#me writing meta after skipping 30 episodes. sorry.

[otterplusharchive]

rey! do you have any recs for kdramas? i have never watched any, but i like lovable characters and romance ? thank you in advance!

I DO IN FACT HAVE DRAMA RECS HII not all of these will be kdramas, but ill start with the kdramas ive watched and enjoyed and ill include all the warnings for them that i can remember off the top of my head and a brief synopsis for u!

kdramas-

1. weight lifting fairy kim bok joo

this was probably one of the first kdramas i saw people post about in like 2015 and i watched a little bit of it in 2016 but then only just got around to finishing it last year. the basic gist of it is its about a young sports college weight lifter, kim bok joo, centering around her navigating through her life and trying to figure out who she is and what she wants in life and what she wants to be. her romantic interest in the show is a swimmer and they have a sort of rivals to friends to lovers, he is SO in love with her and its adorable. i absolutely loved the side characters in this show theyre all so fun and kim bok joos best friends and weight lifting team are especially delightful. my main warning would be that this show addresses eating disorders and theres a lot of mention of both weight gain and weight loss, theres also a plot point early on where kim bok joo has a crush on her eventual love interests older brother but it gets resolved and the older brother literally goes "i didnt realize you had a crush on me and if i knew that i wouldnt have been so friendly with you, it would be completely innapropriate for us to be in a relationship". overall its a really sweet and emotional fun show but if you have issues with weight talk id skip this one

2. tale of the nine tailed

this one is really recent from last year and i didnt expect to be so hooked by it but boy howdy did i get attached to all the characters and the wild plot. it feels hard to explain the plot but basically a nine tailed fox named lee yeon is living in modern day seoul and is working for the underworld finding paranormal spirits/creatures/other rogue foxes that are causing havoc on the world, hes resigned himself to living this life while waiting for his girlfriend who died tragically 600 years ago to come back to life because he traded his status as a mountain god in order to ensure that her soul would one day be reincarnated. a plucky investigative journalist named nam ji ah figures out that hes not human and shenanagins ensue because she looks exactly like his dead girlfriend oooooo whatll happen. the plot beyond that gets really wild and its hard to explain and is easier to just watch. if u enjoy paranormal adventures this one is good. my one big complaint and issue with this is that the immortal mountain spirit meets his original girlfriend when shes a child and she continues to visit him off and on as she grows up which is Hm I Dont Like That! but thankfully the present time romance our female lead meets him when shes about 30 if im remembering right. also warnings for general fantasy violence, references to child abuse, animal death, and abandonment issues

3. extraordinary you

HUGE unreality warning for this. if you have issues with feeling unreal or have paranoia/delusions about not being a real person id avoid this one just because of its premise

ok i know i said tale of the nine tailed was a hard plot to explain but BOY extraordinary you is even HARDER to explain. because its so wild but so good. its about a girl who realizes that she is literally a side character in a comic book, and the story becomes her trying to change the story to save her character from dying but it becomes a lot more than that. the romance in this is literally tooth achingly sweet and the show itself is very pretty, i loved the side characters in this one and the show was engaging and interesting to watch it became really layered and meta. super reccomend this one honestly. my main issues/warnings that i can remember off the top of my head were just one character being the classic controlling boyfriend stereotype, bullying someone specifically for being poor, unreality like i mentioned before, and then at the very end there was this love interest for a side character who got reincarnated from a past piece of writing that they had been in and put in the comic but she was a student and he was the school cook which is weird but thankfully they like barely interact at all and theres no real romance he just like recognizes her and its barely a thing at the end of the show but its still weird

4. mystic pop up bar

big warning for suicide, sexual harrasment (which is framed as being bad and the guy whos harrassing the girl literally gets thrown off a roof)

i havent finished this one yet and thats mainly because im not emotionally ready because this one makes me soooo emotional. if you like found family this is a good one. its about a pop up bar run by a woman whos been tasked with solving the problems of a certain amount of people in order to atone for her crimes in the past before dying, shes able to enter the dreams of people and solve their issues using the information she gets in the dreams. paranormal shenanagins ensue, she acquires a son and a husband and it kills me its so fun and quirky and fun despite handling dark themes and peoples problems. also very sweet the found family murders me

5. kingdom (netflix original)

i literally am not going to be able to watch any other zombie media because kingdom and train to busan are the best pieces of zombie media ive ever seen. warnings for gore and violence and just general horror aspects.

