#also weirdly unambitious

[winepresswrath]

By the second age you should have a circle of friends who spend more time talking about building great elven cities and alliances between all free peoples of middle earth than pyrrhic vengeance quests.

#listen first age Galadriel is the youngest child of a youngest child #who feels constrained by her position as Baby in a family of immortals #second age Galadriel is one of the oldest elves left alive on middle earth #definitely the oldest of her much diminished family #ok maglor exempted #she has seen great horrors! and she wants! like Gil-Galad! #to do something productive about it #i think I would have actually enjoyed or idk been open to enjoying #a galadriel who essentially abdicated her position of responsibility and leadership #and left her nephew (ish) in charge while she ran off to do vengeance #because she's just that fucked up about everything she's lost #but this Galadriel is just- not one of the oldest and most powerful of her people #or a sorceress probably #or capable of telling the valar to fuck off with their promises of forgiveness she doesn't need it #fundamentally I think her biggest sin is that she's boring #but I am also a terrible little nerd sad because adaptation bad #she's so incurious and blinkered and that is simply not my girl #also weirdly unambitious

[frasier-crane-style]

The musical episode

I don't want anything to say I just don't like musicals. I'm fine with musicals. I liked Galavant. I loved Galavant. But Galavant was good.

Most of the songs here are samey-sounding ballads about the characters' angst, unenthusiastically performed, half-heartedly staged... mostly just the singer walking around, sing-talking, while the camera zooms out or zooms in. There are few exceptions, but largely it's unambitious.

I think Galavant and Buffy's Once More With Feeling worked because they had a lot of fun with the idea of the characters being trapped in a musical. They played around with the format, they mixed up the music so you could go from rock & roll number to love song to villain song and so on. The lyrics were witty and joking; the ones in SNW are weirdly straightforward. A lot of them barely even rhyme. Can anyone point me to a joke within the music that's particularly clever?

There are a few good gags, like Pike almost launching into a love ballad or the Klingons doing a boy band number, but largely it seems to be relying on the fact that it's a Star Trek musical to be amusing and not trying to be funny on its own.

Also, a lot of the time they'll have one musical number end and another one immediately start up, and that feels like an amateur hour. Shouldn't you be doing duets? It's weird to complain about too much music in a musical, but I'd rather have a few real hard showstoppers than a LOT of monotonous tunes.

I know you guys probably don't like hearing about what a good writer Joss Whedon is, but this was one episode out of 22! 22! Are you telling me that anything in Strange New Worlds holds a candle to this in terms of technical complexity, earworminess, character insight, lyrical cleverness? It's just a good song, man. And it's not even one of the bigger numbers.

#star trek #strange new worlds #Youtube

[espresshadow]

Got some thoughts about the new Pokémon games under the cut because this got kinda obnoxiously long. Some spoilers but I'm only about 20% in, no new pokémon mentioned.

You can feel the desperation in Scarlet and Violet.

These games make me so, so mad because they're so ambitious and fun to play. They really did nail making it fun. The core gameplay loop has clearly had a lot of thought and work put into it. There's passion and love obvious in this game. And yet it REALLY, REALLY needed another fucking year in the oven.

This is one of the most unpolished games I've ever played. The performance issues, even on a physical copy of the game playing in docked mode, can make the game borderline unplayable. I have yet to encounter a single gameplay bug, but the visual bugs are neverending and unavoidable. Pokémon clip into the ground regularly. I've found sections of terrain textured wrong in really obvious ways. Any time you're in a non-fixed camera battle, the camera WILL clip into the ground. It's genuinely awful. This is unacceptable for a $60 flagship franchise game.

Those things are, like... bad. For sure. But I also keep running into gameplay and story beats and areas that feel like placeholders, and that's the most egregious thing to me.

Most of the shops that fill the world are just a generic blue background and flavor text. The bug gym test (literally the first one) consists of a ball rolling game wholly unconnected from anything and then you fight the gym leader, who is cute and runs a patisserie, but after her fight you can't visit her shop still and it feels weirdly disjointed from everything else. It feels like connective tissue was planned but there was no time. The TM crafting system also feels frankly unfinished, like there was meant to be more depth to it. There are just... lots of things in the game that feel like placeholders because the people working on them had more ambitious ideas but they weren't sure if there would be time to implement them. I'm about 25% in to the game and this feeling keeps getting stronger.

