#'she's just fanservice for traveler' SINCE WHEN DID YOU GET THAT IMPRESSION??? also her character teaser/trailer fucked so hard
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love your thoughts on character’s ages. looking forward to fontaine & sumeru :) i think you described it really well. ages for my are like… they exist but they don’t at the same time.
edit: OH MY GOD TUMBLRS EDITOR FORMATTING SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!! if you see random parts of words bolded PLEASE ignore i dont know why it keeps happening
if you're the same anon as the og ask i am so so so sorry about the delay T_T T_T i was drafting my answer and then boom life happened ..... anyways. thank you for enjoying my thoughts wah <3333333 "they exist but they don't" SAME SAME frfr. like the most on-point (internet) discussion I've read on ages is that the stage of life you're in is often the only factor that matters, and that can vary a lot based on like your past experiences and stuff. and from my own perspective this holds true—similarly, in genshin where all the playable characters have jobs it's hard to kind of quantify them into really distinct age ranges tbh. sometimes it's just vibes (unfortunately vibes often includes height bc it's a game w not very diverse model types). anyways! character hcs:
sumeru (sans scaramouche): collei, cyno, tighnari, faruzan, layla, nilou
i think collei has an actual canon age right? unless I'm tripping and fanon has solidified so much in everyone's minds. I still haven't read the manhua <3 but iirc people think she's 12-13 there right. maybe she's like 17 rn, i can see anywhere from 14-16 though. idk anything abt her timeline so these are quite literally guesstimates from vibes and they're likely to be wrong. Layla is such a college girlie, she's like 19-20 and sleep deprived (same fr); begging for her to catch a break on behalf of uni students everywhere. I don't have a set age for Faruzan, I can see her anywhere from 30-40, 26 years old minimum (the redesigns people give her where she looks visibly older are so cool <3). Given she was a pretty well known researcher back in her day and since academia is a long and arduous career choice, I think it makes sense; also if she's like way older than Kaveh appearance wise (≥ 10 years) , even if she hadn't gotten trapped for a century, that would be sick af (their dynamic is impeccable and I think a larger age difference makes it better, sweeter, and funnier). Nilou also feels 19-20 years old to me; no real explanation, she just has a young adult vibe, like someone just out of her teenage years but quite capable at managing her life, although still testing out responsibility for major decisions and stuff like that (age solidarity w yun jin)
iirc cyno was already mahamatra or something WHILE tighnari was still in school; thus this makes cynonari EXTREMELY funny if you're a moral purist who ships it and thinks they fell in love in their akademiya days LOL. jkjk it's also a reasonable interpretation that Cyno became mahamatra at an insanely young age, since uhhh fucked up temple of silence background smth smth and honestly it feels in character for him to go buck wild at a young age like that (person most suited for young collei fr). HOWEVER. personally I think being mahamatra at like 19 is insane—thus I think tighnari's probably 23, cyno might be 27? I don't know if that makes it """""""better""""""" from an age gap standpoint but I also don't really care. Cyno being older but more joking around friends, while Tighnari is the younger kohai but serious and no-nonsense is pretty funny to me and when they're both serious you know you're fucked
fontaine: lyney, lynette, freminet (are those the only medium youth models so far lol. damn)
anyways lyney and lynette are confirmed to be at least 10 from Lyney's story quest. such helpful information I know lol. I'd think they're probably around 19-20? 18 minimum—I personally wouldn't watch 18 year olds do gravity defying magic tricks at the nation's biggest opera house—being like 1 year older doesn't make it any better ofc lol, but I think they're above the teenage threshold bc of that. Kinda fucked up to think about the timeline and house of hearth stuff though with this in mind
Freminet I'd say is around 16; 14 minimum. No thoughts for this just vibes. mmmmm idk when he was adopted into the house, if he's around 4-5 years younger than L+L, and let's say they entered the House when they were maybe 6-9 (my headcanons, is it now possible to piece together an accurate timeline of this from in-game lore??), and that was maybe 3-4 years after freminet entered, he probably was like 5-7 when he entered... wah frem............. poor child I'm giving him a hug (knowing that he's also a killing machine)
#i can like. i can SO CLEARLY see faruzan as a cs professor. her hangout was so incredibly real to me i LOVE her routes there#cyno and tighnari are interesting to me too. like its so funny to go from 'is he committing academic integrity violations' to 'worthy stude#'worthy student unlike the rest of researchers; has morals' to 'husband to annoy w jokes and also trust w my life'#i love them actually. don't think abt their relationship too much but it's really very sweet#and for the record the sumeru girlies (minus collei sorry) are all so dear. i really like their characters i like how they were written#nilou gets quite a lot of shit i think. from people's commentary on her. i still dont agree w her design but i cant stand for ppl who say#'she's just fanservice for traveler' SINCE WHEN DID YOU GET THAT IMPRESSION??? also her character teaser/trailer fucked so hard#ok anyways. enough from me ty for the follow up ask that also pushed me to actually type this up :) <3#asks#anon ask#ramblings!#teyvat thoughts#headcanons#genshin impact
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Digimon Data Squad Dub Comparison Episode 3 - The Return of Thomas!
This is a companion to my commentary on the original Japanese Digimon Savers! Reading my commentary on the original version of this episode (which you can find here) is recommended before reading this dub comparison.
Original name ~ Dubbed name
Masaru Daimon ~ Marcus Damon
Yoshino Fujieda ~ Yoshino “Yoshi” Fujieda
Tohma H. Norstein ~ Thomas H. Norstein
Sayuri Daimon ~ Sarah Damon
Chika Daimon ~ Kristy Damon
Captain Rentarou Satsuma ~ Commander Richard Sampson
PetitMeramon ~ DemiMeramon
[Since several characters share the same name between the original and the dub, quotes from the dub will always be in italics, while quotes from the original will not, in order to distinguish them.]
In the original, Masaru’s VA is always the one reading out the title card, but the dub mixes it up with different characters depending on the episode. This time, we get Miki and Megumi reading it, complete with fangirl squealing over Thomas. Uh, thanks, dub.
Sarah: “I think Agumon has been a really good influence!”
Marcus & Agumon: “More, please!”
Sarah: “See, he even says ‘please’ now.”
Agumon giving Marcus a reason to wake up early on a non-school day, that makes sense, but Agumon giving him a reason to be more polite? I dunno.
As you can see, there is no dub equivalent of “Agu-chan”. This is understandable and not the dubbers’ fault since English lends itself a lot less to casual terms of endearment like that, but it is a shame.
Marcus: “You served him first?! What did you do, adopt him while I wasn’t looking?”
Marcus says this like it’s not exactly what she’s literally done, and also like it’s not what he’d want. Don’t you want Agumon to be your new little brother, Marcus?
Sarah: “Keep it up, tough guy, and I’ll give your portion to him, too.”
Her affectionate ribbing calling him “tough guy” is cute.
Sarah: “After all, Agumon is a growing boy.”
A neat little nod to the time Agumon said that about himself in episode 1 (even if it didn’t make sense for him to have known that human phrase, but).
Agumon: “I won’t hand over the last of Sayuri’s fried eggs, not even to you!”
~~~~~
Agumon: “Boss, the only way to get this last fried egg is to take it out of my belly.”
Alas, since dub-Agumon is only referring to this particular last fried egg, we lose the future relevance the original line will have. The dub is not watching ahead to be able to pick up on these things.
Chika: “What a child…”
~~~~~
Kristy: “What a doof.”
Similar snark – he definitely is a doof – but there’s something I like about Chika calling her older brother a “child” that isn’t quite there when all she’s calling him is a doof.
Most of Thomas’s shower scene is cut. I will grant the dub that one improvement it consistently makes is doing its best to remove all the unnecessary fanservice bits.
[as Agumon tumbles from the bike basket]
Kristy: “…Doof Two.”
Agumon: [sighing] “I guess…”
What do you mean, Agumon admits and agrees that he is a doof (and implicitly agrees that his boss is one as well). Original-Agumon would not have nearly enough self-awareness to acknowledge that.
Marcus: “Why can’t you travel in the Digivice like all the other Digimon?”
Agumon: “Those other Digimon just show up when they’re called, but you’re lucky. You have me all the time, Boss!”
Unlike in the original, Marcus does actually bring up how Agumon ought to be in the Digivice. But Agumon doesn’t protest with “but I don’t like it in there”, despite him having made even more of a point of not liking cramped spaces in the previous dub episode than he did in the original. If the dub was going to have them discuss this onscreen, it would have been better to take the claustrophobia angle and show Marcus respecting Agumon’s wishes than to make it seem like Agumon’s just being contrary for the heck of it.
Marcus: “This one? No? Oh, just press everything!”
I enjoy the dub being even more obvious about how Marcus figures out which button on his earpiece is the right one to press.
Street punk #2: “Nothing’s going on at all…”
PetitMeramon: “Nothing at all!”
~~~~~
Street punk #2: “Nothing ever goes on around here any more…”
DemiMeramon: “I agree!”
This is significantly different – here, the DemiMeramon isn’t just parroting the dude’s words, it’s definitely expressing its own opinion about things. The implication here is therefore that it starts setting things on fire because of its own boredom, and these dudes here who happen to also be bored have nothing to do with it. That is categorically not how this is supposed to work.
Masaru: “Let’s fight!”
PetitMeramon: “Fight…”
~~~~~
Marcus: “There it is! Fightin’ time again!”
DemiMeramon: “Oh yeah?!”
Again, it’s not parroting his words; it’s responding on its own terms like it’s lucid and thinking for itself. Not how this should work.
Masaru: “You’re not solid enough, damn it! If I could just hit you once, I could get Agumon to evolve!”
~~~~~
Marcus: “It’s not solid enough to land a blow! But I’ve gotta punch it to start the DNA Charge! Otherwise, Agumon can’t Digivolve!”
The original version of this line sounds reasonably naturally like Masaru is just expressing his frustration at the PetitMeramon. But in the dub, it reads a lot more like awkwardly stilted exposition just to make sure the audience understands why this is a problem.
Marcus: “Stop setting things on fire! I just got these shoes!”
This is one of those dub additions for comedy, but I’m not sure I like the resulting impression that Marcus is somebody who cares that much about what he wears, because Masaru definitely never seems to be that kind of person.
Agumon: “Now be a nice fireball and let us punch you!”
Pfft. This episode in a nutshell. More of that dub-Agumon trait of saying things that would be snarky if it didn’t sound like he obliviously means them completely seriously.
Gaomon: “Yes, Master!”
~~~~~
Gaomon: “Sir, yes sir!”
“Yes, Master!” (spoken in English) is Gaomon’s catchphrase in the Japanese, and… I have no idea why the dub couldn’t just keep it exactly as-is. “Master” is a perfectly reasonable thing for him to call Tohma (especially since he’s a dog!), and it even comes already translated.
Instead, he calls Thomas “sir”, which on its own is… fine, I guess. But in particular, the “sir, yes sir!” catchphrase just makes dub-Gaomon come across as some kind of army grunt, rather than as the very good and loyal dog that he is.
Masaru: “Damn it… That thing pissed me off…”
~~~~~
Marcus: “Urghh… I am exhausted. Whew!”
Masaru here is complaining that he didn’t win, but Marcus is basically just neutrally expressing being exhausted without any sense that he’s specifically frustrated at the DemiMeramon for getting away from him. Since the entire ensuing several scenes are supposed to be a lot about Masaru’s frustration that he’s not good enough, the dub is not starting this off on the right note.
Yoshino: “Well, I didn’t think it would go easily for you from the start.”
~~~~~
Yoshi: “Don’t worry, Marcus, you didn’t let us down! No-one here at DATS actually thought you could do it anyway!”
Yikes, that’s some way more backhanded reassurance than she gave originally. And also, why does she even feels she needs to “reassure” him? Marcus was not expressing any sort of notion that he felt like he’d failed in the first place.
Agumon: “Hi there, pal.”
[Gaomon ignores Agumon and walks past him]
Agumon: “Hmph! No birthday present for that guy!”
How does Agumon even know about birthdays, and birthday presents, and the concept of giving birthday presents to people you’re on friendly terms with? These are not things he should reasonably have learned about yet when he’s only been with humans for like a week.
Masaru: “You bastard! You took away my prey!”
~~~~~
Marcus: “Hey, you! When we talk, you listen!”
It makes perfectly reasonable Masaru-ish sense for him to be mad about Tohma winning what was supposed to be his fight. But Marcus? Isn’t even thinking about the fight, apparently, and is instead just being a jerk.
So far, all Thomas and Gaomon have ignored is Agumon’s greeting and a brief “who are you, blondie?” from Marcus (the “blondie” part is dub-only, unsurprisingly), which is a little rude but not really warranting this response already. Heck, “when we talk, you listen” implies Thomas has been ignoring something substantial that Marcus has been trying to say to him, rather than just a question and a greeting.
There’s a record scratch in the BGM as Thomas ignores Marcus’s attempt to challenge him to a fight and just walks past him. I liked the comedic record scratch they had in episode 1, but this one feels a little cheesy and unnecessary.
Megumi: “His stern-looking profile is so wonderful!”
Miki: “It really is!”
~~~~~
Megumi: “He’s so on top of things!”
Miki: “He so is!”
I appreciate the dub changing the topic of Megumi and Miki’s fawning into admiring Thomas’s work ethic, rather than the original admiring of his appearance. (He is fourteen, you are adults, please stop.)
Tohma: “…it seems rather peculiar that there are a large number of Digimon detected in this country lately.”
…
Satsuma: “Is the frequency not as high in EU?”
Tohma: “No. It must be because it has a larger area.”
~~~~~
Thomas: “It seems there have been an unusually large number of Digimon appearances lately.”
…
Sampson: “Hmm. So do you think these numbers could eventually overwhelm the Data Squad?”
Thomas: “No. But of course, that all depends on having the right team in place.”
Seems the dub is ditching the fact that it’s specifically this country that’s been getting so many more Digimon appearances. Instead, Thomas just takes the opportunity to be a passive-aggressive jerk about Marcus sooner than in the original.
Satsuma: “Oh, let me introduce you. This is…”
[Tohma barely even glances at Masaru; Masaru gets angry]
Masaru: “Hey! I don’t care if you’re called Tohma or Tonma… but around here, I’m your senpai! I’ve only been here for three days, but make sure to call me ‘Daimon-san’ or ‘Daimon-senpai’!”
~~~~~
Sampson: “Oh. Go ahead and introduce yourself, Marcus.”
[Thomas barely even glances at Marcus. Marcus gets angry]
Marcus: “Say what?! Why doesn’t *he* introduce himself to *me*?! I’m the one with seniority, even if it’s only three days.”
This reads a lot less like Marcus getting angry has anything to do with the way Thomas just barely even looked at him, and more that he’s mad at Sampson for thinking he ought to introduce himself first. In that vein, it’s somewhat more reasonable for him to go ranting about seniority, I suppose. However, I liked the way that Masaru suddenly ranting about that with no real provocation was unreasonable and was very transparently him trying to assert some kind of superiority, not really about the appropriate-honorific-respect that he tried to insist was the point.
Marcus: “Who does he think he is, anyway? Look, kid! Agumon and I are the top fighters around here, and don’t you forget it!”
Meanwhile in the dub, the lines specifically asking for honorifics have no English equivalent, so we get this to fill the gap. I guess it has a reasonably similar effect and is a similarly uncalled-for assertion of superiority.
(I do like the “kid”, trying to make Thomas seem beneath him despite their equal age.)
Satsuma: “Already blazing down the warpath, eh?”
~~~~~
Sampson: “You are completely out of line.”
Satsuma was being reasonably tolerant of Masaru’s argumentative nature, accepting that this is just how Masaru is and he’ll hopefully be able to rein it in if he just understands the situation better. But Sampson is simply having none of it.
Sampson: “Marcus, Thomas is *your* superior. Deal.”
I guess it’s a lip-flap issue, but Sampson just telling Marcus to “deal” sounds weirdly colloquial for him. Also, “superior” is not quite the same thing as having seniority in terms of just having more experience. This implies that Thomas is going to have the right to give Marcus orders and Marcus will be obligated to follow them, which is not quite it.
Marcus: “You mean I have to take orders from him?”
…Okay, apparently that literally is what the dub wants us to think, even though this is not how things are actually going to work here.
(This is in place of the line establishing that Masaru and Tohma are the same age, but that will be a fact that gets mentioned in a later dub episode.)
Satsuma: “Be sure to get along with each other, as you are colleagues.”
~~~~~
Sampson: “Unlike some teams, *they* have got discipline.”
Satsuma was trying to mediate between the two, but instead Sampson is very clearly taking Thomas’s side, which he really ought to know is only going to rile Marcus up more.
(If Marcus and Agumon’s lack of discipline is really such a big dealbreaker for you, Sampson, why did you even want to recruit him in the first place?)
Tohma: “I think it will be futile to do so, Captain Satsuma. There is not a chance that this person could benefit DATS.”
~~~~~
Thomas: “Commander, please allow me to say a few words about the new recruit. Based on my first impression, I feel he could never benefit DATS in any way.”
Thomas is being a lot less out of line here, asking politely to speak his opinion and qualifying it as being only based on a first impression. This is also not him pointedly refusing to even try and get along like Tohma was, since Sampson didn’t ask him to. The blame in the dub version of this argument is a lot more heaped onto Marcus’s side rather than equally with both of them, and Sampson obviously siding with Thomas doesn’t help matters.
Masaru: “Say that to my face! Look into a person’s eyes when they’re talking!”
~~~~~
Marcus: “Say that to my face! Look me in the eye! If you have the guts!”
There’s slightly less emphasis on Marcus caring about people looking him in the eye when they’re talking to him, since he turns it into a general jab about Thomas not having any guts, but I do appreciate that it’s pretty much still here and unchanged.
Marcus: “What fighting skills does Your Highness possess, you royal jerk?!”
Ehh, I don’t really like Marcus bringing in jabs about the nobility thing at this point. Thomas has just insulted his fighting strength, and in that particular fighting context, Masaru would not care about anything except his opponent’s strength and would not make uncalled-for jabs at something unrelated.
Yoshino: “This is the worst… Go ahead, do whatever you want.”
~~~~~
Yoshi: “Oh well… Good luck. Protect yourself.”
This is after Marcus refuses to put on his headgear in the boxing ring. Yoshino sounds like she’s just exasperatedly washing her hands of his self-destructive recklessness, because hey, at least she tried. But Yoshi still seems to be genuinely trying to help him, even as the “protect yourself” falls kinda flat because he literally just refused to do so. (It doesn’t sound especially sarcastic – the “good luck” at least sounds very genuine.)
Tohma: “Why did you join DATS?”
Masaru: “Huh?! It was so I could win, obviously!”