i absolutely love this one its so thrilling and well done, i love the acting and the way that this show looks its absolutely gorgeous. a zombie plague breaks out in joseon period korea where the emperor has died and then was brought back to life by the queen and her father in a ploy to try and keep their family in political power, the crown prince must find answers. a lot more happens and its very dramatic and good i love the characters in this one

cdramas

1. the untamed. if you follow me and you havent watched the untamed im begging you to watch the untamed. literally one of the most beautiful stories ive experienced in my life i am not joking when i say i cried multiple times over it. the main characters are canonically gay in love and have a son together please watch the untamed. handles a lot of dark themes, heres a tw guide

2. the sleuth of the ming dynasty

this is another one i havent finished but its fun so far, very gay, found family, food, and solving murder mysteries during the ming dynasty

3. hikaru no go (also known as qi hun)

havent finished this one, there is some propaganda about hong kong in the first episode but as far as i know thats the only instance of something like that in the show

this ones about the game go and so far its very sweet and fun, local boy awakens a ghost who was a master of the game of go hundreds of years ago and eventually is persuaded to learn how to play go with the aid of the ghost. im really liking this one so far its very cute and i love the characters in it. if youve watched the untamed nie huaisangs actor ji li is in this one!

4. the legend of yunqian

this ones very short and on youtube, all the episodes are about 5 minutes long and its a lesbian time travel fantasy adventure with a happy ending! funny and cute

jdramas

1. cherry magic

please please please watch cherry magic. the premise sounds very much like a weird yaoi kind of thing but trust me on this. trust me. it is so heart warming and sweet and i was so emotional about it and the growth of the main character.

adachi gains the power to read peoples minds on his 30th birthday based off a urban legend that if youre a 30 year old virgin that youll become a wizard. after gaining this power he accidentally finds out that his extremely popular and handsome coworker has a crush on him, and shenanagins ensue along with adachi having blossoming feelings in return. this show was really refreshing in a lot of ways, adachi is a main character who like.. is unsure of himself and insecure in a very kind of realistic way, he closes himself off and is afraid to reach out to people and through the course of the show we see him slowly come out of his shell and realize that hes likeable and lovable and that people want to be around him and its so nice to see. my main complaint about this show is that i dont really like the background couple, but otherwise this is a very sweet and refreshing gay romance that has a happy ending!

some others that i myself havent seen but that ive seen people talk about a lot and that i want to watch eventually:

- the legend of fei (cdrama)

- the wolf (cdrama)

- gaurdian (cdrama, not the kdrama one called goblin)

- healer (kdrama, i did watch some of this one but it was in 2016 and i never finished it so i barely remember any of it but i do remember liking it)

- nobody knows (kdrama)

- its ok to not be ok (kdrama)

sorry this is so long but i hope youll be able to find a drama u enjoy!!

[elizabethrobertajones]

I stumbled across my own old post from when I ranked all spn seasons in order of my favorite to least and realized I need to figure out where to add s12... was wondering if you had such a ranking and what it is?

Oh no :P That’s a tough one. I’m still thinking about what @k-vichan said on @superspecpod about liking the emotional/motw stuff of season 12 a LOT but ranking the overall plot really really low. (And I just watched 12x15 so I’m freshly annoyed about this exact thing because Perez tried SO MUCH HARDER than he needed to to make the Crowley and Lucifer stuff interesting and to make it go somewhere - anywhere other than 2 more episodes of Lucifer sitting around chained to a chair in a boring room exchanging the same old samey dialogue - so the rest of the Buckleming episodes after just make it like a lesson in not trying so hard because you can coast by on about 3% of the effort >.>)

Maybe it’s time to start getting more nuanced because it’s really hard to decide and there are other seasons which aren’t so starkly split but still have an imbalance in my eyes. I’ll rank them out of 10 for those categories.

So I guess season 12 is 10/10 for motw, probably like 9/10 for emotional arcs and 1/10 for plot, no offence to Berens and Dabb but… Yikes. 12x13 retroactively ruined 6x04 and somehow 9x21 as well and I didn’t think 9x21 was a strong episode to start with… Other plot episodes in the same season don’t stand a chance. I’m putting the good work into “emotional arcs” from those episodes and backing off, although I’ll allow stuff like the good parts of the plot stuff that affected the emotional arcs some leeway into being enjoyable, like all the times the BMoL were used WELL for family drama. (I did also just watch 12x16 after all.) Overall 20/30

