#magic is not exactly the focus here but its the ultimate reason for how stuff works when it wouldnt irl

[balioc]

A Taxonomy of Magic

This is a purely and relentlessly thematic/Doylist set of categories. 

The question is: What is the magic for, in this universe that was created to have magic?

Or, even better: What is nature of the fantasy that’s on display here?

Because it is, literally, fantasy.  It’s pretty much always someone’s secret desire.

(NOTE: “Magic” here is being used to mean “usually actual magic that is coded as such, but also, like, psionics and superhero powers and other kinds of Weird Unnatural Stuff that has been embedded in a fictional world.”)

(NOTE: These categories often commingle and intersect.  I am definitely not claiming that the boundaries between them are rigid.)

I. Magic as The Gun That Can Be Wielded Only By Nerds

Notable example: Dungeons & Dragons

Of all the magic-fantasies on offer, I think of this one as being the clearest and most distinctive.  It’s a power fantasy, in a very direct sense.  Specifically, it’s the fantasy that certain mental abilities or personality traits -- especially “raw intelligence” -- can translate directly into concrete power.  Being magical gives you the wherewithal to hold your own in base-level interpersonal dominance struggles. 

(D&D wizardry is “as a science nerd, I can use my brainpower to blast you in the face with lightning.”  Similarly, sorcery is “as a colorful weirdo, I can use my force of personality to blast you in the face with lightning,” and warlockry is “as a goth/emo kid, I can use my raw power of alienation to blast you in the face with lightning.”)   

You see this a lot in media centered on fighting, unsurprisingly, and it tends to focus on the combative applications and the pure destructive/coercive force of magic (even if magic is notionally capable of doing lots of different things).   It often presents magic specifically as a parallel alternative to brawn-based fighting power.  There’s often an unconscious/reflexive trope that the heights of magic look like “blowing things up real good” / “wizarding war.” 

II. Magic as The Numinous Hidden Glory of the World

Notable examples: Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, H.P. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle

The point of magic, in this formulation, is that it is special.  It is intrinsically wondrous and marvelous.  Interacting with it puts you in a heightened-state-of-existence.  It is -- ultimately -- a metaphor for The Secret Unnameable Yearnings of Your Soul, the glorious jouissance that always seems just out of reach.

It doesn’t so much matter how the magic actually functions, or even what outcomes it produces.  The important thing is what magic is, which is...magical.

This is how you get works that are all about magic but seem entirely disinterested in questions like “what can you achieve with magic?,” “how does the presence of magic change the world?,” etc.  One of the major ways, anyway.

The Numinous Hidden Glory fantasy often revolves around an idea of the magic world, the other-place where everything is drenched in jouissance.  [Sometimes the magic world is another plane of existence, sometimes it’s a hidden society within the “real world,” doesn’t matter.]  The real point of magic, as it’s often presented, is being in that magic world; once you’re there, everything is awesome, even if the actual things you’re seeing and doing are ordinary-seeming or silly.  A magic school is worlds better than a regular school, because it’s magic, even if it’s got exactly the same tedium of classes and social drama that you know from the real world. 

Fantasies of this kind often feature a lot of lush memorable detail that doesn’t particularly cohere in any way.  It all just adds to the magic-ness. 

III. Magic as the Atavistic Anti-Civilizational Power

Notable examples: A Song of Ice and Fire, Godzilla

According to the terms of this fantasy, the point of magic is that it doesn’t make sense.  It doesn’t make sense within the logic of civilized human thought, anyway.  It is nature and chaos given concrete form; it is the thing that tears away at the systems that we, in our [Promethean nobility / overweening hubris], try to build. 

There’s not a baked-in value judgment here.  This kind of magic can be presented as good, bad, or some of both.  Same with civilization, for that matter.

It’s often presented as Old Myths and Folkways that have More Truth and Power Than Seems Reasonable.  Narratively, it often serves as a dramatized version of the failure of episteme, and of the kind of entropic decay that in real life can take centuries to devour empires and ideologies.

This kind of magic is almost always the province of savages, actual inhuman monsters, or (occasionally) the very downtrodden. 

(I think it is enormously telling that in A Song of Ice and Fire -- a series that is jammed full of exotic cults and ancient half-forgotten peoples, all of whom have magic that seems to work and beliefs that at least touch on mysterious truths -- only the Westerosi version of High Medieval Catholicism, the religion to which most of the people we see notionally adhere, is actually just a pack of empty lies.)  

IV. Magic as an Overstuffed Toybox

Notable examples: Naruto, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure

Or, sometimes, we care about what magic actually does.  More than that -- sometimes we want to see magic doing really interesting things, and then other magic intersecting with it in ways that are even more interesting.

The fantasy here, in simplest terms, is “magic can achieve any arbitrary cool effect.”  There doesn’t tend to be an overarching system that explains how it’s all supposed to come together, or if there is, it tends to be kind of lame and hand-wavey -- a rigorous system of Magic Physics, delineating the limits of the possible, would get in the way of all the cool effects we want to show!

Once again, this shows up a lot in combat-heavy narratives.  Less with the genericized D&D-style “magic is a fist that can punch harder than your regular meat fist,” and more with people throwing weird and wacky powers at each other in order to show how those powers can be used creatively to overcome opposition.  Sometimes, instead of combat, you get magicians using their cool-effects magic to MacGuyver their way out of problems or even trying to resolve large-scale social problems.  Issues of magic usage within the narrative being “fair” or “unfair” or “cheesy” are important here in ways that they generally aren’t elsewhere, since the fantasy on offer comes close to being a game. 

(Ratfic often falls into this category.) 

V. Magic as Alternate-Universe Science

Notable examples: the Cosmere books

This covers most of what gets called “hard fantasy.”  The fantasy on offer is a pretty straightforward one -- “magic has actual rules, you can learn them, and once you’ve learned them you can make predictions and achieve outcomes.”  It’s puzzle-y in the way that the previous fantasy was game-y.  It’s often a superstimulus for the feeling of learning a system in the way that video game grinding is a superstimulus for the feeling of rewarding labor. 

The magic effects on offer tend to be less ridiculous and “broken” than toybox magic, because any logic you can use to achieve a ridiculous effect is going to influence the rest of the magic system, and special cases that aren’t grounded in sufficiently-compelling logic will ruin the fantasy. 

Not super common.

VI.  Magic as Psychology-Made-Real

Notable examples: Revolutionary Girl Utena, Persona

This kind of magic makes explicit, and diagetic, what is implicit and metatextual in most fantasy settings.  The magic is an outgrowth of thought, emotion, and belief.  Things have power in the world because they have power in your head.  The things that seem real in the deepest darkest parts of your mind are actually real. 

This is where you get inner demons manifested as actual demons (servile or hostile or anything in between), swords forged from literal hope, dungeons and labyrinths custom-tailored to reflect someone’s trauma, etc. 

The fantasy, of course, is that your inner drama matters. 

My personal favorite.

VII.  Magic as Pure Window Dressing

Notable examples: later Final Fantasy games, Warhammer 40K

This one is weird; it doesn’t really make sense on its own, only metatextually.  I think of its prevalence as an indicator of the extent to which fantasy has become a cultural staple. 

The fantasy on offer in these works is that you are in a fantasy world that is filled with fantasy tropes.  And that’s it.

Because the important thing here is that the magic doesn’t really do anything at all, or at least, it doesn’t do anything that non-magic can’t do equally well.  It doesn’t even serve as an indication that Things are Special, because as presented in-setting, magic isn’t Special.  Being a wizard is just a job, like being a baker or a tailor or something -- or, usually, like being a soldier, because the magic on offer is usually a very-simple kind of combat magic.  And unlike in D&D, it’s not like magic is used only or chiefly by a particularly noteworthy kind of person.  It’s just...there. 

The great stories of the world, in these works, don’t tend to feature magic as anything more than a minor element.  The point is to reassure the audience that this is the kind of world, the kind of story, that has magic. 

-------------------------------------------------

Thoughts?  Critiques?  Other categories to suggest? 

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Michael in the Mainstream: WandaVision

I love Wanda Maximoff, AKA Scarlet Witch. I’m not sure how apparent that is, but just in general I love comic book characters who use magic, and Wanda is probably my favorite (or at least tied with DC’s Zatanna). Sadly, I never really felt like the MCU did her any justice. She debuted in the worst Avengers movie, her brother was killed before they could showcase a meaningful relationship, and then her next appearances had her speedrunning a relationship with Vision. She definitely got some great moments in Infinity War and Endgame, but she felt woefully underutilized. The same could be said of her boyfriend Vision, who had it even worse than her, because he gets killed in Infinity War and is basically forgotten about after that, with nary a mention in Endgame. These are two fantastic characters, and the MCU just didn’t handle them well at all, and they felt like a complete waste that it was really hard to care about.

Thank god for WandaVision.

This show really did something incredible. It made me care so much about two characters I wished I could have cared about before, and become incredibly invested in their relationship. Wanda and Vision get much-needed spotlight and character development and end up becoming two of the best and most fleshed-out characters in the whole franchise, and it’s amazing they waited so long to do this. Wouldn’t it have been better if we cared so much about them before?

The show has three core elements that help make it great: its characters, its themes, and its presentation. The characters are the big one; Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany really get their time to shine, and both of them manage to do great things with their characters, characters who until now felt more like background characters than actual Avengers. Their relationship is so cute, so wholesome, but with an undercurrent of something a bit sadder that ties in with the show’s themes, and then when they have children things become even more sweet with that dark undercurrent still running strong. Aside from them, the standout of the cast would have to be nosy neighbor Agnes played by Kathryn Hahn… or I should say, the show’s villain, Agatha Harkness, a magic-siphoning witch who’s exploiting Wanda’s fragile emotional state to gain the ultimate power. She’s an actual well-executed twist villain, which is quite a feat for modern Disney, and she’s just as fun and campy as you’d hope an evil witch would be, complete with her very own ridiculous villain song that has her winking at the camera and proudly gloating about killing puppies. It’s delightfully cartoonish. Other standouts include Evan Peters as ‘Pietro,’ in a hilarious and clever bit of meta casting that leads to a dick joke (which might be one of the funniest twists in the MCU) and the return of the greatest Ant-Man supporting character Jimmy Woo. Even Darcy, the absolute worst part of the first two Thor films, manages to return and be tolerable.

The presentation is a big selling point, and what helps the story feel so fresh and unique. Each episode is an affectionate take on a different decade’s sitcoms, starting really oldschool and eventually working all the way up to more modern fare. Interspersed throughout these episodes are some rather entertaining fake commercials which harken to elements of Wanda’s life, and a couple of later ones even act as some heavy foreshadowing for future revelations. The different camera techniques, colors, and whatnot really help sell this fantastical sitcom world Wanda created, though I have to say it is a bit of a shame they couldn’t integrate this style more into the climax, even if there are story reasons for it. It was just such a cool and fun concept, it’s a shame it had to be resolved before the climactic finale.

The themes, though, are what really make this show shine. This show is essentially about a woman dealing with grief. Wanda has lost the man she loves, she has lost her brother, and she’s struggling to find her way in the world. As a coping mechanism, she creates a fantasy world and refuses to face reality, burying her emotions and refusing to move on, instead clinging to the happy concepts that might have been. It really is fantastic as a character study of Wanda, giving her a remarkable amount of depth. I found myself relating to a lot of the themes on display; as someone with depression who has had my fair share of painful experiences, I could empathize with Wanda to a degree. Sure, the person I loved was never murdered by Thanos, but I’ve experienced with grief before. It’s really great stuff they’re working with here.

Unfortunately, as good as all these things are, the show isn’t 100% perfect. The biggest issue is when the show switches focus from the interesting stuff inside of Wanda’s sitcom world to more standard MCU stuff outside. Sure, it’s fun to hang out with Jimmy Woo, the greatest character ever, but a lot of the stuff out there just isn’t engaging and some things just aren’t really elaborated on too much. It’s certainly not awful, but between some really confusing twists with Monica Rambeau (who is a good character otherwise and one I want to see more of) and the extremely boring, 2/10 on Psycho Analysis villain Hayward, there’s really not much here that can even hope to compare to the events unfolding in Wanda’s life. The best things from the outside are flashbacks, such as when Monica returned from being snapped or when we get to see Wanda visiting Vision’s corpse in government lockup, which is one of the most tearjerking moments in the show.

There’s also how the swerve into the standard “Big Marvel action” isn’t exactly graceful. After a great episode where Agatha goes back through Wanda’s life, giving even more insight to Wanda as a character and showing us a lot of fascinating moments, we get into the grand finale which feels like what you’d see in a movie theater, for better or for worse. Now I’m a real slut for crazy witch duels between hot women, and this certainly delivers on that front, but there’s so much other crap going on and it really is weird to think how this show about a superhero woman learning to handle her grief somehow became a big, epic showdown that wouldn’t look out of place in a Harry Potter film. I don’t hate this finale as much as some people do, but it definitely feels like the weakest episode overall (which isn’t too bad, since it’s still good, just not really what I would have liked to see).

WandaVision is the sort of thing I want to see more from the MCU going forward. It’s fresh, it’s interesting, it doesn’t take a standard route for the most part, and it utilizes characters who never got a fair shake in interesting and creative ways. Most importantly, it’s very weird and very comic booky, which is something the MCU was lacking for much of its first ten years (save for the films Gunn and Waititi made). I’m sure not everyone is going to find this to be their cup of tea, and it’s easy to grow bored of the cuts away from Wanda to the more cliché affairs outside of her sitcom bubble, but this is definitely a rich and rewarding show that engages with some heavier topics in an easy-to-digest and enjoyable way. Hopefully we’ll see more creativity like this going forward.

[nileqt87]

Thoughts on WandaVision by a non-Marvel fan

As someone who had only seen a single Marvel movie (The Avengers) and only watched Jessica Jones season 1 for David Tennant (while hating nearly every other character in it), which had none of these characters, I only watched WandaVision precisely because it dared to break the mold and be even remotely ambitious instead of doing the same old CGI cartoon fest over and over. And somewhat because of what Marvel has done to the film industry, television has completely and utterly overtaken film as where emotional, dramatic storytelling now happens.

And okay, I happen to have had a major TVLand addiction growing up and binged a ton of the shows referenced in WandaVision long ago (yep, those very same '50s-'80s sitcoms). I couldn't pass up the retro. Love at first sight. Combine that with what promised to be a tragic, human/non-human romance. Sold. I knew little else about the characters.

For a long time, I've seen female fans (in particular) comment on how part of the reason they write fanfiction for Marvel is that they have to read between the lines just to add the implied dramatic content of the relationship focus variety that never quite gets developed in canon (certainly not up to the standard of what a fic reader expects). I saw a few comments that pretty much described WandaVision as exactly that: a fix-it fanfic before tragic reality invaded Pleasantville. Wanda's whole Hex was essentially a glorified fix-it fanfic.

For this reason alone, I can only hope the success of WandaVision gets them to create a season 2 that is dedicated solely to Wanda trying to put her family (Vision) back together that does the tragic romance justice in a way that giving them side parts in other people's movies just isn't going to cut it.

I feel like Vision's ultimate resurrection or even Wanda's struggle with her grief is better left to her own headline story, whether be it film or television. Television is the only medium that is going to allow the actors to really sink their teeth into this sort of star-crossed, tragic drama and not have it relegated to a minor side-character plot. Either give Wanda and Vision their own movie (hopefully, with heightened focus on character development as a lesson learned from television) or wait to integrate the mind and body of Vision in another season that gives both of them center stage with room to develop it.

Them having their twins for real might also be worth a season 2 in a way that probably wouldn't even work on film, as showing such a feminine pregnancy storyline would be a helluva departure for a Marvel movie that goes from action set piece to action set piece.

