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the-solar-system52 · 5 months

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THE RUIN FILES BOOK COVER JUST GOT RELEASED AND OF COURSE I NEED TO GIVE MY TWO CENTS ON IT!

First of all, it's coming out on April 2nd and my birthday is April 8th, meaning I will actually be able to buy and read this book! I will no doubt be reporting on anything of interest and doing some theorising, so I'm really looking forward!

People have already commented on this, BUT OH MY GOD ARE WE FINALLY GETTING SOME BONNIE AND FREDDY LORE??? They could've used any other render of Freddy for the cover, there's even a version of this poster without text, but they SPECIFICALLY used the version Freddy wrote on! I really hope we get some insight into Fronnie being canon or not, I mean, even MAT PAT ships it now. I couldn't have been unintentional.

MY DUDE!!! THERE HE IS!!! Look, I'm not expecting any crazy lore drops since DCA's plotline was already wrapped up pretty nicely imo, but what I do want is CLARIFICATION. Like, even though Youtooz technically confirmed my Eclipse theory, Youtooz is only a merch manufacturer, so it can be debated whether or not they can be relied on for 100% CANON info. And even though I'm quite confident in my theory (that post is probably one of my longest) some parts are a little bit of a stretch and it takes AWHILE to explain. It'd be nice for it be confirmed and just have ONE reliable source to point to.

So I was VERY excited when I saw this because many fans pointed out that this is CONCEPT ART, and not the official poster. I thought we may be getting more concept art in this book! But unfortunately, this was not the case.

Scott replied to this situation saying that the use of concept art was entirely an accident, and will be changed in the final product. I gotta say, this is a bit disappointing. But it is in character for Scott and Steelwool. Unlike the Bendy creators posting concept art on their social media, or Undertale having a whole 'The Art of Undertale' book, FNAF has never been one to share behind-the-scenes stuff.

But I don't blame them. This is most likely due to how theory-focused the fandom is. It'd be easy to see people use concept art as evidence for a theory, despite it not being credible. Like how people use unused lines in the code of the game for theories, despite them probably being UNUSED for a reason. Unfortunately, sharing unused creative ideas would only make the lore even more confusing for some people, so I think its good they didn't go this route.

Anyway, I'm SO excited for this book to come out! Though fnaf books do have a history of being leaked before their release date, if that does happen, it'll most likely be closer to April. But I'll keep you posted!

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qfitpac · 8 months

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Imo this is the most likely event for Sunday, and let me explain why. (leaks from the QSMP discord)

First of all, earlier Quackity mentioned being on a plane. Why is this relevant? Well the only way to get to Korea is by plane. However, 14 hours later, he tweeted that he had lied about the plane. Now why would he do this?

This is, of course, because BTS had been testing the mod and realized that Korean wasn't working. For some reason, whoever coded the translate mod had mixed up the language files and replaced Korean with Spanish, specifically Spanish with a Korean accent. (Tbf I don't blame them, the file was named something like QSMP_language_file_v3_finalFINALVERSION_KOR_Korean_Hangul_Accented_Spanish_ESPANOL, and obvi if ur screen is small the last part would get cut off).

Now Quackity is in a predicament. He's very smart, obviously, so he cancelled his plane immediately and actually got a 70% refund even though he was technically canceling within the 24hr window. And then he got in a call with admins. I was actually in this call (they added me on accident) and although I don't speak or understand Spanish I was able to comprehend everything perfectly (they were speaking English).

Basically, they were screwed. BTS themselves had scheduled out time to make a guest appearance on the QSMP, this was huge! MASSIVE!! But the translator wasn't working: what were they going to do? Now naturally my first instinct was oh, well they can speak English, right? But I should've held in my trust of Quackity and the entire admin team, bcuz their creativity and problem solving is as always off the charts.

One of the admins (not going to name anyone for privacy reasons) had been doing a project on their spare time. Eggsonas, of course, have been a trend on and off since the first adoption day. And this admin had been making all sorts of models. It just so happened, by a stroke of luck, that they had made 7 bts eggs!!!!! Everyone was so excited about it, the entire call was shouting for a good minute lol. I actually had to take out my earbuds.

Eggs, of course, cannot speak. This solved the translator problem flawlessly, as the sign and book translators were working as normal. It also gave the BTS members an extra 2 hours to play on the server! (previously their managers had allocated 2 hours for them to find/create minecraft skins, which obviously is now unneeded.) It's a win-win-win.

Now on to analyzing the teasers: firstly, you'll notice the Update accounts tweets. These are, of course, referencing how bts have both touched and eaten ice and ice cream. Also, as true fans will know, bts just recently broke their freezer and had to mop everything up. It's a nice red herring given the previous ice imagery in teasers, and we all know Quackity loves his trickery.

Secondly, the seven outlined in grass. Grass has been a prominent feature in many BTS music videos. Some say it's even a staple of their work. For example, in their 4th music video there is grass on the ground, to represent how growing up has made them more grounded. Nextly, the seven. Obviously there are seven members, but combined with grass this is actually a double hint: BTS was active for seven years between 2013 and 2020 during which they released songs. This is a special number for them because of these events.

Now obviously, I don't have all the answers. My prediction on the discourse, for example, was completely made up. But i hope this gives you all a sense of what to expect come Sunday. (also please don't tell any qsmp admins I'm leaking this info 😭😭😭😭)

#qsmp #Qsmp theories #This information is untrue and a piece of creative writing and my lunch break ended 40 minutes ago help.#On my god fit is destroying Spreens house is this him finally letting go?

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jklovesfandoms · 2 years

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My friends, the second I admitted to loving Ricky Potts: I mean, I could see you loving the romantic who wants to move to France, or the one who wants to go back to his fiance, or the one without a head. BUT THE ONE WHO SINGS ABOUT DOING THE DO WITH SPACE CATS?

Me: he just like me, fr fr

The one who's just like me, fr fr: *disabled, very autistic coded (imo), created an entire alien race*

(YES I CREATED AN ENTIRE ALIEN RACE IN MY CHILDHOOD, AND AN ENTIRE LANGUAGE, AND AN ENTIRE SIGN LANGUAGE, AND YES I CAN STILL SPEAK IT, KINDA)

They may or may not have been space cats. I will not elaborate (I will, if I am asked politely) (or if I'm put into a singing competition to be revived after a horrible roller coaster accident)

#ride the cyclone #rtc #ride the cyclone musical #ricky potts #ricky potts rtc #ricky potts my beloved #ricky rtc #ricky potts is my gender #man I'm just like him fr fr

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dragynkeep · 2 years

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One thing that really get me about Twiins rant about making Blake's skin darker is how unneeded it was. If she was upset for people not following the rules, that's all she needed to say. But I guess, maybe she felt the need to get on her high horse and talk down to people. I can't help but feel that she did that because some part of her knows that being an asshole and is extremely wrong. However she does not want to confront this, so she hides this by defending another minority (while being completely unaware of how her words hurt said minority).

Another thing that really gets me is her wondering why it is the fantasy minority who always had to have darker skin which is...The answer to her question is right in her face. Gee, I wonder why the minority character who experiences racism is drawn with darker skin by poc artists, gee Twiins I wonder why that is, I see no possible reason why it's the minority character and not more often say, Weiss, who's from the most racist kingdom, father is a racist, and company literally owned slaves.

Lastly, I really don't like how she assumes that everyone who drew people with darker skin knew she was asian coded. She makes the assumption that everyone did it out of malice when that's not the case. Not only does that target black people who saw themselves in Blake, it also hurts darker skin asians who did the same. But ya know, I went looking for the brief evidence that she flashed on screen that Monty said Blake was asian coded. The only thing I found was Monty saying that Blake was somewhat design after Linda Le. That tweet was made back in 2013, which was 11 years ago. Sure that was on the wiki, but it's such a small detail that people can legit just look over it on accident. How does Twiins expect to know that Monty said something like that from 11 years ago. Besides that, she's also ignoring that people could and do see Blake's asian elements as surface deep like Yang, Sun, and Tai. So again, it's never been out of malice, it's never been to erase the asian coding because Blake wouldn't be the "right" minority, it's happening because poc with darker skin colors seem themselves in Blake.

All and all, I'm just worried that this will pit black people against Asian people and dark skinned asians against light skinned asians. I really hope that Twiins' words don't reach that many people nor do others spread it as well.

that's entirely the issue here is that instead of just saying exactly what her issue was, that people didn't obey her rules which imo were racist anyways for her as a white woman to impliment, but instead she co-opted a serious movement targeting anti asian hate to grandstand on. which was never her place & just makes her seem like this white saviour ass bitch who has to educate the poor, uneducated poc about our own issues.

even when she was confronted about the minority she was supposedly 'defending', she further mocked them & insulted them while acting like she was doing them a favour. the literal 'white woman's burden' on her dumb ass lmao.

you absolutely put it out right on why people would associate blake as a minority & would want to depict her as one because i'm sorry, twiins can use an out of context, 11 year old tweet by monty's horny ass all she likes but blake in the show is white. the show knows how to create asian characters, they know how to implement certain aspects to get that across with characters like ren, sun, sienna, bolin, etc. blake has none of that, she was written as a white character based mostly on her white, european voice actress. there is no asian erasure here & there never was, twiins is just too much of a dumbass to admit she was wrong & furthermore, that she was racist.

that's the long & short of it, she was racist. she pitted two minorities against each other, mocked them, insulted them, wrongly assumed that all dark skinned blakes were black when the submission she rejected was of blake as indian - japanese, & overall just acted like an authority where she had no right to. this was never her place to speak over actual poc & the fact she's not only misused terms like blackface & blackwashing, but that she refuses to reflect on any of her actions & just instead cried that she wanted to 'be educated' is disgusting. people were educating her, they were mostly civil where i personally thought they absolutely had the right to call her musty, dusty white ass out & yet she still played the victim. this was the exact same thing she did in the adam debacle when poc were trying to educate her on how her generalizing statements about the character were harmful because they ignored the racial aspect to his character & how the writer's racism influenced it.

i too hope this doesn't incite more hatred towards these groups. light & dark skinned asians, alongside black people, didn't need this when they're both just trying to bring light to their issues. thankfully it does seem like she got a fair amount of backlash to this but it shouldn't have had to be this way.

