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boyfridged · 11 months

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pls expand more on the rehabilitationist v abolitionist dispute comment!

as a preface of sorts: this post is written with marxist theory of criminology in mind, and i relate to many concepts that stem from it. i consider batman as a series to be one of the most politically inclined texts when it comes to superhero comics as a whole, so imo it is imperative that it introduces many different outlooks on the topic of jurisprudence. and it is an approach that used to be pretty popular.

btw. if anything is unclear in terms of theory –– ask.

okay so, to answer the question: there's so much that contributed to this stray thought, and i think i hinted at a lot of it before on this blog, but let me just dump some of my thoughts in a disorganized manner... (maybe one day i will write about it in a more coherent way):

batman as the title needs an actual genuine counterweight to bruce's worldview, one that does not target the no-kill rule. enough with the no-kill discourse, really, i think in many ways it's almost... a detail, and i think the fixation on that detail leads to watering down the whole dilemma. (especially that bruce did not always treat is as a complete dogma and i preferred it that way.) what is more interesting i believe, is that bruce is a rehabilitationist – despite his vigilante work, he is dedicated to the idea of the legal system being a viable solution to crime. and, what is even more important, in his mind, crime is equal to a moral failure. i talked about it at length in my post about eoc, but let me just copy the relevant fragment in here:

bruce, while obviously caring, is still bound by his belief in the legal system and deontological norms. he is benevolent, but he is also ultimately morally committed to the idea of a legal system and thus frames criminals as failing to meet these moral (legal-adjacent) standards (even when he recognizes it is a result of their circumstances). in other words, he might think that a criminal is a good person despite leading a life of crime.

and of course, criminals need to be "corrected" and rehabilitated in order to be able to function in society again. the deviant behavior has to be eliminated.

i don't doubt that at the time when it was introduced, bruce's rehabilitationist philosophy was a radical one when compared with the prevailing popularity of the concept of retributive justice. but in the year of our lord 2023? the view that you can simply "fix" the system by aiding it in some ways is not radical at all. the system in question was mostly built around sustaining that corruption as a goal. and there are (or used to be) some characters, like leslie, who are “vigilante-critical” (among others) because of that reason.

enter jay. jay is very much in a position that makes it clear that the law is not usually on the side of the poor and marginalized. of course, he is only an ~11 year old, so of course he has no language to express most of these worries; he probably does not know anything about the rehabilitationist vs retributive vs reperative justice in a theoretical sense anyway. i doubt he knows that abolition exists as a concept; he might be well-read, but probably not in these categories. but he has certain intuitions; intuitions that i already talked about in the earlier mentioned eoc post. and these intuitions are that crime does not define morality. he does not consider himself wrong for stealing; he is not conflicted about willis being a criminal and grieves him easily; there’s no word of him being resentful to dealers. he has his own idea of justice that seems to be very much affected by his trouble with authority, the intention behind the crime, and perceived harm (this is imo one of the reasons he takes issue with ma gunn specifically). i think this setup is something that could lead to him taking an abolitionist point of view later on, since he seems frustrated with the label of “crime.”

obviously, at this point, jason’s disinterest in crime as something to contempt is seen as a problem (both by the editorial and in-universe); a problem that has to be fixed. and within his tenure of robin, we see him “learning” to ascribe to bruce’s moral code; which makes sense, because he is a kid, and because he trusts bruce. and so, i think his perception in this period does shift to accommodate the rehabilitationist outlook.

the garzonas’ incident, jay’s growing cynicism at the end of his robin run, and the red hood era altogether might suggest that jason, disappointed in the limits of this approach actively takes to the retributive standpoint instead. it’s def true insofar that the writers are not politically educated enough to understand the nuance that (imo) should naturally arise in his storyline. for example: the particular caveat in garzonas’ case is the position of power that felipe occupies and that grants him immunity. bruce, naturally, looks for the ways to bring justice by exploring other legal paths to solve the issue. jay goes with it despite being visibly unhappy. and i think this gets us to the core of the issue which is power and the system– the fact that the system is simply built to make it difficult to incarnate the higher-ups. diplomatic immunity exists for a reason, sure, but the fact that it allows people to get away with wrong-doing is not a side-effect; it's the goal. and so, felipe garzonas cannot be deemed a criminal, but willis and even jay at age of 11 were. the pattern repeats when it comes to the joker, who later uses diplomatic immunity to exploit the role to continue fucking with bruce. so the issue is not that the system does not work. the issue is that the system was built not to work.

another tangent: of course, you may note that the concept of the separation of powers (the judge, the jury, and the executioner) that bruce is so fond of is supposed to remedy the problem of the abuse of power. and it is, without a doubt, something necessary within the democratic system. still, i believe jason quoting arendt explains why he doesn't care for it in the slightest; in the man who stopped laughing #8 jay says: “you familiar with hannah arendt’s concept of schreibtischtäter? desk murderers? it’s people who use the state to kill for them, so they don’t have to get their hands dirty. you should read up on it. i think you’d find it very relatable.” arendt's work emerged in a very specific context, but jay makes it into something more definitive; a trait of the penal system as a whole; you can bring as many people into the workings of the justice system as you want to; but ultimately, most of them will act in the interest of authority, without a second thought (this also explains why he considers that making decisions on who lives and dies yourself is better than blindly following the rule of law.) (<- btw it links very well with the idea of autonomy as a predisposition to be moral since you need it to be an active member of the society. anarchists such as wolff have written lots of that.)

i'd say all of this leads us to the point where jason has great potential to come to the conclusion that abolition is the way to go. the ones in power will not get punished within that framework anyway, and the ones at the "bottom" of the socioeconomic ladder remain victims of it. months, months ago i had anons arguing with me, saying that comicbook characters don't have to be so socially aware and that even people irl rarely are; and i am also willing to indulge the narrative and say that jason is terribly confused regarding it all for now, because of how his childhood went and as a result of his personal trauma. nevertheless, characters are often vessels for ideas, especially in titles like batman; and bruce, for example, is allowed to have a developed a sound ideology on jurisprudence. why not jason? especially that all the motivations are there; the setup is there too. that's just another great incentive to actually make use of his origin story.

an extra disclaimer is that abolition is not the answer to all and that it requires so many reforms on all levels... and i don't think jay would be satiated with the mere idea of restorative justice that usually accompanies it, because that still leaves us with the problem of those in power maintaining it and (in the fictional context) supervillains (who very often do occupy those spaces) prevailing... but you know. abolition is very compatible with general revolutionary principles. who says he can't kill in that name if retiring is not a way to go (though my preferred timeline would include retirement for jay at least for a while... but i digress!)

to conclude, i think it's a conflict much needed not just for the sake of any progression of batman in terms of philosophy, but also because the ways jason was initially introduced (even pre-crisis) suggested that he was supposed to grow to be critical of bruce even as robin, while being on good terms with him too. and that's definitely a kind of dispute that is much more productive and nuanced than just going back to the no-kill rule over and over and over again when the source of it is much more interesting.

i hope you got anything out of my rambling. i rest my case for now:)

#outbox

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gabessquishytum · 10 months

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hi there! long time reader, first time asker, big fan of the blog. I recently discovered this collaborative scifi universe call Human Domestication Guide (they have a wiki! their canon is fascinating) where a benevolent, very intelligent, functionally immortal, shapeshifting alien plant species called the Affini 'domesticated' all humans after the 'terran domestication war' against a capitalist imperialist human government and keep some of the humans as pets and use different kinds of 'xenodrugs' to keep them docile. it's v queer and kinky, with loads of bondage, medical kink, petplay etc.. big potential for monsterfucking tbh.

a majority of the stories in this universe, including the original one, features the relationship between a captured human rebellion soldier and her mistress, and dubcon/noncon brainwashing ensues. BUT, i can't help but wonder what would a war prize!hob & plant!dream HDG AU look like. i personally imagine hob would be just fully on board with such enthusiasm that even baffles dream! meanwhile hob is like nah he never really bought the propaganda of the terran navy anyways and now that he's seen how powerful & altruistic the affini civilisation is? humans never stood a chance. and needless to say the hedonist in hob nearly jumps at the opportunity to become this beautiful shapeshifting plant alien's (have you SEEN dream's plant-adjacent facets in the comics) very, very good human pet (and already halfway fallen in love)

-- 🌳 (if it's not already taken)

Oh I am SO intrigued by this concept!!! Thank you so much for introducing me to this! It sounds right up my street tbh, and I'm definitely going to check out the stories!

I love the idea of an all-powerful alien Dream!!! Especially with plant aspects. Like poppies spreading from his skin, vines twining down from his hair. Like, how is Hob NOT going to fall head over heels? He's been a solider doing shitty soldier things for so long and now he gets to hang out with this beautiful creature who WANTS him??? Literally a dream come true.

I'm imagining incredible potential for sexy outfits here. I mean, latex is usually not top of my kink list, but in a sci-fi universe it feels kind of necessary. Imagine Hob’s upper body beautifully encased in red latex, showing off all his curves and soft edges. He can hardly move but he loves feeling constricted like this. And Dream is so sweet to him when he gets all dolled up, telling Hob that he's the most beautiful pet, the most precious and most obedient.

I love the idea of alien Dream being very fascinated by Hob and his humanness, all his needs to eat and drink and sleep. He's so darling and fragile and Dream just adores taking care of him, keeping him well fed and maybe occasionally dosed up on fun space drugs. Hob loves his life as a spoilt pet who gets nice things and weird alien sex. The way he's gone from muscular, brutalised soldier to pampered well fed pet turns him on so much.

Screw it, if it's Hob, then I DO want to see him covered in latex. Especially the hoboobies. And if we're talking sci-fi, let's not forget the possibilities of oviposition...

#🌳 anon #the sandman #dreamling #nsft #cw dubcon

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neu-apostolisch · 4 months

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As for Gale Discourse Cont., I think it’s also necessary to point out that he’s written as a Comedic Relief character. He unironically says stuff like “pish posh” and is voiced by a well-known (in England) comedian. Unfortunately, because this is a DnD based game, every character you interact with the most needs to be complex and have a tragic backstory and I have a theory his romance arch is heavily derived from Mr. Darcy from the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie. I mention all of this because I am absolutely a Galemancer, and I had a bit of a turmoil about the interview myself until some other tumblr user (I can’t remember who) made a post about this. Seeing Gale through the lens of “oh he’s a silly little guy made to be the butt of all jokes but surprise! he has so much depth anyway” helped me take a breather and have fun with it again. Sorry this got rambley.

ok if you're rambling then i must be reading the dictionary. i think this is a good point to make, especially as an addition to the concept of how the writers view gale. and crucially, i don't think it really undermines people who found more depth in his character. because on some level this is true for every character in this game-- they're all an awkward trope and they grow as the game continues forward and you learn more about them. i'm glad that this perspective helped you re-enjoy the game!

a view of him as The Comic Relief Guy (and Arrogant Wizard) aligns with how the writers are talking about him, and a lot of characters can be viewed chiefly as narrative tropes. so, if galemancers and gale fans can bear with me here, i'll poke at that idea for a bit and why i think it's a good point to make within this long winded thesis i've been developing for two days.

wyll is probably the most obvious to start with in this trope analysis. he is objectively in the party, the voice of reason and a Good Guy. he will unambiguously support whatever the most like, goodhearted, positive, hero-type outcome. so we can classify him that way. i mean, his background is folk hero. then, you travel more with him and his story winds off in its own direction.

astarion is that foil to lawful goodness, and is presented as such. however, astarion also serves an important role in that he introduces one of the first instances of a potential party conflict to you. managing and understanding his vampirism is important to his character and to your party cohesion, at least in a roleplay sense. astarion is also meant to be a character that can frustrate you. think about the people who take bloodless, which is a literal stat negative, for him to be happy. that's an interesting trade that the writers are having you make, and in order to cure bloodless you have to use a spell slot. mechanically, this is the role he serves in the party narrative, and it's up to you the player to decide what you want to do with that. and then his story goes off in its own direction.

i could go on and position other characters in this stripped down way, but it's probably unnecessary.

with these two examples in mind, looking at Gale through this lens, i think he has a bunch of really important functions in the narrative and in the party dynamics. and similar to wyll and astarion above, you can come to view him beyond his initial trope. the biggest hurdle to his development is that his story is fundamentally integrated with the plot of the game. so, on some level, the narrative is unable to develop further on him because he still has that role to play. he has to still be able to kill himself even when the player has convinced him that his life matters because he is stuck in that narrative structure forever. he IS supposed to be the annoying guy who takes your stuff and eats it. you're supposed to have those moments of "oh no, what are supposed to do about this" just like lae'zel in the creche or with kithrak voss, breaking wyll's pact with mizora, and astarion's deal with raphael to kill yurgir. sometimes your companions make you do things that are really annoying.

but-- and this is the key-- gale's story doesn't have as much freedom to move beyond that, which is a fair complaint, even if there's not actually that much to be done about it in the grand scheme of things. (and i think this applies to lae'zel too, i just don't want to get too off-topic. and unfortunately i am not as familiar with her story, which is orin's fault.)

hopefully this comes across as me using your ideas as a springboard for my own, and not me twisting your words or hijacking something you said. i think that's an interesting perspective and thanks for sharing your thoughts!

#gale dekarios #gale bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #bg3 #asks #bg3 spoilers #baldur's gate 3 spoilers #larian critical #bg3 critical

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jesuis-melodrama · 9 months

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TV Show Proposals

Just in case a TV show executive is scrolling through Tumblr searching for their next big hit, here are some proposals from a humble yet rabid media consumer.

More Than Meets the Eye

What do you know about Transformers? That this 1980s cartoon TV series started off as a ploy to sell toys, but impacted their audience so much children were walking out of movie theatres crying when Hasbro literally executed their first line of products in order to introduce the second?

The beginning of Transformers were conceived in the same faith multiple other 1980s cartoon were made – as product advertisement to sell children toys. My Little Pony, Carebears, He-Man, G.I. Joe – they appealed to the violent and action-oriented or cutesy and fashion-oriented subnature of young children, so they could in turn badger their parent to splurge money on figures of their favourite character and any future accessories at the local toy mart.