And it makes me SO MAD. Sword and Shield were, like... fine. They ran okay, they had some pop-in issues but overall the experience felt pretty polished. It was just completely unambitious in a lot of ways. Coming off the heels of the fantastic gen 7 and as the first console Pokémon game, the best thing you could say about them was... decently fun. Inoffensive. More of the same.

The best thing you can say about Scarlet and Violet is that it's REALLY FUCKING FUN. I regularly find myself yelling in delight as shit keeps spontaneously happening. There's so many good choices here. There are a couple baffling decisions (what's with the fuckin uniforms, guys? why would you do this?) but mostly the bad stuff is all things you can absolutely tell were done that way because there was no time to do anything better. You can feel that sense permeating the entire game. The disappointment, the concession, the desperation.

We're getting to the limit of what original Switch hardware can handle. Normally these are the conditions under which the Gamefreak devs flourish. The second generation or set of games on any given console are always leaps and bounds better than the first. Think of Gen 5 vs Gen 4, or Gen 7 vs Gen 6. I'm a Sinnoh apologist but Unova and Alola are some of the best and most polished experiences Pokémon has to offer PERIOD. GF is wringing everything they fucking can out of these consoles because they've learned from the last games how to do that.

GF had Sword and Shield, Let's Go, AND Legends Arceus as experience working with the Switch going into Gen 9. This should have been the best looking fucking game on the goddamn Switch. WE KNOW these developers are capable of this.

The game is bad because GF was crunched.

That's the end of it. The management of GF and Pokémon Company all deserve to be fired, blacklisted, and their severance packages distributed among the employees who nearly killed themselves to get this game out. This is their fault.

This is a post about the games so obviously I'm focusing on the impact this has had on them but I also want to be clear that if the choice was between a new pokémon game never releasing again and GF employees getting crunched, I'd pick the first in a heartbeat. No product or work of art could ever be worth this human suffering inflicted to make it. We can make games without crunch, though! They could have just... given it another year! Two years! That would have been far preferable to this.

I don't have a good closer for this. I think people are quickly becoming aware that the crunch is to blame and calls for GF to unionize are getting louder as the labor movement overall gains steam in the US, but I don’t believe for a heartbeat that it'll happen. I want it to— all labor deserves dignity and representation. It's a snowball's chance in hell at the moment, though.

I think the best outcome here is that the same loud + angry dexit gamers catch on that crunch and bad working conditions caused this and start throwing their weight at improving those working conditions. If major game journalist sites start mentioning crunch in every article about the game, if major community figures start talking about it, maybe something good could come out of it.

Probably not, though, and we'll see the cycle repeat two years from now.

#Pokémon #pokemon #pokemon scarlet and violet #pokemon sv #pokemon scarvio #i have Thoughts #i do think this is just such an obvious example of terrible management and crunch creating a bad game #people on the internet have brainworms tho so my hopes are not high

[tsartomato]

Virus (1999)

It’s an unambitious horror film, but Donald Sutherland and the great VFX, most of which is practical make it a very cool movie. This flick has a lot of russian and it is all laughable. It’s like they’ve opened a dictionary but didn’t check the definitions of the words. And in the screenshot above they couldn’t even pick one of two words, both of which are wrong. Also weirdly they called emergency…

View On WordPress

#Video #Virus (1999)

[1-0-1-9archived]

SEVEN DEADLY SINS

[This man just go shruggu]

#> god all that surprises me is that not all of these are higher #> and also that sloth is higher than wrath because of how easily bored he is #> but i guess it still tracks for how weirdly unambitious he is for someone who's so proud and critical #I STILL NEED A MOTHERFUCKING DASH MEMES TAG | Dash Memes

[theprogressofspring]

in terms of the weasleys ive always thought fred and george could be weirdly brutal towards ron. like ron kind of idolizes them and in return they're usually rude and dismissive. Also always felt bad for percy. like yea he does some bad things later on but he's bullied by everyone except molly purely because he's not as charismatic and funny as the others and is a lot more awkward. its like the family inside joke that they all hate percy. its no wonder he ends up how he does.