Tohma: “Against who?”
Masaru: “Against strong guys!”
~~~~~
Thomas: “What made you join DATS in the first place?”
Marcus: “Huh? It was so I could meet guys like *you*!”
Thomas: “Seriously?”
Yoshi: “He means, he wanted to fight. Strong guys, like you.”
Marcus: “Not him…”
I think what the dub is trying to get at with “guys like you” is similar to a change they made last episode, in which Marcus apparently specifically wants to beat up bad guys, and Thomas is totally one of those, right. I guess props to the dub for at least trying to keep that vaguely consistent? Even though it’s a change that I very much do not like.
I presume the “not him” after Yoshi just said “strong guys like [Thomas]” is Marcus wanting to insist that Thomas isn’t strong, because it otherwise wouldn’t make any sense for him to deny the thing that he literally just said himself.
But, hey, notice something else here? Yoshino doesn’t have a line here in the original. They edited the footage to take away Marcus explaining his own goals and put those words into Yoshi’s mouth instead. Why? Why would you do that. I’d say that maybe they only did so to remove some of the punching from the fight because oh no violence (there will be some Issues the dub has with removing punching from this anime which is very heavily about punching), except they still keep the bit where Thomas punches Marcus in the stomach, so that can’t be it. They actually keep all the punches in this fight uncut, which is Rare for the dub.
Tohma: (He’s beyond help.)
~~~~~
Thomas: (I’m getting tired of this.)
Thomas’s thought is a lot less unreasonable than Tohma’s. Thomas is still coming across as significantly more in the right than Marcus in the dub, rather than them being equally as bad as each other.
Masaru: “A fight doesn’t end until one side admits defeat!”
~~~~~
Marcus: “Sorry ‘bout that. Why don’t you run along and catch up with Sampson. Maybe you can read a report together.”
Ughhh, I really, really don’t like this. The dub has apparently decided that, since Marcus is A Jock™, he must be disdainful of Nerds™ like Thomas and make jabs about that. Masaru doesn’t frigging care! He does not give a damn in the slightest how book-smart and workaholic Tohma is; the only thing that would ever matter to Masaru is how he fares in a fight.
And we get this instead of that fun line showing Masaru’s philosophy about street fights, giving more insight into why he insisted on getting up and continuing the fight even after the “match” had ended.
I also don’t like Marcus’s “apology”. He is very obviously not sorry for deliberately punching Thomas, and trying to act like he is when he obviously isn’t is such an insincere dick thing to do that would never even cross Masaru’s mind.
Yoshino: “Tohma’s beaten Olympic champions in the past.”
~~~~~
Yoshi: “I’ve seen Thomas routinely beat Olympic champions in that very ring!”
…What, in that ring in the gym that’s presumably at DATS? Even if this is the dub assuming it’s not at DATS and is just some gym somewhere nearby in town, you’d have thought that if Tohma had fought champions, he’d have gone to them to do so, rather than inviting them to him. To them, he’s just some random rich kid; why would they go that far out of their way for him?
The “routinely” also serves to make Thomas’s talent sound even more ridiculously over-the-top than it already was.
Yoshino: “Really, the only things worthy of a gold medal around here are your pride and your competitive attitude.”
~~~~~
Yoshi: “Marcus, I’m not impressed by your bragging, and Thomas isn’t even in the room!”
I miss the snark. A lot of characters the dub makes snarkier, but Yoshi kinda becomes a bit less so, it seems.
Kudamon: “If even a small flame from PetitMeramon’s body remains, it has the ability to develop and multiply in a short time. It should have been prevented from doing so earlier.”
~~~~~
Kudamon: “A DemiMeramon can regenerate itself over and over again, multiplying a hundred times in as little as half an hour. Apparently, the area wasn’t sealed off earlier.”
The dub manages to completely leave out the part where this is Masaru’s fault because embers from the PetitMeramon were scattered everywhere from his failed attempts to punch it and then he ran off and left things on fire for new PetitMeramon to regenerate themselves from.
Instead, apparently DemiMeramon can just multiply… whenever? It doesn’t do so from the flames it leaves behind, it just copies itself? Except, if Thomas secured the single DemiMeramon that there was to begin with, it literally should not have been able to do so. Sealing off the area would have been irrelevant once it had been safely turned into an egg. The only way it could have multiplied itself like this is if it did so before Thomas neutralised it – but it clearly didn’t do that in front of Marcus, so this is hardly his fault.
Marcus has the same flashback to punching the DemiMeramon and the same thought that this is his fault, but this makes absolutely no sense with the information the dub has given us. Great job there, dubbers.
Sampson: “And now, the DemiMeramon has been left on its own to multiply at will!”
Um, dub? Do you not remember the part where Thomas brought in the DemiMeramon’s egg? It was not left anywhere. That is not how this happened and not why this is (supposed to be) Marcus’s fault.
Masaru: “Wait! Those fireballs are ours to beat!”
~~~~~
Marcus: “Hey! Hold on a second, that’s our case!”
They really are watering down any sense that Marcus sees this as being about finishing his fight. Instead he’s apparently invested because this is a case, like he ever really cared about the official DATS investigation side of things.
Masaru: “Damn right! We’ll pull it off somehow using our spirits!”
~~~~~
Marcus: “You bet! And we’ll do it with style, too!”
I miss the “somehow”, making it clear that Masaru has absolutely no idea how he’s going to do this and is willing to basically admit that, yet still wants to throw himself into it anyway.
Marcus: “You two can’t handle that many alone! We’ll help!”
The “we’ll help” is a dub addition, but I am surprised by the notion that Marcus sounds willing to just help Thomas, essentially working together with him. That definitely shouldn’t be something he’d want to do right now. (Suddenly the dub is making Marcus come across as more reasonable and less of a jerk than it’s been doing the entire time, because what is consistency.)
Megumi: “His lightning-fast techniques look great!”
~~~~~
Megumi: “His reflexes are lightning fast! And he’s cute!”
Okay, never mind what I said earlier, I guess the dub is still keeping the idea that the computer ladies think Thomas is cute, adding in a reference to that where there wasn’t even one originally.
Agumon: “Wow…”
~~~~~
Agumon: “Cute?”
And because of that, we also lose Agumon being in awe of Tohma and Gaomon’s performance and accidentally making Masaru feel worse, in place of him simply irrelevantly questioning Megumi’s comment.
Kudamon: “Aren’t you going to stop him?”
Satsuma: “Leave him alone.”
~~~~~
Kudamon: “You’re not going to say anything?”
Sampson: “Not yet.”
So apparently, Sampson is planning to give Marcus some kind of talking-to about this at some point probably fairly soon. We’re really losing that sense from Satsuma that he understands that Masaru will be Masaru and is being patient and giving him space to sort his issues with Tohma out on his own, which I enjoyed and am sad to lose.
Agumon: “Aniki… Why are you angry?”
~~~~~
Agumon: “Don’t be upset, Boss! Just because Thomas is better than you!”
Originally Agumon didn’t really understand what was going on in Masaru’s head. Meanwhile, dub-Agumon seems to have Marcus figured out perfectly – and yet is also tactless enough to outright say the thing he’s already realised is upsetting him.
Agumon: “Well, I think Tohma and Gaomon are nasty guys too, but…”
~~~~~
Agumon: “Boss, I’m sorry I said that about Thomas. You’re better than him.”
At least dub-Agumon realises this and apologises after Marcus is clearly not thrilled by it, but his “you’re better than him” reads as pretty empty reassurance when he just said the exact opposite.
(Meanwhile, original-Agumon still didn’t realise this had anything to do with who’s better than who and just thought it had to be about Tohma being kind of a dick, while still being confused at how that would make Aniki this upset…?)
Masaru: “No… It’s myself that I’m mad at, not them.”
~~~~~
Marcus: “No, I’m not. I’m just pig-headed and I let my pride get in my way.”
Marcus, like Masaru, is capable of realising that the problem is himself here… but he goes way further than Masaru does as to why that supposedly is.
And the thing is, this isn’t actually supposed to be the problem in the original! Originally, Masaru’s issue was that Tohma is “better” than him simply in the sense that he’s a stronger and more capable fighter, making Masaru face the fact that he might not be as strong a fighter as he thought he was. But here in the dub, apparently the problem is that Thomas is “better” than Marcus because of Marcus’s personality, because Thomas is supposedly just a better person than some pig-headed arrogant jerk like Marcus.
Which is not the point! Masaru can be reckless and prideful sometimes, but it’s never in a way that makes him a bad fighter or a bad person. He’s been a bit of argumentative jerk in this episode in particular with regards to Tohma, but Tohma himself has been equally bad in that regard in his own very different way. The original was great in having both Masaru and Tohma be equally the problem in this clash between them, in very parallel ways.
Yet apparently the dub wants us to think that, no, Thomas is a perfectly reasonable guy and the problem really is that Marcus is such an arrogant jerk compared to him. Which I guess is somewhat consistent with some of the small changes they’ve been making to the rest of the episode to make Marcus slightly more of a jerk and Thomas slightly less of one, and having Sampson clearly come down on Thomas’s side, to make it look like Marcus’s attitude alone is the problem.
But, urgh! I hate that the dub is doing this to Masaru’s character, presenting Marcus as more of a jerk and as if this is his biggest character flaw, when that has nothing to do with what’s going on with Masaru and just makes Marcus significantly less likeable! Why would you ever think this was a good thing to do with the story’s main protagonist, seriously.
Masaru: “Damn it! What am I doing? Really… what the hell am I doing?”
~~~~~
Marcus: “It’s time I realised it. I still have a lot to learn. Face it. I’m not the ultimate fighter.”
And now, while originally Masaru was unable to properly articulate what it actually was that was frustrating him about himself, Marcus has just fully completed this 100% self-aware reflection. From this, what you’d assume it’d lead into would be, presumably, Marcus trying to be less “pig-headed and prideful” and more like Thomas, since apparently Thomas’s way of doing things obviously makes him better than Marcus as both a fighter and a person?
Yeah, raincheck on that supposed character development. I’m sure you can already tell that’s not what’s going to happen here, since it isn’t in the original, because it doesn’t freaking need to be.
Also, remember how I made a point of how the original changed Masaru’s “already the number one street fighter” into Marcus’s “trying to be the ultimate fighter” in episode 1? That’s becoming extremely relevant right here.
This whole episode is a bit of a wake-up call for Masaru in terms of realising for the first time that maybe he’s not actually the greatest fighter like he thought and there’s still more growing he can do. But Marcus? He’s supposed to have already known that. “Face it, I’m not the ultimate fighter”? You literally never said you were in the first place. You were supposed to already know you had a lot to learn, so why is it only just now “time I realised it”?
There wouldn’t necessarily be anything inherently wrong with the dubbers changing Marcus’s ultimate fighter thing into this if they’d made sure to follow through on it and also change every character moment he gets to be consistent with the new version. Buuut they’re not doing that. I don’t think they realised how meaningful of a change it even was to make in the first place.
Old man: “It’s hard lighting up a fire… The sparks go out easily whenever the wind gets a little too strong.”
Masaru: “Well, obviously!”
~~~~~
Old man: “I’m having trouble starting a fire, though. Y’see, the flames keep dying out on me because the wind’s too strong and it keeps blowing it out.”
Marcus: “Yeah, that’s happened to me, too.”
Unlike Masaru, who was just expressing exasperation at this old guy telling him something obvious like he didn’t already know that the wind blows out flames, Marcus appears to be… getting the metaphor? His own experience that he’s referring to could just be his literal problem of not being able to punch fire, but based on what he’s just been reflecting on a moment ago and also judging from his tone of voice, that doesn’t seem to be it.
Which makes me sad! Masaru is a ridiculously straightforward doofus who wouldn’t know a metaphor if it punched him in the face, and I am disappointed to see the dub water down that delightful part of his character and make Marcus into some kind of regular person who can actually recognise that kind of thing.
Old man: “But… once I get a larger flame going, it burns strongly no matter how much the wind blows. Fire is an interesting thing, isn’t it?”
Masaru: “…This is…”
~~~~~
Old man: “Well… If you learn to use the wind instead of fighting it, you can make the fire burn brighter than ever before. Harness power, don’t extinguish it.”
Marcus: “…He’s right!”
But then, the dub’s version of the metaphor becomes something quite different. Instead of saying that Masaru’s “flame” will soon get so strong that no wind can blow it out, he’s saying that Marcus should harness the “wind” to make his “flame” stronger.
Originally, the metaphor was basically meant to be a reassurance to Masaru that he’s already doing fine – that he just needs to keep going as he has been and continue to grow and soon enough nothing will be able to stop him. But here in the dub, the metaphor appears to be prompting him to take new action of some sort, warning him that his flame will keep getting blown out if he doesn’t do whatever “harnessing the wind” is supposed to mean.
It’s ambiguous exactly what the “wind” could represent here. If it’s something that was getting in Marcus’s way until now, is it meant to be his “pig-headed pride” that he was just thinking was his big problem? Is the point of this supposed to be the old man telling Marcus through metaphor that actually he should keep being exactly the way he is and should just do that harder?
On the one hand I’d be okay with that because hey, guess what, newsflash, there is actually nothing wrong with Masaru being the way he is, and the dub is wrong to try and act like his personality is the issue and to distort his personality into being more of a jerk to make it an issue. But then that just serves to completely undermine the supposed realisation that Marcus had back in the tunnel and set him back on the track of not trying to change at all. (Which, yeah, again, spoilers, he’s not going to; of course he’s not going to be actively trying to make himself more like Thomas, because that’s not something that Masaru would ever do. Masaru has very strong convictions in who he is and wouldn’t change that for anyone.)
And somehow, despite this metaphor being a lot more metaphorical and ambiguous than it was in the original, and despite this being Marcus, he appears to completely understand what the old man is trying to say to him and take those words to heart. Whatever those words actually are. Somehow.
…I suppose it’s possible that actually the “wind” in the metaphor is supposed to represent Thomas, and that this metaphor is trying to encourage Marcus and Thomas to work together to make each other stronger. This would sort of make sense, since GeoGreymon uses fire-based attacks while Gaogamon uses wind-based attacks, and we’ll actually be seeing some metaphorical stuff being done with those attacks of theirs in the next couple of episodes. Still, if that’s the case, it’s nonetheless definitely not what Marcus gets from this metaphor right here.
But you know what else this dub version of the metaphor very much isn’t? It is not remotely useful literal advice about how to punch fire. At no point does it explain the part where a stronger flame won’t be blown out by anything (and will therefore be punchable). So whatever Marcus is getting from the old man’s words here, it isn’t that. This is kind of important for what’s about to happen next.
As Marcus hears about the trouble at the gas tanks and rushes off, the old man has an added line that’s just silence in the original:
Old man: “See what good fire does?”
…which makes even more of a point that this is definitely only meant to be some kind of metaphor. Though, wasn’t he trying to say that the wind would do Marcus good? Marcus already is the fire in this metaphor, so stressing that fire is good seems besides the point. I’m getting increasingly convinced that the dubbers just didn’t have an actual meaning in mind for their version of the metaphor at all and were half-assing this entire conversation. (Yet they somehow still felt they knew better than the original writers enough to change it at all.)
Thomas: “There’s no chance he can secure the DemiMeramon. There’s too many!”
[cut to precisely *three* DemiMeramon flying around]
Yep, sure, three of them is totally too many. Originally the “too many” comment wasn’t there, and Tohma thought Masaru couldn’t do this simply because he hadn’t shown he could handle any PetitMeramon at all. Numbers are not supposed to be the issue here, or at least not the primary one like Thomas is making it sound like it is.
Masaru: “Fire sparks easily go out whenever the wind blows on them. But… Once they burst into flame…!”
[Masaru leaps to punch the Meramon quite solidly in the face and lands with his Digisoul flaring]
Masaru: “They won’t be extinguished so easily!”
~~~~~
Marcus: “Just like the old man said, a fire can be blown out by the wind. Then again… you know what I always say…!”
[Marcus leaps to punch the Meramon quite solidly in the face and lands with his DNA flaring]
Marcus: “You gotta fight fire with fire!”
So… yeah. In the dub, the old man’s words were not actually advice on how to solve this problem, and Marcus’s decision to deliberately make the DemiMeramon stronger had nothing to do with what the old man told him. He had no reason to believe this would work. He really was just being dangerously rash and hot-headed with no sense of actual plan or strategy, and it really did only work out of sheer luck.
(I mean, okay, maybe he could have just figured on his own that making the fire stronger would make it punchable. But Masaru is definitely not supposed to be the kind of person who could figure that out without being nudged in the right direction by someone else. And if Marcus really is perfectly capable of figuring that out on his own, why did he not do so the first time?)
Thomas: “Marcus made Meramon Digivolve on purpose so he could activate his DNA…”
It is very debatable that this was on purpose here, Thomas.
Megumi: “Not bad!”
~~~~~
Megumi: “Marcus proved he could do it!”
Thanks, dub, we needed it made obvious that this fight was about Marcus proving himself, because we couldn’t figure that out on our own.
Thomas: “Don’t get cocky. You just got lucky this time, that’s all.”
This line is basically unchanged, but guess what? Thomas is right to say this, where Tohma wasn’t.
Tohma: “Don’t be absurd. You don’t come up with any strategy or tactics. Do you think using force all the time will let you win at everything?”
Masaru: “Hah, sounds like a sore loser to me.”
~~~~~
Thomas: “Just as I thought, you had no plan and no tactics, just raw power.”
Marcus: “Hah. For a genius, you’re a real sore loser.”
Still basically the same, but again, Thomas is right this time, not being a sore loser. In fact, the added “just as I thought” (and this line comes after the cut back to HQ, so there was conversation prior to it that we didn’t hear) suggests that Thomas has just heard from Marcus himself that, yes, he really did just recklessly charge in with no plan.
I mean, sure, in a sense Thomas is still being a sore loser because Marcus’s raw power still worked. But the point of the sore loser line in the original was that Tohma insisting that Masaru used no tactics in and of itself was him sorely refusing to admit that maybe Masaru actually did have some idea what he was doing after all.
Tohma: “What did you say?”
Masaru: “Wanna make somethin’ of it? I’ll knock you out with one hit to the face this time!”
~~~~~
Thomas: “What did you say?”
Marcus: “Oh, just this: I’ll take my raw power over your tactics any day!”
Granted, outright saying he’d prefer raw power over tactics is definitely something Masaru might also say (of course he would; look at how he never tried to point out that he actually did have a strategy because he doesn’t care about that). But this is a bit of a different way for the dub to show Marcus having his confidence back, since his “conflict” this episode was apparently about “oh no what if raw power is bad and I should be more like Thomas”.
