#villains! and writers will keep reusing him and they have been for the past few decades! and so on and so forth . it's just. idk. i would

[apopcornkernel]

"jason was right to kill blah blah blah it was a good thing that he murdered blah blah blah" ok quick question. whats ur stance on the death penalty.

[hamphobicbasil]

Could u elaborate about the dsmp story being bad? Not a rabid/brain dead fan, just genuinely curious and I enjoy reading people's rants lolol

oh you dont know the floodgates you just opened

a few things:

1. despite not liking the creators of the dsmp anymore, I don't actually hate most of them. [the ones that are particularly unsavory fall outside of this of course] so all that I'm saying i truly mean in a critical sense towards the story, its also just all purely my opinion as someone who enjoys fictional and fantasy stories and who like criticizing works to see what it does well and what it doesn't do well

2. for clarification I'm going to use the c![name] to indicate when I'm talking about the characters. Don't get me wrong, I think its annoying too but its the only way I'm gonna be able to write this thing without getting something across the wrong way yknow?

3. I stopped watching the streams after November 16th, [save for one Techno one but I closed out after a particularly bad story beat lol] and so all information coming afterward is all second hand from either me seeing people on twt talk abt it or people dming me. All i really know is up to dream's imprisonment and some stuff past that.

4. This is mostly aimed towards the "main" story, so stuff abt the badlands, eggpire, and whatnot are briefly mentioned.

anyways uh, i'll try to be brief but also include enough information to get why i feel the way i do on some stuff across

A. Performances Alright obviously these people are all streamers, so obviously they might not be the best actors, and hell no one is even asking that of them. However, when you're telling a story that's based on the audio with the visuals kinda coming to a second, it's gotta be pretty strong. I will say, some of the best actors in my opinion are Wilbur, Tommy, and Tubbo. I would include Ranboo but I never watched any of his story bits or story streams so I can't say much. Wilbur and Tommy are excellent in selling their character's emotions and feelings, when I watch the stream I don't feel like I'm watching an rp but an actual thought-out story yknow? And one of my favorite Tubbo examples was in the Hog Hunt video whenever Techno attacked him, he sounded genuinely afraid and I believed everything his character was feeling.

However, unfortunately, not everyone is gonna be that good. And I'm gonna say it; Dream and Techno have to be the worst out of the entire cast. I understand Techno's whole character is this monotoned badass, however, when really emotional moments hit I feel like he never lets that fall, and a lot of intense moments just ring hollow. And I'm sorry but Dream's attempts at being intimidating leave me laughing whenever I watch them. It feels like he watched that one scene from The Marriage with Adam Driver and Scarlett Johannson and said "Oh this is what good acting looks like! Just yelling." His whole "I don't give a FUCK about Spirit!" speech isn't as great as people keep making it out to be. And whenever he tries to act coy when being a villain it feels like a guy reading the script for the first time, a bit like he's trying too hard. I have more problems with his character but his portrayal certainly doesn't help.

Everyone else is fine, and I don't feel strongly either way about a lot of them.

B. The "Lore" Okay first off, I can't be the only one who thinks it's silly that people are calling the dsmp's story "lore" when it's not, it's the fucking story. Lore indicates backstory to either the world or the characters, which a lot of the streams don't really pertain to. This is a really petty section but god it's a weird pet peeve of mine.

Other than the misusage of "lore" vs "story", the actual lore and world-building of the world are so lackluster that new elements can be introduced whenever and it often feels cluttered or not well thought out at all. And here's the thing, I feel like if the writers sat down just for a few minutes to establish world rules and general history, a lot of this could be solved! but so much is made up on the spot that it starts to feel like they're grabbing at straws to keep people invested, trying to reach that next high and intense story beat without actually earning it.

C. The Egg / Eggpire This is a pretty minor note since I was only invested in the Egg storyline for a little bit, but god it's so underused that it's almost embarrassing. Bad has provided this super interesting antagonistic force that's infecting the SMP, can control people, and who one of our main character is immune to, and it's just never used or even talked about again? Now I understand if he wanted to keep it to a side storyline only, however, to introduce this borderline eldritch creature and force within the world and then never have it dealt with is so weird.

D. The Writing Oh boy this is. kinda a big one. Now I'm not gonna lie, it's pretty obvious I have a bias for the Wilbur writing over the current team [that consisting of Dream, Quackity, and Tommy mostly]. I don't this his writing is perfect by any means, the characters constantly bringing up traitors got obnoxious after a while, and writing Hamilton but in Minecraft really isn't the modern Shakespeare or anything. However, I think his exploration of characters and plot progression was a lot more thought out and well planned, like he actually had two brain cells behind the story yknow? The current team I think fails to be as emotional or even impactful, things happened too fast and my god was everything drowned in angst for so long.

Don't get me wrong, you gotta have your characters face hardships to make them reach their goal believable, but some of the shit they put the characters through just felt like too much. From c!Tubbo's constant comparison to c!Schlatt [who btw, fucking ordered his death and kept him from his friends in a nation he felt trapped in] and on a side note, i kinda really fucking dislike the "c!Schlatt dad!!" au's or the au's where c!Tubbo inherits some of Schlatt's features, it would be like c!Tommy getting a c!Dream mask after his exile, it's feels so weird yet people eat that shit up for some reason.

But god, did c!Tommy get the brunt of it all and in retrospect after his final death, it kinda feels really fucking gross. Now obviously, I'm not trusting any of these people to write decent mental health representation, but c!Tommy's PTSD and how it was explored was just degrading. [Specifically the scene in that one Techno stream where he saw the final control room from the first war, and had a flashback / panic attack where he started calling out for c!Dream. I understand this is an actual thing people with PTSD will experience, but it felt so fucking stereotypical it got on my nerves. I actually had to close out of the stream because it made me feel sick, fiction shouldn't leave you feeling that way.] And don't get me started on how they basically reused the formula from the previous arc. [Problem introduced -> Tensions rise as things start to fall apart -> Big confrontation -> Exile -> Return from Exile -> Blowing up L'Manberg, again.]

And speaking of characters-

E. Character Arcs, or the lack of them In my genuine opinion, some of these characters' arcs are so disappointing. Especially c!Tommy's. I'm not one to believe that he was a "selfish" character or anything, however, his goals were simply set on his discs and maybe c!Tubbo, he didn't have much outside that. However, L'Manberg gave him something to care about, he gave up his discs for it and he fought for it tooth and nail, I think it taught him to open up to others and trust more. It was a great character arc for him to have, seeing him still fight even after his first exile alongside c!Wilbur, to return safely to the nation that he and his found family had built.

But then his second exile happened, and I feel like all of that was undone.

c!Tommy's exile genuinely pisses me off for so many reasons. It's not that characters can't have their low points after reaching a major change or feeling like they've "completed" their arcs or anything, but it's more of the fact that it seems like he's never going to heal that feels like a spit in the face, especially to people who might have had setbacks like that before. Progress isn't linear, sometimes things happen and you get knocked back down, it can take a while to get back up, but I don't think c!Tommy's character is ever going to be allowed to get back up. From c!Dream, who pretty much was a constant abuser in his life, killing him then reviving him, and his still fractured relationship with c!Tubbo, which by the way I have a had time believing they would still be friends after all that happened, it feels like he can never get a win and it's generally kinda a shit way to treat your characters who have been abused. Of course, not all abused characters are going to get happy endings, I'm not trying to dictate that they all should, but c!Tommy deserves one and the fact that it's so obscure feels shitty.

Side note: we still don't have a canon reason to give a shit abt the discs. Like I'm sorry but without some sorta connection to the MacGuffin why should we give a shit about him getting them other than "he wants them lol". Like hell, I would even accept the classic "they were the last gifts from his parents" or something, but we still don't have a reason.

c!Tubbo also lacks a fulfilling arc as well, from someone who started out as a yes man, he has progressed a bit into having his own interests first, but besides that sometimes his character makes me so. depressed. He's easily one of the most pushed around and hated characters within the story, all for being a kid who didn't know what to do and he's in the same vein as c!Tommy; these kids can't get a break. Also, his anti-violence beliefs morphing into the "lets kill c!Techno lol!" bit was so out of place and without proper build-up it was like. what. And now he's building nukes?? god c!Tubbo makes me so sad because he's kicked around constantly and never given a chance to grow.

Another small note, I also don't really enjoy c!Techno at all. Besides the previously stated reasons of lack of emotions when they're really needed, I find his character to be weirdly pretentious. He talks as if he's constantly been betrayed and hurt but I personally, don't see it? Like, I think one of the main examples was the Pogtopia vs. Manberg war, yknow he wanted to end the government but they just reinstated it after they won = c!Techno upset. But this doesn't make sense to me because why did he think otherwise? The entire time c!Tommy had talked about taking back their nation and starting again, so the fact that c!Techno suddenly thought there would be a sudden change is, to put it bluntly, kinda fucking stupid. I don't want to say that he "plays the victim" or anything because that feels a bit harsh, but his character feels so far up his own ass that I can't enjoy him.

