#isn't a buffy game

[oveliagirlhaditright]

Things that sillily make me happy: the fact that in the official Buffy chess set they released, Buffy and Angel are queen and king chess pieces.

And, I mean, it just makes sense that they would do this, of course. As it looks like this set was based on early season two, as Spike and Drusilla are the king and queen pieces for black.

But Buffy and Angel being king and queen pieces works so well, since they're paired together, of course. And equal to each other... and a battle couple. And more than anything, this is great because the queen's the most powerful piece on the board and Buffy's the most powerful character in the series, of course. And her being more powerful than Angel just tracks. Because she canonically is. And this makes me think of the many times where she saved him and he was the damsel.

Anyway...

[bookshelfdreams]

ofmd wasn't "profitable" enough but I didn't even get the feeling hbo wanted to make money off of it. They didn't promote it when s1 dropped, and the promo for s2 was erratic at best. They don't sell merch. Or physical copies. There's no bts documentaries other than what actors (shoutout to Samba ilu) make themselves in their spare time.

It took more than a full year for me to be able to watch s1 legally! I still can't access s2 legally anywhere! It's not that ofmd is unprofitable, it's that hbo refuses to profit off of it, because - well, because profiting off of it would mean investing work and money into it.

And like. Of course, when you compare it to the juggernauts hbo holds rights to, like GoT, ofmd is small fishes. But.

How on earth do these clowns think cult classics happen?

A Game of Thrones was first published in 1996 and didn't make it on the NYT beststeller list until 2011. The first edition of the first Harry Potter book was 500 pieces. And yeah, TV shows are different, but if you look at today's media landscape, would things like Star Trek, or Buffy, or Doctor Who stand the slightest chance? These things take time, is my point. A piece of media doesn't become a massively profitable, beloved classic over night. It takes time and effort to build that kind of franchise.

And the thing is! Nobody who makes these decisions even likes stories. I'm convinced that whoever is in charge at hbo, at amazon prime, even at disney, thinks storytelling is dumb and for idiots. They think it's enough to just slap the name of something people love on whatever garbage they spit out, for it to be profitable. They think it's the brand that sells: Look this has "Lord of the Rings" on it! Look, this one has "Game of Thrones", you like Game of Thrones don't you? Watch my show, boy.

But this isn't how this works. It's not the name that sells (unless, I suppose, you're the MCU, and even there one gets the impression the trick is finally stopping to work), especially not when the product is bad. People aren't idiots.

But it's not about making something good. It's not about making a meaningful piece of art, or telling an engaging story. ofmd served its purpose; it drew in all the subscribers it ever would, so there's no point in letting it go on. Even in the s2 that we did get, this is evident: the penny pinching is palpable, it's clear that the studio didn't want to spend any more money than absolutely necessary on it, and then cut the budget by 40%.

It's not about art. It never has been.

And it's not even about profit, because to be profitable eventually, stories have to be allowed to thrive first. You tell a good story first, and success happens later, often much, much later.

And ofmd was incredibly, astonishingly successful. It was the most in-demand series for weeks after the s1 finale. But even that wasn't enough, it's never enough, ofmd could have made record-setting profits and it still would have been cancelled, because -

Well, I don't know. Because we live in a bad time for art. Because Orwell was right, and stories have become commodities, like shoelaces. Because. Well. It's not about telling a story, is it?

What's the point of a story? What's the point of making something for the joy of making it? What's the point of a piece of art, existing, if it cannot be transferred into numbers for the stockholders?

idk how to end this. I hope David Jenkins finishes the story he wanted to tell, even if just for himself. I hope, against all odds, that weird, fun, heartfelt, beautiful little stories like ofmd continue to happen.

But goddammit.

[coraniaid]

buffy/faith for the ask game

(Reverse unpopular opinions)

Easily my favorite Buffy ship and one of my favorites in any work of fiction. I think the main reasons it works so well for me are:

The way it resonates so strongly with what's going on in the rest of the show the season Faith arrives. I mean, Buffy comes out to her mother (as a Slayer), which is treated by the show as ... well, as Buffy coming out ("it's because you didn't have a strong father figure, isn't it?" / "have you tried ... not being a Slayer?" / "I've tried to march in the Slayer Pride Parade...") and a handful of episodes later Buffy meets another girl who is also a Slayer and who she starts spending a lot of time with (because they have a connection -- "it's kind of a Slayer thing" -- which she doesn't have with her other, non-Slayer friends). And while they're busy patrolling cemeteries and looking for vampires every night, this other Slayer is keen to (1) talk to Buffy about sex and quiz her on her love life; (2) repeatedly tell her that "all men are beasts" and "losers" who can't be trusted; (3) suggest that Buffy should be more open to having sex with the people she spends her nights hunting vampires with (like ... who, Faith?); and (4) is delighted when Buffy breaks up with her boyfriend (and later furious when she gets back together with her previous ex) and immediately suggests that she could replace him ("You're still going to that dance, right? [...] Why don't we go together?"). If this was deliberately laying the ground work for an explicitly romantic arc, it would feel pretty heavy-handed. The fact that it apparently wasn't (at least not on the part of the showrunner or of most of the writers) almost makes it work better, in some ways.

The way that Faith is, from the very beginning, very deliberately written as a foil for Buffy, a person Buffy might have been if things went just a little differently in her life -- because she goes through things very much like things the audience has already seen Buffy go though (living alone in a small place in a strange town with no friends all season the way Buffy did in Anne, panicking and starting to pack to run away in Faith, Hope & Trick in the same way Buffy was accused of doing just the episode before, killing a person the way Buffy thought she had in Season 2's Ted, the way her fear of Kakistos mirrors Buffy's fear of the Master in When She Was Bad) and because she is so aware of the fact that she's always being compared to Buffy and coming up short, either by other people or herself ("you get the Mom, you get the Watcher ... what do I get?") it's very easy to tie Faith's arc across the show back to Buffy and to her feelings about Buffy. Faith wanting Buffy to accept her becomes Faith wanting this idealized version of herself to forgive her failings. And likewise Buffy recriprocating Faith's feelings and admitting to herself that she is attracted to Faith becomes Buffy accepting that Faith (and the things she represents) really are an integral part of Buffy herself; that Faith isn't entirely wrong when she says that Buffy enjoys being a Slayer and that being a Slayer is something she should be proud of (or, again, being "a Slayer").

