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intothewickedwood · 3 years

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Sims 4 Pack Ranking

Wondering which Sims 4 pack to buy? Here is my personal ranking.

Expansion Packs

1. Seasons

Great pack! It brings so much to the game! Weather gives the game a sense of realism. Being able to control the sim calendar is a God-send! You can add your own holidays and schedule events! Traditions are fun and bring family and friends together. I love throwing a Black and White bash on New Year’s Eve and a Dinner party on Christmas Day. It also helps you keep track of your sims’ schedules. Not to mention swings, sprinklers you can play with, kiddie pools, flower-arranging tables, snow activities, scarecrows, water baloon buckets, roller-blading and ice skating rinks and so much more! CAS and Bulid and Buy are also wonderful! And finally you can choose sims’ hot weather and cold weather outfits!

2. Cats and Dogs

I am biased because I love animals. Pets are a great addition to the family. You can train dogs, take them for walks and play with them. CAS for them is amazing! Brindleton Bay is a great seaside new world. And you can create and own your own vet!

3. Island Living

Certainly not everyone’s favourite pack but I absolutely love it! Sulani is a gorgeous world. Living the island lifestyle is one of my favourite’s to experience in this whole game. And now you can vacation their for a wonderful honeymoon or family trip! There’s mermaids (which you can become or create), sand activities, water activities like swimming, jet-skiing, canoeing, diving, scuba-diving and playing with dolphins. CAS and Build and Buy are amazing!

4. Discover University

My one issue with this pack is that I think it takes too long to graduate, especially when you’re playing on short lifespan. But apart from that, I have so much fun completing each students daily and term check-lists and it feels so good for your sim to enter a career at a higher level, already armed with the necessary skills. Living on campus is fun, especially in dorms. You can play table tennis, juggle a football or join the rabbit-hole team, build robots, ride bikes and more!

5. Get Together

Another pack that is not everyone’s favourite. I personally find it to be an essential. I use clubs all the time to allow family and friends to get together and socialise autonomously or to create specialised clubs where they complete hobbies autonomously and raise their skills. I find the nightclub experience so fun and take my sims out to one every friday in their clubs or by hosting a dance party or both! And the world is gorgeous! I love the little cafe’s!

6. Get Famous

I end up having a lot of performer sims, so the fame system and perks come in very handy. And your sim can get famous doing anything with the help of a drone and a video recording station! I think it adds to the game working towards your sim becoming not only a painter but a world-renowned one! There’s even a music station where you can create your own beats! The actor career is my favourite in the whole game. It’s so fun having your sims dress up in different costumes and perform a sword fight on set.

7. City Living

The City is beautiful. The festivals are amazing! My favourite is the spice festival because yes to my sims experiencing new cultures! I love living in an apartment. There are so many quirks, like your neighbour forcing their way in to borrow your shower or for game night. Love shooting hoops, setting off fireworks and adding all the new dishes to unique restaurants.

8. Snowy Escape

I’m still learning about this game as it’s fairly new. Love exploring the new culture. Their aren’t as many things to do at the festivals as I feel their were at those that came with City Living. Great food to add to restaurants. Snowboarding and skiing are really fun and it’s great that kids can do it too and that all ages, including todllers can snowboard. As someone who goes on a lot of walks, I look forward to trying out hiking. It looks really fun! I just feel this pack could have packed in a little more.

9. Get To Work

I’ve had this game for ages and I’m still yet to buy my own retail store. I need to get on that! I haven’t played the scientist career yet but I’ve played the doctor one and the law enforcement one and they do get boring after a while if your playing them actively everyday. Perhaps I should not play actively some days in the future. I think I just need to play with this one more.

10. Eco Lifestyle

I was really dissapointed when I heard this game was coming out. I’m all for saving the environment but I wasn’t sure it was something I’d have fun playing with in the sims and I haven’t really had much fun with it. Candle making is kinda fun but I hate that you have to have bits and pieces to make them as they are not easy to get. The only thing I really like in this pack is juice fizzing and the neighbourhood action plans. Free-love is a great addition for my polyamorous sims but it sucks that once they’re out of the neighbourhood, they get jealous again. Living off a dumpster is a fun challenge but it gets boring after a while. I don’t really like CAS or build and buy that much either.

Game Packs

1. Parenthood

Great pack! Adds so much depth to family play and I am pretty much exclusively a family player, even when I play with supernatural sims. I love that parents and guardians can shape their children’s personalities. Build and Buy is so pretty and colourful! It screams family play! Love the kids school projects. Love being able to ground kids and put them on time out, disciplining and encouraging them and even ordering them to do things.

2. Vampires

I looove playing with supernatural sims! In general I prefer witches and wizards and magic to vampires but this is just a solid pack. Build and Buy is beautiful and allows you to create unique gothic and historical buildings. CAS is very cool too! Forgotton Hollow is gorgeous. I absolutely love the look of it! I want to live their! I don’t care how creepy it is. The vampire powers system is so good and gives you a great goal to work towards. I get such a thrill using powers on and biting other sims at night. It looks so spooky! Super speed is so useful! And I love creating vampire clubs and having them have epic looking vampire duals, letting them spar and train eachother and turn other sims into slaves or vampires or vampire slaves! Much darker than the other games. I just wish kids could have vampire powers and have a vampire form.

3. Realm of Magic

I don’t know what it is but this game doesn’t seem as in depth as Vampires. It should but it somehow doesn’t. But it’s still a very good pack that satisfies my Potterhead needs well enough. You can create so many different types of spellcasters but I personally like going to the magic realm and learning all the spells and potions. It’s so fun duplicating yourself and setting sims on fire or conjuring a meal out of nowhere. Build and Buy is beautiful and duels are epic! I only wish kids could cast spells and it wasn’t so easy to learn all the spells and complete the aspirations.

4. Dine Out

A lot of people say this game is glitched and it does take, like a whole day to have a 3-course meal but I personally enjoy that. I like taking family or friend groups out to beautiful restaurants from the gallery on a Sunday and letting them socialise their all day while waiting for their meals and enjoying the atmosphere. I use this pack all the time. I love owning restaurants. I love choosing the menus and creating restaurants that reflect different cultures’ cuisine. Running one is really fun. It’s hard to get a balance, especially while starting out but with perks you can watch your restaurant thrive.

5. Strangerville

I played this through for the first time recently and I really enjoyed it! Much more than I thought I would. I love the possessed sims. They are so freaky. It’s a shame that it doesn’t feel like a game you’d want to play again but the world is nice.

6. Jungle Adventure

I confess. I entered a (I think it’s called a) temple for the first time at the end of last year. It took me forever to figure out how to get to one but when I finally did I found the game play a bit lackluster. But it’s a beautiful jungle-y world that is worth visiting for a vacation and exploring the culture is fun! Build and Buy is also amazing. And I liked adding the new cuisine to my restaurants.

7. Outdoor Retreat

I haven’t played this one in ages but I remember I had fun doing it. Basically, you could have a similar camping experience in Selvadorada or any other world. But it’s fun for the winter log cabins and if you’re looking for a more forest-y vibe.

8. Spa Day

Gorgeous Build and Buy! Worth it for that alone but I feel this pack could have been a stuff pack if you look at it compared to what we’re going to get in, say, Paranormal Stuff. Working on the wellness skill is cool. Teleporting is useful but a bit slow. I like having my sims go to a yoga class, meditate, get a massage and go to the sauna.

9. Star Wars: Journey to Batuu

I’ve seen like 2 Star Wars films and had no idea what was going on both times. Similarly, I was pretty confused while playing but I can’t deny I had fun completing the missions, fighting with lightsabers and chilling with my droid. I did get board after a while though. It doesn’t really fit in the game but I’m happy for Star Wars fans. I’d be estatic if they did a Harry Potter, Once Upon A Time or X-Men pack!

Stuff Packs

1. Kids Room

By far the best for me. You get so much stuff for kids. Love the addition of Voidcritters! The kids clothing is adorable and the Buy objects are incredible! Perfect for kids and creating unique rooms for them!

2. Toddler

Love the new toddler play equipment! It is so, so cute to watch them play. The CAS is so adorable as are the Buy objects. I have yet to use play dates but they sound great for my families!

3. Backyard

Love the water slide. My sims have so much fun on it. And the objects are great! Perfect for building a family garden. It makes me want to use the garden more in the sims.

4. Spooky

Not everyone’s favourite but I love spooky things (I was deprived of Halloween as a child!). I use it all the time to have spooky dress-up parties or for spooky night clubs or lounges. It’s the perfect thing to flesh out Spooky Day from Seasons.

5. Romantic Garden

I just think it’s pretty lol. CAS is really nice as are the buy items. The wishing well is fun and great to cheat with to bring back dead sims quickly, I recently discovered. There’s nothing more wonderful than going to a beautiful flowery garden at night with your sims couples.

6. Bowling Night

I find bowling pretty fun in the sims. It’s great for a night out with the family. I am biased because I love bowling with family on special occasions in real life. It’s great for sims birthdays and Build and Buy is so unique as is CAS.

7. My First Pet

Again, not everyone’s favourite but the items are freaking cute! Perfect for kids rooms and having a pet rodent is pretty cool as are the new CAS for Cats and Dogs. I wouldn’t be opposed to them expanding another pack like this was used to do in the future.

8. Luxury Party

I use the buffet table and the chocolate fountain all the damn time.

9. Perfect Patio

For the hot tub mainly! But the Buy items are great.

10. Cool Kitchen

I just love having my sims eat ice-cream on a Sunday. There are so many flavour combinations!

11. Movie Hangout

I love my sims having movie night with popcorn lol. And CAS and Build and Buy are pretty cool.

12. Vintage Glamour

CAS and Buy items are awesome. I love the vanity table and that kids can use it. The butler is useful but only a few of my sims live that kind of life.

13. Tiny Living

I was so disapointed when this pack was anounced but actually having a Tiny House comes with a lot of useful benefits. And Build and Buy and CAS are so pretty. Wish the furniture was tinier and the bed didn’t kill your sims all the time! I would actually like to use that bed!

14. Laundry Day

I was upset that simmers voted for this. It adds realism, so I’ll give it points for that.

15. Nifty Knitting

Again, I was upset that simmers voted for this but the Buy items are so colourful and pretty. Knitting can be kinda fun and some of the knittables are cute, especially the baby grows! Plopsy is a fun addition but I haven’t been able to make much money off of it.

16. Moschino

Love the update to photography. I use it with one fashion forward household. I hate CAS and Build and Buy.

17. Fitness

I never use the climbing wall but I like the wood design on the Buy items.

#sims 4 #the sims 4 #ts4 #sims #the sims

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mystech-master · 4 years

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Some other BBTAG scenarios that’d be cool

(I will now try and limit myself to the o.g. 4, b/c I barely know jack about Arcana Heart, Senran Kagura, Akatsuki Blitzkampf)

I might’ve mentioned some of these before, but I’m including them here for completionists sake

1. Ragna hanging out with Gordeau. I like his interactions with Ragna in BBTAG’s story okay, he treated Ragna with respect. Maybe Ragna meets Gordeau in Kanzakai and he goes to Gordeau’s bar and they chat. Ragna learns about how the Hollow Night works, they could chat about how annoyed that are by their usual aquaintances (Goedeau about Hilda and Chaos, and Ragna about.....well almost everyone in his life). Maybe Gordeau and Ragna get on the topic of revenge, since Ragna wants revenge on Terumi and Gordeau has a vendetta against Wagner. Ragna talks about how he had Terumi at his mercy once (CS’ climax) and Gordeau asks if it was worth it. Ragna notes that it was unsatisfying due to Terumi laughing during it when Ragna wanted him to suffer, AND recalls how Lambda died for him, and says it wasn’t worth it. (I see this as between CS and before CP).

If you want to go even further, maybe Gordeau introduces him to the rest of Amnesia (or Hilda and Chaos show up at the bar as Ragna and Gordeau are talking), and they offer Ragna to join Amnesia, sensing the power he has and saying that they share similar goals of taking down their world’s organizations of Order (Amnesia vs Licht Kreis and Ragna vs the N.O.L.). Of course Ragna tells them to fuck off b/c “When I did it it was for revenge, you’re doing it for shits and giggles” (TFS reference). I mean Hilda says that Amnesia’s purpose is just a bunch of people who want to be powerful and have fun. But they don’t kill, that rule was made clear by Chaos in Ekidu’s Chronicle Mode (following the death of Roger and Ogre in Gordeau’s Chronicle Mode).

2. Ragna in Remnant, like his first visit there. Of course Ruby might want to talk to him more, Yang gives him the benefit of the doubt for saving Ruby, Blake is in the middle considering I think she’d understand the situation they were in but also be wary of his Soul Eater ability (I think Blake would notice that), while Weiss would be against him due to her seeing his wanted poster for 90,000,000,000 PD. Ozpin could have Qrow tail Ragna since he is Oz’ informant and Ragna does seem to be a more active/immediate threat to those who don’t know him (if you want comedy maybe Qrow’s Misfortune semblance causes more grief for Ragna. Assuming that RWBY still have their System Crystal from RWBY’s ending, they could tell Ozpin about this and Oz will be up to speed.

So when Ragna shows up at Beacon he gets called to the Headmaster’s Office where the Ozluminati is waiting for him to just get the run down on things. Ragna’s bad attitude would attract Grimm, and also his Soul Eater makes him quite dangerous in a world where the powers are based on the Soul. Oz doesn’t want to start shit and Qrow probably has enough info to see he isn’t AS bad as people say, and that the situation is far more complicated. But Ragna is still a criminal with a dangerous power. The only reason he’s only being given a warning is due to Ruby’s good word, and if he tries anything, no matter the cost he WILL doe everything in his power to stop him from harming his students or the world he has sworn to protect as a Huntsman. Plus the fact that they can’t exactly enforce the las of a whole other Dimension.

Glynda is a bit wary of Ragna but respects Ozpin’s decissions, but Ironwood is in the camp of “This guy is a danger to us, so we should either contain him or kill him”.

If you want to go a bit more into the adult interactions, maybe after Qrow hears of Ragna’s shit lif ehe tries to take Ragna out to drink, but I think Ragna isn’t one to drink b/c he’d see it as a bitch’s way of dealing with probelms. But if Qrow annoy him to a point they have a drink off, butRagna out drinks him b/c his Azure Grimoire has a healing factor against toxins too (as shown how he shook off poison in one of the mangas) so he can’t get drunk.

Or you could have Taiyang seeing Ragna fight (Grimm, sparring with Qrow, who knows) and he picks up on how Ragna’s fighting is like Yang’s: prefering to go trhough everything and rely on your power when you get in a jam. But it can’t always save you. Maybe even have Tai give Ragna a thanks for saving his daughters, or this could be the only way you imagine Burnie Burns as Tai channel his inner Church and have him sass Ragna.

3. Referencing back to the post about the scene in CS where Ragna is with the Kaka Clan, you know the one I constantly reference. I'd imagine that after a week or so of everyone just chilling with each other Ragna is WAY more chill with everyone. So what I thought was maybe Yang and Akihiko, along with a few others maybe, are at a boxing gym and then Ragna shows up being......oddly more friendly/chill than usual, and just have them all have a friendly spar and just have Ragna be chill and friendl with people who don’t insult him or treat him like ass. I wish there was another cool brawler in UNI that Ragna could get along with to even it out.