I have a major grip with c!Dream as well, but that's getting it's own fucking section.

F. L'Manberg This is a quick note before we get into the, forgive me for this, endgame, of this entire rant, since the next two sections are tied together. But god, L'Manberg makes me upset because it feels like they gave up on it.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that it is supposed to be c!Wilbur's "unfinished symphony", the thing that destroyed a once charismatic and widely loved man, his attempt at power that utterly ruined him. But the fact that it just got blown up in the end after everything and left to rot felt like such a waste of time. From the first war, to Pogtopia, to even c!Tommy's exile, it all felt fucking worthless in the end, and the story is actively closer to how it was when it started now more than ever. I wished it was actually allowed to exist and continue to be a peaceful place in what is a chaotic world, but no it was just snuffed out because why dedicate to this concept of finding others you can band together with and feel safe. fuck that noise apparently?

G. The Villains Now villain-wise, I'm only talking about c!Dream [during the first war], c!Schlatt, and c!Wilbur. And believe it or not, this is actually mostly positive.

Now I'm not gonna lie, c!Dream as a staring antagonist wasn't bad actually, he posed a genuine and threatening opposition to L'Manberg, even if we didn't know his real intentions or motivations as to why he was against it. He's lucky in this sense because he didn't have to be good, he had to be passable. If anything, he felt more like an anti-hero than a tyrant or traditional villain, and my god do I wish he kept this theme going forward.

Now quick disclaimer, I don't like JSchlatt as much as the next guy, he's an adult man who should know better than to joke about some sensitive topics and act the way that he does. But the one thing I'll ever give him is that damn, was he a good actor for his character.

Now here's the thing, c!Schlatt wasn't particularly deep at all. He had no real motivations behind his exile of c!Wilbur and c!Tommy other than getting competition out of the way, had no reason to act the way that he did and yknow? that's fine. The reason why he worked was from his performance alone, he was actually intimidating. When he came onto the stream and was doing his typical bad guy stuff, it was actually intense to see what he would do. Whenever he would almost catch c!Tommy back in Manberg, whenever he would begin to pressure c!Tubbo, it put you on the edge of your seat and it felt like everything would change at the drop of a pen. He's a villain to be a villain, and this works out because he's just charismatic and well put together enough to make it interesting, even without the backstory or motives.

c!Wilbur however, is much more tragic, and the best villain of the story. He essentially was the "mentor turned evil" trope and it felt terrible watching him descend into madness, unable to trust barely anyone except for c!Techno and c!Tommy. Hell, in the end I think he still cared about them both, despite losing everything. Sure, he blew up L'Manberg, but there was still a smidge of the old c!Wilbur in there made everything he did feel melancholic. His death at the hands of his father after achieving his final wish was chilling, and something I still think about.

Until yknow, Ghostbur came back way too soon to let people feel his loss as a character within that world. And then he got revived, pretty much-undoing everything that moment meant for his character lol.

And then there's the worst one:

H. Dream. I'm going to be completely honest, c!Dream is one of the main reasons why I dislike the current dsmp stuff so much. Outside of his actions as a person, the way Dream decided to write his character as this overpowered madman of the dsmp really just. destroyed any intrigue that he could've had. Perhaps this is from my growing dislike towards him, manifesting into a bias towards his character, but god I cannot fathom why people try to insist he's interesting when he has as much depth as a fucking puddle.

And here's the thing, I'm not even entirely against c!Dream being a villain, hell I think he would've been great as an anti-hero if anything. Make him sympathetic but not through c!George to get your precious "DNF" points or anything, but show him actually caring about the people within the dsmp, including c!Tommy and c!Tubbo. This would make his rival status with them just a bit more complicated, sure they're enemies, however, he doesn't want to hurt or kill them, and there's still a level of friendship there that keeps them bonded when things get super bad. This could've been super interesting to see, the first villain of the story receiving a sorta redemption arc then descending into madness as he started to fixate on being a god. This is all how I feel personally, but god do I feel like it would've been better than his current character, and hell would've worked with how he was during the Pogtopia arc, before the war that is. I'm not trying to tell Dream how to write his own character, but there are so many other ways he could've done the madman seeking to become god rather then. whatever the hell we got.

Because instead, we got this power-mad asshole who does things... because he can? And that's one of my major issues: he tries to surround his character in mystery to make him "intriguing" but it's kinda like c!Techno, it comes off as pretentious. Not only that, but you cannot keep waving around this mystery of a backstory without ever actually revealing it. I know the story isn't over, but c!Dream is effectively at his lowest point, now would be the time to reveal his backstory. But no just keep it in the dark and keep everyone guessing, that's totally fun and not at all tiring and annoying. (sarcasm, if anyone needs it)

And back to his performance, he doesn't sell this aloof, cynical and strategic warrior that has perfected the blade or some shit, he comes off as some angry guy yelling on reddit. which i don't need to tell you, isn't intimidating. It feels like he's trying to have c!Schlatt's intimidation combined with c!Wilbur's depth, but instead he's like a little brother who's trying to hard to mimic his older brother and is kinda embarrassing himself.

but other then that i dont feel too strongly abt the dsmp lol

but seriously, these are the main complaints I have abt the story tbh, I could probably talk about more but I wont because man. this is probably gonna get me in trouble if any of the hyper-dsmp fans actually read it.

[vagrant-soul]

Yet again, I got hooked by a stinger implying something interesting that wound up amounting to nothing, and I’m starting to feel like the lore is just never going to be able to escape the consequences of being built on an endless string of cliffhangers with disappointing exposition for resolution.

Extensive analysis of why the Empire narrative failed in 4.5 under the cut.

I really liked the twist where Varis was a knowing puppet of the Ascians; sure, it introduced another boring, flat villain characterized primarily by Crazyface, but it did so in a way that gave a character we were more familiar with, who has more emotional weight, a few more shades of complexity. 

Varis previously had one apparent goal (maintain + grow the Empire), a logistical struggle to attain that goal (defeat the warrior of light), and no apparent concerns outside of the scope of that goal beyond glimmers here and there that there might be something more going on beneath the surface (as with your first encounter with him in Heavensward, or when he dismisses his own son as a monster despite the apparent hypocrisy). The twist gave the story an opportunity to provide us with something other than a stock villain in a fancy tin can.

Except, of course it didn’t.

Varis shows his hand immediately, revealing that his solution to the tension and conflict created by the disadvantaged position we’ve just discovered is really just additional brute force. Jumping to any conclusion is disappointing when you’ve only just introduced a concept that leaves room for doubt, surprise, tension, character growth, and all the other things that make a story interesting, but the particulars of this conclusion are especially disappointing because it’s a very simplistic idea dressed up in complexities and contrivances.

His resolution - to kill the Ascians in order to permit humankind greater control of its own affairs, separate from divine meddling - is a plot point once again lifted directly from Final Fantasy XII. In FFXII, it was an excellent motivator for the villain that elegantly added dimension to the story, and that’s probably why it was chosen for reuse here - where it doesn’t work, because the two worlds have VERY different relationships to divinity and use their plot-moving God characters to different ends.

The Ascian narrative particulars have always been hazy, but their central purpose to the story has ALWAYS been to cut across the more political and human stories and play devils-ex-machina. They’re an easy, boring and perpetual threat that allow the player’s eye and the writer’s time to be drawn elsewhere. This is, in fact, the EXACT purpose Ascian-Solus serves; it creates unity in the story through keeping the Greater Evil consistent and it allows the human characters in the foreground the capacity for a little more depth. Crucially, the fact that they’re meddling is not the problem, as Hydaelyn meddles all the time and the narrative tends to agree this is Good - the problem is just that they’re evil (or “agents of chaos”, if you will).

The idea of adding a divergent motivation to a villain by proposing they team up with the heroes to defeat the Greater Evil is itself fine, but the constraint that made this interesting in FFXII is that said villain still had to do it at cross-purposes with the hero’s interests, goals, and well-being; they were still a villain, even if they were aligned on a single point. The writers clearly tried to achieve the same effect here, but because the greater evil in this case is not the silent hand of fate but a bunch of saturday morning cartoons, it became much more difficult to keep the Emperor villainous as well. They needed his methods to keep him antagonistic, and there wasn’t any tool on the table to let them do this besides to make up something arbitrary.

Varis’ proposal to kill the Ascians therefore involves just killing a load of people. In fact, it involves doing all the same stuff the Ascians want to do, except more. His plan heavily references FFXIV’s bloated and complex cosmology, introduced an expansion ago and entirely inconsequential ever since, making it difficult to recall as well. It also introduces a new, unexplained, unsubstantiated idea that going along with the Ascian’s desired plan to unite all the worlds will also, somehow, transmogrify everybody who didn’t die in the process into a race of ultra-peaceful super-humans that will then be able to rid the world of Ascian influence.

