Thinking about how much the Zimvoid arc and Loki season 1 had in common.

Like, both of them star a villain protagonist who ends up trapped in an apocalyptic wasteland populated almost entirely by alternate versions of themselves, most of whom all suffer from the same vice of needing to scramble for power to prove their superiority while a handful of more enlightened versions of themselves reject competition in favor of cooperation. They even both have a kid version of themselves as the leader of the cooperative faction along with an older, wiser version, an aquatic version, and a huge beefcake version.

Of course because Loki is a drama and Invader Zim is a tragedy, the stories take different directions with their character arcs. In in a drama, the story is driven by characters having a flaw that they overcome or a false belief that is corrected, or possessing virtues that allow them to triumph, which all goes toward supporting whatever the story's thesis is. In a tragedy, the story is driven by characters who fail to overcome their flaws, who either never learn their lessons and change or just keep getting worse and worse, or who either abandon their virtues or let their vices win out over them, or whose virtues aren't enough for them to succeed without the support of the world around them backing them up.

Because Loki is a drama, Loki's story is about having his ego broken down so he can be built back up into a better man. He's humbled upon finding himself powerless in the TVA, forced to confront the ugly truth about himself and understand the neediness and insecurity at the root of his obsession with power and superiority. He meets other versions of himself who reflect his worst qualities back at him but also show him that he has the capacity to be better. He learns to be empathetic and care for other people besides himself and causes greater than his own ambitions, but also learns to love himself from falling for another version of him and recognizing that that all the qualities he admires her for are qualities that they share.

By contrast, Zim goes through his experience with the Zimvoid unchanged. Meeting other versions of himself and seeing them all compete for power doesn't make him self reflect on his own pettiness and meeting better versions of himself doesn't inspire him to do better. He doesn't learn to empathize with other versions of himself and doesn't learn to value himself for his own intrinsic qualities. If anything, the experience makes him worse because defeating all the Zims only reaffirms his false belief that his worth comes from his superiority over others.

Loki and the Zimvoid are essentially telling the same story, but the genre makes all the difference to the outcome.

One thing the Zimvoid does though that I really wish Loki had done is support its themes by making the villain another version of the protagonist.

Like, I remember when Loki season 1 first aired everyone was expecting Kang to be behind everything just because it would tie-in with the greater Marvel universe and I was saying I really hoped it would be Loki himself instead. Because Kang wasn't a character in the show until the very end. He had no personal relationship with Loki, he was just some guy we'd never met before. And literally everything else in the show was about Loki being in conflict with himself. It would've made so much more thematic sense if his line early on in the series about his plans to take over the TVA and become the most powerful being in existence was foreshadowing a reveal that one version of him had already done it and the reason he was pruning all other Loki variants who strayed from the path that would lead them to death was because he didn't want any other Lokis to overthrow him or mess up his timeline and throw him off the path that got him to where he was. Kang did end up still tempting Loki with the opportunity to have everything he ever wanted as a final test of his character growth, but it just didn't feel as impactful coming from a stranger as it would've from another Loki.

With the Zimvoid though, we got Zib as the absolute perfect villain for the story. A dark reflection of both our protagonists who are themselves mirrors of one another, reflecting all their worst qualities back at them and showing them the folly of basing their self-worth around proving their superiority over others.

Every time I read Fernando cursing in fic, I can only think about this clip and then my brain short-circuits

Losing it over the fact that the latest episode started with Laszlo (seemingly) completely dejected and despondent, everyone in the house individually convinced that it’s all their fault, and then halfway through dropped Nadja’s detached “maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if we ended up dying?” like a fucking brick but then devoted the final part of the episode to showing that despite the monotony and endlessness inherent to their lives, these weirdos all have so much care and love and devotion for one another even when it’s in spite of themselves, that they all derive so much meaning from their relationships with each other, choosing to end on the note of the Baron’s “I suppose with the right company, it can be beautiful, this eternal existence.” Screaming crying throwing up et cetera

TWEWY is a game with love its centre and I think any reading which insists Neku doesn't love all of his partners (just in a general platonic sense) will automatically result in the thematic messages being missed entirely

oh. hm. i wonder if dark made grimm by himself because light refused to participate in creating anything destructive again after the jabberwalker—certainly it seems telling that in the myth, light creates a vast monoculture lawn and then declares that dark’s contribution of a moon and new biomes and plate tectonics is “spoiling” it; the myth flows from light’s presentation of himself to ancient humans and if he saw any value in these things he would surely have claimed them as his own—and then there’s the brother-cult framing that humans were given the capacity for evil (destruction) and good (creation) and the free will to choose which path to walk, always with the underlying premise that if humankind chooses wrong then they will “destroy themselves” (by earning annihilation at the final judgment)

this is in stark contrast to the narrative treatment of destruction as hunger and as an agent of change, and creation-without-destruction as, well, a vast monoculture lawn. sterile, stagnant, artificial, unalive.