4. Something smaller, just put anyone in the Kaka Village and watch cuteness overload. You guys saw how Weiss was with Zwei and Adrien, and Kanji wanted to pet Jubei so imagine how he’d react to the Kaka kittens.

5. Just something simple and cool for fighting shit: The I.T. go through the Emerald Forest in the style of Beacon’s Initiation Exam. With the 4 o.g. members of the I.T./current 3rd years (Yu, Yosuke, Chie and Yukiko) for one team, with the later members/2nd years form the other team (Naoto, Kanji, Teddie and Rise).

6. Adam Taurus and some other W.F. members are raiding a Sector Seven outpost/storage facility only to be intercepted by Makoto and Blake. After some fighting maybe Kokonoe talks over intercom or through a video screen so we can have some philosophical discussion between her and Adam,. Adam saying she’s kissed up to humans, while Kokonoe calls Adam and the WF bitches for letting the humans’ insults get to them this far. Makoto and Blake are a but uncomfortable, b/c while Adam is too heated about the animal people racism resulting in him going to murder people, Kokonoe has become a cold hearted bitch who, while not evil, has some issues.

7. How does Raven react to all this Cross-Dimensional bullshit? One idea I had was Yu talking with her to try and get her to see the Power of Friendship! He notes how her power also works through bonds, being able to make portals to those she has an emotional connection to (her former husband, brother, and daughter). Maybe then he unleashes his Wild Card aura to show how powerful Friendship can be (you know, the same aura that makes Elizabeth, the one who oneshots Erebus every other month, step back). Raven could still call Yu a naive idiot for thinking he can stop the horrors of Salem, although even she finds it hard to beleive that when Yu most likely just showed off Izanagi-no-Okami aura which was said by Izanami to possibly be near godlike power.

8. Sho Minazuki and Carmine Prime meeting. Both are vulgar fight happy assholes who have a blood moon motif going on. Sho goes to Kanzakai b/c the Hollow Night is full of assholes he can fight for fun. He and Carmine can fight and mayeb vibe off each other a bit, but Sho at leats has a tragic past while Carmine is just a loser who doesn’t care if he dies in a gutter. Mabe Labrys could say something like “I’m glad that Sho-kun finally has a friend he can relate to.....but.....I don’t think he’s a good influence.” As Sho and Carmine are laughing manicaly as they fight.

9. Ozpin learning about the Insulator and just....needing to sit down. Because as we all know from Vol 6, he had No plan to defeat Salem and was playing the long game defense. But now thanks to this cross-dimensional bullshit, here is the perfect weapon to FINALLY end it! Oz tries to talk to Linne about convincing Hyde to let him use it. But Linne has told Hyde to guard the Insulator with his life, and Linne doesn’t trust anyone else with it. Eventually Ozpin’s desperation leaks through and Linne connects the dots about Salem’s Immortality and Ozpin hiding her immortality. She then holds it over Oz’s head that if he tries to force the Insulator from Hyde she’ll spill his secret.

DRAMA

10. The main heroes (Ragna, Yu, Hyde, and Ruby) all talking with System just wondering what it would’ve been like if they all lived in a merged world. How would their lives be different, imagine them all going to school together? The possibilities are endless.

11. Doctor Oobleck beign fascinated by these other worlds and wanting to learn about their histories. Espeically the Persona and Under Night worlds (as thye are “Earth” worlds where things are very normal, no Grimm to limit humanity to 4 kingdoms and some small villages that get razed to the ground on a weekly to monthly basis. That sounds like it would be FASCINATING for a historian like Oobleck. Unfortunately since Earth doesn’t have dark monsters to unite against, we have a shit load of wars against each other. Which could lead to a lot of philosophical discussions about how people can only band together if they have a mutual enemy.

Just imagine Oobleck talking with Jubei or Bang about the Ikaruga Civil War, just Oobleck and Bang talking would be fun.

12. The robot girls: Noel, Aigis, Labrys, Vatista, and Penny all hanging out. Vatista is the most Robotic, Aigis has the most “life” expereince, Noel is the most “human”, Labrys and Penny are both very human like but naive and lack life experience. So they could all talk about shit.

13. Weiss wanting to spend time with Mitsuru, b/c Mitsuru is basically everything Weiss wants to be: she is an exceptional leader (commanding both SEES in her school years and current leader of the Shadow Operatives), a skilled fighter (Mitsuru flawlessly summons her Persona and Weiss struggles with summons at Beacon, AND her 1 v 1 Win-Loss record is kind of iffy), and she is on her way to redeeming her family name and company (after Mitsuru’s grandad caused the Dark Hour Incident 10 years before P3, and Weiss wants to redeem the SDC from her father) although IDK if it is still going on because A. people are still against Kirijo for the explosion accident 10 years before P3, or B. people are just against a woman being in power. Like Mitsuru is liek a perfect role model for Weiss.

I might add more later, lemme know what you guys think and if you guys want to take these to use them for fics.

#bbtag #blazblue cross tag battle #blazblue #persona #p3 #persona 3 #persona 4 #p4 #persona 4 arena #p4a #persona 4 arena ultimax #p4au #under night in-birth #uni #unib #rwby #crossover #character interactions

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squirenonny · 6 years

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Hi there!! Wrt you mentioning about team stimming parties, I was wondering, what types of stimming (toys, materials, their own body etc) do you think the paladins enjoy the most, or get the most benefit from. It's really enjoyable image ; w ; but I know some stims can conflict with other peoples needs, so what might be someones fave might annoy someone else. So I wonder what either makes them most happy, or helps them best when needed! (QwQ Those are intense circumstances they all live in.)

I got carried away,,

Keith: Mainly tactile stims, a few visual stims

Textures: there are Good textures, and there are Bad textures, which is why he always wears his same jacket (good texture) and gloves (first line of defense against bad textures–see also my post about Keith’s gloves). In general, wet and cold is definitely Bad, smooth is usually bad. His favorite textures are (a) layered (running his finger over the wrap on his knife and plucking at the edge of a layer) or (b) ribbed (things like corduroy, or the seams on jeans and jackets that have that edge he can catch his fingernail on.)

Repetitive motions: that classic thumb rubbing that we saw in his vlog. These are typically very tiny movements that he tries to hide–he’ll rub his toes together inside his shoe or tap the toe of his boot against the floor.

Deep pressure & buoyancy: Keith is pretty touch averse, so he doesn’t seek out deep pressure often, but if he’s in the right mood a Shiro (or Hunk) Hug is A++. He also needs a blanket to sleep, preferably two or three. Yes, even in the hottest part of summer. Tight pants/shirt are soothing, and ngl he likes his Blade uniform because it’s a more even pressure than the paladin armor, which is too heavy on his shoulders and too thin/flexible where there isn’t the outer layer of armor. On the flip side, he also likes swimming because of the bouyancy. (Interestingly, he hates the feel of rain/shower water falling on him. It’s just too overwhelming. But being in the water and just floating there is v relaxing.)

Visual stims: mostly the way light reflects off his blade when he twists it back and forth and similar reflection/refraction things (light reflecting off water, mirages, the abundance of glowy things in space… he’ll sometimes stare at the crystal on the bridge for the entire briefing–completely engaged with what people are saying, just. Staring at the ceiling. It’s mesmerizing, okay?)

Chewing: rare, but more common as he gets more comfortable around the other paladins. He used to chew on his pens at the Garrison all the time, and one of the reasons he keeps his hair long (aside from not having the spoons to cut it/get it cut and not liking change in the first place) is so that he can suck/chew on his hair. He had to cut it when he first entered the Garrison, and it’s just finally getting long enough to do it again.

The thing about Keith’s stims is that they’re all very lowkey things he an do to calm himself down without drawing anyone’s attention. Probably he had bad experiences at school or in a foster home with kids making fun of his stims or his foster parents/teachers hammering “sit still” and “quiet hands” into him until he completely stopped doing anything immediately noticeable. He used to flap and run around when he was happy, but he doesn’t do that so much anymore. (It’s coming back, though, especially with Pidge and Lance being such big stimmers.)

As a result, his stims don’t really bother the others too much. Lance has a moral objection to Keith chewing on his hair in particular, and if he’s using a chewer, the sound of it sometimes gets to Pidge, but that’s it.

Pidge: visual, vestibular, and auditory stims

Spinning, flapping, bouncing: A lot of Pidge’s stims involve moving around (see the entire time Beezer was onscreen.) There’s a spinny chair in Green’s lab for the express purpose of happy spins, and the team knows to be ready for excited flapping when something Pidge is working on comes out right. (Lance has been hit in the face on more than one occasion because he likes to drape himself over Pidge’s shoulder.) Bounces in place when bored, runs around the castle at odd hours, climbs the other paladins. Very much a “I have too much energy in me and need to expend it somehow” stimmer.

Music: Pidge usually has music playing in Green’s lab–invariably at deafening levels (the bass pulse in your chest is just as important as the music itself). Upbeat songs are best, but any kind of background noise will do. Has started a collection of alien music since this laptop only has a small portion of Pidge’s library (most of the hard drive was dedicated to Kerberos research/snooping on the Garrison.)

Echolalia: Pidge is big into echolalia. (Pidge isn’t the only one who’s big into echolalia. Lance is also a fan, and Hunk usually joins in when they start an echolalia party.) In particular, Pidge will quote movies/TV shows, echo robot noises back at whatever robot happens to be nearby, and make quiet trilling sounds while working on code

Misc visual stims: There isn’t any one thing Pidge goes to for visual stims, but gradual changes (a la screensavers, lava lamps, auroras, glitter jars) have a tendency to turn into time sinks. Pidge has absolutely spent an hour staring at a screen saver without realizing it while idly musing about programming problems.

Repetitive noises: Can be either good or bad. Mechanical sounds, electronic whirring, and other white noise are great. Sudden, jarring, or grating noises are huge Nos. (See Keith’s chewing and some of Lance’s echolalia.)

Pidge’s flapping and running has a tendency to make Shiro tense up, especially if he’s not in a good place to begin with, so Pidge sometimes has to remember to stay chill or just go somewhere else until the energy is gone. Keith doesn’t like how loud Pidge plays music (it hurts his ears), but he respects personal boundaries and won’t turn it down. He’ll leave if he can, and if he has to stay, he’ll get irritated and snappish until Pidge makes the connection and turns down the volume. It’s the only real sticking point between them when it comes to stims, and they’re working on better communication to make sure it isn’t an issue in the future.)

Lance: Primarily vestibular and auditory stims, plus deep pressure

Spinning, dancing, flying: Lance loves to move. He loves spinning and dancing and big motions and G-forces. (He’s a huge fan of roller coasters and other amusement park rides.) Flying is such a stim for him, holy crap. So much so that it can become a problem. Loops, barrel rolls, sharp turns, hard acceleration–he loves the way it all pushes on his body (see also: deep pressure) and the way it makes him hyper aware of the physical sense of motion. Sometimes he pays so much attention to the sensations that he momentarily loses track of where he’s going–which is why he still sometimes crashes/sideswipes the other lions.

Deep pressure: Lance is a very touchy person in general, but in particular he loves hugs and cuddle piles. His favorite thing is to have Pidge sprawled across his lap, or when he and Hunk are sprawled on the couch in a tangle of limbs, or group hugs, or–Yeah. all of the above. Deep pressure feels like home.

Aerial dance: A combination of vestibular and deep pressure stims. Loves the muscle control it requires for the same reason he loves G-forces while flying. It grounds him, makes him aware of the space he occupies. Add to that the pressure of the silks wrapped around his body and the spinning and negative Gs as he drops, and it’s just the best.

Echolalia: Lance and Pidge can have entire conversations in quotes. Lance also makes sound effects for anything and everything (in training, while flying/fighting in his lion, while cleaning, while dancing through the halls.) He sings nonsense tunes a lot and hums both for the sound and the feel of it.

Voices: Conversation itself can be a stim for Lance, regardless of whether or not he’s a participant. The fastest way for him to fall asleep is by having the people he cares about around talking (e.g. his parents laughing and joking as they clean up in the other room, Hunk and Lance talking less and less coherently as they fall asleep in their room at the Garrison, Pidge and Keith up late during a sleepover in the rec room talking in low voices.) Lance doesn’t even need to hear the words; there’s something soothing about the cadence of it. He’ll use TV or music as a substitute if he has to, and he finds it very hard to fall asleep in total silence.

Lance is a dramatic stimmer, so it totally depends on the rest of the team’s energy levels as to whether or not they’re bothered by it. Most of the time, Hunk and Pidge will join in, and the rest of the team at least doesn’t mind. If they’re tired, though, Lance’s raw energy can be Too Much. There were some clashes early on with Pidge until they worked out a system where Lance’s cuddles didn’t get in the way of Pidge’s hyperfocus on a project. Hunk’s cool with all of Lance’s stims except when he’s in the lion/ship Lance is piloting, because Lance’s stimmy rides make Hunk nauseous.

Mostly, though, if there’s a problem, it’s with Keith or Shiro–and even those are pretty rare. Keith is mostly just confused by Lance’s stims, and isn’t bothered by them unless he’s already in a bad mood and wants to be left alone. Then Lance’s big presence can be too much. And Shiro can be set on edge by Lance’s stims for the same reason Pidge’s can get to him: Shiro’s idea of soothing is calm and quiet, and both Lance and Pidge are… the opposite of that when they’re happy and relaxed. Lance picks up on this quick and usually is able to dial it back right away.

Hunk: Taste, smell, and tactile stims

Taste: Hunk must put All the things in his mouth. Tasting alien foods/spices, yes, but also anything. Flowers. Glittery pink snow-stuff. Purple water. He did this with the Olkari headsets, so I mean. It’s canon. Sorry, I don’t make the rules. This bleeds over into tactile stimming, honestly (see: Olkari headset making his tongue itchy. He sounds so pleased by that I just can’t. I love him.) It also has the unfortunate side effect of having put him in a pod more than once because he accidentally poisoned himself. Worth it, though.

Smell: Hunk cooks to calm down for two reasons. One, it breaks him out of his cyclical thoughts and other anxious habits, giving him something else to focus on that’s familiar and controllable. Two, the smells. Some people have scented candles. Hunk has a rack of extracts. Also, like? Flour has a really bland but comforting smell? And let’s not even get into the smell of a finished dish. Cookies? Pies? Bread?? The kitchen is paradise for many reasons, and olfactory stims are one.

Deep pressure: This team is united in their love of deep pressure, tbh. Group hugs are great all around, and Hunk’s only too happy to dish them out. Always glad to be a pillow for one of the other paladins. Wears a thick vest for that extra little bit of pressure around his chest.

Tinkering: There’s something really satisfying about feeling machine parts click into place under his hands–and the oil is only a bonus, as far as Hunk’s concerned. He’ll take things apart and put them back together on an endless repeat just to feel the weight/texture/shape of the pieces. Also great for repetitive motions. See: stimming with the wires and making the sentry bot hit itself while the younger paladins were waiting in the control room in season 1.

