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creaman · 2 months

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—BECAUSE KUNG FU PANDA 4 KILLED MY GRANDMA, OKAY?

To preface, I watched this movie and I'm genuinely tweaking right now so I had to write down a very brief (lie) criticism on this film — which you should boycott, by the way.

Starting with the things I liked, before briefing my primary points of criticism:

Po's Character Regression

Po and Zhen's Dynamic

The Chameleon

I'd also yap about Lord Shen and the death of the art style and the entire narrative and pacing and use of the staff of wisdom but my therapist says being such a hater is 'unhealthy' or something. My heart is full of hatred.

SPOILERS for the entirety KFP4 for the 2 people who care.

KFP4 undermines and ignores the previous three movies — Unwriting character developments, outright removing the Furious Five, straying from the character design philosophies and is completely inconsistent with the established lore.

Things I Liked About Kung Fu Panda 4

The Chameleon's character design

Visual gag in the Tavern where Po uses a recently thrown axe as a hat rack (made me laugh)

When Mr. Ping did this:

so cute! the little heart!

Po — Character Writing

Po, as established in the previous movies, is confident in his abilities and identity — he’s learnt inner peace, he’s matured as a character. However, in KFP4, his character has completely regressed. He’s immature again (such as KFP1, possibly worse) and says verbatim, “only knows kicking butt and taking names” — UNLEARNING inner peace and insisting that “…being the Dragon Warrior is all I know.”

It’s childish, and sort of Hotel Transylvania-esque.

Which isn’t helped by the comedy, the dialogue — a large chunk of which are jokes in the style of:

Master Shifu says something philosophical

Po quips off of it / doesn’t get it (i.e. Whoa!! beat I don’t know what that means.)

Oh, it’s great, yeah, very tolerable. Po’s shenanigans are normally reeled in by the presence of the Furious Five who are generally more serious in nature, creating a much needed balance in the dynamic — So without them, it’s just Po becoming increasingly obnoxious and insufferable with every consecutive quip throughout the screenplay.

Po and Zhen — Character Dynamics

[No more graphics sorry I'm too angry]

As if it wasn’t obvious that Zhen was going to be the next Dragon Warrior the second she was introduced.

Zhen, as a character, has no depth besides being a quippy thief. She quips, she steals. This character has no motives — it can be assumed that the writers intended on a ‘change of heart’ thing, but she isn’t established as evil, her working for the Chameleon is written as a (albeit poor) twist reveal.

By which point, her taking either side wouldn’t make sense, given that she has shown no loyalty or attachment to either Po nor the Chameleon.

The movie artificially strengthens their bond by having Zhen start opening up about her backstory out of nowhere for no reason but they have done nothing to grow closer to each other.

Small tangent, her backstory is exactly what you’d expect it to be with no subversions or even emotional weight. Woe is me I was so small and hungry I had to steal to survive. Glossed over in about a minute.

The majority of the dialogue between Zhen and Po is spoken exposition — explaining how powerful and badass the Chameleon is, explaining how ‘we have to go here to do that’ and ‘this place was cool until the Chameleon did such and such’, and the rest of their time together is spent engaging in filler chase sequences and fight scenes.

The Chameleon

Where do I even start…

This is where it becomes apparent that the movie relies heavily on telling rather than showing —

She is the weakest villain by far, not only in universe but as a written character; which is particularly disheartening because I genuinely adore her character design and feel as though a shapeshifting character has great potential.

The movie artificially inflates her power by insisting through exposition that this is the most capable antagonist thus far (lie).

The audience is TOLD by Zhen and various restaurant patrons that the Chameleon is a powerful shapeshifting sorceress and that she 'dominates the city' whilst the film does nothing to showcase this.

'Dominating the city' meaning letting her henchpeople run amock and bully the civilians just like Lord Shen's wolves in KFP2... uninspired.

I just realised they didn't even give her a NAME what the FUCK is going on

She describes HERSELF as ruthless, clever and unsentimental when comparing Zhen to herself.

She says HERSELF that she’s “Stronger than every opponent you’ve ever faced.”

Let’s see what vile reprehensible things she’s done, shall we?

Gently push someone down some stairs

Her first appearance is through Zhen’s exposition, as opposed to the dramatic and memorable entrances of the previous villains. Her motives or character aren’t established until the final third of the film. She doesn’t even FIGHT anybody until the final third of the film; and even then, her fight sequences are uninspired and she never really poses a real threat. (She goes down in two hits.)

That being said, WE CAN STILL SAVE HER GUYS WE CAN STILL GET HER OUTTA THERE I'M COMING FOR YOU CHAMELEON I'M GONNA DRAFT YOU A PROPER BACKSTORY AND MOTIVE AND YOU'RE GONNA BE THE MOST THREATENING VILLAIN THUS FAR

There's a scene after the climax of the film where all the kung fu masters and previous villains from the spirit realm bow to Po. I'm not going to provide my thoughts on this because I fear I may burst a blood vessel. Good day!

Closing Statements

To put it simply, Kung Fu Panda 4 was my Megamind 2.

The film rejects its predecessors in every way. It really feels as though they brought in somebody with no prior knowledge of the franchise to direct the movie.

It's a film that relies heavily on telling rather than showing — banking on the previous three movies to carry it through the box office.

It's just really disheartening to see studio execs turn one of the best franchises into a safe sequel cash grab and regress every character's development.

Nevertheless. I do adore the chameleon's character design so I might do my own take on her character.

As far as I'm concerned, there is no fairy godmother, there is no tooth fairy, and there is no kung fu panda 4.

#creaman talks to drywall #kung fu panda 4 #spoilers #I'm actually tweaking #sorry I stopped drawing the graphics because the film crushed my soul #you drive me to drink kung fu panda 4 #when the rantsona crosses their arms #hating on main #kfp #discussion #criticism #kfp4 #technically a vent post #i've lost it #the chameleon #zhen #po

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cellarspider · 3 months

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5/?? The pseudohistory of Prometheus

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We return to a movie I wish to send on a journey down the Kola Superdeep Borehole, Prometheus.

And my insanity truly begins in this segment. We are only 1/10th of the way through the movie so far. Content warnings for discussion of racism in pseudoscience and historical anthropology, Spider getting hung up on logistics and space nerd stuff, and pictures of Yuri Knorozov, the most sour-faced man to ever live.

The cast sits down for a briefing. This is a scene with an easily identifiable narrative function: providing exposition to the theater audience. The act of doing a briefing makes sense. It is the last thing here that will.

We are introduced to a hologram of Peter Weyland, the financier of the expedition. The name means all sorts of Lore to the series, but what’s intensely distracting is that we seem to have caught Weyland halfway through applying his zombie makeup.

Weyland is played by Guy Pierce. As of the filming of this movie, he was somewhere around 45 years old. Yes, they smothered this Australian in old man drag so that he could play this character. This is a baffling decision, that only gets slightly less baffling if you know the production history of the movie, which I did not at the time.

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Guy Pierce was hired to play a younger Peter Weyland. There’s a promo video out there of him giving a fictional TED Talk in the not-to-distant future of next Sunday AD 2023, there were various plans for him to appear in the movie proper. None of those scenes are actually in the movie. They refused to double-cast the role for some reason. While the practical effects in the movie are generally excellent and it does make the tiniest smidge of sense that a hypercapitalist asshole would be portrayed as a literal rubber-faced movie monster, this, like many things in Prometheus, made the movie a very weird sit. One where I was increasingly less open to going along with the movie’s fiction. You are telling me that this is an actual human man. I am not buying it. He looks far less human than David, the only non-human there.

Speaking of David, Weyland calls him “the closest thing to a son I will ever have”, and then immediately says David is an inhuman lesser being, who does not appreciate the specialness of his existence because he does not have a soul.

Which is funny, because I think you can see David’s soul leaving his body at this exact moment.

Weyland then tries to mash in some existential weight to the movie: they might finally get an answer for “why are we here?” and all that jazz! He also tries to explain why naming a ship Prometheus is totally not like calling it Titanic II: Don’t think about the part of the myth where Prometheus is chained to a rock and has his ever-regenerating liver eaten by an eagle every day! Think about the bit where he brought fire to mankind! We’re gonna bring back that bit!

And then the archaeologists take over the briefing, and this, THIS, is the bit where they entirely lost me. My suspension of disbelief had already been strained by multiple oddities up to this point. My skepticism about these characters in particular was already a bit elevated by their implied invocation of the ancient astronauts concept.

Turns out, only Vickers, Shaw, and Holloway know why they’re here.

Two years away from Earth. On a massively expensive expedition that intends to make first contact with an alien culture, the first alien culture that humankind has ever found evidence of. Nobody has been briefed up until this point.

This is lunacy.

Explanations have been figured out by fans since then: this is a passion project by Weyland, an annoyance to the rest of the corporate structure that nobody else believes in. The movie eventually intimates this, through Vickers.

Fans have thus speculated that Weyland was just quarantined off to do his little alien hunt, with no logistical support that would make it actually functional. He believed a crazy theory put forward by Shaw and Holloway, and everyone else wasn’t actually best-of-the-best, they were just whoever would take a big paycheck to do fuck-all for nearly five years of sleeping their way to and from their destination.

I am willing to consider that this was intentional. The movie possibly tries to confirm this with Mr. “I’m here for the money” Fifield, but none of the other characters have enough characterization to determine if this is the general trend.

How could we make a story that more clearly spells this out? Maybe Millburn the biologist could encounter more of the crew talking about the payout from taking the job, or reveal that he himself has some project he needs money for. It would also chip away at the dearth of character-building dialog for most of the cast.

As a result of those deficiencies in characterization, a lot of my discussion of plot points is going to be focused around what they do, rather than why. …Except when it is about the why, at which point the main commentary will be “WHY.”

In any case: while it makes sense, I'm still not certain the film meant for this character motivation. Prometheus is just so loudly explicit with so many of its plot points that it doesn’t seem like this is the case. The movie certainly believes in the sincerity and correctness of the archaeologists, though.

Unfortunately, it also immediately tells me that they’re a couple of wingnuts. I’m not sure if it intends to, for reasons I’ll get into after I foam at the mouth for a little while.

They present a series of artifacts to the crew: Egyptian, Mayan, Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite, Hawaiian, and their Scottish cave painting. All of them feature “men worshiping giant beings”, who are pointing to what stargazer nerds call an asterism: a pattern of stars. Shaw and Holloway believe that these are aliens that engineered humans into their current state. Shaw literally says “it’s what I choose to believe” as the entirety of their justification for this.

