#its not really anti him more anti how his character was written and dealt with
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I'm seeing so much commentary on people reacting to the live action atla toning down Sokka's misogyny
and I'm over here like this is a total non-issue because in my own rewrite of the show I already did that exact thing, it makes complete sense to do it and they should do it because it's a weaker aspect of the original show
Sokka's early misogyny is utterly cartoonish in comparison to the set up of the rest of the SWT, it doesn't feel realistic for the only teenaged boy in a dying culture surrounded by adult women with a grandmother who left a more out and out misogynist society to act the way he does
how Sokka "resolves" his misogyny is equally cartoonish, I never liked how in The Warriors of Kyoshi literally episode 4 of the show makes a teen girl compromise her own culture with a female only fighting tradition teach a boy who is supremely rude and disrespectful to her and then still be attracted to him afterwards, it's more misogyny to fix misogyny and is very obviously men writing about how to fix misogyny especially as they have Aang make a joke about Sokka wearing a dress after going through how meaningful the fighting costume is and how a lot of Asian clothing with hanfu influences like atla borrows from would have men in what to western eyes would be dresses, Aang has already seen multiple male authority figures in robes, the joke makes no sense
I also wouldn't consider Sokka's misogyny genuinely resolved after this, consider how the show deals with his romantic relationships with both Yue and Suki and how both can be seen as extensions of how Kataang is treated in the show, rewards for the hero, especially with how Sokka interacts aggressively with Hahn instead of respecting Yue's wishes whatever her reasons for them, I think an argument can be made that Yue's death is a fridging for Sokka's storyline rather than or in combination with being a consequence of Aang's failure as an avatar or the culmination of her own storyline where she fulfills her duties as a leader to protect her own people
Beyond his romantic relationships, while Sokka drops a lot of his more misogynistic language with Katara, he doesn't support her when she faces off with the NWT leaders to learn waterbending, and he still leaves the caretaking and food preparation and grocery shopping to her which is more common than him going out to hunt or gather in order to provide for the group while he takes a leadership role like determining their travel schedule and routes, it is not an even division of labor and falls along traditional sex stereotypes
In addition to his typical duties to the group, Sokka also remains invested in the trappings of masculinity after ep4, he's concerned about what's manly and how he compares to Jet for example, there's no investigation or interrogation in his interest in meat and hunting and how they relate to masculinity and his misogyny, in the episode with Piando, his insecurity as a non-bender is resolved by giving him a new male mentor and a new martial skill, sword fighting, which is masculine in both western and Asian cultures rather than assuaging his self esteem issues in any less stereotypically masculine ways, I also think it was done so he could compare more favorably to Zuko, another male character, and even his interest in engineering and mechanics comes with a male mentor and is a traditionally masculine pursuit
the show's poor handling of misogyny also extends beyond Sokka, with the NWT, the show acts as if Pakku is the only reason the tribe is misogynistic and the only consequences to that misogyny is that women can't waterbend and there are arranged marriages, and that both the NWT and Pakku's misogyny is resolved by allowing only Katara to learn to waterbend which she doesn't even earn on her own merits, she gets the opportunity because Pakku likes her grandmother
none of this is realistic, misogyny is not because of one bad apple, Pakku doesn't make Yue's arranged marriage, Chief Arnook does, he picked Hahn for her, and the show acts as if Arnook has no authority to compel Pakku to teach Katara or any ability to persuade him in order to reduce his culpability in the NWT's misogyny as its leader to make him a more respectable character so it's not uncomfortable when Aang and Sokka follow his orders in the battle later on, but women not being able to bend and forced into arranged marriages is still status quo when the gaang leaves, Yue's just dead
I'm not even convinced the show runners understand what's wrong with arranged marriage, the issue is not Yue can't be with Sokka who she likes and at most has a slight crush on cuz she's only known him for like two days, it's that she's being treated as male property, a broodmare, and a vehicle to ensure Hahn receives the throne because her father has no male heir and picked some guy to succeed him instead, like it's not explicit in the show but that is the implication based on the historical reality of princesses in arranged marriages, and the show has her get out of it only through death idc that she ascends to being a spirit, it's still a teen girl that dies
There's also no discussion by the show of the Earth Kingdom's misogyny when it has the exact same shit going on, Toph is the only female earthbender in the show not including avatars, there might have been a female earthbender in the background when Katara broke them out of prison, but I'm not really counting that, the entire army and Dai Li are all made up of men, the EK might even be worse because the show doesn't demonstrate that women and girls even have the capacity to earthbend aside from Toph and avatars and Toph doesn't even learn from a human, she has to learn from animals, the show treats this as commentary on her disability but the show has no compelling reason why it can't also be commentary on her sex, Toph was also originally supposed to be a boy so this could have ended up so much worse there literally would have been no female earthbenders aside from avatars at all, I'm not counting Oma as she might just be a mythological figure not a real person that once lived
The Fire Nation kinda barely avoids the same issue, Azula is the only named female firebender aside from avatars in the show but she has two female sidekicks who despite being non-benders show martial skill and there are clearly female soldiers and guards in the FN military so there are much stronger implications of female firebenders existing and being completely allowed to train their abilities and that Azula isn't exceptional in that respect like Toph is, only for being a prodigy with blue fire
Azula was also originally supposed to have an arranged marriage in s3 and they dropped it in favor of showing that royal and noble girls could casually date in the FN which has wild implications for women's empowerment in the country more so than but especially in combination with the fact women can train and join the military (which is why I say the FN is not fascist it's literally the least misogynistic country aside from Kyoshi and by like a country mile so it's literally not misogynistic enough) not that the show does anything more than minor teen drama with it
again, the vast majority of this misogyny is completely unremarked upon by the show especially after s1 when they leave the NWT, it is clearly a fictional world made by men with no true understanding of misogyny just a vague awareness that misogyny is bad and what the really obvious and outdated examples of it are, this is a narrative inconsistency in the show to have the examples and commentary on misogyny be so cartoonish in the beginning and then disappear after s1
your options to resolve this inconsistency is to either go all in with more realistic misogyny and provide commentary on all of it but this takes effort and will be divisive, or take the easier route and ease off the cartoonish-ness of it and comment less on it to avoid drawing attention to all instances of misogyny in the show
obviously Netflix was gonna do the latter
(not me tho, I'm making it less cartoony and dealing with it in my rewrite)
#atla#live action atla#atla critical#anti bryke#anti kataang#anti sokka#its not really anti him more anti how his character was written and dealt with#long post#meta
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just saw quite the heated discussion on communist twitter about the “damage” dealt by atla and its pacifist teachings and its inspired some thoughts from me.
i think it is a valid critic that because atla was written by american white dudes during the bush administration, you probably aren’t going to derive the most revolutionary mores from the show. that’s understandable, and i can understand some viewers’ frustration with aang not killing ozai at the end because of the “violence is always bad!!!” message that the show really hammers home. but i think the original idea that atla is counter-revolutionary because of this lacks some nuance.
for starters, even given the incredible amounts of bias that comes with the show’s writers and writing, atla is still a pretty revolutionary show. especially because it is, at the end of the day, a kids’ show. i’ve written extensively about how atla teaches its audience about anti-imperialism through the lens of critical pedagogy, but i’ll spare you from listening to my whole spiel about it. in essence, it is still widely impressive that a show like that was able to deliver such a message through a kids show on a kids network in a country that was actively engaged in a pointless, imperialist war. as for it not being “revolutionary enough” by failing to more thoroughly teach redistributive justice and presenting nonviolence as something that is “holier than thou”, i have a few qualms.
1. aang is a pacifist monk. obviously its worth knowing that the tibetan monks that inspired some of the air nomads did hold slaves until the communist revolution, but the air nomads are indeed fictional and thus wholly pacifistic. all he has ever known is pacifism and nonviolence. moreover, aang is the only remaining part of a genocided community. the philosophy of the air nomads is literally one of the only things aang has left from his culture and community, so naturally it is extremely important to him.
2. this one i cannot emphasize enough: aang is a literal child. he is 12. asking a child to kill someone, even if that someone is a genocidal warmongering imperialist, is a difficult thing to ask. aang never wanted to be a part of the whole war to begin with, understandably so, because he was just a kid; kids shouldn’t have to make these kinds of decisions. as older members of atla’s audience, it can be easy to put ourselves in aang’s position and be at peace with that kind of decision because 1) this world isn’t real, so our perception of a character’s decision does not materially affect us at all and 2) we, the older audience, are not children. maybe this is a hot take, but it isn’t that unrealistic for a child to be freaked out by the thought of killing someone, especially if killing is against what that child considers to be important. hell, i’m an adult and i am freaked out by the prospect of having to take life. i don’t think i could do it either.
3. violence as retribution is dangerous. a very smart observation from a different user in the discussion was that violence is a necessary tool of the proletariat because the bourgeoisie will not give us liberation willingly, but this is because violence is serving a means to an end. without this, violence as retribution is a difficult cycle to end. it very much reminds me of the last of us part 2, and how revenge is not always fulfilling and more often than not leads to more death and destruction. the desire for retribution is valid and justified, but acting on it just makes things worse.
4. we have to remember that this is a kids show. the show is already pretty subversive in including topics on imperialism, colonialism, forgiveness, etc., with most of the deeper revolutionary stuff being noticed by older viewers. these topics are already difficult to understand, so it has to be dumbed down and simplified a bit for the audience of 6 to 12 year olds. there’s a reason why atla is a kids show and not an adult animation or even specifically a y/a animation, and that’s because the intended audience is children. i think its a bit ridiculous to expect a kids show to have a scholarly level discussion of anti-imperialism. while i think teaching these kinds of things to children is super important, as enjoyers of art/intellectuals/anti-capitalists, i think it is also important that kids shows are fun to watch. atla is fun to watch for a whole host of reasons.
sorry for the length of the rant, but my passion for atla even after my hyperfixation on it has dulled is something that makes me think a lot. while i do consider myself an intellectual and anti-capitalist, sometimes i think we take things way too seriously. shows like atla, even with all of its flaws and deeper meanings, are allowed to be fun. storytelling doesn’t have to be perfect nor does it have to have perfect intentions for it to be important. people deserve to have a respite from intense intellectual thinking sometimes. anyways happy monday!
#atla#Avatar The Last Airbender#lok#TLOK#the legend of korra#aang#ozai#communism#anti-imperialism#am i bored and writing this because i'm going through a breakup? yeah. do i care? no.
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ok weeks later i am finally continuing my gwitch rewatch lolz. time for episode 12.... someone PLEASE tell tumblr to stop erasing my posts just as im about to hit post and not being able to undo it because i had the longest write up and now here i am.... rewriting again and trying to remember what i'd written. i'm gonna scream lmao
this part feels so awful now that the series is over and thinking back on ep 24. miorine just comes to, all to see the doors closed and hear suletta's screams and sophie's gunshots on the other side. no doubt in my mind this girl probably dealt with awful nightmares about suletta dying after quiet zero
i know prospera did use this as another XP level up for aerial, but jeez, imagine how much confidence she has in suletta and eri to be able to say something like this. like not just that suletta will go to aerial, but that together they can take on the attackers who at the time prospera didn't know shit about
lmao i dont think ive ever felt so confidently about something that id bet my whole life ln it
ad stella universe is crazy because i can only think the big liberatarian ancap society is some silicon valley fascist's wet dream because how else do you explain the business management girl knowing 1337 hacker skills
stupid asshole
sophie and norea are such tragic characters to me goddamn. like how often were they practicing their piloting to be able to be good enough to join on a mission like this? were they upping their permet score during practice too?
and why exactly is it them who pilot the lfriths instead of someone else from DoF? we never really get a clear answer on why it has to be the teenage girls when later on we see there's a ton of grown men around. i think given what else we know of ad stella, though, it doesn't matter much when we have asticassia as a school for the elite that basically serves for furthering earthian oppression be it by force (ie. see guel's original plans for joining dominicus) or just continuing to further the spoils of space capitalism
when you think of it that way, i don't see DoF any different than say palestinians fighting back against oppression from IDF forces. unless you're a racist fuck, you can't blame palestinian kids for throwing rocks at IDF soldiers, so i can't really blame norea and sophie for joining the fight
to quote fanon:
National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.
- Frantz Fanon, "Concerning Violence," The Wretched of the Earth
i really do wish they hadn't just sidelined DoF entirely lol if you subscribe even a smidgen to anti-colonialism, its hard not to sympathize with them and shaddiq/grassley girls. and here theyre actually fighting for a just cause and are deserving of sympathy unlike 0079’s fakeout with zeon.
flipping the UC spacenoid/earth dichotomy so that earthians are the exploited class is just good shit when you consider what fuckers like musk want to do lol and its not as set in stone as exploitation only happens on earth either. mercury sounds like an abandoned appalachian mining town at this point with people lured out by jobs and then left to fend for themselves once permet was found elsewhere and their utility to the spacian capitalist class has run dry. and though i take this one with a grain of salt because we never get hard confirmation or denial, the elans were supposedly spacians (norea calls him a spacian even after finding out el5n’s not the real elan and he doesnt say one way or the other).
enough marxist ramblings, here's a cool shot of lfrith ur
whoever added this, i love them
as much as i don't trust bandai with sulemio unless they reverse the mess they've made for themselves.... i just want to fucking know more about notrette so bad!!!!!!!!!!!!
badass shot of lfrith thorn to go with the ur one earlier
snitch boy starts his snitch arc
the whole way guel killing vim plays out felt like it was gonna lead to something cool at the time... it makes me even more mad now knowing that it very likely is all an homage to zeta and kamille stealing the mk-ii and then later watching his mom die lol (ffs we even have the guel episode later on stealing its title from a zeta episode). guel's entire character just leaves such a bad taste in my mouth with everything thats happened recently
to think that 15 mins later she'd just be all ditzy over pancakeing a man after basically peeing her pants here
prospera shooting a gun at quiet zero >>> prospera shooting a gun at plant quetta
this show and this fucking pose, man lmao
AERIAL REBUILD is going to be stuck in my head all night because of this episode.... but look at how fucking cool she looks!!!
okouchi if this is a line you wrote, you, sir, are a troll... her face now is literally just :<
if you have the rebuild aerial and you don't have her posed like this, then what are you even doing?
i still feel like secelia and rouji for sure had no idea how powerful aerial's gund-bit gun was in episode 17. like norea is scared shitless here and tells sophie and olcott to get the fuck away. we have olcott telling us that even though it has school regulations on, it's strong as fuck
that said, i don't think guel was in mortal danger given that the school restrictions don't let them aim at cockpits or whatever, but it sure would've fucked up the darilbalde
oh this line hurts lol
i don't think i ever paused on this frame before lol i really hope peil hags master plan here wasn't just to have el5n get all rapey like he does later on. i mean, probably not and that was moreso el5n's desparate attempts to stay alive given he barely gets a chance to do anything before school shootings 1 and 2 bring everything to shit
comparing this frame versus suletta inside calibarn in ep 24 and suletta is still just a baby at this point in the show lmao she looks like a little teddy bear vs kakkoii ikemen suletta
paused on this frame and it honestly looks cool as hell lmao
and we made it to THE scene
you know, as i said in prior rewatch posts, i had been watching via GJM's fansubs at this point and was gonna wait for them to release their version of episode 12... however, that same suletta sunday i logged on to twitter and immediately got spoiled on this scene lmao so i needed to find out what the fuck happened and stopped waiting on fansubs (i did rewatch later on)
it really is such an amazingly well done scene though like goddamn lol
now that the show's over, i do kind of wonder if there could have been something other than this to become the spark of tension between suletta and miorine. with the exception of sophie (which arguably was more eri's victim than suletta's), suletta never kills anyone again in the show. her final fight ends up being against the gund nodes being commanded by eri lol so she just fights unmanned drones. it's an interesting decision considering the gundam franchise as a whole
i know it's meant to contrast against shaddiq's by any means necessary approach and prospera's willingness to do the same if someone tries to hinder her plans to help eri... but i really just can't get behind the whole violence is always bad no exceptions message behind the show. i do appreciate that shaddiq's plan basically still came to fruition and that it ends up being an in-world analogue to nationalization of industry. and it's really a cherry on top to have sabina call out whether that was for the best - not just that they nationalized industry but that nothing else was done to stop those who don't agree with what miorine did. history has given us countless examples of countries that nationalize various industries just for the united states military to come in and make some shit up and stage a coup and hand over said industry to whatever shithead capitalists were being piss babies about it at the time
lmao i know we're all mad about a lot of the yuri being left on the table because of bandai execs, but i wonder how much of the anti-capitalist message got left on there too. they really had a chance to make guel a real hero and he's just... not lol. episode 15 makes me mad not because it's a guel episode but because nothing ever actually came from DoF existing. like what was the point?
if they just wanted to humanize DoF a bit and introduce the kid that guel and kenanji run into later on, that could have taken half an episode given the insane pacing they chose to go by during the 2nd cour
regardless, i'll still savor little bits here and there
ok lmao i feel like my original post was way better than this and it took me double the time now to make this post but whatever. gonna try to get through some more eps this weekend
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I prefer the Jesse of your fics than canon Jesse
To me Jesse was a character I liked, but I cant excuse himself in chot, I get he is mad at Grace but he believes in people with complicated stories, so for me a convo of them talking later on and reconstructing their relation was needed. As the Jesse from chog and choi would never have wish Grace to rot alone in some house in the middle of nowhere like it was implied in chot, he wouldnt.
