#like whoooo caaaaares

[babsvibes]

Season 13 Episode 5: So You Stink You Can Dance

[lightbulb-warning]

i used to freehand comics all the time as a child and since the part i liked was the drawing part i would just draw panel after panel because i didn't want to stop drawing to think about icky icky words, plus the story TOTALLY still made perfect sense! to me! and noone else, but 'whoooo caaaaares omgggg its not like comics and sequantial art are a communicative meeediummmm lmaoooooo'. i spent my entire childhood telling myself stuff like "oh pfft I know this story by heart- ill SIMPLY remember the dialogue and write it later" ...and. I can't help but admire baby maiora's (call that a minora ba tm tsk) fucking audacity? hubris? confident wrongness? kid couldn't even remember to finish the comics in the first place? INCREDIBLE levels of unearned self assurance, wish that were me, genuinely- what an icon!!! anyway i think i have forever cursed myself

[cortexreaver]

brothers its 2021 it is time to get over vine i think

[gromphadorhina]

Sorry for being Depressed and Angry on main but I hate how I keep pushing people away and think about my ex-friends. I keep thinking “well fuck they probably hate me” and I know its such an unrealistic mindset to think but I fucked it up again today over a dumb argument. It’s like a coincidence, I criticize someone and I ended up being so pissed and passive aggressive because they said something so ignorant to and they all refuse to acknowledge it. I’m at a thin line between “I feel so horrible for doing this and I'm sorry if I acted out passive-aggressive” and “fuck you, you’re such an idiot and a horrible person so fragile in the core. I don't care about your Problem if you refuse to acknowledge your blatant idiocy”

I know I should have the right to be angry over something that personally offends me and it makes me so fucking mad when these people don’t experience anything I have experienced or just being mad over something that.... literally doesn't matter At All besides the internet. but I’m just....sad and scared I might do it again and push them away further. They’re probably gonna see this post but I don’t really care

[cavehags]

Idk if you saw the schitts creek wedding final, I remember you saying you cooled on the show, but I really wasn't into the whole wedding thing it was really corny

yeah i did not like it at all. it was way back in the season 4 finale when it first became obvious to me that the show would end with their wedding. at the time, i was actually okay with it, even excited for it! i thought it was sweet and fitting because the narrative significance of david putting down roots in schitt’s creek was perfect, thematically, for the show’s conclusion. it seemed obvious to me at that time that by the end of the show, the roses would realize that schitt’s creek was their real and permanent home. i don’t care for weddings and i think they’re immoral and i’m particularly bored by how they play out on tv. but i thought if the show’s central theme was about the simple beauty in building a home with the people you love, then a wedding would be a convenient shorthand to put a bow on that arc, in spite of what i personally feel about the institution of matrimony. 

unnnnfortunately, the show broke away from the theme of building a home in a way that felt really fucking weird, egotistical and senselessly driven by a desire to provide vacuous fanservice. while david and patrick end up getting married and buying property in schitt’s creek, the rest of the rose family up and leaves, with johnny and moira heading in one direction and alexis in another. everyone has big plans for their successful futures as independent adults who have money again! but like, what happened to the show about making do with what you have in a home built on love??? this felt hollow, like a regressive gift to fans who prioritized the wrong things (moira’s time with sunrise bay; david and patrick’s relationship). moira leaving a loving home to go do a reboot of an ancient soap opera that was explicitly misogynistic toward her when she worked there the first time is so fucking bleak it’s bojackian. it’s rooted in the past, retracing the past lives the roses should know better than to live. like, what the fuck?

so thematically the season was broken, and then it just added insult to injury when all the wedding stuff took up all that space only to be so, so fucking boring. it’s pretty common on tv for a show to dedicate an entire season to storylines about wedding prep, which is about as boring for the audience as it is for friends of real-life couples who are planning weddings. (VERY FUCKING BORING!) schitt’s creek went hard on the wedding planning stuff, with separate episodes about arranging details like 1) the caterer, 2) the winery, 3) the venue, 4) the maid of honor and 5) the bachelor party, and probably even more i’m forgetting! and like, whoooo fucking caaaaares??? certainly, there were important character moments happening during these events, but they played out the same curious way each time. david would always get annoyed when he had to focus on anyone or anything besides the details of the upcoming wedding. after a while, his irritation at needing to talk alexis through a crisis on his special day touring the venue or whatever felt like a statement of the show’s priorities: wedding first, other stuff when there’s time. but this was a show about a family. these stupid storylines took up valuable narrative space that could have gone towards, idk, david and stevie interacting more than once this season, or moira making her mark on the town through the council, or alexis’ arc ending in any kind of a coherent way re: ted. maybe it even could have gone towards fixing the ending so it wasn’t about the roses all splitting up and going their separate ways to live aspirational lives when that was EXPLICITLY THE OPPOSITE OF THE POINT OF THE SHOW. 

there is another particularly boring trope where plans for a beautiful wedding start to crumble because when the magical day comes, suddenly there’s no flowers and it’s raining and the venue isn’t ready or whatever. the upshot is always that the couple rallies together with their friends and they put together a beautiful day on short notice. i super hate that trope. it’s not interesting! it’s not about anything! it weirdly venerates marriage and the insurmountable power of government-recognized love while questioning, but never entirely doing away with, the capitalist trappings associated with weddings. the end result is always aspirational capitalism. there are always flowers and decorations in the end. watching schitt’s creek participate in that broken and tired trope just broke my heart. how goddamn boring. 

i really liked this show at one point for its lovingly campy sensibility and, to be honest, my queens alexis and moira and stevie, but this was such a fucking downer ending on both a meta and narrative front and it totally stains my entire view of the entire show. bleak. 

