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scribble-dribble-writes · 10 months

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Hello, how are you?, if your request is open, you could write about Miguelito who is afraid to kiss you and end up hurting you because of his fangs (little does he know what reader (she is also a spider woman, she loves him in every way mostly your animalistic or arachnid side ) a little sexual tension please, of course if you feel comfortable, thank you.

Hehehehe this was a unique ask so I had to play around with it. But I hope you like it 💖💖💖

Regresa a mí

You were swinging your way across Nueva York when you spotted him. He was gliding through the sky, his outfit making him look menacing even in daylight but for you it was the perfect time to strike. You had known him since before his days as the vigilante he was now, with his fangs and claws. When he was a genetic scientist sitting down in his cubicle given his large frame, his head would peak over the separator. You knew him well because long ago you had been his colleague, sharing pleasant smiles as you passed by each other in the corridor but the night everything changed for Miguel, it changed your life too.

You had loved him then, secretly, and when you heard of the plot his father had conspired to have him killed, you knew you had to get him to safety. So you ran, putting aside all your work and folders as the only goal that circled through your mind now was to find him.

He was there, working after hours and you breathed a sigh of relief as he sat there hunched over his computer typing in his data from today’s results.

“Miguel.”, you called for him in hushed tones as you rushed to him.

“Miguel, you need to leave now.”, you placed your hand on his shoulder, turning him to face you against his wish.

“I’ve still got work to finish.”, he said, muttering your name in frustration.

“I don’t care, you’ve got to go, your father…”, you felt a sting rise up your arm.

“Your father…”, you tried to speak but your words began to slur, the world around you began to blur. Turning your wrist, you saw a robotic spider scurry away from your arm in it’s back an empty vial which contained a liquid you knew well about. The one you had worked on, a kind of poison that affects your neuro system.

You collapsed but he had caught you in his arms, frustration now replaced with worry as his tapped your cheek, saying your name like a plea for you to tell him what was wrong. But you couldn’t, you could only watch as he winced when he got stung in the neck by a similar bug.

However, Miguel was the only one with the target on his back, you were just collateral damage. As your paralyzed form laid on the floor, you witnessed him getting dragged away, when the words you wanted to tell him died in your mouth.

You should not have survived, he shouldn’t have either but somehow he did and in turn, he had come back for you as you were gasping for air faintly, holding on for whatever reason you weren't sure of.

The memories from that night were hazy but you remembered the distinct warmth of his touch as he plugged you to a system, the concern in his eyes as he placed an oxygen mask over your face and the words, the words that you could never forget as they repeated over and over in your mind every night since then.

“regresa a mí.”, he said as he caressed your cheek and the will to live only grew stronger.

You breathed into whatever concoction he had made and it burned your lungs, the antidote shot through your system making you blackout. When you woke up, your world was different, you had powers from a mutation that had occurred, making you the first recruit to his elite society.

But now, now you were rivals. Everyday a competition to see who bests the other. You shared similar traits with him, your mutation had cause you to develop claws along with other qualities a spider person would have. He was unfortunate, to not have spider sense or the ability to climb walls, which always made you think you were better and that made him adamant to prove you otherwise.

So now as he was right above you, you pressed down on the button on your wrist to spin your web around his ankles, once secured, you yanked on it and watched as he began to fall under your control.

“Argh”, you heard him grunt with annoyance.

“Should have known I would bump into you.”, he grumbled but you could sense the smirk with which he said it.

But before you could react, he tore free from your clutches using the blades on his arm and in turn got a hold of you.

He swung through the skyscrapers as he held you onto his side, his hand resting securely on your waist. He didn’t let you go, the eyes on his mask widening upon realizing how close you were.

But time had slowed, off late he’d been wanting to thank you, for trying to save him when no one did. The world around him had begun to blur and for the first time he wanted to pause, to remove your mask and hold your face in his hand.

“Sorry Miguel, but I don’t need a romantic tour of the city.”, he heard you speak as you slipped from his hold, to fall straight into the traffic below.

“It’s not romantic.”, he yelled after you as you timed your fall, to pull up at the right time to skim over passing cars. Turning to look over your shoulders, you smiled as you spotted him following you.

“It sure felt like it.”, you laughed wanting to annoy him further.

You swung past your milestone point, a deli around the corner , it was only a few more blocks away from your checkpoint, to have won against him in this agility race once again. You propelled yourself higher as you passed through decorative steel rings just to flex on how well you knew your way around the city.

“How does it feel to lose every single day?”, you asked him only to see him use all his limbs as he chased you down, his claws scrapping against the brick façade. His muscles contracting and expanding that for a second you had forgotten about everything else.

“It's only because you’ve got an advantage, you're more agile.”, he huffed.

“So you do agree, that I’m better than you.”, your focus on the race had wavered upon hearing the defeat in his voice.

All you’ve ever craved for was to hear the sound of your name on his lips, said with an edge of pride to it, keeping up this rivalry made it fun, to get him feel flustered over you.

But while you were distracted, he had managed to gain an edge over you as he used the base of a signage to swing higher, now closer to the finish line than you were.

You let out a curse as you bit down on your lip, your weakness for him was evident. Always distracted when he entered a room, your eyes always searching for him, your heart pegged on every word he said. Your feelings were the same since that night and his were too, he didn’t regard you any differently than before and therefore what he had said was only adding to the confusion.

Why were you important to him that he wanted you back?

You weren’t going to let him win, that meant the only time he spent around you, indulging in these games would grow lesser and lesser until one day he would all together end up forgetting you.

Being held in his gaze when you frustrated him meant you lived in his thoughts, atleast for a second.

So you swung into him as his back faced you, your momentum knocking him and you to the ground as you crashed onto the roof of a hotel. Your checkpoint. He was the first to rise as you coughed, clutching your side.

The fun in the tone of his voice had vanished, now it only held worry as he said your name in hurried breaths.

“Are you hurt?”, he carried you.

“Why do you have to be so reckless?”, he fussed over you.

“Always putting yourself at risk.”, he cribbed as he checked your hands and you let him, because moments like these where the only time he got close to you.

His mask disintegrated and his face came into view, you gasped, it had been so long since you had seen the brown of his eyes, the faint cut on his forehead from when he got hurt in his lab when you were around to place a bandage over it, still remembering the smell of his shampoo as you leaned in.

Harbouring these memories seemed to be more cruel than whatever this mutation was. Because it meant you had to spend all your time around him while never getting to touch him.

“I’m fine, Miguel.”, you brushed away his hand, suddenly not feeling the mischief from before because now it had only begun to hurt.

You got up to walk away but he didn’t let you, his hand caught your wrist and you wanted to break free, to bury him in the past, to move on and yet you were tied to his life. You and him were of the same kind, the only spiders to have these odd mutations. You made sense when you were with him. You weren’t an unique entity anymore, when you stood my him, you were mirror images, sharing the same struggle and pain.

“There, you won today.”, you mumbled not wanting to look at him.

He reeled you to him, till you tumbled into his arms as he caught you, his eyes searching your masked face, annoyed that he couldn’t see you.

So in this privacy of the corner behind the maintenance area, in the cool shadow the wall cast over you both, shielding you from the city’s gaze, you felt the soft touch of his finger at the base of your neck. He fiddled with the ends of your hair that had managed to stick out, his gaze now lost as though he had dreamed of this. Your motivation to run was now forgotten, your body now comfortable in his hold because you had longed for it, for his love, even before you had both become freaks.

He hooked his index finger under the elastic of your mask and slowly peeled it away, his eyes drinking in the details of your face, the colour of your skin, the shape of your lips, the slant of your nose, the rise of your cheeks as though he was seeing you for the first time. He froze when his eyes met yours, the last time you were this close was when you telling him to go home. You looked away but he placed his fingers on your cheek, to tilt you to look at him, to hold his gaze, because in your eyes there existed a version of him, that wore a lab coat and enjoyed ordinary existence.

That’s why he couldn’t be around you, you were all he had, a connection to a past that was lost and yet you were also half of him. He had used half of his antidote on you, to safe you from the fate of the poison, to get you back. And since then he had been a coward, avoiding you or indulging in competitive play just so he could be in the periphery of your life. Because the man you had cared for didn’t exist anymore, the scientist who you worked with wasn’t him anymore.

He leaned in towards you but he caught himself. He had seen you at one of the office parties, he hid in the corner along with you and in the mesmerizing light of the mirroball, he had wanted to kiss but instead he downed his drink and looked away. Now, he turned away from you, now if he tried, he would only end up hurting you.

“I’ve never won. I’ve only lost it all.”, he said and it caught you, unsure if he was even talking of the race or the pain of the past.

You wanted to touch his cheek, pristine in this light, he looked solid and beautiful, but you held back. Your claws didn’t respond to your command yet. A small distraction and they would dig into anything you held. You couldn’t leave him with further scars. So you sighed, as you slumped in his arms, both of you caught in a silence that seemed heavy.

“regresa a mí.”, you said and his eyes flashed to yours.

“What does it mean?”, you asked even though you knew what it meant. You wanted to hear him say it, you wanted to know why he said it.

“Where did you hear it?”, he asked as he sat down with you on him.

You caught his gaze. Why were you both lying?

“You said it.”, you furrowed your brows in confusion. Maybe all this while you had gotten it wrong. He could have just said it for the sake of it and here you were being a fool.

“You still remember it?”, he gave in, giving you a bemused look.

“When it plagues my dreams, how can I not?”, you turned to see the top of the shimmering towers to hide the blush in your cheeks.

“Why did you say it?”, you asked, not wanting to wait any longer.

He tilted his head back, to rest it on the wall behind him. A sad smile spreading across his face as he began to reminisce.

“You bumped into me in the corridor and my coffee splashed all over your coat. Yet you got me a refill with your number written on the side. You could have danced away the night at that office party and yet you chose to stand by me. And that night…”, he closed his eyes as he sighed and you knew the ache he felt. It was why it felt soothing to be by his side. You shared a sadness that only in each other’s company did it have a possibility to turn into happiness.

“You could have gone home. You could have left me to my fate. Instead here you are, suffering the cost of trying to warn me.”, his eyes slowly found yours.

“Why?”, he asked softly that the tone of his voice was a dagger to your heart.

“Why did you ask for me to come back to you?”, you answered it with a question. Only if he told you the truth first.

“Because you and I are the same. We are the same kind and without you… without out you, I don’t make sense.”, he said it in an urgency almost as if it had been pent up all these years.

“Now why didn’t you go home that night?”, he held you by your shoulders.

“Why did you have to risk your life to save mine?”, he shook you and you couldn’t keep it together longer.

“I had to. I couldn’t lose you.”, you responded but he didn’t seem satisfied with it.

“No, why did you do it?”, he edged closer as though this particular question had kept him up at night.

“Because I loved you.”, your eyes were fixed on his, not wanting to shy away anymore.

“And as stupid as it sounds, I still do. You, you’re the other half of me. That catastrophic night has tied us together forever and I can’t seem to leave you behind.”, you admitted crumbling into his arms, tucking your head under his chin as if you would loved to just be frozen here.

“But it’s cruel and unfair. We’re a forbidden match.”, he whispered as he placed his lips onto the top of your head.

“Because I can’t touch you?”, you asked and felt the depth of his sigh.

“Because I can’t kiss you.”, he said.

“You’ve never tried to.”, you told him as you pushed away from him to find his gaze.

“And have you?”, he asked.

“Yes.”, you smiled sheepishly.

“Whenever you weren’t looking at me.”, you said quietly to watch his eyes soften.

He took your hands in his and slowly raised it up to his cheek as you fought his hold.

“No, Miguel, stop.”, you panicked, you could feel your claws beginning to protract. To scratch the surface of his skin but it didn’t seem to bother him.

“The trick to dealing with claws is…”, he paused, your hand secure in his as it hovered over his cheek.

“is to forget you have them.”, he said it as he held your gaze and as you calmed down, you began to forget, about the claws, about the past, about everything else. You drowned into the thick brown clay of his eyes and gasped as you felt the soft skin of his cheek under your fingers for the first time, your claws weren’t there anymore. He reveled in the warmth of your fingers as he leaned into it and you leaned closer to him.

But the closer you got, the more he froze.

“Claws aren’t the same as fangs.”, he tried to hold you away but you held both his wrists in your hands and gently pinned them to the side. He could have used his entire force to stop you but he didn’t. He didn’t, because he wanted to be proved wrong.

“I don’t want to hurt you.”, he said quietly as he closed his eyes.

“The beauty of being the same spider species is that”, you paused, to hover over his lips as he exhaled ragged breaths.

“I’m immune to your venom.”, you whispered as you kissed him and you couldn’t hold him down anymore. The moment his hands broke free, they were everywhere, in your hair, up your thighs, behind your waist.

You felt the sharp tip of his fang as your tongue traced over it and it only seemed to fuel him more. Your claws hadn’t emerged and so you sunk your hand into the ends on his hair. He picked you up, to place you on the floor to get on top of you as he never let go of your lips, he made you breathless that the moment you pulled away you gasped for air, he placed kisses on the length of your neck to run the tip of his nose under your jaw to tilt your face, to expose the underside of it to cover it with the impression of his lips.

The edges of his teeth traced the surface of your skin sending a shock through your system when you heard him hum, as your claws scratched his back, his suit protecting him from getting hurt.

“You’re the only woman for me.”, he laughed against your skin, murmuring words in spanish adoring you as he continued to let his lips roam. His hands gathering all your hair in his hands as he held you firm against his chest.

“Hmm enough talking.”, you mumbled pulling him by the width of his neck to you and that was all he needed, for his eyes to turn into slits as his lips found yours again, his tongue nudging the corner of your mouth to deepen the kiss as you forgot about the world around you.

There was no sign of tragedy here anymore.

#miguel o'hara x you #miguel o'hara x reader #miguel ohara #miguel o'hara #miguel x reader #miguel x you #miguel spiderverse #atsv miguel #miguel o'hara fluff #miguel o hara #miguel o'hara fanfiction #spiderman 2099

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tlcartist · 1 year

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On the matter of Jonathan Joestar

I talked a bit about how JJBA plays around with moral ambiguity with it's protagonists here and briefly mentioned how I'd talk about Jonathan separately and that time has come! There are certain aspects of his personality that I find interesting, but don't often see discussed and I'd like to dig into them a bit. Before we begin I will say that, while I did my best to draw from the source material, this does involve a degree of headcanon so take it with a grain of salt.

Background

The problem with Jonathan is that his character is woefully underdeveloped. This was the result of multiple factors such as, A) Jonathan being the first JoJo and Araki was still developing the story and figuring out what he wanted it to be. B) JoJo pt 1 was a product of it's time and was influenced by works of the period like Fist of the North Star. This was an era of power fantasies and led to stories of big beefy dudes punching things but without much in terms of nuance or broader character development. C) Pt 1 was given a much shorter arc at only 44 chapters and therefore Araki had less time to explore his character than future JoJos. Compare this with Battle Tendency being 69 (nice) chapters and Stardust Crusaders being 152 chapters. Because of all of this we are, unfortunately, limited in what we can glean of his personality from the manga, but there are a couple of things I want to touch on.

Duty vs Concern

While we might not see the type of radical character development from Jonathan that we see in later JoJos, what we do see is a shift in perspective as he matures. This can be seen in his first encounter with Erina.

This is a boy who was motivated less out of an altruistic motive and genuine concern and more out of a sense of duty. This is something he's been taught is the Right Thing for a Gentleman to do. A woman is in danger and a man swoops in and rescues her. It wasn't so much about protecting Erina as it was about being The Hero.

