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#and an important person central to the plot and world much earlier than in canon
pocketramblr · 3 years
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I read Last Dragon Chronicles forever ago and the part I remembered best is being really confused the first time I read Fire World
Fire World is so weird it literally plays out like a fanfiction of the rest of the series- an alternative universe where David gets to be the bio son of his found parental figures? Where his love interest gets to be introduced as his childhood friend? Where his future daughter just turns up?? Also everything is magical in a different way? I very much expected that Fire World would turn out to be an in universe story David wrote to get some kind of closure but then it turned out to be a 'normal' parallel universe and gadzooks was calling to this au David for,,, some reason?? For help I guess?? What happened at the end??
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afriendlyirin · 4 years
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I feel creative tonight, so here’s a back-of-the-envelope Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts rewrite:
Let’s start at the top and work our way downwards. What is this story about? The canon doesn’t seem to have an answer beyond “segregation bad, friendship good”.
My answer for a central theme is grief and loss. Let’s actually use the post-apocalyptic setting for something instead of it just being background aesthetic. The story is an allegory for the cultural tension we are currently experiencing, with the world ruined by the older generation who view the strange new young things with fear and repulsion. The humans must accept what they’ve lost and embrace the new mute society instead of pursuing their futile attempts to regain their world by destroying the mutes’. We will parallel this broad-scope theme to personal losses in Kipo’s own story.
So, the first arc is denial. At the macro level, this only requires one change: Kipo’s dad died in the initial attack. Wolf’s oft-stated warnings are correct, and Kipo’s hope that he somehow survived against all odds is naive. Upon this discovery, Kipo swears vengeance on Scarlemagne and pursues him, which is already pretty similar to the canon ending of S1.
We fill this arc by expanding Kipo’s interactions with the mute societies, and using the episodic encounters to actually make the worldbuilding make sense. The theme of denial is integrated through Kipo’s continued attempts to resolve conflicts peacefully despite all advice to the contrary. Crucially, nonviolence does not work perfectly. Perhaps it does lead to the mutes allowing her safe passage, but they are not best friends forever and she does not change their opinion of humans; the next humans who pass through are still gonna get eaten. Kipo is applying a band-aid to the situation, not providing any permanent solution. This can be revisited in future arcs to show the consequences of her denial.
Second arc, anger. Kipo joins the human resistance early on and fully embraces their mission to defeat Scarlemagne. Without Lio to explain things, the journal can actually be a meaningfully-timed reveal about the full nature of her powers in addition to the reveal about her mom (if we’re keeping that). The need for the anchor also becomes more relevant if her dad is completely gone and this is her only tangible reminder of him.
Kipo leads the charge to Scarlemagne and clashes with him. Circumstances require her to go full jaguar to defeat him, at which point she readies to kill him. Her friends go through the whole cliche of trying to talk her down, “This isn’t you!” “If you kill him you’ll be just like him!” “You can’t fight hate with hate!” etc. Kipo kills Scarlemagne anyway, losing herself to the mega jaguar and running off. (To make this more palatable, we could change Scarlemagne’s backstory to be less sympathetic, perhaps removing his connection to Lio entirely. Or we could keep his backstory as-is and embrace the moral grayness!)
Third arc, bargaining. Kipo and her friends must find a way to bring Kipo back, and in the process Kipo must make sacrifices and face hard questions about who she really is and what she has to leave behind. This is paralleled with the reveal of Emilia’s treachery -- for pacing, she probably shouldn’t be revealed as explicitly evil until now. Emilia and her human resistance are desperately clutching for the world they destroyed, trying to bring it back no matter the cost.
She, Kipo, and the other humans must ultimately come to accept that some things can’t be taken back. They destroyed the world and they have to come to terms with that sin. But in their blind nostalgia, they couldn’t see that life has gone on and a perfectly fine society already exists: the mutes’. (This would, of course, require mute society to be actually functional and for industry and innovation to exist outside of Scarlemagne, which we can establish in earlier seasons.) Kipo, as the bridge between their worlds, is able to fully integrate human and mute society, allowing everyone to live prosperously once more. For bonus transhumanism, mutating humanity into a new form like Kipo may be required, similarly to how Adventure Time handled a similar plot point.
Also, Benson doesn’t exist because he’s a completely extraneous character and literally everything he does can be handled by Wolf or Dave. His important moments are actually stronger coming from them, honestly -- a mute inviting Kipo to the theme park to show her the surface has good parts carries a lot more weight than a human doing it. If you still want gayness, Kipo/Wolf is endgame.
(Additionally, as much as I love representation, maybe let’s not have a black girl’s character arc be #NotAllMutes. We can conserve representation by having Kipo actually look Black/Asian instead of a white girl dipped in grape juice.)
So there you have it. A thematically coherent story with topical social commentary and several dark subversions to keep seasoned audiences’ interest.
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hazelspacecadet · 4 years
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She Ra - a full analysis
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WARNING - THIS ANALYSIS CONTAINS MAAAAAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRETY OF SHE RA!! 
“You look out for me, and I look out for you. Nothing really bad can happen as long as we have each other”
She Ra is a show about two people torn apart. It’s important to recognise that this multifaceted masterpiece centres entirely on the Catradora dynamic; Noelle herself has expressed that the show was always about those two, and in a broader sense much of the wider world in the She Ra universe can be seen as a complex manifestation of Adora and Catra’s ever changing bond. Adora is not a hero in the traditional sense, as everything about her character is designed to subvert and deconstruct expectations of the hero’s journey. She is a powerful, strong and determined fighter with healing powers, a morally stubborn and highly empathetic person raised in a genocidal regime, and she runs away from the only home and only exponent of love she has ever known because her internal moral compass is just so intense it overrides the truest bond she will ever feel, at least until external factors allow for reconciliation. 
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But what defines, at a thematic level, the human interactions in She Ra is a cycle of abuse that begins with oppressive control - Horde Prime. He punishes the imperfections in Hordak to the extent that Hordak feels compelled to lash out, to prove himself powerful by any means. Horde Prime is an interesting villain because his rhetoric centres not around darkness, but light and purity. This is not only a more subversive type of manipulative language than is often seen by cartoon villains, but it clearly establishes Horde Prime as being a fundamental representation of abuse and its tendency to beat away at character traits deemed weak, anomalous, or more importantly unable to be controlled. Horde Prime needs control; he needs subservience and pure, untouched power, which is why he forms his empire around a hive mind. Hordak of course breaks the hive mind itself, but abuse is a parasitic thing, and controls Hordak’s deplorable actions on Etheria right from his first introduction, talking directly to Catra. But the cycle does not stop at Hordak; his monstrous coping methods cause subtler damage by affecting Shadow Weaver. She is an interesting character because unlike Hordak, she was shown to have independent agency in her harmful actions before finding her way to the Horde, but it is clear that the intense sensation of being cast out, before the Horde rescued her only to thrust her into a cycle of rage and exploitation, leads to the final stage of this particular cycle: Adora, and more importantly Catra.
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The show makes it abundantly clear that Catra gets the short straw in interactions with Shadow Weaver; and not only that, but it is shown that Catra’s narrative of Adora being a neglectful, selfish pretend-hero is one instilled not by Adora, but Shadow Weaver and her often-times violent favouritism. Adora isn’t selfish or neglectful - her strong moral compass certainly isn’t perfect, and letting go of complete undirected empathy is something she learns in the conversation with Mara in season 5 (“you are worth more than what you can give to other people”) - but those traits are at odds to how Adora is presented, and in particular how her relationship with Catra is presented. Shadow Weaver neglects Catra, and does it to such an extent that Catra is forced into a mindset of breaking her bond with Adora over an injustice that was never her friend’s fault. Shadow Weaver’s manipulation is so powerful, it makes Catra believe that Adora’s protection, her deep-seated love, is malignant. That is abuse: it turns love into hate and protection into violence. 
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In this cycle, this systematic abuse from Prime to Hordak to Shadow Weaver to Catra, there are two anomalies. They have to be anomalous, uncontrollable, natural, because this cycle begins with oppressive control, and therefore only two variables can violate that base injustice - love, and imperfection. From a meta-narrative sense, She Ra is a unique beast because characters do not simply have flaws for the sake of flaws, but those flaws are the direct reason for the eventual collapse of the show’s main antagonism. What breaks Prime is a kiss, and a mad scientist. The kiss is Adora and Catra displaying a desire for closeness that represents years of struggle against systematic abuse, abuse that has deliberately forced love to become hate, and that only when the cycle reaches its peak and the initial abuser makes a final bid for absolute control, can the true reconciliation begin. The mad scientist is of course Entrapta, whose powerful adoration of imperfection ultimately destroys Prime, or at least his preferred vessel. Abuse of the kind shown in She Ra cannot exist when people find beauty and joy in the things it seeks to eliminate, and Entrapta is exactly the anomaly needed to help break the cycle. Returning to the core of those two lovers, Catra finds her want for Adora, and it is reciprocated because the underlying love was always there, but the intent, the desire for closeness only became apparent when years of unnecessary hurt had been recognised and their true cause exposed: not each other, but the cycle.
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Of course, abuse in the She Ra universe is only actively broken by one thing: love. I touched on this theme earlier when discussing abuse as the two are somewhat intertwined but love, in platonic and romantic forms, is so crucial to the functioning of She Ra’s characters and their motivations. Catra and Adora have always loved each other (they only express this at the climax because they must fight through abuse to find a shared desire), and this love is shown right from both the start of the show, and the first time we see them interact chronologically - in Promise. What’s interesting is we never know how they meet, or what they say to each other first, but instead the earliest canonical Catradora interaction is the promise itself: a dedication so strong it defines Catra’s actions years later on an alien ship as she saves a person she does not even claim to like. The show puts Catra and Adora’s love first, as that is the establishment of their truly meaningful connection, with other flashbacks and all of season 5 expanding upon that bond. We know that love breaks abuse because Horde Prime is abuse and he is defeated by a kiss, but what does that imply? 
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The kiss, and therefore the confirmation of She Ra’s central love, carries with it a moral lesson, a message, that hurt and abuse can be overcome through the mutual reconciliation that comes with unconditional love. In the show, all kinds of love shown to be beneficial and non-toxic are unconditional: Catra can only want Adora when she accepts that Adora will always be morally upstanding and stubbornly empathetic, and Adora can only want Catra when she accepts that Catra defaults to self-hatred and pushing away, and only when both of these conditions are made meaningless by the force of attraction and belonging known as love, can the kiss be shown and the abuse broken. 
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Love is not just shown between that central relationship, but throughout She Ra and its characters. Glimmer is a flawed and sometimes maligned character, but her importance to the show and its progression cannot be overstated, especially in season 5. On the ship in episodes 1 and 2, Catra needed something to hold onto. Torn from her home, powerless and very clearly unable to manipulate and fight Horde Prime like she could with Hordak, Catra’s only option became Glimmer. Their bond forms quickly and shakily, but what is so crucial about their interactions is that in order to reconcile with Adora, Catra needed to see someone like Glimmer, who had both made huge mistakes and at one point believed her own mistakes to be the right decision, completely and unconditionally forgive Adora and desire to be home with her. They share love for Adora, different kinds of love, but a strong connection and belonging that in the case of the open and empathetic Glimmer is very obvious. It’s also no accident that later on, during interactions in the expanded Best Friend Squad, Catra takes several social cues from Glimmer first, with Adora a trusted support. Catra is always going to care about Adora more than anything, but it takes the model example of Glimmer to show her how. 
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But Adora is not just the subject of Catra’s attractions. As the main character, the dual figure around which the show is built both emotionally and plot-wise, she has a striking amount of agency, but also experiences a corruption of her truest desires at the hands of abuse. The abuse of Adora is subversive and difficult to spot, but it all comes down the pedestal that Shadow Weaver built for her, as well as her own innate morals and how those two factors, in Adora’s mind, prevented her from loving and caring for Catra in the right way. Throughout the show, Adora treats her own need to help others and her desire to be with the people she loves as mutually exclusive; even when Bow and Glimmer remind her that she is not alone, Adora has a penchant for going it alone, believing herself to be this chosen hero who must rescue the people of Etheria without reconciling with herself and her closest friends. In fact, the part of Adora that pushes people away in the name of heroism is not actually her, but instead the cycle of abuse exploiting her moral compass to fulfill corrupt desires that are not and never could be her own. Even the purported good guys do it, the First Ones making Adora believe that her path, her destiny, is to be a weapon. She fights this at the climax of season 4, but never comes to terms with it mentally until the conversation with Mara. And after it has all become hopeless, lost and Etheria is destined to burn away, Catra flips the script. Adora’s truest desire was Catra, but the abuse was too ingrained, the hurt too deep, for these desires to become reality, to be found within themselves. Only when Adora knows her blind heroism has lost, and therefore all to be lost, can Catra, whose arc has now culminated, save the universe. They both found not only their own destiny, but learnt to accept the intertwining of their lives as something that can be a force for good, a force for love. 
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So to conclude, She Ra is not just about being torn apart, but in the end is about two girls fighting abuse as they learn to love each other, and eventually watching the patterns of abuse fade away as they express pure, unconditional love through a kiss that changes everything. 
“Don’t you get it? I love you. I always have.”
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atamascolily · 3 years
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Okay, I have calmed down enough after reading Aftermath: Empire’s End that I can address the bit that really got to me.
TL;DR: the entire “Contigency” business is based on an extended chess metaphor and... I have questions.
Previously, we have learned that a Jakku orphan named Galli Rax stowed away on Palpatine’s Space Yacht so he could get away, only to be caught by Palpatine. Palps told the kid that he had two choices: die, or go back to Jakku and make sure no one stumbled across the Mysterious Thing (”the Observatory”) Palps was constructing out in the desert. Galli chooses the latter, and Palps sends him back to Jakku and Galli does his thing. Ten years later, Palps shows back up with the space yacht to compliment Galli on a job well done and take him away.
O.... kay. I’m not sure how Palps was able to ensure Rax would keep his end of the bargain. Sure, he has a supervisor Yupe Tashu and a bunch of droids, and I suppose they could have killed Galli, but... there didn’t seem to be anything stopping Galli from running away? I doubt even Palps would have bothered to stalk one kid just to prove a point, but it just seems really weird from Palpatine’s perspective to be so hands-off.
Anyway, so the first thing they do in their Big Reunion is Palps teaches him how to play chess. And I don’t just mean Thinly-Disguised Space Chess as a stand-in for the real thing, I mean actual chess.
Here’s the passage that made me start to howl and gibber from a world-building perspective:
“It’s a very old game. Shah-tezh, in this interation, thought over the eons I have seen it spawn many variants. Dejarik. Moebius. Chess. In most of the iterations the core mechanism remains.”
To be clear: this is Palpatine talking. What the hell does he mean by “over the eons I have seen”? That’s not the sort of thing you say if it’s something you know from a book or a story, that’s what you say if you’ve personally experienced it. Is Palpatine really that old?? If so, this is HUGE, absolutely earth-shattering bombshell from a world-building perspective. Is it ever followed up on? Not that I can tell.
What. The. Actual. Fuck.
(To be fair, I’m not against this, per se, but I just... feel like if it was important.... it should be relevant.... and not name-dropped once and never mentioned again? Like, it matters? AAHHHHHHHHHHH.)
The other thing that made me scream, is, of course, the fact he comes right out and says it’s Chess In Space, which.... While I have used “holo-chess” as a synonym for “dejarik” in my fics, and Wookiepeedia says “holochess” is an accepted synonym for dejarik in nu!canon, this particular passage reads weirdly to me because it implies that chess as we know it on Earth is a separate but related game to dejarik, not just another name for the same game. And I... have questions about that, just like I would if “poker” suddenly appeared in the GFFA lingo along with “sabacc”.
{Also, I just want to note that the Persian word for chess is shatranj. Per the “History of Chess” article on Wikipedia:
Players started calling "Shāh!" (Persian for "King!") when attacking the opponent's king, and "Shāh Māt!" (Persian for "the king is helpless" – see checkmate) when the king was attacked and could not escape from attack. These exclamations persisted in chess as it traveled to other lands.
This isn’t the first time real-life details have migrated into Star Wars - “Tatooine” is named after a location in Tunisia, and the Lars’ farm is located in the “Great Chott” which actually exists on Earth.... but still. I’m just saying.}
And again, this is probably me being stupid and petty about Details That Don’t Matter, except that the one is actually huge from a plot and thematic perspective, so it’s hard not to get tripped up on it.
Anyway, so Palps instructs Galli in the intricacies of shah-tezh, and it all boils down to one thing: “without the Imperator, the demesne cannot survive”.
And That’s the reason why Palpatine has to personally make sure the world burns after his death, because it means that his Empire has completely failed if he dies and deserves to be punished. O.... kay then.
(Granted, Palpatine is a crazed narcissist, but... there’s like no way this makes logical sense, right? And Rax doesn’t even think “oh, that’s insane, but I have to agree to stay alive”. Even at this juncture, when he barely knows Palpatine at all, he’s completely swallowed the Kool-Aid. Which is odd because he’s very skeptical about other things.)
Anyway, Palps repeats it because it’s his guiding principle: “If an Empire cannot protect its Emperor then that Empire must be deemed a failure. It collapses not only because its central figure is gone, but because it must not be allowed to remain.”
He’s so incensed he nearly strangles Galli, but then he relents, and says Galli is “the Contigency” and if he fails, he’ll be replaced, because literally, “destiny”. Then they go watch opera, because Palps hasn’t found anyone to watch opera with him since that one time with Anakin and... Vader isn’t into that, lol.
