#like the ideas suck or my execution is just terrible. it's just bad and i never know what to do to fix it or just make it a little better

[its-captain-sir]

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[whaddayadothatfor]

Ctenizidae

Pairing: Miguel O’Hara x Fem!Reader

Summary: You’re an anomaly from another universe. You’re not dangerous though, so Miguel’s made the executive decision to keep you around until more dangerous criminals are caught and sent home first. Unless that’s not the only reason he’s decided to keep you around…

Content warnings: dub-con, voyeurism, masturbation, obsessive!Miguel

WC: ~1k

AN: Y’all this is so unedited but I wanted to write smut for this man so I did! If y’all like it I can post a second, smuttier part.

MDNI

“Here.” You drop a small plastic bin of chocolate chip cookies in front of Miguel. As a peace offering. No, really.

Miguel raises his right eyebrow in question. He doesn’t even answer you anymore. The other Spider-people go about their day in the cafeteria, having seen this scene time and time again.

Every day for the past two weeks since you were suddenly teleported to Nueva York and promptly labeled an anomaly, you’ve been practically begging Miguel to send you home. He’s declined every time.

This is pretty much how the conversation goes each time:

“Miguel, I think I should—“

“No. We have to send the most dangerous anomalies back to their universe first—“

“I’m dangerous! I’m plenty dangerous.”

“The only thing you’ve maimed, tortured, and killed in the past month is a flippin’ houseplant. You’re staying.”

You see how frustrating this man is?

So you’ve decided that maybe bribery— sorry, a peace offering— will work better. Hence, the cookies.

“Maybe if you eat something sweet you’ll stop being so bitter and stubborn all the time,” you smile tightly. “Then you’ll find it in your heart— the one that shrunk three sizes— to let me go home.”

“I appreciate the offering— though you could use some more creativity in your approach— but just know that these won’t get you home.” He pries open the container and lifts one to his mouth before moaning in delight. “These are delicious. Thank you,” he said, sucking the melted chocolate off of his thumb. His overly enthusiastic groans were clearly a tactic to piss you off, and it worked.

You simmer in anger as he smirks while chewing his cookie. You try to snatch the bin back, but he moves it out of your way.

“Ah, ah, ah,” he says, pushing up from the small table he was sitting at and leaning down to whisper near your ear. “No take-backsies.”

He flustered you, and he knew it. He laughed as he walked away. You stuttered a retort in embarrassment, but he didn’t even have the decency to turn around.

“Ugh, I hate that guy,” you stomped in anger. You muttered several curses before you turned around to leave, only to see several wide-eyed Spideys staring at you in concern. This is why you wait until after you’re alone to throw a tantrum— it scares the locals. Whoops. “Uhh, carry on. My bad. Enjoy your lunch!”

You quickly walk away, feeling defeated. But it doesn’t matter, you’ve got nothing but time. You’ll catch him when he’s sleeping. He’s gotta be more amenable then.

Later

“You know, just for the record, I think you going to his room this late at night is a terrible idea,” Lyla warned as she flitted between standing and reclining with her arms crossed behind her neck.

“Well I think him keeping me here is a terrible idea. I guess we’re all full of them.”

“Seriously—“

“Lyla I don’t care! I’ve got a family to get back to. Friends, a life. I don’t care how fine that man is, I’m going back home. Tonight, preferably.”

“Whatever, it’s your funeral.” She acquiesced before disappearing into the ether, just as you arrived at his door.

“Wait, Lyla! Open the door.” Without a response, the door opened. “Thanks, Lyla.”

You walked in to the large room to see Miguel sitting up in a chair near the center of the room.

“Miguel, you need to listen to me—“

The sight that met you was so shocking you had to take it in one part at a time.

First, You see Miguel’s side profile as he faces the wall to the left of you. He’s breathing heavy, chest heaving as his hand vigorously moves up and down his— oh. Maybe you came at the wrong time.

With the sudden awkwardness that’s overtaken you, you look somewhere else, anywhere else, only to find the source of what he’s staring at— a video, no, porn. The second piece of the puzzle, you take in the video’s content. First, you just see flashes of skin and hear soft grunts and moans emanating from the screen. But then you realize, the voices sound familiar, really familiar. Then it hits you.

It is you.

And him. The both of you together. And that realization connects all the pieces of the puzzle together. He’s keeping you here, on purpose.

Your eyes dart back to Miguel, who has now abandoned his video in favor of the live view he has right in front of him. He’s shirtless but he still has some grey sweats on, pushed down just enough that he can jerk off. His hands move desperately over his cock, aborted grunts and breathy moans coming out sporadically.

He turned his head to the side, his cheeks flushed and his eyes narrowed with desire. You were frozen, stuck in time. Miguel kept stroking his cock while staring into your eyes. He did this right up until his orgasm overtook him, throwing his head back and jerking his hips upward as he called out your name.

His cum spurted out in waves, once, twice, three times. It was thick and opaque and made a mess all over his lower stomach. He sighed and sank back into his chair.

“Did you enjoy the show?” His voice is low and heady as he calls out to you. It takes you a moment to respond, because admittedly you’re still staring at his— well, his everything, dick included. Still It was a very, very nice, thick, veiny d—“Am I interrupting?”

His teasing knocks you out of your reverie.

“I-I should go.” You said. You’re starting to realize that Lyla might have been right. Maybe you should’ve waited until the morning. You start backing up to leave but Miguel shakes his head and the door shuts behind him.

“No, no, no. See, that’s your problem. You’re always trying to leave,” he chastises.

He stalks towards you, like you’re prey. You move backwards until your back hits the door. He reaches over you, placing an arm over your head and his index finger under your chin, lifting it upwards. He bends down, close enough that you can see even minute details of his face.

He narrows his eyes as he bares his fangs.

“You’re not going anywhere.”

[darylbae]

would you write smth for daryl x reader where reader had to fight her way out of one of the outposts and can’t stop scrubbing her hands. to the point where the skin is really sore. maybe he kisses the tops of her hands. washing them one more time at her ask. but gently with warm soapy water. maybe he puts cream on them and wraps them in a bandage.

what if it gets worse — daryl dixon🩰

in which you can't seem to get the blood off your hands, but daryl is there to help

note: i hope this is what you meant anon

REQUESTS ARE OPEN!

This felt too far. Even for you. You had killed too many walkers to count, you weren't the sweetest like Beth once was, you could drive straight past a helpless man. But the plan you were currently driving to execute, was too far for you. You sat with your hands in your lap, trying to stop them from trembling. You were tough, everyone knew it, you knew it. But this felt like you were driving to your death. There was no coming back from this. The RV you were driving in was dark, the air was unsettling, nobody would talk above a whisper. Turn back, Abe. Please. Realize this is a mistake. You were pulled out of your thoughts by Daryl, who laced his fingers around yours. The two of you had always been on the same frequency, it's why you bonded as close as you were. You were the same person in different fonts, but you differed where it mattered. Daryl could feel you were in your own head. He wanted this matter dealt with, he wanted to go back to pretending to hate Alexandria. He wanted his only problem to be fitting in. Not this. You felt a war looming, a deep, dark black hole about to suck you in. Something bad was going to happen. Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow. "Hey," his voice was small, only for you to hear, "you're okay." He brought your hand up to his mouth, peppering small kisses to your knuckles, which were turning white with your grip on his hand. Anything to steady your own nerves. Your hand was small in his, his fingers twice the width of yours. You enjoyed observing his hands, his arms, his smile. Studying Daryl had been your favorite pastime. "Remember when we almost crashed on my bike once because you wouldn't stop tickling me?" He questioned, seeing the sides of your mouth rise into a sweet smile. "There's that smile." The RV had come to a stop and your quick-lived happiness had died. You took hold of the knife in your lap, letting everyone pile off before you did. Daryl took the moment of silence to touch your cheek and bring you into a small kiss. "You can do this." You weren't so sure. Rick had been through the plan, each of you with a role to do. Hide in the van, wait until they're alone, go in for the kill, storm the building.

And you did just that. You escaped having to kill the first two, all you did was storm the building with them. You'd all split into two, you'd gone alongside Daryl, and you were instructed to kill these people in their sleep. People, bad people, who had no idea tonight was their last night. You knew they were terrible people, the pictures on their walls were only a fraction of evidence, but weren't you also just as bad? Killing walkers was one thing, this was an entirely new level of fucked up. The squelch as you'd sunk the knife into their temple made you cringe, and blood had come pooling out. Your first instinct was to reach for it and cover it up, and in doing so, blood had covered your fingers and palms in thick, red blood. You felt nauseous, the knife in your hand feeling close to slipping, you made made a mess of this. The rest of the outpost was the same, knife through the temple, the occasional sounds of bullets thwipping past you to enter the bodies of some unfortunate Saviors. The shakes had spread, your knees almost buckling from the insecurity of your feet. Daryl was quick to notice and wrap an arm around you, securing you against him. "I got ya, sweetheart. Come on." His voice was the only thing you could hear, his arms were the only thing you could feel, and you'd walked with him out onto the open field surrounding the outpost. Daylight was starting to show, you'd heard a radio going off... Something about Maggie and Carol... You'd fallen to your knees to recollect yourself, everyone's heads turning to locate where this mysterious radio caller was. Your brain was off, your body was on. The group on the radio had taken Maggie and Carol to a slaughterhouse, and managed to fight their way out, to your relief. You couldn't take another death on your hands. The blood on your hands had dried, stained between the grooves of your fingerprints. You couldn't look at your hands without feeling sick, but Daryl could happily take your hands in his and distract you. It's something he'd grown to be good at. He shuffled closer into you, pulling your legs over his, and gesturing to his shoulder. "Come 'ere, girl." But you couldn't stop staring at your hands. The blood cracking and flaking on your hands, the feeling of sliding the knife into their brain haunted you. Even as you'd arrived back in Alexandria, you hadn't stopped to tell the tale to others, you'd broken off from the group the moment you left the RV. It wasn't until you were in the home you shared with Daryl, that the tears had started to fall. They were terrible people, you kept reminding yourself. But it wasn't enough.

You'd pushed yourself into the bathroom, rinsing your hands under the taps and scrubbing at your skin. You'd used a scourer, and rag, all of which needed to be binned afterwards. The blood kept flowing through your hands, out of the taps, covering you in guilt. The blood wouldn't wash off. Daryl had finally got himself back, a worried heartbeat echoing in his chest as to your disappearance. In the distance, he heard the tap running and assumed you were getting yourself ready for bed. But the worry hadn't settled. Even before breaching the outpost, you had that look in your eye. Daryl knew you. In and out. He could find you in the dark. He could tell when things weren't right. So when he'd seen you in the midst of a full Lady Macbeth breakdown, he'd dropped everything. All of his own worries and anxieties. Nothing mattered more to him than you. He took your hands in his, seeing pale red water from the residue on your hands, and it all clicked. "Please, Dar," you cried softly, "help me get it off." Daryl's eyebrows wobbled at the sight of you, emotion threatening to expose itself. He'd grabbed a towel, wrapping your hands in it tightly and sitting you down on his lap on the bathroom floor. You sobbed against his chest, the warmth of his skin would usually comfort you, but you couldn't settle. Not even in the safety of your home, or the walls surrounding your community. Daryl couldn't say it's okay, it wasn't. Nothing about this was okay, but the most he could do was hold you. Give you his company.

