#i'm going to try and make a bunch of sets for spooky season this year :)

[willowjay07]

My deadline is October 1st now.

[mifhortunach]

alright. okay. years ago when my attention span was dogshit i tried to listen to f@tt. and i planned to go from beginning to end. chronological. and i got through maybe an episode and a half. apparently you cant go from beginning to end (chronological) and i'm mad about it but im also forcibly shoving my spite and rage into a dark box. anyway. you're the main source of f@tt on my dash. please recommend me a good order?

The tldr of this is: you should probably start with sangfielle!

It’s the one I’ve been posting about mostly recently, its (relatively) short, its more standalone than most of the others, and if we’re got similar enough interests then the spooky aspects will deffo appeal to you. 

That said, here comes the essay, lol~ 

I am p touched that all the posting has inspired you to go at it again! And I deffo get the frustration with the chronological listening problems, because I’d try the same thing- I think that starting with the wording building stuff of AiH is... difficult, I guess. 

I’m just going to present more options / explain what I’m at better than I did above.

(here)

Autumn in Hieron is probably what you tried to start with before, and like... I loved Hieron so much when I was getting into it, but the audio issues and lack fo familarity can be a but hard to get past. 

Hieron (the collected seasons), is wicked long - but its like a combined high & low fantasy kind of setting. The first season is a little, ‘murder hobos are trapped in a corrupted/dying fantasy world’, but as it goes on it becomes broader in scope, and in intent I guess. If you wanted to get into that, the thing to do would probably be to go back and start with autumn. I believe you can probably start with Winter in Hieron?? But I don’t recall 100% how well that explains the previous season. 

The one that they generally recommend starting with is Marielda though! It’s a prequel-ish to all of the Hieron seasons. It’s only 12 eps, they were far enough into making the show that it’s very smooth and really romps along. And its got maybe the best music that any ttrpg has ever had. 

It’s a lot of magic, and gods and weird bureaucracy in unexpected places iirc. Its great fun :D

OR!!

there’s COUNTERweight, Twilight Mirage & all the other scifi seasons! If you’re more interested in robots and anime than in fantasy trappings.C/w is like,, Big Cyberpunk Noir things. In certain ways it sets up the stage for the later space seasons, but with these you generally don’t have to listen to the seasons in any particular order.

C/w is only the second season, so it kinda has some hold over issues of AiH- mostly meaning that at times it can be a little slow and clunky, and there’s some audio issues. Imo, the world building and character stuff MORE than makes up for all of though though. (C/w is; a ragtag bunch of low-level criminals for hire (ex-royal, ex-popstar, secret hacker clone & a robot) accidentally take on the massive robot-god embodiment of capitalism ig?? it’s a little hard to explain, fhdbcjcnc).

Both Twilight Mirage & Partizan are both scifi/big robot seasons & set in the same universe as C/w, but later in time yk? I’m going to clarify what I’m saying about them with the fact that I’ve not listened to either of these seasons in their entirety as of yet.

Twilight Mirage has the background premise of ‘what would a utopia that’s coming to its end look like’. Its... messy, its really long and sprawling, and has some of their strongest character work and world building. I think that to get into it you really need to be on the right wavelength ? But others could tell you better.

I haven’t listened to all of partizan either? Though I am right now, and the next season being set up set directly after, iirc. Partizan is very much a war story, you want to be, paying attention while you're listening, haha. 

That said! I think its super engaging immediately, and the characters are great fun. When it was just coming out it was pushed as a good jumping on point for new listeners, so that might be something to consider.

BUT SANGFIELLE, my beloved! If you’ve been into the fatt posting of the last while, its probably been about sangfielle. Right now that’s their most ‘standalone’ season, they set up a whole new world for it, and its a little different structurally than some of the other seasons. (Who’s in each party changes session to session, so you get a lot of different dynamics, compared with other seasons, and this means you can jump around a little more, in the first couple of seshes, imo).

It’s horror! Less in a particular nasty way, more in a ‘there’s horror themes in previous seasons and we’re playing with those interests of ours more here’. It’s horror about identity, bureaucracy, dehumanisation, being changed by obsession, haunted spaces, and also people getting turned into trains! And SO many bugs.

In a comparative sense, I’m pretty sure it’s also one of their shorter seasons, haha. I think its also very well produced; the music is excellent, and everything flows together really well. It’s very clean, in that sense. 

Its should also be said that ALL of these seasons are consistently both wicked funny, and kinda heart-wrenching at times; it IS critical world building, smart characterisation and fun interactions between good friends <3 ~ 

I think its best to check out whatever sounds sounds most interesting to you, and if you think it’s too slow just skip some of the world-building up the start of whatever season. That said, I’d deffo recommend sangfielle most of all, its very good!!