(The problem with making opera Galli’s thing is that ALL OF THOSE SCENES ARE FLASHBACKS or referred to in passing in the narrative rather than viewed directly. So we don’t see him poised at the opera, plotting, the way Palps did in ROTS, or contemplating art like Thrawn does. So it’s easy to forget that he has this quirk. Also, it makes him feel like a Thrawn knock-off. But I do like that it’s canon that he’s just the Biggest Drama Queen ever, though.)
I’ve said this before in earlier rants, but to repeat: I do not see Palpatine as having the relative humility needed to even consider his own death seriously. in ROTJ, he acts 100% confident that he’s gonna come out the winner. So to come up with an entire elaborate plot, on the off chance that someone might off him seems just... kinda OOC?
Sure, he’s the type to have wheels within wheels and all kinds of schemes going on simultaneously, but... this one involves placing a lot of trust in Galli Rax going along with the script, and I just... don’t get why he would assume Rax would automatically go along with it, or be able to. There are just so many variables that the novel doesn’t seem to address and it’s just hard for me to imagine Palpatine doing this without making other/additional Contigencies, not just one.
Anyway, so it turns out “the Contingency” is to lure both the Imperial remnant and the New Republic fleets to Jakku and then literally blow the entire planet up to take everyone out at once, while a handful of specially chosen loyalist ride off in Palpatine’s Space Yacht for the Unknown Regions to form a new Empire. Which... okay, sure, why not. In theory, this sounds pretty cool and it involves all of Palpatine’s favor tricks, including a planet-destroying superweapon.
Where it actually breaks down is in the details, of course. And Palpatine is still dead, of course, so it does shit-all for him, except for some vindictive satisfaction while still alive, I guess. 
(And if he is planning on coming back, it seems weird to burn down the house you plan on re-occupying later? I guess? *shrugs*)
Anyway, it turns out that Palpatine has a whole network of Observatories, where he does all kinds of secret, evil things:
Palpatine began establishing the Observatories before the start of the Galactic Empire, infusing each with purpose: Some were meant to house ancient Sith artificats, others designed to host powerful weapons designs (or the weapons themselves), others still meant as prisons harnessing the lifeforces of those captured within for a variety of strange purposes.
(which, given that the Ashmead’s Lock prison on Kashyyyk is powered by its inhabitants’ life force a la The Matrix, strongly suggests that it, too, is an Observatory, although the book does not say that directly and canon will probably never mention the energy-harvesting thing again despite ALL OF THE QUESTIONS THE EXISTENCE OF SUCH TECH RAISES.)
I’m okay with this passage, because it means that the Maw Installation, the Eye of Palpatine, and Wayland are all part of this system. It feels very much in-character. However, only Jakku is part of the Contigency, at least according to Galli, but--tbh, I kinda doubt it, because when have we ever known Palpatine to tell the truth? Or have Only One Plan?
Anyway, for decades, the Observatory computers have been plotting a route through hyperspace into the Unknown Regions. (I thought this was something only Jedi could do, since they were supposedly hard-core Space Navigators? Otherwise, what was even the point? *shrugs* Why do you even need a “Sith Wayfinder” anyway? *cough cough*) Then there’s an obligatory Thrawn reference, since Thrawn is canon, but Rax is pretty dismissive and says that the only reason Palps tolerated Thrawn was for his secret navigational insights into the Unknown Regions.
So if Palps loses his original demesne, he’s just gonna go conquer the Chiss or something? Except he can’t, because he’s dead, so what ever. I don’t even know, okay? Does anyone know what happened to Thrawn or the Chiss post-OT in the Disney ‘verse??
Anyway, Palps is convinced there’s something in the dark side waiting for him out there, which Galli is dismissive of. You’d think a guy who had literally been Force-choked would be more accepting of this instead of assuming it was just wishful thinking, but okay then. This is pretty clearly meant to be an obvious Snoke reference, which gets wonky with the TROS retcon that Snoke was a clone-puppet of Palpatine the entire time!
Anyway, Rax gets Yupe Tashu all geared up with Secret Evil Sith Gear and a Magic Kyber Crystal and tosses him into the planet’s core, and it starts the self-destruct process. Except it doesn’t because Rae Sloane kills Rax at the last moment, puts a stop to it, and steals the yacht full of feral children and flies off into the sunset to carry on Rax’s master plan because the New Republic destroyed the Imperial fleet while she was distracted and she apparently is tired of all this shit? Okay.
Anyway, she makes a deal with Armitage Hux that she’ll keep Brendol from abusing him if he keeps the feral kids from attacking her, and apparently it works out. This is supposed to be the origin of the First Order, and I guess they find Snoke or something, but none of the details are ever explained in any material I can find, so.... *shrugs*
I just really don’t understand how the First Order can be functional under the conditions herein described and how it logically evolves from This One Ship to a massive, disciplined force capable of wiping out the New Republic.
So I finished the book and... was kind of mad, because it just felt like a complete waste of my time. Overally, this whole thing just seems like a lot of build-up that doesn’t go anywhere, and provides weird backstory that only raises more unaddressed questions for things that really didn’t need it. 
also, it’s darkly amusing to me that this book comes out saying, “yup, the ST is a literal game-board reset of the OT, and Palps fully intended for it to be that way, even though we at Disney had no plans to bring him back as a villain at first” and I just... well, props for honesty, I guess?
anyway, the whole thing is a mess from a world-building perspective, and even though Star Wars is Fake and In Space, I just get grumpy when things don’t line up, especially since that was supposed to be one of the major selling points of this new canon in the first place.
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whetstonefires · 4 years
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director's cut top guide? I don't have a section in specific pick your favorite I guess I love the whole thing
Awwwww thank you. 💗😊 For the compliment, the interest, and the guidance.  Additionally thanks because I just discovered I didn’t update this fic in October like I thought I did! It’s still in the status it had in July. So uh. I’ll be getting right on that. ˋ( ° ▽、° )
I think I’m gonna go with a passage back near the start, in the first half of chapter 4, the one where Tifa’s getting Vincent out of his coffin. I like how it came out and it’s pretty important, and if I’ve rambled about it at all, it wasn’t recently.
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There’s a push-pull effect fundamental to this scene–first physically, with Tifa moving and destroying actual barriers, and Vincent repeatedly attempting to withdraw. But also on the level of Tifa attempting a series of verbal sallies, which Vincent initially rebuffs and then ignores by vampirically pulling the covers over his head and generally putting the passive in passive-aggressive.
But after telling her to go ahead and set the building on fire with him in it, Vincent gets his lid on and settles on being inert, and Tifa gets to do a monologue.
There are a lot of speeches in this fic, honestly, because of the precedent set by canon/the kinds of characters I’m working with, but most of them are nowhere near this long, and even though Tifa’s trying to achieve a specific rhetorical objective here, they’re generally not quite this honest.
“It’s easy to decide to die,” she told him, at length. “It’s easy to stop fighting when there doesn’t seem to be any hope. I know.
“But you’ll always regret it. You know that. If you’d been brave enough to choose Lucrecia over the Turks before Hojo got his grubby claws into her, maybe none of this would ever have happened. If she’d been brave enough to choose you sooner, it might have been okay. Not choosing is almost always a bad choice. If you come out of hiding, more things will happen—things that can’t unhappen. I know that’s frightening. But things happen without you, too. When you’re not there. When you do nothing.”
Tifa rocked back on her heels. “You can’t make the world go back to the way it was before, get back the same happiness or hope from your memories…not even if you could wind back time.”
Here Tifa is combining her intimate knowledge of Vincent’s circumstances with her own situation to create a sort of…weaponized empathy.
She can’t afford for Vincent to not listen to her, because she refuses to either give up on her mission or kill him, so when the normal approach fails she falls back on contingency and proceeds to run absolutely roughshod over all his personal boundaries.
Now, being able to wield future information against people this way is one of the major features of this general genre of time travel story, particularly when (like Tifa here) the traveler had level-ups, but didn’t get to carry them into New Game Plus. Tifa later uses it against Tseng with no artfulness whatsoever.
But that kind of blunt, bludgeoning use of intimate knowledge is a power game; it’s not how you treat a friend. So Tifa spends a lot of this speech, especially the opening, drawing connections between her experience and Vincent’s, exposing herself emotionally as much as can reasonably be managed without going off on any Tifa-centric tangents.
Being displaced in time and separated from everything you cared about is relevant, here. And she’s also able to bring her personal experience with feeling helpless and trapped–not by the sort of clear antagonistic obstacle you can batter down with your fists but by the certainty that every possible course of action is Terrible and Wrong and so you can’t act, because you can’t choose–she specifically frames it in terms of having to decide between binary options, because that’s how we’ve seen her experience it wrt i.e. ‘talking to Cloud about how his brain is weird.’
The experience is similar enough to Vincent’s, especially his not-initiating of important relationship conversations with Lucretia at the beginning, for these terms to work for communication purposes, but it’s very definitely Tifa’s experience being mapped onto Vincent’s here, and proffered to ameliorate the inherent violence of what she’s doing.
Her coping mechanism for that trapped feeling, though, is to distract herself with Doing Something Constructive that allows her to avoid the issue without feeling like she’s stuck.
There’s a certain extent to which allowing time to process or grieve is important, and Tifa is bad at allowing it, largely I think because she’s very aware of the danger of getting mired in paralysis and ruminating on the bad thing until it’s all that exists. Vincent more than anyone else in the cast is defined by his choice to identify with his trauma, and while Aerith is the one most defined by trying not to do that, Tifa’s far enough to that end to create a conflict in viewpoint even when nothing vitally important is at stake.
I also included a dialogue ping to the place where she talks about this in the Advent Children movie, though if you’ve been following my opinions on ffvii any time at all you probably know I have so many problems with thedecisions made with Tifa in that film. Even the parts that areconsonant with her established characterization require her to have rolled back mostof her development from the OG.
The part where she doesn’t come with Cloud on the rescue mission shebullies him into is so utterly backward and the opposite of her establishedbehavior and values and just basic logic that I have to sort of write around it,because I can’t accept that it happened. But if we ignore that bit, and the amount of self-centeredness in the harangue, some elementsof the interaction have potential.
Because if nothing else it’s the most explicit verbal treatment in the Compilation of the recurring theme of people being ‘stuck.’ Not by bars and walls and certain death, but by the prisons inside their heads.
“But…there are still possibilities. Still things you can do to make the world better. Her choices…they weren’t your fault. But whatever you’re blaming yourself for right now…lying here until you die won’t make it better. The biggest sin of all, to me, is not trying to make things better.
“You aren’t a monster, Vincent. Nothing Hojo did to your body, nothing Lucrecia did to bring you back, could make you one. As long as you have your mind, you decide. And it’s what you decide to do that makes the difference between a human and anything else.”
She’s hitting hard, here: call to action, absolution, extremely targeted personal affirmation, clarification that she really does know what’s up with him, new information that Lucrecia was involved with his current status, and finally, optimistic conceptual framework imposed on the situation, since Vincent certainly isn’t capable of that himself.
This treatment of Vincent’s situation vis-a-vis humanity is, of course, also very relevant to the ensuing plot-central question of what Sephiroth is, and whether he has the power to make good life choices. Which Tifa is not nearly as sure of as with Vincent, since while she stands by the principle that it’s a matter of choice she knows for a fact that Vincent can make good ones, but has certainly never seen evidence with Sephiroth.
And then of course there’s Genesis, who would love to get everyone to accept that his sins are a function of what rather than who he is, and drag down with him anyone he can reach, and who by his very effort to sell the idea makes it seem less likely.
I’ve excerpted only Tifa’s dialogue and some of the tags from the rest of the passage, because her narration gets lengthier and isn’t what I’m focusing on for this commentary.
She waited. But the man in the box didn’t move, and he didn’t speak. “Lucrecia is still alive,” she told him. “Preserved in crystal. Hidden away. You two really are a pair, aren’t you? And maybe you’re both right to be concerned—she’s got Jenova in her, and you’ve got those things that replaced your Limit Breaks. But they don’t control you.”
[…]
“They don’t control you,” she repeated. “Hojo doesn’t control you. You can choose to do nothing for the rest of your long life if that’s what you really want. But it’s not your destiny. And it’s not what’s right.”
‘It’s not what’s right’ is an interesting line in retrospect, because Tifa’s saying it within a framework of denying Vincent’s reasoning that there’s something somehow virtuous about closing himself off from the world, so he can’t do any more harm. Specifically in the context of assuring him that he has control over his actions, and his Limit Break things don’t.
But in the overall argument, about how his power of self-determination relates to responsibility to the world, it can also be read as a moral condemnation, the suggestion that there is a specific thing that’s right, and Vincent isn’t doing it.
“Sephiroth is an adult now,” she said [….] “They put him in the Shinra military. Made him a General.”
[…] “If Hojo and Jenova have their way, he’ll become a monster soon,” she confided in the coffin. “Maybe there’s no way to change that. Maybe it’s too late for him. Maybe it’s his destiny. But it’s not too late for the rest of the world, not yet. I know that much. Everyone who has the power to fight him has a responsibility to try.”
That’s where her speech winds up–rather abrupt return to her earlier, blown-off argument about Sephiroth imminently killing everybody and how Vincent should help. He doesn’t do anything. He continues to be a box.
So then she punches her way into the coffin.
“What are you?”
She knew it wasn’t her feat of strength that had impressed him, though he probably appreciated the rhetorical force of it.
I really like this line. Describing ‘punching open the box someone’s hiding in at the climax of an inspirational speech’ as a rhetorical device is the kind of thing I find very funny, and I got characterization of both of them and story advancement into the sentence too.
“Tifa,” she said. “Tifa Lockhart.” She held out her right hand. “Get up, Vincent Valentine. The world isn’t done with you yet.”
He let her pull him up onto his feet.
Some obvious symbolism there, fitted into the very important fact that this worked.
Getting Vincent out of his coffin has been the only thing Tifa’s attempted so far in the story that has turned out more or less exactly as planned. Not entirely easily, and not following a step-by-step plot because that’s not Tifa, but without random factors interceding and requiring her to recalculate wildly, make decisions entirely on the fly, and draw up a new set of plans in the aftermath, either.
In a way, the Vincent recruitment section microcosms the fight Tifa’s having with the universe throughout the fic, in her efforts to make things line up so she can get a better outcome to this nightmare scenario she’s been pitched back into: direct, physical actions are persistently vital and necessary, but her real success must always hinge on her particular knowledge, and ability to apply it.
Apply it specifically, thus far, mostly to getting people to take her seriously and do as she says. Because she’s been placed in a position where as useful and important as her personal power is, it’s not the right tool to rely on for her central task. That has to be tackled via community building, in a context that intensely disinclines her to attempt such overtures.
Which in turn invokes one of the several great dichotomies of Tifa’s in-game characterization–the periodic tension between her social impulses, to bind and soothe and promote bonding, and her…reactive impulses, to seize the world in both hands and find something to fight and do and change, so she doesn’t feel helpless in the face of all that is evil.
The parts of her character arc in the game that aren’t actively about Cloud seem to center around being forced to face that both these behavior patterns (especially in their role as coping mechanisms) are capable of being not only inadequate but actively, harmfully inappropriate to particular situations.
And then coping with this fact, and continuing to inhabit these parts of her identity in ways that turn out constructive. E.g., choose caring for Cloud over leading party to do anti-Shinra things that have only the vaguest prospect of actually averting the apocalypse; successfully retrieve his mind from the Lifestream. Help punch Sephiroth to death and stop him from holding back Holy; world saved.
If you try really hard to get a personal moral for Tifa out of the OG that isn’t pretty sexist, it might come down to something like: realize that you might be acting wrongly; then, act. Stay afraid, but do it anyway.
And, optimistically: perhaps you do not have to choose between your faces. Perhaps they are both allowed. Perhaps all of you is allowed. Perhaps you are enough.
One of the things Tifa and Cloud share is needing so desperately to be enough.
In a way that’s a feeling that unites the entire party, in their various ways, except maybe Aerith, depending on how you interpret her relationship to the obligations of being the Last Ancient. But Tifa and Cloud are about the same age and come from the same context and share a major trauma, so it looks particularly similar in them.
And of course there are also ways it looks especially similar between Tifa and Vincent, because they’re the most hopeless romantics in the party. 😆
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Introduction
This is a Steven Universe Alternative Universe (AU). It tells the entire story of Steven Universe, episode by episode through fanfiction and illustrations. This is a story you can follow even if you have never watched Steven Universe (and if that is the case, you can skip this introduction and proceed directly to the story to avoid any spoilers). If you are indifferent to spoilers, you can keep reading below.
- - -
In this AU the initial change to the premise of the show is very simple: When the Diamonds blasted the Earth to end the rebellion, Rose Quartz did not succeed in saving any of her rebel-comrades behind her shield. It all happened too fast, none were within reach, she was the single sole gem survivor on the surface of the planet. As far as she knew, she was the only uncorrupted gem on Earth for thousands of years, until Amethyst emerged. Once Rose found Amethyst in the Kindergarten, they were the only two uncorrupted gems on Earth for hundreds of years. Along came Greg Universe and, well, when a Rose and a Greg love each other very much… they make a Steven.
That was the original idea that wouldn’t let me go, and I wanted to see if it could be done and how much would need to be changed and how much the story would change. But as I worked on it, I realised that I could change whatever I wanted, so I changed all the parts of canon that I had “fridge logic” problems with. The result is a Steven AUniverse story exactly the same as the show, except completely different.
Now I know there are a million different AUs out there, so I want to provide some indications that you can use to decide whether this is your kind of thing, in the form of questions:
What is this AU like?
-The tone of this story attempts to match the show as closely as possible. There is no grimdark or gore or disturbed or anything like that. It is lighthearted with gravity and important themes, just like the show. There are “filler episodes” with townies and there are “plot heavy episodes” and they are mostly in the same order as they are in the show.
