It's so interesting how people reacted so drastically to the criticism against the Prequels, disliking both Anakin and the Jedi while liking Obi-Wan, that Anakin and Obi-Wan managed to be basically merged into almost the exact same character.
Anakin has the "relatability factor" of being the protagonist who goes on a journey and has the flaws that are explored within the story. But he's COMPLETELY unlikable as a character, especially in AOTC (and I hear people find child actors grating in general which is a personal taste problem but caused people to dislike Anakin in TPM too). He's whiny, rude, disrespectful, awkward, unforgivably uncool, and comes with a HEFTY dose of secondhand embarrassment in nearly every scene he's in.
Obi-Wan has the "cool factor" of being the one who is the Adult most of the time who is there to showcase how far the teenaged protagonist has to go still, so he gets all of the clever quippy lines and the better fight scenes (and his actor was a little older and more seasoned which probably helped a bit). But he's not the protagonist and so his flaws are not on display and it's not his story being told at all.
TL;DR Obi-Wan is an actually likable character with redeeming entertaining traits, but Anakin had all of the character story beats and protagonist bias.
And this meant Obi-Wan got out of the Prequel Trilogy a lot easier than the rest of the characters, especially Anakin (and the other Jedi).
So then we got The Clone Wars. And TCW is a show that is much lauded for being the show that "saved" the Prequels, generally by "saving" Anakin as a character. How did they do that?
They took away all of those pesky uncomfortable qualities of Anakin's and instead just gave him all of Obi-Wan's more fun likable qualities. TCW Anakin is turned into a dudebro action hero, with tons of cool action scenes to show off just how badass he is, endless amounts of quippy dialogue so he can equal Obi-Wan in their scenes together, capable of flirting with a Queen SO WELL that she doesn't even realize he's faking it until he pulls out a lightsaber. Gone is that secondhand embarrassment, gone are the whiny moments, gone is the inability to have a cool fight scene to save his life. The awkwardness stays just enough to make him ENDEARING, but not enough to cringe at so much you want to turn off what you're watching or just fast forward to the next scene.
And this is the version of Anakin that feels more "right" to people, more true to what they anticipated in a baby Darth Vader. He's angry a lot, violent, prone to lashing out if things don't go his way, but he's also just charming and suave enough that it's mostly understandable why people around him are willing to write off his worse behavior as a momentary struggle. Gone are the tears, gone is the fear of loss being his most obvious motivator. Because THIS is how people expected a villain like Darth Vader to act in his youth.
And then you get fanon Obi-Wan. Because people hated the Jedi, rejected the warrior monks who destroyed their visions of gallant medieval knights, and created a whole new interpretation positioning the Jedi as the villains of the story in order to try to make their peace with that dissonance. But they liked Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan CAN'T be the villain.
So how do you save him from that fate? You make him more like Anakin. He gets to keep the cool fighting abilities and the fun quippy dialogue of course, but he's now completely repressed to the point that he never told Anakin he loved him until Anakin was burning in pieces on Mustafar. Now he's someone who can barely keep himself together and regularly forgets to eat and sleep like a normal person and has to be taken care of by other people. Now he's constantly being portrayed as just as attached to Anakin as Anakin is to him, just as co-dependent as Anakin is in that relationship, just as inclined towards anger and willing to walk away from the more stuffy traditional Jedi Order so he can have the more natural, healthier domestic lifestyle he's always truly wanted and never known he could have. TCW even decided to help out here by giving Obi-Wan a love interest who is for all intents and purposes just a knock-off of Padme, his own forbidden star-crossed love story. He takes on ALL of Anakin's flaws that make Anakin so "relatable" as a character, keeps his more charming likable traits, and loses all of those things that make him a Jedi, that make him Obi-Wan Kenobi.
So now Obi-Wan and Anakin are both cool, charming, suave, silver tongued, attached, repressed, struggling against the Jedi Code. They're effectively the same person, but one of them just happens to commit genocide and the other one... doesn't. What made each of them distinct and interesting characters in their own right is washed away in order to merge them both into two copies of the One Perfect Character and who you like better at that point is probably just down to who you found more attractive or something equally banal.
And through fandom osmosis, this is what is considered their true/"canon" interpretation, regardless of how inaccurate it actually is.