This is correct! Fred and (to a lesser extent) George are extraordinarily brutal (experimenting on younger students, on muggles who can’t defend themselves re: Dudley, inventing love potions that are essentially date-rape drugs, etc.). Ron, thankfully, is a more sensitive, observant, and active soul.Percy is……*deep inhale* my actual son. Percy is so smart and hardworking and Just Trying to Succeed and be recognized in a deeply dysfunctional home full of people who are nothing like him.“its like the family inside joke that they all hate percy.“ lol this hit me too deep and it is 100% true! This is what I mean when I talked about fostering competition between siblings in one of my earlier asks. When you make one child the “villain” of the family for being “oversensitive” or a “bad sport” while simultaneously praising them for the behaviors that contribute to that (fastidiousness, boundaries, self-awareness), the mixed messages are going to cause problems!Percy was definitely blinded with anger when it came to discerning the truth from the Ministry’s party line, and that is short-sighted and bad and he was a fool for that. But Percy was, honestly, spot on when he called out his parents for being unambitious and envious. Fred and George get praised for leaving school and starting a “fun” business that makes them ~rich. But Percy.Percy, who has worked his way up in the Ministry through skill and intelligence and a willingness to be patient and accept abuse, frankly (Weatherby!), is dismissed/accused by Arthur of gaining his position purely because of his family name and ties to Harry Potter. (Remember Ron’s rightfully upset reaction to Hermione thinking Harry was the obvious lock for Prefect? Magnify that by like a million.) 

“Surely it wasn’t Percy’s own talent—it’s that the Ministry wants to spy on us and Harry,” Arthur and Molly say.It’s ironic, honestly. Percy, for once, has escaped the association with his family’s poverty through his YEARS of effort, but is now turning around and getting accused of a sort of Bizarro-poor-person-world version of Lucius Malfoy buying Draco onto the quidditch team.

It’s also very worth nothing that, uh, the Ministry literally never used Percy to spy except for that one Christmas visit to the Burrow that happened LONG after the accusation, and after Percy had accepted Voldemort’s return. There’s literally no indication at all that Percy ever informed on his family or sought opportunities to do so. Pre-Christmas visit, Percy had already chosen estrangement and HATED being at his parents’ house, but he did it because the new Minister—his BOSS and a vocally anti-Voldemort official—asked him to. 

And tbh, it must have stung pretty bad for Percy that this new Minister—not the one his parents warned him about at all!—was using him to get to Harry.

Anyway the Weasleys were emotionally abusive to Percy and all their children (except Ginny and maybe Charlie we can’t be sure) bYE!!!!!

#asks #anonymous #harry potter #percy weasley #molly weasley #arthur weasley #rufus scrimgeour #cornelius fudge #family #fred weasley #george weasley #hp meta #my meta #i made this

[ninavarelas]

my books....

this is rly so wild. that’s my name on there!

everyone has been so excited about the IRON HEART cover reveal, i’m stunned. i get in my head sometimes and forget i am not on a little island where i’m the only one (other than my friends and family) who cares about this story. it’s so strange putting something out into the world and seeing people take it and care for it in ways that have nothing to do with me, if that makes sense. like it comes alive and takes on a new and different shape for each person. that’s so neat and i’m so happy and honored i get to witness it. i can’t put into words (haha) my gratitude for the people who have read and thought about and loved CW and are now so excited for IH.

lovely beautiful rory powers posted on twitter about how as a debut it’s important to distinguish between what you think you want bc it’s a status symbol vs. what you actually want. i’ve been thinking about that.

tbh i’ve kind of always been weirdly unambitious about certain things. i feel disconnected from the publishing world in general bc so much happens in NYC/the east coast and i’m in LA, so i rly haven’t met very many writers or industry people at all, just talked online. (i’m excited to meet people at yallwest this year though! i’m not there in any professional capacity but you bet i’ll be attending panels to hear those cool folks talk!). and honestly, having a 9-6 day job on top of writing is a bit tiring, as my weekdays are just work>writing>sleep and my weekends are all writing. it’s very easy to feel, as i said, like i’m on a little island, separated from the real world. time moves around me and i’m not always aware of it, or an active participant. i don’t rly keep track of what awards are about to be announced or what lists are coming out, etc. which is bad bc I Should Pay Attention To Career Things but good bc there’s nothing about the reception of my first book i’m not satisfied with. the things i see are: people talking about her on social media, people making art and memes, people with CW @s and quotes in their twt bios, people posting cool bookstagram photos, people telling me when they see her in libraries which is my favorite thing.