It’s a new, thinly explained concept that doesn’t have any connection to any of the narrative mechanics we’ve learned in the past. You can’t draw on past story experience to intuitively understand why this character believes this plan would work and is worth pursuing, because it has no basis in anything we’ve learned so far. 

The other problem is the story information we do have - just a few story-hours ago we were introduced to another character who has been hunting Ascians, manually, with, like, a sword and a gun. And he’s been, apparently, quite successful in this approach! Of course, we, the player, have also been pretty successful in a similar approach as well, and have killed 4 or 5 of what were once-12 Ascians in the course of doing other kinds of business. 

The net result is that Varis’ proposal appears both foolish and hasty. It’s a high-effort, high-cost, ???-reward proposition that closes the door on further introspection he or any other character might have about how to solve a difficult problem (i.e. “How do we free the empire of Ascian influence”) that might in turn create a new world state (i.e. “What does Garlemald look like WITHOUT that influence?”). It ignores proven, in-world story information in favor of something invented on the fly, making it obviously irrational to anyone who has taken even a cursory look at the other options. It doesn’t make him look complicated, dastardly, or cunning - it just primes us to expect another cartoon villain, this time with exciting new fascist overtones.

The most frustrating part isn’t the lost opportunities or the strain on believability or even the way the lore seems like an overly complex rusty jungle gym, duct-tape hastily applied to support whatever direction the writers care to go in this time. It’s that this one scenario I’ve written a thousand words on is a microcosm of the interplay between these problems and the greater ones they have created in the past. It just seems inevitable they’ll be repeated into the future.

[sol1056]

three anons: what the hell was all that in S7

Picking out the three that are most to the point for this answer, but I’ve got another dozen or so that overlap. Not sure I’ll have time/energy to answer the rest individually, so hopefully this meta will be sufficient. 

I mean it could be that they had different execs back then who were better at their jobs and kept Shiro around. No one disliked black paladin Shiro, even the DotU fans were ok with it, and the writing in s1-2 was mostly very good. Changing all that was a bad idea. I would have left on the spot if Shiro died or was benched, like now, I'm only around for closure. Maybe they were different execs with this decision & the EPs leaped at the chance. Well, we know who's also gonna be in trouble if that's the case.

With your theory on how storyboards were reused and characters shuffled around for cost cutting, might this not also partly explain the Adam flashback scene and how it was staged? I mean, they were originally supposed to be roommates and the scene was meant to appear in season 2 but got cut. What if they just reused the storyboard (or even animation, if it was already mostly done) the way it was and then just changed the dialogue? This could explain the lack of intimacy in the staging, too. Ezor and Zethrids interactions were more openly intimate maybe not (just) because they‘re villains who die immediately after, but because the decision to make them an item came before storyboarding was done, so the staging is more suggestive. I mean, if you think Shiro was mostly pasted in in the first half of s7, that might make sense.

If cost was the issue and they already had the black paladin Shiro version written, and got the greenlight to change it to Keith then things don't add up. Because they changed it once more! Which could have been avoided if they stuck to the Shiro one. And it goes without saying it would be better written to follow canon instead of the mess we got, like, I cant imagine this NOT discussed. So if it wouldn't be cost effective to change it again for Keith and it would be badly written, why did it happen?

Behind the cut: the most likely chronology of revisions, the clues in S7 as to its original form, and what this means for S8 and the Black Paladin position. 

This is everything I’ve been able to figure out between interviews, podcasts, tweets, plus researching the industry and a few reality-checks with friends more familiar. As always, any mistakes are my own. 

version 0: "five teenagers"

This would’ve been the first pitch after getting the green light, and probably only a loose synopsis, with just the pilot given a rough storyboard. A post-apocalyptic Earth conquered by the Galra, who are seeking Blue. The execs rejected JDS' mechanism for the discovery of Blue, in favor of simply having Keith ‘sense’ Blue. The execs also rejected the idea that Shiro would die only a few episodes in. This summary seems to be the basis of the "five teenagers" part of the teaser.

version A: "shiro kicks the bucket"

Timelines would've dictated moving onto an outline pretty quickly, detailed down to the episode level, including bits of dialogue, motifs, turning points or emotional beats. In this revision, Shiro dies/leaves at the end of S2 and does not return. This is the “originally we wanted him to kick the bucket” version, which the execs rejected.

version B: "shiro goes away for awhile"

If I'm interpreting the hints correctly, the "does Shiro die or not" question got tossed back and forth all the way into S1/S2 pre-production. Rather than rearrange everything, the easiest fix would've been to leave most of the story intact and write only a new ending where Shiro returns. The execs reject this rewrite, saying Shiro can’t be gone that long. This is the “we tried to just have him gone for awhile, but the execs said he had to come back sooner” version.

version C: "enter the clone"

Again, easiest fix is to insert Shiro/Kuron, remove Keith, and reverse that just before Shiro's return in version B. This impacts only the middle seasons (S3-S6); the clone compromise satisfies the execs. Kuron's characterization makes a lot more sense if it’s Keith, in visuals (ie Kuron leaning against the wall in Keith fashion), dialogue (fighting with Lance), and action (leaving without consulting the team). It's also why no one mentions Keith's absence. Because in the original version A, Keith was standing right there.

version D: "wtf is going on", aka Season 7

When JDS mentions having a full season written with Shiro as Black Paladin, it didn't make sense how they'd have a script and not use it. With @ptw30's visual detective work, I think I may've figured it out.

Technical notes: first scripts are all written for a season, then voices are recorded, and then the combined script+recording is used to storyboard. Production seasons are 26-episodes, independent of actual broadcast seasons; VA may be recording scenes across two 13-episode seasons completely out of order, since the recording schedule's going to be based on who's available, not chronology of the file numbers. The biggest staff changes are usually in April ('staffing season') when new shows get the greenlight and start sharking around to catch writers, designers, directors, etc.

In March of this year, S5 was released. At least some of the storyboarders were released in time for staffing season; in April, Hedrick moves to a new project. With S7/S8 being unchanged since version B, I suspect Hedrick delivered the scripts for S7 and S8 by winter of last year, at latest. Even that would be tight, since that's expecting animation to deliver 26 episodes in an 8-month timeframe. [edit: probably delivered much earlier, given the studio leaks show images we can recognize from S7/S8, so some amount of these seasons were in production by then.]

In June, S6 dropped, and a week later, Hamilton was announced as the new story editor via the Lets Voltron podcast. With the lead time required in production, there doesn't seem to be any reason to even need a story editor, at this point. All the pre-production work should be done.

In August, S7 dropped. Hedrick's editor credit is only for the first half of the season; Hamilton gets it for the second half. That means the last six episodes were written after Hedrick's departure. (May Chan's S2 script was reused in part, and she gains a belated co-writing script credit for that. Hedrick should've received the same; it's standard.)

Let's recap a few things we know (and a few we can intuit) about S7:

The season was already written with Shiro returning as Black Paladin, possibly also recorded and storyboarded. 

S6 reversed the S4-S5 trend, lending strength to exec arguments that Shiro is necessary in the story.

After S6 dropped, the EPs said the wolf's name was a spoiler. See this post from @pwt30; tl;dr is that perhaps the EPs intended the wolf to be Shiro's spirit. 

Despite Shiro's return, he's absent for the majority of the first half; when he is present, he barely speaks a half-dozen words, and none are plot-relevant. See @ptw30's post for more details. 

There's a glaring incontinuity when Allura says the paladin armor protected the team, yet Shiro is frozen with the other non-paladins despite wearing armor. 

Keith never offers for Shiro to pilot, nor mentions it, nor even seems to consider it an issue.

Not everything dovetails since I don't have the full picture, but here's my theory: S7 was originally outlined with Shiro's spirit in the wolf, rather than Black. I have no idea when/how JDS would've thought up the CA:WS parallels for his sole writing credit, but Shiro's "I died" and Lotor's psychotic breakdown are squeezed into S6E6, which was written by Josh Hamilton, Hedrick's later replacement. The only other Shiro-in-Black point is a few minutes at the end of S6's final episode. Shifting from Shiro-in-wolf to Shiro-in-Black really only affects one episode, with a bit of editing for another.

Anyway, S6 ends version C, and we segue to version B. For the first half of S7, the clone's body may have been in stasis while the team traveled through its various non-adventures. The episode we now know as S7E1 may have been the mid-point, with about six episodes of Shiro being unconcious. After watching the numbers drop from S3 to S6, the execs may've rejected another six episodes of where-is-Shiro and insisted he come back ASAP.