And you did, the pair of you sat quietly together until your sobs had reduced to little sniffles. Daryl's hands held you tightly to his body, and that alone had been enough to keep you from descending further into this breakdown. "Dar," you spoke, voice cracking and sadness still stuck in your throat. He looked up, his sorrowful eyes upon yours and you knew he'd do anything for you. No matter the time of day or the complexity of what you wanted, you knew he'd do it for you. "Please wash my hands for me. I need it to be gone." He nodded, helping you and himself up to lean over the sink once more. He'd plugged the sink and filled it with warm, soapy water, submerging the both of your hands. His fingers slid over your hands, massaging the soap into all the crevices, and under your nails. He made sure to be thorough, and used a new towel to pat your hands dry. They looked sore, red raw from the scrubbing. "Come on," Daryl whispered, leading you into your shared room, reaching for the selection of creams you kept on the nightstand. He'd taken care of you, silently and efficiently making sure you were okay, not a word to be exchanged between the two of you. You'd climbed back into his lap, head on his shoulder and you felt a little more eased. Not entirely okay, but safer with Daryl. "What if this gets worse?" You asked, glancing up at his eyes which were already fixed on yours. "Then you got me to protect ya," he replied, "I won' let a thing hurt ya, not a hair on ya head. Okay?"

[oscconfessions]

i fucking hate the "why cabby's arc is lesbophobic, misogynistic, ableist, etc etc" post so so much. like okay listen i usually don't care about bad takes it's whatever, the ii fandom usually has terrible ones, but that post specifically has so much misinformation about cabby and takes things that aren't canon as canon (such as, cabby only "caring about fem-enby characters", when a lot of her friendships are with masc characters and she generally cares about people, or that she was treated badly because she "wasn't of help for any male character", when like, no, she was treated badly because she wasn't the best person at the start of s3 and people also forget that, etc) + she was like. actively not the greatest person due to the fact that taylor was in charge of her storyline, and when he was fired, they changed everything completely, and also, cabby's arc being lesbophobic's only proof being her VA doing Cabby's lines with a sapphic intent, which, 1- sapphic doesn't mean lesbian necessarily, there are mspec sapphic people and 2- whatever the vas do or say doesn't meant that it's canon to ii 3- again, it's literally not canon, please don't consider headcanons/ideas the rest of the crew has as canon (since justin did specificy back then that, unless if established by the three of them, it's not canon, or something along the lines of that, it's like saying that cake/brunch's hcs are canon just because he's part of the crew but like, no, they are not)

and meanwhile i can agree that cabby's portrayal of disability is not the best, and could've been better, i think that what people often forget is that. treating issues such as ableism on media doesn't mean that the creators themselves condone those. like yeah the characters (mostly silver and test tube) were assholes to cabby because of her disability, but AE never glorified it nor did they intend for others to feel like it was like that. hell, even the bot and cabby thing, people immediately assumed that it was an intentionally ableist (which, i get it, it could've been executed better) but like. People also forgot that Bot was going through severe identity issues and was strongly struggling with being written down as one thing (because 1, they were made to be the replica of someone. they were LITERALLY written down to act like someone. 2, they recognized that they were terribly attached to test tube and that's why their view on cabby was so complicated. 3. bot immediately recognized that what they did was wrong, and didn't intentionally want to hurt cabby, again. they ARE going through their own troubles as well. AND 4, in the next episode, bot immediately apologizes when given the chance and gives cabby a file they made themselves, because they understand cabby and don't want her to struggle.)

i specifically hate that post so much because it made people be insufferable regarding iii and also made people worse when it came to AE. It is filled with so much misinformation on general and I could break it down completely, but the person who made it just has terrible takes and it feels like they don't even like II and just like the fanon versions of it (and also i refuse to look at it again fully because it is genuinely just. so so weird). also it did make people be worse about Cabby, to which her treatment in the fandom fucking sucks already. like it actively made the fandom worse and it sucks so much.

i shouldn't be this angry about something this dumb because it is kind of stupid but like. oh my god that IS a terrible analysis AND a terrible post that did horrendous damage to the fandom. going on anon because i am too scared to go main. 👍

- 💛🎤 anon

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[ratsbypaulzindel]

HI. BIG OVERVIEW OC POST THING. IT'S RAINFOREST FLOODS.

have you ever thought to yourself "hey wouldnt it be cool if there was an oc story made by two guys and it was about a haunted waterpark slash arcade in a fake town in a real state". you probably haven't. but if you have youre in luck! more under the cut ok.

rainforest floods is a terrible no good ocverse made by me and my good friend crawford @dykeseesgod. everyone in it sucks and is horrible except maybe one or two side characters. it's set in the podunk middle of nowhere town of timberline, new mexico, and more specifically a waterpark/arcade called rainforest floods (title drop).

also the waterpark SUUUCKS like its budget is nothing they are in debt. the managers havent paid taxes in 15 years. anyway these are the employees. theyre bad

and these are the co-managers. theyre even worse (and also toxic old man yaoi. these refs were drawn by the aforementioned crawford)

anyway yeah. they get up to wacky hijinks in what will ideally be a tv show coming out in one million years. they're also horrible and tragic. most of it is bruce's fault. some of its not though!

ok also here's some other side characters.

^ running gag that nobody knows her name except kelsey who has a huge crush on her.

^ unnamed girl's younger brother who is constantly faced with horrors and torment at the hands of the rainforest floods employees. dont get me wrong hes annoying as fuck but he didnt deserve to run on that hamster wheel. (ref also drawn by ford)

^ jeff's girlfriend. also the coolest person in timberline new mexico. worlds most unimportant minor character but she is wonderful and loved by the producers (me and cosmo)

FUNNY OUT OF CONTEXT THINGS THAT SHOULD MAKE YOU MORE INVESTED IN THIS OCVERSE

rainforest floods stupidity logic is a thing me and robbie came up with to explain why all the characters are idiots who dont find things out that are important to the plot too soon.

there's a chain gimmick restaurant that andy's whole family runs except him. its like italian food but its like also magicians. their tagline is "so good its practically magic". andy hates it.

kyle has a curse on him so that nobody remembers or recognizes him outside of like. his family. so the rff employees arent even targeting him for their shenanigans on purpose theyre all just weird freaks.

kelsey gives unnamed girl the company landline as her phone number because shes stupid and a ghost and doesnt have a phone.

the employees all get together on wednesdays in the breakroom and compare evidence on whether or not andy and bruce are together romantically. its the one thing that truly bonds them all together.

vincent: is a watchmojo fan, had his first kiss as beethoven in his 12th grade production of dog sees god confessions of a teenage blockhead (2004), gets really christian in some episode subplot, is not a swiftie but he is a gaylor, wishes he was jonathan sims sooooo bad, types like a toddler who was just given a keyboard.

vincent also ruined rainforest floods' lobby playlist

also there's a brand account that we run and post on whenever we feel like it. its more of a sounding board for ideas we may explore more in the future. its fun but it may be a bit difficult to get the full idea with the execution so :-( sorry you wont fully understand our wonderful and hilarious visions

annnd i think that's it. yay worlds silliest yet most tragic oc story. ok bye ^_^

[donniesexceptionalmind]

HI! HAVE ART!

I have no idea how accurate the outfit is (and I suck major ASS at drawing hats) but I tried and I hope u enjoy :333 (I also made the lil clip thing for the cape the logo thing (???) yall have bc its cool >:D) (AND ALSO PLS PLS PLS TAKE THIS AN EXCUSE TO RANT ABOUT EXECUTIVE DYSFUNCTION OR SMTH BC I HEARD U HAPPEN TO RANT A LOT ABOUT AUTISM AND I AM V INTERESTED IN THAT STUFF!!!)

Me when J saw the art:

I actually infodumped about executive dysfunction before!

But I will share some additional information about it because you drew this amazing piece of art & I am very joyous. ✨️

Here is my personal experience:

Executive dysfunction can be really challenging & for me, it is a huge part of all the things that make autism a disability.

The everyday experience as an autistic person is already loaded with stress, anxiety & discomfort - and on top of that we are getting blessed with not being able to do things even though we need to. There is a barrier in our brain that says "No" & you can't do anything about it. You are perhaps paralyzed, doomscrolling social media or just staring at the wall for hours.

The outside perspective of this is always "You are lazy, you are not trying hard enough, just do it", but it is not as easy as that. If it were that easy, we wouldn't be struggling. Because, you know, we DO KNOW we need to get these things done & sometimes we WANT TO get them done!

In short, executive functioning skills are cognitive skills that help us to regulate & control our thoughts & actions. Planning your actions is actually a higher executive functioning skill just like problem-solving.

Struggling with executive functioning can look like:

Not being able to begin a task that involves multiple steps, e.g., cooking a meal - it's just too much to process, too much to do!

Hyperfocus: getting too absorbed in a task so you forget everything around you, including bodily signals like hunger, thirst, tiredness (although hyperfocus can also be a blessing to get things done and/or experience a large amount of joy, especially when it comes to our special interests)

Struggling to reply to messages in time (e.g. my inability to answer inbox messages even though I genuinely want to)

Struggling with decision making, e.g, which task do I do first, what should I wear? Even crucial things like 'Should I get up?'

What helps me:

ROUTINES. Honestly. As an autistic person I have a lot of terrible days, but there are also days that are not too bad. And the perfectionist that I am, on days that are not too bad I try to do as much as possible- which can lead to having a terrible day straight after. BUT I have established a very well basic system of routines & tasks that IF I stick to them, I will be fine (mostly). (If I were sticking to it. It's a struggle. AHEM.)

And it is OKAY to have rituals & routines.

We seek to replicate success when we experience it because it makes us feel safe, grounded & happy!

And also bring order to the chaos that is the world around us - it is REALLY upsetting to live here, isn't it?

For Leon it's incredibly hard to establish routine because of his ADHD & this is a whole new topic to cover.

And yes, it is fairly common that people of all neurotypes have routines.

The difference though:

My day will get significantly worse if I can't do what I have planned or if I miss a segment of an established ritual.

For example, if I can't have my lunch in the time frame I always have it, it will cause physical & mental pain - sometimes to the point of a meltdown if things add up.

As I mentioned before I am sometimes NOT coherent with sticking to these routines & that is because of internal ableism & my own ignorance.

I struggle to accept that I have a disability & that I am not functioning like neurotypicals. Their standard shall be mine, but I can't live up to that standard. This is a problem I still have to overcome.

I sometimes expect too much of myself & burn myself out, blame myself for not achieving goals etcetera. This is not healthy.

There should be a base level of respect for an autistic person's need for routine & compassion when it does get ripped to shreds.

The world is unpredictable. Unexpected changes will happen if we want it or not.

I hope I was able to provide additional input! /g

[number5theboy]

Five being the founder of the commission is a horrible, horrible writing decision. Everything about it is just terrible.

Oh boy, let's get into this.

I’ve been writing on this on and off for the past month, and this is as clear and structured as I feel I can be. This has become a gigantic 5.5k monstrosity, but I wanted to have all my thoughts somewhere together. It starts off as an ‘actually, the idea here was not that bad’ and turns into ‘but the execution in the show sucked, so let me tell you exactly why this did not work’. Dedicating this to @sohoseance, @sharkneto, @kaleidoscopegirl and @nachtare because it really gave me the final push to finish this to hear that you would be interested in reading it.

First of all, I want to say that I don’t think that Five being the founder of the Commission was the point of that scene, or something that the show really wanted to engage in, from the way the rest of the season plays out. Five has no thoughts on the fact that he founded an organisation that existed to bring about the event that ruined his life; in the same vein, Lila says nothing about the reveal that he was, after all, behind the organisation that ruined her life. What it felt like to me, watching the season, was that the reveal and subsequent “Don’t save the world.”-shtick was there to keep Five away from the plot, and more specifically, Allison’s storyline. Without the detour to the Commission, Five would have had a vested interest in fixing the timeline, and Allison would have had someone working on the same goal, which was not what the writers wanted the storyline to be, so Five had to have something happen to him that kept him from intervening in the main plot (you know, like the shrapnel wound or the paradox psychosis in earlier seasons – same plot devices). Point is, the whole reveal doesn’t seem to have been intended as an actual character exploration and functions more like a badly conceived plot device. They needed Five to not do the thing that he has been established to be doing for the past two seasons, and he’s been written in such a way that the only authority he trusts is himself, so they had to crowbar a version of himself that tells him to do the opposite of what he would naturally do.