How’s it differ from the show?
-The most important aspect is that it’s more political than the show. (What does that even mean?) But the first thing you’ll notice when you read is that in practice I have had to change lots of details: some episodes needed to be revamped completely (because in canon they were about Garnet or Pearl), some plot-important things I changed just because I had “fridge logic” issue with the canon, etc. So in the end it’s very different, a different story told with some of the same characters and structure.
I imagine that doesn’t help very much to know things were changed if you don’t know what sort of things that includes. So below are some specific questions where the answers are slightly more spoilery, and if you want none spoiler with left beef, then please stop reading here and skip to the first episode.
 - - -
Will Pearl and Garnet appear in the story?
-Pearl and Garnet got corrupted by the Diamond blast along with all the other Crystal Gems bar Rose Quartz. So if they appear in the story, they will be corrupted monsters like everyone else. You might recognise them, you might not.
Is Amethyst still the same person?
-Amethyst’s character in the show is very much dependent on being the “youngest” or “worst” Crystal Gem in comparison to Pearl, Garnet and Rose. In this story Amethyst grew up looking up to Rose and having her pretty much all to herself except for Rose’s human love affairs (which Amethyst didn’t mind as she wasn’t in love with Rose herself), and so when Rose disappeared Amethyst felt like she had to take Rose’s place and fill those shoes. So in this story Amethyst is somewhat more responsible while still having her flaws, and her character arc has a different shape.
Was Rose still Pink Diamond?
-I hate to include this here because it’s incredibly spoilery, but I realise these characters are very important and dear to many people, so I will answer honestly: yes and no. I know that’s a total nonanswer, but if the Diamonds are really important to you as characters, this might not be the AU for you, for there will be some… let’s say “character assassination” here.
Was Rose still a bad person?
-Rose has the same flaws in this story as she does in canon. Whether having flaws makes her a bad person or a relatable character depends on each reader.
Will Peridot/Lapis/Jasper/Bismuth/townies/Diamonds/off colors/etc appear in the story?
-Yes, everyone is present and accounted for – though there will be some changes.
Will Spinel appear in the story?
-No, this AU only covers the story we see during the show Steven Universe, not the movie or the epilogue series. And I’m sorry to say but Spinel’s character doesn’t exist in this universe, the Homeworld in this story is not the kind that would create a ”best friend” gem.  Spinels would have some totally different role in this universe.
What about fusions?
Obviously most of the canon fusions include Pearl and/or Garnet, so they are naturally out of the question. But don’t worry. There will be many other Crystal Gems, so there will definitely be fusions besides Smoky Quartz and Stevonnie. The only possible canon fusion, who could happen in this story but won’t, is Malachite.
Are there OCs in the story?
Mostly no. Of course fusions we haven’t seen on screen in the show will be OCs, as well as the component gems of fusions we haven’t seen unfuse in the show, and a few corrupted gems we haven’t seen uncorrupted versions of on the show. Some characters (mainly the Diamonds) are also reimagined and changed so much that they could be considered totally different characters. But there are no gem or human characters that are completely outside of the show’s canon.
Could you give some examples of details that you changed in the story because of “fridge logic”?
-Example 1. In the episode “Frybo” Pearl says that Rose Quartz would put gem shards in (I assume human??) clothes to make them fight for her. But from the way gems talk about shattering and shards (they consider it horrifying etc), it sounds preposterous that the Crystal Gems would have done that. It also isn’t something that Amethyst would know, since she wasn’t around for the war. So the gem shards that make Frybo move are out of the question and that episode’s plot is revamped while keeping the central point (Peedee’s relationship with his dad) intact.
-Example 2. The Rubies getting sucked out the door of the Moon Base is so unscientific it hurts my brain. Space is a vacuum, not a vacuum cleaner; space does not suck. When you open a door into space all the air rushes out really quickly, and then everything is calm (I still don’t understand why the Moon Base would be pressurised in the first place if gems don’t need air?) Also it is established that gems adjust to gravity (Amethyst can’t float-jump on the Moon like Steven can) so the idea that all the Rubies flew off the Moon’s surface so easily is ridiculous. So that part is all totally changed.
-Those are two small examples that changed episode plots significantly. I have some really big fridge logic problems with some of the important parts in the world building in canon, so there are some really big overarching changes. For hardcore fans who know the show well, spotting changes and trying to figure out why there is a change there might make for a fun way to engage with the text. It is also something the readers can engage me, the writer, about. :) I’m very friendly and like to chat with new interesting people from anywhere in the world.
Have you changed anyone’s identity in the story?
-Not intentionally, nothing that has been stated in canon. I’m not super well-versed in the Steven Universe fandom, so it’s hard to say about fanon. I am vaguely aware that there are some very popular interpretations of various characters among the fandom, and I cannot guarantee that the same interpretation can be made based on this story, since I don’t fully understand what specific details those interpretations are based on. Therefore I may have changed a detail that was important to a particular interpretation. But it doesn’t mean I am against that interpretation or that I don’t think that interpretation is valid. So for example, if your interpretation of aromantic and asexual Peridot relies on Peridot never fusing with anyone, then I’m sorry, but I need fusions and I haven’t got that many gems: Peridot will be fusing. But it doesn’t mean that I think aroace Peridot is not valid.
What about ships?
-I don’t ship (it’s just, my brain doesn’t work like that), so there are no ships in particular in this story. But I am also not against shipping. So while there might be some changes to relationships between characters as demanded by the story (for example, I can’t afford to drop Lapis in the ocean for half a season to explore the Malachite dynamic, this story needs more gems earlier than canon does), I’m not intentionally sinking any ships in this story.
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dailyarturia · 5 years
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Instead of just rating servants, what about a rating of the different Fate storylines?
oh now THIS I can do
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WHERE IT ALL BEGAN. often called the most boring route which, I guess yeah because it’s the first route of the first game so it ends up being exposition central. it has its moments and it’s not bad per se but it hasn’t aged that well and the rest of the series has caught up with it since it’s not the entry point for new fans anymore so like half the route’s content and plot twists end up being stuff that is already known from other installments. I still think it’d be nice if ufotable made an ova or something just to complete the set, and also because heaven’s feel actually mirrors fate route on a lot of points so I feel the hf movies aren’t going to be at their best if you haven’t gone over fate route beforehand. if you skip over the outdated exposition you can easily fit all of it in ~10 episodes cause it’s pretty short. 6.5/10 if looked at on its own, but its importance as the base on which later routes build can’t be underestimated 
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my personal favourite route even tho its heroine is the worst part of it. with fate route getting the exposition out of the way ubw can go at a faster pace and is more action oriented. the shirou-archer and related archer-lancer conflict is one of my favourites in all of fate and “here I come, king of heroes- do you have enough weapons in stock?” is ICONIC. rin got massively gimped as heroine cause nasu didn’t seem to dare actually letting her be flawed and shirou ended up too focused on his own conflict to form like a real bond with her but that’s a horse I beat to death long ago. the examination of what makes a hero is in general one of my fav themes in fate and ubw obviously delivers there but what I especially love in ubw is the theme of “don’t ‘welcome to the real world’ me asshole, the real world shouldn’t be like this”. 9/10 would be a 10 if rin had like, any character development
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this one is... so stressful to read, which is GOOD cause that’s the point but that also means my reread is going at a pace of 3 scenes per 4 months. heaven’s feel throws every convention that fate and ubw set up out the goddamn window by immediately killing off like half the cast including powerhouses like gilgamesh and turning an ideological conflict into a really viscerally personal one. the final conflict isn’t a hero versus a world ending calamity, it’s a bunch of traumatised kids with bad blood between them and the rest of the world caught in the crossfire. “the embodiment of all the world’s evils was a victim” is a really powerful statement to make and where fate and ubw only really asked “what makes a hero” hf hammers in the corresponding question of “what makes a villain”. 8.5/10 it’s an incredibly strong thematic ending to the game as a whole but it’s just, not my favourite
jesus christ look what you did, you got me started. here’s a readmore to save your dashboard and rip mobile users cause I got some opinions on fate alright
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this one fucking sucks if you look at it on its own it only works if you know fsn follows it otherwise its just DEATH DESPAIR PAIN SUFFERING yeah yeah we get it urobuchi. apparently he was going through a real bad depressive episode when he was asked to write zero and it was really cathartic to him to be able to write it as dark as he wants knowing that he can’t possibly ruin the happy ending of fsn so, I’ll give him that I guess. I thought it was the greatest shit when I first watched it cause uro’s really good at leveraging shock value but the flaws become more obvious with every rewatch. not really my favourite it’s mostly just asshole central and people who stan zero are usually insufferable but it’s got some good shit among the usual uro stuff. 7/10 PROVIDED you look at it in the context of fsn otherwise it’s like, a 5
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BIG favourite and origin of my wife for life bazett fraga mcremitz. I read this one at the exact right time in my life to be absolutely destroyed by it. the whole game is based on the premise of ‘a second chance’ so it goes out if its way to go into the characters who got kinda shafted in fsn while also being the canon ‘everyone lives’ au. fsn has always underlined how valuable an ordinary life is that’s why we call it family dinner simulator 2004 but fha really hammers that one in. less outright action than fsn but a really strong and tense atmosphere. 9/10 would be a 10 if it weren’t for the fucking caren scene
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basically revisits the themes from zero and stay night from a different angle but the cast is too large to really go into it so its clunky and a lot of characters end up sidelined. still it’s home to a lot of my favs and some of the coolest action in the whole series. I have a lot of apocrypha opinions but most of them boil down to who i want to hold hands with each other and how much I love sieg(fried) so I’ll spare you those. 7/10 thanks to shaky execution but if you take a shovel and make it that deep yourself it easily jumps up to 8 or even 9. don’t watch the anime I’m begging you.
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the storyline actually suffers a lot from how linear and rigid the game structure is so its main selling point is hakuno and their bond with each of the 3 playable servants but by god does it deliver there. hakuno is one of my favourite protagonists of all time and it’s all in how they’re not going to take this shit lying down. it’s a game about forging bonds in a system designed to drive people apart and holding stubborn hope for the future. 9.5/10 the half point is as much acknowledgement of the game’s flaws as I am willing to give because we have decided to stan forever
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lol what was that about linear structure? its like, super horny on main so it’s a hard sell but it basically turns everything I liked about extra up to 14. fate/extra CCC is a game about reaching out to others, how people are stronger together, how the future can be changed for the better as long as you are alive to see it, forming your own identity in the wake of trauma and learning who you are in relation to others as well as to your own past, healthy love and unhealthy love and recognising the difference between the two, and big fat anime titties. 10/10 i am not fucking kidding you if you can handle the horny CCC will be the best ride of your goddamn life.
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look. i don’t want to get started on extella so just take the ratings. 8/10 concept 4/10 execution.
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it’s incomprehensible garbage but it’s MY incomprehensible garbage 9/10 and 3/10 simultaneously
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now we got some real mixed feelings on this bad boy here so I’ll try to keep it short. basically all the chapters up to and including london were mediocre at best with septem as the absolute peak of garbage. they actually said in interviews that they didn’t make a shift towards heavier story content until between london and america so that makes sense but it painfully shows. america camelot babylon salomon then exponentially increased in quality and were the fucking bomb. epic of remnant was a massively mixed bag thanks to all the guest writers with minimal supervision to buy nasu time to write lostbelt. lostbelt is fun again. the main story nowadays is really good quality because nasu is just doing what he does best and writing incomprehensible lore with a story around it but because of the game’s nature as mobile game that wants to make everyone appealing somehow it misses a lot of the visceral emotion that fsn had. events are often too silly even if they do end on a serious note and there’s not enough actual serious story content to balance it out so everyone kinda suffers from character erosion and I’m not sure if there’s an easy way to fix that, cause sure you can say ‘make nasu supervise it more’ but nasu’s always writing like 5 different things at once and he can’t really Do That. I think ultimately fgo has been good for fate as a whole in the story department and I also think a different direction/feel from earlier stuff isn’t bad in itself but the scale at which fgo works does seem like it’s beyond what nasu and co really expected to ever have to handle and so while the amount of successes has increased, the amount of failures has also become more glaring. 5/10 on the first few chapters, 8/10 on the later half of arc one and onwards, ???/10 overall, oh fate how I wish I could quit you (i don’t wish that i’m having a good time)
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sysig · 5 years
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My Case Against 1-5
aka Why Miles Edgeworth is the most important character in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (and it’s not just because he’s my favourite I swear)
*spoilers for Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney cases 1-1 through 1-5! *also opinions
Miles Edgeworth has the strongest character arc in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and using a backfilled case to undermine his character growth not only reduces his impact as a character but delegitimizes the entirety of the first game’s central plot progression. In this essay I will
Miles Edgeworth’s character arc is the strongest of the entire cast in PWAA. His maturation and closure from case 1-2 to 1-4 are the heart of the whole plot of the first game, showing his progression from cold and clever to vulnerable, and willing to listen even to his opponents. This progression is very important to the player’s attitude towards him, as well as his worth as a character, as if he were to always be one way, either cold and clever or vulnerable and more open-minded, he would be rendered a flat character. Not to mention, case 1-4 is arguably the most important case in the game, being the original climax, as well as finally showing all the events of the DL-6 case and Edgeworth’s childhood, furthering his characterization and lending more depth to him, Phoenix, and Larry. Having the events play out as they do, with accusations and uncovering a past that was repressed and hidden, to slimy dealings with the prosecution and blame pinned everywhere, at least Edgeworth didn’t do what everyone, even himself, had been convinced of. But wait, isn’t that a little familiar? Isn’t that very similar to the kind of thing Edgeworth has been accused of, and how Rise from the Ashes plays out? The finger is pointed at Edgeworth, not for murder perhaps, but incriminating nonetheless, and while the past doesn’t reach back as far, it still throws so much into question, the biggest one being: Did Edgeworth use unscrupulous methods, no matter to how willing he was to do so, to win his cases? This case says, well, yes, Edgeworth unwittingly used forged evidence and lays out how he did such a thing, but in the end paints him as having been a pawn for a power he had no control over, an unintentional offender. Do I believe that though? No way! Who was there in the first case against him when he intentionally went out of his way to tamper with a witness’ testimony! Who was there as he covered up for a real-life murderer and let me take the blame! Who was there while he twisted the truth to better suit his four year career as a prosecutor, or two if 1-5 is to be believed? It was me, I saw it all, I bear witness to Edgeworth being unlawful, intentionally, on purpose, knowingly! And you know what? That’s great. It strengthens his characterization more effectively than case 1-5 could ever hope to. Why? Well, in this essay I will...!
Cases 1-2 through 1-4 perfectly set up and foreshadow reopening and solving the DL-6 case; the new cast is small, the old cast is well-established, some evidence is even brought up again, and everything is very tightly written. 
1-2 introduces Edgeworth and all his scummy back alley ways of dealing with unfortunate-for-him evidence and testimony, giving us, the player, reason to dislike him beyond just Being Bad - he’s actively making this case more difficult for us, and has us framed for murder! That bastard! His loss throws him into question, as it did for his mentor and adoptive father, von Karma, but unlike von Karma, Edgeworth’s heart was not hardened past the point of no return. This is reflected best in 1-3
1-3 starts with Edgeworth still gunning to win and making our lives more difficult, with Gumshoe still being on his side and making gathering evidence harder, which leads back to the impression of Edgeworth - if Gumshoe and Edgeworth are working together, and it’s making this case more difficult, it comes back to thinking Edgeworth is a bastard who’s just there to get in the way. But then he underhandedly helps you - refuses to object, presses witnesses, even the Judge seems skeptical of his position as prosecutor! He’s starting to shift, to change, to become more interested in the truth rather than keeping his winning streak alive
Finally 1-4 is where it all comes together. You see his mentor, his father figure, who trained Edgeworth to be just like him, to be unscrupulous and cold and always make sure to get the defendant declared guilty - von Karma. And wouldn’t you know it, Edgeworth of all people is now the one in the defendant’s chair, framed for murder and unwilling to talk, believing not only that von Karma can have him declared guilty, but that his is guilty. Protecting Phoenix from the truth that he’s been wrestling with for fifteen years, until it finally comes to a head - 
Edgeworth is not a murderer, but he’s also not innocent. Not necessarily in 1-4, he’s declared Not Guilty, but in his life, he has done underhanded deeds and dirty dealings. He’s manipulative, cold, refuses help and refutes compelling arguments if they might be inconvenient for him. But he changes, before it’s too late. He becomes vulnerable, is willing to change, to listen, to admit defeat. If he ever got caught he’d surely go to jail, and in 1-2 I’d be tempted to say he got what was coming to him! But he’s not static. He’s dynamic. He learns, he grows, he becomes a better person. And he hates it, he feels so uncomfortable changing that part of himself, those “Unnecessary feelings.” But Phoenix was right - they are necessary, and they prove that Edgeworth has changed. You want evidence? He gives it to you himself, with his uncomfortable expressions and his stopped nightmares. He refuses to become the monster that raised him, stops beating himself up for something he never did, and admits the greatest defeat - he stops prosecuting. Not because he was found for forging evidence but rather because he was saved from anyone finding out now that he’d turned that page. Phoenix Wright saved him from callout culture.
So other than the obvious things about case 1-5, like the occasional typo (not great in a detail-driven story but nobody’s perfect) and some of the more particular puzzles (looking at you unstable jar), Rise from the Ashes has some more egregious problems, least of all being pacing and tone, and most of all being ruining continuity and the heart of the first four cases.
