#but I had to somehow skip two years while including three important events lol

[rainbow-arrow]

so like. I get untitled is a Slow Burn but if it’s any consolation I’ve got the next 32 chapters planned out and half written so at this point yeah it’s a Lot but in ratio to my entire story it’s only like. half of it, you kno

I am also ready for Real Lukadrien content lol

#let's go #untitled #some chapter names #I say ‘names’ but they’re just references lol #but some include: #midnight thirty #third wheel #sad patrol :( #study session :P #so take what u will I don’t know what’s going on lol #I wish the first half of my story was better written #I’ll own up to it #I didn’t want to write the first like 16 chapters #building up the world I had in my head #but I had to somehow skip two years while including three important events lol #might redo them one day ngl

[florrickandassociates]

TGF Thoughts: 5x01- Previously on...

Welcome back!! I’m so excited to be writing one of these again. I think this hiatus has been the longest I’ve gone without new Diane Lockhart content in ten years, and it sure feels like it. A lot of important stuff has happened in the time since TGF season four ended (not concluded—ended). Most notably, CBS All Access became Paramount+ and suddenly started offering a lot of content I care about! I kid. 2020 was quite an eventful year, so I was curious how television’s most topical show was going to take it on. TGF is always forward-looking, but too much happened in 2020 to be ignored. And while I didn’t think TGF would have much to say about the pandemic, it seemed impossible to imagine a season five that pretended it never happened. Going into this premiere, I was expecting that they’d either skip COVID entirely or include very few references, but after seeing this episode, I feel like the writers took the only approach that made sense. And that is why they are the writers, and I'm just some girl on the internet who writes recaps.  

Anyway, before I dive into the episode, I should also note that my pandemic boredom spurred me to actually pay $30 to watch this episode early as part of the virtual ATX Festival. Yes, I paid $30 on top of the money I spend every month on Paramount+ for this show. But I write tens of thousands of words about each TGF episode—are my priorities really that surprising? I note this not to brag or even to poke fun at myself, but because watching the episode before I knew a single thing about it (not even the title!) completely changed my viewing experience. I’ve never had an experience like this with TGW or TGF. I’m one to search for critics tweeting cryptically about screeners and refresh sites looking for background extras (haven’t done this in the TGF era, though) and read every single piece of press I can find. For any big episode, I usually know the outline of what to expect going in (I even knew about Will before the episode aired in the US!). Not this one! So, I got to be surprised, and I had to—gasp—formulate my own opinions before I knew what anyone else thought! It was really pleasant, actually. I think the structure of the episode worked extremely well for me because it caught me by surprise... and also because I’m the kind of person who somehow managed to write a college paper about Previously On sequences.

I see Tumblr has made it so that “keep reading” expands the post in your dash instead of opening a new tab. I absolutely hate this. Here is a link to the post you can click instead of the keep reading button! 

The ATX stream started mid-sentence, meaning I missed the “Previously On... 2020...” title card and skipped right to Adrian saying “I’m retiring.” It was pretty easy to pick up on the device (the directness of the scenes at the start, their cadence, and their placement in the episode made it clear this was meant to mimic a Previously) but the second title card hit way harder because... well, I had no idea if this was meant to be 2020 or some moment outside of real time until a bit later in the episode.  

Man, before I get any farther into this, two things that I don’t know where else to put. First, this episode had to cover so much ground. They had to write out both Adrian and Lucca—more on that later--, figure out how to deal with all of 2020, figure out how to either wrap up or continue all the truncated season 4 plotlines, and set the stage for a new season... in 50 minutes.  

Second, just wanna shout out the Kings’ other Paramout+ show, Evil, which you should absolutely be watching even if you hate horror. Evil is a Kings show, so it is unsurprisingly topical (sometimes evil takes the form of racism or misogyny or Scott Rudin) and at times very, very funny. I would be recapping it if Paramount+ weren’t attacking me personally by airing it at the same time as TGF. Ever hear of too much of a good thing, people?! (On that note, I am VERY upset with myself for not having made a Good vs Evil joke about the Good shows and Evil. I didn’t even think about it until Robert King made the joke on Twitter, and it was right fucking there. How did I fail so miserably?!)  

So STR Laurie, who wants a 20% downsizing, is still a thing. Noted.

This scene with Landau is the only one in this previously that is actually old footage, right?  

Unexpected Margo Martindale! Yay! (Ruth Eastman is a character who is so much more effective on Fight than she was on Wife and I’m quite glad they’ve had her appear on Fight several times. It kind of redeems season seven. Kind of.)

I don’t think the writers intentionally chose for Adrian’s book deal to be with Simon & Schuster because it is the most politically fraught publisher (the number of stories about controversial memoirs they’ve picked up in 2021 alone...) but I kind of like that Adrian’s Road Not Taken involves S&S. My guess is they chose S&S because it is owned by ViacomCBS.  

“Years ago, I wanted to create a law firm run entirely by women, but it never worked out. So, why not now?” Diane says to Liz. One of the advantages of having twelve (!!!) seasons of Diane Lockhart is that we’ve seen what she’s talking about. And we’ve seen her put this idea forward multiple times, too. I have my reservations about Diane’s brand of feminism, and I’ll say more about how fraught a Diane/Liz firm would be as the show explores the potential issues there, but on the surface I’m kind of excited about the prospect of a Diane/Liz led firm. Diane has wanted this for ages, Liz is a good partner, and this actually makes sense (unlike the nonsensical Diane/Alicia alliance of late season seven, where the only rationale was “well, Alicia needs to betray Diane in the finale, but they’re not on good terms. So maybe we make them business partners so then the betrayal stings more?”). Plus I fully love that Diane would end up running a firm with Alicia’s law school rival.

(Has TGF mentioned that Liz and Alicia were law school rivals? No. Am I still clinging on to that as a large part of Liz’s character? ABSOLUTELY.)

Julius is on trial for Memo 618 reasons; Diane is defending him. So this is still happening. (There’s more old footage here.)  

Do they put these references to one/two party consent in these episodes as a wink at the fans? It has to be intentional. (Please do not ask me what the actual law is on this, this show has thoroughly confused me.)  

I knew Cush was filming stuff for TGF, but I didn’t know it was for the premiere. She was just posting about it a few weeks ago, so either they shot a lot of it right before air or she posted a while after filming. Anyway, yay Lucca!  

Bianca’s still around. And, TGF gets to shoot New York for New York, since Bianca is there. I do wish TGF could do more location shoots; there’s something about seeing an actual skyline that feels more real.  

Bianca wants Lucca, who has never been outside of the country (except to St. Lucia, as Bianca reminds her) to go to London and buy her a resort. It’s supposed to be a three week stay and Bianca’s already arranged childcare. Speaking of children, because of COVID and filming constraints, that’s Cush’s real kid in this scene! You can’t really see him, but I recognized his curly hair from Cush’s Instagram, and the Kings confirmed in an interview.  

Adrian wants to write a book about police brutality cases he’s worked on. Ruth very much does not want him to write that book. She wants him to write a book without substance about how white people and black people can work together. He, understandably, has no interest in writing this book. (Also, you can see in the background that Ruth doesn’t think Biden’s odds of winning the Democratic primary are good—there is a big down arrow next to his picture, which definitely dates this scene.)

Oh, David Lee is in this episode. He acts like an asshole towards Marissa when she’s trying to help him.  

Marissa, not happy with the lack of respect, calls Lucca for advice “for a friend.” Lucca mentions she’s in London and Marissa does not believe her and keeps going on and on about her frustrations and her new desire to become a lawyer—quickly.  

Marissa wanting to become a lawyer because she “hates being talked down to” is not a plot I would’ve expected but it’s also one that makes a lot of sense. I think Marissa’s used to being respected and praised even when she’s doing things that aren’t glamorous, so I see how she’d get very restless when she’s no longer outperforming expectations and is instead taken for granted.  

Bells toll in the background on Lucca’s side and Marissa asks where she is. Lucca again notes she’s in London and Marissa still doesn’t believe her.

I’m going to miss Lucca so much, especially since we’ll also be losing a lot of the Millennial Friendship scenes with her. Cush is fantastic (even if she never really got enough to do here) and she plays so well off of the rest of the cast. I even sometimes liked the writing for Maia (who?) when she had scenes with Lucca, Lucca is that good.  

Jay wakes up sweating and unable to breathe, so he deliriously calls his father-figure Adrian. This whole scene is shot like something out of Evil and (I’m getting ahead of myself here) this plot is the only thing about this episode I felt was a misstep.  

“I think you’re my father,” Jay says to Adrian. Heh, I didn’t catch this line the first time around (maybe subliminally I did, since I just called Adrian his father figure lol) but I love that it is included here. Adrian and Jay’s relationship definitely deserves a goodbye.

Adrian calls an ambulance and also gets to Jay before the ambulance somehow. Adrian notes that Jay might have “this thing from China” and... we’re doing the pandemic, y’all. (Minor nitpick: on March 13th, 2020, when this scene is dated, COVID was not “this thing from China”-- we were all aware of it. March 11th was the day Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced they’d tested positive and the NBA shut down and travel was restricted and every single brand that had my email sent me a message about their plans and measures. March 12th was the last time I was in my office, and we’d been getting emails telling us to wash our hands and prepare to work remotely for weeks. I went to San Francisco in mid-late February and distinctly remember deciding to leave a burrito unattended on a table while I washed my hands because I was paranoid about COVID... and then I remember making a specific trip to Walgreens to buy hand sanitizer so that didn’t happen again. My point is, Adrian lives in the same world I do. On March 13th 2020, he would not be treating COVID like it was some new thing he’d vaguely heard of.)  

(I am going to nitpick this timeline, but please know that I’m only doing it because I can, not because I think it’s necessarily a bad choice. Lines like this do feel a little forced, but I see the reason for introducing COVID as something new rather than going for the line that’s exactly historically accurate. I also am pretty sure there are references to dates in March/April in s4 of TGF that are now going to be contradicted by this episode, but I truly do not care. The writers get a pass on this one.)  

We skip slightly back in time to the beginning of March after the MARCH 13TH title card, or maybe this is supposed to be after March 13th and my own memories are preventing me from believing these face-to-face interactions were happening. Who knows.

Michael Bloomberg is... here, again, I guess? He asks Diane to assist with a Supreme Court case about gun control. I guess it does add some weight to the plot and make the stakes feel higher.  

Oh hey, this case is the 7x17 case!!!! Love that continuity.  

Diane and Adrian are both at the office late, working, and there is an unnecessary split screen that feels even more unnecessary when you consider that the editing alone was enough to create the parallel.  

Diane and Adrian have a nice convo (which I’ll really miss, their dynamic is great and this really feels like a successful partnership) as they wait for the elevator. When the elevator dings, they nearly tumble down into nothingness because... the elevator never came. Apparently this is a reference to an law old show I’ve never seen that killed off a character this way, and it’s meant to be a wink at how they are not going to kill off Adrian.

I do not know why I remember this, but I do: after they killed off Will, a critic (Noel Murray; I just googled to confirm my memory) who didn’t want to spoil things tweeted, “Exactly 23 years and 2 days ago, Rosalind Shays fell down an elevator shaft.” Please tell me why I remember this reference that I didn’t even understand well enough to have tracked down the original tweet in under a minute. (https://twitter.com/NoelMu/status/447942456827326464)  

Back on this show, Diane and Adrian share a drink and talk about their wishes. Diane wants to argue in front of the Supreme Court, and Adrian encourages her to speak up. His own near-death experience motivates him to trash the book Ruth has him writing, and Diane trashes the (bad) legal strategy someone else prepared for the Supreme Court.