The fan reception to the Transformers film (1986) allowed studio executives to realise Transformers had something more to it than advertising potential. And fastforward thirty years later when Micheal Bay took the reins to produce the multimillion live-action series, firmly cemented Transformers in its place in American pop-culture.

Although Transformers was always political – the entire Autobot vs Deception concept was based off the Cold War tension at the time of writing the original series – over the years this mostly negligible baseline has been heightened, especially in IDW comic's publishing. From apartheid society, right to self-autonomy, and state-mandated divide of class based on function, certain part of Transformers lore has become 'realistic' enough to be uncomfortable. Even when the characters are giant mecha-alien robots, there is an undeniable human element beneath all the armour.

I am not proposing a TV show of all of IDW's comics, just the More Than Meets the Eye and Lost Light series.

I acknowledge, foremost, that there are already serious issues with only animating this singular storyline alone. IDW, after all, has a near two-decade long history, and animating a stand-alone chapter that happens in the middle of the series is not going to help any new fans or consumers. Additionally, many beloved Transformers legacy characters are not going to appear in the narrative at all, bringing up the question of More Than Meets the Eye's marketability. Inspiring-Prime Rodimus will be leading a 200-bot ship of famously C and D-list characters (many who has since reached fandom fame for the roles they played in MTMTE and Lost Light); and when Bumblebee, Starscream, and Shockwave does come into play, finally, their position in the plot will be extraordinarily confusing unless the reader already knows the comics backstory.

Either way, I think that if some studio executive want to take a risk, they should do so anyway. More Than Meets the Eye was the first Transformers comic I actually read, when I knew absolutely nothing about the IDW lore and was only basing all my knowledge on the Bayverse films, and even though I didn't know who most of the characters are, it took barely five issues to get attached. I found myself intrigued by the witty writing, clever characters, gorgeous art, and the ever-desirable camaraderie that formed between this unlikely found-family group of bots.

More Than Meets The Eye was honestly magical to read, I genuinely believe my life and life philosophy had become better after consuming those 54 issues.

Other issues in producing a More Than Meets the Eye TV show relates to the lack of human characters, as human characters has become a prime template for the human audience to project themselves upon, and More Than Meets the Eye is also notoriously un-child-friendly. From characters such as Overlord to Tarn, or Megatron himself. Torture, murder, concentration camps, cannibalism – the comics illustrate the worst of what a galaxy-wide war between a hard-scrabbling general and a genocidal warlord could produce, and it does not shy away from the details.

More Than Meets the Eye is also a story of redemption. Multiple characters throughout the series – literal war criminals, self-deprecating, suicidal, cruel in the way that those who have given up are cruel – learn to give a damn, to realise how to live for a better tomorrow.

And the two defining titans of the entire franchise meet some of the best writing that has ever been given to them. They don't appear until the second half of the story or they don't appear much at all, but don't let their scarcity convince you of the quality of their characterisation. The writers of More Than Meets The Eye love every character, those who were destined to fade into obscurity and those who were never meant to be in the limelight, and it shows. IDW's Megatron isn't a true villain in the way that Optimus Prime couldn't live up to his untouchable hero image, but this does not mean that Megatron hasn't willingly and gleefully committed evil and Optimus hasn't done the best and the most righteous a leader in his position in the middle of a robot holocaust could've.

Making a More Than Meets The Eye TV show is risky. One hundred percent. It's in the middle of a series that a reader need background knowledge for, it has no human characters, its robot characters aren't exactly winning any popularity contests, and it cannot be marketed towards a general audience.

But More Than Meets the Eye has won two Comics Alliance award for good reason, and it has certainly convinced this Transformers-curious reader with no prior knowledge to become a lifelong fan of the entire franchise.

And I am not the one who sees the potential in a TV series. To any executive who has somehow read till the end of this post, check out these fantastic animations by passionate fans and artists:

魏威安's animated summary of the entire IDW comic history, just to give you an idea of the scope you're dealing with here.

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Spooky Unicornus's heartwarming Christmas-themed short, with some fantastic lighting and movement.

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The Alexicon's mock trailer.

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This disconcerting comics-accurate short by OMUSUNDA featuring some brilliant voice-acting by a Scottish Skids –

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– and a compilation of Ultra Magnus featuring his Animated voice from the same artist.

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The Arcane-fication of Overwatch

I am not a gamer. I don't own any console systems, my iMac is pretty but cannot run computer games, and my favourite game is actually this mobile app called Bullet Echo, which I will proudly announce I am quite good at. Shout out to my main hero, Mirage.

But I have watched literally every single one of Overwatch's animated cinematic shots. And I am fascinated. The storytelling, the animation, the characters and their designs. I love all their accents, the little nods to their culture, and overall, the camaraderie between Overwatch members, although their interactions are brief.

I'm getting the slowly coagulating imagery of a truly fascination techno-dystopian world, a classic tale of a future gone wrong and heroes that rose up to the challenge.

I have heard and read some criticism about Overwatch's lore, that it's simplistic and is weak, lacking in any kind of depth. If this is true, I will claim ignorance to the fact that I have not played a single game. As an animation-enthuasist, I have simply watched the cinematic shorts over and over again, and is enchanted by the short bursts of story I've seen there.

I've never played League of Legends either, and I can bet most of those who watched Arcane never did as well. But Arcane was enjoyable for both hardcore gamers and first-time fans anyway. It had something for the general unfamiliar audience while throwing out some service to those that followed the franchise for a long time. And the trick to maintaining this balance is simple: good writing, writers that care.

So – Arcane-ficiation of Overwatch. Am I going to play Overwatch one day? Unlikely. But would I sit down and watch a TV series about it? Definitely. Comments on Overwatch's cinematic shorts always snarkly points out that the movies are better than the game and the producers should realise where to throw in their funds. I won't cast my own judgement upon these opinions as I, once again, have not played a single game. But I hope some Blizzard executives are warming up to the idea. After all, video game-based TV series has been gaining traction over the past few years. Just look at Arcane, or The Witcher, or The Last of Us. Dungeons and Dragons even managed a big feature blockbuster, with a pretty star-studded cast.

A brief list of my favourite Overwatch shorts, judged by not ranked on story, animation, and voice-acting.

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Percy Jackson

An animated Percy Jackson series.

I know there's a live-action series of Percy Jackson coming out next year, and so far, it seems pretty hopeful. The actors are age accurate, the set design looks amazing, and Rick Riordian himself approves of the series.

Thing is, I grew up reading Percy Jackson and was violently passionate about the series once, back when the live-action movies were the ire of the fandom and the fanart, especially those of Viria's, were so popular they were considered canon. Canon enough that the official Percy Jackson wiki page actually eventually hired Viria to make their official character art.

There was even this petition to make an animated series with Viria's art that I remember signing a couple years ago.

Nowadays, artists likes velinxi has also become fandom staples in defining the stylised appearances of the characters, especially regarding the likeness of the Big Three.

This is one TV show that I'm not too invested about – as animated series with Overwatch and More Than Meets the Eye could be considered inevitable to the franchise at this point while Percy Jackson is significantly more popular and enjoy more medias, blockbusters alongside comics books, a musical, and the upcoming DisneyPlus+ TV series.

Just saying, fans manifested Viris's art being canon enough that the prophecy has been fulfilled. And if 50 000 fans signed a petition to make Viria's art an animated TV show – who knows?

Hamiltion

This is the long shot, I know. Hamilton is probably the most successful musical of this generation, and for good reason. I personally has never seen so much passion, clever lyricism, historical significance, and art stuffed within two hours.

My knowledge of musicals is that usually maybe about 40-70% of the show is sung while the rest is acted. Not for Hamilton, the actors truly push their physicality and vocal cords to the limit by turning it up to 200 percent for the entire performance. Renée Elise Goldsberry sang and rapped and delivered a masterful rendition of emotion during Satisfied (one of my favourite songs, ever) alone. No other musical has come close to Hamilton's set design and sophisication in my humble opinion, and I bet it will be a very long time before another musical that is released will come close.

Here, I am not only proposing the possibility of a TV show, but also a movie. There are many loose-ends in Hamilton that Lin-Manuel Miranda mentioned could not be covered in the play due to time constraints, such as the question as to what happened to Peggy.

A TV show could give the producers plenty of time to expand on fan-favourite moments, such as the Winter Ball or the battlefield scenes along with typing up loose ends. More time could also introduce more songs, and embellish the visual design further with on-site landscape, although the question of whether or not this will elevate the musical's appeal is debatable as Hamilton's single room, rotating dais set has become synonymous with the show and an archetypal of ingenious on-stage set design. Again, like with Percy Jackson, not too fussed about the possibility of Hamilton making it onto the big screen. But just throwing the idea there.

#transformers #more than meets the eye #lost light #blizzard #overwatch #percy jackson #hamilton #tv shows

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samobservessonic · 5 months

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The yearbook’s final story opens with a dialogue-free page of Sonic & Tails adventuring together, before coming across a giant Grounder badnik that seems resistant to their attacks

I think I’ve only mentioned it once, but they have a running joke(?) in these yearbooks where they translate the British stuff that the characters are saying for a more general audience. “Chanked” is the first time they’ve done this and I’ve not already known what the word means. Did “That’s chanked” just go out of style over 30 years ago? Perhaps I should start saying it to my Gen X co-workers and see if they have any idea what I mean

Robotnik announces that soon all badniks will be this size and therefore harder to beat. But it just takes a bit of extra manoeuvring from the duo to take it out

Hey look, it’s Sally! …Yes, I can say it twice for one issue. It’s my read-though and I can point out Sally Acorn as many times as I want (imagine how hard that’d get on an Archie read-through lol). Anyway, it turns out that these larger badniks require three small animals to function. Have they used this concept elsewhere? Badniks with multiple animal batteries, I mean? I can’t think of any examples off-hand. Anyway, Robotnik isn’t done for today - he knocks Sonic & Tails into the water, where another giant badnik is waiting for them. But Sonic proves to be a lot better at swimming than he is in any other canon and you can probably guess how this ends:

Bye-bye, badnik. Robotnik gives up on the idea of big badniks. Personally, I think he’s too quick to cut his losses - the two that he used in this story gave Sonic more of a run-around than the average badnik. But with this being the final yearbook and in its own (somewhat StC-adjacent) continuity, there isn’t anymore next time for him to make more, anyway So, that’s the end of that. There’s a SEGA quiz after this story, but it doesn't have anything in it that I’d really want to talk about here. These yearbooks have been a fun little side-step and I’ve enjoyed all of the comics in them, but I have to admit that I’m glad they didn’t out-stay their welcome. While they’re similar in tone to the early StC comics, part of what I’m enjoying about those is that they’re starting to step away from the source material and introduce some concepts that are uniquely StC and give that universe its own identity. As much as I talk about how I enjoy when the comics pull directly from the games, there’s only so long that doing that can keep my interest personally. Everyone’s mileage is going to vary on that, but I feel that if I kept reading stories that boil down to “Sonic & Tails go to a zone, Robotnik tries to destroy them and it backfires” I’d quickly run out of things to say

Of course, there’s nothing actually wrong with doing that and these yearbooks do fit the bill for their target audience. I’d recommend them to anyone interested in checking out classic Sonic history outside of the games. But now that they’re wrapped up, I’m looking forward to getting back to StC itself

#sam observes sonic #sonic yearbook 1994 #sonic the hedgehog #miles tails prower #sally acorn #dr. robotnik

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ilikekidsshows · 3 years

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One thing that pisses me off not just about the miraculous fandom but modern fandoms is fans inability to consume long overarching stories.

Like so many people are complaining about how long the reveal is taking or why haven't certain characters outgrown this trait yet or why is this character arc botched or abandoned. Like guys we just got the confirmation this show will be 7 seasons long PLUS like 3 tv specials. We're only roughly halfway through the series.

Once the reveal happens half the tension in the show is gone! I'm not saying leave the reveal till season 7 and make us wait 9 years this isn't HIMYM but miraculous is not a fast paced story. It's a long haul story. I just wish more fans would be patient. Miraculous is in the extremely fortunate and rare position that it will have a conclusive end and not be suddenly cancelled. That was and still is a huge problem for shows and cartoons with dedicated fans but networks pull the plug for stupid ass reasons.

So miraculous fans please chill the fuck out on things not resolving right away. We still have 78+ episodes plus the tv specials. If we get the end to certain things now it'll be so boring.

I think the concept of Instant Gratification describes the issue with many modern fandoms today. I hate to sound like I'm anti-technology, but the constant stream of quick and short bursts of entertainment allowed by the information age has made people more impatient. It's not about waiting for the climax to get a deeper sense of satisfaction, it's about getting that instant gratification right this instant. It's why one-shot fanfics are all over the place, when multi-chapter stories used to be just as common and popular, if not even more so, and it’s also why people are less willing to read a fic that’s still a work in progress. It's why people refuse to watch Youtube video essays even as they leave comments on the topic based on the title and thumbnail alone because, while they couldn't be assed to watch a 20-minute video (let alone an hour long one), they sure can spend that time calling the Youtuber names and making arguments the video actually already refutes. It's why a lot of online arguments happen only because one party read nothing but the first and maybe the last paragraph of someone's post and skipped all the explanation for their point of view (if I've ignored an counter argument for one of my posts, it was either because I missed it or because said counter argument did this. I have attention deficit issues so I do genuinely forget responses sometimes, but I'm also not writing a second essay for someone who's proven to me they won't read it).

Of course, it's only by constantly consuming only fast-paced content that you can become this impatient. People have different ideas about stories based on what stories they have encountered in the past.

Another thing that influences the Miraculous fandom in particular is that, while I love to show off exactly how much Miraculous has done to build up the overarching plotlines, Miraculous isn't really a show that's about a single story. It's easy to understand why people think it is one though: there's one main villain, we keep discovering more about the mythology, one of the main plot threads is the romantic relationship between the leads and singular episodes and plot elements tend to get payoff later. What is the purpose of a show if not to progress the story? Because the heroes aren't getting closer to defeating Gabriel or getting together, people think that the story isn't accomplishing anything.

