#need to just power through thinking the execution is uninspired so that there's at least something uninspired to improve upon lol

[fullscoreshenanigans]

Do you have an ao3 account?

I do! Same url as here.

The goal is to actually post something on it lol

I currently have three ideas that I feel are within the realm of my current writing capabilities for a one- or two-shot:

• Don and Gilda sharing a moment with each member of the full score trio pre-Cuvitidala timeskip. I'm still not a hundred percent sure what their moment with Norman would be, but for Emma it would be going over Norman's letter and finalizing their escape plan (with them asking is it really okay to leave Ray on his own until January), and for Ray it would be him approaching them after he returns from Goldy Pond but before Emma wakes up from her coma to apologize for not being all there after Norman was shipped out and to thank them for being there for their family when he couldn't be. • Memory Keeper Ray AU set during the search for the Seven Walls. • Mostly canon-compliant, Cuvitidala-era one/two-shot where Ray pushes Emma out of the way of a demon ambush (which may or may not have been necessary) during one of the times where they’re on the way back to the bunker that winds up with him getting sick. While not a repeat of "The Day Emma Cried" story from the first light novel since Ray isn't fatally ill like they believed Norman was that summer, she can't help but notice the similarities in the situation as she goes off to find a solution to help speed up his recovery. Meanwhile, Ray's fevered dreams drift to his mother and eventually the missing member of their trio. This story was born from the desire of wanting RE to discuss Emma's dream from chapter 93 and as part of a set-up for endgame REN that leaves them off at a reasonable place for where I see them on that front: Emma always unconsciously gravitating and finding solace with the boys but not understanding the totality of those feelings (because Emma loves all of her family dearly; it's an immutable truth of the universe. So what makes them different) so there's some secrets unwittingly being kept on her side of things. Ray, in contrast, accepted that he loved Emma and Norman long ago, back when he first locked up his heart in order to maintain the mental fortitude needed to carry out his escape plan. While he also doesn't comprehend the full magnitude of those feelings (though this is a very poignant declaration),

he can consciously put a name to them, but he's intentionally holding back for a variety of reasons on this front (not wanting it to seem like there's an expectation of reciprocity, still dealing with the grief of Norman's apparent death, but the big one being they're still trying to find a way out of the demon world) and wrestling with the idea of revealing his connection to Isabella, what that connection says about him given the choices he's made, and potentially hearing someone else say things he's been telling himself for years.

[adamwatchesmovies]

Black Adam (2022)

Pitched as a different breed of superhero film, Black Adam unfortunately fails to reach its full potential. Still, there’s enough here that works for me to wish we'd get a sequel. Maybe it’s my history with the comics combined with the source material shining through but I had fun.

In Kahndaq, archeologist Adrianna Tomaz (Sarah Shahi) is searching for the Crown of Sabbac. If this ancient artifact falls in the hands of the criminal organization Intergang, there's no telling how much damage it will cause. Ambushed, she and her brother (Mohammed Amer) are about to die when they awaken Teth-Adam (Dwayne Johnson), a super-powered champion who's been asleep for 5,000 years. As he slaughters the Intergang troops, the Justice Society - Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell) and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo) arrive to stop his rampage.

The biggest difference between Teth-Adam/Black Adam and the other mortal given powers by the wizard Shazam (see 2019’s Shazam!) is that this antihero is a jaded former slave who doesn't hesitate to spill blood. When we meet Black Adam, he’s sending enough lightning through a man to reduce him to a screaming pile of bone and ash. He’s hitting so hard limbs come off. He's stuffing grenades into people’s mouths. Oddly, you still never feel that the Justice Society is truly justified in their “going in guns blazing" approach. While in-universe these mercenaries had lives and families of their own, to us they’re just faceless goons ready to be pulverized. Black Adam doesn’t have a harsh idea of justice that has him cutting off a thief's hands or executing corrupt politicians so he can establish himself as the rightful king of Kahndaq. He's "bad" for killing people but we still remember Man of Steel, and that time Superman snapped General Zod’s neck. Meanwhile, the super-powered squabble is tearing up streets and demolishing historical statues. For that destruction to feel worth it, this movie needed to push the “antihero” idea much further.

The good news is that everything else in Black Adam is pretty great. There are some odd writing decisions in the beginning but they pay off in a satisfying way. Actually, there are several twists that will take you by surprise. There are several issues I can’t discuss because they would give away important plot points but each of these is matched by other decisions that keep you invested in the characters.

One of the best things about Black Adam is the way it translates characters from paper to the screen. If I told you that Cyclone’s power was to manipulate wind, you’d think we’re about to have some flashbacks to The Last Airbender and its uninspired combat but when she moves, director Jaume Collet-Serra takes the colours from her costume and makes them swirl around the screen in a display that’s surprisingly beautiful. Hawkman is a character could easily seem ridiculous. Here, he’s awesome. As the other junior member of the Justice Society, Atom Smasher was only so-so for me, though I found his dynamic with Cyclone rather sweet. This leaves us with Dr. Fate. All of the actors in Black Adam are well cast. Years before they announced this movie, every comic book fan knew they had to get Dwayne Johnson to play him, which makes Pierce Brosnan stealing the movie away from him - and not only because his character’s powers look super cool -  a shocker. The heroes have roles that are about as important as Adrianna’s teenaged son, Amon (Bodhi Sabongui), but you’d be excited to see any of them return.

I wish Black Adam was a better movie. Nonetheless, the way it brings the source material to life, combined with the cast and some well-executed action scenes are enough to earn the film a mild recommendation. Who knows? Shazam! Fury of the Gods might even tie into it and find some ways to elevate the film. Either way, fans of DC should check it out at least the one time, as there’s a mid-credit scene they won’t want to miss. (Theatrical version on the big screen, December 17, 2022)

[whentheynameyoujoy]

So the ATLA Movie Is... Good, Actually?

Just kidding, of course it’s not, it’s so bad it sucked the paint off my walls. But after ten years of people pointing out its glaring flaws, why would anyone bother talking about this garbage heap if not to go the other direction? So here’s a very brief and very superficial list of things the movie does get kinda... not atrociously wrong.

And they won’t be fake hipster pokes, like “It’s fun to laugh at”, “The Rifftrax for this is OK”, or “Kudos to the actress for managing to say we believe in our beliefs as much as they believe in theirs with a straight face”.

(though now that I mentioned it, it is fun to laugh at, the Rifftrax for this is OK, and massive props indeed.)

Rasta Iroh

Yes, I know it’s not exactly the aesthetic of the real Iroh or that it makes no cultural sense for him to sport this do when no one else in the racebended Indian “OMFG what were you thinking Shyamalan” Nation does but goddamn, long-haired dudes are my one mortal weakness and I will ogle the hell out of him.

Jesus is that a man bun I see that’s it mum I’ve been deaded

Yue’s hair

No.

Now we’re talking. Yue’s hair turned white when the Moon spirit gave her life, so it makes sense for it to go black again when she sacrifices herself to revive the koi fish. It’s a neat detail I find myself expecting whenever I rewatch the scene in the show. Yes, I realize it’d be a pointless hassle to animate since she, unlike in the movie, immediately goes on to become the Moon herself but still. I like.

The Blue Spirit’s mop

Zuko, hun, what’s with the dance-off?

First of all, I want to imagine that Zuko the Theatre Nerd was about to leave his ship with just the mask like in the show but then stuck his head into the cleaning cupboard and went, “Yeah, more coverage might be good, even though it do seem mighty fried to shit”.

Which makes me giggle. I like to giggle.

And secondly, the hair’s movement is what makes the static mess of the Blue Spirit’s solo fight scene appear at least bit more dynamic because God knows the cinematography isn’t doing it.

Any particular reason why it’s at the edge of the action, shot all boring-like?

Now, I get why circular shots would be reserved for Aang while he’s in the practice area and then used once the two join forces. What I don’t get is why Aang’s part of the action scene has a defined visual style while Zuko’s delegated to a few stationary wide shots from afar as though he’s a tertiary goon, meaning that when the time comes to combine the respective pieces of cinema language and visually convey collaboration, there’s not really much to combine.

But as long as Zuko is stuck in this static mess, it’s that awesome disaster on his head flopping about that draws the eye, helping me understand that something even is going on over there.

It also prevents me from paying much attention to how the extras are mostly just staying put and a lot of the hits don’t land, so that’s good.

The music slaps

James Newton Howard is too good for this.

Pls ignore that the word “gods” is used in the ATLA universe

I can’t be the only one who constantly uses this piece to daydream about writing specific fanfic scenes instead of, you know, actually sitting down and writing them. It’s just so good at communicating a sense of sorrow while speaking of rebirth that I find myself getting misty-eyed whenever I listen to it. Unfailingly, the soundtrack as a whole manages to break through the mile-thick crust of horrible acting, confusing writing, and uninspired cinematography and make me feel things. And considering how everything on screen is working against it, that’s no small feat.

Imagine what a powerful experience it would be if the score was used in service of an actual movie.

Dev Patel

No wonder since he’s the only one in the film occupying that crucial intersection between “is a good actor” and “was given something to work with”. It also doesn’t hurt that he breaks with the trend of actors starring in martial arts flicks despite never having done any martial art.

And all EIP-jokes about “stiff and humorless” aside, he’s a pretty decent Zuko considering how abridged this version of the character is. A while ago, I remember hearing a reviewer say that with his comedic chops, Patel should have been cast as Sokka. And on one hand, yes, god, absolutely, I need to see that asap. But on the other? He captures all layers of Book 1!Zuko, the desperate obsession, rage, and self-loathing, and at the same time gives you a peek at the soft momma’s boy dork that’s buried underneath. For Christ sakes, he exudes intensity and ambivalence even when acting against an emotionless hunk of wood that’s giving him nothing in return.

Oh, and I guess there’s a tree in the frame.

Ba dum tss

What can I say, the guy’s good.

Showing vs telling

OK, so this movie is all tell and no show, except for one single moment. And it’s the exact moment where the original goes in the other direction in terms of how information is conveyed.

See, I never liked this. The revelation is preceded by Iroh giving advice to Zuko who scolds him for nagging. Iroh then apologizes, moves in to say the line above, and is interrupted by Zuko who seems rather uncomfortable with Iroh laying his feelings out like this. And once they’re out, Zuko verbally confirms that he knew already and Iroh didn’t need to bother.

All this extraneous information and pussyfooting ends up weakening what should be a profound scene that reveals to us, the viewers, how deep the relationship between these two in fact runs.

Compare to the movie where Dadroh acts like a parent by fussing and worrying, with Sonion needing a single look to tell him and us that he understands what it’s all really about.

It’s genuinely efficient and just good.

No Cataang

Fine, a bit mean-girl bitchy from me since I only start minding the ship in Book 3. And probably unintentional on the part of the creators since there are moments where I think they’re trying to set the romance up? There’s a, well, an attempt to recreate the famous introductory shot of fateful meaningful destiny of meaningness, there’s some slight note of saving each other’s bacon going on, I’m pretty sure they’re the only ones in the film who smile, and oh, right, Katara’s shoved into her post-canon useless role where she doesn’t ever do anything, and is all about Aang right from the get go.

Yes, I will blame the “executive producers” because a) I’m incredibly petty, and b) it’s perfectly in line with their vision of the character so why the hell not.

Hilariously, none of it reads on screen because the actors are just... yeah. These poor kids are struggling so much with delivering their own lines and portraying their own characters they don’t seem to have any strength left to create something between them. To be fair, the bare-bones shot-reverse shot style of their scenes doesn’t exactly lend itself to the idea they occupy the same universe, let alone are friends or each other’s crushes.

And I enjoy this immensely because it allows me to forget the depressing horror show Katara’s life turns into post ATLA.

Yes Zutara

I need to delve into this because it’s fucking hilarious. So in a movie which fails to establish the original’s central romance so spectacularly that if Aang got lost in a crowd I don’t believe Katara would notice, SomEOnE thought it’d be a good idea to add an utterly unnecessary non-canon moment where Zuko for some reason feels the need to pause his character-defining hunt for the Avatar which otherwise has him ignore everything and snap at everyone, and explain his central conflict to an unconscious peasant he doesn’t know, complete with gently pushing the hair from the pretty girl’s the soulmate’s the Water Tribe Ambassador’s the Fire Lady’s the love of his life’s her face away, AFTER his uncle nagged him twice to find a girl and settle down.

I just wanted to make sure we’re all on the same page and this is what we really saw.

Celibate Avatars

I have no idea why the decision was made, if TPTB thought expecting viewers to understand the story through the lens of Buddhism would be too much, or if the “executive producers” already worked their retconny magic. What I do know, however, is that there’s a big shift in worldbuilding and Aang’s struggle with his role as the Avatar stops being a personal conflict defined by a) his grief for Air Nomads, b) his notion of being robbed of the loved ones in his life, and c) the selfish attachment to Katara he confuses with true love. Instead, what he has a difficulty to accept is apparently a general notion of who Avatars are supposed to be, i.e. a fantasy version of Catholic monks, no family and worldly relations, period.

I guess either someone understood the original’s portrayal of de/attachment as “hermit no freaky”, or thought the audience would so why not go there outright.

Now, do I like this on its own? No, God no, it makes the world infinitely poorer and changes the story from an exploration of ideas which aren’t all that ingrained in the West, to a cliché tropester about a Catholic priest going Protestant so that he could be with a girl.

At least I assume that’s where they were going to take this eventually.

I mean, I think the direction was “look conflicted, this isn’t the final stage of your journey”?

But consider this—the show went there, it built on the concepts of Eastern philosophy and touched upon the ideas of spiritual awakening, only to swerve in the end and strongly imply they’re bullshit and Aang should have never wasted his time with them.

So honestly, I much prefer scanty worldbuilding to an insulting retcon by a damn rock.

Multiracial Air Nomads

Probably the most substantial “no hint of irony” point on this list and a genuinely good addition to the universe’s worldbuilding.

See, the notion of the elemental nations being perfectly separate and never mingling before Sozin has always been sketchy but it’s especially ridiculous in the case of airbenders. It never made sense to me for all airbenders to be Air Nomads and for all Air Nomads to be monks and for all monks to be chilling at the temples all the time to facilitate a quick everyone-dies genocide should an imperialistic warlord ever decide to commit one.

Because committing everyone to a single way of life at a handful of places kinda goes against the central philosophy behind airbending. Like the freedom and nomadism part.

Instead, there should be more variety to the airbending culture, with some staying at the temples as monks, hermits, and teachers while others live as nomads, travelling the world and creating more airbenders, with the resulting children in turn being influenced by the non-airbending cultures they grew up in.

And thus, not only should airbenders not be modeled after a single culture to create a one-size-fits-all lifestyle, but they should have the most diverse and dynamic culture out of the four nations.

And it’d be precisely this diversity which would pave way for an eventual reveal that some of them survived, that their complete extermination is impossible.

Because they’re everywhere.

You know.

Like air.

[coursecatalog7]

Learn Ethical Hacking From A-Z: Beginner To Expert Course

Learn how to become an elite ethical hacker and easily hack networks, computer systems, web apps and so much more…

What you’ll learn

Learn Ethical Hacking From A-Z: Beginner To Expert Course

How To Become An Elite Ethical Hacker

How To Setup A Hacking Lab

Learn How To Launch Attacks/Exploits Against Computers

How To Start A Cybersecurity/Ethical Hacking Career

How To Hack Into Wireless Networks

Learn How To Conduct Penetration Tests

How To Bypass Antivirus

The Fundamentals of Networking

How To Remain Anonymous On The Internet

The Fundamentals of Linux

The Fundamentals of Bash

How To Gather Website & App Data

The Fundamentals of Python

Maintaining Access To Exploited Computers

Website & Web Application Hacking

Mobile Phone Security Tips

Where You Can Practice Hacking For Free

Conducting Passive & Active Reconnaissance On A Network

Requirements

Basic IT/Computer Skills & Knowledge

Computer With At Least 8GB of RAM/Memory (Less is ok, but your computer may run slow!)

Wifi Hacking Section Only: USB Wireless Adapter (Link Provided In Course Resources)

You Do Not Need Any Prior Experience In Hacking Or Cybersecurity To Go Through This Course

Description

Welcome to – Learn Ethical Hacking From A-Z: Beginner To Expert Course! This practical, hands-on course was created for newbies – that’s to say, people with no prior training or knowledge in hacking and cybersecurity. The aim of this course is to give you the education not just to understand what black-hat hatters do and how, but also to learn exactly how to hack systems like a pro and win the cat and mouse game by securing systems like a professional security expert. Blending practical work with solid theoretical training, we take you from the basics of ethical hacking through to mastery, giving you the training you need not just to hack, but also to secure against a hack. While the theory is important, we understand that it can also be dry and uninspiring. For this reason, this course is packed with examples that you can follow. This practical focus starts from the beginning, where we will teach you about penetration testing and show you how to install the software required (Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX) and jump right into hacking. Throughout, you will analyze and exploit various systems from regular websites through to sprawling networks, along with hacking servers and clients. More than just hacking, you’ll also learn how to conduct efficient penetration testing techniques. This approach gives you the foundational education that you need not just to hack any given system, but also to secure it, with each module covering both sides of the coin. The course covers six main areas:

1: LEARN THE FUNDAMENTALS NECESSARY TO BECOME A HACKER

This foundational section gives you a full introduction to the basics of networking systems – how they communicate and work – and is designed to give you the knowledge you need to succeed in this course. BASICS OF NETWORKING: Networking can be an intimidating topic, but don’t worry! We break down only the necessary things that you need to know in regards to networking and teach you important networking fundamentals SETTING UP A HACKING LAB: You can’t hack without a lab! We walk you step-by-step through the process of setting up your own hacking lab on your laptop or desktop computer! LINUX + SCRIPTING BASICS: Hackers use Linux, which is an OS that the average person may have no experience with. We will go over Linux fundamentals so that you can easily navigate your way through Linux during this course. We also touch on a couple of scripting languages that are a MUST for any ethical hacker and teach you the basics of each one with practical examples. HIDING YOUR IDENTITY ON THE WEB: If you are hacking on the internet, you need to learn how to remain anonymous. We will show you the tools and techniques that you can use to always remain anonymous and unknown on the internet.

2: LEARN HOW TO HACK NETWORKS

This section shows you how to test both wired and wireless systems. You will learn how to go from not having any access to a network to gaining access and being able to begin attacking systems on the network. PRE-CONNECTION ATTACK: Not all attacks require you to be connected to the target or even know the password. Learn how to discover and manipulate devices connected to a network and gather information about your target. GAIN ACCESS TO NETWORKS: Learn how to use the information you have about your target to crack the key and get the access password. This section covers multiple protocols including WEP, WPA, and WPA2. POST-CONNECTION ATTACKS: With a key, you can now leverage powerful hacking techniques to get even more information. Learn how to see what users are doing on a network, inject code in pages, and more on wired and wireless networks

3: HOW TO GAIN ACCESS AND CONNECT TO NETWORKS

This section builds on the lessons learned in section one, showing you how you can get full control and hack into any computer system that you target. SERVER-SIDE ATTACK: Discover how to harvest information about your targeted system – its OS, open ports, and installed services – without user interaction. Then use this information to exploit vulnerabilities and generate reports. CLIENT-SIDE ATTACK: Learn how to hack systems with no vulnerabilities by sneaking in with software updates or using backdoor trojan downloads. You’ll also learn the art of social engineering – or tricking people into giving you information.

4: HOW TO LEVERAGE POST EXPLOITATION

This section shifts the focus on interacting with compromised systems. Now that you have gained access, you’ll learn how you can exploit these systems. ACCESS FILE SYSTEMS: All systems have a wealth of files that you can now manipulate with your access. Learn how to access these systems and how to read, write, upload, and even execute files. MAINTAIN ACCESS: Gaining access to a system and its files is only half of the battle. Learn how to maintain your access and frustrate efforts to secure it again so you can continue to exploit a system. SPY ON YOUR TARGET: Learn how to capture any keystrokes on a keyboard, turn on a computer webcam, take screenshots, and even take control of the system to attack, hack, and access third-party networks and systems.

5: HOW TO HACK WEBSITES AND WEB APPS

In this section, you will learn more about how you can hack into websites and web applications using Kali Linux. You’ll also learn how web applications work – and how to find vulnerabilities within these applications for you to exploit. > How to scan websites/web applications for vulnerabilities to exploit. > How to Brute Force into web applications. > Learn how to conduct SQL injection in web applications. > How to conduct Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF). > How to exploit File Inclusion Vulnerabilities. > Learn how to exploit File Upload Vulnerabilities. > How to automate attacking web applications using various tools. > How to prevent and secure websites & apps yourself.

6: HOW TO MAKE MONEY, LAND A JOB & BUILD A BRAND AS A HACKER

In this section, you will learn how you can make money as an ethical hacker using a variety of methods. You’ll also learn how to build your personal brand and get your name out there as an Ethical Hacker so you can have employers and clients knocking at your door ready to hire you for your services. Then finally, you’ll learn how you can start a career in cybersecurity with some insider tips on what certifications to get and the best way to land a job. This includes: > How to build an ethical hacker personal brand from scratch > How to get instant credibility and authority as a hacker > Learn how to properly network and get others talking about you > How to make money using a variety of websites > How to get started freelancing as a hacker > Learn how to get started consulting as a hacker > How to land a job as a cybersecurity professional This course is comprehensive, showing you both sides of hacking. You will learn to think and operate like a hacker – and how to apply that knowledge as a cybersecurity expert to protect you and your clients’ networks and systems. In taking this ‘cat and mouse approach, your rounded understanding will give your approach new depths and angles, revealing the paths you can take to effectively neutralize any threat. Together with the emphasis on practical examples that you can follow in real life with live systems, you will also benefit from the excitement of hands-on learning. By experiencing precisely what it takes to hack into any given target system, you’ll also learn that no one system is the same and that all approaches can be modified. This real-life learning is an invaluable part of your education, enabling you to better see what hackers are doing and how to block even the most potent attacks. No matter what the scenario or how complicated a hacking situation, this course gives you the foundational training you need to secure a network – and start pursuing a career in a field that is increasingly in demand as the global reliance on technology grows.