Again: I knew the movie wanted me to take this as truth, within its universe. That’s the implicit deal the movie has made with the audience, this is truth. You are supposed to be contemplating the "whys" of it all. But the movie had also smacked me in the brain so many times in the past five minutes, that I, like Millburn the Biologist, was ready to call bullshit.

I appreciate him for doing so, and it shows he could have been a smart character, but sadly, he is in Prometheus.

Because he is a fictional biologist and I am an actual biologist, I will expand on his argument, as I descend into ranting for the rest of the post.

Millburn objects on the basis of evolutionary history, which the movie only partially succeeds in papering over: the implication is that evolution on Earth was directed with the deterministic outcome of creating something like humans.

This opens up a whole new can of worms that the movie doesn’t get into–when exactly did this engineering start? When great apes evolved? When mammals did? Tetrapods? Skeletons? DNA itself? After all, we know the aliens, now dubbed Engineers by the archaeologists, have DNA. Did they seed all life on Earth? How did they evolve? Our last universal common ancestor is believed to have already been using DNA 3-4 billion years ago, evolving out of a likely RNA-based genetic standard. Hominins diverged from other apes around 15-25 million years ago. What sort of culture would undertake a project that required at least 15 million years on the extreme low end?

All excellent questions! The movie is not concerned with them. I am, and that is part of why this movie still lives in a special, awful place in my head.

This isn’t actually what made me become actively hostile toward the archaeologists, though. What managed that, well! It was their archaeology. Anybody who had an Ancient Egypt Phase in their childhood should be able to articulate multiple reasons why the academic community would’ve laughed these guys out of the building.

Bigness in ancient egyptian art does not indicate literal size. It indicates importance. In fact, the artifacts the movie uses exclusively come from artistic traditions which feature hierarchical or non-literal scale. Do the Engineers turn out to actually be eight feet tall? Yes! Am I still annoyed by this? ABSOLUTELY.

You know what else is a big problem? Many of the cultures they reference here had written language! A LOT of written language! They include Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, and Mayan art in their evidence, all of which not only wrote a LOT of things down, but had a habit of annotating a lot of their art with labels to tell you what was going on! You can actually see some on the props they used in this scene!

Beyond that, they had very prescribed formal styles, where you can follow the action entirely through gestures, held objects, attendant symbols, and clothing! If all these cultures, as implied, had actual, direct contact with aliens, recorded in the art presented here, we would know what they were told.

Skipping ahead of the movie for a minute: the Engineers were apparently not telling humans “we’re here in these stars, come find us”, they were telling humans “settle the fuck down or this is where the hurt’s going to come from”.

Here's the thing. Ancient peoples weren't stupid. They wouldn't just not talk about this. If giant aliens came down from the sky and gave them a stern talking-to that contradicted their religion, that would be a big deal. And these characters specifically say the Engineers are being "worshiped" in these images! They're apparently taking onboard what's being said!

It is certainly possible for information to be lost. Over long time scales, that's unfortunately the rule, rather than the exception. But again: half the artifacts have writing on them!

I chose to believe that Shaw and Holloway simply did not attempt to read any available translations of attendant texts, and they were thus cursed for their foolishness by the ghosts of Mayan Studies pioneer Yuri Knorozov and EgyptologistJean-François Champollion, and the still-extant spirit of Assyriologist Irving Finkel.

Knorozov knows your sins against Mayan Studies. Knorozov is a vengeful god. Chapollion and Finkel are likewise very cross.

Two last things stood out to me in the theater. One of them was extremely petty but tied into some very serious issues with pseudoscience, and the other one was not.

Pettiness first: the asterism shown in the artifacts is a pattern of six stars. The movie wants you to believe that it is very spooky that the only asterism that precisely matches this pattern are six stars that are too faint to see with the naked eye. This is laughable, both because the asterism is so generic-looking that I can think of several very visible asterisms that are good matches for the pattern, but it also recapitulates a bunch of really fucking annoying shit from pseudoscientific bullshit.

First: Pseudoscience and pseudohistory likes to make a big deal out of the fact that every culture has stories about the stars. Why?

The sky is very important to every culture’s mythology, because every culture can see the sky. Like, that’s literally it. People can see the sky. They tell stories about it. There’s not much to do at night except look at the sky, when even keeping a fire lit can be an expensive prospect. It is not even the least bit weird when multiple cultures–all of them in the northern hemisphere in this case!–have stories about the same stars.

Second: Cultures vary in their ability to faithfully reproduce celestial landmarks in art and align their architecture is variable, and not as exact as modern techniques can manage. Pseudoscience will claim that they are exact, when it fits their pre-existing theory, or fudge the difference if they want something to fit their claims.

(This is a photoshopped image, by the way.)

Were the stone age temples of Malta secretly aligned with a particular star that foretold the doom of Atlantis, precisely tracking its location through the sky over thousands of years of Earth’s axial wobbling? No! They were roughly aligned with the sun. Sunlight is important when you don’t have electric lights. Were the Great Pyramids of Giza laid out ten thousand years ago to match the layout of the stars in Orion’s Belt, according to the designs of a legendary lost race of highly advanced non-African people? Were they tapping into the Earth’s magnetic field to generate energy? No! They were aligned with the cardinal directions, and they got them a bit wrong!

Hell, if we want to play at that game, I found a decent match for the asterism in Stellarium's Egyptian constellation set. Just flip this 90 degrees clockwise and you'll see I'm totally right. Aliens confirmed.

I know the movie is trying to tell me that all the asterisms in the art are precise matches for each other and are thus impossible to explain without intercultural contact (or aliens!!), but it is also showing me that they are not that precise. So, it’s just showing me stars. At least in some of them. Their little charcoal lad from the Isle of Skye may be throwing fruit at his audience.

In fact, there's a further, probably unintentional link to pseudohistorical claims in the artifacts presented: the Maya artifact shown does not actually depict a "giant figure" being worshiped, in fact, it shows one instantly recognizable, known figure in Classical Maya history: It is an altered version of the ornately carved coffin lid of Kʼinich Janaab Pakal I (24 March 603 - 29 August 683), with the top quarter of the carving replaced with a star pattern that looks nothing like the ones on the other artifacts.

The carving shows Pakal in the pose of an infant, entering into death and being reborn. It is packed full of so many symbolic elements that can be easily recognized by those more familiar with the Classical Maya than I am.

Conspiracy theorist Erich von Däniken thought that it showed Pakal rocketing away on a spaceship. Däniken proposed this because he didn't understand the cultural symbolism, but he had seen pictures of astronauts before.

And on that note, 2,400 words into this rant, we get to the actually bad shit. Unfortunately, it ties into the issue I had with the premise to begin with: the real-world context of pseudoscientific claims of ancient alien contact. Specifically, the racism.

We’re going to unspool this more near the end of the movie, because there was further behind the scenes I was not aware of when I first saw Prometheus, and it just compounds this stuff.

So, when I went on my first tangent on how unpleasant ancient alien theories are, one thing I highlighted is that the further from Western Civilization you get, the more these theories presuppose that fellow humans are incapable of building great works or imagining interesting things. No, they had to be guided, and explicitly shown things that they copied down to the best of their limited capability.

The only european example of alien contact they show is from the Upper Paleolithic, 37,000 years ago. All the examples around the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia range from 5,500-3,700 years ago. The examples from the Classical Maya and Hawaiʻi are from 620 and 680 CE.

During this period, Tang Dynasty merchants were creating the first paper money as the famous female emperor Wu Zetian was on her way to the throne. The Prophet Muhammad went to al-Aqsa mosque, and we’re only eight years before the birth of Charlemagne’s grandfather. We’re no longer talking ancient, it’s just old.

I want to emphasize that the movie is presenting these not as depictions of myths that have been passed down–though there are more problems with that I’ll get into shortly–these are implied to be contemporary depictions of events witnessed by the artists, who were quite possibly instructed by the Engineers to record a precise pattern of stars. An equivalency is being drawn between stone age Europe, bronze age Africa and the Middle East, and a couple of startlingly recent Mesoamerican and Polynesian cultures.

But let’s be generous. Maybe these aren’t supposed to be contemporary accounts in these two outlier cases: the movie’s script will certainly indicate later that they have no idea what they’ve implied here. Perhaps these are story traditions that were handed down from the Olmecs and Melanesian precursors of the first to sail to Hawaiʻi.

Unfortunately, this just recapitulates a different racist trope: that European and more “developed” civilizations invented so much cool and comfortable material culture and philosophy that they forgot the Mystical Religious Truths of the old ways, which were preserved only in Primitive Lands and among Uneducated Peoples, where they never found anything better to do with their time. Oh, if only we had heeded the warnings from those spiritually attuned non-white people!

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(Look, I only remember Devil (2010), which has 50% on Rotten Tomatoes, because M Night Shyamalan wrote and produced it, and this was two years after The Happening came out, so I watched it out of morbid curiosity. It's not as unbelievably bad as The Happening, but as shown in the clip above, the spiritually attuned latino security guard Ramirez attributes toast landing jelly side down to Satan. That is an actual thing that happens in the movie. He is proven right.)

But let's be even more generous: someone probably realized that they'd focused near-exclusively on Middle Eastern cultures, and wanted to throw in a couple from elsewhere. Sitting here, having seen the movie in full, this is the most likely option: their inclusion creates a contradiction with a later scene, and was thus probably not checked for consistency. These cultures were thrown in as a bit of background flavor. I list this last, because in the theater, there was no way to know this at the time.

That answer's still not great. Still leaves us in the same position, where Europeans are pretty much given their own agency, while other cultures need to be led.

Oh, and to anyone else who’s made it this far and knows the production history of Prometheus: don’t worry! I know what Ridley Scott told that one interviewer, about a contact between a less-ancient European power and the Engineers. I’m saving that one. I like to save that one, because strategic deployment of that quote made some of my IRL friends scream.

Next time: the Prometheus descends to an alien world, and I descend further into madness. I am going to drag you all down with me.

(Pictured: Yuri Knorozov, and my present mood.)

