#and the fandom i left is literally so monolithic i do not know what could possibly allow me to escape it its a huge fucking fandom
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hate migrating out of a fandom for Reasons but then i literally have nothing to watch and no blogs to follow anymore
#cant interact with that content anymore At All but like. what. what content do i interact with#its like. worse than a hyperfixation just fading and not having anything in the in-between#bc this was just Sudden and now i have Nothing while i scramble to find something new#i keep checking my youtube subscriptions and there's literally been three posts in the last two days i have nothing to watch#and the fandom i left is literally so monolithic i do not know what could possibly allow me to escape it its a huge fucking fandom#like. how do you just cold turkey change All your youtube recommendations without just deleting everything and starting over#i've just been watching horror game video essays recently bc that's like the only topic that isn't touched by it in my recs#but also watching nothing but horror is severely bad for my brain and i have Plenty Of Evidence For That
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Neurodivergency, and Sephiroth
Right, I’m going to see if I can try and explain why this reading appeals to me.
For some background, I’ve watched a full silent LP of the OG, watched Advent Children, and am largely familiar with his characterisation in Crisis Core(though it gets a bit patchy in some areas). I am not familiar with his characterisation in KH, Dissida, or any other spinoff appearances.
I’m going to be looking at this with an autistic lens, as, hey, I’m autistic, however much of these patterns aren’t exclusive to autistic people by any means and thus are fairly applicable to other labels.
This is an explanaition on why I find this element worth considering, and while I hope that others can relate or take away something from this, in many ways it is highly personal and not intended to be a decleration on Sephiroth’s ‘true nature,’ as it were. I’m not claiming that this was intended by the writers-- Infact, I’d be very surprised if they considered it, at all --As many of the traits he exhibits could be brushed aside as due to his upbringing.
That being said, let’s get into it!
1. Alienation
A common thread in neurodivergency, autism in particular, is some form of alienation. This doesn’t necessarily mean being outcast-- I, for one, have been largely accepted by those around me, and yet there is still that sense of being ‘other‘ that’s always been there, long before I even had a word for it.
Now, of course, in Sephiroth this is more related to his lineage, and how it’s expressed in... well, everything. Even still, I find value in expanding that, and considering just how getting the sense you’re implicitly divided from your peers.
There is, of course, the matter of Sephiroth’s literal isolation-- However, as fun as those scenarios are to play around with, I don’t think Sephiroth was raised wholly, or even mostly in the labs. The reason being that it would be nigh impossible to have hid just what made Sephiroth different, especially knowing how observant he is. It’s clear that Sephiroth had had extensive contact with other children, as epitomised by the line:
“I knew ever since I was a child, I was not like the others. I knew mine was a special existence. But this is not what I meant!”
Sephiroth was painfully aware that he is different, even if he didn’t know exactly how. It is at once an oddly thrilling, and lonely sensation. Thrilling, because-- Hey! --You can do and see things others can’t and/or wouldn’t; and lonely, because it makes it hard to relate to others or have them relate to you.
2. Socialisation
I would like to start off by saying that, while I find it a tad more faithful and endlessly less grating than Sex God Sephiroth, Sephiroth is not a complete and utter social failure. While it’s clear he has difficulty articulating emotions and understanding others, it’s very clear even still that he knows how the game works, and knows how to play it.
This is going to dip far more into speculation territory, so buckle up.
A thing that, perhaps, I don’t see talked about often enough online when it comes to neurodivergent experiences, is that many things that are considered ‘normal‘ get experienced as systems that we need to actively learn and maneuver-- Socialisation especially!
Now, of course there is always some degree of social interaction being a give and take, a step forth and step back, regardless of neurotype, but it’s dialed up far more when you deviate from ‘the norm.‘
If I can give my own example, a thing I struggled with when I was little was humour! Not because I didn’t find things funny, or didn’t know what it was, but because I had issues grasping at the machinations of what made something funny. This lead to alot of nonsensical jokes that left my siblings confounded, until I picked up a joke-book, and started analysing from there. It was mostly alot of puns, which! Due to their simple structure, are a great way to learn the basics! I didn’t even know this was unusual, until my mother pointed it out to me years later.
And that method goes for alot of things.
Sephiroth, above all else, is observant. He makes efforts multiple times throughout the OG and Crisis Core to check up on others and ask how they’re doing. He asks Cloud how he feels returning to his hometown, and about seeing his mother, and urges Zack to check up on Aerith in Crisis Core, to name some notable examples. Even if you get the sense that his attempts are, perhaps, a little ungainly, it makes it clear more than anything that Sephiroth tries.
I think the reason that people have leaned alot more into the overly-awkward perception of Sephiroth in recent times, is because it humanises him. I feel there’s been far more of a shift within fandom to focus on the mundane, on relatability, on humanity. A veneer of endless, effortless confidence really isn’t that sexy anymore-- When sexual-appeal even comes into the matter, at all.
That being said, this section more than anything, I think, is very easy to brush aside due to his... interesting upbringing. Depending on how you construe the timeline, Sephiroth got sent to war as early as twelve, and wouldn’t have had much of an oppurtnity to develop these skills in a healthy and timely manner.
Even without that, a degree of social awkwardness is far from exclusive to any particular neurotype-- It’s the way it arises in him, though, that piques my interest.
3. Analysis and Obsession
This... I think, is the one where I’ll be grasping at straws the most.
While, yes, the obsessive research demonstrated in the OG during the Nibelheim incident and even before that to a lesser extent in Crisis Core could be some indication of a degree to absolutely immerse yourself in a subject in that Very Autistic WayTM, more than anything these are brought on by dire circumstance(the former especially by the question of his very humanity), and as we don’t see Sephiroth as a child, it’s uncertain as to whether he displayed these behaviours as such and to this degree under ‘normal‘ circumstances.
Even so, I get the feeling that Sephiroth is very analytically-minded, in a very Stranger In A Strange World sort of way(not in any way referring to the 1961 novel by a similar name, lmao). I get the feeling he’s the type of person to pick up some highly-esoteric text just for fun and come away with a menagerie of strange and unusual and obscenely specific factoids that he’ll remember for the rest of his life.
Like, someone might mention a topic offhandedly, and though he’d keep his mouth shut because He’s Like ThatTM, a slew of all the little bits and pieces he’s seen or read on the matter over the years would just jump to mind.
What I’m trying to say is, I think Sephiroth would take joy in painstakingly pouring and mulling over topics that not many people would have the consideration nor the mind to hold any long-term, inimate interest in.
If the last point was easily brushed aside, then this one you’d merely have to breathe and it’d fall apart. Nonetheless, I feel that within fandom’s current common framework with how we perceive Sephiroth, this wouldn’t be too much of a stretch.
I, however, want to make it clear that I can see the issue with labelling Sephiroth as neurodivergent. He could all too easily fall into the cliché of cold, emotionally and socially-inept, often rather callous depictions we see all too often in the heavily-neurotypical media that sees us as Missing Something; less than. Things have gotten better, but even still, there’s such a tendency to flatten us down to the things we can’t do, or lawd as us Potential Einsteins in spite of it-- Which, just, while it happens, on the whole it isn’t very helpful or realistic to expect this from us.
We are by no means a monolith, and while I take comfort in the idea of a neurodivergent Sephiroth, I understand that for some, it can feel like taking on a label to a character that vaguely fits the stereotype, and thus, perhaps, insinuating that to be autistic you have to look Like That-- And when it comes to villains in particular, it’s all too easy to dip into demonisation.
This isn’t even getting onto some of the issues that’d have this fall apart, were we to look at other symptoms. The first that comes to mind, and one that even I, as innocuous as I am, experience: sensory overload.
While it is entirely possible that Sephiroth learned to deal with it accordingly in life, or was forced to surpress it, because Shinra’s Science Department(cough cough Hojo) has been shown time and time again to force its subjects into little boxes and blame them for any failures expressed, the fact is that such a symptom could make fighting on the battlefield downright impossible.
Again, this is something that could’ve been given a ‘solution‘(as much as you can or even should think about long-term surpressing your basic thresholds), it nonetheless remains an issue.
I just hope that, on the whole, this served as some food for thought.
TL;DR: Sephiroth is autistic because I Vibe With It.
Also, happy Disability Pride!
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Finale Predictions
Well guys, it's been quite the ride and here we are ready for the finale. First and foremost I have to thank you all for sticking with me over the years. Sending the asks, supporting the theories, dealing with my sometimes crazy metas and predictions, that sometimes hit and sometimes didn’t. And trusting me to be the Fandom Mom.
As is now an annual tradition I’m putting up my post of Finale Predictions before going dark until after the finale airs. This is for fun as I always like to see how well I did. Please no pitchforks if I am wrong on any of these.
So here we go:
Everyone’s favorite villains, Nathaniel, Kora, and SIBYL will all make it to the finale while Garrett will be killed or locked up by the end of the first hour (and it will use some of Fitz’s tech).
SIBYL will eventually get herself a new body.
Nathaniel will turn on Kora and try to take her powers and/or kill her.
Kora has already turned on him and he/we just don’t know it yet. Either betrays him and helps her sister or tries to kill him herself in revenge for her mother. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Daisy will be the one to end Nathaniel and it will be oh so satisfying giant fight scene….even if we have to wait until the second hour for it. Bonus points if Sousa get a hit in first too
Coulson, May, and Elena are able to get to space thanks to Coulson’s new computer Genius Super Power OR Garrett is ordered to bring them so they can lord their victory over them all.
Even though they have pretty much ended Shield and Hydra in the “hot mess” timeline SIBYL and Nathaniel set their sites on the OG Timeline and/or Fitz once they realize he has come into the mix and ruins their plans in the hot mess timeline.. As they are both aware he is the one who ends their little party.
The Chronicoms will not all be super thrilled with what SIBYL has been up too or her methods. This could be another thing that drives SIBYL into the OG Timeline.
The battle between SIBYL and Coulson seems to have gotten a bit more personal so my money is on Coulson being the one to take her down. Close second goes to May and Fitzsimmons.
Diana didn’t only block Memories of Fitz it took out the memories of people associated with him. IE she is not going to remember her friends or Deke.
Deke will earn her trust quickly and be an A+ overprotective grandson of his Nana as they are rescued and get back to the team.
The team will rescue Deke and Jemma, take out a few Chronicoms, and Independence Day their way out of there.
While it won’t be the romantic Philinda some fans want we will see some quality Philinda banter over the finale as it seems they’ve settled into a good place between the two. Coulson has also passed the torch of “team parent” onto her.
Philinda will not end as a couple.
At some point Sousa is really going to question what is going on and his life choices. AKA He looks around stunned at what is going on.
More quality Dousy flirting and banter….they will kiss again and I do see them being a couple when things end.
Fitzsimmons family feels just a lot of them over the whole finale. Iain and Elizabeth are going to murder us with feels. I mean Fitz with his little girl. I shall perish.
Despite not knowing everyone Jemma is going to be super insistent on building or activating a device (that has been stashed on the Zephyr) that she doesn’t know what it does but just knows she needs to build and activate it. She will be the only one who can activate it and possibly it will take something very personal of hers to turn it on. IE how she was hiding Fitz’s ring/necklace in Season 6 she might have the key hiding again. But lets all freak out that Jemma will literally be the key to getting Fitz.
