#this can get frustrating when the eps are all plot or really stupid or particularly reaccionary but making this can also be so fun

[roxyandelsewhere]

this just in: my "one song for each episode of spn" playlist now has everything up to s12! still following my core rules: no songs from the soundtrack or referenced in the ep, and only songs in english

[where-theres-smoak-2]

Hiya 👋 I find it fascinating when people point out stuff about main characters that are brushed over and was I was wondering what’s your top reasons you dislike Alina and what scenes made you dislike her / made no sense.

Well I don't dislike Alina in the show but in the books I do think she is badly written. But here are some things that made the book character less appealing to me than the show.

I think the main one is her complete lack of agency. She very rarely makes any decisions for herself and just seems to go along with what everyone else (mostly male characters) say. There is a problem and instead of Alina being the one to make a decision or think of a solution she is told this is what we are going to do by either, M*l, Nikolai or the apparat. She is pushed around the plot by others actions instead of taking control herself and so often appears more as a puppet than as a commander or influential person in herself. For example in the show Alina is the one who tells M*l that they should seek the stag and kill it for it's amplification powers before the darkling does. Yet in the books this decision isn't hers but M*l's and Alina just goes along with it. There are also several instances where she clearly doesn't agree with the course of action or doesn't want to do something and yet she does it anyway, an example of this is when Nikolai and M*l want to attack the Volcra nest in the fold. She clearly has qualms about it but ends up folding to their will, another example is M*l insisting that once the fold and the darkling are destroyed that they seek a way to remove the amplifier, again this is something Alina doesn't want to do but she agrees with M*l and doesn't tell him her true desire. So what we end up with is a female protagonist who very much seems to be a pawn to the male characters in the book.

Another thing I disliked about the character's storyline is that she was often the victim of men, held captive and used to their advantage and this included one the supposed heroes. The darkling takes her captive twice wanting to use the amplifiers and control her to meet his own goals, Nikolai also at one point takes her captive and only really gives her freedom back to her because she agrees to help him, and the apparat takes her captive so that he can use her to gain religious power over the masses. She also never gets herself out of these situations, she just accepts her situation and waits to be rescued, for others to save her so that they too can use her for their own gain. I find this theme of her either being a victim of men or the pawn of one really worrying.

Another issue with the way she is written which again ties into the two above is that she is made far too dependant on M*l. Not only does she make herself very ill by suppressing her powers to stay with M*l but when her powers are revealed her refusal to let go of her attachment to M*l means that she struggles to master her powers, she becomes physically unable to summon because her refusal to let M*l go. Later in book two and three she spends a lot of time pining after him and getting in arguments about their positions of power. M*l feels useless and resents Alina's new position and power, he wants things to go back to how they were. He really does hold her back in many ways and this really should have been a love that they both grew out of but instead despite it being made obvious that they don't really fit together they both refuse to let the other go which means one or the other has to make sacrifices in order for them to be together. Not only that but Alina often puts M*l's needs, wants and safety above the greater good, rather than save the grisha or other vulnerable people she will safe M*l even going so far as to let 30-40 innocent people die in the fold so that she can save his life. This co-dependant relationship that she has with M*l is very unhealthy and toxic which would be ok if this was recognised within the narrative and then steps were taken to fix it, but instead this relationship is presented as some grand love story despite how damaging it truly is to Alina. In the Tv adaption they show us that Alina can be very happy and actually thrive without M*l in ep 5, its the happiest we ever see her and the most confident, yet she never gets this opportunity in the books.

Alina is also very insecure and jealous and we often see her pitted against other females, in particular Zoya. If there is one thing I really am not a fan of its authors pitting women against women particularly when it is over a man. Throughout all of the books Alina is insecure that Zoya is more beautiful than her and is insecure about her own looks, particularly when is comes to M*l, she is often jealous believing M*l will be turned by other pretty girls instead of him staying loyal to her. She often worries that she won't be good enough as the Sun Summoner and that the people will come to hate her. Again all of this would have been fine if it were limited to just the beginning of her story arc and it was something she overcame, but she never really does. She often comes across as being quite sulky as well. There was this one quote that I kept seeing in the tag that Alina says which is 'I am the Sun Summoner. It gets dark when I say it does.' Obviously before reading the books I kept wondering the circumstances of her saying this. It is a bit of a badass quote so naturally I was imaging all kinds of grand, dramatic scenarios, her shouting it across the battlefield to the darkling, her saying it in a war meeting as they are making plans as a way of instilling hope and confidence in her troops. So you can imagine my disappointment when it is actually said whilst she is lying outside on the ground, sad and feeling sorry for herself. When presented with a problem or a wrench in a plan she doesn't rally her team and try to come up with a solution instead she just sulks which as a reader I found very frustrating. The thing is both Alina and M*l are written as rather realistic teenagers, but the problem is this doesn't fit the world they are living in. They live in a world based off imperial russia and yet the characters do not behave as if they are, instead they act like they are modern day teenagers attending high school with petty jealousy and childhood crushes.

There is also her identity as a grisha and relationship with the grisha. One of the more interesting aspects of the grisha trilogy is the grisha's story, their oppression and their fight to be recognised as human beings and equals. Yet Alina shows very little care for the Grisha. In fact to me it seems like the author just made Alina grisha to serve the plot. Alina is grisha because the narrative needs her to be, they need her to be powerful enough to defeat the villainous darkling and destroy the fold. Instead of striving to improve things for the Grisha Alina supports the monarchy that has spent centuries oppressing them. The moment LB no longer needs Alina to be grisha she is stripped of the identity and the grisha are left in their misery in a world that still hunts, kills and enslaves them.

Alina is also often punished in the narrative by other characters but also by herself. She is often shamed for the attraction she felt towards the darkling and is called things like stupid girl. Not only is she blamed for falling for the darkling's manipulation she is also told she is greedy and power hungry for seeking out the amplifiers and political power. It's a very twisted message that is sent because we are told she is seeking the amplifiers to stop the villain which is a heroic cause and yet we are also told that she is doing out of greed. There seems to be this message that women should not seek power or a change in their position because that means they are greedy and evil.

Then after three books of the protagonist being used as a chess piece by the men in the story she gets one of the worst endings a heroine could. Both Nikolai and M*l get what they want in the end but its at a cost to Alina, Nikolai gets the Ravkan throne and M*l gets the quiet farm life with Alina as his wife. But Alina loses her powers and the position of power she got with them. The two things she explicitly asks for and tells us she desires, her position as general of the second army and her powers/amplifiers. In fact she even tells us in the second book that given a choice she would not give up her powers not even for M*l. Yet that is what happens and worse than that the narrative tells us that she was wrong and greedy for seeking power and influence, they present this ending she gets as a happy one because she gets to spend her life with M*l living a nice normal life. As a reader I found this difficult to except because the character had told us on many occasions that it was not what she wanted, we are shown often how miserable she is without her powers and yet we are expected to believe that this was some wonderful fairytale ending for her when it seems like whilst the men got their happy ever afters it was at the expense of Alina.

There is probably more but before this turns into a full on rant I think it best to leave it here.

[minatsuki-on-main]

Why do you relate to Laica? Why do you ship LaicaxMinatsuki?

(So this reply got accidentally deleted once, which is frustrating because I wrote a whole essay. I’ll just start over now.)