Important additional note, it’s good to go in knowing that regardless of season, you’ll probs have to commit to episodes that average around 2hours long, ahahaha 

- ty again for asking me !!! <3 hope u can get into the show this time round

[myassbrokethefall]

Ah, I sent that anon to @perplexistan. You totally make a good point. I'm also super pissed about how they treated William and Scully as a mother. I remember watching William during the original run (I'm an old) and screaming at the tv when she gave him up. It made zero sense. Especially since there's no evidence he was actually in any danger and if he had magical powers or whatever wouldn't "they" find him anyways? I guess I've bought into the maternal sacrifice trope. I take it back :)

Oops, I saw this last night right as I was leaving work and then forgot to respond! Listen, I’m not opposed to a LITTLE sacrifice, maternal or otherwise, as a plot point. That’s good drama! But there has been…too much of it, for my taste, without really any point, or happiness, or resolution. It’s one of my biggest problems with ye olde x files, that there are all these dramatic emotional high points of terror and sadness all supposedly in service of some good, some end, but that never comes because that part isn’t as dramatic. It all adds up to very little satisfaction. 

MSR is one of those things, but William is another. We have seen Scully being sad and crying about William (before and after he was born, before and after she gave him away), but rarely ever any happiness over him. Every moment of happiness Scully has ever had regarding the entirety of the William storyline has been tainted by some aching, life-destroying sadness. Even before that. First she finds out she can’t have children. Then she finds out she has a daughter, Emily, and tries to adopt her but can’t because of her Lifestyle and she feels guilty. Then Emily dies. Then (timeline-wise) she wants to try in vitro with Mulder and it doesn’t work and there’s crying. Then she finds out she’s pregnant…but Mulder is abducted. Then she cries through her pregnancy as Mulder is first missing, then returned dead and she has to bury him. Then he comes back to life, we WASTE several weeks on “who’s really the father though WINK” and a bunch of non-Mulder-and-Scully-related plotlines that no one cares about, and then she has the baby and everyone is happy for…24 hours (that we don’t get to see) and then Mulder leaves and she’s sad. Sad sad sad sad for Season 9, William (the payoff of all this angst and anticipation) is mostly nonexistent except when he’s being kidnapped in order to make Scully sad some more, and then Scully gives William up two episodes before Mulder returns. Cries on Mulder’s shoulder about how she gave William up and almost can’t even be happy that Mulder is back, end series. IWTB: Scully is sad about William and futilely tries to save another child’s life partly as an expression of that sadness. End of movie. Season 10: Mulder and Scully look sadly at pictures of William and think sadly about the life they never had with William. (Separately, since they had broken up.) Scully’s mother dies. This makes everyone more sad about William. Last episode: Maybe we can find William and take his DNA to save a dying Mulder. Cliffhanger. 

If they finally found William after all this time only for Scully to immediately die, I think I would burn all my XF shit. I’m not even kidding. I am so, so, SO over the Eternal Sadness/You Thought It Was Bad Before, But It’s Worse Now/No Resolve, Only Reboot that has been XF’s drama engine since Season 8. I honestly at this point wish William had just died as a baby because I am very, very, very tired of having the IDEA of William dangled in front of me in order to elicit an emotional reaction but never actually having anything happen. I to be honest with you am not that interested in a Teenage William storyline. When I think about time passing for Mulder and Scully and the idea of them sitting apart looking at pictures of William and being sad and broken up and that being their lives, and what a waste that is, and how they can never go back simply because no one ever got around to making more X-Files for many years, I just get depressed. If there had been a movie two years after Season 9 where this all happened, the DNA, the pictures, the sad daydreams, then maybe. Now I wish it just had been dropped because of all the time that has passed. 

I just want Mulder and Scully to be together and live their lives and do things together and solve mysteries together and have a range of emotion together and be affectionate with each other and fight spooky monsters and for me to have fun watching it. I appreciate (some of) the writers’ feeling that they SHOULD acknowledge William, since it’s a huge huge thing in a person’s life, but at the same time, it’s like a festering wound. So, to have Scully DIE after this extremely awful thread in her life is finally resolved would be the ultimate insult, to me. And also totally sounds like something Chris Carter would do. 

I didn’t mean for this to get so long or to be negative. I’m not feeling XF-negative! Filming is starting and I’m excited and it’s a good time right now because we have MONTHS of filming to look forward to and hope that the season will be awesome and CC will pull it out and end it on a good note and Mulder and Scully will be set free to ride off into the sunset and have whatever adventures we can imagine for them. I don’t want to feel that the people who make the show hate the characters or hate the fans, and I hope there is still sentiment left in the show’s creators for doing right by the characters and by the audience. 

I have plenty – PLENTY – of dark thoughts on the hypothetical scenario we’re discussing, and I could get into them, but I won’t. I can have fun picking at angsty ideas and trying to inoculate myself against them by preparing for them and examining them and acclimating myself, but this one, I can’t. If Mulder or Scully are killed off, it is game over for me with this show. Not fun, not OK, I don’t want to have a group mourning or whatever, I just would need to distance and separate myself and throw myself into something different in order to forget about it. Maybe I’d be ready to have a big group commiseration 10 years from now but I certainly wouldn’t right away. The fact that it’s even being discussed as a remote possibility upsets me. So that is how I’m feeling about that right now. 

OK, this is me venting and getting out all my feelings about William and everything else and now I’m done. Filming starts today! That’s crazy. Two thousand seventeen and we are getting new X-Files.