We won’t see Fitz until near the end of 12 if he is not the cliffhanger.
That Bar place in the promo pics is either Keonig’s Bar or the Playground of the hot mess Timeline. Seems to be some sort of secret Shield Base or what is left of them after the big attack as there are some random Shield agents milling/wth/who are these people in the background. We know The Playground was off the books in the OG Timeline and would make sense it was also in the Hot mess.
Jemma will have her memory resorted relatively quickly after Fitz Kool Aid Man’s in all Star Lord from the portal thing Jemma activates. And it’ll be the freaking power of her love for Fitz/her Family that overloads her (Gimme my Framework fix here). Or Fitzsimmons have a fail safe password. BUT GIMME TRUE LOVE.
CUE THE SECRET CHILD REVEAL!!!!!!!!!! Yes, I will be screaming. The team will be stunned.
I’m sticking to my theory that they will give their daughter a “celestial” or astronomical name to pay off “One of these days we’ll find something magnificent out in space,” thing from Season 3 (especially if she was conceived on the way back from Kitson). Or a name that is very reflective of their Scottish/English roots.
Everyone needs to hold onto their hats because once Jemma has her memories back it will be because they are gonna want to get home to their Little Girl like yesterday and have one hell of a plan that involves saving the world and taking care of Nathaniel, SIBYL, and the Season 6 Finale attack on the Lighthouse.
This is likely where a ton of the Flashbacks come in.
Where has Fitz been? He’s been back in our OG Timeline. The finale confirmation for me came last week when Nathaniel revealed that SIBYL’s time stream couldn’t see him….or their daughter, and that thing sees EVERYTHING in the HOT MESS Timeline. This would also be why Jemma’s messages didn’t reach him, she couldn’t get them to cross into the OG Timeline and this was something she would have known but Diana blocked as part of hiding where Fitz was.
How has Fitz been watching the Chronicoms? Insert incredibly complicated timey whimy thing the writers came up with that me and my Marketing degree can not fathom so just go with it okay, via the using the Framework in the OG Timeline to get into the Chronicom’s system. Little pay back for what SIBYL has been doing in the Hot Mess Timeline. Him being connected to the Framework explains why he was so exposed. Because when someone is hooked up to that thing they can get their heads cut off and not know it.
Now reunited and having dropped the baby announcement Fitzsimmons will present the plan for the “Final Mission” the team must embark on to save the world….again.
And oh baby is it complicated.
Part of said plan will have them back at the Lighthouse during the Chronicom attack.
The dudes that showed up with Jemma at the Temple will be explained. IE I think its some of the team and they cleared out of the Zephyr before the time travel party got started. They also may have grabbed other hunks of the monoliths.
The fight will take place in both the Hot Mess and OG Timelines
We have not seen the last of the Monoliths. The fact we are jumping timelines and have Flint in the mix over in the OG timeline makes me think they are gonna need Mr. Swirly’s help in doing said jumping (Mr. Swirly is the Grey Monolith). Or they really go with the OG and its Harold (Black Space one) that allows for it. Kind of fitting the Monolith that tore Fitzsimmons apart is now the one that reunites them.
We will for sure see Enoch (via Flashback), Davis (please not by Flashback #davislivesagain), Piper and Flint as returning Favorites.
If they have Davis back to life I just gesture exhaustedly at the Monoliths again. Not even gonna try to explain it.
Small chance we run into the Hot Mess’s Timeline Enoch but he will have no relationship or connection to the team and will make me cry.
Top Picks for SURPRISE not on the Press Release faces to pop up if we get them: Ward (I mean really how have we not seen him again yet), Mace, Robbie, Bobbi, Hunter, Koenig (any of them) and Mike. REALLY WANT IT BUT WON”T GET IT! Dadcliffe
Who was keeping Fitzsimmons Daughter safe:
Top Pick: Piper and Flint: Given Fitzsimmons would have run into them picking up the Zephyr and they could have been the “we had help” they talked about.
Second Place Because I Badly want him back: Uncle Enoch 2.0
Left Field Surprise Option: Huntingbird
LOLA RETURNS
We will get a lot of really fun callbacks to past stories or even lines IE “I’m just the Pilot” For May.
“What We Are Fighting For”: Family. The team family….and the Fitzsimmons family. Also they will have gone 13/13 in that someone will say the titles name at some point in the episode.
We will see old weapons and tech from previous seasons make one last appearance, we’ve seen 2 so far in promos and will see more.
Shotgun Axe gets a proper send off in battle (this one is for Kiddo 3)
Bear will deliver the most amazing soundtrack that we’ll never get to buy.
Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story (Sorry Couldn’t Resist)
Nathaniel: Dies, and we will all cheer.
SIBYL: Dies, and we will all cheer.
Garrett: Dies or locked up, won’t make it to the second hour.
Kora: Toss a coin. If she dies she killed for trying to take down Nathaniel. If in her betrayal of Nathaniel she helps Daisy get Jemma and Deke back that could be a good starting place for the sisters to work thing out. Starting place, she has a long way to go to get in good with Daisy and setting up an 11th hour redemption arc.
Mack: Still so nervous for him based on how he has been in interviews, especially the SDCC ones last year. He was so clearly upset by it. So Mack either falls or does something so out of character (Bails before the finale battle which just is not making sense to me Mack is in such a good place right now) for Mack that Henry was upset by it. Essentially I am very confused because what I am seeing on screen now isn’t matching with how Henry was talking as Mack has really come around since his Endgame stage.
Elena: Easily lives. If Mack doesn’t die, wherever he lands she’ll be with him. They’ve been a steady ship all season and I see no reason for them to break up outside of death. And while I have a mountain of concerns for Mack, I have none for Elena.. I also see her still being a presence within Shield, she’s become a good solid agent, and bonus points if she keeps Flint with her….and he gets all the tacos he wants.
Sousa: Totally lives (they might give us a good fake out though because he and Daisy are becoming a thing)I can still see him being Director of Shield if Mack falls or steps down. He’s a good Agent in a new time but he said he is right where he is supposed to be, at Daisy’s side. Where she goes he goes. IE he’s not letting her get away and will always be there after she runs into a wall. So if Daisy leaves Shield, so will he. If she stays so will he. If she opens a coffee bar he’ll learn to make an espresso.
Daisy: Totally Lives, but there will be something about her ending that some fans won’t like and some fans are going to love. Staying with Shield or no whatever she does will involve Inhumans be it the Secret Warriors are up and running again, she is mentoring and training new Inhumans coming into Shield, or my favorite option still is she reopens Afterlife. I’ve been feeling that option for most of the Season and feel like it was really set up with Jaiying as was Daisy looking out for her little sister should the chips fall the right way. The SS Dousy will be sailing right along. IF Kora survives I can see her being in Afterlife as well, Daisy taking her mother’s passion that Kora has a good heart to heart herself.
Deke: Okay this one is weird because I feel like we are going to lose him somehow, but he won’t die. I didn’t get the vibe from Jeff, Elizabeth, or Iain that he died and those three are pretty tight. However, in that I don’t think I’m going to get my Fitzsimmons Family all settling down in a giant castle in Scotland together. They set up for him to make a sacrifice, he’s grown, and has something he’s really truly fighting for. I have loved seeing how close he and Jemma have gotten and how fiercely he’s protected her and her secret. Even in the face of torture he didn’t betray her. It will come as no surprise if he doesn’t sacrifice himself somehow. Either in taking a hit for his family or doing something similar to what he did in Season 5 to make sure they got home. Bringing things full circle. He also expressed that he wouldn’t mind being stuck in the hot mess timeline in ‘83. He built himself a nice life there and Nathaniel did a pretty good job of taking out Hydra...with just a bit of Shield hanging on. So if it comes down to it I don’t see him minding if he gets stuck there. Sure him saying goodbye to Nana and Bobo is gonna hurt like Hades but if he ends up alive, I’m good.
Fitzsimmons: Both live, yes they will scare the crap out of us more than a few times especially after we know about the daughter, but they will live. Totally peace out, we’ve done our time, leaving Shield with the adorable daughter and its Perthshire or Bust. They’ve sacrificed enough and will not be willing to risk it again.
May: Lives and reminds us all that she is one hell of a pilot. If Mack decides he wants to step down, dies, whatever I’ll throw her back in contention for Director, especially as I see Sousa Following Daisy if she leaves. Coulson seemed to have set her on that path and at the very least passed the “Team Parent” torch onto her, that it would be her job to give the Coulson talks to those who needed it. If she’s not Director, she’ll be whomever is right hand, or I still have that option for the Academy being up and running and she’s running that, training the next generation.
Coulson: Lives.I know SHOCKING. I think he was very ready to throw in the towel after spending 20 months in the TV but then Enoch’s moving words in his death were what changed his mind about ‘powering down” when this is all over. Coulson realizes that yes, while it is hard to be the one to leave it is harder for the ones that are left behind but it's also necessary that they move on, and live for those they have lost before. Like Sousa and Fitzsimmons, he’ll be another that they’ll fake out death a few times. I see him leaving Shield though, taking Lola and finally just going and seeing the world, watching the history he loves so much happen. We get to see him driving around or even off in Lola for the last time. Other options include he does something that will allow him to totally run with his new super computer super power. The final thing I can see him doing is being the coolest professor at the newly rebooted Academy.
Flint: Get’s his tacos.
Piper: Keeps being awesome.
Davis: Better live dang it.
Kiddos Predictions:
That weird device Jemma makes brings Fitz
Deke sacrifices himself for Fitz
Fitzsimmons and their kid have to leave Shield
Mack leaves shield
Fitzsimmons, Dousy, Mackelena all stay together
Daisy kills Nathaniel, Daisy needs to quake him up
May or Nathaniel will take out Kora. But if she survives we want Daisy to take her in.
Fitz takes down SIBYL
Piper is watching the Daughter
The daughters name is Olivia
Robo Coulson will sacrifice himself
GHOST RIDER HAD BETTER BE OUR SURPRISE CHARACTER (this was literally shouted at me). Kiddo 3 voted for PIkachu (Lincoln)
Have no idea what will happen to May
We will get a “flash forward” ending showing what the team that is still alive is doing
Flint gets his tacos
They save the team and have a full out war at some point in time
The episode is going to be super good
Mom is going to cry
Well there it is. We’ll check back in on Thursday to see how I did!
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ESSAY: Berserk's Journey of Acceptance Over 30 Years of Fandom
My descent into anime fandom began in the '90s, and just as watching Neon Genesis Evangelion caused my first revelation that cartoons could be art, reading Berserk gave me the same realization about comics. The news of Kentaro Miura’s death, who passed on May 6, has been emotionally complicated for me, as it's the first time a celebrity's death has hit truly close to home. In addition to being the lynchpin for several important personal revelations, Berserk is one of the longest-lasting works I’ve followed and that I must suddenly bid farewell to after existing alongside it for two-thirds of my life.
Berserk is a monolith not only for anime and manga, but also fantasy literature, video games, you name it. It might be one of the single most influential works of the ‘80s — on a level similar to Blade Runner — to a degree where it’s difficult to imagine what the world might look like without it, and the generations of creators the series inspired.
