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tlbodine · 3 years

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The Horror Genius of Five Nights At Freddy’s

I’ve been playing FNAF: Help Wanted VR on my Oculus Quest lately (a birthday present to myself -- I know I’m late to that party!) and it’s reignited in me my old love of this series. I know Scott Cawthon’s politics aren’t great, but I don’t think there’s any malice in his heart beyond usual Christian conservative nonsense -- and I think he stepped down as graciously and magnanimously as possible when confronted about it. Time will judge Scott Cawthon’s politics, and that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I want to talk about what makes these games so damn special, from a horror, design, and marketing perspective. I think there’s really SO MUCH to be learned from studying these games and the wider influence they’ve had as intellectual property.

What Is FNAF?

In case you’ve somehow been living under a rock for the last seven years, Five Nights At Freddy’s (hereafter, FNAF) is a horror franchise spanning 17 games (10 main games + some spinoffs and troll games, we’ll get to that), 27 books, a movie deal, and a couple live-action attractions.

But before it exploded into that kind of tremendous IP, it started out as a single indie pont-and-click game created entirely by one dude, Scott Cawthon. Cawthon had developed other games in the past without much fame or success, including some Christian children’s entertainment. He was working as a cashier at Dollar General and making games in his spare time -- and most of those games got panned.

So he tried making something different.

After being criticized that the characters in one of his children’s games looked like soulless, creepy animatronics, Cawthon had his lightbulb moment and created a horror game centered on....creepy animatronics!

The rest, as they say, is history.

The Genius of FNAF’s Horror Elements

In the first FNAF game, you play as a night security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a sort of ersatz Chuck-E-Cheese establishment. The animatronics are on free-roaming mode at night, but you don’t want to let them find you in your security room so you have to watch them move through the building on security camera monitors. If they get too close, you can slam your security room doors closed. But be careful, because this restaurant operates on a shoestring budget, and the power will go off if you keep the doors closed too long or flicker the lights too often. And once the lights go out, you’re helpless against the animatronics in the dark.

Guiding you through your gameplay is a fellow employee, Phone Guy, who calls you each night with some helpful advice. Phone Guy is voiced by Cawthon himself, and listening to his tapes gives you some hints of the game’s underlying story as well as telling you how to play. A few newspaper clippings and other bits of scrap material help to fill in more details of the story.

Over the next set of games, the story would be further developed, with each new game introducing new mechanics and variations on the theme -- in one, you don a mask to slip past the notice of animatronics; in another, you have to play sound cues to lure an animatronic away from you. By the fourth game, the setup was changed completely, now featuring a child with a flashlight hiding from the monsters outside his door -- nightmarish versions of the beloved child-friendly mascots. The mechanics change just enough between variations to keep things fresh while maintaining a consistent brand.

There are so many things these games do well from a storytelling and horror perspective:

Jump Scares: It’s easy to shrug these games off for relying heavily on jump scares, and they absolutely do have a lot of them. But they’re used strategically. In most games, the jump scares are a punishment (a controlled shock, if you will) -- if you play the game perfectly, you’ll never be jump-scared. This is an important design choice that a lot of other horror games don’t follow.

Atmospheric Dread: These games absolutely deliver horror and tension through every element of design -- some more than others, admittedly. But a combination of sound cues, the overall texture and aesthetic of the world, the “things move when you’re not looking at them” mechanic, all of it works together to create a feeling of unease and paranoia.

Paranoia: As in most survival horror games, you’re at a disadvantage. You can’t move or defend yourself, really -- all you can do is watch. And so watch you do. Except it’s a false sense of security, because flicking lights and checking cameras uses up precious resources, putting you at greater risk. So you have to balance your compulsive need to check, double-check, and make sure...with methodical resource conservation. The best way to survive these games is to remain calm and focused. It’s a brilliant design choice.

Visceral Horror: The monster design of the animatronics is absolutely delightful, and there’s a whole range of them to choose from. The sheer size and weight of the creatures, the way they move and position themselves, their grunginess, the deadness of their eyes, the quantity and prominence of their teeth. They are simultaneously adorable and horrifying.

Implicit Horror: One of the greatest strengths to FNAF as a franchise is that it never wears its story on its sleeve. Instead of outright telling you what’s going on, the story is delivered in bits and pieces that you have to put together yourself -- creating a puzzle for an engaged player to think about and theorize over and consider long after the game is done. But more than that, the nature of the horror itself is such that it becomes increasingly upsetting the more you think on it. The implications of what’s going on in the game world -- that there are decaying bodies tucked away inside mascots that continue to perform for children, that a man dressed in a costume is luring kids away into a private room to kill them, and so forth -- are the epitome of fridge horror.

The FNAF lore does admittedly start to become fairly ridiculous and convoluted as the franchise wears on. But even ret-conned material manages to be pretty interesting in its own right (and there is nothing in the world keeping you from playing the first four games, or even the first six, and pretending none of the rest exist).

Another thing I really appreciate about the FNAF franchise is that it’s quite funny, in a way that complements and underscores the horror rather than detracting from it. It’s something a lot of other properties utterly fail to do.

The Genius of Scott Cawthon’s Marketing

OK, so FNAF utilizes a multi-prong attack for creating horror and implements it well -- big deal. Why did it explode into a massive IP sensation when other indie horror games that are just as well-made barely made a blip on the radar?

Well! That’s where the real genius comes in. This game was built and marketed in a way to maximize its franchisability.

First, the story utilizes instantly identifiable, simple but effective character designs, and then generates more and more instantly identifiable unique characters with each iteration. Having a wealth of characters and clever, unique designs basically paves the way for merchandise and fan-works. (That they’re anthropomorphic animal designs also probably helped -- because that taps into the furry fandom as well without completely alienating non-furries).

Speaking of fan-work, Scott Cawthon has always been very supportive of fandom, only taking action when people would try to profit off knock-off games and that sort of thing -- basically bad-faith copies. But as far as I know he’s always been super chill with fan-created content, even going so far as to engage directly with the fandom. Which brings me to....

These games were practically designed for streaming, and he took care to deliver them into the hands of influential streamers. Because the games are heavy on jump-scares and scale in difficulty (even including extra-challenging modes after the core game is beaten) they are extremely fun to watch people play. They’re short enough to be easily finished over the duration of a long stream, and they’re episodic -- lending themselves perfectly to a YouTube Lets Play format. One Night = One Video, and now the streamer has weeks of content from your game (but viewers can jump in at any time without really missing much).

The games are kid-friendly but also genuinely frightening. Because the most disturbing parts of the game’s lore are hinted at rather than made explicit, younger players can easily engage with the game on a more basic surface level, and others can go as deep into the lore as they feel comfortable. There is no blood and gore and violence or even any explicitly stated death in the main game; all of the murder and death is portrayed obliquely by way of 8-bit mini games and tangential references. Making this game terrifying but accessible to youngsters, and then marketing it directly to younger viewers through popular streamers (and later, merchandising deals) is genius -- because it creates a very broad potential audience, and kids tend to spend 100% of their money (birthdays, allowances, etc.) and are most likely to tell their friends about this super scary game, etc. etc.

By creating a puzzle box of lore, and then interacting directly with the fandom -- dropping hints, trolling, essentially creating an ARG of his own lore through his website, in-game easter eggs, and tie-in materials -- Cawthon created a mystery for fandom to solve. And fans LOVE endlessly speculating over convoluted theories.

Cawthon released these games FAST. He dropped FNAF 2 within months of the first game’s release, and kept up a pace of 1-2 games a year ever since. This steady output ensured the games never dropped out of public consciousness -- and introducing new puzzle pieces for the lore-hungry fans to pore over helped keep the discussion going.

I think MatPat and The Game Theorists owe a tremendous amount of their own huge success to this game. I think Markiplier does, too, and other big streamers and YouTubers. It’s been fascinating watching the symbiotic relationship between these games and the people who make content about these games. Obviously that’s true for a lot of fandom -- but FNAF feels so special because it really did start so small. It’s a true rags-to-riches sleeper hit and luck absolutely played a role in its growth, but skill is a big part too.

Take-Aways For Creatives

I want to be very clear here: I do not think that every piece of media needs to be “IP,” franchisable, an extended universe, or a multimedia sensation. I think there is plenty to be said for creating art of all types, and sometimes that means a standalone story with a small audience.

But if you do want a chance at real break-out, run-away success and forging a media empire of your own, I think there are some take-aways to be learned from the success of FNAF:

Persistence. Scott Cawthon studied animation and game-design in the 1990s and released his first game in 2002. He released a bunch of stuff afterward. None of it stuck. It took 12 years to hit on the winning formula, and then another several years of incredibly hard work to push out more titles and stoke the fires before it really became a sensation. Wherever you’re at on your creative journey, don’t give up. You never know when your next thing will be The Thing that breaks you out.

If you want to sell a lot of something, you have to make it widely appealing to a bunch of people. This means keeping your concept simple to understand (”security guard wards off creepy killer animatronics at a pizza parlor”) and appealing to as wide a segment of the market as you can (ie, a horror story that appeals to both kids and adults). The more hyper-specific your audience, the harder it’s gonna be to find them and the fewer copies of your thing you’ll be selling.

Know your shit and put your best work out there. I think there’s an impulse to feel like “well, nobody reads this anyway, so why does it matter if it’s no good” (I certainly have fallen into that on multiple occasions) but that’s the wrong way to think about it. You never know when and where your break will come. Put your best work out there and keep on polishing your craft with better and better stuff because eventually one of those things you chuck out there is going to be The Thing.

Figure out where your target audience hangs out, and who influences them, and then get your thing in the hands of those influencers. Streaming and YouTube were the secret to FNAF’s success. Maybe yours will be BookTube, or Instagram, or a secret cabal of free librarians. I don’t know. But you should try your best to figure out who would like the thing that you’re making, and then figure out how to reach those people, and put all of your energy into that instead of shotgun-blasting your marketing all willy nilly.

You don’t have to put the whole story on the page. Audiences love puzzles. Fans love mysteries. You can actually leave a lot more unanswered than you think. There’s some value in keeping secrets and leaving things for others to fill in. Remember -- your art is only partly yours. The sandbox belongs to others to play in, too, and you have to let them do that.

If in doubt, appealing to furries never hurts.

Do I take all of this advice myself? Not by a long shot. But it’s definitely a lot to think about.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go beat The Curse of Dreadbear.

#horror analysis #writing advice #fnaf

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tomtenadia · 3 years

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Island Dreams - Epilogue

So, this is it. We officially reached the end. I must admit I am very sad. Writing this story has been such a great journey but Aelin and Rowan have their happy ending. This chapter is set 5 years after the events of the previous chapter. it's divided in two parts. The first one we have Aelin telling in first person what happened in five years. Part two has a snippet of our beloved Whitethorn-Galathynius family. we get to meet Freyja and Morrigan and a surprise too. I hope you love the girls.

I want to say a massive thank to every single person who read the story, reblogged it or left a comment. Thank you. I am so grateful for all the support you gave me.

I am coming back.. A Little Braver is going well and I hope to be brave enough to post chapter one soon.

And now i'll leave you to the story. Enjoy <3

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5 years later

My name is Aelin and my story began five years ago. I was once heartbroken and one day I left my old life behind and took a flight to Scotland, and then a ferry and I ended up on this island called Lewis. I am a bookworm and one of the first thing I did once on the island was to go and hunt for a bookstore. And well, you know the story after that. It’s been five years since the day Rowan and I officially tied our lives together at Callanish. As promised we went back there after a year and a day and renewed our vows.

Married life had its ups and downs but Rowan and I fought through every single challenge that came our way. We made it work, we fought for each other as we promised and we love each other just as we did when we began. And some. Every year Rowan has been celebrating the anniversary of the day I arrived on the island and officially entered his life. Sometimes I think he prefers that day to our wedding anniversary. Anyway, as you remember we finished the story with the four of us, Rowan, me and our two girls Morrigan and Freyja. Those two cute bundles of flesh are now two very active five years old driving mum and dad crazy but also being the most precious thing in our life. They will start primary school next month and I am trying not to cry if I think how much they have grown. Physically they are their father’s clone. They both have deep pine green eyes and his same silver hair. Freyja likes it long and loves when either I or Rowan braid it. He has become quite a wizard at braiding our daughter’s hair. Morrigan, on the other hand, prefers it short. But the similarities end with that. Personality wise they cannot be any more different. Freyja is like me. Rowan calls her his wee Fireheart. She is fierce and stubborn. She has a very strong personality and for a five year old she has her ideas clear on what she wants. She is like quicksilver and always active. She is the first one to wake up and the last one to go to bed. She is curious and fearless and loves nature just as much as her father. She is out little hurricane. Morrigan, on the other hand, is the calm one and reserved and she reminds me so much of Rowan. She observes a lot and when you think she is not paying attention, she comes up with question that makes you realise she was listening after all. She has an inquisitive mind and her non stop questions can be exhausting after a long day. She is shy. Where her sister had been since tender age happy to be with anyone, Morrigan has always been very selective. Growing up she has her favourite selection of adults. She is very close to her father, probably because they are very similar, but Uncle Malcolm and Aedion come second. Aedion got her hooked on planes. Once we were at his and Lys’ house and Morrigan grabbed one of his models planes and started playing with it. Aedion had started talking about the plane and now when they are together she always ask him about planes. We think she’ll be a pilot. Both girls are obsessed with books just like her parents and Rowan has taken upon him the job of teaching them to read. Morrigan can read very simple words and write her own name. Freyja would too if she could sit down for more than five minutes. Good luck with the teachers. She is very bright, she just can’t stay still for very long. She was probably the one doing all the kicking while in the womb. The amazing thing is that they get along. It took us a while to teach them to sleep in their individual rooms. For a while in the morning we would find one in the other’s bed. Always curled up together as they used to do when they were little. Freyja at the park always play the protective one and looks after her sister and chases away the kids who try to take advantage of her sister’s calmer nature. If we were in a fantasy I would imagine Freyja being the woman learning to wield a sword and who would train with the guys and dreamed of becoming a knight. Morrigan, I imagine her as the one with her nose in books and who dreams of becoming a healer. I think Rowan is writing a story about them. Oh yes, I will tell you about his book in a moment. There is a further family member that I need to introduce: our son Dalamar. Yes, Rowan and I have scandalised parents at kindergarten with our weird names. Freyja did not cause much problems but a couple of mothers had a go at me for calling my daughter with such as negative name as Morrigan. I usually explain that I do not expect my daughter to become the goddess of war but that simply Rowan and I liked the name. And do not get me started with Dalamar. No-one apparently has read the Dragonlace chronicles so when we say Dalamar is a dark elf in the books, well, the glares we get are incredible. But again, Rowan and I wanted an original name. We started searching in books to find something we liked and then Rowan found his old copy of the Dragonlance chronicles and he suggested Dalamar. I joked that if we truly wanted to scandalise Stornoway, we should have called him Raistlin. So in the end we went for something less alien and settled on Dalamar. Anyway, Dalamar is two. He was planned though. Rowan and I had decided we wanted a big family so once the girls were around three we started to try and add another member. When we had the conversation we had talked about having four kids, but alas, Dalamar’s birth has been so full of complication that my chances of another pregnancy are now non existent. But Rowan and I are happy. We have our big family. So, Dalamar has blond hair, much fairer than mine and very light blue eyes. He is a gorgeous wee boy. In terms of personality he is halfway between his sisters. He can be adorable one moment and stubborn like a mule the next. But at least they get along and again, Freyja has taken him under her wing. She really is our knight in shining armour. Both girls are fluent Gaelic speakers. After they were born I asked Rowan if he wanted to teach Gaelic to the girls and he had been very happy about it. So we decided that he would speak only Gaelic to the girls and I was the boring parents with English, although sometimes I am brave and I practice with them, then I embarrass myself and revert to English. We have started the same process with Dalamar and he is like a sponge. Morrigan sometimes helps me with my exercises and Gaelic homework. I am taking classes as well when I can. It’s quite embarrassing when you are almost forty and your five years old daughter tells you “Don’t worry mum, you are doing great.” And then adds something in Gaelic and you need to wait for your husband for a translation. Kids, aside… our lives haven’t changed very much. Rowan still works at the bookstore and Malcolm’s sister is still his assistant. She had been wonderful and he could easily count on her when he needed to stay at home with me and the kids. The shop is becoming very popular, my Facebook page has now reached many followers and a year after our daughters were born he finally managed to set up a website for online ordering. My dearest husband also managed to write a book, find an editor and have it printed and distributed in some smaller bookstores. Of course I told him to have in his shop. We did a book signing hoopla and I don’t think I ever seen Rowan so embarrassed. Anyway, he wrote a fantasy and as promised I was in it and I was Queen as requested. He was my warrior. Loads of angst and epic battles but we end up together. I am very proud of him. Now he is working on one were our children are the main characters. I have only read the fist few chapters and I love it already. But I am his wife so I am biased. I still work at the hospital and still love my job. I started helping as well as paramedic and specifically in the air squad. The team that gets to be airlifted at the site of accidents and the whole thing required a special type of training and it had been amazing. On occasions, I get to work with Aedion. He flies, I save lives. I wish I could tell the London guys that they were wrong. Working in a small hospital is not throwing away my career. I feel more satisfied than I ever felt when I was down south. Malcolm is still my second and I still adore him. Three years ago he finally got married. After my wedding Aiden went for his last deployment and made it back alive and then retired from the navy. He and Malcolm started dating seriously. A year later they moved in together and a year after that Malcolm finally proposed. Aiden has found a civilian job and well, they got their happily ever after. Another couple who got their happily ever after is Lysandra and Aedion. He proposed about five months after mine and Rowan’s wedding and three months later they were married. They had gone for a very small and private ceremony. One year later they had their fist child a boy named Marcus and now Lysandra is pregnant with their second, a girl. She climbed up again the ladder at the hospital and now she is just one level below the head of the department. Then we have Elias. How can I forget him? He is still in Shetland and we keep in touch and we meet when he is back on the islands. His job is going wonderfully and recently got promoted. Two years ago he got married to Ciara and he is happy and a few months ago she gave birth to an adorable little girl named Martha. She is cute. I have seen her when they came down last month. We remained good friends and both had the happy ending we wanted. We still joke and we love to compliment each other on making marriage number two stick. His book addiction got worse and I think I created a monster. He also bought Rowan’s book and raved about it for months. Then we have Elide and Lorcan. We see each other quite regularly. Every year in July they come to Heb Celt and now they can stay at our place. We have been down to Glasgow a few times and Lorcan yearly provides Rowan with tickets for the Six Nations and we religiously go and see the matches. I am officially a Scotland’s fan and I even learnt Flower of Scotland. The boys are proud of me. Elide is still a teacher and Lorcan still the coach of the Warriors. Their family has gotten bigger as well and they have a boy and a girl and Elide is expecting a third one. Apparently they want a big family too. Oh and Lorcan can smile for more than a second. I must admit I have changed my mind about the man and once he gets comfortable with someone he is actually quite a decent human being. He as a dark sense of humour and us two are usually the ones scandalising the group with dark jokes. Aunt Maeve is still running her cafe and she had been a great help as well while the kids were growing up. She would come up with crazy excuses to offer to babysit them and gave us plenty of chances for me and Rowan to have some time alone. Especially after the two births. She also spoils the girls and love to bake for them. Freyja loves to bake with Maeve and, like me is obsessed with cakes. Also, baking is the only activity when our energetic daughter can stay still for more than ten minutes. Morrigan, on the other hand is fussy as her father and not a fan of sweet stuff. We really got one clone each. Dalamar is still too small but he eats anything. My mum has joined the group as well. She has bought a flat up here and sold the house in London. She decided that she wanted to be a part of her grandchildren lives so she moved up here and she is in good terms with Maeve and sometimes she helps her at the cafe. The two of them cooking are becoming very popular in town.

