#they just keep making tweets that remind me of my favorite fictional characters its so crazy

[ghostlylicious]

moot always got the hit tweets on private

anyways yeah thats how i imagine their first conversation goes

[shihalyfie]

The 02 epilogue and “realism”

While the following thoughts have been something I’ve been thinking about for a very long time, the official Kizuna Twitter posted some interesting tweets this morning about the 02 epilogue that made me feel very much like I wanted to talk about this in detail today, so I’ve written this up. Considering how historically controversial the 02 epilogue is (or having an opinion on the 02 epilogue at all, really), I’m probably standing on thin ice by even talking about it, but I’ll do my best.

I think there’s no way getting around the fact that the 02 epilogue was really sudden for pretty much everyone -- it pretty much jumps at you without warning at the end of episode 50, a sudden 25-year timeskip when we had just gotten out of Oikawa’s death (and a very chaotic finale in general). But there is another quirk about the epilogue, which is that a lot of what seems “illogical” out of it...is most certainly illogical to someone approaching it as a kid thinking in terms of media tropes, but gains a very different nuance when you become an adult and have a certain degree of life experience under your belt.

(Note: This post does not discuss Kizuna, despite being inspired by something from it, so no fear of spoilers.)

Before we begin for real, I just want to get it out of the way that I’m not trying to “defend” the epilogue in the sense of implying that people are unreasonable for being blindsided. Like I said, it was sudden, and it was a giant timeskip where a ton of incredibly massive changes happened, leaving the audience likely to be disoriented wondering what on earth happened in the middle there to lead up to that. On top of that, although the rest of this meta is basically dedicated to “analyzing the meaning behind the epilogue writing choices from the production perspective”, I will be very honest in that, yes, I do think that, regardless of good intent, it may not have been the best decision to go ahead and make these decisions in this degree of lack of thought as to how the audience (especially one that was expected to be largely comprised of children) would take it -- creativity is a two-way street, after all, and communicating with your audience and understanding how your work will come off is very important.

Still, nevertheless, I’m writing this meta because I think, well...now that we’re all adults, and now that we’ve gotten a plethora of development information over the past twenty years, especially in the light of Kizuna, it’s worth doing an analysis about why these kinds of writing choices were made, because even to this day you get a lot of people who feel completely blindsided about it.

Everyone’s careers

Actually, the reason I decided to make this post was that I was inspired a bit by this morning’s post from the Kizuna Twitter discussing why, despite being a lead-up to the 02 epilogue, some of the cast in Kizuna seems to be in careers or aspirations that are slightly off from the careers we saw them in during the actual epilogue. (Most notably, Sora still working in ikebana instead of fashion design, Mimi being into online shopping instead of her future cooking show, etc.) The official statement was that Seki Hiromi (producer for the original Adventure and 02) personally stepped in and warned them that, in real life, a lot of people will end up changing their career aspirations at this age, and that it wouldn’t hit close to home if everyone had it exactly figured out by this point.

Kizuna is a movie about the Sad Millennial Adult Experience, so of course it is very important that it be relatable to adults in the modern era. But, in all honesty, this principle applies to 02′s epilogue itself as well. Back when the epilogue first aired -- and for the last twenty years, really -- you got a lot of comments like “why didn’t Taichi become a professional soccer player? why didn’t Yamato go into music?” and such. The thing is, though...well, this is a personal anecdote, but I first got into Digimon when I was a preteen, and, having already had an experience where my childhood interests had changed completely, I actually severely disliked seeing people say that because it felt too straightforward. Even that early, that kind of thing felt unrelatable.

Kizuna as a movie, right now, would be impossible to make in the form it is now if it hadn’t been for the 02 epilogue setting that kind of precedent -- because of the idea of your childhood hobbies not feeling as appealing as they used to be and being very lost about what to do now, feeling that everyone lied to you about that whole “having things figured out by adulthood” thing, and maybe you’ll never really figure it out. But even taking out the fact that the 02 epilogue most likely wasn’t written with the idea they’d need to make an adult-relatable movie 20 real-life years later, I think it’s easy to glean that this philosophy was behind the 02 epilogue as well. Especially since, well...Adventure and 02 themselves were both famous for this kind of writing, for depicting the lives of children in surprisingly realistic and close-to-home ways that avoided generic anime tropes.

Actually, Kakudou said it straight-out:

There were a lot of anime normally made with the idea that a given rule must occur, but I decided to do them while having doubts about whether or not it was a good idea to take on such given rules without any detail. Even if we went on with these given rules, I tried to take appropriate steps in showing why such things had occurred through step-by-step arrangements and reasoning. That is why I tried to add a little bit of realness each time to the characters, despite the restrictions that they are from anime.

So yes, that actually was the point -- no using anime tropes unless they felt they could feasibly happen with these characters. Daisuke is commented on as having “the most anime-like” and idealistic personality, but as I commented in my earlier 02 meta, he still doesn’t quite hit all of the check marks on the shounen hero archetype. So after going for a whole series on the line of going into a grounded take on human mentalities and thought processes...it probably would be inappropriate to suddenly shift into an extremely idealized fictional trope-ish depiction of everyone just going into a more exaggerated version of their childhood hobbies.

Again, that doesn’t mean that some of these don’t come off as really sudden -- the most infamous being Yamato becoming an astronaut. This was eventually revealed in 2003 and several times later to be a holdover from the original beta concept for a third Adventure series, so in that light it makes a little more sense -- Yamato probably would be the most passionate about keeping up the fight as a Chosen -- but nevertheless, it’s ambiguous whether that actually still holds (especially since the actual, uh, “third series” was...a bit different), and since we live in a world where that hypothetical Digimon in Space series never happened, it still blindsides the viewer.

On the other hand, though, both the tri. stage play and the official Kizuna profiles only took less than a paragraph to explain the disparity of why Yamato isn’t doing music anymore: he wanted to keep it in the range of hobbies. Which, incidentally, is an extremely common thing for many who experiment with creative work in their youth -- many realize that if they make it into their job, they’ll actually start hating it. Conversely, while I haven’t talked to a lot of astronauts myself, I really do sometimes wonder how many of them actually knew they were going to get into it from childhood.

So that’s the thing. We have no idea what happened, we’re left with very little recourse as to bridging the gap (at least, until Kizuna came 20 years later and helped us out a bit), and that’s why it feels implausible to many -- especially for a kid in the audience who may not have had that experience of having their hobbies change or feel less appealing. In the end, like I said, I’m not sure that going about it this way was the best decision when the very target audience was likely to be confused about this, and since, after all, fiction does have to have some acceptable breaks from reality for the sake of being a followable story. But at the very least, it is very much in line with Adventure and 02′s philosophy towards writing and its characters -- that things would be the case based on what would be these characters’ likely trajectory as actual people, and not as what you might expect “because it’s fiction” or “because they’re this kind of character”.

That everyone has a Digimon partner

I have a very distinct memory of, as a preteen, going around the Internet and seeing a fansite where someone made their “better version” of the epilogue, where their favorite ships got married instead and everyone got the careers they thought they should have, but one major thing that stuck out was that it had the now-adult kids still keep the existence of Digimon a secret, and that it’s kind of a “secret club” that they still have. In general, one of the biggest arguments against the “everyone has a Digimon partner” thing is that this, allegedly, diminishes how “special” the Chosen are when they’re not the super-amazing sole people in the world to have a partner.

When you’re a kid, being the “Chosen One” sounds romantic. You’re a special selected hero with fated abilities to save the world. In the context of Adventure and 02, however, this would actually be very contradictory to the constant reminders given by both series that magical powers selecting you out of nowhere means absolutely nothing if you’re not the one with personal will and volition to do the right thing with what you’re given. In fact, I’d say it’s actually the opposite of what all of those people have said -- if you did something amazing because of fate or because some higher power said you should, it says a lot less about you than if you were given abilities and choices and actively made an attempt to do something good and change the world, by your own volition.

But the other very important thing about the epilogue is that people keep seeing this development of Digimon proliferating all over the world like it was completely out-of-nowhere, to the point I’ve even seen conspiracy theories that the epilogue was a last-minute decision. This is especially funny because the epilogue was one of the first things decided in the entire series -- “the entire series” in this case being not 02, but Adventure -- before they’d even finalized the characterizations for everyone! The 02 epilogue was, infamously, intended to be Adventure’s ending, before 02 was greenlighted and they postponed the plan there resulting in 02 ultimately taking the fall for it.

Because it was a new television series, without an original novel or manga to use as its reference, we had to cut back on the aspect of explaining the character to each voice actor, something that we would usually do under normal circumstances. We only described their basic personality during auditions because it was likely that those personalities would change drastically in the future depending on the plot’s developments. We did not omit the explanations because there were too many characters. I swear.

But in exchange, we began post-recording by saying just this: “This story is one that’s being reminisced on by one of the children in the group who becomes a novelist 28 years later. The narrator here is that child as an adult.” Those who watched the last episode of the continuation series “Digimon Adventure 02” would know that this was Takeru, but back then, that information was kept secret. At the time of the show, it was planned that the last episode of “Digimon Adventure” would end with ‘where are the characters now’ 28 years later. However, in mid-run, production for its sequel “02” was decided and its story contents were established to be juxtaposed to the previous show, so we carried over the 28 years later scene to the sequel series instead.

(From the afterword from Adventure novel #3, from director Kakudou Hiroyuki.)

25 years after 02. 28 years after Adventure. We calculated that very precisely. In 1999, there was Taichi’s group of eight, and there were also eight other people who didn’t appear in Adventure. Before that there were only eight total, and before that only four, and before that only two, and at the beginning, only one. If they were to double every year, then it would be 28 years until everyone in the world would be able to live alongside a Digimon. Threaded through both Adventure and 02 is a story about humanity’s evolution. For everyone to have their own Digimon partner is the final step of evolution. Because there’s not much left for our actual bodies to change in terms of evolution, it is a story about how the hidden parts of our souls use the powers of digital technology to manifest in the real world, resulting in humanity’s evolution.

Statement from Kakudou Hiroyuki, from the Digimon Series Memorial Book.)

About Digimon 10: The initial trigger for humanity receiving partner Digimon was the Hikarigaoka incident in 1996, but at the time the Internet network was not ready and it was too early for anything to happen. The following years resulted in two and then four people getting involved, and after that it doubled every year (twice, because digital and binary). About Digimon 11: Twenty years later, in the world depicted in the final episode of 02, all human beings have received a partner Digimon. This is the ultimate result of Digimon Adventure’s story of evolution.

Statement from Kakudou Hiroyuki, originating from Twitter and later moved to his blog.)

While the 02 epilogue taking place in the year it did sounds like it’s because they just wanted to add an arbitrary neat number of “25 years later” to 02′s finale, in actuality, the original goal was not for that 25 years but to specifically hit the year of 2028 (not 2027, actually), where, calculating the number of humans that could be partnered to a Digimon based on the global population, everyone would have a partner by exactly 2028. The “doubling every year” principle was only brought up in actual anime-centric canon in a drama CD, and even then it was in a context of speculation instead of being stated as hard fact, but it should be noted that even Kizuna is compliant with this principle, since To Sora states directly that the number of Chosen Children as of 2010 is over 30,000, which is the approximate correct amount you should be expecting by 2010 under this principle. (So yes, really, despite ostensibly not being compliant with his original concept, presumably thanks to the nail added by partnership dissolution and how that ties into his theory of Digimon being part of the soul, Kizuna actually goes out of its way to otherwise be compliant with even the more obscure parts of his lore.)

But the really interesting thing that this epilogue concept brings out is that “the adventure of the Tokyo Chosen Children” actually had nothing to do with the proliferation of Chosen Children around the world whatsoever. From the very beginning, even since the original conception of Adventure, the proliferation of Digimon was something that was going to happen whether anyone liked it or not.

In fact, let’s look at what Koushirou actually says in the aforementioned drama CD:

Yes. I’ve figured it out… The meaning behind the term “Chosen Child.” The number of “Chosen Children” has been growing at a steady rate. Having a partner Digimon isn’t really that special. Being a “Chosen Child” means… to cease the hostilities that break out and inconvenience the Digital World. In order to do so, that child gains a partner Digimon faster than another. In other words, we are children chosen to fight. That’s what it means, isn’t it? ... Oh, is that so? That’s surprising. I didn’t expect that not even you would know what countries the Chosen Children come from when they go to the Digital World… It’s Qinglongmon that’s helping you, is it, Gennai-san? Do the other Holy Beasts who have revived not know either? The Digital World is still so full of mysteries. I’ll do my best to look for them over here.

I think a lot of people tend to have misconceptions about the nature of a Chosen Child, and those who picked them, because the way everyone became “chosen ones” is actually very different from how most media usually would play the trope. In particular:

Homeostasis, the Agents, and the Holy Beasts are explicitly not gods nor omniscient. Homeostasis admits their own lack of abilities in Adventure episode 45, and there’s a recurring undercurrent of the “I don’t know” coming from them and the Agents not actually being because they’re deliberately cryptic, but because they really don’t know. In fact, the Digital World itself is depicted as being about as confused about this whole human contact thing as the human world is.

Note that Koushirou makes a distinction between “being a Chosen Child” and “having a Digimon partner”. If you’re deemed someone who might be able to do something important in this very early time when the Digital World is still trying to figure all of this stuff out, in a world where humans overall still don’t understand Digimon very well, you get first dibs because you’re someone who can be a valuable pioneer. In other words, just because everyone else will eventually get a partner doesn’t mean your contributions aren’t still historical, valuable, and important.

The Digital World was mentioned in Adventure episode 19 as being approximately as big in scale as the real-world Earth itself. That means the Digital World is huge. Of course, its time and space doesn’t exactly match up with the real world’s, as demonstrated multiple times in 02 when the kids abuse it to circumvent travel distance, but nevertheless, there is presumably a lot of the Digital World that neither the Adventure nor the 02 kids have seen in their lives. When they meet Qinglongmon in 02 episode 37, he introduces himself as being in charge of the Eastern side -- and we never meet the others. In effect, there’s probably a huge area of the Digital World that needs protecting that even twelve kids from Tokyo can’t cover by themselves. And that answers the question of what the international Chosen Children are there for -- what do you think they’re doing with those Digivices, twiddling their thumbs? The Tokyo Chosen’s adventures were the ones we were blessed with being able to bear witness to, but that absolutely does not exclude the idea that there were other kids going through their own tales of growth and adventure -- especially since, as I said, Homeostasis and the others protecting the Digital World are not omniscient, and there are a lot of known factors beyond their control.