Although not the first, Guts is the prototypical large sword anime boy: Final Fantasy VII's Cloud Strife, Siegfried/Nightmare from Soulcalibur, and Black Clover's Asta are all links in the same chain, with other series like Dark Souls and Claymore taking clear inspiration from Berserk. But even deeper than that, the three-character dynamic between Guts, Griffith, and Casca, the monster designs, the grotesque violence, Miura’s image of hell — all of them can be spotted in countless pieces of media across the globe.
Despite this, it just doesn’t seem like people talk about it very much. For over 20 years, Berserk has stood among the critical pantheon for both anime and manga, but it doesn’t spur conversations in the same way as Neon Genesis Evangelion, Akira, or Dragon Ball Z still do today. Its graphic depictions certainly represent a barrier to entry much higher than even the aforementioned company.
Seeing the internet exude sympathy and fond reminiscing about Berserk was immensely validating and has been my single most therapeutic experience online. Moreso, it reminded me that the fans have always been there. And even looking into it, Berserk is the single best-selling property in the 35-year history of Dark Horse. My feeling is that Berserk just has something about it that reaches deep into you and gets stuck there.
I recall introducing one of my housemates to Berserk a few years ago — a person with all the intelligence and personal drive to both work on cancer research at Stanford while pursuing his own MD and maintaining a level of physical fitness that was frankly unreasonable for the hours that he kept. He was NOT in any way analytical about the media he consumed, but watching him sitting on the floor turning all his considerable willpower and intellect toward delivering an off-the-cuff treatise on how Berserk had so deeply touched him was a sight in itself to behold. His thoughts on the series' portrayal of sex as fundamentally violent leading up to Guts and Casca’s first moment of intimacy in the Golden Age movies was one of the most beautiful sentiments I’d ever heard in reaction to a piece of fiction.
I don’t think I’d ever heard him provide anything but a surface-level take on a piece of media before or since. He was a pretty forthright guy, but the way he just cut into himself and let his feelings pour out onto the floor left me awestruck. The process of reading Berserk can strike emotional chords within you that are tough to untangle. I’ve been writing analysis and experiential pieces related to anime and manga for almost ten years — and interacting with Berserk’s world for almost 30 years — and writing may just be yet another attempt for me to pull my own twisted-up feelings about it apart.
Berserk is one of the most deeply personal works I’ve ever read, both for myself and in my perception of Miura's works. The series' transformation in the past 30 years artistically and thematically is so singular it's difficult to find another work that comes close. The author of Hajime no Ippo, who was among the first to see Berserk as Miura presented him with some early drafts working as his assistant, claimed that the design for Guts and Puck had come from a mess of ideas Miura had been working on since his early school days.
写真は三浦建太郎君が寄稿してくれた鷹村です。
今かなり感傷的になっています。
思い出話をさせて下さい。
僕が初めての週刊連載でスタッフが一人もいなくて困っていたら手伝いにきてくれました。
彼が18で僕が19です。
某大学の芸術学部の学生で講義明けにスケッチブックを片手に来てくれました。 pic.twitter.com/hT1JCWBTKu
— 森川ジョージ (@WANPOWANWAN) May 20, 2021
Miura claimed two of his big influences were Go Nagai’s Violence Jack and Tetsuo Hara and Buronson’s Fist of the North Star. Miura wears these influences on his sleeve, discovering the early concepts that had percolated in his mind just felt right. The beginning of Berserk, despite its amazing visual power, feels like it sprang from a very juvenile concept: Guts is a hypermasculine lone traveler breaking his body against nightmarish creatures in his single-minded pursuit of revenge, rigidly independent and distrustful of others due to his dark past.
Uncompromising, rugged, independent, a really big sword ... Guts is a romantic ideal of masculinity on a quest to personally serve justice against the one who wronged him. Almost nefarious in the manner in which his character checked these boxes, especially when it came to his grim stoicism, unblinkingly facing his struggle against literal cosmic forces. Never doubting himself, never trusting others, never weeping for what he had lost.
Miura said he sketched out most of the backstory when the manga began publication, so I have to assume the larger strokes of the Golden Arc were pretty well figured out from the outset, but I’m less sure if he had fully realized where he wanted to take the story to where we are now. After the introductory mini-arcs of demon-slaying, Berserk encounters Griffith and the story draws us back to a massive flashback arc. We see the same Guts living as a lone mercenary who Griffith persuades to join the Band of the Hawk to help realize his ambitions of rising above the circumstances of his birth to join the nobility.
We discover the horrific abuses of Guts’ adoptive father and eventually learn that Guts, Griffith, and Casca are all victims of sexual violence. The story develops into a sprawling semi-historical epic featuring politics and war, but the real narrative is in the growing companionship between Guts and the members of the band. Directionless and traumatized by his childhood, Guts slowly finds a purpose helping Griffith realize his dream and the courage to allow others to grow close to him.
Miura mentioned that many Band of the Hawk members were based on his early friend groups. Although he was always sparse with details about his personal life, he has spoken about how many of them referred to themselves as aspiring manga authors and how he felt an intense sense of competition, admitting that among them he may have been the only one seriously working toward that goal, desperately keeping ahead in his perceived race against them. It’s intriguing thinking about how much of this angst may have made it to the pages, as it's almost impossible not to imagine Miura put quite a bit of himself in Guts.
Perhaps this is why it feels so real and makes The Eclipse — the quintessential anime betrayal at the hands of Griffith — all the more heartbreaking. The raw violence and macabre imagery certainly helped. While Miura owed Hellraiser’s Cenobites much in the designs of the God Hand, his macabre portrayal of the Band of the Hawk’s eradication within the literal bowels of hell, the massive hand, the black sun, the Skull Knight, and even Miura’s page compositions have been endlessly referenced, copied, and outright plagiarized since.
The events were tragic in any context and I have heard many deeply personal experiences others drew from The Eclipse sympathizing with Guts, Casca, or even Griffith’s spiral driven by his perceived rejection by Guts. Mine were most closely aligned with the tragedy of Guts having overcome such painful circumstances to not only reject his own self enforced solitude, but to fearlessly express his affection for his loved ones.
The Golden Age was a methodical destruction of Guts’ self-destructive methods of preservation ruined in a single selfish act by his most trusted friend, leaving him once again alone and afraid of growing close to those around him. It ripped the romance of Guts’ mission and eventually took the story down a course I never expected. Berserk wasn’t a story of revenge but one of recovery.
Guess that’s enough beating around the bush, as I should talk about how this shift affected me personally. When I was young, when I began reading Berserk I found Guts’ unflagging stoicism to be really cool, not just aesthetically but in how I understood guys were supposed to be. I was slow to make friends during school and my rapidly gentrifying neighborhood had my friends' parents moving away faster than I could find new ones. At some point I think I became too afraid of putting myself out there anymore, risking rejection when even acceptance was so fleeting. It began to feel easier just to resign myself to solitude and pretend my circumstances were beyond my own power to correct.
Unfortunately, I became the stereotypical kid who ate alone during lunch break. Under the invisible expectations demanding I not display weakness, my loneliness was compounded by shame for feeling loneliness. My only recourse was to reveal none of those feelings and pretend the whole thing didn't bother me at all. Needless to say my attempts to cope probably fooled no one and only made things even worse, but I really didn’t know of any better way to handle my situation. I felt bad, I felt even worse about feeling bad and had been provided with zero tools to cope, much less even admit that I had a problem at all.
The arcs following the Golden Age completely changed my perspective. Guts had tragically, yet understandably, cut himself off from others to save himself from experiencing that trauma again and, in effect, denied himself any opportunity to allow himself to be happy again. As he began to meet other characters that attached themselves to him, between Rickert and Erica spending months waiting worried for his return, and even the slimmest hope to rescuing Casca began to seed itself into the story, I could only see Guts as a fool pursuing a grim and hopeless task rather than appreciating everything that he had managed to hold onto.
The same attributes that made Guts so compelling in the opening chapters were revealed as his true enemy. Griffith had committed an unforgivable act but Guts’ journey for revenge was one of self-inflicted pain and fear. The romanticism was gone.
Farnese’s inclusion in the Conviction arc was a revelation. Among the many brilliant aspects of her character, I identified with her simply for how she acted as a stand-in for myself as the reader: Plagued by self-doubt and fear, desperate to maintain her own stoic and uncompromising image, and resentful of her place in the world. She sees Guts’ fearlessness in the face of cosmic horror and believes she might be able to learn his confidence.
But in following Guts, Farnese instead finds a teacher in Casca. In taking care of her, Farnese develops a connection and is able to experience genuine sympathy that develops into a sense of responsibility. Caring for Casca allows Farnese to develop the courage she was lacking not out of reckless self-abandon but compassion.
I can’t exactly credit Berserk with turning my life around, but I feel that it genuinely helped crystallize within me a sense of growing doubts about my maladjusted high school days. My growing awareness of Guts' undeniable role in his own suffering forced me to admit my own role in mine and created a determination to take action to fix it rather than pretending enough stoicism might actually result in some sort of solution.
I visited the Berserk subreddit from time to time and always enjoyed the group's penchant for referring to all the members of the board as “fellow strugglers,” owing both to Skull Knight’s label for Guts and their own tongue-in-cheek humor at waiting through extended hiatuses. Only in retrospect did it feel truly fitting to me. Trying to avoid the pitfalls of Guts’ path is a constant struggle. Today I’m blessed with many good friends but still feel primal pangs of fear holding me back nearly every time I meet someone, the idea of telling others how much they mean to me or even sharing my thoughts and feelings about something I care about deeply as if each action will expose me to attack.
It’s taken time to pull myself away from the behaviors that were so deeply ingrained and it’s a journey where I’m not sure the work will ever be truly done, but witnessing Guts’ own slow progress has been a constant source of reassurance. My sense of admiration for Miura’s epic tale of a man allowing himself to let go after suffering such devastating circumstances brought my own humble problems and their way out into focus.
Over the years I, and many others, have been forced to come to terms with the fact that Berserk would likely never finish. The pattern of long, unexplained hiatuses and the solemn recognition that any of them could be the last is a familiar one. The double-edged sword of manga largely being works created by a single individual is that there is rarely anyone in a position to pick up the torch when the creator calls it quits. Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond, Ai Yazawa’s Nana, and likely Yoshihiro Togashi’s Hunter X Hunter all frozen in indefinite hiatus, the publishers respectfully holding the door open should the creators ever decide to return, leaving it in a liminal space with no sense of conclusion for the fans except what we can make for ourselves.
The reason for Miura’s hiatuses was unclear. Fans liked to joke that he would take long breaks to play The Idolmaster, but Miura was also infamous for taking “breaks” spent minutely illustrating panels to his exacting artistic standard, creating a tumultuous release schedule during the wars featuring thousands of tiny soldiers all dressed in period-appropriate armor. If his health was becoming an issue, it’s uncommon that news would be shared with fans for most authors, much less one as private as Miura.