I'll do a comparison to illustrate why these things aren't as clear-cut signs of a continuous storyline as people think. In the Spider-Man comics, you can pick any issue up and the chances are that the villain will be a part of Spider-Man's already established Rogues Gallery, who's back for more after who knows how many defeats, and those past defeats might even get referenced in callbacks to previous issues. It's also very possible that Peter and Mary Jane's relationship is the central focus with them not being together yet, having relationship problems or even having broken up (in really old issues the girl might be Gwen Stacy and short-term options have also always been available for romantic entanglements). Does this mean Spider-Man is a continuous story where the only point is that all the villains get put away for good and Peter and MJ live happily ever after? No, it doesn't. Spider-Man is designed to go on indefinitely, so there's no clear ending point. So, what is the point of Spider-Man then, if there is no Ending?

It used to be the single issue, because comic books used to have every issue be a stand-alone story about the hero and their supportive cast. These days it's more every three-to-six issues, because superhero comics are written to have short story arcs that can then be collected into trade paperbacks. A superhero series is not a single story; it's a series that functions as a story engine, meaning the series can generate several shorter stories where the hero helps fix a problem or solve a mystery.

In the superhero genre a villain will never get killed off or removed from stories permanently as long as the writers think they can still come up with stories to tell about them. The hero's romantic life will never be completely smooth sailing unless the writer is using other things to ramp up the stakes. Everything always allows for there to be another adventure.

I think the huge success of Avatar: the Last Airbender made people think that a series that is a single story is always superior to a series with multiple shorter plots. When I was liveblogging Sailor Moon, a viewer offered to give me a list of all the non-filler episodes because they genuinely thought I'd feel like I was wasting time on the show otherwise. This attitude is simply not based on fact. It's not fair to compare Miraculous Ladybug to Avatar, because they're both setting up to do completely different things. Miraculous Ladybug is trying to become a brand, like Batman or Spider-Man. It is part of the "Zag Heroes" lineup, a series of French-created superhero franchises to compete in the America-centric superhero market. This challenge is good for the genre, because Marvel and DC have started resembling each other more and more as these companies stew in their old ideas and copy everything that worked for the other one. The superhero genre needs new blood.

Also, Avatar: the Last Airbender first became popular by doing episodic plots for almost the entirety of the first season because it's actually not a wise choice to expect the audience to be willing to commit to a story that'll only give payoff later when working with an untested IP. Very often shows with longer story arcs start with the episodic format to hook people first, and sometimes the more linear plot is introduced specifically because the audience for the show is now expected to be both dedicated enough and older and capable of keeping up. Because, here's the thing: you can't expect little kids to remember every episode or even every character you've introduced in your show. I'm not sure if people are ready to hear that but I'm throwing it out there anyway. Kids are not dumb, they can understand more complex storylines, but many kids are still training their memory, so they might not remember the details of complex storylines that go on for too long.

This is why the news that Miraculous Ladybug's fourth season was going to have a recommended viewing order originally had me concerned. Miraculous is being branded for kids. The plot requiring too much skill in memorizing story details will make it less accessible to kids and might put those two additional seasons at risk. However, it seems that the "constantly changing status quo" concept of Truth, Lies and Gang of Secrets was a fluke and the evolution of the show is more subtle, so they might not be cutting the amount of episodes for those final seasons because the show is getting too complicated for kids to follow all the important details.

Regardless, Miraculous Ladybug being an adventure cartoon TV show instead of a comic book or a more cheaper-to-produce TV drama does mean that Miraculous Ladybug isn’t expected to go on for decades like a superhero comic or a soap opera. Because of this, it can have evolution and changes and even a planned ending. The show is expected to end at some point, even by the people making money off of it, mostly because making a cartoon like this indefinitely costs a lot of money, and kids’ adventure shows tend to see a decrease in returns if they go on for too long.

#media and fandom response #ml fandom salt #miraculous ladybug #miraculous tales of ladybug and chat noir

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clarenecessities · 3 years

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As my followers may have picked up from my long, spiraling rants, I’ve undertaken a new research project, courtesy of the death grip She-Ra has on my brain. And guess what? It’s finally at Disseminate Information Stage! So I’m going to lay out all of the gods, demigods, and godbeasts of the Masters of the Universe. With sources!

This table is more of a cheat sheet. We’re gonna tackle this god by god, with a section on Actual Lore & a meta section to help you decide how valid you think they are, because frankly some canons are more canon than others.

Asklepia, Benevolent Snake Goddess

Lore: Asklepia is one of two snake goddesses, the benevolent twin sister of Serpentia. We know very little about her abilities, but the Snake Clan (a clan of human warriors) were said to worship her, and they were famed for their architecture and healing. She had the ability to curse and deform people--to what extent is uncertain, but she’s known to have condemned a fallen priest named Ka, whose disfigured likeness now adorns Snake Mountain.

Behind the Scenes: First appearing in the 1987 comic “Il Nero Cristallo Del Potere“, Asklepia remained nameless for over 30 years, until Masters of the Universe Classics (MOTUC) released a few choice bios. For the unfamiliar, MOTUC seeks to reconcile the often contradictory canons into one overarching narrative, which is great in theory, but in practice is kind of like putting ice cream on a hot dog. And calling it a Chilly Dog ® as if that makes it taste better. But I digress. In 2019 they released a bio for the Staff of Ka which finally put a name to the less-evil Snake Goddess, in an obvious nod to Asclepius and the asklepian (that staff+snake icon people put on medical stuff).

Sharella, the Green Goddess and/or “Avatar” of Asklepia

Lore: Contradictory

Long Version: Okay I’ve put avatar in quotes because it is... contentious. Basically, and you’ll see here why I felt the need to make this post instead of relying blindly on the wikis, Sharella was introduced (in the ‘87 licensing guide) as a tribal leader who had joint custody of Gray, the original name of He-Ro’s alter ego, while he was growing up. This was further developed by Emiliano Santalucia’s concept work, wherein she was the leader of the Green Tiger Tribe (GTT) specifically. While the comic concept was not run through licensing & is thus not “canon”, the idea of her leading the GTT persisted. This teeny tiny image of her from Tytus and Megator’s 1987 Italian box art was all we had until 2008, when one of He-Man’s accessories described her as the “warrior woman ally” of Queen Veena, “who had been changed into the immortal green-skinned avatar of the Goddess Asklepia”. In 2009, MOTUC released a figure for The Goddess, apparently forgetting they’d done that shit the year before because the packaging did say “K’yrulla” was her real name. They had to cover it up with a sticker.

So who’s The Goddess? Way back in the days before Mattel solidified any of the lore around MOTU, there were mini-comics released with the toys. Initially, the Goddess served a similar function to the Sorceress in the cartoon, and was in fact sometimes called the Sorceress. She facilitated He-Man’s transformations, gave him missions, was generally magical and mysterious, etc. If you know who the Sorceress is, and you can picture Teela, but green? That’s about it.

Back to Sharella, though. The Third Ultimate Battleground rolled around in 2015, and for the first time since some packaging in the 80s, we saw Sharella in action! She was shot through the heart with a poison arrow. Yeah. But don’t worry, she received a blood transfusion from Moss Man (who we’ll get to later), and was transformed into the Green Goddess! She’s immortal now. How Asklepia figures in here is sort of unclear, which is weird since this is still part of the MOTUC line, but whatever. Whatever! Queen Grayskull (the aforementioned Veena) received a bio in 2015 as well, which described Sharella as her apprentice who became “The Goddess”.

Horokoth, Aspect of the Mother Goddess

Lore: DC went a little batshit (pun intended) with the lore for the Eternity War. Here the Goddess is three combined aspects, “Serpos” (Serpentia) for the Snake Men, Zoar for the human “Eternians”, and a third, invented deity called Horokoth, who represents the Horde. Horokoth is “the coming destroyer. The darkness at the end of days.” and is represented by a bat.

Behind the Scenes: That last link has a clearer picture of her, it just didn’t crop well. Also, I confess I couldn’t bring myself to read Eternity War. As thrilling as the prospect of a cohesive narrative is, if I wanted to see Adora slit her brother’s throat there’s the edgier side of deviantArt to peruse. Therefore I know little of Horokoth outside of a few still images of Hordak. The bat was almost certainly selected for the Horde’s vespertilian emblem.

Hordeous, God-Beast of Horokoth

Lore: A “primordial”, bat-like godbeast of Horokoth, created in response to the god Saz’s feline races. Their face was “forever infused“ on the surface of Horde World by Horde Lord (Hordak and Horde Prime’s father in the MOTUC canon) to grant their family power and immortality.

Behind the Scenes: Yes they’ve used some words wrong, but they’ve got the spirit, right? Hordeous was (allegedly, this is secondhand) an invention of the MOTUC crew in answer to Horokoth. Now, the Horde Supreme bio predates Horokoth’s introduction by about 3 years, but obviously the comics were in production already. There’s an undated sketch of Horokoth Hordak from an undated interview (thanks for nothing you useless website) but in that same gallery there’s an orko sketch labeled 2012 so. We’re good right? That makes sense, timeline-wise. Anyway the comics slam dunked Horde Prime out of existence and combined him with Horde Lord so it’s contradictory anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Serpentia, Malevolent Snake Goddess

Lore: The evil counterpart of Asklepia, Serpentia is the goddess of the Snake Men. The priest Ka of the Snake Clan forsook Asklepia in her favor, destroying Asklepia’s sacred orb and stealing the Serpent Ring (an artefact capable of transforming humans into Snake Men) from the Ophidian Spire with King Hsss. In DC’s triune interpretation of the Goddess, Serpentia (here ‘Serpos’) is blood, passion, and desire. A primal and primordial force appearing to the Snake Men in their own image.

Behind the Scenes: Okay yes I’ve reused the Asklepia pic but in my defense they are twins and this is the easiest one to crop. So here’s the thing about Serpentia: we only got a name for her in 2019. We knew there was a snake goddess, and she was pretty evil, or at least hostile towards mammalian life (see: the source of the pic I chose for her). Where Asklepia references the asklepian, ‘Serpentia’ is a much more heavy-handed snake reference, even though Anguis was right there. Those Masters Mondays came through for us, though, with the shield and staff of Ka, Ssssylph, and of course MOTUC’s Dark Despot Skeletor, which is. something. Though only recently named, Serpentia has been a shadow over Eternia since the Snake Men’s introduction in 1985 (or, depending on how much of the presented backstory you accept, even sooner in the form of Skeletor’s lair, Snake Mountain).

Serpos/Sarcedon, God-Beast of Snake Mountain

Lore: Contradictory, but the gist of it is he’s a very large snake with elemental magic and a grudge, that was turned to stone and became Snake Mountain.

Long Version: Snake Mountain was conceived of towards the end of 1982, but wasn’t revealed to the public until September of 1983, with the debut of the Filmation cartoon. For another year, the snake coiled around its summit was simply a carving, its mouth hollowed out for Skeletor to stand in and loom. But in 1984 the Snake Mountain toy was released, completely discarding the Filmation design in favor of the hewn face of the figure we now call Ka. Instead of a snake carving winding its way up the peak, the Mattel toy featured a ‘striking serpent’, alive and attached to the mountain itself. From there, it was an easy leap to make to ‘this carving comes alive’. So easy, in fact, that they did it twice!

First attempted in 1985 in the newspaper storyline “Vengeance of the Viper King”, the snake was here called Sarcedon, the World Destroyer. At the dawn of time, he was said to crush Eternia within his deadly coils. He burrowed deep into the ground, causing fearsome storms that nearly destroyed the planet. Only a fearless hero (implied to be He-Ro) could defeat and imprison Sarcedon. Using a macguffin called a Mirror of History, He-Man forced Sarcedon to behold his own reflection in a reference to the Medusa myth that kind of missed the point of it being reflective. Sarcedon was sent back in time, Snake Mountain was restored, the good guys win, blah blah blah.

That was the last of it until the MYP cartoon in 2004. Serpos as a name was actually first invoked by Mer-Man in a 1982 minicomic, but like it probably wasn’t about the snake. Anyway in the MYP cartoon the Snake Men get this thing called the Medallion of Serpos that lets them un-petrify the snake around Snake Mountain, grow two more heads, and unleash his godly wrath. He breathes fire, trashes Eternos, beats up He-Man, then turns his attention on Castle Grayskull to consume the Orb of Power (containing the strength and wisdom of the Elders, who had first trapped him in stone). He-Man cuts off Serpos’s extra heads with a sword upgrade, the Elders are somehow magically restored to life, and they re-petrify him. Snake Mountain is restored, the good guys win, blah blah blah.

Zoar, the Fighting Falcon

Lore: Contradictory, but it sure is a bird!

Long Version: While Sharella’s backstory is fraught because of the comics couldn’t decide what they wanted her to be, Zoar was similarly tangled up by the toyline. Initially male, he went through several color schemes, some prettier than others. Though there was a vague association with the Sorceress before the cartoon (recall that pre-Filmation, the Sorceress was just the Goddess), Filmation made them literally inseperable by designating Zoar as the Sorceress’s falcon form, to which she was confined when leaving Castle Grayskull.

Some of the comics and Golden books showed Zoar as being flipping enormous & ridden into battle as a steed by Teela and Man-at-Arms. Pre-Filmation, Zoar was always referred to as male, but post-Filmation, always female, as an incarnation of the Sorceress.

The Eternity Wars comics describe Zoar as the third aspect of the Goddess, the ‘Great Preserver’ whose light would shine through the universe for eternity. They pull off a sort of tripartite priestess thing where it’s Serpos/Zoar/Horokoth represented by Teela-Na (the Sorceress)/Teela/Evil-Lyn.

MOTUC, of course, had to reconcile all of these contradictory canons. How’d they do it? “In the folklore of Eternia, the golden falcon symbolized the godhead Zoar, a powerful deity of Preternia. As a god, Zoar could appear in both male and female guises and while the blue-tipped female falcon was associated with the Sorceress of Grayskull, the golden falcon represented Zoar's masculine nature.” So Zoar is genderfluid now, and the Sorceress is merely borrowing their form when transforming into a falcon. This bio also established that Zoar had anointed the first Sorceress, Veena (Queen Grayskull), which explains why she has wings for no apparent reason.

Also it’s not offically MOTUC but the scultors of the line, Four Horsemen, made a single anthro Zoar for Power-Con 2013. In case you need that for some reason.

