#succsession spoilers | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

gemsofthegalaxy · 1 year

Text

I will also acknowledge Greg and Tom are doing things together, they are clearly scheming and plotting and frankly circling the bowl together, so it's not like nothing is going on with them. they are attempting to make moves (tho idk where they're going with it. Lmao.)

and, I don't agree that Tom seems overly annoyed by Greg or no more than usual. but it's simply not as funny or engaging as it used to be. Previously the intrigue with them was wondering if a scene would become insane out of nowhere, but now they just. talk. The crying phonecall in 4.3 was a nice moment and it was funny in 4.4 when Greg fumbled the roast so badly but this episode was really slim pickings, esp for Greg.

Tom's scenes with Shiv are fantastic to me, they always have been, but Greg's scenes with the sibs are just okay- there's no way they actually include him so it's just like. Okay. It might be better if they at least played off him- i could see a universe where Roman and Shiv string him along and fuck around with him, but they generally don't do that. If they had more time, it might be interesting but it's not like they're taking him for a ride this far into it.

I think another thing is, Tom and Greg are relatively safe... like everyone is worried about losing their jobs in the deal, but in the grand scheme of things, so fucking what? With the kids, being ousted from the company has an emotional impact. Tom and Greg were most interesting when they had more precarious positions and especially when they had the threats of jail and DOJ on them. I don't care much if Greg or Tom loses a job. Greg is almost too unimportant to fire, and Tom is a total cockroach in my interpretation of him, he'll be fine, inevitably he'd, like, find another job and a new wife and move on. Tom's scenes with Shiv at least have the effect of raising the emotional sword of damocles over his head because you know he cares about her.

I know Greg is a side character and Tom is in the supporting-main cast (as someone pointed out, he is pretty prominent in the marketing, not that I pay toooo much attention to that but it is a factor) but I can favor some plots and characters even if they're not a protagonist, and when a show is excellent you want it to be ALL good not just the A plot.

Lastly. Their plotline is NOT my only issue with the past couple episodes anyway. The most compelling kid is Roman right now, and while i liked Shiv's girlbossing, something with alllll of it just a bit... off... the pace is kinda funky feeling. we were all so hype and devastated about Logan's death and the placement in the season, but it seems like it might have taken the wind out of their sails a bit?

I withhold ultimate judgment until ep 10. Until then i will discuss stuff and hope for the best

#succsession spoilers #succession #tomgreg #sorry idk. pls dont be rude to me lmfao #long post

29 notes · View notes

ave1dragon · 7 months

Text

Ok, I got the Guide to the Dragon World and I'm gonna talk about it in full now.

Spoilers if you haven't read the book.

I feel about it the guide the same way everyone else does. Either I or the advertisements and delays hyped up the book too much, and I was expecting more in depth stuff, but the guide in itself is a 10/10.

I like the prolong, as it talks about how dragons lump the tribes into stereotypes and this book is a way to stop that, with stories from all the other tribes. I do wish the annotations from the other dragonets of destiny were more frequent.

The scorching story was fine, but would have been more impactful it we didn't already know the more detailed story.

Pyrrhia:

The maps are cool, very detailed, kind of wish it labeled the old Seawing Island palace, considering it labeled the old Nightwing palace.

Mudwings:

The Mudwing chapter is the most well done, with a story of the stereotypes of the Mudwings and then a note of the true life of the Mudwings, followed by two stories about things we heard about in the books, like the Mudwing Succsession crisis and how they found out about the blood red eggs being fireproof.

The Mudwing Succession story also tells us some extra things about mudwing life: Most Mudwing villages have a school and they have a naming ceremony to name themselves after they are old enough to know about Mudwing life.

Sepia's scroll does show one thing: we actually know a fair bit about Mudwing life, about as much as the Skywings or Sandwings, the problem is we don't spend any time with the Mudwings or their kingdom. Like we didn't know how they named themselves, but we also don't know about the Sandwing full moon festival or Skywing schooling, things that probably wouldn't come up outside of a guide like this.

Seawings:

Queen Coral still sucks. We do find out that Coral allied with Blister because Blister gave the Seawings treasure and battle plans and, most importantly, read and memorized all of Queen Coral's scrolls and said she loved them. Apperently Queen Coral is trying to tell everyone that the Seawings had a big hand in ending the war and were a part of the dragonet's plan.

Moray tells Queen Coral that Starflight might want some Seawing history written by someone other then Coral. I like how in this and Talons of Power, Moray doesn't just worship the grown Coral walks on, but actually disagrees with her sometimes and tries to tell her no.

Queen Coral tells us about some of her scrolls. Some we heard of, some we haven't, they were cool.

We also get some letters between Albatross and Queen Lagoon, they don't really tell us much we didn't know about.