Even without delays, the story Miura was building just seemed to be getting too big. The scale continued to grow, his narrative ambition swelling even faster after 20 years of publication, the depth and breadth of his universe constantly expanding. The fan-dubbed “Millennium Falcon Arc” was massive, changing the landscape of Berserk from a low fantasy plagued by roaming demons to a high fantasy where godlike beings of sanity-defying size battled for control of the world. How could Guts even meet Griffith again? What might Casca want to do when her sanity returned? What are the origins of the Skull Knight? And would he do battle with the God Hand? There was too much left to happen and Miura’s art only grew more and more elaborate. It would take decades to resolve all this.
But it didn’t need to. I imagine we’ll never get a precise picture of the final years of Miura’s life leading up to his tragic passing. In the final chapters he released, it felt as if he had directed the story to some conclusion. The unfinished Fantasia arc finds Guts and his newfound band finding a way to finally restore Casca’s sanity and — although there is still unmistakably a boundary separating them — both seem resolute in finding a way to mend their shared wounds together.
One of the final chapters features Guts drinking around the campfire with the two other men of his group, Serpico and Roderick, as he entrusts the recovery of Casca to Schierke and Farnese. It's a scene that, in the original Band of the Hawk, would have found Guts brooding as his fellows engage in bluster. The tone of this conversation, however, is completely different. The three commiserate over how much has changed and the strength each has found in the companionship of the others. After everything that has happened, Guts declares that he is grateful.
The suicidal dedication to his quest for vengeance and dispassionate pragmatism that defined Guts in the earliest chapters is gone. Although they first appeared to be a source of strength as the Black Swordsman, he has learned that they rose from the fear of losing his friends again, from letting others close enough to harm him, and from having no other purpose without others. Whether or not Guts and Griffith were to ever meet again, Guts has rediscovered the strength to no longer carry his burdens alone.
All that has happened is all there will ever be. We too must be grateful.
Peter Fobian is an Associate Manager of Social Video at Crunchyroll, writer for Anime Academy and Anime in America, and an editor at Anime Feminist. You can follow him on Twitter @PeterFobian.
By: Peter Fobian
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I’d like to get your thoughts on this, hope this is okay!
Look at this quote from this article:
“It’s easy to pick on the “this wouldn’t be happening if these characters were coded as male,” but it’s nonetheless true—as a fan of the unrepentantly (gloriously) awful Bill Cipher, among others, I can promise you I see it regularly.”
I immediately thought of this blog when I read this.
Not saying you’re misogynist, of course. This blog is just so fascinating, and for someone to dismiss it all like that is frustrating.
I mean, of course they weren’t referring to you directly, but still.
For someone to brush off people’s interesting, thought-provoking theories as nothing but misogyny is kind of close-minded, in my opinion.
But this makes me curious. Do you think you’d still feel the same way about Bill if he was more feminine-coded? Would it matter?
And what do you think about that statement? Are you as annoyed by it as I am?
It’s always alright to get my thoughts on certain subjects, Anon! And lucky for you, I have lots of thoughts on this.
First of all, thank you for liking my blog! I put a lot of work into it, and I still look back on everything I’ve done here fondly. This blog is my only fandom-specific blog that’s still semi-active even after I’ve left the fandom.
And, about what you said about misogyny... I don’t actually think that’s what the article is talking about. It’s not misogyny for someone to pick apart Bill Cipher, but it’s misogyny if someone offers that level of potential depth to a male character while instantly condemning a female character.
But... honestly, from my experience? These two groups of people are different groups.
I used to run in those “anti” circles, back in 2015? 2016? Before the whole “SU criti/cal” thing started to become popular. But I could still kinda see hints of it? It was back when SU was hailed as THE perfect show, before people knocked it off the pedestal they put it on.
Anyway. These people hated redemption arcs. They saw Bill as this irredeemable monolith of a character, and any alternate interpretations were met with outright malice. I got called out once for, and I am not joking, headcanoning Bill as an abuse victim. They claimed I was “excusing his actions,” but when I asked to please show a screenshot of where I said that this excused him, they couldn’t. Because I never said that.
(I ended up publishing the whole headcanon on my main blog, and people loved it. That reception is what pushed me to create this blog.)
I don’t doubt at least some of those people became the type to nitpick SU. So I feel that the same people that nitpick male characters are also the type to nitpick female ones. They’re just nitpickers with a black-and-white sense of morality.
But there are always exceptions to the rule- people who love morally gray male characters but hate morally grey female characters. Yes, some of these motivations may be spurred on by misogyny. But what frustrates me is the initial assumption of malice. I’m not saying the article itself is guilty of this, as it seems to be speaking to a general problem, but more those tumblr posts or tweets trying to “call people out” if they gravitate towards more morally gray male characters than female ones.
Which brings me to my answer to your question: No, I don’t think I would like Bill as much, had he been a woman.
But please let me explain first.
First, you need to know some facts about me:
I am transmasculine. (Not a trans man- I’m nonbinary.)
I have a personality disorder. I’m not comfortable disclosing which one, but it’s one of the cluster B ones.
I was abused, and my reaction to the abuse was extreme anger and irritability. (Hence the PD.)
Another important fact is that my abuser was a woman. She’s my mother. I had to live with constant emotional abuse, gaslighting, neglect and other forms of malice for my whole life. I’m still not free yet, and I’m turning 20 in a month. (No, literally, exactly one month to the day.)
I was abused my whole life by a vindictive, manipulative shit of a woman, and it made me into a vindictive, manipulative shit of a person. The key difference is that I am actively trying not to be a vindictive, manipulative shit.
When I pick apart asshole male characters, I see myself in them. I do a deep dive into the whys, the hows the whos of why they ended up the way that they did, because it makes me feel liberated. It’s personally liberating to see someone like me, whom everyone sees as a monster, have a backstory that shows that monsters aren’t born, they’re made. It’s liberating to see them try and change, it’s liberating to give them someone to help them change no matter what, it’s liberating to look harder. Because that’s what I wanted. I wanted someone to look at me and see past the violent, angry 15 year old that I was, and actually help me. I wanted someone to see I was a victim, that I didn’t like being the way that I was. I wanted someone to help me and be there for me, even though I was messed up and awful.
(But don’t feel too bad for me- A few years ago I met someone wonderful through this very fandom who was exactly the kind of person I needed. And last November I proposed to him and he said yes!)
When I see a morally grey female character... all I can see is my abuser. I see in them the person that hurt me. I don’t want to look deeper, just as I don’t care about my mother’s long rambles about how shitty her childhood was. Was she also abused? Yes. Do I care? Nope! I don’t feel that same drive to pick apart female characters that act like the male ones I like, because of my trauma.
And honestly? Just because I gravitate towards male characters more doesn’t make me a misogynist. How I treat actual real life women does. I do examine my behavior to make sure I’m not being misogynistic- in fact, it was worry that I was being misogynistic in my dislike of these characters that made me think hard enough to have such a long answer to your question.
Maybe someone liking only male characters is an indicator of misogyny. Maybe it isn’t. I’m not shy about talking about what happened to me but people should not have to disclose their traumas in order to be “allowed” to consume fiction in a way some stranger doesn’t like.
And there actually is a specific subset of morally grey female characters I like: my own OCs.
I guess it’s the fact that I created them and thus can control how they act? They’re all assholes and I love them so much, but I don’t feel that same aversion as I do with characters that aren’t mine. Because the lack of control I had over my own abusive situation is what fucked me up so hard, but now I do have the control. If I watch a TV show, I don’t have any control over what the characters do, they’re not mine. But I do have control over my OCs.
(Psst- if you wanna see those OCs, I’ve since moved to the Invader Zim fandom, and am working on a HUGE fic series for it. (It’s not published yet- I’m working on it behind the scenes.) Those OCs I’m talking about star heavily. Here’s my blog, if you’re interested. I kinda wanna do some metaposting for that fandom, too, but I’ve no idea where to start. I love the Irkens, though, haha. Anyway if any of you happen to like IZ and have a meta-question for me... the askbox IS open!)
Anyway. This got really long. But misogyny in fandom is a thing, and the article does call it out well. I just get frustrated that people immediately assume malice. The statement does annoy me, but because it does happen if the characters are coded as male, too. I see it all the time. People just tend to either be fans of the morally grey, or... not.
#asks#idk what to tag this as...#i never established an original post tag and now i am paying for it#anyway i hope u liked my mini essay lmao!#submission
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So I’ve been kind of thinking about Cisco in the first half of season 6. About his thoughts and feelings and motivations throughout the Bloodwork arc as the Crisis looms ever closer.
Cisco finds out one of his best friends is supposed to die before Christmas and... all things considered he actually takes the news really well. I mean, yes, he steals alien medicine that only might be able to prevent death by antimatter and does so against Barry’s express wishes, but... considering this in context with the last six years of his life, it’s pretty understandable why he reacted like that.
The show began with Cisco carrying some pretty massive survivor’s guilt. He blames himself for Ronnie’s death because he’s the one who closed the door to the pipeline, sealing Ronnie in with the explosion. It’s in this state of mind that Cisco is introduced to the then comatose Barry Allen and Cisco maybe goes a little overboard trying to make STAR Labs into an environment that might entice Barry to wake up, even going so far as to check out Barry’s social media pages in order to play his favorite music.
Because if Cisco focuses on Barry, he can ignore the ghost of Ronnie in the pipeline. The specter in the hallways that Cisco half expects to see, but then he looks up and Ronnie isn’t there. Because Cisco closed the door. And he can’t talk about this with Caitlin because he’s more than half-convinced she’ll hate him.
And then Barry wakes up and he connects with Cisco pretty much instantly. They’re both geeks and nerds and love the same fandoms and they click. Suddenly Barry is Cisco’s new best friend.
The superhero thing is fun, but Barry keeps getting hurt. He heals fast, which makes it feel less real sometimes. But Barry nearly dies from inhaling a meta who turns into a toxin. Bette shows up and Cisco gets a crush on her and she does die, her death a testament to the existence of people who would exploit metas - exploit Barry - if given even half a chance. The device Cisco made in case Barry turned out to be too good to be true after all is stolen and used to commit murder, to hurt Barry. And then the Reverse Flash shows up to prove all of Cisco’s fears about a speedster gone wrong were far from unfounded.
Cracks start showing up in the untouchable facade of Harrison Wells. Hartley Rathaway forces them to acknowledge the truth that Wells was aware that the accelerator might (would) fail. Cisco’s nightmares about Wells killing him. The discovery of the real Wells’ body hidden on the highway to Starling city.
And Ronnie turns out to be alive and Cisco and Barry help save him. But Ronnie never talks to Cisco about what happened when the accelerator overloaded. They don’t talk about how, if not for the creation of FIRESTORM, Ronnie would have died. Should have died. Cisco never gets that conversation with him, never gets the absolution he needs to know Ronnie didn’t blame him or hate him for doing as asked and shutting the door. And then Ronnie dies. Again. Permanently this time.
And both Barry and Caitlin shut Cisco out.
So he’s left grieving on his own again. This time worse, because he’s grieving for the loss of Harrison Wells, a convoluted mess of feelings because how do you miss someone you never actually knew? Was anything Eobard Thawne said to him real or was it all an act? Can Cisco allow himself to grieve for a mentor who cared about him when that person was a murderer and a sham?