Misc tactile stims: Hunk just likes touching things/holding things/fiddling with things. He likes to have something to do with his hands, so even if he doesn’t mean to, he’ll usually find something to play with when he’s bored or trying to focus on something Shiro or Allura is saying.

Hunk, like Keith, has a lot of less obvious stims–though in Hunk’s case it’s less because he’s trying to suppress it and more because his favorite stims are typically ambient things. Put him in a happy environment and he’ll be happy. He’s grossed out almost everyone on the team by the kinds of things he licks/bites, and Pidge gets annoyed when his tinkering turns into fiddling with Pidge’s stuff. Otherwise, he’s pretty chill.

Shiro: Auditory, tactile, and a few vestibular stims

Shiro has two modes: lowkey and highkey

Lowkey Shiro likes things to be calm and quiet. Ambient noises (air in vents, breathing, his own heartbeat) can be stims, but anything that interrupts the (near) silence is a major Sensory Bad. Deep pressure is good when he’s in this state, as is the texture of whatever chair/couch/bed he’s resting on. He’ll be hyperaware of his body, especially its weight, and he’ll run through relaxation exercises or meditation techniques to chase that peculiar calmness that comes when he’s intimately aware of himself and his immediate environment but his mind is completely quiet.

Highkey Shiro, like Pidge, has too much energy and needs to burn it off. He’ll pace or go for a run, or spar, the pounding of his footsteps/clash of his arm on the gladiator’s weapon serving as a grounding force in addition to the release of restless energy. When he can’t leave to burn off energy, he’ll clench and unclench his prosthetic hand, squeeze his arms, and grind his teeth. The repetitive motion and the tug/pressure/pull of it is soothing and helps to take the edge off the frustration/anxiety/overstimulation he’s dealing with.

The most notable thing about Shiro is that almost all of his stims are unconscious–meditation/relaxation techniques being the main exception. He didn’t stim a whole lot before Kerberos, but he does it a lot more frequently after his capture.

As he gets to know the other paladins and becomes more familiar with their stims, he starts to be more deliberate about it–he wears a weighted vest like Hunk’s a lot of the time and usually has a fidget toy with him to stim with during long meetings. Lance also entices him out for relaxing flights in the lions, because as it turns out the sensations of piloting are good for Shiro the same way they are for Lance.

Shiro’s stims don’t bother anyone–in fact, for a long time, no one even realized Shiro was stimming–but he’s by far the most likely to be bothered by the other paladins’ stims. He needs to be in control of his environment, and unexpected/uncontrollable stimuli tend to set him on edge.

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vintagegeekculture · 7 years

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Dead Fandoms, Part 3

Read Part One of Dead Fandoms here.

Read Part Two of Dead Fandoms here.

Before we continue, I want to add the usual caveat that I actually don’t want to be right about these fandoms being dead. I like enthusiasm and energy and it’s a shame to see it vanish.

Mists of Avalon

Remember that period of time of about 15 years, where absolutely everybody read this book and was obsessed with it? It could not have been bigger, and the fandom was Anne Rice huge, overlapping for several years with USENET and the early World Wide Web…but it’s since petered out.

Mists of Avalon’s popularity may be due to the most excellent case of hitting a demographic sweet spot ever. The book was a feminist retelling of the Arthurian Mythos where Morgan Le Fay is the main character, a pagan from matriarchal goddess religions who is fighting against encroaching Christianity and patriarchal forms of society coming in with it. Also, it made Lancelot bisexual and his conflict is how torn he is about his attraction to both Arthur and Guinevere.

Remember, this novel came out in 1983 – talk about being ahead of your time! If it came out today, the reaction from a certain corner would be something like “it is with a heavy heart that I inform you that tumblr is at it again.”

Man, demographically speaking, that’s called “nailing it.” It used to be one of the favorite books of the kind of person who’s bookshelf is dominated by fantasy novels about outspoken, fiery-tongued redheaded women, who dream of someday moving to Scotland, who love Enya music and Kate Bush, who sell homemade needlepoint stuff on etsy, who consider their religious beliefs neo-pagan or wicca, and who have like 15 cats, three of which are named Isis, Hypatia, and Morrigan.

This type of person is still with us, so why did this novel fade in popularity? There’s actually a single hideous reason: after her death around 2001, facts came out that Marion Zimmer Bradley abused her daughters sexually. Even when she was alive, she was known for defending and enabling a known child abuser, her husband, Walter Breen. To say people see your work differently after something like this is an understatement – especially if your identity is built around being a progressive and feminist author.

Robotech

I try to break up my sections on dead fandoms into three parts: first, I explain the property, then explain why it found a devoted audience, and finally, I explain why that fan devotion and community went away. Well, in the case of Robotech, I can do all three with a single sentence: it was the first boy pilot/giant robot Japanimation series that shot for an older, teenage audience to be widely released in the West. Robotech found an audience when it was the only true anime to be widely available, and lost it when became just another import anime show. In the days of Crunchyroll, it’s really hard to explain what made Robotech so special, because it means describing a different world.

Try to imagine what it was like in 1986 for Japanime fans: there were barely any video imports, and if you wanted a series, you usually had to trade tapes at your local basement club (they were so precious they couldn’t even be sold, only traded). If you were lucky, you were given a script to translate what you were watching. Robotech though, was on every day, usually after school. You want an action figure? Well, you could buy a Robotech Valkyrie or a Minmei figure at your local corner FAO Schwartz.

However, the very strategy that led to it getting syndicated is the very reason it was later vilified by the purists who emerged when anime became a widespread cultural force: strictly speaking, there actually is no show called “Robotech.” Since Japanese shows tend to be short run, say, 50-60 episodes, it fell well under the 80-100 episode mark needed for syndication in the US. The producer of Harmony Gold, Carl Macek, had a solution: he’d cut three unrelated but similar looking series together into one, called “Robotech.” The shows looked very similar, had similar love triangles, used similar tropes, and even had little references to each other, so the fit was natural. It led to Robotech becoming a weekday afternoon staple with a strong fandom who called themselves “Protoculture Addicts.” There were conventions entirely devoted to Robotech. The supposed shower scene where Minmei was bare-breasted was the barely whispered stuff of pervert legend in pre-internet days. And the tie in novels, written with the entirely western/Harmony Gold conception of the series and which continued the story, were actually surprisingly readable.

The final nail in the coffin of Robotech fandom was the rise of Sailor Moon, Toonami, Dragonball, and yes, Pokemon (like MC Hammer’s role in popularizing hip hop, Pokemon is often written out of its role in creating an audience for the next wave of cartoon imports out of insecurity). Anime popularity in the West can be defined as not a continuing unbroken chain like scifi book fandom is, but as an unrelated series of waves, like multiple ancient ruins buried on top of each other (Robotech was the vanguard of the third wave, as Anime historians reckon); Robotech’s wave was subsumed by the next, which had different priorities and different “core texts.” Pikachu did what the Zentraedi and Invid couldn’t do: they destroyed the SDF-1.

Legion of Super-Heroes

Legion of Superheroes was comic set in the distant future that combined superheroes with space opera, with a visual aesthetic that can best be described as “Star Trek: the Motion Picture, if it was set in a disco.”

I’ve heard wrestling described as “a soap opera for men.” If that’s the case, then Legion of Super-Heroes was a soap opera for nerds. The book is about attractive 20-somethings who seem to hook up all the time. As a result, it had a large female fanbase, which, I cannot stress enough, is incredibly unusual for this era in comics history. And if you have female fans, you get a lot of shipping and slashfic, and lots of speculation over which of the boy characters in the series is gay. The fanon answer is Element Lad, because he wore magenta-pink and never had a girlfriend. (Can’t argue with bulletproof logic like that.) In other words, it was a 1970s-80s fandom that felt much more “modern” than the more right-brained, bloodless, often anal scifi fandoms that existed around the same time, where letters pages were just nitpicking science errors by model train and elevator enthusiasts.

Legion Headquarters seemed to be a rabbit fuck den built around a supercomputer and Danger Room. Cosmic Boy dressed like Tim Curry in Rocky Horror. There’s one member, Duo Damsel, who can turn into two people, a power that, in the words of Legion writer Jim Shooter, was “useful for weird sex...and not much else.”

LSH was popular because the fans were insanely horny. This is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the thirstiest fandom of all time. You might think I’m overselling this, but I really think that’s an under-analyzed part of how some kinds of fiction build a devoted fanbase.

For example, a big reason for the success of Mass Effect is that everyone has a favorite girl or boy, and you have the option to romance them. Likewise, everyone who was a fan of Legion remembers having a crush. Sardonic Ultra Boy for some reason was a favorite among gay male nerds (aka the Robert Conrad Effect). Tall, blonde, amazonian telepath Saturn Girl, maybe the first female team leader in comics history, is for the guys with backbone who prefer Veronica over Betty. Shrinking Violet was a cute Audrey Hepburn type. And don’t forget Shadow Lass, who was a blue skinned alien babe with pointed ears and is heavily implied to have an accent (she was Aayla Secura before Aayla Secura was Aayla Secura). Light Lass was commonly believed to be “coded lesbian” because of a short haircut and her relationships with men didn’t work out. The point is, it’s one thing to read about the adventures of a superteam, and it implies a totally different level of mental and emotional involvement to read the adventures of your imaginary girlfriend/boyfriend.

Now, I should point out that of all the fandoms I’ve examined here, LSH was maybe the smallest. Legion was never a top seller, but it was a favorite of the most devoted of fans who kept it alive all through the seventies and eighties with an energy and intensity disproportionate to their actual numbers. My gosh, were LSH fans devoted! Interlac and Legion Outpost were two Legion fanzines that are some of the most famous fanzines in comics history.

If nerd culture fandoms were drugs, Star Wars would be alcohol, Doctor Who would be weed, but Legion of Super-Heroes would be injecting heroin directly into your eyeballs. Maybe it is because the Legionnaires were nerdy, too: they played Dungeons and Dragons in their off time (an escape, no doubt, from their humdrum, mundane lives as galaxy-rescuing superheroes). There were sometimes call outs to Monty Python. Basically, the whole thing had a feel like the dorkily earnest skits or filk-singing at a con. Legion felt like it’s own fan series, guest starring Patton Oswalt and Felicia Day.

It helped that the boundary between fandom and professional was incredibly porous. For instance, pro-artist Dave Cockrum did covers for Legion fanzines. Former Legion APA members Todd and Mary Biernbaum got a chance to actually write Legion, where, with the gusto of former slashfic writers given the keys to canon, their major contribution was a subplot that explicitly made Element Lad gay. Mike Grell, a professional artist who got paid to work on the series, did vaguely porno-ish fan art. Again, it’s hard to tell where the pros started and the fandom ended; the inmates were running the asylum.

Mostly, Legion earned this devotion because it could reward it in a way no other comic could. Because Legion was not a wide market comic but was bought by a core audience, after a point, there were no self-contained one-and-done Legion stories. In fact, there weren’t even really arcs as we know it, which is why Legion always has problems getting reprinted in trade form. Legion was plotted like a daytime soap opera: there were always five different stories going on in every issue, and a comic involved cutting between them. Sure, like daytime soap operas, there’s never a beginning, just endless middles, so it was totally impossible for a newbie to jump on board...but soap operas know what they are doing: long term storytelling rewards a long term reader.

This brings me to today, where Legion is no longer being published by DC. There is no discussion about a movie or TV revival. This is amazing. Comics are a world where the tiniest nerd groups get pandered to: Micronauts, Weirdworld, Seeker 3000, and Rom have had revival series, for pete’s sake. It’s incredible there’s no discussion of a film or TV treatment, either; friggin Cyborg from New Teen Titans is getting a solo movie.

Why did Legion stop being such a big deal? Where did the fandom that supported it dissolve to? One word: X-Men. Legion was incredibly ahead of its time. In the 60s and 70s, there were barely any “fan” comics, since superhero comics were like animation is today: mostly aimed at kids, with a minority of discerning adult/teen fans, and it was success among kids, not fans, that led to something being a top seller (hence, “fan favorites” in the 1970s, as surprising as it is to us today, often did not get a lot of work, like Don MacGregor or Barry Smith). But as newsstands started to push comics out, the fan audience started to get bigger and more important…everyone else started to catch up to the things that made Legion unique: most comics started to have attractive people who paired up into couples and/or love triangles, and featured extremely byzantine long term storytelling. If Legion of Super-Heroes is going to be remembered for anything, it’s for being the smaller scale “John the Baptist” to the phenomenon of X-Men, the ultimate “fan” comic.

The other thing that killed Legion, apart from Marvel’s Merry Mutants, that is, was the r-word: reboots. A reboot only works for some properties, but not others. You reboot something when you want to find something for a mass audience to respond to, like with Zorro, Batman, or Godzilla.

Legion, though, was not a comic for everybody, it was a fanboy/girl comic beloved by a niche who read it for continuing stories and minutiae (and to jack off, and in some cases, jill off). Rebooting a comic like that is a bad idea. You do not reboot something where the main way you engage with the property, the greatest strength, is the accumulated lore and history. Rebooting a property like that means losing the reason people like it, and unless it’s something with a wide audience, you only lose fans and won’t get anything in return for it. So for something like Legion (small fandom obsessed with long form plots and details, but unlike Trek, no name recognition) a reboot is the ultimate Achilles heel that shatters everything, a self-destruct button they kept hitting over and over and over until there was nothing at all left.

E. E. Smith’s Lensman Novels

The Lensman series is like Gil Evans’s jazz: it’s your grandparents’ favorite thing that you’ve never heard of.

I mean, have you ever wondered exactly what scifi fandom talked about before the rise of the major core texts and cultural objects (Star Trek, Asimov, etc)? Well, it was this. Lensmen was the subject of fanfiction mailed in manilla envelopes during the 30s, 40s, and 50s (some of which are still around). If you’re from Boston, you might recognize that the two biggest and oldest scifi cons there going back to the 1940s, Boskone (Boscon, get it?) and Arisia, are references to the Lensman series. This series not only created space opera as we know it, but contributed two of the biggest visuals in scifi, the interstellar police drawn from different alien species, and space marines in power armor.

My favorite sign of how big this series was and how fans responded to it, was a great wedding held at Worldcon that duplicated Kimball Kinnison and Clarissa’s wedding on Klovia. This is adorable:

The basic story is pure good vs. evil: galactic civilization faces a crime and piracy wave of unprecedented proportions from technologically advanced pirates (the memory of Prohibition, where criminals had superior firearms and faster cars than the cops, was strong by the mid-1930s). A young officer, Kimball Kinnison (who speaks in a Stan Lee esque style of dialogue known as “mid-century American wiseass”), graduates the academy and is granted a Lens, an object from an ancient mystery civilization, who’s true purpose is unknown.

Lensman Kinnison discovers that the “crime wave” is actually a hostile invasion and assault by a totally alien culture that is based on hierarchy, intolerant of failure, and at the highest level, is ruled by horrifying nightmare things that breathe freezing poison gases. Along the way, he picks up allies, like van Buskirk, a variant human space marine from a heavy gravity planet who can do a standing jump of 20 feet in full space armor, Worsel, a telepathic dragon warrior scientist with the technical improvisation skills of MacGyver (who reads like the most sadistically minmaxed munchkinized RPG character of all time), and Nandreck, a psychologist from a Pluto-like planet of selfish cowards.