S7 only has two episodes that must be in order; the rest are pretty rearrangeable. All they had to do was insert Shiro into the background and record a few lines. (Several lines are pure voice-over, which also saves cost/time by not needing to animate moving mouth.) But the moved episode is only his memory/awakening, and the logical next episode would be Shiro's reconnection, and the rest of the season would roll from there. Without moving the entire second half of the season to the start, moving only his awakening episode would mean Shiro does nothing for 5-6 episodes and then abruptly reconnects.  

In a recent interview, JDS said at first the execs weren't enthused until JDS talked up the new mecha they'd give Shiro to captain. Honestly, there's no way JDS got to be EP without giving a really good pitch, but there may've been another element to his argument: nostalgia. The EPs seem certain everyone suffers from their same nostalgia dementia, which if you do, then you probably have been waiting for any glimpse of that og!Keith. If Shiro returns at the start of S7, then Keith's time in Black has been limited to a few disastrous episodes in S3, and a single big battle in S6. The beginning of S7 is the only time we'd ever see the Voltron84 formation working as a unified team, and returning Shiro too soon would defeat the whole purpose of showing how the team has grown in his absence.

The solution seems to have been to remove Shiro's reconnection completely, and keep Keith in Black. That would mean re-recording Shiro's lines from the midpoint onward, and editing in Keith over Shiro. The savings would be that only half the seaon would have to be reworked, not all. The loose end of the space wolf --- an artifact of version B --- was left in place.  

What I'm not sure of is whether the following are significant enough changes to warrant removing Hedrick's name and replacing it with Hamilton's. It could be, if supervising the revision process is enough to override the previous credits. I have no idea about that part of the industry, and it's the kind of edge case you're just not going to find a lot of blog posts about, so if you know, tell me. Otherwise, your guess is as good as mine.

Anyway, this would've meant Shiro was switched in for Allura, Allura was put back in a lion, and Keith was switched in for Shiro. This would explain why Shiro speaks as the leader of Voltron despite no longer being a paladin, and the uneasy sensations a lot of people got about the characterizations. It was most striking in the last three episodes: Shiro felt like Allura v2, while Keith felt like Shiro v2. And that further, the Altean-Earthian ship just 'lighting up' for Shiro --- and becoming that oversized white mecha --- may've meant as Allura's fourth (fifth?) deus ex machina.

I'd be willing to bet that mid-battle, Allura repeated her stunt from the end of S2, heading out to destroy Sendak's crystal by herself. She wouldn't need Sam to hack her brain, and then we'd also have a call back to when she got knocked down by the crystal-ball thing on Naxzela. If she was the one meant to go toe-to-toe with Sendak, that would explain the bizarre neutrality of Sendak's words --- he says nothing personal to Shiro, at all --- and the even more bizarre silence on Shiro's part. Allura's words wouldn't fit Shiro, so he's silent.

And lastly, it'd mean that the one leaping out of Black to cut down Sendak wouldn't have been Keith. It would've been Shiro.

Where would the story go from here?

If I look at the events of S7, the first half is terribly disjointed, really. If Shiro was supposed to wake at the midpoint, an episode (or two) is missing. One for him to reconnect with Black, and a second that would provide some minor conflict to settle him back into position. Those two episodes were likely replaced with the unexpected and frankly over-told two-parter of the Earth flashbacks.

Two problems with that, one technical, one structural.

First, the flashback two-parter has a lot of moving parts. Brand-new designs, characters, and backdrops. It's far too elaborate to be done in an ultra-compressed timeframe, not without several heart attacks and therapy bills on the part of the animation staff. (Plus, the US-based storyboarding team is already downsized, so fewer hands to do the work.)

Second, it doesn't make a lot of structural sense, especially against the big revelations in S6 of an existing Altean colony. Within the story, there's no reason to halt everything and travel across the universe to take however long to build a new castle, when the Altean colony question is far more pressing. Returning to earth also violates the structure, because it's really just a standard milieu: start on earth, head out to have adventures, and return home at the end.

But here, they're returning home and then possibly leaving again. That's just... a rather peculiar and imbalanced way to do it. It doesn't help that doing so means literally telling Romelle her people are just gonna have to rot, the paladins are certain they need the castle more. Why would you take one of the more compelling storylines you've come up with, only to background it again, and wreck the traditional bookending milieu structure at the same time? Especially if that means coming up with major set-pieces and brand-new designs in the space of several months, after a chunk of your core staff are already onto other things.

I think those two flashback episodes -- and the rewritten finale episodes --- may've been cribbed from S8. In other words, the second half of S7 was the original end of S8. That would mean repurposing already-created storyboards and animation artifacts, so there's a huge time savings there (not counting the need to re-record voices and edit the visuals to match the changed-around parts). 

[note: if there’s anywhere you want to frontload introductions for the spin-off, it’d be in the final season, not the penultimate season. Here it feels like a big honking distraction, rather than an organic segue into the next iteration.]

That change necessitated that utterly bizarro mecha that appeared out of nowhere with the most ridiculously impeccable timing. There needed to be a reason to pull the team back out to space to deal with Haggar and/or the alt-Alteans and/or Lotor or whomever else it turns out to be.

So... where we go from here depends on when S8 gets released, because that’ll tell us how much they did (or did not) edit the episodes. Another clue will be whose name gets listed as head editor for an episode; if we see Hedrick’s name reappear at the top, we’ll know we’re dealing with episodes that are enough unrevised to qualify as being Hedrick-edited, that it’s a version B episode. 

My expectation? They’ll move Shiro’s reconnection to the first part of S8, and add an episode or edit pieces of another, to blend it into what would’ve been the first half of S8 (probably with filler to mask the gap). Then add an episode to segue into the version B finale of S7, where we’d end with the original VLD lineup. With the time needed for animation, that’d be the easiest (if potentially awkward) way to repurpose as much as possible of existing artifacts. 

If we don’t get S8 in the next 1-2 months, though, all bets are off, and there’s a much greater possibility that the entire final season is being redone from scratch. I’d expect Keith to stay in Black, in that case, but I’m always willing to be pleasantly surprised.  

edited to add: see this followup for another detail that supports the reversed-seasons theory

[tasedandconfused]

whoops opinions and sass towards @ m/arvel @ e/ndgame  also kind of @ i/nfinity w/ar if we’re honest will be under the cut so don’t look if you don’t wanna see it js

how the r/ussos and whatever writers were interviewed for e/ndgame plan the characters futures:

Character with immense anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, has sacrificed themselves more than enough times already and finally has a life that they’ve been trying to get for years in spite of their trauma and still is one of the most traumatized humans: Let’s kill them because it’s the only sacrifice that makes sense! 

Character who’s had a ton of unseen trauma, been through more than literally everybody else, has finally obtained a found family and done everything possible to ensure the future is successful? Let’s murder them and in interviews state that she didn’t deserve a funeral because she’s a cipher, when we’ve been ignoring their storyline the entire time. Oh yeah, and say that she, who’s spent her entire time in the movies trying to make up for the murders she committed when she was being tortured, abused, manipulated, and forced into a life she never had a choice out of (and, at least comic wise, the one time she did break the rules was in a v consensual relationship w a guy i’m mentioning later who was then shoved on ice for it because he disobeyed orders and fell in love, which we don’t know if it’s actually in the movies or not bc they keep saying they might include it then cut all scenes of them talking)

Characters who’ve been abused by their adoptive father since literally the beginning? Let’s have one of them die for man pain after trying to rationalize the abusive parent and make him a likable villain, bc why the fuck not, let’s have the other one suddenly be more or less forgiving of him for no real reason, then have a second version of her killed because she refused to stop trying to make her abusive father care about her when he wouldn’t! Because who cares about abuse victims right!

A character who’s been traumatized for essentially 90 years, abused, manipulated, had his mind wiped, his head adjusted, who even knows if he had to suffer for his love for another character in the movies bc they erased their entire and extremely important relationship for favor in q/ueerbaiting and pushing all their female characters aside and ignoring them, continuing to force him into further trauma, have him voluntarily go back on ice in spite of the fact he was literally forced to be on ice whenever he misbehaved while they tore apart his mind repeatedly, then, rather than just say that they want him to be his own character awhile longer before taking over the mantle of another character, state that he’s too damaged to take over the mantle because he was kidnapped, tortured, and abused into a role of a mass assassin when he’s been cured of most if not al of the programming and has been trying to heal for the longest time, and every time he tries to get out of fighting he’s forced back into it by his supposed ‘best friend’, and he’s not had a single incident since the programming was removed from his head but apparently he’s still ‘too damaged’ and ‘not good enough’ for the mantle.

I’m not even gonna try to describe everything about l/oki, but having his abuser murder him is kind of more than a little fucked up. Then again, they’re the same people who thought bringing re/d skull back would be a ‘fun and exciting idea’. 

