#& of course necessary scene where all six of them fuse into one guy and it is Fucking Terrifying

[polyboros]

i need to pick up xbc3 again soon to get back in the groove but my halloween ouroboros fic idea is "what if interlinking and being ouroboros made you share traits with your interlink partner outside of it and also Changed You" aka this is the fic where i catboyify noah

#kbitycus talks #less (body) horror more comedy but still very present ''my body is growing new appendages'' emotion #taion gets wings lanz gets fire. & everybodys Deal is sort of amplified and messy and the lines between interlink partners are blurred #(sena gets mio's cat-eye flashing. this does not bode well. taion vc if i get cat ears too i will lose my mind) #also playing around w concept of moebius physically changing you outside of the interlink #aka what if EVERYONE looked like they were cracking into pieces #my other current xbc3 fic idea is a v simple ''many interlinks one ouroboros'' type au where they all can fuse w each other #mio/sena & lanz/eunie interlinks live rent free in my head especially #but also noah/taion interlink i think would be the starting point there. i'd have to give myself a little refresher on the timeline #& of course necessary scene where all six of them fuse into one guy and it is Fucking Terrifying #the original halloween au also plays into ouroboros becoming inhuman in subtler ways that arent just what they originally had #something something they arent shadowy monsters but there is something off about them still even when moebius' illusion fades #that is still your comrade that is still your friend that is still the boy you saved terms ago but now he is Changed. #there is something sharp in his eyes like the mouth of a snake and his shadow is too long and loops oddly into the others' #etc etc you know how it goes!!!

[winchestersingerautorepair]

A Rift Between

A Brief(-ish) History of Dean, Cas, & Rifts

Let’s talk about rifts for a moment. And when I say rifts, I don’t mean their personal disagreements -- if I were to be discussing that, this post would be less of a brief history and more of a thesis paper. 

No, I’m talking about rift rifts. As in, actual, literal tears in the spacetime continuum. They are littered across the whole run of this show, and we’ve recently had two whole seasons devoted to them. So, the sudden reappearance of rift-adjacent plotlines carries with it a weighty load of textual relevance.

Dean and Castiel’s relationship arc, a fan favorite, began when Leviathans, the notorious fan-unfavorite, came into the picture. 

No, Maeve! Dean and Castiel’s relationship arc began in season 4, not 7! Cas was barely even in season 7! 

Well, let me explain. Season 7, the age of Sera Gamble, was a total show reset. Was it uncomfortable? Yes. Did we all hate it? Yes. But like with muscle, you’ve got to tear through the old before you can develop something new, and Season 7 did this job quite effectively. An identity crisis at that scale means either a massive change of pace or a creative death, and as the show is still on, number one it is. 

So, while we can most reliably chart the beginning of an intentional, substantive romantic undercurrent to Season 8, it is the waiting that allowed it to come to fruition-- Season 7 was a void, an unsustainable period of creative drought, a long cold winter in which seeds fell and laid dormant. And like the winter, it was necessary for rebirth.

This brings me to the first DeanCas rift: 

~~

The Purgatory Spell

Episode: 7x01

This tear in spacetime was the culmination of Castiel’s Season 6 character arc. It was the final, greatest betrayal, the irredeemable course of action which struck his relationship with the Winchesters a fatal blow-- and though his last act was to attempt to right his wrongs, the emergence of this rift meant estrangement and death for the relationship (and for Castiel.)

This incident is established as far more significant for Dean than it is for Sam, so I won’t spend much time justifying my classification of this rift as primarily DeanCas. It’s made pretty damn clear through Dean’s behavior throughout Season 7.

Castiel’s departure catalyzed the emergence of Leviathans. As the lore promised, they brought death and destruction to the whole ecosystem, purging the show and readying it for reincarnation; but I’ve already made this point.

As Destiel 1.0 dies, Destiel 2.0 is born.

~~~

The Purgatory Portal

Episode: 8x07

Let us journey back to "A Little Slice of Kevin"-- the gayest thing to happen to Supernatural up to that point. Suddenly, Dean and Cas’s ambiguity is no longer a joke. It’s no longer flippantly referenced, but Built Into The Narrative In A Noticeable Way. After Season 7, Season 8 shocked the system, earning Purgatory celebrity status as the Destiel fandom exploded back to life. 

But, more important things. The events surrounding this portal not only codified romantic subtext, but reshaped their relationship by putting it in grave peril. Lovers trapped in separate worlds. There’s only like ten thousand examples of this in other fictional, romantic(-ally coded) relationships. Sigh.

As Destiel 2.0 dies, Destiel 3.0 is born.

