#this is definitely the worst story of the series but whatever :/ it has its pros i guess

[the-knights-who-say-book]

Peep is a hearing aid. It is still getting used to this, because it used to be a regular dragon. And now it is a full-time employed hearing aid dragon, all two inches of it, perched on its sorcerer’s ear.

The sorcerer is named Vigil, which is short for Vigilante. Peep tried to point out to its hapless human that being named after their secret identity is a terrible way of keeping it a secret, but Vigil continues to be named Vigil. (It is ridiculous, in Peep’s eyes, how often its good advice goes ignored.) Vigil’s often-changing gender was another surprise to get used to, since dragons don’t tend to have genders.

“What’s a gender for?” Peep had questioned Vigil on its first day of work as it tried to find the best position to stay hidden behind her ear, while holding onto her piercings for balance.

Vigil hummed thoughtfully before answering, “Decoration, I suppose.”

That might have been a joke, but Peep wasn’t sure.

But being genderfluid was a feature of Vigil, not a problem. No, it was the vigilante thing that was the problem. Every night after the labs had been shut up for the day the other apprentice sorcerers would head off to eat dinner together, or watch some shark jousting at the Oceania, or do other normal activities like flying. Meanwhile, Vigil would murmur a few words under their breath to shield their face with a spell, tuck the lab’s resident firekeeping dragon into their sleeve, and go out to foil evil.

It was a terrible hobby, which Vigil would know if they ever took Peep’s advice.

The root of the problem, Peep had decided, was that Vigil was so caught up with how they could that they never considered whether they should. Yes, Peep’s human was remarkably clever, anyone could see that. Vigil didn’t let the fact that they were only an apprentice sorcerer get in their way— they dyed their hair to look like it had been turned blue by frequent exposure to magic, had Peep sit behind their ear to make the quiet world more understandable, and coaxed the lab’s firekeeping dragon to stay in their sleeve and breathe fire on command. With their face hidden, Vigil passed admirably for a fully grown sorcerer.

But they weren’t one, and that was going to get them in trouble one day if Peep didn’t figure out a way to help them.

“You’re going to get hurt,” Peep informed Vigil as he piled boxes into his arms.

“What are you talking about?” Vigil muttered, balancing the pile with precision. “Nothing in the back room is dangerous.” He sidestepped another apprentice coming into the storage room and emerged behind the counter.

“Not in the back room. You’re going to get hurt while out foiling evil if you keep it up. This woman says thank you and keep the change, and the rude guy next to her is trying to get your attention by snapping.”

Vigil dropped the change into the floating tip jar and turned to the man.

Shifts at the lab’s storefront, where anyone could purchase potion ingredients and charms prepared by the apprentices in the labs, were Peep’s busiest times as a hearing aid. Vigil could hear well enough if it was one well-enunciated person alone speaking, but the chaos of the labs, with everyone talking at once, meant he relied on Peep the most.

“He wants one mud-repelling charm,” Peep reported as the man talked, “and make it quick because he’s an asshole, or because he got mud on his very expensive shoes, something like that.”

Vigil made his thoughtful face while listening, one of the many ways he filled the pauses before he could respond in situations like these. “Sorry, we’re out of those. Can I get you anything else?”

The man did not want anything else.

“He said a bad word at you,” Peep said virtuously, because it considered cursing very terrible unless it was done by someone it approved of.

“I could tell,” Vigil muttered, watching the man storm out.

Peep itself was watching someone else enter the store— a rather short knight-in-training in a very unfashionable cap. Peep considered itself an expert on fashion, as well as on poetry and Vigil’s safety. It was because of its expertise on that latter subject that it noticed the knight-in-training. It watched them go right to the shelves of magical candy on the other side of the room, and approved.

“This little kid at the counter wants ingrediants for a stink potion,” Peep repeated absentmindedly as it mulled over the newcomer, and Vigil went back into the storeroom.

He mumbled the ingredients to himself as he found them on the shelves. “Glass eggs, spider eyes—”

“Gross,” Peep commented. “You need friends.”

“—black-spotted mushrooms. Friends would make this less gross how?”

“They wouldn’t. But they might keep you out of trouble.”

“And that’s exactly why I don’t need any. I like trouble.” Vigil went back to the counter and put the ingredients in the girl’s basket.

Peep took the opportunity to notice the knight-in-training again (they were still examining the candies) before turning back to its duties as a hearing aid.“She says thanks, and also that you need friends.”

“Quit it,” Vigil hissed, and greeted a regular customer who signed their request for a fever-reducing charm.

Peep quitted it for all of ten seconds before Vigil was searching the dusty back corners where the healing charms were stored. “You’re only a baby sorcerer, you can’t go around foiling evil all by yourself. Eventually evil will foil back.”

Vigil objected strongly to being called a baby sorcerer. “I hired a hearing aid, not a babysitter.”

“Wrong,” shouted Peep, who loved being right. “You hired a dragon, and a dragon always knows best.”

“Dragons also always live with several nest-mates, which you don’t have, so you’re one to talk about needing friends.” Vigil snatched a fever charm from where it had fallen on the floor with more violence than necessary and straightened up. There was a guilty pause. Dragons are excellent at telling when pauses are guilty. “I mean...” Vigil said quietly.

“Everyone needs friends,” Peep said, trying not to sound like it was going to cry. Unfortunately, dragons are as terrible at not sounding emotional as they are excellent at discerning guilty pauses.

Vigil stroked the tiny ridges of Peep’s back with one finger. “Hey, I didn’t mean that.” His voice was soft.

“I could have nest-mates if I wanted,” Peep said, still sniffling. Dragons’ lying abilities fall squarely between their skills at recognizing guilty pauses and not sounding emotional.

“Of course you could,” Vigil soothed. “You’re the best dragon I know.”

“Including Crackle?” Peep asked, wanting to be sure. “Crackle isn’t even that great of a firekeeper. I’m much better at being a hearing aid than it is at making fire.” Crackle had three nest-mates and its very own nesting hallow in the chimney over the lab’s fireplace, and was very conceited about it in Peep’s opinion.

Vigil abstained from passing judgement on Crackle. “You’re the best hearing aid a sorcerer could have. I’m sorry for what I said.”

Peep blew its nose on a lock of blue hair. “Ok.”

Vigil winced but didn’t comment on that. At the counter he gave the customer the fever charm and they exchanged a few words in sign language that Peep didn’t need to aid in, giving it time to search the room again for the knight-in-training, who was now carrying over a jar of blue candies to purchase. They looked at the apprentices behind the counter, all busy— and their eyes slid right over Vigil’s face without recognition.

Peep frowned to itself. They would never recognize Vigil as the hero who had saved them the other night on their own, not when Vigil had hid his face so well. Clearly, Peep had to intervene, for Vigil’s own good.

Pushing Vigil’s hair aside, Peep stretched itself out as far as it could without falling off his ear, and flapped its green wings urgently. The knight-in-training, not looking, didn’t notice. Humans were oblivious.

Peep flapped its wings some more, and puffed out some violet smoke. On the other side of the counter, the knight-in-training’s eyes flicked to the fading puff of violet in surprise, and followed it down to the tiny green dragon preening with victory, and then to the sorcerer it was perched on.

“You!” Kit shouted.

Peep quickly returned to its hearing aid position. “That knight person over there says ‘you!’ very loudly,” it told Vigil.

“Fuck,” Vigil whispered, trying to avoid the knight’s glare. “That’s the squire I helped the other night! How did they recognize me?”

“Big mystery,” Peep said unhelpfully.

The knight-in-training pushed their way closer to Vigil’s section of the counter, not to be ignored. “You’re that vigilante!”

“They say you’re a vigilante, and probably good friend material.” Peep gave the knight-in-training a wave. They waved back.

Vigil batted at his ear. “Stop that, stop being friendly! I’m a masked vigilante, people aren’t supposed to know who I am.”

The knight-in-training raised an eyebrow, looking at Vigil’s name tag. “In that case, why is your name literally the first half of the word vigilante? Doesn’t seem very masked to me.”

Peep crowed victoriously. “New friend! Can we keep them?”

the other stories about these characters can be found in my tag here. thanks for reading!

[ot3]

i watched red vs blue: zero with my dear friends today and i was asked to “post” my “thoughts” on the subject. Please do not click this readmore unless, for some reason, you want to read three thousand words on the subject of red vs blue: zero critical analysis. i highly doubt that’s the reason anyone is following me, but hey. 

anyway. here you have it. 

Here are my opinions on RVB0 as someone who has quite literally no nostalgia for any older RVB content. I’ve seen seasons 1-13 once and bits and pieces of it more than once here and there, but I only saw it for the first time within the past couple of months. I’ve literally never seen any other RT/AH content. I can name a few people who worked on OG Red vs. Blue but other than Mounty Oum I have NO idea who is responsible for what, really, or what anything else they’ve ever worked on is, or whether or not they’re awful people. I know even less about the people making RVB0 - All I know is that the main writer is named Torrian but I honestly don’t even know if that’s a first name, a last name, or a moniker. All this to say; nothing about my criticism is rooted in any perceived slight against the franchise or branding by the new staff members, because I don’t know or care about any of it. In fact, I’m going to try and avoid any direct comparison between RVB0 and earlier seasons of RVB as a means of critique until the very end, where I’ll look at that relationship specifically.

So here is my opinion of RVB0 as it stands right now:

1. The Writing

Everything about RVB0 feels as if it was written by a first-time writer who hasn’t learned to kill his darlings. The narrative is both simultaneously far too full, leaving very little breathing room for character interaction, and oddly sparse, with a story that lacks any meaningful takeaway, interesting ideas, or genuine emotional connection. It also feels like it’s for a very much younger audience - I don’t mean this as a negative at all. I love tv for kids. I watch more TV for kids than I do for adults, mostly, but I think it’s important to address this because a lot of the time ‘this is for kids’ is used to act like you’re not allowed to critique a narrative thoroughly. It definitely changes the way you critique it, but the critique can still be in good faith.  I watched the entirety of RVB0 only after it was finished, in one sitting, and I was giving it my full attention, essentially like it was a movie. I’m going to assume it was much better to watch in chunks, because as it stood, there was literally no time built into the narrative to process the events that had just transpired, or try and predict what events might be coming in the future. When there’s no time to think about the narrative as you’re watching it, the narrative ends up as being something that happens to the audience, not something they engage with. It’s like the difference between taking notes during a lecture or just sitting and listening. If you’re making no attempt to actively process what’s happening, it doesn’t stick in your mind well. I found myself struggling to recall the events and explanations that had immediately transpired because as soon as one thing had happened, another thing was already happening, and it was like a mental juggling act to try and figure out which information was important enough to dwell on in the time we were given to dwell on it.

Which brings me to another point - pacing. Every event in the show, whether a character moment, a plot moment, or a fight scene, felt like it was supposed to land with almost the exact same amount of emotional weight. It all felt like The Most Important Thing that had Yet Happened. And I understand that this is done as an attempt to squeeze as much as possible out of a rather short runtime, but it fundamentally fails. When everything is the most important thing happening, it all fades into static. That’s what most of 0’s narrative was to me: static. It’s only been a few hours since I watched it but I had to go step by step and type out all of the story beats I could remember and run it by my friends who are much more enthusiastic RVB fans than I am to make sure I hadn’t missed or forgotten anything. I hadn’t, apparently, but the fact that my takeaway from the show was pretty accurate and also disappointingly lackluster says a lot. Strangely enough, the most interesting thing the show alluded to - a holo echo, or whatever the term they used was - was one of the things least extrapolated upon in the show’s incredibly bulky exposition. Benefit of the doubt says that’s something they’ll explore in future seasons (are they getting more? Is that planned? I just realized I don’t actually know.)

And bulky it was! I have quite honestly never seen such flagrant disregard for the rule of “show, don’t tell.” There was not a single ounce of subtlety or implication involved in the storytelling of RVB0. Something was either told to you explicitly, or almost entirely absent from the narrative. Essentially zilch in between. We are told the dynamic the characters have with each other, and their personality pros and cons are listed for us conveniently by Carolina. The plot develops in exposition dumps. This is partially due to the series’ short runtime, but is also very much a result of how that runtime was then used by the writers. They sacrificed a massive chunk of their show for the sake of cramming in a ton of fight scenes, and if they wanted to keep all of those fight scenes, it would have been necessary to pare down their story and characters proportionally in comparison, but they didn’t do that either. They wanted to have it both ways and there simply wasn’t enough time for it. 

The story itself is… uninteresting. It plays out more like the flimsy premise of a video game quest rather than a piece of media to be meaningfully engaged with. RVB0 is I think something I would be pitched by a guy who thinks the MCU and BNHA are the best storytelling to come out of the past decade. It is nothing but tropes. And I hate having to use this as an insult! I love tropes. The worst thing about RVB0 is that nothing it does is wholly unforgivable in its own right. Hunter x Hunter, a phenomenal shonen, is notoriously filled with pages upon pages of detailed exposition and explanations of things, and I absolutely love it. Leverage, my favorite TV show of all time, is literally nothing but a five man band who has to learn to work as a team while seemingly systematically hitting a checklist of every relevant trope in the book. Pacific Rim is an incredibly straightforward good guys vs giant monsters blockbuster to show off some cool fight scenes such as a big robot cutting an alien in half with a giant sword, and it’s some of the most fun I ever have watching a movie. Something being derivative, clunky, poorly executed in some specific areas, narratively weak, or any single one of these flaws, is perfectly fine assuming it’s done with the intention and care that’s necessary to make the good parts shine more. I’ll forgive literally any crime a piece of media commits as long as it’s interesting and/or enjoyable to consume. RVB0 is not that. I’m not sure what the main point of RVB0 was supposed to be, because it seemingly succeeds at nothing. It has absolutely nothing new or innovative to justify its lack of concern for traditional storytelling conventions. Based solely on the amount of screentime things were given, I’d be inclined to say the narrative existed mostly to give flimsy pretense for the fight scenes, but that’s an entire other can of worms.

2. The Visuals + Fights

I have no qualms with things that are all style and no substance. Sometimes you just want to see pretty colors moving on the screen for a while or watch some cool bad guys and monsters or whatever get punched. RVB0 was not this either. The show fundamentally lacked a coherent aesthetic vision. Much of the show had a rather generic sci-fi feel to it with the biggest standouts to this being the very noir looking cityscape, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like something from a batman game, or the temple, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like a world of warcraft raid. They were obviously attempting to get variety in their environment design, which I appreciate, but they did this without having a coherent enough visual language to feel like it was all part of the same world. In general, there was also just a lack of visual clarity or strong shots. The value range in any given scene was poor, the compositions and framing were functional at best, and the character animation was unpleasantly exaggerated. It just doesn’t really look that good beyond fancy rendering techniques.

The fight scenes are their entire own beast. Since ‘FIGHT SCENE’ is the largest single category of scenes in the show, they definitely feel worth looking at with a genuine critical eye. Or, at least, I’d like to, but honestly half the time I found myself almost unable to look at them. The camera is rarely still long enough to really enjoy what you’re watching - tracking the motion of the character AND the camera at such constant breakneck high speeds left little time to appreciate any nuances that might have been present in the choreography or character animation. I tried, believe me, I really did, but the fight scenes leave one with the same sort of dizzy convoluted spectacle as a Michael Bay transformers movie. They also really lacked the impact fight scenes are supposed to have.

It’s hard to have a good, memorable fight scene without it doing one of three things: 1. Showing off innovative or creative fighting styles and choreography 2. Making use of the fight’s setting or environment in an engaging and visually interesting way or 3. Further exploring a character’s personality or actions by the way they fight. It’s also hard to do one of these things on its own without at least touching a bit on the other two. For the most part, I find RVB0’s fight scenes fail to do this. Other than rather surface level insubstantial factors, there was little to visually distinguish any of RVB0’s fight scenes from each other. Not only did I find a lot of them difficult to watch and unappealing, I found them all difficult to watch and unappealing in an almost identical way. They felt incredibly interchangeable and very generic. If you could take a fight scene and change the location it was set and also change which characters were participating and have very little change, it’s probably not a good fight scene. 

I think “generic” is really just the defining word of RVB0 and I think that’s also why it falls short in the humor department  as well.

3. The Comedy

Funny shit is hard to write and humor is also incredibly subjective but I definitely got almost no laughs out of RVB0. I think a total of three. By far the best joke was Carolina having a cast on top of her armor, which, I must stress, is an incredibly funny gag and I love it. But overall I think the humor fell short because it felt like it was tacked on more than a natural and intentional part of this world and these characters. A lot of the jokes felt like they were just thrown in wherever they’d fit, without any build up to punchlines and with little regard for what sort of joke each character would make. Like, there was some, obviously Raymond’s sense of humor had the most character to it, but the character-oriented humor still felt very weak. When focusing on character-driven humor, there’s a LOT you can establish about characters based on what sort of jokes they choose to make, who they’re picking as the punchlines of these jokes, and who their in-universe audience for the jokes is. In RVB0, the jokes all felt very immersion-breaking and self aware, directed wholly towards the audience rather than occurring as a natural result of interplay between the characters. This is partially due to how lackluster the character writing was overall, and the previously stated tight timing, but also definitely due to a lack of a real understanding about what makes a joke land. 

A rule of thumb I personally hold for comedy is that, when push comes to shove, more specific is always going to be more funny. The example I gave when trying to explain this was this:

saying two characters had awkward sex in a movie theater: funny

saying two characters had an awkward handjob in a cinemark: even funnier

saying two characters spent 54 minutes of 11:14's 1:26 runtime trying out some uncomfortably-angled hand stuff in the back of a dilapidated cinemark that lost funding halfway through retrofitting into a dinner theater: the funniest

The more specific a joke is, the more it relies on an in-depth understanding of the characters and world you’re dealing with and the more ‘realistic’ it feels within the context of your media. Especially with this kind of humor. When you’re joking with your friends, you don’t go for stock-humor that could be pulled out of a joke book, you go for the specific. You aim for the weak spots. If a set of jokes could be blindly transplanted into another world, onto another cast of characters, then it’s far too generic to be truly funny or memorable. I don’t think there’s a single joke in RVB0 where the humor of it hinged upon the characters or the setting.

Then there’s the issue of situational comedy and physical comedy. This is really where the humor being ‘tacked on’ shows the most. Once again, part of what makes actually solid comedy land properly is it feeling like a natural result of the world you have established. Real life is absurd and comical situations can be found even in the midst of some pretty grim context, and that’s why black comedy is successful, and why comedy shows are allowed to dip into heavier subject matter from time to time, or why dramas often search for levity in humor. It’s a natural part of being human to find humor in almost any situation. The key thing, though, once again, is finding it in the situation. Many of RVB0’s attempts at humor, once again, feel like they would be the exact same jokes when stripped from their context, and that’s almost never good. A pretty fundamental concept in both storytelling in general but particularly comedy writing is ‘setup and payoff’. No joke in RVB0 is a reward for a seemingly innocuous event in an earlier scene or for an overlooked piece of environmental design. The jokes pop in when there’s time for them in between all the exposition and fighting, and are gone as soon as they’re done. There’s no long term, underlying comedic throughline to give any sense of coherence or intent to the sense of humor the show is trying to establish. Every joke is an isolated one-off quip or one-liner, and it fails to engage the audience in a meaningful way.

All together, each individual component of RVB0 feels like it was conjured up independently, without any concern to how it interacted with the larger product they were creating. And I think this is really where it all falls apart. RVB0 feels criminally generic in a way reminiscent of mass-market media which at least has the luxury of attributing these flaws, this complete and total watering down of anything unique, to heavy oversight and large teams with competing visions. But I don’t think that’s the case for RVB0. I don’t know much about what the pipeline is like for this show, but I feel like the fundamental problem it suffers from is a lack of heart.

In comparison to Red vs. Blue

Let's face it. This is a terrible successor to Red vs. Blue. I wouldn’t care if NONE of the old characters were in it - that’s not my problem. I haven’t seen past season 13 because from what I heard the show already jumped the shark a bit and then some. That’s not what makes it a poor follow up. What makes it a bad successor is that it fundamentally lacks any of the aspects of the OG RVB that made it unique or appealing at all. I find myself wondering what Torrian is trying to say with RVB0 and quite literally the only answer I find myself falling back onto is that he isn’t trying to say anything at all. Regardless of what you feel about the original RVB, it undeniably had things to say. The opening “why are we here” speech does an excellent job at establishing that this is a show intended to poke fun at the misery of bureaucracy and subservience to nonsensical systems, not just in the context of military life, but in a very broad-strokes way almost any middle-class worker can relate to. At the end of the day, fiction is at its best when it resonates with some aspect of its audience’s life. I know instantly which parts of the original Red vs Blue I’m supposed to relate to. I can’t say anything even close to that about 0.

RVB is an absurdist parody that heavily satirizes aspects of the military and life as a low-on-the-food-chain worker in general that almost it’s entire target audience will be familiar with. The most significant draw of the show to me was how the dialogue felt like listening to my friends bicker with each other in our group chats. It required no effort for me to connect with and although the narrative never outright looked to the camera and explained ‘we are critiquing the military’s stupid red tape and self-fullfilling eternal conflict’ they didn’t need to, because the writing trusted itself and its audience enough to believe this could be conveyed. It is, in a way, the complete antithesis to the badass superhero macho military man protagonist that we all know so well. RVB was saying something, and it was saying it in a rather novel format.

Nothing about RVB0 is novel. Nothing about RVB0 says anything. Nothing about it compels me to relate to any of these characters or their situations. RVB0 doesn’t feel like absurdism, or satire. RVB0 feels like it is, completely uncritically, the exact media that RVB itself was riffing off of. Both RVB0 and RVB when you watch them give you the feeling that what you’re seeing here is kids on a playground larping with toy soldiers. It’s all ridiculous and over the top cliche stupid garbage where each side is trying to one-up the other. The critical difference is, in RVB, we’re supposed to look at this and laugh at how ridiculous this is. In RVB0 we’re supposed to unironically think this is all pretty badass. 

The PFL arc of the original RVB existed to show us that setting up an elite team of supersoldiers with special powers was something done in bad faith, with poor outcomes, that left everyone involved either cruel, damaged, or dead. It was a bad thing. And what we’re seeing in RVB0 is the same premise, except, this time it’s good. We’re supposed to root for this format. RVB0 feels much more like a demo reel, cutscenes from a video game that doesn’t exist, or a shonen anime fanboy’s journal scribbling than it feels like a piece of media with any objective value in any area.  In every area that RVB was anti-establishment, RVB0 is pure undiluted establishment through and through.  

[foxtophat]

HEY HEY HEY!!!!  hey guys. haha. um, idk what to say exactly and tumblr likes to eat my posts so lets see how long this lasts:

its’ only been a couple months but i have been frothing at the mouth trying to figure out what next part of mercy to put out. i have a lot of much bigger stories to tell than this one, but kim and john sharing insomnia felt sort of like the right segue into those bigger bits.  so for now, let’s just enjoy a 20k fic about Kim and John, and also a little about John and Nick, but mostly just about John and Jacob.

there are 3 chapters. i’ll post the 2nd one later this week (wednesday or friday i think) and the third will probably go up next monday.  YEAH THAT’S RIGHT i actually have most of this one finished right out the gate!!!

as usual, i’ll put the entire chapter under a readmore in case you don’t want to leave tumblr.  i hope you enjoy what i’ve got for you this time -- if not don’t worry, there will be more dramatic bullshit later :)  comments, kudos, reblogs and likes are all the things that make ficwriting more fun than it already is, so consider helping me out if you enjoy what i’m doing. otherwise, have a good day!!!

Kim's dreams are normally composed of fleeting images in dark, monochrome colors. They're howling-wind nightmares or ethereal moments of peace, but they're short-lived and she's always disconnected from them. She hasn't had a real dream in probably nine years. She used to miss them, before John Seed reappeared with all of his night terrors, just in time to remind her of how good she has it. Now, she's glad that the most she has to contest with is a looming sense of dread that fades almost as soon as she wakes up.

But tonight, Kim is a long way away from all of that. She's standing at the kitchen sink in her childhood home, which is in full summer swing. The rosemary plant her mom keeps on the sill is in full bloom, thick green spikes dotted with blue puffball flowers. Beyond it, the Canadian sky is seawater green, and Kim marvels at the fluffy clouds drifting through the unnatural color. They seem to be floating by much faster than the still air outside would imply. It should rattle her, confuse her, but before that realization sinks in, her mom's voice distracts her away.

"Do you really think he's the one?" she asks, as skeptically as she had all those years ago when Kim first decided to move to Montana. Her mother had liked Nick, of course, because he was a likable guy, but Kim had known from the start that her parents were worried about her. They'd worried about her moving to a red state, about her trusting a man she'd seen a handful of times since they'd met. They hadn't understood the idea of purple pockets or internet dating, and while they supported Kim's love of rifle showmanship, they'd never trusted Nick owning more than three guns.

"What's the point, is all I'm asking," Kim's mom laughs in response to Kim's unspoken comment. "It seems strange to collect weapons..."

"Mom, he hunts !" she chides. "And anyway, he isn't the worst one out there."

"That's exactly what I worry about," her mom says. "What if something bad were to happen? His family is gone, and we'll be so far away..."

Kim sighs, the words stinging more than they should. The aqua colored sky begins to churn outside, the light filtering through a strange red haze. Inside, the sunlight reflects off the white counters, nearly blinding Kim.

"I'll be okay," she says, reciting an amalgamation of all her old defenses as her eyes readjust. "There are a lot of good people out there. They rely on each other a whole lot more than we do here."

"I worry about you, Kimiko. That's all." Her mother sighs sadly. "You'll understand when you have kids of your own."

"But mom..."

Kim tries to tell her that she already has a kid, but she can't muster up the words. After all, shouldn't she know? Wouldn't Kim have visited? Wouldn't she have brought Carmina into this very kitchen, all the surfaces glowing with light, and introduced them? Wouldn't her mom have been there when Carmina was born?

"It's unseasonably warm, isn't it," her dad remarks at the table. He's sitting there with a magazine as if he'd been there the whole time. He, like the rest of the room, glows from the inside, as though a flashlight were shining through his skin. It shines through the wood of the table, through her mom's curious smile, until Kim has to turn her face away. The room grows hotter and hotter, and in the far-off whistling wind she hears the first lonesome wail of an air-raid siren beginning to pick up. There's a blinding burst of light and howling wind, and Kim lifts her hands to her face, desperate not to look directly at the blast —

The bedroom is dark, warm and humid. At first, Kim doesn't know where she is, struggling to sit up, desperate to run, until all at once reality comes crashing back into focus. It doesn't help that she's pinned beneath Nick's arm and Carmina's full dead-sleeping weight.

Normally, moving would be out of the question. But Kim doesn't want this dream clinging to her memory, and she desperately wants to put some space between her and the nuclear glow of her mother's smile. Hell, maybe it isn't the dream at all — maybe it's the heat that's making lying here unbearable. Maybe it's the extra weight pinning her down, or a panic attack waiting in the wings — whatever it is, she needs to get up and run from it. As she worms her way out from underneath her family, Kim can feel the pressure building behind her eyes, fueled by the need to jog out the tension that will soon become unbearable. She needs to exercise the nightmare away before it sticks around and ruins the rest of her night.

It's probably already too late for that. The back of Kim's eyes are itchy with tears as she struggles to get free. She's already memorized her mom's smile, trapped forever in radioactive amber, and that alone is enough trauma to fuel ten more terrible dreams.

Nick and Carmina remain peacefully asleep, even as Kim extracts herself from the bed. That's good — the last thing she needs to do is worry Nick, whose own sleeping habits have just started to even out. He'll try to keep her company, and they'll just wind up keeping each other up, which wasn't ideal back in the day and definitely isn't ideal now .

Even though Carmina sleeps like the dead and Nick isn't likely to hear her, Kim is careful to watch out for the creakiest steps as she heads downstairs. Sunrise isn't for a few hours yet, but Kim isn't going to let that stop her from insomnia-pacing around her own home. It used to be that Kim would jog laps on the runway to clear her head, but that isn't going to work nowadays. She still wants to, of course; she's desperate to step out into the relatively cool night air and run herself ragged enough to pass out again, but that's out of the question. She's not about to break her own rule.

It's only once Kim is downstairs that she starts to relax, lighting one of the candles left out on the table. The light is just barely enough to see by, and Kim struggles to find something to clean up or organize in the half-dark. All of the coping mechanisms that got her through eight years of bunker living have fallen flat in the face of the apocalypse, but that doesn't keep her from trying them over and over again. Some techniques are more adaptable, but it isn't like she can dig into reorganizing the hangar for Nick at... whatever time it is now. Not without somebody catching her breaking her own rules about going outside alone.

If she had any books worth reading, she could throw herself into that, but she can't bear the manuals and children's books right now. Maybe if there was a radio station she could listen to... but no, she wouldn't want to risk burning out the radio after everything Nick and John went through to fix it. There's not going to be another Hail Mary when it comes to that kind of repair.

Her mom would probably use this time to make a series of endless lists. Grocery lists, to-do lists, lists of pros and cons for buying new appliances or inviting Kim's awful step-grandmother to her wedding... there was nothing that her mom couldn't organize into a column of bullet points or check-boxes. Kim could probably do with a few lists herself, but where is she supposed to get the paper? And even if a supply list wouldn't be a waste of resources, where would she go to fill it? It's going to be a while before they can pick up flour from the farmer's market again, that's for sure.

Well, at least wasting some paper will keep her mind busy. There's too much stuff they need, and she's going to drive herself crazy trying to remember all of it. Anyway, they've been using decades-old junk mail to prop up the radio desk — it can't be wasted if it was already trash, right?