Glorybird, Emissary of Zoar

Lore: Many millennia ago, there were three siblings, who were very poor and mistreated by their stepmother, but had hearts filled with kindness and love. Zoar, recognizing their resilience and desire to help people, sent an emissary named Glorybird. Glorybird bestowed upon each sibling a divine gift, but as they used their new powers to fight for good, their stepmother revealed herself to be a Celestial Witch & attempted to sacrifice them to Zoar’s “greatest enemy”, Horokoth.

Backstory: Okay, so the Star Sisters (and Glorybird) were in exactly one episode of She-Ra, primarily to set them up as new toy designs. While prototypes were made for these, the figures weren’t actually produced until MOTUC released figures for them in 2012. Though they were referenced in Princess Prom, and we saw a brief cameo in a background, Glorybird was absent until the introduction of the Star Siblings in Season Five.

That’s right! This bird is a god, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Saz, God of All Felines

Lore: One of the “Gods of the Multiverse” (he is the only member named explicitly), Saz was a blue-furred, feline deity responsible for the creation of all cats, humanoid or otherwise. He transformed himself into an enormous cat-beast to defeat Serpos and Hordeous, whose progenitors created them in envy of his children. Though Serpos was defeated, Hordeous escaped into the cosmos, and Saz himself vanished mysteriously.

Behind the Scenes: “By the whiskers of Saz!” is a fun pseudo-swear made by various cat races throughout MOTU, first in He-Man’s “The Cat and the Spider” and later in She-Ra’s “Magicats”. That was the only real mention of him until... okay, so MOTUC bios aren’t always attached to the product. Starting in 2018, they did this thing called Masters Mondays where they put unposted bios on the org forums. So while we’ve had the sword since 2010, we didn’t get the background on it until March of 2020. And then a couple weeks later, the Cat Mask of Catra bio referred to him as a “mystical being” instead of a god, but the mask was from 2011 so. He may not have been a god yet. It really depends on when the bios were actually written.

Saz wielded a blade probably best described as a falchion, whose quillon & langet formed a vaguely triangular shape around a deep red gem. I want to be clear that while it looks totally rad, this sword would be very impractical and have poor structural integrity were it not made by a literal god. Do not make swords like this. Also it’s almost certainly riffing on the Sword of Omens from Thundercats (affectionate).

Sabe-Or, Son of Saz

Lore: A green-furred, orange-striped paladin, Sabe-Or is one of the only named Ancients. He inherited his father’s blade upon Saz’s mysterious disappearance, and lived for centuries more. Upon his death, he transferred his “heroic essence” into a group of Eternian tigers, forever transforming them into the Green Tiger Tribe, whence both Granger (steed of King Grayskull), and Cringer, steed of Prince Adam.

Behind the Scenes: So “Battle Cat Man” is a concept that’s existed since they decided to make their hero ride a wicked tiger into battle. If you show a kid a superhero, and a supertiger, apparently the natural inclination of most children in the 80s was to combine the two. There are so many custom action figures. So, so many. Sabe-Or is visually a clear reference to this concept, and canonically seems to be the closest we’re going to get outside of the Thundercats crossover, unless you count Cowarros from 4H’s Mythic Legions line (I do, because it means Purrrplor is also canon and I fucking love calling him that).

Moss Man, Ancient Eternian Nature God

Lore: An ally of King Grayskull, Moss Man was something of an Eternian cryptid in the centuries leading up to He-Man Times. He has control over all plant life, the ability to meld with plants, and apparently can imbue sentience to said plants.

Behind the Scenes: Moss Man wasn’t featured in many episodes, because he’s a little... incredibly over-powered. He’s literally Bigfoot from 5000 years ago with magic powers. And like, since I don’t think the writers appreciate how long 5000 years is, you know what happened 5000 years ago? Stonehenge. This bitch is Stonehenge-old. But sure, you can trace a direct line of descent from his contemporary. smh. Anyway according to MOTUC his real name is Kreann’Ot N’Norosh so make of that what you will. Also his toys were pine-scented. I just love that.

Evil Seed, Rebellious Creation of Moss Man

Lore: Created by Moss Man to help fight in the Great Wars, Evil Seed betrayed his master and turned to evil (who could have foreseen this...), finding joy in corrupting all forms of plant life for his own amusement. Moss Man imprisoned him in enchanted chains, keeping him restrained for many millennia.

Behind the Scenes: According to MOTUC, his real name is Sero Malustro, clumsy New Latin for “(to) plant evil-burnt“. Why his name is New Latin and Moss Man’s is... whatever that is, I have no idea. As you can see from the image I included, he originally had an artichoke head, which was upgraded for the Mike Young Productions (MYP) cartoon. Personally I think the artichoke rules.

Volcana, the Fire Goddess

Lore: Canonically, she’s a fire goddess, and the mother of the Volcano Magus. Together, they are a rising force that seeks to conquer Etheria in the wake of Hordak’s defeat.

Backstory: Volcana has taken a long a twisted journey, but was first revealed to fans at Power-Con 2016 in a panel revealing previously unseen concepts and characters. After the first wave of She-Ra toys, a second wave was planned with a snow focus, to bring more attention the Filmation-neglected Frosta. This began with the introduction of a fire villain, an “evil lady that glows with heat” who would attempt to melt Castle Chill. That concept actually refers to a character named Amber (not Ember, as one might assume) who was reworked into a benevolent counterpart, Volcana’s twin sister.

Volcana was later fleshed out to be a Fire Goddess with flame-red hair, x-ray vision, and arms sculpted with flames. Her cape flew up with flame detail that rose up to control the volcano (of Volcanica, a proposed toyset that seems to have been reworked into the Crystal Falls). She was emphasized by Mattel to not start fires, which, honestly, is probably why they scrapped the character. He-Man couldn’t use his sword as a sword; a woman made of fire was basically doomed.

Now, though, we’re several decades in and lines made for collecters that are largely in their 30s and 40s can say whatever they want! So she’s canon, even if Amber isn’t. Yes there’s only one mention of her. Amber technically was mentioned in an unproduced episode titled “Amber Waves of Flame”, but as it was unproduced, it’s noncanonical.

Volcano Magus, Sinister Son of Volcana

Lore: Living within a dormant volcano, the Volcano Magus of the German audio plays was the source of most of Catra’s power and all of her evil intent. He supplied her with magic for spells and schemes with which to assail the Crystal Castle, but neither she nor Clawdeen were aware of the dark influence he held over them.

In the MOTUC canon, he’s specified as the son of Volcana, a demigod from the “Region of Volcanoes” who craved the nature magic of the Whispering Woods. When he learned the Twiggets were inextricably linked to that magic, he used his powers to petrify the former Rebels (this was after the Horde's defeat) and kidnap three Twiggets to drain the magic from their souls. Twiggets, for the uninitiated, are like purple tree-elf things. According to MOTUC, Razz is a Twigget, though the ‘real’ name they assigned her doesn’t fit their naming convention. She is purple, I guess.

Kowl, who avoided petrification, read Razz's spellbooks to find a way to save his friends, and learned of an Entrapment Gem that she hid in a shoe, for some reason. He confronted the Volcano Magus, spoke in the ancient tongue of the First Ones, and sucked him into the Gem.

Backstory: Admittedly this stuff is second hand, as I don’t speak German & they only have transcriptions/translations for the He-Man tapes anyway, but if anybody can find me an audio file I will do my best to verify. The MOTUC stuff at least I can confirm 100% because it’s from 2019 & I do speak English, for better or worse.

Oak, the Jackal God

Lore: Oak was the terrible Jackal God worshiped by the denizens of Zhar, an ancient civilization that once existed in a remote, forested region of Eternia. Long ago, Oak was imprisoned within a statue which could be found within the Temple of the Jackal. When Skeletor removed the statue from the temple, Oak broke free of the enchantment which imprisoned him and wreaked havoc on Eternia. Although the Jackal God was immensely powerful, he could be weakened by the elements of nature and was ultimately foiled by a rainstorm conjured by the combined powers of He-Man's sword and the magic of the temple's guardian priest.

Backstory: I have lifted this from a He-Man guide word for word as I cannot for the life of me find a copy of the Brazilian Editora Abril comic he came from, O Templo Do Chacal (1986). The description is like, suspiciously similar to the plot of the He-Man episode The Cat and the Spider, except the Grimalkin was never described as a god. The rest of it--statue, Skeletor, storm defeat--plays out almost the same. True pity I can’t find the original source, but I do trust this guidebook. You may be interested in Ceres from the UK comics--another dog-slash-statue who frankly might as well be a god himself, but as he’s not called one in canon he’s not going on the list.

The Bitter Rose Goddess

Lore: As Man-at-Arms told the legend, “Every day, a woman climbed Rose Mountain to look for her husband to return from the war. Alas, he never came back. Her tears poured from her cheek and entered the ground. One day she disappeared, but where she stood was a single, solitary rose. It’s the only thing that grows on Rose Mountain.”

The Insect People, who lived at the base of Rose Mountain, believed that the Bitter Rose is all that held the mountain together (and when it was picked, they were proved right). After the flower was restored, it transformed into the Bitter Rose Goddess herself, who explained that she had been a prisoner of her love's sorrow, so bitter that she refused to allow anything else to grow on Rose Mountain. She blessed the surrounding area, blanketing the jagged peaks with roses, and disappeared.

Backstory: She’s kind of... barely a god. She showed up in one episode and no other media & has objectively less power than like, every single demon they ever brought in. I almost didn’t put her on this list.

Mask-Ra, Goddess of Masks

Lore: A goddess who created the magical Masks of Power.

Backstory: Mask-Ra was first mentioned in 2019 and like, look, I’m gonna be real. I don’t respect her. She’s an invention of MOTUC (unless they were drawing on this concept art of Maska-Ra, which I doubt bc he was a Man-E-Faces precursor) and they retconned her into having created Catra’s mask, which is kind of redundant given the entire episode Magicats. This mask did not need two bios. There are no other mentions of her in any canon.

Potential other Masks of Power: The Deemos and Tyrella masks from the He-Man episode “Masks of Power”, lizard and canine masks from the mini-comic “Masks of Power”, Lord Masque’s Demon Mask from the He-Man episode “House of Shokoti, Part 1″, and whatever the hell Red Shadow has going on.

Procrustus, Giant Guardian of Magic

Lore: During the creation of the various dimensions (5 in MOTUC canon but demonstratably higher everywhere else), the gods installed the four-armed, immortal giant Procrustus to guard their secrets at the heart of Eternia. There lay the Starseed, from which the entire dimension was created. It still held immeasurable power, and could be used to conquer entire universes. Hordak, in an attempt to access the Starseed, cracked Eternia in two with the Spell of Separation. Though he was (mostly) thwarted, from then on Procrustus was forced to hold the two halves of Eternia together from within, lest the planet break apart and the Starseed be exposed.

Backstory: First appearing in the mini-comic “The Magic Stealer!”, Procrustus is a lot more tangible than most gods. We know where he is, at all times, and he seems confined to one size. His powers appear to be largely physical, as he had to burrow out of the ground to investigate in the mini-comic instead of teleporting or like, magicking the dirt away. This was his only appearance until MOTUC released a figure for him in 2012. He also showed up in the Subternia map the next year, holding Eternia together.

Standor, Cosmic Creator of Power

Lore: “Before time began, the great Gods of the multiverse convened in the Hall of Power to create all that was and all that will ever be. Head architect of this great task was Standor. A cosmic being of unlimited imagination, Standor helped lead his fellow deities by fueling their energies with raw creative force.”

Backstory: Released for Comikaze 2013 to celebrate the partnership of Mattel and Pow! Entertainment, Standor is literally just Stan Lee But a God. The prototype was called Standar--idk why they changed it, but I think it’s because it’s too easy to confuse with “Standard”. They made a bio for his sunglasses. I don’t want to talk about it.

Bash-Or, Slain Mystic God-Beast

Lore: Very little is known of Bash-Or, the Ram. His last remnant was sealed within the Ram Stone by the ancient sorceror kings of Zalesia, imbuing it with his divine power to overcome any barrier, magical or otherwise.

Backstory: Bash-Or was revealed in the bio for the Ram Stone, September of 2020, but his spirit (previously referred to as ‘the Spirit of the Ram Stone’) was twice utilized by Skeletor in the MYP cartoon, to great effect, before the stone was destroyed.

#she-ra #spop #motu #he-man #clare shares notes #edited to actually include the gd graph

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earthstellar · 3 years

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Cybertron’s Colony Worlds: Paradron

So, if you’re a toy collector, you probably saw the Ratchet and Lifeline Paradron Medics pack as part of the War for Cybertron releases:

But what is Paradron, and who is Lifeline (the mint Arcee repaint on the left above)?

Lifeline: Paradron Medic

We see her first in G1; I will go over her key episode in more detail below.

Generally, the Paradon medics seem to be femme bots, with the same frame type and paint job across each of them for a more uniform look. They are based on Arcee’s animation model, so the toy being a re-paint of the same model makes sense.

In the War for Cybertron background information, Lifeline is a Cybertronian refugee who fled to Paradron at the beginning of the war. She is one of the last surviving members of the Paradron Medic Corps by this time, and doesn’t trust Ratchet until he works with her to care for a few patients; She then provides him with the energon supply he was looking for.

Paradron’s Planetary Cultural Background

In the G1 episode Fight or Flee, we’re introduced to Paradon as Pacifist society; They have a significant abundance of energon, partially owing to the fact that they never had to deplete their resources for war.

Their planet is stated to run on a Democratic principle of government, which contrasts significantly to most depictions of Cybertron, which leans from Traditional Monarchy (a Prime as a spiritually appointed leader in a lineage of holy Primal figures) to Functionism (a class/caste system based around alt-mode ranking).

They do have a carceral (prison) system, despite a seemingly more peaceful society and culture, so there are likely some unseen social issues.

They are staunch Pacifists, which means they do not engage in conflict/combat regardless of circumstance; This is unfortunately the usual take on Pacifists that we see in media, when in reality Pacifism can be manifested as a complex ideology based on contextual circumstance and wider influences, which is a bit shallow, but I know this is an 80s kid’s cartoon.

Fight or Flee Episode Key Points: The One Episode Where Rodimus Genuinely Made Horrific Decisions

Due to this staunch Pacifism, the Decepticons invade by force and start to use the population as an unwilling labour force/slaves.