The scale of the conflict starts small, just skirmishes with pirates, but explodes to near apocalyptic dimensions. This series has space battles with millions of starships emerging from hyperspacial tubes to attack the ultragood Arisians, homeworld of the first intelligent race in the cosmos. By the end of the fourth book, there are mind battles where the reflected and parried mental beams leave hundreds of innocent bystanders dead. In the meantime we get evil Black Lensmen, the Hell Hole in Space, and superweapons like the Negasphere and the Sunbeam, where an entire solar system was turned into a vacuum tube.

It’s not hard to understand why Lensmen faded in importance. While the alien Lensmen had lively psychologies, Lensman Kimball Kinnison was not an interesting person, and that’s a problem when scifi starts to become more about characterization. The Lensman books, with their love of police and their sexism (it is an explicit plot point that the Lens is incompatible with female minds – in canon there are no female Lensmen) led to it being judged harshly by the New Wave writers of the 1960s, who viewed it all as borderline fascist military-scifi establishment hokum, and the reputation of the series never recovered from the spirit of that decade.

Prisoner of Zenda

Prisoner of Zenda is a novel about a roguish con-man who visits a postage-stamp, charmingly picturesque Central European kingdom with storybook castles, where he finds he looks just like the local king and is forced to pose as him in palace intrigues. It’s a swashbuckling story about mistaken identity, swordfighting, and intrigue, one part swashbuckler and one part dark political thriller.

The popularity of this book predates organized fandom as we know it, so I wonder if “fandom” is even the right word to use. All the same, it inspired fanatical dedication from readers. There was such a popular hunger for it that an entire library could be filled with nothing but rip-offs of Prisoner of Zenda. If you have a favorite writer who was active between 1900-1950, I guarantee he probably wrote at least one Prisoner of Zenda rip-off (which is nearly always the least-read book in his oeuvre). The only novel in the 20th Century that inspired more imitators was Sherlock Holmes. Robert Heinlein and Edmond “Planet Smasher” Hamilton wrote scifi updates of Prisoner of Zenda. Doctor Who lifted the plot wholesale for the Tom Baker era episode, “Androids of Tara,” Futurama did this exact plot too, and even Marvel Comics has its own copy of Ruritania, Doctor Doom’s Kingdom of Latveria. Even as late as the 1980s, every kids’ cartoon did a “Prisoner of Zenda” episode, one of the stock plots alongside “everyone gets hit by a shrink ray” and the Christmas Carol episode.

Prisoner of Zenda imitators were so numerous, that they even have their own Library of Congress sub-heading, of “Ruritanian Romance.”

One major reason that Prisoner of Zenda fandom died off is that, between World War I and World War II, there was a brutal lack of sympathy for anything that seemed slightly German, and it seems the incredibly Central European Prisoner of Zenda was a casualty of this. Far and away, the largest immigrant group in the United States through the entire 19th Century were Germans, who were more numerous than Irish or Italians. There were entire cities in the Midwest that were two-thirds German-born or German-descent, who met in Biergartens and German community centers that now no longer exist.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a lot about how the German-American world he grew up in vanished because of the prejudice of the World Wars, and that disappearance was so extensive that it was retroactive, like someone did a DC comic-style continuity reboot where it all never happened: Germans, despite being the largest immigrant group in US history, are left out of the immigrant story. The “Little Bohemias” and “Little Berlins” that were once everywhere no longer exist. There is no holiday dedicated to people of German ancestry in the US, the way the Irish have St. Patrick’s Day or Italians have Columbus Day (there is Von Steuben’s Day, dedicated to a general who fought with George Washington, but it’s a strictly Midwest thing most people outside the region have never heard of, like Sweetest Day). If you’re reading this and you’re an academic, and you’re not sure what to do your dissertation on, try writing about the German-American immigrant world of the 19th and 20th Centuries, because it’s a criminally under-researched topic.

A. Merritt

Pop quiz: who was the most popular and influential fantasy author during the 1930s and 40s?

If you answered Tolkien or Robert E. Howard, you’re wrong - it was actually Abraham Merritt. He was the most popular writer of his age of the kind of fiction he did, and he’s since been mostly forgotten. Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has said that A. Merritt was his favorite fantasy and horror novelist.

Why did A. Merritt and his fandom go away, when at one point, he was THE fantasy author? Well, obviously one big answer was the 1960s counterculture, which brought different writers like Tolkien and Lovecraft to the forefront (by modern standards Lovecraft isn’t a fantasy author, but he was produced by the same early century genre-fluid effluvium that produced Merritt and the rest). The other answer is that A. Merritt was so totally a product of the weird occult speculation of his age that it’s hard to even imagine him clicking with audiences in other eras. His work is based on fringe weirdness that appealed to early 20th Century spiritualism and made sense at the time: reincarnation, racial memory, an obsession with lost race stories and the stone age, and weirdness like the 1920s belief that the Polar Arctic is the ancestral home of the Caucasian race. In other words, it’s impossible to explain Merritt without a ton of sentences that start with “well, people in the 1920s thought that...” That’s not a good sign when it comes to his universality.

That’s it for now. Do you have any suggestions on a dead fandom, or do you keep one of these “dead” fandoms alive in your heart?

#fandom history #lensman #robotech #prisoner of zenda #mists of avalon

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nekosayuri · 6 years

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Family: Uchiha.

I recreated this family first, ages ago, pretty much when Konoha was still empty. <3 it’s probably no surprise if you know me even a little (I mean, I use them in my previews too nowadays xD that’s how much I love them.)

I first created Sasuke and Sayuri in Belladonna Cove for the heck of it, but then I got really attached, especially to their kids. Back then (2014ish), my ACOH story was also not all that developed past their 20s, but playing their sims inspired me a lot, and the kids they had became their kids in my story too (well, only the first three, cause come on, eight kids?!) I literally let their sims guide my writing. <3

Since I wrote little Sim/story profiles for them, I posted them separately first, but here’s the all at once post. :D

This is like the first time I ever do this, but I really wanted to try, so sorry if I’m confusing!

Uchiha Sayuri, previously Amamiya, is first, cause why not? She’s one of the main OCs. Self insert originally, too, so I’m a little biased. :D

Sayuri never really fit into the Ninja world. Something about the occupation always rubbed her the wrong way. She knew she was born in a Ninja village to a Ninja family, but was that really all there was? Was her destiny really to fight and kill? She refused that. It took many years, and some friends in high places, but with effort and stubbornness, Sayuri got people to follow her dream and make it a reality: a village where kids could be kids, without the pressure of the Ninja world on their shoulders, where they have a choice and can make their own way. A place where she would want her own kids to grow up.

Nowadays, Sayuri is the head of the Diplomacy department of Konoha’s government. A skilled negotiator who is not afraid to get in the thick of it, she’s solved many situations that could have ended far worse. She gets personally involved, though, which takes its toll. But she can’t help it– this is how she is. She wouldn’t be so good at it otherwise.

Sayuri is a family sim with a pleasure secondary. Her zodiac is Cancer, with a personality of 5/4/5/5/6. She’s relatively in-the-middle there for someone as revolutionary as her, but despite being kinda shy, she’s also VERY stubborn and willing to fight for her dreams/goals/whatever.

Traits: Family oriented, nurturing, over-emotional, bookworm, and terrible cook.

Turn ons: black hair, logical (may have been influenced a little over the years she was married to Sasuke… xD). Turn offs: bad at cooking that should be a turn off, ugh! Right now, it’s robots, because there’s no such thing, yet! I can never find turn offs that actually make sense.

Sasuke is next, this is my attempt at explaining what he is like in my story?

Sasuke spent 10 years living a life that wasn’t his, pursuing a goal that was forced on him by his brother, Itachi. When he came out on the other side, he couldn’t recognise himself anymore– not the person he was before the whole thing started, not the person he had become over the years. He had nothing left but a hollowness inside that scared him. But he was wrong, and there were people who were there to show him that. As soon as he saw in himself something good that could become bigger, he grabbed it with both of his hands and never let go.

Nowadays, he’s the Head of Shield, a team of elite ninja, chosen only by him and the Hokage. They’re the very best for a reason. Each and every one of them are experts in their field and they normally go on the most dangerous missions, and come back alive. That must say something! Due to his position, Sasuke also has a seat on the council. Though he clearly cares about his position and the village itself, Sasuke would prefer to stay out of harm’s way most of the time… so he can come back home to his family at the end of the day.

Random facts: the name ‘Shield’ was chosen by the Hokage, Naruto, at the time. It’s inspired by a word he heard while visiting the Cloud village. Also, ‘dangerous’ isn’t the same as it used to be 10-20 years ago.

Sasuke is a family sim, too, with a knowledge secondary. His zodiac is Leo, with a personality of 7/4/8/3/5 (mostly head-canon, really). He’s a bit of a clean freak and his active personality is literally his core.

Traits: Athletic, disciplined, brave (a condition for his job), social disaster, natural cook.

Turn ons: fitness, creative. Turn offs: fat.

Kaito is the eldest and the only boy in the family besides Sasuke. I admit I was delighted their first kid was a boy. :D

Kaito is a genius. Everybody knows that. He’s “perfect” in every way (ask his fangirls), and so he should be, he’s an Uchiha after all. Kaito sees it a different way though, he just wants to be left alone, so he can read his books and do his ninja training and hang out with his friends and figure himself out. Everybody is in such a hurry to put him on a pedestal...

Kaito is a teenager (15 story-time), so he has only one aspiration, knowledge. His zodiac is Aries, with a personality of 5/4/7/3/7. He was born in game and everything was copied over, although originally I had Sayuri encourage him to be nicer, so that was copied over as well. He’s hell of a lot like Sasuke, personality wise, but his attitude towards people is more like Sayuri’s. xD

Traits: Genius, brave (from Sasuke), terrible cook (from Sayuri). Teens in my game will have only three traits, get another one as YA, and last one as adults.

Turn ons: athletic, brown hair. Turn offs: jewellery.

Mikoto got her name from Sasuke’s mother, because she was born with her eyes (grey which is lighter than Sasuke’s.) It’s mostly not a thing to name your kids after your parents (with some clan exceptions), but meh.

Right from the start, there was one thing that stood out about Mikoto: her unending care for others. Even as a young child, she would take care of her friends and her little sister, watching over them as if she were their mother. She got more into art as she grew, and she loves painting. She doesn’t really know what she wants to do with her life, you know? She’s only 13 after all! She still has two years before she has to decide whether to go to Ninja school or the Academic one, and she’s going to take her time figuring it out.

Mikoto is a child in the sims, despite being 13 story-time (I kinda figure Teen stage starts at 15), so her aspiration is still to grow up. Her zodiac is Aquarius, with a personality of 4/5/5/5/6. Again, born in game and everything was copied. She’s obviously a lot like Sayuri with the whole in-the-middle thing.

Traits: nurturing (from Sayuri), artistic.

Hikari was born in the middle of the night, when Sasuke and Sayuri caught a glimpse of a falling star just before Sayuri went into labor (that actually happened in my game, I’ll add a link to the picture when the archive actually works -_-). Anyway, I’m a bit of a cliche, so obviously she got her name from the stars lighting up the night sky. XD

Hikari is not like Kaito and Mikoto. She’s not unsure, she’s not confused. She knows exactly what she wants: to be a ninja, of course, so she can be as strong as her father, or even more! so what if she’s just 10 and has plenty of time to make up her mind?

Hikari’s aspiration is to grow up in the sims, since she’s still a child. Her zodiac is Cancer, with a personality of 5/3/8/4/5. She got her active trait from Sasuke and her shyness from Sayuri. :D born in game, copied faithfully as always.

Traits: Shy, athletic (from Sasuke).

Bonus: The cats!

From right (sitting cat) to left: Kuro, Kurona and Ryoma.

Sasuke found Kuro on a dark, rainy night when he was just a kitten. He never cared for animals all that much, but when their eyes met, he couldn’t just leave him be, either. Kuro had the kind of eyes that reminded him of his own, at the time-- aloof, independent, but also lonely and lost. So he took him in for the night. That was when he was 17. Needless to say, Kuro stayed. But Kuro came with his own dark past and his own troubles... he’s a ninja cat, after all!

Fun fact: Kuro means Black in Japanese. That’s how creative his name is! Sasuke’s idea.

It was again a dark, rainy night when… ok no, it was a sunny weekend day, when Sasuke and Sayuri were 21, that Kuro came running in frantically and begged (by meowing, a lot) for them to come with him. When they arrived at the destination, they found a pregnant white cat, but she seemed sick. They took her to the animal hospital, who decided to get her kittens out ASAP. Luckily, everybody survived. The kittens were given homes, and the pretty white cat, well… Kuro got attached to her, so Sasuke and Sayuri ended up taking her in, too. Need I mention she’s also a ninja cat?

Fun fact: Kurona was given her name because, well, there’s Kuro, so if we add na (supposedly, a short for nya, which is the sound cats make in Japanese), you get Kurona. It was Sasuke’s idea

Ryoma is their son. He was a part of a litter of four, but the other three were given away because there was just too much chaos at home and Sasuke couldn’t stand it. There was some whining and crying from the children, who were all old enough to understand what was happening, but what had to be done was done. For some odd reason, though, Sasuke decided to keep Ryoma... the hyper, wild kitten!

Funny fact: He got his name from a character in Prince of Tennis. Yep. No story reason there. XD (the other kittens were named Ryoga, Nana, and Kana. Two males, two females. :D)

A note on ninja cats for interested people: they’re not like normal cats. Their lifespan is much longer (closer to humans), even though their ability to breed is similar to normal cats– basically, they can breed as soon as normal cats, but they lose that ability the older they get (halfway through their life). As always, females sooner than males. Another thing is that they do understand the human language, and they can also talk! That said, both Kuro and Kurona escaped from their ninja village before they actually learned to talk, so neither of them can. They do understand the human language though, as they’re taught that sooner than to actually talk it. They can also read it, but not write.

#The sims 2 #ACOH intros

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realstarfarts · 6 years

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Hard Reset Redux

"Old school" is as much an industry platitude as "rogue-like" or "early access open world survival crafting MMO with photorealistic graphics made by a one-man team (in Unity)." But what does that even meme mean? I started playing PC games in the mid-'90s and experienced Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Unreal, and all the others when they were still the biggest of big deals. Shit, I still have a magazine with the legendary John Romero bitch ad, though I remain undecided about framing it. In terms of FPS, old school can mean lots of things to lots of people, but to me a few stick out: health and armor packs (no fuckin' regen!), secrets, limited narrative, fast gunplay, lots of gore, plenty of guns, and some cool things to look at. Apparently, Flying Wild Hog found a similar checklist and made sure to scream the list at their designers every single day at 8am.

Unfortunately, they're obsessed with a newer fashion of old school than most people prefer (citation: critics and user reviews, also my ass). Serious Sam, Painkiller, and Will Rock were not "le olde school" games, they were interpretations of old mechanics as a counter-trend to casualization conceits forced on developers who had to produce multiplatform games for children. Wolfenstein and Doom, as examples, did not rely on mini-arenas with spawned waves of enemies; they had coherent, progressive levels carefully built for fluid, consistent gameplay.