I wouldn't even hate it if Wanda's sitcom comfort zone made a few more appearances, even if it is merely the occasional domestic fantasy or dream/nightmare, so there is a way to not completely divorce a potential season 2 from season 1's "gimmick". It could be merely as simple as her pointedly doing something Sam/Jeannie-esque with her magic. Cooking with floating kitchen items would be an easy nod.

Probably not what Marvel is thinking of doing, but as a non-Marvel fan, WandaVision has a real opportunity to pull in new viewers with very different tastes that have so far managed to give the films a wide berth. It would do so much better as a show.

Go the route of giving these characters their own headlined projects and Marvel could have a real juggernaut of a 'ship, as well. My impression was that WandaVision got a lot of fans talking about the characters and their relationship in a way that the previous films and comics had not; some even making comments they had barely paid attention to the characters before the show.

IMO, the mere character descriptions sound like some of the most interesting and fleshed-out characters Marvel has got right now with real opportunity for real dramatic depth. And that's putting aside that Scarlet Witch is one of the most powerful characters on the entire Marvel roster. Making a whole television season about a character going through the stages of grief and about a woman who just wants the family she lost back (a woman who desperately wants a husband and children, no less) was very different territory for Marvel. Human/non-human, in addition to having the level of doom that makes tragedies very, very memorable.

There's tropey drama potential there that hasn't been mined with the non-human who becomes more and more "human" (it's the stuff of fairy tales and sci-fi both). Hayward or someone like him could easily be used as a character who doesn't see Vision as equal to humans, for example. Delve into the sort of existential questions about artificial life achieving consciousness no less feeling than a human's that stories like Data on Star Trek, Blade Runner and Bicentennial Man pose. That species difference without the magic of sitcoms could be mined for a gorgeously dramatic plotline. What it means to be human explored through the non-human--one of my favorite tropes.

And of course, it's the stuff of fairy tales--most notably Pinocchio (the once-inanimate learning to and desiring to become real by proving himself worthy and because it fulfills the greatest wish of the person who loves them most), combined with the interspecies romance elements of The Little Mermaid (tragic ending or not--see also the desperate acts taken to achieve this cosmically-denied togetherness, only for such a tragic ending to come of it in the original work).

Given that the MCU movies just lost a bunch of their A-listers, they need something big like this. Marvel needs philosophical and character-driven meat on its meager dramatic bones. Here are two actors who could carry something more ambitious and pick up an entirely different audience. Marvel could get an even bigger female audience with these two, IMO. And it wouldn't be cheap girl power pandering either (I say this as a girl). These characters are legit with incredibly warm, likable, endearing performances behind them. This chemistry works 100%.

I think White Vision having an existential crisis where he's questioning what he is if he has all the memories of a being who clearly can feel every human emotion (the idea that we are our memories), but at the same time knowing that he's only artificial life, would be an interesting lead-up to Vision being fully restored with his full consciousness in addition to the added memories of what he experienced inside the Hex.

A restored Vision would have to reconcile what Wanda did in her grief over him and her family. It's also a glimpse at the life Wanda wants with him, which included something that isn't biologically possible, though it likely is through her own abilities of creation. There's also the idea of balance that he's the one who might hold her back from the brink of going down any further dark paths as a figure of ordered stability for her, while she is key in the chaos of his becoming more "human". The to-be parenthood story is obviously hanging over them.

The situation with Hayward intending for White Vision to remain a mere machine that can be manipulated and used as a weapon in a way that an independently-thinking Vision can't be is also a path to go down. As I said, there's a potential storyline about prejudice regarding artificial intelligence, even if it has all the emotional capability of humans.

And on top of that, Vision is in a relationship with a human, even if it's one who could potentially be the key to restoring his consciousness through her own link with the original Mind Stone. It also furthers Wanda's role as a mother and creator if she can give him back his life in this way. While the heroic Avengers might not question them being "an unusual couple", who says everyone else would be so kind?

I really think he needs to be brought back. Wanda desperately needs him for her story to continue.

[black-streak]

Little Pistol - Nothing Left to Say/Rocks

Chapter 11

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Aftermath of the fall of Hawkmoth. Bet you know what's happening next chapter.

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~---~

"Honey? I'm coming up now, okay?"

The trapdoor shifted, soft footsteps lifting into the darkened space. Stagnant air and dust met the intruder as she moved towards the loft bed that held a dismal little form.

"You don't have to talk about it. You don't have to speak at all if that's what you need. It's okay. I just want you to know I'm here," Sabine sat down on the edge of the bedding, hand hesitating over the blanket. Dropping it back to her lap, she lowered her head, softening her voice further, "I went ahead and formally pulled you from school before the absences could add up. You had enough credits to finish the year without this last month and it's the last thing you need to be dealing with. I hope that's okay. You can wait however long you want to take the test for next year. I know you still want to test out, but there's no rush. Whenever you're ready, honey. For now, just focus on healing."

The sheets rustled and the blanket scrunched up, but nothing of her daughter showed.

"I know you feel guilty for what happened. I know you think you have no right to grieve for him. But he was still your partner. You still went through so much together and even if he hurt you, that doesn't change the fact that he was your partner. You're allowed to grieve someone even when they did wrong by you. Even when you wanted them gone. I know you never meant for him to die and so does everyone else."

Still nothing.

"I'm going to head back down to help your father. I hope you know he's not avoiding you. He just doesn't know how to comfort you. How to help. I'll bring you dinner later on, okay? I love you, Marinette." 

The footsteps drifted back down the steps and the trapdoor nestled back into its place as the room went still.

…

It'd been a month since the takedown of Hawkmoth. The finding of Emilie Agreste's body. The death of Adrien Agreste. 

The company had collapsed under itself and Paris seemed to flip on its head in the wake of their new reality. Ladybug only appeared once more, in court the day of Gabriel Agreste's trial. After the conviction, the hero disappeared along with every trace of her existence. Only the memories and written recordings remained. Magic was an interesting beast and it protected itself the way it'd done for centuries before, by leaving its stories and nothing more. No tangible proof to be found.

The Dupain-Cheng residence, however, flowed with magic, both strong and dark, following the mood of the Guardian who held it. It drew people into the bakery, craving dark chocolate and tarts with lemon curd and tart berries, unknowingly seeking out the magic that once permeated their streets everyday that now seemed lacking.

In the upper parts of the home, a little fox sat watching the woman of the household bustle around the kitchen, the husband working efficiently by her side. As equal as they were, you could tell who took charge between the two. While it typically wasn't in his nature, Trixx felt the need to show respect where it was due.

"Madame."

The small lady sharply pivoted, surprised tension radiating off her as she turned towards his voice, only to settle upon meeting eyes.

"Trixx? Does Marinette need something?"

"Yes, Madame. She would like for you to schedule the test for as soon as possible. She'd like to get her education settled now and not wait."

"Is she quite sure? She could always-"

"Sabby, if she says she wants to take it, let her," Tom stepped in, avoiding looking at the little kwami, still not forgiving the creatures for involving his child in their problems.

"But Tom, she only just started moving out of her room. She still hasn't spoken since... What if it's too soon?"

"What if she wants to do it now so that she doesn't give up on it entirely? We can't know, love. We have to trust her judgement here," he reasoned, grimacing all the same as his wife reluctantly agreed.

"I'll let her know you've agreed. Thank you, Madame, Tom."

...

"They've agreed to the test, Kit. We'll get you freed of your restraints here soon enough," Trixx reassured, floating above their silent guardian.

"It's too soon," Wayzz tried to intervene.

"Not soon enough," Plagg whispered, curled up within Marinette's hair, the same place he'd stayed since having found out his own kitten had passed. They never stayed apart for longer than ten minutes nowadays. 

It's not that he agreed with Adrien's actions or believed him to be a true holder, but the boy had been his own all the same and for that he felt the grief of having lost him. Of being present when the strike that ultimately ended his life hit and knowing he couldn't save him. Now he just wanted to get the little lady and the rest of them out of this dreaded city.

"He's right," Tikki agreed, in her own little nesting spot of yarn, voice tired and defeated, "It's better for all of us this way. Even if I don't agree with where we're going."

"You know where we're going?" Wayzz flew up to her instantly, "She told you?"

"Not in words. But I do. Gotham City. It only makes sense. She wants to find that used to be Robin."

"Hmm. It might be more than that though," Trixx narrowed his eyes, a little smirk crawling along his face.

"You think you know better than me?" Tikki bristled.

"I know that I know her better than you. Think about it. Paris is all healed up and in no need of a hero anymore. Meanwhile she's all messed up inside. Gotham is known for being a dark, brutal place. Perfect for someone with a screw or two loose to work some stuff out, wouldn't you say?"

"And what exactly are you suggesting?" Wayzz seemed on edge now.

"He's suggesting that it'll give her something to fight again so she doesn't fall into herself. Maybe there was a time where she could live with peace, but not anymore. She needs somewhere just as dark as the storm inside her so she can scream and see that it won't back down. She needs chaos," Plagg spoke up once more, feeling the hollow pit inside the girl's chest, "She needs Gotham. If that boy happens to be there, then call it fate."

"No, she's just obsessing, again," Tikki insisted.

"You're obsessing. She tried to back down before and you wouldn't let her. You and your bullheaded, stubborn need for absolute conviction in your chosen," Trixx shut her down.

"It is not-"

"It is, sugarcube. You don't let your chosen change their minds about what they believe in, in a misguided need to push them down the path you've decided they're meant to be on," Plagg intoned in a saddened tone.

"And you don't make your chosen stick to their own word, just letting them change on the flip of a coin," she argued.

"I know," he murmured, eyes downcast, "We're both destructive to our chosen. That's why we're never out of the box unless necessary. You know this."

"... I know," she wilted into herself once more.

"I don't want to go into circulation again. Not for a very long time," Plagg admitted.

The kwamis lay still within the room, with baited breath.

"Okay," the room breathed out, "As long as Marinette's okay with it," Tikki agreed, her voice back to the same tired, defeated tone she had at the start.

All eyes went to the girl still in the bed who hadn't made a noise from the start.

…

Marinette passed the test with absolute ease, not even a hint of panic over the importance of it coming over her.

When she returned home, she told her parents the news, her first words since that dreadful day, "I'm leaving Paris."

[kallypsowrites]

Siege and Storm Thoughts

I have some mixed feelings about this book. It’s definitely not as strong of an entry as the first one for a variety of reasons. But lets start with stuff I like:

1. Alina. I really enjoy her as a protagonist. I like seeing her navigate power and balance of power because I think she proves herself good with it at most every turn. She listens to people, takes advice, stays away from her darker impulses. She never has a moment when she goes too far. It is a shame that her gaining power is still kind of framed as a negative thing, but I’ll get to that in my things I didn’t like section. Overall, she’s good. Still funny. Still blunt. Still very likable and relatable.

2. Nikolai. I LOVE Nikolai. His charisma, his intelligence, his honesty, his genuinely good intentions. He’s a good boy all around. He really is this perfect medium between Mal and the Darkling. Ambitious but not evil. And he has more of a sense of humor than the other two as well. He is consistently the most helpful to Alina while Mal is mostly causing her grief throughout the book. I honestly don’t know why he’s not the endgame love interest. More on that later.

3. Tolya and Tamar. Great new characters. They’re strong. They fight. They are also very helpful to Alina while also calling her on stuff when she makes a mistake. I especially love Tamar but that’s probably because it is hinted she is gay. I’ve decided she is and no one can tell me otherwise. She is my wife.

4. The Darkling. There’s not near enough of him in this book, but he’s a sinister villain and what conversations he has with Alina are electric. The first few chapters *chefs kiss*. This man is never not going hard with his dialogue. And he is a real, credible threat. Love his plan at the end. I like smart villains. Fuck him for hurting Genya though. That’s my girl.

5. Zoya. She got to be more of a person this time. I still think there’s a lot of development left for her and she’s not the most fleshed out, but I like pragmatic characters who put their feelings aside for what they think is the greater good.

6. The beginning and the end. This is a weird thing to say but I think both the opening of the book (up until they get to the Little Palace) and the close of the book (Nikolai’s birthday on) are really strong sections with some of the best material yet. It’s the middle that I have some problems with.

Things I didn’t like:

1. Pacing. The first 10 chapters are very well paced. The return of the Darkling, finding another amplifier, intro of new characters, an exciting trip through the fold on a flying ship. I was really gelling with the novel. And then the pacing just grinds to a halt. Most of the content in the little palace feels like padding out the novel waiting for the final battle to get here. Some of the conflicts, like the one with Mal, seem so contrived to stall for time. We spend a lot of time with side characters but I don’t feel I get to know most of them that well. It just feels like a lot of...waiting. And I definitely found myself skimming through some parts.

Certain things were dragged out for too long. The reason behind the Darkling and Alina’s visits for one thing. I think that could have been revealed to her before the climax. Maybe earlier on to give things more stakes. She realizes that she is the one calling to him and tries to stop but it just keeps happening. Maybe he’s even exploiting the connection to gather intel. There’s just a lot more that could have been done with those meetings to keep the pacing up.

It’s funny because a lot of book 1 was spent at the little palace, but it had momentum then. Alina had a lot of drive because she was trying to reach a goal. In this book, they are preparing for a goal to reach them to respond, so it takes away some agency that could keep the plot moving. I also think we could have gotten to the climax a bit faster because its ultimately only a few chapters. We could have expanded that. All in all this book is about 100 pages longer than the first but it doesn’t need to be.

2. Side characters. Outside of the leads and a few side characters like Tamar, Tolya, Zoya and David, this book really does not delve much more into the characters. Sergei, Marie, Nadie, Fedyor, Ivan...they all end up kind of nothing characters and when half of them die its just like......oh. Kay. David is given a bit more development as is Zoya but it feels kind of superficial with them as well. I’m a little more interested but not exactly forming a connection. And I can’t even say that Tamar and Tolya are that complex. They’re just archetypes that I like done well.

It’s clear that the author likes to focus on her leads. On Alina, Mal, and Nikolai (and the Darkling when he’s there). Alina obviously has to be there for everything. She’s the lead. But it feels like all the complexities are given to the main cast and the side characters kind of suffer. So in the final battle they’re canon fodder. As long as my leads survive I don’t mind. I cared about Genya, despite her barely being in this book, but that’s only because she was written so well in the last one. I guess I can applaud Leigh for being able to flesh out six POV characters in Six of Crows cause she clearly grew in that regard.

3. Mal. I think I was willing to let some things in book 1 slide because like...growing pains, right? They’ve never acknowledged their feelings before. He says some gross things but he does apologize. I’m not that interested in him, but fine. But book 2 his behavior continues to be gross. He’s often weirdly victim blamey at Alina, scared of her power even though she uses it well, and just so unwilling to accept how she’s changed. He’s also a hypocrite, doesn’t listen to her and makes everything about him. His moments of good banter with her are eclipsed by how constantly frustrating he is.

Not to mention he doesn’t really...have anything to do in this book? Like, outside of finding the Sea whip...he has no importance to the plot. He’s Alina’s guard. He doesn’t do much of significance to help her or the war effort. I thought they were going to give him the goal of tracking the fire bird to make that his plot thread but they decided to push that off. Which just shows that his only plot utility is as a tracker--an ability he has and not like...one of his personality traits.

And the book acknowledges that he feels useless but I feel like he still should have had something to do other than cause extra drama for Alina and then save her at the end. He just feels so tacked on most of the time.

4. Alina’s trajectory. Like...I know the endgame. That’s been spoiled for me. But I resent it. I resent whenever a woman gaining power (especially when she treats it well) is viewed as a bad thing. I resent whenever an ‘ordinary life’ is elevated above like...having magic. And if there’s going to be an endgame, Nikolai just makes more sense to me right now. Darklina will end in tragedy. That seems pretty clear. But Nikolai just feels like so much better than Mal. I have to read the other book to fully get my thoughts together on this though.

That’s it for Siege and Storm. See you all when I start Ruin and Rising!

