#honestly i miss notes era when they were no where near as big things were kinda fun back then minus the covid
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Since its 3Hs anniversary some really cool things I like about the game that aren’t talked about enough because the fandom is too busy arguing who is right and who is wrong
The worldbuilding just. 3H has honestly one of my favorite fictional settings. Its just both expansive but also genuinely interesting. I have spent HOURS thinking about the world and made so many ocs its not even funny. I love thinking about the setting of the game so much.
I LOVE the puzzle like way the game explains its world and story. Like I know some people don’t like it because it makes the game a bit too convoluted but personally? I LOVE 3Hs way of not telling everything but rather giving hints and clues the player has to piece themselves. It makes the games world feel more interactive and feels so satisfying. Then again I enjoy that kind of approach to worldbuilding
In general I love 3hs fragmented story and the way how the story is placed in many different fragments. It is geniunely rewarding to replay the game from another storypath and notice the foreshadowing Would’ve the story been probably better had it been just one storypath? Honestly yes. But 3h is ambitious and one of the ways it is is with its fragmented story structure.
The structure of White Clouds is criminally underrated honestly and gets way more hate than it deserves. I love how the first few chapters set up the world of Fodlan and show injustices/conflicts of the world with chapters like the chapter where you face off Lonato for instance. Then the next few chapters are spend in deepening the mysteries such as the conspiracy against the church and the mystery regarding TWSITD. Then Jeralt dies and the last few chapters are spent as “beginning of the End” so to speak, as things clears to the intense climax.
On related note I LOVE how the game handles perspective and how the lords are the respective ways we view the story. I know so many people say “WHite Clouds is same on all paths” but I do feel that’s kinda the point. The story is the same but there are differences that come from the way each of the lords is strongly characterized and has different values, worldviews. The subtle changes on what are focused on in each route also foreshadow what will be focused on each route, which I think is super cool.
Even beyond the lords and routes the game does explore the idea of perspective well. I do think 3h has this very “everyone is the hero of their own story” type of approach to perspective and it shows it well. Each character believes they’re in the right and you can get this view that they view themselves as right. Even Agarthans who are the designated villains have this sense they think they’re in right and that the Nabateans were evil.
The way how games routes being divided into having a different focus is very cool. I love how AM is a smaller scale personal tragedy, how CF is a battle of ideals and how VW explores the world and reveals deeper mysteries. I also love how all of these are related to the lords ideals and worldviews: Dimitri is the most conflicted of the lords so he gets the most characterfocused story focused on . Edelgard is the most ideologically driven so her path focuses on her ideals and battle of wills against Rhea. Claude is the one who is the most freespirited and wants to know the truth so his route focuses on revealing the mysteries.
Also the way the houses characters reflect their respective routes storyline and central themes: Black Eagles are nobles that have conflicting relationships with nobility reflecting Edelgards goal, Blue Lions are all united with the trauma of Tragedy of Duscur, and Golden Deer are a house of misfits who give this “ragtag group who will save the universe with POWER OF FRIENDSHIP and this cool gun I found” vibes which fit the route PERFECTLY
I LOVE how the game plays with and subverts a lot of Fire Emblem tropes. While it does play some tropes straight (dad death and evil cult manipulating behind the scenes) it does do a lot to break from series conventions and playing with ideas to make a more ambitious story. The way it either subverts expectations (The evil emperor being female well intended extremist, Rhea being the Gharnef/Medeus instead of the Nyna archetype she’s presented as), twists familiar tropes to their natural extreme (Dimitris arc is basically the natural extreme end of stereotypical FE lord) and other similar things make the game feeling so planned out, like the writers understood FE stories and wanted to make something that challenges FE while still feeling like it.
The way how every major player acts as foil/pararell to another player is so GOOD. Every faction leader can be compared to the other somehow and that just makes the game SOOOO fun to analyze, trying to find all the similarities and differences and pararells is so rewarding.
A more specific example on this is how i love how the game plays with the idea of holy/sacred weapons. While normally these weapons are artifacts from goddess that defeat dragons, here the holy weapons are bones made from dragons and just???? HOW METAL IS THAT????????? It’s just such a neat way to subvert the idea of sacred weapons. Rather than being blessed creations of the goddess, they are weapons of destruction made by the villains.
I ADORE THE GAMES science fiction elements. I know people say they feel out of place but personally, they make the game memorable for me. I still remember the first time I saw that scene with nukes. I especially love the heavy implication that Sothis isn’t a goddess but rather a powerful alien. It makes her character much more interesting
I know a lot of people don’t like Agarthans but can I just say their backstory being “forced to hide after their land got conquered and desiring it back” making them a dark mirror not just 3h lords/Rhea but FE lords as whole is SO FUCKING METAL. This is what I mean with 3H writers knowing their tropes like back of their hand.
I love how in Part 1 sometimes you’d talk to two characters in Monastery at once instead of just one. It’s something I miss in part 2 honestly.
I love the small sidequests such as the fishing tourney and White Heron cup and wish Part 1 had more of them, it would’ve made the school part feel more alive.
I LOVE how some missions (esp paralogues) have subgoals that you can clear to get better rewards. I wish the game had been more clear with them or even made them main goals of maps sometimes.
I LOVE THE WAY Paralogues act as small gaiden stories that show more of the games world and characters. Its a neat way to let the sidecharacters shine and reveal some neat secrets of the games world and story.
The gameplay loop is honetly fun and satisfying. It is rewarding and while it gets tiring towards the end overall its a good gameplay loop.
I ADORE the aesthetic of Shambhala. Its just so sleek and sinister. The cyrillic letters spelling different words is so cool. Shambhala is my favorite map in the game and the aesthetic is a big reason why.
The games soundtrack is so good!!!!!!!!!! But not only that I LOVE the way its electro elements subtly hint of Agarthans being in control behind the scenes. This is especially cool in Road to Dominion where the electro parts are barely noticeable yet present. but other tracks have subtle electro vibes as well. The other way the games music tells the story (such as use of leitmotifs or how the monastery music changes once Jeralt dies) is great as well.
I love how 3h can be read as an allegory for reformation era and reneissance. Its such an interesting way to read the games events and compare it to a real historical periods there’s quite a bit of f
In general I ADORE the cultural references of the game. There’s surprisingly lot of way the games world is based on real life and the details are just *chefs kiss*
THE GAME IS DENSE WITH THEMATIC IDEAS. Besides the perspective the game tackles ideas of how trauma can affect a persons psyche and worldview (as well how a persons trauma affects the way they interact with the world which in turn can affect the world as well), grief, societal values, historical revisiniosm and so much more. The game tackles SO MANY topics in an interesting manner, it is thematically just as dense as it is storywise as well.
I also love how the games thematic parts work in harmony with the story rather than one overshadowing with the other. Its super refreshing honestly where a games themes and story are both rich and I don’t have to pick one over the other.
Lastly I ADORE the games central message (or at least what I see as the central message anyway): The world’s fucked up and most people want to fix it, but what they deem fixing differs and because of that they go into conflict or outright war rather than trying to find a common ground. Everyone wants a better world but no one can agree what a better world truly means so they fight over it. It was a theme that not only resonates with my personal values but also hit me REALLY hard when I first played it as it’s a theme that I found incredibly relevant and reflective of our own world during the time I played the game for the first time.
So yeah. I made this post since there’s SO MUCH neat things about the game, its gameplay and story that sadly get swept under the rug in favor of either arguing which lord was right/wrong or complaining how the game is an unfinished, rushed and overambitious mess. Is 3h perfect? Hell no. But it’s a game that I hold near and dear to my heart and does genuinely SO MANY THINGS RIGHT, I’m sad no one talks about the genuine strengths the game has anymore, instead just complaining.
I’m not even joking when I say that 3h should be up there as heralded as one of the best, most ambitious and complex JRPGs alongside Xenogears, the first Xenoblade game, Suikoden and Trails series as whole along other such games. Its a shame the games reputation is less like those games and more like Persona 5s where everyone focuses more on its flaws and the fans being annoying than the fact the game does geniunely A LOT right. It’s just that good, ambitious game I love so much.
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Ok ill bite whats the worst mg series
alright, whats the worst magical girl series in your opinion?
Thanks you two for letting me do some yelling.
The obvious guess would likely be one of the recent edgelord shows right? Magical Girl Site or something similar? But nay I say, for while MGS and Day Break Illusion and such and what not generally tell you what to expect right away. Don't like super violence and suffering? Watch something else is the clear message from the get go.
One of the bait and switch series then like Madoka or maybe Yuki Yuna? For what faults they may or may not have, at least these series do something and are interesting, even if you're not huge on what goes down in the series.
A parody then? They range from affectionate to banned in New Zealand but regardless of quality and their feelings for MGs, it's a parody. It's a joke and shouldn't be taken seriously (plus they're usually short so you can just forget about them forever).
So what makes a series terrible then, I am sure you are asking. IMO? Setting expectations for an interesting and enjoyable series, and then dashing them to hell.
Come with me below the cut, as I talk about Key Princess Story: Kagihime Eternal Alice Rondo!
Spoilers abound so if you care about those for a 15 year old series, click away.
Background: Kagihime was a 4 volume manga that ran from 2004-2006 that was picked up for a 13 episode anime adaptation near the end of its run. The manga is created by a pair (Kaishaku) who you may know for making Magical Nyan Nyan Taruto. Kannazuki no Miko, and Steel Angel Kurumi, and the anime had a script written by the same writer (Mamiko Ikeda) for Tenshi Ni Narumon who also did some script writing for Princess Tutu and Seven of Seven. The anime also had 6 character music videos which are fairly simple but a nice addition to the series for the main girls. Discotek has been publishing the anime in the states in recent years, and the manga was brought over by *squints at book spine* Dr Master Publications.
The Premise: Girls transform and enter weird outside of reality spaces to fight each other with giant keys to take each other’s stories to create a third Alice In Wonderland story.
Well, an off-brand Alice story written by Alternate L. Takion, rather than Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson, that while the series uses all the aesthetic hallmarks of the tradition Alice, the little we see of the in universe Alice story is clearly different. Which is fine, at the end of the day, it’s still about someone who loves the Alice stories and wishes there was more, and even makes his own fanfiction version. His? Oh yeah, while the girls do all the fighting, the main character is Aruto, a teen boy who loves Alice, and for reasons we don’t know till late game, can enter the liminal spaces that the ‘Alice Users’ fight in. He chases a girl who looks like the Alice he sees in his story, who is named Arisu, and gets roped into this fanfic battle royale. He is also the older brother of the very needy Kirihara, who also ends up being and Alice User. As does Kirihara’s bff Kisa. To round out the group of enemies-turned-friends-who-will-work-together-to-collect-the-Eternal-Alice-without-having-to-fight-eachother group is a young genius researcher Kirika who wants to know more about Aruto’s connection that allows him to enter the spaces where the girls fight.
Then there’s all the other girls, some of whom still have real importance to the story and some who have a few panels or 2 scenes total. But with a whole bunch of girls to design, the creators reached out to a whole lot of other people to have them create designs! Eventually the battle gets down to the last few girls, there’s a confrontation with the guy running the whole thing, and while the anime and manga vary quite a bit the whole time, in both version Aruto ends up with Kirihara. Oh and Arisu was created by Aruto’s super imagination powers.
The Promise: Here on is subjective, particularly with what I personally saw as potential from this series. because I need you to understand how much I want to like this series.
~Alice in Wonderland themed: I know some people aren’t alice fans and that’s fine you do you but as a big alice fan this is great. We have a few alice episodes and themed characters amongst series like CCS and MGRP, and even Alice themes in other series like Tweeny Witches and Alice 19th. But damn it I am down for Alice series.
~Giant Keyyyyyyyys: Yeah yeah Kingdom Hearts but these keys are much more staff like for a lot of the characters which ads and air of elegance rather than the KH ones that for me at least feel well designed for big ol props rather than actual weapons. We also get...
~Weapon variety: It counts as a key if it’s a thorn whip that can be shaped like a key right? How about a giant pocket knife? Crossbows can also be keys. Hush. And we have this variety because
~Guest Artists: For magical girl series where we have a variety of outfits designed by different people, we have Kagihime, Uta~Kata, and uhh I guess Magia Record? But that’s a mobile game with a hella number of characters and with how mobile game works I wouldn’t count it just because it’s less the intent of the series to have variety and more the nature of having lots of girls. (Precure doesn’t count because unless I missed a memo each season’s set is still by one designer). If a series isn’t about a team and therefore doesn’t need cohesion, bringing in other artists is a great way for variety and new looks.
~The long term goal: Fighting with other people who love the same piece of media you do in hopes of creating new material that will be viewed as official? That’s just fandom nowadays. But it’s a legitimate interesting concept, and opens up so many doors for a message for the series, be it ‘what you create is no less valuable than the canon work’ or ‘it’s hard to let go when something you love doesn’t have more to it but you can still love it for what it is’ or ‘bond with the people who like the thing you like ya idiot instead of fighting about it’. The concept is interesting and there are so many narrative ways you can take this.
~Gays: Between the anime and manga, we have at least 5 wlw. Is it a magical girl series without some gays? (side note- the manga had a short thing where the MC wears a girl’s uniform and is pretty comfortable in it and while there is no way this was the intent, between that and the emphasis on the stories that live in girls and how the fight zones have no men, I’m just saying, Trans girl Aruto.)
~Greater Fairy Tale Premise: We meet a Little Match Girl based MG who is obsessed with Andersen rather than the Alice books, and touch on a Sleeping Beauty character in the manga. The manga at least implies that classic stories and fairy tale authors uh. Live on in a liminal space as immortals with world warping powers within that world and there could be opportunities for other girls in the real world to fight for Little Mermaid 2: Electric Boogaloo.
The Good: Everything has positive points, no matter how bad it is.
~Character Designs: Some of those looks slap. As do most of their weapons.
~Backgrounds: I have a strong opinion on backgrounds in anime that can be easily boiled down to old watercolor backgrounds good, modern filtered photos as background bad, and as a 2006 series, this might not be Memole nice but they’re quite attractive.
~Splash Pages: Easily my favorite thing after the designs, each chapter’s title page for the manga just has a character standing in a setting. Which is not everyone’s thing I’m sure but it’s a nice simplistic way to let the characters breathe imo. Even if at least some of the settings were deffo traced. But that’s how backgrounds work to some extent? If I ever get to the Met again, I am tracking down this exact photo, but here is a likely candidate for an example.
~Different Versions: I do not understand the need to make an adaptation that tries to be a 1:1. Kagihime had the same ideas and characters and did some of the same beats but very much had a different finale story and a lot of changes in the middle (like the Alice cops in the manga). Again, not something everyone probably wants I’m sure, but I very appreciate this, especially since the Anime kept good pace with the number of Manga chapters (reading the manga again while watching the anime at 3.8x speed just now was very interesting to see the different interpretations of events in a different medium.)
The ‘Fine’: Yeah.
~Anime Visuals: Look 2006 was still early enough into digipaint that I will give it a total pass on these. The colors are too bright but in a very bland way, the lineart is nothing interesting, and the faces are. Iffy. But it’s not total garbage to look at (probably helped by backgrounds and character designs...) it just came out in an era where not enough people knew how to stylize things to account for the weakness of the tools of the time. (It was 4 years earlier but I feel Kagihime is the polar opposite of Chobits with its painfully bland color palette while still being just. Flat. Sorry for the drive by Chii.)
~Music?: There sure were songs. Obviously, they are nothing to me.
The Bad: CW for.... somehow all the big things to an extent.
~Fanservice: Look, I am fine with fanservice, especially for a series that’s, ya know, not targeted at kids, big Mai Hime fan here even if I would recommend skipping the panty thief episode. And honestly the series generally isn’t fanservicey, at least by the modern standards of having the camera choosing under the skirt rather than an over the shoulder shot like I’ve seen plenty in other shows. Even the sexier outfits like the rose whip dominatrix aren’t bad BUT. When the girls fight. One takes her phallic key and drives it into another girls chest between the boobs while the loser cries in pain and then her book comes out and when the victor rips out pages, the loser’s clothes also rip. It is very SuperS Amazon Trio assault metaphor-y. There’s also a bit of fanservice with the sister becauseeeee....
~Incest: If you read the premise up there, first wow good job because I’m sure not re-reading that, you might have noticed I said MC ends up with his sister. As someone who is a big mythology fan and watches plenty of anime, I have a decent tolerance for your obligatory ‘oh we’re siblings but actually cousins so our feelings are okay’ or whatever the fuck Citrus has going on I don’t know that series and I don’t vibe BUT. I have limits and boy did this series go beyond that because multiple episodes are dedicated to the sister being in love with the brother? And the brother returns her feelings but knows that they are wrong so he put everything he likes in his sister into his version of Alice who, of course, physically manifests as Arisu who he creates accidentally with his uh. Magic imagination powers. But again in both versions MC still ends up with his sister. Hey, at least the manga eventually said the boy was adopted when the sister was like, 3, so if nothing else no blood relations? The anime did not ad this. -_-
~Under Utilized Characters: Arisu’s gradual revelation that she has no childhood memories because she isn’t a real person is so interesting and they don’t do nothing with it but also? That’s the kind of thing I personally would love to dig into and Kagihime, while touching on this world shattering revelation, easily loops back to So Anyway She Should Fight For The Man and to hell with developing a life or personality outside of what has been written for her. The rest of the main 5 were 2 note characters which. Could be worse? The most interesting character ends up being the child genius who accidentally murdered her childhood bestie (and/or lover? depending on version) and her coming to terms with that (the friend is alive but the version changes how and why she thinks she’s dead). Then the villain has the motivation of ‘i lost my creativity and now have become an immortal living outside of normal space and am getting girls to fight each other because that’s like a story so I’m still relevant right?’. But shoutout to the anime for then taking death of the author literally. The numerous other girls are canon fodder outside of like. The manga version of the dead gf and the little match girl.
~Battle Royale: This is not a thing I have an issue with generally. Again, but Mai Hime fan, I need to read MGRP 11, BUT by not developing the non-main girls there is no emotional connection which makes them just canon fodder and that’s boring as sin for a royale system. The initial main character fights revolve so much around the MC guy being there that they fall flat, and the 2 or 3 final battles in both versions still feel without any stakes. Also for a royale thing most of the characters don’t actually die, which cool! Neat! Except when they do? Some nobodies and a somebody are murdered (at least in the manga) and the tone never feels like it’s supposed to be upping the stakes, it’s just. Some people are dead now. And do you want to guess which of the main characters died?
~Gays: Oh boy the best friend of the brother-complex sister is in love with her and (in the manga) dies. She does apparently get better for the last chapter but the death itself is only felt by the rest of the cast for a page or two before we go back to feeling sad big brother wants to kiss his mentally generated sister clone rather than his actual sister u_u. Bury your gays is nothing new, but I wonder if it was also intended to be justified because Guess Who Is Creepy and a bit Perverted? Oh look the lesbian keeps the used swimsuit of her beloved and manipulates events to get an indirect kiss and when she sees the sister trying to strange Arisu for a moment she decides to do it for the sister? It’s not good. You want bad gay rep in a magical girl series, well here ya go. We also had a nobody in the first(second?) episode whose story pages reveal her having a kiss with a girl, and then we also have the prodigy again and- in the manga- her. Uh. childhood lover who she thought she killed but the girl has been wiping her mind over and over so prodigy remembers ‘killing’ the friend and not the she’s alive so she can keep? fucking with her? Toxic!
~Sexual Content: But wait you say, you already covered fanservice! Ah but that is sexual content for titilation. This is sexual content for dramatic backstory! The red riding hood character was sexually assaulted, another character was manipulated into sex first as a teen and then more often to ‘get into the publishing industry’, and the same writer forces some aggressive kisses on the MC. None of it is gratuitous which is nice, but also, was it necessary? Not making a new point for this but read riding hood’s dog was also murdered so unnecessary animal death gets tossed on in there.
~Male Lead: You can have a male, non magical character as the main character surrounded by magical girls. This is not how to do it. If I can make a vicious and hopefully not understood reference, Aruto is basically Tate from the Mai Hime Manga. If you understood that, I am so sorry. If you didn’t, congrats! Don’t read the manga. Or do and send me asks about the iconic final page of the first volume (18+). Anyway, this dude is boring, everything revolves around him, BUT I’ll be generous and say at least this isn’t a harem series? It looks like it out of context but it’s just a triangle with a fun attached scientist and token lesbian.
~Premise: They didn’t make good use of it. The initial goals of ‘take other girls pages from their soul books because if we get enough we unlock a third alice book’ is good! And then we add the twist that that was never going to happen and either if we get all the pages we can grant a wish, or these fights are just happening for the amusement of and asshole. Either way, yeah okay I guess. But at no point do we ever achieve this forbidden wish granting book and the asshole just. Lives. Nothing happens to him. His peers don’t even dunk on him. The only real changes from the beginning and the end of the series are: the siblings are now chill with dating, and the scientist lady won’t turn into a child in magical spaces. Oh. Yeah.