[[MORE]]

I think having a complex over one’s own perceived insignificance is a particularly hard thing to portray in fiction. By virtue of talking about a character or giving them focus, they appear at least somewhat relevant. Laica was the first character with whom I felt like this theme came across properly, mainly because his flying under everyone’s radar was played on from the audience’s point of view as well. Until around ep 10 he just loiters in the background and only shows up to conveniently take care of the dirty work and I don’t think anyone would have given him a second thought if he just disappeared. By how little even I personally paid attention to him, it hit me really hard why he was so indignated. I feel that way very often. However, it’s so unaddressed as an issue that I wasn’t even fully aware of it before watching BTB.

It makes sense too, because imagine a life where you don’t even have official documents to prove you exist, a family, or anyone to interact with for most of your childhood, then everyone around you gets obsessed with this one specific person that you get informed you’re a spare for. I think of Izanami’s monologue about Koku a lot because to me it was — ironically — more applicable to Laica. I mean the part where they say something like “it’s as if you were screaming ‘I exist!’” because yes, Koku was trying to get his messages noticed, but it was to attract Yuna’s attention while he had a very clear image of his placement in the world and was even a bit too self-assured about it. Laica was actually just frantically trying to prove he existed because it didn’t go for granted in his case. His actions are a very obvious overcompensation, it happens with anything a person is insecure about. “I got denied recognition by everyone so I’m gonna aim for world domination.” Ironically, it’s so ingrained in him that he ends up perpetuating it by exploiting his own talent of not getting noticed; he stays in the background in order not to get suspected, works underhandedly, even gives his name — the only proof of his identity — to someone else. I suspect this started a vicious cycle with his problems. After all, you can’t rely so heavily on a trait of yours without being firmly convinced it’s unchangeable.

Another thing I appreciated and found relatable and — weirdly — respectfully portrayed was how Gilbert was pulling his strings all along. It’s mentioned briefly but they make it evident that it was very heavy psychological manipulation. It prevented Laica —someone who brainwashes people, gives no consideration to their deaths and went up against Koku (and Yuna) in a brutally sadistic way — from harming Gilbert at all when he technically had many chances to. And Laica does not like Gilbert very much at all (as per his dismissiveness when they talked over the phone or the fact that he and Minatsuki were plotting to eliminate him around the start of the show) so he was clearly forced into the partnership. BTB didn’t try to make this pathetic or revel in Laica being weak or anything like that. He was terrifying and dangerous which, though it made him fairly unredeemable, maintained his dignity. People who get manipulated aren’t always ‘soft’ deep down. It’s difficult to process emotional abuse that has gotten you massive authority issues when every fictional character who goes through it ends up being woobified, coddled by someone who’s ‘good’ or such, so this detail really was a gift.

As for why I ship him with Minatsuki... I’m convinced, for a starter, that Laica was incapable of connecting to people in a healthy way. Growing up either alone or around Gilbert is a foolproof way of making sure a kid will never learn a way to relate to others without manipulation and egoism. As much as it’s the wrong way to go about it, what Laica did to Minatsuki was the only way he could have ever felt understood by (and empathized with, with a stretch) someone. The whole incentive behind making Minatsuki take up his identity was to make someone feel the same thing he felt being Koku’s replacement, as he says himself. And I don’t know how much people consider this, but not only was Minatsuki kept around for way longer than it would have made sense, but this whole stunt was largely unnecessary. Laica could have led the Market Maker branch from the shadows on his own — all he had to do was regularly delete everyone’s memories and his identity wouldn’t have gotten out. Minatsuki had a weird symbolic importance to Laica in my opinion. As much as these are two characters who would never show outward affection, there’s a sort of lenience on Laica’s part I can’t place anywhere else. For years he indulged Minatsuki by letting him do basically whatever he wanted, only sort of reprimanding him when he was gonna get himself killed or make massively stupid decisions.

A nagging thing in Laica’s life is people prioritizing Koku over him. It’s a problem that’s never going to go away. I think it’s fair to bring up Izanami because I can see people asking ‘but wasn’t Laica closer to them than to Minatsuki’? And while yes, that bond definitely had its importance, the obstacle is always the same one: Izanami very blatantly preferred Koku. I don’t think Laica would have ever gotten over that. Aside from the fact that he wasn’t really close to anyone, not beyond a certain extent. He didn’t care about either Izanami or Minatsuki dying for instance, it’s just that with Izanami it wasn’t that accentuated with what was shown on-screen. It’s fair to say he doesn’t care about people dying in general. Minatsuki was perhaps the only person who was focused on Laica specifically, something that seemed deliberately induced with the drug addiction and all that — but there still wasn’t anyone else like that. The way Minatsuki ended up was terrible and ep 11 still makes me sad for him, but, just to be controversial, consider the alternative. He would have died as a kid without even having a proper name if Laica didn’t pick him up. Minatsuki started suffering from the moment he regained his memories, but Laica didn’t allow that to happen for about a decade prior to it, a decade in which Minatsuki got to be a mafia boss, give people orders and sit around drinking his expensive whisky, which is possibly more fun than whatever Laica was doing, smuggling drugs, hauling back Kamui from dark alleys and being angry at Koku.

There was no way I wasn’t going to get verbose about this ask.

[jkflesh]

Transcribed a rare interview with Kevin Martin from Spanish. Covering projects like Techno Animal, God, Ice, inception of The Bug... Run through an auto translator  —  pardon for the broken English at some parts. Self Magazine n15 (15 June 1999)

BLOOD AND MEAT / KEVIN MARTIN / TEXT A.C. NAÏA

Far from the wake of mundane media and glares, the name of Kevin Martin still resonates as one of the best kept enigmas of the new English experimental era. Antithesis of the unscrupulous corridor, this unclassifiable nihilist accumulates nevertheless every year, and with a disquieting discretion, an exponential number of crucial projects. Redefining the foundations of extreme rock, the abysses of the cybernetic dub or the electronic musical hell trails, his productions tear at the listener all feelings of indifference and comfort. Superficiality and lightness are also notions banished from their unstable world. Although he loves to bara-jar letters under various pseudonyms (God, Ice, The Bug, etc.) Kevin Martin does not cheat. It is in the depths of himself, in his wounds and anguish, that he draws the necessary energy for the singularly ardent expression of a creativity without stylistic excesses.

--------------------------------- 

- Can you tell us why you are often inclined to work with the same core of people (Justin Broadrick, Alex Buess, Dave Cochrane ...)?

