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ryind · 9 months

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SPOILERS FOR OPPENHEIMER BY THE WAY BECAUSE I HAVE WAY TOO MANY THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS MOVIE AND WANT TO DISSECT IT

Okay so I know there are some very reasonable and valuable complaints, comments, and criticisms about Oppenheimer and how it handles the ACTUAL victims of the war, martyrizing Oppenheimer, an arguably very gray character in reality for more reasons than the atomic bomb and...trying to poison his mentor. You know. The basics.

THAT SAID I AM GOING ABSOLUTELY FERAL FOR CILLIAN MURPHY'S PORTRAYAL OF OPPENHEIMER LIKE I HAVE A 3 IN 1 DEAL FOR HYPERFIXATIONS RIGHT NOW I THINK BECAUSE WE HAVE THE ACTUAL MOVIE, CILLIAN, AND THEN OPPENHEIMER. AGH. LOSING MY MIND. PICKING APART EVERY SCENE AND DETAIL WHILE ALSO GUSHING ABOUT CILLIAN'S PERFORMANCE.

on that note here's some things I worked out about the movie, or rather, my takes on them for those curious (some of these are definitely a stretch, but I like seeing how far I can push a metaphor once I find one, so here we go):

Lotta controversy about the "I am become death" quote during the sex scene, which, fair. I can see why they included it though, upon reflection. In the moment, it just feels like a strange foreshadowing of the bomb itself, which did Not resonate with me and seemed fairly jarring, but upon closer inspection, I think the relevance of that quote in *that* context is that this is the first person Oppenheimer lost. Jean needed Oppenheimer, and he blamed himself for her suicide (or murder, maybe). This was the first time he "became death, destroyer of worlds"; the first marble in the bowl, which mirrors Oppie's reaction to the bomb's actual detonation quite well, too, I think. Something terrible has just happened, and yet the expectation is that Oppenheimer shows up and pretends all is well and he isn't horribly damaged, just martyring on.

SECOND

The orange from Rabi might be a bit deep or I might be a bit stupid. Oranges tend to symbolize positivity and aid, so being told to eat one by a friend in his most vulnerable moment is a kindness, hence some symbolism there. I did unpack this deeper though, say, such that oranges need to be peeled to get to the sweetness, and they are one of the sweetest citrus fruits, though they maintain their tang. This represents perfectly how the orange delivery felt in that scene; sweetness from Rabi in a moment of vulnerability, the orange peel gone, the bitter and trauma numbed exterior of Oppenheimer stripped away for just a moment before the sour slammed back in full force. Also just. Really stretching it but oranges being segmented could both represent a fractured mind AND the different perspectives on Oppenheimer as a whole and his reputation to this day.

Oh and General Groves when telling Oppenheimer he's essentially done with him but will ..try? To keep in contact? And update him?? He's buttoning up his coat if I remember right, mirroring his guard getting put up as he ends his amicable dealings and negotiations with Oppenheimer, adding layers and making himself less vulnerable. Oppie, meanwhile, smokes as the quiet, socially acceptable way to perform an anxious ritual.

Also the RAIN. Don't have this one fully unpacked yet and maybe never will but Cillian in an interview mentioned that Nolan described Oppenheimer as "dancing between the raindrops" and this has only half clicked with me but oh well here we go. The basic idea is likely that Oppenheimer doesn't abide by just one grouping of people or their ideas, or hop on any flow bound for one particular destination. Rather, he dances in the space between; in the uncertainty that looms closer towards the ground the further things fall. I think this works decently with what I've listened to and read about Oppenheimer as a person, saying he'd follow recent physics, always growing impatient with the current field he was in and seeking something more...I don't like the use of this word in relation to science but "trendy." I guess the dust particles and whatnot in the headspace sequences work in line with the whole rain theory too in terms of how Oppenheimer doesn't just think about the interactions and the space between, but lives and breathes it as the space between the raindrops; between those that make the biggest splashes, as he gets caught in the ripples. Also given his anti-war rhetoric throughout the movie I feel like there's maybe a fire/water thing going on with him trying to quench the bomb he created but ultimately failing? Who knows. Maybe it's just rain.

Anyways here's all the ramblings I did to myself to reach these conclusions. They are incomprehensible.

#oppenheimer #cillian murphy #christopher nolan #oppenheimer spoilers #barbenheimer #god dammit cillian has me in a chokehold #american prometheus #j robert oppenheimer #my ap lit brain was Not Okay after that movie

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soraka-in-warhammer40k · 6 months

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Looking at some of grimdank's reaction to the Sanguinius/Horus fight scene, I can only quote myself: "How the absolute hell can vocal participants in a fandom space that draws and always has drawn the vast majority of its narrative content by novels be so absolutely fucking illiterate?"

Luckily its been getting better with time but apparently some people have no clue what a metaphor is. Or how context informs word choices that might look weird in isolation.

The second part I can understand at least somewhat as a side effect of what you can call "meme-brain". When your primary mode of medial engagement includes constant recontextualisation, it tends to skew perception towards an atomized evaluation of content-bits. Memery is fun (this is a shitpost blog so I might be biased here), and spotting lines or scenes that make a good joke removed from their original context is a valid form of entertainment, as well as the very basis of our postmodern remix-culture, but I feel some people forget that you cannot evaluate the quality of fragments when they are competly isolated and removed from the original.

The "textual poacher", to lean on Jenkin's phrase, makes for a shoddy critic at times.

That second part can be weird, but it is understandable. it's just a quirk that happens with every bit of dominant media: the patterns we consume content in shape our way we see content. It's feedback loops all the way down, and something one can be aware of. What I do not get is how absolutely fucking illiterate some people are despite the fact that they are obviously capable of reading.

One character is described as "moving as fast as the laws of physics allow him to" he is given the metaphor of "light", the fastest thing we know. The other character opposes him by actively circumventing the laws of physics and outmatches him, while being his direct opposite in the entirety of the narrative. "Darkness" is an apt choice of words here to complete the metaphor, and yet there's people pointing fingers like "HAHA HE SAID THE EDGY WORD" - completly ignoring that said word has been charged with setting-specific meaning over the course of 70 or so volumes of novels.

I do not expect much from people, but how can some of them read 70 or so volumes of novels and still be so utterly bad at the task? It's like watching someone paint a 100 miniatures over the months and then the 100th one still looks like the 2nd or 3rd. What have they been doing all this time?!

#warhammer 40k #I do not exactly like blurring shitpost life and media studies life but #I feel like I had to write this down #wh40k

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duskwingmoth · 8 months

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I'm of the opinion that Hideo Kojima was leading Metal Gear in increasingly tight concentric circles to the point that if he hadn't left Konami, the next Metal Gear after V would have strangled the series to death on its own insular plotting. His storytelling tendencies have only gotten increasingly esoteric and abstract as his career has worn on, his obscene loreboner is always erect, and he made no secret of his exhausted resentment of his own series over the years.

All three were very bad developments for a series whose roots are poignant post-Soviet political commentary and the real-world implications of nuclear weaponry giant death robots. Did the injection of philosophical musings on the nature of heritage and culture add a good post-modern spice to the series? Hell yes. But after the PS2, when these themes began to overtake the political commentary, you can feel the series start to lose itself. It detaches from the real world, from its own world, from its own characters, as they devolve into plot points and mouthpieces for Kojima to muse on human nature and the purpose of life, polemics ranting themselves at each other atop Mount Snakemore.

Sometimes an elderly Navajo man talks about how much he loves cheeseburgers and they're the only good colonial invention, and that's fun. I agree with that. But all the implications of his part in a story about colonization desecrating indigenous culture and atomizing native people is so buried by layers of metaphor and avant-garde storytelling and literary reference and being sidelined because Phantom Pain is really about the hollowness of chasing retribution and Cowboy Freddy Krueger being mad he had to clean up after Big Boss' dumb ass for several years (*sharp inhale*), that it ends up toothless. No point to make, because it's behind the hazy spectre of Metal Gear Solid. A grandiose video game ouroburos, a selfish, controlling, tired auteur's albatross of an opus.

Revengeance is an antidote for all this, as it reaches beyond The Saga Of Snake into a world that, while still divorced from itself, is far more grounded in the physical, the geopolitical, in exploring the logistic ramifications of all the Weird Plot Shit in MGS4, (accidentally) tapping into a very real and very dangerous sentiment that was brewing in the United States at the time that would boil over a few years later. It isn't perfect, it's far less intricate than Kojima's work, but it's such a breath of fresh air; a clear and strong sign of life in Metal Gear as a concept. It can absolutely persist beyond Kojima, provided it's allowed to leave The Dynasty behind.

I of course had the exact same thought about Star Wars in 2017, and I expect my hopes would be similarly snuffed out with regards to Metal Gear, should it move forward after Delta and the imminent rereleases. But there is a non-zero chance that the next entirely new Metal Gear will be an enthusiastic, daring work made with love, bursting with new material. If Kojima was still in charge, that would be another Return to Zero.

#actual blog post #metal gear #metal gear solid #mgs #i'm on a roll now. you can't stop me from writing

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kuri-no-tani · 2 months

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JVC Post #21

AKIRA

This movie is a cultural treasure. Undoubtedly up there with the best anime movies of all time. The animation is phenomenal, but so is the soundtrack and the writing. Truly a wonderful film.

The movie can be pretty hard to interpret, but there is certainly a lot to unravel nonetheless. I think the first time I watched this I had no idea what to make of it, and even now on my third watch, it's still hard to unpack. I can try to explain what I get out of it though.

Before that though I want to quickly talk about the horror aspect of this movie, which always gets me. There are a good few scenes in this movie that make me look away, starting around when Testuo's guts appear to fall out of him in the beginning. Then, of course, you have the whole ending sequence which is just a horrible, disgusting, fascinating spectacle of body horror. If there is anything at all memorable about Akira, it's Tetsuo's metamorphosis.

In any case, the movie clearly has themes of post-war Japan. The explosion at the beginning sets it up as such immediately. What's markedly different, however, is the futuristic setting. There are appearances of bousouzoku, student protesters, religious fanatics, societal unrest, and other themes that hearken back to postwar Japan, but it's cast in a new light through the cyberpunk setting.

They were able to do a lot of cool things because of the dark cyberpunk influences attached to historical themes. I think something that really stood out was the fate of the scientist. It was his curiosity that led to Tetsuo becoming a problem, it was the original scientists leading the esper project that eventually led to the birth of Akira, and it was that exact morbid curiosity that killed him in the end, crushed by his own machinery. It's a very classic kind of tragedy, one that was all too real during wartime, and one that resulted in the creation of the atomic bombs.