[recurring-polynya]

It is done.

We did it. We watched the whole Bount Arc. Did it go out as it began, incredibly stupidly? The answer is yes.

So, the whole deal with the Bounts is that they could absorb reishi to heal themselves, so they became basically invincible in Soul Society. This made the last few episodes of the arc really stupid because someone would get in a fight with a Bount, and they would heal themself, and they would get hurt and then heal themself, and then at the end of the episode, they would…forget to heal themself? I guess? And die?

Anyway, all the Bounts get defeated in fights that were so boring I don’t want to talk about them. Something something, Ishida’s artifact? He figured out how to not blow it up? Whoooo caaaaares?

Here’s what I do care about: Rantao pulling out her hair clip and it’s A SHIV and she stabs Kariya with it right in the reishi-regenerator. Then she is spent, and Ishida has to defend her and does such a terrible job that Ichigo shows up to protect the both of them. Ichigo is so supportive of all his friends’ romances, I love the way he always shows up, like “I SHIP THESE GUYS AND I WILL PROTECT THEM WITH MY LIFE.” A true hero.

Let’s skip to the next-to-last episode, which ruled. For starters, it opens with Ichigo slamming face-first into the ground at high speed from altitude. Every episode of Bleach should start this way. He and Kariya are fighting on Soukyoku Hill. Why are there all these stunted Halloween trees on Soukyoku Hill anyway? You know there’s some Soul Society gardener whose job it is to maintain those.

At the end of the previous episode, Rukia, high on cold medicine, stumbles out of bed and cons Renji into taking her up to go bother Ichigo while he’s fighting. He takes her up there, but then he gives her a brief lecture on not interfering in peoples’ fights, so they just stand around, ready to murmur “I...chigo…” or “What is this reiatsu?” at the appropriate moments.

Apparently there are some bombs all over Soul Society that Kariya can just detonate at will? There’s a bomb defusing montage featuring a bunch of people who are utterly unqualified to be defusing anything (the Squad 13 3rd Seats…Hisagi and Kira... Ikkaku…?)  Yamamoto yells at Komamura because the bombs aren’t being defused fast enough and also because he is a cranky old man and hasn’t gotten much screen time.

The rest of the Karakura gang show up at Soukyoku Hill, also to bother Ichigo, and Rukia launches into an incredibly long remix of the “don’t bother Ichigo” speech Renji just gave her. God, she just goes on and on. That must have been some good cold medicine.

Then Byakuya and Yoruichi arrive and Byakuya immediately just starts attacking Kariya. I died. Sorry, Rukia: speech wasted. Yoruichi reminds him that they are there to do some kidou seal nonsense if Kariya sets off the bombs and he is not allowed to fight Kariya. He pouts.

Ichigo and Kariya have been fighting this whole time. I think Ichinose shows up at some point? It doesn’t matter. Turns out Kariya didn’t even like the other Bounts and is glad they’re dead. Ouch, sorry other Bounts. He does the whole Bleach villain thing where he logically explains to Ichigo why Soul Society is bad and hypocritical and cannot be forgiven. Like all Bleach villians, he is 100% correct. Obviously, he doesn’t know who he’s dealing with, though, because Ichigo just yells “I am too stupid for logic, I just REALLY LOVE MY PRECIOUS FRIENDS!” like he always does.

Then Yoruichi starts poking Byakuya and is like, “my dude, we have to do the thing now. My dude. My guy.” And Byakuya just stands there. I have long maintained that he can and does sleep with his eyes open during captains’ meetings and you will never convince me that’s not what happens here. Whatever it is he and Yoruichi were supposed to do, they do not.

The Ichigo-Kariya fight ends like every anime fight, where they run past each other and they stand there and you wait for one of them to fall over. And it’s… Ichigo! He lost! Kariya starts to make another speech, gets out, “Ichigo, I--” and decides he does not want to be in this filler arc for another second, turns to dust and blows away.

THIS IS HOW THE BOUNT ARC ENDS.

There is one more episode, and it’s egregious. It starts off with Renji and Ichigo loudly arguing about nothing four feet away from where Rukia is sleeping. Jesus, guys. Byakuya shows up, and in no uncertain terms, tells Ichigo to GTFO.

Ichigo does not, and eventually, Rukia gets up and sits with her boys on the porch for reminiscin’ time. And then! And then! They have moved those awesome, canon “fate is a millstone” flashbacks from the middle of the Advance Team arc where they belong, and crammed them into this shitty interstitial Bount arc epilogue. We find out that Renji got named vice-captain but missed his chance to see Rukia before she leaves for the mission where she will meet Ichigo, interspersed with people remembering Kariya exploding himself and showing that dumb “werewolf Bounts get slaughtered in the Middle Ages” flashback that they have shown at least twice per episode this whole damn time. I AM LIVID.

Finally, I guess Yoruichi rescued the very orange Bount and leaves him with Rantao at her secret Rukongai hobbit hole. He asks Yoruichi why she has helped him, and she basically shrugs and says, “I love crime.”

The episode ends with Kuukaku beating up Ganju.

The end. THE END