#and this even getting into what the actual plot of the episode is bound to be!

[mariocki]

James Maxwell, in various stages of fake facial hair, as Joseph, part of a gang of German art thieves, in The Saint: The Art Collectors (5.18, ITC, 1967)

#james maxwell #fave spotting #the saint #the art collectors #itc #1967 #i am in no doubt whatsoever that @thisbluespirit must have vastly superior quality images of this ep and this guest spot #perhaps even moving images in gif form! #but nevertheless #i was frankly so charmed by JM in this silly little part in this silly little episode that i felt duty bound to make a post #joseph is... well actually Joseph is a former German soldier who helped to loot art treasures in WW2.. wisely the episode doesn't linger #over that plot aspect for too long. now he's after those same paintings and will go to any lengths‚ even disguising himself as a frenchman‚ #to get them. and not just any frenchman! lovely Geoffrey Bayldon no less! with the quick application of a fake beard and moustache and tada #they're uh... identical? #in what could almost be a commentary on JM's experiences with fake facial hair on old tv‚ he very roughly has his beard torn off by Simon #producing some incredible faces in the process (not least when Simon threatens to tear off his real hair as well) #he then gets sheepishly locked up in the cellar he'd been keeping poor Geoffrey in.. but gets to have another go at the paintings later #it's fun! a pretty silly one. but a good time all told

[somekindofpoet]

Like A Movie

Summary: Reader is a struggling screenwriter but things start looking up when they get a surprise visitor who wants to buy their movie.

Jenna Ortega X Fem! Reader

Word Count: 2.8K

A/N: This takes place 10 years in the future. I’m suffering some serious writers block on my other fic and hopefully this helps. It feels weird to write about a real person, but it came so easily I couldn't waste it. 

Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII Part VIII Part IX

You’re an up and coming screenwriter. You just retired after twenty years in the military, and now you’re living in a tiny apartment in LA. You figure you spent your youth doing a job you hated, sacrificing everything and for what? Now you’re going to live out your dream.

The truth is, you’d written page after page and screenplay on screenplay on screenplay and you had nothing to show for it. You sent them all out, hoping and praying for a bite. But now it’s been a year, you’re 38 and the only thing you have to show for your efforts is an apartment full of stacks of haphazardly bound paper and a serious caffeine and nicotine addiction.

Until now. You had written a full feature film, probably the 100th one you’d finished. You stuck it in a drawer months ago, but decided to pull it out and rewrite. You wrote until your fingers ached and your eyes burned. You edited until you felt as if you cut actual pieces of your soul out and threw them away. And finally, you had your final draft. When you printed and bound it, you didn’t think twice about it. You’d figured it would probably end up in the pile of your other stories, gathering dust and resentment. 

Your sister came down from Northern California to visit you, and one day while you were out she’d picked up the script and read the entire 120 pages. She was beside herself. She hounded you until you gave in. The compromise was you’d only send it to A24, not even gathering the hope that anyone would read it. And you thought it had been dumped in the trash, until you got a phone call.

You were standing in your kitchen watching your espresso machine spit its sweet lifeblood into your oversized mug when your phone rang. You considered not answering. You hated talking on the phone, and it was an unknown number. But this is Hollywood, so you know you’re obligated to pick up in case it’s an agent.

“Hello?”

“Hello. Is this the author of Secessus?” A man’s voice comes through the phone.

“Uh, yes?”

“Are you currently at your apartment?”

You look around, confused. You walk to your kitchen window and look outside, but all you see is the bag lady rummaging through the dumpster.

“Yeah. This is creepy, I’m hanging up.”

Your last sentence fell on a dead line. The person on the other end had already hung up after you had confirmed you were home. You shake your head and pick up your mug, taking one last glance outside.

“Weird.” You say as you shuffle back to your desk. Your computer is open to a new script you’re working on, this one is a spec for tv. You figured you’d try your hand at a multi-episode plot and hope to get picked up for a writers room on another show. If you weren’t going to write something original, at least you’d still get to write something. 

You’re about to start tapping away at your keyboard when there’s a soft knocking at your door. You glance at it, then at your phone. None of your friends ever came over unannounced. They knew you hated that. So who the fuck was this?

You get up, and tiptoe to the door. At least if you’re quiet you can look through the peephole and see who it is without alerting them to your presence. This way if it’s someone you don’t want to interact with, you can go back to your desk and pretend you aren’t home. You stand on your tiptoes and close one eye, pressing the other to the small glass window in the door.

All you can make out is a small figure, like really small. They’re wearing a bucket hat but you can see brown hair falling over their shoulders. The person is clearly nervous, and you can see them spinning the rings on their fingers. It’s a girl. 

You lower yourself back down, frowning. It was a rare occasion you turned a girl away from your door, but you had no clue who this was. You get back on your tip toes again to get another look. She’s looking right at the peephole, and even waves at it. You can’t tell who it is because she’s wearing massive pittvipers under her hat, effectively covering her face. 

You lower yourself again, more confused. You shrug to yourself and figure ‘what’s the worst that could happen? She tries to sell me a bible and I tell her I’m a big fat lesbian. Byeee.’ Before opening the door you look down at yourself. You’re bra-less and wearing a white ribbed tank top (formerly know as a wife beater but now affectionately dubbed a wife pleaser) and gray sweats. You are perfectly aware that you look like shit, but you don’t care. Maybe it’ll scare the girl away.

Another knock raps against your door, this time louder and more frantic.

“Hello? I know you’re in there can you please open up? I really need to talk to you.” The girl says from the other side.

She has a sweet voice, high in pitch but not piercingly so. You sigh in resignation and grab the doorknob. The damn thing wasn’t even locked. You swing the door open and blink at the sudden blast of sunlight in your face. 

The girl is there, bouncing on her toes with anxiety. She looks up at you, and you think she looks shockingly familiar. You can’t quite place it though, not with the hat and the sunglasses. She’s wearing a baggy white shirt with a green hem and denim jeans. She’s casual but you can tell that it’s calculated. She’s trying to blend in.

“Uhm, can I help you?”

“Are you y/n?” She asks.

“Yes? Is this a joke? Did you have someone call me?” You’re slightly worried now, and still half blind from the sun shining in your eyes. 

“Can I come inside?” She asks, glancing behind her nervously.

“Are you in trouble or something? Am I being roped into like some action movie scenario?”

She laughs, and you can’t help yourself but think it’s a pleasant sound. She still seems so familiar. Maybe if your damned eyes would adjust you could figure out who this woman is. 

“I’m not in trouble, I just want to talk to you about your script. And I’m pretty sure there’s a paparazzi in your neighbors trash can.” She says, glancing across the parking lot.

You smile, “Oh no, that’s just Janice. She’s the bag lady.”

The girl looks at you like you’re crazy. At least you think she does, because you can’t see much of her face behind the giant reflective glasses she’s wearing. You find yourself feeling slightly indignant. Who is this girl to look at you crazy when she’s the stranger knocking on your door and asking to come inside?

“So?” She says, still looking up at you.

“Oh, uhm…” you hesitate. Your apartment is a disaster. There were scripts and coffee cups everywhere, and likely a pair of socks or two. “This is about Secessus?”

She nods, raising her eyebrows above her glasses. Is she getting impatient? The stones on this girl. You sigh and relent, stepping to the side and waving your hand inside to usher her in. She hurriedly slides past you, her converse squeaking on your wood floors. You shut the door and turn to her. She’s staring at your living room. 

You grimace, “Oof, I wasn’t expecting company so…it’s a mess.”

She approaches a stack of scripts and runs her fingers along the cover page. When she speaks her voice is quiet, almost reverent. Like she’s speaking in a church.

“Are these all screenplays?”

“Yeah- wait, you haven’t even told me your name dude, and you’re in my house. How do you know about Secessus?”

She doesn’t turn around, instead thumbing through the script you know is called Green Ties. You wrote it two months ago and have yet to revise it. 

“Because I read it.”

Realization dawns on you, “Oh you’re from A24?”

She hums, “You could say that. Sometimes.”

She takes her glasses off but she’s still turned away from you. 

“Sometimes? Are you like an agent or something?” You ask as you move around her into your living room. 

She looks up at you and you immediately know who she is. How it took you so long is still a mystery, but now that you can see her of course you know her. Brown eyes, a spattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, the most perfect cupids bow lip.

Jenna motherfucking Ortega. 

“That’s me. Except it’s Marie, not motherfucking. Although that would be a pretty dope middle name.” She replies with a shrug. 

You hadn’t even realized you said it out loud. Your mouth is hanging open and you’re eternally grateful you set your coffee down or it would be on the floor. Along with your pride. You glance down at yourself now painfully aware that you look like a bum who hadn’t showered in a week.

“Jenna Ortega. In my apartment. Read my script.” You think you may be going into shock. She does too.

“Do you want to sit down?” She’s worried, you can see it on her face.

You nod and gesture toward your dining room table. It’s the only surface that isn’t covered in your manuscripts. You grab your coffee from your desk and sit with it at the table, your hands shaking as Jenna sits down across from you. You set the cup down, mentally kicking yourself

“Would you uh-do you want an espresso?” You’re scrambling now, desperately trying to make this scenario less fucking weird. 

She smiles at you and pulls the hat off her head, shaking her hair free. “I’d love one.”

You get up, far too quickly to be considered normal but you figure that ship has sailed now, and make her a cup. As you’re waiting for the machine you begin to gather your senses, willing yourself to be a normal human being for once in your life.

“So, uhm, I just want to apologize. If I had known,” you pause and lean into the counter, looking back at her. “I would have been more…presentable.”

She leans her elbow on your table and rests her head in her hand, still smiling at you. Why is she smiling at you?

“I prefer it this way. It feels more real.”

“Well it feels pretty fuckin unreal to me right now.” You blurt out before you can stop yourself. You grimace at your words but she laughs again. Before you can say anything else the espresso machine chimes telling you Jenna’s coffee is ready. You turn and grab it, quickly setting it down in front of her.

You sit back in your chair, then stand back up when you realize, “Oh shoot do you want anything with it? I have sugar cubes and oat milk, if you’re into that.”

She shakes her head no and blows over the top of the mug, “This is great, thank you.”

You sit back down. You know you’re being a fool. You just can’t get your feet under you. She’s still smiling at you, her eyes shining. She looks exactly like her pictures, maybe even better in person. Her 20s have treated her well and she wears 30 like a goddess. You close your eyes in frustration, seriously what is wrong with you?! Get it together y/n. You take a deep breath and open your eyes again. She’s watching you closely, half hidden amusement on her face. 

“So. You’re here about my movie?”

She nods, her face lighting up like she’s just remembered why she’s here too. “Yeah! A24 gave me the script last week and once I picked it up I couldn’t put it down. I’ve read it at least ten times now. I’ve even found myself rehearsing all the lines for all the characters, I’m obsessed.”

You’re dumbfounded. Jenna Ortega is sitting at your kitchen table and she’s obsessed with your script. You briefly wonder if you’ve ascended into an alternate universe. 

She takes your silence as an invitation to go on. “So I wanted to come here and meet the person who wrote it. I want to make this movie. If you’ll let me.”

“You. You want to make my movie?”

She nods, sipping her coffee. “I’d like to be in it too, obviously. But A24 would produce it. It’d be my directorial debut. But like, if you’re not cool with that we can hire someone too.”