[kinetic-elaboration]

February 9: Mr. Robot 3x10

Finally watched the last episode of Mr. Robot season 3. I was actually on the ball today so I’ve done lots--worked a full 8 hour day, read at lunch, went on a walk, read some fanfic for the first time in literal months--and now I’m exhausted.

So I don’t have too many coherent thoughts.

I remembered a few things from this ep--mostly the Dom part, the Angela and Price reveal, and the very last shot. But there were still a lot of details I forgot, and honestly I think I forgot everything after they leave the barn. I completely forgot all that stuff with the finding the secret magic code keys to undo the hack. I think that’s because it’s actually rather anti-climactic versus a lot of the other stuff that happened. What does restoring the data do? As Grant says, the Dark Army doesn’t care because 5/9 was just a part of the bigger plan that served its purpose. And everything in the past 2 seasons has shown that the Prices and whiteroses of the world will come out on top no matter what, because even tragedy (esp. tragedy) is open to being manipulated. And finally, as the Lady of the Night at the end says, it’s just too simplistic a plan. Just like 5/9 itself. So I mean it’s very IC for Elliot and there’s a certain amount of satisfaction to something, at least, being nice and clean and tidy, but it doesn’t feel like this BIG big moment, especially compared to the earlier scenes. Like the point from the subway on doesn’t match anything from before, where I was so tense my stomach hurt.

I remember finding the Price and Angela story really emotional and surprising the first time I watched it, not because him being her father was so shocking--it’s the sort of twist Esmail does well, where you’re like.. oh DUH and it actually makes more sense now--but because I’d been so willing, in my own naivety, to believe that literally anything, even perhaps time travel itself, was possible-- I mean all the hints! And here he is saying, definitively, no, this is still a realistic universe, in fact probably one of the most realistic universes on tv, and there is absolutely no way we’re suddenly going to become Back to the Future--sometimes people, even/especially ridiculously powerful people, are just out of their minds. The reason was pettiness--it was really that small. There’s something so effectively gut wrenching about that, to me. Such big things, happening for such small reasons.

I felt sort of similarly about Dom being flipped, actually. In some sense, it was a big operation to get her on the side of the Dark Army: a lot of research and so on. But ultimately it was also so simple. She said nothing would make her betray her values and her country and her job, but when they showed her just how far their reach went, how they knew and could find literally her whole family, well that was it. It’s not a complex scheme, is what I’m trying to say, it’s just threats--but it’s also the worst threats imaginable, coupled with some classic emotional manipulation. And so just like that she’s ruined.

The show is just so good at balancing the big and the small, the personal and the organizational and the political. Elliot is just one, often naive, person, and the show doesn’t make him bigger than he is--but it does acknowledge that he’s the protagonist for a reason. So he is good enough to have whiterose’s project moved to the Congo, for example, even though “hundreds of people like” him couldn’t do it. His character and his influence on the world is just... so well calibrated. Big enough to warrant this being HIS show, but not so big as to ruin the realism of a show that’s so much about the puppeteering ability of the rich and powerful.

To circle back to Angela... I haven’t seen S4 but I do know that she dies in 4x01 and I read at least one article that was very unhappy with that narrative decision. I don’t know exactly what I’ll think of it in context yet but I will say... rewatching this season and especially the last couple of episodes, she’s just so damaged, and so lost, it’s hard to see how there could be a redemption or recovery arc for her. I’m talking strictly from a narrative point of view. I do see how the character has come to her end place.

The parallel between Angela and Elliot was so strong. I mean I should have seen it straight off with the way her scene with Price was edited in with his scene at the barn, but like... when Price says “You have to recognize you’ve been conned and learn to live with what you’ve done” I just felt like that could apply to Elliot too. Except Angela’s instinct is to get revenge and Elliot’s is to undo his bad decisions and start again, and Angela is held back from her instincts and Elliot is given free reign. So she ends the season with, essentially, nothing at all, and he ends it with a new purpose (and a new/old antagonist, with Vera coming back....)

So yeah, something here with my Elliot and Angela theory lol... increasingly from the first season on, they’re separated but parallel--like in the scene where he talks to her through the door. They sometimes approach but never quite meet--like when the Cyber Bombings episode ended with them finally face to face, unable to hold both of them together in the frame. They’re so important to each other, but this importance is so often unsaid or out of focus. And I still don’t know what I think... is the love for her that he has located in Elliot or in the Hacker? Or both?

Anyway. I started thinking about how well plotted this show is and how poorly plotted other shows are and now my brain is somewhere else. I need to get ready for bed because I am very tired.

Final thought: I saw you there Ms. Lulu Ferocity!

[nerdarchy-blog]

The follow up to 2017’s Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, on Nov. 17, 2020 fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons upcoming Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything must indeed possess powerful magic to contain so much stuff in 192 pages — the exact page count of its predecessor according to Jeremy Crawford, principal rules designer of the game. The product of 18 months work the book includes material for Dungeons Masters and players of 5E D&D alike. I had an opportunity to join the press briefing with Crawford and Greg Tito, communications and press relations director for D&D and let me tell you, sitting on this was really exciting. Reading and hearing what players speculated on and wanting to say, “You’re all right! It’s all in the book. All the character options and new stuff you’re guessing about are inside!” So let’s get into Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.

On the cover for Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything Tasha holds an ornate grimoire covered with symbols from the planes of existence in stunning art by Magali Villeneuve.

A delightful conversation about 5E D&D

No sense burying the lead — all the options and fresh new modular content you thought might be in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything is there. Subclasses for all the classes are in there. Alternate class features from the most popular Unearthed Arcana in the entirety of 5E D&D are in there. The artificer class is in there — including some tweaks, new infusions and the Armorer subclass that was loved by people, according to Crawford. The Aberrant Mind sorcerer, UA’s most highly rated content ever, is in there and so are many from the past year. Spell Versatility and new Beast Master Companions are in there and I know there’s untold numbers of players stoked to hear this. There’s new artwork for the Artillerist Artificer Specialist that was shared during the briefing too.

A human artificer balances his Eldritch Cannon on his shoulder as seen in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. [Art by Brian Valeza]

Like XGtE the book explores the titular character’s wonderfully complex point of view in comments on the content throughout, with nods to Tasha’s history in her comments and captions. One clue about Tasha’s mysterious origin reveals itself on the cover. The tattoo on her cheek is a chicken leg, which Crawford explained is an “echo of the chicken-legged hut that Baba Yaga lives in.”

A bunch of subclasses and class features only chicken scratches the surface of the scope of material. Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything is organized into four chapters. While perusing the material in the book readers learn more about Tasha and the lore surrounding her. Tasha’s life has involved the fantastic since the very beginning of her origins in the fey realms. As she became a brilliant and powerful wizard her adventures took her to other planes and dimensions so she is unfazed by beings of any sort, least of all her frenemy Mordenkainen.

Character options

Spells and magic items

Group patrons

Tools for Dungeon Masters

Customizing your origin is an important part of the development of the book and something the design team seems particularly proud of, for good reason. Players love the idea of more personalized character origin stories. I use This Is Your Life stuff from XGtE all the time and TCoE builds on that tremendously. Like, seriously a lot. The design goal was tools for players to create truly unique characters with amazingly magical origins and backstories.

This includes modifying traits during character creation to better reflect the story players want to tell and offers a lineage template with fill-in-the-blanks tools to totally personalize characters. The Lineage System introduces a new way to approach creating and playing characters and adventures in 5E D&D, a responsibility the design team takes very seriously as stewards of the game. During the press briefing Crawford and Tito explained how TCoE is one of multiple books demonstrating a shift in how D&D handles things like race.

Other changes include the removal of negative racial modifiers for certain races from Volo’s Guide to Monsters via errata. Crawford explained how their original intention for races like kobold and orc was as Monstrous Adventurers, separate from standard character options. This is why those options are included in their own section in VGtM along with options considered more powerful than standard in some cases, like yuan-ti and to a lesser extent goblins. Because this context is lost through the way so many players engage with 5E D&D through online tools and resources like D&D Beyond, it became a pain point for players and TCoE will include updated versions. Hooray for kobold and orc enthusiasts!

The Lineage System offers tools to create characters not bound by a species archetype. I love the way Crawford explained how this modular piece of content interacts with existing 5E D&D material. The core game, what is presented in the Player’s Handbook and other sources, illustrates an archetypal adventuring character like an elf. Choosing this option for your character represents playing Elfie McElferson in other words — the exact kind of elf that comes to mind when you think of D&D elves. The Lineage System gives players and DMs tools to disentangle characters’ personal traits with cultural traits. And worry not! The path to customization is very smooth according to Crawford, who emphasized it is not complicated at all.

Along with the new class options and alternate features players can customize how each class feels. This includes something that worms its way into the mind of every edition of D&D sooner or later.

Psionics! The Aberrant Mind is just one of the psionic themed subclasses from UA. Along with a few others, these psionic subclasses use a modifed version of the playtest mechanics, which Crawford described as “evolved.” I’m pretty middle of the road when it comes to psionics, neither thrilled to use them or abhorred by their inclusion in the game but I’ve got to say I really dug that Psionic Talent die so I hope that’s what he meant.

During the press briefing they did not get too deep into new spells and magic items in TCoE but there are some tidbits to share. For starters Tasha adds new spells of her own design to D&D canon. Tasha’s caustic brew and Tasha’s otherworldly guise are two mentioned and I’m excited to see more. Spells named for the wizards who created them evokes a sense of mystery and wonder in all D&D players and after all her incredible excursions and magical experimentation I’m certain Tasha’s influence on 5E D&D will be immense.

Spellcasters can boost their power with new spell focus magic items too, which sounds awesome. There’s got to be a magical cauldron, right? One of the magic items Crawford talked about sounds totally awesome — the Tarokka Deck. Not like, any old prophetic card deck though. This is THE Tarokka Deck, an artifact capable of trapping spirits. Can I tell you I lost track of what they said for a moment because I was daydreaming about a Ghostbusters inspired 5E D&D campaign.

Sidekicks (remember them?) get expanded in TCoE too. Resources to create your own customized sidekicks sounds like a lot of fun new toys to play with. When asked what the most surprising thing about the book is, Crawford revealed there’s a sidekick class. You can play as a Warrior, Expert or Spellcaster, which offers a slimmed down experience for perhaps new players or those looking for less complexity. This sounds awesome to me. I’ve used the Sidekicks content from UA several times and it is terrific, so more of that and more ways to use it can’t go wrong.

More than that though Crawford was surprised by “how much liberty players have to customize.” The Lineage System, tons of new class options and alternate features, spells, feats (wow I didn’t even mention those!) all combine to create more levers and dials players and DMs can use to tailor our game experiences and tell the kinds of stories we want with exactly the kinds of characters we imagine.

“Our work on the game is a delightful conversation with the community that never ends,” as Crawford put it. With tremendous amounts of fun, cool sounding new content like they’re brewing up in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, I don’t doubt it.

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A tiefling sorcerer levitates several feet off the ground. [Art by Kieran Yanner]

A lineup of four homunculus servants. [Art by Irina Nordsol]

The young wizard Tasha studies her spellbook in front of Baba Yaga’s hut. Looming nearby is Baba Yaga herself, watching her adopted daughter intently. [Art by Brian Valeza]

This is a massive tome holding secrets of ultimate evil. The exterior of the book reflects the evil within. The covers are made of dark demon scales, which are trimmed in rune-carved metal shaped to look like demonic claws. [Art by David Sladek]

Two wood elf lads swim in a glittering pond, which is fed by a waterfall that pours out of a face carved in a bluff. [Art by Robin Olausson]

A youthful merfolk king lounges on his throne underwater. [Art by Andrew Mar]

Using a psychic spell, a wizard battles a troglodyte underground. [Art by Andrew Mar]

Sidekicks will be expanded in the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. [Image courtesy Wizards of the Coast]

An alternate cover art version is only available through local game stores. [Art by Wylie Beckert]

A heavy, ominous storm brews at sea as clouds gather. But these are not normal storm clouds. These have formed into a churning mass of enormous skulls in the sky. [Art by Titus Lunter]

Oh! Are you still here? One last thing I’ll mention is the section on Magical Environments includes Eldritch Storms, magical fruits and magical roads, a Mirror Realm and a Mimic Colony. Stay nerdy.

Congrats! That new #DnD stuff you thought would be in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything is in there. #staynerdy The follow up to 2017's Xanathar's Guide to Everything, on Nov. 17, 2020 fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons upcoming…

[niennavalier]

So I’m sure no one cares but

I’ve recently discovered genderbent Frozen covers and animatics and honestly I love these? Like, a lot? 

(Rambly thoughts under the cut, because I got invested in talking about Disney movies and ways they write characters and generalizing stuff, despite writing this all on a whim and doing not much research but hey, that’s what this blog is for. Random thoughts about movies and stories and Youtube comments)

I mean, I’ll admit that I’ve never been a big fan of Frozen - nothing against the story (cause it is good and for all I will criticize Disney for not generally being particularly uh...keen on taking any risks, I do appreciate the way they do break the mold here) or the music (it sounds like a Broadway musical, hell yeah) - but tbh Let it Go far overstayed its welcome and yes, I’m glad kids enjoyed the movie, but we heard it nonstop for way longer than we should have. The song honestly never felt like it went away for, what like, 2 years? I can listen to songs on endless loops, and this was still too much for me. Granted, I never hated it (my brother did, possibly still does, so I didn’t mind listening to it for the sole purpose of tormenting him) but still. It sorta turned me off from the franchise. I didn’t need to hear it every time I walked into a store.

And I’ll also admit to never being big on genderbending. Nothing against people who enjoy it, but it’s never been my thing, and the few fics I’ve read with it never felt like it used the swap for any sort of message or to explore anything particularly interesting. Which I would’ve preferred, because otherwise, I didn’t see the reason for the swap, personally. (and to be fair, I turned off of this pretty quickly, so I’m sure there are good ones out there, but it’s really just never been something I’m big on)

But like...okay. There is this animatic for Show Yourself, but with the audio dropped into the male vocal range and I love it so much. It’s wonderful and adorable (and the song is legitimately very good, so I’ve seen that part, despite never having actually watched Frozen 2). And also a handful of actual covers, which are absolutely amazing. And now I’ve found the same sort of thing with Let it Go (which I’m now okay with - I guess it just takes 7 years for me to get over the oversaturation of that song in society) and like holy shit, friends. Big fan.

Scrolling through the comments also gets all the “can we please get a Disney Prince movie” thoughts and hey, I’m so on board with this. I know, there are movies with princes (Aladdin, Hercules, Lion King, etc), but it’s less that plain fact of having a prince, and more of the arc for the character? Basically, I wanna destroy the trend of having male-oriented movies be more action-adventure-y. Let boys be soft and have feelings, that’s all I ask. Make that the character arc, have your main character be male and need to discover himself, all of the fears and insecurities included, I am begging you. 