It isn't until he's able to spend time with Erina that he's able to see her as a real person and not just a damsel in distress. While their time together in those early days was cut short, I think it really helped Jonathan to broaden his perspective and sense of empathy. That's not to say that Jonathan was a bad person, he was just a rich kid who spent the majority of his life being a bit coddled, but each new relationship he gained helped him mature.

We see a shift from the young boy playing the role of The Hero because the thought it was expected of him to a man who puts his life on the line because he wants to, because he'll do anything to protect and avenge the people he cares about.

This is a man who has become hardened through the experience of loss and pain, and those experiences helped him to really truly care for others, not out of societal expectations or chivalry, but out of love.

Ironically, it's this growth that leads us to the thing you could argue is simultaneously Jonathan's biggest flaw.

Compassion to a fault

Jonathan is a character whose greatest strength is also his greatest weakness, that being his unyielding optimism. He's the type of person who is always wanting to see the best in those around him and it's this flaw that Dio took advantage of from day 1. Regardless of how much of a little shit Dio proved himself to be in their youth, Jonathan wanted to believe that wasn't beyond the point of redemption. He wanted to believe that there was a small part of Dio that had some goodness, that could experience regret and remorse even when all evidence proved to the contrary. And it was that optimism, that compassion which lead to Jonathan lowering his guard which allowed Dio to seize the opportunity and strike.

This was a quality that we also saw reflected in Jonathan's father, who also had a history of overlooking the glaring red flags in Dario, not because he was oblivious, but because he wanted to believe he'd become a better person. A quality which led to George taking in Dio even though he was under no obligation to do so, and (we can only assume), choosing to overlook any red flags the boy may have shown in his youth.

George's death was the shock Jonathan needed to realize the truth, that Dio was irredeemable and that he'd chosen to strip himself of his humanity long before donning the stone mask.

AND YET

In spite of the loss of his father and countless others during his quest to defeat Dio, there's still a small part of Jonathan that holds a bit of fondness for him, even at the end of all things. Jonathan's strength is that unlike Dio, he chooses to retain his goodness and humanity.

It was the goodness of Jonathan's heart that allowed him to perhaps be the only one who's ever truly known Dio, the only one who's seen beyond his bravado and facade. And it was this goodness that led to their fates being connected forever.

#jjba #jonathan joestar #jojo's bizarre adventure #character analysis #jojo no kimyou na bouken #b talks jojo #I am once again here to ramble about the silly beefy pretty man anime #I don't even know if this is coherent but I tried #it really is a shame that we didn't get to know Jonathan better #anyway as always open to hearing thoughts and opinions from others so if I done fucked up royally let me know lmao #honestly I probably could have written more about this but even I have my limits

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horseprophecy · 1 year

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(click for better quality!)

here we have one yaoki hanato, looking very cold and composed externally, but maybe not so much on the inside :3

other facts include:

in the grand scheme of things, yaoki’s family is relatively young, only really getting its start during the heian period. its rapid power gain is, of course, mostly due to the curse affecting the family, which have caused their innate talents to gradually shift from more benevolent disciplines of onmyoudou, to ones more focused on sowing discord and misfortune. for the most part though, yaoki’s relatives are still able to perform benevolent onmyoudou - he himself is the major exception, marking an enormous spike in curse-casting talent in exchange for lowered ability in other fields of onmyoudou.

yaoki’s mystic eye is his left eye. its primary effect of causing misfortune and accidents to occur is exacerbated when he expresses strongly with his face, so he takes great care to keep his facial expression neutral. this effect can feed off of his emotions too, though, and sometimes can activate entirely on its own. most of the time, accidents that occur because of his eye are small, and not easily traced to him - nosebleeds, sudden gusts of cold wind, broken shoelaces or bag straps, stubbed toes, etc, but he has seen burst pipes, broken windows, twisted ankles, and even broken limbs once or twice. no one has died, at least to his knowledge, but he lives with the constant, subtle dread that it could happen anytime, and that he can never really tell which blips of bad luck are “his fault” and which ones aren’t.

the secondary effect of his mystic eye is the ability to see visions of potential future disasters, but the key word here is potential, because these visions don’t always come true. the more likely it is to occur, the more vivid they are. he tries to call out potential dangers when he can prove his concern is warranted, but he has a hard time explaining his worry as anything more than unfounded anxiety to people who don’t know him.

yaoki is an excellent cook. as his mystic eye affects himself less than it does others, he spent a lot of time learning his way around the kitchen when he was young in order to keep his parents from getting hurt. he’s generally not a confrontational person, but he is quick to assert that no one come in the kitchen while he’s also there.

when the eerie blue flames of his magecraft burn especially strongly, they sometimes take the shape of a fox with its skull exposed and display something like a will of their own. whether this is a manifestation of the kitsune’s grudge, or something created of yaoki’s own power is not known to him.

while yaoki is not a kitsune himself, he does display a striking resemblance to what is known of the kitsune who laid the curse on his family, most notably in his face shape and heterochromatic eyes. on top of that, he shows a few behaviors heavily associated with kitsune, most notably a love of aburaage (fried tofu).

his fascination with the number eight extends beyond a simple lucky number - in an attempt to find a way to counteract his misfortune-causing, he’s found that repeating an action eight times (tapping something, flipping a switch, drawing circles with his finger, etc) when he feels something bad is going to happen seems to help stave it off. it does work directly in a way, as calming himself down discourages his eye from acting up.

the seals on his body are his own attempt at dampening the effect his curse power has on his surroundings, but while he’s gotten better with practice, he’s not terribly good at making them.

“ah, please be careful, i think that stair will break if anyone walks on it. hm? oh, i’m… yaoki. nice to meet you.”

#fgo #fgo fate grand order #fgo oc #fgo master oc #mastersona #fate grand order #fate grand order oc #yaoki hanato #oc art #fgo art #traditional art #my art

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 7 months

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Last night I did a road trip with my dad, and he wanted to listen to the James Acaster episode of the Marc Maron WTF podcast, so we did. And it reminded me of how much I fucking hate Marc Maron, so I thought I’d write a post complaining about him.

James Acaster was fairly interesting in the episode. It was mainly stuff I’d heard before, before I’ve heard James Acaster interviewed a bunch of times before, and I’ve heard him say some of that stuff in stand-up. Which I think is partly a sign of Marc Maron not being a great interviewer – if you’re going to spend over an hour with someone, it’s nice if you can ask something original enough to get them to tell a story they haven’t already told on every other podcast or show. But it was still interesting stuff.

I just do not understand how the hell Marc Maron is so successful. I know he is very successful. My dad likes him, and kept defending him to me by saying he’s interviewed Barak Obama and stuff. I know that. I know he’s done very well so clearly a lot of people like him. I just don’t understand why.

I kept comparing it to the Comedian’s Comedian podcast, which James Acaster has done five times and I’ve listened to them all, so that’s where I first heard a bunch of the stories he told on WTF. But they sounded so much better on that other podcast, which allows for a direct comparison showing why Stuart Goldsmith is so much better at this than Marc Maron.

I’ve said before that I think when it comes to the technical skills involved in being an interviewer, Stuart Goldsmith is very, very good at it. Hearing the WTF episode made me want to break down what those skills are, because I think Marc Maron is bad at them.

Stuart Goldsmith is so prepared for every interview. He’s clearly just really knowledgeable about comedy in general, but also, before each interview he’ll read or watch or listen to everything he can about a guest. He tells us that he gets his guests to send them any recordings they might have of their current material, even if it’s just audio they make of themselves on stage so they can go back over their set, so he can listen to it and ask them relevant questions. And then he’ll go back and read their book or watch their specials or whatever else. And I guess it’s possible that he’s sometimes lying when he says “I read your book before this interview,” but I don’t think so. Partly because when he says that it’s always followed by him asking some question about some specific thing in their book (or radio show, or recent stand-up release, or whatever he found in his research), proving he at least skimmed it. And partly because he does occasionally say “Sorry, I didn’t have time to [watch/read] your [one specific thing they’ve done]”, just often enough so I know that when he claimed he did watch/read a thing he means it because he’d tell us if he didn’t. Also, his apology is usually followed by the guest saying it’s fine, they certainly don’t expect an interviewer to have read everything they’ve done. And his questions related to their specific work are often followed by the guest being surprised and impressed that he does know so much about them. Especially when he pulls out his knowledge of obscure things they did ages ago, which I think he may occasionally do just to show off, but it’s still cool.

This isn’t just a theoretical principle of being a diligent interviewer who should do homework, it makes a huge difference to the interview’s quality. If you don’t know anything about a person, you can’t ask anything besides the basics, and they’ve answered questions about the basics a million times before. If I wanted to hear a comedians give their basic biographical details, I could look up some short interview they gave to a magazine or some shit. The point of a podcast is supposed to be that you have more time with them, you get into more details. But only if the interviewer knows what they’re talking about. I really love the specific balance that Stuart Goldsmith strikes with that – that he will do a quick “okay, for any listeners who might not know, let’s do a very short summary of who you are”, but then he’ll move on fast in discussions that start with the assumption that the listener already knows the basics. I like that he respects his audience enough to aim it at the nerds.

That’s probably my favourite thing about Stuart Goldsmith, and God, is Marc Maron ever the opposite of that. Could not be more different. To be fair to Marc, I have only listened to four episodes of his podcast, and they were all with British comedians: John Oliver, Andy Zaltzman, Stewart Lee, and James Acaster. And he very clearly – he could not make this more clear, saying it repeatedly – know fuck all about British comedy. He’s done over a thousand episodes, so maybe his ability to prepare for interviews shouldn’t be judged on just those four. Maybe he normally does know about his interviewees, if they’re in American showbusiness, and those four episodes are outliers. Maybe. I don’t know.

But in those four episodes, he makes it so clear that he knows nothing. Even about John Oliver, who was in American showbusiness. He certainly knew nothing about John’s career in England (which as of then wasn’t that long ago, it was 2012 so John had only been in America for six years, it wouldn’t be delving way into ancient history for an interviewer to know something about his ties to comedy in Britain), but he didn’t even seem to know anything about what John did in America, aside from work on The Daily Show. And even then, he didn’t want to talk about what The Daily Show was like or seem to know anything about John’s role on it, he only brought it up to try to get John Oliver to talk shit about Jon Stewart. Which again shows how little he knows, because anyone who’s heard John Oliver say anything about his Daily Show boss would know that you’ll never get a bad word about Jon Stewart out of that guy.

So it annoyed me in that interview, but it was even more pronounced in the other ones. And… okay, I hate saying this, Andy Zaltzman is of course number one in my heart and everything, but it does seem maybe fair enough for Marc Maron to not know about him. I think a decent interviewer would have researched at least a little bit about Andy Zaltzman’s career before doing the episode, but not doing so just makes Marc Maron a bad interviewer, not ignorant of comedy. While for the other three – Marc not only knew less about them than I’d expect of an interviewer, he knew less than I’d expect of any comedian, even an American one. Stewart Lee and James Acaster are two of the most famous comedians in the world, maybe the former’s not a household name but they’re both incredibly famous among comedy nerds – how does Marc Maron get to claim to be such an important and influential comedian (which I think he does, his podcast is supposed to be a really big deal) if he doesn’t even know about them? Also, during John Oliver’s episode, John said he was close friends with Richard Ayoade at Cambridge, and Marc Maron said he’d never heard of Richard Ayoade. In 2012. What the hell?

I’ve just gone back to reread the post I made last year about how much he annoyed me during the John Oliver episode, to remember what was so bad about it. The cliff notes are that he just came off as really aggressively American for all 70 of the minutes, and I hated it. He kept interrupting John to ask for clarification about really basic British things that he could have just worked out from context if he’d been willing to think for half a second, like what a “headteacher” is. Or he kept saying weird things like how Liverpool (where John’s family is from, and lived there much more recently than the 60s) must just be this place full of Beatles mania so it must be wild to live there among all that (again, this was in response to John saying he visited family there when he was growing up in the 70s and 80s). And he kept assuming that John Oliver must love the queen because he’s British.

There was just this constant assumption that everything British is some strange and exotic thing, which is such an American assumption. No offense to any Americans on Tumblr – if you hang out on Tumblr, then I probably don’t mean you. But as a Canadian, it does really annoy me the way some Americans view American as the default and anything not American as a weird foreign curiosity. Marc Maron was doing that to an almost extreme degree when talking about even the tiniest differences between Britain and America.

Oh, and the other cliff notes of my post about the John Oliver episode were that it annoyed me how Marc Maron kept making things about himself, when I was there to hear from John. Including the excruciatingly awkward part where Marc brought up Jon Stewart, John Oliver very politely and respectful said he knows how Marc feels about Jon but John Oliver has nothing bad to say about Jon Stewart so they’ll have to just disagree on it, and then Marc kept trying anyway, for a while, to get him to talk shit about Jon Stewart. What did he think was going to happen there?

I know just enough about the Maron/Stewart feud to have that put me off Marc Maron as well, even though I probably don’t really know enough about it to judge him. The thing I read is that Marc Maron was a dick to Jon Stewart when they were earlier in their careers, then later on admitted that he only acted that way out of jealousy for Jon’s success, and invited Jon Stewart onto his podcast so he can apologize. Jon Stewart said he’d be willing to talk it out and hear an apology but only in private, and Marc Maron didn’t take him up on that. Which kind of taints the validity of any of Marc Maron’s on-air apologies, doesn’t it? I’ve only actually listened to those four episodes of his podcast, but I vaguely know that Marc Maron’s thing is supposed to be having people on his podcast to be really hones about times he’s treated them badly and try to apologize and make amends. I’m not sure any of those count since we know he turns down opportunities to apologize if he can’t get publicity out of it. But again, I may just not know enough about that story. Maybe he did meet Jon Stewart for coffee in 2013 and it’s fine.

He just comes off as gross to me, and I know that’s the point of him, the guy who’s honest about all his flaws and doesn’t pretend not to be gross. But something about that is not just shitty, but such a common type of shitty. I think that’s something else that puts me off about Marc Maron. He sucks in some specific ways that are so common. Acting like a dick and blaming it on his own insecurities. Apologizing but only if he can do it in a really performative way where he makes it all about himself by explaining that it’s just because he’s insecure. Being too myopic to bother learning things about other people, but still thinking of himself as a really empathetic and insightful person just because he’s constantly discussing deep issues with other people, in conversations that he makes all about himself. We all know people like that, and they fucking suck.

Which brings me to the next point: Stuart Goldsmith is a very good interviewer, I think, because he knows when to pull back with his guests. I think it’s something he’s been working on in the last few years, actually, because I’ve noticed he does it extra well in more recent episodes. There are times where he’ll ask a question then just shut up for five, six, or eight or so minutes, and let his guest talk. They’ll talk themselves from one topic to another, and he just lets them get there.

It’s an odd thing, because you rarely hear someone talk for so long uninterrupted in a format where they’re not the only person there. Normally, when the guest gets to the end of their multi-topic monologue, they’ll realize how long they’ve been going, and apologize for rambling or something. And Stuart will say no, they were being interesting and that’s why he shut up to let them talk. It’s a particular technique that I think he’s been working on, maybe based on the idea the guest knows themself better than he knows them, so if he can ask the right question to set them off on an interesting path, they can get themselves down the most interesting route along that path if he lets them find their own way.

Shutting up for 5-10 minutes in an interview, even when the guest finishes their original answer and starts to move to saying something else, is a bit of an odd technique, it’s on I like but I certainly don’t expect other interviewers to do it. I do, however, expect them to let their guest finish the fucking question they were asked. And Marc Maron doesn’t even manage that. He’s constantly interrupting, often to say something about himself, which be only slightly relevant to what his guest was actually saying.

