#so it would work VERY well as a cautionary tale. except it's not that obviously lmfao

[darcyolsson]

rereading twilight and nostalgia is making it an enjoyable experience overall but honestly i was not ready for how genuinely horrible and terrifying edward is. some of this is straight out of a horror movie

[ghostmartyr]

Are you still watching RWBY? What did you think of Volume 8 overall

VOLUME 9 NEVERLAND SAGA WHERE NO ONE CAN HIDE FROM THEIR TRAUMA OR THEIR FRIENDS BY TRYING TO STOP IRONWOOD FROM BLOWING UP HALF THE KINGDOM HE’S SUPPOSEDLY PROTECTING WHILE ALL THEIR OTHER FRIENDS AND ALLIES THINK THEY’RE DEAD.

POGCHAMP.

I enjoyed Volume 8, but I think it stumbles at the end enough to look back at its time management and feel not totally great about it.

Cinder’s development is solid. I’m still not very attached to her, but she has attained my interest at long last. Good for you, Cinder. Solve your emotional problems with murder. Kill Watts. Give Neo a reason to go back to trying to kill you. Make yet another mortal enemy. I support these actions.

Emerald’s flip means she won’t have sad eyes over all the atrocities she’s playing witness to while the timer goes down on her defection anymore, and that’s cool.

Ironwood’s everything is... well. Yeah. Great. Nothing like watch someone destroy themself. Oh, and everything else around them in the process. Once he got started, it was pretty clear where he was going, and that’s just sad. He goes from hugging Qrow and finding relief in his allies to shooting all of them. Shooting Jacques along the way does not even that out.

The Ace-Ops felt too cluttered for the final parts. They’re the cautionary tales, obviously, but I don’t think we get enough time detailing them for them to be on the same stage as Winter coming into her own and RWBY falling into oblivion. Qrow and Robyn get the slow burn and then the panicked call to immediate action, but for the Ace-Ops, Marrow and Harriet are the only ones who the narrative actively does something with. Marrow’s problems are obvious from the start, and Harriet’s emotional heat hints, and then reveals, a depth of trauma that this system has been crap at handling. But Vine and Elm, the critical pieces in talking her down, and centerpieces of keeping Mantle from blowing up, aren’t prominent enough in the narrative for their place in its resolution to feel quite earned. I think if we’d gotten an extra episode it would have worked a little better. As it was, I was left wanting more focus on the central cast.

Which is kind of why I’m so thrilled that RWBY+J are maybe stuck spending some quality time together. The macro plot matters, obviously, but they’ve been moving so fast. Atlas feels like a speedrun of a kingdom falling, and a little more interplay between my faves would be very welcome.

Then there’s the obvious.

Oh, Penny.

I can’t feel good about Penny’s handling in the end.

The Winter Maiden, as soon as we’re introduced, is waiting to die and offer her power to the next one in line. Winter was intended for that, but Penny interrupts.

Two days later, Winter has the power, and Penny’s dead.

This is necessary so that Winter has time to center what she actually believes before she’s upgraded to demigodhood. Winter as the Winter Maiden leading into Volume 8 would have kept her on Ironwood’s script. The disruption of expectations that leaves her vulnerable forces her to respond to what is going on, not what her side believes should be going on.

It makes sense to delay Winter’s ascension, because it gives Winter perspective that she can’t access as long as she’s in her chain of established command.

Making Penny’s value tie entirely back to supporting someone else’s story. She’s allowed to be a real girl, she’s allowed to fight for what she believes in, she’s allowed to have friends, but becoming the Winter Maiden serves Winter’s storyline more than it serves Penny’s.

Which isn’t to say they do nothing with her. Obviously, the virus making the vault look good creates a variety of opportunities. Sure, they could have filled in another domino without Penny specifically, but she’s an instrumental part of getting them inside that vault in how the story goes.

Creating a new body for her is a complicated thing. Penny’s a real girl no matter what her form is, but if you say that while cutting out the nuts and bolts -- it’s a little mixed. In the most benign way I can put my preferences, I like Penny being a robot. I’m thrilled she knows how warm a hug can feel (Pietro, patch notes, get on it), but...

Before Watts causes problems on purpose, Penny shows a little hesitance about not being your standard model of girl, but unless I’ve been worse about my watching comprehension than I thought, she doesn’t have any burning need for flesh. Changing her body is the best solution they can up with in response to her agency being violated.

It’s not my favorite thing in the world. I don’t think it’s entirely good faith to pin all of the possible unfortunate implications on it, but they exist, and they are there. And on the flip side, being granted a body that is created through nothing but who you are is a sentiment that I’m sure resonates with a lot of people. I think there’s a lot to observe in what Penny’s going through, and it’s worth discussion more than angry words.

Except before there’s a chance to collect opinion polls on that, we once again have her asking for death before she hurts her friends.

I believe there’s a post on LotR somewhere that explains why people are okay with it being a mood shift from The Hobbit. People aren’t huge fans of media they consume invalidating media they previously invested in.

Penny dies, then she comes back. Then she dies.

Penny interrupts the inevitability of Winter becoming the Winter Maiden. Then Winter becomes the Winter Maiden.

It feels like a zero sum game, but a zero sum game where our emotions were torqued around for the sake of it, and the object of said torquing is being utilized as a plot object prior to being a character.

Penny obviously has a lot of personality, and a lot of established emotional ties. She’s not just a lamp standing in a corner.

But to use the apt metaphor, you can see the strings. Penny’s trajectory seems to be moving under its own velocity -- but then that ending hits. Despite going through all of the steps to make sure that Penny doesn’t have to sacrifice herself to keep the people she loves safe, despite actually being really creative and clever about doing everything possible to keep her alive --

The plot demands her death.

It isn’t good enough to fix the pressing issue that made sacrifice look good. Sacrifice is still the ultimate answer.

Thematically, that doesn’t jive with the story we’ve been getting.

Emotionally, what the fuck, could we not.

(What’s better than the cute robot girl begging for death? Doing it twice!)

People who are in a more optimistic state about fiction at the moment have noted that Pinocchio does do a lot of dying, and I do like the read of Penny as Jiminy Cricket. Considering the full context of the world, there’s more to justify a return than a lot of characters get. It wouldn’t be the most shocking thing ever.

It’s still kind of fucked up. Penny doesn’t kill herself, but she asks others to kill her, and that’s her being a good girl.

The National Suicide Hotline gets its number placed in the summary of the episode.

Obviously there’s more to it than that, but the implications are there, and a very painful thorn when looking over the rest of her. Creating an environment where it makes sense for this character to kill themself, it’s noble, even --

I don’t think that’s a route of story that the available material handles gracefully.

It’s the “twice” that really hammers the point down into the coffin. It creates a pattern of behavior in Penny. Once, and okay. Heroic sacrifice plays are always a major source of drama, exemplifying how Good the person making the sacrifice is, and how Tragic it is that we’re losing such a good person, all because they have principles and just love these other people so much.

Only if you have a character asking someone to kill them twice in relatively quick succession, the callback isn’t to feats of heroics. It’s suicidal tendencies.

If you’re not prepared to deal with implications of that magnitude, you’ve got to make the link a lot less suggestive. Otherwise you’re telling a new story whether you like it or not, and it’s not one you’re ready for, drastically upping the odds that it’s not going to be the most polished thing ever.

What the issue becomes then, in my personal opinion, is pacing (’hey self why is the answer always pacing’ ‘because shut up’). Penny’s joy of life is a blip in between her asking for death. The heroic nature of her desire for death mixed with the awful despair of her actual death makes this endpoint of her story saturated with a darkness that sours the entire experience.

Complicating it further is the issue of trust.

The writers killed her and brought her back just to kill her again. If they do bring her back again, the faith is kind of broken. Once you show that you’re willing to move a character around like a piece on a chessboard, your audience isn’t going to trust the story enough to invest. They’re going to be looking for the strings. For a complicated special effect that takes a lot of strings, that’s a pain, because the agreement with stories is supposed to be that yes, there are strings, that’s our medium.

If you don’t trust the writers, you are not going to believe in the story.

For my personal taste, if the writers are doing something more with Penny, their presentation has made it difficult for me to see value in the journey, even if the destination happens to be something I ultimately approve of.

Anyway Robyn needs to officially adopt Qrow. He has been a bad guy bandit, now he can be a good guy bandit.

He can be the Happy Huntresses’ cute animal mascot.

That is all that matters.

That is my one, solitary thought on the entire volume.

Thanks for the ask!

[mychemicalraymance]

whilst watching velvet goldmine i was like. thinking about how easy it would be to make that exact movie except it’s about my chemical romance. like ok thinking about the cultural timeline of this. it will be made in approx 7-10 years and i’m very excited for it.  the earliest part of the relevant cultural timeline of vg is like mid ish 60s w the mentioning of mods and rockers and the movie was made in 98 so that like mm...... 30 yrs give or take. and so, taking into acct the fact that culture as of the last 15 yrs or so is evolving faster than it has been since the advent of the 21st century, i’d say we have about 7-10 yrs to wait until we get to the point where we can have a melodramatic stylized mcr vg remake. we are nearly already at a point right now where mid 2000s culture is being remembered fondly deeply by the people who lived it and VERY soon it will be fully realized as a demographic and will be treated like the 90s 80s 70s are now by the commercial culture at large. and like. translating mcr into that movie is SO easy. talking abt the childhood formation of brian is like. 80s 90s horror, rock and comics culture infoming mcr/ the scene at large. 

very easy to follow the progression of the 2000s emo/rock scene and also the fact that gerard was the defining figure of that ( which like. i dont think he’s brian slade at all. i’m obviously being very loose with this). there’s so many parallels btw the movie and how the scene revolved around a select few people and the EXTREMELY mythologized origins/relationships of said people/bands. fuckin crazy. 

barely even touching the fact that gerard/my chem were the 2000s equivalent of a sexual revolution. the sexual rebellion of mcr...... very vg. but like i would not say mcr evolved into the homosexual sweatshop seen in the movie. the gay circus was directed by brendon urie. the commodification of the homosexual gene came more from him and somewhat pete wentz i would posit. not that gerard was a perfect gay icon and can be argued to barely even be one (like..... i would oppose that deeply but it can be argued) but reflecting on these things makes him seem a lot more genuine than a lot of the stuff otherwise seen in the scene. everyone stole from jack fairy. 

we talked about gerard taking a lot of ideas of fame and the way it works from vg on board possibly when working dd and cw. there’s a lot of similarity there except i DO NOT think that gerard slid into the moral bankruptcy/ evilness of fame. he seems extremely aware of it, as a matter of fact. its like he was a version of brian who had seen velvet goldmine himself and was like... wayament hawld awn (not saying gerard has no moral code outside of cautionary tales LOL just as an easy way of explaining that he avoided the moral bankruptcy of celebrity even though chronologically it seemed close to happening  which. gerard has more integrity than that i just mean in the traditional sense of a band. none of this makes sense sorry). he struggled with it would seem but like. gerard despite being a millionare shill could be doing a lot worse. like he could be a (spoilers) republican rock star who faked his death. he did not do that. he escaped uhhh...mostly.... kind of  unscathed.

but that really is part of what i would point to with regards to similarities like bowie did not do that either. the movie is a very very fictionalized take of a biography. its extremely stylized and editorialized. and like. so is mcr. it would be very easy to make a story the exact same way when translating mcr into a fictional movie. that’s already happened sort of with the very very large culture of fanfic etc in the mcr fanbase. that can be attributed in part to the already mythologized origin story and arc of the band. it’s a perfect storm to create a realfake version of the band and their story. and that’s a similarity btw both the the movie and the real life events (for both music scenes). there’s an element of fate and story in the tale/ feeling of glam rock and bowie, as well as a very significant amount of narrative fiction in the text/art of the music for both mcr/ glam.  

there are a lot more just influence parallels btw gerard/my chem/ the scene at large in vg that i could point out and possibly will in the future but this is what i can get out now. 

anyway. i cannot WAIT for there to be a movie musical about the gay catfights of my chemical romance and the scene and how both developed. waiting patiently for the movie version of under pressure with mcr/the used being the bg song for a montage of the gerard and bert characters being in a whirlwind romance and kissing for cameras like satellite of love. like the fanfic culture of these bands has already essentially recreated this fake/melodramatic version of dubiously real events.... use those for the script. it’s the same thing

[d-criss-news]

What would have happened if diversity was introduced in the Golden Age of Hollywood? While we will never actually know, Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan attempt to answer the question in their Netflix limited series, Hollywood, which is like a What If…? comic book about Hollywood in the 1940s. The series takes real people like Rock Hudson, Anna May Wong, and Vivian Leigh and combines them with fictionalized aspiring actors and filmmakers who are willing to do whatever it takes to make Hollywood look at every person as equal, no matter their race or sexual orientation. Also, unlike some of Murphy’s previous projects like American Horror Storyor American Crime Story, Hollywood has an upbeat and optimistic tone which works really well with the time period and material.

With the series arriving next week, I recently landed an extended interview with Murphy and he revealed why he wanted to tell this version of the Golden Age of Hollywood. He explained:

“I was not interested in making a biopic. I was not interested in doing a Wikipedia of Rock Hudson about, who did he know? How did he know them? Did he know Vivian Leigh? Was he aware of who Vivian Leigh was? Did he know who Tallulah Bankhead was? What I wanted to do is sort of an alternative universe look at it. In my universe, looking at these people, some things are the same and some things are very different. I want to make it clear to people that it is not a biopic approach to people’s lives. There are some things we kept very true, obviously, and there are some things that we changed.”

When I asked about where the idea came from, he revealed:

“It’s just something I’ve been working on for years, but it started because I was sort of raised by my grandmother and she was very much an old movie buff. The Golden Era Age was her obsession because she was born in 1913. And so I grew up with her and she would expose me to a lot of movies, but more so she would expose me to a lot of books about movies.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with three people and they were Rock Hudson and Anna May Wong and Hattie McDaniel. And I never really understood why I think until I was older. I think I just saw a lot of sadness in them. They weren’t able to be who they wanted to be and express who they wanted to express. And they were really a sad part of Hollywood history and a cautionary tale.

I was always kind of thinking, even after Feud, ‘Well, what can I do with these three people?’ And I didn’t really have the right… I didn’t know. After Versace, I had a dinner with Darren Criss and we were talking about that Hollywood gas station and how interesting it was. And I was never interested in the sexuality of it really, or the sordidness of it. What I was interested in was the rather sad, upsetting idea that people had to go there to be who they were and to be able to express who they were.

Suddenly, I was like, ‘Oh, this makes sense. I can put all of these interests, this buried history idea into one thing.’ But as I told Darren… Darren and I had just finished doing Versace and I had pretty much finished the writing, I think, of Ratched, so I was interested in doing something upbeat and optimistic that sort of had a happy ending quality to it, which I’ve done not very often in my career.

Then everything just took off. Once I sort of figured out, okay, how do I put all of these things that I’ve been interested in in a while? But that’s common for me. I was doing American Horror Story. It took me five years to figure out that first season, and I like it when things come to you slowly.”

While the entertainment business is attempting to do better about representation and diversity, everyone in town could learn from Ryan Murphy. If you’re not aware, Murphy created the Half Foundation, which works very hard to create equal opportunities for women and minorities behind the camera. In addition, Murphy created the Half Director Mentorship Program which pairs directors on every Murphy television production with “emerging women and minority directors through pre-production and post-production.”

This is an incredible achievement and one of the reasons I’m such a fan of Murphy’s work.

When I spoke to him about what he’s done to champion minority voices and diversity, I was pretty effusive with my praise and asked him to talk about how it happened. He went on to say:

“Well, thank you for saying that. I mean, it’s just from… what happened to me was everything in my life collided, literally, and that I had had enough success and enough really big hits. By the way, all of them, I was told, every single time I had a hit, I was told it would not be a hit. For example, nobody thought Glee would work except for a few of us. Nobody thought American Horror Story would work. Nobody thought The Normal Heart would work. Nobody thought OJ would work. I was used to, ‘No, I believe in this.’ And I had a lot of lovely people who controlled the purse strings in my life who said, ‘Okay, well you’ve had enough successful, we’ll bet on you.’

With that came, green light power and final edit power, but I realized that I had failed miserably. I remember, around this time of 2015, when I started directing, I remember that feeling of I was the only gay person in a set of 400 people, and it was my television show. Everybody was white, male and in their 50s. I just sort of decided, you know what, I’m going to change my own company and I’m just going to have very strict hiring rules.

I created something called the Half Foundation, where I demand that 50% of all of our shows are directed by women. I love championing people like Janet Mock, and helping her move through the system and helping her make her dreams come true. And asking her, she worked on Hollywood, ‘What do you think?’ And she had a lot to say, and she had a lot to say about how the writing should be changed, that we should do this with the Camille character, and think about this.

Once I got to a place where I was empowered, I’ve tried to empower other people. I think that more than even the things that I’m making is the legacy that I’m the most proud of. And I’m very, very aware of it because I look around town and I’m like, ‘Where are the projects that are… ‘ We still don’t have enough of them. We still don’t have enough. We don’t have enough Ava Duvernays and we don’t have enough Steven Canals. We need to have more people like that, who are pushing their stories through the system. More Janet Mocks. Whenever I can step in and help, that’s what I’m the most excited about now.”