Apparently this wasn't the original plan for the character (if there ever was anything like an 'original plan'), but the fact Faith's arc in Season 3 so clearly mirrors Angel's in Season 2 -- and the fact she is so very weird about Angel all season (and that Buffy is equally weird about how attracted to Faith she just keeps insisting Angel must be) just naturally suggests that Faith might have a similiar role to Angel in the narrative beyond just the circumstances of her betrayal of (and later not-quite-being-killed by) Buffy. And Angel is -- for the first three seasons of the show at least -- primarily cast in the role of Buffy's doomed tragic love interest who she has to (metaphorically) kill but will later be reunited with. Which makes Faith ... well, something.

Even if not all the writers were on board, the fact that Eliza Dushku was deliberately playing Faith as attracted to Buffy (and that SMG was playing Buffy as alternately frustrated by and protective of and tempted by Faith) gives their scenes together a chemistry that I don't think most of Buffy's (or Buffy's) canon relationships ever managed. Whether that's the Amends porch scene or Buffy kissing Faith in the hospital in Graduation Day or any and all of their various fights across the show. And those fight scenes are all great, which is another thing I love about the ship: is it really a proper enemies-to-lovers arc if one of the people in it hasn't tried to kill the other one and left them in a coma for months?

Faith's return to Buffy in the last five epsiodes of the show is one of the last season's saving graces, and it helps that by this point the writers definitely seemed to be playing up the ship deliberately ("Willow said you needed me: didn't give it a lot of thought" / "Defensiveness and weird mixed signals ... I've got Faith for that" / "Deep down you've always wanted Buffy to accept you. To love you." / "It feels like it's mine ... I guess that means it's yours"). Even without ever being canon and without wandering what happens post-Chosen, it feels like there's a real narrative arc to their relationship, from their initially rocky start through to "just good friends" to bitter enemies through to Faith seeking (and finding) some measure of redemption and Buffy cautiously letting her back into her life. Faith isn't in the show much (or even mentioned in the show in most episodes), but it feels like she has a genuinely meaningful connection to Buffy that most characters who appeaer in less than a season's worth of episodes can't manage.

The thing that made the ship work for me, rewatching the show after several years back in 2020, is the fact that Faith is -- even at her worst -- incredibly sympathetic precisely because she is such a loser and hates herself so much. She boasts about being a great actor despite the fact we see her awkwardly telling the sort of transparent lies that ... well, normally only Buffy manages (compare "There's this big party ..." in Amends to Buffy trying to tell her old crush Ford that "there was a cat ... and then there was another cat, and they were fighting"), she wants people to think she's cool so badly but only manages to fool Xander and Willow, she tries to act as though she's happy without friends but we only ever see her alone sitting watching old tv shows or lying listlessly on her bed, she insists she doesn't need a Watcher and "has a problem with authority figures" but she is so openly desperate for any sort of parental guidance in her life that she sides with first Mrs Post then the Mayor. She ties Buffy's mom up so she can have someone to listen to how sad she is that Buffy's moved on to a new guy in college and "dumped" her. The scene in the church in Who Are You? where Faith-as-Buffy furiously attacks Buffy-as-Faith while screaming through tears that she's "nothing ... disgusting ... murderous bitch" is, I think, a strong contendor for the best scene the show ever produced.

As Doug Petrie said, the reason Faith works as a character -- and the reason that Buffy/Faith works as a ship -- is that Faith is incredibly unhappy. If Faith was the cool loner she tries to pass herself off as -- and which some of the fandom seems to think she is -- the ship wouldn't be nearly as compelling to me. Faith isn't just the part of Buffy who loves Slaying and pushes back when other people give her orders, and she's not just another verison of Angelus. She's the part of Buffy from Becoming who lost everything and ran away from home, only unlike Buffy she never got to go home again. As Angel asked Buffy in that episode: "no friends, no hope ... take that away, what's left?". Well, Faith is what's left. Of course Buffy would see herself in Faith, right from the beginning. Of course Buffy would want to protect her. As Buffy (Sunnydale Class Protector 1999) tells Angel, Faith is in pain ... she's somebody who "some people ... protective-type people" are naturally drawn to. The show is very consistent about the fact that Buffy's type is friendless losers who look good in leather and can fight alongside her in battle (but not quite as well, so she can protect them and look after them when they're hurt). And what bigger loser in the show is there than Faith?

[sprintingowl]

TTRPGs As Terrariums For Blorbos

One thing that I think isn't covered enough in TTRPG recommendations is styles of play.

There's a lot of "this game has this tone," or "this game is this amount of crunchy," but less "what are you playing towards?"

In games like Microscope and I'm Sorry Did You Say Street Magic? and The Quiet Year, you're playing to see what happens to the setting.

In games like Mork Borg and Into The Odd and Mothership, you're playing to see how far your character can get.

And in a lot of games, you're playing to create a blorbo, an OC, just a little guy, and the soul of the gameplay is the story of who your guy is and who your guy becomes.

This is blorbo style play.

And the thing about styles of play is that you can apply them to any game, even games that aren't really built to enable them. So I wanted to take a moment to shine a spotlight onto some games that do specifically enable you to fully blorb out. (I'll try to cover a mix of genres and tones, but the rpg scene is vast so if you have a favorite that I missed please feel free to shout it out in the replies.)

