oh man your 300k no finch poi au literally gives me life thank you so much for your contribution to this fandom

hah! thank you! it was a work of passion and spite

Some thoughts on the odd divide between s3 and s4 and how easy fix-it fic would be. I don’t think there are really any specific spoilers for the leaks, but I’m putting it under a cut just to be safe. Plus it got long. lmao

This is more just for me to arrange my thoughts about how I want to write going forward. I have to put them somewhere.

Thinking about it now... it’s crazy how much of this season is easy to write away through fic. Like honestly, you make a tweak or two to the last few episodes of s3 and almost all of s4 ceases to exist??

I mean, literally the entirety of both Nandor’s and Guillermo’s storylines just cease to exist if you just deal with Nandor’s depression before he joins a cult (which was my favored way of dealing with it in s3 fic lmao) or make it so he either decides not to go on the trip, takes Guillermo with him, or they meet up soon after he leaves. Like. All of it.

It’s actually bewildering to think about because I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a fandom where writing fix-it fic was so easy...? Like I can make an entire season go away if I want to with very little effort. And the parts I liked best (Colin Robinson, Nadja’s nightclub, the Djinn) would be super easy to write back in.

Like Colin’s always gonna be a baby. But everything else... If Nandor doesn’t succumb to his depression, then he may not quit the council, which means that Nadja’s experiences might not be the same. Or if Guillermo DOES go with Nandor, then maybe she’ll come home early or Laszlo will go bring the baby to her. So you could easily write the nightclub stuff back in, but you wouldn’t even have to do that... Like I probably would bc it’s fun as hell but like. It’s bizarre how much of the season didn’t have to happen. None of it felt like an inevitable conclusion to s3 except Baby Colin...

I think a lot of the issues I do have with this whole season actually arise from that whole year-long gap that we didn’t get to see... It’s been niggling at me this entire time, the fact that Guillermo had so much time and character growth offscreen... Like with the vampires it’s less of a worry because they rarely do anything of much consequence during gaps but Guillermo like?? He did a lot and changed a lot and I’m not sure that’s ever going to be dealt with to my satisfaction. And then Nandor’s storyline this season has been fairly reactive, if that makes sense? No spoilers here, obviously, but I feel like so much of his character... arc... if you can call it that... was just reacting to Guillermo’s changes?

The changes... that are as foreign to the audience as they are to him...

I get it, to some degree, as much as I don’t find it emotionally cathartic. Nandor feels kind of all over the place this season because he’s trying to react to stimuli that he doesn’t understand, and he’s reacting in unpredictable ways because he doesn’t want to confront why he feels the way he does. (Or maybe just isn’t mentally capable of understanding why he does what he does...) And I feel like I can write all that away, and I feel like the writers probably can, too, in s5. But it’s frustrating to have to.

Like... Nandor just really behaves really shittily to everyone around him this season... Both now, as of 4.08, and going forward... And I can deal with that, but god is it a headache...

(It’s also frustrating to know that, like they did last season, it’s entirely possible that they’ll just handwave the HUGE things they did at the end of this season. Knowing now that they’re totally willing to gloss over their cliffhangers and the emotional fallout that should have happened due to them, I’m not sure I have a ton of hope that the things being brought up in 4.09 and 4.10 will ever be adequately dealt with. And Guillermo’s whole cliffhanger could be dealt with as easily as a simple “no”, if people who’ve been spoiled get me. I in fact worry that it will be. lmao)

Marwa... god, fixing Marwa’s arc... I feel like another juncture point to fix things would be to have Nandor not make that last wish, the one where he makes Marwa like what he likes. Then she can just call off the wedding and go on her way. (And I think I’d send the Djinn with her.) Then Nandor could just be single like he obviously wants to be without destroying so many lives, Marwa could go be unbrainwashed, and at least that half of things would be dealt with.

I think Freddie could be dealt with surprisingly easily, too, though I guess going into that would be way more spoiler-y. But suffice it to say, I think there would be many ways to break up that relationship.

I feel like I’m going to write at least a few fics that fully deal with the implications of 4.09 and 4.10, but I’m largely going to write fics that either stay firmly in s3, are that mixture of s4′s nightclub/colin without Nandor OR Guillermo’s fairly frustrating love lives, or have Marwa and Freddie just break up with Nandor and Guillermo.

(this following paragraph still has no specific spoilers for 4.09/4.10, but comes closer than the rest of this ramble? it describes my emotional reaction to Freddie and Marwa.)

I guess I kept hoping that the romances in this season would be written in a way that I find at all emotionally cathartic (or... even interesting) but they both turned out to be uhhhh kind of a mess. Like it’s really kind of impressive how much both storylines ended up squicking me. It kind of reads as what they thought was going to be funny but instead just comes off (to me, at least) as kind of bewildering and upsetting to think about too deeply. So... I think most fics I write going forward are just going to avoid all that as much as possible.

I kind of just want Marwa and Freddie to live out their lives far away from Staten Island...

(end potential vibe spoilers)

Again, it’s possible that some of these subjects will get more emotional depth than I suspect they will, but... idk, it kind of felt like they threw too many things into this season and couldn’t give each idea, character, and relationship the attention it deserved. So maybe that’s why I feel dissatisfied with the way that several of these concepts are getting tied up. (Or... ignored. lmao.)

Um... yeah. I guess I’ll probably be trying to interact with a few of the things from s4 that I wholeheartedly loved while trying to ignore and/or write out Nandor’s and Guillermo’s romantic... journeys... as much as possible. I really thought I’d be wanting to do that out of loyalty to my ship, but honestly I feel like my bigger reason at this point is because both of those romantic “journeys” were ass. lmao

I want to give all four of you something better and I will.

I don’t think I’m entirely pessimistic about s5... I definitely see the way that some of these ideas can be revisited and maybe dealt with more effectively in the future... but for now we’ve got what we’ve got and I think I’m going to write a lot to make it more what I want.

so that’s it for now, I guess, unless I have to make another absurdly wrong and rambling post before tuesday to arrange my thoughts. lmao

TMNT 2k12

I’ve had such an upsurge of my TMNT 2012 content as of late haha. I wonder why? Did interest get renewed and I just never noticed? Meh. Anyways!

my all-time ultimate fave character: April O’Neil

a character I didn’t used to like but now do: Hmm… that’s a good question. Slash maybe? IDK.

a character I used to like but now don’t: I still like him, but I grew more and more frustrated with Mikey as the show went on until by the time it was over I was just done with his lack of maturity/infantilizing in and out of universe

a character I’m indifferent about: Pretty much all of Shredder’s henchmen. Some started interesting like Fishdface and Tiger Claw, then just became one-dimensional by the end. Bebop and Rocksteady wertre probably the most entertaining, but them being brought baack robbed the other Foot Clan villaina and Stockman was just utterly wasted. Karai no longe rbeing a villain really robbed the Foot Clan any remaining depth.

a character who deserved better: April due to her plotline ultimateley being left open-ended with no resolution and Splinter if you’re aware of how everything with him ultimateley ended.

a ship I’ve never been able to get into: Pretty much any Mikey pairing. Him with Renet was cute, but Renet only appeared like… what? Three or so times? So that wasn’t much. Shinigami… IDK what they were even trying to do and they gave up on it almost instantly. Honestly I think Mikey is too immature to have a romantic relationship so I’m not in favor of most ships with him.

a ship I’ve never been able to get over: Probably the only one I’m still a fan of is Yoshi/Tang-Shen.

a cute, low-key ship: Raph/Mona. The other ship I’m still a fan of. No overdone pining that takes too long or teenaged stupidity, they just go for it with them and I love it. It works well for Raph’s character as well, he can at least brag that he has the most successful love life after watching Leo and Donnie be stupid XD

an unpopular ship but I still enjoyed it: None I can think of. Maybe Apritello? IDK if it’s still popular or not, but you eeither loved it or hated it back when the show was airing. It has it’s issues witht he execution and how it ultimateley ended unresolved. But it’s still cute and I still love their relationship espcially when Donnie became better at handeling his feelings.

a ship that was totally wrong and never should have happened: Are there any that became canon that I have issues with? Hmm… none come to mind.

my favourite storyline/moment: Storyline… hmm, IDK. My favorite episode is still The Invasion because a few bits aside, they got everything right int hat episode. The build-up, the tension, the action, the emotions,t he sense of dread as everything that we knew and cared for came crumbling down… it’s still the best episode(s) in the entire series. Which I feel the seocnd half of S3 REALLY mitigated it’s impact, but I’ll rant about that when I hopefully do that Ten Year Revisit series I want to do for TMNT.

a storyline that never should have been written: The Space Arc. A lotof S4’s issues could have been soloved had they just not done the space arc at all, or focused S5 on the Foot Clan front insterad of ending it at S4 and filling S5 with dide-stories. I have a theory as to whyt hat happened, but regardless the Space Arc ruined what should have been the biggest seaosn of the show as the main story reached it;s conclusion, but mad eit feel crammed and rushed as a result. Which we’d lost a lot of good stuff like the last three episodes of S3, the Aeon Crystal subplot, and Fugitoid, but if losing them allowed for a better story then that’s worth losing.

my first thoughts on the show: When TMNT 2012 premiered, I was in a huge slump. Aside form Wild Kratts, The Penguins of Madagascar TV series, and The Legend of Korra I had lost faith in animation. CN, Nick, and Disney had mostly lost my interest (CN I was especially angry at due to the CN Real situation) though Nick had regianed some faith cause of Penguins and LoK, Disney’s films while improving hadn’t regained my faith due to the CGI switch (I hadn’t seen Tangled yet), and RL matters at the time were giving me less and less time to be invested in it. I was more interest in classical animation and was pretty much set on staying there aside from the shows I previously mentioned. I put it on TMNT 2012’s premiere because nothing else was on and at the very least I could enjoy hearing Rob Paulsen. I was blown away. The animaiton, the fights, the characters, the voice acting, it was the best thing I had seen in a looong time. It was the first time I got up to see new episode premiered in years. I was new to Tumblr by then so I was able to ge tinvolved int he fandom very quickly, which really defined my Tumblr career. It was just so cool and I loved it~!

my thoughts now: The show was great, but not without it’s issues. It’s so much easier to realize and point them out now that it’s over and the euphoria has long since worn off. I gave up on it around mid-S4. I stopped watching the premieres and just slowed down until by S5, I’d oretty much stopped all together. My interest was dead. Int he early days I couldn’t imagine life without the show. But by then I was fully into othershows/fandoms and thus I had no problems washing my hands clean of TMNT 2012. Does that mean I hate the show? No. I still have all my DVD’s and comics, as I said I’m planning a 10 year series, and regardless of how it ended TMNT 2012 both got me into Tumblr/fandom culture (for better and worst) and renewed my love for animaiton. Hell it single-handedly made me go form hating CGI that wasn’t Pixar and blaming it for animaiton’s downfall to realizing how misguided that belief was and becoming more open-minded. TMNT 2012 was a huge part of my life, and I’m grateful for that.

