#narratively and thematically they don’t make much sense but neither do the original endings so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[nellasbookplanet]

I just finished my playthrough of me2, and as I put off the overlord and arrival dlcs until the end of it my thoughts on them are very fresh and Must be aired.

The frustrating thing is, they didn’t have to suck. The gameplay, like the shadowbroker dlc, is fun and stands out from the rest of the game! The story and themes of 'how far will you go in sacrificing individual lives in the name of winning a war/stopping extinction' fits well with the overall narrative and emphasis on hard choices! I mostly enjoy them! Only, overlord is completely undone by gross ableism, and arrival doesn’t actually let you engage with the choice it sets up; it fully forces your hand, and then makes the whole thing feel pointless by just having the reapers show up for a surprise attack in the next game anyway. It’s a trolley problem that doesn’t actually let you control the lever and then derails the entire train to hit both tracks no matter what you do.

So, how do you fix arrival? Personally, I would probably keep in the loss of the batarian colony as inevitable, but change the focus. As it is, barely a moment is spared to let it sink in that you're about to end 300 000 lives, and the only 'choice' you get is whether you attempt to (futilely) warn them in a blink and you'll miss it scene. I would've at a minimum added dialogue options where Shepard/the player could’ve expressed anger at how this work could’ve gone on for as long as it did without a warning being sent long before. For a bigger change, that could’ve led into a major conflict: a paragon Shepard trying to warn the colony, while her opponents argue that doing so would jeopordize the project/the hidden base and tries to stop her as part of the final fight of the dlc. If you choose to warn and do it in time, perhaps some small amount of people make it out, with the majority of the colony still being destroyed to keep the tone of sacrifice. If you want to keep it real dark, everyone dies no matter how hard you try to save them, but you should at least have been given the option to seriously try even if it’s hopeless.

But there isn’t really a workaround for how part of the problem with arrival is a problem with the batarians: had the colony been human, turian, or asari, most players would likely have been more upset because those are our allies. The batarians, however, are a one-note species never portrayed as anything other than slavers, criminals, and terrorists. While other species are allowed horrific acts while still being portrayed as complex people capable of both good and bad (need I remind you of the first contact war, the krogan rebellion, the genophage, the quarian's attempted genocide of the geth, the geth's war against biological life, and so on), the player is given little to no reason to sympathize with batarians. Had they been made to feel like actual people while still our enemies from the start of the game, arrival would've felt more like the gut punch of sacrifice it was and less like it was off-handedly writing off a people everyone hates, anyway. There could’ve been a discussion of 'are you more willing to sacrifice those you don’t know/don’t like and what does it say about you; is this a sacrifice or is it selfish revenge with the greater good as cover (a discussion especially brought up if you take the renegade choice)' but instead it feels almost vindictive.

[very-grownup]

Ace Attorney game parallels (no, not that one, or that one, or that one ...)

One of the interesting things about the Great Ace Attorney in the evolution of Shu Takumi's Ace Attorney games is the maturation of "Weird Girl Assistant".

Our original trilogy Weird Girl Assistant is Maya Fey (obviously a perfect being beloved by everyone with taste why can't I preorder that Nendroid yet motherfuckers?), who is all heart and ... not so much knowledge, but a conduit to Mia’s knowledge. She doesn’t personally possess any legal knowledge, but she’s integral for Phoenix in accessing knowledge that would otherwise be denied to him due to Mia’s untimely death. She’s fully Weird in her Assisting.

Apollo Justice has Trucy Wright (obviously a perfect being beloved by everyone with taste), who is a lot of heart but not all heart. She has personal knowledge to impart to Apollo, regarding the perceive ability and his bracelet. It’s integral assisting to how the trials in that game will reach pivotal points, which makes it genuine Assisting, even if outside of that Trucy is plenty Weird. I would argue this is distinctive from the Phoneix-Magatama matter in the original trilogy (it’s easy to forget that Nick doesn’t even have the magatama in the first game) because Trucy is, essentially, teaching Apollo to do something he technically can already do, whereas the magatama is something Phoenix is given by an outside source still connected to the mentor (Pearl). Narratively and thematically they’re different, even if mechanically they function similarly.

Years later, the Great Ace Attorney gave us Susato Mikotoba (obviously a perfect being beloved by everyone with taste). Susato is an /actual trained legal assistant/ to the point she can masquerade as a lawyer in the second game's tutorial. She could BE the lawyer as easily at Ryunosuke, save for her sex in the historical setting of the game. She Assists like no one’s business and her Weird is no weirder than Ryunosuke himself, two young people who grew up in a country with recently opened borders, in a foreign country for the first time. 

A reflection of a maturation in Takumi's depiction of female characters, a general wider consciousness of feminism in popular culture in Japan (something I am in no way qualified to discuss), a third possibility? I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to say that the evolution of the Weird Girl Assistant into an actual competent assistant is a sign of the games ‘maturing’. For all their goofiness there has always been a serious, darker tone in the games compared to the adventure game standbys of North America. It’s built into the series from the choice to have Phoenix’ second case involve the solving of his boss and mentor’s murder.

There may also be something in the connection between the tutorial mentor and the Weird Girl Assistant, holding the balance of knowledge between them like the centre of a seesaw.

The connection with Mia and Maya is obvious: they’re sisters and perfectly mirror each other in their relation to what they bring to Phoenix. Mia on a pedestal of legal knowledge, forever older and wiser than Nick, as her death fixes her on that pedestal. Mia and Nick never get to be colleagues, equals. On the other end, enthusiastic but underage Maya, someone Nick will always be older than and always be wiser than in the legal sense. We don’t know how an older Maya might have fit with the disbarred Phoenix Takumi left the series with; maybe it didn’t matter and outside the confines of the Lawyer Protagonist and Weird Girl Assistant, Maya could stop being a mirror for her sister.

Similarly, Kazuma and Susato are sibling-like. Kazuma, like Mia, is the tutorial mentor, but he’s only a mentor to Ryunosuke because he’s a law student and Ryunosuke isn’t. He doesn’t have that much more knowledge than Ryunosuke and I think it correlates that he doesn’t have that much more knowledge than Susato, the girl who expected to be his legal assistant. There is something like equality here between the Mentor and the Weird Girl Assistant when neither precisely fits their role mold. Kazuma is, I think, as weird as Susato is knowledgeable.

BUT WHAT ABOUT --

Bitch, you know I've always got Apollo Justice opinions to drop.

In Apollo Justice, Kristoph is a fully knowledgeable mentor to Apollo. He is an actual lawyer, he is Apollo’s senior, and he is Apollo’s employer. In these ways, he is on all fours with Mia.

Aside from being the murderer.

There is, frankly, an entire other thing to get into with the tutorial mentors and how their stories intersect with death and a turning point in their respective protagonist’s life and career but this is about Weird Girl Assistants.

So.

What is Kristoph Gavin’s Weird Girl Assistant connection?

THE INCIDENT.

Seven years earlier, in Zak Gramarye’s trial, Trucy is used by Kristoph to deliver fake evidence to Phoenix, leading to Nick’s disbarment.

In Apollo’s tutorial trial, for the murderer of Shadi Smith/Zak Gramarye, Trucy is used by Phoenix to deliver fake evidence to Apollo, leading to Kristoph's arrest (and possibly his disbarment but who knows in the world of Ace Attorney and Japanifornia).

I have nothing but love for Trucy, but she's the shifty, deceitful Weird Girl Assistant to follow a shifty, deceitful Tutorial Mentor in a game about disillusionment and broken trust, following a trilogy about believing in yourself, your instincts, and redemption, and preceding two games riding a balance between hope and despair, with part of that balance being a more equal partnership between the Attorney and his Weird Girl Assistant.

[no-where-new-hero]

This is probably the most controversial kdrama opinion I could have, but I actually really like how Moon Lovers ended. I totally see why people don’t, because they used the exact same non-ending technique that they used in Cheese in the Trap, which is my own beloathed villain origin story. But I think in this case, it makes more sense, and here’s why (spoilers below):

The big thing here is the question of reincarnation, and the fact is that reincarnation isn’t a huge theme in this show, unlike, say, Goblin, where the Goblin’s long wait for his bride’s next lifetime at the end all makes narrative sense. But in Moon Lovers, reincarnation is never really brought up. For once, there isn’t a big deal about past lives or fate bringing Soo and So together (even though you could extrapolate that Ha Jin was meant to travel to the past simply to fix Gwangjong’s legacy as a king). The closest we get to any conversation about that is pretty much only what Hae Soo tells Jung as she dies: “In my next life, I’m going to forget everything and everyone.” Is her next life, then, Ha Jin? Or is this quotation just a bit of a non-sequitur since Ha Jin as Ha Jin is a concurrent or interwoven timeline with Ha Jin as Hae Soo?

Therefore, the idea of a reincarnated Wang So meeting Ha Jin would be fateful and everything, but it wouldn't really feel part of the same story. A Wang So who has forgotten Hae Soo, who has no memory of his past life, would simply be somebody else, even if Ha Jin were to be like "HEY WAIT MISTER WITH THE HANDKERCHIEF don't you find it funny that you have the same face as a dead king haha?" I see why people are clamoring for a second season, because it is a good start. But it's also very different from everything that's been going on hitherto.

The other option, then, is if Wang So somehow time-traveled himself to the present, but there has been no way to connect Soo with Ha Jin. At a certain point, people stopped pointing out that Soo seems un-Soo-like, so why would anyone doubt her? Ji Mong has conveniently left the palace. The eclipse has passed (assuming that works as some kind of time portal). As delightful as the idea is, Wang So's final promise to find Soo feels more like a bone thrown to the audience than anything else, a piece of wishful thinking on his part and on ours.

Yes, Ha Jin crying alone in front of So alone in his portrait is tragic and terrible and all the more heart-rending because we know that neither Ha Jin nor Soo would have wanted to leave him alone like that, were circumstances different. But that's also somehow the most fitting end their story can have. Soo made Gwangjong a better king, but she also, ultimately, has to take the back seat to history, destiny, what have you. She has been told this throughout the show. Love can only do so much. It is beautiful but it is brief, which is a very classical East Asian idea, so it all somehow harmonizes for me. It's thematically relevant. Much like the haunting refrain in My Love From the Star, it's hard to say the goodbyes when you need to. Soo is never able to say goodbye to any of the people who matter to her before she loses them. Should it be any different with So?

[bedlamsbard]

(in response to this post)

This turned out really, really long, so, uh, apologies?  The short version is that the number one rule is that your legacy characters don’t undercut your main cast.

I think Rogue One and Solo pulled it off -- Solo is a weirder case because it’s a prequel story about a main character, but Rogue One’s use of Tarkin, Vader, Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, etc. worked for me because from the beginning they were there to support the original characters in the film and never wavered from that.  Rogue One also benefited from knowing exactly what it was going to do and never wavering from that for an instant.

In terms of the shows, TCW is also not a straightforward case because it was using film characters as its mains and pulling from all over, but in terms of OT characters that appeared in the show, I am pretty happy with how TCW pulled off Chewbacca in Wookiee Hunt (3.22) -- puts him there, uses him well to support the main character of that particular arc (Ahsoka) and the other supporting characters (the other youngling Jedi), but it doesn’t turn into the Chewie episode. Same with Ackbar in the Mon Cala arc in S4: support, not overwhelming, doesn’t waver from the central theme of the arc.  Tarkin’s the other big one, and I’m pretty satisfied with the way he was used in TCW -- he’s always there in reference to the main characters of the arcs he appears in, and not in reference to himself, if that makes sense -- he’s there because having him there specifically makes more sense than it doesn’t.

(Honestly, I think the little philosophical lessons really helped with TCW being able to keep its focus: they have to drive straight towards that and not hesitate about it.  Every time they dropped those (I’m talking about you, Siege of Mandalore), they ran into a problem where they sort of wandered around a bit.)

Maul...I like Maul a lot.  I don’t have that much of a problem with the decision to bring him back into the timeline in TCW (at least you always knew that when George Lucas was doing something he was doing it because he enjoyed it, instead of the current case of “are you doing it for a purpose? for cheap lulz? for the aesthetic? are you setting up a sequel? are you trying to course-correct another piece of canon?”).  I do think Maul got overweighted in S7, and this is partially because they didn’t really have the space to build him up from where he ended in S5.  The Darth Maul - Son of Dathomir comic helps a little, but S7 is such a rapid switch from where he is in S5 (and you do have to assume that most viewers hadn’t read the comic) that he then pulls in too much narrative weight, and that’s because S7 was trying to do something really, really different from what the previous six seasons of TCW were trying to do.

Rebels sometimes pulls it off, sometimes does not.  Since we’re on the topic of Maul already, I am actually fine with Maul in Rebels.  I don’t actually think he was used to his full benefit because they pulled back at the last minute, but Maul in Twilight of the Apprentice? Fine with that. Same with Holocrons of Fate and Visions and Voices. (I’ve got a few other problems with Visions and Voices.)  Maul is always there in relation to the main characters of the show, not in relation to himself and not in relation to a non-Rebels character.  Did it have to be Maul (back in TotA, obvs, not the latter two)?  No, but it makes sense and it works really well thematically with all of the characters present in that episode.  Holocrons and Visions and Voices, same.

Twin Suns, on the other hand, another Maul episode, was a disaster -- beautifully made episode, everyone is in character, it should never have been made.  (I’m currently grumpy about this one specifically because I recently saw an “Ezra shouldn’t have been in Twin Suns” take.)  Yes, Maul and Obi-Wan are both interacting with Ezra, but Ezra in this ep is basically himself the McGuffin.  Neither the actual, thematic, or emotional conflict in the episode revolves around Ezra even if he’s the instigator of that final showdown.  If you can start and end an episode without the show’s main cast (and Rebels differs from TCW in that it did, very specifically, have a main character as well as a main cast), you’ve made a mistake.  Not to mention that Twin Suns takes a bunch of narrative and thematic weight that was set in TotA and earlier in S3 (such as the Maul/Kanan and Maul/Ezra parallels), and then completely ignores it in favor of a confrontation that is not going to be emotionally significant for viewers who are there for the show’s main cast.

