#it's the number that sums up how the show works and versions that mess it up are versions that miss the point entirely

[anitmb]

The Merchant Mod V2 - with a new features and bug fixes

You can find the mod in my tumblr's download page.

This is basically a 2.0 version of the Savvier Seller mod. Because the original Savvier Seller mod used the EA code combined with my edits the code was a horrible mess that I didn’t want to touch any more.

I was also in awe by the Sim State Mod at MTS that I basically wanted to combine the way they sold items via my mod’s basic concept. So, I ditched the idea of updating the SS mod and I started this mod from scratch.

The biggest difference is that you no longer need custom shelves to sell you products.

You also don’t need the EA’s original Savy Seller store item.

But you do need UNI – because the restocking animations are taken from there.

So, before we go any further let’s just say a big thanks for the creators of the Sim State Mod. Without that mod it would never have crossed my mind that we could sell items without a custom shelve. The idea of how to set items for sale is completely stolen from them.

@phoebejaysims and her generic retail register that I did take a look when I was having issues with my mod.

As always the lovely @mspoodle1 who created the restock sign and the shopping bag for this mod.

And last but not least my lovely testers for version 2 @desiree-uk and @modestpixels <3

What’s different in version 2

New feature

Two new options under settings

Only Active Sims Can Buy – default false

Go Home After Purchase – default true

Both options are per register – not global.

Shop From Inventory and The Merchant Box

When you link your register to a merchant box – your sim can directly buy items from the register that are in the Merchant Box inventory.

Under settings you have a new Shop From Inventory... sub section and under that you have the options

Link to Merchant Box, Clear Linked Merchant Box, Turn Cloning on/off.

The Merchant Box can be found under Electronics → misc and it costs 250§

The Merchant Box has two different options. Open and Give a name.

The name that you give the Merchant Box will be shown when linking to the register.

Link to Merchant Box will show all Merchant Boxes in the lot the register is in. IF the register has an owner it will also show the merchant boxes in the owner’s home lot.

The Buy From Inventory -option will not show unless you have linked to a chest.

Buying from the inventory is autonomous and sims will just get a random object.

Go Home and Only Active Can Buy also effect the Buy From Inventory -option.

If you turn on Clone in the Buy From Inventory -option your sim will be deducted the original price of the object when the mod restocks the merchant box inventory.

When you have linked to a merchant box and you put the cursor onto the register the tooltip will read Merchent Box linked: [number of boxes linked]. So you know how many you have linked to.

If you want to turn another item into a merchant box, just change the OBJK of the object to point to Sims3.Gameplay.Objects.HobbiesSkills.ani_Merchant.MerchantBox

Note: the package ani_MerchantBox.package – doesn’t contain any code. Just the merchant box object, which is a Chinese treasure chest. So you can delete the object, if you are using another item as the merchant mod.

Bug Fixes

Sims should no longer buy items excessively. Even if they are the active sim. For some reason the New Stuff – moodlet was not always showing up so sending sims home after a purchase is a good way to prevent them from shopping again.

Employees should now be called to work more efficiently.

When clearing the customer list, the employee should no longer stay to wait for an unexisting customer to come and pay.

You should no longer be able to buy an item if it's price is higher than your family funds.

You should no longer be able to pay for your purchase, if the total sum is bigger than the family funds.

The lovely @mspoodle1 fixed the TSM animations for giving the bag, so sims with long skirts can use the mod without looking funny.

Existing bugs

If you have too many items in your Merchant Box – the shopping dialog box is broken. It still works but looks ugly. I don’t know how much is too much, but having all comics + all skill books was too much. I don’t know can I even fix this.

Sometimes buying / creating the restock item bugs out and fails. This happens very rarely and I have not yet been able to pinpoint when/how it happens, but I promise you – it’s there ^_^

[mokkemusic]

AidaIro’s au’s are really Nene’s stories

I want to share something I always thought about regarding AidaIro’s Hanako au’s (ghost hotel, hoto, playing cards etc) I was talking out my ideas with Cat and Hope and by doing so I have something cohesive to share.  

In my head I can actually imagine Nene being the one to come up with all these au’s cause she’s so creative and in her own fantasy world sometimes. She loves romantic things but also loves odd and dark things so I could see the au’s fitting that.

(That’s @thehopeelias​ art btw that she did for a Tiny Light cover/animatic we collabed together on here)

Monster Nursery

I think the other au’s are easier to see her come up with but I still think Nene would come up with the nursery one as well. Because it would be her desire to see Hanako as a teacher/researcher all grown up. And then she would just make it in the “unique way” Nene always does.

In some way she would want to see what the Yugi twins were like together grown up. And she added Kou to the story as well cause he’s their friend too. She wants to see them older and doing good things. But mostly she wants to make him into something he would be proud of and also see what the brothers would have been like together sharing that success, passion, and happiness.

Nene for this specific AU of Amane being a grown up researcher/teacher, she would be the child in this situation. Mitsuba is always a child, let’s be real. And the mokke... well the mokke are kinda like pet hamsters lol.

And because she loves monsters (like her veggie monsters) she’d want to make herself the coolest fire breathing monster of all of them.

She’d want to know Tsukasa more and how he would act as this adult who got to live out his dreams with his brother. Therefore she would attach herself to him just to bond with him more and see how he can be. How she can imagine him being.

In regards to Mitsuba, I think the only reason she put him in it is cause she’s never seen Mitsuba and Hanako interact and she would just be curious how Hanako would respond and be a father figure like Sensei/researcher to him. So that’s the reason for that.

The mokke were all that was left, she wants to see what Kou would be like caring for something. There’s no better reason for that one being just a mokke. Also Nene knows that he has a little sister he cares for, so taking care of the mokke is easy for him.

Ghost Hotel

The dark magical fantasies like Ghost hotel represents the desire she should be afraid of but secretly craves. Along with the obvious enticing mystery.

Royal (Playing Cards)

The Royal one is what she dreams of like having a prince riding a white horse. But does she really want that? Maybe she wants it a bit darker. A ruthless ruler that her country is at odds with or that is against the way she thinks a prince should be because she says she wants one thing but what she truly wants is a bit of a dark prince. A prince that can sweep her off her feet and rule the kingdom, protect her, and give her luxury in this all powerful fantasy.

Hanako of the Opera

The opera one represents mystery, wanting to know the man (the ghost) that she spends time with that no one knows about. At the same time still not knowing anything about him. At the same time he starts revealing little by little his past tragedy and judgment.

I think of this one line from phantom all of the time. I don’t know if I know if I got the wording exactly but he says something like:

“Why should I show compassion? The world has never shown compassion to me!”

It is very representative of Hanako’s true self. Showing more pain and passion and sorrow and darkness that she puts into this fantasy. Nene created this one to be more raw than the other ones.

Phantom Thief

Phantom thief... I only just recently kinda opened my eyes to phantom thief so.... To start with there are 2 versions. Technically.

One can just be her revised draft of a fantasy story. I’ll just say that. Similar to how a writer often goes back and changes things in their writing. It’s exactly like that. Even changing character roles. For example Nene as a waitress then Nene as detective.

But as far as the reasoning for the phantom thief fantasy is concerned...

Mystery and puzzle solving go together, yes, but...

Hanako’s ultimate goal is to steal the moon.

I’m still working this out but maybe in some underlying way it also represents unachievable dreams.

Additionally it represents Hanako as an outcast (like how phantom is) being “WANTED” by the Minamotos, who are the police. And then Nene working under Tsuchigomori. They aren’t trying to catch the phantom necessarily but mainly trying to uncover more information as detectives do. It is also like how Nene goes to Tsuchigomori for answers about Hanako which he doesn’t give her but at the same time Tsuchigomori sees that she has uncovered more about how Amane can be.

“In all the years I’ve known him I’ve never seen number 7 act like that.”

Tsukasa would be the one Hanako robbed from. Just like he robbed Tsukasa of his life when he killed him. In a deeper sense maybe taking away Tsukasa’s greatest treasure in his eyes, Amane himself. Nene would be the one that Tsukasa hires to do the investigating in this fantasy. Tsukasa liking to mess with things, Nene liking to uncover things (that part is still a theory but it makes sense for her character).

It represents everything Nene is trying to figure out and solve about Hanako. It has the people that he has history with when he was alive, helping her to understand this fantasy and get answers into the mystery that is Hanako. Hanako being the acclaimed villain in a way.

I think that sums up my analysis of all the au’s represented as Nene’s fantasy worlds and why they are set up like that. I may add more to this post as time goes on because I feel like there’s a lot more that can be fleshed out. But because these are AidaIro’s au’s you never know how much truth is behind them. They do seem to have a lot of hidden truths. So regardless I really love thinking like this, Nene is the one that created these stories.

[nealcassatiel]

Supernatural and Russia and the mess of Television Legal Contracts

One of the most important aspects of a television series’ life cycle is its distribution. It is in the stage of distribution when the production companies/studio recoup the largest amount of costs.

By looking at who distributes the show, as well as which companies stand to gain the most from distribution profits, we can gain greater understanding of the various complex agreements and finances at play.

Viewing Statistics in the USA, Russia, and other International Territories

Let’s take a look at where Supernatural is distributed, and it’s popularity in the countries in which it airs. 

After the US, in the past 30 days, Supernatural’s next biggest market is in Russia. The next is in Brazil. 

This got long - more under the cut (I’ll be talking about cuts shortly)

In Russia, Supernatural has been in the top 0.2% watched shows in Russia (link) . This is also the case in Brazil. 

In 2019, a modest survey was done on urban and rural Russians asking them what foreign television they watch. Supernatural was the 6th most mentioned foreign television show (link).

In 2017, Supernatural was three times more popular in Russia than it was in the US (link - this article has just a whole other host of information about it being popular amongst urban and rural US residents, as well as popular amongst both Republics and Democrats, however i haven’t looked further into that data so not going to discuss it much here)

So selling Supernatural to Russia and airing it in Russia is going to bring in a lot of revenue for The C*W and the production companies. That is a lucrative distribution territory and of a huge amount of importance to the network. Russia will air both new episodes, and reruns. Of course, if Supernatural made a queer love story a central premise, then execs are going to get scared that not only will the finale may not be aired in one of their biggest, if not their biggest market: Russia, but that the broadcasters who distribute the show in Russia might also pull the rest of the show and stop broadcasting reruns too. That’s a shit tonne fo distribution profits gone for The C*W, and who knows, maybe their relationship with Russian broadcasters who air their other shows will be on the rocks. After all, trying to sell gay tv to Russians right now is, sadly, never going to happen. This is not an indictment on the Russian viewers, but me saying that the show won’t be sellable to Russian broadcasters if it is too queer.

A huge huge majority of US Supernatural fans are progressive and wanted the more queer focused and found family ending. But the C*W and Warner believes that there are still enough US fans who don’t want something that progressive to be shown. They also know that one of their biggest markets is Russia, and Dean being shown to be bi will not go down well there. I’m just speculating, but The C*W may have looked at those chunks of audience who give them money and decide that they only care about those profits. 

The frustrating thing however, is that no matter the power of Russian Supernatural audiences, looking at the other progressive countries and the popularity of Supernatural there - these numbers as a collective outshine those of Russia. So maybe Russia isn’t that important. Or maybe all The C*W needed to think was ‘we don’t want to stop profits from our biggest international viewership’ and so they never even went further and thought about the collective viewership of the audiences from progressive countries. As I said at the start, distribution is where the companies who invested into making a show recoup the most costs. All the money that comes from distribution is incredibly important.

DISTRIBUTION AND CO-PRODUCTION AGREEMENTS

The writers, the crew, the actors, don’t really get the distribution profits. They may get small cuts of things or bonuses here and there, but they’re all essentially employed by the production company. It is the production company and studio who has sunken money into making the show who will get a cut of the distribution profits. So the production companies and co-production companies, the creator (maybe still if they had a good agent when they first sold the pitch), the network are all going to be the ones to care about how much a finale will matter to profits from showing reruns in less progressive countries. Dabb is an employee - he personally will be paid a fixed sum which is given to him by the production company. He does not care if SPN can’t be aired in Russia - that has no personal affect on him. He was paid to showrun the series and he’ll get nothing more even if it becomes the most watched anti-gay homophobic celebrated show in Moscow. He has no financial reason to cater to anyone. He’s just an employee. 

But if information like this, the knowledge that for multiple years TPTB have wanted Supernatural to cater to a non-progressive international and national audience for the sake of distribution profits, then the show should have never have taken the narrative to a place whose ending could not be green-lit.

If for the sake of these pofits and other secondary rights, for the sake of appeasing rural/southern USA viewers, and trying to keep an audience for Walker, The C*W derailed the final two episodes, then I still don’t fully understand why the ending was heading towards destiel when all of this distribution finance information has been known for many many years. 

It makes sense why such a terrible finale would happen, but it doesn’t make sense why up until episode 18, the entire narrative of the show was leading somewhere completely different? Why were the writers of SPN heading straight towards one thing, if they knew they always knew that they’d have to have a completely different ending? 

The Right of Final Cut / Final Cut Privilege

The answer may lie in the fact that The C*W wasn’t really paying that much attention to SPN, they couldn’t really see all the subtext, but suddenly the subtext all was going to become text and they were all twiddling their thumbs and looking for something to do during COVID when the industry shut down, so they suddenly got way more involved. 

Let’s quickly clear up who The C*W is and how they relate to SPN as a company. Supernatural lists The C*W as one of it’s distributers, but lists Warner Bros Television as a production company. When SPN started it was made by The WB (which is now The C*W). It’s all under Warner Media anyway, but we can basically say that Warner Bros Television (listed as a co-producer of SPN) is the sam as The C*W who is listed as a distributer of SPN. They’re essentially the same so The C*W is both producing and distributing SPN, as well as owning the format rights to the show - sorry that’s all complicated anyway The C*W are the big dogs who own Supernatural and have done from the beginning back when they were called The WB)

Essentially, The C*W have a co-production and distribution agreement for SPN. The power they have from that first agreement when they bought the show off Kripke is almost certainly still MASSIVE today. They are not only the ultimate distributers, but the ultimate producers with all the agreements and all the rights. 

Anyway, back to that first agreement: This was Kripke’s first big deal, and he almost certainly gave Warner Bros/The C*W a whole host of creative control in exchange for them sinking a shit tonne of money into making the show. Which makes me wonder if The C*W has something in entertainment law called “the right of final cut/final cut privilege”. If a studio or distributer has sunken a heck tonne of costs into making the series and are the ones who most need to recoup the distribution costs, then in their contract they may try to give themselves the ‘final cut privilege’ - essentially, this is the final edit. There’s the Director’s Cut, but then after that there is the Final Cut. The Final Cut is what is broadcast. Nowadays, most series and films don’t allow the directors to have final cut privilege anyway - it’s fairly rare from my understanding (one of my hats is a television legal contracts assistant, and all of these contracts still confuse me even though it’s an element of my job - I’m not trained in this outside of work so i apologise if this isn’t clear). The studio or distributer doesn’t even need to clear their final cut with the writer/director/producer. They can just do it. Cut it up and broadcast it, because they’re allowed to in their contract.

So with the finale episode being so short, a mess of montages, Carry on My Wayward Son versions back to back, a narrative mess, the pacing completely off, some scenes way too short and others way too long - this really could insinuate that the stupid clause of ‘the right of final cut’ was utilised by The C*W and without the need to get the permission or allowance of Dabb or even the other production companies, they edited everything they didn’t like out of the finale, citing their contract and the fact that they’re the ones who need to recoup distribution costs, and they don’t want to piss off large swathes of their national and international audience.

In Conclusion

So positives? Well, now that SPN is done and dusted, if there is a spin-off then this shouldn't affect distribution deals in Russia or Brazil. If whoever buys the format rights for Supernatural, allows The C*W to still sell the old series distribution rights, then market the new season of SPN not as a new season but a spin-off, then this will give them more freedom to not cater to the conservative international and national audiences SPN was beholden to due to distribution profits. What I’m saying is - a spin-off could free itself from catering to anyone who isn’t progressive. The old audiences can carry on showing reruns of SPN and completely ignore the new ‘fake’ gay spin-off. They can say that it’s a different production company, a different network - and therefore not the legitimate show. Great. Free SPN. 

A new format agreement could also mean that the new producers could ensure that not the distributer, but the director, or the new trusted production company themselves gets the Right of Final Cut. If another agreement is made, please please please take that right away from The C*W/Warner. 

The difficulty in getting the SPN rights would be caused by the mess of a Format Agreement to even get those rights... Supernatural is co-produced by Kripke Enterprises, Warner Bros. Television, Supernatural Films, and Wonderland Sound and Vision. I’m assuming Kripke Enterprises and Supernatural Films may be under Warner Media (as Warner Bros and The C*W itself is). If Jensen wanted to produce the new spin-off then his new production company is under WB/Warner Media too... so. Disentangling meddling and shitty Warner Media execs from a spin-off would be difficult because they own everyone. 

All in all, it’s easy to see now with that mess of a finale that this was caused with whoever has “The Right Of Final Cut/Final Cut Privilege’. And I HIGHLY doubt Singer or Dabb or any mere employee on the show has it. It’s more and more obvious to me that this power lies in the hands of The C*W/Warner and they didn’t even try to loop Dabb or the main cast in when making the final edits. I’m sure the C*W started to get involved at episode 19 and in the development stage of episode 20, but i’m certain they had a hand in the disastrous final cut. 