DIANE IS WEARING JEANS!!!!!! Tbh, I think my favorite part of this episode is how many slice-of-life scenes and settings we get. These are always my favorite moments. I love the satirical and political stuff too, but the character moments are what get me invested enough to write these. (Yes, Diane in jeans constitutes a character moment.)  

Diane tells Bloomberg she wants to be involved and advocates for herself. Kurt gets a call on their landline (hahaha) from Adrian.

God, I love Diane and Kurt. Not only is their banter fun, you can just see a different, more relaxed side of Diane in these scenes. Diane tells Kurt she has good news for herself, but bad news for him since she’s arguing for gun control. She asks him to help her prep for court, too.  

So this is before Jay is rushed to the hospital, because now we are back at the hospital with Julius, Diane, and Marissa. I do not believe any of these people would be setting foot in a hospital like it’s any other day on March 13th, 2020. But I'm trying not to nitpick.

I get why they chose to give Jay a rather severe case of COVID. I just don’t get literally anything else that follows from the initial shock of Jay having COVID.  

I see why the writers chose March 20th (the actual Illinois stay at home order) as the next date for this timeline. I still do not believe that people were in this particular office on that date.  

You know what else I don’t believe? That RBL just shut down for two weeks and was like, no work is being done. Did law firms really do this? I can believe it if it’s an excuse to cost-cut, and I know there were massive layoffs, but this seems... really weird???  

Why are they setting up a teleconferencing infrastructure (didn’t they have one at LG? In season five?) if they are not planning to do work?  

Lol Diane explains what Zoom is, very slowly. She asks everyone to “download a program called Zoom.com” which is one of the first Zoom jokes I’ve chuckled at in a while.  

Marissa is not happy to hear that there’s no work for her in a work-remote world (this I believe 100%), so she calls Lucca again with more questions about law school.

Love these NYC and London location shots. Wish they could do that for Chicago.

Lucca asks Bianca to help get Marissa into a law school, fast, and Bianca tells Lucca to use her name... then offers her a job.

Marissa is at the office, alone, boxing up her things, when one of the office phones rings with some dude offering her a spot in a law school class. I guess we are really all-in on this! (Why would Lucca have given a firm phone number not specific to Marissa, though?)

Adrian and his corrupt girlfriend decide to shelter in place together. I still do not understand why he is okay with her being corrupt. I also don’t really understand why they’re going from talking about sheltering-in-place to George Floyd. How did we just skip from late March to late May? Are Adrian and corrupt gf having a conversation about sheltering-in-place two months into sheltering in place?  

Okay, I am not doing so good at this no-nitpicking thing. Again, I understand why they need to merge several scenes into one to keep things moving. And I guess they could just be getting around to this conversation.

I’m going to nitpick again, I can’t help myself. How did we just go from a scene of Adrian specifically talking about sheltering in place to a scene of Adrian bursting into a bustling and maskless DNC headquarters room? How!? The only masks in this scene are on TV!! There are like ten people in this scene!  

Anyway, more importantly, Adrian tells Ruth off and screams at her that she needs to listen to him instead of acting like she knows the way forward. He is completely right.  

Why is travel from London closing down in May 2020? Is it because this scene is supposed to be at a different place in the episode? Liz is asking Lucca to come back home from her three week stay in London (which has now lasted three months but travel is just now closing down), and Lucca’s hesitant to come home.

This is all happening via Zoom, btw. Lucca’s in her hotel, Diane and Adrian are at their respective homes, and Liz is in the office. All of this feels right. There is a chat off to the side of the screen where you can see Adrian and the others discussing how to unmute on Zoom. Very real. Though probably not very real in late May 2020. Feels more like April. I am convinced this scene got spliced in later to help the episode flow because everything in this scene (except the TV footage that definitely was added later) feels like it should be happening in the March section.  

Lucca mentions that Bianca offered her a job, and at this point we as viewers know how things are going to go—Lucca's going to end up taking it. Liz types in the Zoom chat that they don’t want to lose Lucca. When Lucca tells them how much Bianca’s offering ($500k/year, go Lucca!), Diane types “Shit.” into the chat. “Shit’s right,” Liz replies. “Yes... What should our counter be?” Diane replies. Lucca is kind enough to point out the messages are not private (again, this feels like March not May) but I think knowing that their reaction to topping $500k is “shit” tells her all she needs to know.  

Diane’s background still says that RBL is a division of STR Laurie. Weird how little we are hearing about the overlords except the 20% staff cut.  

Liz and Adrian chat and decide the only way to keep Lucca is to make her a partner. Which, yeah, if you’d just made her a partner years ago when you told her she was in the running for partner and then offered it to fucking MAIA, maybe she wouldn’t be considering Bianca’s offer. Lucca is definitely one of RBL’s stars, and I don’t think she’s wrong to feel like they don’t value her enough. They treat her well enough to be upset about losing her, but not well enough to have already made her partner and not well enough to actually give her authority (even though she runs a whole department). I’d be pretty unhappy too. It kind of feels sometimes like they take her for granted, and I don’t know that Lucca is one to feel like she owes a company anything. She’s more of an “I’m out for myself” type.  

Madeline and the other partner we’ve seen a few times who isn’t Liz/Diane/Adrian, walk into the office (wearing masks! Which they take off as soon as they enter a room with Liz! Without asking her if she is okay with this! TV logic!) and ask who is replacing Adrian. They think this is a good time to reevaluate having a white name partner of an African American firm, and they are spot on. Liz tries to deflect, noting that Diane is already a name partner and was before Liz even joined, but Madeline and other partner (whose name I really wish they would say so I can stop calling him “other partner”) won’t let up. Their position is that Diane shouldn’t have been made a name partner then—all she did was bring in ChumHum, an account that quickly left the firm. Good point.  

“What is this firm if it’s not African American? It’s just another midsized all-service Midwestern law firm, one of 50,” Madeline argues. The other partner says Liz needs to remove Diane and promote two African Americans to name partner. Liz laughs and asks if they mean themselves. Madeline does not—she's concerned about the number of black associates they’re letting go. Liz heads out, but this conversation is very much ongoing.

And I think it’s a very interesting dilemma! There’s a lot of mileage the writers can get out of this, because I don’t think there’s a right answer or a wrong one. It’s all about what Liz decides she wants the future of the firm to be. If Liz chooses Diane, she might be choosing something that works for her personally or that she thinks is a safer financial bet—but she’ll be choosing to work at a firm that can no longer be thought of as a black firm, and she’ll be choosing to move away from her father’s vision for the firm. And since the plot hinges on what Liz will decide rather than what’s objectively the right path forward, there’s a lot of interesting tension there I can’t wait to see.  

(My favorite thing about Adrian leaving is that Liz will likely get more to do, especially when it comes to managing the firm. Adrian tends to speak up first, but Liz is more than capable of managing without him and I’m so excited to see what she does when her ex-husband isn’t constantly talking over her.)  

Marissa and Lucca video chat with Jay. He’s still in the hospital. One thing that bugs me about how this episode handles COVID is that I never really get the sense that any of the characters are particularly afraid of the virus. Maybe none of them were. But you’d think you’d see a little of that fear, the weird dance of trying to assess others’ comfort levels with masking, etc., in an ep specifically about living through this time. ESPECIALLY since someone they all know and are close to has been hospitalized for MONTHS with this thing! It’s just so weird to go from a scene where people wear masks until they come in contact with other people (when masks matter the most) to a scene of someone in the hospital with COVID.  

And now Jay’s weird hallucinations start as his battery dies on the video chat. I really, truly, hated these hallucinations. I was ready to be done with these from the second they started. They’re weirdly shot, they go on for too long, and they feel like the clunkiest parts of Mind’s Eye when Alicia starts having a debate in her mind about atheism mixed with the (far superior) hospital episode of Evil.  

I don’t have much to say about these hallucinations except that I hated them a lot. When there’s the reveal that Jay is hallucinating a commerical, I almost came around on the hallucinations because that’s kind of funny and inspired. And then several more hallucinations popped up and they had a round table and Jesus got added to the mix and I was like, nope, this is bad in a very uninteresting way. I reject this.  

I feel like the Kings didn’t have much to say about COVID, the actual virus. This episode is definitely more about what the characters’ lives were like during COVID and not the pandemic itself. I think they likely got a lot of their COVID commentary out of their system with their zombie COVID show The Bite (I have not seen The Bite due to it airing on Spectrum On Demand, which I have no way of accessing. Like, I would have to move and then decide to pay for cable in order to watch it.) I also suspect a lot of their commentary on COVID isn’t going to be specific to the virus and is instead going to be about things like mask-wearing and vaccinations becoming political. And, really, that’s just a new variation on talking about polarization... and they’ve been talking about polarization for years.

In fact, they even wrote a whole series about an outbreak of a (space-bug-spread) virus that caused political polarization before Trump was even elected. BrainDead is basically commentary on the pandemic before the pandemic even happened. Soooooo I get why they are more interested in recapping 2020 than in doing a Very Special Episode about themes they’ve been talking about for years. (I still think they would’ve benefitted from at least one character being afraid of getting sick or getting their family sick.)  

There is likely some interesting content in these Jay hallucinations. I hate them so much I cannot find it. You know when you’re just on a completely different wavelength than the writers? This is an example of that.  

Also I’m not a fan of the shadowy directing. I think this is meant to look cooler than it does.  

Have I mentioned yet that I absolutely love the “Previously On” device for this episode? It’s such a fun, propulsive way to get through the slog of 2020. Scenes can be short and to the point, and each scene has to do a lot of lifting to fill in the gaps. I think that leads to scenes that are better constructed and telling on lots of levels—where are people when they’re quarantined? Who’s wearing casual clothes and when? What about this scene defines this character’s life at that moment in time?  

Bizarrely, even though this episode is pretty much all plot (this happens! Then that!), I actually found this to be one of the most character-driven episodes TGF has ever done. There’s a lot of story, but most of that story is about how the characters reacted to 2020 rather than overarching plots that will weigh on the rest of the season. This episode covers a lot of ground, but it does it with character moments that resonate.  

Now it’s July and Diane’s prepping to argue in front of the Supreme Court. Kurt’s helping her witness prep and it gets a little personal... and that ends up turning Diane on. Good to see McHart hasn’t lost its spark. (Remember how Kurt cheated on Diane in season 7 of Wife? No, me neither, because that never happened.)  

Corrupt judge is back. Adrian playfully tries to distract her from work. Then he takes a video call from Liz, who updates him on the conversation she had with John (so that’s his name) and Madeline. I guess that part of May was close to July? Anyway, Adrian isn’t surprised to hear that people are upset at the prospect of Diane being one of two name partners.  

Liz is at the office in workout clothes and I love it!

They’re losing 15 black associates (and Adrian and Lucca) and 4 white ones, Liz says. This sounds like a very big problem. (I’d be curious to know what that is as a percentage of the firm and how the racial composition shifts.)

Liz knows it’s not exactly up to her if Diane stays on as name partner (the other partners get a vote, but I think Liz knows she has a lot of sway here). She’s also wondering if Biden could win, and if so, would it be to the firm’s advantage to be black-owned? Interesting.  

“Well. If you’re thinking it, then Diane’s thinking it, too,” Adrian says. He’s right. “White guilt. It runs verrrrry deep on that one, huh?” Ha. He is right about that, too. I actually can’t decide which of these interpretations is correct, because it could be either even though they seem contradictory. (1) Is Adrian saying it with a hint of mockery because he knows Diane will fight for her partnership even as she would say she’s a huge supporter of black businesses? (2) Is he saying it because he knows Diane would have enough white guilt to realize what her presence as a partner means and think through the implications? I think it is, somehow, a combination. I’m interested in this line because this whole dilemma (from Diane’s POV) is something that’s very familiar. Diane’s always been an idealist who will betray her ideals for personal gain. That sounds like an attack, but I mean that as neutrally as I possibly can. There are so many examples of this that this is kind of just a character trait of hers at this point. Usually those ideals are about feminism, but this situation seems closely related.  