Darth Vader mostly works in Rebels -- in S2 in isolation, not as part of the greater Rebels plot arc which is a weird hot mess of deescalating villains season by season (a whole ‘nother thing).  In Siege of Lothal he’s set up in relation to the main cast and that’s who most of his interaction is with.  Same with TotA, though I sometimes think more weight is put on the Vader/Ahsoka duel than should be there in terms of who the main cast are.  Sometimes I think it’s fine as is.  His other brief appearances are fine, since he’s mostly there just to loom and use up the fabric animation budget.

Tarkin really works in Rebels -- this is honestly Rebels’ biggest legacy character success, my gods, his introduction in Call to Action is terrifying.  Did it have to be Tarkin?  No, they could have made an OC and had the same role, but Tarkin here, in this context?  It ups the tension level a thousand percent, we see him ordering around the Imperials in the show (and the execution scene still gives me chills), and the end of Call to Action, when he’s talking to Kanan on the gunship and orders the destruction of the communications tower?  This is easily one of the most terrifying thing Rebels has ever done and to be honest, I’m not sure they ever topped it in terms of sheer presence.  Evacuating the star destroyer in Fire Across the Galaxy? Perfect parallel to ANH.

From S2-S4, Rebels really wavers back and forth on their use of legacy characters and this is true of the show as a whole from that point onwards -- when there’s a legacy character, they tend to be overweighted in terms of the episode and in terms of how much narrative space is given to them rather than to the main cast.  Not all the time (I have issues with the S4 Mandalore arc, but I think Bo-Katan was played fairly well because most of the narrative weight was still on Sabine), but a lot of the time.  The Future of the Force is really bad on this in terms of Ahsoka -- most of the episode is still focused on Kanan and Ezra, but then they’re taken off the board so she can have her dramatic fight scene.  Shroud of Darkness -- I go back and forth.  (I have other issues with Shroud.)  Leia in A Princess on Lothal -- mostly okay, but some weird moments, like using her to rally the Ghost crew into action?

Wedge in The Antilles Extraction -- fine  He’s played in relation to Sabine, his presence in the ep is thematically consistent with everything else they’re doing. Saw Gerrera in both S3 and S4 I really go back and forth on.  I think I’m mostly okay with him in terms of how he’s played in those four episodes, but I also think there are a lot of questions raised in terms of, like, his relationship to the Alliance.  (This goes for his appearance in Jedi Fallen Order as well -- I’m fine with it, it’s not mindblowing, it was nice to see.)  Mon Mothma I go back and forth on and part of this is because I’m not entirely sure what they were doing with the Rebel Alliance -- this same thing is true for Saw Gerrera.  Especially in the back half of S3 (though it appears earlier as well), Rebels is intersecting more and more with the Rebel Alliance in the lead-up to Rogue One and ANH, but I don’t think they were really entirely sure what they wanted to do with that thematically, which is how we get these wildly varying views of the Alliance even from within it, especially in S4.  Which is part of the reason why S4 thematically is A DISASTER.  (y’all I should not have come out of S4 hating the Rebel Alliance and I still can’t tell if they did that on purpose or not?)

I’m not mentioning every legacy character in Rebels here (Cham, Hondo, Madine, C-3PO and R2-D2, Bail Organa), but mostly the ones where they pay major roles.  Rex I think Rebels mostly managed to pull off having as treating him like supporting cast and not overweighting him as character.  -- The clone trio at the beginning of S2 has them in relation to Kanan, Ezra, Kallus and the stormtroopers, etc., not just in relation to themselves.

(I have no idea how to talk about Thrawn in this context because Thrawn isn’t exactly a legacy character from the current canon, but on the other hand he’s a major EU legacy character, so he’s also just a weird god damn case in general that doesn’t really have a parallel in current canon?)

What else we got -- Star Wars Resistance; doesn’t use that many legacy characters but uses the ones it has pretty sparingly.  Poe is always there in relation to Kaz, Leia has a very brief appearance, Phasma and Hux are mostly there because it makes sense for them to be there, same with Kylo Ren.  Resistance has its issues (both thematically and with pacing) but this is not one of them).

Jedi Fallen Order -- Saw was fine; Vader wasn’t overweighted once he showed up.  Battlefront II had its legacy characters almost entirely in context of Iden and Del; they weren’t there just to be there.  (And not being a gamer I’m not one hundred percent certain how those two felt in actual playing, vs. my watching them on YT.)

(I am not terribly familiar with the current canon books and comics because I stopped reading them a while ago.)

Non-canon example from Legends: Han Solo’s appearance in the Wraith Squadron novels.

The short version of this is: if you’re going to use legacy characters, you want them to be there in relation to your main cast. It has to work thematically; they can’t undercut your mains. Their stories, no matter how important to the saga as a whole, should not overwhelm the main cast of your actual show/film/game/whatever. And they definitely should not undercut your mains.  (I think Mando did this fine with Bo-Katan, tbh.)

[houseofsannae]

A Fistful of Munny - Extended End Notes

Notes for A Fistful of Munny that don’t fit within the character limit under the cut!

Please, read the fic before reading this post

           All right! Welcome to the extended notes, in which I go into excruciating detail over a bunch of stuff that doesn’t matter, because I like the sound of my own voice!

           Let’s start with some more broad stuff that didn’t make the exclusive end notes space. To do the Fistful of Dollars homage, I needed a place where I could have two villainous factions intersecting for Strelitzia to play against one another. After some brainstorming and asking for help from other people working on the Entwined in Trine Sorikai zine (and ultimately ignoring all their very good suggestions (Sorry, guys!)), I eventually realized that the Wasteland from Epic Mickey was a perfect place for this story, both in the sense of having mooks to destroy without Strels committing actual murder, and in the thematic sense of forgotten characters. There was just one issue.

           I hadn’t played Epic Mickey.

           And that is how I spent my summer, playing both Epic Mickey games. Both, because I was looking for a good location to set the story in in-world. Since the Wasteland is based on the Disney theme parks, I was hoping to find one based on Frontierland, their Western section. Such a location did exist – Disney Gulch – but only in the second game. Which meant I had to play Epic Mickey 2, as well. (The first one is a better game, but that’s not really the fault of the developers; they were not given the time they needed to make it as good as the first one. Here’s a video with trivia about the series that goes a little into the development.) I also needed to learn the Mad Doctor’s ultimate fate, since I wanted his Beetleworx/Blotworx to be one of the two villainous factions. In the game, depending on whether you chose the Paint (Paragon) or Thinner (Renegade) path, the Doc is either redeemed… or dead. Neither of which was helpful, so I had to invent.

           But let’s talk about characters and why I picked them in order. The short version for why these choices, at least on the Final Fantasy side, is set-up for later. Obviously I can’t go into detail why. Before that, let’s talk about the Beanie Baby.

           Chi is, as I hope you were able to guess, Strelitzia’s Chirithy. I’ve brought it up several times, but I personally do not like mascot characters. There are a few exceptions, but Chirithies are not one of them. Like I said, KHUx isn’t what happened in this AU, so you’ll have to wait for in-universe answers on why it’s a cat now. Out-of-universe reason is this was the only way I could make it palatable for myself. I arbitrarily decided on a gender for it because as a real cat, it would have a sex. Canonically Chirithies appear to be genderless, and in Japanese refer to themselves with the gender-neutral (but masculine-leaning) boku. I would’ve left Chi that way, save for the fact that he’s a completely normal cat now. (And before you ask, no, not every real cat that appears in KHΨ from this point on is a Chirithy.)

           As for Strelitzia herself, it’s hard for me to pick up a character’s voice when they’re… not voiced. Intonation and cadence do a lot for me mimicking the way a character talks, so it’s a bit more difficult when they don’t technically speak. I tried for a mix between Sora and Kairi, while still keeping her defining character traits of being shy, but also impulsive.

           You may notice that while she’s started remembering faces, if not names, the Player’s name and face still eludes her, despite her (canonical. Deal with it.) crush on them. There is a story reason for this, and will become clear once Luxu takes centre stage.

           The name “Jane” was chosen with more consideration than just “Jane Doe” being the standard name in (at least my corner of) the English-speaking world for a woman of unknown identity. See, the Man With No Name actually has three names. In A Fistful of Dollars, he is referred to (by one character in one scene, once) as “Joe”. “Joan” might have been a more clear homage, but I figure Jane makes sense. And as you might guess, in the next fic, Strels will be going by a different name, still not her own. She’ll remember her name… eventually.

           One might think I could’ve picked any old Cid, and one would be wrong for reasons I can’t explain yet. In fact, I can’t explain much of anything surrounding him yet. What I can say is no, Cidney Aurum is not dead, she’s just not related to Cid Sophiar in this fic verse. An unfortunate consequence of where I wanted to put each of them in the narrative; making them not be related was the only way it made any sense, geographically speaking.

           Hyperion on the other hand, I can talk about. He’s one of the Gremlins in Epic Mickey, and… wait, first things first. Gremlins are from an abandoned Disney film based on a Roald Dahl book, itself based on the cryptids that supposedly haunted airplanes and caused them to malfunction, the earliest known written-down mention of the concept being from the 1920s. The film never got made, but the designs Disney would have used were adapted into a second printing of Dahl’s book, and they were later used in Epic Mickey. Hyperion is, like the publishing imprint that Disney owns, named after a street that Walt Disney used to live on. In-game, Hyperion is in Bog Easy (based on the Haunted Mansion), not Disney Gulch, but his name stuck out to me as being particularly fun, so I picked him instead of trying to figure out what Gremlins actually are in the Gulch (they have names in the files of Epic Mickey 2, but not in the actual game, so it would have been a hunt).

           Regardless of where the setting ended up, for the second villainous faction, I was always going to plop down the good old Don. More things I can’t talk about. For everything FF7, know that I’m always going to be pulling from a mix of the original game, Remake, and Machinabridged. Hence, Corneo’s outfit is a mix of his original and Remake designs (which basically just means he’s wearing blue jeans instead of brown). I didn’t think bringing in his three lieutenants from Remake was necessary, especially since this was supposed to be a kind-of small operation.

           Leslie is picked up and dropped from Remake pretty much unchanged. I needed someone to do the murders Strels couldn’t, and even if he’s not a complete asshole, he’s still mostly an asshole. Have we ever seen small, Materia-like balls used to cast magic before…?

           Onto the fun bits, which is the Disney characters. We’ll start with Percy, who is from a Goofy short called “How to Ride a Horse”, from 1950. And that’s about it. The conceit in Wasteland is that all of the Toons there were basically actors, and they wound up in Wasteland if they were forgotten (that’s not exactly correct, but I’m generalizing). This is interesting, since two of the Toons in Epic Mickey are Horace Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow, both of whom… are residents of Disney Town in Kingdom Hearts, having shown up in Birth by Sleep. So that’s an interesting continuity snarl that I’m going to just ignore.

           Persephone and Pluto, on the other hand, are from an earlier short called “The Goddess of Spring”, from 1934. It was one of the projects Disney tried as practice for Snow White. If you’re about to protest that his name should be Hades, not Pluto, then you’re going to need a time machine so you can tell them back in the 30s. The Goddess of Spring is a musical, in the sense that every single line is sung. Watch it for yourself. There’s a video with better quality floating around YouTube, but for some reason it’s the French dub. And that’s why both of them sing most of their lines. I tried matching the meter of their actual parts, but Persephone’s doesn’t actually follow a syllabic pattern that I could make out. I eventually gave up and just gave her the meter from the start of the short. Pluto’s was easier to manage (and more consistent).

           The skeletons are Disney veterans, presumably the same ones from “The Skeleton Dance” (1929), but more specifically they’re mimicking what they did in “The Mad Doctor” (1933), the first appearance of our other villain. They’re fun.

           The original Mad Doctor was supposedly named “Dr. XXX”, according to the name on his door. This was before the modern film rating system was put in place; it was a different time. In the original short, the Mad Doctor kidnaps Pluto (the dog) with the intent of cutting him in half and putting his front half on a chicken For Science!, and Mickey follows him to his castle to rescue the purloined pooch. The short wasn’t a musical in the same vein as “The Goddess of Spring”, but… the Mad Doctor’s only spoken lines were a song (aside from evil cackling). While I had already decided to do the “Toons that sang in their short can only communicate through song” with Persephone and Pluto before starting on Epic Mickey 2, I hilariously discovered that the game developers had done the exact same gag with the Mad Doctor, most of his lines in the game being sung. (In Epic Mickey there were no fully voiced lines, so he speaks as normally as anyone else does). Which made it easier to write his songs here, since I could just rewrite his songs from the game. I used to write alternate lyrics for songs back in high school, so this was an interesting trip back in time for me. They were stuck in my head for weeks afterwards, but it was worth it.

           I believe that’s everything for the characters. Let’s talk about Keyblades.

           It irks me that three people in KHUx have the same Keyblade. Ephemer, Skuld, and Strelitzia all have variations of Starlight. Now, in KHΨ, there is only one Starlight, and it belongs to Luxu, so I’m going to have to decide on different Keyblades for each of them. (Ephemer’s has already been decided, and I haven’t started brainstorming for Skuld yet. No I do not need suggestions, thank you). Pixie Petal bears a noted (by KHWiki) resemblance to one of Marluxia’s alternate scythes, so that tangential connection was enough for me. Both siblings have flower-themed Keyblades – it makes sense to me.

           You might notice a few disparities in the magic. These are on purpose, and will eventually make sense. And that’s all I can say on that at the moment. ;)

           Oh, yes, one important thing I probably should have said on the main notes: I’m not going for a realistic depiction of amnesia here. Anything I got right was entirely accidental, and I’m fairly certain there’s not much. There might be a story reason for why it works the way it does… and it might be the same reason why other people from KHUx have or had amnesia in the present day…

           You know what’s funny? Although Orcuses look more impressive than Invisibles, their stats in Days are actually worse. I’m fairly sure that this is because the only time we see an Orcus, it’s actually an illusion cast over Xion so that Roxas will fight her to the death. There are no other stats for them (according to KHWiki), since they’ve never been used elsewhere.

           A friendly reminder that Apprentice Xehanort invented the term “Heartless”, which was why Aqua didn’t know what to call them until Mickey told her. Thus, nobody from the era of the Keyblade War should know the term “Heartless” without being told by someone in present day. “Darkling” was the term they used instead. I’m fairly certain KHUx ignores the continuity on this (so why should we trust its continuity for anything else, hmm?)