This whole morning must be a dream. You’re dreaming, you decide. And if this is a dream it doesn’t matter what you say. 

“You’ve got to be shitting me right now.”

She laughs again, you feel proud. That’s three times in the span of ten minutes you’ve made Jenna Ortega laugh. But of course this is a dream. So you’re great. 

“I’m not shitting you. What do you think?”

“I think I’m dreaming.” You say. 

She laughs again. You’re crushing it.

“You’re not dreaming.” She reaches across the table and grabs your hand. You KNOW you’re dreaming now because Jenna Ortega is holding your hand. “See, I’m real. You’re real. And we’re going to make your movie.”

“Holy shit.”

“You haven’t said yes yet.”

You nearly fall out of your chair. “Yes! Yes a million times yes! You can act all the parts, direct it, produce it, burn it to the ground for all I care, are you kidding me?”

Her laughter is quickly becoming the soundtrack to your morning. “I don’t think I can act all the parts, and A24 is on board so we just need to cast the rest.”

You feel like a fish, your mouth is moving but absolutely nothing is coming out. She pulls her hand back and takes another drink of her coffee.

“I’m sure this is sort of overwhelming. But I want you on set with me. And I want you to help me with the cast. If you agree, the studio already has your contract drawn up. They’ll pay you for the script and we’ll start in two months.”

You take a sip of your coffee, then look deep into the cup. Did your sister slip shrooms in the espresso again? You look back to Jenna, she’s patiently waiting for you to answer her. 

“I’m sorry,” you say, “I’m trying to get it together right now. But yes. To all of it. Yes.” You run your hands through your hair, a nervous habit.

Jenna grins at you over her mug. She has her fingers interlaced around it and she’s clinking one of her rings against the porcelain. If you didn’t know any better you’d say she was excited. Thrilled even. 

“Great!” She says, “I’ll let them know.”

You nod. Thanking the universe she’s already read the script because she would probably think you were an idiot if she didn’t know that you could write. You could not pull it together. This morning was just so WEIRD.

“Do you usually make house calls to writers?” You ask her, attempting to compose yourself.

“No. This one is special. And now that I’ve met you, I know I made the right decision.” She downs the last of her coffee and stands.

You stand with her, and move around the table as she makes her way toward your door. You lean around her when she’s in the entry and open it, letting her out. As she’s about to step outside she turns to you.

“That coffee is incredible by the way. How do you feel about this time tomorrow?”

“How do I feel?”

She nods, pulling her hat and sunglasses back on. “Yeah. Do you mind if I come back by to go over the details? I’d stay longer today but I have to go to a casting call.”

“Uh, of course. I’ll have a cup waiting for you.”

You mentally pat yourself on the back. Good job y/n, so smooth, much rizz. 

She grins even wider and turns on her heel, heading down the stairs, leaving you standing in the doorway, awestruck. You watch her as she gets into a town car waiting in the parking lot, and wait till it drives away before you close your door. 

“What the fuck.” You say quietly, “wait what the fuck?!” You yell this time. 

Excitement pumps through your veins and you can’t help yourself but to dance a little jig around the stacks in your living room. Your script is bought! You’re making a movie! Jenna Ortega is coming back to your apartment tomorrow!

You stop dancing, the realization spreading over you. Jenna is coming back over tomorrow. You look around. You have some work to do before she comes back. You pick up your phone and call your best friend, you’re going to need his help if you’re going to get this place cleaned up.

He picks up after two rings.

“Nando. You are not gonna believe the fucking morning I’ve had. How soon can you get here?”

#jenna ortega x reader #jenna ortega #jenna ortega x y/n #Wednesday #vada cavell #tara carpenter #jenna ortega x fem!reader

[r-2-peepoo]

BAD BATCH SPOILERS

Now that the episode is out, let’s talk about Cody’s personality.

Yes he has one. Yes he has always had one. You can argue that he is underdeveloped (and I will agree with you, he hasn’t had nearly as much screen time as he deserves) but he isn’t a blank slate. He has always had a personality and here is a core part of it:

Cody is fundamentally good. That is who he has always been. He is a very obedient soldier but he is similar to Obi Wan in that he is a good person who is just very strongly bound by his duties, hence why they were so close and presumably why they were assigned to work together so often. Obi Wan Kenobi would not trust, let alone be close with someone and have him as his second in command if Cody was not a good person. People forget that Cody was probably the person Obi Wan saw the most throughout the entire war, they were together so often. Obi Wan would not proclaim Cody as a good man who he remembers fondly years into the future, even after he ‘betrays’ if he didn’t think incredibly highly of him and if the Kenobi stamp of approval isn’t enough to convince you then I don’t know what is.

There’s a reason Cody has the rank he has but also that all of the clones trust him, including TBB who generally do not like regs. It’s one of the first things we learn about them as a group actually. The fans have done an insane amount of work in Cody’s personality but it is based on what was already there. You can easily believe Cody is a somewhat stern yet very compassionate person when you read fics about him because that is who he’s been from the beginning.

Absolutely no part of me ever believed that Cody would work for the Empire willingly or that Rex would have to fight/kill him. If that had happened, as much as I love how angsty and dramatic it is as a concept, it would’ve been a complete betrayal of Cody’s character and wouldn’t be a fitting ending for him. The fan theories did get to a lot of us and honestly I thought they were plausible only because a misrepresentation of a fairly minor character is always possible in media, however that is exactly what it would have been had that been the plot. A misrepresentation.

Character arcs need to have structure and Cody turning fascist out of absolutely nowhere would not have fit in with his character arc. The inhibitor chip would be the only way for it to work and even then it wouldn’t be fulfilling at all. It could happen, but it wouldn’t feel right if that makes sense. A death is also a huge mistake, at least in my opinion. He is such a vital character for exploring who the clones are after the war. We still have the rest of the season so maybe he will still die but I truly do not believe it anymore. If he does, I firmly think it will be the wrong creative decision and would waste his character.

TL/DR: Cody has always been a sweet boy and I’m never letting people make me think he isn’t ever again ;-;

#leave my boy ALONE. HE IS NICE. #commander cody #the bad batch #obi wan kenobi #I’m not mad but it has been a little frustrating to see all the discourse. #anyway cody is a sweetheart and I adore him.

[sonicasura]

Let's be honest with ourselves that Transformers Earthspark has its issues. It isn't uncommon for the series to have a few messy iterations throughout the years. However those at least have something going for them.

Bayverse is a junk pile yet there's a lot of material you can build off on and some pretty interesting concepts. RiD15 is an awful sequel to Prime but does decently well as a standalone although there are much needed changes to be had. Earthspark... Well, it's just there.

I can be lenient with the plot holes and poor pacing as Nickelodeon is notorious for interfering with any show that isn't SpongeBob to the point of cancellation. The issues truly land on the characters themselves. I'm gonna try to simplify it without devolving into a rant like the previous draft.

Edit: Gonna add some further edits as I wrote this in the middle of the night. Plus my simplified version skipped some key details.

Robby. Somehow they made a human character I actually dislike instead of be neutral about. In the official Transformers wiki, he's labeled as a big brother who cares for his siblings but his actions so far say otherwise. Robby literally ran away in the first episode because they moved then decided to try and hide the Terrans from his parents.

Yet he rarely gets enough consequences for his actions. I think we don't just need less Emberstone saves not just because of plot armor but force actual character growth on him. Like a life changing to one of his siblings as consequences for his actions and strained relationship until he gets his head outta his ass.

Edit: Yes, I know Robby is a teenager but that isn't a decent enough excuse for his behavior. Seen the trope about big brothers who do act closed off or at some points rude but they haven't done shit that put their family in serious danger. No, I didn't try to purposely forget the times he was injured badly.

There honestly needs to be less of those and his consequences be adjusted to it affects someone else badly. *

Next issue is lacking confrontation with Optimus choices alongside the obvious misplaced trust in the 13 Primes. Quintus Prime literally emotionally manipulated and scarred Mo through a fake bad ending reality because she doubted herself. No good person would do that, much less an actual ally. Even moreso on a child.

I seen this shit in Trollhunters but at least Jim, the main character, was a teenager. (It still was wrong though.) We also got remember that Liege Maximo and Megatronus/The Fallen are Primes. Yet somehow it is best to trust them.

Don't get me started with some of Optimus' choices when it comes to GHOST. He probably did it to protect his Autobots but what about the Decepticons who are locked away? Why are there so little of his companions with him especially since Bumblebee had fucking went into hiding before the show began.

There needs to be tension between Optimus with his Autobots. Someone is bound to snap and Bumblebee would have the biggest impact. The man clearly isn't okay as he's doing things that even Megatron admits ain't like him.

Mandroid needs to be written differently. He has the making of a sympathetic villain but oh boy. First off it is clear that his depiction is ableist aligned since the reason he doesn't like Cybertronians is because he lost his arm. Major thing to change right there.

Give him a narrative where his interest been genuine but slowly declines as the Autobot/Decepticon war increases the number of destroyed lives. Let him become a victim to this than just 'I lost my arm so death alongside experimentation to all Cybertronians'. Also don't make Mandroid ignore the obvious fact that the Transformers parts he puts into his body is slowly poisoning and instead come up with ways to fight the infection. Kinda like in Ironman 2 where Tony's arc reactor began to do the same thing.

Edit: Mandroid's negative views on Cybertronians are about the war and he's aware of the Energon poisoning. It is just that it is poorly portrayed to the point you rarely see it over his Arachnamechs/his ruined life.

Have the man present various evidence of destruction the war caused by both sides at the Malto children or anonymously spread such info around town to sew discontent with the townsfolk. 'These are the people who you consider heroes. Who you see as family and friends. Or should these tragedies be forgotten?'

Do a Baxter Stockman where you frequently see him try to fix the Energon poisoning than just simple dialogue. Even have testing on organic subjects to see how they react and find ways to counter it. Don't keep these key points as simple dialogue. *

I don't think Karen needs much changes either. 'But her taking over Cybertron doesn't make sense!' It actually does for one reason: hubris. Have you ever seen what happens when you give a control freak power? Their behavior becomes more erratic as they begin to think they deserve more. She is xenophobic in nature so imprisoning Decepticons and ordering around the Autobots is a drug to her.

Karen wants to treat them like slaves so the next step in her mind is Cybertron. Her death is well deserved and well played. Just like Icarus, the bitch flew too close to the sun.

I think the last major issue, other than out of character racist Shockwave, is the Terrans. No offense but they need a bit less screentime so the rest of the cast can shine. We barely see Alex and there's unclarified issues involving Bumblebee with Arcee if he's uncomfortable around her.

I also want their flaws to be at the forefront. Thrash is the only one who gotten such character development from his encounter with Swindle. We need more of that! Like Hashtag's overreliance on the Internet biting her back as she is forced to use real world skills.

Edit: I accidentally put in Terrans when I really meant Twitch. The screentime for everyone needs to be balanced mainly for the Malto family. Alex alongside the three younger Terrans rarely get involved or their characters further build upon. Twitch needs to get benched more.