Cisco reconnects with Barry and Caitlin and latches on to Jay, because a friendly mentor is what they need and it fills a hole in Cisco’s life, which he also tries to fill with Harry. And Cisco has to watch as his best friend is nearly murdered in front of him by Zoom. Cisco is the one who shoots Zoom. And so much about Cisco’s decision to become Vibe in season three comes from this moment. Because when Cisco’s friends are hurting, he’s willing to do whatever it takes to protect them. But he’s also shown, before he can even develop his powers, how monstrous those abilities could make him if he ever misused them.
Jay dies. Cisco mourns a friend’s death, again. And, again, he has to use his powers to prove that friend was a fraud.
He starts reconnecting with his brother, only for Dante to die and its too much for him to take and he lashes out at his best friend. Probably in part because Barry has lost so much too, so how can he get back up? How does he keep going? Keep putting on that suit Cisco made for him and keep getting hurt - keep losing people he loves - and not give up? Flashpoint hurts as much because Barry did for himself what he wouldn’t do for Cisco as it does because it proves sometimes Barry can’t get back up. Sometimes Barry does give up. Cisco had to realize that Barry wasn’t a hero first and foremost and its a hard lesson to learn.
At the same time, here comes HR. HR who isn’t the brilliant scientist he pretends to be and who, despite being badly betrayed by his dearest friend, still finds it in himself to be happy and cheerful and wants to spread that joyfulness to others. And who, for reasons that make no sense to Cisco, wants to impress Cisco more than anyone else on their team. And it’s hard for Cisco to have this dynamic reversed. It takes him a while to adjust, to stop being upset by this weird change. To see HR as his own person and not just another extension of the monolithic Harrison Wells across the multiverse.
And HR dies right as he’s finally starting to let Cisco see beyond the cheerful mask to the vulnerable person underneath, the person afraid that he’s never enough and that his contributions are worthless. And Cisco is left feeling like he massively let HR down.
Caitlin doesn’t trust him with her fears about her powers. He has to confront her at every turn, stage interventions, beg her to let him help. And then she’s injured and dies and what comes back is Frost. All their fears made real. And he doesn’t know how to separate out his friend from this person wearing her body, but he does it. He gives her the choice to become Caitlin again. And Frost both does, and doesn’t take it. Caitlin’s love outweighs Frost’s fear and Cisco’s trust gives them the starting point to eventually find common ground. But she still leaves him behind.
Barry goes into the speed force. He probably intended for Cisco to take over Team Flash even then. But Cisco is too depressed for that and Iris needs to feel like there’s something she can control, so she takes the lead and Cisco throws himself into his research and being a super hero. Being Vibe suddenly means having to live up to Barry’s legacy and even with Wally’s help and Iris running the comms, its hard. He’s not getting the support he needs to make this work.
And then Cisco brings Barry back, only for Barry to be lost in his own head and it probably doesn’t feel like success. It feels like he took too long and he let Barry down. And then to learn he was manipulated into bringing his friend back to further the plans of a villain?
Caitlin comes back, but so does Frost. Their dynamic is changed and trust has to be rebuilt between them all. It’s not easy. (It takes until the end of season five to get all three of them there, not just Cisco and Caitlin, and Frost is well aware of the significance of Cisco making her a suit. And its tailored for Frost’s aesthetics, not Caitlin’s.)
Barry’s framed for murder and Cisco can’t save him. He befriends Ralph against his better judgment and Ralph dies, his body stolen by DeVoe. What good are his powers to him if he can’t save his friends? His powers can’t even fix the strain of a long distance relationship with his girlfriend and he has to learn to accept that sometimes love isn’t enough to hold a relationship together.
Ralph survives after all but DeVoe’s plan creates a serial killer even in his failure. And Cisco is tired. Tired of fighting. Tired of taking hits and being knocked down and having to get back up.
When is it going to stop? It isn’t. The hits are going to just keep coming and there is too much on his plate.
So Cisco resolves to take one thing off his plate. Being Vibe is that one thing that has to go. He can handle his stress with that one gone, surely?
He becomes an uncle to a time traveler who hasn’t been born yet. And she’s his best friend all over again, with her smiles and her cheerfulness and her penchant for bouncing back to her feet when life is so hard on her that her back literally breaks from the pressure. She’s Barry’s kid in the worst ways, so self sacrificing that she runs straight towards her death, her own non-existence, because she feels its the right thing to do.
Cisco keeps losing people he cares about. Over and over and over... even when they come back, he loses them again.
So when Barry tells Cisco that all that time they thought they had to prepare for the events in the newspaper clipping that Gideon’s been holding over their head since season one is gone and that Barry isn’t going to fight to find another way to survive... its no wonder Cisco cares more about saving his best friend, then some person he barely knows.
#the flash#cisco ramon#season 6#grief and loss#thoughts on Cisco in season 6#Cisco's been through a lot over the last several years#meta#musing#Ramsey is Caitlin's friend#so Cisco probably would've been a lot more sympathetic to him if not for the looming crisis#but Barry's on the line and Cisco's lost enough friends that he's not going to lose another without a fight
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Marvels Agents of Shield Episode 5.11 speculation part 1
Hello fellow agents of shield fans and casual observers
This post is meant to speculate over the latest Agents of Shield Episode, so if you haven’t watched episode 11 “Comforts of Home”, I wouldn’t read this as it has spoilers.
Again, spoilers.
Alright lads sit down I’ve been jotting down speculation for the past two hours so let’s go.
Alright guys so here’s a quick recap of what we have seen thus far:
-Robin had a vision of the earth ending
-Enoch realized this and sent the shield agents into the future accordingly (separating fitz from the group on purpose)
-the shield agents go through a whole lotta plot (which including seeing a future/past Yo-yo without arms) and end up back together and make a plan to go back to the past using the monolith, flint, and Enoch
Right? Yes that was brief and I glossed over most of the plot but that is essentially the backbone of the story thus far.
Now lets look at the things in this episode that specifically shocked most of us:
-Ruby frikin slicing of yo-yos arms
Wow ya that’s a short list because I think we can agree as the AOS fandom nothing really catches off guard anymore besides the occasional impromptu amputee
Now I’ll come back to this slicing of the limbs in a minute, but let’s address the time travel thing really quick
Now, we all assumed (and by we I mean me) that the reason for the shield agents to go to the future, was to then work their way back. It was a means of gathering information right? On how to fix the past?
But then we learned that they’ve already gone back, multiple times. We realized they were stuck in a loop right? They couldn’t change the past/future, they’ve tried.
They have literally gone back every time and every time they’ve ended up in the exact same spot.
So now you ask, ok that’s great and terrible and all but what’s your point.
My answer: They didnt go into the future to gather information and then get back. They had to go into the future in order to bring something back.
Because think about it. Why would Robin send them into the future, just to have them come back without anything? Just to have them come back without having any changes?
Thats why the other loops didn’t work, there were no changes
So now you ask, “well how is this time any different, are they going through the loop again?”
To which I say WELL let’s think
Yes they all came back but they did bring something back from the future with them, albeit on accident:
Deke.
Now you’re like “WOW already noticed that” but I of course I have an answer
But before I continue with Deke, I’m going to go back to Yo-yo and her sudden slicing of necessary limbs
Now this was the moment we as the AOS fandom audience was like, “what the absolute heck just happened”
I personally was like “but why did this happen??? They came back??? are they reliving the loop??? HOW DID THE SLICY CIRCLE NOT CHOP HER IN HALF??”
But guys (ignoring the last question) we have to remember that the Yo-yo from the future (with her arms already cut off) stated CLEARLY that Kasius cut off her arms, not Ruby. Which means that they DID make a change.
Yes yes, yo-yo still lost her arms, but to a different person, and at a different time. They made a change.
Now you ask: “how did they make this change??”
The answer: Deke
Deke appeared on earth
And as ya do he got hella drunk and Daisy was forced to go after him.
Ruby sliced off Yo-yos arms because Daisy wasn’t there
Daisy wasn’t there because Deke was drunk in prison
Deke was drunk in prison because he came back on accident from the future
Deke came back on accident from the future because he was the only person left to turn on the Monolith
Guys, by making this change, they broke the loop. They are still in danger of living the same fate, but as of now, they have made a change.
They have proved that you can change the past.
They did it with Yo-yo, her arms got cut off by someone else, at a different time, for a different reason.
This means they can change the future.
And the only reason they made this change is because Daisy wasn’t present.
Daisy, again, was not present because Deke was in prison.
Guys
They didn’t go into the future just to come back
They went to be future in order to bring back Deke so they could make a change
Granted, they did it on accident, and maybe they haven’t realized it yet, but Deke being in the past has changed the future.
Deke will be key later on.
Now with Yo-yo, we saw in the past time loop she had both her arms, because she lost them to Kasius, so we know this will have a different outcome.
Now, there’s one more thing I’d like to put out there,
How did Deke get mixed up in all this so perfectly huh? Why didn’t he ever go back before? How did he or his mother get a chunk of the monolith anyway? Why did we never see his parents?
Well guys, I’ll put it this way, they didn’t let us see dekes parents, specifically his dad, because we’ve already seen them.... (continue on next post)...
#agents of shield#aos season 5#agents of shield spoilers#agents of shield speculation#marvel#marvel speculation#fitzsimmons#fitz#simmons#coulson#yoyo rodriguez#etc
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Fic Idea: WtNV/Twilight crossover
Wherein Bella hails not from Phoenix, Arizona, but from a friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead on a regular basis.
And dogs are not allowed in the Dog Park.
Fandoms: Twilight (books, probably movies too? Haven’t seen them), Welcome to Night Vale (podcast)
Warnings: everything Welcome to Night Vale-related. [So, cosmic horror, Librarian-caliber violence and gore, etc.] On the other hand, at least there’s semi-healthy relationships, here? Semi-unreliable narrator, because growing up in Night Vale makes for a skewed reference frame re: what is and is not sane and/or impossible.
Under the cut because of reasons. [You know why.]
Bella's mother and stepfather were a bit whimsical about where they'd end up living, and chose the classic 'throw a dart on a map'.
In one life, the dart might've landed near Phoenix, and the rest would have been history.
In this one, however…Renee's (I think that's what her name is, it's been years since I last touched the books) aim was slightly off when she threw the dart.
Bella still visits her father regularly, of course.
So she knows some things are slightly off, but thinks it’s Forks that’s pretty weird. She only visits for a few months out of every year, though, so she shrugs it off.
The older she gets, the more she realizes some things are lost in translation; it's her father that recommends she join the Girl Scouts, but seems to think she's joking when she talks about earning her Controlling Plants with Minds patch., and by the time she's gotten her Radiation Immunity patch she's given up telling him just what her troop gets up to.
The camping trips, where she befriends Jacob Black and shows off her Surviving in Nature badge skills, merely net her some weird glances, but…eh. Could be worse, though explaining just where she'd gotten her machete from had left everyone involved with more questions than answers.
Not to mention the Summer Reading Program—the first time Bella survived it, she'd left for Forks not a week later. Charlie had congratulated her for her reading chart, and left it at that.