The Autobots, with centuries of war and a lack of nuance, force weapons on the Paradons (who have never handled weapons before), and don’t bother with addressing their cultural ideology before encouraging them to join the battle.

(I understand that this is a children’s show in the 80s and they only have 30 minutes per episode to have a self-contained story unfold, but as a Quaker with Pacifist beliefs, it still irritates me a bit that none of the Autobots ever discuss what could be learned from Paradron’s successes and failures, and they make no effort to engage with local bots to discuss Pacifism and philosophical tenants that may prevent further or future harm from coming to Paradron. But this is fully just my perspective on this.)

The most egregious part of this episode is when Rodimus orders Ultra Magnus to destroy the planet, to prevent it from falling under Decepticon control.

The logic they use to justify this action is that “Paradrons are Cybertronians, and can live on Cybertron”, but this reeks of coloniser energy-- especially as this planet is already a direct colony of Cybertron-- and it’s really, really rough to watch. The planet is vaporised; It vanishes from among the stars.

The Paradronians were not asked their opinion on whether or not this option would be worth it to them; They lost their homeworld and will be forced into a culture based around war.

Sandstorm has regrets, and calls the planet beautiful even as it dies. Rodimus replies with an oddly vicious statement: “Cybertron is better, anyway.” Yikes.

Conclusion:

I like the idea of Cybertron’s colony worlds; There are many, and each one is very distinct. In IDW, we get Caminus, which seemed to use some of the ideas for Paradron in that they generally avoided the war entirely as well.

There’s a lot of potential to use the existence of these colony worlds to discus some pretty interesting stuff, or some pretty deep concepts. Given that TF is a franchise ostensibly for children, we rarely see this covered much outside of the IDW 2005 comics, but it’s fascinating that there are so many colonised planets out there.

The implications of these colonies existing, the reasons for their abandonment or lack of contact (which varies from series to series), and the difference in planetary cultures is even more interesting in contrast with Cybertron and what we see of the main characters-- And how they react to the differences between themselves and their colony counterparts.

I think Paradron has a lot of potential to be re-visited, and I was thrilled to see WFC form a little duo with Lifeline and Ratchet.

Even if they don’t go back to Paradron, given the way the above episode ended, it would be interesting to see the Paradronian people afterwards; Trying to cope with the aftermath, how they were received on Cybertron, whether or not they are able or willing to engage with Cybertronian society given what happened to their planet, etc.

#rodimus #tf ratchet #g1 #transformers #lifeline #idw transformers #maccadam #cybertronian culture #paradron #paradron medics

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retvenkos · 4 years

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“you realize you have enough late fees to pay for this book twice over, right?”

requested

A MODERN! LIBRARY! AU WITH THE PEVENSIES? UMM... YES. THAT HAS TO GO LIKE THIS...

the pevensies first started frequenting the library after they came back from narnia

it was susan’s idea - none of them really knew this world anymore and so, maybe, if they read about it, things would come back to them and they’ll feel more comfortable in this place

edmund teased her, saying she just wanted to quiz him on the dictionary, again.

but, really, he liked the idea. he felt comfortable amongst the endless shelves, it was like he was in the libraries in cair paravel, again, and he was home

and even when they had adjusted to england and had no reason to go back, anymore, they kept going

it was routine at this point - the only time all of them were really together, talking about their lives and all that had happened

and as the years passed by, it felt like a home away from home - a place in england that was t h e i r s

they weren’t sure where they belonged, anymore, but the library was a good a place as any

peter found himself again in the stories of king arthur and the histories of battles and sacrifices - those things that lie heavy on the chests of anyone else.

he loves audio books and documentaries - things he can listen to. he loves to hear it - the interest in people’s voices, the sympathy, the words they use.

he has his headphones in 99.99% of the time, and lucy will sneak up on him to scare him.

he has been kicked out of the library several times, thanks lucy

and edmund? love of mysteries

he went through a sherlock holmes phase. susan watched sherlock with him and they would argue over theories

lucy told him once that he looked like benedict cumberbatch and it was single handedly the best compliment he had ever received (for the time, anyway).

he also got into a few of the classics

he read don quixote and loved it, don’t lie to yourself

he is also constantly checking out rosetta stones - edmund loves languages and you can pry that concept from my cold, dead hands

susan was able to distract herself with love stories, magazines, and other classics

jane austen? yep. susan loved her.

she would browse a lot, taking her time before deciding on anything

she also loved using the computers

she always has some passion to look up or another, and it was easier to use the computers to look something up than to search for a book.

when she knew what she wanted, susan went after it. when she wasn’t sure, she browsed.

lucy, on the other hand, loved ya fiction

the action? the romantic subplots? they were her obsession.

and sometimes susan would read one with lucy and they would talk about it, but no one ever found out. susan would rather die than tell edmund she was team edward

and no, i never read twilight but i have seen the films and susan was team edward i don’t make the rules

lucy also chronically checks out movies at the library and then forgets to take them back until a week after they’re due

and edmund will tell her it’s on netflix, she doesn’t need to check it out, but she says she likes a hard copy, sue her.

she eventually gets into comics, and she and edmund read them together

oh, i guess i should address when you come into the picture

so you work at the library and it doesn’t take you long until you have met the pevensies and have chatted with this chaotic but surprisingly functional family

they’re only in their mid twenties, but they have the dynamic of 40-50 year old siblings?

clearly i’m ignoring their fatal end because we only want fluff, here

all of your coworkers agree that they have those very specific vibes.

and you find these frequents odd and amusing - no one in their age bracket really comes to the library frequently, but this family is constantly here.

i mean, it’s great because their traction is much needed, but it’s just confusing.

the easiest pevensie to talk to is peter, if you ever catch him without his headphones in

he’s just super chummy with everyone he meets and when you first talk to him, he feels like an older brother

he has the c h a r i s m a

“you and your siblings come here, a lot.”

“yeah, there’s a lot of sentimental value, here. this place... it helped us find ourselves, once.”

“well, there’s not better way to know yourself than between pages. books have a way of changing your perspective.”

“but they can also help you erase who you once were.”

and you notice him looking at susan

so you not-so masterfully change the subject

“do you realize how many fines you have?”

but it works

“they’re edmund’s, trust me.”

the second easiest to talk to is lucy - peter may have a natural charisma, but lucy is just kind and pleasant to chat with

she’ll talk to you about anything and everything, even if she has zero idea what you’re talking about

but that’s kind of hard because the amount of collective knowledge the pevensie’s have is insane.

and lucy is definitely the sibling you can befriend the quickest, the gateway to the rest of the pevensies because you just feels so comfortable around her

she introduces you to susan and edmund, and you’re actually able to hit it off with them, too?

the pevensies are great at talking to strangers and i just,,, can they pLEASE teach me their ways???

it’s all those years of being kings and queen, talking to other diplomats, being generally sociable

anyway, you start to hang out with them outside of the library, too, after you’ve formed a bit of a friendship

and maybe you have a particular soft spot for edmund...

and the pevensies start to tell you more of their stories - those that happened to them when they were young, when they were kind of odd - like adults in a child’s body

and you can see susan stiffen with each subsequent story, and you think back to what peter said to you, once...

“but they can also help you erase who you once were”

and so you decide to talk about those stories with edmund, when the two of you are hanging out alone

and you not-so masterfully change the subject

“have any of you watched harry potter, recently? i get big harry potter vibes from all of your stories.”

and lucy and peter are vvv excited, because they used to read harry potter with each other and love it a whole lot

and later, edmund tells you about narnia, about susan not believing, and about where they are, now

coping

all of them

and you nod your head understandingly

“if you ever need me, you know where to find me.”

“yeah.”

“but wouldn’t it be wonderful if they were stories?”

“for others to read?”

“yeah - like story books.”

“yeah... that would be nice.”

and one night, when all of the pevensies are together and susan has gone to the bathroom, edmund tells his siblings about your idea. about writing about narnia... as though it were a story.

and susan hears through the door.

and maybe she puts her english major to use, writing down a story she tries desperately to believe isn’t real

AND FLUFF ENSUES.

-- taglist: @musicallisto, @babyplutoszx2, @locke-writes, @brokenandheadoverheels // message me if you want to be added to the taglist!

#chronicles of narnia #narnia #the pevensies #edmund pevensie #peter pevensie #susan pevensie #lucy pevensie #x reader #reader insert #x you #platonic #platonic!reader #imagine #would include #headcanons #fluff

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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What Sweet Tooth Changes From the Comic

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This article contains spoilers for Sweet Tooth, both the TV series and the comic.

Sweet Tooth, the live-action adaptation of Jeff Lemire’s post-apocalyptic comic, has now arrived on Netflix and it’s a hit! Or at least that’s what producer Robert Downey Jr. ‘s overwhelmingly prevalent promoted tweet claims. I can recite “#SweetTooth is now certified fresh with a perfect 100% critics score. So incredibly proud of the whole @sweettooth team and can’t wait for you to see ‘the show of the summer.’ All episodes are now streaming on Netflix!” more readily than my own name at this point.

Still, it’s easy to see why Sweet Tooth found an audience on Netflix. The story of a gentle deer-boy hybrid named Gus and his quest to find his mother in a virus-ravaged world puts a refreshingly optimistic face on a well-worn post-apocalypse genre. Actor Christian Convery is a real find as Gus a.k.a. Sweet Tooth and the series eight episodes feel like an ‘80s Amblin Entertainment homage done right.

Sweet Tooth is so inherently sweet that audiences might not realize just how much it deviates from its comic inspiration. Lemire’s comic miniseries, published from 2009 through 2013 by DC’s Vertigo imprint, has many fans, including some big pop culture names. Actor Michael Sheen wrote the foreword for the series first collected trade paperback. TV writer Damon Lindelof (Watchmen, Lost) conducted an interview with Lemire for the end of the final book. The comic is also decidedly less sweet than the TV show it inspired.

Arriving in an era before apocalypse fatigue fully set in for pop culture, Sweet Tooth really leans into the Mad Max side of its “Bambi Meets Mad Max” elevator pitch. The book is quite dark and unflinching. That Netflix and series creator Jim Mickle decided to go in a brighter direction for the show is an interesting commentary on entertainment’s priorities at the moment. But what if Sweet Tooth the TV series decided to hew closer to its source material? Read on to see how the comic and the show differ.

Tone

It cannot be overstated just how much darker the Sweet Tooth comic is than the TV series. The show acknowledges that the post-apocalyptic world after “The Sick” would feature some inherent violence. In fact, the whole plot of the show involves hunters trying to kidnap a child and deliver him to the military to be ground up into medicine essentially. That’s obviously dark. But the show still does its best to avoid as much onscreen violence as possible.

When the Big Man or another character rescues Gus from hunters, he does so in a largely bloodless fashion. Even when Big Man takes a bear trap to a poacher’s head, audiences are spared the grisly sights and sounds of it. Readers of the Sweet Tooth comic, however, are spared nothing. The pages of Lemire’s work are positively drenched in blood. Midway through the story, Gus is even forced to beat a fellow hybrid’s brains in with a brick. He says he feels bad about it, but not that bad.

The comic also delves into the realm of sexual violence as many post-apocalyptic stories have felt compelled to do before. Early on in the proceedings Big Man and Gus come across a town where a family captures women and forces them into prostitution. When Big Man rescues two women, they become permanent fixtures of their party. These characters, Lucy and Becky, do not appear in the TV show (though one character does borrow her name from one).

If all the violence didn’t already make it apparent, the Sweet Tooth comic is particularly misanthropic. Nearly all of the human characters in the comic are monsters. Even Gus’s beloved Big Man Jepperd is useful because he’s a monster. Jepperd never loses sight of what makes him useful in this world, which is killing. He only becomes a hero when he applies that skill to those who deserve it. Throughout the series run, the comic continually intimates that perhaps planet Earth would be better off without all these humans anyway.

Characters

Befitting the comic’s darker tone, the characters of Sweet Tooth are also quite a bit darker. While Convery’s depiction of Gus in the show is absolutely pitch perfect for a young Spielbergian hero, the Gus of the comic isn’t quite as self-assured or sophisticated. The education that Gus received from his “pubba” wasn’t necessarily top notch stuff so his vernacular is filled with more slang and abbreviations. He comes across as a true Nebraskan country boy.

Meanwhile, Tommy Jepperds a.k.a Big Man (Nonso Anozie) gets an even bigger makeover for the show. Lemire describes the Jepperds of the comic as being inspired by the concept of an aging Frank Castle. There is absolutely no warmth in the comic’s Big Man. Instead of being an ex-football player, he’s an ex hockey player…and a pretty terrible one at that, only useful as his team’s “enforcer”. Anozie’s Jepperds is quite a bit more personable and open. Though he intends to sell Gus to the Last Men, he never goes through with it. In the comic, Jepperds does exactly that before changing his mind and rescuing the boy.

The pig-girl hybrid Wendy (Naledi Murray) exists in the comic but her mother Aimee (Dania Ramirez) does not. Instead Gus meets Wendy at the Last Men facility after Jepperds sells him off. He meets Wendy’s little buddy Bobby there too.

Gus’s “pubba” is a janitor at a medical facility in both the comic and the show, but as played by Will Forte in the show, he’s a lot more tender and smooth. The show Pubba is the perfect father to young Gus, open, communicative, and knowledgeable. In the comic, however, the character has lost some of his mental faculties in isolation. He is a God-fearing man who entertains and writes down his apocalyptic visions. Gus loves him and he loves Gus but he’s also not operating at full capacity. Also not operating at full capacity is Dr. Adityah Singh (Adeel Akhtar), who becomes inspired by Pubba’s writings and believes that Gus is a new god.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The Animal Army is quite different in the comic. Instead of being a ragtag gang of Neverland-style kids, it’s a disturbing cult of adults in animal masks, led by a deranged man who has five dog-hybrid children. Becky a.k.a Bear (Stefania LaVie Owen) is an invention for the show but she does take her name from a comic character.

General Abbott though? He’s pretty much that villainous in both iterations of the story. Screw that guy.

Story

Though Sweet Tooth’s first season begins and ends in a similar spot to the first “Book” (12 issues) of the comic, the path it takes to get there is wildly different.