(…Did the dub actually deliberately remove the part where the metaphor was literal advice about punching fire so that Marcus could win through nothing but raw power in order to facilitate this complete backpedal in what briefly appeared to be some ill-advised character development? Ugh, but even if that was on purpose, it’s so much more interesting to show that Masaru actually can do strategy sometimes, and it’s just that his strategies are a lot more risky and head-on than Tohma’s!)
Tohma: “You want me… to act alongside him?”
Masaru: “You’re joking! I’ll never accept him as my partner!”
~~~~~
Thomas: “But sir, he’s completely undisciplined!”
Marcus: “This clown?! I’ll never be his partner – he’s way too annoying!”
Thomas and Marcus get given specific reasons to object to working together in the dub – and while Thomas’s complaint of “undisciplined” is perfectly reasonable, Marcus’s complaint of “annoying” seems rather beside the point. Too pompous, too uptight, (too makes-him-feel-like-maybe-strategy-and-not-just-raw-power-might-be-useful); something like that would be more relevant to Marcus. Is this supposed to be another Marcus Just Hates Nerds™ thing? Because ugh.
Overall differences
Oh boy. There’s a lot going on in terms of changes in this episode, and basically all of it is bad.
Rather than Masaru and Tohma both being presented as equally out-of-line for their own reasons in their initial arguments, the narrative firmly comes down on Thomas’s side by making Thomas less unreasonably harsh in his comments and by having Sampson clearly taking Thomas’s side.
The bit where they explain how DemiMeramon multiplied makes no sense and certainly doesn’t logically leave it as being Marcus’s fault at all, yet he still claims it is for no reason and we’re just expected to believe that.
Then there’s Marcus’s whole, ahem, “character arc” for the episode, if it can even be called that. Rather than some delightful subtle exploration of how Masaru deals with the realisation that he’s not necessarily the strongest fighter out there like he professes to be, it becomes this heavy-handed thing about how Marcus’s whole problem is that he’s Such A Big Arrogant Jerk. Marcus is way more self-aware about his supposed exact problem than someone like him really ought to be (including admitting he’s not the ultimate fighter when he never said he was), and for a moment it seems like his character development is going to be about him learning to be less of a jerk and more like Thomas. Except it won’t, because this won’t happen in the original, because this is not remotely Masaru’s problem in the original.
Then there’s the old man’s metaphor. Originally he was effectively saying that Masaru is doing fine the way he is and just needs to keep growing and getting stronger like this. Here, the metaphor is changed to imply that Marcus needs to take some kind of new action, except what new action is extremely unclear and is not actually going to happen, because, again, not how it went originally. Marcus apparently somehow gets this metaphor, which is ridiculous because I’m not even sure what it was on about, never mind that Marcus should be the last person who’s any good with metaphors, just like Masaru is.
And then there’s the part where the old man’s changed metaphor had nothing to do with teaching Marcus how he could literally punch fire and defeat the DemiMeramon. So his victory in the climactic fight really was complete boneheaded reckless luck without a semblance of strategy, and Thomas was right to call it that.
This entire dub version of the episode firmly wants you to come down on Thomas’s side and agree that Marcus is a huge dumb arrogant jerk whose personality is the entire problem here, and, urgh. I hate it. I hate it so much. I hate that the dub writers consciously chose to do this to Masaru’s character. Masaru does not deserve this.
(You’re probably starting to see why I’m actually quite glad that Masaru has a different name in the dub. Marcus may be a somewhat different character that the dub is insistently making worse, but at least Masaru will always be untainted and separate from the dub’s nonsense.)
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So I guess I’m hyperfixating on Death Stranding at the moment
And since I’ve finally finished the story after playing it for like 100 hours over the course of seven months or so I guess I have Opinions(tm) about things I didn’t like in the game
They’re eating at my brain so I’m gonna put them all in a single post to get them out of my system once and for all so I can enjoy the rest in peace
Spoilers, obviously
Hi welcome back to ‘Johannes is obsessing over yet another video game with horror elements in it’! I guess!!
Our latest entry in that category was Until Dawn but since UD can be played in like 6/7 hours and I spent 100 hours of my life on DS, as you can guess we’re talking about a full-blown hyperfixation, the kind that physically hurts because I can’t focus on anything else even after having finished the storyline
But it was super gradual. Again, seven months. I barely made any progress from December to May because I was only doing side-deliveries at the beginning of Chapter 3 instead of... you know... advancing the plot. It became an honest-to-god special interest about two months ago, then 6 days ago while playing chapter 10 it reached hyperfixation levels and now I am in PAIN
I hate my brain
Anyhow
At first I wanted to list the good and the bad hings in it but there’s too many good things to list them all in full, excruciatingly long details, so
Very Quick And Very Incomplete List Of Good Things That I Love
It’s a post-apo game based on travel, logistics, and good will, and it straight up goes AGAINST the whole ‘survival of the fittest’ trope that SO MANY post-apo things try to push!! YES
I insist but it’s built on helping each other and keeping everyone alive, seriously that is my shit right there!
The online community is wholesome?? People leave stuff everywhere, you never see anyone but people put little helpful signs and send you likes, and in my game we almost managed to repair all the roads together
There’s so many new & strange allergies and disabilities and phobias in this post-apo world and? nobody is trying to ““fix”“ anyone?? Like Heartman with his padded floor and his little box that brings him back to life constantly. He’s just... living like that. Nobody’s going “hey maybe you should get another heart operation buddy”
The hero and his phobia of being touched. I. Loved. That. The quiet scenes when he was just talking with Fragile, sitting next to her. In any other context this would just be two people sitting next to each other and talking but it always feels so soft and intimate everytime he allows another human being to just. be next to him. I love it. I love them
Everyone crying constantly because of chiral allergy!!
I loved all the important characters bar one (Bridget/Amelie)!
Why is this walking simulator so enjoyable why am I enjoying the fact that holding L2 + R2 while walking feels like holding your backpack and that you have to relax at times just like you’d have to if you were actually holding a backpack
Seriously. Why
The atmosphere was so great, the music was fantastic and the visuals were on point. A E S T H E T I C
The ghosts!! The giant Beached Things!!! Chiral crystals look! like! creepy hands reaching for the SKY!!
THE RAIN DESTROYS THINGS AND KILLS PEOPLE BY ACCELERATING TIME THIS IS SO COOL SHUT UP
Everytime the game got surreal it was electrifying
THE SURREAL WAR SCENES ON CLIFF’S BEACH
Everyone is using emojis
There’s guys addicted to delivering packages in that game and they’re trying to steal our stuff and we’re like “haha they’re dumb” but we’re basically addicted to delivering packages as the player. So yeah that was pretty fun
Terrorists thinking humanity isn’t going extinct fast enough and wanting to just rip the bandaid and speed things up. Simple but effective concept
People ask for SUPER VITAL ITEMS right next to completely trivial stuff and I’m LIVING for it. “Please fetch my toy dinosaur”. I feel you dude
The most isolated characters are like "LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THIS THING I LIKE" in your emails because they haven't had contact with other humans in years, it's super relatable
There’s a farm where people use the fact that Timefall rain accelerates time to grow food super quickly in one (1) Timefall and harvest everything just before it starts to die and I LOVE that detail of worldbuilding so much
YOU’RE FIGHTING BEACHED THINGS WITH YOUR OWN BODILY FLUIDS IT’S SO STUPID BUT ALSO SO COOL?? I love yeet-ing my own blood at eldritch entities
THE T W I S T S
All the fanservice (bar one detail that I’m gonna complain about later) is on dudes. This game reeeeeeally likes to show dudes naked or somewhat naked. Mostly the main character but this mocap also L O V E S Mads Mikkelsen and there’s a shit ton of homoerotic shots in there
I love Sam the antisocial papa wolf delivery man and if someone touches him or his baby again, I will cry
LOU. LOU LOU LOU PRECIOUS BABY I’D DIE FOR YOU. Wait I did
I love Fragile and how brave she is and how she keeps helping people even if most of them wrongly think she’s a terrorist and yes I will eat this cryptobiote thank you
I love soft science boi Heartman who keeps dying again and again and is a bit too much interested in bodily fluids
I love garbage man Higgs and how complex, funny and still somewhat tragic this memelord actually turned out to be in the end
Seriously I want to stop fixating on this character but you can’t give me YET ANOTHER character who wants to die but at the hands of someone else, that is unfair to do that right after my fixation on the new Doctor Who Master
So yeah Higgs is yet another character who makes me want to grab him by the lapels and shake him and yell WHY! ARE! YOU! LIKE! THIS! STOP! BEING! LIKE! THIS!!
Cliff broke all three of my feelings beautifully and in excruciatingly well-acted scenes that transcended the sometimes lackluster dialogue
John made me cry during That Scene
Mama your background was tragic and terrifying and you didn’t deserve any of this shit and I love you
Deadman was more funny than anything, really, but I still liked him even if he had no sense of personal space whatsoever and it clashed horribly with Sam’s phobias
The ending had some sad parts but was mostly positive, thank goodness
Now I’m gonna explain things I dislike and this looks long but it’s actually only 5 main things so I bolded them to avoid confusion
Things I really disliked (and could have been handled wayyyy better)
We all know it but Kojima isn’t a master of subtlety and some parts of the dialogue kept repeating the same informations again and again AND AGAIN and I was like “ok ok I get it”
The dialogue can be so bad at times seriously
Kojima is a bad writer there I said it
It was particularly annoying with Amelie/Bridget and the fact she’s a horrible person trying (and failing) to justify her actions wasn’t helping
Bridges protocols are incredibly intrusive. All of them. I know it’s framed as bad and Sam hates being spied on all the time and in the end he destroys the device that does that, but I wish someone else would openly criticise it in-game
I guess Deadman sort of did but still
Also I know the whole BB technology was Bridget’s idea, and since she’s the actual villain it’s framed as a twisted, evil thing during the ending, but I wish that had been framed like that much earlier ; a lot of Bridges employees just... seem to accept the idea that their employer is using premature babies and their dead mothers as useful, if disturbing, devices. They seem to justify it by “uh we stole that technology from terrorists” to try to cope with the idea but... yeah.
I mean, one of the points being made very early on is that Sam sees his BB as his child who must be protected at all costs instead of a detection device, but I really wish he wasn’t the only one to object to that thing
Again, the game DOES frame "using babies and their dead mothers as tools” as evil and twisted, I just wish it was given a lot more weight and way sooner
Now let’s talk about the Token Straight(tm) in this game
In any other kind of context it would be a joke! But Death Stranding literally has a Token Straight Guy!
I mean, there IS a few hetero couples among the Preppers. Not a lot, mind you. Like, there’s the Montaineer and his wife for instance. But they’re just there and it’s not what their side plot is about
No I’m talking about this piece of shit right there
This f█cking Junk Dealer guy complains the girl he loves is dead because of Bridges and emotionally blackmails us by sending us old holograms of her before her supposed death (somewhat disturbing holograms too because she looks... pretty young in them), then he sends us on what’s essentially a suicide mission in a BT infested zone, THEN when we give him proof she��s still alive and living in another bunker nearby, he won’t go there himself to check??
But SHE’s like “ok, bring me to him, then!”
He doesn’t deserve you, girl
I’ve already seen several people pointing out that carrying a woman as cargo on your back is... debatable at best and sexist at worst, but that part didn’t really bother me to be honest? She asked to be carried to him and it’s her choice. She was talking to us the entire way too, so that made things a lot less awkward. Also Sam has this phobia of being touched by other people so I bet carrying another human being on his back isn’t fun for him. It was also super stressful to do, to be honest.
And then there’s this EXTREMELY AWKWARD scene when they’re reunited and decide to get married, and thankfully Sam finds it just as awkward as we do because he’s standing super far away from the bunker in a “can’t they talk about this later - I’m right there” way. And I’m under the impression it was intended as cringy, in a “yeppp young people in love are Like That” sort of way, so I can accept that, to be honest. If you don’t take that scene seriously, it’s pretty fun in, again, a cringy sort of way
BUT
Then you receive more emails later and this piece of shit guy complains about her and he’s like “ugh WOMEN” or “marriage is the worst” and they end up divorced in record time and she goes back to her bunker
Which isn’t my problem with this subplot either, I promise I’m gonna explain myself eventually but this context is important. It’s okay to have characters who are pieces of shit like this guy who reeks of incel cologne. It’s alright. Not every character has to be a role-model. It’s good to have characters you can hate.
BUT THEN they get back together later to try to patch things up and you learn he was part of a gang who murdered her parents even though he protected her against the rest of the gang and that’s what I hated about that storyline. I guess if you squint it can be read as “this woman is making REALLY BAD life choices” but I read it as “he saved her so she owes him something, he can’t be entirely bad” and y i k e s this left such a bad taste in my mouth, good lord.
But yeah miss Chiral Artist you’re making really bad life choices please get away from this dude as soon as you can, thank you
Also don’t do this ‘sending Likes’ pose ever again, it was hilarious but also you made me use the word “cringy” several times in this paragraph even though I absolutely hate cringe culture, look what you made me do
Now I have to talk about a scene that was intentionally disturbing as hell but ONE (1) detail in it was disturbing for the wrong reasons
To be honest, I really don’t like the Metal Gear Solid games and one of the reasons is the rampant sexism in them so I... was kind of bracing myself for Death Stranding and expecting it to have at least SOME really bad fanservice with a woman at one point or another but to my surprise?? There was none? All the fanservice is on dudes??? Hello? I really liked that (well at some point Fragile takes a shower in our room but we see literally nothing except her shoulder and then Sam looks away)?? What a refreshing change
THAT BEING SAID
And if you played the game you know exactly what I’m about to talk about
Yep this is the part where Johannes complains about how the bomb flashback was shot
Ok so I guess I should also give some context in case someone is reading this but hasn’t played the game, but the deal with this scene is that our friend Fragile was betrayed by her colleague Higgs who used to be a porter but became a terrorist after meeting the “main“ villain of the game. First he secretly put a thermonuclear bomb in one of her deliveries so she’d nuke an entire city without even knowing it, and everyone after that thought she was a terrorist. And then he tried to do that shit A SECOND TIME, but she noticed and decided to toss the second nuke into a bottomless lake of tar. But he caught her just before she reached the lake and he decided to give her a sadistic choice, which was “teleport away and the bomb stays there and nukes the city, or carry it to the lake but only in your underwear under this rain that speeds up time and it will do enormous damage to your health and your body”
And of course being the hero she is, she decides to take the second option
And it’s an incredibly disturbing scene and it’s genuinely hard to watch
But it’s also the ONLY time a woman is in her underwear in this entire game and there’s A COUPLE of shots that were male-gaze-y at the beginning before she started to run and the really horrific part started.
So in a way I guess it could have been worse? way worse, even
But it still tarnishes an otherwise disturbing (and harrowing at times ; seriously I know I’m oversensitive but it was physically painful to watch) scene with unnecessary shots
We know Fragile had a young body before this happened, this isn’t the point of this scene, guys
Whoever decided to keep these shots (probably Kojima let’s face it), that is bad and you should feel bad
Idk how to do a visual transition for that next one because I do not want to screen that memo
So here’s a screenshot with a nice landscape instead
tw: acephobia
Now I have to talk about something I like the GENERAL IDEA of, but not how the IN-GAME MATERIAL ABOUT IT was written
Because I have to talk about that “asexual world” memo
First I have to say that I absolutely love the fact that a mainstream game openly says in-game “this future is full of asexual people" and?? it’s just that, it’s a part of this world. That’s just how things are. It’s normalised. I love it. For crying out loud this memo has the word demisexual in it. I can’t think of any other mainstream game that had this word in it so far.
It should have stopped there and let me enjoy that in peace but it didn’t
THE MEMO ITSELF WAS CLEARLY WRITTEN BY SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO HANDLE THESE CONCEPTS and there’s some really bad stuff there. I’d say it’s accidental acephobia but it’s still there. I’m not the best person to talk about this because I’m bi, but it still rubbed me the wrong way
The words this memo uses near the beginning are “"sexless lifestyle” among young people” and yikes, my dude. “Lifestyle”, uh? Really?
And then it goes on about how these new labels were already more and more common “among young people before the Death Stranding” and it also rubs me the wrong way, in a “wow young people and their weird labels lol” sort of queerphobic way?
However I’ve seen a post pointing out that the line “One theory posits that the Stranding accelerated the proliferation of these sexualities” was maybe a way of saying ‘yo asexuals are causing the end of the world’ but... I don’t see it, tbh? In the context of the game, society is extremely divided and a lot of people live in complete isolation and social norms have heavily shifted and it’s kind of normal that there’s queer people visible everywhere now, aces included obviously, because nobody’s bothering to hide it anymore. It’s a post-apocalyptic world! People are just being themselves! A lot of characters also seem to be bi/pan! They’re just vibing ok
At least that’s how I read that part, I can understand if someone had a problem with that bit but I didn’t
BUT! THAT’S NOT ALL because the memo concludes (I’m paraphrasing) “the birth rate has dropped, which might be a problem, but harassment and assault have also dropped, which is good, so idk it’s 50/50″ and. like. I get the intention. But it’s clumsy as hell and very bad. Please don’t confuse abuse of power and attraction. They don’t go hand in hand. Don’t do that. Please. And you know that aces can have kids if they want to, right. Come on. It’s 2020 my dude. This shit is harmful
Also. Like. It’s the end of the world in this game. People don’t want kids. It... has nothing to do with aces. Reality itself is crashing down. People are reluctant to have kids because reality.exe might f█cking crash down at any given moment!
Or a Beached Thing could VoidOut their city!
Or someone might send them a nuke, not naming names!!
Anyway!!!
It’s really badly written and whoever wrote it should educate themselves and maybe get an ace to re-read their stuff next time??
Again I’m not the right person to talk about acephobia and I bet an actual ace would have plenty more to say about this
Thankfully it’s a memo written in-game by a random Bridges councellor and NOT by any important character that we actually know
"I must preempt myself by admitting that I do not have any empirical data" yeah so, f█ck off maybe
So I’m just gonna call that guy “another piece of shit character” but it still doesn’t excuse the fact that the memo was written by someone who thought it was a good idea to put it in the game
Just let me enjoy my super queer post-apo world in peace and don’t write shit like that in your game thank you and goodbye
Minor stuff I also disliked but it wasn’t as awful
I get that Sam is upset at the end because Lou is dying but the way he said goodbye to Fragile broke my heart. It was abrupt and you KNOW he’s upset and wants to have nothing to do with Bridges anymore and that’s very understandable but it isn’t her fault
Seriously I want them to be friends again
I’m gonna pretend they’re friends again after Lou is saved and that Sam is a freelance porter again and sometimes their paths cross and they just talk together in the middle of nowhere and share cryptobiotes
The pacing is weird, there’s this deluge of plot in the beginning and the end but not much in the middle?