Also the Dad Number 2 should really be addressed. Wheeljack was clearly uncomfortable when it been brought up. Plus it is way too fast to even consider such ideas unless you plan to have it addressed properly. Like 'Kid. We barely know each other yet somehow I became a father figure in an instant? It's best not to do that until you truly certain "Dad Number 2" doesn't mean harm or feels comfortable with it.' *

Earthspark clearly has potential but these problems need to be handled better. Addong the deleted scenes help add some clarification but canon needs to present it. We are supposed to get a second season so hopefully some of these are addressed.

#sonicasura #maccadam #transformers #transformers series #transformers earthspark #tf #tf series #tf es #tfes #personal idea #rambles #tv shows #slight rant #personal review #fixing canon #canon divergence #character flaws

[watching-sam-and-dean-again]

Sam & Dean are, in fact, soulmates

It’s rant time again! (Sorry)

I saw an idiotic interesting take on Twitter last night where someone claimed that Sam and Dean aren’t soulmates, and that they couldn’t understand how anyone could interpret it that way (particularly referring to "Dark Side of the Moon"). And they actually wondered what show soulmate-truthers (my term) were watching.

Umm, the actual show?

I’ve paraphrased the comment slightly and replies slightly, and I’m not posting a pic of the actual post, because I’m going to try not do that on this blog, but also, this person is just like the others in the replies (and in fandom) who “interpret” the show a certain way because it suits their destiel narrative. They all drank the cool-aid, so why single one out? At the same time, this take shows so little media literacy that it pisses me off. Thus, the rant.

Please do read on if you’re interested.

One argument I saw under this tweet was that Dean needed to find a road to lead him to Sam, so it proves they weren’t in the same heaven.

Wrong.

If they weren’t in the same heaven, Dean wouldn’t have been able to find Sam. Period. We know this because Ash has to do a little spell thing in order for them to leave their heaven (“Winchester Land”) at all. They can’t just jump heavens on their own. We also see this in later seasons. People just don’t hop into each others’ heavens without some sort of help.

Another stupid argument I saw is that Sam and Dean can’t be soulmates because "they’re BROTHERS!”

Wrong Again!

While having a soulmate is often (maybe even most often) seen as a romantic trope, being soulmates is actually not inherently romantic. Let’s even just stay on the WB/CW level for this one for a minute. Dawson and Joey consider themselves soulmates in Dawson’s Creek, but they don’t make a good couple, they work better as friends, and they don’t end up together. While they aren’t entirely platonic, them being soulmates ultimately isn’t about romantic love either. Sorry, I stumbled onto a reactor watching this show lately, so it’s fresh in my mind. You could also make arguments for Xander and Willow, Joey and Phoebe, or Christina and Meredith (Grey’s Anatomy calls it “my person” being science-based, but it amounts to the same thing). Ultimately, being soulmates just means two people have an incredibly close bond, love each other dearly, understand each other on a deeper level than most, and often need each other. Despite what some hellers think, not all love and closeness is sexual or romantic. Finally, if someone sees being soulmates as having to be romantic, they should probably take it up with Kripke.

Anyway, let’s round this rant off at three flawed arguments with this one: people are “free” (passive aggressive) to interpret the episode how they “like,” but Sam and Dean bring soulmates is not actually supported by the episode.

Ugh!

Why the hell would the writers have Ash even mention soulmates in the scene at all, if it wasn’t to tell the audience (and the boys) something important about the characters? Knowing that soulmates share a heaven isn’t necessary to the plot at this moment (if they aren’t soulmates). We have been told people have individual heavens in most cases, so we don’t need to know the soulmate exception to generally understand how heaven works. But we do get this bit of exposition because 1) it tells us why Dean was able to find Sam on his own (with no spells, even though people don’t usually share a space), and 2) because it tells us the info that they are soulmates, bound together no matter what. It deepens their whole tangled up relationship, for better or worse. Is it a bit unusual for brothers to be soulmates? Yes! That’s the whole point. Sam and Dean are weird. This is not news. Where have these people been for the last 4.5 seasons??

Also, Ash looks directly at Sam and Dean after he drops the soulmate bomb. And each of them looks uncomfortable. The scene takes a beat here, a short one but it’s clear, so the audience can acknowledge this info. Why would the camera focus on the characters’ reactions if the soulmates line was a just a random little nugget of info? People hellers will write whole distractions on the significance of “parallels” between characters and “interpret” scenes using head-canons as support, but they can’t don’t want to understand that the camera lingering on the brothers when they learn information about themselves is significant? Also, it suggests in the script that Ash looks away from them to give them a minute to process this info. Why would he care if it didn’t pertain to them? (Hellers. Have. No. Media. Literacy.). Sam and Dean are soulmates. It’s canon.

Also, this is another episode but it adds confirmation. In 15x20, Dean feels Sam on the bridge in the new heaven before he sees or hears him. Thus. Soulmates!

#supernatural #sam and dean #spn meta #anti hellers #Sam and Dean are soulmates #my edits except for 1 #bad take rant

[xerith-42]

Why Blaze is MyStreet's Most Failed Character

Blame the big bang discord for this post, I wasn't gonna write it until those fucks encouraged me.

Anyways here's an entire essay about why Blaze is the most wasted character in the entirety of MyStreet and I will literally fight Jessica and Jason Bravura with my bare hands.

To get us started on our harrowing tale of wasted potential and the best improviser Jessica ever hired, we need to go back a little. Back to Phoenix Drop High Season 2. We won't stay here long, I promise, I hate it more than you can possibly know. But the single saving grace of this absolute mess of a season is ya boi, Blaze. Introduced in the 18th episode of the season, airing on April 12, 2017, with the airing of Phoenix Drop High Season 2 Episode 18, Blaze was a character who started his brief tenure series with a bang!

Literally dude showed up and the first thing he ever did on screen as a character in a piece of media we can engage with is throw someone out of a window. We do not know this mans name yet and he's already left a lasting impression. Sure throwing people out of a window is common in werewolf culture, which I don't care what you say that's objectively funny, but it is bold to start a characters entire introduction with that. Blaze comes out of the gate swinging before he's said a single line.

And then after introducing himself he throws a dead bird at Aphmau to show off his hunting skills?? Okay so he's just that fucking weird and overly enthusiastic about things I guess! That's amazing! MyStreet always shines when it just lets it's characters be fucking weird without making a big deal out of it or talking them down for it. Dottie even says that it's romantic which is again just a great showing of Blaze's enthusiasm and lack of what might appear to be common social decorum because of said enthusiasm.

This is all punctuated and brought to a hilarious breaking point when Blaze's final showing of why he should be the new top dog at his school is when the crazy mother fucker rips his shirt off to literally flex about how he's one of the hottest guys in the school. And I'm going to be real with you, given Blaze's later characterization as a himbo, I'm pretty sure he doesn't actually care about this. He just says it because he thinks it'll boost his chances. Blaze is later shown to be a character willing to throw away his reputation for the things he cares about, but he does get a rather sincere moment with Aphmau, even if she's blushing the entire time.

It shows that Blaze is not only physically affectionate, but also weirdly comfortable with his shirt off. Because this is purely objective character analysis I will not be shoving my Blaze is autistic and has sensory problems with things touching his chest propaganda down your throats, but now that I've mentioned it once you won't stop thinking about it when this comes up.

The show admittedly fumbles the bag a little by having Blaze say in his internal monologue that he thinks Aphmau is cute and acts kind of like a tsundere, but this is Jesson writing so there's always bound to be a bit of That Shit. But in spite of that, Blaze is a character who has an instant impression that leaves a lot of room for comedy potential, and just good ol' fashion silliness. And while the werewolf plot of Season 2 is... bad, Blaze and the Werewolf Pups are stand out characters in the sense that their characterization leaves a lot of potential if they're in a different, better written story.

And even if the arc is bad, Blaze still is a quality part of it. His shallow but hilarious initial characterization gets built on in some really solid ways. Namely in how he acts as a force for good in Aphmau's life even if she doesn't realize or give him permission to do it. This entire season is about how the different men in Aphmau's life handle helping her in a crisis, and funnily enough, in a season centered around Aaron literally overthrowing Aphmau's new love interest, Blaze is the one who was consistently doing what was best for Aphmau.

Aaron fumbles the ball more than a few times, Ein is shown to be actively malicious, and Kai gets hate crimed. But Blaze, who's barely even a contender in this ship war, is constantly working to actually make things better while everyone else is pulling Aphmau away from what actively matters about her position. While Ein is manipulating her and Aaron is trying to prove that, Blaze throws caution to the wind and just does what he thinks is best to restore order.

But more important than that end conclusion is his true goal of standing up for Daniel. A wolf it is established he barely knew before this year, that Blaze is willing to throw his reputation and standing in a bull shit hierarchy because he's seeing how this hierarchy is hurting someone who doesn't deserve it. Blaze is the one who is baring his fangs and willing to throw hands when Daniel cowers away from bullies. By the end of the season Blaze has been given adequate screen time to not only show off his fun and maybe a tad out of touch side, but he's been given a real level of sincerity that's tied into the things he's enthusiastic about. He loves being a werewolf, and he extends that love to all the werewolves around him, until they start being dicks to other werewolves who are literally just sitting there.

At the center of Blaze is that inherent goofiness though. He's always cracking jokes, or the joke when he's on screen, and in a series that was originally pitched as a light hearted slice of life comedy in contrast to MCD's general misery, that sort of character is needed to keep the tone. Such is show in episode 22 when Blaze is reading a book on the Scientific Method to just learn more about science, but realizes the book is upside down.

But he actually understood it enough to properly apply the scientific method to this situation?? Iconic. It's played off as a joke of Blaze exploiting a loophole to get out of class, but even that's pretty smart honestly. Blaze may be a dumb ass but he's always willing to cheat an unfair system.

Episode 22 is basically a Blaze centric episode, which I did not expect, but now that I'm rewatching it for this post it might be the reason I love this character so dearly. It's not only the episode where Blaze manages to learn the Scientific Method upside down, but also stands up for Daniel in a really substantial way. Blaze is loud, enthusiastic, and strong, all traits that are celebrated by werewolf culture, and whether he realizes it or not, him just being around Daniel can do a lot to get bullies to back off. Everyone has seen Blaze toss a mother fucker through a window, they do not want to be on the receiving end of that.

He spends the rest of the episode trying to figure out what Ein's deal is when he hears that Ein went behind Aphmau's back on werewolf matters, landing Daniel in this situation. He hears Ein actively plotting against Daniel, but that is normal werewolf behavior. He concludes that he'll keep an eye on Ein. And this through line of "normal werewolf behavior" informs a lot of Blaze's decisions once he comes to the conclusion that Ein sucks and deserves to be undermined. He resorts to letting his actions speak louder than words and goes to violence after realizing that the wolves aren't listening to reason, they're listening to instinct.

He fights fire with fire, and while Aphmau might not approve, it's more effective than her soft rhetoric has been in getting people to be less of jackasses. This eventually lands him in hot water where he steps in for Daniel after Ein tries to get his goons to beat him up, and even if Blaze is fighting in a five v one, he still goes down swinging. And I'll say it, I think it's sweet that he calls Aaron after this happens. While it's clearly meant to be a thing of Blaze calling the last alpha because he's probably the only person who anyone will listen to, there's an important detail I think is easily overlooked.

He has Aaron's number.