***

“Come on, let’s go and see dad in the shop.” Aelin took Dalamar’s hand and made sure the twins were walking in front of her. Morrigan started blabbing something in Gaelic but Aelin didn’t understand. “Beurla, mo chridhe,” said Aelin to her daughter. “Tha mi duilich, mum.” Morrigan gave her a toothy smile, showing off her missing tooth. They walked to the shop and once they got in the two girls ran to their father who crouched down and they crashed into him. “I bring chaos.” Joked Aelin while Dalamar was still holding her hand. Rowan had started hosting afternoon for kids in his shop when he would reads books or just have storytelling sessions. He had started during the school holidays to have a way to keep the younger children busy but then it became very popular and he kept going, so once a week the shop is invaded by parents and their kids. The twins loved to listen to their dad tell stories. Dalamar loved it as well but he was far too young to understand what was happening so most of the times he would end up playing with Lys and Aedion’s son Marcus. Aelin reached Rowan and gave him a kiss and the twins made disgusted noises and Aelin laughed “one day you will find a boy or a girl and you’ll want to kiss him or her as well and it won’t be as disgusting,” she said tickling Freyja who was the one who was the most disgusted. “I am going to be a knight. I don’t need a boy.” Added Freyja proudly. “I am going to be a doctor like mum.” Was Morrigan’s turn. “So, a knight and a doctor, I guess we got very lucky.” Rowan pulled Aelin in his arms “looks like the goddess of love wants to fight and is not interested in love and the goddess of war wants to heal people.” “Well, you can’t say that we don’t have an interesting family.” Joked Aelin. Then Rowan bend over and lifted Dalamar in his arms “and you?” He kissed his cheek “what do you want to do?” “Tuathanach.” Replied the boy hugging his father. Aelin laughed and brushed his blond hair “that is lovely, my love.” With time and once they were properly settled down they had decided to dedicate a part of the land they owned to have a small farm. They had a couple of cows, a few chickens and loads of sheep. Dalamar loved to run after the sheep and help his dad look after the animals. That’s why Aelin and Rowan were not surprised when he said he wanted to be a farmer. The twins went behind the counter and grabbed the colouring books that Rowan kept stashed for when he had them in the shop and the pencils and ran to the kids’ table at the bottom of the shop. Rowan placed Dalamar on the floor “Go and colour with your sisters.” “Tha.” And the boy joined the two girls. Aelin leaned exhausted against Rowan. “You look tired.” “They have far too much energy. We went to the park. Freyja ran and jumped the whole time. Morrigan wanted to pat the ducks and almost ended up in the pond and Dalamar chased every single dog or cat.” She explained, looking at their kids with affection “then we had ice cream, we went to say hi to Aunt Maeve and grandma Evalin and Freyja and Dalamar stuffed themselves with carrot cake. Morrigan just had a carrot. She is annoyingly healthy like you.” “My girl.” Said Rowan proudly. “Don’t get me wrong, I love them madly, but I just wished they had just a smidge less energy.” Rowan kissed her forehead “I’ll entertain them tonight and make sure they go to bed early. Hopefully they will run out of energy soon.” “Morrigan and Dalamar perhaps. Not Freyja, that girl has limitless power.” “Just like her mother.” Rowan’s arms squeezed her tight “The girls are going to school next month so hopefully they will calm down a bit.” “I am terrified at the idea of Freyja sitting on a chair all day. I feel sorry for the poor teacher.” Rowan laughed “she might find it interesting and actually sit.” “Ro, she can’t even stay still when you read stories.” He scratched his head “I was thinking we can sign her up for some sport.” “You can take her swimming.” Suggested Aelin. Rowan had kept his job as swimming instructor with Dorian and they had made it work. When the kids were at home she would take them to the swimming complex and once Rowan was done they would all swim together. He had begun teaching the twins to float and some very basics techniques. Freyja had loved it, but she preferred jumping from the smallest platform. Morrigan on the other hand had been a good student and had followed her dad’s instructions and could do a nice basic breaststroke. Dalamar would soak with Aelin with his water wings. He loved being in the water. “She could become one of those athletes who jump from platforms into water. A professional diver. She is surely fearless for a five years old.” “I can see her as a rugby player.” And Aelin laughed. “We’ll let her decide.” “Of course,”Aelin kissed him “Look, some mum and kids are arriving.” Rowan was due to start his storytelling session very soon and mothers, fathers and kids had started to arrive in the shop. Five minutes later Rowan took his position at the bottom of the shop on his chair. All the kids sat on the floor on the colourful mats Rowan had bought. Morrigan and Dalamar would sit at his feet, but Rowan would alway keep Freyja in his arms so he could hold her still for a while. “Thank you everyone for coming this afternoon. Kids, are you all comfortable?” Aelin stood in a corner and stared at him as per her usual. Rowan was such a natural around kids. It had been so easy for him to settle into his role as a dad. He had been amazing with their kids and he’d do literally anything to make them happy. But at the same time he had managed to keep the wonderful balance to prevent them to become spoiled brats whose parents would give them anything. “Today’s story is about a princess. Her name is Aelin.” “Like mum.” shouted Freyja in her father’s arms. “Tha, mo chridhe.” And Rowan kissed her head and a smug smile appeared on the girl’s face. “She is fierce and brave and very, very beautiful. So beautiful that all the princes in the realm wanted to marry her.” Aelin laughed and blushed a bit. “Is there a dragon?” Asked Freyja who seemed had already passed her attention span limit. “Shhh, my love.” But he knew it was a desperate hope. “The princess had been put under a spell by her horrible stepmother who was very jealous of her. She could not enjoy true love with the man she loved until the dragon that held the necklace with the spell was killed. Aelin was in love with the captain of the guard, a man called Rowan. The wicked stepmother had found out and so punished her. She had planned to marry her off to a wealthy old man.” When Aelin noticed Freyja was getting fidgety, she took a chair and sat beside her husband and grabbed their daughter so that he could continue his tale. “Rowan offered to go on a quest and kill the dragon but Aelin refused to be left behind. She was not a damsel in distress. So during the night she gathered some of her stuff, donned her armour and together they set off on an adventure. During their trip he would train her with the sword so she could defend herself. It took them a few months but they did manage to reach the dragon’s lair.” “Dragon.” Freyja was ecstatic and Aelin held her tight. “But while they took the path through the magic forest to reach the dragon lair, Rowan and Aelin got separated. The forest was very dangerous but they were both very brave and fought all the perils and when Aelin finally reached the lair she saw that Rowan was already there but he was injured. She drew her sword and decided to face the dragon alone. In the forest she had discovered that she had fire magic and she wanted to punish the dragon. So she started fighting him, but the dragon was huge and she was getting tired. In that instant Rowan woke up again and walked to her. Together they fought the dragon and eventually killed it and destroyed the necklace, setting Aelin free. She finally kissed him and slowly they returned back home. Once back at the castle, they discovered the wicked mother was gone and Aelin and Rowan decided to get married. They invited all the villagers and they lived happily ever after.” Rowan had to simplify the story to make it acceptable to young kids but they seemed to have liked it. He told a few more stories and two hours later the shop was empty and he was alone again with his family. Dalamar had fallen asleep in Aelin’s arms. Morrigan had gone back to her colouring book and Freyja was pretending to be a knight, swinging around the toy sword Rowan had given her. “I am princess Aelin and I kill dragons.” She shouted while Rowan chased her around the shop. Rowan finally grabbed her and lifted her like a sack of potatoes “dad, the dragon,” she protested while trying to wriggle out of her father’s grip. “Freyja!” Aelin noticed Rowan’s command voice. The one that could actually slow down the little terror. The girl stopped moving and Rowan sat her down beside her sister and she grabbed a colouring book and joined Morrigan in silence. “You really have super powers.” Rowan leaned over to kiss his wife’s head “Give me ten minutes and we’ll go home.”

Half an hour later they were finally at home. Rowan carried a sleepy Morrigan and Aelin carried Dalamar who had been sleeping for an hour now. Freyja had followed in silence, with her sword tucked in the belt loop of her trousers. “I’ll make dinner, you change the kids.” Aelin nodded “Let’s go Freyja it’s jammies time.” The little girl gave her a huge smile and followed her mother with Morrigan at her side. Aelin placed Dalamar on the bed, and helped the two girls change into their night clothes. “Did you have fun at dad’s tonight?” “Yes.” They both squealed. Once they were ready, Aelin tied Freyja’s hair “now go back downstairs to dad but let him cook, okay?” The two girls nodded and left the room. Aelin grabbed her little boy and took him to his room, changed him into his pyjama and tucked him in bed “I love you,” she told him while kissing him on the cheek. Then grabbed the baby monitor and joined the rest of her family downstairs. The twins were on the carpet playing quietly with Morrigan’s planes. Aelin joined Rowan and hugged him from behind “Dalamar is in bed and the girls are playing.” She kissed his back “and your food smells amazing.” “Freyja finally calmed down.” “My mum says that she reminds her of me when I was little.” Aelin squeezed him. He switched off the hob and turned engulfing her in his arms “It does not surprise me.” And he kissed her deeply and Aelin replied in the same manner. He pushed her to the table and she grabbed his butt pulling him to her and she moaned against his mouth. He kissed her neck and Aelin’s hands found their way under his t-shirt. Then she pulled away “Ro, the kids are in the other room and awake.” Rowan leaned his forehead against hers cupping her face in his hands. The kiss he gave her was full of need and love “I know.” He sighed pulling away. Their intimate life had taken a bit of a hit and most nights they were too tired to even try and do something. The last time they had managed to get some action was when Aelin’s mother had kidnapped their kids for an entire weekend four months before. And the mornings were not good either because the twins had the habit of waking up and joining their parents in bed for some family cuddling. Aelin crashed her forehead on his chest “I miss our wall…” she laughed “but I know that I would fall asleep as soon as my back hits it.” Rowan kissed her again “I miss you too.” Then pulled away “Come one, let’s go and feed our hurricanes.” In that instant she heard Dalamar calling her through the baby monitor and five minutes later Aelin was downstairs with a weepy boy in her arms “Someone else is joining us for dinner.” The five of them had dinner and once they were done the kids moved to the sofa and Aelin gave them her old laptop so they could watch their hour of tv. She and Rowan had never bought a tv and the kids never asked for it but allowed them to watch an hour of cartoons on Netflix in the evening after dinner while they cleaned up. Most of times they got bored after half an hour and went back playing until bed time but when they were tired they did manage their hour. “They are watching Totoro again.” Said Aelin, joining Rowan in the kitchen with a pile of dishes then she grabbed a towel and started drying all the ones he had already washed. “They do love Totoro.” He added smiling. “Morrigan the other day said she wants to study Japanese so she could talk to Totoro and Freyja wants to go in the woods to look for him.” Rowan roared with laughter “I love the idea of studying Japanese, though.” “Our two wonderful weirdos.”Aelin stored away all the dishes. Once they were done they got back in the living room and silence reigned. The laptop was on the carpet and the three kids were are all hugged together on the sofa. Dalamar sleeping on Freyja’s chest like in the scene where Mei sleeps on Totoro’s belly, her arms protectively around her brother’s back. Morrigan was snuggled against her sister, her hand holding one of Freyja’s. Aelin gasped at the scene and Rowan pulled her to him and kissed her head “they are finally fell asleep.” He turned Aelin and held her from behind, his chin on her head and his arms tight around her. “This is it, Buzzard. This is my island dream.” Rowan kissed her temple. “This is my dream too.”

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littleabriel-blog · 3 years

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My Problem with Loki

Loki is a character beloved by many people. He has been for a decade now, although some people who read comics before the Marvel Cinematic Universe was a thing were fans of him long before the first Thor came out. Over the years since his appearance in that movie the character has gone through a lot of changes, evolving from a villain to an anti-hero both in the MCU and in the comics, the latter even killing off his original incarnation to reincarnate him in a younger body resembling Tom Hiddleston in the hopes that the comics could capitalize on his popularity in order to sell more books. That move, unfortunately, did not bear fruit, with Loki’s solo series being canceled after only five issues. However, Loki remained popular in the movies, so much so that when he was killed off in Infinity War, people were pissed.

As a result of his enduring popularity, Kevin Feige and company decided to give Loki his own solo series on Disney+ when the decision was made to create a string of MCU tie-in shows to supplement the movies, and boost subscription numbers to Disney’s new streaming service. Fans of the character rejoiced. Finally, our favorite character was going to be in the spotlight, and not be merely a supporting character for Thor and hopefully not a butt monkey for the Avengers like he was in the third act of the movie of the same name. WandaVision and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier had previously had well-received and successful debuts on that same platform, and it was hoped that Loki would do the same. Loki turned out to be the most successful of the Disney+ MCU shows that have come out so far, scoring highest in the ratings. As of this writing, it holds a 93% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an 8.5 on IMDb.

Those numbers, however, don’t reflect the entire audience and there were a lot of people who were not altogether happy with the product we received. Many people who had been hardcore fans of Loki since Tom Hiddleston first put on the horned helmet were not pleased, myself included.

The show wasn’t all bad. It did set up the multiverse, introduced Kang, introduced Mobius. The special effects were outstanding, a lot of the gags were hilarious, and we did get some character development from Loki before the spotlight fell away from him and he became all about panting after the real main character...more on that in a few.

So many things, however, were wrong.

If you liked the show, thought it was perfect, and were a fan of the romance, that’s perfectly fine. There is no such thing as a wrong opinion on a work of fiction. Everyone has their interpretations, everyone has their likes and dislikes, and there is nothing wrong with liking the show. There is also nothing wrong with not liking the show. This is a concept that people on both sides of the debate fail to understand, and I have witnessed flame wars, harassment from individuals on both sides, harassment of creators on social media from both sides, and various bits of biphobia, homophobia, transphobia, and other assorted types of phobias on display. I have seen people accuse people who have different opinions on the show than them of “not being a true Loki fan” and stating that people who have certain interpretations of the character don’t “truly know Loki”.

I’m not here to do that, and I assure you, if you liked the show, that’s fine. You’re allowed to. I’m allowed to not like it, and I’m allowed to explained why I didn’t like it just as you’re allowed to explain why you did. As long as both of us are being respectful, expressing an opinion is good. There is expressing an opinion and offering constructive criticism, however, and then there is namecalling, trolling, and having a tantrum and accusing someone of being “aggressive” when they don’t share the same opinion you do.

There is a huge difference between saying “I find the character of Sylvie to be problematic, and here is why” and “I think fans of Sylvie are sick and need therapy”, and people need to learn the difference between the two. Unfortunately, you have people who have become very protective of their favorite characters and tend to take any criticism leveled at said characters personally. It’s basically “You don’t like them? Well then you don’t like me, and since you don’t like me, I don’t like you.” Which is, frankly, a dangerous mentality to have. We are talking about fictional characters, not real people, and there is no need to jump to the defense of someone who does not exist. It is those people who tend to demonstrate that they have unstable personalities and immaturity, and they are the ones I have started blocking on Twitter because, being an adult woman, I don’t have the patience to deal with immature nonsense like that.

So, if you read this and then decide you want to hunt me down to give me a piece of your mind, tell me that I’m not a “true” fan of Loki, and accuse me of whatever, don’t bother. This piece isn’t here for that. It’s here because I wanted to compile my thoughts and feelings in a way that would better for me to articulate. It’s more or less a venting mechanism, purely for my benefit. If someone else gets something out of it, fine. If the creators of the show happen to see it, which is very unlikely because A) I’m not exactly going to push it onto them on their social media to get them to read it and B) they already get bombarded with tons of opinions on the show on a daily basis and aren’t going to care about one more voice added to the mix, even one who has basically compiled a novel, then alright.

And it is a novel, because I have a lot to say about Loki. I have been a huge fan of the character since long before Tom Hiddleston began playing him. My first encounter with Marvel’s Loki came in the form of the X-Men comics, specifically The Asgardian Wars run. It’s available in trade, and you should check it out. I read that run when I was around 10 years old, and I enjoyed Loki as the bad guy in the two stories that make up the collection. The first has him creating a special wish fountain that has a monkey’s paw effect in that it imbues mortals with special gifts and powers, and has the potential to make Earth a better place, but at the cost of killing every magical person and being on Earth. The X-Men and Alpha Flight find out about this after a plane piloted by the wife of one of the X-Men happens to crash in the general location the fountain is located. The two teams go to investigate, Shaman and Snowbird who are both magical beings begin dying, it’s discovered Loki created the fountain in order to score brownie points with The Ones Who Sit Above In Shadow (a pantheon of deities who are basically the Gods to the Asgardians), and after a lengthy battle Loki is defeated, he shuts down the fountain under pressure from The Ones, and slinks back to Asgard with tail between his legs.

In the second story, set after the heroes of Earth had helped Asgard defeat Surtur, Loki’s attention is caught by Storm, who at the time was depowered. He kidnaps her and brings her to Asgard intending to use her to replace Thor as the Goddess of the Storm, and use her as a pawn to, what else, conquer Asgard and seize the throne.

I really enjoyed Loki then, and felt sorry that he never appeared in any other X-Men story, not even in an issue of the New Mutants, and that team boasted an actual Valkyrie (Danielle Moonstar) as one of its members. I was a kid at the time and read pretty much exclusively X-Men since those were the books my father purchased for me. I never felt right about asking him for other books since we were a family with money struggles and I didn’t want to be more of a burden by requesting Thor or Avengers comics--that, and I just didn’t find Thor or the Avengers all that interesting at the time, a sentiment shared by a lot of people until the first Iron Man made us actually care about Tony Stark. I wouldn’t have an opportunity to start reading more comics featuring Loki until I was an adult and able to visit comic book stores on my own. I read several runs that featured him as a character, including Ragnarok, the Broxton, OK run where Loki first appeared as a woman, Dark Reign, and finally Siege. I also went back and read Walt Simonson’s legendary run on The Mighty Thor, which I highly recommend.

Suffice it to say, I’ve been a fan of the character for a long time, and in fact when Tom Hiddleston was cast in the role for Thor, I remember thinking that he was too young. But then I figured it was Hollywood, of course they’re going to deage Loki so that he appears closer in age to his adopted brother in contrast to the comics pre-Siege where Loki was often drawn to look like he was as old as Odin and therefore could be Thor’s uncle or even father as opposed to brother.

Over the years I grew to enjoy the MCU’s version of the character, enjoy Tom Hiddleston in the role, and like most other people was greatly saddened by his death in Infinity War. Like other fans, I looked forward to his solo series and had high hopes for it. Hopes that were, unfortunately, dashed.

It Was Rushed

In the MCU, it took Loki years to go from troubled young god, to villain, to ambivalent ally, to anti-hero, to hero. Literally, years. Months had passed between the end of Thor and the beginning of Avengers during which Loki endured who-knows-what at the hands of Thanos. We don’t know exactly what still. The Loki series didn’t answer that, I guess because they didn’t want to devote precious screentime to an interesting backstory for what was supposed to be the main character when they could focus on something else instead. That something else will be elaborated on.

In Episode 1, Loki is still the villain from Avengers, something he would have remained as into The Dark World. It would take him being in Asgard’s prisons for a year and then him accidentally getting his adopted mother Frigga killed in order for him to begin to do a heel-face turn. From this, we can clearly see that a transition from ax-crazy bad guy to anti-hero is not going to happen overnight. For this person I shall call Ragnarok Loki, it was a process that took time. He suffered a complete mental breakdown while in Asgard’s prison, a fragile emotional state that was compounded by the anger and massive guilt he felt at Frigga’s death.

Even after that, he still hadn’t completely abandoned his villainous ways. At the end of The Dark World we find out that after faking his supposed death earlier in the movie, Loki has assumed Odin’s form and taken his place on Asgard’s throne. In Ragnarok, Loki is still sitting on the throne in Odin’s form, and shows no indication at all that he feels any remorse for giving his adopted father amnesia, stripping away his magic, and abandoning him on Earth to whatever fate he might meet. Loki remains a selfish bastard throughout Ragnarok until the third act, after Thor had treated him to a taste of his own medicine by sticking a taser on him and then giving him a speech about becoming predictable and complacent.

Loki’s arc was one that spanned four movies and six years, since in-universe there were a couple of years between The Dark World and Ragnarok. That meant that his character development took actual time and was realistic. It was one of the things that drew people to the character, the fact that he had a very relatable and believable redemption arc.

Compare that to Episode 1. In less than a day he goes from being the Loki that we saw in Avengers, batshit crazy, selfish, callous, and untrusting, to making personal confessions to a man he had just met only a couple hours previously and agreeing to help the organization that had arrested, stripped, imprisoned, tried, and almost executed him.

What?

I will give the show this: In Episode 2, he shows that he’s still up to his old tricks when he feeds Mobius and the agents all that horsecrap about how a Loki works in the Ren Faire tent, and then revealing that he plans to take over the TVA when he confronts his variant in the futuristic Wal-Mart. The weeping confession to Mobius, that I can’t really get over. How do you go from haughty, arrogant, and “trust is for children and dogs”, to “I don’t enjoy hurting people” in just a couple of hours? The show never indicated that it was a manipulation tactic on Loki’s part. Instead, we were basically told to believe that they became friends just that fast. That emotionally stunted and closed-off Loki made a connection with another person in a matter of hours. Makes sense. Don’t get me wrong, I like Mobius and feel he makes a good foil for Loki. I hope to see more of him in the future. I just have a tough time finding their friendship all that believable.