She's careful in her search for a decent piece of mail, not wanting to tip the radio over as she jimmies a yellowed envelope from under the desk. It's only once she's back at the table with a worn-down nub of a pencil that she finds herself hesitating. After all, what is she supposed to write? What could they reasonably expect to get out here, with no supply chain to rely on? Everything that comes to mind is laughably improbable at best.

It doesn't really matter, though, does it? They're probably not going to be able to find anything besides what they can hunt and grow for themselves, so any food she writes down will be wishful thinking. John had offered to help their scavenging efforts, but it isn't likely they'll find working walkie-talkies or a new car. People who have been above ground longer than the Ryes have already taken over key resource points, and they'll be hard-pressed to give up things without a fair trade. And until they can reliably communicate with one another, trading is going to be nearly impossible. One day, maybe, they'll have trading posts and reliable supply chains, but like other pieces of their fractured society, that's not coming for a long time yet.

Staring at a blank piece of paper is worse than writing something stupid down, and so Kim quickly scribbles the word flour across the top of the envelope. She can't imagine that's going to be a reasonable expectation for a while, but at least it's on paper — and it's outlandish enough that it encourages her to continue, her thoughts darting between impossible dreams and honest reality. Salt , she thinks might not be quite as hard to find. Sugar, probably impossible. For now, they can hope for honey instead.

It goes on like that, growing more abstract as Kim lets herself dream. Milk, eggs, bread, twinkies , meat grinder, hamburgers, tomatoes, grains (seeds), grill (charcoal), gas, gas canisters (storage), duct tape, insulation foam (spray, sheet), toilet cleaner, toilet, hot water, plumbing, bathtub! , tarp, doors, ammunition, floodlights, security system, cans + string (security) —

Her flow is interrupted by a soft, distant thud somewhere upstairs. Kim listens for a few tense seconds, waiting to hear boots on the roof, the hiss of a walkie-talkie, or the slide-click of a gun being cocked. Without the cult, those fears go unrealized, and Kim slumps tiredly into her seat. She's just as paranoid about armed cultists tonight as she is about wild animals, although she's sure that's just her nightmare talking. Eden's Gate is nowhere near the threat it used to be.

The relief is short-lived, as is her solitude, when she hears an upstairs door click shut, followed by the sound of quick footsteps on the landing. The house is too old for any real attempt at stealth, but John tries to avoid the worst offending stairs on his way down. He only realizes Kim is there when he notices the candlelight, coming to an abrupt stop on the last step, one hand clutching the banister tight.

He's sweaty and out of sorts as he wipes his limp hair out of his face. "Oh," he rasps. "Kim."

He's surprised to see her. Kim should be surprised, too — it's one thing to know that John wanders the house at night, but it's another to see it happen in real-time. Honestly, she's barely phased by his appearance. John's sleep schedule has been bunker-erratic ever since Nick brought him home, and no amount of diurnal activity has managed to change it. If anything, Kim suspects he gets less sleep now than he did underground. It isn't for lack of trying, she's sure, but this isn't the first time she's heard him stumbling around in the dark. It's just the first time she's been in the same boat.

"Late night?" she asks.

John struggles once more with the hair in his eyes before giving up. "Just needed some air," he rasps, minding his volume. "Some water."

"Don't mind me," she replies, surprising herself with her own ambivalence. Knowing he moves around while they're sleeping is one thing, but seeing it should be upsetting. It should bother her when he avoids creaky floorboards on his way to help himself to their fresh water. It should make her angry to see him using their resources; at the very least, it should have upset her back when it began normalizing. But, honestly, it hadn't. Kim had just been relieved to see John acting like a person, and not just a haunted shell.

John wipes the back of his hand across his mouth, regarding Kim with deep uncertainty that Kim mostly makes out from his hunched shoulders and tense posture. He tries to hide just how lost he is, but Kim never misses it when he slips. It's not that she's sympathetic towards him, exactly, but she knows just enough about his history to want to pity him.

He doesn't speak, not even after the silence stretches out. Maybe he's waiting for her to make the first move?

The thought almost makes her laugh, but she still cuts him some slack. "Can't sleep either, huh?" she asks.

"Hardly ever," John replies, although he clearly isn't looking for reassurance. He takes a step away from the kitchen, hovering in the nebulous space between the table and the stairs. He's usually quick to leave Kim alone — quicker than he is with Nick, anyway — and so she appreciates the fact that he doesn't run now.

His voice cracks on its low pitch as he haltingly asks, "What are you doing?"

For just a second, Kim imagines giving John the cold shoulder and telling him it's none of his business. But the thought fades as quickly as it comes; it's replaced by the knowledge that John is just as dependent on the family's supplies as she is. Anything she needs, he'll also need. And besides, she's almost positive he'd been in control of the cult's supplies, which means he might have an idea of what they should realistically be looking for. He would know what the cult had planned to do, and she could probably translate that into useful advice.

"Just making a list," she sighs. It sounds stupid enough to make her wince, and she concedes with a joke, "You know, for the next time we're at Wal-Mart."

John huffs in amusement and approaches the table. Now that she's got an audience, Kim wants nothing more to do with the list, and so she pushes towards him before slumping back into her chair. Instead of the quick, distracted glance she had been expecting, John leans over to read it in full. The longer he reads, the more embarrassed Kim is of her late-night daydreaming, but he finishes with the list before she can grab it back.

"Some of these are... more manageable than others," he says, using the same kind of diplomacy he utilizes whenever Nick makes a particularly dumb comment.

"Uh, yeah ," she says, embarrassed even if she isn't surprised. "I know. It was just... taking up space in my head. I needed to write it down, otherwise, I'm going to be up all night."

Kim runs her hand through her hair, waiting for John to retreat as quickly as he'd arrived. Instead, John rereads the list once more. Kim can see his amusement much more plainly as he leans into the candlelight. It highlights the deep bags under his eyes as well, but who isn't carrying that particular mark of exhaustion these days?

"Ammunition isn't as high on the list as I'd imagined," he comments.

"We're okay on bullets for now," she replies. "And it's not like there's much to spare."

Whether or not that satisfies John, Kim isn't sure. He only hums in response, eyes roaming down the paper.

"I see you didn't bother to add more guns."

"We don't need more guns," Kim insists, although it's not strictly true. She's just hesitant to overwhelm the house with firearms. They've been getting on just fine with what they have — any more, and they might turn into a target themselves. One day, sure, they'll need to find something for Carmina to carry on her own, but that day is a long, long way away.

She doesn't need to explain herself to anyone, let alone John Seed, but as he watches her and waits for more, she feels compelled to justify herself. "I don't think we're going to find spare guns or ammunition just lying around, and I'm not about to take them by force. We've managed just fine with what we have."

"For now," John points out. "Things could change. It won't stay this calm forever."

"Why not?" Kim retorts, feeling childish and petulant as soon as the words leave her mouth. "Why do you even care? You're certainly not getting armed."

John clicks his tongue against his teeth. "It's not that," he says, only to abruptly roll over with a muttered, "Never mind."

If John thinks he can avoid the conversation that easily, he has another thing coming. "No, what is it?" she asks.

"It's nothing," he sighs, as if arrogantly dismissing her will keep Kim from pushing. When Kim only frowns unhappily back at him, he reluctantly relents. "Joseph had said taking your weapons was the only way we could ensure you wouldn't use them after the Collapse. And if we didn't lock them away, it would be all you would look for." He stares at the list, although Kim imagines his thoughts are about fifty miles away. "It's stunning how wrong he was about everything. But there are reminders everywhere."

John rarely speaks about Joseph; Kim hasn't heard him broach the subject of his own volition before. The only person who ever talks to him about his brother is Jerome, and those conversations are private and short. Having John bring him up with almost no needling feels like a step forward, even if it's only a small one. Even though John is anxious saying Joseph's name.

It's so easy to forget how much control Joseph had over John. Kim has to make a concentrated effort now and again to remind herself that Joseph hadn't only brainwashed normal, desperate people, but his own family. She can't imagine doing anything to Carmina or Nick that would turn them into the angry, anxious mess John had been even before the Collapse. Not even if it meant they would always do what they were told and would trust her implicitly. She couldn't bear it if Nick ever talked about her the way John talks about Joseph. It's late enough that Kim finds herself wondering how Joseph can even sleep at night.

"It's stupid," John says, taking Kim's contemplative silence as disapproval. "I should have known better."

He inhales, letting out a shaky breath, and closes his eyes briefly. When he opens them, they're suspiciously shiny in the candlelight. It sparks a genuine pang of sympathy in Kim, but there's nothing she can say or do to help him. Nothing she's done so far has made an impact.

"Some of this is reasonable enough," John says, desperately trying to redirect the conversation back to the list. It's an obvious, flat-footed attempt to avoid a tender spot in his psyche, but Kim is willing to let it slide.

"Sure, eventually . But we're a long way off from hot baths and backyard barbecues, much less flour and sugar."

"Those are... less reasonable," he admits, dragging his finger across one of the harder to come by items. Still, he isn't nearly as deterred as she is. "But not everything is impossible to come by. Insulation, for one. Tarp, duct tape. Components like that should be easy enough to find." He taps his finger against the envelope. "And there still places to investigate. Root cellars nobody bothered to touch. Caches you never found. Things hidden in places you wouldn't know to look, especially if you weren't in the Project."

Frowning, Kim rereads a few of the items upside-down from her side of the table. "It's been almost nine years," Kim points out, reluctant to get her hopes up so easily. "Isn't it more likely that everything good has already been discovered?"

Still... John's mentioned secret Eden's Gate supplies before. Given the size of the project and how long they were operating in the county, it's not impossible that some of their hidden stashes haven't been found yet. And they were planning for the apocalypse, right? They'd likely have saved things that could last for a long time. John isn't wrong — more ammunition and more weapons would be helpful. At the very least, they could help arm other survivors.

"It wouldn't hurt to have a look, I guess," Kim relents after thinking it over. "How good is your memory?"

That earns her a rare, quiet chuckle from John. "Middling to poor," he admits, "Although if I had a map, it would help. It would make it easier to mark what I remember."

"To think, it only took nine years and an apocalypse for you to finally hand over the intel."

John huffs, but his response is only mildly offended. "Do you want what I have to offer, or not?"

"Don't be like that," Kim says, placating him with a smile. "It would be a big help. It'll help me sleep better, anyway."

It seems there's more on John's mind than Kim teasing him, since he takes the non-apology and moves on without a fight. "Jacob had caches buried for after the Reaping," he says. "They'll most likely be weapons, but he was... hard to read. It could be that he stored survival equipment in one. There were a few in the valley, but most of them would be in the mountains."

Kim shakes her head at that. "As far as I've heard, nobody's made it very far north. And the stories I have heard aren't good. The dam broke, so a lot of the area is flooded, and supposedly the radiation is still pretty bad."

John hums briefly as he considers the facts. He leans contemplatively over the list, and for a moment Kim wonders if this was a common occurrence for him before the Collapse. How many late nights did he spend bent over a map while his brothers watched and waited for his decisions? She has to suspect it was a lot, because this is the first time she's seen John look even remotely confident.

That confidence is clear in his voice as he remarks defiantly, "I suppose the valley will do until we get airborne again. Let flooding stop us then ."

"Oh, okay," Kim laughs, checking her volume before she lets her amusement wake up the rest of her family. "You are just like Nick. Neither of you are going to give up until you get back in the sky, huh?"

"Exactly," John replies. "I won't trust anybody else to do it. Realistically, a helicopter would be the best option..."

"Oh, right," Kim chuckles. " Realistically ."

John taps accusingly at the list and raises an eyebrow at her. "Less realistic than hot water and iodized table salt?"

If Kim didn't know better, she might think that John is actually teasing her. He normally saves that kind of attitude for Nick, who prefers arguing through and around problems. Kim, on the other hand, rarely has the energy to deal with avoidance tactics, and so she tends to demand his sincerity. Thankfully, the liminal time of just-about-three has softened her stance on the matter.

"Okay," she relents with a smile. "Sure. Might as well add helicopters to the list." It would be a pretty big get for them, all things considered. And anyway, John's right — Kim wouldn't trust flying in a plane jury-rigged together by anyone other than Nick.

But that's a resource that will come in the nebulous future, and Kim's too realistic to worry years in advance right now. There are more pressing concerns to deal with, first — like food, water and security. Any caches John can find will at least fulfill one of those priorities, although Kim can't imagine the cult storing anything other than ammunition and weapons. But even if the caches don't pan out, they might find valuable scrap, like logs for firewood, furniture they can re-purpose, or even old survivalist caches that nobody thought to dig up after the world ended. And now that there are four of them, Kim won't feel so uncomfortable when Nick wants to drive to the middle of nowhere looking for supplies.

Kim sighs with relief, feeling a weight roll off her back that she hadn't been trying to remove. "Things will be a lot easier if you can help us with supplies. And I'll feel better about Nick going out if he has somebody to watch his back."

John pulls the same face he usually makes when someone implies they trust him. Kim could ignore it — after all, John doesn't need to believe they trust them for it to be true. Too bad for him, it's too late at night for her to turn a blind eye. "Oh, get over it," she tells him, unable to help a lopsided smile at his offended scowl. "I seriously doubt you're planning on murdering us at this point. And I know Nick is smart enough to knock the crap out of you if he thinks you've changed your mind."

"I won't," John immediately replies.

Kim believes him, if only because there's nobody left for John to rely on other than them. "Good. Because if I can trust you, that means I won't worry about Nick when he decides to go farther than town. It means we can spend more meaningful time with Carmina, too. Anyway, Nick likes bossing you around, and you like being bossed around, so everybody wins."

John ducks his head, embarrassed, but Kim laughs to let him know she's only teasing. "Seriously," she says, relenting for his benefit, "It does help. It's good to have somebody else to rely on."

"I... want to be helpful," John replies, although Kim suspects that he might be confusing his wants and needs again. It's not quite a compulsion anymore, but even John's most heated attempts to argue about a job end with him rolling over quick. He hasn't outright refused to do something, and Kim doesn't think he ever will, if only to prove to himself one more time that he might actually be capable of change.

It might get annoying one day, but for now, Kim can respect his intense desire to make amends. She just wishes he would accept some form of gratitude or praise in return, to make it less awkward on her end.

Kim rests her hands momentarily on the tabletop, tapping her fingers briefly against the wood. "Okay," she softly declares, "I think I'm going to try to get back to sleep." Whatever she winds up dreaming about now, she's pretty sure it won't be the same awful nightmare again — and that's at least partially because of John's intervention. She figures it's worth telling him as much. "You made a pretty good distraction, so thanks."

He nods immediately in response. "Of course," he replies, momentarily bewildered as he checks Kim's expression for signs of sarcasm or annoyance. His posture relaxes as Kim stands, although Kim imagines his relief is temporary. He's pretty good at working himself up into anxious frenzies — staying out of them is another matter entirely.

"Try to get some sleep yourself, okay?" Kim suggests.

There's no way John means it when he says, "I will," but at least he's willing to placate her instead of getting mad at her being concerned in the first place.

"And try not to wake up Carmina."

John nods affirmatively. Kim's positive that he'll sneak outside once she's gone upstairs, but at least he's waiting patiently for her to leave. If it weren't for her returning exhaustion, Kim might've used him as an excuse to do her own late-night workout, but it'll have to do to merely turn a blind eye to him edging around her rule about going out after dark alone. Kim and Nick have both been woken up by the exterior doors, but John never goes beyond the planters out back, and he always closes up when he comes back in. Kim could call him out on it, but... well, it seems like he needs the freedom.

Kim says goodnight and is mildly surprised when John returns it without any lingering sarcasm. He must be pretty tired, but that's not really a surprise. Hopefully, he'll try to take some of her concern to heart, or at least pretend for her sake.

Although Carmina is definitely still asleep when Kim returns to the bedroom, Nick is watching her with bleary-eyed curiosity. He waits until she's closed the door to speak up, and even then it's a dull, quiet whisper.

"Everything okay?" he asks.

He doesn't mind waiting for Kim to creep back to bed before she answers. "It is," she tells him, gratefully crawling into bed as he opens his arms for her. He folds his arms over her shoulders, letting her wiggle into a comfortable spot before she explains in a whisper. "I needed to move around, and John came downstairs. That's all."

"Hope he wasn't a creep," Nick mumbles into her hair. Kim sighs laughingly into his collarbone, which is already sticking to her cheek with sweat. There's no way she's going to be wrapped up in Nick's arms all night, not when it's this hot, but she'll appreciate it while she's got it.

"Not yet," Kim says. "Just talking about supplies." She presses a kiss to Nick's shoulder and whispers, "We'll talk about it in the morning."

Nick hums happily into Kim's hair. "Sounds good to me," he mumbles. The less they talk about John Seed, the better, after all. Especially right now, when they're tangled up in bed with their daughter snoring next to them; there's no room for serious conversation, and there's absolutely no room for John. There's no space for the nightmares that woke her, either; as Kim falls asleep, Nick's hand tangled up in her hair, she thankfully forgets everything save for a warm, melancholy amber glow.

[iamanartichoke]

Why do you feel that way about fandom? (In regards to your latest reblog)

Ah, I’m not sure if I know how to explain it, but I’ll try. (This got long, so I’m really sorry.)

The thing is, I first got into the Loki fandom early in 2018, so I’m coming up on about two years of being active here. That first year was so fun and exciting; I was elated to be able to discuss my Loki theories and meta with like-minded people, and I was so happy (and surprised!) at the attention my fic was getting.

I was also still at a point where I believed IW was going to blow our minds, so there was that extra kind of thrill of suspense (and a bit of fear but, when you believe in the MCU and haven’t yet lost faith in its writers/directors, the fear is surface-level and adds to the thrill - there’s not really the accompanying dread and despair). 

IW was a crushing blow to that, of course, but even though we were all devastated, we were all devastated as a fandom. We were still in it together; we had one another to vent to and cry with and share fic with. “Loki is alive bc reasons” became kind of an unwritten rule in most post-IW fics; we all agreed that Loki deserved better. 

In 2019, two things happened: one, I was underemployed and dragging my feet on finding better employment due to my mental health, which ruined my life for a little while. I had to move back in with my parents, which (I love them and am grateful they were willing to support me, but) was a toxic environment. I was too depressed to indulge in my escapism the same way (fic and fandom) and my progress on my stories slowed way down. I’ve never quite been able to get back the momentum I had when writing Sanctuary, but that’s another issue. 

The second thing that happened was, obviously, Endgame came out and whatever theories and hopes the fandom was collectively holding onto about Loki were crushed. Not only that, but the portrayal of Thor seemed to amplify the divide in the fandom between the pro/anti Ragnarok argument. 

It seems, to me, that what was a series of battles or skirmishes only became an all-out war after Endgame. That’s only my perception, of course, but I do feel that the latter part of 2019 saw the divide grow larger and larger. Everyone had opinions on what the “correct” portrayal of Thor was, and how it related to Loki, and whether fanon Thor and Loki’s relationship was founded in canon or not. Everyone was defensive of their own point of view; bullying and name-calling and anon hate became more widespread. 

Again, this is just my observation. Those who’ve been on the front lines since Ragnarok came out probably have a much different perspective; I’m only talking about what I observed bc it directly impacts how I feel about fandom these days. 

So here we are in 2020; like I said, I’ve been here about two years. I haven’t rewatched any of the Thor movies in ages (although @delyth88 and I are talking about it), because they make me so sad and also so angry. Sad for what we had, angry for what could have been. So much wasted potential. Loki’s horrific end hangs over everything, as does Thor’s radical character change, and I don’t have the same excited outlook about the characters and the meta potential anymore. 

Not having watched the movies in a long time, along with that feeling of “ugh” around them, impacts me creatively bc I’m not actively feeding my writing inspiration. For me, fanfic writing comes from being so full of feels about the source material that I just can’t get enough and I need more. I draw my inspiration from things like watching Loki’s facial expressions, catching subtle moments between Thor and Loki, analyzing the way they speak, thinking about the story choices happening, and so on, and so on. 

My source of inspiration has dried up, in other words, which has made it hard for me to keep a good writing momentum going. I was feeling great when I rewrote Sea, and then my inspiration kind of plummeted again - this time, bc I felt that I did such a good job rewriting and the response was so positive, I didn’t know if I could finish the rest of the story as well. Like I was already setting up the second half to fail, bc it would be much more “rough draft” than the first - revised and polished, yes, but not gone over with a fine-toothed comb the way the first part was. 

The truth is, I carry a lot of stress and anxiety around my writing. I am always incredibly anxious that no one actually likes my fic, that no one is reading my fic, that people think it’s stupid or pointless, that my quirky humorous touches are ooc, that my plotlines are convoluted and boring and my sex scenes awkward and non-existent. 

I’m having trouble with the Valki relationship bc I haven’t watched Ragnarok in so long, I’ve forgotten how much chemistry was between them and how it made me feel. I’ve forgotten why I chose to pair them up in this ‘verse in the first place. And I worry about that, too - that the people who read my stories for the Valki are walking away unsatisfied. 

So that’s where I am with fic writing - slow and steady, still trying to find my footing, still secretly assuming what I write is shit.

This is on top of feeling more and more isolated on tumblr, mostly because of the aforementioned tensions and overall negativity that’s erupted in the fandom. I have been unfollowed and blocked by people who were once mutuals; I have been blocked by people I’ve never spoken to before. 

There’s so much stress surrounding the things I post now - I’m constantly thinking, have I worded this correctly to convey my meaning without shitting on someone else’s opinion? Is this post going to be the one that makes this or that mutual unfollow me? Am I tagging correctly so my pro Ragnarok mutuals don’t see my criticism, and vice versa? Can I still post pictures of Chris Hemsworth, who is possibly the only man in the world I am definitely attracted to, which is a shame bc I agree that he’s kind of a douche now? But he’s so beautiful, but I have to disclaim that it’s just his face I’m attracted to? If I reblog this post about Loki that I think is hilarious, but is also founded on the flat stabby villain characterization, will I alienate my anti friends? Does it imply I don’t understand or appreciate Loki and that, by reblogging the thing, I’m endorsing a shitty characterization? 

And so on. It makes scrolling my dashboard uncomfortable and un-fun, bc I end up saving tons of posts to my drafts without reblogging them, and after awhile I am not enjoying myself, so I stop scrolling. 

But this means I miss tons of mutuals’ posts, and I was trying to check individual blogs for awhile but I kept falling further behind, and there were more and more posts I’d missed, and I’d get overwhelmed and then feel like they probably hated me anyway at this point for being a shit mutual, so I might as well just keep lurking on the dash for ten minutes and call it a day. 

On top of that, I haven’t read fic in awhile bc of this mindset, so I haven’t commented, and then when I don’t get comments it’s like, well, maybe the story’s not shitty but no one’s reading it bc what do I expect when I’m not reading theirs? You’re not special, Charlotte. 

The worst part about all of this is that none of it should diminish (and hasn’t diminished!) my love of Loki as a character. I am excited about the series, but I am also very anxious about it - about the story not being good, yes, but also about the inevitably divide that will further split the fandom. 

No matter how the story goes, someone’s going to be upset. You can’t please everyone, and trying only makes for worse storytelling. So the wank will continue. 

But I love Loki. I love everything about him. I am interested in writing about him and reading about him and thinking about him. I am invested in him and always will be. It’s just that, right now, I’m kind of falling further and further out of fandom and I find I have less to say. 

And so I either have to wait it out, or work on my own mindset, or keep on keeping on. I just don’t know how long that will take or if I’m even liked enough here to try to bother. 

tl;dr: Fandom has made me cynical and jaded, and it has dampened not my love of Loki, but my love of interacting with the Loki fandom.

(I know you didn’t ask for this hot garbage pile of my feelings, anon, so I’m sorry.) 

[seymour-butz-stuff]

When we last heard from former White House doctor Ronny Jackson, a once-seemingly respected doctor who dissolved quite quickly into a puddle of pro-Trump paranoia and talking points after resigning from his government post in disgrace, he was describing a harrowing tale of being yelled at super harshly by an American protesting Donald Trump's blatantly illegal use of the White House grounds as host grounds for the Republican National Convention.

Now Jackson, who is running for Congress in Texas because Texas Republicans have a well-proven record of electing damn near anyone to high office, is super-very outraged again, this time over claims that Donald J. Trump had "a series of mini-strokes," to use Donald J. Trump's words, that spurred his still-mysterious trip to Walter Reed Medical Center in late 2019. Not true, says Jackson, because "As the President's doctor, I knew about this trip WEEKS in advance!"

Now, there are a bunch of problems with this, but the biggest is that the trip in question took place on November 16, 2019. Ronny Jackson left the White House in March 2018—a year and a half before the medical visit he says he "knew" of. Either Ronny Jackson is the world's worst liar or ... well, given the rest of the video and its frothy claims I'm not sure what option B might be.

Here is how Jackson, the once-White-House physician Trump nominated to run the entire Department of Veterans Affairs, talks these days: "I just turned the TV off after watching the latest episode of fake news, from the communications branch of the Democrat party, also known as CNN."

Yeah, this is how he talks now. Somebody's been writing themselves prescriptions again.

"I won't get into the president's health, I'm no longer his physician, but I will comment, and tell you I was consulted regarding this trip weeks in advance."

Jackson’s dueling descriptions of whether he is or isn’t speaking as Trump’s doctor aside, how does that ... how does that work, exactly? Jackson had been away from the office and retired for a year and a half, but Trump's current doctors felt the need to "consult" with him about the scheduling of a routine medical check-up, to be held on a weekend afternoon and scheduled in strict secrecy because reasons? I realize there's some professional coordination that may be necessary in attempting to maintain the vital national fiction that Donald Trump is forever a lot taller and a lot lighter than he looks in absolutely every public appearance, but Jackson’s newest claim seems a bit much.

Buddy, whatcha being "consulted" on in order to plan a routine but super-secret visit to schedule "half" of a physical a year and a half after you've had the White House medicine cabinet's keys taken away? And how does this square with then-White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham's original claims about the visit—that Donald was simply bored and had free time, so decided to pop in for a partial weekend physical, as one does?

How is it that Ronny Jackson says he had "weeks" of notice, but the Walter Reed Medical Center staff itself wasn't informed until he actually showed up at the building?

See, this is the whole problem with the Dear Leader response brigade. Nobody in America really cares about the Walter Reed visit, not as anything more than passing curiosity. At most, it’s used as something to tease Trump with, because he so readily rises to the bait. But everyone around Trump manages to make the story weirder every time they talk about it. Jackson says he's consulted on the routine scheduling of unannounced weekend half-physicals. Mike Pence says he just can't remember if he was informed that he might have to temporarily be president of the United States, if Trump's routine weekend physical required general anesthesia.

Every addition to the story by Trump's closest defenders make it look even weirder and less plausible than it did before. If you're trying to tamp down on speculation on Dear Leader's spectacular, nothing-to-see-here, definitely nothing brain-involved heath, adding weird new embellishments every time is, ahem, counterproductive.

Whatever the case is, Jackson as hyperpartisan House Republican candidate sounds like a real peach, albeit one that's been left out in the shed too long.

"So why is the left suddenly talking about this? The reason is, they're trying to defer, and distract, from the obvious mental and physical and cognitive issues with former vice president Joe Biden, who is now their nominee for president."

This fella was passing himself off as a doctor, just a sentence or two ago. Now he's saying Donald Trump is the picture of Aryan perfection and the guy who doesn't have trouble navigating gradual slopes and who doesn't alter government weather maps with felt-tipped pens and try to pass them off as official forecasts has "obvious" mental and physical issues.

"If we don't elect President Trump as our president, for this next election, we are in trouble. We are in bad trouble in this country. This country is headed the wrong direction and the ONLY thing that's gonna salvage this country is to give President Trump another four years."

Do you NOT KNOW who the current president is? How does this work? How does any of this work? "This country is headed in the wrong direction, we're completely screwed, everything is going completely to shit, so vote for the guy who oversaw it all or we're all gonna DIEEEEEEEE."

[kcaruth]

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order Review

Before the dark times, before the mouse empire, LucasArts published several fun, memorable Star Wars video games, from Star Wars: Bounty Hunter to The Force Unleashed series. After Disney’s acquisition of LucasArts in 2012, the Mouse House stopped all internal developments at LucasArts and laid off most of its staff in 2013. Signaling its turn to the dark side, Disney awarded EA (voted worst company in America multiple times) a multi-year license to create Star Wars video games.

EA rebooted the Star Wars Battlefront series (2005′s Star Wars: Battlefront II has to be one of my most played video games) and released the new Star Wars Battlefront in November 2015. Critics acknowledged the game’s great graphics and visuals, but it quickly became apparent that the game lacked content. The hero and villain rosters were very limited, and the game only included content from the original trilogy, not the prequels.

Then came EA’s disastrous Star Wars Battlefront II, the repercussions of which shook the gaming world. Released in November 2017, Battlefront II had some promise. It was the first game since the Disney takeover to feature a single-player story mode that was canon to the film series. The game also contained content from the prequel, original, and sequel trilogies. Additionally, EA greatly expanded the hero and villain rosters. However, EA showed it true colors with the game’s loot boxes, which could award players significant gameplay advantages if they purchased them with real money. Essentially, the game turned into a pay to win system, thereby making players who did not purchase loot boxes feel so disadvantaged that Battlefront II virtually became pay to play.

Although Visceral Games, the studio behind the Dead Space series, was developing a single-player Star Wars game, even getting to the point in the development process where they could tease everyone with in-game footage, EA canceled the game and shut down the studio. Not counting the Lego Star Wars games and mobile games, EA’s Battlefront games were the only new Stars Wars video games on the market, an astonishing reality compared to the rate at which LucasArts used to produce games for the franchise.