(Sidenote because I did see some other interesting mentions: I haven’t seen Hunchback, back from what I’m aware of with that movie, that one probably fits closer to what I’m talking about. Also Treasure Planet, because honestly, that really is exactly the kind of arc that I’m talking about, and there’s a reason I love that movie with all my heart, it’s amazing, and go watch it if you haven’t. But like, it’s a coming of age story with some good ol’ found family and no romance! And while Jim is really smart and has some bad-ass moments, I love when we get insight into his emotional state. But I could gush about this movie forever, moving on. The one thing about these is not the lack of royalty (for me), but just...box office? I don’t know the circumstances for Hunchback, except that the numbers apparently aren’t great, and to my knowledge, someone over at Disney just didn’t want Treasure Planet to do great, and this goes to show what marketing does. Apparently, they did the same to Emperor’s New Groove, which isn’t entirely relevant, but my point is, whoever did this to these movies, screw you, they’re wonderful)

(Apologies for the tangent)

Anyway, I’m not saying remake Frozen, but doing the genderbend works really well here, I think? Obviously, I love that Elsa’s arc is entirely her own, and stories about opening up to family and accepting yourself have messages that everyone needs to hear, regardless of any barrier. So this isn’t a criticism, just a thought. Because (granted, I’m not doing research to write this, and I’m admittedly not 100% caught up on Disney movies) it feels to me like female characters do tend to have the more emotional arcs. Talking Disney Renaissance, this feels true in the female-lead movies, especially if you compare to the respective princes. In male-lead movies, it’s not entirely true, and I’m not calling the characters flat or emotionless, but that’s not the main thing going on in the movie. (ie, Simba has his reservations about returning and so he talks to Mufasa, and that’s a big scene and its important, but it feels more like it’s just a step to ultimately taking down Scar - tbh, compare the screentimes there). Again, the Renaissance movies are fantastic and I love them, but I just want to make some comparisons. And I don’t want to delve too deep into the more recent ones, because I haven’t seen them all, but the focus seems much more on the strong, independent female-lead (again, not a criticism because we can always do with more strong ladies who don’t need no man - I am just saying). 

But anyway. Frozen. I like the idea of keeping Anna as herself, because the Hans twist and more slow-burn-y development with Kristoff is good - that accomplishes the idea of breaking down tropes. But Elsa as a male character is really interesting to me? Having an arc that centers on fear that’s born of isolation, and ends with self-acceptance and familial love, is something that I don’t recall seeing in male characters very often (not never, but not often)? But I can think of tons of male characters who appear confident and charismatic, even if that’s in their own way, and then even if we do peel back to find trauma and pain, I can think of more instances of it presenting as bitterness or anger rather than genuine fear (or at the very least, we as the audience don’t quite see that fear). I want to see a male character who was forced to repress who they are and has real fear as to who their true self is. I want this character to discover who that is and have a hard time coming to grips with it, and all that stuff because I honestly just really like writing a lot of self-deprecation. Won’t deny that. And then pairing that with magic is also just interesting IMO. I don’t know how magic tends to fall with regard to this sort of thing, but just the fact that it’s inborn and different (akin to D&D sorcery), rather than learned and understood (like D&D wizardry, or even HP wizards), is an interesting thought to me? Maybe because the “strange and different” type of magic reminds me more of the general conception of witches (or...the Salem Witch Trials) which is also more female-leaning, but I won’t stand by that super strongly, because it’s not something I’ve looked into all that much. But it means, to me, that it would be an interesting way to sorta...turn the tables in the way magic gets used.

Point being: I just think this would be a really solid message. That bravery doesn’t have to be saving the world or killing the dragon or even the self-sacrifice story that’s become more prominent in stories now. It can also come from battling your own demons and opening up to people to ask for help. Which is obviously something everyone needs to learn, but if we’re gonna fight the submissive female character trope with some badass heroines, then I say we also do the same thing in reverse for our male characters. Just a thought

[schtroumpf-a-lunettes]

Smurf Village Upturned, Chapter 13

Ch1 | Ch2 | Ch3 | Ch4 | Ch5 | Ch6 | Ch7 | Ch8 | Ch9 | Ch10 | Ch11 | Ch12

Read on: AO3 | FF.net | This post

PART TWO: A VILLAGE OVERTURNED

Looking back much, much later, Brainy was able to piece together much of what must have happened that day – as well as the chain of events that probably took place for things to turn out as they did. He was able to make an educated assumption on what it must have been like for Roesia, too. The glowing smurfs' luminescence finally became visible to the average eye, and said smurfs were propelled by magical force into Roesia's special little part of the forest, a portion of the ground waiting for each of them. Before long, they were all lined up in place, forming a circle around her with each smurf equally spaced apart. Papa Smurf and Hefty were the first glowing smurfs to arrive who were not already present, apparently. Vanity and Clumsy's sudden hope for a rescue was quickly quashed upon realising that those two were just as trapped as they were. He was there too, of course – Brainy was trapped just like them, but his enchanted glasses meant that it was a fact hardly registered by his conscious self. No, only a subconscious force reigned at that time – one the other smurfs would describe to him as having been "eerie". But once all of the glowing smurfs that Roesia sought were finally in place, Brainy could imagine that she probably started getting very excited, perhaps as giddy as a child on their birthday. She did not think, after all, that this was going to be her last day. No, as far as she was concerned, she was close, so very close to getting exactly what she wanted.

It was Vanity who'd had the “bright” idea of throwing a rock at Brainy's head. Well, at his glasses, to be more precise. None of them could safely move from their spots on the ground, and it was obvious that continuing to wear them would be bad news. Needless to say, Vanity succeeded in knocking the glasses from his face in a rather painful manner, and that's the point where Brainy's properly fleshed-out memories finally rejoin him, for better or for worse. Upon being separated from those cursed glasses, he was back – back to normal, and with no clue what was going on at that. It was all a confused mess – without his glasses the world was a blur. He didn't quite know where he was and there were voices all around him. He took a single step forward as he tried to gather his bearings, and then immediately leapt into the air with a howl. He'd stepped outside the designated markings on the ground that he wasn't even aware of and could not see, and retaliation had been swift in the form of searing pain. Luckily it was over as quickly as it had begun once he was back in place, confused and not daring to try moving again. "Why are you still conscious?" someone had demanded of him. It had been Roesia. Brainy could hardly know how to begin answering such a strange question. "The markings, you should have…" her voice trailed off, and then, after that, evidently she had turned her attention towards other matters instead. "You know, Roesia," Vanity's voice had cut through the cacophony of everyone present, "I have been meaning to ask about this glowing. I know I tend to have a natural shine about me, but something tells me that this is a little more than that." "Oh, well, it's from a vast build-up of accumulated temporal magic! I've never seen such huge concentrations in a single being my entire life, let alone a group like this… You all must have had quite some experiences among yourselves." Roesia's reply made it sound as if she were excited to share this knowledge. She really had been getting ahead of herself. Vanity ploughed on, probably in an attempt to distract her so that someone would perhaps come up with some way of escaping this mess. "You never did answer our question, either. Why did you give Brainy and I the insight?" A quick laugh. "Well, why not? Isn't sharing a good thing?" Obviously, she had given them insight in order to help with furthering her own goals, although it ultimately wouldn't have made a difference in the end. It had been an easy way to make sure that all of the smurfs she needed were accounted for… which would have been more difficult if she couldn't see the whole village and its occupants with her own eyes to verify who glowed and who didn't. That, and she had no doubt been genuinely curious what effects passing on the insight to them would have - a fun little experiment from her point of view. If there were more words exchanged between Roesia and Vanity, he hadn't heard them at that time, because Clumsy had addressed him directly. How had the conversation gone? "Brainy? You alright?" "Oh, the insight," he whispered to Clumsy miserably once he heard the nearby voice, "I never even got to see myself with it." "I wouldn't worry too much, Brainy, I don't think that's such a big deal," Clumsy tried, replying gently. "Oh, but it is! Vanity is so stubborn sometimes. If only you had been given the insight…" "Ah, I'm not sure I'd have use for a fancy thing like that. I feel like, maybe the stuff in other smurfs' minds, should probably stay there, you know?" "You could've told me what you saw, if you had it…" Brainy insisted. Clumsy smiled. "I don't need a special vision to understand my friend – you don't need special powers to figure yourself out, either. That's somethin' you're 'sposed to do on your own." Silence followed, as Brainy took those words in. "That was so… profound of you to say." It was just after this exchange that Roesia started to make her intent clear. She wanted all of their time magic, wanted it for herself. The stuff that had become attached to their essences, presumably as they put the time crystals to use, which was not normally visible to the average eye. But for Roesia, with her special vision? They might as well have been stars burning brightly in the night sky. "Are you connected to Balthazar?" Brainy had heard Papa Smurf demand as he felt around for his glasses. "We know very well that wizard is obsessed with seeing into the future." "I've heard of his exploits, but no, I don't work for anyone. Why restrict yourself to the future, anyway? Time goes out in all directions. Well, it's been nice talking to you. Sorry to cut the conversation short, but it's all finally ready – time for you all to hand over the rich resources of temporal magic you all have." There'd been two smaller circles marked out within the greater circle where the sixteen smurfs, and Smoogle, lined the circumference, all equally spaced apart. Finally, his outstretched fingers made contact with the familiar feel of his fallen glasses – he could tell that the lens was cracked and damaged a little. How annoying. Unthinkingly, he'd slipped them back on again before it could properly click that oh, that's right, the insight was still attached to them, and given its negative side-effects, he probably shouldn't have done that. But something was different about this time. Because now, he could see into Roesia, too. It must have been due to the crack in the lens… so she had merely blocked herself off from being accessible all this time, along with the other "blocks" she had put in place… and with good reason. He was just in time to see her slip her necklace off and lay it in one of the inner two circles before going to stand in the other. A loud gasp had escaped him, heads had turned in his direction. "It's going to kill us," he said. "We're going to die." "What… what?" Snappy looked about fearfully, wide-eyed. "It's not possible to extract temporal magic non-lethally," Brainy explained flatly, "and as long as we're alive and it's bound to us, no one can ever make any actual use of it, least of all ourselves." Yes, he could finally see with clarity exactly what she'd been playing at. Roesia had made no attempt at denial. "Bound temporal magic… kind of like a piece of decoration for the soul… ultimately useless," he remembered Roesia saying, before Sassette's pleading voice rang out: "Say it isn't true! Say it isn't true!" They were all gazing at her in horror, but still she refused to deny Brainy's accusation. "Sorry, I didn't want you to find out beforehand." Vanity spoke next. "...Say, Clumsy, could you toss me my mirror? If this really is my last day on this earth, I want to make sure I look my best." "No… No, Roesia, you won't do this," Papa Smurf spoke up firmly. He was surely thinking very fast, intent on finding a way out of this, for all of them. "Was it not you yourself who said earlier that you had never seen such huge concentrations of temporal magic in a single being your whole life? I can see very clearly how much I'm glowing – isn't that more than enough temporal magic for you? So you can let everyone else go." "I'm really sorry Papa Smurf. It's very noble of you for offering, but I've already got you all here, so it's not much of a bargain… There's so much that can be done with this magic, interchangeably, when it's extracted. Almost like magic currency. And there's a lot of things I want to do. I hope you can understand." "But with everyone here, you still surely have more than enough, several times over. At least set the two smurflings free right now. Please." Brainy didn't have to think too hard to realise that he was aiming to at least get the smurflings out of harm's way first, and then he could focus on freeing everyone else. "I really wish I could, truly, I have nothing against any of you. But I'm afraid I can't risk it. The structural integrity of the entire extraction strictly requires a full set, working together, all in the correct placements. All your temporal magic is alike and therefore connected… so this set-up I've done here maximises that." It was then that Brainy saw Papa Smurf's expression change, as if something had just clicked together in his mind. "…But you don't have a full set." She hadn't captured everyone with temporal magic who had been time travelling all those years ago. She was missing Baby Smurf. That meant the "structural integrity" of the entire extraction and the magically binding markings on the ground were already compromised. Roesia claimed that she needed a "full set" of everyone for her plan to work at maximum capacity, but she didn't have it. Perhaps that was why Brainy had not fallen unconscious upon stepping outside of the markings' confines. If Roesia had heard him, she gave no indication. She was already chanting, at that point. As far as she was aware, she wasn't missing anyone. But even if she didn't have everyone she needed, she would still be able to perform the temporal magic extraction. She'd already started the process. He could feel it, could feel something being sucked out of him, he was losing energy. "No," Papa then announced loudly, "not my little smurfs." And then he took a step outside of his circle. The retaliation from the binding magic must have been immediate. Everyone could see it in Papa's pained expression – he was in pain, no doubt. But unlike Brainy, who had leapt into the air upon being greeted with the sensation, Papa stayed outside of the circle – and then took another step forward instead. With obvious effort, he kept moving one foot in front of the other, exploiting the weaknesses in the set-up's defences caused by Baby's absence. If it weren't for that, the binding markings would be too strong. Roesia broke off her chanting when she noticed and instead began demanding that Papa return to his place. That's where she needed him, after all. But Papa ignored her and gradually continued shuffling onwards, crawling agonisingly forward when his legs gave out. The closer he got to the circle that contained the necklace, the more Roesia's shouts took on a pleading note. She even tried to swat Papa away, but such a thing required leaving her own circle. She unthinkingly tried to take a step forward, to go and swat Papa away, anything, only to shriek in pain and step back as she was assailed with the very same searing sensation for leaving her place. She couldn't afford to leave her place anyway; anyone out of position would make the whole process more and more unstable. That was not in her interest. None of this was. He was moving towards the necklace that was lying on the ground. He must have realised the sheer amount of power running through it: how it operated as the focal point of the entire extraction process. It was simultaneously the weakest and most sensitive point, yet holding the most power. If it were to be disturbed, the careful structure that Roesia set up would abruptly collapse, and with everything thrown so out of balance, the markings on the ground would no longer be magically binding. "You don't know what you're doing! No…!" Roesia cried. It looked like Papa Smurf knew exactly what he was doing. "Set us all free," Papa commanded. "I will." "She's lying," Brainy found himself saying. He could see now how intent she was in finishing what she'd started. How she wouldn't hesitate to double-cross Papa the moment he no longer posed an immediate threat to the extraction process. Papa was close to the enchanted necklace, now. He was close enough to touch it. And Brainy was close enough to a realisation that came just a little too late. He saw Papa Smurf reach out and wrench the necklace out of position, and *** everyone was thrown off their feet by the magic-infused explosion that followed. Brainy landed roughly on the hard ground, the lenses of his glasses now having been shattered completely. After a few stunned moments, he was able to note that he was relatively unharmed. The rough landing may leave some bruises, but nothing more than that. He then had no choice but to try and rely on his ears to make sense of what was going on, since the world was nothing but a great blur to him once more without the aid of his glasses. But listening did little to clear up the confusion – there were so many sounds all around him. Sounds of distress. Words started to get filtered through. But he didn't want to listen. They were saying the wrong things. There were scattered cries, both distant and close by. Some weeping. "No… No!" He began to see… something. Even though he could not see anything clearly, even with his terrible vision he could still distinguish the difference between light and dark, and there was something brightening in his vision – ah, was this it, then? Was he dying? Was he supposed to "move into the light"? No, when he moved closer he found that the light was not connected to him at all. He tripped over another smurf – Clumsy, it was Clumsy, he'd know that voice anywhere… He tried asking Clumsy what was going on. He was so glad to hear his voice and know that he was right by his side. Clumsy told him they were safe, but there was something else in his voice. He trailed off mid-sentence, his attention so focused on something else that he failed to help inform Brainy just what it was. "Papa. Papa…" that was Grouchy. He kept saying it again and again. "I've seen this before," said Grandpa softly. Weakly. "There's nothing… Nothing left to be done." "That's not true! I hate…!" "Papa Smurf saved us all, but he… He…" Smurfette's voice trembled. The others would later help explain to Brainy that it had been Papa who was emanating all that light, when no one else had been glowing anymore after the explosion. It was a light that was different from the glowing caused by the temporal magic. A natural light that would take hold of a smurf's form once the soul had dissipated, according to Grandpa. And then the body would dissipate too, not leaving behind a single trace. That's how it worked when it came to smurfs. Not that anyone present apart from Grandpa had ever had a chance to discover this before. Brainy didn't get to see Papa's form disappear. He only got to hear the reactions to it all around him as it happened in front of the very eyes that could not properly see it. It was actually quite a beautiful sight, if anyone's words to that effect could be trusted, but no sight could ever be beautiful enough to alleviate the excruciating circumstances behind it. All he really got to see was the bright light slowly dimming, fading, as Papa faded along with it. If only his glasses weren't damaged beyond repair, maybe he would have been able to see Papa one last time.