#rwby #rwde #blake belladonna #twiins iink #ais.txt #answered #q #racism /

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cat-sapphics · 3 years

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fuck it imma dump aroace c!tommy on y’all, this is gonna be a long one...

gonna take a break from focusing on twitter for the moment and talk about a hc that’s going around the mcyt fandom but isn’t quite popular enough yet imo. original idea certainly isn’t mine but instead of “it just makes sense” i’ve compiled SO MUCH to make it all add up perfectly!!

he's a very unstable and insecure character, yeah? so he doesn't want people to know things about him that probably aren't "normal" - Especially since there are so fucking many romantic relationships on the dream smp, i guess it's kinda expected of him since ranboo and tubbo got together so openly. but he's aroace, so if he does get into a relationship he won't feel any real romantic or physical attraction and he won't be happy. to cover this, this explains why his whole entire bit is all "i love women and girls and i am very straight but also since twitter is canon i might jokingly be lesbian actually and i very much get lots of pussy and i have sex with girls every night and GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS" blah blah blah. it's so abnormal and strange that it's just a poor attempt at a cover-up, which only kinda works because everyone else obviously knows it's a cover-up but they are just stumped at what for?? he's afraid that since he's so hated on the server already, if he fails to conform to their expectations he'll just be cast out even more. obviously that wouldn't happen, but considering how young he is and how much trauma he's been through, it's reasonable (and actually very normal) for his brain to just shut down all logical thinking and water it all down to "act in a way so as to survive."

but then it doesn’t even stop there - last night i saw someone point out that THOSE cat/mellohi discs are green and purple, which perfectly go hand-in-hand with the colors of the aro and ace flags that aren’t on the grayscale. and i FLIPPED. OUT. because honestly?? obviously there was more to it than just this, but i like to think that at least part of the reason why people failed to grasp his obsession/connection with those discs that he ruined relationships with others over was due to the comfort he found in those colors, almost as if it’s subtle pride “merch” for himself that didn’t raise any questions in that direction.

and THEN i realized that the allium flower is one single item consisting of both purple and green, so as the number one allium duo enthusiast, i just had to bring ranboo into it somehow, which actually came really easily because i knew just what to do: while ranboo is trying his best to make amends with tommy for whatever reason he’s so hostile to the enderboy for (which tommy refuses to disclose; nothing’s ever confused ranboo more), he does what he does best and simply wants to be there for him during whatever he’s doing through - but while doing so, he accidentally puts too much pressure on tommy to spill it all and kinda forces his little secret about being “broken” out of him completely by accident. ranboo feels bad of course, so he makes it clear that said secret is safe with him (he won’t even tell tubbo without permission, and that is very important to tommy because he doesn’t wanna potentially lose his best friend more than he already has) and that being aroace does Not, in fact, make him broken. ranboo picks an allium from the flower forest nearby and gives it to him the next day, their unspoken symbol of trust and acceptance between each other now.

and honestly? if that’s not enough allium duo bonding content for you? i can keep going! to me, c!ranboo is VERY MUCH heavily-coded to be nonbinary (unaligned but not agender imo, i haven’t decided on that yet) and biromantic-asexual. so he tells tommy this that at least for one half of his orientation, he is not alone, and not only that, but he finds comfort in the neopronouns end/ends and voi/void - he just hasn’t told anyone except tubbo beforehand because he’s afraid of receiving judgement as well. and so, they’re in this safe little lonely box together. :]

sooooo yeah, that just about does it for now! i’ll keep adding as i see fit because i love writing this stuff sososo much and projecting lgbt identities onto characters is so deeply important and personal to me <3

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phoenixyfriend · 3 years

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Yet Another “Deidara is Related to Naruto” Fic Concept

Okay so you know how Deidara is the only person in canon to share Naruto and Minato's highlighter yellow hair? And there's all those fics where Dei is Naruto's half brother?

So let’s flip that a bit.

(Once again with help from @firebirdeternal)

Thought being this: Minato was an Iwa infiltrator's mission baby, and Dei is Minato's ludicrously younger half-sibling who ends up in Minato's care for hand-wave reasons.

Ends up screwing the whole plot because Minato and his team have to pass on the Kannabi mission due to Infant Acquisition.

(Minato having to deal with "Explosions!" the Toddler is... really funny. Kakashi and Obito don't have a Dramatic Death-based falling out they just have to bond over babysitting the world's least safe child.)

I have two (2) ideas on how Deidara ends up in Minato's care. One is more of a shitpost than the other.

We’ll start with the Serious Drama idea.

There was an Iwa nin that went undercover in Konoha at some point, slept around a bit, got someone pregnant, and dipped before they had to take responsibility. Said Iwa nin was aware of the kid, but also like. Undercover. And also a dick. And like sixteen.

Anyway, Minato's mom never told him about his dad beyond "he was a jerk who ditched us, I don't have photos," and then died on a mission when Minato was relatively young, so Minato didn't know just WHERE his dad was from.

Fast forward a solid twenty-five years or so, and that Iwa nin has gotten married. Iwa nin is now early forties, married a somewhat younger woman (thirties), and caused a pregnancy, this time with the intent to stick around.

Unfortunately, Iwa nin is a shitty husband, and his wife only realizes this most of the way into the pregnancy, and can't just divorce him, because she's clan (the husband is not), and that sort of thing has Social Consequences. So she does something risky... and fakes her death.

And then proceeds to go to Konoha, because she knows about Minato, even saw a pic and got his name once because her husband got a little tipsy once and talked about it, and admitted that he'd gotten a buddy in infiltration to snap a photo a few years back.

And so Deidara's mom sneaks her way across the continent, and dies shortly before or after arriving in Konoha. It’s somewhere the dad won't follow if he realizes she's alive, and because what little she's heard about Minato at that point is generally not terrible. The war hasn't ramped up enough for him to pull The Bullshit, so all she has is the info that the infiltration buddies got her husband.

Definitely lives long enough to provide a name and basic info on who the relative is, but dies before Minato gets back from a mission.

Alternately, Jiraiya is the one who does the intelligence legwork necessary to figure out all the connections and then drops Baby Deidara in Minato's lap because Family is Important to orphans like them but then also does nothing to help because he is Jiraiya.

AND NOW THE CRACK OPTION

So most of the How Babies Happen backstory is technically the same, but Deidara arriving in Konoha is not an intentional situation, but rather a sealing mishap.

As one does.

Kushina just wanted to use a seal to locate other Uzumaki survivors and Minato figured he'd test it first since his chakra is less volatile and whoops.

Minato: Hey, maybe I'll find out who my dad is!

The seal was supposed to just give them a general direction and distance. Like "36.2 miles, 32.3 degrees east of north. 73.9 miles, 2.5 degrees south of west." etc

It was not supposed to reverse summon An Entire Baby.

Note, Deidara’s exploding chakra is a kekkei genkai that I'm saying he got from his mom because Minato doesn't have it, but the hands are likely the kinjutsu. That said, I want Minato to be like "Ah. Hand mouths. That's... can someone get Tsunade please?"

Kushina: I'm not an expert on babies, so I could be wrong, but is this normal??

Kushina: I deeply hope that was a thing the baby already had before we accidentally pulled it through seal-space.

Kushina: His hair is like yours? Maybe he's like a cousin or a nephew? Minato: I guess??? Should. Should we figure out how to send him back? His parents must be freaking out. Kushina: Uhhhhhhh [handwave reason to keep the baby]

The scene HAS TO boil down to Kushina going "Wait shit are we parents now?"

Minato: No! I mean, I--I want to, yes, eventually, but I wasn't planning on anything this soon and really we should get married first and also I think this is technically my brother and--

I had two ideas for why they wouldn’t immediately try to send Dei back, and Birdie offered one, but here’s the best option IMO.

Deidara's chakra blows up the seal before they can figure out how to reverse what they did. Before they can even analyze what went wrong.

They kept notes but something something spilled ink idk. They gotta start from scratch.

Equally likely: They kept notes but they're basically grad students and those notes were all done in a caffeine-fueled 36-hour Coding Binge and literally not even Master-Sealer-Master-Codebreaker Jiraiya can decipher what the fuck they were doing, let alone them.

Frankly they just can't unscramble this egg so they have to just Do Their Best

They have to get a blood test done by Tsunade or Oro to figure out who this kid even is. The hair helps but??? Whomst are you, child?

And then Jiraiya's like 'Yeah, I know those hands. Kid's from Iwa.'

And the war’s already underway so they can’t admit to accidentally stealing an Iwa child.

There's not really a way to say "Hey we accidentally kidnapped this baby" and still save political face because nobody is going to believe it was an accident anyways so? I guess we just have this baby now.

Probably there’s a name tag on his shirt or something so he’s still Deidara.

Kushina: Minato, seriously, you're old enough to be the baby's dad, just have him call you tou-chan. Minato: But!!! Kushina: We can make Uzumaki babies later, take care of your technically-brother baby now.

Naruto is born and Kushina's just like "How strong are your family's hair genes???"

Technically-uncle Deidara who is like Naruto's older brother is going to be the worst influence on the Chaos baby.

Never let Obito babysit.

Naruto: I want to do pranks. Deidara: I want to explosions. Obito: Seems reasonable. Let's do it!

Anyway, Obito and Deidara never know what kind of ‘friendship’ they had in the other timeline.

Meanwhile, Rin is so ready to help, like she’s not exactly a huge fan of babies or kids, not like Obito is, but she is determined to help and keeps looking up child growth charts and stuff.

Kakashi is terrified that he’s going to break a baby.

Kakashi does not want to hold the baby.

Kakashi does not want to be in the same room as the baby.

Kakashi is going to sit on the outside wall with a sword and make sure nobody hurts the baby, but he will not go near the baby.

Deidara’s like four years older than Naruto and probably Kushina has him hang out with Itachi since Kushina visits Mikoto so often and Mikoto’s already had her first.

Deidara does not like Itachi.

It’s fine.

Being a 'new dad' doesn't excuse Minato from being involved in the war effort but it does change his schedule up enough to miss Kannabi and I stand by this.

#Deidara #Namikaze Minato #Uzumaki Kushina #Jiraiya #MinaKushi #Naruto #adoption #sealing accidents #accidental baby acquisition #Uchiha Obito #Hatake Kakashi #Nohara Rin #Phoenix Posts

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bestworstcase · 4 years

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What are your opinions on the whole Rapunzel-Varian drama in S1 post Queen For A Day, especially with the whole "Rapunzel should've checked on Varian after the snowstorm" or whose fault it was for their conflict?

tbh… if i had to pick one single representative example of the tts fandom’s general inability to handle nuance in fictional conflict, it’d be the QFAD discourse™

because! while this isn’t to rag on anyone, if you pick a random person with an opinion on this question, chances are they will fall into one of two camps. either: 1) corona’s treatment of varian was horrifically unjust and everyone involved except him is a terrible person, or 2) rapunzel did what she had to do and varian’s anger is irrational, unfounded, and fundamentally unfair.

people in camp #1 tend to believe that rapunzel was simply being selfish and acting like a sulky child when she failed to check up on varian after the storm. people in camp #2 tend to point out that rapunzel was traumatized by the events of QFAD too, and believe that this justifies her failure to check up on varian.

but the thing is imo the conflict in QFAD + the rest of s1 is just as complex and messy as the argument cassandra and rapunzel have in RATGT, in that there is no One True Right Answer and no person who is one hundred percent “at fault.” the question of blame is… honestly sort of beside the point if you ask me. to break this down:

#1: rapunzel is a sheltered teenager with minimal social skills dealing with a national emergency halfway through her first unsupervised couple days on the job.

the girl has had like eight months tops of training for the monumental task of ruling a country. she grew up in a situation where the only choice available to her was how she would wile away her free time inside her tower; gothel exerted total control over every other facet of her life. and while she has a little more wiggle room now that she’s out of the tower, she is still basically living her life with all the big, consequential choices made for her.

QFAD was intended to be her first taste of true authority, while still being ultimately inconsequential. if all had gone according to plan, corona would have ticked along more or less on autopilot—just as frederic left it—while rapunzel got in a little practice making judgment calls about minor, unimportant things, like mediating small interpersonal disputes between her subjects.

nobody expected, and rapunzel was absolutely not prepared for, a legitimate national crisis to explode in her face out of nowhere. this was supposed to be pedaling by herself for the first time with training wheels and what she got instead is careening down the freeway on a motorbike at 95mph with zero warning. it is a miracle that she held things together as well as she did.