Eventually, EA finally came to its senses and assigned a single-player action-adventure Star Wars game to Respawn Entertainment, the studio behind the Titanfall series. Former Santa Monica Studio employee Stig Asmussen served as game director, and heavy-hitting talent like writer Chris Avellone, perhaps best known for his work on Fallout: New Vegas, joined the project. Finally, Respawn released Jedi: Fallen Order in November 2019 to much critical acclaim.

Now, with that long-winded background introduction establishing the recent state of Star Wars video gaming out of the way, let’s get into the real reason why everyone is here. What did I think of Jedi: Fallen Order? I am usually well behind on newer video game releases, but our current state of affairs with the global pandemic has afforded me a bit more time to dust off my controller. Having just beaten Fallen Order earlier this week, I have plenty to say about the game. (I even made a pros and cons list! Can you tell I have also been spending my time watching the misadventures of Leslie Knope and company in Parks and Rec?)

At its core, Star Wars is about family, friendship, and good versus evil, so let’s start by talking about this game’s characters and plot. (Don’t worry; I won’t spoil anything from the story.) Fallen Order nails the spirit of Star Wars. Set five years after Revenge of the Sith, players control Cal Kestis, a Padawan forced to keep a low profile after the Jedi Purge. Cal lives on the planet Bracca, where he works as a scrapper salvaging ships from the Clone Wars. Kudos to the game here. I stopped a couple of times just to admire the visuals of Bracca. It was definitely a “wow moment” seeing TIE fighters shriek by overhead and watching a Separatist ship descend from the atmosphere. One day, Cal taps into the Force for the first time since Emperor Palpatine’s Order 66 to save a friend from certain death from a workplace accident. Unfortunately, an Imperial probe droid records the incident, alerting the Empire of a Jedi fugitive. Two Inquisitors quickly arrive on the scene to track down the Jedi. Introduced in the animated series Star Wars Rebels, the menacing Inquisitors are an evil organization of Force-sensitive beings, some of them former Jedi, who have been tortured and turned to the dark side by Darth Vader and the Empire or otherwise willingly joined the organization out of hunger for power. They are tasked with hunting down surviving Jedi in hiding and others exhibiting Force potential. Somehow, Cal has survived this long even though he still carries around his lightsaber with him everywhere! When the Inquisitors corner him, he literally just pulls it out of his pocket! How has no one ever noticed it before? Did none of the Imperial probe droids floating around the planet ever take a snapshot of the weapon? Plot holes aside, two new characters, Greez and Cere, rescue Cal from certain doom at the hands of the Second and Ninth Sisters and ferry him off world.

Cere is a former Jedi who held the role of Seeker in the Order. A Seeker located infants with Force abilities who could be taken to Coruscant and trained in the Jedi arts (think the good version of the Inquisitors). Greez is a starship pilot with a bad gambling habit, a green thumb, and an insatiable appetite. Cal finds a small droid named BD-1, who reveals a message from Jedi Master Eno Cordova, detailing the existence of a hidden Jedi Holocron containing a list of Force-sensitive children across the galaxy. In the wrong hands, this list could lead to the children’s demise. Cal and Cere want to use the list to rebuild the Jedi Order. Thus begins the race between the Empire and our crew of ragtag misfits to secure the Holocron.

Overall, the story is good, great even for recent Star Wars standards. It fits the Star Wars cannon very well, and I loved the nods to the Clone Wars, mentions of obscure characters, and the foreshadowing of future events. Some moments elicit chuckles from the appropriate Star Wars humor, while others go to some truly dark places. The way the game tackles Order 66 earns it extremely high marks from me. The developers need to be applauded for bringing in new and relatively unknown planets that we have not really had the chance to explore before. There is no Hoth, Jakuu, or the like to be seen here, thankfully. Star Wars is a big galaxy; it is about time we saw different parts of it. We have spent more than enough time on Tatooine. The planets we do visit feel alive. Each one has a different color palette, climate, weather pattern (although the developers may have been a little heavy-handed on the fog in a few of the locations), and, of course, flora and fauna.

Cal fights everything from annoying rat creatures to ram-like slugs, from giant venus fly traps to trampoline spring-plants. Players can even collect plant specimens on different planets and plant them in Greez’s terrarium, which was a nice little way to take a piece of each planet with you on your journey. Oh, and the spiders. Cal has to kill tons and tons of spiders. Again, this is Star Wars! There is a whole galaxy at your disposal full of creatures that look like whatever your imagination can dream up, and the best we get is different species of spiders? That is probably nitpicking, but it felt like it was worth pointing out.

When it comes to the Empire, however, the variety is fantastic. Of course, the run-of-the-mill standard stormtroopers are here, but there are also variations like shock baton-wielding scout troopers, flame troopers, and the dangerous Purge troopers, essentially the special forces of the Inquisitors. The chatter between the troopers is great. Before they spot him, Cal can overhear them talking about their notorious accuracy, the planet’s hostile wildlife, or even mundane topics like food rations. Once Cal starts fighting them, they often taunt him, full of confidence in their abilities, but then they come to the realization that they are facing off against a Jedi. The confidence in their voices gradually turns to panicked fear as Cal slices through their numbers. By the time Cal gets to the last trooper standing, that trooper will regularly plead for his life or confess how scared he is. Every once in a while, the Empire will even throw AT-ST walkers at Cal, which are a fun enough challenge, though the strategy to defeat them becomes clear within a minute or two, and players are never forced to change up their tactics. I do love that after Cal destroys the walker, the trooper will crawl out of the wreckage and start shooting at him. Nice touch!

With all that said, the story is not perfect. In fact, once or twice it just feels dumb. For example, Cal goes on this grand mission seeking out an important leader in hiding, and when he finally encounters him, they exchange maybe one full sentence before the leader gifts Cal a rebreather so that he can swim underwater. You are telling me I conquered various obstacles and enemies, traversing across multiple planets all to get...a rebreather? This whole section could have been cut out and streamlined so that the storyline goes directly to the main setpiece of this planet I am talking about. Have one of Cal’s crewmates give him a rebreather and send him on his way instead. Regardless, at least the back and forth traversal gives players another chance to board the ship, ascend from the planet, and blast off into hyperspace. Seeing that never got old.

Respawn and its writers did a great job with these characters, including one of the Inquisitors (the other one is just kind of...meh). I enjoyed getting to know my crew, but I wish they had a little more to do in the game. In reality, they just stay on the ship 95 percent of the time while you are out running around on your mission (not that I entirely blame them...it is a cool ship). The conversations between these characters were usually good, but sometimes Cal would not mention huge, seemingly significant events or people he ran into to his crew! For a cinematic franchise like Star Wars, this game could have used a couple more cutscenes. The game often feeds the plot or a character’s mindset to players by making them idly stand near a crewmate and tapping R3 a handful of times to get them to cough up a couple of lines of dialogue.

As is to be expected from a Star Wars product, the game’s music is terrific. Gordy Haab and Stephen Barton composed the score and recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Bach Choir of London. Mongolian folk metal band The Hu also wrote and recorded a song that is featured during a couple of prominent portions of the game. The song lyrics were written in Mongolian and then translated into a fictional Star Wars alien language. The music compliments and elevates the game’s setpieces, with one standout part reminding me of Thor: Ragnarok. A couple of times, the game goes full John Williams to really make some moments hit home, and boy does it work! Hats off to Respawn for putting in this much effort in regards to the music for the game.

Getting into the gameplay, Fallen Order is an amalgamation of several other games. Dark Souls, Zelda, Uncharted, Metroid, Castlevania, Sekiro, heck even Sonic...they are all here in some form or fashion. Unfortunately for Fallen Order, it does not elevate the features it borrows from those games. The biggest reason? The bugs. Oh my goodness the bugs. How can a blockbuster release like this have so many bugs? Maybe it had something to do with EA or Disney wanting to push the final product out before the release of The Rise of Skywalker the next month, but the amount of bugs in this game are simply unacceptable. While none of them led to a complete game crash, I definitely caught myself grumbling, “I hate this game,” with my frustration levels constantly reaching the scorching temperature of Mustafarian lava, especially considering Fallen Order’s inexcusably long load times. Seriously, the load times after dying are so long that I had enough time to run to the bathroom, heat something up in the microwave, or make a cup of tea (to help relax me from this rage-inducing game) before the game finished loading. How can I lift off from a planet and travel through hyperspace faster than the game can respawn me after dying? It is not just dying, by the way. The game developers think they cleverly hid load times behind elevator rides, but that did not work either! At least throw in some elevator music or comm chatter if you are going to make me stand there for so long!

One time, I fell through the level to my death while walking on what was 100 percent solid ground. Speaking of solid ground, or should I say the lack thereof, enemies continued to fight me while clearly hovering in thin air when they should obviously be plummeting to their death. Woe is me if I tried to reach them, though, because my Jedi character must not have that ability, leading to, that is right, more death falls for me as the enemy looked on from his invisible sliver of ground above. If I was lucky enough to have an enemy remain in my relative vicinity and not stand off a ledge, that enemy had a chance of pinning and glitching Cal against a wall, leaving me trapped until I died from the beating. The enemy who kills Cal glows gold until players shave off a piece of that enemies health, which is great, but that means players cannot see that enemy flash red when he uses an unblockable attack. How could Respawn not notice this error when it is such an important component of the combat? For all the aggressive enemies with magical glitching powers, there were also those that would have a change of heart mid-combat and go pacifistic on me. I found this especially common in the later game and on one planet in particular with ranged enemies. They would fire at me, I would block their shot back at them and injure them, and then they would just stand there staring at me. It was really bizarre and made me uneasy turning my back on them to explore the area. I also experienced my health and Force bars completely disappearing from the screen. The first couple of times it happened, I thought it was intentional and meant that Cal could not die for that sequence of the game. Wrong! So much for thinking I was momentarily invincible with unlimited Force powers. This bug was especially crippling during big boss fights, as you can imagine. Respawn throws in some quick time events once in a while where players have to press the correct button in a very short amount of time. For the most part, I did not mind these, but one exception got my blood boiling. Cal is fighting a giant creature and ends up free falling. The game requires Cal to land in a very, very precise spot and pull of a quick time event. I cannot count the number of times I fell to my death during this part because of how finicky the game was being. Cal conveniently stumbles across every single icy or muddy slide in the galaxy during his travels, a way for the game developers to disguise a way to get players from point A to point B quickly, but these slides are also quite particular with when players jump and where they land. Another good portion of my deaths came from Cal not making a jump on one of these slides when he clearly had the distance or him seemingly landing and making the jump only for him to glitch and then fall backwards into a never-ending dark chasm. The game developers may have thought players would enjoy these slides, but I came to dread them.

The worst game bugs by far, however, dealt with frame rates and level textures. Not contained to one section or even one planet, unfortunately, garbage frame rates wreak more havoc across the galaxy than the treacherous Empire. I am telling you the frame rate is absolutely abysmal in this game. I can forgive a drop in frame rate if it happens a couple of times, but it is like it is a built-in gameplay feature of Fallen Order. It was maddening! How can Respawn expect me to properly block or dodge if the game cannot even keep up with my movements or camera adjustments? Texture pop ins and clipping were also recurring issues. One time, I noticed a soldier’s helmet load in late. Another time, a Wookie’s fur took a while to fill up the character model. (By the way, the Wookies in this game look horrendous.) Sometimes, it would get so bad that the game would just pause completely so that it could load in the content of the area. I honestly thought the game had crashed and was about to reboot the console before everything stuttered back into place and Cal got moving again.

I have done a lot of ranting about the game’s flaws the last few paragraphs, so let me get back to some things I did like. The combat works well. I cannot begin to tell you how satisfying and occasionally outright hilarious it is to Force push a trooper off a ledge, especially when he is standing there trying to intimidate you. I had so much fun simply blocking stormtroopers’ laser bolts right back at them. Best of all, I started taking every opportunity I had to pull enemies toward me, especially ones perched up on higher vantage points, and stab them straight through with my lightsaber. The lightsaber boss fights were a highlight of the game. Players feel the weight of every strike and every struggle when the blades cross.

In addition to Cal’s lightsaber, he also has his Force powers at his disposal. He starts out with Force slow and gradually adds other abilities, such as push and pull, as the game progresses. Players may question how Cal, a Jedi, can struggle with a squadron of stormtroopers or the local wildlife, or they may ask why he does not start with all of his Force abilities, but it all makes sense when you consider that Cal has to rebuild his connection to the Force. He has not used it since he was a child, after all. It makes sense that this amateur padawan who did not complete his training runs into a tough time in combat. When Cal does unlock new Force abilities, the game cleverly flashes back to show Cal’s master teaching him that ability during his training before Order 66.

Players can further bolster their Force, survival, and lightsaber abilities through a skill tree. Skill points accumulated from defeating enemies grant players access to increased health, stronger stim potency, increased lightsaber damage, and mass push, to name a few skills. Even later on in the game when most of your Force abilities have been unlocked and Cal has found a couple of fun new gadgets, the game still feels balanced. Cal never feels overpowered like Starkiller in The Force Unleashed games. Even when they are maxed out, his Force push and pull do not appear to have much of an effect on bosses. At most, they will briefly stagger them, whereas when they do it to Cal, he will comically tumble over like Palpatine when Yoda Force pushed him across his desk in Revenge of the Sith.

I will argue that a couple of Force abilities become outdated later in the game. At one point, I forgot I even had Force slow because I had not used it in a while. I only remembered it while I was trying to solve a small puzzle to escape from an area and had exhausted all other options. Can you blame me for always wanting to Force push enemies off a cliff instead of slowing them down?

I appreciate that the game developers allow players to adjust the difficulty at any time. I started out at a higher difficulty and found myself dying before I even left the first world, Bracca. However, I persisted. That is, until I faced off against Oggdo Bogdo and his trash hitboxes. Players can stumble upon Oggdo Bogdo very early in the game. Oggdo Bogdo, a carnivorous amphibian creature, is a boss variation of the more common lookalikes of him. There is a similar optional alpha creature boss encounter on most planets Cal visits. No matter how hard I tried or how many different strategies I employed, Oggdo Bogdo proved to be too tough for me, and after waiting through countless death loads and having to run back over to Oggdo Bogdo’s location time and time again, I decided to lower the game’s difficulty, allowing me to finally slay this ugly creature.

Like Sekiro’s sculptor’s idols or the bonfires in Dark Souls, Fallen Order relies on meditation circles as its save points. Cal can rest to full health and restore his Force meter as well as restock health stims. Meditation circles also allow players to access the skill tree and spend skill points. These meditation circles implement a good risk versus reward system. If players choose to rest at a meditation circles, all of the enemies he or she has defeated since the last rest will respawn. I regularly found myself weighing the pros and cons of my situation, questioning if I should heal and get more stims or push on so that I did not put more enemies in my path.

While I am on the subject of these meditation circle save points, I have to point out that Fallen Order does not have fast travel. Instead, it encourages players to backtrack and explore previously inaccessible areas that they can now open with their newly unlocked abilities. This was fine for a while, but I quickly grew tired of it when I noticed how much of the backtracking had me slowly climbing, traversing across narrow walkways that Cal has to carefully balance on, or shimmying over narrow cliff edges. This is padding by exploration. While the vine and rope swinging was fun, especially with Force pull, I stopped enjoying climbing up a conveniently placed arrangement of vines and the like by the halfway point of the game, if not earlier. I will admit that I believe Fallen Order contains just the right amount of playtime, but this stuff had it teetering on the too long side. This is compounded by one important world that players have to visit multiple times that feels too big. The developers’ creativity and excitement got a little out of hand here. Just pull up the map of that world to see how unwieldy it is. When I completed the story on a planet like this, I felt exhausted rather than triumphant. Why can’t I hail my crew to come pick me up in the ship where I am rather than having to run across the entire planet again to get back to the landing pad, fighting the same enemies I already cleared out a couple of hours ago? The game developers do provide a few shortcuts that players can open, but the amount of time they end up saving is negligible in some cases.

I was disappointed that there is no real endgame content. Sure, players can continue to explore or fight enemies for the heck of it, but the developers could have done so much more. After players unlock every ability in the skill tree, the skill points they collect after that become meaningless. I will confess that I chose to rush past enemies to get to my next destination rather than waste time or energy fighting them for the 50th time after I had filled out my skill tree. Why not unlock fast travel after players beat the story? How about adding in a fighting arena where players can test their maxed out skill set against waves of enemies? Heck, let the players unlock dark side Force abilites like Force lightning or Force choke after they complete the story so that whatever they do then is not canon. I would have continued to gather skill points for that!

Now I mentioned Cal’s droid companion BD-1 earlier, but BD-1 deserves a special shout-out. BD-1 is spunky and lovable. Not only does BD-1 shoot Cal stims to heal him, the droid also provides hints for puzzles, scans enemies to suggest tactics to take them down, plays recordings that push the story along, and helps Cal navigate the worlds by hacking locked doors or carrying him across zip lines. Additionally, BD-1 projects the holomap of each planet, which is vital to keeping track of where Cal is in relation to the ship or his destination. The holomap itself is decent. Color coding helps players see what is inaccessible and what is unlockable, but for the bigger worlds with multiple levels it can be quite a burden to scroll across. Not to knock BD-1, but I grew impatient waiting for the droid’s animation that it goes through every single time Cal finds a hidden chest. Cal opens up the chest, BD-1 jumps in and rumbles around, and then jumps back out with whatever was inside it, all while Cal repeats the same lines of dialogue, like “Woah, buddy!” or “Careful now.” or “What did you find in there?” There are 107 chests in the game. Let that sink in.

These chests are one of the rewards for exploration. They contain items that players can use to customize Cal, his lightsaber, BD-1, or the ship. While this is motivation enough at the beginning of the game, this customization serves no purpose beyond cosmetics. It comes down to which poncho or paint job players find more aesthetically pleasing. I love that the game developers let players change lightsaber colors, but I wish these different ponchos and lightsaber parts had some sort of effect on the gameplay, such as restoring more of Cal’s Force meter or refilling a small amount of health after defeating an enemy.

Force echoes serve as another reward for exploring. Cal uncovers lore from past events by reaching out through these Force echoes. They rounded out the worlds nicely and added to the feeling that they were lived in, real places in the galaxy. The final element of exploration is BD-1′s scans. While you are running around, BD-1 will occasionally crawl down off Cal’s back and scramble over to something the droid wants to scan. These unlock data entries on the planet, its flora and fauna, the Empire, or other characters. This is all fine and dandy, but the level of exploration the game developers expect players to do with all of the backtracking involved needs to reward me with more than just basic lore, especially when some of the entries feel like the writers did not even try when they wrote them. Is an entry on a storage crate telling me that the Empire stored materials in it really worth stopping to scan? I think not. Instead, the game developers could have really motivated me to explore more by throwing in a few interesting side quests or fun Easter eggs. Maybe players could stumble upon active Imperial transmissions and overhear characters like Tarkin or Thrawn. Maybe players could find an abandoned Imperial camp and watch Imperial or Rebel propaganda over a holofeed that was left on. They could have even hidden a squadron of battle droids that were forgotten from the Clone Wars. So many possibilities!

Jedi: Fallen Order is far from a perfect game and has so much unrealized potential, but I would not trade away my time with it. For every flaw, I can point to a positive, and vice versa. At the end of the day, I got to be a Jedi, and that is good enough for me.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE HUNDRED-RISK COMPANY MANAGEMENT COMPANY

It's so common for both a and b to be true of a successful startup that practically all do raise outside money. Prediction is usually all we have to rely on other defenses. When you're running a startup is the opinion of other investors. Successful startups either get bought or grow into big companies.1 If you're ramen profitable this painful choice goes away.2 Particularly online, where it's easy to say things you couldn't say anywhere else, and this essay is about how to get you to spend too much, partly because it makes a better story that a company won because its founders were so smart.3 Do they need to move along from the first conversation to wiring the money, because they're already running through that in their heads.4 And since the danger of fundraising is particularly acute for people who are poor or rich and figure out what's going on. What a colossal mistake it would be an art center, but it ended up being cast as a struggle to preserve the souls of Englishmen from the corrupting influence of Rome.

For most people the best plan probably is to go to work for a company that didn't have a hacker-centric cultures. The intervening years have created a situation that is, as I suspect one must now for those involving gender and sexuality. Most employees' work is tangled together.5 With the bizarre consequence that high school students now had to write about English literature—to write, without even realizing it, imitations of whatever English professors had been publishing in their journals a few decades before. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas.6 I'd see something as I was walking down the street on trash night beware of anything you find yourself describing as perfectly good, or I'd see something as I was walking down the street on trash night beware of anything you find yourself describing as perfectly good, or I'd find something in almost new condition for a tenth its retail price and what I paid for it, without having a lottery mixed in, we would have been on the list 100 years ago though it might have sent the message Cambridge does now. In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of radiologists as they scanned chest images for signs of lung cancer in a meeting within Philip Morris. Take a label—sexist, for example. Rapid growth is what makes it hard.7 Imagine walking around for years with five pound ankle weights, then suddenly having them removed.

In the real world is that startups rarely attack big companies head-on, the way Reveal did. A startup can't endure that level of ability can get you in trouble.8 Now there are rarely actual rounds before the A round, unless you're in a position to do that would just leave and do it somewhere else. You don't need to rely on other defenses. I'd agree that taste is just personal preference. My advice is, don't say it.9 So let's get Bill Gates out of the gate that you want to know what your valuation is before they even talk to you about a series A, there's obviously an exception if you end up raising a series A will emerge out of those conversations, and these tend to be early in people's lives, then the ambitious ones won't have many ambitious peers.

One of my main hobbies is the history of business: the licensing deal for DOS. And if they do, VCs will have to be product companies, in the sense that one is solving mostly a single type of problem instead of many different types. Few encourage you to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. You just can't fry eggs or cut hair fast enough.10 Good hackers care a lot about where to live.11 So they must be a media company to throw Microsoft off their scent. But by that time, not points. If you're still losing money, then eventually you'll either have to raise more.12 Cadillac of cars in about 1970. Fortunately for startups, big companies are extremely good at denial.

No matter who you pick, they'll find faces engaging. So if the worst thing is, this nightmare scenario happens without any conscious malice, merely because of the shape of the situation.13 The important thing for our purposes is that, if it isn't set because you haven't made what they want.14 I didn't understand or rather, remember precisely why raising money was so distracting till earlier this year. Except books—but books are different. But by definition you don't care; the initial offer was acceptable. Unless you're experienced enough at fundraising to have a plan. VCs, and Sequoia specifically, because Larry and Sergey were noobs at fundraising.15 So don't worry about the suspension; just make that sucker as big and tough-looking as you can, because fundraising is not the same thing: they're pretty open-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had. This isn't just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. The most likely source of examples is math.

But that wasn't the worst problem. It's like the court of Louis XIV. Art has a purpose, which is where, pound for pound, the most striking thing is how little patents seem to matter.16 To launch a taboo, a group has to be type A fundraising. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible. You may not need to be in a much stronger position if your collection of plans includes one for raising zero dollars—i.17 This was too subtle for me.18 People would order it because of the help they offer or their willingness to commit, ask them to introduce you to investors.19

But this will change if enough startups choose SF over the Valley. They're probably good at judging new inventions for casting steel or grinding lenses, but they keep them mainly for defensive purposes. At level 4 we reach the first form of convincing disagreement: counterargument.20 No, except yes if you turn out to be a compulsive negotiator.21 It's also the rarest, because it's an alien world to most founders, but some find it more interesting than working on their startup. Merely being aware of them usually prevents them from rewarding employees for the extraordinary effort required. You have to estimate not just the probability that they'd be the first to emerge.22 Because the main way to spend money on stuff. In fact they were more law schools. I'm not going to apply for patents just because everyone else does. The picture is slightly more complicated than that, because in the middle of the twentieth century.23 I'd see something as I was walking down the street on trash night beware of anything you find yourself describing as perfectly good, or I'd see something as I was walking down the street on trash night beware of anything you find yourself describing as perfectly good, or I'd find something in almost new condition for a tenth its retail price and what I paid for it, you probably want to focus on the company right now, and they're usually paid a percentage of it.

Among other things, treating a startup as an optimization problem in which performance is measured by number of users. Many of the employees e. There was a brief sensation that year when one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. If anything, it's more like the first five. If you could find people who'd eliminated all such influences on their judgement, you'd probably still see variation in what they liked. Their size makes them slow and prevents them from working. But the breakage seems to affect software less than most other fields. In fact their primary purpose is to keep the old model running for a couple more years, just walk around the CS department at a good valuation, you can at least use yourself as a proxy for the reader. They do something people want. Is to teach kids. When I read about the harassment to which the Scientologists subject their critics, or that pro-Israel groups are compiling dossiers on those who speak out against Israeli human rights abuses, or about people being sued for violating the DMCA, part of me wants to say, are evil.24 Which they deserve because they're taking more risk.

Notes

But it wouldn't be irrational.

No. Not all big hits follow this pattern though. But it's a significant startup hub.

Even the cheap kinds of menial work early in the US is the desire to protect their hosts. Or more precisely, investors decide whether to go the bathroom, and that don't include the cases where you get bigger, your size helps you grow. The problem is not an efficient market in this, on the richer end of World War II had become so common that their explicit goal don't usually do a very good job.

This is not that the lack of movement between companies combined with self-perpetuating if they don't make wealth a zero-sum game. Like early medieval architecture, impromptu talks are made of spolia. Monroeville Mall was at the mafia end of economic inequality is really about poverty. In theory you could build products as good ones.

Source: Nielsen Media Research.

This essay was written before Firefox. This is the same weight as any successful startup? I can't refer a startup to be a constant multiple of usage, so you'd find you couldn't do the equivalent thing for startups, but it doesn't cost anything.

Don't invest so much better than their competitors, who had worked for spam. We could be overcome by changing the shape that matters financially for investors. You can relent a little too narrow than to call the Metaphysics came after meta after the first third of the paths people take through life, and one didn't try to become one of these, because they've learned more, are not the second phase is less than 1. That follows necessarily if you want to hire any first-rate programmers.

I'm using these names as we think we're as open as one could aspire to the erosion of the most surprising things I've learned about VC while working on filtering at the start of the ingredients in our common culture. One YC founder wrote after reading a draft, Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson.

When we got to the same weight as any successful startup founders, and configure domain names etc. Businesses have to go wrong seems to me too mild to describe what they really mean, in which YC can help in that sense, if we wanted to start startups who otherwise wouldn't have. Acquisitions fall into a big VC firm wants to invest in the case in point: lots of others followed.

4%? Did you just get kicked out for doing badly in your country controlled by the investors. I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about Intel and Microsoft, not because Delicious users are stupid.

Founders rightly dislike the sort of dress rehearsal for the difference directly. 32. Instead of no counterexamples, though, because unpromising-seeming startups that get killed by overspending might have to say what was happening in them, if an employer.

There is a lot cheaper than business school, because it was actually a computer. You can retroactively describe any made-up idea as an asset class. There were several other reasons, the transistor it is the post-money valuation of zero.

And maybe we should work like casual conversation. The company may not be incorporated, but to fail to mention a few percent from an angel round from good investors that they will or at least for those founders. Morgan's hired hands. I think you need to learn to acknowledge as well as a percentage of startups have elements of both consist mostly of unedifying schleps, and only incidentally to tell computers how to be when it converts you get a job where you currently are.

High school isn't evil; it's IBM. The moment I do in proper essays. Many famous works of their works are lost. But it's a collection itself.

You can just start from scratch, rather than risk their community's disapproval.

Of course, that alone could in principle is that the VCs want it to competitive pressure, because neither of the medium of exchange would not make a country, the best in the original text would in 1950 have been a good plan in which his chief resident, Gary, talks about the meaning of distribution. The point where things start to leave. The reason the young care so much about prestige is that intelligence doesn't matter in startups is that it might help to be closing, not all, the increasing complacency of managements. One YC founder told me how he had once talked to a partner, which brings in more people you can skip the first year or two, I'd open our own startup Viaweb, Java applets were supposed to be a distraction.

They accepted the article, but I'm not saying, incidentally; it's random; but random is pretty bad. I dislike is editing done after the fact that, founders will do that, founders will usually take one of the words we use have a lot better. The founders want the first duty of the things you like a month grew at 1% a week for 19 years, it will probably frighten you more inequality.

The French Laundry in Napa Valley. Doing things that don't include the prices of new stock.

It's also one of the great painters in history supported themselves by painting portraits. If it failed.

The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, Yale University Press, 1981.

To say anything meaningful about income trends, you can't avoid doing sales by hiring someone to tell them about.

Change in the field they describe. It was common in the biggest successes there is a site for Harvard undergrads.

In practice most successful ones.

Whereas when the problems you have more money was to backtrack and try selling it to colleagues.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Garry Tan, and Robert Morris for sparking my interest in this topic.

[pass-the-bechdel]

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend season four full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

100% (seventeen of seventeen).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

47.22%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

Thirteen, distinctly over half, and with nine of those hitting or exceeding 50%, and two of those making it to/over the 60% line.

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Zero, unsurprisingly.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Thirty-nine. Sixteen who appeared in more than one episode, five who appeared in at least half the episodes, and two who appeared in every episode.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Forty-three. Twenty who appeared in more than one episode, seven who appeared in at least half the episodes, and one who appeared in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

Nothing to write home about. It isn’t devoid of good qualities, but it also isn’t half as good as it seems to think it is, and it rarely makes any genuine effort to try (average rating of 3).

General Season Quality:

Patchy. Never regained the highs of the series-best third season, though it showed some potential now and then; likewise, never dragged down the way the show did at its worst in series-low season two, but still definitely wandered in that direction time and again. Comes to a conclusion as predictable as it is boring.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

Ok, since full-season reviews for the final season of a show have a tendency to take on strong full-series overtones, I’m gonna keep this simple, and just focus on the way the character’s storylines came around (or didn’t) by the last episode. Considering that they used that abominable time-skip technique to neatly skip major developments yet again, they made it very easy to reflect on what the narrative has positioned as core to the character’s lives.