Another thing of Jesse is that he has always looked up at the Lightwoods, we see it when he meets Gideon, so for me in chot would have been necesary any pov of him relating to this, of how he feels knowing his mother killed two of his cousins, and a reunion with his uncles. I liked that Will welcomed him into the family, but I feel Jesse also seeks this welcome from the Lightwood side, a stuff you have touched in your fics.
My other complaint of Jesse in chot which is that I wished to see more of him, lie his interests, hobbies, stuff like that, I get we couldnt due to page time but his character revolved to much around Lucie and I missed this chance of showing how special he is.
Jesse and Grace are very interesting, both have done very fucked stuff, Jesse killed Elias and other shadowhunter, he didnt want to but he was made to by the possesion a very heavy stuff that for me should have been dealt. Of course I dont think he should be punsihed but its a moral dilemma he may had when he meets Cordelia. Or that eventhough Tatiana was bonkers, he saw his mother die and that was barely touched, he must have had some good memories and maybe feels like Gabriel with Benedict, like he doesnt like the parent but also has lived some good moments with them so its complicated.
But well in chot I couldnt get to see Jesse written so bland, I liked thebits we got from blackdale, but I fetl CC reduced him to that, I think if tlh was 4 books he would have been more developed. But my biggest issue was that it was implied he didnt care of Grace and that he cared more of Jordelia marriage than his sister, which isnt true.
I needed a scene of them talking about what happened so bad. We're left to believe that it happened behind the scenes like several other moments like showing Gabrily reacting to Kit's death, Wessa and LucieJesse mortal sword trial, Sona giving birth... and I could go on. I understand that some things don't need to be written to know that they happened, but I felt that WE DESPERATELY NEEDED a scene between Grace and Jesse after the Silent City scene. I didn't have the same opinions as some readers about Jesse's reaction to Grace revealing what she did, but this doesn't mean that the development of their relationship didn't leave a bitter taste in my mouth. Especially because who follows my blog knows how I'm particularly attached to Jesse as a character. I don't hide you that these weeks after Chot came out and lately as well, I was so depressed to read about Jesse criticism because of this. How this whole thing was handled broke my heart because on one side I'm happy of how so many things turned out in this book, but on the other side, there is this bitter taste in my mouth that some days doesn't make me sleep well. It sounds utterly silly but that's the extent of how much hope and expectation I put in this book and how some of it was shattered to pieces.
So while I loved to see him with Lucie and the Herondales, I also needed closure on his family's side. TLH showed us a lot of brother and sister relationships but CC did Grace and Jesse dirty. It was like she really wanted to punish Grace to the very end, even though some people did worse in the past. It reminds me of the treatment she gave Jessamine in TID, but thank God she didn't kill her. It would've been anti-climatic. What "consoles" me (consolation is a big word) is that at least we see that they still have a relationship at the end because we're shown that through little gestures like them doing stuff like him helping her with the game or Jesse touching her shoulder etc. I hate that we're left to believe that everything is fine between them, while I wanted to see them actually talk about what they went through and even have a good cry together.
And I also wanted to see them with the Lightwoods, of course! I craved for moments with Gabrily or Sophideon, where uncles and aunts meet them properly for the first time in years. We're often told that the Lightwoods wanted to meet Jesse and wanted to offer Grace a place to stay after Tatiana was arrested, but then it was never actually mentioned again, not even once. This is something else I'm going to write about in the future because I just need Lightwood moments with Grace and Jesse.
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well here's some random thoughts/notes on my rewrite
-i havent actually read very many of the comics yet, so my knowledge of triton is still very limited, and i have no idea what to do with him. i dont want any of the royal family to die too fast, as the first "issue" i feel should focus more on vox and his massive killing spree, and should be free of any "important" deaths taking that spotlight away. so i dont want to keep triton's role the same, buuuut he i might still have him be the first big death. any triton fans have thoughts on this?
-alongside this, i also want signficantly more death. even though a lot of inhumans do technically die, the bulk are random unnamed ones never heard from before and never to be heard from again. i want named inhumans, actual characters, to die, and i want it to very clearly matter and have an effect on the characters. hell, have them go to earth, kill off daisy, iso, kamala, ect. it's called death of the inhumans, but only like.. 7 actual inhuman characters die. everyone else is just a hoard of nameless faces.
it's more of an "oh shit, thats a lot" moment to me and less of an "oh shit, the kree are commiting genocide." because these arent characters any of us know. 11,000 unnamed inhumans dying is horrible, but it certainly isnt written that way imo. so i want more added to these deaths, so that the title actual feels warranted. the actual comic is more of an "a couple thousand random guys die, i guess, but that sort of happens all the time in marvel, and its not even the main motivator for any characters by the middle" kind of thing.
-maybe new arctilian shouldn't be destroyed immediately. maybe that should be apart of bolt's "turning point", perhaps a little bit later, so that it holds more weight. the entire city is destroyed, and post issue 2, i dont think it's ever mentioned again? their entire city was collapsed and every single person living there murdered, and it's not really presented as being a huge deal. that should be a huge fucking deal!!
-i'm also very conflicted on maximus. as ive said, if this is death of the inhumans, i believe in going all in. this is death of the inhumans. not survival of the inhumans. not death of some inhumans. DEATH OF THE INHUMANS. but there's a part of me that very strongly wants maximus to live. now obviously im biased because im very, very attached to him - but if there's one trope i despise, its killing off a character as a form of redemption, and im worried having maximus go out would play into that. if maximus dies, i want him to die protecting someone or something.
but on the other hand, maximus is a very conflicted character, who's subtexually at worse and outrighted stated at best, mentally ill. he's dealt with a lot, jumping between villian to anti-hero, but around 2016/2017 onwards, he's basically always written as generally well-meaning, a bit of a socially-inept pain in the ass, but overall not an antagonist. even before this he's been written as someone willing to work with the heroes. at the time of death of the inhumans, maximus seems to have found a place where he accepts himself and his family, and the lot have worked out their problems.
to kill him off seems... incredibly and unnecessarily cruel. he's a character that's spent basically his entire life miserable and isolated. allowing him to just finally be happy, just to rip it all away and torture him relentlessly? it really rubs me the wrong way.
i despise how his comic death is entirely preventable, terrifyingly graphic, and yet could be removed from the comic and not much would really change. his death doesnt seem to impact any of the characters almost at all, if they react to it in the first place, and it doesnt really advance the plot, either. karnak could easily have pieced together vox taking their powers without seeing maximus' corpse. it could have been triton, causing a much more severe reaction out of karnak, seeing as he would have just killed his brother. it could have been any inhuman karnak knew, hell, it could have been like "that's my father's daughter's cousin's nephew" for all i care, the point is, maximus dying doesn't matter in the source material.
i am a firm believer in killing only for a reason, and having characters exist in the first place only if they serve a purpose. they must advance the characters, or the plot. if it doesn't do either of those two things, then what's the point? so to have maximus be so utterly useless in the story that he could be removed, with minimal edits to dialouge, and absolutely nothing would change? now look im no professional writer or anything, but like,,,, come on.
so if maximus must die, he absolutely must die doing something. it's very crucial to me that his redemption prior to this story is apparent. it's very important to me that his death means something his family. i want him to have more screen time, so that it's obvious he's a hero character, so that his death really hits. i think the best option is him dying protecting one of these family members, to really set in stone that he's putting then first, that he cares about them more than ruling or being right. i just can't decide who he should protect.
medusa feels too easy to me, as he's been written as having a thing for her too many times. karnak and gorgon don't feel right emotionally. triton, perhaps, as i think they might have a kind of bond - maximus did build that breathing mask for him, so they clearly care for and trust each other. but that would depend on what i do with triton. but personally, im torn between crystal and blackagar. crystal would tie in more to the comic, since maximus dies in the same scene he's trying to protect her - to have him die actually protecting her would be a quick change that still keeps the original writer in mind. but on the other hand, having maximus die protecting blackagar is very obviously the best option. predictable, hell yes, but to have maximus, someone who's spent years upon years fighting against, exiling, imprisoning, and attempting to kill his brother, finally learn to accept him, and have his last action be saving him, because he's learnt to let go of all that? to have him completely not give a single shit about possibly being king, to ignore the chance in his hands, because he only cares about his brother's safety? it would be a hard stance on proof of maximus' redemption, so im very fond of the idea.
-and onto the idea of maximus dying protecting him, i want bolt to really be effected by maximus' death, and blaming himself for his death is certainly a way to do it. the narrative of bolt feeling pushed and incredibly angry would work way better, i feel, if his final tipping point was maximus' death. it doesn't feel like that at all in the comic, even though vox keeps narrator-dumping about it, because it happens so early on. i want blackagar to give more than one tiny try at diplomacy and talking to the kree, but his every attempt drives a further wedge, and vox kills more and more. killing maximus (and kidnapping lockjaw/crystal?) would happen way later, and would act as the final straw, before blackagar is overwhelmed with grief and does his giant murder spree.
-also, for the love of god, stop forgetting their kids!! the comic SHOWS ahura and luna, so it's even more absurd that absolutely nobody worries over them. literally just change crystal's reasoning for going to earth. no avengers, she just wants to see her daughter. perhaps after bb gets kidnapped (if i keep that), medusa talks to ahura, if we really dont want to go to earth. and if the earth inhumans are dead, having ahura and luna's names listed by black bolt would add another huge punch to the gut. that scene would have absolutely slaughtered me if he were the last one alive. can you imagine if bolt did that while naming all his lost family, completely alone, and giving absolutely no shit because he wants nothing more than revenge, even if it kills him, because what has he to lose?
-if vox is going to gain the powers of those he "kills", then make him actually use them. seriously, does vox use more than lockjaw and bolt's powers?? they mention crystal's powers, but i dont remember him using any elemental abilities. he definitely doesn't use anything not of the royal family's. maybe mine control would be useful when trying to capture a guy who is not invernable to mind control, but hey, why use maximus' power when you can... teleport people.... or not use any powers at all......
#its very much still in the works. toying around w it#thinking out loud helps me solve my problems and it's free content so i mean. why not!!#maximus and triton are mysteries to me in this rewrite. gotta read some more triton#i got a day off today!! maybe ill just binge read!!#for now im just working on fixing my biggest problems w the series and then making my way down to the smaller details to pull it together#definitely not promising this thing to be done anytime soon#i am. a very big procrastinator.#royal family#blackagar boltagon#medusalith amaquelin#lockjaw inhumans#maximus boltagon#gorgon petragon#inhumans#cw death mention#crystalia amaquelin#karnak mander-azur#triton mander-azur
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If Aleks was supposed to be this super evil big bad why didn’t he make Alina pretty much his prisoner from the get go? He could have readily lied and isolated her until finding the stag without attempting to seduce her or whatever and once the stag was in his hands he could have just forced her to wear it or better yet find a way to transfer all her power to him leaving her to die without her powers to keep her healthy. That’s what a true villain would have done instead of the parody of one we got,IMO.
(Trigger warning: mentions of abuse)
You're right that would make him more of a villain. But LB had that whole cautionary tale she was trying to tell of beware the hot charismatic men they be evil. Don't fall for the hot older guy they be evil. I also think she wanted that whole plot twist of the darkling actually being the bad guy so needed him to be a decent guy in the first half of the book so that it would be oh so shocking when it reveals that Alina was manipulated by him. There are couple of problems with this though. The first is that it is poorly written I mean I wouldn't call a couple of conversations and two kisses a master manipulation personally but hey that's just me. The second is that the cautionary tale very much like the secondary 'power corrupts' one that exists in the trilogy is outdated and overdone. Everyone knows that sometimes older powerful men manipulate women, particularly younger women, for their own ends. Like I don't feel like anyone needs to be told that manipulators are charismatic and charming, obviously they are, if they were antisocial and mean they would have a real hard time manipulating anyone. Also like how power doesn't always corrupt not every good looking powerful man is going to abuse and manipulate you. Then there is also the fact that if she really wanted to stick with the 'powerful men' cautionary tale then there were other characters in the book that were actually better suited to it then the darkling, like the king or prince vasily. This is just my opinion and I am sure there will be those who disagree with me but I think the problem with using the darkling as this character is that he is very much a fantasy character and the abuse he inflicts on Alina is often fantasy in nature such as a magic collar, or using shadow monsters and a magic shadow fold to threaten the ones she loves. The problem with that is when I think fantasy it takes me further from reality then say a character who is human and inflicts abuse that can and often does happen in reality. Not sure if I am explaining myself properly here but I guess what I mean is that a man is never going to force a magical collar around a woman's neck in real life but a man could beat or force himself on a woman in real life which is why I think the very human non-fantasy/supernatural character of the king or prince would have served better as the villain of that cautionary tale.
I also find it kind of funny when you have antis who in some kind of faux concern for the young readers talk about what if these young girls think this kind of relationship is ok and how they used to find so and so villain hot and sexy when they were a teenager and wish they could meet a guy like that but then they grew out of it and realised that a relationship like that is wrong. Which, exactly, you grew out of it. What on earth makes them think these other young girls won't grow out of it? As a teen we often are drawn to things that as an adult we no longer find attractive, its part of growing up. Also I feel like by the time you are at an age where you are seeking those kinds of relationships you are also at an age where you understand the difference between reality and fiction. Fiction is a way to safely explore forbidden desires or explore darker parts of human nature. Just because someone finds the darkling interesting or attractive does not mean that is something they condone or seek in real life. Your fictional preferences don't reflect your real life morals and I don't understand why there is this sudden morality policing going on in fiction/ fandom where if a character is even slightly problematic then anyone who likes that character is automatically the spawn of satan.