#2: varian is a child with an emotionally distant, unsupportive father who sets him up for failure.

he’s smart but he’s also fourteen. he has little if any formal training in alchemy, he’s figuring stuff out by trial and error, and he has zero adult supervision. his efforts have caused significant levels of destruction twice in only a few months—the exploding boilers in WTH, and his invention going haywire (with a little help from st. croix) in GE—and it’s implied that this is a fairly regular occurrence with him.

and yet quirin does nothing. he shouts at varian, shuts him down, and at several points orders him point blank to stop messing with alchemy… but he makes no effort to connect with his son or understand where he’s coming from; he doesn’t try to impose reasonable restrictions (like “don’t mess with volatile chemicals unless i’m there to help”) that would allow varian to pursue his passion while minimizing the danger; and he doesn’t create an environment where varian feels able to turn to his father for help. and then with the black rocks, he lets varian come along to see the king, but refuses to explain why he “lied” (/spoke in code) to the king, destroying any credibility he had in varian’s eyes and making varian panicky and desperate because it seemed like no one else cared.

so the end result is that varian feels like he has no choice but to sneak around behind quirin’s back. he can’t rely on his dad for help if anything goes wrong, but the situation is so dire that doing nothing also isn’t an option. he tries his best to be careful (before quirin barges in on him, varian is attempting to put just one drop of the amber serum on the rock) but even if quirin hadn’t startled him, a terrible accident was bound to happen sooner or later, and the responsibility for that lays just as much if not more on quirin’s shoulders—the adult in this situation—as on varian’s. the kid is FOURTEEN.

(i think a neat argument could be made for varian as a deconstruction of the teen/YA fantasy trope of the hyper-competent teenager with absentee parents whose absence allows the teen to get on with the important work of the high-stakes fantasy plot; but that’s a whole different post)

#3: rapunzel did the right thing, but lost control over the situation due to lack of experience.

it would have been wrong to abandon everybody in corona to run off into the blizzard with varian, and frankly it wouldn’t have helped quirin anyway. he was already encased in amber by the time varian got back to old corona, and rapunzel couldn’t have done anything in the moment had she been with varian then. the only benefit to her presence would have been to comfort varian—which is not a small thing, obviously, but it’s not in any way a reasonable exchange for the hundreds or thousands of lives that would have been lost if she left corona completely without a leader in the middle of a crisis. so broadly speaking, staying in corona was the right call.

however.

rapunzel was not in control during that scene in the palace. varian bursts in, panicking, explains his situation and begs for her help—and rapunzel just says, basically, “i can’t help you, there’s an emergency.” then nigel comes in and reinforces that, which makes varian freak out; he grabs rapunzel and shakes her, nigel signals for the guards in response, and varian gets dragged out of the palace while rapunzel pleads with the guards not to hurt him.

(sidebar: the hate nigel gets for describing varian as “attacking” rapunzel is unfounded. varian grabs her and shakes her roughly back and forth and that is, in fact, assault. nigel is not wrong to describe it as such.)

anyway, notice two the things that DON’T happen here:

1) rapunzel doesn’t offer up any alternative solutions. a more experienced or better prepared leader could have responded to varian’s plea with a plan of action, like: i need to stay in corona to oversee the evacuation, so we can’t leave right this minute, but cassandra will take you to ask xavier for advice right now and the minute it’s safe to leave we’ll go together to help your father. or whatever—the point is to engage proactively with varian’s problem, make him feel heard, and give him something productive to do so he isn’t just sitting around fretting in the palace or struggling back home by himself in the middle of a blizzard.

2) raps doesn’t challenge nigel’s decision when he summons the guards to throw varian out of the palace, which is something she absolutely could have done. she could have said no, i can’t go to old corona right this minute to help him, but we are not throwing him out into the storm again, he stays here with me. this is, again, a sign of her inexperience; she’s not used to being an authority, she’s never been in a situation like this before, and she’s under a ton of pressure—so when an older adult whom she sees as an authority (he’s her father’s advisor!) makes a judgment call, it probably doesn’t even occur to her that she can challenge it.

this is why i say that rapunzel lost control over the situation—because even though she made the Right Decision, she got a kind of awful outcome, ie varian being tossed out into the blizzard to struggle home by himself to deal with his problem without any support, and rapunzel inadvertently breaking her promise from earlier.

#4: rapunzel doesn’t immediately go to check on varian after the storm because she’s traumatized, busy, and trusts her father.

painter’s block is all about how the trauma rapunzel feels as a direct result of her decisions during the storm destroys her ability to choose anything. she feels so debilitated by the fear that she will make the wrong choice—because she worries that she chose wrong when she allowed varian to be sent away—that she can’t do anything at all, let alone find the emotional strength to go to old corona and confront her mistakes. and while she tries to process and move past this trauma, mrs sugarby exploits it in an attempt to force her to free zhan tiri.

the next episode, not in the mood, involves rapunzel being put under enormous pressure to entertain an irascible ally of corona’s while he and her father negotiate a trade deal with the threat of a war breaking out if they fail. NITM is a silly episode, but it has the highest non-magical stakes of any episode in the entire series. this isn’t an event rapunzel could have reasonably skipped out on for the sake of one person, no matter how much she cares. she’s slammed. she’s still being forced to prioritize just like she was in QFAD.

and in the third episode after QFAD, rapunzel is tormented by nightmares about varian and what happened to his father, so she presses frederic for information about the rocks and varian’s safety. and frederic assures her that everything is fine. he lies to her face about the rocks having been removed, and rapunzel has no reason to doubt him, so she relaxes… until varian contacts her directly, and she immediately jumps to help him.

#5: at the same time, varian has been forced into hiding because frederic is attempting to cover up the rock problem.

what happens to varian after QFAD is plainly unfair and unjust. his father is trapped in amber, the rocks have completely destroyed old corona, most of the villagers have presumably moved to the new land frederic set aside for them, and frederic’s secret police are crawling all over the village trying to suppress information about the rocks (and fred’s role in creating them). the blame for this lies squarely at frederic’s feet, and varian is right to be angry.

i believe that varian interprets rapunzel’s absence as a sign that she’s complicit in what frederic is doing, making his anger at her justified as well. he doesn’t have access to the information we do about why rapunzel doesn’t seek varian out immediately—he doesn’t see how distraught and shattered she is after the storm, or the high-stakes political nonsense she has to deal with, and he certainly doesn’t see her trying to pursue the matter of the rocks and varian’s safety with her father and being flatly lied to to convince her to stay put in corona. all he knows is that rapunzel kicked him out and now she’s ignoring him and her father’s agents keep chasing him away from his home, and he draws the conclusion that makes the most sense to him, ie rapunzel must be okay with all of this because otherwise she would be here.

and once he has that idea in his head, the fact that rapunzel immediately jumps to help him when he contacts her isn’t enough to dislodge it. he’s a scared, lonely fourteen year old boy looking at this situation through a purely interpersonal lens while rapunzel is an overwhelmed eighteen year old doing the best she can while juggling about a million things at once and putting varian low on her priority list because she’s been told by a trusted source that varian is fine.

they both make mistakes, they’re both missing important contextual information, and neither of them handles this situation in the best possible way. but neither of them is “at fault” in the sense of being purely in the wrong, and—imo—frederic and quirin hold the lion’s share of the blame here, because they had all the information, and they refused and refused and refused to deal with the black rock problem until it overwhelmed them both. varian and rapunzel are both just kids scrambling to deal with something that should not be their problem to solve, and both of them fuck up! (and even then—the best fred and quirin could’ve done was just be honest and upfront about what the problem was. neither of them had the means to fix anything, and neither of them was responsible for the very unfortunate timing of the blizzard. so it’s not as clear cut as everything bad in s1 happens because fred and quirin stuck their heads in the sand. a lot of it honestly was just sheer bad luck.)

a n y w a y, i think by s3 and after a lot of introspection, varian has figured a lot of this out, and that’s why he’s so quick to let go of his lingering grudge against rapunzel. he’s realized that at the end of the day, rapunzel was just as unprepared and lost in that situation as he was, that she’s not responsible for (and wasn’t complicit in) her father’s decisions, etc, etc.

#rta #this is a bit of a ramble but yeah #tangled-dreamer-97

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justice4sasuke · 3 years

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Sorry to be sending you more opinions but there was something you said a little while ago that I just couldn’t get out of my head so here we go; you said, “you don’t have to forgive your abuser, but you can if you want.” And I agree with that sentiment 100%. I’ve been in the position of needing to decide which option to go with in the past, or should I say I haven’t actually decided yet because there can be SO much nuance involved in making that call. Sometimes it’s very simple, sometimes it’s anything but. And there’s no moral right or wrong answer, it’s about picking which option is healthier for you personally. Neither option makes you weak or strong, righteous or in the wrong (1/3)

Now that being said, I am painfully conscious of the fact that the narrative of, “forgiving your abuser makes you a good/kind/better person or whatever,” is pushed the absolute hardest in children’s and YA media, more than any other circle of media. It’s incredible how much and how often this is the only option presented to kids. I see this in shounen manga especially. And there’s a really famous example of an American children’s cartoon that does this which I could name but I won’t. I recognize that shounen does this a lot because WSJ has a sort of on the down low comic’s code thing going on (2/3)

And if Sasuke were real, I’d have no problem with him making the decision to forgive Itachi. And I’m not going to pretend that it doesn’t make sense character or story wise for him to do so. Hell, if I were in his position I might even make the same choice (then again I might not. I can only compare my experiences to his, but I can’t know them). Anyways I get it. But I also know, deep deep down in my traumatized bones, that a major reason why Kishimoto makes this decision FOR Sasuke as a character, is because it’s part of his crusade against the concept of “~hAtReD~” as it presents itself in victims. The only person who gives Sasuke permission to be hurt and angry EVER is Itachi (if I’m remembering the climax of this arc correctly), and I think that’s super important. And it makes perfect sense that Sasuke’s decision in response is to actually forgive him. But I also KNOW that he’s not allowed to choose otherwise. This is a big hand of the author moment imo (2/3) (p.s. you can wait however long you want to respond to this I don’t mind and I don’t want to overwhelm you especially when this could be more relevant later)

I’m always a proponent of recognizing WHY authors make the decisions they do, but I’m not sure it matters much when it comes to Sasuke’s decision to forgive Itachi.

First I’ll say I find it very hard to parse what Kishimoto actually thinks or feels about anything. This could be because I do not know or speak Japanese or because I don’t seek out content that involves Kishimoto talking about his work. But then again I don’t go looking for author interviews a lot, but I’ve still managed to absorb some information that makes me feel like I know a bit more about the authors. Oda the author of One Piece does multiple Question Corners in each volume of the manga when it comes out that really gives you a feel for who he is as an artist and person and what he thinks. Araki the author of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure has ever-changing interests and those interests bleed through in his work (a moment where that occurred to me that I found particularly amusing was at the end of one of the part 4 volumes Araki says he got a cat encyclopedia and that or the next volume then has a lot of drawings of cats and explanations about their behavior so you’re like well Araki I can tell). Or even a series I don’t even like because it’s miserable like Attack on Titan I’ve absorbed enough through cultural osmosis to know the author has said enough war crime apologist shit that the fascist wet dream that he portrays is intentional.

But Kishimoto...I don’t know what he thinks if I’m honest. Does he really resent people with natural talent for things? Does he think everything bad is just hatred and we need to forgive to get over it? Does he think the state is more important than any person or group of people? You could make these assertions based on his writing maybe but Kishimoto’s writing is so flimsy and so many things change throughout the course of Naruto’s story I would just as soon believe every statement he makes about worldview is an accident. In fact Naruto’s blandness and unrelenting stereotypical shounen characteristic of never giving up could lead me to believe there is no heart in his writing whatsoever. Or hell, the end! Where all the main kid characters end up together as much as possible when you follow a two boys one girl rule and are bound by heteronormativity. None of the pairings had an ounce of heart behind them and some of them were fucking /jokes/ (Shikmaru and Temari maybe had a drop of heart to it based on things that happened in part 1 only). I don’t feel I can say Kishimoto’s opinions come through on anything he writes if he’s going to be so careless with what he does. (Yes, I know there is an argument for him being wrung dry by the manga making machine at the end, but that goes along with my point: does Kishimoto intend anything he writes).