The BT boss fights could have been these epic Shadow of the Colossus showdowns but no, they were relatively standard boss fights. Wasted opportunity
The running on the Beach scene sdfghjhgfdsdfghjhgf that was... dumb
A lot of preppers are interesting in one way or another but some are just boring. Also I wish the design of their bunkers was more varied
Amelie/Bridget’s motivations are all over the place, both creating Bridges AND the Demens is... a lot? I know she both WANTS and DOESN’T want the actual, final end of the world to happen but that is a lot to take in and it’s all very confusing
Who the hell cares about ‘rebuilding America’ I just want to build a network where people can help each other
The ‘likes’ are fun but don’t make much sense
In conclusion
Death Stranding Good
Some stuff Bad
Some stuff Very Bad (but it’s just one memo out of 100+ memos, thank god)
I’m still hyperfixating
Send help
#death stranding#long post#eye contact tw#acephobia tw#from a minor unamed character but still it's there
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Holy Shit!
https://imgur.com/gallery/WKkli
https://imgur.com/gallery/j9OQylb
Beyond the proof that the guy who uploaded this is involved with Bad Robot that he provided at the end of his second post, these definitely seem legit because the first post was in 2018, before The Rise of Skywalker came out, yet the treatment contains some blatant concepts that ended up finding there way into that movie that I have a hard time believing anyone but J.J himself could have come up with (plus, the rest of the plot is very J.J-like, as I’ll get into.)
So these definitely seem to be the discarded Episode VIII and IX treatments. Thoughts?
- Luke’s reasons for coming to Ahch-To definitely seem more in line with TFA than in TLJ, seeing as if he wanted to just “go there to die” he wouldn’t have left a freaking map to the place behind, plus it seemed off that someone disillusioned with the Jedi ways would go to the site of the first Jedi Temple to begin with. His portrayal also matches what we saw at the end of TFA (seeming to be in mourning for Han), and fits the “kind but sad” description from the script. And far from cutting himself off from the Force, Luke has been influencing it from afar as part of his grand plan, explaining Rey’s vision when she touched his lightsaber.
- Luke has a wife and kids! Sadly for EU fans, the wife is not Mara Jade.
- It was Luke’s influence via the Force that explained the things Rey could do that fans deemed her a Mary Sue for, plus some other things that weren’t so routinely noted such as the remarkable coincidence that she and Finn just happened to run into Han and Chewie right after obtaining the Millennium Falcon. Not sure how well this would have gone down...
- Saccrum, Snoke’s home planet, is literally Exogol. Secret ancient Sith planet that is nigh impenetrable to all non-Sith, site of the final battle and (as we’ll soon learn) where Snoke is repeatedly cloned and where Palpatine is resurrected by Sith alchemists...it’s fucking Exogol.
- I recall concept art for Kylo Ren’s partly metallic face floating around.
- Dathan Naut seems cool, but she never really amounts to much.
- So it seems J.J Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan’s vision for the Sequel Trilogy always seemed to boil down to “All the generations of Jedi vs. all the generations of Sith reaching a climactic battle, with Skywalker vs. Palpatine at the heart of it, and the Palpatine who becomes a Skywalker as the key to victory.” That idea was always where they were going.
- Jedi/Sith Holocrons were always gonna be a thing, which is why Rebels worked them in.
- Live-action Ahsoka was also always an objective, it seems, and I bet the way they wrote her out in Rebels’ “Twilight of the Apprentice” was to potentially serve as a lead-in for her appearance in the Sequel Trilogy. But because that never came to pass, they brought her back toward the end of the series and set her on the new trajectory that she’s currently on. Honestly, I think that’s for the better, Ahsoka wouldn’t have really fit in the main film series.
- Not big on this Cfi-Xi character, she mainly seems to be here to “no homo” C-3PO. And her main role relating to the Sith Planet ended up played just fine by C-3PO in TROS anyway.
- BB-8 had the kind of fake-out death they ended up giving to Chewie.
- Wow, so Hux was supposed to die in Episode VIII and Phasma in Episode IX originally. Funny how that got totally flipped backward in the versions we actually ended up getting.
- OK, this “family time” that Rey’s getting is precious. It’s sad we didn’t get to see this.
- Hoo boy, “this is the bad ass Luke Skywalker we’ve been waiting for!” Really? Et tu, J.J and Kasdan? In light of the recent showing by Luke in The Mandalorian, I again question why this portrayal of the character is so widely beloved by fans when it has little to no basis in the OT.
- Rey vs. Kylo Ren in a raging ocean backdrop; here in Episode VIII rather than IX. Similarly, it’s a duel that Kylo clearly has in the bag, but a fluke in the Force allows Rey to survive, although I much prefer the fluke we got to the one this treatment proposes because....
- Goddamn it, J.J. You’re doing the time travel / time paradox shit again? Were Lost, Fringe and Star Trek not enough for you to explore that concept in? This is the biggest part of these treatment drafts that rubs me the wrong way, it’s just so needlessly convoluted and cliche.
- Also, yet another Mystery Box in Luke’s severed hand on Saccrum.
- No Jedi Leia in that flashback? Yeah, I can see why Kathleen Kennedy rejected this.
- Btw, Rian Johnson wasn’t the only one who was going to turn Luke into an asshole failure, it seems. Making this highly risky plan with Ben and not letting his parents know about it? Dick!
- Snoke is the one who destroys Luke’s academy, not Kylo Ren. And he does so as he is dying; another clue-in that there’s more to Snoke than it seems given that he’s still around.
- Lando would have been in Episode IX anyway, albeit still running Cloud City.
- The idea for this Episode IX is that the Skywalkers are a Jedi dynasty that long predated Anakin (Shmi being a descendant of it), and the Palpatines were their Sith enemies. Sheev Palpatine also would have died his first death generations ago and was being constantly resurrected via clone bodies made on Saccrum ever since, so the one that Anakin killed wasn’t the original; Palpatine can’t be stopped unless Saccrum is destroyed. While not as convoluted as the time paradox shit, I appreciate the simpler route they ended up taking.
- J.J and Kasdan always wanted Rey’s father to be a defective Palpatine clone.
- There was never a planned origin for Snoke in these treatments; wherever he came from the bottom line was that Palpatine brought him onto his side by promising to share his key to immortality (constant cloned bodies made on Sacccrum) with him. Again, this ended up being simplified into Snoke just being a whole-sale creation of Palpatine’s from the very beginning.
- Since these are treatments, the “love” part of the dynamic between Rey and Kylo Ren is highly underdeveloped and would likely have been fleshed out in screenwriting. The end result, with the deprogramming vision of Rey and Darth Vader, sounds pretty effective though, but I think I much prefer the Leia death / vision of Han version that we ended up with.
- LOL, the “droid way of making love”. I want to see this idea repurposed someday.
- That’s an interesting twist on Alderaan, although it really doesn’t amount to anything given that the planet Leia grew up on and called home still got destroyed by the Death Star.
- “Magic blood”, another J.J-ism. Again, I much prefer the simpler version TROS gave us.
- The climax’s structure is basically the same as in TROS, with Rey (and others) heading to the Sith planet from Ahch-To and then Leia’s Resistance forces going there from their base, with Rey and Ben facing Palpatine. The biggest differences is that we also have Luke vs. Snoke and Finn vs. Phasma battles going on, in addition to a Jedi vs. Sith ground battle.
- Yeah, I don’t really care for how Phasma’s death is handled: making her hideously scarred and treating her sympathetically don’t sit right with me. Rian Johnson did it better, IMO.
- No red stormtroopers here, but there are red Tie Fighters.
- Ben still gives his life to save Rey, albeit in a less literal manner.
- Palpatine still wants Rey to ascend to the Sith throne and rule by his side. Also: “he loves the smell of burning hair, it reminds him of home”!? Wow, that’s dark in what it’s implying...
- OK, so while not a Jedi, Leia is the Big Damn Hero in the end. That makes sense.
- WTF? Rey straight-up kills Palpatine with Sith lightning!? Yeah, that definitely wasn’t ever gong to fly with Lucasfilm, since it totally contradicts ROTJ’s message! It was inevitable that we’d end up with the more correct “Rey deflects Palpatine’s own Sith lightning back at him”.
- “Rey Skywalker” is the end point for the story here as well, but it ending on Tatooine is so much more emotional than ending it on Alderaan Prime, a place that only just now exists.
My final impression is that we probably could have had the best version of the Sequel Trilogy possible IF the right corrections were made when adapting these treatments into real screenplays, such as axing the more convoluted and pointlessly fanservice-y elements and making different choices for a few of the characters (Rey, Kylo Ren, C-3PO, Phasma, etc...also something more substantial for Poe since they clearly had no idea what to do with him). However, it was also an impossibility for it to ever happen due to many different factors, the biggest of which being Carrie Fisher’s passing in 2016. So as it stands, I am still satisfied with the version we got and am especially happy that J.J returned for TROS to provide the end of the Skywalker Saga with some of his original (mercifully fine-tuned and simplified) ideas.
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Edens Zero: Chapter 121 (My Impressions)
Well...where should I start from here? I was thinking more along the lines of covering Shiki & Homura’s interactions, first, followed by the introduction of Nero’s other squad (and the implications from their presence), then with Weisz & Hermit, before finally capping it out with Rebecca’s powers (and their limitations).
Now that I mentioned it all, ‘though...yeah, let’s go with that! xD
SHIKI & HOMURA
First, I should probably mention about the ‘fanservice’ nature of this scene, since I’ve already seen a few readers bring that up. Sure, you have Homura taking a bath, in this one. And, yes, Mashima has drawn stuff like this, before. However, I don’t think that this kind of fanservice really takes away from the context of the situation.
In fact, I can appreciate the interactions between her, and Shiki—along with their building relationship with each other. Not as much in the romantic sense, but more in terms of the bonds between them. Shiki, again, cares more about his friends he has made, along the way.
Considering Homura’s comments about always being friends together, ‘though...that would be a little concerning.
BEAST SQUAD ONE
So, it turns out that the Beast Squad we were introduced to, wasn’t the only squad on the planet. As a matter of fact, these new three happen to be the strongest squad out of all of them. And, with Shiki, Homura, and Rebecca having just fought against an already-formidable group from before...I don’t see how they’ll pull it off against those three.
One of the members of Squad One suggets that they should capture Shiki, and bring him to Shura. Considering Orc’s comments to Shiki that he’ll end up fighting against both Ziggy, and Shura, ‘though...that’s a little foreboding. But, we’ll see what happens next, before that conclusion can be made.
I also have a feeling that they might also encounter Elsie’s crew...or even Justice’s group, rather than the Edens Zero trio—which is probable, given the title of the next chapter (which I’ll get to, at the end).
WEISZ & HERMIT
I was debating in my mind, whether I should cover this at the end of this post, or leave it as second-last. Eventually, I feel that Rebecca’s scene in this chapter was more important than this, so this became the second-last topic I want to discuss.
As the chapter cover implies, the chapter is more focused is on Weisz, and Hermit, as they make their way towards the satellite that Ziggy is using to electronically transmit the virus.
Much like Shiki and Homura above, I did like the interactions between Weisz and Hermit, if not more than Shiki and Homura. Maybe, it’s because of how Hermit is a human-like android, and the whole relationship between human, and machine, at large in this series.
It’s much concerning when Hermit tells Weisz to destroy her, if she turns on him (despite the latter calming her down). When you consider her earlier comments about how the virus is being updated in real-time (in spite of her having anti-virus protection), it does seem likely that she might be affected by it. I can’t imagine the feels (angst, more like it) that will come about, should that actually happen.
With all that, ‘though...things start to hit the fan really hard, from there. And, I mean it: It’s the return of Dr. Muller.
Aside from taking note of how much he looks like some enemy you fight in Killing Floor 2 (or Wolfenstein), this has to be the most shocking return out of all the characters we’ve seen in the series, so far.
If it’s recalled correctly, Dr. Muller was apprehended by the Interstellar Union Army, after they raided his lab. Then, years later, we see that he’s now working for Ziggy, as evidenced by his remark that he told him he would be meeting Hermit again.
So, my question about all of this, is: How did Dr. Muller end up under Ziggy’s command? But, most importantly, how did he end up in his cyborg form? Both are questions that will have to be answered in the next chapter—and if not, then the one after that.
REBECCA’S POWERS
Finally, oh, finally, there’s this part that I’ve been saving for last!
So, before this chapter, I’ve seen some readers online who have wondered if there were any limitations to Rebecca’s latest capabilities, with regards to time/world travel. This chapter here, pretty much answers that—at least, for the time travel part.
After some experimentation with Pino, Rebecca finds out that she can still use her powers to go back into the previous moment she was in. However, she can’t use it too much, as it actually drains her strength, and can also cause other adverse effects—such as the physical cracking that formed on the side of her face.
Based on the theories that were brought up by other readers online, about how Chronophages (you know, those time-eating monsters we saw, back in Norma, and Guilst?) were formed...and, how they may have something to do with time-altering users, like Rebecca...I get the sense that a possible consequence for overusing those powers would be turning into one of those Chronophages. Either that, or she literally disintegrates from existence. The angsty implications aside, I don’t think we’ll ever know what would happen to her, if she overuses her powers, until later on.
My only question surrounding the use of her powers, is pretty much how she will use them, to get herself, and her friends, out of Foresta, safely.
And, to cap off this post, we do get the title of the next chapters, which is “Victory Giant” (courtesy of 11thDoctor, over on Twitter). There is a character by the name of Victory, who happens to be among Justice’s crew. Maybe the next chapter will have something to do with him, more than anything else.
#edens zero#my impressions#ez spoilers#chapter 121#shiki granbell#homura kougetsu#rebecca bluegarden#weisz steiner#hermit milon#em pino
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it’s been a while since i posted about aa but i just finished soj in its entirety tonight. here’s my new list so far
i still have to give thoughts on cases 4 5 and dlc so that’ll be under a cut. spoilers!
6-4: this was such a filler case, almost shamefully so. i don’t know why they thought they could manage to do this in the 4th case when every game with 5 cases has been pretty consistent about making the 4th case plot relevant, sometimes literally just a preamble to case 5. so yeah i think this one was kinda ass
the two things it had going for it: one, athena. in 6-2 i actually got confused about why i ever liked her, because in that case she felt like she was just acting the part of the Peppy Teen Girl With a Rowdy Streak that makes up almost every assistant character. But then as SOON as she started bantering with Simon in 6-4 i was like “oh, THAT’S why i liked her!” was nice to take control of her again.
two, uendo toneido. while i don’t think you can say the DID was portrayed with quite the necessary respect or kindness, it was handled better than i’ve seen other media handle it-- at least it’s not completely demonized. other people have written more on that in better detail so i’m not really the judge, but the basic point is that this witness was mad fun to read, and even the dumb jokes like the changing number of floor cushions were entertaining. thus why this case is in the “hard carried by one side character” tier.
especially since there was like nothing else going on. no connection to the main plot, only two other characters besides uendo, and for some reason the clown tits girl was here instead of the magic show case (and to be honest, she wasn’t enjoyable for me even BEFORE she did the standard aa female villain thing and changed her speech pattern as soon as she fell under suspicion). just a weird, nothing case stuck right around the point aa games usually enter endgame. And especially weird because...
6-5 part 1: inexplicably there are two separate cases in the final chapter and each gets one day of investigation and trial. such a weird setup, and it really shouldn’t work... but i think it kinda barely does. barely. it would still have been better to split it into case 4 and case 5 though.
i have a hard time articulating much on the first case bc it sort of blends together for me. the main thing is that the concept of it being a civil case where apollo and phoenix face off is really good. it was a good change of pace, even though you knew it was gonna be a murder somehow anyway. sarge was reasonably nice, i guess, paul atishon had some good animations and quirks (my favorite being when he tries to just walk away from the stand to avoid answering a question), and the logic of the actual murder was good enough.
but i especially got those strong “oh this is a FINAL case!” vibes during the segment in the cave, and that added so much to it even if not much of it was relevant in the first half of the case. the adventure feel reminded me of some of the (out of context bc i still havent played it) scenes i know from 3-5, which is a good association to invoke imo. and it did a lot to give apollo and dhurke time to bond.
speaking of which, dhurke, holy shit. what a KING. i don’t think i’ve ever liked a dad character in ace attorney this much. he’s so genuine and like down to earth that it’s impossible not to start liking him and believe how much he cares for his sons. the bit where he rescued apollo from the cave flood... i felt it in my heart
6-5 part 2: let me just get this out of the way: ga’ran sucks. her design after she goes full evil is so bad, she’s so malicious that it’s immediately obvious she’s going to be the culprit, her breakdown is ridiculous and just embarrassing to watch, and inga had already established way more charisma as a villain when he did the “those were orders of execution actually” bit in 6-3. with that said,
i actually liked it for the most part. the spirit channeling stuff was excellent imo-- they probably use it to similar or greater effect in 3-5 but as someone who again has not played that, i was surprised and almost impressed by how well it was applied. maya was relevant for something! it feels like it’s been ages!
rayfa was a little underutilized, i think-- her moment of determination where she stops letting ga’ran have control over her was alright but it fell flat bc it didn’t have any weight during the moment. i kept hoping she would like, wordlessly take of her shawl and do the little verbal preamble to the divination seance while ga’ran kept yelling at her to stop, but no, the script can’t be good like that, i guess. and since she didn’t get to be the investigation assistant for long, none of her charm in that role carried through.
but DHURKE!! oh my god! in a game almost devoid of emotional impact, his involvement in this case really hit. the way they painstakingly animated his death, the scene where he makes a promise with maya, and then the weight of knowing in hindsight that everything he did in the first part of the case was after he’d already died and just wanted to see his son again before passing on for real....... it hurt. i felt something during that section. this case would also be hard carried by him if not for the fact that i really liked the murder bits.
amara was good too--liked how they made her suspiciously serene and accentuated it with the lightning strikes to make her look like a hidden murderer character about to reveal herself, only to walk it back and confirm she was being forced to act that way. i thought it worked. nahyuta was boring though, i’m sorry-- i get the motivation with having to be a bastard bc his sister and mom were basically held hostage, but the only time i found him compelling in that mess was the bit where he removed his one fingerless glove and revealed he still has the dragon tattoo. that was it. athena was also completely unused the whole case (not even a single mood matrix? really?) and trucy one again went without any role of importance.
the ending also... yknow, a friend said they had to end it this way bc they never figured out what they were going to do with apollo (since following up on what they started in aa4 clearly wasn’t an option???) and just threw him on a bus to get rid of him. i agree with that-- he really feels thrown to the side, and with that i think trucy’s officially stranded with no hope of any character advancement. and the way they ended the game with phoenix and lamiroir deciding “yeah, maybe NOW we should finally tell those two they’re related” honestly felt insulting lol
but maybe the dlc case will let things go out on a high note...?!