He says he got it from the werewolf pups, but that means that Blaze went out of his way to make sure he could contact Aaron. He's the reason that Aaron even realizes Ein is playing all of them. Blaze is the catalyst for his undoing because unlike Aaron who's nearly imprisoned, heartbroken, and been hesitant to act in the plot as a result, Blaze doesn't actually care that much if Aphmau currently likes him because he's more worried about her physical and mental well being than whether she wants to kiss him or someone else.

How many Aphmau love interests can say that?

Can any of them say that?

Blaze can.

Blaze actually consistently shows a level of selflessness that's unfitting of how I've seen some people characterize him. He gives up his real chance to be Alpha because Daniel is so compassionate and earnest and genuinely deserves it. Blaze wants to believe in a future lead by people like Daniel and Aphmau where he might not have to keep fighting people to keep things sane. Blaze constantly gives up his pride, his power, his safety just to make sure that his friends are taken care of, or to effect real change in a school he's about to leave.

It wouldn't be long after Phoenix Drop High Season 2 ended that Blaze would make his debut in the main series My Street in the second episode of Season 5, airing only a few days after the end of Phoenix Drop High Season 2. Just like before he really shows up with a bang, literally throwing himself through the air between Lucinda and Kim just to catch a frisbee because Blaze is the most extra mother fucker ever, and then immediately proceeds to flirt with them. Iconic as ever. Short but sweet.

It's in episode 3 that it's revealed that Blaze and the werewolf pups kept Aaron company during his rehabilitation year. But from the way it's worded it sounds like Blaze was called in before anyone else by Aaron's parents. Based on the way they talked and actively planned together before, I wouldn't be surprised if Blaze was the first person who came to his mind when Aaron thought of a werewolf friend.

I think Aaron reached out to Blaze when he needed it.

And even though I've previously stated that I don't think Aaron's parents initially liked Blaze because by this era he's old enough to fully take on his persona as the cool stoner friend who's also a little insane in the most charming way possible, he has a good impact on Aaron. Aaron likes being around him, and maybe they smoke weed to help Aaron relieve some of the lasting pain when no one's looking.

Regardless of his methods, Blaze does an ultimate good in Aaron's life as a result of being there for him when he needed it. So much so that he was invited out to Starlight and is shown to be one of Aaron's main pillars of support. We are given scarcely little of this actual friendship, which is where the problem lies. While before Blaze was a surprisingly engaging part of an other wise terrible story, at least in season 5 the story is a lot slower and character focused. And Blaze can work in these moments, we saw him have real moments of sincerity before.

He gets some of it, but the issue is that Blaze isn't allowed to be alone anymore. The cast of MyStreet is huge, and Blaze is a character who is making his second major appearance, while some characters in the cast have been present since literally episode one. It's hard to justify giving him solo screen time when he's been in the series for such little time and we barely have enough time for certain significant characters to really have arcs (Lucinda). Most of Blaze's scenes are scenes with at least four other characters on screen, he's never allowed screen time without at least two other werewolf characters attached to him.

I don't object to Blaze hanging out with his friends, or even making new ones though out the season but... Would it kill the writers to let him have a scene with Aaron? Like. A single scene. Where it's just Blaze and Aaron. I mean just Blaze and Aaron without Aphmau there. They've done this before. They did it in the season Blaze showed up in. Just one scene where the two of them get to talk about literally anything would do so much. Even if they talk about Aphmau, it's better than nothing. It would strengthen both of their characters so much to be able to get a scene where they talk to each other not as conspirators who kinda know each other, but as real friends supporting one another.

Show that even though Blaze said Daniel was more compassionate than he was, Blaze still is a compassionate and even empathetic person. Show why Aaron was grateful to have him during his recovery. They have those scenes of Aaron at physical therapy, right? Why not have Blaze take him one time and just show how they interact then? The possibilities with this unrealized idea are endless, and that's genuinely upsetting. Opportunities like this present themselves every time Blaze makes an appearance, they even tease me by giving me scenes where Aaron is alone with a character he has little to no connection with, Maria.

Maria was a foil for Aphmau. And Ein was a foil for Aaron. And Blaze was a foil for Ein. There is no reason for Maria to really have a rapor that matters with Aaron. He doesn't really know her that well, she's clearly a friend by association, and it seems like an odd thing to focus on when Blaze is LITERALLY RIGHT THERE IN THE BACKGROUND OF THIS SCENE.

Why won't they let Blaze talk to Aaron? It's so infuriating. The closest we get is in episode 7 when Blaze attempts to calm down Aaron, but he's shown to be ineffective and it comes down to, of course, Aphmau being the one to talk him down. I swear to Hatsune the writers are making fun of me at this point. They're going "Oooooh you want Blaze to be an actually helpful and supportive figure in Aaron's life soooo bad." AND I DO!

I'm serious when I say the show is teasing me. I've been skimming through Season 5 and only watching the episodes when Blaze is on screen, and so far he has never been in a scene with less than 4 people in it. Never. And even in scenes where he gets to be at least a focal point, he's always limited because he has to share that moment in the spotlight with FOUR OTHER CHARACTERS.

Episode 14 is a great example of this. When the werewolf gang gets told they aren't allowed to eat at a restaurant because they're werewolves, Blaze makes it abundantly obvious that he's put up with this before and really doesn't feel like being hate crimed on his vacation. And he knows that actions speak louder than words and therefore joins Maria in saying they should "teach this establishment a lesson." Personally I think Blaze would've just thrown the manager through a window only to realize it's an outdoor establishment and throw him into the ocean. Which would be objectively funny and deserved because that owner was being cringe and racist.

I love the conversation that happens because it shows the unique way that Aaron sees things from passing as a human for most of his life. This has never happened, but he knows that further acts of violence as a result will only make it happen again. This is a great scene for Aaron. Not really good for Blaze, and the next scene makes him worse. I love the detail that Blaze is an instinctual person more than a planner, but it feels wrong that he doesn't even let Aaron consider planning. I know he wants Aaron to be more spontaneous but he should have more awareness of his friend and his habits and be able to accommodate it, not talk over it.

But it's Jesson, so misunderstanding even their simplest character is par for the course. At least episode 15 gives me Garroth and Blaze talking in the background, and I'm starved for good Blaze content, so I was eating this shit up. The problem with watching MyStreet this way is that Blaze... Just doesn't get a lot of moments... At all. There are some episodes where he doesn't even speak at all, and when he does get to talk in episodes, he gets a few lines in one giant ensemble scene.

I don't object to a show having an ensemble cast, or even a lot of characters with a few central ones, but it really is a detriment to the show that Aaron never gets a scene alone with any werewolf he isn't related to. Nana gets to talk to Blaze when she's having a crisis of her relationship history and experience, but it's just so Blaze can tell her the opposite of what she wants to hear. It's not a scene that feels like it was written for Blaze, because it wasn't. It was written for Nana.

And before some jack ass says it "Blaze is a side character he's not supposed to get a lot of focus" and I'm not asking for a lot. I watched every scene he's in in PDH to prove that it works

BECAUSE IT DID.

Blaze showed up officially in episode 18 out of 30, and he wasn't in every episode after his introduction. But the writers gave him a solid introduction, one good episode that spent most of its run time with him, and really good moments throughout the rest of his time in the series. All I'm asking is that Season 5 at least give me one of those things. Either a good episode where he and his relationship with Aaron is brought into focus, even if it's used as a vector to study Aaron's character, or just more sincere moments for him.

It feels like Blaze is a joke character now when he previously made it very clear he's far more than that.

And then they just forget about him. During the first part of the 3 part finale Blaze is there. He's the one who got everyone to gather at the docks because an mf wants to eat some scrumptious food. But when Aaron sees Ein and starts freaking out, Blaze is literally just not in the scene. At all. Not even as like a throwaway of someone who could've helped but failed, he just is not in the scene at all. It legitimately feels like the writers forgot about him entirely.

Blaze the minute the plot shows up:

He's there after Garroth gets turned and was apparently at Garroth's bedside trying to calm him down which I will be thinking about. A lot. I'll be thinking about how we deserved to see or at least hear some of it, about how the writers continue to tease me with an interesting scene that involves my favorite little fucker, about how heartbreaking it would have been to see Blaze and Melissa try to calm Garroth only for him to scream in pain and try to push them away only to reveal that Zane and Nana are able to hear the entire ordeal downstairs and Zane is panicking when he hears his brother screaming in pain. Just thinking about what we could've had if the writers actually cared about any of these characters.

And then after that he dies.

I'm not watching any of When Angels Fall because I know what's good for my health. I know what happens in Season 6 Episode 9 and that's all I need to know. It doesn't matter if the writers may have finally given Blaze an emotional scene, it doesn't matter if they finally gave him even a hint of character development, it doesn't matter if he made a connection in a real way. Because no matter what he did the result is the same. No matter what quality the writers might've pulled out of their ass, it would ultimately be in service of one end. From the start of this season these writers knew what they wanted to do. They wanted to up the stakes and add more drama to the show, and they wanted to do it by killing Blaze.

And I think I know why.

This is 100% a limited view, but I was on Aphmau Instagram at the time that this season was airing. And I ran a Blaze fan account. I talked to a lot of MyStreet fans during this time and I was constantly upset and disappointed that people didn't understand Blaze's character, or just didn't appreciate it as much as I do. Most people liked Blaze on a very surface level, or because he was attached to another character they liked. I found very few people who genuinely cared about him as an individual, probably because Blaze stopped getting scenes alone by the end of PDH, and because the Aphmau fandom (at the time) had more of a focus on shipping than character work and quality. Blaze was easily shippable with a number of characters, canonically shipped with Dottie a little, and had enough characterization that people cared about him, but not enough to get a large dedicated fanbase.

He was the perfect one to kill.

Enough people liked him because he was hard to hate, he was stapled onto Aaron's character with little regard for a story of his own, and his death could be eventually inconsequential. And it was! Blaze's method of dying is so bad it makes me physically angry!

I know the whole story for the last few seasons has been all about Forever Potions and turning people against each other, but just mind controlling Blaze and having him die while under mind control is such such a missed opportunity. There's been a disappointing lack of proper Aaron and Blaze friendship content, but they could have made up for it in this scene with just a few tweaks. Just have Blaze not be mind controlled at the end. He can still go on that rant about Aaron being the cause of all the bad that's happened, but then the words start to become... disjointed. Jilted. As if Blaze is struggling to say them because he knows that they're wrong. Aaron's his friend, there's no way he'd say that about him.

Have it break.

Have him look at his friend in a worse state than he's ever been in, and instead of approaching him with intent to harm, it's intent to heal. A final attempt at getting through to Aaron. And like the times before, it doesn't work. Aaron's angrier than ever and he isn't seeing or thinking straight thanks to Ein's bull shit. All he can see is an enemy in his way. Maybe he sees Blaze's eyes but Blaze's green eye is still Emerald Green, even if the control broke for a moment. Whatever reason, Aaron still attacks.

He doesn't realize that Blaze wasn't trying to hurt him until it's too late. Aaron's anger already ruined a friend's life, it already pulled all of them into the hell they're in, and now it's killed one of his best friends.

ONE CHANGE. THAT'S ALL IT TOOK. ONE SINGLE CHANGE TO MAKE BLAZE'S DEATH ACTUALLY MEAN SOMETHING.