All of that up there is leading into a point, but let me get part two out first. I don’t know if I fully agree with your take because forgiving Itachi isn’t what makes Sasuke “good” in the eyes of the narrative. Sasuke forgiving Itachi is important in terms of how we talk about their relationship but in the eyes of the narrative it is a foregone conclusion. There is some anger and resentment still after Sasuke learns the truth about Itachi, but there’s also still a ton of love and hero-worship there. By the time Itachi says “you should choose your own path” and “no matter what you do from now on I’ll always love you”, Sasuke’s forgiveness has already been granted and after that Sasuke’s journey is more about trying to reconcile his world view. And after Sasuke resurrects the hokages and gets the love story of the ages learns about the founding of Konoha, in true Kishimoto fashion, it seems like Sasuke is going to be a “good” guy now only to have him doing things that seem “evil” during the war and then after Kaguya is defeated he lays out his revolution plan which the manga views as “evil”. Kishimoto puts so little emphasis on forgiveness and explicitly keeps Sasuke in the “wrong” until the end of the manga so I don’t think anyone is expected or intended to see forgiveness as the way to be better. I think we kind of reverse engineer the forgiveness topic by bringing up the point of Sasuke possibly not forgiving Itachi when that’s not even a question in the manga.

This brings us back to Kishimoto’s thoughts and intentions because is the fact that forgiveness or not is not even considered an author conscious decision, that forgiveness is the right choice? Or was forgiveness just the obvious choice because how Sasuke’s character was built out? I don’t think any of us can say because like I said above I think Kishimoto’s actual feelings and goals with his work are hard to pin down.

Also I know this whole blog is about extrapolating and looking outside the framing, but one of the manga’s biggest faults it how is railroads you into what you’re “supposed” to feel and you only don’t feel that way if you give what you’re reading a second thought. And we’re not being railroaded into “Sasuke forgives Itachi so he’s better now”. We’re railroaded into “Sasuke needs to learn more about ninja world” which railroads into “Sasuke is going to help in the war but uh oh is he still bad guy??”. Like once again forgiveness isn’t even a topic of thought in this manga.

I guess I spent over an hour thinking and writing this to say I think the notion that Sasuke is being made to forgive Itachi is so out of the realm of intention or what the point of Itachi and Sasuke’s relationship is I’m going to Death of the Author it and say I think Sasuke chooses to forgive Itachi and that’s his choice. Thinking about whether Sasuke HAD to forgive Itachi because the author wanted it that way is missing the point. But that’s not to say we can’t discuss the implications of choosing forgiveness towards abusers in media, just that I think that is entirely outside the realm of the author’s thinking (with my above caveat that I have no idea what Kishimoto feels about anything). And I think these conversations aren’t really coming out because of the manga, but because of how we are thinking about the manga which is already outside Kishimoto’s intention. I mean I think Sasuke is right so obviously I’m outside Kishimoto’s intention based on his framing.

Side note in regards to rules at WSJ I hear about shit people aren’t allowed to do there and no doubt there are rules but I’m very 🤔 about what are they really because Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure got very violent even in its shounen jump days and this isn’t about /abuse/ exactly but One Piece did have a character that couldn’t forgive their oppressors and wasn’t demonized for it and was treated with understanding. So I’m wondering what exactly these rules are supposed to be.

#another evening where i could be working on fic out the window #goodbye effort in thing i actually care about #i don't think madara and hashirama are a good love story ok #it is just endlessly amusing how the framing is an inch away from being romantic #ineptgay

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kinetic-elaboration · 3 years

Text

July 17: 2x26 Assignment: Earth

Finally finished up S2 of TOS yesterday. That was... a rough episode tbh. I’m just gonna say it: back door pilots are bad! They’re bad. If I wanted to watch that other show, I’d watch it.

Wow, they’re just really jumping right in, huh? “Here we are, on a routine mission into the past, using a time travel method that we invented nbd.”

Investigating desperate problems in the year 2020...2016.... no wait 1968.

Ooh, Spock in the transport room today. Does he have a whole extra random station there? That’s so weird; I’ve never seen that before. It’s like hidden in the corner.

Cat!! Cat!!

What a good actor. I’m still bitter that wikipedia has a whole section about the casting for “Isis the cat” that talks entirely about the human who played Isis for 2 minutes and nothing about the talented feline actor. Where did they find her? How did they teach her to act?

She has a lot of thoughts about Kirk.

I wrote down “Scully, you’ve got to see this” in my notes and I’ve already forgotten what it refers to lol. Some moment that I thought would fit well with my favorite x-files meme.

Change history, you say? Spock is intrigued. ...Admittedly, Spock is often intrigued.

“What if it turns out you’re an invading alien from the future?” Honestly...let him invade. You’re not supposed to be here anyway.

I’m pretty insulted by this. The aliens went through all this trouble to help in 1968...where are our alien helpers NOW?

The cat straight up attacked his face.

Kirk is so fond of Spock being fond of the cat.

“It’s a lovely animal. I feel myself strangely drawn to it.”

Kirk is way too confused by Seven--an allegedly human person with super-human abilities that he says come from aliens--and yet, he’s met Charlie X so??? Is this not the same?

Kirk’s got the whole crew checking in on zoom.

(I actually do like this sequence of him getting video calls from different parts of the ship.)

“Weren’t orbiting H-bombs a huge problem in 1968?” Looks at the camera like he’s on The Office. Not the subtlest bit of writing in the “social commentary” genre. I do say this with love, though. I always enjoy when they comment on contemporary problems.

“He has a totally perfect body.” Lol don’t distract these two bisexuals.

[soft meowing]

“The prisoner has escaped.” The way this is shot, it looks like he’s talking about the cat.

Hmm, I do love the decor. Very 60s. This honestly immediately feels like a different show, and a much more dated show; even when the Enterprise time travels, it tends not to time travel to... office space.

Love the little sounds the computer makes.

So is Isis supposed to be one of the fancy aliens? It’s never explained but one must assume she is.

Aw, he’s petting her paw.

So I assumed the cats sounds are real, but just dubbed. They’re not lol. Which I guess isn’t surprising: this cat makes a lot of noises! They were provided by a human voice actress.

Damn.... I want a secret bookshelf that turns around to reveal a super computer with a big screen. “Computer... play Netflix.”

That’s what Seven does in his spare time.

The computer is an AI. “Beta 5 snobbery” lol.

Where are OUR alien overlords to stop US from destroying ourselves before WE can mature into a peaceful society?

This is really masterful exposition lol. Not forced or awkward at all.

ST sure does love the snooty female computer trope.

“Get us the proper costumes.” Yes, get Spock his Requisite Hat.

Omicron IV....that’s one of the names they use in Futurama lol. Such nerds.

Another excellent Spock Hat.

I love Seven’s various IDs. Great style. I wish my driver’s license looked like those.

“Who do you think you are?” He hasn’t decided yet. That’s why he was shifting through his IDs.

Seven is not smart lol. Like, he should have figured out way faster that this lady isn’t one of the Alien Overlords. He asks her the code question, she doesn’t understand it, and he... assumes she’s just really in character? Dude, that’s what the code questions are for!!! To help you identify people! Otherwise you could just straight up ask: are you an alien?

Instead he’s like “oh, you silly alien, you’re playing with me,” and then is forced to trap her, reveal his whole mission, and ultimately ensnare her in his plan.

I want that typewriter. Voice recognition typewriter.

"My incompetence has made you aware of very secret devices." Well at least he knows.

Trained cat!

The alien overlords were killed in a random car accident. That’s ironic.

Oh look, a real rocket!

Brown pants + short sleeved shirt + tie is such a Classic 60s look.

This security guard doesn’t think it’s weird that this random dude has a cat with him? Is this part of Isis’s alien power?

Except for the part where it’s a weapon, it’s pretty cool to see all this build up to, like... launching stuff into space. Exciting.

Isis likes to be on shoulders. Just like Little Guy.

New hat for Spock. His outer wear hat, and now his fancy hat. There is something to be said for this ep, and that is Kirk and Spock in suits.

Amazing how they literally launched rockets with computers that old. Like seeing the big bank of primitive computers is totally wild. We put people on the moon that way! Amazing.

“Meow.” Lol, Isis is stressed so she’s speaking like a cat. That’s a pretty funny joke actually.

Seven is so incompetent. If he’d just let the Enterprise help, Scotty could have fixed that rocket issue in like 3 seconds.

Lol everyone’s just pulling Gary through space. Now on the Enterprise. Now in the office.

Why does this computer have a hug black screen if it only displays images on the small white circle?

"Spock and I in custody. Main characters, doing nothing, knowing nothing, totally useless and irrelevant. I have never felt more helpless." Literally what is even the point of them today? Does Spock even have lines outside of “I like the cat”?

Isis is jealous of Roberta. Is she.. in a relationship with Seven lol?

Uhura is listening to everyone in the world. She probably has a universal translator on, but I do feel like this scene implies she just...understands all the languages.

So now the warhead is armed and heading to somewhere vague... in other words, everyone has collectively made the situation worse.

....Or this was Seven’s plan all along? To scare people into ceasing to be so careful with nuclear weaponry? As someone who knows humans better than this guy, I think this is a dumbass plan.

“That’s why so many people in my generation are kind of crazy and rebels.” Same, sweetheart.

Really this is just a story about bad communication. If Seven had told Kirk his plan upfront, Kirk would have helped him. And if Kirk weren’t so insistent on involving himself in something just because he happens to be somewhere he probably shouldn’t be, we wouldn’t have this issue either. The hubris of everyone.

Overall, just a really forced narrative imo.

Or that’s how it was supposed to be lol. The Irony of time travel. By it’s nature, everything has already worked out.

Kirk and Spock are like “You’re welcome. Peace out.”

Honestly... Isis was the only good part. Such a talented cat actor!! Or trio of cat actors, I guess. Had to do all those stunts and stuff.. .amazing. I also liked the concept of Isis. How she turned into a human later just to troll Roberta. How she’s never really explained--one must assume, an alien? Plus I pretty much never get tired of human + animal teams where the animal makes animal noises and the human just understands and answers in English.

As a stand alone sci fi concept...it was okay. Kinda dated by now. The alien tech was nifty and Roberta could have grown on me. Maybe even Seven, though he left a lot to be desire. That said, the narrative relied a lot on people getting in each other’s way for no reason, which I find very frustrating.

But as a Star Trek episode....no. The main characters were just nuisances on the side lines!! I’m not even sure what Kirk’s mission here was--to try to figure out what Seven was doing? And stop him if necessary? But he never really decided if it was or not, until the point where not trusting him would basically cause a nuclear war? I don’t know, I found it all very frustrating. The melding of the original show and the spinoff was not smooth.

If I were watching this in 1968, I’d feel very cheated. THIS was the season finale? That’s it? I don’t even get a real Star Trek episode and now I have to wait months for anything new?

And what I get after all that waiting is Spock’s Brain?? I’d be tempted to quit. If I had a tumblr in 1969 I’d be writing multi-paragraph rants about how the best show on television has completely nose-dived lol.