I make this point because Hard Reset plays like a scaled-down sci-fi version of the Serious Sam games: you walk into an area, the laser doors and terminals deactivate, multiple waves of enemies spawn in, you kill them, the doors and terminals reactivate, you move on. Between most of these sections you'll need to find and either activate or blow up a generator for a future laser door.

That's it.

That's the entire gameplay, and I didn't even water it down.

There are two weapons at your disposal, if you don't count the sword which was added with the Redux™. Why would I count the sword? Because using it will get you killed nearly every time.

The gun-y gun shoots like a gun, and can be upgraded to do more gun-like things, such as a grenade launcher (useless, since enemy hitboxes are pixel-perfect and 85% of the time the grenades will fly right through a gap and go into the fuck dimension) or a rocket launcher. A rocket launcher? That's a staple of the FPS genre. Surely, as a proud Olde School FPS™, Hard Reset must at least get that right!

Wrong.

This upgrade is the most anemic example of a rocket launcher I've seen since...ever? The damage is fine, as is the splash radius. The issue is the projectile's speed, which is somewhere between your grandmother driving home from the supermarket with a car full of eggs in her Buick and a legless child "walking" backwards through a minefield. All of the enemies here move fast, so you'll need to strafe fire to stay alive. ...but the majority of the spawned foes you'll face are the melee type who will follow you in close. Strafe fire + akbaring melee enemies + the slowest rocket speed ever = no fun.

The other weapon is a space plasma gun, which is super fun to use, but sadly pretty pointless against everything except the mob-type basic enemy. That is, until you unlock the rail gun upgrade, which is the only weapon Hard Reset at least gets right. My only complaint here is that it's mildly underpowered to what I feel it should be.

To cap it all off with a poophat, all the upgrades are linear, so don't even worry about having player choice at any point. Switching weapons is tedious as well. Whereas in a normal (ie, fun) game, you can press the button and directly get the weapon you need, here you'll need to first select the weapon and then select the fire mode. For example, I'm killing a few zombies with the sword (the only enemy safe to use the sword on), then a flying guy spawns in. I press F3 to switch to my plasma gun, but it's still on the mortar mode I was using last time I had it out. So now I have to press 5 to change over to the rail gun, which of course takes time because of the animation.

Fun!

Enemy variety is shit too. 95% of bad guys are actually bad bots, with the other 5% being zombies. The undead are, in keeping with the game's theme, the most fun thing to kill because they explode in showers of blood and body parts--but you'll rarely see them. Everything else is a robot, big or small; bosses aside, you'll have seen all of them by the end of the first level.

Fun fun!

Aesthetically, environments are top-tier, and I mean that with full conviction. I don't want to spend more time attacking lunatics for misusing terms (in this case cyberpunk, which the game is not), so I'll call the style something like hard sci-fi with a good deal of '40s diesel and retro-futurism tossed in. Ugh, labels are dumb.

I won't talk much about the aesthetics because the video should cover that, but it is important to point out that almost every zone overstays its welcome. I own Hard Reset on Twitch (through the very generous Prime service) and thus can't see my playtime, but I figure I spent about twelve hours beating the game and shooting the video. Even then, the base game's environments were tedious and used far too many of the same assets in each area. The DLC levels are a notable exception.

Music is shit. I have 147 tracks between the OST and ripped music, and it took all of my patience to find suitable songs for the video. If the style remained consistent, or was similar to "The Way to Haven" or "Smietnisko" the whole way through I would have loved it, but the overwhelming majority is shrill or generally obnoxious. Ymmv, but as my taste is superior I doubt it.

The proverbial elephant in my dickhole is Hard Reset Redux' use of simulated mouthbreathing and/or endless fapping. The screen is constantly shaking/moving and there is no option to disable this "feature." Googling reveals many people have the same problem while the developers refuse to respond to any and all complaints about the issue. I did my best to stabilize the footage I captured, but even then it looks rather shitty. I would have skipped playing the game or making a video entirely if I didn't like the aesthetics so much.

Lastly, Hard Reset's story is totally ass, told by ass actors talking through ass microphones about ass. Truthfully I have no idea what it was about, but I'll do my best to summarize:

Major Fletcher is an alcoholic/psychotic detective who really hates robots. His boss, a filthy woman, sends him to fight robots. He gets pretty mad while chasing down the Robot King, but his anger subsides when the Robot King teleports inside his head and becomes his new boss. This really pisses off the cops, who now try to kill him. Also the robots still try to kill him because apparently the Robot King was trying to help humans beat all the robots. Fletcher kills more robots, then a really big robot. The end I guess?

Hard Reset is a shit game.

But the aesthetics are amazing.

#hard reset #redux #aesthetics #showcase #starfarts #game #pc

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pixelgrotto · 7 years

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RIP Archie’s Sonic the Hedgehog comic (1992-2017) After 25 years and nearly 300 issues, Archie’s long-running Sonic the Hedgehog comic was officially cancelled earlier this week. The writing’s been on the wall for a while now, since the comic went on a forced hiatus several months ago and none of the creators were allowed to publicly discuss it due to ongoing negotiations between Archie and Sega. But this Thursday, the book’s final fate was declared, and it looks like the Freedom Fighters - who once announced that they could handle anything - couldn’t quite beat the threat of cancellation. A lot of people dunk on the Archie Sonic comic for being overly convoluted, going through some pretty low points or appealing primarily to furries, and all of these things are kinda true, except for maybe the furry one. But warts and all, Archie Sonic is a glorious beast of monstrously complex proportions. First of all, let the fact that Sonic holds the record for having the longest-running North American comic for a licensed character sink in. Seriously, this series ran from 1992 to 2017 and nearly reached 300 freaking issues. In a time when most comics from Marvel and DC can barely reach double digits before either being renumbered to generate a temporary boost in sales or flat-out cancelled, Sonic the Hedgehog kept chugging along, stealthily reinventing itself from its original status as a slapdash funny book to an ongoing saga that manifested lore so deep that it warranted the release of an entire encyclopedia to help people keep everything straight.

What’s even more interesting is that Archie Sonic became the one place where you could still see characters carried over from the DiC Saturday morning Sonic cartoon show, which was produced in 1993. The show, affectionately dubbed SatAM by everyone who watched it back in the day, frankly doesn’t hold up that well and is a good example of nostalgia goggles at work. It had an incredible theme song, though (SONIC! HE CAN REALLY MOVE! SONIC! HE’S GOT AN ATTITUDE! SONIC! HE’S THE FAAAASTEST THING ALIVE), and the show did do an admirable job of developing a backstory for a mascot who, at the time, had no characterization other than the fact that he was fast and collected rings. SatAM fixed this by putting Sonic in the surprisingly dark world of Mobius, a place ruled by Dr. Robotnik, a dictator who had “roboticized” the population by turning them into droids. It also gave the hedgepig a variety of characters to play off of, like Princess Sally, Antoine the cowardly French fox, Bunnie the half-roboticized rabbit and Rotor the walrus. Along with Tails, this lot was collectively referred to as the Knothole Freedom Fighters. Archie Sonic got its start telling stories with the Freedom Fighters while they were still on air, and even after the show was cancelled, the comic continued using them, essentially turning itself into season three of the cartoon. As the decades passed, the SatAM characters and story threads evolved and changed in wondrously unexpected ways - Sonic and Sally fell in love, the original Dr. Robotnik was killed and replaced with a robotic version of himself from an alternate dimension, Bunnie and Antoine got married and Mobius was revealed to be a future version of Earth that was attacked by the Xorda, aliens who had unleashed gene bombs on the planet, mutating the wildlife into anthropomorphic animals. (This was my goddamn favorite batshit crazy bit of Sonic comic lore ever.) Furthermore, the comic increasingly began introducing more elements from the actual Sonic video games, which had finally developed deeper stories of their own thanks to the advancement of technology. So you had stuff like Sonic and the Freedom Fighters teaming up to fight Perfect Chaos and meeting Silver the Hedgehog and Blaze the Cat. It was an unusual, unique combination of Western and Eastern concepts melding together in one pictorial arena, and it made Archie Sonic feel special.

Speaking of the games, the book was also special because it damn well carried Sonic’s presence in North America during the years when the blue guy wasn’t starring in many video games (the Sega Saturn era) and couldn’t star in any decent video games (the Sonic ‘06 era). Even when Sega was releasing shovelware that damaged the brand, Archie Sonic kept pumping out issues, and its sheer determination to keep going won it legions of dedicated fans. Many of these people, including myself, got stuck on the comic at a young age and stayed long-term. I personally started picking up issues in 1994 or 1995, so basically only three or so years after the book was out. I think I was seven years old. A few years later, I got a subscription and had the comic delivered to my mailbox every month. (I still remember my first issue - it was number 41, when Sonic, Sally and that douchebag skunk Geoffrey St. John went to the Zone of Silence to rescue King Acorn.) The subscription continued until I was in college, and only ended around my junior year, when I forgot to renew it because I was too busy applying to go abroad after graduation.

In short, I subscribed to a periodical about a damn blue hedgehog for a large majority of my life. Even when I stopped regularly reading around issue 180, I always kept abreast of the book’s developments (like that crossover with MEGAMAN!) and told myself that I’d eventually catch up on the stories I missed, likely in the excellent Sonic Select and Sonic Archives trade paperbacks that Archie was publishing. And there were tons of others like me. The Archie Sonic community is such a vibrant one, filled with 90s kids who grew up on this book and even older folks like the crazy Dan Drazen, a 60-something librarian who wrote the most detailed (and overly picky) online reviews of every issue. Many of these fans went on to work for the comic at one point or another, like the incredible Dawn Best and fan favorite Ian Flynn, who swooped in as a writer in the late 2000s and saved the book when it was suffering from a spell of plodding stories. For a lot of us, Archie Sonic was the preferred Sonic canon, and we got pissed when Sega pulled awful jump the shark moments outta their butts - like having Sonic hook up with human princesses in his broken 2006 game - when there was a wealth of solid lore in this weird little comic coming out in America that they always seemed content to ignore.

In fact, the only time Sega really paid close attention to the book was when Ken Penders launched a lawsuit against it, which may have been a contributor to its eventual cancellation. People better than me have already scripted lengthy writeups about Mr. Penders, and I encourage you to read this extremely in-depth take on the whole fiasco, which is a bizarre tale of copyright arguments and delusions of grandeur worthy of any John Grisham novel. But in a nutshell, Ken was a former writer who helped guide Archie Sonic away from simple gag strips and into the realm of full-on adventure tales. His control over the book was major until he was fired, and a few years later, he went on a vehement quest to prove that he owned all characters he had created while working for Archie, including series mainstays like Julie-Su, Knuckles the Echidna’s girlfriend. He ended up suing Archie multiple times and won on legal loopholes, which prompted him to start attacking the book’s current team while declaring that a buttload of barely-related story concepts were his. He also tried suing Sega when Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood came out, claiming that the enemies in the game were too similar to ones he had whipped up. Archie eventually had to come up with a plot device to kill off (trap in another dimension, really) all of the characters he had created during his tenure, and eventually they instituted a full reboot to wipe continuity clean and remove all traces of the lawsuit from history. Unfortunately, the legal issues did some pretty heavy damage to Archie’s relationship with Sega, who were reportedly pissed that the American comic company had let things get so screwed up. And I don’t blame them. To the Sonic fan community, Ken Penders is largely loathed as a megalomaniac who sabotaged a long-running comic for personal gain. But he doesn’t deserve all of the blame, and he did put out some good stories in the day before going bonkers. Archie’s also at fault, both due to their not-so-great freelancer deals as well as their incompetence at handling lawsuits. (At one point the company even fired their entire legal team and hired new attorneys, yeesh.) In recent years, Archie also seems to be terrible at handling their finances, even though they’re currently spearheading Riverdale, a successful show on the CW that’s made all of their high school characters into hot, emo Millennials. (I call it the “Archie Sex Show” in my head.) I’ve heard rumors that company management wants to streamline their output to ONLY focus on Riverdale-related stuff, and seeing as how the Ken Penders business was a tremendous waste of time that ripped some large holes in their relationship with Sega, it only makes sense that both companies would decide to part ways. So where do we go from here? Well, it was suddenly announced today that IDW Publishing would be the ones picking up the Sonic license for a relaunch of the book in 2018. IDW’s a fit place for Sonic, since they currently publish the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles…which Archie once owned the license for. (Funny how these things go in circles, eh?) Unfortunately, I have a feeling that the current arc that was going on in the Archie books - a charming retelling of the Sonic CD story - is going to go unfinished, and I’m also fearful that we’ll be saying goodbye to the DiC Freedom Fighters. I’d LOVE to be proven wrong, and it would warm my heart to see Princess Sally, Bunnie Rabbot, Antoine, Rotor and Nicole survive a change in publishers. But since Sega’s never “officially” acknowledged those characters in a game (except for Sonic Spinball, which was made by an American studio and doesn’t really count) they’re likely going to be classified as expendable cannon fodder that are no longer relevant. There is some hope, though. Perhaps a miracle will occur and IDW will have the good sense to re-hire guys like Ian Flynn or maintain some semblance of the continuity that an entire generation knows and loves. Until the day we know for sure arrives, I’ll just have to re-read my old issues, revel in the glory of covers drawn by SPAZ, laugh at insane crossovers like the time Sonic met Spawn, and remember an era when a hedgehog with attitude and his Knothole friends kicked Dr. Robotnik’s butt and brought me twenty plus years of wonderful adventures. For Mobius! For freedom!

The header image of the Archie Sonic cast was drawn by darkspeeds and found on Deviantart. The cover images are just a few of my favorites from the days when I was subscribed to the book, and were taken from Comic Vine and Cover Browser.

#pixel grotto #musings #video games #sonic the hedgehog #sonic #archie #archie sonic

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siodymph · 7 years

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Disney Femslash Day 5

For today’s prompt “cuddling”, I decided to write about Honey Lemon and Gogo calming down after an intense mission with the Big Hero 6. Enjoy!

(And just a quick reminder, I am still taking requests for this fan week! Till July 12th! I’ve already gotten a few and will begin publishing them for Day 7’s prompt “Free Day!”. So If you’ve made a request you can expect to see those soon!)

You can read this story under the cut or over on my AO3!

word count: 1503

Every part of Gogo’s body felt sore. Parts she didn’t even know she could strain felt bruised. But at least San Fransokyo was safe once again.

Today some weirdo came into the city with unheard tech he’d reverse engineered himself. Claimed he found it on a deserted volcanic island where a super villain lived years ago. He tried to use his giant robots and energetic prison fields to force everyone in the city into submission. And like every threat that came to town the Big Hero 6 came out of hiding to put an end to him and his takeover.

But today’s fight had been much harder than any they’d had in a while. It’d thrown the team off their game, especially Gogo, who’d gotten used to winning fights so easy. A cold slap in the face for the team, the reminder that even thought they were awesome together, they still weren’t the smartest out in the field and they didn’t have the absolute best tech by default.