Download

To download more paid course for free visit free course site where you find 1100+ paid courses for free. You can easily access those courses with just a single click.

[jadekitty777]

Dreams to Dance

People said I couldn’t make an AU out of this prompt... you better believe I made an AU out of this prompt.

Oh but am I EVER excited to get here. This one is my top favorite of my seven entries. I really hope y’all like it too!!

Day 6: Atlas Ball

Rating: K+

Pairing: Qrow/Clover

Word Count: 3.5k

Ao3 Link: Dreams to Dance

Summary: Season 7 of Step to the Beat is in full swing and dancing contestants Qrow Branwen and Clover Ebi have successfully made it to the fifth round. But with Ironwood judging their every move and a theme choice that was particularly unfavorable to them, the couple knew their elimination might be on the horizon. If they were going to stay in this competition, they needed something big, something that would blow everyone else away. 

And Qrow just happened to have an idea.

(AKA: The Dancing AU no one asked for)

~

Qrow swore if his grip got any tighter, his phone was going to shatter.

“Is there anything you’d like to say to those commenting how last night’s choice of theme was particularly unfavorable for the only same-sex dancing pair?” The interviewer, Glynda, asked.

He liked her. She was all business and no nonsense when it came to her questions. She wasn’t shy to ask the difficult ones but never wasted her breath on anything that didn’t at least provoke some thought. And he was pretty sure she was rooting for his team.

It was the man she was directing the question to that he didn’t like.

“I believe those claims are unfounded.” James Ironwood replied, fixing his stupid cufflinks. “While yes, the theme of an ‘Atlas Ball’ brings upon these fairytale notions of a princess being swept up by her prince similar to Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast, it’s merely that. A notion. The theme is merely meant to be a springboard our pairs can use to express their creativity and my scores are issued on the merit of how well they executed that expression. Their gender does not matter.”

“Tch, fuck off.” Qrow grumbled.

Ever since the first episode of Step to the Beat, Ironwood had quickly been singled out as the biggest hard-ass of all the other judges. He seemed to find flaw in everything, docking points for even the smallest half-step out of line or every smile missed, only getting tougher as the seasons went on. He’d been gunning for his and Clover’s elimination since their very first audition where he claimed their foxtrot had been ‘slow’ and ‘uninspired’.

Clover kept telling him he was imagining things but after last night, when they survived yet another round only to have Ironwood announce the theme that was so geared towards the rest of their competition, even his normally optimistic fiancé didn’t have any reassurances to give.

They knew this was probably their end game.

“They say too much bad TV rots the brain you know.”

He looked up from the screen. Clover crossed over the practice mats, hopping up onto the edge of the stage next to him. Qrow huffed in annoyance as his phone was taken away and a water bottle placed in it instead, but ultimately didn’t protest as the video was paused and set, face down, behind them.

He uncapped the bottle, taking a hearty drink, before saying, “Doesn’t it piss you off though?”

“Sure. All the more reason to show everyone we’re more than just the token gay couple.” He replied with the same level of confidence Qrow had always trusted to lead him, whether it be out on the dancefloor or in the ups and downs of life. “So, let’s get started.”

Clover pulled out his little pocketbook, flipping a few pages in where he had written down the eight dance styles allowed for this round.

Since starting in the competition, Qrow and Clover kept themselves on a strict schedule for each new week. The first day was dedicated to choosing their style and song. The next two, they worked on choreography and practice. The day after those was deciding costume, lights and makeup – a portion Qrow, personally, excelled at since he had the eye for color coordination and fashion. Their last two days were spent putting it all together until they had it down to memory. It was exhausting work, and some days they didn’t leave the practice room until after midnight, only to come back a few hours later. But, it was also why he appreciated his fiancé’s knack for organization, because otherwise Qrow was sure they’d be nothing more than a confused wreck like the many other couples who possibly used this very same room.

Before being selected, Qrow hadn’t been all too worried about any of the horror stories they’d witnessed over the years. But, after week after grueling week having the pressure constantly on their shoulders or finishing one round, succeeding at it, only to be thrown into the next with no rest or break, even he and Clover had had their moments. It quickly became apparent to him how things grew so out of hand for the other pair-ups. But a snap of annoyance here or a need for an hour of alone time there was nothing compared to the former contestants who changed their performances halfway through the week or even the very night before going on, only to predictably fumble on stage. Arguments that broke out over trivial details like not having the right trinkets or lipstick. People trying out experimental moves to stand out that more often than not resulted in injury.

Then there was that one event during season three, when the stress of the competition became too much and resulted in a wife and husband filing for divorce.

The very idea a competition could ruin his relationship with Clover seemed ridiculous – if anything, despite the trials and tribulations, he’d never felt closer to his future husband.

He leaned on his arm, scanning over the list. As they weren’t allowed to perform with a dance they’d done before, audition included, a few were already crossed out. Like their uninspired foxtrot. Or the paso doble which had given them a second-place score during the third week. It had been an excellent choice, highlighting their skills like Clover’s strength and Qrow’s flexibility. There was only one dance they did better.

It was on Clover’s mind too. “You think it’s time to break out our rumba?”

It was tempting. They’d been keeping it in their back pocket, as a little ace up their sleeve; but secretly, they’d both hoped they’d get to show it off in the finals. Now not even knowing if they’d make it that far, it was hard not to pull it now. The complex, often speedy movements, the power, and the agile form the rumba called for were all things the two of them exemplified best at. For Qrow especially it framed him well, as it was a very hip-oriented dance and he knew how to use his.

It would almost definitely earn them a high spot for the round, making up for their lacking score last night. But, then what? They’d still have four weeks to survive through, and with their best dance behind them, he couldn’t see them getting that far, as everything else would pale in comparison.

Qrow rolled his head up, meeting the other’s gaze. “Do you think we can make it to the next round?”

Clover hummed, rolling it around in his head. “If we’re careful about it, there’s a chance. But this list is pretty limiting for us. We could do a tango. Maybe with an Addams Family angle?”

“Too predictable.” He waved off, scanning over their options once more. If only they were allowed to switch lead and follow, the jive would have been perfect. So, he skipped over it, only to linger on the very last one.

It was risky.

Probably stupid.

But as an idea formed in his head, he found himself pointing to it and saying, “How about we do this one?”

Clover’s eyebrows furrowed. “The waltz? Are you sure? All of our performances have been high-tempo. They’re not going to be expecting a slow dance from us.”

“Exactly. There’s more than one way to surprise our audience you know. Besides,” Qrow added as he hopped down to the floor. “You’re really going to like what I have planned.”

~

The minutes before their performance were the most nerve-wrecking Qrow had ever had to endure. Stuck backstage as the floor for the act before theirs was cleaned up and their own was readied, a short reel played for the audience – sneak peeks the camera crew had caught of Clover and Qrow’s work as they planned out their moves or answers to the various interviewers who stopped by to inquire about whatever drama was popular that week. Watching himself sink down a bit whenever the camera was on him and hearing his own gravely voice come out over the speakers did nothing to ease his jitters. In fact, it usually left him wanting to be swallowed up by the floor.

“Thirty seconds you two, and then it’s showtime!” One of the crew members called.

A hand slipped into his, squeezing gently.

“We got this.” Clover assured.

He inhaled shakily and let it out slow. Squeezed back. “Yeah, we do.”

Another member made a hand motion and they took it as their cue to walk into the darkness of the stage and get into position as their announcement boomed across the auditorium. “Introducing Clover Ebi and Qrow Branwen, dancing a traditional waltz!”

As the first trills of the violin started up, the lights came on, revealing them facing one another. Clover was down on one knee, holding Qrow’s hand in his.

The production allowed for any sort of props to be used to tell their stories or just liven up the set as a complement to the main attraction. Over the years, he’d seen all sorts of things be brought in – cars, cages, couches. For this dance, they’d only asked for one thing. Set behind Qrow was a small, plastic toy castle that he could imagine his nieces would have played with when they were younger. They needed nothing more, for the real prop was Qrow himself, dressed in an eye-catching scarlet red ball gown befitting of a real princess.

He could already hear the exclamations of the audience around him.

Clover lent forward and, like the true prince charming he was dressed as, brushed his lips to the back of Qrow’s hand before rising. His movements were grand as he swept Qrow down the ramp to the main stage, the two of them turning together so they didn’t waste a single footstep. All the while the soft, dulcet tones of Cathy Cavadini accompanied them as they moved.

“Dreams to dream,

In the dark of the night.

When the world goes wrong,

I can still make it right.”

As they came off the ramp, they started off slow, moving into a whisk that presented them fully to their audience, before Clover brought him back in, whirling him along to the edges of the stage. As they reached the far corner on the right, Qrow was pulled out into a turn. He felt the skirt of the dress rise with him and it felt wonderful to hear a few happy shouts from the onlookers just like they gave the women in similar clothing.

“I can see so far in my dreams,

I’ll follow my dreams,

Until they come true.”

They turned their way to the other corner of the stage, preforming another outward turn that resulted in another set of calls before heading back to the center as the last trills of the first stanza grew to an end, preparing for the first big move. They’d practiced it over and over, knowing it was a difficult maneuver that had to go right on stage no matter what.

Clover guided him into a parallel walk. It was similar to the whisk, all about showing themselves off, except instead of both of them facing the same way, they were back to front, moving in a circular two-step around each other. What no one saw, but Qrow felt, was the slide of Clover’s hand between a hidden slit in the dress, undoing the little metal hooks keeping it closed.

As the music hit a short, bright rise and Cavadini’s voice did likewise on the first verse, Clover brought him back in, his right-hand grabbing onto a fistful of the satin fabric. With the guide of his partner’s left hand, Qrow moved seamlessly into the two inside turns.

“Come with me,

You will see what I mean.

There’s a world, inside,

No one else ever sees.”

He knew he got it just right as the roar of the audience climbed around them while the dress fell away, revealing Qrow’s outfit underneath. It was another prince’s outfit, with greys and blacks and deep greens, that complemented the other’s sharp whites, golds and reds.  He made a show of pulling from Clover’s hold, feigning embarrassment and shame.

Not for long though as Clover tossed the dress towards backstage and made a show of asking for his hand again.

Upon taking it, they renewed the dance, more vigor in their steps than before.

As if learning who Qrow truly was only made their love stronger.

“You will go so far

In my dreams, somewhere in my dreams

Your dreams will come true.

There is a star, waiting to guide us,

Shining inside us, when we close our eyes.”

Rather than down the edges like before, they stayed in the center, moving gracefully around one another in a square pattern, grinning at each other like lovestruck teenagers. At the last corner turn, they came close again for more sweeps and turns. With his legs now freer, he used them to his advantage, kicking them up or popping them behind him for a little extra pizazz on certain moves.

They knew they were approaching the big crescendo as the tempo started to pick up and the singer started to hold notes longer.

As it reached the peak, Clover turned him around so they faced away from one another. He gripped him strong and secure just underneath his armpits as Qrow held out his arms and fell back, almost down to the other’s waistline. With admirable strength, his fiancé kept him lifted up while they made two sweeping turns, Qrow’s legs never touching the ground as he held his legs in a leaping position similar to a ballerina’s grand jeté.

The resounding cheers were deafening.

“Don’t let go,

If you stay close to me!

In my dreams tonight,

You will see what I see.”

Ironically, at the apex of the last turn, Clover had to let him go. Qrow slid along the waxed floor, using his own momentum to swing around so he was facing the other when he stopping moving. Just as before, their separation was brief, Clover coming to lift him.

“Dreams to dream,

As near as can be,

Inside, you and me,

They always come true.”

They took another, tighter, swing around the stage, ultimately coming back to the center. The song winded down on the final verse and in turn, they kept their movements closer, more intimate. When the last words played, Clover dipped him and brought him back up slowly.

As the instruments also began to soften, Clover ended it as they began, taking a step back and falling to one knee. The only difference this time around was he now held Qrow’s hand in both of his, a perfect mimic of the day he’d proposed to him seven months ago.

The crowd went wild around them and the spotlight that had been following them was traded in for full lighting. Clover stood, gathering him up in an ecstatic hug that had Qrow laughing along with him. It had been a perfect performance.

“And that was Qrow and Clover with the last dance!” The host, Roman Torchwick, called as he joined them on stage. “Truly a marvelous way to end the night gentlemen. But, let’s see what the judges have to say about it, shall we?”

“Well, it was quite a display.” Ozpin was the first to speak as he leaned towards his mic. His grin gave away his feelings even before he spoke. “The story you two managed to tell with just a few short actions was masterfully done. You’re the one who crafted it, Qrow?”

Roman held the mic his way so he could answer. “Yeah. Fairytales are so often about overcoming life’s trials and finding true love at the end. I think a lot of us admire that ideal – and that’s what I wanted to capture with tonight’s dance.”

“Well, I’d say you did excellently. Not only was it heartwarming it also provides a poignant message to those watching that the right partner can lift you up.” Oz praised. “It absolutely is your best performance for storytelling thus far, and I’m happy to appoint it a 9.”

Qrow felt the squeeze where Clover’s arm rested on his shoulders and had to fight his blush as he heard his whispered ‘I’m so proud of you!’ that was thankfully not picked up by the mic.

“Oo-hoo! A top score.” Their host flattered. “Let’s see if you can keep it up. So, Port, your thoughts on their song choice and costuming?”

The aging man turned one end of his whitening mustache as he replied, “Dreams to Dream was a very nice choice indeed and truly sells the slow romance of the waltz.  I can see from here those suits of yours are near perfect matches. The dress is where I see flaws. It holds a great level of ingenuity, but it was hard not to laugh outright when the lights first came on, which didn’t match the tone. I also hope you two know those turns at the end of the stage gave away you weren’t exactly wearing glass slippers under that frock, among other things, did you?”

“Hehe, we were admittedly a little zealous with the dress.” Clover admitted. “We knew we should have gone with something less flowy, but it’s hard to deny how aesthetically pleasing it is to see a woman’s dress twirl with her. We wanted to have that too, even if it revealed a bit too much.”

“Zeal can be a great attribute when handled in the right way, but in this case I’d say part of it fell flat – as is, I’m giving you boys a 7.”

Still a good score. Qrow started to breathe a little easier. As long as James wasn’t a total ass and gave them more than a 3, they were moving on to next week

James straightened up, clearing his throat. “It’s really a shame-”

Oh, here we go.

“-That this is the first time you two have given us such a marvelous show all across the board.”

…Eh?

His eyes widened, certain he’d misheard.

But James cold-as-steel Ironwood was smiling. “Your footwork was impeccable and your rhythm to the music was like watching artwork in motion. This performance tonight shows just what you two are really capable of and that you’re truly a force to be reckoned with in this competition.”

Qrow couldn’t get his vocal cords to work. Luckily Clover found it for both of them, “Thank you, sir.”

“I hope you both keep it up. For now, take home another 9 with pride.”

He shared a look with the man beside him, both going from slack-jawed to grinning in seconds. A nine! A nine!!! For the second time, Qrow was tugged into his partner’s solid embrace, this time being twirled around on stage while Roman declared them as tonight’s winning team and the audience hollered and applauded.

Even after they were ushered off stage so the pair that had come in last could give a final goodbye and the announcement of the next round’s stipulations could be broadcast, neither of them couldn’t stop smiling, still buzzing with so much post-performance adrenalin and joy. The smiles stayed on their faces the entire time Glynda asked her questions. Throughout every call from family and friends giving congratulations. The whole drive back to the hotel.

After a warm shower and a hearty dinner, Qrow eventually found himself pillowed against the headboard and tucked against Clover’s side, sleepily watching reruns of the performances. Usually, they ran commentary over them, picking out the flaws and successes of each dance, particularly their own, to try and improve for the next round.

But as he drank in the applause once more as theirs came to an end, he found he didn’t have much to say. The TV was turned off, washing them in silence. He laid his head onto Clover’s chest, feeling fingers thread through his hair.

“You were magnificent out there.” Clover said.

He craned his neck some, enough so his fiancé could see his tiny smirk. “Weren’t half bad yourself, charmer. I’d say you swept me right off my feet.”

He chuckled heartily. “How could I not?” He dropped a kiss on his lips. “You are my fairytale.”

“And you’re mine.” Qrow vowed, cupping Clover’s chin and met him for another kiss.

More than the winning scores or a fancy trophy potentially on the horizon, he’d attest that it was only in moments like these that he attained true victory.

---

A/N: Got a lot of dedications to list for this one:

-The song is as Port says “Dreams to Dream” – specifically Tanya’s version from Fievel Goes West. Cathy Cavadini is her voice actor. I recommend giving it a listen to get an idea of the pacing and where their moves happen.

I took the inspiration for Qrow and Clover’s dance from various Dancing with the Stars performances and recommend watching them as well. I’ll list them out here:

-From both Heather Morris & Maks Chmerkovskiy and James Hinchcliffe & Jenna Johnson’s performances I took the inspiration of circling the stage and some of the up kicks Qrow mentions he does after the dress comes off. You can also see a lot of the ‘whisk’ moves they do in the center of the stage (presenting themselves to the audience). The dip and slow return that James and Jenna do at the end is similar to the one Qrow and Clover do. 

-Von Miller & Witney Carson – from this one, the way Von takes Witney’s hand in the beginning is how I envision Clover asking for it the second time during the dance. The square pattern they do midway through is also the one Qrow and Clover do.

-Marla Maples & Tony Dovolani – This is the big one. This is the lift Qrow and Clover do at the end. It’s really cool looking, so I recommend giving it a watch.

-However, Qrow having his clothes removed mid-performance was inspired by Elizaveta Tuktamysheva’s 2018 ice skating performance.

[ghostmartyr]

SnK 126 Thoughts

Doctors hate him.

Local man faster at finding new fingers than modern medicine.

It’s nice that we never have to wonder which parts of the story Isayama finds interesting. Clearing out all the titans after a hundred years? Dull. Uninspiring. Have a beach day laced with sadness. Announcing the identities of the Armored and Colossal Titans? We got a fight to get to, chop chop.

We have several groups of people who all think this is a terrible idea but have internal disputes and distance issues that interfere with them collaborating and making a feasible offensive?

-looks for the fast forward button-

Like. Part of me -- a very considerable part of me -- finds this hysterical. In a good way.

I have spent the last... more months than I feel like counting slowing writing my way through a oneshot only I care about. It is taking a long time to write, in part, because of pacing. I am very worried about making sure the pacing of the story stays steady, so all of the beats land right.

Some of the additions such care requires are not my favorite things to write, but for the good of the story feeling like something I can say with confidence I’ve put my best effort into, they’re necessary.

So I’m in flabbergasted awe, here, that someone is out in the world, getting paid to skip everything they evidently find too boring to actually spend time on.

The worst part is it’s really hard to even fault the logic.

Presenting our resolved conflicts!

Is Connie going to kill Falco???

Making Falco and Gabi’s island getaway even more traumatic for the dozenth time even though they’ve had all their character development for it??????

Is Armin going to get make it in time to stop Connie from committing a murder that will definitely happen????

Will Gabi hate everything all over again!?@?!12?

The answer to the first question is no.

It has been no since the concept was introduced.

Even Sasha’s dad is all, “Yeah, it’s probably fine that Connie kidnapped this child.”

Is Jean on Floch’s side now?

No, he’s had that character development already.

Is Mikasa on Floch’s side now?

No.

Is Mikasa doing anything at all or joining Reiner in his depression nap on the floor?

Mikasa joined a rebellion but didn’t have a depression nap on the floor because she was given a bed and also only like five people can sleep with all the rumbling going on.

Will she find her scarf?

Who has her scarf?

Is it the last person seen with her scarf?

Is it the last person seen with her scarf who idolizes Mikasa and first met Mikasa when she was wearing that scarf?

Who also idolizes Eren, who gave her that scarf?

Does Louise have the scarf?

scarfscarfscarfscarfscarfscarfscarfscarfscarfscarfscarfscarf

Mikasa found her scarf.

Louise found it first.

As with most things lately, Eren was a bastard about it.

Mikasa has her scarf.

Is Annie going to reunite with the gang and cause shenanigans?????

Sure, why not?

Is Reiner being left in some building somewhere with food no one is making him eat going to result in something bad for Reiner?

Nope, Armored Titan. Plot included.

Is Reiner ever going to wake up?

Yep.

Are the two volunteers with names in any real danger?

Yes, but Floch’s probably not likely to shoot them now.

Is Falco going to find out that his life got even sadder while he was asleep? :(

Yes.

Are the people of Paradis going to get used to their new Titan overlord just like they got used to the walls, leaving the majority to figure this is not their problem and creating the kind of moral squalor that led to their new Titan overlord completely losing his shit in the first place?

Yep.

Does the plot’s chronic abandonment of Hitch imply a good future for her?

Totes.

Are any of the conclusions to these events surprising in a way that would require more buildup to provide understanding of what is going on?

Nnnnnot really?

Fantastic, let’s not waste time on it. We’ve got a volume to end and a badass crew we want looking pretty.

(Also, Levi still really wants Zeke dead.)

It’s really important that all of these high stakes that the audience is so concerned with are dealt with so we can move into the final arc without any lingering thoughts about things that might get in the way of actually writing the final arc.

I think the worst victim here is Connie’s subplot, because things move too quickly for the emotional weight to come home. At the same time... Connie was never going to kill Falco. There’s only so much suspense you can put there when half of Connie’s thoughts about killing Falco are how maybe he shouldn’t be killing Falco.

Armin’s inclusion and the callback to Serum Bowl likewise doesn’t have much meat on it. Armin feeling inadequate is nothing new, and his complicated feelings on who receives Titan powers are likely always going to be complicated. The only conflict to really resolve here is the physical one of getting Connie away from Falco before some dumb accident happens.

That conflict happens, and squared away it gets.

More, “You betrayed me, Mr. Kru -- I mean Connie, :( :(” doesn’t actually benefit the plot at all. More time given to Falco to react to something the audience has known for months doesn’t really benefit the plot at all. Less time with Gabi and Falco being sad little munchkins arguably does benefit the plot, with how many times they’ve been called on for that role.