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Citations for alt text ramblings:

https://www.almendron.com/artehistoria/arte/culturas/egyptian-art-in-age-of-the-pyramids/catalogue-fourth-dynasty/

#Prometheus (2012)#prometheus 2012 #The last time I watched this movie with a scientific colleague and friend #this scene took us twenty minutes to get through #because we were both biologists #plus me with the archaeology and a dash of space nerdery #and they knew mesopotamian history #so by the time we were done with this scene we were ginned up and ready to fight the movie

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mochifiction · 10 months

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Finally finished the new Earthspark episodes and I’ll definitely voice my thoughts on it soon. However, there have been a few complaints I’ve seen on here that genuinely confuse me pertaining to how this fandom interprets this show regarding plot, pacing, character arcs, and target audiences. I saw one user already dislike the fact that the Maltos are the weakest point of this show mostly because of the more slice-of-life episodes that lack that TRANSFORMERS vibe such as conflicts with the war and its lore, consequences of these conflicts, and more. This person rightfully acknowledges that ES was not meant for people their age, and that right there is the point. This entire season was in of itself exposition, to put it in literary terms. It laid the foundations for future conflict, purpose, and development. If you think about it in a timeline of our episodes, we only just met Nightshade, Hashtag, and Jawbreaker not that long ago. It was only JUST NOW that Jawbreaker got an alt-mode. This show is partially if not majorly about growth. The audience grows up with these characters in an initially healthy learning and family environment. The Terrans are discovering the world we as an older audience on this app know already. They were also initially heavily protected to keep them away from Ghost. That healthy and secluded environment leads to discovery and family development. It is only later that this bubble starts to burst, and the more they are exposed to the war’s consequences, the further they stray from childhood innocence. Innocence that we as the audience believes deserves to be protected, but won’t be. It’s easy to be frustrated or bored with the more casual episodes. The amount of secondhand embarrassment I got watching the Terrans break boundaries or go about things I wouldn’t is immense. However, quite frankly, that’s the point. They’re children. Those around them attempted to protect them from consequences of a war that did not involve them. Unfortunately, they fail by the end of the season, which goes into my second point.

A lot of people think some character encounters or developments here were too rushed, but this goes back to my statements about the plot pyramid. This was intentional because it is the exposition. If anyone remembers their elementary school English lessons, they would remember exposition introduces characters, conflict, setting, etc. That was the purpose of this season. We have hints and undertones that were not answered this season, but if all of the conflict was resolved in the first few chapters of a book, it wouldn’t be so entertaining now would it? The things that were not resolved or touched upon this season are likely going to be in the future. Starscream’s time to shine was brief, which a lot of people disliked apparently, but there are clear indications his hatred and resistance against Megatron persist. A lot if not all of the Decepticons heavily loathe Megatron and view him as a traitor. They came to help the Maltos at the end of the season to help save their kind, NOT to resolve this conflict with Megatron. Thrash even in this new chunk of episodes is clearly frustrated that they inherited a war that had nothing to do with them, and this is not the first time he’s said it. That wasn’t resolved this season. We finally got Orion Pax lore! That didn’t get developed this season. All of these things are obviously going to reappear in the seasons to come. That’s how plot works. We got the exposition of a brand new show with new concepts and new takes on old ones. To cram deeply fleshed ideas, arcs, and attempts to satisfy everyone while still catering to kids on Nickelodeon is HARD.

You may be asking where I think these loose ends will go. I think we will probably get more inner Cybertronian conflict next season. With the fallout of Mandroid and Ghost as an organization, humans as the antagonists may potentially shift away from focus. The dust had settled and left Autobots and Decepticons, who still heavily disagree, all together. There is clear resentment from the Decepticons to Megatron, but there is also open hatred between them and Optimus who, to their knowledge, orchestrated and justified their imprisonments. Not only that, but the classic Autobot vs. Decepticon hatred by affiliation remains. I believe the war will be discussed more in the next season along with inner Cybertronian conflict. While this season covered a lot of hatred to the Terrans from people outside of their species, it is possible it will also cover the struggle of receiving hatred or judgement from people you would hope to find kinship with. This will probably be where that childhood innocence dissipates and more individual growing up amidst war aftermath takes place. I’m not sure, but what I’m trying to say is a lot of you are impatient and are asking a whole lot from a show’s first season and then getting upset or irritated when things don’t happen right away. It’s called patience. We are in the exposition. Let them cook for Christ’s sake.

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phykios · 4 months

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Review: "We Visit the Garden Gnome Emporium"; "I Plunge to my Death"; "A God Buys Us Cheeseburgers"

Hey y'all! I'm back. It took a while to write this review, and not just because I had a busy holiday season. The more I tried to consider episodes 3 and 4, the more I realized that a lot of my critiques of them were things I had already touched on in the last two–poor exposition, bad lighting, rushed plot, etc–and so it felt a little redundant to say the same thing all over again. Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how annoying you find me), episode 5 was such a cut above over the rest of the season, I finally have new things to say! With that in mind, the format of this review will be a little different, as I will compare the episodes side by side, rather than consider each one individually.

For a brief, brief recap, the three episodes follow fairly similar plot beats: the trio travels a little, meets a mythological being that tries to mess with their heads, then they all try to sacrifice themselves for the good of the quest before figuring out an alternate way to win. This isn’t a criticism, by the way–the book chapters have similar formats, and repetitive framing is a great way of demonstrating character growth. And of course, there’s no better way to spruce up a travel montage with a little lore dump.

What makes for effective exposition? It’s a delicate balancing act between making sure that the information you need to get across gets to the viewer, but not letting them know that you’ve done it. “Show, don’t tell” is the most common expository technique, and for good reason–information is better retained and more effective when it’s not delivered to you like someone reading off cue cards. And it’s most effective when it’s withheld until just the right moment. PJO TV is not… great at this. It’s mostly little things, one-off little lines, like Luke saying “I’m the best swordsman” or “Annabeth is the smartest,” but there are some more egregious examples, mostly with Chiron explaining the world to Percy. This, I get, and it’s not like Riordan did it that much more elegantly in the books. But I’m more annoyed about Luke info-dumping than anybody else.

I was re-reading The Lightning Thief for several reasons, and one of the things about Luke is that he keeps things very close to the chest. It’s partly to conceal his villainy, but it also makes sense from a psychological standpoint, hiding his emotions not only to keep everyone from finding out the truth about him, but also to recruit kids for the upcoming war. Luke only opens up about what happened to him and Thalia once: at the very end of the book, just before he tries to kill Percy. It’s a powerful moment–the specter of Thalia haunts Percy throughout the book, the ideal of a hero he’s afraid he’ll never be able to measure up to, and we find out that she’s been haunting Luke as well, but for very different reasons. (She haunts the TV show as well, which I like very much–I just hope it pays off!) We are shown hints of his darker side earlier, but withholding the heel turn until now, and pairing it with the first time we see him actually talk about himself, is part of what makes this scene so good and so heinous at the same time. The first time we get glimpses of Luke’s true self, his motivations and what drives him, is the same moment where he crosses the line. And in the meantime, TV!Luke just lets it all hang out.

Consider:

Before camp, I was on the road. Me and a forbidden kid I met along the way. Her name was Thalia… A long time ago, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades agreed their children were becoming too powerful, so they made a pact not to father any more. And it held for a long time, until Zeus broke that pact. Until Thalia. A forbidden kid attracts trouble. Monsters everywhere, it's just a constant battle to stay alive. One day, we, uh, find this little girl hiding in an alley. Annabeth. We were worried about taking her in, exposing her to all that danger. Then we saw her fight. Thalia didn't make it. But Annabeth and me... we did. And we've been family ever since… Annabeth is the strongest warrior in camp. The only way left to prove herself is to go on a quest. [S1E2, “I Become Supreme Lord of the Bathroom”]

Why is he saying all this? Is it for Percy’s benefit, or the audience’s? What does this reveal about Luke’s character? What about this monologue reveals what Luke actually thinks about the pact, or Thalia’s death, or even Annabeth? We’re told he sees her like family, but what does he do to show us?

For contrast, here’s Ares’ lore dump a few episodes later:

You're new to the family, young one, so let me fill you in on how we work. See, years before I was born, my grandpa Kronos ate my aunts and uncles. Yeah. Then my dad made him puke them back up, then chopped him into a million pieces and chucked 'em into a bottomless pit, so that kinda set the tone right outta the gate. Olympians fight. We betray. We backstab. We will push anyone down a flight of stairs to get ahead. And that's why I love my family so much. My dad knows he's not getting this bolt back with quests or goose chases. He knows there's a war coming. And in reality, I think he's okay with that. I think he feels it's just time for a war, so we're gonna have a war. Isn't that great? [S1E5, “A God Buys Us Cheeseburgers”]

What does this reveal about Ares’ character? That he loves violence, and that the threat of war is exciting. That he doesn’t exactly hold his family in high regard. That this is something that is central to who the gods are. All of this is supported by Adam Copeland’s performance, which is flippant, funny, and immature. The details work in concert to show us who Ares is and what he wants, all without ever having him say it out loud.

For all of its clumsiness, though, I actually really like Grover’s little monologue about the nature of questing as we follow the kids into New York City in episode 3. It has a very Fellowship of the Ring vibe (which I’m pretty sure is deliberate) which fits on a meta-level too, with Percy Jackson in conversation with epic stories of the past.

But you know what wasn’t in conversation with the past? The shortest Medusa battle ever recorded.

I’m being a little hyperbolic for comedy’s sake, but genuinely I hated the Medusa fight. Not the Medusa backstory–sidestepping the sexual assault in a middle-grade book was the correct choice, and it’s not like a post-#MeToo Medusa is a shocking or novel idea–but not only should the fight have been at least twice as long, it was missing a full fourth of the mythological ingredients. The mythical Perseus has four gifts: the sword, the mirror shield, the helm of invisibility, and the winged sandals. The book reinterprets the shield as a glass ball. And the show doesn’t use it at all. Is this a nitpicky critique? Maybe. But some of Percy Jackson’s strongest moments are the reinterpretation of mythological scenes, and for those to work, you should incorporate the key details.

Also, again, cannot stress this enough, it was way too short. At least the Echidna fight scene had some blocking involved. And acting.

Speaking of acting, I will say that it’s very consistently well done. I think the kids are more than holding their own against the adults, and they walk the line between playing maturity and still being young very well, which is a very difficult thing to do. In fact, rarely is the acting ever a problem. Because, once again, it’s the writing that makes it fall short.

Let’s do another comparison: Percy sending off Medusa’s head and Percy and Annabeth with Hephaestus’ chair. One is from the books, and one is new. Both are given the appropriate amount of weight in the episode’s runtime. Both are well-acted, well-blocked, well-scored. But the new scene feels out of place to me. Part of the problem is that, being a scene lifted from the books, Percy sending off Medusa’s head feels earned and supported by the material of the last few episodes. He’s pissed at his dad for ignoring him, and pissed that the gods are forcing him to do all this nonsense for reasons he only barely understands. Of course he’s going to foist a magical WMD on them.