Season 11 I thought had some great motw but also some more average ones… Nothing terrible but there were several which were quite rote, so maybe like 8/10, average lifted by Robbie and Nancy Won specifically for 11x04 and 11x19 :P The emotional arc was fairly simple and stretched waaay too long and some parts not resolved, and the whole ikkiness of 16 year old looking Amara hitting on Dean which even when I didn’t think they’d use it as a proper romance arc was horrendously off-putting for the things we SHOULD have cared about, so maybe 5/10. The plot I think was good despite the emotional arc it created being a drag so 9/10 because I really enjoyed watching along with it for the basic drama and twists like Casifer and the hands of god to fill space with decent pacing in the middle, because it generally tied into interesting episodes, and bringing Chuck back and wrapping up was a nice way to raise the stakes and finish the story. Overall 22/30

Season 10 didn’t have any stellar motw except 10x05 - the rest were mostly tolerable-to-good but I can’t give it over 5/10 for the experience because many were plagued by… The emotional arc, which through sheer attrition ends up at like 2/10 and the only redeeming episodes on that were 10x14 for the plot and 10x22 for remembering Cas had a point to be in the season even if it was horrific to watch. But this is the plot that “went where the story took them” so ick, 3/10. Also, the demon!Dean stuff is great but in a bang your fork on the table and yell for more way, which means it’s the only reason I changed this from a 2 to a 3 because I literally forget 10x01-3 aren’t a mini season all on their own, but they still had Cole in them so it’s not going higher than that :P 10/30

Season 9 I literally quit watching over the MotW and the sort of sticky, itchy feeling they have is even worse than season 10 throughout the season, buuut 9x06 and 9x19 are in there. But Bloodlines was a motw. Let’s call it 4, give Berens a consolation cookie, and move on >.> The emotional arc is very strong and I love it a lot even though it’s all angsty and miserable, mostly because I skipped from 9x05 to 9x18 with a quick easy marathon through the Gadreel fight instead of watching along, and then read all the meta on it at once, and it’s got an excellent Destiel plot which a huge amount of the season rides on, so 10/10 because I said so. The plot, as well, flounders in the middle a bit for the angel wars but I think the Mark of Cain is a GOOD part of THIS side of the season and the demon!Dean build up and reveal was excellent, so I’d say 9/10 because once you apply the “Metatron wrote everything the angels do” theory it mostly all scrapes by. Ignoring the MotW, I usually put this as one of my favourite seasons despite the fact I ragequit it once. Overall 23/30

Season 8 has good MotW for the most part but there’s some eh ones and there’s ones I skip so hard I forget they’re part of canon, like the other weird dog episode, so maybe only 6/10. Robbie has another good year. I like Bitten, fight me :P Emotional arcs are much more painful - I’ve read all the meta on the Sam hit a dog fight but unlike the Gadreel one which I find interesting and complex, it bums me out AND feels manufactured, so 8x17 has got to prop the whole thing up to 5/10. The main plot is good. I love Kevin and the trials and Metatron’s introduction and Crowley as a main antagonist. 9/10 with a point deducted for letting Abaddon out and leaving the hell/purgatory portal open. Overall 20/10

Season 7 is a sneaky fave of mine as well because I’m awful :P Buckleming return and write MotW but Robbie arrives on the scene and I think bats a perfect game on his first try. So 7/10 because the other writers also weren’t awful and Plucky’s happened this season. I also think the emotional arc is harrowing but because I mostly remember this season through rewatches where it was all okay and I never knew Cas wasn’t supposed to be gone for good so his return seems waaay more Destiel to me than it might if you didn’t think the entire season was just manufactured to make Dean sad about Cas then give him back, 8/10. And the Leviathan plot was really nicely handled as a season-long big bad who caused a serious and damaging effect to their lives but then they scrounged up all their resources and killed Dick and also the main plot was a series of Dick jokes. so 10/10. 24/30

Season 6 on the other hand… 2/10 for MotW because this was just a resounding failure to make the MotW part of the main plot on the Eve arc but then make it all low budget dragons and spider dudes and mannequins and what have you. UGH. But there IS the fairy episode and it’s the one dang episode with no relevance to anything at all that season except Sam happens to be soulless in it which just adds to the fun. I am a bit uncertain about the emotional arc - it’s miserable for the most part and I am sad about Dean and Lisa being a disaster and going through all the steps of it being terrible. Dean is *buried* in everyone’s angst and problems and it doesn’t even really serve a purpose or let him break. The light in the dark is 6x20 which is going to haul this all the way up from what would have been like a 2 to 5. The plot is also a disaster and VISIBLY a disaster and even 6x20 has some tiny holes and stretches that can’t make it ALL work, though Edlund gives it his best. On the other hand “plot episodes” include Weekend at Bobby’s, Appointment in Samarra, The French Mistake, My Heart Will Go On, and Frontierland, and I am DYING for another season which delivers its main plot through crack episodes of utter gold star nonsense quality. I begrudingly give 7/10 but it’s marking up from like… 3 or something, instead of down from 10 :P Overall 14/30

