#but as a whole adult I'm not interested in turning adult characters into teenagers and then putting them in romantic situations

[hearts-are-connected]

Dang it, I love this ship and I love the enemies to lovers trope. I get that a lot of people see them as a surrogate father and daughter relationship, but it feels like a been there/done that kinda thing.

As much as I love that trope, I'm also a little tired of it. There's only so much Last of Us style found family I take after seeing it for so many years.

The thing I love about VaultGhoul or Ghoulcy is the idea of Lucy breaking down of Cooper's walls while he helps build hers up.

Is he incredibly cruel to her and those around him in the first season? Yes, extremely

Does he need to chill out and find some of his humanity that's been buried under 200+ years of wasteland survival and bitterness? Yes

Who can bring that needed direction to his life while learning the ways of the new world she finds herself in? Lucy MacLean

I know that the canon ship of the show at this moment is Lucy and Maximus, and as much as I love him, I find the pairing obvious and kind of boring from a story telling perspective. I loved it on my first viewing, but upon re-watching the series, I wasn't as behind it as before. I see their relationship, kiss and all, as a kind of first fling for the both of them.

While it doesn't diminish the care they show one another, there's not a lot behind them as a couple. Now I know that some people might turn around to say how she and Cooper spent less time together than her and Max, but I guess the thing I look forward to is seeing what their relationship brings with the second season.

I feel like Max and Lucy will have a great friendship and I'm interested to see where the Brotherhood fits into their dynamic as well.

With Cooper though, I find his story so tragic, as it's supposed to be. He's your standard hardened survivor who only looks out for himself that's now stuck with the happy-go-lucky main character, however, she's not that character anymore by the end. She's still going to be the Lucy we love, but she's changed by the end. While not losing her compassion and some optimism, I think Cooper is going to bring out a harsher side to her as we saw when she bit off his finger.

I want to see her building up her walls and learning when to let them down. How to truly survive while still bringing her own energy to the wasteland and people around her. I want to see Cooper regaining some lost humanity while learning to truly care for another person again. To see the two of them as eventual equals in one another's eyes as they continue on their journey as reluctant allies.

I also want to say that I'm personally kind of tired of the 'age gap' argument. We have stories of teenagers falling in love with hundred year old vampires. So can we just drop the age gap thing?

As long as they're both consenting adults who understand what they're getting themselves into, who cares about an age gap.

Does it truly matter in the scheme of things when we're talking about a world with cryo-stasis and super mutants?

I personally don't think so.

I don't know if anyone will even bother reading this entire thing, and I know I went on a little long, but I wanted to write down my thoughts on the whole shipping situation with the Fallout TV show fandom at this moment.

I'm a VaultGhoul shipper and I can't wait to see where the second season takes our main trio of characters.

#fallout show #fallout amazon #ghoulcy #lucy x cooper #vaultghoul #cooper howard #lucy maclean #a ghoul and his girl #a girl and her ghoul #I ship it #Can't wait for season 2

[bonefall]

heyyyy bonefallll!!! So uhm. Wind released. And if you read it, what do you think of it?

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I started ASC off with a lot of excitement. I had known to not get my hopes up, but for the first time in a long time, I felt like they actually had something meaningful to say about the problems in Clan society. For once, it felt fresh.

A conflict based on a murder mystery and a power struggle, political radicalization within another Clan with anti-Clanswapper bigotry turning violent, and the reluctant heir of a legacy sprawling several generations. Like a dark echo of TPB, implying the root issues had never been truly addressed by Darkest Hour. The Clans still have a terrible ruling system. The culture is still bigoted. Firestar failed to destroy the obsession with legacy-- he just founded a new bloodline.

And even if it wasn't THAT deep, it was at least a grounded plot that was based in the characters more than faith in StarClan. If Nightheart's arc about legacy fell apart, I'd still enjoy watching him struggle, lose people, grow, and find his purpose. Or seeing Splashtail juggle the power he'd managed to snatch and was just not smart enough to hold onto. Or the cool fights that would surely result from an invasion of RiverClan.

Wind tossed it. It was already having a downturn in the previous book, but this is a book that seems so afraid of having interesting conflict that it spends 75% of its time debating if something interesting should happen, and 25% of its time barking, "EVIL HEATHENS WHO HATE GOD WILL DESTROY OUR SOCIETY!!"

I can't get over how awful Splashtail's "descent" is. He's having a dumbass atheist stoner debate with Podlight when they go to the Moonpool, musing that maybe you have to eat 9 mice to get 9 lives, and then 2 appearances later he's foaming at the mouth with a dictator speech and kills harelight no miss.

They even seem to have tried to replicate Stonefur's execution but badly. It's jarring. Splashtail had a big dictator speech, killed the beloved deputy suddenly, and the whole camp looks Super Scared and Upset so that you know it's the Evil Leader and not a systemic problem.

His "TALENT FOR MANIPULATION" is saying he heard Curlfeather murmur evil plans in her sleep and (apropos of nothing) accusing her teenage daughter of "getting the wrong idea" about his adult romantic interest in her. I keep coming back to this because the ENTIRE book's plot is based on this successfully smearing Frostpaw's reputation.

you may be tired of hearing it, but I'm definitely more tired than you because I had to read and analyze an ENTIRE BOOK founded on it.

The plot is endlessly arguing over if they can trust Frostpaw or not, gathering "evidence" to this end, while Sunbeam and Nightheart's POVs uselessly languish in ThunderClan doing mentoring stuff.

Im SO sick of being forced to sit in thunderclan while more interesting things happen offscreen. stop adding MORE cats to ThunderClan, you already have Stormcloud and you do NOTHING with him why are they also getting WAFFLEPAW

Everyone's praising the fact that the book can remember previous entries, but actually, I'm going to drop a hot take; It's actually bad if they CAN obviously reference old material, and then it doesn't influence the actions the characters take. They namedrop Nightstar several times and then come up with excuses for why they still need to sit around and do nothing!!

THAT'S WORSE, ACTUALLY.

SCALDING TAKE, I'd RATHER see the cats have the memories of goldfish if the alternative is "We remember Nightstar! We're simply going to purposefully disregard Nightstar, because the plot needs to happen"

They also muse that maybe Splashtail's evilness is making all the RiverClan cats act evil, and they'll go back to normal once he's removed. This has been implied before, but never so blatantly stated.

But most of all, I can't stop going back to "Godless Heathen Bloodlust." What a fucking joke. For a shining minute it looked like we were going to have interesting villains, but no, they really are just coming out and saying that lacking faith is an indicator of a moral failing. What makes Splashtail so uniquely bad and scary is that he "disrespects the ancestors" (hey podlight. what if eating 9 magic mice gives you 9 lives? woah dude look at this. the bugle chips look like claws. lol haha) and hates love and peace and won't even let Jesus guide him.

The scenes with Frostpaw and her allies are the only parts of this book worth reading. Shadowsight, tigerHeartstar. Clinging to Whistlepaw like she's a life preserver. save me windclan

#asc spoilers #warrior cats analysis #So uh. #my thought is that it is Bad. #I did not Enjoy it #I can FIX IT #I WILL FIX IT #I CAN MAKE THIS WORK BUT JESUS CATS.

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

I read Ultimate Spider-Man #1 by Hickman

So I checked this out in isolation of the whole event or events leading up to it.

I'm trying to decide if this is a case of false advertising or if it is actually as disappointing as it seemed.

This series was marketed on the grounds of 'come check out a married Spider-Man with kids'. But that was by no means the focus of the story. The focus was upon a) Uncle Ben's grieving Aunt May and b) peter's choice about whether to be Spider-Man or not.

Let me steelman and say, hey, the marketing was exploitative but that isn’t Hickman’s fault.

Honestly, this premise is still rather broken.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, this universe is identical to 616 except the Maker has strategically meddled with it to avert the existence of superheroes.

Okay…so he made sure Peter’s parents died when he was 15 instead of like a toddler. And also that he wasn’t bitten by the spider. And also that there was no burglar. Couldn’t he have just gotten rid of the spider? Why all the extra stuff? And if he didn’t do anything other than get rid of the spider…why are all those other things different?