-Golden Sky Stories. This is the English translation of the Japanese TTRPG Yuuyake Koyake. You play as shapeshifter kids and spirits in a small town and, instead of tracking EXP, the thing that you carry from session to session is your relationships with other characters. The tone of the game is heartwarming, and if combat happens, both sides lose. There can be emotional turmoil, but this isn't a game where you have to worry about bad things happening to your blorbo.

-New World Of Darkness. On the other hand, let's say you *want* bad things to happen to your blorbo. You want to play a guy that's really going through it. If you also like modern supernatural stories, New World Of Darkness was built for you. Characters in NWoD can be entirely non-combat, or a literal werewolf, or a noncombat werewolf. The game places a lot of emphasis on navigating through the setting socially, as its supernatural creatures tend to run in factions and starting a fight usually means making a bunch of enemies.

-Pasion De Las Pasiones. Of course, not everyone wants a fantastical setting. Sometimes good old melodrama is hearty and comforting. Pasion De Las Pasiones is a playable telenovela, and it encourages you to play your characters bold and recklessly. Every class even has a built-in Meltdown, where if you're pushed to the edge they become extra reckless, ensuring a broad fallout of messy drama when they do manage to calm down.

-Cortex System / Unisystem. Perhaps you want to drop your blorbo into an existing fictional universe? But you also want stats and meaty character creation instead of just freeform roleplay? There are easily a dozen games on the Cortex engine, including Supernatural, Firefly, Smallville, Battlestar Galactica, Marvel, and Leverage. And on Unisystem, there's Buffy, Army Of Darkness, as well as a somewhat rare I Can't Believe It's Not Planet Of The Apes.

-Lancer / Gubat Banwa. If you like blorb-y play but still want a heavy side of combat, both of these games have you covered. Lancer has a sprawling scifi universe focused on mech pilots, and Gubat Banwa has a violent and lavish mythological Philippines setting. Both of these games also have stunningly beautiful artwork, so if you like seeing a setting visually come to life, these are for you.

-Fabula Ultima. My final recommendation is also an extremely gorgeous looking game. Fabula Ultima is built on the bones of Ryuutama (itself an excellent travel-fantasy game) to enable meaty, blorby Final Fantasy style campaign play. Combat is a rich and deep option in Fabula Ultima, but so is everything from spellcasting to crafting, and players have built-in resources they can spend to affect the story. If a scene isn't quite going the way you want it to, you can spend a point to nudge it in the right direction. Fabula Ultima also feels extremely complete without being too complicated.

So there you go. Eight options, and that's barely scratching the surface of the sea of blorb-y games (Seventh Sea, Exalted, Blue Rose, Legend Of The Five Rings, Coyote And Crow, Timewatch, Nahual, and more!)

It's also not wrong to play non-blorb-y games in a blorb-y way. Do whatever you're comfortable with! But you might enjoy dipping into these titles.

Finally, if you've read this far and you're somehow still looking for MORE recommendations, I wrote this game about runaway changelings trying to find their place in the world, and it's probably the blorbiest in my catalog.

[tobiasdrake]

What's the best depiction of/metaphor for addiction you've seen in fiction?

I don't know if I'd call it the best; I have a hard time remembering all of the media I've consumed when given general questions like that. But the one that stands out most in my mind, at least, is Willow Rosenberg's four-season decline into overdependence and eventual substance abuse of magic in Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.

A point I really like about the way BTVS handles addiction is that it doesn't blame the substance. The message isn't, "Magic is bad for you; It makes you an addict." The problem is never magic, and we see other characters both using magic responsibly and confronting Willow for the way she uses it throughout the series.

The problem, the message that BTVS conveys through Willow's addiction plotline, is addiction. The problem with addiction is addiction. You can be addicted to all kinds of things, not just controlled substances like drugs and alcohol. Caffeine can be addictive. Sugar. Video games. Fast food. Gambling. Sex. The internet. Money. Whatever gives your brain that dopamine hit that makes life worth living, that can form an addiction.

The problem in BTVS isn't magic. It's Willow's dependency on it. The way she makes it her personality, replacing who she was before. The way she leans on it as a crutch whenever things are physically or emotionally difficult. The way it substitutes for her lack of self-esteem, validating her with an artificial confidence boost by making her feel powerful and uniquely capable.

It starts in season two, with Willow casting her very first spell in the season finale to restore Angel's soul. Giles warns her then and there that casting this spell will "open a door that you may never be able to close". She doesn't really know what that means and neither do we.

But from season three onwards as Willow begins to learn about magic, we see her constantly turning to magic whenever things get hard - against advisement from the rest of the cast. People think the addiction storyline began somewhere in season six, but it actually began in episode 03x08 "Lovers Walk".

Willow and Xander, at this point, had begun cheating on their boy/girlfriends Oz and Cordelia with each other. Willow feels intensely guilty for it. At this point, they have three options in front of them:

1 - Break up with Oz and Cordelia, and get together. 2 - Do a better job of controlling their attaction to one another and remain faithful to their partners. 3 - See if Oz and Cordelia would be up for a polycule.

Willow decides to take a fourth option: She decides unilaterally that she should cast an anti-love spell on herself and Xander to magically erase their feelings for one another. She doesn't even consult him on it; In fact, she actively lies to him to keep him from realizing what she's doing.

She's put in a difficult but relatable situation; This is her first time having to make a choice between two people she's interested in. It's a situation where she needs to figure out what she wants for herself. And her response is "I can lobotomize us with magic".

It's gonna be a bumpy ride from here. This is Willow's chief character flaw. When things are hard either physically or emotionally, she leans on magic - Whether it's appropriate or not. Something that both Giles and Tara criticize her for as the seasons progress, to which her response is to sneak around behind their backs and do spells without their knowing - Such as trying to curse Oz after their breakup or giving Dawn guidance to perform an ill-advised resurrection spell on her mom.