Adrian overhears Corrupt GF talking about Julius, Diane, and Memo 618. You would think she would wait to have this conversation until there is no chance of Adrian overhearing, because if Adrian overhears, he might...

... do exactly what he proceeds to do and hop into a car with Diane to give her a heads up. (I think I’m just going to have to accept that the mask usage rule on this episode is “we use masks to show that the characters would wear them, but we don’t want to have scenes where characters are fully masked because that’s annoying.” If that’s not the rule, then why else would Adrian be masked outside... and then take off his mask as soon as he gets into a confined indoor space with Diane?  

Baranski looks ESPECIALLY like Taylor Swift in this scene.  

Adrian tells Diane what he knows. He dug deeper after overhearing Charlotte, so he has even more info. “If you tell me, I will use it,” Diane warns. Adrian knows that, so he takes a moment to decide. And he decides that he cares more about Diane and Julius than about his relationship with a corrupt judge.  

Diane and Julius are masked in court. Visitor and the judge are not. They use masking in a clever way in this scene: Diane uses being masked to her advantage because it means no one can possibly read her lips, so she can use the info Adrian fed her against Charlotte without any fear of spies. Charlotte, who is unmasked, guards her lips with a folder, as the Visitor watches interestedly.  

Diane convinces Charlotte to recuse herself. Charlotte says she’s making a mistake; Diane does not care.  

The new judge is, unfortunately, the idiot who doesn’t know anything about the law. Uh oh.

Charlotte decides she’s done sheltering in place with Adrian. He tries to talk through the conflict, but Charlotte says “You made your choice, Adrian. Julius Cain over me.”

“The choice was about right and wrong, Charlotte,” Adrian tries to explain. I mean, yeah, but if you’re dating a judge who has admitted she’s totally corrupt, didn’t right and wrong go out the window a while ago?

Adrian seems to think the other people involved in the events are bad and Charlotte is good. I am not convinced. I don’t think she’s the big bad, but I don’t think she’s good.  

Charlotte points out that he invaded her privacy. She is right about that. “You said the choice was between right and wrong. Turning over my emails was the choice,” she said. I get her POV. But also, she is corrupt.  

I do not like the way the part of the scene where Adrian physically restrains Charlotte to keep her from leaving is shot. I don’t think this is an abusive scene but I think it should’ve been shot from a little farther back so we could see it’s more like Adrian reaching out in desperation than trying to choke Charlotte. Because it very much looks like he is trying to choke Charlotte.  

He tells Charlotte he loves her. She says it’s too late and leaves. “Maybe you won’t be with me. But you keep down this path... you’ll be done, I’m telling you, you’ll be done.”

I think something that I’ve been missing in these interactions is that I didn’t quite realize until this scene that the Adrian/Charlotte dynamic is more interesting than Adrian liking a corrupt judge. I think he truly believes Charlotte is a good person who got caught up in some bad stuff, and that she can bounce back from it. I’ve always seen Charlotte as someone who is corrupt for herself and then ended up going along with the corruption of others, too, so I’ve dismissed her and the relationship. This is the first scene that has felt real to me, and the first scene where she’s felt like more than a caricature. Kind of sad it’s the last she’ll get with Adrian—now I’m actually starting to find her interesting. Notice how in these last few sentences I’ve used her name instead of “Corrupt GF”!  

Charlotte says she loved Adrian too, but that’s not enough. Awww.

He can’t really be surprised though, can he?  

Now it is August and we get to see Diane and Liz react to the announcement of Kamala Harris as Biden’s VP pick, and I would like to thank the writers for giving me the opportunity to see Diane and Liz react to this. It’s kind of fan-service, but it’s also a nice tie-in to the girl-power theme of the Diane/Liz alliance.

Diane and Liz realize that Adrian’s probably not a good candidate for 2024 if the DNC only wants one black candidate and Harris is the clear front-runner. Liz suggests keeping him on as partner instead, in a way that very much implies this would be her ideal solution. Diane, being Diane, says she was liking the idea of an all-female firm. Liz hesitantly says she was too, and Diane senses the hesitation.

“Let’s look again at which associates to fire. I’m worried we’re losing too many African Americans,” Diane switches the subject. How have they still not made this decision? If any employees know downsizing is coming, and they’ve had months to act on it, assuming there are jobs elsewhere, people would’ve been jumping ship by now.  

But that’s not the point of this scene. The point of this scene is that Liz corrects Diane: “Black. You can just say Black people.” Very nice moment underlining the tension. Diane means well, but she’s still acting like a white lady who doesn’t know how to act around black people... and she wants to (and, I guess, already does) run a black firm. Major yikes.  

Marissa and Lucca are talking again. Marissa does not want to be in law school—she just wants to be a lawyer. Lucca won’t accept Marissa’s refusal to memorize meaningless rules: “Marissa. I know that you know how to play the game, but you have to pass the bar to get into a position to play the game.” Why does this line make me love Lucca? This line isn’t even anything amazing. It’s just a line that cuts through the bullshit and makes a good point.  

Marissa keeps going, insulting all of her peers and teachers, and Lucca figures out how to cut through that, too: she tells Marissa that she’d hire her as a lawyer if she killed someone, but only if Marissa passes the bar. Marissa is instantly intrigued.  

“Why are you leaving here? I’ll miss you,” Marissa says.  

“Because they won’t pay me what I deserve,” Lucca says in a matter-of-fact tone. “Anyway, I thought they fired you.”  

“But they didn’t mean it. It’s like the smoothie place—they kept trying to fire me and I just kept showing up,” Marissa replies. That checks out. (Love the callback!)  

Lucca tries to get Marissa to come over to England. Marissa shuts that down as Lucca gets a news alert—and it’s not good news.  

Our next date is September 18th, 2020 and I will get my nitpicks out of the way up front! I don’t really know why it is daytime for Lucca when she reads the news, considering it was already the evening in the States when the RBG news broke. And, also, it was Rosh Hashanah, so Marissa probably would not have been sitting in her bedroom studying... she most likely would’ve been with family or friends. OK I’M DONE. FOR NOW.  

Diane is getting ready for her arguments in front of the Supreme Court. It’s almost time! She’s in casual clothes but has on a wonderful mask. She’s standing in front of Kurt’s guns to make a point (love that she’s using her video call background to her advantage) and there are several people in her bedroom getting the tech all set up. I have noted before that they only built one set for Diane’s apartment, and it’s just a massive bedroom. Diane choosing to be in front of the guns does a nice job of cutting off my question about why she’d be arguing in front of the Supreme Court from her bedroom rather than the home office she absolutely would have.  

Kurt walks in and tries to shake hands... he’s clearly not very COVID paranoid, and Diane seems to be, and... that’s something I might have wanted to see? How was Diane okay with Kurt taking risks that also affected her?

Diane confirms she intentionally chose to stand in front of the guns. That’s when Kurt gets the push notification. He pulls Diane into the bathroom to show her the news. He hands her his phone and Diane’s face falls. She starts tearing up. “2020 just won’t let go,” she says, speaking for us all.

Normally I hate things that are like, we’re going to contrive this so the news hits at the worst possible moment! This works for me, because the Supreme Court plot for Diane feels more like something that exists to be a through line for the episode. It would also be a little hard to work in RBG’s death as a main plot point—and it is definitely important enough to be a main plotpoint—if it didn’t also affect something in the world of the show.  

Also, another reason I like this contrivance is that it makes it all the more powerful when Diane says, “It’s over. He gets to nominate someone. Another Kavanaugh! We’ll have a conservative court for the next 20 years. My whole fucking life!” She’s not thinking about how this affects her case (and that case is basically a life-long dream for her). She is thinking about way bigger things, and knowing that her mind goes to the bigger things before the personal with news like this really underlines how big of a deal RBG’s death was.  

Diane tells Kurt, “I don’t deserve you. You don’t agree with me.” “I can still feel bad for you,” he responds. He holds her while she cries.

Jay’s hallucination thing is back. Now Karl Marx is here. So is Jesus. I’m so done with this. It’s nice to get a break from writing.

Malcolm X is also on the roundtable and now they’re talking over each other in that way that everyone on this show always does. (RK gave an interview about Evil where he said he likes having the children on that show talk over each other because he grew up in a household like that. I did not need to read that interview to understand that RK likes scenes where people talk over each other.)  

If anything happened in those hallucinations, I missed it, because I didn’t pause the episode. Because I do not care about the hallucinations. Because I hate them.

Now it’s November 2020... Diane’s watching election results and rocking back and forth. She tells Kurt he can go watch Fox News in the other room (so they do have more than one room!). He says he’s fine—he thinks Diane needs it more.  

“Yes, but Kurt, if you stay, I know this isn’t sensible, but... Trump seems to get more votes whenever you’re sitting on this couch,” Diane tells him. Ha, I relate to this kind of superstition so hard. “Are you serious?” Kurt says. “I am so deathly serious,” Diane responds. “Whenever you’re sitting here, Arizona goes for Trump. Humor me, please. Just go in the other room.”  

When Kurt tries to kiss her, she pulls away: “No, no, no. No kiss. If you kiss me, we’ll lose Georgia.” This scene feels so, so real and perfectly captures what it was like (at least for me, though I don’t have a Republican husband or anything) watching election results come in.  

“Uh, if you lose, we’ll be fine, right?” Kurt asks. “Kurt, let me just say this. I’m only saying that we won’t be fine so that the universe will grant me a win,” Diane responds. This scene is so fun and so good! It simultaneously captures a relatable mood, adds some levity, gives us a window into Diane’s life, and shows some of the tensions in her marriage?! I want this all the time!  

Kurt leaves the room. Diane pours more wine.

Later, with Diane still rocking back and forth with anxiety (just you wait for the several more days this will drag on!), Kurt brings in the champagne. “That was for when Hillary won. I can only drink it if Biden wins,” Diane protests. Did I also refuse to drink any celebratory alcohol until things were absolutely certain? No comment.  

“It’s odd you progressives resisted religion. You seem to have a hundred religions to take its place,” Kurt says, speaking on behalf of the writers’ room. (This joke doesn’t get written if the writers don’t believe this and probably even see it in themselves.)  

“Go away, Trump. I mean Kurt,” she shoos him away. Have I mentioned yet I love this scene?  

“Love me even if you lose?” he jokes (though I do wonder if this isn’t that joking? I think it is, but he keeps saying it!) as Diane gestures at him to get out.  

I could do without the joke about Diane’s heart on the TV for a couple reasons. One, it goes on too long. Two, I was very worried something would actually happen to Diane. You’d think that would make the scene feel more tense, but it does not, because it takes me out of the moment.

“Ok, God. You know I don’t believe in you. But I will believe in you if Joe Biden wins. I’m sorry. I know that that’s not what Jesus taught. There’s nothing in the New Testament that says, ‘Believe in me, and I’ll make sure your candidate wins,’ but I need Joe Biden to win. I’m sorry, God, but I just do. I need some faith.” This is a little much but... yeah. Also, is this the first time Diane’s flat out said she’s an atheist? I think it is, though I’ve assumed as much for quite a while.  

The next day in court, masks are no longer required if you’re a series regular and votes are still being counted. I remember those days. Marissa thought Diane was checking in on Jay... Diane was not. She was checking on vote counts.  

Apparently Jay’s finally being released from the hospital!

Bad news for Julius—the idiot judge finds him guilty of some nonsense charge and sentences him to seven years in prison.  

Diane says not to worry, and Julius asks “Why not?” Good point.