I realize that’s supposed to be part of Marc Maron’s appeal. That he has really deep and interesting conversations because he shares so much deep and personal stuff about himself, and because of this, his guests open up more too. And I don’t know, maybe that’s true. I’ve only heard four episodes; maybe in other ones, he does do this well. But in the episodes I’ve heard, the stuff he says about himself doesn’t add to what he gets out of his guests. In the episodes I’ve heard, the guests will be trying to reveal something personal about themselves and he’ll interrupt them to talk about his own life.

I don’t think an interviewer should never talk about themself. I think a really clinical, overly professional interviewer who just asks the rote list of questions and never shares anything is also uninteresting. But there has to be a balance. I’ve learned a fair bit about Stuart Goldsmith by listening to his podcast interviews. He talks with his guests about whatever shared history they have. If he has experience or thoughts that are relevant to what a guest is saying, he’ll share them. And that includes fairly personal stuff, like talking about his anxiety and insecurities and things like that. But he doesn’t do it when his guest is in the middle of a sentence. He does it when it makes sense, and in a way that has some thought behind it. And a fair bit of the personal stuff he shares involve his personal thoughts/opinions/feelings about the specifics of the guest’s work, which are thoughts Marc can’t share during the interviews I’ve heard him do, because he doesn’t fucking know anything about their work.

So those are two things I love about Goldsmith’s interviewing that Marc Maron does terribly: letting his guests talk when they’re onto something interesting (or even just when they’re trying to finish a fucking sentence), and doing his research really well.

Another thing I love about Goldsmith is the way he decides when to push a line of questioning. He’s good at getting actual answers out of guests, even though they’re comedians who are clearly used to dodging interview questions by being comedic. He’ll often ask a question, get an answer in the form of a joke, laugh and play along a bit, and then say, “Okay, that was a good joke, but can you give me an actual answer?” Or he’ll sometimes say, “Tell me without turning it into material.” And you can hear the guest recalibrate a bit, surprised because most interviewers don’t do that, they want the comedian to be funny and entertaining even if that’s at the expense of giving honest and insightful answers. Sometimes it takes two or three tries to get through the recalibration and into the real discussion, but when they get there, it’s always worth it. There’s always something more interesting on the other side.

Other times, you can see that the comedian wasn’t making a joke just because they think they need to be funny in the interview, they were doing it because they wanted to dodge the question. And at that point there’s a bit of tension, where Goldsmith has to decide how hard to try to get them to give a real answer even if they find it mildly discomforting, or at what point to see they’re getting truly uncomfortable and to back off. He's always respectful about it, always listens if they clearly say “I don’t want to talk about that,” always says they’re allowed to refuse to answer. But sometimes, with a little extra pushing, he can get them to figure out their answer to a difficult question, and then conversation turns more interesting.

I think it’s worth clarifying, here, that this doesn’t generally mean he pushes them hard to talk about some specific aspect of their life that they want to keep private or anything. Normally, it means he’s asked a question about how their mind works or why they do a certain thing, they’ve made a joke because clearly the actual answer involves some psychologically complicated issue, and he tries to get them to delve into that issue instead of staying on the surface.

Sometimes this involves making guesses, which can be tricky and doesn’t always go right, but Stuart Goldsmith is, I think, really good at this tricky skill. Sometimes, if it seems like a guest isn’t sure what they think, or how to put it into words, or maybe they tend to do something without even noticing they’re doing it and they don't know how to talk about it, then Stuart Goldsmith will take a guess as to what they really mean. That’s a risk every time, because he has to analyze his guest in real time, and then hope he got it right. But most times I’ve heard him do it, it’s paid off. When he’s asked: “Do you think maybe you do this because… [guess he’s made that’s really specific and he could only have come up with it because he did so much research into their work beforehand]?”, they often say, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of it that way, you’re right.” And then they’ll expand on that, start talking their way into new understandings of things, and often this leads to one of those times when Stuart Goldsmith will just shut up for ages and let them go down the path he’s started, and it’s brilliant interviewing. High level stuff. Of course, a few times, I have heard his guests say no, his guess was wrong, they don’t do that. And on those occasions, Goldsmith has responded gracefully, deferring to them as the people who know themselves, retreating and changing course.

Again, Marc Maron could not possibly be any more different. Stuart Goldsmith clearly puts so much careful thought into that aspect of interviewing, and Marc Maron puts none. In that Acaster interview, he kept making guesses as to where James Acaster was going, and they kept being wrong. They were guesses that not only could have been proven wrong by some careful analysis, they could be proven wrong by a basic knowledge of James Acaster’s work. They were ignorant guesses from a guy who didn’t know what he was talking about, and that’s another reason to do your research before interviews.

God, he was so annoying with James Acaster. Before the interview, he did this introduction thing in which he said he first heard of James Acaster when Repertoire went on YouTube, and he was upset at the audacity of some kid dropping four specials at once. Which actually seems like a fair enough opinion – James Acaster had done a lot in Britain before Repertoire went on Netflix, but he wasn’t internationally famous, I guess it’s fine to not know him, and yeah, dropping four specials at once when you’ve never done one before is a huge thing to do. So, okay, it’s all right if Marc Maron started out thinking of him that way. It’s fine for this story to start that way, this thing that will clearly be a story of “And then I actually watched those specials and realized they were brilliantly creative, and of course we’ve all seen Cold Lasagne now, what a great comedian!”

But it wasn’t going there. He said he refused to watch Repertoire for ages, because he was annoyed about it existing. But then he finally did watch… two of the four of them. But he didn’t say anything about his thoughts on the comedy in them, just said it was cool that he had a coloured microphone. During the interview itself, he mentioned that he saw the first half of the Cold Lasagne video, but not the second half. And that’s it. And he asked James Acaster a bunch of basic questions that no one would have to ask if they already knew anything about him.

I guess I’m comparing apples to oranges here. Stuart Goldsmith aims his podcast at the nerds because that’s who listens to him. Comedy nerds who already know who his guests are, and want to hear a more in-depth discussion with them. While Marc Maron has a lot of listeners who aren’t there to learn more about a guest whom they already know a lot about, they’re there because they like Marc Maron and want to hear him talk. I guess he delivers on that. If you want to hear Marc Maron talk, you’ll get a lot of that in his interviews.

Other things that have annoyed me about Marc Maron:

- He’s one of those men who’s known for frequently dating women who are half his age. This doesn’t make a guy a predator (as long he’s old enough for half his age to be older than a teenager, which he is), he’s not that, it’s no a #metoo situation. It’s just gross. I don’t think guys like that should be canceled, but I find it gross.

I do know that sometimes, a man will meet a much younger woman (or it will happen with some other gender combination and I don't think that's any better, I find it equally gross that Stephen Fry's husband is half his age - but it does seem worth pointing out that when this happens it's usually an older man with a younger woman), they just happen to get along very well, and they enter a relationship that doesn't say anything else about what either of them is like as a person. Maybe sometimes. But not usually, especially if it's a pattern, which it apparently is with Marc Maron. If it's a pattern, then that does say something about what the older person involved is like, and the thing it says is "creepy".

Also, he did a joke about how he wants to sleep with teenage girls, which I could actually possibly forgive on the grounds that it’s just a joke, if not for the circumstances around it. I can think of lots of male comics who could say “Hey, we all want to fuck teenage girls, right?”, and I’d understand that the joke is they’re doing a parody of gross older men and do not really believe that. But 1) Marc Maron actually does date much younger, so when he makes a “joke” about wishing he could go even younger than that it sounds like he probably really means it, and that makes his habit of dating younger women even more gross, and 2) when someone suggested he take down a clip of that joke, he called the guy “totalitarian” and said there should be nothing wrong with saying that because it’s a true fact of life that adult men really do want to fuck teenage girls. So… not “just a joke”, then.

"Age ain't nothing but a number - but it is also a very accurate barometer of how old you are." - David O'Doherty (I'm including that quote because I like it, even though DO'D may not be the best person to quote here as it's a bit weird how much younger Claudia O'Doherty was when he dated her, I think they were 30 and 23, but that's a much smaller gap than the ones I'm talking about with Maron, probably in the realm of weird but not automatically creepy, especially as it's not a pattern and DO'D had the decency to say he also found the age gap uncomfortable, rather than Marc Maron who's repeatedly said the age gaps are great because younger women are more attractive, and that's what I mean about there being some nuance to it, that I don't think all age gaps automatically terrible, it depends on the attitude involved)

- He pronounces “Edinburgh” wrong. I probably also pronounce “Edinburgh” wrong, I think it’s a hard word to say in a North American accent, but I at least know how it’s supposed to sound, while Maron says it in a way that makes it clear he does not know that. And it’s weird that he doesn’t know that, because he’s a world famous comedian who did a run at Edinburgh in 2007.

- He did a run at Edinburgh in 2007 and will not shut the fuck up about much he hated it. I mean, this is clearly selection bias – I assume he doesn’t go on about that in most of his interviews. It just feels to me like he’s always going on about it because he happened to go on about it in the four interviews I’ve heard him do, since they were all with British comedians. But God, he went on about it a lot. And all his complaints clearly came from the same issues that plagues his interviewing skills, which is a lack of willingness to do any preparation. He clearly went to Edinburgh with no idea of what happens at that festival, and instead of realizing the problem was him and maybe he should have learned about how things work in other places before jumping into them, he thinks that other place is wrong. Again… I don’t want to reinforce American stereotypes or anything, but I’d argue that he’s the one reinforcing American stereotypes here, I’m just pointing it out. The myopia is so strong.

- During the John Oliver interview, he talked some shit about Daniel Kitson and it made the back of my neck prickle like a porcupine. Not that I don’t think anyone should ever criticize Daniel Kitson. There are some perfectly reasonable criticisms to make about Daniel Kitson. I, myself, have at times criticized some things about Daniel Kitson. But fucking hell, the way he did it made me want to jump directly into a car and not stop driving until I have arrived in New York so I could punch him. He was being sort of ostensibly complimentary, but so backhanded and condescending about it, and it came from a place of having no fucking idea what he was talking about, but somehow thinking there was any value to him talking about it anyway. You’re not important enough for us to need to hear your thoughts on shit you know nothing about, Marc.

I think it made John Oliver a bit defensive too, he made a point of saying “Daniel Kitson was my best friend” a couple of times, and shortly after the Kitson shit talk was the only time I’ve ever heard John Oliver say anything good about his comedy career in England. Normally John Oliver just talks about how he failed as a comic in England, but in that WTF interview, when Marc Maron kept saying that clearly nothing of value happened with John’s comedy in England, and kept making it clear that he doesn’t see value in any British comedy stuff including Kitson, John said that to be fair, he did make some good stuff in England, he had a comedy career there, he got to make a living at it, he likes some of it.

So there you go, I keep hearing that Marc Maron is some great interviewer because he gets stuff out of his guests that you won’t hear from them anywhere else, and I guess in this instance, it’s true. He managed to be so offensively ignorant in conversation with John Oliver that he got John to defend the comedy he did in Britain, which you won’t hear John Oliver do anywhere else. I still think he can fuck off, though.

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person8789 · 2 years

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Adventures through Twisted Wonderland Book 5- A Beautiful Tyrant

Part 23/?

Previous, Next

Spoilers!

Click pics for better quality

Vil’s journey to insanity continues

I kinda mentioned this last part, but I definitely get why Vil was upset. Did he handle that anger well? No, but tbh I would be pissed too

ME TOO BESTIE

In all seriousness though I think it’s really cool how everything just sort of stopped all at once and without any words at all gave us a hint on the kind of mindset Vil is in right now.

Oh look at Yuu getting visions while they’re awake now.. I wonder if that’s gonna start happening more frequently after chapter 6..

Ok, Yuu. Let’s think about this one realistically. What exactly are you planning on doing to stop him? What would you realistically be able to do on your own to stop him? Now, I get that you probably didn’t realize what exactly he was planning on doing. But you did know that it wasn’t anything good, yes? So now you’ve followed Vil to be a witness to his murder attempt with no back up other than Grim. If this was someone else and not Vil this would be a very dangerous move and could potentially get you killed right along with him. Besides that you were still very lucky that there were others that noticed there was someone going on with Vil as well, because seeing how this scene played out, you didn’t seem to have much hope of stopping this on your own. Let someone know next time don’t just follow him on your own snsuxgshj

Now Vil. Time for you to think about this one realistically. Let’s say Neige drinks the apple juice and kicks the bucket. Since you were the last person who was seen near him, giving him something to consume, you would more than likely be the main suspect. There’s also the fact that yes, technically Neige was alone, but Yuu and Grim followed you here, and will be witnesses to Neige’s death. Not to mention the fact that there are probably cameras set up here as well…. Or at least, I hope there are. Either way, the fact that you’re using that specific brand of apple juice is another strike against you since you yourself posted about it recently. Again, not to mention how all of this would reflect on Epel and his family. Point is, if you had succeeded in this, it really wouldn’t have worked out for you. You’re smarter than this, Vil.

And Rook. You didn’t think I was going to leave you out of this rant, did you? Absolute dumbass right here. So you were going to drink a poisoned drink that you knew was poisoned because you “want to believe in him”. Just what did you think you going to accompany by doing that? Like, what was the goal? Because you knew it was poisoned, given your own urgency for Neige to leave as well as you quite clearly seeing Vil’s reaction. So tell me, how is drinking that apple juice going to help anyone? It would be one thing for you to tell Neige that you need it to drink it simply as a means of getting it away from him, but even after he left you were still going to drink it so what exactly are you trying to prove by drinking this on purpose? Not only does it just not make any sense for you to do this, it makes things worse for Vil as well. You’re ultimately adding on to the guilt that Vil is already going to be feeling and is ultimately going to be the cause of his overblot. If you want him to see that what he’s doing is wrong, this is probably the worst way to go about it.

On another note, Kalim gets absolutely pissed in this scene at Vil and Rook, which I honestly love. I’m glad that we’re getting a highlight that Kalim is more emotionally intelligent than he might seem and also Rook being yelled at for his nonsensical, unhelpful actions as well as Vil getting yelled at for stooping the way he did after telling the team that they were going to win fairly.

I mentioned this a little above, but guilt is in fact the thing that ultimately leads to Vil’s overblot, but the way that he “explains” it is interesting to me. So Vil is obsessed with this Image of “beauty” and “ugliness” but it’s all metaphorical for his attitude and actions. That’s the reason why Neige was seen as the fairest of all, because he was seen as pure and “pretty”. That’s the reason Vil was jealous of him. Vil wanted to be a hero and to be seen as this version of beautiful and pure and be the fairest of all as a result. Just now, he tried to do something that was in great contrast to what he wanted for himself, he did something “ugly” in spirit. Now he sees himself as an “ugly villain”, which from what I can tell, would be something close to being his greatest fear, and is also feeling the guilt that’s associated with that. This is the reason why he overblots.

Ok so on another note I think it’s hilarious that we can choose weather Yuu is paralyzed or not I don’t really know I find it so funny but I do lmao

If overblot bad, why hot?

I mean.. actually no, I don’t really have anything else to say here. He’s beautiful.

Welp. Let’s see if I’m going to get my ass kicked.

If it’s bad enough I’ll make a separate post about it lmao like I did with Jamil. ✌️

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mk-wizard · 3 years

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Big Hero 6 The Series: It could have been better

Hello, friends. Today, I will be analyzing a TV series based on a movie that I fell in love with for its colourful themes, deep plot, compelling characters, great CGI and memorable messages. Before I get into it, I want to take a moment to say that I have quit doing videos. They are too big of a pain in the petunia to make and I write better than I speak, so I will stick to writing essays, reviews and more. Anyway, onto the analysis.