Again, the problem is never that she does magic. Magic is shown to be tremendously useful in making the impossible possible. The problem is that she keeps leaping to extreme gestures of magic to do what was already possible. That she uses it as an emotional crutch, as a surrogate for her own self-esteem.

Magic makes her feel powerful. It makes her feel valid. That's something she didn't have before she had magic, and something she doesn't have when she isn't using magic. So she overindulges and rides the high of being able to crinkle her nose and make party favors go up, or stab a god with knives, or make anyone she loses come back to life because she is Willow Almighty and magic has made her omnipotent.

She likes being Willow Almighty. It's an awful lot better than Willow the Put-Upon Nerd. So she lets an otherwise benign activity become her entire personality, and she is made worse because of it.

[velvetvexations]

The thing about comparing Kipperlilly's grudge to hating DEI and affirmative action is that those things are exactly what she's advocating for. The Bad Kids are not receiving accommodation for anything - and in fact Aguefort seems like the type to despise things like accommodations and would tell disabled people to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, but I digress -rather, they have direct connections to massive save-the-world plots three years in a row now that puts them way ahead of everyone else. Though they put in hard work, that doesn't change the fact that no one else working as hard as they can will ever equal being told to go stop a god from coming back and coincidentally your dad (a) worked directly with that dead god's primary agent in the past and (b) is now a super cool angel secret agent who will directly assist you in the task. Oh, and also, your teammate's parents are the dead god's primary mortal agents. And also they kidnapped your other teammate's dad because he's a powerful demon lord so now she's involved too. And you all happen to end up on Leviathan, where Fabian is an instant celebrity who immediately gets a cult worshiping the planks he walks on because they all work for his rich undead infernal dad.

The issue is that people keep mapping it to the real world and seeing "tragic backstory" like it would be IRL, which is a mistake. It's not a disability. They don't go to normal school to become accountants or NASA engineers, they are there to be doing exactly that shit that their backstories rope them into. Like, this isn't Buffy, they aren't saving the world incidentally, this is school for saving the world to pursue a career in saving the world. Spyre functions so differently from IRL that everyone is dramatically failing to comprehend the actual situation everyone is in.

And the thing about hating affirmative action is that it presumes someone only got into whatever not because they have skill, but because of their race or something like that. That's manifestly different from what's going on here. Kipperlilly has no doubt the Bad Kids are incredibly powerful and skilled - but their backstories gave them opportunities to use that power and skill that no one else will ever have regardless of effort or even luck. The Bad Kids can't go five seconds without tripping over the revelation that the BBEG for the year is one of their second cousins. That just doesn't happen to other people, period. The world revolves around the BK's in ways it will never revolve around anyone else so the Bad Kids will always get the massive adventures to save the world and be the top of their class because they're personally connected to the narrative.

Remember, Brennan has confirmed that other AA students do not do shit like that. They do exactly the sort of missions you'd expect them to - go in dungeon, fight monsters, come back. It's not "uh, the Rat Grinders should have just gone out and saved the world too", that's not how it works. AA students are not usually expected to, their rat grinding is just a more tedious and efficient version of what they would be doing otherwise. The BK's don't get involved with these plots simply because they're the most heroic heroes ever who seek wrongs to right, they do it because every single time everyone but Gorgug (who is for the most part absent major narrative stakes) was born someone that would get those in's, feats reproducible by no one else.

"Ah, but the Seven-"

The Seven prove the tragedy of it. Because Kipperlilly is right, but she's also wrong. The brilliance of BLeeM this season is that he's crafted a narrative inseparable from the meta of how the game works. In a very real way this is like the Dungeons & Dragons versions of Tron. The fact that it's a series of fictional TTRPG sessions is essential to the universe and it's story, in a Twin Peaks-ian way.

Because, see, it's not actually, technically magical trauma that gives out those narrative advantages. Magical trauma is just the most obviously visible side-effect. What the issue actually is is that, as everyone has noted over and over again, the Rat Grinders are NPCs, and it is therefore impossible for the world to ever bend itself around them the way it does for the PCs. Except, most are just saying that as a funny haha joke.

No, like, literally, that's the issue. They will always be in the shadow of the handful of people that the people constructing their world, their timeline, their very existence, has decided matter. They are doomed by narrative causality to be "boring". And I'm going to take a moment to say here, isn't it crazy no one is talking about this when we just got done with Neverafter which was all about this exact thing????? Like, literally the BBEG was the Authors. That is the situation here, more or less.

Anyway, there will never be a demon attacking that due to a curse is only vulnerable to hot licks from Ruben's guitar passed down from the first gnomish rocker. Mary Ann will never be the prophesized liberator of kobolds enslaved in dragon dens. Ivy will never find out her father was secretly a super-soldier for the Council of Chosen who before he was assassinated left her notes detailing a sinister plot within the government of Solace.

People keep having a hard time with this because it intuitively doesn't feel right to ever classify something like losing a father in any context to have some kind of bright side. But if you take nothing else away from this post, let it be this: Adventuring as it's done in Spyre is not something done in the real world. Adventuring is something everyone chose to go to AA to learn and put into practice as their long-term career. And in that, absolutely these things give the PCs a completely one hundred percent insurmountable leg-up on the thing they're all in competition for.

And it being completely insurmountable in that way further goes to show the difference between hating that situation and hating affirmative action. Even AA is not a guarantee that a specific member of the majority will lose out on something and a specific member of the minority will get it instead. As soon as the character sheets were rolled everyone else at Aguefort may as well have just gone home and started studying to be accountants because the main characters had been chosen. Or they could keep going and hope they get a spin-off, I guess.

But Kipperlilly does keep trying, for she doesn't really comprehend the true eldritch horror beyond her existence shackled to the bits of a bunch of comedians, and her solution is to adjust for those unfair advantages.