Speaking of which how/when/why does Jameson know the Parker family at all? Uncle Ben was a factory worker, he had NOTHING to do with the newspaper business and why would a working class guy like him know a millionaire/billionaire like Jameson? Why would he ever go into that business? Why would the Maker change that at all? If he didn’t change that how could ANY of the changed he made in the timeline ever have resulted in that?

Similarly, why is PETER working for the Bugle? Peter’s interest in photography was specifically in relation to his career as Spider-Man. Yes, he developed something of an interest in it later in life in his 20s, but that was a fleeting thing after he left college. It was never really his long term career goal. Sure, you could say he is working on the science section of the Bugle. But…why? Why wouldn’t he just, you know….go into a scientific field in general? What does the Maker gain from changing that if he was responsible for changing that at all?*

And this, in fact, is a microcosm of how the premise of this story is borked. In a world where Peter Parker

Is an adult

Was not really raised by Uncle Ben and Aunt May because his parents died when he was 15

Never experienced the death of Uncle Ben or Aunt May in his teens

Was never a superhero

HOW exactly is he the character we know and love? The fun of a What If or AU is contrasting the new version to the character we are familiar with. But by rights he should be MASSIVELY different as a person. He wasn’t raised by people who were almost a generation older than his parents. He didn’t have to bear the burden of being a provider or caregiver for his household as a teenager. He never had to cope with the guilt of Uncle Ben’s death. And would he even know the Great Power/Great Responsibility thing considering it was a combination of being RAISED by his aunt and uncle along with Ben’s death that drilled that into him? In this universe neither of those things are factors so if he DOES live by that life lesson how and why would he?

As an extension of that, how and why did he wind up with Mary Jane considering his upbringing combined with his life as Spider-Man were important factors in them falling in love. Mary Jane was attracted to his sense of responsibility, but that sense of responsibility came about due to his upbringing and that upbringing has changed. Not to mention, given her abusive father, knowing Peter was a man who had incredible power (like her father had over her) but used it responsibility was a HUGE aspect of her attraction to him, plus she got turned on by the danger to some extent.

So…how did they hook up? Unless the Maker for some fucking reason decided to make sure MJ’s Dad was a successful author and never touched the booze. But WHY would he do that????????????

And then you have the big one which is…Peter can magically sense he is in fact supposed to be Spider-Man….um…Okay, so, yes, Peter does have a certain belief in destiny because he talked about it maybe being his destiny to be Spider-Man when he was a teenager and even older. But…that was a belief. He questioned it. He never SENSED that about himself. You could argue being Spider-Man is from his POV something he doesn’t have a choice about, but that’s like saying a parent doesn’t have a choice to look after their kids. They do. It’ just that you do not have a choice about it if you feel compelled to be a good person. It was never a magical bullshit thing.

Hickman in this regard and in his general portrayal of Peter is almost making this weird ass nature over nurture argument. That Peter wouldn’t been broadly the same kind of guy we always knew him to be albeit he could commit to a 9/5, a family and be less tightly strung because he doesn’t have the stress of heroism or guilt shit. And I guess he has less of a sense of humour? (Although so does Uncle ben, though he is grieving…although Jonah is a lot more touchey feeley than he should be as well sooooooo….)

But that’s just…lame.

It’s making a mockery of Peter Parker’s struggles in the 616 and most traditional portrayals. His experiences are integral in forming him into who he is as a person. Hickman is arguing that Richard and Mary’s DNA was actually the most important thing in shaping his personality. Unless are we really saying Richard and Mary would’ve been broadly the same kind of parents May and Ben were? They were goddam CIA agents!?

And on top of that…the story is making this BROKEN argument for Peter being a superhero. He feels like he is drifting through life. He feels unfulfilled. Like something is missing. Uh huh…um…what about your kids bro?

If you become a superhero aren’t you going to be potentially exposing your family to danger? Don’t you risk your kids growing up without a father because you get killed, crippled or are generally occupied a lot by being a hero.

Now, to be clear, that situation is A LOT different to 616 Peter who already had great power before meeting MJ. He also started his career at age 15 vs this Peter who’s literally going to learn how to web-swing and fight at age 35! Shit, most people whobecome soldiers, fire fighters or police officers don’t START their careers (with 0 training btw) at age 35! And there is a massive support network for those roles too.

I’m not saying Peter can’t be a superhero and a family man, but I am saying it is morally wrong for him to CHOOSE to turn himself into a superhero when he already is a family man. This is like saying it is okay for a man in his midlife crisis to blow a chunk of the family savings on a sports car or get himself a 20 year old mistress because it will make him a more engaged husband and father.

Basically, this first issue represents a lose-lose scenario from where I am standing. We don’t know much about how this Peter is different. The ways in which he is don’t make sense. The ways in which he is similar don’t make sense. These questions need to be answered BEFORE we get to the premise of the story (Peter choosing to be Spider-Man at age 35 when he is a family man). And the premise itself is unbelievable unless we want to buy into Peter being a selfish asshole, which therefore makes him unlikable in general and very much NOT like the Spidey we know and love.

Basically, this series might as well NOT be about Peter Parker in the first place, but some other guy living through a mid-life crisis by becoming a superhero.

*Are you noticing how I kee coming back to the Maker as a explanation for these changes? I don’t even know if the stuff leading into this spelt out what he was and wasn’t involved with, but that is a big question that should be addressed. Unfortunately it is the ONLY way to explain these changes beyond ‘its just different because it is’. And either way it is lazy and lame as shit.

#Spider-Man #Peter Parker #Ultimate Spider-Man #Jonathan Hickman #mary jane watson #mary jane watson parker #Uncle Ben #Ben Parker

[ladyloveandjustice]

2023 Anime Overview: SHY and Migi & Dali

SHY

Premise: In a world where every country has a superhero, 14 year old Teru is Japan's. Her hero name is Shy, and that's exactly what she is-- she's a bit of shrinking violet at times and deals with social anxiety, which makes the public part of being a hero a struggle for her. But with a mysterious boy going around and turning people's hearts and pain against them to make them into dark, painful threats, she and the other heroes are going to have to step things up.

SHY is very much a magical girl show with am American-style-superhero coat of paint, and that's really what draws me to the series. Powers are based on your heart and emotions, the heroes friends and loved ones have their pain and despair manifest as terrible powers when induced by an outside force and then our heroes having to reach out to these people with love and compassion...it is so magical girl core. There's even a magical battle where mother and daughter must reach out to each other!

Also very distinctly magical girl-esque is how a lot of the series is focused on Teru and her cute girl bff having yuri undertones. Said friend calling out her name even activates Teru's "heart" and her powers truly awaken. IDK Teru that's pretty gay.

It does some things that are cool to see in a superhero show- like centering female characters and featuring a disabled superhero. This Anifem article also has an interesting take on one of the fights.

It's also not overly fanservicey so far either, though Teru mentions once that her leotard is skimpier than she's comfortable with (apparently magic assigns them their clothes) which sucks, (and it highlights her rear more than I'm comfortable at times considering her age). Let her have pants! But hey, after dealing with MHA's bullshit, I'll count my blessings that it's a regular leotard.

SHY is often a little silly-- the fact that apparently every country getting a superhero ended ALL WAR somehow is so ridic it wraps around to being endearing. It's also engages in some national stereotypes --for instance the Russian superhero who is Shy's mentor whole schtick being that she's always drunk (but you see it's okay because her alcoholism is based in her childhood love for her parent and she's fine and). There's a weird moment where an adult acts like she's going to kiss a teenager as a prank, and the pacing is a little uneven.

But when it hits, it really hits, and you really root for Teru. Seeing a superheroic take on struggling with social anxiety is fun, and Teru's passion and strength shines through. I'm excited to see more of her adventures, and fortunately a second season is confirmed!

Migi & Dali

Premise: Orphaned twins Migi and Dali perform an amazing con to get adopted by a couple (who mention preferring to adopt only one child)-- they decide to pretend to be only one person, a boy named Hitori, with one of them always just out of sight as school or at home. They go to absurd levels to keep this up because they have an important goal-- their mother was murdered in this town, and they're going to do all they can to find her killer. But what mysteries does this suburban town hold?