On that note, you might notice that, by the doubling-every-year principle and by running a math calculation, in 1999, there were eight other Chosen Children besides Taichi’s group. This also tracks with the fact that Adventure episode 53 revealed that there were other Chosen Children prior to Taichi et al. who performed an incomplete seal on Apocalymon, ones that even Gennai wasn’t aware of (remember how I said that the Agents aren’t actually omniscient?). While the fact that such an ostensibly huge fact was dropped so casually is jarring for the viewer, in retrospect, the fact that this was dropped so casually was indicative of the idea of how...not very much of a big deal this was supposed to be. Taichi and his friends may have been instrumental in the selection process for Chosen Children back in 1995, but they weren’t the only ones who witnessed the Hikarigaoka incident nor to have contact with Digimon, and they weren’t even the first to save the Digital World, nor will they be the last. But the journey of personal growth they took was still important to themselves -- just because they weren’t the only ones who took it didn’t change the fact that such an important thing happened, nor that we got the benefit of being able to meet and resonate with these kids.

In fact, the Hikarigaoka incident wasn’t even the first point of contact with the Digital World. 02 episode 33 hinted very heavily that what humans have perceived as youkai and other spirits were actually Digital World contact, just not something actually noticeable until digital technology started connecting the worlds. Episode 47 revealed that Oikawa Yukio and Hida Hiroki had made contact sometime in the 80s via video games -- even though they weren’t Chosen Children themselves at the time. In short, the concept of the Digital World and its contact with the human one is something that spans throughout history, of which the Tokyo Chosen Children are only part of in very recent years.

And finally, one of the most important parts: the idea that the Digimon would stay a secret to the world for very long is inherently infeasible. The 1999 “Digimon in the sky” incident was international. It made international news. Everyone in Tokyo has clear memories of the “Odaiba fog” incident, and, as revealed in 02 episode 14, even a boy from America, Michael, has clear memory of seeing a Gorimon. Reporters like Ishida Hiroaki didn’t hesitate to get in on the scene and try to cover what was going on, and 02 episode 38 revealed that Takaishi Natsuko was doing intensive enough press coverage on the Digimon incidents that Oikawa actually sought her out for information on it. They’re probably not the only reporters around the world doing the same. One episode later, Gennai revealed that the government/military and scientific worlds had actually caught onto the existence of Digimon and did make active attempts to research it -- but, fearing that the world wasn’t quite ready to do that without exploiting Digimon for evil purposes, Gennai and the other Agents wiped out any data records so that they couldn’t do organized research or swap notes. But just wiping out data doesn’t wipe out the public memory, and, especially when the number of Chosen Children is proliferating, and with all of the Digimon-related disasters that happened around the world in 02 episodes 40-42, at some point the world is going to start becoming very aware of what’s going on with this whole thing.

And finally, about that thing where a lot of people claim that a world where everyone has a Digimon partner must be some kind of dystopia: I think this camp severely underestimates how adaptable the world is.

This is something that might not be as resonant to those who were very young at the time they aired, but Adventure and 02 were written in what was a very shocking and scary world for adults that were living at the time. The rate at which the world changed and adapted to digital technology in the late 80s and all of the 90s was ridiculous, and in some ways even terrifying. Many tech people have pointed out how much it feels like the entire structure of the world has changed in light of technological developments, AI, and the Internet in only the last few decades compared to centuries before. International policy has changed, daily life has changed, business structures have changed, in time much less than 25 years. Hell, I’m writing this post smack in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic; I think anyone reading this right now at this time can attest to how terrifyingly quickly the world changed itself in only a few months in response to such a thing.

Compared to that, a whole 25 years of slow burn where the Digimon partner rate at least had the decency to double every year and give people a chance to acclimate and make public policy seems practically luxurious. On top of that, while there will certainly be more people like the Kaiser out there abusing their power, Digimon evolution at least happens to be tied to human emotions (unlike many other weapons out there), and there is some stifling factor in less-than-pleasant people being a bit less likely to have the same access to overwhelming power as those who are more selfless and virtuous. That kind of limiter is something I wish modern technology could have sometimes.

So what is the Tokyo Chosen Children’s place in this narrative? At the forefront of such incredibly massive incoming changes were children who were living in a completely different world than that familiar to even people who were born five to ten years earlier -- much like the real children born in the world of technology in the late 90s. The Tokyo Chosen Children were some of the earliest pioneers in this regard, being the ones who had to figure out logistics and Digimon and the Digital World and what it meant to be a partner in a world that hadn’t figured any of this out yet, and arguably wasn’t ready yet.

Yet they did, and they saved both worlds with no precedent nor support on what to do. This, I think, is a massively more meaningful accomplishment than the idea that they were exclusively selected by some higher power.

On romance and marriage

I feel like this topic is one I’m setting myself up to end up with my head on a pike by daring to breach it -- there is pretty much no way I can cover this without setting myself up for some risk of this -- but I do want to talk about it. I really don’t want to make this post into a pro- or anti-shipping discourse post, so you’ll have to forgive me as I try to be about as diplomatic about this as I possibly can. For all it’s worth, I’m a firm believer in shipping and shipping headcanons being an integral part of the fan’s experience (heck, anyone who knows me knows that I often talk about my own ships more than I really should), and so, as I said before, I’m writing this largely from the perspective of elucidating “the most likely reason it was written this way”, and not “should it have been written this way” nor “how I think people should feel in spite of this”.

In any case, I’m going to start off this section by a statement from a friend that left a particular impression on me. I’d introduced them to Digimon recently, with both of us as adults, and one thing they commented was that the idea of shipping any of the characters felt a little too odd, because they were all elementary school kids. They, of course, understood quite naturally that I had been shipping some of these kids since I was their age (and that my current round of shipping usually was more about whether they’d get together later than whether they would during the time of the series), so it wasn’t an accusation of me being creepy or anything -- it’s just that, as an adult coming into this for the first time without a lot of preconceived attachments, it felt too weird for them to ship children at that young of an age, and it was something that made me think a lot about it.

As I said, shipping is often an integral part of the fan’s experience, even for those who don’t do “fandom” -- romance is such a huge priority that it permeates all of our media, and how it’s handled is often one of the first things deeply scrutinized. Part of the reason the 02 epilogue is so controversial is that it went pretty much against the face of the most popular ships in the fanbase, and the two that did go forward (Yamato/Sora and Ken/Miyako) weren’t ones that people would conventionally expect given what you’d generally look for when it comes to fictional relationship development.

But that’s kind of the issue here: remember when I pointed out earlier that Adventure and 02 were trying to stay away from anime tropes unless they found it to be particularly relevant to the characters’ arcs? In actuality, the way that people generally expect romance and romance tropes to happen in a series -- especially a not-particularly-romance-centric series like this one -- isn’t how romance generally works, and especially not for kids at the age we saw them in Adventure and 02. It doesn’t seem like coincidence that the first hard show of romance we get (Sora asking Yamato out during Christmas) is when the relevant characters were 14, which is around the earliest age you can imagine two kids actually taking a relationship seriously and having some depth of what they’re getting into. As if to drive this in further, Daisuke’s crush on Hikari is portrayed as a sign of him acting shallow and not having a good sense of priorities at the moment; the whole 02 main cast, as of 02, is probably still too young to entertain anything serious for at least a few more years.

If you look at actual couples, as romantic as “childhood friends to lovers” is as a trope, it’s actually not very common in real life, especially for “childhood” being defined as 8-12. There might be a slightly higher chance when it comes to the Tokyo Chosen Children, considering they’d gone through some shared experiences others might not understand, but even that gets slightly mitigated by the fact that more and more people around the world are becoming Chosen themselves. So while it can happen, and while it’s probably somewhat more likely for this group in particular, it’s not as likely as the average shipper would probably want it to be. Even those who support the canon ships don’t really favor the idea of them being in a continuous relationship all the way up to adulthood -- my personal experience as someone closely following Ken/Miyako fanfiction and comics in both the West and in Japan indicates a common thread of it being treated as a mutual pining ship until several years later, and the Yamato/Sora fans I’ve personally talked to have a very high rate of feeling that the two of them have experienced at least one breakup before getting back together. Or, in short, even people who like those ships have a hard time imagining a unbroken, continuous relationship all the way from elementary/middle school to adulthood, because of how much that generally doesn’t happen.

I promise I am not writing this as a treatise against the ship itself, I swear I’m just using this because it’s the best example I can pull out at the moment, but I’ll put it this way: I think the clearest example of this is Takeru and Hikari, the only pairing that has the unfortunate distinction of being explicitly confirmed as not being married (by Seki Hiromi in V-Jump), whereas everyone outside the scope of Yamato/Sora and Ken/Miyako is still technically in “believe whatever you want” territory. Takeru/Hikari is, depending on which scale of ranking you use, a ship that consistently ranks as one of the three most popular Digimon ships globally, and them not getting together is cited as one of the most common things disliked about the epilogue. But despite its overwhelming popularity to the point you’d think it’d be easy to cater to such a humongous fanbase by pairing them together -- and so few people would dispute it, really! -- not only were they not made an item, but they were explicitly confirmed as not being one.

Why?

Takeru and Hikari probably feel “baited” to anyone who’s looking at this from a romantic trope perspective. They’re constantly in each other’s company to the point where it almost feels like they like hanging out with each other more than they do others. Takeru is shown as having a particular investment in Hikari’s welfare in 02 episodes like 7, 13, and 31. They’re constantly associated with each other in promotional materials, too. But when you look at them in terms of their actual relationship as children...well, I’ll put it this way with another personal anecdote: I actually had multiple platonic friends like that back when I was their age in elementary and later middle school, and, uh...well, people did actually ask if we were in love with each other, and it genuinely, no-strings-attached, annoyed the hell out of me, because we weren’t, and I hated being pigeonholed into that.

In real life, platonic relationships happen a lot with kids in that age group, and it’s not actually all that surprising that 02 would have wanted to portray a healthy one without any strings attached -- the same way the series also portrayed other unconventional situations with kids, such as Iori being a nine-year-old who hangs out with kids much older than him (there are most certainly kids who can attest to being in that position!). I mentioned in my earlier 02 characterization meta that both Takeru and Hikari are actually rather inscrutable (especially in the first half of the series), and in fact, episode 13, usually quoted as a Takeru/Hikari episode, is actually centered around Takeru having difficulty reaching out to Hikari because, despite the fact he was closest to her at that point in time, she still was too closed-in to open up about anything. They almost never talk about what they actually think about each other, other than obviously having an investment in each other’s welfare and enjoying each other’s company, but, again -- this isn’t unusual for platonic friends at this age. And the fact that this is the one ship where there was actual official word putting a foot down and saying, no, this did not end up in marriage...everyone interprets this like it’s some kind of callous move made to make people miserable for no good reason, but I would say that, given the writing philosophy applied to the kids in nearly every other respect, the intent was likely to make a statement that this kind of relationship can exist without it ending up in inevitable marriage somewhere down the line.

We’re inclined to see “two people being emotionally close means a higher chance of being a couple” because this is how romance has been portrayed in media for as long as any of us have been consuming media, but in actuality, relationships are very multifaceted and complicated, and there are many ways to be “emotionally close” to someone in ways that don’t overlap with being “romantically attracted” to someone. This is especially once you start becoming an adult and end up needing to navigate the web of who’s a friend and whom you might have a crush on, and in actuality the person you start flirting with because you think they’re attractive might have been someone you just met last week, or at least someone you don’t know very emotionally intimately (which is why crushes can be intimidating, even in adulthood). This is also what I think fuels the disparity between why Taichi/Sora gained such a huge following and what actually happened with them, because many, many fans will testify that they felt baited by the ship, but if you look in the actual series in terms of what counts as “romantic attraction” and not just emotional closeness, there’s...not a lot; they happened to know each other before the events of the series (but so did Koushirou!), Taichi had a bit of a mental breakdown about saving her (because he’s not someone who abandons important friends), and in Our War Game! they had a bit of a spat with traces of tsundere (which, ultimately, are circumstantial and don’t necessarily indicate they actually have serious mutual feelings for each other). Official word implies that Yamato and Sora were planned since rather early in the series, and it doesn’t seem like coincidence that “pairing up the main hero and heroine” (Taichi and Sora) was given as an example of an avoided trope in an official booklet, so it lends further support to the idea that “not following typical romance tropes and expectations” was a significant priority.

Again, this isn’t me saying anything about those who ship it or those who have been able to figure out ways in which the relationship could work in some very wonderful headcanons I’ve had the benefit of reading over the past decades, nor those who are having a marvelous time with fanfic and headcanon and comics and being a bit more willing to indulge outside the scope of the series’s canon. (Nor the multitude of very good headcanons and meta I’ve seen about the possibility of Takeru/Hikari at least trying out dating somewhere along the line, even if it doesn’t end up anywhere permanent.) Nor does that mean I think that this was the best way for the writers to go about it -- as I’ve said in this meta already, there is an inherent fallacy of not paying enough attention to how writing will be taken and interpreted by people with certain reasonable expectations cultivated from years of media consumption, and especially by kids who aren’t going to pick up that nuance or don’t have the appropriate relationship life experience. Regardless of intent, there’s still a lot that can be criticized about its handling; in many ways, it could be considered a bit cruel that the series had things known to be considered romantic subtext in most other series that may not have been actually intended this way. But, nevertheless, I do feel very strongly that there’s a high likelihood that this is what they were at least going for, even if it didn’t come off that way to most of the audience.

Extrapolating this concept further, it’s also interesting to see how Adventure and 02 treat romance as a relatively insubstantial thing in the grand scope of things. I said earlier that it’s quite understandable that romance and shipping have become the main obsession for media -- and it’s probably been that way for as long as human civilization has even existed -- but when you really think about it, Adventure/02 treat romance as “a thing that is a big part of your life, but not the sole controlling factor”. Again, note how Daisuke’s precocious crush on Hikari manifests when he’s at his most shallow, and even after Yamato and Sora start dating in episode 38, we really don’t hear a lot about it -- granted, neither were in the lead protagonist cast by that point in the series, but whenever they do appear thereafter, it’s almost always about their work helping out as Chosen than it is about their relationship, which is presumably a private thing going on in the background. It’s a part of their lives, but it’s not the only thing going on with them. Of course, shounen anime with casts of these ages don’t tend to breach the topic of romance much at all, but it’s interesting how it touches on the topic and then leaves it in the background -- again, something probably frustrating and a bit too cavalier for those inclined to see shipping and romance as life or death, but from a real-life perspective, makes sense in the realm of friends’ relationships largely not being your business, even if it is significant.

(Ken and Miyako are a trickier matter because their pairing was allegedly based on their voice actors’ friendship, but considering that it has been cited multiple times across multiple Digimon series production notes that character outlines were often subject to change even mid-series based on impressions of the voice actors’ performance -- it happened in Tamers too, and it’s not even unusual for original anime in general -- it’s still ambiguous as to when in production this decision was made, and, considering the flip between Miyako having jealous pettiness over him in episode 3 to fantasizing over him and considering him exactly her type in 8, I would not be surprised if the decision were made somewhere in between there, especially since the fact the epilogue would eventually happen was already established in production over a year prior. Unlike with Yamato and Sora, we don’t get to see the two of them at a reasonable age to start doing anything serious within the scope of 02, which led to the unfortunate result of the reveal of them getting married in the epilogue being a very startling and sudden jump for many.)