~Why did we make this adult a child sometimes?: I think we know why. Stop trying to get those types of folks to watch your already meh series. I also could have sworn at points in the past looking up images for this series I’ve seen extra art for Yuuri the Thumbelina-y Alice User that seemed like it would fit alongside anything by POP. You know, the Moetan guy. If you don’t know, god I wish that were me.
Wrap Up: I have definitely forgotten some points and am well within my rights to ad to this whenever I remember more points but uh. Yeah.
Listen you want an alice themed battle royale with nice outfits? Rozen maiden is right there. Battle Royale magical girl series that’s good with fanservice? Mai Hime. Series with different outfits while being based on a classic story? Pretear.
Hope anyone who read all of this at least got what I was saying, even if they don’t agree with it. And thanks for reading because whoops.
#why do ya'll let me write so damn many words#thanks ya'll for letting me write so many words#kagihime eternal alice rondo#long post#text#not fashion#whoops 3k words
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the robot problem: a critical look at tobecky, 5 years late
hello wordgirl fandom i am back :) and i have a lot of thoughts that i never got around to expressing before i moved on from the show. so be aware that everything i'm saying is based on my experiences during the 2012-2016 era of the fandom & state of tumblr in general, and i am not familiar with more recent fan content.
it's been over five years since the show ended, and @ifbrd reminded me (along with some great analysis) that while tobecky was super popular since before the show technically started (thanks to the play date shorts), it's pretty unhealthy in a lot of ways that tend to be excused or flat out ignored in fanworks. i'd like to reflect on that a bit (a lot); specifically, how both the show and the fandom approached this enemies-to-lovers ship, and how easily this ship can slip into uncomfortable territory if we're careless about how we interpret the ship and create fan content of it.
i will admit, i'm mostly writing this as a response to past me and my old creations - though i moved on from the show as a whole years ago, i do like taking the time to reflect on old interests once in a while, and reevaluating my thoughts on them. and this ship is probably the biggest one that still lurks in the corners of my mind once in a while, so let's go.
cherish is the word: a short positive note before a much longer negative one
i wanted to start this essay off with some positivity, because i am going to be very negative after this. tobecky was, in some ways, cute. it's obvious from the very beginning that these two characters are on pretty equal ground, even if one of them isn't aware of it. and that's part of the fun - the irony of how unaware tobey is that his nemesis/crush/person that pretty much always wins against him is someone that he completely dismisses as incompetent. i want to point this out because honestly, in general i don't like enemies-to-lovers because a lot of them use a power imbalance within the dynamic, and i hate power imbalances, especially when it comes to actual life-or-death scenarios (at least, as much as cartoons can do that). in most episodes, becky is never actually forced to go along with his wishes. she's not held in a 'date' against her will, nor is she ever really outwitted by him. i bring this up because there is one huge, uncomfortable exception, which i will get to later.
another big plus to the ship is the fact that they just... get along? even when fighting? of course we get brief moments where they just hang out and talk about paintings or whatever, but i'm talking about how much they get each other, even if they don't realize it. like the word banter, for example. been there since day one. becky loves words, and while most other people in her life don't really care (ranging from 'eh, that's cool i guess' to her brother calling it annoying), tobey gives her a chance to show off and thus treats her as a worthy adversary as herself, not because of her more generic superpowers - something that we've seen in canon that she feels self-conscious about (see: her motivation in patch game). one of the less noticed examples, to me, is "it's your party and i'll cry if I want to", because it's just - okay. they both are excluded from a social event, and while it's obvious that tobey deals with it by destroying the city, it's also pretty obvious that becky also deals with her frustration by fighting in that battle. like, yes, realistically it's just objectively bad that he's destroying buildings. but they're also providing each other with a way to work through their frustrations, first by fighting and then by talking things out, and finally by hanging out together instead of dwelling on being excluded from the party.
so it makes a lot of sense to me that many tobecky fans gravitated towards writing far-in-the-future fic, usually by implying that some growth had taken place before starting to write the ship. (there are, as far as i'm aware, 2... maybe 3 exceptions, that take the time to attempt a real redemption for him, at least when i left the fandom.) because if you take away his worst moments, either by reasoning out that he was 10 years old and a mess, or that he was a cartoon character in a cartoon world where everyone's actions are over-the-top, or by just flat-out pretending that certain episodes never happened, there's some pretty solid ground to start a ship on.
go gadget go: we all do not see it, we simply close our eyes (review of canon)
when the show began, i was the same age as the characters. a lot of other people were, too - at least in my cohort of the fandom. i think it's pretty safe to say that many of us have fond memories of the show's earlier seasons, and held on to that interest as we got older, for whatever reasons. so like, not to be all 'as an OG fan...', but i remember seeing the shorts air for the first time in 2006. i have a diary entry in july of 2009 about how i, a 12yo with no concept of the idea of 'shipping', was disappointed in the new tobey episode because i wanted more tobecky interactions. (that was robo-camping, btw, lol.) and so i remember how exciting their rivalry felt, watching them as someone literally their exact same age, and then watching that again as a nostalgic 17yo, and then uh... growing up, to put it frankly, and realizing just how unhealthy most of their interactions were.
okay what i meant to say was, this section is an overview of the relationship's canon portrayal throughout the years.
first, we have early tobecky: this includes the shorts and the first few seasons. this is their classic relationship: he likes her and takes robots on rampages to get her attention, she majorly disapproves and has fun taking him down. we've all seen the show, you know what i'm talking about. his backhanded ways of trying to find out her identity often feature prominently in the episodes, which - sigh, i've mentioned this whole issue before, but it's kind of a grey area in the whole uncomfortable-factor thing, because while trying to find out her identity is VERY invasive, it's something that like... everyone in the show tries to do, even her canon crush (scoops). on the one hand, it's really not a great look, but on the other hand, this is a cartoon meant to parody a genre in which this trope is extremely common. so i just wanna say that i have Issues and Thoughts on this aspect of their relationship, but there are other things i find more important to discuss here.
second, we have late tobecky: this is seasons 7-8. this is... a very strange and huge shift from the previous dynamic, though it's not necessarily obvious. what i mean by that is that for some reason, the show writers made it so that half of tobey’s rampages have nothing to do with his crush on wordgirl, even though that used to be the sole reason for his villainy. seriously. we have the birthday episode, where he's upset because he feels left out; wg vs tobey vs the dentist, where he's mad that he has a cavity; and trustworthy tobey, where his robot goes on a rampage... after becky accidentally makes it malfunction. the two outliers are ‘guess who’s coming to thanksgiving dinner’ and ‘patch game’, but they still differ from previous seasons because 1) his destruction is isolated to a forest far away from the city, and 2) his motive is still to impress wordgirl, but his methods are relatively tame. also he completely gives up on the secret identity thing??? i may have missed some things but i think he straight up tells her 'yeah there's no way you're wordgirl, lol' and the subject is just dropped for the rest of the show.
i also want to include 'the robot problem' here, because it's one of two season 6 tobey episodes, and follows the 'doesn't destroy buildings to get her attention' pattern: in fact, he teams up with her to try and stop someone else from going on a rampage (even if his reasons are selfish, lol).
and finally. the other season 6 episode. we have go gadget go, the bane of my time spent in the fandom. because GGG is the single episode where tobey truly manages to take away her autonomy, and proceeds to abuse that power for an extended period of time, for his own amusement. it's bad. it's Very Bad. put in the context that it's a white boy doing this to an (ambiguously) brown girl, it's REALLY REALLY BAD. and the more i look back on it, tbh, the more weirded out i am that the show not only made it seem like she wasn't affected at all within the episode, it just... forgot about it (which is not unusual for shows and especially children’s shows, but WG does make some efforts to either retain continuity or create canon reasons for why things are forgotten about). it's the kind of thing that you can't excuse and honestly you can't redeem (like at this point, you gotta ask yourself why you're spending so much effort trying to redeem this guy when becky has several other possible ships that are nowhere near this unhealthy - violet, scoops, honestly even victoria if you want another hero/villain ship, my absolute fave rarepair rose, etc).
so if you want to still ship it you have to just pretend that it never happened. (i remember trying for weeks to write something exploring the aftermath of this episode, to try and make myself feel better about it, but the more i wrote the more i realized just how traumatic this event should've been, so i eventually just dropped it.) and i brought up my own timeline of experiences earlier to point out that this episode aired eight whole years after the show started. which means that when i saw it, even though i was a huge stickler for canon at the time, i'd built up my own idea of the show and characters strongly enough to go 'yeah, no, this episode sucks and i am going to pretend that it doesn't exist'. and i think a lot of other people did too, because i really saw like... no one mention it, ever, except for some rogue fanfics over on ff dot net that already liked dynamics like that.
because here's the thing, and i don't know if people nowadays are aware of it? but i'm 80% sure (cannot find a source, so the other 20% is that it was just a rumor) that the show was originally supposed to end after season 6. and even if it's a rumor, it makes a ton of sense, because we get 1) an 'ending' to tobecky, which is a bad one, 2) a permanent wordgirl identity reveal that significantly changes one of the major dynamics in the show, 3) an episode where TJ gets to work with wordgirl and get a nice potential ending for their sibling dynamic, 4) an episode where we see Two-Brains explore life without his henchmen... the list goes on, and idk how many of these are just major stretches. but the point is. if the show had ended there, that would've been a pretty solid ending for many things, including their relationship: aka, it would prove that it was only ever heading somewhere bad, and when tobey finally has his moment of triumph, he is truly evil about it. and this provides us fans who HATE go gadget go with an easy reason to dismiss it - we can say that it was an attempt to conclude things in a way that wouldn't have happened if the writers had known they'd get more time. but despite that... it is still a canon episode.
it is odd to me how dramatically the dynamic shifts after that, though, because we seriously go from 'worst case ever, tobecky is toxic, your ship is dead' to 'no actually they get along and hang out and get ice cream together and tobey isn't even pressuring her into it, she's happy to go along with it :)' like, immediately. i never knew much about the show writers, so i don't know if the writers changed in between these seasons, but i would absolutely not be surprised if they did.
the earlier episodes are definitely problematic as well (though they pale in comparison to GGG) but i think everyone who ships it is aware considering that tobey is, yknow, a villain. from memory, he destroys buildings to get her attention, lies to her about the level of danger that people are in to trick her into spending more time with him, blackmails her into reading his poetry, and he creates a robot based on her that’s supposed to be devoted to him (but of course, all of these things backfire). not great stuff of course, but like... he’s a villain, that’s the point of his character. and considering that he’s a child these are things that can be redeemed, if done thoughtfully.
anyway, to sum up this section, the show starts off with a pretty standard 'enemies with an unrequited crush' setup, takes a really dark turn for a single episode, and then for the rest of the show takes their dynamic in a direction that makes it much, much easier to ship. as long as you ignore a lot of previous content.
wordbot: where's becky's autonomy in all of this? (misogyny)
we've finally gotten to the fandom. i recognize that a lot of this is going to come across as hypocritical considering how active i used to be re: this ship, but like... i'm a very different person now. anyway. disclaimer i guess - i don't write this to accuse all tobecky shippers of being like this - i know a lot of us aren't/weren't! but boy do i have things to point out, so without further ado:
it is very hard to ship this without allowing some bit of misogyny to slip into it. very, very hard. the entire premise of the ship involves a girl falling in love with a boy that repeatedly pressures her to date him via threats to the safety of herself and people she cares about, which... it's 2020, i shouldn't have to explain why that's terrible & a terrible example to set for children (which is why i am glad they never made it canon, tbh). best-case fan content has tobey stop pressuring her and start working to redeem himself out of an actual change of heart, which leads to becky seeing him in a new light. worst-case fan content treats his incessant pressuring and sometimes outright threats as something romantic - and even worse, romantic to the point where he deserves her attention and love as a reward for not giving up or whatever. i did see this pretty frequently for a while, especially in the earlier 2010s (didn't read much, Not My Thing At All), but i don't feel like going into detail here because of how obviously problematic it is. one medium (but still bad) case is where the fan content makes him start his redemption, but treats her liking him back as a reward for not knocking buildings over anymore. another not great case is where she tries to fix him with her love, which is a very common and very dangerous romantic trope. both are just... so incredibly unfair to her.
in content where she tries to 'fix him'... yeah i feel like it's really obvious how misogynistic that is. girls and women should not feel responsible for the evil actions of men, plain and simple. idk what else to say here i just really hate that trope and hated it back then and it just sucks! so can we not do that anymore, thanks.
in content that treats her like a reward for good behavior, there really isn't much of an explanation for what she sees in him. if she just goes 'oh wow, you're good now, i am going to fall in love with you for it' the whole thing falls flat because it makes NO sense whatsoever. we get to hear so much about tobey and his feelings and why he likes her and how he feels about it, but where is that energy for becky? why does she choose to trust him, to spend time around him, what does she enjoy about his presence? where is her getting over scoops in the process of falling for tobey? where is her telling her friends about this, confiding in them, asking them for advice? where is her choice in the matter?
win a day with wordgirl: do you guys even like becky or do you just like the idea of her (misogyny... 2!)
it was pretty standard for all fandoms the early-mid 2010s, but that's still not a good excuse for why so many tobecky fanfictions centered specifically around tobey's feelings while refusing to give becky the same level of empathy and nuance. it is true that to ship them comfortably you have to redeem him to some degree, which means spending time figuring him out and trying to find ways to pull him to the light without feeling super OOC. but ships take two people??? and there was so much potential for fanfics to explore becky's complex feelings on the matter - because she is! complex! she's heroic and kind but she's petty and has a competitive streak, she easily befriends villains but also doesn't trust them and doesn't believe they can ever really change, she's the savior of an entire planet but has feelings of inadequacy as her civilian identity and struggles with feeling like she can be successful without superpowers, she's great at the straightforward meanings and uses of words and loves reading but struggles to write passages that aren't dry as hell, it can be easily headcannoned that she's neurodivergent (special interests, issues with fitting in with her peers, taking things very literally, etc)... seriously there is SO MUCH to explore about her character, and a lot of it comes into play when you add tobey into the mix (literally ALL of the things i mentioned are explored at some point using tobey as a parallel or foil), but i rarely saw fanfiction that explored her thoughts on things further than 'he's evil but... maybe good?' or 'he's evil but... i kind of like him anyway?'.
if you want her to fall for him while being a villain, explore it!! why does she go against her morals? does she lie to herself about it to feel better? does she feel like she has to 'fix him' as part of her superhero duties to the city, and if so, how does that affect her as she tries and fails to help him? does she fall for him when she believes that he's turning good, only to feel betrayed when he starts acting worse because he feels like he can get away with it? it's such a shame that fanworks spend so little time even considering these questions, and it is absolutely a product of how deeply misogyny is/was baked into how we approach media (especially back then).
tobey goes good: but wait, i thought this show was progressive (a conclusion, i guess)
ifbrd wrote a great meta recently about how the show is a bit misogynist, despite being progressive in several ways. honestly i don't have much to add, but i'd really recommend reading through this; it makes a lot of great observations about the ways that male and female characters are presented differently through the show
i have little to add, so i'd just like to conclude with a reflection on the ship from my current viewpoint. i do think part of the reason so many of us latched onto the ship, despite how obviously problematic it was, is that the show treats a lot of things that would be serious in real life as normal or even comedic - which is fine lol, i'm not going to pretend that it's not a show for little kids, so they have to keep the tone light.
but if we, as teens/adults, decide to engage with this content in a more realistic manner, we have to be prepared to confront how messed up so many of the things going on really are. and if you still want to ship it, there's nothing inherently wrong with that! there's a lot of interesting things to explore in this ship, no matter what stage of enemies-to-friends-to-lovers you write them at, and it can be really helpful to have a space where you can explore a dynamic such as this in fiction. (speaking from experience here tbh, writing some fic for them helped me deal with complicated feelings about some ex-longtime friends.)
so to write this ship at all means that there are canon issues that you need to deal with if you want to have them end up in a healthy relationship in any manner that makes sense (unless you create an AU where none of that is applicable, which, power to you then). and i’m not saying ‘write them with a healthy endgame or you’re Bad’, not at all lol. but at least please, please take a step back once in a while to examine the dynamic that you’re writing, and please be careful about whether you mean to be romanticizing whatever behaviors you end up portraying as good.
#wordgirl#becky botsford#tobey mccallister#tobecky#tobecky critical#has anyone ever used that tag before LMAO#anyway: i may come back and reword the ending because i am not totally happy with it#but wow this is so many words. so many. send help
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Another Duane interview transcript, coming at you! This one was from a smaller Carmen Sandiego chatroom. There were several interviewers, so that’s why the name of the question asker changes. Get the details below the break! Stay tuned, more interview transcripts coming soon.
Duane Capizzi:
HI EVERYONE! I'M IN!
Sorry I'm late, I got lost on the way haha. Then got lost trying to change my PFP
Thanks for gathering! Shall we get started? Let's do some Q&A!
(as long as they are not geography questions haha)
Fuel:
What characters or plot points were cut from the final product?
Duane Capizzi:
Ooo, starting with a right hook to the jaw!
Let me think about that for a moment: I'm hesitant to give too much away because I'm really hoping we can tell more stories in this world at some point
Which is to say, we tend not to waste anything: if we don't use it when we originally planned, we usually find a way to use something later - and there's usually a "karmic" reason that we waited.
I'll also preface by saying this: I know season 3 was more of a mini-drop and some felt season 4 was rushed. But I wish EVERY season were longer. Season 1: ideally, i wanted the Pilot to be its own event and 10 more episodes after that (but we had to tell the post-Pilot story in 7. At the end of the day, that had its benefits: we got to the Shadowsan turn earlier and I think that's when a lot of viewers realized the ride they were truly in for). Season 2: we initially figured we'd need 5 episodes to have Carmen doing the ACME dance with Chief, and wound up doing it in 3 - mostly because it quickly became clear that Rio needed to be a 2 parter, and the Zack and Ivy backstory a rough 2 parter. So we squeezed 3 episodes worth of plot into 209. It was exhilarating!
So, we had hoped to have more episodes for Season 4 of course. We had a ton of ideas and had to compress things a bit. But honestly in many ways it was for the better. I know we all wanted to live in this world longer, but I think sometimes the flip side is true - when you have big ongoing storylines, it can get frustrating when some things drag out too long. But, we got all the "story" we wanted to tell in Season 4 - we just lost some "incident" if that makes sense. We would have taken longer to get there.
So, all that preface to answer the question: we wanted to do more musical numbers! We had a Bollywood dance sequence in a return to India caper with Paperstar. We wanted to do a famous Elvis suit theft in Las Vegas during an Elvis impersonator convention (Shadowsan's an early elvis guy; Brunt likes the Vegas "jumpsuit" era). We also wanted to do a thread where Gunnar gets captured by ACME so that Julia could interrogate him and he could play mind games with her a la Hannibal Lector and Clarice. CAVEAT TO ALL THIS: these were some ideas that were bouncing around, that may not have seen the light of day if we couldn't get them to work. But they were on our wish list.
re: "other stories" - I could live with these characters for another 32 episodes easily and there have of course been discussions. But alas, that is up to the powers that be. Let's keep fingers crossed - and keep the Carmen love alive online so that someone up there takes note
There is more of course, but those are some things that spring to mind.
Fuel:
Were there any scenes cut for time that were your favorite?
Duane Capizzi:
Not much springs to mind: our directors were amazing at getting everything in the scripts to fit naturally (and in fact, I was the one who was usually suggesting trims to let other things breathe, etc). We were limited to 22 minutes of episode time, NOT counting front and end credits so a little longer than the average show. We have a pretty good idea when the SCRIPT is too long, so the cutting usually happens at script stage before it gets to the board crew so that they don't waste efforts over-boarding material that won't be used.
We had hoped to build out Chase and Carmen teaming up for the first time, meeting at Carmen's hotel lobby etc for more scenes of them together; but had to reduce that to get that all to fit in the VERY packed episode 406. But again, tighter was fine considering. That's one area that leaps to mind. (note that when I say packed, I don't mean that in a bad way: we spend a lot of time pouring over details in editing to make sure everything gets its due).
If I think of anything, I'll circle back at a later point. But the simple answer is that scenes were usually trimmed or compressed at script rather than board or animatic. So nothing comes to mind. I know it's hard to believe, but "shorter is usually better."
except for my answers to fan questions of course
Fuel:
We saw that in s4 episode 6 that Julia's mother(?) is wearing a necklace remarkably similar to the one Julia wears all the time. Is this the same necklace and if so, why was it given to Julia?
Duane Capizzi:
Just when I thought I was detail oriented! Wow! You guys blow me away
I can't take credit for that: it was either the board artist or director who added that. They do slip things in! As I've said before, EVERYONE on the crew really brought their A-game and were as deep thinking and as passionate as I was/am about the show.
It's a nice detail and I would say your interpretation works!
It took me three or four reviews before noticing that the team had slipped in baby Carmen near the play set in Mom's front yard at the end of 408. When I caught it, I was like: bravo!