How it lifts from 1-4 aka Edgeworth’s sordid past & statute of limitations on opening a case (and repressed memories)
It’s cast number and amount of evidence as a climax vs. 1-3 & 1-4 (how 1-3 was a murder unrelated to any of the previously established characters and had a decently large cast but not /so/ large as to be confusing) and (1-4 as a climax works the smoothest because of the foreshadowing of the DL-6 since 1-2 and only introducing a few new characters to keep the characterization tight) plus (refusing to get rid of superfluous evidence despite having already done that in earlier cases)
Lack of/contradicting established continuity and canon (Edgeworth being Lana’s understudy, neglecting mention of von Karma except at the very end and only once; the Blue Badger being made “This year” i.e. 2017 when the plush already existed at least as far back as 2016, if not earlier; Rumours about Edgeworth forging evidence/any other back alley deals being thrown around when even he himself didn’t know about the forged evidence but did know about tampering with testimonies because he did those himself in case 1-2; bringing up Miranda Rights, evidence law, etc., when neither of them had been important to the plot before (internal continuity rather than real-world application)
It’s a badly written mystery (the way it pushes off the initial murder to the very end to make it seem like an afterthought, the way it intentionally redirects the chain of events many times (something like four times?), its “options” only leading to yes or no which really end up with either one or the other with just a strike (!) taken off (i.e. not clever writing); it just seems like it’s a gaslighty mess)
The Good (because there are good things, both objectively and subjectively)
Gant (his design, his theme, the idea he represents (being corruption in the police, blackmail & lies to achieve an end; well established just not well executed, especially taking pieces of evidence, one of which he planted, and intentionally hiding it from Lana instead of further implicating Ema i.e. Lana should’ve been aware of those pieces of ‘’evidence’’ so that it would seem even more like Ema would be implicated if they were real)
The screwdriver reveal (divorced from the context of everything else in the case, the image of Edgeworth truly being used to transport a corpse unwittingly is very well done. It’s in-character, well-revealed, and an interesting concept, especially towards Edgeworth, because of his baggage)
The question raised of corruption in the police force, and foils of Starr and Lana to Gumshoe and Edgeworth
The Bad (objectively bad things like pacing, logical jumpscares (edges toward subjective), hand-holding (like flashbacks to things that happened literally just before the last save), arguably tone shift)
Having this case be both an introduction to new gameplay elements, and the climax of the game i.e., the hardest level (the way things are introduced doesn’t mesh well with having to have the most difficult plot line/convoluted story/etc., because there’s no time to gradually tutorialize these elements without killing the pacing of the case, which it does anyway. It does both things wrong, amazing!)
The Ugly (subjective things, plot progression around and in relation to Edgeworth my favourite charater, sense of humour, using Ema as a replacement for Maya, introducing such a large cast with no foreshadowing (because they couldn’t help it is not an excuse - if you can’t write your plot and have it weave naturally into the pre-established story, maybe you should do a rewrite)
Edgeworth is not a static character and you’d know that if you played Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. His characterization and character arc are the strongest of any other character in the game and writing as though he never did anything unscrupulous undoes the entirety of 1-2 through 1-4
Admittedly, this is neither a good nor a bad, it just is - Darke was convicted of a murder that he did not commit, and was put to death for murders that were never proven. Darke could be Not Guilty for all we, the player, know, and I think that’s maybe the most interesting thing in this case. Too bad it was sidelined for the rest of it
Backfilling as an art is something I’m very familiar with, and if I may toot my own horn, am fairly decent at. You see it all the time with fanfiction and other fanworks, backfilling is a very popular way of making sense or just filling in the time between canon events - fun speculative fiction for fiction. This case is one of the worst examples of backfilling I’ve ever seen. It explains nothing that wasn’t already established, it actively ignores canon, it introduces a dozen new characters that were previously unmentioned and makes them integral to the plots of the established characters, etc., etc. It makes it difficult to want to get to know them when they fall into the conventions of unskilled writers, no matter how earnest
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presentmic69 · 5 years
Text
Alright so this is going to be a fun post and I totally didn't type it up in notepad so I wouldn't risk losing it via refreshing. Basically this post is just going to be a mess of like. The lore ideas I have for my Saints Row insert. General warning for spoilers if you haven't played the games yet, and also mass confusion because it's fucking wild. Also warnings for death, abuse, human trafficking, prostitution, gangs, violence, drowning, dodgy politicians, kidnappings, missing children, cancer, guns, assults, implied sexual abuse, and probably more stuff like that. Saint's Row kinda is dark like that. So please don't feel like you gotta read this lorepost if that stuff will harm u!!
So my self insert for Saints Row takes the position of the Boss (ie the player character throughout most of the games.). She generally follows the same events as the boss, but her timeline and when events actually occur is different. Also her personality is a little varied but probably closest to the Laura Bailey voice except she knows how to technology a little. The Saints Row timeline is canonically fucked to hell so legally I have to change dates around. And by fucked I mean some events in the 3rd game occur after the Earth is Destroyed bc nobody checked the dates. Also my bosses age is changed so that she's not an adult in SRTT, cos Matt would be 16 then and like. That dodgy.
So instead we have a 12 yr old running around shooting stuff for 4 years beforehand. Great! Alright here we go this is the rough lore I have so far in the worlds worst text post.
"Lee", born Emily Hart, was born and raised in the UK on February 17th, 2000, in North West London. She was mainly raised by her grandparents as her parents were somewhat absent in her life. This went on for a good 12 years, where Lee went to primary school and started secondary; became a cub scout, and generally had a decent upbringing. This all changed when her grandparents both died of cancer suddenly when she was 12. Being left with only her mother and uncle, she felt distant from her family, and soon enough her life was changed forever once again.
"Reports are coming in that a British child has potentially been abducted in Central London earlier this week. It was reported previously that Emily Hart, a twelve year old girl from North West London, had not returned home on Tuesday night. The family feared that she had perhaps run away due to stress in the family over a recent death, and appealed for the public to encourage her to come home. However, the case took a tragic turn when police uncovered CCTV footage that appeared to show someone matching the description of Emily being taken from the streets and loaded into a van. Roadblocks were put in place, but no van matching the description was found. The number plates reportedly came back as stolen, and the CCTV footage was too grainy to see the identities of the kidnappers. The Hart family is appealing for any information about this tragic case to come forward, and police believe if they act quickly enough, they will be able to bring Emily home safely."
- A news report, probably.
The Morningstar gang had kidnapped Lee in plain sight in the middle of the day on the busy streets of London. It was practically unheard of for this kind of thing to happen. She was first taken to Belgium, and then over to Mexico via ship. At this point Viola and Kiki took over handling her, and they were both not too comfortable with the idea of handing off a 12 year old to anyone. But there was not much they themselves could do without putting themselves in danger. They handed Lee a couple of hundred bucks, let her go, and told her to run. And run she did. Lee eventually found herself stowing away in a truck with gun shipments bound for the border, which just so happened to be heading to Stilwater.
The truck in question was stopped by the Saints when it reached Stilwater, cos they all wanted some fresh new guns without having to pay. They kind of weren't expecting to find a missing British child in the back of the truck hiding amongst toppled over crates. Lee ended up remaining with the Saints, refusing to even try going home as she felt more of a kinship with them than she ever had her remaining family. She was canonized, did odd jobs here and there in return for a place to sleep and some cash for food, and generally tried to make herself as useful as possible. Johnny started to become like an older brother figure to her. Shit hits the fan and Lee is kidnapped once again and almost drowns in a sunken car as a couple of her friends die in said car. She starts to become unhinged, and long story short, kills the police chief in a Yacht explosion, which leaves her in a coma for a year.
By the time she wakes up, Johnny is on trial for like a lot of murder and about to be sentenced to death. Carlos breaks Lee out of prison, and she breaks Johnny out of court. Lee takes up the position of leader of the saints, despite being like literally 14 ish at this point. Lee recruits some more people, more people die, and the saints end up taking over the company Ultor, which leads them to becoming celebs.
A year after that, the Saints hit Steelport, and start to mess with the Syndicate. Johnny dies in a bank heist gone wrong, and all of the saints funds are drained by Matt Miller under the order of Phillipe Loren. Lee wants revenge for Johnny's death and hunts down Phillipe, messing with some of the Morningstars operations before eventually killing him. She recruits some more people and sets her sights on the Deckers, taking them down after dealing with Matt and beating him in a cyberspace duel. She lets him live and he flees to the UK. With the Deckers out of the way she knows that the Luchadores would be easier to finish off, and sets her sights on them. She humiliates Killbane, defeats the Luchadores and defeats STAG too. At some point she kidnaps Matt's favourite actor because that's a plot point the game has for some reason.
Matt gets hired by MI6, and teams up with the Saints, who are teaming up with them to stop a terror organization lead by the ex STAG leader. Evil dude launches a nuke after falling into molten metal or something and Lee ends up like climbing the nuke to disarm it. Everyone confesses shit to her and I shit you not this is literally what happens in game I'm not making stuff up here. She disarms the nuke, jumps tf off it and crash lands in the White House. (At this point in game the boss becomes the President of the USA but I might change that a little because Lee will legit be 16 which is. Too funny. But if she is then fuck it I mean. It's Trump or her right??? If we're using irl logic.)
It's now 2020 and Matt arrives in the USA to warn Lee that aliens are coming. She doesn't believe him. Aliens come and abduct everyone. I hate this fucking game.
Lee is trapped in a simulation, NOT the 1950s sitcom one I haven't worked out what hers is gonna be yet but it'll Hurt. She escapes, Earths blown up, she saves Matt, they bone, they save everyone else, they kill evil aliens, dating happens, wooooooo.
And that’s basically the like lore lore overview. Generally she follows the flow of the saints games but they occur in wildly different years and much closer together.
SR1- 2012 SR2- 2014 SRTT- 2015 SRIV- 2020
I have yet to work out if GOOH will occur in her timeline, and if so, which ending would be canon. Although with the power of AUS we can do all of them. Also she totally has an Agents of Mayhem AU and Matt is actually present bc hes important. Also many other AUs.
TLDR: saints row is crazy
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luckydicekirby · 5 years
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fic commentary meme: your favorite part of white collar podcast fic, OR the hallucination scene(s) from bathymetry, orrrrr any part of I Really Am Your Color but that seems less likely
SHOCKINGLY i’m sure, hallucinations from bathymetry wins : P I love a good hallucination/dream sequence! A fact about me I’m sure we’re all unaware of. (My favorite bit of the white collar fic is of course everything El says; I have nothing productive to say about I Really Am Your Color other than ‘damn, still can’t believe that lipstick scene’.)
So this whole Brigmore segment/the back half of chapter 4 was added to the outline really late, because initially what I had written down was like. “They solve the attempted murder plot somehow” and that turned out not to be helpful! So I was like okay there’s a witch, so they must be at Brigmore, whatever, and then that ended up tying in really well with being able to poke at the central problem of Billie being unable to move on from her past. And so the blunt force way of getting at this was to have her LITERALLY confront their past and then handwave it with magic! And I really wanted an excuse to write Delilah.
Also this is way more interesting than doing my job and thus got long, oops. From Chapter 4 of Bathymetry.
“You should run,” says a voice from behind her, muffled.
Billie turns around. There’s a woman there wearing Billie’s old Whaler uniform, mask included. She’s a lot more solid that Billie’s visions usually are. Once Billie focuses on her, she doesn’t disappear. “You should run,” she says again, in Billie’s voice. “Before it’s too late. Before you get tangled up in something else you don’t understand.” 
“I’m not going to abandon her.” She’s talking to a ghost, but she can’t quite stop herself. Billie steps forward. She wonders what she would feel, if she reached out.
lol I actually FORGOT that this bit starts with Billie talking to her past self. obviously, I love it when people talk to their past selves. Mineshaft 2.txt baybee
Anyway part of what I wanted to accomplish on a character level while we were here was Billie very pointedly choosing not to run away--to no longer be the version of herself that would. So, the unsubtle way of doing that is just...having that version of herself explicitly tell her to do it! Externalizing internal conflict for fun and profit.
In my outline this whole scene is written as: “B: maybe has a Think about running away but like. She Isn’t Gonna--lol does Past Fake Memory Billie try to tell her to. OR fake memory delilah. Anyway she literally tells her past to fuck off, and...runs into Thackeray menacing C and O? And hard cut” so if you’ve ever wondered how elegant my outlines are: they aren’t. 
“You think I’m stupid,” says her ghost. “You think I let Delilah lead me around by the nose. Maybe I am. Maybe I did. But do you seriously think you’re any better? Please. You’ve been following around the fucking Empress like a puppy. She’s just a reckless, spoiled kid, and you look at her like she’s going to save you from yourself. That’s who we are now?”
Emily-Delilah comparisons are a fun way to make Billie really upset! Sometimes you’re in love with a woman whose mom you helped kill and who is also the niece of your Terrible Ex, And That’s Fine. Also, there’s something very ouch about your past self saying, disdainfully, oh, you think I’m stupid, don’t you?
“Shut up.” Billie steps forward, gets in her own face. It’s not very satisfying.
The ghost snorts. “We always were a sucker for a pretty face. Admit it. You haven’t changed at all. This is who we’ll always be.”
I think we can only assume that Billie making bad choices because a girl is pretty is canon.
“Say that to my fucking face,” Billie says, and the ghost laughs, and laughs, and takes off the mask. Except when she does, she isn’t Billie any longer.
In some universe where I had restraint, I would have Billie have to deal with EITHER her past self or Delilah, but not both. However, restraint is for suckers.
“Little Billie Lurk, lost without her master,” says Delilah, and she looks more real than Billie’s ghost ever could. 
Writing Delilah dialogue is VERY fun. I really like the cadence of the first line here.
Delilah never looked like she belonged in the real world. She was like what Billie imagined the Void would be like, long before she ever set foot there. Otherworldly and regal and terrifying. “So convinced that you’ve changed. What would Daud say? Oh, that’s right. He doesn’t say anything anymore. You left him in the Void. You didn’t even bother to do the one thing he’d asked of you in fifteen years. 
And of course my other fav thing to do in this fic, bring Daud up so I can be mean about him! And have Billie deal with her guilt about him/decide not to be like him, I guess. But mostly to be mean. 
The both of you were always pathetic, trying so hard to wash away the blood on your hands. You haven’t figured out that it always ends in blood. You’ll never learn that lesson if you don’t let the Kaldwin girl go.”
“It doesn’t have to,” Billie says. “It’s a choice. It’s always a choice.”
This also leans into one of the themes of this fic aka “what I think doto was about”, that you can’t blame other people for your own choices, and that at some point you have to admit that murder isn’t gonna solve your problems. (or more poetically, breaking cycles of violence.)
Delilah steps forward, reaching out to cup Billie’s cheek. Emily touched her there earlier today, and Billie leaned into it, and now she’s somewhere in this house, and Billie has to find her—
Ah yes, the romantic face touch! Also, Billie snapping out of the hallucination a little bit by thinking/worrying about Emily here is important--the need to save Emily is the way she leads herself out of being figuratively and literally stuck in the past. Because that’s romantic, to me personally.
“I thought about asking you to join us,” Delilah says, thumb running across Billie’s cheek. “I would have if you hadn’t taken the first ship out, getting away from this place as fast as you could. Even after you betrayed me to Daud. There was always something about you. That fire in your eyes. Ambition and longing and the knowledge that you were owed more than the hand you’d been dealt. Maybe it’s the same thing Emily sees in you.”
“Now you’re really just trying to piss me off.” Billie barely even thought about it, but the twin-bladed knife is back in her hands. 
Delilah laughs. “You think you’re strong enough to kill me now? I don’t think so. You put on such a good show, Billie, but I know you’ve always been weak.”
Delilah explicitly laying out the idea that turning away from violence makes you weak, so that Billie can immediately refute it.
Her grip tightens on the knife.
She wants to make Delilah bleed. That’s what this knife was meant for. 
There’s some sort of throughline about the twin-bladed knife being a symbol of the aforementioned cycles of violence that is a little weak because I only decided to do it like, 2/3 of the way through the story, but that’s why Billie giving it to Emily ends up being a big deal in the next few chapters. Had I edited this story all at once instead of in chunks, I would’ve gone back and laid some groundwork for it earlier.
That’s what it wanted to do to the Outsider, but the Outsider didn’t deserve it. Delilah does. Delilah deserves everything Billie can give her. Delilah tried to kill Emily twice, and the first time Billie didn’t even know, didn’t even think to try to stop her. There’s still time for her to make up for that.
Billie really WANTS to fight her but...
Delilah’s form flickers, and for a moment, Billie can see the empty manor behind her. 
“Well?” Delilah demands.
Delilah’s gone. Emily made sure of it. And Emily didn’t kill her: she’s always been clever enough to find the ways to give people what they deserve without spilling their blood. 
(low chaos is hot, apparently!)
And she’s going to get a bullet between the eyes if Billie doesn’t find her soon.
“I don’t have time for this,” Billie says. She shrugs off Delilah’s ghost, and turns away.
...she deliberately chooses to focus on the present/Emily instead of the past. Romance! Character development! Yeah! Anyway, this is pretty much the point of the scene--Billie choosing not to, say, do what Daud might have done, and try to get revenge on someone who isn’t even there. I actually had a hard time writing the scenes later where she gets together with Emily, because these were the emotional beats I was planning to hit and then I did them early and had to find new ones.
“She’ll never forgive you,” Delilah says. The same crooning voice she always had, because she isn’t here anymore. She’s gone. Billie’s never going to see her again.
Billie vaults over a banister and doesn’t look back. 
Void, she hates this fucking house. The place echoes, and her eyes keep trying to lie to her, and she is so sick and tired of shit like this. She thought it would be over when she dealt with the Outsider, but it’s never really over, is it. There will always be bad people, but Billie isn’t at their mercy anymore. And she’ll die before she lets Emily be, either. 