All I can say about Big Hero 6 the series is that it had a great concept, it presented some great ideas and tried hard to be a cartoon of the times, but it could have and should have been a lot better. The show’s downfall all centers around trying too hard to be kid friendly which makes the shame sting all the more because Big Hero 6 was already kid friendly even with its dark themes, sharp edges and intelligent writing. If anything, even the brightest kid friendly cartoons (Steven Universe, She-Ra, etc.) had those things and actually benefitted from them. By needlessly trying too hard, character development got scrapped, the edges were all smoothed out, storytelling was subpar, the humour was too silly and the executive meddling in the end produced a dismal final season. However, I don’t want this analysis to be one lengthy negative rant about how awful the series was because in its defense, awful is an unfair word. It did have potential and ideas which are worth carrying over to a reboot that I hope will be done someday in the future. Also, we should root for a reboot because Big Hero 6 would not be the first story that needs it before striking gold. Just look at how many times Spider-Man was rebooted in film before MCU found the version that worked. Anyway, I will list all the things in Big Hero 6 that could have been better in my opinion;

1- Go easy on the laughs and be more generous with the action. - I love adding comedy to my own writing because I think a good sense of humour makes everything better, but Big Hero 6 is not a stand up comedy routine. It is a superhero story where we expect action, suspense and life or death situations that are to be taken seriously first. The comedy should be for relief and with the right timing. Also, the chibi cutscenes and having characters act like fools aren’t funny. Ren and Stimpy are the exception not the standard and their way of making you laugh doesn’t fit an action series. In a show as big as Big Hero 6, real life physics and danger matters.

2- Make the villains menacing and gritty. - I admit that after having a movie villain like Yokai who was the stuff of nightmares, it is going to be a challenging act to follow, but it was obvious that the writers were trying especially with some villains who could have easily gone into some dark relatable territory. For example, Mr. Sparkles (the gentleman in the photo above) embodies social media and Internet personalities. Right off the bat, you have a long list of things which embody the dark side of that like scams, fraud, using social media to dox or harass, driving people to suicide, online predators, the Internet personalities being very depressed people in real life, and much more horrifying things. When you stop and look at it, Mr. Sparkles even looks like the Joker which hints how dark and scary he could have been if the stops were removed. The same goes for enemies like Hardlight who embodies online gaming, Liv with cloning, Obake an amoral and insane scientist, and Trina and Noodle Burger Boy (more on him later) being evil robots. Globby especially should have been painted and written in much darker colours rather being played off for laughs because he has many parallels with Clay Face. The only two villains who I can say were supposed to be campy, charming and comical were Baron Von Steamer and Supersonic Sue because they were a satire of the Adam West style villains.

The rest of them needed to be dark and threatening including Mr. Sparkles. In fact, I would love a rebooted version of Mr. Sparkles who gives me the heebie-jeebies. Going back to Noodle Burger Boy, I must confess that I was actually excited when I heard that he was going to be the main villain of the final season because I thought he was going to fulfill his master’s final wish and as a reminder, Noodle Burger Boy was based on a super robot for military purposes.

It would have been fantastic if Noodle Burger Boy was upgraded into a full military war machine with a new threatening look. For that, I think all of the villains deserve to be rebooted and have their full potential unlocked for better or for worse.

3- A show about geniuses merits genius level art quality. - I am usually forgiving towards art styles, but in the case of Big Hero 6, the oversimplified style with minimal details and lack of textures did not suit the show. The characters blend in with the background which makes them look flat and the special effects were extremely dulled down. I also know for a fact that Disney can do a lot better than this because I saw how superbly Tangled the Series was drawn.

You can see and almost feel the difference in quality, the number of layers and level of detail between the two styles. I think there was no excuse Big Hero 6 was not done in the same style and at the same level if not better as Tangled.

3- Don’t dumb down or flanderize amazing characters. - I absolutely detest it when characters are flanderized because it makes them one dimensional and grating. For example, Go Go is tough as nails and extremely calm, but she is not cold or hesitant towards helping her friends. She doesn’t require very special episodes for us to know that. If anything, the movie version of Go Go reminded me a lot of Garnet in how she deconstructed the broody character. She isn’t cold or emotionless. Just calm and mature. Another good example was how Honey Lemon was rewritten to be overly positive to the point of toxicity, naïve and oblivious with a juvenile obsession with stickers. Then you have poor Fred who was rewritten to be an incompetent fool. The spark that makes Big Hero 6 shine is that they are a team of geniuses meaning they are all intelligent. Even Fred is genius in his own way just not a scientific one. He has a vivid imagination, he is resourceful and can get himself out of tight spots. Please, don’t turn characters into dummies especially if their intelligence is a part of them. It doesn’t make them better or funnier. It ruins them.

4- Tadashi needs closure and honour. - I am all for Hiro making peace with the loss of his brother, but Tadashi is to the Big Hero 6 team what Uncle Ben was to Spider-Man. His loss was the catalyst if not the reason. He should never be forgotten. Moreover, there was never any true closure to him especially with the possibility that he may still be alive up in the air. After all, like Callaghan, his body was never found and it turned out that Callaghan was still alive.

With that said, who is to say that Tadashi was not secretly still alive and just hiding or being hidden? This is something that Disney really needed to clear up if not for the fans, then at least as a service to such an important character. Never just forget about them.

5- The format can only be episodic with a deep plots, continuity and character development. - Random episodes with a mere monster of the day is an outdated format which doesn’t fit Big Hero 6′s modern and bright setting. In seasons 1 and 2, when the episodes were plot heavy with character development, the series shined brightest. It also helped move the story along, but with the final season, plot was removed, closure was abandoned or poorly written if any was given, and characters were disallowed from growing. A good example at how plot and character development could have made this series and its characters better was the relationship between Hiro and Megan. Would it have truly survived or would they have broken up?

Would Richardson Mole have eventually lost interest in his obsession with besting and bullying Fred or would his obsession consume him compelling him to become a super villain? I do see quite a few similarities between Mole and Reverse Flash.

Then you have Karmi who is in my opinion, the biggest wild card of the bunch. She was intentionally introduced as an arrogant, prickly and unlikable yet complex character who rivaled Hiro bitterly.

Yet had a huge crush on his alter ego and as time went on, started to grow up and even form a friendship with Hiro. What would have happened further down the road with her? Would she have become a super hero herself? Or maybe even another love interest for Hiro kind of like how Black Cat is for Spider-Man?

Is Obake really gone?

What does the future hold Diana (Liv’s clone), Liv herself or the Sycorax the genetics company?

Is Alistair Krei going to become an ally to Big Hero 6 or an antagonist? There is also the issue at how little we know about the other Big Hero 6 characters other than Fred, Hiro and Baymax. What are Honey Lemon, Wasabi and Go Go’s backstories? These questions matter and while not every mystery can be solved, leaving none of them solved is lazy writing.

6- Executives, kindly stay out of the writing and any other part of the creative process. - I’m sorry, execs, but there is no nice way to say it. History itself proves that every time executives got involved in the creative process of any media, it got worse not better. Leave the writing to the creative team and the execs should only handle the legal stuff. Please. We understand that TV is a business, but writing itself is not. It is an art which you just don’t have a talent for. Let the creative people do their thing with the freedom necessary and you do your thing, deal? Deal.

7- Focus on Hiro and Baymax. - The are the main characters so keep them at the heart of the series no matter what happens around them. That is all I can say.

And that sums up all the things that could have made Big Hero 6 the series better, but this is all just my opinion. What is yours?

PS: I am well aware that the Big Hero 6 series is being retconned because a new series called Baymax is in the works as well as the long awaited sequel to the first movie. I am looking forward to both with an open mind. PPS: I also am aware that some people liked this show the way it was including the art style and I am cool with that. An analysis for art that includes cartoons is never right or wrong. It is solely based on opinion. I may have thought this series could have been better, but there are people who make arguments that it could have been worse.

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bibbykins · 4 years

Text

Tandem Heartbeats and Close Calls

A/N: Hi everyone! I had started this little drabble forever ago and recently finished it in a half-asleep stupor, so I hope you can forgive the quality. It’s not my best work, but I do want to give the time I spent finishing it justice by posting. Also, I know a ton of people want some sort of part two or continuance for Embroidery, and I do too, so until I can muster a proper part-two, please enjoy this drabble... which is also me committing myself to a series of fight/make up drabbles for the soft yan boys. Either way, I hope you all enjoy and have a lovely day/night!

Pairing: Soft Yandere! (Embroidery) Kim Taehyung x Reader

Word Count: 2.2k

Warnings: toxic relationship, unhealthy relationship, panic attack, sensory overload meltdown/reaction, mean/degrading words, dissociation (kinda), emotional manipulation- this is not a depiction of a good or healthy couple this is an installment in the dark romance that I write for a mature (18+ since the first installment is rated as such) audience and do not wish nor intend for anyone to glorify or strive for this kind of relationship and I do not think anyone in BTS would act like this at all IRL, this is a work of fiction depicting a relationship that could not exist as such or functionally IRL,I could go on for days about this but please know that much. Also if I left out anything else I should add in the warnings I am so sorry and please let me know.

Summary: He just wanted to stand up for you and you just wanted to stand on your own. The thought of you doing anything on your own, without him, shakes him to his very core.

You hated tension. You hated anger and the silence that came from having no words to properly express emotions. Yet, here you were with Taehyung, sitting in his living room as he paced wildly, the both of you still in your work clothes. The disagreement turned full-blown fight stemming from an issue that seemed so silly to you.

You looked at your nails, chipping off the polish as you spoke, “I don’t see why you’re overreacting to misogyny in the workplace like this.” You mumbled, "And mad at me for it." You huffed, only earning a scoff from the pacing man.

“I don’t see why you’re so intent on being pushed around by lazy workers.” He seethed, “Youngmin knows better than to throw his work on you, he’s a production manager!”

You fought the urge to roll your eyes at this. You already knew that. You were just about to tell Youngmin that before Taehyung stepped in needlessly. This had definitely not been the first time people dumped work on you purely because you were a capable secretary and someone who looked like a pushover. You knew how to handle these situations, regardless if you ended up doing the work. Taehyung, however, seemed to not have any such faith in you considering the scene he made on the entire accounting floor, embarrassing the life out of you.

“That doesn’t give you the right to make a scene on my behalf.” You hissed back, "I can stand up for myself, if you just gave me the chance."

Taehyung scoffed and it made your eyebrow twitch at his patronizing demeanor, “Well, what else do I do if you’re being pushed around?” You huffed at the comment.

“I’m not being pushed around.” You tried to reason but Taehyung wouldn’t have it.

“Well, I’m the one making sure of that!” You flinched at the volume of his voice, but he didn’t catch it from his pacing while you stood, making him freeze.

“Then why are you the only one pushing me around?!” You huffed, tears in your eyes while Taehyung felt his heart crack. You had never yelled at him before, let alone cried because if him. The same realization seemed to dawn on you as you faltered for a moment, “I-I can handle things myself sometimes, you know.” You spoke incredulously, “I was a person of my own before you, do you not get that?!”

“Oh yeah? Who?” He snapped and you gasped lightly. Is this what he genuinely thought about you? Did your own boyfriend think so low of you and you couldn't see it, “I just remember you being a receptionist that cried on the phone and couldn’t be bothered to so much as make her own lunch, so what were you, if not mine?” He finished his words with a hard glare fixated at you which immediately softened at your glassy eyes with betrayal lying in your pupils

"How could you say that to me?!" You seethed, your eyes void of any affection or love for the man before you, making him freeze, “Do you know how hard I’ve worked to be who I am, and that person is not just your girlfriend, do you want me to prove it?!" Your words felt like a veiled threat, like you would leave him and he felt your words like a spear to the heart.

He could not let that happen, under any circumstances. You could not leave him. He could never allow it. You were his world, his everything, his reason for existing.

Going into panic mode, the man spoke in a hushed tone “Baby, I didn’t mean-

You held your hand up, silencing him as you shook your head, “I need some time to, you know, figure out who I am." You spoke sarcastically but voice quiet as you shuffled to the door.

"W-What do you mean?" He tried to keep the panic in his voice at bay as you slipped on your shoes.

You shrugged, "I don't know." An honest answer did make the situation less frightening for the both of you. What the fuck did you mean? What the fuck were you going to do by yourself?

Wrong answer. In order for you to leave this place, he had to know you loved him and would still continue to do so.

"You know I love you, my Venus, right?" His restraint was hanging by a thread as he watched you slip on your shoes.

"Right." You spoke, barely above a whisper.

Strike two. You didn't say it back. Why would you not say it back? How could you not say it back?! Taehyung watched his nightmare unfold at his own hand. You were slipping away from him, and for the first time, he had no idea what to do.

"I don't want you to go home this late, my love." He took slow steps toward you as your shaky hands tied your shoes, not accustomed to this kind of conflict, "I can just sleep on the couch, and you can..."

You whimpered as you couldn't tie your damn shoes. Your hands were shaking along with the rest of your form as you couldn't focus on the task at hand. You were overstimulated to say the least by everything. From the work day, to the scene, to the fight, to the brokeness of everything around you. Taehyung and you rarely ever fought and each time it was mentally exhausted, but it had never been this bad. You had never felt so sub-human and worthless. Were you just an accessory this whole time?

Had Taehyung loved you or just your company? You felt like a burden to him and just like a shitty excuse of a human all around. What the hell are you if not his? Maybe he was right.

A whine sounded from your closed lips as tears fell to the ground. Your shaky hands had paused on your laces completely, the knots tangled and resembling nothing like the bunny ears you needed. Goodness, you couldn't even tie your damn shoes correctly.

Taehyung's words evidently fell on def years as only distressed sounds and whines came from you. The word was blurrying from your tears and just being overwhelmed all around as your chest squeezed around itself and you opened your mouth to choke on a sob before two hands covered your ears, pushing your face into a familiar chest.

You fought against the embrace before falling on your bottom and defeatedly ceasing your struggles as you focused on the quickened heartbeat your partner had. Why was he so panicked? Surely you were not significant enough to make the ever cool Kim Taehyung's self-confidence shake, right? His heart was pounding furiously, just like yours, though. You thought back to his comment about tandem heart beats on your first night together. Now, the reasoning didn't sound so crazy as the synchronous heartbeats you both shared resounded between your forms. Your sobs evolved into just heavy breaths as your shoulders relaxed a bit, signaling the man holding you to pull back a bit. His hands slid down to cup your cheeks and stroked them softly, a sad smile adorning his beautiful face.

"It's okay, baby, it's okay, hm?" He kissed your forehead, eyes glossy as he pulled back, laying his forehead on yours, "I'm so fucking sorry I was being such a piece of shit." His voice shook, "Fuck, I never meant to hurt you like that, I didn't even mean what I said. I was just fucking projecting because I was nothing until you came into my life-"

"What a lie." You sniffled, "You have always been Kim Taehyung, campus prince, successful businessman, a fucking CEO- board member- whatever." You sighed out, "You've always been something-"

"None of that meant anything to me, barely does now, I never cared about anything until I met you." He breathed shakily, "I love you so much and you brought so much color to my world and I felt like all I had to offer you was protection and I have no damn idea how to be of use to you while you're so effortlessly the focal point of my existence."