Fuel:
When they first met, Zack and Ivy said to Carmen that they were the only family they had, do you know what happened to the rest of Zack and Ivy's family?
Duane Capizzi:
I don't. At least, I don't yet until such a time that I might have the opportunity to explore that. It was important to their relationship with Carmen that they be orphans, so they had that common bond (aside from being "thieves who steal from bad guys" - even if it was only gonna be one time for Zack and Ivy).
I know there are writers out there who like to do entire bio's for characters up front but i'm not one of them. It could be a trap in many ways. I like to have a general idea but be open to the demands of the ongoing storyline. You discover things along the way - it's like you're taking a journey with the characters by writing them, and the longer you spend, the better you get to know them (that was not a prepared statement by the way - I just made that up but I'll have to use it again :). So in Z/I's case it wasn't important to the story or Carmen's relationship, we felt. Conversely, we STARTED with Shadowsan's family backstory with 203, but more important to me was that we use it as a platform to explain why he stays with Carmen and crew. He really has no home at that point, so it was relevant to the present ongoing story. Which is what made that especially powerful to me.
Also, there's always a push-pull between telling character back stories while balancing them with ongoing episodic plots. You have to service both. If you just tell back story, then you're writing a biography
Arden:
What was the biggest challenge when designing these characters, especially the pre-existing characters from the series in the 90's?
Duane Capizzi:
This is probably more of a question for Chromosphere, re: challenges. But from my standpoint overseeing that process, the first thing I'll say is that we weren't necessarily trying to be "true" to those characters since we reinvented nearly every one from the ground up. (with the exception of Carmen of course - her trademark red hat/coat weren't going anywhere! But mostly the update with Carmen was in the styling of her "outerwear"
ALTHOUGH: I will admit that I was pushing for Carmen to have shorter hair as Carmen. I thought it would be a cool update. Chromosphere were really passionate about giving her long full hair and I have to see that they were right. The short tomboy cut worked so well for Black Sheep anyway. We had a different hair style for each of her ages.
So about the reinventions: Gunnar is in spirit a similar character to the original (old colleague in Vile and an early mentor if I remember), but his presentation completely different. We weren't trying to be "in canon" with the original. The beauty of CSD is that every incarnation has been its own entity so that freed us to reimagine the characters. THE CLEANERS, for instance: gimme some Cleaner love! There were a pair of janitors from the original game named RICK AND NICK ICK. They were literally janitors, it was too silly for our purposes. But, it's one small step to make them "Cleaners" (in the sinister hit men sense) - and lo, our reinvention.
So to summarize the answer to your question, they weren't really challenges to me so much as FUN to creatively reinvent the original characters (many of which were from the game, so not really "characters" per se with dialogue and inner lives). Whenever we could, we tried to use character names from the originals and update their looks and personalities. Where we couldn't find an equivalent for what we needed, we created characters from whole cloth. For instance, it seemed a miss to do a heist show without a tunnel guy and a high rise climber guy. Hence, LC & ET, everyone's favorite taco truck vendors!
(yes, i've seen some short hair carmen fan art on Twitter - someone did a great one recently!)
Arden:
Are there plans to give us more of the characters in, say, novel/graphic novel form?
Duane Capizzi:
I know HMH has done a bunch and no doubt have more in works. There's currently a novelization of the Pilot with some additional material if anyone's interested. I consulted on the second one, Clue for Clue, because it falls in the timeline while Chase was still Interpol/pre-Acme so was tricky.
And depending on whether another series in this canon makes it to air, I may just approach them about writing one or two myself to get some "further adventures" our there. Anything is possible!
Arden:
If you could go back and change anything about the series, what would it be?
Duane Capizzi:
File under anecdote, but there was what I felt was an important expression on Gray that kept me awake at nights, from his graduation ceremony at Vile. When we revisited those flashbacks in the Gray arc in Season 4, I had them change his expression there (to be more evil less innocent). We had it corrected in 404 so was able to get permission to have Netflix "fix" the Pilot by adding that shot in. I am tenacious!
We really poured over everything, it's the series that I have virtually zero complaints with the end product to be honest. But the simple answer is: I would have gone back to 106 and "un-greek'd" Gray's nametag. It's sort of a rule for international that we scramble signage (which is weird for a show that takes place in many countries/languages, I know I know). It's mostly for localization/translation reasons. And I'm sure there are some countries where Gray's name might be spoken differently. But as a proper name, I think we could have made an exception and seen "Gray" on his name tag. See? Details! But that's about the worst of it
there's also like one small line from Chief in 208 where she indicates she knows Carmen is a good guy (something to that effect) which I felt was too absolute and would have tweaked the line to temper it a bit. It's tiny, but looking back it sort of bugs me and I kick myself for not catching it. But this is absolutely the series I wanted and couldn't be happier.
Carmen:
How did Carmen know she could trust Julia? As far as we know, she has not seen or heard Julia defending her, and in the Fashionista Caper, Julia even held up her gas gun to her, saying she was under arrest. Do you have any opinions on this? Was it just intuition?
Duane Capizzi:
I'm gonna go with intuition
Carmen was raised on an island with some hardened criminal types. I think she's a pretty good judge of character. Poor Julia, trying to be tough with Carmen didn't suit her.
But, great observation! I'd have to mentally step through everything to see if Carmen had any earlier indication but i think you're right there.
Yes, sometimes you just gotta follow your heart
Carmen:
Are there any characters that didn't actually interact that you think would get along well?
Duane Capizzi:
Amazing question! First, I'd have to think more about who DIDN'T meet - you're asking the hard questions haha. But "get along well" is very specific! Hmmm, care to volley anyone?
I'll also add that so many smaller moments get lost in the "binge" of it all, but I am surprised how few fans have noted the first meeting between Player and Julia. THAT was a good one IMO! Very sweet!
Before getting back to your question, I also want to add that we were originally going to find a way for Carmen to lose her earring in Stockholm so that Julia could pick it up and be communicating with Player. BUT, I cut it at treatment stage because I knew we didn't have room in that episode to service it. Circling back to questions 1 & 2, another case where it turned out better saved for later IMO (saving Player meeting Julia, not to mention the earring business in 402 with Ivy).
Oh of course, Julia and any of the other Vile members. It would have been Gunnar for my vote, as mentioned earlier. We probably would not have had Julia meet anyone else and mixed it up more. I like that Cleo sort of became J's personal nemesis.
YES, SONIA & XIFENG (and LUPE PELIGRO, if I can add). The intent was (and is, if we ever get to revisit) to see them again in Carmen's travels. We started to expand Carmen's world but when we finally learned the finite number of episodes we had to finish the story, we drilled back down into the essentials. Would love to see them some day!
I'm hesitant to share too many things I have in mind in this forum for hope that they will see the light of day one day. You know, "spoilers"
Julia:
Do you have any opinions on Zari? Just in general? Some thoughts on her backstory would be nice if possible
Duane Capizzi:
I love Zari! I really don't have any back story on her at this point. She was originally just "Agent B" but when the need arose to give story points to another agent, we chose her because she looked so awesome! And Sharon Muthu gave voice to her so wonderfully.
I love when we finally teamed her with Chase. Hopefully the anticipation was that she would give him a hard time. I love that we defied expectation (organically, of course) and had her respect him by the end of that episode (for believing that he foiled Carmen!)
Julia:
Do you have any thoughts on small facts about any character, major or minor, that you think are fun/interesting to think about, but don't necessarily add to the plot itself?
Duane Capizzi:
Bellum, like myself, likes cats. But you knew that!
I try to put everything pertinent on screen, doing double duty to service any given episode's story but also the overarching story. That "journey" thing I mentioned earlier - we had no idea Chase falling on his own car would be a thing when I first came up with it. But as other characters refer to the incident, it took on a life of its own and made the characters feel more real.
Sorta kinda related to this question and some earlier ones, I will say that I DO think there's more to learn about Shadowsan's past vis a vis Lady Dokuso: it's clear to me that they have a history together, and it's something I hope to explore someday soon (maybe in a book if not another series
Julia:
Are the Carmen Sandiego books a part of canon?
Duane Capizzi:
I only consulted on the first two or three (too busy with series!) and have not read them, so hard for me to answer in a definite way. They are definitely in the universe we've created, but not in the timeline that I know of (which would have been too hard to pull off with our script development running concurrently). But do know that the book team at HMH pays close attention to the series and world so they should be perfectly compatible. Look no further to their clever social media on the series for example.
Kenz:
We saw in season 4 that Julia and Carmen helped each other mid to long term; would there ever be a possibility that Julia would permanently or semi-permanently join team Red?
Duane Capizzi:
Of course there's a possibility. But in a sense, with ACME now finally on Carmen's side, in a sense if Carmen were back in the game Julia, Chase, Zack and Ivy would ALL be an extension of Carmen's crew. But, would J remain with ACME or literally come to Carmen's team at her HQ? As they said in an old radio show: "Only The Duane Capizzi knows ..."
Kenz:
Where do you see Carmen in her retirement (if she retires)? Do you think she would still travel the world or settle down somewhere? Similarly, do you have any thoughts on what some other characters could be doing years down the line?
Duane Capizzi:
That is a big question, and one difficult to answer without some potential future spoilers (and yes, I really want to tell more Carmen stories if you can't tell But I'll answer by giving you one "read" on our open-ended ending as seen in 408 (read no further if you haven't seen it - yeah, right haha). The ending suggests to me that Carmen settled down for a spell to forge that relationship with her mother, to make up for lost time. But, if that is indeed Carmen that we see on the rooftop, I think the ending suggests that Carmen doesn't stay still for very long. If Vile is back, there is work to be done! Carmen has a life mission - she's one determined lady.
But of course, it's deliberately ambiguous: "anyone with your heart, wisdom and courage can be Carmen Sandiego." Is it Carmen? Sonia? Someone we haven't met? I think both endings resonate: Caroline and I always said "Carmen is bigger than a person, Carmen is a movement" would be a great message to end the series on. And I think our ending resolves this chapter of Carmen's journey as a person, but also elevates her to mythic status. Which is why I love it!
And, that seems to me a pretty perfect question and answer to end our chat on. Thanks everyone! Again, I cannot tell you how moved I am to see that we have such a passionate, intelligent and talented fan base. THANK YOU.
Take care guys, thanks again for having me! 'night!
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Piper/Kyle, except it's an AU where Kyle's parents were never killed by demons, so he lived a perfectly normal, happy childhood and grew up to follow their footsteps into teaching
and Kyle's a normal, maybe even a little boring archaeology professor who secretly dreams of having his very own Indiana Jones moment - up until the day he opens some dusty old chest and unleashes a demon that tries to kill him, and he barely gets away only to run into this petite brunette woman who proceeds to blow the demon the fuck up, and Kyle's never believed in love at first sight before, but he's pretty sure he can make an exception for Piper
wait omg mentally stable kyle au okay wait i gotta wrap my head around this kyle but not absofuckinlutely insane whatta picture omg. okay. i feel like he’s still gotta have this belief in the supernatural i feel like that’s a large part of the charm in literally any kyle dynamic with the sisters is Witch Who Gets It and Man Who’s Only Got Raw Data. there’s an appeal to that. seeing things from different angles all that. so we can say kyle ever good at puzzles has taken his parents notes and everything he knows and various texts and kinda pieced together okay magic does exist. but in this au he’s a professor and not an fbi agent so he can’t just walk around saying Magic Is Real because um he needs this job. also he’s never seen it. but like. the data does not like. like. like it’s real man like are you kidding me. and we’ll say he has one normal friend because he’s normal in this au and he’s like okay here me out tho magic is real and his friend is like ......okay. because like. it could be, i guess? i’m not gonna fight you on this. and kyle also definitely read a lot as a kid he reads a lot now and he’s always kinda like. like you know wondered what it might be like to be a man of action not someone stuck behind a desk all day seeing the world through books. so when he starts to see markers of the gathering storm,,, well. these are the times that make a man. he can either be a pussy about it and keep living his life through paper and ink, or he can follow his intuition. blah blah blah this leads him to get kidnapped by pirates which like. excuse me??? and kyle’s kinda kicking himself because he Wanted to be like a character in an adventure book and well like bada bing bada boom you get what you ask for. which. all due respect on his part. is smart enough to outwit them and escape. he might have dropped his wallet there tho. but when he goes back the same route wandering through the thick fog, all he finds is a solid wall of rock. so i guess he’s fucked in that regard. whoops. but!! magic is real. so that’s a dub. digs a little bit more into the blackjack cutting lore, maybe finds the x marks the spot on where their main hideout was, road trip to. seattle? i guess? port city that isn’t san francisco but is more reasonable to drive to that like. nola or boston. and lo and behold he finds it and find their documentation of the gathering storm accidentally trips a booby trap and jesus fucking christ pirate skeletons with sword which - respectfully - kyle is holding his own for the most part, not getting immediately worried, but there’s no way that would have lasted had the three skeletons not been blown to pieces. and he looks over and sees three brunettes and the one in the center is like who the hell are you? to which kyle really feels like He should be the one asking that question but after stammering out some kind of response about how he’s a professor and he was just looking for some soil samples something generic archaeological because hey. he doesn’t trust these women. he doesn’t know what side they’re on. and he’s not just gonna sacrifice the information he has on the gathering storm. and it’s obvious they don’t believe him, but they don’t kill him either. instead, the one in the center just says be more careful where you leave your stuff and tosses his wallet back to him.
and later at the manor paige is like we just let him go?? and phoebe’s like yeah how to we know he’s not a demon? he wouldn’t be the first to pose as a mortal in the mortal world (because phoebe went to the university to return kyle’s wallet because like it has is ID in it employee id all that under the guise of like. giving a lecture to some of the student’s there as the bay’s leading advice columnist oh hey is there a kyle brody here yeah haha he’s a friend of a friend anyone seen him no he’s on vacation right now? left real abruptly? and then immediately went into his office and touched every surface trying to get a premonition (au in which phoebe didn’t get her powers stripped) and concluded that he’s just Some Guy. like he like has friends and a nine to five and an apartment. so a guy). but piper’s like we don’t know. but we also don’t know what he’s up to or what his connection to the pirates was, which is why i cast a tracking spell on the wallet. and both phoebe and paige approve and in this au again phoebe didn’t get her powers stripped so in styx feet under it’s her and paige on mission and as paige is the one who cast the protection spell and as paige is also very stubborn and also refuses to let innocents die she is the one who gets to become death. she also has a very compelling relationship with death because like. she watched her parents die. and she’s prue’s replacement. the replacement for the dead girl. also fun paige/prue parallel! meanwhile right Should state in any piper/kyle au we just extend pleo’s divorce era by having him remain an elder and keeping that early s6 vibe. so piper’s definitely like a bit more neurotic than normal because you know things haven’t gone great for her and those pirates were warning about the gathering storm and honestly that better not be something that’s gonna hurt her boys because she really could not bear to lose another family member so she’s doing some digging which begins to imply that kyle knows more that he let on so where is he now? the university? great.
and kyle’s you know minding his own business in his office when the same woman practically kicks down his door and is like alright i’m gonna ask again who the hell are you and this time you better answer me honestly. to which: wow. like wow. she’s. she’s a force to be reckoned with and also kinda immediately gains points in kyle’s book for like a) kinda confronting him about knowing more because he’s pretty good at covering his tracks all that so if he’s been Found Out it’s by someone good and b) she also disintegrated evil pirate skeletons so like. 👍. But. he does not trust her for shit. no. absolutely not. he has no reason to. but piper’s not yielding blasts a hole in the wall near his head like quickly now or next time i won’t miss but kyle’s so fuckin stubborn he’s like 🤐 and piper’s. i mean, she can’t kill an innocent. she doesn’t know if that’s who he is, but she can’t run that risk. and kyle’s not saying shit, so she leaves.
then it’s the guardian angel episode where the charmed ones are there on instruction (though they don’t know what they’re looking for. maybe they were just scrying for information) and kyle’s there on a hunch and piper and kyle see each other and it’s um. mac charlie see each other from across the room reaction image. both like. what the fuck are you doing here? and in this one paige is still the one to get her guardian angel stolen and piper’s immediately on high alert because you know big sister/mom mode activated. but they don’t know what they’re looking for and kyle’s like it’s her guardian angel. and piper once again snaps to him firey look in her eyes but kyle’s really just trying to place nice here so he’s like guardian angels. they’ve been going missing being stolen whatever. he’s got the research on it. and piper doesn’t want to trust him but paige is really in grave danger. so, as the sister with the offensive power, she’s going with kyle, and phoebe has to make sure paige doesn’t like. pull a grams. (which for the record i do not accept prewitched as canon but like the elders definitely killed grams <3)
so blah blah blah piper’s now and kyle’s place which is ten times worse than his office because this is where he does his real work and he’s got all the guardian angel shit up and out and is explaining it to piper and it’s making sense but what catches her eye is something on the gathering storm that kyle left out now they’re talking about that they’re starting to realize they’re on the same side. blah blah blah save paige. next episodes what werewolf episode. skip. then!! idk paige still runs magic school right so she’s in the library and she calls piper and she’s like hey remember when you told me to keep an eye out on the gathering storm? and piper’s like yes yeah what is it? and she’s like well we’re inventorying the library and we have books on them and piper’s like that’s good news ! ? and paige is like yeah but we’re missing one. book five. in this something something series. and piper knows Exactly where that book is because she fucking saw it on kyle’s kitchen counter. so now she’s barging into kyle’s place which is getting to be a common occurrence at this point and kyle kinda wants to complain but this is by far the most interesting his life’s been ever and honestly? he’d be kinda bummed if piper stopped kicking down his door. wait actually scratch that you want my book no fuck you changed my mind. to which piper’s like look we’re looking for the same goal here right so give me the book because i have the rest of the series and this could be the missing puzzle piece and kyle’s like okay fine i’ve read the book cover to cover give me the rest of the series and i’ll get you your answers and piper’s like okay let’s get things straight here i’m the witch you’re some two bit archeology professor so when it comes to the handling of sacred magical tomes i’ll be taking the reigns here and kyle’s like fine then you won’t be taking the book. and piper’s like wanna bet and the next think kyle knows he’s hearing the door slam his book’s gone and he’s hearing tires peel out onto the street and he has no idea how she did it.
back at the manor piper’s got her reading glasses on an volume one open and god this fucking sucks. so she makes phoebe take a stab at it and she hates reading it too. paige also starts it and is like respectfully no. piper’s the only one who did the reading in high school. this is her turf. but my god she cannot make it through all eight of these fucking books. So. she calls kyle. he has to come to the manor because there’s no way she’s giving him the books and there’s no way she’s letting him in magic school so. hi. welcome to the house. but!! by a contrived plot device!!!! a gnome has been shot in magic school this book was the only thing at the scene and paige wants to investigate further but she can’t just leave it out there so she brings it back to the manor she’s gonna cast some spell to find out if there are already spells on the book how to reverse it she just needs to find the spell first and like. there’s no way in hell paige ever wears an outfit with big enough pockets to keep the book on her. so she leaves it on the table. to which kyle asks how this is relevant to the collection. to which piper says don’t open that!! whoops. see, this is why i said we don’t let two bit archeology professors near magical books! piper/kyle charmed noir..............
#love me a good piper/kyle ask 🤙🤙🤙#charmed#piper halliwell#kyle brody#piper x kyle#margaretsminiessays#haven't used that tag in forever whoops#should probs go back n backtag
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So in your Naruto FF cover where Noct/Yoru is believed to be a god, what are the reactions of the families of the Chocobros? Cause their Clan member just got poached but they've also been really strange ever since their near death experience that woke up their memories (or did they always remember)? Especially the Hyuuga because they basically had Hikaru/Ignis enslaved and branded. Or even some povs from the Chocobros. (Poor Prompto, being an Aburame lol)
Ooooo tricky. Kinda depends on the family?
Lemme see- Ignis’s family are Most Displeased. They are super possessive of their eyeballs and treat their branch members as slaves anyway so they see it more like theft than a powerful man claiming a friend. Of course, there’s not much they can DO about it considering it’s Yoru and he burns Ignis’s seal off in .05 seconds and also threatens to burn the rest of the main branch to the ground if they touch Ignis again (not in so many words, but his magic does flatten a few of the members with its intensity when they got too close to Ignis.
Tbh that’s probably a blood grudge the Hyuga hold until Naruto’s time even though they stay in Konoha and Ignis is known among the hyuga not only as the blind member but the Stolen Hyuga. A warning to all hyuga of what will happen if they are not careful with their eyes and other such nonsense that only works because younger Hyuga don’t interact with Yoru enough to know that he’s a really chill dude and Ignis is happy where he is.
The Inuzuka are not too thrilled at first, but more laidback about it? Gladio still visits and they can tell that he’s Super Happy about being reunited with Yoru, and Yoru is polite and respectful to them and their dogs like him and you can never go wrong with the opinion of dogs in an Inuzuka’s eyes.
