The Factory!

come on provolone...

this is somewhat of a vent post & something i said i would not do again but has been plaguing me enough that i think getting it out might feel better. so. has anydoggy else been. Baffled and upset by nora sakavic’s refusal to speak on how terribly aftg has treated its characters of color? with the author of the series coming back with a new book and starting up on her online activity again, and questions of what she’d change about aftg bubbling up, it’s particularly glaring to me that we are all playing this very long game of pretend where we ignore how badly the non-white cast has been treated & her lack of thoughts on it

and i understand not wanting to bring up nicky and thea because people pick on her for it. i’m not trying to discredit nora sakavic’s terrible history of getting harrassed online by aftg fans. but i think it is very cynical, and it is very juvenile, and most of all very cruel, that she gets to ignore the very real ways the books have set up these characters to be hated. i think it’s obvious why the characters who get the most hate are the only canonical characters of color, and i think we do not get to treat this like a deliberate decision on the fandom’s part when the books have put these same characters in degrading and embarrassing and terrible positions in the first place. aftg is not a story about nice characters with clean pasts, but there is a very specific nastiness to the only characters of color being a brown man who sexually harasses and later assaults the main character, a black woman whose only scene is her lashing out at her love interest after being ignored for the first two books, and the japanese villain who gets maybe two lines of complexity before he goes back to being a terrible person. the white cast, in comparison, while not at all free from flaws, are never shown to commit mindless evil; all of their actions are ultimately justified. the book goes out of its way to give them concession after concession. we know exactly who to side with, because aftg tells us who these people are. does nicky’s assault ever get addressed in the books? does riko’s reasoning to be the way that he is ever gets more than briefly aluded to? is thea reserved even a shred of humanity or grace in her one scene?

anyway. it’s been years of talking about this and the fandom has been constantly hostile to criticism in this regard, and more recently any criticism at all, and it’s Grating to be on the other side of this discussion. it’s exhausting to know that in ten years we do not get even an acknowledgment besides the author saying she will not answer questions about nicky and thea anymore. it’s upsetting and it’s ugly and i wish no one had to talk about this again, but we do because what i thought was common sense has been washed away by a sudden influx of no-nuance adoration for the trilogy. basically i hope we all explode

two hours later edit: you're allowed to reblog this! sorry about the confusion

Red Hood: The Hill problems I've observed: not enough Red Hood as the title suggests, horrid art – Jason literally looks like Popeye's twin –, entire thing is giving very much tell don't show, like ur trying to convince that Jason the guy that's know for being a crime alley kid is a Hill kid? The suburbs?? And ur not even gonna show me this? Dana's supposedly his childhood best friend, but we ain't got a single panel of them interacting as kids?

don't even get me started on how ooc Jason feels, like I said it before and I'll say it again, Steph should've been the bat used on this story, making she and Dana be childhood friends who reconnect and learn about each other's identity, work together as vigilantes, their moral differences would work way better, also having it be an all women lead comic would've been peak.

Can't believe this is what ended up being my first drawing of Blade

Splatoon oc I had for a while

Fellas, is it gay take care of your rival after a battle to death? 🤨

man just really not vibing with the fandom at large recently

I'm once again thinking about the missed opportunities to have Klaus and Kol bond more. Part of Klaus' whole motivation as a vampire is to get his werewolf part back and to finally be stronger than Mikael (sort of, I'm simplifying) both of which can be obtained by breaking his curse. But Kol? Kol is the only other original that can relate to having a fundamental part of themself ripped away from them. Klaus might not have known he was a werewolf until he killed, but he likely still had a connection he couldn't explain, as evident by him going to watch the wolves transform. And something he'd never been able to explain was now gone. He might only be able to realise the connection afterwards through its absence.

Kol though. Kol had grown up with magic, a connection to nature and the world around him in a way the rest of his siblings supposedly didn't have. And then he gets turned. And not only has his baby brother died, his father has just murdered him and the rest of his siblings after forcing them to drink human blood, which he'll later learn. Now, not only does he have to deal with the grief of Henrik's death and also his own but also the loss of his magic. A loss that's likely only worsened by Kol being a self-proclaimed child prodigy.

Kol is pretty much the only one who could understand what Klaus is going through with the binding of his wolf. We know Kol searched for ways to get his magic back/carry on practicing magic in the same way that Klaus was looking for ways to break his curse. While Klaus likely could still feel his wolf there despite being bound, Kol has no access to his magic anymore. I just think they should've been able to bond or connect over their shared loss of an intrinsic aspect of their selves at the hands of their parents

my rancher!!!

Rot

the only "I think larian should" thing I genuinely agree with is they need to give karlach and wyll as much content as their pet twink & they especially need to rework wyll's arc and quests to actually be about him. fanfic can only fix so much and we are not letting them off the hook for treating their two poc origins as lowest priorities. <3

this is venus from isatcord who has just now connected the dots that you made this iconic mirabelle loop au I keep hearing abt and loving and yet somehow never realized was made by the a mod in the discord 😭 much love to you and ur wonderful ideas

I guess I'm in the minority because I came away from the Ahsoka finale more of a Sabezra shipper than before and more convinced they might be going in a canon Sabezra direction. Nothing ship killing happened in the finale...they are both alive and neither of them are romantically involved with anyone else.

And I'll say this, if Filoni wants Sabine and Ezra to be platonic, as people keep insisting, then he didn't communicate that very clearly, or at all, to the actors and the directors because Ezra and Sabine come across like they are in love. Like seriously Ezra's "I missed you" was pretty darn close to a love confession imo. The way he looked at her and the way he said it had me going "oh he is totally in love with her".

Sure them being separated, again, is a set back but its really a minor one for a scifi fantasy show. When Ezra got stuck nobody knew where he was or even how to begin finding him or if it was even possible. This time around Ezra knows exactly WHERE Sabine and Ahsoka are and HOW to get there. Its been established now that travel between galaxies is indeed possible and it doesn't even appear to be that hard? You just need the coordinates and a powerful enough hyperdrive. Ezra has either already stolen the coordinates from the Chimaera or he's working on a plan to do just that. This separation will be temporary and given that Thrawn is back in the main galaxy now, and there is no OT coming up in the timeline that Ezra needs to be MIA for, I'm betting it will be way, way shorter in universe that the last one. [how long we have to wait to see them reunited I have no idea, everything is so up in the air right now what was the just resolved writers strike and as yet to be resolved actors strike]

The big thing that's giving me pause on canon Sabezra at this moment in time is Sabine apparently committing to becoming a Jedi and her embracing being Ahsoka's apprentice. I just don't now where they are going to come down on the Jedi and romantic attachments thing. I'm worried they might revert back to the Jedi are forbidden romantic attachments angle to align with the BS they established with Luke regarding attachments for the Sequel Trilogy.

The fact that they didn't retcon the fact that Kanan was a Jedi, as I feared they would, and the fact that Carson didn't say "wait how can Jacen's father have been a Jedi? I thought Jedi weren't allowed to have families" gives me hope. And the obvious, to me anyway, "romantic coding" with Sabine and Ezra in Ahsoka gives me hope. But then I remember that they had Luke make Grogu chose between being a Jedi or seeing Din again in the Book of Bobba Fett and I get worried.

if there is anyone in the community who i wholeheartedly believe should make six figures a year from modding its littlemssam. this game would be dead and gone without their mods meanwhile some people who just release extremely similar themed packs/EA mesh edits are making like 8k a month 🤡

pov: you are sebastian proposing the worst idea your friends have ever heard