           I think that covers everything! Or at least everything I’m willing to share at this point. If you’ve read this far, thank you! I appreciate your dedication! ^_^

[reimenaashelyee]

Capturing a Portrait

A post I wrote in March and cleaned up. Reposted from my blog (which has more thoughts on craft and other nonsense). About Alexander Comic.

----

A year in... and I think I've got him.

Disclaimer: I won't deny it. Alexander is impossible to get an accurate picture of. His personhood is made out of sand and everyone brings their own bottles to shape him into. I don't think my jar of sand is the One True Alexander, nor will it ever be. But the good news is, all the other jars aren't that either. The nature of his (after)life is elusive. That's what it is.

But I think I've gotten a hold of him. I mean this in an authorly, character-study sense. I think I've found something interesting.

In the beginning, I had three images of Alexander that I used as my guide: 1) the journey to the Water of Life with the Servant 2) the siege of Thebes 3) the many faces of Alexander. Later I added a fourth image, tied to Hephaestion. Those are the four ingredients for this brain stew. I let them sit. I let them bubble.

There's also a motif that comes up in the ancient biographies and the Alexander Romances: the pursuit. The drive to do things, see things, be things.

Pothos. Desire. Longing.

For a long time I had this suspicion of a particular type of sadness in Alexander's story. I didn't know the name, but I saw the symptoms: the competitive insecurity with his father, the destructive restlessness, the death/fallout of his friends one by one through his own hands, the death of Hephaestion totally out of his hands, the breakdown of his empire after his own death.

Even in the Alexander Romance, the legendary accounts that make him heroic also double down on that sadness. Alexander, kingship is wicked. Alexander, you'll die and never see your beloved mother/sisters again and that's your problem. Alexander, look at this poor, deformed stillborn child – it represents your end. "From my coffin, show the world only a rag in my hand. Say that in the end I die not with the kingdom I sought, but with scraps." Oh, it turns out that Alexander specifically is not fated for the water of life. The two angels warn him, turn back. "You may conquer the world, but the only land you physically own is the land on which your two feet stand on." But even that land is fleeting.

Pothos. A longing for a goal forever out of reach. A goal already lost in its accomplishment. Death gets to you first.

That was the name of the sadness.

Now, I don't intend to use pothos to absolve him. It is sad, but it is separate from the choices he made (in life and in fiction). I still have every intention to put him in the fire.

But I think I got him. My Alexander.

Pothos is not the most original thing ever. I mean, the ancient historians and the Alexander Romance writers already use it. I totally borrowed it from them. And besides, pothos is a posthumous motif that originates from a storyteller's (well, historian's) analysis of Alexander's life. Objectively, it has nothing to do with Alexander's real state of mind, whatever that may be. But man, that motif is powerful and potent and dazzling. No wonder it survives with his memory.

That's why pothos so core to my project and why it needs to remain a thematic forefront.

-

Not too long ago, I had a kind of epiphany related to the philosophical attitude of some of the Romances. It started as a spark of familiarity at first. Why does the attitude seem so familiar? I realised that, of course, it's the same philosophical attitude behind some of my favourite stories in media. And those stories happen to be East Asian. Japanese, especially.

Now, I already came into Alexander Comic with my postcolonial South East Asian lens. I grew up with a lot of Asian media that was only for the Asian gaze, with no consideration or need for Western understanding – alongside Western media, both Hollywood and artsy European and in between. So the way I view the world and the way I tell stories will reflect that media diet. Sometimes it tells me things I wouldn't have known if I had stuck to one source of media.

The funny thing about pothos is that this concept of transcience and imperfection is a whole thing in Japanese and Chinese thought. Mono no aware, wabi sabi, kintsugi... (sorry, all Japanese terms since I'm unable to find the Chinese equivalent... due to a language barrier)

The joy and sadness of autumn. The sand between fingers. The idea that nothing lasts forever and that’s why they are beautiful. The brokenness of a thing being its history. It’s not a brokenness be proud of, or to disguise; it’s simply a brokenness that’s just is. Mundane magic.

It's a thing in the non-English West too.

Saudade. Ubi sunct. Hiraeth. Memento mori.

Closer to home, it's what rindu (and sometimes, sayang) means.

I find it fascinating how someone who used to be the king of the world had not only lost his empire, but his own story. We in the modern world have almost nothing from Alexander's time that speaks about him, to him, and from him. Much of what we know is secondhand, either some hundred years after the fact or from someone else not him. A king of the world cursed to be known by everyone and no one.

-

Admittedly, it's a long dizzying way to obtain a portrait of Alexander... and who knows if this portrait is objectively in line with the real person (probably not! I mean, who knows!). But I think this exploration is part of being an Alexander Romance author.

Nizami said it himself in the first chapters of his own Sikandar Name E Bara: he was a poet overwhelmed with a thousand treasures, desperately trying to find pearls out of them to string into a beautiful narrative. Heck, forget Nizami. Arrian said it too: he had to read through fables and books (Arrian paraphrasingly calls them "trash" in contrast to Nizami's "treasures"), desperately trying to find the best-sounding materials to make his biography of Alexander.*

*the Anabasis is not part of the Romance

At some point in the future, someone will ask me who or what my Alexander is. It won't help that my Romance is neither a straight biography or a complete fantasy, though it includes some of both to paint his portrait. But that's my Alexander. A mish-mash of junk and trash and history and legend. A mosaic or stained glass of foreign words with no equivalent in English.

[khtrinityftw]

Honest KH2 Critique

I wanna talk about Kingdom Hearts II since we're quickly approaching it's 15th anniversary. Ever since it was released, it's become a game that people irritatingly refuse to be moderate over, or at least when it comes to the vocal fans online. People who love it don't love it so much as worship it, while people who hate it don't hate it so much as despise it with every fiber of their being. I may technically fall into the "love" category (I share the majority fan and critic view that KH2, especially it's Final Mix edition, is the best game in the series), but I'm also willing to look at both its good and its bad, and do so in moderation rather than hyperbolically.

And I know, without a doubt - Kingdom Hearts II...has the absolute worst-written story out of the KH Trinity!

OK, that was said hyperbolically, but I did so as a joke!

It's so weird that the original Kingdom Hearts and Chain of Memories have narratives that are deeply and thoughtfully structured with such care and consistency, and then the trilogy is rounded out by such a messily-written rollercoaster of quality!

.....Well, all right, maybe not that weird.

When interviewed shortly after KH2's first public reveal at the 2003 Tokyo Game Show, this is how Tetsuya Nomura described the process for writing the game's story: "I'm writing the plot, the main story of Sora and co. Other people are in charge of the plots for the events that will happen in each Disney world. Combining that with Nojima, we're completing one scenario."

The "other people" in question are the Event team: Masaru Oka, Ryo Tsurumaki, Michio Matsuura, Atsuko Ishikura, Yukari Ishida, and Kumiko Takahashi. Daisuke Watanabe and Harunori Sakemi also assisted Nojima with scenario writing whenever the need arose.

The problem that this process caused isn't apparent at first glance, but it's actually right there in that interview excerpt: "I'm writing the plot". In KH and CoM, Nomura only wrote the initial plot outlines, which were very simple and ripe for being fleshed out by the actual scenario writer. There's a big difference between that and writing a full-fledged plot the way he did here. 

Nomura wrote the story for what transpires in the KH-original worlds: Twilight Town, Hollow Bastion, the World That Never Was and Destiny Islands. It goes like this:

As far as plots go, I actually really like this one. It's a strong plot.

It's also convoluted as Hell.

I made a post saying the three one-word convoluted elements of KH2's plot are "Nobodies", "Data", and "Ansem". All three of those are literally the cornerstones of this plot that Nomura cooked up: they play a huge role through the beginning, middle and end! Because Nomura had more power with making this game, none of the more...out-there stuff that these concepts created could be curbed or removed. Which means that the scenario writer had better be in tune with Nomura when it comes to presenting them in a coherent way.

For the most part, Kazushige Nojima was....not.

Here is a tell-tale sign that Nomura and Nojima were not in sync. When asked if he planned from the start to make Kingdom Hearts be the heart-shaped moon seen on the cover of the original game, Nomura replied "No, I didn't. I asked Nojima-san to write the scenario and in his scenario it was written that the Kingdom Hearts Xemnas created is 'like a moon that floats in the World that Never Was'. When I read that, I thought ‘’Oh, this can be connected!’’"

Nomura just admitted that Nojima essentially had to make up how to convey Xemnas harnessing and trying to complete Kingdom Hearts, because Nomura's plot did nothing to convey it. It was a "wait, how the fuck is he doing that!?" detail. And you really get the sense all throughout the scenario that Nojima is struggling with trying to convey Nomura's stuff, and he has said as much in interviews: Nomura's plot and concepts confused him.

It also doesn't help that Nojima was the least major scenario writer on the original KH, mainly limited to the co-creation of Ansem with Nomura and writing the entire End of the World section. This is probably why Xemnas and Ansem the Wise are clearly the KH-original characters with the most confidence and complexity behind their writing in KH2's scenario. Nojima writes Sora, Kairi, their Nobodies Roxas and Namine, and Riku far more simplistically and trope-y, and the other Organization members and trio of Hayner, Pence and Olette are side characters so naturally they don't get much depth. 

Then there's Masaru Oka and his Event Team. First off, while Masaru Oka is definitely on Nomura's wavelength and understands his vision to a fault, as Event Director he is superbly mediocre at presenting that vision, or Nojima's for that matter. He just isn't cinematically inclined the way Jun Akiyama was in the original KH, and that leads to the event scenes usually being the barest minimum of adequate at best, and laughably awkward at worst.

Secondly, Oka and his team were responsible for creating the plots in the Disney worlds (hence Oka's credit alongside Nomura under "Base Story"). But not only were they frequently lazy and just directly rehashed the movie's story but with Sora, Donald, Goofy and the Heartless shoved in, but half of the time they didn't even bother connecting the world plots to Nomura's main plot in any meaningful way beyond thematically ala CoM, and neither Nomura nor Nojima seemed keen on correcting this even when they really should have.

Here is a chart displaying the game's flow, stage by stage as set by world battle level. Stages where the main plot is progressed in some way are bolded, and stages of the main plot as created by Nomura have red borders around them:

Aside from Space Paranoids which was part of Nomura's plot from the get-go, the only time where correlation with the main plot occurs without any side factor to note is Beast's Castle, where both visits feature the machinations of Organization member Xaldin and culminates in the boss battle against him that leads to his demise.

Olympus Coliseum correlates to the main plot in the first visit but not the second, although the second visit is now made plot-relevant due to tying up loose ends from the first. Port Royal correlates to the main plot in the second visit but not the first, although the first visit is now made plot-relevant due to setting the stage for the second (it also has Larxene's Absent Silhouette in FM). There is technically a main plot correlation in the second visits to the Land of Dragons and Agrabah (the latter of which has Vexen's Absent Silhouette in FM), but Nojima botched the writing of them to the point where there may as well not have been, especially in the case of Agrabah’s which is "oh btw, an Organization XIII member came by off-screen".

And then there's the case of Disney Castle / Timeless River, which only acquires relevance to the main plot because it was decided that Maleficent should be resurrected and be Pete's boss in the present time. And unlike her appearance in Halloween Town, her role in this stage correlates directly to her role in the main story, revealing her resurrection to the heroes and establishing that she seeks a new evil stronghold from which to advance her return to power. Pete's backstory and connection to King Mickey shown here also receives a direct reference toward the climax of the World That Never Was.

While it could be argued that there's additional value in the first visits to Port Royal, Agrabah, Halloween Town and Pride Land due to the presence of Pete (Maleficent when it comes to Halloween Town), I would have to disagree because nothing they actually do in these stages end up mattering to the main story whatsoever - especially in Pride Land, where Pete just shows up in lion form to say “Ooga Booga Booga!”. Their presence alone just ain't enough.

The consequence here is that for the continuous stretch of Port Royal in the first go-round, Olympus Coliseum in the second, and Agrabah, Halloween Town and Pride Land in both go-rounds, it feels like nothing is advancing. And as bad as that sounds on paper, it's even worse when applied to gameplay because it means this lasts for several hours straight! The only main plot event that happens in either cycles is Kairi going to Twilight Town, which happens in a sudden cutscene between Agrabah and Halloween Town and is thus totally out of the player's control!

To sum things up, Nomura wrote a main plot that was good but too overwrought with confusing and complicated details. Nojima is a highly talented writer, but he didn't fully get Nomura's vision. Oka gets Nomura's vision, but he isn't a highly talented Event Director (and as seen in later games, he has even less talent as a writer) and often portrayed scenes that Nomura or Nojima came up with flatly. And none of these men were in sync when it came to how the Disney world plots and the main plot would connect, often simply not caring or else just not trying hard enough.

That is why KH2 has the weakest writing in the KH Trinity: the primary creative voices that shaped the story were completely out of sync with one another on a regular basis. You could say that their hearts just didn't connect on this project. And as a result, we have blatant inconsistences, bad edit jobs, pacing problems, mood whiplashes, missed opportunities, and dumbass moments galore.

However, on the occasions where things between them did manage to sync up, we were given some of the highest points in not only the KH Trinity but the entire KH series, and the input that was given from Daisuke Watanabe, Harunori Sakemi, and others like production assistant (and major Disney fanatic) Eri Morimoto surely helped the messy story become not quite as big a mess as it could have been otherwise. And that story still stayed true to the series' roots as a whimsical Disney/FF crossover project driven by relatable characters and emotional resonance, as opposed to a vanity project for Nomura that is driven by perplexing lore, plot twists and mystery boxes.

And that's why I and so many others love KH2, warts and all, and would gladly take dozens more narrative messes just like it over the different, far less enjoyable kinds of narrative messes that we've been getting afterward.

[dukeofriven]

Steven Universe Future had two challenges it had to overcome: First was that it had to prove that with twenty episodes it could tell a more complete and meaningful resolution than Change Your Mind managed in a single thirty-second shot: in other words, it had to demonstrate that it could more meaningfully summate and resolve the narrative tension of the work than the shot of Steven embracing himself, and understanding himself to be himself. The second challenge was that it had to outperform Steven Universe: The Movie in showing ‘what happens after The End.’