Which is affirmative action.

How is that not obvious.

[theribbonmarkedroom]

The erasure of Andi Mack makes me so sad as someone who watched it as it was airing. I understand the show had issues regarding a Certain Actor, but it still makes me really sad for the people who worked on it. And because the show is such a gem. I want to write about Andi Mack in general one day, but because it's pride month I want to briefly talk about the show through that lens specifically.

Firstly, Andi Mack has so many episodes missing on Disney+ AND DisneyNow that it would be impossible to try to watch the series in full by using any of these apps. Until recently, DisneyNow had completely removed Andi Mack from its app, and put it back on with only an incomplete season three and without any of the games that were there originally (like Andi's Texts). This, I'm assuming, has to do with that Certain Actor, but the missing episodes has also made including Cyrus in any pride posts or collections harder than it should be (more on that in a second).

On Disney+, there is a "Pride Collection" which does not include anything Andi Mack related despite Cyrus being the first openly gay main character on Disney Channel. His coming out scenes (plural because of the individual scenes with Buffy, Andi and then Jonah) were extremely prominent not only to real people, but also to Cyrus' character as a whole. Two out of the three episodes where Cyrus comes out - "Hey, Who Wants Pizza?" (season 2, episode 1) | "Cyrus' Bash-Mitzvah!" (season 2, episode 13) | "One in a Minyan" (season 3, episode 11) - are not even available on Disney+, nor are any of them on DisneyNow (sidebar, Andi Mack isn't featured on DisneyNow 's pride section either). What's even more frustrating is that the series finale, "We Were Here", where Cyrus and TJ are confirmed to have mutual feelings for each other, are available on both Disney+ AND DisneyNow, yet it does not feature on either app's pride sections. Cyrus being gay wasn't just implied, he literally says the words "I'm gay" the third time he comes out and the second time he clearly says he has a crush on Jonah. It's not easy to overlook him as gay, and as a character who should be included in those pride collections, so his omission is clearly deliberate.

Even if the coming out episodes weren't featured, at the very least, any episode with Cyrus and TJ after they became friends should count; episodes like "For the Last Time", "The Cake That Takes the Cake", "Mount Rushmore or Less", "Something to Talk A-Boot" and of course the series finale. Surprising no one, only three of the Tyrus episodes I listed (and there are more) are actually on Disney+. I mean, they included a Miraculous episode in the Disney+ "Pride Episodes" collection that had the most minute blink-and-you'll-miss-it scene of Alec in a wig, so why not include any episode at all with TJ and Cyrus? Idk the whole thing is just very frustrating for so many reasons.

Edit: if anyone is interested in putting together a fan collection of art, stories etc etc of Andi Mack or letters detailing what the show meant to you that we could somehow share with Terri Minsky to let her know how much we appreciate her and Andi Mack, please dm me. There has to be some way we can show her that we haven’t forgotten about the show or her. I can always make another post if there’s enough interest to spread the word

[canonmisogynyvictimstournament]

Now that submissions are closed, we can talk stats. There were 881 valid, unique submissions for 474 characters! Woof, women have it rough out there!

The most submitted characters, with a relevant propaganda snippet included, are:

1. Sakura Haruno (Naruto): 28 [where do i even fucking begin]

2. Cordelia Chase (Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel): 21 [OH SO MANY THINGS]

3. Misa Amane (Death Note): 20 [The author of Death Note invented new forms of misogyny just to apply them to Misa.]

4. Kaede Akamatsu (Danganronpa V3): 15 [Oh, you thought we would have a female main character in one of our mainline games? With a cool defining talent, no less? That's stupid of you]

5. TIE: Kairi (Kingdom Hearts): 14 [I'm so mad. I think she deserves a gun.]

5. TIE: Stephanie Brown (DC Comics): 14 [She does eventually get retconned as surviving the event and hiding out in Africa (don't ask, it does not make more sense in context)]

The canons with the most submissions, with a relevant propaganda snippet included, are:

1. DC Comics: 61 [DC has SO MUCH sexism it's laughable]

2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel: 35 [Fuck Joss Whedon, man.]

3. Naruto: 33 [because Kishimoto hates women]

4. Warrior Cats: 26 [Warriors is one of the most misogynistic children's series I've ever seen]

5. Danganronpa: 25 [I honestly had to think about it just to decide which woman is treated the worst because this series hates them so much]

The canons with the most characters submitted, with a relevant propaganda snippet for a specific character included, are:

1. DC Comics: 21 [Free her from the huge tits back breaking pose.]

2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel: 12 [Anyways she was so hot and for what. 10/10 my lesbian awakening.]

3. Supernatural: 11 [Yeah, she got randomly killed off-screen for shock value and manpain, but she sent an email right before she died so at least her death wasn't in vain, right?]

4. TIE: Star Trek: 9 [She literally gets teleported out of her clothes in one episode.]

4. TIE: Yu-Gi-Oh!: 9 [One loss is particularly brutal as she falls from a large height directly onto her head and goes into a coma (again. yes this was the second time).]

5. TIE: Warrior Cats: 8 [I'm sure she'll get submitted again just ask any reasonable fan they'll tell you about her and her sister]

5. TIE: Attack on Titan: 8 [As a child soldier, she does commit some war crimes]

And here are some charts to show how some of these entries fucked the scale on my charts:

Look at Sakura, fucking up my chart with her numbers.

On a similar note...

Good god, DC, I know what you did, but add fucking up my charts to your list of crimes.