[lovehaswonangelnumbers]

New Post has been published on https://lovehaswonangelnumbers.org/acceleration-of-polarity/

Acceleration of Polarity

Acceleration of Polarity

By A Gift From Gaia

Energetic Navigation – FULLY LOADED

Did someone hit the acceleration button for polarity? Has gravity been turned off? This energy is beyond magical, super intense, super exquisite and I’m witnessing cosmic surfers reach off the charts high waves! IN-CRED-IBLE

High waves are most definitely what we are experiencing, super charged photonic light from the cosmic rays has been pouring through, however we are now due some Solar Winds to bring forward some more action energy, some more super movement for the new codes we have been storing within our DNA to be activated. Protons are currently raising which tells us our magnetosphere is charging so many of the super sensitives will begin to feel the shift now, the prediction is for a G1 storm which is likely to take folk deep within or deep OUT, this will simply depend on how many of those sand bags, those weighted timelines you are prepared to cut away, but DEEP is most definitely the word that springs to mind.

The acceleration of polarity is making itself known within the collective, a divide, something resembling the Grand Canyon is appearing in the 4th frequency, folk dancing with ego and choosing to experience the depths of their minds creations, returning to outdated experiences to realise the attachment programming, where they do not value LIGHT, where they do not value love which ultimately is a lesson in Self Love, the trouble with the 4th frequency is there is an expanded awareness somewhat, which holds responsibility in which the soul will be pushing for those to experience, a guiding light onto the path of the heart where we experience the ultimate heart awakening and begin living as Soul on Earth in Flesh. Yet on the other end of the spectrum there are the cosmic surfers, those who have moved through the 5th portal and there have been a number who have come through are finding the new space of peace, joy and abundant everything like living the dream, clear minds, open hearts and very comfortable in the zero point space where everything begins to move, what this does, energetically speaking is creates acceleration for all, for the entire collective as the cosmic surfers stretch out the bandwidth with their rapid expansion, those anchored in the 3rd dimension of blind bliss, the matrix makers who act like busy little worker ants, securing and building pointlessly hold the old earth frequency in place (for now) which stretches out the 4th frequency so that ALL may be SEEN and more can move from their mind awakened state into their heart awakening, and this is the space in which we see the quickening taking place, everything is pulled, twisted and stretched to the maximum in order for all to be Seen.

Not all are yet able or willing to enter the pain barriers, not all are able to see that behind that smoke screen of what they believe to be true, exists a whole new world designed with the codes of the 5th frequency, that of unconditional love, those who have been surfing the lower aspects of the 4th realm often bounce back into their sleepy space to continue their addiction of chasing the happy dragon, an addiction that this race has been running out for aeons, a false belief that happiness is like a pill, we receive it in small doses when we have been good, our parents and our parents, parents trained us well to believe that happiness isn’t a stable frequency – more blind lies.

I am sure it wont be long before those choosing the old, to go back, start using that word “SORRY” and if you hear it, if you experience the “jumpers” humbly returning, then please remember a sorry is a changed behaviour ONLY and perhaps give a reminder that there is no need to apologise or explain to the out there world, but to realise those words need to be redirected within, for their own Self to feel forgiveness of the highest order.

If you find yourself teetering on the edge of a timeline, if you haven’t quite jumped yet then take some advice……

DON’T GO BACK

Not even with a little extra awareness, not even with a safety plan, not even with a guide…..how much more of the SAME do you need to see, it becomes self sacrificing and trust me when I say, as we now move ever closer to the great conjunction in January, going back is going to feel like suicide, that’s one heck of a ego death you are choosing, however perhaps it is needed, perhaps to connect with the heart the entire world needs to snap in half to be able to see the core.

In order to release these attachments, in order to snap the back of duality it really is a case of doing the opposite and from here observing the fallout, which will highlight the anchors that held you in so tightly, for you to begin dissecting and breaking down the old codes.

Now enough of the old world HOW ABOUT THE NEW!

Goodness me its been quite a wave, cosmic surfers, those chasing the waves out front are expanding in their amazingness and experiencing realities that are now feeling so spacious, everything forming, aligning as the focus purely now goes onto the physical vessel and the realisation comes in that in order to CARRY on the experience MORE must be given to the physical body. New exercise routines, new diets, new ways of living consciously, tweaks and turns to improve the ability to hold and carry this light begins and light bodies begin to come online in the higher frequencies that attract the Soulstyle life we are to experience. Everything becomes simple, there are no requirements to push, to exert energy in fields not along the path, to seek, to correct, to debate or to state, its just simple, its easy and it all comes home to YOU.

Home is where the heart is after all…..

Todays energy brings some beautiful harmonies for us to play in, the moon makes a number of trines so I will give a brief explanation.

Moon trine Juno, well Juno is really coming into play now as the Sun, Venus and Mars play around this little gem in our sky. Juno represents commitment, partnerships and if I continue lots of things that create attachment out there in the timelines of realities so I would like to quickly invert this, commitment to Source (being you, and All), the partnership or the union of the masculine and feminine within YOU, lets entirely release this out there stuff, everything is reflective of the internal vibration, so as we know, by making the adjustments within and by holding a love frequency we attract realities aligned, lets keep the focus entirely on Self expansion…

So as we know the Sun, Mars and Venus are about to conjunct with Juno who requests the union, the balance, the harmony between the masculine and feminine within. The Moons trine today feels somewhat like a preparation so whilst in some octaves they will be experiencing the emotional streams of realising what is out of whack, this is ultimately preparing you for the meet just hours away, tomorrow the sun conjuncts Juno and they begin entering the frequency of Regulus, this trine could work like a little trickster, as we know trines are harmonious so it may be easy to drift into the false beliefs as the trine makes this soft, its easy to MANIPULATE through the false kindness, the relief that this moment is more comfortable, that “they” are being reasonable “today” BUT and we love big BUTS this is likely to give a lesson for you to look deeper into the truth, the agenda and the subconscious drivers as this trine energy could well be flipped on its head and the TRUTH, the behaviour rears its head again as we move into this Virgo party now about to happen, like walking into a party dressed in fancy dress but the invite clearly stated casual dress, not paying attention? THINK you know better? Like dancing with illusions? LIGHTS ON, you will feel the spotlight.

Those of open heart will feel this super nurturing energy, expanding on the already established equilibrium, moon trine juno is a get out in nature day, it’s a day to play with the magic, to create something from the heart, a stream of purity to play in.

Moon trine Venus echoes this, open the heart, come back home, kick off those shoes and dance barefoot to the harmony of Earth, this holds some super relaxed tones to again get creative, enjoy some leisure time and nurture Self just that whole lot more. Its an energy to practice the affirmation of SOFT, tone everything down, walk softly, touch softly, speak softly and through this focus it will be super easy to spot the harshness….FOR you to then realign and deal with in order to continue the these divine experiences.

Moon trine Pholus gives new direction, new coordinates are being seeded and there are glimpses, day dreaming, feeling into what the new timeline will be like, this can make folk feel a little ungrounded however it is up in the heights that we receive the most amazing dreams and from here it is your role, as ground control to begin planting them in the fertile soil of reality.

Whereas Pholus now also trine to Venus brings in a huge amount of heart vibration, a huge influx of feel to direct the inner masculine into a space of Deal as we listen to the whispers from within. This also could play out in the reality as a female bringing assistance or perhaps a new perspective for you to see and change course…..watch out for angels in female form, these changes will be long lasting.

Moon trine Mars creates that harmony I just mentioned with the venus pholus transit, this feels like a compliant masculine energy that is ready and able to take direction from that internal feminine whisper. Confidence increases, an inner knowing that it is exactly right to follow the heart, and it feels safe, comfortable and aligned……because it is!

Mercury trine Jupiter gives an expansion on the data we are currently receiving, MORE, MORE and MORE we scream when tuned into the hearts requests however the lower octaves can experience a lot of mind junk bubbling up to the surface, things can get noisy and the most perfect way to begin un-muddling the muddle is to journal it all out, spend time (self love) removing the noise from the mind and get it on paper, start the evaluations, start seeing what is conscious and what is unconscious, the chances are everything that is loud is simply unconscious and really needs a data dump, get it on paper and hold a little ritual of burning it, purifying it out.

Moon will be moving through a conjunction with Uranus today, more direction changes to be expected, the Moon is currently at 0 degrees and Uranus at 6 degrees Taurus, so this charged moon with its aspects today is really getting down and dirty in the foundational spaces of you, demanding that all old emotions are released, like a clear up as she begins her task of dissolving what no longer allows the structure, the foundation to hold securely. This may reflect in your patterns in terms of self love, cosmic surfers will no doubt be pulled towards making changes in diet, exercise and aligning their way, their habits to a more light aligned way, those in the lower octaves generally look at the relationships, the attachments and when Uranus is in play we often see a lot of reactive activity, which creates somewhat surprise revelations, in order to shift direction. Sudden roadblocks tend to appear, emotionally charged to highlight this road is now fully closed.

All in all it appears the collective have some huge opportunities to shift in a completely new direction, and if this solar wind appears this will assist no end, changes are here for the picking.

You only need choose………do you choose the light of your Soul, do you choose Source, do you choose unconditional everything and to be a part of creating the new world

Or do you choose the stress, anxiety filled and cyclic patterns of the people program.

*****

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[mst3kproject]

Psycho A-Go-Go

Before he made Carnival Magic, Al Adamson made movies like this.

We open on a crotch.  A mediocre singer sings a mediocre song, while a couple of fringe-bedecked go-go dancers gyrate behind her.  This only just barely has anything to do with the plot, but we’ll be treated to a couple of recurrences of it.

When the actual movie starts, it’s with some guys in surgical scrubs committing a jewel heist.  A policeman catches up with them, and they have to stash their loot in the back of a pickup truck – before they can retrieve it, the truck’s owner returns and drives off.  This guy turns out to be Dave Clarke, husband of the singer from the opening.  He never notices his expensive cargo, but it’s found later by his six-year-old daughter Nancy, who decides it’s pirate treasure and hides it in her Christie Minstrel doll.  The thieves search Clarke’s house and when they find nothing there, they decide to pry the truth out of him by going after his wife and daughter.  If only Clarke had any truth to tell them!

You know how I’ve mentioned that all the men in these movies look exactly alike?  Psycho A-Go-Go is a particularly egregious offender.  The thieves all look alike, except for the one who gets shot, who I was prepared to refer to as Scowling Hemsworth Brother, and the guy in charge, who has inexplicably drawn a mustache and goatee on himself with a sharpie marker.  Worse, all these guys also look just like Clarke!  Why is this?  Is it the haircut?  They all have dark hair in that 60’s Man Haircut.  Eventually I figured out that one was The Rapey One and another was The One Who Kinda Looks Like Tom Hanks In Big, but by then the movie was two thirds over.  There’s also a couple of cops who were cast in the same mold.

The same thing goes on with the women in the movie. There’s an abundance of dark beehive hairdos over identical faces.  The bad guy’s moll (whose name I never caught, so I shall call her Molly), Mrs. Clarke, the murdered secretary, elevator woman, and the nightclub singer all look exactly the same… to the point where I was trying to figure out if the singer were the same person as Molly but then the movie blindsided me with the revelation that she was actually Mrs. Clarke!  I only managed to tell them apart when they were all in different rooms.

Maybe it’s the soft focus.  The whole movie is in soft focus and maybe it obscures the facial features?  It’s not very well-lit either.  There’s the inevitable shitty day-for-night, which I think just gives up at the end and decides the sun is rising, and a climactic car chase so dark all you can see are headlights, but the rest is kinda muddy too.  A lot of shots are also from across a room, and appear to just show a bunch of identical men in identical suits.  Maybe the casting director had a secret cloning lab.  I don’t know.  I just don’t know.

So much for what the movie looks like. Let’s talk about what happens in it. There’s a surprising amount that’s trying to go on in Psycho A-Go-Go.  Of course there’s the main plot where the bad guys are trying to get the diamonds back but nobody knows where they are except for Nancy, whom they never think of asking. There’s actually one nice little moment in this, when Nancy tells Rapey Guy she’ll give him her treasure if he’ll promise not to hurt her mother.  He ignores her, because he thinks a six-year-old girl’s treasure is probably just a bunch of those rings you used to get at the dentist.  He doesn’t realize his mistake until the Christie Minstrel doll is dropped and broken open during the chase, and then it’s too late. I think this is supposed to be ironic but it doesn’t quite get there.

Aside from that, there’s a number of other plotlines. Molly is supposed to be Sharpie Mustache’s girlfriend, but she’s cheating on him with Guy Who Looks Like Tom Hanks, and Sharpie Mustache gets more suspicious of and more violent towards them as the movie goes on.  Dave’s brother-in-law is one of the cops investigating the robbery, and manages to swoop in at the end to save the day.  Rapey Guy keeps wandering off to brutalize women, which is never really dealt with, and there’s also the Mute Thug who makes friends with Nancy.  All of this is cliché and none of it is really interesting.  Scenes of multiple identical guys talking are downright boring – how are we supposed to care when we can’t even tell which are the good guys and which the bad?

I will say, though, that at least Psycho-A-Go-Go sets everything up.  Hiding the diamonds in the doll never really gets the payoff it deserves, but other stuff works.  It’s a bit too much of a coincidence that Dave’s brother-in-law is the detective on the case, but it does explain how the cops knew where to go and prevents their arrival being a deus ex machina – if only all these men didn’t look alike, so we could tell which one just got shot.  The murders Rapey Guy commits are almost entirely gratuitous, but they do make us feel that Mrs. Clarke is truly in danger when he gets his hands on her.

There is a lot of brutality against women that goes on here.  Sharpie Mustache slaps Molly around a lot, and Rapey Guy just goes around committing felonies for fun.  All he needed from the office at the construction company was Dave’s name and address, but he stabbed the secretary for no reason.  She didn’t even see him there.  All he needed from the redhead was to know where Mrs. Clarke was, but he rapes and strangles her – possibly not in that order.  These two incidents are never brought up again, not even in a police context.  Nobody in the movie gives a shit about these women, and apparently Al Adamson, who also wrote the script, didn’t either.  They’re nothing to him but foreshadowing.

I think Rapey Guy may be the ‘Psycho’ referenced in the title, but if so that’s a little strange because the movie doesn’t present him as the main villain.  Sharpie Mustache is the criminal mastermind, and while we do see him losing control of his henchmen, he’s still the one who’s giving the orders.  I guess with him dead there’s nobody to rein in Rapey Guy anymore, but I don’t think he ever actually tried to.

Psycho-A-Go-Go isn’t very clear about who its hero is, either. It can’t be Dave, the man whose family is in danger, because in the fine tradition of shitty movie non-heroes, he of course doesn’t do anything.  He spends the middle part of the film tied to a chair in his own living room, and at the climax he hits his head on a rock and just lies there while his brother-in-law the cop shoots Rapey Guy instead.  So is Officer Brother-in-Law the hero?  He can’t be, because we barely see him.  He and Dave talk very briefly about the case at the nightclub, and then he goes to Dave’s house after his wife asks him to check up on the family, who aren’t answering the doorbell or phone.

I really don’t think Psycho-A-Go-Go is trying to be a movie with something to say, either.  I mean, yeah, it’s another film in which crime doesn’t pay at least partly because the criminals ultimately turn on each other, but really it’s just a lot of scenes of people being horrible in an attempt to shock and thrill the audience.  Nobody really grows.  This is the sort of movie that seems tailor-made for that hoary old arc about the man who doesn’t realize how important his family is to him until they’re in danger, but they don’t even have that.  Dave’s domestic tranquility is shattered, and then restored. I guess Molly and The Guy Who Looks Like Tom Hanks grow a little, since they decide to get out of the whole ‘crime’ thing, but in any reasonable universe they both ended up in jail.