First, a note on time skips: like any technique, they have their place in a storyteller’s toolbox, and it is completely possible to use them to strong effect. Time skips, in and of themselves, are not the devil, nor are they automatic signs of lazy storytelling - they just need to exist for a good reason. Having serious changes take place in the interim, and dropping the audience into the chaos on the other side so that they can unravel all that change and work out how things developed and how they fit together now after the fact? Great use of a time skip, because it still uses the interim developments for active storytelling, and drives viewer engagement by making you pay attention to put the pieces together. There’s heaps of potential in that, plus you can bring vitality to plot development that might actually have been laborious to watch in real-time; when viewed in retrospect, it can become much more interesting than it would have been as a chronological thread. The two big time skips we had in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend? Categorically not that. The first one, in season three, was essentially a way of going ‘nothing interesting whatsoever happened in these character’s lives for eight entire months’, which is just abysmal storytelling, and the only real explanation for why they bothered with the time skip at all was that they wanted to fast-track the pregnancy plot (which, I’ll say again, I am still really disturbed by - it meant declaring that absolutely nothing that happened - for Heather, as a pregnant person, or for Darryl as an expectant parent, or for Rebecca as the egg donor who never really addressed her own feelings about her decision (this season limply acknowledged that in one episode, but you know what would have been better? The inclusion of emotional ups and downs over time! It’s only EXACTLY the kind of thing which is deeply pertinent to Rebecca’s mental state!) - none of it was meaningful enough to be worth telling a story about, and that’s depressingly lazy and insulting to the characters, frankly, and NOT just because of my own pregnancy-related feelings). Skipping eight months of your own story without using that missing time for anything is ridiculous (and if you don’t want to waste time on a plot thread, don’t include it in the first place - since the entire baby storyline came to a big zero on character and narrative development anyway, they might as well have not bothered pretending). The entire year they time-skipped in the final episode of this season? Kinda the exact same problem, even though they did include little flashback scenes this time to pretend that anything meaningful happened. If it actually mattered, you shoulda built it into the course of the actual season, instead of handwaving it in at the eleventh hour without any development or fallout. This is not how storytelling works.

And what did we get as the sum total of our character development in the time-skipped year, what action was jumped over and then treated as the culmination of each individual’s life and time on the show? Well, Josh got a new serious girlfriend. One of the better characters on the whole show, a highlight when there was sometimes little light to be had, and he...got a girlfriend. Wow. Josh’s story really went places, huh? Nathaniel? Quit his job and went to work at his favourite place, the zoo, which is a much more interesting development and easily my favourite one, but also, they didn’t build towards that at all. You could be forgiven for forgetting that Nathaniel likes going to the zoo when he’s sad, because that was just a bit from a song one episode, long ago, and the show never reinforced his interest in the zoo outside of that. Objectively, I love this as an end-place for his character, but in the context of his development on-show, it’s kinda out of left field, they did not incorporate it in to his narrative the way they should have if they were gonna use it in this way. Similar problem: Paula, whose Great Achievement was bringing pro bono work to her firm, only, we’d never had any real indication that she was passionate about it before, it was just something she started doing to support Rebecca. This doesn’t feel like a development that actually has anything to do with Paula at all, and it certainly doesn’t bring things around on any part of her personal plot in a way that could be considered meaningful. Valencia finally gets to be engaged, she makes it happen for herself by being the one to propose, and that’s nice but hardly less of a bland culmination than ‘and Josh has a girlfriend’. Darryl’s relationship and child-in-the-making is also ho-hum, and kinda reinforces the idea that they coulda just skipped the stupid Hebecca plot since it was seemingly just a way to preoccupy Darryl while they couldn’t come up with any real story for him, only to have his story end with achieving the same thing he had already spent the previous season achieving, just with a partner involved this time. Heather, Hector, White Josh? No meaningful developments, they were never important. Greg? Something restaurant related? I literally can’t even remember already, that’s how much I don’t care. Why was he even here? Nope, still don’t care.

And then of course, Rebecca. She sure did ‘resolve’ her BPD as a plot point by taking medication, so, not impressed by the way they handled that in the end, and in the meantime she finally realised that her happiness was not and should not be defined by relationships and that she should pursue the things in life which actually make her happy within herself, and that is...exactly the basic conclusion that I assumed this show would come to back when it started. I somehow foolishly thought they would have to have something more up their sleeves than ‘don’t define yourself through your relationship with someone else’, especially after they doubled and tripled down (get it, tripled? Because of the three guys?) on the idea that romance was part of the endgame for Rebecca, literally to the last episode; turning around and pulling a ‘but romance isn’t the most important thing!’ after THAT MUCH time and energy spent on forefronting it in the late stages of the show doesn’t feel like some kind of clever twist, it’s something really obvious that the show had various leaned on at other points in its run, only to return to the romantic centre with a greater and greater vengeance. By this point, blowing off the romances with all three of these other characters that Rebecca had already blown off - numerous times! - in the past isn’t some revelation of character development, it’s just pattern repetition. For the sprinkling of other plot threads they wrapped up for Rebecca this season, each of them applauded to some extent for whatever catharsis they brought, this ultimately ended her story in the most redundant of ways, placing at the core of her story the very same thing that the show had already denounced and restored time and time again. But anyway. This all sounds awfully series-review-ish. The moral of the story is, I hated the final episode with a passion and it made me feel like the entire show was largely pointless viewing, and that’s unfortunate because there were various glimmers of thoughtful wrap-ups across the rest of the season. Anything else, I guess I’ll talk it out in the only place left for it: the full series review.

[introsquirrel]

Much Ado About Monkey Island

so i’ve been playing a lot of Monkey Island recently, because the BEST GAME EVER (Curse of Monkey Island, the 3rd in the series) is FINALLY ON STEAM and i strongly suggest anyone who likes witty puzzle games play it, even if you haven’t played the others because it can stand on its own and it’s all around a really great game with one of my favorite protagonists of all time.

anyway, i replayed Tales of Monkey Island after finishing Curse... in a...day.... any there’s a cut scene after the credits of the last chapter that inspired this mess. THIS IS NOT SPOILER FREE. IT HAS SO MANY SPOILERS. ALL OF THE SPOILERS.

Also this is not a rag on Morgan LeFlay. I love morgan. what a great character!

if you are unfamiliar with this series but still want to read this for some reason, here’s what you need to know: guybrush is stupid and clever and he picks up random things and keeps them in his pants (and coat pockets in the 5th game), lechuck is the series villain and is in love with elaine and has been a ghost and a zombie and a voodoo zombie who kidnaps elaine like all the time, the crossroads is like pirate greek underworld, the voodoo lady does not have a name that we know of

fic can be read here if you don’t like tumblr, and the rest is under the cut

Fic name: Much Ado About Monkey Island Rating: G Fandom: Monkey Island Relationships: Guybrush Threepwood/Elaine Marley, Guybrush Threepwood & Morgan LeFlay Characters: Elaine Marley, Morgan LeFlay, Guybrush Threepwood Warnings: Kind of a love triangle situation, but not really, this is unedited

Elaine Marley Threepwood, Governor of Melee Island, Booty Island, and Plunder Island, part-time pirate, accomplished ambassador, and wife of the legendary (if exasperating) pirate Guybrush Threepwood, took a moment to fully bask in the novelty that was being on the other side of this whole kidnapping business.

Not that it made her any happier about it, but at least she wasn’t the one caged in a weird voodoo trap while some variation of undead suitor proclaimed his love for her. Thank the pirate gods for that. She would probably run herself through if she had to fend off LeChuck again and then her husband might do something stupid like bring her back from the dead, or bind their spirits together, or dig up her grave and cry over her corpse until some bizzaro unlikely miracle happened and she spontaneously came back to life with a list of conditions to her newfound reincarnation.

“Is this how you feel all of the time?” Guybrush asks her, sounding incredulous. “Man, this is annoying and frustrating. I didn’t think it was possible, but my respect for you just raised to a whole new level of awe.”

“Thank you sweetie,” Elaine calls, mostly to shut her dumbass (but endearing!) husband.

“No, seriously!”

“Shut up Guybrush,” Morgan LeFlay says, not taking her eyes off Elaine.

This is probably the most surprising turn of events. Morgan LeFlay is very much dead, according to Guybrush. She is also a “really great person!” according to Guybrush. She is also a competent swordfighter, which Elaine vaguely remembers from issuing her a pox-induced challenge to a fight to the death for Guybrush. And also she helped kill LeChuck once and for all, according to Guybrush. And Morgan LeFlay is known for mostly killing pirates, not kidnapping them and forcing them to marry her. It was distinctly out of character for her (according to Guybrush).

Elaine isn’t certain how it figures in, but she’s 100% sure the Voodoo Lady is involved somehow.

Currently Morgan LeFlay is a ghost pirate hunter, in the corporeal world, with a very much not ghostly ship, holding very much not ghostly objects.

Definitely VooDoo Lady sea scumm happening.

Morgan takes this opportunity monologue, like a true villain. (She must have been taking lessons.) “Look, I know that you’re stupidly gaga over Elaine for some reason-”

“There’s lots of reasons! I have an itemized list!”

He doesn’t, but she’s sure that when they get home he’ll make one and frame it in a public area because he’s that much of an embarrassing romantic. (The thought of it makes her swoon a little bit, but she’ll never admit it in public.)

“-when we had a moment! A really romantic moment! I kind of compared myself to a giant ugly manatee for you so you could understand me better.”

“What? I thought you were just helping me figure out how to seduce a manatee to I could get La Esponja Grande.”

“Well, I mean, that too. It was a metaphor.”

“I think you mean double entendre,” Elaine pipes in.

Morgan growls. “I didn’t ask you!”

“I’m almost positive Elaine made that word up, but i’m also mostly positive that she’s right. She’s right most of the time. All of the time.”

“Shut up about Elaine for five seconds! Geez!”

Elaine unfolds herself from her fighting crouch. “Look, Morgan. I’m sure we can come to some sort of compromise.”

Guybrush squeaks. “I’m not agreeing to be cut in half!”

“Smuggle bunny,” Elaine sings through her teeth, “please zip your trap while the ladies talk, okay?”

“Fine, but I stand by my statement.”

“There is no compromise,” Morgan says. “To get a human form, I need Guybrush. To be happy, I’m pretty sure I’ll need Guybrush. Have you met other pirates around here? Or even other men? They’re disgusting and are either terrified of me or want to tame me. I just want to be me. And human. That’s important too.”

“Of course I’ve met other pirates, why do you think I married Guybrush?”

“Aww,” Guybrush says. “That’s so sweet… I think.”

“And we can work together to get you a human form back. Guybrush talked a lot about you, and you sound like a decent person. I would have let him help you if you asked.”

Morgan stares at her blankly. “He… talked about me?”

“Yes. How you’re a lifelong fan and how you cut off his hand. How he got you to pretend to be his wife. All the things you helped him with in at the Crossroads. I’d be jealous except he seemed completely oblivious to the fact that you had a crush on him.”

Guybrush yells, “Wait, you what?”

“See?”

Morgan looks devastated. To Guybrush she says, “Didn’t I tell you? You are stupidly loyal to Elaine, and I respected that about you, but I also hated it. It’s so unfair!”

“Oh, Morgan.”

Elaine considers for a moment. “We’ll both help you get your human form back. On two conditions.”

“Is one of them not cutting me in half?”

“What are the conditions,” Morgan asks, studiously ignoring Guybrush like a pro.

“One,” Elaine holds up a finger, “whatever the Voodoo Lady is setting you up to do here with marrying Guybrush, it has to stop. We’re married and neither of us wants that to change. I’m not going to apologize for that.”

Morgan does not look happy, but she doesn’t protest outright so Elaine decides to take that as a good sign. And also pretty much confirmation the VooDoo Lady is involved. Figures.

“Two, when doing whatever weird side quests you will inevitably get yourself into, you take me along.”

“What?!” Morgan yells.

“Oh, this can’t be good,” Guybrush says.

“I’m saying this because Guybrush runs off all the time and he works best by himself most of those times. But with all his stories about you, you seem like an accomplished woman and Davey Jones knows that we need more of those around here. I’d like us to be allies.”

Guybrush does a little dance. “Yeah! You’d both make a super intelligent and an utterly terrifyingly competent team! Okay, actually, hm. That is a little too terrifying. Especially for me.”

Morgan, on the other hand, looks a little dumbfounded. “Allies?”

“Yes. As a bonus you can hang around my stupidly clever husband to your heart’s content, but just know that he’s just as crude and idiotic as any other given pirate, just with far more charm attached.”

Guybrush is muttering to himself (or some unknown audience, he does that sometimes) while Morgan frowns and thinks about the deal.

“... Okay,” she finally says. “Okay, I’ll team up with you and try to become your ally. I heard you’re a governess right?”

“Governor, technically. Guybrush is the governess.”

“I am?”

“Governor, then. Can you teach me how to lead people without terrifying them beyond belief?”

“She might still be figuring that one out,” Guybrush says.

“Oh absolutely,” Elaine smiles, and purposely makes it ambiguous who she was answering. She sheathes her sword. “Now that that’s out of the way, release Guybrush and we can talk business.”

“Oh, um, about that.”

Elaine blinks at Morgan, in suspicion. “What.”

“He wasn’t meant to be captured there. That cage wasn’t finished yet and I didn’t add a way to open it yet. So he’s… kind of trapped in there.”

“Oh no,” Guybrush yells. “I can’t pillage and plunder while trapped in a box! I can’t scavenge the seven seas while caged like a wild animal! I can’t even use the bathroom without the rest of the ship bearing witness! This is the worst.”

“Well,” Elaine smiles. “Let’s take a look at that voodoo spell and see if we can’t Guybrush some solution together.”

“Ha!” Morgan says, also smiling, and digs out the spell from her boot. (How…?) “I guess this is our first quest together, Governor Threepwood.”

“I suppose it is, Pirate Huntress LeFlay.” They share a smile, before Elaine turns to her husband. “Honeylumps, I’m going to need you to empty your pockets and your pants.”

“In public?”

Morgan shrieks, “You need him to what?!”

[daniel--berry]

Worst to Best Superhero Movies I’ve Seen

31) The Amazing Spider-Man

I hate this movie. I laughed throughout the entire film. “The lizard” could not have been a worse super-villain. I sort of liked the yellow Spidey-eyes, I guess. Emma Stone gave a nice performance. Can’t write anything else about it.

30) Doctor Strange

This is one of the only movies on the list I fell asleep during. Some of the visuals were pretty original, but the storyline was like a terrible version of Kung Fu Panda. Maybe if they casted Jack Black instead of super-boring Benedict Cumberbatch (I loved you in Sherlock baby, don’t be offended), Doctor Strange could have had a little charisma. I think this is the only movie on this list that made me upset after watching it.

29) Suicide Squad

What is this movie, some kind of Suicide Squad? Maaaan, what a great cast in such a forgettable movie. Here’s the thing though, I liked it more than most people did. I think whatever-her-name-is was a charismatic (though definitely not funny) Harley Quinn. Jared Leto wasn’t super offensive as the Joker, I looked forward to his scenes, but he looked like an idiot, like a twenty year old with temporary tattoos. What is this guy, some kind of Joker?

28) Thor

I can’t remember this movie. It was probably better than Suicide Squad though. Oh yeah, there’s that part where he throws his coffee on the ground and yells “Another!”. Haha, that was pretty funny.

27) Deadpool

Haha, he uses bad words! But it’s a superhero movie! This movie will serve best as the first R-rated movie a 12 year old sees behind his parent’s back. This is the other one I fell asleep during. 

26) Thor: The Dark World

This one’s interesting. I actually like this movie a lot, in theory. Visually, it’s one of my favorite Marvel movies. You could even say that if I made a MCU movie, it would look a lot like this one. Again, in theory, this is cool. It made Loki an anti-hero after the Avengers, which I think is a great choice. Unfortunately, this is a big piece of shit. And it will make you (unjustly) dislike Natalie Portman. 

25) Wonder Woman

Wow, I thought I’d love this movie. I’ve always thought Wonder Woman was a great character. Gal Gadot is almost perfect for the role. But man, what a boring story. Way too much time is spent on an ugly island, and the rest of the movie is a fish-out-of-water Crocodile Dundee rip-off, with Tumblr-friendly British humor. Haha, that English woman’s accent is sooo British! No thank you. A DAMN boring movie! 

24) The Amazing Spider-Man 2

We’re starting to get to superhero movies that I actually sort-of enjoy. This is my second favorite Spider-Man movie, but that’s out of the three ones on this list. I think this movie ruined Jamie Foxx’s career. Spider-Man has never looked better, though. Definitely the best Spidey-suit. I’m a sucker for those huge eyes. I walked out of the movie wanting to see a sequel, to be honest.

23) Ant-Man

I don’t remember this one, but I remember laughing a lot. Doesn’t Ant-Man work at Baskin Robbins or something in this? Oh yeah, and Michael Douglas is in this. I love that guy!

22) Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice

What a STUPID title for a movie. Nothing felt natural here. Did I mention that I hate the title? Here’s the thing, some of the elements of this movie work great. People made fun of the “Martha” twist, but I liked it, as well as Ben Affleck’s portrayal of Batman. But again, nothing was natural about this story. The tone shift is so dramatic from Man of Steel, and yet it’s supposed to be a direct sequel. Henry Cavill’s Superman isn’t memorable. Jesse Eisenberg’s lines were badly written and he never seemed like a real human being. Still, I didn’t hate it.

21) Thor: Ragnarok

Such great ideas here. Pairing Hulk and Thor for a comedy? Wonderful. Jeff Goldblum as a charismatic (gay) planet emperor is my favorite new MCU character. More of him, please! Why so low on this list? Hela sucked, as all Thor villains do. But man, she sucked the worst. The goddess of death? She just looks kind of goth, and never does anything too death-y. I like how the fire monster destroys the Thor world (what’s it called again?), and to the movie’s credit, it doesn’t treat this like an earth-shattering moment. Because let’s be honest, we never gave a fuck about that place.

20) Avengers: Age of Ultron

Ok, yes. This movie has aged pretty badly. But there’s a lot to like! Vision is a graceful, hot, AI legend right out of the gate. Lots of nice seeds are sown here, but it’s too bad that Ultron was a big dumbass who didn’t know how to execute any of his angsty plans. His “age” lasted about a day? Day of Ultron. Still, Tony Stark deserves to be put in prison by now.

19) Guardians of the Galaxy

As far as nailing a tone down, this movie did it best. You can call this movie airtight in its execution. The only negative is that every following Marvel movie felt like it had to be just as funny as this one.

18) Man of Steel

I love me a serious superhero film. I think this movie is best described in pros and cons. Pros: Henry Cavill is the best onscreen Superman yet, Michael Shannon made an otherwise goofy role kind of believable, the special effects are the best I’ve ever seen in a superhero film. Cons: None of this matters, because you’ve just never seen a more boring plot to a film in your life.

17) Batman

There will be no disrespect for the classics here. Every good superhero movie owes it all to Batman. This movie nailed it in every category. Jack Nicholson’s weirdo Joker was all-too-perfect, and the goth-horror scenery was inspired. Best of all, Michael Keaton made the idea of a gay orphan dressing up as a bat pretty relatable.

16) Superman

They haven’t quite gotten it right until 2006, but more on that up the list. This is the best Superman will ever be, because the character really just doesn’t work in the modern day. Christopher Reeve gives a romantic, gosh-golly version of the comic character, and it’s pretty damn good. Also, Marlon Brando’s Jor-El is haunting and gorgeous when he speaks. Another classic.

15) Batman Begins

Blah blah blah, gritty, dark, blah blah blah. Reinvented superhero movies, blah blah blah realistic.

14) Captain America: The First Avenger

This is the heart and soul of the MCU, and one of the most unique out of the series. Still feels important even in the third phase, and has a lot of great messages that I am too lazy to write. Great movie, and Chris Evans as Captain America was the best casting choice since Robert Downey Jr. Nothing but greatness here.

13) Iron Man 2

Do people really think this is the worst of the MCU? Not by a long-shot. But oh my god, Tony Stark is just such a war criminal. And Mickey Rourke is delightful! I love that part where Iron Man empties his bladder into his own Iron Man suit. Did Superman ever do that shit? Fuck Superman!

12) Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

My ass has seen a lot of superhero movies, but I don’t think my ass has smiled more watching one of them. Ummmm, what a fucking great movie? With a fucking great plot? And, like, a great villain for fucking once? A truly lovely film.

11) The Dark Knight Rises

A marxist superhero film? No wonder it’s not the fan favorite. But I love it just the same. The funeral scene at the end is beautifully acted by all involved. Yes, Bruce Wayne died, but it didn’t feel cheap. Catwoman driving the batpod? An icon of cinema. A great ending to a great blah blah blah, not as good as The Dark Blah blah blah.

10) Marvel’s The Avengers

What a moment for a little thirteen year old nerdfuck like me. It leans on the immature side of the MCU, yes. But it’s damn near perfect filmmaking, and by far the most accessible superhero movie to date. Hulk Smash!

9) Iron Man 3

We’re getting into real personal-favorite territory here. Shane Black’s Christmas superhero film is hated by a lot of people, but don’t worry, they’re all just sweaty ugly nerds with untouched genitals who don’t realize that Fu-Manchu proto-Asian wizard stereotypes aren’t exactly the best material for a 2013 film. Man, I adore this movie. It’s a perfect blend of comedy (not too much) and drama (not too much), with an infusion of self awareness that appeals to a cynical guy like me.

8) Superman Returns

This movie really understands Superman. It’s too bad it was overshadowed by Batman Begins, because this movie has a lot to offer. No, it isn’t action-packed, and yes it does star Kevin Spacey (gross) as Lex Luther, but the romanticism and themes of a post-superhero world are rich with wonderful dialogue and the best onscreen Lois Lane yet. Forget the Kryptonite iceberg at the end, Superman’s journey of finding himself is surprisingly great material for a film, delicately directed by Bryan Singer. Wait, is that TWO pedophile boy rapists in one film? Yikes, you know what.......never mind. 

7) Captain America: Civil War

The re-watchability here is astonishing. It’s not even an Avengers film, and it’s still easily the best Avengers film. And yet, it stays its course as a personal story of loyalty and sacrifice for the titular character. It’s totally a Captain America movie. Also, can Tony Stark just get fucking imprisoned already?

6) Iron Man

Easily the “coolest” superhero movie ever made. I can watch terrorists get blown up by lasers all day! A true classic, and still feels just a little more legitimate than all the other MCU films.

5) Spider-Man: Homecoming

A relatable protagonist? A relatable villain? An evil psycopath? (Tony Stark). What’s not to love? It might not have “amazing” in the title like those other fuck-your-mom Spidey movies, but it most certainly is. (Amazing, I mean).

4) The Dark Knight

Blah blah blah joker, blah blah blah Heath Ledger, Christopher Nolan. Blahblahblahblah dark, reinvented the genre, blah blah blah.

3) Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Yes I’ll say it. Here we have the best story in a superhero film to date. And to disguise all the intellectual themes of post-terrorist society, individuality, corruption, the pointlessness of patriotism, and homoeroticism, we have just enough kick-ass action scenes for your average brain-dead male to get a kick out of it too.

2) X-Men: Days of Future Past

I’m a sucker for time travel, and fuck me if this didn’t deliver 100%. This was my first X-Men movie experience, and I still think about it about once every couple of weeks. I don’t even want to write about it because I get embarrassed by my love for this movie.

1) Logan

The world’s changed. All the mutants are dead. Patrick Stewart is a senile fuck. Wolverine’s claws hurt when he tries to bring them out. Jesus Christ, there’s so much here that I can’t believe it’s a real movie. There’s just something about seeing a grizzly Hugh Jackman in a bloody t-shirt that really grinds my gears. It’s tragic, it’s beautiful, it’s expansive, and it feels like the last superhero movie that ever needs to be made.

[akirotempest]

My Favorite Anime’s of 2018

So if I haven’t explained by now, I don’t really have the time to make a youtube video for this like last year which sucks because I would actually put effort into it and make it funny ect. And also considering that winter season as started might as well do it now. So instead of a well put together video, you get a blog post on an almost dead site yay! So incase you were curious on my list for whatever reason, my top 10 favorite anime’s of 2018!

Number 10 - Overlord Season 2&3

It had been about 2 and a half years since Overlord’s first season aired back in the summer of 2015. And it certainly leave an impression on the Isekai genre as a whole. Fast forward to Winter 2018 and damn, the amount of Isekai animes increased almost ten fold with their being at least 1-3 every season. Overlord  would have its work cut of for it so really stand apart from the rest. And for the most part, it did. It expanded on the world by giving more characters screen time than in the past and seeing how they handle certain situations without Lord Ains and helping to set up a new season. Season II was well worth the wait. If you could get past the first 3-4 episodes of build up that is. The second half felt more interesting and just better written the the first half with could be a drag to watch.  It was pretty surprising to hear at the end of the season that season 3 would be airing in the summer, just 4 months later. But unlike season II, season 3 to me was mostly a bore. It had its moments here and there and certainly gave a few more characters a little bit of a spot light and attention, however, the cgi has some of the worst of the series and of the year as whole. I’d say as bad as Berserk’s remake cgi which is considered to be some of the worst all time. Even though season 3 was mostly a miss, I’m still game to see more of these characters and see their eventual conquest of the world. 

Number 9 - My Hero Academia Season 3

How far My Hero Academia has come since its debut in Shonen Jump back in 2014. Right as Naruto had ended its 15 year long run, My Hero, unknown to most at the time, would take the torch shortly after and run with it. Since then its become arguably the second biggest if not the biggest anime in North America only behind Dragon Ball Super (DBS Broly will make sure of that). Two very successful season’s, a movie screen all across NA. So much so that an extra week of screenings were added. 2018 was certainly a great year for the My Hero franchise as a whole. Season 3 continues right where Season 2 left off as the first half see’s students from classes 1-A and 1-B going on a field trip to an training camp to help hone their powers even more. However, the newly formed League of Villains launch an attack on the camp grounds with their own objective. The climax of the first half see’s All Might face off against his greatest enemy, All for One. With the final moments of the battle being some of the most memorable in not only shonen history, but of all anime. The second half seeing the students trying to go for their hero licenses which will enable them to use their quirks for heroic purposes without needed a pro hero with them. While the final results are a shock, the second half just can’t compare with the first. The final episode of the season is definitely worth the wait. Not only does it wrap up this portion of the story, but sets up the now highly anticipated season 4. Without spoiling it, shit’s about to get fucking real.

Number 8 - How Not to Summon A Demon Lord

Now... with all the stuff I post and talk about, one might think that Ecchi anime would be my favorite type of anime. Surprise! It isn’t. So when I saw this I was turned off by it think it would be another High School DXD type of deal. Because that went so well this year. But when I sat down to watch it I was surprised that I found myself binging the entire show with 2 episodes yet to air. The story follows a video game otaku shut in whom one day gets teleported to another world. Where haven’t we heard that opening before?! But to his surprise, he’s not himself, but as his avatar from the game he played, which he was an OP Demon Lord. The two girls that summoned him argue over who gets to keep him as in this world, the summoned one is enslaved by those whom summoned it. However unknown to all 3, when one of the girls trys to command him, a spell he casted on himself reflects the magic back and now he has enslaved both girls. We’re still here for the plot right? The show then follows them trying to undo to find a way to undo the spell. To me, it had the SAO affect where the plot might of been dull, but the characters worked well off each other. Especially where the main character is OP, he doesn’t know what the hell is going on half the time as even though he’s a demon lord, he doesn't mean to be. If you’re a fan of the Isekai genre and want to wash away the taste of last years, In Another World With My Smartphone, then I defiantly recommend giving this one a try.

Number 7 - Skilled Teaser Tagaki-San

This ones a bit of an odd one. The plot is a girl named Tagaki teases her classmate Nishikata. Although he one day vows to get back at her, he fails every single time. The whole anime is essentially a bunch of shorts like in the original manga. It was something adorable and sometime to just watch to pass the time with. Nothing that made you think too hard or was made out to be more than what it is. Although toward the end of the series; a bit of story does come into play with an ending that certainly left those whom watched all the way til the end wanting more. 

Number 6 - That Time I  Got Reincarnated as a Slime

This would defiantly be in my top 5 best anime of the year and just narrowly missed the top 5 of my favorites. Slime is about a man whom gets stabbed and passes. But wouldn’t you know it... He gets teleported to another world yay!!! However he is reincarnated as a slime. Which in most another world animes (except for Konosuba), slime’s tend to be weakest creatures in the world. This little slime however, gets granted with a very OP move that he exploits to it’s fullest. Without giving to much away, the story revolves around him and his adventure in this new mysterious world along with the companies along the way. 13 episodes and I haven’t gotten tired of discovering more of the world and its races. I want to know what happens next because the characters once again, make the show a memorable one. 

Number 5 - Laid Back Camp

Alright the top 5! What did I enjoy more than My Hero and Slime?! An anime about 5 girls that go camping. That’s it. That’s the whole show. Although I will admit, this show isn’t for everyone as, it can get rather boring. With that being said, this has got to be one of the most comfiest anime’s of all time. A show where you can just turn on and shut your mind off from everything going on in the world. The art of some of these shots has got to be some of the best animation of the year. Some of the best moments are when the characters see a lake, a mountain, the sky at its most beautiful moments just before and after the sun rises. All locations visited in the anime are locations in real life where the crew drew inspiration from and recreated it. Seeing the characters react makes the viewer feel as if you’re right there with them experiencing it for the first time. A no pun indented, laid back anime that makes you appreciate the world we live in just a little more. 