Second thing to mention is that even if it was intended to be a genuine character moment, I don’t think it was meant to be completely bad, for the simple reason that Steve Blackman, the showrunner and head writer, genuinely doesn’t think that the Commission is a bad or evil organisation (no, really). Which. Has been obvious since the writing of S2, but that doesn’t erase the writing and establishing of the Commission in S1. Someone get the man someone who checks the implications of his writing ideas, the show is in dire need for that. Why I bring this is up is that it a) explains why neither Five nor Lila really seem to react and realise what ‘Five founded the Commission’ implies, what he would be responsible for, and b) I don’t think that Blackman realised that a lot of viewers would look at how the Commission and Five as a character has been established, see that apparently Five founded the Commission and go ‘yeah, this is not compelling and makes very little sense’. Put a pin in that, we’ll get back to it shortly.

The thing is, theoretically, I don’t think this is a horrible writing decision. It could have genuinely been so interesting, a very compelling character exploration. And then it just was the most underwhelming thing. When I watched S3 for the first time and Five said the word ‘founder’, I immediately clocked what they were doing. I knew exactly who the founder was going to be, I didn’t even need the paradox psychosis mannerisms to clue me in, because I love it when time travel is used in stories to confront a protagonist with an older version of themselves who is an antagonist in the story. When well done, that story beat can be so fun and so interesting. Dark (2017-2020) and Looper (2012) are a show and film respectively that I love that tackle this kind of story. As a kid, I was obsessed with Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox, a book which subverts this story beat in a way that blew my little child mind. Five being the founder could and should have worked. It’s a concept deeply ingrained in what makes this character tick.

The hook of Five being the founder should have been the intrigue of how he ended up becoming the exact opposite of what he stood for so far. That’s the crux of this trope, contrasting the same person at different points in their life, having to confront something you loathe that is something you will become. And it would have been interesting and satisfying, in a way, to see everything time-travel-related lead right back to Five, that it really was only him and his powers that shifted the timeline, something about the full realisation of his potential as the most powerful man in the space-time-continuum. And also as someone who despite all that power failed. How great it would have been if the show actually took the time to explore this. I don’t think the idea of ‘Five founded the Commission’ was doomed from the start, it could have been so very compelling.

Instead, we got an incredibly muddled storyline that was more confusing than intriguing, had no clearly defined stakes and resolved (?) in such an unsatisfactory way that I still don’t know how I really feel about it. In my head, there’s two ways this storyline plays out:

Five did the correct thing. He headed the warning of his old self, did not save the world, and everything got reset, staving off the founding of the Commission and him ever going down the path of becoming the founder. It is badly written and really majorly serves so Five has something to do that does not really impact the plot, but at least it is done with and I won’t have to think about it again, should this show get renewed for S4.

Five did not do the correct thing. The world was saved/reset, and there are many, many opportunities to lose that arm and go down the path to found the Commission in his future. This lame storyline continues into a hypothetical S4 as the ultimate proof that the writers have no idea what to do with him.

Under the cut, I’ll first talk about why the whole ‘Five founded the Commission’-shebang doesn’t work the way it was written into the show, and then I’ll talk about why I have an inkling that it could continue into S4 even though I think it’s a terrible idea. Also, major spoilers for the show Dark (2017-2020), if you have not seen that, do yourself a favour, watch it, come back to this later. It feels like the thing they were trying to do with Five in S3 but actually good. Do check the trigger warnings though, it's a show that can be rough in places.

There’s this show. In it, there is a boy whose father committed suicide for an unknown reason. When the boy is still young, an apocalypse happens, wiping out life as he knows it. He learns how to survive in the apocalyptic wasteland, all the while thinking about how to prevent it. He knows time travel is possible. If only he could harness its power to work in his favour. As he is trying to get to the bottom of how time works, there is interference by a shadowy organisation with assassins that want to manipulate the timestream so that the apocalypse does happen, but the boy, who is now a man, keeps getting in the way of that. One day, he meets the man who founded the shadowy organisation. He is old and withered and time travel has left its mark on him. And the penny drops. The old man is the young man is the boy, and he will turn into him, eventually. The old man who once was the boy needs the apocalypse to happen, because it is the only way to figure out a way to  prevent it, because pinning down the origin of it all is muddled and complicated and marred in personal, familial connections for the man. He is trapped in an endless loop of repeating and alternating time, at a point branching into several different timelines, the apocalypse always happens, and he is always fated to become what he loathes most until he can find a way to break the cycle.

That’s, in the most simplified way possible, a part of the plot of the show Dark (2017-2020). It does this plot a surprising amount of justice, it really explores themes of family and time paradoxes and consequences of one’s actions through the focus on its main character, Jonas Kahnwald. I also think that the above is kind of, sort of the ballpark they were trying to hit with the whole ‘Five is the founder of the Commission’-storyline. That time was going to wear down Five until he decided to take the timestream into his own hands, founding the Commission to get himself out of the apocalyptic wasteland and give himself a chance to save the world. The thing is that it doesn’t work with the way that the Commission has been set up to work in previous seasons.

The thing with Dark’s story is that it is contained to one single town in Germany, and the families that live therein. The entire plot revolves around the time paradox and the apocalypse and how everyone fits into it. TUA does not work like that. The implications are for the whole world and the whole of human history – those are the things the Commission meddles in. Where the shadowy organisation in Dark only has very few people and very little, sometimes backfiring technology, the Commission in TUA has essentially been established to be all-knowing, all-powerful. They can travel through time precisely with the briefcases, and even have the ability to stop time altogether. They can modify bodies to their liking, repair them beyond everything imaginable, extending their employees lives. They have the Infinite Switchboard, a plot device that allows them to see not only what is happening in the timeline, but also in alternative timelines (it is singularly the worst plot device in this show, I hate it beyond words). They have technology to shield themselves from paradoxes, which Five himself built, with the implication that most of the tech at the Commission’s disposal has its origin with Five and his powers.

In Dark, the origin of the time paradox that causes the apocalypse, the thing that needs resolving, is a very complicated, tangled mess that tracks through interpersonal relationships and complicated feelings on family. It is not as easy as just removing one person from the timeline, or even one person at all, but rather a culmination of decisions that created walking paradoxes, which then snowballed to make other situations more complicated. In contrast, in TUA, solving the apocalypse – the first one - is pretty simple. What lead up to it is complex, but in the end, it is Viktor, egged on by Harold Jenkins due to something that is ultimately Reginald’s fault.

The point being is that since Five was the founder of the Commission, he had access to all that technology and knowledge, and he knew exactly how the apocalypse came to be. To prevent it, all he needed to do was travel to outside the prison and knock Harold out the second he stepped out. Or even better, go back and prevent Reginald from ever suppressing Viktor’s powers in the first place. Five has long been established as a smart man, when he founded the Commission, he had everything at his disposal to turn the world around for good with little problem.

Instead, the show tells us he somehow set up an ineffectual, all-powerful bureaucracy that goes fiddling about in the past so that everything happens to lead up to the 2019 apocalypse. There is no reasoning given as to why Founder Five would want the apocalypse to happen. We know nothing about his motivations. He exists to be cryptic to Five, tell him not to save the world, and then he dies. He’s not an antagonist, he’s a plot device, despite standing for the very opposite of what Five stands for. This is part of a larger problem where the Commission actually has no fixed characteristics or ethos, it is just what the show needs it to be, even though all of that keeps contradicting each other and creating a woefully muddled picture that makes trying to understand what is going on a headache and a half.

Because that is another fundamental difference between Dark and TUA is that Dark had one head writer, Jantje Friese, who was fully involved in the writing of every single episode and had a complete three-season-plan of how this show was going to play out. Meanwhile, Steve Blackman is playing it by ear, does not have a throughline or a plan as to where TUA is going, and is adapting and changing established things (like the Commission) depending on what the story needs in the moment, leading to a bigger picture that makes no sense.

The reveal of Five being the Founder doesn’t work because based on everything that has been established before, the power that Five would have had, Five could have and should have done other things. Even if he needed to found the Commission to find other people to help him develop things like the briefcases or the thrice-damned Infinite Switchboard, once he had those, what was his motivation to keep the apocalypse going? What was his motivation to meddle with the past? Why was any of it necessary? In Dark, the old man was backed into a corner, he had exhausted every other possibility. That show gave him motivations and really delved into why he became what he was; he was a character in his own right, the Big Bad of the show that explored why he became that.

TUA, on the other hand, is not interested enough in Founder Five to give us a compelling reason as to why he exists. Founder Five is not a character, he is a plot device masquerading as a character.  Unfortunately, that character is one that the viewers are very familiar with, so of course they would try to connect the Five that is by this point very established and has a reasonably strong characterisation going for him to Founder Five, who is just there, I guess. And people come up empty, because there is not enough to Founder Five to make sense why Five would become him, and the Commission is such a flaming dumpster fire of contradictory writing that it is barely possible to make sense of it, so connecting the two Fives through that is also not really possible.

The thing is, Dark also only gave the viewer the motivations of the old man after he had gotten introduced, the writing fleshed him out afterwards. But what they had done beforehand was built him up as a threat, as a shadowy figure with goals, and he was introduced as a character several episodes before the reveal of who he really was, so the viewers actually already knew him. In contrast, the concept of Founder Five and the character himself get introduced and killed off in the same episode.

And Dark allowed their old man to actually be an antagonist, to be the Big Bad, to really sharpen the difference between him and his young self as an interesting clash of characters. However, due to the inconsistent writing of the Commission (which was the Big Bad in S1 and then got written into a really misguided ‘actually the whole concept of the Commission isn’t bad despite them indiscriminately killing innocent people based on something they think should happen - the end of times – there was just one bad apple, the Handler, the Commission is neat as heck uwu’) and Steve Blackman’s inexplicable idea that the Commission isn’t bad, Founder Five isn’t allowed to be the Big Bad despite that being a much more compelling take. Instead he’s just a guy who’s there to get Five to act a certain way. Cool.

The reason I brough Dark up as a comparison is that it is well-written and well thought-out, and it really takes its time with character exploration so that every version of this one character makes sense to the viewer. Knowing how a similar plot plays out in Dark made my experience watching S3 actively worse, because I had seen how compelling and fun and gut-wrenching this exact take on a character could be. I was genuinely hyped when I realised that Five was the founder, I thought they were going to take the opportunity and meaningfully explore the character, and then Founder Five was not a character, not an antagonist, just a mouthpiece for the writers to get Five to not do the thing he’s been relentlessly doing for two seasons. And TUA’s take on this doesn’t have to be like Dark. It wouldn’t really fit with how the tone of the show has been going (sidenote: it would absolutely have fit S1 though), and just because Dark did it one way doesn’t mean that is the only right way. I’m just saying it was a compelling way, and they did a lot more interesting things with it than TUA did, which could easily have found its own fun and off-the-wall spin on having Five found the Commission, but they didn’t.

Alright. Okay. Founder Five as a character is a dud. So what about him as a plot device? Was the pay-off to the whole ‘don’t save the world’-thing worth the headache of trying to reconcile Five with Founder Five? Not really. I’m still in the dark – pun not intended – about what exactly they were trying to do with Five in the latter part of the season. Intellectually, I know the answer is ‘keep him out of Allison’s storyline so that their motivations don’t align and they don’t team up’ (which is a shame, if Five had kept wanting to save the world, we could have had some really interesting collaboration and fighting with Allison about whether or not to trust Reginald with the reset, but alas it was not to be). Practically? Who knows.