When I compare this film to Carnival Magic, the two movies don’t have a whole lot in common.  Carnival Magic hid its dark content under a veneer of cheerful family fun, and in a way Psycho-A-Go-Go does the same thing – Dave’s happy family are blissfully unaware of the underworld they’re about to be sucked into, and the diamonds are hidden inside the apparently harmless Christie Minstrel doll.  Psycho-A-Go-Go is much more tonally consistent, since when we meet the happy family we already know that horrible things are going to happen to them, and it feels like the film-makers’ hearts were way more in it than they were in Carnival Magic.  That’s somewhat troubling when we consider the difference in content.

If you want to ask me which movie is better, I don’t know how to answer you.  Carnival Magic looks better, with a crisper picture and characters who don’t all look the same, but it’s a weird, messy, disjointed film that isn’t sure what it’s plot is.  Psycho-A-Go-Go looks like ass, and it’s also weird and messy and not sure what we’re supposed to be focused on, but everything that happens is unified by the common thread of the diamonds, and we’re not switching from domestic violence to talking monkey antics and back again.    I’d still rather watch either of them again than Cry Wilderness, but man… this one left just a bad aftertaste.  Can’t I just watch My Neighbour Totoro for the rest of my life?

[gryphons-of-aentha]

The Approximate Plotline of the Gryphonverse (pt. 3)

This is the part where everything gets very weird, jarringly fast. I suspect there must be a way to rework some of this to make it cohesive enough with the first two parts to compile it into one story, but for now I’m afraid we’re stuck with massive, strangely meta genre whiplash.

it also becomes more apparent that the reason all this coincides with Earth dates in real time is that I’ve been making a lot of this up as I go for over ten years now.

So Kyran, and shortly thereafter Iadra, who chased him through the portal, suddenly find themselves on Earth circa 2008. Or rather an alternate timeline Earth that was created when some human teenagers with a basement laboratory, and an interdimensional being badly disguised as a talking dog, accidentally tore a hole in reality, which is what Kyran’s hastily-made portal led through. The humans (and space dog) quickly become entangled in the gryphons’ conflicts as it becomes apparent that the connection between their worlds isn’t going away on its own and none of them know how to close it. A couple years and several shenanigans later (during which Talon and Iadra have reunited and befriended the humans and dog-alien, and Kyran has made enemies of them), Aentha and Earth remain strangely linked and everyone starts to notice signs of something strange at work.

(it’s here that I should mention that the humans, in the original series of short stories I wrote documenting this when I was fifteen, were pretty much self inserts of me and my brother for shits and giggles/stand-ins. Due to conflicts with certain potential subplots that have cropped up that I want to use, this is no longer canon, but it means the Wielder is currently not much more than an empty character slot because I haven’t figured out how I actually want to approach him as a character, aka I am trapped in Jonathan Sims purgatory and don’t know how to get out. So aside from things he definitely does because it’s required to progress the plot, there’s basically a conspicuous void there right now. also the sword was originally called the Ancient Katana™ [the ™ is somehow pronounced but nobody can figure out why or how, and speaking the full name causes the lights to flicker even while outdoors] because I was making fun of all the stupid and sometimes kind of racist tropes that crop up with chosen one narratives, but these days I’m not sure where that falls on the line between “making fun of a dumb racist trope” and “just being racist” so I’m shelving that until I get some second opinions on that one)

Unbeknownst to anyone, larger forces are at play in this pseudo-Earth: an entity similar in nature to the Powers of Darkness, but that feeds on narrative tropes rather than suffering and is substantially more powerful, was drawn by the first Rift created by the humans, and has been manipulating events on Earth in order to trap everyone in a repeating narrative that provides it with a consistent energy source. This comes to a head when one of the humans accidentally becomes some kind of Chosen One known as the Wielder (according to the space dog, who is the only one versed in this stuff) by finding a magic sword that can manipulate both interdimensional energy and narrative tropes (among other things). Kyran, meanwhile, has been looking for this sword, because during some events that tore the Fourth Wall (an actual thing in this story) he realized that he’s been cast as the villain in whatever story they’re all stuck in and therefore can never actually win, which he’s becoming increasingly desperate to do since he’s now back in debt with the Powers of Darkness and needs to resolve this situation and focus his attention back on Aentha and overthrowing Shale. The sword can potentially solve both of these problems, and also make him immensely powerful. With the Entity still manipulating everything, this leads to him inadvertently becoming the Wielder’s arch nemesis but gets him no closer to actually claiming the sword.

Eventually Kyran manages to break reality enough to force a confrontation with the Wielder on neutral ground where the Entity’s narrative won’t prevent him from winning, but due to some unforeseen external factors fails again, and gets his soul bound to the sword. This essentially traps him in a pocket dimension unless summoned by the Wielder and renders him physically unable to cause any actual harm to the Wielder or his allies. On the plus side, the Powers of Darkness can no longer reach Kyran, so as long as he’s bound to the sword and by extension the Entity, he’s safe from any consequences he’s racked up. Incidentally, it also cuts off the by-then-considerable hold the Powers of Darkness had over his mind. No longer clouded by the influence of a malevolent multiconsciousness and with not much to do while trapped in the void, he engages in some actual self reflection for the first time in his life and isn’t thrilled with the conclusion (this by no means makes him instantly a better person, but it does gradually lessen the degree to which he’s an abject asshole). He also discovers that due to his gryphonic heritage, he has a limited amount of control and mobility in interdimensional space (though the sword prevents him from going to any physical dimension) and he finds his way to a gryphonic ruin that seems to have once been part of either a temple or a library, and discovers more about gryphonic history than any Aenthian gryphon ever has. The Wielder mainly leaves him to his own devices in there, since they’re still enemies but at this point there’s not much either of them can really do to the other, and while the sword’s power to bind some beings is intended as a kind of familiar mechanic, Kyran is really not the kind of bound creature to be anything but a belligerent hindrance if summoned. Also every time they interact it tends to end with someone getting stabbed.

The destruction Kyran caused in his bid for the sword, meanwhile, created a schism that broke all known gateways between Earth and Aentha, trapping Talon and Iadra back in their own world. Not knowing what happened to the humans or Kyran, and with no way to find out, they mainly just go back to their lives, now living almost entirely on the outskirts, since things between Andolia and the neighboring gryphons are still getting worse. After a year or two they have a son, who they name Iadros (gryphonic tradition is to name the firstborn cub after the mother regardless of the cub’s gender) and mainly stay occupied with that until the political situation gets dangerous enough for the gryphons that they start to consider ways to access Earth again, with the idea that maybe the Wielder’s Chosen One status would help them solve the whole mess, but at the very least to get Iadros out of harm’s way while he grows up.

About five years after the schism was created, circa 2017, they finally find a way back, unknowingly thanks again to gryphons being powerful interdimensional beings who created a number of their own pathways and pocket dimensions between worlds. As it turns out, things have been developing on the Earth side as well. Kyran and the Wielder have, if not become friends, at least reached a kind of truce, since it turns out when rendered unable to be an evil warlock Kyran’s default state is “Genealogy Aunt but make it goth,” and he’s trying to track down the lost origin world of gryphons, partly for something to do while he’s been trapped in a pocket dimension for five years and partly out of the newfound desire to do something non-destructive for once. It’s almost less of a redemption arc than a quarter-life crisis that happens to lead in a positive direction. Anyway, he needed the Wielder and the sword in order to travel to other worlds on the trail of this lost dimension, and has at least agreed to not stab anyone with letter openers in exchange. Probably helps that they’ve all gone from a gaggle of cosmically-overpowered teenagers to slightly more emotionally mature cosmically-overpowered twenty-somethings.

After some time of this, during which more monster-of-the-week things happen in the course of this ultimately fruitless search for the lost world, it becomes apparent that Kyran probably isn’t interested in killing them all anymore and the Wielder offers to free him from the sword (this will not reattach his soul to his body; his soul currently resides in a crystal from which it can’t be unbound, but giving the crystal to him will separate his will from the sword and the Wielder and he’ll be able to travel around physical reality on his own again). He refuses, knowing that both the Powers of Darkness are probably looking for him at this point and the Entity has a vested interest in him remaining the villain, and he’s very certain that he doesn’t have the willpower or actual power to fight them off and they’d end up back at square one. Especially since the whole soul-trapped-in-a-crystal thing makes him vulnerable to specifically that kind of danger. As long as he remains bound to the sword, the Powers of Darkness can’t get to him to call in his significant debt, and the Entity can’t do anything because technically he’s still the villain of the story and is being forced by the sword’s power to not fight the Wielder. Technically. This was the point where I awkwardly realized I’d accidentally set up a perfect gay enemies-to-lovers plot and had to completely rethink the Wielder as a character because I love that trope too much to just not use it.

Anyway, Talon and Iadra aren’t thrilled to learn that Kyran and the humans are on more or less amicable terms now, since their last few interactions with Kyran have done nothing to indicate that having him around will be conducive to safely raising a child and Iadra in particular has still not forgiven him for what he did to Talon, and without five years of context, the fact that the three (four counting the talking space dog) of them are kind of working together now feels like a bit of a betrayal.

There’s no time for this to really come to a head, because their attempt at magic-sword-based rules-lawyering has actually not fooled or appeased the Entity at all, and it’s very set on returning equilibrium. It tries a couple tactics to get Kyran to turn on everyone or vice versa, including but not limited to sending a double of him to Earth to cause problems (it doesn’t work because the sword renders that impossible and they all know that) and trying to provoke the talking dog who still doesn’t really like him into acting on it (he doesn’t because he has a moral compass and better things to do), but the arrival of Talon, Iadra, and Iadros provides exactly the opportunity it thinks it needs, and it finds a way to hijack Iadros. And unfortunately there’s going to be yet another part to this.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Michael in the Mainstream: The Chris Columbus Harry Potter Films

Here’s a bold stance to take these days: I actually still really love the Harry Potter franchise.

Yes, this series hasn’t had a huge impact on my own writing; my stories I’m working on draw far more from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and the Percy Jackson series than they do Harry Potter. And yes, the author of the franchise has outed herself as a transphobic scumbag whose every post-script addition to her franchise has been an unprecedented bad move (save, perhaps, for allowing Johnny Depp the opportunity to work during a very trying time in his life). But while the author is a horrendous person and the story hasn’t exactly given me as much to work with as other stories have, there are so many great themes, ideas, and characters that even now I’d still say this is one of my favorite series of all time. The world of Harry Potter is just so fascinating, the usage of folklore is interesting, and it has one of the most menacing and disturbing villains in young adult literature and manages to play the whole “love prevails over evil” cliché in such a way that it actually works.

And, of course, then we get into what I’m really here to talk about: the adaptations. The movies are not entirely better than the books; while I do think most of the films are on par with their novel counterparts, and they certainly do a good job of scrubbing out some of the iffier elements in Rowling’s writing, I still think there’s a certain, ahem, magic that the books have that gives them a slight edge. But, look, I’m a movie reviewer, and these films are some of my favorites of all time, and as much as I love the books I’m not going to sit around and say the books surpass them in every single way. There’s a lot to love in these films, and hopefully I’ll be able to convey that as I review the series.

Of course, the only place to truly start is the Chris Columbus duology. Columbus is not the most impressive director out there – this is the man who gave us Rent, Pixels, and that abominable adaptation of Percy Jackson after all – but early on in his career he made a name for himself directing whimsical classics such as the first two Home Alone movies and Mrs. Doubtfire. Those films are wonderfully cast and have a lot of charm, and thankfully this is the Columbus we got to bring us the first two entries in Harry’s story. 

One of the greatest strengths of the first two Harry Potter movies is just the sheer, unrelenting magic and wonder they invoke. They’re so whimsical, so enchanting, so fun; they fully suck you into the world Rowling created and utilize every tool they can to keep you believing. Everything in these films serves to heighten the magic; practical effects and CGI come together with fantastic costuming and set design to make the world of wizards and Hogwarts school feel oh so real. And of course, none of this would be even remotely as effective if not for the legendary score by John Williams, who crafted some of the most iconic and memorable compositions of the 21st century for these films. In short: the tone of these films is pretty perfect for what they are, and every element in them works to make sure you are buying into this tone at every moment.

The other massively important element is the casting, and by god, the casting in these films is simply perfect. Of course, the title characters and his peers have to be unknowns, and thankfully they managed to pluck out some brilliant talent. I don’t need to tell you how good Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson are, even back in these films, but I do feel the need to say that Rupert Grint is vastly underappreciated; I really don’t think the films would work quite as well without his presence, because he does bring that goofy charm Harry’s friend group needs to balance it out. Matthew Lewis is the adorable coward Neville Longbottom and Tom Felton is the snotty brat Draco Malfoy, and though both of their roles are fairly minor in the first two films they manage to make their mark. The second movie pulls in Bonnie Wright as Ginny, and again, I’m gonna say she’s rather underrated; I think she did quite a fine job in her role.

But of course, the real draw of these films is the sheer amount of star power they have in terms of U.K.  actors. You’ve got Maggie Smith (McGonagall), Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid), Warwick Davis (Flitwick and, bafflingly, only the voice of Griphook, who was played by the American Verne Troyer in the first film for… some reason), John Hurt (Ollivander), Toby Jones (Dobby), John Cleese (Nearly Headless Nick)… and this is only the first two films. The movies would continue pulling in stars like it was Smash Ultimate, determined to tell you that “EVERYONE IS HERE” and be the ultimate culmination of U.K. culture.

Of course, even in the first few movies there are those who truly stand out as perfect. Smith and Coltrane are most certainly the perfect embodiment of their characters, but I think a great deal of praise should be given to Richard Griffiths as Uncle Vernon; the man is a volatile, raging bastard the likes of which you rarely see, and he is at once repulsive and comical. He’s pretty much the British answer to J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson. Then we have Jason Isaacs as Lucius Malfoy in the second film, and he is just delightfully, deliciously devilish and dastardly. Isaacs actually came up with a lot of Mr. Malfoy’s quirks himself, such as the long blonde hair, the cane wand, and the part where he tries to murder a small child in cold blood for releasing his house elf (which came about because he forgot literally every other spell and had just read Goblet of Fire, so...). Then of course there is Kenneth Branagh as Gilderoy Lockhart, and… well, it’s Kenneth Branagh as Gilderoy Lockhart. I don’t think you could find a more perfect casting choice (except perhaps Hugh Grant, who was originally cast but had to drop out). He just really hams it up as the obnoxious blowhard and helps make him much more tolerable than his book counterpart, though he does unfortunately have the lack of plot relevance Lockhart did in the book, which is a problem unique to Lockhart. Fun fact, he is the ONLY Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher in the series to not ultimately matter in regards to the main story.

Of course, the greatest casting choice of them all is most certainly The late, great Alan Rickman as everyone’s favorite greasy potions professor, Severus Snape. I think Rickman goes a long way towards helping make Snape one of the greatest characters of all time, with everything about his performance just being perfect, and what makes it even better is how it would ultimately subvert his typical roles (though that’s a story for a different review). I don’t think either of the first films is really his best outing, butt he first one definitely sets him up splendidly. Snape barely has a role in the second film – something that greatly irritated Rickman during the movie’s production apparently – but he still does a good job with what limited screentime he has. Then we have Richard Harris as Dumbledore. Due to his untimely death, he only played Dumbledore in the first two films, but he really did give a wonderful performance that had all the charm, whimsy, and wonder the Dumbledore of the first few books was full of. The thing is, I don’t know if he would have been able to make the transition into the more serious and darker aspects of Dumbledore that popped up in the later books. I guess we’ll never know, which is truly a shame, but at the very least he gave us a good showing with what little time he had.

