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zarla-s · 3 years

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yo dawg any thoughts on DR chapter 2 thus far

I SURE DO because BOY there was a lot to unpack in that chapter. I'm still trying to sort out my thoughts about it, I like literally just finished the alt route a few hours ago which just gave me a whole bunch of new info to try and sort through, haha. I’m going to need to sit down and really think about it for a while before I can start spinning things together effectively.

BUT ANYWAY, FOR QUICK SPOILER-FREE THOUGHTS CHAPTER 2 WAS REALLY GOOD AND I LIKED IT MORE THAN CHAPTER 1 TBH I loved the expanded mechanics and the new sense of depth to everything, it gave a much clearer picture of what Deltarune is going to be than Chapter 1 I think. I think I was also more open to it this time since I was prepared for it going in - I got totally blindsided by Chapter 1 and had no idea what was going on or what it meant or if it was a sequel or what, but this time I knew what the deal was so I could just take Chapter 2 on its own merits. Loved the characters and the enemies and the bullet patterns were all really cute, loved it. It all felt really cohesive.

SPOILER THOUGHTS UNDER THE CUT for both the main route and the alt route (I like the name Snowgrave for it but in my head I just keep calling it the alt route, haha)

I’ll just do this as a list because I don’t have the energy to really get in-depth with a lot of it at the moment.

I’m really suspicious of Ralsei. I was suspicious of him before but I’m really suspicious of him now. It’s weird he can walk around in other dark worlds without turning to stone, that there’s a room for Asriel in the Queen’s mansion and not one for him, and VERY weird that he knew exactly what Kris had to do in the real world to bring the other darkners back into the dark world. How did he know that. Also he looked cuter with his hat.

Spamton is great and creepy, I was able to do his battle first try! Which was way better luck than I had with Jevil lol. Although, today I went to try and do it again just to check, and I spared Jevil my first try. :O So maybe Jevil got rebalanced? I dunno, it just seemed a lot easier all of a sudden. ANYWAY, SPAMTON IS GREAT

Spamton has to be ghost related but i’m not sure how yet, I assume Mettaton due to the form and the wings and the name and the recurring Neo motif in his theme, but there was also general ghost motifs in his theme as well and some things don’t add up. It did look like you find the disk in Mettaton Neo’s discarded body, and Seam says it might have belonged to an old Lightner. A lot of ghost connections. What if Spamton is Dess’s ghost

Love Queen and the Tasques, goes without saying I’m sure, all the enemies were so cute. Loved checking on Lancer in my items.

Hugely pleased with the ramped up gay and also Noelle is precious

Kris opening the fountains is an interesting twist. I wonder if they opened the first castle town fountain or not (also, no one else seems to see the castle town door?). It’s weird because there was a door connecting castle town to the card world, and there was no door to the cyberworld. But somehow Ralsei knew how to get there anyway? How did he get there? How could he tell. Ralsei’s up to something. I do not trust him.

Susie’s the best

The Snowgrave route is really creepy in a different way than the murder run in Undertale which I’m very intrigued by, I want to see where that’s going. There are interesting parallels you could draw between Kris controlling Noelle and the player controlling Kris, but again it’s something I’ll have to think more about before it becomes something more coherent. Something something “strength” being achieved by giving up control to someone else, blocking out what they do, just doing whatever they tell you, something something

lol berdly died lol kris just shoving his body in a closet

The Flowey TV at the end is also intriguing, I wonder if Flowey is the one forcing Kris to remove their SOUL and do stuff. I wonder. Kris moves so jerkily without your control and also it seems like it takes a lot of time for Kris to get enough strength or control to move to pull the soul out in the first place. There’s the puppet/string connection that Spamton highlights, but also when he says that even when all the strings were cut, he wasn’t free. It could be that taking out YOUR soul just leaves Kris open to Flowey’s control instead. I dunno. Lot of questions.

Also strange that Kris deliberately opened the front door and turned on the TV before opening the fountain. And that they take their SOUL out pretty regularly, apparently? Toriel doesn’t seem that bothered by Kris spending a ton of time in the bathroom with the water on, anyway.