Your breath hitched at this, "I-I… What the hell are you talking about?" You huffed out, "This whole night I have felt like such a burden, like I was just a pet for you to look after, like I would be nothing without you- like you said-" Pain flashed across his face. He did say that. He didn’t mean it, but he said it and it affected you.

"Shit, I did not mean that at all, please believe me." He begged, voice cracking, "I am nothing if not yours, I can't take care of myself without you, my life is nothing without you in it." You opened your mouth to protest but he continued after a heavy breath, "I remember you as the receptionist who didn't care who liked her and who didn't, but you were still so shamelessly human and it was, and still is, fucking beautiful to see, you are so dedicated and hard-working. I felt the only way I could even get involved with you was through anonymous lunches because I was too cowardly to just approach you. Why would you like me to begin with? You never once needed me, but I have spent years now, needing you so shamelessly and it makes me feel so small when you don't need my help and I lash out like a child about it and say things I don't fucking mean, at all." He took a deep breath, "I love you more than anything, more than life itself, and I never want to make you feel like anything less than a fucking goddess and I'm so sorry I fucked up so bad." You couldn't find words as he gave you a short kiss on your nose before pulling away, averting his eyes as his cheeks glistened and he focused his hand on your shoes, "If you still need time on your own, I understand, and...and I will respect that." He spoke softly, defeated, as he gently undid the tangle of knots on your left shoe before beginning to tie it correctly, "Is that too tight?" He murmured.

You shook your head, tears heavy on your cheeks, "Stop, Tae-Tae." You pleaded softly but he could hardly register your words until you laid a hand on his, making him look up at you.

You studied his face, tears fresh on his cheeks with stains beginning to dry from previous ones, "Baby?" His voice was so broken.

"You can just take off the shoes, I-I want to lay down." You looked at him as he met your eyes with hopefully ones, "With you. I want to lay down… with you." He nodded before gingerly taking your shoes off, as if to give you time to change your mind, "I love you Tae-Tae, I really fucking do, and it's so scary because I want to be perfect for you like you are for me and I feel like I keep falling short and so to hear you say that earlier it just…" You shrugged, not sure how to vocalize how you felt.

He sighed, "I really didn't mean it, but it doesn't change the fact that I said it." He began to take off the other shoe, "I do think you're perfect and I need to be better with my stupid fucking insecurity about it and stop being such a dick." He slipped the other shoe off before pulling you into a tight embrace, "I love you, so much, and I would give up everything in a heartbeat just to be with you." You held him back, giving him peace of mind after being so vulnerable.

Your body was exhausted as he carried you to his bedroom. You could barely help him as he dressed you for bed and tucked you in carefully before sliding in next to you. He cradled you delicately in his arms, not squeezing until you held him against you tighter, "I forgive you." You whispered against his chest, "I love you, I really do."

"Thank you so much, my Venus." He sighed in relief at your words, "I love you too, so fucking much." He leant down as you kissed his lips softly.

Taehyung lightly admonished himself for a moment. He nearly lost you. He could never let that happen again from his own foolishness. He couldn't live without you. He would never fuck up like that again, and he wouldn't. He vowed to never make a scene like that. He had to do that shit in private, obviously. He slipped up, but he would not be so obnoxious again.

Before he could continue to curse his stupidity, you snuggled against him, "G'night, my love." You murmured and he relaxed instantly, head cleared with only thoughts of how much he loved you.

"Sweet dreams, my Venus." He kissed the crown of your head and you hummed in delight at the gesture before he joined you in closing his eyes and drifting away into a peaceful sleep after one of the scariest nights of his life.

Thankfully, Taehyung never made the same mistake twice. Especially a mistake so critical. Who knows what he would’ve had to do if you were dead set on leaving him? Again, thankfully, neither you, nor Taehyung, would not find out. Not that Taehyung planned for you to ever find out just how far he was willing to go to keep you with him, to keep your requited love, to keep both of your hearts beating, together.

Masterlist

Donate to my ko-fi (if you want to ofc)

#bts #bts fanfic #bts series #bts drabble #kim taehyung #bts v #soft yandere bts #yandere bts #bts angst #bts fluff #yandere bts drabble

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makeste · 3 years

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Lately I’ve been hearing people talking about BNHA’s editor, but I don’t really understand it? Could you please have a go at explaining it?

okay so first off, just a quick overview on what a manga editor is/does for anyone who’s not aware or has only a vague idea. basically, they more or less oversee the manga, and work with the mangaka to give them feedback on the story and the layout and the pacing and so forth. a good editor will make sure the series stays true to the mangaka’s vision, but will tweak things to make sure the story meets the publisher’s standards, and just generally help keep the story on track. (this is a pretty good video to watch to get a better idea of the weekly manga creation process in general. incidentally that’s one of my favorite Youtube channels and I highly recommend the "day in the life" series if you have any kind of interest in Japan in general; it’s really good and weirdly calming and addictive lol).

different editors have different styles and are good at different things; for instance certain editors may be more hands-on and involved, while others might be more chill and laid-back and pretty much let the mangaka do their own thing. the former might pair well with a mangaka who’s just starting out and needs more guidance, whereas the latter might work better with mangaka who already have a lot of experience and are more sure of themselves. a lot of care goes into making sure the editor and mangaka are a good match, and it’s not unusual for long-running series to have multiple editors as time goes on. a good editor can help elevate a series and filter out bad ideas and really raise the quality of the work; bt on the flip side of the coin, really bad editors can and have been responsible for terrible decisions that have all but ruined stories at times.

anyway, so BnHA has had I think four editors to date. most of what I know about them I gleaned from this interview tbh.

Koike Hitoshi, who was the editor from June 2013 to June 2014

Monji Kengo, who was the editor from June 2014 to December 2017

Yoritomi Ryosuke, who was editor from December 2017 to September 2020

and most recently Taguchi Hikaru, who took over as editor in September 2020 and is the current editor today

moving on to the actual ask now at last, so when you say “lately I’ve been hearing people talking about BnHA’s editor”, I assume you’re referring to the fact that parts of the fandom aren’t entirely happy with Taguchi’s job as editor thus far. so those complaints mostly seem to be centered around three things:

the pacing (although to be fair I’ve seen complaints about the pacing being both too fast and too slow, so I don’t necessarily put a lot of stock in this one)

the increased focus on action/fighting

and lastly and most specifically, an increase in sensationalized storytelling in the form of each chapter having some new big flashy draw (sexy new characters, dramatic plot twists, fancy new quirks, etc.), and a marked increase in cliffhangers, whether they fit in naturally with the story or not

these are all things that editors have a lot of influence over, so there’s definitely some validity to these complaints. although to be fair, a lot of these are also very subjective, and we also have no way of knowing which decisions have come from Taguchi and which have come from Horikoshi. for a lot of people though, Horikoshi has obviously earned more benefit of the doubt than Taguchi has, especially since the previous series Taguchi edited, Samurai 8, was a pretty big flop. (though from what I’ve heard, I’m inclined to put most of the blame for that elsewhere; Jump was basically hoping lightning would strike twice and that the series would succeed just from having Kishimoto Masashi’s name on the cover, but the reality was that it really just wasn’t a very good manga lol.) there’s just not a lot there to inspire confidence, basically, and so he’s an easy target on top of everything else. and apparently one of his comments in an interview (specifically, that the story was going to get even more exciting from here on out) further reinforced those impressions of him putting too much focus on making the series more dramatic and action-y to attract new readers.

all that said, my opinion on the newer chapters isn’t really that negative, and for each chapter that I have disliked (which is mainly 307 lol), there’s been a 284 and a 285 and a 290 and a 299, 301, 302, 306, 310, 312, etc. etc. etc. which I have very much enjoyed (with several of those actually ranking among my favorite chapters ever). so I would say that overall he’s actually been doing a fairly decent job. and I mean, if we’re going to start rating all of the editors based on the worst chapters they’ve ever overseen, then the same editor who was in charge during my two favorite stretches of the manga (83 through 95, and 116 through 121) would be ranked at the bottom of my list because he also happened to be the guy running things during the worst stretches of the Basement arc. or what about Yoritomi, who oversaw the Pro Hero, MVA, and Endeavor Agency arcs, but also permitted Horikoshi to torture us with that one mushroom chapter?? all I’m saying is that all of these guys have had their various low points, lol.

anyways though, that’s basically the short (or my version of “short”) version of the editor stuff as far as I know. all in all, just like with everything else that’s controversial in this fandom, some of the points are reasonable and some are less so imo. the cliffhanger thing is a bit annoying because it’s hard to unsee once you start paying attention to it. but for the most part I think he’s done a decent job thus far, especially given the huge momentum shifts he’s had to preside over, not to mention the fact that the transition happened in the midst of a pandemic.

all said and done, I’m pretty satisfied, and especially given how long of a tenure the previous two editors had, I think he deserves more time to prove himself before we start making final judgments. I mean, not that our opinions make an iota of difference anyway lol, but still.

#bnha #boku no hero academia #taguchi hikaru #bnha spoilers #mha spoilers #bnha manga spoilers #makeste reads bnha #asks #anon asks #long post

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hoekaashi · 4 years

Text

3 am Talks - hq pt 2

a/n: i hope you enjoy these! they take place some time during the time skip or close to when the six years are up. pairings: oikawa x reader, iwaizumi x reader, mattsun x reader, kuroo x reader, kenma x reader warnings: some spoilers, smoking weed taglist: @babydabi, @suckersuki, @bakugoustanaccount, @animoozies part 1 | part 3

‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾　*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* 　☽༓･*˚⁺‧͙

⇾ c o n s p i r a c y t h e o r i e s ⇾ lots of aliens talk ⇾ will try to convince you that he did in fact, see a UFO once ⇾ but also, will complain about the flat ass comments he constant receives ⇾ spills his secret that not even iwa knows - he dropped a shitton of cash to work out with the Kardashian’s personal trainer in hopes to get a nice juicy bubble butt ⇾ spoiler: it didn’t work ⇾ if he’s in a more serious/softer mood, he would talk more about the mistakes he made in the past in regards to his relationships ⇾ friendships or romantic ⇾ a very vulnerable moment for him where he just let’s everything he’s been holding in out

“I swear! I was seven, I went camping with Iwa-chan and his family!” Oikawa was sitting back on his heels with his right hand up, swearing to you. You rolled your eyes. “What, did the aliens abduct you and perform a surgery? You got a nasty scar on you somewhere?” He narrowed his eyes. “I will prove it. I just need to find the picture for you.” “Right. Wait, have you been working out more?” His expression quickly changed from utter disbelief to a smirk. “I have.” “Well, none of it is helping your ass.” He hung his head in defeat. “All that money wasted. I can’t believe I actually thought the Kardashian’s trainer would be able to help me.” “Babe, they’re all plastic and I think that’s the only thing that will help you at this point.” “Every amazing thing about me is natural. Why would I ruin that by enhancing my features unnaturally?” You shrugged. “At least you have that going for you.” “What do you mean ‘at least’?” he asked with air quotes. “I have you, don’t I?” You didn’t expect him to say something like that. “What?” “If you’ve stuck around this long, I must be doing something right. I know I fucked up in the past, but I’m glad you’re so patient with me. It can’t be easy dating someone who only thinks about volleyball.” You smiled softly as he continued. “I want to apologize to Kageyama properly for the way I treated him. And Iwa-chan too. He always had to deal with my bs and that wasn’t his place as my friend.” “Well, he stuck around you all this time, so you must be doing something right too.”

.・゜-: ✧ :-　-: ✧ :-゜・．

⇾ since california is 16 hours behind, these talks would be in the middle of the day for one of you until a surprise visit happens ⇾ but usually, it would just consist of the two of you catching up ⇾ in person though, he would talk more about how freeing it is to be in a new place, away from everything that was familiar ⇾ how it feels good not to live in anyone's shadow and just start fresh ⇾ (not that he hated being with oikawa, it was just something new for him) ⇾ but also how he doesn’t want to get left behind in the game of life ⇾ how even his new friends *cough* ushiwaka *cough* is going after his dreams

“So how do you like California?” It was 2 am, you just picked up your boyfriend from the airport and you were heading back home. It was a long drive back which gave you plenty of time to talk. “It’s nice. You’re not there, but other than that, I like it.” “Don’t let Oikawa hear that,” you laughed. Iwa slid down his seat a bit and got comfortable. “It feels so freeing. It’s a new start. No one knows me as the ace of Seijoh or as the guy who’s friends with Oikawa. I enjoy people not assuming I’m gay for my best friend.” Even though he was being serious, you couldn’t help but snort at the comment. After all, you had been one of those people too. “It’s like I hit restart and I’m enjoying every minute of it.” “Do you miss anything though? You sound like you’re really enjoying it there.” “Of course I miss things and people. Even though it’s fun, I do miss Shittykawa’s annoying ass and walking in on Makki and Mattsun getting high. Hell, sometimes I miss not being around all the fangirls. But everyone is moving on with their lives, so I can’t stay stuck in the past.” You hummed to let him know you were still listening. “I refuse to get left behind. Even Ushiwaka is going after his own goals.” “Who would’ve thought you would go to a new country, run into him there, and become friends?” Iwa laughed. “Not me, and definitely not Oikawa. He still brings it up, to this day. It’s been two years and he thinks I’ve replaced him.”

.・゜-: ✧ :-　-: ✧ :-゜・．

⇾ high talks ⇾ i feel like he’s not stressed about much that he needs to vent or get something off his chest ⇾ would probably feel free when he’s high - free from being an adult - and would talk about that ⇾ maybe some funny stories from high school ⇾ makes lots of jokes ⇾ but once it hits him, he’ll be talking about deep shit ⇾ talks about life and everyone’s purpose, why we’re here, that sort of shit

“And then Iwa got so annoyed, he just pantsed Oikawa in front of the girl.” You giggled as Mattsun finally got the story right. “So what happened with the girl?” you asked. “I think she died in the spot because she got to see Oikawa in his underwear.” He took another hit of his blunt and blew the smoke out, over his head. “I wonder if he’s enjoying Argentina.” You glanced up at him before turning your attention back to the show neither of you were really watching. “I’m sure he misses you guys.” “I hope he finds his purpose. All that practice to never make it to nationals…” He sighed. “Iwa is studying to be a trainer. Him too. I hope he gets what he wants in life.” “And you?” Mattsun chuckled. “My purpose is to enjoy my time here. There are enough people in the world who are stressing over something or another. I’m here to balance the scale. Can’t have too much stress in the world or the negativity will just take over. That’s me and Makki, we just chilling through life. What's that saying? Que salsa?” “Que sera sera?” “Yeah that one! Oikawa said that to me when we were talking once.” “I’m surprised you remembered it.” “I’m smarter than I appear. I can’t threaten the nerds either. Balancing the scales.”