There were three key take-aways from that godforsaken paradox-safe bunker: the words ‘Don’t save the world.’, the tattoo, and the cut-off arm. The first one was an instruction from Founder Five to Five, the other two were markers of Founder Five. Back at Hotel Obsidian, Five puzzles over them, thinking that it might be Founder Five’s attempt to discourage him from becoming him, thinking about how he could try to break the cycle, all of it with – or rather at – Klaus. It’s, I think, the one really good scene coming out of this weird storyline, because we actually get to see Five’s thoughts and that it fucked him up seeing himself die, and the fact that it makes no sense (we all feel you, buddy). And I’ll give praise where it’s due, I think Aidan Gallagher did a great job with the odd material he was given, his acting in the bunker and at the bar with Klaus genuinely is top-notch, I wish they would reward this performance with the writing it deserves.

The talk with Klaus leads him to this season’s most pointless side tangent, the Mothers of Agony. After bringing up the idea of trying to break the cycle and expressing disgust at potentially dying with an old-man-tramp-stamp, any reluctance Five has had is promptly shoved out the window, never to be seen again. He talks to Pogo, gets some plot information because that’s what Five is usually for, and he gets the tattoo that he didn’t want with no discernible reasoning as to why. He talks some about how destiny doesn’t care whether he is sure about getting it or not, which is odd, because Five, as previously established in this show, doesn’t care about destiny (you know how que sera sera is bullshit in any language? That was a key part of his characterisation in S1 and seems to have been forgotten here.). So here he is still following Founder Five’s path for no established reason except that the plot tells him to and it’s supposed to keep us on tenterhooks on whether he will make the right decision. The tattoo, with that, fulfils its plot obligations and is never seen again.

He then helps a tiny bit to save the world real quick, with the whole ‘Christopher imprisons the kugelblitz’-thing that doesn’t stick, so it barely matters except for the fact that it makes him give up. Which I genuinely think is perfectly natural and understandable, he has been at this for a month straight and everything he’s been doing has made things worse, so maybe giving up and giving in doesn’t seem so bad anymore. It’s devastating in his arc, I think, that he finally is at the end of his rope after a lifetime of stubbornly clinging to life, to the belief that he can change things. The show does not particularly indulge that framing though, instead having him be funny drunk for an episode. Woo. Remember when Five’s alcoholism was something genuinely devastating from his time in the apocalypse in S1? Good fucking times. Anyway. He pivots his position from saving the world to not saving it, which is only solidified once Reginald shows up and suddenly he wants to save the world, which Five doesn’t trust him about because he knows he is hiding something from them. He then doubles down on not saving the world with the vote, swinging it so that they don’t go and save the world. Reginald then does some murdering and strong-arms them into a position where they do have to go and save it anyway.

This is where things get really muddled and I don’t understand Five’s thinking anymore. He knows that Reginald is up to no good. He knows that there is information he isn’t privy to that Reginald knows. He knows Reginald is using them, putting their lives on the line, and there was this deal with Allison that Five doesn’t know the terms of. And of course Five figures out where the sigils are. He is observant and aware of his surroundings, this has been well-established.

He gets summarily interrupted by one of the guardians cutting off his arm. So now we have what I think is supposed to be tension but when I watched, I was mostly confused. He has the tattoo, he has lost an arm and gained the knowledge on how to save the world. The pumps are primed for him to go down the path to founding the Commission, it all depends on the choices he makes now.

Inexplicably, he tells Reginald (who, again, he does not trust and does not like) where the sigils are. Is he saving the world here? I genuinely don’t know, but I don’t think it’s meant to be that. Maybe. Again, we are in muddled territory because I am very confused on his decision-making in this last episode.

What I think is supposed to be his pivotal choice is when it comes down between him and Allison to step on the last sigil. There were supposed to only be seven of them, Reginald meant for all of them to be incapacitated when he reset the world, but now there is a choice. And Five, somehow, does what Reginald tells him to and steps on the sigil. He doesn’t know it will incapacitate him, but it does, and so he can’t act anymore. What he can do is talk to Allison, and what he says convinces her to kill Reginald before he can kill her siblings, but only after Reginald has already locked in his new version of the world, his reset, honouring the terms he set with Allison. She pushes the button and resets (saves?) the world, with her conditions intact (she gets back all her siblings, Luther and Klaus included, and Ray and Claire), but because it was a deal with the devil, the siblings are stripped of their powers, and Reginald gets his wife back and more power than he’s ever had. It remains to be seen how this will play out, should this show get a fourth season.

More importantly, and tying this back to Founder Five The Plot Device, is that Five gets his arm back, so does this mean he averted going down the path of becoming the Commission’s founder? I think that’s how the show is set up to be, although I’m not 100% sure, put a pin in it, I’ll get back to it shortly. What I interpret is that Five did make the right choice by taking his spot on the sigil. If he had not and Allison, desperate to save the world and get her family back, had stepped onto the sigil, it would have left Five and Reginald. And Five, who did not have a deal with Reginald and would have seen his beloved siblings in pain, would have had a lot less qualms about putting that axe through Reginald’s brain, but then Reginald would not have had the time to reprogram the world. What I think the implication is is that Five would have ended up with the reconfiguration screen and somehow, I don’t know, used it to, you know, save the world. And he would have fucked it up somehow because that’s what Five tends to do – make things worse – and this would somehow, at some point, led to him founding the Commission to right his mistakes. Maybe. I don’t know. This is the best I can do and I am not certain that’s how I’m supposed to understand the finale in relation to the whole Commission-founding-business.

So, to recap, how did the Founder Five Plot Device work out? It created some kind of tension on whether or not Five was going to turn it around and decide to break the cycle. Kind of. Sort of. It was not particularly well-written and genuinely confused me more than it intrigued me. And I understand that it can’t be clear-cut, it’s supposed to be difficult for both the viewer and Five as a character to see what the right course of action is, I just don’t think it was particularly effective in building tension and I hated the thing the writing did where it would have Five state that he would not do a thing (get the tattoo, work with Reginald) and then he would turn around and do the thing with no real thing happening in-between that convinced him to act otherwise. Like. He volunteered that info on the sigils before he knew that could stop the guardian. And I think a part of the point was that in order to not become Founder Five, Five would have to act against his instincts and do what Reginald says, but it really was not conveyed well and his willingness to help Reginald along after his whole shebang about the deal with Allison was mostly confusing. Was he pressed to extremes? Yes. Was it the last resort the show portrayed it to be? Not really.

I also think this all would have worked better if Allison and Five had had any kind of established relationship beforehand. They barely talked for two seasons and basically only sniped at each other for the third. Maybe there was a point there that despite all the fighting, Five loves her enough to put her over himself, but they barely let them interact despite it having the biggest potential, especially this season, but who knows.

So, to sum up, even disregarding Founder Five as a character, what he brought as a plot device was also mostly muddled and confusing, and even in retrospect I’m still trying to figure out what exactly they were going for. I think it could’ve been made substantially better if there had been more than just the one scene of Five reflecting on what he witnessed in that bunker, but as it is, it just feels unsatisfactory in a way that I can’t really put my finger on. But at least it’s over and done with, Five will not go on to found the Commission, it’s a new day, it’s a new dawn. I think. Maybe. Potentially.

Okay.

The thing is that once I thought about the cliffhanger ending and what world Reginald has created, Five in that position looks to me way, WAY more likely to found the Commission than anything he did before the reset.

For the first time, I think we see a world that he would actively object to. He doesn’t like Reginald, he doesn’t trust Reginald, and with all that has happened, Reginald now seemingly has more power than ever, having shaped the world in the image he deems ideal and having depowered his former children in the process. They are still alive, because no matter how conniving, he upheld his part of the deal with Allison. What I’m saying is, this world is the first world where I could see Five going ‘this should all burn’, the ultimate act of defiance, rather ending the world than let Reginald have it.

But to do that, Five would need his powers, and Five doesn’t have his powers. What he does have is a reasonably good understanding of them, of the math behind them. This seems, to me, like a good set of circumstances for him to reverse-engineer his powers and put them, just as an example, into a briefcase, to use them to stop his father from taking over the world, even if it costs him said world.

He’s gotten his arm back, sure, but he is physically 13 and Founder Five died at a hundred years, there’s a good 87 years for Five to get his arm chopped off again. The only thing that could definitely tell us that Five made the right decision, did not save the world, is the absence of the tattoo, but we haven’t seen that, so the prospect of him actually having saved the world after all and still somehow founding the Commission is not completely discarded.

But by God, do I hope it is. I don’t have much interest in a potential S4 where we see Five pursue that because a) there’s this rule that every season only spans 10 days, and you can’t cram that kind of development into 10 days and b) it’s just. Five is such an interesting character to me. He is so fun and the performance is endlessly entertaining to me, and I don’t want to watch him become a bureaucrat. It’s literally the least interesting thing I can imagine him doing, and comic!Five got into the stock market. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see him reverse-engineer his powers, but not if it leads down to him becoming a non-character.

If you made it this far, 5k in, I congratulate and thank you for keeping with my thoughts for this long. The TL;DR is that Five founding the Commission is not the worst idea ever, theoretically, but this show does not have the writing and continuity necessary to pull it off into an interesting twist. Founder Five was not a character, he mostly felt like a plot device that was barely used to explore Five’s character, and even the plot devised for him was not particularly compelling or well-written and led more to confusion than anything else, exacerbated by the fact that the writing made Five say certain things and then do contradictory things with nothing in-between really indicating why he would have changed his mind. It is not particularly good at creating tension around his decisions and the pay-off, if it can even be called that, is more confusing than satisfactory with the weird decision-making Five has got going on in the season finale. There is the small but hopefully unfounded dread that this ‘Five founded the Commission’-storyline might extend into a potential S4, as the circumstances where the siblings left off at the end of S3 seem to me much more favourable to make Five found the Commission than anything else that came before, but I really, really hope I am wrong, because this show does not have the writing to make this kind of storyline as compelling as it deserves to be. If you want this storyline pulled off in a much better thought-out and satisfactory way, I can warmly recommend Netflix’s Dark (2017-2020).

[kitsunefyuu]

I was really disappointed with the fact that we never had a completely recovered AFO, like the most we had was the rewind, which to be honest doesn't count, since besides having had it like that for a short time, and it wasn't really a recovered body it was he's simply younger, his true form continues to be the potato, since his vestige is still like that, I wanted an AFO without having this time bomb that is Rewind (which honestly doesn't make sense, the AFO gets younger the more it gets hurt , Izuku prevented him from rejuvenating by getting hurt) I wanted that unstoppable and imposing threat that was AFO in his prime, someone can say we have Tomura for that, I'll be honest with you I think Tomura is a terrible villain, and he's a simple destroyer he doesn't convey the evil aura of the AFO, in addition to not supporting the Quirk 100%, after all, cracks on the body are a bad omen, anyway, sorry for the long question, I just needed to get this off my chest

Honestly, there a chance that Horikoshi just keeps progressively changing his ideas. As maybe he did originally plan for AFO to be fully recovered. But changed his mind to focus on Tomura as much as I enjoy the save the victim- It not being executed in the best way.

NOT helped that Tomura as you said definitely isn't super evil final boss energy. But also the fact that Izuku kind of doesn't have a lot to relate to Tomura on. Unless we go to delve into all the bullshit that Izuku endured which MEANS calling out hero society.

Which if does that would work best with AFO who claims society will never change and always be exploited. Regardless it feels like Horikoshi had a LOT of stuff he wants to do with AFO. Yet because of how he paced everything and TOO many characters he was held back as a supervillain.

And you're always welcome to vent! AFO had the credentials to be a great supervillain as a kind of antithesis to all of society. As well as showing what happens when a 'victim' to abuser/monster pipeline becomes so reviled and allowed to fester so long. To become the very monster of society to take advantage and create more monsters like Tomura. Or just anything.

Tomura isn't simply a destroyer but you're right he definitely does not scream evil. He seems like like a Antivillain, he hates society but he actually likes his friends. He enjoys being around them and wants to destroy society because it sucks. Like damn he sounds like a protagonist almost!