A character who never really had to give up anything, especially now since they decided sending him to his ‘old life’ would be so much better than having him make a new life (which already was gonna be canon, he’s supposed to be living w s/haron according to the writers before the r/ussos had that cut bc they didn’t want emily back and they thought it was ‘too domestic’. and hey, sending him back to a girl he knew for a few months but apparently ‘loved more than anyone else, including the woman he actually fell in love with now, and his two best friends who fucking needed him’ was such a better storyline than letting him make a new life in modern times, not fuck up the past and the universe, and not be able to be held fully accountable for every horrible thing h/ydra did, from infiltrating s/hield to kidnapping and controlling b/ucky, because he already showed by fucking p/eggy that he didn’t care about preserving the t/imeline. he had the opportunity to stop it and chose not to. But hey, he didn’t have to actually suffer at all during the whole movie! Cause apparently he didn’t care that his two best friends died! Or that he fucked over his relationship with one of his other best friends from the comics! Because fun! 

Also, on a slightly unrelated note, there’s one thing that really pisses me off about M/arvel as a whole, that nobody actually cares about but somehow I notice every single time. And no, this has nothing to do with how I personally feel about any of the actors, some I like some I don’t, I’m not specifying who or who, some of these are ethnically and some are religiously, but here’s the thing.

G/weneth P/altrow? J/ewish. Not coming back. We know she’s gonna be referenced in FFH. That’s probably it.  R/obert D/owney Jr? J/ewish. T/ony died. S/carlet J/ohannson? J/ewish. Has her BW movie and is probably done, killed her in what is one of her most canon moments, but in a shitty way and giving shitty excuses. N/atalie P/ortman? Jewi/sh. They basically deleted her from the canon with nothing but a few reused scenes and a few throwaway lines from T/hor. K/at D/ennings? Je/wish. Don’t even reference her anymore, doubt she’s coming back, they really don’t care.  A/aron T/aylor J/ohnson? Half more correct than E/lizabeth was for his role. He’s J/ewish. They killed him. 

Do you see the pattern here? But hey, R/ed S/kull, one of H/ydra’s elites? He’s alive! Isn’t that great messages to throw for people! Like the entire rest of this shitstick is. And hey, H/ayley A/twell, who literally sent her fanbase to attack Em/ily V/an camp for taking a role, and to attack C/hloe B/ennett for being the lead on A/gents of S/hield bc it had more of a fanbase than her crappy show did, and she tried to get it framed as anti-feminist and racist when it has more WOC in the main cast than her show did in probably both seasons? She got to win! She got her way! Isn’t that fantastic! 

anyways the reasons I don’t conform to the M/CU w most of my characters is very much so these reasons, they have no problem showing their r/acism, s/exism, and bullshit repeatedly and only pushing the w/hites forward while fucking over everyone else whenever they can. I know a lot of people don’t see it, and I’m not saying it’s not okay to like the movies, but I’m pretty tired of having to explain my reasons for being pissed off when the heads have no problem showing their ableism, sexism, and racism at any point they can. 

[jordoalejandro]

The Fifth Annual List of TV Shows I Saw the Past Year

This is another weird year for the list.

For one, a handful of shows are still on some kind of COVID related delay or hiatus.

Two, I dropped quite a few shows. Some I just bailed on because I had no patience to watch another season of them. Some shows I never got around to because I had an Apple TV+ free subscription that came with my iPhone and that ran out and I didn’t pay to renew it. (Here’s my quick review of Apple TV+: the quality of the shows is good but the quantity leaves a lot to be desired. You could probably pay for a month and binge through everything you have any interest in.)

Three, a lot of shows that I’m reviewing here have seasons that aren’t finished. They’re still going. Most are at least close to finishing. Some that have just started I’m going to wait on and review on next year’s list. But a handful of shows on this list are chugging along. I’m trying to factor that into my reviews but it's obviously a bit unfair to the shows. On the other hand, who cares?

So it’ll be a list with fewer entries, comprised of full seasons of shows and shows I watched most of. The list must happen, though. However it has to happen, it must happen.

Here’s the list of shows I’ve watched since the last Emmy Awards.

41. The Equalizer (Season 1 - 2021, CBS) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - The Equalizer is a fascinating show. You know how with some shows people will say the show is fully realized from the pilot? It’s usually presented as a good thing -- a show that knew what it was from the start and executed that vision. The Equalizer is that but in a bad way. It’s a show that from the pilot has felt like it was already in its tired ninth season, trudging along, writers and actors and everyone just going through the motions because they’re trapped in their contracts. There’s nothing fresh about this. No life to it. Uninteresting plots. Weak dialogue. Characters -- both heroes and villains -- that you’ve seen a thousand times (the nerdy IT expert, the troublesome teenage child of the main character, the generic good looking older white guy boss figure, blah blah blah). A show that’s already in late-stage syndication mode.

40. The Flash (Season 7 - 2021, CW) (Last year’s ranking: 49) - Speaking of late-stage syndication mode, The Flash has been in a creative tailspin for several years now. A big part of the problem is they just have no ideas left in the tank for villains on this show. This leads to them either reusing old ones (which doesn’t have a ton of dramatic impact -- we’ve seen The Flash beat all these people before), or digging through comic canon for the ones they have left (they’ve been unused this long for a reason). The other problem is it turns out running fast as a solution to every issue gets old very quickly. The producers must have felt this, and having gotten tired of telling Barry he has to run faster than he’s ever run before, they’ve switched it up and are now telling him to love people harder than he’s ever loved them before. Beyond the structural problems, the show is just not working on a very basic level. The writing has gotten super corny. The acting seems off. They’ve introduced new characters that are not working. The Flash had my worst rated episode this year and the weird thing was, it wasn’t even a mess of an episode. Like, functionally, it worked. It went from point A to point B and all that fine. But the problem was the titular Flash took off in the first few minutes of the episode to have sex with his wife on an island (not a joke) and didn’t return until the last few minutes of the episode. In between, viewers received a very boring, very boilerplate episode of The Flash, starring one of the new side characters it’s incredibly hard to care about. And she interacted with some even more to-the-side side characters and had some relationship issues with them and on and on until they inevitably saved the day in the end and it was so dull and so pointless that it made me say out loud, “What is this? Why am I watching this? Who could possibly care about anything that is happening on screen right now?” I felt that a lot during this season of The Flash. That was the only time I felt compelled to articulate it, but I felt it a lot. And that’s not a great place to be with a show.

39. Riverdale (Season 5 - 2021, CW) (Last year’s ranking: 50) - Here’s a little insight as to how stupid Riverdale can be. Between episodes three and four of this season (episode three was what would’ve been the season finale of season 4, which was cut short by COVID so at least it's not wholly random, in fairness), Riverdale did a seven year time jump. This seven year time jump landed them in the year… 2021. They shifted everything that happened in the first four seasons of their show, including dozens upon dozens of current day pop culture references, about a decade into the past. And why did they do this? So they could change a few things and then basically keep telling the same exact stories they were telling the first four years of this show. Just stupid nonsense. Stupid nonsense all around. Which, to be fair, I actually used to look forward to from this show. I’ve argued here that it’s at its best when it’s being as stupid as possible, but this year the nonsense just doesn’t seem inspired. They’re recycling some plots. The actors seem checked out. Maybe all the years of nonsense have finally taken their toll on them.

38. Batwoman (Season 2 - 2021, CW) (Last year’s ranking: 43) - Batwoman lost its main actress in between seasons, which obviously put it at a difficult crossroads. In my opinion, the wise thing to do would have probably been to recast as best as possible and carry on. Instead, the show chose to go a different direction and cast a new person to play an entirely new character. There was maybe a way this could work, but you likely have to retool the entire show to get there. Instead, they changed nothing but the main character and inserted her into the middle of the old character’s world, forcing her to have the same supporting characters and deal with some of the same storylines the old character was dealing with. This led to a lot of story beats where new Batwoman had to interact with old Batwoman’s family. What was in season one drama between Batwoman and her sister, or her father, became drama between the new Batwoman and this crazy lady she just met, or this guy she barely knows. As you might be able to guess, this added an air of “who cares?” to the proceedings. Also, the whole season essentially became an origin story for new Batwoman, which was a problem because that’s basically what season one of the show was. It wasn't super engrossing. That said, let me put aside the issues raised there. Having to recast your main actress is obviously a tough situation. They didn’t handle it well, but it was tough. Here’s why this show is still all the way down here on the list: bad execution. Week in, week out: bad plots, bad dialogue, dumb subplots, forgettable villains. A lot of the same issues that are plaguing The Flash. The show is simply not executing. It’s like these superhero CW shows don’t know how to do writers’ rooms over Zoom.