This would not be the only relationship in the show that happened too fast that we were forced to just buy, which leads me to Sylvie.

She’s the variant that the TVA had been hunting, that Mobius recruited Loki to help capture. And while I normally hate it when people ascribe a certain label onto a new female character because reasons (ones that are usually misogynistic), I think it fits rather well in Sylvie’s case.

Enter The Mary Sue

Mary Sue is a term that gets thrown around a lot. To sum up the meaning in very simple terms, it refers to a character who is too perfect to be believable. Mary Sues are often author-self inserts in fiction, they’re usually the love interest for at least one male hero and it’s usually the male hero the author will admit to having a crush on, their scenes usually are presented much more descriptively than those of the other characters, the story will revolve around them often at the expense of the development and plots for the other characters of the story, and they’re presented as beautiful, powerful, intelligent, beautiful, special, strong, beautiful, and desirable. Yes, beautiful is on the list more than once, and it’s deliberate.

The term comes from an old Star Trek parody fanfic, and while it is usually applied to original characters in fan fiction, the term has been used to describe characters in canon media as well. Some examples of characters who have been described as Mary Sues would include Bella from the Twilight books, Felicity from the show Arrow, Jaenelle Angelline from Anne Bishop’s The Black Jewel novels, Sookie Stackhouse from True Blood, Rey from the last Star Wars trilogy, and Jean Grey from the X-Men comics. Note I do not necessarily agree that those characters are Mary Sues, I have merely heard these characters referred to as Mary Sues, and when I look at them objectively I can kind of see where the accusations come from. Some other terms that can apply are Creator’s Pet and of course Author Self-Insert. Not all Mary Sues are Author Self-Inserts, but a lot of them are. Also, not all characters who can be labeled Mary Sues are female, though they often are. The male version of a Mary Sue is called a Marty Stu, and a couple of characters I’ve seen get ascribed that label include Harry Potter, Daemon Sadi from Anne Bishop’s The Black Jewel novels, Edward from Twilight, and Red Hulk from Marvel Comics. Even Batman and Wolverine haven’t been immune from the Marty Stu stamp, although you can argue that it does apply in their cases especially depending on who’s writing them. Sometimes it is painfully obvious they are author self-inserts...the aforementioned Bella is a good example. Others, you can only speculate on. And while there are theories going around that Sylvie is someone’s self-insert, we don’t have definitive proof of that.

There are good arguments, however, for her being labeled a Mary Sue and Creator’s Pet.

First are her powers. In the show we are told that Sylvie taught herself magic, especially her ability to “enchant”, the power to get into the minds of others and manipulate them. The fact that she taught herself would indicate that her education and skill in using magic should be lacking, right? She should not be as good as, say, someone who learned magic from his foster mother who herself was taught by Asgardian witches?

Yet in the show, Sylvie not only runs circles around Loki magically wise, she even teaches him a few tricks. This is startlingly in contrast to the comics. Loki’s Sylvie is partially based on the character Sylvie Lushton from the Young Avengers, a bad guy who was once a normal girl whom Loki imbued with powers before his death at the hands of the Sentry during the events of 2010’s Siege storyline. In the comics, Loki not only gave Sylvie her powers, but he was the one who taught her how to use them. Now, of course things in the MCU are not going to follow the way things are in the comics. MCU Loki is nowhere near as old as comics Loki and has so far not demonstrated the ability to give other beings powers. And MCU Sylvie is a composite of Sylvie Lushton and Lady Loki, which is also problematic, but we’ll get to that.

But the point is that Sylvie had no training. Her magic is some improvised slapped-together stuff that at best she picked up here and there and at worst she just pulled out of her ass. Now, knowing that, we’re supposed to buy that she can mop the floor magically wise with someone who was formally trained by a sorceress? And that furthermore, she can school him as well?

To make up for her lack of experience and knowledge, Loki is nerfed. Power wise and intellectually wise, he is nerfed. In Thor and Avengers Loki is smart, well-spoken, and a master manipulator. At one point he is able to turn all of the Avengers against one another, and while his magic has never been anywhere near the level it was at in the comics pre-Siege (after his resurrection, he was powered down and is currently nowhere near the powerhouse he had been prior to 2011) he was able to pull off some impressive displays of skill nonetheless. Shape shifting, illusion casting, it was a good repertoire.

In Episode 3, however...well, he does use teleportation to some impressive affect during his fight with Sylvie, but he still doesn’t get the upperhand. And he should. Loki is a better trained fighter, better trained in sorcery, and realistically should have at the least managed to incapacitate his variant. He doesn’t however, because the moment he meets Sylvie his IQ drops about 20 points. He falls easily for her tricks, makes laughable plans, gets drunk and draws too much attention when he knows that is a bad idea, and manages to get them both stuck on a moon that will soon be dust courtesy of the rogue planet about to crash into it. Loki has made some blunders in the various MCU movies he’s been in, mostly due to his own arrogance and tendency to underestimate his foes, but he’s not that stupid. In fact, in The Dark World he screams at Thor and calls him an idiot for drawing attention to themselves by hijacking an elven ship and crashing into every column and statue within a fifty-foot radius.

Where exactly is that smart, calculating, more careful Loki we know from the films? He’s been transformed and dumbed down, in an attempt to prop Sylvie up. It’s a tired trope, making the male character a dumbass in order to make the female character look good. Well, I should say male-presenting and female-presenting characters in this case, but their supposed gender fluidity really is not represented well and it’s completely contradicted later on, but we’ll get to that.

Anyway, making the male character stupid in order to make the female character look better by comparison is not empowering. It’s insulting. It implies that women are not smart or capable enough to meet men on equal footing, that the only way we can shine is not by virtue of our own strengths, but merely by making us look better than the men.

She doesn’t just outshine Loki intellectually and power wise, she outshines him period. The show from Episode 3 on becomes about Sylvie. She is the show’s main focus, and Loki? He’s relegated to the role of supporting character in the series that’s named after him. Supporting character, and love interest. From Episode 3 on, the show might as well be called Sylvie.

Now, some people will say that since Sylvie is a Loki, the show was indeed focusing on Loki. The problem is, the show is very inconsistent as to whether or not Sylvie really is a Loki or a different person entirely. I will explain more later, but the writers seem to change Sylvie’s identity to suit whatever narrative they want to present to the audience, including the pre-Pixar Disney romance they foist upon us.

The Romance, and why some find it gross

One major characteristic of the Mary Sue is that she always draws the romantic and sexual interest of the main male character, who may or may not be a Marty Stu himself. Oftentimes he’s not, and Loki does not fit the criteria of a Marty Stu by any stretch of the imagination. These romances always happen fast with little to no buildup. There is no what writers of romance call “slow burn”, it’s just throw Mary at the male character, hook them up, and get the audience to buy it. Basically, it’s reminiscent of the romance stories in the Classical Era Disney animated films. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella all fall madly in love with their princes within minutes of meeting them. There’s no getting to know each other, there is no preamble, there is no slow courtship, no real drama to speak of. It’s basically Love At First Sight or True Love. This trend continues even into the Disney Renaissance. In The Little Mermaid, Ariel is willing to make a deal with a witch to give up her fins for a prince she hasn’t even spoken to yet. He doesn’t even know she exists, and she leaves her home and family behind, gives up her voice, all for a mere shot at hooking up with him.

That’s not love, that’s lust. That’s hormones overruling your brain, and it’s an insulting trope, one that feminists have railed against for years. Disney has made a little progress. The movie Frozen took the mickey out of the Love At First Sight/True Love trope with the song “Love Is An Open Door” and the prince Anna wanting to marry turning out to be a major sleazebag who just wants to use her, but we still only have three Disney princesses (Elsa, Moana, and Merida) who have never had love interests and two (Anna and Rapunzel) whose love stories come close to being slow burns, out of 12 official Princesses. There’s still a long way to go, and boy is there a major step backwards in Loki.

In Episode 3, Loki fights Sylvie and they end up on Lamentis 1. Sylvie spends a good portion of the time insulting and trying to kill Loki, and Loki finds himself having to defend himself from her. That changes once they get on the train going to the Arc. After sneaking aboard the train using a disguise and a flimsy story, the two Lokis sit in a booth, where Loki proceeds to drink champagne. It is then that, out of nowhere, the conversation shifts from how Sylvie learned her powers to the topic of love.

Why? Why would you bring that up in conversation with someone who was doing her best to kill you a couple hours prior?

Then Loki makes things worse by asking Sylvie if she has a beau waiting for her. Why? It doesn’t make sense. The two of you are at each other’s throats, she’s done her best to kill you, neither of you trusts the other, and, completely out of left field, you decide to basically ask “So...are you single?”

Now, enemies to lovers is a trope that can work when done right. Typically, it’s a very subtle, slow progression that the audience witnesses over time in a novel, movie or television series. Weeks and even months will go by in the narrative during which the two people go from wanting each other dead to developing feelings for one another. There’s usually a “will they, won’t they period” that lasts for some time that’s full of teases and flirting before the couple does hook up and gives the audience the resolution. Done in this way, enemies to lovers can work.

This...this is not the right way to do enemies to lovers. Within a couple of hours Loki and Sylvie go from hatred and doing their damnedest to stabbing one another in the backs, to having a connection that causes a nexus event?

By the way, that nexus event makes no sense. In Episode 2, it is established that it is impossible to create a nexus event in an apocalypse. It is why Sylvie was able to avoid capture by the TVA for so long. In fact, just minutes prior to the two of them almost dying in Episode 4, Sylvie flat-out says that she figured out that she needed to hide in apocalypses because she discovered she didn’t create a nexus event when she hid in them.

Now the two of them are able to create a nexus event in the midst of an apocalypse? Why? Their “connection” isn’t going to lead to any consequences...they were about to die. No one else need never have known about the “moment” the two of them shared. It’s very confusing and the only purpose it really serves is to paint Loki and Sylvie as soulmates, which doesn’t make sense in the context of the show. The concept of soulmates is that for every person, there is someone out there they are predestined to be with. Loki is a show that, at the core of it, is about rejecting predestination and embracing free will. In that context, the idea of soulmates is ludicrous and contradictory to the message that we make our own destiny. This is why True Love is unrealistic, and I hate to break it to you romantics out there, but Love At First sight does not exist.

Infatuation At First Sight exists, but that is not Love, no matter what your hormones are telling you. Love takes time to evolve, and it takes work to maintain. It sure as hell doesn’t happen after less than 12 hours of knowing each other, during which a huge chunk of time was devoted to trying to manipulate, outsmart, and murder the person you’re supposedly in love with. No one falls in love in less than 12 hours, period, unless it’s a Classical Era Disney animated movie. They basically turned Loki into a big Disney Romance trope. I have a very hard time buying that Loki, who we have established is emotionally stunted and closed off, would form a love connection in just a few hours, especially with someone who was doing her best to murder him in that timespan.

That is not the only reason this relationship is problematic. The term “Selfcest” has been thrown around, and a lot of defenders of this particular ship claim that the term was very recently made up in social media for the sole purpose of badmouthing this particular romance. That is not the case. Selfcest is a term that has existed among fiction writers for years, it’s just that more people have recently become aware of it thanks to this show. The trope has been used and referred to in various works of fiction, especially in fantasy and science fiction where cloning, alternative universes, and magic occur. A lot of the insults I get from people who can’t stand that I don’t like the romance basically go along the lines of saying selfcest doesn’t exist. No, it doesn’t...in reality. But this isn’t reality, is it? It’s fiction. It’s a fictional world where such a thing could be possible, and even in works where it’s not possible it’s often alluded to.

In A Song Of Ice And Fire, we have the infamous twincest relationship going on between Cersei and Jamie Lannister, and it is heavily implied that sleeping with her brother is the closest that Cersei can get to banging herself and that is why she does it. Jamie is basically everything she feels she should have been and was denied due to being born a woman. In fact, in later books when he reunites with her after having been away from King’s Landing for over a year, during which time he’s grown a beard and shaved his head, Cersei no longer finds him as attractive since they no longer look as much alike.

And with advances in cloning, selfcest might be possible in the future. We already have sex robots, and people with money are capable of making those robots look like themselves. There is nothing stopping them from doing it.

Knowing all of this, the argument of “selfcest doesn’t exist!” falls flat. And it especially falls flat when you’re referring to a fictional universe where a large purple man once killed off half the population of said universe with a snap of his fingers, where scientists turn into giant green monsters, the Norse gods not only exist but regularly interact with people on Earth, and there’s such a thing as a Sorcerer Supreme.

As I have said, the show has been rather inconsistent in stating what exactly Sylvie’s identity is. One moment, we are told Sylvie is a Loki and that she and Loki are the same person. Mobius says it, Kang says it multiple times, Judge Renslayer says it, the director and the writers state it in interviews. But then in the next breath, they contradict it by saying that she’s not a Loki, she’s Sylvie and a different person.

You can’t have it both ways. Which is it? Either she’s a Loki, or she’s not. The narrative is very confusing and it changes depending on how they want us to see Sylvie, especially in relation to her romance with Loki. It’s so much easier to avoid the selfcest/incest accusations when you can say they are different people. But then they say they’re the same person. Make up your minds!

Since the show first established that Sylvie is a Loki, I’m going with that. Especially since we saw a bit of her backstory. She grew up in Asgard as a member of the royal family, which means she had Odin as a father, Frigga as mother, and Thor as brother. She may or may not have the same DNA as Loki. We never got confirmation either way, and there are people who argue that they don’t to which I have to ask: How do you know? The show never tells us! “Oh, well, there’s Alligator Loki, are you going to say he has the same DNA as well?” Well, we are never told how exactly Alligator Loki came to be. Is he actually an alligator, or is he Loki who somehow got permanently stuck when he shapeshifted? People tend to forget that he can do that. Ragnarok established that he can turn into a snake, and a deleted scene actually had the childhood story go that Loki turned into a rug to cover a hole in the ground and then dumped Thor into it. There is the scene where Doctor Strange drops Loki through a portal, and Thor is left poking at a business card, and it is clear that for a moment he thinks that Loki turned into that. We know Loki can shapeshift, so Alligator Loki can very well have the same DNA. We just don’t know, because the show never explains it for the same reason the show cut out the scenes with Throg fighting Loki...to devote more screentime to Sylki.

Even if they don’t have the same DNA, it’s still established that they are the same person, they have the same family, they’re both the God/dess of Mischief, and even Sylvie herself acknowledges that she is a Loki despite the fact that she changed her name. So selfcest very much applies here, and a good argument can be made that selfcest is the ultimate in incest...after all, there isn’t anyone else you’re more related to than yourself. It is very understandable, therefore, that a lot of people would be very, very uncomfortable with such a relationship. Having the same DNA would merely be the icing on the very gross cake.

Furthermore, just because selfcest does not exist in reality does not mean someone can’t find the concept distasteful. “It’s not real!” “It’s just fiction!” Yes, and people are allowed to have their own feelings and opinions on fiction. If they find the idea of selfcest hard to stomach, that’s their prerogative and you really have no right to tell them they are wrong for feeling that way. They should not have to justify to anyone why they feel that way either. No one owes you an explanation for why they find real world incest or cannibalism distasteful, so they don’t owe you an explanation for this.

“Well, of course Loki would fall for himself...he’s a narcissist!” Is he though? Is he really? Having dealt with my fair share of narcissists in my life, I have to wonder if the fans who say that, along with the writers, know what a narcissist really is.

Is Loki a narcissist?

Bringing up Cersei Lannister again, the novels she appears in establishes that she is an extreme narcissist. She sleeps with her twin brother because it’s the closest she can come to sleeping with herself, and she desires to do that because she is a narcissist. A narcissist is someone whose personality is defined by an inflated sense of self-importance, troubled relationships, lack of empathy for others, and an excessive deep-seated need for attention and admiration. It’s a very simplistic definition, and there are plenty of YouTube videos devoted to delving into narcissists into more depth, as well as videos on how to cope with the aftermath of abuse at the hands of narcissists. Narcissists are so devoted to themselves that they ignore the needs and the feelings of those in their lives, which often results in abusive behavior. There are entire support groups that exist for victims of narcissists.

At first glance, one can see why some might consider Loki a narcissist. He does engage in some pretty selfish behavior, he goes to great lengths to get attention, his relationships to his family are indeed fraught with drama, and he seems to have a pretty overinflated ego. He even goes so far as to write a play featuring himself as the central character, and build a giant golden statue of himself after taking over Asgard in the guise of Odin. But really, is his ego truly that big? Or he is overcompensating for his self-hatred and self-disgust?

Loki suffered quite the emotional blow when he found out his true heritage, a revelation that shook him to his very core. Of course, his relationship with his father suffered as a result...the man lied to him for his entire life. Their relationship really was not that great even before that since Odin found it easier to relate to Thor, who was more like him in personality, than to Loki, who was more cerebral and quieter. Loki’s relationship to Frigga fared much better. He’s quick to forgive her involvement in covering up the truth about his parentage, and it is obvious that they are close. Even his relationship with Thor prior to the events of the movie is not all that bad, the two brothers are affectionate and playful, and when Loki interrupts Thor’s coronation, it’s not just for the sake of creating trouble, but to postpone Thor taking the crown for another little while because he is not fit to rule. At the time Thor had yet to go through his character development arc on Earth and he was still an overly arrogant, bloodthirsty, elitist douchebag, so Loki really had a good point.

A true narcissist would have done what Loki did just for the sake of making life difficult for Thor. Also, he would have done it because he wanted the throne. Loki states repeatedly that he never wanted to rule. A true narcissist would have been all smiles about taking the throne instead of being reluctant about it as Loki was when Frigga handed him Gungnir.

Throughout the films, and in the first episode of the series, we see that Loki does indeed love his family and is capable of feeling guilt over the things that he does to them, intentionally or not. Narcissists typically don’t feel remorse. As far as they are concerned, they are perfect and can do no wrong, so they have nothing to feel bad about. If they hurt you, it’s because you deserved it. You shouldn’t have provoked their ire.

Loki feels bad for getting Frigga killed, and then later on Odin. Then he is in tears when Odin dies, and later at the mere thought of never seeing Thor again when the two brothers talk in an elevator on Sakaar. Those are not the actions of someone who is incapable of loving anyone but himself, as I’ve seen so many people claim about him. And the fact that he sacrificed himself to save his brother also kind of kills the whole “narcissist” narrative.

In Episode 1, Loki breaks down and confesses to Mobius that he doesn’t like hurting people. He does it because it’s part of the façade, and admits that he sees himself as weak. A few episodes later, he admits to a memory illusion Sif that he craves attention “because I’m a narcissist” and admits to being afraid of being alone. That is far more self-reflection than a typical narcissist is capable of in my experience. As I said, narcissists tend to think they are perfect. A true narcissist would never admit to having any flaws, and sure as hell would never admit that they are a narcissist. As far as the true narcissist is concerned, if you find them flawed in any way, that’s on you. The narcissist has no need for self-reflection because they honestly see nothing wrong with themselves, and believe that they don’t need to change...it’s everyone else who does.

A good real-life example from my past is a former friend I’ll call D. D was a self-proclaimed brat who was quite proud of the fact that she could be difficult to be in a relationship with and tended to go through men like tissue paper. She was demanding, self-centered, extremely jealous, manipulative, and prone to wild mood swings. She could and did go from zero to insane at the drop of a hat. In the time I knew her, she left a string of burnt guys behind, and according to her it was because they just weren’t man enough to handle her. She also left behind a string of broken former friends, to the point where there really needed to be a support group for former friends of D who suddenly had her turn them into Public Enemy Number 1 when they either started taking attention away from D, or...well, that was it really. As I said, she was a very jealous person and had a chronic need to be the center of attention, especially if there were men around. Anyway, instead of working on herself to become less self-involved, self-absorbed, and more empathetic, she double downed on her abrasiveness and constant need for attention until she finally wore the poor man down and he either ghosted her or outright dumped her. She never broke up with them, preferring to keep them around for as long as they were willing in order to toy with them as a cat does with a mouse. I tried to talk to her about her horrible behavior, but instead of taking my constructive criticism and maybe using it to make some needed changes, she completely turned on me and did her best to make my life hell until I finally cut her out of it. I learned two things: Narcissists don’t want help because they don’t feel they need it and they are never going to change as a result, and never, ever try to confront a narcissist. It’ll only end badly.