~~~

Seasons 9, 10, and 11 are filled with near misses. Divisions between worlds/fates test and change their bond -- Heaven and Hell exert tremendous force on both, and the gates of Heaven and the Darkness’s breach of barriers flirt pretty openly with the rift theme -- but there isn’t anything that fits the profile cut and dry, so let us leap to Season 12. Five long years of glacial shifts, five long years of a slow, steady amping up of queer subtext. An argument can be made that it had graduated from subtext in some places, but both fandom and GA were frog-boiled enough in their interpretations for this argument to be an aside.

Destiel 3.0 reaches a transitional stage, and becomes Destiel 3.0+.

Now, It’s season 12. And like goddamned CLOCKWORK, six years after Season 6, another unstable tear in spacetime appears, and terminates Castiel’s character arc.

Rift? Check. Cas dead? Check. We’ve seen this pattern. Time for shit to CHANGE. And boy, did it.

~~~

The Rift

Episode: 12x23

Oh, boy. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. Castiel’s death in the Season 12 finale was a magnum opus of SPN’s romantically coded imagery. I could elaborate, but if you’ve read this far into this post you likely already know what I’m talking about. My point is, a hall of mirrors is the chosen space in which Destiel 3.0+ is killed. 

The relationship death lasts only a short while; their estrangement in separate realms is a five episode-long period of detachment and review. Our characters, as well as the viewers, stride through a hall of mirrors. In solitude, this DeanCas winter becomes a chance to reflect, because there is no better way to get a feel for the importance of something than to eliminate it. The crucial elements of Dean and Cas’s relationship, what they mean to each other, becomes clearer than ever before because, look! This is Dean without Cas! This is the show without Cas! Don’t you hate it?

I mean, guys. Mirrors. Cas spoke to a reflection of himself in the Empty. Literally. He addressed his greatest fears about relationships with himself. He was forced to rewatch his greatest mistakes, and what gets featured? Our first two DeanCas rifts. F*ck this show.

DreamHunter parallel! 13x10 reenacted this scene for us with Claire and Kaia. 

Then, 13x05 changes the whole game once more. You know, the episode titled Thanatology. The study of Death. Fuck this show.

As Destiel 3.0+ dies, Destiel 4.0 is born.

~~~

The intensity of the queer narrative amps up continually. Things are getting harder to write off.

Rifts between worlds, crossover and confinement, and estrangement, and the blurring of lines, and the breaking of old taboos/breach of old barriers dominates the remainder of Season 13 and Season 14. We hold this broad focus for a long time, and Dean and Castiel become the emotional equivalent of the plot arc, always there, brewing, but taking a backseat to the Big Stuff. A wall rises, and solidifies. Silver Pole of Communication Barriers, anyone?

Then? Season 15 kicks us in the Destiel balls.

Full disclosure: I didn’t see this next part coming. I dared not ask season 15 for anything this significant, so the last scene of 15x08 just about took my life. 

~~~

The Purgatory Rift

Episode(s): 15x08, 15x09

Dun dun DUN!!

This twist was my favorite Christmas present, because it communicated to me that the writers have an understanding of Dean and Cas’s history to match our own. Not only are they actively writing them utilizing the Destiel playbook, they obviously care immensely about the destiny of their relationship. I am speaking too soon to say this definitively, but this mission has all the hallmarks of a plot device designed to serve many purposes in respect to Dean and Castiel. They’ve got ALL the ingredients. There are so many things tied in here that it gets pretty damn near fanfiction territory.

Please read my reaction to the purgatory twist if you need context, as I don’t feel much like regurgitating it. This post is long enough, lol. (A bloom that grows only in one place? Fuck you, writers. You’re going to KILL me.)

~~~

So, to recap: In a universe defined by barriers and guidelines, a relationship that refuses to be defined will be under constant siege. Dean and Castiel suffer from the sheer reality of walking lines between two designated states of being-- friends and lovers, angel and human, take your pick. The current order isn’t friendly to beings who don’t fit a category. Until the barriers are stripped away, they cannot exist as they are, and rifts will continue to rip them apart. 