6-6: it was okay.
it would’ve worked pretty well as a filler case in an older aa-- honestly i think it’d be one of the better filler cases, certainly worth replacing the shitty ones like 2-3 or 3-3 or, hey, 6-4. but whether i’d say it was worth paying for... eh.
the time travel conceit was done well enough, i think. the way they tied it back to sorin and pierce’s backstories was nice, and the twist about having two receptions was good, although they needed to treat that as a real twist with much more gravity. when the truth comes out it just feels like “oh of course that’s what happened” rather than a big surprise worthy of the Confessing the Truth theme. it’s sort of important because the case becomes a lot less interesting when you take out the time travel element.
far as characters are concerned, i think they needed more side characters to sell the whole thing-- another sprocket family member or another servant of the household. it felt a little limited-- sorin and pierce are pretty good witnesses and i like their quirks and their secrets, but the only alive woman (ellen) has very few traits and no connection to the deeper story of the case, so she falls really flat. the old aa characters didn’t add much- maya and edgeworth were just there for fanservice, ema didn’t get to do much other than acknowledge for the first time in years that she’s a big edgeworth fan, and larry is annoying as hell like he always is.
and oh my god i actually forgot while i was writing that, how they put in athena and trucy but only used them for brief slapstick where trucy would try to set athena on fire and shit. again-- no mood matrix? couldn’t even try once to fit those two characters into something?
i did like pierce’s transformation into his surgeon form though-- that was really cool. loved him doing surgery on a robot, taking xrays of the lawyers, and his breakdown was fantastic-- he would make a really good culprit if they didn’t whiff the last bit of pathos at the end. i don’t think he should’ve been aiming for revenge on sorin; it would have hurt much more if he was still loyal to the guy and never intended for him to be in danger, but the final “why’d you do it?” talk in the trial just felt flat and one-note, much like the one in 6-4.
... so that’s spirit of justice! not a super positive experience but i’m happy to say it’s done. as much as i want to go and replay dgs, i think when i do go back to ace attorney i’ll be replaying the trilogy for the first time since high school
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Ghost-Spider #1 Thoughts
Since I enjoyed the Spider-Geddon aftermath issue of Ghost Spider and because seeing Spider-Gwen meet Earth 616 Jackal intrigued me I decided to check out the current story arc and...um...oh dear...
So confession. I dropped Spider-Gwen’s title after reading the issue that debuted Earth 65 Kraven. The moment I saw him with his stupid Hipster look I was like ‘Noooooooooooooooope’.
So consequently I missed out on such gems as Gwenom and other great ideas I’m sure were inspired by variant covers.
What I’m saying is I’m out of the loop and therefore any analysis I might be able to provide isn’t going to be that great because I’m literally lacking in information.
That all being said I also maintain what Stan the Man said once upon a time, every comic is someone’s first. That goes for issue #1s moreso than others!
So we come to this title.
Was it good.
From where I’m standing...no not really.
Okay so first of all the art is lovely, it really is. And the scene where George’s surprise party goes very wrong was really well paced out by the art, which sold the comedy very well!
As for other positives...um...the story remembered to address the fact that Gwen can’t just show up to Earth 616 and go to school there. The idea that Iron Man established a scholarship for extra terrestrial and extra terrestrial people fixes that problem...but it opens up a boatload of questions.
Is Gwen and fellow students from other dimensions like her stealing student places from people based in Earth 616?
Wouldn’t education standards vary wildly across dimensions? After all a lot of times when it comes to education it’s less how well you did as much as where you went (or sadly who you know). I mean I know people from my university, which was no slouch, who got great grades but were passed over for jobs by people with less impressive grades but from more prestigious universities. Is a grade from Oxford or Yale on Earth 616 worth as much on the job market as it is on Earth 65? It may well be that on Earth 65 (which we know has a different history to Earth 616 and isn’t necessarily a reflection of OUR real life world) ESU is regarded as a lesser school that’s easy to pass.
Wouldn’t the subject of allowing aliens and other dimensional people to attend schools on Earth 616 open up a HUGE political debate regarding immigration? Provided it was known to the government of course and it Tony was hiding it from them then isn’t that super unethical?
What about the potential for disease and illnesses that could be brought over from a dimension with a starkly different germ history to Earth 616?
Do Gwen’s fellow students get to know she’s a foreign student from another dimension?
Are such things REALLy so common place blasé in the 616 universe? Surely the norm is to acknowledge that aliens and such things exist but to suspend disbelief to allow life to go on as normal, but if people are just actually reacting realistically to something like this doesn’t that break down the verisimilitude of the Marvel universe?
If Gwen is attending school with the legal name of Gwen Stacy and LOOKS like Gwen Stacy wouldn’t that raise a shitton of problems for her because she looks JUST LIKE A DEAD WOMAN! I mean Gwen’s clone at least changed her name. Is ESU really not going to have records of that time one of their students was murdered on a bridge? Gwen’s death was public knowledge the Green Goblin boasted about it on TV and Ben Urich wrote a book on it!
All of which is academic because even if Gwen earns a college education on Earth 616...how is that going to help her in the long run?
Think about it, she might be taught skills and stuff that she could then use in any jobs she adopts. But having skills is sadly only half the battle when it comes to getting a job. Of equal or possibly greater value is having the PROOF you have those skills. Someone can be a brilliant self-taught nuclear engineer. But if they’ve not got a college diploma to prove it they aren’t getting a job.
How is a diploma from Earth 616 going to mean anything besides a piece of paper on Earth 65. There wouldn’t be any records proving she attended ESU and even if Gwen tells them that she earned the degree in another universe they’d only have her word for it, faking a piece of paper saying you graduated is easy! Even if they did believe her no one in authority on Earth 65 has the power to verify how legit or qualified Earth 616’s ESU is. It could be an online course for all they know. Not to mention do the residents of Earth 65 even know that travel between parallel universes is even a thing?
I’m sure a lot of 616 citizens are probably vaguely aware of that but on Earth 65 that isn’t necessarily the case because they’ve not had a long history of Skrull invasions!
It’s all just so contrived to just have Gwen situated in Earth 616 because that would boost her sales in theory.
Creatively it causes problems too.
Let’s put aside how it means subplots and supporting characters are going to have to be divided between two universes where their collision will be difficult if not impossible.
Let’s even put aside how being a public figure in Earth 65 whilst she spends a huge chunk of her time in another universe entirely puts Gwen’s Dad (who’s human and at risk from heart attacks) at HUGE risk!
What is really gained creatively from having Gwen on Earth 616 where she can interact with like 616 Peter, 616 MJ, 616 Miles?
Fanservice. Sure. I mean that’s why I’m reading this.
But creatively speaking it is just...impoverishing for everyone.
Let’s first look at this from the POV of the 616 residents.
Miles gets to potentially date Gwen more easily now. This is a bad thing. Miles is already too similar to Peter and whilst this dynamic might work in the animated movies (which are themselves an AU to the comics) in an ongoing Miles story having him literally dating a version of Spider-Man’s girlfriend is reductive. Not to mention it might be a bad idea to have him date a fellow super in general, it undermines his normalcy and relative normalcy is important to Spider-Heroes. In this case it wouldn’t even be dating a hero, it’d be dating a hero from another universe!
For Mary Jane it also undermines her normalcy too as well as undermining the weight of Gwen’s death in her life because a version of Gwen, is alive and well and capable of regularly interacting with her.
The same holds true but a thousand times more for Peter. Unless you quarantine off this series as ‘Spider-Gwen continuity’ any time Peter feels mournful over Gwen now is going to feel rather hollow because you know he is regularly chatty with Spider-Gwen and literally helped her get into the same school as him!
That’s another bad thing about the comic by the way. Isn’t being on record as helping an other dimensional version of his dead girlfriend going to seriously put the spotlight on Peter in a big way? Does he even have the clout to help her get into ESU given how he’s only recently returned there himself? And what was with the dialogue implying he works there? When did that happen? He attends school there but he’s not got a job there last I checked??????????????
Also...isn’t Peter like seriously waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too chill about Gwen? Remember how in the 1970s Clone Saga (the story this comic actively references) he was seriously shaken up when Gwen’s clone appeared? Remember when he had varying degrees of similar reactions EVERY time one of Gwen’s clones showed up, including when Spider-Gwen was impersonating one of Gwen’s clones in Clone Conspiracy?
Now he’s face to face with a living breathing version of Gwen Stacy who is arguably more real than any of those clones and he’s all smiles and meh. He doesn’t even think about it in the other titles! Like dude if Spider-Man came face to face with a living Gwen Stacy that would dwell on his mind somewhat!
Now let’s consider this from Gwen’s POV.
What does she gain from interacting on Earth 616?
Well she gets to be comparatively more normal than on her own Earth where she is a celebrity. Okay cool...couldn’t you just get to the same ends by mindwiping her identity from people on Earth 65? I mean we already did this with Peter Parker why is the integrity of Spider-Gwen’s narrative more precious?
She gets to interact with Earth 616 Jackal...which is really more interesting from the Jackal’s POV because does she even know who the hell Miles Warren is? It doesn’t seem like it based on this issue. I mean that’s why I’m reading this arc right now. Because seeing Miles Warren react to a living Gwen Stacy is an interesting idea to me. But why move the main character in this direction to do something interesting with a villain. Not even one of her own villains either, another character’s villain. Oh but Earth 65 Jackal is also doing stuff. Why is he even evil in her universe she’s not dead? Was he in love with Peter in her universe?
This basically applies to every villain and supporting character Gwen could bump into on Earth 616. Norman, Harry, Jameson, Curt Connors, Jill Stacy, etc.
The most interesting characters she could interact with from her POV are Peter and Mary Jane. But with Mary Jane you have to think the mileage doesn’t go much further than “Wow you are much nicer than my Earth’s Em Jay (who’s name has apparently changed now) who’s a total diva b-word!”.
And with Peter...well this issue already basically dispelled the drama from that. She regards him as a older friend but not a peer, not her Peter and someone she can chat to and fight crime with sometimes. That’s it really. There was more emotion and drama derived from that Conway backup story where she met the Goblin Peter back in Spider-Verse.
Meanwhile her own supporting cast and villains are very much left in the lurch. I mean the Man-Wolf is getting released on her Earth and I’m just like ‘so what she’s not even there right now!”
And like Peter and Miles this torpedoes the idea of Gwen being relatively normal. Juggling normal life problems with superhero problems flies out of the window when you are commuting between dimensions, one of which you are famously dead and the other of which you are just famous.
What else is there to talk about.
So Gwen’s costume is apparently composed of spiders but is also a symbiote...um...weird. in fairness maybe that’s addressed in older issues.
What’s weirder was the random giant rat...what was that even about?????????????
The only other positive I have to say about this issue was that at least it wasn’t as pretentious and not as obnoxiously zany as Latour’s run.
Finally...what was up with that opening page saying Gwen got her powers a few months ago??????
You telling me Gwen got her powers in high school, became famous as Spider-Gwen, Peter got crazy and turned himself into a lizard before dying, Gwen changed her world view, a campaign to capture her happened, she went to college, THEN Spider-Verse happened, THEN everything in volume 1 happened, THEN everything in Secret Wars happened, THEN everything in volume 2, Clone Conspiracy and Web Warriors happened (including the Spider Women crossover), then everything in volume 3 including Spider-Geddon happened and all this shit happened...in under a year?
What the fuck was everyone on speed or something that’s ridiculous!
I’m gonna pick up the next few issues but if they’re more of the same I hope the Jackal story wraps up sooner rather than later.
#Ghost-Spider#Spider-Gwen#Gwen Stacy#Spider-Man#Peter Parker#George Stacy#Captain Stacy#Spider-Verse#Spider-Geddon#Em Jay#the jackal#jackal#Miles Warren#Mary Jane Watson#Mary Jane Watson Parker#mj watson#mjwatsonedit
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The organization members death were underwhelming. Your thoughts on their deaths???
Yeah, I have to agree. I take it you mean the Organization members in KH3. The True Organization was so underwhelming.
Master Xehanort—The game never properly explained his motivations, so I wasn’t quite sure how to feel about his death. He had a very abrupt “redemption” where he and Eraqus were all buddy-buddy again, which came out of nowhere. I had no idea what was even going on in his boss fight. What were those black-clad figures fighting with him? How did Sora know he needed to trap him using a portal? Nothing was explained. In theory I liked kid Xehanort’s reunion with kid Eraqus. But it didn’t have enough impact because there was nothing building up to it, other than a single scene of them playing chess.
Xemnas—I liked his final words before disappearing, but it felt like they came out of nowhere. There was no evidence Xemnas ever felt that way. Why was he so lonely? It seems like he was supposed to be seen as tragic, but again, there was nothing leading up to it. I felt like we got robbed. We never learned why he couldn’t use the Keyblade. Also I was very disappointed that we never saw Aqua or Ventus react when they learned that Terra was possessed and that his Heartless and Nobody were the ones that were causing all the chaos in the world.
Young Xehanort—This guy was super important to the plot. He was the one who was traveling through time recruiting everyone. Supposedly he was tracking people using the Recusant’s Sigil. He was tracking Sora in KH3D, and the Ultimania said he had his eye on Isa for a long time. Unsurprisingly Young Xehanort is the one who retrieved Isa in KH3D. But he didn’t feel all that important, really. His time travel ability was left mostly unexplained. His death was completely forgettable. We never even learned why he was the Mysterious Figure in BBS.
Ansem Seeker of Darkness—Again, another resolution that felt like it was supposed to have way more building up to it. Why did Riku say he’d miss him? That truly came out of nowhere and surprised me. At first I thought it was Nomura breaking the fourth wall. He said in an interview that he was sad that certain characters would never be appearing again, and he did really like Xehanort. But I did notice that ASoD’s characterization was strange in KH3. Perhaps Riku was meant to be referring to the Terra part of him. After all, the relationship between Xehanort and Terra, and how those two personalities were split was supposed to be important to the cancelled game. And Riku recognized Terra at the end of KH3D.
Vanitas—I got the impression that Vanitas was supposed to be a lot more important to the plot than he really was. He felt so useless in the grand scheme of things. I thought he’d have a lot more to do with Sora, too .Also, in KH3D, he didn’t have a physical form. Sora saw him with Young Xehanort, but he was simply reacting to Ventus’s heart. I think Vanitas was supposed to have a lot more plot involvement, like with Xemnas’s search for the Chamber of Waking. And after Ventus went back to Sora, maybe Vanitas could feel what Sora felt.
He was also Ven’s dark half, which should have been more significant. I always thought Ven would have to go through some kind of character development where he reintegrated Vanitas back into him at the end. But Vanitas just…disappeared. Also, the fact that he looked like Sora was not treated like it was a big deal. Sora was just like, “Oh that’s weird.” Kinda like Roxas and Ventus or Kairi and Xion. It was just…never commented on. I was amused by the fact that Vanitas didn’t suddenly do a 180 after he was defeated. But he still didn’t leave a significant impression on me in KH3.
Riku—When I first learned that Riku was a Seeker of Darkness, I thought it had the potential to create some awesome story moments. But his defeat was ridiculous. I expected Riku to have some kind of clash with his dark half, where he’d get character development confronting his inner weakness. In KH3D, there was a lot of hints that his struggle with the darkness was not over.
When I first played KH3D a long time ago, I was actually annoyed because I thought they were dragging out Riku’s struggle instead of just accepting he was a good guy. But I think I kinda see where they were going. Riku did need closure on what happened to him in KH1. Sadly, he didn’t get that. Instead, the boss battle with his dark self was treated as this weird Riku/Naminé shipping thing, which really caught me off guard. I had NO idea what was going on with the weird Spirit Riku. That just made no sense and I really wondered what the hell Nomura was smoking when he wrote those scenes. In hindsight, I just see it as a contrived excuse to bring Naminé back. But when I first played KH3, Riku Replica’s death really left me scratching my head.
Marluxia—I couldn’t really feel anything for Marluxia’s defeat because I had no idea why he was even there. He received almost no backstory. So even in KH3, to me he was little more than “the flower dude”. I was aware that he was in KHUX, but I had no idea that game was going to be so important when I played KH3. Silly me, I was under the impression that the HD remasters were made to give players everything they needed to prepare for KH3.
KHUX was included in the form of a movie. And I mistakenly thought that movie was created to give players all the info they needed from KHUX that was relevant in KH3. But that really wasn’t the case. Apparently, I was supposed to know all about who Strelitzia and Skuld were, which I did not. When speaking to the Nameless Star, I admit I didn’t have a clue who it was and I had a hard time caring, since they had absolutely nothing to do with THIS plot arc.
Larxene—Larxene was the same as Marluxia for me. She was little more than “the bitchy chick”. I was looking forward to learning more about her and Marluxia, but that didn’t happen. Apparently she was just tagging along with him? That’s why she was a Seeker of Darkness? I thought that was lame. I read on the wiki that she had a sister or something.
But you see, if those types of things were supposed to be relevant, why was none of it included in the HD collections? That was baffling. In KH CoM, Marluxia and Larxene wanted Sora so they could use the Keyblade for something. They both seemed pretty amoral. In KH3, they made Marluxia seem like Isa or something, where he lost his heart, was possessed the whole time, and needed to be saved. Then he would be absolved of all his sins. But unlike with Saïx, that was never really hinted at? I never got that sense from Marluxia.
Luxord—Again, why is this person here? How did he become a Seeker of Darkness? Who is he? What was his life as a human like? I had a really hard time caring about his boss fight because he felt like he was just included for nostalgia. Same with Marluxia and Larxene. They just needed a few familiar faces to fill out the ranks. I’m sure that there was originally supposed to be a good reason he was a Seeker of Darkness, but they obviously had no time to get into that. I like Luxord. I think he’s really cool and gentlemanly. But we still know nothing about him.
Xigbar—His “death” was also lame. The moment he jumped off the ledge was made to seem all dramatic and final. And you know, I would have really liked if it was left like that. Xigbar committing suicide truly was the perfect ending for him. But surprise! It was all revealed to be a ruse. Why did he have to pretend to kill himself? Wasn’t he supposed to be a Nobody? Why didn’t he vanish after his defeat like all the other Nobodies did? Made no sense.
Saïx—Well, it’s no secret that I hated his “death” and everything else about his characterization in KH3. His whole subplot was USELESS. The whole point of his story was so Lea would have someone to rescue, so his training as a Keyblade wielder paid off. Terra, Aqua, and Ven had each other to go home with. Sora, Riku, and Kairi had each other to go home with. Donald, Goofy, and Mickey had each other to go home with. Isa was Lea’s person to bring home. Lea’s home is NOT Twilight Town. And he’s not going to be hanging out with Roxas and Xion all day.