Y' know what? I'm so used to only favoring a handful of people that I'm just completely thrown me off by s5 of druck. I love them all!...even the hard to love characters bc I know there is more complexity to them. im intrigued, charmed and excited about all of them! Druck really came thru and leveled jp this season. God bless. I hope the team are receiving and feeling an outpouring of love and support. They deserve it. (And THANK YOU, Sarah, for providing the translations!)

hi!! wahhh, i agree, this season has completely blown me away! never ever EVER did i expect to love all these characters as much as i already do. nora is already on her way to take away matteo's spot of my favourite druck character because i love her so much.

i think the best thing druck has done with this cast is that it's so diverse!! i'm sure everyone can identify themselves with at least one of the characters, i think that's not possible with characters you can't relate to at all (*cough* kato *cough*)

i love how they continue to show us more little quirks and personality traits of the main characters with every clip, none of them feel 2-dimensional to me or are just there for comic relief like Sam in the og gen...

idk i'm just unbelievably happy with this season. i love the plot and the pacing, the acting is AMAZING and the soundtrack is great. this week especially is hurting me like no other skam episode has done before. druck has a great way to show how helpless you feel when you try to come to terms with your mental illness and overall try to understand what's happening to you

it makes me really proud that german teens can watch a show like druck and feel represented in some way because most other german shows are VERY lacking when it comes to teenager/young adult struggles.

(also thank you for being so kind!! sadly i can't translate every clip/chat anymore because i have uni this month (no online classes anymore when the number of new covid cases per day is as high as it's ever been in germany but my uni doesn't care i guess lol) but i try to do at least some of them or reblog them when i see any :))

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, S5

Overall I’d say this was the best season since the first one, and the ending it gives the story is a satisfying and moving one. I really liked how the show gestures back at some canonical She-Ra concepts - the rebels hiding out in the Whispering Woods, for example - while at the same time doing things that are completely outside the original canon’s scope - She-Ra in Space! And I thought the ensemble was well-used, main characters, side characters, and antagonists all getting their own storylines and resolutions in a way that isn’t easy with such a wide cast of characters, but was handled with elegance.

But look, if you’ve read anything I’ve written or tweeted about this show over the last four seasons, you know I have fundamental issues with how it chooses to direct its storytelling and characterization energies. It doesn’t come as much of a surprise that the concluding season didn’t address most of those issues. A big part of that is that the show I wanted She-Ra to be clearly wasn’t the one Stevenson and her team were making, and that’s fine. But I find it genuinely strange that of the three series that are obvious thematic and emotional successors to Avatar: The Last Airbender - She-Ra, The Legend of Korra, and The Dragon Prince - none of them reach the same heights of plotting and characterization, and at least in She-Ra’s case I think this is rooted in an unwillingness to complicate a rather simplistic central theme. 

(Also, at least part of the problem has to be that the show’s five-season, 52-episode run spanned only seventeen months. Even if you add in the production period for the first season, that’s a truly bonkers schedule that must have told in the depth and complexity of the final product.)

Take Catra, for example. If you’d asked me where I thought her storyline was going before watching the season, I would have said pretty confidently that she was going to get at least some level of redemption story. After all, her situation at the end of S4 perfectly positions her to switch sides by stripping her of all the things she thought she wanted and placing her in a precarious position that she might not be able to talk or manipulate her way out of. The season premiere establishes those facts even further by making Horde Prime a literal monomaniacal monster. And yeah, it’s pretty clever that in a series that places so much emphasis on the importance of friendship as the path towards moral growth, the villain is narcissism personified, a person who has no use for others except as they reflect himself, and subjugate themselves entirely to his will. So it’s not surprising that, finally cut off from any realistic path towards power and made to feel her own vulnerability, Catra would finally start doing some soul-searching and realize how badly she’d treated the people who cared about her. 

(Though if you’ll allow me a snide moment, I can’t help but point out that in the Best Redemption Story Ever, Zuko actually gets all the power and approval he’d thought he wanted before realizing that it means nothing without his honor and self-respect. I think we all know that if Catra had gotten a position of power from Horde Prime, she would have felt no loyalty towards Adora and Etheria, and helped him to conquer them.)

Similarly, I think I would have given you better odds than even that the series would end with some romantic storyline between Catra and Adora. And I don’t want to downplay the importance of depicting a story like that - before the end of the season I found myself wondering why Bow and Glimmer’s romance was being depicted so chastely, before realizing that the writers wanted the first kiss on the show to be between two women. I respect that impulse and the representation the show ends up delivering - we’ve come a long way from Korra and Asami holding hands at the end of their show. But at the same time, I can’t help but feel that the way that the show arrives at this point requires a significant rewriting of Catra’s personality and character arc, not to mention the history of her relationship with Adora.

As the fifth season argues it, the root of Catra’s resentment of Adora is romantic disappointment. She complains that “Adora doesn’t want me. Not the way I want her”, and leaves the team when Adora decides to risk her life by destroying the Heart of Etheria because she takes it as a personal rejection. But this is, to say the least, a massive whitewashing of what we’ve seen of Catra and Adora’s past relationship. In flashbacks, particularly the ones from S4, it’s made clear that even when they were on the same wavelength, Catra and Adora’s friendship was toxic and dysfunctional. Catra may have always loved Adora, but it was a selfish love, one that saw Adora as an instrument for the validation of Catra’s confidence and self-image, and denied her any opportunity for pursuing her own interests and desires. 

There’s room for a story about Catra growing past that selfishness and learning to love generously and openly, of course, but we don’t get that story in S5. When Catra complains that in sacrificing herself for Etheria, Adora is refusing to want things for herself, it’s not an honest character moment. Catra has never cared what Adora wants - in fact, her refusal to acknowledge Adora’s right to make her own choices and take a path in life that left Catra behind has been the crux of their enmity since the series premiere. Having her suddenly change tunes doesn’t feel organic, but like a parachuted-in personality transplant.

To put it back in ATLA terms, Catra was never Zuko. Adora is Zuko - someone raised with bad principles who nevertheless has enough innate compassion, and a powerful moral compass, that with a little support - emotional or magical - they can break through their indoctrination and become a hero. Catra is Azula - obsessed with power, possessed of very little compassion for others, and, most importantly, seriously emotionally unbalanced. I’m not saying someone like that can’t be helped and can’t become a better person, but it takes a great deal more than what the last season of She-Ra has given us.

Meanwhile, if you look at Adora’s storyline, on one level it gives us what I’ve wanted for a while. I’ve complained a lot about how Adora has remained static throughout the middle seasons of the show while other characters - Glimmer, Catra, Scorpia - got character arcs and changed meaningfully. One effect of that has been to create a strange disconnect between the show’s central themes and its main character. In a story that is supposedly all about the importance of friendship and personal connections, the heroine is someone who achieves her heroic destiny by rejecting those connections in favor of a more global morality, and who then had to struggle with balancing her sense of global responsibility with personal attachments - to Glimmer and Bow as much as to Catra.

The fifth season finally circles back to these ideas and places Adora at its center. I thought her conversation with Mara about having the right to be more than She-Ra, and to do more with her life than sacrifice it for others, was a really powerful moment. I just feel like, once again, the foundation wasn’t laid for it. First because Adora’s growth has been mostly ignored during the intervening three seasons, and second because this is a character arc that clashes with the show’s friendship-above-all message in ways that aren’t really acknowledged.

When you think about it, the moments when Adora has been the most herself are the ones when she rejects toxic friendship and stands up for herself - in her confrontations with Catra, especially over the course of the first season, and when she defies Glimmer’s decision to use the Heart of Etheria and the end of S4 and destroys the sword. So to the already complicated issue of where to draw the line between the things you want for yourself and the things you owe others, you add the thorny matter of when to detach yourself from toxic friends who see you only as a means to an end. Except that She-Ra never really grapples with this extra wrinkle - and again, Catra’s hasty personality transplant plays into this, because we get to pretend that the only problem she and Adora ever had was romantic miscommunication.

In a season that is all about putting aside differences and personal grievances to fight for a common cause, there is a refreshing number of instances that remind us that those grievances are still relevant - the fact that nobody will ever really trust Shadow Weaver, for example, or the other princesses calling Entrapta out on her seeming indifference to the consequences of her actions (though in this case, and yet again, Entrapta’s neuroatypicality is used as a get-out-of-jail-free card from taking personal responsibility). Even Glimmer gets to spend a bit of time in the dog house, at the same time that she and Bow work together and save each other’s lives. But once again, when it comes to the main character, we can’t let pesky matters like a lifetime of toxic friendship get in the way of a happy ending in which lesbian love conquers all.

There was a good story to be told here, one that could have easily ended up in the same place as the series actually did. But it required actually delving into the complexity of a character like Adora, and dealing honestly with the problems in her relationship with Catra. She-Ra ends - as it did throughout it run - by choosing to paper over those difficulties in favor of a friendship-conquers-all message that is a great deal less convincing.

(Also, am I wrong or are there a lot of loose ends still? I don’t think we ever find out who Adora was, what Greyskull is, and what She-Ra actually is.)

For the ask meme, Keith?

ooooh keith. full disclosure, while i know a lot of spoilers for things via cultural osmosis, in my full watch of the show i’m only in the first couple eps of s5 so idk about how things play out later

favorite thing about them: I love his passion, and his anger, and the potential he had in an arc about learning to channel his emotions healthily and productively, and learning to work with others as part of a team rather than... not learning to do that and being a leader who winds up leading his team because he hares off to do his own thing and they have no choice but to follow. (granted, it’s possible that he does actually learn these things, I still don’t know how the whole kuron thing is gonna play out so We’ll See)

least favorite thing about them: How much his Lone Wolf thing gets played up, despite his arc ostensibly being about him learning....not to be a lone wolf anymore. Like idk there were a lot of times in the first three seasons I thought he was learning this and then he Didn’t and i just. -fist clench- por que

favorite line: I don’t have any off-hand, the show hasn’t had any quotes that really Stuck Out to me (no iconic lines that I could quote after just seeing them once), and this is my first watch so I haven’t committed any to memory. I do remember liking his speech to Lance encouraging him to keep the Red Lion after Shiro came back, though, even if I never did like the whole changing of the guard thing. (Allura should’ve been the Black Paladin dammit.)

brOTP: I really enjoy his bond with Shiro (while I don’t ship it romantically, it has nothing to do with their ages, I just don’t really have an investment in romantic ships in this show that don’t have to do with Allura bc she’s the primary point of my investment in the series), and their friendship and the hints I’ve seen at their past mentorship bond.