It why I imagined Tomura and Izuku teaming up to take out AFO. As a kind of way to connect but welp that on me for not accounting for Bakugou needing his 'big moment'. 🫡

[theygotlost]

What do you think of the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie?

My dad really likes it (I think I remember him saying he likes it more than the book) but I don’t care for it and it is a matter of debate for us

well i just finished rewatching it just now so here's all my thoughts fresh out of the oven!

I don't like it. it's bad and not good. at best it's just mediocre. I hateeeeee that they forced an arthur/trillian romance its so annoying and insufferable and NOTHING. ITS SO LAME. especially cause trillian also became a damsel in distress and I just had to roll my eyes back into my head.

ig the book didn't have enough content to adapt into a feature film so they added an entirely original midsection with that creepy guy named kamala harris or whatever his name was and the entire time i was just like uhhh wtf is happening and why are we here. as a result the ending feels pretty rushed to me.

there were a couple of new additions that I thought weren't half bad though. like the flyswatters on the vogon planet that slap you every time you think for yourself and marvin using the point of view gun to give the vogon army acute depression. those were pretty good.

and who the hell cast this movie? zooey deschanel as trillian sucked ass. I don't like her or her scary blue eyes or her lackadaisical #californiagurl performance. mos def is also a terrible actor and not a convincing ford at all. martin freeman at least has the appropriate depressed british white man vibes to be arthur but i hate looking at his face cause it just reminds me of sherlock.

zaphod is the one I have the most to say about. I actually do like sam rockwell's zaphod because he looks the part and is appropriately sleazy. and I liked his outfits and accessories (though imo there was too much black and I would have preferred more bright colors and patterns). I especially love his combo of nail polish and this little gold chain thingy on his hand. just a nice lil slutty detail.

I'm completely baffled by his choice of a southern american accent though, where'd that come from? is it supposed to be like a bill clinton hillbilly president type deal or something?

and of course there's the elephant in the room regarding his heads. oh christ almighty how I hate the way they handled his second head. I get that it would have been harder to pull off the normal 2 heads side by side in a convincing way for the entire movie (its 2005 and the cgi in this movie looks fake as shit), but good lord every time his second head popped up from below seriously made me want to retch. its sickening to look at and sickening to think about and it's just way more awkward than the more straightforward solution. I also think it's strange that the movie added an explanation that zaphod created the second head during his campaign to store all his uncharismatic traits??? why can't he just be an alien with 2 heads??? I ALSO seriously hate how the other head is all CRAZYYYYYY AND WEIRDDDD AND INSANEEE ASYLUMMMMMM it's not funny at all it's just really hard to watch.

all these issues are kind of surprising given that douglas adams is credited as an executive producer AND screenplay writer? which is also weird since the movie was released 4 years after his death? I have no idea what the production of this movie was like and I'm afraid to find out.

[silvertsundere]

Silver Talks AniManga (21/04/24)

I actually haven't watched BA yet cause there aren't any (good) subs out atm and it's prob gonna take a couple days so if I have something to say about this episode I will next week but anyway

green - new series/new to me blue - finale/completed

Anime

Jellyfish Can't Swim in the Night Ep 3

that was a really good ep, helps that I can relate to kiui a lot more than the other 3 too. tomita miyu did a great job as her and the direction was really good too. I saw the "twist" coming early in the episode and when they explained the story for the play I figured where it was going but it was still very well executed. now that the main cast has been assembled I'll be looking forward to what shenanigans they get up to

Kaiju 8 Ep2

also a good ep, think I liked it more than 1 despite a couple awkward bits that were better in the manga like the window opening. which speaking of opening the op sucks ass holy, I wasn't a fan of the ed in the previous ep but I was like "well it's just generic radio pop it's not that bad" but they really goofed it with the op huh. they're clearly desperate to make this a hit in the west considering how popular the manga is over here too but getting mainstream artists to do your op/ed isn't gonna help. I mean look at mashle, s2 was a lot more popular and even the manga sales got a huge boost cause of how much people liked the op. shoulda went with something catchier like that instead but whatever but anyway, I also really liked the shinomiya scenes, she's one of my favourites so it was fun seeing her in action. looking forward to her getting more scenes next ep and showing off

Wonderful Precure! Ep12

one of the best eps so far, to me, we even got some sakuga crumbs. from when the designs originally leaked yuki had my favourite design by far and her being a cat girl was good too. she's also the only one so far to commit violence which is exactly what I was hoping for. she'll probably stop it in the future cause of the other cures but I'll cherish it while I can. it's kinda weird that they made her blonde in the human form but I guess it's so the transformed and human form don't have the same hair colour. I love her voice tho, not really seen her in any roles except hoshi syoko from imas but that's a good one. she was also beryberie in the previous precure season so it's a pretty big upgrade to go from a side chara to a main cure, good for her. but yeah, I figured from the start yuki/nyammy would be my favourite and seeing her in action now solidified that idea even more, I'll be looking forward to seeing more of her in the coming eps

Manga

Kyokuto Necromance Ch1

this new series is by naba fusai who did aliens area a couple years ago. gave that a 4 in the end but it wasn't a terrible manga by any means. this one felt a lot better tho, you can really tell the author leveled up a lot since the previous series ended, the art is a lot sharper and easy to read. the chapter itself was pretty similar to the aliens area one but more engaging. they did a good job setting up the basic premise and giving a decent understanding how stuff works anyway, the powers system is similar to stands so that's cool, it's fun to see other people's take on araki's baby. we're gonna have to see with the next few chaps but just from chap 1 I think this could survive for a good while

Shadow Eliminators Ch19 (Finale)

Despite the 3 score I don't got much to say about this. Unlike something like ichigoki or ichinose fam which were REALLY bad so I had a lot to talk about, or something like aliens area or super smartphone which weren't completely terrible cause they had some neat ideas, I basically have nothing to say about this. The art and designs are REALLY good as easily the best part about this manga but everything else about it was pretty generic and forgettable. I would give this author another chance but they would have to spend a lot of time cooking to come up with something more compelling than this. They would probably be better off and teaming up with someone else and letting them do the story while they do the art cause, again, that was really really good and significantly better than the average series we get better luck next time mr kento, may you avoid the U19 club

Astro Royale Ch2

hey that was a pretty good chap too, it felt a lot like an early OP chap which is cool, I said on ch1 that we'd have to see with the next few chaps how this would go but if it continues having the same energy from these 2 chaps I could totally see this being the next long runner in the magazine. ofc it could go south in the next handful of chaps but it's a veteran author so I have some trust it won't

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball GT 43

✨GT Stands for Garish Travesty✨

✨”Good” “Ideas”, Poorly Executed✨

So the “idea” here was to have Goku fight Frieza and Cell in Hell.  We already saw this in DBZ 195, and it didn’t even go down, because Pikkon swooped in and took out both of these guys and King Cold before Goku could get to them.

But still, this could be a good time.  The plot here is that all the classic villains have returned to invade Earth, and Goku’s trapped in Hell with Frieza and Cell, so this seems like a decent set up for some great action.  You’ve got plenty of star power, and even if Goku has these two outmatched, it’s a two-on-one deal, so maybe it can still work out. 

Except for one thing.  This is Dragon Ball GT, and for some reason they decided that this episode should look like absolute dogshit. 

Frieza kind of looks all right... I guess?  He looks pretty crappy, but he seems more or less recognizable.

But Cell looks like some shitty new character wearing a Cell costume.  His eyes are too big, and he just looks wrong in every shot. 

This is just a really unpleasant episode to watch.  I knew this was coming, and I thought I was prepared for it, but man, it’s just ugly.  There are some off-model characters in episodes of DB and DBZ, but somehow this one just sinks to a completely different level. 

It’s something about the eyes, I think.  I can’t quite put my finger on it, but everyone looks really wrong.  And unfortunately, there’s a lot of close up shots of the characters, all looking like misshapen bootleg action figures.

This is so bad.  I’m not even kidding a little.  If the episode had a better plot or script, I could forgive the bad animation, but no.  It sucks in every possible way. 

This was my introduction to Dragon Ball GT, by the way.  In 2004, I bought a strategy guide for one of the games, Budokai 2, and it came with a DVD of this episode.  The idea was to promote GT, which would be airing on Cartoon Network later that year.  I assume they picked Episode 43 because of all the star power.  In addition to the main cast, you also have Cell, Frieza, Nappa, 17, and Dr. Gero.  It’s like a damn reunion.  Except the episode sucks ass.  Everyone looks terrible, and even thought there’s a lot of fighting going on, all of it is pathetic. 

All right, let’s dive in to this turkey.

In brief: Goku’s fight with Cell and Frieza sucks because none of them take the fight seriously.  All I wanted was for Goku to blow the bad guys mind with some Super Saiyan 4 action, but instead he refuses to transform at all.  He still does an overblown power-up any way, but he doesn’t transform.  Goku still styles all over these two, and they can’t even touch him.  When Frieza tries a ki disc, Goku rides it like a surfboard.  Then he grabs a needle spike from the scenery and weilds it like his nyo’ibo.  So he’s just recreating his classic look from the old days.  That’s how seriously Goku is taking this.  Cell fires a Kamehameha at Goku, and he just knocks it back at him with his stick.  Cell gets blown up by his own attack, and the ki disc slices Frieza in half. 

But that doesn’t matter, because Cell and Frieza are already dead, so they just come back and keep fighting.  We don’t see them regenerate or anything, because the animators are lazy, as well as bad.  Cell manages to sucker Goku in and... catches him with his tail? 

Yeah, so he tries to absorb Goku and assimilate his power, the way he absorbed 17 and 18 to achieve his perfect form.  But... that’s not how Cell works.  For a moment, it seems like Cell has actually increased his power this way, but then Goku just forces himself back out of his tail, and escapes.  This is stupid.

So Frieza and Cell use a new technique to turn the tables on Goku, the Hell Buster.  This traps Goku in a ki structure, which they then launch down into the lower depths of hell.  So they’re not really defeating Goku so much as relocating him to some place else where the environment will finish him off.

Then this old lady subjects Goku to four different torments on the “Hell Pilgrimage”: She cooks Goku in a giant stew pot, then subjects him to tickle torture, then a sauna, then she freezes him with a big machine.

Frieza promises that they’ll come down there to finish him off.  So if they could do that Hell Buster move from the start, why did they even bother attacking him with anything else?

Meanwhile, the Earth is being besieged by all the other villains, like... uh... the Saibamen!  Remember them?  Well they’re back!  Yeah, who else have we got?

More Saibamen!  Wow, look at them go.  This is pretty bad news for the Earth.  It’s too bad Goku isn’t here to put a stop to this.  But it’s not just Saibamen plaguing the world.  No, there’s also...

... Saibamen.  I don’t remember there being this many of them before.  Did they have an orgy or something to make more? 

Goten and Trunks just sort of watch all this with a mixture of disgust and fear.  Uub literally flies over and asks them to step in and help.  I have no idea why this is happening.  The Saibamen aren’t even that tough.  Uub just flies through the streets, taking them out with one hit apiece, but Goten and Trunks seem reluctant to pitch in.  

Meanwhile, Pan and Mr. Satan are being chased by... General Rildo.  Can we go back to the Saibamen, please?  Gohan shows up to save them, and now we’ve got Rildo vs. Gohan, a dream match if there ever (yawn!) was one.

Okay, so this appearance by Rildo is the only confirmation we have that he died in Episode 23.  This episode makes zero effort to reintroduce the character.  He doesn’t even get any lines!   Shouldn’t Rildo be using his final form in this thing?  Is he helping the bad guys because of his loyalty to Dr. Mu?  Or is he actually loyal to Baby?  Shouldn’t he be asking where Baby is during all of this?  I mean, either he wants to keep working for Baby, or he should want to kick Baby’s ass because Baby killed Dr. Mu. 

Or, you would think he’d want to stay in Hell to fight Goku, since he’s supposed to be stronger than anyone else on the bad guy team, remember? Goku said his ki was “even greater than Buu’s”. 