In any case, I’m going to close this with yet another disclaimer -- I know I’m repeating myself too many times at this point, but I really, really want to make it clear that I am not, in any way, trying to imply that I don’t understand why people would be blindsided by the epilogue in any of the above ways (careers, the status of Digimon partnerships, shipping) because, as I said, I do think there is some merit to the philosophy that maybe they should have paid a bit more attention to how people -- especially kids -- would actually see the events rather than the writing philosophy behind why it should be written this way. (And, to be honest, I think I might have this complaint behind not just the epilogue, but both Adventure and 02 as a whole, for a multitude of different reasons.) Moreover, there are a million other cans of worms that could be feasibly discussed regarding the epilogue that I’ve only barely scratched the surface of here, because there are so many different topics to unpack when it comes to it, and I could go on forever (and further increase my risk of ending up with my head on a pike...). And of course there’s the wider issue of how to handle timeskip epilogues in general (they don’t really tend to be very popular, do they), so, really, there’s only so much I can cover in one post before dragging this on for too long. But in the end, even after writing all this, I understand that there are a lot of people who still won’t like it or don’t want to accept it, and that’s fine; it’s not my place to try and convince people to.

But, nevertheless, the reason why I made this post -- and what I hope the take-home can be -- is that, no, I don’t think this was made as a random off-their-rocker decision with the intent to make everyone miserable, nor some kind of fever dream that the writing staff must have pulled out while drunk, nor whatever accusations I’ve seen levied about it as a weird spontaneous idea (and the fact it really did come out very suddenly at people), but that -- regardless of how it landed -- there was some idea behind why it played out, and why, even 20 real-life years later, principles like “not everyone’s going to stick with the same career even in adulthood” continue to hold.

[thickenmyblood]

I love how you really put a lot of thought into how you regard and read fanfic as well as how you respond to questions about how you feel aout it. Can I ask what are some parts/ideas in fics that really made you go wow, this is well planned or like I never would have thought about this or I forgot that this plot point and device were even a thing! I hope this makes sense

I love you, kind stranger. Thank you for reading my delirious posts and giving me the chance to scream about fics, which is always a pleasure. 

Note: If your fic is in this post and you don’t want it to be, let me know and I’ll take it down. 

Zeitnot by thereshaegoes

I love the idea of time travel, so when I read this fic’s summary I bookmarked it instantly. At first, I thought it was going to be eight chapters of Laurent waking up the day of the battle of Marlas, but the author really surprised me.

I loved that someone died at the end of each chapter (at first, at least) but what really made me go ‘oh’ is when Lauret realizes the Damen from “this new reality” is, in fact, his Damen! 

Damen not being with Jokaste was weird to me, but I shrugged it off as a personal choice the author had made. Then, when Damen was talking about abolishing slavery, I was still in denial. ‘Oh, well, some people don’t like to write Damen as a slave owner, which is cool’. And then, when the big reveal finally came, I was just… amazed. I literally put my phone down and went, ‘okay, this person really knows what they’re doing when it comes to writing’. 

I love the little plot twists. In my head, a plot twist most basic example is ‘oh, X is a traitor’ but… this? This is so much better.

Between the Shadow and the Soul by Anonymous

This work was… insanely refreshing, innovative, transgressive, and outrageously good. It does feature a lot of sex scenes, but at the same time, it felt like sex was the least important part of the story. I don’t know how to explain myself when it comes to this fic (and God knows I’ve tried) but… The sex scenes aren’t there just for the smut of it all, if that makes any sense. 

Auguste as a narrator is so unusual, and yet it made the fic so painful and enjoyable! I loved the way it left you wondering just how accurate his POV was. I loved the sex scenes with actual characterization. This author never, not even for one second, stopped focusing on the dynamic between Laurent, Auguste, and Damen. It could be argued that the Laurent/Auguste bit weighted more than the overall OT3 bit, but still… I had literally forgotten what sex scenes were for until I read this fic.

Sex scenes, especially in this particular work, are not parentheses in the story. They’re not there for the reader to take a break from the “actual plot” or “narration”. They are what holds the story together, and they’re opportunities for the reader to learn more about the characters

.

Cherry Wine by SteeleStingray

Yes, I’m back on my bullshit. Yes, I’m talking about CW again. But I’ll make it short because there is no way you don’t know how I feel about this work. If you don’t, check out this comment (which, by the way, is not even a fraction of what I wanted to say to the author when I read the fic). 

What I found innovative and made me go “is this allowed?” about CW is not the idea of an OT3, but rather this particular take on a relationship that consists of three people. I’ve read a few published books that feature similar couples (all of them suck, and when I say they suck I mean it) so I was very hesitant to read this because of that reason. 

Usually, when people write OT3 they pepper in a lot of stuff I don’t like to read about: extreme jealousy, misunderstandings, cheating, weird dynamics that feel stilted, awkward sex scenes where one of the three just sits in a chair and watches the other two like some voyeur from Juan José Saer’s stories. Guess what doesn’t happen in CW? 

Another thing I liked about this work is that it reminded me that themes in fiction aren’t limited to one specific work. This author really likes nicknames. At the time, when I had only read CW, I thought it was just a one-time thing. Turns out, it’s not. An emerald-coloured nightmare also features nicknames. I like this idea that you can tell who wrote something based on little details and narrative choices. It’s like the author is winking at you, going ‘ha, did you get it?’

Ink on Paper by deripmaver

I don’t usually like fics with non-linear narrative because I’m a lazy bitch who can’t keep up. I’d never really seen the point in using flashbacks, scenes from the past, or anything like that because my writing style (oh, fuck off, my writing style, who the fuck do I think I am) is more about references. And then I read this fic. And I was like, ‘okay, I’ve seen the light of not writing everything linearly like an idiot’. 

The Mannequin Gallery by marrieddorks

Yes, I realize I’m talking about all my favorite fics. I feel no shame.

This fic is a Modern AU. Everyone who has ever written a Modern AU knows that one of the trickiest parts is finding characters professions that make sense with who they are/what they like/what they’re good at. This story features Damen as an influencer. That’s it, that’s my whole tweet. 

It reminded me that even when you’re writing a Modern AU (or any sort of AU, really) it’s important to know what the essence of the characters you’re writing is. The way even Jord’s job makes sense… And how it feels like the author didn’t just steal the characters’ names and use them to create a random story (which is valid, too)... and… Okay, this has nothing to do with a plot twist or a narrative device but have you read this Nicaise? Have you? You haven’t read Nicaise until you’ve read this fic.

(and that's why) you're so beautiful now by iwasgonegonegone

This fic is 612 words. It has no plot. One of the tags reads, “listen they're in love and they're cute and that's all i have to say” and I… yes. This fic inspired me to write plot-less stories again. Not only that, it made me enjoy writing them. 

Lately, I’ve been talking to a friend of mine about a new pairing we both like a lot. We go back and forth for hours sometimes just talking about what they’d do, details about the worldbuilding, a billion ‘what-ifs’... and I love it. If one of us sat down to write a story based on all our conversations, it would be a character study fic. It would have, maybe, some plot to it, but… Plot would feel like an excuse to talk about their relationship. And I love that. I fucking hate plot, I hate it, and this… Yes. This fic is like a little slice of life. The author has mentioned before that they enjoy writing poetry (more than longer pieces of fiction) and this story reads like a poem. You know when you read a poem and you get this weird tingly feeling? Read this and feel that, you’re welcome.

The Life We Live by homewithyou

I’ve said before that I don’t go looking for mpreg. Sometimes, mpreg has come looking for me, and I’ve closed my door on its face. I read this fic mainly because I never pay attention to the tags on AO3 (healthy, I know) and I was too busy making myself toast to read the summary. 

I was five paragraphs in and this bit hit me like a fucking electric hammer to the head: “...which had been going haywire more often than not since the pregnancy began five months ago.” I was like, ‘wait, did I—am I reading—why am I—’ and then I just shut my mouth and continued reading. I’m glad I did. I’m glad I didn’t let my narrowmindedness stop me from giving this fic a try. I’m glad people out there are writing stories that they enjoy, about topics a few others would deem controversial. 

This also applies to the Lamen/Auguste fic I mentioned above. What’s the point of writing if you’re not going to take risks and be honest about what you like to write about? It takes honesty and commitment to write anything that strays from the norm. And so I’m glad this person posted this story, because it changed me in a small way (‘what if I shut the fuck up and read more mpreg instead of instantly clicking out?’).

This is another perfect example of how plot is poison and you don’t need it in your life (unless you enjoy poison. In that case consume the plot, write the plot, sniff the plot. And die). A morning in bed, just nuzzling and talking… living life… Again, this made me realize that you can say a lot about two characters just from a morning in bed. It made me want to write 25 pages of dialogue in bed (this and Manuel Puig’s book titled Kiss of the spider woman, which I recommend fervently). 

Plot? In this house? We don’t know her. You’re a strong, independent writer. You don’t need no plot.

For a more general response, I’d say that Steele’s worldbuilding is impeccable and made me look at the setting of stories differently. 

Foreshadowing is always amazing, but I haven’t read a lot of fics where it’s a prominent element (which is not to say authors aren’t good at it, I just don’t read enough fics to give you a good example of this). 

I really like oxymorons and when writers use funny adverbs. GallaPlacidia’s adverbs are to die for, so definitely check out her stories if you’re interested in that. 

I also love the way xlydiadeetz writes archs. She does this thing where she divides the story into different… timelines? archs? I… don’t even know. Amazing.

I hope this answer made sense. 

[asking-jude]

I rely on fictional characters or artists as a coping mechanism in a really unhealthy way and there is this band I've been supporting for more than 5 years that helped me get through some of my toughest times. But now the members are being accused of some horrible things. At first it was just people digging up tweets from years ago, but now there's allegations of some serious stuff and I will always believe the victims. But this band was my rock for such a long time and I feel phisically sick rn

Hi there,

        I’m so sorry that you are feeling conflicted about all of this. I understand how it feels to use music to get you through some difficult times. The music will always be in your memories, and when you hear it, it will remind you of how far you’ve come. It all depends on what you feel comfortable doing. Some people cut ties to musical artists who’s lives complicate their feelings, while others separate the artist’s from the music. 

        If listening to this band’s music convicts you in any way, it might be best to cut ties. This is a lot easier said than done. Here is some information on “divorcing” your favorite band: https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2014/02/21/280715487/the-good-listener-for-bands-and-fans-the-no-fault-divorce. You cannot erase the memories you’ve made with the music. If you decide to not listen to them anymore, it may not be forever. Maybe you will, one day, be able to listen to them again.

        There are a lot of ways to stop supporting this band. You can keep the music you own, and stop buying new releases, if that makes you feel more comfortable. If you decided to “break up” with your band, here are some tips that can help you get through it: https://headspace.org.au/young-people/how-to-get-over-a-relationship-breakup/. You will never be able to replace the music you love. The idea is not to totally replace your love, rather to find something else you love as well. 

        it is not uncommon to develop an emotional attachment to a fictional character. Check out this information on why it happens: https://www.motionpictures.org/2013/07/the-psychology-of-character-bonding-why-we-feel-a-real-connection-to-actors/. I cannot ignore that you said your attachments are unhealthy. Is it unhealthy because they are fictional characters, or is it because of something else? 

        If you are worried about the unhealthy attachment you have to fictional characters, it might benefit you to talk to someone. I know that counseling can be really expensive, but www.betterhelp.com offers online therapy at a lower rate. Sessions start around $40. Also, www.psychologytoday.com is a great resource for searching for a counselor. You can search by location and specification. 

Good luck!

Andrea

Asking Jude has moved to its OWN platform at askingjude.org. We highly recommend you create an account on Asking Jude’s website, so you can receive 24/7 support from the Asking Jude Team and our community members. 

[signoraviolettavalery]

I’m new to the Roswell New Mexico fandom and I have noticed people,you, don’t really like the creator Carina and I was wondering why.

Ooooh boy. Would you like those answers in alphabetical order, chronological order, order of egregiousness, or order of how much they piss me off? 

I have a lot of issues with Carina, as do a lot of other people. Obviously, not everyone agrees with me, and some of my answers may be controversial (they’re the subject of biiiig debates in fandom). I have no intention of re-opening those debates, so what I write below is a summary of my opinions (many of which I know are shared by at least some others in fandom) for the purposes of answering your question. I’m also putting it all under a cut, because it’s a lot of negativity that some people may want to skip. 

I mention a lot of tweets and interviews in the answer below; I, frankly, don’t want to go searching for and linking to each interview and tweet (and also, Carina has me blocked, for reasons I’ll get into), but everything below has a source that I can find if you super want to read it yourself. 

So, here goes.

Firstly, Carina pisses me off because she is a white, straight woman who is writing about oppressed and marginalized minorities and, quite frankly, doing a bad job of it. She brags constantly about how progressive her show is, how much she wanted to include people of color and comment on things like immigration, how important the Malex storyline is to her, etc, etc, but doesn’t seem to be capable of (or care about) the delicacy, nuance, and care such issues require.

In a panel she did on Roswell (at ATX or NYCC, I think?) she talked about how she had qualms writing about marginalized people from identities she didn’t belong to; she said she was plagued by the question of “should I even be doing this?” Which she then immediately answered with, “but we’re doing it!” and that was that, and that seemed to me to be such a flippant way to answer the question. Like, you’re writing about people whose experiences you don’t share and your response isn’t “I’m going to do research and talk to people,” it’s “eh, I”m doing it anyway”? 

Then there’s the fact that when it comes to representation, Roswell has done a really really shitty job, engaged in harmful tropes, and thrown its characters of color under the bus. Carina insists that she consults with a lot of advocacy groups when writing about the experiences of undocumented immigrants and Latina characters, and yet. Liz simply forgives Max in the span of two episodes, even though he covered up her sister’s murder and was responsible for subjecting her family to racially-motivated hate crimes for a decade. Max, a white man, at no point acknowledges his privilege; he just pouts and whines when she rejects him until the Latina who was fucked over by his use of privilege just...forgives him. It is, in my opinion, incredibly indelicate and kind of insulting. She made the south Asian man (the only Asian character on the show, in fact) the borderline pedophile serial killer who violated Isobel for years, was creepily grooming both Isobel and Rosa, and murdered a bunch of women. She made the only black woman on the show (Maria) the plot device for an entire season: Maria had no storyline. She was there to give information to Liz when Liz was solving Rosa’s murder. She hasn’t known about the aliens all season and was thus excluded from the major show narratives. Her one defining character trait (her loyalty to her friends) was completely thrown away in order to make her a plot device for Malex (because let’s face it, Miluca won’t last and Malex will get back together). Narratively, she was thrown under the bus. 