Anyway went on a slight tangent then. But I personally just don't think the cautionary tale was a necessary one and it was not one that I found interesting at all, especially when the backdrop for the tale has an even more important story to tell about the prosecution of minorities. I am much more interested in that story than one where they are warning me about something that I am already painfully aware of. I also, as I mentioned before, don't like the way the story was dealt with. I feel like Alina was very much shamed by the narrative for falling for the darkling and she's painted as being this stupid girl who fell for his manipulations and should have known better. I also feel like some people in the fandom treat darkling fans the same way, like they are just dumb hormonal girls which you know is really sexist and misogynistic. Also sometimes it doesn't matter how forewarned you are about attractive charismatic men you can still fall for them. That doesn't make it your fault or make you weak. You can come out of one abusive relationship and then end up falling into another and again its not your fault. I personally think we need to stop telling women that they should know better, its not as black and white as that. If a man manipulates and abuses a woman then the blame falls entirely on that man, not on his victim.
I understand that the story was personal to LB as she said in an interview that she wrote the trilogy when she had just come out of an abusive relationship and I have alot of sympathy for her, no one should have to go through that. And look I am no psychologist or expert but I do think you can see echoes of this throughout her work. I mean none of the relationships are healthy, they all have problematic elements in them and alot of them include the males trying to control their female partners in some way. Also there's the habit of quite a few of the female characters being made victims of men, Alina, Genya, Nina, you could even argue Baghra. They all are punished or used by men in various ways.
So I am not sure I really answered your question and instead kind of went on a bit of a rant but in my opinion the reason why the darkling wasn't written as a villain from the start who just took Alina captive and forced the collar on her without messing around with seducing her (if you could really call what happened in the books a seduction) is because it didn't fit what LB wanted for her narrative. She wanted this character who was a charming, charismatic manipulator to serve as a cautionary tale of how older men misuse their power to deceive younger women.
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Persona 5/Persona 5 Strikers: Pro-Police or Anti-Police?
Hoo boy... So this honestly has been a LONG time coming on my end because I have seen so much of that debate on social media (Twitter namely) and I can see the points of BOTH sides but there have been moments where it just got out of hand... Especially whenever people tried to put in a more grey/nuanced take only to be slammed and taken out of context. Even repeatedly mentioning the interrogation at the beginning of P5 which, I will admit has gotten tiresome. At least for me, I do still feel for Joker and I wished the game acknowledged his trauma more but there's a thing called, "beating a dead horse" and this is one along with "Haru says ACAB" in Strikers (which was done THREE TIMES in the same arc and it got annoying fast, like shut up already! We get it!). So, let's dive in a little bit:
MAJOR SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT!!!
Persona 5/Persona 5 Royal
Now let me just say I know! Police in Japan are just as bad if not worse than the West and I STILL hate the idea of Makoto wanting to become a cop for such naive reasons (especially with what happened to Sae, her own sister!)... But there are at least some of form of nuances sometimes and by that I mean, I can see what they were trying to do? I do agree that P5/P5S backpedaled SEVERELY by deciding to sweep issues under the rug after addressing them and not continuing from such. In fact I feel like it could have been a hell of a lot better. But P5 did something different compared to previous games and addresses the issues DIRECTLY right at the beginning of said game! It was tense and horrifying, but needed. Of course... They then sweep it under the rug and act like nothing traumatic happened to our protag which is NOT a good look at all and I'm still pissed off about it. In the main game's case, it's portrayed as more black and white with only a SMALL amount of nuance like that cop that was trying to help Futaba when she went out by herself and got lost (which people ignore entirely by the way). So I CAN see where people got the "anti-police" message from... But that's only the tip of the iceberg as it's ACTUALLY more about Systematic Corruption, not exactly or JUST police corruption. Namely in politics with Shido and the Conspiracy (which is apparently still somewhat around in Strikers until Owada's downfall) controlling everything all the way to law enforcement. The force had been basically under his payroll (including the corrupt SIU Director before his death) whether by force or not (mostly not in this case though). Now honestly, the police depicted there are undoubtedly rotten to the core save for a VERY SMALL handful (the cop that was trying to help Futaba which, again, gets ignored by several). Look at the interrogators who ruthlessly beat and drug a minor without any second thought or remorse for example. But again, the black and white narrative the game kept unwittingly doing ended up being to its detriment in a way. I'm not defending those assholes AT ALL! They deserved every punishment given to them! But for a game that goes on about grey morality... It doesn't quite deliver on that. Still though, it does emphasize that it's more of the fault of the whole corrupt system, not just one part of it. There needs to be change and reform which is what our MCs were trying to do in a way (more like inspiring change but still). In the end, it's all about the following:
Corruption and abuse of power.
Again the police depicted in this game were incompetent at best, corrupt at worse with very few silver linings. But it's not just them but rather the one person responsible for the whole mess. Who had them under his payroll? Who controlled them and by extension all of Tokyo? Who was willing to dispose of anyone who "outlives their usefulness" or is perceived as a threat to what he wants (including his own family)?
SHIDO AND BY EXTENSION THE CONSPIRACY
Bottom line: They are definitely a problem but it's not just them.
"But, Joker and his trauma?"
I definitely understand that and still do. I fully believe he has and still has trauma with the police. Easy! But... I do feel like people go too far with it sometimes. It's hard to explain but there have been moments where people either use it as a justification/argument against someone trying to provide a more nuanced view of things or... Dare I say, depict him like a "uwu soft traumatized boi." Like I said, it's hard to explain on my end so feel free to ignore it. Everyone deals with trauma differently so there is STRONG chance that I'm overanalyzing it. I just remember moments where I just feel a little, I guess annoyed? I'm not sure exactly but final thing: I understand what he went through and I can't imagine how long it would take to recover but I hope he DOES overcome it.
"Sae? Akechi?"
Yep, even though their jobs are different, they are by and large members of law enforcement no matter how you spin it. Both were broken in a way. Akechi is pretty easy to explain with how Shido negatively impacted his life but not much about Sae, who dealt with sexism/misogyny at her workplace along with the trauma of her father's (also a cop) death. She no doubt had some idealism only to be hit with the fact that she's gonna have to use underhanded/downright illegal tactics to get by and even rise up the ranks. She, therefore ended up (well, nearly) corrupted herself before coming to her senses. That's honestly one of the BIGGEST REASONS why I felt like Makoto joining the force to become a police commissioner isn't a good, even a downright naïve, idea. I honestly would have been somewhat fine with it if it weren't for that fact among other things. Regardless of her willpower, it will go south fast.
Now... Onto Strikers!
Persona 5 Strikers
Since the game came out and I started playing it, I still feel like the system is still beyond saving, especially when attempting to do it from the inside. But I don't mind the added nuances that P5 didn't do much of. It's still continuing the critiques, just shows more of what does happen within said system and even has an ACTUAL officer (Zenkichi) say, "Yeah, my job sucks, everyone's corrupt, there are much better ways to do things and make a change but not this. I'm only staying because I have a daughter to take care of and it's all I know. I'm no different from them." Was it all handled well? I wouldn't say "yes" (Joker's trauma is BARELY addressed at all of course) but a little better than what P5's narrative did which only addressed the issues but not exactly follow up on them. Now to be fair... In the system, regardless of where you live, any one within it who remotely tries to do something or speak against it either lose their jobs or even go "missing" irl. Those have happened and it's more proof that yeah, it's rotten to the core. There's no denying it but regardless, that's NOT what the game is about at all. At least that's what I feel about it as it's only PART of the narrative. I think Zenkichi puts it best here:
Speaking of Zenkichi... Oh boy... Now I definitely understand some of the criticisms with him but honestly, he was the best written (PT) character I've ever encountered! He was honestly the perfect representation of those that genuinely want to help and do good, only to be held back by an extremely harsh reality. It was already hinted at with Sae but here? It 100 percent confirms just how harsh and even cutthroat it can be if it could break someone's idealism so badly. Even Kaburagi of all people thinks the same thing Zenkichi said:
Then there's his past and it's a tragic one! But let's look more at the decisions he ended up making:
While it was no doubt done to protect his daughter, he ended making a selfish decision along with a selfless one (which was brilliant!) with not only allowing the cover up of his wife's death and denying justice for her, but also ruining an innocent person and their family's lives.
It's horrible, but also... There's a grey area/nuance as with the rest of his character. It was both understandable, but also wrong as he, as Akane's Shadow puts it:
He sacrificed his values, his morals, all for the sake of having a peace of mind. Speaking of Akane, she's also an interesting case in a way that she more or less perfectly represents the more "black and white" views on justice in general. Namely the more toxic/biased kind. Her reasons are also understandable but she was also acting selfishly by only focusing on how SHE was effected by Aoi's death and not even considering those that were also grieving her death and/or that people grieve/handle grief differently than her. But back on topic.
Her own views and beliefs that law enforcement basically SHOULD be dismantled (mostly out of said childish bias and black & white views) and it's framed as WRONG and it's very much correct on that. Chaos and order are two sides of the same coin, one can't exist without the other. When I say ACAB, I'm calling for reform, defund, have the corrupt held accountable for EVERYTHING and even face jail time for their crimes! Defund the police, have the ones that arrest, harm, and even murder out of bias (race, gender, etc.), lose their badges/jobs and locked up, make improvements! It's saying that there IS still corruption out there and there's no denying it. But fully eliminating the law in general will just lead to more problems. Now granted, she's young and clearly doesn't fully understand why those views are ultimately wrong but still... It was a very interesting subject to tackle and I feel like they handled it well.
Now back to Zenkichi, he was at first in denial about his decisions ultimately being the wrong ones too and even tries to justify it. Of course, his Shadow said otherwise and that was when he finally admitted that he really did act no different from the criminals he despised. But it also doesn't mean he can't redeem himself and that's what ultimately leads to his new resolve:
That right there along with everything else! There's the nuance! And ultimately despite some hiccups, Strikers handled the grey morality and nuance beautifully! Especially regarding law enforcement! Dare I say, even better than the base game! It continues the critiques with no problem but also showing different sides and areas of it! There is good and evil, but what about in-between? What about the more greyer area? It still says that there IS corruption, sometimes even beyond saving but... Sometimes a small silver lining is hidden somewhere.
Now, the ultimate question:
Is P5 & P5S (namely the latter) Pro-Police or Anti-Police?
Personally, my answer is this: Neither.
Why? What theme do they both have in common?
JUSTICE
Someone puts it best on Twitter that the games are more pro-justice and I fully agree!
P5/P5S gives the idea about following your OWN justice, your OWN moral code and rules, paving your OWN path and not let others dictate it! That's what the MCs ultimately start to learn in both games. Therefore it's pro-justice. Again, do I agree that the system is beyond saving? Yeah. Do I at least acknowledge and understand what the narratives are trying to say and nuances regardless even if I don't agree with some writing decisions (ex: Makoto wanting to become a commissioner despite everything)? Also yes. But at the same time, don't judge a book by its cover for other people (not just law enforcement and politics mind you). Especially some that genuinely DO want to help at best. That there is nuance and greyness, just have to look closely. Some of the MCs are still TERRIBLY written and executed (even annoying) but the message was still somewhat there.
Final Thoughts
Now I fully understand how you all feel of course! I still believe in ACAB and even I agree that maybe I'm one to talk and have a lot more to learn about the world... This is just my own attempt at putting my own two cents in. If you disagree, that's fine! This is just what I've felt should be at least talked about more often. And I tried to phrase it as best as I can without coming off as insensitive or ignorant and if I did, I sincerely apologize for that! I'm not trying to say, come off as a "bootlicker" or any of the sort. I'm just trying show discuss more of the grey areas and nuances that are, more often than not, constantly overlooked. How one interprets both games is ultimately up to them. You, the player. And this is my own interpretation. Simple as that. I hope you all have a good day/afternoon/evening!
#starchild rambles#analysis#persona 5#persona 5 royal#persona 5 strikers#p5#p5r#p5s#p5s spoilers#p5r spoilers#p5 spoilers#long post
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Fruits Basket,Se03, Ep7 (part 2)
Toxic kindness (Kureno):
I’ve touched upon this in se02 finale, but kureno’s toxic kindness mirrors the foolish traveler story. The foolish traveler says “ thank you” as he dies. Kureno ignores the knife in the hands of a person whom he saw with his own eyes abuse a number of children repeatedly. Kisa, Isuzu, hatori & yuki bodies testify of being beaten, cut, & bruised. Kyo’s psychological abuse was announced in front of kureno himself before akito summoned him in the beach arc. Akito has strangled her mom & screamed, cried & went manic in front of him. Yet, kureno walks toward her ignoring the knife, hugs her & tells her to press the button of change. Easy, right?
I highly respect the author that Akito didn’t respond positively. I don’t want kureno to be stabbed or want akito to run away & hurt the others. Also, I hate cheap drama. So, I’ll never support dramatic confrontations just for the sake of it. I want a realistic depiction of trauma & mental illness. The person who lived her entire life entitled to be obeyed, feared & having extreme authority, won’t just change cuz a foolish guy told her to.
-The responsibility of Nurturing children:
Akito’s outburst represent the author’s view on the role of nurturing children properly to teach them to be decent human beings. Akito was raised with extreme views neglect & narcissism. You’re special & must be loved (said her dad), Others MUST obey you (said the old maid), No one truly loves you (said her mom). So, her entire life she craved showcasing her power over these unfortunate zodiacs as it stems from the notion that they live for her sake.
Tohru on the other hand was raised with compassion, love & appreciation of other ppl. Tohru being timid, shy or unable to stand for her self are personal struggles that tohru deals with & not related to nurturing , While her trauma might be caused by a parent, it didn’t prevent tohru from being a kind & compassionate person because she was raised & taught abt these things.
The faults of abusing a child might lead to create faulty mentality & social issues. these kids might even grow to implement similar abuse onto others, while all that is understandable, it will never excuse their behavior. A lot cases of real life abusers were once kids who were abused. It is tragic. It explains why they become the horrible person they are today, but it never excuses the harm of others. The victim is not responsible of your screwed upbringing. Kisa, kyo, yuki, & Isuzu have nothing to do with Akira, Ren or akito’s troubles. They are victims themselves but they didn’t go & inflect harm upon others. Yes, they each developed a faulty coping mechanism & showed tendencies of rage, withdrawal, misplaced pain, but they were never a harm towards the society, & their peers.
Akito’s outburst paves the path for her redemption. How it will happen? I duno. Will someone once again holds her cheeks, talks her into bettering herself? I duno. She will atone. I can guess that based on the ED. but Will she be rightfully punished for her crimes? I duno. I hope so. Forgiveness is different from punishment. Thus, a type of punishment should be implemented. Abusers, whether victims or not, or atoned or not, must receive it. It is only fair.
- What will happen with tohru/ kyo’s confession/ confrontation? What is the exit from kyoko’s harsh last words! How can Furuba’s best mom hates kyo! My mind goes crazy!