And it failed. That that... nothing was what all this was leading to is flabbergasting. I have often been frequently discomforted by Steven Universe Future: I said more than once that this show, episode after episode, seemed to have narrowed-in on my adult trauma and separated it into component parts. Being so distorted by rage you feel like you’re flying to pieces? Feel that down in my soul. SUF was building to something  - some people thought it was a narrative truth, some final revelation about Pink Diamond, but it was always more likely an emotional truth: whatever it was it was big and heavy and was going to hit like a meteorite. And then it... didn’t? There is something to be said for subverting expectations: the devil’s advovate wants to point to The Holy Grail as a film that builds to an ending that gets the rug pulled out of it at the last second. But that kind of irony isn’t really Steven Universe’s mode of story. The show has often handled ‘big battle segues into talking things out’ very well (see, again, Change Your Mind). The fact that the resolution to Steven’s problems would be found in talking and not fighting was never in question. What was in question was what kind of conversation would it be. And the answer was ‘everyone stands around and restates their primary character flaw from, like, season 2.’ okay, they don’t stand, they hug, but it’s where Steven Universe Future just falls over and dies with a sad little wet fart of a dying balloon. I mean the tension was already gone: there’s no sense of menace from KAijuSteven, there’s not really any thematic reason to go with a giant kaiju except it’s maybe the one anime trope the show hasn’t hit yet. It’s not a visually interesting kaiju: it’s kind of awful, honestly, and for a show that’s so great about changing bodies that still retain some semblance of original personalities, it doesn’t much seem like Steven. It’s a fight of mediocrity: the fight between Alexandrite and Malachite had more oomph, and I always forget that happened.

But forget the fight: bad fight choreography can be forgiven if the show nails the emotional tone. But what is this... this nothing! Why is Steven Universe Future regressing to character beats from years ago? BAM BAM BAM we had emotional punches over and over: Jasper, the White Diamond screaming scene, Steven losing it in the hospital - what’s it going to take to bring our boy home and help him heal? Warmed-over season 1 scripts, I guess. Connie’s argument that everyone always leans on Steven and he never leans on them in return is... completely divorced from the text of the show: the entire first seasons were about Steven learning to step out from the gems shadows, and even in later seasons where he has largely become the Leader Of The Crystal Gems the interplay of ‘we all rely on one another’ remained strong. I... I.... Ugh. I think what rankles is that the solution to Steven’s problem i just a big group hug feels like... kind of a ‘oh fuck off’ moment. It’s a catharsis of emotional release that doesn’t genuinely seem grounded in any of the experiences Steven has just gone through: Steven cries all the time. Steven feels all the time. And Steven gets plenty of physical affection. The show seems to be playing the reversal card: Steven has helped so many villains hug it out and get in touch with their emotional sides, now it is used on him. But

But it worked on villains because they were touched starved. It works on them because they’ve been denied love, because they’re lonely. There’s sort of a theme going on earlier in SUF that part of Steven’s problem is that he’s afraid everyone’s moved on without him and that’s he’s stuck in old paradigms not knowing how to feel. But everyone hugging him, telling him its okay to feel is... it’s still an old paradigm! We’ve done ‘Steven gets angry’ before. A few times! WE”VE BEEN HERE ALREADY.

And a big group hug is - it’s not the fucking solution to the problem. Steven hasn’t had a problem with being emotionally closed - he was weeping over Jasper two episodes ago, and screaming out a lot of anguish through White an episode before that

Fuck, what am I even trying to say here? I think it’s this: what makes Change Your mind work so well is that it’s quiet. The real climax of the narrative arc isn’t the big fight with White’s SHip, it’s the almost-silence of Steven crawling across the floor, hugging himself, and laughing. It’s small and self-contained. The resolution to SU the Movie isn’t the fight on top of the drill, it’s the aftermath, the quiet little conversation with Steven and Spinel that finally gets through to her. The resolution to this is a massive, shouting group hug full of big loud emotional tears and it... makes the monster go away. It’s big and loud and noisy and it sucks.

This sucks. It’s a shockingly mediocre nothing that neither rises to the emotional complexity it raised in early episodes nor manages to subvert expectation by playing down to the truly intimate: it drags in an ensemble it’s spend the previous 17 episode not really doing anything with. God, I could talk about taht for ages - quick, what, if anything, was accomplished with spending a full eleven minutes giving a shit about Bluebird Azurite? SUF is horribly unfoccused, with the lighter ‘here’s some things that happened in the future’ ‘fan-service’ episodes being entirely unrelated to the the ‘Steven struggles to deal with anger’ plotline of the later episodes. The best moment in it is an off-handed comment by Steven that he’s talking toa therapist now. For fuck sake, that needs to be the fucking finale right there. The actual emotional catharsis the ‘defusing the kaiju’ needed wasn’t other people telling Steven how they care about them - in fact, that just plays right back into Connie’s point about making it about themselves. It’s that Steven needs the opportunity to talk about his problems and be heard - WITHOUT ANYONE IMMEDIATELY TRYING TO RESOLVE THE PROBLEM. No Greg giving a speech. No Garnet dropping some wisdom. No 15-point Pearl plan or Amethyst scheme. It neede deveryone on that bitch to sit down, shut the hell up, and just let Steven talk until he had talked himself out, and at no point offer any solutions. Those come later. First, important, desperate, is just to let him talk his shit out without anyone jumping on the issue. But it just get relegated to a throw-away line. God this was dull. More than anything it was just dull: it pulled every punch, and it blew all it’s surprises and twits on episode 1-17, I guess, because every moment lands exactly as you expect. It spent seventeen episodes acting like it had something really important to say about anger and an uncertain future and not knowing your place And then it got up to the mic and had nothing new to say. A show that triggered me this many times over the previous 17 episodes should have something fucking meaningful to say at the end of it, for pity’s sake. What a waste.

[beeftony]

So if you’re going into The Witcher on Netflix without having read the books, be aware that the plots in each episode are linked thematically, not chronologically. As far as I can gather, the Fall of Cintra and everything involving Ciri takes place in the “present” timeline, while just about everything else, all the way up to the final episode, is a flashback. They don’t make this very obvious at first, and I’m not sure how a viewer who’s still learning everybody’s names and how this world works are going to catch all the hints in Yennefer’s origin scenes that they take place almost a century before anything else that happens.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of changes that were made, most of which I think work better for the narrative:

The framing story of The Last Wish is gone, and we only get an offhand mention of the Sisters of Melitele. In the original collection of short stories, Geralt had to spend a few weeks recovering from the Striga attack seen in the third episode. The story where that happens was not only the first published Witcher story, but didn’t originally involve Triss. I do think it’s a much better way of introducing her character than how the books did it, which was an offhand mention by Yennefer folllowed by a gigantic infodump in Blood of Elves.

Foltest was extremely forthcoming in the original story, and the incest between him and his sister was more of an open secret. The idea to cure the Striga was something a fortuneteller had told him, and was the reason nobody had taken the contract in recent years. I do like the way they framed it here better, even if it robbed us of the “she’s the most striggish striga to ever striga!” line.

The Fall of Cintra was never explicity shown in the books, only recounted after the fact. Neither was the Battle at Sodden Hill. Geralt wasn’t present for either, and only heard of them through stories the locals told, and was, among other false information, under the impression that Triss Merigold died in the battle (she gets burned in the show, but in the books she was immolated from head to toe and didn’t even have skin until the mages fixed her up). Because we’re not stuck with only his perspective this time, we get to see both.

Geralt was, however, present for the scenes in the Forests of Brokilon, as the short story where that happens is the first time he meets Ciri. It actually takes place before the Fall of Cintra, and he just gives her to Mousesack at the end of it, leaving Ciri screaming “I’m your destiny!” after him.

Geralt originally met Stregobor before he met Renfri of Creydon (and already knew who he was, rather than having to be told), and he and the Ealdorman of Blaviken also had a pre-existing relationship. The story Geralt tells his horse about his “first monster” was originally part of one of the framing device chapters that consists entirely of Geralt monologuing his origin to a character who is mute and therefore can’t talk back to him. Having Roach fill that role instead makes sense.

Geralt and Jaskier (also called Dandelion in a few translations) didn’t have a scene where they first meet in the books, they’ve just known each other for years even by the time “The Edge of The World” takes place. That story originally involved a forest spirit who stopped the elves from killing them because nature had apparently chosen humans as the future.

Jaskier wasn’t present for Pavetta’s betrothal feast, and Geralt was invited there under the alias “Ravix of Fourhorn” by Queen Calanthe, who came up with the plan to use him to kill Duny before the event even happened. This is a much livelier version of that story, which mostly consists of an overly long conversation between Geralt and Calanthe that I’m glad they trimmed down.

They made a few changes to “The Last Wish,” in which Yennefer merely wanted to bind the Djinn to her will in the original, whereas here she wants to absorb it into herself. The scene where they fuck in the ruins of the mayor’s house, with Dandelion saying: “Oh, they’re alive. They’re very alive,” played out with that exact level of comedy in the original short story.

In “The Bounds of Reason,” the story where they hunt the dragon, there were quite a few things different:

Yennefer already knew about the wish, and wanted to use the dragon to undo it. I like the change made here, because unlike other stories involving infertile women, she isn’t portrayed as a monster or a helpless victim but as someone who wants to take back a choice that was stolen from her. It lines up perfectly with her characterization in the books too, where she also longed for motherhood.

The reason the green dragon was vulnerable in the original is because a peasant had filled a dead sheep with poison and tricked the dragon into eating it.

King Niedamir accompanied the expedition, and originally wanted to hunt the dragon because he was told he couldn’t marry the Princess of Malleore unless he’d slain one. At the end of everything he just decides to marry the princess anyway and torture anyone who disagrees.

In the cliff scene, Geralt and Yennefer were the ones dangling, and Yennefer said she was “admiring the view” while clinging to his waist.

Eyck of Denesle didn’t get his throat slit in the woods, but attacked Villentretenmerth (who actually appears in his true form much earlier, but the fact that he’s disguised in human form is still secret), and got his spine broken for his trouble.

Yennefer actually gets to fight and kill in this version, unlike in the original where the Reavers tie her up and tear her shirt open while attempting to rape her, and Dandelion won’t stop staring at her chest. This is unequivocally the better version

Geralt and Yennefer actually get back together in this story, rather than being driven apart, because again, she already knew about the wish.

This does mean that “A Shard of Ice” gets cut completely, but I think meeting Istredd as part of Yennefer’s backstory works better than a story in which he and Geralt attempt to duel each other over her, before she just breaks up with both of them.

[bigskydreaming]

I may or may not still be stuck on that reblog from earlier that inspired thoughts of how Finn, Rey and Poe all act as foils for K/ylo in certain ways, representing the three different aspects of his life, heritage and choices. 

Rey as a Force user and successor to Luke Skywalker, who K/ylo was the natural heir to before he rejected that path. 

Poe as a dedicated member of the Resistance and successor to Leia Skywalker Organa Solo (using her full name because the Skywalker part is relevant to aspects of this post but I refuse to ever uphold it as more important than any of her other names or titles, so all four names it is). With Leia also being who K/ylo could just as feasibly been the natural heir to had he chosen that path.

And Finn as someone the First Order/Empire/Dark Side tried to make into a weapon to serve their purposes and them alone, isolating them from family and attempting to make them reliant on them with no other bonds to others, even others with their same allegiance to the FO/Empire/DS....just as they did with Anakin....and with Finn rejecting all that and turning explicitly to the Light, as Anakin ultimately did....making Finn the true successor to the path K/ylo claimed to choose, as while Anakin’s final acts may quite arguably be too little too late to merit true redemption...they nevertheless quite clearly express his final alignment, no matter how K/ylo attempted to rewrite history to match his preferred perspective on the ancestor he honors for all the wrong reasons.

So in that sense, all three of the sequel trilogy’s protagonists serve as narrative foils to K/ylo, providing two different windows looking out on what he could’ve been, if he’d chosen his mother or uncle’s paths....and one inverted mirror showing what he should’ve looked like if he’d actually chosen his grandfather’s path, the way he tries to claim.

And thus, all three of them, each in their own, entirely separate ways.....are the spiritual successors to the Skywalkers whose choices reshaped their galaxy in the first two trilogies...

Even without a single one of them actually needing to be a Skywalker themselves.

Of course, due to the way Finn’s narrative potential stands out as a singular amid the three and with Poe and Rey’s paths flanking his, even though all three share thematic and narrative commonalities....

I maintain that naturally makes Finn’s narrative function the more logical lynchpin of the three distinct foils, bringing it all together.

So if it had been plotted this way from the start, rather than Poe’s importance boosted after the fact while Finn’s importance was either artificially inflated from the start or lessened because of TLJ’s creative changes under the direction of Dude Whose Name I Literally Have Forgotten, Please Don’t Refresh My Memory In The Notes, I Actually Prefer It This Way....

Then I think the way the trilogy should have unfolded is with each of the three movies spotlighting a different one of the three protagonists and the specific ways they mirrored K/ylo’s potential vs his actual choices and ultimate results.

And thus the first movie should have been Poe’s movie, due to the fact that of the three protagonists, he was the one who was already furthest along his particular path before the movie even started, and thus had the most potential as a vehicle for steering the other two protags into their narrative positions at the same time as showcasing the current state of the galaxy and resistance, and serving as a bridge between the new trilogy and the stars of the original trilogy, or at least Leia and Han. 

And of course, this still allows this to be the film where K/ylo kills his father and thus most fully cements his choices and allegiances as he turns his back on the life that could have been his by virtue of his birth, effectively saying “I don’t want or need this, the circumstances of my birth do not decide who I am, only I decide who I am.”

With Poe perfectly mirroring even that, as the end of the film and start of the next one could still bring about his rise within the ranks of the resistance, which is something we’ve been told Leia had hopes for all along. As Poe then demonstrates what could have been K/ylo’s while definitively cementing both his path and his place in history...right alongside Leia Skywalker Organa Solo’s name in future retellings of this time in galactic events. And it doesn’t require anything like Poe viewing her as his mother, as he has his own parents already.....because Leia’s own story in the original trilogy established that she was a Skywalker by birth and an Organa by her adoptive parents’ choice and her own choice to continue honoring them and the childhood and family they gave her...and neither of these things ever demanded conflict, because just as K/ylo’s killing Han declared, everything about Leia’s narrative has always upheld that the circumstances of her birth do not decide who she is...only she decides who she is. 