OTP: I will say right now that it’s not exactly ‘otp’ level for me, but like I said above the only ships I’m really invested in are Allura-centric, and I deeply love the potential that Kallura had before it was evidently discarded (interestingly enough, Keith/Allura was the main ship of the original Voltron, where Allura was pale-skinned and also didn’t die at the end, but you know that’s just very interesting to me) in favor of kataang-light, now with somehow Even Less Agency, but whatever this isn’t about that. At any rate, Keith’s galra heritage makes their potential relationship very interesting, both from a standpoint of Allura having to move past her inherent dislike/distrust of him due to his blood (and like, the fact that he didn’t even know he had Galra blood should really have mitigated this somewhat, but that’s another story), and anyway, they had a lot of really sweet moments and I’m very sad none of that potential was explored later on.

nOTP: This is mostly because of the fandom, but I just have this kneejerk dislike of Klance. I don’t like the way the fandom acts like they were baited (I’m over four seasons in, yall, and I’m not seeing anything that could even reasonably be read as romantic development, and like people can ship what they want I don’t care, but this is the ship everyone was acting like it was In the Stars from the very beginning? i realize I’m probably kicking a hornet’s nest with this, but yeesh, i’d ship sheith romantically before i’d ever ship this), and I hate how they seem to think they were entitled to an endgame and a romance that was never so much as hinted at in the show itself.

random headcanon: Mmmm I haven’t spent enough time thinking abt him to really develop one. I will say that he strikes me as someone who says he loves spicy food, but actually can’t handle spice for shit, so he’ll sit there shoveling jalapenos in his mouth while crying and adamantly pretending he’s Fine.

unpopular opinion: I don’t remember enough about the vld fandom to know what exactly constitutes unpopular, but I thought since I heard about it (and now, having seen it in s3/4, i stand by this opinion), Keith should not have been the Black Paladin. It should’ve been Allura. And I think it was monumentally stupid of the Black Lion to ‘choose’ someone who had all the leadership skills of a drunk pomeranian (I say with love), who then proceeds to nearly get the entire team killed because he’s Not A Leader and trying to force him to be one did more harm than good, especially early on. (and Black Paladin Allura is the hill I will pitch my tent and die upon, thank you and good night)

song i associate with them: hit me with your best shot by pat benatar

favorite picture of them: tumblr is being a bitch and not letting me upload, but -insert pic of keith in the black t-shirt from his training outfit here- something about tight black muscle-t’s just does it for me ok

send me a character and i’ll list things!

I don’t get when people say Bellamy was a jerk for the “It’s gonna take a while for me to feel nothing like a good Azgeda spy” line. Bellamy himself thinks he’s a jerk and tells E.cho this, but that’s just typical Bellamy blaming himself for everything. Bellamy was bringing up an issue in their relationship: E.cho’s lack of openness and vulnerability with him. It’s been made very clear throughout the series that this is something he desperately needs specifically with Clarke and E.cho has been unable to fulfill that need. He should be able to address that, and I really don’t mind that the line was a dig at her. Like at all. And here’s why: 

E.cho has completely disregarded Bellamy’s feelings this entire season so far in regard to his sister. Octagon has treated him like complete shit for seasons, which no, E.cho does not know about, but she is very well aware of the abuse Octagon put him through last season. Throwing him in the pit to keep her power is...y i k e s. E.cho knows this happened, yet it’s like she doesn’t care about its emotional impact on Bellamy. She has consistently not respected Bellamy’s decision to leave Octagon out in the woods for not just the safety of everyone but his own well being. 

That’s huge for Bellamy by the way. In the past, he would have never put himself first. He always put Octagon’s feelings above his own. Now though, he’s thinking of his feelings first, and E.cho is over here trying to get him to bring Octagon back because clearly he’s upset about his decision and regrets it. But no, he doesn’t regret it. He knows this was the best decision for his own well being. He tells her, “No, this is me being human, feeling things when the people I love are in trouble or die” because she just doesn’t get it, and the reason she doesn’t get it is because she either lacks the emotional capacity to understand Bellamy unlike Clarke who has understood him from day 1 or has insecurities over who he forgives and how long that takes (E.cho--three years, Clarke--instant forgiveness, Octagon--indefinite). I’m thinking it’s a combination of both. 

Moving on though, what I really wanted to bring up is that spy!E.cho is the E.cho that felt no remorse over the trauma she put Bellamy through, terrorizing him and his loved ones, not just because she was following orders but because she enjoyed it. The narrative loves to claim that she was “just following orders” but that’s not true. She actively enjoyed what she did to Bellamy, and my theory on that is that she had a thing for him, but couldn’t express it because they were enemies and she’d been conditioned to suppress any and all feeling, so tormenting him was her only way to express herself. Think of middle school when you made fun of the person you liked. It’s the same concept, just (obviously) fucked up due to E.cho’s upbringing. 

Anyway, Bellamy doesn’t know this, but the point is that he remembers spy!E.cho. He remembers the girl who got his girlfriend (Gina) killed, consistently tried to murder his best friend (Clarke), actively shot arrows at his sister in an attempt to kill her in the conclave, and felt guilt over none of it, which is made clear when her response to Clarke’s “We all have blood on our hands don’t we? Or do you think those people you blew up in Mount Weather don’t count because you were ‘following orders’?” is “I should have killed you when I had the chance.” She doesn’t regret her shitty actions, just that they didn’t work out in her favor. Even now that she’s with Bellamy, she still doesn’t regret them, and E.cho who doesn’t feel things like human beings normally do is triggering for Bellamy. Spy!E.cho is triggering for Bellamy. 

On the ring, I think he had conjured up in his head the idea that E.cho had changed because she was one of them now, but she was only one of them because her other people banished her. She didn’t change. She adapted. She changed priorities. And she did all of this by being the same person she always was and Bellamy didn’t notice because she straight up lied about her parents. She didn’t tell him about her real past, so he has no idea how she became the person that she is today. He has no idea who E.cho even is at all. 

There’s a line he said last season that really stuck out to me. He tells Octagon, “We all have things to answer for. Things that shouldn’t be forgiven but are because we did them for our people--our family. E.cho is no different. She was an Azgeda spy, but now she’s with me” and literally nearly every word of it is false. E.cho did not do things for her family. The Ice Nation wasn’t her family. It was far from it, but Bellamy didn’t know this. E.cho lied to him, so he only just found in 6x04 that Nia took her in after her family was murdered by rouge Ice Nation warriors. Nia wasn’t her family. She was E.cho’s superior who she followed orders from. That’s not family. That’s fucked up. 

But again, Bellamy conflates the two because he doesn’t know any better. He has convinced himself that just as he protected his people, she protected hers, but it wasn’t the same. Bellamy did things because he wore his heart on his sleeve and had the purest intentions (i.e. save his people) and still regretted them every single day and was always trying to be better. E.cho did things because she was either following orders or doing what she thought was in the Ice Nation’s best interests, and her intentions (i.e. greed, power for her people, etc.) were not pure and she didn’t regret any of her actions or ever try to be better. It honestly breaks my heart that Bellamy would ever compare himself to someone like her, but he does because that’s just the kind of person he is (never recognizing the good in himself that separates him from others), and he’s been lied to and also wants E.cho to be a good person. He wants her to be this person that she’s not. She’ll never be Clarke what he needs.

She was an Azgeda spy and now she’s with Bellamy, yes that’s true, but that doesn’t mean what he thinks it means. It doesn’t mean she’s changed. She’s still the same girl who got his girlfriend stabbed like seven times and then blown up and would do it all again if she could go back, which was made clear by “I’m sorry about the girl, but I was following orders Bellamy.” It’s very reminiscent of Clarke’s call out in s5 about her having just been following orders and her response indicating that she doesn’t regret it.

TLDR: I know that the writers seem to be so obsessed with E.cho and claim that she’s a hero, but that has not been shown on screen. I’m really hoping that Bellamy comes to realize that she’s not the girl he thought she was, that he fell in love with a lie. That’s a significant part of the reason for who he became over those six years, and it would be a huge disservice to his character to not explore why s5 Bellamy was the way he was. 

The Battle of Winterfell

Okay, I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t particularly care for this episode. I came into it so hyped, because Miguel Sapochnik was in charge of the most important episode of the series to date and he has yet to disappoint, but in hindsight I realized this episode was never going to work. Not that I disliked the whole thing, because there were some moments which I absolutely love, but overall this episode was poorly conceptualized and executed even worse. Below the cut I’ll explain why I disliked it, and how I think the show could have done better. . . 

First, I think this episode was poorly executed in the writing room, not by the actors, directors, and behind-the-scenes crew. Watching the Game Revealed for this episode shows just how incredible the crew behind this show is, and its a shame that all that excellent work was largely wasted by D&D. 

Visually speaking though, this episode was stunning. The shots of Drogon and Rhaegal against the sky, lighting wights on fire, is legitimately breathtaking. Arya’s parkour is also stunning. Miguel Sapochnik and everyone else involved really did not disappoint, as far as they could carry the episode.

To me, this episode failed on two fronts: its approach to characters, and its approach to the battle. 

Characters

The biggest problem this episode had, is that it approached its characters through the lens of the action, and not the action through the lens of its characters. While D&D promised many character moments, there was only one - the Hound deciding to toughen up because Arya was in danger. Otherwise, all of the “character beats” were slow motion shots of people reacting to the battle. Those moments, its important to note, do not come from scripting - those scenes were Miguel Sapochnik desperately trying to ground his action within the emotions of his characters. But these scenes fail to carry the emotional burden the episode needed, because they are entirely generic; that’s what I mean when I say D&D did not consider the action through their characters. None of the scenes in these episodes were written from the perspective of “How would Jon, Daenerys, Tyrion, Sansa, et al, react and how does that change our episode?”, they were all written from the perspective of “These are the exact events we are going to have, what room does that leave for character expression?” - and of course, the answer was very little. Arya’s plotline this episode comes the closest to personalized, and even that falls very short. Listening to the Inside the Episode, the idea behind Arya’s story was “what if we took away her characteristics, what is she left with?” which leads to more near death fake outs, but prevents any real character moments. They intentionally took her back to season one Arya, instead of incorporating 7 years of growth into her scenes. 