The people you mentioned are musicians that I admire very particularly and whose musical steps I respect and greatly appreciate. They are beings without equivalents that, at the individual level, are very close to me: it is very difficult to find such a way of thinking, of approaching events and music in my opinion. Besides, it's true that I tend not to be very social in London. I have made a very cynical judgment about the types of bands that exist in London. People have, in effect, a tendency to form very closed groups that frequent certain bars, certain clubs, which are among themselves, say initiated by such a journalist or such a musician, around people of such stamp; It is especially shocking for people who claim to be in electronic music: they are always the same people who always walk together in the same place, with a kind of pre-established codes that prevent any openness, any tolerance from others. It is not difficult for musicians to be part of this genre of groups, it is simply the idea of ??clan or band that I dislike: I think that in it they lose their identity, their personality, since they must think, in some way, as the group and not by themselves. Justin and I, due to our past, we have many points in common in our sensitivity to the everyday, in our way of approaching musical creation. What seems almost a form of alienation that we should try to get rid of a bit (laughs)! Justin is almost a brother to me, the way we work together depends almost on telepathy: I have never met someone who could have the same tastes, the same musical aspirations as me. It is impossible for him or for me to live without music. It has become an almost unhealthy obsession to be in a permanent process of creation, we have constantly need to feel the extremes, to grow back always beyond the limits. As for Alex, when I created God I thought that no one had yet done what I wanted to do, that is, this idea of ??fusion of very extreme music, especially through free jazz and contemporary classical music, to create a dynamic on the sonorities, a kind of sensory impact. After some years with God I realized that someone had already specified a certain kind of dream that I had projected in God: a group that was called 16/17. - Finally you have worked with many musicians next to Mick Harris. Why have you never undertaken any project with him? At a given moment we wanted, in fact, to work on a common project; on the other hand, Justin [and he played many times in the old club that I had in Brixton. But Micky is a person with whom it is very difficult to work! (laughs) Micky is someone who does not want to think and least admit the idea of ??dialogue; On the other hand I think that today his music lacks something ... If he manifested something of animosity it would be against 90% of [people that there are on the world and not for the 10% of the people that I respect and love: That's why I do not understand how someone like Micky can be bad with certain people who count as his friends. - From God to The Bug, the variety of your projects is quite impressive. Is it that this multiplicity covers a particular desire to express itself in different ways? In fact I have never had the conscious will to accumulate the projects because of any frustration: God was, for example, a very free project in which I never imposed anything. By nature I am someone who never rests, who likes to work constantly. And I also like to work with people, because for me the music comes from a permanent learning and in that sense it has almost a religious dimension. It is a belief in itself. For me music must represent your own thought, your way of living and of conceiving things. If you think too abstractly, something will always be missing and, above all, you will not be honest with yourself. In that case it is essential that my music reflects the state in which I find myself and where I live, otherwise it feels a kind of betrayal. - Despite the multiplicity of names, there seems to be a profound similarity between all your projects. Do you have the feeling that after all you are trying to explain a single and always the same story in different forms? Yes, absolutely, but I do not know if because it is a state of mind, a particular attitude or simply the two things: Justin and I refer almost systematically to a 'hardcore' approach, but I never speak from a 'hardcore' cliché that immediately suggests a 'pu nk-bou rrin' trend, but to that authentic and profound element that can be found in every musical form, be it country, free jazz, hi hop or metal , called 'hardcore', that is, integrity, the fact One make no decision for commercial or business reasons, know how to save the unity of your creation without any commitment to the industry: it is what I call having a 'hardcore' attitude; it is this attitude that remains as a permanent plot after all my musical work. - It is found in your works (in the titles or the letters of the feet) very strong oppositions between your religious and mystical references with others related to sex or violence. This makes me think of writers like G. Bataille or also of sado-masochism ... Totally, but what I think is important is to consider this sadomasochistic dimension as inevitable, because it participates in the very nature of human relations, forms part of life. I am sorry to see that certain groups emphasize this particular aspect, as if it depended on the domain of the extraordinary. For me there is nothing abnormal or particular about this idea of ??sado-masochism. What interests me, anyway, is what allows me to really feel that I live: all the sensations that allow me to be or to exist. I deliberately put aside all the codes, programs or pre-established responses that society wants to impose, so sex remains one of those rare things that allow us to achieve ecstasy - and without artifice - and pleasure of this life. - Is it because the media have a hard time fencing and appreciating your music the reason why so few interviews and information about you are found in the press? I think I would lie if I said that we have done everything to avoid or reject the press or the media in general. Justin, more than me, has been very required because of Godflesh and has received some attention on his part. For mine, I have not done anything in favor of any personal promotion because it does not interest me and rather makes me uncomfortable. In fact, I think I am rather in disagreement with the feeling, with the interpretation of certain music magazines. And since I myself have been a journalist at The Wire, it would be ridiculous to say that I am against the press; but, on the other hand, I am precisely more aware of the sometimes erroneous vision of people who believe they have understood a music and that in the end it has gone from Largo to the essentials. In addition to all this, I think that today most of the musical compositions are totally impersonal and are directly related to the business, which immediately falsifies the starting data. I believe in music that is personal, I play a music that comes from me and from nowhere else. I do not have W1, 'journalists come to find out no matter what about what a part of the truth represents in me. It may seem like a cliché, but I think we play before us before we think about the audience or about the people who are going to buy our records. It may seem selfish, but it is just the truth, a very simple feeling: we like to play for ourselves! - Can we say that there is finally a direct relationship between strong elements of your past and your current musical production? Totally yes, particularly when I think about the influence that punk has had on me. It is the form of music that has revealed in me a particular feeling of freedom and of 'non-commitment', which has been in the end the most inspiring throughout all my projects. I remember very well the moment I ordered a Damned or Stupid record by mail - I do not know exactly - and instead I received an EP of Discharge: it was a kind of shock, almost a revelation. The music I listened to was usually very methodical and formal, and that, the first time, was a true deflagration of noise, without melodic consideration, far from the harmony or the traditional structures. Now I can assure you that it was thanks to that I heard that single that I thought about creating a particular sound. Punk in a general way - before becoming a caricature, and I think in particular of the Crass label - represents the freedom to create, independence and individuality, using music as the only means to interrogate the environment, the world , society, human relations, and non-commercial purposes. Punk has had a strong impact on the perception that I still have of music today. - Going back to the names of your different projects, Techno Animal refers to a kind of duality, an almost impossible mixture between technology and what belongs to the realm of instinct, of the animal ... Yes, completely, and there is a certain perversity that like in this association of words: it evokes the fusion that runs the risk of arriving in the coming years, the next stage of man is to merge with technology, and that will be the only way to survive. But Techno Animal also refers to the contradiction between technology, that is, everything that is machine and mechanics, kingdom of the scientific entity, which has nothing to do with the animal, either in form or in constitution; There are almost two associations that make sure that they will not work if they are merged. - Can Ice be considered as an extension of God? Let's say it was not thought in this sense, but based on the facts, it almost happens like that. Somehow I felt frustrated in God since I had to try to like too many people. For me, the music must be part of a democratic framework, a framework that I have not found more than in Techno Animal with Justin, since in fact we are so similar that the fusion between us is inevitable. The only problem is that there is no criticism between us ... With God everyone wanted to have their part of participation, their part of promotion, of notoriety in relation to their own instrument, that's why I ended up feeling frustrated since I did not could use to create more technological means. It became clear that if I wanted to work in the studio with the machines, I needed to form a new group. God was a group made for the scene, while Techno Animal was entirely a studio project - but recently we have started working with live instruments - and Ice is much closer to the idea of ??arranging the live music in a study. Somehow Ice gets a little closer to Techno Animal and has never been conceived to be a continuity of God. If God continues still in the future it will be in a radically different form. In fact in all my projects I try to translate my dreams, to make abstract ideas become alive and real. And if one day I lack ideas, visions or dreams, there is no other way for me to continue. It would be dishonest to follow by simple custom or for commercial reasons. This year I really had the impression that that moment had come, I believed that everything ended, that it reached the edge of the abyss. But in reality everything has started again, especially working on Ice's next album. - If you follow your record evolution, one realizes that your recent projects are more instrumental. Do you have the tendency to think that the voice does not contribute anything interesting? Interestingly on Ice's next album there is a voice in all the songs. I think it's a bit of a reaction to all the previous projects that, in effect, were becoming very instrumental. In fact the two years spent with this album have been a kind of lyrical catharsis in relation to the lack of communication or the use of the instrumental alone. I have the impression that in the new album the lyrics have been a kind of relief. Anyway I had an irresistible desire that this album was the most 'sung' of all that had been able to do before. I have spent hours in the studio to multiply my voice and transform it into 36 different effects to change all the intonations in each theme. But it is true that I think I have sinned little by little in my projects to reduce any need for verbal expression, because I can not stand the idea that the person who sings in a group is the focus of attention of the audience or listeners, when the other musicians are so important or sometimes even more so. For me a group is conceived as an entity and being honest with myself I would not stand to become the main focus of attention, simply because I sing or write lyrics. This hierarchy does not interest me, but unfortunately it is the most frequent. - The new Techno Animal album has been developed in collaboration with Alec Empire. Why have you chosen to work precisely with him? Because we do not like it (laughs)! I'm not kidding. I think he is someone who has managed to achieve a certain notoriety not because of a fashion issue but because he is full of energy and because he is entirely dedicated to his music, a little as if it were also a vital need in him. When we met him on the tour it was absolutely fantastic: it has never been a matter of ego or other nonsense of this kind as it happens with many musicians or groups. So the audience rather was disturbed by our live performance and he was the only one who stayed on the edge of the stage venting like a nutcase. We liked everything he did, I have written numerous articles about him and Justin has adored him since the first meeting. It is a question of attitude and Alec reacts in the same way as we do.    - Can you tell us about this album of Techno Animal remixes made by Tortoise, Alec Empire, Wordsound, etc. which will be released under the City Slang label?    It is another example of the work done with Alec Empire. Actually I would not say it's an album of remixes but rather of 'soundclash', it really is the most appropriate name. It is more a collaboration than a remix, the groups send us their sounds mixed with ours and then we return them after having also worked on ourselves. Everything is almost finished, we only wait for the band of Alec and Thomas Köner to finish the album. - What about the other name behind which you hide: DJ Dissector? (Laughter) It's just a joke, I wonder where you got the information from. Actually I was fed up with all this hype that there was around a so-called 'Dj culture'. What I really love to see and put on the highest point are the 'Scratch Djs' from the US, in general people who remain invisible to the public and who nevertheless have tremendous talent, but I do not like to accept that pseudo-idea brought by people that are not Djs about a culture of Djs. - About the Djs, what do you think about the New York phenomenon-not the illbient and its figureheads like DJ Spooky? Recently I discovered a group called Priest, from which only one single appeared and which is related to that movement and I found the topic interesting. As for DJ Spooky ... I respect Paul D. Miller for his communicative side: it's fun to hear him speak, to see the body of knowledge that, on the other hand, he handles with a certain mastery. As for his work, I think he is not up to what he wants to do, I think he is benefiting from a certain fashion phenomenon that does not really reflect the quality of his work; I know many DJs darker than him who do better things and innovate more than him. I remember the tour we did in January with Alec and Spooky: I was surprised to see that all the attention was focused on him and that nobody cared about Alec, when for me the work of this one is better, more experimental. I also believe that most of the ideas that support the illbient movement do not come from Paul D. Miller, but from others like David Toop, etc. But Spooky has managed to impose because he likes to be under the light of the projectors and I think he is strong enough to do his own promotion. It is funny because many musicians that I have been able to find detest Spooky, and in particular, because of his way of seeing things, of all his knowledge. I think very honestly that he is a very sympathetic guy and that in a very intelligent way he adapts to different media and knows how to adapt his language, even if he is before a rapper or a composer like Xenakis. But I do not like his work, I do not consider him as a Dj. I think what he has said about trip hop or elscratching is not coherent: he has the tendency to dilute the great importance of hip hop while I think it is one of the values ??of the future, since in three years I am sure it will be a lifestyle completely separate, taking into account the passion and quality of work of people who are fully involved in this move. The underground hip hop of New York is absolutely extraordinary, but unfortunately many DJs stay in anonymity and it is Spooky who always monopolizes the most attention. I think that this is due to the journalists who are stronger in the art of creating phenomena from little ... - The last project of The Bug with DJ Vadim until now is an auditory adaptation of the film 'The Conversation' by Francis Ford Coppola. How did you come up with this idea? In addition to the album, The Bug was not really a collaboration with Vadim. He contributed the sounds of the drums and I did all the rest. But hey, for reasons that I will not need here, I could not be the leader of another formation that was not Techno Animal. However The Bug is not another group at all, but hey ...! I met Vadim about two years ago and I loved his way of approaching things and treating them. Then he asked me to work on a project and six months later I had the idea of ??an imaginary soundtrack that would be completely electronic, but later I saw that it was an outdated idea since I had worked it last year. If The Bug continues, the idea is to try to make soundtracks of films that you want to listen to or that would replace those that already exist because they do not convince us in relation to films. I saw the film for the first time ten or twelve years ago and the only thing I remember is a set of very strong feelings about violence, the obsession to be both voyeur and paranoid in front of the characters. I have seen it again and then I have proposed to Vadim to make a new sound interpretation of 'The Conversation' because it seemed to me that some very strong elements of the film had remained hidden or in a residual state in the soundtrack. It was very marked by the way in which the film shows the internal and external duality of the characters, I found it extraordinary. - You seem rather disappointed about the record industry. Ice's next album, however, is on WEA ... Yes, I'm really cynical about everything that can be done about the groups and the music itself, but this interests both the big and to the independent labels: most of them are not worth much, you only have to see the Earache stamp that has made me go through the tube to me as to other groups. This label has become worse than one of the big ones! For me it is not contradictory to make an album in a big label because in any case the relationship is simple: they exploit me, but I also exploit them with a rebound, all the maximum and in the longest time I can ... (laughs) I understand completely that I can be criticized for this, but I do not care. I always think about 1 to 5% of the people that interest me and that reciprocally are interested in my work, and for me it is a kind of important victory against the commercial machine every time I can get an album with a big house: it is the case of Isolationism 'with Virgin; I was very happy to see that God finally appeared in the department store and that the group received a certain popularity. Do not forget that it is an authentic war that takes place in musical circuits and to receive something, you have to be in permanent struggle.