I hope we’re able to pry our beloved show out of the hands of those who don’t care about its narratives, but have more power than anyone to change the show’s narratives. Thanks for coming with me on this essay/me working out this complicated mess. It’s 00:50 and I'm super tired so I hope all this makes sense. Television contracts confuse me and I work with them so i dunno how clear any of this is. 

Anyway - I hope it was totally boring.  

[dreamescapeswriting]

Unfinished Business ~ Part Six

WORD COUNT: 6K

WARNINGS: Mentions of mafia, strong language, murder, blood

PAIRING: Bang Chan X Reader

DESCRIPTION: Part six of nine of my new Bang Chan series. 

You’re taken hostage but one of Seoul’s leading mafia families Bang Chan but he doesn’t take you because he wants to fake a marriage or make you fall for him in 365 days no…He wants to use you for his own personal gain. To take over another family but when you try to escape things take a turn for the worst and you learn Chan isn’t one to be messed with.(Please I suck at describing stuff)

THEMES: TW || Chapter includes mentioned of being touched inappropriately by a stranger, Smut will be included in a later chapter so this is a fic for a mature audience, Chan x Fem!Reader, Self insert

MASTERLIST | PREVIOUS | NEXT

"Wake up sleepyhead," You groaned, shoving whoever was waking you up away from you, hitting them in the face.

"Five more minutes." A rough tug sat you up and you came face to face with Changbin, who was holding a plate in one hand and you in the other.

"Chan isn't here. Eat and then do whatever it is that you do when he isn't here." You looked down at the food on the plate and decided within seconds that you weren't hungry for whatever that was. It didn't look appetising and you didn't trust Changbin as far as you could throw him.

"Where's Jisung? I thought it was his shift this morning." You mumbled taking the plate and leaving it on the bedside table. Changbin didn't care if you ate it or not, he didn't really care for you at all, so he watched you walk around the bedroom trying to figure out what your plan was.

"Are you planning your escape today?" You stared at him and raised your eyebrow, as if he could think you'd run after what Chan did.

"No, I was thinking of cleaning. You guys are pigs." He lunged at you and you smirked at him, you weren't afraid of him or anyone else in this place. They wouldn't kill you because of how Chan acted around you, they held nothing over you which meant you had some kind of leverage.

"I'm going for a shower and then I'm cleaning the house." You rolled your eyes at him and walked into the ensuite bathroom, slamming and locking the door behind you. It's not as though you could escape through the tiny window and it wasn't like you had anywhere to go. Your ankle was doing better though which was great, one less thing to have to worry about when you did inevitably escape from Chan.

The front door had banged open, you looked up from the floor you were cleaning to see who it was that had made such a loud entrance,

"You have a date tonight." You stared at Felix as he spoke to you, as though you had some kind of idea as to what he was talking about.

"To whom are you referring?" He held up two tickets to a charity ball and you stared at them, black tie and ball gown were expected. There was going to be auctions held to donate money to charity. It was a charity ball that donated to the nursing home you used to work at, they held the party once or twice a year for benefactors to make generous donations.

"Chan's going to that?" You questioned. You'd served there a couple of years ago when you wanted to volunteer and the place was beautiful, it was right in Seoul centre in one of the biggest, most expensive hotels ever. Felix nodded his head,

"Like he does every year. Donates a large sum to them every year as well as auction things off. He donates throughout the year though through anonymous donations." You stared at Felix as he told you what Chan did for them, it surprised you you'd only ever heard of the bad things that Chan did for his money, not with it.

"Stealing from the rich to give to the poor? Sounds too much like Robin hood for me." Felix chuckled and shook his head at you, he could see something was going on inside your head. Like a battle with yourself that you weren't going to admit to losing just yet, he was brilliant at reading people and to him, you were an open book.

"I can't go. I have nothing to wear." You went back to cleaning the dishes you'd collected from all over the house and that's when Felix pulled out a wallet.

"That's why I have money, Jisung and Changbin will be following along with us to make sure you don't try anything." You glanced over at your shoulder, Changbin wasn't looking too happy about going with you on the field trip.

"Why not someone else?" You took the washing up gloves off your hands and walked over to the towels. They all knew about your dislike for Changbin since neither of you was trying to hide it, drying your hands and turning back to Felix.

"No one else is free...It'll be fun. I'll help you find something and then I'll get us all a tie to match your dress." Your version of fun seemed different from Felix's. You'd rather stay at home in your bed all day rather than shopping for the perfect dress and shoes.

"Let's go-"

"Don't I have to change first?" You remembered Chan's surprise when you wanted to go out in the jeans you'd been painting in. But Felix was fine with you coming in the leggings and oversized shirt they'd gotten you, it wasn't like he was trying to show you off to everyone.

"Not that's fine. Let's go, we don't want to be late tonight."

The shopping trip hadn't been a total drag like you'd thought it would be, Changbin managed to pretend to be happy to be there. Jisung and Felix were like the brothers you always wanted except way better than you had imagined them to be. It was so nice to be out of the house and joking around with them so much you'd almost forgotten who they were.

"I feel stupid," You said, as you stared yourself in the mirror. Felix was in your bedroom wearing an all-black suit, along with a red tie to match your dress. Chan wanted you all to match so people would know you were all together at the party, that way no one would mess with you. Chan had only gotten back an hour ago and had spent his entire time back locking his office complaining about something to Minho. You'd heard him shouting from inside of the bathroom when you were getting ready but you couldn't understand a word of it, it was all too muffled through the walls to understand anything. He'd been shouting at Minho about how Namjoon was going to be at the party, he never made appearances at things like that which was both good and bad news.

"Chan's downstairs now, the car is here." You sighed and came out of the bathroom nervously playing with your fingers as you waited for them to see you again. The red silk gown was floor length with a split at the front left side coming up to your mid-thigh.

"Whoa." You stared at Felix and shook your head at him, he was the one that had picked the dress out and saw you try it on.

"You saw it before."

"That was before the hair and makeup, you look...whoa." Your makeup had been done by someone in the mall along with your hair. You shook your head at him again and went over to the mirror to look at yourself. It felt like you were playing dress up as a kid all over again, the dress cost more than anything you would ever be able to afford in this lifetime or the next and it had an A-line flow with a backless detail. It was something you never would have worn before, but were wearing now because you had to look your best for the evening.

"Chan's gonna-"

"Chan's gonna what - oh my god," Seungmin gasped as he walked into the room, he'd come to see what was taking so long but he was shocked by how you looked as well.

"Boys," You scoffed, playfully rolling your eyes and heading down the staircase. You could hear Chan ranting about something to the rest of the boys, doubling their security and watching him all night. He didn't care if they were tired or not, they weren't to have their eyes off the ball for even a moment there was too much at risk.

"Are you even listening? This is more important than all the other times we've been to these things. We have someone important to protect now- Are you even listening to me?" Jisung pointed over his shoulder at you, and Chan turned around to see you standing there with a small shy smile on your face. Chan’s jaw dropped as he stared at you, you looked incredible and he couldn't believe you were standing there so awkwardly. Someone that looked like you should have been walking tall and high with their head held high, and he was going to make sure he could help you do that. He was going to make you confident and feel like the beautiful girl you were. All thoughts about what he was talking to his men about were gone as you came closer to him. He took your hand in his and kissed the top of it, placing it back down at your hip and you felt a flutter in your heart as he stared at you. No one had ever looked at you like that before, it was nerve-wracking but at the same time, it made you feel warm inside, safe and that you weren't alone.

"The car," Changbin said, having no time to waste on this stupid moment Chan seemed to be having with you. They were all on edge for the night and were now protecting you and Chan while you were at the event together.

"Is everything okay?" You asked, as you sat in the back of Chan's car together Jeongin was driving with Seungmin by his side. The car in front of you had Felix and Minho inside and the last car behind you carried Hyunjin, Jisung and Changbin, you were being watched from angles. The same thing, matching cars and number plates in case any of you were followed it would be easy enough to confuse them. He was going to make sure nothing happened to you.

"Everything is fine." He lied, looking out of the window. He didn't feel like he could lie while looking you in the eyes. Right now he was having a hard time keeping his hands to himself, because you weren't his to touch he didn't want to make you uncomfortable by putting his hands on you,

"At the party, I'm going to introduce you as my fiancé...go along with it." You nodded and he slipped off a ring from his pinky finger. Turning to look at you as he slid it onto your ring finger, it was the perfect fit.

"Is there a reason we're faking that I'm your fiancé?" Chan nodded and turned to you trying to make it seem like he wasn't lying through his teeth right now.

"Namjoon."

"The man from the store?" Chan nodded again,

"I realise that I'm not in your eyes but what I do I do for the good of people and Namjoon...Let's just say he has his own selfish reasons for what he and his crew do. Killing for fun, killing for the sake of killing-" You felt fear ripple through your body and Chan could see that so he stopped talking about it. Namjoon was well known everywhere, everyone had heard of Namjoon and if they hadn't they were either stupid or didn't live in Seoul.

"So I have a target on my back because he saw us together the other day?" This was Chan's idea in the first place, he shouldn't be feeling guilty about this but he was. The plan was to lure Namjoon out, but since the day you spent alone together he'd been having second thoughts about the entire thing. He figured being seen by Namjoon would bring him out of hiding and have him admit that he killed Chan's wife. The bonus would be having him scare you so much you would be too terrified to leave Chan's side, so now why was he feeling so guilty for doing it? All he wanted to do was make you stay with him forever, he would be the one to protect you.

"I promise to look after you, he won't ever hurt you." You could tell by the way he was holding your hands, squeezing them and staring into your eyes that he was sincere. Which was what scared you. He was closer to believing that you actually liked him, while you were now stuck with staying with him forever or being on the run from two big mafia leaders who would both want you dead.

"Why do you come to these events?" You asked, trying to change the subject to anything else.  You could avoid the feeling of being scared if you just put it off long enough.

"I have my reasons," He linked your hands together as he sat in the back of the car. He didn't know how to act around you, you were being so nice to him lately and he didn't want to do anything to change that.

"Do I have to be scared about being out with you?" You questioned, your mind wandering back to Namjoon who was going to be at the event.

"No. I promised I would never let anything happen to you and I meant it." He squeezed your hand. You felt somewhat comforted by it, knowing that he was starting to fall for you hard enough to want to protect you. But then your mind went back to Changbin's threat and your conflicting heart. You could already feel yourself feeling sorry for him, clearly whatever had happened with his wife was affecting him badly. Maybe he was just that good guy that got pushed too far. One half of you was wanting to stay with him, but your brain was still on fire battling the thought about him doing what he did to Mrs Lu and the story your ditzy barmaid had told you. That chan had been the one to kill her, anyone with more than three brain cells could tell he hadn't though, that the story of him killing his wife was complete bullshit.

"Thank you." You whispered, looking out of the window nervously as you thought about the event. It was highly publicised meaning someone was going to get your photograph of you sitting there.

"Did you mean it?" You questioned quickly, he hummed at you and turned to stare at your face wondering what you were talking about.

"Did I mean what?"

"About taking me to see my grandfather?" He could tell by the look on your face that you were excited about the thought of it. But you were doing your best to stay calm about it and so he nodded at you. It could be a reward for you if you were good tonight while you were out with him.

"I'll take you if you behave tonight." You smiled shyly at him and nodded, promising you would be good. You'd promised not to try and get away and you meant it.

"Then let's get to it. Maybe get a nice photo to give to him?" Chan asked you, as he looked at the photographers outside the hotel. You nodded and the door opened, flashing lights started to blind you and you held onto Chan as he helped you out of the car.

"How do you deal with this?" You giggled, looking at him as he walked with you side by side. He linked his arm around your waist and smiled down at you trying to look good for the cameras. He paused at the bottom of the steps, a red carpet had been laid out and people were screaming questions at everyone who was walking there. It was like Chan was some kind of famous celebrity and people wanted to interview him.

"I smile and get on with it, I never liked this side of my life. They glorify the things I do and it's wrong, even if I do this all for the right reasons it makes it look good when it's not." You stared up at him as you walked towards the doors, lost in your own world as if the rest of the world melted away as you stared into his eyes. But he kept his head forward trying to focus on not falling over.

The evening was going admirably. You were in the middle of a huge event hall in the hotel, the walls were all white with marble columns to keep up the extremely high ceilings. The boys and you were all at the second-floor bar that looked down over at the rest of the party,

"Y/n?" You turned, to see a man around 6'0 smiling at you and coming over to you. You were standing at the bar while Chan went to stand beside someone and talk. The man was wearing a black suit with a blue tie on, you'd never seen him before so you had no idea how he knew your name. Jisung was supposed to be watching you but he was on his phone, you didn't blame him though it must have been boring watching someone all night.

"Hello." You greeted coldly, looking to try and get Jisung's attention but it wasn't going to work. Changbin was nowhere to be seen and Hyunjin was in the bathroom. You were starting to panic when the man reached for your hand, lifting it to his lips and kissing it gently, looking at the ring on your finger but he didn't care about it.

"May I have a dance? I'm Clarke."

"No, I don't think my fiancé would like that." You were trying to come up with some excuse to get away from him, but Chan's back was to you as he spoke to someone about a donation he was making to them. You didn't know how to get him to turn around without screaming his name, and causing a scene not something you wanted to do in such a nice place.

"I'm sure he won't mind one dance." He pulled you over towards the staircase that led down to the bottom floor. Your heart began to pound, if the boys looked up to see you missing it would be bad news for you, but if Chan looked and saw you with another man it would be bad news for him.

"My fiancé really wouldn't like this, he's-"

"He's an idiot by letting you stand alone and giving you such a cheap-looking metal ring." His hand landed on your waist. Your eyes locked onto the back of Chan's head, hoping that somehow he would feel the stare and turn around.

"Please let me go." You begged him, but his hand slipped down to your waist while his other grabbed onto your ass squeezing it softly. He trailed his hand to your thigh so you slapped him across the face, the room was so packed no one noticed. So you began rushing over to Jisung, he was the closest one to you and the nicest one out of them all. Your hand gripped onto his bicep as you pleaded for him to help you,

"Help." You whispered, he looked at your panicked face and then saw a man coming over to you holding his face with a red mark across his cheek.

"You slapped him?" You nodded, explaining that he started touching you and you had to get away.

"You little whore, dressing like this and expecting not to be touched?!" You whimpered, as the man began storming towards you. Jisung took control of the situation quickly,

"Chan!" Chan turned around and saw the worried look on your face and then the man. He was livid, he stormed to your sight and took your face in his hands turning it side to side to look at you. The man stopped as he realised it was Chan that you were with and not someone else, he began begging for them not to hurt him but Changbin grabbed onto his arms.

"You okay? Did he hurt you?" You shook your head and Chan turned around to punch the man who'd grabbed you the way he did,

"Changbin, take him back to the house and put him up in the basement I'm not through with him." He ran his hands through his black hair. You noticed curls starting to form as he pulled it from the styling gel, you never knew he had curly hair. It was something you were trying to focus on to keep you calm.

"You sure you're okay? Did he hurt you at all?"

"No, I'm fine. He just grabbed my ass and my-" He went to follow Changbin out of the hotel, wanting to kill him for even thinking about touching you. You grabbed onto his hand,

"Don't leave me please." You urged him and he stared down at your hand on his wrist. He felt his heart begin to pick up and he nodded at you, even if he did feel like it was his fault for leaving you alone when he promised he wouldn't.

"Fine. Let's go and have a drink." You followed him towards the bar and ordered a scotch, he did the same and looked at you. He could tell that the fact that the man touching you was bothering you. You were scared, having someone touch you like that in such a public place, you had no idea what could have happened if he'd gotten you down the stairs.

"You promised to watch me, you promised. What if that was Namjoon that got hold of me?" He shook his head at you. He cupped your cheek in his hands running his thumb over your skin trying to calm you down.

"I took my eyes away for two seconds, it's not my fault you're so beautiful that everyone wants you. I promise he'll get what's coming to him. No one will hurt you or touch you." You realised what he meant by that and you stared at him,

"You're going to kill him..." It was a statement rather than a question, about what he was or wasn't going to do. But he heard your voice crack and he stared at you wanting to search for any signs that you didn't want him to, but all he could see was the sign of you being okay with it.

"Yes." He answered blandly, but he didn't care, no scumbag should get away with touching people that clearly asked him to stop.

"Good. Make him pay for it." He liked this side of you, you had no idea where it was coming from but you wanted the man to pay for what he'd done to you. It always happened in the bar you used to work in, sleazy men would touch whoever they wanted and get away with it and you were sick of it. It was about time that somebody took care of it.

"I'll make sure he does." He promised, kissing your cheek and then looking around for the time,

"We have time for a dance before the auctioning starts." He took your hand, you downed the drink of scotch, following him to the staircase to head down for a dance together.

Both of you lost in your world as Namjoon watched from across the room, he asked his right-hand man for the information they had gathered on you. It was strange how you'd seemingly come from nowhere and were now being announced as Chan's fiancé. They told him about your family history, your grandmother using his money and dying leaving bills unpaid. He smirked watching you being waltzed around by Chan, he had a plan now. Chan's hand was placed on your waist, while his other hand held onto yours, slowly leading you along the floor swaying back and forth with you.

"You look great tonight, by the way, I don't know if I mentioned that." You laughed at Chan and nodded at him, even though you didn't believe what he was saying.

"You didn't have to, the boys did it for you. Apparently, I'm 'whoa'." He chuckled and nodded in agreement with them.