Compare that approach to a previous episode, Blackwater, written by George Martin. Every single scene in that episode (except the dude bro scene with Bronn that GRRM was forced to write) is designed to show you something about Stannis, Davos, Cersei, Tyrion, or Sansa. It was a battle written specifically to highlight its characters. The perfect scene to highlight this difference is Sansa in the Sept during Blackwater, vs Sansa in the crypts during The Long Night. Sansa was not written to be useless this episode; her line “I will not abandon my people” combined with the unaired scenes of her killing wights, is quite enough evidence that the intent of D&D was to feature her. Yet, in the finished product, its very clear that D&D really didn’t understand how to feature her; the scenes in the crypts are entirely superfluous, because they exist solely to include Tyrion and Sansa. Whereas in Blackwater, GRRM wrote the scenes to highlight Sansa’s leadership, kindness, bravery, loyalty, and compassion. She is not even included in the “battle” portion of the episode, but many of her very best lines are from that episode and its corresponding book chapters - because GRRM worked the battle around his characters, instead of D&D who worked their characters around the battle. D&D genuinely didn’t know how to include scenes in this episode that weren’t action, and The Long Night suffered greatly for it. The best way to fix this problem would have been to re-examine each scene from a character’s perspective based on their specific story arc over 7 1/2 seasons. D&D were too focused on the base concept of fear, on how everyone is just terrified of death personified, that they forgot each character has their own story. Like I previously said, only the Hound has a scene like this, where we understand his specific reaction based on his specific story arc. 

This episode also failed to incorporate its characters even when the action called for it. While my above complaint is that D&D couldn’t look outside the action to make room for characters, this one is similar but slightly different - even when the action would have been greatly improved by individualized character beats, D&D chose to ignore that in favor of straight battle sequences. The obvious example of this is Daenerys, and her complete ambivalence in the face of Viserion. The only time her character was allowed to influence her scenes this episode, is when she as a Khaleesi decided she could not watch her Khalasar slaughtered; and the only reason that was included, was an excuse to get the battle rolling as D&D envisioned it. But wouldn’t dragon vs dragon content in this episode have greatly benefited from an emotionally bereft Daenerys? I am far from her biggest stan, but it is truly a slap in the face to pretend as if one of her dragons dying, and then being brought back to try and kill her, would not almost kill Daenerys. The dragons are her children; she looks at them and sees herself reflected back, both the good and the bad. Her self worth and importance is tied to them. To not only lose one, but to see it turned against her, is a scene literally begging to be about Daenerys’ loss. And yet, her emotional connection to Viserion is completely irrelevant to her battle with the Night King.

The previous complaints I’ve had with this episode were all things I think would have been relatively easy to fix within the episode itself, but the next problem I have has been building since season one, and was probably unfixable by season 6. And that problem is of Bran, Jon, and the Night King. Obviously I don’t know what GRRM’s plans for the Others are, but I am very sure Bran is at the heart of it. Don’t get me wrong, it was amazing to see a Stark defeat the Night King; but, if we are being honest with ourselves, it was the wrong Stark. Since the start of the series, when we see the Night’s Watch deserter executed through Bran’s eyes, he has been the narrator of the Others. Yet for some reason, D&D made the decision in s1 that they weren’t going to include Northern Mysticism, or Bran’s more supernatural elements. They pretty much eliminated Warging from the show completely (which is entirely unthinkable in the books). By cutting Bran off from his plot with the Others, they filled his role with Jon. Now, Jon is very connected to the North and weirwoods and that sort of high fantasy element, but he is not connected to the White Walkers directly. Jon Snow has never even faced a White Walker in the books, compared to his show counterpart who has had run-ins with the Night King since s5. By making Jon a much more stereotypical Action Hero, they’ve already gutted what the White Walkers are in the books. Once they left Bran out of s5, there really was no going back. To me, its obvious that at some point midway through the show, D&D realized from GRRM just how important Bran was to the fight against the AotD, but it was too late to do anything about it. So Bran being in the Godswood, after an extremely vague explanation of why the Night King wants to kill him, was their desperate attempt to pick up the pieces. That left D&D with only one other option for taking out the Night King - shock value. They literally say as much in the Inside the Episode. All of the above doesn’t even mention how big a problem the Night King existing at all is, but it is a huge problem. The Night’s King, from the books, is not some all powerful figure; he is a man, who made a very stupid choice out of love. The Night’s King story is a deeply personal tale, which most likely revolves around a Stark, which ties the story back to our main characters (specifically Bran). By changing the Night’s King story into one centralized White Walker villain, they took away all the personality of the White Walkers while simultaneously pinning the entire narrative onto one character (which can only lead to an unsatisfactory ending). 

The Battle

Now that I’ve explained why I dislike the character element of The Long Night, lets break down why the battle itself falls short. . . 

They played this way too straightforward. If they weren’t going to ground this episode within emotional stakes and payoffs, they had to be way more creative within the battle itself. I know Dan Weiss gave his “reasons” for not including Ice Spiders, but they were stupid (for anyone who hasn’t seen the article, he said they didn’t think they could animate giant spiders well); Lord of the Rings came out more than 15 years ago and Shelob was very well done, and you’re telling me that Game of Thrones couldn’t pull them off?

Ice Spiders isn’t the only thing they could have done though. GRRM’s story is some Cthulu level horror and heavy metal stuff, and D&D should have embraced those elements. The shots of the dragons fighting worked so well because it was a visually new experience, but D&D scripted way too much melee fighting to be the backbone of the episode. Sapochnik did the best he could to make it stimulating throughout, but as an audience this can only be entertaining for so long. And D&D were obviously very attached to making this episode feature length, regardless - what I’m saying is, an editor needed to be more involved in the final cut. 

three anons: what the hell was all that in S7

Picking out the three that are most to the point for this answer, but I’ve got another dozen or so that overlap. Not sure I’ll have time/energy to answer the rest individually, so hopefully this meta will be sufficient. 

I mean it could be that they had different execs back then who were better at their jobs and kept Shiro around. No one disliked black paladin Shiro, even the DotU fans were ok with it, and the writing in s1-2 was mostly very good. Changing all that was a bad idea. I would have left on the spot if Shiro died or was benched, like now, I'm only around for closure. Maybe they were different execs with this decision & the EPs leaped at the chance. Well, we know who's also gonna be in trouble if that's the case.

With your theory on how storyboards were reused and characters shuffled around for cost cutting, might this not also partly explain the Adam flashback scene and how it was staged? I mean, they were originally supposed to be roommates and the scene was meant to appear in season 2 but got cut. What if they just reused the storyboard (or even animation, if it was already mostly done) the way it was and then just changed the dialogue? This could explain the lack of intimacy in the staging, too. Ezor and Zethrids interactions were more openly intimate maybe not (just) because they‘re villains who die immediately after, but because the decision to make them an item came before storyboarding was done, so the staging is more suggestive. I mean, if you think Shiro was mostly pasted in in the first half of s7, that might make sense.

If cost was the issue and they already had the black paladin Shiro version written, and got the greenlight to change it to Keith then things don't add up. Because they changed it once more! Which could have been avoided if they stuck to the Shiro one. And it goes without saying it would be better written to follow canon instead of the mess we got, like, I cant imagine this NOT discussed. So if it wouldn't be cost effective to change it again for Keith and it would be badly written, why did it happen?

Behind the cut: the most likely chronology of revisions, the clues in S7 as to its original form, and what this means for S8 and the Black Paladin position. 

This is everything I’ve been able to figure out between interviews, podcasts, tweets, plus researching the industry and a few reality-checks with friends more familiar. As always, any mistakes are my own. 

version 0: "five teenagers"

This would’ve been the first pitch after getting the green light, and probably only a loose synopsis, with just the pilot given a rough storyboard. A post-apocalyptic Earth conquered by the Galra, who are seeking Blue. The execs rejected JDS' mechanism for the discovery of Blue, in favor of simply having Keith ‘sense’ Blue. The execs also rejected the idea that Shiro would die only a few episodes in. This summary seems to be the basis of the "five teenagers" part of the teaser.

version A: "shiro kicks the bucket"

Timelines would've dictated moving onto an outline pretty quickly, detailed down to the episode level, including bits of dialogue, motifs, turning points or emotional beats. In this revision, Shiro dies/leaves at the end of S2 and does not return. This is the “originally we wanted him to kick the bucket” version, which the execs rejected.

version B: "shiro goes away for awhile"

If I'm interpreting the hints correctly, the "does Shiro die or not" question got tossed back and forth all the way into S1/S2 pre-production. Rather than rearrange everything, the easiest fix would've been to leave most of the story intact and write only a new ending where Shiro returns. The execs reject this rewrite, saying Shiro can’t be gone that long. This is the “we tried to just have him gone for awhile, but the execs said he had to come back sooner” version.

version C: "enter the clone"

Again, easiest fix is to insert Shiro/Kuron, remove Keith, and reverse that just before Shiro's return in version B. This impacts only the middle seasons (S3-S6); the clone compromise satisfies the execs. Kuron's characterization makes a lot more sense if it’s Keith, in visuals (ie Kuron leaning against the wall in Keith fashion), dialogue (fighting with Lance), and action (leaving without consulting the team). It's also why no one mentions Keith's absence. Because in the original version A, Keith was standing right there.

version D: "wtf is going on", aka Season 7

When JDS mentions having a full season written with Shiro as Black Paladin, it didn't make sense how they'd have a script and not use it. With @ptw30's visual detective work, I think I may've figured it out.

Technical notes: first scripts are all written for a season, then voices are recorded, and then the combined script+recording is used to storyboard. Production seasons are 26-episodes, independent of actual broadcast seasons; VA may be recording scenes across two 13-episode seasons completely out of order, since the recording schedule's going to be based on who's available, not chronology of the file numbers. The biggest staff changes are usually in April ('staffing season') when new shows get the greenlight and start sharking around to catch writers, designers, directors, etc.

In March of this year, S5 was released. At least some of the storyboarders were released in time for staffing season; in April, Hedrick moves to a new project. With S7/S8 being unchanged since version B, I suspect Hedrick delivered the scripts for S7 and S8 by winter of last year, at latest. Even that would be tight, since that's expecting animation to deliver 26 episodes in an 8-month timeframe. [edit: probably delivered much earlier, given the studio leaks show images we can recognize from S7/S8, so some amount of these seasons were in production by then.]