Oh, and Nappa’s also here.  He blows up an entire city, which is the most any of these guys seem to have done since they invaded, but then Vegeta confronts him.  Strange that Vegeta waited until after the city got destroyed before stepping in, but whatever.  At least this promises to be an interesting scene.  Nappa’s no match for Vegeta, but they know each other well, and you could get some drama out of this encounter if....

Yeah, Vegeta one-shots him.  Never mind.

Then Gero and Mu show up and introduce Vegeta to their latest creation, “Hell Fighter 17.”  He bursts out of the rubble and there’s flames and everything, and Vegeta doesn’t seem too impressed.  Then they fight, and Vegeta doesn’t bother turning Super Saiyan.  He can’t hit Hell Fighter 17, but since he won’t transform, it makes it seem like he’s not even trying. 

As they fight, Hell Fighter 17 telepathically contacts his counterpart, the original 17, and asks him what’s taking him so long.  Remember, the plan was for both 17′s to link up and fuse into a single, invincible warrior.  Apparently Hell Fighter 17 is having some trouble with Vegeta, so he’s anxious to get that boost in power.  Well why did they go picking a fight with Vegeta, then?  They could have waited for both 17′s to combine, and then gone after him.

Instead, Original 17 tracks down his sister, Android 18, and invites her to join them.  We’ve yet to establish how Gero and Mu are controlling the original 17, but presumably they’re using Hell Fighter 17 to do it, and now Original 17 is using the same trick to influence 18.  Except Gero’s team never told him to do this, so I have to assume this wasn’t part of the plan.

Let me add some context here.  Nobody has seen 17 in years.  It was assumed that he got resurrected at the end of the Cell Games, but they never actually showed 17-- dead or alive-- until the very end of the Kid Buu fight, when he makes a cameo appearance to send energy to Goku’s Spirit Bomb.  This episode is set sixteen years after that battle, and no one ever says anything about keeping in touch with the guy. 

In fact, in the previous episode, it’s strongly implied that Trunks had never met 17 before the ambush.  He sensed 17′s ki, noticed it was similar to 18′s, and figured it out that way.  Which is bullshit, by the way.  17 and 18 don’t have ki signatures for Trunks to sense. 

So when 17 confronts 18 (and Krillin and Marron), it’s the first time they’ve been on screen together since 17 got  absorbed by Cell.  That was 23 years ago.  It’s never established whether they’ve been in contact during that time, or if this is their first meeting since 17 was wished back to life.   This is a stupid way to reintroduce a character.

I think the idea with this arc was to focus on 17, because he was the one villain who never got killed or rehabilitated.  We never found out what happened to him, and this arc would finally address his final fate.  But it turned out to be a colossal shitshow, in part because 17 is mind-controlled the entire time, so we never find out what he wants, or what he’s been up to all these years.  Instead, we just get two versions of him, and one of them hypnotizes 18 for no obvious reason, and the other one fights Vegeta in a weak, watered-down brawl.   If anyone liked 17 enough to be excited about this arc, Episode 43 has made sure to punish them for their enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, Goten, Trunks, and Uub are still zapping Saibamen, literally repeating shots of them zapping Saibamen earlier in the episode.   And Gohan is still fighting General Rildo, and not much is happening there.

And Goku’s frozen.  Good times.

✨Positivity Page✨

Perhaps the one decent shot in this episode is this one where Vegeta watches Hell Fighter 17 surrounded by flames.  He doesn’t look much like Vegeta, but at least he looks very handsome and cool.  It’s like he bribed the animation director to make him look good for one shot. 

✨Is this episode worse than “The Roaming Lake”?✨

Hell damn yes it’s worse than “The Roaming Lake”.  That episode was really pleasant to look at.  Not like this garbage dump. 

The only real question is whether Episode 43 is the worst episode of GT.  That’s a tough call, because it has to compete with the Para Bros. and Doltaki.  But Episode 43 definitely has a safe spot in the Bottom Five. 

✨The Blade Braxton Memorial Haiku*✨

Hells Pilgrimage stop

Number 5: Hell of watching

GT 43.

[julianobungus]

i know this is random but this has been floating on my mind so here you go

simon laurent: a extremely misguided and truamatized teen boy/young adult with a warped sense of reality he needs serious help and a acually a supportive environment to unlearn his terrible views.

half of the it fandom: haha irredeemable violent bigot.

oh god i am sometimes happy that that infinity train fandom kind of died out i mean i am still upset that the show is cancelled but the fandom kind of sucked espacially their takes of simon was really terrible and complately throwing his complexity out of the window to make him the irredeemable villian they want him to be.

THANK YOU

Now listen, I get that it's easy to hate/dislike an antagonistic character, but I'm quite annoyed by the IT fandom for not being able to withhold from blasting Simon at every opportunity they got. Even under fanarts of Simon you'd find the odd comment about how 'bad' he was.

I like the idea that Simon was an antagonist, but I didn't like the execution - he's a victim of tragic circumstance, so I wish they show had done a better job to show that. They sorta did, but they still made him look irredeemable - which he wasn't, really. He was a kid who was abducted and forced to survive in an environment that was actively dangerous for human life.

I just find it sceevy that the fandom gives Amelia a free pass, but not the younger, immature, inexperienced Simon? Amelia has no excuse for what she did, and arguably did worse than Simon. Granted, I like Amelia's character and what they did with her - showing what grief can do to people who can't move on - but she looks even worse when compared to Simon, who didn't really have a choice.

I hate it, man.

[desertedhero]

An analytical look at the story for HDtF

Heads up: I’ll be discussing spoilers for Hunt Down the Freeman as well as some minor details from HL2 and HLA. Also, these are all just my own thoughts based on my experiences as a storyteller and player, so it's okay if you disagree with any of it.

Criticisms aside...I love this game. HDtF has delightful concepts at its core. Why, then, is it regarded as a terrible game? Are my standards simply that low to enjoy a bad story? That's up to interpretation. Instead of focusing on fixing the story, I'm focusing on why it feels like it needs fixing in the first place. This won't be about how I'd want the story to be, or what the creators may have intended. It’s about the story as it exists.

There’s a lot to say about gameplay, sound design, and everything else. That's also for another post, because this one is about story development and writing.

I want to talk about this because a lot of my own ideas use basic storytelling concepts about character and theme as a foundation. So, I’m laying that down to build from later. I hope anyone looking to write those fun fix-it fics and story rewrites gets some ideas from this. If you wonder why the plot might’ve disappointed you and you enjoy story analysis, artist or not, this is for you.

Whether the game sucks or not, it has a fun premise. The execution is where it gets messy. It’s because HDtF is plot-driven, rather than character-driven. Let's start with what that means and why it's important.

When I refer to something as plot-driven, I mean that characters follow beats rather than create them. They become passive by acting in whatever way the writer needs them to so they hit each plot point. In character-driven stories, they act on their own instead of how the writer needs them to. When characters don't act according to a core set of beliefs, they can feel inconsistent. They’re full of conflicting ideas.

A story might favor plot over character development if the creators think the plot is that cool. I can't speak for the HDtF creators, but it wouldn't surprise me if that was the case for them because their plot is cool. The premise is incredible!! Hunting down Gordon Freeman and playing an antagonistic character? Man, sign me up. It all just..fell flat. Why? One reason is because Mitchell, as a protagonist, is passive for most of the story. The plot requires him to be a vessel for it to occur. If he were an active protagonist, the story would look different even if the ending remained the same. If you feel like Mitchell isn't that relatable, or his behavior doesn't make sense, that's okay. His role in the story is to follow the plot regardless of his own personality, motives, and goals.

What are Mitchell’s goals? According to what we see at the start of the game, he's looking for vengeance on the guy who fucked up his face. Cool! That's a setup for a revenge story, and those can be a lot of fun. When the opportunity arrives in act three, thou, Mitchell is resistant. Why doesn't he want to kill Freeman, when at the beginning it's established that he's sworn to get his revenge? Mitchell does specify that he sees the power, authority, and time he’s been granted as a curse. He doesn’t want part of that. Despite this apparent change of heart, he surrenders to Gman without too much of a fight. The plot demands he hunt down Freeman, after all.

It’s possible the scenes with Captain Roosevelt are meant to alert players to this change. It’s fresh in our minds that he made a deal with the devil and soon Gman will come for him. When he does, Mitchell says “I just want it to end. Freeman can go to hell.” He sees the power, authority, and time he’s been given as a curse. His original desire, a whim, has become a burden. He's now being manipulated into doing something he doesn't want. But something about the build up to this scene still makes it feels like there’s an inconsistency. Do you agree? Throu act two, did we learn enough about Mitchell’s dilemma to make sense of his response to Gman?

Inconsistencies are also referred to as plot holes or continuity errors. These make up a majority of the problems in this story. You’ve surely already identified a lot of them if you’ve played the game or watched a playthrou. (Another example is Mitchell knowing what the Borealis is.) There's a few ways to resolve inconsistencies. The method I use to generate ideas is super simple. Just keep asking questions. Keep asking "why?" Here's a quick example of what it looks like for me:

Why does Mitchell want revenge on Freeman? Well, he believes it's Freeman who not only beat the shit out of him, but also killed his squad.

Why does it matter if he killed his squad? His military training might have taught him the value of teamwork and fellowship. Maybe he has friends in his squad. Or it's that he's alone now, and being alone means facing himself and his past. (This could make him emotionally dependent upon Nick and Adam later on…)

What would make him change his mind about revenge? Like he tells Gman, the life he's been given is cursed. It could also be that after 20 years it seems that Freeman's vanished off the face of the earth, so Mitchell might feel resigned to never finding him. Or, he started healing and doesn't feel the desire for revenge anymore. Or, he has too much to lose if he started hunting Freeman. It'd be a suicide mission that risks everything he's accomplished–even if he's questioning how much his life is worth. (He found something he cares about more than revenge and so he must choose between the two goals…)

These are just starting points. You could answer the same questions differently, then continue through train of thought. In general, I find asking questions and answering them a few layers deep is effective. Conducting a Q&A helps find what works and what doesn't, or what's interesting and what's not. Ask questions even if they seem obvious or silly.

Storytelling principles like cause-and-effect and Chekhov’s gun remind us that everything matters. One thing causes another. Things shown to the audience must have a payoff later. However, there is at least one big thing that might not meet these principles. The first sequence of the game is a montage of key moments in Mitchell's life. It's how we're intended to connect with him. Is there any point in the game that he references any of these events? If you can't think of anything, don't worry–I can't either. As it stands the backstory montage does nothing to let us know who Mitchell is as a person. Logically, it should, and it does tell us about him. It's an issue because it doesn't seem like these experiences are motivating his actions. The montage could be cut from the game and it wouldn't impact our understanding of who Mitchell is based on what he does any time after it.

How could it become important, then? Well, Mitchell is the brother of Adrian Shephard, and they're shown in the montage. The game brings Adrian in for a cameo at the end, but they're never referenced in any other way. Hell, no one even refers to Mitchell as Shephard, which would make sense to do. The most obvious answer is to make Adrian mean something to Mitchell. Whatever your interpretation of the montage is, ask how it affected Mitchell. What happened, and how did that shape who he is at the start of the game? Whether or not Adrian shows up in the story, there ought to be an emotional relevance on Mitchell's end. He could mention that he understands what it's like having a sibling. Maybe he relates to someone else because of his experiences as a soldier. Any relevant subtext acknowledging that those key backstory moments matter to him would make him more relatable. That would confirm that those moments should matter to us as the players. Everything serves a purpose.