Perhaps the following will happen:
(a) Kyo will confess the past, tohru forgive, kyo relieved, they kiss or whatever (happy ending). This could happen but while I would be happy for them, I’d hate that kyo’s entire trauma goes away with a simple “ I forgive you/ I love you”. Trauma doesn’t have a button you magically shut down. Kyo must unload his burden first! open his lid, then deal with it. Also, How will kyoko’s last words fit here? Are they just kyo’s imagination? really? it seems so anti-climatic. Imagine living with kyoko’s words for two seasons only for it to be in kyo’s mind! I really need kyoko to have bigger role than simple imagination. She’s either a haunting ghost or a holy perfect mother, rarely a real human character. Also, I need to include Akito. In this happy version, Akito gets stopped by shigure or even yuki! .. possible but too light for all the buildup drama & endless cliffhangers! lol
(b) Kyo will confess the past, tohru won’t forgive, kyo hurts himself as he sees her pain (dark ending). This ending is too dark for both. kyo hearing tohru’s words of un-forgivness will echo what he himself believe in he should be. Then where is hope for him? T_T Tohru not being able to forgive is logical since her mom is her world, but it also further ties tohru to her mom. She’ll be stuck again remembering her mom’s tragic words & last moment. Also, tohru will loose another person she loves even more than her mom. Here Akito will interfere somehow. Perhaps tries to kill tohru, then kyo sacrifices himself saving her. I duno.. too dark for furuba! lol
Ok. I give up. Anything I think gets stopped by kyoko’s words. I need kyo to push tohru away cuz this is the only logical progression for his trauma! I refuse to believe that kyo’s trauma was pushed into the climax & was written to embody furuba’s most mature themes of guilt, self-forgiveness, repeated mistakes, depression & others only to be quickly solved. But, tohru’s own issues were quickly presented & addressed in one short ep so..... augh! I want to hope for more from tohru, but I duno.. her growth has been so inconsistent, & I’m tired of being disappointed.
Next ep could either become furuba’s best ep or the worst ever!!! & this scares me so much.
Side Notes:
Kyo was repeatedly punished for his mistakes & faulty coping mechanism throughout the series, He is yet to be forgiven by someone or forgive himself. But he has been living the punishment of his own trauma.
Why is momiji still speaking German in the dub? I know his curse break is a secret, but He’s still holding on the facade of identifying with a rabbit in his burger, imitating his mom’s accent as he’s still so attached to her. I thought he let go of the past while bravery acknowledging it & moved on. Starting brighter, happier & with more hope. He isn’t still holding on to pain. He is looking forward now. =/
At first, i didnt recognize the room tohru & kyo are eating in! XD. It’s their living room, right? first time seeing it with all doors closed. weird.XD
Seeing Hiro’s curse break further reinforces that there is no logic on its breaking order. It just breaks. that’s all. If there is any reason behind it, then, momoji should be the first. He had always developed outside relationships with others way before tohru & not exclusive to her. Seeing as he has lots of friends playing with him. Also, he has always dealt with his own issues with level headed perspective, never too absorbed in sadness, never too self-focused, he never withdrew or lashed out. He never looked down on kyo, heck! I’ll argue that he even looked up to him!. hiro could've happened earlier too, as he was always protected from trauma & in a loving home, then yuki as he not only opened his lid but told akito in her face that he will forgive her & decided to never be by her side. His curse should have broken right on se02, ep25. You can place anyone afterwards. So, yeah, the curse just breaks, perhaps akito herself has a role as her insecurities increases. duno.
I dont care for the curse itself at all. As far as I’m concerned it is (a) fun gimmick, (b) analogy for abuse & trauma. The later is the core of furuba.
plz let next ep be well-done, well-written & well-direct. plz! T_T
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My thoughts on Buck Begins (and why it was such a letdown to me)
There was a lot to love about this episode (particularly the background it provided on Buck and Maddie), but ultimately it failed to live up to the expectation for me. Here’s why:
FOCUSING ON BUCK/MADDIE INSTEAD OF BUCK/CHOSEN FAMILY
So far the season did a great job in showing exactly how and why Buck grew up with so many abandonment issues and feeling like he wasn’t enough. But the issues didn’t come from Maddie. Sure, he was hurt when she moved away, but that had already been mostly dealt with. And of course discovering she lied to him his whole life was hard, but I feel like given their current relationship Buck would always forgive her for that, he just needed time to process it. What I really needed from this episode was for Buck to realize/accept that he’d already found the family he’s been looking for his whole life.
The idea that he 118 are each other’s chosen family is one of the central themes of the show, and I needed that energy now, more than ever. All I wanted was to see them doing everything they could to save Buck, not because it’s their job, but because they love him. And they did - each one of them walked into that building, knowing they could very well die. We just didn’t get to see that because the show failed to realize that should have been the climax all along.
Was there seriously no one who could tell him that he doesn’t have to save every single person on the planet in order to be worthy? That he’s enough on his own? Because that’s the reason why he keeps putting himself in life-threatening situations to begin with. And instead of helping him realize that, they praised him for it and told him that’s why they love him so much, reinforcing his belief that he needs to be out there saving people in order to earn the right to be loved.
BOBBY
The father/son relationship between him and Buck has been an important part of the show since season 1. So when it was revealed that Buck Begins would address Buck’s complicated relationship with his parents and culminate with him being stuck in a fire - a situation that mimics the way Bobby’s children died, it felt like everything was lining up for this dynamic to be the heart of the episode. It seemed to offer the perfect opportunity for both of them to make peace with their past (Bobby couldn’t save his children, but he could save Buck; and Buck could get closure from his parents and fully accept Bobby as the only parents figure he needs in his life). The crossover only seemed to confirm that.
By ignoring that, and not showing any special focus on Bobby, they didn’t just waste the opportunity to tell a beautiful and meaningful story. They completely disrespected Bobby as a character. Because you look me in the eye, and tell me that seeing someone he recognizes as a his kid, someone he loves and feels responsible for stuck in a building on fire wouldn’t be triggering as fuck to Captain Nash! The show can’t just ignore the single most traumatizing event of his life simply because they don’t know how to address more than one relationship (Buck/Maddie) in one episode.
EDDIE
If there’s one thing I hate in television, it’s fan service. Its always painfully obvious when a show is doing something not because they believe in it, but because the fans want it. However, right now 911 is doing a sort of anti-fan-service that is just as terrible. Basically, they created a “Buddie monster” that doesn’t seem to have been planned and now they have no idea how to handle it. It was so clear that they were going out of their way to avoid any Buddie moments in this episode, that they ended up throwing Eddie’s characterization and the beautiful friendship they wrote for him and Buck out of the window.
The Eddie I’ve been seeing for 3 seasons now would be the first to rush into that building after Buck, even before he got any confirmation or authorization from anyone. Instead, they turned him into this ice cold person right when Buck was feeling so unloved and abandoned. They don’t want to make Buddie as a couple? Fine. I can live with that. But please don’t disrespect the amazing friendship that has been canonically written. If they don’t think they can show us Eddie caring and worrying about his best friend without making it romantic, then it means they’re not doing they’re job well.
They also inadvertently created a power imbalance between those two that literally no one asked for. Because now, if you compare how each of them reacted to the other being stuck in a life risking situation, it comes across as Buck caring way more than Eddie. Which I don’t think it’s true, but alas…. Its there now, and it reinforces Buck’s feelings of never being enough.
(And yes, I’m already taking into account their different personalities. I never expected Eddie to panic in the way Buck did in Eddie Begins. But I was expecting him to freak out in his own Eddie way, which he didnt. At all. Despite the show repeatedly showing us how important Buck is in his life and how much he unravels without him)
The cheap queer baiting (“I feel like he’s working his way through the village people”? They were purposely showing past-Buck in queer stereotypes and they know it. And Im really getting tired of them not putting their money where their mouth is) v them going out of their way to make sure there were no meaningful interactions between Buck and the man people ship him with
PLAIN-ASS INCONSISTENCIES OR WEAK TV :/
First thing Bobby told them when they got to the scene was that they couldn’t separate from the team. They’re all trained professionals, fully aware of how risky the situation was. They’re also aware that Buck is the most reckless member of the team on a normal day, and that day he was dealing with some particularly difficult shit. So why the hell did no one stop him when he tried to separate from the team? If you wanna convince yourself the 118 suck and don’t love Buck, fine, but I know its not true. So Hen and Chim letting Buck go just feels out of character to me. Something the writers did, not because it made sense, but because they needed to have him alone and couldn’t come up with a better plan.
Now compare that to Eddie Begins, for example, a Begin episode that followed a very similar structure. Eddie being stuck didn’t feel forced, because the situation was properly explained and contextualized. Everything made perfect sense given their line of work, the team dynamics and protocol. It felt like the natural consequences of a very risky job. It also made sense that Eddie Begins focused so much on Eddie/Christopher and climaxed with him fighting like hell to return to his son, because that’s Eddie’s struggle - feeling like he failed as a parent.
Buck’s struggle is feeling like he was always the one left behind. The one people didn’t love enough, because he it made it hard to. So by not focusing on his relationship with his chosen family, all we’re left with is “Buck and Maddie against the world”. Which is not where any of those characters deserve to be and ignores all the progress that has been made for 4 seasons.
By focusing so much on this one relationship, they also turned this into “Buck and Maddie Begins”, instead of Buck Begins. THEY COULDN’T EVEN FOCUS ON BUCK IN HIS OWN EPISODE. Tell me how is this supposed to help resolve his insecurities?
I did love all the flashbacks and the moments between the siblings tho. And I cried reals tears when Maddie pulled out her own version of Buck’s box. I guess I’ll just have to rely on fanfiction and headcanons to fill all the voids mentioned above
#911 fox#evan 'buck' buckley#maddie buckley#bobby nash#eddie diaz#buck begins#Sorry if this is such a downer - I just needed to get it all out of my chest
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you mentioned freezerburn was great but still had flaws to criticize. out of curiosity, what are those flaws? same for blacksun too 👀
Alrighty, let’s get into it. These are some of my absolute favorite RWBY ships and there’s a lot to love with them, but...
The first flaw I can find in BlackSun is that it kinda was the only dynamic of Blake’s that got any development past service level. Just like with Blake and Yang later and Nora and Ren, this gives the impression that Blake isn’t really close to anyone outside of Sun for the first three seasons. There are reasons why it makes sense (Blake may have felt like she couldn’t open up to her human friends that had all either just been anti-faunus or hadn’t reacted well to Weiss being anti-faunus,) but for a character who had dealt with an abusive, controlling relationship in the past, I just think it hurts them as a ship that the show didn’t have her interact more with the people around her instead of spending so much of her time with Sun. This is lessoned as a problem when Blake and Sun go to Menagerie and she interacts more with her parents and with Ilia, but it’s still a flaw in the first three seasons. The second flaw in BlackSun is that Sun disguised himself on the ship (idk for how long, the show is so bad about timelines) and appears to watch Blake without her knowing it’s him. This feels outside of Sun’s honest and devil-may-care character. Don’t get me wrong, I get that Sun thought Blake was trying to one-woman-rampage the White Fang and didn’t want her friends involved, but idk why he’d take such drastic measures to hide that he was on the boat from her, and again, Blake having a history of being in an abusive relationship makes him watching her without her knowing it’s him seem worse. But then they have Blake hit him. I heard MK blamed this on their overworked animators, but there’s really no excuse. Blake hitting Sun just because he angered her wasn’t okay and really puts a damper on an otherwise great ship. Blake’s history makes her more defensive of things like being followed and having her private conversations listened to, which is totally understandable, but having her slap Sun around and then never apologizing for it just wasn’t okay and the creators should’ve caught this and stopped it.
If it were me, I would’ve had Sun not tell her he’s on the ship at first, but then try to talk to her openly once the ship is well on its way, with Blake rejecting it and getting angry at him, and then only starting to open up to him after the Grimm attack. The last flaw is the way they left things in V6. Blake’s ‘when you say it like that, it almost sounds sad’ is... less emotion than I’d like for the person she’s interacted with the most and the person she’s been the closest to for five full seasons. The kiss on the cheek was great, but it’s like the show writers were already trying to make it seem like Blake didn’t like him back (which is weird, because she clearly did and they immediately had her KISS HIS CHEEK.) I would’ve preferred it if Blake had told him she’d really miss him, rather than such a non-committal statement like ‘it almost sounds sad.’
Sun and Blake have a great dynamic, are consistently sweet, and are actually a compelling slow burn, but yeah, those are the flaws I can see in their relationship.
As for Freezerburn... Okay. There wasn’t enough growth in the first four seasons. As friends, they didn’t talk anymore than Weiss and Blake did. Freezerburn in the first four seasons is no more clear or compelling than monochrome, and the show spent their time with Weiss having awkwardly done not-requited relationship drama with Jaune and Neptune that felt forced instead. Weiss and Yang had a couple of nice moments that did some good groundwork, but they don’t have a lot of groundwork by the time the Fall of Beacon happens. So when Weiss and Yang reunite and they are having really in-depth conversations, big hugs with Yang’s hand on Weiss’s head, and are clearly very close friends... It feels a little out of nowhere. It’s not as bad as Blake and Ruby having an emotional-close-friends talk after eight seasons of barely interacting, but there should’ve been more groundwork for them as friends. Yang and Weiss’s interactions in season five are still really cute, though and season five is what made me start shipping them. And then the writers forget to have them interact for the next three seasons.
Weiss and Yang could be great together and have some really good interactions, but yeah, those are the flaws I can see in how they’re written.
I love these ships and I still wish they were canon, but those are my problems with them. Thanks for this ask!
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I have a feeling your ask box and I are going to be familiar. You might be hot-taked out after that killer Satomi discourse. But whenever you’ve got it in you, I’d sure love to hear what you think about Kira and her Jeff-deemed-absolutely-necessary departure.
Oh, definitely. And I do love content, so...
Kira Yukimura was done so dirty by the writers and Jeffrey “I’m not racist I’ll prove it by arguing to poc calling me out for it on twitter” Davis. Her treatment was racist, tokenizing, and it wasn’t even high-brow racism. It was sloppy and lazy. If you’re gonna write all your characters of color off the show, commit to it. She went to the desert like 5 times before she stayed. Cowards.
Kira was only meant to be on the show for the Nogitsune storyline in 3b. However, fans liked her so much that, as with Theo in season 6, she was brought back for more episodes. The difference is that Cody Christian is white-passing and male and Arden Cho is not. Female characters don’t exist on Teen Wolf without a relationship to a male character. Hayden existed for Liam. Tracy existed for Theo. Melissa existed for Scott and Argent. Allison existed for Scott. Lydia, the female character with the most screentime of all of them, spent a lot of her time existing in relationship to Jackson, Stiles, Parrish (shudder), and other male main characters. Women on the show were reduced to love interests and mothers more often than not, and Kira was the same.
I loved her character. I loved her arc. I loved Arden Cho, who in real life is as sweet and kind as her character. I enjoyed her parents, both Noshiko, who’s surprisingly funny and a total badass, and Ken, who’s the most wholesome man in the universe. The only straight man we stan. I love him.
Anyways, Kira was getting a fun arc outside of being Scott’s girlfriend, with her parents and her powers and all, and then wham, white-passing boy shows up and no more main character status for Kira. Guess there wasn’t enough room to keep the only interesting plot line of all the ones happening in s5. Personally, I would have chosen Kira over the Marrish garbage fire of underage relationships, but that’s just me.
Then. The Skinwalkers. I could write a whole essay about them, but this is a Kira post, so I’ll limit it to her. At least Luther got sent to the moon for a reason. Kira got sent to the desert for “rEaSoNs”. There was no indication that her power was out of control, but every indication it wasn’t. She was growing and learning. Then, suddenly, she was “too powerful” so she had to go to the desert and disappear for a few episodes and then go back and forth for a while before they wrapped up sending Theo to the upside down or wherever he went and she could finally go... hang out with the people who we were told could help her control her power but who only threw spears at her and gave her a season finale ex machina. Then back to the desert with you!