The Aburame ... are honestly the most chill about this? They aren’t too thrilled at first, but Yoru already has a Hyuga and an Inuzuka by then, so there is a precedent, and after a bit of watching it’s clear that these four are basically a Hive unto themselves and Prompto is happy to be there, is healthy and well cared for so they just kinda- shrug and move on. Maybe use the fact that one of their own is “Favored by Yoru” to their advantage during tricky Council meetings generations later.
The oddness and memories thing were long commented on, but ... mostly unnoticed in Hikaru’s case? Among the Branch Clan it was noted, but no one said anything or really thought about it because honestly I doubt the Hyuga have never had an Incident where Branch Members get a bit ... weird post Sealing and post a traumatic experience. That’s a chakra doohickey tattooed to your SKULL, side-effects are not impossible. The Inuzuka noticed it too, but Gladio was still ... himself, just a big more jaded and mature so they let it slide.
The Aburame maybe spent a good few years trying to figure out what the freak happened with Prompto though. Because they’ve never had a bug-a-phobic member before and it’s weird. They love him tho. He’s their disaster child.
Tbh in the Warring States Era nobody was really focused on mental health. If you were loyal to the Clan and could fight that was all that really mattered, weirdo personality changes aside.
Uhhh POVs but only short snips, and pls forgive any inconsistencies with previously establish AU lore my brain is tired and I may not keep all the details 100% straight. Just roll with it.:
Ignis:
After a lifetime of being blind, being able to SEE everything, all around, at any given time is unnerving. This entire era is unnerving and Hikaru has bitten his tongue more than once to keep from railing against it. Against sending CHILDREN, some not much older than toddlers out into the field, against the brand on his head and the heads of so many others that burns on the whim of a Main Branch member.
He keeps his head down, but inside ... he hates. More than a little bit. He is a fractured piece of glass and he knows too much pressure with make him snap, so he does his utmost to avoid those situations (because if he snaps children will get hurt even more than now and nothing will change in the Clan).
Then one day they go to meet Hashirama and Madara, to speak of peace, and of course Hikaru has heard of Yoru, the mysterious forest spirit that supposedly watches over the new village and ensures no fighting happens, but he does not actually think this Yoru will be all that impressive.
He never expects it to be NOCTIS. Noctis, who looks at him with hope and wonder in his eyes, who looks so very unchanged despite lifetimes, who rises and calls him brother and Ignis and friend and CLAIMS him in a way the Clan Head cannot dispute. No one can dispute against Noctis, because he is still a Lucis Caelum and a king and to him, their chakra is pebbles in an ocean.
And for the first time in a long time, Ignis is happy. Ignis has hope.
...
Gladio
Gladiolus loves his new family, and he knows they love him back. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t miss his old life like a wound in his side. Iris’s presence makes it a bit better but also not, because war is cruel and no one cares that she is still so young (older than the other Clans children sent to the field, because Inuzuka treasure their puppies, but still far too YOUNG to the mind of a Shield and Crownsguard). He loves his canine partner and the Pack, he loves that they don’t really question his memories, how his personality has matured and changed since the incident that woke him up.
Even so...
Even so, the absence of his brothers is a bleeding wound in his heart, and when the Clan Head looks at him, Gladio knows the man can see that in his heart of hearts, Gladio is not part of their Pack. He is family, but he has another Pack, another Alpha he swore to a lifetime ago, and that loyalty still howls in his soul far stronger than even the ties of blood and Pack and love that binds him to the Inuzuka.
So perhaps that is why the Clan Head does not look as outraged or surprised as he could have been when Yoru finds him, when NOCTIS looks back at Gladio from an eerily familiar yet not face. That is why, while the Hyuga sputter in shock when Gladio hugs Ignis tight and spins him in a circle for joy, the Inuzuka just watch with comprehension dawning in their eyes. Gladio looks to his Clan Head and says he’s going with Yoru and there is not request for permission. Just a courtesy of announcement. Because THIS- this is his Pack, his Alpha, his Beta, his brothers and littermates. He will follow them above all.
And the Clan Head lets him go.
...
Prompto:
Prompto wants to know who he ticked off in his past life that had a say in the next, because he HAD to have ticked off someone. Why else would he have been reborn into a clan of LIVING HIVE PEOPLE???????
He thinks he distresses them- no, he knows he does, when he flinches from the clan techniques and hives, from the little insects and their pheromones that the Clan uses as essentially an insectoid, chakra-based texting system amongst themselves. He knows he stresses out his hive for a long time, flinching from the feel of them inside him, from the skitter of their legs and wings and the whisper of their tiny, simple little thoughts in his own when they talk to him.
It .... it’s bad for a while. A WHILE. Bad enough the Clan won’t let him fight (which is fine with him) but also bad enough he loses weight and can’t sleep from the hive buzzing buzzing buzzing under his skin from his distress toward them.
It’s his great great grandma that saves him, quite literally, because an Aburame that rejects the hive is an Aburame who dies, not by any malicious intent on the Clans’ part but just- biologically. Just like starving to death will kill him, rejecting his Hive will kill him too and he KNOWS that but he can’t just- turn off his fear.
Then one day Elder Maya, the oldest living Aburame, sends for him. He comes to her private house with shivering skin and jumping senses and the hyper-awareness of the things inside him buzzing buzzing buzzing trying to remove the source of his distress and making it worse because they WERE his distress-.
Elder Maya takes his shaking hands and leads him to her garden.
It’s- it’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful he could cry for his long lost camera of another life. There are colors everywhere, blues and greens, reds, pinks, whites, and mixed splashes of yellow and purple- flowers that stand tall, flowers that droop, flowers dangling from the vines growing up tree trunks.
And everywhere there were flowers, there were butterflies. Butterflies and ladybugs, the two insects he wasn’t completely creeped out by because they were so pretty and photogenic, and for a moment Prompto is so awed his shaking stops, the Hive inside him goes quiet. A butterfly flaps lazily over to him, a glorious thing with vivid blue wings the color of magic and black dots and swirls that remind him of fire. It settles on his hand and he doesn’t flinch from it like he does the kikachu of the clan, just stays quiet and watches it with a bit of awe.
“You are not scared of these ones,” Elder Maya hums.
“U-um ... no,” he whispers as he watches it, “they’re ... pretty. Cute. They don’t ... they don’t look like they’ll hurt me.” And that’s not really his issue with the Kikaichu, but he can’t explain a phobia to ninja, not well anyway.
“Good,” says his great great grandmother, but not with her lips, with the soft splash of impression-scent-sensation from the butterfly on his hand and he gapes as he realizes THIS is her hive. These ladybugs and butterflies are Elder Maya’s hive. He stares at her and she adjusts the dark glasses she wears, “I will give you some of mine. Why? So you can cultivate a new Hive that you will not be afraid of.”
And she does. And it’s CREEPY, but also ... kinda not? It’s ... it still freaks him out to have bugs under his skin, but these ones ... he knows these ones. He chose them, he hatched them, he raised them. They are beautiful and deadly and soft looking and can strip flesh from a target in seconds and he wishes he had a camera because it would be so cool to have butterflies that can pose on command.
It’s a rocky road, but his shaking stops, and his weight goes back to normal, and his sleep schedule returns, and all the Clan breathes a sigh of relief when they see Prompto ambling around, not flinching from the glittery blue butterflies flitting on his shoulders.
And it’s not like his old life, his brothers he misses so badly, but its kinda nice to never be alone. Wherever he goes, his Hive goes, and his new Queens are kinda ... bossy almost and its endearing in a creepy kinda way. The only thing that would make life better, make it perfect (other than to not need a Hive in the first place) would be to have his brothers again.
And then they go to the new village of Konoha, and he meets the famed and terrifying Yoru, who isn’t terrifying at all, but is instead old and tired and blue eyed, and a fish lover and when he smiles, crooked and shy at Prompto all his Hive SINGS under his skin because he KNOWS.
And suddenly the world is perfect again.
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animatic ideas :0 (ramble away, i would love to hear them!!)
mk thank you for enabling me, i will now be yelling
anyway
this is gonna be so obnoxiously long i am so sorry
can you add read more's on asks? eeeekkkk because this got so damn long lmao
mild dsmp spoilers obviously
this is the playlist, by the way
-im sorry boris (wilbur soot)
i think it would work really well with mmm slightly post lmanburg niki. andby slightly i mean. well when she leaves (that is the whole thing of the song gdfjkhgsdf) also side note at like 1 minute 11 on that song theres a discord notification really subtly in the background and it makes me paranoid every time i hear it. anyway god its such a nice song. even for just like. the end of lmanburg. not necesarily paired with a character, just the sense of leaving a place that was so highly populated before it got blown up twice and was like. the main part of the smp. yeah. anyway also the lines "they'll knock down the pubs before helping you...they'll let you jump under trains before helping you" yeah those four lines have big niki vibes but also i think the song could work well with exile tommy or actually even with the finale when tubbo is about to sacrifice himself? mmmmm yeah
-this is home (cavetown)
mmmm got exile tommy vibes innit. a lot of these have exile tommy vibes tbf i just like sad songs and also exile tommy. plus the song has a lot of like. the message is sort of like. changing yourself to appeal to others? like with "ill cut my hair to make you stare" but also the repeated thing of "ill figure out a way to get us out of here" which is clearly the main character of the song trying to help everyone when they are clearly not in a good way themself. yeah thats got big tommy vibes in general tbh but more like. pre finale tommy. i think he got a bit more independant after that.
-soldier poet king (the oh hellos)
ok this is self explanatory and has been done to death already but d a m n its kinda funky. anyway i had thoughts and actually started this but then lost motivation and deleted it all lmaooo. the only proof of its existance is a shitty storyboard in my draw which will hopefully never see the light of day again (unless anyone wants to see it :eyes:) anyway i had the thought of like. sbi? so soldier techno poet wilbur and king tommy. but tbf tommy and techno are kinda interchangeable with that, cos while techno is obviously the better fighter, tommy is used a lot, especially in lmanberg era and also i think he probably will be now that wilburs back
-pyjama pants (cavetown)
ok so i honestly dont remember why this is on the playlist but tbf this could go well with a bunch of characters. thinking like. phil and wilbur? or wil and tommy, or tubbo and ranboo are two that like. i know for a fact that i did not put the song on the playlist specifically for them but god thinking about it now it works so well with them
-boys will be bugs (cavetown)
OH BOY THERES A LOT OF CAVETOWN ON HERE HUH (i feel like that probably says something about me but shhhhhh we dont need to talk about that) ANYWAY
I think this could probably work really well with tommy? because of the whole like. trying really hard to come across as not caring about others, but really being like. very vunerable. but at the same time it could go really well with wilbur for the same reasons. also the song fucks ok cant deny it. to be fair i think it works better with tommy, because he's younger and also he really likes bugs (unless i am mistaken) which is just a cool coincidence but still)
-brother (kodaline)
FUCKKKKKKKKKKK THIS WORKS SO WELL WITH SO MANY CHARACTERS AND IS ALSO ***SO ANGSTY*** WHAT
anyway
i added it because of tommy and tubbo because holy shit, but also it could work very very well with wilbur and tommy, techno and wilbur, probably techno and tommy, and oh my god i just thought of this but this would work so well with phil and techno!!!! but yeah i originally thought tommy and tubbo because i thought it was a funny coincidence with exile tommy waking up underwater, and theres a line that says "if you were drowned at sea, id give you my lungs so you could breathe" and like. just thinking about the compasses especially. me gusta.
-feel better (penelope scott)
fundy. that is all.
no ok this works well with fundy but also probably karl sapnap and quackity, and also very much wilbur, like it works well with both. just mainly fundy idk why its got big fundy vibes tho. very poggers.
-as the world caves in (matt maltese)
ok but like this goes very very well with the explosions of lamberg. either of them. i think probably the first one is better, but i think it goes well with both. probably the first one, because it was way more emotional i think? cos it was the first time that their homes had been destroyed and everything, but also because it was so personal, because wilbur was the one who did it. i think that also it would work well if it was set during the explosion but also focussed on different facets? so like. one bit about wilburs perspective, one bit about tommys, one about phils, one about fundys maybe? idk just a bunch of lmaburg citizens' povs for this. its good. as the world caves in is a song that can be so gender tbh.
-do you hear the people sing? (les mis)
obvious obvious obvious...... but like..... also tbh it goes well with a bunch of things. like, mmmmm wilbur in pogtopia. the butcher army. lmaburg independance war (obviously ghdskj) but yeah. also this song just goes so hard like b r u h
-wolf in sheeps clothing (set it off, william beckett)
SO MANY OF THESE ARE LIKE. PRETTY OBVIOUS IF YOUVE HEARD THE SONG
but yeah. it would go so well with like. well any betrayal basically. so eret, from tommys pov maybe, or about wilbur from nikis pov, or wilbur from anyone pov tbf, or quackity from charlie/purpled/foolish/sams pov, or sam from tommys pov, really it works well with so many people which says a lot about the characters tbh but shhhhhhhhhhhh
-need you here (idkhow)
OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD
mk mk mk mk FUNDY AND WILBUR THO
like b r u h that works so well with them
also i started this one as well but didnt like it, theres a story board in my draw as well for it because like. oh my god its such a good idea i just am shit at animating and don't have a decent enough program :')
also also
the line "daddy has to go, and that makes me sad, but daddy will always come back, he promised" fuckkkkkk that works so well with like. say for example, idk, when they're celebrating schlatts death and wilbur leaves to press the button? the sheer fucking angst of that is enough to kill any one person istg that is in fact the entire reason why i started the animatic in the first place. just that line. also all the lines sung by the child voice. fuckin angsty as hell. also ust generally a banging song, as is every idkhow song
-green (cavetown)
another cavetown song huh. ok sure.
mk so wilbur and sally and fundy. like. for a start, the imagry of a fish at the start? boom sally.
anyway the lines "you looked so good in green, i hope you're well, and you look so good with him, (schlatt ig?) and I'm proud of you still (wilburrrr and fundyyyy) i miss your perfect teeth, i was too blunt, i hope you feel happy, that's all I want"
FUCKKKK
the whole song is about missing someone you used to love and only hoping the best for them!!!! and wishing that they are happy and safe!!!!!!!!!!! and hoping they still think about you!!!!! but even if they dont its fine because all you want is for them to be happy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
-achilles come down (gang of youths)
OK I THOUGHT IT COULDNT GET ANGSTIER
so like. tw suicide but thats what the entire song is about and bing bang boom i just think it works so so so so so so so well with not only exile tommy (who obviously did try to kill himself) but also wilbur in a slightly more metaphorical way? so like. his self destructive habits leading him to a point where he had no choice other than to kill himself and to take his country down with him. and its all about other characters trying to help them and persuade them not to but also near the end there is a second voice trying to persuade them to go along with it, which im thinking like. if its wilbur, either dream or maybe just himself. his own brain persuading him to continue down the path that would inevitably lead to his and his countries destruction. also it works well with schlatt for the same reasons, except he doesnt want to die. maybe (since the song is so goddamn long) like. one verse for tommy one for wilbur and one for schlatt? dead gang poggg but also like. the verses cover fairly different things which work with one character but not so much the others, for example the first verse would be tommy because its mainly about persuading the person to not kill themself (which tommy did himself but shhh) the second for schlatt because its literally about drinking and smoking away your problems, and the third for wilbur since its more of a fight between the "good" and the "bad" sides, which is obviously what wilbur was experiencing. also obviously i have a soft spot for this song because its string instruments and french, basically my favourite combination ever (also i like his voice idfk lmao)
ANYWAY THATS ALL THE SONGS ON THERE SO FAR
i literally thought of another song while i was in the shower today but i dont remember which it was but a n y w a y the playlist will most definitely be getting longer, especially since there are so many more songs that are good for this but i just havent added them yet lmao. anyway ive been writing this for like an hour gsdfjhgdhfsg but still oh my god this was fun to write
#long post#tw suicide#only a mention at the end but still gotta be safe :)#dsmp#dreamsmp#dsmp animatics#robin talks#ask#thank you so much for the ask tho cos like. i dont wanna be annoying or anything? but also like. i really wanted to talk about this gsdfkjg#god i hope the read more worked or this is gonna be annoying to everyone ever#its fine probably maybe not really
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Dating Disney: The Little Mermaid
So when I started, Dating Disney, it was with the intention to pin down the fashion validity of Disney’s leading men, but when I started looking at Eric, I found that he’s wearing very hard to pin down clothes. A simple shirt, some pants, boots, and possibly a cummerbund? Or a sash? It’s really unclear. So rather than that, I decided to use clues in the movie to pin down a general historical time frame and location for Disney Movies, and I’m not really going in any order. I stand by Sleeping Beauty being set in mid to late 14th century Italy, but from here on out, I’ll be focused more on history and the movie, using context clues to set a time frame.
Story Origins
Den Lille Havfrue or The Little Mermaid, was written in 1836 and published in 1837 by Hans Christian Andersen, a Danish writer. It was written initially as a discreet love letter to Edvard Collin who had won his fancy. Edvard had gotten himself engaged to then 13-year-old Henriette Tybjerg 3 years earlier in 1833. The story is a highly symbolic depiction of Andersen’s feelings, as Edvard represents the handsome prince, Henriette is the kind foreign princess taking the love of his life, and Andersen is the suffering hero who endures great heartache to be near the one he loves, and is effectively voiceless, unable to speak his true feelings due to the time when he was living in. Henriette was actually so worried that he’d make a scene and declare his love for Edvard at their wedding that they “accidentally” gave him the wrong day, and he missed the ceremony. Thus, Andersen wrote the little mermaid disguised as a wedding gift, which Edvard had little interest in and which Andersen later decided to publish. I won’t do this for all of the stories, mind you, but this one had a very interesting history behind it.
Clothing
The first costume doesn’t appear in the actual movie, but is used occasionally as part of the Disney Prince line-up attire that Eric sports. In this image, he’s sporting a waistcoat, cravat, and tailcoats, all indicative of 19th century men’s fashion. In particular, this look rose to popularity in the 1840s and stayed popular through to the 1850s. Eric’s wedding suit and the engagement suit are both military jackets that include epaulets on the wedding suit. These are in fact naval admiral jackets, as seen in the below picture.
All of these fashion elements emerged during and following the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815). Most of the men except Eric have buckles on their shoes. Although we might associate the image more with the 18th century and the American revolution or pilgrims, buckled shoes were still a common sight in the 19th century that it’s not out of place or unreasonable for them to worn in this film.
The widely hated pink dress (and quite unfairly I think) that Ariel wears to dinner seems to fit with 1850s fashion although the large sleeves were apparently designed to resemble 1980′s prom dresses. The blue dress Ariel wears for the date is entirely era inappropriate (especially since her ankles are visible during the Victorian Era), and neither hers nor Vanessa’s corset dresses are fitting for their time period. It should be noted that the visible different skirts was not a trend of the 1800s, and this was the closest example I could find, and even then appears to be an outlier in what’s been recorded of 1850′s fashions. Now, it’s possible that this dress could be old and was just lying around, so even Ariel’s dress is not necessarily proof of a finalized decade, since she could simply be wearing an out of fashion gown.
Technology
The Tobacco pipe that Scuttle calls a Snarfblat, seems to resemble a Calabash type tobacco pipe, first invented in 1898, at least according to one source I found. The Calabash is widely recognized for its saxophone shape, and is closely associated with Sherlock Holmes imagery. There are other types called Bent or Billiard pipes that may have existed earlier, but I couldn’t find when those kinds of tobacco pipes would have been invented.
Eric’s Ship seems to resemble a Galleon, mostly in the bent U shape of the ship and the bulky stern. An evolution of the Portuguese Carrack ships of the 15th century, these Spanish ships were invented initially as armed cargo ships, but were also used as warships. In the early 19th century, they were drafted as auxiliary war vessels, dominating naval warfare for most of the Age of Sailing. Although Eric’s ship is not quite a Galleon, given that his ship as a more noticeably protruding cabin on the ship’s stern, it still maintains the unique U-shape of the vessel.
The type of carriage we see when Eric gives Ariel a tour of his kingdom seems to resemble the Phaeton carriage. Both are four-wheeled carriages with a fold-up back and a swooping decal on the front of the vehicle. Shown to the right is an image of Queen Victoria as a child with her mother in a Phaeton. I don’t have an exact year as the link no longer works with the British Museum of History, but Queen Victoria was born in 1819, and she looks fairly young, so I might posit that this might date anywhere from 1822-1834? But I’m legitimately guessing. The point is, this type of carriage would have existed at this time and later.
When we see the town square of Eric’s kingdom, we see a clocktower and gas lamps. While I couldn’t find an exact year of when clock towers became a common thing, the clock that houses Big Ben in Elizabeth Tower was built in 1844, so that’s a least a clue as to when a much smaller clock might have been commonplace. Gas lamps as a public source of illumination began in 1809, as commemorated by a political cartoon of onlookers marveling at the new wonder.
Geography & Climate
Hurricanes - when the sea storm hits, the sailors declare that the storm is a hurricane. Initially, I assumed the movie was still set in Europe, and I looked up and found that there have in fact been instances of hurricanes hitting the western countries of Europe. However, the palm trees kind of debunked that theory.