In June, S6 dropped, and a week later, Hamilton was announced as the new story editor via the Lets Voltron podcast. With the lead time required in production, there doesn't seem to be any reason to even need a story editor, at this point. All the pre-production work should be done.

In August, S7 dropped. Hedrick's editor credit is only for the first half of the season; Hamilton gets it for the second half. That means the last six episodes were written after Hedrick's departure. (May Chan's S2 script was reused in part, and she gains a belated co-writing script credit for that. Hedrick should've received the same; it's standard.)

Let's recap a few things we know (and a few we can intuit) about S7:

The season was already written with Shiro returning as Black Paladin, possibly also recorded and storyboarded. 

S6 reversed the S4-S5 trend, lending strength to exec arguments that Shiro is necessary in the story.

After S6 dropped, the EPs said the wolf's name was a spoiler. See this post from @pwt30; tl;dr is that perhaps the EPs intended the wolf to be Shiro's spirit. 

Despite Shiro's return, he's absent for the majority of the first half; when he is present, he barely speaks a half-dozen words, and none are plot-relevant. See @ptw30's post for more details. 

There's a glaring incontinuity when Allura says the paladin armor protected the team, yet Shiro is frozen with the other non-paladins despite wearing armor. 

Keith never offers for Shiro to pilot, nor mentions it, nor even seems to consider it an issue.

Not everything dovetails since I don't have the full picture, but here's my theory: S7 was originally outlined with Shiro's spirit in the wolf, rather than Black. I have no idea when/how JDS would've thought up the CA:WS parallels for his sole writing credit, but Shiro's "I died" and Lotor's psychotic breakdown are squeezed into S6E6, which was written by Josh Hamilton, Hedrick's later replacement. The only other Shiro-in-Black point is a few minutes at the end of S6's final episode. Shifting from Shiro-in-wolf to Shiro-in-Black really only affects one episode, with a bit of editing for another.

Anyway, S6 ends version C, and we segue to version B. For the first half of S7, the clone's body may have been in stasis while the team traveled through its various non-adventures. The episode we now know as S7E1 may have been the mid-point, with about six episodes of Shiro being unconcious. After watching the numbers drop from S3 to S6, the execs may've rejected another six episodes of where-is-Shiro and insisted he come back ASAP.

S7 only has two episodes that must be in order; the rest are pretty rearrangeable. All they had to do was insert Shiro into the background and record a few lines. (Several lines are pure voice-over, which also saves cost/time by not needing to animate moving mouth.) But the moved episode is only his memory/awakening, and the logical next episode would be Shiro's reconnection, and the rest of the season would roll from there. Without moving the entire second half of the season to the start, moving only his awakening episode would mean Shiro does nothing for 5-6 episodes and then abruptly reconnects.  

In a recent interview, JDS said at first the execs weren't enthused until JDS talked up the new mecha they'd give Shiro to captain. Honestly, there's no way JDS got to be EP without giving a really good pitch, but there may've been another element to his argument: nostalgia. The EPs seem certain everyone suffers from their same nostalgia dementia, which if you do, then you probably have been waiting for any glimpse of that og!Keith. If Shiro returns at the start of S7, then Keith's time in Black has been limited to a few disastrous episodes in S3, and a single big battle in S6. The beginning of S7 is the only time we'd ever see the Voltron84 formation working as a unified team, and returning Shiro too soon would defeat the whole purpose of showing how the team has grown in his absence.

The solution seems to have been to remove Shiro's reconnection completely, and keep Keith in Black. That would mean re-recording Shiro's lines from the midpoint onward, and editing in Keith over Shiro. The savings would be that only half the seaon would have to be reworked, not all. The loose end of the space wolf --- an artifact of version B --- was left in place.  

What I'm not sure of is whether the following are significant enough changes to warrant removing Hedrick's name and replacing it with Hamilton's. It could be, if supervising the revision process is enough to override the previous credits. I have no idea about that part of the industry, and it's the kind of edge case you're just not going to find a lot of blog posts about, so if you know, tell me. Otherwise, your guess is as good as mine.

Anyway, this would've meant Shiro was switched in for Allura, Allura was put back in a lion, and Keith was switched in for Shiro. This would explain why Shiro speaks as the leader of Voltron despite no longer being a paladin, and the uneasy sensations a lot of people got about the characterizations. It was most striking in the last three episodes: Shiro felt like Allura v2, while Keith felt like Shiro v2. And that further, the Altean-Earthian ship just 'lighting up' for Shiro --- and becoming that oversized white mecha --- may've meant as Allura's fourth (fifth?) deus ex machina.

I'd be willing to bet that mid-battle, Allura repeated her stunt from the end of S2, heading out to destroy Sendak's crystal by herself. She wouldn't need Sam to hack her brain, and then we'd also have a call back to when she got knocked down by the crystal-ball thing on Naxzela. If she was the one meant to go toe-to-toe with Sendak, that would explain the bizarre neutrality of Sendak's words --- he says nothing personal to Shiro, at all --- and the even more bizarre silence on Shiro's part. Allura's words wouldn't fit Shiro, so he's silent.

And lastly, it'd mean that the one leaping out of Black to cut down Sendak wouldn't have been Keith. It would've been Shiro.

Where would the story go from here?

If I look at the events of S7, the first half is terribly disjointed, really. If Shiro was supposed to wake at the midpoint, an episode (or two) is missing. One for him to reconnect with Black, and a second that would provide some minor conflict to settle him back into position. Those two episodes were likely replaced with the unexpected and frankly over-told two-parter of the Earth flashbacks.

Two problems with that, one technical, one structural.

First, the flashback two-parter has a lot of moving parts. Brand-new designs, characters, and backdrops. It's far too elaborate to be done in an ultra-compressed timeframe, not without several heart attacks and therapy bills on the part of the animation staff. (Plus, the US-based storyboarding team is already downsized, so fewer hands to do the work.)

Second, it doesn't make a lot of structural sense, especially against the big revelations in S6 of an existing Altean colony. Within the story, there's no reason to halt everything and travel across the universe to take however long to build a new castle, when the Altean colony question is far more pressing. Returning to earth also violates the structure, because it's really just a standard milieu: start on earth, head out to have adventures, and return home at the end.

But here, they're returning home and then possibly leaving again. That's just... a rather peculiar and imbalanced way to do it. It doesn't help that doing so means literally telling Romelle her people are just gonna have to rot, the paladins are certain they need the castle more. Why would you take one of the more compelling storylines you've come up with, only to background it again, and wreck the traditional bookending milieu structure at the same time? Especially if that means coming up with major set-pieces and brand-new designs in the space of several months, after a chunk of your core staff are already onto other things.

I think those two flashback episodes -- and the rewritten finale episodes --- may've been cribbed from S8. In other words, the second half of S7 was the original end of S8. That would mean repurposing already-created storyboards and animation artifacts, so there's a huge time savings there (not counting the need to re-record voices and edit the visuals to match the changed-around parts). 

[note: if there’s anywhere you want to frontload introductions for the spin-off, it’d be in the final season, not the penultimate season. Here it feels like a big honking distraction, rather than an organic segue into the next iteration.]

That change necessitated that utterly bizarro mecha that appeared out of nowhere with the most ridiculously impeccable timing. There needed to be a reason to pull the team back out to space to deal with Haggar and/or the alt-Alteans and/or Lotor or whomever else it turns out to be.

So... where we go from here depends on when S8 gets released, because that’ll tell us how much they did (or did not) edit the episodes. Another clue will be whose name gets listed as head editor for an episode; if we see Hedrick’s name reappear at the top, we’ll know we’re dealing with episodes that are enough unrevised to qualify as being Hedrick-edited, that it’s a version B episode. 

My expectation? They’ll move Shiro’s reconnection to the first part of S8, and add an episode or edit pieces of another, to blend it into what would’ve been the first half of S8 (probably with filler to mask the gap). Then add an episode to segue into the version B finale of S7, where we’d end with the original VLD lineup. With the time needed for animation, that’d be the easiest (if potentially awkward) way to repurpose as much as possible of existing artifacts. 

If we don’t get S8 in the next 1-2 months, though, all bets are off, and there’s a much greater possibility that the entire final season is being redone from scratch. I’d expect Keith to stay in Black, in that case, but I’m always willing to be pleasantly surprised.  

edited to add: see this followup for another detail that supports the reversed-seasons theory

Idk how you can love evak so much and disrespect the creator of these characters 🙄

Okay, I’ve been getting a few of these asks and it’s getting annoying so I’m just going to answer this one.

I have to say, I don’t really understand this idea that for me to love Even and Isak I have to love their creator and everything she does ever after. I love what she did with s1 and s3, but it’s no secret that I’m not a fan of s2 because of William and it’s def not a secret that I really don’t like what she did with s4. But none of those things seem to be controversial. So, what I’m getting from this is that it’s me not liking what she’s doing with the Skam books, in particular the s3 book, that’s getting you all angry.

And why is that? Is it because it’s Evak? That honestly doesn’t make any sense to me.

I love Even and Isak, I love Evak as a ship and I love what Julie created when she did s3. But I don’t think I need to like everything she does from that point on just because she did something great with that. And I don’t think that respecting a creator means that they can never be criticized.  

I was so excited about the books and I even bought book 1. But her adding things to the scripts after the fact just turned me right off them. JA was done with Norwegian Skam. She left it to go do another one in USA. If she had more to add to the characters she should’ve done a s5 or handed it off to someone else to do it, imo.

For me, the second she stopped doing OG Skam those characters stopped being hers and became ours.

But for some reason she insists on adding to the universe almost 2 years later with newly written scenes. If all these things were important, why didn’t she put them in the show? I get that she’s probably doing it as a favor to the fans and I’m not trying to take the enjoyment away from the people who enjoy the books as they are, but it’s just not for me.

Whatever she’s doing now, it’s not canon. It’s not part of the show. I don’t need her to add to it and make it almost impossible for us who like to imagine these things to keep speculating.

I’ve heard other authors say that they don’t know what to do with their wips that contain some of the scenes she’s speculated on now. Whether to just… stop writing them? That they’re unsure what is the truth now; their version or hers?

And it’s this that gets me the most; I’m scared that these added scenes are killing creativity. That they’re gonna make us stop wondering and speculating and that the days of seeing your fave Skam blog answer an ask about “what’s your hc for why Even chose that house” are probably over.