.・゜-: ✧ :-　-: ✧ :-゜・．

⇾ would range from crackhead ideas to deep conversations ⇾ could go from reciting a funny story about kenma to his insecurities in your relationship real fast ⇾ so kuroo is a scorpio and l i t e r a l l y every scorpio I know absolutely sucks ASS at opening up, doesn’t matter what gender ⇾ a part of his insecurities is that you’re constantly trying to get him to open up more and confide in you, but even after knowing him for as long as you have, he barely does ⇾ and it’s not that he doesn’t trust you, it’s just he doesn’t like to feel that vulnerable with anyone ⇾ there would be a lot of thanking you - for being so patient with him, for dealing with his teasing, for accepting his friends, etc ⇾ he doesn’t strike me as someone who enjoys serious conversations too much so if he felt awkward, he would try to make things more light, cue talks about the latest scientific discoveries

The two of you were calming down from a story Kuroo told you about Kenma that happened recently. “I’m sure deep down, he wishes we never became friends.” “It’s not hidden very deep. He texted me that this morning.” Moving closer to Kuroo, you rested your arms on his chest and placed your chin on top of your hands. One of his hands automatically went to card through your hair. Kuroo’s face softened as he took a moment to stare at you. “I’m sorry.” You stared at him confused. “You’ve been with me for so long. I feel like I know your entire life story and your life stories from your last five lives and here I am, unable to even bring up my childhood and family problems. You shouldn’t have to deal with that.” You shrugged slightly. “I mean, yeah it’s pretty annoying but I’ve just come to…” You bit your tongue. “Come to what?” “Come to not expect anything,” you said with a sigh. That caused Kuroo to sit up, making you sit up as well. “Do you really not expect anything from me now?” “Well, not nothing. More like I’m not expecting you to open up. I’m tired of sounding clingy whenever I try to even ask about your day.” He ran a hand through his hair. “You know I never want you to feel like that, right?” You shrugged again. “I just… I don’t know, it’s just hard for me to open up to other people. I guess I’m just used to having someone who understands me without me having to say anything. Vulnerability feels so strange to me so I just try to avoid it when I can.” He took both your hands into his. “I’ll do a better job, I promise. Thank you for being patient with me.”

.・゜-: ✧ :-　-: ✧ :-゜・．

⇾ he’s not much of a talker, we all know this ⇾ but if you ask him the right questions (ie. being annoyingly persistent) he’ll talk ⇾ LOTS of appreciation ⇾ very grateful to all the people he’s met in his life and how each one that he holds dear to his heart plays a different role in his life ⇾ how much he cherishes the people he loves ⇾ and then the conversation would turn to you - how much he appreciates you ⇾ let’s be honest, kenma sucks ass at being affectionate, his love language is probably quality time because just knowing that you’re willing to sit with him as he streams is good enough to make his gamer heart happy ⇾ so he would take the time to fully express how much he does love you since he rarely makes it known to you in other ways

“Kenma, how much longer are you gonna play? You have class tomorrow,” you said while he was streaming. Glancing at the time, he told his viewers that he was going to wrap it up for the night and he joined you in bed. You were talking his ear off about the meet up you had with some of your friends and you could see him grow more and more irritated. “Why did you call me to sleep if you were just going to talk.” “Oh. Well, this is the only time I got to be with just you today…” You pulled the blanket higher up on your body and curled into a ball with your back to Kenma. You felt him shift under the covers until you felt his arm wrap around your waist, pulling you closer to him. “I’m sorry. Tell me what happened next.” You shook your head. “It’s fine, we can talk in the morning.” He buried his face in your neck, giving you a soft kiss. “I love you. I don’t say that enough. I cherish you even if I don’t show you that. You and Kuroo and Shoyo. All of you are the closest people to me, and I appreciate you all so much for the different ways you’ve helped me.” You placed your hand on top of his and interlaced your fingers. “I love you too.” “How about we have lunch tomorrow? I can cancel the stream at night and we can watch a movie.” “What about the viewers?” “They can survive one night without watching me. I owe you since I’ve been a bad boyfriend.”

#oikawa tōru #oikawa x reader #iwaizumi hajime #iwaizumi x reader #matsukawa issei #matsukawa x reader #mattsun x reader #kuroo tetsurou #kuroo x reader #kenma kozume #kenma x reader #haikyuu!!#haikyuu fic #haikyuu imagines #haikyuu x reader

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lichfucker · 3 years

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i would love to hear about why all of the ted lasso characters would fail survivor but especially rebecca

hhh ALL of them... okay the vast majority of the players can be explained away with just "physical prowess enough to make them a threat in individual challenges but dumb as bricks and would not be able to strategize themselves out of a bad spot"

this is abt to get long lmao so I'm putting individual ppl under the cut

nate is the most obvious first boot I honestly feel bad about it. bumbling, socially awkward, has NO idea how to assert himself without being an asshole about it (in the rare instances when he does assert himself at all), and even if he's smart enough to be a great strategist (which he absolutely IS), he can't convey it well enough to convince his tribe to overlook his (probable) lack of challenge ability. most of the time, people don't want to draw harsh lines in the sand on the very first vote so they can pretend everyone's getting along and still friends, so nate would be a sort of freebie vote that it'd be easy to agree on.

beard is too much of a follower. what ted says to dr sharon abt him is, "that man has had many lives, many masters." he's very comfortable being led by people with stronger personalities, and even when he disagrees with their calls he will still execute them like a perfect little lackey. the thing about beard is that I think he'd go VERY far in a season of survivor! I think he could EASILY make it all the way to the end! but I just don't think he can WIN. he's genius-level intelligent and SO strategically savvy, but more than that he is fiercely loyal. he'll attach himself to the right person (or the wrong person, as it were), and even if he is whispering in that person's ear all the way through, he would be TOO content to let them take all the credit, he wouldn't push back against them if they disagree with his plans and make a lesser move instead (the whole beginning of 'beard after hours' is him berating himself for not standing up and making the hard calls even when he knew they'd be better), he wouldn't turn around and slit that person's throat at the end to further his own game, and he would make himself socially impenetrable to everyone else. nobody could get close to him, nobody could like or understand him, he'd probably be seen as good collateral if the opposition couldn't strike directly at whomever beard works with, and if he DOES make it to final tribal, I think he'd have a very difficult time convincing the jury that he deserves the credit and the limelight. he wants to win, I just don't think he believes he deserves to.

ted and roy actually would have the exact same problem, which is "physically and strategically competent, but so FUCKING ANNOYING to live with that they get booted for the sake of tribal quality of life." roy would isolate himself socially with his aggression, and ted...

ted is the antithesis of what a "good survivor player" ought to be, which I actually think could work to his advantage in a number of ways? like I think more typical players would find him incredibly unpredictable because he's sharp enough to see what the best moves are, but generous and self-sacrificing enough not to make them. like, there's a reason he's a coach and not a player. there's a reason he says that he doesn't measure success in wins and losses. if he could survive the first few votes, his social game would be AMAZING-- the entire first season of the show is about him wearing rebecca down through the sheer magnitude of his friendship! lesser survivor players would be so endeared to him that they couldn't fathom voting him off, but they're the ones who are getting picked off in his stead. moderately savvy survivor players would not trust a single word out of ted lasso's mouth; there's no fucking way a man can be this kind and this sincere, not on survivor, it's just not possible, he must be plotting something MASSIVE, we have to strike first before he gets his chance. and the truly brilliant survivor players would realize that he IS genuine, he IS sincere, he IS loyal and giving to his core, and that's DANGEROUS. you can't let someone like that make it to the end or they'll take your million dollars. best to shut it down at the jump.

and above all that, I just think that ted... ted would thrive in the pre-merge, in the tribal portion of the game, he's SO team-oriented, but post-merge, in the individual game... perhaps if he had a solid alliance he could also feel that way about, then it might suit his temperament, but ultimately I think he just. wouldn't want it badly enough. I just think the significant majority of people would be vastly more self-interested than ted would be, so they'd take the shot first.

higgins is an interesting midpoint between all three of nate, beard, and ted, in that he's a henchman through and through even when he disagrees with his boss, he's a pushover who'd be seen as a liability in physical challenges in the early game, and he's off-puttingly friendly and polite to the point that nobody would trust that he's being sincere even though he absolutely is. early boot, maybe second or third.

maybe it's just because I've got cook islands on the brain, but jamie (esp season 1 jamie but like. season 2 as well lmao) would play A LOT like early ozzy. an arrogant wonder-boy who's good at everything (did you know there's literally a survivor casting archetype called the "amazing ace"?), with a heart-wrenching underdog story (playing for richmond, that is), an absolute beast in challenges, a huge threat but always immune, he'd win his way to the end but ultimately be beaten out in final tribal by someone smart enough to have dragged him along as their meat shield the whole game.

and as for rebecca... g-d. this one I think hurts me the most because she has everything going for her, she doesn't have a single one of the problems I've listed for anyone else, but I do genuinely believe that rebecca still loses. she's strong and she's smart and she's assertive and she's ruthless and she's sociable and she's a great liar and she's ambitious and she's ADAPTIBLE (she immediately bounces back after not getting the sun to run the photo of ted and keeley and comes up with an alternate plan that will still serve her own endgame, and by g-d being able to roll with the punches and change course is the single most important thing a survivor player can do), but rebecca still loses.

even if we set aside the fact that survivor on the whole is not particularly kind to women over 40... season 1 rebecca, especially early season 1 rebecca, is spite-motivated to the point of self-destruction. she will set her sights on one target and she will be relentless in her effort to get that person out and it'll make her so myopic that she won't see her own end coming immediately afterwards. nobody on that tribe wants to be her next victim-- better get rid of her once she's proven what she's capable of.

she's also dreadfully insecure in the wake of her divorce and when her polished veneer cracks enough to let it show (how many days of being rained on do we think it'll take for her to slip? my guess is five), some people will see it as the vulnerability that finally allows them to connect with her on a human level, while others will see it as a threatening endgame storyline and an exploitable weakness.

there are some juries, particularly old-school juries, that wouldn't vote for her in the end purely based on the fact that a million dollars is just a drop in the bucket to a woman like rebecca mannion welton. that would be a real shame, and a disservice to the game she would have had to play just to make it that far.

what's more likely than that, though, in my opinion, is that rebecca... loses the drive to win. I think that somewhere along the way survivor stops being a game that she is playing, stops being a competition, and instead becomes a journey of personal growth through adversity. I think she, like ted, stops measuring her success in wins and losses. I think she proves herself more capable and resilient than she ever thought she could be, and that is worth more to her than the money or the title of sole survivor, and she stops fighting for it. and maybe the jury admires that, and gives it to her anyway, rewards her transformation. or maybe they don't. maybe they view it as a concession, a forfeit. but I'm not certain that that moment of revelation happens at the final tribal council. I think it happens just before. I think it happens after the final immunity challenge, and she tearfully and valiantly allows herself to be voted out just inches from the finish line. I think rebecca is the fallen angel of the season, and she goes off to the jury with her head held high, which is nice, and so very noble of her, and the fans would be DYING to have her play again but she wouldn't, because she'll have gotten everything she could have wanted out of her survivor experience, and she doesn't need the crown on top of it.

I think rebecca COULD win. she just WON'T.

#jockjamsandjellies #thanks jack #bluh bluh #honestly I'm a little tipsy and this hurt me to write #rebecca's arc in the show of her becoming a better person is literally an arc of her becoming a worse survivor player #and that's not to say that it's impossible for someone who's kind and honest and open-hearted to win survivor!!#bc plenty of those people have!#it's just that... I think she'd end up pulling a rafe in guatemala and valiantly falling on the sword right at the end for NO REASON #when victory was otherwise all but guaranteed!#also I didn't mention ted's panic attacks at all because I do not believe they would matter lmao I've seen multiple seasons #where people had panic attacks during challenges that they weren't even participating in #and then those people made it all the way to final tribal and one of them even won #survivor #ted lasso

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just2bubbly · 3 years

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Disclosing a Secret

Masterlist

Summary

"And will they accept me?"

"They should."

"And what if they don't?"

When insecurity makes Cinder question her role in Kai's life, will Kai be able to convince her that she is the one for him, the only one?

Ship: Kaider

Words: 899 words

Kai's Perspective

Seeing her like this felt different, she was no longer the scrawny mechanic that Kai had found out hiding under a table. She was a picture of striking and elegance and everything else that Kai would want her to be, need her to be. And this time she was shoulder to shoulder with him. She had been the Queen of Luna. She remains the Queen nonetheless- of people's hearts and most importantly his. And when she stands beside him to face the world which has proved horrible to her kind for time and time again. She does not cower before their gaze- she meets it with the same level of intensity. Like a Queen that she was, as the Empress that she will be.

"Kai, Stop staring !" she gushed.

"You look so gorgeous- my eyes can't leave your sight" he exclaimed, as his eyes twinkled with amusement at the sight of his beloved.

"Well handsome, how about we get done with this and then you could take your time gazing at me?"

"Sounds endurable"

"Good, Now come back to work" she ordered. He groaned but the grin plastered on his face said otherwise.

"Remind me why do we have to do this?" he wailed, his hands itching to tug at his hair. He suppressed the urge recalling the time and hours his stylist had put trying to make his hair look pristine.

"It's necessary-" she said, but thinking better of it concluded, "Torin wants us to."

"Yeah, because that's the right thing to do. An Emperor cannot elope. He and his fiancee should take out time to announce their engagement"- Kai said or rather quoted Torin mockingly.

"I guess it is time to declare it already...I have been staying long enough to raise a few eyebrows," she admitted.

"Not long enough to do something as stupid as the showing of rings!" he muttered.

"Kai, I have been staying at the palace for the last 2 years as a Lunar ambassador- I don't think I can handle Camilla's questioning look every time she sees me beside you in conferences."

He sighed saying, "I don't care about what Camilla or others think as long as you and I know the truth."

"It's about time - besides the media has probably guessed it so far and the masses are awaiting news about a royal marriage from last year," she claimed.

His engagement- their engagement was not supposed to remain confidential for so long truly. They were supposed to announce it within 6 months but things went on happening. Things like an increase in injustice against cyborgs, rumours about questionable intentions of Lunars, strained relations between multiple nations of the EU, Cinder having to overlook the newly formed Lunar government that this announcement kept on being delayed for a very long time, until now.He was a bit worried about people's reaction to him marrying Cinder. She was bright, brilliant, compassionate, selfless, just and had every other quality that a leader has to have. Nevertheless, she was also a Lunar and cyborg, two very sore spots for Earthen masses.

"Are you anxious?" she asked, as her fingers played with the hem of her flowing dress.

"More than ever" he admitted.

"Do you think they would accept me?" she implored, trying to speak aloud about her worry.

"They will- they should" he assured. His slender fingers holding her hand in his.

She looked down at their joined hands and insisted, "And what if they don't?"

Giving a squeeze to her hand, he promised, "Then we will just convince them."

He stared at her as she looked up at him. Meeting her gaze, he smiled reassuringly and she returned his affection with a genuine one. He gazed into her brown eyes that he had come to love so much over the years- they looked like freshly melted chocolate making a deep pool that made Kai want to drown in them with joy. She was disturbed, he could sense that.He wanted to drive her concerns away and convince her that the Commonwealth would accept her. It was the last few minutes of their shared secret which was about to be disclosed to the world, with hopes that it would bring only well wishes and greetings of delight and infinite joy.He pulled her closer against him, to just feel warm with love.

"Kai, you are ruining the dress" she whispered in his ear.

"And since when did you care about creased dresses Cinder?"

"Since Iko started scolding me for nominal things and how I can't keep myself pristine for a single minute."

He chuckled, feeling his worry drain down a bit. Maybe the Commonwealth had grown out of their prejudices. Perhaps they had disposed of the rotten idea of all Lunars and cyborgs being evil or maybe they had not. But that was not going to stop Kai from marrying Cinder- the lady that he has come to love every moment. He was not going to give his Cinder away because some people thought that she was not worthy. Whatever happens tonight, he would marry only Cinder- the person wrapped around his arms who deserved everything that he could give her and everything that he could not. She was meant to be here tonight -by his side and she would continue to live on beside him forever and nobody was going to change it.

A/N: I usually don't write from Kai's perspective but this was easy- a moment of privacy before facing the media where Kai reflects on his time with Cinder.

Has anyone read Rule of Wolves or any other grishaverse book? You can DM me to bond over it!

Be sure to vote and comment if you like it.