In the end they had saved the day. But it came at a price in collateral damage, hurt bodies, as well as hurt egos.

Remembering the fight now still made her want to grind her teeth. They’d all gotten sloppy, herself included. And when the colossal omnidroids came crashing into the city none of them had been fully prepared. Learning intelligence that would observe a threat around them and simultaneously calculate a sure-fire way to illuminate said threat. They were created to be unstoppable. Gogo had to admit that while their design was a bit outdated the concept behind them was impressive. It just wasn’t that admirable when it was being used to take-over the city and destroy everyone.

At one point during the fight, Gogo thought she finally found a weak spot on the indestructible things. Directly underneath tem where they couldn’t shoot. But them the omnidroid had buckled its legs to crush her into a pulp. If her girlfriend hadn’t been there to make one of her instant-barrier-bubbles she would have been crushed.

And that thought did not sit easily with Gogo. She’d narrowly escaped danger many times. But today was probably the first times she literally had a brush with death. She could have actually died.

Eventually the team had found the real weak spot on the omnidroids. With Baymax 2.0 acting as a shield, Wasabi was able to cut off the head of the robot and destroy the thing from the inside out. Once all the robots had been destroyed and the wack-job caught and handed over to the police, the city began to put itself back together. The team retreated back to Fred’s place to lick their wounds and recover. Also to go into temporary hiding from the authorities for all the collateral damage done to the water-front district of San Fransokyo.

Gogo and Honey Lemon had taken over one of the guest suites, completely claimed it as their own for the day. First thing Gogo had done was use the top-of-the-line bath tub to ice her shoulders, shins and knees which had felt like they were burning after their mission. It was an old practice she’d taken up back when she did track and field in high school. She let the icy waters prick at her skin and soothed her muscles. And tried to regulate her breathing. Just in and out, a constant repetitive motion. By the time she was done, she felt much less tense and hurt then first stepping into the mansion. But standing still for so long also let the exhaustion she’d tried to ignore before really kick in. And as she stepped out of the bathroom, the only thing left on her mind was diving face first into one of Fred’s ridiculous, million-dollar beds and passing out for a few years.

Honey Lemon must have been thinking along the same lines because when Gogo stepped out of the bathroom she saw her girlfriend bundled up in a nest of quilts and pillows. Both her wrists were wrapped tightly, she’d sprained both of them today when a robot had shot at her while she tried to make her chem-balls. And her whole body seemed worn as she sank into the luxury bed.

Gogo crawled up onto the bed and settled behind her. “You ok?” She asked, reaching her arms around the two of them but not hugging her quiet yet.

Sometimes her girlfriend preferred to be the big soon, but seeing how her hands were in bandages Gogo didn’t want her to hurt herself on accident. But Honey Lemon didn’t move to stop her so Gogo took that as an ok sign and hugged her. Trying to be careful of all the scrapes and bruises she knew were probably all over Honey too. She didn’t say anything. But Gogo knew she was still awake, her eyes had followed her when she’d stepped into bed. Plus her breathing still hadn’t calmed down to something more cathartic.

She tried again, trying to gently nudge her girlfriend. “Honey? Babe, you alright?”

Honey took a deep breath that almost shook Gogo’s arms off her. But then she finally answered quietly. “Mmhmm. You ice your legs?”

“Yeah, feels a lot better now.” Gogo tapped her still icy feet against Honey’s but she had no reaction. She simply pressed her feet that had been snuggled in blankets against hers, trying to warm them up. It reminded Gogo of how whenever her hands got cold Honey would kiss them and hold them between hers. And despite how cruddy she felt it made her smile. “What about you?”

“Not good. But I’ll be fine.”

Gogo thought that might be the end of it. But then she took another grounding breath and continued.

“It’s just… I can’t stop thinking about it. All the people who got hurt. They got hurt because of us Gogo. We made a promise to keep the city safe and we broke it today.”

“I know.” Gogo agreed. They were supposed to be better than this. But she the haunted tone in Honey Lemon’s voice scared her. Even if she was having similar thoughts Gogo hated to think of how much her girlfriend was hurting too.

“We’re supposed to handle these sorts of things. But today we couldn’t. We said we were heroes. But-“

“We’re still heroes, Honey.” Gogo cut in, trying to stop her girlfriend’s negative train of thought. “You’re a good person. You always will be.”

“Being good means nothing if everyone gets hurt because of you.” She replied bitterly.

“Did you reverse engineer an army of death-bots?”

“… No?” Honey Lemon said, sighing.

“Did you try to destroy the city and take over the world?”

“No… I know where you’re going with this Gogo. But it doesn’t excuse me not being able to do my job right. Did you see how many building got destroyed? All those people are out of work now! Not to mention the civilians who got hurt. And you!” Honey Lemon sounded more frantic as she spoke. Worry weighing down her voice. “…What if I hadn’t been there to save you?”

“But you were. You were there and you saved me.” Gogo said, trying not to think about the circumstance herself. She squeezed her girlfriend a little tighter. “I’m alright. I’m right here.”

“But I can’t stop thinking about it. That was far to close. We were all far to close to failing. Imagine if we hadn’t found their weak spot?”

“Then imagine if we hadn’t shown up at all.” Gogo snapped back, she was starting to lose some patience. “Imagine if we all sat back and expected someone else to do what we do? You can’t because that’s not the type of people we are, Honey. It’s not the type of person you are. When you see someone in trouble you do something about it. That’s what good people do, and that’s what we did.”

Gogo couldn’t help but see her words reflecting herself but she kept talking regardless, after pressing a light kiss to her girlfriend’s neck. “Look, I know today sucked. I hate myself for how it went down! But for now we’re all San Fransokyo has. And at the end of the day the only thing we can possibly give is our best. Our best effort, our best strategy. We can only give it our best shot. And you do Honey, every day we go to school or go to the streets you do your best.”

“Thank you. But can we stop talking about this for now. I kinda want to turn my brain off for a few hours.”

“Can do.” Gogo replied. Peppering a few more kisses onto Honey’s neck as they both settled down and tried to actually sleep. “I love you.”

“I love you too.” Honey Lemon said back, her voice heavy with sleep.

And hugging her tight, Gogo let her eyes shut and tried to stop the wild mess of thoughts still going through her head.

#disney femslash week #disney femslash #day 5 #gogo tomago/honey lemon #honey lemon/gogo tomago #cuddling

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briangroth27 · 7 years

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Power Rangers (2017): Go, Go See This!

This is my 100th original blog post! Fitting that it’s about the modernization of one of my favorite things from childhood!

I was seven when Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers premiered on FOX Kids in 1993 and I still vividly recall watching the pilot in my parents’ living room. As soon as that Saturday’s morning cartoons ended, I immediately watched my newly-recorded VHS copy of “Day of the Dumpster” again: the adventures of five “teenagers with attitude” had hooked me instantly! Along with Superman, Batman, the Flash, and TMNT, the Power Rangers were some of the first live-action superheroes I ever saw, and they definitely left an impression. The giant robots (based on dinosaurs, another childhood obsession thanks to the recent release of my still-favorite movie, Jurassic Park) and monsters blew my mind. Amy Jo Johnson was my first celebrity crush. I took Tae Kwan Do for a few years solely because of Power Rangers. I still have all the original action figures, the Morpher & Power Coins, the Blade Blaster, the Megazord, and the Sega Genesis video game. I fell out of the Ranger fandom after Zeo ended, but I’ve always fondly remembered the originals. I went into the new movie just hoping it would be fun and proud of its roots; things like the R-rated Power/Rangers by Adi Shankar are cool and all, but the real Power Rangers don’t need to be grim and gritty. I left the theater humming the theme song with a huge smile; this movie is great!

If you were a fan of the show, you’ll love the new movie for taking the characters deeper than the original series did and for the clear love it has for its source material. If you thought the show was too cheesy, you’ll probably appreciate the modernized themes and issues the teens face here. The movie makes you wait for most of the action, but the characters were fun and compelling enough (and the actors strong enough) that it never felt slow. When the action does arrive, it’s earned and very well-tied to the characters’ arcs! That connection, striking at the core of the Rangers mythos, also makes for an important message about teamwork and understanding.

I didn’t think the Rangers needed to have powers when not morphed, but it didn’t hurt the story to introduce that aspect either (though it does remove an easy path to drama if they’re attacked and can’t morph). The Putties were formidable even with super-strength, so not having powers would’ve led to the unmorphed Rangers’ immediate deaths in this film (a rare case of the movies scaling the villains up to meet the standards of the heroes, something I wish Superman films would do with everyone not named Zod). I thought the suits were a little over-designed and bulky, preferring the ones from 1995’s film, but I didn’t hate them. Similarly, I prefer the simplicity of the original zord and Megazord designs, but these are good too. Jason gets his Power Sword during the fight with the Putty Patrol, but I wish everyone else had gotten their Ranger-specific weapons too (Zack’s ax, Billy’s lance, Kim’s bow, and Trini’s daggers). The final showdown didn’t feel rushed; I totally felt that it was worth the wait. That the team visibly showed fear during the final battle also humanized them and helped sell the idea that they were still teens and not at all polished superheroes, despite their mighty powers.

Though the film looks a little washed out in terms of its color palette, there’s a great energy running through it. The effects were solid and felt realistic. I loved all the nods to the original series, such as the movie’s MacGuffin (the Zeo Crystal), what seemed like a shout-out to one of Rita’s best henchman (Scorpina), and an outstanding, iconic scene during the final battle. While there is a definite sequel teased in the mid-credits scene, this is a complete movie and I loved that it didn’t just feel like a stepping stone to bigger things.

Absolutely see this!

Full Spoilers…

My absolute favorite aspect of the movie was its focus on friendship and the need for the Rangers to harmonize in order for their powers to fully work. Like their Megazord, the Power Rangers are a team that’s stronger together than they are individually, and their literal inability to morph until after they’ve opened up and bonded with each other was portrayed perfectly. This was an excellent bridge between their character arcs (which felt like real things modern teens go through) and the superhero side of the story. There’s an important metaphor in your friends giving you the power to become a supercharged version of yourself capable of fighting your demons, and to paraphrase Zordon’s catchphrase from the series, that power protects these kids (and hopefully, the kids in the audience who see the value of connection and teamwork). Given the realistic diversity of this cast, it’s also easy to see this as a broader metaphor that the only way to survive and harness our true potential is to understand each other and work together.

Always believing the teens’ “attitude” meant good attitudes, I was initially skeptical when the trailer cast the Rangers-to-be as juvenile delinquents rather than the show’s socially conscious do-gooders, but the trailer was misleading. Jason (Dacre Montgomery), Kimberly (Naomi Scott), and Billy (RJ Cyler) meet in detention and Zack (Ludi Lin) skips school a lot, but none of them are terrible people needing epic redemption arcs. Instead, they’ve made mistakes (Jason’s in trouble for a prank gone very awry and Billy for an innocent experiment with explosives), but are still generally good kids.

Kimberly did the worst thing—forwarding a scandalous picture of one of her ex-friends—but it didn’t mar her character as much as I feared it would (I was spoiled on that plot point). She and the movie acknowledge this as the awful thing it is and I was impressed that she immediately shot down Jason’s well-intended suggestion that she forgive herself because there are “lots of pictures out there.” Instead, she correctly points out that it changes nothing about the picture she sent or the effect it had on her former friend. “Everyone else does it” doesn’t comfort her or excuse her actions and the fact that she knows how bad it was and has clearly grown softened this change from the show’s Kimberly for me. Scott’s Kim isn’t the valley girl Johnson was, but you can definitely see hints that she used to be a similar popular girl. Despite the darker backstory, Scott channels the corresponding original actor more than anyone else in the film, crafting a performance that’s her own but includes strong shades of Amy Jo Johnson (as well as a dash of Buffy season 1-Sarah Michelle Gellar). She probably has the most personal growth in the film and, along with Billy, was my favorite character.

Billy’s still the brains of the team and sets their ascent to Rangerhood into motion. Though Cyler brought a different energy to Billy than David Yost did, he was still most definitely “Billy.” While Scott channeled her predecessor most, Cyler channels the essence of the original character most. Everyone deserves to see themselves as heroes, so I loved that the film delivered an autistic hero in Billy, something I don’t think any other superhero movie or TV show has done yet. To the film’s credit, his being on the Spectrum is never portrayed as something to overcome or a handicap he’s “so brave” to live with; it’s merely a fact of his life and doesn’t hamper his superheroics in any way. Cyler brought an instant likability to Billy that pulled me into the Rangers’ circle and played perfectly against his hidden pain over to the loss of his father. Because he’s so personable, Billy’s death hit me hard (even though I didn’t think it’d be permanent) and the other Rangers’ reactions felt realistic and believable—though they’re only together a week, the team’s bonding feels real.

Jason’s prank causes property damage so he isn’t initially the Boy Scout from the show (though he is a jock), but I really liked that his movie arc takes that idea and shows us how he might’ve gotten there, molding him into the upstanding (and understanding) father figure he craves as he takes on leadership of the Power Rangers. While he does have a father (David Denman) in the movie, there’s clearly a distance between them. What exactly caused it isn’t revealed beyond his dad not understanding him and perhaps having goals and expectations Jason doesn’t want for himself, so Jason’s issues felt the most routine and well-trodden in terms of movies and TV. However, his relationship with the Rangers is more important than with his parents, so I was satisfied that Jason’s parental issues were resolved by Zordon standing in for his dad, particularly when Jason found out why the Rangers morphing was so important to Zordon's plans. I liked that even though he was chosen to be the leader by virtue of being the Red Ranger, he wasn’t a natural and it felt like he had to earn that position, both in Zordon’s eyes and in terms of motivating the team. As familiar as Jason’s issues were (perhaps they were delivered in shorthand precisely because they're so universal), Montgomery never came off as boring or bland and he was a good lead.

Zack was fun and I liked that his up-for-anything bravado (an update of show Zack’s charisma, party-guy attitude, and jokester persona) was a cover for the knowledge that he’d probably very soon lose his mom (Fiona Fu) to her illness. While he and Trini (Becky G) could’ve definitely used more screentime to match the arcs Jason, Kimberly, and Billy had, I think Zack gets enough for Lin to display the fears just under the surface of his cool guy façade. He also gets to have some serious fun joyriding in his zord and physicalizes the tension and pressure the team’s under to become perfect superheroes in a week when he comes to blows with Jason. So, even though he wasn’t as big a focus as he should’ve been, he contributed to the personality mix in unique ways. Trini absolutely needed more material—her and Zack’s reduced screentime compared to everyone else is my one big negative note about the film—but what she got worked well. MMPR’s Trini was soft-spoken and polite, which here translated into a disaffected loner persona, owing to being moved around a lot and her parents’ (Erica Cerra, Patrick Sabongui) inability to accept her as anything other than the normal daughter they wanted. I liked that they made her the first LGBTQ movie superhero (Mystique and Harley Quinn are bi in the comics, but the X-films and Suicide Squad haven’t had that onscreen yet) and didn’t mind that this amounted to one conversation: none of the other Rangers have love lives explored here either. While Trini is guarded for a good portion of the film and her limited screentime gives her the hardest time when it comes to connecting with the others, I thought Becky G pulled the arc off. I bought her reasons for not talking sooner and her growing friendship with/trust in the others, particularly Kimberly, felt genuine. Not giving Trini more to do was a missed opportunity for what could’ve been a fun sequence of her using her superpowers to evade her helicopter parents to go train. Speaking of her parents, it’s odd they didn’t hear her room being trashed by Rita. She could’ve written the damage off as (extremely localized) effects of Goldar’s attack later on, but someone should’ve heard walls being dented. That could’ve been an opportunity to employ a classic “superhero has to explain extraordinary problems to keep their identity secret” moment. Given Becky G’s sardonic delivery when questioned about where she’d been spending her nights, she could’ve told her parents exactly what happened, comically upending those superhero tropes.