"They're right. You look gorgeous." You could feel your cheeks heating up as he complimented you,

"Dip." He said, you stared up at him as he dipped you down and smiled at you. A camera flash went off capturing the happy moment making you both momentarily blind.

"Look at the happy couple." You both stood up to see Namjoon staring at you,

"Y/n Y/l/n, and Bang Chan...surprising couple." You cleared your throat and Chan wrapped his arm around your waist, he knew Namjoon would have gotten to know everything about you by now.

"Can I see the ring?" You didn't have a chance to decline, Namjoon just took your hand in his and stared down at the small silver band around your finger.

"Huh. Seems simple for someone like Chan to give you." Chan didn't have time to say anything,

"I asked for something simple, inexpensive to prove how much I wanted Chan for Chan and not who he was and his money." Namjoon nodded along and looked at Chan.

"May I dance with her?" Chan stepped aside willingly, not wanting to disobey Namjoon and cause a scene. He watched as Namjoon began to dance with you in the same way Chan had been doing before.

"I know he took you against your will, do you want to get out of here?" You stared up at Namjoon as he stared off behind you, trying not to make it look obvious about what he was talking about.

"He didn't take me against my will, I went with him. I love him." You seemed so convincing you almost believed yourself, Namjoon stared down at you shocked that the words had even left your mouth.

"Love him? My dear, that almost sounded convincing to me. You barely know the man, you've been with him less than a week." He kissed your forehead and brought you into a hug,

"You better watch out my love, as soon as he turns his back, you're mine just like his ex. I'll assume he told you the horror story but be warned, I will kill you just like I did to her...Paint his living room a nice shade of red again." He left you alone and you stood staring at the back of his head, Chan frowned coming over to you.

"What's wrong? Did he hurt you? Say something?" You turned to look up at Chan and he stared down at you, you looked terrified, more terrified than the night he'd killed Mrs Lu.

"H-He said I have to watch out before you turn your back and I end up just like your ex." Chan's hand on your hip tightened and you whimpered moving away from his grasp.

"What does that mean? What happened?" He looked around and shouted Seungmin and Jeongin over. It gave him the confirmation he'd been using you for, but now his blood ran cold at the thought of Namjoon threatening you. It wasn't just Chan using you for information anymore, he liked you a lot and now you were in real danger

"Give them the money, bid on the weekend away, I need to take her home. Namjoon threatened her." His hands were on your arm and he was rushing you out of the hall and towards the exit of the building,

"Smile and look happy, if Namjoon knows he's scared you he wins." You nodded and started smiling up at him, he took your hand in his and sighed.

"Come here," He bent down to pick you up bridal style and you squealed, wrapping your arms around his neck and staring into his eyes.

"What are you doing?" You asked, looking into his eyes and nowhere else as the cameras flashed at you both running to the car.

"You move too slowly in those heels. I have to get you home where I can keep you safe." He sat you in the car and told Felix to drive fast and not stop for anything.

"What happened with your ex...Is he going to get me?" You panicked and he linked your hand in his.

"I'll tell you everything, I promise, but right now you need to get home and get you safe. I'm not going to let you die okay." He kissed your cheek and you laid your head on his shoulder, staring at the back of Felix's head as you drove to the house.

"You'll be fine here, no one can get in here, it's all secure," Chan said as he stood in your door, you were laid in the bed dressed in an oversized shirt and some shorts. You hadn't stopped shaking since the moment you left the hotel and he still hadn't told you what happened with his ex. Just that she was dead and it was Namjoon's fault. You were more scared of Namjoon than you ever had been of Chan,

"Get some sleep, we'll talk in the morning. Seungmin is right outside if you need him." You nodded at him and he turned to leave the room without another word.

"Goodnight." You called out and he nodded at you, saying it back before leaving the room quietly, shutting the door behind him.

You laid there for an hour while you listened to the wind and rain outside, the thunder started and you wanted to cry. Thunderstorms used to make you calm but tonight it seemed to make everything scarier, like in a horror movie. Every sound made you think it was someone trying to break into the mansion, specifically your bedroom. You got out of the bed and snuck out of the door, Seungmin was asleep so you could sneak out of the door without being heard. You tapped on the bedroom door belonging to Chan but there was no response, you were about to turn back when thunder clapped so loudly you jumped. Rushing into the room the door banged, he jumped up and pointed a gun at you thinking you were an intruder,

"Chan!" You held up your hands to make him see that you were free of any weapon, and that you weren't going to hurt him, but you let out a whimper as he kept it tracked on you,

"I'm sorry." You whispered, turning to stare at him. He was wearing a black t-shirt and some shorts, he shook his head and stared at you, panicked that something was wrong.

"I'm sorry! Did you hear something?" He questioned you, he got up from the bed to get closer to you.

"No, no." You whispered, shaking your head and looking around his room, it was the one room you hadn't been in yet.

"Do you want me to put the gun away?" You nodded frantically, slowly lowering your hands down now that he knew who it was in his bedroom this late at night.

"Yes please." He took the gun and put it away in the drawer beside his bed and cleared his throat, rubbing the back of your head as you got closer to him.

"What's wrong?" He sat down on the bed and you walked into the room sitting down beside him.

"I'm scared, he said he'd kill me, Chan." You admitted and he sighed, wrapping his arms around your shoulders and drawing you closer to him,

"What if he gets me?"

"I won't let it happen. I won't let him anywhere near you, you're mine and I'm going to protect you." He repeated, pulling you to lay down on the bed with him. He spooned you and began tracing patterns into your skin as a way of trying to calm you down. You let the 'you're mine' comment pass, it felt nice for him to say that to you right now, it was something you needed to hear.

"I promise." He kissed your shoulder blade and you closed your eyes, feeling safe and protected around him enough to fall asleep for the first time all night.

"Get some sleep. I promise to protect you." He kissed your shoulder again and you hummed, shuffling back towards him wanting him to hold you closer. But you turned around to face him instead, deciding now would be a good time to question him since you weren't tired.

"Aren't you scared of him?" He shook his head and ran his hand over your cheek, tracing his thumb along your skin as he stared into your eyes. He had to be strong to you even if it meant telling you he wasn't scared when he was.

"He holds no power over me, I don't care about him but if he comes anywhere near you-" Your hand on his cheek calmed him down, you could see him growing more and more agitated, but he was shocked that you'd touched him like this. All the other times you seemed to move away but you were willing, getting close to him and touching him willingly.

"Thank you for protecting me, not just with Namjoon but with that guy at the party." He nodded, the guy had been locked in the basement the moment the boys got him home and Chan was planning on dealing with him in the morning.

"Anything for you." You looked at him, your eyes glancing from his to his lips trying to fight back the feeling of wanting to kiss him but it was hard. You close your eyes and leant in and he leant down pressing his lips against yours. As soon as he kissed you the world fell away, it was all slow and soft something you'd never thought would happen to you, it felt like it was something from the books you'd read as a teenager. It was comforting and his hand fell away from your face and to your hip, dragging your body closer to him so there was no space between you any more. You could feel his heart beating against your chest as he brought you closer, pulling away and running his thumb along your bottom lip.

"Do it again," You begged him to kiss you one more time, your mind blank as your heart took over your actions. He pressed his lips against yours, the world falling away in an instant, but this time the kiss was hot and full of passion. His tongue ran along the seam of your lips and you parted them for him wanting nothing more than to make out with him all night. The kiss was sloppy and you could taste the scotch you'd both been drinking that night. You wrapped your arm around his neck and he chuckled, pulling away from you not wanting to take things too far too soon.

"Enough for one night," He placed a gentle kiss on your lips again to satisfy you and you shifted on the bed, laying your head on his chest to fall asleep while listening to his heartbeat. He laid on his back looking at the ceiling while he listened to your breathing trying to make it the focus of his thoughts. As long as you were still breathing he had something to fight for, something to stop him going after Namjoon right away and coming up with some kind of plan. For you it felt safe right next to him, it was strange and didn't make sense in your head but your heart was telling you it felt right to be there with him no matter what he'd done. The kiss had been too good for you to ignore the chemistry between you both. He kissed the top of your head as your eyes got too heavy to keep them open any longer, and you stopped fighting to keep them open, drifting away into the best night's sleep you or Chan had ever had in the longest time.

Tagline: My fantastic and wonderful editor I would be nowhere without! @moonprincessdiviniation​ @taestannie​ @kneel-begyourpardon​ @calling-dips-on-j-hope​ @hugs4chan​ @ncitythoughts​ @inseonqt​ @cloudsgathering​ @atletino​ @mischiefmakerliesmith5​ @freckledquokka @happygirl327​

[theowlhouseheadcanons]

So what are the Beta's personalities? I don't think there is a guide. All I know is Luz is a Bustard, Amity is pure bred bitch and Willow is S M U G.

Okay, I have two options: do you want the detailed, serious answer or the over-simplified, stupidish answer? Choose wisely.

Painfully detailed:

All we “canonically” know about them, apart from the designs, is their heavier approach to darker, maybe punk/goth vibes - a lead to all the content the fandom produced so far, creating all kinds of creative views about their characters.

If we take a look to Dana´s unrelated artworks, it's a mix of grim bizarrice with mundane and/or wholesome character remarks that makes the odd creations seem… relatable and emphatic, or at least curious enough to make you crook your neck in contemplation. There is also this faint feeling of madness and gloom (with different variations depending on the piece), but they all seem consistent within the big picture.

Overall, they appeal for complexity, and this is where I think the Betas stand - with deep roots on dark humor too. So, after making this boastful analysis of Dana´s art that nobody asked for, let's get to them.

Amity:

As her canon version, she's a character with layers (and masks, depending on the company she might be bearing at the time).

At first impression, she might seems cold and uninterested, with sarcasm being her favorite tool in conversation; Amity makes the effort to keep most people around her at distance to avoid creating unnecessary attachments, so she´ll come off as rude and selfish - but if you hang around enough or prove you have some guts and values, she might take a liking; And once you become friends, you´ll never meet someone more loyal;

She doesn't mind breaking rules – especially her mother's rules – for the sake of entertainment and for helping her friends. She's a fan of pranks and deception, but do not mistake her impetus for recklessness: Amity plays clever to guarantee he reputation remains intact for the right people (leaving the ones who knows her true ways crawling under their skin (enemies) or smirking at her (friends));

She's not one who easily share personal information, reserving her deeper feelings and worries to a scarce number of people;

She won't back down from discussions, and if she feels like something or someone is crossing any lines of her (surprisingly existing) "moral code" she won't leave it alone until she gives a final word on it (besides, she loves the taste of victory, and hate when the ones she cares get hurt in any sense); She fights with words that hit exactly on people's weak spots, but if she's irritated enough she might put her destructive magic to some use (as a threat);

In school, her notes are good (although she can easily make them better if she just puts in the effort) and if the teachers don't insist on pushing some expected behavior towards her, and instead work with her “flexible learning process”, she won't bother. Actually, if she takes interest in the class, she´ll deepen discussions with interesting topics and good criticism, making teachers raise their eyebrows on her competence. But, if for some reason the schoolmaster gets on a tight spot with Amity, she´ll make sure every minute of their class feels a bit closer to hell :)

(One might imagine how polemic Beta Amity must be among the faculty)

When she's not idly hanging with Boscha and the girls, she can be spotted sauntering alone in the corridors, wearing the portrait of Boredom on her face that keeps most people at distance. The only individual that doesn´t appear to be affected by her subtle threatening aurea is Willow: as anything odd and potentially entertaining, Willow conquered Amity´s attention enough to mold a friendship with her. They work pretty well together, with Willow´s centred personality balancing off Amity's fiery behavior. Hanging out with Willow feels both relaxing and exciting, as she never knows what new “job” her friend might be up to - and she's always down to tag along on her quests;

Willow:

Willow is an intriguing kid – and I'm not talking about her dubious choice of fashion or her ability to keep a poker face to everything and everyone while absorbing more details and information than anyone in the room – everyone that knows her agrees with that definition. And everyone knows her; Why? Well...

Her irreducible dedication and unbiased expertise in the bizarre and all sorts of knowledge makes her a handy option for those who need to get some job done and they don't know who else to call. Her almost obsessive curiosity for everything keeps her constantly busy with some experiment, project or investigation;

She displays the minimum respect to people around her and seems genuinely unbothered by social dramas and average teen stuff; Interacting with Willow might feel awkward or incredibly interesting as she has the habit of infodumping and calling attention to random details in the environment (and you'll never know what's going on her mind); ~Her humor is a little morbid too~

She's the kind of person you can hang out alot but if you put some thought on it you'll get shocked how little you know about them – Willow doesn't have a problem with sharing, but she'll only do when requested;

And besides, she rather have the company of plants and herself (a fact she more show than tell), because neither of them will delay her plans or interrupt them with spontaneous cases of *looks down on notes* needing help; (but don't worry, if she's your friend, she will help)

Willow will defy rules only if she knows there won't be bad consequences for her and her "partners in crime" – and she might not share that part with them sometimes so they won't get comfortable enough to mess up;

Luz:

The main common thing between Beta and Canon Luz is their contagious energy and righteous mind: they're always ready to have a good time while being able to help someone; The main difference, I guess, is that Beta Luz has a more flexible moral on methods she might use to do "good";

She never skips the calls for adventure, even the ones that presents potential dangers (which she generally doesn't take note until it's too late) making her a magnet for trouble;

Her friends are so used to her shenanigans that Luz doesn't need more than a look to have them sighing "what have you done this time?"

She's a sporty girl, but also a lover of video games and anime and trying new stuff – which once again, might be a call for danger;

She's friendly but can't help her passive aggressive humor, which can gets sharp depending on her mood; Aggression and offences are a last case resource, unless we're talking about bad guys; She might be down to break rules if it is necessary for doing good, but overall she rather leave law undisturbed; She doesn't mind taking "alternative" ways to achieve her goals, but she draws a line on cheating – and that buys her some heated discussions with Amity;

Luz swears she tries to not get involved in people's business but she never thinks twice before calling people out when they're being unnecessarily bad or rude. Actually, she has the habit of acting before thinking – the main pillar of her troublemaker reputation;

With all that, one might think she's reckless and slow in catching things up – which is not a lie, but that doesn't mean she can't be responsible: she always keep her promises and is committed to following deadlines and conditions – and I'm not sure if this is the place to add, but she's pretty good with children! For Amity's amusement

In sum (simple version):

[glapplebloom]

Our first impressions of the new cast, and I’m not going to talk about that.

As you can probably tell with my enjoyment of the Powerpuff Girls Reboot, I’m not too bothered on who plays who. Sometimes it's good to let new people play characters to give their own spin on things. Ben Schwartz, for example, does a great job at his version of Sonic. And if we’re lucky, Chris Pratt will do okay as Mario and Jack Black will give us a cover of Ignorance Is Bliss. So I am not going to judge these characters by their new voices, just their new situation. And oh boy, it's a new situation.

My Little Pony: Tell Your Tale’s first set of episodes is about five minutes each. And the first episode “A Home to Share” is about the five of them working on their Lighthouse. To sum it up, imagine the Castle Sweet Castle set up only shrunkated. Zipp, Pipp, Izzy and Hitch are excited to work on it and they’re probably worse than the Main Five in that episode. Like Pip is the only one who has the ego thing and it's not the worst factor of the set up.

Like if there was any time for Sunny to be upset and give them a self-reflection of their actions, it would have been when they almost destroyed her picture of her father. But in a nice scene, Sunny realizes that like her father to her, she has to be the one to bring out the best in them. So she does. Of the four episodes, this is the only one with a song and I’m not a fan of it. But it ends with the Lighthouse fully fixed.

The next episode, “Zipp’s Flight School”, sees the others convince Zipp to teach some pegasi how to fly. She doesn’t seem interested because it seems hopeless, but after flying off and seeing a Pesagus Mother teaching her child to fly, it gave her flashbacks to when her own mother encouraged her to do the tricks she wanted to do. This inspires her to teach them and it works. But she isn’t going to teach again.

Now what should have been the second episode is “Sisters Take Flight”, which shows the Pegasi Sisters leaving Zephyr Heights to move to the new Lighthouse (for some reason). Good news, Pipp shows more personality! Bad news, it's the “I pack a lot because I’m a girl and fashionable” trope. To send them off the Queen gives them a parade with giant balloons, a grand speech and even a nice looking statue of the two.

Of course, since this should have been the second episode, the Pegasi aren’t used to flying so they crash into things ruining the event. But the Royal Family are still in good spirits and even take a picture together. Pipp asks Zipp if she’s going to miss Zephyr Heights and Zipp thinks maybe, but now it's time for a new adventure. Of course, they can go visit her and vice versa anytime so it's not a big deal, but this could be used to symbolize moving out on your own.

And the Final Episode is Nightmare Roommate, where Izzy is a nightmare to deal with. She snores, sleep magics so they thought a blanket she was unknowingly levitating was a ghost, uses their stuff and makes a mess. The Pegasi ask Sunny to deal with it, but she doesn’t want things to get awkward so they go to Hitch for advice. His advice: honesty is the best policy, but a gift can help smooth things over. 

They do that, which turns out to be the stuff she was using so she doesn’t have to use theirs. The thing is she doesn’t like those things, she just wanted to do that to fit in. So they fixed the “stop using my stuff” problem, but the others are still in a work in progress. I know people didn't like Pony Life, but this feels even safer than that show. 

Favorite episode: Sisters Take Flight. It really shows off the dynamic between the two better than the movie and shows that despite those differences with each other, they’re family. Least favorite: A Home to Share. Outside that one scene it's pretty much a musical number and I am not a fan of it. It’s relatively harmless, but if you were looking forward to this you may be disappointed. 