But then there’s The Enterprise Incident, which is one of the best episodes... I don’t know, man. It’s a conundrum. I’ve only seen maybe half of season 3 but from what I remember it’s very uneven: some of the best eps (The Enterprise Incident, For the World Is Hollow, Day of the Dove) mixed in with some of the worst (Spock’s Brain, The Paradise Syndrome), plus some that are good concepts but shoddily executed (The Way to Eden). So we’ll see what I think about it when I see it all in one piece, in air date order.

#the year 2021 #2021: fandom thoughts #2021: star trek #star trek tos

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alonsista · 4 years

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Tbf I'd definitely want to hear everything about "Germany 2010: the breakdown" so feel free to use this ask to share your knowledge with me 👀👀💕

thanks for the ask, anna!! i’m sure you already know all about it, though 😂 oh where do i even begin... to anyone who has never seen it, this race is a must watch! the iconicity..... the cultural impact.... the teammate drama.... the $100k fine....

germany 2010: how one of ferrari’s biggest ‘fuck ups’ was actually kinda worth it

the german gp was the 11th race of that season - lewis was then leading the championship with 158 points and fernando was 5th with 98 (1 win + 2 podiums). massa (whom i’ll be calling felipe from now on here bc it’s kinda weird for me to call him massa ngl) was 8th with 67 points (0 wins + 2 podiums). their podiums were both p2/p3 so the only difference between them at that point was fernando’s win in bahrain.

felipe led most of the race, jenson led some of the laps too but the brazilian took back the lead until lap 48. i rewatched it a few months ago and he was locking up for some odd reason i don’t know, which was clearly not helping at all. still, he was leading it, but if we look at the drivers standings, he clearly did NOT have a shot at the championship and a fernando win was supposed to be much more welcome to ferrari.

the sad unfortunate coincidence here was that that race was held on the same day as the first anniversary of felipe's accident; basically pretty much everyone wanted him to win because it would mean more than his first win in a year and a half, it would also mean that he’s still got it even after having almost died.

but ferrari made the (right yet fucked up, imo) decision to have them switch their places. although i think the most fucked up thing here was actually forcing (felipe’s then engineer and also the loml) rob smedley to do that instead of having literally anyone else do it (errr, dunno, maybe stefano domenicali himself). 8 y/o me energy raging over this = still unmatched. i swore to god i would never support ferrari again BUT HEY i was born a clown.

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...nevertheless, that was the birth of one of THE most iconic team radios aka felipe, fernando is faster than you. that’s simply poetic F1, it can’t get better than this. a team radio that cost ferrari a U$100.000 fine. why, one would ask... well, they had this stupid rule (after the 2002 season) that BANNED TEAM ORDERS. idk if any newer fans (or just anyone at all) are actually reading this but yeah, you heard it right. they unironically thought that banning team orders was gonna help this sport become more competitive. it still amazes me to this day, they thought no one was gonna come up with coded messages.

i could go on yelling about how the podium is yet THE BEST PART OF THIS RACE (because THE AKWARDNESS!!!!!!!!! the 2-min deafening silence! felipe looking like he could kill fernando in front of everyone!) but this post is already as long as it is. if some of y’all have never watched this race please do it and make sure to watch the press conference afterwards too. those were the 2 most awkward F1 moments i have ever seen during my entire life and i think nothing will top that.

welp, here’s the bbc coverage about it which features ferrari’s then team principal (stefano domenicali aka satan himself) who literally couldn’t give ANY fucks about it (istg this man still frightens me to this day. if i ever get rich RICH i’m not buying a Lamborghini - he’s the ceo) + the loml rob smedley (i’m a rob fan first human second) + schumi PREACHING THE TRUTH (that it’s the right thing to do for the championship, and it’s something that had been done several times before)

if you can’t watch the press con then this entire transcript will still give you a very good laugh. maybe i love it more than i should.

lovely. also completely worth watching felipe and fernando’s post race interviews (nando saying there were no team orders and he thought felipe had a gear problem <3).

but this is THE BEST video imo, you can cut the tension with a knife. vettel trying to run away because of how bad it was and fernando not letting him go. fernando answering shitty questions. felipe about to throw some hands in front of the journalists. a cultural reset.

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IN CONCLUSION, why was it worth it? well, it was a huuuge controversy and unfortunately fernando didn’t end up winning the championship, but he still finished 2nd with a 4-point difference from vettel. thanks for coming to my ted talk.

#long post #asks #mclarenrenaissance #f1 #fernando alonso #felipe massa #ferrari #*#germany 2010 #ferrari fernando

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bigskydreaming · 4 years

Note

All right, you have officially sold me on Bobby Drake. Where do I start reading?

Its a good question, lol! Honestly, it mostly just depends on how far back you want to go. I mean, he’s been around for sixty years, lol, so there’s a shit ton of appearances to wade through, and it depends on how familiar you are with the X-Men as a whole.

If you’re not familiar with the X-Men or Marvel in general, this is actually a really good time to jump in with reading the current books without much prior knowledge. Just last year the X-books underwent a huge status quo shakeup in the two limited series House of X and Powers of X, that pretty much like....transformed their entire place in the Marvel Universe as a whole and gave them a whole new playing field that was all pretty clearly laid out within just those two series. So its a really good starting point to kinda catch up quick to where things stand now and then just branch out from there to whatever catches your interest.

Bobby’s a main character in a book called Marauders currently, which is only on issue #6 or #7 right now, and the book is pretty central to the major happenings in the X-Men’s corner of the universe. Plus a lot of great characters in the rest of the cast - Storm, Bishop, Emma Frost, etc.

If you want to start from way far back and have a good long, consistent read, the original X-Factor (the first series, vol 1) is where I would go. I don’t think anyone really needs to read the original X-Men series from the 60s to get a handle on the characters or universe, and personally I’ve always found X-Factor a much better read using all the same characters except with the added bonus of no Xavier. As he is. The Worst.

Between the original X-Men run and X-Factor’s debut, Bobby, Angel and Beast popped up on various other superteams, like Bobby and Angel were on the Champions together for a bit, and then the three of them were on a team called the Defenders for a while...if you can find old Defenders issues online (this would have been back in the 70s/early 80s), they’re worth checking out just for Bobby’s brief romance with a shapeshifting character named Cloud who he first met as a woman but later shifted into a man. And while they decided to just be friends at that point, given that this was the era of the Comics Code when gay relationships were ‘frowned upon,’ this was the earliest and most blatant gay-coding of Bobby, literal decades before he was made canon gay in the comics. Plus, they’re just pretty fun stories and Bobby and Cloud were super cute together.

But yeah, then X-Factor ran for a number of years without interruption, staying consistent with the same core cast of just the original five X-Men and the supporting characters they introduced in that series, like Rictor (another future famous gay X-character, just a wee punk teenager at the time, lol). It was pretty fun overall, IMO, should give anyone new to the Marvel U a pretty solid grasp of all the major players in it, and its where a lot of big names like Apocalypse made their debut. And of course, I think Bobby was well written throughout it. X-Factor was also where a couple of the things I mentioned in that post happened, like the storyline where Loki kidnapped Bobby to use his powers to make his army.

After that.....basically, the original X-Men left that title to rejoin the X-Men when Marvel relaunched the X-Men line with a brand new X-Men #1 in the early 90s....and at the same time, they kept the already existing Uncanny X-Men title going, which was around #280 at that time.

Since they had such a huge cast of characters at that point, they split the X-Men into two fairly iconic lineups, the Blue and the Gold....the Blue team were the chronicled in the adjectiveless X-Men book, and featured Cyclops, Gambit, Psylocke, Beast, Wolverine, Rogue and others, while the Gold team were the main characters of the continuing Uncanny X-Men title from again, around #280 and onward. The Gold team was Bobby, Jean Grey, Colossus, Storm, Archangel, and then later Bishop as well, etc.

This era was where a lot of the best Bobby stories took place, IMO. Very early after the Gold team was formed, Bobby had a mishap with Mikhail Rasputin, the older brother of Colossus, whose powers shifted Bobby into his organic ice form for the very first time, where he became living ice that he could control and shapeshift and heal, rather than just cover himself with ice. This was the beginning of them exploring the versatility of Bobby’s powers and what eventually led to them making him an omega level mutant, though even back in X-Factor they’d established that he was far more powerful than anyone had realized before that.

Then Uncanny X-Men #311 continued this and launched one of the most pivotal periods in Bobby’s development. An accident led to a comatose Emma Frost’s mind jumping into Bobby’s body and taking control, and she used his body and powers to seek revenge for the deaths of her own students, and in the process pushed his powers even further than anyone had thought possible. This is where he came to realize he could literally teleport by melting into any body of water and recreating himself anywhere else connected to that body of water, like traveling from one end of a river to another, or even across oceans instantly....as well as proving to him that he could literally get holes blown in his ice form and just fill them up with new ice and transform back into his flesh and blood self, none the worse for wear.

This period also led to him showing up in Generation X a lot, where Emma became one of the teachers for that generation of young mutants, because during this time, Bobby and Emma like....clashed a lot, because Bobby had a lot of issues about her hijacking his body and then taking it on what was essentially a suicide run at the time, and was also resentful of her being instantly able to do things with his powers he hadn’t even conceived of with years of training with them, and Emma was....prickly at the best of times, back then even moreso than now, so she tended to taunt him with this and push his buttons by insinuating she knew more about him than he did himself, and she knew what really was holding him back all these years, etc, etc....but then they eventually formed a very unconventional but real rapport, and decades later, they still have this weird thing where they’d probably never admit to even liking each other, but they probably respect each other more than just about any other of their teammates combined. (Also, the Christian that Bobby is currently with in the comics is Emma’s older brother).

Back to Uncanny X-Men....to take his mind off of everything that the body-jacking by Emma had brought up for him, and because Rogue was having a lot of similar issues due to her new relationship with Gambit and the glimpse of various secrets of his that she’d gotten via her own powers....Bobby and Rogue decided to take a road trip together, that went on for about a dozen issues all in all, and are some of my all time favorite Bobby stories. This includes Uncanny #319, where they go visit Bobby’s parents together and Bobby tells off his dad in epic fashion (this was literally the first comic I ever read, and still one of my faves today, lol....also he made a giant ice palace off the coastline that was as big as a city and that has nothing to do with anything except for the fact that it was very pretty and very gay. Foreshadowing!)

Then there were a couple of big iconic crossover events that took over all the titles for awhile - the first was the alternate universe Age of Apocalypse event - and its worth tracking down and reading in its entirety, IMO. Definitely one of the most pivotal ‘events’ in Marvel history, but it was actually pretty good, too? LOL. And the Age of Apocalypse version of Bobby was pretty bad ass. (He returned in Rick Remender’s X-Force title about fifteen years later, but we don’t speak of Rick Remender or that return, for both are bad and wrong).

Then reality was restored, and the Onslaught crossover happened, and like.....really the only thing you need to know about that is its basically where the entire Marvel Universe teamed up to fight the evil brain baby slash hatechild of Professor X and Magneto. I’m just saying. Read it at your own peril. I’m not even saying its BAD, I’m just saying. Read it at your own peril.

Then in Uncanny X-Men #340.....that’s the issue where Bobby left the team for awhile to take care of his dad after he was almost killed at that hate rally I mentioned in one of my Bobby posts today, so I forget where the whole ‘going undercover in Graydon Creed’s campaign’ storyline started, but back up a bit from there and you’d be good to go. He and Sam (Cannonball) went undercover together and that was basically the start of the epic Bobby and Sam bromance slash subtextual romance that I still love to this day, too.