But the chair scene doesn’t have that prior support. Consider:

Eat or be eaten. Power and glory and nothing else matters. Ares is that way, Zeus is that way, my mother is that way. He isn't that way. He's better than that. Maybe I was that way once. But I don't wanna be that way anymore. I won't be like all of you. I just won't. [S1E5, “A God Buys Us Cheeseburgers”]

In a vacuum, this would be a great scene. Walker’s fear is palpable and real, and Leah delivers a heartfelt performance in anguish at her friend’s supposed fate. That’s all well and good, except that these characters have known each other for… what, three days? A week? And for all her talk of glory, Annabeth dispensed with that idea pretty much right out the gate, as she killed a Fury rather than hand Percy over to Alecto. She tries to sacrifice herself for the quest all the time. What power and glory is she seeking?

This is an excellent scene that unfortunately doesn’t belong in this season. This scene, as my dear @frenchswissborder pointed out, does not belong after the Thrill Ride of Love (before the Zoo Truck scene as well!) but instead feels like it should be in the Battle of the Labyrinth’s Mt. St Helen confession scene. Putting it there at least would build on three years of friendship, rather than a handful of days of not annoying each other.

I don’t mind new scenes. I want new scenes. If I wanted a one-to-one adaptation, I’d just read the books again. But the new scenes have to matter. They have to bring something new to the table. Let me put it this way: when The Lightning Thief musical said, “Fuck it, Cerberus is a DJ,” it was both leaning into its own medium as musical theater and riffing on the idea of the underworld being under a recording studio. When PJO TV says, “Fuck it, exposition time,” it feels like they’re reading off Mythomagic card stats.

What makes an adaptation great, in my opinion, is how well it speaks to the subtext of the original work. The musical is excellent at this, in particular how it uses the conventions of musical theater to highlight the parallels between Percy and Luke by giving them variations on the same “I Want” song. Where PJO TV shines is how it speaks to the subtext of abusive adults. Abuse of children is sadly not always so obvious, and I like how the Mist lets Alecto, Echidna, and Ares act pretty much with impunity. They are predators, and they are able to move without fear of detection. This even applies to Medusa, too, having her pretend to offer Percy a way out, when she really is only interested in herself and her needs.

But, as the show tends to do, this only causes the story to kneecap itself by neutering Gabe as an abusive figure. I understand why it is this way, as book Sally, for all her kind and loving nature, wasn’t exactly written with a backbone. Part of this, I assume, is just that The Lightning Thief was published in 2005, and that a) the conversation around intimate partner abuse simply was not in the mainstream, and b) Riordan just got better at female characters over time. So the trade-off is that by making Sally a more formidable, dynamic character in the show, they had to dial down Gabe’s uglier, abusive nature–which is going to be really awkward in a few episodes when Sally kills him just for the crime of being annoying.

Stray thoughts:

Just taking a moment here to say that I think the set design has been really gorgeous so far. Shout out in particular to the attic in the Big House!

I’m only just noticing this now, but the trunk of Thalia’s pine tree looks like there’s a human in there–bent knee, arms outstretched, head bowed–and I think that’s awesome.

The idea of monsters sensing a demigod’s weakness and responding to that is so good, and I’m taking it.

Earlier versions of this review had a long and annoying rant about Medusa’s origins, so allow me to tl;dr: there is no original Medusa myth. Ovid’s Medusa myth in Metamorphoses comes about 800 years after Hesiod’s Theogony, which comes after Homer’s Iliad. It’s not a question of Ovid against Hesiod against Homer, it’s a question of these authors plus thousands of pieces of pottery depicting hundreds of variations on the Medusa myth, and we cannot definitively say which one is the source of the myth. That said, I don’t dislike a #MeToo Medusa, I just mostly hate the discourse around it.

It’s nice to see some architecture nerd Annabeth, but between the way the show glosses over it, and the lack of crippling arachnophobia, her character is being reduced too much to “prideful” for my tastes. It’s not that Annabeth isn’t prideful, obviously, it’s just that she has more dimension to her than the show is currently presenting.

Annabeth and Grover throwing water on Percy like a beached whale is very funny, but it did make me realize that they haven’t introduced nectar/ambrosia in the show. Maybe they’re saving it for the finale?

Ares calling them all cousins makes me extremely happy. This was something that Riordan did in the early books, but he kind of petered off, presumably so as not to imply weird pseudo-incestuous things once Percabeth started, but I always loved it.

I’m saving the Percy and Annabeth relationship breakdown until after the season, but it is coming! (But I am sad that “seaweed brain” came out of nowhere :( we just rolled right over it!)

The lighting is really bad, especially in the dark, and I am learning to live with it, but I am not happy about it.

Aryan is the breakout actor of the trio, in my opinion. Playing awkward is so, so easy to overdo, but he brings a sincerity and a quickwittedness to Grover that I absolutely adore–he’s a sweet kid, and he’s clearly scared, but he knows when to summon his courage and do the brave thing for him and his friends.

Also here are some screencaps that I like. They don’t have anything to do with the review, I just think they’re neat :3 (IDs/thots in the alt)

#pjo tv #pjo spoilers #pjo tv spoilers #sasha review #this is a long one lads!

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blazethecheeto · 28 days

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hey hi this might just be my obsession with her but hey. what happened to caitlin's screentime. i miss her. i miss when she had relevant plot and the writers cared about her and didn't just show up to say some science exposition then disappear for another two episodes.

i thought she was one of the main characters. LIKE SHE IS. it just feels like they forgot almost every plot point they have with her until the next caitlin centric episode. whcih gets more and more sparse each season.

s6 was actually brutal, she had virtually no screentime or episodes, it was all about frost, which i get that they wanted to do something different, but caitlin shouldn't have been completely pushed aside. like, i feel like after s4, they didn't know what to do with caitlin. if she doesn't have a love interest or her storyline with frost, they have no idea what to do with her plot.

so they don't include her at all.

WHICH PISSES ME OFF? BECAUSE THERE IS SO MUCH. SO MUCH POTENTIAL FOR CAITLIN STORYLINES THAT DON'T INCLUDE FROST.

those brief, beautiful moments where she gets a chance to shine or have her angst, like when the flashbacks showed her getting fucking run over??? by her dad?? which she repressed for 20 years??? and that's not good plot material for the writers??

in 7x08, when caitlin just breaks down because she doesn't want to live a life without frost?? 2x22 when caitlin thinks she sees jay everywhere and is terrified?

they have an actual goldmine of a character with built-up plot and lore and angst and personality and she's literally my favourite flash character ever and they just. push her aside.

they have deleted scenes of really good caitlin stuff with danielle acting her ass off and they just scrap it because hey we actually wanna see more of another wells or cecile or allegra or whoever they decide to focus on today :3

guys i promised myself this wouldn't be an anti-flash rant, istg im just so sad. i love caitlin. i love frost. i love their storylines.

it just sucks the show doesn't seem to think they matter.

#sorry for the ramble im just-#ugh first time flash watcher feeling fr #like the things they could have done with “i dont think ill ever be whole again”#with “youve got your happy ending everyone else be damned”#with “if i let myself feel all that pain and let that anger out its never gonna stop”#with “im the one whos turning evil”#the whole e-1 kf and caitlin scene when they were trapped together #the amount of fics and headcanons and absolute GUT wrenching analysis's i made for caitlin back in her s2 state #fandom rant #mine #caitlin snow #killer frost #the flash #when your fave character gets done dirty URGGGGHH #flash critical #?#cw the flash #dont get me started on danielle saying she wanted caitlin to date women #arrowverse

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hetaphilia · 1 year

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England & Canada Fic Recs

my fellow royal red bros fans I am here hot and fresh with some fics about the two or majorly involving their dynamic that I enjoy, mostly from ff.net and ao3 (some are probably crossposted)

Golden Child - drunk England going on about how great little America was to Canada’s silent hurt... except maybe he’s not talking about America at all. Oneshot, ending gives me a nice warm feeling.

Industry and Grandeur - 1800s, France invites England and a colonial Canada to his country for an exposition, lots of lovely interactions between the duo. Just wonderfully written, some great historical Hetalia.

Gift of God - England and Canada head to a restaurant after a meeting to chat when they overhear the plight of a human couple tables away. Canada makes a selfless choice. Very sweet, really like how the author writes them.

The Cold We Hate - ACE family overall, but royal red bros too for sure. Details the North American ice storm of 1998 and how the weather affects America and Canada, staying over at England’s house so he can take care of them.

Teatime questioning - little Matthew asks England how to get a girl to like him, except it might not actually be about liking him, nor how to get a girl to in the first place. Toothrottingly cute, love to think this is how Canada gets into tea.

On Love and Loyalty - a look at Canada’s and England’s relationship throughout Canadian history. Just good sold stuff with a sweet ending.

The Frozen Friend - winter in Canada in the early days after England’s acquired him as a colony. Canada apparently has a strange man as an old friend, but England feels wary for some reason. Then he learns who he really is and oh shit. Slightly spooky and has protective Kumajiro, one of my faves lore wise.

Haunting Echoes - snippet of WW1 with kinda snapped Canada and worried England. Short but dark. Poor Canada.

Feverish - might be if not my fave Het fic, then among my top. FACE family centric, but lots of royal red bros throughout. Canada falls ill, tries to persevere through a world meeting, and things snowball from there as America, England, and France are pulled in to care for their brother that seems to keep getting worse after brief bouts of recovery. And Russia’s there too...? Canada’s failing health may be linked to something more subtle but nefarious than any of them initially thought. Great pacing, characterization, lots of character dynamics, knows when to amp up the tension and when to give it a break. Sadly, this fic remains unfinished and is unlikely to ever be completed, but the 20 chapters we do get are wonderful. I recommend it even if just to enjoy the ride.

#hetalia #hws #hws canada #hws england #royal red bros #fic rec #might make another list in the future when I cobble together more

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vaalthus · 3 months

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A Brief Respite (spoilers)

Ya know never occurred to me they'd all be at the Inn. The refugees we saved of course.

*confused sobbing*

You know I'm still curious as to the exact mechanics as to how Wargoth Sr did this. Feels like the answer lies with in affecting the Empress since all Atealan are supposed to come from her but I'm just not sure.