Connie cooling down and being pals instead of perpetually angry was going to happen at some point. Throw it in with the rest. Armin needing someone to lean on without melodramatic childhood bonds fits right in. Throw it in.

Did we need Louise?

I would argue I wanted more of Louise, but my opinion seems to matter very little in these things

Mikasa needs Louise. Louise is someone Mikasa inspires into following Eren down the wrong path. Louise is the mouthpiece that tells Mikasa that Eren, who promised to wrap her scarf around her as many times as necessary, wants nothing to do with it anymore.

Louise is someone Mikasa protected, and she’s dead.

One last nail in that awkward coffin.

And I guess we just don’t like children anymore and Falco and Gabi have all the survival tokens, so yeah, throw Louise on the pyre too.

What else, what else... oh, more Floch and speeches. Because he’s still allowed to talk. More happy voices about how no one has to worry about dying anymore because everyone who would think of killing you is going to be murdered.

Uhhhh. Annie could conceivably be there, right?

Yeah, sure.

Annie’s here now.

We all are agreed that was always going to happen, right? No problem?

Public executions in front of an angry mob?

For one morally bankrupt religious nut and one Good Boi who deserves the chance to punch Floch in the face a few times before shooting him?

Yeah, pile that on. Make it really clear that if Eren was going to destroy the world, he might as well have taken out the island too, since we’re doing the whole party anyway.

Give Onyankopon a really solid moment, too. Someone in the chapter has to represent that genocide is bad. Well, Connie sort of implied that already. But Onyankopon has been screwed over the most for doing absolutely everything right, so he deserves the chance to point out that everything is fucked and also fuck you this is terrible you were supposed to be better.

Then like, uh.

That gives us a cast, right?

We’ve got Jean, Magath, Pieck, Yelena, Onyankopon, Hange, and Levi on one side, and Reiner, Annie, Falco, Gabi, Connie, Armin, and Mikasa on the other.

Fourteen!

One over thirteen!

That’s like lucky, right?

Can we do the plot now?

Can we, can we, can we?

It’s amazing.

It’s abominably paced, but oh wow is it incredible. Need everyone on the island who has an interest in stopping this in agreement? Well, here’s a chapter for you. Now they are. Now we can actually maybe like. Do stuff. Against Eren.

Good luck figuring out how, but we’ve at least got everyone assembled now.

Except Historia.

Because you know, fuck the Queen.

...Does anyone on the island remember they have a Queen?

This is a serious question.

Like no, this is amazing. It’s like, well, we could have a bunch of chapters slowly building up to this point while everyone starts counting Wall Titans in the background and wondering when we’ll get on with actually fixing this massive problem instead of just detailing it further for the hundredth time.

Or.

Or.

We could just admit that we all basically knew this was coming, so we can skip to the good stuff. Good? Good.

Only we make sure to draw it all out so there’s no argument over how it went down and no one does anything dangerous like apply imagination while a hasty time skip patch job takes hold.

Because that’s probably next chapter.

SHOUNEN POWERS ACTIVATE.

Team Fuck Zeke vs. Team People Die When They Are Killed And We’re Not About That (right now).

Pray tell, do any of you have the power to do literally anything about this?

I do wonder if that’s some of why we’re zooming through these points. While I think there’s a slightly legitimate case to be made that extra time on things we all realized were going to go down is not needed (...it... is needed, for like. enjoying things, but you know let’s just not), part of that hinges on the complications they’re about to face.

Stopping Connie from child murder eats up time. Finding Annie takes time. Confirming Mikasa’s scarf reunion takes time. Confirming Levi and Hange are alive takes time. Confirming Magath and Pieck are willing not to murder them immediately takes time.

I don’t think Levi and Hange’s side is too badly harmed from the pacing. It’s fast, but it’s working with the backing of time. They’ve been absent for a while, and catching us up on where they are and what ground they’re standing on proceeds smoothly. Without the rest of the chapter being what it is, I don’t think the starting scene would feel particularly unusual.

Even the rest of the chapter with its speedrunning ways isn’t too terrible once your brain is expecting it.

...I can’t really excuse Annie.

Unless Rule of Funny comes into play. But even then, yeah. Wow.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that despite our full cast of degenerates assembled, we still don’t have a workable plan in sight. Five of the nine Titans are working together against Eren. One remaining is missing in action, but also generally anti-Eren at this point.

Then we’ve got nine humans.

So what?

One Colossal Titan with a baseball enthusiast destroys the Survey Corps, and only dies due to human error and someone’s willing sacrifice.

Eren’s got more than we can count, and the stegosaurus behemoth he’s using as a body now.

It’s all very nice and good to form a united front of fourteen people deciding to kill a god, but what does that actually mean?

Even if we’re generous, and include Shadis and his allies in the available forces, how does that actually help anyone? Does anyone have a good idea of how to get to Eren, let alone stop him? Has anyone in this group had a single stable conversation with him since he set out on his own?

If we took an extra couple of chapters to settle down all of the live wires this one grounds, those issues would still be at the front of the main plot. Drifting into the side pools doesn’t damage the story, but it does interfere with momentum.

Stories are hard. Balancing a story’s pace between what the completed work will look like and what the audience is currently experiencing is a nightmare.

This story has the largest conflict it will ever probably face, and a bit of a list of things to check off before it can get around to dealing with that. So it goes with the option of speeding through the list and skidding to a halt in front of the main show.

I don’t exactly approve of it, but given that this is what was chosen, it’s hard to turn away the benefits. I didn’t really want to read about Connie’s shenanigans with Falco and Armin turning into more shenanigans when they come across Annie and try to figure out if they have to kill her, then yet more with --

There is a lot going on. Consolidating that into a lot going on, but with everyone on the same side proactively working together... I like where this lands us.

It’s just really, really funny.

I don’t think I have another example of an author not wanting to write something, so just. not. This whole chapter is like, “oh wait I wrote myself into a hole well now I’m just going to erase that hole and move along.”

From a writing standpoint, it’s hard not to find that endearing. Wiping the slate clean is something you can do endlessly in unpublished works, but with published works, once you ink yourself into a situation, that situation tends to demand attention.

These situations got a little. As a treat.

:)

But back to the state of the story, the primary conflict is pretty firmly locked in, “Well now what?”

Ideally, you lace, “Well now what?” in with all the subplots you have going, and then upon their conclusion you have a solid, “What has arrived!” moment, and everything plays together beautifully, but this has chosen not to do that. Except with the emotional resolutions.

Team Fuck Zeke.

Team People Die When They Are Killed And We’re Not About That (right now). 

-underlines the clears philosophies of the teams-

Wait Yelena doesn’t fit in on Team Fuck Zeke. Unless.

But yeah, so now what?

Does all of this friendly bonding help?

I mean. Maybe Magath and all of his highly influential Marleyan politics can land the good people of Paradis (aka the ones not enjoying their coup) a deal with the rest of the world to unite in taking down Eren?

Or something?

(Seriously, how many countries are looking at this and thinking to themselves, “If they hit Marley first, that’s one problem solved”? I do not think anyone has forgotten they hate Marley, they just hate other things (Eren) more right now.)

While we’re at it, maybe Armin and Mikasa shoot beams powered by friendship into Eren’s stegosaurus skull.

The story potentially still has a lot of downtime. Mixing that in with all of the subplots would absolutely be preferred, but doing that while keeping enough of the main story going to keep the tension up regarding the end of the world...

It gets tricky.

I am sympathetic to the difficulty.

Amazing.

What a chapter.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: Emperor Palpatine

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS!)

There are villains. There are memes about villains. There are villains who are memes. And then, high above all of them, sitting on a lofty throne all his own, is Emperor Sheev Palpatine, a character so insanely incredible that it’s frankly quite baffling that even George Lucas at his worst still couldn’t make him awful… No, that was good old J.J. Abrams. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Palpatine is pretty much the archetype for the evil emperor in modern fiction, a mysterious evil sorcerer in dark robes who commands the main villain from afar and contains power beyond anything thought possible. But what’s interesting to note is that Palpatine really has three distinct eras to him: the original trilogy, where he was basically an outside context last minute threat who only had a presence in the third act of Return of the Jedi; the prequel trilogy, which is his best showing and where the Sheev we’ve all come to known and love really got to spread his wings and fly; and finally, the sequel era, the worst showing of Palpatine hands down, where he is randomly slapped into a film with no foreshadowing or buildup to pander to nostalgia.

So let’s take a look at our old pal Sheevy and see what makes him one of the greatest villains of all time, and one of the worst.

Motivation/Goals: Palpatine is motivated by one thing, and one thing only:

He spends the entire prequel trilogy building this up, working behind the scenes and manipulating both sides of the Clone Wars to his advantage so he can be given more and more political power. This works out beautifully for him, allowing him to dispose of his pawns like Dooku, take over the senate, seize absolute power, amass an army of clones, and of course execute Order 66. But most importantly, he is able to manipulate the frustrated and hurting Anakin to his side, mostly because the Jedi are a bunch of bumbling, archaic morons who put so much restrictions and belittle him so much that this creepy, predatory man is able to feed into his insecurities and send him tumbling to the Dark Side.

In the original trilogy, Palpatine is pretty content with letting Vader handle the affairs of the Empire, at least until Luke shows up and the Rebels become a substantial threat. Once the time comes, he has Luke and Vader get together and puts them up against each other, thinking the outcome is either that he gets a new apprentice/keeps his old one in check, or corrupts Luke somehow into killing his father and joining him as the new Sith. He didn’t count on Vader turning, but ah well.

The thing is that throughout these six films he remains remarkably consistent in his goals. He wants power, and if he can’t keep that power he’s going to make sure as many people suffer on his way down as possible. He’s almost cartoonishly evil in the best way possible!

And then came the sequels.

His motivations in the sequels are, quite frankly, impossible to discern, because they seem to change every scene. If he’s behind Snoke and the First Order, it’s easy to guess that he probably wanted Rey dead, right? Because that’s sure the vibe Snoke gave in The Last Jedi. But no, after it seeming like he wants her dead for most of The Rise of Skywalker, as soon as she shows up his plan is suddenly for her to kill him so he can transfer into his body. And then he changes that a short time later to “I am going to suck the life out of Rey and Ben so this shitty clone body can be great.” It’s like they’re cramming three or four different Palpatine plots into the twenty-five minutes of screentime Palpatine has in this film, and there is just absolutely no thematic cohesion anywhere. It’s just a mess.

Performance: If there is one thing that is always consistent with Palpatine, it is that Ian McDiarmid is absolutely fantastic as him. This man is able to take the most cliché, generic evil overlord archetype imaginable and transform every single line of dialogue he spouts into a meme, and even when he’s the absolute worst version of this character possible and strapped to a giant Sith dialysis machine on some Sith planet where he makes Snoke clones and verbally berates Adam Driver, he still finds time to be hilariously awesome.

Final Fate: Palpatine seriously underestimated Anakin, and ended up chucked down into the Death Star, where he died. He certainly didn’t have a poorly-explained clone backup of himself anywhere that would rise up decades later to completely override any victories the heroes ever had by ensuring that the entire lineage of the Skywalkers was destroyed and then usurped by his own spawn.

Best Scene: In a scene that justifies the entire existence of the prequels, shows off McDiarmid’s acting chops as he pulls off some actual subtlety as Palpatine, delivers some great background lore, and helps make Revenge of the Sith as awesome as it is… well, have you heard of the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?

Best Quote: Look, I could put just about anything he says in Revenge of the Sith here. I could put just about anything he says here. This man is an absolute meme machine who spits out only the finest quotable soundbites you will ever here. But look, I’m tired of not singling out great lines, so let me give you the one I quote the most. It’s one of his greatest quotes, and yet it is unbelievably simple. Two words and a ridiculously hammy inflection is all this man needs to be a meme:

Final Thoughts & Score: Sheev Palpatine is a man of extremes. Every aspect of him is so large that when he does something, he does it with the full force of his entire character. Revenge of the Sith will eternally be his best showing in the entire franchise, because he just spends the entirety of his screentime being the most insanely impressive scheming, manipulative bastard imaginable while somehow managing to cram in time for a sick spin through the air or a monologue about his former master at the space opera house. He manages to singlehandedly redeem the prequels if only by existing in them, and he helps elevates Revenge of the Sith into being the only one of those films that is generally accepted as being legitimately awesome. And while he is absent for much of the original trilogy, seeing as he wasn’t exactly conceived of right off the bat, he manages to make the most of his appearance in Return of the Jedi by being just as delightfully malevolent as ever, goading Luke and Vader into a duel and shooting lightning from his fingertips.

There are few villains who are just this completely basic and cliché that could ever hope to be great, but thanks to McDiarmid’s portrayal, he has gone on to be one of the single most iconic villains of all time, and one of the most iconic characters of all time. The guy is practically a living meme, from his name to his actions in the prequels, and he has certainly inspired many an evil overlord after him. For a character so seemingly unoriginal, it can be hard to believe he probably deserves an 11/10, but he most definitely does. He’s just become a staple of the franchise, to the point where some people feel it just ain’t Star Wars without him…

...Including, unfortunately, J.J. Abrams and a few other writers. Palpatine managed to be shoehorned into the prequels by being a surprise twist villain for The Rise of Skywalker (and as we’ve all seen from their recent animated movies, out-of-nowhere twist villains are great!), and it is without a doubt the most stupid and embarrassing showing one could possibly imagine for a character of this caliber. His motivations seem to change every time he opens his mouth, a lot of his dialogue is just uninspired, and while he does get a somewhat striking design here it’s hampered by the fact that his entire existence and role are really unexplained in the film and he feels like he was slapped in for the sake of being there. 

There’s also the fact that his mere existence and the fact he ends up being responsible for Ben Solo’s death means he completely overrides the entire franchise, comes out on top with his granddaughter usurping the Skywalker name, and succeeds entirely at wiping out the Skywalker lineage. This entire nine film series was just buildup to Palpatine ultimately winning, and just when things couldn’t get worse, Disney decided to take away the one thing that made this Palpatine hilarious – the idea that, with his hideous scarred face, he was able to bang a woman and conceive a child – and completely toss it out the window by saying this Palpatine was actually a clone. Not in the movie, of course, because that would make way too much sense, no; it was confirmed on Twitter.

I think it goes without saying Clone Palpatine gets a 1/10. And this is through no fault of McDiarmid; he’s still genuinely great in the role, even if the role is stupid, his character’s actions are stupid, and just everything about the character’s existence is stupid. He’s certainly not phoning it in at all, and ignoring everything else about the film Clone Palpatine is at least somewhat amusing on his own. There’s also the fact that this Palpatine most definitely has an incredibly striking design and looks really cool, despite the unbelievable lameness of what he actually is:

But how he is utilized within the franchise and what he ultimately accomplishes and represents is too much for me to actually forgive in the context of Psycho Analysis. When the most redemptive thing I can say about Clone Palpatine is that his actor is at least trying and his design is cool despite the awful writing and story relevance, that is not the sign of a great character. That is the sign of a great actor desperately trying to salvage a trainwreck.

But it’s like I said earlier; Palpatine is a man of extremes. If he’s gonna be a great villain, then by god is he going to be one of the greatest villains of all time. And if he’s going to be a crappy villain? Well then he’s gonna sit among the worst ever. I kind of respect that about good ol’ Sheev; he just can’t do anything in half measures. I guess as a Sith he really does deal in absolutes, be it absolutely amazing or absolutely awful.

UPDATE: I stand by all my criticisms of Sheev Clonepatine, but dammit, there’s just too many hilarious memes, and I can’t really hate Ian McDiarmid’s performance. Yes, I’ve come around quick, but I guess it is true: when Palpatine succeeds, he succeeds epically and hilariously, and when he fails, he fails epically and hilariously. His role in the story and the stupidity of him being here at all is a 1/10 for sure, but I think he’s just hilarious enough to edge into the “So bad it’s good” category of 3/10 alongside his bouncing baby boy Snoke. 

Just remember: No matter what Disney tries to tell you, Palpatine fucks.

[arcticdementor]

This can't be overstated, I expect. The Founders were pretty sure the courts were the "weak branch" of the tripartite government. From Federalist 78 by Alexander Hamilton: . . . the judiciary . . . will always be the least dangerous [of the three branches of government] to the political rights of the COnstitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them. The Executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments. This is the same essay where he lays out the nature of judicial review and defends what would eventually be the holding of Marbury v. Madison, so reviewing laws for constitutionality is clearly something he envisioned. What he probably did not envision was just how much power over the purse American courts would ultimately wield, not directly but in the form of rulings requiring government entities to spend certain amounts of money in response to complaints about "discrimination." There is frankly an epidemic among state courts today where "public interest" attorneys, paid from state coffers, sue states for failing to live up to various ideals concerning public education (with regard to e.g. integration, or minority student achievement). Often the courts rule simply that the state must increase education spending, and award the "volunteer" lawyers exorbitant sums of money for their time. (One reason I abandoned that profession was precisely that, for each brilliant jurist or passionate advocate I had the honor of meeting, I had to first sift through twenty or thirty complete and total bastards.) My conundrum is that I am comfortable that the courts are working mostly as intended; they're just increasingly run by judges who have prestigious degrees instead of real educations. Real jurists like Antonin Scalia (whose jurisprudence I kind of hate but who was unquestionably brilliant) are being replaced with uninspired bureaucrats like John Roberts or identity hucksters like Sonia Sotomayor. So technical cases generally come out fine, but cases requiring genuine statecraft get butchered beyond belief. And for all that, if I can be forgiven some wild speculation, I still think the zeitgeist is a bigger problem. Specifically, I think that America has lost its sense of community in the 1960s and is unlikely to find it again, except in brief windows in the face of e.g. major national catastrophes. The last time it really existed was in the wake of the Islamist terrorist attack on 9/11/01. Before that, I think the late 80s/early 90s saw the last bits of Cold War unity. And one of the most important developments beginning in the 1960s has been the huge importation of pluralistic views as held by immigrants from non-Enlightenment cultures. American prosperity attracted economic migrants, in such numbers (I believe first- and second-generation immigrants now make up fully 25% of the population of the United States) that the only "common value" we can really claim to have as a nation today is a desire for prosperity. Not a Puritan work ethic, not truth or intellect or military power--just money. And this has inspired more than a few people to board the Marxmobile, but of course the radical redistribution of wealth still requires a strong buy-in to what is supposedly the "capitalist" problem; redistribution may or may not actually alleviate material envy, but it's not actually the envy that's dividing us. It is cultural division that paves the path to envy. I can be happy when "my people" succeed, even if I am personally failing. But when there is no "my people," then material inequality becomes a personal affront to the less-fortunate. Information technology seemed like a promising avenue to embracing microculture and thus short-circuiting the problems of cultural pluralism, but judging by the present state of social media, we are still very much a species in need of meatspace community. Maybe someday transhumanism will get us over this hurdle! But at the moment, I'm not sure I see a way out that doesn't require either a transhumanist singularity, or a truly shocking amount of bloodshed. Which is one reason I find it so offensive when people engage in anti-intellectual sneering at the viability or even permissibility of moonshot projects like AI, immortality, and space travel. I understand the hurdles and the doubts, but the alternative to radical technological progress appears to be mass suffering at historically unprecedented scale.

“naraburns”

[joyofcrime-elinorhigh]

RWBY REVW:

** Disclaimer: When I do reviews, I make it my mission to point out both the good and the bad in whatever I'm reviewing. And I want to make it clear that me doing so is in no way meant to be taken as disrespect to anybody who worked on the show, especially the late Monty Oum. He was a visionary animator and it's a tragedy that he was taken from this world so soon. Anyway, with all that out of the way, let the regular review commence. **

**  **Hello everybody, my name is JoyofCrimeArt, and I've always had a particular fondness for web series. There's just a certain charm to online content that I don't think can be repudiated with other more conventional mediums. Unlike other mediums, web series have the most creative freedom to do whatever the heck they want. They don't have to adhere to studio notes, focus groups, or censorship guidelines. It's just a group of people, or sometimes even just one person, deciding to put something out there into the world. Simply because they want to see said thing exist. And I think that the freedom that can comes from that can result in some very unique and creative piece of entertainment that may not have been approved if they had been pitched to a more "main stream" outlets. Not to mention the fact that web series, when compared to film and television, are definitely the underdog. And who doesn't love a good underdog story?

 I've talked about several web series before, (like _Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared _and _Camp Camp) _and I'm defiantly going to talk about more in the future. However, today I wanna talk about a certain web series that managed to do something that very little other web original series have done. And that's break into main stream through sheer force of will. And that series is RWBY.

 RWBY, created by the late Monty Oum and produced by Rooster Teeth, is an anime inspired online series that premiered in 2013. Now in the middle of it's sixth season (Oh, I'm sorry. Not seasons. Volumes? Cause we have to be all different all of a sudden.) it is still going stronger than ever. Now Rooster Teeth had always been one of the biggest companies out there for online content, and have had plenty of success with their very popular Red vs Blue machinima series, along with other projects. So RWBY doesn't exactly have the same underdog story as most other web series out there. It was made by a studio, and had a decent budget behind it from the start. However, the thing that I find noticeable about the series, and the thing that drew me into the series in the first place, was just how different it looked compared to so many other web series out there.

 Animated web series as a genre is very much a dying breed. Sure, they were all the rage back in the early 2000's on sites like Newgrounds, and with shows like Homestar Runner and Eddsworld. But ever since the rise of Youtube and the algorithm shift they've become a bit of a dying art. (Outside of the "Animated Storytime Video" genre but that's kinda it's own separate thing.) Why spends weeks or even months on a three to five minute animation when you could just record a let's play or vlog in a fraction of the time, and get way more views in the process? And if you do decide to devote yourself to web animation than you gotta find a way to make it cost effect. This usually means short, comedic, easy to animate sketches. Often with some kind of parody element included to help get the viewers in. That way the series would (hopefully) become financially viable enough that more animations could be made. (Like How It Should of Ended as an example.) And this isn't necessarily a bad thing. There's nothing wrong with the shows that follow this formula. But I bring this up to show how much of a contrast RWBY is by comparison.