And then there’s the queer representation, which...don’t get me started. She keeps talking about how much she loves Malex and how they’re her favorites, but she’s also very explicitly said that she finds happy relationships boring and that she uses fiction to work out her own trauma, which means that she’s essentially likely going to put the only same-sex ship on the show through an interminable amount of tragedy (because that’s what queer viewers absolutely need in this day and age). 

Plus, the idea of a straight woman using a fictional same-sex relationship to work out her own issue makes me really, really uncomfortable, because she’s made it clear that she fundamentally doesn’t understand the queer experience. She says she consults with advocacy groups when she’s writing queer characters (she won’t actually name these LGBT advocacy groups, which doesn’t make me sideye her at all), but I have doubts about whether she listens to them. I mean, she said, after the season 1 finale aired, that Michael going to Maria has nothing to do with her being a woman, even though she also explicitly said Michael wants something “easy,” and a same-sex relationship in Roswell, as it’s presented in canon, can never be easy. Roswell is canonically a homophobic, bigoted town, and Malex’s trauma stems largely from homophobia. Their relationship issues stem (not entirely, but largely) from them being the victims of homophobic abuse and a homophobic hate crime. Being with Maria means Michael never has to worry about any of those things, and the fact that Carina doesn’t seem to conceive of this is mind-boggling to me. 

Then there’s the fact that Maria...basically outed Michael to Liz, and this doesn’t seem to be a problem. Of course, maybe they’ll address it in season 2, I don’t know. But, Carina basically wrote a woman who has been best friends with a gay guy for more than a decade as casually outing someone (when she tells Liz that Michael is Museum Guy). The fact that this is a problem doesn’t seem to cross her mind for a second when she tells Liz, even though this is information Michael has never told her himself and they’ve known each other for a decade. It’s not something Carina’s ever mentioned in the numerous post-finale interviews she did. And frankly, it doesn’t matter who Maria outed Michael to; the fact that she’s capable of it when best friends with a gay guy in a town like Roswell, when Maria has been written as a loyal and understanding friend up to now, again suggests to me that Carina just does not comprehend the queer experience. 

(Also, technically, all the Isobel/Rosa hints, then it turning out that actually Noah was possessing Isobel, screams queerbaiting to me)

And then there’s the mess that is the love triangle. I’m of the camp that things that it’s complete and utter bullshit that contributes to the stereotype of bisexual people as promiscuous, though I know there’s people who think it’s good representation. It shows that she’s more interested in her particular (and frankly, kind of esoteric) storytelling preferences more than she cares about representation or continuity. The love triangle is, frankly, really badly written, and nothing about Maria developing “feelings” for Michael (or him for her, honestly) is in any way believable. Maria getting with Michael behind Alex’s back requires throwing out Maria’s only character trait (her loyalty and commitment to being a good friend). But Carina ~has~ to have her love triangle, characterization or continuity be damned. 

Speaking of storytelling, Carina is kind of...a bad writer. Look, I love the characters on Roswell, and I love the world she created, and it had some truly beautiful moments. But let’s just admit the season 1 plot was a mess. There were so many plot holes. Who knows what? Does Alex know Liz knows about aliens and vice versa? Does Alex know about Rosa, or just about aliens? Why did they spend episode 9 establishing that Alex is taking over project Sheppard to find the alien serial killer, only to have him be missing from the episode (1x11) where they find the alien serial killer? Does Alex know that it’s Noah? If Michael’s hand got broken right before he went to cover up Rosa’s murder, why did Liz think it couldn’t have been Michael “because his hand was broken then”? If Isobel is an event planner (a busy and demanding job) how did they manage to cover up her being missing for so many weeks? If Malex went straight from the museum to the toolshed, when did Alex have time to tell Maria about Museum Guy? What is Alex’s rank? (it changes from the pilot to the show). I could go on. Like, I just don’t have a lot of trust in the narrative going forward, in character and emotional continuity, in a fulfilling story for the characters I love, given that Carina seems to have a basic inability to so much as google (”my entropy changes”? that makes no sense), let alone write a story that makes sense. 

Part of the reason she’s not a very good writer, though, is because she doesn’t seem to like criticism. She insists she listens to it from people who matter and whose judgment she trusts, but, um, the mess that is the narrative suggests otherwise to me. The fact that she wrote in the love triangle suggests otherwise; it screams to me that it’s something she just had to have, regardless of whether it made narrative sense. She also literally blocks fans on Twitter who give her any kind of criticism. I don’t mean hate and vitriol, I mean criticism. She complains about how she, a public figure, a showrunner with a show that has millions of viewers, wants to log in to twitter and only see positive things and have fun interactions with friends. And I get it, criticism can be exhausting. But her job is literally to bring viewers to the CW. It is to tell a good story, and, if she wants to be as woke and progressive as she insists she is, it is to listen to different people - including fans. If she wants to shoot the shit with friends on Twitter, maybe she should get a private account. But I personally believe that she can’t use queer and marginalized characters to work out her own trauma, with no understanding of those people’s experiences, and then demand that people only ever praise her for it. It reminds me of the debate about criticism in fic comments, actually: some fic writers don’t want any negative comments. Which is fine if you’re writing fic for fun. Carina’s a professional writer with a TV show, who is getting paid. Insulating herself from literally any and all objections from the audience she’s writing for is, in my opinion, stupid, and also incredibly self-centered if she’s writing about people who’s experiences she doesn’t share. 

Honorable mentions, probably not worth getting into: 

She has like, a really creepy crush on Michael Vlamis, and even though she’s technically his boss, she’s constantly basically...thirsting over him on Twitter and Instagram in very uncomfortable ways

Max’s little speech to Michael in 1x11 about how he felt “everything,” every part of the abuse Michael suffered, and how guilty he felt about it, was just absolutely horrifying and tone deaf. Max, a character with great privilege, basically making all of Michael’s abuse about himself and how guilty it made him feel and acting like he can in any way share or understand Michael’s experience was just in every way gross, but clearly intended to make Max ~compelling~ and get the brothers to start talking and become closer and it just again shows a complete misunderstanding of the experiences of people less fortunate than her. 

Which, in short, all means that I have absolutely zero faith in Season 2. I’m not in the least bit excited for it. I think she’ll completely let us down, and I expect a lot more of the same tone-deafness and lack of nuance in relation to complex issues and marginalized characters. I think she’ll put us through the wringer, emotionally, for the sake of writing angst rather than telling a good story. 

Anyway, hope that answered your question, anon. 

[popcornbutterflymedia]

every episode since the pilot has been a favorite, so to call this one another favorite is redundant. this is a standout episode, a breakthrough. there is a lot to unpack and i love it.

this episode grounds the central romance in the real world between two people burdened by responsibility, haunted by their past, hardened by their own hurts. there has always been a personal need for a love story between two people who feels undeserving of love, while the other is incapable of giving love. i’ve always wondered at the dynamics of two damaged beings, if love is even possible for them. this single episode has made it that story, and it’s incredibly satisfying.

a random, possibly unrelated question: are hardened people who aren’t used to being vulnerable considered broken, when they don’t show emotion, and are incapable to let emotion in or are they just shaped differently? if they are indeed brojen, is brokenness even a bad thing?

this installment in the series is a reckoning with the hurts that shape people, acceptance and healing.

we are reminded of the outburst from the previous installment that seemingly came out of left field. it accomplished what it set out to do, which was to drive a wedge between taguro and sensui, and thus by extension the friend group. it was clear, after this confrontation that their alter egos are still alive, ready to answer either's call. what it hasn't done, at this point, is explain why everything imploded in the first place. more on that later. what it has also done though, is show donny's improved acting, which frankly, til now still leaves me speechless. the sparks between donny and belle were also on full display, so bright, it's blinding, so present it will be foolish to deny it.

in deib’s bedside monologue for an audience of one, he laments his predisposition to hurt everyone he loves, compounded by having to constantly prove his worth, he carries the weight of the world in his heart. weather or not this is the factual truth matters little when life makes one question one’s worth, and capacity to love. 

onscreen moments become relatable when fictional situations are made alive by feelings that become friends you know do well, and emotions take hold of the heart, like this one did and never let go. there is still a heaviness as this is being written, that is not unwanted.

at the barb, team max inquires about the girl's supposed friendship with deib, which paved the way to a map of max's heart, along with a comprehensive history of its heartbreaks. this lesson includes a chapter on childhood love, one she willingly waited on for years. it was a summer romance, new and shiny, bright and childlike and blinding. she had the boy's heart in her keeping only returned when and shares when the boy returned home. it felt good, she said, to be loved, and be loved in return, to be accepted unconditionally. it was good. it was good, until the boy discovered the bigger world, and the bigger world discovered the boy. the world gave everything rj wanted, and maybe demanded so much from him in return. home was difficult to come back to, where without a word, with his heart in her hands, waiting and waiting, her and waiting. that is how we, the audience found her: waiting. that is how her friends found her: waiting. that is how deib met her: in a state of mistrust, and uncertainly waiting.

without a word of absolution, from rj, max took on the responsibility of being left behind. she was left to her own devices for survival, thus the harsh exterior, the high walls around her heart, taking on the pain, keeping it all in, while her trust issues affect all her present relationships, active and possible ones.

a belated realization is that max and deib share a selflessness that can be toxic, in that they both take responsibility for any pain, or unfortunately circumstance. they internalize that weight and carry it around, unprompted

writing is usually a balm for a heavy heart. there is something about putting words to one’s feelings and seeing those words on a safe writing blank space that makes everything better. it has saved max countless times over, that is until it hasn’t.

max’s dad has been surprising me since the beginning. the anchor, and stand up man that is as a character is genuinely refreshing where stories like these are concerned. he is a character i am grateful for. he is found in her eldest daughter’s room late at night after a long day. he worries about max, and doesn’t want her to stay out late, as it may affect her academics. it is powerful to only be asked to do well in school and nothing else. he then proceeds to speak about her mom, for the first time ever. he tells her how he met her mother, a petty thief from a world so different than what he had known. it must have been refreshing to not answer to familial demands, and be treated, and challenged as an equal. it must have been the newness of it all, but there was enough love between them for max to be given a place in the world.

verbal assurance matters. we tend to believe the effects of our life circumstances. we live by that belief until someone comes along and tells us that our minds are playing tricks on us. a definitive absolution and acceptance.

if he had only known, if he had only been told he says, he would have taken care of her, he would have loved her in an instant. his daughter would ask for nothing. the daughter assures her father everything is as it should be, if it wasn’t she wouldn’t be the brave, strong girl that she is. if it wasn’t, he would not be happy with the family he has now. elle, maxrill, and macy. macy, the present wife is a complicated character. macy, the wife that met the world’s standards is in earshot of the room where the conversation that matters is taking place. the door is open, almost giving her permission to listen in. and she does. and she breaks. and she’s a beautifully broken down human being. with wine and an embrace from her loyal but just as hurt daughter, macy attempts to collect pieces of her dignity and bravely keeps it together. i felt that. i felt issa and melizza who both impress every episode. it’s one of the most beautiful moments in the entire series. there’s more story to be told there. stories of mothers and daughters and girls and women and their plight, what hey have to endure, a respected place in the world, for acceptance, for love. goodness, for love. (reason number 345554345678844 for season 2 please and thank you! XD)

back at benison, teams max and deib are still reeling from their rift a plan of action - taguro and sensui together again. it’s the most sincere, funniest, most kilig version of of modern pass the message ever played that involved both friend groups. it gave us jealous deib, triggered max, and kilig tochiko and it got tagsen to crack. it also gave us a cast who has mastered the art of perfect timing with each other.

the mean girls are meaner than ever. elle, is in understandable pain. her own, and as an advocate for her mother. it’s aimee’s pride that is severely offended. she is  barely hanging on to her place in benison’s social hierarchy and jostling for deib’s attention. the key to both injuries is max’s removal from campus. a plan is hatched: hurt the girl, and  convince the queen bee whose name was once never dared to be spoken of to take up her place in benison again.

en route to the lockers, driven by a pang of jealousy, triggered by max's one word conformation, deib is eager to patch things up with the girl. unbeknownst to him, the girl in question is being followed through the hallways. the assailant got to the lockers, to max before deib ever did. max fought back just like she promised her dad, except, she doesn't win every fight. and this is one of her unlucky nights. deb found unconscious max sprawled across the hallway. in a fit of panic, and urgency to save her, in that moment, all bets, competition, tension and cold wars are off. deib carries max his arms to safety.

she wakes up in a hospital bed surrounded by her friends, her teacher, her parents, dazed and confused, not knowing how she got there in the first place. her doctor explains she suffered a head trauma, good thing her friend found her and brought her to the hospital. said friend in question sits quietly by her bedside. a ghost of a grateful smile appears on her lips, as she catches the glimmer of satisfaction in his eyes. for a moment, she basks in being the hero of the day. she basks in being her hero.

upon further questioning, it is determined that she does not remember anything. max’s dad wants to have the case investigated. the hero of the day. he introduces himself as deib lhor enrile. the father who is meeting the boy for the first time has heard about him. heroic acts lose their value for people whose unfaltering reputation precedes them. it’s going to be an uphill battle for thee girl’s affections, and her father’s approval. this is just the starting point.

max’s classmates wait patiently outside her room. the conversation of choice is max and elle’s family set up, initially a little less discreet until the chatter caught elle’s ire. they had no idea of the ties that bind the two girls. that is until deib chimes in. family is important to max and elle, he says, much to everyone’s surprise. 

how could he ever know? this is the same question i had regarding episode five. i was reminded that i had tweeted my confusion about max’s sudden outburst and max and deib’s ensuing confrontation. while we understand friendship fights, max and deib’s just seemed a little to unwarranted, and a little to personal. we get a flashback of max in deib’s room, talking about family sealed with pinky promises, vouched for by an elementary school award in trustworthiness.

i cried. that broke me. butterflies for kilig are fine, but the older you get the more conversation matters. the desire to be seen, to have others be witness to your existence, to validate your journey. the older you get. the small acts of kindness make up grand love. now we understand.

back at the hospital, everything is going well with max’s family unit, which includes macy and elle. she is about to rest when she gets a call from her uncle and grandmother. aside from max, her lola and tito get to speak to maxim too. they get to thank max’s dad for sponsoring her grandmother’s medicines. striking is macy’s reaction to her husband’s helping hand, then we are reminded that she did not know how to feel about her husband’s act of charity. it’s a small thing, but this show wins with their attention to detail.

max becomes her old, spunky mindoro self. brave, astig, angas. all in front of the new family who despite trying, despite the love, she has been tiptoeing around. they saw her loud and strong, even deib did, and for some that whole picture broke me. there is something so sad, yet so victorious about instinctively letting people, especially those you’ve been impossibly proper around, see who you truly are. in some ways it’s also a slap in their faces, a wake up call to allow people to be who they truly are. thank you for that moment.

on a moment of authenticity is where this episode ends. a moment of peace, tentative. consider this the first dig in a deeper excavation of character and history that will make up this love story. i remember tagging this episode six and episode seven twin episodes. i might be a week late but i am excited to revisit that. 

just infinite amounts of gratitude for this show, and it’s substance, and its heart, and boundless love for the kids, the cast of characters who are all special, who all have my heart. just for giving me something to write, and keeping me sane, i owe this show a lot.

 love and gratitude.