[pallas17]

Winx Club - Live action rewrite/discussion

I was obsessed with Winx Club when I was little but even though I still enjoy it I get annoyed at the immaturity and the many original ideas that weren't executed worthily. The Netflix... Well... "adaptation", I'd pretend it doesn't exist. I say let's together rewrite Winx so it fits an older audience.

- First the main fairy characters are the same. Same backstory (maybe a few added siblings and diversity, I would change Aisha to be just a princess and not a Crown one) and same personalities but they act their age instead of being 10 year olds in the body of teenagers.

- We expand the good plotlines and maybe delete the more/not-as-original-good-ones. For example keep the Domino/Ancient witches drama but cut out season 7's plotline and I would prefer to cut out s4's too but that is to be discussed.

- Work on the villains backstories and arc's. I'd say make the Trix and Valtor the main villains and make them more of a threat instead of switching antagonists every season like a pair of underwear.

- Lower a little bit the boyfriend factor or take more time to work out the love stories in the show...Focus on friendship, self-love, growing up, responsibilities and basically themes that young adults could relate to.

- Make the restoration of Domino the end game. Let it take time... Instead of fixing a whole genocide within the blink of an eye. Don't bring back Marion and Oritel because besides the 2nd 3D film they had not much of a role or impact in the franchise and their sacrifice used to be a big deal but when they brought them back to life it took away the weight from it all. Make it painful and sad. Make Bloom and Daphne cope with the loss of their parents, heritage and kingdom.

-While on the Daphne note... I PERSONALLY adore the character of Daphne and would love to expand her storyline and personality more. I would take off the witches' curse much earlier in the show and make her a big part of the restoration of Domino and the defeat of the great evil. I wouldn't marry her off at all. And would have her deal with PTSD and she would need rehabilitation and to relearn how to walk.

(I could make a whole post about Daphne AU headcanons, tell me if you would be interested)

- Expand and explain the laws and rules of the Winx Magical Universe. Creation, how does magic work, how do politics work. I'm not a big fan of spending too much time on Earth and restoring magic there. What about you?

- No white-washing. Aisha is part of the Negroid race and so is Stormy. Musa is part of the Mongoloid. Flora is a latina, Darcy too. Icy is Caucasian but has albinism. Side note Bloom has lots of freckles.

- Maybe lower the number of episodes but increase their duration. (40-50 min)

- Keep some of the theme songs and have an opening. It could be a compilation of the girls trying to be normal teenagers in the mids of the war and chaos.

- Still have transformation but make them short and not full of musical numbers. Maybe have like a instrumental theme for them.

-Have fewer transformations and fix their designs. I'd take inspiration for the last transformation from the Bloomix design. It seemed the most practical and beautiful to me.

- How about having Bloom earn her Enchantix by saving Daphne through sacrifice from the curse and not just sending her off to some desert to meditate and ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom She's the strongest fairy once again because... Will power?! 🤨 Will power is important for situations like Aisha refusing the arranged mariage, Stella learning to think before she speaks, Flora becoming bolder, Daphne coping with trauma but breaking the very founding laws of your world? I'm gonna tell you this kids your "will" power will never break the Laws of Physics.

- Keep the colours of the original but match them better. Don't forget your colour theory cinematographers!

- KEEP THE HUMOUR AND JOY OF THE ORIGINAL (looking angrily at you Netflix 👀) HAVE SOME RIDICULOUSNESS IN IT, IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE FUN.

- Make it mature but maybe 12+ stuff and not 16+. You can have dirty jokes but make it sly and not as blunt and obvious as in a certain Netflix adaption.

- Keep the serious themes like adoption, sacrifice, divorce, arranged engagement, breaking the old patriarchal traditions, the importance of up-bringing and parent-child bond.

-Have them struggle with their own version of high-school. It's hell for us so I'm not letting them go easy. Make them refuse parties and going out because they have to study for some shitty finals. Like seriously they had so much time on their hands.

- I imagined a scene, maybe at the end of the first season where Musa would play a melody she created on her sinthesizer that would resemble the melody of the s1 theme song and the girls would start giggling, dancing carelessly, they would mess around playfully and sloppily and would make up these cheesy lyrics about their Club (which would resemble the original lyrics) At the end one will say... "Well that was too sappy, even for us"

"It sounded like the theme song of some pre-school cartoon tv show."

- It would have many inside jokes relating to the original and how corny it was (I know that it was intended for younger audiences, I loved it and still do)

- To sum it all up. Make it nostalgic and good. Learn from both the good and bad. See what the audience wants. Put time and effort and some artistic touch. Create it for the love of cinematography and not just to have another over-advertised golden goose.

[bloggerthannothing]

Kittens Game Apotheosis Farming: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The G_d-Emperor

And that the other ones who’d given it a shot

Had seen a modest sum grow geometrically

And then they had forgiven themselves

Because the net reward had justified

The colossal mess they made of their lives

-Hey Mister DJ I Thought You Said We Had A Deal, They Might Be Giants

Introduction

Kittens Game is a very good incremental game. If playing incremental games doesn't violate your personal code of conduct, I very strongly recommend playing it. I'm going to spoil basically all of the mechanics in this...tutorial? Speedrun guide? Love letter to a wonderfully designed set of systems? Memoir of madness induced in the pursuit of ever bigger numbers? Let's go with 'guide'.

A basic overview of Kittens Game: you manage a village of kittens. You assign them to jobs to produce resources, and use those resources to construct buildings, buy upgrades, and research technologies in the pursuit of getting more resources to build an ever larger village town empire galactic federation of kittens. Classic incremental game stuff. 

Along the way, you'll create hyper-efficient workaholic sun cultists, develop AI that doesn't share your values, commit genocide across dimensional boundaries, engage in trade with the unfathomable elder gods, and of course, destroy the timeline to do it all again. 

Let's focus on that last part. Resetting nets you two resources: karma and paragon. Karma increases happiness, making your kittens produce a bit more. Paragon increases production, up to a cap of +200%, and boosts storage with no limit. It can be spent on important upgrades called Metaphysics, and it can also be converted into Burned Paragon, which is half as effective as normal Paragon, but will stack with it. So you can reach +300% production with a high amount of both Paragon and Burned Paragon. Neat.

Here are some numbers for scale. One kitten gives one point of Paragon. The most expensive "normal" Metaphysics upgrade, Renaissance, costs 750 Paragon. The most expensive Metaphysics upgrade in the entire game, only put there to give end-game players a long term goal to work for, costs 60k Paragon. 

Burned Paragon actually has one more effect I didn't mention. One tiny, insignificant effect that doesn't really matter much and shouldn't affect gameplay at all. It boosts the trait of your leader. 

Context: You can assign a kitten to be the leader of your village. The leader gets a boost to their production, and their trait gives some small bonus to your society. For example, the merchant trait gives you 3% more resources from trading, and the metallurgist trait gives you 10% more product when you craft metallic goods. 

Burned Paragon boosts the effects of these traits by an amount proportional to its square root. So quadrupling how much BP you have only doubles the increase in trait effect. An example: With 100k Paragon, and the Policy that doubles leader trait effect, you would have a merchant giving you +35% gains from trade. So even with all of that work, in the total end-game case, it's not a huge deal. Right?

Apotheosis

A relatively recent, experimental alpha build of the game introduced a new resource: apotheosis. Apotheosis boosts the paragon you get from kittens each reset. By a lot. There is...probably a good reason it's not in the main version of the game. It's overpowered. But the way in which it is overpowered makes things very, very interesting. 

Every point of apotheosis gives a flat 1% increase to paragon gain. So, 100 Apotheosis = double paragon, 300 apotheosis = quadruple paragon, and so on. 

How do we get this apotheosis? By completing Challenges: from a fresh reset, you must complete an objective (like reaching the planet Helios) while under some restriction (such as only half your kittens can work) and you'll gain apotheosis based on what the Challenge was. You can enable multiple Challenges at the same time, and get the reward for each as soon as you complete its respective goal.

You can also enable optional Conditions to make the Challenges harder, and boost the apotheosis reward you get (for example, one Condition disables your metaphysics upgrades). 

For this guide, there are two important Challenges and one important Condition. 

The first important Challenge is Winter Has Come. With this challenge activated, your kitten farmers' catnip production is unaffected by Paragon, and it's always winter, lowering catnip production from catnip fields by 75%. 

This challenge normally wouldn't be a big deal, but happy kittens consume more catnip, and guess whose kittens are in a constant state of euphoria due to their immense amount of positive karma?

So kittens are consuming 20x more catnip, it's always winter, and farmers don't get the paragon bonus. It's not quite as bad as it sounds - farmers are still producing way more than normal due to their aforementioned constant state of euphoria - but it heavily influences early game decision making. 

Challenges also give a normal resource instantly on their completion, in addition to apotheosis. Winter Has Come gives 1000 void on completion, which is a very sizable amount - typically, void has to be accrued in very small amounts (<10) from an event which has a chance to occur every 15 minutes.

The goal is to reach the planet Helios. Winter Has Come itself is a low-difficulty challenge with a fairly low apotheosis reward. Why do we care about it? The void will come in handy.

The second important challenge is Atheism. While this Challenge is active, faith cannot be gained or used at all, and this decides everything. Remember those workaholic sun cultists I mentioned earlier? In normal endgame gameplay, the production bonus from Solar Revolution is so high (~8000%) that once you unlock it, you can complete the rest of the tech tree pretty much instantly. Like, in less than five minutes. This is great for efficiency, but it can make things a bit dull in the long term - instead of managing anything interesting or working around bottlenecks, you're just clicking through menus as fast as you can to build housing for kittens and then reset. 

Atheism makes for a longer and more interesting run, and also provides a sizable amount of apotheosis. The goal of Atheism is to build a cryochamber. This requires gathering many time crystals and reaching nearly the very end of the tech tree. 

The important Condition is "No Apocrypha". This disables several religion-related upgrades. Because we already have Atheism enabled, this incurs very little additional difficulty, but provides a massive multiplier to apotheosis rewards - about 20x. 

So that's the run we're looking at - starting from nothing, in a godless world of eternal winter, reach the faraway planet of Helios and construct a Cryochamber to preserve the life of our society's greatest kittens. In total, it produces around 450 Apotheosis, and may be repeated indefinitely.

It All Comes Together

So. This particular combination of Challenges and Conditions creates stupidly high amounts of apotheosis, that apotheosis produces stupid amounts of paragon, and those stupid amounts of paragon create a stupidly powerful leader.

And that stupidly powerful leader's stupidly powerful traits, when applied to this particular run, produce really interesting gameplay and optimization problems, even though all of your numbers are 10x or 100x higher than they were ever designed to be.  I think this is partly due to the fact that Kittens Game's systems are designed extremely well, and partly due to some sheer cosmic luck.

This guide is going to show you what strategies I use to complete this run as quickly as possible, because speedrunning is fun. My current record is 2 hours, 48 minutes, and 5 seconds in real-time, or Year 12, Autumn, Day 42 by the in-game calendar. 

“Rules”

These are standards I follow to make this run as fun and interesting as possible (for myself).

Offline progression "off", pausing allowed, real time does not count time while paused. This gives you time to think about what you're doing and makes it less of a button mash checklist-fest.

Keyboard shortcuts for simple actions are allowed, e.g. leader switching, worker assignment, pausing, upgrading leaders, and observing events. However, event observation has to require actively pressing a button each time - no holding down a key! I allowed for this because I made a hotkey script for this exact run, with all of those hotkeys.

Opening multiple instances of the game to manipulate trading RNG is allowed. No one likes an RNG dependent run, and I justify it in-universe as "timeline manipulation." This is probably the sketchiest rule.

Prerequisites and a Disclaimer on Numbers

-Have completed Anarchy and Black Sky at least once

-Have a lot of Burned Paragon (>100k) and some regular Paragon (>500) to max out production bonus

-Have all the Metaphysics upgrades

About the numbers in this guide - because this is a very specific set of unusual circumstances, and because costs grow exponentially and not linearly, it’s hard for me to gauge how optimal numbers of things would change if you have more or less Burned Paragon or Karma than I do.

For that reason (and because I want this guide to be a useful reference for me) all of the specific numbers I cite will be based upon my resource totals, which are as follows at time of writing:

Even if your numbers are lower or higher than mine, many of the same strategies will apply as long as you have the prerequisites done.

Outline

Here is the general outline of each distinct "phase" of the run. Each individual part will get its own post later, because there's a lot to talk about in each. 

Phase 1: Start to Leader. In order to make use of our stupidly powerful leader, we need them to gain enough job experience. This phase is about avoiding starvation, getting our village off the ground, and creating the world's best education system. 

Phase 2: Leader to Geodesy. To make full use of our Leader's trading prowess, we need the gold production from Geodesy. This phase revolves around observing the heavens in order to explore the seas, the beginning of the industrial revolution, and keeping up a 24/7 party.

Phase 3: Geodesy to Astrophysicists. Getting the rare metal we need will take a lot of knowledge about space. This phase revolves around luxury housing, negotiating with Zebras, and the internet. 

Phase 4: Astrophysicists to Cryochamber. The final stretch. This phase revolves around privatizing the moon and haggling with elder gods. 

[leahazel]

More about my morally-grey heroines and their messed-up relationships

I wanted to elaborate on this post I wrote about D&F and BFS, but it turns out that adding readmore links to reblogs is a PITA, and I just now that this is gonna turn into a fucking novelette. 

So here we go.

Time to go into some detail about this!

Let’s define our terms:

“Decline and Fall” is my 120K+ series of loosely chronological, interconnected short fics, set in a tiny fandom for a visual novel that’s been in alpha development since 2015. For the record, the word count disincludes unfinished drafts, and stories that I’m holding back because they’re based on canon spoilers.

“Blood from Stone“ is my 100K unfinished Skyrim WIP, which began as a response to a kink meme prompt, and is not so much a rarepair as a non-existent one.

Both of these stories centrally feature young female protagonists and their sexual relationship with a much older man. Both heroines are... “grey” to say the least.

Let’s compare our fandoms, shall we?

Skyrim is a juggernaut fandom for a super-popular RPG which is part of a 30-yo franchise. The setting is moderately dark and casually sprinkled with murder cults, cannibalism, secret police death squads, and the prison industrial complex. The player character can be a thief and a murderer and everyone just learns to be okay with it because the only alternative is a fiery apocalypse. They also rob graves for the lulz.

Seven Kingdoms: The Princess Problem is a pinkie-toe-sized fandom for a hybrid RPG and dating sim where attractive young people flirt and date for the purpose of brokering world peace. The setting is one where you can actually broker world peace effectively. The player character can perpetrate a fair amount of proxy violence, but maintaining a good reputation dishonestly is legitimately difficult.

Now, let’s compare our heroines:

Corinne is a 24-year-old bounty hunter who became a folk hero, a soldier, and a cult assassin. She’s living alone and working for a living since she was 18. She’s never been in love, but she’s had multiple sexual and romantic relationships in the past. I deliberately wrote her as being very sexually confident and self-assured. She also has combat training, magical training, her special Dragonborn powers, and an incalculable amount of social clout. By every metric, she’s a powerful character. Though she can talk her way out of a tight spot (all my favorite characters can), she can also fight her way out.

Verity is (at the beginning of D&F) not yet 18 years old. She’s a princess from a very conservative kingdom who was raised to become a barter bride in a diplomatic marriage. The values that were passed to her were duty, tradition, and absolute obedience. Her primary skills are social, charisma, eloquence, and persuasion. Then she was dropped into the deep water of a diplomatic summit and had the weight of future history put on her shoulders, without ever having been taught how to make her own decisions or live with her regret.

To sum up, we have one hyper-competent, confident, and independent badass, universally recognized as powerful and dangerous, and then we have someone who’s basically a deconstruction of a traditional fantasy princess.

Okay, what about the more specific setting within the game world?

BFS is set in Markarth, arguably the most corrupt city in Skyrim, and the site of a localized war, on top of the 2-3 other wars that Skyrim has going on. The city is controlled by the cartel-like Silver-Blood family, and their enemies are swiftly and brutally eliminated. The rule of law is a joke. When the player character arrives at Markarth, they witness a chain or murders and are drawn into a conspiracy that sees them sentenced to life in prison for a crime they didn’t commit. The ruling elite suppress the native underclass by a variety of inventive methods. The roads into the city are controlled by the remnants of a violent but failed uprising, and this uprising is actually the origin story of Skyrim’s entire civil war storyline.

D&F is set in Revaire, explicitly the most violently war-torn of the seven kingdoms. Once the epicenter of a conquering empire, it was a country full of arts and culture, until a bloody coup slaughtered the entire royal line and instituted a new and more brutal regime. The new regime is on shaky grounds and foresighted people predict its imminent fall to rebel forces. So much, so canon. In D&F, I made a point of developing the new royals and their small coterie of supporters, as well as illustrating their constant struggle to conceal how widely reviled they are by the populace, and most of the former nobility. Their apathy to the plight of the common people is underscored in contrast to Verity’s compassion, which is ridiculed as a sentimental feminine affectation.

I’m attracted to certain themes, as you might have noticed.

Now, we get to talk about love interests.