Another concept the plot brings up that has no payoff is the Cremators (I believe that’s what Boris calls the entities that are tended to in the factory). It's another violation of the idea that everything in a story is meant to set something up to or resolve a setup. If the Cremators meant anything, they would have been brought back to perhaps make good on their purpose that Boris claims is to kill humans that the Combine view as trash. Instead the importance of the factory is introducing Boris and giving Mitchell the opportunity to rescue the kids. Mitchell sees this in a negative light, that he's only using them for his own benefit. If this is the only thing the factory scene was meant to accomplish, why do we even know about the Cremators? 

Like Mitchell, other characters also suffer from being puppets of the plot. Adam and Nick serve a purpose of delivering Mitchell to where he needs to be. Adam can even be interpreted as a scapegoat for the writers to get out of actually having Mitchell kill Freeman. I personally don't, but I could see an argument made for it. Meanwhile, Nick is introduced to give exposition, get Mitchell going on his first mission, and to bail him out at the end so he can accomplish his goal of revenge. I’ll discuss that last point more when we get to theme.

I've heard professional writers say that every character in a story needs a reason to be there. I like that idea a lot! The plot needs Adam, Nick, and the others to support Mitchell. A character-driven approach, thou, would ask why they need to be part of the plot. How do they benefit from being part of the story? For example, why does Nick help Mitchell out in the hospital? Why does Adam negotiate to join him? We learn in game that he’s also looking to get out of the city and that he knows something no one else seems to know about the Combine, but that’s the extent of our knowledge. (I’m still curious why exactly he didn’t follow up on his plan to go separate ways once they left the city. That’s an inconsistency created by the plot’s need to have him stick around for the end.) Support characters either help or hinder Mitchell along the way. They all have a reason to collide with his goals. Or, they should.

In some cases, support characters may only exist for one sequence, like say Boston Joe. Boston Joe should be important to Mitchell regardless of how long he’s on screen. Right? Theoretically, his contribution pushes Mitchell forward or changes him somehow. (What was the significance of the powerplant sequence, actually? I’ve watched three different playthrous and none of them have a conclusion to that subplot. Why was it important for Mitchell to do that? I’m assuming there's a missing sequence or cutscene that transitions us to the docks. If this is the case, that’s another inconsistency, another source of confusion or frustration. It’s a missed opportunity to tell us something about Mitchell depending on how it's resolved. It would, ideally, give us insight to how he's changing as a result of his experiences. He sees himself as a bad guy in act three, so the conclusion to the powerplant might be a step towards informing that mindset. Anyway...)

If you compare how engaged support characters are with Mitchell to how engaged they are with Gordon in HL2–or with Alyx in HLA–there’s a big difference. What did those games do right that HDtF did not?

In HL2 and HLA, other characters support the main plot while having their own goals. Alyx has her own agenda throughout the games because she has other priorities. She has a life outside being a companion for Gordon. She’s also given time to express what those goals are and pursue them. We know her goals involve saving Eli, and this runs alongside Gordon’s goals. This makes her feel more like a real person, right? In HLA we have Russell with his own thoughts and ideas. The Vortigaunt cut off from the Vortessence stood out to me, too. They had personality and a goal that clashed with Alyx’s. That goal connected to hers later on despite not seeming relevant to her at first. On the other hand, we don’t know what Nick wants, outside of helping Mitchell. We don’t know why Adam sticks around, after he initially planned to go separate ways when they left Albuquerque. We don't know what Adam's deal with Gman was about. They don’t have a life outside the main plot.

If you feel frustrated that we have these cool characters that we don't get to learn about, that’s understandable. One of the great delights of HL2 and HLA is interacting with the support characters, and HDtF doesn’t allow us to do that.

I will say thou, the way that Boris and Sasha connect to the story is interesting. This says nothing about the quality of the subplot, but Mitchell meeting Boris in act two did matter later on. The deaths of the support characters in act one also matter. Why? Gman promised Mitchell power and authority, so any events that lead to him obtaining those things fulfill that promise. Mitchell even expresses some disdain that they died for him like that. Support characters should always matter to a protagonist in some way, and most of them do matter to Mitchell’s journey.

The next big idea I want to delve into is about theme. Let’s transition from how characters and plot interact to what messages those interactions deliver.

Mitchell serves as a vessel for the plot and is passive, but there is one moment where he makes a choice for himself. When he refuses to die to the Combine, and in doing so gives Gman the biggest "fuck you," what he's doing is actively participating in creating story. This was the most compelling moment for me. It felt like Mitchell, at last, chose to do something the plot didn't force him to. Makes me wonder what consequences could have occurred if he made different decisions. Even if he ends up in the same situation at the end, how could the journey be more engaging?

HDtF establishes a premise for a revenge story, but thematically it appears to be more than that. Which is fine because many stories do explore more than one theme! It also reads as a story about someone who's manipulated into abandoning their own goals and self destructing. What message does it leave us with, then? When Adam is revealed to be a traitor and Mitchell responds to this betrayal, what is that meant to tell us?

Mitchell killing Adam is a cathartic scene (for me, anyway) because a promise has been fulfilled. He achieved the goal he set out for at the beginning. There's more happening in the story that leaves ambiguity about how we're meant to feel about it, thou. How are we meant to take it when Mitchell kills the man he's been on a ship with for 20 years in a moment of reckless rage? The fact is we don’t have any details about Adam to let us understand his own goals and motives, other than he had a deal with Gman. That deal implies he had no choice, much like how it was for both Mitchell and Boris. Is that enough of an explanation?

Typically, revenge stories make it clear who we're supposed to hate and who to support. We know the antagonist's death is justified because we usually see a) what they did and b) why they did it. The reasoning plays into why we’re meant to root for the protagonist instead of the antagonist, right? In some cases they might want the same thing but one is willing to cross lines the other won’t. We even see hints of this in the first time Mitchell and Adam meet. They have similar yet differing ideas about loyalty. HDtF, however, does not give us the full picture by the end. It doesn't tell us if Mitchell is justified or if Adam deserved to be killed based on both what he did and why he did it. It's completely up to interpretation.

Why is it important that there's no clear message? Is it not enough to hand players these ideas and end it by asking “hey how fucked up was that, right?” Based on general responses from players that I've seen so far, what makes this story laughable is likely because it feels like it takes itself seriously without having anything serious to say. It doesn’t carry an emotional truth but acts like it does. Whatever the creators wanted to say seems to have gotten lost somewhere along the way, because clearly at least most of us missed the message.

HDtF has fun and thought provoking concepts, but they haven’t been explored enough to create a story as compelling as the creators likely envisioned. Each character has the potential to be incredible. There is a lot of flexibility in the themes that the story presents. We're given many concepts in an almost frustratingly open-ended way, but the ambiguity leaves room for different yet equally interesting interpretations. Is it a story about getting justified revenge? Maybe it’s unjustified and becomes a tragedy. Is it about escaping the cycle of abuse? Exploring the similarities between heroes and villains? Perhaps it’s about forgiveness and the consequences of betrayal?

The story of Hunt Down the Freeman might look like a first draft, but the opportunities for interpretation and engagement are endless. It’s a fantastic sort of mystery story! There’s even more to say about the writing in terms of plot, pacing, dialogue and character voice, use of exposition..but I’m leaving it here. I hope this sparks some new thoughts! And if you love the story like I do, maybe even some creative connections. Or, maybe you hate the story and this validates your reasoning for it, and that’d be okay, too.

(Thank you so much for reading this far, hot damn!! I had so much fun writing it and it gave me a lot I want to expand upon later.)

[girlbob-boypants]

1-21-25 for uh Guild Wars? or whatever you want

You know what yeah let's be violent about my beloved game. Oh okay this was a lot more than I expected uh lets put that under the cut

1. The character everyone gets wrong

You think I'd say my precious baby boy BUT its Caithe. She's an incredibly interesting character who is denied the actual on screen depth and arcs she needs. It's an interesting case where the people who hate her are missing the points and the people who stan her talk like she's actually given an arc instead of simply plopped into the story with a "she's better now." The key example being the fact that she doesn't show up in s4 until THE END OF EPISODE FOUR??? That's hardly her fault cause for whatever reason THATS when she's allowed to actually give a fuck about the daughter she loves so much that the moment that daughter cared about the fact that WE WERE BEING MURDERED she ignored Aurene for fuck knows how long?? And then admitting that is enough for them to ignore the psychic connection Aurene canonically has with the Commander so they can just. Set Caithe to post therapy with no real story. The people who hate her act like she's personally the cause of every single problem in the game and that setting her on fire and replacing her with a man will fix everything. Meanwhile the people who stan her claim her story was sooooo good and 100% justified and didn't fuck with things or have problems. She's a brilliant concept that post HoT is executed in a parking lot. And while her parts in EoD are perfectly fine and logical it's just...ugh. She's barely there and exists purely to limit Aurene's screentime with the Commander. Which sucks cause I love both of them.

21. Part of canon you think is overhyped

All of EoD. I am going to pick at a certain part, actually. Rama as a character and especially the entire story with the cop father he has was TRASH. Not as in it's a bad idea but in that it's so terribly done. The lack of build up, the fact that it's the ONLY RATIONAL PERSON WITH A PROBLEM WITH JOON'S MONOPOLY OF TECH who turns out to be King Fascist, the way they just don't explore Li's whole being Kurzick like Rama (or at least I think that's what was being implied? It was literally just Rama saying his Secret Name in front of us and then not addressing it). It all goes nowhere and means very little beyond the strike mission. Like no we aren't going to explore this corruption of the cops, we aren't going to discuss why the society of Cantha would cultivate a minority joining a supremacist group, and we're ESPECIALLY not going to explore Rama's feelings about it for longer than a minute or two. Didn't you know his entire story is that he has a crush on a cop? Don't ask for depth, don't ask why the only people who have an issue with forest polluting tech monopolies are fascists and ecofascists, and don't ask us to give Rama lines that aren't mcu zingers. Take what you get and go make really fucking questionable jokes mocking his hat without expecting more of the expac that brutally murdered Icebrood Saga and gave us CHAMPIONS.

Not too fond, really.

Also the beast races but that's not really controversial to say it's just true. But I hate the Kodan, Grawl, and Centaurs especially. Whoever wrote their parts in s2 and s3 should be hit with a bat and robbed.

25. Common fandom complaint that you're sick of hearing

This one I'm actually having trouble with rn. The obvious answer is character hate and, no, I don't mean character criticism. I mean things like 'i hate Trahearne cause he sucks his voice is annoying and he's overhyped' and the many, many death wishes. This feels like a cop out but I barely scroll the tag anymore cause the game is in a weird space in my heart so I only really engage with it as I see fit for myself. Which is mostly nostalgia tinted thoughts about past seasons and expacs but hey. Better than being a rage filled ball of spite and bad faith readings like I've been in the past with things I've fallen out of love with.

I'd also say I got tired of the weird relationship gw2 has with strikes and raids both from newbies AND vets alike? This game kinda sucks at making the endgame accessible for everyone and I'm vividly aware of that but vets complain that it's stale while gatekeeping to the point of intimidation and newbies all sit and stare at the training LFG without doing anything like these groups are a match made in hell and if anet just learned how to make something like the ff14 duty finder it'd probably be a lot easier but that would require work and admitting that having some kind of role system would make class and party designs easier.

[inquisitor-apologist]

Star wars: 3, 5, 7, 10, 12 ♥️

3. which character are you actually most like?

Probably Sabine Wren—I’m a punk teenager who loves to die my hair, and I have a lot of combat experience. (7 years of karate) I love painting, and I’m trying to be more active in fighting against the empire I live in (usa). Perhaps one day I will be able to blow up fascists with homemade bombs…

5. what planet would you most like to visit? 

Considering I literally named myself after it, I kind of have to go with Korriban, don’t I? Cool, ancient planet full of giant statues, evil holocrons, and malevolent ghosts, what’s not to love? Honestly tlt it’d be worth it just to see the giant statues.

7. who do you hope you never meet?

Grogu. Little dude is exactly football-sized and I don’t think I could resist the urge to drop-kick him. I would feel terrible about it afterwards, but I don’t think I would be strong enough to stop myself.