Number 4 - Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai 

This one in all honesty is extremely hard to explain the plot of. At first glance one might think, oh where we go, another harem.  And even though it almost instigated a war of who is best waifu of the series, it became so much more. Most people who have seen this agree that it pretty much will become an instant classic and on most people’s list, anime of the year. The story follows Sakuta Azusagawa as he one day finds a girl dressed in a bunny suit in a library. However, he seems to be the only one to notice her as no one else bats an eye. The girl who’s name is Mai finds it to be intriguing as well. Calling this  Adolescence or Puberty Syndrome, Sakuta decides to figure out what exactly is going on. Along the way, he forms a friendship with Mai and helps another’s who suffer from the syndrome. The basic summary does not do the show justice, but I still highly recommend it to anyone. 

Number 3 - A Place Further Than the Universe

This is one show that really hits home on a multitude of levels. The story is very quite simple. Four girls who travel to Antarctica. That’s about it. How can that simple plot be relatable is the slightest? I’m pretty sure we’ve all at some point or another day dream of completing our goals in life, our plans our ambitions, that you’ll one day get to. One day, not today because of school, work, responsibilities, not feeling up to it, money being an issue. But one day you’ll get to it. Maybe. It’ll turn to days, weeks, months, years even before you even think about doing it. And before you know it. You’re youth is gone, and won’t be able to do the things you once dreams of doing. Maybe all you needed was that one sign or push to get you moving. This is where the main character comes Mari comes in. She has plans and goals she wants to achieve, but the fear of the unknown and anxiety have always held her back. It all changes when she one days meets a girl named Shirase, whom is the complete oppose of her. She will not let anyone or anything stop her from achieving her dream of reaching Antarctica and searching for her mother. Her mother disappeared 3 years ago and has been trying to fund her way there ever since, despite everyone around her ridiculing her for it. Inspired by this Mari takes that step that she’s been needing and joins Shirase. This attracts two other characters whom have their own reasons for joining for they have also been looking for that push. The rest of the show is them bonding and having experiences they would of never had. The second to last episode is where things really hit the fan. The outcome was known already, but now she’s able to move on and live her life. It was made more special that the journey was made with friends. Reminding us that some experiences, are best experienced with those you love and care for. To not be afraid of the unknown, to take the step toward your dreams instead of them remaining dreams. 

Number 2 - Sword Art Online: Alicization 

What the fuck?! Sword Art? Is actually good? What the fuck is going on?! Even though Sword Art is one of my all time favorite series, I will admit, most of it is horrible. Alicization pretty much makes up for most of the bad. We once again follow Kirito as he’s trapped in this new world after being stabbed with a syringe and goes into a coma. Stupid way to get him in there but regardless, this is where the story takes off.  Without giving anything away, if you’ve ever been a fan of Sword Art I highly recommend giving this a try.Because what’s better than one Kirito? Two Kirito’s! With one being blonde. 

Number 1 - Darling in The Franxx

Well, we’ve come to this. My favorite anime of the year, Darling in the Franxx!! It had everything, character development to where each character actually something to offer, ever changing story that left us wanting more, amazing mecha fights and action, a romance that was fleshed out and very well written. Arguably the best anime of 2018. These 15 episodes were simply amazing. Because the series ended at episode 15. Because nothing else happened after. There totally weren’t 8 more episodes.... That completely fucked this series. Studio Trigger literally had no idea where to take the show and it became a cluster fuck. What was a shoe in for anime of the year became one of the most disappointing anime’s of all time. I could probably make a whole video on why it is...... BECAUSE FUCK STUDIO TRIGGER, AND FUCK YOUR SPACE BATTLES. at least we had SSSS. Gridman.. heard that was okay.. 

Number 1 - Hinamatsuri

Where do I even begin with Hinamatsuri. I haven’t had this much fun with a comedy since Konosuba. The story is one day, a yakuza member named Nitta has something fall on his head. When he checks to see what hit it, he sees a girl inside this egg shaped box whom turns out has amazing psychic powers and is named Hina. He reluctantly takes her in. For being a comedy/ slice of life anime, this show has amazing character development . By the end of the show, most characters are almost new people by the end of it. The direction of this was handled extremely well and not rushed. It felt more fluid than forced which felt natural for these characters. I had a great time seeing all these different characters interact with one another. A few thing the series touches on are homeless, humanity, running way, acceptance, family, gambling, and money. Each character deals with one or more of these and explores them in depth. And makes one appreciate what we already have. If you’re a fan of comedy and slice of life, then I highly recommend watching. 

Well there you have it. Surprised you’re still even here. But thanks for reading all the way through. I really appreciate it. Fuck Darling in the Franxx. 002 and Ichigo are best girls though...

[equalmeasurefiction]

Holy Daddy Issues, Tenzin! Part 3- Character Development and Character Agency

So, what if Korra had recovered by actually experiencing the world?

Now, the obvious answer is: it would have been a wonderful moment of character growth.  But I don’t think that’s a satisfying answer.  I’d say that this question deserves some very thorough answering and, in light of this series of posts, needs to be answered as two separate questions:

1. What would it have been like if Korra had recovered by actually experiencing the world?

2. What would it have been like if family weren’t the central theme of Legend of Korra?  What if Legend of Korra had actually been ABOUT KORRA?

What would it have been like?

I think it would have been great for Korra to connect with characters who weren’t related to her or Aang.  The audience would have finally been able to see Korra interact with common people and they would have been able to get a feel for the world outside of Korra’s immediate friendship circle.  This could have been a wonderful moment of growth for her character.

However, I also think that this growth would have been too little, too late.  This episode should have happened immediately after Korra lost her bending the first time.

Now, part of the problem here is that Legend of Korra kept being jerked around by Nick.

I’m going to rehash a little of what I said in Holy Daddy Issues, Tenzin! Part 2 (HDIT!2): Legend of Korra isn’t really a show about Korra, it’s about family.  Since the show is about family, the arcs that take precedence aren’t the ones that place Korra’s character development at the center of the narrative.  So Korra’s development over the course of the series is very uneven when it happens.

There is no through line in her development.  We don’t really see her start to deal with the consequences of her actions until Season 4 and that’s much, much too late.  That episode should have followed Season 1.  The audience shouldn’t have had to wait two entire seasons to see Korra Alone in Season 4.

I have a personal theory that, while the arcs in Legend of Korra are well situated for a story about ‘family’ and ‘filial relationships,’ they’re thematically out of order for Korra’s own growth/emotional arc as the Avatar.  Season 1 is perfectly fine where it is, but, for Korra’s growth and development in Season 1 to be meaningful and powerful--for the show to be about her instead of about everyone around her--the subsequent seasons need to be reshuffled.  And the events and growth that Korra experienced in Season 4 should have immediately followed Season 1.

Why?

Because Season 4 picks up right where Season 1 left off in Korra’s story.  Korra Alone, despite being an accurate depiction of PTSD was a rehash of Season 1′s finale two seasons too late.  Yes, Korra Alone set us up for a more nuanced look at Korra’s state of mind, but the emotions and issues that caused Korra’s trauma were fundamentally the same.

In Season 1, Korra is tormented by a menacing adult male who is out to take her power and her status as the Avatar away from her.  He tells her that he is out to destroy her (remove her bending) and that the world doesn’t need her anymore.

In Season 3, Korra is pursued by a menacing adult male who is out to take her power and status as the Avatar away from her.  He tells her that he is out to destroy her (kill her) and that the world doesn’t need her anymore.

Yes, Amon and Zaheer are different antagonists (antagonist is the wrong word, but that’s another meta).  Yes, their reasons for taking Korra down are different and compelling for different reasons, but their relationship with Korra is fundamentally the same.  They exist to destroy her and both do significant damage to her in the course of their struggle with her.

While Korra’s clearly not afraid of Zaheer (she was terrified of Amon), she still ends up in almost exactly the same position:

She is left badly hurt and without the ability to bend and her status as the Avatar is compromised.

In Season 1, the worst thing Korra could imagine was losing her bending and her power as the Avatar.  In Seasons 3 and 4 she hasn’t changed.  The thing that causes Korra the most suffering is the fact that she’s lost her bending and her status as Avatar has been compromised.  Yes, she’s been traumatized by Zaheer and yes the damage is deeper, but everything still comes down to Korra’s power and status.

So what was the point of Season 2 and Season 3 if Season 4 starts Korra off where Season 1 left her (before Aang showed up to fix everything)?

And that’s why I say that Korra Alone is “too little, too late”, because it shows exactly how little thought and energy went into the development of the main character.  Her emotional arc and development as an Avatar is never the central focus of the series, but it should be focal point.  We should watch Korra, as a young Avatar, blunder through the world, make mistakes, and live with the consequences.  Instead, Korra’s growth is put aside and time and energy is spent on the development of secondary characters who aren’t central to the storyline (I’m looking at you Tenzin, with your beautiful ‘I’m not my father’ story-arc).  As a result, Korra is spared the development she needs to make her a powerful and engaging character.

Now, this isn’t to say that Seasons 2 and 3 weren’t entertaining and that I didn’t enjoy them (though Season 2 is a bit...eh).  I love this show.  But I think that if the content of the seasons had been changed around a bit, the series could have given Korra the development she needed.  And that’s the painful part--it would have only taken a few small changes to make the series a whole lot better.

What would it have been like if Legend of Korra had actually been about Korra?

It’s hard to say what the series would have looked like if Legend of Korra had actually been about its main character.  I have no idea what it would have looked like, but I can identify core problems with the series that actual prevent Korra from being the central character in her own narrative.  I’ve covered a few of theme in these posts already, but I’m going to just do a rundown here, because I have a few more points to make on this topic.

Now this is by no means a definitive list and I’m probably missing a few things, but this series wasn’t meant to be that long and I can always add more later, so... Here we go:

The family theme overwhelmed the show and moved the narrative away from Korra’s development. (See: Holy Daddy Issues Tenzin Parts 1&2)

The series wasted a lot of time when they “reset” Korra at the beginning of Season 2.  They ended up spending two seasons putting her back in the same place Season 1 left her at before Aang showed up. (See above)

Korra is a female character who has very little agency in her own series...

Since we’ve covered points 1 and 2, we’re going to explore point three.

Let’s talk about the difference between an ‘active character’ and a ‘character with agency.’  See, the vast majority of characters are ‘active characters,’ because they do things.  All character HAVE to do things in order to participate in a story.  But characters only have agency if their actions and choices 1. directly influence the plot and 2. the actions ‘belong’ to them and aren’t ‘permitted’ by other characters.

In order for Legend of Korra to be about Korra, Korra would have to have agency.  And Korra, despite being strong and active and aggressive, doesn’t have much agency.  Yes, she does things, but her actions and choices don’t influence the plot and are rarely hers.

Remember how in Season 1 Korra decided that she wanted to pro-bend and not join Tarrolok’s task-force?  That was 100% her choice.  And it was 100% Tarrlok’s choice to manipulate her into joining his task-force-- a task-force which put her in Amon’s way and moved the plot forward.

Korra’s choice to be a pro-bender wasn’t really plot relevant (yes it introduced Mako and Bolin, but the show didn’t need all those sports sequences, beautiful though they were).  Tarrlok’s choice to force her to join the task-force was totally plot relevant.  So was Amon’s choice to let Korra get away in Episode 3, The Revelation.  And so was Amon’s choice to attack the pro-bending arena--forcing Korra to act when she clearly wanted nothing to do with the plot.

And, I would like to point out that even Korra’s decision to become a pro-bender required ‘permission’ from Tenzin.  Remember how Korra and Tenzin had a huge fight in Episode 2 (A Leaf in the Wind) about pro-bending?  Yes, Korra decided to defy him, but in the end Tenzin is the one who is allowed to ‘decide’ if Korra continues with the sport.  Sure, Korra makes a quip about having already signed on for the championships, but we don’t see that conversation happen, we see the conversation where Tenzin decides that pro-bending isn’t that bad.

The episode frames Tenzin’s acceptance of pro-bending as the hinge upon which plot hangs.  It’s not about Korra’s growth, it’s about Tenzin’s.

Korra falls into the same trap that many heroines fall into (Jyn Erso, anyone?).  For all Korra’s pluck and daring, she doesn’t have much agency and her choices are rarely hers alone.  When you look at the Legend of Korra Series--and I mean really break it down, it’s apparent that Korra doesn’t do things as much as male characters ‘allow’ Korra to do things.

There is always a male character that gives Korra permission to do whatever she wants to do.  And she always looks for permission from these male characters.  When she doesn’t get permission, she’s punished.

Let’s walk through a few examples beyond the ones listed above (I’ll keep this short for everyone’s sake and because I’m going to break down all this out in another set I’ve been planning):

Season 1, Episode 1- Korra decides to run away from home and goes to Republic City.  This is something that Korra does without permission.  What happens?  She makes a mess and is punished by the police as a result.  Things are only made-right again when Tenzin permits her to stay (he decides that it’s okay).

Season 1, Episode 12- Korra decides to face down Amon and reveal the truth about him to his supporters.  1. Tarrlok decided to help her and all but GAVE her the idea.  2. Amon decides to lets her speak.  3.  Amon has already prepared an alternate story with ‘evidence.’  (I’m not even going to get into how Tarrlok and Amon are the real protagonists of Season 1, since they’re the ones who are technically making all the choices in the story).

And this isn’t a Season 1 problem.  It’s prevalent throughout the entire series.  The first four episodes of Season 2 are just one long arc that punishes Korra for choosing her own teacher and leaving Tenzin.  One could argue that Season 2 is just one long beat-down for her--every single time she makes a decision and the men around her disagree with her choice, she gets the tar kicked out of her.

Remember in Season 2, Episode 5- When Korra needs permission/help from Raiko to do her job?  And Mako decides that Korra’s overreacting about the oppression of the Southern Tribe and declares that she’s started a war?  He even decides to go behind her back and tell Raiko about Korra’s plan to recruit the United Forces.  So, in this episode, Korra needs permission from the president and her boyfriend to be the Avatar and resolve the world’s problems.  And when they deny her and she goes out on her own, she gets taken down by a giant spirit.

In Season 3 Korra listens to Tenzin and everything goes right for the most part, which means the villains have to be a bit more proactive for a change.  The only time she actively defies her elders is when she runs off into the desert to chase down Aiwei.  That’s when the Red Lotus tracks them down and the Earth Queens forces capture Asami and Korra.

Finally, we have Season 4, where Korra (finally) goes off on her own without telling anyone to try and sort herself out.  This would, of course, be fine if Kuvira hadn’t decided to become a dictator while Korra was AWOL, so one could argue that Korra’s being punished for just trying to be independent for a single episode...

I’m not going to keep going, because this is getting a little painful.  I’ve got a nice big list of these instances and these are only a few of them.  I am going to point out here that this trend in the series cheapens almost every single one of Korra’s triumphs.

When you take a character’s agency away from them and give it to other characters, the character’s importance is diminished.  The character can’t own their victories and audience is left frustrated.  They want to like the character and they want to sympathize and empathize with the character, but when the character has no agency, the audience feels thwarted.

I guess what I’m saying is that in order for Legend of Korra to really be about Korra, the entire underlying structure of the series would need a bit of an overhaul.  The family theme would need to be a bit more subdued, there would  need to be a stronger focus on Korra’s development, and she’d need to be able to make her own decisions without being punished every single time she crossed an grown man/adult.

All this would require some small, but very significant changes to the series.  We’d probably lose some of the pro-bending and Tenzin’s role might change a bit, but Korra would be ‘stronger’ for it.  On the whole, I think a series with a stronger lead would have been much more satisfying.

But then, if this series did exist I wouldn’t have written this essay or spent so much time learning about the series... So I’m kind of glad that Korra exists as it does.  All these problems are, as I’ve said before, a wonderful foundation to build on.

[metacog]

Summary of Dealing With An Ambiguous World, by Bilahari Kausikan, Lecture 1

This book is a collection of lectures Kausikan delivered as the SR Nathan fellow for 2016. The background of the lectures is the work of a foreign service officer in Singapore - a tiny, yet exceptional island surrounded by larger, potentially difficult neighbours.

Kausikan was a 2nd generation Singaporean government servant. He served as a junior officer under Lee Kuan Yew and SR Nathan, the first Foreign Minister. Much later in his career he became the Perm Sec of the Foreign Ministry, and is now, in his retirement, an Ambassador-at-Large of Singapore. His stories of the Singaporean foreign service in the early days seem a little like the Wild West, where nobody had much experience and they were all learning as they went along.

The main themes of Kausikan’s lectures here are that of education. Kausikan’s goal is to educate the public on the realities that bind Singapore's foreign policy.

Despite being a civil servant (or perhaps because he is one), Kausikan is staunchly pro PAP. He says that Singapore being parochial isn’t a good thing, yet displays many such behaviours throughout the lectures. He says debate is good, but shoots down opposing viewpoints (by opposition politicians, by academics like P.J. Thum) as ‘stupid’.

Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed these lectures. I find Kausikan hugely entertaining and very educational; the q&a segments in particular resembled very much an uncle in a kopitiam holding forth about the world, insulting every other country under the sun. Except this is one of Singapore's Ambassadors at Large, and likely knows what he is talking about.

Lecture 1: An Age Without Definition

Bilahari opens with the premise for this series of lectures: that while in the past Singapore's foreign officers could operate without public scrutiny, this is not desirable in the long run and less tenable in the today's complex world. His lectures are intended to educate Singaporeans on the parameters that many in the foreign service and civil service understand as constraints on Singapore as a small island state. He thinks these constraints aren't well understood within the public.

Before he begins, Kausikan makes 3 general points about foreign policy.

A good foreign policy must take the world as it is. This is easier said than done because information is incomplete, deception is expected, and humans are good at deceiving themselves.

Foreign policy is also hard to comprehend because it deals with human relations. The very effort of attempting to understand foreign relations changes the environment you are trying to understand.

Because this is so complex, humans rely on mental frameworks to simplify this complexity. This means that whatever you use to understand can only ever be partially or contingently true. (Kausikan doesn't want to exaggerate too much, there are accepted norms amongst countries that can be accepted as true. But the risk exists.)

In short, Kausikan thinks the main difficulty of being good at foreign policy is the ability to ensure your mental frameworks map well to reality. The worst kind of error is when you believe absolutely that your beliefs and ideas are completely true, and there are no alternatives. This is the most dangerous error, and the most likely to be committed, because of a higher than usual level of uncertainty in international relations.

This segues into the main topic of this lecture. Why is there a high level of uncertainty and ambiguity? The reason is the end of the Cold War.

The Cold War made international relations simpler because it had a well defined structure. The danger of the Cold War drew the structure in sharp focus. Clarity and danger created order: the superpowers couldn't afford to fight directly with each other. Instead they conducted proxy wars. This meant that as long as you were prudent, and a little lucky, it was clear to a nation state playing at the periphery how to position itself to keep out of the way of the superpowers and to stay out of proxy wars.

That clarity ended after the Cold War ended.

For a brief moment it seemed like one country controlled the levers of the world. The Western side of the Cold War conflict was an American creation, and both sides claimed universality of worldview. With the Soviet side gone, American power, ideas and institutions ruled supreme, and led to a declaration from some quarters of "the end of history". But that didn't last, with the failures of the recent wars in the Middle East and the meltdown on Wall Street.

Without global structure, global leadership is diffused. It becomes difficult to deal with international problems: refugees, nuclear proliferation, climate change.

Some now think, with the G20, that we have a entered a multipolar world. Kausikan rejects this idea. Says that the US is the only truly global power, but now one where its limits are self evident.

Kausikan also rejects Ian Bremmer's idea that we are in a G0 formless world. The US order is fraying, but still exists; and the G20 coexists with many other international institutions like the UN and the World Bank and the IMF. These structures aren't going away.

Kausikan now reviews the various places power lies:

American power still exists. But it cannot lead alone. While the US also did not lead alone during the Cold War, today the lack of similar danger gives no reason for other countries to accept US leadership except on an ad hoc and partial basis. So: lots of ambiguity.

Europe: the end of the Cold War has made clearer the differences between American and European values. The most liberal American is less interventionist (in terms of government) than the most conservative European. Kausikan then attacks the overly idealistic concept of the EU, and says that is doomed to fail. These arguments are not new; LKY is known for saying the same for decades. A supranational organisation is too far ahead of its time, and now Europe is grappling with its internal problems. It will have to come to terms with its failed ideals. Kausikan sees this as the ultimate manifestation of mental model being too far from reality. Therefore, Europe is not a major global geopolitical force any longer.

America's east Asia allies: Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea ... these can only play regional roles, with sporadic responsibilities elsewhere. But even in east Asia their power is threatened by an ascendant china.

What about BRICS? Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa? Kausikan points out the term was crested as a marketing strategy by a fund manager. Not a real geopolitical concept despite having a bank and some meetings.

Russia: dissatisfied power, smouldering with resentment at the loss of its superpower status. Kausikan thinks the US and Europe made a strategic mistake in mistreating Russia at the end of the Cold War. For now, Russia is still powerful, has the political will to protect its core interests (e.g. Syria and Ukraine). But economically and demographically on the downward trend, and without a coherent global vision for itself. Kausikan doesn't think that they have a role to play in Asia, (he mentions elsewhere that without a Pacific fleet they are irrelevant in Asia, and their current trajectory is that they're likely to become junior partner to China)

India unlike Russia is not dissatisfied. It has always had a global vision of itself, but that vision makes it wary of playing a major power's game. India has a long history, and Kausikan thinks they are on the upward trajectory. But because India is so large and so complex to govern, its preoccupations will be mostly inward. Its external preoccupations are mostly with Pakistan. It has ignored China for decades after a disastrous border war with them, and doesn't really know what to do with regard to China now that it cannot afford to ignore them. It has been hyping a relationship with Japan, but Kausikan thinks geographic realities will mean this never amounts to much.

China: ooh, China. Any new global order will likely have US China relation as its main pillar. But we are not yet a G2 world (nor is a G2 world a foregone conclusion). 3 points about this relationship, in service of Kausikan's point that the world is ambiguous:

China US relations are very ambiguous. They are not friends, not enemies, and not neutral partners. Profound interdependence is mixed with profound strategic distrust.

The main beneficiary of the end of the Cold War isn't the west but China. It is free from major international responsibilities and a free rider in plugging into the globalised post Cold War order, with prosperous results.

What will China do with its newfound status and power? Kausikan thinks even its leaders are not sure. It has no incentive to change the current world order, from which it is the main beneficiary, but it also does not have a deep attachment to it, as this same system was responsible for "100 years of humiliation". Xi Jinping has been the most ambitious yet in his pronouncement of a global Chinese vision, but this is not clear, not a plan, and not consistent all the time with its actions.

And so we have the world as it is today: an ambiguous, unclear map of relationships where no major power is necessarily a friend, an enemy or truly neutral with each other. Kausikan thinks this will last for decades.

Why did we end up in this world? Why was the promise of a post Cold War world not fulfilled? Kausikan argues that one key factor was the attitudes of the Americans at the end of the Cold War. They were nakedly triumphant, confident of the universality and superiority of their beliefs, which made it harder for the world to accept American leadership.

Whereas, with time, it became clearer that America mixed up the end of the Cold War with the fall of the Soviet Union. Kausikan thinks history has shown the former to be triggered by events that happened in Germany, and the latter by Gorbachev's failed attempt to reform the Soviet Union. Americans have little part to play in the direct events.

(I think this part of Kausikan's argument is the weakest, but to be fair he was near the end of his lecture. Can't resist quoting this bit, though: in his 1992 State of the Union Address, George HW Bush declared "By the grace of God, America won the Cold War ... A world once divided into two armed camps now recognises one sole and preeminent power, the United States of America. And this they regard with no dread. For the world trusts us with power, and the world is right." Later, in his memoirs, Bush says that it is likely the Cold War would have ended regardless of whatever the Americans might have done.)

Kausikan's point about post Cold War American failure is to illustrate 'the stubborn persistence of mental frameworks, irrespective of appropriateness and in defiance of empirical evidence ... (this) universalist impulse still lingers ... and continues to have real effects on policy." Inappropriate mental frameworks may not matter much when the world order is settled. They matter a great deal in an ambiguous world.

The basic strategic challenge facing all countries in this world, then, is how do we position ourselves to preserve the widest range of options and avoid being forced into invidious choices? There is no longer any clarity in the world order. This is the primary challenge of Singapore's foreign policy.

[recentanimenews]

One Piece World Seeker Is A Monkey D. Luffy Highlight Reel

  There are a lot of ways that One Piece World Seeker could've gone horribly, tragically wrong. And honestly, sometimes it felt like it was about to. The second or third time a random villager tells you "Hey, could you find two potatoes for me!" or "I need three small flowers so that I can ask a girl on a date!", you get that terrible feeling in the pit of your gut that says "Oh no. This might be all that the game is. This might be it."

    But even when it's lackluster (and trust me, finding items for strangers is rarely anything but), One Piece World Seeker rides on a wave of simply being inherently pleasant to play. In fact, I don't think it's ever been this fun to play as an anime character in a non-fighting game. Playing as Luffy is rad. Zipping up on signs and propelling yourself through the air never gets old. Building yourself up so that you can use your Gum Gum Elephant Gatling Gun attack or go into Gear Fourth is always a treat. And gaining new powers so that you can find fresh ways to explore the island makes updating your skills a fun exercise, rather than something that you feel forced to do just so you can keep up with the game.

  I know that some of you are probably hesitant to purchase this game because you can only play as Luffy and none of the other members of the Straw Hat Crew, but if there's one definite thing that can be said about World Seeker, it's that at least the character that you DO get to play as is awesome.

    But even if you can't play as them, don't worry about not getting to hang out with your various Straw Hat pals. They can be found on the Thousand Sunny or around the Prison Island, giving you missions and helping you with your equipment and such. And along with them is basically a montage of One Piece villains, many of which you fight in battles that often come out of nowhere. But we'll get to that in a second. 

  The plot of One Piece World Seeker is this: Prison Island is a land divided, with its citizens being either emphatically for or against the heavy navy presence there. And stuck in the middle is Jeanne, daughter of the former leader of the island and now trying desperately to keep things from falling into chaos and corruption. Her brother is Isaac, and he is mysterious and has sweet robot hands. That's all I have to say about him. 

    Over the course of the game, you'll delve into the secrets of the island, duel with many pirates and navy operatives, and try to help Jeanne. And man, does Jeanne need a lot of help. Though she does grow over the course of the game, many early portions involve her being unable to settle even the slightest dispute among islanders, only to have Luffy remind everyone to be nice for once and/or beat them up.

  In One Piece World Seeker, Luffy is not only a prolific adventurer, but a relationship counselor and therapist. Somehow, Luffy's suggestion of "Hey, it's family! You should help 'em out!" fixes all woes. And on that note, I never noticed just how much One Piece has in common with the Fast and the Furious franchise when it comes to their themes and structure. A group the collects members as it goes in order to complete increasingly huge and explosive missions, all while constantly reaffirming the importance of family? Huh. That's a neat realization.

    However, the main draw of this game isn't the conflict resolution discussions, surprisingly. It's the open world adventuring, and it only gets better as it goes along. I know that open world games usually suffer from the opposite: You're presented with this big, huge Gotham City or ancient civilization or whatever, and you come to find that it's mostly just an empty slog that doesn't improve no matter how good you get at the game. With World Seeker, as I mentioned, it definitely improves as you acquire more skills. There are copious Fast Travel points, but as you build up Luffy's attributes, you'll find that the canyons and rivers and mountains that once seemed tiresome to maneuver around are now easily traversable.

  And while it isn't the most inspired open world setting that I've ever seen, there are some places that are legitimately beautiful. Ruby City, which is filled with farm land, is so nice to behold and run around in. The underground prison, dampened by the water that you have to drain out of it and lit by dim lights and alarm traps, is super cool to look at, provided that you've taken out all the guards and aren't currently getting annihilated by sea stone bullets. The little towns are very quaint and cute and honestly, the worst section of the game is Steel City, and even then, you can swing from sign to sign in a Spider-Man-esque display of "Please do not sue us, Marvel."

  Oh, and those boss battles with villains that I talked about? Stay on your guard, because along with being fun, they can beat the crap out of you when you least expect it. I did not think I'd have a problem with the three jerk brothers from Germa 66, nor did I think a sudden skirmish with Admiral Kizaru would be that tough. But the game lures you into a false sense of confidence where you imagine that most battles are won by waiting for an enemy to stop shooting before you rush forward with rubber punches. No, you gotta learn how to properly evade, how to take down aerial foes without pausing too long, and when to unleash your special skills. There was nothing quite as sad as thinking that my Red Hawk was gonna take down Fujitora, only to discover that he was blocking and about to bring down a meteor on me.

    Yes, the "family reunion" approach to bringing in characters can sometimes be a little confusing when you think about the story being told. You wonder why Tashigi is hanging out, or why Buggy just happened to be near you, or just what part Trafalgar Law has to play in all this, considering that when he first appears in the game, he says about two sentences and then leaves for hours. But World Seeker made me yell, outloud, "OH MAN. CROCODILE'S HERE?!?" at 3 AM, so I can forgive a lot of that. 

  However, World Seeker is not a perfect game. Much like with the main One Piece series, you're often left wondering "Okay, how much left is there?" This is especially true with the types of missions that I mentioned at the start of the article. You go find someone, and then they ask you to collect something, but then you have to beat up some no-name pirates, before going to another guy to settle it all. It's busy work, and as much as it's a staple of modern open world games, it still sucks to see it here.

  Also, the lack of voice acting can often be a bummer. There is SOME voice acting, but it's usually reserved for major cut scenes and those are few and far between. You just end up having to make do with reading the dialogue and hearing repetitive noises from each character, though I'll never get tired of Mayumi Tanaka's iconic "I'm exhausted and I want meat" sigh for Luffy. 