A more famous example? Former US President Donald Trump. I won’t get into that, because really all you need to do is perform a quick Google search to see what all he’s done and witness his narcissism on full display. But really, place him side by side with Loki. Do you see any similarities at all? Maybe on the surface, but when you go deeper...no. Loki is not a narcissist. He’s capable of deep self-reflection, owns his faults, is capable of loving others, and feels remorse. I would argue that anyone who says he is a narcissist, either does not know the character, or hasn’t ever actually dealt with a narcissist in real life, to which I can only say: Lucky you.

I honestly would argue that calling Loki a narcissist is actually doing a disservice to victims of abuse from actual narcissists.

What about Sylvie? Well, in contrast to Loki who does show remorse while Mobius is playing that “This Is Your Life” reel for him, Sylvie shows no remorse or regret. She knows that the TVA agents she kills are as much victims as she is. They are innocent variants who were kidnapped from Earth and forced to work for the TVA after having their memories wiped. She knows this, yet the first time we see her she burns a bunch of TVA agents alive, and she just stands there watching as they scream in agony. In the next episode she says right out that she’s “having some fun” while possessing the body of C-90 and murdering more agents. She is not at all sorry about doing what she did, and we’re supposed to be understanding since she was kidnapped as a child. Okay, but the entire TVA didn’t do that. The agents she kills didn’t personally kidnap her. The only one we see who was directly involved in that is Renslayer. Sylvie “did what she had to do”, fine. But she doesn’t feel bad about it, at all. The flashback to her as a child takes great pains to try to show us what a good person she is when she cries out “Help him!” as another prisoner is being beaten, but I guess she grew out of it.

We don’t know if Sylvie has any other narcissistic traits besides lack of remorse because, well, the show really doesn’t do much to show her personality. Other than killing people, trying to kill Loki, and then flirting with Loki, we just don’t really see much to her. It’s another trait of a Mary Sue. Mary Sues often have bland, one-dimensional personalities. After all, their only purpose is usually to serve as love interests for one or more male characters. Mary Sues break the “show, don’t tell” rule by having the other characters verbally inform us about their traits, usually while singing their praises, but we don’t actually see those traits in the Mary Sue herself.

Loki calls Sylvie “amazing”, but how amazing is she, really? She kills people she knows are victims, she endangers the timeline just to sneak into the TVA, and then she kills Kang despite knowing that there is a very good chance that doing so could unleash something far, far worse than him. Then again, it doesn’t have to make sense when you’re pushing an unwanted and unasked for romance on an audience who was expecting a scifi show, not a romance.

I have spoken in a few places about this. Romance is fine, but in a show that blatantly places itself in the scifi genre, it really should only be the background, not center stage. When I expressed this opinion, I got accused of being dismissive of an essential part of the human experience. Well, first of all, congratulations: You just invalidated the existence of people on the asexual and aromantic spectrums, not to mention people who are celibate by choice. Second, that is why we have the romance genre. To tell stories centered around romance. I like romance, I read romance novels, and I sometimes write romantic fiction. But there are some places where it just is not appropriate.

There are people who say that adding romance makes things more interesting. Nope, in those cases it’s just a smokescreen, something used to hide plot holes and distract us from just how empty the story really is. Writers like to say that if you need a romance to make things more interesting, then you really don’t have much of a story in the first place. And sadly, Loki does have some plot holes. The nexus event on Lamentis is a good example, and the romance is definitely used to distract us from that. People were so focused on “oh wow, they’re having a moment, they’re soulmates!” that they didn’t think “waitaminute...didn’t they say that nexus events can’t occur in apocalypses?”

We really did not need a romance in Loki. Period. It was unnecessary, it was distracting, a lot of people found it disturbing, and it actively hurt a marginalized group.

Loki Is A Queer Icon!...maybe

I am not going to say that the relationship between Loki and Sylvie is not a bisexual one. A bisexual relationship is a bisexual relationship regardless of whether or not the person the bisexual person is with is the opposite sex. Saying otherwise is biphobic. Biphobic people in both the straight and the queer communities have been excluding bisexual people who happen to be in opposite sex relationships for years because apparently one stops being bisexual once they get into a relationship with someone of the opposite sex. This is horseshit. I’ve been in relationships with CIS men, did I stop being attracted to other men, women, nonbinary, genderfluid, agender, and other genderqueer people? No. No, I didn’t, because while I was entangled, I was not dead. Heterosexual people don’t stop being attracted to other members of the opposite sex when they are in relationships, it’s no different with queer people.

So, stop saying that Loki and Sylvie are not a bisexual relationship. You’re not doing us any favors at all, and in fact you’re only helping the biphobes who want to kick us out of Pride and other queer spaces for daring to date members of the opposite sex.

I will address the “Bit of both” line however. In Episode 3, Loki has that response to Sylvie’s questioning about whether there had been any would-be princesses or princes in his life. Again, a conversation that comes out of nowhere. She stated outright that she didn’t trust him, clearly wanted him dead, and now she’s asking if he’s single. Whatever.

Anyway, people went nuts when Loki answered “A bit of both”. It was confirmation that Loki was bisexual, it was celebrated on social media...and it is really biphobic and Kate Herron, who is bisexual herself, really should have known better.

Biphobic people have long tried to sow division between the bi and trans communities (unsurprisingly, biphobia and transphobia tend to go hand-in-hand) by saying that the concept of being bisexual is transphobic. “Bi” means two, ergo bisexual people are only attracted to two genders, specifically CIS men and CIS women. It never occurs to anyone that the “two genders” a bisexual person could be attracted to could be, say, women (and yes, I include trans women in that, since they are in fact women, get over it) and non-binary people, or agender and gender-fluid people, it’s always CIS men and CIS women. This despite the fact that the definition of bisexual has been “attraction to more than one gender” since long before the Bisexual Manifesto was put out in 1990.

Some people have tried to remedy this by adopting the moniker of “pansexual” instead, which A) is basically reinforcing what biphobes are saying about bisexuals and creating even more division and B) doesn’t just mean “attraction to trans people as well, I’m not transphobic, I promise!” “Pansexual” is not interchangeable with “bisexual”. Pansexual is attraction to all genders. Bisexual means attraction to more than one gender, but not necessarily to all genders. You can have a bisexual person, for instance, who is attracted to all genders except for men. If you are attracted to more than one gender, but not to all genders, you are bisexual, and labeling yourself pansexual is lying and basically caving in to the biphobes.

I’m not trying to police what people call themselves...if you want to use the two terms interchangeably, if you want to call yourself bisexual, or pansexual, it’s fine. But just evaluate the reasons why. Are you calling yourself pansexual because you really think you can be, or are you just calling yourself that out of fear of being labeled transphobic? The latter, in my opinion, is not a really good reason, and it only helps deliver the biphobic message that bisexual people are transphobic.

So, by saying “a bit of both”, Loki is really helping to reinforce that biphobic assertion that bisexual people are attracted just to CIS men and CIS women. It’s disappointing, but it is Disney so I suppose that is the best we can expect for now. It just shows that Disney really has a long way to go.

What’s more problematic is the supposed genderfluid representation. Now, I am a CIS woman. As such, I feel unqualified to really say that the representation is shitty and fluidphobic. However, if I’m not qualified to say that it is, then Kate Herron and the writers are unqualified to say that it isn’t. Rule of thumb: If members of a marginalized group are telling you that you did a poor job of representing them and that you are being transphobic or fluidphobic, instead of ignoring and dismissing their concerns like a good portion of the population already does, it’s a really good idea to listen to what they are saying and learn how you can do better.

There have been some genderfluid and trans people who expressed that they liked the show, and good for them. But I have seen a lot of very valid criticisms and concerns from genderfluid and trans people about the representation on the show, and I think they really should be listened to. Kate, you and I are queer, but we are still CIS women. Ergo, we have no say in whether or not the way you attempted to present Loki’s gender fluidity is transphobic. If genderfluid people say it’s fluidphobic or trans people say it’s transphobic, then it is indeed fluidphobic/transphobic. To say otherwise is gaslighting a marginalized community who already faces gaslighting on a daily basis.

I will touch on a couple of things.

First, in Episode 5, Loki asks a bunch of his variants if they have ever encountered a female version of themselves, a question that is met with varying levels of incredulousness and even disgust. If Loki was truly genderfluid, this question wouldn’t have been asked. Genderfluid means the person shifts genders along the spectrum. Loki does this in the comics. Comicbook Loki switches between masculine and feminine presenting on the drop of a dime, especially in his current incarnation. Loki in the MCU we are told is also genderfluid, and should also be able to hop along the gender spectrum on a whim. There should not be a “female variant” therefore, since they are all the same gender. There could be a female presenting variant, but that is not the same thing. They would still be all genderfluid in that case. Also, Sylvie’s nexus event would not have been “being born the Goddess of Mischief”. Okay, the show never actually says that is the nexus event that led to her being arrested, but it heavily implies it. If Sylvie is a Loki, and as a Loki is genderfluid, her being the “Goddess” of Mischief should never have been an issue since they can change genders anyway.

Second, making Lady Loki a separate person is problematic. A lot of genderfluid people felt that this move invalidated their identity by basically showing that the same person cannot indeed be different genders along the spectrum. I don’t feel I’m totally qualified to really get into this. I will just say that if you’re going to write a genderfluid character, maybe at least get an actual genderfluid person to advise in the writing room.

Third, there is a transphobic movement called trans exclusionary radical feminism. You might have heard of it. Unfortunately, it is a very widespread movement that has done a lot of harm to the trans community, successfully blocking funding to organizations that help trans people, blocking laws that would benefit trans people, and the movement includes celebrities like Graham Linehan and JK Rowling.

One of the weapons they like to use against trans women is the concept of “autogynephilia”. It is basically the sexual fetish of becoming aroused from thinking of oneself as a woman. Many, many of these transphobic “feminists” love to say that trans women are merely men who have this particular sexual fetish.

It’s bullshit of course. Maybe there is a small segment of the male population that has that fetish, but trans women are not included in that. For trans women, things like dressing as women, changing their names, having state and federal issued IDs that say they are female, and being able to use the restrooms and change rooms that match the gender they actually are as opposed to the one they were assigned at birth is not a matter of sexual arousal. It’s a matter of making their external realities match their internal ones. It’s a matter of validation of their identities as women. Sexual gratification has nothing to do with it.

Now, Loki is not trans, but genderfluid people do tend to fall under the trans umbrella. We have Loki, a supposedly genderfluid individual and masculine presenting, falling head over heels in love with a feminine presenting version of himself. Maybe it’s just me, but it just seems like a form of autogynephilia to me.

Way to go, Kate...you just gave the TERFs more ammo.

One more note: At one point, Kate tweeted a list of the different Loki emojis, and “jokingly” included #FiretruckLoki with an emoji of a firetruck. Kate, you do realize that a “joke” transphobes love to harp on is that they can identify as an attack helicopter, right?

It’s his way of learning self-love!

That is not how you learn self-love.

First, the people who are making this argument often contradict themselves by then saying that Sylvie is a different person. Again, make up your minds. Either Sylvie is the same person as Loki, or she’s not. You can’t have it both ways, and you can’t continue to change the narrative to fit whatever it is you want to shove down the audience’s throats.

Second, romantic love and self-love are two different things entirely. Loki isn’t feeling self-love with Sylvie, he’s feeling romantic love. That’s not learning self-love. That's narcissism, and it’s character regression in his case. He’s supposed to be evolving past being a self-centered, egotistical shitweasel, and falling in love with a variant of himself makes him, as Mobius put it, “a seismic narcissist”. It’s not character development.

Third, this argument tends to come in the same breath as saying that Loki is a narcissist so of course he would fall for a variant of himself. If Loki is a narcissist though, why would he need to learn self-love? Narcissists already love themselves, that is the very definition of the word. If Loki needs to learn self-love, that would imply that he actually hates himself, which is the opposite of narcissism. Again, the writers and the fans who make these arguments when they feel the need to defend this relationship need to make up their minds. Either he’s a narcissist and therefore already loves himself too much, or he hates himself and needs to learn to love himself. It’s once again changing the narrative to fill a plothole.

Fourth, the whole learning self-love and trust narrative is completely thrown out the window in Episode 6 when Sylvie decides to toy with Loki’s emotions, using his feelings for her against him by kissing him as a distraction so she could grab Kang’s temp pad and toss Loki back to the TVA. To Sylvie, her revenge was more important than the bond she had with him. The move basically set Loki’s progress back several steps. What little progress he made anyway.

TL:DR, is there hope for Season 2?

Whew, this went on for a while, didn’t it? Told you I had a lot to say.

As I have said, if you liked the first season of Loki and think I am completely full of shit, that’s fine and it’s your prerogative. More power to you.

But, and this is a huge but, that does not give you the right to harass and bully people who did not like it.

I have witnessed horrible things from both sides of the now split Loki fandom on social media. Harassment and even death threats towards the creators. Telling people who don’t like the Loki and Sylvie relationship that they need to drink bleach. Homophobic attacks. Gatekeeping.

There’s constructive criticism and sharing your opinions, and then there is...this.

Both sides need to chill.

Anyway.

Even though Kate Herron has left the show, Michael Waldron is still the showrunner and as such I am not altogether optimistic for Season 2. I would like to see more emphasis on Loki himself for that season. Yes, it’s a novel thought, wanting a show that is called Loki to actually be about Loki, but here we are.

I would like to see actual character development in Loki rather than the old “true love transforms bad boy and conquers all” trope. There is a reason Disney has started to abandon that trope in their animated movies. They’ve been getting dragged about it for decades.

If Sylvie must return, there needs to be some actual consistency surrounding her character. The show needs to decide if she is a Loki or not and stick with whichever one they decide. And seriously, no more romance. Frankly, after what she pulled in Episode 6, I will be severely disappointed if the writers have Loki crawling back to her. That would make him pathetic, and Loki deserves better.

Really, Loki does not need a romance, period. He’s too emotionally immature, he has a lot of character growth to go through, and a romance would do nothing but be a distraction and an impediment to that growth. Anyone who got married too young can confirm that it is important to learn more about yourself and figure yourself out before you even think of getting involved with another person, who should not be your whole world. The Loki and Sylvie romance was reminding me of Classic Disney in another not-good way in that the two of them, especially on Loki’s side, were starting to revolve around one another and that does not make for a healthy relationship. Again, turning Loki into a Disney Prince (or, seeing as how he’s supposed to be genderfluid, Princess). Stop it.

Again, the romance was a smokescreen. It was a distraction from just how thin the plot was. Please, for the love of G-d, give more focus to the actual plot.

Do some research and talk to some psychologists for healthy ways Loki can “learn self-love" and develop as a character. If Ragnarok Loki can do it without relying on a romance with a variant with himself, then surely TVA Loki can pull it off.

Speaking of talking to people, listen to the concerns of the trans and genderfluid fans. Listen, talk to them, maybe get a couple in the writer’s room. CIS people should not write genderfluid people, and this season is a good example of why.

Please remember that Loki is not an idiot. Yes, he has pulled some fast ones and hasn’t been the greatest planner, but he is not downright stupid like he was in season 1.

And...really that’s all I have. As I have said, this thesis really wasn’t about making suggestions to the creators because I seriously doubt they will ever even see this. This was more less me screaming into the void, venting because I was that upset about what I saw as character assassination happening to one of my favorite characters. Keeping all of this in was proving to be bad for my blood pressure.

I am attached to the character, have been for years. Loki is just one character in the MCU who I love, who I want to see done right. I had been looking forward to his solo series for a very long time, and the disappointment I felt was something that I just couldn’t keep in. I kept my mouth shut when they killed off Tony Stark for no reason other than that Ronnie Downey, Jr. didn't want to renew his contract. I didn’t say anything at the Russo Brothers’ “happy ending” for Steve Rogers, even though I feel it made no sense and is a massive plot hole.

What they did to Loki, however...I couldn’t keep silent.

#loki series negativity #anti sylki

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incomprehensiblelentils · 3 years

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@dollsome-does-tumblr does this and opened it up to anyone and I am feeling chatty today SO!

Because I co-write a lot with my lovely wife, I might answer some questions including those co-written stories, or I might not, depends on how I feel when I get there.

name:

Megan but I go by Lentils most places on the internet, Shadowcrawler over on AO3

fandoms:

at the moment: MCU, especially Agents of SHIELD and Daredevil; Terminator: Dark Fate; Halt and Catch Fire. Oh and I wrote Dollhouse fanfics a thousand years ago. Sometimes I will watch a movie/show and think “those two girls should be gay” and bang out 2k of fic about it and then never write for that fandom again. (I THOUGHT this was going to be HACF but as it turns out, no, it’s not done with me yet.)

where you post:

AO3, at Shadowcrawler. I also have a tumblr @lentils-writes where theoretically I post links to fics/advertise them in the tags, because I used to be real precious about not putting porn on this blog, but fuck it.

most popular multi-chapter fic:

Co-written, it’s definitely mallverse, which is I think the reason most writers definitely hate us because it’s very long and there are a lot of tags lmao. The problem is that every tagged character HAS shown up in a significant fashion at some point so we can’t just...untag them! It doesn’t update weekly anymore because we’re exhausted by life lmao so at least there’s that???

As for a multi-chapter fic that was just me, I don’t tend to do that so much, so actually it’s say you will, my 3-chapter Endgame fix-it where Clint dies instead of Natasha and Natasha and Laura have a past. It actually has over 1000 hits which is very exciting! I feel like it’s...niche in a way that is frustrating but understandable lol. I put a lot of my heart into it and some people really liked it, so that’s gratifying.

favorite story you’ve written so far:

Co-written, I think our SHIELD Dollhouse AU is very underrated for the amount of work we put into it. Author bias evident here because I love Dollhouse warts and all, and it’s a lot of fun translating episode plots as well as the general trajectory of the show into stuff that will work with SHIELD characters. We don’t just rewrite episodes, we really try and rework them as needed. Also it features both Skimmons and my beloved rarepair Bobbi/Kara, though of course they won’t get together until later.

Of my own stuff, I’m still really really proud of the AU where Kara Palamas didn’t die. I think that was a pretty severe misstep of the show and I think I did a good job of fixing it. (I haven’t forgotten Kara, promise!)

fic you were nervous to post:

lolololol I wrote some uh. Terminator pornography last year and. They are very porny! I had co-written a bunch of smut obviously, but that was the first time I’d posted like, PWP all by myself on purpose??? and that was TERRIFYING. Also I was very nervous to post the Engame fix-it because that was my own personal goodbye/tribute to Natasha.

how you choose your titles:

They are always either song lyrics or jokes (such as Three Lawyers and a Baby, my Daredevil Accidental Baby Acquisition fic). My WIP docs are always titled either obvious shit like “RoseJannah horse girls” or memes like “what if we belonged to a fire cult and we fucked haha just kidding unless...?” or “Morgan has two mommies.”

do you outline?:

B and I typically outline for the co-written fics, although it’s more often chapter-by-chapter outlines since that’s how we write them. On occasion we’ve fully planned multi-chapter stuff out in advance but that’s less common. Oh and the one-shots are nearly always outlined as well, just to keep ourselves organized.

When I have written planned multi-chapter fics in the past I have used outlines - particularly for the Kara one and I had to do that for the SHIELD Kill Bill AU because I was trying to follow the format of the movie. For things that are allegedly supposed to be one-shots I almost never outline, which turns out to be a terrible idea when they inevitably balloon beyond my control and become 45k like say you will. That one, I wrote out a list of scenes I thought needed to be in it and then I wrote about 75% of those scenes and then I wrote a bunch more scenes I hadn’t planned for. Don’t be like me, kids!

complete fics:

According to AO3, 89 as of right now. Uh, you do not want me to list all of them, here’s a link, I guess!

in progress:

I don’t understand what the difference is between this question and the WIP questions lmao help????

posted WIPs that I have active plans to continue at this time:

Cowritten: mallverse as I said, and its femslash smut oneshots spinoff and character flashbacks spinoff and older characters/teachers spinoff (these get updated, uh, irregularly), the first half of a Piper/Snowflake SHIELD s7 fic that we are planning on finishing the second half of soonish, SHIELD Dollhouse AU, SHIELD Teen Beach AU, SHIELD Buffy AU. You may notice a pattern!