My only problems with the first two films are extremely minor, though there is at least one somewhat big issue I have. You see, while I do like everything about these films, I feel like they’re a bit too loyal to the books, not doing enough to distinguish themselves as their own thing like films such as Prisoner of Azkaban would do. But if I’m being honest, this is seriously nitpicky; it’s not like this really makes me think less of the films, because they have way more going for than against them. Stuff like this and the cornier early performances from the kid actors are to be expected when a franchise is still finding its legs. It really is more of a personal thing for me; I prefer when creators allow their own vision to affect an adaptation so that I can see how they perceive and interpret the work, but at the same time the first two Harry Potter books are all about setting up and the main plot doesn’t really kick off until the third and fourth books, so… I guess everything balances out?

It is a bit odd looking back at these first two films and noting how relatively self-contained they are compared to the denser films that were to come; you could much more easily jump into either one of these films and really get what’s going on compared to later movies, where you would almost definitely be lost if you tried to leap in without an inkling of the plot. But that is something I do like, since the first two films have really strong plots that focus more on the magical worldbuilding and developing the characters, setting up an incredibly strong foundation for the series to come. There are a few trims of the plot here and there, but it’s not nearly as major as some things that would end up cut later.

But, really, what’s there to cut? Like I said, these movies are more about the worldbuilding and setting up for later plotlines. They’re relatively simple stories here, and I think that’s kind of their big strengths, because it lets the characters and world shine through. The first film honestly is just Harry experiencing the wizarding world for the first time, with him going from scene to scene and just taking in all of the magical sights. Most of the big plot stuff really happens towards the end, when they make the journey down to the Philosopher’s Stone. The second movie is where things get a lot more plot-heavy, with the film focusing on the mystery of the Chamber of Secrets and all of the troubles that the basilisk within causes. Despite how grim the stories can get, especially the second one, these films never really lose that whimsical, adventurous tone, which is incredibly impressive all things considered.

It’s not really criticisms, but there are a few things that make me a bit sad didn’t happen in the first couple of films, or at the very least offer up some interesting “what could have been” scenarios. I think the most notable missed opportunity is the decision to axe Peeves, despite him being planned and having Rik Mayall film scenes with him only to have said scenes left on the cutting room floor, never to see the light of day; Mayall had some rather colorful words to say about the film after it came out. Sean Connery passing up on playing Dumbledore is another missed opportunity, but Connery has always been awful at picking roles and hates fantasy, so this isn’t shocking to me in the slightest. Terry Gilliam being straight-up told by Rowling she didn’t want him directing is another sad but necessary decision, as was Spielberg dropping out; neither guy would have been a very good fit for the franchise, honestly. Alan Cumming turning down the role of Lockhart because Grint and Watson were going to be paid more than him is a bit… lame, but also I don’t think he’d have been as good as Branagh in the role; as much as I love Cumming, Branagh has this grandiose stage actor hamminess that Lockhart desperately needs. There’s a lot of fascinating trivia facts I learned writing this review, and a lot of it paints some pretty weird pictures of how this franchise could have turned out in another world.

Chamber of Secrets and Sorcerer's Stone are both absolutely fantastic, whimsical fantasy movies, and I’d definitely recommend both of them to anyone who likes the fantasy genre. It’s a great jumping off point for younger people who may not be able to handle something as intense or heavy as, say, The Lord of the Rings making it a very useful gateway drug into fantasy, though it still manages to work perfectly as fun, engaging fantasy on its own. I’m personally more of a fan of the third and eighth movies but I can definitely hear arguments for either of these two being someone’s favorites or even the best in the franchise, because they invoke a lot of nostalgia and charm just thinking about them, good memories of seeing them with my family when I was a kid.

Some have come to view Chamber of Secrets less positively over the years, seeing it as an awkward transitional phase between the lighter, more whimsical adventures and the darker plot-driven ones, but honestly, Between the Columbus films, Chamber is definitely the superior one. It takes everything that was great about the first film and builds on it, and also gives us Lucius Malfoy, Dobby, Gilderoy Lockhart, and way better special effects and a more consistent narrative. The first film is still a classic, of course, but it’s almost episodic in nature and a lot more focused on showing Hogwarts to us than delivering a story. Still, it definitely has the plus of having way more Snape than the second film did, and there’s no arguments against that from me! Both films are very good at what they do, and both definitely deserve a watch.

[rosecorcoranwrites]

MacGuffins Matter

If you know what a MacGuffin is, you're probably thinking that they actually don't matter in the slightest and that I'm full of nonsense. If you don't know what a MacGuffin is, here's a definition from Merriam-Webster: an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance. The most famous example is the Maltese Falcon, in the film of the same name. It sets the plot in motion, in that every character wants the statue for himself, but lacks intrinsic value in that "the Maltese Falcon" could be swapped out for the treasure of your choice: the Abyssinian Monkey, the Peruvian Chinchilla, the MacGuffian Beast.

Technically, a MacGuffin only lacks intrinsic value in the meta sense, as the characters themselves obviously want the object for some reason. The Harry Potter books, I think, are perfect examples of well-done MacGuffins (except the last book, but more on that later). The Philosopher's Stone in the first book is a powerful magic item that grants perpetual life, so it makes sense for it to be under lock and key, and for Voldemort to want it. In the meta-narrative, it's just an object that provides a mystery for Harry & Co. to investigate. Rowling does something similar with the horcruxes, which are vitally important to stopping Voldemort, ie, are a convenient way to provide a challenging search for our heroes in the final book.

And yet, many authors don't treat MacGuffins like they matter. Because I overanalyze every bit of media I consume, I've noticed two trends of late wherein MacGuffins are misused, and I'm here to tell you all why this is a problem.

The first trend is when the writers forget why the MacGuffin matters to the characters. This occurs when a plot revolving around a MacGuffin stops dead in its tracks, sometimes for chapters or episodes on end, for no discernible reason. Now, I can give some leeway to dawdling around in comedies, since their purpose is to provide laughs rather than tension. In Slayers Next, for example, the characters are looking for the Claire Bible, a MacGuffin of untold power, but spend 90% of the plot derping around getting into ridiculous situations. To be fair, most of these situations are, in fact, because they are looking for the Claire Bible but keep getting false leads. The only arc where they actually stay in one place for multiple episodes is when they learn that the father of one of the characters has been assassinated and have to investigate. Notice, something intrinsically important—solving the murder of an important character—briefly takes precedence over finding the non-intrinsically important plot device. This diversion works, first, because the diversion is deeply personal and, second, because finding the MacGuffin is not time sensitive, as far as the characters know.

On the other hand, you have Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, where the characters camp in the woods for-seemingly-ever. This isn't a comedy, and what's more, lives are at stake. Every minute that Voldemort isn't killed is a chance for him and the Death Eaters to murder muggles and muggleborns. Yet, we the audience are treated to five million chapters (perhaps I exaggerate) of the characters sitting around wondering what to do next. What's even more frustrating is that the non-camping-in-the-woods parts of that book are so interesting: infiltrating the Ministry of Magic, escaping Malfoy Manor, breaking into Gringotts, returning to Hogwarts. I will be the first to say that a story needs downtime as well as action, but the chapters in the woods felt not like downtime, but wasted time: we learned that Ron has feelings of inadequacy, as well as a strong loyalty to his family, which we already knew; we learn that Harry is willing to brave freezing water to get important stuff, which we already knew; we learn, retroactively, that Snape's patronus is a doe because he loved Lily, which... Wait, why would he associate her with the female version of the animal her husband turns into? As usual, I digress...

Anyway, these chapters make the plot stop dead, making us wonder why the characters aren't doing more to find the horcruxes. They know some of the horcruxes are associated with the Hogwarts founders, so why not seek out a historian? They know they need some serious power to destroy them, so why not seek out a powerful wizard? Why not do something? You could easily argue that they were trying, but I'm not blaming the characters, I'm blaming the writer. She gave us these MacGuffins, but rather than use them to drive the plot, she lets the plot slowly, agonizingly crawl forward due to happenstance. The characters happen to overhear that the sword in Lestrange's vault was a fake, and then they happen to have the real one delivered right to them. Harry happens to be correct in his unsubstatiated theory that Helga Hufflepuff's cup might actually be in the vault, and then they happen to fly to Hogwarts where it just so happens that a ghost knows where the diadem is. Although they do take action once they know where a Horcrux is, they do nothing to actually try and find out where they are. Voldemort showing up at he end with Nagini in tow, by this point, is a convenience rather than a threat, because they don't have to bother finding him!

A more recent example is in Tangled: The Series, season two. The characters have a MacGuffin: nigh-unbreakable black rocks that are spreading across the land and that have a magical connection to the flower that saved Rapunzel's mom during childbirth. The characters are questing to find out what, exactly, these black rocks are all about. Much like Slayers, the series is rather lighthearted and episodic, so it's okay for them to take random side adventures here and there, since they are traveling and thus encountering various people and creatures. What is not okay is for them to get shipwrecked and stranded on a island for three episodes! The writers chose to do this, chose to have the characters stay in one spot rather than journey toward their goal. Like the horcruxes in Harry Potter, the black rocks are somewhat time sensitive, as they've eaten up swaths of land that people need for farming and living and whatnot. There is also a certain side character who shall remain nameless (no spoilers; watch the series!) who very much needs them to figure out how to undo the damage the rocks have done, ASAP. Dropping the main characters on the island makes it seem as if the writers forgot that all those people affected by the rocks exist. Yes, technically the MacGuffin doesn't have intrinsic value—they could be purple rocks or black thorns or whatever—but whatever they are, they do have value to the characters in that there is a pressing mystery to be solved.

And that is why dawdling in a MacGuffin-based story is so frustrating. The MacGuffin spurs the plot; forgetting about the MacGuffin stalls the plot. Worse, it erases the value the characters put on the MacGuffin, which undercuts the realism of the story and, at times, can make the characters seem not fully invested in whatever their mission is. The only thing that should divert the characters from this mission is something even more urgent that, in the best case scenario, in some way will end up relating to or enhancing the plot.

Worse than stalling, however, is adding more MacGuffins before the first ones are dealt with. Again, we can look at Deathly Hallows. In each of the first six books of the series, a MacGuffin of one sort or another is introduced and then found by the end of the book. Book six, along with establishing and then revealing the identity of the Half-Blood Prince, also introduces the concept of horcruxes. Ah, thinks the audience, so these will be the five MacGuffins that Harry is looking for in the last book (as two of the seven have already been destroyed). But alas! In the final volume, we are introduced to three extra MacGuffins: the Deathly Hallows, in the form of Harry's invisibility cloak, the stone in Marvolo's ring, and the most MacGuffiny of all, the Elder Wand. Despite the fact that the horcruxes are a rather pressing matter, much story time is spent discussing the Deathly Hallows, their origin, Dumbledore's and Grindlewald's connection to them, the fact that the ring shows you wraiths that entice you to throw your life away, how Voldemort wants the Elder Wand but Harry's actually the master of it, and other things which completely divert from the actual plot of the book.

I'll come right out and say it: nothing about the Deathly Hallows actually adds to the story. In fact, I argue that they detracts from the message of the series as a whole. Is love the ultimate weapon against evil? Nope, you just need to become master of the Elder Wand! Is a focus on blood lineage a bunch of hokum? Not at all, because Harry and Voldemort are secretly related to the three brothers! But I digress once again.

The main reason Rowling should not have introduced these three MacGuffins was that she already had five, which get left by the wayside due to so much focus on the Hallows. Let me rephrase that: the reason she should not have introduced this new plot line was she already had a complicated plot line that gets diverted by this new addition. Chapters that could be used by our heroes to look for horcruxes are spent focusing on who is currently in charge of the Elder Wand. It's like the author is saying, "Yeah, I introduced a prophecy regarding Harry, and the idea that love is more powerful than magic, and that you have to slowly destroy Voldemort one piece at a time, but all that is boring. Here's a one-hit-one-kill-wonder weapon. Wouldn't you rather read about that?" Maybe I would, if that was what was introduced as the means of ending Voldemort. But it wasn't. Horcruxes were. Focus, Rowling, focus!

Lest you think I'm only picking on Harry Potter (I really do like the series, I promise!), lets take a look at another story with far too many MacGuffins: RWBY. The first several seasons of the show were pretty low-key fantasy school type plots, with magical fighting thrown in. We were introduced to our first set of MacGuffins in season three, in the form of the four maidens: Spring, Winter, Summer, and Fall. At the end of the season, the spirit of the Fall Maiden was transferred to a new host, leaving us to assume that in subsequent seasons we might be introduced to the other three maidens, who the good guys and the bad guys want for... reasons? It's a little vague, but still intriguing. We meet one of the other maidens in season five and it looks like we might be on our way to—Oh, just kidding; she leaves the show and our heroes and villains have a new MacGuffin that they want: four relics that are housed under the four schools. So they coincide with the maidens? No? O-okay, well, I guess in the next seasons, they'll be looking for the maidens and the relics, and—Nope! Gods! There are two Manichean gods who destroyed the world and will destroy it again if the relics are brought together and humanity is still fighting, so that's why the good guys are gathering them... during a war? What? Wait, where are the maidens? Where is the plot? What's happening? A lot of viewers jumped ship at this point, and although I'm going to stick with the show (I have a high nonsense threshold), I don't blame them. It's gone off the rails. We don't know what the characters want, other than the relics, but we don't really know why they want them, since, as long as the relics aren't brought together, everything is hunky dory. Truly, truly, I do not know what the writers were thinking introducing so many plot lines. The Maiden MacGuffins were driving the plot, but by introducing the Relic MacGuffins, it necessarily diverts the plot elsewhere.

One final clarification: I'm not saying that a story can't have multiple plot lines. I love stories where each character wants something different, and thus leads the narrative in different directions. What I'm against is letting any of those storylines die on the vine, which is what happens when MacGuffins are forgotten and characters either sit around not going after them or run off after new ones. This makes the audience assume that the MacGuffin isn't important to the characters, that it has no intrinsic or narrative value, and that it doesn't matter. What writers need to ask themselves is, if it's that unimportant to characters and doesn't drive the plot, why include it to begin with?

[myfriendpokey]

50 Short Years!

This January makes a full 5 years since releasing 50 Short Games!

I admit, it is weird to think about.

In general I don’t have very strong feelings about anything I’ve worked on, since anything like that has usually burnt itself out somewhere in the process of making the thing.

But it feels a little startling that this particular game came out 5 years ago, because in many ways I feel like I’m still working somewhere in it’s orbit – it still feels “close” to me in terms of, I guess, setting up the way I’ve been thinking about and working on these things ever since then. I still feel like I’m working out some of the stuff that came up in its production.. compare to older games which can feel like they were made by different, mercifully forgotten, people.

The game is temporarily discounted on itch down to just $1, until valentine’s day - good for friends, good for lovers.

When this first came out, I included a big note file of the processes and ideas and etc that went into it. I have posted that to my website for free to mark this little anniversary. But since a decent bit of time has passed since those impressions, and since I don’t feel like refreshing them, I thought it might be interesting to try writing up a sort of “afterlife” of this game, specifically the ways it sort of covertly turned out to influence what I did for the 5 years after it, as well.

Here are my notes seperated by theme.

- colour - mice - pacing - work / life - gameplay - theme - writing - distribution

- COLOUR: this is a strange one. 50SG felt like the first time I was really aware of / interested in trying to add “colour” as an element I could play with within my games, trying to add it to the lego set along with “rocks” and “little guys”. More colours, interesting colours, colour combinations, games which would be colourful as images. Because I’ve never actually been a very visual person (surprise surprise ha ha ha) and even when I draw, or sculpt, I tend to focus on lines and omit colour as much as possible... When I was a kid I disliked any kind of colouring or painting, as opposed to scribbling, but just before 50SG I’d been working on an uncompleted game with painted textures, and enjoyed it enough to want to explore the effects more.

