#AND I have plot/theme/craft reasons for disliking it.

[greenerteacups]

What do you think as Hermione's career would be post battle of Hogwarts? To me her being minister for magic really doesn't make sense. She does not have patience or tact to wade through murky waters of politics 😭😭

So hard to say! The Trio are so, so young when we leave them, I find it almost impossible to project their futures farther than a few years out. The job that suited me at 17 would be radically unsuited to me now. That's why of all the Trio, Ron's ending strikes me as the most realistic — he jumps straight into the save-the-world business again, burns out, realizes he's actually Done The Fuck Enough, Thanks, and pivots into a low-stress career where he gets to see his family a lot. Feels accurate! The others are weirder to me because they do seem to just... pick a lane and stay there.

With Hermione, you could spin her a couple ways. You could say that she leans into her bookish side and does research or teaching, which is not my preference for a couple reasons (namely, I don't think Hermione would like academia as a profession; she finds her classwork interesting and enjoys intellectual validation, but she'd be stifled and wasted in a DPhil program, and she'd be infuriated by the administrative politicking of your average higher-ed faculty). You could say that she gets disaffected with politics and ends up as a barrister or a lobbyist of some kind, but if anything that requires more political finesse, because you don't actually have institutional power, you're just handling the people who make decisions and trying to persuade them of your goals. This is not Hermione's preferred method of influence. She's not even particularly good at persuasion, she just happens to be smart enough (and right often enough) that people take her ideas seriously.

Or you could say her brashness fades with the years into a softened flavor of tell-you-like-it-is honesty, which some politicians actually do successfully trade on; as we see in British politics today, you don't have to be all that charming or clever to get ahead, you just need to be really driven and well-connected (which Hermione completely is; she fought shoulder-to-shoulder with the first postwar Minister and her bestie, the Literal Messiah, runs the Auror Office.) But I don't know if Hermione especially wants to be Minister, after the war. She's just watched years of horrendous bureaucratic incompetence plunge the country into a violent civil conflict. She's had not one, but two Ministers of Magic try to bully or shame her friends into complicity with fascism. Her view of government is... likely extremely dark.

But Hermione also isn't the kind of person who sees her life as a quest for happiness. Babygirl has a savior complex that makes Harry look selfish. (She basically kills her parents — yeah, obliviating is a form of murder, #changemymind — "for their own good," and justifies every batshit, vindictive, mean-spirited move she ever pulls on the grounds that it "helps" one of her friends.) She is a mean, lean, dragon-slaying machine, and she needs a dragon. After Voldemort, the Ministry is the no. 1 threat to muggle-borns and non-wizarding Beings. As a war heroine with basically infinite political capital, I'd be surprised if she didn't try to do something there. That said, Hermione is so vivacious and dynamic that she could potentially grow in a hundred different directions; it's possible that all of this, while true of her at 18, becomes completely inaccurate by 22. That's why I'm not too fussed about any particular fanon interpretation.

#greenteacup asks #sidebar: I know Minister “of” Magic is an Americanism but mea culpa #Someday I might actually bite it and pay someone to britpick Lionheart but I can't do it now #because I have a ban on editing published fic unless it's finished. Otherwise I'll never get around to writing the actual ending #I have a Process #is it the best process? likely not! but it makes the words go. so here we are. #I also think the fact that JKR is Gen X makes a difference here. careers worked differently in the 80s and 90s than they do now #i.e. we have the gig economy and a lot more mobility and EXPECTATION of mobility in your early life #that means career changes & professional pivots through your 20s and 30s are increasingly normal #and in fact have always been normal — but the image of the 'true' or 'ideal' career has changed #so we look at those careers and go hm. really? none of them changed? #none of them even went to uni? do wizards... just not? #but again. I believe the epilogue was written almost completely without consideration as to what happened between the BOH and then #I really believe that JKR did not know what happened to Harry except a wedding and 3 kids. because that was the whole point #I don't think she even knew what his career was when she wrote that scene #It existed to marry everyone off and do a quick munchkin headcount #because of the understandable temptation as an author to keep your hand on the wheel. but it didn't even matter! #the epilogue changed NOTHING! it was the most useless chapter in the series! I just — GOD #you can absolutely accuse me of being sour grapes about my ships getting nixed. I AM sour grapes. I AM a hater. #AND I have plot/theme/craft reasons for disliking it. #I'm not objective. I just want credit for being a sophisticated hater. my grapes may be sour but they're still artisinal.

[mediaevalmusereads]

Romancing the Duke. By Tessa Dare. Avon, 2014.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Genre: historical romance

Series: Castles Ever After #1

Summary: As the daughter of a famed author, Isolde Ophelia Goodnight grew up on tales of brave knights and fair maidens. She never doubted romance would be in her future, too. The storybooks offered endless possibilities.

And as she grew older, Izzy crossed them off. One by one by one.

Ugly duckling turned swan?

Abducted by handsome highwayman?

Rescued from drudgery by charming prince?

No, no, and… Heh.

Now Izzy’s given up yearning for romance. She’ll settle for a roof over her head. What fairy tales are left over for an impoverished twenty-six year-old woman who’s never even been kissed?

This one.

***Full review below.***

Content Warnings: graphic sexual content, ableism, reference to bullying

Overview: I'm in a bit of a reading slump, so I figured I'd try to get back into things by picking up some Tessa Dare. I loved the Spindle Cove series, so I figured I'd try Castles Ever After. Overall, I liked this book more than I thought I would. Despite some pacing problems and a male love interest that is an archetype I dislike, there was something thematically satisfying about how everything came together in this novel. So for that reason, this book gets 4 stars from me.

Writing: Dare's writing in this book contains all the characteristic humor balanced with sincerity that an avid reader might expect from the author. There were moments that were silly alongside moments that were more serious, and it was a comforting reminder of why I enjoy Dare's work so much.

But what I really liked about this book was the way all the thematic threads came together. This book is concerned with a number of things: fairy tales (or fiction, more broadly) vs reality, feeling like one cannot live up to expectations, etc. All of them complimented each other and wove in and out of the individual character arcs in ways that I found incredibly satisfying.

Plot: The non-romance plot of this book follows Isolde Goodnight, the impoverished daughter of a famous children's author. After the sudden death of her father leaves her penniless, Izzy receives a letter from a mysterious solicitor, informing her that she has inherited a castle from an admirer of her late father. Izzy travels to claim the castle only to find that the previous owner - the mysterious and surly Ransom Vane, Duke of Rothbury - is still living inside. With both Izzy and Ransom unwilling to give up their claim on the castle, the two resolve to tolerate each other until the legal matters can be settled.

There were parts of this book that I found a little silly, but on the whole, it was charming and light and I got swept up in the fairy-tale dramatics of it all. I liked seeing the push and pull between Izzy and Ransom, and I think the theme of inheritance and fraud was interesting without being overpowering or distracting.

I do think, however, that the last 25% of the book or so was incredibly rushed. There was a moment when Ransom had a change of heart about Izzy's father and his stories, and from that point on, it felt like Dare was racing to the end. I think Random's change would have felt more natural if we had seen more of the process from his perspective. As it stands, the scenes are structured in a way so that Ransom pops off page for a while and comes back completely changed, and we learn of what changed him through expositional dialogue. As a result, a lot of important things are told to us, and the action being described is dramatic enough where I would have actually liked to see it play out.

But even so, the plot came together in a way that I felt did a lot of justice to the book's themes, so even with the pacing issues, the plot was crafted well enough to impress me.

Characters: Izzy, our heroine, is admirable for her stubborn refusal to give up on her security and for her refusal to back down from Ransom. I liked that she could outsmart Ransom and get the upper hand, and I liked that she often used that power to do things that benefited both of them. I also really liked that Izzy was inexperienced without being naive. Since she has never been kissed and has grown up on fairy tales, one might expect that she has unrealistic expectations of romance, but I found her down-to-earth (yet not too austere) attitude refreshing. I also very much respected Izzy's awareness about how appearances affect one's place in society and how not meeting people's expectations can damage relationships, especially between (for lack of a better word) celebrities and fans.

Ransom, our hero, is of an archetype that I don't enjoy much: he's grumpy and self-loathing in a way that feels too self-indulgent, and he's constantly telling the heroine how much of a dangerous monster he is. Given his background and the themes this book is playing with, I understand why Ransom is written this way, but even so, I've kind of had my fill of heroes like him.

Supporting characters were rather charming in that most of them were loyal, devoted supporters of either Izzy's father or Ransom's mother. I loved that Izzy was kind to people who were just a little too devoted to her father's stories, seeing them as well-intentioned and worthy of respect. I also loved the dedication and affection Ransom's valet, Duncan, had for his master and how he challenges the definition of "family" for Ransom's benefit.

Romance: The romance between Izzy and Ransom was entertaining in that they were constantly at odds with one another, trying their best to get the upper hand. It was amusing to watch them go toe to toe and for Izzy to almost single handedly be responsible for Ransom wanting to rejoin the wider world, learning that asking for help is not a sign of weakness. It made the emotional intimacy more powerful, and I felt like both characters grew together as individuals and as one half of a couple.

The only thing that irritated me was that there were a few moments when Ransom's forwardness felt a little too aggressive, though my observation might be based on personal taste. I'm not a fan of heroes who don't necessarily care for their virgin partners properly, and it seemed to me that there were times when Ransom prioritized his own pleasure over Izzy's comfort.

TL;DR: Despite some pacing problems and a hero who is a bit too broody for my tastes, Romancing the Duke earns a higher rating for its stubborn heroine and its effective exploration of complex themes. Though there were some things that I wish were different, overall, this book was fairly entertaining and did a good job incorporating various fairy tale and gothic elements without feeling too naive.

[tracybirds]

hiya! for the ask game- 14 and 15

-cora :]

💕💕 Thank you Cora!! I got a bit long and rambly bc I'm doing this first thing in the morning lolol but yay, fun questions!

14. Tell me about a headcanon you love, dislike and have a neutral opinion on

I am not married to any of my headcanons lol so if I contradict any of these in fic then shh you didn't see that 😅💕 however!

Love: I think it was @gaviiadastra who introduced me to this one - Gordon and John sending each other interesting articles and cool facts about the science stuff they're reading and just generally putting their heads together and geeking out 😄 it's cute and relatable

Dislike: The thing I love about Thunderbirds is how genuine and kind everyone is, so I don't really like any headcanon that takes away from that. Like John ensuring that bad people get their comeuppance leverage style, or Scott or Gordon losing their temper that stuff I don't mind and think is pretty fun, but the most important thing for me is that they are never cruel and they don't exact revenge on anyone.

Neutral: I would say I hang out here for most headcanons since I mostly have a "sure, why not!" thing going on 😄 Maybe Virgil and his coffee love? I'm pretty neutral on that - I'll write it into fics if I need it, but I have no issue with having him leap out of bed raring to go if I need him to do that instead!

15. Which protagonist do you think would make a good villain?

Lol and just after I said I didn't like anything that took away from them being good. But honestly, I think that they all have the potential. That's the thing about having a lot of power; the consequences of your actions are extremely far-reaching and have the potential to propel you into being seen as a hero or as a villain very easily. And almost all the characters have a lot of power that they're currently wielding for good and if even of them were to switch, things would be bad. I think the following would make the best villains though because they have extra power in particular ways over the others so have a shortlist:

• John - he's the one that usually gets a bit of the evil potential schtick and it does make sense. He has the ability to be sly and calculating if he were to ignore the emotion of the situation, to pull all the information at his fingertips together and then use it and it's all that information that he has access to that would make him have the ability to do far more damage than your average villain.

• Scott / Jeff - For similar reasons so I've grouped them together - both of them have power over the rest of their family due to their leadership positions and the high trust model present in said leadership, and they have the charm factor over everyone outside of their family. They have access as leaders of a major corporation to more people and could very easily assign tasks to people who never see the whole picture until it's too late...

• Lady Penelope - like all of them, Penelope has a name and a reputation that she can use to her advantage, but she especially has access to a network of spies and agents who could be convinced to gather intel and carry out plots for anything that money and simple persuasion can't accomplish.

There's some themes here of course - money, information, influence, trust. All of these things give you power over others and all of these can be abused to craft a villain (thank goodness they all chose otherwise!! They all chose kindness and that makes me !!!!!)

#ask games 😁💕

[yvesdot]

Writer Questionnaire Tag Game

Tagged by @avi-why who answered such wonderful questions I couldn't believe the ones he posed were even better!

is there a common piece of writing advice that you disagree with? alternatively, is there one you think (generally) most people should follow?

“Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.” <- why I will never recommend On Writing, a memoir, as a how-to book on craft.