[juvoci]

9 January 2021

9 January 2021.

3:54 PM.

So, I’ve written about writing fiction on this blog before, and this much has become clear to me: It seems that I enjoy writing about fictional worlds, rather than writing stories within those fictional worlds.

So, in this blog post, I’m going to write about a fictional world that I’ve been creating, and perhaps someday I’ll publish a novel or something of a story within this fictional world.

But, until then, I’m just gonna write about it. But why am I writing this on my blog? Why am I publishing this for all the world to see?

Because, well, I have this weird mental thing, which I can’t seem to figure out, nor seem to change... and that weird mental thing is this notion that, if something isn’t immediate relevant, I can’t really find the motivation to work on it.

In other words, I need to work in real-time in order to feel like my work is meaningful and thus be motivated to actually work on my work work work work work work... shoutout to Rihanna and Drake.

So, yeah. I’ve found that if I just publish my work (almost immediately or instantaneously; and even actually immediately and instantaneously, when I stream on Instagram Live or YouTube Live or Twitch TV, etcetera), then I have much more motivation to actually continue working.

Whereas, when I don’t publish my work (almost) immediately, I start to feel... disconnected, irrelevant, lonely in the work.

I guess I just like sharing stuff. I want my work to be an ongoing conversation, not something I slave away at by myself for days upon days upon days and then release to the world.

My friend Zane recommended that I write Flash Fiction. No, that’s not the right name for it. What is it called? It’s this kind of fiction where, every few days or every week or whatever, the author releases a new chapter of the story. Well, I don’t know if it has a name, but it’s a good idea. I might try that in the near future. If I forget, please remind me.

ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ

It is now 4:07 PM. I’m feeling a little antsy, so I’m going to do some exercise — yoga, weight-lifting, etcetera — to release some energy. BRB.

4:17 PM. Random thought just occurred to me. Another reason I like publishing my writing immediately is because I like talking to people. When I write and publish in real-time... it’s as if I’m talking to you, the reader.

Only losers go to school. I taught myself how to move. I’m not the type to count on you. Because stupid’s next to "I love you".

So what can you show me, that my heart don't know already? 'Cause we make our own sense, and you're qualified to me.

— Lyrics from Losers by The Weeknd featuring Labrinth

5:01 PM.

A beautiful and hilarious quote by Lucky Yates. He tweeted it on the day of the Capitol Attacks in Washington DC.

I should post a vlog on YouTube about my experience with marijuana. The flower has played an interesting role in my life thus far.

5:12 PM.

Cracks create beauty, and beauty is broken.

5:56 PM.

Oh, yeah, I was gonna write about my fictional universe. I’m making some coffee right now. It’s a little late for coffee... but today feels like a coffee kind of night.

So, anyways, the universe I’m creating is called Universe 1830. First, I’ll explain what exactly this universe is, then I’ll explain why I’m creating this fictional universe.

So, what is Universe 1830?

Well, like I said, it’s, um, a fictional universe. Just like any other universe, it has stories, locations, characters, history, culture, technology, etcetera. You can think of Universe 1830 as a sub-universe of the larger Universe (the Absolutely Infinite Universe). (Or maybe the Universe of all Universes, or something.)

The numbers make it interesting because then you can imagine infinite universes numerically. For example, Universe 1, Universe 2, Universe 3, Universe 40, Universe 50, Universe 60, Universe 700, Universe 800, Universe 900, Universe 1000000 Universe 2000000, Universe 3000000, Universe 4000000000, Universe 5000000000, Universe 6000000000, Universe 7000000000000... I think you get the idea. INFINITE Universes.

And then Universe 1830 is just right there in between Universe 1831 and Universe 1829. (Impressively, pretty close to Universe 1, actually.) (Just kidding, the numbers are arbitrary, simply for labeling purposes.) (Maybe someday I’ll play around with these numbers.)

So, yeah, Universe 1830 is a sub-universe within the larger literally completely infinite Universe.

Universe 1830 has its own canon. And, for now at least, this canon can only be written by me, this individual, Juvoci. Perhaps, in the future, I’ll permit other writers to write within the 1830 Universe. But, for now, I will preserve that right for me alone, for the sake of keeping 1830 a contained project.

Of course, anyone can write fan fiction for Universe 1830, if anyone is so inclined. All such writing will only be part of the “1830 Fan-Fiction Universe” unless I adopt it into the Official Canon.

Get it? Got it? Cool. Moving forward.

Why am I creating this fictional universe?

There’s a few reasons.

1 — Writing fiction is a great way to explore and discuss real world issues. By using fictional locations, places, names, characters, histories, etcetera... I can explore real world issues in a different context and without name-dropping. (But that isn’t to say that I won’t name drop. 😏)

2 — I love writing fiction. Contemporary Fiction, Sci-Fi & Fantasy Fiction, Historical Fiction... it’s all good fun to me! I just love writing, language, ideas, worlds, universes... I just love it.

3 — I can’t think of any more reasons.

6:19 PM.

So, yeah, I guess that’s what and why. Did I miss anything?

Listening to music by Victor Norman right now. It’s like dark and minimal Drum and Bass... or something. Right up my ally, whatever it is. Good stuff.

Oh, another reason I want to create a fictional universe is because this world we live in now is messed up in so many ways. I feel like we, as a global society, need to start telling ourselves a different story about what this world is. We need a new mythology. So I’m hoping that potentially by creating this fiction universe called 1830, we can meld and blend our real-world mythology with this fictional mythology and hence create a new story and context for ourselves and thus create a better Earth.

Like, for example, different “realms” or “planets” in Universe 1830 worship certain pantheons of gods; and we here as humans on Earth can use these gods as symbols and heroes and idols and signposts. These gods can give us motivation and direction.

And later, in this blog, I’ll talk about some of the gods.

But, remember, I’m literally going to be building this universe in real-time, while blogging on the internet... so not everything I write is immediately canon. I might make edits later.

That being said, I am going to create a wikipedia (either on this website or on Fandom or both) which keeps track of the characters, locations, stories, yada yada. So this blog will sort of act as a “sketchbook” for Universe 1830, and the wikipedia will act as a sort of “logbook” for Universe 1830. I’ll elaborate on this further, in the future.

6:32 PM.

💜 This is my favorite heart emoji, by the way. Although, I wish there was a pink one. There is a pink one, but it has some shit on it or something.

7:04 PM.

So, Ora is perhaps the first character I should talk about in Universe 1830, because Ora was the first character I ever created for Universe 1830.

So, who is Ora? Well, Ora is... alot of things, lol. I created him in 2015... so he’s been developed for awhile.

But, yes, Ora is a male, a man, a he. I suppose, that is the first thing you have learned about Ora.

Now, does this mean that Ora has a penis? I don’t know, maybe. At certain points in Ora’s existence, he is a male human... so I suppose that, yes, Ora, at certain points, has a penis.

The only reason I mention that last bit is because of the interesting things happening in pop culture regarding the difference between sex and gender. Honestly, the debate is beyond me. I say, “be whoever you wanna be” and “I’ll call you whatever you wanna be called”. So, yeah, I guess that, when I say “Ora is a male”, I’m basically just saying that he was born with a penis, and likely still has one (assuming he’s in human form). (“Human form?” you’re asking. Yes. Ora has more than one form. I’ll cover this later.)

But, also, I suppose that, when I say “Ora is a male”, I’m also saying that his masculine energy is stronger than his feminine energy. Now, what exactly the difference is between masculine energy and feminine energy is... complicated, and not something I even completely understand. It’s more of a... feeling. Stuff just feels masculine or feminine to me. It’s hard to explain. It’s almost... an emotion. Maybe I’ll dive deeper into this topic another time.

But, let’s get back to Ora. Who is Ora?

7:15 PM.

Like I said before, Ora has multiple forms. So it can get a bit complicated when we talk about what or who Ora is. But I’ll begin from a place of simplicity; when Ora was a human.

(I suppose I should write all of the lore in past tense? As if all the events of Universe 1830 occurred back in the day? Perhaps? Not sure yet.)

Ora was a human in the Realm of Zunora (a realm which has many other names) on Planet Zunora (a planet which has many other names).

Who is Zunora? Zunora is a god / goddess. (Zunora is known to appear in both male and female forms, so I’ll henceforth refer to Zunora as he, she, and they. That being said, Zunora appears most often in her feminine form... so I’ll usually refer to Zunora as female. She tends to reserve her masculine forms for when she needs to be dominating. Deeper voice, bigger frame, etcetera. Classic biological differences.)

(Fuck, I’m writing in present tense now. Whatever, screw worrying about tenses. 😂)

For the sake of convenience, I’ll simply refer to Zunora as a “god”. Honestly, in my mind, “god” can apply to male and female gods. Even distinguishing goddess from god is kind of insulting. They’re all just gods, they’re all just actors, they’re all just princes, etcetera...

So, yeah, Zunora is a God. Zunora is a God of Light. Her colors are yellow (or gold), black, and white. Zunora is a God of Inspiration, Creativity, Radiance, Spark, Lightning, Electricity...

Indeed, Zunora is a God inspired by the Sun. So any (or at least most) of the Sun’s characteristics, are characteristics of Zunora. The name Zunora comes from the English translation of Sun Aura. (I will explain the history of language in the Realm of Zunora at another time, and at that time I will explain exactly what I mean by “English translation”. But, in short, it’s an effort to maintain the “realism” or at least “realistic feeling” of the “fictional” universe.)

That being said, when Zunora was created, she was created to be the aura of the Sun, and not the Sun itself. In other words, Zunora is symbolic of the light surrounding the Sun... but not the literal Sun itself.

Now, you may have noticed that “Ora” and “Zunora” are quite similar in that they both have “ora” in them. Look at you, Einstein! Atta-boy! Ehem. Sorry.

But, yes, Ora is derived from Zunora. (Or, perhaps, Zunora is derived from Ora? Queue the suspenseful music!) Just exactly why Ora is named after Zunora is something I’ll probably cover in a story about Ora. (A story which I’ve already finished some percentage of and I hope to publish someday.)

8:21 PM.

Sorry, got distracted by the news. Watching Reuters videos about the Capitol Attack on January 6. Reuters is a great news source. They are more diverse, (relatively) less biased, and less anxiety-inducing, than other news sources. I highly recommend checking out their videos at reuters.com/video.

It’s amazing how many military factions there are (and have been). The FBI, the Maryland National Guard, the Capitol Police, Antifa, the US Coast Guard, the Red Army, the People's Liberation Army, the Korean People's Army... I mean the list goes on and on and on...

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more understanding of why militaries exist. Peeps be fucking shit up, and sometimes we need an elite force of trained soldiers to stop the fuck-uppery. That being said, I still think that, at the end of the day, violence isn’t the answer. I still hope and dream for a world without violence. And I think we can achieve it.

I’m a believer! I couldn’t leave her, if I tried!

Then I got the idea: 1830 will be a non-violent military force. We use our minds to inspire change, not physical force. Sounds kinda corny, right? Whatever.

Oh, by the way, 1830 is different from Universe 1830. 1830 is a real-world community, while Universe 1830 is a fictional universe. Hm... this could get confusing. Maybe I should give Universe 1830 a second and more practical name. How about... Fable Union? Sounds good. Universe 1830 is now also called Fable Union. Great.

So, yeah, 1830 is a religion, a non-violent military force, and a... newspaper?! Surprise!

Yes, 1830 is also a media outlet, a digital magazine (and perhaps someday physical), a newspaper.

Sigh... 1830 is alot of things. Lots of potential. But only Time will tell what it truly becomes.

Stop looking at me like that. Yes, I am aware that I’m a little crazy. (Just kidding, I’m 100% sane. Just kidding, I’m not. Just kidding, I am.) (I am.) (Seriously.) (Okay, not that seriously... but... seriously enough.) (Wtf am I talking about?)

8:36 PM. Jeez. I’ve spent like the entire day writing. Cool.

But, yeah, 1830 is a platform for intellectual and political conversation.

Let’s get back to talking about Ora.

8:48 PM.

Maybe I should just continue writing the fictional stories about these characters, instead of explaining it all here, because I feel like... if I keep writing about them in this format, I’ll end up just spoiling the stories... and that’s no fun, right?

But everytime I try writing the fictional stories, I lose motivation, as I mentioned in another recent blog post. Hm...

Fuck it. Let’s talk about something else. I need to think more about how I wanna approach Universe 1830. Sorry for the false alarm! Oops, I mean Fable Union (also known as Universe 1830).

Let’s talk about Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cryptocurrency in general.

Firstly, I wanna post a screenshot. In the Economics Explained Discord (great YouTube channel, highly recommend it), I simply asked this question: Thoughts on Bitcoin (or Cryptocurrency in general)? And I received some pretty interesting responses. Here is one of the most interesting responses I received:

Don’t stare at money too long, it’s Medusa! — Kanye West

Sorry, just thought of that for some reason. It’s true, though. Yes, what a wise intuition that was! Before we begin talking about cryptocurrency, which is money of course... let us acknowledge that we must not over-indulge in money! Fair warning.

But, yes, let’s go over this interesting response regarding Cryptocurrency.

This Discord user (whom I won’t name, for the sake of privacy... but if you read this, and want me to credit you, let me know), begins by saying a bunch of stuff about oil and Ethereum and petrodollars, but I don’t quite understand what he’s (I’m guessing it’s a dude, because most people on Discord are probably dudes, but I don’t really know for sure) trying to say here. Please let me know if you understand. But, moving on...

Something he says, which is super interesting to me, which is why I exclamation-point-emojied it, is “The whole idea that supply cannot be changed is just false.” And, at first, when he said this, I was like: “Wait, whoa, what? Isn’t one of the major points of Bitcoin that it has a limited and thus scarce supply? But this statement by this anonymous Discord user completely contradicts that.

But then I thought about it... and, wait a second, I think it might be true! What if a government, slowly but surely, built itself around Bitcoin, such that it held Bitcoin as its central currency, and then could export subsidies and import taxes, as it pleased, through Bitcoin, in order to control the supply and demand of Bitcoin.

In other words, control of Bitcoin’s availability, through subsidies and taxes, is essentially synonymous with control of Bitcoin’s supply.

In other words, being able to control Bitcoin’s value, by controlling its availability, is essentially the same as controlling its supply.