Then we have election results! We skip, specifically, to December 14th and the electoral college vote. I’m a little sad we skipped over the huge party that was November 7th, but I get why they’d rather keep things moving along. I think showing November 7th in an uncomplicated way would’ve just been too close to fanservice. But, man, what a day.  

Diane, in a red hoodie with leopard print that she somehow manages to still look classy in, is ready to pop champagne. Then she hears that on January 6th, a joint session of Congress will count the electoral votes and there might be a debate. “Nope. If I open it now, something bad will happen,” she reasons. “I’ve waited four years. I can wait another few weeks.”

It’s been almost a year and they’re still somehow negotiating with Lucca, but I understand why they’d space this out across the episode. Otherwise we’d have to say goodbye to Lucca in the first like, 15 mins of the episode and all those scenes would be in a row. I can forgive (and still nitpick) choices like this when the reasoning behind them seems sound.  

Adrian says they don’t want to lose Lucca. He, Liz, and Diane are all in the conference room, and they ask Lucca for a yes or no on their latest offer by the end of the call. Diane offers Lucca partner—she'll be the youngest partner in the firm’s history—and she’ll get a $500,000/year salary. Adrian tries to sell her on being part of American history by being part of the firm.

“We are a black firm, Lucca, and we need you,” Liz says with a lot of passion for someone who knows she might very well partner with Diane. Diane looks at Liz with a bit of suspicion at this, wondering if Liz is showing her cards.  

Lucca manages to make the wifi malfunction (or she gets very lucky) and uses the disconnection to call Bianca for a counteroffer, even though they said they needed a yes or no on the spot.  

“They used George Floyd because they want you for less. They have never appreciated you as much as I do. All those scars, all that time being taken for granted and undervalued has made you a fighter. It’s made you someone I now want,” Bianca tells Lucca. She gives Lucca a counter offer of $1.3 million and the title of CFO. Lucca takes it. Is there really another choice? (If she were concerned about loyalty to the firm and the partnership was what she wanted, she probably would've just taken it.)  

(Also, the partners can’t really act like Lucca is making history by being the youngest partner ever when they passed her over for partner two years earlier and offered it to Maia! To MAIA! Who had like three years of work experience! And yes I was fine with Alicia and Cary getting partnership offers with four years but, one, that was a scam, and two, Alicia and Cary actually worked. Oh, I see I still hate Maia with a passion. Back to THIS season...)

Lucca apologetically informs Marissa she’s leaving and the offer was just too good to turn down. I believe it. I also believe Lucca wants that job more. What has loyalty to RBL gotten her? She's someone so talented and good at her job that she just gets job offers from acquaintances all the time (starting with Alicia!). RBL appreciates her, but just enough to appease her while still undervaluing her. I don’t know that I would’ve believed a plot where Lucca actively job hunts, but I definitely believe this.

“Marissa, we don’t have to work together to be friends,” Lucca tells Marissa. I’m going to miss this so much. Why is this the best material Lucca’s gotten in ages?! I think one of the things that makes Lucca such a great character is that you can see why everyone instantly wants her on their team. She’s a fantastic friend (without giving too much of herself), she’s not a pushover, and she is incredibly sharp and able to get to the heart of any situation. I love her and I’m sad we won’t get to see more of her.  

(On that bit about friendship—I can’t write about Lucca’s departure without writing about the moment I realized just how great of a character Lucca was. It was in 7x13, when Alicia has her breakdown that’s seven seasons in the making... and Lucca supports her. But the writing, and Cush’s performance, never make it feel like Lucca exists to be a part of Alicia’s story. Lucca seems like her own fully formed person who happens to be supporting Alicia at this moment. I don’t think I can overstate how tough of a task it is to get me to care about the other person in a pivotal Alicia scene, especially when that other person was added to the cast in the final season and many suspected she’d just be a replacement for a different beloved character! Anyway, Lucca’s been great for years, and I’ll miss her.)  

Just when I thought I couldn’t hate the hallucinations more, we get a hint that they are going to continue: Jay sees one right after he learns that Marissa’s used her quarantine to start law school and he’s done nothing.  

Jay says he carries a gun now and it’s “performative.” I have no idea what that means and Marissa and Lucca don’t seem to, either.  

Another thing I like about Lucca’s final scene is that it isn’t rushed. We have time for all that, and also for Lucca to tell Marissa about the time she stole her breakfast sandwich, and for Marissa to react to it, and for Marissa to find Lucca’s Birkin bag, and for Lucca to tell Marissa to keep it, and for Marissa to react to that, and for Lucca to sappily say “think of me when you use it,” and for Marissa to nonsensically reply, “you think of me when I use it,” and there’s still a little bit more of the scene after that!  

Marissa’s silly line makes Lucca tear up. “God, I’m gonna miss you guys,” she says. “I’m gonna miss this. You make me smile. I didn’t smile much before you guys.” Awwwwwww. This is also so true to character! Her friendship with Alicia aside, Lucca’s definitely said before she’s not one to have friends (which is hilarious because she is, as I've said like 100 times, a fantastic friend and also just like, the coolest person??? Who wouldn’t want to be HER friend?!).  

She says she has to go because she’s getting too emotional and says goodbye. She’s also super sappy and when Marissa says, “you were the best,” she responds that they were the best TOGETHER! Awwwwwww.  

What a nice, fitting goodbye for Lucca. There’s no bad blood or fireworks—she just makes a change like a lot of people do. I’d like to think she’ll still be friends with Marissa and Jay after this. I don’t want too many Lucca references in future episodes, but I would really like it if we see Marissa and Jay update each other on the latest from Lucca, or if a scene begins with Marissa closing out an Instagram post from Lucca of her kid, or something. I wouldn’t want clues about what Lucca’s up to, but I’d love to see that she’s still a part of Marissa and Jay’s lives.

Now it is January 6th. Liz, Adrian, and Diane sit on the floor of the mostly empty office, watching TV coverage and drinking. It’s so relaxed it’s almost surreal, and it, like many other moments in this episode, feels like a slice of life. Everyone’s dressed casually and no one is worried about appearances or looking like the boss.  

“God, have you ever seen anything like it. It’s so fucked,” Diane says. Adrian’s more optimistic—the courts rejected most of the challenges to election results! “System worked,” he says. “Yay.” Liz says in response. She’s not as optimistic as he is.  

“Liz. Liz. Sometimes when things work out, there is no parade. There’s no congratulations, but I’ll tell you this: We live to fight another day,” he explains to her even though she makes a good point that a system just barely hanging on doesn’t bode well for the future. (She doesn’t say all this, but that’s a very loaded, “Yay.”)  

“Yeah? Then why are you leaving the law?” Liz asks. Diane seconds to the question.

Adrian announces he’s still retiring—and he’s moving to Atlanta. He wants to go to the south to help “create and consolidate political power.” He’s excited to start over and inspired by Georgia going blue. This is a very nice exit for Adrian. I fully believe that he’s interested in political organizing, that he’d be good at it, and that he’s ready for a change. I don’t think he’s always the most progressive person (of the three in this scene, Liz is absolutely the most progressive one, though Diane probably thinks she is!), but I absolutely think he thinks of himself as an activist and I believe that if he’s going to step away from the law, he’d do so to make a move like this.  

Adrian—and Lucca, but especially Adrian—probably both got better exits thanks to the events of 2020. If Adrian had just left to be groomed by the DNC, that would’ve been a predictable and boring ending for him. His candidacy would, obviously, go nowhere, and the whole thing felt weird from the minute it was introduced. But this? Adrian being energized—like so many others were—by the ways the world changed in 2020 and using his already announced departure from the firm and recent breakup as a chance to start over and make change? This is great!  

Adrian asks Liz and Diane what’s next for them. Liz says that she thinks the Biden admin will be better for black businesses. Adrian asks if they’re replacing him, and Diane says, “I think the big question is, are you replacing me?” She’s smart. I like how this scene goes from friendly to tense very fast, with everyone kind of testing the waters. Adrian tries to force the conversation, Liz opens with something vague yet pointed, and Diane speaks what’s previously been unspoken.

Liz says it’s not her intention to push Diane out. “I can’t change the color of my skin,” Diane replies. “I know,” Liz laughs. Audra’s delivery is fantastic on that line.  

“Hey, I’m gonna fight for my partnership,” Diane says. “I know,” Liz says. The tone of this scene is so different from previous partnership drama on these shows and I’m excited about it. This is just a bunch of adults talking about business decisions with each other and treating each other as equals?? It's not backstabbing?? Or drama?? No one is hiding things?? It’s refreshing and I hope this plot stays like this. We’ve done so much partnership drama that I think drama that stems from a real, pressing question that has no easy answers and isn’t anyone’s fault is going to be much more fruitful for the show.  

Adrian heads out—ah, I see now this scene is set in his empty office and this is why they are on the floor—and gets a nice last moment with Diane. And then they give him a last moment with Liz, which I knew they would but was still glad to see.  

Liz asks if he knows what he’s doing—he says he’s not sure.

Adrian asks if Liz knows where she stands regarding Diane. “It’s going to be interesting,” Liz says. I don’t think she’s decided what she’s going to do yet.

It wouldn’t be an Adrian and Liz scene if Adrian didn’t have some unsolicited advice. “Diane’s a terrific lawyer, but this firm belongs to you.  Your dad built it. He did, Liz. Despite all his faults. You got to run this place the way you want. This is a black firm. And after today, the world needs black firms. You got me?” He tells Liz. He makes it seem like Liz gets the choice and then tells her what to do. She says, “I got it,” signaling she understood him but not that she necessarily agrees.  

I cannot wait to see what Liz does next!!!!!!! About this but just in general!!!!! Without Adrian there giving her constant advice I feel like she can grow so much and the show will have to give her more to do!!! I think Adrian, for all his many wonderful qualities and all he brought to the show, can suck all the air out of a room with his charisma, and Liz usually ends up suffering as a result. She’s such a capable lawyer in her own right, but Adrian has a way of making it always seem like he’s right—even in arguments she wins. I’m excited to see Liz lead (or stumble at leadership; she is fairly new to management) without Adrian’s direct influence.  

Liz walks Adrian out and it’s cute. They run into Marissa and Jay. “Everybody fun is leaving,” Marissa notes. Liz is minorly offended, but playfully. Heh.

Adrian asks Jay how he’s doing; Jay says he’s a long-hauler but he’s doing okay. I like that they included that moment in Adrian’s goodbye sequence. It’s a very little thing, but it underlines that Adrian cares about Jay.  

Then Liz interrupts to note that Trump pardoned a lot of convicted and corrupt Republican officials....... including Julius.  

Everyone celebrates, but especially Diane and Marissa. Diane lets out her wonderful laugh and then we, finally, get to the credits. Because now that the previouslies are over, it’s time for the real show.

The credits are absolutely delightful, btw. I was a little worried some of the kittens would blow up, though! Once I relaxed and realized what they were up to—literal puppies and kittens because Biden won—I couldn’t get enough of these credits. They work so well because they accurately capture the way I (and all of these characters, except maybe Julius and Kurt) feel about the election results, but it’s so exaggerated that you know the kittens and puppies aren’t a realistic representation of our new reality. They’re just too good to be true, but you may as well enjoy them for a minute. I’m sure we’ll be back to exploding vases next week.

What a great episode! My timeline nitpicks and whatever they’re trying to do with Jay aside, I was blown away by how well the writers managed to move on from season 4, tie up loose ends, and write out two main characters. And they did it all while making me revisit the events of 2020, a year I don’t think many of us want to spend much time thinking about! This episode was enjoyable, fun, emotional, and clever. I don’t know what to expect from the rest of the season, but I’m definitely excited about the show in a way I haven’t really been in quite some time.  

This season’s naming convention seems to be titles that end with ... and only have the first word capitalized. I want to see more. 