Keeping on theme, I think anyone looking to 'improve' their writing should get into analyzing plot structure. How do their favorite movies work? How do their favorite books work? What differences do they find between novels and short stories by an author they like? What makes a "boring" story to them? Do cultural folktales from their family share any similarities to each other in their beats? You don't have to outline your work (though I'm also a believer in learning how to, for similar reasons); plot knowledge is nice to have just to ambiently improve the way you think about your stories as you tell them.

you can have dinner with any author, living or dead. but the catch is that after the dinner, you and that author will team up against a third writer in a no holds barred cage match throwdown. which 2 authors do you pick?

Lewis Carroll, before I even finished reading the question, because she and I could have a great time. Then I got stuck because I don't know who I'd want to fight that I'd really have a chance against, and I feel like I wouldn't really want to physically defeat anybody. Maybe if we were up against a recently-beloved currently-hated public figure we could raise money for charity, or something.

have you ever experimented with poetry, plays, or screenwriting? what was the result?

I have written poetry and I've written a few script versions of scenes (on Patreon!) and I just don't understand the fundamentals of either. What really baffles me about screenwriting is how one can imagine so thoroughly what they want (?) a given scene to look like, only to distill it into a text-only medium. How do you keep it all in there, while leaving all the 'extraneous' bits out? And how do you see the potential when reading and evaluating it? How do you tell the difference between a script that is bad, and one that can be made good in the shooting and casting and acting and directing? How do you delineate what is the screenwriter's job versus, say, the composer or the costume designer's? Don't even get me started on poetry.

(If you have answers to these questions you're welcome to peep me anytime; I love hearing people talk about art.)

what type of rancid twitter discourse would your current wip generate? Well, in Book Two there's a scene where someone mentions Kay having an Oedipus complex in passing, to which Kay says they've clearly never read the play, and they say of course they have, and nobody ever addresses the claim again. So there's that.

what author would you love to be compared to? what author would you hate to be compared to? I'm rarely picky about being compared to authors (or texts) people like, though I think the big ones that have been done repeatedly are Carmen Maria Machado and Lemony Snicket. I only think I'd mind being compared to authors if I felt the reasons for comparison were unappealing-- e.g. "your prose reminds me of [author whose prose I dislike], because [thing I dislike about their prose]," or "your work has wonderful political messaging, just like Harry Potter." There's a point at which you start feeling sorry for yourself.

design the ideal piece of merch/swag for your wip.

The obvious answer is custom mantel clocks for each of the characters (Constantine would be a little grandfather clock, Kay something lovely and see-through and mechanical, and Atlas a simple black mantel clock to match his in canon), but why not consider a universe in which we also do Kuroshitsuji-style shoes?

free space: what's one thing you really want to talk about in your writing that no one ever asks about?

I do a lot of foreshadowing throughout KAY that isn't going to be discussionworthy until Book Two. Depressing! I also think mysterygf's morality is very interesting as someone who has to write it; I want her to seem one-hundred-percent justified in everything she does to some people, and the devil personified to others. Again, though, how are we to discuss this when I haven't written the book. Speaking of which, off I go...!

Five questions for @asablehart @goose-books @musetta3 and anyone else who'd like to pick up the tag!

If someone has just come here from the tag game, what piece of yours should they read?

Is there an overlap between the genres you won't read and the ones you won't write? Are there any genres you'd like to write but, for whatever reason, haven't? Why?

What's the last book that really positively surprised you? Why didn't you think you'd like it, and why did you like it in the end?

Self-pub, indie pub, or tradpub?

What would you like teenagers to think of your work? This is regardless of what age groups you write for, because they're going to get ahold of it anyhow.

#tag games #txt #the one and only universe of kay rainier

[tumble4rpdr]

I was tagged by the always wonderful @glittertrail to do this💕

relationship status: single but will soon start actively looking (I just have to get my confidence and dating profile up)

favourite colour: any shade of blue and purple, black, deep/blood red

favourite food: I have an affinity for junk food (I love all the foods that are terrible for me) but especially pizza, fries, Cheetos puffs, pumpkin donuts, and Entenmann’s powdered donuts and chocolate frosted Pop’ems (I think I might have the least refined palate ever😁)

song stuck in your head: The Game Is Over by Evanescence and Walking in the Snow by Run The Jewels (I saw them both in concert recently and I haven’t been able to get these songs out of my head)

time: 5:53PM (though it’ll probably be later once I actually finish this)

dream trip: For some reason I’ve always wanted to go to France though my brother keeps wanting me to go to Tokyo with him (he went a few years ago and thinks I would love it) and I’m slowly coming around to the idea. If I were to stay in my own country I think that Las Vegas sounds fun and there’s just so much there to do and try (though not all of it’s good🙈)

last book I read: Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein (I keep meaning to move on to his second book but I just never get to it)

last book I enjoyed reading: I definitely enjoyed reading Children of the New World and while I liked some of the short stories more then others, overall the theme of the book was so relevant and well portrayed and every story had at least one line or section that made me go “wow” and just fall in love

last book I hated reading: Adolf in Wonderland by Carlton Mellick III. I read this years ago but this is (unfortunately) always my go to choice for a book I hated reading. It was my first foray into bizarro fiction and between the title and the plot summary I had such high expectations and really thought that this book would be different and interesting. Ultimately there was no plot and it was weird just for the sake of being weird and I was so let down and don’t even think I finished it

bonus questions:

favourite thing to cook/bake: I used to bake a lot more when I had more free time but I’ll still occasionally make these macadamia nut macaroons (with coconut and Saltine crackers drizzled in chocolate) that I love (I’ll sometimes end up eating the batter as I’m spooning it into the baking trays🙈) and that seem to be a favorite of my friends and family

favourite craft to do in my free time: Unfortunately I don’t participate in any kind of crafting

most niche dislike: I spent so long trying to come up with a good answer for this question and the best I answer I could come up with (and it’s still awful and not really niche) is fruit snacks (Welch’s if I had to narrow it down but honestly I despise any and all brands). I’m thinking it’s because I’ve had to eat them so much throughout my life (whenever my blood sugar got low) so now they just taste so cloyingly sweet and gross to me that I can hardly eat them (I still keep them around but found other things to help deal with my lows)

opinion(s) on circuses: Yes for a Cirque du Soleil type situation with stunts and acrobatics (though even then I worry that the performers will get hurt even though it’s so cool to see) but a very strong no to typical circuses since I know the animals get treated horribly

do you have a sense of direction: In terms of my career surprisingly yes (though it’s recent and it might very well change), in terms of my personal life not so much, and in terms of a legitimate sense of direction 1000% no (I’ll be in a car and start confusing left and right if I’m driving to a place I’ve never been before🙈)

I’m never sure who to tag so I’ll just offer this up to anyone who hasn’t done it yet and wants to💜

#as always thank you for the ask💗

[slackernoon]

Review of Mystics of Fortune

The Mystics of Fortune is a post-apocalyptic tale about a war between mystics – men who gain supernatural powers from rare magical trees called Amurski – and a private corporation seeking to dominate the planet of Ojult. In 2039, an asteroid storm decimated 80% of the human population. A decade later, African scientists discovered that the remaining particles of the asteroid storm contained an extremely deadly virus called the Kupita virus. Soon thereafter, the Kupita viral pandemic destroyed much of the remaining human population. But two decades before these cataclysmic events wiped out most of the human population, Dr. Sabrina Maria Reeves invented faster-than-light (FTL) travel and founded the Reeves corporation – an asteroid mining company. Many hoped this new technology would help humanity escape the threats of annihilation it would face two decades later. Hundreds of years later, the Reeves corporation, led by one of Sabrina's descendants, Elasus Reeves, is waging a war against mystics for control over the planet of Ojult. In the midst of the war on Ojult, the main character, Jayden Vaut, is exiled from Earth and forced to live through the war. He is torn between fighting a nearly hopeless war in the hope of protecting those he loves and living a peaceful pacifist life. The narrative’s ambitious scope and polished prose were, unfortunately, not enough to compensate for its lack of heartfelt themes, generic worldbuilding and underdeveloped plot. I also felt that the Kupita virus and asteroid storm in the prologue were not strong determinants of the future events that took place on the planet of Ojult. I can imagine all the events that transpired on the planet of Ojult having taken place without the decimation of Earth’s population. Its seemingly well-crafted plot is equally as underwhelming as the heart of its story. Contrived subplots sometimes hurt the story's believability. For instance, two mystics - who both lead their own respective armies of mystics - fight each other for an illogical reason that is essential to the plot's development. Some readers may find some of this book’s worldbuilding elements distracting or controversial. Covid skeptics may feel irritated by Mike J Carlozzi’s decision to use a viral pandemic to kickstart his story’s plot. The Kupita virus may remind some readers of the ongoing real-world pandemic that they may not want to think about. Moreover, many of those who are weary of the current state of global pandemic politics, may find no redeeming value in The Mystics of Fortune’s premise. Some of those who are afraid of what they believe is the potential harm of future viral pandemics, may, on the other hand, readily embrace The Mystics of Fortune’s premise. In my opinion, if Carlozzi had decided to make the Kupita virus the central premise of the story rather than an additional element of the narrative’s plot, then it might be easier for Covid skeptics to decide whether or not they would prefer to skip this book in favor of another sci-fi novel. These kinds of readers may prefer to reject the book at face value rather than wrestle with their desire to see how the simultaneous emergence of powerful mystics and faster-than-light travel would affect a post-apocalyptic world. It may also make it easier for those most worried about the potential harm of future pandemics to further embrace Carlozzi’s sci-fi epic. I personally disliked the inclusion of a viral pandemic. I felt that it diverted attention away from powerful social structures to natural forces humanity has no control over, which I felt undermined rather than reinforced the story’s core themes. Fans of Frank Herbert’s Dune series may also feel as disappointed by its vapid social themes as I was. One theme in particular stands out as a missed opportunity to me: racism. To my surprise, Mike Carlozzi succeeded in making racism boring. Fans of the Harry Potter series, who have come to expect social conflicts as layered and complex as the conflict between muggles and wizards, may also feel disappointed by this underdeveloped theme. To emphasize the development of a new class divide, Carlozzi create new words to describe the inherent prejudice of the various social classes in his fictional world. Non-mystics are often referred to in a derogatory way as Thoba. I felt that Carlozzi failed to show how such discrimination affects the worldviews, decision making or emotional well-being of important characters. I felt that such social discrimination was, throughout the story, always presented as a momentary challenge that posed no threat to the long-term emotional well-being of essential characters. Lastly, I found the story’s ending even less interesting than its unremarkable magic system. I rate this book a 1 out of 4 stars. I would not recommend this book to anyone. The book is generally well-edited and there were less than a handful of errors.

#sci-fi #fantasy #sci-fi books #fantasy books #science fiction #fiction books #onlinebookclub

[thesublemon]

planning ≠ coherence

I talk a big game about liking coherence in art, and it’s probably clear that I have an apophenic tendency to enjoy textual interpretation. And this might lead people to think that I have a preference for carefully planned and plotted art, or that I look down on the messy and improvisational. But this is actually almost the opposite of the case. Not because I don’t really like coherence, but because artistic coherence is something more complicated than planning, and isn’t even necessarily possible to achieve with planning.

The thing about improvisation, is that at its best it’s about finding the choice that feels right. I listen to jazz more than any other kind of music, and one of the reasons I like it so much is the exhilaration of someone landing on a musical idea that simultaneously makes a song feel bigger and more complete. A solo isn’t fun if it’s just a bunch of disconnected ideas (similar to how whimsy isn’t fun if it doesn’t also “work”). It’s fun if it picks up on the things that the other players are doing, or ideas that showed up earlier in the song, and then makes them feel like they go together. Even if they “go together” in the sense of being coherently discordant, eg repeating ideas that don’t work multiple times. If beauty is fit, then the joy of improv is finding fit in unexpected places.

This goes for narrative too. In long-running stories like comics, book series, and TV shows, much is often made about whether certain choices were planned from the beginning. If things were planned, that’s a reason for praise, and if things weren’t planned, that’s a reason for derision, either towards the showrunners or towards people attempting to interpret the work. Say, “This plot point only happened because an actor wanted to leave the show. Therefore it has no meaning to read into.” But making things up as one goes is not what makes a story lose its plot, so to speak. Making things up is only a problem if the things the artist makes up don’t go with what came before.

In Impro, a very excellent book about the craft of improvisation, Keith Johnstone calls this process of making-things-go-with-what-came-before “re-incorporation”:

The improviser has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future. His story can take him anywhere, but he must still ‘balance’ it, and give it shape, by remembering incidents that have been shelved and reincorporating them.