See what I’m saying? I’m honestly not sure if I’m making myself clear, or making any sense. It makes sense to me, anyway.

So, in other words, yes, there will (supposedly) only ever be 21,000,000 Bitcoins in existence. But manipulation of Bitcoin’s value is about the same as manipulation of Bitcoin’s supply.

HOWEVER, if Bitcoin becomes the GLOBAL RESERVE CURRENCY for ALL countries... then it should be more stable, because then there will be competition, and not a monopoly, over the Bitcoin’s income and outcome, and thus value.

This is actually the best result, in my opinion; that Bitcoin becomes the Official Global Reserve Currency. The OGRC...? 😂 Official Global Reserve Exchange... or OGRE. 👹 Lmao.

9:40 PM.

If Bitcoin became the world’s official reserve currency... that would be dope. Why? Because it actually does, numerically-speaking, have a static supply. This means that governments, corporations, individuals, nobody can create Bitcoins out of thin air (unlike dollars *cough*).

That’s why Bitcoin is such a great reserve currency. And other currencies, like the US dollar, the Chinese yen, the Russian ruble, and Ethereum (ETH), can be backed by the value of Bitcoin.

Just as a side note, I wanna acknowledge how awesome of a name Bitcoin is. Hats off to whoever came up with it. I mean, it is kind of an obvious choice, no doubt. But it’s so beautiful in its obviousness and simplicity. It’s a great name. There are some other cryptocurrencies with great names too, though. Tether, for example, is a great cryptocurrency name. (Although, I’m not sure whether or not Tether is as good an investment as it is a name...)

Returning to the anonymous Discord user’s posting, I’m gonna define a few terms he mentions, for you and for myself.

petrodollar : In America, the petrodollar is any US dollar paid to oil-exporting countries in exchange for oil. The dollar is the preeminent global currency. As a result, most international transactions, including oil, are priced in dollars. Oil-exporting nations receive dollars for their exports, not their own currency.

blockchain : A system in which a record of transactions, made in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency, are maintained across several computers that are linked in a peer-to-peer network.

smart contract : A computer program or a transaction protocol which is intended to automatically execute, control, or document legally, relevant events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement. A self-executing contract, being directly written into lines of code. This code exists across a distributed, decentralized blockchain network.

I was going define unspent transaction outputs (UTXO) and account-based chains... but it turns out that they’re just super technical terms that aren’t super relevant to the average consumer... so I’ll just skip over those. You can research them on your own, if you’re interested.

11:21 PM.

Got distracted again. Starting to get pretty tired.

The Discord user says that Ethereum has a higher throughput than Bitcoin. This means that transactions can happen faster on Ethereum (I think, but please correct me if I’m wrong). I’ve heard that Ethereum might end up being a currency which is used more often, but uses Bitcoin as its reserve currency.

10 January 2021.

1:37 AM.

Yeah, I’m pretty tired now.

I just played some Magic the Gathering (MTG) for the first time in months. I actually streamed it on Twitch. It was quite fun, honestly. I might continue. I really love that game. It’s a great game.

I used to be a pretty competitive Magic player. For a brief time in 2019, I was ranked in the Top 400 players worldwide on Magic Arena.

5:44 AM.

I feel pretty distracted, in life, generally-speaking. Modern life demands my attention in too many directions at once. I’m glad to be moving to Oregon soon, into the wilderness, for awhile.

Focus is so important.

“There must be a better life...” he says, “somewhere... beyond.”

6:17 AM.

Part of me honestly thinks that the whole fictional universe thing is kind of dumb. But I think I might just be over-thinking it. I think I think? Yes.

But seriously, I feel like it could be dumb. But then part of me loves it, and wants to keep building it. I’m not sure how to feel about it.

Is there a way for me to continue working on it without feeling like it’s kinda dumb? Or is it just actually kind of dumb?

No, I don’t think it’s just dumb. I think I just haven’t put enough effort into it to make it seem like something that’s actually cool. Maybe it will just take more work.

Bear with me. I’ll figure it out. Someday.

Loading . . .

[hellowallflowerfriend]

“Have you ever seen a flower grow?

If you did, it would slow you down.

It would remind you that real things take time. And, it’s magic too, isn’t it?”

I recently watched the movie rendition of one of my favorite childhood novels. The cinematic version of, Stargirl, was not quite how I pictured it, but it was still true to its form. It still made me cry.

                                                       * * *

About four years prior I had bought and read the book again, felt my heart light on fire again, and cried as I had the first time I read it. I felt that same strange loyalty to the Stargirl I had read about as a young girl. It felt as if I were reaching into the heart of that childhood promise I had made during my first read.

I closed the book, wiping tears from my face, and remembered the promise I had made to myself back then -- that I would never, never forget what I read. As a child, shoulders curled forward, careful, and sweet -- I had promised myself that when I grew up, I would be just like her.

                                                      * * *

Stargirl has her own pet rat that sits on her shoulder as she plays the ukulele and sings. She wears long, sifting skirts, she goes for leisurely walks in the desert, saying hello to animals and plants around her. She represents to me an un-tethered, new soul. Stargirl is a work of fiction, but she has been real in my life.

                                                      * * *

“The next time you see a flower sticking up out of the ground or in a vase, just remember that part of what makes it beautiful is how long it took it to grow.”

I love that Jerry Spinelli wrote of this beautiful soul and chose to give her the name, “Stargirl.” I like to think about the fact that we are all made of the same material as stars, that we are made of stardust. From stardust we come, and from stardust we shall return. I like to think of people as glowing, and when we are at our most fulfilled, and when we are at our truest, we shine the brightest. I think that was what was so inspiring to me about this character from this childhood book. She really, really shined.

Now, when I see a beautiful flower or plant, I leave it in the ground. I high-five trees as I run, imagining their soft leaves as encouraging palms. I tweet at birds as I pass them, and I talk to my cat as if he can understand me. I still have so many other ways I could keep that promise to myself, When I grow up, I want to be Stargirl. I love how much this character, made of dreams, letters, and paper, has become a hero in my life.

                                                      * * *

For now, I will do my very best to slow down and watch the plants grow. I will remind myself that real things take time. I will do all I can to be awed by the world.

We can all learn from Stargirl. We can start with taking a slow, solitary walk in the dessert. We can continue by listening to the nothing and everything that surrounds us. We can become the stars, and the stars can become us. When we glow within ourselves, we can finally join the stellar beauty that surrounds us -- realizing that the magic has been within us all along.

[aurimeanswind]

Your Favorite Video Game Franchises—Sunday Chats (10-8-17)

I know it seems like I keep using generic questions for my “Alex Asks” Sunday Chats, but hey, bear with me here. You gotta lay the groundwork for all of the best relationships.

This week I asked this:

This comes from a lot of places. This year I’ve especially been thinking about the video game lineages that have affected me or at least left the most with me over the years. Most importantly, the sequels to the two biggest video game worlds in my life, Persona and Zelda, both came out this year. It’s been kind of monumental for me. Both are interesting too, because they have me assessing and looking at what ties me to those two specific franchises.

On one, it’s so much nostalgia Zelda means more to me than most things because it’s really the franchise that made me or helped me like games as much as I do today. Watching my brother Brady playthrough The Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past, going to the mall with him when he traded in all his old games to get it, and the story that that encapsulates in my heart and in my mind is critically important to my love of games, and my relationship with the medium as it began. It’s one of those aspects that keeps me tethered to games so forcefully, so completely and utterly in the grasp of the stories and adventures in the medium and that’s where they started for me.

Years later I’d return to A Link to the Past on my own time and play through it to 100% completion by myself. It’s one of the first games I ever 100%’d, and it’s also one of the first times I ever wanted to, a habit that is all-encompassing for just about any and all video games now. I don’t do it as much as I’d like to, because I know the tradeoff of time to commitment, and if I didn’t have to/want to play every new game that came out every day, I’d certainly spend far more time just perfecting and completing them to a near insane-level.

A Link to the Past is where my lineage with games began. It’s one of the first games I’ll play with my kids in the future, if I’m ever lucky enough to have any. It’s massively important to me, and this year’s Breath of the Wild brought not only all those feelings back for me, but entirely new ones as well, as my brothers and I shared a text message thread describing our experiences with the game through the early months of this year.

On the other end of that is Persona 5, which is related to a coming-of-age in a totally different way. Persona 3 FES was one of those games that affected me on a delayed response. I beat it and I felt kind of... hollow. I was so accomplished, and it hit me so hard, and then... nothing. And then when I was laying in my bed alone that night, I just broke down crying. It was something that had genuinely touched my soul, being someone in high school and someone separated from my friends. It pulled all the right strings and hit all the right notes at all the right times.

What’s more, I had never experience any piece of media that had characters grow, and change, and evolve, and relationships with them, in such an intimate way. I loved the characters of that game, I truly did. It impacted me in full force.

Persona 3 was about overcoming insurmountable odds, believing in your friends, believing in what you had done, and fighting until you had nothing left for the betterment of all people. About the selfless act of giving yourself up for all your friends, and Persona 5 revisits a ton of those different themes as well. It’s about those same threads coming to fruition in a completely different, but also globally-impacting way, with plenty of Japanese bullshit along the way.

As I came into adolescence, Persona 3 was the game that made me realize how much I loved all that Japanese bullshit, but also I how much slower pacing worked for me, how much I prefered it. Persona 5 helps rebuild all those feelings, but also ultimately showed me how much I’ve changed and evolved since then, for both the better and worse.

These are the two most important franchises in media to my life, outside of Harry Potter. And I don’t think it’s dumb, or silly to latch onto media and fiction as absolute and important aspects of your upbringing. Myths and stories and franchises are outlets for us to learn new things, experience things we could never ourselves, broaden our horizons, and open our hearts to suffrage that we aren’t privy to. It’s also time for us to reflect on what we like and what we do, and while these two video game franchises may seem shallow to some, they aren’t to me. Whether that’s part projection, or part of something that’s absolutely there, that exact question is precisely what makes media interpretation subjective, and holding those pieces of media close to you totally okay.

So with that said, let’s look at YOUR favorite franchises in games.

Even though Cam is bad at following instructions insofar as “few tweets” is concerned, this is exactly the shit I’m talking about here. This is what I want.

What I love about this story is that this game means something so specific to you because your experience with it was so specific. Just like all games for all people. And there is of course crossover there, but art is reflected in the one who views it, and that’s what makes the discussion around games so fun. That these things reflected onto us in such completely different ways.

What you say about .dotHack reminds me of the way I am with Zelda. That there was this big world out there that only I could save. That I needed to try, and fail, and try again to succeed in that world. That people and tools and deities would help me, and that if my belief was strong I’d hold steadfast and be able to beat the big bad. These are philosophy that, though childlike, you can clearly see reflected in me to this day. And it’s because of a game like that. Without Zelda, I’d at the very least like games in a wholly different way than I do today.

Bravo Cam. I understand.

Well, while I don’t think Roger is being serious about the Frog game, even though I do vividly remember this boxart and that weird frog penis on it, it does make me think of a Frog-related game that got me into a whole different kind of franchise.

Amazing Frog, the Ouya game of all things, is what got me into Game Grumps. And it’s still an amazing episode to this day.

Ahh my old nemesis Final Fantasy Six. And hearing you bring up FF4 here as well is really important, because I have played Four most of the way through and really love it. To know that Six can build on what was there with new and more engrossing depth makes me want to play it more as well. I love to hear when and where the scope of storytelling in games expanded for folks, because like I said for me that was kind of Persona 3, and how it could get under my skin and into my heart without me even realizing it. My view of games and their stories changed in so many ways with that game.

Of course! And Rock Band has grown into something you’ve played with friends and shared with so many others. It’s a wonderful franchise, and of all the rhythm games I’ve been bad at, Rock Band is surely the one I like the most.

Rock Band parties will always be a loving aspect of my most endearing memories with my high school friends.

Katamari is always a game I’ve only ever experience from arm’s length. I love that it not only resonated with one person, but two! I love it.

Katamari reminds me a lot of the weird Japanese games that have somehow crossed over the Pacific and also found their own niche here in the US. Persona I’d say was in the same camp, but that’s all big now. Katamari never had legions of adoring fans, but it had its passionate it ones. Few games are as carefree and fun, but also odd, and, as Jazz said, visually arresting. A game about rolling up big balls, collecting stuff, and then turning them into stars, may seem nonsensical, and it is, but it’s also just endlessly endearing.

Watching the Game Grumps play that game has been the most I’ve experienced with it, and it seems like a game you can kind of zone out and get lost in. Once again: I love it.

Uncharted is a franchise that, in my head, is like those big movie franchises like Star Wars that resonates for so many human reasons beyond its premise.

If anything, those games showed us what masterclass directors those folks at Naughty Dog are. When we look at the story and writing of something like Jak and Daxter, I’d say it’s good, but the leap to the Uncharted franchise is to another level entirely. It’s human, it’s relatable, and it slowly breaks down all the merits the franchise, and many games, are built on. How the search for adventure can become a sickness, when it starts to put so many lives on the line. It’s all with the caveat of Nathan Drake being a “mass murderer”, sure, but the games build such human characters through humor it’s incredible.

Especially Uncharted 4. Because goddamn.

All the Spoopy factor! How topical!

Resident evil is a franchise that I got to so late, it makes me wish I loved horror as a youngun’. But, regardless, Resident Evil 7 is easily one of my favorite games this year, and I adore it. Where that franchise has gone, both good and bad, from its humble beginnings, is stellar. It really sets the scenes for horror games in general, and with Mikami’s legacy continuing with The Evil Within 2 this coming week, you can clearly see that Resident Evil is at the very least one of the most influential names in all of games.

Man. Metal Gear Solid.

Especially MGS3. That’s a whole conversation on its own.

The end of Metal Gear Solid 3, even if it was lost on me long ago, was a game-changer, that’s for sure. Something like Persona 3 helped me go back and appreciate those MGS games even more, because of the more, lets say, steady indoctrination to “Japanese bullshit” then MGS’s full-throttle approach.

Another franchise I totally missed the boat on, until much much later. But I never knew this about you Andrew! Halo is definitely marvelous, and sets the scene for the modern action blockbuster video game, like an Uncharted. If anything, most of the Sony/Microsoft big action franchises wouldn't be the same, I don't’ think, if it weren’t for the Halo franchise.

For me it wasn’t Dishonored that set the scene for strong morality in games, but Fallout 3. The “Karma System” as i think it was in the game, was where I was first introduced to something like that. Sure, inFamous had it, but  such a binary system doesn’t count I don’t think.

I had gotten the want to play passively from stuff like Metal Gear Solid, so that wasn’t new to me, but I love the way Dishonored ties the world to those choices. How it’s reflected not only in Corvo, but in Emily as well. It’s truly a beautiful world in games, unlike anything else out there, from its majesty, to its absolute horror as well.