The Purgatory Rift of 15x08 is such a big deal because it fuses themes. The rifts of the Dabb era have merged with the gateways of the Carver era. Not only are our long-standing almost-lovers returning to their relationship’s place of origin, they are doing so by breaching physical barriers designed to keep them apart; and all the while, the most dangerous, important rift is not the one in the fabric of reality, but the one in their relationship. 

I expect this major rift to end no differently than it has in the past. Dean and Cas will be separated, and Cas will be out of reach. And then, they’ll be reunited. But, where will that take us? What will the next reincarnation look like? 

As Destiel 4.0 dies, something will be born.

#who sucks at tags? me #spn meta #spotting patterns #symbolism #destiel #purgatory #spn s7 #spn s8 #spn s12 #spn s15 #theme: rebirth #endgame speculation #15x09 #15x09 speculation #rifts #mine

[jim-reid]

The Jesus and Mary Chain on Psychocandy: ‘It was a little miracle’

26 october 2014

How did two dreamy, painfully shy brothers from suburban Scotland create one of the most remarkable albums of the 80s? As the Reids prepare to revive Psychocandy 30 years on, we talk to indie pop’s unlikely rabble rousers

There’s a clip on YouTube of the Jesus and Mary Chain frontman Jim Reid at his hilarious and terrifying peak as an interviewee. It’s 1985 and he’s just been told, off-camera, by an assistant on a Belgian TV show that the host is a Joy Division fanatic, so on no account should he say anything bad about the band. Jim is a fan himself, but of course, he feels obliged to lay waste to Joy Division. The host looks like he wants to either throw a punch or throw up.

Twenty-nine years later, I meet Jim in Manchester, where he’s being interviewed for 6 Music by Mary Anne Hobbs. She gets a much easier time of it than the Belgian guy. Jim’s negativity, no longer weaponised, is dryly comical as he dismisses everything from his school days (“I wasn’t even important enough to be bullied”) to dancing (“I think I danced once in 1985”). The only subjects that elicit undiluted enthusiasm are the Velvet Underground (“the best band in the world ever”) and Francis Bacon, whose paintings he describes as “reality reconstructed in a way that it ought to have been in the first place”.

You could say the same of the 1985 album that Jim and his guitarist brother, William, are performing in full for the first time next month. Psychocandy (“it’s a one-word review of what it contains,” says Jim) was an explosive anomaly. Into the chasm between the expensive, imperial realm of pop and the insular, underachieving ghetto of indie erupted the most notorious band since the Sex Pistols, attended by riots, bans and breathless headlines, even though the Reids were painfully shy. Some of Psychocandy is beautifully wasted pop, like Lou Reed working in the Brill Building; some sounds like being trapped in a wind tunnel full of broken glass and bees; the rest sounds like both happening at once. The Jesus and Mary Chain were a band without a middle. There was only melody and noise, beauty and violence, love and hate.

“Contrast’s dead,” says Douglas Hart, who played bass in the Mary Chain before quitting in 1991 to become a successful music video director. “We live in this slightly anodyne world. That contrast was important psychologically. If you were pissing people off it made you feel great.”

Alan McGee, the Creation Records founder who made a fortune from Oasis, is managing the Mary Chain again almost 30 years after they fired him. He still sounds like their biggest fan, seeing them as a vital bridge in British rock between punk and the 90s. “I believed the Mary Chain were the greatest group in the world,” he gushes. “I genuinely believed they were the revolution.”

Speaking to the brothers separately about Psychocandy is both confusing and illuminating because they often disagree. Jim, who now lives in Devon and has two daughters, is very funny in a self-deprecating, Eeyoreish way. William, speaking from Los Angeles (he moved there in 1998) apologises for his inarticulacy and bad memory. “My 14-year-old son asks me these questions and I just say I don’t know,” he says pleadingly. “We just did it. I don’t know how we did it. It’s a little miracle. It could all have been different.”