From the s1 book I’ve noticed that it’s very hard to see which scenes are added later on and which are part of the original scripts. That makes it almost impossible to see which are her headcanons and which aren’t. And hard to see if she’s added more than a couple of scenes, did she add notes, or lines to the scripts? We can’t be sure. And I really, really don’t like that either.

I don’t really understand why this bothers people so much. I’m not trying to tell anyone else they can’t enjoy these scenes/things, I’m just saying that I don’t. I really don’t want to turn off anon because I get a lot of lovely messages too, but this is getting exhausting.

So. Please stop. Respect that my views on this, and probably also other things, are different than yours. And maybe, if my blog offends you this much you should… stop following it? Just a thought.

Glad I Came When I Did...

I came to Tumblr in July of last year, I had only been watching SPN since the March before, but I had watched everything from the beginning and was all caught up, and well into my rewatches when I got here, and I am so thankful that was the case. When I got here, and saw what many of you say about the show, characters, writers and show runners, I wondered what show you all are watching.  For one thing, the show wasnt “better” in the Kripke era, it was just different for the first 3 seasons, but that was just laying the foundation for what the show was building up to. Sure, it was nice to have just Sam and Dean in every episode and not muddied down with side characters, but this show literally being an epic, needed to get bigger. It wouldnt have lasted 13 years and counting,if it just stayed Sam and Dean hunting shifters and vampires. Season 4 changed everything, and keep in mind this was Kripke, not Gamble or Carver, we got Cas and other angels, it got darker and more personal when Dean went to Hell and was tortured and ended up breaking the first seal, and Sam was drinking demon blood and became addicted, and ultimately raising Lucifer, we learned that that the brothers were part of a big Heavenly plan, and even had Gospels written about them. The great battle of Armageddon would be fought by them! Had the story not exploded like that, the show never would have gotten a 6th season. So many of you just said “It never should have gotten a 6th season anyway” but youd sit there and whine for the next 2 years about how badly it ended. Sam sacrifces himself to save the world and ends up alone in the dark? Dean ends up with a chick he hardly knows? How does this make a good ending to such a great story?  Next, Dean is not an abusive masogynist, and Sam is not the pseudo-female that bends to Dean’s every whim. I’ll agree that Dean hit Sam too much in the early seasons (remember? back with it was “so much better”?) but Sam is a big guy and it was always a fair fight whenever he faught back, he just chose not to fight sometimes. Not because he’s afraid of Dean, but because its Sam’s nature to just not want to fight, Those of you who treat Sam like a battered wife from the 50s, or Stockholm syndrom gone wild, are just really projecting your political agenda on a show that wishes to not take part in ANY political agenda.  Sam and Dean fight. In any drama with brothers, they fight. Since early S7, Dean hasnt hit Sam without being under a supernatural influence, and no one seems to want to accept that that part of Dean has changed. Why? Because youre putting Sam in the battered wife position, where you would tell a battered wife, that the abusive husband wont ever change. Not where he SHOULD be, as a big, strong man, fully capable of kicking Dean’s ass if he wants to, but he doesnt because he loves Dean, and knows Dean loves him, even if he hasnt always known the right way to show it. 

On that same topic, Sam is not the female architype of this story, though sometimes a male/female formula is used. Normally however, Sam and Dean are Butch and Sundance or Luke Skywalker and Han Solo the way Kripke created these characters. Sam has feminine qualities, and so does Dean, but all men do, and all women have some masculine qualities.... thats just being realitic. I am just as tired of hearing about Dean’s “Toxic masculity” as I am about hearing that Sam is a woman with a penis... well, we’ve never been shown he has one, so a woman with facial hair? I dont know.... but feminize either of them in your fan fic if thats what youre into, but don’t write it into the show, when that’s not what the show is telling us.  Neither Sam nor Dean are bisexual, and I dont care if Sam has never said he’s straight, or if he sumonned a male crossroads demon, or Dean and Cas breathed the same air, or Dean made a mix tape. After 12 yrs, if neither of these boys have canonically dated a man, we can safely assume they never will. Even if Wincest was canon, it wouldnt mean they have any interest in men aside from each other.  Sam gets blamed for a lot, he does, but not everything all the time and Dean never blamed Sam for anything (after S4) that he didnt blame himself for too. in S5 Fallen Idols, Dean reminds Sam that he broke the first seal, and tells Sam he couldnt have known killing Lilith was a bad thing, In S8 when Dean tells Sam what things he could confess, he isnt throwing blame on him, but acknowledging that these werent good things, and may need confessing.... ignorance is no excuse for the law right? And Dean puts blame on them both for releasing the Darkness. In my time of watching this show, free from Tumblr, never once did Sam come off as stupid, evil, or less important than Dean. Either in the show or where the writing was concerned.  Dean may asstert himself as the boss or the leader, and most of the time, he is the leader, and thats alright, theyre a team, it doesnt minimize Sam at all, he has said basically he prefers to follow because it’s easier than leading, but he certainly can lead when necessary. Dean is the infantry and Sam is the tank. Thats not making one greater than the other, thats stratagy. But as far as being Sam’s boss, look again.... Dean barks orders at Sam sometimes, but Sam gives orders subtly, he tells Dean to stop, he stops, he gives him a bitch face, he stops, he puts his hand out, Dean doesnt get cake, he says “dont kill him” Dean doesnt kill him, Sam flashes puppydog eyes and gets basically whatever he wants. Sometimes Dean defies Sam, and sometimes Sam defies Dean... see that? The narative does not favor Dean over Sam. Again, I state that Sam has never looked weak or stupid or habitually wrong in my time of watching. A few times Dean says “Im always right” but that doesnt mean he is written to be always right. Its just a Dean thing. Dean is not the “fav” of the writers because he has more speaking lines either. Sam is a quiet character, and since Jared isnt comfortable with long monologues, that works out pretty good. Sam has more personafications than Dean, more pain and affliciton... this isnt “HEY WE HATE SAM SO LETS MAKE HIM SUFFER!! HAHAHAHA!!” This is showcasing how well Jared acts pain, or takes on a different personality. This doesnt put Dean/Jensen down, his strong points are comedic parts, making long dialogue not sound boring, and showing full emotion while still being able to speak clearly. Put these exceptional talents together and it makes for 2 awesome main characters that are defined individuals and not mirrors of each other, and yet they stay similar enough to be believable brothers, best friends, and soulmates. I dont begrudge anyones opinion on anything It’s yours, you have it, and I respect it, but it appears that a lot of you are wasting your time on a show you hate, that goes against everything you stand for, and treats your favorite actor/character like a meaningless extra, and sadly, some are following you and theyre not having their own experience, they’re living yours. I cant tell you how often I hear someone hasnt watched a certain episode, or a certain season because Tumblr people hated it, so they thought it not worth it. and I have to explain that Tumblr people hate everything, and mostly wont ever be happy with the show unless whatever ship they ship becomes canon, which none of them will. So may I suggest, lighten up. take the show at face value, dont sit there, arms crossed, phone in hand waiting to meta on something you want to be there that isnt, and just laugh and love and cry with the rest of us :)

OUaT S6 Wrap-Up 3/3: Characters & Conclusion

Part 1: Structure | Part 2: Theme

In my 6x01 review, I posited the following arcs for this season:

Rumple’s arc has to do with whether he can avoid repeating his own early story – especially challenging when it seems that he has lost this child before he can even be born – and regain what he has lost, before it’s too late.

Regina wants to start a new story, but she’s already taken a step down the path she walked once before, and her other half is out there plotting evil.

Emma has been told that her story will end soon, just as it finally seemed that happiness was within her reach. Can she avoid this? Should she avoid it?

And indeed, those were each brought to a conclusion by the end of the season.

Rumple did avoid repeating his own story. 

Regina has started two new stories, one of each of her selves.

Emma met her fate and has her happy ending.

There are a lot of devils in those details, though. 

First off, I want to say that guest villains got treated terribly this season. As I noted earlier, we never found out much of anything about Hyde -- nothing about how he came to be so powerful, why he wanted Storybrooke, or what even his deal was other than revenge on Rumple. We never got a coherent explanation for the nature of the Evil Queen as an entity. Gideon made more sense in retrospect, but for his first few episodes he was apparently without any motive, which significantly weakened their impact. We were on the brink of the season finale before we knew what moved the Black Fairy, and even after her centric her whole plan continued to make no sense. She had to kill Emma because it’s prophesied? She wanted the town because why exactly? The Dark Curse was suppose to do what? What the hell kind of lazy bullshit?

The long-term characters’ side is not much better.

Emma’s trip around the Hero’s Journey came to a conclusion in S5. We spent this season in an extended denouement for her, the attainment of her happy ending. Those steps were doled out in agonizingly scanty increments -- moving in together, getting engaged, breaking the engagement, doing it again, the tacit admission on screen (at last) that adults in a committed relationship often have sex, and the wedding itself. The only other thing they had on tap for Emma to do all season was to endure visions of her own death -- a matter she can only passively endure -- and fight a redundant duel. It’s telling that the supposed turning point of the finale, when she chose to return to Storybrooke, happened off-screen.

Even the wedding -- a visual at which her story has been aiming for four seasons -- was a stop and go affair that hardly received the build-up I would have expected. The two engagements, multiple episodes of separation, followed by the “do it now/no wait don’t/never mind do it now!” back and forth made it difficult for this audience member to give a damn about the ceremony. Much as I still love the characters, their circumstances for the second half of this season have felt contrived in the most laborious fashion. Pancakes don’t make up for that, guys.

The Savior mythology remains so murky that’s hard to imagine why they bothered with it at all, except as a sorry attempt to justify the idea of the Final Battle. What they added by bringing in multiple additional Saviors doesn’t work very well on that level.

With both Jafar/Aladdin and Rumple/Fiona you had a clearly-defined long-term nemesis relationship with logical character roots. Aladdin and Jafar were fighting over their mutual home territory, and there is a natural potential for conflict in any parent-child relationship. In the wish world, we had Emma and Regina, which is certainly a long and complicated relationship supporting the idea of a conflict.

None of these prop up the idea that any old villain can come along and say, “You’re a Savior and I’m a Really Evil Person, so I now we have to fight to the death.” (I know I keep complaining about this, but I am still floored that they tried to sell it.) And then, having laboriously tried to establish that, they threw it all out the window anyway with Emma as the sole savior of the multiverse in the finale.

That mess aside, giving Emma a light season after the S5 wringer she went through might have made sense, except that no one else seems to have anything pressing to do, either.