Johnstone is big on the idea that satisfying narrative depends on a sense of structure, and that reincorporation is one of the most important tactics for creating structure. To paraphrase him, a story where a character runs away from a bear, swims across lake, and finds a woman in a cabin on the other side, and “makes passionate love” to her has no structure. It’s just a series of events. Whereas if the bear then knocks the cabin’s door down and the woman cries out that it’s her lover, then suddenly it feels like a story. Because not only has the bear been reincorporated, it has been linked to the woman. From this perspective, if a story has no sense of reincorporation, or new developments don’t make sense with what came before, then it will feel incoherent, no matter how planned out it was.

I also keep thinking about Paul Bouissac’s discussion of gags and narrative in The Semiotics of Clowns and Clowning. He explains that what makes a scene funny is not whether it strings a bunch of gags together, but how those gags are organized. To use an example from the book, it’s one thing for a clown to pretend to hurt its thumb, and ask for an audience member to kiss it. It’s another thing for it to keep hurting different parts and then finally hurt its groin and act scandalized at the idea that someone might kiss it. Bouissac calls this sort of repetition “anaphor”:

Anaphor is one of the main tools of textual consistency. In linguistics, it designates the use of pronouns or any other indexical units to refer back to another word or phrase in the text. It links together parts of sentences and bridges the grammatical gaps between clauses, which is a consequence of the linearity of language. In rhetoric, anaphors are repetitions of words or structures that build up the cohesion of discourse and create momentum toward a climax. In multimodal communication, words, gestures, objects, or musical tunes can play the same role by reminding the receiver—that is, the spectator in the case of a performance—of signs and events produced earlier in the act.

One of the things that fascinated me about Farscape as a teenager, was that in contrast to other scifi of the time, it made no pretenses of having been planned—unlike say, Babylon 5. Or even shows like The X-Files, Lost, or Battlestar Galactica that gave you the “feeling” of a plan whether or not they had one, or were capable of following through. Farscape felt incredibly coherent, both in terms of theme and plot, but this coherence came about purely on the strength of the writing’s ability to ideate and then reincorporate. It would take someone’s weird costume idea, like the villain having glowing rods that screw inside his head, and snowball that into a whole storyline where the villain is a half breed of one hot-blooded race and one cold-blooded race, and can only stay alive by thermo-regulating the inside of his brain. And then decide that his vendetta against the hot-blooded race has motivated his obsession with the protagonist since the first season. Yet these twists never feel like “ret-conning” in a pejorative sense, because it all feels narratively and thematically sensible. (Unsurprisingly, making the show was described as “more like improv jazz than plotting out a symphony”).

None of which is to say that I dislike planning or polish, either. Stephen King, as a so-called “discovery” writer, famously writes off the cuff, without outlines. As he puts it in On Writing:

You may wonder where plot is in all this. The answer—my answer, anyway—is nowhere. I won’t try to convince you that I’ve never plotted any more than I’d try to convince you that I’ve never told a lie, but I do both as infrequently as possible. I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible. It’s best that I be as clear about this as I can—I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course).

But his best stories feel like whatever bloat might have been generated from this narrative improvisation has then been pared down to what that improvisation was really getting at. And I can’t lie, I get a particular joy from reading or watching something and feeling without a doubt that the artist is in complete control of my experience. It was one of the most gratifying aspects of rewatching The Wire recently: the feeling that the little meanings and foreshadowings I was seeing in each choice were almost certainly intended. Nothing is more satisfying to an apopheniac than feeling like the patterns you see are actually real. And nothing is more annoying than a story that tries to pull some sort of reveal on you (“Dan is gossip girl!” “Angel is Twilight!” “Rey is a Palpatine!”) that doesn’t make any sense because it wasn’t intended from the beginning. Just because those characters existed in the story before, doesn’t make it good reincorporation. So if a story is a story because of structure, then if the choice is between a planned structure and no structure, the former is almost certainly going to be better.

Point is, it’s not really the process that matters. All creativity is improvisational in a sense, because all creativity involves making things up. What matters is how dedicated an artist is to the integrity of their work. If a writer has carefully planned their whole story out, with every twist and every theme clearly in mind, but can’t adapt if they start writing and find out that something they planned doesn’t actually work, that’s one kind of failure mode. The narrative equivalent of designing a perfect castle and then building it on a swamp. On the other hand, if a writer tries to go with the flow, but can’t reincorporate that flow, then that will be another failure mode. To the extent that I respond to improvisational art, it’s because improvisational art is often more attuned to these questions of whether something is moment-to-moment right. But what matters, above all, is the rightness. That’s what defines coherence. Whether there is a sense in the work that it is oriented around something, and whether the choices contribute to that something.

#posts: art #i could've also connected a pattern language to this #and the post about how it's the solution to high modernism #but hopefully the castle-on-a-swamp analogy will encompass that #the philosophy of 'here are things that generally work but also any solutions must be adapted their environment'

[isfjmel-phleg]

Book Discussion Ask Game: 17, 18, 19, 20, 25, 26

17. A book that's well-written that you like.

Enemy Brothers by Constance Savery has such a well-crafted blend of ingredients. A resonant, beautifully executed theme. Complex and likeable characters. A riveting plot. Evocative prose. Savery even manages to make a kind of melodramatic premise seem plausible and worth investment in, and she juggles a large cast pretty well.

18. A book that's well-written that you dislike.

Naomi Novik’s prose is gorgeous, vividly detailed. It drew me in when I started reading Uprooted until one particular scene whose nature made the vivid detail no longer an asset. Even without that scene, I didn’t care for the romance, and by the end, the content issue had not improved. This book has a lot going for it, and I find no fault with the writing, but it just wasn’t to my taste.

19. A book that's not well-written that you love anyway.

I love the Oz books, mostly for nostalgic reasons. Their literary quality varies. Sometimes Baum had inspired ideas that he pulled off well. Sometimes (more often as the series progressed and he was stuck writing Oz and only Oz whether he wanted to or not) he’s totally phoning it in. The Road to Oz is basically plotless. The Lost Princess of Oz (as fond as I am of it!) has a premise with a lot of potential but is burdened with an overly-large cast and weak structure. Rinkitink in Oz would have been one of his best fantasies if its original ending had not been replaced by an awkward Dorothy ex machina ending that allowed it to technically pass as an Oz book. There are flaws right and left. But they’re so much fun to read, with plenty of unanswered questions and inconsistencies that invite engagement, and they revitalized my imagination when I finally finished the series as a thirteen-year-old.

20. A book that you enjoyed, but barely remember.

Goodreads informs me that nearly ten years I read a book called The Last Treasure by Janet S. Anderson. I have no memory of this book.

25. A book on your B-tier: Not one of your favorites, but one you enjoyed.

You’re the only one to ask this question, so I’ll supply a few options for this one.

Withering-by-Sea by Judith Rossell. Charming Victorian-esque fantasy with lovely illustrations.

The Humming Room by Ellen Potter. Retelling of The Secret Garden set in modern times in the Thousand Island region of upstate New York. Heavy emphasis on setting and atmosphere. It’s a bit underdeveloped toward the end but a beautiful read that captures a lot of the spirit of its inspiration.

The Aviary by Kathleen O’Dell. It’s been a while since I’ve read this one, but it’s Victorian-esque fantasy with lots of atmosphere and mystery and secrets.

The Dragonfly Pool by Eva Ibbotson. Featuring a girl from an unconventional English boarding school during the 1940s and the young prince of a Ruritanian country trying to keep out the Nazis. I don’t love most of Ibbotson’s books because she has a tendency toward making antagonists exaggeratedly horrible and irredeemable (very Us vs. Them, I don’t know quite how to describe it?), but it’s much less pronounced here, and the characters feel more real.

26. An author on your B-tier: Not one of your favorites, but you enjoy their work.

I’ve read three of Merrie Haskell’s books and really liked two of them (and did not care at all for the third). Her fairy tales have a medieval setting, which is typical, but the setting isn’t just cosmetic. Haskell has evidently done her research on the middle ages and has specific dates in mind for the setting of each book. It makes the settings feel authentic and grounded even while they’re clearly fantastical, and I respect that a lot.

Francisca Gibbons only has two books out, which I don’t consider enough material to declare a favorite, but I’ve very much enjoyed both installments of her Clock of Stars series so far and eagerly await the next.

#asks #fictionadventurer #thank you! #random personal stuff

[strangertheory]

After you so thoughtfully answered that last anon, I'm wondering a few things. Most importantly, how do you think The Duffers could write it, if mileven ends up not being endgame, in a way that was accessible and easy to understand and like for casual viewers?

The “shipping war” between Mileven and Byler fans has never sat well with me because I think there’s an elephant in the room that is rarely acknowledged by fans of either ship. I’m unsure if it’s because they don’t want to acknowledge the elephant, if it’s because they haven’t noticed the elephant yet, or if it’s because they have heard rumor of the elephant but have decided to dismiss it as unimportant.

I believe that what is going on in the story is truly not what most fans think. I think there's a meta layer that hasn't been shared with us yet but that will start to be unraveled in season 4 or 5. I cannot say for sure what that layer is: but I'm thoroughly convinced that it is there. Things are not as they seem.

El and Will are mirrors of one another, and there are details that connect each of them in a way that goes beyond mere coincidence. Their stories appear to be intertwined intentionally, and although the reasons for this remain mysterious to us currently, I suspect their connection will become relevant in later seasons.

Yes, I believe that "Byler is endgame" in the sense that I believe that Mike is in love with his childhood friend that he's known since he was 5 and he met them on the swings and that he's played D&D with and that went missing in 1983 and he was devastated upon seeing the body being lifted out of the Quarry and was relieved to find was still alive and that he greeted at the hospital when they woke up.

But I believe that something is going on here that we (as fans) are not completely aware of yet and that El’s story and Will’s story are deeply intertwined.

How do I think The Duffers could write the conclusion of Mike and El’s romantic relationship in a way that is accessible and easy to understand?

I hypothesize that the writers will eventually reveal a very specific connection that exists between El and Will. It will surely be a huge plot twist.

I believe that characters will begin to be more open and honest about their feelings in season 4 and season 5. Season 3 lacked open communication and honesty. In my opinion there was so much lying and miscommunication that it verged on being the main theme of season 3! (You can read my notes on that in this blogpost.)

I think the writers will reveal that Mike has been afraid to allow his true feelings and his true self to show because of his fear of being judged by society and by his friends. I think that we will have a storyline that involves Mike realizing that he's comfortable rejecting society's expectations of him and embracing who he really is and who he really loves.

But we can completely disregard my suggestion that El and Will are connected in some mysterious way and simply look at this as a “boy-meets-girl and boy and girl decide to stop dating” situation too.

Telling a story in which a lead character suddenly realizes that they had feelings for someone else is not complicated and is not unusual. It would only be surprising to fans that have funneled their attention and their devotion into believing that a long-term romantic relationship between Mike and El is an unchangeable certainty.

How do I think The Duffers could write the conclusion of Mike and El’s romantic relationship in a way that is easy to like for casual viewers?

The truth is: there will always be viewers that dislike discovering that a main character has feelings for a different character than the one they hoped they would stay romantically involved with. Add to that the unfortunate existence of homophobia and some fans might also be upset because they don’t like the idea of two teenage boys having romantic feelings for each other, either.

Sometimes the story a writer wants to tell might deviate from the fandom’s expectations. It happens all the time. A writer’s goal is to tell a good story, and sometimes telling a good story involves subverting expectations rather than affirming them. The Duffer Brothers seem the type to enjoy a good plot-twist. I could be wrong, but I think they enjoy layering Stranger Things with secrets and carefully crafting scenarios so that when the truth beneath the surface is revealed everyone watching the series can say "Wow! What a twist! We should have seen the foreshadowing but we can only see it now in hindsight.”

I think that Mike and Will realizing and confessing their mutual feelings for one another is a very likeable story. Mike and Will’s love story can be an incredibly well-written friends-to-lovers, slow-burn, mutual pining, angst-with-a-happy-ending, queer coming-of-age love story in the midst of a supernatural scifi fantasy horror adventure. I find it very easy to like this story. It’s FANTASTIC. And I don’t see why “casual” viewers couldn’t love this story, too. I do think they might have to be open-minded and unprejudiced in order to enjoy it, however. They will also have to be open to respecting that El is more than capable of having a happy ending that isn’t dependent on a teenage boy dating her. I hope that fans that invested all of their hopes and dreams into El dating Mike indefinitely will still have an interest in cheering for El and her new dreams and goals even if (hypothetically) she is no longer romantically involved with Mike by the end of season 5. If they care about El dating Mike more than her happiness, then perhaps they need to re-evaluate how they relate to fictional stories and also make sure that they respect when people in their real lives decide that they are better off as friends.