The reason I call this a strange one is that, mostly - - I failed!!! I feel very aware now of how much of this game is just scratchy line drawings, how little colours are actually used once I'd worked out which ones I preferred working with from the set. I did try to change things up over the course of the series and some games (specifically the Mogey ones) tried to use flat colour or colour patterns more. But when I think about the game now the memories I mostly have are of essentially monochrome or mostly-monochrome drawings.

In fairness, some of this was technical too - I never had any kind of consistent way to light my pictures for when I was photographing them, and a lot of the time the bright markers came out muddy, which sort of discouraged me from trying to do anything specifically with colour effects. Strong lines are also a lot easier to chop up into discrete little game-shapes.

But I think this sense of missed opportunity - having this big bag of markers in all colours, all translucent lines, and not really using them - was specifically what made me spend the next few years trying to work with colour even more. Hence stuff like Mouse Corp, and certain entries in the Hardpack 11-in-1, and Magic Wand. I think I moved more towards pixel art again because it gave me a very quick way to play with colours, and swap them in and out, without having to worry about correctly photographing them first. And in fact my current game came about directly from trying to play more with ideas of translucent outline sprites on top of flat fields of colour – trying to combine colour with line in a looser way than just colouring stuff in.

I'd like to go back to playing with markers some time.

- MICE: I think this was the first time I used mice in my games. Previously the emblematic animal was the Dog – Murder Dog, Goblet Grotto dog... The dog is a "LAWFUL" animal, one which can be aimlessly malevolent on behalf of some higher system or master. The dog stands in for the implicit malignity of the game system as a whole. 

Meanwhile, mouse is the "UNLAWFUL" animal - they live in spaces they do not construct, and scavenge from what they find within, they are constrained by those spaces but also have something of an independent life within them. By this time, I had been working on a lot of games where the gameworld itself was sort of an ominous presence - Crime Zone, Goblet Grotto, Drill Killer etc - and I think the move from "dog" to "mouse" came about as a way to think about these spaces as just kind of indeterminate and abandoned instead of actively malign. Places which don't really notice your being there, which were constructed and then left for some unknowable purpose. I cannot say if this shift in thinking is good or bad.

- PACING: I forget whether I mention it in the notes - but the prototype for all the marker games was an earlier one-off called "Gold's Enigma", done with crayons and in Klik N Play. And that game felt like sort of a revelation because it was so quick to just add new areas to it, or copy and paste elements around, or switch from one game control system or mode of representation to another.  So you could have an extremely short, quick game that still contained enough of a shift to make you feel like you’d gone somewhere or like the view from one side of the game was different to the view from the other. I don’t know how consistently or successfully this was ever really done (the end of Happy Bird is my personal favourite version) but it did stick in my head, as an ideal to work towards. And I think something like the more longform Magic Wand was still sort of driven by a desire to try a “fuller” take on this same idea.

- WORK / LIFE: I don't remember exactly but I think this was my first time successfully trying to start a new, slightly longform project while also having a day job. With other games either they were short enough for me to just blow through in a concentrated rush or else enough pieces had already been laid down (eg  Goblet Grotto) that I could just brainlessly slam together any remaining levels in the  mornings before I went to work. Making games as a hobby isn't necessarily hard but figuring out how to do it consistently over long periods took me a long adjustment period. For the short games I ended up doodling ideas at lunch, coming home, eating dinner, and then around 7 or 8 I'd start chopping up my image sheets and putting them into the game. And hope to finish by 11 so I wouldn't be too wiped the next day. These days it's more like 8-10pm. Working in the early mornings can be good if you're very determinedly getting through some pre-assigned tasks but can be harder and more frustrating if you're trying to be more exploratory about things. I guess to the extent I’d draw any lesson from this it’d be, set aside a very specific time period for working on stuff but also try to have a process where “working on stuff” can involve a certain level of constructive busywork just so you don’t come home and have to immediately face a blank page? “Placing stuff around on a screen” is ultimately what absorbs me so working in a way that let me do that as quickly and aimlessly as possible helped a lot. Well, that’s my opinion.

- GAMEPLAY: I used the default 8-directional walk system in MMF2, and the default screen-follows-the-player function, so many times in the course of these games that I just burnt myself out on them entirely. They’re fine, but using them so many times over a brief period made me more and more conscious of them to the point where it could feel like I was just filling in the same template each time... I think part of why I shifted to Unity, even though it’s more of a hassle, is just to be able to escape that sense of a singular unchangeable “point of view”  and make things where moving or looking around would feel a bit looser and less set in stone. I hope this helps explain my gradual, doomed love affair with extremely idiosyncratic camera systems.

- THEME: Did any themes carry over to any of my post-50SG games? Maybe some but to me it’s less noticeable than seeing what was stripped out. Having a deadline and a very fixed scope did sort of push me more towards including “real world content” in whatever strange way – dreams, specific moments of the early morning or the night, events like work nights out, locations I knew... Compare that to the longer games I’ve done which all kind of take place in these dreamy, private fantasy dimensions. I enjoy that too, and it’s easier to do that when you’re making a game that’s just sort of endlessly adding to itself over time.. It’d be good to get back to working in a way which encouraged that material connection.

- WRITING: I think the notes file that came with 50SG was the first time I did any real writing about the process of making these things, or ideas and notes, etc. And now I can’t shut up!! Well, I did a similar writeup document for Magic Wand, and hope to do so with my current game eventually as well. I think writing that, and having people be encouraging about it, did help me become more interested in looking at and recording the state of my brain as it’s slowly rotted into goop from exposure to these terrible machines. Which is in itself not a bad reason to keep doing it. 

- DISTRIBUTION: This was my first commercial game and probably the biggest impact of that was in getting me to move away from PC-only tools. I'd planned a mac version of this game at some point, or specifically to do HTML versions and then use a workaround I'd read about to convert HTML files to Mac and Linux apps... but the HTML conversion sometimes led to strange bugs, and I never had a testing computer to see whether the actual ports would work, and the multiple layers of things that could go wrong (making a html export, to be put into a mac or linux wrapper, to be loaded from a Unity scene...) eventually made me slowly give up on this. I think of getting back to it but to be honest I have such limited energy and for the five months a year I don't just want to hibernate I'd rather keep working on new projects.... I am sorry.... Well, this was a big impetus to try moving to pure Unity and HTML which had more multiplatform support from the get-go. I don't know if I took any other commercial lessons from it! It sold around 500 copies, and talking to other people making weird scrappy narrative type games it sounded like they mostly also sold 500 copies, maybe to the same people or maybe just to each other. At this level of economic activity you can just do what you like.

So in conclusion 50 Short Games is a land of contrasts. It feels distant to me, I don't have any strong feelings about it anymore, but I also feel sort of like I'm still moving around in the terrain this game originally sketched out for me, and still kind of responding to it in either positive or negative forms. Thank you to anyone who bought it. I just put it on sale again to mark the five year anniversary, you can find it on itch.io, gamejolt or kartridge. Please buy several hundred copies and salt them around through hidden disc drives buried in a desert somewhere so that some day they can inspire some form of apocalypse cult.

In the year 2525 if man is still alive if woman, still survives they will find.....

- stephen 2019

[pass-the-bechdel]

Supergirl season three full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

100% (twenty-three of twenty-three).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

57.23%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

All but one (it was that crappy crossover episode). All but four have casts over 50%.

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Zero.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Forty-four. Twenty who appeared in more than one episode, five who appeared in at least half the episodes, and two who appeared in every episode.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Thirty-four. Ten who appeared in more than one episode, four who appeared in at least half the episodes, and one who appeared in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

Not bad; a handful of episodes included some sincere effort to make quality statements about social issues, but they were pretty clunky about it and not always successful; certainly never impressive enough to increase the content rating (average rating of 3).

General Season Quality:

Middling. It was full of useless plot threads and wasted time, and much of the content had no real function; consequently, the central story arc lacked stakes, emotional resonance, and heart. That said, most of the episodes are basically solid viewing, and there was infinitely less rage-inducing content than there was in season two. That’s a weak win, but still a win.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

Hey, remember Morgan Edge? He was in four episodes at the beginning of the season, served no real narrative function despite his prominent treatment within those recurrences, and then Lena had him arrested using the most obviously-coerced confession in history? Sure, he was guilty, but he confessed under duress while being actively threatened with death by drone, the evidence of both the tape itself and of the testimony of the many eyewitnesses to the attack would have had him bouncing out of jail like that. The ridiculousness of that plot ‘resolution’ was even worse than the meaninglessness of Edge’s character in the first place. Remember when, briefly, they pretended that Morgan Edge was important?

Edge is a prime example of the fatal flaw in this entire season: pointless plot threads that went nowhere, meant nothing, furthered no characterisation for regular characters, and had no impact on the central arc of the season. Story-wise, the season lurched all over the place, and while it wasn’t without its good elements, ultimately it achieved very little. Sure, the season ended with a number of apparent changes for most of the major characters’ lives (though, conspicuously, not Kara’s) - Alex is now head of the DEO, J’onn is doing...something else, hopefully not something that removes him from the show, Winn has apparently gone to the future, traded out for our new friend ‘Brainy’ (a change I will be happy for if it sticks), and James has publicly revealed himself as Guardian - but the thing is, these changes are mostly last-minute, not things that the season was building toward all along. These changes are mostly not the result of character arcs, they’re just things that are happening now as set-up for next season. This season itself? Not much happened.

We wasted quite a lot of time with Mon-El, AGAIN, which is especially disappointing because it’s the largest time-and-attention-suck of the season, and it is completely irrelevant to everything; at least when we were wasting time with Mon-El last season, it was because he was the centrepiece of the (awful) plot. This time around, he’s just there to draaagg out the fallout from his departure, so that instead of getting over the relationship within the six months between the end of last season and the beginning of this one, Kara can continue to pine ridiculously and then get caught up in ~complicated feelings~ when Mon-El reappears, back from the future and bringing his new wife with him. That’s the closest thing Kara gets to a personal arc this season, actually; having ~complicated feelings~ about Mon-El. So, her story isn’t really about herself, it’s about whatever Mon-El is doing (again!), and then after wasting the entire season on that sorry excuse for a story, they amicably split in the end and he goes back to the future and that’s...it? I sincerely hope that’s it, and that he won’t be appearing again as a regular on the show, but it’s also a super disappointing waste of time. They didn’t have to bring Mon-El back at all, not for some drawn-out version of ‘closure’ for Kara, and not for any of the other nothing that his presence achieved in the meantime. Honestly, having characters show up FROM THE FUTURE and then not doing anything useful or important with it is so weird. We coulda dropped Brainy here and sent Winn away in a short-arc subplot, it’d have been neater and less time consuming, and we wouldn’t have troubled with all the Mon-El and Imra crap. As much as Mon-El kept carrying on about how he would never disrespect Imra, the story itself disrespects her by giving her no other meaningful narrative function than to be a barrier between Mon-El and Kara (which, as the story plays out...didn’t matter anyway). The whole thing amounts to a lot of bluster with no real impact; we end the season with Mon-El gone and Kara having to move on, and that’s EXACTLY HOW WE ENDED LAST TIME.

Meanwhile, back at the actual central arc for the season, shit was still whack, y’all. I wondered what they were gonna do with it after they went and had Reign show up so early in the piece (I thought maybe they were gonna build over the course of the season with Samantha progressively losing more control, but, that woulda required narrative pacing and story building to be in play, and the creators weren’t into that kind of crap this season), and what they went for was a completely pointless side-distraction with two other, lesser world-killers, who appeared out of nowhere, fooled around for a few episodes, and then died, ne’er to trouble the story again. Reign absorbing their powers didn’t have any effect (particularly egregious since the Legion was so worried about Pestilence, only to declare their work done once she was gone because apparently, Reign wasn’t gonna go around using that particular world-killer power anyway, because...reasons), they might as well have never included other world-killers at all, the only reason they were there was so that the plot could tread water for a while after revealing its Big Gun at mid-season and having nowhere left to go. Selena and her fellow witches, likewise, proved utterly pointless, just another distraction that wound up easily dispatched, and meanwhile Reign was killed/separated from Samantha only to return again and then be pretty easily defeated anyway with a combination of shoddy time travel and the last-minute addition of a convenient...magic fountain. Yeah. Even the oft-repeated notion they hammered about saving Samantha by recalling her to herself, using her connection with Ruby, etc, turned out to be a total smokescreen - Samantha and Ruby both proved to be total plot devices rather than characters in their own right, foisted on the pre-existing characters to generate artificial emotional stakes with a friendship that burst forth fully-formed in the space of two episodes, and giving Alex a child to focus her maternal instincts on for a while. Presumably, we’ll now never see them again. 

Oh, and did I mention that Kara finds out that her mother and a whole chunk of Krypton actually survived, but they totally underplay it and she has essentially no emotional reaction to this development at all? Since this seemingly life-altering revelation also has no impact on character or story, they might as well not have bothered, I mean, Kara is more hung up on losing her asshole boyfriend from last season than she is on discovering that a whole piece of her world (friends/family included) is actually still around, so. Who needs logical characterisation, anyway? For all that Kara complains about feeling out of balance living two lives, she also spends almost no time living as Kara Danvers instead of Supergirl in this season (especially the second half); remember when her job as a reporter used to matter to character or story, like, at all? Remember when actually being seen to balance things was a source of narrative conflict and development? Now, if she had discovered that surviving part of Krypton near the BEGINNING of the season instead of in the fourth-last episode, maybe she could have spent the season having, I dunno, a sort of character arc about dealing with it? Selena and the relevant mythology on the world-killers and the ways to kill them/make them/whatever could have all been introduced in earlier parts of the season so that they could BUILD THE FUCKING NARRATIVE instead of just throwing in convenient new plot devices and information at the last second? Maybe the whole story could have been improved by making it actually about the character the series is named after, and analysing her still-developing relationship with her identity and its duality? It’s such a fucking obvious character arc I want to punch something. How, HOW was this not what the whole season was about? How did we end up futzing around with Mon-El and pointless future-visitors and extra antagonists who didn’t matter to the season or its characters at all?

If you forgot that they also had some time-wasting with some fanatical cult crap on Earth that mostly just served to provide Kara with yet another character to drop explainers about things instead of having her learn stuff in some kind of plot-related fashion, I could understand; it was pretty forgettable. Alex and Maggie broke up, which was rather sudden and wasteful, really, but at least it was tied to Alex’s realisation that she wants to have children and that constituted one of the only solid character threads of this messy, wishy-washy season (though it also often kept Alex distracted in other parts of the story and not having those all-important sisterly interactions with Kara which formed the backbone of the show in the first season, so, boo for that). J’onn had his dad around for a while, and that was legitimately pretty good stuff (y’all know I’m weak for Martians), though I really hope it has some strong narrative fallout in season four because otherwise it seems like a plot designed to torture J’onn emotionally, as if his story isn’t already tragic enough. They also wasted James less this season? Unfortunately, they wasted Lena more, and I’m especially suspicious of the way they not only strangled the amount of story she spent with Kara as a friend, they also threw in this awkwardly-executed situation with Lena actively disliking Supergirl and turning Kara’s secret into something which jeopardises their future relationship. Their interactions last season were so strong, and the effort to put space between them in this season feels overt (giving Lena a romance with James and a new/old best friend in Samantha contributes to this); I can’t help but wonder if the Powers That Be were upset that they’d accidentally made a female relationship with more chemistry than the canon-lesbian couple (and at the same time as they were badly failing at giving Kara a believable hetero love interest, no less) and decided that breaking up one of their best character partnerships was preferable to anyone reading the hero of the story as anything other than straight. They’ve made so many hugely questionable decisions about Kara’s personal life at this point, no BTS fuckery would surprise me. Remember season one, when the plot had a shape and the characters generally did things for understandable reasons? Those were the days. We’re closer to getting back to them now than we were after the disaster that was last season, but I’m still not banking on the show ever regaining the focused quality which made the first season work so well. To do that, they have to start telling stories about Kara again, at minimum. That would be a start.