Why Sweet Tooth’s Ending is Ultimately Hopeful

By Nicole Hill

Scenes at Aimee’s Preserve and at Dr. Singh’s Stepford-ian community are invented entirely for the show. The Preserve is mentioned in the comic, but it’s never confirmed to exist (and likely does not, given the comic’s relentlessly dark tone). The first time Gus and readers meet Wendy and Dr. Singh is at the Last Men facility where Gus finds himself in the final episode of the season. Also new to the TV series are Gus and Big Man’s side quest through an outdoor sporting goods store, and the entire Animal Army’s arc.

In the comic, Gus, Big Man, and company’s journey stretches from Nebraska to Alaska (hey, that rhymes!). The show elects to shorten that a bit by having Gus venture from Wyoming to Colorado. In addition to introducing new stories, the show also abandons some comic stories entirely, likely in pursuit of its cheerier tone.

Netflix has not announced Sweet Tooth season 2 yet. Based on the show’s apparent success, however, future seasons seem likely. When they arrive, they will undoubtedly have many more changes to make from the source material to ensure an appropriately sweet viewing experience.

Sweet Tooth is available to stream on Netflix now.

The post What Sweet Tooth Changes From the Comic appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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elkian · 3 years

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I was gonna do a “missing the point”-style meme but I’m honestly not sure that would even work tho so:

Harry Potter and My Hero Academia/Boku no Hero Academia have similar issues with introducing and then immediately ignoring ENORMOUS issues re: ableism.

I think these two series in specific come to mind bc it’s ableism within a specific empowered community, and in both cases the series are pretty well-known and the community (Wix/Heroes) are immediately identifiable to many audiences.

[WARNING: Discussions of ableism, child harm, and abuse on multiple levels.]

What’s the problem?

SQUIBS.

[This post got stupid huge SO here is a tl,dr for all you lovely people who understandably have no time for this.

TL, DR: Both Harry Potter and Boku No Hero have a bad tendency to implement or imply a level of disability regarding unempowered people in empowered societies. They then continue on to completely disregard important conclusions to these implications, such as how heavily it is implied that these unempowered people (Squibs) are so ‘worthless’ to those societies that their very deaths are merely a byline rather than an actual tragedy.

This is especially troubling in MHA/BNHA when so many other political and worldbuilding considerations HAVE been planned out, and seems to be less-discussed in the fandom as a whole, so that’s a much larger chunk of this post.]

That’s your tl, dr!

Here’s the Harry Potter angle:

HP has a bit that I’ve seen people discussing already: Neville’s magic was discovered when his uncle dropped a literal child a potenial lethal distance.

Neville activating his power and surviving is celebrated, and then JKR immediately glosses over the glaring issue this has introduced: the heavy implication that a Squib dying from this incident would have not have been mourned or even really commented on.

The few adult Squibs (and isn’t that a whole new slice of wonderful /j) are generally disliked and ridiculed for some reason or other. Now, while obviously there are plenty of places where the Venn diagram of “disabled” and “asshole” intersect irl, when your ONLY presentation of a disabled character or group is, every time, an asshole or a fool or both, boy! That’s bad!

Neville (who is generally presented as magically, physically, and mentally weak and often treated as comic relief) is a bit better via the POV Character constantly having positive interactions with him, but this is still a mess. Yes, Neville canonically is not a Squib, but it’s not subtle that he’s on the cusp OF being a Squib, and that is a key element of ridiculing him in many situations (also the whole trauma thing multiple times, like if I really get into it I could do a whole double-size post of how Neville was done dirty or nearly dirty by JK all the time but this isn’t that post).

This isn’t even the point of this post. Let’s move to MHA/BNHA

Hero Academia has differing but honestly even worse issues. And I’m aware that different countries handle ableism and accessibility in different ways, but if you think too hard about it this is an absolute clusterfuck.

What is the problem now?

Squibs! Or rather, the main character of the series, Midoriya Izuku.

Deku (a nickname meaning “useless”! Imparted after his disability is recognized! hilarity!!) is also born without powers. Even worse in some ways, he is born without powers in a world where the overwhelming majority of the global population has some kind of empowerment. I can’t recall if it’s outright stated or only implied that someone with a functionally useless (and hoo boy, usefullness to society is its own post nope not today i do not have that much energy) Quirk is still more of a person than a Quirkless human.

That sink in? Okay, let’s move on.

In a narratively not-uncommon turn of events, Deku gains power. This is partially a product of, and directly tied to, his own work and determination, as well as his willingness to help even when physically outmatched.

To an American audience (NOT the intended audience though I wouldn’t doubt it if Horikoshi meant to have international appeal more or less from the start), this is a deeply satisfying narrative. Who doesn’t love an underdog story? And we even learn that the strongest hero of all time (til this point, anyways) was ALSO born Quirkless!

However, from here, things take a nosedive.

The key problem is a combination of story progression and overall thought put into worldbuilding. Horikoshi’s efforts may not be the MOST thorough, but he has put a great deal of work and thought into his creation (he at least understands the concept of implications and sometimes plans accordingly, looking at you JKR). However, that tied with story progression and personal repercussions actually works to the detriment of the matter.

Especially given recent turns of events.

[BIG MEGA SPOILERS FOR FAIRLY RECENT PLOT

STOP HERE IF YOU’RE NOT CAUGHT UP

SERIOUSLY]

What I mean by this is the current state of events re: two particular recent/recent-ish plot arcs.

First, Quirk Removal, and second, Endeavor’s comeuppance.

Quirk Removal/Loss was the start of my realization to what the narrative was doing regarding Izuku’s Quirklessness and the state of being overall.

This arc was a perfect time to bring up Midoriya’s past! A lot of Western works certainly would have done so! And yes, it may be bordering on done-to-death, but many elements of Hero Academia put new twists on common themes and cliches; it wasn’t unreasonable to hope that he might do it again.

Instead, little to NOTHING is discussed during this time! In fact, iirc I’d go so far as to say Midoriya straight-up never considers his past at any point during this arc!? If I’m wrong then it obviously made little impact.

NOW, not every disabled character needs to incorporate their disability and/or skills gleaned from living with it in every narrative. In fact, it would get tedious and questionable if they did (note: this does NOT mean ignoring/forgetting the character is even disabled when convenient. Like, I’d like to think that’s the obvious point of this post but... *gestures at tumblr*).

But the complete lack of it here feels really weird. Like, almost hollow. I think Midoriya makes some kind of suggestion to Mirio of his former Quirklessness at the end of the arc, but nothing that made any kind of impact.

Let’s move on.

Endeavor.

Now, the problem with Endeavor’s arc is not the arc itself. Or, rather, it’s the fact that Endeavor’s Comeuppance is pretty good.

This is a problem because someone else should be getting this exact same arc, yet the issue is never even RECOGNIZED, let alone addressed.

Endeavor’s abuse of his wife and children, all in the name of creating a Heroic legacy, is publicized and tanks his popularity. The general public is now aware of what he’s done to the people closest to him, which aside from giving him a more correct reputation, means they can’t trust him to protect them if they can’t trust him to protect his own family.

This isn’t the goal of this post and I’m no expert regardless, but up to this point (around chapter 290) this was handled in an interesting way. Endeavor is humanized and often shown interacting with people in a way that, while often domineering, isn’t always aggressive or abusive. He runs a Hero Agency for crying out loud! But abuse in the real world often isn’t constant, nor happening to everyone in contact with the abuser. So this is a surprisingly good lead up to the reveal, where you can understand how most people never realized this was an issue.

But here’s my main point. Let’s examine some traits and actions that come up:

physically abusive to a child (often dangerously so) to the point of permanent trauma and severe scarring in some cases

target of abuse was weaker (physically and/or regarding Quirk power)

often abused victim emotionally/psychologically, bringing this weakness up again and again

own immense power led to rising in the world of Heroics

comrades, fellow Heroes, UA teachers etc. not aware of prior abuse issues

Who does this sound like?

Endeavor, who has a whole fucking arc dedicated to this reveal and repercussions?

Or Bakugou?

Reminder: This isn’t a hate post. This isn’t a character post, or even an abuse post. This is about ableism.

Bakugou exhibits many, many traits and actions that Endeavor was literally just punished for. So why does the treatment of these characters in-universe differ so drastically?

Two primary reasons I can think of, which feed into each other:

1) Bakugou was a child (still technically is a minor, remember! Still a first-year high schooler!) when this started. This doesn’t mean he’s strictly innocent, but it’s an important point, because it leads us to

2) Bakugou Katsuki’s abuse of Midoriya Izuku is socially accepted.

Reminder of the audience’s first encounter with Katsuki. The very first page with him is him and his grade-school posse picking on a kid that Izuku is trying to protect. His posse is showing off their Quirk powers and mocking Izuku’s lack thereof.

Then we flash forward to late-middle school versions of the kids. Bakugou, in front of a fucking teacher and entire class, is verbally, physically, etc. abusive to Izuku. He trashes his stuff, threatens him, tells him to kill himself (which, as Izuku notes later, is a fucking felony in Japan too).

No one stops him.

No one criticizes him.

We don’t even get a shot of like, some more ‘regular’ students being like “man Bakugou’s kinda fucked up but we’re too scared to do anything about it” NO. NO. Everyone more or less either backs Katsuki up or straight up doesn’t care.

Remember that this started when Katsuki and Izuku were four. Remember that Katsuki’s power is absurdly dangerous, ie. LITERAL. GODDAMN. EXPLOSIONS.

Izuku has scars. He probably has hearing loss! He may have gotten at least one concussion which can cause serious neurological issues and open him up to further risk!

He could have died.

And?

NO ONE. DOES. ANYTHING.

THIS is the point of the post. THIS is the value placed on Quirkless people in this society.

And yet. Despite Endeavor’s comeuppance. Despite All Might and Izuku’s blatant ‘value’ to society through Heroics. Despite so many other political implications and quandaries address in the Hero Academia series.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing about this is addressed. The nearly-lethal ableism towards Quirkless people in this society is never ONCE brought up properly once Izuku receives One For All.

There is so much potential here! There is so much worth talking about! And yet we’ve moved into what feels very much like the Final Battle without it being addessed, despite numerous, numerous opportunities for a meaningful conversation about it along the way.

Mirio losing his power! Hell, Mirio’s powers’ drawbacks (and pretty much every Quirk’s drawback! if acknowledged properly!) border on a disability-analogue, and even more when Yuga’s laser comes up, and yet again and again we fail to truly engage with the matter in a meaningful way.

At this point, even if it comes up in the finale, I’m going to be disappointed in this particular aspect of the series due to the complete and total shut-down it’s been given so far.

What the FUCK, Horikoshi?

#elk text #24th #February #2021 #February 24th 2021 #I hope the bold helps with reading #long post warn #elk has thoughts #sorry for the ramble #Ableism #other shit comes up but plz keep in mind that that is the PRIMARY POINT OF THIS #also:#child abuse warn #abuse warn #harry potter spoilers warn #boku no hero spoilers #like REAL BIG spoilers for later Hero Academia stuff!#this is not a character hate post and i will block judiciously #elk has feelings

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duhragonball · 3 years

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BEGIN: Battle Tendency Liveblog. JJBA Ch. 45-47

🇺🇸🗽🧗‍♂️🧼🪀🌵Part 2, Hell Yeah!🌪️🎈🛩️🌋🚬

I'm pretty friggin' excited for Part 6 anime, and Part 6 is one of my faves, so one could understandably assume that Part 6 is my favorite. And I post a lot of other JoJo stuff on this blog, so it's probably not obvious, but Part 2 is the best.

I got into JoJo in 2017, watching Parts 1-4 in anime version, then reading the scanlations of Parts 5-8 while I waited for the anime to catch up. Then I re-liveblogged the Part 5 manga because there was finally a proper translation available. And technically the Part 8 liveblog never ended, since the manga is still ongoing.

As I developed an appreciation for the manga, I started to feel like I should go back and check out the comic versions of Parts 1 through 4. Where better to start than my personal favorite? But I never got around to it, until now.

There's a few things I want to explore with Part 2. First, I want to go through and work out why exactly I like it so much. It's kind of tough to articulate, but usually I just say that it's fast-paced and something's always happening. Part 1 takes a while to get going, and Parts 3-8 rely on the Stand concept, which means that each of them occasionally fall into the trap of becoming formulaic. Part 2 doesn't have the hassle of introducing all the lore, and it doesn't have the luxury of just doing a gauntlet of Stand Battles to pad out the story. But I think there's more to it than that. Battle Tendency has a charm all it's own, and that's what I want to talk about.

Second, now that I've become familiar with Parts 1-7 (and most of 8), I want to go back and see how 2 holds up as part of this mythos. BT sort of gets overlooked, I think, and that's fair, since it doesn't involve Dio, Stands, or the more outlandish costumes of the later installments. A lot of fans write off Parts 1 and 2 for being "boring", but at least Phantom Blood carries the prestige of starting it all, and providing the origin of Dio. Something I think a lot about is whether or not Part 2 "connects" with the later entries in the JoJo series. It forms a trilogy with 1 and 3, and Part 4 features Joseph's legacy in an important way, but what about the later ones? Parts 5 through 8 owe a huge debt to Stardust Crusaders for introducing Stands, and to Phantom Blood for introducing JoJo's, but what does Part 2 give them, if anything?

Third, I'm interested in seeing how BT holds up in isolation. It's a direct sequel to Part 1, and it ends with a prelude to Part 3, so it's clearly designed to function as part of a larger saga. But Parts 4 and 5 really don't operate that way, and that got me thinking that maybe Part 2 is more self-contained than I give it credit for.

But enough about that, let's get this started.

There's two plot threads in these opening chapters. One reintroduces Robert E. O. Speedwagon, now a 70 year old oil tycoon, and Straizo, who has succeeded the late Tonpetti as the Ripple Master. Speedwagon has been using his oil fortune to fund a research organization called the Speedwagon Foundation, and it discovered something major during an archaeological expedition: an engraving of the stone mask, the same one Dio used to turn himself into a vampire 50 years earlier. Note that the mummified corpse lying on the slab with the engraving has vampire fangs. Whoever this guy is, he didn't just know about the masks, he used one personally.