The Reids grew up in the suburban new town of East Kilbride, “the edge of the universe”, spiritually distant from Glasgow, let alone London. You had to be a fantasist to think of making it from there. Unable to get their act together in time for punk (Hart calls the Mary Chain “a punk band out of time”), they quit their jobs in 1980. For the next three years they would stay up all night, fuelled by tea and biscuits, dreaming up the perfect band. “We were like weird twins in those days, finishing each other’s sentences,” says Jim. “We were very much of the same mind.”

Eventually, they imagined music that fused the noise of German industrial band Einstürzende Neubaten with the pop sweetness of the Shangri-Las. When they first heard The Velvet Underground & Nico, says Jim, “Our jaws hit the floor. They were the Mary Chain before the Mary Chain. That was the point at which we were kicked off our sofa.”

By 1983 Jim was 21 and William 24. William had given himself until his 27th birthday for the band to succeed before moving to Israel to work on a kibbutz. “I think everybody thought we were a couple of wasters, and, to be honest, we probably were,” says Jim. “We thought, well, if we don’t do this now, we’re never going to do it.”

That year their dad lost his factory job and gave his sons £300 from his redundancy pay-off. They spent it on a Portastudio to make demos of the songs that would become their first singles, Upside Down and Never Understand. Neither of them wanted to be the singer so they flipped a coin and Jim lost. “It could have gone the other way,” he says. “After a while I started to shag more girls than he did and he was like, ‘I want to be the singer!’ And I was like, ‘Sorry, son, the coin doesn’t lie.’”

“I’ve got a great job,” counters William. “I get to hide in the shadows and do what the hell I want. Jim’s got to be the guy that everybody looks at.”

Despite the unfavourable odds, the Reids felt confident because they felt necessary. “We hated the 1980s music scene,” says Jim. “I mean, we detested it. The Mary Chain were more influenced by bad music than good. We did well out of that. We only started a band because we thought, ‘Why isn’t anyone else doing this?’”

Through a stroke of luck their demo tape reached future Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie. He sent it to his friend Alan McGee, who released Upside Down on Creation and became their manager. “McGee’s enthusiasm was a driving force,” says Jim. “He was like your battery charger. You’d look at Alan and he’d be frothing at the mouth and you’d be like, ‘Fucking hell, he’s right!’”

After recording Upside Down and hiring Bobby Gillespie as their drummer in late 1984, the Mary Chain looked for a major-label deal. “We had expectations we were going to be the Beatles or the Stones, so you have to go big,” says William. “We had huge balls.”

They soon signed to Blanco Y Negro, the WEA subsidiary established by Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis. Jim’s biggest regret is that they didn’t choose Rough Trade. “At the time, everyone was indie-schmindie,” explains Jim. “I wasn’t interested in a spotty kid with an Oxfam jumper playing in a room above a pub to his 22 mates. I wanted to be Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Jim Morrison. I saw us at Wembley Stadium. What I didn’t realise was that Warner Brothers weren’t interested in the Mary Chain. Nobody there liked the band, nobody there did anything for the band. There was a sense that people just wanted you out of the building as quickly as possible.”

At times it seemed the whole music industry was resistant to them, like a body rejecting a transplanted organ. They butted heads with pressing plant workers who refused to manufacture the pungently named B-side Jesus Fuck and BBC sound engineers who wanted to “fix” the band’s unorthodox sound.

“You’d go to the toilet and come back and the guitars were all turned down,” remembers Jim. “We didn’t know what the rules were. What we did know was what sounded good.”

Then there was their live reputation. They drank heavily to drown their nerves, so their early shows, sometimes as short as 15 minutes, projected chaos and alienation which a growing number of troublemakers mistook for violence. When they played the North London Polytechnic in March 1985, audience members trashed the stage while the band hid in their dressing room. The music press reported a “riot”; McGee, in the spirit of Malcolm McLaren, excitedly declared it “art as terrorism”; suddenly the band’s reputation was out of control.

“After that, you had to come to a Mary Chain gig with a baseball bat,” says Jim. “The notoriety did sort of… spiral, and we had to nip it in the bud.”

“That was McGee trying to make it an event,” says William. “We had a lot of arguments with him about that. It wasn’t Alan going on stage and being a target for these lunatics. It was us.”

The Reids’ scabrously self-aggrandising interview style, however, was all their own work. They used words the same way they deployed white noise and feedback: to provoke and excite but also to conceal their shyness. “To knock things down that people held in high regard got you noticed,” says Jim. “A lot of it was bravado. You’re almost trying to talk yourself into it. Nobody else is saying this so we will: we’re better than the Beatles.”