Again, everyone in Hollywood should be looking at what Ryan Murphy has done and asking themselves how they can contribute.

Hollywood debuts on May 1st on Netflix and stars David Corenswet as Jack, Darren Crissas Raymond, Jeremy Pope as Archie, Laura Harrier as Camille, Samara Weaving as Claire, Dylan McDermott as Ernie, Holland Taylor as Ellen Kincaid, Patti LuPone as Avis, Jim Parsons as Henry Willson, Jake Picking as Rock Hudson, Joe Mantello as Dick, and Maude Apatow as Henrietta.

[fortheloveoflizards]

Headcanons

Wings of Fire Dragon Culture - Myths and Legends

Darkstalker – Darkstalker has obviously become one of the most infamous legends in Pyrrhia, thanks to his actions both in the past and present. Being an Icewing/Nightwing hybrid gifted with prophecy, mind-reading and animus powers made him formidable and terrifying even to this day. So much so, in fact, that his story is still used as a cautionary tale for young Nightwings. The story goes that Darkstalker’s parents, Foeslayer of the Nightwings and Prince Arctic of the Icewings, fell in love and eloped, though for many years it was believed that the prince had been kidnapped as part of a Nightwing scheme. The most famous part of his story is when he used his magical artefact to force his father to kill himself in a way so gruesome that almost the entirety of the Nightwing tribe fled to a faraway, volcanic island. His downfall came about when his then girlfriend, Clearsight of the Nightwings, worked in secret with his mentor, Fathom of the Seawings, to trap Darkstalker under a mountain forever. Forever, of course, only lasting about 2000 years. The rest of the story is, I assume, pretty well known by the majority of the Wings of Fire fan-base, so details are unnecessary.

Spectre – Not much is known nowadays about the old Icewing legend of a ghostly dragon prowling the Frozen Coast, with piercing white eyes, accompanied by a single scavenger. The basic story tells of an Icewing dragonet disappearing during a particularly dark winter. The dragonet had hatched sickly and weak, and no one had been expecting it to survive. Nor had they been expecting for said dragonet to disappear mysteriously without a trace. It was quickly concluded that the dragonet had been killed, presumably by it’s mother. As the murder of any dragonet, even weak ones, is strictly taboo unless it’s the result of a challenge, the mother of the missing dragonet was promptly persecuted by the rest of the tribe, stripped of her rank in all but official terms, and eventually disappeared, herself. Things died down for an indeterminate amount of time, until rumours among the border guards began to spread inland of a strange, moon pale, translucent dragon appearing and disappearing out of the fog, sometimes even luring guards out to sea. For the most part, the tribe brushed off the stories as outlandish gossip amongst the low ranked in order to amuse themselves. It was only when, on a dark night, during the largest blizzard the tribe had ever seen, an entire platoon of guards went missing, without so much as a talon print or scale left in the snow the next morning. Many Icewings claimed it was a hoax, but enough believed that it was a spirit, come to reap justice upon those that it felt had offended it, for the story to rapidly gain infamy in the tribe. As for whether the spirit was of the missing dragonet, the mother, or something else entirely, well, that changes depending on who’s telling the story. The only things that remain constant throughout all versions, are the pale white eyes and scavenger bodyguard. Although uncommon, it is said that one could tell if Spectre was about to appear upon spotting it’s scavenger; often it would be standing stock still on an iceberg, or half submerged in the surf, but sightings were rarely reported without it’s inclusion.

Hydra – This is a myth that can be found consistently throughout the history and culture of almost every Pyrrhian tribe, as the Hydra was thought to be the creature from which every tribe originated. This belief was only very recently countered, as it was found that many of the tribes did not share common ancestors. Regardless, the story of the Hydra is a beloved one among scholars and students alike. The basic premise was a large dragon with seven head – one for each tribe – who constantly fought for control of the body. The story typically concludes with each of the heads being separated from the body in some way, with a single head being left to control the body. Which head is left, metaphorically, standing changes from tribe to tribe; as does the order in which the other heads were separated. The Hydra is a common sight during festivals of all kinds, and is still viewed mostly as proof that the tribes can’t coexist in peace. Although, since the founding of the Jade Mountain Academy, it’s use as an example of the similarities between the tribes has increased.

Amphithere – As Peril explained in her book, Skywings believe in a form of reincarnation. Through the act of leaving the body of the deceased in a chamber open to the sky, the belief is that the soul of the dragon will then be able to come back as a Skywing rather than any other dragon. The task of ferrying souls to their new life is that of Amphitheres. These are often portrayed as invisible dragon-like creatures lacking legs that are rumoured to guard the wind currents in and around the Sky Kingdom, using their massive wings to stir up gales and tornadoes. Amphitheres are another prominent character in Pyrrhian mythology, although their significance is pretty much completely lost on most other tribes.

Wail/Whalewings – These colossal Seawing monsters are believed to roam the deepest parts of the ocean, luring prey (including dragons) down to their doom by making distressed whale noises. Their description (and the spelling of the word, itself) varies from story to story. The most common draws from angler-fish and other deep sea creatures; translucent glowing white, with the undigested remains of previous meals still visible in it’s gut. The myth presumably originated as a way for Seawing parents to deter dragonets from venturing too deep without their protection. Of course, there is still much of the ocean that remains unexplored, so there’s a possibility of creatures larger than dragons existing. Wailwings aren’t as heavily featured in art as other creatures, as Seawings prefer to keep things bright and happy rather than mysterious. Dark water places scary.

Aura – Icewings don’t seem to have much imagination for the benevolent side of mythology, and tend to be pretty suspicious of just about everything. There are, however, a few exceptions. One such example being Aura; spirits of the Aurora Borealis that appear to worthy dragons in times of darkness to provide guidance and bestow gifts/knowledge. The tribe remains adamant that Aura bear no correlation with the Nightwing myth, Moon Sprites. Icewings will often leave tributes for Aura during coronation and wedding ceremonies. These consist of prey, animal skins, treasure and a special type of candle made from blubber. These candles are used exclusively for Aura tributes, and being found burning one outside of the ceremonies is punishable by exile and even death.

Moon Sprites – As with the Icewings, Nightwings insist that Moon Sprites are nothing like Aura, despite the similar mythology. Nightwings believe Moon Sprites are messengers sent by the moons to grant wishes and deliver prophecies, and supposedly gave Nightwings their powers. Similar tributes are left for Moon Sprites, typically just before times of harvest or the changing from autumn to winter. Nightwings believe that the moons themselves are cognisant, and have long worshipped them as what you might call Gods. As such, it would be fair to liken Moon Sprites to angels.

Dragonflies – Most tribes believe a dragon is either turned into a dragonfly or, in the case of the Skywings, reincarnated as one, as punishment for a varying list of crimes for each tribe (E.g Rainwings believe they are tasked to assist the changing of the seasons and once a certain number of springs has passed their debt is considered repaid, while Mudwings believe they are given a number of “deaths” as a dragonfly, meaning they must die as a dragonfly for that number of times before returning as a dragon, and Sandwings believe they mark when an oasis contains hidden treasure). Despite this mythology, dragonflies are often depicted as symbols of rebirth, justice and second chances.

SeaDragonets(Seahorses) – Seawings believe these creatures embody the spirits of dragonets taken by the sea. Many Seawings believe they watch over dragonets to protect them from meeting the same fate, as SeaDragonets are drawn to the warm water of Seawing hatcheries. Hatchery guards are also in charge of tending to the SeaDragonets, as they give a reliable warning regarding sharks and intruders – swimming around in flurries, causing mini bubble whirlpools. There are two common varieties of SeaDragonets in the ocean surrounding Pyrrhia; the most common, smaller species, which can also be referred to as “Seahorses”, which come in a range of browns, creams and generally more “bland” colours, and the rarer Reef Dwelling SeaDragonets, which are larger and typically white, pink or blue. These Reef Dwelling SeaDragonets are revered among aristocratic Seawings, and kept mostly in the palace gardens and Royal Hatchery.

WyndWyrms – Sandwings and Skywings believe these serpent-like creatures push the sun across the sky, anchored to it by great chains of stars, while Seawing myths say they control the tides. WyndWyrms heavily feature in Sandwing tapestries and Seawing murals. Skywings have a lot of songs about them, and they typically work in tandem with Amphitheres. While not inherently dragon-like, WyndWyrms are usually described as having dragon faces and snake bodies, sometimes even with fur, like legless otters.

The Grand Nightwing – The legend of a massive Nightwing that holds the sky within her wings has long since been written out of almost every history scroll, as it was found to be a story spread by the Nightwings themselves in order to appear more powerful. She was said to have three eyes (the moons) in order to watch over all of dragon-kind. Thunderstorms were her announcement that crimes had been committed, with lightning being her fire, aimed at the offender. Murals of her still endure, mostly on the walls of the old Night Kingdom, though some murals have been uncovered in the desert. While a widely disapproved of story, Nightwings and Sandwings still share the myth with their dragonets.

Pre-Scorching Stories – These are mostly about the foundations of modern dragon society and the early wars that determined the longstanding tribe borders, however there are more than a few stories heavily featuring scavengers. These cast a rather grim light on the many strange metal things found on the ocean floor, in the rainforest and in the desert, covered in strange markings and numbers. Most of these artefacts are all twisted and warped by time and fire, but scholars believe they hint to the existence of advanced scavenger societies, all but exterminated by the Scorching.

Honeysuckle – A Rainwing animus from before the Scorching who supposedly gave the Rainwings their venom. Paintings of her can be found in the old rainforest caves that appear to have been used as shelter. Her most commonly depicted appearance is lavender purple with gold and lime green accents. It is believed that her descendants survive to this day within the tribe.

Cliffhanger – A legendary Skywing warrior said to have successfully fought off 30 enemy squadrons by himself while simultaneously protecting his Queen and wounded comrades. He features heavily in Skywing art, and occasionally in Sandwing tapestries as well (presumably the battle that made him famous was between Sandwings and Skywings), with large, dark red wings and long black horns. The spear that he supposedly stopped from killing the Queen with his own body is kept in the Skywing treasury.

Bullroarer – During the infamous battle between the Mudwings and Seawings over control of Crescent Bay*, the Seawings planned a surprise attack by infiltrating the Mud Kingdom border under cover of darkness. This plan would have worked had it not been for the lowly border guard, Bullroarer, who’s dying roar alerted the entire Mud Kingdom in time for the army to organise. While Bullroarer did perish, his sibs were lorded and moved to the rich inner Kingdom to be part of the Queen’s official guard.

*The bay between the Mud Kingdom and the Kingdom of the Sea on the map of Pyrrhia

[wazafam]

The launch of DC's Future State has already brought new and ambitious re-imaginings of the publisher's core characters. But after learning just what is in store with the Future State versions the Suicide Squad and a millenia-old Black Adam, there's no question some of the biggest surprises for readers are still on the way.

In addition to a new version of Batman or wild glimpses of DC's possible futures, the conclusion of Death Metal also brought with it the return of parallel worlds and realities many believed to be erased, or at least overlooked, from the DC Multiverse. It's those worlds that have been chosen for DC's Future State: Suicide Squad #1 arriving January 26th. With a new version of Task Force X taking a mission to Earth-3, followed by Black Adam's own mission in the 853 Century in the same issue, the stage is set for two major twists. Screen Rant got the chance to speak with new Suicide Squad writer Robbie Thompson and Jeremy Adams about both unexpected tales. The full interview, as well as a preview of both stories contained in Future State: Suicide Squad #1 can be found below.

RELATED: Superboy is Building DC's New Suicide Squad

Screen Rant: So with Death Metal setting up a new status quo, the shift from that finale into Future State obviously happened faster for readers than for you guys. Can each of you speak to the process of how you joined Future State, and landed on these particular characters, and inside the same book? I'm assuming you didn't need to be talked into an event like this.

Robbie Thompson: I was working on Teen Titans, and this was a long time ago. Usually in comics, your runway is about 20 feet, so it was quite a while back. I'm not sure when you go brought in, Jeremy, but I felt like we got a lot of time which we don't normally get. Was that your experience as well?

Jeremy Adams: No, my experience was that I was brought in under the umbrella of 5G. Then that all fell apart. I had never written a comic, and that's always been on my bucket list since I was a little child. So I thought, "Oh, it was so close. And yet again, it has crumbled before me." Then a couple months ago, my friend Tim, who's writing Teen Titans now in the Shazam Future State, mentioned me to our editor Mike Cotton. Cotton asked, "What about these guys?" And Tim's like, "Oh, Jeremy is great." So, Cotton called me up and said, "Hey, would you like to do something with Black Adam in Future State?" And I'm like, "Okay, what's that?" I really didn't have much time.

The advantage I had compared to a lot of the people in Future State is that mine is so far removed in the future to the DC One Million segment that I didn't need that much run-up, other than trying to make sense of DC One Million. Which I loved, but it's crazy. Cotton, very cleverly, is trying to weave some overarching story between the Future State titles that he's editing - which I think is very good. So, having to try to figure out how to put that into what I was doing was really fun. But I didn't have a lot of lead up.

Robbie Thompson: I guess we had somewhat similar experiences in that, although I was not involved in the artist formerly known as 5G, there was definitely a sense that I got of, "Okay, here's this big event, and here's how we can be interconnected. Here's how we can tell stories that can stand on their own," which was another big appeal to me.

I also knew I was going to be writing the Suicide Squad ongoing book, so that that was really helpful too. Because Cotton and [Assistant Editor Marquis] Draper both had a very clear idea what they wanted for that book, which made forward reverse-engineering Future State a little bit easier on my part. Just to finish the thought, I was working on Teen Titans and my job was to come in and land that plane. That's that's what I did, and that was fun. I figured, "Okay, my time at DC is done. I'm wrapped. I never got to write Ambush Bug, but it was a good time." But then Cotton reached out and was like, "Hey, what are your thoughts on the Suicide Squad?"

I was a big fan up to Tom Taylor's recent run with that crew, so I'm like, "What did you have in mind?" I'm from TV, so it's always great when editors are like showrunners and have a clear vision of what they want; it makes the job a lot easier and a lot more fun. To have a little bit more time than usual was also cool. It's not that we haven't burned through that time or changed some stuff, but to have the luxury of that was very cool.

SR: Death Metal opened the door for revisiting previous worlds and realities and storylines. For you, Robbie, that means a return to Earth 3. And for Jeremy, it's a trip it's a trip through time to DC One Million. Can you both set the stage for these return trips, if it will be the same version fans know, and what it was you found appealing about these corners of DC lore?

Jeremy Adams: For me, it's the Black Adam of it. When you read DC One Million, which is so far flung in the future, one of the things that I noticed was that there was a lack of discussion of magic. And I think that was kind of the thread I started pulling at when you're talking about Black Adam and who would that character be. Why is there no real discussion of magic, and what does that look like? Kind of hinting at what could have happened to magic, but also using that as a catalyst to get us into a bigger threat that is going to play a critical role, especially in Teen Titans Future State.

I thought that, to a degree, I had one of the easier jobs because I could be so far in the future. I don't know if I'm spoiling anything, but in one of the panels in the background, you can see Etrigan, except he has a Detective Chimp hat. I didn't have any brakes put on me, in terms of the things I could do or not do. The fact is that the DC One Million just afforded me an opportunity to play with that, and go into that world. When I first read it, I was kind of like, "I don't know..." and then I reread it and I'm like, "This is awesome!" It's really strange and out there, but it has a really great ending. To be able to play something in that time, and then try to trace it back to what might have happened in some of the other books, was really fun.

Robbie Thompson: I would say I had a similar experience, in terms of the worlds that's opened up. Earth-3 is fun and everything but, I think for me, it was more about what Cotton and the crew wanted to do with Amanda Waller. I think she's always been such an amazing character. She's both the protagonist and the antagonist of the story. And where they wanted to take her was eventually to Earth-3, which is sort of a bit of a cautionary tale. If she gets what she wants in the ongoing series, it's curtains for us. But it was really more about exploring what drives Amanda Waller.

In Future State, we see what she's doing. And then in the series, I guess, we kind of unpack why she's doing it. We're seeing her trying to do something different after having done the sort of the same for a while. And we're exploring what that breaking point was for her, and why she wants to try something different. That, coupled with the addition of Superboy to the team - he's in the Future State books, and the two-parter is centered around him and Waller. He's introduced very quickly in the ongoing story, and I was just really excited about that character.

We have a bit of a mystery with him - I don't know how much I'm allowed to say - in terms of where he's going and why he's there, but it dovetails a little bit with Walter's story. You'll see it hinted at in Future State issue 2. I was excited Earth-3 and I love the crime syndicate and all that other stuff. But, really, it was about exploring what Waller is up to, and it was kind of a means to that end. She's a means to an end kind of a character, so it felt like it fit pretty nicely.

Jeremy Adams: It's such a good high concept too, Robbie.

Robbie Thompson: I blame Cotton; it's all his fault.