It might get revealed later in the comics, but I'm pretty sure the anime version had Speedwagon explain that he primary purpose of his foundation was to learn more about phenomena like the Stone Mask, which is probably why they were digging up an Aztec temple in Mexico to begin with. As I recall, the Stone Mask was discovered in that part of the world, and taken back to Europe, where it eventually came into the possession of the Joestar family. Speedwagon would know this tale, and so if he wanted to find out more about the mask, he would have known where to start. Fifty years later, he seems to have hit paydirt.

But the mask engraving isn't why he called Straizo all the way in from Tibet. Deeper in the temple, there's a weird looking area that looks like something from out of an H.R. Giger painting. In the center stands this column, or pillar, if you will, and mounted on the pillar is...

...This guy, surrounded by more stone masks. When I first watched this part of the anime, I though the big reveal here was that there were lots and lots of Stone Masks, which would be a big problem, since Part 1 made a big deal out of destroying the one Stone Mask that started all the trouble. And maybe the guy in the pillar was the one who invented the things, I thought, but the bigger problem is that he made so many of them. But no, Speedwagon explains that the "Pillar Man" is not an image carved into the stone, but a living being, in some form of suspended animation. He even has a pulse.

So who is this guy and why did he create the Stone Masks? Speedwagon does not care. He only wants this Pillar Man destroyed before he wakes up, and that's the sole reason he called in Straizo. The two of them were the only survivors of the battle with Dio 50 years ago, and Straizo's Hamon power, also known as the Ripple, can destroy vampires that were created by the Stone Mask. So he's desperately hoping Straizo can finish off the Pillar Man the same way. But Straizo doesn't seem as concerned about it, and he asks about Joseph Joestar instead. So I guess I ought to circle back to the other plotline...

Fifty years after Jonathan Joestar sacrificed himself to defeat Dio Brando, his wife Erina and his grandson Joseph have moved to New York City. Joseph tries to buy a Coke, but this kid swipes his wallet. Kind of funny how Joesph's first and last appearances in JJBA are him getting robbed.

But the kid runs afoul of the local corrupt cops, who bludgeon him with their batons and threaten to put him in jail for 20 years unless he agrees to give them a cut of whatever money he makes from pickpocketing. When Joseph catches up to this scene, the cop even says he's going to keep Joseph's wallet "as evidence". I gotta say, not everything from Battle Tendency has aged well, but this police brutality stuff has become incredibly relevant. This could be 2021, except the cop would have had a gun, and he would have shot Smokey, then Joseph because he mistook the Coke bottle for a rocket launcher.

Joseph tries to defuse the situation by claiming he gave the wallet to the kid as a gift, but the cop doesn't believe that story, and he wouldn't care even if he did. He even smears boogers in Joseph's face just to prove that he can say and do whatever he pleases. Up to this point, Joseph looks and seems a lot like Jonathan. Later artwork tries to downplay that resemblance, probably just so it's easier to tell them apart. The anime gave Joseph different color hair, and Hirohiko Araki himself started drawing young Joseph with aviator goggles all the time, even though he doesn't wear them that much in this story. But starting out, the idea was that Joseph is the spitting image of his grandfather, and it almost looks like this is just an clever way to sneak Jonathan back into the story and transport him forward in time, except....

Coming through, coming through, coming through now

Coming through, coming through, coming through

Shake it like it's heat, Overdrive!

Yeah, so Joseph can do Hamon/Ripple tricks just like his grandfather, and all the others guys who could use Hamon back in Part 1. The difference is that when Joseph does it, it looks coooooool. After breaking Officer Hulk Hogan’s trigger finger, Joseph takes a big swig of soda, because it’s awesome.

To Smokey’s surprise, Joseph did all that badass stuff a second ago, but he’s terrified about his grandmother scolding him for it. So Joseph wants to run for it, and that suits Smokey, so they rush off together, beginning a long tradition of JoJo’s running from things. Enemies, consequences, you name it.

Smokey asks Joseph how he learned how to do that trick with the coke bottle, and he says he has no idea, he’s just always been able to do it. He knows his grandfather had the same power, but he’s dead, and so are his mother and father. Curiously, Joseph’s father did not have Hamon powers, so it seems to have skipped a generation.

And that sets up the other side of the plot. Speedwagon wants Straizo to destroy the Pillar Man immediately, but Straizo first asks about Joseph. He had heard some time ago that Joseph had innate Hamon abilities, and he had used them once to rescue Speedwagon from a kidnapping attempt in midair. A flashback shows us this moment, with guys threatening to ransom and kill Speedwagon, but Joseph is just chilling in the back with a Superman comic.

Okay, time out. This panel rules and all, but the Superman comic book didn’t start until 1939, a year after Battle Tendency begins. Superman was featured in the 1938 magazine Action Comics, but this scene on the plane is a flashback to Joseph from his early teens. Also, the earliest DC bullet logo didn’t appear until 1940, so what is this? Some kind of magic, time travelling comic book? I hope someone got fired for this blunder!

Anyway, Joseph was content to ignore the hijackers until one of them struck him, and even that wouldn’t have upset him except he got his own blood on his clothes, which Erina bought him, so that sends him into a rage. Speedwagon was worried that Joseph might clobber the hijackers, but instead he knocks out the pilot, then drags him and Speedwagon out of the plane before it crashes. The main thrust of that story was that Speedwagon was more worried about what Joseph might do than the hijackers who had already threatened to murder him. Joseph is slow to anger, but once you piss him off he’s going to go to war, and he doesn’t always think things through.

But he’s never been trained to use his powers like Straizo’s order. Upon hearing this, Straizo kills his own disciples, and all of the Speedwagon Foundation guys, then knocks Speedwagon himself out. This will anger Joseph when he hears about it, but Straizo is counting on this. As he explains, Hamon power can slow his aging process down considerably. He and Speedwagon are both about 70 here, but he looks much younger. Even so, he’s feeling his age, and he confesses that he always admired Dio for his immortality and power. So now that there’s Stone Masks available, he’s decided to use one on himself, become a vampire, and become “a being that surpasses all”.

And that’s a theme that runs through all of Battle Tendency, along with the rest of the JoJo franchise. The main villains always seek power to position themselves above the rest of humanity. At first, it seems kind of random for one of the men who opposed Dio to suddenly switch allegiences like this, but in truth, it’s human nature to be tempted by this kind of power. Dio succumbed to the lure of the Mask, and now we find that Straizo would have done the same. He just didn’t have the opportunity until now.

But the reason he’s concerned about Joseph is that he’s thinking this through. Dio was defeated after all, so Straizo wants to eliminate anyone who could potentially defeat him. Aside from himself and Speedwagon, the only others who know about the battle with Dio and the Stone Mask are Erina and Joseph. Once he eliminates them, he’ll be free to do as he pleases.

Back to New York, this is a pretty sweet drawing of a car. I’m not a car guy, but even I can get behind this. By now, Smokey has met Erina Joestar, and he finds out some of the backstory from Part 1. Erina’s husband died at sea, and she was pregnant with their son, Joseph’s father, and had a baby girl whom she rescued from the same incident at sea. The two children grew up, married, had Joseph, and died, the father in World War I, and the mother of some unspecified illness. Perhaps out of loneliness, Erina is “unflinchingly kind” even to someone like Smokey Brown, who doesn’t seem to think he’s worthy of her favor.

Anyway, Erina wants to take Smokey out to dinner at this nice Italian restaurant, but this racist mafia guy makes a big stink about a Black person being allowed to eat there. Joseph gets up to kick his ass, but first he has to check with Erina to make sure it’s okay, and she’s like “Yeah, destroy that guy,” because even though she doesn’t approve of Joseph beating up people, she can’t abide disrespect to her friends. This leads to the memorable fight scene where Joseph is like eight steps ahead of his opponent. He goes for his brass knuckles, but can’t find them, and Joseph deduces where they are because of some bloodstains on his shirt. He even suggests what this guy is about to say next because he’s so predictable.

Then he dodges every blow, moving so quickly that this jerk thinks he was hitting Joseph, when in fact he was punching a hat rack behind Joseph, and somehow he didn’t notice that he impaled his hand on broken wood until Joseph explained it to him. And honestly, this feels like the prototype for a lot of Stand Battles down the line. I’ll have more to say on that later.

What puts Battle Tendency over the top is how Joseph not only outwits this big lummox, but the rest of the diners at this restaurant all start applauding him for doing it. They’re just honored to be present in this insane comic book where literally anything can happen. “He made that asshole punch a hat rack! This is awesome!”

Then this dude suddenly speaks up. He’s not only the mafia guy in charge of the first guy, but he’s also heard a hot tip about Speedwagon getting murdered in Mexico by a Tibetan man. He knew Erina would be interested in hearing this, but he’d never met her before. Small world, huh?

How would this guy already know about it, though? I guess Straizo deliberately leaked the story, specifically so Joseph would find out about it sooner, but it seems awfully convenient. But that’s how Battle Tendency rolls. This thing’s only seven volumes long, and we’ve got a lot of ground to cover...

#jojo's bizarre adventure #battle tendency #joseph joestar #smokey brown #erina joestar #robert e o speedwagon #straizo #santana

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wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 4 years

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Psycho Analysis: The Moonchild

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS!)

I feel like this one was inevitable. As soon as I decided to bust open the doors on literary mediums like books and comics, this guy was always going to loom over me. Well, let’s just bite the bullet and talk about him.

In the final portion of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Centuries, we are introduced to Oliver Haddo’s ultimate creation… a creation he is incredibly disappointed in. You see, the Antichrist or Moonchild is a whiny, miserable young adult strung out on prescription drugs because he went mad after realizing what he was being manipulated into. He is the subject of derision by all who know him, and is treated like a punching bag by most of the narrative, up to and including God literally telling him he’s a bitch. Our villain here is just a miserable, whiny, kind of misogynistic brat who doesn’t even want to be a villain, and in general is just unpleasant and ineffective save for a school massacre he pulls off.

Oh yeah, and his real name is Harry Potter. Kind of an important detail, that.

Motivation/Goals: So as the antichrist, you’d think Mr. Potter might, you know, maybe want to bring about the end of days and all that. But no! He actually pops pills and isolates himself in Grimmauld Place so that he doesn’t do that! He doesn’t want to be the Antichrist and, really, who would? Most of his screentime is thus spent whining, until he ultimately decides to embrace being the Antichrist because he feels he has no other choice. We’ll get into all of that in a bit, but honestly, his motivation is extremely weak despite the incredibly graphic setup we’re given to his downward spiral: when he first discovered he was being manipulated by Satanists, he went on a magical school shooting, shown to us in a first-person perspective to emulate the games that were often blamed for real school shootings. We get to see Harry slaughter Ron, Hermione, Snape, Dumbledore, and so on, we get to see what he did to Hogsmeade and the Hogwarts Express, and absolutely none of it is pleasant.

With setup like that you’d expect maybe a little more intrigue and indecision, maybe some sort of conflict between fate and choice or something beyond Harry sitting around half-naked, high off of antidepressants, being a whiny little bitch, but you might be giving the dude who wrote a porno where the kids from Peter Pan engage in underage incest a bit too much credit.

Final Fate: So Harry has gone absolutely bonkers and it seems that nothing can possibly stop him; our heroes seem to be written into a corner. So what does Moore do? He has God - who in this universe is Mary Poppins - descend from the heavens and have her say how she protects the imaginations of children and how she just straight up hates Harry. Never mind that Harry is quite literally an abused child who was twisted by the cruel machinations of a body surfing wizard, apparently he’s a child not worth protecting or caring about and is unworthy of sympathy. Anyway, Mary Poppins just turns him into a chalk drawing and that’s the end of that.

Great writing, Alan Moore, critically acclaimed creator of Watchmen!

Best Scene: Saying Harry here had a ‘best scene’ is seriously pushing it, because literally every moment he’s on the page the comic just beats you over the head with Moore’s biases. I wish I could put the school shooting sequence, because the idea behind it is legitimately intriguing, but the whole sequence is just interwoven with Moore whacking off his hateboner for the series. But on the subject of boners… well, I think there’s only one panel that can truly and adequately sum up this entire character and how much of a miserable failure he is. Those who have followed me for a long time knew this was coming, but for the rest of you, behold - Harry Potter Dick Lightning:

Final Thoughts & Score: Quite frankly, this is the worst thing Alan Moore has ever done.

I’m not even mad as a fan of Harry Potter; Moore was honestly ahead of his time in hating the franchise to this level. The issue I have is that he doesn’t really deconstruct or criticize in any meaningful way, he just is doing edgy “take that” stuff that you’d expect from a chump like Garth Ennis. Like, the concept here is incredibly solid and intriguing - this version of Harry has been groomed from birth by Satanists to become the Antichrist, with all of his adventures fabricated and all of his relationships manufactured to keep him under the illusion he is a hero to mankind. Upon discovering the truth, he snaps, massacres everyone at his school for their role in his manipulations, and went into exile to stave off the apocalypse, although he ultimately and bitterly accepts his role because he feels he was never given a choice… and he wasn’t! He’s an incredibly depressing and miserable deconstruction of the concept of “The Chosen One,” and yet the whole thing falls apart on multiple levels.

The first is that the Harry Potter franchise already deconstructs the concept of “The Chosen One;” the text goes out of its way to point out that Voldemort’s own actions are what is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by targeting someone with the will and drive to fight back against him. Harry’s not so much chosen by fate so much as forcibly chosen by an evil manipulator… and that’s basically what we have here, but with less substance. Moore doesn’t really comment on anything, instead leading into the second big issue - Harry’s whole role is to be a strawman punching bag villain so that Moore can complain about modern fantasy franchises. Moore seems to view Harry as the epitome of the lazy regurgitation of the same story over and over that modern blockbuster culture so often falls into… except that Harry Potter was an original product developed by one person and had no artificial longevity slapped onto the franchise in the form of unneeded sequels or spinoffs to extend the lifespan of the franchise at the time Moore wrote this. Throw in the fact Moore just in general seems extremely contemptuous of any post-70s pop culture in Centuries and how Harry is ultimately taken down by crusty old characters from older literature really just leads to Moore coming across as a grumpy old man who hates anything new, not helped by his tired criticisms of millennials and their perceived lack of culture. Maybe Moore would have had more of a point if he created this storyline today, but he didn’t. Thus, he has no point and he just looks like a miserable old fart.