It’s funny because the political angle of Bioshock is still, to some extent, over my head. Knowing Ayn Rand now and seeing how that is brought into Rapture though, reflectively, has definitely changed that experience for me. I’d have to go back and see Bioshock 2 all the way through to even begin to remember the political commentary in that game.

But Bioshock’s dueling powers that be of Andrew Ryan and Fontaine always frustrated me. Two powers that wished to usurp one another, all for the sake of more influence. with more deeper insecurities laid beneath them. It’s reflective of modern politics in a very unsettling way, and something I could never come to agree with or even empathize with. But that kind of visceral reaction is just the kind of thing video games can evoke out of the player by not just showing you a world, but by surrounding you with it.

Rapture is certainly one of the most compelling settings in all of video game history.

This so fantastic. A game introducing you to a wholly new kind of interest, in such a much more one-to-one way too! Like, I wouldn’t get really into Spelunking from playing Spelunky, that’s not a thing that happens, but Forza to being a gearhead or a car guy or whatever you want to call it totally makes sense.

Forza also has that benefit of being something really approachable too. I think it lays out exactly what it is and how to bring you into its style really well. From my brief experiences with the Forza series, that’s what I’ve taken away at least. That’s so rad!

And hell year EDM. Let’s go to an EDM concert together Jon.

I love seeing how all the franchises roped people wither into game sin a new way or into a totally new thing entirely. It helps evolve relationships, change perspective on storytelling, and more! I just adore it. Keeping play those games. Keep making those stories.

Thanks for placating my question this week everyone. Sorry to the folks that didn’t get it or didn’t read, but no answers from me this week. I will keep writing and be ready to answer them next week, but until then, hey:

keep it real.

[dorkstreet]

Sad Girls by Lang Leav

Synopsis:

Basically this book is about a certain girl named Audrey and how her lie affected almost every aspect of her life. Her lie led her to meet Rad, the boy who turned her world completely into a rollercoaster of events that suddenly bombarded her life. Thus, an ill-fated romance blossomed, which could be that one thing that would push her to the edge.

Discussion:

I love the fact that the main character Audrey is a writer which I can relate myself to in such ways. It defined my personal issues as a writer who constantly suffers from pain which later becomes my driving force and inspiration to almost all of my works. I was able to put myself in her shoes and it gave me the idea of what it is to live between those pages and experience first-hand the emotions that kept me so focused on reading the book. Keeping a lie that huge was no easy task, especially if it concerned almost everyone in your life. Despite the fact that Audrey, even from the very beginning of the book, has done a huge mistake in her life, it made me feel that even characters in a book all have those flaws and imperfections that we all living breathing humans in reality do have. Now let’s get to the part where I talk about Rad. Gosh, this guy. He is the sort of guy that would take things seriously when it comes to loyalty, devotion and most importantly, love. He was also a writer just like Audrey which is one of the many reasons why Rad and Audrey were really meant for each other. I remember Audrey stating most of the time that she felt having these thoughts that even her boyfriend wouldn’t even give a damn about and only Rad would understand. I expected a lot from his character and Lang Leav just overcame my expectations about him. I felt so wrong shipping Rad and Audrey at the beginning because Ana just died and what would you expect Rad would do about it? There’s this certain connection that Rad and Audrey have that I instantly saw between them and it was magical. Their way of conversing with each other with those sarcastic, witty, and humorous minds was seriously entertaining and it made me forget that I was reading the book but rather it seemed that I belonged in that particular scene.

Parts of the book that made a total impact to me:

Audrey’s Birthday. As much as this scene was romantic to the point where I almost screamed out loud, it was one of the most heart-breaking scenes in the book. Rad had privately given Audrey a gift which was a snow globe with snowcapped mountains inside. Audrey was surprised because of the fact that Rad remembered her telling him how one day she would like to live in a house at a snowcapped mountain while writing her own novel. Sadly, Rad felt that things were becoming a little bit too wrong between him and Audrey. Ana, Rad’s girlfriend had just died and Audrey currently has her boyfriend Duck. Rad wouldn’t want people to have a wrong impression about them so he decided to get things done before it would go out of hand.

Lang Leav tweeted this and it was cool having those scenes based from reality because it makes you feel that the characters are not fictional.

 “Are you still with Duck?” he asked. “Yeah.” “Oh.”

This conversation was from the scene where Audrey, after months without keeping in touch with each other and discovering that Rad became a famous author, was the one tasked to interview him about his book. Rad was obviously disappointed that she was still in a relationship with Duck. This just clearly hinted us that Rad possibly had feelings for Audrey even just for a little bit.

“You’re the only person I know who would say something like that.” He grinned at me and shrugged, “I just like how your mind works; that’s all.”

Audrey insisting that she knew how to properly do horseback riding and ends up falling off her horse. She decided that she would just stick on riding merry-go-rounds as an alternative which made Rad to compliment her about how she has this unique perspective of things that he finds fascinating (and secretly, attractive).  

To top off my thoughts about this book, I would like to share all the quotes and lines I have bookmarked. It will serve as a reminder on why I love this book so much.

“What if I’m making a huge mistake?” “Then make it. You can’t go on living a lie.”

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” This is the iconic opening line from The Tale of Two Cities which I will state in another book review on what this line meant to me.

“I learned that writing is the consolation prize you are given when you don’t get the thing you want the most.”

“It’s human nature, I suppose. To have another person validate your own unique view of the world.”

“It’s amazing what people create using their pain. Work that is touched by melancholy has its own unique beauty. Even the word ‘melancholy’ is pretty, the way it rolls on your tongue. I think sadness adds some literature that is unique.”

“People who are prone to sadness are more likely to pick up a pen.”

“Writers struggle more than most when it comes to sentimental attachment. They only write about things they’ve felt deeply.”

“You know, missing someone can sometimes be the best thing for a writer.

And lastly, two of my favorite line ever written in the entire book,

“But I don’t think all writers are sad. I think it’s the other way around-all sad people write.”

“Your first love isn’t the first person you give your heart to-it’s the first one who breaks it.”

[gravetells]

Wanted & Wired (Tether #1) by Vivien Jackson #BookReview #ScifiUrbanDystopian #CyberpunkRomance

*** This review is SPOILER-FREE! Read on with confidence! ***

Author Vivien Jackson’s bio may be the last page I read in this book, but it sets up the atmosphere of the Wanted & Wired story ‘verse just about perfectly. And the rest of Ms. Jackson’s bio is just as entertaining and appealing to a girl who grew up loving Han Solo and grew into a keen appreciation of Captain Mal…

Vivien Jackson writes fantastical, futuristic, down-home salacious kissery.

Right from the first scene, Wanted & Wired hits the ground running and immerses the reader in its futuristic dystopian setting, where terms like whole-organic and post-human have nothing to do with fancy grocery stores.

“I’ll let you know the details once I’ve completed my diagnostic.” “That should be any minute now, though, right? It takes you, like, five hot seconds to check out my bios.” “That’s because I have you loaded in active memory.” “Eh?” What she wouldn’t have given for some plain speaking from her partner. For once. But he got her frustration, or must have, ’cause his half smile looked a little sheepish. “Guess you could say you’re always on my mind.”

Not since my college Science Fiction English class have I had so much fun with futuristic urban sci-fi (okay, let’s just call it cyberpunk). Wanted & Wired invoked so many fond memories of the greats—like Asimov, Gibson’s Neuromancer, even Ghost in the Shell—and invited me to snark along with Mari’s obvious affinity with some very famous space pirate captains. Wanted & Wired fair shivers with a Wild West vibe that breathes life and vibrancy into an already brilliant story world. You can hear it in the turn of a phrase, the peek of a crinoline underskirt, the twang of the Texas-secessionist accents.

In the dim blue glow of the free-fae light, her eyes looked big as desert marigolds. Somebody who didn’t know about her love of all things deadly might end their assessment right at those eyes. Delicate, they’d think. Delicate and precious. Heron agreed, to a point. But he also knew what Mari was capable of. Delicate, precious, and… completely badass. The perfect mix.

And holy hell, this book packs some serious action sequences. About thirty percent in was one that had me grinning like a fool, with a Knight-Rider-meets-the-Avengers-meets-Firefly flair, and I’m pretty sure I actually fist-pumped when the scene careened to victory. Flashy cars are one thing—one thing I covet so very hard—but said sexy machine hardwired into a human brain and handled with finesse and utility… and some seriously lethal mods? Oh my. I think I may have a new hero crush. Heron is that perfect, killer combination of cool under pressure, crazy smart, uber confident, unpredictably lethal, and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable. Mari is his polar opposite in everything except dealing in death, and she owns her sexuality like few other female leads in the romance genre. Neither of the main characters loves killing, but they’re willing to do it to protect each other. Mari is a true badass, a sniper who has zero compunctions about taking out a mech or clone, and she’s as dangerous with her god-given limbs as she is with her favorite toys. She also has a deep-seated aversion to anything bio-mechanically enhanced, and Heron definitely falls under that heading.

About the last thing he expected was for her to keep gazing straight at him, flaying him layer by layer with hot-whiskey eyes. She stroked a finger over his bare knuckles. “Well, we already talked about the guilt, got that sorted. So I’m guessing something else is going on. Ain’t it always? Tell me.” Her voice was made of temptation. Heron pressed his lips flatter before he spoke, out loud and in his most uptight, professory tone. “Well, for one thing, physically, I’m hampered by this transmission, this virus. I appropriated voluntary control of most of my autonomic systems some time ago, but…” “The big words do turn me on, but I flunked out sophomore year. You want me to follow this, it’s gotta be in English. Or Spanish, if you’d rather. Just not Genius.”

It takes a lot of something special to lure me away from chain reading romances, but Heron and Mari and the world Ms. Jackson has built around them are just fascinating. I’d read a whole series dedicated to Heron’s youth, just watching him grow up, come into his own, become this incomparable, alluring other.

“For instance, you got any exposed electrical ports? Spots I oughtn’t get wet?” He looked down at her. Agony. Blissful, sharp, buttered agony. “Only in my head and hands, and even there, nanocoated seams make the electronics waterp… fuck.” Her unspoken question hit him in the gut. “Yes, Mari, you may put your mouth all over me.” “Goody.”

Wanted & Wired is an adrenaline-inducing sci-fi adventure that skips across a canvas splashed with primers of Wild West, sophisticated-steampunk flair, and even space pirates of a sort (but the kind who spend as much time running black ops on the ground as holed up in their cozy mercenary space plane). All things that, on their own, wouldn’t really appeal to me, but this story world is addicting and all kinds of creative. Like so many of the sci-fi classics, Wanted & Wired wrestles with the philosophical definition of humanity: What defines ‘human’? Where does ‘machine’ begin? How comfortable do we trust ourselves to become with tech before we lose our sense of self, control over our own destinies? This story is steeped in diversity—racial, bio-mechanical, sexual, sub-genre—you name it, and Wanted & Wired just might have it.

Readers who fancy the sci-fi greats will lust after @Vivien_Jackson’s Wanted & Wired Click To Tweet

Straight up, you won’t find many stories like this in the romance market right now, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the Tether story universe inspires a thriving new cyberpunk romance sub-genre. Any romance or urban fantasy reader who gets the warm fuzzies thinking about Star Wars or Firefly or Isaac Asimov will adore Wanted & Wired, be sucked in right from the start and beg for more when it ends. Me? I’m excited to see what’s coming next for Mari, Heron, and all their precious things.

Straight up, you won’t find many femme-strong stories like @Vivien_Jackson’s Wanted & Wired Click To Tweet

You may also like…

Reading Wanted & Wired reminded me a little of the dynamics (and sheer power of the hero character) in Burn For Me by Ilona Andrews. While the Hidden Legacy story universe feels more like traditional urban fantasy—with magic rather than science and, on the whole, a lot less sex—the tenacity of the characters, the seething undercurrents of sexual attraction, and the innovation of the story world in both series ring pure and inspire serious addiction.

@~~ Did you enjoy this review? Rate it up on Amazon | GoodReads! ~~@

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from Wanted & Wired (Tether #1) by Vivien Jackson #BookReview #ScifiUrbanDystopian #CyberpunkRomance

[ecoorganic]

'Ted Lasso' and the Journey From Viral Promo to TV Series

Jason Sudeikis reprises his role as a befuddled coach in England, with his viral NBC promos evolving into a full-on TV show. He explains the story of how it happened.

There’s a scene in Ted Lasso, where the title character–Jason Sudeikis’s American football coach who abruptly turns into a Premier League manager–sprints to the assistant referee in the middle of a crucial match after raising his flag for an offside call.

“Come on, now! What do you mean? How’s that offside?” complains Lasso, with his characteristic Kansan drawl as the linesman looks at him with confusion.

“What?” asks the official.

Lasso gets closer. “No, I’m serious. How’s that offside...I don’t understand it yet.”

This lack of complete understanding and across-the-pond confusion is one way to describe the essence of Apple TV+’s latest sitcom, which originated from a 2013 NBC Sports promo. That's where Sudeikis introduced his character as part of the network’s acquisition of the Premier League broadcast rights. 

The idea was simple. Lasso, an intense, wide-eyed college football coach from Kansas City arrives in London and enters the alien world of the Premier League. In the promos, he takes over Tottenham (the following season,

he returns as head coach of youth girls' team St. Catherine Fighting Owls), questioning why players don’t wear more pads and teaching the art of flopping. He has no knowledge of the game or its cultural and historical significance. It was a satiric outlook at two different worlds seen through the eyes of a naïve American, and for NBC, it was a way to both attract a loyal, knowledgeable soccer fan as well as appeal to a new audience. 

In the end, it worked, as both promos (2013 and 2014) went viral and gained a tremendous amount of attention. Combined, the videos have generated more than 20 million views on YouTube and helped the network build a strong foundation for its Premier League audience.

It’s been six years since those promos aired, and soccer in the U.S.–without Ted Lasso–has grown tremendously in popularity. So how was the character revived? 

“I guess it’s a dozen little things that go right that you’re willing and ready to receive,” Sudeikis told Sports Illustrated. “After doing the second video (in 2014), it really unlocked elements of the character that we found very, very fun to write and portray and view the world through. So, one day in 2015, my partner Olivia (the actress and filmmaker Olivia Wilde) came up to me one day and said, ‘You know, you should do Ted Lasso as a show,’ and I said, ‘I don’t know,’ but then after marinating on it, I thought maybe this could happen.”

In spring of the same year, Sudeikis got together with his creative partners and writers, Joe Kelly and Brendan Hunt–the three of them started together with Chicago’s well-known improv group The Second City and Amsterdam’s Boom Chicago; Hunt also plays Lasso’s assistant coach and confidante Coach Beard–and powered through for a week to see if they could create a show out of it. 

“When you have a germ of an idea, you don’t know if it’s something you say out loud or if it’s a tweet or a letter or a screenplay, who knows," Sudeikis said. "So, we sat down, and we were able to bang out a pilot pretty quick in that week. As well as outlining six to 10 episodes of the first season. And that let us know, ‘O.K., there’s something here.’”