“A lot of people thought we were snotty little brats,” says William. “We were snotty little brats. You need a bit of that when you’re young, don’t you?”

To the hysterically impatient 80s music press, the Mary Chain felt electrifying but not necessarily built to last. Only the brothers knew that they had a fistful of great songs that had never been played live. William was the more prolific songwriter but Jim was a shrewd editor and together they were formidable.

“‘Mary Chain’ and ‘hype’ were synonymous,” says Jim. “We knew that a lot of people thought Psychocandy was going to be the singles and a collection of B-sides. So we were quietly confident, quite smug about it. We felt as if everything on Psychocandy was a potential single.”

The songs were one secret weapon; their discipline was another. The men who always performed drunk recorded Psychocandy entirely sober: “Lots of tea and Wimpy [burgers], not speed and alcohol,” says Hart. The apparent chaos was in fact meticulously choreographed: they sampled white noise and feedback and carefully punched it into the mix. Getting the sound exactly right is why the album, recorded at north London’s Southern Studios with engineer John Loder, took six weeks.

“To us, it seemed like an eternity,” says Jim. “We thought we were budding Phil Spectors. I’m sure a fly on the wall would have been thinking: ‘These guys are nuts.’”

Musical disagreements were sometimes settled with fists. At one point Jim threw William into a studio door with such ferocity that it came off its hinges. “They were really great at fighting [verbally] because they could push each other’s buttons,” Hart says admiringly. “Sometimes I would stand by in awe. How can people slag each other so beautifully? And then they’d start throwing punches and you’d have to intervene.”

The Reids felt “pretty cocky” about Psychocandy and critics adored it, but the industry remained frosty. According to Jim, Warner Music UK chairman Rob Dickins told them, “Nobody’s going to buy it.” Radio 1 DJ Mike Smith blacklisted follow-up single Some Candy Talking because he was convinced, wrongly, that it was about heroin. When the Mary Chain toured the US, their Jesus Fuck T-shirts didn’t go down well. “The promoter in Texas said, ‘They’ll lynch you,’ so he put a bit of tape [on the T-shirts]. He put the tape over the word ‘Jesus’ and left the word ‘Fuck’.” Jim rolls his eyes. “That speaks volumes.”

The Reids’ shyness made even cult success hard to enjoy. “They were fucking miserable,” says McGee. “We’d been offered Top of the Pops and they were looking at me like I’d asked if they wanted to take a walk around Auschwitz.” Jim rejects this (“McGee’s talking bollocks”), but Hart seems to concur. “When bands are great they create a little gang mentality that excludes others by necessity. Our spiky reputation would go before us, which we enjoyed at first, but after a while you get a bit lonely and think: ‘Why aren’t we having a good time?’”

At any rate, the brothers’ reticence created a glass ceiling. As songs such as In a Hole and My Little Underground made clear, the Mary Chain were introverts. Their wall of noise was defensive rather than aggressive, a prickly cocoon that anticipated the hermetic roar of My Bloody Valentine. However great the songs, they lacked the common touch, so how on Earth did they ever believe they’d play Wembley?

“What were we thinking?” Jim agrees. “Psychocandy in a stadium? It was never going to happen. But we had such utter self-belief. We were absurdly naive.”

In retrospect, it was for the best, because the Reids weren’t primed to withstand celebrity. “Massive fame would have probably screwed with my head,” agrees Jim. “I think William would have enjoyed the adulation.”

William flatly disagrees. “I really think we would have fallen to pieces.”

Instead, the Jesus and Mary Chain fell to pieces slowly. Starting with 1987’s cleaner-sounding Darklands (William’s favourite), each subsequent Mary Chain album was good and different but each one took longer to make as they drank more and spoke less.

“In 85 I drank to get over my nerves; in 97 I drank because I just had to,” says Jim. “That process gradually ended up with me being an addict. I’d be sitting in the living room with a bottle of whisky and phoning up my dealer to get a gram of coke. But [despite] the drugs, the drink, the bickering, the music never suffered. I stand by every record we made.”