(<- not a euphemism for “dead” and i resent that the word has those connotations now.)

to create is to destroy; paint, for example, is destroyed by the act of painting. you can’t ever use it as paint again. eating a meal is destructive—both in the sense that something living has to be killed, whether plant or animal, and in the sense that the food itself is destroyed. but this is the basis of all life. one eats to stay alive, to grow.

so in light’s view grimm are evil abominations because his brother made them to be destructive; to dark the grimm are embodiments of natural forces whose churnings keep the world forever in motion and therefore alive. jabber came out wrong—brutal, but effective, the blacksmith says—because light’s misapprehension of destruction influenced his nature. the grimm, created by dark alone, turned out right.

are they good? are they bad? they just are. the tides, the mountains, the deserts, the storms, earthquakes and volcanoes, the grimm.

meanwhile humans were given destruction by darkness and creation by light—the separation and recombination into one being was probably necessary to avoid a repeat of what happened with jabber—and then taught, by light, to understand their natures as a moral conflict and a moral challenge to rise above ‘evil’, i.e. destruction.

this is, of course, why light is so set on the necessity of permanent death: in his afterlife the dead are unaware and unalive, existing in everlasting stasis, and so nothing can ever be destroyed. darkness, who has never feared destruction, allows salem to glimpse the truth that life and death are a circle. and then he burns it all down and leaves her alive in the ashes, the wellspring of primordial destruction there for her to do with it as she will. and she does, and that is how mankind returns to life and how the faunus come to be.

which is the whole point. the grimm represent and embody pure destruction, hunger and change, which the brothers’ humans were taught to abhor as unnatural, evil abominations. salem becomes grimm and in doing so stakes humanity’s claim on destruction as darkness understood it, rejecting the false moral dichotomy light imposed on her generation. remnant is set free, and humanity rises phoenix-like from the ashes, unbound by death.

the brothers’ humans rebelled in order to claim the powers of their creators and perfect their own design. and she did.

society if laios's leg didnt get magically reattached

i know this is A Reach and possibly nitpicky but i think the prettification of the hunger games movies can be seen even in the small matter of katniss's hairstyle. what's described as a simple and practical braid in the books is now a fancy diagonal over-the-shoulder dutch braid in the movies (a braid that is neither functional when the purpose is to get your long hair out of the way, nor very quick/easy to do on yourself), and added to that is the fact that katniss has bangs, once again something that is very impractical when you consider that katniss hunts for a living and those loose hairs would not only be visually obstructive but would also get caught in the bowstring and yanked like hell every time she shoots. in the training sequence of catching fire you can literally see that the bangs are in her eyes. there's a reason olympic archers always have their hair tied up and tucked out of the way. if she were to have a dutch/french braid, the point of that would literally BE to get those shorter hairs out of the way. but since this is a hollywood movie of course they have to make their star have pretty hair that frames her face just so

the thing is that martha and the doctor are an interesting, complicated, eternally evolving in my head dynamic that completely change the game of the narrative, and I am so into them and I will think about them forever and ever

and on the other hand I suspect that at least a certain percent of it comes from my specific reading of the doctor-as-character, and from things that the writing brought up around martha, her position in her family, her history as a medical student, her later decision to join UNIT and Torchwood, her more-than-average complex feelings both during and after being a Companion about what that life meant for her, and what the doctor changed in her life, that I would say were intentional, but weren't brought up in a narrative that was given as much space and time (ha) as other companions, and so she is eternally left in character limbo where I can only ask questions (and read fanfic) and stipulate on what this story was all about for her, and where she went as consequence, and what her feelings are about having been within it, and of course the parts that aged more poorly related to a bunch of white people writing a black woman as a lead character who weren't so well-versed on nuance as one would wish... so it's also the most frustrating dynamic in nu!who, if not all of doctor who, for me, because there is no attempt at giving it a proper end from her side, in the way there has been for so many other companions, including of course lots and lots of classic!who companions

on the third hand you would really want that potential bringing-back to be interesting in a way that interacts with their past dynamic, and fun for freema to do, and you'd worry about the amount of racist backlash that might occur, because nobody was giving martha grace as a character in the first place, would this past complexity that seemed to go over a lot of peoples' heads be something that the show perhaps should be more explicit about, so that there is no ambiguity as to how this series of events affected her and why it's more complicated than with other companions, and how does it both honour her character's inherent strengths, while also not having to make her be so strong All The Damn Time

on the fourth hand... just wanna see her again. and she'd be fire opposite ncuti, you know she would

Cheng Yi, Zeng Shunxi, and Xiao Shunyao 2023-24 New Year's Eve + New Years gala photos

i'm kind of obsessed with the lockwood and co worldbuilding, actually. like, it's such a fascinating one-step-to-the-left universe alteration. what if, right as 70s britain is careening towards an economic crisis, keynesianism is creaking, and the whole country's about to come down with the 'british disease'. what if, out of the shuttered up city high streets in london and liverpool, or the burgeoning ghost towns of the rapidly de-industrialising north, literal ghosts began to emerge? what if?

I’m trying to draw Sirris and Sydney today and (this is personal preference btw) I think I prefer design wise if they look distinctly different.

Only because it affirms “Sydney got his hair color from their late parent and is following in their footsteps and Sirris has to get reminded of their late partner constantly-”

Well that was something!

Furious Five-related spoilers in tags!

Do you think 16 year old Peter and 16 year old Wade would get along?

oohh my god. oh my god. don't you make me bring back my high school au i was writing

i have a few snippets of it posted to tumblr here but was RESOLUTE not to start posting it to ao3 until i've finished writing it in it's entirety (i hate having unfinished projects) – i don't know if i'll ever finish it, but the conceit was as simple as... what if peter had a friend in high school. and what if it was wade wilson.

i love high school wade so much - he's - he's been through a lot already, yeah, but he's kind of weirdly more self-assured than he goes onto be in adulthood. pre-military, pre-cancer, pre-weapon x, pre-all the violence and killing that warps him into something he deems entirely unloveable.

i think for both wade and peter, getting their powers kind of is the root of a lot of their problems with self-worth. just like you don't really worry about your place in the world until you hit adolescence, y'know. so peter's getting his powers, and worrying about his place in the world, and wade is still coming at life from a point of innocence - teaching peter that he doesn't need to worry so much.

BETTER CALL SAUL 01x09 Pimento

Something something erasing who he was before something getting mad when people deadname him