Season 5… has awful MotW. I’m sorry, it does. All the ones that look like MotW but then turn out to be plot episodes are great (well, except for 5x09), but all the ones that stay MotW are like… Curious Case of Dean Winchester. Swap Meat. Blaaaaah. 3/10. I skip everything that isn’t about the apocalypse properly when I watch - thankfully there aren’t a whole lot of them. Emotional arc is the pay off of 5 years work and it doesn’t make me cry but it is a pretty great heaping of good emotional arc tying up and probably why a lot of the following seasons are wonky or go for manufactured drama to boot up the story properly. 10/10. Plot is almost omnipresent, mostly well-delivered, and although it is too melodramatic for “we literally knew we had a season 6 lined up” with a side order of “it definitely was meant to look like this all the way through and we didn’t cram in any last minute retcons or deuz ex machinas ha ha” *sweats nervously*, at least the original watch was a MEMORABLE JOURNEY so I give it 9/10 with a side-eye for rewatching and also with hindsight attempting to finish the story 1 or 8 seasons and counting from a reasonable place. Overall 22/30

Season 4 is my favourite but it has 4x11 aka “we want to intentionally write an episode so bad they’ll never air it and no one will watch it haha isn’t this a lark” right in the middle, so 9/10 for motw, 10/10 and 10/10 for everything else. Can you even explain season 4 to people who don’t get it? :P 29/30

Season 3 has the best motw to plot episodes ratio aside from season 12 probably. A WHOLE bunch of classics and only really 2 I dislike in it so I’d give it 8/10 because it is allowed to coast on those, and it’s about to take a hammering for emotional arc, because like season 10 it’s got a simple purpose that Dean Is Not Okay And Sam Wants To Save Him, which combines the same angry, reckless Dean and desperate miserable Sam, only then gets a writers’ strike bang in the middle so they’re even more frustrated and miserable and to no good end so 1/10. And I have a personal grudge against the show for ending forever after sending Dean to Hell because it got cancelled after the strike and I had to live with that for nearly 3 years before it turned out this was not, in fact, what had happened. 1/10 for the inevitable tanking of what looked like a strong start and just no way to salvage it but admit defeat and wait for season 4. Overall 10/30 

Season 2 is just 10/10 for motw, 10/10 for emotional arc and … maybe like 8 or 9 out of ten for plot. Let’s go with 8 with hindsight that season 4 and 5 trashed Azazel’s hard work so hard I see all the time people wondering “why did he have to go to SO MUCH trouble” and the only conclusion I got is “for shits and giggles” or to waffle about how no one knew anything for certain. (The other problem is that so much of what happens isn’t explained, and it saves a point because Croatoan finally got an answer *3* years later.) But I love season 2. Simple and gets the job done and hollows you out along the way and the much stronger follow up to the first season to really explore the characters and their trauma with a much better understanding of them. Overall 28/30.

Season 1 is more mixed for motw. They’re almost all of the episodes but Bugs and Racist Truck deserve the slamming Word of God keeps giving them in the story because they ARE racist and poorly plotted and relying on chance resolutions. I like the urban legends and the different feel it has to any other season as they find their feet with easy hunts but I don’t think a lot of them are classics in the same way season 2 episodes feel much more firmly covered in the show’s fingerprints because these are the patterns they go on to subvert or explore in much more abstract ways. Maybe 8/10. Characterisation is shaky and one note compared to later on some things, and the emotional arc is simple but also relies on John just not talking to them to the point of frustration and Sam and Dean are so isolated it’s claustrophobic at times. 7/10. But plot is simple and works and is the best hook to watch all the rest so 10/10. Overall 25/30

…

and yeah, adding up reasons I like the season against reasons I don’t, season 12 is way more watchable to me than season 10 even though they literally committed the same off-putting crime in the 21st episode both times. Other seasons score much worse for just being kinda meh or having two out of the three main reasons I enjoy something be really bad, like season 3 or 6, so even though there’s stuff I love in them, I think they’re worse overall seasons… 

I don’t know why I spent so much time on this. :P Lack of will to do anything else. Thanks for letting me ramble at you if you read this far :P

[canonstitute]

ʟɪᴠᴇʙʟᴏɢ» SDWAY!∙S2E1

Scooby Doo, Where Are You! S2 Ep1 – Nowhere to Hyde

Rambles/reactions/meta under the cut! Because I literally write thousands of words of this garbage once you get me started [NOTE: text taken & edited from a live chat with a friend]

aka, ‘I Watched Eps. 1-17 and Thought Show Was Way More Nuanced Than Everyone Remembered, Then Season 2 Changed the Writing Staff’

I WANTED to start on s2 since the s1 episodes have like, barely half the "scooby doo" cliches that this entire show is known for

i want a hallway chase scene BRING ON THE SECOND WRITING STAFF FOR MEMES

aka im afraid

[someone mentions magic show at "the high school"] wait do they go tO THIS HIGH SCHOOL????

are they home????