Which Poe now upholds as well in his own ways, as the true successor to Princess Leia, the face of resistance. In essence, both of their stories proclaiming and affirming that how thoroughly K/ylo sought to divorce himself from following this path was never needed to separate himself from the life some thought he was destined for because of his birth, in order to define who he wanted to be himself.

Then, the second movie IMO should have been Rey’s, the way K/ylo’s natural abilities as a Force user next led him to the path Luke Skywalker had walked and now represented. Where the first movie was an inverted mirror of K/ylo’s life by birth, the second would serve as an inverted mirror of his childhood, by virtue of natural ability.

With Poe’s narrative in the first movie steering Rey into the same place as TFA, getting her to where she needed to go in order to be Luke’s student and learn from him, to unlock her potential as a Force wielder and discover what doors that opened for her as she debates which of them she wants to walk through....similarly, you don’t need to change much about Rey or her narrative to make the most of this here. Because Rey’s relative lack of a backstory and her life inexperience in various areas due to growing up as isolated as she did...both potentially combine to mimic aspects of childhood. A time of self-discovery and exploration, deciding who we are and who we want to be.

Ironically, that thing said about her past by the Dude Whose Name I Still Don’t Remember And Am Making A Conscious Choice Not To Look Up, Respect My Choices Please And Thank You....like, it still could hold true here. About how not knowing where she came from being important in a narrative or thematic way or whatever. I forget the full context or the full reason he had for saying it, and feel comfortable assuming it was bad and wrong and stupid....but, I maintain, neither Rey nor the audience knowing or ever learning who her parents were or where she originally came from could work perfectly for this movie too.

Because it makes her a blank slate...and thus, kind of the ideal candidate for a Jedi, according to the philosophies of the Jedi Order....when Anakin was a Jedi. With no prior ties or emotional attachments to ‘get in the way.’

This film should still revolve around Rey’s choice of alignment, the temptation to choose the Dark Side being brought before her. But whereas K/ylo chose the Dark Side even while having numerous emotional attachments that could have kept him from it if he’d valued them highly enough (and there continues to be zero evidence that Leia and Han were in any way a negative impact on their child to the degree stans of his try to frame them as being, so I’ll thank anyone tempted to make that claim for choosing to go contemplate their own asshole instead, thanks ever so much)...

As I was saying, ahem, in complete contrast to that, the entire opposite end of the spectrum, was Rey and her comparative lack of emotional attachments. Except for Finn and Poe, who she’d only met recently, she had as few attachments as it was pretty much even possible for her to have before embarking on her personal journey as a Force user.

And thus, as a narrative foil to K/ylo, she was perfectly positioned to most fully embody and affirm Luke Skywalker’s narrative in the original trilogy, and advance it from there onward. Because her being an ideal candidate for the Jedi Order even according to its old, pre-Empire standards, meant that her choosing to reject the Dark Side would uphold that the problem was neither having too many emotional attachments....like K/ylo had plenty of and plenty of pre-Empire Jedi would have haughtily trotted out as proof of why they were dangerous.....but also, the problem wasn’t having too few emotional attachments....like was arguably a key factor in Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side, with his emotional attachments being whittled away at or cited as innately dangerous to prioritize.

No. As Luke’s original narrative showed, and Rey’s would embody and hopefully now advance beyond that point....its never been about having too few or too many emotional attachments. Its entirely about what you do with them, the role they play in your life and your choices.

And thus Rey and the second movie of the trilogy would stand as an inverted mirror to the life K/ylo could have had by virtue of his natural abilities with the Force, the path he was presented with in his time of childhood, as the intended heir to Luke Skywalker and the path he’d once walked. And Rey and a choice to reject the Dark Side at the climax of this second movie standing as a rejection of the idea that it was ultimately either Luke’s actions that brought about K/ylo’s choices or the Jedi Order’s actions that brought about Anakin’s....while playing a role, a large role, in all of that....ultimately, as Rey’s choice of alignment would affirm here....it had always, and would always come down to: “What do I choose? I am not defined by the abilities I possess....neither the Light nor the Dark have an automatic claim over me. It is my choice.”

Which brings us at last, to Finn.

As I maintain in the view of all three protags as narrative foils, he’s the logical and most symbolic centerpoint of the triad of characters....which makes him the most logical and most symbolic lead for the finale of the trilogy. And the last movie thus should always have been his movie.

Because Finn and the way we were introduced to him from the start...is what always had the most potential to ensure this trilogy not only affirmed the original trilogy, and retold it in new ways for new audiences and old....but that it went further. Advanced somewhere new. Left us somewhere entirely unexplored, rather than just at the same endpoint the cycle always seems to ultimately revert to in the expanded saga of the Light vs the Dark Side.

See, as foils, both Poe and Rey, and both their movies, would have been about exploring the roads untraveled by K/ylo. The paths he’d not taken by his own choices. Bookending him in terms of what he could have been, as demonstrated by those trying to deal with the problems created by what he is now, what he became.

Poe was the birth of a new trilogy here, the spiritual successor to the idea that we are not defined by our births. Where we began does not have to determine where we end up.

Rey was its childhood, the spiritual successor to the idea that we are not defined by our abilities. What we can do does not have to determine who we can be.

Finn, then, as the last movie of the trilogy, is its adulthood. Birth and childhood and the possibilities they present or limit, the doors they open and close...they’ve made their cases, they’ve played their parts.

But now, in adulthood, its about the actual choices we make. And the consequences those choices carry.

And thus while Poe and Rey functioned within the narratives of their respective movies as windows to what K/ylo could have been had he chosen to walk the paths of his mother and uncle rather than rejected them to walk the path of his grandfather - at least as he insisted on viewing it....

Finn’s narrative in his movie would function fully and wholly as the inverted mirror of not the paths K/ylo could have chosen...but the path he did choose, instead.

And why it was not what he’d convinced himself it was. And never could have been. And never was going to be.

Because just as Poe and Rey were already introduced as perfectly positioned for their narratives as I outlined them here...the same holds true of Finn.

The first movie began where the original trilogy began. With K/ylo already established in the role his grandfather had made iconic....not as the Jedi he’d once been, but Darth Vader, the willing monster he became.

Finn, in stark contrast...began where Darth Vader ended.

Lucas has long said that all six movies ultimately were as much Anakin’s extended story as they were anything else. That in the end, it all came down to that final sacrifice, that last rejection of the Dark and return to the Light.

Thus Finn’s narrative was ultimately the true continuation past the endpoint of both previous trilogies and where they brought us to, and last left us.

He began where Anakin Skywalker ended, making him the one true heir to the Skywalker legacy K/ylo had tried to embrace - at least through the lens he’d committed to viewing it through.

By virtue of our initial introduction to Finn being his conscious and committed choice to defy the First Order that had raised him and molded him to be its weapon, to reject all of that and walk his own path in a completely opposite direction, just as K/ylo had consciously rejected everything he felt his birth and childhood wanted him to be and tried to make of him in order to walk his own path in the completely opposite direction....

This meant that both characters, ultimately, walked the same road.....but without ever meeting or overlapping or treading the same ground, that we saw.

With Finn, we begin where Anakin ultimately ended, and thus Star Wars says, there is always new ground to walk. The story we told, the one we told you was all about leading up to that one final climax....is not the only story worth telling. There are still stories to tell past that point, that choice that Anakin ultimately made.

And here’s one now.

Finn’s story.

And thus while Poe and Rey’s movies showed us everything the Skywalker Heir could have been if he’d made different choices, in two separate directions, two different paths he could have walked and still fulfilled the legacy of the legendary Skywalker family....Finn’s movie would have shown us everything the Skywalker Heir was, by virtue of the choices he had made, the path he did walk.....because Finn is that Skywalker heir, the true spiritual successor of the founding patriarch of the Skywalker line, Anakin, the man with no father. Finn is the final fulfillment and continuation of the Skywalker legacy in a new generation, not K/ylo, no matter how much the latter claimed to be, wanted to be, tried to be.

Because he fucking. Missed. The point.

No, all along its been Finn who is everything Anakin’s entire arc ever made of him...the choices he’d made in defiance or fulfillment of who he was by birth, whatever your stance may be on what the Force intended for him and whether he ultimately fulfilled it or not.....the man he’d become either in spite of or because of who he was by childhood, the way the Jedi Order had tried or failed to teach him or mold him, whatever your stance may be on how much culpability they share for that.

If both the prequel and the original trilogy were ultimately all Anakin’s story....

Then from the very first scene we were introduced to Finn...

They had everything they needed to make Anakin’s story Finn’s backstory.

Just as Poe and Rey were already ideally positioned to affirm, uphold and advance Luke and Leia’s original narratives as their spiritual successors, Finn was ideally positioned to do the same for Anakin’s as his. A two minute long scene at the very start of the new sequel pretty perfectly encapsulated: 

“This is Finn. You know his story. You’ve already seen it. Now, let’s get started with what happens next.”

What does one do after one’s rejected the Dark and chosen the Light?

The original trilogy said, well, one dies, we guess.

The sequel trilogy could have said, well, there’s a whole fucking lot left one can do after that, so here’s three movies to watch that unfold, with the last one specifically devoted to exploring where that road leads from here.

And thus, all three movies and their protagonists could have built upon everything that came before them, could even have claimed the same thing that was said about the original and prequel trilogy being ultimately about Anakin, as this one too could in a way be all about K/ylo and the choices he didn’t make and the ones that he did....

And with all three movies and protags then culminating in one deliberate, incontrovertible message:

K/ylo Ren is a loser punk shithead and the Dark Side sucks, don’t believe the hype. Here’s three movies worth of proof. Now back to the ongoing saga of the Skywalker Legacy, as enacted by its three different points that are nevertheless all headed in the same general direction: 

Into the future.

And into the Light.

But nah, LucasFilms decided “hey what if we just suck instead.”

Absolute fucking icons.

[dgcatanisiri]

So. Did see Rise of Skywalker today.

“Flawed, but probably as good as we were going to get” is my two cent summary, especially given some of the whispers I’m hearing about what went on behind the scenes that, in effect, this was “the Disney shareholder’s” trilogy more than any individual, and I think you all can guess my opinion of the Disney shareholders in general... (plus the inevitable difficulty of trying to unify two movies that honestly had a lot of tonal and thematic clash to begin with).

You want more details, they’re behind the cut, because I’m going to respect the spoiler tags.

First things first, let me get this out of the way first, Kelly Marie Tran and Rose Tico DESERVED. BETTER. Like, bare minimum, I think there should have been a scene between her and Rey at the start while Rey is reading the Jedi tomes. Just a little something that connects the two. Better still, use her as a touchstone character for what’s happening at the Resistance base in the first half - yeah, sure, you can only do so much with the jiggered footage of Carrie Fisher, but SO. WHAT. Leia doesn’t have to be in those scenes. 

Hell, have her and Connix talk, considering that Connix was significant enough to both be in charge of the D’Qar evacuation AND Poe’s right hand during the mutiny. Since Connix is played by Billie Lourd, Carrie Fisher’s daughter, it’d have been a fine connection there, especially if you want to include some foreshadowing of Leia’s eventual death, talk about them being concerned about the way that the General is handling everything happening, losing everyone so close to her.

Like, that’s the off the top of my head ways to enhance Rose’s part in this movie without significantly altering any of the plot. Truthfully, I think she should have been part of the group the whole time anyway. 

I still don’t particularly like the return of Palpatine as the big bad, meaning that we’re pretty much completely undermining the end of the original trilogy. I mean, wasn’t that what Anakin Skywalker’s death in Return of the Jedi meant? At least when the Legends line brought him back, it was a) still during the post-RotJ war clean up, where the Empire was still fighting after Endor, still part of the same war, and b) left ambiguous enough if that was genuinely Palpatine or just a clone that claimed to be the original Palpatine.

But I can also appreciate the thematic relevance of Palpatine, the Emperor, Darth Sidious, whatever name he uses, being the overarching villain of the Skywalker Saga. So... We’ll call it even? Meh.

I will RELUCTANTLY allow the idea of Leia sacrificing herself to pull back her son from the dark side, mostly on the basis of being limited by the footage of Carrie Fisher, so using her death to have story meaning can be tolerated. Still don’t like it - I have firmly been of the believe that, given all the times he made the active choice to be evil, he could not simply return to the light, be redeemed or forgiven. But since he did, ultimately, die, I will allow it - I’m only going to be able to view his death as, effectively, him making the only effort at atonement that could be done, stopping Palpatine, before his true penance came in not being able to be a part of the galaxy he helped to save.

That said, I do NOT accept the kiss. I will only even possibly pretend it happened under the pretense of being a heat of the moment victory thing that meant nothing. Because FUCK REYLOW.

First half of the movie is HORRENDOUSLY compacted. Like, I legit feel like there was a good fifteen minutes or more hacked out of it. Too much is happening right off the bat and just doesn’t stop. It settles down eventually, but MAN could that have done with less compression.

Honestly, overall, it feels like at least two movies crammed into one, like Disney refused to split it up because “but it’s a TRILOGY!” Which, uh... Not to open the “TLJ discourse” can of worms, but... That was always going to happen, considering the massive tonal clash between Abrams and Johnson as writers and directors. Especially with Johnson having basically done nothing that would advance a core arc, by way of having the main characters of the trilogy interact - TLJ had Rey, Finn, and Poe all in different plots in separate areas, which made no sense to begin with, considering these were supposed to be the core characters, shouldn’t they have actually gotten to interact sooner? 

Like I said in the summary, TFA and TLJ have little that actually connects them. In the sense of creating a coherent narrative, it’s not unreasonable that Abrams downplayed a lot of Johnson’s elements, considering that Johnson did the same with elements Abrams included in TFA - Finn’s potential Force affinity (I’ll get to that), the Knights of Ren (suddenly back with no explanation), the conscription of child soldiers as stormtroopers (which really SHOULD have been a core part of TLJ, instead of the child slavery on Canto Bight, considering it mattered to Finn’s character as already established), the idea that Luke had been searching for something (because why would he have left a map to where he was going in TFA if, as TLJ said, he went to Ach-to to wait for death?)... TRoS was always going to be in a bind on these things, and, really, considering that neither film prior was written with an ending in mind, there was no real solution but to just dance around the subject.