I rly don’t see how ppl be 20+ shipping kids anymore tbh… like, it’s so rampant and I don’t see the appeal to it anymore being as tho I’m in my late 20’s.
i was wondering why people were making it out to be such a huge thing that alastor is aroace canonically....and then i tried to think of literally any other character i've seen that's canonically aro or ace....yeah i'm coming up empty 😍
Just wanted to say thank you for the ottosuba posting you've done lately. The English speaking fandom is absolutely barren with Otto content, let alone ottosuba content. So to have someone as awesome about it as you post via Tumblr posts, fanfic, fanart, etc. on a good(-ish) website like Tumblr is like finding a diamond in the rough. Anyhow, looking forward to any future ottosuba content from you!
(。・ω・。)ノ♡
anon you made my day fr these are very high compliments T^T <3 i appreciate it a lot pfft a part of me is always like "I CANT REVEAL HOW MUCH MY BRAIN IS ROTTING OVER THESE CHARACTERS..." bc i get a little embarassed a little shy bc what if i am posting the same things too much...??? but then i simultaneously go "lol my blog my rules anyway im gonna make a gazillion billion content *clicks post*" which is how all the otto and ottosuba content gets churned out alsdflj. especially bc - like you said - the english speaking fandom is a BARREN DESERT when it comes to otto and ottosuba content T^TT ive been thinking about it lately bc they seem to be a lot more popular in the japanese speaking fandom i think, but theres next to Nothing with the english speaking fandom :o interesting difference there.
but regardless :o yeah i keep making otto and ottosuba content bc i am in Desperate need of it... its a desert and i gotta feed myself too HAH theyve always been interesting to me but in the years ive been into rezero that Interest has skyrocketed bc of all the interesting developments pfft (and also the lack of english fancontent for them HAH). i just think theyre so underrated in the english fandom.... thank you for liking my stuff anon <3 :DD
I've been thinking about this sentence is false. So the frankenturrets all malfunction at the sentence (which in itself suggests that the turrets are AIs. Interesting implications) but Wheatley doesn't. Now this is presented as him simply being too stupid to understand the paradox but the key thing is GLaDOS also isn't affected. She does the whole 'don't think about it' thing but the point of the paradox was that AIs can't resist thinking about it and just saying 'don't think about it' wouldn't help much.
My theory: GLaDOS wasn't affected because she isn't technically an AI; she used to be human. Which could imply that Wheatley could also have been human at some point, hence him being unaffected. We don't know how the personality cores were created (as far as I'm aware - I could be wrong) and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say their intelligence isn't completely artificial. Perhaps some of the corrupted cores could have been created when the transferral process went wrong (space core used to be an astronaut or aspiring one and I don't care if it's feasible I am accepting that into my headcanon).
TLDR: I think that personality cores are also the result of transferring human consciousness into a machine, though perhaps a more simplified version than GLaDOS that allows only certain aspects of the person to be transferred (ie. not their whole personality).
We are NOT the same, I say Duke wasn’t Robin bc he said he wasn’t Robin and We Are Robin was unfortunately not taken as seriously by the batfam as I would’ve liked.
YOU say Duke wasn’t Robin so you don’t have to include him in ur fanfics and fanart without feeling guilty, and u conveniently use this to also ignore the only woc in the batfam all the damn time unless it’s time for her to be a silent badass or translate ur faves emotions to whoever tf he’s talking to.
No actually though while I'm on a roll ranting about the funny monke show
THIS FUCKING SCENE IN PARTICULAR GETS ME SO BAD. I THINK ABOUT THIS SCENE SO OFTEN
The timing of MK's words and what we see on screen.
"I'd never abandon her when she needs me"
When MK says this, the shot is focused on Wukong, as he listens in and starts to glance back at Macaque.
LIKE WE KNOW. WE K N O W WUKONG ABANDONED MACAQUE. Those two have SOME shit going on in their past. Macaque needed Wukong, and he left him (either intentionally or unintentionally) and that left Macaque bitter and sad, and that bitterness was prolly left to rot after hundreds of years (not to mention that whatever happened between them got worse and worse and. Yknow jttw. Wukong ends up killing him.)
BUT WHAT GETS ME IS THE NEXT PART AFTERWARDS.
"We're heroes, it's what we do!"
Macaque and Wukong have ALWAYS been compared to the sun and moon. Like, canonically. Wukong calls Macaque his shadow, Macaque compares him to light-- they're opposites.