Thongvor Silver-Blood is rather anemically characterized in Skyrim’s canon, so much of the information that I include in BFS is inferred. From his limited number of dialogues in the game, we know that he’s politically ambitious, a Stormcloak supporter, easily angered, and that he has one legitimate friend in the city. Like most Skyrim characters of his age bracket, he served in the Great War. He’s defined by his relationship to his generational cohort. In BFS, he’s def8ined in contrast to his brother. Thonar is comfortable being thought of as a villain. Thongvor still needs to believe that he’s the good guy. And I’m gonna get more into that in later chapters, too.

As a love interest, he’s initially in awe of Corinne, and always genuinely adoring, but more than a little jealous and possessive. BFS is not a story about love redeeming bad men (don’t get me started), but Thongvor shows different sides of his personality to different people, and the side that Corinne gets to see is much nicer than what most people do.

Hyperion Asper is a character of my own devising, whose existence in 7KPP canon is purely implied. We know his children, Jarrod and Gisette, and we knew that he organized a coup to seize the throne. I posit him as a tyrant and unrepentant child-killer (not directly stated in D&F, at least not yet). He’s ruthless and manipulative and his sole purpose is maintaining a sense of personal power. I structured him as the bad example that Jarrod tries -- and fails -- to live up to.

As a love interest... look, he’s a man who’s cheating on his wife with his son’s wife. He seduces Verity and manipulates her, and takes a special delight in pushing her buttons. All his compliments to her are mean-spirited and back-handed. He’s also jealous and possessive... which is especially pathetic, since he’s jealous of his own son, whom Verity doesn’t even like. His rage is a constant implied undercurrent in the narrative.

And the relationship dynamics themselves?

Corinne kisses Thongvor, proposes marriage to him, and then sleeps with him before riding off into mortal danger. She’s fond and affectionate, but she shies away from intense emotions, whether negative or positive. Since they spend most of their time apart, their marriage has been defined by Thongvor yearning like a sailor’s wife, while Corinne ran around doing violence and crime. They only just had their first fight. It will change when they get to spend some more significant time together... but on the whole, their marriage is fairly happy, and the emotional dynamic favors Corinne -- so far. It’s not a pure gender reversal, but that element is definitely dominant.

Hyperion starts seducing Verity on their very first meeting, and relies on a combination of magnetic attraction and Verity’s inexperience in life to keep her coming back, against her better judgment. Their relationship is mutually defined by a combination of attraction and resentment of that attraction. The danger of the situation is an essential element, to the point where it’s hard to imagine their affair would survive without it. It’s a puzzle and a battle, a source of fascination but not of comfort. There’s lust involved, and curiosity, but not a shred of love or even like. The closest thing to genuine affection is when Verity briefly imagines that there could be a version of Hyperion she actually liked, cobbled from his various, hidden good qualities. Any trappings of a genuine relationship are deliberately discordant.

I have tried, more than once, to imagine an alternate universe in which these two could be happy. It can’t be done. they are a study in dysfunction.

So where’s the similarity, with all these differences outlined?

Corinne’s choice to marry into the Silver-Blood family makes her complicit in their rule of the Reach, corrupt and reactionary as it is. Her reluctance to accept being called by their name reflects a reluctance to confront unpleasant truths that’s fundamental to her character. Choosing to be one of them affects and will continue to affect how other people see her, mostly negatively, and mostly without her being aware of it. Being Thongvor’s wife has gained her enemies. The fact that she doesn’t share his more reactionary views is something that they’ve both chosen to elegantly ignore, but the rest of the world won’t be so generous.

Verity’s choice to marry into the Revaire royal family makes her complicit in their violence against the forces rebelling against them, albeit in a more subtle way. Her personal dislike of Jarrod and the fact that their marriage was purely political will not absolve her in anyone’s eyes. Neither will her compassionate and charitable character, which can only be seen as a fig leaf to the Revaire royals’ general brutality. She has lost at least one good friend -- who will never see her the same way, since she chose to throw her lot in with his enemies. She will go down in history as an Asper wife -- but if she’s lucky, not just as that.

Both Corinne and Verity choose to accept some of the violence of the system that they live under, in order to serve their own lofty, long-term goals. Both of them are more image-driven than they care to admit, and though they are genuinely caring and compassionate, they will readily sacrifice compassion in service on their goals. They are queens (or queen-like figures), one-degree-of-separation members of the ruling class, implicated but not directly in control.

And their relationships serve to highlight what they are willing to accept, even though it goes against their conscience.

Is there a conclusion to be drawn here?

Sort of. I want to write about power, compromise and complicity. For whatever reason, it turns out that yw/om relationships are... a really good vehicle for exploring that. I can’t really explain why that is, just yet. I just... have had these thoughts floating, unstructured, in my head for months on end. I needed to get them out on paper, and give them some semblance of order.

I don’t even know why anyone but me would read this, as long and meandering as it is. But having it accessible might be of use to me.

[elencelebrindal]

Alright, can you rank which modern Golds are often portrayed closest to their canon parts in fan fiction and which are practically fanon (even if we love it).

I sure can! Keep in mind this is my personal experience, so people might have read different stuff than me. If you see something you feel like it’s wrong, it’s probably because we have different sources.  I mostly rely on English and Italian fan fiction. I started reading something in Spanish and Portuguese, but my understanding of the language is not smooth. 

I’m going to use a scale from 1 (least accurate) to 10 (most accurate), and then write my explanation. 

Mu 5/10 He’s mostly depicted as calm, collected and gentle in any situation, with no regards toward his actual somewhat “aggressive” nature in combat. Mu is not Shun, he’s not that diplomatic and he’s not that kind with everyone. Though, I’ve seen a fair share of works in which Mu is considered a gentle man with a tough attitude, so it’s fine. 

Aldebaran 10/10 As far as I know, Aldebaran is very well depicted in the works he appears in. It might be because there’s already not that much information to use for him, because unfortunately Aldebaran doesn’t get the same amount of attention of other characters, but his personality is almost always spot on and even when it’s not, it’s still compatible with his canon version. 

Saga 4/10 I read too much stuff of pre-Ares Saga that completely ignores the fact he was really gentle and kind. Most people use his aggressive and demanding personality when it’s not the case to do so, especially if he’s written as part of the pairing Aiolos x Saga. And then, the works that depict him after the entire ordeal with Ares still have him as somewhat evil and ready to betray. I know the Hades Chapter has a good influence on that, but Saga himself is not evil. Some authors, though, handle this character really well, so he still gets his justice. 

Kanon 7/10 While he gets a lot better treatment than Saga, I still come across works with him as the Gemini Saint still depicted as inherently malevolent, in some ways. I love what people do with him as the Sea Dragon, it’s almost always perfect how they capture this character, but there are some hiccups here and there with his Gemini self.

Deathmask 10/10 Deathmask is a character that can change depending on what major source it’s used to describe him, but I’ve never seen (aside from ooc representations) wrong depiction of him. People are really amazing at describing him as a heartless bastard (thus using the classic as inspiration) or as a man that has evolved and got his redemption (thus using Hades and/or Soul of Gold as inspiration). To this day I’ve never really seen his canon self being distorted.

Aiolia 8/10 He is amazingly close to the canon counterpart in fan fiction, but sometimes people tend to focus too much on the fact that he has to be brave and strong all the time. We had Aiolia prey of his own emotions in canon, so why going this heavy-handed only on one side of his personality? Rarely I’ve seen Aiolia described in his worst, like when he was grieving and angry. A couple works I’ve read perfectly summed up Aiolia using the entirety of his emotion range, and it was one of the best representations I’ve seen of him. 

Shaka 9/10 I feel like people actually got what Shaka’s character is. Sometimes there’s something that goes too far into the fanon side of the things, but it’s not that prominent in the community so I’ll let it slide more than I’d normally do. I like that people take into account his emotions without using them too much, and I like that people never forget how powerful he is or how messed up his early life was. The only thing I don’t like is how easily some authors make him get close to another person, with no second guesses or thinking, because canon Shaka is not that close to his companions. I made that mistake myself, after all, so I count in the list of those people. Most of the times I’m only disappointed when it’s clearly an ooc situation, and those don’t count because it’s intentional. 

Dohko 10/10 He’s pretty spot on, if you ask me. Dohko is relatively easy to get right, because he has a good balance (ironically) of irony and wise thinking, sprinkled with a good old-fashioned fighting spirit. I’ve never seen a fan work mess this up. Dohko is probablt the most “human” fictional character I’ve seen, because he acts a lot like a real life person (paranormal stuff notwithstanding), and I think that’s something really helpful in writing him.

Milo 5/10 Milo is either a hit or a miss in fan fiction. I see so many people focusing on the wrong stuff when tackling him, like only caring about the “sexiness factor” or making him a mischievous trouble-maker. Milo is a complex character, with a proud nature and a loyal attitude towards Athena and his companions, and this side of his personality is almost never showed. It’s always him being a goofy man with an inclination for disaster, and not enough about him being an actual competent Saint with more than his looks. I read a whole lot of stuff with him, and I was pleased in a good number of works, but at the same time I was disappointed in seeing how many people don’t actually care about how Milo is presented in canon. 

Aiolos ?/10 I don’t know. Honestly, I didn’t read enough about him, and I’m conflicted. Some people depict him as an overall perfect character, others like to make him more human, and a few just have fun using Aiolos without giving him a proper personality. Though, I haven’t seen anything that made me go “no, this is wrong”, so I guess it’s a good thing. Aiolos is one of those characters that really depends on what specific vision people have of him, since canon works don’t help as much in pinpointing a set behavior. 

Shura 8/10 Aside from those works that love to put him as a helpless participant of the chain of events, he’s very well depicted. Faithful? Yeah. A bit crazy? Also yeah. I don’t like when he’s described as someone who refuses to take responsibility for his actions, because I’ve seen very bad works with him as a Saint that was forced to follow Ares so “killing was an order and nothing else”. I like when people give him awareness of his own actions, because it’s something that actually appears in canon (and most notably in Soul of Gold). 

Camus 5/10 Too many times I’ve seen him depicted as a traitor that loves to betray anything and anyone for his own amusement, and too many times people threw away the kindness hidden under the ice. This particular side of his personality only shows up in fan fiction that depict him with Milo, and in works where he’s with Hyoga as a child. Most of the time, aside from these examples, he’s always cold and heartless, or lacks personality. I might have been unlucky with what I found, but this is my experience. 

Aphrodite 1/10 Please. Aphrodite is one of the Saints that gets the worst of everything. People love so much giving him a narcissistic and self-centered view that they forget how, on the contrary, Aphrodite is not like that. I mentioned this in one of my earliest posts, but it’s easy to guess why: because he’s feminine, because he wears makeup, and because he comes off with a somewhat sensual vibe, Aphrodite is often depicted as this inherently androgynous man with a deep care for beauty.  Guys, that’s not him. That’s Misty. Misty is narcissistic and fixated with his beauty, Misty hates getting blood on himself. Aphrodite thinks power is beauty, not the opposite. He doesn’t care about spilling blood on himself. He’s cruel and he’s merciless, and he willingly betrayed Athena, willingly killed Shun’s master like nothing. Stop depicting him as this weak Saint that cannot stand an insult or a stain on his clothes.  I almost never see a good depiction of him. His canon personality almost never shows up in fiction. 

[tossertozier]

hey i was wondering if you could talk a little about your thoughts behind eddie and richie's very limited playlist. i realise its quite an old fic now but something abt it has rly stuck with me since i first read it ages ago and i would be super interested to understand richie and the other losers perspectives on eddie and richies relationship. eddies head is always quite a lonely difficult place to be and i would love to know how you see this version of eddie and richie going forward 1/2

no worries if its difficult/youre too busy but if you have a moment i would rly love to read a little more about that universe. thank you !! 2/2

honestly anon i just read the beginning segment of that fic and i had to stop. i could call it projection: the fic. all of my fics are to some extent.... but that fic is nearly obvious. the entire opening sequence is straight out of my own life.

this is the fic in question if anyone hasn’t read it. i would read it before reading this post. the post is almost as long and will spoil the whole thing.

but of course in real life the guy i was fucking at the time was not my long term best friend so their relationship in the fic would be a lot more complex. i was never thinking about marrying my fuck buddy. but i did only fuck him bc he reminded me of someone else.

i decided to go with making it so new rules wasn’t necessarily applying to just eddie or just richie but could be about either of them. it’s definitely one of the more tragic of my fics. the part where richie and eddie have sex because they can’t have a conversation hurts me. it’s a very personal piece of myself to have written into a fic. “eddie laughs as he grabs his upper arms and he thinks to himself that this is it. this is almost enough.” && then later with the “i always thought you two were meant to be.” “please, please.” he tightens his pinky in hers, and spares a glance for bill “don’t say that.” like... the whole thing is so sad. i left it ambiguous in the writing with intention, bc i think it’s much more interesting to read things that leave room for interpretation, but when i was writing it, i was envisioning richie as in love with eddie. it’s unreciprocated but eddie needs to feel that love and attention anyway so he lets richie love him.

the other complicated piece of it is in this fic and really in none of my others, eddie really underestimates richies intelligence. “for fuck’s sakes, eddie.” he rips his hands off of him and eddie feels the cold bit his skin where richie leaves it, “don’t lie to me,” he stands up, whipping off his shirt even though it’s apparent they’re not having sex that night. “i’m not a fucking child.” he uses the deodorant on eddie’s dresser. he trades shirts out for one in his black leather bag. he shuts eddie’s door behind him. he doesn’t know what hurts more, that he’s off to find another what’s-her-face, or that eddie has to make himself care about it.

richie is well aware eddie doesn’t love him back but richie is content to take what he can get. eddie doesn’t love him back because he doesn’t think richie will ever love him in the way he imagines being loved. in the way he imagines bill loving him, or bill being as a lover. richie does love eddie, but eddie doesn’t really acknowledge that because it is not what he has always imagined love to look like.

he just wants to be in love with richie tozier, who doesn’t love him, but in a different way. a survivable way.

when i wrote this i was having a lot of thoughts about hero worship and eddie and bill and didn’t really have a space in any of my other fics to dive into it. it wouldn’t have worked in on pointe as eddie didn’t desperately need a role model at that point in his life. &tfat! eddie has already well moved past that. tfoas bill was a huge fucking mess. i wanted to put thoughts out there on what happens when you spend a lot of time fantasizing. i think a lot of young (especially gays) do. the creation of this person in your head and exactly how they would love you is such a hard thing for any REAL person to combat. really i just wanted to get out some feelings about how fantasy can really disrupt real life. bill and eddie not interacting in the fic is purposeful. i wanted to show that eddie’s fantasies are sort of baseless, but he clings to them anyway. they feel safe, even if they hurt him.

& then the

eddie knows richie does this purposefully, takes all the real decision making out of his hands. he asks the question but lets eddie decide what the question even is.

this is the passage that really sums up why eddie and richie don���t work in this universe. richie doesn’t even see himself as an adult. he is childish and selfish and immature and eddie confuses all of that with him not having actual feelings for eddie which isn’t true.

again... if you’re left wondering what happens next... it’s kind of intentional bc i did want it to be able to be read multiple different ways? but i’m gonna talk about what i was thinking of when i wrote it.

the entire last scene is... what it is. i used it will come back and i hoped readers would take that as even as eddie says that this is the last time it’s gonna happen, that’s just not true. they are hopelessly codependent. eddie thinks as he leaves about things dying before they can grow again, but then he also puts on blackbird. because people. aren’t trees. we have to take the broken bits... the longing and expectations and hurt of our past and move on with it stuck to us because you can never truly just shed your past like a skin and move on. eddie knows that he has to let it (bill’s marriage) hurt him and let that pain and rejection be a part of him because it will be whether he acknowledges it or numbs himself out to the point he can’t feel it using whichever vice (alcohol, attention, sex.)

does eddie think there’s hope for them at the end of that au? no. does richie think there’s hope for them at the end of that au? no.

do i think richie & eddie might have hope in that au? yeah... actually. i think they’re twin flames they’re characters that lend themselves beautifully to fanfiction because i can always see them falling in love over and over again.

it would take a lot of growth and recovery of course but... both of them know that. at the end of the fic, richie is confronted with that he is an adult now, regardless of if he wants to be one, and eddie knows he has to take himself as he is and keep going if he ever wants to get forward. that’s mutually good places for the characters to be... even if the ending feels a little desolate. it’s not. it’s bleak & bare... but it’s hopeful. there’s a life waiting at the end of winter.

thanks for asking anon!! this was fun to talk about. i actually like that fic more than i like a good number of my old fics so it was a nice quick reread.

[natsubeatsrock]

So, I watched and read Twin Star Exorcists, and...

This post has been long in coming. Back when I was watching the anime version of Twin Star Exorcists, I made it a point to mention how much I wanted people to watch it rather than read it. I even did it a few times here on this blog. At the time, this was because I was enjoying the anime version despite what fans of the original were saying. When Fairy Tail ended, I said that I was going to get into the manga version of this series. I tried it and I got 20 chapters before I decided to give up.

What happened?

What kind of insane parallel universe have I found myself in where I enjoy the Studio Pierrot adaptation of not one but two major shonen action manga series? Though, Black Clover seems to be a fairly straight adaptation with some filler here and there. There are plenty of changes in Twin Star Exorcists that make it easy for me to understand why fans of the Twin Star manga didn't like the adaptation. Why am I on the opposite side of this debate?

Fortunately, I actually have a few answers to this question. Good thing too. It's not like I have too many people on my side on this. Not to mention, when I mentioned my dislike, I was told it would be interesting to hear my thoughts. When the show was originally airing in 2016...