On top of this, the people behind the effort to stop Tetsuo were the very same ones to unleash him and others like him unto the world. It's a very poetic movie in a way. Tetsuo's metamorphosis at the end was not only a disgusting physical one, but a metaphysical one as well. Through his neutralization by way of Akira, he births a new universe through his transformation, and realizes himself at the end of the movie. Tetsuo was a very childish and immature character at the beginning, and it was only at the end, through a terribly painful and grotesque transformation, that he was able to transcend humanity. To me it almost reads as an intense metaphor for growing up in a hostile environment.

It must have been much of the same in the time after the war. In fact, Old Tokyo is literally just a big hole in the ground. The only evidence it was ever there at all is the evidence of it's destruction.

It's a great movie, and a seminal work in Japanese Cyberpunk if nothing else. If you liked this movie and want to check out more Japanese Cyberpunk, check out:

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

Serial Experiments Lain

Ergo Proxy

Paprika (2006)

#doing this for a class

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nyuquizbowl · 1 year

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“What’s in the Box?”

We’re revisting a classic with this episode of SNACKS: Schrodinger’s cat. (I know the accents aren’t there, you try getting special characters into a tumblr post.)

My physical chemistry professor (who shall remain nameless because one of you might actually have to take his course) once tried to explain to us the concept of Schrodinger's cat. The point of Schrodinger's cat is to create a metaphor that represents the idea of quantum superposition and wave function collapse, (both of which are terms that inevitably show up in Quiz Bowl.)

The professor explained it like this: "Imagine you have a cat, placed in a box. Imagine the box has a gun in it. Imagine the gun is linked up to a Geiger counter, and imagine the Geiger counter is in the presence of a radioactive isotope. The isotope exists in two possible states, decayed or not decayed, because it is impossible to know, at the atomic level, whether the isotope has begun to decay. Eventually, when the isotope decays, the Geiger counter will detect the particle it ejects from its nucleus, which will trigger the gun to fire and shoot the cat. But until that happens, the atom superimposed in both states at once."

What my Professor did was turn Schrodinger's cat into "Schrodinger's isotope featuring an elaborate murder contraption for a cat." The point of Schrodinger's cat is to demonstrate that a system, until it is observed, exists superimposed in all possible states. In the case of the isotope, its possible states are decayed or not decayed. If we were to create a wave function for this isotope, there'd be a 50% for "decayed" and a 50% for "not decayed." Once the Geiger counter picks up the decay, the possibilities "collapse" into the one observed state, which means the wave function goes from a range of probabilities across multiple states to a 100% probability for the single observed state (graphically it’s a line that’s infinitely tall and infinitely thin, also known as a delta function, a term that will, inevitably, appear in Quiz Bowl.)

For an electron, states are represented by wave functions which show the probability of the electron to exist in any place at any time. Essentially, the electron exists everywhere at every time except where it doesn't. (The places it doesn't are called "nodes," another term which you'll find in Quiz Bowl.) Since it can be in any of those multiple possible states, we consider it to exist in all of them. That creates the probability cloud known as an orbital (s, p, d, f, etc. depending on the number and location of the angular node). What's interesting about electrons is they're not somewhere in the orbital cloud, they're the whole cloud.

Most explanations of Schrodinger's cat leave out the Geiger counter. Some have a bottle of poison or toxic gas which may or may not have opened, killing the cat inside, but all you need is a cat and a soundproof box. Until the box is opened, the cat inside exists in all possible states (dead, not dead, undead, etc.) Once it is observed, you can be 100% sure that it is one of those states.

The problem with Schrodinger's cat is the cat actually IS one of those states, before we observe it. You can't really superimpose a cat that is (presumably) dictated by classical mechanics. Regardless of whether or not you open the box, the cat actually IS dead or alive in there. For the metaphor to work, it's not that the cat exists in multiple states in reality; the cat exists in multiple states in one's imagination. Before the box is opened, there is an image of what one dreads to see (the dead cat) and what one hopes to see (the live cat) (If this was Pet Sematary, the two are reversed.) And all of those mental images exist in the same conscious space, until the true state is observed and all but one become irrelevant.

#nyuqb #schrodinger #cat #SNACKS

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zekekaiju · 1 year

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Godzilla: a character study

The western media struggles with Godzilla. They don't seem to quite know what to make of him. Honestly, Godzilla vs Kong is the first Hollywood movie that might have gotten him right. I think this stems from a lack of understanding regarding what the heck Godzilla is because he's not just a monster. You see in the TOHO films, Godzilla has both a philosophical role and a physical role. He is a metaphor and also the literal personification of that metaphor. He is both literally and metaphorically the personification of nuclear power, a manmade force of nature. Which is why he has varying and somewhat contradictory roles. He can be both the hero and the villain, the same way nuclear energy in nuclear power plants is helpful but nuclear energy from weapons is harmful. He is cannot be controlled by humans because he is a force of nature, but, because he is a manmade force of nature, humanity always tries to control him. Because he is the personification of nuclear power, he cannot be permanently destroyed as long as nuclear power exists or unless something else makes it obsolete. Nearly everytime someone creates a weapon to destroy Godzilla it births a monster that is worse then Godzilla, because the only thing that is capable of making atomic weapons obsolete would be a doomsday device something that ends all of humanity. I think this is also why Godzilla movies frequently begin with Godzilla sleeping in the ocean. He is an ever present threat but he is also largely dormant. Many times he is attacked first by humanity or another monster and rampages in response to this attack. An underlying theme throughout the Godzilla movies is that Godzilla and by extension nuclear power is shaped by how we approach it.

#godzilla #godzilla vs king kong #toho godzilla #character study #nuclear #nuclear weapons #nuclear power

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why-this-kolaveri-machi · 3 years

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please. i can’t do this alone.

Titans 3.01

thoughts! thoughts! thoughts! some red hot thoughts!

SPOILERS ahead.

1. one episode in, and this season already looks set to give me everything i want. its abandonment of plot and storytelling conventions as it goes from one point to the next at breakneck speed; its cheerful bastardisation of iconic storylines from the comics; the ‘as-you-know-bob’ clunky exposition on one end and extremely restrained, subtle explorations of complex character dynamics on the other; endless shots of neon bleeding into black and blue corridors, shadows and silhouettes; my delight in seeing it celebrate and deconstruct the dark nolan-y batman aesthetic at the same time; my bafflement that it’s so fucking goddamn obsessed with the batfam when it’s supposed to be about the TITANS; kory just... saving every overburdened, clunky scene that she’s in by her sparkling charisma. just... *chef’s kiss*. muah. my show is back, in all its glory.

MY SHOW IS BACK, Y’ALL!

1.5. i mean... this show is so artful and weird and not afraid to go absolutely bonkers in exploring its characters’ psyche, but can just about barely stage a passable comic book fight when every tom dick and harry and their new streaming services can deliver ones that are far more exciting. i love this show with every atom of my body.

(there’s something to be said about rooting for the underdog as well. a pleasure in finding something to love about what other people dismiss. but! enough navel gazing! i have fictional characters’ navels to look at! metaphorically! and maybe literally!)

2. i expected jason’s death to come about pretty early in the season as soon as i heard rumours that red hood was showing up, but for it to happen in the first five minutes of the first episode... that’s a record.

(well. “happen.” still don’t know what exactly went down there.)

2.25. GOD. jason is such a tortured and tragic character in this show, used and passed around by people with alleged good intentions, never really fitting in anywhere. he’s veritably bleeding vulnerability and the need to belong, the need to be known, and yet the tragedy is that his death proves that nobody in his life knew anything about him at all; that they only saw the flimsy walls he put up to protect his soft core, and thought that that was all there was. that they say they loved him, but blame him for his own death.

dick is flabbergasted that jason can read, though we know from last season, from what jason revealed to rose, that he has a love for plays and music. barbara is quick to dismiss his actions as ‘impulsive’. bruce has no idea that his supposed son was building his own little chemistry lab right under his nose, and beyond that, no idea that jason needed structure, stability and validation beyond being left alone in a huge house with a treasure trove of dangerous weapons. kory thought his decision to fight the joker was from not learning and growing when the guy tried to kill himself last season and nobody apart from dick even tried to talk to him about it! did you consider that he might still be suicidal? especially after the titans admitted to having “given up” on him because he was just “too hard”?

2.5. the one thing that’s been consistent across all three seasons (so far) of the show is the unreliable narrator trope. there’s a reason why the characters’ dismissals of jason’s actions as impulsive is so repetitive; why jason’s death is a mystery dick feels compelled to solve. it’s a flailing attempt to know his brother much too late--but with red hood, maybe he gets a second chance, just like he got one with the titans. this is what jason’s arc has been building up to. this is ‘death in the family’ but more fucked up in some ways. it didn’t linger on the death because the death wasn’t the point. the joker isn’t the point. everything that came before it is.

this way it will also make perfect sense that the red hood’s main enemy becomes the titans rather than batman.

2.75. goodness knows what’s going on with jason’s little chemistry project. at first i thought he was immunising himself to joker gas or something, but maybe it’s what passes for lazarus pit juice in this universe?

anyway, it’s pretty impressive that jason learnt all of that from a college chemistry textbook. STOP BRINGING UP THAT HE READ SOMETHING, DICK--

2.8. i’m glad that dick doesn’t immediately sink into self-loathing and guilt and tries to investigate jason’s death while also acknowledging how he failed him. it’s like he actually learned something from the last two years!

anyway. more about dick later.

3. oh how i love titans!bruce. a lot of characters had a lot of Opinions on his reaction to jason’s death in this episode, but again, i ask you to consider that they’re unreliable narrators, and this universe’s bruce is a product of how it shaped him. bruce wayne has become a phantom to himself--an artifice borne out of vigorous discipline and crushing self-denial.

bruce has been batman for a very long time, and without a robin for much longer. (dick must be... in his early thirties? so he was robin for about, say, 10-12 years according to the timeline of the show. that still makes bruce pretty old when he took on his first robin.) things have... calcified (possibly parts of his brain). the personal cost and the collateral from the mission he’s taken up for most of his life is too much to countenance; it has to be a war, and war requires sacrifice.

on some level bruce knows that’s a lie. he’s so goddamned alone. what’s he going to do? sit down and cry? who’s going to listen to him now? oh, is he going to just stop being batman? who’s going to stop gotham from consuming herself then? he’ll just have to forge ahead, do better next time, maybe he’ll be firmer with them, or kinder with them, or notice more things, or train them harder, or spend more time--

3.25. don’t get me wrong: titans!bruce is an asshole and a half. his roster of potential robins was honestly bone-chilling. the fact that there’s a twisted root of compassion makes it more disturbing.

3.5. alfred’s dead! it must’ve been pretty recent, because i could’ve sworn that dick tried to call alfred in the very first episode of season 1, or at least considered calling him...

what a devastating double-blow for bruce then, losing his father-figure and his, uh.... son-figure so close together.