And this is a deliberate echo of a doto line-- “you’ve always been at the mercy of bad people, haven’t you?”, which Billie says about the Outsider when she finds his body in the void. I love the doto thing of drawing parallels between Billie and the Outsider and so I do it a lot in this fic. Thackery and Flint being an Overseer and a witch is kind of an attempt to draw this parallel out further--they were at the mercy of bad people too.
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didanawisgi · 6 years
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The Odyssey is about a man. It says so right at the beginning — in Robert Fagles’s 1996 translation, for example, the poem opens with the line, “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns.”
In the course of the poem, that man plots his return home after fighting the Trojan War, slaughters the suitors vying to marry his wife Penelope, and reestablishes himself as the head of his household.
But the Odyssey is also about other people: Penelope, the nymph Calypso, the witch Circe, the princess Nausicaa; Odysseus’s many shipmates who died before they could make it home; the countless slaves in Odysseus’s house, many of whom are never named.
Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English, is as concerned with these surrounding characters as she is with Odysseus himself. Written in plain, contemporary language and released earlier this month to much fanfare, her translationlays bare some of the inequalities between characters that other translations have elided. It offers not just a new version of the poem, but a new way of thinking about it in the context of gender and power relationships today. As Wilson puts it, “the question of who matters is actually central to what the text is about.”
Why it matters for a woman to translate the Odyssey
Composed around the 8th century BC, the Odyssey is one of the oldest works of literature typically read by an American audience; for comparison, it’s almost 2,000 years older than Beowulf. While the Iliad tells the story of the Trojan War, the Odyssey picks up after the war is over, when Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, is trying to make his way home.
Both poems are traditionally attributed to the Greek poet Homer, but since they almost certainly originated as oral performances and not written texts, it’s hard to tell whether a single person composed them, or whether they are the result of many different creators and performers refining and contributing to a story over a period of time. (The introduction to Wilson’s translation includes a longer discussion of the question of who “Homer” was.)
Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, has also translated plays by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides and the Roman philosopher Seneca. Her translation of the Odyssey is one of many in English (though the others have been by men), including versions by Fagles, Robert Fitzgerald, Richmond Lattimore, and more. Translating the long-dead language Homer used — a variant of ancient Greek called Homeric Greek — into contemporary English is no easy task, and translators bring their own skills, opinions, and stylistic sensibilities to the text. The result is that every translation is different, almost a new poem in itself.
A battlefield epic, the Iliad has very few major female characters. The Odyssey, however, devotes significant time to the life (and even the dreams) of Penelope. Circe, Calypso, and the goddess Athena all play important roles. This was one of the reasons I was drawn to the Odyssey as a teenager, and why I’ve returned to it many times over the years.
But the Odyssey is hardly a feminist text. Odysseus may have trouble getting home, but at least he gets to travel the world and have sex with beautiful women like Calypso and Circe. Penelope, meanwhile, has to wait around while boorish suitors drink and carouse in her family’s home, pressuring her to marry one of them. To buy time, she says she can’t marry until she finishes weaving a funeral shroud for her father-in-law, but every night she undoes the day’s work, making the task last as long as she can. “His work always gets him somewhere,” Wilson told me. “Her work is all about undoing. It’s all about hiding herself, hiding her desires, and creating something whose only purpose is to get nowhere.”
Some feminist readings of the Odyssey have tried to cast Penelope as heroic in her own way, sometimes by comparing her to Odysseus. “I think there’s so many things wrong with that,” Wilson said. “She’s constantly still being judged by, is she like him.” What’s more, the heroic-Penelope reading focuses on a wealthy woman at the expense of the many enslaved women in the poem, some of whom meet an untimely and brutal end. When Odysseus returns home and kills all the suitors, he also tells his son Telemachus to kill the slave women who had sex with (or were raped by) the suitors. “Hack at them with long swords, eradicate / all life from them,” Odysseus says in Wilson’s translation. “They will forget the things / the suitors made them do with them in secret.”
As a woman, Wilson believes she comes to the Odyssey with a different perspective than translators who have gone before her. “Female translators often stand at a critical distance when approaching authors who are not only male, but also deeply embedded in a canon that has for many centuries been imagined as belonging to men,” she wrote in a recent essay at the Guardian. She called translating Homer as a woman an experience of “intimate alienation.”
“Earlier translators are not as uncomfortable with the text as I am,” she explained to me, “and I like that I’m uncomfortable.” Part of her goal with the translation was to make readers uncomfortable too — with the fact that Odysseus owns slaves, and with the inequities in his marriage to Penelope. Making these aspects of the poem visible, rather than glossing over them, “makes it a more interesting text,” she said.
Wilson’s translation is different from its predecessors in subtle — and not so subtle — ways
Part of the way Wilson challenges previous readings of the Odyssey is with style. Her translation made a splash months before it was published, when an excerpt ran in the summer 2017 issue of the Paris Review. I and other Odyssey fans were excited by Wilson’s opening line: “Tell me about a complicated man.” In its matter-of-fact language, it’s worlds different from Fagles’s “Sing to me of the man, Muse,” or Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 version, “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story / of that man skilled in all ways of contending.” Wilson chose to use plain, relatively contemporary language in part to “invite readers to respond more actively with the text,” she writes in a translator’s note. “Impressive displays of rhetoric and linguistic force are a good way to seem important and invite a particular kind of admiration, but they tend to silence dissent and discourage deeper modes of engagement.”
“There’s an idea that Homer has to sound heroic and ancient,” Wilson told me, but that idea comes with a value system attached, one that includes “endorsing this very hierarchical kind of society as if that’s what heroism is.” Telling the story in plainer language allows readers to see Odysseus and his society in another light.
There are flashes of beauty in Wilson’s Odyssey. “The early Dawn was born,” she writes in Book 2; “her fingers bloomed.” Of the forest on Calypso’s island, where many birds nest, she writes, “It was full of wings.” But throughout the book, there’s a frankness to Wilson’s language around work and the people who do it. Of Eurymedusa, a slave in the house of princess Nausicaa, she writes, “She used to babysit young Nausicaa / and now she lit her fire and cooked her meal.”
The slaves in older translations of the Odyssey do not “babysit” — often, they’re not identified as slaves at all. Fagles, for instance, calls Eurymedusa a “chambermaid.” Fitzgerald calls her a “nurse.” “It sort of stuns me when I look at other translations,” Wilson said, “how much work seems to go into making slavery invisible.”
Wilson, by contrast, uses the word “slave” for Eurymedusa and many other enslaved characters, even when the original uses a more specific term. The Homeric Greek dmoe, or “female-house-slave,” Wilson writes in her translator’s note, could be translated as “maid” or “domestic servant,” but those terms would imply that the woman was free. “The need to acknowledge the fact and the horror of slavery,” she writes, “and to mark the fact that the idealized society depicted in the poem is one where slavery is shockingly taken for granted, seems to me to outweigh the need to specify, in every instance, the type of slave.”
While Wilson’s language is often plain, it’s also carefully chosen. She told Wyatt Mason at the New York Times magazine she could have begun the poem with the line “Tell me about a straying husband,” an even more radical choice that would still have been “a viable translation.” But, she said, “it would give an entirely different perspective and an entirely different setup for the poem.” She spoke, Mason noted, with “the firmness of someone making hard choices she believes in.”
Those choices show up clearly in her treatment of Penelope. Penelope is a frustrating character — it’s not entirely clear why she doesn’t simply send the suitors away or marry one of them, and the poem offers limited access to her thoughts and feelings. Wilson didn’t try to make Penelope easier to understand — “the opacity of Penelope,” as she puts it, is one of the aspects of the poem she wants to trouble readers and make them uncomfortable.
But small details can tell us something about even the most frustrating of characters. At one point in Book 21, Penelope unlocks the storeroom where Odysseus keeps his weapons — as Wilson writes in her translator’s note, this act sets in motion the slaughter of the suitors and the resolution of the poem. As she picks up the key, Homer describes her hand as pachus, or “thick.” “There is a problem here,” Wilson writes, “since in our culture, women are not supposed to have big, thick, or fat hands.” Translators have usually solved the problem by skipping the adjective, or putting in something more traditional — Fagles mentions Penelope’s “steady hand.” Wilson, however, renders the moment this way: “Her muscular, firm hand/ picked up the ivory handle of the key.”
“Weaving does in fact make a person’s hands more muscular,” she writes. “I wanted to ensure that my translation, like the original, underlines Penelope’s physical competence, which marks her as a character who plays a crucial part in the action — whether or not she knows what she is doing.”
Wilson does not give Penelope more agency or power than she has in the original poem, but she also does not take any of the queen’s original power away by making descriptions of her conform to modern gender stereotypes.
“Part of fighting misogyny in the current world is having a really clear sense of what the structures of thought and the structures of society are that have enabled androcentrism in different cultures, including our own,” Wilson said, and the Odyssey, looked at in the right way, can help readers understand those structures more clearly. The poem offers a “defense of a male dominant society, a defense of its own hero and his triumph over everybody else,” she said, “but it also seems to provide these avenues for realizing what’s so horrible about this narrative, what’s missing about this narrative.”
Recent events have led to a widespread debate over how audiences should consume the work of people we know to be abusers of women. This is intertwined with the question of how we should consume art that has racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted elements. Often elided from this conversation is the fact that people of color and women of all races have been consuming racist and sexist art in America for generations (in many classes on Western literature, for instance, they have had little choice), and developing their own responses to it, responses that are often deeply nuanced.
Conservative talk of “special snowflakes” demanding trigger warnings ignores the fact that people marginalized in the Western canon have long read literature from it in exactly the way Wilson describes: both as an endorsement of its author’s values, and as evidence of how horrible those values can be, and whom they leave out.
Wilson’s translation, then, is not a feminist version of the Odyssey. It is a version of the Odyssey that lays bare the morals of its time and place, and invites us to consider how different they are from our own, and how similar.
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thefatlannister · 6 years
Text
“You’ll have to make it a kill shot:” That Bellarke Scene in 4x11
Okay so at this point I’m aware that I’m bordering on beating a dead horse, but “Clarke would never choose to sacrifice the entire human race for Bellamy” is apparently the Hill I’m Dying On.
I wanted to respond to this comment on my old meta “Start with Bellamy Blake: Unconditional Love + Narrative Meaning” with what’s basically my overdue reaction and analysis of what happened in 5x11 with Bellarke. **It is important to note before I begin that the gun scene in 4x11 is primarily about Clarke thematically, and her character arc. What did and didn’t happen in this ep is also tied into Clarke’s (semblance of a) character arc in season 4 which I’m hoping to write about separately.
But for now let’s dive into the 4x11 gun scene from a bellarke perspective:
I see everyone out here like “CLARKE WAS WILLING TO LET HER MOTHER DIE BUT CAN’T KILL BELLAMY TO SAVE THE HUMAN RACE!!” Which is basically a retread of the argument that was going around after 3x15 and the “start with Bellamy Blake scene.” My reaction to this interpretation of 4x11 is largely the same as my reaction to that interpretation of 3x15, namely that this is a very reductive interpretation of the scene and the circumstances surrounding Clarke’s decision and bellarke’s relationship. Also, just a warning up front that I’m really not trying to sound preachy, mostly because it’s totally understandable for people to interpret the scene the way they do— more than 3x15, the 4x11 scene is framed in /extremely/ personal and even romantic terms. It’s FRAMED like it’s a scene where Clarke DOES choose Bellamy over the rest of humanity.
However, I’d argue that both the very specific circumstances of the plot AND the nature of Bellarke’s relationship undermine that interpretation. I will also talk a little below about how I believe poor writing- from a macro and micro standpoint- contribute to the confusing framing of this scene.
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Plot Context
The task of describing and understanding the actual circumstances and stakes of the moral conundrum we’re presented with in 4x11 is very hard. This is largely because the episode does SUCH a poor job of establishing and explaining them itself. In many ways I’d say the episode actually makes false assumptions about the scenario it sets up, which is frustrating on multiple levels. So here’s what we know about the situation:
1. Clarke, Jaha and all of Skaikru are locked in the bunker. Skaikru thinks they’re safe to ride out the 5 years.
2. Octavia, Indra, Gaia, and Kane are the only ones outside the bunker who KNOW that Clarke stole it; this is true for THE DURATION OF THE EP.
3. Clarke, Jaha, Abby, Bellamy know from the beginning of the ep that Octavia won the conclave and that NO ONE OTHER THAN HER (and Indra,Kane, etc) KNOW THAT CLARKE STOLE THE BUNKER.
4. Clarke, Jaha, et al have the ability to communicate with Octavia et al if need be.
The problem with 4x11 is that it’s written as if Clarke and the others have no idea what’s going on outside that door. Clarke is written as if there’s a mob on the other side of the door waiting to slaughter skaikru. In fact, I think an earlier, perhaps even a filmed, version of this episode had exactly that, because even in the promo for the original ep that’s the situation that’s implied.
Clarke’s defense to Niylah in bed (don’t even get me started…) about Skaikru’s technological know-how would make a TON more sense if Skaikru were actually shown as in danger of being completely slaughtered. But as it is, we know Octavia is in control, and that word of the stolen bunker hasn’t gotten out yet. Which means that if they open the door, the likely outcome isn’t the slaughter of skaikru, and it CERTAINLY is not the end of the human race (a HUGE leap).
The stakes of opening the door are that hundreds more members of SKAIKRU will die. Not all of them, but more of them. And honestly, as the leaders of skaikru, it would be totally valid for Clarke and Jaha to be worried about that!! But that’s not the argument that’s presented in 4x11- that argument isn’t introduced until 4x12. Instead there’s this nonsensical assumption - by apparently both the writers and the viewers - that if Clarke opens the door then all of humanity will die.
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Character Context
Now, to get to the central question at play when interpreting this scene from a bellarke perspective: Does Clarke believe when she lowers the gun that she is dooming the human race to death? We the audience know she’s not, but in Clarke’s mind, is her choosing to let Bellamy open the door fundamentally the same as if Clarke gave ALIE the passcode in 3x15, thus temporarily saving her mother but dooming the human race?
The obvious answer, to me, is OF COURSE NOT. Because only someone weak-willed or short-sighted would make that decision, and Clarke Griffin is neither. I cover this topic in considerable detail in my original meta, but if Clarke knows for a fact that sacrificing a loved one could save the world, and the alternative is losing the world AND that loved one, there is literally only one choice that makes sense. That’s why she let Abby hang in 3x15, and that’s why she would have been forced to let Bellamy hang too.
So what’s different in 4x11? Clarke seems convinced throughout the episode that opening the door could mean the end of the human race. She also, notably, spends the episode NOT TALKING TO BELLAMY, until this last scene.
What makes 4x11 different is that this ISN’T a clear cut “save the world or save this person” situation, and that it’s BELLAMY that’s able to instill enough doubt in Clarke that she’s not willing to kill him over it (read: an infinitesimal bit of doubt).
With ALIE, there WAS no uncertainty - like Bellamy says, "we knew what would happen then - now, we know nothing.” Fundamentally, Clarke's argument in the 4x11 scene is based on that fact that she KNOWS that if they DON’T open the door, the human race survives. But if they DO open the door, the survival of the human race is UNCERTAIN, not categorically doomed.
And, ultimately, Clarke is NOT willing to kill Bellamy over an uncertainty.
Of course, had it been anyone BUT Bellamy on those stairs, she likely would have been willing to kill them. But Bellamy is her partner, her co-leader, the person she loves most in the world. And, importantly, in the moments where Clarke doesn’t trust her own decision-making, she trusts Bellamy’s. That’s canon fact.
That’s why the subtext of what Bellamy says to her about keeping the door closed is so important: I know we’ve done stuff like this before, I know this feels necessary- like closing the dropship door, like pulling the lever in Mt Weather, but it’s not. And you know how you know it’s not? Because I won’t share the burden of it with you. In fact, you’ll have to kill me to do it.
And Clarke, who wants DESPERATELY not to hurt him, who has affirmed and reaffirmed how much she trusts him, ultimately is not willing to bet Bellamy’s life on him being wrong. Which, of COURSE she’s not, because she loves him.
Although my interpretation of this scene may not be as classically romantic as others, I find it no less compelling. In fact, I think it says really fucking beautiful things about Bellarke.
Their relationship is defined in part by their knowledge that, in a situation where the choice was LITERALLY between the survival of the human race and the other person's survival, Bellamy would beg Clarke to pull the trigger and vice versa. They would do it, to save their people, to save the human race.
Bellamy literally does this in 4x13- makes the choice to leave Clarke behind, because not doing so means both she and his people die. It kills him to do it, but it is in the strength of her love and the knowledge of her faith in him that he is ABLE to do it!! They have changed and molded and supported each other in order to make each other capable of making decisions that might ultimately mean putting the people they both love before each other. That’s what bonds them and, ultimately, that’s what breaks them.
4x11 is an example of that bond being used to help Clarke understand when NOT to make that kind of hard choice. The very fact that Bellamy isn’t on her side is what allows her to make the right decision and to hold onto her humanity. It’s their relationship with each other that keeps them CENTERED, that keeps them balanced enough to retain their humanity but also to be able to make the hard decisions.
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Narrative Framing
To finish off, I want to circle back to my original observation that I totally understand /why/ people interpret this scene as the romantic trope “you over the world.” And that’s because it’s literally presented that way. As explored in this essay, anyone reading into the plot and character dynamics of the scene can see that it’s nowhere near as straightforward as that. And yet, Clarke’s tears, the lack of her verbal acknowledgement of his arguments, and even the script itself all combine to narrative frame this scene in a way that is undeniably… romantic.
In a way, the scene oversimplifies *itself.* The actual dialogue we receive (not the subtext) - "you'll have to make it a kill shot"- is specifically meant to frame Clarke's choice as either kill Bellamy or let him open the door. This is the frame even though a reasonable viewer could just be like “well obvi she can shoot him in the leg or something.”