Whatever is going on in the story: I look forward to seeing what happens between Will, Mike, and El in seasons 4 and 5. I understand that my theories and my interpretations of the series might be incorrect, but these are my thoughts on what has happened so far in the story and what I predict might happen next.

Thanks for Asking!

...

If you’d like to read my blogposts regarding what I think is going on between Will and El and read about the Stranger Things theories that I find the most compelling you can find them all listed at my pinned index post here at this link.

#byler #anti mileven #will byers #mike wheeler #stranger things #byler is real #stranger things theory

[asvaitso]

Time Is An Allusion

While I greatly dislike writing reviews in first person, on this occasion I am forced to concede that it is perhaps the best way forward for one reason: Life is Strange and Before the Storm are video games, yes, but - more importantly - they are narratives about the tribulations of being a teenager, how to love and grieve, and ultimately why all of us must share in each other's triumphs... and our failures. Because of this, much of the value to be taken away from the experience is necessarily subjective, rather than objective; everyone will see this story differently, and rightly so. Expressing how I see the world personally is the only appropriate way to display said subjectivity.

Given that we are talking about games that are effectively walking simulators with a massive amount of dialogue, I hope that you can appreciate the comparative unimportance that things like graphics, music, and gameplay mechanics have when held against the writing and voice acting. While somewhat simple, the visuals adequately perform the job of setting the stage for your journey and the tried-and-true adventure game controls will be inherently understood by any gamer. The soundtrack is a mix of indie pop-rock tracks and relaxing instrumental tunes that suit the themes of the game very well. Given its importance, the voice acting is performed with an outstanding attention to detail; in particular, the performances given by Hannah Telle (Max), Ashly Burch (older Chloe), Rhianna DeVries (younger Chloe), and Kylie Brown (Rachel) are integral to the storytelling which would be greatly diminished without them.

Games in this genre fall into three broad subcategories: games that are funny, games that are horrific, and games that are somber; The Stanley Parable, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter are good examples of each type. While nearly every adventure game does a passable job of crossing into all three of those camps, LiS and BtS do the best job of the lot in attempting to subvert your expectations by keeping you guessing as to exactly which you will encounter next. You get a goodly helping of humorous teenage one-liners, some deeply intimate moments of love and lust, a sense of pervasive horror from the mystery at the center of the story, and the dreadful growing knowledge that your choices are the cause of more woes than just your own.

That brings us to the heart of this retrospective: the story of Max Caulfield, Chloe Price, and Rachel Amber. This is your spoiler warning.

Max is a smart, sassy, artistic, socially awkward girl that dreams big, lives small, and can travel through and heavily manipulate the flow of time. Family drama might be Chloe's most defining trait, but it rounds itself out nicely with her nerd-turned-stoner backstory, a strong sense of emotional vulnerability, and her ability to verbally spar with anyone about anything. Lastly, there's Rachel, deeply loved - or burningly hated - by everyone, passionate, fearless, and sentimentally turbulent. A big thanks to DONTNOD and Deck Nine for crafting a cadre of strong and complex young women to push this tale forward; we see far too few positive takes on LGBTQIA+ themes in games and having a unique opportunity to view them from behind the eyes of three very different teenaged girls is amazing.

The stage for this narrative is the aforementioned Arcadia Bay, a sleepy town of a couple thousand people that is fictionally located somewhere on the Pacific Ocean coastline in the state of Oregon; in all probability it shares the same imaginary landscape as Twin Peaks and Bright Falls in the sense that it is a haven for strange and unusual phenomena. There is a major economic depression in the background of the story that is important for several reasons, most important of which is that it is being caused by the actions of the Prescott family, a group of wealthy, unscrupulous land owners that are more involved in the central plot than you might at first realize. In many ways, this tiny village is - itself - a character in the story, and its fate is caught up in the same series of choices that will determine what becomes of the three main protagonists.

Starting at the chronologically earliest point - a statement that seems silly in a story about time travel - Max spends one last day with her best friend, Chloe, pointedly avoiding the reality that her family is moving away to Seattle. While they pretend to be pirates and relive their childhood, it slowly becomes obvious that Chloe is already aware of the truth. They have a brief chat about being BFFs even after they are separated when Chloe's mother, Joyce, arrives home with a police escort. William, Chloe's father, has been killed in a car accident, coincidentally causing her to lose both her closest companion and her favorite parent on the same day.

With her entire support structure dismantled in one fell swoop, Chloe enters into a period of strife against her mom, her school, and society-at-large. Max, in typical teenage fashion, loses contact with her friend not out of malice but simply out of forgetfulness, shame, and distance. Three years later, Chloe's rebellion takes a peculiar turn when she attends a concert at an abandoned mill where her impulsiveness brings her into conflict with Arcadia Bay's criminal underground, particularly Damon and Frank, a pair of drug dealers. She is saved at the last moment by the appearance of Rachel, who whisks her away to the mosh pit where they spend an amazing night partying, dancing, and staying out well past their curfew.

Rachel tempts Chloe into skipping school the next day and they head out on an adventure that ends with them seeing Rachel's dad kissing a mysterious woman that is definitely not his wife. Unsurprisingly, Rachel becomes distant and depressed and rejects Chloe's heartfelt acknowledgment of their bond. Not one to be deterred, Chloe chases her new friend down and promises to help her uncover the truth; Rachel, in a fit of rage, accidentally starts a wildfire that threatens to destroy the entire town. One thing leads to another and very soon Rachel has effectively taken Max's place in Chloe's life. The chemistry between the two girls is immediately obvious to everyone that encounters them together; nowhere is this more visible than during the school's performance of Twelfth Night where Rachel decides to ad-lib a new segment of Shakespeare's greatest work in order to confess her feelings for Chloe.

Returning to the beginning, I'd like to propose a thought experiment to you. Think of the person that has had the largest instant impact upon your life. Maybe you thought of a steadfast friend that you've known since Kindergarten, or perhaps it was a lover that swept you up like a whirlwind, or did you think of someone terrible that haunts your nightmares? The point of the demonstration is not to credit this single individual with making you who you are, but to point out that someone else had that same effect on their life... and someone else on theirs. Everyone and everything is connected in a chaotic web of emotions and events that spreads outward infinitely.

This is ultimately the point of the Life is Strange games, and is not an observation confined to just the first two.

The path through this chaos eventually leads to Chloe finding out that the mysterious woman, Sera, is actually Rachel's birth mother. Frank and Damon meet with the girls and try to stop their search for answers and Rachel is seriously injured in the ensuing fight. Regardless of the decisions you make afterward, the end of Before the Storm refuses to budge much beyond the fine details. This sharp contrast between the two games - one has a canonical ending and the other doesn't - is a clever nod to the fact that because BtS is a prequel, the story can only really end one way... Chloe's lack of time traveling skills don't make altering the outcome any easier, either.

In the intervening four years between Life is Strange and Before the Storm, Rachel and Chloe become much more than friends, however, not everything is perfect in Arcadia Bay. The duo parties hard, finds enjoyment in recreational drug use, and causes havoc at their prestigious private school, Blackwell Academy. Unfortunately, after slowly building a growing distance between herself and Chloe, Rachel vanishes into thin air. A distraught Chloe spearheads the crusade to find her and comes into conflict with the rich and powerful kids - Nathan Prescott and Victoria Chase specifically - of the school's posh Vortex Club because of it.

Six months after Rachel’s disappearance, Max returns to Arcadia Bay in order to attend classes at Blackwell because the recently hired Mark Jefferson - a famous photographer from the 1990s - is a teacher there. Her quiet demeanor puts her immediately at odds with Victoria and the other members of the previously foreshadowed Vortex Club. After witnessing Nathan shooting a blue-haired girl - who is there to blackmail him - in the school restroom, a deus ex machina occurs: Max discovers that she can rewind time and manipulate the flow of events, replaying them differently by using knowledge she has gained from the future. Using this ability takes an enormous amount of concentration and energy and it fails to work at key story moments when she is exhausted or hurt. Exactly how her power works and what boundaries it has aren't fully explored in the game but it is heavily implied that every time Max uses her abilities, she creates alternate universes where terrible things happen due to her abuse of the fundamental laws of nature.

Every choice that you make as a player changes the outcome of the game's path in some way. Major decisions can change which characters live or die, or even whether or not the entire town is destroyed. Minor ones can heavily change the way that dialogues play out or even what information you have available to you in your quest to find Rachel. Many options have unpredictable consequences, and a great example of this is near the end of LiS when Max uses her time rewinding power to try and warn a classmate that she is in grave danger; if you have treated Victoria well enough, she will trust you, but in trusting you, she will actually go to the unknown villain for help and get herself killed.

After she stops the attack in the restroom with a well-timed pull of the fire alarm, Nathan attacks Max in the parking lot but she is rescued by Warren, her would-be boyfriend, and a chance encounter with Chloe, now sporting the blue-dyed hair seen in Before the Storm's finale. Reunited after years of silence, Chloe is initially standoffish with Max but after learning about her super power, she tells her what she knows about Rachel's disappearance in the hope that these events are somehow connected. This assumption leads to another girl, Kate, who is seemingly afflicted by the same series of events that lead up to Rachel's disappearance; based on your ability to gather information you will either have an easy or a very difficult time trying to literally talk her down from a ledge. Regardless of the outcome, Nathan and his family will fall into the spotlight as Chloe, Max, Kate, and Warren bring what they think they know to the authorities... with very limited results.

Depressed by her inability to stop the Prescotts from flaunting the law, Max accidentally discovers that her special ability is not limited to simply rewinding time: by focusing on a photograph that she is physically in, she can transfer her consciousness into that past version of herself. When she mistakenly returns to the day where she and Chloe were pretending to be pirates, she hides William's car keys and thus prevents his car accident. This major change to temporal continuity is where the story - and the stability of time itself - go off the proverbial rails. Max discovers that rather than William dying in a traffic accident, Chloe is crippled by one instead.

This alternate version of Chloe never meets Rachel, who still disappears under unusual circumstances, and is left quadriplegic and dying from the systematic shutdown of her respiratory system. In one of the most emotionally traumatic scenes in any video game, she begs Max to end her life so that her parents won't have to suffer from more crippling debt and sorrow. Choose how you will because the result is the same either way; Max decides that she has altered the universe too much and goes back in time again to prevent herself from hiding the keys. This leads to William's death for a second time, and returns her to where we left off in 2013 with nothing seemingly changed except that birds and whales seem to be dying en masse, it's snowing in the dog days of summer, there are two moons in the sky, and visions of a world-ending tornado begin to plague Max's dreams.

With the investigation of Rachel's disappearance coming to a dead end, Max and Chloe put together what they know with Frank's drug dealing journal and Nathan's hacked cellphone. They follow these final bits of evidence to an abandoned barn where a hidden bunker has been being used by Nathan to photograph his victims after he kidnaps and drugs them. Going through the binders full of damning photographic proof, they discover unusual images of Rachel posed with Nathan in a shallow grave in the junkyard where she and Chloe used to hang out. Flying as fast as they can to that location, the girls finally uncover the horrible truth that Rachel didn't abandon Chloe but was murdered and unceremoniously dumped in a hole by a monster. As the girls are overcome with grief and anger, a ghostly doe looks on from the forest and slowly fades away.

I choose to interpret this as proof that Rachel is the source of Max's powers, and that she has been appearing as the spirit animals that keep guiding Max to places where her abilities will be most useful. Perhaps Rachel's soul was allowed to linger in the mortal world in order to guide Chloe and Max to the truth so that she - and the other assaulted girls - could have justice against a cleverly disguised enemy. Unfortunately, their preconstructed opinions about Nathan lead them to exactly the wrong conclusion and both girls are led into a trap where Chloe is killed and Max is drugged and kidnapped by the true villain: Mr. Jefferson.

Having played through both games twice now, I find the writing of this particular twist to be some of the best in gaming history. Once you know the identity of the true antagonist, a second pass at the game allows you to reinterpret much of what is said so as to see that the threads of the truth were there to be had all along; your attachment to Max and her obsession with Nathan as a villain is why your own judgment becomes colored in such a way that you inevitably dupe yourself into making the same mistake. Playing into your expectations this way is a trick that can easily backfire because people are smarter than they are often given credit for and having them detect the lie ahead of time contains the risk that the whole game will be spoiled for them. A great example of a similar plot device is in Memory, Sorrow, & Thorn by Tad Williams; very early in the first book of the trilogy you are given the information you need in order to see what is going to happen at the end but the Human mind likes to gloss over very minor details like a man going to fight a dragon with a spear and coming back with a sword.