Taglist: @cinderswrench @gingerale2017 @shellyseashell @linhcinder686 (Tell me if you want to be added/removed!)

#kaider #just2bubbly fics #fanfcition #disclosing a secret #oneshot #marissa meyer #comfort #fluff #kaito #linh cinder #selene blackburn #lunar chronicles #tlc #emperor kaito #cinder #the annoouncement

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grailfinders · 3 years

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Fate and Phantasms #146: Medusa (Lancer)

Today on Fate and Phantasms, we’re making the mini-dusa, Medusa Lancer. In this build, Medusa is an Eldritch Knight Fighter, and only that. Sadly Flesh to Stone is a little to high-level to get, but we’ll make it work.

Check out her build breakdown below the cut, or her character sheet over here!

Next up: The closest thing we’re getting to a Tiamat build.

Race and Background

Having been kicked out of godhood by Athena, Medusa is the ultimate Hermit, giving her Religion proficiency. We’ll also switch things up and give her Acrobatics proficiency for sick anime flips while fighting.

Like her sisters, she’s also a Yuan-Ti, giving her +1 Intelligence and +2 Strength, thanks to Tasha’s. She also gets Darkvision, Innate Spellcasting for the Poison Spray cantrip and unlimited uses of Animal Friendship on snakes. At third level you can also cast Suggestion once per long rest. All these spells use charisma to cast. You have Magic Resistance and Poison Immunity as well, the former giving you advantage on saves against magic, and the latter making you completely immune to poison damage and the poisoned condition.

It’s a shame you aren’t Small, but no race is perfect.

Ability Scores

Even if you’re wearing armor it doesn’t cover much, so make sure your Dexterity is pretty high. After that is Strength, which actually becomes your highest stat after racial bonuses if you’re using the standard array, because you’re swinging around a giant scythe and you aren’t a monk. Third is Intelligence, you know more than you let on and that’s the stat your eyes are attached to. Your Constitution isn’t amazing, but it’ll be plenty. Your Wisdom is kind of low, but we’re dumping Charisma. You just are not a people person, and you’re easily bribed with sweets.

Levels

1. First level fighters get a Fighting Style, and Thrown Weapon Fighting makes your scythe and chains a little more deadly, adding 2 to its damage rolls. Drawing the weapon can also be done in the same action you attack with it. You also get a Second Wind, letting you heal yourself as a bonus action. Your goddess core might protect you, but it’s important to pace yourself too.

You also get proficiency in Strength and Constitution saves, as well as two fighter skills. You’ve been on your own for a bit, so Survival is a good pick, and your character arc starts with you not being a fan of humanity, so I bet your Intimidation rolls will get a workout.

2. Second level fighters get an Action Surge, letting you slap an extra action onto your turn once per short rest. Copying an anime is always hard to do in D&D, but this’ll make it a bit easier at least.

3. As an Eldritch Knight, you get a Weapon Bond, letting you summon a weapon to your hand as a bonus action. You also can’t be disarmed while you’re conscious, but you’ll be throwing that thing around so much it probably won’t do much.

The big draw of the E. Knight, however, is the Spells you can cast with your Intelligence. Most of the spells you get will be abjuration or evocation, but that doesn’t stop you from getting Booming Blade and Mold Earth as cantrips. The former makes your scythe a bit scarier, and the latter is one of the few things proving your legitimacy as an earth goddess. You also get Mage Armor, because let’s be honest that outfit doesn’t count, Snare for some quick and dirty immobilization, and Longstrider to make yourself a little more mobile.

4. Speaking of mobility, use your first Ability Score Improvement to grab the Mobile feat, making you 10′ faster per round and making it so you can ignore attacks of opportunity from creatures you’ve tried to hit this turn.

You also learn the spell Protection from Evil and Good, making it harder for the gods to continue to ruin your life. Gods: not even once.

5. Your Extra Attack lets you attack twice per action, or four times with your action surge. Chains aren’t that deadly a weapon, it’s more about the quantity over quality.

6. Use this ASI to bump up your Intelligence for stronger spells. Trust me, you’ll want them.

7. Seventh level eldritch knights learn War Magic. If you use your action to cast a cantrip, you can then use your bonus action to hit somebody. How nice of them. You also learn the first of the two “none of the spells from 2nd level really work for you so we’re taking things that could reasonably be construed as Not Magic” spells, Enhance Ability, which lets you try a bit harder to gain advantage on one kind of ability score check. If you pick one of the physical scores, you also get a little bonus for your troubles.

8. Use this ASI to bump up your Strength for stronger scything. You also learn the one good 2nd level spell, Hold Person, forcing a wisdom saving throw (DC 8+proficiency + int modifier) on a humanoid, or they become paralyzed for the duration of the spell, up to a minute. They get to remake the save each round, but we’ll get a way to deal with that in a bit.

9. Before that though, you’re going to be Indomitable, letting you re-roll a failed save once per long rest! Your wisdom save’s looking a little weak, but we’ll patch it up in a bit.

10. Tenth level eldritch knights get an Eldritch Strike, giving creatures you hit disadvantage on saves against your spells for the next round. That means hitting people makes your hold person work better, and hold person makes your hitting people work better. It’s symbiosis.

Your war magic is so powerful it almost makes True Strike not useless, and you also get the second NOTSF2LRWFYSWTTTCRBCANM spell, Arcane Lock. It’s a lock, just pretend you’re carrying a lock around for some reason.

11. I hope the Extra Attacks aren’t getting too repetitive yet, because you’re getting another one this level! Now you can attack three times an action, or six times a turn with action surge.

You also learn the spell Thought Shield, because I was so tired of second level’s nonsense I turned to the UA to pad this out. For eight hours, one creature you touch can’t have their mind read, and it has advantage on saves that would determine if it’s lying. If people could figure you out, you wouldn’t be a god.

12. Twelfth level fighters get another ASI, and this one is making us Resilient, giving you +1 Wisdom and proficiency with wisdom saves. Actually getting magic cast on you is for plebians.

13. Your second use of Indomitable per long rest isn’t that flashy, but what is flashy is getting to use third level spells, like Intellect Fortress! For up to an hour, the creature you target has resistance to psychic damage, and gets advantage on Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma saves. You already have advantage on most of those saves thanks to magic resistance, but now you can pass that onto a chosen champion as well. You could also use that third level slot for hold person, to hold two people at once.

14. Let’s make your magic even stronger with another ASI going right into Intelligence. That should make your eyes almost inescapable! You also learn the spell Haste, doubling your movement speed, adding 2 to your AC, and giving you most of an extra action each turn for the duration of the spell. You have to take a bit of a nap the turn after it ends, but the fight should be over by then.

15. Fifteenth level eldritch knights get an Arcane Charge when you use your Action Surge, letting you anime teleport behind someone immediately before or after your second action, to make sure the enemy knows it’s “nothing personnel, kid”.

16. Use this ASI to round up your Dexterity and Wisdom for better saves and a higher AC. You also learn Counterspell, because your scythe is literally sharp enough to cut magic. I’m sure Medea isn’t jealous at all.

17. Seventeenth level fighters get an extra use of Action Surge and Indomitable. Not much else to say about this level. You’re just you, but better.

18. Your last eldritch knight goody continues the trend of “you, but better” with Improved War Magic, letting you attack as a bonus action after casting any sort of spell. Hit some people, action surge, cast hold person on them while they’re weak, then hit them again for more fun.

19. Use your last ASI for more Constitution for better concentration and more HP. You also learn the spell Stoneskin for even more defense, giving you resistance to physical damage types.

20. Your last level gives you yet another Extra Attack, giving you four attacks per action or eight with action surge. You also get your last spell, Protection from Energy, which can give you resistance to one type of damage: acid, cold, fire, lightning, or thunder, for up to an hour.

Pros:

Normally hold person’s “save every turn” weakness would be an issue, but thanks to eldritch strike you can use it effectively for crowd control. Hit people, freeze them in place, then hit them some more!

You’re also pretty mobile, with 40-50 feet of movement and teleportation making it hard to pin you down for retaliation.

On top of all of that, you’re strongly resistant against magic, with ways to cheat spell saves and reduce damage even further with Protection from Energy.

Cons:

Using daggers, scythes, and whips to represent your chained weapons is fine and all, but it does mean all your attacks only do 1d4 damage. Even paralyzing your enemies for guaranteed crits isn’t going to make you scary.

Eldritch Knight spell slots only go up to level 4, so you won’t be able to cast Flesh to Stone. Maybe the big you can do it...

Your mobility spells, Hold Person, and protection spells all use concentration, so you’ll only be able to do one of those at a time.

#fgo #Fate Grand Order #D&D 5e #Medusa #Fate and Phantasms #Fighter

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mysticalmusicwhispers · 3 years

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i'm just going to put indchuran for the pottertalia ask even if we all know their houses already i just want to read your character analysis of them :D

The bastards!!!!! :)

For anyone that missed it, Vietnam is here (spoilers: she’s an unconventional Slytherin)!

I think I discussed before that they’re all in Slytherin, and they’re in there for mostly the same reasons, although China is the only one that I think has almost 100% Slytherin qualities.

China Yao views most of his interactions through the lens of business transactions and mutual interests, and has a lot of “every person for themselves” mentality. He partners up with people (in a platonic business affair way) because both parties have something to benefit from the arrangement, not for sentimentality or loyalty. After both their needs have been fulfilled, he isn't one to stick around because of sentimentality, not unless he's really formed a bond with the other person and genuinely likes them as a friend, not just a good business partner. Yao also has ridiculously questionable morals, so it's logical that he also believes ethics > morals, whereas Gryffindors are more morally aligned. He's incredibly ambitious, partially because he views ambition and success as necessary to keep his footing in the world, but also because he just has a thirst to do better. Quite admirable, but he does shady business to achieve his success (none of it is outright illegal/wrong, but it's still very gray), and this combination puts him firmly in Slytherin to me (Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs would only choose the right, 100% moral path, and Ravenclaws don't really thirst for success/status, and instead seek knowledge above all.) Although canon depicts him as rather sunshiney, that doesn’t contradict his Slytherin qualities (nobody said Slytherins had to brood all the time), and a lot of his actions and thoughts are guided by cunning, reason, and ambition. (also realistically, I think he could tick off every single adjective on the Slytherin corner of this image, even if he doesn’t always show it. In modern day, he can afford to goof off and fool around quite a lot, but when it really comes down to it, Yao’s 100% Slytherin.)

India Also a Slytherin; he’s a fair bit more extroverted than Yao (I think they’re both pretty extroverted, but India is a true social butterfly) and his people oriented tendencies + his cheerfulness might get him sorted into Hufflepuff (at least in the one (1) sorting I’ve seen for him... 😔). However, he’s prone to gaslighting and guilt tripping and overall using emotions as tools to manipulate people to do things the way he wants, and when it comes down to it, he runs on his own agenda and... is not the most sympathetic when his plans are detrimental to others. And anyways, Slytherins can be charming and genuine when they want (biggest gripe with HP is that Slytherins are always shown as unequivocally evil and Bastards) but it’s just not their core goal/personality. I think he’s also rather quick to act on emotion sometimes and his feathers get ruffled very easily on certain subjects. He also loves attention and is at least 70% drama queen, and because he feeds off of praise/attention and values other peoples’ opinions a lot he’s Slytherin (sure he’s self-motivated as well but loves it when loads of people like him.) His egotism and how he preens under attention, flaunting his accomplishments, I think that is also kinda slytherin. India also isn’t a stickler for fairness, and hmm... I think he would pretend to be moral and righteous (a Gryffindor and Hufflepuff thing), but he never actually lives up to that standard and can do quite underhanded things to get what he wants (he doesn’t see it as underhanded but it still is). I think he can fall into periods of laziness and procrastination which is inherently a roadblock to ambition, but overall I think he’s mostly a Slytherin.

Iran Slytherin, but unlike India who might seem like a Hufflepuff, Iran might seem like a Ravenclaw (I think?). They appreciate the fine arts very much and hhh I think they appreciate a well written romance tbh (along with other literature)? And with the amount of learning/inventions/knowledge that’s come out of Persia/Iran I think they’d be very fond of learning and appreciate a great mind or a thoughtful discussion more than most. However their ultimate goal in life (? as much as a country can have a life) isn’t to collect knowledge or to learn as much as possible (although they appreciate intellect), but success (and their ambition, especially in ancient times, proves that success is what they’re chasing), and therefore that aligns them more with Slytherin. They can also be kinda ruthless in their pursuit of that and do whatever it takes, although most of the time they’re pretty amicable with others. But again, like China, they don’t really cultivate friendships for being friends alone, more like “you have something I want and I have something you want so let’s work together for a little until we both get what we desire”. They’re very friendly and mild-mannered about partnering together though, and it’s very chill to work with them, except that they see others as rather disposable and don’t really have a concept of loyalty. Also they can hold a grudge for a really, really long time, but are pretty good at not showing it for business (but they get rather tetchy when someone bugs them to make up) and I think that’s pretty Slytherin (pretend everything’s fine because it gives you the upper hand.) Additionally, they brood a lot and often blow things out of proportion when complaining dramatically. They’re very good at logicking out their next steps (instead of using instincts/relying on emotions and subjective view of others, which I think is more Gryffindor/hufflepuff) and operate based on facts and ethics, and would rather be the first to act instead of waiting for an opponent to strike a blow first (proactiveness). Anyways, their pragmatism + ambition = Slytherin, and although knowledge = Ravenclaw that’s not the thing they ultimately value.

As always, the sorting is based on this and this

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dwellordream · 3 years

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“If any character in English popular culture stands for the sheep, it is Griselda. Her chief detractor is, not surprisingly, the shrew. In Robert Snawsel's A Looking Glass for Married Folks, Eulalie preaches the Griselda gospel to Xanthippe and Margery, urging them to bear their husbands' blows and drunkenness with meek loving kindness. This is too much for Margery: "Are you a woman, and make them such dish-clouts and slaves to their husbands? Came you of a woman, that you should give them no prerogative, but make them altogether underlings?" Margery's scornful reference to slavery goes to the dark heart of the Griselda myth. Folklorists have argued about the ancestry of the famous tale for more than a century.

William Edwin Bettridge and Francis Lee Utley have made a strong case that Griselda owes her features to a folktale from medieval Smyrna called "the Patience of the Princess." A prince buys a poor girl from her father and lays a wager with her that she will not be able to submit to all his demands with utter composure. The prince shuts her in a tower alone and tests her for twenty years, repeatedly impregnating her and then taking away her newborn infants, telling her that he is going to kill them. She builds a mother doll out of clay to talk to and cry to but never loses her patience, and in this way she wins the bet.

The tale, which matches the European narrative more closely than any other yet found, throws into stark relief the specter of female sexual slavery that haunts Griselda's story. The most striking variance between them is that the girl from Smyrna is sold into involuntary servitude by her father, whereas Griselda has a choice and agrees to voluntary and total obedience. Passing into European culture, the story came to Boccaccio. In reworking it for the Decameron he reclothed it in local garb, fashioning his novella partly in terms of Italian wedding and dowry customs that were sharply weighted against brides and wives. Boccaccio thought Griselda's story significant enough to give it pride of place as the last tale on the book's final day of storytelling.