I've decided to stick to the material that happens before the time skip with this post. This reason is two-fold. One is around the point where I stopped reading the series. It makes sense to explain why my opinion soured on the manga before the point that I dropped it. Two, past that point, the manga and anime diverge from one another. It will be easier to talk about the adaptations’ differences if I’m operating on a level playing field.

If I could boil down the issues that I had with the jump from anime to manga, it would be the dynamic of the main relationship in the series. The focus, as far as the anime is concerned, was placed on their shared growth. They both have to grow stronger, but they also have to form a stronger bond as the Twin Star Exorcists.

That's not to say that isn't the case with the manga. If it weren't the case, I don't know that the series would be built around the Twin Star Exorcists as a concept. The series exists because it focuses on two people who have to work together and are expected to get married and have a kid. It would be wrong to say that there is only focus on this on the anime. But I can't say that it feels the same across both versions. It feels like that theme takes a back seat to Rokuro's growth in the manga.

If I was lazy, I could soley focus on moments in the anime that don’t in the manga. I could talk about how Subaru is actively pushing them to become closer as a couple in the anime. However, that feels kind of wrong in this kind of post. Rather, I want to focus on how the anime changed moments that came from the manga to fit this end.

For example, Ryogo is left behind on a mission in Magano in chapter 3 and episode 4. When Rokuro hears of this, he asks Benio for help in both versions. They go together to rescue Ryogo and Rokuro works to destroy one giant Kegare while Benio takes out the smaller ones. By the end of both the chapter and episode, Benio comes to recognize, as Ryogo said before the mission, that Rokuro is at his best as an exorcist before going on to squabble more.

Here's where the differences come in.

In the manga, Benio tells Rokuro that she's coming with him to help, whereas this is implied in the anime. Rokuro shows himself to be such a capable fighter in the manga that even the large Kegare is afraid of him. In the anime, he has to get bailed out by Benio in fighting the small Kegare and only fights the large Kegare by himself because he rushes for it. Benio's acknowledgment of Rokuro in the manga shows that she's probably fallen for him but he's dense and seems to have messed it up. In the anime, we're still far from getting this overt realization on her part (they save that for the fight against Kamui) and their squabble doesn't seem to hurt the chances of a romantic relationship in the same way.

Speaking of which, there's a similar moment to that conversation later on in the arc. After the fight with Yuto, they're reprimanded by the exorcist union for going without their permission. At one point in the conversation, Rokuro tells Benio they should get married and have the kid they're foretold to as part of the argument they make in their defense. Benio asks him about his sincerity regarding this strategy after the fact.

In the manga, he admits it was a bluff and that he wants to end their partnerships because there's likely someone else Benio would want to marry, which doesn't go over with her well. In the anime, he admits that he isn't exactly sure how he feels about the whole thing but, at the very least, wants things to stay the way they are. She agrees, but you can tell that she probably wished he was being honest. While Benio's feelings are the same in both versions, the way they're treated is different and I prefer the anime treatment.

I also prefer the treatment of Mayura in the anime. No adaptation of his series wasn't going to present her as Rokuro's childhood friend who had an unrequited crush on him. However, I'm glad that she was introduced early on and becomes one of Benio's friends as well. When she ends up becoming corrupted, the manga has Rokuro catch her as she's falling from the sky. In the anime, where both of them have formed a bond with her, they both catch her.

Then there's the main antagonist of this section: Ijika Yuto. With the split in adaptations, Yuto ends up serving a different role past their big fight at the Hinatsuki Dorm. Thankfully, I don't have to talk about that here and can focus on the revelation of his connection to Rokuro and the motive to defeat him, which plays out a bit differently in both versions. This is where the differences felt strongest for me.

Yuto and Rokuro met each other at the Hinatsuki Dorm. While they learn to get along, the big connection between them is that the Hinatsuki Tragedy, the main reason Rokuro stopped being an exorcist, happened because of Yuto. Up to the start of the series, it's believed that Rokuro killed Yuto because of the incident. This is a problem because Yuto is Benio's brother, who would otherwise be her last living family member.

In both versions, these revelations happen in the opposite order: we learn that Yuto was thought to be killed by Rokuro, then that he was responsible for the Hinatsuki tragedy. However, these revelations happen back to back in the anime. In the manga, these revelations are split in between a number of other events, including Mayura's corruption. That felt jarring to read the first time. Even as the resolution to their tension results in the discovery of Resonance, I absolutely preferred the anime order of events. 

That order would also include pushing Benio's apology for Yuto's actions earlier than it happened in the manga (it's also better framed in the anime and I'm sorry if you disagree). In the anime, this happens near the end of an episode and the episode ends when they both resolve to get stronger together. After she does, she asks him if she can come with him in the upcoming fight with Yuto which he's not willing to accept at first. That I didn't like. It made more sense to me that his objection would be if she could fight him, which is how the anime frames his sole objection to her coming. There's no reason he should think he can take on Yuto by himself. 

If I could sum up the reasons why I prefer the anime version with one example, it would be the beginning of chapter 13. The chapter begins with  Rokuro reflecting on the pain caused him by Yuto's antics. We see a younger version of himself in pain after the events and an older Rokuro offers words of encouragement before walking forward. Normally, I would lament the exclusion of this scene from before the fight in the anime.

However, the anime did one over the manga. In the second opening for the show, we don't just get events inspired by this moment. We get an equivalent set of scenes from Benio's perspective. We see her crying because of the loss of her family and an older version of herself comfort the younger. That I read chapter 13 and could tell that right away is marvelous, but the fact that I wanted a similar scene for Benio is why I prefer the anime.

[tigerlover16-uk-2]

Thank you, Sun and Moon

I know I'm a day early with this, but I wanted to get this out while I was still motivated. So, here we go.

To give an idea of what the Pokemon Sun and Moon anime means to me, let me start by going into my history with the anime.

I started watching Pokemon since the day it first aired in the UK. Back then, i remember Pokemon feeling like it was the biggest thing in the world, and for me it remained that way as i grew up.

I followed the show through the original series, Advanced Generation to well into Diamond and Pearl, and I always loved it. It was a constant presence in my life, and while I don't think I usually called it my number 1 favourite show, it was something I cherished and enjoyed more than most others. And at the time I was watching Diamond and Pearl and finding it possibly the best season yet, I was convinced I'd be following the series for pretty much the rest of my life.

And then, somewhere halfway through DP, something odd happened... I started missing episodes.

Like, id missed an episode of the series once in a blue moon due to extraneous circumstances, but I never actually took a break from watching the show, even when it was in reruns.

And yet for some reason, for a couple months, I couldn't be bothered to keep up with the anime. I'd later sum up that I was feeling burn out, but it felt odd how I'd just randomly seemed to lose interest when I'd been really enjoying Diamond and Pearl up until then.

Eventually I did start watching newer episodes again, but the same thing happened during the league arc, of which I only remember reading summaries on bulbapedia and only actually caught the last battle against Tobias. Something which... kinda bothered me. Not to a great deal at first, but the aftertaste felt more and more sour when I started watching the next series, Best Wishes.

I'll say right now, this is where I really started to question the quality of the Pokemon anime. I stopped watching the series after the dub got a few episodes past where the cancelled Team Rocket vs Team Plasma two parter would have aired. I did keep following plot summaries and checking new episodes pages on bulbapedia for a while, but that eventually lessened as I came to a realization.

The story was going nowhere. The show was just running in circles and making excuses to keep Ash's journey going in perpetuity.

I suppose maybe that should have been obvious already, but up through Diamond and Pearl, for all it's own backtracking, it still felt like Ash's journey was progressing and that the show itself was evolving and getting better in a number of ways. That we really were getting closer to seeing Ash becoming a master.

But between Tobias randomly being thrown into the league to eliminate Ash in a really lazy manner that felt unnatural compared to the last two times he'd lost a league, and a lot of the blatant bad writing decisions I was seeing like Zekrom showing up out of nowhere to nerf Pikachu so it could lose to Trip's Snivy, it really made me question where the story was going... if the show was even trying to tell a consistent story anymore, and they weren't just spinning their wheels and repeating the same patterns over and over again with no sign of ending or really moving forward.

At this same time I'd also been looking into the production history of the show and seeing what other people were saying about the anime online. I learned the show was originally supposed to end with Kanto and Ash winning the league, and I began looking back and noticing all the dropped plot points and mishandled story moments.

The GS ball plot never being resolved properly, the stuff with Ho-oh in Johto amounting to pretty much nothing, the mishandling of the Team Aqua and Magma plot, and a bunch of other things that made me realize...

This show is kind of a mess. There really isn't any kind of a plan or an end point. They're going to keep forcing Ash to lose at the league, reset his progress and keep running in circles because they don't want to do what Digimon and Yu-gi-oh did and let the story end and getting a new protagonist.

Needless to say, this coming at a rough time in my life where I was pretty miserable and becoming increasingly cynical with the world as well as more critical of media I watched, and in conjunction with what I saw people were saying about the show, left me feeling VERY disillusioned with the Pokemon anime.

Because I loved Pokemon, I thought it was the greatest franchise in the world and it had infinite potential. Surely, the anime should be better than this. Surely, Pokemon deserved better. SURELY, it should have been a great show for all ages like Shudo wanted it to be, and not some cheap commercial for the games?

I think the thing that broke me completely was Newtwo in the Genesect movie, because the anime's original take on Mewtwo is one of my favourite fictional characters of all time, and his story through his movie, Mewtwo returns and the birth of Mewtwo short and radio drama was what younger me had always thought represented how great Pokemon could be at it's best, and that the series was something meaningful...

And here OLM were giving us a boring copy of that character minus the nuance.

Did they even care, I thought? Was I just stupid for liking the anime as much as I did for so long? Was it even worth hoping things could get better?

By the time it was into XY, I had given up on the Pokemon anime and become disillusioned with it as a whole, spending the next few years bitter and pining over a better version of the series that only seemed to exist in my mind. I didn't even bother to keep up with reading about new episodes on Bulbapedia anymore, I didn't have a clue what was going on. And I was sure I didn't care, and I never would again.

What reason was there to be invested in a series that clearly had no faith in itself, and certainly no regard for people like me who had had faith in it and wanted a good story.

I did start listening in again towards the end of XYZ when i kept seeing so many people gushing about how great it was and how competent Ash had supposedly become. For a minute i almost got caught up in the hype that he might win the Kalos league, and that the writers had finally learned their lesson.

And then Ash lost.

I remember shrugging my shoulders and going "oh well" and then moving on with my life. I didn't even feel mad, I'd already resigned myself to what the outcome would most likely be, so what was the point in getting worked up when I don't even care about the show at all, right?

... Right?

I still remember the tepid reactions the trailer and announcements for the Sun and Moon anime got at this time. I'll admit, when I first heard the premise would involve Ash going to school I laughed and thought it was a stupid idea.

... but watching the various announcements and teasers for the show, something about it... intrigued me. I watched the first 5 episodes shortly after they aired and found myself enjoying them, but after that I got a bit distracted and didn't watch any more of it for a while.

A similar thing actually happened with XY, where despite my frustration at that point I did try to give the series a chance, but I quickly got bored, dropped it and stopped paying attention to the show as a whole until much later.

But unlike back then, I actually did pay attention to what was going on in the show, and what I was hearing did sound generally optimistic. I think it was a mix of the 20th movie coming up and the announcement of the Kanto two parter that convinced me to really sit down and watch the whole thing. And what I saw... was pretty darn good, I must say.

I was surprised with myself. I'd given up on the show, hadn't I? All the damage was already done, wasn't it? No matter what Sun and Moon did to shake things up, the show as a whole would still be inevitably tied down by it's status quo in the end, and nothing that happened here would matter or mean anything come the next series, right?

And yet, here I was. Having a good time and finding Pokemon Sun and Moon a pretty fun series overall. And I started to realize how much... just how much I'd missed the anime. How despite my insistence that I'd moved on and didn't care anymore... I never really had. I still wanted to love the series.

From that point on I kept watching Sun and Moon on a weekly basis, and eventually re-watched the entire series from start to finish, including everything I hadn't seen from BW and XY.

Slowly over time, my resentment and bitterness started to subside. For while so many of my problems with the show remained, I realized I could still have fun with it even though it wasn't perfect.

It felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

I won't pretend Sun and Moon was a perfect series. It had it's dull episodes and missed opportunities, just like all the series that came before it. There was plenty of stuff I thought could be better... and yet, the show never felt like it got bad or stopped being overall enjoyable despite those occasional gripes.

It didn't so much feel like the writers were just repeating all the same formulas and going through the motions anymore with Sun and Moon. There was a sense of fun to the show, a consistent level of joy and quality and, dare I say, PASSION to the series that I appreciated and kept me coming back to it.

And when the show was in top form, it honestly blew me away at times. I'll never forget the feeling of watching episode 108 and the scenes with Mallow reuniting with the spirit of her mother and thinking to myself "... THIS is a real episode of the Pokemon anime?"

I was happy. For the first time in so long, I felt content with the anime and not embarrassed to like it. But even then, I was thinking I'd have to like the show in spite of it's gaping, frustrating faults. I never dreamed the show or the writers would have the courage to break the dreaded cycles that pushed me away from it in the first place.

And then, only a few weeks ago now, the unthinkable happened... Ash Ketchum won the Alola league.

I'm still gobsmacked by it, honestly. I literally didn't think I was going to live to see the day. I'd resigned to the thought that the writers would always force him to lose... but against all my expectations, he did it. Ash won a pokemon league from the games.

And then just to really seal the deal, they even let him beat Kukui, a champion equivalent trainer, AND Tapu Koko right after that. Something that I never would have thought was possible to see happen in the Pokemon anime.

Honestly, watching that four parter, it felt like if you swapped out Kukui and Tapu Koko with Lance and Ho-oh, that could have been the ending I always thought the original series should have had... and it was GLORIOUS.

So now I'm sitting here, eagerly looking forward to the next series and feeling captivated by it's all regions premise and deviations from the formulas we'd come to expect as the eternal standard for this show, and I can hardly contain my excitement.

Because for the first time in a long time, Ash was finally allowed to achieve something extraordinary besides the obligatory "save the world from the current gen's villains" plot. For the first time since Diamond and Pearl, it feels like the story is actually moving forward into the next phase and the show is evolving.

For the first time in a long, long time... I look forward to the future of this series.

I could go on. There's plenty more I could say about Sun and Moon as a whole, discussing it's story, the characters and the writing, but... Honestly, there'll be plenty of time for that in the future. And for now, I feel like ive said all I needed to say.

At the end of the day, looking back on it all, I don't actually know if I'd call Sun and Moon my favourite Pokemon series. There's things about the Advanced Generation and Diamond and Pearl I liked more.

But Sun and Moon is, without a doubt, the Pokemon series I'm the most grateful for.

So, without further ado...

Thank you, Sun and Moon. Thank you for being a fun, charming, wholesome kids show. 

Thank you for being entertaining and a joy to watch these past few years.

Thank you for being creative and not completely repetitive.

Thank you for fulfilling a childhood dream of mine I never thought could come true.

Thank you for helping Pokemon to evolve and move on to a new era.

Thank you, Pokemon Sun and Moon... for restoring my faith in the Pokemon anime.

Though I'm sure there'll be many ups and downs in the future, I swear I'm going to stick with this show until one of us kicks the bucket. And I'm content with that now.

It's late and I should go to bed. Hope the final episode tomorrow is a good one.

[tamayokny]

Name ten favourite characters from ten different things (books, tv, film, etc.) then tag ten people

This was extremely difficult to do. The first two were easy, since they are my ride or die, but choosing 10 different characters? From ten different things? I don’t know if I even like 10 different things, but I found some loopholes, lol.

tagged by @bpdanakins <3

1. Lara Croft - Tomb Raider

Lara Croft has been one of my idols since I was a small child. My mom had bought Tomb Raider: Starring Lara Croft and Tomb Raider: Adventures of Lara Croft for my sister on the PlayStation. I remember watching my sister play it, and then sometimes I was allowed to play it. I continued the Tomb Raider legacy throughout the years.

Lara Croft is just. Amazing. I love every version of her. Classic Lara deflected the life her parents had wanted her to have, and paid the price for it. Did that stop her? No, it did not! She was able to make her own mark in the world. LAU!Lara wanted to find out what happened to her mother, and honestly I love Keeley Hawes as Lara. She was witty and funny, and Legend is one of my favorite TR games. And Reboot!Lara? I love her. I honestly don’t care what people say, Reboot!Lara is great! Her first game is also fun to play. Each version of Lara Croft offers something different, and I love it. While many of Lara’s core values are in each incarnation (adventurous, ambitious, brave, etc.), each brings a new perspective which I enjoy!

Fun fact: my irl best friend and Lara share the same zodiac sign!

2. Wanda Maximoff (Scarlet Witch) - Marvel

I LOVE WANDA MAXIMOFF WITH ALL MY HEART!!! She’s a huge comfort character for me. She’s one of the most powerful mutants (yes, I am ignoring the retcon), and she’s complex. Wanda first appeared in X-Men #4 alongside her brother, Pietro, as members of Magneto’s Brotherhood. Eventually, the twins become heroes and join the Avengers.

Wanda’s mutation is magic; probability, to put it at best. She can warp reality. While she is strong, she is also human. Many remember her best as having a mental breakdown and creates House of M (influenced by her beloved brother). After this, she goes off the radar for a few years before her reincarnated sons find her.