    Lastly, the story is often not very engaging. I liked learning more about the hidden plot behind the game's events and about the Dyna Stones, gems of immense power that could destroy everything. But hearing about the squabbles between anti and pro navy people made little difference in my overall impression of the game, especially since most of this part of the story took place as you had yet more conversations with townsfolk about why they were so grumpy. 

  Overall, One Piece World Seeker is a game that, despite a few narrative shortcomings, I had a ton of fun playing. It's hard to determine what kind of open world experience that One Piece would "deserve," considering that One Piece, along with Tolkien's Middle Earth, are basically the best depictions of "open world" fiction. But if you're looking for a game where, ten or twenty hours in, you're still not tired of using Monkey D. Luffy to explore forests and punch Akainu in the mouth, then pick up World Seeker. It's not the ultimate One Piece game, but it's one of the best times I've had playing one.

  REVIEW ROUNDUP:

+ Playing as Luffy is joyous, and will keep you coming back to the game

+ Seeing all of the different heroes and villains is always nice

+ Some sections of the game are really, really pretty

+ Learning new skills is quick, easy, and never a chore

+ Captain Buggy is here!

- The lack of voice acting is pretty disappointing

- The story is pretty muddled

  Are you planning to pick up One Piece World Seeker? What aspects of the game are you most excited about? Let us know in the comments!

  -------------------

  Daniel Dockery is a writer/editor for Crunchyroll that is currently playing more World Seeker. Ask him about it on Twitter. 

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features! 

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[placetobenation]

With such a large history to play with, discovering the beauty of Bob Backlund’s charisma or the connection of Bruno Sammartino to the MSG crowd was a new development throughout this project similar to rewatching The Godfather and On the Waterfront to rediscover the genius of Marlon Brando. WWE may not have always been YOUR promotion but for the better part of 50 years, it was THE promotion in the United States and transformed the pro wrestling landscape. This project serves to praise the individuals that best helped shape the vision of Vince McMahon Sr. and Jr. Place to be Nation is proud to present to you a ranking of the Greatest WWE Wrestlers Ever.

– Chad Campbell

Note: Results of this list are based on 118 ballots received between May and December 2017. Voters were asked to submit their list of the 100 Greatest WWE Wrestlers of all time and consider only their WWWF/WWF/WWE career. Ties were broken based on 1) number of ballots a wrestler appeared on and 2) high vote. 

Every wrestler who received at least one vote will be recognized in the coming weeks. Please stay tuned to Place to Be Nation as we reveal all of the honorable mentions right through the cream of the crop. Read the other installments, both written and audio, of this project here.

39. Scott Hall Total Points: 6,149 Total Ballots: 112 Average Rank: 46.1 High Vote: 14 Low Vote: 94 High Voter: Andy Halleen

Nuance: Razor Ramon was with the WWF for four years, and his return as Scott Hall lasted only a few months, so his longevity is limited. He worked as both a heel and a babyface and was effective in both roles. He had limited tag team work, but did team with the 1-2-3 Kid on and off. Whatever the “It” factor is, Razor Ramon had it. The Bad Guy oozing machismo was cool, which was undeniable and something wrestlers generally either have or don’t.

Jump Up Moments: His upset loss to Kid was one of the biggest moments in the early years of Raw, and led to a nice story arc where he would feud with, team with and feud with Kid again. His biggest bouts were excellent ladder matches against Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania X and later SummerSlam 1995 over the IC Title. Ramon challenged Bret Hart for the WWF Title at Royal Rumble 1993 in a good match. He had a memorable feud with Goldust before leaving the company in 1996. Ramon was a four-time Intercontinental Champion.

Promos/Character: The Bad Guy was a fantastic character, colorful enough to fit in with the cartoon world of the early 90s WWF, but gritty enough and realistic enough to stand out. He was oozing machismo, dripping with gold (from his neck and often from the IC title) and a dead-eye shot when flicking his ever-present toothpick. Razor was introduced to WWF fans through a series of well-done vignettes, based on the Scarface character, where Ramon would talk encourage fans to “Look at me, mang” and see how he was about to take the WWF by storm. Razor was a good talker, but may have been hancuffed a bit by the gimmick when it comes to delivering his promos. Still, the character is one of the most memorable of its time (or any time really) and it’s impossible to picture anyone besides Scott Hall doing it effectively, even if the WWF tried that once.

Workrate: Razor was a good, solid worker, always capable of delivering a strong match. He was very athletic for a man of his size, threw good punches and had a cool, unique and effective finisher in the Razor’s Edge. Unless he was backdropped over the ropes trying to hit the move. Which happened every match, but we digress. Ramon could occasionally climb to higher heights as a worker, as he did in the two ladder matches with Michaels. He also had a tag team match teaming with Kid against Shawn Michaels and Diesel that was fantastic as well.

Staff Thoughts: The Bad Guy was one of the coolest characters the company ever did, mang! The vignettes, the gold chains, the toothpick, the accent, it was all very memorable, and undoubtedly led to countless eye injuries from errant toothhpick flips of fans trying to ooze machismo. His match with Kid on Raw was a great surprise moment and led to a cool story arc between the two characters. His ladder matches with Shawn are fantastic and were revolutionary at the time. We’ll just forget about the NWO run on his return, even though it did lead to a WrestleMania match with Steve Austin, shall we? You can hear JT and Aaron talk about the Bad Guy on this Making the Cut podcast.

From the Voters: “Memorable character who was good on the mic and in the ring. Threw the best punches in the history of the business. Ladder match with Shawn is an all timer. Liked his matches with Bret too at Royal Rumble and King of the Ring 93. Even his matches with Diesel were pretty good I thought. If not for personal issues he easily could’ve been World Champion, but still didn’t do too shabby as he was the IC Champ a lot. Only thing against him is longevity as his Razor run checked in at only a little under four years.” – Wade Ferrari, June 2, 2017

“Razor is someone that kept me interested during a down time in the WWF, he came in strong in late 92 and really had a great run through 1995 and pretty much owned the IC division his entire run. Worked well with Bret, Jarrett, all the Clique guys, and had some fun squash matches on those early Raws, probably a middle of the list guy for me.” – Sean Zern, June 9, 2017

“Razor seems like a good ‘short run’ candidate. He wasn’t around all that long, but I think he’s a very memorable character, I like him as a worker, he has some memorable moments (losing to Kid, ladder match), held the IC title 4 times when that meant something, and was very over once he turned babyface. I think he would have been accepted as world champ in 95. It’s a back end kind of resume, but I think he merits serious consideration.” – Andy Russell, July 19, 2017

38. Ultimate Warrior Total Points: 6,437 Total Ballots: 105 Average Rank: 39.7 High Vote: 8 Low Vote: 100 High Voter: Andy LaBar

Nuance: Ultimate Warrior and nuance go together like water and a grease fire. Warrior is pure, unbridled insanity. A man, no, myth from Parts Unknown who had one job – destroy in an Ultimate way, use his energy for great applause, to get in and out and be unbeatable. Warrior came in in 1987, and was gone in 1992, and the less we pretend to care about his 1996 run, the better. He was muscles, rope-shaking, and gorilla press slams. Warrior was a Rob Liefeld comic before such a thing existed, like no one before him nor after him. The problem is, when you create someone who is unbeatable, who is literally not of this world – you put yourself into a corner that is hard to come out of. His tag team runs were fun, if unmemorable.

Jump Up Moments: The Warrior lacked nuance because he was one jump-up moment after another. A candle that burned so bright, it went out entirely too quick. From the moment the guitar riffs of his music hit and Warrior ran out to the ring, shaking the ropes, spinning around, pointing at the sky, there are few things in wrestling more iconic from a imagery standpoint as that. He worked jobbers and squash matches for a year, before surprising the crowd at SummerSlam 88 by destroying the Honky Tonk Man and ending his lengthy IC title run. He wrestled Andre the Giant on SNME, Ted DiBiase in Tokyo, and he’s beaten Randy Savage, Rick Rude, Andre the Giant and Hulk Hogan as well. He BEAT Hogan in an excellent main event at WrestleMania VI, was given the ball to run with and blew it. Lastly, as morbid as it is – the way that Warrior died is as much myth as anything, and seems to be the only way this BEING could go out. Returning to the company after two decades, being inducted into the Hall of Fame, showing up at WrestleMania XXX, giving a promo at Raw and then dying the next day – intense and unreal – just like his life.

Promos/Character: “DIG YOUR CLAWS INTO MY ORGANS! STRETCH INTO MY TENDONS! BURY YOUR ANCHORS INTO MY BONES FOR THE POWER OF THE WARRIOR WILL ALWAYS PREVAIL!”

“NOW YOU MUST DEAL WITH THE CREATION OF ALL THE UNPLEASANTRIES IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE AS I FEEL THE INJECTION FROM THE GODS ABOVE!”

“I WAS SENT IN A CAPSULE FROM A PLACE NOT FROM HERE AND I CAME HERE FOR ONE REASON: TO ATTACK AND KEEP COMIN’. NOT TO ASK, BUT JUST TO GIVE. NOT TO WANT, BUT JUST TO SEND.”

“NORMAL PEOPLE, PEOPLE THAT WALK THE STREETS EVERY DAY, WE CANNOT UNDERSTAND!”

Come on!

Workrate: Say what you will about the Ultimate Warrior as a technical wrestler – he had almost nothing in that category, but due to this energy, the Warrior was one of the best big match wrestlers of his era. So while one would be hard pressed to point to little things here and there that make the Warrior great inside the ring, his matches that are highly thought of are amongst the best of the early 90s in WWF. He has legit four-star matches with Rick Rude, Randy Savage and one of the biggest Main Event feel wars of all time with Hulk Hogan. Watching Warrior is like reconfiguring your definition and notions of what “workrate” is. He obviously has stinkers, but to the idea that he is one of the worst of all time is unfounded – he has some of the most memorable matches in company history.

Staff Thoughts: Yeah, I’ve gushed here. And I’ll get this out of the way here, even as the high voter on Warrior – he was a real piece of crap human outside of the ring (and perhaps even inside), but as laid out in the “Andy and Chad talk the GWWE” podcast, Warrior is the purest distillation of 80s and 90s excess – a character that was unlike any that came before (or that capitalized on all those that tried), and one that will forever be impossible to do again. Warrior came at the perfect time, lasted the perfect amount of time and will go down as one of the most memorable wrestlers in the history of wrestling. The facepaint, the tassles, the music, the promos. There is no humanity within the Ultimate Warrior – he is escapism, pure and simple and that’s something we could stand to value a little bit more in wrestling. Oh, and the match with Savage at WrestleMania VII is STILL the best story the company has ever told.

From the Voters: “Ol Jim was a sack of shit. I love warrior. I think his best matches are among the best in wwf/e history. I love his promos, his look, nostalgia or not. To this day, I get excited when Warrior is on tv. It’s the ultimate unreality, the ultimate distillation of what wwf tried and tried and tried. I expect to be the high man on Warrior.” – Andy LaBarr, November 3, 2017

“To me a prime example of what the WWF was best at in the late 80s and early 90s which was creating larger than life characters. He will go down in the lure as one of the more colorful people in WWE history. To me that has to be in consideration, I feel the in ring hurts his cause to be more of a threat but still should be on the list.” – Danny Louis Kuchler, June 7, 2017

“He is a top performer worthy of this list. Sure, his amphetamine-inspired promos were difficult to decipher as a child. To his credit, he worked his tail off to get his character over, which is what the WWF during the Federation years demanded.His in-ring style against enhancement wrestlers were difficult to watch, but when it was time to shine on major shows, he hardly disappointed. He got over every time. I was never a mark for the Ultimate Warrior, but he will have a strong showing on my list.” – Jeffrey Thomas, June 7, 2017

37. Randy Orton Total Points: 6,548 Total Ballots: 105 Average Rank: 38.6 High Vote: 9 Low Vote: 98 High Voter: Brad Faulk

Nuance: Randy Orton’s been around forever, debuting with the company in 2002, so he’s definitely got the longevity box checked. He’s worked as both a babyface and a heel, primarily as singles worker, but with notable tag team runs with Edge and the Wyatt Family, as well as being in stables like Evolution, the Legacy and the Authority. If you could create a prototype for a pro wrestler it would look like Randy Orton, but whatever the extra “It” factor that connects a wrestler to the audience seems to be at worst missing, or at best inconsistent, from Orton.

Jump Up Moments: Orton had strong early heel work, from his RNN updates when he was returning from his shoulder injury to joining Evolution, becoming The Legend Killer and winning the IC title. His feud with Mick Foley was a definite hit and their match at Backlash 2004 might still be Orton’s best. He became the youngest World Champion ever, defeating Chris Benoit in a very good match at SummerSlam 2004. He moved to SmackDown and feuded with the Undertaker having memorable matches at WrestleMania 21 and SummerSlam 2005, before teaming with his father to defeat the Deadman in a handicap match and then lock him in a coffin and set it on fire. They would then battle at Armageddon 2005 in a Hell in a Cell match. In 2006, he joined with Edge to form Rated RKO, feuding with D-Generation X and captured the World Tag Team Championship. Orton had a good triple-threat match for the WWE title with Triple H and John Cena at WrestleMania XXIV. Feuded with the McMahon family, punting Vince and Shane and RKO’ing Stephanie and then won the 2009 Royal Rumble to set up a match with Triple H for the title. In 2011, Orton had a great series of matches with Christian feuding over the World Heavyweight Title with matches at Capitol Punishment, Over the Limit, Money in the Bank, SummerSlam and matches on SmackDown, including a steel cage match in August. He then feuded with Mark Henry during his hot 2011 run. Orton won the 2013 Money in the Bank briefcase, which he cashed in on Daniel Bryan after he won the WWE Title, joining the Authority and serving as the foil to Bryan until WrestleMania XXX. He then joined forces with Batista and Triple H to reform Evolution to face The Shield at Extreme Rules and Payback 2014. Orton is a former IC Champion, World Tag Team Champion, SmackDown Tag Team Champion, Money in the Bank winner, two-time Royal Rumble winner, four-time World Heavyweight Champion and nine-time WWE Champion.

Promos/Character: The Legend Killing Apex Predator Viper really lacks in this category. These days all promos are scripted, but it’s really more evident than when Orton gives his often wooden performances. And Orton’s character work is that he hears voices in his head and is pretty much a douche (as a face, as well as a heel). He’s always seemed like he’s just missing a little something, just a step away from getting it with his character, but not quite getting there. And if anyone’s ever had a dumber, douchier pose we can’t think of them.

Workrate: Orton’s got all the tools to be a very good worker, and when he puts it all together he’s capable of some really great matches. The RKO OUTTA NOWHERE is a great finisher, and he’s countered shooting star presses, springboard dives, curb stomps and other moves for memorable finishes and nearfalls. He has a lot of other crisp and impactful offensive moves, like his powerslam, his draping DDT and the punt. However, his offense generally works best when he’s a babyface, but his character works best as a heel. Still, his resume of good to great matches is long and distinguished. His Backlash match with Foley in 2004 is great and the Evolution vs. Rock nN Sock at WrestleMania XX is a fun match too. Check out any of his 2011 matches with Christian, as that series is all great. He provided a good corporate heel foil for B+ Player Daniel Bryan to conquer on this road to WrestleMania XXX, and they had good matches along the way. The Shield vs. Evolution matches are great as well. While Orton’s highs are tremendously high, it should be noted he goes through lengthy periods where he seems to mail it in, and can also be guilty of dreck like his WrestleMania and House of Horrors matches with Bray Wyatt.

Staff Thoughts: It’s hard to imagine many wrestlers with more of a mixed bag than Orton. He’s got a lot of good to great stuff, some really bad stuff and A WHOLE LOTTA “just there” periods where he’s doing nothing interesting. His promos and character trend from awful to acceptable, and his Legend Killer and RNN updates were entertaining and may have been his promo highlights. Still, his resume is stellar and he has a lot of good to great matches and he’s just so ingrained into the WWE it’s impossible to imagine the company without him.

From the Voters: “I’m not his biggest fan, but it’s hard to ignore how important he has been to the company for the past 15 years. He is Cena #2. He’s in my upper tier, but the back half of that.” – Jason Sherman, June 2, 2017

“He is probably going to be in my Top 30. He was my favorite guy on the roster outside of HBK from 2007-2010. He’s always done great character work. I feel like he could have been higher if he didn’t have periods of time where he didn’t appear to be trying.” – Mike Eller, June 2, 2017

“I loved his early heel run, got bored with him during Rated RKO, got back into him in 07, then the HHH feud really killed it for me until that series with Christian which were incredible, so there is lot to weigh in on, he will be ranked but there is some rewatching that I have to do.” – Sean Zern, June 2, 2017

36. Goldust Total Points: 6,563 Total Ballots: 115 Average Rank: 43.9 High Vote: 10 Low Vote: 92 High Voter: Nikolaj; Good Ol’ Will From Texas

Nuance: Goldust has been with the company about 15 years, having been in and out of the company since 1996. He also appeared with his father Dusty Rhodes to take on Ted Dibiase and Virgil at Royal Rumble 1991. He’s been both a face and a heel and a singles as well as notable tag teams with Cody Rhodes and Booker T. Goldust is a master of little character touches and evolutions that makes him stand the test of time.

Jump Up Moments: Goldust had a memorable feud with Razor Ramon in 1995-96 due to his unwanted advances toward the Bad Guy. Razor ‘s suspension killed the feud abruptly and resulted in Roddy Piper subbing for him in the Backlot Brawl at WrestleMania XII, which was memorable and a decent brawl before nonsense took over. As a face he warred with Hunter Hearst-Helmsley and then had a really memorable feud with Brian Pillman following teaming with Steve Austin, Ken Shamrock and the Legion of Doom against the Hart Foundation in the all time classic main event of Canadian Stampede. Goldust later formed a fun team with Booker T and feuded with the UnAmericans winning the Tag Team Titles. His tag team run with half-brother Cody in 2013 was great and featured terrific matches against The Shield at Battleground 2013 and on Raw to win the tag titles. Goldust is a nine-time Hardcore Champion, a three-time IC Champion, a World Tag Team Champion and two-time WWE Tag Team Champion.

Promos/Character: The Goldust character was edgy and revolutionary when it debuted in 1995, as a movie quoting eccentric with a crush on Razor Ramon. That was quickly established to have been just playing mind games in order to avert any heat that may come their way for negative portrayal of a gay character. He would continue to be a face painting weirdo for most of the next two decades, which shouldn’t work, but Goldust made it happen. There had been effeminate characters in wrestling before, which were usually cheap heat magnets, but that wasn’t Goldust, he always had more depth. From his early vignettes quoting movies to his comedy work in his tag team with Booker, Goldust was always evolving. By the time he was teaming with Cody, the character was really more like “The Natural” Dustin Rhodes in the not so natural facepaint and ring attire of Goldust. This groundbreaking character work and evolution is a big part of what lands Goldust on this list.

Workrate: Goldust has some stellar work with his tag team with Cody and the matches from late 2013 are really great. He had a very good match with Randy Orton on Raw during the same timeframe. He’s enjoyed a late career renaissance that’s led to him having very good TV matches in recent years and being a consistently great worker and ring general. The early Goldust years featured a lot of stalling and “mind games” as he was transitioning from working as Dustin Rhodes to working as Goldust.

Staff Thoughts: One of the more revolutionary, edgy and certainly memorable characters in company history. He’s done great work as a weirdo character, as a comedy character and as a serious character, all as different shades of the Goldust character. He’s been a consistently entertaining part of the company for nearly 20 years, and can be counted on to deliver good matches whenever he’s called upon. You can hear JT and Aaron discuss him on Making the Cut and hear Good Ol’ Will profess his undying love on FYC for …deep inhale…Goldust… CHOMP.

From the Voters: “Listed probably somewhere in the 30s. A controversial adult-y character in still kid friendly 95 WWF. Had great feuds with Razor, Piper, and HHH. Reinvented himself with TAFKAG and the weird ass gear. Did it again tagging with Booker T and yet again with his brother.” – Dennis Nunez, May 29, 2017

“I’m surprised to see people giving him a pass for some of the awful boring matches he had in 96, but that said — I love this dude. The definition of buying into a character and making it work. He’ll be nowhere in the vicinity of my top 10, but I can see him being a top 50 guy on the basis of his work post-2002 and his overall character and promo work. A truly great pro wrestler.” – Greg Phillips, June 1, 2017

“Ok, he was assured a Top 20 spot for being possibly the greatest offensive wrestler ever in the fed, having a great singles feud with Val Venis, 2 legit great tag teams with multiple great matches, multiple runs in different eras constantly remaining over and even being a smart comedy figure. Been watching the Booker/Goldust tag stuff and they were pretty great. Raised Booker and Dustin on my list. Going through his New Generation stuff now.” – Good Ol’ Will from Texas, May 30, 2017

35. AJ Styles Total Points: 6,643 Total Ballots: 108 Average Rank: 39.5 High Vote: 9 Low Vote: 97 High Voter: Taylor Keahey

Nuance: Longevity is the knock on AJ Styles as he’s only had two years with the company. During this time he’s played both a babyface and a heel and has been effective in both roles. He’s been primarily a singles star, but had a brief tag team run with Chris Jericho. AJ Styles carries himself like a star and felt like a huge deal from the moment he debuted.

Jump Up Moments: The Phenomenal One debuted at the 2016 Royal Rumble to a huge pop, with the fans telling WWE they already thought this guy was a star. He went on to prove them right. After starting slow with a program with Chris Jericho lasting through WrestleMania 32, he went on a run of great matches to rival anyone in company history. AJ challenged Roman Reigns for his WWE World Title at Payback and Extreme Rules 2016 in awesome matches. He then attacked a returning John Cena, setting their feud up, defeating him at Money in the Bank and SummerSlam in many people’s 2016 WWE match of the year and one of the best SummerSlam matches ever. AJ then defeated Dean Ambrose for the WWE World title at Backlash, and successfully defended it against Ambrose and Cena at No Mercy in another stellar match. Styles first title reign came to an end when he lost to John Cena at Royal Rumble 2017 in another match of the year contender. At WrestleMania 33 he defeated Shane McMahon in a better than expected bout that he completely carried. He then had a good feud with Kevin Owens winning the US Championship twice in the process. At TLC 2017, he was a last-minute replacement for Bray Wyatt and had a good match against Finn Balor. Styles won his second WWE Championship by defeating Jinder Mahal on an episode of SmackDown in November in Manchester, England, becoming the first recognized World Champion crowned outside of North America. This was the first time a world title changed hands on SmackDown since 2003. He then challenged Brock Lesnar in a champion vs. champion match at Survivor Series that was great, before retaining his title against Mahal at Clash of Champions at the end of the voting period. Styles is a two-time WWE Champion and a two-time United States Champion.

Promos/Character: The “Face That Runs the Place” has played a compelling character as both a face and a heel during his short time with the company. Unlike so many stars of the day, the fans have been invested in Styles his entire run, always caring about whatever he’s doing. He has cut good promos since coming to the WWE, something that was a weakness at times prior to his arrival.

Workrate: AJ Styles’ in-ring work is sensational, incredible, terrific, unbelievable and yes, phenomenal. During his short period of time, he’s had a string of classic matches that wrestlers who spent more than a decade in WWE can’t touch. His feud with Reigns produced great bouts. His feud with Cena produced multiple MOTYC across two years and those matches are on the short list of best matches ever on both SummerSlam and the Royal Rumble. His match against Lesnar at Survivor Series was great and the match against Mahal at Clash is probably Mahal’s best match ever. Styles has done all this while having almost no down periods or bad matches.

Staff Thoughts: Your mileage on AJ Styles likely depends on how you value output compared to longevity. Yes, he’s only been with the company for two years, but during that time he has made his case with meaningful feuds and classic matches, nearly all being near the main event level. If you just look at the matches and moments he’s had, they rival plenty of wrestlers with a far longer tenure. You can see AJ gaining momentum with voters in the Facebook comments, as the initial talk was his rookie year with the company might earn him a spot low on the list. But as he just kept producing, more and more voters shot him up the rankings, as he likely benefited more than anyone else for his work during the voting period. Styles was the highlight of nearly every show he was on, and it’s hard to imagine WWE without him during the past two years. You can hear the guys talk about the Phenomenal One on this FYC podcast.

From the Voters: “Think he’s light years ahead of any other guy who has started in the most recent era apart from perhaps Reigns (and I still think he’s comfortably ahead of him). He will make my top 50. Probably not top 25. His run is short but the body of work is still there as he’s in a work heavy era. Amount of shows & PPVs means he’s probably had as many televised matches as guys from bygone eras who had 5-8 year careers. He currently has only 1 PPV appearence less than Warrior and 1 more than Piper, for example.” – James Derbyshire, July 12, 2017

“By the time this list is submitted and compiled we’ll likely be looking at 2 full years of AJ as a WWE performer. Guys like Rick Rude are getting merit and he only had three years is look over. So yeah, AJ is going on the list. He might not have a huge body of work to be in the top 30, but he’s kinda my 50 right now with room to move up.” – David Mann, July 12, 2017

“Since the Jericho feud, one could argue he hasn’t had any ppv singles matches that clocked in below 4 stars. He was main eventing by his fourth ppv, pinning Cena clean his 6th month in, won the WWE title on his 8th month with the company, and then had the best straight run of ppv matches since maybe Triple H in 2000. He’s killing it, and by December, he’ll be 2 years in. Some would argue he was in WWE’s best match in 2016, and right now, he’s probably half of the leading candidates (with the same opponent) in 2017. If he left tomorrow, he would be remembered for years, and at this moment, I think he’s already had more ppv main events than Daniel Bryan did. Like Steve Williams said, longevity is his enemy, so while I’d argue he’s not top 30 or 40, I’d also argue he definitely has a place on the list.” – James Proffitt, May 31, 2017

34. Christian Total Points: 6,646 Total Ballots: 112 Average Rank: 41.7 High Vote: 8 Low Vote: 95 High Voter: David Carli

Nuance: Christian had a seven year run with the company from 1998 to 2005, and another four years upon his return in 2009, giving him more than a decade on his resume, so he checks the box for longevity. He played both a face and a heel, and had singles runs as well as notable tag teams with Edge, Chris Jericho and Lance Storm. Christian had a number of intangibles from acting ability to facial expressions that ensured he always got over with the fans in a way that often exceeded his push.

Jump Up Moments: Christian won the Light Heavyweight Title in his debut match and joined forces with Edge and Gangrel as the Brood. He really took off when he formed his tag team with “brother” Edge, having a great three-way feud with the Hardy Boyz and Dudley Boyz that featured legendary classic ladder and TLC matches at No Mercy 1999, WrestleMania 2000, SummerSlam 2000 and WrestleMania X7. The team with Edge also gave us great backstage comedy segments with Kurt Angle and Mick Foley and in-ring poses “for the benefit of those with flash photography.” He feuded with Edge over the Intercontinental Title when the team split, trading the title back and forth. Christian would later form the UnAmericans stable with Lance Storm and Test, winning the WWE Tag Team Titles while feuding with Booker T and Goldust. Christian then formed a tag team with Chris Jericho that competed in a very good four-team TLC match on Raw and later won the WWE Tag Team Titles. He would then bet Jericho $1 (Canadian) that he could win the affections of Lita before Jericho could win the hand of Trish Stratus. The angle saw great character work from all involved and culminated in a very good match at WrestleMania XX between the two former friends where Trish morphed into Hot Evil Trish and joined Christian. He competed in the first Money in the Bank ladder match at WrestleMania 21, before beginning a feud with John Cena claiming Cena was a poser and that Christian was a better rapper. The two had a triple-threat match along with Jericho for Cena’s WWE title at Vengeance 2005. Christian then left the company until 2009, winning the ECW title quickly upon his return. He was the veteran steadying force on ECW having good-to-great matches with Jack Swagger, Yoshi Tatsu, Tommy Dreamer, Zack Ryder, William Regal, Shelton Benjamin and others on a weekly basis through 2009, before finally losing the title on the last episode of ECW. Christian won the World Heavyweight Championship from Alberto Del Rio at Extreme Rules 2011 and embarked on a classic feud with Randy Orton over the belt. The two had outstanding matches over the title through August. Christian would feud with Del Rio over the World Title again in 2013 and the two had a very tremendous match at the loaded SummerSlam 2013 card. He would also turn in a solid performance at the Elimination Chamber match in 2014. Christian is a former Light Heavyweight Champion, Hardcore Champion and European Champion, a four-time IC Champion, nine time Tag Team Champion, two-time ECW Champion and two-time World Champion.

Promos/Character: CHRISTIAN! CHRISTIAN! AT LAST HE’S ON HIS OWN! And despite the very good character work he did with Edge, when he was on his own he really got to show his character and promo chops (and that badass rock opera theme song). Captain Charisma was such a good talker that he was given his own interview segment “The Peep Show” to speak to all his fans. He was able to tweak and evolve his character over time, being able to play comedy better than almost anyone on the roster, but still be considered a serious challenger for mid-card titles and eventually the World Title. The character work during the angle with Jericho, Trish and Lita was top-notch from all involved and Christian more than held his own, earning his $1 Canadian. He made the feud with Cena into something legit with his promos, getting cheered in the process, and getting himself over, likely more than the company ever intended.