Petrarch read the novella and converted it to an exemplum in Latin for male scholars. Griselda entered English culture through Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale," which is largely based on Petrarch's version. Plays, ballads, and pamphlets on Griselda issued forth on the continent and in England throughout the early modern period, with a cluster of publications and performances in the mid- to late sixteenth century. Arguably the most radical change between versions occurred when Petrarch reworked Boccaccio. The Decameron's final tale is told by the satirist Dioneo, a crucial choice by Boccaccio. Refusing to let the happy ending stay happy, Dioneo spells out the political import of the story and caps it off with a horn joke against the marquis:

Everyone was very happy with the way everything had turned out ....Gualtieri was judged to be the wisest of men (although the tests to which he had subjected his wife were regarded as harsh and intolerable), and Griselda the wisest of them all ....What more can be said here, except that godlike spirits do sometimes rain down from heaven into poor homes, just as those more suited to governing pigs than to ruling over men make their appearances in royal palaces?

Who besides Griselda could have endured the severe and unheard-of trials that Gualtieri imposed upon her and remained with a not only tearless but happy face? It might have served Gualtieri right if he had run into the kind of woman who, once driven out of her home in nothing but a shift, would have allowed another man to shake her fur to the point of getting herself a nice-looking dress out of the affair.

Scholars often downplay Dioneo's bitter words about pig-tending and his final putdown of Gualtieri, attributing it to his cynicism; but their labors to match the tale's disturbing sadism with an uplifting exemplary meaning are less than persuasive. The passage is much more than a glib throwaway, as Edward Fechter points out: "the climax angrily repudiates theological allegory and exemplum." Certainly, it seems fitting that the last lines of the last tale in the Decameron should recapitulate the Boccaccian theme of cuckoldry as female revenge. Dioneo's parting shot about "the shaking of the fur" is also an invitation to his listeners and the book's readers to come up with better interpretations than do the silly sheeplike courtiers of the tale, who judge "Walter wise and Griselda the wisest of all."

Furthermore, it is a jest that asks for scornful laughter, especially from listeners who have grutched throughout the tale at Walter's arrogance, egotism, and sadism. Petrarch told Boccaccio that the story so fascinated him that he decided to spread the tale to scholars abroad. So "snatching up my pen, I attacked this story of yours." The angle of Petrarch's attack on the novella (which he termed "a little too free at times") becomes manifest at the cuckoldry-free conclusion of "A Fable of Wifely Obedience and Devotion," in which he erases Boccaccio's satire and his bawdy call for female revenge:

This story it has seemed good to me to weave anew, in another tongue, not so much that it might stir the matrons of our times to imitate the patience of this wife-who seems to me scarcely imitable-as that it might stir all those who read it to imitate the woman's steadfastness, at least; so that they may have the resolution to perform for God what this woman performed for her husband ...Therefore I would assuredly enter on the list of steadfast men the name of anyone who endured for his God, without a murmur, what this obscure peasant woman endured for her mortal husband.

Petrarch's straight-faced version has none of Dioneo's political satire or irony. He is writing in Latin to male scholars, not in vernacular Italian to women and men, as Boccaccio had done. Nonetheless, it is Petrarch that Chaucer credits by name in the vernacular, mixed-audience "Clerk's Tale," although he departs from Petrarch in crucial ways. The Clerk does follow his source in insisting that his moral applies not to wives but to all humankind: This storie is seyd, nat for that wyves sholde Folwen Grisilde as in humilytee, For it were inportable, though they wolde; But for every wight, in his degree, Should be constant in adversitee As was Grisilde .... (I 142-47)

Chaucer actually intensifies Petrarch's warning that wives should not try to imitate Griselda, calling her example "inportable," or unbearable. (The Merchant, whose turn comes next, blatantly ignores this caveat, complaining "Ther is a long and large difference I Bitwix Grisildis grete pacience I And my wyf the passyng crueltee.") Still, scholarly attempts to align Chaucer's Walter with God do not work because Walter is described as "tempting" his wife, a word almost always associated with sin and vice. In another departure from Petrarch, Chaucer's Clerk breaks in several times to condemn the marquis. After Walter first decides to try his wife, the Clerk interjects hotly what neded it Hir for to tempte, and alwey moore and moore, Thogh som men preyse it for a subtill wit? But as for me, I seye that yvele it sit T'assaye a wyf whan that it is no nede, And putten hire in angwysshe and in drede. (45?-62)

Chaucer's version subtly calls Grisildis's ovine quality into question. The lamb of God is Christ, of course, and Grisildis' meekness when her daughter is taken away resembles his suffering: "Grisildis moot al suffre and al consente, I And as a lambe she sitteth meke and stille" But "moot" she? Within English popular culture, sheep and lambs do sometimes stand for the positive values of resignation and endurance-for example, in emblems on patience. But there is no doubt that sheep generally connote passivity, cowardice, and stupidity. In terms of sheer frequency, the negative secular connotation overwhelms the positive religious one.

A related complicating effect is the criticism leveled at "the unsad" (that is, fickle and sheeplike) people of the realm, who at first deplore Walter's acts but change their minds when they see the pretty new queen (actually his daughter), leading "sadde folk" to exclaim: "0 stormy people! unsad and evere untrewe!" As the Clerk finishes his tale, he shows that he is fully aware that not all his listeners will appreciate Griselda's virtues. With teasing wit he acknowledges the Wife of Bath, who has been called the tale's motivating force and dialogic counterpart. Just before the comic envoy he promises "for the Wyves love of Bathe" to gladden her "and al hire secte" with a song urging them to ignore Grisildis and revel in shrewdam (rr69-74).

By shifting the Clerk's role from that of the preacher of a pious exemplum to a merry jester-singer, Chaucer undercuts his clerkly authority and blurs the moral legibility of his tale, already obscured by Griselda's lack of moral agency and her husband's viciousness. Nonetheless, Griselda quickly proved alluring to husbands, and she retained that allure despite proving highly problematic as a pattern for wives. Like the new husband in the jest about the pottage, men who wanted very much to promote Griselda as a model found her too hot to handle.

In the training manual he prepared for his young wife in the 1390s, the Menagier de Paris offers a confused and troubled account of why he wants her to learn about Griselda. He rushes to assure his wife that he'll never torment her "beyond reason" as the "foolish, arrogant" Walter does Griselda, nor does he expect such obedience: I have set down this story here only in order to instruct you, not to apply it directly to you, and not because I wish such obedience from you. I am in no way worthy of it. I am not a marquis, nor have I taken in you a shepherdess as my wife. Nor am I so foolish, arrogant, or immature in judgment as not to know that I may not properly assault or assay you thus, nor in any such fashion.

God keep me from testing you in this way or any other, under color of lies or dissimulations …I apologize if this story deals with too great cruelty-cruelty, in my view, beyond reason. Do not credit it as having really happened; but the story has it so, and I ought not to change it nor invent another, since someone wiser than I composed it and set it down. Because other people have seen it, I want you to see it too, so that you may be able to talk about everything just as they do.

What he really wants, it seems, is for his wife to be au courant. Griselda had "much currency off the page as a talking point in the late fourteenth century" and was "a subject about which wives might be expected to have an opinion." Codified as a way to get women talking (instead of shutting them up), the narrative about testing is itself a means of testing a woman's opinions and conduct. Is Griselda sick or stoic? Enslaved or free? Is hers a saint's tale, with Walter an abstract tool in the central mystery of her endurance, or is it as much a story about Walter and his court? Is he a cruel tyrant or a stern but loving husband with every right to test his wife? Is Walter God and Griselda a female Christ or Abraham or Job? All these positions have been argued during the six centuries of the debate.

Some recent readers still find Griselda admirable and even question whether she should be regarded as a passive victim. Harriet Hawkins has argued that Chaucer's tale should be read as a criticism of unquestioning obedience to authority, even divine authority, while Lars Engle hears "an implicit voice of sane moral protest" in Grisildis's mild objections to her husband. Such strained attempts at recuperation show that Griselda disturbs more than she edifies, raising but failing to answer questions about the limits of obedience in the face of tyranny and the conflict between Christian duty and wifely subjection.”

- Pamela Allen Brown, “Griselda the Fool.” in Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England

#pamela allen brown #renaissance #history #medieval #late middle ages #better a shrew than a sheep

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margridarnauds · 3 years

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Scattered Thoughts on Treason: The Musical

[warning for some critical discussion]

The Cold Hard Ground:

First song I listened to.

God, we’re getting DARK. This is seriously a mix between a villain song and a hero song, and I’m HERE for it.

This is the one I’m possibly most interested in, because it’s really making me wonder how they’re going to portray the plotters: Are we going to be seeing them as fanatics, or as heroes, or somewhere in-between? In this song, it looks like Catesby is a man broken by grief who turned to fanatical religion as a way of coping with his own suicidal tendencies.

“So TAKEEEEE MEEEEEEEEEEE. You won’t BREEEEEAAAAAK meeee, it’s too late to SAAAAAAAAVVVVEEEE MEEEEEE.”

GOD those final notes are going HARD.

At first, I thought that it was rather scattered, musically wise, but the more I listen to it, the more I think it’s brilliant because the music comes together by the end, as Catesby seems to calcify in his convictions.

I’ll be really curious to see how anyone but Hadley serves this, but a solid 80% of this song, at the moment, is built on his impressive performance. I’ll be really curious in knowing how the livestreams went.

Take Things To Our Own Hands:

Honestly, my favorite song on the album, probably one of them that I can best visualize on stage.

WE NEED TO THINK OF A WAAAAAY TO BRING THE WHOLE SHIP DOWN.

Favorite vocal moment: When all the conspirators’ voices join one another, and then the moment at the end where it sounds almost like a church’s choir.

I absolutely LOVE the slick folkish feel to this, paired with the driven pace, it’s like if “The Story Told” from Monte Cristo decided to go folk, I love it. It really has a feel that I don’t see many musicals going for (Hadestown being the closest, though it goes in a jazzier style than this) , and that’s something really in its favor. If the rest of the songs follow this level of quality and tone, this musical is going to be a really, really fun ride.

Also, it’s very interesting in terms of how, even though this is the conspirators’ “Pump Me Up” song, there’s this very DARK overtone to it, which makes sense given what they’re proposing. Their voices go increasingly hard, almost into a staccato, and I wonder how much of that is diction VS them showing how hardened and increasingly radicalized the conspirators are becoming.

That being said: “I once had influenza but now that’s all gone when things turned sour”?????????????????? I’m trying desperately to wrap my head around this lyric, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

The lyrics in this particular song are, admittedly, its weakest point: They tend to be very, very repetitive, but, in all honesty, it doesn’t really bother me - It works with that mood of the conspirators becoming radicalized.

I know that Hadley tends to get most of the kudos for this song, but the other conspirators (Waylon Jacobs, Oliver Savile and Emmanuel Kojo) deserve MASSIVE kudos for their performances, I’m seriously going to be looking into all of them after this.

The Day Elizabeth Died

I started off not really caring for this song, but I’ve really warmed to it.

I’m really curious about who the main singer in this song is supposed to be, because I feel like that will really change how I feel about the lyrics specifying that she had “An inch of makeup on her face”. If we’re supposed to view this from the perspective of a devoutly religious 17th century Catholic woman, I can understand it more than a Protestant woman, given that it really, really works with some misogynistic stereotypes about Elizabeth.

So, the singer’s apparently Anne Vaux, which makes sense. Okay, I’ll give them this one. A little period-accurate internalized misogyny can be good for the soul.

I LOVE Rebecca La Chance’s voice. It’s so wonderfully clear and strong, delicate, but with steel beneath it.

There’s something almost....wistful, melancholy, and isolated about this song? It strikes a very odd balance between being sympathetic to Elizabeth (some say she died of a broken heart) while condemning her reign.

ALSO. BEST VOCAL MOMENT ON THE ENTIRE ALBUM. “We mourned for her, she was our queen, and for 45 years, she had reigned supreme.” And then the conspirators coming on with “WE DID NOT MOOOOOURRRRN FOR HER. SHEWASOURCAPTOR.” I could, legitimately, listen to that bit alone on repeat, I’m actually obsessed with it. That odd, conflicted feeling between Elizabeth having been Queen for longer than most of England had been alive, providing a sense of stability, while also the very real persecution that English Catholics were under. This is the kind of nuance I really want to see the musical carry forward.

Blind Faith

I don’t really know what to say except that Martha Percy’s love for Thomas Percy is juxtaposed with Thomas Percy’s feelings for Catesby.

Literally.

That’s the song.

If this musical ever develops a fandom, there are going to be a hundred Catesby/Thomas fics, with James/Thomas being the darkhorse fic.

It’s hard to judge this one, simply because it’s much more conventional love song - It sounds similar to, for example, “That Would Be Enough”, if Alexander Hamiltpn decided to blow up George III instead of join the American Revolution. It’s a TWIST on the conventional love song, but it still follows similar beats.

But I DO love how their voices go together, the song really starts to shine when that happens.

That last “This path was MINE to choose, he has nothing to prove”, probably is the best vocal moment.

Overall, I don’t have MANY thoughts on this song in comparison to the others, but I can also see myself warming up to it over time.

The Promise

“His face is quite nice” It’s VERY obvious they’re going for a queer comic relief interpretation of James, which I honestly have mixed feelings about given that he is, clearly, going to be the one that our protagonists are trying to get rid of. There’s.....something about that, a bunch of presumably straight protagonists ganging up to kill a stereotypically portrayed gay man. I know that historically, James WAS, but.....I still don’t like how stereotypical they played this one. Someone could point to Herod from JCS but, in all fairness, Herod was written in the 1970s (and, tbh, given that the central relationship in the musical is Jesus and Judas, you could argue that the entire musical is very, very homoerotic, which makes it less glaring.) This is...well, I’ll have to see how the musical deals with it. I’m willing to give it a fair shake, but they might have set themselves up for danger here.

But Daniel Boys is, admittedly, serving this song on a silver platter.

Really, really going into the Spoiled Child Route here.

If it sounds like I’m disappointed with this song compared to the others, it’s because......yeah, I kind of am. Musically, it’s fine and a little catchy, lyrically, it’s fine, but that nuance I’d been seeing in the other songs goes out the window. James isn’t my favorite historical figure of all time (Bro basically set up the English Civil War), but there still HAD to be a better way to do him justice than this.

It doesn’t hurt that, unlike the other songs, which were demonstrably TREASON, this one is very much.....a JCS/Hamilton rip-off. Like, it’s very, very blatant.

Love the rising strings when Percy tells him that Elizabeth is dying, that sense of tension - It does remind me a little of something I heard in The Pirate Queen, but you know what? I’ll give it to them.

Lowkey obsessed with Oliver Saville’s eyebrow raise when he says “You could save England.”

The problem is that they’re leaning so hard into the comic route that, when James says that he’ll be a fair king, it really, really makes the Catholic nobility sound dumb as Hell to listen to him. Like “Yes, man who routinely, gleefully sings about cutting off people’s heads, I’ll listen to you!” I know they’re desperate but....come on.

But also. THAT HIGH NOTE. Daniel Boys really put 110% in there.

Overall, my takeaway is that this musical could either do very, very well or very, very badly, depending on how they play it. It’s hard to judge because the public only has access to 5 tracks (except for the lucky ducks who bought tickets to the stream, where they got access to 10) - It’s hard to judge a musical based off of 5 tracks, and a musical about the Gunpowder Plot with, say, a love song called “Blind Faith” almost sounds like something out of a parody, something destined to be one of those flops that go down in history. BUT, that being said, the musical has some very strong vocal performances and some really good music, when it keeps to its own mood and style instead of trying to go off of what other, more successful musicals have done. There’s some real, real promise in this musical, and I’ll be both anxious and excited to see how it all turns out (and if they ever offer a full purchase for the live recording......I’d honestly probably buy it.) It was a shame I found out about it so late in the game, because I’d have totally bought tickets to the stream if I had known earlier.

#treason the musical

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