 A fully original action anime inspired series, not based on any pre-established i.p, where the animation was the main focus. Rather than being animated in flash it was animated with motion captured CG. And despite all of that the series had new episodes coming out on regular basis and getting millions of views with every released. This series broke every rule in the book, and somehow ended up becoming insanely popular in the process. There wasn't very many web series like it. Now, I've brought up this series several times in other reviews. Sometimes I praised it, other times I made fun of it. Which is why I think it's time to finally put the jokes aside, and give my honest on RWBY.

 Now there is a lot to go over with this series. Like, I said earlier, there are six sea-VOLUMES out as of the writing of this review. And given that this is a story based show with a changing status quo, it makes reviewing the show a bit tricky. And since I wanna have this review act somewhat as a introduction to the series for people who are on the fence about watching it or not, I'm going to try to keep spoilers somewhat light. But there will be some things I'll have to talk about, so if you want to go into the series COMPLETELY BLIND without knowing anything, you should probably drop off now. And if there's enough support in the comments (or if I just decide to at some point) I may come back to this series at a later date and do a more spoiler heavy review focused on events of the newer volumes. But with all that said, let's dive right in.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x9zjk2MgVQ

The plot of RWBY is actually pretty simple. (GASP!-)

 The series follows a young teenager names Ruby Rose. She's a protege when it comes to the art of combat and dreams of being a huntress. What a huntress you may ask? Well hunters and huntresses are warriors who's job is to protect humanity from the Grimm? What are Grimm you may ask? Well Grimm are monsters that are manifestations of humanities negative emotions. Try to keep up. Anyway, Ruby, along with everyone else in this world, has aura. aura is used to channel there semblances. _WHAT ARE SEMBLANCES you may ask?! _Well there basically superpowers powered by aura used by hunters to fight Grimm. But then there's also Dust, which is not the same thing as a semblance or aura and is DEFINITELY not magic. Magic is a whole separate can of worms that comes up later. Dust is energy (not aura though) that hunters put into there weapons to fight Grimm. RWBY semblance is super speed and her weapon is Crescent Rose, which is a scythe that's also a gun. Understand that? Good, cause that's just the first three minutes. Don't worry, it's all very well explained, and not convoluted in the slightest. Anyway-

 Basically, the world functions like an JRPG. That's all you really need to know. There are random monsters everywhere, everyone has weapons and abilities, and they can equip the weapons with special elemental attributes attributes. After a chance encounter with some mysterious villains Ruby, despite only being fifteen, is selected to attend the worlds top school for hunters and training. Weapon Meister Academy, I mean Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, I mean UA Academy, I mean Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, I mean Beacon Academy! Yeah, that's the one!

 Ruby ends up getting sorted into her house-err, I mean-sorted into her team, Team RWBY. (convent, I know.) where she is joined by her half-sister Yang Xiao-Long, and her new teammates Weiss Schnee and Blake Belladonna. _Can these rag-tad team of huntresses in training learn to harness there abilities, and just maybe learn friendship along the way?! _Well if you've ever seen a piece of fiction before, you probably know the answer.

 Now, I know I just got done taking a ton of jabs at the shows premise for having so many similarities to so many other popular piece of media. But all jokes aside, I don't think that any of that is actually a problem. As they say, there are no original ideas. So taking some inspiration from other works isn't really an issue as long as you have your own unique execution and spin to it, which RWBY thankfully does. RWBY has this unique style and flair to it that's all it's own. And it really does help it stand out as it's own thing. Also, since it borrows from so many different genres and franchise, the series ends up being this really bizarre melting pot of concepts that I haven't really seen done in tandem before. There's elements of action, drama, fantasy, magical girl, superpowers, coming of age stories, giant robots on at least one occasion...and THAT'S pretty original.

 It's like the people at Rooster Teeth decided they wanted to make an anime, but couldn't decide on what kind of anime they wanted to make. So they just said, "Screw it!" and decided to do them all, And while that might sound like a criticism, it really isn't. I love how over the top and crazy this show can get. It's kinda part of the charm.

Now let's talk about the characters. I've seen a lot of people (mostly hard core anime fans) argue that the characters in this series are cliche and uninspired. And in my opinion at least, there both kinda right and kinda wrong. It's true that a lot of the cast do fall into the somewhat standard "anime" tropes. Ruby is the typical wide eyed genki girl who's greatest skill is her kindness and optimism. Weiss is the stuck up snob tsundere from an upper class family who has to learn the power of friendship. Blake is the quite bookish girl with a dark and mysterious past who learns to open up. and Yang is the hot blooded action girl slash cool older sister archetype. Basically, there's a waifu for every flavor.

 But like the series itself, the series makes up for some of these more cliche elements by adding more elements to the characters as the series goes on. These developments start fairly basic with things like "Oh, Ruby has to learn responsibility and leadership" or _"Oh, Weiss has to learn to stop being a fu*king BITCH for like the fifteenth time this week." _But as the series goes on we get much more complex and serious themes. From Ruby's history with her dead mom, Yang's struggles with PTSD, Weiss' broken family, or Blake' history of racial predigests. These are all themes that are tackled, and they are tackled well...for the most part. For a show that starts out pretty light it ends up in some dark places. But despite this it never deviates so much that it loses it's root, and becomes unrecognizable from where the series started. The series ages with the audience and the characters.

 In addition to Team RWBY we also have Team JNRP (Juniper). They're kinda like the "B-Team" of the series. However, they become more important as the series goes on, and are basically main characters in their own right too. They're's Pyrrha, a prodigy huntress, gifted with natural talent. She's smart, kind, popular, and a skillful leader, and is literally selected as the objective best student by the school's headmaster in volume three. But she's not a Mary-Sue or anything...she has problems! Like how people are intimidated by her because she's so perfect and...she's not a Mary-Sue I swear! We also have Jaune, the leader of the team. He's a pathetic loser who has no skill, no semblance, and literally had to lie his way into the school. So of course he's the one who Pyrrha has the hots for. Because wish fulfillment. There's Ren, a stoic but sensitive ninja warrior who, judging from his hair and season four redesign, really seems to like the color pink despite being...y'know, a ninja. And Nora, a hyperactive genki girl who's job is to hyperactive and generally genki when Ruby's not around. Also, there all named after cross-dressers for literally no reason.

 Like Team RWBY, while they all start kinda cliche they become more and more interesting as the series develops and we get more into there development. From Jaune's arc (Heh, get it?) of becoming a competent warrior to protect the people he cares for. To Ren and Nora connected tragic upbringing. To Pyrrah...being too perfect. Y'know, all good character arcs that really helps develop the cast.

 I don't know why I keep making fun of Pyrrha. I really do like her as a character, and her arc with Jaune is very captivating...She is a Mary-Sue though. 

 These arcs end up being just as interesting as the arcs the members of Team RWBY go through, an help make these "side characters" all the more interesting and human. Even if there not the stars of the show, I ended up finding this team just as interesting as our main protagonist, if not more so on certain occasions.

 And sure, the characters may rely a bit on common tropes, but it's all about the execution of these tropes that determine the quality. I'm not going to act like their the most complex characters ever made or anything, and a lot of the darker themes I talked about before have been explored better in other series. But that doesn't mean the cast is bad, by any sense. I was still invested in there stories, and felt suspense for them when I was suppose to. There's a real comradely with the teammates, and they good chemistry with each other. They feel like real friends, and that's what matters the most.

 Let's talk about the animation. I've seen a lot of people either really love or really hate the animation of the series, and I noticed that the difference seems to often be based on what standard it is being judged by. People who judge RWBY as a web series seem to be really impressed with the visuals and action scenes. While people who judge it as an "anime" seem to think that the show looks cheap and uninspired. And while I can understand the later viewpoint I do tend to find agreeing more with the viewpoint of the former. RWBY isn't an anime...

 _-**YES IT IS! SHUT UP! **_

 ...And while Rooster Teeth is a big company, but it's still not as large as other major anime productions. They obviously were on a budget, especially early on. And they were taking on a project on a scale much larger than anything they had done before. It's an all CG motion capture web series, featuring entirely new and original assets that had to build from the ground up from scratch. So yeah, or course it's not going to look as good as other animes. But I don't think that should be held against it to much, given the circumstances. Plus honestly, it's still probably one of, it not the, best looking web series I've ever seen. It's definitely one of the most ambitious.

 That being said though, I'm not going to be one hundred percent nice here. Looking back at early episodes, yeah, they look kinda rough. They still look good, especially by the standard of web series. But you can definitely see the budget show in some parts. It's clear they were biting off a bit more than they could chew in some respects. That being said though it is remarkable to see how much the shows animation has improved overtime. By the time we get to volume four, where a new animation engine was introduced, the show goes from "looking good by web animation standards." to "looking genuinely good by animation standards in general." I honestly really like the shows visuals a lot.

 And don't forget the action scenes! This is the part of the show that you can tell the most amount of effort was put into, and the part that the shows original creator, Monty Oum, was the most personally involved in. From the animation to the choreography, the action scenes are what gives the series it's sense of style. The action scenes are over the top, flashy, stylish, and such an array of pure insanity, and it's hard not to be blown away by them. And in a time where so many western cartoons are so comedy oriented, it's really a breath of fresh air to see an american action show with fight scenes as hype as the ones this show presents.

 The voice acting is also pretty good. Starting out with a cast mostly reusing actions known from Rooster Teeth's other works. I admit that there were some growing pains early on with the cast, but they really did grow into there roles pretty fast. And as they series goes on they get a lot more "high profile" actors. From the likes of Vic Mignogna, Aaron Dismuke, Chris Sabat, Yuri Lowenthal, and Cherami Leigh among others. All the actors do really good jobs preforming there characters, for the most part. If I had to nitpick any performances though, and these are nitpicks mind you, would be the performances of Ruby and Pyrrah. Maybe it's just me, but I never felt like either characters sounded like the ages they were suppose to be. Regardless, these are nitpicks, There more of just an observation rather than a "fault" in the series.

 So the show has good animation, good characters, amazing action scenes, and a pretty all star voice cast. Sounds like the show is pretty awesome show, right? Sure they've been some nitpicks and complaints here and there, but it's mostly been over all pretty minor stuff. Nothing that would impact the show that much.

 So, Let's talk about the shows writing.

 So remember when I said that this show was convoluted? This is a serious problem. Things in this show are often not explained very well. For example, in most stories where a character has a special powers, there powers would be shown off or explained right when the characters are introduced. We'd learn how they work, and what there limits are. There are several characters in RWBY who's semblances I still don't fully understand. Like Ruby's super speed. Does Ruby turns into roses peddles when she uses her super speed or is that just an artistic license thing? And there are some characters who we don't even figure out what there semblances do until WAY late into the series. Ren for example, who's introduced in volume one, semblance isn't shown until volume four! And it's not like he only unlocks his powers in volume four or something, he's always had them. It's just never mentioned or came up before, and you'd think it would be. Things like "How are characters powers work." are things that should be established early on!

 The show is also REALLY bad at set up. (Don't @ me!) They'll have these moments where a "big twist" is suppose to happen that's suppose to catch the audience off guard. And they do, but only the twist are set up in such minute ways, there's no way the audience can realistically be expected to see it coming. I know the idea is to help make these twist surprising, but they don't give the audience enough hints to piece things together. They'll be a minor, one off line in one episode, that'll be a major plot point volumes down the road, with nothing to imply that said line was significant. And since these twist aren't set up very well, a lot of these twist just end up feeling like, "um, okay. This is a thing now." I know it's probably all planned out from the beginning, but it's not properly set up. It sometimes feels like the people behind the show are just like "Hey, you know what would be cool?" and just throw things at the wall until they stick. This can work sometimes but other times it just feels random. The shows acts like "They got us." when really it's a problem with their own writing.

 The show also has a major problem with focus. I listed Team RWBY and Team JNPR as the main characters. That's EIGHT different characters to divide focus between, which is already a lot when you only have twelve to fourteen episodes per volume to work with. And while those eight character are the closest thing the show has to "definitive main characters" there are so many other side characters who  that I didn't mention in order to keep this review spoiler free/not ten thousand words long. addition to Team RWBY and JNPR, there's also _(Slight Spoiler Warning) _Team SUNN, Ozpin's circle, Cinder's group, Salem's group, the White Fang, Raven's tribe, the various teachers at the school, the characters extended families, That useless rabbit girl that the fandom likes for some reason. etcetera. (Spoilers Over) There's just too many characters to keep track of! And while there's nothing wrong with having a large cast, (personally I tend to gravitate more to shows that do.) it can defiantly be hard to juggle all that screen time. Sure these side characters are often interesting, but they end up distracting focus and taking time away from the main cast, and side characters shouldn't do that.

 Often, characters will only have a few moments per volume to really shine, due to just how much screen time they have to share. And sometimes it can make big character moments feel a bit undeserved, as there just isn't enough build up to make the moments feel as powerful as they should. And this is a problem that has gotten more and more prevalent overtime as the series has become more ensemble. But I'm hopeful that, given the series extending it's length from twelve episodes per volume to fourteen, as well as the episodes getting genuinely longer, this problem may be able to be fixed in the future. Maybe. Please...

 So to sum up, is RWBY a perfect series? No. It is a very flawed show. VERY FLAWED. Particularly in the writing and the story department. However, I do not think that the show is as bad as a lot of the more vocal hatedom seems to think it is. Just because a series is flawed, doesn't mean you can't enjoy the elements that do work. Even when the flaws are extremely glaring. And that's how I feel about this show. Sure it has problems, but in my opinion the positives out-way the negatives. The action is still done very well, the characters are all pretty fun to be around. The world, while a bit overly complicated at times is interesting. And more importantly, the series never feels like it's being lazy. You can feel the passion that went into the series, and the show can be a lot of fun. There are just some parts where you might need to turn your brain off for a bit. There are plenty of worse series out there that don't try as hard and provide a lot less. But overall, the element I think I enjoy the most about RWBY is what the show represents.

 What RWBY shows is that it is possible for a web animated series to hit the main stream. You can get RWBY T-shirts and merch easily, not just online, but in actual retail stores without much effort. The series can be watched on Netflix and Cruchyroll._ _There are not one, but TWO tie in manga's. There's a spin-off comedy series that's on it's third season. It's one of the four franchises represented in _Blazblue: Cross Tag Battle! _And most importantly it is partially responsible for transforming Rooster Teeth from a fairly successful internet company known for video game parodies, to a studio that is seen in the same light as the likes of more main stream television outlets! Never in my life had I seen a web animated series see this level of success. And sure, you could say that all that just means that the show is just good at selling out or whatever, but I like to have a more positive perspective. I think the show deserves to be respected for it's accomplished.

 And to me, that's inspiring. It's like the weeb equivalent to the American dream! And that's why I have a RWBY poster hung over my work desk. As a reminder that there is no limitations to how far an online content can go. With just some hard work, determination, a studio of about three hundred employees, a stellar marketing team, a close connection to the anime dubbing industry, and a ton of money, you too can make your dreams a reality. And that's motivational...I think...maybe. And if they can make it, maybe I can make my own weeaboo dreams a reality...

_  **SPIRIT WARRIORS COMING OUT TWO THOUSAND AND NEVER!~

**_  So that's my review of RWBY. What do you think of the series, and would you like me to do another review of the series in the future? Maybe on volume six or something, kinda like what I do with my Dragon Ball Super reviews? Tell me all this in the comments down bellow. I'd love to start a conversation, even if you disagree with my points I made here. Please fav, follow, and comment if you liked the review and have a great day.

(I do not own any of the images or videos in this review all credit goes to there original owners.)

https://www.deviantart.com/joyofcrimeart/journal/RWBY-REVW-775726477 DA Link

[mimeparadox]

My Big Damn Irina Derevko Post

(Note: Spoilers for Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and The Americans ahead. And for Alias, obviously.)

I’ve never understood why Irina Derevko is so beloved.

No, scratch that. I do understand why she’s beloved. What I don’t understand is the belief that the character on-screen actually had anything but the most superficial likeness to the character than exists in the better-than-the-actual-show fandom headcanons.  Like, season 2 is overwhelmingly considered the best season of the series, and Irina is often credited as one of the main reasons, and…I can’t see it? [*1] 

Similarly, I don’t understand the hate for Irina’s final story. Yes, the missiles and mass murder specifically were stupid, and the final fight with Sydney is seriously lacking in “oomph”, but these are execution problems, and most of the complaints appear to be about the concept—as in, fans believe Irina wouldn’t put her ambitions above Sydney, especially after season 4. To which I say…really? 

Sure, I can buy that Irina loves Sydney, and Jack, and Nadia, in her own, destructive way; what I can’t believe is she cares for them more than she does her agenda, whatever that is at any given moment .  Like, I don’t believe anything she does in season 2 actually works, if the idea is that she’s somehow doing it for a greater good. Maybe if she were operating from a position of weakness, but that’s not the case—she remains the strongest piece in the game throughout the season. [*2] Why, exactly, is all this convolution and emotional manipulation of the people she allegedly loves needed, if her goal is a sympathetic one?  Furthermore, the series glosses over, if not outright ignores, the various details which indicate that Irina was not on the level—first and foremost: why go to the C.I.A., i.e. the United States, in the first place, unless she wants something only they can provide?  She’s not American!  Her work as the Man was global!

(Speaking of agendas, I know that it’s taken as gospel by at least part of the fandom that everything Irina did in season two was in order to be able to find Nadia again. Fair enough: even if it’s not quite canon—I don’t think they ever explicitly say this was actually the case—there’s enough actual in-show evidence (a rare thing, in some respects) to make it plausible [*3]. That, said, I’m not sure “trying to find my daughter” justifies much of anything she does—not enough to make her more sympathetic than, say, Sloane.)

I also don’t think Irina’s presence does a whole lot for the series’ larger narrative, as evidenced by the fact that, for all her importance, she doesn’t actually change a whole lot. It feels like she should, but between the SD-6 take-down being way emptier than it should have been, and the fact that neither Sydney nor Jack end the season any different than they started it, she ends up feeling largely inconsequential. [*4] It is also equally hard, if not impossible, to say how the events of the season have changed Irina, given how opaque everything about her is designed to be.  Later, Irina ends up being largely incidental to Nadia’s discovery, and Nadia’s story is arguably better with Irina as the unsolvable dead mystery, in part because it helps differentiate her from the possibly evil possibly repentant figure that already exists in SpySkipper’s life.

And that’s one of my other issues with Irina as a character: while there is in theory a lot to distinguish her from the rest of the cast—her upbringing alone!—the way the show uses her de-emphasizes those differences and emphasizes the similarities to such a degree that she often ends up feeling redundant.  The “whose side is she on” beat, in particular, had arguably already become overused when it came time to play it with her, and by the time SD-6 was done and she explicitly joined Sloane, there were too many similarities between the two to make the dynamic between them compelling, particularly since the show made it verboten for either of them to speak about their motivations.  Furthermore, if one believes that Irina did it all for her family, then what is there to distinguish her from Jack, who’s already ready to torture as many people as necessary for that very thing?  

To be clear, there were ways Irina could have realized her potential to be Alias’ version of Metal Gear Solid’s The Man The Boss or The Americans’ Elizabeth Jennings—or rather, a version of those characters that actually works as well as they do.  That’s certainly what her fans seem to want. Unfortunately, those ways rely on Alias being…not like itself.

I am not the first person to note the similarities between Irina (a.k.a. Laura Bristow) and Elizabeth Jennings (a.k.a. Nadezhda): they’re hard not to notice, given that they’re both KGB spies and assassins embedded in the United States and operating under cover during the Cold War, and forced to select between loyalty to their country and the family they’d made (although it’s worth noting that Elizabeth’s husband, unlike Jack, is in on the scheme and also a KGB spy/assassin) [*5]. The Boss, meanwhile, parallels season 2 Irina: at the beginning of Snake Eater, where she appears, she betrays the C.I.A. without explanation and defects to Russia, and she spends most of the story running rings around everyone, including her protégé Snake (the game’s protagonist, who’s been assigned to kill her and stop her sponsor, a Russian colonel named Volgin) until her actual motives are revealed. She also exists in a universe which combines semi-realistic espionage with frequent batshittery, including psychics, hornets as a weapon of choice, impossibly old snipers with the power of photosynthesis, and a ridiculous amount of reversals and double-crosses.

That said, despite the similarities, there is one chief difference between either work and Alias, which is crucial to making their stories work: neither is naive about the world they’re presenting, both understand, in a way Alias does, that one can’t be a spy and keep one’s hands clean. Being a spy, for the Boss, meant betraying her old friends and everyone she ever loved, allowing herself to become an international pariah, and ultimately dying, because that’s what the mission required.  Elizabeth Jennings killed innocent people, ruined friends’ lives, blackmailed countless people, manipulated her daughter into following her footsteps, and ran herself ragged for years, all because she believed in the cause.  It’s not a great life, being a spy. 

MSG 3 images obtained from Metal Gear Solid 3: The Movie, a re-edit of the game’s cutscenes by KefkaProduction. It can be seen here.

(Sydney, meanwhile, often just has to lie a lot.) [*6]

The thing about this sort of work is that it breaks down one’s ability to claim the moral high ground. Once you’re doing terrible things on the regular, it’s easy to see enemy spies are just other people who are also doing terrible things for their mission—potential comrades who just happen to be on the other side. Snake, The Boss’ protégé in Snake Eater, develops a relationship with Ocelot, a Sark-like soldier working for the Russians.  Elizabeth and Philip Jennings develop a friendship with Stan Beeman, an F.B.I. counter-intelligence agent living right next door, which turns out to be every bit as genuine as it is an effort to cultivate a source. 

Alias, however, spends much of the series unable and unwilling to strip Sydney of her moral high ground, once she obtains it by working for the C.I.A.  What should have been the beginning of her moral journey—after all, how different is SD-6 from the C.I.A., if the people working for the former can’t tell they aren’t working for the latter, and their missions largely work out the same way?—is instead treated as the end. As terrible as U.S. intelligence proves to be, it never actually makes Sydney question her loyalties, or even her feelings about it all. This, in turn, utterly undermines Irina’s potential as a storytelling element.  What good is a temptress if there’s no potential for the person being tempted to change? 