RELATED: DC's New Superman Is Quite Different From His Father, Kal-El

SR: Despite the name of the book being The Suicide Squad, you're getting to assemble three teams in play at this point. The first page will pleasantly surprise people when they open the book to meet the Justice Squad, which has been glimpsed in some preview pages. You have assembled a motley crew out of some hilarious deep cuts that are guaranteed to send fans searching DC Wikis.

Robbie Thompson: Again, I have to credit Cotton and Draper, the editors on the book. When we first started talking about the book again, we initially were talking about the ongoing Suicide Squad book. There were a lot of pieces that they wanted to play around with. But the thing that was appealing to me, and I think it's the appeal of the great Suicide Squad runs that I've enjoyed, is the motley crew of both familiar faces and obscure faces. To spoil a little bit in the new series, we'll be introducing some new characters. I wouldn't get attached. I mean, it is the Suicide Squad. I literally will put that in the script. I'll be like, "Don't get attached. Two pages later. the neck bomb's going off."

But, yeah, we wanted to kind of play around you know with what a Bizarro Justice League would look like. What would it look like if Waller was assembling ostensibly her own version of the Justice League, with her squad bent on it? It led to some larger iconic characters, like Conner Kent now being Superman. But then we were like, "Okay, who's our Flash? Who's Wonder Woman..." and that led to some really just fun and frankly weird shit, getting Talon as Batman and Clayface as the Martian Manhunter.

To Jeremy's point earlier, because Cotton is weaving a bunch of these things together, we do have the futuristic version of a new Teen Titan character that will be introduced in Tim's book. It's definitely a weird group of people. I think this is in the preview pages, but much like any Suicide Squad or anything with Waller attached, I wouldn't get attached to any of these people. Pretty quickly, you see a pretty iconic character go right out the window. But that's been our MO: how do we keep this true to those classic Ostrander stories that are character-driven, but with characters that are obscure and weird and that you end up caring about? Then, of course, their heads blow up and that's the great paradigm of a book like this.

The Justice Squad is definitely a motley crew. But, like you said, we're gonna meet a couple of others. I think I'm allowed to tease stuff. If this is the new Task Force X, there's also hinting at a Task Force Z. What powers that, I think, is a cool mystery for fans. And then, of course, our last page is the Squad itself. It's always fun to build teams, but on Suicide Squad, it's even more fun to break them down - sometimes literally. The two-page spread that introduces the Squad is really just another piece of fantastic storytelling from Javier Fernandez, who's the artist on the book.

SR: A special treat is that Peacemaker is playing a major role here. He's getting a ton of buzz right now, thanks to James Gunn's Suicide Squad sequel, but you have the cool honor of introducing him to a lot of fans. Where does your Peacemaker fit in this battle of bad versus evil?

Robbie Thompson: I think the great thing about Peacemaker is in his first line: "peace at any cost," or whatever, I'm blanking on the exact phrasing. He is such a delightfully arch character in that regard. And he's such a fun contrast, especially in the later years where he got even more rigorous and how he wanted to find peace. So, I think the thing that's fun about him is that he's not really interested in good or evil; he's interested in peace. He doesn't really care who gets in his way, as you'll see in the story, and this is the story that we're gonna be telling long term with Peacemaker.

He is at odds with Amanda Waller. As you'll see in the ongoing series, he's a willing member of the Suicide Squad - as much as you can be. At least that's what he's telling himself. In terms of placing where he's at, I think what we hint at in the story is that he was working for Waller and was a believer and what she was doing, and she has gone a step too far even for Peacemaker. Waller is kind of off the rails. But what I think is great about both characters is they both can be protagonists and antagonists. They both genuinely feel that what they're doing is not only the right thing, but the good thing. In their minds, they have justified their actions to meet that questionable morality.

Yes, he's a buzzy character, because he's going to be in the movie and they're doing a TV show. And it's John Cena playing him, which is amazing. I love that guy. But it was really about finding a fun, opposite number for Waller. They're two people that might seemingly be on the same page, but then what would tear them apart? That's sort of where you're seeing Peacemaker at the beginning of this; he is none too pleased with Waller.

SR: That actually is a fantastic segue for you, Jeremy. Fans of Shazam don't need to be told how far Black Adam would climb if he was given a few hundred centuries. For that very reason, the Adam they meet in this story is not the one that they're going to expect. What led you in that direction of subverting his reputation?

Jeremy Adams: I think because Adam's trajectory from being the chosen champion of the wizard Shazam, and then that power going through his head so he becomes this kind of antihero, feels like a hollow pursuit. I think what makes him interesting is when he finally found Kahndaq, and he's like, "I have a people, and I have a mission to protect." This has extended out into the universe now, but he gives up that iron fist, and it's more about Kahndaq being a place of refuge. He mirrors that, and he's kind of stepped away when we meet him from that life of being a warrior; of being somebody that fought for things. He's almost gone the other extreme, into kind of pacifism.

And he's lived for hundreds of years. There's this perspective he has on what actually means something. That's kind of where our story moves a little bit. What would it take for somebody that's seen it all to keep wanting to live? And that's where we meet him. What brings that fire back that makes him want to fight again? Because that's not where he is when we meet him.

Related: The New Wonder Woman is Completely Rewriting DC Mythology

SR: What are your hopes for this tale? I feel like this is a very different story than people would expect from Future State Black Adam.

Jeremy Adams: Yeah. I'm in awe of many different things: the fact that they let us create some characters, which has been an absolute joy - particularly one character that I got to help create that is my favorite person ever. Also, taking something from my animation work and being able to put it into the DC proper has been really great too, and seeing how that character will have far-reaching effects in other books.

But this is my first time out as a comic writer, and I'm still learning the ropes. Mostly, when I see Fernando Pasarin's art, I'm like, "Why are we splitting it with words? This is stupid. We need to strip out all the words, and just put this incredible art there." Because he really captures the emotion and the humor and some of the insanity of it. But I think because it was my first attempt at a comic, and it was also me thinking it could be my last attempt at a comic, I'm gonna just throw the kitchen sink at it. I think it's really fun, and even the second one doubles down on the craziness of it. But I like that kind of unrestrained imagination, where I can keep putting ideas out.

Robbie Thompson: I did the same thing when I was at Marvel, I think it was issue 4 of Silk. Because I was like, "Oh, we'll get cancelled at 5." Right? But I put the Fantastic Four and Galactus in it, and there was no reason for either to be in the book. I thought, "This is it. This is my chance. It's the fourth issue."

Jeremy Adams: That's what I did when I got on Supernatural, because I knew it was the last season. "Here's a bunch of ideas!" And they're like, "No."

SR: You both are giving readers a lot to talk about with, with more than one headline-worthy twist or reveal or development. Are you prepared to see how fans react to those bombshells?

Jeremy Adams: Robbie and I have been through the crucible that is Supernatural. So, sans expectation, I'm just like, "Alright, whatever." That's not why I do it. I do it because I want to tell that story. I want to be crazy or zany or whatever. Because I'm a fan, so I write toward my inner fan.

Robbie Thompson: I mean, you're always going to have - on characters that people are so attached to, or teams that people are so attached to, or content - you're always going to have something. It's almost a fool's errand to chase it. Becaus when you do chase after the shiny thing, it's the thing that you never thought - it turns out they love this over here, and they're obsessed with that detail.

I certainly hope that people talk about it. As one of my first editors said, "It's only when they're not talking about your book that you're in trouble." I certainly hope they do, but I wouldn't say it was the intention. I really can say that on every book I've ever worked on, there's always the thing that I felt like, "Oh, this will get their tongues waggin'." And then no, it was actually this thing over here. It was this relationship that people got really invested in, that was for me just a means to a plot end, but for them it was the conduit into the book or the story or whatever. So, yeah, I certainly hope they get chatting.

SR: In that vein, can each of you speak a bit about the art teams responsible for this future cosplay? They more than deliver right from the start, and it's hard to imagine them elevating it from here.

Robbie Thompson: I'm really bare bones in my scripts. I'll just say, "This is a new version of Batman; it's Talon. Have fun?" I'm dressed like a failed lumberjack; I'm not the guy for that. Fortunately on Future State, I'm working with Javier and Eduardo on the ongoing. They're just briilliant artists. Javier took all of the ideas that we were talking about in the book and really just made his own take on all these characters. And then Alex came in with his colors and did an amazing job, and everybody just came to play in their own way. If people end up cosplaying as Talon Batman or this creepy Martian Manhunter, it's all thanks to Javier and his design work. I don't know about you, Jeremy, but seeing those new designs come in every single time is always so exciting and really fun.

Jeremy Adams: Yeah, I was a little overwhelmed by it all. Because in animation, you write something and then you got to wait a couple years before you actually get to see it. But when it comes to this, it's almost like live theater a little bit. You have a very quick reaction that you get, because these geniuses that are artists and colorist and inkers come in, and give you this magic from the little words you scribble down. I probably am a little more descriptive in certain things, just because of the byproduct of animation in general. But the fact is that everything that I had in my mind, Fernando did it times 10. It was just so detailed and so interesting. Even the coloring and the inking; everything was just so perfect.

It's a weird thing for me, because you get the pencils back and you're like, "Can we just release this? This is so good." Then you get the inks back, and you're like, "Well, this is great!" And then you get the colors back, and you feel like, "Well, I don't know why I'm here." That's kind of how I feel the entire time.

Future State: Suicide Squad #1 will be available at comic book shops and digitally on February 26th, 2020.

Future State: Suicide Squad #1

Written by: Robbie Thompson, Jeremy Adams

Art by: Javier Fernandez, Fernando Pasarin, Alex Sinclair, Oclair Albert, Jeromy Cox

Cover Art by: Javier Fernandez, Marcelo MaioloDerrick Chew

Editor: Mike Cotton,

SUICIDE SQUAD, PART 1 / BLACK ADAM, PART 1

The Suicide Squad enters the Future State era as Amanda Waller uses Task Force X to save the world and remake it in her image—but what happens when the team shows up to stop her? And in the second story in this extra-sized issue, Black Adam, the immortal one-time champion of the wizard Shazam, rules the planet Kahndaq in the 853rd century. Can he save the future from a threat rooted in the past?

MORE: Nightwing Is Becoming The Anakin Skywalker of Future State

Exclusive Preview: Suicide Squad & Black Adam Future State from https://ift.tt/3qO4evh

[that-shamrock-vibe]

Disney+ What To Watch: My Top 10 Favourite Direct-To-Video Disney Sequels

#8. Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp’s Adventure

It is rare that a movie or television series can give me cravings, but the sequel to Lady and the Tramp interestingly enough makes me hungry for spaghetti and meatballs every time I see it.

After recently seeing the live-action version and the change to the ending that that movie did, it is slightly interesting to ponder if this movie should have even happened in the first place.

The movie’s plot kind of follows the same messages as the first. No more than seven months may have passed from the ending of the first movie to here where the Brown family and their dogs are singing about how perfect their suburban lives are...all except Lady and Tramp’s only male puppy Scamp who dreams of being a street dog rather than being domesticated. His antics get him into trouble with his family and leads to a falling out with his father...who seems very keen to hide his past as a street dog from him.

Scamp then runs away from home and meets another puppy Angel who is part of a group of Junkyard Dogs led by Buster who preaches about how against the domestic life he is. However, after being told to steal food from his family he is confronted by Tramp who it turns out used to be friends with Buster before deciding to get into the domestic life.

After a brief run in at the pound, Scamp decides to go home and convinces the other junkyard dogs that they can have cushy lives rather than being ruled by Buster who is left under a pile of junk.

The movie does a kind of reverse on the first movie as Scamp is born domesticated but wants to be a street dog before realising that the best place for him is with those who love him.

It’s weird to think that Disney are trying to preach the message of not knowing how good you have something until you don’t have it anymore to kids when realistically if kids were to follow this kind of logic they would obviously have to run away from home and get involved with a bad crowd. While a tragic everyday occurrence, this isn’t the type of thing you would expect Disney to promote, especially back in the day.

Lady and the Tramp II is also one of the few direct-to-video sequels that almost maintains the animation quality of the first movie, which the original was notable for having.

The clear romance between Scamp and Angel is similar to that of Lady and Tramp in the first movie. With Angel having Tramp’s origin story from the live-action remake it leads to a more compelling character, but it is clear that the Junkyard Dogs aside from Buster are better suited to domestic life so it is a no brainer when they end up with families at the end.

It’s slightly weird that in this sequel they decide to properly show us Jim Dear and Darling’s faces, particularly as their roles in this movie are either to be the disciplinarians or worrying over Scamp. Aunt Sarah and Si & Am make brief appearances in this movie but don’t serve any major purpose other than showing disdain towards Scamp.

As with a lot of sequels the songs aren’t as good as the original movie, but fortunately here the original movie didn’t have the best soundtrack save for a couple of songs.

The main issue with the movie is an issue I will bring up again in later choices but while I do understand how Tramp wanted to shield his kids from the mistakes of his past as many parents do, given that Scamp has such a passion for the street life it would be just as easy to tell Scamp about his cautionary tale and as warn him away from it, because not telling him only deepened Scamp’s resentment and resolve.

Despite being the main focus of the first movie, Lady is very much pushed to the side in this movie aside from being the worrying mother. Because the story is very Tramp centric it’s only really Tramp who is developed.

Also having the backstory of Tramp as a junkyard dog would have maybe worked if maybe one of the pound dogs from the first movie was part of the group here, as it stands it does seem as if Buster is just a shoe-horned in antagonist.

If you love dogs as I do then it’s a cute movie, there are mature themes with regards to a child running away from home and the impact on the family, but there’s also the fact of the movie being rather static rather than developing and moving forward. Scamp may learn a lesson but the movie is simply about Scamp learning a lesson rather than feeling hard done by and the family realising they need to mutually change it’s just Scamp learning about taking his life for granted.

I may not be familiar with Charmed but I do know that Alyssa Milano voicing Angel as a leading lady halfway through the show’s run was clearly a way of capitalising on bringing her fanbase over.

As it stands, the movie isn’t bad, much like a lot of my choices it is not a harmful movie and even does focus on mature and sensitive themes. It’s just a question that we didn’t really need to see Scamp long for something he thinks he wants only to realise his best place is where he already is.

As a dinner time movie when I was 10-11 though it was a fun couple of hours, and like I said my fondness for meatballs probably came from this movie.

So what do you guys think? Post your comments and check out more Disney+ What to Watch Top 10s as well as more Top 10 Lists and other posts.

[aureolinthoughts]

“On My Block” Ending: Some Thoughts on Characterization and POC Narratives

Okay...I’m calling it. What the writers did with the ending of season 3 of On My Block is more or less the same crap D&D pulled with Game of Thrones...sending a beloved character crashing headlong into complete villainy for no reason other than to be “subversive” and to rush the ending of the show. Sure Cesar was scared (and needed the Santos to get rid of Cuchillos and find Oscar), but him pulling what amounts to a heel-face turn to align himself with gang interests (when what he has always wanted was to get out of “the life” and become an architect) is COMPLETE nonsense. 

What also hurts me to the bone is that the ending of the show as is flies COMPLETELY in the face of EVERYTHING the crew has stood for up until now...spits in the face of what is supposed to be the central theme of the show: “In Squad We Trust.” From the first episode, the heart and soul of this show has been the idea of “la familia”...that family fights for and loves one another through thick and thin. Sure they may get angry at one another (as the crew did in the woods in 3x08), but at the end of the day, the squad will ALWAYS come back together to support one another. The writers started to chip away at that at the end of season 2, and then full-on set about destroying that in season 3, and I’m very, very upset about it. At the end of season 3, the familia is broken up, and that breaks my heart. I mean, in the FIRST episode Mario Martinez tells “the crew” that they need to have each other’s backs no matter what...why write them in such a way that they suddenly abandon that? It doesn’t make any sense. 

As of now, I’m holding on to hope that the ‘ending’ of 3x08 was actually just a dream/nightmare sequence much like the one Cesar had after he kissed Olivia and we will find out that things went a different way, because not only does the ending spit in the face of the theme of the show, it makes ALL the characters OOC. Jamal HATES football and literally spent MONTHS lying to his parents and faking injuries to get out of playing...why on earth is he suddenly on the team? It makes NO sense. Ruby and Jasmine aren’t dressed the way we know them to dress...doesn’t make any sense either. Ruby and Jamal aren’t friends anymore...what on earth happened? Before she left Freeridge, Monse PROMISED to keep the picture of her friends in “prime viewing position” in her room, and now the picture is stuffed behind a vase, out of sight and out of mind? That’s ridiculous. And of course...(and much has been said about this already)...Cesar is now leader of the Santos? Admittedly, 3x07 and 3x08 DID kind of set that up...but I don’t buy the way they wrote his descent into villainy. 

And no, Oscar would not leave Cesar in the hood and run off to the suburbs to have a good life. By the way, it also makes NO sense to give Oscar the fate Cesar wanted (out of the gang and out of the hood) and to give Cesar the fate that Oscar has literally been heading to since episode 1. I appreciate the extra depth that Oscar got in season 3, but let’s not pretend this guy was an angel...he ordered his 14-year-old brother to commit a murder and then kicked him out to sleep on the streets when he refused to do so. Come to think of it, OSCAR had something of a heel-face turn as well...suddenly deciding that making peace with other gangs is the right way to do things...as opposed to committing murders. I suppose realizing what Cuchillos did to his father woke him up some, but we needed more elaboration and development of that, not just one short conversation between him and Cesar. 