Ideally I'd like it Blaze just didn't die at all, least of all before the finale, but if you're going to kill him off unceremoniously at least make it have some emotional weight. You've been neglecting him for an entire season and now you just kill him off? Just like that? Oh he gets to show up in heaven? How nice. Is it a scene where he gets to express regrets, remorse, or even give any insight into his feelings?

Of course it fucking isn't! Are you kidding me, that's not even close to what happens. I said i wouldn't watch When Angels Fall but

I LIED!!

I watched Blaze's death scene and his scene in heaven to make sure I knew well and good how badly they failed to kill off my favorite character! And man, the scene in heaven is just the worst! Blaze does a genuinely kind thing for Aphmau and decides to stay with her when she's alone because he doesn't want her to hurt. He saw how much pain Aaron was in without her. He just wants to fucking help her.

But Aphmau's too self absorbed to realize that and instead goes on a whole rant about how she always needs other people to take care of or protect her and how everyone else would be better off yadda yadda. What she doesn't realize and what Blaze eventually gets to tell her is that people were around her and took care of her because they just wanted to. Because she was nice to be around. And they never expected anything else, and never saw her as a burden.

And that's actually a really nice moment. Sort of. There's two major problems. First, Blaze gets cut off from telling Aphmau this at first because Irene has to go on a whole rant about Aphmau being selfish. And she is right in everything that she says, but it feels weird for Irene, who literally doesn't know her, to be making this judgement. This scene should have been Irene observing a conversation between Blaze and Aphmau were Blaze just tries to make her feel better.

And that would hopefully solve problem number two. Which is that what Blaze says is very genuine and heartfelt, but severely handicapped by the fact that he and Aphmau were only friends for a short period of time in High School, and an equally short period of time within the last few months. What Blaze says about why he likes being around her is true, but it would have a lot more weight if there was a chance for Blaze to have been around her as a friend more.

Fuck it, if you need Blaze to be on screen with at least two other characters, why was there never a scene of Blaze, Aaron and Aphmau just talking? Would a single scene of that fucking killed you? Just one scene would have made their friendships a lot more solid and therefore heartbreaking to lose when it gets torn apart.

Third problem, the scene ends with a focus on Irene. Blaze's words echo in her ears, and remind her of her friends. And I like that idea because I'm an absolute sucker for MCD, but it takes the scene away from the focus. This should be a scene about one of Aphmau's friends encouraging her to not give up even if it all seems lost. At least don't let her death be in vain by saying such awful things about her friends while they may be grieving. But Irene is brought into focus again because the show isn't about Blaze, or Aphmau apparently, I guess her Aphmau Main Character Powers overrides Aphmau's. She has more experience with them.

Blaze and Aphmau's very heartfelt dialogue is brought down by the fact that these two characters lives didn't intersect very directly out of high school. Through the course of Season 5 I never got the idea that Blaze was Aphmau's friend. Not to say they weren't friendly, I think Blaze adored her just as much as he did in high school, but as a viewer I was never shown that they cared particularly for one another. I believe that Blaze sincerely cared about her even after all this time, but that's not because of anything the writers did with him in these seasons. It's just because that's the kind of person Blaze is.

But their friendship not being strong really weakens the scene. This is a scene that I know for a fact worked as intended when I watched it as it was coming out. I was an overemotional mess of a 15 year old who hated how this series was going but kept watching it because it was almost over and I might as well get it done with. It pulled on my heartstrings and they sang and I cried. I cried a lot. This scene made me incredibly emotional, and it still got to me as an adult, but the devil is in the details.

Blaze and his arc might work on the surface. They work if you don't pay that close of attention to it. They work if you care more about the characters he's constantly around more than Blaze. And when I first watched Seasons 5&6, I still had a very deep attachment to a lot of these characters, especially Melissa, who he shares a lot of scenes with. So I felt... satisfied? I would've liked more, but I probably wouldn't have complained about what I got (his death scene not withstanding I always thought that was bad).

My my, how the times have changed.

If it wasn't obvious from the four thousand or so words you just read, Blaze is a rather unique case of these writers failing as writers. A rather unique case where the perfect character to fix a lot of problems with their show practically jumped up in the air waving his arms around and they still brushed past him to focus on a predetermined story he was shoved into. I don't think the writers ever really had a plan for where Blaze would go or what he would do.

A lot of Blaze's best character moments are when he isn't being written by Jesson. The reason I love the minigames so much is because there, Blaze's incredibly talented voice actor Jason Lord is actually really funny and pretty good at improv. Obviously some bits of the mini games are scripted, but a lot of them are just seeing how much voice actors can get into their characters, which he's fantastic at. A lot of Blaze's funniest moments come from this too, which is great when the writers turn him into a comedy character but the characters voice actor is funnier than they both are and is only a funny character when they don't have direct control of him. Lord is able to bring life to a character who may have been lacking it due to the simultaneously focused and unfocused way the series was written.

Blaze is proof of what happens when writers don't bother to develop their characters beyond the outline. The draft notes for PDH Season 2 said "there's going to be a wolf character who tries to become Alpha and instead stands up for Daniel when he's bullied." and then Blaze was born. The writers gave him some characterization as a treat to make the story work better, and then were done with it then and there. We fleshed him out enough, good character, time to put him in season 5 so people stop criticizing us for not giving Aaron enough friends.

But the problem wasn't a lack of quantity in friends, it was a lack of quality. It was a lack of scenes that let Aaron interact with other characters without Aphmau present. It was a lack of characters to point to that were real emotional connections Aaron had that weren't his last minute family or his girlfriend. It was a lack of attention given to the few characters that could've filled that role. Dante almost filled it in season 2, and Aaron and Garroth could have arguably become closer after everything in season 4, but at that point Aaron's entire arc became centered around Aphmau.

It was the fact that Blaze was one of the few people who ever directly reached out to Aaron and then was never given a scene alone again. It was because the writers wrote too many characters, tried to give the series a more direct focus, and then failed to account for the characters that were dragged along even if they didn't necessarily know what to do with them.

So when Season 6 came around and they decided to make the show super serious no really stop laughing, they needed characters to kill off to up the stakes. It's not like Blaze's character was going anywhere. It's not like they had a plan for him. Nothing was really being lost.

It's not like Blaze was one of the most sincere and dedicated characters in the series. It's not like he had one of the biggest potentials in regards to his relationship with Aphmau or Aaron. It's not like there was time spent proving that he could be a solid pillar of support in both of their lives even under dire circumstances. It's not like he was set up that way through individual scenes where he got to talk to each of them on a personal level. That definitely didn't happen.

TLDR: MyStreet peaked at season 2 and they fumbled the bag with the best chance to make it peak even higher and I'm forever bitter about it. Now get out of my house.

#I watched episodes of mystreet and pdh for this post #which I swore I would never do again #but here we are #the things I do for love #holy fuck this post is long #long post #very long post #over 4k words post #long exhausted sigh #and i still have to tag it #ohhh boy #mystreet #text post #character analysis #episode analysis #mystreet blaze #mystreet aaron #melissa lycan #when angels fall #phoenix drop high #aphblr #aphmau #mystreet aphmau

[pinkandpurple360]

Thank you, I think you just nailed what it is about Stolas that bothers me.

Like, you said how Asmodeus encourages Fizz to build a support system outside of him. He calls up Blitzo despite literally talking shit about him the episode before, just because he trusts Fizz’s forgiveness and knows he needs support, both physically and emotionally, that only Blitz can provide. And he doesn’t seem to mind that Fizz has interests outside of just their relationship, like performing (unless it’s Mammon). Not to say that Ozzie or the relationship is flawless (none are), but at Oz seems to genuinely just want Fizz to be happy. If by some bizarre twist Fizz broke up with Ozzie, I think the big guy would be sad, but ultimately would rather see the guy who taught him love be happy without him than be unhappy with him.

…Meanwhile, Stolas acts like Blitz solely exists to be his taboo imp lover. Stolas has never shown any interest in Blitz’s actual work, his hobbies, his family, his friends, his past, anything. He literally dirty talks to him while he is literally getting shot at. He doesn’t ever actually listen to him, and if the recent alleged Full Moon plot leaks are anything to go by, he’s never going to. This isn’t even getting into the coercion. Even if that wasn’t a factor, I feel like if Blitz were to move on (which let’s be real, he’s trying to) Stolas would mope and blame Blitz for all of his problems, and believe he is entitled to Blitz’s affection. That’s why I’ll never be able to get behind the ship no matter how much it’s stuffed in our face. It’s built on not only literal SA and class exploitation, but an incredibly unhealthy idealization and victim complex.

Oh wait, did I say would? This is literally canon.

Exactly because I know Asmodeus is very protective but who wouldn’t be? After seeing mammons behaviour I completely understand. And giving fizz someone else to provide safety was an act of kindness, uh, even though fizz wasn’t too happy about it🤭 he seems to notice how important Blitzø is to fizz more than fizz does..might be a bit of a shock to come later…I just love how he doesn’t force fizz to be with him, he’d always give him that choice.

EXACTLY anon. The coercion is a massive problem, but this ship is so incompatible that it’s still deeply flawed without that factor. “They’re both bad at communicating!” Is something shippers say to imply they’re clumsy in love and so similar to each other..when..no..poor communication is why relationships fail, why they end up abusive, and why they shouldn’t continue.

Stolas never cares that it’s a bad time, he uses blitzø as his security in LooLoo land despite not even needing it. To fuel a fetish of being saved by him, which in western energy nearly got him killed. When he learned Loona had to get a vaccination, he didn’t give a damn. He wanted IMP to drop everything and come to his aid, when he didn’t even feel in danger until the phone call ended. “I believe he has me bound by blessed ropes, limiting my ability to free myself I’m afraid. 😏 so I think you should come save me 😌”

While explaining about the blessed rope, and not having his grimoire in the human world, he’s smiling in both scenes. Think about it, his supposed weakness plot devices give him an opportunity to manipulate the situation again, to spend time with Blitzø against his will. In seeing stars he used violent intimidation tactics to get the three to bend to his will and do him favours. You can see the dark character he truly is with this pattern of behaviour.

There’s a lot of talk that Stella is mad about the cheating with an imp, but consider that seconds before he sees Blitzø at the party, Stella pisses him off by talking about how bad their sex life was. He then decides to jump in bed with said imp, which is even what he refers to him as. “Sir, we caught this nasty imp” “come with me, imp.” That’s a race play fetish right there.

Also yeah holy crap. Blitzø says he’s being used as a sex toy and stolas….cries? then kicks him out of his house? What a little bitch… “I will make amends” no you won’t liar 💀 then Blitzø will apologise to him and fawn over him like he used to for Fizzarolli? I feel sick..

#stolitz critical

[reduxulousoctopus]

Okay, have just finished Courage and now I feel like I gotta write my review of "the Morpherine episode" lol

Before we get into it, I have to say I'm a bit disappointed by the Sentinel plot after what happened during the finale of season one.

To recap, it turns out that the Sentinels are abducting world leaders because their programming told them to defend humans from mutants, but because "mutants ARE humans," Mastermold interpreted that to means their mission is actually to defend humans from themselves by taking control of the world. Brilliant way to resolve that arc, and a clever subversion of both the human bigotry that created them AND Xavier's/the X-Men's mission to promote equality between humans and mutants (because the Sentinels are still their enemies even while technically agreeing with them).