Then he was out of the books for awhile, off taking care of his dad, and didn’t really return until this big event called Operation: Zero Tolerance happened, wherein the government went after the X-Men directly and captured pretty much all their big guns, and Bobby came back to help and had to single-handedly rescue a bunch of random mutants from Sentinels and make an interim team with which to like, save the day themselves. O:ZT is actually a really good story for him, I really like how competent he was portrayed there, and also it was the introduction of Dr. CeCe Reyes, who is also a fave. She was also briefly a sorta/not sorta love interest for Bobby, that of course didn’t ultimately go anywhere. On account of, y’know. His Massive Gayness.

Then Bobby left the team again to go return to taking care of his dad, and also because certain writers hated him (though tbh, Bobby’s actually one of the longest running heroes in the Marvel U, as in....he’s spent the longest consecutive times active in various books/teams without taking breaks, compared to pretty much all other characters who aren’t Wolverine, Captain America or Spider-man. He was a constant presence in books pretty much from his creation up until the mid-90s, so like, he was due for some time-off. I GUESS. WHATEVER).

From this point, he didn’t return until a storyline called The Twelve. It was very bad, and very dumb, and you should not read it. Your brain cells will thank me later.

Then there was a miniseries called X-Men Forever - this you SHOULD read, as its where the term omega mutant was essentially coined for the first time in the way its been used ever since, and its where both Bobby and Jean found out they were omega level mutants for the first time. And Mystique and Toad and Juggernaut were also there because....idk, tbh. That was all very strange to me. But! Still! Worth a read!

Then came a veeeeery underrated Iceman solo miniseries of four issues, that is weird but also very worth tracking down as it was a great Bobby, very poignant and also kinda sad, but like. I’d highly recommend. Especially as it was pretty much the last good Bobby for awhile, with the exception of Joe Casey, who wrote a decent Bobby but a terrible Everyone Else.

Then we enter the Dark Ages of Bobby. Where everything is bad and all the writers are the worst.

First up is Chuck Austen. Bobby was a core member of his X-Men lineup, throughout his run. This is not a good reason to read Chuck Austen’s run. Do not read Chuck Austen’s run. You’re welcome.

Then there was Peter Milligan’s run. Peter Milligan’s run was not as bad as Austen’s run. This is not a good reason to read Peter Milligan’s run. Do not read Peter Milligan’s run. You’re welcome.

Then Mike Carey took over. You CAN read Mike Carey’s run. You probably even SHOULD read Mike Carey’s run. He is not perfect, but he liked Bobby and we like him for liking Bobby. His Bobby actually spoke in complete sentences and displayed more than one emotion per issue. And Supernovas is a pretty good arc and was actually where the Children of the Vault were first introduced, and they were just brought back in the most recent X-Men issue to be a recurring antagonist, so they’re like. Relevant and stuff.

And then there’s Messiah Complex, which is basically the Advent of Oh Hai, Everything’s About To Get Just Fucking AWFUL For Mutants From Here For the Next Ten Years Or So, and there’s like....blechness with Bobby and Mystique, which...I mean....all else aside, she’s Rogue’s MOM, but WHATEVER. Look, there were....plot reasons. Kinda. So. Whatever. Just blink rapidly and move on from that as quickly as you can.

You can pretty safely jump ship at that point, because Divided We Stand is No, Second Coming is Ugh, and Schism is Why. And also there’s Age of X in there somewhere, which is to be avoided because Age of X basically just wanted to be Age of Apocalypse and its not Age of Apocalypse. Just like Age of X-Man is similarly not Age of Apocalypse, and even Age of Apocalypse 2.0 is not Age of Apocalypse. Stop trying to be Age of Apocalypse, everybody. NONE OF YOU ARE AGE OF APOCALYPSE.

You may have one (1) year of Marjorie M. Liu writing Astonishing X-Men, as a treat. She wrote a great Bobby, this was where the whole ‘freezing the whole Earth, whoopsie’ thing happened, and it was a great and very underrated story.

Then post Schism there’s stuff like Wolverine and the X-Men, where Bobby’s a main character after being lured to take Logan’s side in the Schism instead of Scott’s, with the promise of Being Relevant. ‘Twas a lie. Bobby ‘twas there, but hardly relevant. And Jason Aaron is not as good a writer as advertised, since he’s mostly the one doing the advertising and like.....dude should not trust his own hype. There’s weird and whimsical, and then there’s just plain WEIRD, and most of Wolverine and the X-Men is the latter, claiming to be the former, and like. You can’t trust anyone these days.

Then comes the Era of Bendis. Die, Era of Bendis, Die.

Do not read the Era of Bendis. Do not speak of the Era of Bendis. If the Era of Bendis bursts into flames on the street next to you, look pointedly away, and trip anyone who runs up to try and douse the Era of Bendis with a bucket of water.

Just trust me. The Bendis, and then the Hopeless (that’s the name of the actual writer who took over on All New X-Men, but it pretty well sums up the feelings of Bobby fans on the matter too, ‘twas fate), and then the Bendis again....bad, bad, bad and also Superbad, but not the movie.

You will hear promises, siren songs, of a young, teenage time-displaced Bobby Drake having his first boyfriend, an Inhuman named Romeo. THIS IS A LIE. ITS A TRICK! A TRAP! DO NOT FALL FOR IT!

Basically everything is blah blah blahful for awhile....until the Bobby solo series by Sina Grace, which gets a bad rap, but I maintain its worth the read. Like, I’m not going to call it my favorite take on him or anything like that, but its still good fun and a vastly more competent and compelling Bobby than anything Bendis ever eked out.

And that basically catches us up to the present, where we’re at with Marauders.

So!

There you go! Umm....this was supposed to be just a brief list of arc titles to check out, but then I went and hyper-fixated like a BUFFOON, so....umm. Yeah! Have at it!

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sarcasticace · 5 years

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wait why is AME b2 so bad??

Under the cut because this gets long and kinda rant-y, sorry

- The writers should’ve never implemented double elimination. It helped this season feel different, which was something this book needed to be successful, but it only made it feel like the new characters left way too soon. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like we hardly got to know most of them. I get that it was so there was never an odd number of contestants, but they could’ve done something like… winner is exempt every other challenge or something.

- I am convinced the writers DID NOT know what to do with Ivy or Vince. Particularly Ivy. They kept switching between the 2D villain Adam-mancers love to petty hate to this really compelling (at least imo), complicated rival character. They should have stuck with the later AND they should have paired Ivy with MC at least once, leading to addressing her betrayal from last season: letting players forgive Ivy and move on (and rekindle their romance if players did that last season) or remain bitter towards her. But mostly pairing MC and Ivy in a challenge for the drama. It boggles my mind that both Ivy and MC are in the same season, but no one bothered to pair them up. I vaguely remember it was one of the reasons S10 didn’t tank. I might be remembering some details wrong, but in-universe, didn’t fans tune it to see that sweet MC/Ivy drama? Any good showrunner would have taken advantage and milked the hell out of it by doing whatever they can to put the two in the same room. I guess Carson being portrayed as incompetent subverted that, but Carson is a fictional character so that doesn’t count. If the writers weren’t going to fully take advantage of the Ivy/MC dynamic, they should have cut Ivy from the book entirely.

- The partners. This was such a brilliant idea, but omg did they fuck it up. Why did they ONLY pair MC with Slater, Vince, and Adam. I mean, of fucking course it’s Adam, but they should’ve made it so the contestants got new partners AFTER EVERY CHALLENGE. Not when Carson felt like it or something came up. And MC should never have been paired with Adam (or Mack and Derek for that matter). It should have been Ivy (for the above reason) and all the new characters especially if they were committed to the idea of double eliminations. That way players get to know the characters one-on-one before they’re gone. Obviously, Adam is gonna stick around till the end because he’s one of the LIs and he’s on the cover. Also because of the whole proposal setup. Making him one of MC’s partners is a waste of time when you have new characters that will be leaving way before him. Diamond scenes aren’t going anywhere. That’s where they’re putting LI character+romantic development nowadays. MC, Adam, Mack, and Derek seem to have formed a friends group. They interact the most and there are several entire chapters where those three (+Jen) are the only characters to appear. What’s the point? Just pull a Total Drama and bring back the old contestants in a season 10.2, but switch up the elimination order. Having said that, yes, we do get to interact a lot with Eden/Heath and Kiara, but not characters like Yvette and Rowan. Maybe it’s just me, but I felt like I knew more about Ryder, Lina, and Han in their short time than any of the new All-Stars. These are winners and VIPs of previous seasons. They should have something to offer! If the new characters mean nothing then why waste the assets. Take Yvette for example… she’s a mom and willing to use her kids to guilt people into not voting her off. Enough to make players dislike her, but besides that moments and a few single lines, she’s a throwaway characters. And to prove my point, PB didn’t even wait for AME2 to finish before recycling her character model for a minor patient character in Open Heart. I don’t care about PB reusing assets, but can they stop being THAT lazy for five minutes.

- There’s the fact that they didn’t do anything creative with partners outside of the ones involving the MC. Particularly the ones for the LIs. Vince, for example, didn’t get paired with Adam AT ALL despite their history. Just like with MC/Ivy, why would any showrunner worth their salt not want to capitalize on the drama between Adam and Vince? Same goes for the actual writers of this book. Why even have Adam around if not to spice things up with Vince?

- And since we’re on the topic of Vince… why did he not have that big of a role? I mean, on one hand, I kinda like that he’s just a diva and annoying. I’ll give B2 that much, they subverted my expectation of Vince being the main villain of this book, but in all honestly… they should’ve went with that route. It would’ve been exciting if MC would have to ally with Ivy in order to defeat a worse contestant. Then I was expecting Slater to be the secret big bad and Vince would be a red herring, but again… nope. Vince is just a diva and Slater plays rough. Those aren’t bad things, but they were also disappointing… much like the entire book. I know they didn’t want to copy what they did in the last book, but having this book’s finale just include your friends/LI rather than having it you vs. your rival is kinda lackluster imo.

- One last thing about Vince… he almost seriously injured Adam in one of the earlier chapters and it’s never brought up again. Ever! They could’ve included a scene later on, like B1 had with Zeke, where MC could decide whether to reveal they saw Vince mess with the controls and that’d sway the opinions of the jury house and affect whether or not they’d listen to him. But of course that’s not what happened. This is Choices so consequences are only every applied to the MC.

- This “dating Jen” drama should’ve been done in full back in B1, but only for players actually romancing Jen. No offence to the other LIs, but Jen was the most appealing. Having a forbidden romance with one of the producers? Narrowly avoiding getting caught and risking your chance of staying on the show? It’s way more interesting that Adam/Mackenzie all of a sudden falling for MC just because. We know PB has the coding power. They could’ve and should’ve done it If they’re gonna have multiple endings for RoD, of all books, then they should commit to a standard for their books and should’ve coded AME A LOT better. Hell, they should’ve just outlined the whole series better, but we ended up with… this.

- Also they need to do something with Mack’s backstory… her family is poor? She wants the prize money to put her sister through college. And yet she ONLY ever sabotaged Ryder then fell in love with MC and did nothing dirty for the rest of both seasons. If they weren’t gonna make Ivy a complicated rival character, they should’ve just cut Ivy all together and given that storyline to Mack. This is mostly a B1 complaint, but it follows through to B2 because they don’t commit with Ivy and don’t do much with Mack. They introduce her family, which was interesting, but idk she lost a lot of appeal for me in B1 when she fell head over heals for my MC for no reason. Mackenzie’s route had “slow burn” written all over it, but they neglected her. Either Mack should’ve been the rival LI or they should’ve cut her and made Adam fully customizable (like Hayden) then have Ivy fill the role of second female LI.