Despite the excitement for the idea, that’s all it was at that moment–an idea without a home. So, life continued, and the three friends left Ted Lasso alone for a few years and diverted their focus to their respective careers. 

“But that allowed us to get a little space from it, and low and behold, the showbiz gods looked and smiled down on us and brought Bill to our doorstep,” Sudeikis said.

"Bill" is Bill Lawrence, the experienced television writer, producer and creative force behind award-winning shows such as Scrubs, Cougar Town and Spin City. Lawrence entered the frame in 2017 when he and Sudeikis played pickup basketball a couple of nights a week and one night, the idea of Ted Lasso came up. After a few more chats, he read the script and the concept and was immediately interested. 

“I wanted to work with Jason Sudeikis, he just cracks me up. I thought he was awesome on SNL, whenever he shows up in a movie, I’m immediately into it and he seems like that dude you want to hang with,” Lawrence said. “I’d also seen those sketches, the promotional videos for the Premier League back when he did them and I thought they were so funny, and he said, 'What if we made that character three-dimensional and really rounded him out?' Ted Lasso can still be goofy and funny, but we could also have our version.”

And this was critical for Sudeikis. In the commercials, Lasso’s unawareness is funny and often endearing, but for a show, there had be more to him for the audience to not just laugh, but also root for him. 

“I think Scrubs is a fantastic show. You can put the 10 best episodes of it up against any show,” Sudeikis said. “Bill writes male characters and relationships so beautifully, his use of music and dealing with heavy duty issues of life and death. And now, two years later, here we are talking about it. It’s actually really gonna happen and I can’t kind of believe it.”

Not only is the show happening (it premieres this Friday), but it also succeeds in its mission. Ted Lasso is warm, it’s funny and–like the main character–it has heart. Unlike the commercials, where Ted’s biggest trait is his buffoonery, the show celebrates his relentless thirst for hope. He is a man with passion, dignity and someone you for whom you cheer. Lasso is the eternal optimist, whose naivety is both a strength and a weakness, and just like J.D from Scrubs, Lasso is vulnerable (in the show, he actually leaves the U.S. to escape from a troubled marriage) and aches for comfort. That’s what he offers his new team in return–an arrogant, underachieving Premier League side controlled by a scorned owner. It’s not Tottenham this time around, but the fictional AFC Richmond.

Lawrence sees Lasso as the perfect example of the inspiring teacher. A sports version of Robin Williams's John Keating from Dead Poets Society, where his personality is a weapon against cynical reporters and resentful fans who naturally express their disgust at the thought of an American with no knowledge of the game taking over their beloved club.

“We all grew up with a favorite teacher or a favorite coach. They put us on a path. These people never force you into doing anything. It’s just good folks,” Lawrence said. “Me and Jason overlap cause we also like doing shows with heart and because it’s such a dumpster-fire time in the world, Jason really wanted to do a show that was hopeful and optimistic, and most sports movies have that. That’s what's at their core. It’s the underdog. We were trying to capture that optimism and hopefulness that comes with those iconic figures from your life, whether it’s a coach, a teacher or a parent.”

If there's a coach in the real Premier League that emits optimism and hopefulness, it's Liverpool's Jurgen Klopp, and Sudeikis admits that Lasso's character in the show is partly inspired by him. 

“Man. When I heard about him taking his squad to go do karaoke, I was like, ‘hellooooo, story idea…’” said Sudeikis, who also admires Pep Guardiola. “I really love those coaches. I really like the way they handle themselves as leaders of an organization. They are guys who I would follow into a fist fight.”

Sudeikis loves the game but fully admits he still needs to do more before calling himself a hardcore, scholarly fan. 

"I love the sport. My joke has been that I have a deep appreciation for it but a shallow understanding. But that’s why I keep company with Brendan and Joe, who know their stuff,” Sudeikis said. “But it’s still all new to me. Every time I go to see a match, I buy a kit for me at the gift shop and a kit for my little boy. I’m ready to be a fair-weather fan for whoever needs it [laughs]. I know people hate for me that, but that’s the truth.”

The showrunners put together a cast with colorful characters who add depth to the multiple plots. There’s the tough-as-nails veteran midfielder Roy Kent (surely inspired by Roy Keane and played by Brett Goldstein), the narcissistic Man City loanee Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster), the charismatic duo of Dani Rojas (Mexican star played by Cristo Fernandez) and Nigerian forward Sam Obisanya (Toheeb Jimoh). Nick Mohammed (who can be seen in Sky TV/Peacock’s Intelligence) also shines as the quiet kitman. It’s also refreshing to hear NBC’s Arlo White serving as the show’s commentator throughout AFC Richmond’s season.

But if there’s someone aside from Sudeikis's Lasso who steals the show, it’s Keeley Jones, the confident and no-nonsense TV celebrity/model/PR guru played by Juno Temple. She was the only actor who didn’t audition, as Sudeikis, who knew her work, wanted her in the show from the get-go. 

“I met Juno with Olivia when they were on Vinyl (Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese’s 2016 HBO show), so I’ve done karaoke with her. I’ve been in a room with her. I knew her,” Sudeikis said. “She’s so fun and dynamic and just pro-female. She’s just a kick-ass that lives with an excitement that’s fun to be around, and that’s a little bit of what the character had.”

In the end, Ted Lasso is exactly what an audience needs right now. It’s a story that makes you laugh and reminds you to smile at adversity. It’s a lesson that’s less about football management and more about unity, and the script works because it takes a hold of our differences and embraces them as one. And it echoes Lasso’s favorite Walt Whitman quote, “Be curious, not judgmental.”

Lasso is heroic, not because he commands respect but because he earns it. He is kind, because he doesn’t know any other way. But like us, he is also vulnerable, and that’s why we can relate to his journey.

“He’s more white rabbit than white knight, but he’s actually becoming the change he wants to see in the world, without any agenda,” Sudeikis said. “And these days, that’s unusual, both in real life and on television.”

from Blogger https://ift.tt/2CirCh7

[ecoorganic]

'Ted Lasso' and the Journey From Viral Promo to TV Series

Jason Sudeikis reprises his role as a befuddled coach in England, with his viral NBC promos evolving into a full-on TV show. He explains the story of how it happened.

There’s a scene in Ted Lasso, where the title character–Jason Sudeikis’s American football coach who abruptly turns into a Premier League manager–sprints to the assistant referee in the middle of a crucial match after raising his flag for an offside call.

“Come on, now! What do you mean? How’s that offside?” complains Lasso, with his characteristic Kansan drawl as the linesman looks at him with confusion.

“What?” asks the official.

Lasso gets closer. “No, I’m serious. How’s that offside...I don’t understand it yet.”

This lack of complete understanding and across-the-pond confusion is one way to describe the essence of Apple TV+’s latest sitcom, which originated from a 2013 NBC Sports promo. That's where Sudeikis introduced his character as part of the network’s acquisition of the Premier League broadcast rights. 

The idea was simple. Lasso, an intense, wide-eyed college football coach from Kansas City arrives in London and enters the alien world of the Premier League. In the promos, he takes over Tottenham (the following season,

he returns as head coach of youth girls' team St. Catherine Fighting Owls), questioning why players don’t wear more pads and teaching the art of flopping. He has no knowledge of the game or its cultural and historical significance. It was a satiric outlook at two different worlds seen through the eyes of a naïve American, and for NBC, it was a way to both attract a loyal, knowledgeable soccer fan as well as appeal to a new audience. 

In the end, it worked, as both promos (2013 and 2014) went viral and gained a tremendous amount of attention. Combined, the videos have generated more than 20 million views on YouTube and helped the network build a strong foundation for its Premier League audience.

It’s been six years since those promos aired, and soccer in the U.S.–without Ted Lasso–has grown tremendously in popularity. So how was the character revived? 

“I guess it’s a dozen little things that go right that you’re willing and ready to receive,” Sudeikis told Sports Illustrated. “After doing the second video (in 2014), it really unlocked elements of the character that we found very, very fun to write and portray and view the world through. So, one day in 2015, my partner Olivia (the actress and filmmaker Olivia Wilde) came up to me one day and said, ‘You know, you should do Ted Lasso as a show,’ and I said, ‘I don’t know,’ but then after marinating on it, I thought maybe this could happen.”

In spring of the same year, Sudeikis got together with his creative partners and writers, Joe Kelly and Brendan Hunt–the three of them started together with Chicago’s well-known improv group The Second City and Amsterdam’s Boom Chicago; Hunt also plays Lasso’s assistant coach and confidante Coach Beard–and powered through for a week to see if they could create a show out of it. 

“When you have a germ of an idea, you don’t know if it’s something you say out loud or if it’s a tweet or a letter or a screenplay, who knows," Sudeikis said. "So, we sat down, and we were able to bang out a pilot pretty quick in that week. As well as outlining six to 10 episodes of the first season. And that let us know, ‘O.K., there’s something here.’”

Despite the excitement for the idea, that’s all it was at that moment–an idea without a home. So, life continued, and the three friends left Ted Lasso alone for a few years and diverted their focus to their respective careers. 

“But that allowed us to get a little space from it, and low and behold, the showbiz gods looked and smiled down on us and brought Bill to our doorstep,” Sudeikis said.

"Bill" is Bill Lawrence, the experienced television writer, producer and creative force behind award-winning shows such as Scrubs, Cougar Town and Spin City. Lawrence entered the frame in 2017 when he and Sudeikis played pickup basketball a couple of nights a week and one night, the idea of Ted Lasso came up. After a few more chats, he read the script and the concept and was immediately interested. 

“I wanted to work with Jason Sudeikis, he just cracks me up. I thought he was awesome on SNL, whenever he shows up in a movie, I’m immediately into it and he seems like that dude you want to hang with,” Lawrence said. “I’d also seen those sketches, the promotional videos for the Premier League back when he did them and I thought they were so funny, and he said, 'What if we made that character three-dimensional and really rounded him out?' Ted Lasso can still be goofy and funny, but we could also have our version.”

And this was critical for Sudeikis. In the commercials, Lasso’s unawareness is funny and often endearing, but for a show, there had be more to him for the audience to not just laugh, but also root for him. 

“I think Scrubs is a fantastic show. You can put the 10 best episodes of it up against any show,” Sudeikis said. “Bill writes male characters and relationships so beautifully, his use of music and dealing with heavy duty issues of life and death. And now, two years later, here we are talking about it. It’s actually really gonna happen and I can’t kind of believe it.”

Not only is the show happening (it premieres this Friday), but it also succeeds in its mission. Ted Lasso is warm, it’s funny and–like the main character–it has heart. Unlike the commercials, where Ted’s biggest trait is his buffoonery, the show celebrates his relentless thirst for hope. He is a man with passion, dignity and someone you for whom you cheer. Lasso is the eternal optimist, whose naivety is both a strength and a weakness, and just like J.D from Scrubs, Lasso is vulnerable (in the show, he actually leaves the U.S. to escape from a troubled marriage) and aches for comfort. That’s what he offers his new team in return–an arrogant, underachieving Premier League side controlled by a scorned owner. It’s not Tottenham this time around, but the fictional AFC Richmond.

Lawrence sees Lasso as the perfect example of the inspiring teacher. A sports version of Robin Williams's John Keating from Dead Poets Society, where his personality is a weapon against cynical reporters and resentful fans who naturally express their disgust at the thought of an American with no knowledge of the game taking over their beloved club.

“We all grew up with a favorite teacher or a favorite coach. They put us on a path. These people never force you into doing anything. It’s just good folks,” Lawrence said. “Me and Jason overlap cause we also like doing shows with heart and because it’s such a dumpster-fire time in the world, Jason really wanted to do a show that was hopeful and optimistic, and most sports movies have that. That’s what's at their core. It’s the underdog. We were trying to capture that optimism and hopefulness that comes with those iconic figures from your life, whether it’s a coach, a teacher or a parent.”

If there's a coach in the real Premier League that emits optimism and hopefulness, it's Liverpool's Jurgen Klopp, and Sudeikis admits that Lasso's character in the show is partly inspired by him. 

“Man. When I heard about him taking his squad to go do karaoke, I was like, ‘hellooooo, story idea…’” said Sudeikis, who also admires Pep Guardiola. “I really love those coaches. I really like the way they handle themselves as leaders of an organization. They are guys who I would follow into a fist fight.”

Sudeikis loves the game but fully admits he still needs to do more before calling himself a hardcore, scholarly fan. 

"I love the sport. My joke has been that I have a deep appreciation for it but a shallow understanding. But that’s why I keep company with Brendan and Joe, who know their stuff,” Sudeikis said. “But it’s still all new to me. Every time I go to see a match, I buy a kit for me at the gift shop and a kit for my little boy. I’m ready to be a fair-weather fan for whoever needs it [laughs]. I know people hate for me that, but that’s the truth.”

The showrunners put together a cast with colorful characters who add depth to the multiple plots. There’s the tough-as-nails veteran midfielder Roy Kent (surely inspired by Roy Keane and played by Brett Goldstein), the narcissistic Man City loanee Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster), the charismatic duo of Dani Rojas (Mexican star played by Cristo Fernandez) and Nigerian forward Sam Obisanya (Toheeb Jimoh). Nick Mohammed (who can be seen in Sky TV/Peacock’s Intelligence) also shines as the quiet kitman. It’s also refreshing to hear NBC’s Arlo White serving as the show’s commentator throughout AFC Richmond’s season.

But if there’s someone aside from Sudeikis's Lasso who steals the show, it’s Keeley Jones, the confident and no-nonsense TV celebrity/model/PR guru played by Juno Temple. She was the only actor who didn’t audition, as Sudeikis, who knew her work, wanted her in the show from the get-go. 

“I met Juno with Olivia when they were on Vinyl (Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese’s 2016 HBO show), so I’ve done karaoke with her. I’ve been in a room with her. I knew her,” Sudeikis said. “She’s so fun and dynamic and just pro-female. She’s just a kick-ass that lives with an excitement that’s fun to be around, and that’s a little bit of what the character had.”

In the end, Ted Lasso is exactly what an audience needs right now. It’s a story that makes you laugh and reminds you to smile at adversity. It’s a lesson that’s less about football management and more about unity, and the script works because it takes a hold of our differences and embraces them as one. And it echoes Lasso’s favorite Walt Whitman quote, “Be curious, not judgmental.”

Lasso is heroic, not because he commands respect but because he earns it. He is kind, because he doesn’t know any other way. But like us, he is also vulnerable, and that’s why we can relate to his journey.

“He’s more white rabbit than white knight, but he’s actually becoming the change he wants to see in the world, without any agenda,” Sudeikis said. “And these days, that’s unusual, both in real life and on television.”

from Blogger https://ift.tt/2CirCh7