(Similarly, if we’re not allowed to know what Irina Derevko wants—a key element of character-building, as many people will tell you—how are we meant to know how she herself is being changed?)  

Given what we got, it’s no surprise that Irina’s season 4 return is so uninspired, consisting largely of fan service moments, and very little in terms of character progression, or sense that the Sydney’s relationship has moved forward in any way that feels natural—what else was there to do? [*6] It’s inoffensive to the point of being really annoying. 

While Irina’s season 5 appearances are in a way a step backwards, Irina was always more interesting the closer she got to villainy. Her appearance in “Maternal Instinct” is a hoot, and allows her and Sydney to play roles only they could play.  Their final battle, while not really satisfying—in part because it’s the fourth ladyfight in as many finales, and none had come even close to matching the original—feels necessary for Sydney’s story, which had finally begun progressing again after seasons of stalling: there is catharsis to “I am through being disappointed in you” that feels utterly necessary. Could it have been better?  Sure, but then, so could 80% of everything having to do with Irina. 

Footnote footnote revolution!

[*1] I remain convinced that season 2 is actually the worst season, is the one that irrevocably ruined Alias, and that Irina actually had a fair amount to do with that. But that’s a different TED Talk, and I’m willing to fight about it, if anyone wants.

[*2] Well, it depends: the status of Irina’s organization following her “defection” is…unclear. If we accept the idea that the organization is in shambles, as the season suggests, then there’s really no reason why, exactly, the C.I.A. actually needs her cooperation, given that they…uh… didn’t need it in order to actually grievously ruin it in the first place.  And yet, here we are.  

[*3] To a degree, anyway. The Nadia story gets us as far as explaining why Irina would need The Telling, but doesn’t tell us why she’d need The Circumference, even if we ignore its eventual canon purpose.  

[*4] No, their season 3 belief that Irina can be worked with doesn’t count, as it is spun out of whole cloth, and can’t be directly tied into anything that occurred the previous season.  

[*5] The Americans also features an enviable wig game, which should feel very comforting to Alias fans.

[*6] I’m being mostly glib here, but also accurate: while they were a million reasons why Sydney could justifiably consider her double agent status to be  hellish, having to lie to everyone was consistently treated as the absolute worst part of it all.  Fair enough, in a series ultimately about identity, except Alias never really made the attempt to explore that element, either. The closest it got was Julia Thorne, and that was aborted before it could really get anywhere interesting. 

[*7] Although to be fair, that’s partly because, again, the series isn’t really concerned with having Sydney evolve as a person since season 1.

[angeltriestoblog]

I’ve been thinking and writing and thinking about writing

This time last year, I spent my free time cooped up in my university’s study hall. There, I would drink from smuggled cups of vending machine coffee, in the hopes of converting my lethargy into caffeine, and the caffeine into words. My dream publication at the time had opened up internship applications, and though they set no deadline, I pressured myself to finish all the requirements as fast as I could. Every impulse decision I had was always coupled with this need to execute at the soonest possible time, like my brain knew if I took a second longer, my common sense would kick in and pull the brakes. I guess my failure to think everything through reflected in my cover letter template (lazy), resume (unremarkable), sample works (in retrospect, bland and uninspiring), and the absence of an acceptance letter in my inbox.

I have lost respect for said publication since then, though not because I harbored bitterness in my heart: their failure to compensate hardworking interns as well as the steep decline in the quality of their content should be enough reason. (Looks like I dodged a bullet back there.) Though it can’t be denied that at the time, I was heartbroken. The feeling lingered with me longer than I cared to admit. Despite getting featured on a national broadsheet and accepted into my school’s student paper less than a month later, I still couldn’t bring myself to be fully confident in my skill set because of that one specific, indirect rejection.

Which is why, being where I am now and having achieved as much as I have in a span of five short months feels like the highest form of vindication. Quarantine boredom compelled me to submit an article pitch to the then newly-launched Underdog, an online platform dedicated to the digital native’s latest preoccupation. It was a piece about the boybands I loved and lost (read: the dissolution of One Direction, and every other group I adored with the same degree of intensity), one I was actually planning to post on the blog. But in a span of a few weeks, my idea was accepted, refined, revised, and turned into a full-fledged essay that landed me my first ever paycheck.  

I was still on some euphoric high, emboldened beyond belief, when I chose to take it a notch higher and apply as a staff writer for one of my all-time favorite magazines. During the summer before college, I was paralyzed by a legitimate existential crisis that left me aimless and afraid. I turned to the Internet for solace, and in my search for a voice of reason, I found Lithium Magazine, and their collection of articles which viewed life in the authentic, critical, occasionally self-deprecating way only Gen Z teens know how. I was aware being turned down by them would easily mean a one-way ticket to retirement for me; thank God my inner critic was taking a power nap or else it would have talked me out of it for sure. The day after I submitted my accomplished application form and a far more impressive portfolio of sample articles (by my standards, at least), I woke up to an acceptance letter and just knew life was not going to be the same.

The past four months I’ve spent as a contributor for Lithium have been some of my most fulfilling as a writer. I am constantly being pushed to the limits of my imagination and creativity when it comes to the content I produce. I can’t find it in me to half-ass pitches or beat around the bush in paragraphs: I owe it to the effortlessly talented people I work with, and the impressive body of work they have managed to accumulate over the years. My first pieces for the month of July were about the effectivity of online therapy in a Filipino context, and the irony of being a low-maintenance friend during a time when the need for human connection is higher than ever. This was followed by my personal essay in defense of basic girls: my favorite one so far, and probably my boss’ too, considering that it’s an Editor’s Pick for the month of August. Though I am infinitely proud of them, as they are my first forays into the international publishing world, I know I can (and thus am determined to) do better.

Since then, I’ve churned out articles on an almost-daily basis for an array of online and print zines. I scout for inspiration in the morning and once struck by lightning, I type away until roosters start to crow once again. Most days, I only took a time out for the daily two-hour movie. It seemed like I was working a part-time job instead of nurturing a hobby. But it never felt like a chore to me. I simply love what I do and I feel like the fact that it shows is the reason why sites are kind enough to publish my work. 

You can view my portfolio if you want to see everything I’ve put out so far but here are five of my most recommended, in case you’re too lazy for that!

The story of my coming-of-age based on the usernames I had on social media platforms, for Uniquely Aligned;

An expose on all-girls Catholic high schools in the Philippines and their inaction towards sexual harassment cases, for Ashamed Magazine;

A part-review of Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay, part-rant on the evident lack in Western media that accurately portrays Filipino life, for Reclamation Magazine;

A piece on why talking about mental health should never be a one-way street, for Gen Rise Media;

A love letter to one of my favorite movies of all time, and its flawed eponymous protagonist, for Mid-Heaven Magazine

On a rather tangential note, I also started expanding my network on LinkedIn, though I wasn’t exactly sure what I was hoping to get out of this exercise. I simply enjoyed the process of generating new variations of the same job descriptions. One day, I was sent an email by Riya, the Executive Director of The Young Writers Initiative, a nonprofit that provides resources for aspiring authors to improve their craft and advance their career. They wanted to recruit me to be a mentor for freelancing for their upcoming summer internship program. I had just woken up then and had to rub the sleep from my eyes to read it properly. Apparently, I was recommended by a connection (hi, Srilekha!) who took my sample works as an obvious display of my credibility in the field. Given that this sounded like an exciting opportunity, I immediately agreed. Everything happened at a pretty fast pace after that, as I got swept up in the process of selecting a mentee and figuring out what I could possibly teach them. I guess I didn’t find the time to process what exactly was going on, and what it meant for me as a writer.

It didn’t take long for the impostor syndrome to hit. And quite hard, if I may add. I was due for an interview with Madison, one of my fellow TYWI mentors and I had scanned the questions she sent me. Though I clearly knew what advice I would give to aspiring freelance writers, or had a routine in mind that allowed me to balance all my existing priorities, my hands felt like they were loaded with cement. I could barely type on the document before me. I must have had a staring contest with my taunting cursor for an hour.

I mean, maybe I couldn’t say anything because I didn’t have the right to say them. After all, whatever I knew, I borrowed from someone else - perhaps an actual authority in the field. Wasn’t I just some girl who got lucky during the quarantine? While the current state of the world forced everyone into stagnancy, I coped best with the help of the written word. Had everyone else been under the same circumstances, I wouldn’t be in my current situation. Needless to say, when the actual feature came out, I spiraled. 

I wish I could claim that I only had to do x and y for the storm cloud above my head to go away. But as controversial as it sounds, I maintain that no writer fully gets rid of impostor syndrome. In fact, let me widen the scope of my statement: no creative can do it. I have never known anybody with both an inclination toward the arts and a strong sense of confidence. It’s like our limitless imagination only raises the already impossibly high standards we hold ourselves against. We never really think highly of ourselves to begin with, so when we meet a goal, achieve something we’ve only ever dreamt of, we bring ourselves down. We invalidate our hard work and dismiss it as an act of charity by the karmic forces of the universe.

Thankfully, I have an amazing support system: my immediate family members and closest friends, always ready to offer reassurance when it’s scarce (hold on, I got these intense Economics war flashbacks GOD). I seriously don’t know where I’d be without them. Actually, I do know. Probably wallowing in pools of self-deprecation. I think I would’ve ended up chickening out of new opportunities on the sole basis of my self-imposed inexperience. My loved ones were the quickest to remind me that I was only a beginner in freelancing but I had been writing since I learned how to grip a pen in my hand. I have prepared for this all my life and I was finally reaping the fruits of my labor. Who was I to shy away from the blessings that were so generously being lavished upon me?

In fact, just a few hours ago, I bagged two very exciting contributor roles for organizations that I admire very deeply. I have several pitches in the pipeline as of now, which I absolutely cannot wait to bring to life and share with you guys. As far-fetched as this sounds, this is only the beginning for me. I am so grateful to everyone who has believed in me, read my work (or even a mere paragraph of it because I know how underappreciated the written word can be these days), and left encouraging comments. 

WIshing you nothing but love and light always, always, always,

Angel

[badlypackedtraveller]

Nobody supports the home side.

Crossing the border into ROMANIA the vibe changes again. We are immediately in a country still trying to shake off its past. Big industrial plants belch thick, acrid black smoke onto the atmosphere. There are few eco credentials to boast of and the people look beaten and depressed. Compared to where we have just been it’s all just a bit shit.

However the industrial wastelands soon give way to beautiful scenery and great, empty motorways. We end the day at the Hotel Palace[1] in Turda, which despite the unfortunate name is actually rather lovely.

As we are parking up the bikes on the pavement outside the hotel a couple of local cops wander over giving both us and the bikes a disapproving once over. “Here we go”, thinks I, expecting to be immediately moved on. Instead they mumble something to each other, give us a nod and wander off to resume their boredom elsewhere.

On a Saturday night waitress Anna can’t think of anywhere exciting to send us. A couple of street cafes boast chain smokers, grumpy staff and local football on the TV, but not much else. Turda’s highlight is the theatre, started in the 1980s and never completed.

We leave Turda as soon as breakfast is over and Anna waves us goodbye.

A target of this trip has been to ride the Transfargarasan Pass, that’s what we’ve come all this way to do. Somewhere south of Turda at a petrol stop we meet up with another UK couple of GSs who have sold up everything at home in Halifax to follow their dream of life on the road. Good for them. “You’re too late”, they advise, “You need to be at the bottom of the pass by 0600 at the latest”.

It was all a bit of an anticlimax. A magnificent road to be sure – Top Gear describe it as the best road to drive in Europe – but we end up nose to tail in a traffic jam all the way to the top. Even allowing for racing past on the wrong side of the white lines when gaps in the traffic allow it takes us at least an hour to get up to the top. Cars take three hours easily. At the top the majority of the Sunday drivers fight for a parking space, buy some tat from the numerous stalls lining the road, likewise bad food before joining the jam on the same road back down.

Clarkson and his chums had the road closed, methinks.

However, if you keep on the road south you are rewarded with long sweeping curves that are a joy to ride and coffee at Conacul Ursului.[2] All the way to Pitesti.

Pitesti is a much more interesting bet, although with an unfortunate legacy. Pitesti’s history includes brainwashing experiments carried out at the prison here. The idea was to force convicts to brutalise and torture each other in order to make them have no sense of loyalty to anyone other than the regime that provided for them. Of course, it never worked and eventually the experiment was curtailed in 1952, the prisoners executed and the prison staff and scientists given light sentences, promoted or shuffled off somewhere else. Securitate officials who had overseen the experiment, were tried the following year; all were given light sentences, and were freed soon after.

At the four star La Strada Boutique Hotel’s[3] restaurant the waitress looks terrified when we say hello to her and scurries off to find a colleague who speaks some English. She then spends the next 24 hours hurrying out of any room we walk into.

Double bed again and so Phil makes his usual drama out of informing whoever is on reception that we are not gay, not a couple and we definitely booked a twin room. “Look, it says so on my phone”. Somebody is duly summoned to move the beds a foot apart. Who knows what horrors are averted and Phil sleeps soundly and safely.

On an amble through the town later in the evening I find plenty of busy cafes and a large public screen showing a Romanian Premiership football game. Pretty uninspiring stuff. Nobody I speak to admits to supporting the home side.

On the road between Pitiesti and Brazov we happen upon the Mateias Mausoleum;[4] a tribute to the glorious Moldovan dead knocking lumps out of the Russians. Same sad story everywhere. The Mausoleum is dedicated to the heroes of the National Union War (1916-1918). The Central Powers advancement towards the Romanian Plain was arrested by the battles fought here by the Namaiesti Group, led by the General Traian Gaiseanu. The Mausoleum was built between 1928 and 1935 by the contractor de Nicolo, after the blueprints of architect Dumitru Ionescu-Berechet, the impressive mausoleum, made ​​mainly of Albeşti limestone comprises two bodies: the first, horizontal, houses ossuaries, with marble plates bearing the carved names of fallen soldiers placed on the walls. A spiral staircase leads to the second body, a vertical tower containing, in 31 crypts, the remains of over 2,300 Romanian soldiers.

Memorials I get but why historians feel a need to accessorise them with instruments of death is beyond me. At Mateias we are treated to a diorama of the sound effects of battle and killing.

Romania doesn’t want us to leave. Biking requires discipline and a couple of near misses today are testament to that:

1.    A drunk walks out of a hedge and ambles unaware across the road in the path of the oncoming traffic. One, two, three cars ahead of me hit the brakes hard. The drunk pauses to gaze bemusedly at the cars oblivious to how close he has been to not being.

2.    I check my rear-view and pull out to overtake. The powerful Mercedes behind me does exactly the same thing at exactly the same time but accelerates quicker. He gets very close to my back wheel. Too close for comfort.

You have to challenge the voice in your head that says “another ten miles” or “nearly there, I’ll stop soon” and just stop, slow down, pull over, enjoy the ride.

Arriving in Bacau I pull up outside the decrepit Hotel Moldova waiting for Phil to catch up with me. There is a well reported con that goes like this – Hi, I’m an English student. Let’s go somewhere and I’ll buy you a drink so that I can practice my English. So you adjourn to a bar and two beers appear. The student soon makes his excuses and disappears off to the loo and is never seen again. The barman then requests payment for two beers at £100.00+ The doors are locked and heavies appear. The bill must be settled in cash.

No sooner have I got of the bike than I get the “Hi, I’m a student approach”. It turns out that this guy has noticed the UK plates on my bike and genuinely wants to offer help if needed. Sometimes cynicism catches you unawares.

The Bohemia Hotel[5] is in a dodgy part of town bordered by scruffy industrial units on one side and railway tracks on the other. We are on the wrong side of the tracks, literally. When I go out to find a cigar shop (none, what is about Eastern Europe’s aversion to cigars?) fat rats scurry amongst the roadside bins. Strangely, a very nice hotel in an ugly part of town. Twin beds and tonight Phil’s snoring is augmented by the sounds of passing rolling stock. I zone them both out.

Leaving Romania is great, not because we are leaving Romania, although that has taken some stamina, but because eastern Romania is beautiful. Leaving Bacau less so when we get caught in a downpour and thunderstorm. As we take shelter passing cars send tidal waves over our bikes. Of course, we do all the things you are advised not to do in such a situation i.e. take shelter under some trees, next to an electrified railway line, next to a makeshift iron cross to a dead railway worker. The clues are all there to be ignored.

Romania has proved to be a strange country and full of surprises and contradictions. Heavy industry, cruel to the environment, peasant living, prematurely aged people the product of a life of drudgery, brand new Dacia Dusters everywhere, cheek by jowl with horse and carts, pockets of ostentatious new wealth, ugly fashions. It is a country wanting to change but still too firmly rooted in its past. It’s all just a bit shit.

[1] Str Piata Republicii 31, Turda, jud Cluj. T: +40 264 317230 E: hotelpalaceturda@yahoo.ro www.hotelpalaceturda.ro

[2] Cazare Restaurant, Transfargarasan DN7C, Km 107, jud Arges. T:0752 877877 E: cabana@conacul-ursului.ro www.conacul-ursului.ro

[3] Boutique Villa, Bulevardul Republicii 63, Pitesti. T: 0770 225078 www.lastradapitesti.ro

[4] E574, Valea Mare-Pravat

[5] Str. Ghe. Donici 2bis, Bacau. T: 0040 234 516008 E: rezervari@hotelbohemia.ro www.hotelbohemia.ro

[cineresis]

TumblrFrostbite's AU Questions: If the Joker had existed in the Earth-3 Universe (who had a different origin in how he became what he is) instead of the Jokester, would the Clown Prince of Crime be a bigger threat than Owlman in that 'verse's Gotham? Also, what happens if Jokester and Batman had coexisted together on Earth-0/New Earth?

(This gets very in-depth and incorporates various continuities. Jokester characterisation is inevitably influenced by incomparable AO3 author Kieron_oDuibhir; Jason characterisation is primarily extrapolated from Under the Red Hood. Warning for Owlman’s ableism, Heath Ledger’s Joker, Batman’s emotionally-stunted parenting, and lots and lots of nihilism.)

So we have, at base, two options: either Owlman creates the Joker, or he doesn’t.

Say he creates the Joker – in whatever way, intentional or not. What we have now is a man freed of the fetters of morality and sensibility, and who has the king of Gotham’s night to thank for it. It was Owlman who showed him that life is nothing more than irony and slapstick, that the universe is meaningless and chaotic and cruel and will kill you just because it can, so what can the Joker do but show his appreciation to the fullest extent of his ability? How better to honour that act than to demonstrate how well he’s learned everything Owlman taught him?

Of course he aspires to grandiosity, because along with all the other limits he’s discarded is the idea that he should be careful about how much space he takes up in the world, that he should restrain himself from unduly rocking the boat, that he should ever bother to do anything less than he is capable of. But in no known universe has the Joker ever been as great a threat as Owlman even in a mundane sense. In no known universe has he ever held as effective a stranglehold even over Gotham’s institutions and criminal element alike, much less over the world’s. Oh, he has ambition, certainly, and he has the drive and ruthlessness to fulfil it. But his primary threat is the threat of a terrorist, the threat of unpredictable wide-scale violence to sow panic and mayhem – he’s a bomb or a bullet shot into a crowd, not a knife or a rifle or a guided missile. He lacks focus.

(Not that Owlman is a threat to Gotham. You don’t piss where you eat, and in any case it’s never been terror that he craves – it’s control, and under that a desperate, howling need to matter, to make a difference and exert his influence on the fabric of reality, because safety is a fairy tale and he’s seen what the world does to the helpless and the insignificant. Fear is simply a means to an end, though a satisfying one. Within five years of routing and restructuring Gotham’s Court of Owls to his own ends, the city’s bureaucracy and law enforcement run like a well-oiled machine, even if the machine in question is Moloch.)

That lack of focus is the second reason Owlman dislikes the Joker. Owlman hates, as constantly and naturally as breathing. He despises the overwhelming majority of humanity for their self-deceptive lip service to cultural mores and the expectations of their peers, for the petty ways they sabotage themselves to stay within delineated bounds, for their uninspired ambitions, for the way they fearfully turn their gazes from the dark and put their hopes in false idols of law, love, religion, or a social contract that has any compelling interest in their well-being. None of these things, Owlman knows, will save them, and they will die unremarkable and unremembered deaths without ever having done anything worthy of note. The Joker recognises this, at least. He recognises that there is no human force greater than the will to power – aspiration and achievement, intent and the pursuit of it – but he lacks the necessary willpower to make his intent a reality, and Owlman hates incompetence almost as much as idiocy. The Joker is capable of incredible focus when he wants to be, but inevitably his obsessions lead him astray of his primary goal, to his detriment.And that’s the first reason Owlman dislikes him: that the Joker recognises his place in the universe, but he doesn’t take it seriously. Owlman’s not opposed to fun. He wouldn’t do what he does if he didn’t enjoy it. He’d still do everything he could to gain so much power he’d never again feel fear, but he doesn’t actually need to go out night after night to extort people and organisations and punish those who didn’t play by the rules. If he wanted to, he could easily fritter the rest of his life away on shameless hedonism, but what he wants is to be the next best thing to God and spite Death while he’s at it, and the fact that he wants it is what makes it important. But the Joker doesn’t even care about what he wants enough to focus on carrying it through to the end. The Joker is so invested in deceiving himself about his true goals that he’s barely better than the sheep Owlman exploits. He dresses like a clown, but it’s not the makeup and the gags that Owlman hates (aside from the humiliation factor, which he’d gut Joker for the second he dared to aim it in Owlman’s direction). It’s the farce.