One of the film’s biggest surprises was that Zordon (Bryan Cranston) has an actual arc, making him far more interesting than the show’s version. I’d heard there was a prologue focusing on his history with Rita Repulsa (Elizabeth Banks), but feared a focus on Zordon and Rita might overshadow the Rangers themselves. That prologue is only a couple of minutes long, but Zordon’s desire to have a physical body again was still unexpectedly touching. His tension with the Rangers over this point provided some good conflict I didn’t see coming. Alpha 5 (Bill Hader) was another big improvement over the original version, who I always found annoying. Banks was entirely over the top as Rita, but that’s exactly who Rita is supposed to be! Like the Joker, I really don’t have an interest in an entirely serious version of Rita Repulsa. In fact, Banks’ casting—along with the tag line “Go Go”—was the first thing that convinced me this wasn’t going to be the super-serious mess it could’ve been in our current “gritty is automatically superior” pop culture mindset. Rita’s full-on insane and she fit in without breaking the tone of the movie, even against the grounded Rangers. I never felt she wasn’t a deadly serious threat (she kills several Rangers in this movie alone!).

It was cool that Amy Jo Johnson and Jason David Frank (my favorite original Rangers) got cameos here! I wish David Yost, Austin St. John, and Walter Jones also appeared; maybe next time. Jason Narvy and Paul Schrier really should get cameos too; as the original series’ Bulk and Skull, they were the longest-running characters in the show’s history. With that in mind, I was surprised a new Bulk and Skull didn’t make an appearance here…Jason’s prank buddy Damo (Matt Shively), possibly feeling rejected after Jason finds new friends, and the “Bully of Detention” (Wesley MacInnes) could’ve easily been them.

The post-credit scene lays out the arrival of Tommy Oliver, the Green Ranger, though I wouldn’t have minded one more film with just the original five Rangers. With five more films planned, there’s more than enough time to explore the dynamic between these kids before throwing Tommy into the mix. Still, I’m definitely excited for the prospect of a traitor Ranger, especially with this film’s emphasis on the team’s need for unity and trust to morph. Someone who can get past their defenses, earn their trust, and then stab them in the back will be a perfect, devastating adversary!

I love that we’re getting something of a Ranger renaissance now (to say nothing of the fact that 24 years and several iterations later, the show is still going). Not only did this movie come out (along with a tie-in sequel comic), but there’s an excellent ongoing Boom! Studios comic book featuring the original team! It’s set right after MMPR’s “Green With Evil” saga and deals with the Rangers learning to trust Tommy, and whether or not he can trust himself to be free of Rita’s influence. There’s also a fun Kimberly-focused 6-issue miniseries (“Pink”), set after she left the team, a crossover with the Justice League, and a brand new ongoing series set right after “Day of the Dumpster,” Saban’s Go Go Power Rangers, coming soon! While it’s at the other end of the tonal spectrum, Adi Shankar is trying to put together a gritty, adult-focused animated series about Power Rangers too. And of course, Saban & Lionsgate are planning at least five more films in the rebooted series, one of which may be a prequel focusing on Zordon and Rita’s team. With the film taking a series of hits at the box office after a strong opening, I think these plans might be pared down, but I really hope we get to see these Rangers’ adventures continue. Rather than rushing to create an entire universe at once, focus on making an excellent sequel to this one’s already superb foundation and then build from there!

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squirenonny · 7 years

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7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14. Voltron and/or Mistborn.

[Autistic character ask meme]

Voltron (Keith, Pidge) first, then Mistborn (Steris, Vin, Spook) below the cut because this got really long haaaa these aren’t special interests at ALL

Voltron

7. what calms them down?

90% of the time Keith calms down with some kind of physical activity (i.e. training). Mostly stress builds up as a restless kind of energy, paired with frustration that very easily turns to anger, and fighting is just… the fastest way to get it out. Plus, training is totally acceptable for a paladin, so there’s that. Other forms of physical activity that Keith finds calming: hiking, cave diving, jogging, pacing. (The other 10% of the time, he calms down by being incredibly still–star-gazing with Shiro or Pidge are favorites, but he’ll also sometimes just…. lie on his bed and let his mind wander.)

Pidge calms down by getting tf away from people. Normally that means going to work on robots/computers/other random projects down in Green’s hangar (or in their bedroom back on Earth), but it could also mean reading, listening to music (or intergalactic transmissions), or watching a movie while wrapped in the biggest blanket they can find. I also like to think Pidge sketches a lot. Mostly technical drawings, but sometimes just random things. (I mean. Voltron with a flaming sword + ladybug + whatever else ended up on their notepad.)

8. Do they know they’re Autistic? if so when & how did they realise?

Pidge absolutely knows they’re autistic. They were diagnosed relatively young, probably in elementary school, after a teacher noticed Pidge’s social and communication difficulties and talked with the Holts. So in a way it feels like they’ve always known. Certainly as long as they’ve been aware of people outside their family, they’ve known they were different, and they had a word for that pretty early on.

Keith doesn’t know he’s autistic. Maybe he’s very early in the process of self-diagnosis: getting to know Pidge brings him past the ‘all I know about autism I learned from Hollywood’ stage, and he’s started to identify with certain autistic traits, but he hasn’t had more than the occasional flash of ‘maaaaybe I’m autistic??’ followed immediately by that kind of embarrassed denial so many of us get. (That, “Come on Keith, get over yourself, you’re just an introvert, stop trying to be a special snowflake.”) We’ll get there.

11. how do they prefer to communicate? are they non verbal/have periods of being non verbal? do they use sign language? do they talk? do they prefer text, etc?

Pidge tends to be hyperverbal and doesn’t usually have difficulty with spoken language, but they do find typing to be more efficient. They’re less likely to ramble that way, and they feel more in control of their words when they can edit them before they send the message.

Keith is partially nonverbal. He goes nonverbal when he’s stressed or angry, and when he’s tired/confused/otherwise emotional or low on spoons, words can be hard to come by or get mixed up. (Also, regulating tone is just. The worst.) He doesn’t have a preferred alternate form of communication, mostly because he’s never thought of it, secondarily because he’s self-conscious about communication issues and would rather just be the “brooding emo silent one” than call attention to it. (I do think that eventually he and the rest of Team Voltron would start to develop a kind of sign language–probably a mix of military handtalk, ASL, and Altean Sign Language, because I doubt anyone else in the castle is fluent in any form of sign language.)

12. Is there any senses they struggle with particularly? (hearing, taste, etc)

Pidge has texture sensitivities, especially in clothing and food, but otherwise their hearing is the most sensitive. Buzzing/beeping/humming/other “white noise” gets on their nerves VERY quickly. They use their noise-cancelling headphones a lot even when they aren’t listening to transmissions or music.

Keith is touch-averse. There are certain people/circumstances that don’t bother him (shoulder-touching, Shiro in general, honestly Hunk most of the time, because Hunk gives such tight hugs that it’s deep pressure, which is nice.) Glancing/incidental/light touches–especially when unexpected–are the main issue.

13. their special interests?

Pidge: computers/robots/programming, conspiracy theories, especially aliens. All sorts of creative things–mechanical projects, crafts, legos, building card towers?? Basically anything where they put stuff together to make other stuff. Pidge is a beast at McGuyvering shit.

[Keith’s SIs answered here]

14. are they open about being autistic or do they prefer to keep it to themselves?

Pidge is open about it with friends. It’s not something they would want classmates or acquaintances knowing about, but they tell the other paladins pretty quickly, and they have it in their About on Tumblr and Twitter.

Keith still isn’t even convinced he is autistic, so Pidge (and a little later, Shiro) are the only ones who know he’s even questioning it.

Mistborn

7. what calms them down?

Steris: The biggest way for her to calm down is to be in control in whatever way she can. That might mean making a schedule, organizing a room, or just researching something related to her current project. Being proactive in general helps–she doesn’t really unwind, per se. She can *be* relaxed, but taking a break for the purposes of stress-relief is counter-productive if she hasn’t already de-stressed to a certain level.

Vin: Physical activity, having a set routine or at least a stable set of rules she can live by. Tactile stims are also good–cuddling with Elend, petting TenSoon, letting her mistcloak drift around her. She finds the mists especially calming because it’s the right combination of control, activity, solitude, and low-level sensory stimulation.

Spook: Being in a social situation without necessarily being expected to interact is very relaxing–he likes to have people around, though for most of the series conversations/remembering social norms is more stressful than it is helpful. He like observing–observing his friends or keeping watch. There’s something soothing about looking out through the mists and listening to background noise (the things that aren’t important enough to focus on).

8. Do they know they’re Autistic? if so when & how did they realise?

Spook and Vin for sure no. I highly doubt the Final Empire has a concept of autism or… anything, really. I feel like Steris is aware that she’s neurodiverse, even if she doesn’t have the words for it (or the same words we do…) I guess it would be the equivalent of self-diagnosed. She realized growing up that she was different and sought out other people (or their writings) who had similar experiences. She’s identified where she struggles and developed coping mechanisms in the interest of control.

11. how do they prefer to communicate? are they non verbal/have periods of being non verbal? do they use sign language? do they talk? do they prefer text, etc?

Vin doesn’t have any specific communication issues as far as forms of communication. She is reluctant to share things about herself, and she struggles with code-switching (living on the streets vs. joining a crew vs. mingling with the nobility), and is cautious with her words when she doesn’t feel safe, but it’s not because of a specific difficulty with verbal communication.

Spook has occasional nonverbal episodes–which were much more pronounced when he had the added anxiety of only speaking Eastern Street Slang. He doesn’t pick up languages quickly, and he has a considerable amount of social anxiety centered on the way he talks, which provoked quite a few nonverbal episodes early on in his time with Kelsier’s crew. They diminished as he learned the language. Social anxiety plus his sensitive hearing (tin + autistic sensory issues = augh son your poor ears) means that I imagine Spook having a tendency toward sign language.

Steris, like Vin, doesn’t have specific problems with verbal communication, but she does find written communication to be more precise than spoken word. Speaking is more convenient, so it’s her default, but she very much enjoys writing letters.

12. Is there any senses they struggle with particularly? (hearing, taste, etc)

I don’t see Vin having any particular sensory issues. She’s pretty adaptable, so when she does have issues it’s because something’s new and she’s hyperaware of it–i.e. longer hair, formal gowns, ect. Mostly tactile issues when it’s anything.

Spook. (Spoooook.) Okay, full disclosure: blame Hero of Ages for this, but I headcanon Spook having a lot of sensory issues even before he snapped. He’s big on control and focus because he has to be. Tin is useless to him if he can’t learn to block things out because it’s so easy to push him into overload. And most of the time he’s fine. Unless he’s low on spoons–then things get iffy. Sound is particularly bad, and bright lights.

I think a lot of Steris’s sensory issues are food-related. Nothing is particularly bad, so she mostly just deals with sensory stuff, but she has strong preferences regarding taste and texture, so she likes to be in charge of the menu as much as possible.

13. their special interests?

Vin: Vin has been so focused on survival for so long that she doesn’t have special interests in a traditional sense, but she does get hyperfocused on things–learning the rules of her current surroundings, learning how to use metals, fighting, ect. She goes all-out and gets obsessed with things once she’s put her mind to learning them. The mysteries surrounding the mist spirit and the Well of Ascension were sort of SIs in their own right (though, again, partially born of necessity.)

Spook: people. He spends so much time observing that he tends to develop special interests for people or places. That slum down the block from the safehouse where he knows everyone’s name and who just had a baby and what the current biggest threats are. That noble family he’s supposed to be watching and their staff and their schedule. Vin was a special interest when she first arrived, and that flared into a crush briefly before the hyperfocus eased and their relationship became more natural.

Steris: Politics is the biggest. She knows everything because of long, intense study. Who’s who, the major rivalries and alliances, expectations and common missteps. How to say what she wants without saying it outright. This extends into history and law a little bit, but it’s very much focused on the interactions between the major Houses and other players.

14. are they open about being autistic or do they prefer to keep it to themselves?

Doesn’t really apply because I don’t think Scadrial really has a concept of autism yet (especially in the original trilogy era). Steris is pretty much “This is who I am, deal with it.”

#cfsbf #mistborn #voltron #autistic keith #autistic pidge #neurodiverse defenders of the universe #autistic headcanons #ask meme #actually autistic #ch: i'll find the truth; i'll never stop #ch: shut up and trust me #ch: homicidal hat trick #ch: pseudo religious vigilante freedom fighter #steris harms #(i can't believe she doesn't have a character tag??)#(for shame)

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imuskansameer · 4 years

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Defeating Used Activities: Why Incentives to Decrease Pre-Owned Gaming Are Awful

Gaming is one of the biggest hobbies and even careers in the world. People play games for fun or learning while others record videos concerning the games. In this short article, I will focus more on gaming itself and not so much the side of making gaming videos. Gamers can be found in many different ages, genders, religions, locations and shapes. The backgrounds of folks who are gamers make gaming very much more fun. 릴게임 손오공

Backgrounds of gamers can play a component in the sort of games that individuals play. There are all sorts of combinations for different categories associated with the kind of games and type of gamers. You should go through the game's website to obtain all the pertinent information just before buying.

There are lots of online platforms where you are able to buy games from such as for instance Steam or Humble Bundle. Those sites will give you the description, videos by the business, pictures, user and non-user tags, reviews, website, company and their social account(s). Be aware the game's website mightn't explain to you everything you need to know. As the absolute minimum, a gaming company will show a brief sales pitch description, little bit of pictures (5 at best), one or two videos by them and their social accounts. The absolute most they will provide is an insightful description, their social accounts, user reviews and videos by them.

In games that report a man strong and smart, he'll mostly likely be white, tall, thin, movie star looking and buff. You will rarely see him be a community, short, chubby, not buff, nerdy looking, while still being strong and smart. You see this even LESS for females. Some females in games will also be white, tall, thin and strong while showing skin like no tomorrow. You simply see THESE females in MMORPG games (Massively Multiplayer online Role Playing Game) though. RPG games are created for fantasy worlds where you mostly fight people and monsters. Needless to say the females'stats will undoubtedly be strong nevertheless they won't look strong.

Generally in most games, once they add an identity for you really to play they always add a white male first, then a white female, then a black male, and a black female. They don't really even really add folks who are mixes of races or in between. In regards to the black characters they simply add one shade of "black" or "African American" and don't assume all black person on the planet is that shade.