Workrate: Captain Charisma had good to great matches up and down the card throughout his entire WWE career. The ladder and TLC matches he had when he teamed with Edge are great trainwreck wars. His feud with Jericho and their match at WrestleMania XX is a bit of a hidden gem, often overlooked. He did great work in the mid-card for the IC title and in the tag division in 2002-2005 before the brief feud with Cena and his departure. When he returned he carried anyone with two legs to very good matches during his run with ECW. Then some of the best matches of his career (and likely Orton’s) came in 2011 at Over the Limit, Capitol Punishment, SummerSlam and a cage match on the 8/30 episode of SmackDown. He also had a very great match with Del Rio at SummerSlam 2013 that gets lost on that all time card. Christian had very good matches week in and week out and was known for being an elite TV worker. The only weakness in his game came when he started using the spear as his finisher as a tribute to Edge, despite it looking silly for a man his size to do and it kept him from using the much cooler Unprettier/KillSwitch to close out matches.

Staff Thoughts: Damn, Christian has a lot of great stuff on his resume. And the only blemish we can find is that Steve Austin was leaving Christian a voicemail when he came up with the “What?” nonsense that plagues us to this day. But we won’t hold that against Captain Charisma. He could do it all from talking and character work to bringing the goods in tags, mid-card and main event feuds. The voters have spoken and clearly they are among the Peeps that Christian catered to during his long and distinguished WWF/E career. To hear what Aaron George and Ben Morse had to say about Christian check out this podblast.

From the Voters: “I don’t know about top 15 but I would be surprised if Christian is out of my top 25. The guy has a lot of quality stuff and ranks high on most of the NJPW structure. I think he also has some real memorable feuds given his placement on the card. Like the Jericho vs Christian stuff was only around 3rd most important thing on just Raw in 2004 and it is still really memorable stuff.” – Chad Campbell, May 28, 2017

“The back half of his run is really good when he came back. The feud with him and Randy Orton was huge part of Smackdown in the Summer of 2011. Also i enjoyed his runs as ECW Champion after his return. Can’t leave out his first run of course with Edge as Tag Champs and feud with Chris Jericho in 2004. Going back and watching some of early 2004 on The Network that feud was a huge part of RAW before and Post WM 20. Check out the Cage Match they had on May 10th if nobody has seen it in a while, its very good.” – Jay Hinchey, May 28, 2017

“The man had good to great matches on a weekly basis during his run as ECW Champion, including matches with people like Yoshi Tatsu, Zack Ryder, Tommy Dreamer, and Shelton Benjamin that are highlights of their respective careers. After years of WWE searching for a veteran presence who could provide stability to the ECW brand, Christian held it down. Later he got good matches out of the likes of Brodus Clay, Alberto Del Rio, and Randy Orton, a cumulative achievement that might as well make him a miracle worker. And that’s not even considering his tag run.” – Glenn W. Butler, May 28, 2017

33. Sgt. Slaughter Total Points: 6,784 Total Ballots: 109 Average Rank: 38.8 High Vote: 10 Low Vote: 94 High Voter: Kelly Nelson; Kevin E. Pittack

Nuance: Sgt. Slaughter had about a six-year tenure with the WWF as an active competitor over three runs from 1980 to 1992. He showed the ability to play both a babyface and a heel on multiple occasions and was over with the fans regardless of his role. He worked primarily as a singles wrestler but was able to work tags when asked.

Jump Up Moments: Sarge entered the company as a hated heel, immediately becoming one of the top challengers for Bob Backlund in 1980-81, with the two having a series of great matches. Slaughter was one of the only stars of the day that Backlund didn’t defeated at MSG during this run. He then went on to feud with Pat Patterson after calling him “yellow” and doubling the payout if Patterson could break his cobra clutch. When Patterson accepted and was breaking the hold, Sarge released it and beat down Patterson, resulting in a hot feud and the famous Alley Fight at MSG on April 21, 1981, which is a fantastic match. Slaughter returned to the company in 1983, beating Backlund with his riding crop to reignite their feud, and the two had another series of very good matches. In 1984, Sarge turned babyface to defend America’s honor from no-good foreign heel the Iron Sheik. The two had an incredibly intense bloody feud, culminating in the famous Boot Camp match at MSG that’s must-see for any wrestling fan. Slaughter would return to the WWF in the fall of 1990 as an Iraqi sympathizer and win the WWF World title from the Ultimate Warrior at the 1991 Royal Rumble. He would lose the title to Hulk Hogan at the main event of WrestleMania VII in a really good match. Slaughter would lose a three-on-two handicap match to Hogan and Ultimate Warrior at SummerSlam 1991 before turning babyface until retiring from active competition in 1992. He would be named commissioner in 1997 and feud with D-Generation X having a Boot Camp match with Triple H at the D-Generation X PPV.

Promos/Character:Listen here, maggots, Sarge could get his point across in any promo he wanted to, as a heel or face. During his initial heel run he was paired with the Grand Wizard, but still did plenty of his own talking, including calling Patterson yellow to kick off their feud with the cobra clutch challenge. After his face turn he was able to bang the drum and wave the flag for the ol’ US of A adding even more heat to the Iron Sheik feud. Slaughter claims he was never comfortable with the Iraqi sympathizer angle (and many feel it was a bit in poor taste) but he added fuel to the fire calling US troops soft and claiming he supported Iraq because they were violent and he liked violence. The angle was effective getting heel heat for Slaughter and he took to wearing a bulletproof vest when he went out in public. The drill sergeant character resonated and made a good natural heel before being easily transitioned into a patriotic babyface. The character worked so well, it landed Sarge a spot as a G.I. Joe character, having his own action figure and appearing in their cartoon and animated movies.

Workrate: Sarge was an incredible worker during his 1980s stints, with the Alley Fight with Patterson and the Boot Camp match with the Iron Sheik being among the best WWF matches of the decade. Slaughter brought an intensity and violence to these brawls that’s second to none. He also had very good matches with Backlund in both 1981 and 1983, bringing the intensity to all their matches as well. Even in 1991, he was able to have good matches with Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Warrior at a time when that wasn’t always the case. Regardless of his opponent or the time of his run, Slaughter was a top-notch worker, and anytime he stepped through the ropes you knew he was going to deliver.

Staff Thoughts: Slaughter was a revelation for many voters, according to Facebook posts, and that alone makes this project as success, because Sarge is fucking awesome. The cobra clutch challenge! The Alley Fight with Patterson! The Boot Camp Match! Beating Backlund to within an inch of his life with a riding crop! It was all awesome. Add in the late career Iraqi sympathizer angle and title run and Sarge was an easy addition to the top portion of the list. You can hear the guys talk more about Slaughter in this FYC podcast.

From the Voters: “The Backlund/Slaughter series at the Spectrum in I think 83 were really good. Slaughter makes my list, it’s just a matter of where. The boot camp match with Iron Sheik is one of my favorite matches.” – Matt Souza, June 2, 2017

“Sarge is very likely going to be top 20, and may even crack the top 10. Insanely entertaining in all his forms.” – Kevin E. Pittack, December 10, 2017

“Some awesome wars with Pat, Sheik and Hogan at the Garden.His 90-91 heel run was very risky with what was going on in the world, but was the perfect guy for the role.” – Jason Greenhouse, June 3, 2017

32. Jeff Hardy Total Points: 6,879 Total Ballots: 112 Average Rank: 39.6 High Vote: 13 Low Vote: 99 High Voter: Henry Rivers

Nuance: Jeff Hardy has put in nearly a decade over three separate runs, with the latest his current run, and he also sporadically appeared as a jobber for the company prior to 1998. Other than a brief stint as the New Brood, he’s never worked heel, spending his WWF/E career as popular babyface. He’s had a successful singles run in the mid-card and main event and is one half of one of the greatest tag teams in company history with his brother Matt.

Jump Up Moments: The Hardy Boyz team had great matches with Edge & Christian in a ladder match at No Mercy 1999 to burst onto the scene. They would then have an extended three-way feud with the Dudley Boyz and Edge & Christian, tearing the house down in ladder and TLC matches at WrestleMania 2000, SummerSlam 2000 and WrestleMania X7. Jeff stood out as the star of those matches with his daredevil aerial moves off the ladders. In 2001, Jeff received his first singles success, winning the Intercontinental title from Triple H, as well as the Light Heavyweight and Hardcore Title throughout the year. Hardy would make the Hardcore Title matter again with his matches against Rob Van Dam and the Undertaker during this timeframe. In 2002, Jeff challenged the Undertaker for the Undisputed title in a ladder match on Raw in a very good match. Upon his return from a four-year absence from WWE, Jeff defeated Johnny Nitro for the IC title and the two traded the belt back and forth while Hardy reunited the tag team with his brother. They competed in a four-way ladder match at Armageddon 2006 in the match where Joey Mercury took a ladder off the face, igniting their feud with MNM. Their matches with MNM at Royal Rumble and No Way Out 2007 are some of the best non-gimmick tag matches put on by the WWE. Hardy competed in the Money in the Bank ladder match at WrestleMania 23 driving himself and Edge through a ladder in another daring aerial maneuver. Jeff began a feud with Umaga over the IC title winning it for a fourth time and starting his push toward the main event. He would team with and challenge Triple H during the last part of 2007, with Hardy winning a match to become number one contender at Armageddon 2007. He hit Randy Orton with a Swanton Bomb from the top of the Raw set in anticipation of their match at Royal Rumble 2008. Hardy was drafted to SmackDown in summer 2008 and was a regular challenger for the WWE Championship. He was scheduled to be in the title match at Survivor Series 2008, before being “attacked in his hotel” and being removed from the match. He would win the WWE Championship from Edge in a three-way also involving Triple H at Armageddon 2008. He would lose the title the next month when brother Matt turned on him, igniting their feud from WrestleMania to Backlash. Jeff then won the World Heavyweight title from Edge in a ladder match at Extreme Rules, but CM Punk cashed in his Money in the Bank briefcase and starting a great feud. Hardy and Punk had a series of very good matches at The Bash, Night of Champions, SummerSlam and the August 28, 2009 episode of SmackDown, which saw Hardy lose a cage match resulting in him leaving the WWE. He returned with Matt at WrestleMania 33, winning the Raw Tag Team titles and the two have had good matches with The Bar. Jeff is a six-time WWF/World Tag Team Champion, a  WCW Tag Team Champion, Raw Tag Team Champion, Light Heavyweight Champion, European Champion, three-time Hardcore Champion, four-time IC Champion, WWE Champion and two-time World Champion.

Promos/Character: The Charismatic Enigma can’t cut a promo. Let’s be honest here, he may have shown improvement, but it was going from possibly the worst promo by someone who speaks a language similar to English to merely bad. His painted face era talking about E-MADGE-EYE-NATION or whatever it was left quite a few of us wondering if he was mid hallucination or we were. Still, despite that, the character was OVER. Fuck was he over. And he did have a unique character of, let’s say artistic free spirit, which matches nicely with his daredevil ring work. From Team Xtreme to the World Champion, he was always unique and you could always hear the little girls squeal whenever he took his shirt off, for whatever that’s worth.

Workrate: It was a mixed bag for Jeff as at his worst he could be sloppy and reckless and at times his matches lacked direction. Oh, but at his best he was great. He always worked the high flying reckless style and it served him well in ladder matches and TLCs of the day. But he refined his style to keep all the highspot hits while having very good match structure around them with Triple H, Edge and Punk. Add that to the tag team resume that includes the triangle ladders and TLCs and MNM feud, as well as his mid-card matches with RVD and Umaga and you’ve got a really impressive body of work.

Staff Thoughts: Good Ol’ JR might say Jeff’s goofier than a pet coon, but that uniqueness certainly resonated with a portion of the audience. Even the fans that didn’t wear cut-up pantyhose on their arms appreciated Jeff for risking his life by jumping off the highest thing he could find for our entertainment. He was also a master of generating sympathy from the crowd through his selling (and possibly legitimately nearly dying many matches as well). His athleticism was undeniable and his matches were always exciting. He built a helluva resume of good to great matches in the singles and tag ranks and connected as a character by overcoming his struggles and flaws to grab the proverbial brass ring. All of that lands the Charismatic Enigma in a prominent spot on our list.

From the Voters: “Top 100 for sure just don’t know where exactly. Very unique individual and very over whether it be with one of the greatest teams of all time with Matt or by himself as the WWE champion. A daredevil, he stole the show in the TLC matches and had two great Monday night Raw matches one against the Undertaker in a ladder match and another against HHH both I believe were around 2002 2003.” – Eric Boyd, May 30, 2017

“A legit draw on top with two distinct runs with the company. And now starting a third. His ’08-’09 saw the culmination of his World title quest and he finished strong with the Punk feud. Has serious tag AND singles credentials here too.” – Brad Warren, May 30, 2017

“Possibly top 50. While he was never as versatile or as good a character as his brother, he was undoubtedly the bigger star and could connect with the crowd like few others could. At his peak, he was rivaling John Cena in terms of star power and merchandise selling. And as short-lived as his main event run was (primarily due to his own demons), his ascent to the WWE Championship and feud with Punk were top-notch stories. Not to mention he is arguably the king of the “car crash” spottiest.” – Greg Rossbach, July 7, 2017

31. Batista Total Points: 6,977 Total Ballots: 112 Average Rank: 38.7 High Vote: 11 Low Vote: 98 High Voter: Sean

Nuance: Batista had an eight-year run with the company after his debut and had another run in 2013-14, mainly feuding with Daniel Bryan and the Shield. Batista has played a babyface and a heel and been effective in both roles. He’s been largely a singles wrestler, but had notable tag teams with Ric Flair and Rey Mysterio, so he has shown flexibility. Batista was a master of facial expressions and body language, which was a critical component to him breaking out as a star from Evolution. He’s always carried himself as a star.

Jump Up Moments: After spending a brief period of time as the Deacon to Reverend D-Von, Batista joined Evolution, winning the World Tag Team Titles with Ric Flair. The WrestleMania XX match with Evolution against the Rock ‘N’ Sock Connection is a sneaky fun match. Batista began showing more character, often rolling his eyes in the background while Triple H cut promos on behalf of Evolution. The Animal then won the 2005 Royal Rumble and decided to challenge Triple H for his World Heavyweight Championship, winning the gold at WrestleMania 21. He continued feuding with Triple H, culminating with a great Hell in a Cell match at Vengeance 2005 and becoming the first person to pin The Game inside the Cell. He teamed with Rey Mysterio winning the WWE Tag Team Titles in a good feud with MNM. Batista had a very good match with Undertaker at WrestleMania 23, and the two continued feuding through much of 2007. He faced Umaga at WrestleMania XXIV and then feuded with Shawn Michaels after HBK retired Ric Flair. Batista won the World Tag Team Titles with John Cena to further their feud, which culminated in a really good match at SummerSlam 2008. In 2009, Batista teamed with Rey Mysterio to unsuccessfully challenge JeriShow for the Unified Tag Team titles, and later turned on Mysterio after a Fatal Four-Way for the World Heavyweight Title. Batista destroyed Rey, which led to a feud throughout 2009. Batista renewed his feud with Cena in 2010, with good matches at WrestleMania XXVI, Extreme Rules and Over the Limit. Batista returned to the company in 2014 winning the Royal Rumble. He would go on to lose his shot at the WWE World Championship in an exciting three-way match with Daniel Bryan and Randy Orton at WrestleMania XXX. He eventually joined forces with Orton and Triple H reforming Evolution and having great six-man tag matches against The Shield at Extreme Rules and Payback 2014. Batista is a former WWE Tag Team Champion, three-time World Tag Team Champion, two-time WWE Champion and four-time World Heavyweight Champion.

Promos/Character: Batista has always done great character work, getting over by conveying he didn’t buy what Triple H was selling in Evolution through his facial expressions while standing in the background. One of his most iconic moments is giving Triple H and Flair the thumbs down before signing his contract to challenge Triple H at WrestleMania 21. And his turn on Rey yelling “You were supposed to be my friend!” is one of the best turns of recent memory. Batista always came off as a natural and it’s no coincidence he has found success in Hollywood post-WWE, as he was one of the best actors in the company. His promos were always believable, usually as a cool guy in contrast to the screaming manic style of others. He played a believable douchebag heel in his feud against Cena, and he deserves credit for recognizing a negative fan reaction in 2014, and embracing it by becoming an effective heel.

Workrate: Batista was hit or miss in the ring depending on whether he had chemistry with his opponent. When he does, The Animal can have classics and he provides good power offense. His HIAC match with Triple H in 2005 is great, and he always had good battles with the Undertaker, particularly their WrestleMania 23 match. His run with Cena in 2009-10 had lot of very good matches. The six-man tags against The Shield in 2014 were great as well.

Staff Thoughts: Batista has a sneaky good resume, providing excellent character work during his entire run, more very good main events than you might expect and almost no bad stuff. He’s one of the best actors in the company and he behaves like you’d expect a normal human to behave, rather than ranting and raving like a lunatic. But when he has a reason, he can come unhinged, like when he turned on Mysterio. His matches with Taker and Cena are top-level main events and his latest return saw him doing solid heel work to put over Daniel Bryan and then join with Evolution to have a very good feud with The Shield. He always came across like a big star and carried himself like a big deal. You can hear what the guys had to say about Batista on this FYC podcast.

From the Voters: “I thought he still turned into a huge star, and he kind of walked away at a time when he was having his hottest run in the company. He still had a great 5 year run, and i thought he had a fun run his last time back. I’m thinking he’s going to be a top 20-25 guy for me.” – Sean Zern, May 28, 2017

“I could end up having him very high. I hated Evolution too, but he was the best guy in it. Got over huge in 05 and actually drew big and had very good matches with boring, top of the card failure, HHH. Loved his tag stuff. Undertaker match at Mania is outstanding. Farewell feud with Cena was incredible. Comeback was excellent. Turned into a tremendous promo over time. Was over as a face, but was excellent as a heel. He lacks the longevity and blowaway impact I want out of a top tier guy, but I could easily see myself rating him ahead of some major names. Might make my top 25.” – Dylan Hales, June 7, 2017

“He was around a lot longer than it seems, and I was starting to weigh up his good and bad periods but like, what are the bad periods? 2006. MAYBE 2009 before he went to SD. But like the rest…he was good in Evolution. Good in 2005 breaking out. Good in 2007. Good in 2008 before the injury. Good in 2009/10 as a heel. And even in 2014 he was fine once he turned heel. He feels like a hot and cold candidate but really, he was good for a lot longer than he wasn’t.” – Stacey O’Loughlin, June 7, 2017

30. Greg Valentine Total Points: 7,085 Total Ballots: 105 Average Rank: 33.7 High Vote: 3 Low Vote: 93 High Voter: Pete Schirmacher

Nuance: Greg Valentine had about a decade run with the company, appearing first in late 1978, and having a long uninterrupted stretch from 1984 to 1992. He was also one of Shawn Michaels’ Knights at Survivor Series 1993 and appeared in the 1994 Royal Rumble. The Hammer aplayed a heel for the bulk of his career, but had a babyface run from late 1990 to the 1992 Royal Rumble. He was a singles star with a successful tag team run with Brutus Beefcake and another tag team run with Honky Tonk Man.

Jump Up Moments: Valentine came to the WWF in late 1978 and would soon break Chief Jay Strongbow’s leg, giving him the aura of a badass with no remorse. He was managed by the Grand Wizard during this time and would face Bob Backlund for the WWF Championship in a great one-hour draw at Madison Square Garden in February 1979. The Hammer returned in 1981, again challenging Backlund, with the title being held up when a dazed referee accidentally handed Valentine the belt. He would face Backlund in a great steel cage match at the Philadelphia Spectrum in February 1982, before moving on to feuding with Pedro Morales over the Intercontinental title, injuring him by suplexing him on the floor. Valentine left the company until 1984 when he returned for good, winning the IC title from Tito Santana on September 24, 1984. Valentine then put Santana in the figure-four leglock, further injuring the leg Valentine worked all match and igniting the red-hot feud between the two. Valentine defended the IC title against the Junkyard Dog at the first WrestleMania, losing by countout when he took a walk. Hammer then resumed his classic feud with Santana in many very good matches culminating in the classic cage bout where Santana regained the IC title on July 6, 1985 in Baltimore. Valentine was enraged and destroyed the belt after losing his IC title after a 285-day reign. Valentine then formed The Dream Team with Brutus Beefcake and won the WWF Tag Team Championship from the US Express on August 24, 1985. The Dream Team would have excellent matches with The British Bulldogs, Santana and Ricky Steamboat (4/21/85, Toronto Maple Leaf Gardens) and the Killer Bees, before losing the titles to the Bulldogs in a classic match at WrestleMania 2. The Dream Team may still be suffering from the effects of the Nightmare at the Rosemont Horizon, if Gorilla Monsoon is to be believed, but they did challenge the Bulldogs for the titles in a series of cage matches during the summer of 1986. The Dream Team then moved on to feuding with the Fabulous Rougeaus, culminating in a win at WrestleMania III that saw Beefcake turfed from the team. Valentine did his best to carry Dino Bravo in the New Dream Team, but the Hammer is only a mortal man, and some people can’t be carried. In 1988, Valentine began a feud with Don Muraco that included putting his manager Superstar Billy Graham in the figure four leglock, despite Graham having an artificial hip and walking with a cane, but the feud was dropped when Muraco was fired. Hammer then went on to feud with Ronnie Garvin, defeating him in a retirement match, but asking he be reinstated after Garvin insulted Valentine as ring announcer at SummerSlam 1989. The feud continued until Garvin won a very good submission match at the 1990 Royal Rumble, countering Valentine’s Heartbreaker shin guard used to put more pressure on his figure four, with his own Hammer Jammer shin guard. Valentine then formed the Rhythm & Blues tag team with the Honky Tonk Man, before turning babyface losing to Earthquake at WrestleMania VII and Irwin R. Schyster at SummerSlam 1991 and appearing in the 1992 Royal Rumble match.

Promos/Character: Valentine was not the best promo, and was always paired with a manager, going from The Grand Wizard to Capt. Lou Albano to Luscious Johnny V to Jimmy Hart. Hammer played a no-nonsense character who would kick-ass, take names and break legs. At this writing it’s still unknown whether he was the motivation for the classic album “Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em” by MC Hammer. Other than being an asskicker, there wasn’t a lot of character depth for Valentine, which likely limited his upward mobility on this list.

Workrate: Some voters would tell you that Valentine is THE BEST worker in WWF/E history, and he is certainly on the short list of contenders. His matches against Backlund for the title are among the greatest matches of that era. The Valentine/Santana feud is one of the greatest angles of the 1980s and the cage match to settle the feud is particularly memorable. The Dream Team is an underrated tag team with classics against the British Bulldogs and Santana & Steamboat, and our hot take is that Beefcake was NOT the workhorse of that team. Valentine went on to have another excellent feud with Ronnie Garvin late in his career to round out his case. Hammer always worked hard often forcing other wrestlers to keep up, making every match good at worst. You’ll almost never see a bad Valentine match, as he always did the little things and knew how to structure a match to get the crowd engaged. He knew how to bring hard-hitting offense and still sell and show ass as a heel. Few wrestlers had his consistency nor his high-end classic matches.

Staff Thoughts: Valentine gets in on the strength of his classic matches with Backlund, the all-timer feud with Santana, the Dream Team run and the late career feud with Garvin. That’s a diverse resume, from the hour-long draw with Backlund in 1979 to his Garvin match at Royal Rumble 1990. No doubt, it was a long and distinguished career for the man who reached middle-age at 21 and then never aged a day since. Along the way he had classic tag team bouts and can console himself with the fact that he made Beefcake part of a good tag team, as he continues to struggle to recover from the Nightmare at the Rosemont Horizon. Add it all together and Valentine has a strong resume as an all-time great worker than hit with voters placing him high on our list.

From the Voters: “I think you can honestly make a case for Valentine as the greatest WWF worker of all time. Backlund’s best opponent, four insanely amazing matches (dont sleep on their 84 match). The Tito feud. Dream Team, Oh My God, the Dream Team! US Express, Bulldogs and a Can-Am Match all great. His solo runs through 90 were great. Garvin feud was awesome as were his matches with Blue Blazer and a reprise of the Tito feud in 88. What did he so well was he took all these WWF wrestlers out of their comfort zone. He forced people to work hard and react organically. He was selfless, but he wasnt going to let you coast. He reminds of Regal in that respect. When you watch a Valentine match in the WWF setting it is like nothing else on a WWF card.” – Martin Boulevard, May 29, 2017

“Oh for sure. Probably got the best matches out of one of the greatest champions in the company (Backlund). Had an epic IC title run. Did the best he could with some nonsense later in his career. I got nothing but time for Valentine. He would for sure be on the list.” – Matthew Richards, May 30, 2017

“He’s a top 20 contender in this thing. Feud with Tito is legendary. Hell of a tag guy. Carried those scrubs Brutus and Bravo for two years. Feud with Garvin is a hidden gem from 89-90. ”- Jason Greenhouse, May 29, 2017

29. Ricky Steamboat Total Points: 7,218 Total Ballots: 114 Average Rank: 37.7 High Vote: 6 Low Vote: 88 High Voter: Vince Male

Nuance: The nuance category isn’t kind to the Dragon, as he had only about a five-year run with the company from 1985-88 and a brief stint in 1991.Ricky  Steamboat was the consummate white meat babyface, having never worked heel. He’s primarily been a singles worker in WWF but has some very good tag matches teaming with other babyfaces, like Tito Santana and Hulk Hogan.

Jump Up Moments: Steamboat defeated Matt Borne at the first WrestleMania before entering into a feud with Mr. Fuji and Don Muraco, where the heels hung him with his karate black belt, before battling on two Saturday Night’s Main Events. He defeated Hercules at WrestleMania 2, before moving on to his feud with Jake “The Snake” Roberts. The feud began when Roberts attacked Steamboat before their match on the May 3, 1986 SNME, giving Steamboat the DDT on the floor. The Dragon beat the Snake in a Snake Pit match at the Big Event in Toronto and later on the October 1986 SNME in a Snake Pit rematch. Steamboat then challenged Randy Savage for the Intercontinental Title, losing by countout on November 22, 1986, only for Savage to continue his attack injuring Steamboat’s larynx by coming off the top rope with the ring bell. He returned at SNME in January 1987 saving George Steele from an attack with the ring bell by Savage. This two would have several matches, including a great one at Maple Leaf Gardens from February 1987 before meeting at WrestleMania III. That match is an instant classic, beloved by a generation of fans, as it had an epic feeling that was the first of its kind since the Hulkamania era began. Steamboat would then drop his IC title to the Honky Tonk Man in a shocking upset on the June 13, 1987 edition of Superstars. He lost in the first round of the WrestleMania IV tournament to Greg Valentine, robbing us of a rematch with Savage. Steamboat then left the company until 1991 when he returned in a dragon costume breathing fire (literally) where he was undefeated on TV and teamed with Kerry Von Erich and Davey Boy Smith to defeat Warlord, Hercules and Paul Roma at SummerSlam 1991, before again leaving the company. In 2009, Steamboat took part in an angle with Roddy Piper and Jimmy Snuka taking on Chris Jericho, who was running down the legends. Steamboat appeared in-ring for the first time in nearly 15 years teaming with Piper and Snuka against Jericho at WrestleMania XXV, and the Steamboat/Jericho portions were shockingly good. He had a strong singles match with Jericho at Backlash 2009.

Promos/Character: Perhaps Steamboat’s best promo work came when he was trying to speak again after Savage’s attack injured his throat. Otherwise, Dragon wasn’t much of a promo guy, doing his talking in the ring. He played a great white meat babyface, but that was due more to his in-ring character work than his out of the ring work. The less said about the fire-breathing dragon costume era, the better.

Workrate: Ricky Steamboat is an all-time great worker, with nearly every match being good and his best being classics. The WrestleMania III match stands out as an all-timer and, while you may debate it’s star ranking, for many young fans, it was a match unlike any they’d seen before. It’s undeniable how influential that match was, with its multiple near-falls (though some may count this as a negative due to how persistent this would become). Steamboat played one of the best underdog babyfaces of all-time, giving greater credence to matches during his feuds with Savage, Roberts and others. He didn’t often have tag team matches, but did team with Tito Santana to challenge the Dream Team in an excellent match on 4/25/1985 at the Maple Leaf Gardens. He also had a great match with Savage in 1986 at the Boston Gardens that is on the Macho Madness DVD.

Staff Thoughts: His run was short, but my God was it memorable. Ricky Steamboat represented the ultimate underdog babyface to a generation of fans who started watching WWF in the mid-1980s. For young fans who weren’t watching the Iron Sheik/Sgt. Slaughter feud or the Santana/Valentine feud, the WrestleMania III match showed that there could be more to wrestling than lumbering giants and Hulk up comebacks. Add that iconic, influential match to his feud with Roberts and his other work with Savage and his shocking loss to the Honky Tonk Man, and voters definitely remembered to Enter the Dragon on their ballots. You can hear the guys talk about Steamboat on this FYC podcast.

From the Voters: “One of the best white meat babyfaces ever. It was a smart move never even hinting at a heel turn for him, would’ve been a disaster. Steamboat was a good guy personified. Savage feud was amazing, but I enjoyed the Muraco feud even more. My only issue was his very short IC title run. I know he had asked for time off to be with his family, but it was such a disappointment to see such a small reign after such a great chase. That, combined with his best work being in WCW, makes me have him ranked lower than most other people will.” – Tim Tetreault, June 2, 2017

“Naturally. All time greatest babyface that never had a run with the WWF Title. Best arm drag in the business period, even to this day. His work in the 80s speaks for itself. And I truly almost cried when he showed up at Wrestlemania 25. The guy still had it.” – Michael Schoen, June 2, 2017

“Not enough time to be way up the list, but Jake and Savage feuds were good and memorable. His comeback was short but fun. I saw him go 25 mins with Drew Mac on a 2009 house show and it was great. Will make it, but not enough meat to be top tier.” – Dylan Hales, June 16, 2017

28. Tito Santana Total Points: 7,335 Total Ballots: 111 Average Rank: 35 High Vote: 5 Low Vote: 97 High Voter: Dean Coles

Nuance: Tito Santana appeared in the WWF in 1979 and 1980 before returning to the company in 1982 for a 10-year run, so he has longevity covered. Santana has always played a babyface, but has had both a successful singles run as well as tag team success with Ivan Putski and Rick Martel.