[lynmars79]

Voltron: Legendary Defender S7 Thoughts:

There is a lot to like, but this season was dark and rough plot and character wise. The paladins went through some crap, we got a lot of backstory, while there were still funny moments it wasn’t as slapstick for the most part, and they remembered Lance and Hunk are people, so that’s cool. We got a time skip thanks to the shenanigans from the end of S6, which is used to fantastic effect to move certain plot elements forward.

Overall, some solid storytelling, lots of excitement balanced with quiet moments, a lot of world building, a lot of time covered, a lot of characterization. I laughed, I cried, it was great. But this season has some problems and issues too, for sure.

Skip the gameshow ep with cosmic entity Bob. Really, it’s not important at all, and not nearly as good a breather episode as the space mall or last season’s roleplay session. Reminded me in a bad way of the “Uncle Grandpa” ep of Steven Universe. I don’t know why I sat through it; I think I hoped it would have a point, but no, not really.

I am not sure where Acxa vanished to for several episodes. She was with them after the pirate ships, gave some info, then...left? Somehow? With no ship of her own? Like, seriously, I don’t know how/when she left, and why she wasn’t there for most of their journey, just to cameo in the final montage, when I thought the writers had just straight up forgotten her and how useful she would have been for half the season (more than Romelle, and I like Romelle!). Has she at least made up her mind finally? I think she has, now that Lotor’s out of the picture and what happened on Zethrid and Ezor’s ship.

Sam and Colleen Holt do not mess around. Though Colleen sort of vanished again after the catch-up eps.

I was happy the classmates from the flashback eps, and some Galaxy Garrison characters we’ve seen before, got some expansion. Veronica rocks. I like Leifsdottir too; another super smart woman whose team leader relies on her brain’s ability to create instant tactics. Admiral Sanda was mostly a reasonable authority figure and wasn’t entirely wrong, until she got frustrated and scared and did the really stupid thing, but she made up for it in the end. I really liked the Earth stuff.