Here’s another fact about Owlman: he creates his own enemies. He was wrought from the darkest depths of adversity, and he came out the other side as the obsessive power-hungry authoritarian that he is today. He can’t help but be curious: what could he do to someone, what confluence of circumstances must there be, in order to break them free of their complacency? What is it that turns someone from sheep to wolf? (And let it not be said that Owlman misunderstands the biological reality of that metaphor: he knows the importance of community when it’s founded on a functional social structure. A man must sleep, and it would be well to have competent allies invested in him waking up again.) What would it take to create a proper ideological opponent – one who can bring a more convincing case against him than the only arguments anyone ever seems to have against those who deviate from expected conduct, which always boil down to either “you’re insane” or “you’re an asshole”? (There is a reason he cuts Batman off so disdainfully on Earth Prime.) Owlman leaves people alive if he thinks they can learn from it. He mutilates them and lets them go, like catch-and-release irritants; or else he kills the idiots and lets their families live, to see whether they fall into line, seek vengeance, or simply fail to justify their continued existence too. So it surprises only those who don’t know either man when the Joker realises that peacocking and pulling on Owlman’s pigtails for attention isn’t having the effect he wants, and he goes to war in earnest.There are lots of ways this can go, and all of them are disastrous for Gotham, but sooner or later it comes down to only one possible outcome. Owlman is not Batman. In the prime universe, the Joker isn’t wrong when he says that it’s Batman’s reluctance to kill that is responsible for every additional crime he commits, because he will never stop so long as both of them are still alive. In this world, once the Joker is no longer useful or amusing enough to continue earning his stay of execution, the game will always end with two armour-piercing rounds to the chest to put him down and one in the head to finish him off. Owlman has better things to do than indulge someone who isn’t worth his time or effort.(Years later, when he looks at Luthor’s calculations and realises what he’s seeing, it is the most power Owlman has ever held: the power to travel to any timeline that branched off from the original Earth, and to affect each one limitlessly without concern for the consequences, because every action he takes is negated in the instant of taking it. It is the most powerless he has ever felt.)

But let’s say that Owlman doesn’t create the Joker. This is Heath Ledger’s Joker instead, who comes out of nowhere and whose terror is as much that of the unknown and inexplicable as that of violence. He does what he does because he is a nihilist down to every cell in his body, in the jargonistic Nietzschean sense of a person oriented toward avolition and the destruction of values rather than toward life and striving, and what he really wants is to force the world to see the same truth he does as he dances in the light of its conflagration. Look on these Works, ye Hopeful, and despair!(And that’s different and the same as Owlman, once Crisis on Two Earths comes to pass. Owlman is an existentialist and a perfect Nietzschean protagonist, not a devotee of entropy. It’s a strangely ubiquitous error. Owlman never does anything without a reason, and he doesn’t decide to destroy all existence just because nothing matters – he does it because control is his only defense against the terror of mortality, the dark night of the soul, and destroying Earth Prime is the only available course of action left whose outcome he alone can determine. It’s the only available course of action that matters. Nietzsche himself saw nihilism as an inevitable result of value systems outliving their ability to fulfill fundamental human needs, and therefore as both a necessary process and one necessary to overcome. When the moment of epiphany dawns and you realise that all you care about is empty of worth or meaning, you return to the core truth that there is no point to being alive except subjective self-definition and the will to power, and you define which new values give you sufficient reason to continue living. It’s not just vitriol that drives Owlman to strip humanity of its comforting illusions – it’s his instinctive dehumanisation of every person who wastes their life so damned intractably on a rickety edifice of social constructs and specious excuses that they may as well be dead, and the profound loneliness that comes of being one of the few people on Earth worth existing. Both Owlman and the Joker are forces of darkness seeking to corrupt the light until it is as dark as they, but at least Owlman has other projects at the same time.)

And let’s say that the Jester does exist in this world, because this Joker arises as a reactionary force and it’s much more interesting than using any other endlessly-recurring enemy when the first time the Joker shows his face is to waltz onto Owlman’s turf and say, I can help take care of that little problem of yours.Owlman looks at this warped parody of the clown with his Glasgow smile and his smeared, ugly warpaint, this funhouse mirror image shattered and reassembled by someone without the capacity for care, twitchy and restless and prowling the room with a bottomless hyena hunger, and he says, Prove it.The Joker licks his lips, a darting tic of a movement stretched out into something obscene, and he leans forward and says, See, he says, see, it seems to me that what you have is this thorn in your side that you just can’t get rid of, right? You try and you try and go around and around in circles, and this game of cat and mouse that you’ve got here, it just. Never. Ends! No matter what you do. And I think, what I think is, is that it’s because you don’t think about it the right way. Everything in that big beautiful brain of yours is like…exquisite Swiss clockwork, all ticking along with this perfect mechanical precision, a place for everything and everything in its place, et cetera. And your little problem is like a grain of sand in the gears and when you try to solve that problem, well, it all just goes to pieces. But me? He holds his hands out, open and empty, no weapons, ladies and gentlemen, nothing up his sleeves. I know how nutcases like that think.Because you’re one of them? Owlman asks, voice heavy with irony.No, the Joker says quietly, all mockery suddenly gone and leaving behind a sucking, deadly emptiness. No. I’m not. But, he adds, nearly as an afterthought, they’d sure like me to be.

Owlman understands how rationality that tends to skew wide of common convention can seem like madness to the uncreative. He’s also met his share of psychotics insistent on their sanity, so he isn’t laying any bets yet as to which category this joker falls into. He asks, So what do you get out of this?The Joker says, A partnership. He says, What you’re doing with this town, really, it’s inspiring. You’ve got the law running scared, and everyone else is so busy trying to stay afloat and keep from drawing attention from the monsters under the bed that they’d sell their families up the river the very moment you dropped a hint! I admire that, Owlsie.A crescent-shaped blade clips a layer of skin from the clown’s ear and buries itself an inch deep in the wall behind him.The Joker hacks out a skittery laugh, ha–! Touches the cut and dismisses the blood on his fingertips with a glance and an ugly, asymmetric grin. Message received. But let me get to, heh, to the point: I think we could do great things together, you and I. You with the vision, and me with the…technique. All I need is a go-ahead and your promise. You look like a man who keeps his word. And if you aren’t interested…well! I can promise you’ll never see me again.(This is, of course, a threat.)Owlman gives him a long look. And why should I offer you this opportunity?

I’ve heard about you, the clown replies, licking his lips in the space between sentences, feral with barely-suppressed anticipation. Everyone in this town knows to either bring you the Jester alive or not lay a hand on him. And some people might think that’s impractical, or territorial, or maybe just a teensy bit romantic—There is nothing in the multiverse that can shut this Joker up short of sheer existential shock, yet the sudden glint of metal in Owlman’s hand and the look of get to the point or lose your fucking tongue he levels at him through his expressionless owl mask briefly manages. (Owlman has no time for homophobia or other pointless bigotry simply because that’s a stupid way to run a business, but nor does he have patience for people without the sense necessary to keep their blood inside their bodies, and the Joker is gunning for a Darwin Award at 130mph in a stolen ice cream truck.) Another too-quick grin darts across the Joker’s face, insolent and nervy. But the important thing is, they’re all wrong. I know how that brain of yours works, and it’s not just about calling dibs. It’s about sending a message. And if you give me the honor of taking out your trash, I can guarantee you that no one in Gotham will ever feel safe around a face like this – a flutter-fingered gesture encompasses the clown makeup – again.So Owlman grants the Joker the courtesy of an audition: destroy the Jester both literally and symbolically, don’t get himself killed in the process, and Owlman will make good on their deal.

A cumulative hour in his presence, and he loathes this Joker more than he ever could the other one. It’s not just that he doesn’t take his goals seriously. Whatever his true aims are, this Joker is meticulous in his preparations, putting them together with the care and attention to detail of a chessmaster or, more precisely, a bombmaker. It’s that the man himself is a bad joke. Everything he says and does – the tics exaggerated to the point of lasciviousness, the mincing mannerisms interspersed with sexual implications and aggressive vulgarity, the intrusions on others’ personal space, the utter disregard for any concept of the truth in his self-contradictory anecdotes – every part of the persona is faked solely to disconcert and disgust, a cheap plastic veneer with nothing behind it except for the occasional momentary flash of sincerity, discordantly subdued in comparison. This Joker pokes adders’ nests and goads murderers without even gaining any particular satisfaction from it. The only real passion he ever shows is for destruction and, at one point, when a periodic check-in culminates in Owlman pinning him to the wall by his throat and calmly threatening to remove an eye if he takes another step out of line, as the Joker wheezes laughter and invites Owlman to observe the suicide-vest pull-ring suddenly looped taut around his thumb.

Why so serious? the clown reprises breathlessly, feet scrabbling against the wall for purchase, and Owlman is sorely tempted to remove both his thumb and the eye. Since he’s at the wrong angle to do that before the Joker blows them both up, he instead squeezes the carotid pressure points at the sides of the clown’s neck – not pressing on his windpipe enough to alarm him; let him think that Owlman simply has trouble controlling his temper – until a few seconds later his eyes roll back in his head and his body goes slack, hands dropping limply back to his sides. Owlman lets him fall and puts a steel-armoured boot into his ribs as a reminder to keep on-task. (Broken ribs: continuously painful, mildly disabling but not enough to interfere with his work, exploitable for more severe injury, and most importantly less likely to incite betrayal than as-yet unearned mutilation. Owlman doesn’t actually begrudge sensible precautions for self-defense, so long as they remain only a threat.) The vest is confiscated and disposed of, as well as any other weapons Owlman finds on him in a thorough pat-down the clown wisely refrains from commenting on beyond pained laughter and sharp protests of excessive roughness.

From this encounter Owlman concludes, firstly, that the Joker is profoundly sadomasochistic and only slightly less suicidal; secondly, that if he screws up this mission in a way that redounds negatively upon the Court of Owls, Owlman will make him beg for death before granting it; and thirdly, whether or not said mission succeeds, Owlman is going to fucking murder him. The man’s very existence is offensive almost beyond Owlman’s capacity to express without spitting.

When the mission goes down a few days later, it predictably goes off the rails, because that’s how this story goes: the Joker never gets to kill the hero. Inevitably, there are casualties – perhaps civilian, perhaps another member or several of the Jester’s circus of rogues, but either way the primary objective goes uncompleted and the Jester lives to grieve the losses and fight another day. Gotham will not easily forget the scars of this confrontation. The Joker, no doubt sensing the retribution headed his way, disappears with the materiel and manpower Owlman lent him. (Not much, nothing too closely associated with him, and nothing he couldn’t replace, though Owlman intends to find out exactly how the man managed to make anyone in his Court turn coat.)

Owlman hunts him down. It’s unexpectedly difficult to find an unkempt madman with livid facial scars, but the Joker doesn’t have half the Jester’s practice at guerrilla tactics and soon enough Owlman tracks him down to his current hideout. He materialises soundlessly from the shadows and slams the Joker’s head into the nearest hard surface, and then the next moment the Joker is bent double clutching at the bloody hole in his stomach – from gun or knife or diamond-tipped talons, it makes no difference, because all that matters is that Owlman isn’t going to let this Joker bleed out before he gets the chance to explain exactly why he deserves it.

The clown is surprisingly dangerous even with a couple of broken ribs and a soon-to-be-fatal gut wound, not to mention whatever other injuries he picked up from his failed character assassination, and he manages to get a knife in through one of the gaps in Owlman’s armour before Owlman breaks his wrist and kicks him to the ground. The brief, guttural cry as Owlman stomps his other hand into the floor for good measure is reasonably gratifying. Joker curls up around his injuries, giggling wetly and unceasingly except when he has to gasp for breath or make noises of pain, and Owlman has to uncurl him like a hedgehog and push him down onto his back so he can lean a knee into his stomach and force the clown to look at him, talons digging parallel red lines into the scars on his cheeks. He keeps giggling as Owlman talks, cackles uncontrollably when Owlman slaps him to make him pay attention, and only stops so he can wheeze, Hey – hey. Wanna hear a joke?Is it you? Owlman asks with vindictive disinterest.

Close, giggles the clown. Sustained pressure on the diaphragm is a reliable way to suffocate someone, and with the combination of pain and blood loss and Owlman’s weight on him the Joker is already having trouble focusing on Owlman’s face, eyelids fluttering deliriously. It’s more about the fact that this place is littered with explosives – as are quite a few of your offsite operations – and you have just made it impossible for me to type the cancellation code. He waggles his crushed hand, grin stretching horrifically serene across his face like a gaping wound, teeth stained red with blood. I set it for three minutes when you showed up – how much time is there left, d'you think?Owlman glances at the clock display in the corner of his HUD and knows immediately that it’s not enough to subdue the Joker and drag him out of the building, much less find the detonator on him and disarm it. He gets up off of his victim and runs. Wild, unhinged laughter follows him out as the first explosions make the air behind him shudder with a wave of searing heat, drowning out all other sound.Afterward, he does not find a body amidst the charred wreckage. It should have been impossible for the Joker to make it out of the building alive, but the fact remains: there is no body to be found, and nor will Owlman or any member of his Court ever find one.

But now for happier things: where does the Jester come from, in the positive-polarity universe? Was he a victim of one of Gotham’s mob families rather than Owlman, mutilated and left to shoulder the burden of a loved one’s murder because he made the wrong jokes, stepped on the wrong toes, didn’t heed the warning signs when he went too far? Was he a rehabilitation case spurred into turning his life around after an encounter with Batman, a hapless Red Hood who was only ever in it for a lack of other options, who fell from a catwalk due to a sheer confluence of bad luck and whose face as he fell never stops haunting Batman’s waking ruminations? Was he a random bystander who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Did he simply appear one day with no name and no past and decide, just as in any other circumstance, that there was nothing for it but to fight darkness with light and cruelty with kindness and revel in the fact that life, that the very nature of being alive, brings with it the opportunity for growth and self-determination and connection with those around you?

(He alludes to his past on occasion, in vague and casual terms, and with little external evidence of any emotion other than the carefree self-deprecation of the Fool. Batman knows more about him than anyone except, perhaps, his family, and knows equally that it doesn’t make much of a difference – to the Jester, yesterday matters because it establishes the conditions for today, and today is what you make of it. Whenever someone asks about his origin – they’re usually bright enough not to mention his disfigurement, though it’s implied in the question – he pirouettes to face them with a bright, inhumanly wide grin: Why, I make it my life’s work to bring low the powerful and raise up the weak, to spread laughter and joy, and to never set foot in court without everyone knowing I don’t belong there! Whatever else would I have done with myself?)The Jester gets along best with Robin, for they are kindred spirits, the brightness and animation to Batman’s swift and silent shadow. And they both get along well with kids, sapping the monster of its aura of menace with fast-flying quips and dazzling acrobatics, reassuring them that they’re safe and turning black-caped vengeance into an unambiguous protector, a tamed beast that punishes the vicious and protects the innocent. J wishes he could calm tears with sweets and big bear hugs but it’s bad policy to train kids to accept candy from strangers, so he sticks to sleight-of-hand magic tricks and lets his audience keep whatever small items he conjures as talismans against the dark.

Dick likes him best of all the Robins, because he grew up in the circus and even if the Jester lacks the training of a professional clown, the attitude is there, the groan-worthy love of a sly dig or a terrible pun and the backbreaking, humiliating dedication to drawing out a smile. You have to really like people to make it as a clown. He has a performer’s love of the spotlight, too, and an easy personal magnetism that eats up attention like a particularly friendly gravity well. In a way that Batman never does, the Jester feels like home.(Did he come onto the scene before or after Robin started joining Batman on his nightly patrols? Again, it doesn’t make much of a difference – the two men work together when their paths happen to cross, but they both have their own beats and their own cases a lot of the time. Where Batman focuses on street crime and corruption, the Jester is more involved in community service and social support networks and mainly tends to kick bad-guy butt when he knows it’s affecting those with little to lose. Batman finds people jobs and directs them to shelters and makes anonymous donations to those who could use them; J helps repair leaky roofs and gets people in touch with friends who offer affordable daycare or can help you navigate bureaucratic hurdles pro bono.) 

The Jester gets along surprisingly well with Batman, whose stern demeanour belies a dry, subtle sense of humour that tends toward a faintly British style of cynicism. (When J learns that Alfred the Actual English Butler works for the big bad bat, he is delighted. Batman’s batman, ha!) They make an amazingly effective straight man/funny guy duo, Batman setting him up almost undetectably so that J can then knock the punchlines out of the park. (This in itself is ironic, since the Jester is the only one of the pair who’s shown any compelling evidence of being straight by merit of falling in love with and subsequently marrying a beautiful, vivacious woman. Catwoman aside – J’s inclined to think that what’s going on there has more to do with the Dark Knight’s savior complex than heterosexuality per se, since otherwise Batman shows about as much sexual proclivity as a particularly introverted rock. Which is very professional, all told.)  

(The first time the two of them cross paths for more than a minute or two, Batman is staking out a building from one of the Jester’s rooftops when a grating half-whisper a few inches behind his right ear says, Ooh, what are we going to do tonight, Brain? Batman suppresses the instinctive motion toward violence with only a small, barely-visible twitch. He lowers his binoculars for a moment to glance directly into a huge, ghoulish red grin that quickly backs off a few more inches at his expression. Contrary to ordinary laws of perspective, the grin gets bigger. There are little golden jingle bells sewn to the Jester’s cap and the scalloped edges of his collar and tunic, but they apparently lack clappers, which is both sensible and slightly irritating. Turning back to his target, he replies, low-voiced, The Russian’s started moving in on the drug trade in this area after the sting on Falcone’s crew the other week. I’ve tracked several of their dealers back here.Supplier, huh? The Jester perches comfortably on top of a nearby air-conditioning unit, kicking his feet slightly. So what’s the plan?

I go in, Batman says. You stay out here. I don’t need to be tracking someone else when there could be gunfire. (Someone he’s unaccustomed to fighting alongside, he means, considering that the whole Robin thing happens at some point.)J sticks out his tongue, which goes completely unappreciated by the giant man-bat cryptid staring intently across the street. Boo to you, too. Come on, I do this every night just like you – I can take care of myself. And anyway, these are my people. I have just as much right to help them out as you do.Batman doesn’t move in any way that J can tell, but something in his posture softens – inasmuch as the difference between diamond and corundum, at least – and he tells J the plan. J’s grin stretches nearly to his ears. Twenty minutes later, they move in and pull it off without a hitch. It is awesome. And there isn’t even much gunfire, so there.)

Jason, now. Jason likes the Jester because even if he doesn’t let the kid put himself in harm’s way like Batman does, he lets him get away with more, and when he wants Jason to do something he’s good at phrasing it so he feels included, important. Meanwhile, J loves the kid even more than he worries about him – for the way he glories in everything he does, glories in the doing of it and the power and freedom to do it, drinking life down like he never thought he’d get to. Jason is sharp-edged in a way Dick only ever was when a case hit too close to home: where Dick is a being of the air, light and swift on his feet and so defiant of gravity that he moves as comfortably in the vertical axis as the horizontal, Jason is fire, feverish and fearless and prickly and hungry for experience, for justice, for affection and validation even as he affects to disdain it. Jason grasps for everything he can hold, stakes a claim on the rare people he lets himself care about, acts on impulse and doesn’t hold back once he’s decided on something. J worries sometimes that he and Jason are too alike, that they both bring out each other’s worst qualities and one day he’ll forget himself and it’ll all end in tears.

(Don’t, Batman says when J mentions it to him. You’re the only one he always listens to. Unspoken: Batman trusts the Jester’s way of handling Jason more than his own. This is the night after J talked the kid down from beating a child trafficker into unconsciousness, so he sees where Bats is coming from, but given that his argument was yes, he deserves it and worse, yes, if the law doesn’t stop people like him then we have to, that’s why we do what we do and what you’ve done tonight has already saved those kids and others that would have ended up like them, so just hand me that crowbar for now…he’s a bit less confident.J stops pacing and throws up his hands. That’s my whole point!Batman gives him one of his many Looks, which here means that he should stop being foolish, as if that isn’t his very nature. J grumbles to himself and starts pacing again in agitation. The matter goes unresolved.)

As Jason grows older he becomes fiercer, less restrained, and J worries more and more until one day Jason shows up at the door of the abandoned toy factory that J set up as a base of operations, wearing an utterly emotionless expression that means he is inches from exploding.Disoriented by the sight of a Robin in the middle of the day, J stupidly says the first thing that comes to mind, which is Shouldn’t you be in school?Jason’s expression tightens, another millimeter closer to the explosion, and he shrugs and says, Dunno. I’m not sure I can afford it anymore.While J gapes, Jason pushes past him and into the factory to dump his duffle bag on one of the mismatched sofas in the improvised living area. He sits down beside it, elbows resting moodily on his knees as he glares through a pile of books that J should really get around to reshelving at some point and that certainly didn’t deserve this kind of treatment. Harley is out at work for the next few hours; J wishes heartily that she were here, but he’d feel too guilty taking her away from the people who need her. He’ll have to handle this on his own.(Oh, Harley. Harley Harley Harley. His bright, brilliant Harleen Quinzel, saddled with a pun name because her parents thought it was cute, worked her ass off all the way through medical school and sexism and mental-illness stigma of the worst kind just so she could do for other people what had been done for her; who did exactly that during J’s several-month tenure at Arkham following the whole…face thing…who introduced herself in precise, proper tones and then visibly braced for the inevitable joke.After a moment of careful thought, J said, Y'know…in the pantomime, the original Harlequin character was the male hero, pursuing the love of the beautiful Columbine. He grinned too widely, winced, then recovered airily, I’d much rather tell all my deepest, darkest insecurities to you.Dr. Quinzel stared at him, then conscientiously dropped her eyes back to his patient file before saying, like she didn’t know quite what to feel about it, You know, I think that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about my name.

She told him to call her Harleen, to think of her as a friend if he was comfortable with that, and called him Mr. J for lack of any name he felt a closer identification with. It was a little too easy to inadvertently make her retreat into scrupulous propriety, so he did his best not to say anything that would make her feel like she had to withdraw to a safe clinical distance; but then she told him that she was here to help him get better, it wasn’t his job to worry about her, and to say anything he wanted to talk about, so he did his best to obey and tried not to get attached to the little warm glow of self-worth that bubbled up in his chest whenever he managed to make her laugh. A month and a half later, she told him she would be resigning from Arkham the following week. Ethics reasons.But, he protested, Har– Dr. Quinzel – you shouldn’t just throw away your whole life! I’ll be out of here any week now, you said, and you do so much good here—Dr. Quinzel waited until he ran out of words, then said in that crisp tone, Mr. J, then smiled. I am not throwing my life away. With my credentials, I can get very nearly any psychiatric post I wish. We’ve both been as honest in here with each other as my position allows, so I hope I’ve managed to ensure a minimum of the kind of miscommunication that might cause ethical issues. And anyway, if we were to have a relationship, it would be inappropriate to continue holding a job where I’d still be counseling you beyond the scope of our doctor-patient relationship. She grinned at his expression, cheeks dimpling. I’ve been thinking of getting into social work. Kids and families, you know? That was my other top choice when Arkham hired me.)