Lea was supposed to bring Isa back. That means taking the initiative, like he did in KH3D. It was heavily implied that he needed to be saved. Even on the clock tower, Lea said he was dragging him home. Isa was the original person Lea promised to bring back. But…he did nothing of the sort. Lea didn’t bring Isa back OR drag him home. Saïx came to the good side on his own after having a random change of heart for no discernible reason. Lea forgot all about him until he randomly showed up on the clock tower. He wasn’t concerned with bringing him home. His relationship with Lea and his boss fight were treated with almost no seriousness whatsoever. Instead of a fight to the death, Lea casually said he’d clobber him tomorrow, like they were going to have a boxing match or something.
Then he had a “redemption” that was so lazy and poorly planned, it had to happen off-screen. Isa was never meant to have a redemption, so one had to be shoe-horned in, using the secret reports of all things. Obviously Isa was a very low priority in KH3. It also made no sense. If he wanted to atone, why did he become a Seeker of Darkness? Could he not bring back Roxas and Xion AFTER Xehanort was defeated? They weren’t Guardians of Light, so they weren’t needed in the final battle. They didn’t need to come back anyway, but still. It was just done for fanservice. And apparently he fought Lea in the final battle because he was too stubborn and embarrassed to admit that he wanted to “atone”. It was all an act. Everything about Saïx was a total waste of screentime IMO. I’ve never seen a work of fiction give a character such a transparently ill-fitting and contradictory backstory in my entire life. I’m not even being hyperbolic, either.
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LOADING INFORMATION ON NIGHTMARE’S VOCAL, DANCE ZHAO DAXIA...
IDOL DETAILS
STAGENAME: Xia
CURRENT AGE: 19
DEBUT AGE:17
TRAINEE SINCE AGE: 16
COMPANY: Koala.T
SECONDARY SKILL: N/A
IDOL PROFILE
NICKNAME(S): nightmare’s babydoll, xixi
INSPIRATION: daxia was largely inspired to be an idol by her favorite groups, who she’d began to love after seeing online videos. after winning a small talent contest at her school, she said that it showed her what fame and being loved by fans felt like and that she’d give anything to feel that for the rest of her life. from there on, she began grinding to work towards becoming the sweet and talented idol she is today.
SPECIAL TALENTS:
martial arts - she started learning at the six and continued classes off-and-on until receiving her black belt at the age of thirteen.
choreography - after being a dedicated for so long, she’s practiced many years so master several of her favorite group’s choreographies from the last three generations, going as far as to try to mimic their mannerisms.
impressions - often teasing, but she has a special skill for impersonating both her members and other idols she’s fond of.
NOTABLE FACTS:
she was first found after starring on the show “superstar k”, where she placed 4th.
she once went on a trip to new york city and took a picture with rihanna.
daxia’s a huge fan of western music from the 90’s, and once a week she posts song recommendations for fans to follow and add to their playlist, along with an extended explanation and preferred method of listening.
she is known for her significant weight loss during her time as a trainee to debut, losing around 22 kg in a month. she refuses to say how, for fear others will try it as well.
IDOL GOALS
SHORT-TERM GOALS:
daxia does not hope that nightmare will change their concept, but instead that it will be better received by the public as they keep promoting, she also hopes that as they get more experienced, she will be more natural at fitting in with the dark concept. she wants to also better connect with international fans more, and hopes to be able to travel to china on tour and connect with fans in her native tongue.
LONG-TERM GOALS:
despite the cultural difference, daxia hopes to become a beloved figure of the korean entertainment. while highly ambitious, she hopes that she’ll have a lengthy and successful career and eventually be able to venture into other types such as acting and more variety. she wants to be a long term public figure known for her personality, and eventually be able to earn enough to move her parents to korea.
IDOL IMAGE
[did you see that new girl they added, daxia? she doesn’t look like the nightmare type at all.]
cute face, devilish grin. daxia’s introduction to nightmare was certainly a shocking one, such childlike features accompanying such an eerie concept. and yet, in a way, it works. the deceitfulness in her smiles is just the soft energy they need. sure, nightmare doesn’t ever catch a break because of their concept, but in a way it’s xia who helps bring the cuteness back that they’re missing.
[i heard she’s the least talented out of the bunch, though. is she just a pretty face?]
upon her debut, she receives almost instant criticism. she’s lacking skills. she shouldn’t have debuted so soon. she barely can speak korean. all in all, everyone seems to view her as a trainee who still needs lots of work. what could she do? it’s not like she doesn’t agree, but daxia had been dying to make it big and nightmare seemed like her only chance. she tries her hardest to work hard, but they don’t seem to get past her swift debut and lackluster skills. the only thing that’s saving her is her charisma, even the anti-fans can’t deny she has an incredible stage presence and personality onscreen.
[yeah, i think so. but she’s a little cute….right?]
so koala.t uses a new method, using her downfalls as their strength. within a month of debut, they stray her away from the dark character it seemed everyone else was playing. instead, they have her play dumb. since they can’t seem to do much with her, they work with her flaws and make them “cute” to the audience. her korean, which is lacking but nevertheless improving, is told to be intentionally worse to play the clueless foreigner card. her voice cracks are made to be a cute mishap, and her lack of coordination can be attributed to her adorable clumsiness. koala.t feels that all her critiques have been swiftly cleaned up, but xia can’t say she feels the same. unable to be completely herself, to be made to be some quirky, relatable little kid for the public’s sake.
[i guess so. she’s sweet, at least. i think she likes what she does.]
but it’s not all bad, in xia’s book. being among the youngest of the bunch means she’s frequently doted on, and gets the privilege of teasing her members without seeming to mean. she’s known as “nightmare’s babydoll”, the sort of sunlight in such a dark concept. her fanservice and frequent streams make her a favorite among those who prefer personality to skill, something she can’t decide on whether she likes or not. whatever her beliefs, her marketing as the cute side, the “dawn”, of a hellish nightmare, has been one that’s put xia out of the darkness.
IDOL HISTORY
begin. from the very first few seconds she left the womb, daxia knew she was special. born a daughter, the only child to parents who for so long had tried to conceive a child. while she wasn’t hardly wealthy enough to be deemed spoiled, daxia always felt confident that there was a place for her in the world. her first steps, first words, first meal, all of it was caught on camera alongside the cheers of proud parents. they cherished her. cherished her so much that they never let her out of their sight. how could they, anyways, when all the bad in the world was so willing to swallow up girls like her? daxia was known to be terribly susceptible to colds, had an extensive list of allergies, and all the likes. even her asthma, which she felt was a minor setback, would result in panic anytime it decided to cause her some trouble. she was a small, cute thing, their bao, or treasure.
both in their mid 30s, they raised her in a disciplined yet loving household. to satisfy their fears, the girl was homeschooled all throughout her schooling years, drilled with lessons in math, english, and more. her friends all lay within her stuffed animals, and when she got older shifted to living souls behind her computer screen. with the bulk of social interaction coming from her parents and penpals, xia soon got bored and resorted to a different form of entertainment. something fresh. something….exciting. kpop. her parents, being extremely traditional, accepted nothing but the chinese ballads they filled the house with. so, in secret, she plugged her headphones in and began to fall a little deeper for the celebrities who seemed so far away. her hobby soon became addiction, and within a few months she could tell anyone who listened an alphabetical list of over a hundred boy and girl groups. you see, it took her away. away from her parents, from wuxi, from china. for once, she felt like she wasn’t trapped within her house but instead apart of something much more. korea, in general, soon gained her interest, and she slowly shifted from interest solely in idols to learning the language and culture. by the time she turned 17, she’d begun learning simple phrases and had her eyes set on the country.
if she was being completely and utterly honest with herself, daxia knew she had no place at home. she had no work skills, no real talents, only a passion and a kind soul. it was only when she stumbled upon an advertisement for a talent competition based in korea that she began taking the idea of a future seriously. a future with her passion, in which she may even be able to share the stage with her idols. daxia, being the ambitious teenager she was, worked her hardest to land a spot. staying up late at dance studios, visiting vocal coaches. her savings account, which had largely been holding funds from her job, was emptied to get her plane ticket there.
those dreams soon came crashing down, when her reign of superstar k quickly ended as she left the show with 4th place. the people had loved her bright spirit and small-town girl feel, but it hadn’t been enough to win a talent-based competition. with low spirits and even lower funds, she’d just begun her travels back home when the company she knew well, koala.t, contacted her in hopes of bringing her into the agency. it was clear she had a lot to improve, but her bright spirit and work ethic gave them a sort of momentum.. sooner than she ever thought possible with the talents she had, she was put into nightmare’s lineup. how was it possible? even daxia knew, with the optimistic lenses she saw the world with, that there was less celebrating than she’d hoped. other trainees had worked far longer, far harder, and had the talent to back it up. what was daxia doing, standing next to such talented girls? the thought haunted her, and the constant criticisms of her surprise debut didn’t make it any easier.
just like that, all daxia’s ideas of what reality was were all ripped from her eyes. she was thrown into the trainee scene faster than she could imagine, as her family watched on with shock. in a country she could barely understand, working to be just like the people she’d always felt were in another universe. the transition was anything but easy, filled with tear-filled nights of frustration and the same, sad homesick feeling whenever she thought of her family back home. she was 16, her parent’s bao, who had always been raised a baby. now, here she was, with the culture shock of her life and struck with the reality of independence and the entertainment industry.
nightmare’s concept hit her like a pound of bricks, as she had to learn concepts such as alluring and sexy. never had she been associated with these words before, but she tried her best to catch up with the rest of her members. the cute, soft daxia was certainly still there. but with such high stakes, she was willing to do whatever it took. she was already let go once, and she’d be damned if she let her only opportunity to be a somebody go through her hands like that again. her hard work seemed to be working against her, though, for every time
everyone swears her charm is in her uniqueness, but daxia wishes everything in her it isn’t true. because it’s all her differences that make her faults, and no matter how out there nightmare might be in concept she hopes they don’t say the same about her, the individual. so she smiles like everyone, tries to speak like everyone, and doesn’t dare complain.
because she’s different, she knows, but will do anything to hide from the spotlight and blend into the background.
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Analysis: NaLu in the GMG arc
It's no secret that this story arc did wonders for the development of Natsu/Lucy emotional bonding. However many NaLu moments are not what we would call subtle, and some of them capitalized on fanservice. So it's becomes a little hard to notice how NaLu scenes showcase the chemistry between the characters as well as how delusional some shallow pairings truly are
First of all we have the prelude to the arc. When Lucy recieved the news of her father's death, Natsu and Happy were with her. Even though Lucy was effectively repressing her feelings about the whole situation, Natsu not only grasped how she possibly felt but was so depressed about it he let get away a chance to join a fight...
...given his character has some traits of a "blood knight", this is actually pretty impressive. It shows how much can Lucy affect Natsu even without putting effort into it, and that's a sign of a strong emotional connection with a good chemistry
It's also consistent with something we saw in the "Rainbow Sakura" special. To sum it up, Lucy is very excited about the prospect of going to the festival and seeing the cherry blossoms, but she gets sick the day of the Hanami festival so at the end she couldn't go. During the party, while every FT guild member is enjoying the festival...
...we see Natsu and Happy are the only ones who are not enjoying themselves, all because Lucy couldn't come and she's missing something she was dearly looking foward to
Instead of enjoying the party like the rest of the guild, the Fire Dragon Slayer, in a very touching and quasi-romantic gesture, uproots an entire Rainbow Sakura tree just for Lucy to see. Needless to say Lucy knew who did that for her and appreciated it a lot
So, the moment when Natsu is feeling so down about Lucy's situation is consistent with their relationship. And it makes even more sense given Natsu can't do much to comfort her this time and he knows it. Luckily for him, Lucy found closure and let go of the sadness she felt in the same chapter.
We can also rely on an overlooked but nice detail. This and the following NaLu moments, all happened after Lisanna's return. So instead of trying to re-connect with his childhood friend, Natsu consitently stuck closer and closer to Lucy. Proving a remarkable emotional attachment to the blonde celestial mage.
Moving on, the next moment I'd like to highlight is the aftermath of the Lucy Vs. Flare battle. Yes, Lucy lost because they were getting cheated and she was really upset and frustrated about it. But who's the guy who walks up to her after the battle is over? Natsu! Who both praised and comforted her. This is an important element of chemistry between characters, when one (or both them) seek to provide with emotional support
Sadly this gets overlooked because many fans (including those who support NaLu) overhyped Juvia's paranoid delusion of a passionate GrayLu encounter that very same night. This is was taken way too seriously by many readers, but the fact remains both Lucy and Gray completely dismissed that crazy delusion, and during that late night party Lucy stuck close to the person that comforted and supported her earlier after going through such a bad experience in the GMG
Next moment is very controversial. When Lucy was brutally beaten by a Minerva, both Natsu and Gray catched her as she fell. Some manga readers are very familiar with the concept of "pandering". At times an author try to please as many fandoms as possible to either sell more of their work or avoid losing their audience. Even some western writers indulge into this. However, while the FT author tried to pander shippers here, and pretty much added fuel to the shipping war that was raging on back then; he also provided something, during the following chapter, that made some people understand who was the person Lucy felt the strongest about...
...by having her to say his name as she drifted off to sleep. Quoting Heisenberg: "Say my name"
Again, this is consistent with something we see later after the Tartaros arc; when FT disbanded Lucy spent a year tracking every single FT member. But after seeing Natsu's return we get a very interesting narration from the manga:
FT readers already know how the rest goes during the GMG. In their 2v2 fight, Natsu BFR'd his partner, Gajeel, so he could stomp by himself the members of the guild that brutalized Lucy.
Next moment is something similar to the first one I mentioned. Once again we know Natsu shares some traits typically found in the "Blood Knight" trope. He enjoys a good battle, and the GMG final offered many chances to fight very strong opponents. However under a series of plot-driven cirumstances, Lucy was put under arrest alongside a fellow celestial mage in the King's castle. Natsu was so infuriated by this that his guildmates had to tie him up in order to prevent him from storming the castle to rescue Lucy
While all the guildmates were mad about it, Natsu had the strongest emotional response and he chose to pass the chance to fight in the GMG final just to rescue Lucy
Lucy's reaction to this is both amusing and cute. Since she knows how much Natsu enjoys the thrill of a fight. Still, this is probably one of the smallest moments they had, as the following showings hold more significance and a greater impact.
From this point onwards the plot gets a little complicated for it introduces time-travel. A Lucy from the future comes with a warning about an invasion of dragons that will wipe most life on earth. Even though this is a fantasy setting, dragons haven't been seen in centuries. So naturally to imagine an army of them poping out of nowhere would seem hard to believe. Yet as soon a Lucy of the future finishes with her story, Natsu is already preparing himself for the attack much to her surprise. When she questions if her comrades will believe her, Natsu reaffirm his trust and faith in Lucy.
When Future Lucy laments not having a plan to deal with the attack, Natsu comforts her reassuring her they'll take care of the matter and in a very touching manner...
...he expressed his gratitude for Lucy's determination to protect their future
Makes me wonder why NaLu fans often disregard their meaningful moments for the sake of weaker premises. Style over substance is getting very old!
However, the plot gets even more complicated when we get another time traveler trying to ensure the bad future when nearly everyone dies actually happens. At first he tries to fool everyone by claiming Lucy is the one who triggers the upcoming apocalypse, when in reality she's one of the persons who can stop it! Yet Natsu, despite being as clueless as he is, doesn't buy the act and holds onto his trust/faith in Lucy. When the guy strikes down Future Lucy, Natsu his tears in his eyes and anger in his fist delievers this little yet meaningful line:
The tears
His line
Natsu stating how much Lucy means to him. This is consistent with another showing from the last arc. When Natsu thought Lucy was killed by their current enemy, he went into a berserker rage (and a new superform) in which he was killing everything that was getting in his way. Touch Lucy and you're getting burned to a crisp
I could actually mention the next one, but given the amount of fanservice it involved I prefer to overlook it and leave it to any real NaLu fan to explain what made it a great moment aside from the "frolicking" in the nude. For now, I'm going to jump straigh to this arc's conclusion:
As the 'dragon apocalypse' was prevented, we see Future Lucy reuniting with her comrades in what the chapter calls the "golden plains", the meaning of this place as well as its placement in time and space is up to interpretation, but who's there to recieve her. I'll give you three guesses, the first two don't count...
Natsu is there and as he enthusiastically takes her to reunite with the rest of their guildmates from her own timespace, she tears up for the joy she feels. The chapter focuses on Future Lucy's emotional response to seeing the Natsu of her timeline once again, which is consistent with the first time she sees Natsu in the present during the GMG. This effectively gives her character a closure and a happy ending. But that's not all, back to the present Lucy experiences all the feelings her future self felt in those moments at the "golden plains" and tears up as well, acting on those feelings she runs to Natsu and hugs him from behind while the chapter closes with the following words:
"You don't need a reason to cry. All you need is to feel the warmth that dwells in your chest"
A highly poetic line that conveys Lucy’s feelings in that scene. This is more than enough emotional build-up leading to a logical conclusion:
A NaLu child XD (the other kid is a Gruvia child)
Joking aside, this arc provides with a consistent protrayal of Natsu/Lucy bonding and their solid chemistry. Something not many are able to notice, but those who do come to appreciate even more the beauty, the appeal, and the strength of their emotional connection
Previous analysis on LuNa/NaLu chemistry here: http://warlordgab.tumblr.com/post/157284507416/analysis-chemistry
Previous analysis on LuNa's progression here: http://warlordgab.tumblr.com/post/163994230826/analysis-constructing-a-potent-relationship
#fairy tail#hiro mashima#NaLu#Natsu#Lucy#natsu x lucy#natsu dragneel#lucy heartfilia#lucy dragneel#bonding#chemistry
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Velvet and Magilou and Eizen for the meme, please!
That’s a lot haha. Going under cut for spoilers!
Velvet
First impression
She looks like a typical emo edgy character. On top of that, the whole revenge thing just made her seem like a female Sasuke. I was so apprehensive about her because it is so easy to write such a character badly. Also, her clothes are absolute fanservice and that really sucks.
Impression now
I love her, She got some really amazing character development. Hitting all the important points aside, the way they executed her writing was so emotional and beautiful, and I really, really appreciate how her character growth was tied directly to the plot. Not many video games do that.