4. i don’t know about barbara yet. i mean, i like her, but she had so much clunky expository dialogue to deliver this episode, and for an episode that was named after her, she only showed up halfway through it. but i like the weight of history behind her interactions with both bruce and dick and her compassion to bruce before he cruelly crossed a line. i also like the implication that she and dick have been in touch recently, and that she didn’t immediately try to guilt-trip dick about some perceived abandonment. it’d be too repetitive.

4.5. there’s also a sense that she ran interference for dick a lot whenever there was something Too Big and Emotional for him to confront directly, and i like and appreciate that character beat.

5. dick, my man! it really does feel like a substantial length of time has passed between the end of s2 and the beginning of s3... kory’s got a new costume, they’ve become celebrities in SF, working missions together, and dick’s actually smiling! genuinely enjoying his work and having fun with it for possibly the first time in the entire series! it’s really a far cry from the fractured, dysfunctional mess that they were at the end of the last season.

i just hope this doesn’t mean that they’ve magically reached a resolution off-screen to all of their fucked-upness from last season, and that the repercussions--for gar in particular--are actually addressed on screen.

5.25. i mentioned this briefly above, but it really is so refreshing that dick doesn’t wallow in guilt and self-loathing after jason’s death; he acknowledges his and the titans’ failure, is able to admit to barbara honestly that he’s not doing great, and is actively trying to reach out to bruce to make sure he’s ok, is trying to investigate what made jason seek out the joker on his own, and is probably the only person not immediately buying that it was jason’s recklessness that got him killed. i love that dick is finally beginning to trust his instincts or just employ them at all after years of guilt and paranoia and self-loathing. we love some positive character growth!

5.5. another thing i love? the bruce-dick interactions on this show. every scene they’re in together is so fraught with tension, both of them holding themselves back, their emotions on a whipcord-tight leash. dick wants to reach out to bruce, is even somewhat familiar with this brand of denial in the wake of grief, but wants barbara to make the first move because he genuinely does not know how to get bruce to open up. his instincts are right, and wonderful, and genuine, but his expression has been smothered by years of trauma, emotional and physical self-discipline, and what i suspect is poorly treated mental illness.

it takes a lot for him to finally explode at bruce at the end of the episode--in a way he hasn’t done even when his only opinion of bruce was ‘fuck him’--and it’s all the more startling for how subdued he’s been through the episode, how much he’s been holding back his emotions for bruce’s sake. love it.

5.75. it sort of hurts my heart to see the flying graysons poster in jason’s room. there are a few implications:

a) jason settled into dick’s old room despite living in a giant mansion with dozens of other rooms he could’ve used

b) he didn’t take down dick’s poster--not when he moved in and was idolising him, not when he moved out of the titans and was sort of hating him. i wonder if the reminder of what dick was before robin--that he was forged out of unspeakable tragedy--gave jason the connection to dick that he so desperately wanted in real life

c) dick moved right back into the room and slept on the bed that was now jason’s. grief can be so quiet and piecemeal sometimes.

6. i spy the beginnings of actual arcs for both gar and kory! i just hope that with the move to gotham their stories don’t fall to the wayside...

6.5. i’ve known tim drake for less than ten minutes but if anything were to happen to him i’d kill everybody

7. this review has gone on for too long and i am tiRED. however, before i leave: i miss some of the dedication-to-aesthetic that titans season 1 used to have. remember how the first few episodes didn’t really feel like a superhero show but something out of gothic horror? there was something gorgeous and raw about that, about open landscapes and the road and creepy buildings looming up at the end of it. moving to titans tower in s2 really ruined a lot of that for me, given its ripped-from-architectural-digest aesthetic, all smooth and clean and artificial.

i hope that we really explore gotham’s hellscape in interesting and innovative ways instead of camping out in the batcave all the time and indulging in the show’s unending love for long corridors, neon backlights and silhouettes.

8.....

9. wait, fuck, HOW CAN I FORGET ABOUT HOT PSYCHIATRIST GUY (TM)??? NONE of you prepared me for his return! NONE OF YOU! i gasped! i got up and did a happy dance!

listen, titans writers, if you’ve had a peek at my titans s3 wishlist, please go ahead and give the other items on the list a go too, thankyouverymuch.

#titans #titans spoilers #meta #jason todd #dick grayson #bruce wayne #barbara gordon #a tragic jalebi #a byronic cupcake

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she-who-fights-and-writes · 4 years

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How to Write Fight Scenes

Almost every writer struggles with fight scenes in one way or another, even the experienced ones. There are more components to a fight scene than to any other scene, in my opinion.

A fight scene combines dialogue, action, pacing, and every single other element of writing into a deadly concoction that can be hell to write and even more hell to edit.

That’s why I’ve provided a helpful list of tips that you can use to make your fight scenes the best that they can possibly be!

1. If Your Fight Scene Doesn’t Take Place in a Hot Air Balloon, Then It Probably Should

Now, this is not in the literal sense.

Hear me out:

A fight scene in a field where the two armies/teams collide head-on? Boring. Overused. Underwhelming.

A fight scene in that same field with those same two armies but during an earthquake where the ground is opening up beneath them? New. Avant Garde. Keeps the reader on their toes.

It doesn’t literally have to take place in a hot air balloon; what I’m saying is that you should push the circumstances of the fight scene to make it new and interesting.

A personal example is when I had a fight scene that really just wasn’t working for me; it was dull, it dragged on, and it was a bitch to get past the writer’s block.

But then, instead of having the fight scene out in the open like how I’d originally intended it, I made a split-second decision to have it take place in a tunnel, and let me tell you, it was AWESOME.

The new setting made the battle a lot more visceral; it was tight and cramped, and the characters were tripping on bodies and slipping in blood as they were jostled around in a tight space.

Doesn’t that sound more interesting than fighting in an open field?

Having the surroundings inhibit or alter the fighting style is what can make a fight scene truly a masterpiece.

Even if your battle has to take place in an open field, you can add different elements like an earthquake, the enemies’ swords being on fire, or different battle strategies to make it super cool experience.

Here are some examples of well-set fight scenes where the surroundings are taken into account to make it all the more interesting:

Club Fight (John Wick, 2014)

Carnival Fight (Stranger Things, Season 3 Episode 7)

The Hound vs. Beric Dondarrion (Game of Thrones, Season 3 Episode 5)

Jason Bourne vs Desh Bouksani (The Bourne Ultimatum, 2007)

Clarice Starling vs Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs, 1991)

Church Fight (Kingsman: The Secret Service, 2014)

Staircase Fight (Atomic Blonde, 2017)

Kitchen Fight (Sleepless, 2017)

2. Brevity is the Soul of Wit (AKA, Keep Your Writing Simple)

The way you write during a fight scene is a great way to keep a good pace.

Your readers should be on the edge of their seats, dying to know if their favorite characters are going to live or die; they don’t want to read big words like “indubitably” and “scintillating.”

Feel free to reference my post about writing pain here.

Your word choice should be gritty. It should reflect the desperation of the fight.

Don’t use long, winding sentences and flowy paragraphs for fight scenes.

Short sentence fragments.

Paragraphs that barely last a line.

Scattered, grammar-breaking clauses that put the reader in the same frantic state of mind as the characters.

(You see what I did there?)

Also, fight scenes are the major scene where the “show don’t tell” rule applies. If you only had a choice to follow that rule on one specific occasion, it should be during the fight scenes.

The readers should know how your characters are feeling just by their actions, not by you outwardly stating it.

Example:

The knife shredded the sleeve of her jacket, blood bursting forth and running down her arm. It surprised her at first and hurt like hell, but it didn’t take long for her to grow furious.

Vs.

The knife shredded the sleeve of her jacket, blood bursting forth and running down her arm. Her eyes widened as she clamped her hand over the wound, but as she watched the blood trickling through her fingers, her expression contorted into something monstrous.

See how much better the second one sounds? You can tell exactly what this character is feeling even though I didn’t explicitly tell you.

Something else that also helps fight scenes is literary devices.

Similes. Metaphors. Onomatopoeias. Hyperboles.

If you use these (sparingly, mind you!) it can really give your fight scene that kick that you’ve always wanted it to have.

Examples:

She rose to her feet as blood streamed down her body in a torrent, her eyes blazing like a thousand suns.

He turned to regard his opponent with clenched fists and a smile like razors.

She fought like a wolf trapped in the confines of a human skin.

The buildings crumbled as if made from silk and twine rather than metal and stone.

Be careful not to overuse them, though! If every other line has a literary device, it loses its punch!

3. Your Characters Shouldn’t Be Invincible

You shouldn’t be giving your characters the “invincible plot armor” treatment.

While all of the unnamed lackeys get swamped by the “unimaginable power” of the enemy, they shouldn’t be coming at your main characters any slower than they come at everyone else.

Your main characters should be having the shit kicked out of them.

There should be something about the fight that makes the readers think, “Wait a minute, they might not survive this.”

For example, let’s take Character A. Character A is strong, fast, and well-trained. The perfect soldier. He can hold his own in a fight.

However, what if his dominant hand is injured? How will he compensate for the injury?

The point of a battle is saying “On what circumstances will my characters be able to win” and then pushing it just a bit further into the grey area between “decisive victory” and “devastating defeat.”

A character who relies on speed getting their leg injured.

An expert cavalryman whose horse falls halfway through the battle.

A flying character grounded by a wing injury.

A magical character running out of potions and spells.

You want to push your character to their physical limits, take them out of their comfort zone and plop them right into the thick of it.

Only then will your fight really build tension, and tension is what every battle needs in order for the readers to not feel like their time has been wasted; if they know the characters are just going to win, then what’s the point?

Here are some fight scenes that do a good job of not knowing if the main characters are going to win:

The Battle of the Bastards (Game of Thrones, Season 6 Episode 9)

The Battle of Winterfell (Game of Thrones, Season 8 Episode 3) (Although the characters have undeniable plot armor, you don’t know if the battle itself is going to be won or not)

The Final Battle (Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2, 2012)

T’Challa vs Killmonger (Black Panther, 2018)

4. Study Other Fight Scenes

Whether they be in books, TV shows, or movies, a bit of research never hurts! (Which is why I’ve been putting recommendations throughout this post)

Watching fight scenes helps you get an idea of what you should describe, and reading fight scenes gives you an idea of how to describe it.

Besides, it’s a pretty fun kind of research, too!

Thanks for reading, I hope this helped!

#writing #writing advice #writing help #writing tips #fight scenes #writing fight scenes #writing a fight scene #writers #creative writing #help with writing #authors #writing a book #fanfiction #fanfic

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timerainseternal · 3 years

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New theory: the amount that the Hargeeeves' powers are confusing to me specifically is directly correlated to the amount of impact they have on the plot.