So she doesn’t really talk about it. Or her Unmodified Sumerian classes, or the bloodstone circles, or…
Time goes on, and Bella's visiting for less and less time, because the older she gets the more things pile up, and by the time she's reached high school her internship at the radio station means she's busier than ever, running errands for Station Management and Cecil, and simply surviving.
It's not until StrexCorp shows up, however, that Bella deems it a good idea to visit Charlie again.
Well…it's less her idea, and more 'StrexCorp bought their neighborhood and is working on shutting down Night Vale High and instating their own charter schools in time for her class to graduate and fuck that noise'.
Plus, it's not like she had much cause to stick around, not when Phil and Renee had been planning on doing something for his job prospects [which, incidentally enough, had been something StrexCorp could slightly respect. Go figure].
So, really, between the choice of attending a Desert Bluff school [ugh], or Forks High, it was really a no-brainer for Bella.
Even if Forks was a kind of weird place.
…it's been a while, actually.
Turns out, distance doesn’t make the heart grow fonder, it just makes things less weirder.
[Seriously, just how did younger her not notice some things?]
It's been years, but Bella's still vaguely terrified by how green everything is. The Whispering Forest was five minutes from her house, after all. She wholeheartedly approves of the rain and the various clouds [even if none of them glow here. Weird].
Fork's high school isn't that bad, but Bella sorely misses her Unmodified Sumerian credits.
And she's vaguely confused by everyone's complaining about PE. [It had some very good real-world applications, what was the big deal? Dodging fireballs invoked by black magic was easy, compared to Chad Steinbeck's throwing arm.]
Kinda weird how nonchalant everyone was about their librarians, though by now she's almost used to how everyone laughs whenever she talked about the killer Summer Reading Program. [Younger her had merited a few curious glances when she'd clung to her backpack, as if carrying duct tape and several days' worth of food and water wasn't a perfectly rational thing to have in a library. Weird.]
And her dad's Police Department must be having severe budget cuts, if his patrol car can't fly and he doesn't even have a balaclava. [So, very, weird.]
She's still fascinated by the Cullens, of course. That's a fundamental constant.
Except here, Bella's not infatuated, or obsessed-- or, at least, not in a "love at first sight" sort of way.
No, here, Bella still sees the predatory gleam in the Cullen's eyes, and their ethereal beauty. But instead of growing warily curious, she instead feels a pang of homesickness, and resolves to befriend them. [That blonde in particular really reminds her of Jessica Simmons in fifth grade, back before she forgot to check her harness when their Girl Scout troop was earning their Paragliding and Divebombing patches.]
That Edward guy was more of an afterthought than anything else, actually. Though it was also a new record, too: not even five minutes and he hated her guts, when her personal best was four hours and thirty-seven minutes for a budding blood feud.
The Cullens, meanwhile, don't know what to think of this new arrival.
Bella Swan had, in the span of five school days, gone from "flavor of the week" to "what the fuck is she on, or is she just trolling?" with alarming speed.
Her father had made it well known she had an eccentric sense of humor, but that still didn't quite prepare everyone for her incredible deadpan, or her reactions to the most random things. [Like her incredulity about wheat-based products: what kind of weird diet was she on?]
They’re seeing this eccentric newcomer who smells of sand and mesquite and desert wind [though Edward doesn't know why it's so enticing to him], and are even more confused. Because of their enhanced senses, they can tell Bella's confusion is genuine, and why was she so terrified when Valentine's Day was brought up?
Alice's the one that puts them on alert: trying to see Bella's future gives her a migraine, and flashes of something great and terrible that she can't quantify, a black abyss and yet not and what was she?!
So, of course, Jasper's equally alarmed, because for something to unnerve his was-committed-to-an-asylum-as-a-human girlfriend…plus her emotions when someone talked about Homecoming should not have been that extreme...
Edward's fascinated, but also questions his self-control as time passes and Bella's slowly smelling less and less like her former hometown, and more and more appealing to him. On the plus side, at least she's not…overly interested in him? She doesn't smell like it, at least. Huh. [That he can't read her mind is but secondary, at this point.]
Rosalind is so, very befuddled with Bella's fearlessness: she's tried to scare her away, but each time she tries, Bella just springs up and mentions something about scouts and patches and what the hell?!
Emmett's the one in the parking lot, when the accident nearly happens. He's very amused by it all, and has a running bet as to why this new chick's gravitating towards them so much, when he sees Edward gear up to save— holy shit did the new girl just backflip away from the SUV? She did. And talked about summer reading programs being good practice. [What even.]
Carlisle's also highly interested in the mystery that is Bella Swan. Even ignoring what his family's been saying, he took her vitals after the almost-accident, and the machine broke. Or, at least, that's the only logical explanation as to why the readouts say her blood's irradiated AND poisonous, and carrying trace elements of...something he'd never seen before. [Bella, meanwhile, thinks the orange juice just doesn't taste the same. What was this sugary swill? Orange juice was supposed to be imaginary, with an acrid tang and a sharp aftertaste. Forks was so weird.]
The Port Angeles thing had Edward very confused, because the would-be rapists' thoughts went from 'easy target' to 'WHERE THE HELL DID SHE GET THAT MACHETE FROM?!' and 'am I seeing things, or is she really throwing textbooks with a slingshot?!' with almost-alarming speed.
And when he pulled up, he couldn’t see it, nor where she could even make that fit.
Huh.
Bella and the Cullens become friends, and when the vampire thing comes up, she doesn't so much as bat an eye.
"Hey, Old Woman Josie's got a houseful of Angels. Even if the hierarchy's classified by the City Council. Not to mention Hiram McDaniels, he's literally a five-headed dragon. At least you're not from Desert Bluffs, right?"
…that's a new one.
Bella's more than happy to answer their questions, too, and that's how the Cullens learn that somehow her cooking was bad enough to get her banned from Desert Bluffs [though why that last one was said with a distinct note of pride, they still didn't quite get].
Her questions, in turn, aren't quite like the ones they'd answered in the past. Carlisle doesn't want to know where Bella got the term Lizard Kings from, or why she thinks he knows where Franchia is [which…what?], or…the list goes on.
Overall, Bella's slightly strange, but perfectly friendly.
[Alice has yet to decide what she makes of Bella's talks about the Monolith, though.]
Edward is actually getting slightly interested in her, but Bella doesn’t exactly have romance at the forefront; she's more than happy to talk about her efforts in helping Night Vale's local Children's Militia[?! Wow was the town creative with names], though, and the first time she touched an oven in their household was also the last. [How the hell she'd managed to recreate Greek fire was something to ask at a later date.]
Plus, her strange smell wasn't the least of it, not after what Carlisle had ascertained. Bella's apparent confusion about regrowing appendages aside, turns out her inoculations included stuff for 'Blood-Space War botulism' and 'Librarian-based diphtheria' as well as the usual chicken pox and tetanus.
Time passes, and things are going well.
Sure, she smells slightly weird as time goes by, but that's probably because of her unique upbringing, plus it's a gradual thing so the Cullens get used to it fairly easily. Even if the scent of something scorching was slightly off-putting, but then, there was a reason nobody let Bella cook.
Bella's pretty weird, but she's also pretty cool, so it balances out in the end.
Some things just get lost in translation, though. Even now.
The baseball game was…interesting.
Bella's comments about Night Vale's annual Sheriff's Secret Police vs. Firefighters game left everyone looking at her in horror, but it was the nonchalance with which she caught the 120 miles-per-hour baseball that let her into the game.
When the new vampires rock up…hmm. I can't decide.
Option A:
Bella smelled not only of mesquite and desert wind, but also an underlying tang of something Other, something not of this world. She was the only one alive to have earned the Blood-Space War patch in her troop, and when they tried to attack she smiled and let the tang of dark magic sear the air warningly.
Option B:
Bella smelled of something Other, and since these newcomers hadn't been there when her smell had gradually changed, the Cullens are wondering why they're freaking out.
“She smells of monster!"
"What the hell are you talking about?”
Option C:
She smells more like a local than not; a year out of Night Vale, in a rainy place, meant its distinct aroma had gradually faded. They try to attack, and Bella's ready to go to bat, but no dice.
“I could've taken them!" She mutters petulantly. Bah. Overprotective vampires. Just when she'd been having fun, too.
They're insistent that she flee. Eh, it's been a while, might as well check up on how Renee’s been doing, or if they managed to evict StrexCorp. It's adorable how Edward's so concerned for her health, but really.
Their first hint Something's Up is when she pulls out the bloodstone circles.
Specifically, "What the hell are bloodstone circles."
Bella returns to her hometown, at the Cullen's insistence, she might add. It's been a while, and… oh, shit.
"What's the big deal about—mmph!" Edward manages before Bella claps a hand over his mouth.
“Watch your words, it's Street Cleaning Day tomorrow! C'mon, I think I remember a bunker we can hide out in."
"What."
They glimpse the vampires trying to get to them, but then…
"Fuck it, time for the big guns. Let's go the library."
"What."
"Bring a machete, orange juice, and I hope you remember at least some Jane Austen, it might very well save our lives Mr. I Lived A Hundred Years."
"What?!"
"We have no time, just run!"
Hiding out by the Dog Park is also an acceptable one; the scent means the poor fools try to take on the Hooded Figures, which yeah.
After a crash course as to everything Night Vale, Bella's slightly reluctant to go back to Forks, meanwhile Edward's more than a little freaked out, while the rest of the Cullens are in no better shape. The trip back is in almost complete silence. Bella's asleep, because the library always required a lot of energy, meanwhile the rest of the car's eying her a lot more warily than a few days ago.
She's nursing a sprained wrist from staving off a Librarian, a broken leg from landing the wrong way after sticking an illegal pen on one vampire and a loaf of bread on the other [and thus siccing the Sheriff's Secret Police on both], and a concussion on top of that. Still intimidating anyway; just where had that assault rifle even come from?!
Ah, the joys of having earned her Concealed Weaponry patch during seventh grade…
And that's the end of the events of Twilight.
During New Moon, Bella's not desperately seeking death once the Cullens go MIA.
Either she goes 'welp, getting kind of bored here, oh hey, Jacob! Want to cliff dive?...okay this is actually kind of tame, but at least I'm not as homesick now, thanks!'
Or, she'd go 'my only friends are gone, StrexCorp fucked off from Night Vale, screw it I'm coming home'.
If she were to meet the Volturi, she'd immediately light up and go 'oh hey do you have any relation to the Large Brotherhood of the Small Chamber? Or Night Vale's City Council?' which, in turn, would cause some…interesting reactions. [A facepalm here, a 'oh god I thought we were done with you guys' groan from there, etc. The Cullens are both curious but also don't want to know.]
At some point, an ancient vampire shows up, and Bella’s practicing her Unmodified Sumerian and ignoring everyone’s stares when they realize it’s the human who’s just blasé and talking to this guy in his mother tongue. She’s not fluent, but it’s enough.
Where did this idea even come from? Who knows? [Dammit brain]
#fic idea#fic ideas#it's probably a bit dorky but meh#Welcome to Night Vale#Twilight#crossover#Naught rambles
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Top Misconceptions People Have about Pulp-Era Science Fiction
A lot of people I run into have all kinds of misconceptions about what pulp-era scifi, from the 1920s-1950s, was actually like.