After William quit the band in 1998, during an onstage punch-up in LA, the brothers didn’t speak for a year or perform together for almost a decade. Since their first reunion show at the Coachella festival in 2007, where Scarlett Johansson joined them for Psychocandy highlight Just Like Honey, they’ve maintained enough harmony to tour regularly and work on a seventh album that, Jim promises, “will be bloody good”.

I ask Jim to describe their relationship and he sighs heavily. “Oh God. It’s complicated. We tolerate each other. I know how to wind him up, he knows how to wind me up. Sober, we give each other space. Bring drink into the equation, it can get a bit bloody again.” On this subject, unusually, William is in complete agreement.

The impossibility of recreating the turmoil and combat of 1985 in front of a reverential older crowd led the Reids to decline previous offers to tour Psychocandy, but now it’s part of the appeal. “Even when the album was out, it was about riots and falling over drunk on stage,” says Jim. “It was about everything but the music. If you’re looking for skinny young kids in a strop, kicking their guitars, stay at home.”

I ask William how he thinks the audience would react if they regressed 30 years, got drunk, played for 15 minutes and stormed off. He sounds intrigued.

“What if we did play exactly what we did in 1985?” he muses. “I wonder if people would embrace it.”

#interview

[sharingthesamesky]

Here’s the Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Fragmentary Passage and Kingdom Hearts Back Cover reactions thread I promised you

Back Cover:

THIS MOVIE IS SO PRETTY HOLY SHIT

Also, the cinematography is incredible. Like. From someone who studied film, this shit is really good. There was like. That one moment when it was a little on the nose with the flower petals, but this is a Kingdom Hearts game so comparatively it was downright subtle.

If the Master of Masters isn’t somehow connected with Braig I’d be surprised at this point. (Master of Masters, here after known as Mr. MoM). Plot says it should be Xehanort, but mannerism SCREAM Braig. (They also share the whole one-eyed thing.)

Is Kingdom Hearts using Norse mythology symbolism now too? Because Mr. MoM’s whole “takes one eye out and casts it into [the future] to know ultimate truth” thing is just Odin.

How on earth did Mr. MoM convince these 6 super serious people to listen to him. He doesn’t seem like someone any of them would agree to train under AT ALL. Maybe Gula? But Aced and Ira? I guess there just weren’t any other Mr. MoMs to pick from?

The fucker wrote the book of prophecy in vague rhyme because he’s terrible

I swear this time travel thing is so dumb. “Don’t want you to cause any temporal paradoxes” MY ASS. you can’t just make shit up because its sounds cool. How does this work? If you “can’t change the future” then like. What is even the point of anything? Are there some events that are fixed but the specifics are still in flux?

The real reason Luxu doesn’t get a book of prophesy is that Mr. MoM hand copied the thing five times already and didn’t feel like doing it again.

Alternatively he hand copied it six times but that foreteller moogle that gives you your medals got Luxu’s copy.

I mean clearly Mr. MoM saw the keyblade war and was like “what’s the best, most fun way I can cause this? Oh! I know! I’ll tell Gula to find a “traitor” and make them all fight each other. I mean if there was really a traitor, I could just tell Gula who it was, because I can SEE THE FUTURE, but that wouldn’t be fun at all!”

Seriously if Gula hadn’t preempted that speech what would he have said.

“Oh, I know. I’ll make Aced feel jealous and make him attack the leader because I’m totally a champion of light. TOTALLY.”

Why is Ira so sure that this event would have been in the book? What kind of events make it into the book? Clearly not everything or Ira wouldn’t need Invi’s reports at all, right? Seriously did I mention this time travel stuff is terrible?

“I might vanish or I might not - anyone’s guess” says the man whose entire shtick is knowing the future. Everyone: Sounds legit.

If Mr. MoM’s keyblade makes it all the way to the present, why the fuck do their books end with the keyblade war? I mean probably because they all die in it and telling them that is a sure way to cause those supposed temporal paradoxes, (or because Mr. MoM is just a conniving ass) but I swear none of them thought to ask why his vision of the future stops there? Well, I suppose “and then the world ends” is a good enough place as any to claim you can’t see past. Even if you’re lying liar about it.

We all know Luxu’s the traitor right? Let’s just get this out of the way. Not that he necessarily betrayed anyone or anything, but Gula’s magic paper says “bears the sigil” so it’s gotta be LuXu. Unless of course its one of our key kids who went all edgy and put an X in their names.