To be clear, I'm not talking about how much they break the laws of the universe. This is just a Certified Silly Post and I do not have the brainpower to debate whether monster tummy, Very Convincing, spooky scary skeletons, or the ability to manipulate physics in a very specific way, is the most glitch-inducing. Nor am I talking about how much we don't understand about the powers, just what we do know about them and how consistent they are with the stated power. (Could Diego yeet the moon into the Earth? The world may never know.) Basically, as I watched the show, how much my brain said "that works for me, I guess" is the metric I'm working off of. They're also grouped together, since I couldn't decide on a 1-7 scale, so there are instead three levels of confusing and plot-relevant. This is also entirely memory-based, so I may miss things, and does not account for the character's importance to the plot, only the power's.

The Completely Understandable:

Luther: Strong and Tough™ are not confusing, and nor are they brought up very often. A chandelier fell on him, he punched some things, but like, what did that change, plotwise? Not much.

Diego: Again, this one only sort of gets used, like with the bullets and all, but it's also not really a plot changer. We know he can change the trajectory of thrown objects, which is fairly straightforward to see and understand. Like in my moon example, we don't know how far that extends, but while there are a lot of questions about his powers, what is directly shown is neither too confusing or too contradictory to our understanding. I've seen people curve soccer balls before, and bullets and knives are not different enough from one another to surprise me when he switches.

Ben: Now, you may be wondering why this is here and not later, but that is because we are Not discussing logistics here. I do not know how this power works in terms of physics, and I do not know where the tentacles are when they're not out. However, Ben's power isn't confusing, practically speaking. Open chest: boom, tentacles. It's also not plot relevant because he's dead (oops), though if losing control was how he died it's a bit more important. That's conjecture though, and should be stricken from the record.

A Bit Weird, But I Get It:

Klaus: I'm gonna be honest, I debated where to put Klaus. His power is a major driving force behind his personal plot, but his personal plot doesn't tend to impact the course of events as a whole too much (sorry, Klaus). I guess it gives us Ben, which is nice, but also he's very rarely plot relevant since he's, you know, dead. Also Klaus' powers grow as he sobers up and practices, so it's pretty inconsistent, but given a general understanding of how ghosts work in media there's nothing too out of the realm of understanding. I'm...not sure how much of the Little Girl putting him back on Earth is part of his power--like whether his power annoys her or if he just does that through sheer force of personality--so I'm just...not gonna touch the strange not-immortality that is seemingly not caused by his own doing. In short, if ghosts were just dropped on us without general media context, he'd be way up there, but since it's not, and since the power averages out to kinda plot-important but not completely, I put him here.

Allison: Rumors are obviously very important to the plot as a whole, both in Allison's personal journey and with they key rumors of repressing Vanya's powers and then of being throat-slashed. This normally wouldn't line up with how confusing her power is--mind control is pretty understandable so long as we put away the questions about how it works--but the scene that really boggles me is the "I heard a rumor I blew your mind" part. Like, what? I thought it was just make a person do a thing they can do, not making brain explosions! What is that!!! I know it's in the doomed timeline, but it still counts as a thing she can do. Theoretically I could use this one example to put her in the next category because of how many questions it opens up, but Five and Vanya are so plot important and confusing that they are a class on their own, so Allison gets to be with Klaus on this one in the kinda plot-important, kinda strange section.

The Utterly Wild:

Five: On the surface, Five's powers kinda make sense, except that they don't because the Umbrella Academy categorically refuses to make rules about time travel. Time-travelling back made him thirteen! And also made his siblings briefly children again too, unless that was a metaphor! How does changing the past change the future? How does it change your personal past? He can just completely rewind everything, which is sort of fine except that it also rewound and unshot him, even though he should still be travelling forward in his personal timeline! Also his powers run out even though nobody else's seem to, and maybe if they explained why that happened with even one line I could let it go but they have not! And my, oh my, the plot relevance of Five's powers. They are there to solve everything and kick off the plot, and also create problems on accident. Very confusing in the presentation of the power's rules, and very plot-relevant.

Vanya: Oh, Vanya, destroyer of worlds. Her powers are the exact opposite of Five's in terms of plot: there to ruin everything and end the plot, and also solve things on accident. They are the thing the plot is working to stop, so they're very important. They're also wild. Okay, sure, turning sound into energy, that's fine, I can play ball. Blowing up the moon, sure, that just takes a lot of energy. Destroying the world in the original timeline to a level where things are not absolutely atomized nearby, but also it seems like absolutely everyone is dead, and that's only with an energy blast or something? That's...hard to figure out exactly how it got done, but I guess that's fine. Holding up your siblings with weird energy beams as your skin and eyes are bleached white? Uh... Using your sound-based powers to heal a drowned child and gIVE HIM POWERS TOO??? WHAT? WHAT?????? VANYA WHAT ARE YOU DOING???????

So, in conclusion, the plot relevance of a power is directly correlated to how absolutely bonkers it is. People are free to disagree with my ranking, especially since I did rank this under the caveat of "not touching how any of this works," but I think it's pretty funny that the more the writers have to use a power in the plot, the more they freak out and slap extra stuff onto it and absolutely refuse to explain any inconsistencies that arise. (This is a very fun show to analyze at 3am.)

#well it's neither super strength nor tkme travel #i guess I'll put you here #tua #the umbrella academy #luther hargreeves #diego hargreeves #allison hargreeves #klaus hargreeves #five hargreeves #ben hargreeves #vanya hargreeves #tua meta #i hope this will be coherent when i wake up tomorrow #and i hope you all like my 3am epiphanies #also i think lila would be with allison and klaus in the section of #we'll just have to speculate about the sparrows #if being a cube counts as a power i think christopher gets his own section above five and vanya #tua spoilers

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simonalkenmayeris-still-dead · 3 years

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Hey this may sound weird I like your blog but I still don’t fully understand the name of isdead.

I think it’s something to do with that scholder (can’t spell it but the cat in the box is alive and dead guy)

I mean is it that since his character is real but Simon is not real?

P.s. I’m still in high school and I haven’t read any sort literature by that guy or I’m reading your url the wrong way. I do hope you have a good evening.

-Tiz

You’re thinking of Erwin Schrodinger. It’s actually three references in one, because why do one reference when you can do more, right?

To start with Schrodinger, he was using the idea of the cat to make fun of the idea in quantum physics that atoms don’t have a definitive state until they’re observed.

So he made up this metaphor of the cat trapped in the box with a poison which will be released upon the atomic degeneration of some material. And then he extended that metaphor ad absurdum to say that if the premise was true, then because we cannot observe the cat, then it must be both alive and dead at the same time.

When I starting this blog, I was using a similar metaphor for Simon, in the sense that because we can’t observe him, we have to assume both that he is and is not a real monster at the same time.

The original reference, as I’ve said many times before, was just to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, mostly because my mum had been watching the film the day or a couple of days before. The themes in that play are concerned with the nature of reality. And obviously, so is Simon’s blog.

Then a while after I’d started it was pointed out to me that this blog is also ascribing to the concept of Death of the Author. I know a lot of people on the internet talk about death of the author as though it’s a concept that allows you to divorce an author from their work, but that’s not what it is at all.

The essay is basically saying that once a creator - any creator - has put their work out into the world, they don’t get to dictate how it’s received. Any interpretation that an audience makes is a valid interpretation, because everyone is going to bring their personal experience to the work.

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angerissue · 3 years

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Character Survey.

Real name: Dr. Robert Bruce Banner, Ph.D..

Single or taken: Single, and this probably isn't going to change anytime soon. He has a number of ingrained emotional issues, and ideological issues that pertain to his condition, that prevent him from seeking romantic relationships and even just becoming close to someone. One-night stands are possible, because they don’t involve emotional commitment from either party, but real relationships scare the hell out of him. The closer that someone gets to Bruce, the more he fears hurting them or being hurt himself.

Abilities or powers: He has an extremely high IQ, almost unprecedented intuition when it comes to the sciences and its numerous technologies, and a great ability to think outside the box and solve complicated, confounding problems. Also, he can turn big and green, which makes him capable of inhuman physical feats and gives him a ridiculous healing factor. This cannot be understated; he can literally recover from decapitation if the conditions are right. It's debatable whether these qualify as gifts or curses, because of the experiences they've created for Bruce in the past, but they're definitely abilities at the least.

Eye colour: Brown. Sometimes green if he’s in a mood.

Hair colour: Dark brown with some grey.

Family members: Rebecca Banner (mother / deceased), Brian Banner (father / incarcerated), Jennifer Walters (cousin / alive), Susan Drake (adoptive aunt / unknown), Elaine Banner (aunt / deceased).

Pets: In The Persistence, he owns a white knockout mouse named Eddie, who came from a selection of ailing lab mice that he experimented on with the Hulk's plasma. He doesn’t have pets in other verses, though he wouldn’t mind a cat, or a dog with a calm and mellow demeanour, as long as his living situation and overall routine is constant and undisturbed. Otherwise, it will never be a possibility. Back when General Ross' squad broke down his door in Brazil, he needed to abandon a mutt named Rick, and it hurt because he’d become very fond of him. He doesn't want to do this to another animal.

Hobbies or activities: He loves hiking and jogging (with trails in forested areas being his preferred location), cooking and baking, gardening, reading textbooks and science journalism, bait fishing, programming and experimenting, travelling, sightseeing, meditation, yoga, collecting and listening to vinyl records, and being a rebel by listening to police scanners and going after bad guys if he doesn't have much else to do. But even if it seems like he's not outwardly doing anything, he's probably still occupied — he tends to spend a profuse amount of time in his own head, ruminating and reflecting on future goals, whether it involves anticipating or dreading them. He also likes to contemplate new concepts and designs for technologies.

Animal that represents them: Definitely a pangolin, because you can’t look at a pangolin and the way it carries itself and not think of Banner from a purely visual perspective. Add on the fact that their bodies are covered in hardened scales for defense, and how they curl up into a ball whenever they're upset and threatened, and you have a metaphorical version of Bruce, who tends to shy away and retreat into himself whenever he's having a lower moment, and has a lot of deep-seated defensive mechanisms on display during social interactions. But seriously, these animals just want to walk around eating ants, minding their own business. They don’t have a bone to pick with anyone... Which is also similar to Bruce. And did I mention that pangolins are endangered, because they're frequently hunted and trapped by humans for their supposed “beneficial properties” in medicine (none of which are proven)? That's similar to how Banner has been followed all over the place by the U.S. military, just because they perceived his condition to be useful somehow.

Worst habits: Take your pick. Distancing himself from other people even when he could use the company, self-flagellation, humouring his guilt complex even when he's not responsible for certain negative outcomes, repressing or suppressing his emotions when he needs to express them (or the opposite, staying as the Hulk so he can stew in those strong emotions and therefore punish himself for whatever he “did wrong”), running away from connections that involve real commitment, especially romantic ones.