So having the Sentinels, especially Mastermold, just be generic mutant-hunting robots again is a let-down, especially without any explanation. They could have kept the Sentinels as the villains for this episode without ignoring all that, y'know? Ah, well. More superficially, they also changed the voice of the Sentinels for some reason? They just sound like guys now, it's weird.

Alright, that's enough of the actually respectable media analysis, let's get into what we're really here for:

While I didn't notice any bombshell lines like "Or maybe it's love you're missing?" in this episode, there were plenty of cute moments. For the most part, nothing they do really steps outside the bounds of best-friendship. For example, Logan is the only one who hugs Morph to welcome them back, but that's not particularly suggestive of anything besides a confirmation that the two of them are closer to each other than they are to the other X-Men.

That said, as soon as Wolverine and Morph are alone, there's a moment where they're both watching some drone footage of the factory they're going to investigate--or, at least, they're supposed to be watching the footage. Instead, the two of them keep staring at each other, then quickly glancing back at the screen as soon as they notice the other one looking. It's like they both know they should be focused on the mission, but all they can think about is each other and the fact that they're finally back together after so much time apart. Or they understand each other so well and have that kind of chemistry where they can have an entire silent conversation just by looking at each other.

There's also some dialogue during their mission together which could be interpreted as slightly flirtatious:

Wolverine: "Still haven't lost your touch, I see." Morph: "Just like riding a bicycle."//"Looks like you haven't lost your touch, either. [laughter]"

It's wild that Wolverine--the jackass who once loudly demanded "Yeah, who? No deserters in this crowd!" after Cyclops tried to subtly explain that some mutants (Rogue) might want to be "cured" (Rogue) and live a normal life (Rogue) because their powers cause them so much pain and isolation (Rogue Rogue he's talking about Rogue she's literally sitting right next to you, catch a fucking hint!), and made fun of Gambit for reacting with alarm at the sight of a (deactivated) Sentinel--is so openly concerned for Morph's emotional well-being after realizing that Sentinels are involved. Like at one point Cyclops even has to step in like "the Professor's just been abducted by giant robots can you shut the fuck up about Morph's feelings for one second???"

We get yet another scene of Logan reacting to Morph's scent, this time as a direct parallel to the one in 'Till Death Do Us Part when he first realizes that Morph's still alive. There's something so weirdly intimate about Logan being able to identity people by scent, considering how closely smells are tied to memories and emotions. Add the fact that Morph's shapeshifting powers can change everything except their scent, so that means Logan can always recognize them no matter what they look or sound like-- it's so good. And the writers must have agreed, because they put in more scenes of Logan tracking or recognizing Morph by their scent than anyone else (at least at this point in the series, we'll see if anyone catches up).

When Morph does their usual shtick, Logan's right there grinning from ear to ear like a doofus. Sir calm down, you're one step away from giggling and twirling your hair around your finger. This is kicking your feet in bed writing "Mx. Morph Howlett" in your dairy type behavior, stoooooop.

Wolverine calls Morph "kid" a couple times this episode, the flip-side of Morph calling him "old man" in Whatever It Takes. Morph also calls him "big guy," which is cute.

Speaking of names, I think this is the first episode where Morph calls him Logan instead of Wolverine. While crying, too, which-- how dare you?? Like yeah, a moment of intense emotion is exactly the correct time to have one character switch to using a more personal name for another character, but also it hurts my feelings so stop it. Look at Wolverine's face, show-writers, you made him sad too.

Morph's very pretty brown eyes get a lot of focus and close-ups in this episode. I wonder if Logan misses seeing them more often now that Morph's going for the inhuman blank-eyed look in '97.

Not relevant, but I have to mention how much I love Wolverine's line-read of "keep your shirt on, puh-rettay boyuh." lol I don't think that's a Canadian accent Mr. Dodd but I do appreciate it thanks. Bringing it back on topic though, at the end, the heartbroken delivery of "Morph, wait!" when Morph takes off to go back to Muir Island is so freaking sad. His voice even breaks a little on the word "wait". He tried so hard to bring Morph home was so happy to finally have them back only to to lose them again and I

So anyway. Yeah. The hype is real. I was disappointed by the Sentinel plot, but that isn't really the focus of the episode. Despite my complaints, the time they could have spent explaining why the Sentinels are back to hunting mutants would have cut down on the exploration of Morph's character, their terribly-timed attempt to return to active duty, and their relationship with Wolverine.

And although nothing explicitly "shippy" happened between them in this episode, Whatever It Takes already established (in my opinion) that there was something not-platonic going on between them before Morph's supposed death (whether they were in a romantic relationship, friends with benefits who caught feelings, had a mutual attraction they never acted on, etc).

With that context, I think their interactions in this episode could be seen as an example of what they're like as a couple. We get to see their dynamic, how they banter, what names they call each other, an example of something that they argue about (Morph feels like they're being babied by Logan's over-protectiveness), an indication of how sentimental/outwardly affectionate they are (Morph mockingly asks if Wolverine's "going to get all mushy on me" and Wolverine answers "I don't get mushy"-- you know, like a liar), and so on.

I'll probably have more to say about this episode later but I've literally been up all night and need to go to bed before I pass out at my desk lol

#morpherine #wolverine #morph #x men

[sophfandoms53]

I wish Hazbin had more than 8 episodes this season bc 1) the pacing is all over the place (outside of episode 4) and 2) it would’ve been so nice to actually see when and why Alastor started to genuinely care about the hotel.

The pilot and the first episode of the show characterize him as sticking around for the entertainment because of how silly the idea of redeeming a sinner is to him but then episode 5 has him fully backing up Charlie’s wishes for the hotel and even tells Mimzy she’s welcomed to stay if she actually wants to try redemption and was upset she had put the hotel in danger with her presence.

I think that turnaround in Alastor’s perspective is so interesting but when did that happen? Why did that happen? How did that happen? What made him care?

He clearly still has ulterior motives, there’s 0 denying that given his scene with Husk in the same episode, but he does seem to actually care about Charlie and her hotel. Which can be connected to the leash Husk claimed Alastor is bound by but Alastor is also the most distant from the cast.

We never see him around everyone for more than a few minutes at a time. Everyone went out to the club in episode 6 but Alastor is nowhere to be found in the entire episode.

That bond with anyone in the hotel, even Charlie, that would explain Alastor’s sudden support in the hotel has not been shown on screen and I really wish the show had more time to do that.

That’s really what Hazbin lacks. Time. Time to slow down and just let the characters breathe. Everything is moving so fast because they probably didn’t know a second season was coming until later which I can understand but that also means the plot takes priority over the characters and a majority of the cast is suffering from it.

Angel’s the only character who’s gotten an episode solely about him and exploring, expanding, and developing his character and his bonds in the hotel are what we see the most. This makes sense given he’s the main guest in the hotel but no other character has been able to have their own character and arc be explored the way Angel has.

The show needed more episodes like Masquerade to explore the cast before diving headfirst into the Heaven vs. Hell redemption conflict. That was always going to be the direction the show went in but they needed so much more time to do it because there are so many characters to juggle and so much is happening. Big moments that are supposed to matter don’t hit as hard as they should bc the cast is overstuffed and everyone is fighting for screen time.

This isn’t the teams fault, they’re doing a decent job with the limit time they were given but 8 episodes is not enough time for a show this ambitious with everything it’s trying to do. Doubling the episode count to 16 would’ve done wonders for the pacing and the show could slow down and take its time.

A lot of what Hazbin presents are good ideas. It’s all interesting but none of it is given enough time because the big Heaven and Hell plot has to take a majority of the shows focus. I do hope season 2 fixes this but that’s also gonna depend where the show is going after season 1 is over. We’ll see next week.

My main wish for the show going forward is each character gets their chance to be explored just as Angel has.

#hazbin has the millie problem of helluva boss but like everyone is millie #you understand who they are on a basic level but that’s kinda it #there’s not enough depth beyond what little we know #the show tries especially with Vaggie and Charlie #and i think Charlie is handled better than most of the cast outside of Angel #but oof Vaggie #i see what they wanted to do with her but again the pacing of it is a mess #everyone else in the hotel has their moments for sure #i utterly love husk and i wanna see more of him #but he needs his own episode that explores him and his whole deal with alastor #which would in turn explain some of alastor’s stuff #ik he’s supposed to be a mystery and that’s fine #but we can still learn more about him as a person without knowing all of his past y’know #anyway all I thought as i wrote this post was wow i’d get jumped on twitter for saying this #just wanted to talk about thisss #i love hazbin and helluva but they are never beating the pacing issue allegations #helluva’s pacing is actually more annoying for different reasons tho #hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel spoilers

[crystalsamethyst]

If the show ever gets to that actual point, I want them to do what they did with LQQ's bestie official and give Wu Ming some more screen time. Nothing that would alter the plot of course but we just need more content and to stare at his pretty (masked) face a while longer.

Show him trying to serve his dianxia or like what he was doing for the three days even if it was nervously watching or being bound by Ruoye or something. Give us some treats with him staring longingly at dianxia while he isn't looking. Give us a small look at the red eye behind the slits of the mask glaring at fangxin. I would kill for a full episode of Wu Ming reacting quietly to things

#tgcf #wu ming

[fatalism-and-villainy]

I would love to hear more of your opinions on Francis Dolarhyde

Anon, I am so sorry this took me two weeks to answer. I had the whole thing formulated, but it took awhile to track down the scenes/quotes that supported this argument, so here we are.

My initial response to this was “I don’t have many thoughts on him,” but that’s not actually true. I don’t have many thoughts on him as a character - I’m pretty okay with what he’s doing in the story and how he slots into Will and Hannibal’s dynamic, but he’s not one of the cast members who compels me the most.

But what I do find compelling about him is how his character is stylistically handled.

One of the most striking things about him, to me, is what Bryan Fuller said on one of the DVD commentaries for season 3, about the sequences at Dolarhyde’s house demonstrating the horror of cinema. And it’s really true - the horror of the scenes at his house, when he rehearses and relives his murders, is communicated visually through the close-ups on his film projector. For example, in episode 11, when Reba is at his house and he watches - unbeknown to her - footage of Molly and Walter, there are close-ups of the film spinning in its reel:

And this kind of visual focus on the projector and film is pretty frequent in the scenes at his house. It’s all about the film! Hannibal frequently features this kind of close-up object focus in its cinematography, but it’s telling that with Dolarhyde, the main other kind of technology we see it with is the tattoo needle shown upon his introduction.

The film, and the voyeurism it represents, is part of the technology of his becoming, just as his Red Dragon tattoos are. And his long introductory sequence also features the artsy sequence wherein he seemingly gets bound by the film and transforms into the projector.

His bestial nature is linked to his voyeurism and its monstrous appetites.

I also think about Dolarhyde in the context what Elizabeth Sandifer has to say about him, in her episode-by-episode commentary on Hannibal: that NBC!Dolarhyde “exists in constant tension with modernity.” Commenting on the effect of Dolarhyde retaining the job at the film processing plant that he has in the original Red Dragon novel, she says:

Inasmuch as it’s an object worthy of scrutiny, it speaks to Harris’s consistent fascination with turning modernity into monstrosity. But in 2015, nearly thirty-five years later, his connection to film is dated—a connection less to modernity than to early 20th century modernism. (Hannibal himself, of course, presents similar issues.) He is a technological monster, yes, but he is rooted in the hauntological qualities of technology as opposed to any futuristic ones.