By myself, I have: Have Your Elf a Merry Little Christmas, a Terminator Hallmark Christmas fic that I ambitiously posted the first chapter of in 2019 and then lost steam immediately (I am going to go back to it sooner or later bc I had some cute ideas for it); the SHIELD Fate of the Furious AU that has one chapter to go and which I do intend on finishing eventually; Three Lawyers and a Little Lady, the Daredevil Accidentally Baby Acquisition AU that is literally just cute kidfic and poly avocados and which I have a bunch of ideas for and just need to buckle down and finish some.

posted WIPs that I have given up on:

Lol so there’s a Dollhouse Caroline/Bennett Doctor Who AU that I wrote purely as idfic and which nobody ever cared about except me, and I think that ship has sailed! RIP darlings. I also had an ongoing Skimmons series waaaay back when where I posted oneshots that were like missing scenes or gay readings for each s1 episode, and I just feel like it would be inauthentic to even try and finish it at this point. (It does include the first ever Skimmons fic to be posted on AO3! Really truly, there’s one fic that shows up as older but it’s an ongoing fic and was updated with the tag way after I posted mine.)

exchange fics due soon/unrevealed:

I haven’t done an exchange since like 2015 lololol I am so bad at them. I am currently working on finishing up my MCU Femslash bingo card, very late, and I do have plans for almost all of the remaining squares!

WIPs that live in my fanfic folder and are incomplete and who knows when they’ll be finished:

“RoseJannah horse girls,” which has been put on hold temporarily but is literally just Rose and Jannah being gay while riding orbaks

half of a Daisy/Gwen fic from Marvel Rising because I know they’re not making any more of those but I stg those two were really gay

multiple fics about Elise Nelson-Page including: avocados Halloween with smol Elise, Aunt Elektra very reluctantly taking smol Elise shopping until she realizes smol Elise also likes weapons (she buys her a fake katana), Uncle Frank is a pushover and spoils the shit out of Elise, and baby Elise has a high fever and everyone freaks out but then she gets better and smile at them for the first time (inspired by baby me lol).

coming soon/not yet started:

“Morgan has two mommies,” yet another Endgame fix-it where Maya Hansen did not die in Iron Man 3 and she resurfaces and she and Pepper kiss and eventually she adopts Morgan

Claire and Colleen go on a nice date to get coffee/tea where Danny doesn’t interrupt them goddammit

Bobbi/Kara Warehouse 13 AU which is sort of like “For the Team” but gayer ft. grappling hook

X-Men: Evolution Tabby/Amara fluff

Cameron/Donna character study disguised as smut

Grace proposes to Dani with a ring made out of the metal from her power source and Carl officiates the wedding

Dani gets horny watching Grace eat a peach and jerks off and Grace ends up hearing her and then they fuck (I have been calling this “the peach fic” in my head but I gotta stop being delicate about it lmfao it is just porn)

B and I have plans to do a Nico/Karolina Jasper in Deadland AU but we keep forgetting

I MUST WRITE FOGGY AND KAREN SADLY FUCKING IN A CHURCH WHILE THEY MOURN MATT THIS YEAR I STG

do you accept prompts:

uhhhhhh I have on occasion written a prompt for someone before but it’s pretty rare and I have enough trouble writing the shit I come up with in my own head lol. but never say never?

upcoming story you are most excited to write:

I’ve got a bit of the Bobbi/Kara Warehouse fic written and it’s nice to go back to that world. Also I’m weirdly excited about the Cam/Donna smutty character study I mentioned above, I have a lot of what I think are good ideas for it and it’ll be fun.

tagging @unwind-myself @swiftzeldas @swashbucklery @loved-the-stars-too-fondly and, if you want to, you!

#sometimes I write things

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manuscripts-dontburn · 4 years

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READATHONS:

Eyreathon (2 books)

Medievalthon (7 books)

Down Among the Sticks and Bones

Author: Seanan McGuire

First published: 2017

Pages: 187

Rating: ★★★★★

How long did it take: 1 day

Given that I was rather underwhelmed by the first book I did not expect any great shakes from its sequel. But I am pleasantly surprised and must say that this one, from the very start to the finish, was just great. I loved the character descriptions and development, and while the first book seemed unremarkable and choppy when it came to writing, here, in a more fantastical setting, the author uses a language so beautiful I could only be amazed.

Wonderstruck

Author: Brian Selznick

First published: 2011

Pages: 640

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 1 day

Wonderstruck is a wonderful middle-grade book that can be enjoyed by readers of any age. The format combining very cleverly (beautiful) illustrations with written word add a certain unique quality to a story which is in itself, frankly, perhaps a bit too straightforward and moves forward steadily and with Ben overcoming every obstacle very quickly and conveniently. At the same time if you are looking for a "quiet" book which will warm your icy heart, you cannot really go wrong with this one.

Hamnet

Author: Maggie O'Farrell

First published: 2020

Pages: 384

Rating: ★★★★★

How long did it take: 6 days

Open this book and you open a window through which you will see a moment from a distant past. A family, tightly-knit yet also broken, and how its people came together, lived together, lost something precious and grieved together, yet each on their own. This book is a painting, a portrait of a short span of time, which pulls you within it and fills in all your senses. You see, you hear, you smell, you taste, you touch. You are a part of that moment. You are overwhelmed by the beauty of nature and the depth of feelings. You cry. You hope. You heal. The words dance on the pages. This book, in all its profound sadness, is stunningly beautiful.

Cybele's Secret

Author: Juliet Marillier

First published: 2011

Pages: 424

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 5 days

It was lovely to revisit the world Juliet Marillier has created for Wildwood Dancing. The magic is still there, though it is flavoured with a different setting and vastly different kind of plot. Cybele´s Secret has a very slow first half, which I enjoyed for the most part but I can imagine many others getting restless reading it. The adventure bit was fabulously paced, even if it made me a little dizzy. The ending need not have been that long. Still, this was a very pleasant read.

Lilac Girls

Author: Marthy Hall Kelly

First published: 2016

Pages: 502

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

How long did it take: 4 days

At first, I was rather bored. The book felt exactly like many other (interestingly always American written) run-of-the-mill WW2 novels which are so popular. It felt exactly like the underwhelming Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, it was written in a language as unimpressive as the Bronze Horseman by Paulina Simmons. Then things got more interesting with the introduction of Herta and for a while, I was hoping that getting the story from the point of view of an actual Nazi in opposed to just her victims would turn the whole thing around. Unfortunately, the last part of the book made the whole story just fall apart and there was no redemption to it. The story was told but never "shown". The WHOLE plotline involving Caroline was painfully uninteresting and had she only been introduced as a side character in the final chapters, it would have completely sufficed. What could have been in-depth and heart-wrenching journey into the Ravensbrück hell and the way it functioned was never explored. There is no time given to tell us how the characters learned to live there, how they felt, what their experience was beyond the basic physical realities. Then there were little things I resented. From the use of the extremely formal and detached word "matka" for a beloved mother (Slavic languages have a whole variety of loving addresses for our Mamas) to the thickly-layered sentiment of American culture being everything Eastern Europe craved for (Why would Kassia´s favourite singer be Eddie Fisher? Why would her mother have Gone with the Wind on her night table? Yes, everything American felt exotic and as such was desired, but Polish - and other European - culture is so rich that these mentions felt forced and oh, so very unwanted). This is an example of a good intention of the author to present a case not many people are aware of (and that I definitely count as the biggest positive of the book), but unfortunately, her writing abilities failed to do the topic justice.

Anne of Green Gables: A Graphic Novel

Author: Mariah Marsden and Brenna Thummler

First published: 2017

Pages: 232

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 1 day

The graphic novel reminded me perfectly why I loved the character of Anne so much. The illustrations do full justice to the poetry of nature that L.M. Montgomery captured in the original novel as well. I am not sure how well some of the relationships would translate on the page if I have not already read the book itself though.

The Dream Thieves

Author: Maggie Stiefvater

First published: 2013

Pages: 493

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 9 days

At times I had no idea what was going on, but this was entertaining

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

Author: Adam Higginbotham

First published: 2019

Pages: 560

Rating: ★★★★★

How long did it take: 4 days

Excellent. Tip: Read alongside The Prayer for Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich to reach the most nightmarish reading experience.

Blue Lily, Lily Blue

Author: Maggie Stiefvater

First published: 2014

Pages: 391

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 4 days

This is just such a cool adventure to be on! And that cliffhanger was really unexpected!

Holy Rus': The Rebirth of Orthodoxy in the New Russia

Author: John P. Burgess

First published: 2017

Pages: 280

Rating: ★★★☆☆

How long did it take: 19 days

An interesting look at the current Russian Orthodox life by a Protestant American. On one hand, his Protestantism gives him an unemotional and critical advantage. On the other hand, his Protestantism prevents him to actually experience the orthodox faith and therefore we cannot take his words as anything than that - his own opinion.

Kristin Lavransdatter: The Cross

Author: Sigrid Undset

First published: 1922

Pages: 396

Rating: ★★★★★

How long did it take: 9 days

What a glorious study of human characters this book is! Also: I cried.

Galatea

Author: Madeline Miller

First published: 2013

Pages: 37

Rating: ★★★★★

How long did it take: 1 day

Nobody writes mythology that feels so realistic as Madeline Miller does. And few authors write short stories which are as powerful as a full-fledge novel.

The Raven King

Author: Maggie Stiefvater

First published: 2016

Pages: 439

Rating: ★★★★★

How long did it take: 7 days

Do you also like it when there is a big, unexpected reveal in a book? How about 30-40 of them? Yeah, this whole thing was a wild ride! Beautifully written, super imaginative and completely unpredictable.

The Palace of Illusions

Author: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

First published: 2008

Pages: 360

Rating: ★★★☆☆

How long did it take: 12 days

If nothing else, I am grateful that this book has given me some knowledge and explanation to the epic Mahabharata (which I am not brave enough to read just yet). Unfortunately, this book is more of a telling than a re-telling. The happenings are described only from afar for the most part, some of the most emotional moments are only related in passing. And finally, the main character of Panchaali is without development. She is the same from the first page to the last, which is rather inconceivable given the traumatic events she has to go through. And so I am a bit torn about how to rate this book. The story is stunning, but not the product of the author. I suppose somewhere in the middle of all the possible rating scales will have to be enough.

#booklr #wrap up #May 2020

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resplendentroses324 · 5 years

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Things I love and Appreciate™️ about Good Omens from both the book and show in no particular order:

- Crowley makes a point of saying he didn’t mean to fall, ergo he never meant to become a demon

-When he did fall it wasn’t falling it was a SAUNTER (vaguely downwards)

-David TenNANTS SAUNTERING

-Aziraphale shielding Crowley with his wing in the rain

-Crowley’s LOOKS™️ throughout history

-For some fucking amazing reason if Crowley leaves cds in his car for too long it turns into the Best of Queen

-Crowley trapped a demon in a cassette tape and considered leaving it in the car so it would turn into Queen

-Aziraphale being perceived as “gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide”

-The Earth being a Libra

-Crowley started the first conversation he and Zira ever had

-Crowley wanting to take Jesus to travel the world

-Crowley taking the stain out of Zira’s coat because he pouted at him

-Aziraphale lighting a cop’s ticket book on fire as he was writing Crowley a ticket

-CROWLEY BRINGING ZIRA’S DOVE BACK TO LIFE WHAT DEMON /DOES THAT/

-Uh......CROWLEY, just like, in general

-Crowley walking into a church even though it pains him to step on holy ground to save Zira from Nazis.

-One of the Nazis being Mark Gatiss who just magically appears as a background character in every british show

-After blowing up said Nazis and the whole church with it made sure that Zira’s books miraculously survived the explosion

-Aziraphale turning a gun into a water pistol because it was pointed at Crowley who wasn’t paying attention.

-Crowley being called a Flash Bastard.

-Crowley being asleep throughout the whole 19th century because he likes naps

-Golden Girls is one of Crowley’s favorite shows

-The part about Greasy Johnson and how they drop the bomb on you that he’s Baby B in a FOOTNOTE and the only reason you put two and two together is because of the comment about tropical fish

-Crowley ensuring Hamlet would be popular because Aziraphale pouted at him and asked nicely

-Aziraphale just wanted to make Anathema’s bike nicer for her

-How lovingly Crowley calls Zira ‘Angel’ when you’d expect him to say it sarcastically.

-Aziraphale thinking he ought to tell Crowley about a situation and promptly realizing that he wanted to tell Crowley something before he told Heaven about it

-Aziraphale knowing something was wrong just because of the way Crowley answered the phone

-Crowley legitimately tries to model himself as a type of person and makes decisions in decorating based on what kind of human he think’s he’d be. Aka Crowley has a humansona

-Crowley’s plants are the most beautiful in London because he yells at them

-Aziraphale is the only angel that knows how to dance

-MICHAEL SHEEN’S ADORABLE SMILE HE HAS WHEN DANCING IN THE SCENE WHERE THEY EXPLAIN THAT ZIRA DANCES.

-The TERRIBLE 70s montage dance that Crowley is doing in the same scene to explain how demons dance but fucking awfully

-The guy that thought Crowley and Zira were breaking up on the street and gave Zira his sympathies

-The first swear Aziraphale had said in more than 6000 years being ‘bugger’ and then immediately five minutes later says fuck

-Somebody to Love playing over Crowley searching for Zira in the burning shop

-Aziraphale in Paris about to be executed nevermind that he’s an angel and perfectly capable of rescuing himself waits for Crowley to come rescue him and acts relieved when HE REALLY COULD HAVE LEFT AT ANY TIME

-“Don’t look so disappointed. Perhaps one day we could...we could go on a picnic, dine at the Ritz”

-“I’ll give you a lift. Anywhere you want to go”

-YOU GO TO /FAST/ FOR ME CROWLEY

-“Because, underneath it all, Crowley was an optimist.”

-Crowley thinking Zira to be dead and instead of drinking himself silly decides to still try and save the world

-Crowley saving the world simply because his husband threatens to not talk to him ever again

-Aziraphale and Crowley getting HeavenandHell.exe to stop working simply by asking if they were sure the Great Plan was the same thing as the Ineffable Plan.

-Any instance where Crowley is just bullshitting someone ie: the phone hoax

-‘God does not play games with His loyal servants’ “whooo-ee, where have you /been/“

-ZIRA AND CROWLEY HOLDING HANDS TO FACE SATAN

-“It’s all worked out for the best though...just imagine how awful it might have been if we had been at all competent....” “......eeeeeuh....point taken” DUMBASSES

-Crowley ‘has good cheekbones’ and ‘can do really weird things with his tongue’

-“SO LONG SUCKAAAAA” *procedes to do really weird snake tongue hiss*

-Crowley ALSO doesn’t blink much and hisses when he’s frustrated. SNAKE. MAN.

-THE SWAP. How well they know each other to be able fucking fool their bosses of more than 6000 years

-How you can tell the Swap was made between the bus scene and the next day because of “Zira”’s face and attitude when he went into the shop and “Crowley”s giddy smile at the sight of the Bentley

-Zira hailing a cab when he was pretending to be Crowley instead of driving the Bentley because he probably respects the car and its owner too much to take the driver’s seat

-Both of them asking about the shop/car because they’re switched and want to know the state of their beloved things and both of them assuring their husband that their precious car and shop were ok

-Crowley knowing the shop well enough to notice there were books that weren’t there before

-How much fun Zira appeared to be having pretending to be Crowley like ‘hee hee im a demon!’ meanwhile Crowley is using his time as Zira to spit hell fire at Gabriel for being mean to his husband.

-That heartwarming toast to the world and the LOVE in Aziraphale’s eyes.

-demon wings are the same as angel wings except demons groom theirs better

-The strawberry popsicle and the vanilla ice cream cone

-Them dining at the Ritz while a Nightengale sings in Berkley square

-THE DELETED SCENE FROM THE SCRIPT BOOK WHERE CROWLEY BRINGS ZIRA FLOWERS AND CHOCOLATES TO COMMEMORATE THE OPENING OF HIS SHOP

-THE SAME SCENE CONTINUED ON TO CROWLEY SCARING GABRIEL INTO LETTING ZIRA STAY ON EARTH BECAUSE ZIRAS THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN “THWART HIS DEMONIC PLANS”

-Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett never thinking this absolute masterpiece would ever be popular in any way, and then it WAS

-Michael Sheen and David Tennant openly saying that it’s a love story and talking about the romance and discussing how the characters love each other and how they express it and how Michael makes a point of saying how he stares lovingly at Crowley in scenes.

-How I very rarely obsess over something enough to post so much of it at once and declare my blog dedicated to it and how the post I made right before this one was a declaration that this is now a Good Omens blog

-The fact that I’ve edited this post at least eight times because the ineffable husbands tag keeps reminding me of more good shit™️

#good omens #aziraphale #anthony j crowley #neil gaiman #terry pratchett #ineffable husbands

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kaibutsushidousha · 6 years

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Artbook data - Korekiyo Shinguuji

Him of all people gets the best comment so far.

Seiyuu’s comment: Ken’ichi Suzumura

I could finally perform in DanganRonpa! I remember a member of the production telling me “Please voice a character in our series some day” years ago (laughs). Thank you very much for remembering me. As the Super High School Level Anthropologist, Korekiyo Shinguuji-kun is mysterious. The instruction I got from the production was “Emphasize on his cool points, while still making him creepy”. He was wonderfully fun to play.

Kodaka’s comment: In the interstice between creepiness and aesthetic

Shunguuji’s character setting is a combination of multiple sorts of imagery... underground culture, anthropology, archaic, visual kei. His name is also a vivid reminder of history and anthropology. His sprite poses were made thinking in various things, but above all, poses from visual kei bands. The mask was Komatsuzaki’s idea and I decided to make it relevant to the story. I had already decided to make chapter 3 feel like a Japanese horror movie, so I need a character who were familiar with nursery songs. As you presume, I decided to have a Super High School Level Anthropologist to fill that job.

One of the characteristics I added to make his character more unique was having their gobis be written in katakana, but I was second-guessing about this a lot. It was overblown, it was really overblown. However, it fit well with Suzumura-san’s amazing performance and it became a speaking style fun to imitate, so I think the result was a great success. By the way, I prepared a plenty of creepy character moments for him, but the staff kept telling me he was already creepy enough with only the main story stuff, so I toned it down some. Maybe it’s just me that loves this kind of underground story character too much. I thought he would be well-received among the fans of Suehiro Maruo’s mangas, but I still haven’t seen any comment saying that so far.

Also, I wanted to make his character moments be about forbidden love, just like it usually was Shouwa underground movies and stage plays. I put some meaningful line in the first half of the script as foreshadowing. His loving sister throws salt at him during his execution, but... it’s ambiguous wether she is the real deal or controlled by Monokuma. Assuming she was real, that exorcism was her way of expressing her anger, saying “What the hell are you doing, murdering people and saying this about my feelings somehow?”. But regardless of whether she is real or not, we know for sure that summoning the person most dear to him is Monokuma’s pestering.

Design notes:

Regulation cap: A military-style school cap matching the design of his uniform. He is always wearing, so seeing him without is a rare sight to behold.

Armband: The armband in his right arm comes from his old school, the Yuuhigaoka Academy. It matches perfectly the uniform his beloved sister arranged for him.

Mysterious Mask: A mask that completely covers his important parts, from the the neck to the mouth. He has a variety of masks for a variety scenes of his daily life, like eating, sleeping, exercising and etc. Do you want to see his face he never exposes?

Underwear: Shinguuji’s favorite bikini bottom. It has a stoic color and sexy form. It represents the work of his life: the multifacetedness of humanity.

Long Black Hair: A jet black long hair is synonym with the archaic image of beauty, that still maintains a deep-seated popularity. It fits Shinguuji’s feminine feel so much that it puts his female colleagues to shame.

Bandages: Both of his arms are always wrapped in bandages, although it’s really unlikely that he is actually injured. As he is a cultural anthropologist, the implication is that this is related to sorcery.

Boots: Long boots to go with his uniform. The rare design with the zipper in the center is has an effect of making the already tall and slender Shinguuji look even taller.

Favorite Presents:

Toko no Monogatari: An academic collection of ancient popular customs, tradition, legends and saying related to gender. It super exciting for its academic value.

Haniwa Dancing Excessively: Pottery made mainly during the Kofun Era, said to imitate the moves of dancing energetically. As it is a historical piece, hand it to Shinguuji as soon as possible.

Monkey’s Paw: A mummified disembodied monkey hand that grants you any 3 wishes. Maybe he has some wish he absolutely wants fullfilled regardless of the high price?

Hated Present:

Air Exorcising Spray: An air freshener spray. One of its ingredients is holy water, so it has an effect of repelling ghost and apparitions. On the day you use it carelessly, Shinguuji will be furious!