The last act of the story is more metaphorical and abstract than the rest because the continuity of the world has started to break down from Max abusing her power. She eventually defeats Jefferson in a battle-of-wills through clever use of her abilities and returns to where the whole game started in his classroom before Nathan attacked Chloe. Using her newfound confidence and knowledge, she leads the police to Rachel's body, brings Nathan and Jefferson to justice, and wins a trip to San Francisco to show off her art. This reality starts to break down around her and Max is forced to return to the beginning once again. This cycle is broken by the appearance of the tornado from her visions and, after a trek through the town as it is slowly torn apart by the wind and the torrential downpour, Max's mind is drawn in on itself in a final attempt by Fate-with-a-capital-F to show her what she needs to see so she can stop this disaster from destroying everyone she knows and loves.

At the penultimate moment before the town is swallowed by the tornado that Rachel, Max, and Chloe have created with their misadventures, Max is given a solemn choice: to return one last time to the beginning and allow Chloe to die at Nathan's hands as is her destiny, or to keep her alive and sacrifice everyone else in Arcadia Bay to the tornado with the hands of time broken forever. Both endings are emotionally distressing and it's not for me to tell you which one is true. For my own part, I will always refer back to the ancient Vulcan axiom that, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few... or the one." That being said, saving Chloe is the more popular choice, and although it is very selfish and I feel that going that route implies that you failed to understand the moral of the game's story, I cannot fault people for choosing it.

Getting to the heart of it for me, neither Rachel or Chloe deserved to die, and nobody that young ever really does, but it's important to remember that terrible things happen all the time and you can either choose to live your life as best you can by trying to make the world a better place around you, like Rachel, or you can let the sorrow of our existence turn you into something less-than-Human, like Nathan. The impact that Chloe - and Rachel by proxy - has on Max shapes her life forever and regardless of what becomes of her later, they will live on through her. In the end, Max learns the valuable lesson that just because you can do a thing doesn't mean that you should do it. There are fundamental laws in the universe that should not be broken and attempting to defy Fate has drastic consequences. Overall the two games contain a masterfully told narrative that is likely to make you laugh and cry and be fiercely angry at the unfairness of it all... but that's just a consequence of how strange life is.

#review #gamereview #lifeisstrange #beforethestorm #2015 #2022 #retrospective

[animenymph07]

Hayop Ka!: The Nimfa Dimaano Story. The Way to Jumpstart A Possible New Wave of Filipino Animation. A Review

Making and showing Philippine-made animations is a rarity, whether it’s a film or an animated series. Even if many people dream of having more local animations, they are rarely invested, as they are more in favor with pet projects featuring artistas in loveteams or comedians. And when an animated film is being released, they will focus more on an all-star cast (a huge gamble to which of them has amazing voice acting skills) and the marketing. While there’s no problem on either of those, the main issue is whether or not the animation crew will be giving good treatment and the creation of the overall film be given the same love & care as the voice cast.

Hayop Ka! is the latest addition of a Philippine-made animation. While there is an all-star cast, the promotion was mostly spread through the trailer & stills on social media sites. I mean, who can resist such a bright, eye-catching visual? Apparently, the film took 3 years to make, which means they took the time and effort to make sure the film is well-invested and meticulously crafted.

I was really happy when the movie is finished and released on Netflix.

I watched it immediately, but I take breaks from it for reasons that I’m about to tell in this review.

Animation: Truly its strongest point. I’m so proud of our animators! The color palette is bright and colorful. The art style is easy on the eyes. The “flow” of the animation feels so natural and easy to understand all the visual cues. I love the cinematography and the fine details in it. The character designs are so good! I hope that more people will take notes from here as an example of the potential Filipino animators could make if they’re well-invested in time, effort, and money. Also, this could give people more appreciation in the arts and something to be proud of as Filipinos. I do hope that even the foreigners would like it too!

Voice Acting: It’s really good. I think it was casted well (with a certain exception of you know who). I’d like to think that the voice cast is guided well, because the way they voice out different expressions, onomatopoeia, and the pauses are well-executed. And this is coming from being a fan of both English & Japanese voice actors! And I don’t have to complain about their voices not matching their mouth flaps, unlike a certain local anime.

Humor: Pretty standard with all the puns and sexual innuendos. It is definitely not for kids! The good thing is that there’s nice execution and the subtitles manage to put something that’s closely accurate to the jokes. The only problem is that not everyone will be able to understand, especially the foreigners. 

Plot: The plot is definitely something that needs working on in the future. It’s just the stereotypical story that are always featured in Filipino rom-coms and teleseryes. It’s just so predictable and triggering that I just skip a few scenes and just get to the end. There’s definitely a semblance of character development and solid motivations in the main character. But in the end, I just can’t help but dislike all of the characters. Nothing is going to justify all of their actions and decisions. The ending and the epilogue is more decent. My personal favorite scene comes after an obligatory hair-pulling cat fight.

Themes: Don’t expect anything groundbreaking and inspirational. The themes are obviously mature, and executed with little consequence. Everything is basically a farce, and the jokes are on those toxic characters. I do understand that the inspiration of the movie is from local radio dramas (pretty decent voice acting there) and possibly, the love advice corner. And the content of those are often toxic love stories and glorified kabet culture (infidelity culture). I understand that the main purpose of the movie is to showcase the potential of Filipino animation and to entertain people. It’s just that a lot of people will be triggered by the themes and for some like me, get easily tired because they are overdone. One would need to have thick skin for this. 

Overall, it’s worth a watch for the visuals and a bit of crude humor. The story is too triggering for me. If you’re okay with the cliched stories and humor, then it’ll be worth a fun time for you. When it comes to its place in Philippine animation, I’d say this is the best animation film in this moment! I hope that they will inspire people to raise their standards on what the things they want to watch.

At some time in the near future, expect a few weeks that I’ll make a detailed review of all the episodes of Barangay 143. Even though there’s already a general consensus and I share the same sentiments as them, I just want to elaborate on the reasons behind these feelings.

#hayop ka #filipinoanimation

[bluecoloreddreams]

(Disclaimer: this contains spoilers for the Fruits Basket and Fruits Basket: Another manga, as well as taking into consideration tidbits from Takaya’s twitter.) 

So, okay, first of all we have to address the YMMV aspect: Some people don’t like this ship. As long as they’re respectful, I have no beef with that. I’m well aware that some people cannot/choose not to make the distinction between “real life” and “fiction”— I have the luxury of this choice, so some of the “problematic” ships/character aspects within Furuba don’t bother me (for the most part). It’s fiction, and I’m aware of this.  

Again, some people cannot/do not make this distinction, and that’s none of my business because that’s their personal life. I’m aware that people dislike aspects of Akigure, and that’s fine. 

Personally? I’ve been reading Furuba since like, basically the dawn of time. I was reading scans on, like,  MSN groups. I remember a friend at church (of all places) telling me about the Akito reveal because I was behind on updates. It’s literally engrained upon my shipping heart at this point. 

(Headcanons ahoy! Like literally, this is all headcanon/my perspective on the series as a whole. YMMV/YKINMK/Dead Dove, the whole works, if you know you know

YES I wrote it like it’s an actual research paper because I have No Chill At All, please forgive me. It’s long and pretty rambling.) 

Addressing the first elephant in the room: Given my limited interactions with the fandom, my impression of Akigure from a generalized fan POV is that it’s pretty divisive. Every episode she comes up there are “I hate this kid” comments and I cry

Akito is a favorite of mine, and it’s impossible for anime-only’s to make a deep, informed call on her character. On the other hand, a lot of manga-readers dislike her too. 

So, why am I talking about whether or not people like Akito as a character? 

I’m of the opinion that it impacts people’s ability to view her character arc as one that deserves a happy ending. That she doesn’t deserve to have love, happiness, or forgiveness, all of which are given to her when she and Shigure finally end up together on equal footing. (Do I think the way it’s rushed in the original Furuba ending? Yeah, but hey. Sensei had like a huge ensemble cast to wrap ends on. Now there’s Furubana to look to and it’s just chef’s kiss.)

There’s a mental aspect in this, involving the dichotomy between “reality” and “fiction”. 

There is absolutely zero argument that are a lot of things that Akito does that uh, listen, if it was IRL she’d be in jail! Jail for terror baby! Jail for life! 

Fortunately, Fruits Basket is a work of fiction. These characters aren’t real, they’re idealized brushstrokes of human nature created to move a plot and a message along. 

That’s why Akito and Shigure work as a couple and as characters: 

They’re both incredibly deep characters that get passed off as one-dimensional by a lot of people (and the original anime, woof). Some of it is again, because anime-only fans just don’t have the whole story, since Akito’s arc is one that builds gradually until it hits a point where all hell breaks loose, which we are a ways away from. 

So what’s the message that their relationship and characters are supposed to pass on? 

Well, it breaks down into two categories: world building and thematic arcs. The latter is more important and what I’ll be focusing on, while the former is just a little spice that I, personally enjoy, and won’t really talk about in depth. (It’s that the magical realism in Furuba sets up the idea of soulmates, it’s just…. Something I enjoy and it’s really heacanony, so I can’t really justify spending more words on it!) 

When discussing Fruits Baskets in any capacity, I feel like we must first keep in mind the thematic “lessons” of the series: 

There is an inherent loneliness in living as a human being, since loss, grief, and hurt are indelible parts of the human experience, and learning to cope with these feelings in a compassionate manner is a life-long lesson 

People react differently to the loneliness of existence, and their reactions are based upon their personalities, their upbringings, and their own choices 

Everyone is capable of change and learning, if they choose to do so, however: 

Personal agency is taught, but in the vacuum of positive reinforcement, the ability of a person to choose to be compassionate is stifled or outright inaccessible

Therefore, if you are not taught to deal with your grief and existence outside of others, your ability to connect may become warped, manipulative, or abusive, and this is not the fault of the child but instead the parental figure 

Eventually, you will be aware of your actions, and then it is your burden to choose—some people do not take this choice (the head maid, Ren, Kyo’s bio dad, Rin’s parents, Sawa’s mother in Furubana)  

Abuse has long lasting effects on the psyche and can be physical, emotional, and/or mental in nature and must be dealt with in order to grow as a person

“Dealt with” does not mean that it goes away, but that it is acknowledged and given a positive outlet (Yuki’s garden, Aaya’s shop, Rin’s art, Momiji’s violin playing)

Forgiveness is not linear

Forgiving yourself is a long and arduous process, and happens independent of other people’s forgiveness

This is really brought to the forefront in Fruits Basket: Another, when Shiki talks about how his mother interacts with the rest of the Sohma family. It’s shown she’s done what she can to make amends, but recognizes that while she can individually hold relationships with certain family members, as a whole, it's best if she allows them to be away from her. 

This is a whole tangent on its own, but there’s a certain blanket of casual forgiveness given to Akito by the entirety of the shown Zodiac in Furubana, in that they trust that she’s raised a kind and thoughtful son and allow him the grace of his own family. 

Again, in Takaya’s tweets post-series that acknowledges that Akito’s friends with Uo-chan, despite her relationship with Kureno (and it shows a depth of awareness on Kureno’s part that he stays away

People flourish in environments where love and positive reinforcement is given freely, even when people are in the wrong

This doesn’t mean that no one is ever scolded: see Komaki and Kakeru, Kisa and Hiro, Hatori chews out Shigure all the time, but never ceases being his confidant 

So okay, that’s A Lot. But every single character in Furuba follows these themes in their own manner, because the series is about healing and learning how to heal from abuse, neglect, and isolation. Someone’s gonna have to be doing it. Point blank, the end, to tell a story there must be conflict, and boy howdy, there’s a lot of conflict in Furuba. Every personal thematic arc in the series ends up tying into a romantic one, because Furuba is a romcom drama. 

There’s a loop that goes “personal betterment”->”crush”/”friendship”->”conflict”->”personal growth”/”relationship growth” in the series for every character. That’s the bread and butter of Furuba. 

But anyway. To the question: 

I love them because they work, they’re both their own people with their own narrative focuses, motivations, conflicts, and flaws. Both Shigure and Akito are believable in their own right in the context of Furuba, and I think Takaya did wonderfully in crafting a story where their personalities mesh well and give each other reasons to better themselves.

To talk about them together, you have to talk about them separately. 

I’m gonna start with Shigure because, truthfully? 

I just want to lament about how often he’s simply passed off as either comic relief or absolute trash. He’s so underestimated! 