And now, enjoy some rankings of my favorite things:

My favorite universal sentiment quotes from propaganda are:

She lived she served cunt and then she got killed off super early so that the male characters could experience man pain and also because I guess she would have been too powerful if left alive. [Wen Qing (Mo Dao Zu Shi)]

That design. Dear god. I don't want to live on this planet anymore. [Mitzi (The Queen's Corgi)]

In the end she may have girlbossed too close to the sun, but I support her anger. [Ling Wen (Heaven Official's Blessing)]

the victim of “writer doesn’t understand women and also hates them” disease. [Naomi Misora (Death Note)]

She could 100% kill somebody but nobody ever effing lets her. Rip queen. [Kairi (Kingdom Hearts)]

My favorite raging at a writer quotes from propaganda are:

1. You took every single protagonist to weird lion heaven, Clive, but suddenly Susan isn't good enough. [Susan Pevensie (The Chronicles of Narnia)]

2. Being a woman written by Joss Whedon should automatically entitle her to financial compensation tbh. [River Tam (Firefly)]

3. A lot can be summed up in a couple words, namely, "Furman, why?" [Arcee (Transformers)]

4. Can you tell respect women juice ran in Tolstoy's veins. [Lise Bolkonskaya (War and Peace)]

5. TIE: (specifically a guy called Dan Didio, who we all hate) [Stephanie Brown (DC Comics)]

5. TIE: until Geoff motherfucking Johns comes into the picture [Pantha (DC Comics)]

My favorite quotes from propaganda that have nothing to do with misogyny, y'all are just funny:

I wish I could use bold here, because there's no such thing as uppercase numbers. [Arcee (Transformers)]

the most convoluted and lore dense piece of media this side of the afton criticality. [Jane Crocker (Homestuck)]

ended up starting a gang war by accident [Stephanie Brown (DC Comics)]

Ashfur, who later turns out to be a murderous incel [Squirrelflight (Warrior Cats)]

Hawkfrost is actively seeing Brambleclaw and his evil father in cat hell. [Squirrelflight (Warrior Cats)]

[greghatecrimes]

Baby Ducks AU Teenage Headcanons

(Only Chase and Thirteen this time since I'm still not exactly sure how I'm going to put Kutner in this AU, but eventually I will write some for him too)

Both Chase and Thirteen are one hundred thousand percent 'nerds'. In both the academic and the hobby sense.

Both of them are quick as a whip (they're House's kids, how could they not be?). On the Honor Roll, all honors and AP classes, that sort of thing. There's never any pressure from House or Wilson to be high achieving; they're very self motivated, but it's not for the grades or the GPA. Growing up with House meant that his thirst for knowledge rubbed off on them. They always want to know more about the world, the body, the brain, etc.

Chase is quiet about it, but he's a bookworm. He's always got one in his backpack or on his bedside table.

Thirteen enjoys reading too, but she's a bit more of a TV nerd. I think her favorites would be Xena: Warrior Princess, Buffy, most of the Star Trek series, etc. (Probably also really liked the '80s She-Ra as a kid, even though it was a little bit before her time in this AU)

Thirteen and some of her friends get into D&D when she's 12-13, and she LOVES it. She (lovingly) bullies Chase into trying it despite his many, many complaints, but he ends up adoring it, too. They manage to convince House and drag Wilson into doing one-shots with them a couple times a month, and eventually start trying to wheedle their way into a full campaign. (They succeed. House DMs and has too much fun with it.)

(Wilson is supportive of the nerdiness and D&D, it just takes him a while to wrap his head around how to do TTRPGs)

Neither one of them is quite as into video games as House is, but they both enjoy playing them. There are definitely many extremely intense family Mario Kart nights, and Thirteen and Chase have one hundred percent gotten into a physical fight that started over Mario Kart (lmaoooo).

Thirteen is into the Legend of Zelda games whereas I think teenage Chase would enjoy faster paced games like the Sonic franchise. Both of them like the Pokémon games and would probably play the ones you could link up with each other on (the ones on GBC and GBA, and maybe later the original NDS) together.

Tweenage Chase and Thirteen (14 and 12) stay up way too late to play Pokemon together. There's a period where almost every night they're hidden in one of their bedrooms, lights off and covers pulled up over their heads, with a flashlight and their Gameboy Colors.

Teenage Chase takes after House and plays the guitar. He can definitely carry a tune (read: he has a great voice but he's modest about it/doesn't ever tell anyone outside his family about it), but he'd keep singing as something for himself, just at home or in private.

Thirteen takes up the piano to improve her dexterity and fine motor skills once she's old enough to understand that she's at risk for Huntington's. Music theory isn't her style, but she does love the challenge in teaching herself progressively harder and harder pieces, and the control and detail it takes to master something particularly tricky.

House has absolutely shown them anime and manga. More on that in a later post for sure.

[wasted-women]

ROUND 1C, MATCH 3 OUT OF 8!

Causes of Death & Propaganda Under the Cut:

Tara Maclay

Cause of Death: Shot in crossfire

Propaganda:

Ok so idk if she actually counts but I'm submitting her and please throw her out if not. Here's why I think Tara was fridged: the sole purpose of her death was to further the plot and cause pain to other characters. Now, because it's Buffy, these other characters were women. So her death was only to cause pain to her girlfriend (ex-girlfriend? They were broken up but mending) Willow, cause her to relapse into magic, and then make her essentially the big bad of the season. All of this was then to cause Buffy, the protag, to have to fight her best friend and be told she needed to either stop her or kill her. So while Buffy and Willow are both women, Tara's death was solely to cause them pain as significant other and protagonist and to further the plot. (It's also bury your guys and Joss Whedon sooooo). Tara literally was killed sloppily for no other reason than as a plot device in a desperate "well we already killed our protag and brought her back to life, how do we raise the stakes from here" ploy necessitated by crappy writing. If she doesn't count, again please throw her out, but I feel like she counts as fridging esp when looking at how Joss Whedon rights Buffy in this season to essentially bc a self insert of man pain but as a woman.

this is the only lgbt example I can think of but it definitely counts imo. link to death scene here (scene starts a minute into the video, with obvious trigger warnings for death and blood and gunshots): https://youtu.be/01NxsKojYyM?si=dxZvcvOhp3x6S8ha

Stuffing a woman in the fridge is one thing, but stuffing a queer woman who was one half of a beloved same-sex couple on a TV show famous for its strong female characters for the sake of drama while enforcing negative LGBT+ stereotypes in the process is really something else.