It's hard to put Migi & Dali into words, but I'll do my best. It starts out as an utterly absurd show that plays it's "spookiness" so ridiculously that it becomes comedy (Mother's Basement compared it to the potato chip scene from Death Note, and I think that's apt, though it's very much intentional with this show). Seeing the ridiculous lengths the twins go to in order to keep up their con is amazing. Situations like them assuming their foster mother must be scalping children because they don't understand what a wig is or one twin throwing on a wig on so the other twin (who should know what he looks like because he can LOOK IN THE MIRROR) doesn't recognize him are hilarious.

But then the show also becomes a tightly plotted and genuinely tense murder mystery that is incredibly moving at times? WHAT? All while keeping up it's signature brand of goofiness and absurdity! Side characters I did not expect to care about go through great development, Migi and Dali have some great character arcs, there's some genuine commentary on abuse, the damage you can do to children by forcing perfection on them, the struggle of being a foster kid, grief and recovery and more.

There are some things to warn for--parental abuse, rape through deception (def framed as bad, but yep. that happens), general harm to children, a very uncomfortable strip search of a child that involved ass-grabbing, and the weird bits where teen characters are kidnapped and forced to dress up and act like a baby (which turns out to be very thematically important and follows an interesting arc of being played partly for comedy at first then becoming deadly serious later) and of course the murder and stuff you'd expect from a murder mystery. (There's also some stuff involving infertility I think is fraught, but I can't really get into it without spoiling).

I know that's a huge list, but the show is definitely very rewarding--entertaining and full of more incredible twists and turns that one show has any right to be. Including the greatest housekeeper of all time, i would follow her into hell.

I can't get into more without spoiling, but yes, if you can handle this weird, wild ride, you should absolutely go on it. Sano Nami was a true talent.

#migi and dali #migi to dali #migi & dali #shy anime #shy teru #teru momijiyama #fall 2023 anime #my reviews #anime overview #anime

[notwritinganyflufftoday]

Magical Boys WIP Intro

Saving their friend (and the whole world, I guess?) with the power of love, magic and being kinda gross.

Falling into a swamp is never fun, but it's worse when it turns out to be a magic swamp with a monster that kidnaps the most popular, princely and perfect guy in school.

It also transforms Billy and his two classmates, Beau and Younes, into very stereotypical magical boys —frills, sparkles and colour-coordinated outfits included.

Not only do they have to navigate this bizarre new world in form-fitting skirts and shorts, they have to do it quickly in order to rescue Arno before the monster that kidnapped him... tries to marry him?

Billy, Beau and Younes have quite a big task ahead of them and that's not even to mention the interpersonal drama teenagers can and will get into when it really isn't the time for it.

---

Based entirely on my love for the magical girl genre and everything it entails when it comes to modern fantasy romance with my own gay and trans spin on it.

A three-part story catered to a (queer) young adult audience.

Current status: book 1 draft 1 finished, writing draft 2

Third person limited | Multiple POVs | present tense

In case you're interested in following along while i'm writing this story. I will be tagging it as "#magical boys wip" for as long as it doesn't have an official title, and let me know if you want to be added to a taglist, so I can start one up.

Character introductions for the boys!

Taglist: @dustylovelyrun, @wildswrites, @sarandipitywrites, @skyderman, @thelaughingstag

#magical boys wip #writeblr #wip intro #queer characters #written by a queer author

[wolfsbanesparks]

I'm curious and making a seperate post about the forgotten and older Captain Marvel characters from the past comics, but what are your thoughts on them? A bunch of them aren't even used anymore, but have so much potential to them if they're ever brought back.

Like Joane Jameson, apparently she was Billy and Captain Marvel's secretary at Whiz Radio, who knew of both of his identities and helped them. I really like this idea and think it would really be useful for a Billy Batson that's a street kid and constantly wary of adults who might want to turn him back in to the foster system, she provides a safe example for Billy to look up to and actually trust. Not just that, but she could also provide assistance for Billy/Captain Marvel on missions, things he may lack insight on or informing him of villainous attacks/incidents.

Are there any characters you wish to see be brought back to the present day comics or see them be included in fanfictions more? I also really like the idea of Dr. Sivana's children be brought back into the action more, especially Beautia, since she's actually a good person (from what I remember) and on good terms with the Captain

So it's taken me literally forever to answer this because every time I do I go down a mini research rabbit hole about older/unused characters because there are SO many that I would like to see more of.

My thoughts under the cut because it got long.

This isn't even everyone, but it's a lot of cool underutilized characters I'd love to see brought back.

Because of the number of characters, I'm splitting them into categories for ease of reading:

Civilians

Cissie Sommerly: Billy's girlfriend and the niece of his boss Sterling Morris (who also needs to used more tbh) She is a sweetheart who loves her little brother (Pete) and is very kind hearted. She didn’t get much development in the older comics, but she often had to deal with Billy and Cap’s shenanigans. I would love to see more of her!

The Sivana kids Beautia, Georgia, Thad Jr, and Magnificus: we recently got an adult Georgia in the New Champion of Shazam but I want to see the whole family together! And exploring their family dynamics with only half of them being supervillains would be so fun! They love each other but it's complicated. Georgia and Thad jr were basically parallels to Mary and Captain Marvel Jr and that was a fun balance. Meanwhile Beautia and Magnificus weren't really interested in their father's evil scheme though they gkt roped into them sometimes. And of course Beautia's crush on Captain Marvel causes problems but she's still awesome and even tutors Billy for school.

Sunny Sparkle: basically he was so universally beloved by everyone who met him that they just gave him things. Bank robbers would just hand him their stolen cash. Car jackers would give him the keys. He was gifted so much stuff every day that Billy had to help him donate and sell stuff regularly. In modern comics, I think it'd be cool if he was unknowingly a metahuman whose power was being hypnotically charming.

Freckles Marvel: she was Uncle Dudley's niece and despite not having powers, liked to tag along on adventures especially with Mary. She's a lot like Darla with her upbeat little sister energy. I can see them being friends in modern comics (or maybe even related since they both have the last name Dudley)

Dexter Knox: a child prodigy and inventor who was good friends with Billy. He's basically the smartest person in Fawcett and he loves showcasing his inventions to Billy.

Villains

Arson Fiend: an insurance salesman that uses extortion and threats of arson to meet his sales quota. He drinks a potion that gives him fire powers which he uses to commit arson against people who didn’t buy insurance from him. We've talked a bit about his connection to other Captain Marvel villains like Lady Blaze who healed him and gave him his powers back when he lost them. He's such a simply evil character that works really well for comics.

Chain Lightning: a teenager with multiple personalities and the power to control lightning. She has 4 personalities: Amy (the "main" alter), Amber (the more angry/volatile alter who protects the system), the Inner Child (no name besides that but encapsulates their child like wonder), and ID (the embodiment of their id, thus more impulsive than the others). She actually absorbs some of the Marvel’s magic lightning which allows her alters to temporarily have their own bodies. Amy is in love with Captain Marvel Jr because he saved her life, but the other alters are more wary of him, especially Amber. While any adaptation of Chain Lightning needs to be conscious of the ableism that happens when depicting a system, I think there's a lot of great potential with this character.

Sabina: she is technically from the Trials of Shazam not Fawcett comics, but I think she's cool. Basically she was raised by a cult called the Council of Merlin. She was destined to be 10th in line to receive the powers of Shazam so she starts killing those ahead of her in the order to ensure that once Billy was mo longer the Champion the powers would go to her. But when Billy was transitioning to become the Wizard he chose Freddy as his Champion, bypassing Sabina and the predestined order of things. So Sabina decides to kill Freddy AND the gods he was going to get his powers from. She's so evil and cool and I really like her design. I definitely think there's a way to bring her back.

Fawcett Heroes: there are a ton of fun characters that weren’t necessarily Captain Marvel characters but were part of the same world before he was a DC property.

Bulletman and Bulletgirl: literally Billy’s favorite superheros! He reads their comics and everything! They were very popular at the time, Whiz comics second most popular characters behind the Marvels. They are a husband and wife duo that gave themselves superpowers (strength, durability etc) which they use to fight crime, particularly supernatural villains.

Mr Scarlet and Pinky: Brian and Pinky Butler are a father-son vigilante duo. They were so good at their jobs that Brian barely had any work as a district attorney because of such low crime rates. They were basically a working class version of Batman and Robin. They're good friends with the Marvel family and when Mary got her first solo series, part of the advertising was having Pinky send her pen pal letters inviting her to have new adventures with him and the other Fawcett characters.

