Ed Balls

i do not believe in having a tag for reblogs. all posts are equal in the eyes of god.

Any thoughts on Doctor Sivana?

Nothing too extensive but Sivana rules in a way that doesn't really invite too much introspection. He's THE archetypal mad scientist comic book supervillain and he's more or less stayed as that, arguably the most influential of them after Luthor if not outright on par with him, because while Luthor is the comic book supervillain template, the pop culture image of a mad scientist (big head short body, ugly, big glasses, always with a labcoat, hunchback and big teeth optional) is pretty much taken from Sivana. But Luthor's status atop the ladder and position opposite Superman mutated him into varying kinds of villain and a complicated character over time, where as Sivana is Sivana and never really needed to be anything else, there's just a purity to him. They've tried to make him a Luthor clone and the movie ran with that, but who cares, we all know what Sivana is, you're not fooling anyone with that guy.

He's got a pretty great thing going as not just an evil scientist, but the evil scientist head of an evil scientist family, with children split in either looking exactly like him or looking like chiseled models who look brutally dissonant next to their dad, and he genuinely loves his kids (at least usually or in his own way), in fact he's even show loving the ones that don't support him and turned good. If he's going to be the arch-nemesis of the superhero who introduced the concept of a superhero family, he can't exactly be lacking in one of his own, and that familial aspect he has towards his children has become just as important to his characterization as the fact that he spends most of his waking hours trying to destroy a child and failing.

They get some mileage out of how ruthless he can be despite his image (and people's tendency to overlook how dark Captain Marvel stories could get), he has enough basic standards to not go as low as other DCU supervillains and Thunderworld establishes a Hannibal Lecter-esque Sivana to hammer in contrast with the main one finding him unnerving, but I'll never forget this panel:

Like I said, there's a lot of dark stuff in Captain Marvel/Shazam that gets forgotten, but I also like this about Sivana, that's the flip-side of that purity I mentioned. That he can and does have almost a Doofenshmirtz-thing going on, where he's playing such an over-the-top cartoon villain 24/7 that every mundane or decent thing he does becomes inherently funny via contrast, as is his loving relationship with his own family, but he is a guy who's very serious about taking over the world and very serious about destroying Captain Marvel even if that means killing the boy Billy Batson to do it and doesn't think for one second about that contradiction. Contradictions are for chumps. He may love HIS kids, other kids are just a thing in the way. Sivana doesn't need to explain himself, like some OTHER inferior bald guy who sold out to become a CEO or something, Sivana lets his deeds do the talking.

Besides, evil is his family activity, who's to deny the joys of it to him?

The haunting ancient Celtic carnyx being played for an audience. This is the sound Roman soldiers would have heard their Celtic enemies make.

early SCP and RPC stand well above the rest of modern horror simply for having some goddamn variety

homestuck

homestuck

does that mean aradia is racist now

aradia was always racist

i don't care about black and latina trans women

Finale, at long last

STARE DIRECTLY INTO THE SUN

i find a lot of attempts to analyze memes involve some very obvious projection on the analyst’s part. “people are making these dark spongebob memes because they’re worried about microplastics and climate change” nah brah it’s just shock humor. the only one worried about that stuff is you.

Now that I think about it, one of the most dated, late-80s-to-early-90s things about the Simpsons is that the comically evil energy executive Mr. Burns, who callously pollutes the environment to accrue more personal wealth, owns a fucking nuclear fission plant, as opposed to what I suppose the original Simpsons writers were framing as the sane, safe, and clean alternative; coal fired turbines.

i'm gonna level with you guys

"Flesha" is a dumb name for Cyn wearing Tessa's skin. she literally has less flesh than normal Tessa.

watchmojo top ten war crimes in vietnam

i love unova. it's the only region where every mon feels like it's on equal footing. it's a land of organic popularity.

the only gen 5 mega is audino. the only gen 5 gigantamax is garbodor. pla rolls around and suddenly there's a new genie. sv comes along and now bisharp has an evolution for some reason. the most popular unovamon across multiple polls is a fucking chandelier, you couldn't pick a better representative for the generation that was torn to shreds on release for its objectmons. you just never know what you're going to get from unova.

if someone tells you their favorite pokemon is something from gen 5, more than any other region, you know that this person has a deep love for pokemon. unova is just, fuckin great man.