It is CLEAR that the writers/directors.etc. intended to frame this moment as "Clarke can't pull the trigger because she loves him too much.” That is indisputably what the scene is telling us, and I think it is this message that is the catalyst for so many members of the audience to then conclude “Clarke chose Bellamy over the human race.”
So I guess my point here is that they clearly wanted to frame this scene as being about Clarke’s (nonplatonic, earth-shatteringly intense) feelings for Bellamy, for better or for worse. And I, for one, am curious as to WHY they would be so intent on doing that….😏😏
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jennaschererwrites · 4 years
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Inside the Groundbreaking Queer Reboot of ‘She-Ra’ | Rolling Stone
We’re all shaped by the myths we grow up with, whether it’s the stories we learn from holy books or Saturday morning cartoons. Kids who see themselves as the hero learn to center themselves in their own life stories. Kids who see their experiences relegated to the sidelines, or not represented at all, come away with a very different lesson — one that can take years to unlearn.
Which is exactly what makes a show like She-Ra and the Princesses of Power so vital. Since its premiere in 2018, Noelle Stevenson’s reboot of the cult Eighties cartoon has joined a revolution in the world of children’s animation, combining classic genre storytelling with diverse representation and a progressive worldview (see also: Nickelodeon’s The Legend of Korra, Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time and Steven Universe). In its fifth and final season, which dropped on Netflix last month, She-Ra rounded out its 52-episode run by centering a queer romance — specifically, between its hero, Adora, and her best frenemy Catra — and positing that such a love can, quite literally, save the world.
“I knew from the start that it wasn’t going to be easy,” says Stevenson, speaking via phone from Los Angeles. “Because this is She-Ra. To have the culmination of her arc be this lesbian love plot is a big deal! And I understood that. But I also felt that it was really important.”
The original She-Ra: Princess of Power was a 1985 Filmation spin-off of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, which itself was based on a line of Mattel action figures. Set on the planet of Etheria, She-Ra follows a band of magical princesses in their rebellion against the Evil Horde, a totalitarian sci-fi regime bent on global domination. Adora is an ex-Horde soldier who joins the rebellion after she gains the ability to transform into She-Ra, a superpowered Chosen One with glowing blue eyes, a mystical sword, and a very cool outfit.
In 2015, when Stevenson, then 23, found out that DreamWorks Animation was looking for someone to pitch a new take on She-Ra, she jumped at the chance. She was already an Eisner Award-winning cartoonist and writer who had made a name for herself with works like her web comic-turned-graphic novel Nimona and the Boom! Studios series Lumberjanes.
“The world [of She-Ra] is so incredibly vibrant, and has so many powerful female characters. It’s this world that has all my interests rolled into one: It’s got the flying ponies and superpowers and all of these things that, immediately, I was like, ‘I want to do this. I want to be the one to do this,’” she says.
While Stevenson’s reimagination of the world of Etheria pays tribute to its predecessor, it includes some key differences. The reboot transforms the musclebound, scantily-clad grownups of the original series into awkward teens in much more practical (but still very sparkly) clothing. In addition to embracing a diversity of races, genders, and body types, the She-Ra reboot fleshes out the characters and their backstories, giving them fully-fledged arcs and complicating the good/evil binary of the original. The princesses of the rebellion aren’t simply heroic, and the soldiers of the Horde aren’t simply villains; everyone’s just a human being (or scorpion person or alien clone or flying horse, as the case may be) trying to make their way in a world that doesn’t offer easy solutions. It’s also, incidentally, really funny.
For Stevenson, it was crucial that the characters felt three-dimensional, and that it was their choices that guided the direction of the storytelling. “The characters all began with a deep personal flaw, and the process of making the show was kind of giving them the room to process those flaws. But we wanted it to feel organic. We wanted the characters to feel like real people that we knew,” she explains.
From the start, She-Ra’s most compelling tension was always between Adora (Aimee Carrero) and Catra (AJ Michalka), Adora’s childhood best friend who becomes her bitterest rival after Adora leaves the Horde to join the rebellion. In the show’s first four seasons, the two continually fight and reconcile and break apart again, their obsession with each other marking them as something more than frenemies.
“It’s a dynamic that I find really interesting: the attraction and the tension between the villain and the hero, especially when they know each other better than anyone. They love each other, but there’s something between them that cannot be overcome,” Stevenson says.
Stevenson always knew that she wanted the relationship between Catra and Adora to be a romantic one; but she had to walk a fine line, because she didn’t know if the studio would give her the go-ahead to put an explicitly lesbian love story front and center. At first, as in Steven Universe, Rebecca Sugar’s radically progressive series that aired its final episodes earlier this year, she steeped the world of the She-Ra reboot in queerness. The show features multiple side characters in same-sex relationships, characters who flout traditional gender roles, and even a nonbinary character (Double Trouble, voiced by transgender writer and activist Jacob Tobia).
Still, Stevenson, herself a gay woman, wanted young viewers to be able to see a queer relationship that wasn’t just incidental, but central to the plot of the entire series. “I’ve loved these stories my entire life, you know? I was a huge Star Wars and Lord of the Rings fan as a kid. But there weren’t a lot of characters that I felt personally represented by,” she says. “We love what makes these stories classic, but we’ve seen them all culminate in the same kind of romance so many times: The hero gets the girl, he gets the kiss, and then he saves the world. And it’s not just [swapping] the man and the woman for two women. You have to actually approach it from a standpoint of: How do you make these stories, at their roots, queer?
“So that’s what I was trying to do — for little queer kids to see that this is normal, that these are stories that can happen and that exist, and that can center them and make them feel seen and understood.”
Whether or not Adora and Catra’s romance would become canonical was in the hands of the studio, and it was a risk Stevenson couldn’t be sure it would be willing to take. So the show played a long game — hinting at a romantic dynamic between the two without making it explicit, for fear of disappointing fans in the end if they weren’t able to deliver. Fortunately, a groundswell of viewer support for a potential relationship between the characters — a phenomenon known in the fan community as “shipping” — allowed Stevenson to make a case to the studio for supporting the story she wanted to tell with She-Ra.
“Just as I had hoped, people started picking up on this tension and getting really passionate about it,” she says. “It was immediately one of the strongest fandom ships right out of the gate. And that was when I finally showed my hand and was like, ‘Look. We’ve got a bunch of people who, just off Season One, are really, really excited about the gay representation in this show. I have been planning for this. And here’s how it needs to end, and not just because I want a moment that everyone’s gonna talk about. It’s the logical conclusion of both their character arcs. They need each other.’”
Finally, after years of hedging their bets, Stevenson and her collaborators got the go-ahead from DreamWorks. “I really wanted it to be so central to the plot that if at any point they were like, ‘Oh, we changed our minds, we want to take it out again,’ they wouldn’t be able to, because it would be so baked in,” she explains. “The temperature is not always right, and depending on what’s happening in the world, not everyone wants to be the studio that sticks their neck out and makes a statement like this. You will get a flat ‘no’ sometimes. But if you bide your time, or you come at it from another angle, that can change. You just have to keep pushing.”
Feedback for the conclusion of She-Ra has been overwhelmingly positive both from critics and fans. Viewer support has been pouring out in the form of social media posts, YouTube reaction videos, and fan art and fan fiction. Stevenson, who first made a name for herself online with Lord of the Rings and Avengers fan art, has been blown away by the support from She-Ra lovers. “That’s how you know that you’re successful at what you set out to do — if people are getting inspired by the stories that you’re telling. I think that that’s the beauty of fan work, is that it’s an evolution of the genre. We take that inspiration and create something new all the time.”
Unfettered by restrictions, the final season of She-Ra is a tightly plotted, character-driven masterwork, featuring a slow-burn redemption arc, a harrowing villain, and a timely message about the power of love and unity against the forces of repression and tyranny. It’s a show about becoming kinder and more open in the face of unrelenting darkness, about banding together to prepare for the worst, but always hoping for the best in spite of overwhelming odds.
Stevenson says that she and her team began work on She-Ra in the aftermath of the 2016 election. “The veil was ripped off, and we had to reckon with a world that we hadn’t expected. And that theme of relying on each other and being stronger together became so much more relevant,” she recalls. “I remember writing one script after a particularly bad news day where it just felt like nothing was ever going to be OK again. It’s an episode where Adora realizes that there are supposed to be stars in the sky, and there aren’t any more stars. And as Aimee [Carrero] was recording the lines, she was crying, and we were crying, because we were all experiencing this together — the idea that things were changing in maybe irreparable ways.”
The refrain of She-Ra’s catchy-as-hell power-pop theme song is “We must be strong, and we must be brave.” According to Stevenson, that’s easier said than done; but the whole point of the series is that you have to try anyway. It’s a message that rings especially true at this moment in our world when it seems like everything is spinning out of control, and it’s all too easy to feel helpless.
“It always comes back to this — when you realize that there’s a great evil or a great darkness that won’t just go away from one fight,” Stevenson says. “It boils up, and it can be pushed back down, but it’s something that we’ll probably have to be fighting for the rest of our lives. That’s really hard to do, and it makes you really tired sometimes, and it can be really scary. But when you are surrounded by the people that you love, and when you have that love for the people around you, then that strength is possible.”
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mushbabe · 7 years
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Mass Cartoon Crossover AU
heyyyyy its uhhhhhh another fucking au writing from me
ties into this comic i did here, which i am making a sequel to
so if you wanted to hear my explanation for how shit like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, CN City, and canon crossovers might possibly work, clicky that readmore friend it’s about to get deep and overly thought-out
so like. basically: when a creator creates something, the universe for this something exists on another plane. the characters are all real, just more or less materially inaccessible to people on our plane. there are points in the various planes of existence where our plane and their plane meet, be the points natural or artificial. these points of meeting were used to film things like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Space Jam, where visceral, fleshy organisms like ourselves could stand alongside the 2-D manifestations of our own minds. both humans and cartoons could enter the opposing side’s realm, but by no means is it natural or healthy for the state of the worlds, not to mention for the individuals crossing dimensions. as such, the scenes in both WFRR and Space Jam where any one person was not in their respective domain were filmed in intervals...
so now we’ve got two planes: ours, and the plane of our creations. like previously stated, each creation has a universe in which it exists and lives, a place where it is given purpose, a story, stuff to do, etc.. compared to our universe, these worlds are all incredibly small.  though the sizes can vary wildly: from the universe of Ed Edd ‘n Eddy, which is more or less encompassed by the cul de sac that they live in, to the universe of Adventure Time (which feels expansive, but really is only made up of the places shown or mentioned in the show, and is by no means infinite like that of our own.) lets imagine that all of these universes are kind of tied together. think about wreck-it ralph when i say that there is a central location, a city probably, that they can all converge in and exist within. 
to keep things homogeneous and as easy to digest as possible, lets assume the only universes that are inherently tied together are the universes from the same kind of media. 2D televised cartoons would all be tied into one place. 3D televised cartoons would converge in a different place. Anime/Video Games/all that good shit would tie in somewhere else respectively. We could imagine that this is because these similar universes are close in proximity as a result of being similar. and because they’re all so close, they all have an established point where they all meet. contrasting this, the convergence of two different kinds of media would be extremely rare and hard to achieve, but is do-able, and has been exploited by characters before (cite the Jimmy-Timmy Power Hour). for the sake of keeping with the natural order, these ties are temporary and will break off easily. 
to illustrate this converging of similar universes, we could imagine this structure as a large central bubble with a bunch of other smaller bubbles surrounding it, each of them connected to the middle one by a thread. 
DIRECTLY CONNECTED WORLDS
but !! these small, individual worlds can also be connected to each other directly! some of these connections are inherent, as they were part of their design upon their creation. a good example of this: the universe of Gravity Falls and Rick and Morty would have a natural thread connecting the two. 
some of these connections can also be forged. these connections are typically the result of a crossover episode, and would exist between the worlds of Futurama and The Simpsons, and The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy and Codename: Kids Next Door since they all had crossover episodes with each other. In all likelihood, the lifespan of these connections is probably dependent on factors like the earnestness of the episode(s) in question (whether they were done for a cheap cash-in or because the writers were genuinely invested in these characters meeting) and how compatible these universes are (things like similar visual styles and how much sense the crossover makes. the crossover between The Jetsons and The Flintstones makes way more sense thematically than the crossover between Kim Possible and Lilo & Stitch. 
THE HUBWORLD:
this is best understood when you think about the old Cartoon Network City bumpers that CN used to play in between commercials. They were large, semi-realistic urban environments where all of the characters from the programming of the time would interact with the world and with each other. CN City could be thought of as a district of this larger city where all these worlds converge. this is a place that, regardless of art-style or compatibility, everyone can just exist alongside each other. 
so not all of the cartoons live here. lots of them live in their respective worlds for their own reasons (their show may still be ongoing and they need to actually be there for it to happen, or maybe they just prefer their own world) but they may make trips into town to run errands, visit, attend university or even commute to their city jobs. however, after a character’s show has run its course, plenty of them make the decision to move permanently to the city. 
we know that each character can leave their original universe and travel to the central connecting one, but can they leave the central one to visit another person’s universe? i would say yes. probably not for extended periods though. unless there is an existing connector between the two character’s worlds, visiting wouldn’t feel comfortable, and the characters probably just wouldn’t want to. i imagine that, while it’s not exactly illegal or impossible to visit, staying for a long time is frowned upon. again, we can refer back to wreck-it ralph for comparison. visiting is fine, but eventually you need to go home.
IMPORTANT FIGURES:
a character’s role in the city and to others is determined by a lot of things. usually, one would find a job they can perform with their unique skills and/or powers. I’ve headcanon’d the roles of a lot of characters already. some ideas I’ve had:
The Powerpuff Girls are easily the ones in charge of protecting the city. They head Homeworld Security, the various police departments, and have a lot of people working under them. They can often be seen patrolling. 
the city is headed by a City Council and a Mayor (there is also a Head Judge in charge of the court system, but they don’t determine any legislation, they just enforce it.) The Mayor is kind of shadowy in the au at first, but it’s pretty obvious that it’s Mickey Mouse. He’s concerned with corporate interests for the most part.
the Council is made up of elected representatives, each coming from different big names in the cartoon world (Nick, WB, Disney, Hanna-Barbara, etc.) The Council Chairman tbh has to be Bugs Bunny. he’s iconic, charismatic, and experienced, and so has a lot of sway in how things operate; it only made sense that he go into politics. a crucial part of the “plot” of this au is that Bugs and Mickey are bitter rivals. It’s understood by most that Bugs should be the de facto mayor, but through underhanded means, Mickey stays one step ahead of him. while Bugs isn’t exactly innocent either, he certainly stands for different ideals. Bugs is definitely a man of the people. 
Professor Utonium is the dean of the university as well as the head of its robotics department, their most successful STEM department. he teaches a few robotics classes. Dexter, Edd, and Phineas would have all studied under him at one point
Without a doubt, Warden from SuperJail! is the warden of what’s probably the largest and craziest prison in existence. Only a mind like his could contain the biggest threats to the hubworld’s wellbeing. 
i’ve thought about the placement of a lot of other characters too, but i only wanted to list here the one’s integral to the structure of the city.
with that said, all of the villains original to the connected worlds are very much still real and still able to wreak havoc on this metropolis. some won’t have a reason to concern themselves with it, while others will certainly make it a target. this includes extradimensional entities like Bill Cipher, Him, and Aku, who wouldn’t exactly be contained in the city jail. a main concern of the city government is how to protect the town from these major antagonists. 
CITY DISTRICTS:
i was talking about districts of the city earlier. another district i was thinking about is Toontown, a space relegated to old fashioned, classic “toons”. Like, Animaniacs / Tom & Jerry / Merrie Melodies / Steamboat Willie / Roger Rabbit -esque toons. the one’s we all understand as the physics defying characters who can pull material from nothing (hammerspace) as well as take a shotgun shell to the face and live. The nigh-indestructible, goofy-ass, slapstick, foundational characters of animated comedy. this is gonna be one of the few districts that is actually somewhat segregational. I imagine that society views toons in a weird, kind of split way. on one hand, the Old Toons are to be respected. they forged a path and laid a foundation in entertainment and have helped bring all of this into existence. on the other hand, Toons are also considered outmoded. classic slapstick has largely reached the end of its run. the iconic white gloves, cigars, and dynamite have all come to represent a bygone golden era full of its own problematic ideals. their shows are analyzed now much like modern psychologists would analyze Freud: no one can doubt the significance of the impact they’ve had, but the faults are widely acknowledged. (for example, modern cartoons would probably criticize older toons’ shows’ lack of diverse protagonists, rampant themes of racism / antisemitism / blatant use of tobacco / objectification of female characters, for being unfunny or unchallenging to the viewer, or for just being visually unappealing as some newer cartoons might believe.) as a result of this mindset, older Toons are the target of some prejudice but also some high respect. it depends on which group you’re talking to. 
List of City Districts
New Townsville (the one filmed for the CN City Bumpers). town hall, banks, business hub.
Toontown (the one filmed in WFRR) - area reserved for Toons
Endsborough - slightly evil, run down part of town. bars, gambling, etc. hangout for the unsavory.
University District - the campus, dorms, student accommodations 
Hillwood Metropolitan Area - expansive, unspecific urban area, main marketplace, apartments, schools. underground cultural haven.
Jump District - upscale part of town, nice stores, ritzy condos. opposite of Endsborough. favorite hangout/residence of hero-types. 
Middleville - suburban residence area, lots of families living here.