That being said,

I'm curious if we might one day aid in the Atealans reclaiming this power. Seems unlikely given that they would no longer have a reason to be on Lore, save out of sentiment, but it would be nice to explore if the damage Wargoth did was truly permanent.

Hard decisions made by the atealan people or the Empress?

I'm just loving the exposition that gives so much but hides just enough for new players that won't have a lot of the context older players already have.

Assuming its still canon, this would be a perfect spot in the time line of the Atealan's history for the trithril curse to have begun. Surely some among their numbers would have desperately wanted to try to have their people be able to live under sunlight without affliction once more and travel beyond Somorah

Avatars, the side-by-side exposition/foreshadowing art is just too damn good.

And then there's the characterization...

I love how devastating it feels to know that a world has been basically been lost forever, somebody's home and loved ones. It's the shoe that drops for Alz'Ein that makes it clear they can never go back to where they came from and worse the enemy responsible for all that loss is still coming after them.

Stronger than who Alz'Ein? Veyla? The Fallen? Surely not Wargoth.

Ah I can smell the frustration of the Rising Fire War from here.

#dragonfable #dragonfable spoilers #alz'ein #the atealan #this was some mighty fine introduction into Ateala if I do say so myself #Still a little surprised at times to see Serenity...well ya know #perhaps wargoth's nature as an Infernal made it possible #the threads #the threads of their being #atrea #the ateala

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bardsandbees · 3 months

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Here’s my semi-brief thoughts on the new Avatar show. Spoilers below:

My biggest gripe with the new show is that it’s a prime example of the death of media literacy. SO much of the story has been dedicated to just…info-dumping lore and basically having to say out loud who’s good and who’s bad and how you should feel about each character. It was cool to hear Gran-Gran say the intro of the OG show but she did it as a major exposition bomb. One of MANY especially in the first few episodes. ATLA’s heart is it’s world-building and the relationships between it’s characters, and those things went hand in hand as the OG show progressed. The characters learned from each other and grew as people, and the new show just feels deeply bland and shallow. The characters have been stripped of so many of their most human traits because it makes them seem like bad people, and it needs to be shoved in your face that they’re the good guys, so they can’t possibly have flaws. Sokka can’t be a huge misogynist, Katara can’t be angry and impulsive, Aang can’t be childish, etc. Hell, even Zuko seems to have been dumbed down at the cost of making Iroh seem like the better character, and don’t even get me started on what they’ve done to him. In season one we’re supposed to hate Zuko, so that his redemption arc is all the more compelling. Taking time this early to force out that “he’s a good guy don’t worry!” speaks very poorly to the writing, among other things. Overall it just feels very weak, and like the writers felt the need to spell everything out for audiences. The show starting in the past, while interesting to see and setting the mood quick, it was thematically so absurd and set me up to be disappointed. Aang should never have known about the war and the Fire Nation invasion before he went in the ice, it’s part of what bonds him to Katara in the first place! She teaches him what happened and tries to help him through the emotions of that realization. He comes to terms on his own that he’s the last of his people, he doesn’t have some old lady throw it in his face in a crowd. Listen, there’s some things about this show I actually enjoyed, and it certainly could’ve been worse. But God, I’m not a fan. I hate to say it, but I’m hoping Netflix stays true to themselves and cancels it after this season.

#i could talk for hours about my issues with this #and i know a lot of people will be upset cause they like it #yes it can be fun and camp but it’s trying so hard to be gritty it’s embarrassing #for a kid’s show atla was incredibly nuanced and carried heavy themes and could still be portrayed lightly #this is just trying too hard and still coming up far short #i need to keep talking about this so if you also hated it please dm me #i have so many thoughts #netflix atla #avatar the last airbender

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ostrichmonkey-games · 1 year

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DEATHGRIND!!MEGASTRUCTURE Design Dive

Wow this has been sitting in my drafts, mostly finished for ages now. Anyways, time to release it to the wilds.

A few weeks ago I released a new game (editor's note: it has now been more than a few weeks), DEATHGRIND!!MEGASTRUCTURE for the Together We Go Jam over on itch. Together We Go is a design guide/SRD based on Down We Go, which itself is under the often nebulous umbrella of "OSR" gaming. In this case, it's the snappy mechanics, emphasis on anti-canon, relatively high lethality, and emphasis on the table's creativity is what puts it under that umbrella, imo. I'd consider it part of the maybe post-osr or N(ew)SR but that's a discussion for another time and for people who understand that scene better than me. I was drawn to TWG b/c it's a pretty simple framework with a cool twist on the typical OSR style of classes.

Rather than picking a class, you invest levels into multiple classes as you progress, with each class having its own set of cool abilities and more importantly, bonuses. One class might give you a bonus to hit things, another increases your defense. Stuff like that. It's pretty fun! A full breakdown on DWG/TWG could be fun sometime.

Now, time for the DEATHGRIND!!MEGASTRUCTURE stuff beneath the cut! It's long!

WRITING AND DESIGN

Anyway, DGMS. Originally I had the brain-blast of a title for the eventual game; Hyperpop Megastructure. Which honestly, could be very fun to revisit, but I scrapped that angle because I didn't want to do too much on the layout/graphic design side of things (editor's note; he did in fact do too much on the layout/graphic design side of things) and a hyperpop inspired game should have a wild layout. Also I'm just not familiar enough with the genre to really do it service -lmao.

I stuck with the Megastructure part for the time being and started brainstorming the potential classes (since those make the mechanical core of the game). Below are the early versions straight from my notes;

These were the initial outlines for the classes (a 4th was added later) and really set the tone for the rest of the game (and it marks the first appearance of the FRACTALDEATHMACHINE). By that point, I knew I wanted to do something inspired by BLAME! by Tsutomu Nihei. Its the first thing I always think of when the word "megastructure" comes up. Honestly, it's a very formative piece of sci-fi for me.

I wanted to push DGMS weirder. Just go all out on the nonsense. Together We Go games don't rely on a lot of setting exposition. The information of the world is found within the mechanics, random tables, gear, and factions that are presented.

This is what forms the central idea of an "anti-canon". You (the writer) give just enough info on the world and setting for the table to get started, but the details, the lore and truths about that world emerge at the table as the Referee/GM and players explore and interact with what is on the paper.

The FRACTALDEATHMACHINE is the biggest example of this anti-canon in practice. All the table gets is a brief description of a few general things. The FDM is hungry, it is ancient, and it is always pursuing the TOWER. A few other places in the text provide more spaces for the table to explore by prompting the players and GM to come up with "terrible truths" about the nature of the FDM.

What is this insight? Why is it considered terrible? Go find out!

For DGMS I wrote a relatively short bit relaying the premise of the game to readers; you play as POST_human remnants within the ancient megastructure the TOWER which is constantly under threat by the ravenous FRACTALDEATHMACHINE.

Side note, I absolutely went bananas with funky proper nouns and formatting. Small things like that can really help convey the tone of the game!

And that's really about it for the setting assumptions. More details are tucked into descriptions of the factions, gear, classes, and locations you get to explore, but there aren't any answers out there. Its all up to the table to find those answers for themselves! What is the FRACTALDEATHMACHINE, why is it devouring the TOWER, can you stop it? Who knows!

Go find out!

MECHANICS

The core game mechanics fit onto a single page, and aren't really changed too much from the base TWG system. In general, its a straightforward "roll over a difficulty value" using a d20.

Three of the four classes give a special bonus either to hit things, defense, or "hacking" - the undefined "magic" of the game. The fourth class, the DLVR, gets a special situational bonus that implies something about their place in the world - a special bonus against ARCHITECT relics - something which furthers the potential for the table to explore the anti-canon. What exactly is their link to the ARCHITECTS?

Outside of the core mechanics and classes, there are two major parts of the game (and two slightly more minor-ish parts). The LAYERS of the TOWER and the CTY_enclave. LAYERS are effectively unmapped "dungeons". They are dangerous sections of the world where the "outside" adventures happen.

DWG uses mapped dungeons as its, well, dungeons. I've never been hugely into running or playing through mapped dungeons (though I appreciate a well thought out dungeon!) And also I'm lazy. So unmapped it is. LAYERS are essentially a compact list of hazards, hostiles, and interesting tid-bits for the referee to use to whip up something fun and dangerous.

TWG games have a punchy, fast-paced, high-lethality action, so in DGMS, I was far more concerned with providing refs a general template and list of Interesting Things, than complex maps or complicated enemies. The ref does far more responding to player actions than they do planning out complicated encounters. It is perfectly easy, in this sort of game, to just toss something at the players and see what happens!

Couple that with mechanics such as "reaction rolls" (randomly determining how NPCs react to players) and the ref's job starts to become plugging a few random variables into a mechanical procedure, seeing what gets spit out, and then asking players what they do next, and then continuing the whole loop! I love procedural gameplay, and could, and probably will, write more on that another time.

Aside from being the places where most of the adventures happen, LAYERS are also another way to package Interesting World bits. One of my favorite parts about writing for/designing this style of game, is that you rarely need justification for putting something in. I can say that in one LAYER, players will face a "MACHINE!!GOD blastula". And that's it! Everything about the nature of that thing is going to emerge at the table, and will almost always be way cooler than whatever deep lore I could have written for it! (Now, this doesn't mean that I don't enjoy writing some Dense Exposition, but time and place and all that).

The other half to the LAYERS is the CTY_enclave; the players homebase and secondary adventure site. I whipped up a quick mapping procedure for creating your CTY_enclave, and it shifts every time the players return to it from their adventures. There are different modules within the CTY. In some you can buy stuff, others you can get information and recover health. Some hide valuable resources but also equally hidden danger.

Just like LAYERS, I wanted to embed story-potential, that delicious anti-canon, into the CTY. Little nuggets of Ideas like, Conduit Riders in the middle of a death race, machine monks transporting a metal sarcophagus (that has a small chance of containing a copy of one player!), or gaining the ability to commune with the FRACTALDEATHMACHINE itself, are breadcrumbs that could turn into larger story beats and adventures if the players and table invest their own interpretation and meaning into them!

Aside from that, the main Design Bit I did for the CTY is the mapping method. A hub location is part of the TWG vibe, but I felt that one, mapping using dice is fun, and two, a constantly, randomly shifting hub really suited the tone and setting of the game.

The last two main parts of the game are the gear and hostile lists. Again, they have surface purposes - cool stuff to Get, cool stuff to Fight (and get killed by) - but also help provide more of that anti-canon scaffolding (I am really going to need to do a whole thing on anti-canon at some point).