When MK talks about them being heroes, it's focused on Macaque because- well, he's NOT a hero. Not to himself, anyway. And this is brought up again and again; during his shadow plays, he specifically refers to Wukong (and MK) as "the hero". And they are! But Macaque doesn't see himself like that-- he refers to himself as "the Warrior". He doesn't feel like a hero. And this is brought up again in the s3 specials. "I'm not a hero, bud-" and "then be a warrior".
He's so used to living in everyone's shadows and being at the bottom of the barrel-- he's got a "worse version of Wukong's powers" (in Wukong's own words), he's revived by LBD only to be forced to do her dirty work, he's punished when he doesn't fall in line with her- he loses no matter what.
AND LBD SAYS IT HERSELF.
As soon as Macaque was given the chance (or, a "breath of new life") he tries to fuck off and do his own thing! He tries to stay far away from everything else.
But he doesn't get to.
He's threatened and shoved down into the dirt again and again and again and it's no wonder he was so desperate in s3e8-10. He tries to freak Tang out, tries to compare them to each other, but it backfires. LBD immediately tries to off him, but he desperately screams at her about a weapon MK and the others are planning to use- he doesn't care that he's giving her information, he just doesn't want to DIE. He begs MK and everyone else to stand down, that he just wants to take the Samadhi Fire and leave. He sounds just so DONE with it all during that scene. And when Tang does finish the ritual and the Samadhi Fire is reawakened-- what does it do?
It gets rid of LBD's hold on Macaque. He's no longer being trapped in crystal.
And he says, all happy, "it worked!"
You see the same thing in s3e8. After Tang tells him "don't you see the Samadhi Fire is our only way of helping humanity?"
Macaque tells him, "the Samadhi Fire is MY only chance at getting far away from the Lady Bone Demon"
He never wanted to help her. All he wanted to do was get away from her. He never intended to give her the Samadhi Fire, the rings-- nothing.
He's selfish, and honestly, who can blame him? Given everything we know about him, he owes everyone here nothing. He doesn't want to help them, he doesn't want to help or listen to WUKONG, who (again, either intentionally or unintentionally) abandoned him and later killed him, he doesn't even want to rlly hurt MK that much ("stand down, or I will PUT you down" implies that he doesn't want to fight him if he doesn't have to, but at this point he's so desperate for his own survival that he will if MK won't get out of his way).
Macaque doesn't see himself as a hero because he can't identify himself with that kind of title.
eh this is what I get for taking so long to finish a project
(rip that Dark Core Day video project from like two years ago now that has Chiyo's art and voice, which is now outdated, I guess. But that's just how sso is)
I still can't believe out of everyone and everything that could have gotten rid of the loophole in Angel's curse, it was Illyria (strongly hinted at the very end of the season 12 comics). Just goes to show how the Powers That Be don't care about their champions, and are really kind of evil (though we already knew that). And they were probably keeping the loophole on purpose, thinking that if it wasn't there he and Buffy would just run off and be happy together instead of fighting for them, the bastards.
seeing a take so bad you have to put down your phone and have an in-depth analysis of the media in your head to make sure you dont agree with a crumb of their bullshit
marvel should hire me to write bc i'd pull the funniest thing on earth where i am wiping his catholic slate CLEAN and i would explcitily have him go ehhhh i've never really been religious me and my dad went some easters and christmases and attended a few services outside of that but that stopped by the time i was around 10 and my dad just kinda gave up on it because he didn't particularly want to go by that point either. and even then we hadn't gone every year for easter and christmas in that time frame. and then we never bring that shit up again in the story. he is only catholic in the sense he went a few times and it's the only church experience he knew and his dad probably grew up going to church more in his youth being dragged in by his family but he never felt particularly compelled to go back to it once he moved out on his own. catholic only in the fact that his family was irish catholic but his dad is a lapsed catholic who did not give a fuuuuuck
imma be dead ass, Lu writers, pls Gimmie some of that shit that legend and wild are using pretty please i am screaming and crying over my scars they’re being sooooo annoying right now :’)
"the characters only have like 4 traits and are super boring" girl i think you're just ignoring all their depth by refusing to engage with them beyond the surface level text
I feel like life series fanon jimmy is kind of mischaracterized and there’s an easy way to make sure you’re doing it right: he has a lot of unearned confidence