Jellystone - large park
CITY GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS
I am also going to list my ideas for these:
Mayor - Mickey Mouse
Chief Justice - MENTOK THE MIND-TAKER (he’s from Harvey Birdman and he’s a great judge ok google him)
City Councilmen:
Warner Brothers / Chairman - Bugs Bunny 
Cartoon Network - Grim
Metro Goldwyn-Mayer - Pink Panther
Nickelodeon - Phoebe Heyerdahl
Hanna Barbara - Top Cat
Disney -  Stanford Pines (not Stanley)
Adult Swim - Dr. Mrs. The Monarch
THE GUILD OF CALAMITOUS INTENT 
as one might imagine, the hubworld is going to be full of both heroes and villains. to manage the inevitable carnage, i thought i’d borrow an organization from The Venture Bros. the Guild of Calamitous Intent’s purpose (in this au anyway) is to fit villains with their arch-rivals and contain the amount of collateral damage their conflict creates. heroes and villains can only fight one villain/hero at a time, respectively. this is to prevent things like all-out fights between huge numbers of villains and heroes, which would destroy a good portion of the city. as well, there is a limit to how much destruction one pair of arch rivals can cause. charges are incurred otherwise. certain areas are entirely off-limits (schools, hospitals, etc. basically they follow the Geneva Convention here). the presence of the Guild would also be a good explanation for why villains only tend to target one hero most of the time. once one villain/hero is defeated, another one can take be fit to take their place. villains and heroes are both ranked in order of power and resources, and a villain is always paired with a hero of equal rank to allow for the fairest fight. arching outside of guild regulations is strictly forbidden and the Guild will hunt down a rogue villain/hero. groups of villains/heroes that are always together (the Teen Titans for example) will count as a single arch-able entity and will be ranked according to their combined power. So in this universe, Slade would be labeled as the Teen Titan’s arch-enemy. 
while the Guild is originally a service for evil characters run by evil characters, they generally play a neutral role in the struggle between good and evil. 
but there are bound to be evil doers who are too chaotic to follow guild regulations. these characters have to act in the utmost secrecy or simply be too powerful to be taken out normally; otherwise, the Guild will act upon them. the heads of the Guild are totally anonymous, and, while they’ve worked with the City before to impose certain regulations, they are independent of the government. All villains and heroes must be properly registered, but registered villains ARE NOT guaranteed safety from Homeworld Security. heroes and the police often work together to take down bad guys, and its a hero’s responsibility to keep their respective villain in check.
ANYWAY that’s what I’ve thought up so far for the overarching premise. I STILL NEED A NAME FOR THE CITY 
i could just call it Big City a la Sheep in the Big City, but thats.... kinda dumb. idk i’ll think on it.
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wingheadshellhead · 7 years
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Hi, I love your blog! So I've been reading a lot of 616 stevetony lately, and I've noticed that in both canon and in a lot of fiction, Steve seems to really dislike Extremis (even before superior iron man). Why do you think that is? Even without looking at this with shipper goggles (which I always am), I think it's really strange that Steve has so much disdain for something that essentially saved one of his best friend's lives.
(THIS HAS TAKEN ME 5 BILLION YEARS BUT HERE IT IS FINALLY)
i used to be in the same boat and automatically assumed steve’s dislike of extremis was one of those fandom headcanon things that was so commonly accepted it’d basically become fact, but it’s really, actually, all 100% canon. but the comics that deal with it happen right before civil war so i think many ppl have simply forgotten or skipped over that part of tony’s timeline.
execute program is the 6-issue arc that comes right after extremis and it’s the main thing i tell everyone they have to read if they’re putting themselves thru the ringer that is 616′s civil war. it is so so important to understanding tony’s headspace and where he’s at before the events of civil war occur. 
READ EXECUTE PROGRAM. a) bc it’s absolutely crucial to tony’s side of civil war, b) the follow-through from the extremis arc is just… amazing, virtuosic. i really genuinely think it is a fascinating, excellently-written arc, c) when it gets gay it gets very gay. truST ME you do not need your shipper goggles for this at all bc guess which of the following things are canon: the sound of steve saying his voice being the only thing that snaps tony out of (likely a dissociative episode) trying to murder a villain that nearly kills peter, dyeing his hair blond when he’s going on the run, tony stopping his heart to save steve’s life. all of them !!! all canon !!!!!! 
extremis is, basically, terrifying. to the average human being, hell even the average superhuman. it’s p much unfathomable the sheer level/magnitude/scope of extremis. extremis allows tony to access and control any piece of technology on earth and even in earth’s atmosphere, he can hear satellites. it’s like having the singularity as a superpower. 
so part 1, iron man vol. 4 #7 (2006), opening issue and we have tony stopping a villain with lethal force, all while counting down the milliseconds and bidding on priceless artefacts.
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now, avengers don’t kill. and tony doesn’t, he stops the man’s heart, then restarts it, basically performing defibrillation. 
and then we get this conversation: 
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and after tony jets off leaving the new avengers to sort out the aftermath, we get this disturbing reminder:
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a proper reread might prove me wrong but i don’t think the writers ever clarify whether this transformation in tony’s personality is due to extremis or outside manipulation (which is the culmination of execute program’s arc as i’ll go into in a bit). but when your brain is literally a machine and you Have Become more machine than human, this is the natural progression of tony’s humanity – the aspects of compassion, empathy, etc. – fading into the background to accomodate for extremis. 
extremis brings out everything about tony that steve (and possibly the world) fears most. it makes him cold and calculating, and with a brain like tony stark’s elevated by the superhuman capacity to think and react at the speed of a machine, he’s unstopppable.
part 2, iron man vol. 4 #8, we have tony nearly straight up burning a man alive for almost killing peter and laughing about it. 
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he’s so deep in Destroy Mode that he doesn’t even register steve’s warning, and here i think he acts entirely out of instinct –– like extremis is thinking for him rather than his brain prompting him to do this. 
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extremis is also the cause of tension between tony and the newly-formed new avengers (one of my favorite line-ups!!), he almost gets into a fight with logan and jessica has to break them up. it turns out tony is missing time in his memory, which is extremely worrying for someone w/ his level of power…
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what’s so fascinating about extremis, and why we have so much to thank warren ellis for (the writer of the extremis arc), is that it is the perfect and the most logical climax of the modern iron man story. tony’s worst villain, as we’ve known since the very beginning really, has never been anyone else but himself. and in the case of extremis, it’s a highly technologically advanced version of himself that can do and be everything he’s ever dreamed of being able to achieve vs. him. 
the question extremis asks is at what cost? at what cost does technological advancement, bleeding-edge breakthroughs, and the spirit of human innovation come at? how far would tony go to become the Ideal version of himself that he sees as superior in every way? what would he sacrifice for that?
extremis represents basically the pinnacle of sci-fi tech in iron man comics, it’s why even god awful superior iron man used a 3.0 version of it as the foundation for tony’s sins. it’s the farthest point he’s ever reached, and it’s also the lowest in terms of the damage and fallout that comes from it. because ofc, tony stark can’t have nice things like this, but also bc the hubris + nature of extremis allowing its host to play god can’t exist without there being negative consequences. really b ad consequences. 
huge respect to danial & charles knauf, the authors of execute program, too, because they find a way to perfectly bring the arc full circle as ellis did with his extremis. the central villain plot revolves around ho yinsen’s son. the kid hacks extremis and uses it to control tony, sending him to subconsciously assassinate a bunch of people on his kill list, i.e. a list of all the men involved in yinsen’s death. i mean like, HOLY SHIT, an iron man plot where a literal ghost from tony’s past – a direct victim of events tony was involved in, the son of the man that sacrificed his life so iron man could be born and so tony stark could live – shows up, weaponises tony’s own body + technology and uses him to murder people who are scheduled to participate in a peace summit despite the blood on their hands and the human cost of their involvement in the weapons industry.
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DRAWING PARALLELS BETWEEN YINSEN’S LIFE’S WORK AND TONY’S LIKE DEATH AND DYING WOULD BE KINDER. again bc of my memory or even regardless due to constant retcons + reruns of the iron man origin story, i don’t know if it’s ever been explicitly stated before that yinsen also got into the weapons industry in order to get the funding necessary to support his other revolutionary work. but his son literally conflates yinsen with tony here, blending them into one + the same with that final panel and it becomes very obvious that at least a small part of him blames father for entering into weapons design. if he hadn’t, he might never have been captured by the the terrorist group that wanted him and tony to build them missiles. 
also, yinsen + villains involving yinsen are a recurring theme in iron man history but can we talk abt the fact that tony has never ever let himself forget the man bc jesus christ
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yinsen’s kid is killed by a SHIELD sniper, activating the dead man’s switch and unleashing all the peackeeping units tony built that are now compromised. now, tony’s no jean grey or wanda maximoff but if this arc shows anything it’s not to underestimate him bc intentional or not (lmao) if he put his mind to it there’s literally no limit to the damage he could do. 
we see various heroes fighting off the peacekeeping units, and the new avengers are at the peace summit fighting a hulkbuster. 
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and here it is people !!! the 23989485th time tony kills himself so steve can live. 
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JUST. THE LOOK ON HIS FACE. AND THEN THIS ABSOLUTE LACK OF HESITATION:
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so, yes. extremis was traumatising for pretty much every single person involved. steve has extremely good reasons for HATING extremis, even in the early stages or even if a fic is taking place before the events of execute program.
if you read the full arc, you’ll see tony running himself into the ground with his new abilities (world’s greatest multitasker can now multitask 192483958 things at once? ofc he’s going to use and abuse and exploit that), you see him spiralling and losing his grip on reality (mainly because he’s actually having dissociative episodes and losing time due to being remotely controlled to assassinate ppl but also bc of the Effect extremis is having on him). i brought up wanda and jean earlier as a casual reference but like, to put it in that kind of perspective, people just weren’t made to have this much power.
on a smaller scale, apart from eating up all of tony’s time and attention and mental health in a really bad way, it just Distances him from everyone. especially from the team. it’s Isolating, having this much going on in his brain and no one else in the world to fully understand it. 
and on steve’s side, you also have the fact that tony’s genius is both one of the things he loves and lowkey resents most about him. he has this deep-set anxiety about tony with all his brilliance and intelligence leaving him behind in the dust, or worse, laughing at him and how outdated and dim-witted he is in comparison. this is steve’s version of tony’s “i’m never going to be good enough for him”, a sentiment summed up in a quote from him as early as tales of suspense vol. 2 (1995): “yes, tony stark, a man of today and tomorrow is the man i’ll never be.” he’s so afraid of being abandoned + alienated by tony’s mind and the future that tony’s worked so tirelessly to build that might render him irrelevant. he’s scared of a future where he has no purpose, but more or just as importantly, he’s scared of becoming obsolete in tony’s life, of not being needed by tony anymore. one of the things that endeared him so much to tony, and which laid the foundations of their lifelong friendship, was the fact that from Day One (1), tony made him feel At Home. he never let him feel ashamed or isolated as The Man Out Of Time, he actively worked to make steve feel comfortable and to give him the things he needed to acclimatise and to fit himself into this brave new world. 
extremis undoes all of that. it propels tony so far and so fast into the future that it makes tony untouchable to steve. all of the ‘i can hear satellites’ stuff renders steve helpless and even more out of his depth than usual. it presses all of steve’s secret buttons and then some.
to sum this all up, and to finish my extra rambling abt tony bc u asked me about extremis and i couldn’t not finish with this:
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here we have, ladies and gentlemen, everything u need to understand abt tony going into civil war. and it’s not on any of the official civil war fucking reading lists which really pisses me off because whether or not they did it on purpose the knaufs basically wrote all of execute program as the perfect precursor and characterisation groundwork for an antebellum tony stark. 
a tony stark who was just very recently manipulated against his will into assassinating people and causing a world-threatening incident that could have resulted in the deaths of thousands, including his own friends and teammates (and the love of his life), is a very different tony stark to the one ppl see in civil war #1.
what happens in stamford was an accident, too. no one meant for that to happen. tony knows first fucking hand what that means and what it feels like to carry that responsibility and guilt. his position in civil war supporting the SHRA is not only to protect the potential lives that could be lost in another stamford incident but also to protect superhumans and superheroes from ever being exploited against their will by villains to kill and hurt and destroy. 
superheroes are inherently susceptible to being used, it’s just part of the narrative convention –– a superhero is brainwashed or mind controlled or otherwise forced against their will to do something awful. and even if it’s not their fault there needs to be  accountability  for the victims. both the victims that suffer directly because of superhuman incidents but also the superheroes that become victims of ppl who abuse their powers. it’s abt protecting superheroes not just from civilians but from themselves. and if u’ve read a single comic u kno that this kinda shit happens way too often and way too easily.
sO YE S T hIS iS W HY. AND IT Ex PL AINS SO MUC H AND i j UST WISH P PL WOULD GODDAMN REA D THIS. LIKE EVERYONE WHO EVER WANTS TO SAY ANOTHER A GODDAMN THING ABOUT TONY STARK IN CIVIL WAR NEEDS TO FIRST READ EXECUTE PROGRAM FIRST OR PAY ME $10
anyway…………… one last time, i’m so so so sorry this took forever to get to. hope the wait was worth it!
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nivenus · 6 years
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2017 in Film: A Retrospective and Ranking
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So tomorrow’s the big day, right? The day when Hollywood’s elite gather and decide what films are the best?
In genre fandom there’s a reflexive instinct to reject the Oscars, which has long dismissed (sometimes truly impressive) efforts by science fiction, fantasy, horror, and other genre filmmakers. I totally get that, even if it’s not always true (just look at this year’s nominees). But rather than grouse and complain about how we disagree with the Academy, I thought it would be more rewarding to talk about how we felt about the cinema of 2017.
It’s been a really good year, I think it’s hard to deny, even if Hollywood itself (and the world in general) has had a pretty awful one. Even some of the worst films I’ve seen were pretty darn good and the best were truly terrific. It’s also been a pretty stand-out year for genre films in particular, with some great additions to the horror and superhero canon in particular. With that in mind I’ve ranked every 2017 film I’ve seen and invite others to do the same.
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19. Ayla by Elias
Ayla is one of two feature-length films I saw at Portland’s annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival at the Hollywood Theatre, an experience I can heartily recommend to anyone in the Pacific Northwest who loves horror or weird fiction. The basic premise of Ayla is that a young man who lost his sister as a child and is unable to let go of her memory finds what appears to be an adult and strangely mute version of his sister, who comes to occupy a central place in his life as he neglects every other part of his life, including his living family and friends. Essentially, Ayla is a story about loss and how it can consume us.
Out of all the debut films I saw this year, Ayla is unmistakably the weakest but that doesn’t mean its bad by any means. The central hook driving the story is a compelling one and the performances given by the film’s mostly unknown cast (Nicholas Wilder, Tristan Risk, Dee Wallace, and Sarah Schoofs in the lead) are actually quite good and do a great job of drawing you into the narrative. Unfortunately, the movie just kind of ends abruptly and there’s never really a satisfying explanation for why the protagonist is so obsessed with his dead sister (his other family members have all moved on… why hasn’t he?). Still, it’s a nice showcase for the cast and the director’s skills which are not insubstantial.
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18. The Lego Batman Movie by Chris McKay
When it was announced that Warner Bros. had decided to make a spin-off of The Lego Movie centered on Will Arnett’s comically self-obsessed version of Bruce Wayne there was a fair amount of skepticism. Arnett’s Batman was funny but would the joke perpetuate itself for a full movie without becoming dull? The good news is no and The Lego Batman Movie not only is funny but actually tells a pretty decent story. The bad news is that it’s still mostly forgettable.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with The Lego Batman Movie but I have to confess that nearly a year later I barely remember it. I remember all the plot beats and who all the characters were but I don’t remember how I felt watching it. I remember the narrative theme and thrust of the story (“it’s braver to let yourself feel things for other people than to go it alone”) and I appreciated the thought behind it but it didn’t stick with me. Maybe that’s because I already feel that message has been told in more interesting ways. Maybe it’s because the movie never quite escapes the impression of being a merchandising cash-in, unlike The Lego Movie. I liked The Lego Batman, but ultimately I can’t give it more than a solid C in retrospect.
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17. They Remain by Philip Gelatt
The other feature film I saw at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, They Remain is an adaptation of Laird Barron’s “-30-,” directed by Philip Gelatt, perhaps best-known to science fiction fans as the screenwriter of Europa Report (an excellent film I also saw this year, but which came out many years earlier and so doesn’t qualify for this list). They Remain focuses on a pair of scientists (William Harper Jackson and Rebecca Henderson) who are sent by a nebulous corporate employer to study strange animal behavior at the former site of a murderous cult that made headlines years earlier. A dark and moody film, They Remain examines the nature of cults, the effects of isolation, and the relationship between humans and their environment.
I was pretty excited to watch They Remain, especially since it was the actual premiere of the film, shown to audiences for the first time. Europa Report really surprised me when I checked it out earlier this year and I was eager to see what Gelatt’s newest film looked like. For the most part, I was very pleased with what I got. Gelatt does a great job at getting into the head of his lead character and the sense of dawning paranoia and psychosis that begins to overtake him at the film’s story progresses. You feel, like him, that reality is unravelling around you. Unfortunately, the film also has a last-minute twist (which I assume is in the original story as well) that didn’t quite work for me and I never was quite sure whether the cult’s past activities were a red herring or an important plot point. Then again, part of the appeal is likely considering such questions for yourself.
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16. Blade Runner 2049 by Denis Villeneuve
Man was there any movie this year sci-fi nerds were more hyped for and the general public just didn’t care about? Blade Runner 2049 has at this point become somewhat infamous for being hyped everywhere by every nerd site imaginable and then just sort of dropping to the sound of crickets chirping. Which isn’t to say it wasn’t very well-received in some quarters. Hyperbolically (in my opinion) some have proclaimed it to exceed the original Blade Runner (itself a notable flop at the box office but darling among sci-fi fandom) in every way. Personally? I found Blade Runner 2049 a beautiful and ambitious but ultimately failed endeavor towards profundity.