I love Wanda because she has heart, courage, and cares for others. She’s intuitive and sensitive and, in many ways, reminds me of myself. I genuinely love Wanda with all my heart. She remains to be my number one favorite superhero. I wish more people knew her--the real her. The MCU does not do her (or her brother) justice. At all. (At least AOU kind of got their “reluctant villains to heroes” origin story well enough?)

Also: fuck you Marvel for retconning Magneto as the Maximoffs’ father. It’s been 5 years but I still elect to ignore that.

3. Phoebe Halliwell - Charmed

Growing up, Charmed was one of my favorite TV shows. To sum it up, it’s about a group of sisters who discover that they’re witches. Specifically, they’re the Charmed Ones and they protect the innocent. For awhile, I’ve said that Piper is my favorite sister but after my last rewatch, I say that Phoebe is my favorite.

At the beginning of the series, Phoebe was the youngest and the rebel of the family. Before the pilot, Phoebe was living in New York but we see her move back in. We also see that she has a strained relationship with her eldest sister, Prue, due to her scummy fiancé. Phoebe is also the reason why their magic was unlocked. (As children, their powers were bounded in order to keep them safe.)

Over time, we see Phoebe mature more. However, there are a few things that never changes with Phoebe. She’s kind and caring for others, always wanting to help them no matter what. (She shares this trait with the youngest sister, Paige.) She is deeply connected with her emotions (which causes her to gain the power of empathy in season 6). Phoebe has also had rough luck with love (see: Cole the demon, etc.) but no matter how much she gets hurt, Phoebe still has hope. She still has love in her heart. No matter how much she gets knocked down, she finds a way of getting back up, and I admire her a lot for it.

4. Catelyn Stark - A Song of Ice and Fire

Family. Duty. Honor. This is House Tully’s family motto, which is deeply embedded into Catelyn. Catelyn was married to Ned Stark during Robert’s Rebellion, after her former betrothed was murdered in King’s Landing (who, ironically, was Ned’s older brother). Their wedding night resulted in the birth of their firstborn: Robb Stark, heir to Winterfell and King in the North.

Catelyn Stark is the mother of the wolves, and her love for her family is no doubt a core of her character. However, Catelyn is clever and if you mess with her, you will certainly gain her wrath. Her eldest values her for her wisdom, and will turn to her for help. She will do anything for her family, such as freeing Jaime Lannister to get her girls back, or offering herself to save her eldest during the horrific events of the Red Wedding.

Catelyn is murdered, along with majority of the Stark party, at the Red Wedding. However, she is resurrected and becomes Lady Stoneheart. Stoneheart is out for vengeance, because she believes all of her children are gone; taken by the enemy. Stoneheart murders Frey or Lannister alike--whoever is associated with them. She holds no mercy.

There is so much more to Catelyn that I could go on, but I will stop here. (Besides, I need to reread the books again!) I will say this: fuck you, D&D.

5. Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto) - Marvel

MAGNETO TIME? MAGNETO TIME.

Erik Lehnsherr was a young boy when World War II happened and because he was Jewish, he was sent to Auschwitz. His family did not survive, but Erik did. Depending on what you follow on, Erik either A) escaped with Magda (who is the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver’s mother) and started a life with her or B) he hunted down the men who worked for Sebastian Shaw (movie universe).

Anyway, Erik had been a mutant since around the time he was sent to the camps and after the horror and trauma he’s faced, Erik decided that mutants would never be accepted by “their less evolved kin”. So, he became Magneto, a protector for mutants and enemy for humans.

Magneto is only one side of the coin, however. Charles Xavier is a longtime frenemy of sorts, both having different perspectives in life. Xavier believes in coexistence, but Magneto believes otherwise. He had seen what humanity is capable of, and he never wants that to happen again. If he must be a villain, than so be it.

Magneto is beautifully complex. He has done some questionable things (I’m thinking of the comics for this one), but he has also done great things for his people. “Never again,” he says. He fights to keep it that way. Magneto is sympathetic at best, and I certainly understand where he comes from. Tell me this: if you were Magneto, what would you have done?

Also: while Michael Fassbender is not Jewish in any way, he did one hell of a job portraying this amazing character.

6. Kira Yukimura - Teen Wolf

I wasn’t planning on adding Teen Wolf to the list, but here I am.

Kira was introduced to us in season 3b, written as a “new love interest” for Scott McCall. I remember a lot of fans of a certain ship were pissed, but whatever. I’m not here to talk about romance.

So, in 3b Kira was a new student, with her dad as the new history teacher at Beacon Hills High School. She’s of both Korean and Japanese descent, and she ends up playing an important role in the story arc. We find out that she’s a Kitsune, thanks to her mother who explains how a Kitsune and a werewolf must come together to defeat the Nogitsune, who happens to be possessing the loveable Stiles Stilinski.

After this, Kira becomes a part of the McCall Pack and Scott’s girlfriend. In my opinion, they’re cute together but many people hate them together. Oh well. Kira also becomes a badass in her own right, as her abilities evolve. However, in season 5, the creators put her on the shelf, as she trains with Skinwalkers and is never seen again. I am so fucking MAD about that.

Like many characters on this list, Kira has heart and courage. She’s a bit of an introvert but she is loyal, and cares for her pack. She’s cute and a bit goofy. She is skilled and deadly. Kira is one of the coolest characters Teen Wolf had, and the way they treated her was disappointed. (Even though after her death, Allison was always mentioned/connected in some way. I like Allison, don’t get me wrong but all I can say is: interesting...)

Fun fact: Arden Cho, the actress, is the VA for Sam Nishimura in Tomb Raider (2013)!

7. Lois Wilkerson - Malcolm in the Middle

The mother of four boys, the matriarch of the Wilkerson household is not one to push around.

Lois has had a rather rough life. Her parents were not the best, and everyone tries to push her down. However, Lois fights back and is not afraid to stand up for what is right. Francis, her oldest, describes her as an absolute menace and while her sons and husband fear her, they also admire her for her strength and courage. Lois is tough as nails, but she can also break, too. However, her family--the family she and Hal created, no one else--is there for her. Lois is incredibly strong willed no matter what, and I love her so much.

8. Theon Greyjoy - A Song of Ice and Fire

No words can describe on how much I love this fashionable war criminal.

Before the start of the series, Theon is a hostage/ward of Lord Stark, as a result of his father’s failed rebellion. Theon was a reminder that if Balon Greyjoy pulled something again, his last (male) heir would get the chopping block. Pretty brutal for a young child, right?

Now, at the start of the series, Theon is nineteen and is seemingly best friends with Robb Stark, the heir to Winterfell and the North. He shows loyalty to Robb and the Starks, claiming that Lord Stark was like a father to him. He’s also skilled with archery and, like I mentioned earlier, fashion.

Then A Clash of Kings occur, and we began to see how Theon Greyjoy is.

Robb Stark has been proclaimed as King of the North, and sends Theon to the Iron Islands in hopes to gain allies with Balon Greyjoy. However, this does not occur. Old Greyjoy says “fuck that and if you’re [Theon] aren’t with us, then you‘re against us.” We see Theon conflicted, but we also see how strained his relationship with his father is. In the end, Theon joins the Greyjoys, and promptly sacks Winterfell. However, that is not the end. Theon is tricked by Ramsay Bolton and this vile man takes Winterfell. I believe while he took the women and children captive, the men were killed...save for Theon, of course.

Theon is held captive by Ramsay Bolton, and is tortured quite brutally. Theon goes through a lot in this time. His appearance had changed drastically: black hair turned white and brittle, he becomes skin and bones, and loses a few fingers and toes. Theon is no longer Theon. He became Reek. The new Reek.

Then, Jeyne Poole (or Sansa; I hate you D&D) arrives, under the guise that she is Arya Stark and she is to wed Ramsay Bolton. Jeyne begged Theon to help her, but he is in no position of power. He is a completely broken man. Time flies by. Jeyne is in absolute misery but with the help of Mance and some spearwives, Theon is able to escape Winterfell with Jeyne during a winter storm. Currently, in the books, Theon is set to be executed by Stannis Baratheon, who is currently holding him captive.

Theon Greyjoy may be a fuckup, but to me he is such an amazing character. He holds much conflict, from being a hostage/ward to Prince to prisoner. Theon Greyjoy may have done a lot of shit, but he is also a survivor. Everything he has been put through, he somehow lives to see another day. Despite holding negative feelings to Lord Stark and everyone around, claiming he owed no one anything (fair enough), he loved Robb. When Theon had found out he was murdered at the Red Wedding, you know what he thought?

I should have been with him. Where was I? I should have died with him.

Theon is far from perfect, but that is what makes him great. He has come so far, and I hope his journey does not end any time soon.

9. Suki - Avatar: The Last Airbender

Zuko may have the best redemption arc (or does he? See above.), but Suki holds a special place in my heart.

We first meet Suki season one, on Kyoshi Island. She is the leader of the Kyoshi Warriors, and effectively puts Sokka in his place. However, when Sokka requests a few lessons, Suki is happy to help...as long as he followed the guidelines.

Suki is a certified badass. Although a non-bender, Suki has incredible skill and event went against Azula. However, Suki and the others surrendered (so that Appa would not be captured), leading to her imprisonment at Boiling Rock. Eventually, Sokka and Zuko free her (with the help of Mai). After this, Suki joined the Gaang in ceasing the 100 Year War.

Suki is strong but like many other characters in this list, she has heart. She is an effective leader and fighter, offering her help whenever she can. Too bad she was never mentioned in The Legend of Korra. Suki is underrated and she deserves more love and respect.

10. Max Mayfield - Stranger Things

We first meet Max in season 2 as the new girl in Hawkins. She seems like your average girl but she quickly gets tied into the party after Lucas begs her to show her what has happened with him and the rest of the party. However, there’s a lot more to Max.

Max moved to Hawkins with her mother, stepfather, and stepbrother. It’s easy to see that Max and Billy, her stepbrother, do not get along. Billy is outright mean to her, lashing out at practically every chance he gets. Max fights back, however...especially when he threatens her friends.

In season 3, we finally get to see Max and El bond. (Thank God we didn’t have to put up with the “jealousy” tidbit. I would have--) El believes that Mike is lying and Max is like, “Well yeah. Come on let’s go to the mall!” and the girls have a blast together. I was so happy to see the two bond and have fun. I was so happy that El was spending time with someone other than Mike. I was so happy the girls were having fun by themselves. Honestly, the best part of season 3 was them becoming friends.

I love Max because she is confident and is not afraid to speak her mind. She’s funny and in many ways, we are alike. (Especially with our attitudes on boys and relationships.) However, Max is also vulnerable. We see this with her stepbrother, especially in season 3 I think. Their relationship was drastically different in season 3 and while many didn’t like it (myself included)...I also thought about Max. She’s a young girl and no matter how much bad blood was in between them, it will be traumatizing to see a transformation like this to someone you know quite well. It would be scary.

Anyway, I love Max.

Honorable mentions: Kitty Pryde (Shadowcat), Ororo Munroe (Storm), Jean Grey (Phoenix), Anna Marie (Rogue), Sam Nishimura, Malia Tate, all of House Martell, Dustin Henderson...

Thanks for reading! I hope you all enjoyed reading this. Tell me, do I have a certain type of character that I’m attracted to? Also, I’m not sure who has all done this, so if you haven’t it: who are your top 10 favorite characters? Let me know!

[uk-news-talking-politics]

Peak uncertainty: This is what covid might do to our politics

By Chaminda Jayanetti

Just because something should happen, doesn't mean it will.

Many articles speculating on how Britain will look different after coronavirus mistake what the writer thinks should happen with what probably will, trusting in the logic of the moment when politics often obeys anything but.

Others focus on the party political fallout, which is the most unpredictable aspect of all. Coronavirus may determine the next election - or it may play no role in it at all.

But to really get an idea of how Britain could look on the other side, we need to get away from the big picture discussion and dig deep into policy areas.

Who cares?

The centrality of the NHS is now guaranteed no matter who is in charge. The Tories had already pledged increased funding, and the need for spare capacity in the event of pandemics may force a rethink of service redesigns and efficiency measures that aimed to minimise 'waste'.

Bigger questions surround the adult care system. No-one can now ignore the funding cuts and staff shortages that have left the care sector so depleted. If elderly and disabled people find themselves dying untreated in care homes in large numbers, this might - and should - become a point of national shame over the coming weeks.

The Tories' direction of travel is towards a social insurance system, whereby people pay in to a fund during their working lives that gives them access to care provision when they need it. But those who are retired or have lifelong care needs won't be able to pay into an insurance scheme before receiving care. These immediate care needs will need direct public funding, not long-term insurance.

Labour under Jeremy Corbyn took a different tack: universal free personal care for the over-65s, with an ambition to extend this to all working age adults. This is simpler and more inclusive than our current means tested mess, but it doesn't come cheap: Labour's manifesto estimated the cost as £11bn a year by 2023/24.

Keir Starmer will be under pressure from some to stick with their existing policy, and from others to engage with social insurance proposals. Keeping Labour MPs united behind whatever strategy he adopts won't be easy.

But it's plausible the Tories will also be pulled in another direction - towards voluntarism. The party's social and fiscal conservatives - uneasy bedfellows in recent years - could use the increased community cooperation seen amid the pandemic as evidence that volunteers and family members can take on more of the care burden, while still improving pay and conditions for care staff.

Expect to see rhetoric that the pandemic has 'unleashed' Britain's 'community spirit', which should be 'channelled' after the crisis by relying on family and neighbours to 'look in' on people in need - the soft-soap version of women doing unpaid care work in lieu of public services. The current trend in care provision is towards making use of what 'assets' people already have, including friends and family - an approach that can be used for good or ill. The temptation for the government to lean on unpaid volunteers instead of the taxpayer is not hard to imagine.

The care system was the biggest public service challenge facing the government before coronavirus. Now that's been magnified tenfold. It could become one of the big battlegrounds of post-pandemic politics, between competing visions of society based on universalism, managed markets, and voluntarism.

Bob Crow was right

Before his death in 2014, Bob Crow was one of the most demonised figures in Britain. His readiness to threaten to shut down rail networks as head of the RMT union made him a bête noire for commuters, causing considerable disruption.

Crow was a rarity in post-Thatcher Britain - a union leader who was ready to use strike action as a sword, not just a shield. Whereas most unions only went on strike in defence of existing jobs, pay and conditions, Crow levered the criticality of the role of his members to transform their economic position.

He was accused of holding passengers and politicians to ransom, but his argument was a simple one: the disruption caused by his members going on strike showed how important their role was, and they should be paid more - much more - to reflect this.

It has taken the worst pandemic in more than a century for many people to realise this point. Pay does not necessarily reflect the importance of a worker's role - in fact, very often it does nothing of the sort. Pay reflects many factors: supply and demand of labour, required skills and levels of education, the strength or weakness of collective bargaining, the resources of the employer, and the profit-making productivity of the role. The social necessity of the role comes below pretty much all of them.

There may well be a post-pandemic cross-party consensus for a higher minimum wage and more protection from exploitation - action on zero hours contracts, for example - to protect low-paid workers from poverty.

But Crow didn't want his members to be low paid at all. He wanted to transform their economic station. We keep hearing about essential workers in cleaning, portering, social care and customer service. Will this be rewarded with more middle class pay and conditions?

There are reasons to be doubtful. There will likely be broad acceptance of the importance of care workers, who are a very visible part of the fight against coronavirus. But that does not mean politicians will be ready to fork out for transformative pay rises. Will Starmer accept billions of pounds of extra spending on top of the £11bn Labour has already earmarked for social care, let alone the Tories?

And where is the industrial, political or public pressure going to come from to secure such pay rises for the often migrant workers in portering and cleaning? We don't want to accept it, but many workers on middle incomes would sneer at the idea of porters and cleaners being paid the same as them.

The safety net

The benefit system has taken a battering over the last decade. Now the economic shutdown is driving more than a million people to seek refuge in the rubble left behind.

The government has responded by performing emergency repairs -  raising benefit payments and scrapping job search requirements in a desperate attempt to stop the newly unemployed middle classes struggling in the way the unemployed poor were expected to.

Things could play out from here in a number of ways. If Universal Credit functions to a level the government can live with, they will declare the system a success, leaving Starmer in a politically difficult position. Will he keep Labour's pledge to axe what will have become an established system, or switch to reforming it, thus angering his left flank. Labour may try and build a minimum income guarantee using the framework of this system. Or they may 'abolish' Universal Credit by tweaking it and changing its name.

If Universal Credit simply topples over - unable to process claims properly, or pay out the right sums of money - the government might be forced to give up its costly and chaotic flagship scheme.

What then? Labour would push for a more generous system with far fewer conditions and sanctions. The Tories would be truly hamstrung, having in this scenario wasted a decade on a failed system.

Public opinion would not necessarily favour a more generous, less judgemental approach. The declared end of the pandemic, and the gradual return to some kind of economic normality, would likely bring back demands that the unemployed get back to work, and that they be cattle-prodded into doing so. Laid off workers do not carry the same image as health and care workers in this pandemic - and doubtless right wing ideologues will start shouting about the deficit the first chance they get.

But if the economic recovery is insipid, with little job creation, enduring high unemployment, and a stop-start lockdown as the virus returns, both parties could be drawn to more universal systems - a minimum income guarantee set at a liveable level, or even a Universal Basic Income.

The government toyed with introducing UBI last month, but it would face wide opposition from Tory MPs unhappy at its cost. Claire Ainsley, who is expected to be unveiled as Starmer's policy chief, is also a sceptic. It is expensive, blunt and largely untested. But if jobs don't reappear as the pandemic passes, the 'on yer bike' mentality that has underpinned the benefit system for decades will itself be left redundant.