Yes, you are in fact seeing palm trees. Growing naturally. In the place Eric calls his kingdom. So we are definitely not in Europe. This is further backed by the fact that a hurricane hit only two or so days ago, and hurricane season tends to be in autumn, while the foliage in Eric’s kingdom is a vibrant summer green. This has lead me to the assumption that Eric’s “kingdom” is a colony in either Florida or more likely, one of the Caribbean islands. Which would most likely mean that Eric is a Spanish prince. This is backed up by the simple fact that the general aesthetic of not only the castle, but the kingdom has a very Spanish look to it. But I’m not really at all well-versed enough in architecture to elaborate other than “it looks kinda Spanish to me”. He could be the son of the Spanish king and ruling this local area due to its economic importance and could possibly have a warship to fight off pirates. Eric might also not be the first in line for the throne, thus this is why he’s so far from home and without any parents around. He came to the new world to rule a smaller slice of his kingdom since he’d probably never be king of Spain. And yes, I did find that there are marshlands in the Caribbean, so Eric and Ariel can still go for their boat ride through the bayou.
There’s also a portrait of Phillip and Aurora in Eric’s dining hall, which means he’s probably related to them. Considering they’re Italian and he’s Spanish, it’s extremely likely. It’s not super relevant, but it’s a neat easter egg. Or if it’s not Phillip and Aurora, it could be Eric’s parents, and it just looks a lot like Phillip and Aurora, which could still be a clue that they’re related. Although the painting is rather recent, not like a 14th century tapestry, so it’s probably either a painting of his parents, or Aurora and Phillip are a big deal in Eric’s family, resulting in them getting a more modern portrait made of them.
Verdict
All around, I would have to say that the movie is set on one of the Caribbean islands under Spanish colonialism in around the mid 19th century. Although the pipe might be from a later decade, it’s such a minor detail, and so late in the century that if anything it’s an outlier in the data. Most of the facts tend to point more toward the early and middle of the 19th century, which is why I lean more toward the early-to-mid 1850s as the era of choice for this film. What this means for the world at large is that both America and France have denounced their monarchs. Victoria took the English throne in 1837 and has been ruling for about 20 years. Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species sparks outrage among the public at the notion of being a monkey’s nephew. Furthermore, it pretty much dissolves the Little Mermaid from being connected to the Frozen/Tangled conspiracy at all, as Ariel is all the way over in the New World, while Arendale is half-way across the world. It’s possible that the ship could have been commandeered by pirates who sailed the ship to the Caribbean where it was sank, but that’s adding extra steps and filling in blanks to try and force the theory to work. So there you have it, Ariel married a Spanish prince who was a full on navy admiral living in colonial Caribbean islands in the 1850s. Honestly, I’m just as surprised as you are. I would not have logically pegged the Caribbean for the setting of the film. But, that’s where the evidence points.
SETTING: A Spanish Colony in the Caribbean
KINGDOM: The Spanish Empire (1492 -1975)
PERIOD: 1850s (Victorian Era)
LANGUAGE: Spanish
#dating disney#little mermaid#disney#ariel#eric#sebastian#ursula#history#19th century#hans christian andersen#princess ariel#disney princess#disney princesses#spain#colonialism#spanish#caribbean#prince eric#disney prince#disney eric#the little mermaid#disney frozen#frozen#tangled#disney tangled#fashion#clothing
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WandaVision series review part 2.
Last week, I posted part 1 of my WandaVision series review, containing my initial thoughts and breakdown of episodes 1-3 (part 1 can be found here). This post, part 2, will contain my breakdown of episodes 4-6, and part 3, to come next week, will contain episodes 7-9 and my final thoughts.
So, let’s go.
Episode Four: ‘We Interrupt This Program’
This is the episode where everything comes together; where things start to make sense. This episode debuted on January 29th, finally giving us some answers after the first and second episodes were released on the 15th. It has a runtime of 34 minutes, which is fairly on par with the episodes up to here, though this episode doesn’t follow the sitcom format, but feels more like your classic MCU content.
The episode opens with a previously on WandaVision recap, which seems to very much focus on Geraldine, the meaning of which soon becomes clear. And we enter a black screen which slowly fades into the form of Geraldine, with voices from the movie Captain Marvel--the voices of Carol Danvers, Maria Rambeau and Maria’s daughter, Monica, which just confirms fan speculation that Geraldine is, in fact, a grown-up Monica Rambeau, and we must currently be seeing her after the Blip--after Bruce Banner’s snap in Avengers: Endgame returned all those Thanos killed at the end of Avengers: Infinity War.
Monica sits in a hospital room, but the bed beside her is empty, then she leaves the room to panic as people coalesce throughout the hospital. She asks about a patient in room 104, then one of the doctors recognises her, and tells her her mother--Maria Rambeau--who presumably was who she was in the hospital for, is dead, and about the Blip, because it seems to Monica it’s only been a few minutes. And we have the Marvel logo, after an introduction instead of right at the beginning as in the sitcom episodes.
Cut to the headquarters of SWORD, standing for Sentient Weapon Observation and Response Division, which is quite clearly just talking about Vision. Honestly, though, Marvel’s obsession with making their acronyms real words--I’m talking to you, SHIELD and HYDRA--is mildly irritating because of how unrealistic it is. Just a me-gripe.
Monica fails to access the building, her badge apparently outdated, and we’re introduced to Tyler Hayward, acting director of SWORD in Monica’s absence. Hayward brings her into the building and declares Monica grounded, able to only carry out terrestrial missions, on her mother’s order for if the personnel who disappeared in the Blip were to return. He then assigns her to an ‘FBI thing’. Cue the wonderful Jimmy Woo.
Monica is welcomed near the sign for Westview by Jimmy Woo, the FBI agent who dealt with Scott Lang’s house arrest in Ant-Man and the Wasp. Jimmy tells Monica a witness he had in Westview has gone off the radar; that everyone seems to have forgotten the man’s existence. And they approach two policemen stood by the sign, who claim Westview doesn’t exist. Ah, Wanda’s lovely magic. Jimmy also says he can’t contact anyone on the inside.
‘This isn’t a missing person’s case, Captain Rambeau, it’s a missing town. Population 3,892.’
And Jimmy claims the town itself won’t let him in to investigate, but though the town seems empty, it is visible, and there doesn’t appear to be any physical barrier. Monica sends in a helicopter-style drone, and the camera feed glitches like a television screen as it nears the town, then the drone disappears--the toy helicopter Wanda found in episode 2. Monica approaches the town, and a television-barrier becomes apparent. Monica touches it, and is pulled inside, hence becoming Geraldine within Westview in episodes 2 and 3.
Cut to a day later, the glorious Darcy Lewis from the first two Thor movies, Jane Foster’s (Thor’s love interest’s) intern, now graduated and with a PhD in astrophysics, sits in a van with several other scientists of different fields. Outside Westview, SWORD has set up a kind of military base. Darcy takes some readings and gets ‘a colossal amount of CMBR’ (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, which is one of the things used to prove the Big Bang Theory), and notices ‘longer wavelengths superimposed over the noise’, and has the idea to set up and link a vintage television to it.
Cut to night, we watch a man in some kind of protective suit crawl through sewers into Westview, the border of which transforms him into the beekeeper from the end of episode 2 which prompted Wanda to rewind and skip to the 1970s.
Darcy’s TV picks up the signal, and plays the previous episodes of WandaVision in their sitcom format, pointing out Vision is meant to be very, very, very dead. We see that the hands the camera zoomed out to reveal watching the show at the end of episode 1 belong to Darcy.
At this point, SWORD starts putting together a wall and whiteboard of their information, and it’s really fun to see them asking all the same questions we as an audience are. Why hexagonal shape? I take it this means the border is hexagonal, not that we’d know that as an audience. Why sitcoms? I know the answer, but only because I watched episode 8 already. Same time and space? and, of course, Is Vision alive?
It’s really fun knowing the answers.
Jimmy and Darcy watch Monica as Geraldine, and question whether she’s playing along or if she’s oblivious. With some science-y Darcy stuff, we also see that the voice in the radio in episode 2 was Jimmy, but we see the episode glitched itself out of that situation, like what SWORD is calling the ‘Westview anomaly’ is righting itself when they interfere.
As they watch Wanda give birth, they expect the anomaly to break, as all the other people are real people brainwashed, but then the babies are born, indicating Wanda has some kind of creational power (foreshadowing). Geraldine mentions Ultron, and as Wanda tells her to leave, the episode again glitches to the credits, not quite as we saw in the actual episode.
It then cuts back to that scene in episode 3, but not through the old TV as Jimmy and Darcy are watching. I didn’t notice whether or not it did this in episode 3, but the aspect ratio has increased, more to that typical of a modern show, in contrast to the smaller ones of the early sitcoms. And we watch Wanda threaten Geraldine with her magic, glowing red as it should--the event episode 3 emitted, instead giving us Vision’s perspective. Wanda tells Geraldine to leave, and blasts her through the walls of the house, and straight out of Westview, hence the end clip of episode 3. Wanda repairs the wall just before Vision returns home.
Something curious though--we know when SWORD sends things, including people, into it, they transform to fit the style, like the drone becoming a helicopter, the man becoming a beekeeper and Monica’s style changing to fit the decade, but when Monica comes out of Westview, she still looks like she did in the 70s episode.
Cut back to Wanda inside Westview, and she sees Vision walking, but apparently dead; skin-tissue-stuff pale, eyes blank and a hole in his head where Thanos took the mind stone, but he acts normal. Then Wanda sees him again looking normal. Vision tells her they don’t have to stay here if they don’t want to, and Wanda replies that they can’t; that this is their home--’Oh, don’t worry darling. I have everything under control.’ Which affirms Geraldine’s claim at the end of episode 3, that it’s all Wanda. (I’m going to refer to her as Geraldine when talking about episodes 1-3 and Monica when talking about 4-9, even though it’s the same character.)
Wanda and Vision sit down to watch TV and the credits begin, though Vision seems a little apprehensive.
And we finally have some answers about what the hell has been happening in Westview, and the vaguest idea how it fits into the MCU timeline as a whole.
Episode Five: ‘On a Very Special Episode...’
This episode was released on February 5th, with a runtime of 41 minutes, longer than any of its predecessors but still not exceptionally long. This is likely so it can follow the 1980s sitcom format with the inclusion of the SWORD parts. Note at this point, when the decade shifts, it occurs as something goes wrong: we shift to the 1960s when Mr and Mrs Hart question Wanda and Vision about how they came to Westview; we shift to the 1970s when they see the beekeeper, and we shift to the 1980s as Wanda forces Monica out of Westview.
So, we have the recap; nothing particularly noteworthy about it or its focus.
Shit, I just realised Tony’s snap at the end of Avengers: Endgame is now part of the Marvel logo sequence. Ouch.
Music plays, and we open to Tommy crying in a 1980s-style house. This episode is mostly formatted off Full House, in which Elizabeth Olsen’s elder sisters, identical twins Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, played the youngest daughter, Michelle Tanner. Unrelated to the plot, but a fun aspect.
Billy and Tommy won’t stop crying, so Wanda tries to force them to sleep with her powers, but it doesn’t work, and we still don’t see the red sparks, but, again, that’s an 80s-style special effects thing. Also, aspect ratio in this episode: a little larger than in episodes 1-3, but not quite episode 4′s. Funny thing here is that episodes 1-3 were shot and edited in such a way the episodes registered on Disney+ as having a larger ratio, giving a black border around the frame on the screen, but it doesn’t have that in this episode. Just a technical thing I’m not sure of the cause of, though in retrospect may simply be to convey the size of TV screens in the eras.
Also, can we take a moment to appreciate Wanda’s curly hair and floral waistcoat in this episode?
Agnes shows up to help them with the babies, to which Vision is apprehensive, and after a moment, she says to Wanda: ‘Do you want me to take that again?’ as though they’re following a script. This continues, Agnes asks if they should take it from the top, which confuses Vision, but Wanda just laughs it off. This is interesting, because the only other person we’ve yet seen break character is Geraldine, who entered the anomaly after its initial formation. Then Agnes shifts back into character, and the laugh track picks up again.
Vision questions Agnes’s comments aside with Wanda, but Wanda brushes it off, and acts as though nothing happened, and his suspicion only grows.
Then suddenly the twins are about... five? I’d say five. I don’t know. As Wanda and Vision realise this, Agnes says, ‘Kids. You can’t control ‘em. No matter how hard you try.’ There’s a running theme of children in this show--obviously the children themselves, ‘for the children’ in episode 2, and Mrs Hart’s questioning of when they were going to have children in episode 1. This semantic field fed theories that Wanda was literally doing this ‘for the children’, and this comment from Agnes could suggest the children will be the downfall of the anomaly--Wanda brainwashes the adults, but not the children.
The introduction to this episode is really cute. It has a mellow pop song playing over the top, and the 80s thing of using old photos of the characters; they’ve used actual photos of Elizabeth Olsen and the actors playing the twins, and mildly horrifying photoshopped versions of Paul Bettany as a child, but made into Vision. These photos of Vision were leaked before this episode came out, and it’s just hilarious to me because Vision was born an adult. And, assuming WandaVision takes place in 2024, after Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home, Vision is literally nine years old as it takes place.
There generally isn’t much to pick apart in the theme songs themselves, but the general idea of this one is ‘we’re making it up as we go along,’ which could be an interesting insight into Wanda’s state of mind--we’ve somewhat villainised her up to this point, creating the anomaly and controlling people, but the stance should be taken that she just doesn’t know what she’s doing, and is trying her best, selfish as her goals may be.
Cut to Hayward questioning Monica about her memories, and she describes a hopeless feeling--grief--controlling her--Wanda’s grief at the loss of Vision in the fight against Thanos. They take some kind of scan of Monica’s body and draw blood, but have to redo them because the results came out blank--foreshadowing.
Hayward describes Wanda as ‘the principal victimiser’ instead of one of the victims of whatever was happening in Westview, jumping straight to villainous conclusions.
A point here: in a recap of the ‘subjects’, Jimmy Woo states Wanda was born in 1989, which is actually a change to canon, because in the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron, set in 2015, she was 16, born in 1999. Questionable. Still not sure why they did this, but this makes her 29 in WandaVision, excluding the years of the Blip, where she would otherwise be only 19.
Hayward asks Jimmy if Wanda has an alias--in the comics, Wanda Maximoff is Scarlet Witch, but this alias has not yet been stated in the MCU--foreshadowing. Hayward focuses on her failures, such as working against the Avengers upon her introduction and the destruction she caused in Nigeria at the beginning of Captain America: Civil War. He then calls Wanda a terrorist based on how Monica described her experience in Westview.
Hayward then reveals to us footage of Wanda entering the SWORD headquarters where Vision’s body was kept, and shattering glass to access it, broken into pieces, as though to steal it, which Jimmy doesn’t believe because it’s a violation of the Sokovia Accords, and Darcy wonders what will happen when Vision learns the truth.
Wanda comes into the kitchen to find Tommy and Billy with a dog they found and want to keep. Wanda is apprehensive about letting them keep him, Agnes shows up with a dog house, and Wanda decides to create a dog collar, right in front of Agnes. Vision calls her out on this, and she says she’s ‘tired of hiding’. They name the dog Sparky, then Wanda sides with Vision that the twins aren’t old enough to care for him until they’re ten years old, to which they just age themselves up again. Agnes jokes that the dog should stay the same size, but still doesn’t question the magic.
A note here: Wanda skips decades when things don’t go her way, and the twins skip ages--Wanda is in control of the things around her, but not herself, as they are in control of themselves.
Meanwhile, Monica tries to figure out how she could re-enter Westview, and Darcy starts to call the anomaly the Hex because of its hexagonal shape. And they discuss that Wanda must be wielding ‘an insane amount of power’ to maintain the Hex and the twins, beyond anything she’s ever displayed before. Monica mentions she could’ve taken down Thanos on her own if he hadn’t used the infinity stones, and Jimmy mentions he thinks Captain Marvel came close, to which Monica stiffens, and dismisses the conversation about her--something has clearly happened between Monica and Carol since the events of Captain Marvel.
They go a lab to run an analysis on the 70s clothes Monica wore when she came out of the Hex, and discover they’re bulletproof, like the vest she wore when she entered, and they establish Wanda isn’t creating anything, but is rewriting reality.
Vision goes to work, where he helps his co-worker Norm with his computer, and they get an email from SWORD about Westview, mentioning Darcy and radiation. Everyone in the office reads it out with Norm, but they laugh at it, while Vision is suspicious. He turns off the computer with his powers, then does the same zap-thing to Norm, who suddenly comes back to his regular consciousness, outside of Wanda’s control, and begs for help. He tells Vision he has to stop ‘her’, that ‘she’s in [his] head’. Vision zaps him again, and he goes back into sitcom-brain.
Wanda tells the twins Vision went to work, which they question because it’s Saturday. Wanda tells them he just needed a distraction because they weren’t ‘on the same page’. She talks about family, and tells them that her on brother is far away.
Sparky the dog barks at something outside, and we cut to a drone’s view. Monica has sent in an 80s drone, something the Hex wouldn’t need to rewrite, and we see that’s what Sparky barked at. Monica tries to speak to Wanda, and through the drone’s view, but not the broadcast’s, her eyes turn red, and Hayward orders an operator to ‘take the shot’, though Monica didn’t know it was armed. They take the shot and the drone’s camera cuts out. Alarms blare, and a worker claims ‘there’s a breach.’
We go outside to the border, and Wanda exits the Hex, wearing what she wore in the climax of the Infinity Saga, dragging the drone behind her. This is confusing to watch back, because I know in retrospect she wore civilian clothes when the Hex was created, and was left in them when it was destroyed. Shooters aim their guns at her, and she throws the drone to Hayward’s feet. As she talks, what she had elft of her accent in Avengers: Infinity War has returned. She tells them to ‘stay out of [her] home,’ that ‘if [they] don’t bother [her], [she], won’t bother [them].’ Monica talks to her, and she prepares her magic. Monica asks what she wants, and she replies ‘[she has] what [she wants]. And no-one will ever take it from [her] again.’
And ‘for the children’ clicks--Wanda clearly created the Hex to have a life and a family with Vision. Wanda uses her magic to turn the guns onto Hayward, but they don’t shoot as she returns to the Hex.
This scene is important, because it shows us for certain that Wanda is aware of what she is doing, and shows for certain that she is in control, where before we had substantial evidence, but nothing this undeniable.
And cue this episode’s advert, for Lagos Brand paper towels--’For when you make a mess you didn’t mean to.’ This is a reference to an event at the beginning of Captain America: Civil War, in which Wanda accidentally killed twenty-six civilians in Lagos, Nigeria.
We cut back to the Hex, where Sparky has disappeared. They cross paths with a mailman, who says ‘Your Mom won’t let him get far,’ another subconscious reference of one of Wanda’s cast to her control. They find the dog dead in Agnes’s yard, who says he ate her azaleas, which poisoned him. The twins are upset, but Wanda stops them aging up, and gives them a lecture about grief. One of the twins tells her she can ‘fix the dead,’ which Agnes does question. This is a reference to her apparent resurrection of Vision, but Wanda tells them death is inevitable and forever; blatant hypocrisy.
Later, Vision asks Wanda how the boys are, and Wanda says ‘life moves pretty fast out in the suburbs’, a reference to the show’s time-jumping. Vision tells Wanda of his conversation with Norm, and tells her he was in pain. Vision says ‘You can’t control me the way you do them,’ to which Wanda replies, ‘Can’t I?’ and the credits roll, but sitcom-style credits, not the WandaVision credits.
Wanda tries to leave, and Vision asks about the ‘Maximoff Anomaly’, but she feigns ignorance. He accuses her of controlling the town, the credits stop, and they rise into the air with their powers. Wanda says she did it for both of them, Vision asks what’s outside of Westview, but she doesn’t answer. Vision says he can’t remember his life before Westview, but Wanda reassures him that he is her husband and a father; he asks why there are no other children in Westview, which she again dismisses. Wanda exaggerates the insanity of what he thinks--gaslighting--and says she doesn’t know how it started in the first place.
The doorbell rings, which she says she didn’t do, and Wanda opens the door to Pietro Maximoff, the brother who she claimed was ‘far away’, but we know to be dead. Except it isn’t Aaron Taylor Johnson’s Pietro, from Avengers: Age of Ultron, and it’s not just a recast. He’s played by Evan Peters, who plays the version of Quicksilver in the X-Men movies, which is clearly intentional.
This led to speculation about the opening of the multiverse, and even though WandaVision doesn’t directly go that route, Wanda’s next appearance is going to be in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
This episode was an excellent one, and we’ve truly begun to build towards the climax.
Episode Six: ‘All-New Halloween Spooktacular!’
Released February 12th, this episode has a still-leaving-a-lot-to-be-desired 37 minute runtime, and is one of the ones primarily featured in the trailers, which showed Wanda and Vision dressed in mock-up costumes of their character design in the comic books, which is especially exciting for Wanda, because, not only has she not yet been officially called ‘Scarlet Witch’, she also hasn’t had an official costume, with most of her other outfits in a darker red, but not the comic Scarlet Witch.