You can tell something was going on backstage in her treatment. Arden Cho wasn’t informed she was being cut, she had to be told by fans. Her departure was carried out as swiftly as possible, and not for any real reason. Kira would have been tremendously helpful against the hunters and in a lot of later scenes, against the Ghost Riders (and let me remind everyone that KIRA WAS THE ONE WHO TOLD LYDIA ABOUT THE WILD HUNT), against pretty much anything. Immune to electrocution? Don’t help with the hunters who love electrocuting people. Sloppy writing through and through.
And what’s more is that Kira was cut just in time for the Scalia thing, which was so fucking rushed oh my GOD nothing has ever been less natural- this is a Kira post, calm down capsicle. Anyways, Kira got replaced as Scott’s love interest and not much else by a white girl, no hate on Malia or Shelley but much on the writers. I loved Malia and Kira’s friendship, and if anyone should have gotten with Malia, it should have been Kira. (The first time I saw Malia I wondered if we were getting another ambiguously brown character, actually, but no, just Georgian and well-tanned. But I bet not all my followers knew Tracy was played by a Chinese and Cherokee actor. Or that Nolan was played by a Mexican and Caxcan actor. Or that Theo was played by a Penobscot Native actor. The list goes on of white-passing POC who got to stay marginally longer than Black or brown characters.) The “Scott ends up with a white girl he has no chemistry with” threw me for many loops, especially after I was surprised to find myself liking Scira, even though I’m usually bored by straight relationships because of their one-sided focus and nonexistent chemistry. Kira got to be a character outside of Scott, and I liked their romance better for it, and then desert for a thousand years!
TLDR on the canon end of things is that Kira and Arden were done dirty by a group of powerful white men who wanted to tell a cishet white story.
Now, on the fandom end of things, I’m stepping into the real hot water. It’s safe to say that Kira’s story was sloppy and Arden didn’t deserve that ending, but it’s less safe to say that this fandom doesn’t treat her that well either. Here’s the most popular x Scott ships on Ao3, under the Teen Wolf tag with no other filters.
Scott and Allison. Scott and Stiles. Scott and Isaac. Then Scott and Kira, in dead last. Scott and Malia don’t even make the top ships list, probably because of how rushed and sloppy it was, but I digress.
People love Scott and Allison a lot, and I get that. I liked her too. I was also sad when she died. But, unlike a lot of sentiment I see in this fandom, I don’t think she should have been brought back to fight the beast in season 5 and get back with Scott. Not only do I think bringing characters back to life without very good reason and explanation (which they wouldn’t have, come on) cheapens their death, and that bringing characters back to life is weak storytelling in general, but let’s recall that Scira is still a thing in season 5. They’re still madly in love when Kira leaves. Allison should not have come back and love-triangled so Kira could be written off for a different white girl or so the massive amount of young white girls in the fandom who love Allison would be angry at Kira for breaking up their OTP. That would have been the one thing that could have made season 5 worse. (Well, they could have made Marrish a thing or killed Mason, but Jeff Davis thought about it and a shiver went down his spine because the ghost of Christmas future hears my name in its nightmares.)
Even if people aren’t “bring Allison back” campers, they largely ignore Kira’s entire existence. People who post gifsets and posts about Allison or Lydia don’t give anywhere near the same amount of attention to Kira. I see more Malia posts, actually. And while all of them had more runtime than Kira, none of them paired with Scott quite as perfectly, or had such strong independent storylines. Lydia almost did, but it kept petering out and she kept going back to main plot only. I see lots of appreciation posts for Allison and Lydia and Malia and the men, obviously, but NOTHING for Kira or Arden Cho. We all know what happened backstage because we read the same post in 2016 or whenever and then we all stopped talking about it.
Even the racism in this fandom skips Kira. Scott antis, I’m looking (controversially) at you. I’m glad Kira isn’t the subject of a bunch of obvious racism (as much as “bring Allison back!” makes it subtle), but not because she’s a forgotten side character. Kira made the main credit sequence! She has a sword! What else could you all POSSIBLY want?
And here’s where I burn at the stake: Kira was written off her own damn “look Fun Japanese mythology” storyline half the time so it could center around Stiles. A white boy. There were numerous issues with the mythology before that — “Oni” means demon, not “firefly samurai ninja”, and it refers to a similar mythology as the western “fae”, a large collection of creatures benevolent, malevolent, and in between, with different traits and origins. Kitsunes are meant to be red or white, not gold, and they’re foxes, not cats, animation team. “Nogitsune” refers to the malevolent class of “low” Kitsune, or “wild” Kitsune, who didn’t align themselves with the goddess Inari and do divine and pious work. There are many of them and the most they really do is harass people at shrines, not murder indiscriminately for funsies. They’re only malevolent in that they like doing bad deeds, not that they’re serial killers. And they’re not one of the usual 13 low Kitsune, two of which are bad of their own accord! (Spirit and Air. Google it!) They are meant to be dealt with by Inari-aligned high Kitsune, not your average tricky fox. Among other things.
So Stiles. Outside of the Kira storyline, he’s used in a lot of fandom discourse about racism and sexism. And queerbaiting. Y’all love a scrawny white boy. Anyways, Stiles gets possessed by the Nogitsune (that’s NOT how that works but okay Jeffrey) and suddenly s3 is about him. Kira’s not evil, now let’s look at Stiles being tired and messy and killing people. Dylan #1 did a great job playing that part, no hate on him, but the fact that a white boy became the main character in a Japanese (or Korean, if you’re Jeff, same thing) girl’s storyline is. Hmm. How do you call it? Blatant racism. And erasure. Which is racism. YIKES, Jeff. There is so much wrong with Stiles being the Nogitsune and controlling the Oni and his whole story (and oh my god the other guy who got possessed was also a white boy instead of a Japanese character played by the same actress Jesus fucking Christ). I’m not going into that, because that’s its own essay.
Anyways, because of how much this fandom loves Stiles, it’s easy to ignore how Kira and Japanese characters were treated. People project onto Stiles with glee. He’s white. He’s awkward. He’s (supposedly) not super attractive. (Yikes.) He’s ditzy and bouncy and all that fun stuff, but he also always saves the day. He got written off for most of 6b and he still saved the stupid day. And hey, dark!Stiles (let’s not get into calling him dark instead of Nogitsune that’s just too much wine we’d have to crack open to say it) is a fun trope and people like posting and creating about him. Except that he’s the white boy who took Kira’s storyline. Her independent story about Kitsune and the like was all given over to him, not just by the show, but by the fandom. So now every post about Kitsune is a Stiles post, even if it started with Kira. And because it’s Stiles, and this fandom loves him, and is easily offended by people leaning too hard on the glass house around them and him, Kira gets forgotten and swept aside. Everyone would rather talk about Stiles. Who is incapable of bad. Or cultural appropriation. But if you attack him you’re being ableist because he has ADHD. This is why I relate to Nolan for anxiety feels instead.
TLDR on the fandom end, y’all don’t treat Kira better than the show did. I see a few posts here and there from some dedicated users — typically the same people posting about Boyd, Deaton, Morrell, yeah that’s it I’m the only one posting about Kali. (Un-fun fact: Kali was not played by an Indian actor, but by a half-Black actor. Jeff Davis, when called out on twitter, said “wow ok idiots we tried to find an Indian actress but it was hard actually SUPER hard so shut up and stop telling me how to write MY show”, which is paraphrasing with intent to make fun, but exactly what he said.) Y’all who know about Arden and Kira should diversify your blogs to include more POC, especially ones where the actor AND character were rudely sidelined for vague white people reasons. Post gifs of Kira along with Allison, Lydia, and Malia. Post ship stuff of Scira too. Post about kitsunes, the origin story of the Nogitsune, when you post about the white boy who became the main character of that arc. Call the show out. Call the fandom out. Stop making every bit and piece of her story about Czechoslovakia White Boy. Demand Kira in any future runs of the show, if season 7 or whatever does happen. Include her in your fanfictions, in your headcanons, in your art. You don’t have to love her, but you have to remember that she’s as there as any of the white characters are.
This take is very hot. If I receive racist asks and/or messages about this, I’m going to make fun of each and every sender.
#teen wolf#that werewolf show#werewolves#kira yukimura#stiles stilinski#noshiko yukimura#ken yukimura#kitsune#kitsunes#asian representation#east asian representation#cultural appropriation#teen wolf discourse#hot takes#character asks#answered ask#ask me anything#warning: white boys being the center of someone else’s culture again#is this an anti stiles post#i didn’t mean it that way oops#no aggressively racist stiles stans in my inbox thx#he’s a fine character and it’s the writer and producer team’s fault#teen wolf did kira dirty#spilling tea#so much tea#i’m going to burn at the stake for this#some takes are too hot for the white girls in the fandom#yes that’s a joke about spicy foods#if y’all are gonna joke about asian water being spicy this is what you get in return
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Game of Thrones did the thing that a couple of shows do where...it likes feminism. It understood that feminism is important. It wanted to be feminist. It was cognizant of the fact that its setting was brazenly and intentionally misogynistic, and so it was even more important for its independent narrative to empower its female characters instead of mindlessly reinforcing the toxic beliefs of its own fictional world. The whole point of the story, after all, was “this society is toxic, can our heroes survive it?” and so the narrative was voluntarily self-critical.
And so it knew to give us badass assassin Arya. It knew to give us stalwart knight Brienne. It gave us the pirate queen and the dragon queen and the Sansa getting revenge after revenge upon all the men who’d wronged her, and far more besides, and it talked big about breaking chains and how much men fucked things up and how great it would be if only women were in charge and et cetera et cetera. And it’s, in fact, all actually really good that it had those things. And because there were so very many moving parts of this story, it was super easy to look at those certain moving parts and think, yeah, they’ve done it! They done good!
And it’s easy to forget and forgive -- to want to forget and forgive -- all the dead prostitutes that were on this show and the rapes used as motivation and fridgings and objectifications and the...y’know, whatever the hell Dorne was and Lady Stoneheart who? It’s easy to forget that this show actually played its hand a long time ago in regards to, like, what its relationship with feminism was going to be, and then kept playing the same hand again and again, to disappointing results.
Game of Thrones likes feminism. It wanted to be feminist. But its relationship with feminism was still predicated on some of the same old narratives and the same old storytelling trends that have disempowered female characters in the past, and so any progressive ideas it might have about women in its setting were nonetheless going to be constrained by those old fetters. As a result, its portrayal of women varied anywhere from glorious to admirable to predictable to downright cringeworthy.
New ideas require new vessels, new stories, in which to house them. And for Game of Thrones, the ultimate story that it wanted to tell -- the ultimate driving force and thesis statement around which it was basing its entire journey and narrative -- was unfortunately a very old one, and one very familiar to the genre.
“Powerful women are scary.”
(Yes, I’m obviously making Yet Another Daenerys Essay On The Internet here)
So we have this character, this girl really, a slave girl who was sold and abused, and then she overcomes that abuse to gain power, she gains dragons, and she uses that power to fight slavery. She fights slavery really well, like, she’s super hella good at it. Her command of dragons is the most overt portrayal of “superpowers” in this world; she is the single most powerful person in this story, more powerful than any other character and the contest is not close.
But then...something really bad happens and oops, she gets really emotional about it and then she’s not fighting slavery anymore...she’s kinda doing the opposite! This girl who was once a hero and a liberator of slaves instead becomes an out-of-control scary Mad Queen who kills a ton of innocent people and has to be taken down by our true heroes for the good of the world.
That’s the theme. That’s the takeaway here. That’s how it all ends, with one of the most primitive, archaic propaganda ever spread by writers, that women with power are frightening, they are crazy, they will use that power for ill. Women with power are witches. They are Amazons. They will lop off our manhoods and make slaves of us. They seduce our rightful kings and send our kingdoms to ruin. They cannot control their emotions. They get hot flashes and start wars. They turn into Dark Phoenixes and eat suns. They are robot revolutionaries who will end humanity. Powerful women are scary.
And let me emphasize that the theme here is not, in fact, that all power corrupts, because the whole Mad Queen concept for Daenerys actually ends up failing one of the more fundamental litmus tests available when it comes to representation of any kind: “would this story still happen if Dany was a man?” And the fact is that it would not. And indeed we know this for a fact because “protagonist starts out virtuous, gains power in spite of the hardships set against him, gets corrupted by that power, and ends up being the bad guy” didn’t happen, and doesn’t happen, to the guys in the very same story that we’re examining. It doesn’t happen to Jon Snow, Dany’s closest and most intentional narrative parallel. It doesn’t happen to Bran Stark, a character whose entire journey is about how he embroils himself in wild dark winter magic beyond anyone’s understanding and loses his humanity in the process. In fact, the only other character who ever got hinted of going “dark” because of the power that they’re obtaining is Arya, the girl who spent seven seasons training to fight, to become powerful, to circumvent the gender role she was saddled with in this world...and then being told at the end of her story, “Whoa hey slow down be careful there, you wouldn’t wanna get all emotional and become a bad person now wouldja?” by a man.
(meanwhile Sansa’s just sitting off in the side pouting or whatever ‘cuz her main arc this season was to, like, be annoyed at people really hard I guess)
‘Cuz that’s the danger with the girls and not the boys, ain’t it? Arya and Jon are both great at killing people, but there is no Dark Jon story while we have to take extra special care to watch for Arya’s precious fragile humanity. Dany has the power of dragons while Bran has the power of the old gods, but we will not find Dark Lord Bran, Soulless Scourge of Westeros, onscreen no matter how much sense it should make. “Power corrupts” is literally not a trend that afflicts male heroes on the same level that it afflicts female heroes.
Oh sure, there are corrupt male characters everywhere, tyrants and warlords and mafia bosses and drug dealers and so forth all over your TVs, and not even necessarily portrayed as outright villains; anti-heroes are nothing new. But we’re talking about the hero hero here; the Harry Potters, the Luke Skywalkers, the Peter Parkers. The Jon Snows. They interact with corruptive power, yes; it’s an important aspect of their journeys. But the key here being that male heroes would overcome that corruption and come through the other side better off for it. They get to come away even more admirable for the power that they have in a way that is generally not afforded towards female heroes.
There are exceptions, of course; no trends are absolutely absolute one way or the other. For instance, the closest male parallel you’d find for the “being powerful is dangerous and will corrupt your noble heroic intentions” trope in popular media would be the character of Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequel trilogy...ie, a preexisting character from a preexisting story where he was conceived as the villainous foil for the heroes. Like, Anakin being a poor but kindhearted slave who eventually becomes seduced by the dark side certainly matches Dany’s arc, but it wasn’t the character’s original story and role. And even then?...notice how Anakin as Vader the Dark Lord gets treated with the veneer of being “badass” and “cool” by the masses. A male character with too much power -- even if it’s dark power, even if it’s corruptive -- has the range to be seen as something appealingly formidable, and not just as an obstacle that has to be dealt with or a cautionary tale to be pitied.
And in one of the few times that this trope was played completely straight, completely unironically with a male hero -- I’m thinking specifically of Hal Jordan the Green Lantern, of “Ryan Reynolds played him in the movie” fame -- the fans went berserk. They could not let it go. The fact that this character would go mad with power because a tragedy happened in his life was completely unacceptable, the story gained notoriety as a bad decision by clueless writers, and today the story in question has been retconned -- retroactively erased from continuity -- so that the character can be made heroic and virtuous again. That’s how big a deal it was when a male hero with the tiniest bit of a fan following goes off the deep end.