So Kris opened the fountain in the library at the end of chapter 1, then also went and ate all the pie. Then Kris went out and slashed Toriel’s tires (presumably) and possibly ate all the sugar in her car before opening the fountains. I wonder if there’s a connection between sugar and Kris pulling your soul out to do whatever.

Ralsei says darkners turn to stone when they’re in a world that’s not their own, Onion says they hear a song from the ocean they can’t remember but they’re sure they’ve heard it before (Mother 1 nod, I see you!):

Just gonna throw this out there.

I spent a bunch of time getting the egg and putting it in Asgore’s fridge and NOTHING, DANG IT

Noelle seems able to hear your voice as the player, or at least a strange terrifying voice that doesn’t seem to be Kris’s. My guess is the player, but if the TV really is Flowey, then maybe it’s him? Questions.

lol throughout the snowgrave route i called noelle my murder girlfriend

By the way you can do the Snowgrave route even if you’ve spared everyone up to that point. You can also start sparing people again right after Noelle leaves. Thus names like Murder run or Genocide run don’t really fit to me. Neither does weird run, weird implies something a lot less... dark? I think Snowgrave is the way to go here. Or alt I guess but that’s pretty vague, although people will probably know what you’re talking about.

I CAN’T BELIEVE I GOT ROBBED OF PAPYRUS AGAIN well no I can believe that, part of me thought that might happen BUT I WAS HOPING

The difficulty level was nice throughout, not too hard and not too easy. Close shaves, but nothing frustrating. I think I actually only died to Berdly and Spamton on the Snowgrave route, come to think of it. NO WAIT I died a lot to the teacups leading up to Spamton’s battle lol but that doesn’t count.

There’s a lot you can make out of Spamton’s dialogue and I don’t have the energy to stitch it all together right now though, haha. What he says in the store about, what was it... a call for you, asking if anyone was there? And then in the Snowgrave route where he says you can call for friends all you want and they won’t answer? An Earthbound nod of course, but still. It makes me wonder where things are going.

(There’s a second thing I want to tie to that but I’ll probably make that a separate post)

Given that Toby said there’d only be one ending and there are routes where Berdly is alive or DEAD, I get the feeling we’re heading for a “rocks fall, everyone dies” ending more than ever. Or an ending where the world of Deltarune is destroyed and becomes Undertale, or something. idk. I’m just speculating.

There’s an explanation for Kris’s saves now! Theories I had about it before are off-base now with new information, haha. So Kris has been saving in every dark world they create, which includes Castle Town. Well, if not them though, they saved over SOMEone’s file when they showed up there. I do wonder why the spade king and Queen didn’t recognize Kris though if they were the one convincing them to create chaos in their kingdoms. Although the video of the fountain being created DID say that there was so much smoke, you couldn’t see who was doing it. Maybe Kris was in disguise.

Spamton says something very weird when he talks about the knight at his store, which makes sense if Kris was actually the knight. I can’t remember it exactly though right now.

Spamton is really insistent on talking to Kris alone.

It could be that Kris is exploring the nature of freedom/control with Noelle during the Snowgrave route since they’re struggling with that themselves. Although the closer glimpses of the player during that route (when she seems to hear you, the player’s voice) make that a bit fuzzy.

It’s interesting that Noelle’s description says she freezes the enemy right off the bat before you do anything. Also she’s really hesitant and resistant about going to Spamton’s shop specifically it seems, and when she’s there she says something that implies “why did you bring me HERE” along with the odd line “there’s no one here, no one at all” and that it’s creepy and weird, but also nostalgic for her. I almost wonder if Noelle had something to do with Dess’s death (I assume Dess is dead from how everyone talks about her). Or if she believes she did, anyway. She could just be nostalgic for the scared feeling like she says to Kris later on a normal route, but I dunno. It’s weirdly specific.

When you fight enemies down with Noelle, it always says “Noelle got stronger” even if Noelle doesn’t kill the enemy with her magic, even though I’m pretty sure her stats don’t change unless you get the ice kill.