- Again with Mack… her complaining about cheating is really funny and kinda OOC. Like I mentioned before, she literally sabotaged Ryder because he was a jerk and she wanted to win. Did the writers forget about that? This was just one of several points that shows the writers did not care about their own story and characters.

- Also they needed to do something? … anything… with Derek. Poor man, he’s the only LI who gets how this show is played. He deserves better. I don’t talk about Derek much, but I honestly love this man. He’s just dull. He needs… anything. Give him anything. Like the only significant storyline they gave him, that I can remember, is his show-mance with Ivy and that was more Ivy’s storyline than his.

- And Bianca being friend-zoned despite PB bringing her back. Really? PB must know a lot of fans like her. At the very least a lot of tumblr fans. Idk why they wouldn’t want to capitalize on that. Did they really think it wasn’t a good idea to give her a few diamond scenes? Did neglecting her again make them more money? So instead of giving Bianca… literally anything, they give Slater, a completely new character, a couple of diamond scenes and let players be a little flirty with him.

- Having Eden/Heath and Kiara getting into an accident was a good twist, I was genuinely worried about them, but I gotta laugh that it took them both out of the competition. I mean, it makes sense. They were seriously injured. Realistically, they wouldn’t be able to compete, but their elimination brought the final 6 to MC, the LIs, Vince, and Ivy/Slater. Determinant 5 of 6 contestants are from S10 and one has been in 3 seasons, 2 of which he quit. That’s so dumb. Like… were there ANY in-universe fans who saw this and thought this show was rigged? I mean, more than fans normally would about reality shows?

- How did Mack, Adam, and Derek even get on this show? At first I thought MC was surrounded by celebrities. Bianca was a model, Han was an athlete, Ryder was a pop star, etc etc. I assumed everyone else were celebutantes or something and MC was the odd one out who got lucky when they stumbled across Whitney and Jen. But nah, Mack and Adam (and I think Derek too) are just college students who applied for the show to pay for tuition??? If they’re not famous or didn’t come from fame, why did Piper invite them to compete in the first place? What was so special about them that drew her attention. This is a minor complaint, but it’s just weird to see each of the LIs come from regular families like MC. Not that what we got was bad, but like… did they win a contest or something? What’s the deal? Idk if it’s in a diamond scene I didn’t pay for, but it really should be a free piece of characterization. It would’ve made me care more about the LIs and make them more memorable.

- Does anyone think the friendship/ally status does anything besides determine who votes for who at the end of the season? Why would they implement the friendship meter from ES if they don’t use it for alternate dialogue? Because they know most of the characters won’t be in the next book? Probably, but still. I can’t tell if Adam hating MC is any different then Adam being MC’s ally besides him voting for them at the end of S10, but even then, that doesn’t make sense because he has ample reason to not vote for Ivy. And yet he still votes for Ivy if he’s anything lower than ally. Again, mostly a b1 complaint.

- Someone had a great idea (I forget who, but please message me) that the LIs should be an auto vote and for the rest, whether or not they vote for your should be based on a percentage. The higher the relationship status, the higher the chance. Friends being 75%, neutral being 50% or lower, dislike/hate somewhere around 20 -15%. As an idea.

And that’s the major ones, I’m sure there are more other people can tack on.

#ask #anon #AntiAme #but also #America's Most Eligible #cause im bitter and i love this series

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zdbztumble · 5 years

Text

Botching Backwards and Forwards, Or: Today’s KH Ramble, Part I

As I play through KH III, I’ve also been catching up with the series by watching the Let’s Plays of the other games done by Team Four Star. Because they didn’t play through Coded and only watched the cutscenes from 358/2 Days, that means that there’s only one game on their playlist that I haven’t played myself, that game being Dream Drop Distance. From what I can tell, its gameplay operates on a similar mechanic to Birth by Sleep, which I enjoyed quite a bit. I frankly prefer the Command Decks to what we have in the console games. DDD making levels out of some left-field choices in Disney worlds was a pleasant surprise too. For the Fantasia world alone, I’ll have to consider picking DDD up when I’m not facing a month of utter financial ruin.

And yet, between the two of them, BbS and DDD are responsible for nearly everything wrong with the story of Kingdom Hearts up to this point IMO. Coded got the ball rolling by opening back up a story that had already been satisfyingly ended in KH II, but these two titles do the bulk of the damage to a series that, up to that point, had handled its story pretty well.

Starting with BbS, I freely admit that some of my issues with it boil down to a matter of preference. Turning the Keyblade into a (once) fairly common weapon with many wielders, with a history detailing a great Keyblade War and a test for a Mark of Mastery...all of that wasn’t to my taste, but I can’t say that there’s anything in principle wrong with it. It isn’t necessarily out of place for this series, and the one major wrinkle in continuity it causes (Keyblades choosing wielders) could be squared fairly easily. A prequel focusing on hitherto unmentioned characters rather than the series protagonists isn’t an inherently wrong choice either, though I’ll have more to say about that in Part II of this rant. That I don’t find Terra, Ven, or Aqua terribly interesting as characters is mostly a matter of preference as well, though I do think Terra’s descent into the darkness relies too much on sheer idiocy, and I will admit that Aqua is possibly the most fun player character in this series with her plethora of magic spells. But where I more seriously fault BbS (and Coded, for opening this door) is in its changes to Xehanort’s plots and backstory, and in undermining one of the best thematic ideas from the original Kingdom Hearts game.

"Ansem” turning out to be the true villain of KH I after two-thirds of the gameplay pass under the assumption that it’s the confederation of Disney villains was an effective twist that let an original character, more comfortably of the Square Enix half of the crossover, shine. “Ansem” turning out to be Xehanort the renegade apprentice, with his Nobody Xemnas the leader of Organization XIII, was hardly the most organic twist in the world; I don’t think anyone would go back to KH I and say “oh, it was so obvious, how did I not see it before?” But it made for another genuinely surprising twist in KH II. A villain can only have so many twists and secret plans, however, before effective surprises become cheap gimmicks, and any ability to take their current scheme seriously evaporates.

The revelation that Xehanort is in fact a transparently evil old man who, years before any of the events that led to KH I, plotted to synthesize a X-Blade and bring about a second Keyblade War (with less than ten combatants, so it’d be more of a Keyblade Skirmish) in what basically amounts to a mad scientist’s scheme in fantasy genre clothing, was the breaking point for me. This is a common trap of both prequels and conventional sequels; trying to tie too many things into a small group of characters, or in this case, a single character. Making Xehanort into a villain that spans multiple generations, the man who set into motion everything that preceded KH I and is indirectly responsible for Sora, Kairi, and Riku becoming Keyblade Wielders, can seem like an expansion of the universe on paper, but in execution, it’s a contraction. It reduces too many events down to factors in a single character’s actions. The fact that his scheme is no more coherent than those from KH I and II doesn’t help, nor does the fact that the storyline that most directly leads into Xehanort’s role in those games - Terra’s - is so transparently ripped from Revenge of the Sith.

But Xehanort’s abrupt reentry into the story isn’t truly maddening - not in BbS, at least. For me, the worst part of the BbS story is how it retroactively changes Sora’s. I’d go so far as to say that BbS is to Sora what Dragon Ball: Minus is to Bardock and Goku.

Don’t misunderstand me on that point: BbS is nowhere near as bad a game as Dragon Ball: Minus is a comic. What I mean by that is: prior to Dragon Ball: Minus, most people took Bardock: the Father of Goku to be canon. And, in that TV special, the history given to Goku, derived from what was said in the manga at the time, was that he was of no account by the standards of Saiyan society. He was a no-account spawn of a low-class warrior, sent off to a far-flung planet to clear out its worthless inhabitants. That low-class warrior who fathered him was as ruthless and mercenary as any typical Saiyan, and while he was stronger than the average low-class fighter and was given psychic insight into the fate of his people, Bardock was ultimately just another Saiyan doomed to die and be forgotten by time. Nothing in Goku’s origins is special or fated, which makes his accidental amnesia and eventual surpassing of Vegeta, the supposed Saiyan ideal, more remarkable. By transforming Bardock into a more tamed Saiyan with a close familial bond to his mate, who sends his son to Earth for safety in a blatant rip-off of Superman’s origins, Goku and Bardock both become too special, Goku’s turning into a kind-hearted child becomes too telegraphed, and their stories become too beholden to “chosen one” cliches.

And that is what BbS does to Sora, Riku, and to a lesser extent Kairi. That all three of them just happen, in their childhoods, to have had contact with Keyblade Wielders who left a personal mark upon them - and, in Sora’s case, literally took up residence inside him - is just too pat. It makes the three of them ending up with Keyblades too easy, too predestined. This hurts all three of them, but Sora most of all. Ven looking like Roxas and Vanitas looking like Sora, is a massive headache (and yes, I’m aware that there is at least some explanation of that), but the big loss is in the thematic content of the story, and there is where the comparisons to Dragon Ball: Minus really come into play.

Like a pre-Minus Goku, pre-BbS Sora is not special, in any way, at the start of KH I. He’s an ordinary young teen, plucky and affable and just a bit lazy, with a burgeoning quasi-romantic interest in his friend Kairi and an in-all-things rivalry with his best friend Riku. Compared to Riku, Sora comes up short in pretty much every area. Riku, at first glance, is faster, stronger, smarter, more dedicated, more fearless, and more capable. If you were going to choose one of those two to be the fated hero wielding a magic blade to save the worlds from darkness, Riku’s the better candidate by every metric, on paper. And, in fact, the Keyblade does choose Riku. The whole “chosen one” cliche is subverted in KH I in a brilliant way by essentially having destiny make the wrong choice. That Sora only gets the Keyblade by accident, loses it to its intended master, but quickly reclaims it on the strength of his accomplishments and his purity - that he earns it - is one of my favorite things in this entire series, and is a wonderful thematic idea and moral. Giving Sora and Riku both a fated “touched by a master” backstory kills so much of that idea, and it’s enough to make me wish that there was no BbS, as fun as the gameplay can be.

Ironically, DDD tries to have its cake and eat it too by playing up the fact that Sora wasn’t chosen by the Keyblade, but the damage was done by that point. And DDD further undermines that initial concept in the way it writes Sora, and his relationship with Riku. For one thing, Sora in DDD seems so much dumber than he was in previous games. Up to that point, he’d been written as an upbeat young teen, possessed of a certain level of immaturity and naivete, but always determined to help save the day, and more than capable of getting serious when needed. DDD abruptly starts to portray him as more of a doofy shonen hero, without any clear motivation and to no real purpose. It also introduces the idea that the central dynamic in Sora and Riku’s friendship is that Sora lifts Riku’s spirits while Riku takes up the slack from Sora’s sloppiness and carelessness. I have a real problem with that presentation, because it just isn’t true.

If you go back and look at KH I, those early Destiny Islands scenes set Sora up as the underdog to Riku’s Big Man on Campus. Riku jokes that he’s the only one working on the raft, and Kairi remarks that “he’s changed,” but he doesn’t come off as someone needing to perk up. And with one of the first challenges of the game being Sora gathering raft supplies, it doesn’t seem that Riku needs to take up that much slack either. In any event, over the course of KH I, Riku’s the one who drops the slack and falls into darkness, with Sora literally having to stop him from doing horrible things. And it’s Sora who continues on through CoM and KH II, saving the worlds. While Riku does appear here and there to aid Sora, his aid doesn’t come in the form of “taking up slack” or cleaning up after messes Sora leaves; Sora, Donald, and Goofy are still able to save the day by their own skill in each world. This whole notion, and Sora’s more dim-witted persona, seem invented, if not from whole cloth, then from very little that was previously established.