Role models: Steve Rogers for his patriotism and overall sense of morality, Neils Bohr for his defense of the Bohr atomic model (which had been a radical theory for the time) and subsequent successes, Ernest Rutherford for similar reasons, and his mother when he was younger, though he doesn’t remember much about her because he was only six when she died. Same goes for his aunt, Susan; while he spent more time around her than Rebecca in total, he was rather emotionally absent by this point because of all the trauma earlier in his childhood. In general, his role models tend to be people who remain strong in the face of adversity and judgement, and stick to their values for the benefit of others. All the above people qualify in that sense, for different reasons.

Sexual orientation: Heterosexual.

Thoughts on marriage and kids: Nope, and bigger nope. He would love to have a close connection with someone, however much he's actually repressed the desire for the time being, and some part of him does want to have a child — however, he always concludes that it wouldn't be worth it. Bruce believes marriage would be a shackle for anyone who's unfortunate enough to become his partner, and it would open them up to potential threats from people who could use them to get to him and his condition. And children are a no-go because Bruce doesn’t want them to have a father like him; he might be absent for a lot of their upbringing, and either unstable or otherwise unaccommodating in temperament if he’s upset. And he'll constantly be trying to hide his condition from them as well, because god forbid they find out their father is a monster, and they feel like a freak because of it. He's been in a position where he felt like an anomaly as a child, and he's not interested in subjecting his children to this. He also loathes the idea of bringing children into the world because he would not be able to ensure their safety — after all, he can’t even ensure his own. So to Bruce, he'd be setting them up for endangerment just because they’re related to him, similar to how his partner would become a target as well.

Style preferences: Safe and conservative, and not flamboyant by any means. He usually sticks to warmer and neutral palettes, and cuts/styles that are classic and unlikely to fall out of style; this includes his suits, jackets, pants, and shirts. We're talking chinos and slacks, poplin dress shirts, wool sport coats and blazers. Most occasions will see him wearing the dress shirt, slacks, and sport coat together. If he's feeling more adventurous, he'll pair a sport coat with a crewneck, or he could even go with a polo shirt and jeans, but the latter is rare. In general, Bruce's most interesting piece is a brown leather bomber jacket, which he usually wears in the warmer months; colder weather will bring out a peacoat (and he loves to pop the collar in lieu of using a scarf). As far as cost goes, Bruce is fairly well-off between the royalties from S.H.I.E.L.D. and other work he's done here and there, but even so, he doesn't purchase outrageously expensive clothing and tends to go for the mid-upper brands. He'll do made-to-measure, but not full bespoke. He finds any further spending to be superfluous.

Approach to friendships: Cautious and uncertain about them, and tends not to approach people first, because he would hate to overstep his boundaries / make someone uncomfortable. Rather accommodating to people he considers friends, but he's extremely quick to duck out if they can’t meet him eye-to-eye regarding touchy topics, like decisions that affect the well-being of many people. This is the reason he shunned his friendship with Tony after they debated about the Sokovia Accords. Being an introvert, he’s one of those people who doesn't like bothering his friends; even if they make it abundantly clear that he's welcome anytime, he'll hesitate, but he’s completely okay and even happy if those friends approach him instead. He doesn't always like when his personal space is invaded, or if someone touches him, but he'll start to make exceptions if he becomes more familiar with someone. He loves the people that he can consider friends, but he always views the friendships as something that could dissolve in a heartbeat. On some level, even unconscious, he's always expecting things to end.

Thoughts on pie: An acceptable desert. Bumbleberry, strawberry rhubarb, and pumpkin are his favourites. He prefers the homemade variety, and because of it, he tends to make his own, butter crust and all, avoiding store-bought unless it’s particularly memorable — or if someone buys a slice for him. He’s appreciative like that.

Favourite place to spend time: Somewhere he can guarantee that he's not being watched; these are most commonly his labs in the Northwind Observatory, quiet and secluded trails, or his chambers in the Crown City citadel on Sakaar. Not only do these locations ease his anxieties about being studied, inspected, or followed, but he feels less of a pressure to put on false pretenses and exhaust himself with social niceties, many of which may be fabricated. He doesn’t need much external stimulation, because he’s fine simply turning inward and thinking, without paying much attention to his surroundings, but he’ll certainly admit to spending a ton of time tinkering with pet projects if he’s in the labs. Obviously, Bruce prefers to be alone in most of these cases. But if he's with someone he cares about, whether a friend or a romantic partner, and can openly express himself around them, that's nice for him too.

Swim in the lake or ocean: Lakes, without question. He has some bad memories of being in the ocean, whether it’s about the time he was tossing and turning in glacial waters after his failed suicide attempt, or clawing his way out of a quinjet that crashed into the water while his alter started to take over. Bruce remembers all that, and it's not pleasant. The openness of oceans perturb him as well; lakes are usually far more intimate and amniotic because they’re often surrounded by forests, which allows him to feel safer and less exposed.

Their type: Someone who is, and is comfortable with showing, some semblance of dependence on him, which would placate his need to fill a provider role and not simply be a charity case; he's had enough of that between begging on the streets and asking Tony Stark for boarding. (This doesn't mean he's looking for someone who's a total pushover, cannot make their own decisions, or is emotionally needy, because those would make him run in the other direction, frankly.) Someone who can hold their own and stand up for their beliefs when necessary. Someone who can challenge him intellectually, though not necessarily in an academic sense; it really just depends on how much they can expand his own perspective by giving their own. Someone who really understands his needs and issues. And obviously, someone who isn't scared of his condition, because it's going to manifest a lot. It needs to; he doesn't really have a choice in the matter. Hulk is another story, but fortunately, he doesn't show up enough to really be an immediate concern, and Bruce and his partner can cross that bridge when they reach it. Physically, he's usually attracted to women who are slightly shorter than him; their hair can be anything from blonde to brown, and he prefers body types that are similar to his own; more on the slender side but not necessarily fragile.

Camping or indoors: He’d rather be indoors. He isn’t extremely fond of camping, if we’re using the most common definition of "pitching a tent, cooking with a fire made from sticks and tinder, and spending the night in the woods with the bears and the bugs". There are indeed occasions where he cannot stand to be indoors, whether because he’s feeling claustrophobic (a common symptom of abstaining a little too long from transformations), or he simply needs some time away from other people in the geographic sense, but in those cases, he’s more likely to go for a walk or hike, not set up an entire campsite and spend the rest of the night outdoors. For him, camping is meant for a survival-type situation rather than a recreational one. The closest thing to camping he'll do is living in a cabin with a wood stove and local water supply, which he’s done a few times over the years. He's even purchased a few cabins by the time his Persistence verse rolls around, so if one of the properties are compromised, he could always retreat to another one.

Tagged by: @mynameisanakin! Tagging: @fallencomrade , @asgardianhammer , @alongingwithin , and anyone else who wants to do this.

#( meme response. )#( headcanon. )#( multiple. )

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akyaea22 · 4 years

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How did Eve get into Twisted Wonderland:

A post where I go way too deep about theoretical physics and stuff that I researched for a fic.

(Spoilers for “Down the Rabbit Hole” Chapter 5)

(Semi-Spoilers for Prologue Chapter 4)

Alright, here’s some background knowledge about wormholes/parallel universes and whatnot. I don’t actually study these topics, I just find them incredibly interesting, so if you see anything incorrect, feel free to flame me in the replies/comments/whatever they’re called.

If you don’t want the background knowledge or you just want to skip further down, I’ll mark the end of the background exposition with a line.

Ok, so I’m pretty sure everyone is familiar with the concept of worm holes and parallel universes, right? Hollywood has drilled it into our heads with their sci-fi movies and whatnot.

Imagine the universe as a flat sheet of paper. If you fold it in half, and then violently stab a pencil through it, the pencil serves as the worm hole, connecting the two ends together. Theoretically, if you travel through the worm hole, you’d end up on the other side of the universe in a fraction of the time it would take for you to actually travel the universe if it wasn’t folded.

Parrallel universes. You all heard the whole NASA thing where they might’ve (Key word: might have. Meaning: Maybe. Possibly) found evidence of a parallel universe where time travels backwards? If not, uhh- look it up. It’s interesting. So a parallel universe is basically another universe, just different. How different? Movies and books usually make them similar to our universe, but slightly different. This is because they don’t want the reader/watcher to feel too out of place. Why explain a bunch of new and unfamiliar concepts when you can just tweak a couple things, slap a new label on it, and call it a day? On the other hand, there probably are some books and movies out there that actually do take you to a new universe, but even then, they usually keep the basic stuff the same. There’s gravity (probably), air (also probably), and the Sun (listen, I haven’t seen every piece of media that’s ever been made so please take this list with a grain of salt.)

The thing is, in another universe, everything could be different. The laws of physics as we know them in this world cannot be applied to the other universe. Gravity could just not exist, stars could suck in heat instead of radiating it, black holes could shoot out matter. It would all be possible, because it’s in a different universe. The new universe don’t gotta play by our rules.

———————————-

Have any of these things actually been proven? No. They haven’t. Right now, they only exist in the realm of theoretical physics. Basically meaning, theoretically, this could happen, but we don’t really know yet.

While “Down the Rabbit Hole” isn’t a “The Martian” level story with absolute scientific details down to the smallest detail, there is some level of science involved.

(Spoilers for Chapter 5 “Down the Rabbit Hole” Last Warning)

In Chapter 5, Eve mentions worm holes and parallel universes when Crowley brings up the fact that she might be from another world. Neither of the characters explicitly confirm that that’s how Eve got into the Twisted Wonderland universe, but it’s what I’m sticking with for now. (Watch this post get outdated as my indecisive self starts to come up with more stuff)

I decided to shove some science into my fic because I didn’t want to go down the “They were thrown into the universe because magic” path. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with that path either. I just prefer the science-y path because I find that it’s incredibly interesting to read and write about these things that could possibly exist. (And that you could possibly be isekai’d into another world, but that’s beside the point.)

Is this the last time that I’m gonna shove some science into my story? Uhh- no. I’m probably gonna use it here and there at times if I can. If there’s an opportunity to explain something, I’ll take it. Will it be a long-winded essay on how random stuff in the Twisted Wonderland universe works? No. I have my limits. I’m not gonna research how Grim breathing fire works and the possible effects it would have on his body. While an interesting topic, I get that readers wouldn’t want to sift through that in the middle of a story. It’ll probably get waved away under the “Hey, it’s a parallel universe with different rules, so you don’t have to question it.” rug.

List of random questions I have: (These are for my own reference to satisfy my burning curiosity, so you can stop reading here if you want.)

Is the universe actually flat though? Isn’t the Earth a sphere so wouldn’t that wipe the theory off the map?

Why is the worm hole shown to be this kind of like cinched cylinder? Why not a normal cylinder or a rectangular prism or something?

Do the ends (following the paper metaphor) actually touch? Diagrams show that they don’t touch, forming more of a U-shape.

What’s the space in between? I know it’s hyperspace, but what is it specifically?

What happens to the stuff that is on the folded part? It’s curved, so does the stuff curve with it? (Imagine a flat planet curving.)