He really wishes Harley was here.Jaybird, the Jester says cautiously, what happened?Jason shrugs again, that same hopeless one-shouldered rise and drop. We had another fight. The usual. I didn’t back down this time, so he fired me.The boy is fifteen years old and underneath the anger in his voice is so much pain that he refuses to let himself feel, so much that it hurts to draw breath, suffusing every line of his posture like he’s trying to armour himself in enough sharpness to cut anyone who comes near. The Jester sits down next to him, not too close, and when Jason’s body language doesn’t change he puts a tentative hand on the kid’s shoulder. Jason relaxes marginally under the touch, like he always has once he got used to J’s absentminded tactility, and J feels guilty again for no reason. He’s pretty sure the kid doesn’t do that for anyone but him and Harley. You can stay here as long as you need, he assures Jason, then asks, Want me to talk to him?Jason shakes his head. Not much point. We’ve already said everything there is to say.

J’s heart breaks. It’s not entirely anyone’s fault, not really, because Bruce has never really known what to do with his own emotions, much less other people’s, and Jason has more than enough emotions for the both of them, and neither of them knows how to deal with hurt feelings except through repression and control. Jason is a difficult kid, anyone would be a difficult kid with that kind of childhood, and J would bet dollars to doughnuts that Bruce felt he was compromising as much as he dared for Jason’s safety and couldn’t understand why Jason wouldn’t accept what he was trying to tell him – and meanwhile Jason would have felt more and more unheard, unfairly restricted, invalidated and patronised. On reflection, it’s not just the Jester that Jason is too similar to.What a mess. He could really use his wife’s skillset right about now.Jason is leaning just very slightly into the contact in a way that says he doesn’t realise he’s doing it, so J takes a chance and slides his arm around the kid’s shoulders, giving him something warm and solid to ground himself against. Gradually Jason melts into the touch, and they end up with the Jester’s arms wrapped around him and Jason breathing deep shuddering breaths against his collarbone, not crying, J can’t remember ever seeing Jason cry and as far as he knows the kid doesn’t. J pats him awkwardly and says stupid comforting reassurances, things like don’t worry and it’s okay, it’ll be alright and you’re okay, there’s nothing wrong with you, no one’s gonna make you leave and eventually those shuddering breaths slow and Jason says, muffled, into his shirt, Any chance you could use a sidekick?The Jester can’t say no. He does say, You know he cares about you, right? He worries about you so much. He doesn’t use the word love, doesn’t dare; Jason would never accept that, would never let himself believe it from anyone, and J’s never heard him say it to anyone, either. Too many scars.Sure, says Jason, and he just sounds exhausted now, wrung out from carrying and releasing more emotion than any person has the strength to hold, much less a lonely teen with PTSD and major trust issues. He just doesn’t see me as a person.There’s nothing J can really say in response to that.(He does, however, treat Bruce coolly and professionally when he sees him next, which is an unmistakable signal that the Bat has made his way neck-deep into the ball pit of rainbow-coloured clown poo. Bruce does talk with the Jester about it, and J answers completely  and honestly, hiding nothing except what Jason would want hidden. Bruce accepts this in the critical spirit in which it is meant.)

(There is no Joker to kill Jason in this timeline, so does he die? Perhaps the Jester’s fears come true and he’s hoist on his own petard, burnt up by the same fire that drives him, or perhaps it’s someone else who dies – either way, the first time J attends the funeral of one of their own, Bruce finds him about a hundred feet away under a crabapple tree shading a scattered family plot, just within hearing range of the proceedings but far enough away to keep from obviously compromising the identity of the deceased. J is dressed up in as close as he gets to formal civvies, which in this case means a midnight-purple three-piece suit sharply tailored for a man closer to Bruce’s size and shape than his own, spats, and a wide-brimmed fedora to somewhat hide his unnatural pallor. Harley, who can at least pass unnoticed when she wants to, is perhaps among the mourners around the grave; he would have told her to go, if it were someone she was emotionally attached to. Both she and the deceased deserve that much.J gives Bruce a nod as he comes over, letting out a long breath as he looks out over the cemetery. After a moment, he comments, It’s kind of like that Pagliacci story, y'know? When your whole life’s about making other people feel better, there’s not really much room to have your own. He glances up at Bruce with a subdued smile, which is primarily distinguishable from his typical one by the lack of visible teeth. Anyway. How are you holding up?Bruce raises an eyebrow and gives J one of his Looks.J punches him in the arm, then shakes out the hand theatrically. Buddy my pal, I am married to a psychiatrist. Trust me when I say you in no way need to go there and we can stick to the tradition of sublimating our negative emotions into violence and risky behaviours, as is our prerogative as men.The eyebrow returns to its proper elevation and Bruce looks back out to the gathered mourners, posture changing not a jot. J can sense his relief.)(J is good at using his feelings to connect with other people, though. It’s probably because unlike Bruce and Harley and the rest of Gotham’s vigilantes, the law never even pretended to be on his side, so he got used to thinking of justice as something you had to make happen yourself, whether or not anyone gets punished. Everyone does the wrong thing sometimes, after all, and what matters is that they stop so it can be made right, not that they hurt for it. That’s why his first instinct is to validate why someone’s doing whatever they’re doing, whether or not he agrees with it. 

The ancient Greeks had this thing, catharsis, that was the purpose of all those tragic plays. Everyone would get together to watch an hour-long portrayal of all the follies of man (and woman, &c.) and take comfort in the fact that they weren’t alone in their mistakes and their struggles, that everyone around them was feeling the same way they were, and they’d go home afterward and be a little more understanding with each other for a while, a little more forgiving of themselves. The Jester once talked Mr. Freeze down that way when Freeze had frozen him to the floor and he couldn’t reach any of his gadgets – just stood and acknowledged his pain, acknowledged the reasons he was doing the things he did, acknowledged that when you’ve been hurt and wronged so badly it’s impossible not to want to lash out and make everyone see what was done to you with no one to care. Freeze had stopped in his tracks, threatened him and his loved ones, ranted about the injustices he’d borne whenever the Jester gave him an opening to…and his expression became more and more confused when J kept agreeing with him, more and more unsettled and lost because he couldn’t imagine anyone being on his side, and by the end of it his face was all tight and creased like he would have been crying if he physically could and when Batman crept up in his blind spot to take his freeze gun (while J tried to communicate solely through eyebrow movements not to do anything aggressive) he just stood there and let it be taken, then slowly crumpled to his knees.

Nora, he said like the name was being physically dragged out of him, Nora, I’m so sorry. God, what I’ve done…she would hate me.

Batman hesitated so briefly it would have been unnoticeable to a layman, then laid his free hand on the shoulder of Freeze’s cryosuit and stepped into his range of vision so Freeze could see what he was doing even if he couldn’t feel the contact, and said in his low voice, Then you’ll have to become the kind of man she can love again, Victor.

I can’t, said Freeze, shaking his head in desperate denial. I’ve done too much. She could never forgive me.

You can, said Batman. I’ll help you.

And me! J chimed in, trying to look like the entire lower half of his body wasn’t going somewhat terrifyingly numb.

Batman Looked at him, then back down to Mr. Freeze, and affirmed, We’ll all help you, while the Jester beamed anxiously in the background.

It was one of the more nerve-wracking things J has done in his career of incredibly risky moves, and he spent the rest of the day under observation to make sure there wouldn’t be hypothermia damage; he absolutely never plans to have to try that kind of thing on someone like, say, Bane.)

Bruce originally picks up Jason a few months after Dick leaves for college, and the Jester will most certainly never contradict his insistence that it was coincidence and not empty-nest syndrome (aloud, anyway). Batgirl precedes Jason by about a year, and immediately drives the papers and news channels into a frenzy of speculation about the new auburn-haired Bat, where she came from, why she showed up now. Batman vouches for her; Dick gets a little more detailed and says she’s infuriating – a complete amateur – but all right, I guess. Whoever she is, she’s not part of the arrangement the Dynamic Duo have together: she doesn’t patrol with them, but appears more opportunistically in response to crimes noteworthy enough to make it into police radio dispatches or the news. J assumes she’s more law-oriented than he is and keeps out of her way, at least until he hears about her teaming up with Catwoman to bag Roland Daggett for museum theft and an attempted frame-up. When J learns the details, he chortles like a loon while Harley grins ear to ear and looks skyward as if thanking providence for the joke.

J likes Batgirl! It’s true that she’s an amateur early on, but everyone has to start somewhere and she’s sharp and puts every lesson into practice as soon as she’s learned it. She also trades puns with him and Harley, so that makes her good in his book. She bonds with Harley in particular, which is probably inevitable for a pair of intimidatingly brilliant and multitalented women, and Harley ends up subtly mothering her and pulling out her family-counselor tricks when Batgirl vents about certain unnamed figures in her life smothering and/or underestimating her.

Batman definitely knows who she is, and J and Harley have vague suspicions, but they courteously avoid looking any further into it until Dick has his falling-out with Bruce and leaves to establish his own brand separate from the Batman-and-Robin duo that’s defined nearly half his life. Batgirl starts showing up more, joining Batman on patrols and at the cave, and by the turn of the season it’s clear that she’s taken Robin’s place as Batman’s primary backup and civilian-reassurer. She also ends up taking over Alfred’s job of remote research and logistical support, to which Alfred professes sincere relief. At some point they tell J and Harley that Batgirl’s true identity is Barbara Gordon, Jim Gordon’s daughter; all Harley says is, Well, I s’pose it runs in the family, and J utterly loses it. Barbara has that strained look where she’s trying to hide supreme amusement at their reactions, so that’s okay.

She forthrightly big-sisters Jason as soon as he’s brought in on the family business, which works out because he reacts to her exactly like an irritated little brother. After Bruce fires him, she comes over to the factory to hang out and talk with him, even if Bruce doesn’t. He tolerates her, acts like he isn’t grateful she’s there, but he doesn’t try to make her leave. After the first attempt, she doesn’t try to convince him to come back.

Your esteemed author doesn’t read the comics and DCAU’s Tim Drake is more than half Jason Todd in backstory and characterisation in any case, so I can’t say much about the other Robins individually except that after already driving Dick to become Nightwing (cf. The New Batman Adventures ep. 17 “Old Wounds”), Bruce takes Jason leaving even harder than anyone was quite prepared for. The Jester and Harley are perhaps less willing to help support Bruce in this than they usually are, so it’s a clever, driven young photographer who sees his hero becoming impulsive and self-destructive and realises what he must do to fix it. Tim treats Jason coolly when they meet on the job, and Jason makes passive-aggressive or aggressive-aggressive allusions to Batman’s tyrannical tendencies, but when push comes to shove they find they can both appreciate each other’s focus on Solving The Problem by whatever means they have at hand.

(Jason models his new sidekick persona after Puck, perhaps, the perennial Robin Goodfellow, avatar of mischief and harbinger of painful ironies. There has always been an element of Pan in the character of Robin, innocent and Dionysian, revelling as easily in violence as in flight as he subdued criminals with the same boyish exuberance as Peter did the pirates.)

Later, Cass probably takes joy in the Jester and Harley’s body language – so alive, so in love, laughing genuinely even when they’re sad.

Damian probably can’t stand the Jester, but then he can’t stand most people. J doesn’t stop trying to make him laugh. One day, it works. Damian is horrified. J is so, so proud. (Harley brings her family-counseling A-game to interactions with the boy, but even she has trouble making a dent in the Great Wall of Damian’s Judgment at first. She eventually makes progress by gently leading him into considering others’ needs and points of view, which prompts a good deal of troubled self-reflection on Damian’s part…which then inevitably leads to him blaming the “giggling harridan” for trying to turn him against his mother and grandfather, which Harley uses to springboard a discussion that somehow, amazingly, ends in Damian sincerely apologising. Which is probably a miracle of some sort.)

The Jester doesn’t join the initial lineup of the Justice League. In most timelines, the League forms in response to a major world crisis, and in that kind of situation the Jester and his partners are going to be clearing the streets and rescuing trapped or disabled civilians, not getting into the thick of things with the heavy hitters. He’s an acrobat with a terrifyingly creative mastery of props and gadgets, not a superhuman, and moreover he’s a local guy. Gotham is his city, and he knows its streets and rooftops and boltholes and major players as well as he knows his own heartbeat. This is where he can do the most good.

And because he’s just an acrobat with a terrifyingly creative mastery of props and gadgets, whenever he’s needed for something outside his usual purview, he ironically does best in a guerrilla capacity despite the bells and motley. There’s nothing like a decade of experience at having nothing between you and real actual flying bullets except surprise and agility to really hone one’s stealth and ambush skills. Also, he’s very bendy! He’s no Ragdoll, but if you need someone to steal a vital component from a high-security facility, just give him a map and a radio uplink, point him at an air vent, and watch him go.

I’m not going to examine every change that comes of having a friendly clown instead of the Joker in this universe, but I can’t let pass one difference of note. The “World’s Finest” arc, after all, was precipitated by the Joker tracking down a twenty-pound statuette made entirely of kryptonite, stealing it, and selling his services to Lex Luthor against Superman.

Whereas if the Jester tracked the Laughing Dragon statue to an antiques store in Gotham, things would have gone a little differently. He would have paid for the thing, first of all – with Bruce Wayne’s money, admittedly, Harley doesn’t make that much, but J’s entirely certain that Bruce is aware of the checkbook he once pocketed from his desk and trusts him not to use it without good cause. Plus it cuts down on occasionally having to choose between stealing someone’s actual valuables or risking something important falling into dangerous hands.

While Harley goes into the shop to charm the proprietor with a pair of big baby blues and a forged check, the Jester pops over a few blocks to call the Daily Planet via payphone.

Hi, he tells the receptionist, uh, what do I do if I have an anonymous tip for Lois Lane?

The receptionist tells him she’ll transfer him to Ms. Lane’s private line. He taps his pointy-toed shoe restlessly as he waits.

When Ms. Lane picks up, the Jester says, Yeah, so, I have a question. How would you dispose of twenty pounds of radioactive green rock?

After a moment, Lois replies, incredulous, Is this a threat?

Ah, says the Jester, no. Nooo. I can assure you I have only the best of intentions, hence my asking your advice.

Because calling with an anonymous tip and then phrasing it like that is actually very ominous, Lois points out.

Right, says the the Jester. Sorry about that. I didn’t want to assume anything, so.

Assume anything? J can hear the raised eyebrow.

You know, says J, on the outside chance that, say, you didn’t actually want it destroyed because your friend’s heroic persona is a ruse and you’re being coerced into giving him good publicity. I didn’t want to say it aloud. He probably could have sent a letter instead, but super-sight and X-ray vision are just as much of a hazard in that sense.

Huh, says Lois. Usually when we get crank calls, we don’t get them from a real, live crank. I mean, every so often you get a conspiracist who trusts the media enough to come to us, but usually it’s just people who think the fact that they got screwed over means the whole system’s in on it.

I did say ‘outside chance’, didn’t I? J makes his voice indignant, but he’s not actually all that bothered. He’s a costumed vigilante, certain kinds of consideration are going to sound like paranoia to normals who aren’t used to it. Even if he would have expected better from Superman’s favourite journalist.

You’re right, admits Lois. That’s…very considerate. Thank you. I’m fine, though. I’ll…just go check on the answer to your question now. Can you hold?

A few minutes later, she’s back on the line: You can dissolve it in acid, such as hydrochloric acid at a concentration of about 30% or higher.

Awesome, says the Jester. Thanks. Good luck with your reporting.

They save a sliver, of course, and to prevent it from going astray they give it to Batman for highest-security safekeeping. Just in case.

[kurguardianz]

Voltron: Legendary Defender Season One Rant

Voltron: Legendary Defender Season One Rant

Originally I was just going to measure this season by both its pros and its cons. But then I thought “This show is getting enough praise as it is without my help.” And in all honesty, my analyzing the pros felt half-assed when I really wanted to focus more on the cons. I haven’t seen the 1980s cartoon, so I can’t judge ‘VLD’ as a bad reboot or not. All I’ve seen from the original cartoon is a video on youtube titled ‘Best Voltron Moments’. It looks dated and silly as all hell compared to ‘VLD’. And good god what did they do to Pidge’s voice??? However, I actually had more fun laughing at an eight to nine minute video displaying 80s cheese than I did watching this modernized reboot.

I’m not saying I don’t like ‘VLD’, because I do. I just didn’t love it. Rather than blasting through this season in a matter of hours, it became more of a chore to sit through that it took me days, if not weeks, just to finish it. Is this one of those shows that isn’t for me? Is there something that I’m missing? Or did they just not do a good job at distracting me from its faults? Keep in mind, this is all opinion based, and not everyone is going to like something everyone else loves. Also, I’m aware that there are comics based off of this show. I don’t care. I’m focusing on the cartoon, not the comics. And from what my dearest friend and fan of the show told me, they’re not even that good. With that said, here’s my rant.

“The Galra.” I will admit, the Galra have some pretty menacing designs, chilling voice talent, and they prove to be more of a challenge for the Paladins. But underneath the surface, there’s really nothing to the Galra that we haven’t already seen in terms of an evil empire ruling the world — or in this case, the galaxy. It certainly doesn’t help that almost every villain introduced in this season has about as much character and personality as the gravity in space. I say ‘almost every villain’ because the only two characters that do anything remotely interesting are Haggar and Thace. One is a master druid and most trusted advisor to Emperor Zarkon, and the other helps the Paladins escape in the season finale.

With the exception of those two, everyone else like Sendak or Haxxus is just a cardboard cutout villain that our heroes have to fight. The biggest problem is that the main villain of the show, Zarkon, falls under the same trapping as any other evil ruler, where they have so much power and are not interesting because of it. Yes, he mops the floor with Keith and the red lion. Yes, we learn that he was the former paladin for the black lion. Yes, he is perhaps the most powerful enemy in the entire show already. But what does it matter when the villain himself is so boring to watch? I get their wanting to make him an all powerful baddie, but they should’ve made him captivating as a villain first.

Besides, being all powerful is not what makes a good villain. Take for example The Major from ‘Hellsing Ultimate’. The Major is a marksman for shit and is nowhere near as powerful as Emperor Zarkon. But what The Major lacks in vigor, he makes up for it with charisma. He has such undying passion for war; he has dinner while watching his vampire army wreak havoc; he’s always smiling because he’s having so much fun; and he has such a way with words that they flow like a river. You can argue that he doesn’t know when to shut up, but because he’s so fascinating as a villain, I could watch him give his speech on how much he loves war more than I would Zarkon wailing on the red lion.

While I can take each of them seriously, the Galra are just uninspired with very few of them really doing anything interesting enough that I want to know more about them. It might have something to do with the fact that they introduce six Galra in one season (Zarkon, Haggar, Thace, Sendak, Haxxus and Prorok) without giving a single one of them any time to develop or leave much of an impression on me. Perhaps if they were to make Sendak and Haxxus the main villains of the season while Zarkon was kept in the shadows or background to, you know, properly build him up as this evil tyrant, something might’ve stuck. But with what I was given, I dread who the Paladins are going to fight next.

“Side Characters.” Not only do they try to cram too many bad guys in the first season, but they do the same with side characters. Keep in mind, this is coming from someone who watches ‘Game of Thrones’ where its side characters galore. Unlike ‘GoT’ however where they can be interesting or play an actual role in the story, the side characters in ‘VLD’ are pretty much throwaways. Like candy wrappers. Take for example King Alfor. He has about five minutes of screen time — mostly as a hologram — with no real purpose other than to show that he and Allura are father and daughter. And instead of keeping him around for a second season to provide wisdom and such, they kill him off before this one is even over.

Sure, they’ll probably show him during a flashback or two next season, and his saying “Goodbye” to Allura was actually a pretty touching moment. Looking back at it now however, I feel like they could’ve held onto that until I actually, you know, got to know him better as an actual character. But hey, at least his getting killed off wasn’t so much a cheap ploy to get me bawling like it was with Rover. Yes, he was a helpful little drone to the very end, but Rover was no BB-8 or R2-D2. Plus, the execution with Pidge’s reaction was way off. Her shouting “No!” while moving in slow motion felt like something I would see from the 1980s cartoon. Except here it wasn’t unintentionally funny, it was just cliche.

Speaking of Pidge, we all remember her father and brother, Samuel and Matthew Holt, don’t we? I didn’t. It wasn’t until days after watching the season finale that I realized “Oh yeah, they’re still being held prisoner somewhere.” Then again, when given just one minute of screen time in the entire season, how could I not forget these two? Outside of being space explorers, Samuel and Matthew Holt have no actual character outside of their being family members that Pidge has to eventually find and rescue. On a side note, how is it that no one at the Galaxy Garrison looked at Pidge and thought “Hey, doesn’t that kid look an awful lot like Matthew Holt? One of our famous space explorers that went missing?”

Lastly, there’s the alien bounty hunter, Rolo, his partner, Nyma, and their cyber-unit, Breezer. Much like the Galra, their designs and voice work are really the only things they have going for them. Especially when they got Norman Reedus to do the voice for Rolo. Wait a sec, two actors from ‘The Walking Dead’ providing their voices in ‘VLD’??? Whoa. Mind blown. Other than that, I wouldn’t really care to see these characters again. I’d go into a lot of detail with Shay and her dick of a brother, Rax, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing them again anytime soon, if ever. Even so, I’ve already seen these type of characters before, and I can pretty much say the same for everyone that I’ve listed.