“He’s a joke of a grown man… He is reliable and I trust him.” (Another, v. 3)

He’s incredibly intelligent when it comes to interpersonal relationships, which is why he’s able to do what he does. He’s also incredibly kind—no one made him take in Yuki or Kyo or Tohru. He could have just went “ah, I’d prefer not to” and moved on. But he didn’t, made up some bullshit so Haru would feel like taking in Yuki was a transaction, and let me just tell you, I am the same age as Shigure and if you gave ME three teenagers to be the guardian of?! It would be a full on disaster.

He’s actually incredibly trustworthy (if he wants to be), insightful, and a genuinely good guardian despite his jokes and wisecracking. 

He forced Kyo to go back to school, knowing full well it would be good for him. He lets a whole host of children run rampant through his home. Kids who actually enjoy his presence. He’s shown as having a good familial relationship with Rin (who tries to warp that for her own means), Kisa, Haru, and Momiji. His advice to Tohru is genuine, insightful, and ridiculously helpful. 

Shigure is good with people. He gets up at the crack of dawn to drive Shiki to see Sawa in Furubana. He’s who Mutsuki and Hajime immediately go “holy shit you need to do something about this” to when they find out Shiki’s getting nasty notes about Akito. He’s who Shiki goes to when Sawa fell down the stairs as a child. As much as Shiki and the others make fun of Shigure, he’s obviously someone who’s trustworthy. And that’s not some new development, he’s always been trustworthy in regards to those he loves. No one asked him to show up to Tohru’s teacher conference, he volunteered. Like this dude loves people, he’s the dog spirit after all, and rightly so. 

Does he have his own motivations? Of course! But so does everyone else in Furuba. He’s a complex character, man! 

He laughs and jokes a lot because he’s projecting this image of a laid back, doofus. When you think about who he’s friends with, the whole middling goofball act makes a lot of sense. Just like some of Ayame’s over the top behavior is a defense mechanism, I believe that Shigure casts himself as a generally unappealing man to keep himself safe from advances when he was in school, but also to temper the wildly unequal personalities of his other two friends. He’s the sort of person who would just go “eh, whatever makes it easy”, and that’s just how he is. 

He doesn’t mean the creepy school girl thing, it’s a bit and I think the only people who don’t realize he’s running a bit are Yuki, Kyo, and Tohru who are absolutely too stupid to realize he’s playing them for reactions. He thinks it’s funny. 

Anyway:

When the older Zodiac had the dream of Shigure, Shigure is the only one who made the active choice to seek out that feeling. His soul was touched, and he decided that he wanted that and only that. This doesn’t necessarily mean he went full Jacob from Breaking Dawn, but it does mean he acknowledged there was a bond, and he wanted it. 

When you get into the technicalities of the curse, it’s mentioned that their Zodiac spirits influence how they interact with Akito, and that going against her can cause physical and emotional pain. Yuki cries when meeting her, and it’s mentioned that that’s just the normal reaction for the Zodiacs. 

It’s hard to say how much of their early interactions are influenced by the curse, but it’s obvious that Shigure has genuine fondness for her. She wasn’t always absolutely broken, as shown in Yuki’s backstory, and was a precocious child, one who sought affection openly. 

Shigure has an indulgent personality, and is shown to love being adored. Guess who loves him! Akito! Guess who wants lots and lots of affection! Akito! 

Their personalities are very well matched as they get older: They’re both intelligent and coy. They both have fairly sharp tongues when needed, and have no qualms about doing whatever it takes to get what they want. 

Shigure wants Akito to be independent from the curse. He’s made it clear to her he doesn’t want to be her father, he doesn’t want to be her friend, he wants to be her lover. Those are boundaries that Akito’s never been given before, and his frankness with her and his jealousy with Kureno is something she agonizes over, simply because she’s never been given any sort of serious interpersonal boundaries, or repercussions for her actions. He’s always kept himself separate from her, because of those boundaries, even when they were children. 

That’s important. It opens the door to the idea that her actions have consequences, and is a persistent nagging in the back of her mind. 

“Even though you hadn’t realized it, I was waiting for that day.” (ch 101)

For the bulk of the series, the only person who sees Akito as a person separate from the curse, and sees a future where she can grow is Akito. He has an extraordinary amount of patience for her, and forgives her for a lot. 

There are only two incidents that Shigure cannot forgive: Her sleeping with Kureno, and at the very end of the series, I’m of the full opinion that if Akito had pushed Tohru off the cliff, Shigure would have been done with her. Look at that expression, that is the look of someone who is toeing the line of throwing away all his hopes and dreams. If she really had pushed Tohru, I just...... The series would have taken a much darker tone. 

OKAY that’s enough about our favorite terrible author! (Okay, an aside, Shigure, please share your work ethic, you goof off so much but you’ve published so many things…how…)  

ONTO AKITO! 

“I’ve  finally realized… she hated her own shallowness all this time, from the very start.” // “It’s frightening because you have no choices.” (ch 121) 

A lot of people dislike Akito because she, for the bulk of the manga, is violent, manipulative and just downright unpleasant. And that’s fine, but it’s not the point of her arc or the themes of the manga.  (It is, however, the point of Rin’s: you don’t have to forgive everyone.) 

She’s not the only violent person in the series. If we as readers can forgive Uo-chan and Kyoko, or even Hana-chan for her moment of violence, why can we not extend the same grace to Akito? 

Violence is often shown as a knee-jerk reaction to fear and sadness: Kyoko, Uo, Hana, Kyo, Rin, and Akito all react violently to negative situations and feelings. Even Kisa reacts violently when she’s at her worst, biting both Haru and Tohru when she’s in her tiger form, which is shown to actually cause pain like a real tiger would. (It’s played for laughs, but has anyone been bitten for realsies by a house cat? That hurts! How much more would a house-cat sized tiger hurt!!!) 

Out of all of them, Hanajima and Kisa are the only characters to show immediate remorse, because they have what the others don’t: A positive support system. Once positive role models and support systems are in place, all of the others begin to learn how to react differently and ease out of the knee-jerk reactions that were ingrained in them. 

It’s made explicit in the manga that you have to be taught how to react positively, you have to learn and choose to be good, to be friendly, to love yourself outside of others’ perceptions of yourself. Look at Yuki’s arc. Look at Uo-chan’s. Kyoko’s. 

Yuki sums it up nicely in the last chapter of the manga, where he tells Tohru that she taught the Zodiac how to become human. She allows them to grow into people who can make the choice to be loving, compassionate individuals. 

Just because Akito doesn’t interact positively with Tohru for the bulk of the manga, it doesn’t make it any less true: 

Akito is kept in a juvenile state of being: No one teaches her to suck it up, that the world exists outside of herself, that other people are people and not things. In fact, she’s actively encouraged to act the way she does. She’s incredibly broken, between the maids of the Sohma estate just… allowing her to do whatever the fuck she wants and her absolutely jacked up relationship with Ren and Akira. She has no moral compass at all. No one bothers to teach her that her actions have serious consequences. 

She knows, in a roundabout way that hey, these people don’t like me. There’s a serious mental dissonance between what she latently knows—these are all people with no connection to her other than the bond of the curse. This is why Tohru is able to break through to her at the climax of the manga: 

She knows she’s wrong, but no one has ever told her she’s wrong but understood why she’s doing it. Akito just didn’t have the words to explain herself. What do children do when they cannot communicate? They lash out. Kids will bite, scratch, yell, kick, fall to the floor and have screaming tantrums out of frustration. Eventually, most kids learn that there are other ways to express frustration, and move along. (Not all, though, but most.)

Akito was taught that this is acceptable, allowable, and is her right as god. She is actively broken and kept that way through the neglect of the Sohma family maids, Ren’s abuse, and how Akira framed her role in the Zodiac. 

I can go on and on and on and on why the way Akito was treated for her role in the Zodiac by her parents and the rest of the Sohma estate was just awful. I hate it, it’s terrible, she never had a chance to learn and grow and be the genuinely thoughtful woman we know she grows into. 

She doesn’t force her path of forgiveness onto others and is fully cognizant of what she did, the repercussions of her actions, and lives her entire life after the curse breaks trying to right what she did wrong. 

“Even if she gets hurt, she says she deserves it. She tells me not to let it bother me, but… I’ve always, always loved her so much.” (Another, ch. 13) 

Tohru opens the door for Akito. She extends her hand, offers her friendship despite having seen the absolute worst of Akito. She tells Akito that everyone is lonely, everyone wants bonds, and acknowledges Akito’s worst fears, that Akito herself is selfish and dirty for wanting something assured and unending because she, Tohru, herself is dirty and selfish. Tohru knows what Akito has done, knows she’s injured some of her beloved friends, had plans to lock up Kyo, hurt Hatori. 

Tohru still forgives her. One of Tohru’s striking traits in the manga is that she is suffering, every day, she struggles with the grief of losing her mother and the fear of being alone in the world. Through nothing but her own empathy and realization that loneliness is universal, she’s able to forgive people. She forgives Akito and cares for her, and through Tohru, Akito is introduced to the realization that she’s been wrong and that maybe, she shouldn’t be forgiven. 

Shigure also forgives her, and this is the crux of their ship. 

To me, that itself is wildly important. 

They’ve always circled around each other, and Shigure has always been waiting for Akito to be able to come to him again, in full control of her life and choices. He wants Akito the woman, not Akito the god. 

He’s been waiting for the day Akito can meet him as an equal. Akito wants it too, and has wanted him to turn and see her for a very very long time. But she’s been terrified, the entire time, that when he does see her as herself, Shigure won’t like what he sees, and will leave. She’s aware of what she’s done post-curse, she’s aware of the impacts it will have on the former Zodiac members, and she’s aware that once the “bonds” of god and the animals is gone, there may not be anyone left for her.

Neither of them are under any illusions at the end of the series: Akito knows she has to atone for what she did, Shigure knows she has to learn to grow into a person who can function alone. They both know that there are people who are against them changing the oppressive structure of the Sohma family. 

Neither of them care. There are things that they want, together, and it’s enough. There’s a whole new world for them to explore and learn about. And in Furubana, this is shown to be a lifelong effort on their parts: 

“She said after meeting me, she learned so many things for the first time. She smiled happily as she said it.” (Another, #13) 

To close, I’d like to take a moment to talk about the curse and Shigure, and how he set things in motion. 

Without Shigure, the curse would have devolved on its own, yes, but the circumstances would not have allowed for the freedom the Zodiac had at the end of the manga. It would not have ended with Akito being able to learn and live freely. Allowing Tohru into the Sohma family cracked open a door to compassion and kindness none of them had ever experienced before, because the Sohma family seems to exist in a vacuum of stability and love. 

It wasn’t that Shigure knew instantly that Tohru was kind and loving and thoughtful, if anything, his read on her was “completely normal, albeit strange, teenage girl who obviously has a rough life”. But she was normal, she was from outside the Sohmas, and he knew that was enough. No one in the family was stepping up to change the status quo and how stifling and abusive it was, so he did it himself. 

He did it because he loved Akito. 

Not because he felt bad for himself, or Hatori, or any of the others, but merely because he loved her to the point of manipulation. It backfired in his face, because he got a big ol’ dose of “loving and respecting” juice from Tohru, but he still got the end he wanted. 

What I mean to say is best summarized in  chapter 123: 

“It would be nice to live in a kind world, without any troubles, without any fear, without hurting anybody, without ever being hurt, only doing the right thing. I wish I could reach this kind world by the shortest path possible. … “That’s wrong”, or “that’s stupid”: If it’s someone else’s life it’s so easy to make such irresponsible comments. ...It would be great, but it doesn’t exist. … Little by little, walking one step at a time, is all you can do.” 

We get to experience the roughest part of the path with Akito and Shigure, we got to watch them be terrible people who were lonely and in want of love struggle and learn how to get up and move on. 

They tease each other, Shigure is thoughtful of the distinction between “the person Akito was raised to be” and “the person who Akito is”. He’s seen her at her messiest, and she’s seen him at his most jealous. They still chose each other, despite the hurt they caused each other, and others. They make up for it, reflect, and live a life that demonstrates that they have learned. They have friends who are thoughtful and loving and would not hesitate to drop everything and help them, lend an ear when they’re frustrated, help them not to make the same mistakes. 

And then we get to see them be wonderful, kind, thoughtful, loving parents in Furubana. 

We got to see their adorable, kind, compassionate child be friends with the children of the people Akito hurt, because everyone in the former Zodiac’s family collectively decided “never again, no”. 

Their child adores them. Shiki in Furubana #13 radiates love for Akito and Shigure the same way Mutsuki and Hajime do. 

They are genuinely good parents, even when they tease Shiki, and I think that is testament for how good they are for each other and how much they’ve changed as adults. 

I think that’s enough of a reason to ship them, don’t you?