Recap of the relevant information, roll the Marvel logo, and this episode opens with a fast-paced theme song, which shows Wanda for the first time with the red effects of her magic in the Hex through the sitcom camera. This song mentions ‘illusion’ again and again, then moves into a rather elongated verse of repeating ‘let’s keep it going’, implying Wanda is now simply trying to extend the time she has with her family.
The twins introduce the episode in that 1990s break-the-fourth-wall style, they play with Pietro, and Wanda comes downstairs in her costume, claiming to be a Sokovian fortune teller. Pietro says it’s ‘worse than the costumes Mom made us the year we got typhus,’ and we cut to a really brief flashback of Wanda and Pietro trick-or-treating; Wanda has her hair in a braid and Pietro has an eyepatch, which some thought might just be an Easter egg of the two dressing as Black Widow and Nick Fury, but looking at it now, it seems more incidental.
Vision then comes downstairs in his costume, and says he’s only wearing it because Wanda took all his other clothes out of his closet, and that it’s a Mexican wrestler. He tries to leave for the neighbourhood watch, to which Wanda starts, ‘No, that’s not what you’re supposed to--’ as though she’s beginning to lose control over the Hex. Pietro dresses in a mock-Quicksilver costume, and dresses Tommy in something similar, referencing that Tommy, in the comics, also has superspeed.
Wanda tries to test Pietro on a memory of their childhood, which he calls her out on, and she asks why he looks different, but he says ‘you tell me’, again implying this is her doing. Wanda talks to Herb, one of the neighbours and a member of the watch, who tells her Vision isn’t on duty.
Cut to Vision near the edge of town, and he sees people in their yard repeating the same motions over and over, as if Wanda has less control over the outskirts of town.
Cut to this episode’s commercial: this one is animated, of a boy of a deserted island, and a shark jumps out of the water, and gives him a ‘Yo-Magic’ yoghurt to eat, which the boy takes, but is too weak to open. Time passes, and we watch him starve--’Yo-Magic! The snack for survivors!’ This could be referring to Wanda’s inability to save the people around her with her magic--she couldn’t save HYDRA’s other test subjects, then she couldn’t save Pietro, then Vision.
Wanda asks Pietro what happened to his accent, and he asks her the same question, then tells her his memories are fuzzy. Tommy then goes to get candy, and reveals his superspeed powers. He and Billy then go off with a promise not to ‘go past Ellis Avenue.’
Darcy, Jimmy and Monica hack into Hayward’s data, and discover he figured out a way through the boundary, and that he’s tracking Vision and the people in his vicinity. They notice the people at the edge of town are hardly moving. Cut to Vision, who realises the people even further out are completely stagnant. He then morphs from his human costume to his typical Vision-self, flies upward and observes the town, noticing a car at the edge, which he flies down to.
We see Agnes in the car, dressed as a witch and still, but not unresponsive like the others. She tells him she got lost--’In the town you grew up in?--and he zaps her the way he did Norm in the last episode. She recognises him as Vision, an Avenger, but he doesn’t know what an Avenger is. She tells him he’s dead, and explains Wanda’s control, then laughs manically until Vision zaps her again, and she once again becomes the Nosy Neighbour, then turns the car and drives away. We zoom out to the street sign: Ellis Avenue.
Darcy sees Monica’s bloodwork in Hayward’s files, and tells Monica she can’t go back into the Hex as she wishes, because she’s already been through the boundary twice, and had her cells rewritten molecularly--Ms Marvel!! But Monica dismisses it, and tells Darcy she won’t stop until she helps Wanda.
Pietro accuses Wanda laughingly of only avoiding traumatising the town’s children by only bringing them out for a holiday cameo, but praises her, because ‘Families and couples stay together, most personalities aren’t far off from what’s underneath, people got better jobs, better haircuts, for sure,’ and tells her he’s impressed, but asks how she did it, which she doesn’t answer, then tells him she doesn’t know how she did it. She just remembers loneliness, and numbness.
She then looks back to Pietro, and sees him with bullet wounds in his chest; dead the way she saw Vision in episode 4, but she blinks it away.
Darcy watches Hayward’s tracking of Vision, and he approaches the barrier, sees it in all its television glory. Then he pushes through. He strains to make it through, and SWORD agents pull up on the other side. He nearly makes it, cape all that’s left, but it clearly painful, and he falls to the ground. Chunks of him tear off and fly back through the barrier. Meanwhile, Billy realises something is wrong with an echo of Wanda’s power, hearing Vision’s yells, and runs to Wanda.
Hayward handcuffs Darcy to stop her trying to get him to help Vision as he comes apart. Wanda asks Billy where Vision is, to which Pietro says, ‘Hey, don’t sweat it, sis. It’s not like your dead husband can die twice.’ Her eyes turn red and she sends him flying into a haystack. Billy focuses, and sees the SWORD soldiers, says he thinks Vision’s dying, and Wanda freezes everything around her, then sends out a blast of power.
Outside, the boundary of the Hex moves, expanding, and the SWORD agents panic to get away as Vision is re-encapsulated, but Darcy is handcuffed, and t passes over her. The SWORD camp turns into a circus, but Hayward, Monica and Jimmy get away--slightly wondering why Monica tried to when she was trying to get back in.
And the episode ends there. I don’t really have much of a conclusion to this episode--in truth, not too much actually happened aside from Pietro and the twins, but we are so building to the climax. This is also actually furthered by the absence of a laugh track in this episode, though this is also due to the fact they became less common.
And that summarises my breakdown of episodes 4-6. Part 3, with episodes 7-9, will come next week!
#wandavision#marvel#mcu#avengers#marvel cinematic universe#disney#disney plus#disney+#the avengers#wanda#wanda maximoff#scarlet witch#vision#quicksilver#pietro maximoff#the vision#maximoff#tv review#show review#programme review#program review#tv show review#movie review#movies#books#tv shows
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Homestuck is My Favorite Sprite Comic
Yes, you read that right.
Homestuck is my favorite sprite comic.
Those of you who remember the earlier days of the internet are probably looking at this post in disbelief right about now. Others of you might be scratching your heads, not knowing what I’m talking about.
But here’s my pitch: Homestuck is the culmination of an entire genre of internet art, and the tools that make it so powerful are the very tools that made that genre once so reviled.
Homestuck is the greatest and most successful sprite comic of all time.
And honestly, I’ve wanted to talk about that for ages, so let’s do it.
WHAT SPRITE COMICS WERE
Many of my readers are probably too young to remember the era of sprite comics. So: what were sprite comics?
Sprite comics were a genre of webcomics made entirely by taking pixel art from video games – especially character art, called “sprites,” but also backgrounds and other images—and placing them into panels to tell a story. They were near-ubiquitous on the internet in the early 2000s, emerging right as webcomics in general were seeking to establish themselves as an art form.
They were not, shall we say, known for their quality. The low bar to access meant that art skill was not an obstacle to starting one. The folks behind the huge swell of them tended to be young people, kids and early teenagers recreating the plots of their favorite video games with new OCs—not the most advanced writers or artists. They were the early 2000s’ quintessential example of ephemeral, childish art. Unfortunately, they look even worse today—blown-up pixels don’t hold up well when displayed on higher-resolution monitors.
Today, they’re mostly forgotten, remembered only as a weird, strange moment in the youth of the internet. Someone who evoked them today, such as a blogger who compared them to one of the most successful webcomics of all time, would be inviting good-natured teasing at the very least.
It would be unfair to dismiss them entirely, though. In this low-stakes environment, comics where the author could bring more skill—engaging writing, legitimately funny jokes, or especially, a real ability to work with pixel art—really stood out. (Unsurprisingly, these authors tended to skew a bit older.)
The obvious one to mention is Bob and George. Bob and George wasn’t the first sprite comic, but it was the most influential. Conceived initially as Mega Man-themed filler for a hand-drawn comic about superheroes, it quickly became a merging of the two concepts, with the original characters made into Mega Man-style sprites, full of running gags, humorous retellings of the Mega Man games, elaborate storylines about time travel, and robots eating ice cream. It was generally agreed, even among sprite comic haters, that Bob and George was a pretty good comic. Worth mentioning also are 8-Bit Theater, which turned the plot of the first Final Fantasy into a spectacular and hilarious farce, and of course Kid Radd, my second favorite sprite comic. (More on that later.)
But even if you weren’t looking for greatness—there was something just damn fun about them. The passion of sprite comic authors was clear, even if their ideas didn’t always cohere. To this day, I think the sprite comic scene has the same appeal pulp art does—it’s crude and rough, full of garbage to sift through, but every so often, something deeply sincere and bizarre shines through, and the culture of its authors is a fascinating object of study in itself.
Okay, full disclosure: I was one of the people who made a sprite comic. I’ve written about my experiences with that in more depth elsewhere, but yeah, I was on the inside of this scene, rather than a disinterested observer, and from the inside, maybe it’s a lot easier to see the appeal.
Still, let me make this claim: even with all their flaws, sprite comics were doing some incredibly interesting things, and Homestuck is heir to their legacy.
TAKE ME DOWN TO RECOLOR CITY
One of the problems people always had with sprite comics was the sprites themselves. They’re the most repetitive thing in the world. You just keep copying and pasting the same images over and over again, maybe with a few tweaks. That’s not really being an artist, is it? It’s so lazy. Re-drawing things from different angles keeps things dynamic, develops your skill, and makes your work better in general. Right?
I’m mostly in agreement. Certainly I think it’s fair to rag on the Control-Alt-Delete guy, along with other early bad webcomics, for copy-pasting their characters while dropping in new expressions and mass-producing tepid strips. And to be fair, digging through bad sprite comics often felt like an exercise in seeing the same slightly-edited recolors of Mega Man characters over and over again. You got really tired of that same body with its blobby feet and hands.
(It should be noted, though, that there were folks in the sprite comic scene who could pixel art the quills off a porcupine. I salute you, brave pixel art masters of 2006. I hope you all got into your chosen art school.)
All this said, I think the repetitive and simplistic nature of sprite comics was often their biggest strength.
THE POWER OF ABSTRACTION
In his classic work Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud makes an observation about cartooning that has stayed with me to this day.
McCloud notes that simple, abstract drawings, like faces that are only few lines and dots on a page, resonate with us more strongly than more detailed drawings. This is because our minds fill in what’s missing on the page. We ascribe human depth to simple gestures and expressions based on our own emotions and experiences – and this makes us feel closer to these characters as readers. Secretly, simple cartoons can be one of the most powerful forms of storytelling. If you want your readers to fall in love with your characters, draw them simply, and let them fill them in.
Video game sprites work very well in this regard. They have that same simplicity that cartoons do. In fact, I’d be willing to bet a huge part of the success of SNES-era RPGs was simple, almost childlike character sprites drawing people in. I think sprites did the same for sprite comics.
Here’s the weird thing: Bob and George worked. Despite four different characters being variations on the same friggin’ Mega Man sprite in different colors, they immediately began to seem like different people with distinct personalities. For me, George’s befuddled, helpless dismay immediately comes to mind whenever I picture his face, while with Mega Man himself it’s usually a wide-eyed, childlike glee. I would never confuse them. This, despite the fact that the only actual difference between their faces is that George is blonde. It’s pretty clear what happened. The personalities the author established for them through dialogue and storytelling shone through, and my brain did the rest.
Sprites, in short, were a canvas upon which the mind could project any story the author wanted to tell. Even the most minute differences in pixel art came to stand, in the best sprite comics, for wide divergences in personality and ideals, once the reader spent enough time with them to adapt to their style of representation.
Wait a minute, haven’t we seen this somewhere before? Character designs that focus on variations on a theme, with subtle differences that nonetheless render them instantly recognizable?
Oh, right.
Look at what greets us on the very first page of Homestuck. An absurdly simple cartoon boy, abstracted to a ridiculous degree—he doesn’t even have arms!—followed a whole bunch of characters that follow suit. Though many other representations of the characters emerge, these little figures never quite go away, do they? Why is that?
Simple: they’re very easy to manipulate. They’re modular—you can give John arms or not, depending on whether it’s useful. You can put him in a whole variety of poses and save them to a template. You can change out his facial expressions with copy and paste. You can give him a new haircut and call him Jake. It’s all very quick and easy.
Sprite comics proliferated because they were very easy to mass-produce. Andrew Hussie’s original conception of Homestuck was very similar: something he could put out very quickly and easily, where even the most elaborate ideas could rely on existing assets to be sped smoothly along. We all know the result: an incredible production machine, churning out unfathomable amounts of content from 2009-2012. I’d say it was a good call.
But it goes way deeper than that. The modular nature of sprites always suggested a kind of modularity to the sprite comic premise. George and Mega Man were different people, true, but also two variations on a theme. Was there something underlying them that they had in common? Perhaps their similarity says something like: We exist in a world which has a certain set of rules? One of my favorite conceits from Bob and George was that when characters visited the past, they were represented by NES-era Mega Man sprites, while in the present, they were SNES sprites, and in the future, the author used elaborate splicing to render them as 32-bit Mega Man 8 sprites or similar.
Suppose there was a skilled cartoonist thinking about his next big project, who wanted to tell a story centered around this kind of modularity, a narrative that was built out of iterative, swappable pieces by its very design. He might very well create a sprite comic named Homestuck.
Homestuck is a story about a game that creates a hyperflexible mythology for its players, where the villains, challenges, and setting change depending upon what players bring to the experience, yet which all share underlying goals and assumptions. What more perfect opportunity to create a modular story as well? Different groups of kids and trolls have motifs that get swapped around to produce new characters, whether that’s through ectobiology, the Scratch, or the eerie parallels between the kids and trolls’ sessions. And yet each character can be analyzed as an individual.
This is an incredible way to build a huge emotional investment from your readers. Not only does this kind of characterization invite analysis, the abstractions draw readers in to generate their own headcanons and interpretations. A deep commitment to pluralism is at the heart of Hussie’s character design. Then, too, it encourages readers to build their own new designs from these models. Kidswaps, bloodswaps, fantrolls—these have long been the heart of Homestuck’s fandom. And what are bloodswaps if not sprite recolors for a new generation? With the added bonus that now a change in color carries narrative weight, evoking new moods and identities for these characters in ways that early sprite comics could only dream of.
In Hussie’s hands, even the dreaded copy-and-paste takes on heroic depth of meaning. Even when Hussie moves away from sprites to his own loose art style, he continues to remix what we’ve previously see. Indeed, Hussie talks about how he would go out of his way to edit his own art into new images even when it would take more time than drawing something new. Why? Because he wanted to evoke that very feeling of having seen this before—the visual callback to go along with the many conceptual and verbal callbacks that echo throughout Homestuck. This is at the heart of what Doc Scratch (speaking for Hussie) called “circumstantial simultaneity:” we are invited to compare two moments or two characters, to see what they have in common, or how they contrast. Everything in Paradox Space is deeply linked with everything else. And Hussie establishes this in our minds using nothing less than the tool sprite comics were so deeply reviled for: the “lazy” repetition of an image.
(It’s fitting that some of the most jaw-droppingly gorgeous images in Homestuck—dream bubble scenery and the like—are the result of Hussie taking things he’s made before and combining them into fantastic dreamscapes.)
But it all started with the hyperflexible, adaptable character images Hussie created at the very beginning of Homestuck.
And if you need more proof that Homestuck is a sprite comic, I think we need look no further than what Hussie, and the rest of the Homestuck community call these images.
We call them sprites.
THE FIRST GENRE-BENDERS
Was Andrew Hussie influenced by sprite comics in the development of Homestuck? It’s hard to say, but as a webcomic artist in the first decade of the 2000s, he was surely aware of them. It’s likely that he quickly realized that his quick, adaptable images served the same purposes as a sprite in a video game or a sprite comic, and chose to call them that.
One purpose I haven’t mentioned up until now: sprites lend themselves very well to animations. In fact, in their original context of video games, that’s exactly what they’re for: frames of art that can be used to show a character running, jumping, posing, moving across a screen. It’s not surprising, then, that sprite comic makers quickly saw the utility in that.
Homestuck was, in fact, not the first webcomic to make Flash animations part of its story. There were experiments with various gifs and such in other comics, but I think sprite comics were among the most successful at becoming the multi-media creations that would come to be known as hypercomics..
Take a look at this animation from Bob and George. It represents a climactic final confrontation against a long-standing villain, using special effects to make everything dramatic, but ultimately, like many a Homestuck animation, leads to kind of a pyscheout. The drama and the humor of the moment are clear, though. This relies in large part on the music—which is taken directly from the game Chrono Trigger. This makes total sense. Interestingly, it also contains voice acting, which is something Homestuck never tried—probably because it would run contrary to its ideals of pluralism. What I find fascinating is that in sprite comics, animations like these served a very similar purpose to Homestuck’s big flashes: elevating a big moment into something larger-than-life. Another good example is this sequence from Crash and Bass. Seriously, it seems like every sprite comic maker wanted to try their hand at Flash animation.
(By the way, it’s a lot harder than it looks!! I envy Hussie his vectorized sprites. Pixel art is a PAIN to work with in the already buggy program that is Flash.)
The result: because of the sprites themselves, sprite comics were among the first works to play around with the border between comics and other media in the way that would come to be thought of as quintessentially Homestuck.
What it also meant was that another genre emerged in parallel with sprite comics: the sprite animation. Frequently these would retell the story of a particular game, offer a spectacular animated battle sequence, parody the source material, or all three. Great examples include this animation for Mega Man Zero, and this frankly preposterous crossover battle sequence. Chris Niosi’s TOME also found its earliest roots as an animation series of this kind. You also found plenty of sprite-based flash games, in which players could manipulate game characters in a way that was totally outside the context of the original works.
The website the vast majority of these games and animations were hosted on?
Newgrounds, best known to Homestuck fans as the website Hussie crashed in 2011 while trying to upload Cascade.
What’s less talked about is that Hussie was friends, or at least on conversational terms with, the owner of the site, hence the idea to host his huge animation there in the first place, and other flashes, like the first Alterniabound, were initially hosted there as well.
It’s hard to believe that Hussie wasn’t at least a little familiar with the Newgrounds scene. I suspect that he largely conceived of Homestuck as part of the world of “Flash animation—” which in 2009 meant the wide variety of things that were hosted on Newgrounds, including sprite animations.
The freedom and fluidity sprite comics had to change into games and animations and back into comics again was one of their most fascinating traits. Homestuck’s commitment to media-bending needs, at this point, no introduction. But what’s less known is that sprite comics were exploring that territory first—that Homestuck, in short, is the kind of thing they wanted to grow up to be.
PUT ME IN THE GAME
I would be a fool not to mention another big thing Homestuck and sprite comics have in common: a character who is literally the author in cartoon form, running around doing goofy things and messing with the story. This was an incredibly common cliché in sprite comics, no doubt because of Bob and George, who did it early on and never looked back. You might have noticed that the animation I linked above concerns a showdown between Bob and George’s author, David Anez—depicted, delightfully, as another Mega Man recolor—and a mysterious alternate author named Helmut—who is like Mega Man plus Sepiroth I think? It’s all very strange. I could ramble for hours about the relationship between Hussie and the alt-author villains of Homestuck and what it all means, but I’m not sure I can nail anything down with certainty for these two. Maybe Bob and George was never quite that metaphysical.
But yes, bringing the author into the story in some form was already a cliché by the time Homestuck started up. Indeed, I think that’s why Hussie’s character refers to it as “a bad idea” to break the fourth wall—he’s recognizing that people will have seen this before, and are already tired of this sort of shit. And then he goes and does it anyway and makes it somehow brilliant, because he’s Andrew Hussie.
Homestuck breathes life into the cliché by taking it in a metaphysical/metafictional direction. I don’t think that was really the motivation for most sprite comic authors, though. Let’s see if we can dig a little deeper.
I think the cliché kept happening because sprite comic authors were writing about a subject that very closely concerned themselves: video games. I’m only kind of joking. The thing about video games is that even though they’re made for everyone, playing through one yourself feels like an intensely personal experience. You develop an emotional relationship to a world, to its characters, that feels distinctly your own. Now, suddenly, thanks to the magic of sprites, you have an opportunity to tell stories about that world for others to read. Of course you’re going to want to put yourself in the story in some form.
When it wasn’t author characters in sprite comics, it was OCs. You know Dr. Wily? Well here’s my own original villain, Dr. Vindictus. You know Mega Man? Here’s my new character, Super Cool Man. He hangs out with Mega Man and they beat the bad guys together. Stuff like that. Most sprite comics retold the story of a game, or multiple games in a big crossover format, with original elements added in. There was quite a lot of “Link and Sonic and Mega Man are all friends with my OC and they hang out at his house.”
What’s interesting, though, is that because these sprite comics were very aware that they were about video games, this was where they sometimes got very meta. It started with humorous observation—hey, isn’t it funny that Link goes around breaking into people’s houses and smashing their pots? But sometimes, it grew into more serious commentary. Is Mega Man trapped in a never-ending cycle, doomed to fight the same fight against the same mad scientist until the end of time? Is it worth it, being a video game hero?