“Taking Flight” Stop me if you heard this one before. The party comes across one or few characters that need help with something and have a sob story to tell. One of the party members however has his doubts about the people they’re helping, but no one else ever listens to him/her and never have their own suspicions. Their inadvisable asses soon get bitten when the people they’ve been helping were lying to them the whole time. Gasp. They then apologize for not listening to said party member and waste a good chunk of time correcting their own mistake. You should know this cliche like the back of your hand, because every other TV show you can think of has beaten this trope to death.

‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ wasn’t free from this cliche, neither was ’The Legend of Korra’. And now they’re written it in ‘VLD’ where they follow it paint by number. Not so much a creative angle to be seen anywhere. Be honest, were any of you really caught off guard when Rolo and Nyma stole the blue lion? Were any of you really at the edge of your seat when the Paladins gave chase to get it back? I certainly wasn’t, because I already knew the route they were taking as soon as Hunk had his doubts about Rolo and company. That’s how bad this cliche has gotten — it’s to the point where as soon as you see it you know it’s going to lead you to anything but surprising. Except for ‘Gravity Falls’.

What’s worse is that they threw away a golden opportunity for Lance to not get his lion back until later on in the season. Think about it, without all five lions, the Paladins can’t form Voltron. And without Voltron, the stakes would be much higher from then on as the Paladins would have only four lions to go up against hundreds of fleet ships, and perhaps a Robeast. But no, the blue lion gets stolen and retaken all in the same episode. Wasted opportunity, and a waste of an episode that could’ve been used to develop the characters. If it weren’t for the possibility of Rolo, Nyma and Breezer showing their faces again next season or so, you could literally skip this episode and wouldn’t miss anything crucial.

“Some Assembly Required” Again, stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Our band of heroes need to learn how to work as a team through a series of tests. Their instructor has a huge stick up their ass 24/7 through the ordeal, and almost all of our heroes fail miserably at every single test they’re given. Each test our heroes fail at results in their getting on each other’s nerves, leading to a lot of bickering, more failure, and more scolding from their instructor along the way. Yippee. They FINALLY pass one little test out of the many they failed at, their instructor cuts them some slack, and the heroes are now able to work together as a team from then on.

This cliche has reared its ugly head just about everywhere in any cartoon and TV show you can think of, and it keeps getting worse every single time I see it. It’s not that the Paladins have to learn how to work as a team that annoys me, it’s how they bicker, fight with each other and get scolded by Allura through the majority of the episode. Granted, they throw in a little humor into the mix to try and make this not such a miserable experience to watch — the key word being ‘try” — and once in a while Haggar would show up to create the Gladiator Robeast. But as painfully cliche and predictable ‘Taking Flight’ was, this episode was just painfully cliche, predictable and cringeworthy.

If they want the Paladins learning to work as a team, they should have them actually learn to work as a team! Have them bond with one another; understand one another; interact with one another; poke fun at one another; help out one another; be thankful for one another! But no, we can’t have that, because that would actually be fun and interesting. No, let’s instead have twenty minutes of unnecessary tension between the Paladins and Allura and have it all build up to a food fight. And then let’s have Coran spill a somewhat misogynistic line about how “A man can be driven to do almost anything if a beautiful women is just really, really mean to him.” Seriously, was I the only one not laughing at that?

“Princess Allura.” Before any of you scream bloody murder, I’m all for female characters that are smart and strong, especially princesses since they’ve been given a bad rap. One of my favorite female characters is Princess Leia from “Star Wars”, the first real female commando in film history. Much like Leia, Allura is a princess of a destroyed home planet and leads a team of rebels against an evil galactic empire. One of the major differences however is that Princess Leia didn’t have a nice helping of the “new powers as the plot demands it” trope to get things done or be in control. She didn’t need super strength, shapeshifting, or energy manipulation. All she needed was a blaster or two and her wits.

Plus, Princess Leia wasn’t a strong female character just for the sake of being a strong female character. No. She had a sense of humor; she warmed up to the men around her; she would celebrate; she would comfort; she would interact with friends and newcomers. She felt like an actual person. Princess Allura? She feels like a dull know-it-all by comparison, whose sole purpose is to spout exposition, give generic speeches, and put into action one of the many powers at her disposal. In short, she’s a cross between a plot device and a Mary Sue than an actual character. If you didn’t think of Allura as a Mary Sue, it becomes more apparent after reading the article down below.

http://thefederalist.com/2016/06/16/netflixs-voltron-reboot-the-best-modern-myth-makers-can-do/

Say what you will about Rey from ‘Force Awakens’ being a Mary Sue, but at least I actually felt something for the character and wanted to see more of her. For me, it’s the exact opposite with Allura. They focus too much on what they think makes a strong female character (i.e. lots of power and authority) that they forget to give her human qualities. The only time I really felt anything but apathy for Allura was when she had to say “Goodbye” to her father. Why? Because she was sad; she felt like a real person; and I could actually relate to her given the situation she was in. But that didn’t last long as she pulls another super power out of her ass in the next episode and we’re right back to square one.

A strong female character is welcoming, but making them all powerful is not the way to go. They have to be strong and interesting as an actual character first, otherwise there’s nothing to be emotionally invested in. Plus, not all strength comes from throwing robot guards like they were soft balls. Strength can also come from overcoming your flaws; your fears; your turmoils; personal struggles; and everyday troubles that keep getting in the way of what’s important to you. You can’t have good without evil, and you certainly can’t have strength without weakness. With the exception of that scene I mentioned with King Alfor, Princess Allura is nothing but strength, and ultimately that’s why she is a weak character.

“The Season Finale.” So now that I’ve established Princess Allura is not to my liking, you can imagine my disinterest in the season finale when the Paladins had to go and rescue her from Zarkon. Especially when Allura doesn’t even try to use her super strength to, oh, I don’t know, break out of her cell? Not so much a beating or kicking at the door, just sitting in a corner most of the time. Then there’s the whole song and dance where Coran gets on Shiro’s case for Allura’s capture, just to apologize a few minutes later, because drama. And of course Keith suggests they leave Allura in captivity, but I already know they’re going to rescue her regardless, so it’s just a time waster. Boy are we off to a great start.

Here’s a crazy idea. What if Shiro got captured instead of Allura? Sure, Shiro is borderline Gary Stu, but at least he has some PTSD shit going on for me to actually care about him. Plus, there would be a lot more at stake. Without Shiro to pilot the black lion, the Paladins can’t form Voltron. And without the one thing that can defeat Zarkon, the Paladins would be going on a suicide mission. Or better yet, have Keith pilot the black lion. We saw from the first trailer that they’re building him up for that in the next season. This could’ve been a golden opportunity to show his capabilities of doing so, giving Shiro all the more reason to say “Keith, if something happens to me, I want you to pilot the black lion.”

Would it have been a much better route? Maybe, may not, but chances are it would’ve been a lot less boring than what I was given. The whole time they had Voltron blowing up garrison fleet ships and Zarkon wailing on the red lion, I kept looking to see how much longer the episode was before I could watch something else, like Steven Universe or Gravity Falls. Either the stakes weren’t that high or I just wasn’t interested in ‘VLD’ anymore already, but when five mecha lions and a giant robot blowing shit up is as exciting to watch as a Michael Bay ‘Transformers’ sequel, something’s wrong. Really, the only intense moment in the entire finale was Shiro’s nightmare fuel of a fight with Hagar. Yikes.

And finally there’s the ending, or at least what they thought counts as an ending. Just as the finale actually starts to get interesting with the lions separating in the wormhole, it all cuts to black and the credits start rolling. Seriously? This is how they wanted to leave us hanging? Stopping right in the middle of something does not qualify as a good cliffhanger, or a season finale for that matter. It would’ve been better had they shown one of the Paladins all alone in parts unknown, wondering where everyone else was, and THEN they roll the credits. But no, this finale is pretty much holding me hostage to actually see that in the second season. A second season that, in all honesty, I won’t be watching anytime soon.

“Final Judgement.” I have to give them credit, ‘VLD’ has some of the best animation thus far in a western animated series; likable main characters; a fairly decent sense of humor; some intense action scenes; and I gotta give them extra points for throwing more ethnicity into the mix. But already the show is held back by muddled storytelling; generic villains; forgettable side characters; a boring princess; and an unsatisfying first season finale. I would’ve gone on to talk about the overuse of dialogue and the sloppy pacing, but I’ve already made my point loud and clear, and I’m sure all of you are wanting to decorate your bedroom walls with my blood and guts right about now.

I want to like this show, and I do. I like it enough to make a “VLD” AMV or two. It’s just not really doing anything for me. Granted, this is just the first season, but if I’m not engrossed in what was given to me, chances are I’m not going to be happy what comes next. Maybe the second season will fix some of the problems I’ve listed, maybe not. I still intend to watch the second season just to see where it all leads, I just won’t be in any rush to actually see it. If you still love this show after everything you’ve read, that’s fine by me. It means that you found a joy to “VLD” that I couldn’t, so don’t let my opinion tarnish that. You watch what you love, and I’ll watch what I love.

[mina-goroshi-blog]

Worst of the worst (of the worst): Battlefield Earth

As anyone who knows me can attest, I have a deep and abiding love for unpleasant experiences. I’ve been known to pull all-nighters when none are necessary, just because I don’t want to sleep. I seldom exercise, but when the mood strikes I’ll go on 40 km walks and return home with knees locking up and feet blistered. When I cook for myself, I make my food spicy to the point of pain. All of this is, of course, is insane. So why do I do this? Because pain provides context for pleasure. Because pain, on some level, is exciting. Because pain reminds you that you’re still alive.

Battlefield Earth is pain. In rough terms, it is the box that that one Bene Gesserit put Paul Atreides’ hand in. Battlefield Earth is the mind-killer. Battlefield Earth is the little-death that leads to total obliteration.

And I love it. It is wonderful, in its excruciation. Never before or since has a film aimed so high and fallen so low. It is a tale of ambition, hubris, greed, and failure. Battlefield Earth is a Calvinist meditation on the human condition. To watch the film is to experience the pain of Christ as he tread the Via Dolorosa, as John Travolta and Barry Pepper qua the Romans mock you and scourge you. The full weight of every cinematic sin which has ever been committed or will be committed weighs heavily on your shoulders.

And, like the suffering of Christ, Battlefield Earth has a redemptive purpose. There have been bad movies before, and there will be bad movies again; all are dwarfed by the enormity of suck that is Battlefield Earth. One feels oddly at peace, as the experience ends and the tension headache ebbs away. “The sun will rise in the morning,” you think. “There will come another day.” You might even learn a thing or two by watching it.

Join me, then, in finishing the Litany of Fear:

I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where Battlefield Earth has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Shall we begin?

Battlefield Earth opens in the year 3000. For a thousand years, Earth has been under the brutal domination of the Psychlos, a cruel race of dreadlocked alien Nazis kitted out in early-2000s mall goth apparel. The majority of humanity has been enslaved by these raver Klingons. Only a few pockets survive in the wild, where they have been reduced to a stone-age existence. One such specimen of humanity is Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper), our protagonist. As the film opens, Jonnie is leaving his home on a journey of exploration. The audience doesn’t know or care what he’s after; neither does the plot. In short order he is captured by the Psychlos and enslaved.

Terl (John Travolta) is a Psychlo with a problem. As the chief of security for the Earth, he looks forward to the end of his tour of duty, only for the board of directors to extend his deployment another fifty cycles, with endless options for renewal.

Terl hatches a scheme: he will force his enslaved humans to mine gold for him, so that he can buy his way back home. They seem to spend most of their time sitting around in cages and hitting rocks against other rocks, so honestly his plan seems pretty unimpeachable. Conveniently for the plot, Terl chooses Jonnie to carry out his scheme. He puts him through an advanced learning program, taught by a hologram of an alien with very low self-esteem. In a matter of minutes, Jonnie knows all that there is to know. It’s kind of like if the cast and crew of The Matrix spent a long night huffing gasoline before shooting the “I know kung fu” scene.

The training program, of course, also teaches Jonnie how to pilot spaceships, as well as the history of all the earth, the cosmos and the Psychlo race. Having been given a shuttle, the shiftless and workshy Jonnie decides to bring Terl gold from Fort Knox’s stash rather than going to the effort of mining it himself. Since the writers have basically given up at this point, Jonnie also happens to discover a subterranean US army base fully stocked with inexplicably functional and still-fueled warplanes. Within a week, he has trained all the remaining humans to be combat pilots. Terl suspects something is amiss, and to prove his point he shoots a few cows as the horrified humans look on - planting the seed of rebellion that will be his own undoing.

The humans put their plan into effect by launching a full-scale attack on the Psychlo base. In the course of the battle, the massive dome the Psychlos have built over Denver is destroyed, and the Psychlos inside suffocate, unable to breathe the Earth’s atmosphere. Since the plot has entirely stopped trying by now, Jonnie finds a teleportation device and transports an atom bomb to the Psychlo homeworld, Psychlo. It detonates in spectacular fashion, exterminating all life. The humans celebrate this act of genocidal planetary annihilation, Terl is locked in the vault of Fort Knox, and at long last the credits roll.

There is so much wrong with this garbage film that one hardly knows where to begin. Though it sounds like the fevered ramblings of a lunatic, I assure you that the plot summary above is 100% accurate. Narrative elements are introduced and then forgotten about in the space of a single scene. Part of this, I assume, was a perceived need to cram in details from the equally nonsensical 1000-page L. Ron Hubbard book the film was adapted from; this was very much a vanity project for the Church of Scientology (on which more later.) But the film is already vastly too long, while (paradoxically) far too short to deal with all the elements it tries to introduce. The dialogue and characters are no better - Jonnie could have been played to satisfaction by an upturned mop with a cutout of Barry Pepper’s face glued on. John Travolta’s performance is at least memorable in its insanity; every scene he’s in crackles with enthusiasm and Very Big Acting. Travolta was having the time of his life, bless his heart.

The film is notorious also for its horrible design. The lighting for most scenes has a queasy quality reminiscent of a laser tag arena after far too much greasy pizza, while virtually every shot is from an extreme Dutch angle. It’s supposed to make the audience feel uncomfortable and disoriented, I would guess, in which case it congratulations are in order because one does indeed feel rather sick after a while. The net effect reminds one of an uninspired nu-metal video. The special effects are mostly executed competently, for the time, and are of the late 90s school of CG where everything looks vaguely like it’s made of Plasticine. Presumably, some talented artists were involved, which is a real shame because the concept art they were tasked with interpreting puts one in mind of nothing so much as the cover art for a Mexican bootleg VHS of Alien. Even the scene transitions are overdesigned and dumb: there are no less than a dozen of those stupid barn door wipes, which were jarring and weird in Star Wars, when handled by a competent editor, and which are physically painful here. I’d recommend accompanying them with the sound of a slide whistle if you have one to hand.

The people to blame for this unspeakable blasphemy of a film are, of course, the Church of Scientology. L. Ron Hubbard considered the book from which the film was adapted as somewhat of a masterpiece, in clear distinction to the portion of humanity who are allowed to handle sharp objects without supervision, and Scientologists were reportedly ordered to buy multiple copies of it when it was released to help it reach the top of the sales charts. Hubbard apparently had Travolta in mind for the role of Terl from the beginning, and after Travolta’s career was revitalized after Pulp Fiction he threatened, cajoled and pleaded until he was able to secure funding for the film:

Battlefield Earth is the pinnacle of using my power for something. I told my manager, "If we can't do the things now that we want to do, what good is the power? Let's test it and try to get the things done that we believe in."

The Church of Scientology got in on the action, too, its members pestering 20th Century Fox to make the film until the studio heads got fed up and sold the rights to Franchise Pictures, a production studio specializing in untouchable vanity projects. With production costs spiraling to a reported $50 million, hype reached such a high that the Church of Scientology sent a giant inflatable Terl on a nationwide tour.

The success of this film rested on one crucial factor: that it didn’t turn out to be worse than an unanesthetized root canal. Oh, well.

There are reasons to watch this film. That a film like Plan 9 from Outer Space or Troll 2 should have been dreadful was a given: they were shot on a zero-dollar budget, with cardboard sets and props bought from the dollar store, “starring” actors who had never acted before and “directed” by people who had never directed before (and indeed still hadn’t by the end of production.) Battlefield Earth doesn’t have this excuse. A fleet of caterers arrived every morning on set to feed the production. Highly-skilled makeup artists, riggers and lighting technicians toiled away behind the scenes, while some of the biggest stars in Hollywood were in front of the camera. An army of tech artists produced CG assets for this picture, toiling away in obscurity for months in devotion to their art. The film shot was taken to a lab where it was treated by some of the best specialists on earth, meticulously assembled and given form and direction by a small cadre of editors. 50 million dollars were spent, and at the end of it all, Battlefield Earth was the result: a shining monument to failure. This film, which is everything that film shouldn’t be. It is failure. It is ugliness. It is pain.

And without pain, what is pleasure? You can’t afford to miss Battlefield Earth.

[evnoweb]

How Educators Can Empower Students Through Technology

With education turning on the technology skills of students and teachers, its important to gain a rudimentary understanding of foundational technology. I don’t mean phone apps and games. I mean the basics of how to use the tech tools that are driving learning. Dr. Paul Perry, former teacher, administrator, and nonprofit exec, has put together a brief guide for educators looking to expand learning opportunities for students using technology.

***

Ready or not, digital transformation has come to education. With the coronavirus pandemic pushing some 1.2 billion students out of the classroom, schools have been forced to make a decade of progress in online learning in just a few short months. You’ve probably seen stories or heard from friends with listless teenagers at home, struggling with the new format. While that’s a reality for many families, it’s not the whole story.

Online learning has been shown to increase retention and tends to take less time. In fact, recent research demonstrates that students retain up to 60% more material through online learning as compared to just 10% in a physical classroom. Because students can control the pace of their learning, the same research showed that e-learning can require 40-60% less time than traditional classroom settings.

That’s a lot of good news about this massive new experiment in learning through technology. For educators looking for more silver lining in the realm of online, we’ve got a few more tips.

Strategies for educators to leverage technology for better learning

Here’s some current context for technology in education:

Just over 4 out of 5 schools (82%) primarily use digital tools to communication with parents (while 18% use analog methods like letters and phone calls)

A significant majority of parents (76%) prefer digital communication when it comes to schools (and most—81%–say they’re satisfied with those communication methods)

A simple majority of parents (59%) that send their kids to schools that use analog communication would prefer a switch to digital communication methods

The data demonstrates an appetite (at least among parents) for the expansion of digital tools in the realm of education. Modern online learning focuses on long-term benefits over short-term costs, encourages adaptation and implementation of skills, as well as the development of personalized experiences.

This raises the question: How exactly should schools invest in technology to keep up?

Address the digital divide

Not all learners are starting on similar footing.

As thousands of school districts across the country have rolled out remote learning, many have discovered that students have very different sets of resources when it comes to digital education tools.

Some districts are shipping off Chromebooks to students. Others are even going as far as working with internet service providers to ensure that each household has sufficient internet access to make remote learning possible.

The recent giant leap into digital education is an opportunity for educational leaders to address many of the inequities that have plagued the education system (and society at large) for quite a while.

Educational institutions must consider closing the digital divide amongst their students a core goal of all future learning efforts—not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s a critical way to prepare all students for educational success now as well as giving them an opportunity to thrive beyond graduation.

It’s the basis for their future prosperity. 

Automate and simplify administrative tasks

Preparing students for an increasingly automated world is the same as preparing them for the “real world.” That’s a phrase that gets thrown a lot in education.

The data tells the tale.

A recent study from McKinsey showed that 75% of workers surveyed shared that their companies have already begun automating business processes or have plans to do so. Such automation has a real impact when it comes to productivity as half of employees estimate that it could save them up to 2 hours per day.

Educational leaders could relieve the burden of administrative work that many teachers and administrators face by leveraging automation for tasks such as electronic signatures, attendance tracking, and basic communication with families.

Absent meaningful automation of key processes in education, lots of talent is being lost.

Enhance learning and growth opportunities

Think about how major companies provide substantial professional development for their employees.

Not all of those learning opportunities are well-executed and many employees (about a third) report that the uninspiring content alone is a significant barrier to learning.

This tells us that both businesses and schools have work to do when it comes to fostering engagement and deepening learning in their respective contexts.

Technology, when leveraged the right way, can drive active participation and boost retention of information. It can also make learning downright enjoyable.

From interactive flat panel displays that give learners access to thousands of apps to ebooks that deliver interactive content into students’ hands, there’s a lot of promising technology out there well-positioned to supercharge learning.

A good example is Classcraft Quests—an application that matches a lesson plan to a fantasy world that students traverse by completing tasks, allowing them to go deeper as they unlock further “quests” in their learning process. This is a fantastic way to personalize each student’s learning journey. 

Every student deserves to have their unique and individual needs met—and education leaders must be ready to deliver. 

The peril and promise of digital transformation in education

It’s not as simple as flipping a switch.

Schools and learning organizations must first determine their own goals for student development. Ideally those are borne from students’ skills, interests, and broader societal needs.

Then, every educational institution must audit their current technological offerings to first better understand what they can do for learners with their current resources.

While it’s virtually impossible to predict the future to understand what skills students will need down the road, educators have laid the context for students by focusing on core skills and mindsets that will help students thrive in most conditions.

Technology can be a powerful partner in the growth process for educators and students. It should be used with these core goals in mind.

Author bio:

Dr. Paul Perry has worked as a teacher, school leader, and nonprofit executive within educational institutions for over a decade. As part of the Expanded Success Initiative (ESI), he designed and launched innovative new high schools in America’s largest school district, New York City. Currently, Dr. Perry serves as board co-chair for a national nonprofit that empowers high school students from underserved communities by offering transformational journeys abroad each year. He also works as a freelance writer and Operations Lead with Optimist.

More on remote teaching

10 Tips for Teaching Remotely

Teaching Online During #COVID19–More from my Inbox

13 Teaching Strategies to Shake up Your Remote Teaching

Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-18 technology for 30 years. She is the editor/author of over a hundred tech ed resources including a K-12 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum. She is an adjunct professor in tech ed, Master Teacher, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, contributor to NEA Today, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.

How Educators Can Empower Students Through Technology published first on https://medium.com/@DigitalDLCourse