We then get a scroll about learning the beginnings of Aquatic. It was alright, I don't really care about the Seawings all that much, but it was cool.

Turtle was assigned to write about Seawing customs, but he turned it in too late and had to send in a letter from his brother instead. That was rather annoying to me, "oh no we can't learn the full details about Seawing culture for some reason, lets just learn about hatching day events."

Anemone tells Tamarin about how she misses her and the Seawings main weakness is not being able to communicate with other dragons as well. Also we have blind scrolls now!

I don't really care about the Seawings that much, they're probably my least favorite Pyrrhian tribe.

Rainwings:

The Rainwing chapter starts with a story from Kinkajou about Silver, Glory's pet sloth, and how Silver met Glory and helped her. Silver is clearly a stand in for Kinkajou, it also has parentheses around notations of her talking to Moon about how to write a story, and isn't technically very well written. I really like the story. I'm not really someone who wants a new story with Kinkajou in the lead, but it was fun.

We then read the "Dangers of the Rainforest" scroll, with a few annotations from Glory about how the Rainforest isn't so dangerous and the Rainwings can be dangerous if they wanted to. I like how the scroll is one mentioned in the series, specifically The Hidden Kingdom, and is accurate to the description, it barely mentioned the Rainwings themselves.

Handsome tells Glory about the story of the Royal Rainwing Challenges and how they started. The Rainwings used to fight for the throne in the death matches that every other Pyrrhian tribe did, and then they went through eight queens in a month, and the ninth queen said we should stop the death fights, as if we kill all the strongest, smartest Rainwings, we won't have any smart, strong Rainwings left, so they devised different, non deadly challenges. We learn about a few more: The storytelling challenge, the cooking challenge, and the sloth taming challenge.

Jambu then tells us about different colors on Rainwings and what they mean. It also notes the usefulness of this, as if you are in trouble or if you feel bad, your friends will know and can help.

We then learn about how the Rainwings didn't know how to read and write for a while, but they did tell oral stories, either about history or just new, made up stories, and how Starflight realized how creative and deep the Rainwings could be.

However, in the past, the Rainwings could read and interacted with other dragons and got into wars, and then we read the letter about what happened to the Rainwings.

The letter is Python, the great-aunt of the current Rainwing queen, Queen Jacaranda, the granddaughter of Queen Anaconda, the Rainwing queen in Darkstalker's time. Python is upset that Jacaranda is abiding by the peace treaties and dismantling the army and saying that venom can no longer be used on other dragons. The Skywings took a lot of rainforest and killed about half the Rainwings, although Python says that they Anaconda would have fought even if she was the last Rainwing left. This does explain why the Rainwings are pacifists, but doesn't explain why they stopped reading or interacting with other tribes, I guess that was the fault of the queens Grandeur let on the throne, but everyone talks like the Rainwings fell apart a long time ago.

I do like how the Rainwings are written in this book compared to the Hidden Kingdom. The Hidden Kingdom has a problem of saying the Rainwings are bad for things that aren't bad at all, like not having a Rainwing palace, or Suntime, or not eating meat. Hidden Kingdom may have been trying to say at the end that the Rainwings are fine, they just need to still fight if nessesary, but I did not find it very clear.

The guide book tells us that the Rainwing traditions make sense actually, and even thought they can't read, they can still tell stories.

It also seems like the story of how the Rainwings changed was a bit retconned. In the third book, Grandeur said that they used to keep track of the royal eggs, but her daughters were useless, so they opened the throne to everyone, but then the only ones who signed up were bad queens. Earlier Grandeur said that in her day, the Rainwings used camoflauge to hid from tribes who wanted to take their rainforest and she wouldn't mind using her venom on the Nightwings, so I think the original plan was that the Rainwings fell apart with Grandeur, but then it was changed to show how the Rainwings aren't bad, just different.

Nightwings:

I enjoyed Tales of the Nightwings, but it is different from how the novels describe it. We didn't know much about it to be fair; it was Starflight's favorite scroll, it mentioned some stuff about Nightwing schools, and we found out it was all untrue after finding out Nightwings couldn't really read minds or see the future, at the time. This made it sound like it was a scroll about the fake life of the Nightwings, but instead it was a story about a Nightwing who didn't have any powers, got bullied, and then had a vision that saved everyone. This would be fine, but then the comment about none of it being true doesn't make sense. I get that they were talking about the powers in general, but its not written as a true story. I would have liked it more if it was a bunch of supposedly true stories about Nightwing life.

Moon tells Starflight how Nightwing powers work, we know all of it so I'm not gonna go over it.

Glory and Deathbringer talk to Mastermind about why Nightwings think the way they do.