Enter Homestuck. What I’ve been dancing around this whole time is:
Homestuck is a sprite comic…because Homestuck is a video game.
Or more specifically, Homestuck’s a comic about a video game called SBURB, where the lines between the game and the comic about the game blur as characters wrestle with the narratives around them, both those encoded into the game and those encoded into our expectations.
Homestuck presents the fantasy of many a sprite comic maker: I get to go on heroic quests, I get to change the world and become a god. I get to be part of the video game. And then it asks the same question certain sprite comics were beginning to ask:
Is it worth it, to be that hero?
I want to tell you about my second favorite sprite comic, a comic called Kid Radd.
Kid Radd distinguished itself from other sprite comics of the time by being a completely original production. Its sprites looked like they could be from a variety of NES and SNES-era video games, but they were all done from scratch, and the games they purported to represent were all fictional. Kid Radd used animations with original music, and sometimes interactive, clickable games, to tell its story. It also used all sorts of neat programming tricks to make it load faster on the internet of the early 2000s, which was great—unfortunately, these same techniques made it break as web technology evolved, something Homestuck fans in 2019 can definitely relate to. The good news is, fans have maintained a dedicated and reformatted archive where the comics can still be seen and downloaded.
Kid Radd’s premise is that video game characters themselves are conscious and alive—more specifically, their sprites. Sprites developed consciousness as human beings projected personality and identity onto them, remaining aware of their status as video game constructs while also seeking to be something more. The story follows the titular Kid Radd, at first in the context of his own game, commenting on the choices the player controlling him. He must endure every death, every strange decision along the way to save his girlfriend Sheena. Then the story expands into a larger context as Radd, Sheena, and many other video game characters are released onto the internet as data. They try to find their own identities and build a society for themselves, but struggle with the tendency toward violence that games have programmed into them. The story culminates in an honestly moving moment where Radd confronts the all-powerful creators of their reality—human beings.
It’s a very good comic.
The first sprite comic authors wanted to fuse real life with video games. Later sprite comic authors decided to ask: what would that really mean? Would it be painful? Would you suffer? Would you find a way to make your life meaningful all the same? Despite the limitations of sprite comics, these ideas had incredible potential, and in works like Kid Radd, they flourished.
Homestuck is heir to that legacy.
It takes the questions Kid Radd was asking, and asks them in new ways. It tries to understand, on an even deeper level, how the rules of video games shape our own minds and give us ways to understand ourselves.
At its heart, Homestuck is a sprite comic, and it might just be the greatest of them all.
EPILOGUE
I’ve seen a lot of good discussion recently on how Homestuck preserves a certain era of the internet like a time capsule: its culture, its technology, its assumptions, its memes.
I think sprite comics, too, are part of the culture that created Homestuck. Do I think Hussie spent the early 2000s recoloring Mega Man sprites? No, probably not. But what I do know is that sprite comics were part of his world. The first webcomic cartoonists came of age alongside an odd companion, the weird, overly sincere, dorky little sibling that was sprite comics. Like them or hate them, you couldn’t escape them. They were there.
And maybe a certain cartoonist saw a kind of potential in them, in the same way he summoned Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff from the depths of bad gamer culture.
Or maybe he just knew, as some sprite comic authors did, that the time was right for their kind of story.
On a personal level—Homestuck came along right when I needed it.
Around 2009, the bubble that was sprite comics finally burst. People were getting tired of them, or growing out of them, and blown-up sprites no longer looked so good on modern monitors.
I was more than a little heartbroken. I’d enjoyed Bob and George, read my fill of Mega Man generica, and fallen utterly in love with Kid Radd. I’d been working on my own sprite comic for a long time out of a sense that there was huge potential in them that we were only scratching the surface of. I’d dreamed of maybe someday doing something as amazing as the best of them did. But I was watching that world disappear. I had to admit to myself that my work wasn’t going to continue to find an audience. That I could live with. But it was painful to think that the potential I sensed, the feats of storytelling I wanted to see in the world, would never be realized.
And then, in the fall of 2010, a friend linked me to a comic that broke all the rules, that mixed animation, games, music, images and chatlogs. A comic that crafted its own sprites, just as Kid Radd did, and remixed its images into an ever-expanding web of associations and meanings. A comic that took on the idea of living inside a video game with relish and turned it into a gorgeous meditation on escaping the ideas and systems that control us.
That this comic would exist, let alone that it would succeed. That it would become one of the most popular creations of all time, that it would surpass other webcomics and break out into anime conventions and the real world, that it would become such a cultural juggernaut, to the point where it’s impossible to imagine an internet without Homestuck—
I can’t even put into words how happy that makes me. It’s the reason I’m still writing essays about Homestuck nearly eight years after I found it.
And it’s why Homestuck will always be my favorite sprite comic.
-Ari
[Notes: The image of the kids came from the ever-useful MSPA Wiki—please support and aid in their efforts to provide a good source of info about Homestuck! They need more support these days than ever.
For more on Homestuck’s place as a continuation of the zeitgeist of early 2000s experimental webcomics, this article by Sam Keeper at Storming the Ivory Tower is excellent and insightful.
Thanks for reading, y’all.]
#homestuck analysis#homestuck#homestuck's influences#hypercomics#understanding homestuck#sprite comics#internet culture
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Dawn of the 1st Day
“Where’d the Time go?”
(Part 1/2)
Sensing a looming danger but no immediate threat, they allowed themselves a moment to regain composure. Whatever magic it was pulling them around had never had such an effect before. While sometimes enough to make one falter, this one in particular left them all with vertigo. The miserable Hero of Legend looked ready to crumble under the migraine he typically was able to grit and bear.
The Hero of the Sky was the first to recover. While working at his friend’s neck in hopes of helping, he tried to assess the situation. They were in a new area, one that somehow felt more ominous than anything he’d ever encountered. An intense, sinister hate that sent shivers up his spine.
Those who needed to rest while crawling dungeons, raiding temples, and being wide open to attack develop a keen sense of atmosphere. The absolute rage radiating from all sides set the party of heroes on high alert.
The sky child was reminded of Demise, and yet, the sensation felt heavier. Personal. The demon king may have had targeted his hatred on the goddess and her hero directly, but he hadn’t originally fought out of hatred. That evil sought power and would only hold anger for those actively in his way. Though the curse had twisted into pure malice by the Hero of the Wild’s era, most reappearances focused primarily on attaining power, the other two reincarnations affected by the curse merely put under surveillance.
“Wasn’t it just past noon?” The question snapped the Skyloftian out of his musings. Glancing back at the clock tower, he found it read 6:07, the scent of dew indicating early morn. The youngest of them was correct. It had been just after lunch when the worlds shifted.
“Odd? That’s never happened before,” the Hero of Twilight grunted.
The area wasn’t familiar at all either, judging by the faces shared amongst his comrades. It raised suspicion. The strong aftereffects of the magic that brought them there, the time of day changing, the storm of emotion that made the humid air even heavier. A gut feeling told him that the shadow they’d been following wasn’t behind this.
“Those construction workers look like my own, but that doesn’t lend much. I mean, we did have to drag away the old man before he spent all his rupees on milk after meeting my era’s Malon,” the most colorful among them smirked.
Unfortunately, the reaction they’d hoped to catch was nonexistent. Their unofficial leader was nowhere to be seen. The notion of anyone getting left behind had to be the most disturbing aspect of the last fifteen minutes. The missing hero’s protege looked beside himself with worry and lost on what to do.
“Look!” The Hero of Ages clapped for attention. “Just because the shift was harsher than usual, it doesn’t mean he got left behind. We’d see him again if he had been anyways. We were brought together for a reason, after all. The old man knows how to take care of himself, and he wouldn’t want us fussing over his absence instead of focusing on the matter at hand.
“Something strange is going on-different than usual, but we can’t panic over the unknown. Let’s split up and ask around. Where are we? What and where is the danger? Has anyone seen the old man? He may have only wandered off. It wouldn’t be the first time any of us had.”
Huh. He sure knew how to boost everyone’s morale. Must come from being a captain where he’s from.
“It would be unlike him to wander?” The Hero of Hyrule spoke up.
“Yeah, but... maybe he knows the place? He could’a gotten caught up in his head and forgot the plot. Okay, we’ll keep an eye out,” the farm hand nodded. He sounded as if he were trying to convince himself more than anyone else.
The eight left of them paired off to cover more ground. As the saying goes, it’s dangerous to go alone. One pair stayed put as the others went separate ways.
~*~
Link let the young hero wrap himself in the end of his scarf once again, the sudden changes in temperature chilling the island dweller. Having become fairly close, Link found it a small comfort to have the boy near. The teen was more than capable on his own, but something in the air raised the hairs off his neck.
The air cooled further as they passed the threshold to an open playground. The dew had yet to dry from the grass sealing in the night’s chill for a bit longer.
“Tingle!” his excitable friend whispered. He jutted his head towards an odd fellow spinning in place. It was a wonder the guy didn’t get dizzy.
The man, who had to be in his mid to late thirties, wore what Link could only describe as dark red undergarments over a skin-tight, full-body suit of a vibrant green. A hood exposed only his face and came to a point sticking up on the top of his head. Finally clueing Link in to what he was doing, he had a pen and parchment in hand and a compass dangling from his neck.
Okay, a map maker. Spinning explained. Gaudy costume? Still weird.
The little sailor tugged him over by the scarf he had wrapped tightly around his arms and was still firmly tucked around Link’s neck. The “forest fairy” was rather nice if a little bizarre. He told them that he sold maps of current locations at a discount, and so, the pair sat down next to a slide to get a better look at “Clock Town.”
Link frowned. The name tickled something in the back of his mind, and Tingle also seemed vaguely familiar. He quit thinking on it when felt a sharp sting in his neck, which had been happening frequently as of late. He must’ve jumped, because he received a concerned glance that he had to wave off.
Link knew the sting wasn’t a bad thing. He could recall his adventures just fine, but names, faces, and locations had become foggy since meeting the others. He remembered traveling across different eras and meeting many people of legend and myth. He figured out that the sting would stop him from thinking on them, and he pieced together that they were probably people his companions knew on their adventures (and likely lost). The goddesses sure had peculiar ways to protect their heroes. He just hoped the fog would clear once it was all over, feeling a sense of loss over his amnesia.
He blinked to focus on the map. The town was sectioned off in four areas, convenient that they’d paired off. “South Clock Town” held the clock tower with little else but the banker they had passed on their way north. To the west was what looked like an alley for shopping and other errands. The east, however, was far larger and most likely housed the local inn, which Link made a quick mental note of. The playground they were in didn’t have much, but they decided to ask around a bit more before ditching the place.
The little boy shooting darts at a balloon didn’t tell them anything. He had refused to listen to them and yelled at them to leave him alone to his practice. Not wanting to anger the child anymore, they proceeded to speak with the guard positioned at the town exit. After flailing for a moment at having found such a decorated knight in Clock Town, he managed to collect himself enough to direct them towards a cave past where Tingle... had been? “If anything, surely the Great Fairy can guide you!”
Entering the Fairy Fountain was just as refreshing as ever. The temperature was always comfortable no matter the weather outside. A calm would wash over you like a serene spring morning. Tall arches layered in vines surrounded a shallow pool of crystal clear water. The same water cascading down the circular wall parting at the entrance.
Link heard a squawk beside him, and he gasped also catching sight of a swirling cluster of fairies. Typically, there may be three or four fairies milling about at any given time, but there had to be around twenty circling in the center of the fountain.
“Heroes! Please hear my plea!” a warbled voice squealed from the mass. “I have been broken and shattered to pieces by the masked Skull Kid. Please find the one Stray Fairy lost in town, and bring her to this Fairy Fountain.”
Without hesitation, they spun on their heels and sprinted away to hunt down the missing fairy.
~*~
Link sighed as his childhood hero spent another handful of rupees to retry a game for the umpteenth time. For one who treasures his wallet so much, the Hero of Legend sure loved gambling. He’d tried prying him away, but the stubborn veteran just kept getting more red and hell-bent with every loss.
“I’ll be right outside when you’re done!” Link shouted over the loud music. The only acknowledgment he received was a shooing motion.
Taking a breather, he watched two performers juggling to each other in a daze. They were actually really good. The balls were thrown high and were in order of color. Maintaining that had to be difficult.
Link ruffled his hair. He really shouldn’t be spacing out like that, especially in unknown territory. Deciding to at least start on their original task, Link made his way over to the jugglers and overheard their conversation.
“My, my! Funny things are happening in town, aren’t they? Funny. Funny.”
“You’re telling me! Like the rumors about the swamp to the south? Did you hear about the kidnapping?”
What? Kidnapping? Link worried his bottom lip. Should I grab the others? We should help, right?
“Oh, my! The kidnapping?”
“Yep! But then the kid woke up. Get it? Kid napping? Hooo... I got a million of ‘em!”
He glared at the twins’ laughter. Though honestly, it wasn’t even a bad joke. Relax, Link. You’re just on edge. He rolled his shoulders back and coughed. “Excuse me. New around here. Could you tell me what’s going on?”
“We’re the twin jugglers from the Gorman Troupe! We’re practicing for the big carnival! It happens once in a blue moon!”
“Or in this year’s case, once in a really, really scary, red-eyed moon!”
“Ho! Ho! I hear it’s gonna fall harder than the way my clumsy brother is always dropping our juggling balls!”
“You see, we’re entertainers. We must keep people smiling. No matter how grim things get, we must always be optimistic!”
They proceeded to talk about some fellow performers, but Link’s mind was elsewhere. Scary moon? What do they mean it’s gonna fall? He turned around to go get his partner but found him standing only a couple feet away.
“Sorry, come again? ‘Red-eyed moon?’ What’s fallin’?” the Hero of Legend asked.
“Why, just look up!”
“Frightening, isn’t it? Hooo...”
AN: I feel like it’s been at least a month since I posted the Prologue, and I felt kinda bad about it. At least this part was fairly finished in my opinion, so I wanted to go ahead and post it. I don’t really have the other half fleshed out as much as I’d like it to be, but I’ll continue to work on it. Hope you like! (The majority of the dialogue for the npcs are taken straight from the game. That’s something taking up a huge part of my time trying to incorporate their words in scenes.)
#legend of zelda#linkeduniverse#linked universe#LU in MM#Ch 1 Pt 1#only tagging the prevelant characters#Sky#Legend#Twilight#Ages#Wind#Hyrule#Tingle#Jugglers#sorry i took so long#enjoy
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Monsta X Concert Review
On Saturday 8/3/19, I went to the MONSTA X <WE ARE HERE> show at the Hulu Theater in NYC. After such a great concert last year, I was more than happy for my second Kpop concert to be at Monsta X’s next world tour. The fact that it was in NY instead of NJ made it even easier for me to attend. Plus, my brother joined me for this concert so it was nice to go to a Kpop event with someone. This year’s experience was a bit different from last year’s, but one thing that stayed consistent is that Monsta X put on a good show.
There’s a lot to discuss, so I’ve broken down the concert experience into parts.
Pre-Concert
Tickets
As I mentioned in a previous post, getting a ticket took more work this year. There seems to have been a technical problem with the Powerhouse website but I was still able to get decent tickets. I think I was technically closer to the stage than I was last year, but I was more to the left of it so I wasn’t able to watch Monsta X from the center like last time. Nevertheless, I was in the front row of my section, so I was able to see and enjoy everything fairly well.
Venue
Although it was easier to get to this venue, it was nowhere near as nice as the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. For a place as famous as Madison Square Garden, the Hulu Theater is very basic with not much aesthetic at all—mostly just grey walls filled with (granted, comfy) seats. That’s not a big deal though since that aspect of the venue doesn’t really matter. But what does matter is the fact that the acoustics were lacking so the sound quality for this concert wasn’t as good as the rich, surround-sound-like experience of the NJPAC. It’s a shame that the venue had an unfortunate effect on the concert but oh well :/
Crowd
There was obviously a high percentage of young females but there seems to have been slightly more guys than before. There were very few older people attending this show and few Asian people in general, but I think the group was still diverse. The crowd waited patiently outside in the setting sun, and it was really nice to see two concertgoers dressed in Ongshimi Minhyuk outfits! The general check-in process was very organized but there was, understandably, much more security (metal detectors, bag x-rays and K-9 dogs) since this is NYC. Either way, everyone was seated and ready to go in no time thanks to all the helpful staff.
CONCERT
Although the concert was originally advertised to be at 8 PM, I found out only a few days earlier that it would actually be at 7 PM. But I guess most people got the memo because the place was pretty much full before the show started. There were some “false alarms” because a few things happened before everything officially began (e.g. the lights dimmed, a screen for the tour popped up and an Mnet ad appeared twice), but the show did start at approximately 7:10 PM.
Stage/Audio/Visual
The main stage wasn’t that big and it was only one level, but there were multiple big screens that displayed things from different angles and used different effects. The screens enhanced the overall concert experience since I could watch close ups on side screens and also enjoy background visuals on the main screen. Like I said, the audio was not very good and sounded a bit low for some reason. It also seemed like the audio was only coming from the stage area instead of sound filling up the entire theater. Either way, the lighting was good and there were points during performances where stage lights changed colors, steam blew from the stage and confetti rained over part of the audience.
Videos
The show started with a really cool opening video that introduced the group/members. The other concert videos were also good and I actually think that this year’s video content was better than last year’s. Instead of a Monsta X party, they had “MonTube” that showed each member doing funny YouTube-style video clips that related to their personalities and interests. The other videos showed more scenes and details from the Alligator/Shoot Out era and they did a good job explaining the whole 7 Deadly Sins concept that they’ve pretty much had since their Beautiful era. Although I definitely enjoyed the videos for The Connect Tour, I still don’t quite know what they were really about. So Monsta X did a much better job at making their videos entertaining yet understandable this year.
Talks
Monsta X talked throughout the concert in both English and Korean (with a translator), but they made a clear effort to speak more English this time. Although some members still struggle with English, you could hear how much other members improved (Kihyun’s English is now the second best in the group!) and most were able to speak more comfortably than last year. The most surprising part of the talks was when each member gave a little speech entirely in English at the end of the show. I honestly think they should’ve just let Shownu and Wonho speak Korean since it was so difficult for them to express themselves in a different language, but I appreciate the effort and I think their English will continue to improve with time.
Songs/Performances
Monsta X performed about 20 songs, plus they had special group acts and solos. There were more props for this concert which was a nice touch to their performances. As usual, everyone sounded good and the dancing was on point. I think their wardrobe was better than last year’s and their black and gold outfits were my favorite. They sang about half of the songs from each of their latest albums, some songs from The Connect mini album, but few (or even no) songs from the rest of their discography. I guess Monsta X is reaching a point in their career where their song collection has gotten so big that many great songs can’t be in their concerts simply due to time constraints. And the fact that they released two full length albums back-to-back made it even less likely that most of their older songs would be performed. Nevertheless, some of the missing songs were featured in the bgm of their videos and overall Monsta X picked a solid set list that included different styles, energies and moods for the concert.
I’m not a fan of the remix versions of Monsta X songs, but the 8-bit video screen for I’M’s part in Hero was really nice. They sang less title tracks but the new choreography for their non-title tracks was good (especially for Oh My). Minhyuk and Jooheon sang the Ongshimi chorus during one of the talks and it was funny when Jooheon sang and Wonho rapped another member’s part while performing. I was surprised that many of my favorite songs weren’t in the concert, but it was good seeing less/non-promoted songs live. The solo performances were a real treat since I enjoyed Jooheon's drum solo and Hyungwon’s DJ stage was one of the best parts of the show.
Conclusion
Overall, it was great to see Monsta X again. Unlike last year, I had to stand up most of the time so I could see, but thankfully I didn’t lose my voice or get dehydrated because I learned my lesson from my first concert :P. There was actually more humor in this show than last year so it was fun to enjoy music and laugh throughout the evening. I hope everyone had a wonderful time, and I’m glad that the rest of the world tour was a success. Monsta X, fighting!
For more details about the concert, keep reading :)
Intro video
Shoot Out, Hero (remix), Trespass (remix)
Intro talk
Kihyun screams hits a high note that makes him cough
It was really funny/cute when Minhyuk was like “Did you miss us? Did you miss ME?? Did you miss Wonho?”