As an aside, Sumalee Montano voiced Admiral Sanda, and Matthew Mercer played Sendak’s Lieutenant, and working on this show is what got Mercer and Montano talking about her recent guest spots on Critical Role.

Battle of the One Armed Bosses. Good times. They really both should have been asphyxiated and/or vaporized, but hey, magic cartoon physics.

The Thing at the end: hrm, the base the Blades tried to get to that supposedly had Alteans in it was empty. No one’s seen Haggar in years. My money is she took over Lotor’s little project.

Hello IGF Atlas, you’re amazing. Especially once Coran gives you a shiny.

Give SpaceDad a Break 2k18. Seriously, Takashi Shirogane has been through enough. Though he has some wicked cool moments, particularly in the season finale arc.

Discussion over the controversial discourse issues under the cut, as it requires more blatant spoilers. Mobile users, the rest of this post (3 paragraphs) may be visible, be warned.

OK, making a big deal at SDCC about LGBTQIA+ rep in the show and then immediately killing off that character is....not cool. Yes, they broke up in backstory, but there was a lot unresolved and they literally only introduced him in a flashback to then fridge him during the “here’s what happened meanwhile” ep, in a relatively offhand, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it way (cuz I did, and had to go back and look). Adam existed just to give Shiro (more) emotional pain and loss, because they didn’t want to kill anyone from Lance and Hunk’s families but had to show a cost. So making a big announcement at the biggest hype con of the year, just...I can see why it sits so very wrong with so many people.

Also, Zethrid and Ezor were definitely giving off power lesbian pirate couple vibes (body language and the things they said to each other were fairly blatant), and it’s quite likely Acxa and Keith’s escape killed them, too. I will be happy to see them again--those girls are all hard to kill so I hold out hope--but good grief.

So, yeah, if people talk about Voltron queerbaiting and having serious bury your gays moments...I can’t say they’re wrong. Yeah, Shiro is waaaaaay more than his Word-of-God sexuality, but they hyped the relationship up, and then not only was it not at all clear on screen what his relationship with Adam even was, but then they just up and killed one of the two explicitly stated LGBTQIA+ characters, having introduced him solely for that purpose. And that, alone, is a problem, regardless of his relationship status with Shiro and the potential to resolve (or not) their conflict.

[emilywatchescursedshow]

Ep 13 - Route 666

Director: Paul Shapiro Writers: Eric Kripke, Eugenie Ross-Leming, Brad Buckner

Honestly I just... What was this episode.

Hokay so there’s a lot to unpack here and a lot that I’m not very qualified to unpack here. Let’s start with the stupid: the monster is the melted combination of a giant truck and it’s shitty racist owner. So literally, the monster is the ghost of a racist truck. I sort of love how campy and ridiculous this is, particularly because although I’m not an expert on cars I would be Very Surprised if that kind of monster truck was even manufactured during the 1960s when the historical events that are described in the episode take place. The twist at the end that it’s not just a ghost of a person but also the ghost of THE LITERAL TRUCK I guess helps to set up why the Impala ends up in heaven with Dean at the end of the show so that’s some pretty big foreshadowing. Honestly, kudos to whoever had the balls to pitch this concept, I don’t know if the world is a better place for its existence but it’s here now.

Onto the race stuff. The person ghost (not the truck ghost) is of a dude who was killed in self-defense by a Black man who was marrying the White lady the racist dude wanted to marry. Apparently after the White lady and the Black man got together the racist went on a killing spree that wasn’t really followed up with by the police officers because it was the police in the 1960s. The story-telling of what life was like for Black people in the town back then didn’t seem to pull many punches - it was pretty up front about how they were subjected to pretty brutal treatment. Sort of like in Bugs, I was actually pretty surprised by how up front they were about the severity of the violence.

I was a little.. weirded out by the way the episode communicated race relations in the present day. They say that Black people couldn’t rely on the cops “back then” and they do this weird fake out to convince you that the mayor is racist (and also evil somehow) because the mayor is skating over/being weird about the deaths of Black men in the town - and then it turns out that no, the mayor is “one of the good ones” (gross) because he let Cassie’s dad (the Black man from before) get away with killing the racist. The plot points with the mayor are never followed up on because he ends up getting killed by the monster. There’s a sort of minor scene where Dean and Sam are talking to two blue-collar men - a Black man and a White man - and the Black man intimates (to the surprise of the White man) essentially that the police were not friendly to Black people “back in the day” and I was like.. really? Just back in the day? Because based on how the murders of these Black people are being handled in the show, and you know, from living in the world, I can tell you that this is not a “back in the day” kind of issue.

Also we get to watch two Black men die on screen and basically no one does anything about it which is......... frustrating.....

The only other thing really worth talking about imo is the relationship between Dean and Cassie. I think it’s really stupid that they essentially broke up by accident, but I guess that Says Something about how communicative Dean is with his romantic partners. I also think we are told a lot more about Cassie than we are shown. I think she’s a reporter and is well known in town, but she doesn’t really get to do much? Or have a voice of her own? I don’t know I felt like she was written in a very passive way and her main role in the episode was to be an emotional link for Dean into the events of the episode. There’s also a really stupid scene where they forced her actress to run around the house all scared because the truck is just revving it’s engine outside and flashing its headlights. I really wanted the truck to just like crash into the house bc like, what else could it possibly be threatening to do. (Also I know from being alive and having a friend who watches the show that Cassie ends up dying so I know she comes back and I know they kill her off and frankly I’m not looking forward to having to watch the show bend around to that happening.)

There’s plenty more to say about these theme’s that I’m not going to here. All in all, I’m putting this episode in the same category as Bugs in terms of: ok handling of the racial themes in a historical context, very questionable handling of the racial themes in the present day context of the show. Also very stupid supernatural threat.

Onto the live comments! - Uhoh big truck chasing this guy back and forth - Uhoh I hope that guy’s ok - Oh it was a ghost truck - We're meeting Cassie i guess - The car driving effects are a lot better now - No driver whoooowooo - Uhoh the evil truck got the newspaper guy - Are we gonna find out why the truck is targeting Black people - I see so racism is a thing of the past.. or not? - Wow I sure hope Cassie doesn't die - "are we done with this metaphor" (oh right this was when Cassie and Dean were fighting it was great in context) - Time for some smoochies - This song is a lot - Oh i thought the mayor was evil but the truck just killed him - I think its probably her mom - Dean using a computer - Uhoh its gonna just destroy Cassie's house?? - What is the goal for the truck here just chase her around her own house from the outside?? And then the scene cuts? - I was right it was the mom - Did Cyrus kill himself ? - Oh no Cyrus murdered a bunch of children and then Martin killed Cyrus - But then why are the attacks starting again now - Ah yes why didn’t the Black man who killed a White man call the cops in a rural town in the 1960s - That was a pretty quick drag the truck out of the swamp process - Idiots you have to burn the truck - ... fused with the truck..? - You're too good for him Cassie

Final thoughts are... this episode is definitely Not Good, but I would hesitate to say that it’s the worst episode of Supernatural that I’ve seen so far. I think that Bugs is worse, and Home might be worse just from a storytelling perspective. It’s definitely Very Weird and Pretty Stupid for the writers to handle intense racial themes in an episode where the supernatural villain is extremely stupid and campy. I think that contrast is definitely very jarring, which makes it easy to overlook some of the more interesting meat on the story’s bones. I think the past vs present handling of racial theming (as in, racism is a thing of the past) is now a worrying two episode trend that now I will be on the look out for. At least this time the villain of the episode wasn’t the racial minority, unlike in Bugs.