The frustrating thing about Blade Runner 2049 is that it starts a lot better than it ends (far from the only 2017 film to suffer from that problem). The opening sequence where K visits the old replicant to “retire” him (which remains a chilling euphemism) is terrific, as are many that follow as K tries to uncover the nature of the mystery he’s stumbled on to. It’s only towards the end of the film, about the time that Harrison Ford’s Deckard finally makes his appearance, that things really begin to fall apart and you realize the movie was full of good ideas it didn’t know what to do with (as well as many half-baked ideas that should have been shelved). It doesn’t help that virtually every female character in the film is either defined by her relationship to men, a sexist stereotype, or both. There were parts of Blade Runner 2049 that I really liked, but in the end I couldn’t love it.
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15. Alien: Covenant by Ridley Scott
More than anything else on this list I think switching the places of Blade Runner 2049 and Alien: Covenant will be a controversial choice. The funny thing though is that they share a lot in common for both good and bad, which may not be entirely coincidental considering they’re both follow-ups to Ridley Scott’s most widely praised films (even though Scott declined to direct Blade Runner 2049 in favor of Covenant). And like many I was pretty disappointed by Covenant when it finally debuted, though perhaps for different reasons than many (I’m very much on record as having been a big fan of Prometheus).
But despite Covenant’s confused narrative—which clearly wanted to be a sequel to Prometheus but got sidelined into being a more direct Alien prequel instead—I have to say that it stuck with me more. After I walked away from Blade Runner 2049 I rarely gave it another thought, at least after working out my disappointment. But Covenant is full of interesting ideas it actually commits to: the interplay of creation and destruction, the wrath of the created against the creator, and the nature of what it means to love. And if nothing else, Michael Fassbender provided was immensely enjoyable both as the Oedipal David and the gentler, kinder Walter.
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14. Logan by James Mangold
Rounding out the three Michael Green scripts of 2017 (the guy certainly got around last year) is Logan, which is an interesting case in how far you can stretch the conventional boundaries of the superhero genre. It’s often been said that superhero films aren’t really a genre, with Marvel’s own Kevin Feige arguing that Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man actually represent different kinds of movies and whether or not you buy that argument it’s hard to argue that Logan isn’t a very different style of film than not only the aforementioned three but also Wolverine’s two previous solo outings. It has been described as a Western (though that itself is a very broad genre) and even noir but a typical superhero film it clearly is not.
I really liked Logan quite a lot when I saw it and had relatively few qualms with it other than some minor complaints about the ending. Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, and Dafne Keen all give phenomenal performances and James Mangold was quite effective at weaving a story about aging, depression, and regaining hope. It didn’t really stick with me though and that’s one reason it doesn’t rate higher. Once I’d seen Logan I didn’t much think of it. Which is too bad because it’s very experimental style is something I’d like to see a lot more of in superhero films (more on that later).
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13. Dunkirk by Christopher Nolan
There was a time when I was as big of a fan of Christopher Nolan as anyone. I was immensely impressed by Batman Begins when I saw it abroad in Britain back in 2005 and The Dark Knight only confirmed my intense affection for the way he reinvented Batman. It’s easy to forget now, given how slavishly DC and Warner Bros. have been (poorly) aping his style for over a decade now but Nolan’s take on the caped crusader was genuinely fresh when audiences first experienced it, wiping away not only the painful memories of Joel Schumacher’s take but also the still campy but more fun style of Tim Burton’s. And since then I’ve enjoyed pretty much every film Nolan has directed though with some reservations in a few cases.
I’m happy to say that Dunkirk is no exception: it’s a very solid piece of work that manages to be a war film where the war is actually horrifying and not simply a stage for rousing heroics. It’s fairly notable for not featuring any German characters at all: the enemy is entirely unseen which, although unconventional, is probably a far more accurate rendition of war than is usually portrayed in Hollywood films. The film does, however, fall victim to some of Christopher Nolan’s weaknesses as a director, lacking in compelling human characters to ground the action (though Cillian Murphy’s shell-shocked soldier, who goes unnamed, is a possible exception). Nonetheless, it’s worth seeing if you’re a fan of either Nolan or his frequent collaborator Hans Zimmer, who makes an already tense film even more riveting.
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12. War for the Planet of the Apes by Matt Reeves
It’s often forgotten but the original Planet of the Apes film was not thought of as a particularly cheesy or silly film at the time. Released the same year as 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1968 picture was considered thought-provoking and though the makeup has aged somewhat (the characters look more like humans than actual chimpanzees or orangutans) it remains pretty visually striking. So the fact that the new Planet of the Apes series (which is ambiguously framed as either prequels or a reboot) has garnered critical acclaim is less a course change than a course correction, getting back to the core of the first film and the novel it was based on before the more campy sequels came along.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes were startlingly good. Both dealt with the concept of consciousness, bioethics, the politics of revolution, and non-human animal rights with a deftness that one would rarely expect from a major studio blockbuster. War of the Planet of the Apes, unfortunately, is a bit more of what one might expect. It’s still good, but compared with the pitch perfect execution of Rise and Dawn, it falters slightly. The villain is a little too simplistic, the arc of Caesar a little too predictable, and the plot basically just moves in a circle so that it’s not really clear if anything was learned or gained from the experience. It’s still worth seeing to finish out the new trilogy, but I’ll admit I was disappointed.
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11. Spider-Man: Homecoming by Jon Watts
Given his recent faltering (as much a consequence of Sony Pictures’ financial troubles as anything else), one might be forgiven for thinking Peter Parker was a spent force in the superhero business. If you’re not familiar with comics or the merchandising that drives the genre, it’d be easy to assume the web crawling had long since been eclipsed by Iron Man or Captain America. And indeed, there’s hints of that in Homecoming, which features some heavy guest starring by Tony Stark and lots of references to the other Avengers. But Homecoming also proves that in the right hands, Peter’s still got a lot of storytelling potential.
Spider-Man: Homecoming is relatively unambitious by Spider-Man movie standards but where it aims it mostly hits on target. Compared with the cheeky melodrama of the Sam Raimi / Tobey Maguire films or the Batman Begins-style reboot of the Marc Webb / Andrew Garfield films director Jon Watts aims for a fairly simple coming-of-age story with actor Tom Holland at its center. And he more or less nails that. Holland’s Peter is a little self-centered, but in that very typically adolescent way we all are at a certain age and you can tell he means well. It helps that Homecoming grounds its whimsy with Michael Keaton’s take on the Vulture, which although hardly accurate to the comics makes for one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s better villains.
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10. Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2 by James Gunn
When Guardians of the Galaxy originally debuted in 2014, no one would have guessed it would quickly become one of Marvel’s most celebrated films. Indeed, many industry analysts wondered what the hell Marvel was thinking, making a colorful space adventure powered by 1970s one-hit wonders and starring a talking tree and raccoon. But the skeptics were proved wrong and it’s probably no exaggeration to say that the Guardians now stand second only to Captain America and Iron Man in their impact on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And so when a sequel was inevitably announced everyone got excited.
Perhaps it should prove no surprise than that Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2 is perhaps the most hotly contested Marvel film since Avengers: Age of Ultron. I’ve seen people who’ve been moved to tears by it while I’ve also seen people who loved the first film bored and disappointed by it. It is probably no coincidence that Guardians also centers itself much more tightly on the first film’s nominal lead, Peter Quinn, and the mystery of his parentage. For many this resulted in a male-focused film that lost some of the diverse charm of the original. But others (most compellingly Charlie Jane Anders) argued it allowed the film to tell a compelling story about the dangers of toxic masculinity and patriarchal mythmaking. Personally, I fall somewhere in-between. I saw and appreciated what Volume 2 was doing but I can also acknowledge why some people felt it fell flat.
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9. Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi by Rian Johnson
Is there any bigger franchise in the world than Star Wars? Marvel, also owned by Disney, is certainly gunning for the title but the cultural impact of Star Wars, I would argue, goes far beyond what Marvel has achieved (so far). Indeed, Star Wars is so big and so popular that it’s really hard to remember just how weird the first movie was. But it’s worth going back through old interviews with the cast and crew and noting how no one (with the possible exception of Steven Spielberg) thought the movie would be a success, let alone a runaway hit that would spawn a massive media empire.
I’m noted among my friends and followers as being something of a grumpkin when it comes to Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Part of that is just how safe J.J. Abrams played it, opting for a story that more or less replicated the beats of Episode IV: A New Hope and a setting that saw a scrappy rebellion once more engaged against a massive authoritarian empire (at the cost of essentially making the original films seem pointless). Perhaps because of that, Episode VIII was a breath of fresh air. After the fun but largely empty adventure of The Force Awakens, Rian Johnson throws us into a more complicated and at times admittedly dorky version of Star Wars… which is really what the franchise has always been at its best. Obnoxiously cute porgs, goofy humor, and odd pacing, I’ll take them all in a heartbeat when coupled with a story that actually has something to say about the Force and which takes its characters seriously enough to show them fail.
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9. Okja by Bong Joon-hoo
Netflix has has a bad run in recent months, with a number of high-profile releases that were widely ridiculed or outright slammed by audiences and critics alike. But not all of Netflix’s “original” pictures (actually usually produced by outside parties and then distributed by Netflix) have gone over poorly and last year one picture in particular garnered critical acclaim: Okja, South Korean director Bong Joon-hoo’s newest feature. And it is certainly worth a watch.
Okja is, at its core, about a young girl and her friendship with a strange, fantastical beast dubbed a “super pig,” and raised as part of a massive corporate publicity stunt to raise support for their genetically engineered food. Of course, that’s simplifying quite a bit. In truth, Okja is an incredibly complicated film, one that can simultaneously criticize the packaged meat industry and animal rights activists, which can make you bond with the suffering of a digitally generated meat animal while also not feeling immediately grossed out when her friends and family sit down minutes later to eat some chicken stew. It’s crazy, it’s twisted, it’s unnerving, and it’s very, very good.
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7. Coco by Lee Unkrich
Pixar is one of those studios that I always feel a little bit ambivalent about. They’re indisputably full of great talent and they’ve made some great classics, but often when a new film of theirs is released I’ll confess to usually feeling no great urge to see it. I think part of it is that they’ve been so successful that they crowd out most other animation studios and styles, to the point that even non-Pixar films often imitate their look and style. As a fan of traditional animation as well as animated films that aim at a more adult crowd, I’ll admit that bothers me a little. But every time I actually go and watch a Pixar film I’m almost always pleasantly surprised.
Coco is a really great example. I wasn’t exactly sure whether or not I’d enjoy Pixar’s take on Mexican spirituality, though I did make note of the fact that the studio made a special effort to do its research and hire Latin American performers. When I actually saw it though I was won over completely. Coco is an incredibly beautiful film, with rich music and a genuinely moving story about family, loss, and creativity. It is very easily the best Pixar movie I’ve seen in many years and quite competitive against the likes of Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles. So much for my biases.
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6. It (Chapter One) by Andy Muschietti
I wasn’t always a horror fan. For a long time I actively avoided horror and was easily spooked by even the most timid forays into the genre. I’d convinced myself that as a person who was naturally anxious, who avoided the appearance of danger reflexively, horror films would ruin me. I eventually learned, however, that the opposite was true. Given the opportunity to experience fear within a confined, prepared context, I actually found I felt liberated. And I also gradually realized, looking back on my childhood, I’d actually always enjoyed getting a little bit scared from time to time.
It, based on one of horror giant Stephen King’s most famous novels, touches on some of that experience. It positions a group of children as the main characters, unusually for a horror film aimed at adults (as opposed to a children’s fantasy film with horror elements) but it largely works, in part because it reminds us how easy it is to feel as children that something lurks in the shadows that adults won’t tell us about. The film is not perfect—it telegraphs some of its scares too early and is uncomfortably comfortable with sexualizing its female lead, Beverly Marsh—but it is a very good example of a horror film that touches on the psychology of fear and the importance of confronting that which frightens us. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how the second part turns out.
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5. The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro
Technically, I didn’t see The Shape of Water until this year. But since it came out in 2017 and everyone’s going to be talking about it over the next few days I felt it was important to include. I often feel Guillermo del Toro is one of those directors who simultaneously gets too much and too little credit. He’s by far one of his generation’s best visual storytellers, with an expert eye for set design and special effects that is scarcely rivaled. He also sometimes tends to write simplistic stories with very easy to follow themes and easily identifiable heroes and villains. So I wasn’t sure what I’d think of The Shape of Water. The answer is that it may be del Toro’s most complex film yet.
That’s a heavy claim of course, given how excellent Pan’s Labyrinth is. But del Toro something does here he never does in any of his previous films (to my recollection) which is write actually complex, nuanced characters. The Asset, del Toro’s male romantic lead, is beautiful in that strangely monstrous way del Toro loves and full of love—but he’s also not above eating domestic animals, which reminds us he’s not human and a little dangerous. Colonel Strickland is a horrible human being in the same mold as Captain Vidal from Pan’s Labyrinth—but he’s also not completely dehumanized here and we get a sense of the pain and desperation that drives him as well. Of course, the real star is Elisa Esposito, the film’s mute heroine who nonetheless never feels voiceless and whose earnest desire to be accepted and loved is moving and universally relatable.
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4. Get Out by Jordan Peele
Was it a good a year for horror or what? Not every film was a hit but there were certainly a lot of really high profile releases explicitly labeled as horror in 2017 as well as a number that arguably touch on the genre’s edges (such as Dunkirk, Blade Runner 2049, Okja, and The Shape of Water). And the year’s horror extravaganzas arguably started with Get Out, one of the most talked about movies of the year and the long-form directorial debut of renowned actor and comedian Jordan Peele.
What is there to say about Get Out without entirely spoiling its premise or the major surprises? That it’s a horror film viewed through the lens of a black man’s experience in a white-dominated culture? That’s true but seems reductive. That it manages to be both deeply disturbing and laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes within the span of a single scene? Also true. That it will probably make your skin crawl and cause you to question some of your very basic assumptions about the black experience if you’re not black? Definitely. Altogether, Get Out deeply deserves every accolade its earned and makes a very compelling claim for required viewing in the horror genre as well as the examination of race in American cinema.
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3. Wonder Woman by Patty Jenkins
If there’s one movie that’s felt neglected at this year’s Academy Awards after generating a huge amount of conversation it is without a doubt Wonder Woman. After debuting to nearly universal praise and an immense box office return (making it the highest grossing DC Comics movie ever without Batman as the lead character) it has been curiously overshadowed in this year’s accolades, especially considering the arguably favorable timing in the age of Trump and #metoo. Perhaps it’s because there are so many other good films to choose from. But for my money Wonder Woman beats many of them.
Wonder Woman is not a perfect film but is definitely excellent. Featuring a compelling and passionate lead in Gal Gadot and built around a story about war, fear, and why helping people matters even if they’re flawed, Wonder Woman impressed and thrilled me… and I’m not even a fan of the character (nothing against her, I just haven’t read the source material). I also have to give the film a big thumb’s up for telling possibly the best love story in a superhero film since Captain America: The First Avenger and for doing so in a way that centered the female gaze. Also, as someone who’s been continually frustrated with how small Marvel’s gods seem, it was gratifying to see some truly mythic mythology in Wonder Woman.
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2. Thor: Ragnarok by Taika Waititi
Of course, Marvel had to come along the same year and prove that they can do gods right. I’ve never been as much of a critic of the Thor films as many others have—I thought the first Thor, while silly also had a great message and genuinely great chemistry between its too leads (I for one will miss Natalie Portman, who’s sorely underrated). But there’s no denying they’ve often felt trapped between embracing the melodramatic and mythopoeic origins and staying true to the style and trappings of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But finally, with New Zealand’s talented son Taika Waititi, someone got it just right.
My greatest fear, going into Thor: Ragnarok was that, like previous Thor films it would be silly but forgettable. That the trailers seemed to be aping the style of the the Guardians of the Galaxy films did not do much to alleviate this feeling. But that was very much not the case. Far from being just a silly romp (which some critics still described it as), Ragnarok is actually a great story that examines the core of who Thor is, both as a Marvel superhero and as an actual, literal god. It also happens to be very funny. But ultimately it’s not the laughs that won me over. It’s Odin’s speech to his son about what it means to be a god, the responsibility that entails, and why it’s the ideas that matter, not the things or places we associate with them.
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1. Atomic Blonde by David Leitch
As aforementioned it was a great year for horror. It was also very clearly a pretty good year for superheroes, with both Marvel and DC breaking out of their usual patterns. My number one favorite film was not, however, a superhero or horror film. It was a spy film, a genre for which I have great affection but which has become neglected in recent years. I am, of course, talking about Atomic Blonde.
I’ve never seen the John Wick films—a personal failing many of my friends are happy to remind me of—but if they’re anything like Atomic Blonde, directed by one of the men behind the camera of those films, I understand the love. Atomic Blonde is a pitch perfect spy film, combining intrigue, frenetic action, and the sexy thrills we’ve come to expect from the genre in a seamless fashion. It also happens to have come out right at the peak of 80s nostalgia but while the film makes extensive use of an 80s soundtrack for excellent effect, it doesn’t feel trapped by that style the way many other projects do. Atomic Blonde is without a doubt a modern film, doing things with cinematography and choreography I didn’t even know were possible. I can’t recommend it enough.
And that’s it me for me. I don’t even remotely expect my ranking to line up perfectly with any of yours (heck, my ranking changed several times writing this) but I’m curious. What did you love? What did you hate? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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