Let’s talk briefly about the Poe background stuff, which... *sigh* It was so POINTLESS to introduce the idea that he was a drug dealer. Like, first of all, RACIST AS FUCK to make the Latino man a drug dealer. Secondly, when and how, considering his canon back story is that he is the son of minor Rebel heroes, how did he have the time for this to happen? Third and not least, the guy’s an ace pilot, why WOULDN’T he know about hotwiring vehicles? He should know them inside and out!

Zorii is... There. That’s about all I really can say about her. Same with Jannah. Both of these felt like characters who SHOULD have had more relevance, had they been introduced sooner (and in which case, I’d toss Zorii and swap in Rose anyway). Considering they’re dropped in at the last second as they are, they honestly end up just feeling like props meant to portray Poe and Finn as straight, which... 

Okay, Disney overlords are homophobic cowards. Let’s just acknowledge that right off. Finn/Poe was a ship that was never going to be allowed off the ground. We all knew it going in. So make Finn/Rey a thing and let Poe be read as gay, even if it’s not said. It would have been that simple. TFA laid the foundation, and that hug in TLJ was a good building block as well. But no. You have to be cowards and not “rock the boat” by both not having an interracial relationship AND trying to appease the Reylows. Ugh.

Anyway, any and all flirtation between Poe and Zorii is PURE mlm/wlw joking with one another. Stormpilot is endgame. Rey/Rose is real. Fuck Disney and fuck canon. MOVING ON.

Also on that note, FINN IS FORCE SENSITIVE, GODDAMMIT. The adamant refusal to acknowledge this REALLY pisses me off, because Finn is a PERFECT mirror to Kylo Ren and should have been his counterpart throughout this trilogy - Finn was a nameless stormtrooper with no past, Kylo was the heir to legacies, Finn refused to slaughter innocents, Kylo gave that order. Finn embraced the Resistance, Kylo led the First Order. THIS is the duality of characters that should have driven this trilogy. I’m not trying to take away Rey’s significance, but...

When people complain about Rey’s lineage, I’m just not all that big on this matter. First of all, I was neutral on the subject from day one. As time has gone on, however, I have reached a point where I’m just ‘...well, yeah, of course she’s got an important lineage.’ Because TFA made a big deal of this fact. This was her driving motivation. On top of that, TLJ trying the “they were nobodies” thing actually legit pisses me off, because what abandoned child just casually accepts “they were nobodies”? Even if they weren’t significant (which, again, by way of Maz and the lightsaber calling to her in TFA, there was a strong implication of them being significant, particularly with the stage directions in the script for Luke and Leia when interacting with Rey), they weren’t nobodies FOR HER. But TLJ basically has her discard the search casually.

So you want a hero who comes from nothing? Again, may I present FINN, the stormtrooper who came from nothing, who should have been leading a stormtrooper uprising, who should have gotten to be a Jedi, who DESERVED BETTER THAN THIS TRILOGY GAVE HIM...

Gah. Okay. I’m tired of ranting about the things that I didn’t like. There ARE positives, I swear!

Chewie’s breakdown over Leia’s death about broke me. Like, the moment he collapses... God, that was choking me up an hour later, too. How much it must hurt Chewie and Lando to be the only ones left... Honestly, I was half afraid that the Falcon would be destroyed during that final conflict. 

Honestly, I know the idea was that Han’s appearance was just a figment, a manifestation of the inner thoughts, but I’m going to call it confirmation of Han being Force sensitive. Mostly because I picture Han losing his shit at the idea. And, honestly, I can’t help but wish that, at the least, we could have had Leia appear there, but we weren’t going to get that either way.

Speaking of Leia, honestly, I think they did the best they could with what they had of her, and, truthfully, I think it was a fine tribute to Carrie, to have Leia there, die within the context of this movie, and not just die off between films. Yes, it bound their hands some, but... It wouldn’t have been right without her, either. 

Though I do reiterate that the binding with the footage is no excuse for hacking Rose practically out of the film entirely.

I focused on the issues I had against the movie, mostly because I feel like they stood out more than the things that I liked. The problem this trilogy has had since day one is that they went into this without a plan. This trilogy never knew where it was going until this movie came along. So two movies of basically throwing everything at the wall, leading to one movie having to tie it all up. This movie was always going to struggle, but in the end, I think it probably came out as best as it could.

If you want to call that damning with faint praise... I suppose it sort of is, but, more truthfully, it’s seeing it for what it is and judging it as such. This movie was hobbled before it could walk, that it managed what it did as well as it did is really a tribute to those who tried to make it work.

I feel like that’s all the major things I have to bring up right now. Though I will add... Yeah, let’s be real. They call this the end of the Skywalker Saga, but in twenty years or so, we’re going to get a fourth trilogy. Because we’re basically at the point of “every generation’s going to have their own Star Wars trilogy.”

[littleblackgoldfish]

Hello! I'm a Mass Effect fan & I reread a post you made on the trilogy & its story structure, & I was curious if you'd think swapping the main plots of the first two instalments would do much to improve things? As in swapping the villain focuses around, fighting the Collectors in ME1, & Saren in ME2. I've talked about the idea with a friend before & how it'd clear some logical issues that arise in 2, such as the Council's denial of the Reapers when they could've seen Sovereign out their window.

Originally I intended to answer this before the holidays, but well… the holidays.

In short, no.

To make that answer longer; it wouldn’t not fix it, but it also doesn’t really do much to address the core problems, structurally, that I see. Fundamentally the problem isn’t with the antagonists of the individual stories that each game tries to tell, but with the fact that they are essentially individual stories. What Saren does has little to do with what the Collectors do and neither builds on the themes of the other. 

They certainly could have, with the Collectors essentially representing the ultimate end point of Saren’s collaboration. But there’s no sign of that sort of connection, of that sort of reflection in the games themselves; all indications are that the Reapers simply took whatever leftovers they had of the Protheans and twisted them. If perhaps Javik (or rather a similarly position character, they would have to have been very different from Javik himself) had appeared in the second game rather than the third it might have been possible to build that sort of thematic/narrative meaning in.

But, that still would only have been a paper thin sort of thematic bandaid.

Ultimately what gives a story meaning is the questions it asks of its’ audience, not the things it tells them, but the things it asks them to tell themselves. 

And, in the end, all three of the games offer up very different questions. ME1 is interested in what Saren is up to, what happened to the Protheans, why the Geth are suddenly showing up, that sort of stuff. ME2 concerns itself with who and what the Collectors are, what is happened to the human colonists, and whether Cerberus is worth redeeming (the answer is no, btw). ME3 spends most of its time figuring out who and what can help you fight the Reapers, what the Crucible is, and why the Reapers are doing what they are doing. The only ‘question’ all three games have in common is 'how do we defeat the Reapers,’ which is a boring question for several reasons.

There are only a few answers, basically all of which are as obvious from the start as they are at the end; 'you don’t,’ 'fight them,’ 'someone will save you.’ Understand I don’t mean any of these answers are bad, but that they make an unsatisfying throughline to pin your series on because the audience can see the answer coming a mile off. For these questions what matters isn’t the question or the answer, but the journey to get there. The journey of the Mass Effect Trilogy is enjoyable, satisfying.

It’s the finish line where the story stumbles and that’s where the questions and answers that story is about matter. 

Unfortunately the third game spends a lot of time on the answer to a question that never really mattered (no character in the entire series has figuring out the Reapers motivation as their driving focus) even if it was technically asked in the first game. Because it’s not enough to ask the question, you have to actually spend time exploring its dimensions, you have to make it matter to the characters and to your readers/audience.

Structurally 'fixing’ the trilogy is actually pretty easy, in the sense that you can do it with relatively few key alterations. Move the discovery of the Crucible from early on in the third game to early on in the second. Boom. Fixed (of course this necessitates further macro and micro scale changes across the rest of the series in order to make it really work, but that’s writing for you).

Of course that does nothing for the theme problems that are really at the root of why so many people were unsatisfied with the end, but just cutting out the Star Child ending bullshit would basically neuter that issue and from there you can just make turn the Crucible into a reverse trap (meant as a trap for the galaxy, turned into a trap for the Reapers using the various elements (Geth, Rachni, Javik, whatever you want) of the series to bullshit the how).

And that’s where I’m gonna cut off because I don’t want to spend the next few hours charting out all the small little changes you could make to fix this mess of a series. Hope this is what you wanted.

[kinetic-elaboration]

May 18: Whitby and the Mouse

I’ve been thinking about this and

[Spoilers for the Southern Reach trilogy below] [by which I mean, don’t read this post, read the books]

*

I don’t think Whitby is a clone. And I don’t think OG Whitby is the mouse.

I have to say I dislike the idea that just because clones exist, all characters who are a little bit weird, and/or all characters who have returned from Area X are clones. (Someone literally said on r/SouthernReach “everyone who leaves Area X is a clone, thus Whitby and the director must be clones” like ??? That statement is tautological. I feel like a lot people wouldn’t say it so starkly but nevertheless believe the same thing, though.) Like, I get it, the clones are cool. But isn’t it cool/er/ to think that Area X can do something other than return clones to the world? That the number of outcomes for people who enter Area X is bigger than two? What I’m trying to say is that I don’t really want Whitby to be a clone. I think it’s more interesting to say he’s not. And I also think that if you assume he is, and especially if you think other people are too, you’re going to run into nonsense later on, drawing these theories to their conclusions.

But I also don’t think Clone!Whitby is the best, most textually supported interpretation either.

Here are the known, definite, canon clones: Ghost Bird; the blanks from the last eleventh and the twelfth expeditions; the director who expanded the border at the end of Authority. We don’t know anything about this last clone, if she has memories or personality or anything. I mostly assumed she was a blank, too. The one bit of evidence in favor of this: Grace is positive enough that she is not really the director that she feels comfortable shooting her and killing her. If the director had been more Ghost Bird than Mr. Biologist, I don’t think this would have been as easy of a call.

So among the canonical clones we have Ghost Bird, and the blanks.

And we have some potential clones (aka characters who I’ve seen presumed or supposed to be clones while reading theories on the internet): the director at some earlier point; Lowry; Whitby.

Ghost Bird is a clear anomaly among the canonical clones, but not so much if you include the potential clones. If you include the potential clones, then Area X has the ability to create a variety of lifelike human duplicates, including, from the time of the very first expedition, one that can function for decades on the outside without anyone thinking he’s inhuman. 

And if Area X has, and has always had, that ability, why is Ghost Bird’s creation consistently held up as such an odd and special thing? Why is Ghost Bird herself presented as unique? And why are so many factors, specific to her and the biologist, delineated to explain her creation?

Unlike any other character, the biologist:

Was known to Area X through a prior expedition member (we know that her husband was thinking about her a lot, since he addressed his journal to her, so Area X could have ‘read’ her in him before she even arrived);

Has a personality that seems like it would be easier for AX to read: more of a loner, someone who finds it easier to, in her own words, fit into any environment in which she finds herself;

Was conditioned before arriving in AX to be even more isolated and paranoid than usual;

Had an intimate relationship with a clone (I don’t actually think this is important but I’m adding it anyway since I’ve seen it mentioned in some theories);

Is so unusual even before any conditioning or any time spent in AX that the director feels in her presence like she is in the presence of AX itself;

And, most importantly, was exposed to the spores several days before Ghost Bird’s creation, allowing her to be ‘someone AX knows’ before meeting the Crawler and being fully scanned--this factor is mentioned specifically in Acceptance as the main reason why Ghost Bird is able to exist as such a perfect, nearly-human clone.

Why go through all the trouble of creating such a unique Original for cloning purposes, if Area X can make clones like Whitby, post-first-AX-trip director, and Lowry?

This is largely definitive for me, but my full reasoning actually goes farther, and is harder to describe. Especially not without sounding like I’m actually arguing against myself. It has to do with the ways that Whitby changes after being in Area X. His reaction is unique among everyone who’s been in and come back out. He also comes in under fairly unique circumstances.

Unlike the expedition members, Whitby doesn’t have any sort of conditioning or training before he crosses the border. There are other characters who fall into that category, too: the director before her first trip, Control, Grace, and potentially Lowry, who had some training probably, but not like the later expeditions, whose training was based on his experience. I guess this could be evidence as to why his clone is a little different, but to me, it’s a good explanation as to why he, the original, returns so changed, so broken. A particularly good comparison, I think, is Control, who I could easily see returning to the outside world and going down a Whitby-esque spiral, in slightly different circumstances. He’s sort of, I say tentatively, an ‘improvement’ on Whitby, an experiment repeated with only slightly different variables, which leads to a different outcome.

So what I think happened to Whitby is, roughly, this: he went into AX with arguably the least preparation of anyone; he was scanned by something while the director was in the tower, allowing a clone to be made; he encountered his clone, who was carrying a backpack with a plant--for expansion purposes--and a phone--for communicating with Lowry purposes--and was so upset that he fought the double; he killed the double, just as he said he had (what happened to the body is a bit of a mystery--I guess the clone could have been a hallucination the entire time, and he just found the backpack among the journals--but this comes out to mostly the same imo since his experience was still that of having ‘killed himself’); and he took the materials out of AX. He’s still “himself,” in the sense that he can follow a train of existence back to his pre-trip self, but is nevertheless altered by his time across the border.

I think this alteration is, at the very least, akin to that of a person in real life who’s gone through some sort of trauma. Just like we might say someone who’s survived a warzone or a horrific accident is ‘a different person’ so Whitby is ‘a different person.’ The experience of fighting and killing his own double is unique and weird and terrifying and uncanny and of course he’d react to that.

It’s also possible he was ‘altered’ in some more traditional sci-fi-y way, because he and the director were in Area X for quite some time, and we really don’t see that much of the journey, compared to its total length. (I think...the time dilation makes this a hard thing to pinpoint... But I think they were there for a couple weeks in Earth time? And if so, possibly even longer in AX time. But I could also be getting this wrong, too lazy to look.) This is, of course, vague, but other characters have started to feel ‘the brightness’ fairly early, so perhaps he was ‘infected’ in this way, too.

He may also have been pricked by the flower, but this happens late in the timeline, and while I think this might explain how the SR became another tower, and perhaps even the expansion of the border, it doesn’t explain the changes to his personality.