And again, there doesn’t seem to be a clear motive, unless it’s to highlight the differences between Sora and Riku and give more justification to Riku getting the Mark of Mastery when Sora wasn’t. But the writing doesn’t give a coherent through-line to that idea, nor does it sufficiently justify Sora not becoming a Master. Had the game actively told a story of turning the tables, and made a point to stress the idea that Riku’s fully reformed and that Sora was slipping up, then I’d be more forgiving (even if I still wouldn’t like the idea), but the work just isn’t there.

I’ll admit that there’s a certain amount of bias in my assessment; I’ve never liked Riku as a character. As a teen playing KH I for the first time, I found it easy to project my dislike of certain people IRL onto him, and in the years since, I’ve continued to find that the manner of his turn to darkness in KH I makes it very hard to accept him back into the fold with Sora and the others. He’s also a lousy player character in Reverse/Rebirth and in KH III IMO. But I accept that he’s the deuteragonist, and that his story since KH I has been one of redemption. In principle, a game that builds him up as a character and lets him save the day is fine. But the manner in which it was done in DDD was all wrong. And to an extent, the changes made to his and Sora’s friendship, and to Sora’s personality, have all carried over into KH III, which is even more frustrating.

And, speaking of things carried over...DDD is where Xehanort gets completely ridiculous IMO. Having pulled a third twist that he was actually an ancient Keyblade Master seeking to provoke a war, now there’s a fourth twist where his younger self has been traveling through time (by ridiculous means) to ensure that the fifth twist - that all that business about Nobodies having no hearts was a lie, and that the real Organization XIII exists to create thirteen Horcruxes vessels for Xehanort’s heart, so that there can be thirteen darknesses to face the seven lights in the Keyblade War (which still seems short of the numbers you’d need for an actual war, but whatever). The whole business about “recompletion” allowing an original person to revive if their Heartless and Nobody are destroyed is already enough of a contrivance to bring the original Xehanort back, but time travel and heart-splitting is even more absurd. And I still haven’t been able to figure out how “Ansem” and Xemnas can be back in action, even with the time travel aspect.

Recompletion also means that DDD brings back the rest of Organization XIII. I consider nearly all of them to be glorified henchmen, possessed of a gimmick for combat and a single personality trait at best, so their revival - and their cameos in BbS - do nothing for me. A big exception to that is Axel, but if I don’t care much for Riku, I can’t stand Axel. He comes off as what an “edgy” teenage writer would come up with for a “cool” character in a bad first stab at fiction. From his character design to his abused catchphrase, everything about him pisses me off. His one saving grace in KH II was that he sacrifices himself, and nothing undermines a sacrifice like a contrived way around death. That he’s become a Keyblade Wielder, and one of the Seven Guardians of Light, is ridiculous to me, and I’m not sure if I can think of a more blatant example of a writer’s pet character being so inorganically shoved to the forefront of a story that supposedly isn’t about them.

DDD also started to open the door to the possibility of Roxas and Namine being restored. That idea is less annoying to me than any of these others, but it’s still a mistake IMO. That Roxas and Namine both ultimately elect to give up their lives as individuals to return Sora and Kairi to their full selves, accepting their fate so that others can live more fully, is a bittersweet and touching concept, and one that lets “death” have some real consequences and the happy ending of KH II come with a price. I hate seeing that undermined, and I’m frankly frustrated by how much of KH III’s front half involved chatter about Roxas.

And speaking of KH III...that’s where Part II comes in.

ADDENDUM: Another thing about DDD that I feel undermines Sora is that, while writing him dumber, the game also hypes him up more than he ever was in the past. It’s the same problem as Harry Potter; for all that series’ virtues, constantly pointing out how special Harry is can end up taking away from his character by making his unique traits too ubiquitous. Other characters constantly pointing out how kind and loving and easy to bond with Sora is undermines that trait by over-playing it and turning it into an exercise in “tell, don’t show.”

#critique #commentary #kingdom hearts #birth by sleep #dream drop distance #disney #z's crits

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moviestorian · 5 years

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As someone who loves films and history, can you name some films that bugged you from a historical perspective? Not necessarily historical accuracy per se, but where you feel they way they changed history ruined the story?

Hi! :)

Ooooh I love this question! Indeed, cinema and history are my two greatest passions. I’d like to point out that I don’t expect a film to be 100% period accurate, because it’s really difficult to achieve and also the screenwriting requires some specific narrative/pacing choices for the storytelling’s sake. I think sometimes the liberties taken by the director/writer can be advantageous, but that’s rarely the case. I’m going to concentrate on the examples where it didn’t, in my personal opinion, work well and I’m gonna try to explain my choices.

In no particular order:

Pretty much anything based on Phillippa Gregory’s novels, that is: The Other Boleyn Girl, The White Queen, The White Princess, etc. Watching these are usually ultimate cringe compilations. And certainly constantly pitting women against each other to create a cheap drama is not “feminism”, despite Gregory and Emma Frost trying to convince us otherwise. Also, congratulations for making the majority of the characters not only historically inaccurate, but largely unsympathetic.

The Imitation Game. Visually and on the technical aspects of it, it’s a very good movie with amazing cast (and music!). It was the script which really bugged me. It’s not just about being largely inaccurate (I remember seeing someone doing a scene by scene analysis in terms of fact checking, and the entire movie is only about 40% historically accurate), but it’s about the scale and how they made the entire story and the people involved absolutely one dimensional. It’s oversimplified, and I feel like they made up some things just to stir drama, thus taking away most of Turing’s complexities, especially when it comes to the relationship with his team (what was it with making Hugh Alexander look like a complete asshole and a violent man? Or turning commander Denniston into a villain for no literal reason?). It doesn’t really help that Cumberbatch, who is imo a very good actor overall, was directed in such a way that he was basically Sherlock 2.0. I really love the fact that they made it look like breaking the Enigma code was basically 1)done by like 5 people; 2)an accident. Not to mention that many lines from the movie are so trite I wanna *headdesk*.

Aftermath (pol. Pokłosie) - I think the movie worked very well as a crime story for most of the time, and I’m glad the director dared to touch the sensitive topic of Jedwabne, but I have no idea what the fuck was he thinking when he was writing the scene in which one of the main characters was LITERALLY stabbed and pretty much crucified to the barn in a Polish village in 2001. Like, I get the village was fictional, but the movie was supposed to be realistic, right? Honestly, wtf.

Mary Queen of Scots - that movie was not only boring as hell, but dear filmmakers, having Mary forcing herself on her husband isn’t “empowering” or something to be praised for. The actors were wasted on such blandly written characters.

I’m sad to admit it, but I’m afraid BoRhap also applies. Inaccuracy is one thing, but I wish the script wasn’t so banal.

Knightfall. Watching this show destroyed my brain cells. Relying your storyline on a forced romance between a knight of the Templars and queen Joan, who was supposedly dead by the time the action of the show takes place, was a pretty bold choice. And oh boy, what we do NOT have in this show! We have the Holy Grail, Philip the Fair being friends with the Templars, faked virginity test, the conflict with the pope who should also be dead at this point, de Nogaret being in love with Isabella, murder plots, Philip murdering his pregnant wife during the battle (but the child somehow survived and was born)…That show was fricking wild and I hella don’t want to see season 2.

Victoria - I really liked season 1, but as the show progressed it has become very poorly written. Again, everything for the drama TM.

Aaaaand unpopular opinion alert: the last 20 minutes or so of Schindler’s List. I’m not gonna rant about the fact that there’s a serious factual error literally in the first few minutes of the film (with the subtitles explaining the outbreak of WWII) because I was eventually really invested in the plot and I adored the cinematography, but honestly? The last 20-30 minutes (sth like that)ruined the script to a huge extent. Everything we’ve seen before turned overly melodramatic - I’m talking about the scene in which Schindler starts sobbing about being ashamed that he didn’t save more lives. I get what they were trying to do here, but to have Schindler say it out loud, in front of a few hundred people, expressively lamenting about whether or not he should’ve sold his car or even his pin in order to save more lives is so awfully straightforward and rather unsubtle exposition. Real shame, if you ask me, because I really liked the movie overall and if not for that ending I’d give it a higher rating. Everything became way too black and white, you know? I realize that probably many people will disagree, but that was my impression.

That’s all what I can think of right now. :D

#answered #yogurtbattle #wera speaks #hopefully i won't get eaten for the last one XD

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whetstonefires · 6 years

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I thought Starfire was originally black-coded? Like, she came from slavery, she had massive hair, her nose was usually drawn flatter than, say, Raven's. Like, you might be right in that they cast the black lady as the alien just to make a diversity quota and that that's pretty messed up, but it also might be a call back to NTT

I mean, if they actually engage with her enslaved past in a sensitive manner, especially the even-more-sensitive manner required by her casting, I will be...beyond shocked, in a good way. That was certainly never achieved in the comics imo, it was underexplored cheap pathos 900%.

But Kori’s visual design was arrived at via ‘Red Sonja in space’ and then adding the Mighty Mouse contrail, and then sort of fusing that with big hair, and it was the 80s; big hair was in fashion for white girls. there was a whole fad on for chemical perms to give you fake frizz.

I just went through a couple of issues comparing noses, and Kori’s is generally flatter than Raven’s but that’s not saying much since Raven’s was designed to be aquiline (a trait it lost over time), and wider than Donna’s but not any shorter, often longer, so there’s something there but it’s really subtle.

If she was ever black-coded in the comics pretty sure it was entirely by accident, which is tbh a good thing because the whole ‘her wild warrior blood makes it difficult for her not to KILL!’ thing was pretty racist even assuming she wasn’t meant to invoke any racial concept more specific than ‘utopian primitivism but in space.’ The way Dick talked about her wrt that aspect of her character reliably gave me hives. Ick. There are some scenes where I just chant ‘dump him’ all the way through and I actually ship it, as much as I ship anyone who doesn’t have a canon happy ending.

I really hope she wasn’t secretly being intentionally black coded, frankly, that would make Dick’s racist language way worse. Like. Yikes.

I do agree it’s a very reasonable casting based on traits she already had, and the fact that the actress isn’t even 5′10 let alone over 6′ and they’re apparently not going to try to pretend otherwise via camera tricks was my only disappoint. dick should not be taller than kori that’s just wrong.

Previously, I’d experienced vague misgivings about how they were planning to write the character because there was already a lot of misogyny worked into the way Kori’s been written in the past, and some things like the way her anger issues, general impulsivity, and culturally instilled comfort with lethal violence have been framed promised to become even more fraught in the context of how black women are generally depicted. But I’m a lot less optimistic with the realization that Vic’s not on the show, suggesting their most likely reason for the casting is regressive rather than progressive, in this year 2018.

...also now that I know they’re not giving Beast Boy green skin I tend to suspect Kori isn’t orange not because they wanted to pass on the bad trends with casting poc as nonhuman and then painting them but because they’re cutting costs on makeup overall. :/

#teen titans #koriand'r #dick grayson #racism #ask #hoc est meum #i heard they're putting hawk and dove on the show #i wonder which hawk and dove #maybe they'll be black too and i'm jumping to conclusions #a nonny mouse

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