Key Phrases:

My Beloved Mythology: Anthropology, Shinguuji’s field of talent, is a subject that studies the history behind traditions and costums presents in daily life. In other words, to be well versed in this discipline, you must be in direct contact with people and their home lives. By the way, it’s well known that common points can be found in the legends and folklore passed down even to these days and one of the intertwining legends he seems to be focused on are the “Hainuwele archetype”. These are legends abouts gods who defecate food and the seed of food is obtaining by killing them. They are present in almost every land with few variations, with the Japanese versions being Ohogetsuhime and Ukemochi. Shinguuji laughing a creepy laugh filled with hidden meaning, but when he is talking about anthropology, his delivery truly shows why he’s got a Super High School Level talent!

Fascinated by Ropes: One of the influences Shinguuji’s constant fieldwork had in his life was ropes. He had the extreme experience of being “tied” in some land, based on a tradition of welcoming guests with ropes, and it was quite an unforgettable one. As a good anthropologist, he of course has a good understanding of the formal costums rooted in people’s souls, but for that very reason, we wish he would tone down his creepy excitement whenever he sees any kind of rope, be it a tsuna or just a wire...

He can tell the lenghty and sturdyness of any rope just by looking... That’s impressive, but what kinds of tradition involves tying people?

The Perfect Getup!: In other to maintain a peaceful life in the Saishuu Academy, everyone leaves their room at 8A.M. after the morning announcement to eat breakfast. Someone like Saihara, who stays up late, wakes up with the announcement. Shinguuji, however, wakes up 6(!) and spends an entire hour getting dressed. Quite the fashionista for a man. It takes a lot of time in the morning to get his glossy black hair and his impecably pleated special uniform all perfect. Doing it so composedly with no hurry or haste might be a daily cultural tradition.

The Nailbrush, the Hand Mirror and the Sewing Kit are among his liked items. We can assume that’s just the proper ettiquette of an intelectual boy?

A Mask’s Secret is a Man’s Secret: When you think Shinguuji, you think of his trademark pitch-black mask. He actually is always bringing a number of them on his person for multiple purposes (one for eating, one for bathing, one for sleeping, one for exercising, etc.). Furthermore, when he is eating, his mouth can never be seen, regardless of whether the zipper is open or closed... What’s the reason for all this work?! And the secret to how he eats or drinks?! Saihara definitely is not the only one curious!

Main Quotes:

“Aah! Marvelous! I can’t believe ‘this’ really existed“: One of the costums Shinguuji has been longing for, the Kagonoko. 200 years ago, a small village called Ryuuken Village, apparently specialized in curses and incantations, was destroyed. He personally researched it and even managed to obtain a copy of one ancient spellbook. Maybe as reward to his zeal, his laboratory had more than just valuable anthropology documents, it had all sorts of tools related to the kagonoko legend, enshrined in mint condition! He is too overjoyed to ask Monokuma how did he managed to obtain all that. He is completely entranced by it with an uneraseable sarcastic smile on his face. He calls it a “trick of fate”.

“A precious person I love... so much, so much... from the bottom of my heart...“: Shinguuji is so interested in anthropology that it sometimes seems like he is not as interested in the currently living people. However, he does have someone he declares his earnest love to with the same intensity he talks about anthropology, She is “inside him“! Could this mean... here?!

Final comment: The most aesthetic boy in the cast: Shinguuji. He is remarkably beautiful, although you can’t see it through his creepy smile. If only he had a more approachable personality.

#korekiyo shinguuji #artbook translations #kodaka didn't explain why the gobis are in katakana and I'm very disappointed about it #that said shinguuji's comment was still the most informative one so far #does he unzip the mask to eat or not?

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ciathyzareposts · 6 years

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The Sierra Discovery Adventures

Among the most rewarding hidden gems in Sierra’s voluminous catalog must be the games of the Discovery Series, the company’s brief-lived educational line of the early 1990s. Doubtless because of that dreaded educational label, these games are little-remembered today even by many hardcore Sierra fans, and, unlike most of the better-known Sierra games, have never been reissued in digital-download editions.

In my book, that’s a real shame. For reasons I’ve described at exhaustive length by now in other articles, I’m not a big fan of Sierra’s usual careless approach to adventure-game design, but the games of the Discovery Series stand out for their lack of such staple Sierra traits as dead ends, illogical puzzles, and instant deaths, despite the fact that they were designed and implemented by the very same people who were responsible for the “adult” adventure games. These design teams were, it seems, motivated to show children the mercy they couldn’t be bothered to bestow upon their adult players. While it’s true that even the Discovery games weren’t, as we’ll see, entirely free of regrettable design choices, these forgotten stepchildren ironically hold up far better today than most of their more popular siblings. For that reason, they’re well worth highlighting as part of this ongoing history.

I’ve already written about the Discovery Series’s two Dr. Brain games, creative and often deceptively challenging puzzle collections that can be enjoyed by adults as easily as children. Today, then, I’d like to complete my coverage. Although some of the other Discovery games were aimed at younger children, and are thus outside the scope of our usual software interests, three others could almost have been sold as regular Sierra adventure games. So, I’ll use this article to look at this trio more closely — the first of which in particular is a true classic, in my opinion the best Sierra adventure of any stripe released during 1992.

Gano Haine and Jane Jensen

One of the ways in which Sierra stood out in a positive way from their peers was their willingness to employ women in the roles of writer and designer. At a time when almost no one else in the computer-games industry had any women in prominent creative roles, Sierra’s gender balance approached fifty-fifty at times.

Gano Haine, one of these female designers, was also a fine example of what we might call a second-generation adventure designer — someone who had seen the genre evolve from the perspective of a player in the 1980s, and was now ready to make her own mark on it in the 1990s. She took a roundabout route into the industry. A mother and junior-high teacher of fifteen years standing, hers was a prominent voice in the Gamers Forum on CompuServe in the latter 1980s. She wrote extensively there about the good and bad of each game she played. “I don’t think it’s something you do to yourself on purpose,” she said of her adventure-game addiction. “I soon realized that I needed to find a way to make it a profession or I’d starve.” Luckily, Sierra hired her, albeit initially only as an informal consultant. Soon, though, she moved to Oakhurst, California, to become a full-time Sierra game designer. That happened in 1991, just as the Discovery Series was being born.

Everyone among the designers, whether a wizened veteran or a fresh-faced recruit, was given an opportunity to pitch an idea for the new line. The stakes were high because those whose pitches were not accepted would quite probably wind up working in subservient roles on those projects which had been given the green light. Yet Haine was motivated by more than personal ambition when she offered up her idea. One teenage memory that had never left her came to the fore.

I worked a lot in children’s summer camps. There was a beach where we took the children every Wednesday, a beautiful beach, with rocks and glittering sand. I remember once we sat on the rocks and watched a whole school of porpoises jumping in the waves.

Anyway, the next season when we went there, the whole beach was covered with litter. As I walked down to the water with the kids, I looked down, and there was human sewage running across the sand and into the ocean. To see that beautiful place trashed was tremendously painful to me.

Thus was born EcoQuest: an adventure game meant to teach its young players about our precious, fragile natural heritage. After her idea was accepted, Haine was assigned Jane Jensen, a former Hewlett Packard programmer and frustrated novelist who had been hired at almost the same time as her, to work with her as co-designer. This meant that EcoQuest would not only have a female lead designer, but would become the first computer game in history that was the product of an all-female design team.

Thinking, as Sierra always encouraged their designers to do, in terms of an all-new game’s series potential, Haine and Jensen created a young protagonist named Adam. Adam’s father is an ecologist who spends his life traveling the globe dealing with various environment catastrophes, and his lonely son tags along, finding his friends among the animals living in the places they visit.

In light of the disturbing memory that had spawned the series, the first game had always been destined to take place in the ocean. Adam gets recruited by one of his anthropomorphic animal friends, a dolphin named Delphineus, to search for Cetus, the great sperm whale whom all of the other undersea creatures look to for guidance, but who’s now gone missing. (One guess which species of bipedal mammal is responsible…) The game was therefore given the subtitle of The Search for Cetus to join the EcoQuest series badge.

Sierra was by no means immune to the allure of the trendy, and certainly there was a whiff of just that to making this game at this time. The first international Earth Day had taken place on April 22, 1990, accompanied by a well-orchestrated media campaign that turned a spotlight — arguably a brighter spotlight than at any earlier moment in history — onto the many environmental catastrophes that were facing our planet even then. This new EcoQuest series was very much of a piece with Earth Day and the many other media initiatives it spawned. Still, the environmental message of EcoQuest isn’t just a gimmick; anthropomorphic sea creatures aside, it’s very much in scientific earnest. Haine and Jensen worked with the Marine Mammal Center of Sausalito, California, to get the science right, and Sierra even agreed to donate a portion of the profits to the same organization.

There’s a refreshing sweetness to the game that some might call naivete, an assumption that the most important single factor contributing to the pollution of our oceans is simple ignorance. For example, Adam meets a fishing boat at one point whose propeller lacks a protective cage to prevent it from injuring manatees and other ocean life. He devises a way of making such a cage and explains its importance to the fisherman, who’s horrified to learn the damage his naked propeller had been causing and more than happy to be given this solution. The only glaring exception to the rule of human ignorance rather than malice is the whaling ship that, it turns out, has harpooned poor Cetus.

The message of The Search for Cetus would thus seem to be that, while there are a few bad apples among us, most people want to keep our oceans as pristine as possible and want the enormous variety of species which live in them to be able to survive and thrive. Is this really so very naive? From my experience, at any rate, most people would react just the same as the fisherman in an isolated circumstance like his. It’s the political and financial interests that keep getting in the way, preventing large-scale change by inflaming passions that have little bearing on the practicalities at hand. Said interests are obviously outside the scope of this children’s adventure game, but the same game does serve as a reminder that many things in this world aren’t really so complicated in themselves; they’re complicated only because some among us insist on making them so, often for disingenuous purposes.

Yet The Search for Cetus is never as preachy as the paragraph I’ve just written. Jane Jensen would later go on to become one of the most famed adventure designers in history through her trilogy of supernatural mysteries starring the reluctant hero Gabriel Knight. The talent for characterization that would make those games so beloved is also present, at least in a nascent form, in The Search for Cetus. From an hysterical hermit crab to a French artiste of a blowfish, the personalities are all a lot of fun. “The characters’ voices and personalities are used to humanize their plight,” said Jensen, “giving a voice to the faceless victims of our carelessness.” Most critically, the characters all feel honestly cute or comic or both; The Search for Cetus never condescends to its audience. This is vitally important to the goal of getting the game’s environmental message across because children can smell adult condescension from a mile away, and it’s guaranteed to make them run screaming.

The techniques the game uses to educate in a natural-feeling interactive context are still worthy of study today. For example, a new verb is added to the standard Sierra control panel: “recycle.” This comes to function as a little hidden-object game-within-the-game, as you scan each screen for trash, getting a point for every piece that you recycle. Along the way, you’ll be astonished both by the sheer variety of junk that makes its way into our oceans and the damage it causes: plastic bags suffocate blowfish, organic waste causes algae to grow out of control, plastic six-pack rings entangle swordfish and dolphins, balloons get eaten by turtles, bleach poisons the water, tar and oil kill coral. In the non-linear middle section of the game, you solve a whole series of such problems for the ocean’s inhabitants, learning a great deal about them in the process. You even mark a major chemical spill for cleanup. The game refuses to throw up its hands at the scale of the damage humanity has done; it’s lesson is that, yes, the damage is immense, but we — and even you, working at the individual level — can do something about it. This may be the most important message of all to take away from The Search for Cetus.

The game isn’t hard by any means, but nor is it trivial. Jane Jensen:

Gano and I are both Sierra players, so when we started to design our first Sierra game, we designed a game that we would want to play. The puzzles in EcoQuest are traditional Sierra adventure-game puzzles, with an ecological and educational slant. You can’t die in the game, but other than that, it’s a real Sierra adventure. Because it is aimed at an older audience, the gameplay isn’t simplified like Mixed-Up Mother Goose or Fairy Tales. The puzzles are challenging, and lots of fun.

Thus the concessions to the children that were expected to become the primary audience take the form not of complete infantilization, but rather a lack of pointless deaths, a lack of of unwinnable states, and a number of optional puzzles which score points but aren’t required to finish the game. Many outside Sierra’s rather insular circle of designers, of course, would call all of these things — especially the first two — simply good design, full stop.

Released in early 1992, The Search for Cetus did well enough that Sierra funded a CD-ROM version with voice acting to supplement the original floppy-based version about a year later. And they funded a further adventure of young Adam as well, which was also released in early 1993. In Lost Secret of the Rainforest, he and his father head for the Amazon, where they confront the bureaucrats, poachers, and clear-cutters that threaten another vital ecosystem’s existence.

With this second game in the series, Sierra clearly opted for not fixing what isn’t broken: all of the educational approaches and program features we remember from the original, from the anthropomorphic animals to the recycling icon, make a return. There’s even a clever new minigame this time around, involving an “ecorder,” a handheld scanner that identifies plants and animals and other things you encounter and provides a bit of information about them. So, in addition to hunting for toxic trash, you’re encouraged to try to find everything in the ecorder’s database as you explore the jungle.

Unfortunately, though, it just doesn’t all come together as well as it did the first time around. Jane Jensen didn’t work on Lost Secret, leaving the entirety of the game in the hands of Gano Haine, who lacked her talent for engaging characters and dialog. She obviously strove mightily, but the results too often come across as labored, unfunny, and/or leaden. (Haine did mention in an interview that, responding to complaints from some quarters that the text in Search for Cetus was too advanced for some children, she made a conscious attempt to simplify the writing in the sequel; this may also have contributed to the effect I’m describing.)

The puzzle design as well is unbalanced, being fairly straightforward until a scene in the middle which seems to have been beamed in from another game entirely. This scene, in which Adam has been captured by a group of poachers and needs to escape, all but requires a walkthrough to complete for players of any age, combining read-the-author’s mind puzzles with the necessity for fiddly, pinpoint-precise clicking and timing. And then, after you clear that hurtle, the game settles back down into the old routine, running on to the end in its old straightforward manner, as if it nothing out of the way had ever happened. It’s deeply strange, and all by itself makes Lost Secret difficult to recommend with anything like the same enthusiasm as its predecessor. It’s not really a bad game on the whole — especially if you go into it forewarned about its one truly bad sequence — but it’s not a great one either.

The poacher named Slaughter has a pink-river dolphin carcass hanging over his door, book stands made from exotic horns, a jaguar-skin rug on his floor, and a footstool made from an elephant’s foot. Laying it on just a bit thick, perhaps?

And on that somewhat disappointing note, the EcoQuest series ended. The science behind the two games still holds up, and the messages they impart about environmental stewardship are more vital than ever. From the modern perspective, the infelicities in the games’ depiction of environmental issues mostly come in their lack of attention to another threat that has become all too clear in the years since they were made: the impact global warming is having on both our oceans and our rain forests. This lack doesn’t, however, invalidate anything that EcoQuest does say about ecological issues. The second game in particular definitely has its flaws, but together the two stand as noble efforts to use the magic of interactivity as a means of engagement with pressing real-world issues — the sort of thing that the games industry, fixated as it always has been on escapist entertainment, hasn’t attempted as much as it perhaps ought to. “Environmental issues are very emotional,” acknowledges Gano Haine, “and you inevitably contact people who have very deep disagreements about those issues.” Yet the EcoQuest series dares to present, in a commonsense but scientifically rigorous way, the impact some of our worst practices are having on our planet, and dares to ask whether we all couldn’t just set politics aside and try to do that little bit more to make the situation better.

In that spirit, I have to note that some of the most inspiring aspects of the EcoQuest story are only tangentially related to the actual games. A proud moment for everyone involved with the series came when Sierra received a letter from a group of kids in faraway Finland, who had played The Search for Cetus and been motivated to organize a cleanup effort at a polluted lake in their neighborhood. Meanwhile the research that went into making the games caused the entire company of Sierra Online to begin taking issues of sustainability more seriously. They started printing everything from game boxes to pay stubs on recycled paper; started reusing their shipping pallets; started using recycled disks; started sorting their trash and sending it to the recycler. They also started investigating the use of water-based instead of chemical-based coatings for their boxes, soybean ink for printing, and fully biodegradable materials for packing. No, they didn’t hesitate to pat themselves on the back for all this in their newsletter (which, for the record, was also printed on recycled paper after EcoQuest) — but, what the hell, they’d earned it.

The words they wrote in their newsletter apply more than ever today: “It’s not always easy, but it’s worth it. Saving the planet isn’t a passing fad. It’s critical, for our own future and for the future of our children.” One can only hope that the games brought some others around to the same point of view — and may even continue to do so today, for those few who discover them moldering away in some archive or other.

Pepper’s Adventures in Time, the third and final adventure game released as part of the Discovery Series, was a very different proposition from EcoQuest. Its original proposer wasn’t one of Sierra’s regular designers, but rather Bill Davis, the veteran television and film animator who had been brought in at the end of the 1980s to systematize the company’s production processes to suit a new era of greater audiovisual fidelity and exploding budgets. His proposal was for a series called Twisty History, which would teach children about the subject by asking them to protect history as we know it from the depredations wrought by the evil inventor of a time machine. Because Davis wasn’t himself a designer, the first game in the planned series became something of a community effort, a collaboration that included Gano Haine and Jane Jensen as well as Lorelei Shannon and Josh Mandel. (That is, for those tracking gender equality in real time, three female designers and one male.)

Lockjaw has been captured by a spoiled brat of a Royalist!

The star of the series, as sketched by Bill Davis and filled in by the design team, is a girl named Pepper Pumpernickel, a spunky little thing who doesn’t take kindly to the opposite sex telling her what she can and can’t do. Her costar is Lockjaw, her pet dog. Davis:

We’d recently lost a dog to leukemia, had gone through an extended period of mourning, and had decided it was time to adopt. So my wife and son headed for our favorite adoption agency, the local animal shelter. They came home with a German shepherd/terrier mix. The terrier turned out to be Staffordshire terrier. For those in the dark, as we were, Staffordshire terrier is synonymous with “pit bull.” Anyway, she turned out to be a lovable little mutt with a bit of an attitude. Thirty pounds of attitude, to be precise. Well, as I was sitting at the drawing board designing characters for Twisty, she shoved her attitude up my behind and into the game proposal.

Lockjaw threatens at times to steal the game from Pepper — as, one senses, he was intended to. The player even gets to control him rather than Pepper from time to time, using his own unique set of doggie verbs, like a nose icon for sniffing, a paw icon for digging, and a mouth icon for eating — or biting. It’s clear that the designers really, really want you to be charmed by their fierce but lovable pooch, but for the most part he is indeed as cute as they want him to be, getting himself and Pepper into all kinds of trouble, only to save the day when the plot calls for it.

Ben Franklin’s doctrine of sober industriousness has been corrupted into hippie indolence. It’s up to Pepper to right the course of history as we know it.

Otherwise, the theme of this first — and, as it would turn out, only — game in the series is fairly predictable for a work of children’s history written in this one’s time and place. Pepper travels back to “Colonial” times, that semi-mythical pre-Revolutionary War period familiar to every American grade-school student, when Ben Franklin was flying his kite around, Thomas Paine was writing about the rights of the citizen, and the evil British were placing absurd levies on the colonists’ tea supply. (Perish the thought!)

While its cozily traditional depiction of such a well-worn era of history doesn’t feel as urgent or relevant as the environmental issues presented by EcoQuest, the game itself is a lot of fun. The script follows the time-tested cartoon strategy of mixing broad slapstick humor aimed at children with subtler jokes for any adults who might be playing along: referencing Monty Python, poking fun at the tedious professors we’ve all had to endure. Josh Mandel had worked as a standup comedian before coming to Sierra, and his instinct for the punchline combined with Jane Jensen’s talent for memorable characterization can’t help but charm.

The puzzle design too is pretty solid, with just a couple of places that could have used a bit more guidance for the player and/or a bit more practical thinking-through on the part of the designers. (Someone really should have told the designers that fresh tomatoes and ketchup aren’t remotely the same thing when it comes to making fake blood…) And, once again, the games does a good job of blending the educational elements organically into the whole. This time around, you have a “truth” icon you can use to find out what is cartoon invention and what is historically accurate; the same icon provides more background on the latter. You use what you have (hopefully) learned in this way to try to pass a quiz that’s presented at the end of each chapter, thus turning the study of history into a sort of scavenger hunt that’s more entertaining than one might expect, even for us jaded adults.