Ibis the Invincible: an Egyptian prince whose mummy was uncovered and brought back to life (by Shazam). He uses the Ibistick, an extremely powerful magical wand, to help people as he adjusts to modern life. He can do just about anything as long as he has his wand and often gets thrown in the middle of conflicts between gods.

Kid Eternity: aka Kit Freeman, Freddy’s long lost little brother with ghost powers! After dying in a boating accident when he wasn’t supposed to, he was brought back and given powers as compensation. He can summon spirits, turn invisible, and become intangible, though his powers shifted over time. He's such a cool character and he deserves more love!

Whew that was a lot! If anyone else has characters to add (and I know there are many) I would love to hear about it! And if any of these characters intrigue you I encourage you to check them out and sneak them into your fics!

#ask me whatever you want y'all #shazam #billy batson #dc captain marvel #fawcett comics #forgotten and underutilized characters #we need to see more of these guys #so many of the Fawcett comics characters have been tossed to the side despite being so cool #and the marvel fam's supporting cast has just been gutted in favor of cameos from other DC characters

[user-needs-new-hyperfixation]

Hello, can I ask what do you mean "in canon it's impossible for Sherlock to settle down with a woman"? Like, as a fan of Holmes and always read the books since middle school, I'm kinda confuse here, I don't mean anything negative. Sorry, do you think Poirot (from Agatha Christie) is also queer?

Maybe because I grew up with very religious mother and lived in anti-LGBTQ country, I'm kinda slow in picking up subtext. Like until now I'm still kinda confuse with my friend who have ships from any fandoms (but I still love to hear and read her headcanons or fics about those characters)....

I really agree with you, I've seen many Holmes' adaptations (cartoon, tv series, manga) but Yuumori is clearly the closest to Doyle's works. Do you think the mangaka also love to read Holmes' books?

Story time! (Welcome to "Hyper answers asks like an old lady going on an hour long barely-on-topic tangent at the slightest prompting.)

I totally get where you're coming from, I was raised in like...knockoff Southern Baptist churches. Growing up, homosexuality was presented to me as a sexual perversion incapable of involving real love. It's kind of silly, but it's true: a ship was a big part of changing that for me. I read Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle as a teenager, and Kurogane and Fai had something that was inescapably romantic and beautiful but never strictly sexual (tho the potential is certainly there). Between that and an online community of LGBTQ+ adults who were incredibly patient and kind towards me even when I was suuuuper ignorant, I started to open up towards queer relationships as...well, just relationships. Relationships that can encompass sex and also encompass love and friendship and communication and partnership and all those other things I'd been taught were exclusive to monogamous straight people. And then, even as terrified as I was, I was eventually able to face the fact that I'd always had crushes on girls just as often as crushes on guys. So yeah, there's a reason Kurofai is my ship of all ships, the actual One True Pairing for me. Because it cracked open a door just enough that I could slowly lever it open the rest of the way. There seem to be quite a lot of anecdotes like this: women enjoying BL/mlm ships is often seen as fetishy (which can certainly be part of it) but for some reason I can't fully articulate it also seems to sometimes be a means for girls and women to explore their own not-straightness.

ANYWAY. SHERLOCK HOLMES. Tbh I'm not gonna go too in-depth because I would bet good money that there are a bunch of scholarly articles on Holmes' queerness. People have probably done their doctorate theses on this! Much smarter and more well-read folks than I have already covered the topic. For me, it really boils down to: he never outright expresses sexual or romantic interest in anyone (we must resist the urge to assume his respect for Irene Adler is romantic just because he is a man and she is a woman). He's almost certainly on the asexual spectrum. But when he does exhibit symptoms one might associate with romantic and/or sexual interest (particularly romantic, imo), it's always towards men (usually Watson, of course). For example, notable flirt John Watson saying that Holmes blushes at his compliments the way a girl does is...suggestive.

The whole thing is complicated by Watson being (in my opinion at least) an unreliable and sometimes downright petty narrator. He keeps going on spiels about Holmes being cold and heartless, only to turn around and describe him greeting his friends warmly and being emotionally moved by music and baby-talking puppies and charming old ladies. It makes Watson sometimes come across as one of those allo people who are so unable to conceive of a life without romantic and/or sexual desire that they start dehumanizing those who don't experience it. Alternatively and maybe more charitably, he just has a big ol' crush on Holmes, is understandably alarmed by it given the time period, and gets bitchy and defensive when he feels it might not be reciprocated.

But ultimately...do I think Arthur Conan Doyle sat down at a desk in the late 19th century/early 20th century and was like "I am going to write some ace queer representation for the tumblr girlies (gn)"? Obviously not. 😅 I do think he might have set out to create a character who very deliberately did not need to have the otherwise almost obligatory straight romantic side-plot. Holmes is never in any way set up as having a life headed towards marriage and children, in spite of how typical that was for the time. The companionship he does express a need and desire for comes in the form of another man. He's "lost without [his] Boswell." He sneakily buys Watson's practice out from under him so he'll be free to move back in and go on more adventures with him. He threatens violence when Watson is hurt. Etc etc. I think it's very fair to interpret it all through a queer lens, the quibble would be more in whether that queerness ever manifests sexually.

I definitely think the Yuumori creators have not only read ACD but also other fiction based on the stories, possibly even including some very old pastiches like this one. I love how seemingly nerdy they are about it haha! The series is full of easter eggs and callouts to other Holmesian works.

As for Poirot, I know very little about the character beyond a few episodes of the show I watched as a young'un, but that is not the mustache of a straight man (I'm joking I'm joking I have absolutely no opinion on that one! 🤣)

Thanks for the ask, and for actually reading this ramble if you got this far! 😅

#acd holmes #acd canon #yuukuko no moriarty #kurofai #rambling #asks

[not-so-mundane-after-all]

Now I'm gonna be predictable and ask you for Dick and Rachel for the character thing 💙🖤

My two favorite birds!!!!! Okay *cracks knuckles* here we go

DICK GRAYSON

First impression:

Hot, mysterious, "hmmm I know that face", had this edge about him that had me lean closer to my tv and go "okay, interesting, go on"

Impression now:

The love of my life, a mark on my soul, the blueprint for a Comfort Character™, my #1 TV Dad, must be protected at all cost mostly from himself

Favorite moment:

How can I pick just one? My favorite kinds of his moments are when he gets feral protective over his baby girl (like in 1x07 or 4x08) or any alteration of "I won't let anything happen to you" because all I hear is "I love you"

Extra kudos for all the shirtless scenes 😏

Idea for a story:

One that has been recently lurking at the edge of my mind is giving him an AU where basically everything is the same except his parents are alive — mostly because I want to write them interacting with Kory and the kids

Unpopular opinion:

He gets waaaay too much crap from the fandom, for even the littlest things. He's a flawed character who makes stupid mistakes sometimes. If he was perfect all the time, he'd be boring. He doesn't have to be the best leader, an A+ father figure 100% of the time or constantly kissing the earth the woman he loves walks on to be a good character. Don't like his storyline? Shit on the writers, it's their fault.

Favorite relationship:

There's only one answer to that, always will be.

His light in the darkness. His turning point. His true north. He wouldn't be the man he is now if it wasn't for this one little girl throwing a brick at a cop car and getting herself brought to his station. You can't deny that. The show doesn't. It reminds you, time and time again, who is his anchor. Who keeps him from slipping back into the dark.

Favorite headcanon:

He knows how to play guitar and a little bit of piano because the Haly Circus crew used to jam out all the time. His dad taught him the guitar, Clay was a master of keys and his mother had the voice of an angel and wrote her own songs.

RACHEL ROTH

First impression:

OHHH SHE'S A BABY!!!! I was instantly protective of her and related to her in her loneliness.

Impression now:

FOREVER MY BABY GIRL. Always proud of her, always protective of her. My best girl, my favorite witch. Daddy's Girl and The Best Big Sister-to-be™

Favorite moment:

That walk?! The confidence?! Making dad look all proud in the background?! COME ONNNNNN

Idea for a story:

A while back I wrote down some notes for a concept about adult Rachel and her relationship with teenage Mar'i, inspired by my own relationship with my older sister. There's 19 years between us and the difference between Rachel and Mar'i could end up being similar. I was thinking of writing her as a bestie but also the second mother, ride or die and voice of reason, "dad's gonna kill you" but also "dad's gonna kill both of us if he finds out so we're not gonna tell him". A lot of shenanigans, a lot of heart-to-heart.