Favorite moment
Ummm there were quite a few… but for Velvet herself, I think I loved the ending the most. She knew that she had committed many sins in her quest to kill Artorius, and she knew she had to pay for that. She acknowledged that. She also knew that it was selfish of her to make the choice to eat and be eaten by Innominat, leaving Phi to live. But despite knowing that, she made her choice. I find that extremely beautiful… and very, very human.
Idea for a story
WELL SHE KIND OF “DIES” AT THE END SO THERE CAN BE NO SEQUEL. ;___; But originally, I’d wanted to see Velvet make a choice between saving Laphicet and fulfilling her revenge. In canon, her revenge itself was rendered meaningless due to Innominat, and while I do like that as well, I’d really have loved to see her make a conscious choice between killing Artorius and saving Phi. I’d like to see her decide that vengeance was not as important as keeping someone important to her alive.I also want all the happy family AUs, but then again, in AUs she wouldn’t have gone through all that beautiful character development ;w;
Unpopular opinion
I don’t ship her romantically with anyone. Although I joke about crack Velcro because of the ship name, I honestly didn’t see her (or any of the others in Main Cast Berseria) doing anything (in canon) that is considered undeniably romantic. But I love the whole main cast coming together as a really unorthodox family, supporting each other and caring for each other.
Favorite relationship
Her and Phi, of course.
Favorite headcanon
Someday in future, Sorey and Maotelus find a way to deal with all the aftermath, then wake Velvet for a final goodbye, and then she, Innominat and Maotelus are put to eternal rest.
Magilou
First impression
Interesting design, although not my favourite style. Typical joke character.
Impression now
Much as I appreciate her character development points, I wasn’t fond of the way it was executed. It felt rushed and squashed mostly into one tiny segment of the whole game, which made it very difficult for me to really like her. Personality wise, she makes me laugh whenever she interacts with the rest of the Berseria party, but she’s not my favourite type of character either.
Favorite moment
Probably her crowning moment of glory? When she stood before Melchior to protect her adopted family and ensure that they have a safe way out of the Earthpulse. You go, girl, admit that you love them.
Idea for a story
I’m not sure I have any ^^;
Unpopular opinion
Basically what I wrote above about her character writing execution. ^^; I know a lot of people love her and her development, and i do get why, but I just can’t… get over how badly it was done :
Favorite relationship
Her and Bienfu and Grimoire, I think. But also her with the rest of the Berseria cast.
Favorite headcanon
I don’t think I have any for her, sorry ^^;
Eizen
First impression
IT. IS. EDNA’S. BROTHER. WE. KNOW. WHAT. HAPPENS. TO. HIM. IN. THE. END. HOLY YULIAJSOJESOJASOIENAKEAlso Edna said Sorey reminded her of her brother but this guy looks nothing like that happy cinnamon roll type?
Impression now
Okay the similarity is explained because they’re both nerds over archaeology. This guy is such a dork On top of that I really, really, REALLY love him. Eizen doesn’t get very clear character development in the game, which is a shame. But his personality, his beliefs, they appeal to me a great deal. I love how they didn’t simply make him an overprotective older brother who left his sister to protect her, because of his curse. Although that seems to be the case on the surface, Eizen’s problem is more complex than that. He realised that he didn’t want to go back to living with Edna on the mountain because he loves adventuring and exploring with the Aifread pirates. He was being selfish, and that’s okay. I do imagine that after the whole battle with Innominat and Artorius ended, he’d start to visit Edna once in a while, but continue his travelling with the Van Eltia, because that’s the life he wants.
Favorite moment
Oh no I have two that I can’t choose between. 1. “Laphicet, tell this self-absorbed idiot what she needs to hear!” The way he slammed his chains into the ground and held Phi… He knew what his two team members needed. And he was right there to support them. 2. When he stood before Theodora and told Zaveid all those home truths. In the words of Eep from the Croods, ‘That wasn’t living! That was just…. “Not Dying”!’ He knew that, and he had to show that to Zaveid, too.
Idea for a story
HE ALSO DIES IN ZESTIRIA everyone I love dies, basically.But I’d love to see him journeying around on the Van Eltia with the Aifread pirates even after Berseria. He strikes up quite a friendship with Zaveid, who begins travelling with them as well. And from time to time, they visit Maotelus at his shrine with some of the stuff they collected on their travels. Zaveid tries to teach him all sorts of things Velvet wouldn’t have approved of. Eizen smacks him.
Unpopular opinion
I love the fact that he died in the end. I wouldn’t have wanted him saved, like in the ZX anime, because that defeats the point of his entire character arc. He believed in living his life to the fullest, doing what he wanted to do, no matter what his curse or the malevolence system did. And he was perfectly willing to die after he had lived that life. I think that’s how it should be for sentient beings. Malaks/seraphs living forever is just ridiculous, but that species being so horribly crafted is another can of worms that I won’t open here XD; Also ditto on the romantic relationship business, particularly with Rokurou or Zaveid. :/
Favorite relationship
Him and Benwick and the rest of the Aifread pirates, as well as him and the Berseria party. Also him and Zaveid, although mostly in the future, since they were clashing far too much to really get along properly during most of the canon story.
Favorite headcanon
As seen above! He’d also give Benwick’s kids and grandkids toys from far-off places. Benwick tells them that the Earth Fairy brought them.
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Jak & Daxter game(s) finale idea (part 2)
Part two of my Jak and Daxter finale. This one is focused on the story of Jak 4
The game takes places a few years after the gangs last adventure and many things have happened since then, there is plenty of eco to go around even light eco, there is better communication between the cities of the world, even a teleportation system making it easy for people to get from one city to another, and a lack of monsters making the planet pretty peaceful. Our favorite characters have also had some big things happen to them, Jak has been dating Keira for a few years now, Keira is close to being an eco sage (if LF is canon), Torn and Ashelin have gotten married and had a few kids, and throughout the game(s) Daxter and Tess talk about getting ready for there upcoming wedding, though Daxter’s still the lovable goof we all know though trying to stop his “good looks” from attracting the ladies.
Things seem good until Jak and Daxter are called to stop some weird creatures near the city (maybe Haven City, doesn’t matter) giving us the tutorial level. After that they go back to the city but that’s when things get interesting as they see a giant meteor heading towards them, Jak tries to use a replica of Mar’s defense system to stop it but discover its been sabotage while he was out. Luckily the meteor missies the city but its then revealed that it isn’t a meteor at all but a giant damaged Dark Maker ship that is releasing pods everywhere, some of which crash into the city and releasing creatures from earlier which Jak and the other must fight, teaching the player how to use the morph gun and Dark and Light form Jak. After taking out the creatures, Jak and some of the other characters decide to head towards where the ship crashed.
They get there and after fighting through the creatures that live in the area and the ship’s defenses, they see one of the ship’s computers is still working but blocked off so Daxter has to go in and check it out, getting a recorded message from it and showing it to the others where it projects a message from a Dark Maker. Fans debate on what the Dark Makers look like, some say the Trooper enemy from Jak 3 were them who some say those were just robots or cybernetically enhanced ones, I tend to believe that they were just machines used by the Dark Makers, so for the story I made my own idea for what I think they could look like. I see the Dark Makers having a reptilian like form, a contrast to the Precursor’s mammal like appearance, being almost as tall as Jak’s species. There skin is dark like the dark eco they use and have jagged tails and sharp claws and teeth.
Jak and the others watch the video of the Dark Maker leader named Flak saying all survivors should meet at one of the following places, revealing a map. The gang decides to go to one of theses places and are shocked that the closest place is at Misty Island. Jak and Daxter go there, dealing with enemies and referencing the events of Jak 1 but soon realize that the place has new equipment meaning the Dark Makers and the troops are up to something. They eventually hide when they hear Dark Maker troops taking orders from two voices and are shocked to see that the ones giving orders are Gol and Maia, the villains from the first game.
The two villains returning would be an intriguing idea as since they were the first villains Jak and Daxter fought, it only be poetic to make Jak and Daxter fight them again in there last adventure, plus there return was hinted at in Jak 3 so don’t NG go through with the idea ? I do seem them with different designs, for Gol I see him being older looking but with a strong build and very mutated, having some aspects of Dark Jak and the Dark Makers, like claw like nails and black eyes. Maia on the other had I can see having a similar look as in Jak 1 but in Jak and Daxter style maybe having a bigger chest and a more revealing outfit, hey with Tess being an Ottsel and the possibility of Keira wearing something like in Lost Frontier someone’s got to pick up the lack of fanservice XD, plus its been confirmed that she uses Dark Eco to make herself look younger, maybe this is a result of hiding her mutations. Jak and Daxter are quickly captured and brought to them where they give a brief story of what happened to them.
For years they were stuck in the planet’s catacombs, mutated by all the dark eco there but in a good way as it slowed down there aging and gave them more power then before and were eventually able to contact the Dark Makers down there who made the two there champions, like what the Precursors did with Jak. They also say that the Dark Makers are on the brink of extinction thanks to Jak's actions in Jak 3 but Gol says the siblings and the Dark Makers have a plan to fix this but don’t tell Jak and Daxter as they plan to kill them. Jak gets mad and turns into Dark Jak but Gol and Maia aren’t impress as they turn into dark forms of there own and easily stop him and knock him into an arena, leading to a boss fight with a powerful soldier. After defeating the boss, Gol tells his troops to kill Jak and Daxter but they are saved by Torn and Ashelin as they all escape, but not before Daxter grabs something that Gol dropped during the chaos. Maybe we can get a turret section during a chase scene ?
After getting to safety Daxter shows the others a data disk he got which the other try and decrypt, but while that’s happening Jak and Daxter do a few missions like stopping a Dark Maker eco mining site and battling waves of enemies who are attacking a city. Eventually they team decrypt the data and discover the antagonist plan.
Turns out the villains are trying to find an ancient temple built for the purpose of making white eco, a very rare and much more powerful form of light eco that is only made when you combine the right amount of the 4 types of eco, too much of one and you get light eco. This might help or hurt the games canon but the light eco Jak used to easily defeated Gol and Maia the first time could be labeled as white eco while still being light eco. So throughout the game Jak and Daxter have to travel the world in order to find the temple and prevent the Dark Makers from using it to for their plans. The disk also says that the villains have discovered several devices made by eco sages and the Precursors that can help them create white eco and search to retrieve them at some points of the game, kinda like all the side missions in Jak 2 and 3.
I can see some other minor plot stories happening in the game like along the way the gang learn that Mar had a connection to the temple somehow, learning more about Mar himself even getting a decent picture of him, learning more about the process of being an eco sage as Jak meets some along the way who teach him how to harness the power of other ecos and what happened to the sages in this future, and learning more about eco , the dark makers, and the Jak and Daxter world itself from Precursor statues with recorded messages you can find and listen to. Jak and Daxter.
However two side plots Id like to see is one where Jak and Daxter meet a Dark Maker minor character who is a bit nicer then the others, showing a great sense of honor and respect for his enemies and another where Jak and Daxter fight with each other, damaging there friendship. The latter could be about how after many years, Jak is tired of Daxter’s irresponsibility and attitude as maybe Daxter has endangered them and the others on several occasions in the game yet when he finally lashes out at Daxter he is in the wrong as he does it after his anger as Dark Jak almost got Tess killed. It’d be a lot like how Ratchet & Clank were against each other in there first game and/or Tools of Destruction. However after learning that Mar was best friends with a Precursor who taught Mar all he knew in order to become a great inventor but who’s death changed Mar forever, the two make up.
I’m gonna stop right here and post the rest in part 3 but what are your thoughts so far ?
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I. Am. Iron Man.
So i didn’t get into all of the stuff i loved about Endgame in my review because i was still processing. here was just, SO MUCH, and i’m not talking about the many, many, easter eggs. I’m talking about all of the fanservice. All of the nods. All of the ending character arcs and plot points. Bro, the shine in this movie is so bright that an entire post was needed unto itself so here we go:
Clint’s family getting dusted. My guy, this is the MOST i have ever seen Hawkeye do and it was so much. Like, Jeremy Renner got to act and it was devastating. This man lost his entire world and it broke him. It f*cking broke him and you SEE that happen.
Robert Downey Jr. I’ve heard whispers that he might be nominated for an Oscar and i’d be okay with that. Dude kind of Dark Knight Joker’s his way through this movie. And that ending scene? I. Am. Ironman. Bruh!
Paper Football!
Karen Gillan’s Nebula was pretty legit. This is the most she’s done in these films and i, as man who absolutely adores his Ginger Goddess, was incredibly happy to see it. I was a curious how they were going to incorporate her relevance from the story, into this movie, and was happy to see that she was so prominent.
“I lost the kid.” F*ck you, movie, for making me feel things so early!
Rocket and Nebula. Seeing those two characters together, knowing what they lost? F*ck!
Toy’s entire unloading on Captain America after getting back from space was just... F*ck. He was right in the worse way and no trust. No trust. I get why he feels the way he does but both of these cats f*cked up.
“I. Am. Inevitable.”
“I went for the head.”
Five years later. BRUH!
Scott Lang! Bro, Paul Rudd is a gift and he’s far more compelling and relevant in this flick than he’s ever been, even in his own movies. Dude was in the quantum realm and, for him, it’s only been 5 hours so he’s completely f*cking lost. Especially when...
F*cking grown ass Cassie! BRUH!! Are we going to get a Stature in the new MCU soon?? Seeing Emma Furhman walked out that door was ridiculous and the way Rudd played his surprised was perfect. I believed this was the first time he saw his what has to be his 15 year old daughter after last seeing her as a 10 year old. Solid f*cking scene.
Namor easter egg
Morgan Stark, are you kidding me? Kid was adorable! Terrible at her job but adorable to look at. And she did an admirable job as a proper for Stark to quip.
Professor Hulk was pretty okay, I like that Mark Rufflo’s arc had a finite conclusion but, i dunno? I kind of feel like this is temporary, as it is in the comics, but we’ll see. According to him, he was able to make that equilibrium happen in 18 months so he’s been that way for 3 and half years.
“I love you 3000.”
“Time travel!”
Literally any scene with Natasha and Clint but that first one when they finally see each other after so many years. If you’ve kept up on this entire saga, you know that Clint and Natasha love each other like siblings. He saved her from her bloody ass past, kind of, and literally set her on pace to become a hero. Clint saw her potential and nurtured her into the leader of the Avengers. Now, she has the opportunity to do it for him, to pull him out of the darkest that used to be her life. Which makes what happens not to much later a f*cking gut punch. Still, it was nice to see something “normal” return for those character.
Speaking of Natasha, Scarlett did a fantastic job as the character. For the first time since Winter Soldier, i felt like Black Widow was an actual character and not a prop. Like, when you look at it, these movies have been blessed with their casts and you get to see why in this flick. Her arc in this flick is one of finality but she’s able to do so much with her screen time, it’s ridiculous. Ma gives Tony a run for his money, easy.
“What’s up, Normal Sized Guy?”
New Asgard, Angry Girl, Meek, Korg, and Fat Thor. BRUH!
Chris Hemsworth doing his best impression of The Dude was hilarious and makes all of the sense. Dude had just destroyed Asgard and taken his place as king when Thanos decided to slaughter half his people, kill his best friend, kill his brother, and then Snapped. Thor lost 3/4 of the entire Asgardian race. There’s literally like, 12 houses in New Asgard. That’s what’s left. Dude’s understandably in a bad place.
TIME HEIST!!
That’s America’s ass!
Watching Hulk half-heartedly smash on his way to the Santum Santorum was cute. Speaking of...
Bro, the Ancient One kind of fending off Chitari was awesome. She would have definitely been there, doing her thing, over yonder. I never even thought of that! It was also dope seeing Tilda Swinton back for a cameo, the first of many time displaced shenanigans!
Loki peace-ing out!
Alexander Pierce, Rumlow, and Sitwell. Seeing them again was awesome.
“Hail HYDRA.”
Everything on Morag was hilarious. Paring Nebula and Rhodey together was a stroke of genius. They play off each other well. I hope they have a bit more interaction going forard. Interesting enough, there are a couple of scenes where they get to interact, and it looks like Rhodey might have made a proper impression. Like, Nebula LIKES him and it’s cute as sh*t.
Past Nebula f*cking everything up! Jesus, b*tch, get your sh*t together!
“That is destiny fulfilled.” Bruh, past Thanos just being okay with his murder is chilling.
That struggle to be Vormire’s sacrifice. Bro, that was f*cked up and it hurt when she fell.
“Let me go.” F*CK!!
Howard and Tony interacting as adults. That was awesome to see, I’m glad Tony got that in the end. he needed it.
Peggy. All she had to do was look up. That’s all. F*CK!
Yo, Jarvis! Shout out to the one show that gets a reference in the movies! Nice!
Stark’s gauntlet. Cats are trying to argue that stark tech shouldn’t be able to harness the power of the tones but, why not? The current armor can do some incredible stuff and there’s a ton of vibranium availed to them now because of Okoye. It kind of makes sense they’d be able to find a way to make that happen.
Time-Travel Thanos! My man didn’t have nearly the presence in this film, than he did in the past and that’s okay. He’s not supposed to. this isn’t about stopping the Snap. It’s abut undoing it. It’s about AVENGING the fallen. Outside of being a final obstacle, Thanos holds no real relevance to Endgame. But, that last obstacle is a doozy!
The Big Three versus The Mad Titan. BRUH!!!
Cap wielding Mjolnir! BRUHH!!!!
Thanos shattering Cap’s shield. BRUH!!!!!
“Avengers. Assemble” F*CKING, BRUH!!!!!
Iron-Dad! Seriously, the reunion scene between Pete and Tony made me cry. The fact that they let Tom Holland and RDJ come up with that scene on their own; Like, all of that was improvised on the spot, was amazing. Seeing them together as the opposite of how i felt when Pete got dusted.
F*cking Wand, man! She solo’d Thanos as second time! and nearly killed him! Ma went in on him with brutality and pure rage! If not for Corvis bailing him out with spaceship guns, that would have been the end right there.
Wait, did i mention Rescue? Pepper out her in her own armor, making some vets in the hero game, look like straight rookies. Dope sh*t is dope!
“If i tell you what happens, it won’t happen.”
Black Panther acknowledging Clint, the opposite of the first time they met way back in Civil War.
Pete finally activating instant kill mode. Stabby-stabby!
“Heads up, Queens.”
“Hey, Peter Parker. You got something for me?”
But dat A-Force, though. HNGGGG!! i’m not goin to lie i never knew i wanted some thing so bad until i saw all those chicks line up and absolutely hard body Thanos’s army. We need this movie. Make this sh*t happen!
Carol eating Thanos’ headbutt and that look of legitimate concern on his face. Keep in mind this is a Thanos with a five stone Infinity gauntlet on, and Captain Marvel is overpowering him. She’s a f*cking problem!
“I am Inevitable.”