LAYOUT AND GRAPHIC DESIGN

And here's where my hubris caught up with me. What initially was going to be a nice, simple, streamlined layout, ended up being over the top. But it was super fun to make, so no need for me to learn any lessons here.

When designing layout, I tend to start with some cover ideas and mockups. Since BLAME! was such a large thematic inspiration, I also looked at its covers (specifically the Master Edition versions). I love the brutalist inspired graphic design, and wanted to carry that into DGMS, and then add a layer of grunge and wear and tear to it as well.

I played around a lot with masks and textures (there's literally a picture of concrete that I turned into a texture) before eventually landing on the looks you can see on the cover. Then it was also a matter of perusing fonts for text, headers, etc, etc.

For the interior, I made heavy use of Lone Archivist's Graphic Archive asset packs. They rule. Buy them here.

I made my life infinitely more difficult by making every single page different and unique, but it was also a fun art project, so I don't regret that. I didn't spend too much time on typesetting, because this was technically a game jam entry (though I did clean it up later when the game ended up getting printed).

And honestly, that takes us to the end. My process was kind of all over the place for making the final version, a lot of jumping between the text and layout. But it ended up being a very fun project with one of my favorite final results.

If you're interested in picking up the game yourself, you can snag the digital version off my itch page HERE (there's currently a handful of free community copies if you wanna try before you buy) and if you're interested in print copies, Plus One EXP has you covered over HERE.

Spencer of Gila RPGs also made a fantastic 5-minute overview of the game you can watch;

youtube

And! Tony hosted a stream that I GMed if you want to see how the game is in action;

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But yeah, DEATHGRIND!!MEGASTRUCTURE. It's one of my favorite games I've made!

#ttrpg #indie ttrpg #indie ttrpgs #osr #DGMS #design dive

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688199 · 4 months

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I could go into depth as to why Hazbin Hotel’s pilot was significantly better than the actual series (minus voice acting and song quality) but will I?

Let’s speed run through just how the opening scene of both the pilot and episode 1 differs, and how the pilot is better.

So the pilot opens with Charlie singing solemnly, while we get a brief look into the aftermath of the extermination and how it affects different people (for example the Vees seemingly don’t care, different to the implication of Carmilla having the curtains closed during the extermination), specifically Charlie.

This entire scenes makes clear early on that this extermination thing really really upsets Charlie and makes her doubt herself and the world. It immediately grounds her character as one who has empathy and insecurity.

I would also like to add that I really like how the tower countdown thing resets to 365 so we are shown that the extermination is a yearly, devastating event.

On the other hand, the actual episode 1 opens with Charlie forcing exposition about her parents’ lore and then directly telling us everything that the pilot lets us infer.

> “I get pretty worked up after the extermination happens.” We’re only shown chaos in the background, rather than taken through that chaos. There’s no time to digest just how bad the extermination is and how it impacts hell.

Since viewers are new to the world and series, they don’t know how hell is like. The happy day in hell musical number later on makes it seem like that’s what hell is normally supposed to look despite it being the aftermath of an extermination.

This leads to Charlie’s motivations being weak. We know that the extermination is bad, sure, logically. But the opening scene fails to let us feel it the same way the pilot does.

If the extermination plays such a huge role in motivating Charlie’s actions, why is it only told to us super briefly?

Not only that, “pretty worked up” doesn’t even show through in Charlie’s action well. It’s just there to force Charlie to dump exposition. Compare this to pilot Charlie who cried while singing.

The issue with the Prime Hazbin Hotel is its pacing and the way it assumes you’ve watched the pilot and are a fan who already knows all about the series and characters. But it can’t do that. But it does, so execution wise it fails quite miserably.

Allat just for just the opening scene. I can go much further but I’m too lazy right now.

#hazbin hotel #other than the songs I’m not really enjoying the series #as an ex fan who loved the pilot and watched it religiously #im sorry its disappointing #and the only reason why people like it is because the series is just fanservice disguised as a proper cartoon #is this opinion controversial #what did they do to my goat alastor #or should I say deer ahaha my jokes are lame

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mdhwrites · 11 months

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Why Are Swap AUs So Easy For The Owl House and IMPOSSIBLE For Amphibia?

So first, I want to make this clear that this isn’t to knock anyone who likes Swap AUs for The Owl House. I’m actually making this blog because today I was kind of reminiscing about The Crow House, my own Swap AU and the best answer I have to the question of “What would my version of The Owl House look like.” They’re a lot of fun to consider because being in a different narrative role and the like would do to the story and world is a really interesting question. I will say that I have seen a lot of Swap AU art that is frustrating for this reason though as they feel a lot more like characters cosplaying each other, including personality, rather than actually exploring what they would be like in the other’s role.

I’ve also seen a lot less Amphibia Swap AU art... And I think there’s a good reason for that. See, with TOH, the narrative role IS also the character’s personality. Luz is the isekai’d protagonist who warms up to a mentor, changing them and the world she arrives in for the better (at least in concept). Eda is the grizzled mentor who will learn to be nicer by her student. King is just comic relief and then lore wise is important and so becomes incredibly wise to fit his expositional spot in the world. Amity is the love interest and brief rival. Hunter is that a second time but done worse and as a love interest to a less important character. The better the character is is usually dependent on how good the trope they’re pulling on, not because they themselves are really going to surprise you or stay consistent even. After all, once Eda becomes Mama Eda, she also loses a lot her snark and her criminal background because that’s no longer the trope she is despite that still having been part of her recent history. Or hell, the fact that once the curse is resolved in S1, it only is ever a plot device, including power up, for Eda’s character because its narrative role as a part of who Eda is and something that hurts her is no longer relevant to the writers.

That actually makes swapping people’s position in the plot less about what their personality does to the plot but how you justify them being in the role that the other was. You have to ENTIRELY change the show in order to make a Swap AU more drastic than that by things like having the swap with Luz be someone who doesn’t like magic and genuinely has no interest in this world so that they never connect with Eda. The person you swap with Amity needs to not be a love interest but a genuine rival who never connects with the other person. You effectively have to go with the edgy options for a lot of things and at that point you’re just kind of missing the whole retelling point of a Swap AU.

And of course there would be changes but more in dialogue and the like. This was something I struggled with with my Lumity stuff in The Crow House because I still wanted some of the highlights but with a spin by how I changed things with Amity (including in Covention actually being a real danger to Luz and that making her opt for a non-magical way to win the fight) but I was still worried about it coming off as too much like the show. Too much like things weren’t different because, well... So few characters acted particular to themselves and more to their tropes.

It’s like in Looking Glass Ruins where Amity goes “I do stupid things around you.” That is a GREAT line for Lumity’s archtype... But it’s not for Lumity specifically. Amity has actually done very few things that would be considered dumb and those that would be, she’s never faced consequences for. Even her parents or Boscha never actually get back at her for her actions against them and besides that? Usually it’s Luz who’s the fuck up but that’s just a part of her archtype. But the line fits the narrative role for where Lumity is at in their relationship, even if it hasn’t been earned, so the writers include it anyways because that’s just how the writing in TOH works.

And again: That makes a Swap AU INCREDIBLY easy. You want to say X character would act like this in this narrative role? You probably can find a moment that excuses it. I mean, we get like six different versions of Hunter in S2 because every appearance is effectively a different character than the last with MAYBE a little transitional moment like in Hunting Palisman. Like the writers did, you can just excuse a character acting a certain because they all meld together to become so similar and so functional eventually so... Why not?

This is the exact OPPOSITE of how Amphibia wrote its story though. The one I actually think is easiest to point out is ANYONE swapping with Sasha. Grime is a very strong person after all who ruled by force and fear. His soldiers were actually fairly loyal, even if they were unhappy. Anne at the start of the show isn’t the Heart yet so connecting the with the toads, who she’d find disgusting like she often found the Plantars early on, wouldn’t be possible for her. This is partially because she’s also lazy. Meanwhile, Marcy is socially awkward and somewhat absorbed in her own interests so she also wouldn’t be able to talk to the guards in a way that turned them to her side. Even if either did, they would have no control there. Grime would still be in charge: Period. They would just be the weird soldier and thus also have no power to do things like the escort Anne got or convince Grime to just raze Wartwood and instead be a bit sneaker and a bit more charismatic.

DRASTIC changes happen if ANYONE other than Sasha is the one in Toad Tower. Her manipulative side, her want for control, her willingness to hurt those around her if she thinks what she’s doing is better for them, or more fun sometimes especially early on, is what makes her such a dangerous villain. However, just as Anne was affected by Sasha, it’s really easy to imagine Marcy and Anne affected Sasha back and that’s why she’s able to connect with guards and their odd interests... At least until they’re wrapped around her finger. Her viewpoint as the girl who will make her friend’s lives better and never questioning that is a large part of her arc. Her personality had to be tested and SMASHED before she could become a better person, which is why she’s actually at her most confident in S2 because S1 was a setback. She needed rock bottom to realize her convictions were wrong.

Which just in general is a masterclass in how to write a manipulative villain, let alone one that thinks they’re in the right for all their decisions. Sasha is one of the best written characters I’ve ever SEEN and I’m still only halfway through S2 of Amphibia.

But even just Reunion shows how Anne’s malleability that made Sasha able to control her is also why she was able to become a better person that Wartwood could respect and trust. How much of that can be said about The Owl House? Amity ALWAYS feels more motivated by a crush, especially in S2, in her changes than any moral position she used to hold or a specific part of her that agreed with Luz’s outlooks besides “I also like Azura.” Eda literally makes no sense because in S2 we find out she adopted King which throws her entire first season personality out the window. Hunter feels like he restarts his arc three times because Luz, Amity and Willow all can connect to him on really basic levels that have more to do with backstory than they do with personality traits.

So in short... Amphibia’s still fucking awesome, I still want to finish it by the end of the month, but TOH does continue to be better for fanfiction in one way or another with the choices it makes.

#Amphiba #the owl house criticism #toh critical #Swap AU

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levmada · 7 months

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aot before the fall review in no particular order(mostly cuz im mad)

SPOILERS

xavi was introduced in the story as nothing but an antagonist that wanted to kill kuklo and basically saw him as an annoying bug. then when the wallists came and killed most of his family + kuklo left with sharle, he LOATHED him. in total xavi came at kuklo meaning to kill him 3 or 4 times?? THEN ALL THE SUDDEN in one of the last arcs (the training one) xavi suddenly is working together with him?? yeah he said it was for sharle, but it'd be just as easy to whisk her away during the expedition or something. why suddenly did he start caring so much about the future of humanity, the survey corps, and the odm gear?? because his boss liked him? bffr. BOOO. in the final confrontation, youre telling me xavi and kuklo happened to kill a titan together and suddenly xavi likes and approves of him WHEN JUST A MOMENT BEFORE he was determined to kill him???????? THEN X A V I of all people tore down MP corruption? XAVI? CHARACTER ASSASSINATION I TELL YOU. what a fucking disappointment.