37. Everything’s Gonna Be Okay (Season 2 - 2021, Freeform) (Last year’s ranking: 47) - I said last year I didn’t know if I liked this show or not. I think the fact that I’ve put it near the bottom of my list for two years in a row has answered that for me. It’s a kind of fascinating show in how, I guess… aimless it is. Floating from one scene to the next, one plot to the next, one episode to the next, no real driving force. A comedy that’s not really funny. A drama that isn’t very strong. A few good moments in a season of ten half-hour episodes. Would I have watched a third season? Yeah, probably. Not in a hate-watch way, but also not in a like-watch way. I’m glad it got canceled because it means I’m free of it. Would I recommend to other people any of the shows I’ve seen from Josh Thomas? No. Definitely not. Will I watch whatever Josh Thomas writes next? Yeah, probably. Though I can’t say why.

36. Soulmates (Season 1 - 2020, AMC) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - This was a short Black Mirror-esque anthology series that ran out of interesting stories to tell surprisingly quick. Like, third episode quick. This show’s problem is that, while Black Mirror has freedom to tell lots of different stories, Soulmates is restrained by its premise: a short time into the future a company creates a test that can match you to your soulmate with 100% accuracy. It’s not a bad premise, but you can sort of imagine how it would constrain the storytelling possibilities. The test matches you with someone surprising, the test matches you with the wrong person, etc. etc. The whole thing was only six episodes and it felt repetitive even within that small amount.

35. Debris (Season 1 - 2021, NBC) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - Debris was created by J. H. Wyman, who did a lot of work on Fringe, one of my favorite sci-fi shows ever. Unfortunately, Debris was just a pale imitation of Fringe. The characters weren’t strong enough. The ideas weren’t intriguing enough. The episodes were often flat. They just didn’t have enough action or drama or horror or twists or whatever you might be hoping for from a show like this. They’d have a lot of walking around and looking at stuff and people talking about the stuff that was happening and then they’d kind of just peter out. A real disappointment.

34. The Walking Dead: World Beyond (Season 1 - 2020, AMC) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - You know how teenagers can often be the worst characters on a TV show? How they can exist just to act bratty and make really stupid decisions? Well, imagine a whole show of that. I’m half-joking. It’s not that bad. There’s some fun stuff and it works as a companion piece in this series of shows, but for the most part, it’s a lot of watching teenagers make really stupid decisions and almost getting themselves killed.

33. Stargirl (Season 2 - 2021, CW) (Last year’s ranking: 36) - Speaking of teenagers making really stupid decisions and almost getting themselves killed... Stargirl is a bit of a strange show. It’s kind of lighthearted, but also weirdly dark (more children die in this show than died in all the other shows I watched this year combined). It has some interesting characters and some absolutely ridiculous ones. Some fun episodes, but what also feels like quite a bit of filler. It’s not bad, it’s just also not great.

32. Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist (Season 2 - 2021, NBC) (Last year’s ranking: 20) - The first season of this show was about a handful of things, but the big emotional throughline was about Zoey dealing with the impending death of her father, who had been diagnosed with an incurable neurological disease. While the other plotlines in the show could be hit or miss, there was always emotional meat on that bone, so to speak. Well, minor spoiler alert I guess, but her father died at the end of the first season from the aforementioned incurable disease. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the second season of the show really laid bare how important that throughline was to the whole thing. Without it, the show felt rudderless. There were a lot of pieces of plots but nothing really anchoring them the way her father’s storyline did. Plus, there was a lot more love-triangle stuff, which wasn’t the most original, compelling plot the first season and grew even more tiresome in the second. The show sort of became like late-stage Glee for me, where I stopped caring about the plots and just listened for the songs. That more or less worked with Glee because almost all the people on that show were excellent singers. It works much less on this show because maybe (generously) half the performers are good singers.

31. MacGyver (Season 5 - 2020-2021, CBS) (Last year’s ranking: 26) - It was a pretty weak final season for MacGyver. They abandoned some interesting storylines from last season in a disappointing way. In fairness, it’s because last season got shortened by COVID and I guess for whatever reason they couldn’t find a way to pick back up where they left off. But still, they had a tough time regaining the momentum after they lost it. The cancellation was without warning from CBS, too, so there’s no real conclusion to anything. Just an average season finale that suddenly became a series finale. Tough way to go out.

30. Bob's Burgers (Season 11 - 2020-2021, FOX) (Last year’s ranking: 38) - I was looking back at my episode ratings for this show from the last two years and realized they were pretty similar. Both last year and this year, there was only one episode per season that I thought was pretty good. There was also one episode each year I thought was awful. And then, basically, there were 21 episodes each season that were fine. Just fine. A few laughs. Nothing really engrossing. Worked well enough to keep me entertained and not much more.

29. The Walking Dead (Season 10B - 2021, AMC) (Last year’s ranking: 29) - The eleventh season of the show is currently on-going. That’ll be on next year’s list. This is just for a grouping of six episodes that aired earlier this year. They were extremely forgettable with the exception of two episodes. I enjoyed “One More” quite a bit and I really liked the Negan origin story episode: “Here’s Negan”. Probably one of the best episodes they’d done in years.

28. The Blacklist (Season 8 - 2020-2021, NBC) (Last year’s ranking: 39) - A slight improvement for this show from last year. A handful of average episodes, a few very good ones. A really fascinating choice made at the end of the season that makes me interested in seeing what next season will be like.

27. The Moodys (Season 2 - 2021, FOX) (Last year’s ranking: 46) - I described this show last season as “likeable if not particularly funny” and said if it was to come back, the writing would have to get sharper. That remains pretty accurate. The writing was slightly better, though not enough to make this a truly good show.

26. Falcon and the Winter Soldier (Season 1 - 2021, Disney+) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - This show was way too overstuffed to really work well, which seems a poor choice made in the writing process. It has like a dozen different ideas it wants to touch on and doesn’t really execute any single one of them in a satisfying manner. The real shame of it is there was a good show in here if they just chose to keep things simple. The best episode by far featured Falcon and the Winter Soldier going on a mission with Baron Zemo. That was it. They went to a shady bar of villains and did some spy stuff. Blew some stuff up. Fought some bad guys. That’s the show! Sticking with a core of that and cutting the 20-something unnecessary side characters would’ve gone a long way.

25. Archer (Season 11 - 2020, FXX) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - The show returned to its spy satire roots and started clicking again. It’s not at the level of its earlier peak seasons, but it’s still reliable for some good laughs.

24. The Great North (Season 1 - 2021, FOX) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - Solid animated comedy from two of the writers of Bob’s Burgers. It obviously borrows a lot from the style and tone of that show. I do find The Great North a little fresher. The writing is a little sharper, the stories are a little more interesting (but it also isn’t in its 11th season like Bob’s Burgers so it’s not a wholly fair comparison). It slots in nicely with the other FOX Sunday animation shows.

23. The Simpsons (Season 32 - 2020-2021, FOX) (Last year’s ranking: 37) - I essentially write the same thing every year about The Simpsons. Some highs, some lows. I felt the quality of episodes this season, for whatever reason, was generally a little bit higher than last, thus it’s up here.

22. Duncanville (Season 2 - 2021, FOX) (Last year’s ranking: 34) - It didn’t make the huge leap in quality I was hoping for, but it was consistently above average this season, with a couple of flashes of excellence.

21. Snowpiercer (Season 2 - 2021, TNT) (Last year’s ranking: 14) - Decent second season for this show. Started a bit slowly but picked up in the back half. Sean Bean was a good addition to the cast. If it dropped in quality from season one, it might be because I liked this show as my stupid summer show and season two aired during the winter. High possibility this affected my opinion of it.

20. Chad (Season 1 - 2021, TBS) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - This isn’t a show for people who can’t handle cringe comedy. It lives there. And if the joke isn’t landing, which sometimes it doesn’t on this show, then you’re just trapped in a scene. But! But the jokes often do land, and when they do, they are very good. It’s also occasionally a touching show. The main character is a little dick, but the show also has a lot of sympathy for him -- he’s the son of immigrants trying so hard to fit in in middle school, to be what he perceives to be normal, in a battle with his own identity, in some of the most difficult years in a teen's life. You hate him but you also feel for him and want him to win. It’s a show with a little more depth than I thought it would have coming in.

19. What If…? (Season 1 - 2021, Disney+) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - You know how it is with anthology shows: you win some, you lose some. The show is better at coming up with concepts than executing them, I think. Episodes feel a little rushed (generally because they’re trying to tell a movie’s worth -- or sometimes multiple movies’ worth -- of story in half an hour) and sometimes they feel like they just end because they've reached their time limit. Overall though, it’s a fun way to just try different things in the Marvel Universe.

18. Family Guy (Season 19 - 2020-2021, FOX) (Last year’s ranking: 24) - I barely even write blurbs about Family Guy on these lists anymore. It’s very consistent. This is around where it ends up on every list.

17. Alex Rider (Season 1 - 2020, IMDbTV) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - Fun fact: I watched this show as part of an online paid focus group thing. I’ll just tell you what I told the people who ran the focus group. It’s good. It’s sleek and well-made. It moves just a little too slow for a spy thriller but not to the point of being boring. The show does need a little more life though. Some more quips and liveliness. It’s pretty preposterous on a conceptual level. A teenager is recruited into MI6 to be a spy and save the world. Don’t play that too seriously. Everyone understands this is teenage James Bond, so be that. Lean into it.