Unpopular opinion:

She should have had the final fight with Brother Blood, since this whole thing was about and came from her brother, her heritage, her prophecy.

Favorite relationship:

The simplest reason is because I was just happy to see this child finally being loved. Finally having someone to believe in her and protect her. Finally knowing what it's like to have someone who cares. Finally being held and comforted and understood.

Favorite headcanon:

Girl can SING. But is shy as hell about it. Only Gar knows about it and only because he found out by total accident when he heard her belt out those Ariana Grande whistle notes like it's nothing. They keep it secret until Dickkory's wedding, where she gives a performance of a lifetime.

CODY I LOVE YOU! THANK YOUUUUUU

#ask game #mundi asks #dc titans #titans #dick grayson #rachel roth

[willel]

I've wanted some kind of Jonathan and Steve friendship or comradery for a while. It may be because the actors have wanted this from the very start, but I am a big enjoyer of trios.

I despise love triangles that overstay their welcome. Especially love triangles that have already died and are resurrected because the writers can't think of anything more interesting to do.

Nah, I prefer a team of three pre and post love triangle drama. In real life I know it's probably way harder to get along with people you were previously in a love triangle with, especially if it ended badly or violence was involved. Which it was. But also see so much potential in a dynamic like that. The three of you have literally been through hell and back. Fought each other. Hated each other. Protected each other. At the end of the day, because of all that drama, you somehow know each other very well and can't help but want to stick around.

All that said, I don't like what season 4 did with this at all. Like I mentioned, I loathe zombie love triangles. I hate that they used Robin and Eddie's characters to dig it up and give Steve second thoughts about the whole thing. I dislike it even further than Steve doesn't have the decency to not make intentional moves on someone who is already in a relationship.

I think season 2 did a great thing by showing even though Jonathan and Steve don't exactly get along, he purposely got out of Steve's way and even lied for Steve about leaving the party to help a relationship that wasn't even his.

Petty love triangle relationship drama aside, no matter which side you land on or which ship you ship, I appreciate how they wrote Jonathan's behavior back then and I wish that had been extended to Steve. I also believe Steve would be the kind of person to lie or make up excuses for someone else from time to time, so why didn't they write that?

What I want for next season is basically the same thing, but better. I don't want more scenes of Steve trying to "win the girl". I want scenes of Steve trying to figure Jonathan out. What makes him different. Why did Nancy choose him? Who is he? I don't need Steve trying to fix Nancy and Jonathan's relationship, that isn't a requirement. I just need Steve to come to some kind of understanding about Jonathan specifically.

As an extension of that, I'd like Robin to do the same thing as I didn't appreciate her role in the S4 relationship drama either.

It's like they've both made up their mind about Jonathan without knowing him at all and tried to undercut him. I mean, that is something teenagers and young adults do so I'm not hating them for it. Just urg, why did it have to be written that way. They writers didn't have to do that.

On the reverse side of that, I want Jonathan to be doing the same. Who is Steve really? He's not that bad apparently so why not figure that out for himself? Doubtful they'll find a lot in common but hey, maybe they do find that one thing they can get along on and become friendly or friends?

If Robin and Steve are witness to Will (and El) being targeted again, maybe they can both come to an epiphany like "Oh, that's why he's like this. I get him now." (by that I mean, Jonathan's crippling fear of his family suffering or being alone, so much so he will drop EVERYTHING. School, friendships, and even relationships will take a backseat for the purpose of protecting his family)

I don't want this to turn into a "Gasp, I didn't realize you were sooooo amazing Steve!" I really want some mutual "You know... you aren't too bad at all." energy. It's LONG overdue.

Do I have any real hopes of this happening? No. Lol. This kind of stuff would require them actually writing Jonathan for once, which they haven't done a significant amount of in 2 seasons. My true hope is that they will completely shock and surprise me, pull a 180, and make a Steve and Jonathan friendship believable because I really do like the idea of it if it's coming from a mutual place of understanding and respect.

#stranger things #jonathan byers #steve harrington #theory

[random-conspiracy]

Ok, I'm entering my villain (& heroes!) arch aajshashasa. This stupid fixation of superpowers and fiction comic stories.

WELL, HOT TAKE OF THE DAY:

The majority of superpowers in fiction and oc's are boring because they're straightforward. Picture it, there's aaaaaaaaaaaaaaalways someone with the power of:

Mimic someone's power

Invisivility

Steel skin

Puppeteer or any variation of body and mind manipulation (because *wink wink* we're all edgys and saw creepypastas a lot hashas)

Perhaps fly

Ultra speed

And shit like that ajshashasa. Don't get me wrong, those are amazing superpowers. Even just one person in a normal-esque world is a fucking anomaly and represents a game changer.

HOWEVER it's quite boring and honestly quite lazy. Because oh yes! The evil twisted villain of the wee has the power of... mind control. OH BOY! I fucking wonder what is gonna happen! (sacarsm). Or shadow control powers or super force and you know the rest. WHAT a twist! (/s).

And the same goes for the heroes that GOD forbid they're not teenagers or young adults in well shaped bodies BECAUSE UUUUUUFFFFFFFFFF. Call me crazy but if you can fly I doubt you're using at all your muscles the same way a common person does ahshasa. But why fucking not, we can never have enough twinks and women in spandex, can we? ahshahsa.

There's no twist and creative work in a superheroe or a villain or whatever that has JUST that exact power that conveniently works.

I'm a slut for the characters with random and incoherent powers!

That's where this shit goes hard. Beacuse it's so easy to be a superhero whn you can walk through walls or move at high speed. But what happens when you have the power to deconstruct objetcs? Fly just 50 cm off the groud? Exact knowledge of the pupulation in Taiwan (while you live in Argentina)?

What happens to them??? I wanna see the shenanigans, the creative solutions to abnormal problems! And what happens to the powers that become a burden or that straight up are incompatible with the common society. What happens if you're born without bones? If TV signals sometimes cross without way to evade it into your mind?

I wanna see creative villains. With powers like super healing and bubblegum madness. Concidental induction and urbomancy. Hhahshahsas

The thing is not actually that the pwoers are common or simple, the thing is for me that the weaponization in battle is the number one thought. Like, yeah, I bet turning sound waves into lethal blades is powerful but out of battle, does it matter? It means somethig? Can you cut a frozen pizza for dinner or you destroy your whole kitchen?

(Tbf, a story a bout a character struggling to see beyond his powers shapped to battle could be interesting BUT that's another story ahsahsas).

And I'm also bored of the god-like powers. You can fly and you can control minds! For free I guess and with no real consequences. Bceause let's be serious, Spidermand and Superman as archetypes of the hero had their own limitation (not precisely linked to their powers by themselves BUT WHATEVER). They're more or less the exception to this.

I Wanna See Limits

LIMITS. I care 0 if the character can eat the fucking Sun. What I want to see is that power in personal impact and relativity. Sometimes the right (or wrong!) word has more power that destroying the Earth. And a lot of it comes from the limitations. How easy is everything when you have all the power, but the limitations are what shape the plausibility, the humanity and the imagination around it. For example Magneto. It's because of his clear limitations that he scaping from the plastic underground prison in the movies is so fantastic. He uses a creative solution to work around his limits. Amazing!

Idk man, Brandon Sanderson said this shit already. Go see him go see him.

#superpowers #superpowers ideas #superhero #superheroes #supervillain #writing prompt #prompt #I'm so fucking normal about this #ideas #superpower ideas #superpower #oc

[bugeyedfreaks]

So I was thinking about the whole “misogyny behind the supposed lack of interest in teenage girl Powerpuffs” statement you made and something hit me: the reason why the reboots suck is because they’re trying to squeeze edgy, Cinemasins-style teenage and adult situations and humor out of perpetually five year old girls and it makes me so mad that Craig said that because teenage girls ALREADY think that their lives end once they have boobies or are interested in girly hobbies and it would be so subversive to have a show that continues off of the “GIRLS CAN BE ANYTHING.” message of the original with “TEENAGE GIRLS CAN DO ANYTHING. THEY DON’T HAVE TO BE MEN LITE TO BE HEROES.” but instead, we get like five reboots of various levels of quality, all because he thinks teenage girls have cooties or whatever.