NOW IM THINKING ABOUT THE FINAL CHAPTER.

the second half of the final chapter is nothing but an exposition dump in the form of a letter from sharle to a friend. major shit happens (like the major plot point with gloria being murdered) just GLOSSED OVER in a brief explanation. so annoying

goddamn the training arc went on for foreverrrr. SUCH A DRAG!!!!!!! it was like a lot was happening while nothing was happening. after the underground arc, the pacing went from say 80 to -999999. god i was so bored. i glossed these two volumes at parts because i was so bored. it was supposed to be a time to get to know the characters and figure out who was working against the survey corps, and while that twist was very smart, i wasn't happy. i expected this resolution BECAUSE OF COURSE the survey corps never gets dissolved. OF COURSE the odm gear would work. there was absolutely no tension.

for two volumes, i couldnt find myself caring about these new characters (like rosa, kurz, ivo...).

like when felix almost got eaten. like okay? he fell into that same category of cadets that werent fleshed out enough at all and i felt ambivilent when he sacrificed himself for rosa

ROSA. the plot wanted her to be important and interesting sooooo bad. suggesting a love triangle for the main pair, her importance as maria and sorum's daughter, the multiple times it was insisted she was discriminated against for being a woman (despite that NEVER having come up in all of the 50 chapters before that. if this was consistent, i'd feel differently. it's the best conflict that has to do with her character though).

i really didn't care what her motivations were for killing the titans because i didn't care about her. she's just... uninteresting. so broody. and why? because she got bullied by the boys? for several chapters until she became friends with sharle she did nothing but disappear and feel sorry for herself. maybe it's me, but it was just annoying.

yeah maria (her mom) disapproved of her joining the scouts, and it was interesting to see what maria would think after losing her husband to the titans too, but i kind of figured that would work out (and it did - in just one scene).

why the hell was she made a squad leader right off the bat????? her performance was NOT great, i mean failing at the odm tests multiple times, passing out during one of the training runs... it seems like the plot wanted her to be important (due to her parents) so she was made a squad leader.

shallow and boring. my least favorite character.

the lore is BY FAR THE GREATEST PART OF BEFORE THE FALL. it could be partly because aot is my biggest hyperfixation so i was super super interested by default, but the way btf expanded on the lore - the process of the odm invention, where the iceburst stone and ultra hard metal comes from, what the underground is like, etc - was superb and i loved every crumb.

angel is my favorite character. im not going to complain that btf wasnt referenced in canon more because i dont think thats fair to isayama and his editors, as all isayama did was approve what the writer and artists did. angel is a genius who contributed the most to the odm gear. i wanted so badly for him to leave the underground, overcome his guilt over corina and sorum's deaths, and work together with the main characters to advance the survey corps. he suffered so damn much and he overcame it. he's extremely interesting, well-written, and blorbo worthy.

im glad kuklo was also written extremely well since he was the main character. i only wish that he struggled MORE to adjust what life is like outside of a cage being treated as a freakshow act for being known as the son of a titan. it seemed like as soon as he and sharle escaped, he was the conventional shonen boy. which was pretty disappointing. you'd think kuklo would be awkward and unsocialized or distrusting of people for the abuse and isolation he went through, but he was perfectly fine. near the end, he had no more development and it seemed he blended way into the background, but thats not necessarily a complaint. it was rewarding to see him finally become a scout along with cardina.

loveeee cardina. he's just great. i don't have any complaints about him. despite not going in-depth about his past or who he is - i still cared about him, while i CANT say the same about rosa and the cadets introduced much later.

i have so much to say about the uprising arc. it was underwhelming it seriously came WAY out of nowhere. characters were introduced way too fast, appearing in one chapter and in the next one dying. the same can definitely be said of main aot, but the difference is i CARED about what happened to characters like nifa, willy, and pastor nick. the writing for these characters just ISNT there. i didn't care what the dissidents wanted because i never saw them struggle, or find out WHO THEY WERE. they werent fleshed out. i simply didnt care. they failed. boo hoo. mortiz was entertaining, but to me, mostly because it was like a trainwreck i couldnt look away from. his downfall was entertaining and i liked it.

the first arc with kuklo being imprisoned, meeting sharle, and escaping was my favorite next to the underground arc. it was sooo fun to see sharle try to navigate the underground and finding allies. even though her intentions were pretty naive (i guess?) i was rooting for her and cared that she survived.

carlo, his dad pikale - GREAT characters. was always super interesting to learn more about pikale since he's known as this legendary figure who killed a titan first, and as that was expanded upon and we learned that it was actually sorum and angel was super fun. carlo is a great commander and i liked him a lot too.

i thought sharle was annoyingly useless early on, but when she went against xavi after being captured and braving the underground was where her character rly started to grow and that was fun. she went from cowering at the sight of a titan she saw from the wall to resourceful and independent which felt natural. also seeing her become a craftsman and become her own person outside being from nobility.

maybe this is also just me, but the romance in this story WASNT for me. i wish it wasnt shoved in my face so much how much tension there was between kuklo and sharle to get together. like... we knew that was going to happen. also she was the damsel in distress so many times it felt contrived to me. but they were cute at times (especially with the side stories) and their romance was believable.

the problem came in when rosa was introduced and she took a liking to kuklo. MAYBE also just me... but love triangles are so boring and my least favorite romance trope. i didnt care about this subplot whatsoever and had me rolling my eyes at most points. it was nice to see rosa and sharle become friends instead, and having rosa realize she just wanted to BE kuklo instead of wanting to be with him. that was great.

the art? WOW amazing!!!!! its not that the art style compared to isayama was refreshing so much as super fun and creative. my favorite was how more horrifying the titans were portrayed than even in main aot. i have 0 complaints about it. i loved it

before the fall definitely started out extremely strong, dipped down during the uprising arc, and shined again after that UP UNTIL the training arc after kuklo got majorly injured. from there it was a TOTAL fall from grace. the final chapter was rushed, glossed over, and it sucked.

overall... i enjoyed it, but i wouldn't read it again. i can definitely reccomend it to aot fans who are interested in the lore most of all, but if youre a casual fan who wants a story like main aot or even no regrets (which was mainly character centered), you will be incredibly disappointed.

6/10

#aot before the fall #the end #...im just gonna read junior high now #or the school caste #im glad i read it but wouldnt do it again #aot kuklo #aot sharle #aot angel #aot

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jennycinco-5 · 1 year

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Something IMPORTANT that ML completely forget to included in canon series

“ LORE AND BACKSTORY “

This two important thing aside Character Development and consistency that ML completely forget to be included. But which Lore and Backstories that deserve to be included in series and deserved its own Episode for it :

GABRIEL BACKSTORY (Before meet Emilie and before her “Death”)

If you wanted to prove that Gabriel indeed used to be a good man just like how the narrative wanted to sympathize with him, then SHOW IT ON HIS FREAKING FLASHBACK ! There are LOT OF HINTS about his background but it only mentioned in exposition rather than shown from his point of view. Heck we also didn’t even see in from Adrien flashback about how Gabriel used to be from his point-of-view. Adrien mention that Gabriel is “changed-man” after Emilie “Death” but That Guy didn’t show some mini brief flashback about how he used to be from his own son point-of-view. Dear orc and his followers, how can I sympathize with Gabriel if we can’t see how he used to be on-screen to make the viewer understand him but spend lot of money on unnecessary “CHloe Is EvuuuulZzz All Along” flashback episode only to excuse Marinette stalkery behavior ?

THE LORE OF ALL MIRACULOUSES

Oh yes ! This one is need to be mentioned in EARLY EPISODE instead in NON-CANON COMIC. Sure the comic explained quite good concept about Miraculouses and Kwami but they don’t expand or mentioned it again in freaking canon-show. They have TWO MOVIES about another Miraculouses but still doesn’t bring about the creator of the jewels or how the jewels were created ! Making the movies are pointless “other country representation”

OTHER IMPORTANT CHARACTER BACKSTORY

They show spend lot of money to create unnecessary filler episode that not really important for the plot. Derision included since it was nothing more a cheap excuse about Marinette stalkery behavior need blamed on Chloe and her “love-trauma” is completely random since it never shown when she date Luka (Maybe Luka is not white-blonde boy lols) .We already know almost everything about Bourgeois but it doesn’t really important for the plot but what about the other character who willingly worked or having a connection with Gabriel and anything that still ties with the plot of then show ?

There are many unnecessary filler episode that can be replaced with :

Adrien’s backstory before Emilie “Death” since we need to learn about how his life before the series started like come on~ He is THE MAIN CHARACTER right ?!

Emilie’s backstory ! Is she good or evil ?! Who the hell is she ?! Why we should care about her and her “death” is impact for the plot ?!

How the Order or Guardian founded ? are they good or evil ?!

Were there any Butterfly Predecessor that ever become Evil which resulting why the power of Buttterfly renamed as “Akumatization” ?

Nathalie past and how she meet both Emilie and Gabriel

Tomoe Tsurugi past and why she wanted worked with Gabriel (+ Kagami’s past)

Lila past especially WHO THE HELL IS SHE ?! Is she human or Alien-something ?