I also think that the brothers had the least role in this episode of all of the episodes we’ve seen so far. You’ll note that except for Dean’s relationship with Cassie, neither of them got mentioned in my episode thoughts. Overall, they basically just receive the episode’s story and then have a brief action at the end. We get the character beat that Dean sucks at communication and that’s about it.

[sol1056]

the consequences of unexplored implications

One of the hardest things to do in writing (above and beyond all the regular hard things) is recognizing the unexplored implications. Some of these can be more obvious with some simple stats: how many characters are male vs female? how many white characters get speaking parts or are named, vs how many non-white? 

Others take a bit more thought, like realizing the only female characters are unnamed prostitutes, or the only Hispanic characters are janitors. Sometimes it means untangling a well-meaning attempt to subvert a racist trope (ie uncivilized/inferior primitives) that actually ended up unwittingly in a completely different but equally racist trope (ie the noble savage). 

And then there’s a really tricky one to realize, that at least in my experience needs a big-picture view of the entire story. Only then can you see how seemingly independent parts, when overlapped, result in unfortunate implications. 

It’s this last one that I’m starting to twig on, in VLD. And it comes from a combination of a particularly pernicious trope in American media, the canonical relationship between Keith and Shiro, and the purpose of repetition in stories.

the bury your gays trope

Basically, this trope shows up when a story establishes a happy queer relationship, and immediately decides one of the two must die. 

Often, especially in older works (to the extent that they are found in older works, of course), gay characters just aren't allowed happy endings. Even if they do end up having some kind of relationship, at least one half of the couple, often the one who was more aggressive in pursuing a relationship, thus "perverting" the other one, has to die at the end. ... Nowadays, when opinions on sexuality have shifted somewhat, this justification will often be attempted via Too Good for This Sinful Earth. Sometimes it's because the Magical Queer has died in a Heroic Sacrifice so that the straights may live. 

(Also, for some reason, it’s a particular favorite to have one-half of a lesbian couple killed by a stray bullet. Google it.)

Honestly, this trope is so pervasive, it’s damn hard watching popular media. You end up constantly braced for the inevitable death (sometimes followed by the surviving partner going totally evil, a la Willow in BtVS). Well, unless the relationship is toxic or controlling, and then the implication is that het relationships are the only healthy ones, but that’s a slightly different trope. 

In short: if you’re queer, happy endings are not for you. And if you do manage to get a happy ending (ie Bill in Dr Who), you had to suffer ten times as much as anyone else to get there. Compared to het relationships in the same story, it’s always the queer couples that suffer the most. One way or another.

canonical and word-of-god Shiro/Keith

Assumption: Keith and Shiro have an emotional bond much deeper than any couple we’ve seen on-screen. The very least one could say is that they have a deep relationship, albeit presumably platonic. (I should also note that I do consider ‘platonic’ love to be an equal to ‘romantic’ love; it’s just a different type of consummation.) 

Apart from that, there’s word-of-god: the EPs’ comments (ie “beloved mentor”), VA interviews, and various directors/artists posting sheith images with romantic vibes. Yes, that’s all non-canonical, but the message is: if you read this platonic as simply pre-romantic, well, the series’ creators are there with you. 

I will note, I don’t consider this as representation. In canon or it doesn’t count! (Looking at you, Rowling.) Still, word-of-god is clearly impacting the fandom’s interpretations of the relationship.  

using repetition in stories

The try/fail cycle and repetition have a core element in common: an event repeats until the character learns what they need to achieve victory/resolution. The difference is that in try/fail, the character should move up each time. In repetition, the character must re-experience a lesson they failed the first time.

To compare: 

try/fail: the antagonist has a black belt! get white belt, challenge antagonist, fail. okay, green belt! challenge antagonist, fail. next belt!

repetition: the antagonist has a black belt! test for white belt, fail. test for white belt again, fail. test for white belt again... 

When the overall plot’s try/fail is too similar, readers will see the protagonist as too stupid to quit (or change tactics). Repetition works best as a recurring motif: event A, parallel event B, character learns and changes, we have development, and this happens in support of, or alongside, the plot’s try/fail cycle.

Example: if Lance were to flirt with ten different girls and they all shot him down, that’s try/fail. His development is via repetition: it’s a repeating pattern with Allura, until he learns to take a different approach.

Here’s the important thing: like try/fail, repetition is a lesson to be learned. Most readers assume repetition means the previous instances were failures. If the character does the exact same thing and this time it goes beautifully, expect some side-eying from your more astute readers. 

But at the same time, if the character had no control over the outcome in previous instances, expect frustration instead. Readers will intuit the story is indulging in a kind of victim-blaming: the character had no power to ‘do it right’ before, yet the repetition implies that failure was their fault.

And that brings us to how these three parts, combined, make me see some seriously unfortunate implications in VLD.

all three together

So we have sort of this gray-area kinetic-platonic, potential-romantic, relationship. And twice now, one-half of that relationship has been, well, not killed, but sort of killed. Gone, vanished. The other half is left behind, grieving. It’s implied Keith fell apart the first time, and then we got to see it on-screen, the second time. 

It doesn’t actually matter whether S3/S4 Shiro is the ‘real’ one. If he’s not, then we have a third loss. If he is -- but compromised as a tool of the empire -- then it’s still a loss, if a psychological one. He’s there, it’s just not... him, anymore.

In other words, three times that a potential-queer relationship has been put through a Kill Your Gays maneuver that ended up being just a ploy. 

Done once, it could’ve been a subversion of the trope. Aha, the writers could say, we didn’t kill anyone, instead, we brought him back! Yes, one-half of the couple (and later, we find out, both halves) suffered during the separation, but since that’s mostly backstory, it’s all good, they’re happy now. Carry on, Jeeves.

Done twice, the writers not only re-triggered a possible KYG interpretation, they also tripped over the issue of repetition. Remember, the repetition is a lesson -- something must be learned, to prevent its recurrence. 

The problem is removing Shiro leaves Keith to experience the aftermath. By default, he takes the protagonist’s role, and according to the literary convention, he has to learn something to prevent a repeat. But in neither instance -- the Kerberos mission, or Shiro’s disappearance from Black -- does the story give any indication that Keith had a direct impact on the outcome. He did nothing to cause either, therefore there’s nothing he could feasibly do to fix either. 

That makes it especially infuriating that the third time around, one could conceivably say: gee, Keith kept looking, until he found this not-Shiro. If not-Shiro does any damage, that can be traced back to Keith. 

On its own, that could be an interesting dilemma. Taken in light of repetition, not so good. The unfortunate implication is he should’ve learned from the previous two times, and his failure to do so is the reason he ended up here.   

what’s the lesson, then?

Is it: stop caring for this person? Is it: loving someone that much means you have to suffer? Is it: you can’t just be happy? Is it: if you want to try for happiness, you have to earn the right to it? 

How is it that Lance can just flirt, make peace, and develop a deep friendship with Allura -- and neither are forced to undergo repeated trauma in the process? Or that Pidge has just one scene of implied loss, and it’s over and resolved in the same episode? Yet meanwhile Keith -- the only one with a same-sex relationship of significant depth -- has to lose, and lose, and lose? 

Maybe the writers figured: well, it’s not really death, it doesn’t count, let’s go ahead and yank that chain a second and third time. The story is blind to how their plot-twists aren’t all that better. It's still the same old bullshit: if you’re queer, you don’t get the happy ending. And if you do, it can’t be the simple meet-like-love of a het relationship. You’ve got to suffer for it.  