“Pulp-Era Science Fiction was about optimistic futures.”
Optimistic futures were always, always vastly outnumbered by end of the world stories with mutants, Frankenstein creations that turn against us, murderous robot rebellions, terrifying alien invasions, and atomic horror. People don’t change. Then as now, we were more interested in hearing about how it could all go wrong.
To quote H.L. Gold, editor of Galaxy Science Fiction, in 1952:
“Over 90% of stories submitted to Galaxy Science Fiction still nag away at atomic, hydrogen and bacteriological war, the post atomic world, reversion to barbarism, mutant children killed because they have only ten toes and fingers instead of twelve….the temptation is strong to write, ‘look, fellers, the end isn’t here yet.’”
The movie Tomorrowland is a particulary egregious example of this tremendous misconception (and I can’t believe Brad Bird passed on making Force Awakens to make a movie that was 90 minutes of driving through the Florida swamps). In reality, pre-1960s scifi novels trafficked in dread, dystopian futures, and fear. There was simply never a time when optimistic scifi was overrepresented, even the boyish Jules Verne became skeptical of the possibilities of technology all the way at the turn of the century. One of the most famous pulp scifi yarns was Jack Williamson’s The Humanoids, about a race of Borg-like robots who so totally micromanage humans “for our own protection” that they leave us with nothing to do but wait “with folded hands.”
“Pulp scifi often featured muscular, large-chinned, womanizing main characters.”
Here’s the image often used in parodies of pulp scifi: the main character is a big-chinned, ultra-muscular dope in tights who is a compulsive womanizer and talks like Adam West in Batman. Whenever I see this, I think to myself…what exactly is it they’re making fun of?
It’s more normal than you think to find parodies of things that never actually existed. Mystery buffs and historians, for example, can’t find a single straight example of “the Butler did it.” It’s a thing people think is a thing that was never a thing, and another example would be the idea of the “silent film villain” in a mustache and top hat (which there are no straight examples of, either). There are no non-parody examples of Superman changing in a phone booth; he just never did this.
In reality, my favorite description of pulp mag era science fiction heroes is that they are “wisecracking Anglo-Saxon engineers addicted to alcohol and tobacco who like nothing better than to explain things to others that they already know.” The average pulp scifi hero had speech patterns best described as “Mid-Century American Wiseass” than like Adam West or the Lone Ranger.
The nearest the Spaceman Spiff stereotype came to hitting the mark was with the magazine heroes of the Lensmen and Captain Future, and they’re both nowhere near close. Captain Future was a muscular hero with a chin, but he also had a Captain Picard level desire to use diplomacy first, and believed that most encounters with aliens were only hostile due to misunderstandings and lack of communication (and the story makes him right). He also didn’t seem interested in women, mostly because he had better things to do for the solar system and didn’t have the time for love. The Lensmen, on the other hand, had a ruthless, bloodthirsty streak, and were very much like the “murder machine” Brock Sampson (an attitude somewhat justified by the stakes in their struggle).
“Pulp Era Scifi were mainly action/adventure stories with good vs. evil.”
This is a half-truth, since, like so much other genre fiction, scifi has always been sugared up with fight scenes and chases. And there was a period, early in the century, when most scifi followed the Edgar Rice Burroughs model and were basically just Westerns or swashbucklers with different props, ray guns instead of six-shooters. But the key thing to remember is how weird so much of this scifi was, and that science fiction, starting in the mid-1930s, eventually became something other than just adventure stories with different trappings.
One of my favorite examples of this is A. Bertram Chandler’s story, “Giant-Killer.” The story is about rats on a starship who acquire intelligence due to proximity to the star drive’s radiation, and who set about killing the human crew one by one. Another great example is Eando Binder’s Adam Link stories, told from the point of view of a robot who is held responsible for the death of his creator.
What’s more, one of the best writers to come out of this era is best known for never having truly evil bad guys: Isaac Asimov. His “Caves of Steel,” published in 1953, had no true villains. The Spacers, who we assumed were snobs, only isolated themselves because they had no immunities to the germs of earth.
“Racism was endemic to the pulps.”
It is absolutely true that the pulps reflected the unconscious views of society as a whole at the time, but as typical of history, the reality was usually much more complex than our mental image of the era. For instance, overt racism was usually shown as villainous: in most exploration magazines like Adventure, you can typically play “spot the evil asshole we’re not supposed to like” by seeing who calls the people of India “dirty monkeys” (as in Harold Lamb).
Street & Smith, the largest of all of the pulp publishers, had a standing rule in the 1920s-1930s to never to use villains who were ethnic minorities because of the fear of spreading race hate by negative portrayals. In fact, in one known case, the villain of Resurrection Day was going to be a Japanese General, but the publisher demanded a revision and he was changed to an American criminal. Try to imagine if a modern-day TV network made a rule that minority groups were not to be depicted as gang bangers or drug dealers, for fear that this would create prejudice when people interact with minority groups in everyday life, and you can see how revolutionary this policy was. It’s a mistake to call this era very enlightened, but it’s also a mistake to say everyone born before 1970 was evil.
“Pulp scifi writers in the early days were indifferent to scientific reality and played fast and loose with science.”
FALSE.
This is, by an order of magnitude, the most false item on this list.
In fact, you might say that early science fiction fandom were obsessed with scientific accuracy to the point it was borderline anal retentive. Nearly every single one of the lettercols in Astounding Science Fiction were nitpickers fussing about scientific details. In fact, modern scifi fandom’s grudging tolerance for storytelling necessities like sound in space at the movies, or novels that use “hyperspace” are actually something of a step down from what the culture around scifi was in the 1920s-1950s. Part of it was due to the fact that organized scifi fandom came out of science clubs; Hugo Gernsback created the first scifi pulp magazine as a way to sell electronics and radio equipment to hobbyists, and the “First Fandom” of the 1930s were science enthusiasts who talked science first and the fiction that speculated about it second.
In retrospect, a lot of it was just plain obvious insecurity: in a new medium considered “kid’s stuff,” they wanted to show scifi was plausible, relevant, and something different from “fairy tales.” It’s the same insecure mentality that leads video gamers to repeatedly ask if games are art. You’ve got nothing to prove there, guys, calm down (and take it from a pulp scifi aficionado, the most interesting things are always done in the period when a medium is considered disposable trash).
One of the best examples was the famous Howard P. Lovecraft, who published “The Shadow out of Time” in the 1936 issue of Astounding. Even though it might be the only thing from that issue that is even remotely reprinted today, the letters page from this issue practically rose up in revolt against this story as not being based on accurate science. Lovecraft was never published in Astounding ever again.
If you ever wanted to find out what Star Wars would be like if they were bigger hardasses about scientific plausibility, check out E.E. Smith’s Lensman series. People expect a big, bold, brassy space opera series with heroes and villains to play fast and loose, but it was shockingly scientifically grounded.
To be fair, science fiction was not a monolith on this. One of the earliest division in science fiction was between the Astounding Science Fiction writers based in New York, who often had engineering and scientific backgrounds and had left-wing (in some cases, literally Communist) politics, and the Amazing Stories writers based in the Midwest, who were usually self taught, and had right-wing, heartland politics. Because the Midwestern writers in Amazing Stories were often self-taught, they had a huge authority problem with science and played as fast and loose as you could get. While this is true, it’s worth noting science fiction fandom absolutely turned on Amazing Stories for this, especially when the writers started dabbling with spiritualism and other weirdness like the Shaver Mystery. And to this day, it’s impossible to find many Amazing Stories tales published elsewhere.
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How Batwoman Takes on Policing and Social Issues
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Police brutality has gone from a niche concern – one most white people considered impolite to bring up at dinner parties – to a compulsory national conversation. It’s long overdue, which has left many playing catch-up, especially white folks and popular media. As David Dennis Jr. pointed out in his excellent Twitter thread (seriously, go read it!) superhero shows have an especially tall order, given that they rely on portraying lawlessness and a fictionalized criminality that the hero can then clamp down on. But that image is out of touch with reality and can send damaging messages.
We’ve long discussed this problematic aspect of the genre in our reviews and features, whether it’s Barry Allen’s personal private prison kept in the basement of STAR Labs or Oliver Queen’s incredibly short-lived interest in reforming the prison industrial complex…before he went right back to adding more people to it. But Batwoman has taken a different tack that other comic book shows could learn from.
Batwoman has, to greater and lesser degrees, explored gentrification, corruption of police and the legal system, police brutality/the lawlessness of privatized law enforcement, and the wrongful conviction of a Black man. The show is not perfect, and it must be stated that no other show is doing quite what HBO’s Watchmen did in terms of exploring this country’s legacy of race, anti-Black violence, and policing. But Batwoman is a superhero show that spent the last year actively engaging with questions like “was that an appropriate use of force?” and “isn’t this a gross violation of the civil rights of the people of Gotham City?”
In the Gotham of Batwoman, a private security firm called The Crows operates with near-impunity within the city, keeping the incredibly well-heeled secure while everyone else hopes for the best. Gated community is an understatement, and frankly, the firm is closer to a mercenary paramilitary operation.
By the end of the season, The Crows have expanded their reach through an app that’s available to all Gothamites, even those who aren’t clients, so anyone can call in the mercenaries if they see big bad Alice and her brother Mouse, or Batwoman, whom Crows head honcho Jake Kane views as equally villainous. It’s easy to imagine the Crows’ app going the way of SketchFactor in DC and other IRL safety apps, which quickly turned into racial and socioeconomic maps, with white and upper class folks flagging anything that made them uncomfortable – namely, Black neighborhoods.
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Replacing Kate Kane on Batwoman Season 2 is a Terrible Idea
By Lacy Baugher
Sophie Moore, a high-ranking agent with the Crows, continually pushes back against their use of force and in several circumstances when the Crows overstep the rights of citizens, to the point where she is sidelined, suspended, and eventually kicked off the Crows. She questions her mentor Jacob Kane in his vendetta against Batwoman – for whom there is no arrest warrant, the shoot-to-kill order on Alice that comes and goes throughout the season, and the extreme blanket use of surveillance on average citizens. If you’re worried about police breaking the law or the militarization of the police, try the privatization of a police force on for size. While the writing on Batwoman clearly raises concerns throughout the season, Sophie and Kate are among the only people able to effectively check the Crows’ power, largely due to their personal and professional relationships with Jake Kane.
One of the show’s greatest assets has been the willingness of its writing and its hero to give the supposed villain of any given episode – who is often disenfranchised in some way that turns out to be connected to how they have lashed out at the system – the benefit of the doubt. It’s a benefit that our legal system is based on, but one that we know many people do not get – and one that the Crows don’t often give to suspects. Some so-called villains have turned out to be innocent people manipulated by others, or victims of systems that eroded their humanity.