Oh yeah, what I said on this post! I could have given you a short answer like a normal blogger, but here is my long, rambling answer where I basically agree and get a little off track and go more in detail about the suckiness of the reboots/the suckiness of saying the girls aren't special if they're older... behind the cut. 🤣

“Teenage girls ALREADY think that their lives end once they have boobies or are interested in girly hobbies.” It's definitely not an inherent thought by any means, but I totally know what you're saying. Society and culture and the media and the internet push girls into thinking they have to become a certain kind of "mature" by a certain age and it's awful. And to say that the girls wouldn’t be “special” if they were older felt as if it was reinforcing the whole gross notion that women allegedly turn into completely different creatures at puberty and from there on out rapidly lose their worth/usefulness as they get older. To say that the girls wouldn’t or couldn’t be “special” when they grow up… yeah, the wording was pretty yikes.

I guess I should quickly clarify that I prefer Craig doing what he does best, and I'm perfectly fine with the girls continuing to be kindergarteners if the show gets rebooted or continued. And he hasn't been involved with the series since 2008, so he's not responsible for any of the content in the reboots that have already happened. I don’t believe he’s some raging sexist (…well, I hope not) either, it’s just that the way he’s said some of the things he’s said concerning this topic are kinda… ugh. Poorly communicated. It's frustrating sometimes! 😩

I get what Craig was trying to say: having the girls be ass-kicking kindergarteners is a fun and unique premise (true, and I love them that way, it's OG, baby!), and having them be teenagers or adults… well, there are already a lot of ass-kicking superheroines who are teenagers/adults. But that's such a limited view of who the girls really are. Their being kindergarteners isn’t the only thing that makes them unique compared to other superheroes/hero teams. They’re three sisters (essentially triplets) with a creator who acts as their single-parent father figure (so they have a loving and stable family life), and each one of them has distinct personalities and talents. They’re fully fleshed-out characters on their own, but they’re also incomplete if they aren’t together. How many other superheroes or superheroines are like that?

Regarding the comment he made about their “kryptonite,” I definitely think that an interesting setback (and strength!) of theirs– regardless of them being in kindergarten– is that none of the girls have alter egos, so they can never just have “normal” lives. At least Clark Kent and Diana Prince could maybe pretend to be regular people once in a while. Blossom and Bubbles and Buttercup can’t! No matter how old they become, the girls will always have to deal with their “real world” responsibilities in tandem with their “superhero” responsibilities because they don’t have to hide anything about their powers from the world. Other superheroes’ lives would end if their “normal” identity was exposed: theirs wouldn’t. And then again, no matter what unique responsibilities they’d be facing, no matter their stage in life, they’d continue to have to deal with the positives and negatives of that kind of existence, and, like I've discussed on here before, I think there are soooo many stories that could potentially be explored stemming from that. So... like... come on. Not special, my foot! It's not like their adventures would all of a sudden end or could never be just as unique as they've always been!

In the case of making a story with the girls being older, yeah, that doesn’t automatically mean you need to stuff your show with edgy, "adult" humor. You barely even have to change how they talk. They don’t have to talk about sex or comment on the latest pop culture thing to be “mature.” They don’t have to get all serious and gritty to be “mature.” Those are the kinds of things people in Hollywood think maturity is (does a certain someone who's also in Hollywood believe that, too? 👀). The problem is in the writing, in misunderstanding what the show is and who the characters are in the first place, how they deal with life to begin with, and so far it seems that the right storytellers who could tell really cool stories in that sort of setting who do understand all that haven’t come along yet.

Also, a thing that I feel is critical to getting the tone of the girls as characters right is that they exist in a universe that, while it may have exciting action and fighting and carnage, is still a very silly place. The goofiness of that universe comes with a very specific tone that has not been well replicated in these other iterations of the series. The balance of the girls' “normal” and “superhero” lives is always off-kilter (and I’m gonna be controversial… I think the live-action script didn't hit the mark but was a billion times closer to getting that balance than the 2016 reboot), and the type of humor that gets used is way off in tone (PPG humor ≠ twerking/Simpsons humor/lazy pop culture jokes/sex jokes). Plus, that small but critical dose of sincerity in the writing of the original show barely ever feels like it’s present in any of these newer iterations.

...but what do I know, I dunno, do I even get the characters? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That's just how I feel about it all. Sorry for all these words, haha.

#me to myself after writing all of this: shhhhh grandma let's get you to bed #but yeah gahhhh there could have been better ways of saying what was said fr

[disco-troy]

it shouldnt be contriversal that u cant just murder people sdkfjhsadjksahf and yet- True you also can't go out and beat up criminals. All super hero comics are about the idealization of violence. Many are about the idealization of violence as a trauma response. Also revenge stories are a cornerstone of human art so even with all that being true it is still a useful, worthwhile, healthy, and helpful type of media. See for example the Count of Monte-Cristo.

Okay, I can see where you are coming from, but I hope this response helps you understand where I'm coming from as well. I will be mostly talking about preboot Jason here, because that contains most of the moments that bother me, and also I refuse to read anything written by Lobdell anymore.

Murder in the DCU is, in general, frowned upon. Like I understand where you are coming from with the whole suspension of disbelief bit, but while heroes and fighting villains are a part of the constructs of the universe, murder, really isn’t? The moral line of not killing is very much still present in dcu, especially for heroes, and in Gotham. Death is still a big deal, and most people don’t come back to life, and when a hero kills someone (or thinks they killed someone - like in the case of Black Lighting) it is very often a big deal.

I think Jason has a lot of interesting facets as a character, and things that people can engage with that are super interesting. He is a character who was a victim, and a hero, and remembered in a distorted way. And that hurts. But at the same time its not fair to put this on the batfam either; the mourning process is for the living, and you are not expecting them to come back to life! In addition, Jason took that pain and anger and hurt and killed a lot of people. I think we should be able to acknowledge that Jason is hurting a lot, and it is sympathetic that he is lashing out but it does not justify the actions he is taking. If have a different interpretation, all the more power to you! But unfortunately, canon does not really back up this interpretation, and by trying to make it canon, it lands in some pretty unfortunate implications.

In canon, Jason: - Is a drug lord -  I have a lot of thoughts about this decision for Jason - especially with Robin!Jason being against drugs and his own mother dying from overdose, him profiting from the sale of drug is a little uncomfortable (upwards of 40% of all drugs trade ://). In addition, people act like Jason is some perfect drug lord, when in reality UTrH, Jason is never seen making rules against selling to addicts or anything. He does make rules against selling to kids, which, I guess if they just turned 18, or if an adult buys it and gives it to them that’s okay then? He also preforms CAPITAL PUNISHMENT on people who haven't committed much of a crime other than selling drugs to a 17 year old or whatever. - Blows up a school to prove a point (?) to a teenager - Kills like 81 people? to escape prison - Breaks into a tower to beat up a teenage hero - actually lets just make this one bullet point shoots and attempts to murder a lot of heroes, and like his actual family a bunch of times

I see this pattern in the fandom of defending these actions - Jason being a drug lord, Jason demonizing and murdering common criminals just because they committed a crime, and that makes me really unconformable. Its dehumanizing poor and marginalized people when you dismiss every henchman Jason murders without a second thought. They don’t deserve to die just because they made bad decisions, and especially in terms of drug dealers comes uncontrollably close to war on drugs propaganda.

Its a general feeling I have about putting antiheroes on a pedestal because they can "do what the hero can't" or whatever, without properly engaging with the text and realizing these actions are wrong.