And I just love that. Like, it’s fascinating to me that even though the film processing plant is no longer the means through which Dolarhyde is discovered, as in the novel, there’s something about it that just felt intrinsic to his character to Fuller&co. As an adaptational move, it turns the mundanity of his profession into a sort of retro technophilia, kind of reminiscent of that quote that goes around sometimes about how out-of-date technology acquires a new aesthetic resonance when it’s removed from its zeitgeist.

Hannibal is very deliberately out-of-time. Hannibal the character is surrounded by the signifiers of 19th century aestheticism, and Dolarhyde, in turn, becomes representative of the aestheticization of the late ‘70s. And that shift in temporality reflects the narrative turn in the utility of film in this arc - his videos are no longer a plot element, but rather a way of aesthetically and psychologically rendering his character. Rather appropriate to the fact that Will’s 3B arc, in turn, constitutes him shifting focus from the question of how Dolarhyde is choosing his victims to the question of the degree to which he himself shares Dolarhyde’s appetite.

I think the strange, out-of-time quality of Dolarhyde’s use of film - rather than modern digital technology - can also be taken to reflect the level of artistic distance through which we ourselves see the show. Violence on Hannibal is very stylized, very refracted through an aestheticized lens. It’s made beautiful to us. The datedness of this form of technology, the way it renders the projector and film themselves as aesthetic objects, keeps us at a remove from the violence itself. Instead, it reorients us towards point of view, and interpretation. Towards how things are seen, rather than simply the fact of their occurrence.

Geoff Klock, in the oft-cited book If Oscar Wilde Ate People, notes the significance of “seeing” in the show (113). The question “see?”, as Klock notes, bookends the first and last episodes of the show, posed first by Garett Jacob Hobbs and then, on the cliff, by Hannibal. And of course, Dolarhyde himself poses this question, when confronting Chilton with pictures of his crimes: “Do you see?”

Being able to see the aesthetic and artistic qualities in murder, and to see beyond its immorality, is thematically central to the show, in Klock’s argument. And to me, Dolarhyde embodies that concept perhaps more so than any of the show’s other villains (save, perhaps, Hannibal himself). As noted in the film Manhunter, sight is the main sense through which Dolarhyde perceives the world. The two pieces of iconography associated with him on the show are the broken mirror in his house (and of course, his habit of arranging the mirror shards on his victims’ eyes) and the film projector - demonstrating his fractured view of himself, and the consequential control he asserts over the images of his victims, and the way he uses them to transform his view of himself.

Essentially, the show links the potential for violence to a sort of interpretive capacity that is metaphorically associated with sight, and Dolarhyde is a character very associated with sight. And the cinematic and stylistic framing of his psyche has a lot of fascinating implications as to the show’s aesthetic rendering of violence.

#hannibal meta #francis dolarhyde #hannibal season 3 #hannibal #my meta #hannibal talk #i am always here to talk about style style STYLE #not to mention temporality #queue

[breathlessmorro]

Read your post about wu, misako, and garmadon and the love triangle. Great post and loved your joke. If you didn't make a post yet, I was wondering what your opinion is on the season 3 love triangle between Nya, Jay, and Cole?

Part two-

Okay so history lesson: season three is around the time the showrunners figured out that girls watched the show as well, and what better way to appeal to girls than with love drama right guys??? Because that's not stereotypical and insensitive, and butchering female characters for the sake entertainment isn't misogynistic at all!

... Okay so I have some negative thoughts, but the love triangle doesn't necessarily have to be bad? It's not great writing, but NinjaGo writers are known to sacrifice consistency for the sake of the plot a LOT so I'm not going to make a huge deal out of it. Up until Cole was described as Nya's "perfect match," she never had any interest in him. The love triangle between her and Cole comes completely out of nowhere, and gets treated more seriously in the show than most of the fans take it.

So let's try to break it down - Nya and Jay establish at the beginning of season 3 that they have some boundaries. They don't state what they are, but it's implied Jay isn't allowed to fawn over her and get super clingy. Which, after a reminder, Jay actually fulfills. The first episode implies they're in a healthy relationship, with even their students knowing about it. Nya even seems excited by the idea that Jay might be her perfect match.

Then she gets paired with Cole, and she insists no one say anything. Now, I'm gonna dip into my psychology classes and say that Nya's sudden "feelings" and "attraction" to Cole is based off of the power of suggestion rather than actual attraction.

The Power of Suggestion is the theory that when an individual has an idea conveyed to them, and only after that, said idea becomes a reality. The way it works is that your brain has to consider every idea that pops up in it, and how you react to that idea can strengthen it. Nya's extreme shock to the idea that she's meant to be with Cole solidified the suggestion that she should be with him in her mind, and with the way the human brain works, she was already thinking of reasons why. When your brain makes a statement, it automatically looks for proof, and so that's why Nya was able to believe that she genuinely had feelings for Cole - because she had plenty of reasons for why she could.

It's confirmed that Cole didn't really have feelings for Nya. He liked the attention, and because of Jay immediately getting mad at him for it, he amped up his own reactions. I don't think Cole ever had feelings for Nya, and he just got competitive because that's part of his personality.

Jay on the other hand. Since day ONE Jay has been interested in Nya. He wanted to know her favorite color, wanted to impress her. Him unlocking his true potential was because she admitted she actually liked him no strings attached. He's been head over heels for that girl from the start, and he's canonically very insecure about being liked. So when Pixal, someone who almost never lies, says that she's supposed to be with Cole, and Nya doesn't immediately reassure him? He was bound to react the way that he did. That being said, immediately jumping to violence was wrong of him, especially because he didn't technically have proof Cole had acted on anything, but it makes sense.

To put it bluntly, everybody messed up. Nya shouldn't have hid the perfect match thing, or tried to initiate any kind of romantic affection with Cole. Cole shouldn't have reciprocated, and especially shouldn't have endorsed hiding it from Jay. Jay should have asked what was going on, and actually gotten the information he needed before going on the attack - not to mention he should have focused his hurt on the fact that Nya actually kind of cheated on him, but it's understandable why he was mad at Cole.

If someone wants to argue for Mudshock, I'm all for it! I just don't like the way it was canonically portrayed. It did feel very teenager-y so kudos to the team for being accurate to the vibes, but ultimately they ended up butchering two incredible characters (Nya and Cole) for the sake of marketing. I don't think anyone who wrote this actually knows how upsetting it is when you find out your partner is cheating on you with your best friend, so they played up the love triangle for the masses.

TL:DR: in canon? I'm not a fan of Mudshock. In fanon, where it gets explored and balanced out and all three of them are healthy and supportive??? ABSOLUTELY SIGN ME UP BABY

#breathless speaks #nya smith #nya ninjago #jay walker #jaya #jay ninjago #jayashipping #mudshock #cole x nya #i forgot what cole x nya omfggg

[sweetcloverheart]

Clover Rants Miraculously: Complexity

Miraculous suffers badly from complexity addiction and it’s gotten absolutely worse since season 5 started. Character routes can’t be predictable or just being A to B to C anymore - no, there has to be a twist every minute, they have to deconstruct all the tropes and chara types, they have to keep the audience on their toes every second or else! No one’s allowed to predict anything and things can’t be simply as they appear. However, they also lacks the patience to make the complexity they put in relevant or meaningful. As a result, character growth becomes flat as their personalities and values are changed or reverted back to previous stages to suit whatever the plot needs, with opinions that seem ripped straight from reddit pages and twitter threads that seem to lack any understanding of the topics they’re preaching. No one is allowed to contradict or question anything and status quo must be maintained at all costs, even as it bogs down all the new plot elements and lore they try to bring in. It wants everything to be “deep” without actually doing any work in digging for it.

Which is why the canon Chloe salt, Marinette’s bullying backstory, sentikids, and the Gabriel thing fall flat in their jobs to get everyone to subscribe to the writer’s sole interpretation of the characters/plotlnes they present (and nothing else) - because the writers want the benefits of creating a deeply thematic work that goes outside the bounds of its genre without actually doing anything to create said depth.

Chloe can’t just be a dumb mean girl bully with a sad backstory to explain why she does it - nah, she has to represent the worst of humanity and parallel an abusive parent and monologue about how she has no soul and everyone’s stupid for thinking she does and turn out to be responsible for every bad thing to everyone ever, but the writers will never actually address any of it meaningfully while actively trying to pretend that any implications they made about her character or backstory doesn’t exist or act like it was actually this super malicious psyop done by Chloe herself and we just imagined seasons 2 and 3 in a collective mass hallucination.

Marinette can’t just be cringe about her first crush because she’s a teen and that’s what teens do when it comes to first crushes - nah, she has to have this completely out of nowhere and nonsense dramatic backstory about a prank by Chloe and Kim that justifies all the (kinda borderline creepy) stuff she pulled in the start of the show with PTSD and now you can’t make fun of/criticize her or your mocking a trauma victim you jerk (all while these issues get solved in one episode and all the other reasons to properly explain her flightiness around Adrien are either swept under the rug or just ignored due to inconveniencing their insistence of pushing this “Dating trauma” storyline that somehow only effects her with Adrien and not Luka or Chat Noire for reasons)!

It’s not enough that Adrien (and Kagami and Felix) is an abused kid trying to get out of his father’s controlling grip and come to his own as he explores expanding his boundaries and learns to stand up for himself - nah, he has to be a magical slave golem with 180 different flavors of awful implications baked into the lore of how his creation works and no feasible way for him in canon to actually break away from his dad on his own or with help, with the ending (if it makes it to the final draft/actual episode) regarding it making his entire journey of self-actualization and independence basically meaningless

Gabriel can’t simply be being an over-the-top control freak because of losing his wife and have that be shown as unreasonable - nah, he needs to be given Marinette’s exact same backstory (minus the bullying but I would not put it past them at this point) to justify why he’s totally in the right to be ruining children’s lives and terrorizing citizens and should totally be allowed to win in the end. It’s not that he’s unfairly putting the responsibility of his grief onto completely strangers and poorly justifying it with the idea that it’ll restore his family back to their idyllic days and benefit his son - in the end, guy’s just “a man who loves his family”, so let’s just forget about all the terrorism and emotionally abusing his only living child and focus on the important stuff, like the fact that Chloe and Lila are both the devil and more evil than him.

(Speaking of) Lila can’t just simply be a consummate liar who develops an irrational hatemance against our leading lady for pointing this out - nah, she has to turn out to have a gajillion different damn fake families and even faker aliases to jump through when she get tired of it or they get compromised, and all with it’s own naming system! Are her eyes actually green? Does she really have hair? Is she even Italian? Who knows - certainly not the writers! Isn’t great you invested years of interest and headcanons into a character who turned out to be a complete sham and whom the writers are now going to use to recycle the S1 villain gimmick because the Butterfly is the only villain allowed to exist? I sure am!

The writers want their story to be overly complicated and “deeper than average kids cartoons” but they want to retain their “silly simple cartoon” format and while it’s possible to do, the show runners seem adamant in not taking the steps forward necessary to achieve it, causing a constant conflict in both the show’s genre and character narratives that hurts it’s plotline

TLDR: In the immortal words - pick a lane my dude

#Clover Rants Miraculously #ML Salt #I spotted a queuety

[artbyblastweave]

Just watched Free Guy. As is the case with all Ryan Reynolds vehicles, I thought it was reasonably good. Corny at points. But one thing I found genuinely charming was the level of verisimilitude baked into the plot and premise; the writing and art people were both clearly familiar with both the mechanics of MMOS like Free City and the game industry more broadly. 