Season FIVE? There have already been as many TGF seasons as there were TGW seasons prior to Hitting the Fan?! Time flies. 

Please writers: No topical episodes this year-- no pee tape, no Melania divorce, no Epstein. None of that business. 

Sorry if I repeated myself here. I never proofread these things, and I wrote half of this on Saturday and half of it today (Wednesday) and the days in between were an absolute blur so I cannot remember if I said the same things about this episode twice. 

#the good fight #tgfthoughts

[supernovaken]

Why Kid is Luffy’s Only Rival

Been thinking about this one for a while now. Eustass ‘Captain’ Kid, one of the main players of the worst generation and top dog of the ‘Victoria Punk’ pirate ship. Calling Kid the top dog seems extremely redundant but when your nickname is ‘Captain’ what the heck is a blog to do.

His introduction to the story is as a brash, easily triggered and quick tempered super rookie designed as a direct rival to our very own Straw-Hat Luffy. Kid and the other Supernova Captains were slipped into the story as equals to our rubbery protagonist with their entry and journey through the first half of the Grand Line being described as the catalyst to ushering in the next generations of Pirates.

Reading the manga however, that high admiration for Kid has been somewhat shit on quelled. Nothing against Kid but there is no one, absolutely no one that can compare to The Future King of the Pirates.

So what is it about Kid that’s so good, what separates him from the other (less spectacular) supernova. And I really am including Law in that list of unimpressive pirates - I mean sad backstories are everything in One Piece but Trafalgar Law is just as ineffective in the world as the other members of the supernova. His feats and accolades are great to read about but in the grand scheme of things he’s very meh. A post time skip inclusion to the Straw Hats dynamic with all the underwhelming presence of Princess Vivi.

But this is a Kid fan post so the less said about Law the better, maybe i’ll give him his very own post next.

Let’s talk about Eustass ‘Captain’ Kid

We seem to know both a lot and nothing at all about this reckless member of the worst generation. His brash and battle scarred appearance, his vicious personality as a pirate contrast with his unshakable love for his crew comparable to Roger himself. (They both get very triggered if someone were to speak badly about their crews).

Beyond his pending backstory (which will no doubt be sad as all heck, invoking all of the feels), one of the more compelling unknowns around Kid is his introductory bounty when we met him at the Sabaody Archipelago. The contentious figure of 315,000,000 Berri had us questioning how he managed to outdo the protagonist we had been following since the East Blue.

The quick and easy answer - he caused a huge number of civilian casualties along the way

BORING!! #SnoozeAlert.

The long answer - and some might say more fun. Figuring out where this number for his bounty came from, what kind of feats and activities could he possibly have done on his journey to the Grand Lines half way point. Comparing Luffy’s journey and coming up with theories on what Kid could have done similarly is our best bet and should make understanding why Kid is the indisputable mirror and number one rival to our favourite Monkey boy pirate. (Discounting Blackbeard of course)

So how do we do that lol...

Not the easiest job to take on considering we have no idea how bounties are decided in the One Piece world, we can only speculate based on the small details we do know and track back against the Straw Hats who we have seen in action, receiving their very own dead or alive posters. I’ll be going through mostly everything we know up to the story’s half-way point pre-timeskip, unless something relevant crops up from the New World, but from my take it gets a lot more difficult to make assumptions after that point.

Where to begin? The beginning of course…

It's amazing how often Oda has to remind us bounty values are not a reflection of a pirates strength but a reflection of their threat level at the time of issue. And this distinction becomes extremely important in trying to figure out what Kid did. What threatening actions could he have done, when would he have done it and who precisely is he a threat to.

“On the Blue Sea below, there are a class of people called "pirates"... they are criminals who sail the seas in search of plunder. These people fly a black flag with a skull atop their ship's mast. ”— Gan Fall

The moment a person raises that black flag marked with a skull and crossbones as their symbol, they are immediately declaring themselves to be enemies of the state. Outlaws that choose to ignore the rules of the land, instead living out at sea and taking from the land what they want. Pirates!!

By becoming a pirate you are officially waging war on the government - The World Government (WG) and by extension its sea based military unit - The Marines. Clearly this is the ‘who’ when the question of threatening behaviour is raised. As simple as it sounds, it really does tell us quite a bit when inferring the actions and reasoning behind Kids bounty.

Kid has done something that has directly threatened the WG

But what about that old, boring line on ‘causing civilian casualties’... How much weight does that truly hold in determining your threat level.

I’d like to argue that in the world of One Piece, this sort of action, in actuality, holds little to no meaning. From Buggy destroying Orange Town, Krieg bombarding a Baratie filled with civilian customers and Arlongs ten year stint of villainy in Kokoyashi, the East Blue Saga is littered with examples of high civilian casualties yet we see no consequence come of it in the form of newly raised bounty figures. The obvious conclusion would be that attacking civilians is not enough to get a bounty figure raised and if raised it won’t be by much, this does also pose new questions. Is it enough to get a new bounty issued? And does the lack of Marine presence affect the disclosure of a pirate's actions? In the first two cases the Marines weren’t even around, hard to believe those actions wouldn’t have been reported to them though, and in the last case the only Marine directly involved was unsympathetically corrupt to the bone.

Now I can’t ignore the involvement of a certain Monkey D Luffy in these incidents. His defeat of the pirates meant that although they were still on the run from the Marines (barring Arlong), they were now a non factor as a more noteworthy individual has somehow come out of nowhere and defeated 3 of the most prominent East Blue Captains and crews (4 but Kuro was dead to them). This collective feat is what earned Luffy the top East Blue bounty of 30M Berri.

Expanding a little on the importance of Marine presence. At each point Luffy’s bounty is increased it has been the direct result of him acting against a representative of the Government - publicly.

First bounty of 30M Berri issued after the defeat of Arlong. It was the action against Marine Captain Nezumi of the 16th Branch in the East Blue which prompted him to personally request a bounty for the Captain of the pirate crew that defeated and humiliated him. Luffy’s feats before this may have been used as justification for the value, but no wanted poster would exist without this Marine present.

Second bounty of 100M Berri issued after the defeat of Ōka Shichibukai Sir Crocodile. Public awareness of Crocodile's defeat was inevitable due to his instigation of a coup against the established monarchy of a member nation of the World Government - The Nefertari Family. Although in the media Luffy’s involvement was suppressed, the WG couldn’t ignore the unprecedented issue they now had at his hands with a Warlords defeat and arrest. So Luffy’s threat level automatically went up, more than tripling.

Third bounty of 300M Berri issued after the infiltration, destruction and escape of the WG judiciary island Enies Lobby. Directly opposing the WG and causing multiple casualties amongst the marines and world government officials (not as significant as civilians?), declaring war on the WG by burning the flag that represents the entity, defeating one of their greatest assets, Rob Lucci and the CP9 as well as being the scapegoat for the annihilation of the island under the unstoppable force of the Buster Call and escaping with the Devils Child Nico Robin in the midst of it.

We mustn’t forget that afterwards Luffy defeated Ōka Shichibukai Geko Moria on the isolated island-ship of Thriller Bark. The only WG presence was through Kuma’s arrival allowing for a full suppression of the incident, Moria keeping his position with Kuma given orders to take the head of the Straw-Hat Captain. He then infiltrated two more Government facilities, causing the greatest unprecedented breakout in history with multiple pirates in tow at Impel Down, and greatly impacting the Paramount War fought at Marine HQ while facilitating the release and potential escape of Portgas D Ace and the Whitebeard Pirates. The culmination of this led to his final pre-timeskip bounty increase to 400M Berri.

At this point there are three things that stand out when it comes to Luffy’s high value bounty increases:

A direct and public action must be taken against the Marines and WG

The large scale of some the incidents have proven too difficult to fully suppress

Strangely casualties amongst government officials hold less weight than civilian casualties.

So how does this apply to Kid. How can we use this to decipher the actions and merits behind his introductory bounty.

Well, I believe that to reach the bounty level of 315M Berri Kid must have accomplished feats near to equal that of Monkey D Luffy. How can that be when all of Luffy’s feats are first in their nature, unprecedented events. My argument though is that if we apply the nearest reasonable equivalent, could we get more of an understanding of Kids exploits.

What can be equivalent to the defeat of one, if not two, Ōka Shichibukai. What compares to the breach of a Marine and Government inhabited island. Direct, public, sizable, irrepressible and includes civilians....

The long awaited, highly drawn out conclusion - A Marine Base

Specifically a large Marine Base located in the GrandLine Paradise and under the command of a Vice Admiral, littered with the presence of marine officials and their civilian families.

Vice Admirals no doubt must be seen as equals in strength, intimidation (via rank) and authority level amongst the everyday civilians as each of the Seven Warlords of the Sea. The admiration Crocodile received from the people of Alabasta in thanks to his title cannot be compared to the much less acknowledged presence of, Captain at the time, Smoker when he was on the island. The reactive fear most pirates display at the sheer mention of a Warlord being in the area emulates that of a Vice Admiral beyond any reaction a lower ranked official may create.

*Potential Spoiler if not caught up with Episode 957 of the Anime*

Upon the abolishment of the Warlord system we are shown multiple warships on approach to each of the Shichibukai, assumedly all led by at least one Vice Admiral ranked Marine officer based on the presence of Vice Admiral Stainless addressing Buggy The Clown. It’s clear from this scene along with the ones depicting Boa Hancock and Dracule Mihawk, that the Marines acknowledge how formidable the Warlords are and how much of their own military might is required to apprehend each. Although we don’t yet know the outcome we can infer the comparability between the Ōka Shichibukai and the Vice Admirals of the Marines.

Kid definitely proved his capability and threat level by, at the very least, bringing down one of the GrandLine Marine Bases on his chosen route towards Sabaody Archipelago. And I can tell you for free that he is the only member of the Supernova (outside of Luffy) that is capable of doing this. Oda has shown us that not one of the other Supernovas compare in a level of reckless behaviour to Luffy with each of them finding a way to survive and slowly build up their presence in the New World. Law directly requested to become a Shichibukai to aid freer movement, Capone submitted(even though temporarily) to becoming a subordinate of the Big Mom Pirates, the others we know attempting to form alliances for a more promising chance to survive against the Emperors. Only Luffy and Kid have shown enough will to directly oppose all powers that threatened them no matter how overwhelming the odds seemed.

So that's it, a very long winded theory haphazardly put together as to how Eustass Kid achieved a comparable and slightly higher bounty of 315M Berri to our Luffy’s 300M at the time, and strongest reasoning for why Kid is Luffy’s only rival.

Who knows, may one day attempt to put some fanfiction together around this theory, potentially using G4 since we know the least about it and it must exist in the canon storyline.

#eustasscaptainkid #eustass kid #trafalgar law #one piece #monkey d luffy #roronoa zoro #supernova #shichibukai #crocodile #sir crocodile #doflamingo family #boa hancock #buggy the clown #gecko moria #bartholomew kuma #dracule mihawk #world government #one piece marines #smoker

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Gou Ep18

This week in Higurashi, things are relatively peaceful and mundane, which somehow has me just as nervous as all the shit that went down in the last arc.

Thoughts under the cut.

The preview images we got obviously included stuff from Matsuribayashi flashbacks, but I guess now we know that the entire episode was focused on Matsuribayashi and it’s aftermath, with no follow-up to the end of Nekodamashi. I think we’re going to spend a few more episodes on this flashback [which feels like a weird way to describe it since we’re dealing with new post-Matsuribayashi content, but it still happens chronologically before Gou], and to me this makes it feel more likely that when we cut back to the end of Nekodamashi, Satoko will get stopped before she can shoot Rika, and that arc will continue on and be the ‘true ending’ of Gou. Unless this ends in a super tragic and depressing way, which I guess is possible if they really lean into this being a Bernkastel origin story.