#Mitkun writes stuff #fruits basket manga spoilers #fruits basket another #fruits basket spoilers #akigure #fruits basket akito #fruits basket shigure

[ammaterasu]

9,10,22

9 Most disliked character(s)? Why?

Danzo and the elders

Theyre evil reincarnate, powerful behind-the-scenes, corrupt politicians orchestrating genocides, running underground hunger games, pitting children against each other (no one talks about sai enough but that story hurted) etc etc.

die die die die die die die dIE DIE DIE

10 Most disliked arc? Why?

Kaguya

It undermined all the major themes and buildup of the series – pinning everything on some alien and in-turn taking away accountability from the shinobi and corrupted practices of the human world.

Also following up Madara, the most op and satisfying ‘villain’ with kaguya was just a let down. (not that I even like the war arc bc of its own reasons but that’s another post that many others have summarized much more eloquently)

Ill be honest the storyline for this series already went off the rails since time but this was just a very boring villain that didn’t really stoke the reader with thought-provoking ideological questions like Pein did, as an example (bc actually this is just some mystic higher powered evil alien deity behind it all)

Also, this arc was followed by the final Naruto and Sasuke fight which everyone knew was bound to conclude the series with. Except, leading up to that fight by uniting them against a common enemy where you see sasuke fighting alongside Konoha forces which he vowed to burn down 2 chapters ago? Then endlessly show him save Naruto time and time again (like uh, u want to kill him bc u want to be alone…? Ok so your thoughts have already changed?) , but Vote2 needed to happen so idk it just didn’t flow well and consequently, the start of Vote2 felt forced to me (the actual vote2 fight itself tho was nice, I liked it, just the lead up felt forced. Like I would’ve just cut+pasted vote2 chapters in front of another leadup)

22 Popular character you hate?

Sakura

She was introduced as the shallow, damsel-in-distress token female character in a 3-person group and yea ofc I /would/ have liked her if she actually matured, had complex goals and driving forces for growth but alas that’s Not her. That’s Not the point of her character. Also she’s one of the few characters that was given a backstory that just made you hate her even more. Her backstory w ino started off so cute like ‘wow finally, ok they have history! They were friends! The ‘flower in bloom’ moment was so touching!! Until… what made them break apart? Sakura dropping her for a crush who doesn’t even know her existence???? u dropped ur FIRST FRIEND that saved you from bullies, that praised your greatest insecurity!!!(and ill bring this up again but *cough* *cough* lets see how loyal Naruto was to his ‘first friend’ in comparison) And does this ever get addressed? Do you see her ever apologize to ino for being such a jerk to her? For growing up and realizing wow I was so dumb ino, #sistersbeforemisters (JOKING but u get the point). why doesn’t she grow up? Cuz kishi is misogynistic? Or bc he purposefully crafted a character that u r Not supposed to like? And if so, why would he do that?

Like to me, kishi contrived Sakura with the purpose to uplift Naruto in the eyes of the viewers. The Plot of the show was the storyline between naruto&sasuke and whats an easy way to show the reader how strong, loyal, selfless, mutual the bond between naruto&sasuke is? Well, lets show the reader the opposite of this bond. Lets show a dynamic where sasuke is chased by someone deep vs someone shallow, someone who understands him at his core vs someone who has an idolized infatuation on him, someone who was endlessly loyal to their first bond, vs someone who dropped it for a shallow childish reason, someone who got closer to him through rigorous training and ambition pushing each other to improve and grow vs someone who tried to get closer by putting others down through insults and petty remarks etc etc etc.

And that’s not to say that Sakura as a standalone character didn’t have any shining moments that I appreciated (sasori arc was good, her performing open heart surgery on Naruto was satisfying, her trying to guilt trip sasuke on narutos behalf was annoying af but when I look back on it that was one of the first times I saw her fighting for ‘sasuke’ on someone ELSE’s behalf like… wow the words coming out were garbage but the thought process was.. hm.. thoughtful. Etc).

But the thing is, once you hate someone, they have to REALLY change for you to appreciate them and ofc besides this, fundamentally her character is still not a standalone character with her own goals and passion. Her goal was to ‘get a guy’ .

Send me Salty Asks !

#this got.. ridiculously long lol #thanks for letting me be salty >:) #and thank you for the questions and being patient with me <3 #asks #as always if u agree disagree feel free to share ur thoughts!

[bobbyshaddoe80]

Liberated Audio Reviews

Blake's 7 - The Liberator Chronicles Vol. 6

RELEASED OCTOBER 2013

Recorded on: 2, 10 and 30 October and 13 December 2012

Recorded at: Moat Studios

Review By Robert L. Torres

Incentive by Peter Anghelides

'The Liberator crew are recovering from a Galactic War and searching for their lost members Blake and Jenna. But it’s a search that leads them into terrible danger…'

Because this story marks the return of Steven Pacey to the role of Del Tarrant, I think it is best that I get my views on the character out of my system before getting to the rest of the review.

Honestly.... Out of the main characters that have come and gone on the show during its four season run, there are two that I do not count as my favorites.

The first is Soolin, largely due to how bland and one note the character was compared to the character she was brought on to replace in Series D... Cally.

The other character is Del Tarrant, and I shall endeavor to explain why I dislike him despite Steven Pacey's fine performance.

From the first moment he appeared on the show, there was something about him that just rubbed me the wrong way. For years I knew it was the character himself that seemed like the problem... But I could never work out why.

This story finally brought to light why I disliked Tarrant's character. He was a young, cocky, hot shot with loyalties only to himself... Basically a less charming and less endearing version of Star Lord. He was impatient, brash, and only seemed to be throwing in his lot with the resistance for no other reason than for fame and glory.

In addition, Tarrant seemed to go out of his way to get under everyone's skin (or rather just Avon's), and always bristled under Avon's command.

I understand that with Gareth Thomas having left the series, they needed to create a new character to go up against Avon on the decision making, much in the same way Avon used to butt heads with Blake. Except the dynamic between Avon and Tarrant, from what I remember, was different and far more antagonistic than it was between Blake and Avon. Avon was an Alpha dog, but Tarrant was also an Alpha dog. This is probably why most of their disagreements, from what I remember, tended to come across like dick wagging contests.

It has been a while since I saw the series proper, but there are only two things of any significance regarding Tarrant that I remember. The first was the Series C episode 'Death Watch', which I think involved his twin brother Deeta. The other was the episode 'Sand' from Series D, which involved him and Servalan being trapped on a planet together... Having conjugal relations.

While the character of Del Tarrant isn't my favorite, Anghelides does a pretty good job of at least attempting to shed a bit of light on his character. This is accomplished by focusing on his desperate desire to stand out from the crowd and make a name for himself on par with the legendary Blake and Jenna.

The story begins not long after Tarrant and Dayna have officially joined the crew. During their latest attempt to locate Blake and Jenna, Tarrant and Avon are captured and interrogated while strapped to an electro-shock lie detector. This dual focused narrative split is in itself a pretty interesting dig at unreliable narratives, especially given that both Tarrant and Avon receive electro shocks whenever they aren't being completely truthful in their recollections.

By the way, kudos to Adrian Lukis for his exquisite portrayal of Interrogator Bracheeni. The scenes that featured him interacting with Tarrant and Avon were actually some of the best parts of the story. The revelation of who and what Bracheeni is added a great deal to the narrative, especially in providing an explanation as to why the Liberator crew had to abandon the search for Blake and Jenna.

All things considered, it is nice to get an actual in-universe explanation as opposed to what actually happened: the plot thread being dropped without explanation, forcing viewers to accept the fact that Blake and Jenna weren't coming back... Ever.

While there are some interesting ideas and set ups featured in the story, the narrated recollections are not really that engaging. In addition, my problem with this story is the same problem I had with Volume Three's 'Armageddon Storm'. Its a narrated story that should have been done as a full cast audio.

Final Score: 6 out of 10 Plasma Bolts

As it stands, this story does its job of filling an hour and retroactively provides answers to lingering questions, thus making it essential. However, this is marred by being an uneven story that is only half engaging.

Jenna's Story by Steve Lyons

'Jenna's story is finally told - from her escape from the Liberator during the Galactic War, to her determination to continue the fight against the Federation alone… with the odds stacked against her.'

When Big Finish Productions obtained the rights to produce new stories set within Series A through C of Blake's 7, this not only opened up story avenues to provide greater focus stories for many of its characters, but also an opportunity to fill in a couple of gaps in the narrative.

While 'Incentive' was an uneven story, it still managed to do what the show itself was unable or unwilling to do at the time: explain why the Liberator crew abandoned their search for Blake and Jenna.

Answering lingering questions seems to be this boxset's central theme as the next two stories are focused on what happened to the characters that literally jumped ship at the end of Series B, Jenna and Blake.

According to dialogue spoken by Cally in early Series C, it was always assumed that Jenna was with Blake when they abandoned ship during the Galactic War. It was also naturally assumed that Jenna had been with Blake the whole time during Series C and D.

Turns out that wasn't the case at all... Which actually works to the benefit of this story and the next.

Here, Jenna recounts how she spent her time surviving and fighting during the events of Series C and leading into Series D. It provides Sally Knyvette with great material and also serves as a reminder of what made me, personally, fall out of love with the series during Series D... Particularly with the way the series ended.

Let me be clear, as much I personally didn't like not having Blake and Jenna around on the show anymore, Steve Lyons managed to craft an exceptional Jenna-centric story that absolutely had to be told. This story, as well as the next one, managed to do a much better job implementing the central themes of what was meant to be on display during Series C and particularly during Series D: how the crusade that Blake started with hope and optimism slowly but surely devolved into cynicism, suspicion, self-interest and ultimately self-destruction.

This is highlighted well during Jenna's dealings with Correll, played by John Banks, and his disrespectfully dismissive attitude towards people with 'noble causes', his derogatory disbelief in 'heroes', as well as his overriding, self-serving self-interest.

Kudos to Banks for portraying someone that's basically an unlikeable, selfish jerk without becoming despicable.

The crux and climax of the story is based on a line of dialogue Blake tells Tarrant during the series finale regarding Jenna's ultimate fate. While the moment itself is thrilling and well executed, I had hoped that it was a lie as part of Blake's test or something. Still, what was crafted here is suitably tragic as it showcases the depths of Jenna's devotion, and even her love, for Blake.

The ultimate tragedy being that, in the end, she never did get to tell Blake how she felt about him... and how much he meant to her.

Final Score: 10 out of 10 Plasma Bolts

A superbly satisfying sendoff and sublime swansong for Sally's Stannis!

Blake's Story by Mark Wright and Cavan Scott

'Blake's story is finally told - from his escape from the Liberator during the Galactic War, to his new life as a troubled, scarred man on a distant rebel world…'

Before getting into the review, I have to state that while I understand the reasons why Gareth Thomas and Sally Knyvette left the show at the end of Series B, it is my opinion that the show lost quite a bit of its inherent identity once Blake and Jenna were gone.

While many contend that promoting the late Paul Darrow to lead actor was the creative booster shot the show needed, there is a reason the show was still called Blake's 7 and not Avon's 7.

No matter who is given the spotlight and focus, Blake's presence is still very embedded within the show's DNA. Despite his absence, Blake's influence is still keenly felt by those that inhabit this fictional universe... Both directly and indirectly.

While the storytelling avenues may have opened up for the rest of the cast, the audience would still inevitably wonder, 'Where the hell is Blake? When is he coming back?' Largely because the audience was still interested in seeing Blake's story continue.

Both Gareth Thomas and Chris Boucher no doubt understood this to be absolutely true. As long as the Roj Blake character remained alive, but missing from a show that bared his character's name, then Gareth Thomas would not have been able to truly move forward in his career.

Which is why its no surprise that the most memorable moment in the entire series came about at Thomas' insistence.

But this isn't about how Blake's story ends... Its about the circumstances Blake experienced during Series C and D that led to his ultimate fate on Gauda Prime. And I am pleased to say that Wright and Scott do an excellent job filling in the blanks of Blake's journey.

From landing on the planet Epheron in his escape pod, to attempting to reunite with the Liberator (which includes Blake visiting the planet Shorlan post-Armageddon Storm), to being captured, tortured and accused of treachery by the Resistance (thus explaining the scar over his eye he displayed in the series finale), its all presented here brilliantly. I also appreciate how engaging these moments are, and aren't treated as plot points to check off.

The late Gareth Thomas really did a great job with this material, displaying the same charisma and intensity he had shown throughout his tenure on the show, which is doubly unfortunate that he had opted out after Series B.