[re: shaggy mentions watching tv at home] YOU LIVE IN A VAN WHAT DOES HOME MEAN WHAT IS THIS

also i lied about casual watching i'm going to hyperfocus on this b/c skipping to season 2 it's already blowing my mind

that

that [coordinated screaming from gang] is not what they say when they seE A MONSTER

was the end of S1 like this or did the first 10 episodes just exist in a bizarre alternative universe where their personalities were more or less balanced so no one was too much anything

SHAGGY IS NOT SUPPOSED TO PRETEND HE'S BRAVE like okay yeah wow completely changing the writing staff is absolutely something that made this show into. uh, its own image

this actually feels like an episode of A Pup Named Scooby-Doo?? almost exactly tbh

minus the child-participation gags and Red Herring

[H-B ‘animation’] DAPHNE'S TINY LEGS

freddy when on earth--FREDDY YOU ARE NOT AGGRESSIVE YOU ARE JUST LIKE OBLIVOUS TO FEELINGS AND ALWAYS ABOUT THE MYSTERY

i didn't realize how attached i was to the gang in the first 10 episodes until they started morphing into the way the critics parodied them for 30 years after

the first ten episodes weren't like, even that good, they just had bits that I could read into that made the silliness worth it and no this characterization gets woooorse

also like I'm barely noticing the plot sorry, the episode guy is secretly a ghost from potion

uh, necklace. dried mud

THIS MOMENT IS GOOD. "RAGGY!" / "COMING, SCOOB!" friendship is my fave dynamic in this show

at least velma's still with the lovebirds [daphne and fred] [when gang splits up].

also my intuition is screaming 'duh it's the helga' [as culprit] but the fact they keep beating it in makes me wonder if they'll switch the formula just to fuck with me

because the big thing is it's always that guy with like, two lines, and she's shown up…………………thrice in three scenes

amgbghgmmmmm uncomfortable native american portrayaaaallllls

tho………like I swear there's this nagging feeling i have that i remembered shaggy being like, partially native american by ancestry and i have no idea why i would think so because nothing i remember in an episode i know of supports it

like, feels like something about a character you read in a wiki or fansite one time but then it's gone off the grid? that kind of thing itching thought you can't validate

and it's not the first time I've had that thought [that I'd possibly seen someone Shaggy was part Native-American] randomly during an episode this year that i'm watching but I never cared much about scooby doo before now so why would I have been reading character trivia

WHAT THE FUCK ARE "KNOCKOUT DROPS"

WHAT

okay hologram movie projectors are worse but KNOCKOUT DROPS

they couldn't even say chloroform--which like better they didn't say chloroform because that shit is kind of a murder weapon not a sleepy pill but it just sounds like they were too lazy to even look it up

oh i love that [recycled animation] fred face

ohhhhhh boy here it is

there's the musical chase scene

that's where it started, unless i'm forgetting a lot of music from the first ten episodes instead of wacky soundtrack stuff

OH FUCK THERE IT IS

THE HALLWAY

THEY DID DOORS

START OF DARKNESS

Larz Bourne

Tom Dagenais

Bill Lutz

^i literally searched up the episode and these three men are both responsible for COMPLETELY RUINING SCOOBY DOO WHERE ARE YOU and making it into a goddamn forty year monolith that is immortalized because of the direction change and the tropes so notorious that every kid remembers them and i'm so conflicted

………mild curious fred [scene] soothes me

i fully expect velma to deliver the denoument

does fred do it??? lmao that'd be a change from both the stock trope fred AND the original fred

okay here are some major costume plugs here

I CAN'T BELIEVE SHAGGY AND SCOOB DIDN'T FUCK [the trap] UP what do you fucking know

[incorrect guess on villain] and way to go gang you finally fucked one up

actually no they never really……had the guy pinned really when they caught him in early eps??

they just caught him and unmasked him and then used hindsight to figure out what the clues meant

in fact these guys suck at solving mysteries

THEY SHOULD BE 'CRIMINAL REVEALERS INC'

they're great at that part

okay rant delivered i'm just gonna listen to the music

SKINNY SCOOB LEGS IN THAT CREDITS SCENE