Anyway, at this point it looks like we’re just going back and seeing what happened with Satoko between 1983 and 1988 that convinced her to make some sort of a deal to go back in time and punish Rika for her sins, and it’s nice to finally start getting some answers. We haven’t really figured out anything to do with the mechanics of the different murders of the first three arcs happened, but we’re getting a much clearer image of Satoko’s backstory and her motives.

There’s still clearly a lot left to happen to her since things only really come to a head in 1988, but this episode already sets the stage for showing how the whole friend group is starting to break apart over time, and how all the traditions and norms of the village are starting to change. On the one hand it’s really satisfying to see this sort of pay-off after everything that happened in the VN, but on the other hand it makes sense that it all ends up just making Satoko feel alienated and abandoned by everyone.

Even on top of stuff like Mion graduating and Rika wanting to go to St Lucia’s, there’s also other stuff going on like Keiichi taking over the club and removing all the tricks and schemes that Satoko liked about the club games, and the village heads publicly putting an end to the dam war, and declaring the curse as basically just being a myth.

Even after everyone met Hanyuu and found out about the true nature of the curse, I can see how Satoko wouldn’t be very happy about having everything with the curse and the dam war cast aside and moved on from. It’s a good thing in the long run, but it doesn’t really erase all of the stuff it caused Satoko to go through.

We also found out about how the disease is starting to clear up all on it’s own, probably as a result of Hanyuu’s big change of heart and her deciding to ‘go to sleep’ after the events of Matsuribayashi, which Satoko at least seemed happy about, but it makes me wonder what happens with Satoshi after all this. One of the big reasons why Satoko’s motives for starting this new loop confused me is just because Satoshi should have already been cured by 1988, so even if Satoko had begun drifting away from her friends and having to adjust to life at a shitty Catholic boarding school, she’d at least have her brother back. But this is making me wonder if maybe he never actually gets cured, and if that might be part of why she’s looping in the first place.

Even with the disease disappearing over time, it’s possible that Satoshi had basically gone past the point of no return, and that even if they woke him from his coma, he’d never properly recover. Or maybe he ends up getting killed, directly or indirectly, as part of the clinic being shut down.

And on the whole topic of Satoshi, we also didn’t hear anything about Shion in this episode, which also makes me wonder how she’d respond to whatever happens to Satoshi in the future, and what her relationship with the club ended up being like. It also feels like one of the reasons why Rika and Satoko are going to St Lucia’s in the first place rather than any other school might just be so that Satoko can end up interacting with Shion there, but I’ll get back to that in a minute.

Aside from that, the whole scene where Rika and Satoko talked about how they both disliked how Keiichi was getting rid of the dirty tricks in the club games, and how ‘Rika’s pure soul had been tainted from all the games she and Satoko played’ just felt like they were going out of their way to mess with people like me who want more Bern and Lambda content, lmao. That whole scene really makes it obvious how those two end up with the sort of relationship they have in Umineko. It’s an extreme, exaggerated version of them playing games together that involve foul play and punishments. Also, I feel like both Rika and Satoko’s teenage designs make them look more like Bern and Lambda, which is interesting.

There’s speculation about whether or not Satoko will pass her entrance exams to St Lucia’s, but in her scene in the OP she’s wearing the St Lucia’s uniform, rather than the one she wears in this episode, so I think it’s very likely that she’ll get in, and that the real problem will just be what happens once she starts going there, considering how bad of a time both Shion and Ange had there.

We already know that Rika thinks very highly of her time there, and I think it’s pretty likely that she’d have an easier time fitting in than Shion and Ange did, but it seems pretty inevitable to me that Satoko would end up getting bullied and isolated. I think she ends up drifting away from Rika as a result of this, while Rika winds up not noticing what’s happening to Satoko because she’s too busy enjoying her new happy school life. And since it looks like Satoko probably spent about four years there before everything went to shit, that’s a lot of time for things to get really bad for her.

Considering that this episode also proves that Mion was just about to enter high school at the end of the VN, it’s very likely that Shion was still attending St. Lucia’s at the same time as Rika and Satoko, so I think we’ll end up seeing them interacting, which will be interesting. I could see this tying into whatever ends up happening to Satoshi, since both Satoko and Shion are invested in him. I also think that having Shion become more important this way could also let them finally include some material from Meakashi, so we don’t just entirely skip her whole backstory. Similarly, I get the feeling that we might see more of post-Matsuribayashi Rena in a way that delves more into her backstory and her family, and gives some answers in hindsight about what she was going through in Onidamashi. Which wouldn’t really be the most satisfying substitute for the entire Tsumihoroboshi arc, but it’s something.

The other big reason why I think Shion might get involved soon, and part of why I think Rika and Satoko are going to St. Lucia’s in the first place, is that we might find out that Shion is more or less Satoko’s accomplice. This is mainly inspired by the theories people have made about how Satoko seems to be holding Shion’s hair ribbon on the cover of the new ending theme’s CD jacket, but in general I think it makes a lot of sense that they’d end up working together. I don’t necessarily think that Shion is also a looper or anything, I think Satoko has probably been reaching out to her at the start of each loop in Gou to make her an accomplice, and their interactions at St Lucia’s might set the foundation for why she’d do that.

At the very least, if that time at St Lucia’s lets them become closer, it’d make it easier for Satoko to figure out how to get Shion on her side in each loop once she starts looping, but I think it’d also tie into Satoshi’s fate. If Satoko finds out exactly what happens to him, and she can convince Shion to believe her, that might help get her to become her accomplice.

I don’t really think Satoko did much of anything in Onidamashi, since nothing Rena did had anything to do with Rika, and we also didn’t even see Shion at all, but I think Watadamashi would have been the start of this. It’d also explain why Shion doesn’t even show up in Nekodamashi and never went L5 in spite of being the most obvious person to go L5, if Satoko was intentionally protecting her.

I don’t actually have any real concrete idea of how Shion being Satoko’s accomplice would relate to the mechanics of anything in Watadamashi or Tataridamashi, let alone all the loops in Nekodamashi, but it at least makes sense in terms of their motivations, lol.

Shion’s role in Watadamashi has always felt super weird, though, what with her strange phone call to Keiichi after the festival, and her apparently getting killed by Mion. And there’s also the whole mystery of why Satoko even bothered going to the Sonozaki estate at the end of that arc, since Rika had already died by that point. At this point I wonder if maybe Shion was still alive by that point, and only died at the end of the arc, instead of being killed on the night of the festival like we’re lead to think happened.

I think Shion being the main accomplice would help explain the logistics of how people like Kimiyoshi and Akane apparently got injected and turned L5, though. It still seems like a stretch to think that Satoko would be able to do it, and that they’d even listen to anything she tries to tell them, but I could see it happening if Shion was the one who did it instead. 

I’m hoping that eventually this whole flashback will reach the point where we start seeing Satoko’s perspective on the first three arcs, since there’s still a lot that needs to be explained about them. It wouldn’t be as fleshed out as a full series of answer arcs like the VN had, but still.

Onidamashi’s kinda weird because it feels like it can be ‘solved’ almost entirely just with knowledge about Rena’s character from the VN. Satoko might have been involved with it, but it’s very easy to imagine how Rena could have just gone down the same route as Tsumihorboshi without any intervention from Satoko at all. So since Gou doesn’t really seem all that interested in actually answering all the mysteries for new fans, I could see them not really going into detail about that arc, and only explaining the very end of it with Rika and Satoko dying, since VN fans could just figure out the solution for Rena’s side of things on their own.

Watadamashi is probably the arc that needs the most explaining, at least in terms of the different murders and how they happened and who did them. At this point I guess we’re just meant to take the story of Tomitake and Takano fleeing the village at face value, and that there’s probably not much else going on there, but we don’t know exactly what happened that lead to Kimiyoshi, Oryo, and Shion dying, or who exactly killed Rika and why they did it, or why Satoko went to the Sonozaki estate and wound up getting killed there. I’m still honestly not very sure what happened in that arc, even now that we know a lot about the bigger picture of the story. Even now that we know more about Satoko’s motives, it’s still hard to explain why she bothered going to the Sonozaki estate after Rika had already died. Since her whole motive just seems to be about Rika, it feels like she would have just wanted to reset the loop as quickly as possible, and there’d be much simpler ways to go about killing herself to make it happen.

Tataridamashi is also kinda weird, but less in terms of it’s murder mysteries, and more in terms of what was going on in the background of that arc in general. I don’t really buy the idea that Satoko was entirely faking all of the abuse in that arc, considering that in Nekodamashi she had an entirely genuine panicked response just to seeing the jack-in-the-box again, which makes it feel very unlikely that she’d be able to completely fake a way more severe PTSD attack. There’s also the fact that, even if we’re dealing with a Satoko from the Matsuribayashi timeline, she doesn’t necessarily remember the timelines where Teppei comes back to the village. It feels pretty unrealistic to imagine that just because she’s aware that she’s in a time loop, she suddenly doesn’t have any trauma toward Teppei anymore, and is able to be a master manipulator who can fake her own abuse just to mess with people. I also just don’t even know what her motive for faking her abuse would be, aside just wanting Rika to feel bad. But that feels like a pretty convoluted way to go about it, and in general it just feels like it’d be an insensitive way to handle child abuse as a topic.

It also just feels odd to me to think that this version of Teppei either wasn’t actually abusive, or just randomly changed his tactics entirely. But I do think it’s noteworthy that they drew visual attention at the end of the arc to Satoko’s lack of bruises, and that we didn’t physically see Teppei after the visit from Chie [aside from when he attacked Keiichi, which might have just been a hallucination]. Rather than Satoko just completely fabricating her abuse, I think that Teppei did start abusing her like in Tatarigoroshi, but Satoko ended up killing him in self-defense, which might have happened shortly before her big breakdown, which could still mean that whole scene was genuine, in it’s own way. And even if she did kill him, we already saw in Tatarigoroshi that Satoko is able to hallucinate him as still being alive even after his death, so even if she killed him in self-defense, it’s possible that she wound up convincing herself that he was still alive and abusing her.

Even with the meta-knowledge of being a looper, and what we know of her disease curing itself later on in time, it’s still likely to me that she genuinely still suffered from HS during the Gou loops. I mean, we know that Rika of all people went L5 at least once, in spite of knowing about the disease and everything. We saw in Nekodamashi that even after all this, Satoko apparently stilled believed in the existence of Oyashiro-sama as a conventional god figure who curses people, so I can imagine that even after she started looping, she could still develop HS and get paranoid about things.

I’m still not entirely sure what happened with Ooishi behind the scenes in that arc that lead to him going L5, and what exactly happened to Keiichi at Satoko’s house. It seems very likely to me that Teppei was already dead by that point, and he was just a hallucination, but usually the hallucinations don’t cause people to hear people say things that they aren’t actually saying, so the fact that Satoko mentioned her uncle in that scene when Teppei showed up might imply that she was in the phase of hallucinating him being alive as well.

Anyway, I think that this section of the flashback will end with Satoko in 1988 being contacted by some sort of supernatural/meta entity posing as Oyashiro-sama who convinces her to go back in time to punish Rika, so I’m curious to see exactly how that plays out, and how much it might tie into Umineko stuff. I still think it’s likely that Lambda decided to make Satoko her new piece, at least. But I dunno if we’ll explicitly see her in that case, or if it’d just be like Satoko hearing a disembodied voice in her head.

I’m not sure exactly how long I think this flashback will go for, though, with both the post-Matsuribayashi stuff, and any flashbacks to the first three arcs of Gou. It’d be kinda nice if we at least get one full episode going over each of the first three arcs, but we’ll see. There’s still about four more years left to go in this flashback until we get to 1988, but I don’t think it’d take that many episodes to get there.