Her girlfriend, Willow essentially plays the role of the man in the relationship. Tara dies to facilitate her villain arc. Xander is also sad about her death and he is a man.

Mako Mori

Cause of Death: Exploded in a helicopter

Propaganda:

The Mako Mori test has been proposed as a "better" version of the Bechdel Test (which I'm well aware of the bechdel tests point and common misuse) she has a full, rich arc that is not romance oriented in the first movie. Also she pilots a giant robot. In the second movie she's textbook definition fridged.

Daenerys Targareon

Cause of Death: Stabbed by her lover for becoming a tyrant

Propaganda:

I'm just. I can't believe she hasn't been submitted yet. Classic example of end game fridging, where she *had* to be killed by her male lover to bring him pain and Man Tears TM. Clearly it effects him (sad) more than her (dead). Now obv Dany had a whole plot prior to this, but her death itself is such a classic example of fridging that I have to submit her, it legit only happened for a stupid "plot" to bring Jon ManPain. It was a death so stupid that GOT, what once was a cultural touchstone, isn't talked about except in how bad the end was

[oveliagirlhaditright]

Fandom things I'm looking forward to:

Kingdom Hearts IV and Missing Link

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Final Fantasy IX Remake

Final Fantasy Tactics Remaster or Remake (whichever it is. I've heard both things)

The fourth Madoka Magica movie, whenever that comes out (seriously. Where is it? First it was announced as the Concept movie. Then it was re-announced years later with a new name, and it's still missing)

The Percy Jackson TV show

The Infernal Devices TV show

Maybe the Twilight TV show. Maybe.

The animated Smallville continuation that Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum are working on, whenever it comes out

I was going to put Baron and Toluca on this list (that's, like, a spiritual successor to the OG "Roswell" TV show. Majandra Delfino who played Maria in the show wrote the script, and she and Brendan Fehr who played Michael star in it. They're also planning for more Roswell cameos in later episodes), but it came out and I didn't even know it? But I have no idea how to watch it, though, as I guess it only came out in theaters in Albuquerque. Here's hoping it comes out on DVD or something...

The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes

The alleged Firefly reboot

The new Daredevil show

The Batman Part II

The next part in Tom Holland's Spider-Man movies

The DCU, starting with Superman Legacy in 2025

The Five Nights at Freddy's movie and Help Wanted 2

The Iron Lung movie

The TV show that it sounds like Markiplier will be working on after he's done with the Iron Lung movie

The next Bendy and the Ink Machine thing being worked on

MAYBE the Hello Neighbor sequel. I know. I KNOW! (It's really only because the second game had to end on a cliffhanger.)

Five Nights at Candy's 4

Frozen III

Disney's "Wish"

The next and final season of the Clear Card arc of Cardcaptor Sakura

The new Avatar series (the one about the third Avatar in the cycle: the Earth bender)

The live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender series, perhaps

The Chosen season 4

[nevergonnabemuchmorethanweather]

A big part of the reason I only ship Buffy with Angel (aside from the fact that they're basically canonical soulmates) is that I feel like Angel is the only one who simultaneously sees and isn't intimidated by how extraordinary Buffy is and gives her a safe place to be entirely unextraordinary for a little while.

With Angel, she gets to have insecurities and hurt feelings and irrational fears and snappy, bitchy moments. She gets to just need a hug and a pep-talk sometimes, or reassurance after a bad dream, or just a break from things in general.

And at the same time she never, ever needs to pretend she's less than she is. She doesn't need to pretend to need help when she doesn't, or that she doesn't know what to do when she does. She doesn't have to play an elaborate game of charades to draw attention away from her own strength and intelligence or that she is, in fact, very much the Head Bitch In Charge.

And Angel is equally interested in both sides of her. He wants to hear silly stories from her childhood and take her ice skating and laugh at her messy bed hair and listen to her complain about stuff. He's also very much into watching her kick everybody's ass, including sometimes his. And it's not that he loves both the girl and the slayer. He understands, better than just about anyone else, that there's no distinction.

[finalgirl1984]

The thing about that whole speech Spike gives to Robin in "Lies my parents told me" Is that in basically saying that Nikki had a choice, and she chose slayerhood over her son, and she chose to die, and that in doing so we should have little sympathy for her or Robin, is that it kind of indirectly says we shouldn't have any sympathy for Buffy either. If we shouldn't care about Nikki because she "chose" this life, then why care about Buffy. It could even be argued Buffy had more of a choice than Nikki because of Kendra and later Faith. If Nikki's being a slayer overshadowed and negated her love for her son, then Buffy's being a slayer should negate her love for Dawn. If it's ok for Spike to kill her with no remorse, then it would have been fine for any other demon to kill buffy. If Nikki's death isn't tragic and just part of the game she knew she was getting into, then Buffy's deaths shouldn't be tragic either. If we shouldn't care about Robin's pain at losing his mother, then we shouldn't care about Dawn's pain at losing her sister. But of course, we do and are supposed to sympathize with buffy because she's the main character.