this is kind of morbid (?) but in terms of career ambitions, i was never rly able to imagine an adult future for myself, so the fact that i’m here and writing is so nice and i want to keep doing exactly this for a long long time. i have sort of vague, generic aspirations (hitting NYT list, being financially comfortable) but the thing i like most is the process of writing, like the physical process of sitting down and writing words, and if someone wants to publish the product of that, and people want to read it, it feels like a wild bonus.

i think my ideal life is like, i live in a little cottage in the woods and write all day and i have a rly nice bathtub and lots of windows. and sometimes my agent calls me and says hey guess what we sold the thing, you can keep your cottage for another year! and i’m like wow! thank you! and also in this scenario i’m magically good at making bread and the local birds do my laundry and i pay them in birdseed and shiny trinkets and we have a cool symbiotic relationship type thing going on. ALSO all my friends live nearby so i can cook them dinner whenever i want.

HMM what else... what other thoughts.... i’m starting to draft my 3rd book now and am thinking about my 4th. i’m not sure when i’ll be able to give more detail about 3rd book (probably not for a while 😭) but i’m excited about it. she’s weird and spooky and very me, even more me than CW. i like her a lot.

ok i think that’s about it... i’m bored at work and i like talking into the void here. 2 many thoughts head full!!

anyway i hope all y’all are doing well, i hope february is kinder than january, i hope you’re reading or watching or eating good things. ok love you bye

#i love hitting post with wild abandon and then immediately catching 47 typos #whew! #just some thoughts i guess

[retro-roulette]

Retro Roulette #95: Super Adventure Island (SNES, 1992)

“Let’s just make the same stuff as before, but add the word ‘Super’ to it” - every SNES developer in history

It was long, long ago in October 2019 that I took a look at the late NES release Adventure Island 3. That one was a late enough release, in fact, that this week’s game pre-dates it by about 6 months, in terms of their original releases in Japan. So for those keeping track, numbers go 1, 2, Super, and 3. It’s canon.

As before, our hero Master Higgins detests wearing clothes and most of God’s creatures, forcing him to kill them all with axes and boomerangs to stay alive (you even kill penguins in this one). Outside of that, it’s your fairly standard simple platformer - run, jump, don’t die, fight the occasional cool-looking boss.

As with other games in the series, you have a ‘health’ meter that is always slowly draining, but can be replenished by picking up various fruits. This is because Master Higgins has scurvy, and spends his life seeking a cure. It consumes him.

Throughout the game, you’ll encounter a number of different standard ‘2d platforming’ sorts of levels - vertical climbs, underwater slogs, and even a mine cart auto-scroller, which is an interesting portent of things to come on the SNES. While they’re generally well-done, none of the levels are all that lengthy or complicated, and the whole thing can be beaten in less than an hour without a ton of trouble. This keeps the game from feeling truly essential, but it’s definitely an enjoyable platformer, if also a bit of an unambitious one.

When playing this, I couldn’t help that while it isn’t an especially exciting game for an adult, this feels like the perfect introduction to this sort of game for younger kids. If you’ve been dying to start corrupting your children by getting them into video games (and admit it - you know you have), Super Adventure Island is an excellent choice. If you’re not a kid but still a fan of simple platformers, this is worth an hour or two of your time, too.

I just realized he looks constipated and now i can’t unsee it. It’s the same in EVERY screenshot, too - just scroll up and look. It’s weird.

In addition to the subsequent NES game Adventure Island 3, there was one more sequel, Super Adventure Island II, released in late 1994. That one commands a weirdly high price tag, and is apparently pretty good, and made an effort to do more with the series’ relatively simple formula.

We’re sticking with the SNES next week, for a very weird game in an extremely overdone and early-90s genre. I’m excited! See you then.