How much energy does it take to create this thing? How are they even created?

What’s with all the types of stuff? (Dark matter, Exotic matter, Negative energy, Repulsive gravity, etc.)

How do you find out if a parallel universe exists? It’s not gonna be in blinking neon signs, so do you just wait for some kind of sign? Do you wait for a random portal to open and someone steps out claiming to be from another universe, or is there actually something you can detect to figure out if another universe exists?

You wouldn’t be able to even enter another universe without risking death. Like, the other universe could have toxic chemicals replacing all of the oxygen atoms. We don’t know what’s there. Why would we want to find these things anyways? (I mean, aside from just the feeling of “Oh neat. There’s another universe”)

The entire parallel universe thing is just a giant question mark.

Did I spend too much time thinking about this? Yes. Yes I did. Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.

#boiling the ramen #twisted wonderland #twst #disney twisted wonderland #disney twst #I got way too into this #But hey #thanks for coming to my tedtalk

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bbq-hawks-wings · 5 years

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Hiya! So I have a question/theory not exactly about hawks but the concept of quirks in the mha universe. So I had this thought and I was wondering do you think it would be possible for a character to have a quirk like whenever they played an instrument the people around them would immediately go into a sleepy, sedated state?? Or basically if it's possible for a person's quirk to be like not be biologically a part of their body (ie: anything they paint comes to life)

OOH OOH OOH!!!! I was going to write requests, but I just HAD to jump on this immediately. I like the way you think, anon! Asking some very important lore-based questions!

My short answer to your theory is “Mostly no, but kind of yes? Depends on the specifics and how you explain it.” So let me explain! I go on a bit where I geek out over Shinsou’s quirk, but I’ll keep the whole debacle under the cut. I hope you enjoy it!

Minor spoilers for explanations about how Shinsou’s quirk works from the manga.

HeroAca is at it’s core a science fantasy world - wherein inhuman feats instead of being written away by magic are given a plausible-enough “scientific” explanation to help the audience’s suspension of belief. It doesn’t have to be completely accurate but it has to make just enough sense to feel grounded in the real world and also makes it easy to put limitations on it. Quirks are explicitly described as being genetic. How they got written into the human genome is unknown, but it’s crystal clear that biological lineage is the key to passing down quirks. (All for One and One for All being glaring exceptions to the rule, even in universe.)

This is how we’re able to put “glycerin sweat” with “ sweaty, sparking palms” and get “combustible explosive sweat from the hands” or “ice” plus “fire” equals “fire and ice.”

Therefore, quirks are inherently connected via some biological component. However, how that manifests itself has a lot of potential, and it mainly has to do with the property being manifested to begin with. For example:

Tetsu Tetsu has the ability to harden his body into steel - specifically his skin. This is physical composition of his body that he is able to change at will, but he cannot change the composition of something he touches even though that organ which possesses the shifting ability comes in contact. His quirk is limited to his body, period.

Momo’s ability to create inanimate matter is manifested through her adipose tissue (fat). She requires both the energy and atoms required to produce matter directly from her own body. These things can exist outside her body but she ceases to be able to affect their composition the moment it’s no longer part of her body.

Ochako is able to nullify the effect of gravity on any body she touches - inanimate, living, herself, etc. However, this effect only works after she has physically come into contact with it and only from the pads on her fingertips. Her quirk originates from her body but leaves lingering effects as long as she doesn’t cancel them.

All of the above are easy examples of “my body changes myself/something else and my quirk depends on my body to do so.” However, let’s look at an example that feels more “intangible” which I think is what you’re going for.

Shinsou is a super interesting one and so far the closest to what you’re trying to describe. His quirk, we know, is biologically coded into every cell in his body, but how it manifest, though a bit of a mystery, has a pretty logical explanation depending on how we parse it out.

He has the ability to sedate his human target and force their body to do rudimentary tasks via vocal commands - effectively making them a human puppet adhering to his will. However, the way it both takes effect and manifests is particularly interesting, so I’ll drop the frames and extrapolate in a moment.

To break it down, Hitoshi’s quirk works as thus:

He must intentionally choose and FOCUS on his target in order to activate phase one of his quirk

His voice may be modified via his artificial vocal cords, but he cannot transform his voice digitally (mini theory on this at the end)

He must then get them to respond to him directly (it’s implied this is vocally, but the way it’s worded sounds almost like they need to consciously respond in some way instead of blocking him out)

Once he has control, he can make them do virtually anything with their body but their brain and voice are useless.

To me, it sounds like Hitoshi’s quirk actively hijacks his target’s brain by suppressing the higher functions and taking over some of the lower ones. My best “rational” explanation is some audible property in his voice (it’s presumably outside the spectrum of human hearing) is able to first bait the parts of the brain that control cognition and neutralize them when it “opens itself” up via cognitive reply. From there, cognition is suppressed and he takes over what I presume is the midbrain and sections of the gray matter physically responsible for motor control.

Sounds crazy, but while the sound aspect is unusual, this kind of thing actually exists in real life! Check out parasitic fungus and worms that turn prey like ants and snails into “zombies” by taking over their brain and doing their bidding in order to complete their life cycle.

If you can explain an OC’s quirk like THAT, you’re gold!

If you wanted one that plays music that makes people in the immediate vicinity sleepy and sluggish, explain it by saying that something about the sound stimulates the brain into producing melatonin or effects the thyroid. It doesn’t have to be clear exactly how (though extra points if you can make it as scientific as you can) but if it’s plausible ENOUGH, it works. It could be like in Hitoshi’s case where it isn’t the so much the noise we hear but some unheard component that does the work and she just chose, say, a flute because it puts people at ease and she’s liked it since she was a kid.

The “paintings to life” is a bit trickier. If you wanted to fit this in the lore of the series I’d say whatever substance she animates has to come from her body. However, an easy workaround is that she could produce her own paint! She adds the pigment separately, but the clear medium is whatever substance she produces from her body that she can control. The medium is basically how acrylic and oil paints are different - The shade of color can be exactly the same, but the medium it floats in will act and perform differently which is a great metaphor if she has difficultly controlling the “living” medium without a visualization to get it to do what she wants!

I hope that was a fun breakdown of how I think you can adapt seemingly random superpowers into the rules of the series. It takes some real-world knowledge to do so, but the cool part is that the physical world is capable of SO much that we’re barely scratching the surface of understanding. Doing even just a couple of hours of research can get you enough information to come up with a power that not only could plausibly work but also has the bonus of building in a weakness for power balance!

This is super fun! I love when you guys send me theories like this!!!!

Bonus mini theory! “Could Shinsou’s quirk work over old analog technology?”

Something interesting to note is the auditory angle he needs to use his quirk, and my theory is that the auditory component may force his target’s brain into doing the actual sedation work for him. In real life, our brains and bodies are very much effected by sonic waves, even those we can’t hear. It’s theorized that infrasound - sound outside our hear-able spectrum) caused by structural unsoundness, some machinery, and more might be reason humans consistently perceive certain locations as haunted. I mentioned this in my theory about Hawk’s sensory sensitivity but it’s worth mentioning again here.

I specifically mentioned “digitally” above because analog and digital sound waves are structurally different which may be why it’s not some specific noise we physically hear but actually the vibration of the sound wave itself that does the brainwashing. Here’s a picture of analog vs digital waves to demonstrate what I mean.

See how analog is smooth but digital is a series of plateaus? Now I don’t have much formal education to back myself up from here on out, but the way I understand it is digital is basically just a complicated series of “on’s” and “off’s”/”yes” and “no” so it’s literally impossible for it to achieve that smooth curve in analog. Look at what it does to a sample in this graph.

While, to our ears, the digital interpretation of the analog signal is close enough that we wouldn’t hear the difference, the structure has been chewed up all to hell! Though we don’ have a whole lot of information one way or the other, I can’t help but wonder if those splines (the curvy lines between points) are where the magic happens. He even says outright that voice modulating technology (almost all of which is now exclusively digital) distorts his voice too much. Old technology used to work on materials that operated on these analog waves, so I can’t help but wonder if that would do the trick. It obviously wouldn’t work on a gramophone since without the active focusing his quirk requires it’s still a useless sound bite, but if he were to, say, speak over an old telephone would that work?

It’s entirely possible that there’s some other property in his voice that needs proximity to work (such as a frequency analog broadcasting can’t replicate) so he needs to be physically close to his target, or just the fact that analog technology is clunky and potentially more hassle that it’s worth that would make this a moot point; but I couldn’t help myself diving a little deeper.

#minor spoilers #bnha meta #mha meta #she speaks #shinsou hitoshi #hitoshi shinsou #shinso hitoshi #hitoshi shinso #bnha theory #mha theory

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chiclet-go-boom · 4 years

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AND ANOTHER THING

Okay, back to insomnia for another night since this stupid fucking movie is keeping me awake with emotional trauma. So here are my highlights of pain because I have nothing else to do at 4am but try and get them out of me and into the void where hopefully they’ll rot quietly.

Long rant about The Rise of Skywalker with even more swear words.

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PLOT HOLES SO DEEP THEY HAVE THEIR OWN EVENT HORIZON

Pretty much this entire movie, but these are the highlights that stick out:

How the fuck did Palpatine survive his on-camera death? It’s not only never explained, it’s never even touched on. Nobody asks any questions, ever. Complete retcon for the Original Trilogy.

How the fuck was Palpatine somehow Snoke as well? We get a brief shot of Snoke clones in a vat, and that’s it for what we know. His old ass raisin body is still around looking creepier than ever, so he’s not transferring his consciousness around into new vessels apparently.

If he was Snoke, why the hell did he command Kylo to kill Rey in the throne room of the Supremacy “to complete his training”, when his motivation for this movie was to get Rey alive to Exogol to kill him so he could… transfer his consciousness? See previous point.

Palpatine tells Rey she has to kill him so they can “be one” in order to save her friends… only if she does that and he takes her over, he’s not likely going to save her friends. Yet Rey treats it as a serious choice.

If Palpatine wants Rey to kill him so he can merge with her or take her over or whatever the hell transfer of sith power is suppose happen and then she turns around AND DOES IT, why is Palpatine actually really dead now? He wanted to be dead. That was the whole point. Do I trust in this? Or is the guy just mostly-dead again. This plotline whistles, it has so many holes.

Rey and Kylo Ren are equals in the Force. Rey is shown at the very beginning of the movie happily drifting twenty feet in the air while doing her best impression of an atom illustration at the same time. If you read the comics, Snoke is also shown tossing a younger Kylo over a cliff and Kylo catches himself with the Force above the rocks. Now, Kylo gets tossed into a pit at the end and just… falls to his near death? And has to climb up using his hands? Why show Rey floating if you’re not going to use it later for Kylo? Does JJ just not get the concept behind Chekhov’s Gun?