16. Prodigal Son (Season 2 - 2021, FOX) (Last year’s ranking: 28) - A fun second and final season for Prodigal Son. They only did 13 episodes for this season so they got to do a little more long term storytelling and fewer cases-of-the-week (this show handles those well anyway so not necessarily a bad thing). The bummer is that the show got canceled without much warning so they didn’t get to wrap things up, leaving on not quite a cliffhanger, but a fairly open-ended note.

15. Legends of Tomorrow (Season 6 - 2021, CW) (Last year’s ranking: 11) - The only show on the CW that seems to be in control of what it’s doing. Not as good a season as last season, but still quality work. Good characters, funny, imaginative.

14. Fargo (Season 4 - 2020, FX) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - First time on a list for Fargo since the very first TV list I wrote in 2017. An impressive hiatus. I will say, I do think this was the weakest of the four seasons of Fargo. It took way too long to get the train rolling, though when it did, it got much better and delivered four really strong episodes at the end of the season. When it’s on, Fargo can fire on cylinders in storytelling and characters and dialogue that very few shows on TV can match up with. This season’s issue was that it took far too long to be on.

13. 9-1-1: Lone Star (Season 2 - 2021, FOX) (Last year’s ranking: 35) - I've really come to enjoy this show. I think this show found a groove in season two, putting out pretty consistently above-average episodes. It still has a lot of over-the-top silliness, but the characters are strong and most of the plots work.

12. Superstore (Season 6 - 2020-2021, NBC) (Last year’s ranking: 25) - Superstore was one of the few shows to incorporate COVID into their storylines in a natural way and manage to find humor in the situation, so bravo for both attempting that and succeeding at it. Behind the scenes, the show lost their main star, America Ferrera, at the start of the season, which should obviously have been a tough blow to take, but the rest of the ensemble stepped up and the show continued on without missing a beat in quality. Then, after filming nine episodes, they learned that this would be their final season, so the producers transitioned really well into endgame mode, crafting a strong backstretch of episodes to wrap everything up. I would guess with all the behind the scenes stuff and shooting this whole thing in the midst of a pandemic, this was the most difficult of the show’s six seasons to create. The fact that they were able to deliver such a satisfying finale through all of it is very impressive.

11. Fear The Walking Dead (Season 6 - 2020-2021, AMC) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - I’d say this season was not as strong as last, but I still found it very good, and generally more enjoyable in recent years than the original flavor Walking Dead. A fascinating story choice at the end of the season, setting up an intriguing seventh season.

10. Animal Kingdom (Season 5 - 2021, TNT) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - Not the strongest season Animal Kingdom has had, but the show is still one of my favorites. This season is sort of about the characters searching for their identity in a new world, which is interesting in its own right but perhaps not as much as pulling off daring heists? I get the sense this season is doing some prep work in anticipation of next season, the show’s last. I’m predicting a very good final season.

9. American Dad! (Season 18 - 2021, TBS) (Last year’s ranking: 23) - A return to form for the show. Much improved over last season for me.

8. Love, Victor (Season 2 - 2021, Hulu) (Last year’s ranking: 5) - Just a minor step down in quality from the first season, I think mostly because the show lost a little focus. Season one was about Victor’s journey to self-acceptance and coming out, season two was more about dealing with the fallout from all that. There wasn’t a super-strong throughline. But still a very sweet show. Funny. Romantic. Very enjoyable.

7. Mr. Mayor (Season 1 - 2021, NBC) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - This show is going to be good. I’m calling it. It already had a very strong first season with one of my favorite comedic episodes of any show this year in 1.6 “Respect in the Workplace”. Tina Fey and Robert Carlock behind the scenes, a very good cast in front of the camera, this show is set up to become one of my favorites.

6. Mythic Quest (Season 2 - 2021, Apple TV+) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - Mythic Quest is a fascinating show. For 90% of its episodes, it’s just a very good workplace comedy. And then, every now and then, it just uncorks a truly fantastic standalone episode. Season one did this with episode 1.5 “A Dark Quiet Death”. The show also released a quarantine episode called, appropriately, “Quarantine” that was probably my favorite COVID-related TV episode, one that should serve as a nice time capsule for this period at some point down the road. Season two was an improvement in quality overall from season one, and it also featured a tremendous two-part standalone story (episodes 2.6 “Backstory!” and 2.7 “Peter”). It’s a funny show with good characters and a surprising amount of heart.

5. The Other Two (Season 2 - 2021, HBO Max) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - Great, great satire of the entertainment industry. Excellent characters. Fantastic writing. Often hilarious, but it also has some depth to it when it comes to matters surrounding the core family.

4. Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Season 8 - 2021, NBC) (Last year’s ranking: 7) - It’s only appropriate that this show ends up here in its final season. I once wrote about this show that I was never excited to see it pop up in my DVR, despite really enjoying it when I actually got around to watching the individual episodes. This final season was essentially a bunch of very special episodes. The show felt it was obligated to tackle all kinds of important real world topics instead of just being a goofy sitcom. It didn’t really work and it made me once again unenthused about starting up an episode. And yet, the show’s actually plotting within episodes and joke-writing ability is so incredibly strong that once I started the episode, I found myself really, really enjoying it as always. The series finale is a great example. Super obvious character arcs, things you saw telegraphed from basically the beginning of the season, and yet, the episode was still pitch perfect. Hilarious and moving and exactly how you'd hope for a show to wrap up. Stuck the landing brilliantly. This was a show that always succeeded in spite of itself. In spite of its premise and its core identity. It succeeded because it was always one of the sharpest written shows on television. Its final season was no different.

3. WandaVision (Season 1 - 2021, Disney+) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - I really enjoyed the early episodes of this show, where they went to great lengths to capture the setting and feel of various past eras of television. They did an incredible job with the sets and costumes, and beyond that, even the writing was very good at aping the styles of the eras being portrayed. But as much as I enjoyed the early episodes, I really loved when the show took a turn and slowly unfolded into a piece about one character’s loss and grief. A tremendous second gear. A fantastic show overall.

2. The Mandalorian (Season 2 - 2020, Disney+) (Last year’s ranking: 2) - A tremendously fun show. Didn’t lose a step from season one.

1. Loki (Season 1 - 2021, Disney+) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - Loved this show. Not just from a storytelling perspective. On that alone, it’s an excellent show. Some fun mystery stuff, some mind-bending stuff, clever, funny writing, great characters, solid drama. Beyond that though, I was just loving everything I was seeing and hearing on screen. The sets -- everything from the TVA headquarters to alien planets -- look amazing. The costumes are great. The music is superb. The show just had everything firing on all cylinders. It was brilliantly done.

So there we have it. Like I mentioned, some of these shows are still going on and have a few episodes left in their seasons. I might come back and do some light editing on this list if any of those shows do something truly surprising in a good or bad way in those final episodes but the likelihood is they probably won’t do enough to wildly change my opinion of them.

Or, if you’re reading this in the future, maybe I’ve already done that and that adjusted list is the list you’re looking at!

Wow.

Mind. Blown.

- - - - -

Read More:

Annual Lists of TV Shows I Saw the Past Year

[chickenscratchingdotcom]

Turning an outline from a list of plot points into a scaffolding that you can use to build a story

by Hugh Sullivan

chickenscratching.com

chickenscratchingdotcom.tumblr.com

Note: this is an article I wrote last year for NaNoWriMo, with the intent of publishing it then. For some reason it never got published, so I figured I’d start out some very pre-NaNo posts with this now.

I could write an entire article on the various ways of coming up with an outline... but it’s been done. A lot. Which is what I found when I started preparing for my first attempt at completing a full novel for National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short).

There are dozens of methods for coming up with an outline, maybe as many as there are writers. Some methods get reused a lot. Randy Ingermanson’s snowflake method is great for expounding something into a pulp-style 4 act format, and I used my own personal take on the concept to do the outline for my first NaNoWriMo story. Snyder’s ‘save the cat’ or Campbell’s ‘hero’s journey’ beat sheet is good for adventure stories. A sprawling list of clues, red herrings, and possible deductions to be made in different situations can be used for a mystery story. A list of obstacles and how to overcome them can be a barebones outline for everything from a children’s story to a romance novel to a sprawling science fiction epic.

The first year that I did NaNoWriMo, I thought an outline would be enough. But a week before November started, I looked at my outline and realized that I still didn’t know how to make it go from an outline into a story.

So here’s what I did, and I hope this will help you too.