But the story they’ve written, and the choices they’ve made, tell me: these implications are not on their radar. Worse, I end up feeling like they don’t care enough to even put it on their radar.

That’s why it really bothers me when the EPs say they’re pushing for queer representation. Because if the writers can’t even see the implications of doing this to a deeply caring platonic relationship between two people of the same gender, like hell if I want to see what they’d do to an actual, onscreen, queer relationship. 

If you are rising up right now to insist ‘this is what the story demanded!’, I strongly recommend you go read this post: this is a jar full of major characters. Yes, that post is talking about black characters vs white, but it goes for any marginalized group, including lgbtqia.

Bottom line: no story demands anything. You’re the goddamn writer; you control the story. If you write shit, you’re a shitty writer. 

Think harder. Dig deeper. Do better. 

[spiftynifty]

Voltron season 4

So this season was... kind of a mess. I’ve talked briefly before about this show’s struggle with what I feel like the creators want it to be (character driven) and what the clients (Dreamworks & Netflix) want it to be (action driven). This season for me was DEFINITELY the weakest of the four, no contest, because of that very struggle. Spoilers below the cut.

So maybe I’m just more used to an Avatar-verse type of pacing, but to put it in animation terms this season felt like it was all keyframes and no inbetweens. The passage of time was murky as all hell and the omission of certain key developments or heck even moments that lead to developments was sorely felt. 

First, Keith being a Blade of Marmora. What?? Like don’t get me wrong, this is awesome and I’ve always hoped he would be this eventually but there was no lead-up to it whatsoever. It’s just episode 6/7 then boom, “months later...” all these things are different, all this tension feels completely out of nowhere because we haven’t seen ANY of it. We’ve just been dropped right in the middle of the ACTION. Honestly a throwaway line in season 3, like maybe Kolivan sees Keith training and comments, “You are technically Galra. As such you could train with Marmora and hone your tactics.”, a brief shot of Keith considering this, PERFECT. Pair it with that Shiro/Keith scene where Shiro insists he’s proud Black chose him, even better. This is how you write character over action.

Second, Pidge’s episode was great!! But it was also completely out of nowhere. Apart from that brief scene in season 3 where she finds video footage of Matt, the motivation to look for him just hasn’t been there. I was additionally annoyed by her super quick explanation about the shopkeeper giving her intel, like how did she know the shopkeeper had that intel? What led that on the goose chase? Again something solved with a tertiary character mistaking Pidge for Matt in a throwaway scene. Heck, starting the episode with this would have been great. Lose the lizard assassin entirely, we never learn anything about him or his boss and all it does is show that Matt and Pidge are a great team-- something that can be shown easily in future episodes. 

Third. NOT RESOLVING THE CLONE(??) ISSUE. I’ve read a lot of posts about this and I agree; as great as it is to feel like Shiro is truly back, season 3 set up so hard that he wasn’t really Shiro, or that he had been brainwashed, so as a result the audience just doesn’t trust him at all. He was my favorite character for a long time, and this season I didn’t like him because I didn’t know who he was. The way they did this season too didn’t feel like they were being clever for future seasons, it felt like they had dropped the whole issue entirely. I was sure that in the last episode Haggar’s secret weapon was going to be Shiro, what an amazing moment that would have been (though making the rest of the plot nonsensical). But no, there was absolutely zero payoff in this episode and it’s a lot easier to root for a character when you know who they are.

Fourth. After stealing much of the show in season 3, Lotor and his Generals.... just... kind of... sucked this season?? It was like someone had just sucked all the energy out of all of them. Lotor was an interesting, clever character in season 4 and suddenly he got rash and stupid. There are better ways to show the fall of confidence in a cocky character that really show that character and evoke sympathy from watchers. I didn’t care about any of them this season.

Fifth. On that note, this season made it hard to care about almost any of the characters. Everything felt tense and distant and oddly 2-dimensional about them (with a couple of exceptions that I’ll talk about in the POSITIVES below). I’ve read people insisting they did, it was only because Shiro and Keith got sidelined that people are salty. Well, yes and no? After the show being about him for 2 (1.5?) seasons, Keith got super awkwardly and obviously sidelined in a mission we never learned about, and this is after the untold story in between ep 7 and 8(s4 e1) of him becoming a Blade. Like we didn’t get to see him juggle Voltron and Shiro’s expectations vs what he wanted for himself, we only caught the tail end of it when it was reaching a boiling point (which btw from a narrative POV makes said boiling point feel disjointed and less effective). Shiro didn’t do much this season either besides hint at having struggled with losing Black (again, something that would have been nice to see but action sells more toys than character development) and then get Black back and be a little less tense. Pidge got a little development with her backstory, which was great, but Hunk still remains largely unchanged by this show which is frustrated. Also I’m sorry but I actually hated most of Coran ep. It didn’t move anything forward and actually felt like a step BACKWARDS in Coran’s character. 

Overall yeah, this was just a “hit the plot points hard and fast” season which was so frustrating because I want this show to be able to explore more character-level stuff without being afraid of turning off its young boy toy-buyer audience (who from what I have seen are still not the actual primary audience).

But despite my generally negative feels on this season, there WERE some ~~~~~POSITIVES~~~~~

-Marmora Keith is pretty great -We got another Sheith hug! Even if the animation in this hug was particularly weak and also there was a major awkward crotch gap? It was weird. -And then EVERYONE joined in the hug and it was beautiful -Speaking of Sheith, that Pre-Kerb photobomb that I DEFINITELY didn’t catch but thanks to Tumblr I have now seen, well played -Haggar/Honerva in the mirror was GREAT and this is the kind of character moment shit I want more of Dreamworks -Narti’s death genuinely shocked me, and the other Generals choosing her over Lotor was G R E A T -THE KALTENEKER SCENE OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD. Literally my favorite part of the whole season. SO GOOD. -Coran being a big Shiro stan (but we didn’t get to SEE Shiro in that tight shirt so minus 10 points for Dreamworksdor) -Shiro hugging Matt -Pidge showing Matt around, particularly loved her room -Pidge, Matt, and Hunk hanging out and being smarty-pants together -ALLURA!!! This season was so great. From playing Keith to using her powers to lecturing Keith, it was all beautiful. And on that note... -LANCE AND ALLURA. I’ve been super super low-key shipping Allurance since the lion switch in season 3, but their stuff this season was WONDERFUL. He stops being the gaga-for-girls Lance with her and helps her out and picks her up when she doesn’t believe in herself. When she is able to work her magic and Lance says, “I didn’t do anything, it was all you” I was like *_* this is SO. NICE. -Female Galra generals! TWO OF THEM! It was like a beautiful surprise gift.

And that’s all I can think of to be honest. This season was just such a mess, even when paired with season 3. Season 3 had so much more emotional power on all fronts, which is def what I like most about this show.

[kinetic-elaboration]

May 25: The Finale

So here's how I stand with The 100 now that the finale has aired.

I still haven't watched anything past 4x10, but I'm reading spoilers on my dash and keeping up with the general outlines of things. Before the finale aired, I was starting to get curious about developments again and thought I might just wait for the last ep to air and then binge the final arc maybe over the long weekend or something. Now that I know how the season ends up, my interest in watching has plummeted and while I think it would be silly of me to say 'I'll never watch it ever' (those are very much the sort of words a person like me later eats), I have no interest in watching it any time soon. Maybe over the summer. Sometime. Eventually. Who knows?

The biggest reason to watch the last episodes is to be able to have an actual leg to stand on for complaining purposes but frankly not being up to date on canon hasn't stopped me yet, lol. I just disclaim all complaints with 'I'm one of those annoying people who bitches about developments in episodes I haven't seen' and leave it at that.  