Unless the two of them are running some elaborate scheme (TOGETHER) to dismantle the Santos or defeat a rival gang or something, there is no way I’m buying the “Oscar in the suburbs and Cesar in the hood” plot point. It just doesn’t make any sense. Whatever happened to the smart kid who straight up said: “I’m NOT a killer” and wanted to get out of Freeridge to have a better life? I could see him struggling with being scared after the Santos were “weakened”, but literally presiding over someone being “jumped in”? No. Not my Cesar. 

Also, the familia PROMISED Monse that nothing was going to change when she left...obviously, SOME things would change as the crew got older, but I just can’t accept the crew splitting up and going off to do things that run COMPLETELY contrary to their previously established characterization. Nope. I don’t buy it.

TBH, tho...a LOT of season 3 was straight-up a mess...nowhere near as good as season 1 or season 2 in terms of emotional impact,  plotting, characterization, etc. Season 4 is going to have to be REALLY good in order to make up for how bad Season 3 was, assuming that the show gets renewed (which I REALLY hope it does). There’s a running joke that the third season of Netflix shows are always bad...and On My Block was no exception. I don’t know what the writers were drinking when they wrote the end of season 2 and season 3, but I hope they quit drinking it or hire new writers, because this is...a mess. A messy and crappy way to treat a show that was so good, both in terms of plotting/characterization and Black & Latina/Latino representation. 

Another thing...I’m honestly just tired of stories about POC having tragic endings. It’s almost like writers are allergic to writing narratives about POC that do NOT center on some terrible tragedy or have some horrible end. Monse, Ruby, Cesar, and Jamal have all gone through SO much. They MORE than deserve a happy ending...why can’t they just have one? Also, why was season 3 only eight episodes? I don’t get it. I saw a theory that the show is Monse writing a book because the episodes are called “chapters”, and for goodness’ sake, that ‘book’ NEEDS and DESERVES a happy ending. I WANT to see Monse becoming a really good writer (also, it’s a shame we never actually get to see her flex her writing skills-why?). I WANT to see Ruby putting those math and logic skills to work (he’d be a GREAT lawyer, I think). I WANT to see Jamal putting his nerdiness and tenacity to use (may he’d become an engineer or an investigative reporter or something?). I WANT to see Cesar getting out of the gang and working towards fulfilling his dream of becoming an architect (and of course, being cute with Monse). I WANT to see Oscar leave behind a life of violence for something better...he had dreams of being a chef...why can’t we have a storyline about what it will take for an ex-con to get into a culinary school? 

We NEED more hopeful stories about POC, stories that tell POC kids (and adults!) that we deserve happiness...and that it is within reach. I am SICK of the ‘cautionary tales’, sick of the endless tragic narratives. There is more to being Black or Brown than suffering...and we need stories that tell us that. On My Block was doing that, until it lost its way. 

I hope it finds its way again. 

[innerchorus]

Chapter 77 provided a glimpse of YOUNG GIEVE!

This was super interesting because so little is known about Gieve’s backstory, and for that reason I wanted to take a closer look at what we are shown here and what it might tell us about Gieve’s early life (because thanks to this scene, I have some theories).

This is a very short flashback so I’m going to include all of it below for those who haven’t been able to read the chapter yet.

This flashback shows us a man reciting a cautionary tale concerning Mount Demavant and Zahhak to a group of people (mixed ages/genders) sat around a fire inside a tent. I’ll outline my thoughts on it below.

These people are definitely Parsian, nomadic, and probably a family group. How can we be sure they are Parsian? Well, we know that Gieve is, but even discounting that for a moment, we know that this legend and the fear of the Snake King Zahhak that accompanies it is part of the Parsian national consciousness but not widely known or believed by those from other countries.

I think their nomadic nature is evidenced by the fact that this is taking place in a tent, with belongings suited for travel (bedrolls, luggage packaged up for travel etc) but that could certainly lean towards semi-nomadic depending on how they make a living as they travel around (perhaps they might end up staying in cities/towns for a while here and there, especially if they earn money by entertaining with music and poetry...you can see an oud in the first image!). In addition to this, the story about Zahhak isn’t just a story; it has a practical purpose here, too; a warning that although they may travel far and wide, they shouldn’t venture near Mount Demavant. (Aside from Zahhak, there are other sensible reasons for not going there, as can be seen from the landscape and weather visible in this chapter.)

Why do I feel sure this is a family group? The mixed of ages makes me think of an extended family who live together, travel together and make a shared living (possibly as part of a larger group / nomadic tribe). The dynamic also seems to indicate this, with the older man being the ‘head of the family’ with everyone else listening to him. Gieve’s own words in this chapter also support both the idea that he grew up with family, and the theory that these people earned their living without resorting to banditry. I’ll expand on that now.

Right before this glimpse into his past, Gieve notices tracks which indicate he’s not alone on the mountain, and thinks:

‘No decent man would venture anywhere near Mount Demavant. With the exception of yours truly. Which means they’re brigands or bandits... Either way, they’ll be scoundrels who wouldn’t obey even their own parents.’  (emphasis mine)

Gieve thinks of himself as a decent man, and by extension those who raised him must have been decent people, too. The last line in particular seems to be very significant, given that we have the flashback immediately afterwards. It makes me think that the man in the flashback may well be his father (certain elements of Gieve’s personal style seem to have originated here: the pattern on this man’s hood/blanket is very similar to the one on Gieve’s, both of them have animal paw accessories, and an oud is present which I presume belongs to the man telling the story; this article about gōsān also theorises that the occupation of minstrel must have been passed down from father to son). If this is Gieve’s father, I think we can assume that Gieve had a good relationship with him.

I think it’s worth paying close attention to the wording of Gieve’s thoughts at the close of the flashback, too. As we return to the present, Gieve thinks:

‘Hmph... The dead don’t reawaken.’

I can’t help but wonder whether this scene is also a hint that something bad might have happened to the people in it. The line quoted above is ostensibly about the foretold return of the Hero King, who will then banish Zahhak forever, but it seems as though Gieve is also thinking about something else, something more personal. Is he reflecting on an experience in his past, something that happened to the other people in the flashback? Is that line a hint that some or all of them are dead? I think so. (To be honest, I always had the impression that Gieve learned to be self-sufficient from an early age; that fits with him losing his family while he was young.)

So I definitely think this scene is meant to allude to something bad that happened in Gieve’s past.

I have no idea whether we’ll ever find out for certain what happened, though. I did have an initial theory that there might have been some sort of incident where he didn’t listen to the cautions of his parents and something bad happened as a result, but the more I consider it, the less likely I find that to be true. If you look at young Gieve in this flashback, he sits at the front of the group. I can imagine that he was captivated by the tale being told and obviously believed in it wholeheartedly. He calls the others on the mountain ‘scoundrels who wouldn’t obey even their own parents’ because he sees them as the opposite of himself.

As the flashback ends and we return to the present, it’s clear that as an adult, Gieve is now much more disillusioned with the world and can no longer see things in the same way he did as a child. His experiences (which very likely include the loss of his family) have taught him that the world doesn’t work the way it does in legends and stories, and so he can’t help but be cynical even if part of him wants to be proven wrong (he may be a skeptic, but he definitely has a romantic heart).

So, that was a vague theory about Gieve’s past.

Here’s another theory/headcanon to end this post with. I’ve joked before about Gieve secretly being an immortal Prince of Sistan (since this is the lie he used to deceive Tahamenay’s attendant) but after this flashback I’m considering the idea that Gieve and his family were inspired by/descended from the Saka (a nomadic Iranian people who invaded the Parthian Empire and then eventually settled in Sistan). In the world of Arslan Senki, Sistan is an old country that no longer exists; given the historical location of the real Sistan, perhaps it was absorbed into Pars a long time ago.

I admit that there’s little supporting evidence and mostly I just like the thought that there may have been a grain of truth in what Gieve said after all, but I did notice that one particular Saka group were described as ‘red-haired and blue-eyed.’ Gieve is also described in the novels as having reddish hair and dark blue eyes.

The flashback in this chapter is a new scene added by Hiromu Arakawa, but it’s highly likely that she asked Yoshika Tanaka for guidance. I wonder whether he revealed details about Gieve’s backstory that we don’t yet know If anyone has any thoughts or theories of their own, I’d love to hear about them!

[pretty-well-funded]

Little Sister, pt 3

this story is pretty fucked up.  read at your own risk.

and if it isn’t obvious by now, no one has powers.  The Starks are rich but not famous, and no one has invented a suspiciously advanced language interface.  everyone is just a relatively normal person. fyi.

Part 1 | Part 2

Petra wakes up in the morning and lays in bed for a while, considering...considering.  Thinking over everything that happened last night, without the tipsy haze.  

It’s a low bar, but at least he laid it all out on the table and gave her a clear out.  Like, she knows that doesn’t really make it better, except it kind of does?  She’s just not really sure how to...or if she even wants to.

It’s a bad idea.  It’s like...the worst idea.  They make entire movies that are intended to be cautionary tales.  She always thought girls that bragged about their older boyfriends were missing the obvious.  And yet...

Not that he’d be her boyfriend.  She’s not dumb.  That’s not...he called himself an opportunist, for God’s sake.  He should’ve just said “slut” and gotten it over with. And if it is only, like, sex or whatever, she’s not sure where that leaves them, after.  He’s family, now.  Although maybe he’ll fuck off out of their lives.  He’s pretty much implied that he’s only hung around for her.

Still, it’s not like she’d never see him again.  And they’d have to pretend to be brother and sister and stuff.

When she tries to imagine telling Tony yes, she can’t really imagine what that means.  What comes next.  She’s not naive, she knows what goes where and the run of the mill kind of stuff that people do together, but.  She can’t picture how that would play out.  Can’t imagine exactly how it would proceed.

She’s sure he’s thought about it.  She’s sure he has...ideas.  Or plans.  So maybe it doesn’t matter whether she can picture it.  She could just. Let him do...whatever.

She wonders if he wants, like...an answer.  For her to actually say...words, about what she wants.  She thinks maybe not?  Obviously he’s been...nudging, since the day they met.  Nudging, and watching for her to push back.  Maybe she can just...not do that, and he’ll...

Tell me to back off and I will.  That’s what he’d said.  Not “tell me if you want this” or “tell me what you want.”  Just to tell him if she doesn’t want.  And she’s not sure, really, but right now she doesn’t not want it.

She chews on her lip for another few minutes - she goes through, like, a thousand sticks of lip balm a year - and doesn’t change out of her pajamas before she leaves her room.

*

She’s making coffee in the kitchen when he wanders in.  He doesn’t speak at first, so she pretends she hasn’t heard him, a little nervous about her choice of clothing and what it’s telling him.  

She almost jumps out of her skin when she feels him right behind her, brushing against her ass and reaching over her for a coffee mug.  It’s not an accident.  Nothing he does around her is an accident.  

“Good morning,” he says, and drops a kiss against her ear.  She fumbles the coffee pot and spills some on the counter.  He sounds smugly amused when he says, “It’s supposed to go in the mug, sweetheart.”

“I know that,” she grumbles.  “You don’t need the other mug, this one’s yours.  I don’t drink coffee.”

Tony’s fingers dig into the knots in her shoulders.  “That was very sweet of you, then.  Thanks, honey.  How about I make us breakfast?  Eggs sound good?”

“Yeah.  Thank you.”  She slides awkwardly out from under his hands, and takes a seat at the counter, watching as he moves around.

Staring at his ass, really.  He’s wearing a tank top again, so...arms, but he’s also wearing sweatpants.  Usually guys wear big baggy whatever, but these cling to ass like...like they appreciate how well it’s made just as much as Petra does.

Then Tony turns and she can see...that’s his dick, that is definitely his dick.  This is not a drill.  His condoms are XXL, oh god.

She’s so distracted, she doesn’t even realize he’s walking towards her until he sets a glass of juice down.  Petra doesn’t even bother looking at his face, just thunks her head against the counter right next to it and prays for death.  

“There you go.  Thought you looked thirsty,” he says, and yeah, ha ha ha.  Petra bangs her head down a couple times and he chuckles, tugging at her ponytail.  “Hey.  No brain damage before breakfast.”

She waits until she feels him move away before she sits up, taking a couple gulps of OJ in hopes it will cool her face down.

*

By the time they’re sitting down to eat, it seems like they’ve maybe agreed to never speak of it again.

“So, what do you want to do today?  We can do anything you want.”

“You don’t have to work or anything?”

“I like to live down to expectations every so often and play the entitled CEO’s kid who just fucks off.  Keeps them from expecting too much from me.”

Petra still isn’t used to...like.  Who he and Howard are.  They have so much money, and they own like...an entire huge company.  She knows she and her mom will move in with Howard after they’re back from their honeymoon, but it doesn’t feel real yet.  Her mom wanted to ‘keep things normal’ for as long as possible, or whatever.

Tony whistles to catch her attention.  “Hello. Space cadet.  What are we doing today?”

She looks down at her eggs.  “Oh, um.”  She tries and fails to sound casual when she says, “I dunno, we could just hang around here and stuff?”

When she risks a look up, Tony’s grinning, settled back in his chair and radiating...something.  It makes her mouth dry.  “Hang out and stuff, huh?”

Petra shrugs, nodding.  She can feel her face get progressively hotter.

“Hm, well, sounds like a plan to me.  Some good, clean family bonding.  Just stay here and be comfortable, right?  Who needs to get dressed, anyway?”

She can tell, even without looking directly at him, that his eyes are on her legs.  “Yeah.  Exactly.”

“Alrighty, then.  Sounds like a plan.”

*

Petra’s not sure quite what to expect after the relatively open acknowledgement of What’s Happening, but she didn’t think that Tony would pat his thigh invitingly as soon as he sat down on the love-seat.  

“Come sit with me,” he says, like it isn’t wildly inappropriate (a little voice in her head starts hysterically laughing) to ask a teenage girl to sit in his lap at 10am.  “Petra,” he says patiently when she freezes next to the couch.

She’s not sure how he does it, but she hears a whole conversation in her name.  Tell me to fuck off, and I will.  It’s unbecoming for such a smart girl to play dumb.  

He watches and waits while she makes up her mind, but when she steps closer, he tugs her hand and helps her into his lap.

“Relax,” he says, and hands her the remote.  “Find us something.”

She preoccupies herself with that for a little while, and Tony spends the time subtly rearranging her body until they’re both more comfortable.  She knows she’s still stiff as a board, but she can’t help it.  

He presses a kiss that feels very reassuring to her bare shoulder, then inhales against her skin and brushes his mouth against a new spot.  She gasps a little and stops changing channels, completely unsure what she stopped on as he continues to kiss up her neck.  Her eyes are fixed on the tv but seeing nothing.  She just focuses on breathing rather than panting.

Nothing Tony’s doing with his mouth could be interpreted as innocent.

He mouths at her ear, and just...she’d never ever considered that could be sexy, but it feels really good, and he’s breathing just as hard and carefully as she is.  She realizes, self-consciously, that she’s really wet, and presses her thighs together like that could stop it or something.  

Instead, she only draws Tony’s attention there, and his fingers follow, starting this time at the hem of her shorts and just...stroking.  Petra’s hips jerk backwards and Tony sort of...sighs against her ear, breathy and vocal and almost a moan.  

“Speak now...” he murmurs, and before she has time to understand what he’s saying, his fingers slide in between the clench of her legs and brushes at the center seam of her shorts.

She makes a startled sound that’s throaty and startling. 

“Yes,” Tony hisses, and nips at her earlobe, using her distraction to ease her knees apart.  “Stay just like that.”

They’re both breathing raggedly and staring as he traces the seam of her crotch with his fingers, light at first, then firmer.  Petra feels a little out-of-body.  She can’t quite believe what she’s seeing. And feeling.

Tony turns his face to speak directly in her ear.  “Fuck, you’re so wet, baby.”  His fingers brush particularly firm over her clit, and she jerks, whimpers.  “I’m the first, aren’t I?  To pet your little pussy?”

She nods, another sound slipping out as he rubs her.  

Tony moans.  “Oh, I’m gonna treat it so right.  Fuck, I think it knows how good I’m gonna love it already.”  

He cups his entire hand against her and rubs.  Unlike the too-soon bite of his touch against her clit, it’s just right and just enough.  The fabric of her shorts is always baby-soft, that’s why she loves them, but she’s so slick by now it’s embarrassing.  It feels like her shorts are hardly there, but they are, and the friction is just exactly perfect. 

It takes her a while to understand that she’s rubbing herself against the flat of his hand just as much as he’s rubbing his hand over her.  

“That’s it, sweetheart, does that feel good?  Are you gonna come for me?”

Petra’s breath hitches as it occurs to her that she just might.  Tony hums and it shivers through her whole body.

“That’s a good girl.  You feel fantastic in my lap.  I wanna eat your ass right up in these shorts.”