[vampyreblogger]

here's an introduction post because i've had stuff in my bio for so long but never made a post! :3

so, hiiiii! introduction under the cut :3

hiya XD !!!

about me:

my name's ozzy, and my pronouns are he/they/she (with a heavy preference on he/him). i love vampires (if that wasn't obvious :P) and i'm 18 years old and live in the uk. i'm emo and goth (but moreso emo) !!

i also am diagnosed with autism & adhd, which isn't super important but does explain my posting habits lol

i'm always open to messages and asks from anyone - mutuals or not! i promise i'm friendly X3

i'm arospec and polyamorous and my partners are @abowlofpastainatophat 🦥 & @a-vverevvolfs-vvorld 🐀

my pfp is regularly updated when i change my appearance/feel like it, and the picrew i use is:

https://picrew.me/en/image_maker/1469769

about my posts & reblogs:

i'm terrible at tagging but i try to tag original posts w "ozzy rambles" and edits w "ozzy edits"

i'm a multifandom mess, so i can't guarantee there won't be any curveball fandoms but generally i will post stuff abt the fandoms below (⭐️ = special interest)

music:

my chemical romance ⭐️

panic! at the disco

pierce the veil

counting crows

podcasts:

the magnus archives

the magnus protocol

rusty quill gaming

shows:

supernatural ⭐️

it's always sunny in philadelphia

hannibal

merlin

the x files

avatar: the last airbender

breaking bad

death note

buffy the vampire slayer

games:

skyrim

assassin's creed 2

fnaf: pizzeria simulator

youtubers:

dan and phil

general interests:

shakespeare

music

vampires

horror

about my writing:

my fanfic blog is @vampyrewriter and i take commissions (but also i will probably listen to any requests/suggestions anyway - i'm always looking for new ideas!)

other sideblogs:

my digital scrapbook blog is @vampyrescrapbook

my poetry blog (mostly unused) is @vampyrepoem

my backup(?) blog is @vampyresilly

thank you for reading! xoxo

[horsegirlhob]

My roommate found a way to play the Buffy gamecube game and I am so obsessed with it. Why is Kakistos the main villain? Why is Sid the puppet from season 1 here? When I was struggling to open a door while playing as Spike, Buffy's disembodied voice started giving me control instructions via negging (while experiencing a similar problem as Willow, Tara's disembodied voice gently gave me helpful instructions. Mean ghost Buffy is very much a feature of the Spike character option.) The same loud incredibly ominous music plays the entire time, even during cutscenes where it isn't appropriate.

[baltears]

idk how else to describe this like i think the kind of traditionalist/hyperliteral read of buffy not catching feelings for spike until late s5/s6 just misses the level of iron grip buffy keeps on her feelings. apropos of nothing other than seeing this read one too many times and im not up on my buffy meta scholarship so forgive me if im making the same points everyone and their mother has been making for the past two decades

keeping tight control over her feelings is not something buffy started doing after a certain point, it's a behavior she has coming into the pilot bc we see that at that point there's already a level of emotional distance between her and joyce (not only re the slayer stuff and the later retconned-in betrayal & invalidation trauma from being thrown in an institution when she tried to tell her parents the truth, but also for instance the intensity of buffy's distress over the divorce). she already has a home life consisting of not voicing most of her difficult and 'close to the chest' emotions. when she tries to be genuine in a way that asks for space for her frustration or anger or more 'selfish' feelings, this is often not met with understanding (worth mentioning that giles does a MUCH better job on this than joyce for the most part, but other characters including willow and xander respond poorly a substantial number of times). as a result she is well practiced at suppressing emotions that are too inconvenient or complicated to feel acceptable to verbalize, so she tends to just kind of whistle past things that feel hard to tackle until she reaches a point where she can no longer bear to ignore them. this is a core part of her canon characterization that is also visible at many points in buffy's relationship with angel (s3 comes to mind, when she spends a good chunk of the season operating under the convenient belief that they're in a functional platonic friendship when she subconsciously knows they are still too hung up on each other for that to be feasible). so like we know this is something buffy does. it is not at all unusual for her to feel things that she keeps beneath her conscious awareness + does not allow herself to process and admit to having felt until well after the fact.

this takes me to the oft cited point that from the first time she interacts with spike, there is a different vibe happening than is typical for buffy and vamps. it just feels very obvious to me that from basically minute one (or maybe more accurately from their first fight, when she isn't so much on the back foot) she registers him on some level as a person who happens to be really interesting and hot, but has a fairly easy time of it keeping this feeling out of her conscious awareness bc 1) he's also an unsouled vamp, meaning she can choose to dismiss his personhood as nonexistent and his personality as mere performance or game-playing (ie he is not a 'real' person, therefore the relationship need not be acknowledged as 'real' either – taken to extremes in s6 when she has to actively abuse him and continually reaffirm his lack of humanity and lack of worth in order to sustain the self-told belief that she doesnt see or experience his personhood and doesnt feel a human connection with him), 2) they're mortal enemies, 3) he likes to be really annoying on purpose + as a vampire also has a baseline level of generally acting like a bit of a creep, and 4) for much of their relationship she has other romantic objects on whom she can more acceptably focus her attention (insert reference to spuffy being a queer coded relationship here).

i think this state of noticing-slash-not-noticing persists from 2.03 through s3&4 and into season 5. by then she is so good at studiously ignoring how weird and flirtatious and intense their dynamic has always been that the revelation that spike is now acting very obviously like hes in love with her, to the extent that someone else could notice, takes her totally by surprise. getting more specific idk how else one could possibly explain how her ass was acting in something blue pre-spell, like i absolutely canNOT see buffy behaving like that around any other vamp literally ever. they were both being so unceasingly annoying with their creepy little flirty back and forth that both giles and willow were completely over it and just wanted them to shut up and stop paying so much attention to each other. ig the point im getting at is i think it's weird and dont get it when ppl seem to read buffy's character as if shes basically just saying the things she feels and vice versa rather than like regularly and even habitually lying to herself, bc i just don't think that's in line with the character that we're shown. buffy SAYS for a very long time that she doesnt care about spike and basically says and does everything possible to deny that she has any attachment to him at all, but frankly i think the level of aggression and frequency with which she expresses variations on that sentiment in and of itself gives the lie to that idea. anyways i think she was down bad pretty much immediately and just took a very long time to let herself notice