For example, the season finale deconstructed the media and law enforcement trope of the giant invincible Black man, using the show’s own gossip host (voiced with juicy irony by longtime Batwoman comic fan Rachel Maddow) to introduce a suspect with barely-coded language. The show goes on to deconstruct that narrative, introducing the audience to his brother, who worries about his sibling who was nothing like the man described on TV. Gotham’s professional football league used him for entertainment and several people in positions of power abused their privilege to do serious harm, in this case irreparable CTE that turned a gentle man into someone who literally couldn’t feel pain, yet another harmful stereotype of Black folks that has caused harm from slavery to the medical field.
Gotham’s actual police force is so incompetent as to be a non-factor. They only come up in maybe a handful of episodes, but they feature prominently in one of the season’s best arcs: the wrongful conviction for Lucius Fox’s murder. His father’s murder was a defining moment in Luke Fox’s life.
Normally the calm, logical, emotionally removed man behind the comms and tech on Team Bat, we watched Luke put together the pieces and realize that a fellow Black man had been set up to take the fall for his father’s death and then pursue the real killer. This wasn’t a clunky after school special one-and-done story so the creators can check a box. The arc was allowed to breathe over many episodes, giving actor Camrus Johnson the space to show the complex and often-changing swirl of emotions his character was experiencing.
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Batwoman Showrunner Addresses Kate Kane Season 2 Departure
By Kayti Burt
Nothing about the writing or the performance was straightforward or easy. It’s the kind of ambitious writing and gnarled injustice that real people actually face, the sort of thing that we actually need real heroes for. It was a high point of Camrus Johnson’s excellent, season-long performance.
It’s worth noting that simply having the male lead – number two on the call sheet, Batwoman’s professional other half – played by a Black man, makes a big difference. But while other Arrowverse shows have had prominent Black characters – John Diggle on Arrow and Iris and Joe West on The Flash come to mind – Batwoman is different. For one, the writing has made explicit that Luke and Kate are partners, whereas for all that he came to eventually love and respect them, Oliver fought Diggle and Felicity every step of the way, and The Flash has always felt like a lead singer with a backing band. Even then, there’s a hierarchy, and a quick spin around the internet will produce ample evidence that neither Iris West-Allen nor Candice Patton have received the kind of treatment that a show’s leading lady would normally expect.
At the root of this is the writers’ room. Batwoman is written by a diverse group of people that represents the issues discussed on the show. It includes queer folks, women, and BIPOC. Actors can do their best to convey the work with skill, sensitivity, and depth. But talent behind the scenes needs to be diverse as well, otherwise they’re still going to be talking about Grandma Esther’s noodles.
While there’s a lot we don’t know about Batwoman season 2, namely the LGBTQ actor who will play the new lead and how they will be written in to pick up the threads from last season, I hope Batwoman will continue working with “villains” who are more complicated than we’re used to seeing on shows with tights.
I also hope they’re able to portray more of the income inequality that showrunner Caroline Dries discussed in an interview with Den of Geek earlier this season. “One thing we had in Gotham City is this idea of the ‘us-versus-them’ in the districts where people are protected and then other districts where they’re left to their own devices because they can’t afford private security.”
Dries told us that, unfortunately, this wasn’t as emphasized as she would have liked, due to the limitations as production.
“In a perfect world, you’d have a bird’s eye view of the city and you would actually be able to see districts,” Dries said. There were some references to this earlier in the season with checkpoints between neighborhoods, but as the season went on, Dries said those little bridge scenes were the first to get cut due to time and money. Fortunately, it sounds like it will still be part of season 2, and likely more pronounced.
“If I had all the time in the world and all the money in the world, I would have been able to dramatize that disparity better and the segregation a little bit better, visually,” Dries said. “But we’re going to continue to keep that alive, especially now as we’ve seen the Crows sort of becoming more heightened in their power and becoming more authoritarian and scarier.”
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DC FanDome to Reveal DCEU, Arrowverse, and More DC Universe Secrets
By Jim Dandy
Moreover, homelessness has been part of the show’s narrative since the very first teaser, but Batwoman has yet to engage with the issue of economic inequality or with actual people experiencing homelessness as individuals, rather than as an abstract concept. Even if it’s simply by having Mary, Luke, or the mysterious “Ryan Wilder” develop a relationship with someone who sleeps rough outside Wayne Tower or their apartment building, or if Mary’s clinic starts back up again and a character or two is differentiated that way, it would be nice to see humanity and individualism, rather than a monolith.
Finally, while it’s not an issue involving our carceral systems, it must be said that Batwoman has provided the space for Meagan Tandy’s Sophie to have a truly lovely storyline about her sexuality. While Kate Kane/Batwoman has basically always been out and accepted, that’s not everyone’s story. Not everyone has accepting parents and a family fortune to fall back on if they’re kicked out of the military. Sophie’s journey as a queer Black woman has been allowed to progress at her own pace, allowing the character to unpack what it means for her relationship (she starts the series married to a man), her identity, and her family as she explores who she is and what that means to her. Not everyone’s path is the same, nor do they have to express it the same way. While it’s great for people to see Kate Kane as a role model, I imagine there are far more people who can relate to Sophie Moore.
As television reorients itself around a long overdue reprioritization of Black lives, the landscape will shift, in some cases dramatically, as with the cancellation of long-running show Cops. But for other shows, like Batwoman, there’s an opportunity to continue pushing even further forward on the very social issues that once caused trolls to review-bomb the show with so much online hate. Heading into season 2, as the social and cultural landscape shifts, Batwoman should continue Kate Kane’s legacy of fighting injustice intersectionally, centering the marginalized while upending comic book tropes about law and order.
The post How Batwoman Takes on Policing and Social Issues appeared first on Den of Geek.
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This CEO was so broke he had to crash on Travis Kalanick's couch — now he's raised $18 million from Andreessen Horowitz
Today, programming software company Mashape announces a $18 million investment, led by famed Silicon Valley firm Andreesen Horowitz.
Andreessen Horowitz general partner Martin Casado, who cofounded networking startup Nicira before VMware gobbled it up in 2012 for $1.26 billion, will also join Mashape's board.
Today, Mashape is going strong, with 25 employees. And teams at companies like Amazon, Spotify, and Target are using Mashape's flagship Kong software to build their apps in more modern ways. Better yet, as of December 2016, Marietti says, Mashape is cash flow positive, after raising a relatively meager $8.1 million in venture funding over the years.
But before we go into what Mashape will do with this money, let's step back and look at how this company got here. It's a story of determination and dumb luck — even Casado says that one of the things he most admires about the Mashape founders is "the amount of sacrifice that they did" to get where they are today.
"You walk along a hard road as a company," says Mashape CEO Augusto Marietti.
Indeed, in a very real way, if it weren't for Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, the leaders of Silicon Valley's two most prominent startups, and a willingness to rough it out when they were broke, Mashape might not exist.
The Uber-Airbnb connection
It was 2009, and 18-year-olds Augusto Marietti and Marco Palladino had come from Milan to San Francisco's TechCrunch 50 conference with a demo of a website that could mash up data sources...and very little else.
An entrepreneur named Travis Kalanick (yes, the future Uber CEO) made the trip possible when he picked Marietti and Palladino from a crowd of 30 or so applicants to crash free of charge at his "Jampad" — his large San Francisco home, which doubled as a hangout and meeting spot for the local startup scene — for 10 days during the event.
"I don't know why he picked us, but he picked us," says Marietti.
The event didn't result in the funding they were looking for, but the Mashape team wasn't discouraged. Besides, they had made a powerful friend, which would come in handy later. They flew back and forth between Italy and San Francisco, hustling for funding.
At this point, they were teetering on broke. They ate rice and beans, took meetings at Starbucks, and shared the same bed in the cheap Airbnb rooms they found. Once, Marietti says, they ended up sleeping on benches in San Francisco's Dolores Park because they had nowhere else to stay.
Still, they had another fortuitous encounter when their Airbnb fandom resulted in them crashing at Airbnb's headquarters — which at the time was really just 8 guys sharing a house in San Francisco. There, Marietti got to watch Airbnb cofounders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia at work, internalizing their focus on building communities.
Chesky and Gebbia, too, acted as mentors for the young Mashape team. The biggest lesson Marietti learned from the Airbnb founders: A competitor can replicate your product's features. But if you have a dedicated community of users, well, that's "very, very hard to copy."
Turning point
The real turning point would come in April of 2010, when Mashape finally found a group of early YouTube employees who might be willing to make a small investment. Kalanick offered the Jampad's living room as a meeting spot, and even sat on Marietti's side of the table during negotiations.
When one group of investors said they might be interested, but they needed to sleep on a decision, Kalanick pushed Marietti into taking a more hard-line stance, telling Marietti that "if they leave, you're never going to see them again."
Kalanick instead told the investors that they had five minutes to talk privately and make a decision, or else Mashape would walk away. A handshake deal was struck for a little over $100,000, and the Mashape team, which only had $2,000 in the bank at this point between then, was saved.
"That saved us, literally," Marietti says. "We wouldn't be here without Travis."
It was hard enough in 2010, Marietti says. Nowadays, he says, there are more and more startups vying for attention, and he's not confident they could do it again. "I probably wouldn't survive if I had to do it now," Marietti says.
So what does Mashape do?
Mashape is riding the wave that programmers call "microservices," where you take one big, monolithic, complex piece of software and break it down into multiple simple little ones. Those little bits then talk to each other via a method called APIs, or application programming interfaces.
With microservices, if you're trying to build a new website, mobile app, Amazon Alexa skill, or smart refrigerator, programmers can just build the vast majority of the software from the figurative Lego bricks they already have, rather than start over from scratch. It's an approach pioneered at companies like Amazon and PayPal.
Marietti describes this as a "shapeless" approach to software development, where the same code can be reused across platforms old and new. And he says that, as "elephants" among the Fortune 500 and their ilk start to accelerate their software strategies, they're turning to Kong to help them manage and secure their microservices architectures.
"They're the elephants going through a transition," says Marietti. "They have a very complex need."
That's why Marietti is raising the funding now, despite Mashape's recent turn towards profitability. He sees a big chance to build out Mashape's profile among big companies, positioning Kong as a big way to help them move into the future.
Bits into atoms
From the perspective of Andreessen Horowitz's Martin Casado, Mashape is playing into a bigger trend entirely.
To go back to Travis Kalanick, much of Uber's strategy hinges on the usage of APIs: When you hail an Uber via Google Maps, that's Google's code "talking" to Uber via an API. Similarly, when you use an Amazon Echo to play a Spotify song, Alexa "asks" Spotify for the song via API.
Now, Casado says, there are APIs that let you do everything from send text messages, to reserving warehouse space, to sending snail mail via USPS. It's not just apps and services that are being affected; it's the physical world.
"Any service that exists, there's a way to programmatically control it," Casado says.
So as software just keeps on eating the world, Casado says, there's going to be even more demand for software like Mashape's Kong, which can help company manage this exploding world of APIs. And as it is, he says, Kong is already the most popular software of its type out there. And, true to the lessons, that Marietti learned from Airbnb's founders, Kong has a thriving community of thousands of open source developers using it in their own projects
"I think now is the time to be bold because now is the time to disrupt the infrastructure," says Casado.
SEE ALSO: Meet 'Professor X,' the AI genius who left his lab at Princeton to beat Uber, Google, and Intel at their own game
Join the conversation about this story »
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