Petra clutches at his top as it starts to feel too big.  “Tony - “

“Yes.  Fuck, you’re close, aren’t you?  Just from rubbing your little pussy on my hand.  Christ, you are a dream.  I’m gonna have you every which way I can manage before you can leave.”

Petra squeezes her thighs together and comes, moaning.  He just keeps on rubbing and it goes on forever, so much longer than when she touches herself because she always shies away when it’s too big.

She’s limp in his lap, sweaty and overheated, by the time his hand finally stops moving. Her clit sends aftershocks through her body for a while.

When it’s done, and she can finally stand to open her eyes, Tony’s watching her face, dark and hungry.  “You,” he breathes, “ are so goddamn sexy.”

His hips press up against her ass.  She can feel his dick.  She still feels tender and ready between her legs.

She whines a little, making him chuckle, when he slides his hand from between her legs and pulls the neck of her tank top down.  Down so far it exposes her breast.  Holds it just long enough to get her nipple in his mouth, and then he’s noisily suckling and moaning around it.

He’s rough, suckling hard and then using his teeth, facial hair scratchy against the very sensitive skin.  It feels...fucking amazing.  Then his hand is inside her shorts and he’s slippery, sliding against her.

She gasps, tenses, hips tucking back, away, on reflex, but he just follows.  Mauls her nipple one last time and lets it pop out of his mouth, kissing her chest.

“Shh, just let me.  I’ll treat it so good.”  His finger rubs at her clit and this time it’s not too much, feels so good she can’t control how she reacts, panting and moaning and riding his hand.  “Yeah.  Yeah that’s right, you love it, don’t you.”

The hand that was supporting Petra’s back slides up to cup her head and hold her still while he thrusts his tongue in her mouth, muffling the sounds she can’t seem to stop.  

It’s her first real kiss.

He hums and sucks her bottom lip into his mouth before pulling back.  Supports her head and just studies her face.

She has time to take a breath as his fingers still between her legs, but then they’re sliding forward and Tony’s watching her reaction as his middle finger pushes inside.

It goes easily at first - she’s so wet - and then she clenches, and he tuts this comforting little sound.  “Relax.  Just relax, I’m gonna take such good care of you.”

She does, and he drops a kiss on her mouth.  He thrusts carefully with a single finger for a while, then his ring finger presses inside too.

“Tony.”  

“Love the way you say that, all breathy and pleading.  How does that feel, sweetheart.  Okay?”

She nods quickly.  It’s not as good as when he rubbed her clit but it’s...weirdly...hot.  She’s never liked fingering herself all that much, but the reality of his big calloused hand between her legs and the way he’s watching her and fucking his fingers in nice and slow is...

It feels...naughty and like something that means more than just his fingers.

Tony kisses the tip of her nose.  “Be a doll and push your shorts down, would you?  Gimme some room to work.”

She reaches down and slides them down her thighs, choosing to not think too much about it.  But then she catches a look at his hand and what it’s doing, and this foreign sound escapes her.  It sounds a bit like the way she says his name.

Tony looks, too, and sighs like he’s pleased and satisfied.  He pulls his fingers all the way out and slides them in.  Petra squirms, almost not able to stand it.  Not the movement or the feeling, just...the reality.  Too, too much.

Tony catches her mouth again with his and plays while his fingers keep sliding all out, then all in.  She feels her knees curling toward her chest, protective like a pill bug, but it also opens her up for what he’s doing.  

Tony hums, approving.  “Good girl,” he manages before he slips his tongue in her mouth.

His fingers speed up so incrementally, she can’t say when it starts to be...less sliding than...fucking.  He fucks her with his fingers hard and fast, until she has to rip her mouth off his just to draw enough oxygen.  She can’t even move with it, it’s too fast for that and her hips don’t know how.  

All she can do is clutch at her thighs and take it, panting so fast, she goes lightheaded.  It feels...to say it feels good would be wrong.  It doesn’t feel bad, either.  Just...big.  It’s such a big feeling, getting bigger, and the sound is obscene.  She can hear the wet sound of his fingers as they fuck her, and the increasingly loud, desperate noises coming from her own throat.  Tony’s just watching as this big thing builds, like she’s a spectacle.

When it finally breaks, she actually wails, a big embarrassing sound she didn’t realize she could make, except she can’t not make it, not right then. He keeps fucking into her almost too long, and then he slows, until he’s just sort of rocking, buried deep.  

He presses a kiss to the middle of her forehead as she trembles her way down, and then he’s pulling his fingers free and she feels...bereft.

She parts her lips when his fingers nudge her mouth and finds herself sucking those same fingers clean.  She’s so exhausted and spent she doesn’t have it in her to blush.

Tony’s smiling at her, a nice one, while he shakes out his hand.  Oh.  Did it cramp?  

“You need a nap now, sweet girl?”

She thinks she nods, but her eyelids feel so heavy.

“Okay, but we’re not laying down on this godforsaken thing, it’d break my spine in half.  Let’s move to my bedroom, okay?”

She feels weird and wobbly when she stands up, but she goes where he guides her and they slide under the covers together.  He tucks her under his arm and turns on the tv, then mutes.  He makes encouraging noises as she snuggles in, and she finds herself squirming til she’s wrapped around his thigh, sighing happily when he angles his leg so she can press herself flush against it.  

It’s not that she’s horny, just...the pressure feels good.  Makes her less empty.  She rocks against the muscle for a little while until she’s soothed.

Then she drifts off to sleep

*

...lol, I did NOT expect to jizz out this entire thing tonight, I thought I was just gonna start on the next part, then THIS HAPPENED in one sitting.  Jesus fuck.

@stvrkerslut @golden-trio-united @honeybee-parker @joleka666 @extraspicychickennugget @harmonystarker @the-mad-starker @lilsoshie @stark-stark-baby

[clairen45]

About that Dark Visions comic...

I think it’s fair to say that when Marvel’s Dark Visions miniseries about Vader as seen from a different perspective was announced, everybody was excited. We have been hammered on the head since ROTS that “there are heroes on both sides” , and with the expectations concerning the end of the saga as a massive redemption and hope plot, you were bound to be curious about what they would come up with. TBH, I was not expecting to see a softer side to Vader. It would be wrong to expect anything like that, and it would somehow diminish from what happens to him in the OT. He is supposed to be more machine than man. So, no, I definitely did not expect him, or wished him to be the kind of guy operating as the Death Star Secret Santa, knitting socks for the poor and needy, or rescuing people’s pets. It was not my understanding that he was much loved by his Imperial “colleagues” either. When we first see him in ANH; he is derided and dismissed both by a colleague (sorry, forgot the name but you all know whose faithless person I am thinking of) and Leia. Respected for sure, because of the fear he instills in people. So if awe is obviously the right word to use, in the most etymological sense of the term, that is to say “ a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder”, how many people found Vader awesome? Besides the audience. There had to be. And as a concept, it was pretty cool.

That being said, if you think of the title for the series, there were already many ways of interpreting it. Dark Visions... Visions of the power of the Dark Side? The way some people saw Vader? The way Vader thought people saw him? Did the stories happen for real or are they just what the title imply they are: visions. Images. Fantasies. Daydreams or nightmares? Possibly just the imagination of some deranged mind. There is something there that implies that we are not dealing with something too objective. But rather something unhinged and disturbing.

Now, I intend to keep this in mind about the issue that has been raising so much concern: “Tall, Dark, and Handsome”. I think malaise is really the word we should settle for. This issue is problematic in many ways.

For those who haven’t read it or just heard about it through social media and people complaining about it (possibly people on the other side of the spectrum fanning about it), this is how you can sum it up: this is the first person narrative of an unnamed nurse, working on the Death Star for Vader’s personal doctor. The nurse has developed an obsessive infatuation for Vader that has her snoop around him and collect bits and pieces about him (mostly gorish remains of his time at the medical bay) that she hides in her room. She keeps on daydreaming about him and the connection she thinks they have, until one day she musters up her courage and goes to talk to him in his private quarters in order to let him know of her love for him. He cuts her off in all the meanings of the word, both interrupting her speech of eternal devotion and undying love, and piercing her through with his saber. Last moment we see her is lying dead on the floor while he moves away and asking for the sanitation to rid him of the “garbage”.

Ok, that’s a tall order. Here are points that I find entirely problematic.

1.The Question of Agency:

The authors decided to give a voice, a narrative agency to a character that is presented as inconsequential to the story. She is an anonymous nurse, a dot, in  the bigger picture of the Empire. Much, let’s say, like our current ST heroes: Rey, Finn, and Rose, who started as “nobody”, even more so in the case of Finn and Rey who have literally been deprived of their identities. You could think it’s cool to thus give a voice to this nurse. Even more so when you consider that throughout the comic, she is presented as downtrodden, poor, pushed over, abused physically and verbally, dismissed, and despised. Her employer disrespects her constantly, calling her “fool”, “idiot”, or “stupid”. He shoves her around, and also diminishes her job, calling it “not a real job” or insinuating that she does not do her job correctly. Cases in point:

And what do we get in this story? A female nobody who starts asserting herself. Wow.

She tells her own story. First person narrative. She becomes an agent.

Look at the evolution of her daydream fantasies. She starts from damsel in distress who needs a man to protect her from her daily abuser

From nurse whose job means something, to a solid professional, and equal partner to her fantasy Lord:

And finally a powerful woman in her own rights, even overshadowing her partner, and who is able to defend herself.

Which then matures into her mustering up the courage to speak for herself, and tell her feelings to the (unwilling) object of her affection.

Except that.... well...she is just presented as a massive psycho. And, ok, it’s fair, we all know that there are female stalkers, and that her obsession for Vader is totally crazy because she doesn’t know anything about him, and she actually fell for someone who was treating her as poorly as the others. But there is the malaise there... The mix of female empowerment and batshit craziness. That’s what put a lot of people ill-at-ease. I wouldn’t even call that subversion, because, dudes, what are we subverting there exactly. It’s not like women are not daily abused and treated poorly at work and in their relationships on a daily basis... And are we supposed to take that as a cautionary tale about fangirl craziness? Because, there again, why did they need to have that girl get such a shitty treatment all through the comic. It is like the comic says that she deserved it. In the end it’s not just Vader calling her trash. It’s also the doctor calling her trash for most of the comic, and even have her literally waddle in a trash compactor. Cause this was supposed to be subtle?

Like, fine, if it were only Vader calling her garbage because the man is just dead inside, which, fairly, is represented in the comic. But it’s just not Vader, it is the way the character is presented through the eyes of the doctor AND even through the eyes of a cartoonist who keeps on representing her with the stupidest darned faces.

And there is no other viewpoint. Family, friends, other nurses or colleagues who could give us another idea about her. Or explain why she is like that. Nope. Basically, this woman is given a voice just so she can be cut off mid-sentence and made... fun of... I guess? Was that the author’s goal? Is it what we are supposed to feel? About this pathetic character and her pathetic life, dreams, goals, feelings, and eventual demise?

The “Subversion” of Female Romantic Tropes

Like ... LOL... How is that “subverted” anyways? But, ok, let’s go through them. It has all the classic elements of female literature.

The Cinderella story: nobody falls for high lord and expects to be swooped off her feet. Complete with ball scene, because, yes, why not? I give them a point, though, for the cool reflection on the ground which has her in her regular scrubs... BTW, Beauty and the Beast in the mix as well.

the nurse complex! Otherwise known as the Florence Nightingale effect. You know, woman is going to take care of the guy... They even made her a real nurse! Again, so subtle. Couldn’t make her any other profession and still be victim of this complex.

the reference to so-called “trashy” female lit, think bodice ripping, Harlequin, and their infamous covers. Even the title of the comic: “Tall, Dark, and Handsome”

The effing Phantom of the Opera!

and of course all the female discourse about love, because, yep, trashy: “kindred spirits” etc...

And again, how are we supposed to interpret it? Well, hang on, this woman, remember, is a bat-shit crazy deluded psycho, who has delusions about life and love. Oh, and the doctor says she is trash. And he throws all her stupid gory, disgusting trickets in the trash. Oh and also Vader says she is garbage. Well. Ok. So, I guess all of that which mattered to her, all her ideas, all that she loved, was just that. Trash. Garbage. Well, take that, you female reader!

But wait, it gets even better...

Star Wars is just trash!

Yep, because on closer look, most of the fantasies this woman has are very Star-Warsy. I am floored that they are actually trashing these:

Anakin and Padmé’s Naboo scenery, green, lush, terrace, nightgowns...

The scene when Anakin learns about Padmé’s death:

and of course, the one that you were not expecting... Reylo... “You are not alone”

Again, why is this problematic? In itself, it is fine and fair to be making fun of trashy female literature and campy romance novels, it is also fine to make fun of crazy stalkers, and it is also fine to be making fun of Star Wars. So why does it feel so icky in this comic somehow?

You can’t help but feel disgusted when you consider how poorly this woman is represented. There is not one aspect of her life that is not ridiculed. And again, this is about a woman who has NOTHING. They could have the girl fall in love with Vader and being killed by him because he is a cold-hearted machine. He killed his wife, the love of his life, so yea, of course he will feel not a pang of remorse or hesitation at killing this nobody who thinks she is in love with him. But they did not need to make fun of the very little she had in her life: her dreams. Her effing dreams. Plus the crazy stalker psycho. And the crazy face. And the fact that again we are talking about a woman, who had NOTHING. No family, no connection, no friends, no respect at work, not many possessions except her sad little Vader treasure chest.

And again, context. Here we are, reading a Star Wars comic where a lot of fanboys have been using the EXACT same terms to ridicule women in the fandom. Especially in the Reylo context. Trash. Garbage. Crazy bitches. Ridiculing theories about ... well, well, ain’t it a sweet surprise... Phantom of the Opera, or Beauty and the Beast parallels with Reylo. I’ll be damned. It feels crazy awkward, if you ask me. I mean, again, it’s all fair, but you don’t do that when you are in the midst of a toxic fandom war.

So why do I give zero F...  about it in the end?

If some antis in the fandom saw that as validation, well, let them have their moment of happiness. It won’t last. We can give them that.

One, I don’t think for one second that it means anything about what will happen in the ST as far as Reylo is concerned. Again, they are even making fun of Anidala in the comic, and dude, that thing happened. As my good friends from @lordsofthesithpodcast would tell you after their glorious SWCC panel : Romance, these ships belong in Star Wars.

Two, as I highlighted in the introduction, this belongs in the Dark Visions series. It is meant, in my own opinion, to be disturbing and unhinged. Not sugar coated. So maybe the whole point was shock value. Mission accomplished. It was poor taste again given the context and the awful treatment THEY (and not just Vader) give their female character, but yea, dark visions. Not Star Wars Adventures. You have to look at the target audience and everything.

Three, if it were not for the in-your-face references to female tropes, I actually took most of it as a critique of fandom in general. The problem is not that she is a fangirl. There are some crazy obsessive fangirls, mind you. The problem is that they are making fun of all things female on top of that. But, remove the romantic aspects. Couldn’t that apply to fanboys as well? I could totally picture a cadet, or some other young imperial, developing the same crazed obsession over Vader. And it was just as toxic. And, tbh, it could very well be. Collecting trinkets is not just a girl thing, and after seeing with my own eyes the tons of merch purchased by fanboys at the recent SWCC convention, or the obsessive way some guy could talk to you about Vader and the minute trivial details in his life, or that they are the only ones understanding the guy, well yea... it works...

I’ll even go a step further. I wondered for a sec if the whole thing was not even a critical meta about the franchise as a whole. Let me explain. Some fanboys have complained about the femininization of the franchise, that is “polluting” the shades of Pemberley, I mean Star Wars. Claiming that what is happening right now is utter garbage. Also also, I have another possible reading which has the nurse representing the current state of the fandom and how crazy obsessed they can be over a franchise that some currently view as tired and dead inside (especially since it has fallen into the fold of Disney). Representing the unhealthy relationship between the two. And guess what, it doesn’t end well for the fandom. Who will never get what they want.

I will finally quote this from Chuck Wendig who was fired from the project and came up with that particular comment on Twitter, and which actually seems to go with how I tried to read it myself:

Apropos of absolutely nothing, my issue three of SHADOW OF VADER was about a toxic fanboy (a morgue attendant on the Death Star) who became obsessed with Vader. (And it didn’t end well for him. Er, obviously.) I thought it was good and I’m sorry you won’t see it! Onward we go. 

I think they kept some of the original idea from Wendig, but it took a turn for the worse. It would be great if the authors cared to explain about their intent for this piece if any. I am not saying they should. I actually totally respect and support full freedom of speech and authorial choices. It is our choice, then, as a reader to read or not the material we don’t care about. I am just curious to know their opinion I guess, and I was not able to find any comment online. If anyone has a reference, I am interested...

In any event, I think everyone should read the comic for themselves if they are curious about it. Better to make your own opinion about it.

[rosecorcoranwrites]

Editing Advice Part 1: Continuity

Although I said I wouldn't be giving writing advice on this blog, I never said anything about editing advice. Plenty of people give (unhelpful, short-sighted, or far too niche) writing advice, but few focus on the crucial final part of the writing process, and yet, editing is what gives a lot of writers the most trouble. I personally love editing far more than the initial writing stage and so am here to offer my advice in not one, not two, not even three, but four—yes four!—blog posts!