In spite of this being a fairly sparse episode, I ended up having a fair bit to say about it, lol.

#murasaki rambles #higurashi #higurashi gou #plus more Umineko spoilers

[kinetic-elaboration]

100 Days of Writing: Day Sixty-Three

I decided to catch up on The 100 Days of Writing and then I... accidentally wrote a large number of words. In my defense, this is like 2 weeks’ worth of questions. Also I skipped the ones I didn’t have anything to say about so actually this could be worse.

(I’m not even kidding, this is really long. I talk about writing rituals, tools for plotting, my thoughts on opening with dialogue and why I don’t like it, my favorite topics, the weather, and what length of fic I like to write.)

I’m tagging, and apologizing to, @the-wip-project and fellow participants @she-who-the-river-could-not-hold, @thelittlefanpire, @hopskipaway, @easilydistractedbyfanfic, @dylanobrienisbatman, and @fontainebleau22.

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Day 49: How do you get yourself in the mood to write? Do you have a ritual?

Every time I tell myself I’m going to get back into doing these questions, I see this one in my bookmarks and go nope! and turn around. It’s not a hard question; I’ve just been having trouble consistently getting into the mood to write, so I feel like any answer I try to give to it will be, in some sense, a lie. Like do I ever get “in the mood” to write? Really?? Also, I feel like I’m relying too much on ‘ritual,’ building up ‘the perfect writing situation’ in my head, which at the end of the day is less important than just saying ‘I’m going to do this now’ and then doing it.

I do have some things I always do when I sit down to a writing session. I write on my couch. Almost always (unless I’m on an event deadline where I just have to write in bits and pieces whenever possible), I write in sprints—I use write or die to keep me actually typing and not staring into space. I write in order, and I often write a whole scene at a time. So before I start I need to have at least a couple solid opening sentences in mind, plus some kind of idea about what happens/needs to happen in the scene. In order to get in the right headspace, I usually spend some time just thinking before I actually get to writing. I reread my outline or notes, and skim whatever I might have already written on the project. Sometimes I look at images that help me get in the right mood. Sometimes I just imagine or daydream for a bit. The difficulty, especially recently, is in making sure I do this just enough and not too much, because then I get too caught up in my head and I can no longer translate what I’m seeing into words.

In a broader sense, I also have a building up to writing ritual—again, I think this is part of my problem, that I don’t know how to balance this build up with actual writing. In the hours/days before writing something, I turn it over in my head a lot. I practice different versions of those critical opening sentences. I play it out like a fantasy just to see if there’s a possible flow, even if the final version is different. Basically, I try to turn it into something that just needs to be written, that just needs to get out. But again—this can lead to overthinking and frustration.

The best way I can describe writing for me is that, when it goes well, I find a rhythm, or enter into a zone, where I can describe the images in my head in a way that’s both accurate and pleasant to read. But entering that zone or finding that rhythm is like jumping into a game of jump rope. If you don’t do it right, you’re just going to trip over your feet and get tangled in the rope. But if you do it correctly, it’s fun and exhilarating and you can keep jumping for a long time. Sometimes it takes me some false starts to jump in. And recently I’ve been having days where I just can’t at all, where I tangle the rope up so much I can’t unknot it. Those are the days I just have the same sentences repeating over and over in my head, sounding wrong, and I can’t do anything about it. On the other hand, I write in much longer sprints than I did a couple years ago. I used to only write partial scenes, maybe a few hundred words. Now I can write whole scenes without stopping, and on a few occasions, I’ve written multiple scenes or even whole stories without stopping. So in other words, when it works,  it really works. But it doesn’t always, and there’s not a lot of in between.

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Day 50 What fic/story made you?

Um… honestly I’ve been writing, in general and fic specifically, for such a long time that I didn’t have a ‘maybe I can do this’ moment. I mean one problem I’ve never had is thinking I can’t do this. I had positive reinforcement for my school and academic writing, and for a long time my fictional stories were just for me, and I knew what I liked. Even just thinking about my fic writing… I’ve been posting fic online since 2006, and I’ve been in multiple fandoms. I don’t really have much connection to a lot of those early stories anymore. They feel like they were written by someone else, a little. I’ve also moved on from most of the fandoms I wrote for in my early fic days so I don’t feel like I can really judge them anymore.

That said… there is kinda an obvious answer for my Star Trek fic lol. I also have favorite stories, and stories that stick out even years after I wrote them, in all (or at least most) of the fandoms I’ve been in. But I’m not sure if that’s the same.

Also, I had two teachers who were really encouraging of me and who I still think about often. One was my seventh grade English teacher, who had us do a lot of writing exercises of various types, both large and small, including keeping writing journals we wrote in every day at the start of class. He once told my mom that I wrote well, not for a seventh grader, but in general, and to be honest I still think of that with some regularity and take a lot of pride and comfort in it. The other was my creative writing professor in college. I don’t think I did my best work for that class, but she was very encouraging and seemed to like what I did. At the end of the semester, as I was preparing my portfolio, she told me that if I didn’t want to do much editing, I didn’t have to, because my unedited work would stand on its own. Again, especially considering all the problems that I saw with my writing for that class even then, I really took that comment to heart. When I’m feeling very self-critical, I remind myself that even my raw scribblings have, perhaps, something to them, and it helps ease the excessive and unwarranted pressure I put on myself. These aren’t really stories about specific writing pieces that ‘made’ me but I do think they speak to that ‘maybe I can do this’ feeling.

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Day 51: Do you use tools for plotting and what are they?

So, generally, no. Sometimes I’ll look at various writing/plotting/organizational tools as a method of distraction, but my actual process is very simple. I use plain old notebooks and pens, and word documents on my computer, to plan all my fics, from the one-shots to the multi-chapters. I start by writing down general thoughts and brainstorming, then I build a scene list and/or outline, and then, if necessary, I separate the scenes lists into chapters. Sometimes I break down the scenes even more, if I have additional ideas I don’t wan to forget or if I know I need to hit certain points in a specific scene. The process varies a little bit from project to project, but that’s basically all I do.

I did use Evernote to plan the (still unwritten….) Ark AU. I don’t know if that was the best program choice or if something else exists that would have more precisely met my needs. But that’s what I used and that’s how it is. It’s a little annoying that every time I open it, it’s been updated, and the interface looks totally different and I have to relearn where everything is. But the tagging system has worked decently to allow me to see the big picture of this complex, multi-strand, multi-character, multi-ship disaster epic of a story. I struggled to plot it for a long time because I didn’t know how to balance all of the different parts. In Evernote, I made one ‘note’ for each character, and one for each scene (in addition to miscellaneous notes about sub plots, relationships, questions, etc.). Then I tagged each of them, including tagging the scenes by chapter. So now I can look at a list of all the characters, or all the scenes, or all of the scenes in chapter 8, or whatever, but I can also look at just one particular note at a time, and not be distracted by anything else. That said, I do also have one note that is just a total scene list for the whole fic, which is pretty reminiscent of my usual outlining process.

So… somehow this helped me plot (tentatively) the whole thing, but as I’ve written almost none of it—I finished outlining this in February 2020 so in my defense… I think you can see why it stalled—I’m not yet sure if it was a successful experiment in a ‘plotting tool.’

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Day 60: How do you start your chapters? Do you start with dialogue? Why or why not?

While I am definitely against prescriptive “writing rues” generally, as my own personal rule, I try not to start with dialogue unless I have a very good reason.

To be quite honest, I think it’s lazy. I do think that dialogue openings can be used well, if the writer acknowledges that they are intensely stylistic and, from a reader’s perspective, quite difficult. Even within fanfiction, where a line of dialogue (especially if accompanied by a dialogue tag or swiftly followed by a reference to the speaker) gives a lot more information to the reader than in original fiction, opening with dialogue still shoves the reader directly into the deep end of the scene, with very little to orient her. WHERE is the speaker? WHO is being addressed in the dialogue? WHAT is the context of the conversation? Who ELSE might be present in the scene?

There are reasons you might want to throw the reader in the aforementioned deep-end. Maybe it’s an in media res situation and you want to emphasize the overwhelming nature of the action—starting a scene with “Get down!” for example. Or maybe the overall mood is one of disorientation or floating or uncertainty, and you want to create the same effect in the reader.

But I think if you’re starting a scene with dialogue because that’s the first thing that comes to mind for you—the person who conveniently already has the setting, character list, and even future plot already in mind—and it’s just simplest and easiest to start that way, you’re doing a disservice to the reader.

For example, I actually am planning to start the next chapter of the Sleeping Beauty AU with dialogue. My POV character is in a room with multiple other characters, and she’s examining something meaningful to her and not fully listening to the conversation around her. So I want the dialogue to float around in the background, to feel unmoored, and to stand in contrast to the very precise, detailed thoughts and memories that she’s experiencing, which are grounded in physical sensations like touch.

I haven’t quite gotten it to work yet, though, in part because opening with dialogue and doing it well is, in my opinion, quite hard. The difficulty lies in alleviating the challenges the reader is experiencing and making the text fluid and easy to picture. You need to get all of that scene-setting information—the who, what, when, where, and why—in very quickly, but without being jarring. In this scene in particular, I have multiple characters, all in a comparatively unusual location, and I need to establish where they are, who exactly is there, how they’ve come to meet my POV character (which happens ‘off screen’ between the end of Ch5 and the beginning of Ch6), all on top of the character’s thoughts and feelings.

I know all of this very well. To picture the scene in my own head takes only a moment. I just think about it and I see all seven of the characters, where they’re sitting, how they’re positioned, what their facial expressions are, and I also know roughly what each of them is thinking and feeling. To describe all of this in words would take several sentences. Do I put all those sentences on the front end? Do I weave them in among other description and dialogue? Is all of it even necessary—maybe we don’t need to know who’s sitting in what order on the couch, for example.

I’ve gone over a couple of different ways to do this in my head, and I’m sure it is possible, but I’m struggling to get it all down in a coherent way. (Admittedly, I’ve only made one solid attempt. As I was describing above, I’m probably going to jump in with several false starts, and then it will suddenly click.)

My initial attempt to set up the scene relied heavily on dialogue, but when I read it over, what sounded snappy and interesting in my head just fell completely flat—because it lacked context and thus, any meaning. I think the gulf between how dialogue openings feel to the writer and how they feel to the reader is large. To the writer, they feel easy and natural. To the reader, they can feel forced and, contrary to the writer’s intention, serve as an additional reminder that this is a constructed narrative rather than an immersive experience—the opposite of natural. In other words, as I said, they’re a highly stylized form of writing.

To illustrate, this was my first try at the Chapter 6 intro:

"I still can't believe it," a lightly awed voice says from somewhere behind Clarke. "The Princess of Alpha Station really used to live in our quarters.”

She pictures Miller, sunk into the couch cushions, slowly shaking his head, the expression on his face equal parts satisfied and amused.

"Really? That's what you think is the oddest part of all this?"

"Yeah, Bry, I do. Would you prefer I gloat? About being right this whole time? Who says she's just a legend now?"

My current idea is to still start with dialogue, but to move back into a significant amount of description pretty immediately afterward, and only then add more dialogue. Even this is a little hazy, since I haven’t thought much about this fic in a while. But I do think it’s quite clear this won’t work.

As for how I DO start chapters/scenes/stories… I like to start with a strong image that sets the scene and mood of the story, and hopefully leaves the reader wanting to know more. Here are some examples of story openings I’ve written recently, which I like a lot:

When Bellamy is angered, deafening bouts of thunder shake the heavens.

The cawing of the crows—high, sharp, angry shots of sound. The buzzing of the telephone wires.

Marcus Kane's body shows up again in June, skeletal and rotting, six months after his disappearance at the turn of the year.