Lightspeed skipping. Very cool. I’ll allow it in space, particularly if you have a Force sensitive pilot who might be able to sense where they’re going and not rip themselves apart by impacting something solid (hello, Holdo Sacrifice Maneuver) but you can’t jump to lightspeed in gravity wells. You’ll tear your ship apart. The fact that Han did once is an outlier and should not be counted because that asshole has the galaxy’s own luck when it comes to bending fate and consequence. Did absolutely nobody read Wookiepedia?

And now TIE fighters can do it too and have both hyperspeed and hyperspace tracking technology installed? Kylo’s Whisper is unique with its lightspeed capabilities, a cutting edge piece of technology, but the ships chasing Poe in the opening Resistance sequence are just run of the mill fighter ships. They should have been left in the proverbial dirt.

JUST GENERAL CRATER SIZES PLOTHOLES

Why did Kylo try to mow Rey down with his actual ship, when it had perfectly serviceable and oh, deadly guns?

If C3PO wasn’t permitted by his programming to translate the dagger (because otherwise this movie would be over a lot faster), why didn’t they just go to a library on Coruscant?

Luke and Leia knew Rey was of Palpatine blood all along? Then why did neither of them know who the hell she was when they met in the previous movies? Luke even said “Who are you?” right to her face.

Why the hell did Rey die? She had all the power of a thousand generations at her fingertips and they’ve already shown she can heal mortal wounds. Instead she just… keels over because the script told her to. So Ben can turn up and heal her back, because they share the same soul and he has the same power. You know, the ability to heal mortal wounds? Only now it’s his turn to keel over for no reason. And if he has to fade into the Force, why the fuck didn’t Rey do it first, leaving him no body to save?

How the hell does a dagger that can point to an ancient Sith wayfinder artefact have an exact match to the outline of a piece of wreckage. It would only be useable from a precise angle and distance to the silhouette - the angle and distance that nobody had any way of knowing.

Since when can Force ghosts catch material objects out of the air and lift physical machinery?

Speaking of, how the hell does a rusted, damaged X-Wing deliberately sunk for a decade in order to strand its owner on-planet with no way off even if he changes his mind have no problems drying out and working perfectly for a hyperspace jump?

Kylo’s Whisper had the wayfinder plugged into it when he went to Exogol. He then used his ship to try and run Rey down on Pasaana, only she damaged it and the central cockpit went up in a ball of flame, sans wings. The wayfinder should have been toast, yet it somehow turns up on a different ship, the one that Rey steals from Kylo on the Death Star. Is the wayfinder now on all Kylo’s ships? The magic multiplying wayfinder? And completely immune to blistering fire temperatures that melted a space-capable ship?

Why is an entire fleet of destroyers, so many they dwarf the skies, just sitting idly on a planet and needing navigational guidance in order to get above atmosphere? Who grounds a star destroyer at all, let alone a murderous amount of them?

How did they get planet killing weapons on those destroyers without massive amounts of kyber? Kyber is scarce, Starkiller Base would have likely wiped out any known remaining stocks of the precious mineral. And the stuff is unstable as fuck, which is why its limited to lightsabers (tiny amounts of crystal) or huge moon-sized bases to contain it. Sticking it on a ship should be impossible. It’s never questioned or explained.

Why was Palpatine surprised by the Force Bond? Surprised enough to completely abandon his plan to take over Rey and instead decided he’d just suck the bond dry of power to regenerate his body (well, it fixed his fingers at least). If he was Snoke or controlling Snoke as he claimed, he should have not only known all about it, he should have known how strong it was.

Rey won by deflecting Palpatine’s Force lightning back at him and melting his body like shades of The Lost Ark. All he needed to do was… stop using lightning and I don’t know, Force push her into the pit with Kylo. Rey problem solved. If Kylo couldn’t levitate anymore, Rey sure couldn’t.

IT TRIVIALIZES CONSEQUENCES. IT TRIVIALIZES SACRIFICE.

In one of the few cool and unexpected things, Rey destroys a transport with Force lightning. She kills her friend Chewbacca (and a bunch of redshirt stormtroopers). She screams in horror but finally runs away from the crime. We’re all devastated, poor Chewie

But wait, no! There were two transports out of fucking nowhere apparently and Chewie is just captured. So it’s a mulligan, people. His death is erased, it didn’t happen. This also counts as a plot hole since Rey senses Chewbacca nearby on the destroyer later just fine, but couldn’t tell he was just on the other side of the rock while they were on the ground.

In order to be permitted to translate the Sith markings on the dagger, C3PO has to undergo a factory reset. He has a poignant moment saying goodbye to everyone and then metaphorically lays down and dies for the cause. But wait! No, actually he’s fine. R2D2 restores nearly his entire memory later on, we can all calm down now.

Kylo Ren/Ben Solo sacrifices himself for the love of his life and nobody takes even a second to mourn him. Even Rey just moves on with no trouble - she doesn’t even cry. If it happens, it happens off camera and therefore doesn’t happen at all. His sacrifice meant nothing because nobody but nobody will ever know about it.

SO MUCH PANDERING IT SHOULD LOUNGE AGAINST A STREETLIGHT

C3PO, a minor character in all the movies, suddenly has a major speaking part and actual plot relevance.

Rey training with the blind helmet and the hunter drone like Luke did.

Rey wearing a Rebel helmet as she escapes from Ahch-To.

Lando. Again. Used as a signpost (go that way, kids!) and appears again with the cavalry later, just like he did in previous movies.

Rey sliding down yet another dune

Ewoks cheering as something blows up in the sky

A star destroyer going down over the Jakku ship graveyard.

Double sunrise/sunset on a sand planet. (fine, I can live with this one)

Chewbacca finally get a medal

Tatooine itself and the Lars homestead.

THE COMPLETE LOSS OF CHARACTERISATION

Rose Tico who? She has a couple of throwaway lines and a walk on appearance. What a jerk move for a great character.

Hux gets barely more significance and completely throws away his entire motivation from the first two movies (a calculated rise to power to command a galaxy wide army because he wants control of everything) in exchange for utterly petty harrassment. It’s not even revenge, he can’t affect much. He doesn’t even plot against Kylo, he just kicks the metaphorical equivalent of sand onto Kylo’s robes and mutters something about rubber and glue. Then gets himself killed because he’s stupid. This is the man who masterminded a superweapon and used it, only to get taken out with a bulky bandage wrapped around the outside of his uniform.

Finn’s decision to leave the First Order in an act of real bravery is reduced to because a “feeling” told him too. Because he has the Force. But doesn’t tell anyone all year. For reasons. He had two character arcs in the other movies, moving him away from a drone in a faceless army into a person with agency and something to offer, and he spends three quarters of this movie running after Rey and yelling her name.

Poe. Oh god, they murdered Poe. He’s the fucking son of real heroes of the Resistance, a golden child with his own legacy burdens and they instead they give him (and his Hispanic actor) a drug dealer background. Crass at best, utterly contemptible at worst. The movies are the most canon canon that it can be. Did nobody check Poe’s Wookiepedia page before putting this into the script?

Kylo Ren kills both his masters in the previous movie, only to bow to a third within the first five minutes in this one. Kylo says “I’ll kill you too” but the next thing we know, he’s got red decals on his helmet proclaiming his new allegiance. What the fuck? Then spends most of the movie contradicting everything he said in TLJ proving that yes, Kylo Ren was lying to Rey all along and it all was a manipulative dick move to consolidate personal power at the expense of everything else. Spends his time gaslighting her and telling her she has no choice but to be his queen.

(side note on this: he TELLS her she WILL take his hand the next time he offers it… aaaaand she doesn’t. Again. Why the fuck did they put that in the script at all? So Kylo can look stupid by being so confident and forceful with his prediction only to get blown off when the moment comes around again? pfft.)

Even Palpatine isn’t consistent. He wanted to live forever, tricking Death and reigning as the supreme Sith Lord for all time. Instead in this movie he apparently just wants to be Rey. He spends 30 years grooming the scion of Skywalker and does absolutely nothing with him in the end.

TOLD THE WRONG FUCKING STORY

This story should have pulled threads from Anakin’s fall and Luke’s failure and used them to tell a story about how its always possible to come back from the worst of your choices and that love for family, love for friends and love for each other is the one real power in the world.

Instead all the Skywalkers died because Palpatine worked through three generations to subvert the will of the very Force so that his bloodline is the only one that remains ascendant. Rey turns out only to be powerful because her grandfather was powerful, completely negating the idea that the Force plays no favorites and anybody can be the one to turn the tide of evil. Anakin’s children are painted in the worst possible light and the entire saga ends on a horrible, desolate note because all of them died and the one who deserved it the least had to give the utmost, and will still always be painted as the villain.

We had bad guys already. The First Order. Hux. Fuck, they could have elevated Mitaka and given the poor baby some meatier lines. We could have had a stormtrooper uprising, which would have tied beautifully to Finn and given him an arc. We had a power dynamic we cared about - Hux versus Kylo which could have gone in very interesting directions with Snoke no longer holding either of their leashes. We did not need a completely new army full of ships to fight and the complete erasure and irrelevance of the First Order.

The decision to include Palpatine could have been a specific plot tied to Kylo-as-Skywalker-bloodline, exploring and driving his redemption as the extent of his lifelong manipulation becomes apparent. Instead, he’s got nothing to do with Kylo other than spouting a few lines at the Supreme Leader at the beginning and then tossing him into the pit at the end. What a waste of an intriguing idea.

Going by dialogue count and the amount of scenes he’s in, Poe is the protagonist in this story, except nothing changes for him. Rey wanders around angry for most of the movie for reasons that are unclear and nothing changes for her either except the revelation that her grandpa is still around which she tells nobody about so it’s never a thing that needs to be dealt with. Kylo is an unyielding, uncompromising murder bot again and is the only one where something about him materially changes, even if its kinda hamfisted. We ran around for the entire movie and nobody even SAID anything to each other for the most part, honestly.

Han Solo’s memory was poignant, if you’re okay with rehashes of conversations we’ve already had in other movies. Kylo Ren/Ben Solo has no lines of dialogue for nearly the last hour of the movie beyond ‘ow’. How his actor managed to carry his character through that anyways is a fucking tribute to Adam Driver’s skill with his facial expressions.

Leia crawled off into a hole to die with nobody noticing and managed to distract her son long enough to get him likely mortally stabbed by the person who was supposed to love him most. Rey did what Luke failed to do. She even regretted it right afterwards just like Luke did. (For the record, this is the point in the movie where I gave up all hope. If Rey could actually bring herself to hurt Kylo, let alone stick his own saber in his chest, I didn’t recognize her character anymore.)

Luke promised Kylo he’d see him again, but then spent all his Force energy motivating Rey, so Kylo died still hating his uncle and never forgiving his mom.

Kylo Ren never reconciled himself with Ben Solo. The movie just treated him like he had a Jekyll/Hyde thing going on so they could throw Kylo into the sea, leaving only Ben behind. That is so fucking simplistic I could have howled.