#snes #super nintendo #nintendo #snes games #adventure island #super adventure island #master higgins #everything is super #higgins is constipated #retro games #retro gaming #retro video games #retro roulette #scurvy

[compllexes]

doux, chatoyer, luciole, nuage 💕

chatoyer (to shimmer): what is sure to make you cry?

ohhh i’m a sensitive lil shit so anything authentic and genuine - things like sincerity and kindness and good character development in fiction lol (and i mean like. real authenticity, not cheap, token plot devices). also, i get weirdly emotional when something is literarily well done, or if it’s unorthodox or defies any kind of convention or challenges me in some way and teaches me things/changes the way i see things 

doux (soft): where do you feel most safe?

with my friends and family tbh

luciole (firefly): what was your dream job when you were little?

i wanted to be an author. i remember in school we had this interview project thing on what you wanted to be in the future and i was so embarrassed to explain mine cause i thought people would find it super lame and completely unambitious. some time after, my friends brought it up in conversation and they kinda laughed about it which made me die a little inside. but of course now i know better and i hope they do, too. (and if they don’t, well. their loss.)

nuage (cloud): what is your dream job now?

ah.. i don’t know. i really don’t know. it’s not writing anymore, cause i’m pretty sure i wanna do it as a hobby, but as to the thing that would be the source of my income… i sincerely have no idea. help

aesthetic french asks

#enquiries

[j-kaiwa]

Discussion Article June 17th

What Never Leaving Your Hometown Does to Your Brain

Leaving home is an American tradition and it shapes American brains.

Throw a stone at the internet and you’ll have a broken computer. Throw a stone online and you’ll hit a wikiHow, subreddit, or Thought Catalog diatribe pondering the consequences of a stationary life. Our culture is not so obsessed with the “move from a small town, get a start in the big city” narrative — thanks a bunch, Horatio Alger — that the idea of staying put is weirdly conflated with the idea of failure. The Gilded Age is well behind us, but we’re still Manifest Destiny-ing our way from city to 35 Best Cities For Young Adults listicle. But what if we didn’t? What if we just put down roots?

“Unambitious Loser With Happy, Fulfilling Life Still Lives In Hometown,” declared The Onion in 2013. Scientifically, that sounds about right. Our brains are much more influenced by the specific locations we live in than by the abstract idea of being stuck. Still, you can learn a lot about a person by where they are from and where they have chosen to be. In a sense, migration patterns are indicative of self diagnosis. Witness the data showing that a childhood in a blue state or a densely populated area makes it significantly less likely for a person to marry young. New York kids stay single and keep swiping. They also feel weird about it: City kids have a slew of brain issues that their rural counterparts don’t. Research reveals that people in cities are 21 percent more at risk for anxiety disorders and 30 percent more likely to have a mood disorder. In a study by the University of Heidelberg, the amygdala and cingulate cortex (the bit that controls emotion and adversity response) of otherwise healthy city-dwellers became over-active in stressful situations.

The political polarization of the country presumably hasn’t done much to help. Opportunity is less of a motivator when culture varies widely and the digital economy is in full swing. Presumably that’s why more people are just staying home.

“The notion that one can pick up and move to a location that promises better opportunities has long been an important part of the American mystique,” writes authors from the University of Notre Dame and the Federal Reserve Board in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. “However, migration rates have been falling in the past several decades, calling into question the extent to which high rates of geographic mobility are still a distinguishing characteristic of the U.S. economy.”

Non-academic translation: More and more Americans are putting down stakes. Internal migration has declined across demographic and socioeconomic groups since the 1980s and has steadily continued to drop. Only 11.6 percent of people changed residencies between 2010 and 2011, the lowest rate of movement since the government started tracking these trends in the 1940s. Younger people tend to move more, but they don’t migrate the way they once did. They go west after graduating Harvard Business School, but not after getting their high school diplomas.

Whether you choose to move is also largely determined by what state you grew up in. The current economic downturn, the rise of the two-career couple, and our aging population of baby boomers have all effected the decrease in internal migration. But whether one breaks from the four-in-ten Americans who have never moved from their hometown is hugely considered by the chance of your birthplace. In the Midwest more than 70 percent of residents stayed in the state where they were born and nearly half of all adults in this region spent their entire lives in their hometown. Meanwhile, less than a third of those who have grown up in Western states have done the same, with Californians among the most likely to move around more frequently

Julia, 25, fits into what the Pew Research Center defines as the “mover” category. She’s college educated, from California, and has lived in three different cities in the past seven years. Her motivation for moving around after college has primarily been work, although she knew going back to the West Coast would be good culture fit.

