it.

His eyes softened when he looked at the pendant around your neck. “No, that was my mother’s.”

Your heart thumped in your chest and you stared at him with wide eyes. “You gave me your mother’s necklace?”

He winced. “Is that too forward? You didn’t know you were being courted, after all.”

“You’re serious,” You whispered. “You really want to be with me?”

“Yes,” He said matter-of-factly. “I do.”

You hated that you were such an easy crier. “Well, one thing’s for sure,” you said, sniffling.

“What’s that?” He asked in concern.

You chuckled. “You’re going to need to build a bigger bed. That one in the cabin won’t hold both of us unless I was lying on top of you.”

He looked startled, and then grinned wickedly. “I wouldn’t mind that one bit,” he replied, kissing your cheek. You turned your head and caught his lips with your own, and he returned the kiss enthusiastically. You ran your fingernails through the soft fur of his face, pulling with and against the grain, as his hands roamed your back.

“I guess we should start hauling all of this home,” You said, laying your head against his chest.

“Tonight?” He asked.

“Why not tonight?” You asked, looking up at him.

His eyes twinkled mischievously. “It’s rather late. I was thinking we could spend a night under the stars together,” He replied. “Perhaps… consummate the union.”

“You’re assuming much, aren’t you?” You said playfully.

“How much?” He asked with a grin.

You answered with a grin of your own. “Not that much. But I did leave the cabin door open.”

“Hmm,” He hummed, standing. “You wait here. I’ll take care of it.” He bent to kiss you, lingering for several seconds, gently scrapping his teeth over your bottom lip, making you moan. “You’ll be here when I get back, eh?”

“There’s nowhere I’d rather be,” you assured him.

Since my work is no longer searchable, please do me a favor and reblog this story if you enjoyed it. Help me reach a wider audience! To help me continue creating, please consider buying me a Kofi, becoming a Patron, or donating directly to my PayPal!

Thanks for reading!

My Masterlist

The Exophilia Creator’s Masterlist

[ginnyzero]

Mash Up Genre: SciFi Horror

I am not much of a horror film person. I don’t like slasher films and there isn’t much about horror that really enthuses me. I don’t like being ‘scared’ or that ‘mind numbing feeling of discomfort.’ I also have a pretty fine-tuned nervous system. I jump, easily. You know that scene in Independence Day where the alien has just taken out the scientists and he flings one of them against the glass of the smoky room. I jump, every, single, time. I know its coming and I still jump. Look boys, if you really want a film where I’m going to cuddle up to you and hide in your lap the entire time, then choose a horror film and you’ll be happy. (Except the Thing or whatever it was, I couldn’t sit and watch it, it bored me so much and then we got to the end and I was all, “Oh, tentacle porn.” That one took ten minutes for the people I was living with to react to as well. Amusement.)

So, it wasn’t really until I was talking with a former roommate (not the ones already mentioned) who also doesn’t like horror films. We were discussing Pitch Black because I liked the film and she didn’t. And she pointed out that she just couldn’t get invested in films where most of the characters die before the end. And I had this “oh damn it,” moment as I realized that Vin Diesel and the science fiction setting had suckered me into watching a survival horror film. The very thing I claimed not to enjoy!

Science fiction and horror go hand in hand. Because what isn’t scary about an alien trying to kill you? Humanity fears the unknown. There is nothing more unknown than a different race with different needs and an all encompassing desire to wipe out humanity. Friendly and cooperative aliens are few and far between to some writers. They are more common in books and television shows rather than movies.

Of course, scifi horror didn’t start out with shiny spaceships and slick aliens, it started with monsters, men who could turn invisible and doctors with multiple personalities. The 1950s is when the concept of space travel and aliens really started to take off. The Thing was actually a remake of “The Thing from Another World” from 1952. Invasion of the Body Snatchers came out in 1956 and coined a new term ‘pod people.’ In the 1960s, the Planet of the Apes was produced. Maybe not quite as horrifying as some of the others, but I find the idea quite terrifying. Alien, The Thing, Predator, Pitch Black (though the concept was abandoned quickly), most of the Starship Troopers franchise (even though survival horror isn’t what Starship Troopers is about), Independence Day and Serenity are all examples of modern day scifi horror movies.

Part of science fiction’s appeal is that to an extent most of it is ‘scare’ fiction. Scare fiction are stories that warn humanity about the consequences of their actions before those actions are even taken so that, hopefully, humanity won’t go about doing whatever it is the writer is trying to warn us about. Whether it is the evils of technology, artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, or aliens. Scare fiction exists to warn us ‘don’t do that.’ If you create artificial intelligence without limits, the machines will rise up to take over the world! (Asimov, Terminator, the Matrix.) Fear the unknown. Be on the lookout for Aliens! They want to kill you! (Every alien survival horror movie ever.)

With the genre already predisposed to trying to warn humanity, it is just the next step to try and make the watcher uncomfortable, discomforted and sometimes, downright terrified. Horror is about the unnatural played out on a large scale. Frankenstein was unnatural. A mismatched creatures formed of parts from dead men and brought to life through technology. People were terrified, shocked and disgusted that he existed. When watching a survival horror movie, it is just as much about the jumps, the strange ways that they die as for rooting for someone, anyone to live at the end.

Of course, people don’t like to be scared all the time and they have an interesting way of dealing with those fears. They laugh at it. So, eventually, something as terrifying and unnatural as Frankenstein is going to become the butt of the jokes in the Munsters. The Scary Movie franchise was just something that was coming whether we liked it or not.

Science fiction horror is a pretty successful mash up with a long history behind it. One that even suckers me into watching it from time to time. (I’m looking at you Starship Troopers, but that’s a rant for another time.)