I know that some of you claim “It was budget reason” or something to defend lacking of this. Here something I need to talk with you : Agent Ali and BoBoiBoy the 3D Animation from Malaysia, while the budget are not as much as Miraculous Ladybug, they still show about the lore and backstory that important for the plot

Before expand the story into Galaxy series, Original Series BoBoiBoy already had the backstory of the antagonist, the race of the antagonist origin and the lore of Power Sphera (The robot who also of the source of any power) and why the robots constantly hunted by many Aliens by have the 1st generation of Power Sphera show in the 1st movie. Season 1 of Galaxy has brief explanation about TAPOPS (organization of Power Sphera protector) and a canon-special chapter about Fang and Kaizo past. The 2nd Movie and Season 2 Galaxy explain the lore of BoBoiBoy Elemental form, their previous masters (most of them explained brief by their closed relation and family), fusion form and 3rd tier form. Mechamato is a prequel about Amato (BoBoiBoy Father) childhood. Sure we still has no idea about Fang and the others power origins but at least they already explain the lore of the main character power and important things like some antagonist origin and the Power Sphera

Agents Ali has several flashback and backstory about the main series important character like the main character, pillar chiefs, antagonist and the rivals to know about their life and their motivation. Even the minor one like Young Agents has a chance to share about their motivation .Then we have a movie about Aliya, Ali’s mother and creator of IRIS and OVERRIDE MODE (the gadget who constantly hunted by main villains), her past and the villain who connected with her

There are lot of children animation that still care about to show background of important character.Steven Universe has SEVERAL flashback to show about the Diamonds, Rose Quartz and Crystal Gems and Greg Universe past to know about their character. ATLA has flashback about royal nation family, the main character past and how the character learn their elemental power

Miraculous Ladybug forget to include it since they only care about Love Square fanservice and “revenge-fantasy” on bratty teenage girl. In Season 5 they try to include these but only create more retcon and inconsistency and become way too rushed

#ml salt #ml writing salt #ml writer salt #bad writing #this show is iredeeemable #Orc decide to follow his fantasy rather than a plot story #even canon-defended doesn't care about this #as long as love square canon #who cares about the plot ?!#Even Malaysian Animation can be better than this shit show #If you want watch you can find it on Netflix and Disney Hotstar

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sylwanin-was-right · 1 year

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How would you rewrite Avatar the Way of Water?

Ooh good question. My answer will evolve overtime, and i need to rewatch the movie a few times and read more reviews from critics and fans to really be comprehensive about my answer, but to start out briefly, I'll bullet point which parts Id rewrite in a different direction or take out entirely:

First act introducing family dynamics - it felt so incredibly rushed. I was really anticipating the return to the forest, expositions about new Omaticaya territory and their culture. I wanted to see how the kids would learn to be Omatikaya for act 1, but we just got short montages of vague locations and implications of "normalcy" before their major displacement again. It didnt feel like enough and it felt like a lot of the lore from Avatar media were overlooked for brief visual immersion. So I would have at least written Jake narrating a longer montage of how the boys and girls grew up learning customs and coming of age rituals/ceremonies. I would include at least a short snippet of how they slowly progressed in appearence from infancy to teenagehood/childhood (like in a fading montage of their bodies and faces aging) so we could better establish their faces, understand their personalities more, and see them be somewhat "normal" before the trauma. I would also make all their births and introductions seem equal in the short montage and narration. It just seemed overtly foreshadowing and neglectful that Neteyam's and Kiri's birth and infancy were emphasized while Lo'ak and Tuk'tirey's were implied with no onscreen time (even though theyre introduced to the audience as literally newborn characters). Hell even Spider had a scene where he was running around the RDA facility as a toddler in a diaper. I just feel like if we're going to have so many characters, all of whom are included throughout the story, they should all be introduced in a way that didnt give away their roles and arcs so overtly and were more likely to connect with through longer screentime.

Jake and Neytiri's kids' interactions with the Ronal and Tonorwari's kids - I dont think these scenes were over extended necessarily. After all, this movie was about the kids mostly. They were just excessive in the "bullies vs. underdogs" format that the writing itself felt childish and redundant. What bothered me most about it was the cruelty of Aonung and his friends and how that never really explained from their cultural or even personal perspectives, so the progression of their cruelty was so exponential it felt outlandish. I would personally take time to build up their tensions through various examples of Jake and Neytiri's kids struggling with or quicky learning varous Metkayina customs, like food prep, ettiquate at eating sites, and even smaller things like making or customizing their saddles for riding or water sports within the clan. This could be in a montage with one major sequence being related to riding their ilu (which would be instrumental to the rest of the film). More time to interact with each other and express their personalities would reveal their cultural attitudes, expand Metkayina lore, and flesh out the characters more realistically.

The emphasis on nuclear family dynamics - I think the patriarchal dynamics Jake and Neytiri's family had and even of Ronal and Tonowari's family were really offputting and uninspired. While it somewhat made sense to portray Jake as overbearing and authoritative, and even bring out his human, military past in a time of war against humans, his role as a father was not explored in ways that were challenged by Indigenous-inspired wisdom about equity and equality in a collective family dynamic. Neytiri was very passive, the way Jake treated the kids was really toxic at times (especially the way he talked to Lo'ak and Neteyam). Tonowari was portrayed as an authoritative leader who's words carried the most weight (though Ronal seemed to be less passive than Neytiri). I would have written the story so that their family transition from tribal to nuclear, and isolated became a deep issue, especially for Neytiri, and that Jake's patriarchal biases and toxic masculinity were clearly issues for Neytiri and the boys. I would also write their family dynamics so the boys wouldnt just be shown doing "masculine" coded things, like being a warrior and recklessly fighting and the girls "feminine" things, like being nurturing. Lo'ak could be shown doing/fixing his hair, Tuk shown practicing archery/hunting, etc. Idk... it just felt that the patriarchal nuclear family dyanmic was never explored to be problematic or even foreign to make the "family is fortress" challenge audiences' pre-existing biases (since it clesrly wasnt true in the film lol). It clashed a lot with the lore and didnt feel inspired by many Indigenous philosophies.

The parallels to the A1 - personally there were too many for me and at times it felt really corny (I dont want Jake to have a catchphrase for defeating his enemies, thanks) lol. A few here and there is fine, especially at the beginning to reintroduce the tone of the film due to the 13 year time gap (like the introduction being a similar camera shot over the forest and Quaritch's quips toward the RECOM fleet), and because making some parallels is just clever writing and also kinda fun. But at times it was just so Not Subtle and felt morelike rehashes than parallels lol.

Introduction to sacred sites - Theyre supposed to be sacred so why are they so accessible to anybody, including children and outsiders, with no sort of onscreen initiation process or supervision lol. Whats the point of having a tsahìk if theres free admission to your most sacred and sensitive sites like a hands on exhibit? LMAO I didnt like how the Tree of Voices was used as a mystical backdrop for Jake and Neytiri's lovemaking and then its destruction hardly mentioned nor reacted to at all by the Omaticaya when the RDA came and literally almost uprooted the entire thing. So when Tsireya, Aonung, and Rutxo took the Omatikaya kids to their Tree of Souls for the exposition of the location, it just felt so cheap? Like you all are children, none of you are spiritual leaders. Why is no one else there? Why is their not initiation process to doing something as sacred as making tsaheylu with it for the firsy time? I think I just would have taken more time to explain what their Tree of Souls was while also having a proper (and brief) initiation process, and also have Ronal and Tonowari have the whole family introduced to the tree to connect to rather than just the kids. I think this could stll smoothly write into Kiri's seizure scene, but this time there would be a collective reaction to her response, and the affects she had on the Tree losing light (something that had significant implications but no further investigation in the film). I think this collective reaction would also make Jake's decision to call for Norm and Max's aid more obviously a problem with both the tracking, and the disrespect of customs of the Metkayina (Ronal had a whole line where she felt her role as Tsahìk was disegarded and that was major).

Amrita and unobtainium's value - It makes sense that there be multiple markets to fund the RDA's missions, so the whaling operation wouldnt have to be cut out. But the anti-aging syrum from the Tulkun being more valuable than the mineral that supposedly powers most of Earth is nonsensical to me and not believable. I guess the nonsense aspect of it is to highlight the irrationality of greed and the West's destructive obsession with youth. But... it just doesnt make sense as a writing choice to justify Scoresby's character and the whaling fleet as antagonists to the Tulkun specifically, and a financial supplement to the RDA. It feels incompatable with the premise that Earth is "overpopulated" (which in and of itself is problematic) because having a population that desperately wants to extend their lives (or seem impossibly young looking) on a planet where youth seems abundant and the kandscape is dystopian is questionable lol. The tulkun hunting fleet could have simply been justified as its own venture capitalist thing among the RDA's forces, and an obvious parallel to the harms of industrial whaling and fishing irl.

Kiri and Neytiri's scene -I wrote about it already but that whole scene with Kiri and Neytiri should have been so much longer and in depth lol

Neytiri and Ronal's first interactions- They should have def been less immediately hostile to each other. The hissing match can be completely cut since it was clearly a misogynistic pun about women being "catty" and having a catfight (the men dismissing them as irrational punctuates this 🙄). Or at least Ronal and Neytiri can have their hissing moment but it should be from an actual buildup of tensions between them living among each other, especialy since Neytiri and Ronal had their Reasons to be uncomfortale with giving and recieving uturu that were already introduced (Neytiri was uncomfortable and traumatized being isolated from her home as a refugee sacrificing herself to protect her people and her children, and Ronal had spiritual suspicions about the integrity of avatars, held xenophobic biases about different Na'vi, didnt like the liability of taking in refugees, and saw Jake as pathetic). I also wrote about this before, but it just felt overtly cruel and unncessary for Ronal and Neytiri to have a brief connection from seeing a Tulkun mother lose her life and her baby. The mother Tulkun didnt have to be Ronal's spirit sister (and honestly calf didnt have to die, too), and Ronal and Neytiri could have resolved their tensions together by bonding over motherhood in other ways, like having a short scene where they work together using their shared tsahìk and healing knowledge to prove theyre more alike than different and should be cooperative, or hell, bonding over takin care for the Tulkun mother's orphaned calf. I just really didnt like how Cameron portayed Ronal and Neytiri and their introducton was super bad. A lot could have been explored from their shared identities as mothers, tsahìk, "wives", and people who had something to learn from others (and ofc having a shared enemy).

Underwater scenes with the kids - I'm sorry but these could have been so much shorter lol. This is def my own bias as I dont care to see things in 3D, and while the scenes were dazzling (and I personally didnt have a problem with the slower pacing of act 2 because I like longer slice of life shots), it felt these scenes overlapped with act 1 where a lot of content and development could have been revealed about Jake and Neytiri's family, the Omatikaya, the Metkayina, and even the RDA (like Bridgehead's size and development). Ofc I wouldnt cut these scenes entiely because they are beautiful and important; they show the initiation process of learning a vital skill among the Metkayina as well as their character development learning different philosophies about water, etc. And after all, Avatar as a franchise is known for being a visual, escapist spectacle. But they felt quite overextended for act 2, so I'd simply make the underwater exposition scenes a bit shorter lol.

Theres def more and I'll update this post as I think of more and rewatch the film!

#askbox #oel.mine #avatar 2 #avatar film #james cameron avatar #avatar way of water #avatar the way of water #jake sully #ronal #neytiri #awow review

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