What had been planned as the beginning of the Twisty History series was re-badged as the one-off Pepper’s Adventures in Time just before its release in the spring of 1993. This development coincided with the end of the Discovery Series as a whole, only two years after it had begun. Sierra had just acquired a Seattle software house known as Bright Star Technology, who were henceforward to constitute their official educational division. Bright Star appropriated the character of Dr. Brain, but the rest of the budding collection of series and characters that constituted the Discovery lineup were quietly retired, and the designers who had made them returned to games meant strictly to entertain. And so passed into history one of the most refreshing groups of games ever released by Sierra.

(Sources: the book Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games, and Hidden Objects by Anastasia Salter; Sierra’s newsletter InterAction of Spring 1992, Fall 1992, Winter 1992, and June 1993; Compute! of January 1993; Questbusters of March 1992; materials in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play. And my thanks go to Corey Cole, who took the time to answer some questions about this period of Sierra’s history from his perspective as a developer there.

Feel free to download EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus, EcoQuest: Lost Secret of the Rainforest, and Pepper’s Adventures in Time from this site, in a format that will make them as easy as possible to get running using your platform’s version of DOSBox.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/the-sierra-discovery-adventures/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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baseballbatcrossnecklace-blog · 6 years

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Baseball Bat Cross Necklace

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britesparc · 3 years

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Weekend Top Ten #480

Top Ten Videogame Logos

I like games. I’ve been playing them for a long time; since the 1980s, which was over seven years ago. In that time I’ve seen many ages of gaming come and go – remember full motion video? – but one thing I have noticed is that game packaging has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. From large sturdy cardboard boxes the size of two hardback books back in the early nineties, to slim ‘n sexy DVD cases around the turn of the millennium, to – well – absolutely nothing these days as we oxidise games from the air. And one of the things that used to – and, I guess, still can do – make a game’s box art really pop was a sexy, elaborate, or otherwise just really frickin’ cool logo.

Now, by “logo” I’m basically talking about the design and typeface of the title itself. I don’t really mean the lambda sign from Half-Life, or – to step outside specific games for a second – the famous Ghostbusters symbol. Some games do actually end up with iconography incorporated into their title design, and you might see a little bit of it here; but for the sake of argument, I’m using “logo” to mean “title”, and how pretty that title is.

And I gotta say, some games had very, very pretty titles.

Now, I know, from research, that 8-bit games released in the eighties often had wild and wacky logos. However, there’s precious little of that on my list, because I didn’t really notice it at the time. I can appreciate it now, looking back, but it meant nothing to me forty years ago because, well, I wasn’t born or was simply far too young to notice. I didn’t really pay attention to box art until I had my Amiga, and that was about 1990. So there’s precious little here that’s genuinely old. That being said, I do seriously think that the golden age of logo design was that late eighties/early nineties period, as we transitioned from 8-bit to 16-bit home computers, with a legacy that continued into the PC dominance years of the mid-to-late-nineties. I think at this point the industry benefited from beginning to have certain established patterns and artists, but was still loose enough to allow a huge deal of experimentation and a feel of general lawlessness. It was in this era that Roger Dean reigned supreme, a vastly talented artist whose airbrush style defined the Amiga 500 for me. His work can be seen on this list, and – surprise – it’s at number one. Dean was so good that not only did his artwork grace dozens of boxes, but he also designed the greatest logo for a game developer of all time.

(Just as an aside: I had a lot of Psygnosis games for the Amiga. I remember vividly my cousin and I would desperately try to parse the wording of that logo – “Is it a P-S-V? P-S-V-C?” – during the brief time it appeared on screen whilst the game loaded. Ah, those exotic early years, full of wonder and possibility… but I digress)

Anyway, there were loads of bright, bold, colourful logos in those days. I think they mostly wanted box art that leaped out from a crowded computer shop shelf, and generally there was probably an assumption that the audience would be either young or nerdy, so there was no outward desire to be elegant or minimalist. Huge, chunky logos were popular; large text, airbrushed artwork, characters incorporated into the logo itself; plenty of shading and embossing effects were used to make a logo stand out proud on the box.

As time wore on, and the target audience aged and maybe wanted to appear a bit cooler, logos seemed to grow smaller. 3D extruded block text was replaced with simple white font work and elegant design. As such, into this new millennium, there are very few really exciting logos nowadays. Even my beloved Half-Life has a really minimalist design, which works, yeah, but it’s not exactly an all-timer. We do still get some very good logos now and again; I’ll go to bat for Halo any day of the week, but even that is twenty years old now. BioShock’s was pretty cool, too, with its rusted brass façade, but even that’s, what, 14 at this point? Blimey.

I think the evolution of the game logo can best be illustrated by comparing the original Doom logo to the one used in the 2016 remake. Vibrant colour versus flat white. I know which I prefer.

So there we are; my ten favourite game logos. And as these are game logos, I’ve banned anything that’s adapted from external media, whether it’s a Star War or Spider-Man or even Cyberpunk 2077 (which does have a cracking logo but is more or less a version of the one used in the original role-playing game). Anyway. Let’s have at it.

Shadow of the Beast (1989): not the first Roger Dean box art, but arguably the most famous, and certainly the one that caught my attention. Well, actually, it was Beast II in 1990 that I saw, but I’m picking this original logo as it’s a bit cleaner without the “II”. Anyway, what’s not to like? Dean’s fantasy-metal style is evident, with a logo that’s kind of threatening to look at, the pointed curls descending from the letters connoting teeth or claws, but the brushed, metallic detailing giving it a technological bent. Supremely cool, freakish, and a style carried very strongly into the game (and moreso the sequel).

Elite (1984): a rare example of a relatively minimalist piece of box art for the eighties, but all the same this logo is something else. Huge and bold, carved out of solid gold, its eagle wings suggesting the power of flight whilst the strangely-crowned head suggests something almost majestic or godlike. It’s the perfect logo for a game about space exploration, yet it also has echoes of Nazi symbolism or even Judge Dredd, giving the game a subtle sense of menace.

Lemmings (1991): unlike the other two, this was a fun, bouncy game, whose childish, cartoony stylings hid a dark and fierce puzzling heart (and also supremely distressing scenes of Lemmings getting mutilated). But this logo is beautiful, its jolly, chunky green typeface reflecting both pastoral beauty and the hair of the little critters; the misaligned letters reminiscent of the undulating hills the levels hint at (but don’t actually contain, particularly). And we get the heads of the Lemming poking out, squarely cementing them as an important part of the experience, their character the defining characteristic of the game itself and all its associated art.

Doom (1993): a seminal moment in gaming, and a seminal logo too. Surprisingly colourful for a game about the ravages of hell, this is a bold and bright bit of typography, the extruded letters suggestive of the 3D nature of the game itself; the almost terracotta tiles meshing with the complex mechanical geometry on the letters reminiscent of the game’s merging of the supernatural with the highly technological. And there’s the pointed extremities of the word, directed down like fangs, hinting at the horrors and dangers to come. Quite simply brilliant.

Minecraft (2009): the most recent game on the list, but its logo is almost a throwback. Thick, square, blocky letters reflect the cuboid nature of the gameworld; the angle away from the camera suggests height and importance, subtly hinting at the scale of the game itself. This is an iconic piece of iconography, instantly recognisable by children – to the extent that trying to draw a logo like Minecraft, or recreate the Minecraft logo itself, is fairly common in our house. I also like that one of the letters appears to be a Creeper.

Pac-Man (1980): and here we have the oldest logo! But so iconic. The chunky font, with letters comprised of thick shapes, devoid of some of their detailing, is cool enough; despite being released at the beginning of the eighties it has an almost sixties vibe. The “C”, of course, looks like Pac-Man himself. But what really makes it art is the offset colours, giving it the air of a misprint or of looking at 3D without glasses. It’s a deeply cool effect and helps make the logo feel timeless.

Dizzy (1987): another oldie, making its first appearance in ‘87’s Dizzy: The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure, although the logo design was very slightly tweaked and refined by the follow year’s Treasure Island Dizzy. Simplistic 3D block letters, but what makes it sing is that they’re dizzy; linework suggests them spinning, but it’s how the perspective differs from letter to letter, giving them a confused and discordant feel, that gives it just that little bit extra.

Zool (1992): perhaps a lesser-known and less iconic logo, unless you were a huge Amiga game in the early nineties. The airbrushing to give it a metallic, embossed effect is very of the moment, but what I love is the eyes. The double-O is rendered as Zool’s cross-looking eyes in his ninja bandana. On one hand, making the Os eyes is rather first-base, but partly it’s how they’re executed that I like; it’s also just because the big angry eyes are rather funny.

Pokémon (1996): first appearing on the cover of Pokémon Red and Green in ’96, the general Pokémon logo is a beaut. Again, it gives the appearance of simplicity, but the execution is complex. Chunky, friendly lettering, yellow like kid favourite Pikachu; kids’ll love that. The blue outline and drop shadow help it pop and give it a subtle, almost 3D effect. And the letters are discordant; rather than a regimented logo, it’s all over the shop, different sizes and weights of letter, all jostling for position on the page. It perfectly encapsulates the tone of the game.

Deus Ex (2000): I’ve more-or-less steered clear of the sci-fi design of “metallic logo that’s otherwise just the title”. I like logos with a bit of something extra; hence no Perfect Dark or Halo, despite those being great in and of themselves. Deus Ex takes the spot, though, partly because the letters seem built out of something, cobbled together in a dystopic, cyberpunk-y way. As you play a cyborg, this feels apt. And then there’s the logo itself, a towering corporate-looking edifice, a brilliant juxtaposition of two shapes that together suggest a D and an X. It’s slick and shiny, and is present in the game itself as a gently rotating loading screen, reflective of the advanced 3D graphics the game possessed.

Honourable mentions go to Theme Park, with a logo that’s suitably corporate and also reflective of a roller coaster, and Quake, just for that really cool nail-through-the-Q effect.

#top ten #games #gaming #logos #artwork #titles #box art #retro games

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ryodan · 7 years

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Every team 7 ship VS NaruHina

To the clique that argued with me in the saltiest of ways, I dedicate to you my first ever anti nh post. I hope you think twice about telling people to kill themselves over your self insert and stop being a pimple on society’s ass.

Let’s start with the one that gets on your tits the most

Naruhina VS Narusaku (The Heaven and The Earth), alternatively titled : stop being angry he liked the hot chick and stop pretending Sakura isnt kushinas parallel

Whenever you feel the need to drag Sakura remember your origin story, @Lunaneko14. Don’t forget your years of defending SS to ride on it’s back lest ns happens

Your ship was here, while the ns fandom had this..no amount of sakura bitterness will change that, @mythicalheartbeat

Ya boy that she was gorgeous from before team 7’s creation

Before you call Sakura selfish while gratifying Hintata, @fallingforkonoha, remember your void eyed princess entered a fight Tsunade knew not to interfere in knowing she can’t do anything to confess her feelings (at the perfect timing too, really) saying this about herself

A sentiment that continued until her almost final appearance in the manga she took up less than 1% of, as she took a moment to appreciate Narutos, big capable hands in front of her dead cousin . hand holding in front of lavish scenery is so sweet

VS Sakura, the selfish monster who went in knowing she might get hurt, for him, because she cared greatly about his physical and emotional safety

Remember all those times Hinata just cared so much about his dreams, all those times she was there when he needed her

I love how she always believed in him, unlike Sakura. What a bitch, remember that comment she made in chapter 3 out of 700? Awful.

This QUEEN vs this BITCH, amirite @blackotaku97?

You know whats better than stealing someones ninja way, walmart naruto with a nuclear mushroom cloud of a head? Supporting your precious peoples ninja ways and finding your own.

A common argument that gets thrown around : Hinata was ALWAYS there for him

Sorry, I must have missed her in Narutos speech of the people who saved him from his loneliness and pain

I really like how she sees him miserable and doesn’t help him it’s the epitome of always there

Most of all, you nasty trash can excuse of a human being, I want you to get your head out of your asshole for just 3 seconds and accept that this happened

You can’t change what’s been set in stone

No amount of yapping with a filler movie can change the past. But you know what? Bitches bark and yap, that’s no surprise

No amount of yapping about the twin lions fist, a head branch hyuga jutsu being hinatas own changes facts, @commanderkurama

My fav part of the pain arc was when Naruto never asked Hinata about her confession, or her safety. I also particularly like Narutos first ever hug that someone else initiated

Drag Sakura all you want but remember when you were here after 2013

Narusakus had this before 2007

Remember that while your self insert was fainting and going on suicide missions

Sakura and Naruto had already built a relationship based on mutual support, respect, love and equal footing (weather platonic or romantic, love is love). A relationship where they both believed in each other, supported each other, had each others back, laughed with each other, cried with each other, had actual chemistry with each other. Remember that the next time you whine about people loving this ship instead of your talked about the weather and clothes ship in an entire movie dedicated to them couple.

Sakura supports your faves so much that no wonder you want to debunk her heroine status and reduce her to a side supporting character that matches your background fav

Hiding her tears so she doesn’t hurt him!11! reminds me of that time she fake confessed to keep him, kakashi and the rest of the world safe even if at the cost of killing her beloved one to save him from falling into deeper darkness. Sakura is so selfish, no wonder everyone in Japan hates NS

Know your place, Linda. Keep your scumbag-kun and the girl 2ch calls Hinabuta (quick Japanese crash course, that means hinapig), I like my Naruto and Sakura-chan just fine.

SasuSaku (The Hawk and The Cherry Blossom), alternatively titled: You rode on my back for years because your ship wouldn’t have had a hope in high hell if it were not for these two

Lunaneko, I think someone told me you said we try to compete with your shit ship.

It’s hard hearing you over making ship history

While Naruto was busy ignoring Hinatas general existence because she has the presence of the trash can in the sasusaku confession scene Sasuke (a boy who’s been thirsted after fresh from mikotos womb was already flustered and blushing towards sakura

You know what development is? Starting off with an irritable boy with 6 years worth of survivor guilt and manipulation weighing on his shoulders, saying something incredibly ignorant that rightfully pisses him the fuck off but still having him worry enough about you to stay with you to ensure your safety even at the risk of elimination

Aside from giving naruto his first hug, she gave sasuke his in years. Apparently Linkin park was so affected by human touch that he opened up to her about something he’s been repressing and isolating himself over for years. Going so far as stating ‘At that time, I was crying’ and even explaining his entire stance in the story ‘I am avenger’

Development is going from this look

To this look

From this

To this

And that wink too. There’s more chemistry in that wink than the entire NH movie

Remember that time Sakura helped Sasuke develop from a boy who had a childhood trauma based fear of stronger opponents with blood lust to a boy who fought Orochimaru bravely and grew 10x times in a single scene? All while she developed herself? And grew from an agreeable sasuke fangirl to a respected team mate? Y’all wanna compare the war hand hold scene to this? The war scene could have had potential if it ended better lmao

Why was he fighting?

Protecting her seems like an odd concept to you? Sasuke can’t relate :/ Naruto aint even wanna walk hinata home what joke is this

Remember that time Sasuke almost killed a guy in the forest of death? No, not broke Zakus arm

Sasuke was willing to kill for Sakura and I hope you know sasuke’s stance on killing. Where’s Naruto having this much care for hinata I don’t see it my competition is really lagging in this ‘race’

Remember that irritable boy? This boy crawling to her for comfort is a boy who grew alongside her, naruhina who?

You know what she did? She stayed up all night tending to her team mates, falling for konoha. Theres a fine line between cheating your crush at the risk of your team and staying up all night in a place titled the forest of death tending to their wounds at a mere bud age of 12

Wait no, bud who? She bloomed, all thanks to being inspired by the holy trinity (whos front and center? Louder for the people in the back, this is inspiration not just wanting to be with someone) and her own determination to protect her loved ones

Mutual development? Fuck me up. Here is an emotional maturation moment for BOTH of them

I love all of these mutual nh moments in the manga, all 0.0005 of them

She gave rise to a gentle protective side of him, so much so that he has used polite Japanese speaking to her before. The databook even states he saw her as someone he needed to protect. people ship ships for that special spark.The only spark hinata ever got was her wet dream from holding narutos hand, which she awoke from when she tripped on rock-kun

Naruto can’t tell apart true love from ramen? Canon Naruto can’t relate

I love that panel of jealous Naruto it’s great, oh wait its not him

Compete with Nh over what, blackotaku? Where is your naruto @ hinata speech I must need new glasses

Your bitch ass tried using you’re annoying as an argument and it’s so funny because imagine thinking he’s coming from a place of hate after he was willing to consciously give up his revenge for her safety and him saying what he said in their first encounter with a smile after pretending he didn’t remember their first meeting

Followed by this, the moment Japanese fans hailed the most emotional of part 1

You wish you were ss lmao, you wish you made it to 44 volumes out of 72

Compete with nh? On what? Getting stronger for your loved ones?

Chemistry?

Mutual support?

Their feelings are connected, their kid is the physical manifestation of their love not the screw that keeps them together..Her husband is travelling through space and time to keep them and the entire world safe. Naruto is 2 meters away, out there with a limitless bay of chakra unable to get clones to do his work for him.. anti-sakura-pro-hinata, at least when sasuke came home after 6 years of much harder work..he had dinner with his family. Maybe it’s because his daughter was raised well and it was pleasant being around someone who isn’t a brat.

Being intuitive to each other?

Oh lmao remember how Sakura was the only person who against all odds knew sasuke would leave the village?

Angst to keep it interesting?

Call me when Gaiden isn’t one of Kishimotos best selling works. Call me when your ship actually wants to spend time with each other.

Where Narutos ultimate expression of love at? Is is sleeping on the couch? Boruto novel states sasusaku is having so much sex that sakuras skin is glossing, meanwhile naruto has erectile dysfunction and a shriveled dick by age 32

Sit down, there is not much competition. We keep the SS Japanese penguins, the Jump Fiesta sign attraction, the popularity, the ambitious kid and the moments, the canon selfless love only for the purpose of saving your lover and you keep the canon selfish love for the purpose of a confession and the banana who wishes its father dies and the mom who just cried.

But remember who made you

SasuNaru (Yin and Yang), alternatively titled: having black hair isn’t enough to make naruto obsessed.

The garbage can @anti-sakura-pro-hinata blog that attempted to call Sasuke trash because her fictional boyfriend was obsessed with him seems to forget Sasuke didn’t ask for it. Naruto needed a pep talk from fillermaru and fillerkura to chase after hinata yet chased after sasuke, even begged authorities to not kill him purely because he is his ‘friend’ for 3 years. He trained with him in mind, a fact so obvious that Kakashi pointed out Sasuke is the driving force behind Narutos training. Sasuke, and the image he had of team 7 in his mind. An image so important to him that the thought of it being tarnished by Sasukes absence made him have a panic attack.

He went after sasuke to save his best friend and for them all to be happy and smiling together, im sorry he didn’t include Hinata in his fantasies but Team 7 is kind of booked..we only have room for neo sanins, vip people and connected hearts here. If youre jealous your self insert doesn’t matter,, I don’t know, make up fanfiction where she appears in more than 38 pages of the manga

#parallels

Hinata is canonically narutos most important person!11!! where? Must be on fight on top of the moon land. Be happy Naruto went rampant when his seal was weak, Konoha was destroyed, Jirayah was murdered, Kakashi was killed, Tsunade was hurt and then Hinatas ass decided to risk him chakra depletion, death and losing himself. But remember who made him go rampant with a strong seal at the slight mention of a name

The boy he wanted the acknowledgement of the most because he admired him so much that being like him was his goal

Yet when he got it was still like ‘later, emo asshole. Just get your shit together first.’

Why? Because he loved his friend so much that understanding him and fighting (literally fighting) the fated hatred in his heart mattered more to him than the ego he wanted stroked since age 7

What does that mean? I don’t know man. They trained together, laughed together, rivaled each other, were petty to each other and before they knew it they were inseparable. Back then and always

@remedialaction, come after sasuke because your self insert isn’t noticing the shy girl hes friendzoned later. A huge part of Narutos development was heavily tied to Sasuke, lets not ignore the fact that sasuke being a good team mate who put the 3 man cell idea into his head before Kakashi even told them about team work is the reason why they even became ninjas

Remove and erase Sasukes victim status, his entire arc, motivations, fate and position in the story because he is in the way of a ship when he isn’t the only reason Narutos dick was alive for Hinata

But no Sasuke is a bad person, no matter what the narrative and facts are because nardo is obsessed with him

Praise hinata for her naruto-kun became my goal speech when you acknowledge

‘I knew you were always alone. I felt better knowing there was someone like me..i wanted to hang out with you. It just made me happy! But I couldn’t..i was jealous of how skilled you were, so I turned you into a rival. I wanted to be just like you. I started with nothing but I finally made a connection. We went on missions as team 7, and I kept chasing you, wanting to be just as strong, just as cool. Im really glad I met you!’