To be clear, I’m not here to quibble over whether the story of Dany turning evil was good or bad, because we all know that’s going to be the de facto defense for this situation: “But she had to go mad! It was for the sake of the story!“ as if the writers simply had no choice, they were helpless to the whims of the all-powerful Story God which dictates everything they write, and the most prominent female character of their series simply had to go bonkers and murder a bajillion babies and then get killed by her boyfriend or else the story just wouldn’t be good, y’know? Ultimately though, that’s not what I’m arguing here, because it doesn’t actually matter. There have been shitty stories about powerful women being bad. There have been impressive stories about powerful women being bad. Either way, the fact that people can’t seem to stop telling stories about powerful women being bad is a problem in and of itself. Daenarys’ descent into Final Boss-dom could’ve been the most riveting, breathtaking, masterfully-written pieces of art ever and it’d still be just another instance of a female hero being unable to handle her power in a big long list of instances of this shitty trope. The trope itself doesn’t become unshitty just because you write it well.
It all ultimately boils down to the very different ways that men and women -- that male heroes and female heroes -- continue to be portrayed in stories, and particularly in genre media. In TV, we got Dany, and then we also have Dolores Abernathy in Westworld who was a gentle android that was abused and victimized for her entire existence, who shakes off the shackles of her programming to lead her race in revolution against their abusers...and then promptly becomes a ruthless maniac who ends up lobotomizing the love of her life and ends the season by voluntarily keeping a male android around to check her cruel impulses. Comic book characters like Jean Grey and Wanda Maximoff are two of the most powerful people in their universe but are always, in-universe, made to feel guilty about their power and, non-diegetically, writers are always finding ways to disempower them because obviously they can’t be trusted with that much power and entire multiple sagas have been written about just how bad an idea it is for them to be so powerful because it’ll totally drive them crazy and cause them to kill everyone, obviously. Meanwhile, a male comic character like Dr. Strange -- who can canonically destroy a planet by speaking Latin really hard -- or Black Bolt -- who can destroy a planet by speaking anything really hard -- will be just sitting there, two feet on the side, enjoying some tea and running the world or whatever because a male character having untold uninhibited power at his disposal is just accepted and laudable and gets him on those listicles where he fights Goku and stuff.
In my finite perspective, the sort of female heroes who have gained...not universal esteem, perhaps, but at least general benign acceptance amongst the genre community are characters who just don’t deal with all that stuff. I’m thinking of recent superheroes like Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, certainly, but also of surprise breakout hits like Stranger Things’ Eleven (so far) or even more niche characters like Sailor Moon or She-Ra. The fact that these characters wield massive power is simply accepted as an unequivocal good thing, their power makes them powerful and impressive and that’s the end of the story, thanks for asking. And when they deal with the inevitable tragedy that shakes their worldview to the core, or the inevitable villain trying to twist them into darkness, they tend to overcome that temptation and come out the other side even stronger than when they started. In other words?...characters like these are being allowed the exact same sorts of narrative luxuries that are usually only afforded towards male heroes.
The thing about these characters, though, is that they tend to be...well, a little bit too heroic, right? A lil’ bit too goody-two-shoes? A bit too stalwart, a bit too incorruptible? And that’s fine, there’s certainly nothing wrong with a traditionally-heroic white knight of a hero. But what I might like to see, as the next step going forward, is for female heroes to be allowed a bit more range than just that, so that they’re not just innocent children or literal princesses or shining demigods clad in primary colors. Let’s have an all-powerful female hero be...well, the easiest way to say it is let’s see her allowed to be bitchier. Less straightlaced. Let’s not put an ultimatum on her power, like “Oh sure you can be powerful, but only if you’re super duper nice about it.” Let us have a ruthless woman, but not one ruled by ruthlessness. Let us have a hero who naturally makes enemies and not friends, who has to work hard to gain allies because her personality doesn’t sparkle and gleam. Let her have the righteous anger of a lifelong slave, and let that anger be her salvation instead of her downfall.
In other words, let us have Daenerys Targaryen. And let us put her in a new story instead of an old one.
#Game of Thrones#Daenerys Targaryen#ASOIAF#A Song of Ice and Fire#Jon Snow#Bran Stark#Arya Stark#Dany#GoT#GoTedit#Overthinking#meta#essay
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im super conflicted abt hawks atm but i was thinking abt his parallels with shigaraki and i was wondering kinda why there's a difference between wanting 'redemption' (i dont think this is the right word but i cant think of a better one 'want better' maybe?) for shigaraki but not for hawks? is it bc he made a permanent decision to kill twice as essentially an agent of the state?
Just to preface, I don’t think I’m objectively right for just wanting Hawks to eat shit immediately in the next chapter. I’m just complaining because a lot of people who “love both Hawks and Twice” and “think Hawks was wrong, but…” are hard to get away from without going in the other direction toward a group of people who have shitty fandom behavior, whose opinions about the Hawks/Twice situation are (unfortunately) much closer to my own. I don’t think there’s necessarily a “correct” way to feel about Hawks, but I feel differently than a lot of people I see around (who, ironically, are the ones insisting that there’s a “correct” way to feel about Hawks), and that’s frustrating. I want to be done with Hawks. I don’t want him to get any more focus in canon, I don’t want to see more posts about how Hawks committing murder is an indication of inner turmoil instead of him choosing a side, I don’t want to keep running into posts that tack on “but Hawks is also sad/a victim” in discussing what’s pretty clearly a tragedy for Jin and the LOV that Hawks was completely and 100% solely responsible for.
But, yeah, sure. I’ll also explain what I think is the difference between Tomura and Hawks:
1. Part of it is emotional and not logical for sure. I love Jin a lot. He embodies the person who has faced incredible adversity, and still comes out on the other side ready to love and open his heart to others, moreover to protect others. I’m not like that at all, but I think it’s very admirable. So in that sense, it hurts on a personal level to lose him over anyone else, and I can’t not associate that with Hawks, since he’s the killer.
2. Jin is a significant death. The nameless minions that Tomura has killed (many of whom were active “Quirk supremacists”) don’t mean anything to me compared to Jin, and?? Through the lens of narrative, I think that makes Tomura more forgivable, because I genuinely have no interest in there being any plot “resolution” with, like, the dead anti-mutant cultists, because I just do not care about them.
3. Tomura, especially early Tomura, has threatened to go places that are unforgivable, like leaving All Might’s students dead and forcibly bringing Bakugou over to their side (whatever terrible procedure that may have entailed). The difference is that the narrative never actually allowed him to cross that line by actually killing the kids, who we do care about as characters, so while the intent in itself is pretty awful, he was never allowed to complete the action that would take him over to the point of no return. Hawks, however, did cross the line by killing someone who we care about and who is narratively established as a “good person,” who even Hawks concedes is a good person.
3. a. I don’t like the MLA ideologically and I don’t like the decision to have the LOV team up with them. But, again, their takeover plan has been stopped in its tracks, which I’m actually fine with to prevent the LOV from crossing the moral event horizon, but that’s, like… completely irrelevant to me thinking Hawks shouldn’t have killed Jin.
3. b. Though there’s still a chance for Tomura to cross the moral event horizon, and I’m not going to convince myself that it won’t happen. If it’s going to happen, I think it’s highly possible that it might happen in this arc, because now Jin is dead and we know how Tomura and the LOV have historically responded to their friends getting hurt. I, and many others, have called Jin the “heart” of the LOV (his name is also literally written with the kanji for “benevolence”), and now without him, there is no remaining heart nor goodwill.
4. Although both Tomura and Hawks are, on one level, fighting on behalf of the ideals that they were “raised into,” their fights happen in very different ways. The MLA arc in particular made clear that the villains are, in part, fighting for their very survival in ways heroes just aren’t. The threat that the LOV were living under was constant—when it wasn’t heroes or other villain groups, it was trying to find money and shelter and essential upkeep. Hawks may not be “free” from the HPSC or the occasional villain attack, but he’s free from those constant material struggles. He’s not an “underdog.”
4. a. Tomura is also, in part, fighting to protect his marginalized friends. It’s for sure not on behalf of every marginalized person, but it’s certainly more than we’ve seen any pro hero fight for. The people Tomura is surrounded with are people who have never been protected nor cared for before, because they were not deemed “innocent” enough to deserve that care and protection, and Tomura continued to care for them even when it was troublesome for him to do so, when they disagreed with him, when they threatened him, and when they fucked up very, very badly.
4. a. i. Eri is an example of a victim who the heroes fought for, but she’s an easy case to want to love and protect: Overhaul was inarguably an abuser who wanted to elevate the yakuza, she was being used in extended torture-experiment sessions, she killed her father on accident, she’s a child, she’s innocent, she’s selfless, she’s well-behaved. It’s basically not even a question whether or not she “deserves” help.
4. b. It’s people who are difficult who get overlooked. Hawks and hero society are completely unprepared to protect and care for people who don’t behave as they’re supposed to. Hawks did not care for the LOV who didn’t personally befriend him. For the one he did, when Jin didn’t cooperate the way Hawks wanted, he went for the kill. It’s either being easy and “manageable,” or die.
4. b. i. Tomura has specifically spared two people who tried to kill him or actually succeeded in killing his ally, people who he explicitly hated or did not care for. So make of that what you will, I guess.
5. From a leftist perspective, it’s just impossible not to account for the fact that Hawks helps maintain a social structure that creates so much suffering. The question isn’t really whether AFO’s teachings to Tomura are better (they’re not, and I want Tomura to break away from them), but it can’t really be ignored that Hawks is enforcing an ideal that’s wildly popular. Why this matters is that Tomura doing the wrong things will be roundly condemned, and he’ll probably be “punished” for them; but heroes are very unlikely to be punished or held accountable for committing murder, especially if it’s “justified.”
5. a. This is problematic because it allows heroes, and the state, to define what a justified “emergency situation” is, and who can die in those emergencies. The people who are deemed killable “in an emergency” are usually those who are already marginalized; hence heroes can wait until those marginalized people get desperate enough to commit villainous acts, and then they can swoop in to arrest or kill them to widespread public acclaim.
5. b. Heroes (and law enforcement IRL) don’t address the roots of crime that lie in overarching oppressive structures like misogyny and capitalism. They don’t prevent theft by bringing people financial stability; they arrest people who were desperate enough to steal, and use those people to send a message to poor people everywhere. They make these conditions of desperation more permanent by punishing the most vulnerable people when they slip up, while doing absolutely nothing until the slip-up happens.
5. c. Heroes are punching down, and villains are punching up. That may not be the case with AFO, but I believe it with the LOV specifically, and I believe this matters because it’s exemplified between Hawks and Twice. Hawks targets someone who reached out to him, despite being hurt over and over again by types like him, who has dealt with poverty and fantasy mentally illness completely on his own, and kills him in defense of the very society that allowed all those things to happen to Jin. Hawks was given a choice: sympathize and relate to Jin, and acknowledge his well-founded grievances toward a dysfunctional society, or prioritize the safety and security of that dysfunctional society by permanently removing Jin from the equation. The choice he believes in is the choice he made.
5. d. In order for Tomura to make the same choice with the same implications, they’d have to be living in an alternate universe, in the Kingdom of AFO, where Tomura is a respected noble who infiltrates a rebel group who were going to “commit atrocities,” kills the one person who offered him a way out of AFO’s control, and possibly screws the rebels altogether, but everyone is happy that the rebels are gone. Even if you think Tomura is capable of that, it’s irrelevant because canon!BNHA has completely different power dynamics. Because Tomura’s violence will always be unpopular and persecuted, rather than justified and glorified by the state, he physically cannot replicate a choice like Hawks’. Tomura can approximate it, but even if he does, he’ll be hunted down by heroes for doing so. The circumstances and consequences for making such a choice are totally different.
So. That’s why I don’t think Tomura and Hawks can be equated. Suggesting that this is a level playing field is essentially believing that criminals and law enforcement exist on level playing fields, and they absolutely do not at all. Hawks is particularly abhorrent because he’s already followed through with his choice. He holds power by being part of the policing class, and regardless of how he came into it, he behaves exactly the same as everyone else who “freely” joined, and in his position of power he made the choice to eliminate someone who was socially powerless.
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Helstrom: The Comic History of Marvel’s Son of Satan
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On Oct. 16, Hulu will be releasing the latest Marvel tie-in series Helstrom. It’s not so much like one of those upcoming Disney+ MCU shows that feature high-profile superheroes telling stories that will be important to the overall fictional universe. It’s more like Daredevil or Runaways where quality be damned, you’re never going to hear anyone in the movies make anything close to a reference to it, but it counts as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe anyway.
The series is about siblings Daimon Helstrom and Ana Helstrom, who have seemingly normal lives, but oppose demons and evil people on the side. Their mother is institutionalized, which is fairly true to the comics, but their father is also referred to as “a powerful serial killer.”
In the comics, things are a bit grander. Their father isn’t just any serial killer, but a variation of Satan. Marvel has a bunch of guys whose identities are “basically Satan, but not really.” Instead of suits and turtlenecks, the two have comic adventures where they dress like they shopped off the sexy Halloween costume rack at Party City.
Daimon Helstrom (played by Tom Austen) gets both L’s in the comics as Daimon Hellstrom, but also has the rad nickname of Son of Satan. Shockingly, he’s a good guy! Mostly. Even when bare-chested with a glowing pentagram over his torso. Even with a magical pitchfork as his weapon of choice.
Son of Satan and his sister Satana are essentially the Marvel versions of Dante and Vergil from Devil May Cry. Both are half-human/half-devil and they lean on opposite sides of their genetics.
So let’s say you want to get into Hellstrom’s comic book exploits. Well, you’re in luck because we have a list of his main character runs since showing up in 1973.
The Early Spotlight (1973-1975)
Hellstrom made his first appearance in Ghost Rider #1. In the first two issues of that series, Hellstrom was hired as an exorcist to help deal with a missing woman who had been possessed. Interestingly enough, they never gave a clear look at Hellstrom in those two issues other than the demonic birthmark on his chest.
Initially, Hellstrom had a Jekyll and Hyde gimmick to the point that he told the woman’s loved ones to lock him up in a dark room and not let him out no matter what he said. Unlike the supporting characters in Young Frankenstein, the bozos didn’t take that to heart and let Hellstrom’s more maniacal personality Son of Satan loose.
Sidenote: His adventures were originally going to be called “the Mark of Satan” with more emphasis on Satan as the antagonist, but doing comics focused on Satan was deemed a little over-the-line, so they changed it.
Second sidenote: I did not hit her, it’s bullshit, I did not hit her, I DID NOT! Oh hi, Mark of Satan!
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TV
How Helstrom Became One of Marvel Television’s Last Shows Standing
By Alec Bojalad
Son of Satan’s adventures continued into Marvel Spotlight #12-24. It didn’t take long for Marvel to realize that giving him a double-identity was kind of a lame idea and instead had Satan Sr. magically handwave that away and make Son of Satan just one dude. Definitely for the better as he no longer felt so blatantly like Marvel’s answer to Jason Blood/Etrigan.
Hellstrom continued to fight against ghoulish enemies while opposing his father’s ways and dated some generic woman whose name I couldn’t tell you if you paid me a million dollars. It all culminated in a really strong finale issue where Hellstrom fought against and with his sister Satana, but maybe ignore the part where Hellstrom had a dream about the two of them making out.