So what’s the mouse? I get the neatness of saying ‘well it’s Whitby!’ and I have to say I don’t have any other real explanation for it. Honestly, it really could be just a mouse. Just an ordinary, unchanged, Earth mouse, that for whatever reason Whitby has chosen for a pet. A comfort object. I mean, Control--who, again I think is most akin to Whitby in terms of experience and interaction with AX--has a comfort animal too, Chorry, who he carries with him in the form of a carving even after he enters AX, and which is dearly important to him. Chorry isn’t magical or alien and neither is the carving; Control’s attachment to the carving is part of his attempt to hold on to his humanity. I think the mouse could be similar.

I guess it’s also possible that, since Whitby found the mouse “in the attic,” by which he clearly means the SR attic, and the SR has already been compromised by this point (probably very compromised; probably compromised by Lowry), that the mouse is another sort of ‘plant’ (pun unintended) by AX, another little feeler sent out into the world, like the clones, like the (literal) plant. But I don’t know what thinking of the mouse in this way does for the narrative. I don’t know what it tells you that is new or necessary or interesting.

Yeah, the more I write, the more I think Whitby and Control are thematically linked in some way [like, re: my comparison above to repeating an experiment with different variables, they also have that conversation about many different universes existing, all slightly different from each other] and that the mouse is his Chorry, and that Whitby is definitely a human who, shocked and confused by his encounter with the alien force, is just trying his best, even as his mind is semi-broken and unable to think clearly anymore. I think that’s the story here, different than the clone stories, different than Ghost Bird’s story, more unique than viewing him as a clone.

[pass-the-bechdel]

Dollhouse season two full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

100% (thirteen of thirteen).

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

44.96%

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

Eleven, six of which had a cast of 50%+.

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

Zero.

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

Eighteen. Twelve 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-three. Twelve 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:

Rubbish. As with the first season, the show suffers seriously for having no moral compass, it indulges in misogynistic violence and voyeuristic sex crimes as a mainstay, and any attempts to critique its own content are marred by hypocrisy and excuses (average rating of 2.76).

General Season Quality:

Also rubbish. While the majority of the cast are doing a fantastic job despite flimsy, problematic material, and there are a bare few episodes that could be considered good, altogether there’s no cohesion to the story, it lurches and fast-tracks and skips over anything that seems like it would have been a good concept to explore, and in the process it manages to lose any semblance of being about something. It’s just an excuse to stretch some acting chops on different kinds of character templates, and even that, it did badly.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

...so. I guess it’s a ‘nevermind, then’ on the exploration of any of the show’s own invoked themes re: personhood et al. I really thought they did more in that arena, but outside of a handful of single scenes sprinkled across the series, they really never did dig in to their existential concepts or anything that could approximate a broader narrative purpose beyond ‘let’s get Eliza Dushku to embody common sexual fantasies’. It’s ok to do some prompting of meta discussions for the audience and then leave them to fill in the blanks with their own musings, but not at the expense of bothering to say anything about your own subject matter. If you don’t have anything to say, then don’t ask people to listen to you. Keep your gross rape fantasies to yourself (or share with your therapist, damn), and leave the storytelling to people with a story to tell.

Everything that was wrong with season one is still entirely intact in season two, they fixed zero of their problems - they’re still fetishising and excusing rape, shamelessly objectifying and brutalising women, steeping the series in misogyny for no discernible reason, failing to achieve a basic moral underpinning to their content, underusing their quality acting assets while over-using their worst ones, and of course - as above - completely ignoring the need for a cohesive purpose to their own story or even just a ground-level sense that they knew what they were doing (or at least what they WANTED to be doing) with the arc of the narrative. Indeed, not only were all of the first season’s flaws intact, but season two even managed to make many of them worse! Off the top of my head, I’m not sure they made a single good character decision in the entire season, but I’m gonna save that conversation for the full series review so that I can properly compare the changes from one season to the next; there are plenty of other sins in season two to keep me busy for now. The lack of a moral anything (compass, backbone, compunction, whatever you want to call it) became a much bigger problem as the show attempted to escalate the scope of conflict with outside forces - largely, the Rossum corporation who runs the Dollhouses in service of their E-vil Plans - despite its own characters having committed all the same atrocities variously and knowingly, and the sketchy characterisation did a poor job of convincing that some magical moral something-or-other had taken hold between the seasons to give these characters new ethical dimensions that aren’t just blind hypocrisy. But, the biggest flaw of the season - relevant to all other issues but most especially to the lack of a central narrative theme or sense of meaning behind it - was the arc of the...’story’ that the season told. It was a Goddamn disaster, kids.

Pro tip: if you happen to, say, make a tv show that performs badly in the ratings in its first season, but you score a second season anyway, and you’re not confident that you’ll ever get a third...don’t try to jam all of the possible plot you imagined for a long-term series down into one season. It’s also probably a good idea to NOT end your first season with an ambitious flash-forward to an apocalyptic future which you are now irrevocably committed to bringing about in your regular narrative in spite of having only thirteen episodes to do it; a problem compounded by the inclusion of ‘flashbacks’ within that flash-forward, depicting events that you have now made canon only to turn around and nullify your own story by changing your mind about how to have it unfold (in the course of insisting on trying to make the whole thing unfold immediately, with plot that should have taken at least half a season to be explicated instead being fast-tracked into the subplot of a single episode). Don’t do that. Especially, don’t do that if you’re gonna ditch any kind of meaningful character arcs or thematic discussions or anything which would give your story a sense of purpose or cohesion or a mission statement of any kind (have I mentioned that yet? It’s mildly important to storytelling). Choosing to roll out a series of rapidly-accelerated plot events with all the nuance removed for streamlining is patently useless - you’ve removed everything that would make those plot events have value. That’s assuming that there were character beats (beats! Not beatings! This show has an excess of the latter; criminally few of the former) or narrative explorations or conceptual deliberations or somesuch in the original plan, anyway, and the first season did not do a great job of suggesting that there were (just...a better job than season two did). At any rate, better that you spend your time well and sadly never get to conclude the story like you wanted, rather than screwing over your own idea trying to just deliver the cliff notes. Cui bono?

Let’s consider what we got this season: thirteen episodes, and the first three are total Imprint of the Week fodder. A certain amount of episodic adventuring is expected, yes, but it’s a good idea to actually inject some useful plot machinations in there at the same time, and the first three episodes were very weak on both the one-off plot and the inclusion of significant long-term detail. The first two episodes are especially bad for being boring, inconsequential, and failing to capitalise on any interest drummed up by the end of the previous season; both also include teensy extra scenes of Senator Perrin pursuing his investigation into the Dollhouse, though neither creates any tension or interest around it, they literally just amount to ‘here is a guy, he’s gathering evidence’. It’s not exactly a thrilling or detailed introduction to the ‘Dollhouse plant in the government’ plot which comes to a head in a two-parter a few episodes later and then never impacts the story ever again. The story has no chance to build before it’s over: it’s introduced, it escalates, it’s nonsense, and then it’s done (the fact that the entire plot turns out illogical in the extreme really, really steps on any attempt at relevance or use). If you’re not gonna try and make the plot thread at least functional, why waste two whole episodes on it? You’ve only got thirteen, and you already wasted the first three! 

I say they wasted the first three episodes, but arguably, it’s more than that: episode four was ‘Belonging’, with the unfortunate decision to explain how Sierra came to be in the Dollhouse by expanding on the existing rape narrative with her abuser, Nolan, and while the episode in itself mostly works (in spite of itself, really), it’s not of any long-term importance outside of some character building/expansion, which is not a complete waste of time but, also, is not turned to a particular purpose. We didn’t need to lose an entire episode on this; we could have built and expanded upon character while dealing with some meaningful plot content, instead of indulging that ol’ rape obsession some more. Similar flaws exist for most of the other episodes of the season - though not entirely useless, spending an episode on an unfocused and largely meaningless Alpha visit in ‘A Love Supreme’ or fast-tracking through Victor’s backstory with the overly-ambitious and ultimately irrelevant military tech in ‘Stop-Loss’ is not a good use of the limited time the series had left to tell its story. And then there was the terrible ‘Meet Jane Doe’, which gave us a time-skip and a bunch of rushed plot to do with Echo learning to master the many personalities composing her identity while Topher mocked up a doomsday device out of thin air back at the Dollhouse: the single most excessively stupid example of what should have been at least a half-season’s worth of plot, instead crammed down into a ridiculously contrived subplot in a single episode. If you’re gonna try and tell several season’s worth of plot in thirteen episodes, you gotta COMMIT, man: hard plot, every episode is essential, every one of them advances your central narrative in some significant way even when it appears you’ve just done an episodic plot, it’s all vital to the endgame. Don’t think you’re gonna tell a few years of story in three episodes, and spend the rest of the time on fetish fantasies. Don’t be that stupid. 

As I noted when it happened, ‘The Attic’ is the only genuinely good episode of the season, and not least because it’s the only episode that does a passable job of making it seem like the plot has actually been going somewhere, for a reason, and with intention. It’s still very much a too-little-too-late situation, and the episode does all the heavy-lifting on introducing the puzzle pieces to complete the plot at the last minute, rather than having any of those pieces seeded at an earlier point in the series (the way that pre-planned things in a story that is going somewhere for a reason usually are). It gives us a last minute mystery to solve - who is Rossum’s shadowy founder? - though that turns out to be a very ill-advised mystery (for the calibre of the reveal, for the stupid convenience of having a shadowy founder to rail at, and for the obvious pointlessness of pretending that there’s a singular Boss Battle to be had that will magically dissolve the power of the corporation and its various pre-established players (Harding, Ambrose, and now the addition of Clyde 2.0 as well as ‘the founder’)). It also gives us a final mission - to take out Rossum’s mainframe - though that turns out similarly ill-advised in a more low-key way, since ‘we took down their computers’ is a patently idiotic way to ‘win’ (it’s laughable to pretend that any of the characters could be fooled into thinking that blowing up the Tucson facility would be anything more than an inconvenience to a global medical research corporation with thousands of employees and billions of dollars in resources and a trillion opportunities to store information on non-networked computers or on paper or in any of their numerous potential ‘legit’ published scientific proofs, etc, to say nothing of the fact that the physical tech and the people who built and used it are all still there, and yep, so are all those other Rossum higher-ups and probably even the founder himself, waiting on a harddrive to be put back into play). It all makes for an incredibly weak finisher to the ‘main’ plot, and that’s before we pointlessly bounce into the future again to show that, oh yeah, it WAS all meaningless and our characters are fucking morons who made no difference to anything with that explosion-y mainframe bullshit! The potentially-clever game-changer idea of including the flash-forward to the Thoughtpocalypse at the end of season one becomes a mistake now, when it calls for the waste of the finale on concluding a whole wild story development that the show never got a chance to actually develop at all. Eek. This is not how you storytelling, y’all. 

Heavy sigh. Honestly, I really, really thought this show would give me more to talk about, because at first glance it looks complex and stocked with conversation starters and potentially polarising content. Upon analysis, however, the complexity is a sham, the show itself starts no conversations, and the content lacks the nuance necessary to create oppositional interpretations. Ironically, it turns out as empty as the dolls are, simplistic, lacking the self-awareness to reflect on itself and the basic comprehension to fathom morality. It has no personality, no drive, and though at times it shows glimmers of understanding that there could be more to its existence than catering to shallow pleasures, ultimately it never focuses well enough to follow that anywhere. Even its transgressions are bland and predictable, worth calling out - as aggressive misogyny and rape fetishisation always is - but not worth picking apart in detail (because - shock horror - it’s not morally complicated and full of shades of grey, it’s just bad and wrong: it’s very simple and easy to follow, Whedon. Get therapy). If the Dollhouse is all about giving people what they need, well, I think I know what Joss Whedon needs: to shut up, and leave the show-creating to someone who hates women less, and knows how to string an idea into an actual story, more.

[elizabethrobertajones]

Hot take: 13x23 is 5x18 “Point of No Return” but they’re married and they’ve adopted the anti-Christ. And also no Adam.

counterpoint: Jack is Adam but filtered through 9 years of Dabb regret for introducing both Jesse and Adam to the story and then constantly being asked about them when neither were intended to play any further part in the narrative but THIS is the child he would sculpt from that experience if Buckleming are gonna force more creepy baby stories on him :P 

5x18 starts with Dean defining himself by all the things that are the dismal tools of his trade and core identity, boxing them up to give away (technically the Lisa exchange was also written as the opening of the episode but it got shuffled over one episode to be the end of the previous, which I think is a solid decision but I’ll throw it in here for sake of argument). Dean is primarily defined by his leather jacket, gun and car keys, all of which hark back to John and the identity that he crafted to be half a John knock off, half what he thought John would want Dean to be which may be better/different than John but only to John’s own specifications. Stripped down of all that he wrote his “where we’re going we don’t need roads” letter to Sam and Bobby, meaning for that to be pretty much it.

In the open of 13x23 the “good times” define Dean in a completely different way. He has Sam and ~a~ Bobby, but also his mom, Cas and Jack. Cas plays a pretty small role in the very open of the episode, not being included in that letter, and it makes sense to me in the way that Cas is still very much a fellow solider rather than a family member - he’s very much deep in the stuff that even just the next year will have solidified him to Dean as so important that season 6 hurts like it does, but they’re still in that forging fire and having crucial bonding conversations - my favourite from season 5 is literally in the previous episode. 

And it’s interesting in the open of 13x23 that we see a sort of ~normal life resumes~ period for them, which includes Dean driving around hunting, but he’s doing it with Sam and Cas and Jack, and it’s so wildly different from the grim identity as a hunter that he inherited from John. They’ve made it their own way to the point that they have an angel that’s got their backs and a lil nephilim baby who is making a normal werewolf hunt devastatingly easy to the point of being kinda comical. (Obviously that’s not a lasting thing since Jack is depowered by the end but they got to enjoy it). And this leads to a dead opposite version of Dean’s suicide note, where instead he daydreams out loud to a present Sam, taking their life from a POV where he can think about a HAPPY endgame, the beach holiday, the drinks with lil umbrellas, and Cas is there. Then he wanders off and is parental towards Jack.