10. do you think the jedi were right or wrong?

This one’s pretty obvious if you look at my blog, and, well, imo, if you look at the movies. The Jedi are, as presented by Lucas, unequivocally the good guys. The core dichotomy of Star Wars is the Dark side and the Light, (or, in the OT, the Dark side and the Force) compassion versus selfishness, and the Jedi were the compassionate guys, the ones who used the force to better themselves and help others. Their philosophy on non attachment is heavily based on Buddhism—George Lucas actually converted to Buddhism and described himself as a Methodist-Buddhist—so I think it’s fair to say that it was intended to be a positive, healthy way to live. (Please, Star Wars fandom, I am begging you to look up what attachment means in Star Wars, it’s different than what attachment means to USAmericans) Also, the ‘no romantic relationships’ thing makes a lot of sense when you realize the Jedi are monks first and foremost, and monks that have super dangerous government jobs. I know it’s annoying for shipping, but it does make sense with the worldbuilding.

The tragedy of the prequels was that Anakin, in his selfishness and greed, betrayed the Jedi and allowed the rise of the Empire. That doesn’t work if the Jedi are the bad guys, then it’s a completely different story. So, yeah, the Jedi were absolutely right.

12. do you care who rey’s parents are?

Ok, so since this ask game was posted when the sequels were still coming out and my opinion has changed a lot since 2019, I’ll answer this two different ways: how I felt then, and how I feel now.

When the sequels were coming out: No. I was pretty young back then, and not fully into Star Wars yet, and I basically took what the movies said at face value. Oh, they abandoned her? That’s sad, guess we won’t see them. Oh, they were junk traders that sold her? That sucks, I bet Rey feels really bad about that. Oh, she’s a Palpatine? That’s cool, I wasn’t expecting that. I watched a lot of those theory videos talking about how she could totally be a Skywalker or a Kenobi or a Solo, but I never really had a strong opinion on it. My reaction to her being Palpatine’s granddaughter was mostly ‘huh, how would that work? I don’t think he had a wife?’ I get now that it was a big question that everyone wanted the answer to, but I was too young to care.

Now: Yeah, actually, and I really like the idea of her being a Palpatine. I think it was a really good idea, and had they actually planned the story around it, it would’ve worked really well. Like, if she was established as a Palpatine in tfa, it would’ve added a lot to her character. Why is she so desperate to stay on Jakku? Because she’s hiding from the First Order. It would have also explained Snoke and Kylo Ren’s interest in her—as Palpatine’s heir, they would’ve really wanted to get her on their side. I really like the idea of her being a Palpatine, but the execution was so awful, just like most of the sequels.

Thanks for the ask! These were really fun to do

[animebw]

Short Reflection: Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water

I have not watched much old anime. It’s an oversight I know I need to correct; there’s plenty of great stuff to be found in anime’s long history, and I’d be doing myself a disservice if my only experience with this medium’s past came in the form of Miyazaki movies (as fantastic as those movies may be). But I tend to drag my heels on it because, well, me and old anime don’t always get along. As many excellent shows and movies as I’ve seen in the years before the new millennium, a lot of stuff from back then has just not aged well. At least not for me. Maybe it’s a disconnect with the visual and thematic aesthetics of the time compared to how modern anime looks and feels. Maybe it’s the difference of growing up in a post-Evangelion world and finding it hard to return to anime that were made before that franchise’s overwhelming influence. Or maybe some of this stuff just straight-up sucked and we were too young or inexperienced with the medium to realize. I want to like old anime, and I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff I’ll love that I just haven’t found yet, but a lot of the time, engaging with anime’s history means running into barriers that I’m not always able to overcome. And sadly, that’s exactly what happened with Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water.

If nothing else, the circumstances of Nadia’s creation are fascinating enough to engage with on their own. Originally a pitch from Hayao Miyazaki himself, it was eventually picked up to be directed by Hideaki Anno, a man who’s creative sensibilities couldn’t be farther from Miyazaki’s if he tried. The show’s tumultuous production was so destructive to Anno’s mental health that he stayed away from directing another project for years. And when he finally returned to the director’s chair, he channeled those mental health struggles into his new project, resulting in the absolute game-changer that was Neon Genesis Evangelion. So in a weird way, Nadia and its creation is responsible for the shape of the modern anime landscape. Anime as we know it wouldn’t exist without Evangelion, and Evangelion wouldn’t exist without the executives at Gainax forcing Nadia’s creators to shoehorn in an entirely new story arc mid-production because the ratings were so good. So, uh, I guess the legendarily terrible Island Arc wasn’t a total waste after all? I dunno, silver linings and all that.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The premise is, fittingly enough, classic Miyazaki, by which I mean it’s basically just Castle in the Sky again. You’ve got a mysterious girl with a magical pendant who teams up with an ordinary boy to find a lost civilization the pendant is important to, that civilization is a metaphor for the sin of hubris and the need for humans to live in harmony with nature instead of trying to subdue it, the bad guys are a fascist-coded cult seeking to monopolize the old civilization’s power for themselves and rule the world, and there’s a secondary bad guy team of bumbling Team Rocket-esque criminals who eventually end of on the side of the good guys (The Grandis Gang is the best part of this show and I appreciated every moment they were on screen). There are some differences, of course- the setting is the late 19th century instead of a post-apocalyptic pastoral paradise, the ancient civilization is buried under the waves instead of hidden above the clouds- but the broad strokes are basically identical. But hey, Miyazaki’s never been shy about recycling ideas before, and if the execution of these ideas here had been as great as Laputa, that’s what really matters.

Except, of course, this isn’t a Miyazaki show. It’s a Hideaki Anno show. And the clash between the very Miyazaki premise and the very Anno execution of that premise is easily the biggest reason to watch Nadia. It’s fascinating watching this all-ages fantasy adventure take sudden turns into death and darkness. It’s fascinating watching Miyazaki’s trademark whimsy and lush portrait of reality filtered through Anno’s fascination with jagged edges and even more jagged characters. Violence is intense and shocking. Body horror, though rare, is genuinely gruesome. The depictions of ancient cultures are steeped in cryptidian menace and existential mystique. Nadia herself is a far more jaded protagonist than Miyazaki’s ever written, a girl who pushes the world away out of fear it’ll just hurt her to engage with other people again. There’s even a lot of the experimental direction that would come to define Evangelion’s final stretch of accidental art-house brilliance. It never stops being a whimsical adventure first and foremost, but Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water is far more willing to engage with the darker, edgier side of its adventure than Castle in the Sky ever did. If you enjoy tracking the careers and styles of specific artists, this show will be like catnip to you.

Unfortunately, I can’t just enjoy Nadia on the basis of its eclectic blend of storytelling sensibilities. I have to judge it as a show. And even putting aside the infamous Island Arc (Don’t worry, we’ll get to that mess in a moment), this is a deeply flawed product of its time. And sadly, Nadia herself is one of its biggest issues. Or rather, the issue is in how she’s treated. Despite her name being in the title, Nadia barely gets to do anything besides mope, get captured, get rescued, and be ferried along by plot forces that tell her she’s The Most Important Thing(tm) ever. It’s the same problem last year’s Fena: Pirate Princess had, where the protagonist is supposedly the most special amazing important person ever, but it all manifests as the plot pushing her around rather than her getting to take charge of her own story. Now, Nadia’s emotional growth as a person is central to the show, so it’s not like it completely ignores her. Her journey of learning to accept other people and let go of her past feeds directly into the show’s thesis on humanity, and how we all need to support each other as one people instead of isolating ourselves through arrogance or fear. But it would still be nice if she actually got to do something on that journey instead of the plot mostly unfolding without her influence.

And sadly, that’s far from the only way this show lets its female characters down. There’s the expected fanservice, of course, all of it very groan-worthy whether it’s “accidental” pervert moments or the men just straight up leering at the girls around them. But what’s even worse is... okay, look, remember back in Gunbuster how that one girl fell in love with her much older coach out of nowhere? Remember how gross and completely nonsensical it was? Yeah, I’m starting to think Anno had a bit of an Electra complex in his early days as a creator. Quite literally in this case, because Electra is literally the name of one of the characters in this show, and her big emotional breakdown comes from being in love the man who basically raised her as an adoptive father, only to succumb to jealousy when she thought his biological daughter was stealing his attention. No, I am not making this up. This is literally in-universe how Electra describes her feelings. And then they eventually have a kid together! Yes, really! And believe it or not, that’s not even the only time this show pulls an Usagi Drop on you! Christ almighty, at least when Evangelion went full Freudian psychosexual drama with Misato and Ritsuko, it was fucked up on purpose.

As for the Island Arc... yeah, it’s exactly as horrendous as you’ve heard. It’s a pointless diversion that only exists to kill time because the studio ordered more episodes, all the characters are Flanderized to their most annoying selves, the story’s tone takes a bizarre diversion into Looney Tunes territory, the animation takes a serious nosedive because there wasn’t enough time to make the episodes on such short notice (on the bright side, the majority of Nadia does still hold up and look great), and it basically butchers everything this show had going for it. For all my issues with The Secret of Blue Water, I can at least respect its sense of adventure and commitment to its complex themes. But the Island Arc isn’t just bad on its own, it feels like a deliberate insult to the show it’s supposedly a part of. In particular, it shits all over Nadia with some of the worst character assassination I think I’ve ever seen, and it turns her romance with co-protagonist inventor boy Jean into an absolutely agonizing slog of pointless conflict and convenient progress-backtracking that makes Zero no Tsukaima look like Kaguya-sama. Whoever was responsible for how this arc turned out, it feels like they just hated Nadia, and they used their time in charge as an excuse to play out their weird misogynistic fantasies of putting her in her place. It’s honestly more degrading than any of the fanservice moments.

And since there’s actually some big important plot developments in the middle of the Island Arc, you can’t just skip it like your average Naruto or Bleach filler arc. You either have to track down a fan edit of this arc that cuts out all but the most important bits, suffer through it in its entirety, or just skip all but the most relevant episodes and be content missing the connective tissue that would otherwise tell you how certain characters got to where they are. It’s a no-win scenario no matter how you slice it. I could honestly spend an entirely separate review just breaking down all the ways the Island Arc sucks, that’s how bad it gets. But at that point I wouldn’t really be reviewing Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water anymore. If there’s one consolation, it’s that outside that handful of important plot beats, everything in this arc matters so little that its terribleness doesn’t impact the rest of the show. You might as well be watching an entirely different show with entirely different priorities, and when things finally get back on track for the final five episodes, you can slip right back into Nadia Proper as if nothing ever happened, the characters still untainted by whatever madness took hold of them for the past twelve episodes. Not that it really dulls the pain of having to sit through them in the first place, but still. Again: silver linings.

I realize I’ve been negative for a lot of this review, and I wish that weren’t the case. Because there were things I really liked about Nadia! I liked the overall animation and art design! I liked its willingness to engage with death as a thematic concept and give it some real gravitas! I liked the Grandis Gang’s antics! I liked how weird and out-there it was willing to get with its pulp sci-fi! I even really liked the English dub! Yeah, it took some getting used to, and Jean’s voice actor really shouldn’t have been forced to do that terrible French accent, but it’s got so much charm! It’s not hard to see why this show became a classic; even despite its obvious inspirations, it’s got so much originality, so much passion. It’s the kind of singular work that you just know nothing else will ever quite duplicate again, and I respect it for that. But time has not been kind to Nadia. Watching this show over three decades later, its warts have only grown more cancerous, its flaws more unavoidable, its missteps less forgivable. There’s plenty of good to be found in here, but on the whole, too much of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water feels like it’s better off being left in the past. And in the end, I’m forced to give it a score of:

4.5/10

God, I’m really sad about this. I wanted to like Nadia so much, but I just couldn’t get past some of those issues. Hopefully whichever show you choose for me to watch next will be a little more up my alley!