“Say I was offered a job in Seattle or Los Angeles, I would have gone there,” she says, describing a move to Berkeley. “Its a cultural thing in my family as well. I was raised with the mantra, ‘Grow up, do well, work hard, and get out of here.’’

One’s personality can predict whether or not they’ll move in ways that may seem surprising. It makes sense that highly active people have a higher tendency to migrate and social people choose to go to urban locations. But the very emotional are more likely to move away from home as well. They may not move too far from where they are from, but “the fact that they do not move often or selectively to urban locations indicates that people with this personality trait move simply because they are not content where they are,” states the Association for Psychological Science.

If you liked your hometown as a kid, there is no way to predict your happiness if you never move away. Seeing new things is amazing, but being able to see your mom anytime you want is amazing as well. Contentment largely rests on aligning one’s traits with one’s situation. If you’re a 22-year-old from Indiana who wants to get married soon and grew up on a farm, well, Chicago probably isn’t a good bet. That said, you’ll never know what could have been if it never was.

If that makes you nervous, you might want to consider moving out of the city.

[realtalk-princeton]

hi high schooler here trying to decide between princeton and a state school. princeton would be more expensive and seems like a lot more hard work, and im worried about not being able to fit in; the state school would basically be the cheaper and easier option. can you offer any advice? is going to princeton really that rewarding, even for someone rather unambitious?

Response from Amygdala:

Honestly, it depends a lot on what you want to get out of school. Princeton is an intense bubble. If you come here, your life will be Princeton for four years. Many people never really leave campus (although some of us do, I try to get out every weekend). It is hard but there are a ton of resources and a lot of people who can help you. I also think it would be easier to find your niche at Princeton, where everyone is really invested in extracurriculars and there are only 5,000 students than at a state school with 25k+ students. Here, you can make personal relationships with faculty if you seek that out; at a state school, you’ll probably just be a number. Princeton is hard work but if you don’t care that much about your GPA it becomes a lot less hard. It’s not too difficult to get a 3.0 here. It’s the people who really want a 3.7+ that find academics really consuming. 

I think being here has been rewarding in that I have learned a ton about myself and have had a lot of research and travel opportunities that I am not sure I would have been able to have at a state school. I have also been surrounded by (generally) intelligent people (although honestly I thought people here would be a lot smarter and more mature when I was a prefrosh). It has also been stressful and kind of weirdly exclusive, but I think that might be the case at a lot of places, even state schools. 

Anyway, my verdict is: don’t be worried about fitting in, there are so many different groups and environments on campus and one is sure to work out for you. If Princeton is a financial burden for your family, talk to the financial aid office, especially if you got a scholarship at your state school. They might be able to match it. My thought on difficulty is that you come to college to learn and grow and you’re going to do that best in a challenging environment. Coasting for four years sounds really boring to me. I guess my last thought is that there are hundreds of students on Princeton’s waitlist who are really eager for a challenging and rigorous place. If you’re really not feeling that at all, then don’t force yourself into a miserable four years; take your state school’s offer and let them have your spot here. 

[frasier-crane-style]

Elseworlds

Well, Tumblr isn’t dead yet and the CW-DC just did a big crossover, so I think it’s time to make fun of the CW........ for the last time.

Did you know Tim Allen actually ended Home Improvement after season 8 because he knew the show couldn’t maintain its level of quality and was on the way downhill? Tim Allen has more creative integrity than anyone involved in the making of Supernatural. Think about that.

Anyhoo, lots to digest! Largely, this crossover felt to me weirdly lackluster and obligatory, like the whole thing was just a trailer for the oncoming Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover. It just felt unambitious, which is the last thing an ‘event’ like this should feel like. In fact, it felt a little like I imagine the result would be of filming a bunch of people playing DC Universe Online. We visit Smallville and see Lois Lane! We go to Gotham and meet Batman...’s cousin, and fight a breakout at Arkham Asylum, complete with Mr. Freeze...’s gun and the Scarecrow...’s fear gas. Then, we wrap the whole thing up with an Evil Superman, because God knows, DC never gets bored of that.