Taika Waititi’s character- a craven “whiz kid” who uses his power over his subordinates to make an ass of himself playing at being hip, is a Kind Of Guy. The Joe Keery vessel and Millie- Bright Young Developers Eaten By The Machine- are kinds of guys, in Game-Dev. (Hi, ZA/UM!) The kind of off-the-beaten-path player that Guy becomes- and the stark light it throws the actual intended gameplay loop into- is a thing you see constantly in big MMOs where players try to see what the actual affordances of the framework are.  (You saw this a lot with Fallout 76, and the sinking playerbase discovery that it was all violence all the way down.)

The plot point that the stolen content was inadequately dummied out and just left out of bounds for the heroes to discover is something that would look like shitty, overly convenient writing until you remember the ubiquity of lazy dummy-outs and weird legacy code in real life game-dev (and how pointedly lazy the villain who did it was established to be.) The early plot point about the developers going in with cheat-mode enabled to try and root Guy out manually feels like a “NCIS hacking” moment until you remember those old-school MMO stories about developers having to try and go in and manually kill hackers because the only other way to get rid of them would be to scrub the server. EVE online and World Of Warcraft are a mill for stories about emergent systems and dynamics that spiral out of player and developer control. Guy is able to win the end-game fight against Dude because despite being massively overpowered Dude was thrown together in Crunch Time and Guy had years to emerge organically in conversation with the rest of his system.

And-this is crucial- this is the first “video game movie” to successfully bridge what I think of as the “granularity gap” in fictional depictions of video games. The granularity gap is when the in-game worlds are shown with an absurd level of fidelity- avatars having the ability to interact with the environment with the same fluidity and articulation as a human in real life, et al et al. This is done either for the gag (see that one episode of Community Where Abed turns a retro RPG into a factory sim as a bit) or because the writers genuinely don’t have the frame of reference for the limitations on how in-depth a game would be. Either way I’ve watched a bunch of “stuck in a game world” shows where my first reaction is always, “yeah, there’s very little chance a consumer game would have that level of brick-by-brick simulation.” 

In Free Guy, this disconnect is elevated to the status of plot point; the universe of the game was mechanistically engineered with Dwarf-fortress levels of commitment to reproducing reality by a pair of neurotic auteurs doing it for the art. The mass-market, run-and-gun cash-grab GTA clone has such unrealistically complicated under-the-hood modelling because a craven goon butchered a system meant for more interesting emergent behaviors in order to make a marketable shooter that doesn’t use even a sliver of what the engine was coded to allow. If you assume a Black-Mirror-style near-future, this falls back within my suspension of disbelief; even if not, it’s thematically within my suspension of disbelief that a “kiss” functionality exists within NPCS but got dummied out on the player-end because it would detract from over-the-top clownshow streamer-bait violence.

#thoughts #meta #free guy #ryan reynolds #also I really liked the bit in the end where he realizes that his feelings for Millie are reflective of the predelictions of his coder #and they amicably break things off because it would be weird to date your god/ to spend all your time dating a love letter #and the only way for Guy to truly be free is to stop living as a go-between #between his creators #media analysis

[o-uncle-newt]

Cabin Pressure Advent Day 24: Xinzhou

To quote Stefon from SNL, this episode has everything! It's actually pretty crazy how much it manages to fit- seamlessly!- into less than half an hour. We have the introduction of such iconic concepts as Fizz Buzz and "here I am don't tread on me," the excellent Film Double Bills game, bacon shirt, baby chicken and baby lamb... I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but honestly the big things is that this all fits around SO many conversations that move the plot forward.

So many of the important things that we need to do before moving on toward the end of the show happen in this episode. We establish that Martin is dating Theresa (even if he won't put a label on it) and is invested enough to potentially want to choose a job in proximity to her. We know that Carolyn hasn't given Herc any kind of real answer and is pretty avoidant of the consequences. We know that Douglas did not know that Carolyn is essentially cutting his job out from under his feet.... and we know that Arthur doesn't know what multiples are. Oh, Arthur, I love you so.

It's interesting, because the arc of Douglas moving from being obnoxious to Martin about his interest in Swiss Airways is not super clearly laid out. What we do perceive is that he isn't necessarily being snarky at first because he genuinely has no confidence in Martin- he's having a knee jerk reaction to the idea of losing this situation. He's basically exactly where he wants to be- and I think to him that's the depressing part, because he has an image of himself as being so much more than he currently is and if he's happy regardless then that can feel like a weakness of its own... it's hard for him to admit he's really happy where he is. I think that what really changes his mind is realizing that Martin genuinely does have bigger dreams, and that those dreams have nothing to do with being a captain. As I've mentioned in one or two of these, Martin's motivating factor for trying to rescue MJN, every other episode when they have to work to save the day, is that nobody else will let him be a captain and being captain is massively important to him. But now, he's prioritizing flying airliners and being near the girl he's dating over that ego thing. He's grown up, and I think seeing that proves to Douglas how selfish his earlier thought is.

And Carolyn... it's so hard to know what Carolyn is thinking exactly. On the one hand, she's pushing Herc away by telling him not to consider her as he takes the Swiss Airways job, and at the same time she's encouraging Martin to leave for his betterment, which will eventually (as far as we now know) lead to the end of MJN Air. Is it some kind of weird self sabotage? Is it her being a more selfless person than one might imagine her being in S1? She's probably the most emotionally bound-up character, and it will of course be fun to see how she navigates the next few episodes...

But also, as already discussed, this episode has so many amazing amazing moments in it and I'm just so in awe of JF for pulling it off so flawlessly- while Limerick is the bomb, I think this one might be even more skillfully pulled off, with a lot more demanded of it. I also have a nice nostalgic memory related to Xinzhou as I made a friend through this episode! A friend and I were out for dinner with a group of people, some of whom we knew and some who we didn't, and someone (for some reason) mentioned baby food- possibly in the context of them liking to eat baby food? I don't recall. Anyway, I made a sotto voce comment to my friend about eating chicken flavored baby food and I suddenly heard a British accent a few seats down- "is that a Cabin Pressure reference?!" Turns out, she was IN THE AUDIENCE for Xinzhou and said it was even better in person, I was very jealous, and while we've drifted apart since then it was very nice to get to know her- and all because of a Cabin Pressure reference.

Next episode is Yverdon... can't believe this is almost over!!

#cabin pressure #cabin pressure advent 2023 #cabin pressure advent #john finnemore #xinzhou

[silverpen-and-paper]

loki season 2 episode 3 spoilers!

“it’s broken” says voiceover sylvie over the shot of loki and mobius torturing brad. yes sylvie i agree

oooh a lot of renslayer in this recap thing, i hope that means we’ll get to see her this episode

oooohh old timey marvel theme

is this. the old west?? i cannot tell

RENSLAYER!!

miss minutes is horrifying

she looks like she’s animated differently than season 1. way more cheap-cgi-ish, like they didn’t have time to finish animating her movements. i might be misremembering s1 tho?

child kang?? is that you??

i thought kang said he was born in the century 3000 or something? or ig this kid might be a variant? OR MAYBE HE LIED ABOUT WHEN HE WAS BORN

“you can hack into the system” “oh, that is such a relief!” ouroboros autistic vibes intensify

mobius and loki are fancyyy

HOT AIR BALLOONS!! AAA THIS PLACE IS SO VIBEY

SKDHSKSK??? there’s a nordic section???

was that use of they/them for loki intentional orrrr 👀

you know what i’m gonna say loki’s using he/they pronouns this episode and no one can stop me

“thor wasn’t that tall”

AAAAAA this episode is such a fun aesthetic so far i will never shut up about this

“what do you know about the future, boy” “great question! and the answer is, more than you…………………………..might think”

dang kang must be cosplaying as thor with all those lightning bolts

nope nope mobius that’s a terrible idea. do i have a better one? no. do i know that taking kang to the tva will backfire? yes

oh come on loki is jotun they should be able to take this human even if he is big

oh good he used his magic

GASPPP SYLVIE

what if they broke the loom instead of fixing it/expanding it/whatever they’re trying to do now? someone built the loom in the first place, the timeline wasn’t always bound by it, right? so if they broke it maybe it wouldn’t have as bad an effect on the tva as they think

if victor timely’s inventions have all been tricks so far then i don’t think he’s gonna know how to fix something for real

kinda agreeing with sylvie at the moment

welp loki just magically shoved victor close to the door that’s about to open. this can’t end well

MOBIUS AND LOKI WITH A DOUBLE BIKE??? FELLAS IT WOULD BE WAY MORE EFFICIENT TO JUST GET TWO SEPARATE BIKES

nooo they aren’t gonna ride the bike :( fanartists, you know what to do

whoop here comes the villain romance. and you know what they’re kind of perfect for each other

ahhhh so he CAN invent

squints at miss minutes. you seem jealous

I’M DYING VICTOR THINKS MOBIUS IS LOKI’S BUTLER???

skshdks maybe if you didn’t scream “THEY TRACKED US, RUN” you would’ve had more time to run, victor

MAGIC BLAST

how did they get in the wall?!

ok but this victor/ravonna romance is actually really cute. they are both bad people but the perfect ones for each other

yup miss minutes is definitely jealous

awwwww he made her a flower! this relationship is definitely gonna end in tragedy

uh oh ravonna didn’t hear it when he said he doesn’t do partners

damn already? i was expecting victor’s betrayal to happen in the next episode at least

i wonder if this is gonna make ravonna switch sides

that is an unsettling amount of mannequins

“the culmination of my life’s work” but what does it dooooo

uh oh miss minutes i think you’re gonna scare him

btw victor is kinda giving arospec vibes

miss minutes. stop. i am begging you. this is making both me and victor very uncomfortable

MISS MINUTES NO. VICTOR RUN AWAY FROM HER AND BE A GOOD PERSON WHO IS NOT A DICTATOR

OHHHH RAVONNA’S HERE! DRAMAAA

SHE’S GOT A POINTY GLOWY THING

loki and mobius are here now!

“all that matters is order vs chaos. i’m order” AND HERE COMES SYLVIE AS THE CHAOS!!!

hmmm? elaborate trick or will victor be good?

sylvie sees herself in him. she can’t do it

see you later loki and mobius and victor

HOLY CRAP SYLVIE I DID NOT EXPECT THAT. DANG JUST DUMPING RAVONNA IN FRONT OF THE DEAD BODY OF THE PERSON SHE IDOLIZED

OHOHO WHAT’S THE JUICY PLOT SECRET MISS MINUTES?

i bet it’s something about kang wiping ravonna’s memories of a life they had together or something

no end credits scene this time!

i loved this episode!! i think it’s my favorite one yet

#tbh i didn't like the last episode much #but this one just about makes up for it! #loki #loki show #loki series #loki season 2 #loki s2 #loki season 2 spoilers #loki season 2 episode 3 #loki s2 ep3 #loki spoilers #mobius #mobius m mobius #ravonna renslayer #victor timely #miss minutes #sylvie laufeydottir #he who remains #kang #mcu