JUST STRAIGHT UP ‘WUT’ MOMENTS

They literally dropped on top of the dagger mcguffin that had been buried for twenty years. Just. Fell on it.

Rey’s parents sold her into slavery to keep her safe? Say wut?

How the fuck did Palpatine lose track of his kid and his grandkid in the first place? Palpatine doesn’t have kids in canon, he’s SITH. He doesn’t share. If he had relatives, they’d’ve been sacrificed on a Dark Altar loooong before now.

Why is Rey on Tatooine with BB8? Isn’t that Poe’s droid? Did Poe and his droid get a divorce?

Why the hell does Rey have a new lightsaber out of literally nowhere. Ben just died three minutes ago onscreen. Why are we suddenly looking at new glowing stick. Did weeks pass? Months?

How did Leia become a Jedi and we’re only just finding out about it now? And if Leia was a Jedi, why the fuck did she send her ten year old special needs son to his uncle? Are they actually trying to paint Leia as a bad mother who dumped a problem child on her family to take care of while she carried on with her life?

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

The Knights of Ren. They just turned out to be four seconds of eye candy and completely unnecessary. They wandered around looking vaguely menacing and that was their entire function. They didn’t even actually menace anything until fighting their supposed Master for a half minute for completely ambiguous reasons. Why were they even in the film in the first place?

Jannah could very well be Lando’s daughter per the supplementary materials, but it’s not even mentioned when Lando first pops up - that he’s living on this planet now and his young daughter was harvested by the First Order. It would have been a great “heyyyy” moment at the end when he offers to help her find her family.

Anakin. Oh sweet biscuits and gravy, why didn’t Hayden Christensen make a cameo in this as Anakin and give Kylo hope at the end? We could have tied the prequels to the sequels so effortlessly and given our favorite character something he’s wanted for most of his life, the approval and love of his grandfather. Hell, I personally would trade Han Solo’s moment (as sweet as it was) for a moment with Vader.

Kylo (or Rey by proxy) never got a chance to heal his kyber crystal. That should have happened, it would have been fucking poignant to mend something fractured that badly and been a much better symbol than Kylo simply throwing his saber away. It’s supposed to represent his life, his soul. Again, see previous comment about dumb Jekyll/Hyde parallel.

IN CONCLUSION

If you could care less about these characters and Star Wars and you are indeed a casual fan, this movie is pretty to look at. That’s its one redeeming feature. Finn and Poe have great banter, they should have been boyfriends. D-O was cute. Poor Snap, I guess.

Yes, I care that Rey and Kylo/Ben got their kiss, but it was robbed of nearly every iota of emotional weight by the previous two hours of near useless plot and exposition. It could have made me happy cry. Instead I was all but numb with the whiplash, and when I heard “Rey Skywalker” I couldn’t get out of the theatre fast enough.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk on how emotional trauma over fictional characters has all but derailed my Christmas.

#the rise of skywalker #tros spoilers

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mutantsrisingrpg · 4 years

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Congratulations DYLAN! You’ve been accepted as NEPTUNE.

Dylan, I was so excited to see you apply for a second character and even more excited to see you apply for Neptune! The cosmic metaphor that you weaved throughout the entire app is something that I absolutely loved. Making Avery be the second born and comparing it to leftover cosmic energy had me howling! I also loved that you wrote about how special twins are when it comes to mutants - their powers being the yin to the others yang was especially something that stood out to me. I’m so, so excited to see you bring Avery to life!

Welcome to Mutants Rising! Please read the checklist and submit your account within 24 hours.

Out of Character Information:

NAME/ALIAS: Dylan

PRONOUNS: He/Him

AGE: 22

TIMEZONE & ACTIVITY LEVEL: GMT. 6/7 Days

In Character Information:

DESIRED ROLE: Avery O’Brien aka Neptune

GENDER/PRONOUNS: Male, He/Him

DETAILS & ANALYSIS:

Avery can take you by surprise. At first you might just see this edgy kid walking down the street, fists clenched and ready to throw them at the first person to give them a skew look. With a packet of Marlboro in his back pocket and tongue primed with his general response, ‘fuck off’, you just simply wouldn’t expect Megan the Stallion to be blasting through his earphones as he walked.

Sure, Avery definitely knew how to get himself into trouble and he had picked up a few bad habits along the way but Avery would probably be the kindest and most loyal friend you could make. He’d often babysit his neighbors kids and he genuinely enjoyed it. His aesthetic was mostly a facade, tough and ready to rumble when he’d definitely prefer to avoid a fight if possible.

He might be young, but don’t underestimate him. He’s been on the street long enough to know how things work and life has definitely taught him how to look out for himself and his sister. He’s pulled off countless jobs since their parents kicked them out and has managed to keep his hands as clean as they could be. So what gives Avery the edge? He’s cunning and smart, he knows how to work angles and get what he wants, one way or another.

As for Avery’s powers, he doesn’t really understand them, and nor does the rest of the world, to be honest. He’s read multiple essays and watched countless videos on dark matter and energy and what that meant exactly. When he uses his powers, it’s as if he can feel each individual molecule of something, measuring up its mass. He can then change how gravity affects the object, making it ‘heavier’ or ‘lighter’. He’s also experimented with dark energy blasts which seem to be an invisible force that pushes everything out of its way and constantly expands if he doesn’t control it. Honestly, his powers frighten him, as does the unknown to all humans. What really gets to him is that if Dark Energy is what causes the universe to keep expanding, should he really be playing around with that shit?

BIO:

TW: Homophobia

Penelope was born first and then Avery, like the leftover cosmic energy when a star is born. The two were inseparable and doing so would bring about the same results as splitting an atom, metaphorically. As they grew older, they spaced apart but were still always in each other’s orbits, one revolving their life around the other and visa versa. As far as Avery could remember, his early childhood was a good one, or maybe he was just far too young to really see how his family life really was. He went to school, worked hard and would come home only to spend the rest of his free time with Penelope.

As he got older, Avery was always testing his boundaries. How far could he push his luck with his parents, peers, teachers, and even law enforcement. He hung around with the wrong crowd and got pulled into things he never originally wanted to do. It was nothing serious until he was involved in the destruction of a school bus. Nobody could explain how the bus had been crushed nor who had been involved. It happened just after summer break, Avery and a group of his friends had snuck onto school campus that night just to mess around and smoke some weed. Avery was mainly there for Mitch Evans, Avery’s love interest at the time.

The night progressed and the group ended up hanging out in a school bus. The group whittled down to just 4 kids when Avery finally gained the courage to make a move on Mitch. He had tried to kiss the other and Mitch’s reaction was violent and resulted in Mitch punching Avery in the face and shoving him out of the bus. The flurry of embarrassment and heartbreak felt as if it was crushing his soul and before he knew it, the bus started to creak as the metal began to indent. The group inside had mostly been able to get out untouched, everyone except Mitch, who’s leg got stuck under a chair whilst the bus was imploding. After managing to free Mitch from the bus and getting him to the nearest hospital, the group vowed never to mention what had happened out of fear that whatever crushed the bus would follow them. Little did they know that Avery was the one that had crushed the bus and the only other person to ever know this would be Penelope. That was also the last time that Avery ever spoke to Mitch Evans.

That was just the beginning of weird events that would follow the O’Brien twins. Their father seemed to end every day with a bottle of whiskey and their mother seemed to become more unhinged every day. Avery pushed through, working hard at school, knowing that getting into college would be his escape. Having Penelope was also a blessing, having someone he could trust and open up too was a privilege he knew not many had.

Half-way through high school was when it all changed. Their parents had officially rejected them and kicked them out of the house. They had nowhere to go and started crashing on their friend’s couches. Soon Avery was given the opportunity to work a job with one of his friend’s older brothers and he took it. They robbed a yacht and got away with a bag full of expensive jewelry and cash from the on-board bar. It took a couple of weeks before the money was laundered, but Avery got his cut and a reputation. He was asked to do a couple of more jobs and started learning the ropes. It was his senior year when he pulled off his own job. He put most of his money into a savings account to buy a place for him and his sister. He finished school and was given a bursary to study engineering at a local college.

Now, at the age of 24 he is still studying engineering and lives in a decent apartment with his sister. He also works as an intern at a local high-end engineering firm that specialises in space technology. At night he works as a bartender which is mostly a cover and is where he gets approached by most of his clients to pull off jobs for them for a percentage of the cut. There’s been a change in the winds recently though and whispers of new and powerful mutant gangs coming to Miami has him watching his back.

His life is extremely busy so he’s constantly living in the now. If you stopped him and asked him what his goals were, he’d default to saying something about making sure that Penelope is safe, not that she needs his protection, but he barely thinks about what he wants these days. That’s why everyone in his life that has a ‘more than friends’ status seems to come and go, Avery doesn’t think about what he wants and always puts others first before himself, stretching himself as thinly as possible which often leaves his partners feeling neglected or toyed with.

EXPANDED CONNECTIONS:

Penelope O’Brien. It’s said that twins have some sort of special connection, and if that were true for humans, it was definitely true for mutants, especially if their powers were the yin to the other’s yang. Penelope was like the birth of a brand new star whilst Avery was the death of one. They were each other’s best friends from the second they were born. Not only was Penelope always there for him, she was the only one he confided in after the school bus incident. They spent countless nights staying up until sunrise chatting about boys and girls, school, life goals, games and so much more! Penelope was the first person Avery spoke to about his powers and he was so happy that he wasn’t the only twin with ‘gifts’. Being able to support each other was so much easier since they shared a secret. If anything weird would happen they’d race to the other and tell them, learning about each other’s powers together. Penelope wasn’t just his twin sister, they were his best friend too! Considering that Avery struggled to keep love around, this meant a lot to him. He couldn’t imagine what his life would be like without her and that’s why he’d die for her. He’d rather not be alive than live a life without her. This is where Avery’s loyalty turned fierce and where he would definitely cross a line if need be. In a sense, Penelope was Avery’s weakness in more than one way, emotionally and physically. He was sure that if there was anyone that could match his powers it would be Penelope and to what extent, he had no idea and he hoped that he’d never have to find out.

EXTRA:

Oh boy oh boy. I MEAN. What shouldn’t I put here?

I’m thinking that his reputation might get one of the groups to approach him? Maybe more than one group gets him to work for them as a freelancer?

Honestly I’m probably going to make a lot of content for Avery throughout the next week purely because I have so much muse for him, but I also kinda wanted to get this app in and this doesn’t influence decisions so… but here’s a link to the Pinterest board:

https://pin.it/3FkPGew

I might also make a mock-blog? And on there I’ll have graphics and headcanons? IDK. I’ll send it in if I do.

ANYTHING ELSE: Nope! All good! I honestly love this RP so much and I’m waaaaaay too invested for my own good.

#accepted #accepted: neptune

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