“and I. Am. Iron Man.”
Watching Tony die was f*cked up. Rhodey and Pepper getting their moments, sure, but seeing Pete break down like that? Hearing him call Tony by his first name, for the first and last time, man, i lost it again. Tony watched Pete die five years ago and now Pete is watching Tony die. This is a 15 year old, man. man, f*ck this movie for making me feel things!
“I love you, 3000!” F*CK!!!
Yo, Harley was there! That was kind of dope. Kid got huge since Iron Man 3.
“I’m going to get you all the cheeseburgers you want” Come on, movie, you can’t keep emotionally devastating me like this. It’s not fair.
Old man Cap. I’m glad Falcon got the shield, he deserved it and thee’s no way Bucky and be Bucky cap, he’s a literal, publicly known, terrorist, but seeing an aged and happy cap who finally got some of that life Tony was talking about, did my heart some good. until...
My mans finally getting his dance. That’s it. That’s the last scene of this film; Steve and Peggy slow dancing in their home and i f*cking lost it again. He finally got to keep his date.
Endgame was so good, dude. This thing, even withit’s flaws, gave me, as a fan, everything i needed. If i never get another MCU film after this, i am good. We lost some pivotal characters, sure, but what was left, i think, is pretty special. I’m curious to see Far From Home now. That takes place immediately after this and i want to know what heading we’re going toward. It’ll be nice to get a breather after this bookend. It has been one helluva ride.
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I. Am. Iron Man.
So i didn’t get into all of the stuff i loved about Endgame in my review because i was still processing. here was just, SO MUCH, and i’m not talking about the many, many, easter eggs. I’m talking about all of the fanservice. All of the nods. All of the ending character arcs and plot points. Bro, the shine in this movie is so bright that an entire post was needed unto itself so here we go:
Clint’s family getting dusted. My guy, this is the MOST i have ever seen Hawkeye do and it was so much. Like, Jeremy Renner got to act and it was devastating. This man lost his entire world and it broke him. It f*cking broke him and you SEE that happen.
Robert Downey Jr. I’ve heard whispers that he might be nominated for an Oscar and i’d be okay with that. Dude kind of Dark Knight Joker’s his way through this movie. And that ending scene? I. Am. Ironman. Bruh!
Paper Football!
Karen Gillan’s Nebula was pretty legit. This is the most she’s done in these films and i, as man who absolutely adores his Ginger Goddess, was incredibly happy to see it. I was a curious how they were going to incorporate her relevance from the story, into this movie, and was happy to see that she was so prominent.
“I lost the kid.” F*ck you, movie, for making me feel things so early!
Rocket and Nebula. Seeing those two characters together, knowing what they lost? F*ck!
Toy’s entire unloading on Captain America after getting back from space was just... F*ck. He was right in the worse way and no trust. No trust. I get why he feels the way he does but both of these cats f*cked up.
“I. Am. Inevitable.”
“I went for the head.”
Five years later. BRUH!
Scott Lang! Bro, Paul Rudd is a gift and he’s far more compelling and relevant in this flick than he’s ever been, even in his own movies. Dude was in the quantum realm and, for him, it’s only been 5 hours so he’s completely f*cking lost. Especially when...
F*cking grown ass Cassie! BRUH!! Are we going to get a Stature in the new MCU soon?? Seeing Emma Furhman walked out that door was ridiculous and the way Rudd played his surprised was perfect. I believed this was the first time he saw his what has to be his 15 year old daughter after last seeing her as a 10 year old. Solid f*cking scene.
Namor easter egg
Morgan Stark, are you kidding me? Kid was adorable! Terrible at her job but adorable to look at. And she did an admirable job as a proper for Stark to quip.
Professor Hulk was pretty okay, I like that Mark Rufflo’s arc had a finite conclusion but, i dunno? I kind of feel like this is temporary, as it is in the comics, but we’ll see. According to him, he was able to make that equilibrium happen in 18 months so he’s been that way for 3 and half years.
“I love you 3000.”
“Time travel!”
Literally any scene with Natasha and Clint but that first one when they finally see each other after so many years. If you’ve kept up on this entire saga, you know that Clint and Natasha love each other like siblings. He saved her from her bloody ass past, kind of, and literally set her on pace to become a hero. Clint saw her potential and nurtured her into the leader of the Avengers. Now, she has the opportunity to do it for him, to pull him out of the darkest that used to be her life. Which makes what happens not to much later a f*cking gut punch. Still, it was nice to see something “normal” return for those character.
Speaking of Natasha, Scarlett did a fantastic job as the character. For the first time since Winter Soldier, i felt like Black Widow was an actual character and not a prop. Like, when you look at it, these movies have been blessed with their casts and you get to see why in this flick. Her arc in this flick is one of finality but she’s able to do so much with her screen time, it’s ridiculous. Ma gives Tony a run for his money, easy.
“What’s up, Normal Sized Guy?”
New Asgard, Angry Girl, Meek, Korg, and Fat Thor. BRUH!
Chris Hemsworth doing his best impression of The Dude was hilarious and makes all of the sense. Dude had just destroyed Asgard and taken his place as king when Thanos decided to slaughter half his people, kill his best friend, kill his brother, and then Snapped. Thor lost 3/4 of the entire Asgardian race. There’s literally like, 12 houses in New Asgard. That’s what’s left. Dude’s understandably in a bad place.
TIME HEIST!!
That’s America’s ass!
Watching Hulk half-heartedly smash on his way to the Santum Santorum was cute. Speaking of...
Bro, the Ancient One kind of fending off Chitari was awesome. She would have definitely been there, doing her thing, over yonder. I never even thought of that! It was also dope seeing Tilda Swinton back for a cameo, the first of many time displaced shenanigans!
Loki peace-ing out!
Alexander Pierce, Rumlow, and Sitwell. Seeing them again was awesome.
“Hail HYDRA.”
Everything on Morag was hilarious. Paring Nebula and Rhodey together was a stroke of genius. They play off each other well. I hope they have a bit more interaction going forard. Interesting enough, there are a couple of scenes where they get to interact, and it looks like Rhodey might have made a proper impression. Like, Nebula LIKES him and it’s cute as sh*t.
Past Nebula f*cking everything up! Jesus, b*tch, get your sh*t together!
“That is destiny fulfilled.” Bruh, past Thanos just being okay with his murder is chilling.
That struggle to be Vormire’s sacrifice. Bro, that was f*cked up and it hurt when she fell.
“Let me go.” F*CK!!
Howard and Tony interacting as adults. That was awesome to see, I’m glad Tony got that in the end. he needed it.
Peggy. All she had to do was look up. That’s all. F*CK!
Yo, Jarvis! Shout out to the one show that gets a reference in the movies! Nice!
Stark’s gauntlet. Cats are trying to argue that stark tech shouldn’t be able to harness the power of the tones but, why not? The current armor can do some incredible stuff and there’s a ton of vibranium availed to them now because of Okoye. It kind of makes sense they’d be able to find a way to make that happen.
Time-Travel Thanos! My man didn’t have nearly the presence in this film, than he did in the past and that’s okay. He’s not supposed to. this isn’t about stopping the Snap. It’s abut undoing it. It’s about AVENGING the fallen. Outside of being a final obstacle, Thanos holds no real relevance to Endgame. But, that last obstacle is a doozy!
The Big Three versus The Mad Titan. BRUH!!!
Cap wielding Mjolnir! BRUHH!!!!
Thanos shattering Cap’s shield. BRUH!!!!!
“Avengers. Assemble” F*CKING, BRUH!!!!!
Iron-Dad! Seriously, the reunion scene between Pete and Tony made me cry. The fact that they let Tom Holland and RDJ come up with that scene on their own; Like, all of that was improvised on the spot, was amazing. Seeing them together as the opposite of how i felt when Pete got dusted.
F*cking Wand, man! She solo’d Thanos as second time! and nearly killed him! Ma went in on him with brutality and pure rage! If not for Corvis bailing him out with spaceship guns, that would have been the end right there.
Wait, did i mention Rescue? Pepper out her in her own armor, making some vets in the hero game, look like straight rookies. Dope sh*t is dope!
“If i tell you what happens, it won’t happen.”
Black Panther acknowledging Clint, the opposite of the first time they met way back in Civil War.
Pete finally activating instant kill mode. Stabby-stabby!
“Heads up, Queens.”
“Hey, Peter Parker. You got something for me?”
But dat A-Force, though. HNGGGG!! i’m not goin to lie i never knew i wanted some thing so bad until i saw all those chicks line up and absolutely hard body Thanos’s army. We need this movie. Make this sh*t happen!
Carol eating Thanos’ headbutt and that look of legitimate concern on his face. Keep in mind this is a Thanos with a five stone Infinity gauntlet on, and Captain Marvel is overpowering him. She’s a f*cking problem!
“I am Inevitable.”
“and I. Am. Iron Man.”
Watching Tony die was f*cked up. Rhodey and Pepper getting their moments, sure, but seeing Pete break down like that? Hearing him call Tony by his first name, for the first and last time, man, i lost it again. Tony watched Pete die five years ago and now Pete is watching Tony die. This is a 15 year old, man. man, f*ck this movie for making me feel things!
“I love you, 3000!” F*CK!!!
Yo, Harley was there! That was kind of dope. Kid got huge since Iron Man 3.
“I’m going to get you all the cheeseburgers you want” Come on, movie, you can’t keep emotionally devastating me like this. It’s not fair.
Old man Cap. I’m glad Falcon got the shield, he deserved it and thee’s no way Bucky and be Bucky cap, he’s a literal, publicly known, terrorist, but seeing an aged and happy cap who finally got some of that life Tony was talking about, did my heart some good. until...
My mans finally getting his dance. That’s it. That’s the last scene of this film; Steve and Peggy slow dancing in their home and i f*cking lost it again. He finally got to keep his date.
Endgame was so good, dude. This thing, even with it’s flaws, gave me, as a fan, everything i needed. If i never get another MCU film after this, i am good. We lost some pivotal characters, sure, but what was left, i think, is pretty special. I’m curious to see Far From Home now. That takes place immediately after this and i want to know what heading we’re going toward. It’ll be nice to get a breather after this bookend. It has been one helluva ride.
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Strike Witches episode 1: first impression
so im gonna try strike witches: the unknown anime
i chose to not familiarize myself with the premise beyond 'something like fighter pilots i think?' that i picked up by osmosis
oh hey look a discarded doll. def war is hell vibes here
cant say im a fan of the visuals from the first several seconds, the color scheme and everything seems kinda bland? the only reason im making this observation is bc i had to pause to let it load tho
oh look Very Noticable CGI
(i have a headache and am vaguely nauseous and basically am Very Cranky as a result)
man, there aren't even characters yet. it's been almost two minuets and there still aren't people for me to relate too that's a crime
by which i dont mean that literally but just 'this might not be the thing i want to watch right now'
oh hey monsters
okay this is better than just straight up war is hell between humans
omfg in 1939
subtle
'we wanna play with ww2 era toys but without bringing up the fact japan was on the side of nazi germany' i assume
sure im onboard if thats the premise
magitech??? magitech!!!
that's. their legs. in those things. are they evoking Baba Yaga and her travels in a stupa bc thats
okay panty shots
i think imma quit at the end of this episode
oh i. just realized this is the movie
that actually makes it a bit better and gives me more hope
lets try the actual first episode first
ok the first shot is of the sky and not a discarded doll that's already better
holy shit whatever this video player is it allows to load external captions from pc or url. technology progresses at an incredible pace
i love that the fighter planes are clearly shown attacking the vortex first 9u9
opening has so many girls wearing shoes but no pants. im just. this entire device's entire point is clearly to fanservice
that does not mean this is bad character-wise yet ofc. i watched and liked fucking rosario+vampire. this show has a chance yet. lets see what its got
the op song is nice
its also very straightforward about aesthetic of this show being 'girls without pants in absolutely non-sexual situaitons' and i can respect that
and oh look it actually does start with characters interacting right after exposition that's what im talking about
okay so now might be a good time to mention that the first context i heard of strike witches was uh. misogynist porn. like the kind that doesnt go for 'look at these relatable characters being kinky' but for 'consider: what if powerful girls got hurt instead'. so thats the context in my brain and i want to fucking overwrite it
military uniforms+panties are definitely an aesthetic and im incredibly amused by it
okay every single girl here doesnt wear pants
sure
that actually looks like a swimsuit rather than panties and thats nice
also they are characterizing the protagonist! like i know thats not much to ask for but im going into this straight off blogging about madoka and this is just such a relief! she is kind and brave and plucky and talks gently to a scared kitten and I love her
also she Does Not Think Things Through
shes like the typical shonen protagonist but a girl. im in
Yoshika her name is Yoshika
and her motivation is her dad but eh sure whatever
I kind of like the touch of 'it was classified military information' not sure why
theres nothing about Yoshika that qualifies her other than her personality and magic powers huh
yep thats a swimsuit
aww shes a healer!
I love that the military observers rush to help as soon as they see something is off
theres work and then theres helping emergencies
oh!!!! her mom and grandma are around!!! and teaching her!!! im happy!!!
Yoshika why is all that a 'but' to 'you should learn to control your power'
i dont think there was any subtext of 'you shouldnt even try' there? or was it? maybe i should just trust her for now
awww Yoshika actually doesn't want to go to war <3
but this woman thinks she will because she wants to help people and she'll help people the most there
I
I like this ;~;
I'm so happy I like this
I love Yoshika's 'fuck war' instinct
I love her drive to help everyone and in fact the trope of magical healer almost killing themselves to help a patient (despite it being professionally inadvisable) is actually the thing i made my very first rp character sooo :> you know. stuff
something is fishy about that letter. its no coincidence it was sent just now...
I love Sakamoto and her A+ social skills
HA HA HA HA HA
also huh... she's not in on whatever's up with that letter
Yoshika so uh
alright she'll take her without enlisting her huh
interesting
but uh what about school
I guess military and witches can override all that and it kind of makes sense to me thematically
'Britannia' gee how familiar that name sounds and i dont mean geographically
so hm could Yoshika be a military doctor without actually enlisting? how do the formalities work there
i like that Sakamoto doesnt question her dislike of all things military like its unexpected but mostly bc Sakamoto's got a one track mind that has a hard time expecting anything other than what she wants to happen
and beyond that its like 'sure ok a conscientous objector got it'
even though its weird how there would be conscientous objectors to fighting MONSTERS its not like theres an alternative to not fight
I mean also clearly Yoshika is a kid and theres room left for that in other characters' treatment of her opinions and I love that
they dont get Offended that she doesn't understand and Have Proper Respect
well Sakamoto doesn't at least not sure about how other people will react
man that raccoon on the road sure was convenient though. like i first thought it was Sakamoto's deliberate tactic to gauge Yoshiko's powers. she was opening her eye to i guess do just that visually and then the raccoon appeared and it just felt very natural that one follows from the other?
is this foreshadowing or are the writers of this anime just unfamiliar with the concept of 'subtle'
i dont mind if its the latter tbh
(im writing a ton of reflection bc the episode broke after i tried to rewind a little and i decided to download it after all, and its doing that)
so far, this show seeems nicely straightforward and fast paced. like, really straightforward. yoshiko's introduction? saving a kitten. making a ww2 era anime without difficult shit? monsters attacked in 1939. motivations and revelations are handled with all the subtlety of a hammer to the face, from the raccoon to the letter. even fanservice has the same charming quality that makes me actually be okay with the entire point of their outfits being gratuitous panty shots. making sense and having pretense is for the weak. this anime knows what it wants to be and is going straight for that. i respect that approach
also its p clear that what it wants is to be character driven and its been Delivering on that since its only half episode one and i already Love two characters personally and also some supporting cast (Yoshiko's entire family)
and like you know that in some other show GASP MIGHT MY DAD BE STILL ALIVE would be a reveal saved for like. the halfway point. but here its literally the starting point spurring everything into action bc all other motivation was just too slow to get the character where she was supposed to go. good job yo
there's this trope where the main character doesn't want to go into the main conflict (Refusal of the Call)... and very often it's handled by either 1) letting them wallow until everything goes to shit showing how wrong they were or 2) immediately conveniently wrecking everything so they have no choice now
I uh. am really glad this show went a different way
if just joining the conflict isnt a good enough motivation GET A BETTER ONE and IT DOESNT HAVE TO BE ANGST (and it doesn't have to be romance, either!!! why are those two the only things writers seem to be able to think of jfc)
...okay I was more like two thirds through the episode rather than half but my points stand
okay so I think what just happened was Yoshiko realized the parallel between herself and her dad leaving and got scared and her response was to comfort other people and I love that <3
I love that Sakamoto doesn't have a doubt in her mind that Yoshiko isn't going to be useless and will definitely help and also comes to her to discuss this explicitly <3
man I love Sakamoto and her absolute lack of social graces and sense of when enough is enough
and the fact that Yoshiko is working chores now and seems to enjoy it too <3
and it's when it's established that she's part of the team that Sakamoto starts showing off <3
she clearly has a dedicated well thought out campaign of convincing Yoshiko going on and its borne out not of manipulation but of clear conviction that she is right and she just has to show the girl what she doesnt know yet <3
ahaha of course showing off worked <3
so I paused and imma make a bet with myself on whether Sakamoto is going to tell her 'if you liked that you can join' right now or leave that unsaid subtly
my bet is that she is, bc subtlety is an entirely foreign concept to this wonderful human being, and if i lose im going to make my bed right now not even waiting for the end of the episode
let's see
oh she starts with education
huh, this is not widely known? i had no idea
anyway lets see if she says the thing
I love that it's her dad and it's this kind thing of 'this is what he said he was going to do, and he did' <3
huh so that was slightly more subtlety than I expected, she offered her to try them rather than trying to recruit her directly
so I lost the bet
gotta go make the bed now
BAM DONE YAY GOOD SELF CARE
hey more main characters!!!! I love all of you already!!! you have personality and discuss things that make sense!!! including their outfits!!! I love them!!!! the parasol girl is my favorite
but also the tiny girl
and the red-haired girl
they are all my favorites!!!
omfg a month of travel
and half a day early Yoshiko gets impatient I love her
YOU ARE A NONCOMBATANT she said with the steely confidence of a commanding officer <3
I love so much that Sakamoto respects Yoshiko's boundaries re: fighting???
OMG THE ENDING SONG
I LOVE IT
I love the upbeat and airy tone this show manages to have despite the premise??? like I had trepidations at the start bc I dislike doom&gloom-heaviness of 'war is hell' narratives and I'm not a WW2 affictionado. but instead of shiny boom boom toys and angst it's all character adorableness and so much sky??? even the lack of pants ends up feeling like freedom
this is the anime we all deserve
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