A costly affair

Britain is running up huge deficits as sectors of the economy grind to a halt. How will all this be paid for? Starmer is calling for higher taxes on the rich, but that alone is unlikely to be sufficient, especially if corporate profits remain depressed for years. Everyone is going to have to pay more.

Could the Tories go in for funding cuts? Perhaps - but likely not at the scale we've seen. The big targets after 2010 were local government and welfare. The former can't be cut further without it collapsing. The Tories may winnow away at the latter. Foreign aid could take a hit. But the party would have to tear up its electoral strategy of higher spending on schools, hospitals and police to recreate full-blown Osbornomics.

Labour, and possibly even the Tories, may look to wealth taxes to help bring down the deficit. Taxing people's wealth would be a major shift in Britain's approach, and could finally tackle one of the key sources of economic inequality.

But there's a problem. The richest hold most of their wealth as financial assets, meaning they can easily move it to offshore tax havens. Fixed assets, like houses, tend to benefit the middle classes. Taxing property wealth could hit Tory homeowners while barely affecting hedge fund billionaires. Targeting the latter would require a Tory government to clamp down hard on tax havens.

Conservative MPs are likely to be split on middle class tax rises and spending cuts. If the Tories go after tax havens and impose a progressive wealth tax, it would be one of the most dramatic changes the pandemic brings about. The curtailment of the free movement of capital would be a paradigm-shifting development, and an extraordinary one for a Conservative government.

What does need to happen is for governments to spend on preventative services - such as social care - in the knowledge that this will cut required spending down the line. Only when that happens will Britain's fiscal politics finally grow up.

But on a variety of fronts, the British are going to have to decide what it is we are willing to pay for. If we want functioning public services and low deficits, we'll have to pay more tax. If we want properly paid frontline public servants, we'll have to pay more tax still. If we want to end poverty pay, we may have to pay more for goods. If we want to protect the high street, or British producers, we may have to pay more in digital sales taxes or import tariffs.

Cakeism has run out of road.

The known unknowns

If Britain does head down the path of higher taxes, more generous benefits and greater public provision, our politics and economy will start to look more European - either universalist northern European, or rather more patriarchal southern European.

But the irony is, we'll be firmly outside Europe. Nothing that is happening right now will be fostering a European identity among voters. And if the government decides to take radical action on the economy, that could mean Britain fundamentally diverges from EU rules, keeping us on a separate path into the future.

All this is predicated on coronavirus being conclusively 'defeated', and a one-off in its mortality, geographical spread and disruption. Those are the prerequisites for things eventually returning to some recognisable norm.

If, however, pandemics of this scale become even semi-regular, shutting down national economies for months at a time, everything changes. Rents become unpayable, debts unaffordable, jobs untenable, the economy itself unsustainable. When Rupert Harrison, George Osborne's former adviser, is openly suggesting debt forgiveness, we are in very new territory.

Most people will want life to get back to normal as soon as possible. But if normal never comes, anything goes. And even the most radical ideas we've discussed would be on the moderate end of what could happen then.

[starringemiliaclarke]

Emilia Clarke on Game of Thrones finale's shock twist: 'I stand by Daenerys'

Emilia Clarke read a paragraph in the final script for Game of Thrones.

She read it again and again. Seven times, she says, she read the words that revealed the devastating fate of Daenerys Targaryen, a character she’s portrayed on the HBO global phenomenon for nearly a decade.

“What, what, what, WHAT!?” the actress recalls thinking. “Because it comes out of f—king nowhere. I’m flabbergasted. Absolutely never saw that coming.”

It was October 2017. The actress had recently completed filming Solo: A Star Wars Story and had just returned to London following a brief vacation. She electronically received the scripts the moment she landed at Heathrow and recalls that she “completely flipped out,” turned to her traveling companion and said, “‘Oh my god! I gotta go! I gotta go!’ And they’re like, ‘You gotta get your bags!’”

Once at home, the actress prepared herself. “I got myself situated,” she says. “I got my cup of tea. I had to physically prepare the space and then begin reading them.”

Clarke swiped through pages: Daenerys arrives at Winterfell and Sansa doesn’t like her. She discovers Jon Snow is the true heir to the Iron Throne and isn’t thrilled. She fights in the battle against the Night King and survives, but loses longtime friend and protector Ser Jorah Mormont. Then her other close friend and advisor Missandei dies too. Varys betrays her. Jon Snow pulls away. Having lost half her army, two dragons, and nearly everybody she cares about, Daenerys goes full Tagaryen to win: She attacks King’s Landing and kills … thousands of civilians? Daenerys’ longtime conquest achieved, she meets with Jon Snow in the Red Keep throne room and … and then … then he …

“I cried,” Clarke says. “And I went for a walk. I walked out of the house and took my keys and phone and walked back with blisters on my feet. I didn’t come back for five hours. I’m like, ‘How am I going to do this?’”

Sitting next to Clarke on the flight, as it so happens, was Kit Harington, who plays Jon Snow. Harington deliberately hadn’t yet read the scripts so he could experience the story for the first time with all his castmates. Clarke, positively bursting with wanting to talk about her storyline, found the flight maddening. “This literally sums up Kit and I’s friendship,” she says, and sputtered: “Boy! Would you? Seriously? You’re just not?…”

At the table read, Clarke sat across from Harington so she could “watch him compute all of this.” When they got to their final scene together, recalls Harington, “I looked at Emilia and there was a moment of me realizing, ‘No, no…’”

And Clarke nodded back, sadly, ‘Yes…’

“He was crying,” Clarke says. “And then it was kind of great him not having read it.”

The main story driver of Game of Thrones’ final season is the evolution of Daenerys Targaryen from one of the show’s most-loved heroes into a destroyer of cities and would-be dictator. Author George R.R. Martin calls his saga “A Song of Ice and Fire.” Jon Snow is the stable, immovable ice of Winterfell; Daenerys the conquering, unpredictable fire of Dragonstone. After years apart, they came together in season 7. The duo fell in love, help saved the realm from a world-annihilating supernatural threat and, in the series finale, their coupling is destroyed — Daenerys perishes, while a devastated Jon Snow is banished to rejoin the Night’s Watch.

Was this ending Martin’s original plan? The author told showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss the intended conclusion to his unfinished novels years ago but, since then, the HBO version has made several narrative detours. The showrunners are not giving interviews about episode 6 (and told EW they plan to spend the finale offline — “drunk and far away from the Internet” as Benioff put it).

Regardless of the final season’s narrative’s origin, the Thrones writers have planned Dany’s fate for years and have foreshadowed the dark turn in the storyline. In previous seasons, producers would sometimes ask Clarke to play a scene a bit different than what she expected for a seemingly heroic character. “There’s a number of times I’ve been like: ‘Why are you giving me that note?’” Clarke says. “So yes, this has made me look back at all the notes I’ve ever had.”

After Episode 5, “The Bells,” the reaction to Dany’s “Mad Queen” turn has been explosive and frequently negative. Some critics insist Daenerys doesn’t have the capacity for such monumental evil and the twist is an example of female characters being mishandled on the series. Others say Dany’s unstable sociopathic tendencies were indeed established, but the final season moved too fast and flubbed its execution.

For Clarke, the final season arc required mapping out a series of turning points. Dany’s attack on King’s Landing might have seemed abrupt, but from the beginning of the season Daenerys has reacted with increasing anger, desperation and coldness to one setback after another, shifting the Mother of Dragons into new emotional territory that would ultimately lead to her destruction.

Sitting in her dressing room on the set of Thrones last spring, Clarke broke down Daenerys’ entire season 8 internal journey leading up to the apocalyptic King’s Landing firebombing in a single breathless monologue.

“She genuinely starts with the best intentions and truly hopes there isn’t going to be something scuttling her greatest plans,” she says. “The problem is [the Starks] don’t like her and she sees it. She goes, ‘Okay, one chance.’ She gives them that chance and it doesn’t work and she’s too far to turn around. She’s made her bed, she’s laying in it. It’s done. And that’s the thing. I don’t think she realizes until it happens — the real effect of their reactions on her is: ‘I don’t give a s—t.’ This is my whole existence. Since birth! She literally was brought into this world going, ‘Run!’ These f—kers have f—ked everything up, and now it’s, ‘You’re our only hope.’ There’s so much she’s taken on in her duty in life to rectify, so much she’s seen and witnessed and been through and lost and suffered and hurt. Suddenly these people are turning around and saying, ‘We don’t accept you.’ But she’s too far down the line. She’s killed so many people already. I can’t turn this ship around. It’s too much. One by one, you see all these strings being cut. And there’s just this last thread she’s holding onto: There’s this boy. And she thinks, ‘He loves me, and I think that’s enough.’ But is it enough? Is it? And it’s just that hope and wishing that finally there is someone who accepts her for everything she is and … he f—king doesn’t.”

And losing Missandei? “There’s a number of turning points you see for Daenerys in the season, but that’s the biggest break. There’s nothing I will not do after losing Missandei and seeing the sacrifice she was prepared to make for her. That breaks her completely. There’s nothing left to making a tough choice.��

Executing Varys for treason? “She f—king warned him last season. We love Varys. I love [actor Conleth Hill]. But he changes his colors as many times as he wants. She needs to know the people who are supporting her regardless. That was my only option, essentially, is what I mean.”

Burying Cersei Lannister under the collapse of the Red Keep? “With Cersei, it’s a complete no-brainer. Lady’s a crazy motherf—ker. She’s going down.”

Yet Clarke also had another, more personal reaction to Dany’s meltdown. “I have my own feelings [about the storyline] and it’s peppered with my feelings about myself,” she admits. “It’s gotten to that point now where you read [comments about] the character you [have to remind yourself], ‘They’re not talking about you, Emilia, they’re talking about the character.”

Like many actors who have played the same role for a long time, Clarke identifies with her character and has put much of herself into the role. She believes in Daenerys’ confidence, idealism and past acts of compassion. As the actress wrote in a New Yorkeressay in March, she played the Breaker of Chains through some life-threatening personal hardships, secretly enduring two brain aneurysms during her early years on the show. “You go on set and play a badass and you walk through fire and that became the thing that saved me from considering my own mortality,” she wrote. Clarke has drawn strength from Daenerys and infused Daenerys with her strength.

“I genuinely did this, and it’s embarrassing and I’m going to admit it to you,” Clarke says. “I called my mom and—“ Clarke shifts into a tearful voice to perform the conversation as she reenacts the call: “I read the scripts and I don’t want to tell you what happens but can you just talk me off this ledge? It really messed me up.’ And then I asked my mom and brother really weird questions. They were like: ‘What are you asking us this for? What do you mean do I think Daenerys is a good person? Why are you asking us that question? Why do you care what people think of Daenerys? Are you okay?’”

“And I’m all: ‘I’m fine! … But is there anything Daenerys could do that would make you hate her?’”

During EW’s visit to Northern Ireland last March, I took a walk with co-executive producer Bryan Cogman into the dark woods near the production camp. It was around midnight and bitterly cold. Our boots scrunched on the muddy gravel and the bustling sounds of crew activity from the set slowly receded into the distance.

“Emilia has been threading that needle beautifully this season,” Cogman says. “It’s the hardest job anybody has on this show.”

As we pass crew members our voices cautiously go silent. While Dany’s Mad Queen arc was known by all, her death in the finale was a secret even among many who work on the show. Killing Daenerys was a massive and difficult move. On a show that’s introduced dozens of distinctive breakout characters, Daenerys is arguably the most easily identifiable and iconic. She is T-shirts and coffee mugs and posters and bobbleheads and memes and the name of hundreds of kids around the world with GoTfan parents; a fearless figure of female empowerment.

“I still don’t know how I feel about a lot of what happens this season and I helped write it,” Cogman says. “It’s emotionally very challenging. It’s designed to not feel good. That said, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The best drama is the type you have to think about. There’s a dangerous tendency right now to make art and popular culture to feel safe for everybody and make everybody feel okay when watching and I don’t believe in that. The show is messy and grey and that’s where it’s always lived — from Jaime pushing a little boy out the window to Ned Stark’s death to the Red Wedding. This is the kind of story that’s meant to unsettle you and challenge you and make you think and question. I think that was George’s intent and what David and Dan wanted to do. However you feel about the final episodes of this show I don’t think anybody will ever accuse us of taking the easy way out.”

I point out Daenerys’ final season arc shifts the entire series, or at least her role in it. Upon rewatch, every Daenerys scene will now be viewed differently; the story of the rise of a villain more than a hero.

“Yes, although I don’t know if she’s a villain,” Cogman says. “This is a tragedy. She’s a tragic figure in a very Shakespearean and Greek sense. When Jon asks Tyrion [in the finale] if they were wrong and Tyrion says, ‘Ask me again in 10 years,’ I think that’s valid.”

Tyrion actor Peter Dinklage says the showrunners on set compared Dany’s dragon-bombing of King’s Landing to the U.S. dropping nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki to decisively end World War II in 1945. “That’s what war is,” Dinklage says. “Did we make the right choices in war? How much longer would [WWII] have gone on if we didn’t make horrible decisions? We love Daenerys. All the fans love Daenerys, and she’s doing these things for the greater good. ‘The greater good’ has been in the headlines lately… when freeing everyone for the greater good you’re going to hurt some innocents along the way, unfortunately.”

Gwendoline Christie, who plays Brienne of Tarth, adds there’s another political lesson to be learned in the final season as well. “The signs have actually always been there,” Christie says of Daenerys. “And they’ve been there in ways we felt at the time were just mistakes or controversial. At this time, it’s important to question true motives. This show has always been about power and, more than ever, it’s an interesting illustration that people in pursuit of power can come in many different forms and we need to question everything.” 

Killing Daenerys also forever changes Jon Snow, leading to his circular fate: returning to serve the rest of his life at The Wall. Harington spoke about the show’s finale in a production tent on the season 8 set, his voice so cautiously low a recorder could barely pick him up. Harington explained he avoids talking about the death scene on the set, and he and Clarke came up with a secret hand signal to refer to it — touching a fist to their heart.

“I think it’s going to divide,” Harington says of the finale’s fan reaction. “But if you track her story all the way back, she does some terrible things. She crucifies people. She burns people alive. This has been building. So, we have to say to the audience: ‘You’re in denial about this woman as well. You knew something was wrong. You’re culpable, you cheered her on.’”

Harington adds he worries the final two episodes will be accused of being sexist, an ongoing criticism of GoT that has recently resurfaced perhaps more pointedly than ever before. “One of my worries with this is we have Cersei and Dany, two leading women, who fall,” he says. “The justification is: Just because they’re women, why should they be the goodies? They’re the most interesting characters in the show. And that’s what Thrones has always done. You can’t just say the strong women are going to end up the good people. Dany is not a good person. It’s going to open up discussion but there’s nothing done in this show that isn’t truthful to the characters. And when have you ever seen a woman play a dictator?”

There’s plenty of tragedy for Jon as well, he points out. “This is the second woman he’s fallen in love with who dies in his arms and he cradles her in the same way,” Harington notes. “That’s an awful thing. In some ways, Jon did the same thing to [his Wildling lover] Ygritte by training the boy who kills her. This destroys Jon to do this.”

Back in Clarke’s dressing room, the actress is preparing to film one of her final scenes on the series. Understandably, she can’t quite bring herself to feel sorry for Jon Snow.

“Um, he just doesn’t like women does he?” Clarke quips. “He keeps f—king killing them. No. If I were to put myself in his shoes I’m not sure what else he could have done aside from … oh, I dunno, maybe having a discussion with me about it? Ask my opinion? Warn me? It’s like being in the middle of a phone call with your boyfriend and they just hang up and never call you again. ‘Oh, this great thing happened to me at work today —hello?’ And that was 9 years ago…”

Clarke’s phone call metaphor is characteristically witty, and the actress has given some fascinating insight about the season as a whole. But nothing yet quite feels like the bottom, the blunt truth of how she feels about Daenerys’ fate.

“You’re about to ask if me — as Emilia — disagreed with her at any point,” Clarke intuits. “It was a f—king struggle reading the scripts. What I was taught at drama school — and if you print this there will be drama school teachers going ‘that’s bulls—t,’ but here we go: I was told that your character is right. Your character makes a choice and you need to be right with that. An actor should never be afraid to look ugly. We have uglier sides to ourselves. And after 10 years of working on this show, it’s logical. Where else can she go? I tried to think what the ending will be. It’s not like she’s suddenly going to go, ‘Okay, I’m gonna put a kettle on and put cookies in the oven and we’ll just sit down and have a lovely time and pop a few kids out.’ That was never going to happen. She’s a Targaryen.”

“I thought she was going to die,” she continues. “I feel very taken care of as a character in that sense. It’s a very beautiful and touching ending. Hopefully, what you’ll see in that last moment as she’s dying is: There’s the vulnerability — there’s the little girl you met in season 1. See? She’s right there. And now, she’s not there anymore…”

A crew member comes for Clarke and she stands up. It’s time for her to go. Clarke begins to walk away, turns around, breaks away from the staffer, and comes back.

There’s one last thing she wants you to know.

“But having said all of the things I’ve just said…” Clarke says. “I stand by Daenerys. I stand by her! I can’t not.”

Source

Emilia Clarke on Game of Thrones finale’s shock twist: ‘I stand by Daenerys’ was originally published on Enchanting Emilia Clarke | Est 2012