Step 1) Map out your foundation

The very first novel I ever wrote for NaNoWriMo (or at all, for that matter) was written in a very episodic format, made to be published serially in short audio format, and then as a whole novel afterward. The main story had four acts, each act had four chapters, each chapter could be divided up into four 10-ish minute long podcasts. (Should I choose to make four books in this series, then I suppose the structure will be completely fractal at that point) This made it easy for me to separate out each episode to do this step. However, not every outline is going to be as clearly delineated. You may have to go through every point in your outline, or you may be able to find small logical groupings of events.

Then you start listing out what each section actually does for the story.

In general, the early parts will involve setting up the characters, world, and plot. Later chapters will illustrate more about the characters, move the plot along, and show how the characters change and grow.

For example, here is a basic example of a chapter outline from my first NaNoWriMo novel. My original outline had a basic overview of each chapter, and four separate points divided up into what would happen in each ~10 minute podcast.

 Chapter 1) Jacobs washes up in Crown Bay, setting the story in motion

•        Jacobs washes up on shore in Crown Bay. Jim Leatherby uses a magical item and finds him.

•        Jacobs gets drunk, screams at a statue commemorating the massacre ten years prior, then gets cornered by guards and subsequently rescued by Jim Leatherby.

•        Jim brings Jacobs somewhere quiet to get sober, and then recognizes him.

•        Cut to the governor’s office in the city. The governor confides in his right-hand man, Commodore Briggs, that he’s near breaking down. He lost his wife during the massacre ten years ago, he can’t afford to lose his daughter. Briggs brings him the good news that Captain Jacobs has been spotted, and he takes a group of soldiers to find him.

 Once the outline of this chapter was done, I went through and wrote down all of the functions that this chapter served in the novel.

 Functions of Chapter 1

•        Hook the reader into the lead character and world.

•        Introduce the reader to the two protagonists.

•        Introduce the idea of magical items in this world.

•        Show that Jim has a very simple life, and that the magic item he possesses can lead him to find adventure outside of that life.

•        Show that Jacobs is in fact the captain of a pirate ship, not just a sailor who fell overboard.

•        Show that Jacobs is well known enough that the governor would be looking for him, and leave the reader with enough questions as to why to keep them reading further.

•        Show that this town has a history, and link that history to why Jim is an orphan and Jacobs left to became a pirate.

 Most of these functions will seem simple and obvious to the writer of the outline. Even so, it’s good to actually list them out so that you know what your foundation is supporting. Now that we’ve mapped out what the outline currently supports, we move on to the next step.

  Step 2) Figure out where to place your support beams

Every story has basic needs that need to be fulfilled. A story needs a beginning, a middle, an end, and action or conflict to move itself along while keeping the reader engaged.

The basic outline of my novel was a very simple four act structure, similar to the potboiler pulp stories of Lester Dent and Michael Moorcock. In the first act, the world, characters, and the adventure were introduced. In the second, the characters found themselves embroiled in that adventure. The peak of the growing adventure hits between the second and third act, where the characters have to choose whether to blunder on or give up. And by the end of the third act, they have found themselves in so deep that there is no longer a choice. They have to see their way to the end. (Those who have looked into popular story and act structures may recognize this as somewhat similar to the current Hollywood 3-act structure, and both styles are compatible with most popular beat sheet formats as well.)

That meant that for my story, the basic needs for each act were simple. I needed to hook the audience at the beginning with an interesting world and characters. I needed to keep building the story in such a way that it kept people tuning in for the next chapter or episode.

But every plot point creates a set of needs as well. Let’s say that in your story, part of your plot entails a group of people traveling into a dangerous area.

So now you add to your list of story needs:

•        Show the reader that the area is dangerous

•        Show whether the characters know it’s dangerous.

 There are also some more subtle needs that you may not think of right away, but once you get into the habit of looking for them, you’ll find them fairly easily. Some of them may not have to be in any one particular place in the story, they may simply need to be inserted somewhere before the point where they are used in the story. Think of this is kind of a reverse Chekov’s gun. If a gun is needed at the end of the story, then make a note to show that the gun exists in the universe.

For example, when I realized that a minor character was going to be killed off at the end of the story, I decided that his past life before the story needed to at least be hinted at, if not expounded on so that when he died he could pass on some sage advice and maybe make some of the sappier readers get a little bit misty-eyed. (Not that I would know ANYTHING about that. Men don’t cry. Not even when a house-elf breaks his promise and sacrifices himself to save someone else’s life. Nope.) So that was added to the general list, as a note of something that needed to be worked in where it could be.

Some obvious things to put on the list of overarching story needs are things like:

•        Get the audience to know the characters well enough to understand their motivations and capabilities. (There’s nothing better than a villain whose motivations you understand... but can’t condone.)

•        Display the basic traits of the important characters and settings. (Even if your protagonist is going to be a boring everyman character for the audience to project themselves onto, the rest of the cast has to be three dimensional and interesting.)

•        Find some way to fill in any important backstory that’s relevant to the current plot. (Sometimes this may end in a simple flashback or prologue. But if you just keep it in mind while writing, you can often find a spot to weave it into the narrative much more naturally.)

•        Give the reader a question. (Who killed the butler?)

•        Answer the reader’s question. (It was the maid in the drawing room with the candlestick.)

Now that you have your foundation and you’ve set up support beams on it, it’s time to make sure that the beams can actually support your story.

Step 3) Build your crossbraces

Now that you have a list of what each chapter accomplishes, and what each chapter and the story overall needs, you can start going through and finding the holes in your outline and plugging them. Sometimes this is as simple a step as leaving yourself a note to mention something important in a character’s backstory. Other times it may require adding in a few extra plot points that you hadn’t thought of in the original outline. Something that you may have been able to do on the fly when writing, but now you don’t have to.

Keep in mind that even if you miss something in the planning phase, this method can help while writing as well. If you reach a block, don’t try to figure out how to get around it. Try to figure out what the story needs to continue. Does it need an outside force to make something happen? Or do the characters need to find their own way? This can be a wonderful spot to allow a person to step forward, do something to show growth and character, and help move the story along.

At one point in my novel outline, I needed a way for a character to escape after being tied up. So I made a point to mention in earlier chapters that he hid several coins in hidden pockets in a leather bracelet, and he was quite adept at sleight of hand, repeatedly making the coins appear and disappear. So when the time came, it wasn’t a shock to the reader when he produced a coin and used it to saw away at the rope. A simple bit of characterization early on saved me from a plot hole at the end of the novel, and simultaneously helped illustrate the character better for the audience.

Step 4) Start building

Now that your outline has filled in, you’ve got more than just a list of plot points. You’ve got a guide that you can use to write your story. A solid, but not inflexible scaffolding to build on.

For an example on how to use the guide in practice, let’s break down the plot point that I mentioned above. In this case, we’ll say that the characters are going to go into this dangerous area, and they will be made aware of the danger.

In the original outline, it would have simply said, “The protagonist, his sidekick, and the guide go into the Blasphort Desert.” Now, you have a bit more set up to write the scene when it happens.

 “Hmm,” the guide said, poking the ground with the toe of his boot. “Not good.”

“What is it?” the protagonist asked.

“Wyrling tracks. Their territory is close. Probably near the canyon, for access to water.”

The protagonist shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. We have to get through. And if we stray too far from the river...”

“Only one way to deal with wyrlings,” the guide said.

The sidekick piped up, “At least there’s something. How do you deal with a wyrling?”

“Run faster,” the guide replied.

The protagonist looked at the guide curiously. “I didn’t think you could outrun a wyrling.”

The guide shook his head. “Can’t. But outrun someone else, and...”

“Oh,” the sidekick said.

The protagonist put his hand on the sidekick’s shoulder. “Doesn’t matter.”

 Now when the scene is written, both the audience and the characters know they’re walking into danger, and some other needs outside of the scene have been fulfilled. For one, the audience now knows a bit more about the personality of the three characters and the danger that they’ll be facing. The guide is simple and straightforward, the hero determined but sensible, the sidekick a little more worried about the situation than the hero, and wyrlings are some sort of dangerous creature, but will stop to feed.

From my own experience, I’ve found that there isn’t a clever pun or turn of phrase that I’ve come up with that makes me feel half as clever a writer as when I write a short passage that manages to fulfill a half dozen story needs. And when facing the normal amounts of self-doubt that one faces while writing a novel, those moments where we as writers feel clever should be cherished.

   About the author

Hugh Sullivan has been a long time dabbler in writing, music, and tabletop and video game design. After a ten year hiatus from creative work, the voice in his head finally convinced him that not having a creative outlet was going to eventually drive him crazy, so he went back to school to do a minor in video game design, worked on designing a tabletop role playing game, started participating in NaNoWriMo, and composing soundtracks to accompany podcasts of his writing.

Ironically, doing all four at once may be a clearer sign of madness than following the advice of a voice in one’s head. Follow his work at his website, chickenscratching.com, or his slightly more active tumblr account, chickenscratchingdotcom.tumblr.com.