Apparently some of the Rainwings are ready to forgive the Nightwings immediately, I hope these are the ones who weren't imprisoned because otherwise, why. At least he knows he did bad. Mastermind is kind of like Darkstalker in my eyes, a dragon who is bad and did bad things, but because he has a character outside of evil, some people don't think he's bad.

Nightwings are taught from birth that they are the best dragons genetically and because of their powers. Mastermind also seem surprised that the other tribes don't think that way about their tribes, at least not to that extent.

They didn't just ask the Rainwings for help because they knew almost nothing about them, and when they found out about Rainwing venom, they assumed the Rainwings were dangerous and were also afraid to show weakness, since they talked about how strong they were. It's interesting that in both this and Prisoners, most Nightwing take the Rainwings seriously, which makes me think that the Nightwings told everyone Rainwings were lazy to keep everyone away from the Rainwings.

The good of the Nightwings is their love of learning, and how they were the first tribe to develop a written language, and take medicine seriously, and they used to help the other tribes with their visions.

We then get a note from Fierceteeth about the new Nightwing colony, Renewal, for the purposes of starting their own tribe with their own queen instead of merging with the Rainwings.

Fierceteeth seems to try to make herself tougher then she is, talking about how hard it is to live here instead of the Rainforest, as if bragging, and how she says she doesn't care about Nightwing history, but the island was cool. The Nightwings have also become nocternal, waking up late in the day and hunting through the night and then goingg to sleep shortly after sunrise.

Fierceteeth is also interested in the theater, as no one on the island was ever taught anything artistic, just "science, superiority, and survival," which is interesting, the Nightwings are trying to put on a play, and Fierceteeth says she'll send Starflight some tickets if it works.

Also Fierceteeth has eggs, and she says Starflight is invited since he's the only family Fierceteeth has left. She seems excited about said eggs, which is not something I expected of her character. I think it cute and she seems to care about her brother more then she lets on. Also we learn the Skywings have big hatching day parties, probably courtecy of Queen Scarlet.

We then get a scroll from Renewal about Queen Vigilance's glass jubilee. Vigilance brought back the Full moon festival and has musicians play during it. The festival celebrates the gifts of the tribe. Each seer offers a future vision, and the mind readers share the thoughts of adoration to the queen. Queen Vigilance also made an island temple to the first nightwing librarians, and hopes to have the glass jubilee continue.

We can see that in the past, the Nightwings still though of themselves as the superior tribe, both in arts and science. I also like the inclusion of the island temple, no one seems to talk about the Nightwing temple in the discussion of religion. Also I like how this is clearly propaganda, I bet Vigilance's children are bad at playing and no one was thinking of her.

Sandwings:

Yeah, I'm with everyone else on the Sandwing chapter, it's the worst out of the book. It doesn't tell us anything about Sandwing life and culture.

We get a flyer asking if anyone knows about the missing treasure, the Desert Tiara, the Twilight necklace, the Sandwing Septer, and some assorted gold coins with Queen Oasis's face on them.

Then we see a letter from Sunny about Burn's creepy hall, the hall contained the white dragon with no wings that was said to be a Icewing Sandwing hybrid, but Sunny doesn't think so. She doesn't think their a Silkwing, because they only have two wingbuds, so either they're from a non heard of tribe, or an animus enchanted dragon. This is interesting, because I thought the white dragon was a Silkwing until graphic novel 5, when they just looked like a Icewing with no wings.

She also has a dragon bite viper skin, a fish tank full of odd looking fish, a blood red Mudwing egg she planed on destroying on the brightest night, but it never hatched, a Silkwing wing, and the Stuffed Nightwing, who bragged about having an animus object, the dreamvisitor, and wouldn't give it to Burn, so she had him killed, but she could never find the dreamvisitor because they swallowed it.

We did learn about some new treasure and more about the "hybrid" and the wing and how the Nightwing got here and about some more stuff in Burns collection, so there's that.

We then get Smolder's diary, from the first week after the death of Queen Oasis and how he raised Flower. This is my main problem with the chapter, the big story doesn't tell us anything new about the Sandwings. The Mudwing sucession scroll told us about Mudwing schools and how they get their names and royal life. The Skywing scroll of Queen Scarlet's husband told use about Skywing families and Queen Firestorm, but we don't get anything in Smolder's story we didn't already know. If we did, I would be more lenient to this chapter, but it doesn't

Tell us about the Full Moon festival, or the Sandwing animus gifts, or how Jerboa III met Queen Glacier or something. Burn's weirdling tower was a cool idea, but it's not enough.

#wof #wings of fire #i'll be updating this until it's finished #I can't finish it at the moment #mudwings #seawings #rainwings #nightwings #sandwings

26 notes · View notes