Party Time, Play It Cool
Talk + Kihyun asks us to sing the chorus of Play It Cool’s English version
Mohae, Jealousy
MonTube video
Shownu - ASMR mukbang
Wonho - Fitness
Minhyuk - Makeup
Kihyun - Coffee
Hyungwon- Fashion
Jooheon - Cooking (makes a Honeyto burrito)
I.M. - English class
Group Performances
Kihyun, Minhyuk, & Hyungwon - Bazzi’s Myself
Jooheon & I.M hip hop song + Jooheon plays the drums
Wonho & Shownu - Mirror (made by Wonho)
Talk about songs
Jooheon & I.M messed up the bottle flip during their performance so they tried again but still failed :P Hyungwon was the one who was able to do it. (Note: They didn’t get around to talking about their song, but according to @KUnnies_on Twitter it’s called 삼박자)
Honestly, Noel Hada, Sweetheart
Talk
No Reason
7 Deadly Sins Movie
This was a very interesting video because it clearly showed which sin each member was portraying: wrath (Shownu), sloth (Wonho), agony (Minhyuk), loneliness (Kihyun), pride (Hyungwon), greed (Jooheon), and envy (I.M.). Even though I already knew/figured out most of this already, the reason why I wasn’t sure about some of them is because they replaced lust and gluttony with agony and loneliness, which are more emotions than actual sins.
It’s nice that the video officially clarified all this because I thought Minhyuk was lust since many of his scenes in MVs had roses in them and Kihyun was gluttony since all the formula-filled images related to him made it seem that he was a glutton for knowledge or something (or maybe Wonho was gluttony because he ate an apple in an MV?). Either way, their concept makes more sense now :)
Who Do You Love, Dramarama
Talk
Oh My, Special, Fallin’
Talk + them acting like this was the end of the show :P
Alligator, H.One’s DJ performance, Rodeo
Real Goodbye/Closing (mostly done in English)
By My Side
Group picture, Wonho’s shirt toss, final bows
Credits with behind the scenes footage
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I am here
Alright, my first D&D fic because sincerely, I think I have a problem. Mr. Sinclaire x MC (Isabel Fairfield)
Word count is approximately 1750
Rating: there be no smut or language here. G.
I wrote this through my “notes” feature on my phone so I apologize for any formatting errors or grammatical... things. I also want to preface that I’ve never written this era, so I apologize if language or what not is awful. Let me know what you think...
——————
London was lovely. The Earl of Edgewater’s home even better. Time with her friend ; time flirting with her friends step brother. Briar has loved every moment of her time as Isabel’s ladies maid. She had experienced so many new things. She got to enjoy Isabel’s new wardrobe, even occasionally getting to try on her fine new dresses. Of course, that was with her best friends approval. They had, after all, only been sharing clothes since they were in diapers. They had always shared, well, everything. It was this, that alarmed her when, on this evening she went up to help Isabel to prepare for dinner and her friend was gone.
There was a note on her bed- Isabel’s scrawling hand writing saying she would be back shortly, to please not alert Mr. Marlcaster or Miss Sutton. Briar knew Isabel though... ever since she was a little girl, she’d had a wanderers heart. While they were in Grovershire, of course, it was safer for her to roam. She knew the safest routes home, knew the area as well as the back of her hand. London; well; London, she did not. She should not have left with out an escort. There were unscrupulous people in a city this big, who would be overly happy to take advantage of a lady like Isabel.
Don’t ask or alert Mr. Marlcaster or Miss Sutton... What was she supposed to do? What was she going to do if Isabel got lost?! She could ask Mr. Harper or Miss Parsons to help locate her, but neither of them were anymore familiar with the city than she was. Mr. Marlcaster was, but Isabel didn’t want him involved.... She thought a moment, then rushed down to let Mr. Harper know she was stepping out a moment, in case she were needed (unlikely, but not unheard of, since Isabel was out.
Briar hurried down several rows of townhouses until things began to look familiar. She and Isabel had taken a stroll and she had pointed out the townhouse where she had attended her first dinner party. He would know the city. She could tell him the normal places she would go; he could make suggestions... he wouldn’t report it directly to the Countess. She knocked on the door, acutely aware that his own servants were unlikely to allow her access to him. She wrung her hands after she knocked again, a little more desperately this time, waited a moment before she stepped back down the stairs, fully prepared to go find Isabel on her own. She honestly didn’t hear the door open, until a deep voice softly said, “Miss Daly?”
Dropping into a curtsy and lowering her head, she said, “ I am so terribly sorry to bother you Mr. Sinclaire.” She stood again, a little afraid to be addressing the gentry man. Not all of them were kind, whereas even those who were did not always extend the same courtesy to those “below” them. Isabel spoke frequently of the man before her; and she seemed convinced of his kindness- that he was a good man. Briar would soon see, now, wouldn’t she?
“Miss Daly, is everything quite alright?” He looked far more casual than any of the other times she had happened to see him, just in his tan undershirt and trousers.
“Mr. Sinclaire, it’s Isabel—“ she cut off, immediately correcting herself, “Lady Isabel.” She had never fully understood the term about the color draining from someone’s face until that instant. He looked stricken as she continued, “I- I mean, I’m sure it’s nothing—she has always been her own person and—“
“Miss Daly, where is Lady Isabel?”
~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~
Ernest Sinclaire had always prided himself on not being prone to flights of fancy or being susceptible to panic. In fact, when he first saw Miss Daly, he half expected that Lady Isabel may be right behind her or playing some sort of trick on him— until he saw the state that her lady’s maid was in. The state her friend was in. The handful of times he’s seen Miss Daly, she seemed happy; carefree. This was unnerving. It took her a moment to compose herself- she took a deep breath, “I don’t know!!” It came out in a rush and as though she was trying very hard not to sob. “Back at home, in Grovershire, Isabel wandered. It was safe. She knew that. It isn’t here. She does not know what is safe here... I don’t know the city; the only ones I know who may are Mr. Marlcaster and maybe Miss Sutton, but neither of them.... She asked me not to involve them. She doesn’t completely trust them. I simply cannot stand the idea of harm coming to her.”
Clearly, that made two of them. He had a grasp of the layout of the city area closest to them. He couldn’t imagine that she would have wandered too far. She was a little fearless, but not stupid. She would never go so far, right? “Miss Daly, you should return to your townhouse- in case she has already returned for the evening. I will grab my jacket and sweep the area. Lady Isabel is no fool, even if she has not yet returned, I imagine she will not be far.” Miss Daly nodded once, his words soothing her fears slightly, “Is she prone to visit parks? Gardens? Storefronts?”
“Parks and gardens, probably. When she ran in Grovershire, it was often to be alone. To think— but she’s been different here. Distracted, a little.”
So, it would be akin to finding a needle in a haystack. ‘Perfect.’ What he told her, however, was, “Please return home. I will find her, I will bring her home.”
“Thank you, Mr. Sinclaire!” With that, away toward the townhouse she went. With that, *he* was being sent on a wild goose chase through London. The absolute worst part was, his only complaint was fear for her well-being. Honestly, in his own mind, he’d search for her all night if he needed to. He could not tolerate the thought of something.. of anything, happening.
He returned to his study to grab his discarded jacket which he put back on and headed to the streets. How- How had he let this woman get under his skin? So far under his skin. She was beautiful and bold- almost more than even her current station as heiress could grant her. Challenging- at every turn, when their gazes met, it was a hard fought battle on who would look away first. Her garden party had started it, this infatuation. His dinner party had convinced him he was doomed. Not even the lovely in her own right, Miss Holloway had been able to draw his attention- and her poisonous words towards Lady Isabel had not had the effect she’d been hoping for. He had enough respect for the earl and for the Lady of Edgewater herself to allow it.
Through one of the parks he wandered, through two of the public gardens, through to the heart of the city... while he had been feigning interest in Miss Holloway’s complements and discussion at his dinner; if he were truthful, he had paid far more interest to the conversation Isabel had been having with Duke Richards. She had told him her mother had been an opera singer— maybe—
There. She sat on a bench across the street from the Opera St. James. Her gaze was upward, on the gas lighted marquee sign. Her expression— normally so lively and joyous— was curiously blank. No... it was solemn. He studied her, one of the few times he was able to without her doing the same. She was so stunning. Every time he saw her, it was like opening his eyes anew. She lowered her head a bit, one bare hand lifted to brush her cheek. A tear. Rarely, she gave glimpses of her grief. Only, with him, in their conversation during his dinner party when she had asked about his wife. He hadn’t considered it but he’d had years to grieve the woman his heart had no longer favored for the majority of the marriage. She’d had weeks. Weeks in which she had been thrust into a completely different life and had barely batted an eye. So strong.
“Is this where she sang? Your mother, I mean?” He asked it, not even aware he was going to. What was it that she had done to him?
Isabel startled, a hand coming to her chest, but upon seeing hearing his voice and seeing him, it was almost as though a shroud was lifted and the melancholy was, while not entire dispelled, vastly improved. She smiled at him, “It is.” She paused for a moment, “I do not recall mentioning that she was a singer to you.” She tilted her head to one side, her dark curls falling over her shoulder.
He absently rubbed the back of his neck, “I may have overheard you speaking of it to Duke Richards.”
“You were eavesdropping on the Duke and I?” She feigned shock.
“Clearly I couldn’t rely on Mr. Marlcaster to intervene should the Duke do anything... untoward. I believe my attention was where it needed to be.” He could feel himself blushing, heat creeping up his neck.
“Mr. Marlcaster is... trying. I cannot imagine being raised by the Countess was easy. In particular when you’re clearly not the favored child. I’ve only endured a few weeks and have found it quite trying. A lifetime?”
“You are likely more kind than he deserves.”
“I’ve been given a chance at a new life. I think that opportunity should include kindness for those willing to try. He has many reasons to hate me. I only hope to prove myself by worthy of it.”
He walked closer as she spoke and sat on the bench beside her. Near enough he could touch her, far enough to be considered appropriate. “You know, you gave Miss Daly quite a fright.”
Her mouth dropped into an o of surprise, “Briar came to you?” She looked slyly at him from the corner of her eyes, “You were worried?” She put her hand on the bench between them.
He looked at it for a moment, Small, delicate, bare. A question. An invitation. He looked at her, met her gaze, not willing to look away as he twined his fingers with hers, squeezing them softly, “ I am here, aren’t I?”
#choices: stories you play#desire & decorum#mc x ernest sinclaire#ernest sinclaire#playchoices#dont be too brutal please#💙
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So I never really see a whole bunch of these, but how about some hcs of just the whole RFA plus minor trio all gathering at someone's house in their pajamas to watch a scary movie? Like just some hang out time. MC could be there too, but isn't in a relationship w/ anyone. everyonestillhasalowkeycrushonthem-WHAT
“everyone still has a lowkey crush” OR MAYBE IT’S POLYAMORY - shush. Anyway, it is I, coming out of a mountain of work to drop headcanons!
Yoosung predictably finds someone to cling to, and also predictably enough it is Zen, who initially tries to shove him off before getting so scared himself that he uses Yoosung as a makeshift teddy-bear. To be honest Yoosung didn’t quite get the memo that it was scary movie night, he just thought it was pajama and hang out night, so initially the opening shot of a family moving into a Victorian-era home seemed to him like the beginning of a fun, feel-good comedy. His expectations were horribly betrayed. Poor Yoosung!
Zen was aware that this was scary movie night and Zen came in prepared to be a tough guy for you to cling to when the tensions rose, but unfortunately it took about fifteen minutes for Yoosung to get spooked and crawl into Zen’s lap like a fluffed-up chick. At first Zen tried to shove him off with a palm to his face, but after two beers and a couple of axe murders Zen wasn’t feeling too great about the weird creaking sounds the upstairs neighbors made. It wasn’t that he was scared, he protested afterwards. He just wanted Yoosung to stop crying. That’s the only reason why they were cuddling, dang-it.
Jaehee, in contrast, was stone-cold the entire time and casually munching popcorn. She managed to snag the Big Comfy Chair, the squishy one that felt great to sink into after a long day of slaving underneath a mountain of paperwork, and was having a good time in her fleece pajamas just relaxing. The entire affair seemed cheesy to her, and she gossiped with Vanderwood (who was seated on the arm of the big comfy chair, because Seven had chased them out of their original space with too many puns) about how bad the special effects were. At least, until she fell asleep. Sleep well, Jaehee. It’s better to miss all this nonsense.
Jumin is also stone-cold, but he seems to be studying the movie in a way you find… worrying. It’s like he’s trying to take mental notes about the arcane geometry that the teenage son starts drawing in the basement, and you are at least 90% certain when you see him pull out his phone, he’s looking up some kind of symbol or another. He also announces a strange amount of trivia about various objects that appear, such as antique desks and fancy writing implements, and he totally dismisses that that’s how insurance policies work. Zen calls him a buzzkill.
Seven is just out to have a good time, and by a good time we of course mean scare everyone as much as possible. He’s come pre-equipped with bags of slimy things and has booby-trapped your apartment with all manner of weird gags and sound-making devices that he can activate with a push of a button. He later has to pay for a new door your cupboard when Saeran goes to get some cookies, is attacked by pop-out tube snakes, and gets so freaked out that he rips the wood off his hinges and tries to attack an imaginary monster in your kitchen.
V is an innocent, sweet child who tends to watch classical films rather than pulpy horror. He whispers very loud questions to Jumin, who he’s sitting next to, about why the teenage daughter hasn’t called the police or even changed into something a bit more practical for running. V remains unaware that he is a hypocrite. He grows steadily more and more perturbed over the course of the film, and as the night grows later, he leans more and more against his Best Friend Jumin while not taking his eyes off the screen. He’s weirdly fascinated by it, but it also just sort of… upsets him in a weird way.
Jumin is patient with this.
Saeran honestly showed up mostly to eat your snacks, not to watch horror movies, which are Dumb. He is also not sitting next to you and holding your hand because he is scared either, it is just because he doesn’t want you to be scared. After the Kitchen Incident where Seven pranked him, he is still definitely not scared, and definitely not half in your lap because he desperately wants the comfort of another human being. It’s just….. … .…he’s just protecting you from Seven’s bullshit with his body ok. He’s defending you. It isn’t about him!!!
He convinces literally no one. You try not to laugh.
Vanderwood just wanted to eat snacks and laze around in their fabulous leopard print pajamas, and they’re honestly getting to do neither because Saeran is hogging the snacks and Jaehee is hogging the popcorn. This is part of the reason why, in a huff, they put as much distance between Seven and themselves as possible and relocate near Jaehee and the popcorn, which they steel at every possible opportunity while also engaging in some good-old horror movie smack-talk. Then they feel a…… crawling on their neck, produced by one of Seven’s animatronic spiders, and they scream so loudly that someone thought there was a murder and called the police on your apartment.
You wouldn’t be surprised if Vanderwood re-enacts their own horror movie scenario some day.
#midnightmagi#mysme#mysme headcanons#mystic messenger#mystic messenger headcanons#mysme reactions#mystic messenger reactions#mysme imagines#mystic messenger imagines#long post#mystic messenger spoilers#mysme spoilers#vanderwood#v#saeran choi#horror movie#yoosung kim#zen#hyun ryu#jaehee kang#jumin han#seven#luciel choi#unknown#let's play spot the ships
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Matisse Thybulle is becoming the cult hero Philly deserves
Matisse Thybulle is living up to his college reputation during the start of his 76ers tenure.
The Sixers rookie sensation is a walking defensive highlight reel.
Elton Brand kept repeating himself at the Philadelphia 76ers’ introductory press conference after the 2019 NBA Draft. “We had to have him,” Brand said again and again, subtly acknowledging the rumors that he had promised Washington Huskies wing Matisse Thybulle during the draft combine and was willing to do whatever it took to get him. Celtics general manager Danny Ainge saw Brand’s desperation and took advantage, trading back four spots and picking up the No. 33 selection from Philadelphia in return.
Brand may have telegraphed his infatuation with Thybulle, but the cost of an early second rounder won’t matter if the Sixers’ rookie continues the riveting progression he’s shown in the early part of the season. When Thybulle is on the floor, it’s hard to notice anyone else. The Denver Nuggets got a first hand look at that experience on Wednesday night.
Thybulle was everywhere and everything against the Nuggets, flying around the court on defense, finishing above the rim in transition, and continuing his hot shooting from deep. He ended the night with 13 points, five rebounds, and one steal, with multiple jaw-dropping sequences underscoring his second straight brilliant performance. He finished +20 in a game where no other Sixer was better than +9.
Matisse Thybulle, to me, you are perfect. pic.twitter.com/AzlG1tsqcV
— NBC Sports Philadelphia (@NBCSPhilly) December 11, 2019
Thybulle is just now working his way into a regular spot in Brett Brown’s rotation, but when he does play, he’s making a major impact. The Sixers are 16-2 in games where he plays at least 12 minutes. He’s one of the league’s most accurate three-point shooters on low volume. According to 538’s RAPTOR metric, he’s the most impactful defensive player in the league, with a slight lead over Rudy Gobert and Kawhi Leonard.
This feels like the rare rookie who is ready to contribute right away while still just scratching the surface of what he could one day become. The rest of the world is just now seeing what Brand always believed.
Thybulle has been a historic defensive playmaker
All Thybulle did during his four years at Washington was rewrite the defensive record books. As a senior, Thybulle became the first player in the modern era ever to have 100 steals and 80 blocks in a season. He was Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year as a junior and national defensive player of the year as a senior.
Thybulle did his damage his last two years playing in the 2-3 zone that head coach Mike Hopkins brought with him from Syracuse. It led some to wonder if his immense production would translate to pro-style defenses, a question Thybulle answered definitively as soon as he put on Sixers colors.
Thybulle immediately impressed in summer league, and took his legend to another level in the preseason, where he averaged 2.6 steals and 1.4 blocks in just 19.1 minutes per night. Just ask Luke Kennard if Thybulle’s defensive numbers in college were a mirage.
Some Matisse Thybulle highlights from last night, focusing on his defense.
He's now averaging 5.6 steals and 2.8 blocks per 36 minutes in preseason pic.twitter.com/tuutNf89P4
— Tom West (@TomWestNBA) October 16, 2019
Thybulle’s defensive playmaking has been just as excellent in the regular season. He’s averaging 3.1 steals and 1.5 blocks per-36. He’s second in the NBA in steal rate. He’s near the top of the leaderboard in deflections per-36. The Sixers defense, which is No. 4 in the league, is 3.7 points per 100 possessions better when he’s on the floor.
His anticipation instincts are real. His reaction time is real. Seemingly every time he takes the court, Thybulle is making two or three defensive plays at minimum that make you rewind and watch again.
youtube
At 22 years old, Thybulle already looks like a seasoned vet on the defensive end if you accept that every player will have a missed rotation once in a while. Those that saw him at Washington knew his steal and block rates would translate, zone be damned. It’s what he’s showing so far on the other end that is actually surprising.
Thybulle is a developing shooter
Thybulle’s jumper had potential coming out of Washington, but it was also no sure thing. He hit a respectable 35.8 percent of his threes on four attempts per game over his four-year career, but his percentage was down to just 30.5 percent as a senior. More troubling, Thybulle looked reluctant to shoot in his final year, passing up open threes to swing the ball or attack half-hearted closeouts.
Thybulle hit 39 percent of his 28 attempts from three in summer league, giving Philly hoop his range could extend to the pro line. He’s continued that in a big way during the regular season. Right now, Thybulle is hitting 46.3 percent of the 54 three-pointers he’s attempted. That puts him No. 6 in the league in three-point percentage.
THYBULLE BACK TO BACK THREE ! #PhilaUnite pic.twitter.com/WNcpNO22kU
— 76ers FR (@FR_Sixers) December 9, 2019
Thybulle’s shooting is going to regress, but his touch looks legitimate and his low arcing shot appears soft coming out of his hands.
The Sixers don’t need Thybulle to be one of the league’s best shooters like he’s been so far. They just need him to be respectable. Anything else he gives them beyond that on offense is going to make the imagination run wild of what he could one day become.
The 76ers finally found a usable rookie
From Joel Embiid to Ben Simmons to Markelle Fultz to Zhaire Smith, the Sixers have had comically bad luck with rookie injuries. We’re not trying to jinx Thybulle, simply noting that even making it 24 games into his rookie year is a cause for celebration.
Thybulle is also simply easy to root for. Every time he speaks to the media, you can tell he’s living his dream.
"Even just like six months ago, if you had told me I'd be in the position I'm in today, it would have been really hard for me to believe you... I'm so grateful."
Matisse Thybulle doesn't hold back on how it feels to have the team relying on him. pic.twitter.com/QbMu67HfMS
— NBC Sports Philadelphia (@NBCSPhilly) December 9, 2019
Sixers fans are turning Thybulle into the cult hero he was always destined to be. This has been the perfect union of a hyper-passionate fanbase and a player whose impressive skill set and beaming personality demand appreciation beyond his per-game numbers.
honestly i don’t even watch the other sixers anymore i just watch matisse
— Michael Levin (@Michael_Levin) December 11, 2019
the Matisse Thybulle draft day deal with the Celtics is the first time Philly has won a trade with Boston since we got Ben Franklin back in 1723
— shamus (@shamus_clancy) December 9, 2019
Thybulle has outlier athletic ability with outlier defensive instincts. He’s entered the league with his own signature celebration. He has a ways to go on offense and will need to learn the nuances of defensive coverages, but it’s clear he has some special talents that he’s already been able to successfully deploy against pros.
The Sixers are still figuring out who they are with mismatched pieces that think outside the box the rest of the NBA is living in. Whatever the Sixers eventually develop into, Thybulle will be a big piece.
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