Bring sasuke down and praise hakuna hintatas for saying the same thing. ‘Naruto kun saved me’ vs ‘Thanks to you I found salvation’

And weep over how sad your ship looks like next to two arms connected by love (platonic or not love is love), fate, tears and literal blood.

But no, what is yin and yang, light and shadows, love and hate, 2 lonely people watching over each other because ‘finally someone understands my solitude’ as a dynamic in comparison to meek girl and loud guy who could have voiced his attraction eons ago?! It’s funny, even with the canon context of SNS being indra and ashuras chakra incarnate and a brotherly bond, it still works better and is a hella lot more interesting than NH

The scenes showing Naruto and Sasukes iconic team work have more chemistry than naruhinas entire manga time, movie time, filler time and hell even fan art and fan fiction time. I know you're jealous because sasuke is well loved, but show some respect to Borutos mother.

Kakasaku (Hot and hotter), alternatively titled: Get your head out of your ass

Kakasaku is pedophilia!!

It’s bad!11! because my subjective opinion said so!11!

Not as bad as nh

People ship adult Kakasaku for a whole lot more meaningful stuff than a self insert ship

Kakashi never looked down on her since shippuuden. He acknowledged her strength and how far shes come from being the whiny 12 year old he used to teach. He always knew by part two that she’d be great and he respected her a lot. He saw her kind heart and praised her for it and for her selfless love. They grew to become fellow comrades in the war who had equal respect for each other. What can y’all say about NH? This is a joke.

I want to stay in my lane, but the lanes converge when you make ugly personal attacks at people and insult ships and characters to elevate your own shit show. Drag Team 7 into your ugliness again and I expose your insecure ass.

Y’all can’t touch this aesthetic. Come at these kids when Naruto doesn’t remember them when he’s eating a bento (Something special made by someone you love-sarada) made by his wife.

Special thanks to @uzumakura for tht good ns wank, @sakuraharunos for that good sns wank, @chiwawha for her opinion on ks and me for my patience

#narusaku #sasusaku #kakasaku #sasunarusasu #pro team 7 #sasuke uchiha #sakura haruno #naruto uzumaki #kakashi hatake #anti hinata #anti naruhina #anti anti sasusaku #anti anti narusaku #anti anti sasunaru #they all have me blocked #lmao

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epacer · 5 years

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Classmates

Kathy Najimy, Class of 1975

Kathy Najimy on fighting for equality, “Hocus Pocus,” and performing with the American Pops Orchestra

Kathy Najimy enjoys playing games. Literally.

“For about three years, when I was living in San Diego,” she says of her early days trying to break into show business, “I paid the rent by going on Wheel of Fortune, Family Feud, and The $10,000 Pyramid.”

Years later, of course, Najimy, beloved for her roles as Sister Mary Patrick in Sister Act, part of a trio of witch siblings in Hocus Pocus, and as Peggy Hill in Mike Judge’s stunning, astonishingly heartfelt animated sitcom King of the Hill, appears on game shows as a celebrity star. Her favorite is Pyramid, which she calls “a brilliantly designed” game show, as winning it relies on talent. “There’s not a lot of luck,” she says. “It’s heaven for me. Any time that they call me up to go do the $100,000 Pyramid — especially because I get to be around the really, really cute Michael Strahan — I say ‘Yes!'”

If game shows are Najimy’s preferred form of celebrity leisure, then activism is her driving lifeforce. A card-carrying, outspoken feminist (she’s pals with Gloria Steinem, who officiated her marriage to musician Dan Finnerty in 1998), Najimy has been aligned with nearly every liberal rights organization in modern history, from PETA and Planned Parenthood to HRC and PFLAG. Her passion for what she feels is right and good and just flows naturally and abundantly from her, and she speaks of change and justice with a ferocious, emphatic charge.

“I have been a feminist since I was 14 years old,” she says over the course of two phone conversations. “And feminism dedicates itself to the equality and respect of all people.”

Najimy will appear as a special guest at this Saturday’s American Pops Orchestra concert, “I Am What I Am: The Music of Jerry Herman,” alongside Paige Davis of Trading Spaces, Broadway star Mauricio Martinez (see page 32), RuPaul’s Drag Race contender Alexis Michelle, Tracy Lynn Olivera, and Paul Roeckell, and was surprised when she got the call to appear.

“My agent got the request,” she says. “They said, ‘Does Kathy happen to be free on this weekend.’ And I was. And other than what’s going on there right now with the administration, I love Washington, D.C. I said, ‘Listen you guys, despite what you think from a couple of old movies that I used to do, where I kind of pretend comedy sing, I don’t really sing.’ And they said, ‘It’s okay, don’t worry. We’ll make it work.’ They were just so adorable and so persistent and convincing that I said sure. I think it will be really fun.”

“It’s so funny,” says APO’s founder and conductor, Luke Frazier. “She walked into the first rehearsal and said, ‘I’m not really a singer. I’m more of a talk-singer.’ We get done with rehearsal. I’m like, ‘No, Kathy. You can actually sing.’ She’s just very modest about it.”

Frazier has chosen a few special numbers for Najimy — among them one of Herman’s greatest chestnuts: “Hello, Dolly!” She’ll also sing “Bosom Buddies,” a raucous duet from Mame, with Davis and “The Man in the Moon” from the same show.

“So many of Jerry Herman’s female leads are truly larger than life,” says Frazier. “They all have an element of comedy, but there’s a lot of depth to them. Kathy has played so many roles where she shows off not only her comedic side, but as a person, there’s so much depth in the causes she cares about. Since she spends so much of her time on activism, it’s kind of that great duality. She brings so much to the roles.”

For her part, Najimy is thrilled to be a part of Saturday’s APO event. Each of APO’s shows are unique to their one evening, hand-crafted by Frazier to be eclectic, entertaining, musically invigorating, and fully adventurous. All the performers have a moment in the spotlight, culminating in a powerful all-hands-on-deck finale, and each APO show is calculated to evoke a wide range of emotional responses — from boisterous laughter to some serious heartstring-tugging.

“Every single APO show is original,” says Frazier. “We create them. They’ve never been done before. They’re never performed again. It’s one night. It’s a special event. That’s what makes us unique.”

Najimy, for her part, is up for the challenge. “I did a lot of musicals growing up — I did a lot in community theater,” she says. “I sung badly on purpose in Sister Act. And I sang backup for Bette in Hocus Pocus. But none of it was solo performer singing.”

Najimy, whose current projects include producing a documentary exploring why more than 50% of white women voted for Donald Trump, plans to incorporate some of her ideologies into the evening, but she won’t go into specifics. “I have about three songs,” she says, “and before each song, I’m going to talk a little bit about — not in a serious way — just where we are, that we’re in D.C., and how close we are to the haunted house. And also how much women have come forward and made strides in the [House] last year, which is really heartening.

“Of course,” she adds, “I would have liked for us to take the Senate as well.”

METRO WEEKLY: You are a well-known, amazing advocate for many issues, but specifically, with regard to the LGBTQ community, you took a stance for us as a celebrity long before many others. You were one of the first. And I think that’s remarkable. You didn’t have to do that. So the obvious question is, why?

KATHY NAJIMY: Well, I’ll tell you. I’m a feminist. And as a feminist, I believe in equal rights, equality, and justice for all people. So when there is a community of people who are being treated less than citizens because of who they love, that makes no sense to me. I believe everybody has the ability to love anybody. And I feel like there’s a spectrum between one and a hundred and we all fit somewhere there. Love is love, you know? And I believe that with all my heart. So I thought it was very unjust when I was a young activist in the ’70s and ’80s that anybody would be persecuted. That made no sense to me. I was happy to — and honored — to help any way that I could.

Also, in the ’80s, I was in college when the AIDS epidemic came to light. I’ve been sort of an ambassador for people with AIDS for many, many years. AIDS is the only disease where the people who have it are persecuted. If you have any other major disease, you’re surrounded by love and doctors wanting to help. People with AIDS not only had found themselves with a life-threatening disease, but also with no support. And that broke my heart.

MW: It’s different now, though.

NAJIMY: Different, yes. But when we needed it not to be different, it wasn’t. I mean, there’s a lot of people living healthy lives with HIV/AIDS now, thank goodness, but we lost way too many for no reason other than homophobia and hate.

MW: Did you at all worry at all about what your outspokenness, especially in the early years, might do to your career?

NAJIMY: Oh, it certainly has harmed my career, but I don’t care at all. I am an activist and human person first. Business is not everything, it’s not my life. There were certainly people — agents and such — who said if you speak out about this, then these people won’t cast you. And I said I respect their choice not to cast me. That is their choice and that’s fine. I don’t wish to be cast by them. And I respect my choice to be an advocate and to speak out and do one of the things in my life that is most precious to me.

Certainly, there have been studios that have asked me not to talk about radical notions. It’s their right to ask me and my right to decide to. You should hear some of the requirements they make. But isn’t it great to be a troublemaker? [Laughs.] It’s so sexy! I love it.

MW: You’re definitely my kind of troublemaker. We live in a country founded on different points of view. Yet, I often find myself feeling the opposing point of view is wrong.

NAJIMY: Yeah, but I respect their right to say it. I fight for their right to say what I don’t believe in. I don’t fight for their right to legislate against human conditions and human choices. But freedom of speech is freedom of speech, and we all don’t have the same opinions.

MW: I look over your career and think how marvelous it’s been so far. One of my favorite shows you did was King of the Hill. Peggy Hill was just such a rich, full-bodied animated character, largely through your interpretation of her. The show poked fun at conservative values, but not in a mean way — it was more instructive. Mike Judge found a way to appeal to both liberals and conservatives and provide insights.

NAJIMY: I’ve got to tell you — I’ve been on a lot of jobs and my thirteen seasons on King of the Hill were among my favorite. It’s really hard to find integrity like that. Every single Monday on our doorstep came a script that was just so funny and so relevant and so brave. I loved the writing on King of the Hill. I also liked that it was very collaborative — we weren’t separate from the writers. We were all at the table read together. We all got to put in our point of view. It was very respectful of the actors and what we wanted to bring to the characters. There was no preciousness about anything. And, to tell the truth, the greatest part is that there was no hair, no makeup, no line memorizing, no 6 a.m. calls. No wardrobe fittings. You just showed up for a couple of hours and recorded. It’s something I’m so proud of — I love King of the Hill. Every moment of it was just a joy and I’m a complainer, so there you go.

Najimy

MW: One of your biggest hits was Hocus Pocus, which just celebrated its 25th Anniversary. Disney made a big deal about it. Can you briefly talk about your experience making it?

NAJIMY: I’ve made 30 films, and you never know which ones are going to stick, which ones are going to become really popular. You just sort of make them. So the experience of it was only very singular to me because I had been a huge fan — like a crazy sycophant fan — of Bette Midler’s growing up.

I had all of her posters. I had all of her records. I had several incidents where I would run backstage at the Hollywood Bowl with guards running after me, and opening all the rooms until I found her in the room. I had one where I found where she lived in New York, when I visited New York in the ’70s, and left a message with her housekeeper. I even had one where I sang to her.

MW: That’s something.

NAJIMY: Well, I worked for a singing telegram company in San Diego. So my boyfriend at the time, Greg Barnes, who is now a big fancy Broadway costume designer, had designed costumes for a junior theater’s Alice in Wonderland. He gave me the “I’m late, I’m late” bunny costume. We took the bus up the Hollywood Bowl where Bette was performing and I pretended to the officials that I had a singing telegram for her after the show. But it really was just from me.

So, I hopped backstage, and in all these pseudo-celebrities were in Bette’s room surrounding her. And I sang a song and handed her the telegram that said, “From Kathy.” And she said, “Kathy? Kathy who?” And I said, “I don’t know, but I love you, too!” And I hopped out and fainted.

So for all of those experiences, plus more that we can’t go into today, getting a call from Jeffrey Katzenberg, after I did Sister Act, who said, “I want to offer you a role in a movie called Hocus Pocus to play Bette Midler’s sister” — that was really a full fate turnaround. An interesting highlight of my life.

MW: Did you ever reveal to Bette that the singing bunny was you?

NAJIMY: I didn’t want to freak her out, so I would slowly let her know things. Like, “Oh, you wore those shoes in Chicago in March of ’78. No, no, you didn’t sing that at that concert. You sang this other song.” She would always sort of look at me side-eyed until one day I said, “Remember that girl who ran backstage and got pulled off by the guards?” And she said, “Yes.” I go, “And then, remember that bunny?” And she said, “Yes.” I said, “Well, I’m the bunny.”

MW: What did she say?

NAJIMY: I think it was just a very slow sort of like, “Oh God, I’m making a movie with a crazy person” into very good castmates and friends.

MW: What was it like working with her?

NAJIMY: It was great. She’s tough and she knows what she wants, and so am I, and there was a lot involved in Hocus Pocus. There was dancing and singing and children and animals, and I mean, it was just flying, it was a lot, but it didn’t do well the first weekend. It didn’t do well at all. It just took years and years, and slowly started building an audience, generation after generation.

MW: And now it’s a phenomenon.

NAJIMY: Who knew?

MW: I will often ask this question of straight actors we speak with: Do you remember the first time someone came out to you, and what was your response?

NAJIMY: You know, I think one reason that I am effortlessly an ally of the gay community, besides my political views, is that in community theater, you’re usually surrounded by a lot of gay men. Those were the guys I hung out with, those were my friends. So being a part of the gay community was seamless for me. All my friends came out to me. In fact, straight married men now will come out to me. I’m a gay magnet. People who want to be gay will come out to me.

Also, I have to say something about being straight-identified by being married — I do believe that there is a spectrum. A lot of people don’t agree, but I believe there’s a spectrum between one and a hundred. And I don’t believe anybody is anything. I believe we have the ability to love who we choose, when we choose, and how we choose. And so, I think sometimes, straight people have to act straighter than they are because they’re afraid of political homophobia. And gay people need to be really rooted in gayness because it’s been taken away for so long. When something is beyond your reach, and then it is in your reach, you really root down hard.

MW: It’s more relevant today with the current administration. It’s scary.

NAJIMY: I’m scared. I’m scared-scared. The loss of Democracy is earth-shattering.

MW: But what do we do? How do we wake up from this? I’m looking to you for all the answers.

NAJIMY: I’ll tell you exactly what I think we should do. I think the reason that Trump is the President — God, I’ve never said that sentence before, that’s eerie — I think that the reason he won is because the Democratic Party and the Liberals were split. And I think we lost a lot with the anti-Hillary people. I was a Hillary devotee — I was actually a speaker for her. I would go and speak where she couldn’t. That was such an honor.

But I feel like the split, which I think is because of misogyny, led to Donald Trump’s win. I think whoever wins the Democratic nomination, whoever it is, we must wholeheartedly rally around that person. We must forget our differences of who our favorites were, because now this is serious business. Donald Trump is President. We can’t pussyfoot around anymore. We can’t go, “Oh, I don’t like him or I don’t like her.” Too f-ing bad. We have Donald Trump. That’s our alternative.

I was at the Tribeca Film Festival’s events and someone asked who do you want and I went, “Whoever is going to be the candidate, that’s who I want.” And that’s who we all should want. We have to all want the same person — any sort of a compassionate thinking person. Or else we’ll have another four years of Trump. So, you know, I’m going to rally around 100 percent, heart and soul, with whomever wins the nomination.

Now, I know who I would like to be nominated, but if that doesn’t happen, I’m not going to split the vote. I’m not going to not vote. I’ll just support that person, because we don’t have a choice anymore. We’re losing our rights — women are losing their right to reproductive choice. There’s many states in the middle of the country where there are no reproductive rights now. It’s happening. It’s real.

MW: It’s horrible.

NAJIMY: Oh, it’s horrible racism. It’s horrible misogyny. It’s horrible homophobia. It’s horrible everything. It’s anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-any kind of a brain. It’s really bad. And lives are being lost and Trump is making decisions that will affect our children’s children. There won’t be a planet. So, whoever is the nominee, that’s who I’m going to wave my flag for. Anybody but him.

MW: Who would be on your dream ticket, though? We’ve got so many amazing choices out there now. It’s an amazing field in many respects.

NAJIMY: Who would I pick? Well, I want Hillary. But if I can’t have Hillary, I love Kamala Harris. But honestly, it doesn’t matter to me. Anybody but Trump.

God, it’s so hard, because I don’t know enough yet. Honestly, I’m not being coy because, obviously, I say what I think, but I haven’t quite heard enough to claim my stake yet. I would love for it to be a woman. It’s time for it to be a woman, but I want whoever will win.

MW: You’re currently producing a documentary about the 53% of white women who voted for Trump in 2016.

NAJIMY: I am. At the end of this month, we’re going to do our first three days [of shooting]. They’re the most important equation in the nightmare of the last two years. We can’t dismiss them — they’re either women who voted for Obama, or didn’t vote at all, who, in 2016, voted for Donald Trump. So we need to honor them and find out why and what, and understand it, so it doesn’t happen again.

MW: It is a very perplexing statistic. We’re all like, “How could any woman vote for him?”

NAJIMY: Every one of us producers [of the documentary] has a different theory. My theory is that it is because of self-misogyny. When you’re taught that you’re not worthy — that you’re not worth as much [as men] — it seeps into your great-grandmother, and then down to your grandmother, and less to your mother, and less to you, but it’s still there. And if you think you aren’t worth as much, you’re not going to vote for someone that you think isn’t worthy.

Other people think differently. Gloria [Steinem] thinks it’s because they vote the party line of their husband. I mean, we all have a different idea. The truth is that none of us can put words in their mouth. We need to really find out and ask them and understand, so that we can move past this crazy nightmare.

MW: I want to bring it back to activism. What is the importance of activism to you and why should we all remain vigilant?

NAJIMY: There have always been activists and nonactivists, but at this point, there really is no choice. We know that, every day, we’re waking up, and not only are opinions changing, but laws are changing — laws that govern us and our daughters and sons. If you have any interest in the future beyond a year from now, just with climate change….

I mean, I’m so inspired by today’s high school students. This one girl that had just gotten an award here in New York said, “I take every Friday off and go sit in front of the UN.” And they said, “Do your parents mind that you aren’t going to school that day?” And she said, “No, they understand. If I’m not an activist today, I won’t have a future.”

The kinds of adjustments that are being made that affect our whole lives are devastating changes. I understand that everybody’s different. I don’t require everybody to be the same, but what I do require is that you open the paper and look on the internet and turn on the news, and see how, every single day, this isn’t just happening. It was planned, and it is dangerous, and we are going to find ourselves in the same position as in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Things are going to change in a way that you can’t imagine, because we’re ignoring and saying, “Well, I’m not a political person,” or, “It doesn’t affect me,” or, “It’s too hard.” And I get that it’s too hard. It’s too hard for me. I get that it’s scary. It’s too scary for me. Nobody wants to do this. We all thought it would be Hillary, and we’d be swimming in a lake and having picnics. But it’s real and it affects everyone, you and your kids, your nieces, your nephews, and just the future in general, people you’re not even related to. It’s the future of humanity. Democracy is being systemically [dismantled]. All the bolts are being loosened, all of them.

We can’t be sure what they’re finding out about Donald Trump. We don’t know how he got to be president. I mean, how many presidents have had 17,000 investigations about them being crooked? I mean, there was Nixon, and a couple more, and certainly, first of all, I don’t care what presidents have affairs with who. That’s a personal choice between them and their wife or their husband. That is none of my business, and I don’t judge somebody on what they do in their personal life. I judge them on how they protect and rule our country and sisterhood and brotherhood with the world, and this administration, more than any other administration — and there’s been some pretty sad ones — is boasting about the illegal-ness of their affairs. I mean, you can’t not pay attention this time.

MW: I have to bring up one final thing before you go. You made a guest appearance at Mid-Atlantic Leather Weekend here in 2009. What do you remember about that experience?

NAJIMY: I remember that I was a little bit surprised about how very, very polite and well behaved every single person at that whole event was. I thought they were the sweetest, kindest, most considerate people. Not that I didn’t think they would be, but like it was very peaceful. It wasn’t very raucous, you know what I mean? Everyone was just really nice. The reason I was in D.C. was for the Obama Inauguration. And the excitement was in the air, you know? And then, of course, I went home with a couple of leather queens.

*Reposted interview article from the Metro Weekly by Randy Shulman on May 16, 2019

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