This could have been an interesting season for Regina. She started out with major focus on her, got a lot of attention during the wish episodes, and spent several additional episodes working out the aftermath of her doomed romance with Robin. Unfortunately, whether it was in the idea or the execution, I have to say that her plot had a vital flaw; as either a conflict or a character study, Split Queen never took off and flew.

Looking back, I feel that they passed over a major opportunity for introspective interaction in favor of having the two Regina versions insult and throw fireballs at one another. This should by rights have been a subtle contest between perfect equals, and it was not. Even among the character’s fans, the resolution of her inner conflict did not appear to be a rousing success. (For those of us who didn’t like the character to begin with, it was a travesty.) Since then, she doesn’t seem to have any significant role to play. Her relationship with Zelena appears to have no solid foundation, but is either on or off depending on what the writers want Zelena to be doing in reaction to Regina. Having her give hope speeches cements the change, but it feels weird? Don’t get me started on the fact that somehow both halves of her have a happy ending now.

Rumple barely had anything to do all season, which is outright bizarre, given his role as the prime mover in so much of the plot in previous seasons. His role in creating the situation that led to Gideon’s abduction was never addressed head-on, which weakened the thematic power of the season’s second half for him. Ditto Belle coming back again, as if all of her doubts early in the season were quite forgotten.

His conflict with the Black Fairy -- which you might assume would be a Big Fucking Deal that could have drawn him into long-term cooperation with other characters -- wasn’t even a thing until the very end of the season. That conflict was ended in a way I can only call perfunctory. What finally changed in him? How did it change, given that he’s the Dark One?  The whole “Darkest of all the Dark Ones” bit was never even mentioned.   Why is it okay for him to kill Fiona but it wasn’t okay for Snow to kill Cora?

I guess we’ll never know, and that is the core my problem. There was a curious avoidance of introspection throughout the season. The show has always depended on conflict and magical flash, of course, but it also gave its characters chances to reflect on themselves and their roles at regular intervals. After all of these years, one might expect characters to be assured in their identities, that this season would tie things off securely.

I feel like Charming was the only character who came out of this season well, having resolved a major lingering issue from his past. Snow had no individual story. Killian was retreading ground the writers churned up quite thoroughly last season. Emma was largely facilitating contrived drama via dubious characterization and also repeating herself a lot. The less I say about Regina the better. Rumple got to play two notes all season -- controlling husband and alarmed dad -- neither of which is exactly new ground.

Conclusion

I end this wrap-up with the strong impression that whatever the root cause, the writers had no idea what to do with this season. I suspect for one that they didn’t expect a renewal at all, that they threw this together in a panic. They put together a skeleton half-composed of the Savior thing and half of Regina’s arc. Each of these plots had a parallel at the start of the season, and both of them were dropped by the halfway point, only to return in a painfully weak form in the finale. In the middle was mush.

Everything about the Savior mythology this season feels tacked-on, last-minute, and desperately inorganic to their previous story. There also wasn’t very much of it. They introduced this thread in the Aladdin scene from the season premiere, came back to it a few episodes later, but then… forgot? or otherwise neglected to tie it back to that theme at all when they wrapped up Jasmine and Aladdin’s adventure late in the season; there was literally nothing Savior-related in that story. Meanwhile, Emma’s side of the parallel turned right and dove into a motiveless, stakeless swamp with Gideon and the Black Fairy, which relied on the characters repeating the phrase Final Battle as if hearing it enough times would make anybody believe that it was important. Having the battle turn out to be internal, fine, but what was that stupid fight scene for, then?

I also have to state my firm belief that Regina was supposed to be in the Black Fairy’s spot. I have no idea what happened there, but seriously. There was absolutely nothing in her supplied back-story that made Fiona’s behavior or dialog in that episode comprehensible.

Whether or not they initially planned it this way or if fatigue set in partway through a planned season-long arc, Regina’s story came to an end ⅔ through the season. Her early parallel was with Jekyll and Hyde, but again all of that was disposed of along the way. There was no callback to its origin in the resolution of that arc (in fact, I don’t think anyone at all has even mentioned Hyde since he died, which I feel supports my theory that the sole reason for including him/them was create the Split Queen situation). The inner battle that originally created the two Reginas -- her powerful desires to hurt other people -- was elided in a resolution that recast the entire story to be a sympathetic one about her relationship to herself. Jekyll and Hyde died; the staggering human cost of Regina’s choices was erased. Even her Evil Queen half got to come back after her finale sacrifice, happier than ever.

Finally, there was no link whatsoever between these two anchor plots. Regina’s story concerned herself and Snowing and slightly Zelena, but Emma was barely present in it. Emma’s story concerned Regina for exactly as long as we thought that Regina might be the Hooded Figure; after that was cleared up, she became irrelevant in it. To this weak framework the writers attached bits and pieces of additional stories that again had no thematic resonance with either of the main plots, resulting in the hodgepodge of elements diagrammed earlier.

The writers didn’t think they were going to have the long hiatus they ended up having, so it’s not surprising that they failed to plan for the break, but that lack of information -- along with the drought of news regarding any season 7 right up until the actual finale -- adds to my sense that there has been some really terrible communication going on behind the scenes. And if it feels like we just watched an entire season of filler plot, that’s because they stretched what might have been a half dozen episodes’ worth of good material out to 20.

It’s not what I wanted to be writing at this point, to say the least.

When the antis for KC come calling...

So, @morleybell got an ask on the above topic, and I wanted to reply to it,but it got too long so I thought I’d make it into its own post. So the question was what to reply to antis who claim Klaroline is abusive.

Here goes :

Not even in the fandom since s5(never in tumblr!tvd fandom like ever) but I do skim the tag every once in a while. Came across your post, loved the general gist of it, but would like to add some and clear up some stuff you passionately stated in bulk😆, if you don’t mind. I’ve been wanting to get this out for a long time.

I think the crux of this whole matter is an element which is called a ‘morally grey character’ ; you know the ones - not entirely a villian but too twisted to be a traditional hero. Obviously there are naysayers who say Klaus doesn’t fit into the mold of someone w/ grey morality, hey haters gonna hate but the jury’s still out on that one apparently even though it’s obvious. Moving On. More on this later.

• agree with the SC part. If one looks at the whole picture from the start, Caroline got shitted upon and shoved to side by the writers and her supposed ‘friends’ right from the start in favour of Elena even by stefan. The afterthought. The girl every new male addition to the cast(not all but close) hooked up with. The secondary character whose romantic plot usually has their fan going “uhmmm not exactly the one I’d choose for her. This is just settling” because hey!one needs to fill up the episode, right? Who cares if she was a second choice?

For me, Klaroline came in at that part of the plot, where I was just about tearing my hair apart because the MF gang were really pissing me off. Caroline was never a priority, everyone was willing to let her be collateral damage in this ever revolving war against elena, she was just supposed to accept that her best friend is dating her assaulter. I mean I get that she is the cornucopia of giving, but thats what friends are for! To make these givers realise that enough is enough, now think about yourself, make yourself a priority. The Caroline I fell in love with initially, the one with the big dreams, the one who wanted to live live to the fullest, explore the entire world because yes embracing vampirism gave her that opportunity….That Girl was entirely diminished by the end. There’s growing up and having responsibilities and then there’s having to grow up because of not-their-doing responsibilities. Klaus had come in a AT THAT CRUCIAL POINT. I remember thinking ‘yesss, she’s a priority for once’ also ‘idc if this relationship works out or not, but this one can be her ticket and reason to move out of that soul-sucking selfish town and friends’

• IT’S A SUPERNATURAL SHOW. This. Funny and irritating why people forget this. The show depicts them as these all encompassing, good in combat and strategy, well versed in lore of the centuries, sensual, blood-drinking vampires…I’m afraid that goes hand in hand with blood and sex and murder and deceit. If you want a century old virgin goody two shoes, I believe you’re in the wrong franchise. For this show, its not about who is good and who is bad, it’s about who is evil and who is more evil, and that too is relative on how you define evil/what you consider evil. Also what’s blatant in this fandom, is the hypocrisy. This is what I wanted to especially expound upon :

So what irritates me about the fans the most is their hypocrisy. Also the puritan fanaticism some have embraced and loudly preached. I wont even include DE and Damon in my arguments, i think they’ve been discussed at length by all (like it deserves to be) this is better explained with Stefan. When people say Klaus is a mass murderer and has killed soooo many people over the years, ergo klaus is evil but stefan is my innocent bae(not verbatim but the intent is obvious)…. conveniently forgetting the fact that stefan killed so many people too, went ripper twice, in his 300(?) yrs…had he lived as long as klaus lived…who know whether the number would have risen or not (hint : it will)Imagine living on and on for so many years, the world around you changing, civilisations changing,people you loved dying, but you’re set in stone. Immortality has been romanticised like all get go, but realistically I can’t imagine someone not going absolute nutters every once in a while whether or not you have a reason to keep living on. The show has shown only the positive sides of Stefan and his dealing with vampirism which in turn makes him appealing, but I can’t imagine someone with Stefan’s characterisation - the broodiness and the guilt - would live a long innocent life. Psychologically, something will always make him crack. I know I’m coming across as someone who hates Stefan which is simply not true. S1-3 Stefan and S1-4 Caroline were my absolute faves. Believe me, I only watched the show until then for these two. But I realised we do excuse his murders w/ - he didn’t want to, he feels guilty, he repented, it’s out of his control. But ultimately clinically speaking(with my inner stefan fan supressed)…There were dead bodies. Families mourned. Lives were taken. Stefan regretted it yes, but it doesn’t give them their life back. None of these vampire’s victims (Salvatore’s, Mikaelsons’,Forbes’) are coming back. Why do we not still hate stefan or any 'good side’ vampires for that, but love to do it to the Mikaelsons?

Second thing I mentioned was puritanism. Simply put, this goes in the good box ; this goes in the baaaad box. Some people differentiate characters like - this is a good person(can do no wrong) and this is a bad person(be suspicious of this one’s dealings ) from the initial interactions and context of the show. Characters on the 'Good’ side in the start, are reveled for doing 'a thing’ ; but if a potentially grey character from the 'Bad’ side does the same 'thing’ they are jeered upon for doing it. Am I saying don’t point out and jeer evil wrongdoings of evil characters? NO. I’m not trying to be apologist for villains, most deserve what we throw at them. BUT But but, in this case, on this show, is the line differentiating them really that clear? Are these 'good’ and 'bad’ characters exclusively on those sides? Like you mentioned, Kol is killed, Klaus retaliates. Had a sibling from the 'good ’ side been killed by the Mikaelsons, pretty sure they’d have retaliated the same way. We cheer one but jeer the other? Why? The deed is the same, cruel and inhuman on both accounts, yet we celebrate one and mourn other?