-Petty nitpick department: Batwoman just standing around on rooftops looks weird. Not only does it give the odd impression that she’s spent the entire time between episodes just, uh, standing, but c’mon--you’re supposed to crouch. Or at least hunch. Everybody knows that!

-Weirdly missed opportunity to have Ollie do the Flash narration, considering all the other opening narrations are futzed with.

-The whole thing is pretty much a glorified body swap--Stephen Amell is playing Barry Allen and vice versa. I can see how TPTB would be too pressed for time to explain a whole ‘nother continuity where Barry Allen became Green Arrow and Oliver Queen became the Flash, but still, it’s not as much fun.

-They also wholeheartedly borrow the thing of Ollie having to be happy to use Barry’s powers and Barry having to be mad to use Ollie’s ‘powers’ from the episode of Teen Titans where Raven and Starfire switched bodies. So, I guess, congratulations on making the central plot point of your crossover the same as a half-hour episode of a children’s cartoon.

-Remember that time Barry was too happy and too confident in his abilities, so his dad died?  

-They got a good actress to play the Lois Lane to this Clark Kent, considering they both just look kinda awkward? His chin looks like he had a face transplant done and her nose looks like someone is constantly Photoshopping it.

NHHHA, He-Man!!

-Don’t do a callback to Smallville, show. Oliver Queen has now spent more time in costume as the Flash than Tom Welling did as Superman.

-Direct fucking hit when Oliver said that Barry couldn’t take a crap without getting a peptalk from his team, but on the other hand, Oliver can’t take a crap without Felicity wondering what it means for their relationship. “Oliver didn’t tell me he needed to go to the bathroom! Why wouldn’t he trust me?”

-I’m just saying, last season on Agents of SHIELD, pretty much every character was in a relationship--there was not so much damn drama. It’s a fucking body-swap plotline, guys. You don’t need to treat it like it could lead to someone’s divorce! Really, at this point, if you’re in a relationship with a crazy superhero, you should be used to it. 

-(Although I suppose I’m a little hard to please here, since over on Legends of Tomorrow they suddenly expect us to care about Constantine rescuing the love of his life when we’ve seen their relationship for all of four seconds. But hey, like I said, Agents of SHIELD manages a happy medium and finds time for Ghost Rider to show up.)

-For the post-apocalyptic hellscape they make Gotham out to be, the police respond awfully fast to disturbances.

-”We’re on the corner of Burton and Nolan!” Groooooan.

-Ruby Rose, everyone: the Less Convincing Michelle Rodriguez. It’d probably a bad sign for how compelling Kate Kane is as a character that everyone would rather talk about where Batman is and why Batman would leave. And, speaking as someone who both watched Birds of Prey and The Dark Knight Rises--Rocky, that ‘Batman Retires’ plot point never works!

-(Is Batwoman even that popular a character to get her own spin-off? I suppose she’s ‘TV show’ popular, but still--I think she’s one of those Batfamily members that is somewhere behind Alfred but ahead of Ace, right next to Azrael. And I do think it’s hilarious that TPTB were insistent on casting a real, authentic lesbian!!!--and then immediately got complaints that they didn’t cast a Jew. Oh, Ziggy, will you ever win?)

-I don’t want to be too hard on Ruby Rose here. Yes, she doesn’t showcase anything other than one mode: Snide And Slightly Pouty (Stephen Amell ain’t winning no Oscars, but he can differentiate between Ollie As A Civilian and Ollie In A Halloween Costume). But the writing does her no favors in making a case for this character as being deserving of any amount of screentime, besides the fact that she dresses like Batman, the guy we really care about. She’s a heroine, as are featured variously in every Arrowverse show. She’s queer, as is Alex Danvers, Sara Lance, John Constantine, et al. She’s rich to the point of having unlimited resources, as are (sometimes) Oliver Queen, Barry Allen, Kara through her billionaire friends. She lives in a crime-ridden hellhole, as Ollie has done for several seasons. What makes any of this compelling? The Gotham setting? Arrow has already turned itself into an effective facsimile of that, to the point of having Ra’s al Ghul show up to make Queen into his son-in-law. Arkham Asylum seems completely generic, as does Wayne Tower. It’s all just a different part of Vancouver; who cares?