I don't want to be like the anti's, hating the show and talking about how much I hate it but sticking around in fandom anyway, raining on everyone else's parade. It worries me that people might come across my ranty posts and think that of me. But... okay, look, I have done a lot of complaining going all the way back to season 3 and I'm up front both about what I don't like in the show and about why I'm here in the fandom anyway. I like the fandom, I like the characters, I like the universe, etc. I still want to engage in the transformative-works aspect of the fandom. And honestly I've never been a meta writer or engaged in speculation or predictions so looking only at what I produce, content-wise...whether or not I like the canon or even whether or not I'm caught up on it makes no difference. It will matter even less now that we're in the hiatus and there's no new material to speculate on in the first place.  

Finally, and most importantly, I'm really honestly not here to ruin or even put a damper on anyone else's fandom experience. I tag my negative posts as negative. I censor names when I'm talking shit about specific characters or ships. I don't go into people's inboxes and I don't even have a Twitter but if I did, I wouldn't use it to harass other users or people who work on the show. Like, I just want to sincerely love the first two seasons, the general concept, and the characters, while bemoaning the state of the show as it is now. (Also, tbh...sometimes complaining is fun and the vast number of people who leisure-complain on any number of topics is evidence enough of this phenomenon—at least I'm honest about taking pleasure in the occasional bout of this is so fucking stupid inconsequential-rage.)

As for what I actually think of what I've heard of the finale.... I've tried to write this up a couple of different ways and I think (hope) I've FINALLY distilled my thoughts.

The two things I ABSOLUTELY DID NOT WANT out of the finale were (1) for the characters to go to space and (2) a time jump of pretty much any sort. So now that those two things have happened, my brain has basically short circuited. I cannot even comprehend this. I literally don't have the words. Maybe I sound hyperbolic, but I'm just trying to explain how much disdain I have for these two plot points. I can't even fathom how anyone ever thought this would be a good idea; it's like I'm in an alternate entertainment universe. It's ludicrous.

My problem with the space launch is that it crosses the disbelief line for me. Obviously there's a lot of faux-science in this show and everyone has a different line as to what is reasonable-enough if you don't think about it too hard, and what is just absolute nonsense but, for whatever reason, this is my line. I don't know what the details were on the actual show come launch-time but just the concept of launching a space craft from a post-apocalyptic wasteland is so ridiculous that I cannot imagine a way to squint or turn my head or angle my screen so that it seems even remotely tenable. A ROCKET LAUNCH. FROM THE RUINS OF POST-NUCLEAR NEW YORK. Like ?????????????????????????. I previously described this possibility as sounding to my ears like riding a pegicorn to New Jersey to get the magic potion from Raul (s/o to my freshman year roommate for the Raul in-joke, so useful to me so many years later), and that's still how I feel.

My bigger problem is with the time jump. To put it briefly, it's a new show now. The combination of Radiation 2.0 and the time jump has cemented that.

I've felt for a while now that whatever it is I'm watching now isn't what I originally signed up to watch. I've seen a few other posts to similar effect, and even my mother (who acts as my Typical Casual Viewer one-person control group, even though quite obviously she is not representative of a typical cw viewer at all—still she's not in the fandom so she is completely untainted by what goes on in these parts)--even my mom said she thinks JRoth/the writers are basically telling a completely different story now than they were initially. I've had, and am still having, a hard time articulating exactly what makes it fundamentally different (as opposed to merely a show that's evolved over time, as long-running shows do), or even when exactly it happened. But I guess at its core the complaint is: this is supposedly a show about "the hundred," and of that group almost all have been killed or lost to the ether, and the remaining members have had their screen time chronically cut short to accommodate a growing cast of characters who have increasingly little to do with that core group or its original purpose or journey. The complaint is  partly one of frustration at the large number of delinquent deaths and the small scraps of screen time given to other alleged mains, and partly a more general annoyance at the loss of the whole meaning of the affiliation "the hundred." What does it mean to be a member of the hundred anymore? Basically nothing. And when it ceased to have meaning (by which I mean S3), the show became, in essence, a different show.

Obviously there's a counter to this whole general complaint (that the show is too bloated with characters generally and/or Grounders specifically), which I've also seen floated out there recently, which is that destroying everything on Earth will allow something more like S1 to flourish again, and a new emphasis to be placed on the core young people. To this I say, first, it's way too early to tell what S5 will be. And I'm in a particularly bad place to really engage with this argument, given how much of even the current canon I've missed. BUT I am skeptical. First, we were told S4 would feel like S1 again and IMO it most definitely has not. Second, most of the hundred are dead and/or gone—I'm not just talking about the toll among the original mains or even the original named characters, I'm talking about how 42 of the original captured teens made it out of Mt. Weather and all but 4 of them were never heard of again. So even if the show returns to caring more about, say, Monty than it does about Grounder of the Week, nothing can undo the destruction to the original concept; nothing can really solve the problem of which I'm complaining. And third, I don't think the writers think they're writing a bad show; I mean, they're the ones who brought us down this path in the first place. This, what we've seen over the past 2 years, IS JRoth's vision. Yes, sometimes showrunners make a mis-step and readjust course, and I thought perhaps that would happen for S4, but it hasn't, which means that he doesn't think S3 had the problems I think it had, which means there's no reason to think S5 will be any better than S3 or S4 were, at least from my POV.  

But anyway as I was saying—

Maybe there's been room for argument about this same show/different show question up to now; it's a fuzzy sort of concept in my mind with which I'm not entirely comfortable—I feel a bit like I'm just Complaining About Change like an old grandma, tbh. Despite how it sounds, I do want to be open-minded about others' creativity and to give the benefit of the doubt to ongoing projects/unfinished stories. Regardless, ending S4 in this way is a pretty big sign that the theory, whether or not it was right before, is right as of now. Is there any way to more effectively raze the ground and salt the Earth than to literally raze the ground and then skip ahead 6 years? I have a million problems with this large time gap, but on the top of the list is that, like everyone over the age of 25 knows, a person changes dramatically between the ages of 18 and 25, or 16 and 22, just in the normal course of events, apocalypse(s) not withstanding. The writers have given themselves carte blanche to do literally absolutely anything with these characters. Even for a show that's barely cared at all about consistency over time in pretty much any aspect, that's troubling. (Also, like, I signed up for a show about a bunch of teens in the forest, not a group of twenty-somethings...doing whatever they'll be doing in season 5. I feel a tiny bit like a promise has been broken, sorry.)

So having basically established that whatever this show used to be, it's not that anymore, I guess the question is: what is it now, and do I like it? I think this is the question every viewer basically has to ask themselves, consciously or no. For me, what I've seen the last two years is some mismash of GoT, general dystopia, repetitive story lines, action sequences, and nonsense "science." The plot is ridiculous,  the pacing is terrible, the emphases are (for my taste) in all the wrong places, the characters are shoddily drawn, and often times, it's fucking boring. It's a bad show. Things like loyalty to a few characters, interest in a few story lines, and sheer curiosity/inertia have kept me here despite it all, but at this point I feel the balance has just shifted imperceptibly the other way. Jasper's death has a lot to do with it (he was my favorite, he had the only good or even coherent story of S3, and the way his death and its aftermath were handled were so insulting one could easily justify a decision to stop watching as mini-protest), but I think that it was more the (very heavy) straw on the camel's back than anything else.

I guess the tl:dr version of this is GOODBYE BITCHES I'M DONE and yet I still can't even promise I won't be watching Season 5, like I can't predict how I'll feel in a year.