First, let's look at continuity, in three categories: Time, Place, and People. Technically, you ought to keep continuity in mind throughout the writing process, but it's still easy to forget one or two things. Thus, when you finally decide "I'm going to edit this WIP!", you need to double check that everything is consistent, not just from a plot standpoint, but from a spacial, chronological, and personal standpoint as well.

Time

This includes character ages (especially in flashbacks and exposition), the beginning and endings of school years, the seasons and their weather patterns, moon phases (especially when writing about werewolves), times of day, how long it takes for events to happen (a wound to heal, DNA to come back from the lab, traveling from point A to point B), historical matters (phraseology, having characters use things that hadn't been invented yet, people in the middle ages eating potatoes, etc.) and so on.

One time, I was reading a WIP where their main character's (or MC's) sister, who was twelve, was being discussed. The MC said that her sister had been dating someone at the same time the MC was first learning to use her magic powers. Fine, except that later it was stated that she first learned to use those powers five years ago. Which would make the sister seven at the time. Ain't no seven-year-old datin' nobody. The author of the WIP had just forgotten that all the characters ages would change, not just the main character's.

In my own writing, I had to be very careful in Outcast Shadows, because two groups of characters were in two locations doing two things: Group A was traveling across a continent, while Group B were hanging out in a single building in a single city. But they had to meet up at the end of the book, under specific circumstances, so I had to make sure that both storylines took the same amount of time. In the first draft, Group A took far longer than Group B, which was disastrous! I had to go back and, first, measure exactly how long it would take Group A to do all their traveling and find things for Group B to do that made sense for the story to fill up that specific amount of time.

As careful as I was in Outcast Shadows, though, I completely forgot that Misha left a certain location a day earlier than everyone else in Recast Light—and this was after four rewrites. I had to account for what he was doing for an entire day, which meant rewriting several scenes. It ended up working out in the end, but is a cautionary tale I won't soon forget.

Place

This includes anything spacial, such as the layouts of rooms, buildings, cities, and continents; the blocking of character movements; light sources; the configuration of the the solar system; and so on.

For example, if your character was flat on his back a few sentences ago, but now he's standing, were we ever told that he got up? Did your characters, while touring the lower rooms of a castle, ever climb something in order to get to that second story room where they end up (mine didn't, in the first draft of Miscast Spells!). If your scene takes place in a dark and dingy torch-lit tavern, how can your characters notice tiny details, or are you picturing the scene as brightly lit as it would be with electric lighting?

Obviously, some of this can be fudged a bit—I don't think anyone but me cares about how scenes are lit—but some of it can't. And readers will notice. There was the famous case of Larry Niven's Ringworld, in which a character is teleporting east in order to extend his birthday, but of course the earth rotates east, meaning he would actually be moving later into the day, or even into the next, rather than earlier. So many readers noticed that Niven actually corrected it in later editions. Then there is Stephanie Meyer's Breaking Dawn, in which the Cullens have a house on an island off the west coast of Rio de Janeiro which, you know, doesn't have a west coast. These authors had professional editors who didn't catch these mistakes, so you can't rely on other people to notice continuity errors for you. Do your own research and know the layout of your own setting, especially if it's the setting we all live in.

People

This category includes what your characters have, what they know, and who they are.

For what they have, consider clothing and accessories, weapons, and useful items. If they don't have an umbrella, but it's raining in your scene, do they just stand there in the rain? Do they like it? Aren't they cold? If your character has some huge rucksack full of gear, they should always have that rucksack full of gear unless we can assume they left it in a safe place; if they're traveling from one end of the continent to the other, mention how heavy that rucksack is from time to time, and consider where it is during a fight or action scene (Are they still carrying it? Do they drop it? Do they pick it back up when they flee?).

Another thing that characters can have is injuries, which, unless magically healed, have lasting effects. If your character got punched in the face yesterday, they should have a bruise show up in a day or two, and last for about a week (she writes, realizing that she has had a character bruise far too fast in her own published book!). If your character has lost a lot of blood, or broken a bone, or received a concussion, all of that needs to be taken into account in the coming chapters. Again, this can usually be solved by a quick mention that such and such still hurt, but injuries will also impact how much traveling and fighting your character can do, so keep that in mind, too.

Be mindful, also, of what people in your story know, including POV and non-POV characters. A pet peeve of mine is when authors in multi-viewpoint narratives slip up and have the viewpoint character be privy to what other characters are thinking when there is no reason for them to know that. Then there is the opposite problem, typically in first person present tense stories, where, in order to have exposition, the MC will randomly be thinking about information that everyone in the setting already knows. It would be like reading a novel set in our world and having the first person narrator think "243 years ago, America declared independence from Britain, which it had formerly been a colony of. This was followed by what is known as the Revolutionary War, where the Patriots, on the American side, fought the Red Coats, the British soldiers". No one thinks that way, because they personally already know it; who are they explaining it to, themselves? Find a more natural way for this information across to the audience. Maybe the character is arguing about it with an friend or is helping a younger sibling with their homework.  For this sort of thing, dialogue is definitely your friend, but still, double check to make sure this seems natural.

Finally, think about who your characters are, as opposed to who you wanted them to be. Characters change and grow over the course of writing, and what you might have considered in-character when you were outlining the novel might be out-of-character now. Consider your character's emotional reactions, moral choices, word choice, and so on. Never let an intended message be a reason to railroad a character into some preconceived destiny. Take the time to look at your character, not as a writer, but as a reader.

This last bit of advice holds true for all parts of editing. Think about how you would view your story as a reader. While beta readers and editors are helpful, you can't put everything on them (especially considering that there are published stories with continuity errors). Think about what a reader might nitpick, and what they might not care about. I suggest caring about it anyway, because it's your story, and it should be the best you can make it. Polishing your story into its bright and shiny best self is what editing is all about, and we've only just begun!

[spookyspaghettisundae]

Getting Rid of the Roomer

I’m just going to submit this account to the world here in the form of fiction. I could tell you this story was real, but I’ve never met anybody who would believe me. Or I would get locked up for it; I’d wind up in jail or in a mental institution. I left behind enough incriminating evidence.

If you recognize what I’m describing, beware. If you observe the same things I’ve observed, then consider this a cautionary tale, rather than a short horror story. You can laugh at me if you never even come close to experiencing what I did, and I will be happy for you.

But you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Anyway, I’ll start at the top. My parents and my sister died in a car crash and I was in a pretty dark place for a while after that. I think I lost almost an entire year to drinking. That portion of my life was pretty much a blur. I made a lot of bad decisions, and a friend finally set me straight. I got a new job to replace the one I’d lost. I turned a new page in the book of my life and slowly recovered from there.

The one thing I hadn’t screwed up in the year post-crash was burning through all the money I’d inherited. Our family was never rich—my parents were that sort of vanishing middle class Generation-X types. I was raised to live within my means and I never lost the habit. Not even when I lost a year of my life to booze.

Even after cleaning up, I was tempted to sell our family home and move to an apartment. The place was always so quiet and dreadfully empty since the crash.

You know how some people describe silence as deafening? That’s what it was like. I think part of the downward spiral to the bottom of the bottles was just to drown it out. I wasn’t even partying, just bingeing on vapid shows and mediocre movies between work and withdrawing from life. But I digress.

I stayed in our home and could stand it less and less. I had been shopping around for an apartment to move to until my friend suggested I should renovate the place and section it into apartments, then rent out the bottom one. The inheritance was more than good enough to cover this and the guy at the bank confirmed this would be a sound investment—better than selling the place.

So I went through with it.

I kinda enjoyed that period of time when contractors were constantly filling the place with life again. The hammering and drilling and sawing. The shuffling of the electricians. The tinker-tanker sounds that a plumber made. After about half a year, all the work was done and the old house was in awesome shape.

Bright white walls, all-new wiring and fiberglass throughout the place, pristine water pouring from the faucets. Instead of that sleek and—I’m sorry, in my opinion cold—modern sort of look and feel, I had decided on a more quaint and cozy design when having the contractors renovate and design the place.

Aside from some keepsakes, I got rid of all old furniture and gave most of my family’s things away to charities or friends. I started feeling at home again. Finally satisfied with the state of the house, I read up on how to rent out the place, got some counseling, and worked out all the details. Then I went online.

For the next year, things were great. I got back into dating, enjoyed my job, and rebuilt every relationship my alcoholism had eroded up until then.

The renting went great, too. Well, for the most part, if you ignore the one single incident with some rude jerks who left a mess and tried to get away without paying. It was a real headache and a hassle and I almost stopped renting out the bottom apartment because of them, but decided against it.

I should have, though.

The roomers usually only stayed for short periods of time, like a weekend, a week, or a month. Outside of when I met them for the first time and got them settled in, and sent them off once their time was up, I had little contact or exposure to them. Working full-time and visiting my friend often meant I hardly spent any time at home.

So here’s where things got weird. I apologize for taking this long to get to this, but you have to really understand some important details. I lived alone. I was a recovering alcoholic. Deep down, I still felt vulnerable. But most importantly: because life was good, I wasn’t paying attention.

I should have paid more attention to the red flags that kept popping up.

The weirdness began when this really handsome guy started renting the place downstairs. Obviously, I’m not going to use his real name, so let’s call him Jeff.

Jeff was not only attractive, he was charming. He seemed to be pretty bright. I remember meeting him for the first time, as he stood there in khaki cargo shorts and a pink polo shirt, and thinking I wouldn’t mind having him stay around longer. And my heart skipped a beat when I learned he wanted to stay indefinitely.

We haggled a bit over the rent costs but settled on something that we were both content with. The prospect of having him as a roomer for an indefinite amount of time was looking to be a lot less of a hassle than the constant in-and-out that had been common with the roomers from the online service so far. And I sure as hell didn’t want a repeat of that couple of jerks I mentioned above.

After Jeff moved in, I didn’t see much of him. At the time, I regretted not getting to know him any better because I wasn’t seeing anybody else. But I also thought it might be a can of worms, and I didn’t feel like being pushy. Despite his appearance, Jeff turned out to be very private and a bit of a recluse. He rarely had any company over, and was a very quiet neighbor.

Till this day, I don’t even know where Jeff got the money nor what kind of work he was doing. All I know is that it took me several months before I noticed that I always only saw his company come—but never leave.

This never dawned on me until I saw him drive off in a car in which a young woman had arrived to visit him. She had dark rings under her eyes, wore some raggedy clothing, and looked a bit like a slob, if I’m being honest. My first thought upon seeing her was that he might be selling drugs, which alarmed me. But the real red flag was waking up before my alarm clock went off the next morning, and seeing not her, but Jeff leave the apartment, and witnessing him drive off in her car. I never saw her or that white car ever again.

I tried my best to find a rational explanation for that—anything that didn’t involve him being a drug dealer and murdering his guest. How could I have just called the cops on him? Jeff always paid his rent on time and was never a burden. He even asked one time if it was okay for him to buy and install a new washing machine in his apartment, rather than asking me to take care of that.

The suspicions never went away, though. They only got worse. Whenever I was at home and I heard a car pull up, I watched Jeff’s visitors with heightened awareness. I started wondering how paranoid I must have looked if anybody had noticed me staring out the window, with the lights off and peeking through a crack between the curtains. I started taking notes, just in case my worst fears came true and I’d ever have to tell the cops.

Without exception, I never saw his guests leave. At ungodly hours, Jeff would drive away with their vehicles if they hadn’t arrived on foot in the first place. One time, I decided to use a sick day and stay up all night to see him return after driving off in someone else’s car.

Sure enough, I saw Jeff returning hours later. On foot. He looked up at my window where I stood, watching him. And although I think it’s impossible that he could have seen me—we didn’t lock eyes or anything—it sure felt like he did. My heart pounded so hard it wanted to explode. Seeing him glance up at my window scared the hell out of me and I stopped spying on Jeff for the next few weeks.

He never bothered me, but this whole situation was beginning to plague me. I started having awful nightmares and I felt like I needed to do something. I didn’t feel like sharing the burden, so I didn’t tell anybody about this. I didn’t want to sound like I’m crazy. I didn’t want to be laughed at. All I knew was that I couldn’t go on like this.

I started losing sleep which caught up to me at work. It was a problem. I had trouble staying awake at my desk. The days went by in a blur and it reminded me of my year of heavy drinking, especially in the phase before I lost my previous job. One day, I stood before the door to Jeff’s apartment, master key in hand.

I remember trembling. Worse, I remember the weird smell.

I hadn’t gotten close to the door to the bottom-level apartment in a long time. Just a few steps away from it was this smell. Pungent and sweet, it reminded me of my friend’s grandparents’ home—which taught me that this was the smell of moth balls. There was also a hint of alcohol in the air, but not your garden variety for drinking—more like the medical sort which you use as rubbing alcohol.

“Hey.”

Judging by Jeff’s facial expression, I must have jumped a whole foot off the ground in shock. He sported a smile somewhere in between what must have been pleasant surprise and—what I think now—sadism.

Carrying one of those recyclable grocery bags in one hand, he walked up to me and to the door while asking, “Anything I can do for you?”

I stammered out some lies about wanting to see if he needed anything. As I lied my way through the conversation, I fabricated this story of wanting to go visit some relatives for a week, and that I was just checking up on him as well as informing him in case anything came up. I couldn’t tell if Jeff was buying my crap, but I was already considering what to do come next week to make my lie convincing—using up some sick days and going on a short vacation didn’t sound like the worst idea to me.

Jeff insisted he needed nothing, and thanked me for being such a good home owner. He really appreciated the privacy, he said. What I didn’t realize while I stumbled through this phony exchange, was that I unintentionally bought enough time for him to open the front door to his apartment.

That sweet pungent smell really hit my nose hard when he did. It burned in my nostrils. I could feel them flare and I knew he saw it as his gaze swept down to my nose and back up into my eyes as we talked.

As it was winter and already after dark, and he had no lights on inside, I couldn’t really make out any details inside his apartment. It just seemed like a lot of motes of dust floated in the air.

I saw something move inside. About the size of a chihuahua or a cat, I couldn’t tell. It peered out to the entrance where we stood and the dim light from the street reflected on a set of small eyes. The thing darted around a corner and into the living room, out of sight. When Jeff flicked the entry hall’s light switch on, there was nothing there.

But I knew what I had seen. And the shiver down my spine, and my jumble of thoughts afterwards told me that it was no dog or cat. Furthermore, I had never seen Jeff bring home any pets, and I sure as hell never heard any noises from his apartment to suggest such a presence.

He caught me staring into the entrance and quickly locked up behind him. The smile on his face didn’t reach his eyes anymore, and I was seriously afraid now.

I really did end up going on a short vacation the week after that. Just packed up and went on a cross-country road trip. Saw the Grand Canyon. Couldn’t get my damned mind off of the weird things that were piling up. At the very least, I wasn’t having any nightmares. Funny enough, I slept like a baby in the motels and hotels where I laid my head down to rest, even though I always used to have trouble sleeping on travels or in other people’s homes when I was younger.

So I couldn’t clear my head or make sense of all I’d been witnessing with Jeff, but I had reached a decision. I would wait for him to dispose of a visitor’s vehicle one night, and sneak into his apartment to find out what he’s hiding there.

I had to get rid of Jeff. I had to find something in there that would justify calling the cops on him.

It was a good idea, but my plan didn’t work. The simple reason was that I didn’t see Jeff have any visitors in the following days. Or weeks. I was now losing sleep but for a different reason: I was watching Jeff come and go to buy groceries once every couple of days, observing his every move and waiting to see him do anything incriminating, much like that wheelchair-bound guy in that Hitchcock movie. But he never did anything downright suspicious in and of itself. I seriously began to wonder if I wasn’t going crazy; if I had really experienced all these things.

I would check my own door’s locks twice or three times. I worried he might visit me when I’m sleeping. And I worried that his weird pet might become a problem.

Instead of just watching, I listened more. The more I paid attention, the more Jeff’s apartment was as quiet as a tomb—I heard more from neighbors a house away. I don’t think I ever heard him watching any television. I found it bizarre that he spent so much time at home in complete silence.

Alcohol in public places stared back at me, as if it was taunting me to drink it. While I struggled to resist the temptation, I constantly wondered if I hadn’t long caved in and been lying to myself, that all the weirdness of the past months was to blame on me relapsing and fooling myself into thinking I’d been sober all that time. That’s how messed up I felt.

So I changed my plan. I just had to. His grocery runs were much shorter than whenever he had gotten rid of visiting cars, but I had to make do. It gave me about thirty minutes if I wanted to be cautious and err on the shorter side of things.

I set my phone’s alarm clock to alert me in ten minutes, because that would have to do. I took along the largest kitchen knife, just in case Jeff’s pet was something dangerous that might attack me.

And I went down to his door once he left to go shopping one Tuesday. The smell was there and it was even stronger this time. So sharp and surreal that it made me feel a bit light-headed.

Again, I trembled. I shook like a worthless twig in a tornado. At first, my hand shook so badly that I couldn’t even get the key into the lock, then I almost dropped the keys altogether. Third try did the trick and I swung the door open, holding the knife in front of me like some idiot in a horror movie who was about to die.