The framing device utilized for Blake recounting events is brilliant, and the twist reveal is actually rather clever... If a little unsurprising. However, it serves the narrative well as it goes to the heart of the tragic and ironic inevitability that lies ahead for Blake, particularly in his connection to Avon.

Despite their disagreements and opposing ideals... And no matter how often Avon secretly wished to be rid of Blake... They still needed each other.

It often reminds me of why the Doctor chooses to travel with companions, the companions keep the Doctor grounded and keep the Doctor from going too far for the sake of selfish self interest and so on.

While neither one would ever admit it, Blake and Avon had the ability to keep each other in check. And even though Blake said at the end of 'Star One' and even near the end of this story that he always trusted Avon... Its only with the benefit of hindsight do we question whether or not that trust was warranted.

Final Score: 10 out of 10 Plasma Bolts

A truly satisfying sendoff for the original star of the show.

Final score for Volume 6 of the Liberator Chronicles, in its entirety, is 8 out of 10 Plasma Bolts.

This is an essential set of stories for longtime fans. Even though there are six more boxsets of stories left in the range, if the Liberator Chronicles audio range ended here, it would have ended on a major high note.

As an aside, while the next six boxsets have produced some outstanding stories, I personally feel that both 'Jenna's Story' and 'Blake's Story' should have been the stories utilized as the finale for the Liberator Chronicles range overall.

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#big finish productions #blake's 7 #audiobook #reviews #audio dramas

[itsclydebitches]

Whether they’re critic or RWBY fanatic, I can’t stomach people who accuse Clover of being an idiot about the Tyrian situation. I actually saw someone say he was dumb for telling Qrow Robyn can only get help if he comes quietly (which is TRUE and there was NOTHING to suggest he wasn’t going to help her). It’s toxic victim blaming of the highest order, and another thing I can’t stand about this fandom.

I’m not a fan of it either. The writing and parts of the fandom both would benefit from acknowledging that responsibility for every Bad Thing in the show doesn’t reside solely at the feet of one individual. Likewise that disliking one character isn’t good grounds for blaming another. From what I witnessed over the course of the volume, a lot of people really liked Clover or were otherwise neutral towards him... up until he failed to toss Ironwood aside in favor of the heroes. Many of the posts working to blame Clover for that whole debacle seem to be less about Clover and more about Ironwood. If you support him you must be awful and you thus must be responsible for every awful thing that goes down... even as we get objective evidence of others making the bad decisions: Robyn attacks him, Qrow teams up with Tyrian, etc. 

What it comes down to is that the RWBYJNRQO group refuses to make sacrifices. You’re right that Clover was right. He told Qrow he needed to stop fighting him because Robyn needed help. That’s the truth. You attacked me, she got hurt in this crash, so now you need to cut that out so we can get her medical attention. Qrow was thus faced with a question: “Am I willing to let myself be arrested in order to get Robyn potentially life-saving help?” (they don’t know how seriously she was injured) and he answered, “No. I’m not. I’d rather try to take out Clover myself, then potentially deal with Tyrian myself - even though I got poisoned by him once - and figure out how to get Robyn help myself. Even though I’m wanted by all Atlas authorities and can’t radio in for assistance. Even though this cold is supposedly deadly and I’m wasting time with a fight.” It’s arrogance to think he can manage all this and selfish to prioritize that perfect scenario (coughRubycough) over Robyn’s safety. I love him but Qrow was the stupid one here and all that was before he decided, “Teaming up with the serial killer is a great idea.” 

And yes, we can flip things and demand that Clover make the sacrifice instead. “He should have told Qrow he’d no longer try to arrest him so they could get Robyn help. He cared more about the arrest than Robyn’s life” but there are so many more reasons why that’s a far bigger and less logical sacrifice for him to make. Robyn just tried to shoot him in the face. Qrow helped her try to take him out. So Clover is supposed to care for her and trust him? Coming into Atlas with an un-arrested Qrow is a risk to Clover’s position. Letting Qrow run off and lying about how he escaped isn’t something he’d want to do to Ironwood. There’s no scenario here in which Clover doesn’t risk too much whereas Qrow could have put the tinniest bit of trust in two friends to say, “If Ironwood is arresting us then my recently reckless niece must have done something pretty bad. I’ve expressed a desire to talk to Ironwood so yes, I’ll go with you in order to achieve that and hopefully work things out.” He should have done that in the airship. He absolutely should have done it when Robyn’s life was potentially on the line. Heroes make those kinds of sacrifices. 

All of which is wrapped up in the expectations attached to this storyline. People are inclined to blame Ironwood - and by extension Clover - because the whole “arresting the heroes” plot is always attached to an evil, corrupt system trying to take out innocent good guys. But RWBY failed to write that corrupt system or innocent protagonists. Ruby did lie to Ironwood. Blake and Yang did betray him. They did promise to stop the only plan they currently have to save lives. This isn’t a case of heroes resisting arrest because they’ve been set up, or because they know the system will kill/silence them, or even because they’re the only ones who can save the world and thus their freedom is necessary. The group did all the things they’re being arrested for, there’s no danger attached to that arrest, and their freedom is arguably doing harm to the people of Atlas. All of this reflects back on Clover where the audience is primed to say, “How dare he try to arrest our heroes! He’s awful” without thinking through whether RWBYJNORQO have done things lately worthy of arrest and whether their arrest would benefit the rest of the kingdom. In Volume 7 RT did not write a story where these arrests were undeserved or their freedom integral to others’ survival. They certainly didn’t write heroes who were willing to give up something of their own - in this case personal freedom for a time - in order to maintain an ally (Ruby) or to save another (Qrow). They’re written as selfish. 

It sucks (suuuuucks) to be living in 2020, looking at a cop-esque character arresting a minority supporting freedom fighter/a main protagonist and going, “Clover did nothing wrong here”... but that’s the stance I’m taking. RWBY is trying to capitalize on a lot of political themes but is failing to write the basic pieces necessary for that story: like military figures who are objectively in the wrong and heroes who are innocent of their accused crimes, or at least committed those crimes for persuasively good reasons. Yang betraying Ironwood when she knows nothing about Robyn is not comparable to something like, say, Jean Valjean stealing bread to feed himself in a poverty ridden France. Breaking bad laws for good reasons is SO COMMON in storytelling (and the real world!) yet somehow RT failed to craft any moment where I thought the heroes’ ideals outweighed their bad actions. The heroes were not thrust into an awful system that we were happy to see them dismantle. Clover could have resorted to violence right off the bat. Blake and Yang could have been innocents this whole volume. Ruby could have had a solid plan that Ironwood foolishly ignored. The Ace Ops could have been written as morally gray types whose arrest poses a threat to our heroes. They could have attacked first. Clover could have teamed up with Tyrian. Robyn could have tried to keep her head down and was faced with an unlawful arrest purely for associating with Qrow... we could have had a hundred different scenarios to make this setup work and get me to cheer as the group cleverly dodged persecution. RWBY ignored all of them. 

#rwby #rwde #mymetas #Anonymous

[autumnslance]

Hello! Are you looking forward to 5.3, and do you have any story predictions? :)

I am very much looking forward to 5.3! I am planning to be up bright and early in the morning (6am my time) for the Live Letter and likely a trailer. I also took Patch Day off work so I can just play and not sit and be unproductive and distracted at work all day.

As a reminder: trailers are meant to hype us up and are often cut to be misleading! Incomplete, out of context voiced lines over entirely unrelated scenes/images! Things spliced together to pique interest and fuel theories! Do not trust it!

They may use more NieR music. Or part of the boss theme for the Secret Trial. Or both.

I had a lot to say so here’s a cut!

Predictions? Hrm. At this point I’m not sure. I can think of a few different possibilities, especially with The Crystal Tower raids becoming mandatory (and honestly they should have just done that before Shadowbringers entirely). We also know Our Lady Natsuko Ishikawa is back to lead writing for this finale of the storyarc she’s guided this entire time.

-I do think the Crystal Tower on the Source will become important again, as will its slumbering keeper. There’ve been hints dropped to that regard since the end of 5.0.

-I’m not so sure the Exarch will die; there’s a lot of talk about it and people claiming “OMG death flags!!!” but that just makes me think the opposite; he might come close, but with the way the narrative has relied on second chances and hope, I don’t see it as that likely. Also Her Grace Ishikawa dislikes killing off characters if she can help it, so unless she’s under orders, I feel it’s unlikely.

There are other ways The Queen can break our hears, after all.

-I am ready for a big, teary scene where Ryne says goodbye to the Scions, especially Thancred. There are a couple possibilities for how it can go, though.

-Interrupted by an enemy/event, leaving only last soft looks and things still unsaid but the communication is finally there.

-Thancred (and/or Urianger and/or Y’shtola) end up remaining on the First after all, perhaps to give the others a chance, or to help the Exarch, or Ryne, or similar last minute emergency reasons; unintentional, but they won’t just leave their friends hanging.

-The Archons do get to leave, but it’s difficult getting them back to their bodies; this is where I think Young G’raha comes back in. His blood on the Source can be used to reverse what Exarch does on the First to get the Scions into the souljars and back into corporeal form.

-A big part of me wants Ryne to last minute suddenly have to help us get the Scions back. That’s been my theory the whole time and I won’t let go until this is resolved. Minfilia got the Heroes of the First home with her, Ryne could be able to do the same; she’s as Blessed as the WoL is, after all, and just as Rejoined.

-That last one does leave Gaia alone, though, which is rough, but also she could finish Eden on her own at this clean break point in that story. While Ryne dearly loves and wants to rebuild the First, she is the Oracle of Light--and Light’s time over that world is done. That Oracle’s powers and point of hope are no longer needed, but a personification of Darkness’ changes, well...

-Runar may have a role somehow; there’s theorizing on the focus on him last patch, and him overhearing Y’shtola talk of leaving, might leave him open to manipulation.

-Frankly all the new-minted WoLs are open to manipulation, and Elidibus turning them on the Scions somehow.

-I want Angelo to come back with Alisaie. Barring that, she immediately remakes him. I definitely want a scene or at least mention of her testing her new technique on Ga Bu, but that might take another patch or two.

(I’m pretty sure out of all of them, the twins are definitely getting home; their stories on the First have been neatly wrapped up and their role alongside the WoL keeps them pretty safe, I think)

-I want a stabilized portal with the First. I don’t want the world “cut off” so far as plot goes (open for us to return for leveling/crafting/instanced reasons, but the story there being over). It would negate in so many ways the point of saving the First to let it rot in MMO static world status, but I’m also sure that’s likely to happen. Story moves on, as do the lives there, but the game can’t depict it unless there’s a plot reason for it to update.

-We’ll start working on the still-destroyed other side of the Firmament. It’ll go much like the last patch’s progression did, as that actually worked out rather well. Maybe it’s a new form of player housing. Possibly. They’ve got to come up with something different.

-Anogg and Konog will blow things up. Machine lifeforms will attack the Goggs’ carnival. The Chief will yell and curse a lot. Nines may end up helping protect people from the machine lifeforms and then begrudgingly work with us, and 2B if we can wake her; she’s in promo art still so may get woken up during the story leading into the Bunker. I know there’s at least one other faction in NieR those figures in the art could be, and the gear they hinted will be based on said figures. We’ll learn some, but not the whole story, of what happened to 2B and why Nines was enraged while not infected (his eyes were clear). Maybe we’ll meet A2; as a boss? I doubt we’ll see Adam and/or Eve until part 3, though; they feel like end bosses, if I understand their role in story right (I’ve not played any NieR).

-People will gripe and whine there are no changes to the actual writing, dialogue, or voice acting for ARR, especially in EN, not realizing how much more work that is, not to mention probably legal issues and contractual obligations with that studio and the actors.

-I’m hoping for Class and Job quests for New Game+

(as an aside, I would love for the ARR Beast Tribes to get retooled to be a bit more like HW and later Beast Tribes, and ARR and HW DoL/DoH quests to get updated to be more StB-style; for one thing, it’s an actual test of your gathering/crafting skills, not “buy it from the MB/have a buddy make it” and for two, once contained to story items, it might make it easier to add those quests to New Game+)

-Please give us Hildibrand. Please. I’m begging, SE! Greg canonically has riftwalking powers and used them at the end of StB Hildy. Please. Give us the Inspector, he’s how the WoL destresses from what MSQ throws at them.

There’s probably more I’m forgetting, but this is more than enough for now. I’m trying not to go too hard on speculation, as whatever happens will still surprise me somehow.

I do expect tears though. Lots and lots of tears.

#prompts #blogging #about me #Patch 5.3 #Reflections in Crystal #speculation #Dark Autumn #Aeryn Striker #C'oretta Khell #Iyna Cauld #Anonymous