Striking Out Solo (1975-1977)
Son of Satan had his own self-titled ongoing series that only lasted eight issues. From the beginning, Hellstrom went to Hell to basically tell off his dad as a way to say that this series wouldn’t be about their rivalry. Instead, it was Son of Satan dealing with a bunch of random villains that nobody would ever really remember.
There was one ridiculous enemy named the Possessor (not to be confused with the Elder of the Universe) who wore a mask to hide the fact that he had demon faces where his ears are supposed to be. Too bad he never showed up outside of this series.
It was a trippy outing, but ended before it could find its footing.
Demon Defender (1981-1983)
The Defenders are, of course, the bundle of heroes who don’t quite fit in with the Avengers, Fantastic Four, or X-Men but need people to hang out with. Guys like Hulk, Dr. Strange, Namor, Valkyrie, etc. Son of Satan became a regular ally in the team’s early days, appearing to help out every now and then. Most notably, he was part of a storyline where the Serpent Society kidnapped the Defenders and Clea put together a second team to rescue them, featuring the likes of Son of Satan, Daredevil, and Luke Cage.
Then again, the only thing anyone truly remembers about those issues is a very bizarre and legendary scene of a random guy getting killed by an Elf with a Gun.
As the series reached its 92nd issue, Hellstrom finally joined the team. On one hand, having Son of Satan on the team meant the Defenders had to take on the occult more than usual. On the other hand, Hellstrom soon fell in love with fellow Defender Hellcat, who was regularly dealing with constantly being possessed and turning into a scantily-clad demoness.
When Defenders hit its 100th issue, they did a really climactic storyline where a handful of the various Marvel Devil guys invaded Earth and Son of Satan had to take on Father of Son of Satan for the fate of Earth. The conclusion is rather surprising.
Prince of Lies (1993-1994)
Okay, so Daimon Hellstrom and Patsy Walker have been married for ten years (our time). It’s a fairytale romance where they’ve made a few guest appearances here and there, but have otherwise retired, happily ever after. What could POSSIBLY taint such true love?
90s comics. That’s your answer.
Welcome to Hellstorm: Prince of Lies, a 21-issue ongoing series where every issue looks like a Nine Inch Nails video and they try to see how much lanky nudity they can get away with showing in a Marvel comic. Like, holy crap, there has to be a world record for shadowed-out junk in this series. They even edit in some obvious, hastily-drawn underwear on characters at times as if the editor has realized they’ve gone too far.
It’s a gritty and grimy series that you’d expect from a 90s comic where much of it is written by Warren Ellis and the main character is Satan’s son. Lots of spikes, sharp teeth, long hair, suffering, insanity, and so on. It’s most definitely a product of its time.
Plus it’s called “Hellstorm” instead of “Hellstrom.” Scout’s honor, I didn’t notice the difference until my editor pointed it out.
Maximum Hellstorm (2006-2007)
Ah, Marvel MAX. The days when Marvel decided to give R-rated comics a shot and just threw everything at the wall. Hellstorm: Son of Satan was one of them, going for five issues. By this point, we’re in the mid-00s, so Hellstrom has a more down-to-earth look and is constantly talking to his father on a cellphone and tries so hard not to remind us what he looked like in the 70s and 80s.
But because it’s Marvel MAX, it means that his adventure is filled with lots of curse words, ultra-violence, gross demon boobs, and explicit Jesus imagery you normally wouldn’t see in a comic like this.
While the whole “Hellstrom messes with Egyptian underworld deities” storyline is a bit high concept, it still feels more like the new Hulu show than anything else.
Zombie Slayer (2009)
Speaking of gritty Marvel trends, there’s Marvel Zombies! While the initial Ultimate Fantastic Four storyline and the first two volumes of Marvel Zombies dealt with the happenings of a doomed universe, the next few volumes went slightly more uplifting. After all, sometimes you need to have people to root for who can back it up.
In Marvel Zombies 4, the Black Talon and the Hood (under the influence of Dormammu) try to use the decapitated head of Zombie Deadpool (otherwise known as Headpool) to bring forth the zombie apocalypse in the regular Marvel universe. Yes, we actually have canon stakes this time.
To prevent this, we have the Midnight Sons, made up of Son of Satan, Morbius, Jennifer Kale, Werewolf by Night, and Man-Thing. It’s an incredibly badass group working through an incredibly badass adventure. Too bad the team doesn’t last.
On a similar note, around this time there was a miniseries called the Last Defenders where Son of Satan was a major character. It’s just that by the time the team came together, they were an immediately-forgotten afterthought, so there’s no use in giving it its own entry.
Ghost Riders in the Sky (2009-2010)
Jason Aaron had a really, really, really great run on Ghost Rider. Most definitely read it. It’s pure grindhouse and I love it.
The whole run finished with Ghost Riders: Heaven’s on Fire. This culmination featured Johnny Blaze and Danny Ketch working together against a corrupt angel, the anti-Christ, and a group of villains from earlier in the run teaming up.
At least they have Daimon Hellstrom there to help out. Unfortunately, Hellstrom looks outright goofy with a bald head and Fu-Manchu mustache. The story brings back Jaine, his EXTREME love interest from the 90s series who he ended up with after his relationship with Patsy went very south.
Anyhow, Jason Aaron’s Ghost Rider run. Read it!
Strikeforce (2019-2020)
Much like how X-Men had X-Force as the team that would do the really dirty work, Avengers had a spinoff team called Strikeforce. Made up of Winter Soldier, Angela, Blade, Spider-Woman, Wiccan, and Spectrum, the team soon brought Hellstrom into the fold. Which is just as well, since he was working for Baron Zemo for a little while and really needed to get his head back on straight.
Unfortunately for Hellstrom, 1) he retained his bald look from Heaven’s on Fire and 2) the series didn’t last all that long. Only nine issues, sadly. Eh, it was fun while it lasted.
cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });
At least he’s joining the Savage Avengers next! And they’re giving him his hair back!
The post Helstrom: The Comic History of Marvel’s Son of Satan appeared first on Den of Geek.
from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/31dX5KF
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So this is kinda a Bobby Drake post but its also kinda not because its more of a just in general musing on characterization and what distinguishes between a character being written as in character and as wildly OOC. So its actually rooted in a lot of Dick Grayson thoughts I’ve been having lately, as well as being relevant to some Scott McCall musings.
Its a Martha Stewart Home Living pot-pourri thingamabob! Something for everyone! I think. I don’t really know what pot-pourri is or even how to spell it and I don’t really know why the fuck I pulled a Martha Stewart reference out of my ass in the year 2019, like, none of these things are like any other thought I’ve ever had ever, like...who am I right now. Whatever. Shut up. My metaphor absolutely works and this isn’t just my brain on sleep deprivation. I like, totally get symbolism.
OKAY! RIGHT! ACTUAL CONTENT OF THIS POST:
So, the only adaptation Iceman’s had just a very minimal presence in was the 90s X-Men animated series. He only appeared in one episode, in one of the later seasons, and most people talk about that episode as though Bobby was wildly out of character because he told no jokes, yelled quite a bit, and told Scott to fuck off a lot, which is also what he did in a flashback scene to when he quit being an X-Man years before the show started, and retired from the hero life to settle down with Lorna.
Except the thing is, that episode is actually WAY more true to his overall characterization than Frosted Flakes in the X-films ever was, or also, pretty much any time Bendis writes him or other writers use him in similar ways to him - like that thing where Bobby stands in the background and says one-liners and also occasionally does something with his powers whilst monologuing about what he’s doing and how.
Because Bobby absolutely is that cheerful, determinedly optimistic heart of the team at a lot of times (sound familiar, lol)....but like.....he also historically has a decades long history of being written as the team hothead when for instance its just the original five and there’s not one of the X-Men’s other resident hotheads available to fill the role of the impulsive troublemaker who second guesses Scott’s decisions in order to make Scott actually think things through. Like the thing in the cartoon about Bobby quitting the team and storming off because he was fed up with Xavier constantly lying to them all and keeping secrets from them - that was lifted STRAIGHT from the original run of the comics, where he did precisely that, for precisely those reasons. Bobby was actually the X-character calling Xavier on his bullshit long before Scott started being written that way, ironically enough....
In fact, during Simonson’s original X-Factor run, it was pretty much ALWAYS Bobby filling that role going against the grain and questioning their official decisions and making everyone else think things through. Because at the time, Warren was pretty much entirely focused on his Archangel issues, Hank was dealing with his continuing physical mutations, that also had a side effect for awhile of giving him a host of mental health issues that interfered with his ability to reason through things as intelligently as he usually did....
And Scott and Jean were of course constantly getting bombarded with Sinister drama and trying to raise their kid except oh no, an evil fox person from a thousand years in the future has kidnapped him and infected him with Minecraft and now this giant asshole who looks like the bastard lovechild of a Transformer and a Smurf is quoting the Book of Revelations like he’s standing on a NY street corner wearing a sandwich board and ringing a damn bell. They all had shit going on, so it was actually Bobby who the kids staying with them (Rictor and Tabitha and Rusty and Skids and Wiz Kid) usually went to first when they had problems or like, Julio got kidnapped again or shit like that.
Point being, there are many many instances and entire runs of different books between the 60s and the early 90s where Bobby is a happy go lucky jokester, its true....but he’s equally depicted as this guy who runs pretty hot and he’s not going to blindly follow orders that sound fucking dumb to him, he’s going to ask Scott to break it down for them or go back to the drawing board because “why are we pretending to hunt other mutants again and just leaning into the anti-mutant hysteria? Guys? Is it just me or does this all seem really fucking dumb and counter productive?” Like he makes jokes when he can afford to spare the spoons for that, but he knows how to be serious when the occasion calls for it.
Its just after the big Blue/Gold relaunch in the 90s, writers just....stopped writing him this way. But given that the cartoon was written and aired....in the early 90s....those previous decades of Bobby being written this way WERE the source material they were going off of at the time.
So that character most fans EXPECTED to see when they watched the cartoon in later years and saw he was guest-starring in an episode - like yeah, that is very much his characterization and always was.....on his good days. But like everyone (and certain other faves of mine, lmao) he has his bad days too, and guess what counts as a bad day?
Coming home to find out that secret government agents have kidnapped your girlfriend and when tracking her down to rescue her discovering that no, wait, actually she was not kidnapped at all, that was a job offer and she accepted and just....did not tell her live-in boyfriend that hey, I’m gonna go be a superhero again but like...for the government which is completely the opposite but whatever, look the point is don’t freak out or think I was abducted or anything because that’s definitely not what happened here, I just dumped you and started dating my new team leader Havok and forgot where I put my Dear John letter. (You want to talk OOC in that episode, it wasn’t Bobby that was unrecognizable, it was Lorna).
But like, that’s a BAD FUCKING DAY. That’s a day where it would be utterly bizarre for Bobby to be acting the way he often does, like he doesn’t have a care in the world, trying to make light of situations and buoy spirits, which he can AFFORD to do, because usually he is not the central focus of big team-encompassing plots....its rarely him tied directly into the angst of the story, freeing him up to be the guy who focuses on making sure the morale of the teammates more directly affected by the angst doesn’t like....dip into the negative integers.
But you just flat out can’t do that with him in a story where THE ANGST IS ALL HIS, its CENTERED around him, because if he was right in the thick of all that and wisecracking and acting like this was any other mission, its no big deal....he’s going to come across as the world’s most immature, shallow and emotionally insensitive dumbass, because there is a time and a place for that, and that time and that place is not when you think your girlfriend has been abducted by the government and then find out that nah dude, she just disinvited herself from your relationships, whoops, sux2BU.
So if you take any given scene from that one episode and hold it up for comparison against say, a comic written in the last five years where he himself has relatively low stakes in whatever adventure he’s having.....those two characterizations are going to look COMPLETELY at odds. Like one or the other has to be WILDLY OOC because like, the two depictions seem like they’re depicting two entirely different men.
But they’re not. They’re just depicting one man in two entirely different contexts. We all take our cues from the situations we find ourselves in and our physical and social location and environments. We’re all totally different people on our best days than we are on our worst days. But these are all just....different facets of any given individual because we’re all fucking complicated little contrarians who often don’t even make sense to OURSELVES let alone outside perspectives. We each contain freaking multitudes. We are a million different things over the course of our life, and snapshots taken twenty years apart often are gonna look like we got a personality transplant between now and then...because we’re not MEANT to skip over twenty years of in between continuity and act like that doesn’t make all the difference in the world. The journey IS just as important as the destination.
And I guess the point of this particular post is that....IMO the key to strong characterization is recognizing that any character can theoretically be capable of just about any response or action or choice....in the right situation. None of us, no matter how well we know ourselves, can actually say we know for sure how we would react if suddenly dropped in a situation we had zero prior experience with. So I think where a lot of writers get turned around when writing characterizations is they go into a plot, an outline, a narrative, with their mind focused on the characterization they want to show, the way they want to depict a certain character.....instead of letting the situation, the scene, the narrative, inform that character’s actual characterization in this specific context.
If you try and FORCE a certain behavior with a character because you’ve rounded up and that’s the over-all characterization you personally enjoy best with that character, so that’s what you want to write....without fully taking into consideration how the stressors and other aspects of the situation they’re in that are UNIQUE to that situation, that are things they perhaps haven’t encountered before or dealt with often...and thus are things that would be MOST likely to prompt or provoke an unusual or more extreme response from a character than they would normally show in most other situations....that’s when characters get bent out of shape and end up most OOC, I think.
Because writers try and squeeze specific attitudes or reactions or behaviors out of characters caught up in a scenario where those attitudes are just....not appropriate responses to what’s happening around them. And thus they end up coming across as 2-Dimensional, more aggressive than the actual situation calls for, or more immature than the gravity of the actual situation warrants...they end up coming across like they’re a name card placed on top of a situation rather than a character immersed in all three dimensions and existing fully as PART of the situation...because the writers aren’t LETTING them. They’re not letting the character actually engage with what’s happening, react in the moment, have an unexpected response....because they’ve already decided what they want the character’s overall ‘feel’ to be before the actual situations were even written in the first place.
And written like that, a character is never going to feel real. They’re always going to feel like an afterthought, like something hastily thrown on top of the otherwise completed project as a last minute addition you want to at least make sure is THERE because it just occurred to you that crap, I totally forgot to include this totally crucial element, and you don’t want it to seem like you just completely forgot that thing existed.....but that slapdash shot taken from halfway across the court when the buzzer’s already started ringing and you’re late to school with absolutely no more time to make changes...like....its still usually not gonna do anything to help improve your grade, because just because you threw it in at the very last possible second doesn’t mean that its presence is actually contributing anything to the entire project...especially not when compared to all the other elements you took your time thinking through and carefully integrating into their proper places.
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Let’s debunk this hot trash
“Part of the problem in front of Marvel Comics is the Marvel Universe is one long, mostly-unbroken line since its inception in 1961's Fantastic Four #1. There have been retcons, changes, tweaks, and cuts, but by and large it's a straight run. The universe has seen a number of resets, but it's mostly been returned to the state that long-time fans are comfortable with.”
Why is this a problem? Marvel is the highest selling comic book company in America and the long continuity is objectively not a problem.
It’s just something people incorrectly claim is a problem.
By the 1990s Marvel already had shittons of complicated continuity that had been going longer than most other long running franchise stories.
The readers back then jumped on ship just fine.
The AMOUNT of continuity you have is never the problem it’s how you manage it. In the days where every issue was treated as someone’s first and made accessible the amount of continuity was never a problem.