It was broad daylight but the inside of his apartment was draped in pitch black darkness, as if he had covered up all the windows to prevent light from getting in. Not a single light was on. Further down the hall, I saw eyes, at the height of a cat, again. But it was not just one pair, it was several. I stopped counting after ten pairs of eyes. They stared at me, never blinking, but they moved. I realized they weren’t just reflecting sunlight from outside, they were kind of glowing.

Instead of shying away from me like the last time, more of them gathered in the darkness back there. Watching me. Then they crept towards me, closer and closer, and I began to see silhouettes and outlines, then clearer shapes as they came closer to the light. And to this day, I couldn’t really tell you what they were.

They moved on all fours but looked humanoid. Not like toddlers, but thin and lithe, somehow emaciated but strong in their motions. Their fingers and toes were long and clawed, clicking on the hardwood floors. They made no other sounds. They had strange mouths that split sideways and antennas on their head, like insects.

I must have been frozen with terror. I recall the foul taste on my tongue as I stood there, mouth agape, hyperventilating, and my heart pounding so hard that it wanted to escape through my gullet and jump right out of my own damned skin.

These awful creatures took their time to creep closer. They never got close enough for me to really see them fully. I never saw enough light on them to be able to tell you the texture of their skin. But I can tell you this, they looked dusty. Like the dust was flaking off of them, like they had been wallowing in a pile of dry dirt.

The fucking look of them still haunts me in my nightmares and even in my waking hours when I try to picture them. They stared at me and I knew they looked hungry. I can’t explain why, but I sensed a ravenous hunger from them. Or my mind made that up—I don’t really care to distinguish.

What saved my life was my alarm clock going off. My ten minute warning. These things jolted backwards and scurried away from me, keeping their eyes locked onto mine. But the sudden beeping sounds from my pocket frightened them and they retreated.

“Shit,” I heard Jeff say behind me.

I spun around just to see him drop his bag with his groceries all tumbling out onto the asphalt. Bottles of rubbing alcohol, boxes of moth balls, and stacks of packaged raw meat.

He looked as surprised and terrified as I felt that moment, but I had no time to really let that sink in. The world spun around me and I felt like throwing up—the overwhelmingly pungent smell, the nightmare creatures behind me, and feeling trapped in between Jeff and those horrid things. I could feel their presence behind me. I wanted to turn and look at them, as if that would stop them from creeping up on me, but I couldn’t turn my back on Jeff now.

“You weren’t supposed to see this,” he said in a trembling voice.

He lunged at me and I stabbed him in the belly with my knife. He grabbed my knife by the blade but I pulled back and stabbed him several times more until he stumbled past me into the apartment. I remember the look of shock on his face as he saw his own blood on his hands. He collapsed just inside the door and crawled deeper into the bowels of his apartment.

Those creatures shied back further, almost disappearing into the darkness. Except for those eyes. Those fucking eyes, they stared at Jeff and me, like frightened children. He reached out a hand towards them and gurgled something, but I couldn’t make sense of it. I thought I had injured him so badly that he couldn’t speak clearly anymore, but whenever I think back to it I have to wonder if it wasn’t some sort of alien language. I feel sick again, just writing about all of this now.

I slammed the door shut behind him and locked it.

I don’t know how I didn’t panic, but the things I did next make me wonder if I didn’t have it in me to become a serial killer. Sure, my heartbeat was racing a million miles a minute and I felt like I was seeing myself from the outside. But without running, I gathered up Jeff’s groceries and put them in my car. I hosed down the driveway to clean up whatever blood of Jeff’s had spilled there. I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting to see Jeff’s door open and him come out at me with a vengeance, those things in tow, but none of that ever happened.

Once I’d gotten all that out of the way, I packed a traveling suitcase and fled.

I didn’t just go somewhere to clear my head, I fled the country. I obtained a new identity and started a new life. I somehow succeeded at leaving all of this behind me, riding on wings of despair and fueled by the nightmares that want to follow me for the rest of my life. I’m poor now, but I’m alive, and I haven’t experienced any such thing ever again. So here I am, writing this story and getting it published to make a little bit of money on the side.

And also to warn you. If you see any of the thing I’ve described, you’ll know. You’ll know how to handle the situation better than I did.

I don’t know what happened to Jeff and I don’t know if I’m a wanted murderer now. I don’t very much care to find out. I stay away from cryptozoology crap, I avoid anything even remotely related to aliens, the supernatural, or religion. I don’t know what I encountered here—what festered in the apartment, and what might still be there. I don’t want to know.

But what I do know is that you need to pay attention.

—Submitted by Wratts

[jojotier]

The circumstances of Igogusa’s death don’t sit right with me.

So we have 3 versions of the story of what happened to Igogusa. Let’s review what we know:

1. Igogusa married into a wealthy family and left Sado Island forever (shown to be false by a messenger during the Russo-Japanese War, but it’s hinted that this messenger may work for Tsurumi.) Tsurumi says that this story is false.

2. Igogusa killed herself out of grief after hearing that Tsukishima had died. (It’s unclear if this is how she actually died, as her “body” is only found later, underneath Tsukishima’s father’s house. How did it get there if it was suicide?) Tsurumi doesn’t say whether this is true or not.

3. Igogusa was murdered, seemingly by Tsukishima’s father. (This one was the implied story, when the messenger told Tsukishima that her bones were under his father’s house.) Tsurumi doesn’t say whether this is true or not.

From chapter 149, we know that Igogusa’s body was found directly after Tsukishima’s capture. 

And from chapter 150, we know that Tsurumi, as well as everyone else, saw the body.

Notice the line “Everyone saw her being dug up.” Meaning, Tsurumi was there when the body was found in Tsukishima’s father’s house. 

Still, there’s a few things about this story that seem off to me. Let’s go through the list of possible scenarios one at a time, because, in short: I think Tsurumi might have more of a hand in how she died than we know.

Or else, I think Tsurumi had a hand in placing the body.

First and foremost, let’s ask the question- is Igogusa really dead? Or really, the question would be, if she showed back up in the narrative, what would happen? 

Scenario 1: Igogusa is really alive.

Let’s say she hypothetically is alive- Noda wouldn’t leave that dramatic piece as a footnote. If Igogusa is alive, she will come back into the story in the future, either actually married or showing that she’d run away. And it isn’t at all unreasonable to think that she’d run: just look at this odd little exchange in 150.

“I love you for calling me by my name... and to me, your hair is lovely too. So I’ll beat up anyone who makes fun of it.”

“That’s why they all hate you, Hajime.”

Now this line can be taken two ways- either Igogusa is criticizing Tsukishima for standing up for himself or declaring that he’ll hurt others who hurt her, or she’s taking part of the blame for why the townsfolk hate Tsukishima.

I’m a little more inclined to think that it’s a mix of both, both since the townspeople seemed to hold some ire for her too (”She had wild, unruly hair... the people called her “Igogusa” to tease her”) and since both she and Tsukishima had already planned on running away after he returned from the Sino-Japanese War. She might have had her things already packed. But she also might have been criticizing the fact that he was so hellbent on fighting others over her, which she doesn’t want.

So let’s say that Igogusa runs away. If she’s alive, Noda will use her again... and then Tsurumi will find out. Tsukishima will find out that Tsurumi’s lied to him all this time, and that he could’ve always had Igogusa back, which would be a pretty good catalyst for his defecting from Tsurumi’s side.

Now, let it be clear that Tsukishima is Absolutely Essential to Tsurumi’s schemes. He’s a consistently and forever loyal man, willing to do just about anything in Tsurumi’s service without much maintenance needed. He holds the respect of others, like Koito, and doesn’t usually talk back. He acts as a good casual link between Tsurumi and wide-eyed fanboys like Koito- a middle man not blindsided by Tsurumi’s manipulative charisma. If Tsukishima leaves, a crucial cog in his schemes is missing.

So why would Tsurumi take the chance of leaving Igogusa alive?

Strikeout Scenario 1. Igogusa must be dead because if she isn’t, she’s too much of a threat to Tsurumi.

But that leaves the question: Did she kill herself, or was she murdered? 

Scenario 2: Igogusa killed herself. 

Perhaps blaming herself, Igogusa goes to the sea and drowns herself. Note: This is the version of the story that everyone in Sado assumed, which is... a little odd, don’t you find? Even if Igogusa might not have been well liked in the village, she presumably had parents who might have at least cared somewhat for her. Even if they knew her affiliation with Tsukishima, I doubt their animosity for him would make them see her as evil.

And then there’s the fact that, throughout Tsukishima’s life, he’s been known as the murderer’s son. The villagers thought that they had a murderer in their midst.

So that begs the question... why did they not immediately suspect the town murderer, Tsukishima sr?

I find the wording of this extremely odd. She went missing, and then her shoes were found on the shore. Logically, that doesn’t necessarily mean suicide- anyone can lose their shoes when spending a lot of time on the beach, or else perhaps they were swept away by the tide. It’s a very purposefully vague way of saying she killed herself.

(Note: We also should not discount the cultural significance of this line, since abandoned shoes are a symbol in Japanese media of suicide. So while this seems intentionally vague, it could very actually be meant to be taken as extremely explicit confirmation that Igogusa did, indeed, kill herself.)

So, either the shoes were the only thing that the villagers found, or else an eyewitness may have come forward. 

Why wouldn’t an eye witness be mentioned to Tsukishima? Perhaps it was to spare his feelings on it all, since it seemed that by the time he returned as a war veteran who very obviously was trying to change his ways, that they may have changed their minds about him. Perhaps there was one. But let’s hypothetically say there was.

Let’s say that the eyewitness saw Igogusa go to the shore. This on its own doesn’t appear to be a surefire indication of her suicide- after all, Tsukishima and Igogusa are depicted many times as being by the sea, perhaps as a secret meeting place. It would make sense that Igogusa might go to this place for comfort, or to think. But let’s take it a step further and say that the fictional eyewitness saw her jump. Easy- case closed. Igogusa killed herself.

But that leaves just one odd detail.

If Igogusa killed herself, why would her body be underneath Tsukishima’s father’s house? 

Scenario 3: Igogusa was murdered.

It’s highly unlikely that he dragged Igogusa’s body there. But, he also seems to have been wanting to hold Tsukishima back: just look at how Tsukishima himself describes it.

So his father’s behavior in spreading the rumor of his death is likely not new to Tsukishima. It’s very likely that Tsukishima’s father deliberately held him back from many things, growing up- but that’s a meta for another time. Tsukishima’s father would stand to gain absolutely from murdering Igogusa. He’d take away Tsukishima’s will to live and motivation to leave, all in one fell swoop. 

So, it’s case closed yet again. Igogusa was killed. It was a tragedy for all involved.

However... I have one simple problem with everything.

Who identified Igogusa’s body?

Sam Jojotier, I hear you say, really? Is this the one detail you want to hone in on?

And I say to you, yes, yes absolutely. 

Let’s recall the circumstances of Tsukishima initially finding out about Igogusa’s death. He’s out on the battlefield, where he and Tsurumi could die at all time. The one who tells him is hinted at being one of Tsurumi’s men. 

Now, from the man’s shocked expression, he didn’t know Tsukishima was under Tsurumi’s employ. From the way he speaks, it seems that Tsukishima has become somewhat of a folkstory, even in his own hometown. “There’s nobody in my generation who doesn’t know about Tsukishima Hajime.” Very likely, it was a cautionary tale- because the young man gives no indication that he’s been told the story of what happens after Tsukishima reaches death row.

From his seeming age, he himself wasn’t there. But Tsukishima knows that Tsurumi was. And why wouldn’t Tsurumi keep tabs on how Sado is doing, if only because he doesn’t want the townspeople to know that the murderer’s son, a murderer himself, has been sprung from death row?

And how do we know that First Lieutenant Tsurumi had contact with the body?

He had to have been, because if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to cut off a piece of Igogusa’s hair. 

What else do we know about the body?

- No autopsy is mentioned. - None of the other townspeople are mentioned. - Igogusa’s parents aren’t mentioned. - The only character we absolutely know was around the body was Tsurumi Tokushirou.

Which raises one final question... was the body underneath Tsukishima’s father’s house really Igogusa?

Regardless of how Igogusa died, this leaves two questions:

- If she killed herself, how did that body get under the house? - If it was a murder... who really killed her?

And in both cases, I believe Tsurumi’s involved.

(Now’s the part where we get into wild speculation)

If she killed herself, it would be easy enough for Tsurumi to stash her body underneath Tsukishima’s father’s house, if only because the knowledge that Tsukishima had been the cause of her committing suicide might have driven Tsukishima to suicide himself. Much easier- much less of a chance of his right-hand offing himself- if he makes her death look like no fault of his own.

But wait, you may be saying, what’s this about the body possibly not being Igogusa’s? Why would Tsurumi want to plant another person’s body? Could he have even pulled that off?

The short answer to the last question is, he absolutely could have. Just find another corpse, and then chop it up so that nothing discernable is left except for, perhaps, the hair and similar features- after all, he’s making this murder seem to be at the hands of Tsukishima’s father, and the townspeople supposedly had quite a few nasty rumors about him. How are we supposed to know that some of their stories may or may not have contained detail about how he loved torturing and mutilating his victims?

See the above reason on why, though- he had to make it seem as if Igogusa was murdered. If she killed herself, she would likely have fallen into the sea and begun to decompose. Since she likely wasn’t swept away into the open water, which would slow the rate of decomposition (since cold, running, salty water tends to slow the body’s rate of decomposition), because if she were her body wouldn’t have ever been found, she likely remained in the water near the cliff. 

The thing about a waterlogged body, however, is that eventually, they begin to bloat something fierce. Depending on how much bacteria might have flourished within her decaying body, Igogusa’s corpse would have filled up with gas. Her torso would rise to the surface first, making her easy to spot- but she would be nearly unrecognizable. That’s not to say anything of the marine life that would have taken up nigh instantaneously inside of her bloated body, eating away at her flesh as a new ecosystem.

It’d be pretty hard to use her corpse as a murder victim’s corpse if she stayed in the water all that time. 

Let’s say, however, that it was murder most foul. Well, hell, it still couldn’t have been Tsurumi who killed her himself- after all, Igogusa disappeared ten days before Tsukishima returned, and it’s very likely that Tsurumi returned at the same time that Tsukishima did. 

However... he still very well could have killed her indirectly. We know that there are at least 2 more 7th Division members- lovely Ariko and gun-toting Kikuda- who we don’t have a backstory for. Who knows how many more men Tsurumi could have had in his network to send out to Sado, and who knows how many men he had seduced into doing the dirty deed?

So what does all this mean?

Well, for one thing, it means that Tsurumi is a diabolical bag of dicks. But we all kinda knew that already.

More importantly... what would happen if Tsukishima knew just how involved Tsurumi might have been?

Or maybe I’m being paranoid. But knowing Tsurumi...

tl;dr: I think Igogusa’s death was suspicious as hell, and Tsurumi almost certainly had a larger part in it than he lets on.

[the-desolated-quill]

Demons Of The Punjab - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Let us now look at our first non-Chibnall episode this series. Demons Of The Punjab, written by Vinay Patel. 

Curious about her grandmother’s past, Yasmin persuades the Doctor to take them to India in 1947 only to discover that the man her grandmother is marrying isn’t her grandfather, but a Hindu man named Prem. What follows is quite possibly the most well written and emotionally charged Who historical story I think I’ve ever seen.

Honestly this comes as something of a relief. I confess when the giant alien bats showed up, screeching and teleporting all over the place like something out of a tacky horror film, I was worried. Chris Chibnall and Malorie Blackman showed remarkable restraint with their episode Rosa, focusing solely on Rosa Parks and the oppressive society she was forced to endure without letting the sci-fi elements intrude or distract from the narrative. With this in mind, an amateur production of ‘Attack of the Killer Bat People’ trouncing all over partitioned India doesn’t exactly seem like a good follow up to me. Thankfully they don’t go that route. Turns out that the Thijarians (not the Vaginas, as I first misheard them) are just a massive red herring. They’re not alien invaders. They’re just travelling psychopomps comforting the dead. Presumably they’re the basis for the numerous death deities that have appeared throughout many cultures and civilisations. It’s a nice idea. Granted the episode would have worked just as well without them, but it’s still a good twist on the monster of the week format nonetheless.

Patel quite rightly focuses on the characters and historical setting. Demons Of The Punjab is refreshing in more ways than one. It’s a historical, but it’s not set in Britain or America. Some people (let’s call them idiots) may complain that the show is getting ‘too PC’, but I for one am quite interested in the history of India. It’s about time we delved into the past of another country and another culture. New Who has spent so much time in Victorian London in recent years, I’m surprised the Doctor doesn’t just rent a holiday home there. It’s also nice to have an episode that isn’t afraid to point out that the British Empire was... well... a bit of a bastard, to put it mildly. The Moffat era in particular was very much guilty of romanticising British history (the most notable example being Winston Churchill, presented as a cuddly leader and the Doctor’s bezzie mate when in reality he was a colossal racist and arguably the very epitome of British imperialism in the early twentieth century). Patriots and anglophiles can’t help but think of Britain in positive terms, seeing the British Empire as some kind of noble ideal. The truth of the matter is the British Empire wasn’t some Utopian peace keeping force uniting the world. It was a bunch of white colonialists taking other people’s land and resources and not giving a tally-ho fuck what the ‘alien races’ thought.