Jump Up Moments: In 1979, he teamed with Ivan Putski to defeat Johnny and Jerry Valiant for the WWF Tag Team Championship, before losing them to the Wild Samoans in 1980. Tito returned to the WWF for good in 1982 and began feuding with Don Muraco over the Intercontinental Title in 1983. During this same timeframe he would challenge the Iron Sheik for the WWF Championship at the Philadelphia Spectrum battling to a double-DQ in one of the Sheik’s only title defenses. After a lengthy feud, Sanatana captured the IC title on February 11, 1984. “Chico” would then start an epic feud with Greg Valentine over the IC title, losing it to The Hammer in September 1984 and being injured by Valentine shortly afterwards. Santana began using Valentine’s figure-four leglock and appeared in the opening match of the first WrestleMania making The Executioner submit. Santana and Valentine would continue their feud in a series of no-DQ, lumberjack and other matches in singles and tags. The feud finally ended in a great cage match on July 6, 1985, and is considered one of the best in-ring feuds in WWF history, and likely the best of the 1980s. “Chico” would defend the title until losing to Randy Savage in February 8, 1986 when crooked referee Danny Davis failed to notice Savage using a foreign object. He would challenge Savage in a series of rematches, all of which are quite good. Tito teamed with JYD to take on Terry and Hoss Funk in a very good match at WrestleMania 2. At WrestleMania III, Santana teamed with the British Bulldogs to challenge the Hart Foundation and aforementioned crooked ref Danny Davis. Tito would then join forces with Rick Martel as a team that strikes with force… called Strike Force. Strike Force would have a great series of matches with The Islanders, and then go on to defeat the Hart Foundation for the WWF Tag Team Championship, holding the belts for five months. At WrestleMania IV, Demolition would end Strike Force’s reign in another good match. Strike Force split during a match with the Brain Busters at WrestleMania V when Martel walked out on Santana. Tito would feud with Martel for the remainder of 1989 with the two being on opposing teams at SummerSlam and Survivor Series 1989, and Santana defeated Martel in the finals of the 1989 King of the Ring tournament. Santana made it to the finals of the IC title tournament in 1990, losing to Mr. Perfect. Their SNME title rematch was of the top WWF bouts of the year. He was the sole survivor for his team at the 1990 Survivor Series and he lost to the Mountie at WrestleMania VII. He would then adopt the El Matador gimmick and wrestle Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania VIII and Papa Shango in a dark match at WrestleMania IX, making him the only performer other than Hulk Hogan to appear in the first nine WrestleManias. Santana is a two-time WWF Tag Team Champion, a two-time IC Champion and the 1989 King of the Ring.

Promos/Character: Tito was not a good promo. His two most memorable promos were probably the one with Martle naming their tag team because they strike with force or Tito screaming “Lord” at Lord Alfred Hayes after Valentine injured his knee. Both of those would be memorable more for unintentional comedy than anything else. His character work is a bit flat, though he does play the best matador to grace the squared circle we have ever seen.

Workrate: Santana is another wrestler with a strong case for being one of the best babyface workers in WWF history. His feud with Valentine may be the best feud of the 1980s and one of the best in-ring feuds of all-time. Strike Force was a great tag team with excellent matches against the Islanders and good feuds with Demolition, the Brain Busters and other teams of the day. Tito worked great as an underdog, as he’s an excellent seller and shows great fire when fighting from underneath. Tito was always able to capture fan’s attention and support, doing most of his character work in-ring.

Staff Thoughts: Tito Santana is one of the all-time great in-ring workers in the WWF. He’s had a prominent role in the transition into the Rock ‘n’ Wrestling era, holding down the workrate portion of the company with his stellar feud with Valentine,while also appealing to the kids WWF was targeting (he was a character of Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling cartoon). Tito is the only wrestler not named Hulk Hogan to appear at the first nine WrestleManias, which speaks to the faith the company had in “Chico.” The feud with Valentine and tag work with Strike Force provides his top-end stuff, but Tito was also a very consistent worker and you’d be hard-pressed to find a bad Tito Santana match. To hear the guys talk about Tito check out this FYC podcast.

From the Voters: “Tito is a guy who as a kid i never really appreciated however going back and watching some of his stuff great worker a guy who was a stalwart of the mid card. Great matches with Greg Valentine, Randy Savage and others. I need to see a lot more including more matches with him and Valentine but he would be on my list.” – Mike Poulin, June 4, 2017

“Tito, might make it into my top 20. At first when I think of the guy I’m like “yeah sure, he’ll be in there somewhere.” But I forget that I missed a lot of his key feuds and matches. He was really the workhorse of the company from 84-86. He was adapt as a singles and tag guy. And he was always over with the crowds. Here’s a guy that I wish the Network would spotlight with a Collection because you know he has a bunch of gems, 10-15 minute clinics that go unheralded.” – David Mann, June 5, 2017

“If this were just based on ring work, he’d be very high. One of the best pro wrestlers of his era. Unfortunately he had nothing in the way of promos or great character work. He was extremely versatile in singles and tag work, but never got a heel run, which would have been interesting. He gave Curt Hennig his best match in the WWF that didn’t involve Bret Hart. Tito’s a lock, just not sure where. Probably somewhere past 50.” – Greg Phillips, June 8, 2017

27. Jake Roberts Total Points: 7,464 Total Ballots: 111 Average Rank: 33.8 High Vote: 6 Low Vote: 76 High Voter: Taylor Keahey

Nuance: Jake “The Snake” Roberts had a six-year run with the company from 1986 to 1992 supplemented with his return in 1996 into 1997 and brief appearances in 2005 and 2014. He played both a heel and a babyface, showing great flexibility, though primarily as a singles wrestler. If there’s anyone who could give a nuanced performance, it’s Jake the Snake, as his psychology, character, body language and tone were second to none.

Jump Up Moments: Roberts debuted in March of 1986 and defeated George Wells at WrestleMania 2 making him foam from the mouth when he wrapped Damien around his head. The first of his many great feuds began at the May 1986 Saturday Night’s Main Event when he DDT’d Ricky Steamboat on the floor and laid his snake on The Dragon. The two would have Snake Pit matches at the Big Event and the October 1986 SNME. Jake would get an interview segment called the Snake Pit at this time. He also was getting cheered and would be turned face by the fans. Jake officially turned when the Honky Tonk Man attacked him during an episode of the Snake Pit, legitimately injuring his neck with a guitar shot. This led to their match at WrestleMania III which saw Alice Cooper accompany Jake to the ring where he shockingly lost to HTM. Roberts would challenge Honky for the IC title throughout much of 1987. In 1988, Jake began feuding with “Ravishing” Rick Rude, who inadvertently selected Jake’s wife Cheryl as the lucky winner of his post-match celebratory kiss, though Cheryl refused and slapped Rude. This led to Rude airbrushing images of Cheryl on his tights, sending Jake into a rage. Jake appeared on the winning team at Survivor Series 1988 opposite Rude and other members of the Heenan Family, including Andre the Giant, who he also feuded with. On the March 1989 SNME Jake came out to assist Brutus Beefcake in his match against Rick Rude, using Damien to scare Andre (who was assisting Rude) into a “heart attack”, starting their feud. Andre won most of the house show circuit matches, but Jake won their WrestleMania V match by DQ when Andre attacked guest referee Big John Studd. The Snake then moved on to a feud with “The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase after DiBiase attacked Roberts following a match with Virgil. Jake returned from injury to steal the Million Dollar Belt and dared DiBiase or Virgil to reach into Damien’s sack to retrieve the belt. Roberts took on The Million Dollar Man at WrestleMania VI, losing via countout, but giving away DiBiase’s money afterwards. Roberts feuded with Rick Martel in 1990-91, after The Model sprayed Arrogance in Jake’s eyes blinding him. This hot angle culminated in a blindfold match at WrestleMania VII, in an interesting match for crowd participation, which ended when Jake located Martel and planted him with the DDT. He would then feud with Earthquake after the big man squashed Damien and served Quakeburgers to Lord Alfred Hayes. This caused Jake to introduce a new snake Lucifer, who was Damien’s big brother. In 1991, Jake was helping train Ultimate Warrior in the dark ways to prepare him for his feud with the Undertaker, locking him in a casket, burying him alive and having him walk through a room of live snakes, only to be bitten by a cobra, revealing that Snake, Taker and Paul Bearer had been working together all along. Warrior was fired before the scheduled series of matches took place. During the wedding reception for Randy Savage and Elizabeth, Jake and the Undertaker gave them a live cobra as a gift, starting his feud with Savage, where he later goaded him to the ring and had a cobra bite his arm. The two would feud into 1992 battling at This Tuesday in Texas and on SNME. Jake was poised to hit whoever came through the door next, Savage or Elizabeth, before being stopped by the Undertaker, leading to their feud. This led to Jake demanding answers on The Funeral Parlor and DDT’ing Bearer before trapping Undertaker’s hand in a casket and hitting him repeatedly with a chair. This led to a match between the two at WrestleMania VIII. Jake would leave the company until 1996 when he returned with his born-again Christian gimmick. He advanced to the finals of the 1996 King of the Ring losing to Steve Austin and being the motivation for Austin cutting the Austin 3:16 promo.

Promos/Character: Jake “The Snake” Roberts has to be on ANYONE’S short list of the best promos in WWF history. He was a stark departure from the manic screaming of the main eventers of the day, and Jake would talk slowly and silently staring a hole through your soul and talking about dark matters. He would tell you to “Never Trust a Snake”, and he certainly played that character to a T. His feuds were some of the best of the time, if not all-time, because he played that dark character and cut promos with a scary psychology not seen before and never done as well since. He’s a hugely memorable character and is remembered with mixtures of fondness and fear by fans of the era.

Workrate: Jake was a capable worker, but his blow-off matches never lived up to the hype of his feuds. Most of the matches weren’t that memorable, even when the feuds are. He had great in-ring psychology and the DDT is one of the coolest finishers of all-time, but workrate is a bit of a weakness for the Snake.

Staff Thoughts: There’s never been anyone like Jake the Snake, with his deep, dark promos and psychology. He just got it and connected with the crowd on a whole other level, whether as a babyface or a heel. His feuds were always some of the best of the time and as a promo there’s no one better. The slow, quiet delivery and that stare just made everything he said that much creepier. For someone who never won a WWF Title, could he possibly be more memorable? That list of feuds is incredible, showing he was always busy, never just killing time during his WWF run. The lack of memorable matches likely hampered Jake’s placement on the list, and if not for his personal demons, there’s no telling how high he may have climbed. Still, his character work feuds and promos alone struck a chord with voters for sure. You can hear Good Ol’ Will and the guys talk about Jake the Snake on this FYC podcast.

From the Voters: “No doubt. Mind, promos, matches with big time feuds..steamboat, honkey, rude, Martel, dibiase, warrior, savage. One of the best heels of all times!” – Shawn Kidd, May 30, 2017

“Hard to imagine any fan of the federation era not including him on their list. Pretty much epitomizes the era and probably an easy top 25 choice for me. A lot of guys get hyped up for their psychology and mind for the business. Jake lives up to that hype. Best worker ever? No, but I was compelled with every feud he was ever in from Steamboat in 86 to undertaker in 92.” – Brian Meyer, May 30, 2017

“I’ve been rewatching his DVD set lately and gaining even more appreciation for him. The master of the little things. His matches rarely drag because he’s always doing something. Great at elevating feuds to the next level; had great ones with Steamboat, Rude, Martel, and Savage. He may not have had a lot of great matches, but he also had very few bad ones. Superb as both a face and a heel. One of the best promos of all-time.” – Ben Morse, June 7, 2017

26. Ted DiBiase Total Points: 7,518 Total Ballots: 112 Average Rank: 33.9 High Vote: 7 Low Vote: 84 High Voter: D. Macgregor

Nuance: Ted DiBiase worked eight years as an in-ring competitor for the company, including a babyface cup of coffee in 1979, and his main run from 1987-1993, before transitioning to a managerial role in 1994. He had a babyface run in 1979, but is best known for his heel work as The Million Dollar Man. He had both a singles run and a tag run teaming with Irwin R. Schyster as Money, Inc.

Jump Up Moments: DiBiase’s 1979 run was significant for a feud with Pat Patterson where he lost the North American Title, leading Patterson to unify that title with the South American Title in that good ol’ tournament in Rio de Janerio. He was also Hulk Hogan’s first opponent in Madison Square Garden during this time. Upon his return in 1987 as the Million Dollar Man, he attempted to buy the WWF Championship from Hulk Hogan, who told him he’d have to win it in the ring. DiBiase attempted to do this unsuccessfully before recruiting Andre the Giant to win the title for him. This led to the Hulk Hogan/Andre the Giant match on the Main Event on Feb. 5, 1988, where Andre “won” the title and presented it to DiBiase, before WWF officials discovered the wrong Hebner counted the pin, leading to the title being vacated and a tournament to crown a new champion at WrestleMania IV. DiBiase would advance to the finals of the tournament losing to Randy Savage, and continuing to feud with him at house shows where the matches would be better than their WrestleMania IV main event. DiBiase would team with Andre the Giant to take on Hogan and Savage in the main event of the first SummerSlam in a very good match. He would then win the 1988 King of the Ring. He purchased Hercules’ contract from Bobby Heenan with thoughts of making him his slave, but Hercules turned face proclaiming he was a man and feuded with DiBiase. In 1989, he would create the Million Dollar Belt and feud with Jake ”The Snake” Roberts over the belt, as well as continuing his feud with Hogan by aligning with Zeus. As punishment for buying #30 in the 1989 Royal Rumble, DiBiase was forced to take #1 in the 1990 Rumble, lasting over 45 minutes, a record at the time. Roberts returned from injury stealing the Million Dollar Belt and putting it in Damien’s sack, leading to a match at WrestleMania VI where DiBiase won by count out. At SummerSlam 1990, DiBiase bought the services of Sapphire leading to crackerjack detective Jim Duggan looking for her and DiBiase feuding with Dusty Rhodes through the beginning of 1991. DiBiase captained a Survivor Series team in 1990 with the debuting Undertaker being the surprise team member. At the 1991 Royal Rumble, DiBiase and Virgil defeated Dusty and Dustin Rhodes, and DiBiase ordered Virgil to put the Million Dollar Belt around his waist but The King of Meat Sauce instead hit him with the belt. At WrestleMania VII, DiBiase lost via count out to Virgil, and would lose the Million Dollar Belt to Virgil at SummerSlam 1991 to a huge pop. In 1992, DiBiase would team with Irwin R. Schyster to form Money, Inc. The team won the WWF Tag Team Titles from the Legion of Doom in February 1992 and defended the titles against the Natural Disasters at WrestleMania VIII and eventually lost the them to the Disasters over the summer. They would regain the titles and feud with the Nasty Boys. DiBiase faced the returning Brutus Beefcake on an early episode of Raw, smashing his face with a briefcase causing Jimmy Hart to turn on Money, Inc. and Beefcake’s friend Hogan to challenge the team to a match at WrestleMania IX, where Money, Inc. retained their titles by DQ. The team would then feud with the Steiner Brothers, trading the tag team titles back and forth. His last match for the WWF was against Razor Ramon at SummerSlam 1993. He would take on a managerial role as head of the Million Dollar Corporation from 1994 to 1996. DiBiase was the inaugural North American Heavyweight Champion, a King of the Ring and three-time WWF Tag Team Champion.

Promos/Character: The Million Dollar Man is one of the most memorable and colorful characters in WWF history. From the vignettes announcing his arrival to his in-arena skits challenging fans to bounce basketballs or perform demeaning tasks for money, it was clear that “Everybody had a price and everyone’s going to pay” for the Million Dollar Man. DiBiase played the part perfectly, from his trademark evil laugh to his suits with dollar signs and his custom made Million Dollar Championship. DiBiase was a great talker, always able to add to his feuds and make them seem important. Plus, it was such a hateable character, his matches often had unreal heat.

Workrate: DiBiase was a technically sound wrestler and everything he did looked good in the ring, but he lacks the memorable top-notch matches to put him over the top. The 1979 babyface matches with Pat Patterson are very good. His house show matches with Savage are good, not great. His feud with Virgil was very hot and the SummerSlam match where Virgil wins the Million Dollar Belt was a memorable moment after a strong match. The Money, Inc. tag team run featured mostly forgettable matches. Overall, his in-ring results are a bit underwhelming, particularly for someone like DiBiase, who we know to be talented from his work elsewhere.

Staff Thoughts: The Million Dollar Man is one of the top characters that the WWF has ever had. He was involved in so many memorable moments. His feuds with Hercules and Virgil were fun, as was him purchasing Sapphire and feuding with Dusty and Dustin. He was in the main event of WrestleMania IV in the finals of the tournament and later faced Hogan for the tag titles at WrestleMania IX, so he had his WrestleMania moments. The memorable matches were few and far between, which limits his place on the list somewhat. Money, Inc. was a top team at a time when the tag team scene was dreck, for whatever that’s worth. You can hear the guys talk about DiBiase on this FYC podcast.

From the Voters: “As a character, he could be Top Ten. Unfortunately, he has no classic matches in the WWF. I enjoy some of his matches but there are so many guys with better matches on the list. Maybe his 10 minute challenge against Dustin in 1990 or the Mania match against Macho Man. Couldn’t stand the Money Inc tag team overall. On the plus side, so many memorable moments and angles. He makes the list but I don’t have him very high.” – Good Ol’ Will from Texas, June 3, 2017

“The definition of not needing a title to get over. I know they did the Hogan/Andre thing where DiBiase sort of had the belt for a bit, but it just seems like he should’ve been the main man at that time and had a run with the title. Such a great, believable heel with the mat skills to back up the talk. Definitely in the Top 50 for me.” – Mike Andrews, June 8, 2017

“Difficult guy for me to rank, partly because of the categories. He has so many “jump up” moments, but almost no “jump up” matches, even though many are good. I think particularly to his work with Bret. Yet his work was always crisp, he always had the crowd engaged and was always over as a heel. I think he’ll end up placing higher than some might think.” – Greg Phillips, June 8, 2017

25. Mr. Perfect Total Points: 7,569 Total Ballots: 116 Average Rank: 35.8 High Vote: 5 Low Vote: 87 High Voter: Scott Herrin

Nuance: Mr. Perfect was a character in the WWF for about a nine-year stretch, though he missed a couple of years of that time due to injury. He also spent some time in the early 1980s teaming up with Eddie Gilbert. Mr. Perfect spent time as a heel and a babyface, with the bulk of his time in singles work.

Jump Up Moments: Mr. Perfect debuted with perhaps the best series of vignettes the company ever did, showing Perfect performing a variety of sporting events, well, perfectly. While Tom Brady can’t throw and catch the ball himself, according to his wife, Mr. Perfect showed he could in these vignettes. He was one of the survivors at the 1989 Survivor Series and was undefeated on TV for over a year. Perfect helped The Genius defeat Hulk Hogan via count out on Saturday Night’s Main Event, kick-starting a feud between Perfect and Hogan, where they wrestled at live events and Perfect defeated Hogan via DQ in a match televised from MSG. Mr. Perfect was the runner-up in the 1990 Royal Rumble. He suffered his first pinfall loss on TV to Intercontinental Champion Ultimate Warrior on an MSG Network special. He also lost to Brutus Beefcake at WrestleMania VI. Perfect lost to Hogan in a good match on SNME April 28, 1990. Perfect won the tournament for the vacated IC title and successfully defended the title against Tito Santana on SNME in a great match before dropping the title to Texas Tornado at SummerSlam 1990. He captained the Perfect Team in a losing effort at Survivor Series 1990 and then regained the IC title from Tornado. He then retained the IC title against Big Boss Man at WrestleMania VII. Perfect then suffered injuries and lost the IC title to Bret Hart in an excellent match at SummerSlam 1991. He spent the next year as Ric Flair’s executive consultant, forming a power team with Flair and Bobby Heenan. Perfect eventually turned on Flair joining Randy Savage for a tag team match against Flair and Razor Ramon at Survivor Series 1992. He would then feud with Flair winning a memorable loser leaves WWF match on Raw in January 1993. Perfect then began a rivalry with Lex Luger, losing to him at WrestleMania IX. He had a very good match with Doink to qualify for the 1993 King of the Ring, where he defeated Mr. Hughes, before losing to eventual winner Bret Hart in the semi-finals in another great match. He then challenged Shawn Michaels for the IC title at SummerSlam 1993 in a match that WWF promised would be a classic, but was not. He then retired from in-ring work until his return to the company in 2002, when he was a surprise entrant in the Royal Rumble lasting until the final four. Mr. Perfect was a two-time IC Champion.

Promos/Character: Mr. Perfect is on the short list of best characters the WWF has ever had. The vignettes where he executed every sport from billiards to swimming were fantastic. Perfect played the character… ahem… perfectly with his cocky walk and sneer and especially that gum swat. He was always nails on the gum swat, no matter the trying circumstances. Mr. Perfect was great on the stick as well, later serving as an executive consultant for Ric Flair (and if you can be called upon to cut promos to help Ric F’n Flair, you know the company thinks you can talk) and as a color commentator. Add it all up and Mr. Perfect was a character that stood the test of time with fans, making him one of the more memorable characters ever.

Workrate: Mr. Perfect was a great seller (if anything it was too overblown and some fans feel like he oversold too much) and had some innovative moves like his somersault neck snap and the PerfectPlex finisher. Sometimes his offenses wasn’t as impactful as you might like, and the number of classic matches aren’t quite what you’d like from someone with Perfect’s talent. Still, the matches with Bret Hart at SummerSlam 1991 and King of the Ring 1993 are excellent, and his matches with Hogan are very good. His match with the Blue Blazer at Wrestlemania V is one of the best five-minute matches in company history and his loser leaves WWF match against Flair is very good as well.

Staff Thoughts: Mr. Perfect is one of the most memorable WWF characters ever, with the excellent vignettes holding up to this day. The towel, the gum swat and the sneer made him a great character and instantly a big deal. He then went undefeated for a year and feuded with Hogan, showing that he was a big deal. His star fell a bit, but he was the IC title level anchor for the early 1990s and had classic matches with Bret Hart. He was an important part of the team with Flair and Heenan and then had a good feud with Flair before he left the company. All said, the in-ring quality and strong character work make him the Perfect candidate for the top portion of our list. To hear what the guys had to say about Mr. Perfect, check out this FYC podcast.

From the Voters: “You absolutely nailed exactly one of the things I am looking for on my list in general which is this is a WWE exclusive list. What do we know about the WWE? It is very much character driven. Mr. Perfect might have done a lot more elsewhere but in the WWE he had to get over the gimmick that he was given, and he absolutely did. Oh, and he may not have been as great of a worker as he was in previous stints… but he was still pretty damn good, particularly when you compare him to his peers within the WWE within his era.” – Brian Meyer, June 2, 2017

“So many factors that put him inside the cut. His selling of the Mr. Perfect gimmick. Fantastic athlete who was fluid in the ring. He also sold others offense effectively. He was willing to job to inferior talent and not lose momentum. He jobbed to Beefcake at Wrestlemania and then Von Erich at the very next PPV while keeping momentum as a dangerous threat to the title. It was strange to see him as a face, but his promo work and attitude helped him get over with the fans. It would not surprise me if he finished as high as 60.” – Jeffrey Thomas, June 2, 2017

“My favorite wrestling character of all time (well, behind deviations like Heel Stone Cold and Hollywood Rock). Not a lot of folks know that. I adored him. He was an exceptional, phenomenal worker who made *everyone* he wrestled look better than they did coming in (Shawn Michaels at SummerSlem excluded). His two matches with Bret are among the greatest matches I’ve ever seen. Could talk like few of his peers, could work like few of his peers, and was still over in his comeback run. He’s in, and he’s going to rank highly for me.” – Greg Phillips, June 2, 2017

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Pro Bull Riding is Creating a Safe Space for People who Hate Anthem Protests

Last month, aging country singer Neal McCoy released the grammatically questionable single “Take a Knee, My Ass (I Won’t Take a Knee).” The song, which criticizes NFL players kneeling during the national anthem, went viral. It was lampooned by the left, and fans of good music on both sides of the aisle, even as it was reflexively lauded by Fox News and theblaze, the latter of which misspelled McCoy’s name.

But “My Ass” was neither the first, nor the most vitriolic anti-protest country song to come out this fall. Ryan Weaver, 44, released his song “Get Up” on October 26 as part of his EP Celebrate America, and boy, are its lyrics something.

“Get up or get out, you don’t have a thing to complain about,” Weaver sings over the country-tinged, arena-rock chorus. “If you can’t show more respect than that, find somewhere else to hang your hat.”

The song’s words, he says, are not meant to be taken literally, even though he also says he means every word.

“If it’s taken as it was meant, it was ‘do it some other time,’” Weaver told VICE Sports. “If you want America—not just the folks that agree with the protest—but if you want the rest of America to listen to the protest and listen to the message . . .” He trailed off.

For Weaver, a 20-year Army and combat veteran who lost a brother and a brother-in-law in the Middle East, the national anthem symbolized their deaths and is therefore sacred. An NFL player kneeling during the anthem is insulting their sacrifice.

When I reminded Weaver that Kaepernick repeatedly said he was protesting police brutality against the black community, not the military, Weaver refused to acknowledge that this was an issue, referring instead to “cultural problems,” and claimed that the anthem’s meaning—its symbol’s definition—has changed over time.

A guy’s opinion is a guy’s opinion. But in Weaver’s case, that opinion also has major corporate implications. In August, Weaver signed a contract to become the “Patriotic Voice” of Professional Bull Riders (PBR), the bull-riding league. Their arrangement with Weaver, at a time when player activism is turning some fans away from the NFL, appears to be part of a broader branding strategy to position PBR as the anti-NFL: the sport for patriots who stand for the anthem, love the troops, and aren’t afraid to say so.

PBR, after all, paid for the recording of “Get Up.” And in 2017, it began a campaign, also called Celebrate America, featuring Weaver as spokesperson. The campaign is an outgrowth of its riders’ “We Stand United” pledge, a loyalty oath its 35 top athletes took in September 2016 in response to Kaepernick’s kneeling the month before. In that pledge, competitors vowed to stand during the national anthem of the country in which they compete. (PBR’s 2017 Built Ford Tough Series, its most lucrative for overall point standings, was contested exclusively in the U.S.)

It would be overly dismissive to chock PBR’s Celebrate America theme and Weaver’s PBR-funded EP as pandering. According to CEO Sean Gleason, throughout its existence the league has consistently recognized veterans and first responders at its events. Celebrate America is simply a formalized name for its longstanding support.

“This organization was started by 20 cowboys 25 years ago [who] had a deep love and appreciation for our country and the opportunities it affords,” Gleason says. “We have been very patriotic and have for 25 years.”

Whether PBR has benefited from this stance is impossible to isolate, but according to its most recent data, business is booming. After the conclusion of 2016 season in November of that year, the league reported a 7.4 percent jump in attendance year-over-year and also claimed a 12 percent increase in viewership on CBS, “drawing more viewers than any sport outside the NFL.”

Weaver himself seems to be a true believer of his message, but PBR’s promotion and packaging of it could also easily be viewed as a means of differentiating itself as a hard-right option to fans disenchanted by the kneeling liberals of the NFL. The timeline of its messaging is an amazing coincidence at best, and at its worst a calculated move to increase the league’s audience.

The wrinkle here is that while PBR’s front-office cowboys may share Weaver’s politics, the league’s ultimate responsibility, after being purchased by WME/IMG in 2015, is to be profitable to its ownership.

WME/IMG, renamed Endeavor in October, is a sprawling international conglomerate which owns a variety of properties, including part of the UFC, esports’ ELeague, and Miss Universe. Its properties espouse all stances now, regardless of conflict, and its talent management, which is its oldest business, represents a number of pop artists, many of whom have spoken out in support of NFL players kneeling. In fact, you can go down its roster alphabetically and find at least one for each letter who has spoken out in favor of the NFL’s players kneeling. Start with 2 Chainz, a featured guest on Victor Oladipo’s supportive single “Rope a Dope,” released in September.

Endeavor’s stance, therefore, is to be whatever to whomever, provided it’s profitable.

Gleason said that Endeavor has largely been hands off.

“They recognize that PBR is an organization that was founded by cowboys on cowboy values, and that it’s important to the athletes and the people that participate in our sport to have our own opinions about choices like standing for the anthem.”

“They own us, but we have a brand and a business that we operate from Pueblo, Colorado,” he added.

Endeavor declined to comment for this story.

Talk to Weaver long enough, and you find a passionate guy who’s excited for the exposure PBR has given him to spread his message and music, which he says is one of unity. Gleason, heading the PBR, says the same thing: the purpose of his organization’s Celebrate America campaign is to foster unity.

“No, we don’t think anybody should get out of our country if they have a differing opinion from our athletes,” Gleason says, adding that while PBR supports Weaver and “his overall values,” it doesn’t necessarily agree with or approve of every word he writes. He has his artistic license.

“You want to try to paint us into a corner of divisiveness, and that’s not the case. We do have our opinions about whether or not you should stand for the national anthem, but then we’re out in the market trying to bring unity and reach out to everyone that is interested in discovering the sport of bull riding,” Gleason says. “It’s not a binary choice.”

But as long as Professional Bull Riders funds and promotes an artist who offers only two options, it sends a mixed message. The choice is not a choice at all, according to Weaver: get up or get out.

Pro Bull Riding is Creating a Safe Space for People who Hate Anthem Protests syndicated from http://ift.tt/2ug2Ns6