I understand what you are saying about revenge stories, and if UrTH was about Jason killing just the Joker or people who hurt him, I could see your point more. But Jason hurts people totally unrelated to his revenge quest and he doesn't want to kill the joker; he wants Bruce to. Numerous times Jason can kill the Joker, he can stop him from killing, but he decides that his vengeance, him feeling avenged is more important. Jason will not kill the Joker; he wants Bruce to to do it, even though he knows it will hurt Bruce and so many others. He just wants absolution. He just wants to know he's loved, and he doesn't care who he hurts in the process. Its understandable! Its sympathetic! He's been through a lot. But at the end of the day, this isn't behavior that should be glorified and defended and justified. That's what I mean by it shouldn't be controversial that murder is bad. In count of Count of Monte Cristo, you aren’t supposed to think that Dantes blind revenge is good - there is a part in the book where he reflects and realizes that he’s hurt innocent people. And though he eventually goes forwards with his final revenge or whatever, there is an acknowledgement that he’s hurt people - innocent people (he ended up hurting his first love and her son Albert for instance). Jason never has that, in canon or otherwise, and a lot of people talk about him as if he has nothing to apologize for. In addition, Dantes only targets those responsible for his imprisonment, and they are taken down by their own vices which is what makes his revenge quest satifsying; Jason targets a lot of people that have nothing to do with his death. And this isn't to say you can't like him or that characters should never do bad things; Jason is a super interesting character to analyses and go in different directions for! Its just important to remember he isn’t a reliable narrator, and to not blindly justify murder. Anyways, I hope this initial dump of words helps you understand what I'm saying more? I'm in the process of writing a longer more comprehensive post on this topic for another ask, specifically what war on drugs rhetoric entails and its history, but that probably won't be out for a few months.

#asks #asked and answered #im really sorry if my inital tags were aggressive in any way #i was just frustrated about the way a lot of people portray jason and engage in this sort of rheoric that harms real people!! #dc comics #dc meta

[tiredguyswag]

on Carmen Sandiego & differing ideologies and interpretations

*cracks knuckles* who's up for an analysis (that may just be me grasping at straws)?

"If you choose the path of a professional thief, there will be no turning back."

"It's never too late to change."

Something to ruminate on concerning VILE and Carmen's way of thinking.

Carmen has a more optimistic outlook, saying that it's never too late to change (although that scene was anything but optimistic), while VILE seems to think differently, what with their 'no turning back' ideology.

On the surface, that's that. Carmen knows that everybody can change for the better if they're willing to put in the effort, because she did, and she was RAISED to believed otherwise. VILE manipulates people (usually young, impressionable teenagers or barely-adults) into thinking that now that they're here, there's no going back for them.

But it's worth noting how different their interpretations are.

VILE saying that there's no turning back is taken to mean that there's no saving the operatives now.

Carmen's interpretation, however, while recognising that people could change for the better, also states that 'now there's no getting out of this whole mess you were roped into unless you clean it up'.

After all, could anyone with her morals, knowing that if they just leave, this shadow organisation would continue stealing priceless works of historical and sentimental value without getting caught, and also aware of the fact that they have skills that far surpass the rest of their grade, simply stand by and do nothing? Would they be able to turn their backs on something they feel so strongly about, letting the perpetrators go unchecked, and just 'go back'?

Carmen certainly can't. Hell, she doesn't even know what to go back to.

She's crossed that line, and now she can never turn back until her job is done.

Something fun to note is that when Shadowsan first said the 'no turning back' line back in S1, almost all of us interpreted it as VILE's ideology, but in S2, though it is never mentioned explicitly, we find out that he meant Carmen's version after all!

Speaking of Shadowsan, it's interesting to see how he's been affected by this. We know he feels very guilty about how he behaved in his past, and he can't turn back either. He can't go back to the way things were, can't undo the damage. He can only keep moving forward and try to make things right.

Also fun to think about how this ideology might have affected Gray's decision in the Himalayas, while taking into account his line - "But I am that guy. I have always been that guy." He's such a fun character to observe under a microscope and I wish the show hadn't been cancelled so soon there were moments you could TELL the crew wanted to take lots of plot lines somewhere.

(netflix I see you cancelling shows with latina leads you're not slick)

ANYWAY! I wrote this post instead of preparing for my hindi test and it seems I'm only losing one mark so! No harm, no foul, amirite?

#carmen sandiego 2019 #carmen sandiego netflix #carmen sandiego #carmen sandiego meta #cs meta

[lionheartedmusings]

hey i thought your post about the moral glorification of natalie is super interesting. but what do you think about the moral glorification of lottie? by the show and the fans? the ending of s1 set her up to be this ominous figure, only for season 2 to humanize her at every turn and emphasize her good intentions. i have mixed feelings because while i do love lottie's arc this season, i can't help but wonder if we were robbed of a more morally grey lottie

thanks for enjoying the post! it had been driving me a bit insane but i'm glad it resonated! as for lottie… oh boy, buckle in because this is going to probably be long and a hard one to answer.

from the fandom's perspective, i have spent a lot of time watching the yellowjackets reddit and tumblr seems to be a lot more sympathetic to lottie's character than the sub — over there, lottie is as bad as the devil and she's a massive evil mastermind which… i vehemently disagree with. i will even go as far as to disagree that she was ever really set up to be anything other than she is: she's a teenage girl doing her best to help people keep hope, and she fully believes that her reverence and submission to the wilderness is actively doing good, so she keeps doing it.

the show has done a brilliant job with humanising every character enough that they're all (at least to me) deeply understandable and relatable in both their good moments and their bad — i'll use misty as an example for a moment. misty isn't all there before the crash and she's clearly desensitised to violence to an extent, but her destroying the black box? i understand that. i don't agree with it, but i can 1000% understand how an isolated teen got a glimpse of friendship and acceptance, and wanted to keep it going for a bit longer. in misty's mind, maybe it would take them a bit longer to be rescued (a couple weeks vs a few days) because people were looking for them —she was completely unaware of the consequences of her actions. i understand misty's actions, she just didn't think of what the ramifications of them could be... like lottie.

lottie, a mentally ill completely neglected teen, goes into the wilderness and communes (or believes she does at least) with something bigger than herself and starts listening and appeasing it... and it starts "rewarding" them, so she keeps going. she's helping, it's helping, so she pulls as many people in as she can because the more they pay respects to this entity, the bigger the chance of them surviving. she's just doing her best to help — by the time she realises that she's been made into a prophet and is being deified, it's too late to turn back, and she ultimately passes (or tries to, i definitely don't think it'll stick) the power off to someone else who she hopes will do a better job.

but the interesting thing is, her actions directly lead to the escalation of violence and the ritualisation of their survival — it's her faith that leads the others down the rabbit hole and regardless of good intentions, she actively starts a religion that ends up being one of cannibalism and blood. how do you analyse the morality of it? i think teen lottie herself would see herself as a villain, if her suicidal ideation and martyr complex are anything to go by.

adult lottie is, i think, set up to be a lot more morally grey by the show — she's pulled back into this way of thinking by travis, and she spirals further when natalie arrives at the compound (the cult-like society she created to try and help people, the same way she couldn't help her friends twenty years ago, because lottie's a character about cycles more than anything else). she's the one who suggests a submission to the wilderness again, it's her actions that lead to the hunt and to natalie's death, but in the end in her delusion she thinks it will all have been for a good reason (keeping van alive, which is a whole other can of worms i don't have time to unpack).

when did lottie go from a teenager horrified by the consequences of her actions, to a grown woman who sees death as vindication? in the wilderness it was a coping mechanism, but adult lottie is fully aware that the line between the wilderness and their actions is very blurred — when did that happen?

i think seasons 3 forward are going to have us see a much more morally grey lottie, but up until now i think her characterisation makes a lot of sense because it establishes intention vs. consequence very very well, and it allows us to do what the girls couldn't do in the 90s — see lottie matthews as a person and not some prophet or messiah, so we can now see how the well-meaning and kind go down the rabbit hole of fanaticism to the point of seeing death as a bargaining chip they can actively play all to justify the horrors they've caused so far.

her characterisation is about the deterioration of lottie's character and thinking, and you have to rise characters up to let them fall. now, i support all her rights and her wrongs but by god, is lottie a wildly interesting character with a lot more layers and thought than she's usually given.

i'm so sorry this turned into... this.

#yellowjackets #yellowjackets spoilers #lottie matthews #charlotte matthews #misty quigley #look listen it's almost 1k words i had more thoughts but fiugsofgb

[not-poignant]

Ooh, cool! Thank you so much for the long reply! A lot of this was genuinely completely new to me -- I'd never known there were ongoing discussions that early, but of course it makes complete sense there were, both on LJ and predating it. I think it also goes to show how well we could self-segregate on LJ, I think moreso than we can now.