In games, nearly all the characters are usually thin and tall. You do not really see characters which are short and thin, tall and chubby, short and chubby, etc. There are certainly a lot of people who aren't thin and who aren't tall.

Then lastly, there's the mental message that goes with the gender, race, and body type. What do After all by the mental message? Some games send an indirect message about that character being strong and smart or something else. While for other games it can be a mental message either deliberately or not. For instance, in the game you play and you see a fraction female who's short, chubby, nerdy looking and her traits are to become a goof ball, naive, and dumb. It may send a mental message to you that people that look like her are just like her. They're not smart, they aren't thin, and are not tall. They did poorly in school, etc. etc. So you start thinking those activities centered on not merely seeing this because game over and over again, nevertheless when it happens in other games too.

The worst part is NONE of these specific things are true. Yes, some individuals aren't thin, tall, and maybe not that bright; however, not EVERYONE is similar to this! You do have short chubby minorities that are smart as all move out! You've all sorts of combinations of people who ARE smart! Needless to say, all these things about gender, race, body type, and messages aren't just in gaming; they're in movies, TV shows, ads, etc. What's interesting is that a few of the creators who make the games, movies, TV shows, ads, etc., are minorities themselves and they make up the populace of the earth. (Search "world population by race 2016" and click the initial three links if you do not believe me.)

Quick disclaimer: I AM NOT BASHING ANYONE! Yes, I was shouting that. This part of the article is telling you what I am aware, read, hear and experience in gaming.

If you do not trust in me go look at today's TV shows, movies, ads, and games. A present to look at permanently representation is Milo Murphy's Law. Two games to check out as a guide permanently representation are OverWatch and Atlas Reactor. Now in these fields it's gotten better for representation specifically gender, race and just now starting body type (specifically in this order). Some games even add robots and creatures as playable characters to avoid having issues with representation. This removes the situation of users wanting a personality to represent their actual or preferred gender, race, or body type because now there's an identity most users can agree on. All things considered, you can't please everyone.

Alright, since I ranted and got the bad stuff out from the way; let's enter into the nice elements of gaming! You've gamers as young as 36 months old and as old as 90+! Irrespective of your actual age, race, gender, religion, culture, or location gaming could be best for anyone. Gaming can not merely be fun, but beneficial and educational.

An advantage with gaming is it can benefit youth have more confidence in themselves and be more social. Should they play an on the web multiplayer game and speak with other players all over the world, this can help then get used to talking to others besides family and they gain confidence in what they're saying. They could go from an introvert to a cultural fanatic! It can occur fast or slowly. Even if it's not just a game but a place for gamers, artists, fashion designers, car enthusiast, etc. to chat; it will still make them become more social. Keep in mind though, typing to someone and then voice chatting to someone are two different experiences. Youth can be very social when typing but very shy when voice chatting.

This is one way I am. Before I was shy when talking to people I didn't know if it was online or offline, now I've be comfortable with it because I am aware the way to handle myself and have confidence in myself. But as it pertains to voice chatting online, I'm the quiet person on the chat. Counterproductive right! You might even forget I was in a call with you! Before when individuals at the lender said "Hi" I wouldn't say anything, now I really respond and say "Hi. How are you?" From then on I don't really expect to consult with them so I'll be quiet again lol. See what I am talking about? After socializing, in general, over time you obtain better at it and become less nervous and well informed in yourself.

Another benefit with gaming is team work. Sometimes in games the only way to win or accomplish a target is to work well with a number of players. Using games, players are allowed a task may be accomplished with only 1 player, but it could be harder until you do have more players than yourself. Other times certain tasks can't be accomplished with one player and need two or more. There are times you produce a group with friends and family or family in order to complete the goal. Other times you possibly can make friends with people you didn't know.

This really is where it could possibly get tricky. If it's a game where you can make a group that's invite only, you'd just invite friends and family or family. You are able to strategize with them, you'd be more comfortable talking together, and you'll all agree to work together. If it is a game where there's no group system but you can still use others, aka free for fall, and you can talk to them there might still be described as a goal that could only be completed with multiple players. Have you got to play with other players you've never talked to before if your family and friends can't join you and you actually want to complete this goal?

This isn't a poor thing though! This is where you not merely be much more social however, you learn to assist other players you've never met before. If you always play together with your family and friends you both already understand how to interact, how the other thinks, etc. But if it's someone you've never met it can be quite a little difficult. Me and my cousin spent my youth doing everything together without really having any friends, maybe colleagues and associates but certainly not friends. So we were very used to knowing what the other wanted or how they played etc. But whenever we actually got two friends, it had been extremely tough to acknowledge many things. When you play and work with others now it will undoubtedly be easier later. Me and my cousin have improved our skills to work well with others.

Another benefit is patience which ties in with team building and socializing. After all, to be able to progress at something you not just keep carrying it out however you have to have patience while doing it. There are lots of times in games where you have to wait. The same as reading is in everything, you need to have patience for everything. In games you always have to attend for something. You have to have patience for finding something, something in order to complete cooking, something in order to complete dying, your friends to come back from going afk (Away From Keyboard), the next wave of monsters in the future, the following level to open, etc. etc. I had to have patience when writing this article! So gaming might help you've more patience in gaming and everyday life.

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justafineblog-blog · 6 years

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My Essay on Genndy Tartakovsky

Genndy Tartakovsky

Genndy Tartakovsky is an animator, storyboard artist, producer, director and screenwriter, he is most famous for the cartoon network series’ Dexter's Laboratory, Samurai Jack and Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2003). I grew up on Tartakovsky’s work without even knowing it, I only recently found out that this is the man who partially inspired me throughout my childhood.

One of my favourite Tartakovsky projects is Dexter’s Laboratory, Known for its simple style and, in my opinion, it’s very interesting characters, Dexter’s Laboratory tells the classic story of a mad scientist constantly trying to invent new creations and most of the time failing but this time it comes with a twist, the scientist is very young boy, he’s supposedly around 8 years old, interestingly Dexter’s Russian accent is a reference to Genndy himself as when he was a young boy he had a very harsh Russian accent.

In terms of style and feel, Dexter’s Laboratory was heavily inspired by the classic cartoons of the late 1940s and 1950s. the character designs of Dexter and his supporting cast were very from an approximation of actual human anatomy, a huge difference from what people were used to at the time, the design was quiet close to the aesthetic used by Hanna-Barbera cartoons combined with the fact that the each episode was split in to 7 minute segments telling a new story each segment and because of this the show had to rely on slapstick violence and gags similar to tom and jerry and the looney tunes actually . It carried this out incredibly well.

For example, the episode ‘The big cheese’ told us a story where Dexter wanted to learn how to speak French but after something wrong in his attempt Dexter woke up only being able to say one thing “Omelette du fromage.” The episode then takes us through Dexter’s whole day which leads to some typically absurd moments, you would think after a while this gag would get old but somehow it managed to stay fresh all throughout the episode, Of course, the thing that really upset Dexter was the fact that he couldn’t get in to his voice activated computer as the password was ‘Star Wars’ and Dexter’s attempts to access the computer resulted in a huge explosion. This combination of effective storytelling, classic humour was exactly the type of thing Dexter Laboratory is still remembered for to this day.

Another very famous animated series’ that Tartakovsky had a part to play in was Power Puff Girls, this show was amazing, I would call this show one of favourite animated series of all time, the brilliantly vibrant colours, the fantastic, gorgeous, simplistic style of all the characters and the classic archetypes used, it all culminates in the perfect kids show.

I especially loved the designs of the villains, they were all so obviously inspired by classic Saturday morning cartoon villains and the characterisations echo this.

The episodes that Tartakovsky directed were complex and added a lot more to the characters, for example the episode ‘Mr. Mojo Rising’ in which Mo Jo Jo Jo captures the professor in hopes to lure the Power Puffs in to a trap, in this episode Mo Jo discovers that he was the one that caused the accident that created The Power Puff Girls, his greatest enemies, but the interesting thing about this episode is that Mo Jo manages to defeat the girls. This episode adds so much to the character of Mo Jo Jo by making him find out the truth, and the fact that he defeats the girls means that Tarkovsky was tired of seeing the heroes win and in turn this adds a fresh new take in the story of good vs evil.

Genndy once said “For me, animation is the caricature of life. It's something that we create, from the ground up” I think that that this is a beautiful statement and truly shows the real passion behind every one of Tarkovskys projects, he fully delves in to all of his projects because he genuinely loves his work.

When Tartakovsky was done with Dexter’s Laboratory and Power Puff Girls he decided to go with something much different and introduced us to the ultra-stylized action series that would reinvigorate Tartakovsky’s career and proof to the world that he could truly do anything ‘Samurai Jack’ but that wasn’t why the animator decided to do this new style, the reason that Samurai Jack was so cinematic and far from his original style was so that he didn’t want to do dialog, he was clearly burned out after the various comedy’s was known for.

Tartakovsky would never take on two projects at once, he is of the believe that you cant fully put yourself in to two at once “Whenever you're doing two things at once, you're compromising them both” I completely agree with this statement, you should allows focus on one project before moving on to the next, if you complete a project and receive criticism you can work on that in your next project but if you work on two projects at a time you wont be able to consider critiques.

I've always loved Samurai Jack and Dexter's Laboratory, but I especially loved his version of Star Wars: The Clone Wars due to his incredible style and all the interesting ways he showed the conflict within the characters using colours and style, for example in the scene where Anakin Skywalker fights the assassin Assajj Ventress, with each clash of their sabres, a flash of some of Anakin's masters shows an expression of despair and disappointment.

Not only was he skilled with stylistic animation but he is also skilled in script writing and foreshadowing events, at one point during the aforementioned duel Assajj states to Anakin “your fall will be my ascension to the Sith”, it turns out that her literal fall was another step on his journey to become the dark lord Darth Vader, If this was unclear to the casual watcher, it was made obvious by the mood, lighting, music, and visuals of the scene. It’s entirely unmistakable that this was meant to be a turning point for Anakin Skywalker, another testament to the skill of Tartakovsky.

Getting this series off the ground was no easy feat and is quite an interesting story, the idea came together from conversations between Lucasfilm and Cartoon Network, when Tartakovsky was offered the project he of course said although there was a small problem, Lucasfilm wanted the series to consist of one minute episodes so Tartakovsky told cartoon network that he couldn't really do anything significant with one-minute episodes-it's simply too short a time to tell a story. Cartoon Network went back to Lucasfilm and relayed the message and told them that they would be working with the team behind Samurai Jack, it turns out that George Lucas watches and really admires Samurai Jack, so they sent word that they now would be allowed three-minutes for each episode. When they got the word back from Lucasfilm, he still wasn’t sure that three minutes would be enough to tell a story.

So he took several existing 22-minute episodes of Samurai Jack and re-edited them into three-minute versions to see if it would work. He wanted to know that in three minutes you could make sense, capture the viewer's interest and still tell a compelling story. He found that this worked surprisingly well, particularly when each instalment worked to build upon the previous one, to offer an important piece to the overall story.

The series won three Emmy awards two for Outstanding Animated Program and another for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation

Even though Tartakovsky is incredibly well known due to his success in traditional drawn animation he has recently done a lot of work in 3d animation, he has directed all the movies in the hotel Transylvania franchise including a short film based in the universe called ‘Puppy’. Hotel Transylvania is a movie franchise where we follow Dracula, after his wife is killed by an angry human mob he decides to open a hotel as a haven to all other monsters, most importantly his daughter.

Tarkovskys main priority for all projects is the audience, he uses everything in his arsenal to make sure the audience is fully immersed in the worlds he creates “The computer is designed to mimic reality. And in an animated world, in my perspective, that's the worst thing to do. I want people to walk into a movie theatre and be transported to a different world”

Tartakovsky has also worked on the 2016 3d animated movie ‘Trolls’, Trolls is about a group of happy little creatures who due to various things are forced to go on an adventure to protect their people, I have never seen the movie but after reading the synopsis for the film it seems to be, just another Smurfs, Tartakovsky much prefers his movie projects to his television projects simply because he loves being in the audience with everyone else rather than going home and hearing what people thought later, “Watching a movie with an audience is so exciting. For me, coming from TV, you finish an episode and then it airs, and I'm at home. There's no gratification and there's no audience interaction with it”

In 2010 Tartakovsky was inspired to create a new series in the vein of speed racer and battle of the planets “I started messing around with this idea for a show about a robot, but he's disguised as a human in high school” the goal was to place a character with almost no emotion into the most highly intense emotional situation that we can all relate to, and see what comes out of it.

Like all of us when Tartakovsky was a child he always loved the idea of a kid in a giant robot, because we knew we weren’t tough on our own but if we had a giant robot we wouldn’t have to be tough.

Earlier in his career Tartakovsky worked as an assistant animator, storyboard artist and in between artist on a lot of very famous series’ such as Cow and chicken, Tiny Toon Adventures and my personal favourite series of all time Batman: The Animated Series which of course follows the adventures of the much beloved hero The Batman, he is also credited as supervising producer for The Grim adventures of Billy & Mandy and a timing director for Steven Universe but only for the pilots of these two shows.

I believe the most important part of any television show or movie is the heart, any time you watch anything from Genndy Tartakovsky you feel the heart and all the love that pours in to everything he produces, when there is no love in a project you can really tell, and it almost feels cold and robotic.

I have gone in to detail about a lot of Tarkovskys work but what about the projects that didn’t come through the ones that were left in the dark, that had some amazing potential, in 2013 Genndy Tartakovsky was planning an animated short based on the very famous superhero ‘Superman’, he was working on this project with Scott Willis the plans were unfortunately scrapped but not before some concept art was made, and the images are truly beautiful, they were quiet different from what were used to with the iconic hero, the images suggest that it would have been a sort of bleak story, the opportunity eventually came back to Genndy and his team but the agreement had lessened and over time it continue to lessen until there was nothing left, we only have two images to go off but if Tartakovsky was at the helm, this could have been the Superman story we have been waiting for.

Recently Tartakovsky was working on a new ‘Pop Eye’ movie based on the iconic character for Sony, but the production company got “cold feet” and pulled the sure success from production, this surely would have been an amazing return for the character that we may never get now, but Sony are continuing to work with the legendary animator so as long as the company don’t make another one of their purely idiotic mistakes we will still get to see Genndy’s passion project and original idea ‘Can You Imagine’ which sounds like a fantastic beautiful tale about a boy and his imagination.

In conclusion Genndy Tartakovsky is a very well-rounded animator, with a plethora of incredible, inspiring, life changing work under his belt. Before this essay my knowledge was very limited on this man, however now I that I have deeply researched his work I have learned so much about his process and the inventive ways that he would test things, I am now very interested in Genndy Tartakovsky and I would like to look in to his work and take in all the inspiration I possibly can.

http://www.azquotes.com/author/87771-Genndy_Tartakovsky

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/z49d9e/you-can-thank-genndy-tartakovsky-for-the-cartoon-network-holy-trinity

http://www.slashfilm.com/genndy-tartakovsky-superman-concept-art/

https://jonnegroni.com/2015/03/13/why-the-ruler-of-my-childhood-just-got-kicked-off-the-new-popeye-movie/

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