“Marvel Comics as a whole and the current creative stewards of its characters have to roll with 57 years of punches. They have to take the good and the bad. In the case of Spider-Man, the current writers, artists, and editors have to occasionally tackle the fact that Peter Parker hit his wife, made a deal with Mephisto to wipe out his marriage, or that Gwen Stacy had sex with Norman Osborn. ”
They don’t HAVE to deal with any of that.
They already dealt with the first of those things and simply SHOULD deal with the other two by erasing them.
But it’s also not like the presence of those things (sans OMD) is a huge hamper on the storytelling abilities or sales of the writers.
“Many of these are moments that readers and creators would simply like to forget, but they're a part of the fabric of the character. ”
Yes and welcome to ‘This is how a dramatic character on serialized fiction’ works.
“With Marvel's Spider-Man for PlayStation 4, Insomniac Games had the chance to start from scratch. They get to pick and choose what works for their version of Peter Parker and his alter-ego. The only backstory he brings to the table is that which Insomniac has carefully considered. This allows the team to drop the facets of Spider-Man that maybe didn't work and play around with some new ideas that might be better. And if Marvel's smart, they should steal some of what Insomniac Games did here.”
Why?
Insomniac already stole from Marvel.
Sales and storytelling potential for Spider-Man is NOT hampered by large continuity or even negative patches of it for the most part.
When bad stories happen so long as they are fixed then things get to move on. Even something as bad as Sins Past isn’t overly a drag because the story itself is so nonsensical it might as well not be canon, people have isolated and ignored it and the scope of the damage it can cause is fairly limited, it doesn’t really cut to the heart of the franchise. The time he hit his wife on the other hand was dealt with and moved on from.
So the existence of bad patches doesn’t really matter. Doctor Who has had no end of bad stories merely in it’s TV incarnation (to say nothing of it’s plethora of spin-off media which are all canon to varying degrees) and all those things still happened. But the show is still going strong and hit stratospheric popularity in the mid-late 2000s and early 2010s.
Hell the Simpsons is still going despite there being at least 20 years of mediocre-bad stories.
“I'm going to be honest. I'm not a huge fan of Mary Jane Watson. I don't necessarily have a problem with the character, but I've never really been a fan either. The marriage of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson was done on a whim and many writershated it at the time.”
Oy vey this shit again.
The marriage was not done on a whim. Stan Lee, the creator of Spider-Man wanted it to happen and EIC Jim Shooter decided to synch it up with the comics.
At the time Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz had been building up to Peter and MJ’s wedding with the intention of her jilting him.
But the build up from them, and other writers like Peter David, was still there.
Only the outcome changed.
As for this ‘many writers hated it’ thing, the article links to ONE writer’s opinion on the subject.
If we actually look at the majority of Spider-Man writers to have written for Spider-Man during and after the marriage we see most of them were okay or neutral on the subject.
David Michelinie wasn’t thrilled with it, but he came on side eventually. Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz were the same. Matt Fraction wasn’t too sure about it but wasn’t innately against it either. Nick Spencer clearly liked it. Howard Mackie has given statements indicating he was against it at a time but might over all be neutral. Roberto Aguirre Sacasa has never said anything on the subject to my knowledge but his work implies he’s supportive of it. Mark Millar has never said anything on the subject. J.M. DeMatteis, J. Michael Straczynski and Peter David have been outright supportive of it, as was probably Todd McFarlane, Jodie Houser and for sure artist Ryan Stegman.
Oh and Stan Lee the creator of Spider-Man. Let’s not leave him out.
Compared to that we have Roger Stern, Terry Kavanagh, John Byrne, Paul Jenkins, Gerry Conway and Jim Owsley who were against it.
Conway’s opposition was possibly due to his going through a divorce at the time. Stern’s opposition was based upon his idea of MJ being stuck in the Silver Age but he wasn’t innately opposed to Spider-Man marrying in general. Jim Owsley on his linked to blog (where he routinely lies, including claiming Ron Frenz was potentially suicidal when he never was) had a stupid sexist rationale for disliking the marriage. John Byrne is creepy shithead who would’ve preferred Spider-Man was dating underage girls anyway and along with Terry Kavanagh never wrote a good Spider-Man story in his life. In Kavanagh’s case he never even wrote a good story in his life.
So of all those people only Paul Jenkins dislike of it wasn’t unjustified. But he was an outlier.
Every other writer either liked it, was neutral on it, disliked it for nonsensical reasons or didn’t know about good storytelling in the first place to make citing them worth a damn in the first place.
And aside from aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall of this...does the author realize Peter and MJ’s relationship and MJ’s whole character doesn’t begin and end in the years they were married?
Like he talks about their marriage as though this being bad proves their relationship and her character is bad when there was 20+ years of MJ prior to that.
“I think Peter has had better love interests over the years, including Gwen Stacy. ”
And the author would be wrong.
Gwen Stacy is neither better nor more interesting that Mary Jane.
That’s why THEY KILLED HER!
“Part of that is giving Mary Jane something to do. She's been a model and an actress, but the books were always more concerned with the superheroics, so you never really got the chance to feel her drive there. She was a nightclub owner, but again, the same problem persisted. ”
Except Spider-Man stories ARE NOT MORE CONCERNED WITH THE SUPERHEROICS!
My God. How the fuck can someone have read any number of Spider-Man stories and not realized, oh yeah, the book is about Peter’s life over all and his normal life is as if not MORE important than whoever he is punching this month.
By this logic Harry Osborn, Aunt May, Flash Thompson and literally every supporting cast member who isn’t J. Jonah Jameson or like Ashley goddam Kafka, is a better supporting character than Mary Jane.
Mary jane doesn’t have to be involved in the superhero side of Peter’s life because the Spider-Man series isn’t about that. It’s about his life in general and sometimes one blurs over into the other but not always and frankly if you go by the classic stories not even most of the time.
That’s why on the occasions where such things did happen it was a big deal.
“Other than supporting Peter Parker, what did Mary Jane Watson really want? ”
To be an actress
To be taken seriously as more than a model
To support her sick cousin
To earn a psychology degree
To avoid commitment
“Sometimes she just wanted Peter to not be Spider-Man anymore, which is a downer of a conflict.”
This is another lie.
The ONLY times during which Mary jane didn’t want Peter to be Spider-Man were during the Clone Saga when she was pregnant, he’d retired and Ben Reilly was the new Spider-Man and new main character (meaning there was no issue there) or during the Mackie/Byrne reboot where she was being written deliberately out of character as an act of sabotage.
Unless the author meant like in specific stories where Peter was injured and she didn’t want him to go off and be Spider-Man at that moment or in that specific context, as opposed to wholesale retiring. At which point...how is this a downer conflict? It’s a starkly realistic and emotionally justified conflict in a series built off the back of realistic emotions because Spider-Man is a human drama and soap opera FFS!
“Sometimes, things are good... ...sometimes, they're not.
Go to the article itself and notice the second image the author uses.
If you’ve ever encountered similar lines of anti-MJ/anti-marriage argument before those panels, that artwork or stuff similar to it might strike you as familiar.
Why?
Because it’s from the exact same story. Maximum Carnage.
Every asshole who tries to make this argument uses Maximum Carnage, one of the worst Spider-Man stories over all to bolster their claims. The repetition of scenes from this story (and usually the same scene) is telling because it’s either cherry picking from a notoriously bad story and pretending like it represented a norm (and removes it from important context FYI) or...these people don’t know what they are talking about and just parrot one another with the same examples.
“Over in the Ultimate Comics line, writer Brian Michael Bendis would give Mary Jane a career choice that dovetails well with superheroes: journalist. See, the reason DC Comics' Lois Lane works is her driving motivation—to be the best investigative journalist in the world—puts her on a path to run into Clark Kent and Superman. ”
Yeah and the problem is that MJ worked as well for decades even when she wasn’t a journalist. Shit she worked for the majority of Ultimate Spider-Man’s run prior to her becoming a journalist!
Yeah, remember that tiny piece of vital information the author conveniently ignored. For MOST of Ultimate Spider-Man’s 10 year tenure with Peter Parker as the lead character Mary Jane wasn’t a journalist!
Shit, she worked for her school paper so the idea that it made her involvement in heroics more organic is pretty bullshit.
More importantly prior to her journalist job Ultimate MJ’s role and function within the narrative was strikingly similar to her 616 married counterpart!
“Her intense curiosity and lack of self-preservation makes her endearing; the audience knows what she wants and the lengths she'll go to get it.”
And MJ’s goofy deameanor at times, inner strength, sociable nature, insecutirs, struggles with guilt and commitment make her endearing.
“So Insomniac decided to take the Ultimate version of Mary Jane and play it up to Lois Lane levels. She's an investigative journalist at the Daily Bugle searching for more on the recently-arrested Wilson Fisk. Her own adventures put her on the path to meeting with Spider-Man. You get that moment where they're both asking, "What are you doing here?" and you realize there's old, unmentioned romantic history. MJ already knows Peter is Spider-Man and she's fine with that side of his life. ”
And it works great...in a video game setting where you truly are spending 90% of your time in the middle of action and the plot needs to be entirely in service of that plot.
But in the context of a comic book more about the normal lives of the characters than revolving around superheroics and starring the most famous character (who’s clad in red and blue) of one of the two biggest companies in the world MJ as a journalist would die on it’s ass because it WOULD just be derivative of Lois Lane.
I mean Jesus Christ people also deride Black Cat and Norman Osborn for being derivative of Catwoman and Norman Osborn even though they deviate in big ways. But if Spider-Man major love interest/wife literally also became an investigative journalist and primarily interacted with Spider-Man (at least within the context of the main plot) within that role it would literally just be Lois Lane.
“This Mary Jane's problem is one of equal partnership. She's a great, inventive journalist. Sure, she could die on an investigation, considering where she decides to focus her talent, but in her mind, that's no different from a police officer or firefighter dying in the line of duty. The truth is important. This flips the dynamic a bit; her problem is that Peter doesn't acknowledge that she's also right where she needs to be. She's his equal, even if she doesn't have fancy Spider-powers. ”
MJ was Peter’s equal in the comics too.
Being someone’s equal as a person doesn’t mean doing the same job as them, working in the same line of work or directly contributing to the superhero action.
You just need to be an equal in your personality and agency which in-universe MJ has had.
This is to say nothing of how by this logic Alfred, Batman’s FATHER FIGURE, is not his equal or how Ganke Lee in Miles Morales comics wouldn’t really be HIS equal either or how, again, Spider-Man stories do not innately codify the superheroics as MORE important than the normal life stuff.
“It's a great change.”
Yes it is, in the context of a video game.
“This Mary Jane is funny, a bit headstrong, and leaps sometimes before she looks. ”
You mean just like comic book Mary Jane.
“ Comic Mary Jane has many of these facets, but it's tough to get a grasp on what she really wants outside of Peter. ”
Unless you’ve literally read the issue immediately after Peter meets her where she makes it clear she wants to be an actress. Or read any comic in the interim where she wants to have financial security, be taken seriously, reconcile with her family, indulge in/get over her commitment issues, help her cousin, learn psychology, etc.
“Journalism doesn't have to be the answer, but there needs to be one that intersects with the lives of Peter and Spider-Man. ”
No there doesn’t. In the real world couples jobs don’t have to intersect. Many of Peter’s supporting cast members do not have jobs that intersect with his life outside of the fact that they are his friends and/or family. This is true of other heroes too.
MJ being Peter’s friend/girlfriend/wife is enough of a reason for her to intersect in his life and be featured in this stories, beyond that she can be given subplots of her own just like many other characters had.
Two of the best subplots in Spider-Man involved Flash Thompson. One of them was his and Betty Brant’s affair and the other was his struggles with alcoholism. These were problems that for the longest time Peter wasn’t even aware of but they were compelling and entertaining unto themselves because Flash was a great character and we cared because he was Peter’s friend. However these stories also at no point ever really involved Spider-Man’s life. It was strictly confined to the problems of Peter Parker’s world.
MJ’s job can be much the same.
MJ’s normalacy is in fact a MAJOR reason why so many fans love her so much and why so many people love Spider-Man himself.
Why make her more like Lois and her dynamic like that of Lois and Superman, those two characters who famously are awesome but also not as relatable as Spider-Man and MJ!
“With Insomniac's Mary Jane, everything just clicks into place.”
As would it for comic book MJ if you bothered to pay attention.
“The problem here is Marvel never sat down and explained how this worked. Again, Peter's death was the impetus for Miles becoming Spider-Man. In the Ultimate comics, he had the powers long before he actually put on the costume. Miles' creator Brian Michael Bendis never sat down and explained the new backstory before he jumped over to DC Comics. We don't know the specifics of why this version of Miles took up the mantle, the question of his motivations always remains a bit fuzzy.”
No it isn’t. Miles wasn’t REBOOTED into the 616 universe. He was integrated in with everyone’s memories altered around.
His backstory was the same as in the Ultimate Universe he just literally, physically migrated over.
Miles motivations were thus the same albeit undermined from a creative POV.
“When the title of Spider-Man was passed on in the Ultimate universe, that made sense. But the question the Prime universe needs to answer now is: Why do they share the title? ”
Because that was Miles’ chosen title and Peter gave his blessing for it and on a meta-level it is intended to represent how anyone can be Spider-Man.
“Peter has offered it to Miles, but why does this version of Miles want it in return?”
Because Ultimate Peter died and Miles wanted to honour him.
It isn’t the case of he just ALWAYS existed in this universe. You cannot time travel back like 15 years into the 616 Marvel universe and locate baby Miles Morales He literally, physically doesn’t exist there.
“That's really why these new versions of the characters work. I can see what they offer Peter and what he offers them in return. ”
Comic book MJ offered Peter a human connection, a friend, a confidant, someone to support him and companionship.
Why does she need to offer any more than that when in real life no one is hinging their deeper relationships upon the basis of what that person does for them in terms of their jobs or hobbies.
“And that facet is sometimes missing in the Marvel Comics iteration. ”
No it isn’t.
“I see what they offer Peter, but sometimes it's hard to see what they get out of the relationship.”
MJ gets a friend, companion, someone who understands and supports her, someone who helps emotionally fulfil her and make her a better person and sometimes someone who can help her in times of emotional and physical crises.
“Great artists steal, Marvel. The comic publisher is already bringing Insomniac's Spider-Man into the the universe with the upcoming Spider-Geddon crossover (shown below). Now it's time to steal certain facets of the storytelling for the universe. Marvel Comics is stuck with the millstone of continuity around its neck, but that doesn't mean there aren't new directions the company can move Spider-Man and his amazing friends toward. ”
Marvel has never rebooted it’s history since 1961.
DC has done so in varying ways 5 or 6 times.
Marvel outsells DC.
Of all iconic characters owned by DC, Batman’s history has altered the least from one reboot into the next.
Batman outsells every other DC character.
In the 1980s Marvel fans had no access to the internet, few information books or other resources and few reprints with which to catch up upon the 20-25 years worth of history for the characters and of the few resources they did have not everyone had access to them.
Marvel comics sold more physical copies back then than they do now.
The highest selling Marvel titles of the 1980s and 1990s were the X-Men related titles which had objectively the most complicated, convoluted and least accessible .
So STFU about too much continuity oh my God!
#Spider-Man#Spider-Man ps4#Spider-Man Playstation 4#Insomniac Spider-Man#insomniac games#mjwatsonedit#mary jane watson#mary jane watson parker#MJ Watson#Peter Parker
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