The sky has turned a bruised yellow, like the inside of a plum, by the time Bellamy starts seeing the robots in the fields.

At noon on the third-to-last day before Christmas, Murphy leaves the cafe, with a single peppermint mocha and a small paper bag, and heads right, walking parallel to the ocean.

The last one doesn’t seem as interesting but consider: you get the who, what, when, and where, the mystery of the paper bag and where he might be going, and also the immediate understanding that this is probably going to be a Fluffy Beach Christmas story—which is correct, that’s exactly what it is.

I’m not saying that I’m always creative or unique. I often start stories off with descriptions of the weather. And I have committed the ~~cardinal sin~~ of starting with a character waking up, heaven forbid. I don’t have any hard and fast rules for myself other than that I try to avoid dialogue, or at least, be careful about its use (another example: I use dialogue to start off Mad Women—but it reads like narration, until it’s rudely interrupted, a sort of in-joke/reference/twist). I try to match the mood of the story and, as I said, include something that will create a question for the reader, some version of why, that the rest of the story will answer.

*

Day 61: Do you describe the weather? Try changing a scene you wrote by adding weather effects.

After writing a book for the last question, here’s an easy one! Yes, I describe the weather. A lot. Often. In detail.

(Though if we’re talking about the Sleeping Beauty AU as my “current wip,” I actually don’t do much weather describing there, because 4 of the 6 chapters take place in a location with no weather.)

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Day 62: What is your favorite thing to write about?

Honestly I like to write about people being dramatic about their emotions. That’s what I’ve discovered while writing my surprisingly self-indulgent Troped fic: I want to describe people acting as if Everything was the Most Ever. It’s fun. Part of this is getting into the usual romantic tropes—longing, pining, exaggerated touches and glances and the like—but why stop at romance when you also have stuff like The Weather and Random Feelings to contemplate?

I also like setting scenes that I find soothing, which is part of why I like Seasonal Stories.

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Day 63: Are you more of a drabble/flash or a longfic/novel kind of writer?

I’m in the middle. I mostly write one-shots, and I’ve noticed that a lot of them fall in the 4-6k range. Long one-shots can get all the way to 10-12k but I feel like most of those are, semi-objectively speaking, too long, and would probably have been stronger if they were pruned down to 6k, or, better yet, never made it past 6k in the first place.

I have written some multi-chapters, or, uh, started multi-chapters, but I’m VERY bad at it. The only thing that makes me slightly less bad is being stubborn. Hence the existence of a WIP that I’ve had going for over 10 years now and refuse to call abandoned. Hence this year’s extended angst about the Sleeping Beauty AU, which is only 6 chapters but has taken me literally years to write. I don’t honestly know if I’ve ever finished a multi-chapter WIP, like, properly speaking. I’ve done some short multi-chapters that I wrote as if they were one-shots and then split up for ease of reading or, I dunno, just because. I wrote a Big Bang once, but it’s not very good. Nor very long, if I remember correctly. Generally speaking I probably shouldn’t be allowed to write novels lol—I have a lot of them in my ‘I should write this one day’ idea list—but as it so happens, no one can stop me, so here we are. I definitely have wild fantasies of writing multi-chapters with ease but I’m just a very slow writer and my ideas can’t keep up with my actual-writing. Thus one shots are much easier than multi-chaps, and one-shots on a deadline are much easier than ‘I’ll finish this whenever’ one-shots. One-shots written for events or exchanges also tend to be shorter (and, imo, better) because of the deadlines they’re written on, and are thus more likely to hit that sweet 4-6k spot than stories where I’m allowed to ramble at will.

All that said, I ALSO write a good number of drabbles/writing exercises. I used to write them more often than I do now, but still over the last five years I’ve produced 110,000+ words in free-standing scenes so like… that’s also a thing I guess.

#100 days of writing #my 100 days of writing #100daysofwriting

[merrylittlehogwartsrp]

Sample Application

For the purposes of providing a sample application that won’t get in the way of any potentially active character, I have chosen to write an app for Narcissa Malfoy as though she were going to be one of the celebrants attending the events in Hogsmeade with the D.A.. This doesn’t mean Narcissa is off limits to applicants now of course -- just that I thought she was unlikely to be of interest in this game, but is still a character about whom enough general details are known that she would be a viable sample app candidate!

Any further questions about the app, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

CHARACTER DETAILS:

FULL NAME & NICKNAMES: Narcissa Carina Malfoy née Black; nickname “Cissy” but only to family and very close friends

BIRTHDATE: May 20, 1955

BLOOD-STATUS: pure-blood (the purest!)

* GENDER IDENTITY: transgender female

* GENDER PRESENTATION/PRONOUNS: feminine, she/her

* SEXUAL ORIENTATION: pansexual

* NOTE: this does not have to correspond to canon, or to the temp pronouns in the bios!

CHARACTER SITUATION:

OCCUPATION: nothing (both born into and married into wealth), although she and Lucius used to dabble in politics (and look where that got them!)

HOUSING: Malfoy Manor, a sprawling estate in Wiltshire, England, with her husband and son (and a house-elf or two but who’s counting?)

SOCIAL STANDING: once the crème de la crème, now a pariah; the “good guys” view her as little better than a Death Eater herself and the “bad guys” view her as a traitor

CHARACTER CONFIGURATION:

TALENTS/WEAKNESSES - flying(+), dueling(+), potions(+); herbology(-), animals(-), teamwork(-)

STRENGTHS/FLAWS - dutiful(+), proud(+), brave(+); snobby(-), shallow(-), closed-minded(-)

CHARACTER HISTORY: please write one short paragraph for each.

FAMILY BACKGROUND: the youngest daughter of the ancient and noble House of Black, Narcissa’s childhood was all privilege and purity. She had two lovely sisters and two doting parents and two...well, she had two cousins. They were both imperfect in different ways, but they were still family. Narcissa herself fit the mold of expectations perfectly (although there was some upset when she declared herself a witch and thus no longer the heir who would carry on the family name -- but her parents adjusted quickly enough; the only evidence of that brief tension lies in her rebellious choice of a non-constellation name) and married into a family that was every bit as pure if somewhat more pragmatic, and she and her beloved Lucius raised their son to follow in their footsteps perfectly. She lost one sister to mud and the other to prison, but she and Lucius endured. Dodging Azkaban after the Dark Lord fell was a bit tricky, but they made it out intact -- but then Voldemort came back and upended their happy sanctuary.

LIFE DURING THE WAR: At first the Malfoys thought that everything would be all right -- or at least, they lied to themselves for comfort. But the Dark Lord had never truly forgiven Lucius for his lack of loyalty, and when everything went pear-shaped with the Prophecy that was the beginning of the end for them. When the Dark Lord targeted Cissy’s beloved son, that was the end for him -- he just didn’t know it yet. Beaten-down, cowed, and disgraced, the Malfoys slunk and groveled their way through the war, sinking lower and lower in their misery and powerlessness and shame until there was no option left but to turn on the Dark Lord directly. For Narcissa there was no question, no hesitation; for all that she was and remains a staunch blood-supremacist, she loved her son more than she valued her ideals. She lied to Voldemort, saved Harry Potter, and somehow that translated to amnesty for everything they’d done in Voldemort’s name.

LAST THREE YEARS: Have been long, exceedingly long and exceedingly unpleasant. Turning evidence for the Ministry, enduring the endless trials as both witness and defendant...watching so many old friends go to prison in their place...having to force smiles and muster gratitude for scum and mud and other sub-humans...it was torture. (And Narcissa’s been crucio’ed by experts; she knows torture.) The important thing though is that all three of them are alive and free. Losing Bella hurt, but Cissy is just glad she wasn’t forced to kill her sister herself (she’d been dreading that possibility ever since Voldemort gave Draco his erstwhile “mission” to kill Dumbledore) and besides, she’d lost one sister before and lived through it; at least Bella never actually betrayed her (even though Cissy is certain she would have if the Dark Lord had ordered it). Now the Malfoys keep to themselves, their dreams of power punctured and their influence evaporated; Narcissa can barely keep her head high on the rare trip to Diagon Alley, these days -- but their money, at least, spends nearly as well as it ever did (even if there are a few shops were they aren’t welcome no matter how much gold they bring). The hardest thing for Cissy now is worrying about Draco. The war was hard on him, harder than it was on Lucius and her -- or maybe it just seems that way, since the both of them were more worried about him than themselves. Or maybe it’s because they were supposed to make a better life for him, and instead they’ve made it so much worse.

HOLIDAY DETAILS:

The Black family always celebrated a very traditional wizarding Christmas: all the trappings of an English Muggle holiday, with none of the underlying religion. They have an exchange of presents in the morning and a large feast in the evening, with either an idyllic day at home in between or -- more often when they were younger, less so once all the problems with Sirius and Andromeda got in the way -- a gathering of all the extended family at one home or another. Once she married into the Malfoy family, much the same continued...briefly. But soon there were few Blacks left, and the Malfoys had always been an uncommonly small family for pure-bloods, and the celebrations shrank and shrank each year. When Draco was five, Narcissa and Lucius decided to change that by hosting a massive Boxing Day Party at the manor. It soon became one of the social highlights of the season and they went all-out in greater and greater extravagance of decorations and spectacle -- until Voldemort came back. There was one tense, stilted soiree that was more about playing politics than anything -- and then the next year Lucius was in Azkaban, and Narcissa scraped-together a small, insincere affair just to prove that she wasn’t cowed. After that, there was no more parties. Even if they wanted to start throwing them again, who would they invite? Who would come? Now it’s just the three of them left, and she and Lucius do their best to give Draco as happy a holiday as they can, showering him with presents and decorating the manor as lavishly as though the party were still going to happen...but each year it feels a little more shallow, a little more pathetic. The excuse to skip all that this year comes as a relief, even though Narcissa would rather shave her head than come here and celebrate with all this filth -- but she doesn’t dare say no. As long as they keep thinking of her as “the woman who saved Harry Potter,” they won’t try and throw her, her husband, or her son in Azkaban for their crimes. If she has to rub elbows with mud and force a smile while they call her a “war hero” instead of a traitor in order to keep her family safe, then that’s what she’ll do.

OOC SUPPLEMENT:

SHIPS: I am a huge fan of lucissa which is obviously canon here in that they were and are married, and I do believe that previous canon events require them to at least have had an affectionate partnership -- but I have played a great many permutations of the Malfoys’ marriage before and am happy to do so again should whomever apps Lucius prefer not to have a lovey-dovey marriage (or should our takes on the characters simply fail to mesh suitably for that). We could have it be that the fallout of the war soured things for them, or they drifted apart over the grueling ordeal of the trials, or that they were never really in love passionately but simply got along as friends and co-parents -- or they can be totally head-over-heels for each other! I’m happy with anything, so long as their backstory at least indicates enough companionship to make sense with the snippets we saw in canon. There are no other ships for Narcissa that I am going to be actively seeking out, but I’m in no way opposed to playing others should they emerge over the course of the game whether as group affairs with her husband included, acceptable affairs on the side, or not-so-acceptable liaisons or even outright betrayals. Narcissa is someone who very much ranks purity (and prettiness) above something as minor as gender and she’s a shallow, selfish woman, but she wouldn’t be the first Black sister to have her heart betray her…

CHANGES: none, although I suppose if I were truly apping Narcissa I would need to request a change to Draco’s bio to allow for her to either substitute in as “the Malfoy representative,” or to come along as well (with or without her son’s knowledge lol) but as this is simply for a sample app, I’m just going to write this under the presumption that she is supposed to be there.

FACECLAIM: Charlize Theron & Diane Kruger

#sample app #hp rp #hp rpg #hp roleplay #narcissa malfoy