The partition of India is quite possibly one of the most petty and irresponsible things we as a country have ever done. Crudely dividing the country into regions before picking up their ball and going home, leaving the native Indians to sort it out for themselves. What angers me is that I was never actually taught this in school. I learned about the partition of India years later through fucking Wikipedia. And you’d think this is something we ought to know. Like the Atlantic slave trade, this isn’t ancient history. This happened relatively recently and the after effects are still being felt today.

So not only am I’m glad we’ve got an episode like this, I’m also glad that Patel chooses to explore the partition of India in a very intelligent and respectful way. Like with previous episodes, Demons Of The Punjab is very intimate and small scale. It’s not about the Doctor combating a massive threat. It’s about how a massive threat affects the lives of this one family.

Demons Of The Punjab has a stellar cast to play Yasmin’s extended family. Amita Suman does an excellent job as the younger version of Yasmin’s grandmother Umbreen. Something this series has been really good at for the most part is finding that humanity at the core of the stories. It’s not about the aliens. It’s about the people. Demons is not about the space bats. It’s about this young woman struggling to compromise between committing to her Hindu fiance and staying faithful to her Muslim faith in the wake of rising political and societal tension, and Suman portrays this perfectly. It’s an incredibly powerful and moving performance and it’s her character you feel for the most.

Then there’s Shane Zaza as Prem, quite possibly the nicest guy in the fucking world and definitely didn’t deserve his final fate. He’s appalled by the rioting and infighting, saying how this wasn’t what he fought for in the war. Despite being confused and scared by the ‘demons’, he still accompanies the Doctor and Ryan and protects them from harm. But most importantly, he clearly loves Umbreen dearly, preparing to share and adapt his beliefs to hers and vice versa. Throughout the episode, Prem and Umbreen’s relationship is presented as the ideal. A love for the ages. How the world should be, transcending belief systems and cultural barriers. This could have become quite sickly in the wrong hands, bu thankfully the episode never over-eggs the pudding. We like this couple and we like Prem, which is what makes his death at the end one of the most heartbreaking in all of New Who and the fact that this comes at the hands of his own brother makes it all the more tragic.

Hamza Jeetoa’s performance as Manish was exceptional. From the start you know there’s something not quite right with him as he seems to buy into the India/Pakistan border quite enthusiastically, but I assumed (perhaps in my naivety) that the Doctor would persuade him to accept his new sister in law Umbreen over the course of the story. Of course that’s not the case. Like I said, the aliens are the red herring. The real villain is Manish. Except... it’s not. While Prem was out fighting for the Brits, a disillusioned and confused Manish was left alone, leaving him a prime target for radicalisation. So as disgusting and horrifying as his actions are, it’s hard to truly hate him because he’s not a bad person. You do see occasional glimpses of brotherly affection between him and Prem, a brief window into their relationship before the partition, and it’s this that humanises him and makes him an effective antagonist. Yes he’s killed people, yes he killed his own brother, yes his views are downright poisonous, but he is in many ways just another victim of this turbulent time. He’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of rigid belief systems and how easy it is to indoctrinate and radicalise the young and disenfranchised. Jeetoa does a great job selling this character without tipping over into panto. He’s not some rabid bigot foaming at the mouth. He’s a confused young man who has willingly bought into this anti-Islamic dogma because of his own frustrations toward the British, He feels like an actual person. It’s this that makes the ending truly shocking.

I don’t think there’s any need to talk about the main cast. They are predictably good. Jodie Whittaker continues to blow me away as the Doctor. Her eulogy at the wedding, her excitement and enthusiasm when celebrating the night before with Yaz and Umbreen, and her sorrow and disgust when Manish shoots Prem are all memorable moments showing Whittaker’s range as an actor. Graham and Ryan don’t have as much to do this episode, although they do still have their moments (the scene where Graham hugged Prem and told him what a good man he was made me cry. God, Bradley Walsh can act!). This really is Yasmin’s episode and it’s about time too. My one complaint I’ve had throughout this series so far has been that Yaz has felt largely superfluous. She’s not a bad character by any means. It’s a problem common with many of the ensemble casts Doctor Who has had over the years. There’s always at least one cast member reduced to being the spare part. So it was great to see Yaz finally get a chance in the spotlight and Mandip Gill rises to the occasion as she portrays her character’s internal conflict. Obviously she doesn’t want Prem to die. He’s a nice guy and her grandmother clearly loves him, but he’s not her grandfather. In order for Yaz to exist in the future, Prem has to die. I love episodes where the Doctor and his companions can’t interfere as they often serve as great moral dilemmas as well as the means of exploring internal strife. Watching Prem die, knowing she can’t change it for risk of damaging her own timeline, is painful and gut-wrenching, and Gill gives her best performance to date.

Demons Of The Punjab I think is my favourite episode so far this series because it shows just how flexible the Doctor Who format is and what kind of stories you can tell. This is a very human story that packs a massive dramatic punch and has great relevance to today. As I said, the effects of the partition of India are still being felt today and the radicalisation of young people is something we’ve sadly become all too familiar with (see ISIS and the alt-right). It’s what makes this episode’s central theme, to love and respect everyone regardless of cultural differences, all the more poignant. If Demons Of The Punjab teaches us anything, it’s that we could use a lot more Prems in the world right now.

[frankcastled]

So, I was drunk and told people to fight me on facebook about the MCU, and people did and this is my response to one of those people who said, “the villains are trash.” I just decided to post it on here for The Discourse. I love The Discourse. (Also, it explains why I refer to another person while writing this. I don’t feel like editing.)

So, your comment is super broad. I dunno if you’re referring to some villains or all of them, but I agree and disagree. Are all the villains in every movie perfect? No. Some of them have been underwhelming, that’s for sure. Malekith is a good example of this. And then on the opposite of the end of the same spectrum you have Loki, who is arguably the best villain. But let’s make him an exception to the rule, because he appears across multiple films and thus he has room to develop and grow as a villain and a character, even beyond the Thor films and so, like the heroes, he has a character arc that makes sense and just naturally makes him a good villain.  

But anyway, I’m assuming you’re talking about the infamous Marvel villain problem. Well known and although I don’t know the specifics of the argument, I’m going to pick out a few standalone villains who I think stand well on their own and actually present the heroes with real stakes.

First, Obadiah Stane. So, I think a fair argument can be made, that in a way, he is the catalyst for everything in the MCU. For one, there would be no Iron Man without Obadiah. I mean, he had Tony kidnapped, which is subsequently the reason Tony developed the Mark I in the first place! He’s the entire reason the Iron Man exists. In Civil War, we see the opposite effect: where Iron Man, as a result from mere existence, spawned a backlash. It’s pretty much the entire plot of Civil War: heroes create villains. But with Obadiah, he was a villain who created a hero, which I think is fascinating (and fine, a lot of stories follow this narrative, but in a world where superheroes are generally an accepted thing, it’s fascinating within this context). Not only that, but he has a history with Tony and with Tony’s father, Howard. Did the movie explore him fully and completely? No. That’s, I think, part of the problem with the villains in the MCU, most of them are given their one movie and because they are killed off, don’t have room to develop or grow the same way our protagonists do (again, the exception being Loki). However, I think Obadiah is also a great start for the MCU, plus the kind of villain who doesn’t like to get his hands dirty. He goes out of his way to have other people do his dirty work: having Raza be the one to kidnap and kill Tony, trying to get the scientists to build an arc reactor, etc. However, at the end of the day he realizes that he has to do it himself and does exactly that.

Stakes: He got his own Iron Man suit, makes him and Tony evenly matched. Perfect introductory villain.

Second, Red Skull from Captain America. I’m not even entirely sure that I even like him as a villain, so much as I like what he does for the movie and for developing Captain America as a character. But, I’m gonna throw him out there, because I’m already writing an essay here and may as well go full force. So, Red Skull first and foremost serves as a foil for Captain America. He got injected with the serum, etc, etc and yet here he is, the bad guy to Captain America’s good guy. He is the, “it was important for the super soldier experiment to pick the appropriate person to do tests on because this is what happens if we pick the wrong person” scenario. He is the “what if” scenario. He is like the dark side of Captain America. I think that’s important to establish for Captain America as a character because so much of the first movie is all about pushing his character and motivations and the Red Skull also kind of serves as a cautionary tale of, “this is what happens when you get greedy and power hungry and search out power for the wrong reasons.” But, it also establishes why he’s a formidable foe for Captain America. He has the same abilities as him. He is a match which also serves to show that an ordinary person could not take Captain America time (yeah, yeah we see this demonstrated multiple times when he takes out 20 henchmen on his own, but whatever). Again, I don’t know if any of these points necessarily make Red Skull a good villain, but I also think it was necessary for him to the the first villain (but also he’s a nazi and yeah this movie came out ages before, umm, well today’s current political climate, but suddenly Captain America straight up fighting a nazi is relevant again, but I digress).

Stakes: Also enhanced with super soldier serum. Is literally Captain America, but the evil version. Perfect introductory villain.

Captain America: Winter Soldier. I’m including this movie, because the villain here isn’t the traditional Marvel villain and I think that’s part of the reason why people love this movie so much. It’s complex and explores something very real and tangible (in my humble opinion, I think it’s slightly overrated and I have movies higher than this on my list, but I loved this one nonetheless). So, we’re made to believe the Winter Soldier is the villain. Makes for great drama and I would say a good twist, but considering the trailers gave it away— Anyway, he starts off as the villain, but as the movie progresses, lo and behold we find out that it’s really Hydra that’s behind all this!!!! *GASP* Not only that, but somehow Hydra is still around. And I’m not going to get too wordy, because Hydra ends up falling into the Loki category of villain, in that, they become a well developed and established organization being developed across multiple films, but hey! Still, they count as a valid villain and the fact that Hydra infiltrates S.H.I.E.L.D. and manages to compromise them, I feel speaks volumes for how powerful they are.

Stakes: Is an en entire organization whom Steve Rogers has history with and thus it dissolves his trust of others in general. Of course there are stakes.

Next we have one of the newer entries to the MCU: Spider-Man, or rather, The Vulture. So, I think part of what makes him a brilliant villain, maybe only second to Loki, is that he is so damn relatable. Which is the point. He represents the blue collar worker and the struggle they encounter in today’s world. He gets his job taken away (by one of the HEROES no less!) and is left being obsolete. Machines and technology are basically doing what he does (because are we really going to believe that Tony Stark has physical and living people doing the jobs that his Iron Legion can feasibly do or any other specialized drone that he may have made to do clean up) and that’s kind of the one thing you hear a lot about today: people are being replaced by machines! People with a limited skillset are having their jobs taken by machines! They’re being left behind and forgotten because they have never done any other job but the one job they just had taken away from them. The Vulture presents such a modern day dilemma for so many people, especially nowadays (coughminerscough). And so the Vulture forces us to question a lot. Do the ends justify the means? How far is too far? How bad is he when he was literally doing this to keep a roof over his family’s head, a family we know about and grow to care about prior to the big reveal and thus compromising how we feel? He’s one of the more complex villains I would argue. His entire character arc is about being able to obtain materials to make weapons so that he can sell them and literally keep food on the table and a roof over his family’s head (hey, remember which other famous character was a weapons manufacturer and made his living off selling weapons and facilitating war? Hmmm, he might have popped up once or twice in this movie already…). Ultimately, yeah, we know what he’s doing isn’t great. He sells to only criminals (that we know of), I’m sure part of it is out of necessity considering that he kept all the debris illegally, and what better way to make sure your client base doesn’t talk than to make sure they’re already criminals who aren’t going to go blabbing since they live their lives outside of the law, anyway. I could go on, but I won’t.

Stakes: Well, Peter Parker is a high school kid with powers and the Vulture has alien technology and is an adult, so pretty evenly matched. Arguably the Vulture has less morality than Peter Parker, as well, and thus will aim for the kill, unlike Peter who obviously aims to keep him alive.

The living planet, Ego. Okay, so this one, again like Red Skull, I’m not even entirely sure if he makes a good villain, or because I like the purpose he serves and the way he drives the story. But, he’s gonna get thrown on here. So, this was never a secret, but hey turns out Ego is Peter Quill’s father! Hurray! How happy for Peter Quill. Ego ends up being the opposite of Winter Soldier, in that he is meant to be a good guy until he’s revealed to be the villain. I think this is part of makes the second Guardians movie really compelling. There isn’t a real villain until the final reveal. Even the Sovereign, who arguably are something of a secondary antagonist, are more of a nuisance to the Guardians rather than an outright villain. Anyway, part of the whole Guardians’ storyline is the concept of family (if the use of Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain didn’t give it away, then I don’t know what would have) and that’s why Ego makes such a suitable villain for this movie. Peter’s own biological parentage isn’t really family, not in the same way Yondu was and not in the same way the Guardians are to Peter. Ego is a necessary villain because it makes an incredibly relevant point, that hey, your family isn’t actually who is related to you by blood, but about who you make your family. That people who share blood with you can be the people who make you miserable, but that does not mean you have any obligation to them. Honestly, the movie said it best, “Sometimes, the thing you’ve been looking for your whole life is right there beside you all along.”

Stakes: Literally a god. Does not get harder to defeat than this. Someone straight up died, so.

Final villain, I swear. I thought having a nice variety of good and relevant villains was important for the discourse. Hela. (Huh, three of my villains from the three most recent films.) So, first I would like to point out, I think Hela was vastly underused. I don’t think she had much screen time and I think she should have had more, but that being said, I do think there was one very important thing that Hela did accomplish, and it honestly makes up for her lack of screen time. So, at the end of Ragnarok, you have everyone on the ship and Asgard has just turned into a fiery hellscape. Fun stuff. Taika then has this moment as Korg, where Korg talks about how they can rebuild Asgard because it has a foundation, etc. only to then have any semblance of a foundation blow up. It’s a joke. However, it’s a very important joke, (to be fair, the following of what I’m going to say kind of is a shot in the dark and based on only two viewings of this movie) I think part of the point of Korg making light of what has just happened, despite the seriousness of the situation (Thor no longer has a home. He has all these people with him that he needs to find a home for so they can rebuild their lives and start anew and that’s something very serious), but remember Hela’s entire arc in the movie? For the most of the movie, she talks about her life before Odin imprisoned her. There’s a scene where she destroys a mural and reveals another mural underneath that showed her and Odin conquering the world. She talks about all the conquests she and Odin have, building an empire (kind of sounds like white colonialism, if you ask me) and I think that’s kind of the point of her character? She reveals Asgard for what it is, a sham. She reveals Odin for who he was. She shows that the foundation of Asgard was built upon conquests and wars and that after she was imprisoned: lies. Ragnarok isn’t just about Asgard dying, but about Asgard having a fresh start. It’s the cyclical nature of what Ragnarok really is and I think it’s part of why Korg makes light of the whole situation. There was never really a foundation for Asgard. It was covered up and in the end, it was built on something dirty. Hela, while brief her appearance is, serves to expose all that. She was a villain because her father made her that way, that much is clear. She didn’t want to conquer Asgard because that’s what villains do, she wanted to conquer Asgard because that’s literally what she was told was true. She was the rightful successor, but also she probably truly believed that. In fact, you see her giving Asgard the chance to simply accept her (which, to be fair, from the POV of the people, that’s a lot to ask when they’ve literally never heard of her, so you can’t blame them, but you also can’t blame her) and she might have ruled with an iron fist, but again, that’s how she was raised. Wars and conquests, and in a way it makes her character arc kind of tragic. In all honesty, I kind of hope she ends up coming back because I think she’s fascinating (and I’ve heard that in the comics Thanos has a thing for her, and to be honest, I am here for the evil, villain couple).

Stakes: She is Thor’s sister, therefore is a goddess and is level with him in the sense they are both otherworldly beings. Also, she can create weapons from nothingness. Literally Thor and company can’t defeat her, they bring back the hell monster to get rid of her (and to be honest I am not even sure that she’s dead anyway). People died, people less powerful than Thor and friends.

Anyway, if you’ve made it this far, congratulations for making it through my rambling! Here’s are just how I think the villains stack up individually in terms of being awful to being excellent.

Terrible, glad they are dead. 3 out of 10 stars.

Tim Roth (Lmao, okay that’s the actor, but god knows what his character’s name is, I admit I’ve seen the Incredible Hulk like four times and it’s at the bottom of my MCU movie list)

Malekith

Okay, probably could have been better but the movie was good so I don’t care.

Whiplash + Justin Hammer

Killian Aldrich

Hovers in the middle of being “eh” to being “good.”

Kaecilius + Dormammu

I liked them, not sure of public opinion, I could defend in a fight.

Ronan the Accuser

Ultron

Darren Cross

Zemo

Villains I think are good and just wrote a literally essay about 

Obadiah Stane

Red Skull

Hydra

Ego

Vulture

Hela

The only collectively good villain in the MCU that most people agree on

Loki