Okay, even not knowing that, why in the hell did no one mention Luxu as a possibility for the traitor in the first place?

I mean they know about Luxu even though he’s sort of implied to be a latecomer to the group. Did they all start out wearing those black cloaks before they got their fancy foreteller gear?

Okay who designed the fancy foreteller gear who made those masks and how did Mr. MoM convince them to go with that? I mean - scratch that last part these idiot’s will do anything he says apparently.

(You’ll pry my guilt bonuses from my cold dead, darkness ridden hands, KHuX)

Mr. MoM engineered this entire thing and use everyones unquestioning loyalty and sense of his own perfection to do it. No one bothered to question any of the details and that’s why it worked.

“Hey, Master, why to all the chirithy look the same? Wouldn’t it be easier to tell which one turned into a nightmare if they were like. Numbered or something?”

“Hey Master, you want us to… collect Lux? What are we collecting it for? Shouldn’t we… not do that?”

“Wait you want us to… take Lux from… the future?”

Seriously this movie answers zero of the questions about how time works in KHuX. None of them at all. Well, maybe Season Two will address it.

“Hey Master, why is it called a Nightmare if this isn’t the world of dreams because obviously it isn’t right? RIGHT?”

Ava tells her dandelions they are gonna practice leaving the world by going into the realm of dreams though so.

I’m sorry I couldn’t take that scene seriously with all the key kids in their default starter outfits. No keyblader that’s the “best of the best” is gonna be wearing a starter outfit with no perks.

Okay, I get that Gula couldn’t tell anyone his role, and that Aced’s “true role” aka the failsafe powder keg fuse makes sense to keep secret, but why didn’t Ava tell anyone her role?

The foretellers have different VA’s than the characters they obviously correspond to, but they’re similar (well, accept Aced) and they speak in a very similar way. Care to comment? (Mr. MoM giggling in the distance)

Ava, how does Ephemer even know about the book? Did you tell all the keykids about it or what? I kind of doubt that. Ephemer you clever little sneak.

The Foretellers have a secret castle no one is allowed to enter and yet they have their meeting in the warehouse that literally everyone goes into all the time.

"coolheaded Gula?" More like flips the fuck out when he can't figure something out and tries to SUMMON KINGDOM HEARTS Gula.

Too bad Spongebob can never know what’s inside my secret box.

Seriously, why does ANYONE trust this guy.

Luxu’s reaction to “it’s my eye” is amazing.

No Name. Really. You don’t say.

The NA rankings are pretty spot on though. Good on us.

Fragmentary Passage:

Holy shit I’m so sold on the “technical demo” aspects of this game. Next Gen I love you.

You have to understand the last gen I had was a PS2. Why is everything so reflective and responsive its amazing.

Aqua’s VA is better than she was in BBS, but it still definitely limited my enjoyment of the game.

I did not realize the top of Aqua’s outfit was supposed to be see-through mesh other than the boob pads. Not sure how I feel about that.

I hope that the FFXIII style “hallways simulator” thing was because of time constraints and not because it’s how KH3 is gonna go.

The whole “There’s no time in the realm of Darkness” thing is really interesting, especially given all this time travel nonsense in the Realm of Light. But. Things still clearly progress in a linear fashion in there. Aqua doesn’t see Riku running through the darkness and then walk for a long while and then see Mickey. People enter and leave the place in an order that seems to be shared. Which means there is time. I think the word you are looking for is vague, arbitrary, or inconsistent.

Goddammit Nomura, take a second to read about time between your Latin lessons and your comparative mythology classes.

The new Heartless look really cool. I like them. And the elemental effects are fantastic. I could watch those heartless throw water at me all day.

The world design, apart from the linearness of some of the levels, was amazing. The suspended structures and twisted landscapes were really compelling.

I can’t be the only one who got strong “American McGee’s Alice” series vibes though, right? In a good way.

The mirror puzzle was neat. Not sure how long it would have taken me to figure out had I been playing and not watching a walkthrough so I’m calling it neat entirely by concept and visuals.

Phantom Aqua attacks in a pattern pretty similar to Xehanort’s fight with Terra in BBS, but with a mix of Aqua’s moves thrown in.

Aqua’s attack style is… kind of Extra. That twirl where she sticks her leggy straight up vertically in the air is like… Was that necessary? It certainly isn’t physically possible. Ask figure skaters.