Sure, you can argue that maybe Moore’s basic parody of the character by exaggerating his tendencies to their logical extreme and attacking elements of the plot that had been criticized to death by fans to begin with has its place, and perhaps you could even say that the take in the comic is just an extreme take on how Harry acted in the fifth book, what with the lashing out at his friends and his general feeling of a lack of control, and there is some merit to that, or there would be if Moore’s own unrepentant bias didn’t undermine everything. Look, you can hate Harry Potter, but then why slap it into your work? It’s supremely cringey when people insert characters they hate into fanfiction and just completely derail their characters so that they can treat them like garbage with the narrative, and is that not what Moore did here? Is League not just public domain fanfiction? There’s a reason why I coined “Harry Potter Dick Lightning” as a phrase used to showcase a moment where a fanwork’s contempt for a character becomes so extreme that it not only jumps the shark, it rockets over it into the upper atmosphere. Any criticisms or messages Moore is trying to convey is tarnished by his blatant, seething contempt for the character, and that gets in the way of good writing and good storytelling. Having two characters express pity at having to murder an abused child who was warped by Satanists into being a tool of the apocalypse does not make up for how the narrative constantly mocks, belittles, and treats him like garbage to the point he really can’t function as an effective villain that can be taken seriously.

All of this adds up to what I’d argue is the absolute worst villain in all of fiction, bar none. There is just not a single redeeming quality about the Antichrist as a character. None. Nothing. I cannot think of another villain that so completely fails on every single level as this one does. He doesn’t work as an antagonist because most of the bad things he does are offscreen and he doesn’t come into conflict with the heroes until the very end, and most of his screentime features him doing nothing of note. He doesn’t work as a critique, because he is acting as a criticism for things his character never really represented in the first place. He only really functions as the sort of garbage you’d see in My Immortal, where the characters you know and love are turned into evil jerks because the writer hates them - but he even fails at being that, because at least My Immortal is funny about it!

I am going out on a limb and saying that there cannot possibly be a villain that so utterly fails at everything it sets out to be as hard as Harry does. I don’t even want to try and believe it. And so, without hesitation, I am giving Moore’s shallow Potter parody a 0/10. And I pray to Mary Poppins that this is the only one of those I ever dish out, because I really don’t want to imagine what could possibly be worse than Harry Potter Dick Lightning.

#Psycho Analysis #Harry Potter #the league of extraordinary gentlemen #Alan Moore #Centuries #The Antichrist #The Moonchild

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reelybadfnafocs · 3 years

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Here I go (oh boy, sorry for the terrible English, I’m actually Brazilian so this is hard) (i was about to be like holaaaaaaaa otro latino but then i remembred yall speak porch of geese fml. anyway hi. mod mangles on the case)

Name: Dolly the Dog

Species: Dog

Gender: Female

Job: The narrator of the shows/babysitter

Purpose: To help with the narration during the shows and to take care of the lost children in the establishment. Children are instructed to, if they ever lose sight of their parents, stay close to the stage and play with her; the parents are instructed to look there first. If the parents don’t come back to take their child, one of the employees has to discover where the child lives and take the poor kid home. If the kid is not comfortable with the employee, they can take their favorite animatronic to accompany them (this was only permitted after one incident, in which a girl made a scandal because she didn’t wanted to go with the day guard to her house). while i think the concept of a kid showing up to someone’s house with like a 6 ft furry robot is funny, i don’t see this really panning out in practice. as iffy as i am about it, i think the “babysitter/lost child center” thing can stay as is, but i think employees would defer to calling parents first (if the child is old enough to have memorized a phone number/have a phone), local authorities, or CPS.

Creator: Sarah Brown (another OC), the owner of the establishment and the creator of all the animatronics.

Location: The Showtime Funland, a restaurant for all the family (but specially for their children). It’s a vibrant, cheery and colorful place, where there are seven animatronics: Ollie the Owl, Billy the Bird, Fany the Fish, Charlie the Cat, Dolly the Dog, Happy and Lucky. Happy and Lucky are the only human-ish animatronics, and both of them are out of order during the game, and the others are the main actors of the stage, where they tell stories with musicals during the meals on the restaurant or just stay on the playground with the kids; the only one who can’t go to the playground during the day is Dolly, who’s programmed to stay and take care of the children waiting for their parents.

Where: On the stage; she sits on the front of the stage, on the right, and narrates the story that’s being performed.

Age: She’s the oldest animatronic: seven years of functioning. Her character is older than that, because of her old version, but since it was malfunctioning in a way which wasn’t even possible to take lightly, she was replaced by her new version. Her character is 14 years old. this is a little unclear to me…has she been in service for 14 years, or is the character supposed to be like a 14 year old child? i don’t think animatronics really need ages tbh but i dont see any issue with this either, so you can scrap this detail if you feel unsure about it.

Haunted/not: She is not haunted, but her program is malfunctioning; her AI is not recognizing the faces of the employees during the night for “unknown reasons”, and she attacks them as if they are “threats to the establishment”, in a way that she wasn’t programmed to do; she was supposed to call the police if any intruder came, but she becomes aggressive during the night because of someone meddling with her system.

During the game: The first thing the game shows is a cutscene, where the night guard is guided through the whole building by the day guard (called “Steve Hughes” by Annie, but it’s not known if this is the same day guard or not), and is introduced to the animatronics and told a bit of the story behind the establishment. It was created by Sarah Brown, a famous inventor, and was a well known establishment since its opening during the 80’s. During its history in business, there where countless robbers and stupid teenagers trying to get in and mess around with the things inside Funland, so the night guard was supposed to deal with these problems; but the animatronics, after a terrible incident in which the night guard was attacked by a robber, received a new AI capable of recognizing the faces of the employees and to give the night guard an alert if there was any intruder. The night guard is left alone to watch the cameras while listening to “Annie”’s recordings, since she was the last night guard, and discover about the malfunctioning of the AIs. In the third night, Annie quits, leaving the player with her guide about how to avoid the animatronics and with some recordings of how to flee if there’s something happening during the night (like a fire, for example) without getting caught. First, only Ollie and Fany are threats, but through night two and three Billy and Charlie too start to malfunction; in the end of night three, Dolly starts to do so as well. In the fifth night, Happy and Lucky also leave the deposit where they are hidden to attack the player. On the sixth bonus night, Annie left an odd recording of her and Sarah talking about the AIs of the animatronics, and Sarah implies that she knows of someone who would “do anything to make his business bigger than mine again, and wouldn’t hesitate to sabotage my creations”, as if she knows about the malfunctioning.

During the nights (3-5 (and bonus night)): She is the most predictable and organized of the animatronics, always making this specific path: first she leaves the stage, where she normally is, then goes through the playground (and stays there for a while), passes by the kitchen, through the deposit (where the audio doesn’t work, but the camera does), and then to the left corridor to the night guard’s office. She never changes her path, but as the game progresses she begins to become more and more fast and, since the other animatronics are more unpredictable, it’s harder to pay attention to her movements. Annie says, on her second recording, that she’s afraid of all the animatronics besides Dolly, since she is “the less threatening”; but, on her guide to escape on night four, she seems to have changed her mind (or it was a previous recording, before she labeled Dolly as “predictable and almost harmless”), it doesn’t chronologically make sense to have this be a previous recording, unless you intend to imply that annie went back and remade recordings for nights 1-3 right before she quit in addition to the night 4 guide. saying that “it would be best if you pay attention to her, since she’s fast and difficult to see without the flashlights”.

Skill: She tries to kill the player, first at the end of night three until night five (and the sixth bonus night). Dolly has a very advanced AI and is equipped with a recognition system, at least a hundred plays and stories on her memory, a voice system that helps her to change her voice when needed, the ability to sing, dance and interact with humans properly, and a system that can regulate her body heat. i was gonna say a hundred seems a bit much but idk how many stories the storyteller-esque animatronics are programmed to have tbh. if youre aiming to make the restaurant one of those cheaper places, id recommend scaling this number down.

Personality: During the day, Dolly is incredible cocky and arrogant when it comes to her role as the narrator, and she proclaims herself the “star of the show”, something her old version had but was even worse, coming to the extreme of pushing another animatronic off the stage and destroying it completely after getting annoyed by the poor robot. She’s kind with the children and the adults alike, but acts more politely with the elder and more sisterly with the younger audience; she says, during the game, that it’s horrible to never be able to go to the playground, but that she loves to take care of the lost children. During the night, she becomes a very aggressive but organized animatronic, something that her personality has during daytime as well; she is often annoyed by the others, since they sometimes go against the script for comic relief. Dolly is the most talkative of the animatronics during their attempts to kill the player, often bragging about her role as the narrator and star of the Showtime Funland and threatening to “end the show” of the night guard.

Appearance: A black and white dog (white on her mouth, chin, hands and belly), with big, glowing brown-yellowish eyes. Her ears are long and fall by the sides of her head, and she has paws instead of feet, but still has hands. She wears a magician hat with a blue bow on it, and sometimes during her show takes it off, just to reveal something inside of it that can help during the play (for example, a sword so that the protagonist can slay the dragon or a pie to the little protagonist give as a gift to a friend); she also wears a blue bowtie that matches her hat’s bow.

ok, final thoughts:

i was going to comment on how high-quality these animatronics seem to be, but given that you go out of your way to describe Sarah Brown as a very competent mechanic(? is that the right term idk), i think ill let it go. this seems like one of those higher end fancy-ish restaurants so most of this can slide, unlike if you were to make the location be some sort of cheap or dirty diner.

no notes on the story, i think it works well. the game seems to have kind of a steep difficulty spike towards the latter half with nights 3, 4, and 5, but thats not really an issue i think because you deal with more shit on fnaf 2 anyway. there were some iffy bits here and there, but nothing too bad that was worth pointing out or changing, so overall this is a solid character! good job :D

~mod mangle

#WHAT WAS THAT THING WITH THE TAGS OH GOD WJFKSDKEKFKSKF #submission #mod mangle

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overseer2020 · 3 years

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Hero Work 4

The first side story I'd like to show is this idea that would have to be put in another set entirely if I ever use it. In the vein of Platinum Angel and other creatures that present obstacles for the opponent and must be destroyed before victory can be achieved, I dreamt up Rubberbanding Angel.

I don't have fateful hour in my design for Heroes & Villains. I suppose at the end of the (major) story, I could see a case being made for including fateful hour. Heck, Ethra only has the one Angelic Caretaker, so I guess it wouldn't be unfeasible to see her eventually beaten down, exhausted and at her most desperate. Maybe this is a Heroes & Villains card after all!

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When I was coming up with the "Avengers Alliance" cycle of keywords (Blaster, Infiltrator, Tactician, Scrapper and Bruiser), I didn't stop there. After all there were a few common keywords left over.

On an unrelated note (because this keyword doesn't necessarily belong on this card), in addition to working on Part 2, I'm also revising Part 1 so it dovetails well with the rest of the block. While I have so far only hinted at there being a contingent of self-actualized, unofficially authorized crimefighters (aka private detectives and vigilantes), I don't think I hit that nail hard enough, so I intend to introduce the concept of The Man of Mystery.

I suppose you could say that a Man of Mystery should probably be wearing a mask. But maybe this person doesn't need one or hasn't thought of it yet. This isn't final art anyway.

As for the new keyword, I considered a bunch of keywords to go with double strike. Flanking, provoke, skulk, poisonous, wither, ward 2, bushido 2, and "{This} can’t be blocked by creatures with power 2 or less" (daunt) were all contenders for at least a moment. Flanking was closest to what I wanted. Provoke was almost the final keyword, but I backed away from using the actual keyword as I wanted the opponent to choose how to block. Also, gaining provoke after the attack trigger window is counter-productive.

Including Frenzy in the design file is actually a distinct possibility since I'm already bringing Absorb in (they debuted at the same time in Future Sight). Both abilities (as well as Provoke) play into the combative nature of the block. Introducing a new keyword in Crimeworld, however, at this stage would have largely negative effects on the balance of cards that have already been designed, requiring an extensive rethink on the entire set.

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While Men of Mystery don't need their own "lord", I had this name pop into my head, it made me chuckle, so I mocked up a card for it and tossed on another "Alliance"-style keyword. The name is an intentional mash-up of actual pulp heroes in the vein of some of the other creatures I've designed. The keyword almost had Absorb in the mix (but once you have indestructible as an option, what's the point?) Despite neither element being designed for the other, they work surprisingly well together.

At the last moment (literal moments ago as I type), I added the p/t bonus and Vigilance -- because the preeminent Vigilante should probably have Vigilance. I almost put in unblockable, but protection from creatures is a bit more useful in a world full of creatures with activated abilities.

For those who may not know, The Spirit, The Spider and The Shadow were all "mystery men" pulp heroes.

The image comes from the surprising number of eldritch horror-affiliated images I came across when looking for pictures of 1940s-type detectives. I suddenly really like this image. (And this card; I might just have to use it somewhere.) I considered using the following image for one of the above cards, but as that's a real cover for The Spider, I didn't think it was wise nor creative to use it for my original characters.

I love the way he's swinging into action while hanging from his own noose. I don't think that imagery would fly in a Wizard of the Coast product, though. The gun is also a Magic: the Gathering no-no. I left the text box blank because I couldn't think of anything interesting and this was about the art anyway. At the last moment, I gave it a name like it was the first issue of the comic/magazine. (Saga?)

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The final Alliance keyword bucks the trend by triggering when an opponent attacks you. As such, I mocked up a defender to show it off.

Suddenly gaining reach implies jumping up to stop incoming creatures and I had to give it some power because blockers with first strike are a pain to deal with.

Also, for symmetry, here's where Absorb slots in. I didn't put Absorb or Frenzy into the first five because I didn't want to force those keywords to only be useable on Ethra. It also feels wrong to "introduce" a new keyword and then incorporate that keyword inside the functionality of another new keyword. Perhaps the ancillary products or "Return to Ethra" will make use of these keywords.

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Wow! I didn't think I would have enough to say about these idle thought cards. Now I'm excited about testing them out in real games. (I really need a playtest group. I've seen some societies online, but I never quite got the hang of having virtual friends.)

Next Time: ????

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