I think, in retrospect, that a lot of my experiences with 2000s fandom can be summed up with, 'I was a teenager' and thus wanted to be 'cool'. There was a lot of 'not like other girls'-ism going on in those sporking and Mary Sue comms, and I always just assumed we were all teenagers -- it certainly felt that way. The few people I've kept in touch with from those days have largely grown out of it, though it doesn't surprise to hear there were (and probably still are) grown adults who shit on others' fanfics.

(As an addendum, I could add that slashfic and that sort of 'canon non-compliance' was completely okay in the fandom spaces I ran in back then, but people would get very upset about extremely arbitrary things-- 'transfer students' in HP, changing characters' ages, making up a minor oc side character for plot purposes because all ocs were apparently bad (and especially if female), etc. It was strange which hairs people decided to split.)

Anyway! Thank you VERY much for such a long and in-depth reply! It's cool to see how these things have changed and developed, and I'm glad to see my experience wasn't emblematic of fandom as a whole.

Thanks for such a thought-provoking question! It really got me thinking about how Livejournal was really excellent at creating different sort of pockets of experiences, and in a while is really reflective as proto-social media of like, the big echo chambers we have happening now all across social media! That's really interesting to think about.

For me, it's funny, most of the fandom folks I knew were all older than me, many were in their 40s and 50s while I was in my 20s. Very few teens comparatively were attracted to certain fandoms like The X-Files and NCIS some of the other spaces I was in, so while there were definitely teens, it was like... a different feeling. Like, even these days I find it fascinating how there are 'younger' fandoms (in terms of how many younger folk are in it) and 'older' fandoms.

And yeah you're so right about people getting upset about arbitrary things! And also that um, 'not like other girls' which now itself is kind of mocked by fandom, so things really did come full circle on that front where now it's not cool to be one of the people who says that x.x

Honestly it's hard to be a teenager on the internet! All the things that play out like... all the dynamics, a lot just play out online instead, and they still exist. A person still wants to be cool and accepted and liked (and that's not age specific, like, most of us want a degree of at least some of these lol), and cliques can form very quickly. I remember how bad it felt back then even in my 20s when I got unfriended by a mutual who I thought was a really good friend, that stuff was devastating!

"making up a minor oc side character for plot purposes because all ocs were apparently bad"

Ahaha this is one of the reasons I still sometimes have like apologetic tones in some of my comments about the amount of OCs I add, because yeah that was really disapproved of! I remember that and I still have like... shades of that at times. I'm mostly over it now, but oof I remember the first time I did it and I was like 'is this okay *chews on fingernails* I bet people will hate this because of it.' (And then that turned into Fae Tales so).

The Mary Sue stuff was really aggressively unpacked, like in very popular kind of fandom-friendly journalism spaces at the time, I mean that's how we ended up with the journalism site 'The Mary Sue' in the first place. People really took a stand on that one. In a way, we were all kind of looking at our own attitudes, like, *why* is it bad to do this, or *what* does it mean that a girl feels like they can't be like other girls - is that internalised misogyny (and sometimes it was), and I miss that kind of meta discussion because I do feel it happens a little less now.

There was a time when I didn't like Mary Sues, no one did, though I think that was before I found my first meta community where it was like 'oh people are talking about EVERYTHING I thought was like universally accepted in fandom.' Though we never got that far on how racist fandom could be, which is still an issue, but one that does get talked about (it would just be nice if AO3 talked about it too).

I sadly think a lot of people in their 40s and 50s can act a lot like teenagers in fandom spaces sometimes, some of the antis in like teenage spaces today are like 40s kind of 'guiding them along' this path of moral puritanical righteousness and almost role-modelling how to bully others. And some of the folks running public Sporking blogs were like... older folks who fostered connections to younger folk.

LJ was wild tbh :D

Anyway, it's so interesting to think of all the different pockets we ended up in. I'm sure there's like countless more that we both have no experience of, where someone else would be like 'oh I was in LJ fandom what's a Mary Sue?' and that would be entirely legitimate too. Sometimes it's easy (I fall into this trap) to think of historical fandom as being one thing instead of like a thousand things. So yeah, this was cool! Thank you :D

#asks and answers #pia on fandom #i actually still really miss livejournal as it used to be #i like dreamwidth but it's different #also i keep forgetting to blog there lmao

[wen-kexing-apologist]

Watchlist Tag Game!

Another unexpected tag game! This time from @waitmyturtles

Currently watching

A Boss and a Babe: Wasn't sure if I was going to watch this one because I'm not a huge fan of boss and subordinate as a positive romantic plot (looking at you GAP, sorry). But started watching it after seeing some of @respectthepetty's posts about Episode 4.

Bed Friend: If I were being accurate, I would have put this show down like four times in a row because I have rewatched all available episodes about four times, and honestly will probably watch the whole thing again. I love it so much, I do still think that Moonlight Chicken is my favorite show of the 2023 line up so far, but goddamn if I don't get overly attached to traumatized men.

Breaking Bad: Fun Fact! I have watched the first season of this show three times and never made it beyond that! So my friend set out to fix it and now we are trading one season of Breaking Bad for one show of my choice with a comparable number of episodes. Traded season one for Moonlight Chicken, and I'm trading season two and three for Word of Honor.

The Eclipse: Can't put my finger on why but for some reason I am obsessed with this show where the main character is a emotional repressed gay boy who has difficulty accepting himself and feels pressured to perform actions far outside what a teenager should be allowed to do because adults put pressure on him and because he doesn't want people to be disappointed in him...Anyway, with the Our Skyy 2 release date coming up how could I not rewatch this show I have already seen approximately six times?

The Eighth Sense: Have to thank @bengiyo for writing about The Eighth Sense, and everyone else that I follow that started watching this show immediately and started writing beautiful things about how queer it feels. It's my first Korean BL TV show (I did watch Wish You a few years back) and I am thoroughly enjoying my time so far!!

Unintentional Love Story: Don't have a lot to say about this show yet, I'm only two episodes in, but I think it's good so far!

Word of Honor: Rewatching this with my friend to try to get him to branch out of American television. I figured the costumes alone in this show would keep his interest, but let's be real, I was dying to see his reaction to my favorite little war criminal Wen Kexing who has done absolutely nothing wrong ever in his life, m'kay? This is my completely unbiased, objective opinion (do not look at my username).

Looking forward to watching soon

*ahem*

That is all...

...just kidding!

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: Somehow, my tumblr blog accidentally turned into a primarily BL based blog, probably but actually before I was introduced to Word of Honor and then rapidly and descended into the Thai BL world from there (I know WoH is a cdrama, but I found KinnPorsche through a masterpost of queer asian media that was on the woh tag) my hyperfixation and truest love is playing Dungeons and Dragons. I've been in a campaign for 6 years now and recently started another campaign with another group! I wanted to see this movie when it came out but I had COVID and only now am freed from my self isolation! Heard it was good and fun and worth seeing in theaters so I am hoping to go soon!

Our Skyy 2: I just miss my boys, okay? I'm only human.

Only Friends: If the fact that I have watched KinnPorsche 14 times is anything to go by I love messy bitches, and this seems like a show full of messy bitches! Any show that requires a fucking flow chart to know their relationships to one another? I'm in! Also, I listened to the playlist that Jojo posted on Spotify and I was sold. This is definitely my most anticipated of 2023.

Still deciding if I’m gonna watch

Succession: I follow at least one person who has been posting a lot about Succession as the fourth and final season airs, and it sounds really good! I was actually convinced to start the first episode but I kinda fell off of it pretty quick. I think I was tired and I know like with any show the pilot is not the episode to judge something on.

Beef: Only putting this on here because I felt compelled to look it up in the tumblr tags today just to put some feelers out.

and that's it lol, I finsihed Shadow and Bone Season 2 and The Owl House so I don't really have any other shows that I am thinking about watching at the moment. If anyone who reads these block paragraphs has suggestions I'm all ears.

Well, anyone I was going to tag has been tagged by wmt so uhhhh, if you wanna do this game, take this as me officially tagging you!

#tag game #a boss and a babe #bed friend #bed friend the series #breaking bad #the eclipse #the eighth sense #unintentional love story #word of honor #d&d: honor among thieves #d&d movie #our skyy 2 #only friends #beef #succession