What people instantly think when I say this, 'you’re probably a person who excuses abuse in real life too’'you believe this…you must be horrid in real life’….*shrugging* A. There is a clear divide between fiction and reality. one I have to actually live in and the other is entertainment. Damn sure I can differentiate between them. B. There is an actual sense is not automatically trusting the NiceGuy, everyone has flaws if you look hard enough, they’re gonna come out eventually I’d rather not be lulled in a false sense of security. I’m not saying The Mikaelsons are good people and they just need some lurrvvve and understanding. What I’m saying is the Mikaelsons are shitty. But so are the Salvatores. So is Elena. And sometimes so is Caroline. If its just fiction, isn’t it hypocritical thay we only hold few accountable, but excuse the behaviour of the rest?

When people say KC is 'abusive’ I always take in with the idea that it’s because Klaus is heartless mass murderer. Which he is. There’s no going around that. He IS NOT a good guy. That stabbing didn’t really make sense to me…why did he do it? But tyler’s mum yeah…if you can excuse the council for their behaviour, don’t be a hypocrite please when the favor is returned. On a completely different but still related note, this is similar to the bullying topic in HP. When it comes to being bullies for whatever reason, people easily excuse the marauders because ultimately they were on the 'light’ side. But draco is held accountable even though he was technically younger than james. But back on the topic at hand.

But KC? Like you provided the lines and to anyone who watched the show….Caroline was not impressed by him. Attracted to him?Sure. But she never acted on it at all until 5×11. She kept questioning his motives, was suspicious of his moves, never defended his actions, brought up his misdeeds to him when he tried to pretend to be a good guy, tried to sneakily gain favours from him utilising his interest in her, it goes on and on. You never hear a single praise for him from her lips (as far as I can remember) All she did was that she gave him a benefit of doubt. Try to understand his motives rather than just IDENTIFY. EVIL. KILL. Try to understand that someone who has lived this long, what goes on thay ancient head, did he ever want to be human? , how does he justify his misdeeds? But Was it enough? Well canonically, apparatently not.

And I get it. I’m not saying excuse the murders by the Mikaelson’s too. NO. I’m saying hold all of them responsible. Caroline. Stefan. Damon. Klaus. And then critic the characters after that. Don’t claim some sort of moral high ground when there isn’t any.

This show, these writers…when given enough screen time, they could redeem an irredeemable villain of their choosing. Seriously, for real. (Damon gets it but Katherine or Kai(this one would need toooo much work) doesnt) and people lap it up. Basically, it’s on the writers on who they choose to get to be the GoodGuy, which villian gets forgiveness for the misdeeds even though the other villains did the same thing. I don’t watch TO but I’m sure they gave 'reasons’ and 'backstory’ on why Klaus behaves the way he does. I mean if you think in a critical analysis sort of way, that is how a redemption arc works. You get to know the inner workings and history of the protag and what experiences made them the person they are, then it’s upto the audience whether or not they forgive them.

But I digress. What is the main point of this entirely too long rant, is that saying KC is abusive is just absurd. Not on this show, not in this context. If its klaus that is your problem, you better have a problem w/ the rest of the lot too. Also he is the one guy who was the only one who asked Caroline whether she would like the cure instead, didn’t use her solely to get to elena, prioritised her, didn’t think Caroline’s love to plan and shop and everything that does not scream stereotypical intelligent girl as shallow and superficial, gave her plenty opportunities to make something more out of her life if she wanted with or WITHOUT HIM. If she wanted to fly free alone for a decade or even a century or two, go for it as long she came back to him when she’s had her fill. Yeah, that just screams abusive and controlling to me😒

Bottom line anti kcs, I’m sorry you wanted this to be a black and white clear issue so you justify your hate. But it’s simply not. I’m not saying KC IS an angelic done-no-evil ship, but when ships all around are pirates, what’s another one,eh.

Also, might as well reiterate, I haven’t seen the show after 4×22, just kept up w/ the show from a lot of different shipper’s (SE, KC and SC shippers too unfortunately) blogs and my sister who watches the show, so I might be off w/ some of the facts. If any of them are blatantly obvious and it’s because I missed something crucial in the remaining seasons I’m tagging the people I’ve seen answering KC qs or were active in their KC defense so this post is refined @my-ownfairytale @klarolinedrabbles @jonsnowbitch

30 days of suikoden challenge , day 6 ——

favorite star of destiny from suikoden v

talk about a tough decision........there are so many stars in s5 that i like, but also at the same time none that jump out at me immediately like sasarai or sierra, or even snowe ( shit, what’s with all these s names....... ). the closest in terms of just emotional attachment and intensity would be sialeeds — fuck, another s name — but she’s not a star. after a lot of deliberation, i think i have to pick my favorite based not only on emotional attachment and personal bias, but on how well the character’s own narrative presents as part of the game and how well-implemented they are, and for that, in the end i think points come down to roy. 

someone masquerading as the protagonist isn’t totally new in suikoden — there was a similar sequence in s2 with that guy who pretended to be riou for the sake of capitalizing on his reputation. with how much s5 takes from 2, it’s no surprise that roy is an expansion of that one guy; they took what that guy did with riou and made it into an entire plot point in s5, which i thought was really creative. i definitely thought that making a plot arc out of the consequences of someone else taking on the protagonist’s role was both realistic and clever — there are definitely side effects like that when you become a heroic figure, and i like that s5 explored it more deeply.

i also enjoy that even after the arc was over and you get to recruit roy, that’s not the end of him. he doesn’t just become another one of your random 108 stars — he becomes central to the loyalist army’s strategic plans and features at many crucial plot points. in a game where you’re mostly recruiting people for arbitrary reasons because you need all 108 stars, there usually isn’t any significance to the people you’re bringing into your army. you’re asking these people to join you because.......idk, just because. sometimes because their skills are unique, but it still feels random most of the time. in light of that, it’s refreshing to be recruiting roy for a practical purpose; it’s not just because freyjadour doesn’t want to kill him or forgives him or something, it’s because there’s something that roy can do that would benefit them strategically. thus, his recruitment is well-implemented into the narrative.

roy gets a lot of bonus points in that regard too just because he’s just about the only one of his star whose actually in any way prominent to the story. the other chizoku stars ( or ‘bandit / thief star’ ) are either completely negligible or just unsavory, and it’s nice to see this star get the spotlight in one game and handled favorably. it’s also nicely symbolic because the chizoku is one of the earthly stars, which contrasts directly with freyjadour as one of the heavenly stars. they set up a nice parallel as foil characters in that way, since roy is very much the “earthly” side of the frey / roy coin, being more in-tune with the mundane necessities of life and survival while freyjadour focuses on far-sighted, loftier ideals. they contrast each other effectively and i’ll leave the rest of this train of thought for another day when i talk about my frey / roy ship feelings.

on a character level, roy is also appealing. i definitely liked him from the moment i first saw him, without even knowing his personality or how he would appear in the game. he does, unfortunately, wholly embody the ‘rogue with a heart of gold’ trope, but it’s somehow more endearing because he’s still so young and foolhardy. though he’s a good guy with a surprisingly strong sense of honor, he’s not savvy or worldly enough to discard his more immature side, and still huffs and puffs all the time — and that’s not just a show; he really does enjoy that kind of spotlight and does still carry a certain degree of hubris. 

i would have liked the game to show more of this dichotomy — after his initial recruitment scene, he reverts right back to his playfully roguish ways for the rest of his appearances, and i would have liked to see more of the discussion on his feelings of envy towards freyjadour ( getting dealt such different hands in life despite looking so similar ) and i would have liked the game to pursue more of lyon’s line when she tells him that he’s acting childishly for ruining other people’s lives just because he thinks his own is unfair. it’s — presumably? — something that roy takes to heart despite acting sarcastic about it at first, and i want to know how it might have influenced his time with the loyalist army. he joins and agrees to help because he’s holding true to his promise that, if he lost the duel, they could do anything with him, but how does he feel about what he’s doing later on? does he see himself as wanting to do good / help the prince’s cause because he acknowledges lyon’s words ( and if so, how much of it is him really wanting to, and how much of it is to impress lyon )? is it out of fun so he can keep impersonating the prince? the game never tells us more about how he feels about the whole thing.

that being said, there’s a lot of great character base set up in just his meeting with freyjadour. again, he’s clearly noble in his own way, and — though crass — clearly well-intentioned. i enjoy that he’s young because it gives him room to grow, because he also so clearly continues to posture all the time. it does sadden me a little bit that most of his appearances in the rest of the game center around his crush on lyon ( which personally i don’t really like, but i very rarely enjoy these kinds of forced romantic interests, especially in a love triangle like this, especially since i also don’t really like frey / lyon haha ). but i understand that in a game like suikoden, it’s hard to give one character too much screen time. there’s so many other things to cover. still, even just one scene or a better conversation the night before the decisive battle where roy addresses his feelings of envy or maybe how his perspective has changed or not changed would’ve been nice.

one thing i do really like also is his role in the alternate endings / paths of the game. if you lose to him in the duel, roy really does take over the prince’s role as head of the army, and dies for it — since.......he has no experience leading an army or being in that kind of position at all, presumably. even though it’s a bad ending, i’m really interested in his attitude surrounding this, too. does he relish in the opportunity to live the high life? does he come to regret it down the road? does he realize he’s essentially abandoning his own identity? does he learn what it’s like to have the lives and faiths of so many people riding on you? it’s a really interesting alternate path for the sake of roy’s own character arc, and fun to think about, for sure. also, in the event you choose to defend your own castle, i do also like that he ends up dying for your cause. it’s both suiting and kind of sad that he dies not as himself, but as freyjadour. though of course it leads to the player not being able to get all 108 stars, it’s a good narrative move on the developers’ part, i think.

so i think basically my “i really like roy” is not so much “here’s all the reasons why he’s a great character” like i feel about my other favorites, but more along the lines of “here’s all the reasons the role he plays in the story are really thematically nice and why he’s really thematically nice as a foil to freyjadour and i wish the game had given us more insight”. but i’m starting to realize the latter remark is how i feel about s5 as a whole orz

( also not totally related but my vague headcanons about roy being haswar’s secretly abandoned child totally work since lunas is geographically closest to rainwall and that’s where he grew up / operated. yes.... )

honorable mentions: miakis ( probably real runner-up ), rahal, freyjadour, kyle, belcoot, cathari, shoon, ernst