The whole Lisa and Ben endgame was also one of isolation and removing hunting and personal life, but the Good Times construct a world where Dean has it all - present parental figures rather than an absent memory, his brother, a spouse and a kid. Jack overlapping with Dean’s parenting of Ben in his emotional landscape doesn’t subtract from his life - Jack’s the reason he can even wonder if he and Sam and Cas can take his beach vacation he has been craving out loud basically since John died. Where they’re going they still need the car but only to get around for good reasons, you know? 

So these being the two underlying mindsets Dean has before attempting to/actually saying yes to Michael is fascinating because one of them strips him bare as removing all his personhood, putting the weight of the world on his shoulders, and painting him the idea of a paradise where the lucky few survive and everyone lives happily in Heaven. Michael’s endgame is in Pamela and Leah’s descriptions that convince Dean in the 2 previous episodes - that maybe it’s not so bad that some people get to go to Heaven. But Leah then goes evangelical club of lucky 1000 people style Heaven ascending, and this is where the spoilers about Michael in season 14 overlap with her message so obviously 5x17 might be a key thematic episode as well, as 5x16, 17 and 18 make Michael’s mission and intent so extremely clear. (5x13 too but brr, there’s so much that happens in that exchange I’d need another post :P).

AU Michael sees them as Paradise AU, while they’ve been viewing his world as Apocalypse AU, and I think those 2 perspectives are a very clear meta commentary on the way that his vision was presented back in season 5 as well - that he was going for that full Christian judgement day where the sheep and the goats are separated or whatever, and the planet is cleansed. He already attempted it in the Apocalypse AU but it clearly went awry and it sounds from spoilers like he’s gonna have a second go at realising this properly? I haven’t really been paying clear attention to the spoilers but it stood out to me having Dabb tease the sort of stuff I’ve been describing because that was barely implicit in season 13 since of course AU Michael made such a hash of the apocalypse on his first go at it. But of course for budget reasons he’s being more careful and less openly destructive in Paradise AU. And the very fact that the main SPN verse is Paradise AU to him is utterly fascinating when layered over season 5 and what we glean of Michael’s plan post-Lucifer killing, which our original Michael seems to see as an irritating first step even back then. 

And then to get to season 13, Dean in this wonderful happy good place is going to be the time he ends up saying Yes because it’s not the weight of the world on his shoulders - I mean, yeah, it is, but. It’s the weight of his family. And Sam and Jack are the ones who are taken - the haemorrhaging brothers Zach casually used as leverage in 5x18 - and we get Dean bargaining with AU Michael just like he bargained with Zach and Michael in 5x18 to worm his way to a change of mind and a “no”, he ends up in the place where to save his brother and son the only option is a yes in another room.

Carver being Carver - and we have his whole showrunning to use as a focus lens on this - went the route of that codependency debate about whether Dean would even care to save Adam or just Sam’s sweet bacon and manipulated Adam into feeling like they wouldn’t care, that they were the cause of all his problems, and Adam was caught in the middle, lied to, and wanting to see his mom again and Zach’s abuse of him in this way to get what he wants is the mirror of Lucifer getting to Jack and trying to prove he can be a good father while attempting to sweet talk Jack enough to agree to zap them off Earth and away from Michael’s plan. It DOESN’T get framed as a Sam and Dean us or them, the break comes before that when Jack for himself sees Lucifer being an abusive ass, and disowns him, and rather than a loss of Adam it’s a distinctive gaining of Jack as a permanent family feature. 

The confrontation with him, Sam and Lucifer goes on to finish making that extremely clear, with Sam and Jack competing to die for each other - not for Dean - and showing the bonds and strength they have as their own father and son relationship that has grown outside of the Sam n Dean codependency that Michael manipulated to make it look like even in the last moment they had “lost” Adam to it, rather than him stealing him from under their noses. They did actually intend to rescue him, though I think the staging of it was more like a careless moment of Dean helping Sam through the door first, it wasn’t a Huge Choice To Ditch Adam - though that careless priority of Sam comes back around in 6x11 as well so it’s not like a non-element, it was still not like, a Fuck You Adam I Only Care About Sam. 

Obviously in 13x23 with Jack the focus of the abduction and Sam leaping in on it HEROICALLY, there’s of course the sense that is heightened for us the audience that Sam is in trouble as well but while 5x18 had a Save Adam thing and this was a Save Jack thing, in every other way the emotional lines come down about family as a unit not a playing favourites game OR any commentary whatsoever on codependency except in its absence, while 5x18 is one of the only episodes to even actually use that word to describe Sam n Dean. It happened to be Sam and Jack in this situation but any combination of his peeps could have triggered this response in Dean, I feel. This is just the narratively neat way it played out.

And, of course, to get to the worst part… Which i still can’t even handle even when it’s been the focus of my icon for at least a month… Cas having to deal with Dean saying yes, after 5x18 was such a huge argument and point of pain between them, the one time Cas has turned violently on Dean was for attempting to give up and say yes to Michael in that episode, and it caused him a complete loss of faith, and was his impetus to help them get to Adam but in the cattiest fuck you possible in that last moment outside the warehouse. He describes going into the suicide mission to clear out the angels as not having to deal with watching Dean say yes, so of course in 13x23 his role is to chill with Dean as his accepted husband, third wheel, whatever else, part of the beach vacation, unquestioned part of the family, only for Dean to suddenly do the thing in front of him that in 5x18 had been their lowest point, personally and emotionally and interpersonally. When they had no faith in each other, and were both suicidal and miserable. 

And Cas is left in moments having to deal with losing potentially his entire family - son, brother, husband - to Lucifer and Michael, and it’s like they’re right back at the start. So much has changed and it’s not about faith, it’s not about believing in each other… He and Jack are part of this Winchester family and their investment is so different. But it’s seeing Dean make this sacrifice for family in front of him when of all of them Cas and Dean know the stakes of saying yes to Michael the best in the sense of having fought it out like that before. Because it’s the thing that forged them. That on the other side of it, Cas told Dean he wasn’t the broken shell of a man he thought he was or whatever he said in 5x21 when apologising for his lack of faith in his surprise that Dean hadn’t said yes. That last minute reconciliation and forging of what was the core of their bond from then on…

I think for Cas, still, his belonging is a bit more tenuous and Jack helps - he’s helped all of them by the brief “good times” montage at the start - but he’s always doubted his place in the family and the role he has and Dean’s always been his strongest connection, and having Jack and a settled few weeks to months with all these people around feels like a good way to give Cas time to feel truly in a part of the family unit. But even in 13x06 you can see they all have all their different bonds and dynamics and with Jack there it gives Cas another purpose and connection and Jack is also firmly connected to Sam and Dean. It’s sort of a joke that they’re all his dads when Rowena says it, but it’s seriously not untrue. For lack of any other relatable life experience and the circumstances of Jack’s existence, Dean, Cas and Sam are his fathers for the roles they’ve played to him, and those new bonds are like a thicker glue between TFW that none of them can really argue their way out of when it comes to emotional doubt about belonging. If Cas struggles to see the Bunker as home and his purpose on earth, then Jack DOES, and can clearly name his family, who matters to him, what he wants and where he wants to be, by the last moments that Lucifer steals his grace, Jack is avowedly a part of their world, and that’s a link Cas now has that sort of chains him there one step further than he ever had before that his doubts are going to have to listen to. And, you know, 10 seconds later Jack is gone and Sam is gone and Dean is saying yes to Michael. 

It makes Cas in 5x18 even more interesting just because this is the moment of shattering for him, and thinking back to how he was and what he stood to lose then is both deeply personal but so removed from what he has in season 13 that it’s hard to grasp at it, except that it’s so so connected to Dean and Dean only, that in the same way that losing Jack and Sam at once challenges the codependency set up that Zach presented via Adam, you have Cas no longer laser focused on Dean. And yet, of course. He stays behind with Dean to see him say yes, because in 5x18 that was his laser focus of emotional characterisation and as much as Sam and Jack mean to him, this is how to hurt Cas to his very very core. And still, even in this new family, shows the pressure point is Dean, and this very personal history they share when it comes to saying yes to Michael. How Dean represented Cas’s faith, and when they lost their faith they lost it together, and then gained it back together, because of each other. Leaving Cas to watch that happen… ugh, it’s illegal. I don’t even have words for the magnitude of what Dabb put him through and I’ve been wrangling with it all summer and now it’s September and it still hurts on a cosmic level :P 

And yet in the end the episodes end the same - hubris and losing a character to Michael, who still manages to sneak a victory and a vessel out of the scenario, even after Dean bargained with him and stabbed a smarmy adversary and seemed for a moment like the biggest badass and a fuckin hero to Sammy and defended their family and independence and place in the world. But in this case, Dean had already let Michael through the door, and he didn’t have to settle for a second rate vessel. Dean always bargains with himself and this time, the bargain that he gets to kill the bad guy in exchange for Michael’s cooperation failed, and like in both scenarios Michael took his vessel by force and trickery, because for Michael, the “yes” has always been a pretty hypothetical necessity in the first place >.> 

[jinjojess]

Gold “Jigsaw” Starz wants me to play a game

Okay, so I saw the “which 2 would you revive in the DR games?” question and I think the opposite is pretty interesting, but to maximize the thought of the question, I came up with some rules:

1) You can’t just kill off your least faves, there needs to be some thematic meaning behind the deaths (even if the meaning is the inherent lack of meaning, like Ishimaru)

2) You have to explain the contexts of their deaths in your scenario (how did they die and why?)

3) You can move around deaths so an establish killer or victim kills or is killed by your chosen characters. They do not have to be the same role (killers can be victimized and vice versa)

3a) If you do this, you also have to explain how the revised murders played out (but not how they are thematically involved)

Bonus rule for V3) You can’t just have everyone die in the final Execution like they should have. For this scenario, you can choose everyone who was alive by the start of Trial 6 (Saihara, HaruMaki, Yumeno, Shirogane, and Kiibo)

I hope this isn’t too much lol, I just wanted to come up with a cool game.

Okay, here we go!

DR1

I’d have had Naegi actually die in the 5th trial, and then switch to Kirigiri as the player character, and her choosing to adopt his optimistic outlook in the critical moment against Junko at the end. I understand that the reason this didn’t happen was because a) Kodaka wanted to hammer home that normal people are important too, and b) he doesn’t know how to write from the perspective of a really smart, observant detective without ruining the experience of discovery for the player, but from a narrative standpoint, I think that would have been a legitimately shocking development in a game full of shocking developments and then maybe DR3 wouldn’t have turned out as shit as it did because we wouldn’t have Naegi “literal Jesus” Makoto taking over the series like a fucking cancer. 

As for the girl, surprise! I’d actually have had Kirigiri die at the end of the game, perhaps to let the others go free. She’d feel like she’d be paying back both Naegi and Samidare that way, and it would mean that in later installments the more neglected characters could get more screentime. 

SDR2

I kind of like the idea of Owari and Souda staying behind in the Shinsekai Program to try and help revive the others from the inside, knowing full well that they may be stuck there forever. Not necessarily a “death” scenario, but pretty close. (We’re assuming that Sparkle Hinakura doesn’t exist in this version of canon.) Neither Owari nor Souda really had much impact on the story, and I think reconciling their naturally selfish/self-absorbed natures by having them make a sacrifice like that would put a nice cap on an actual character arc for the two of them.

DR:AE

I love them all to death, but the three boys in the Warriors of Hope should’ve died. Nagisa was crushed by a robot, like?? Having all the important characters live at the end was just so unsatisfying and unrealistic. (I don’t care enough about Haiji to want him dead.)

Girl is a little more complicated–originally the scenario I wanted at the end of the game was for Komaru to fall into despair and become Nu Junko, with Fukawa going to rescue her and bring her back to her senses (there’d be a Chapter 6 where you’d play as Fukawa by herself) before the Mirai Kikan arrived to “handle” the situation. At the end, Fukawa manages to bring Komaru back, but she gets gunned down by Future Foundation goons anyway. This sets the stage for DR3 where both Naegi and Fukawa have their mettle tested.

Alternatively, Fukawa could also die to protect Komaru, which would then trigger her to try and find an alternate path from the one the Mirai Kikan is taking.

DR3

Both boy and girl should have come out of the remaining survivors. Kirigiri and one of the guys. Naegi giving up his life to keep another friend from dying = good. Hagakure making a last minute sacrifice = he finally gets a moment to be the hero in a big way. Togami dies doing the right thing rather than the smart thing = nice cap off to his character.

DR Zero

Not enough people survived to really answer this question.

DR Kirigiri

This one is going to be answered in future tense, as I don’t know what’s coming up yet.

I want Yadorigi to be consumed with the desire to avenge Uosumi and die as a result of getting too up in the Committee’s face. Seeing him become a culprit in some special Duel Noir against Shinsen would be cool.

Connected to that, I want Mizuiyama to sacrifice herself to show she trusts the others, since she’s so wary of everyone else.

(Samidare is too obvious a choice and I’m 95% sure she will die.)

DR Togami

I don’t want Shinobu to die necessarily, but it would be interesting to see Togami react to it. Preferably, she dies in such a way that she takes Suzuhiko and Kazuya out with her–she gets revenge on both her brothers, ending things on her own terms.

Killer Killer

A subtle one, but the series ends on an older Dougami investigating a murder-suicide implied to be Hijirihara and Asano.

V3

Not totally clear on the rules for this one, since it sounds like I have to choose how the final trial ends?

Uh, if I can’t kill everyone, I guess Saihara and the others make good on their word, leaving only Shirogane and Kiibo behind. Kiibo obviously doesn’t blow up to destroy the school in this one–rather he just shoots Mother Monokuma who explodes and blows a hole through the sky. Shirogane has snapped and refuses to leave the grounds of Saishuu Gakuen despite the Team DR clean up crew coming in. Kiibo, meanwhile, has regained his own personality, but now that he doesn’t have any inner voice to follow, he seems confused for a few moments, but then quietly leaves the premises. 

The final scene I guess would be a shadowy cabal of Team DR producers, discussing how Shirogane will have to be sacked and how they can do damage control. Someone mentions using their last ditch resort, and then the camera is facing a door head-on. The door swings open and inside is a CG of Komatsuzaki-style Kodaka sitting on the floor in dirty clothes with shackles around his ankles.

~END~

So that’s it! Sorry I didn’t go mega in-depth on moving around existing parts of canon–if I started that, I’d have to rewrite the entire thing and I really don’t have time to do that. Still, it was fun, so that’s for the game, Starz!