The Terra/Xehanort scene was surprisingly good despite Terra’s VA. It was nice to get some insight into how that relationship is going. Because the rest of time seems pretty linear, we know that scene takes place, for Terra, at some point AFTER the worlds start vanishing. But if we take the claim that time is - if not absent - weird in the Realm of Darkness, then we don’t have any sense other than that. Maleficent gathered the princesses from the worlds we saw before she met Riku so that isn’t any indication, really.

Did I start crying when I saw Destiny Islands? Almost. Did I take a million screenshots of HD Destiny Islands? You bet your ass I did.

I did kinda cry when I saw Riku in his dumb KH1 puffy pants, though.

So behind the door in the Realm of Light is the heart of the world, but when it’s in the realm of darkness, it’s a magic keyblade shrine? I’m not really gonna argue. It seems to be a symbolic thing. Whatever. Good to know it’s a “push” door I suppose.

I’m not looking forward to that Demon Tide boss showing up again.

Mickey says he’s been “working with” Sora and Riku and he’s a fucking liar you didn’t do shit for them during KH1, Your Majesty, I WAS THERE.

“Kingdom hearts.. well okay not really kingdom hearts but. It’s sorta like a mini kingdom hearts? look we didn’t have the lore finalized at this point so just. pretend for me, Aqua.”

I can’t believe the Darkness ate King Mickey’s shirt.

(I know it was for the sake of consistency, and if it hadn’t happened you’d have people saying Mickey took his shirt off to be all macho mouse for that scene but still. Did anyone remember going in what Mickey was or wasn’t wearing during that scene?)

Kairi gets 3 seconds of screen time, and they are THE BEST. She’s super on point and I love her and hope she beats Lea up repeatedly and that we get to watch. Or do it.

I’m so thankful that Yensid didn’t pull a “no, Kairi you’re a princess of heart you can’t do both.” I didn’t think he would but it wasn’t NOT a fear of mine.

RIKU AND KAIRI INTERACTION. I PRAYED SO HARD. FOR SO MANY YEARS.

Riku’s whole “I tried to hard too be a role model” thing had me in tears. My son. My beautiful darling son. I am so proud of you. So proud

Sora-esque.

Yen Sid’s “No, see you would have done some stupid brave shit and fucked it all up” was. Amazing. Surpassed only by his “Sora, you fool, you complete and utter fuckup.”

“HAPPENS ALL THE TIME”

So… was Yensid actually talking about Hercules or did Sora just… guess wrong. Because Yensid never explicitly says to go to Olympus Coliseum. Sora’s just…. really literal minded.

Goddammit I take back what I said about Next Gen the canon Disney characters look TERRIBLE. I really hope they work on that before KH3 because I really don’t want to deal with plastic model Donald and Goofy the whole time. Please.

I did NOT miss Donald Ducks voice.

That Gummi ship scene was incredible? HD Sora is so expressive and adorable and precious.

I like watching the dynamic between those three. It’s weird as fuck to watch with these graphics, and Donald and Goofy’s voices make it near impossible to take seriously, but it was fun to see.

“May your heart be your guiding key” DID YOU ALL FORGET WHY SORA FUCKED UP SO BAD IN THE MARK OF MASTERY? GOD DIDN’T YOU HEAR WHAT XIGBAR SAID? “Aren’t hearts great? Lead us wrong every time.” GODDAMMIT.

(I suspect that Mr. MoM knew that too, and was counting on it, hard. Even if he isn’t Braig.)

Special Credits:

I don’t have much to say other than HOLY SHIT NOSTALGIA and that i’m such a sucker for parallels in fiction that I was kind of rolling around with glee.

I actually didn’t realize just how much hugging and touching there is in this series?

Everyone’s all “KH doesn’t have explicit Romantic Parings” But they DID just do a giant romance montage (which included Namine and Roxas?) just to lead up to Sora and Kairi so. Not all that subtle.

As much as I’m :/ about that last bit, it was nice to see this game remember that other parts of the Destiny Islands trio exist besides Sora and Riku’s dynamic. We got some Riku and Kairi in 0.2 and we got this little bit in the credits so at least they haven’t forgotten Kairi exists.

#kh 2.8 spoilers