-Likewise, Supergirl, speaking to you as a TV show--you really should either be adamant that Kara is heterosexual or give her a weirdly flirtatious scene with Batwoman, but not both. I know you need, need, need to let the audience know Batwoman is a lesbian...

Pictured: The CW subtly letting you know about a character’s minority status.

But c’mon. We’ve been over this.

-Speaking of minority status, maybe it’s not the best idea to let slip that John Diggle is an AU John Stewart. Yes, there’s ten brothas in the DC Universe, and four of them are actually the other six. There are so few Negros on Earth-1 that they had to make Barack Obama into a superhero. The Batfamily has two black folks and they’re both related to Lucius Fox. There’s so few black people in Metropolis that Black Lightning knows who his father is!

Folks, the DC Universe is so white, the Black Lanterns are all dead. The DC Universe is so white, they don’t even have black Kryptonite. The DC Universe is so white, even Black Condor is a honky. The DC Universe is so white, they don’t even need a Justice League of Africa, they just have a Batman of Africa! The DC Universe is so white, the blackest guy on the Justice League is a refrigerator with one-half of a brother’s face on top of it. The DC Universe is so white, they named the black woman on the Teen Titans after a bug that’s half yellow! Now Milestone, the Milestone Universe is black. It’s so black, Aquaman is the most powerful superhero there, because he’s the only one who can swim!

(-I’m planning on being chased off of Tumblr like Indiana Jones after he snags an ancient artifact.)

-Would it be that hard for them to go to Arkham and run into the Ventriloquist or Orca or someone memorable, so long as they have access to the Batman toy chest? We got, uhh, Lady Who Can Pick Up Gun and Psycho Pirate I Guess? Like I said, unambitious. Wouldn’t it be so much cooler if they got someone from Gotham to film just one little cameo? 

-Also, considering the sex scandal these shows have had, maybe it’s not the best idea to joke about their EPs being depraved maniacs? (Was Guggenheim the one who actually got MeToo’d? Because if so, Dude--Not Funny)

-The show had to character-shill Batwoman so hard that Ollie and Barry stopped being fear-gassed just to reiterate that she is too an interesting character in her own right! (If the characters have all heard of Batman, wouldn’t they have heard of Batwoman too if she’s been an active vigilante more recently?)

-But who cares about four unstoppable superheroes teaming up when we can find out how Felicity feels about her relationship? Just a thought--if you fight with your SO all the time about nearly everything, maybe you shouldn’t be in a relationship. 

-Long story short, Doctor Destiny rewrites reality again to make Barry, Oliver, and Kara into supervillains in a world where he’s the hero. He also makes the other characters into pointless cameos, and weirdly gets criticized by Kara for... not giving himself a sex-change operation by becoming Superman instead of Supergirl? He doesn’t have gender dysphoria, Supergirl. I thought she was all about trans issues this season?

-Like, I don’t know, if a woman used a magic lamp to wish herself President, would anyone criticize her making herself a lady President instead of a man President?

-I guess it wouldn’t be Supergirl unless they crowbarred in an extremely awkward girlpower message where Superman and Lois agree that Supergirl/women in general are more useful than men, despite the fact that all Supergirl did was the exact same thing as Barry, while Superman and Oliver fought Dr. Destiny, and all Lois did was call in a bunch of men as reinforcements and then need to be rescued.

-But like I said about being unambitious--wouldn’t it be fun to see our heroes be forced to team up with a few supervillains to save the day? Instead, we just have Cisco playing a villain (something he’s done numerous times before). They get his help, have a weirdly poor showing in a fight against Jimmy Olsen, get Superman’s help again, yadda yadda. 

-We also get Superman proposing to Lois Lane. Yeah, considering they’ve been in a relationship at least since Supergirl Season 1, she’s carrying his child, and they’re planning to move to an alien world together, yeah, I should think so? I know Superman probably isn’t a Republican, but does anyone think he’d be so blase about putting a ring on it? Hell, if nothing else, he should want to tie the knot before Ma or Pa bite it. Couldn’t they have just made it that he wants to renew his vows with Lois in a Kryptonian ceremony or some such? 

#dc comics #arrow #supergirl #the flash #elseworlds