I remember when I played the first chapter I wanted to do a murder run immediately afterwards (that’s me! I’m still doing that!) and then as I went through I noticed I wasn’t killing anyone, no matter how hard I tried. They’d always heal themselves or run away until the game went the way it wanted me to, with only minor differences. To be honest, I found it kind of frustrating. It really did feel like control was being taken away from me, particularly because it presented the option and then did nothing with it. Why let me fight if it doesn’t do anything? Why harp so much on making good choices if I can’t make any other ones? What’s the point?

Then in chapter 2, it turns out oh hey, fighting will make you lose recruits, and it’s like alright, that makes more sense. But still I felt railroaded into this sort of fluffy, feel-good kind of path. Even when I fought everyone off on a normal route, it mostly went the same except with a few different bits of dialogue. Again, it was weirdly frustrating. It felt like something was missing.

And then, you get Noelle. And then it turns out you DO have a way to kill people, after all this time. NOW you have a chance to take control and stop doing what the game clearly wants you to do, and what everyone is telling you to do. You’ve found a loophole! YOU can’t kill anyone, but NOELLE can. There was a definite kind of contrary rebelliousness during that run for me, a kind of “you can’t stop me from doing this or ruining what you wanted me to do” kind of feeling, which I assume is meant to mirror how Kris feels all the time when your soul is in them. I didn’t see it as a need or instinct to level Noelle (no one in the game can even get levels through exp! There’s no point! No one’s important stats ever change except through equipment!), just a realization that you found a loophole in what you’re supposed to do - or who you’re supposed to be. Noelle’s just a tool for that, which Spamton even calls you out about in his final battle by asking if you want to “use” her again when you call for her.

AND SHE COMES WHEN YOU CALL HER TOO HOW DOES SHE DO THAT

Also interesting: when you call for your friends in that route to help you, they don’t come/can’t hear you, and Spamton says it’s your fault. If you call for your weapon though (Noelle) she comes almost immediately. You don’t even have to call her, you whisper her name once and she’s there.

There’s a lot going on in the route is the jist, haha.

I HOPE ASGORE IS DOING OKAY ;_; HE HAS TO BEG SANS FOR FREE PICKLES

I also noticed that when Sans is like “oh you keep your flowers under glass huh, like that movie” Asgore is like “yes it’s... very similar to that movie” with a shifty look. The flower in Beauty and the Beast symbolized the prince’s life. Asgore what are you up to. Did you get up to murdering antics again. He DOES say he talks to the flowers a lot.

I think the dark worlds are getting stronger, since in Chapter 1 everyone went home mostly fine, but in Chapter 2 injuries seem to carry over. Berdly freaking dies lol in the Snowgrave route, but also if you fight the Queen during that battle where Berdly has a wire in his face, he’ll eventually pull off the wire himself and in the process burn up his arm all crispy. Then in the real world, his arm is paralyzed! So things are definitely carrying over from one to the other.

Queen has to be related to Susie’s mom issues. Ralsei says darkners are meant to serve Lightners and follow them and bring them happiness - darkners might be a kind of Silent Hill thing where they reflect what Lightners want or fear (Noelle wants her mom to love and prioritize her happiness over everything, perhaps, or is just afraid of how smothering and controlling she can be). Also sad that the Ambulance enemies show up right after you get Noelle. :( And Queen mentions Noelle making a lot of sad and strange searches - I assume searches about whatever illness her dad has or how to deal with grief or guilt.

I thought maybe Spade King was Susie related thusly because he talks a lot about being a Bad Guy, but on second thought, his main motivation is resentment about being discarded and forgotten by Lightners and the people who used to give him purpose. Maybe he’s a reflection of Kris’s issues about Asriel leaving. Just speculating.

For some reason I pictured Asriel as a like football bro due to all his trophies but it sounds like he’s just a wussy as Ralsei is lol. Which makes sense. Ralsei was always kind of worryingly accepting of the abuse you dish out to him, he’ll forgive Kris of practically anything (I gave him an S. Poison and he was like OW! I mean, uh, thanks Kris! Haha!), he’s so desperate for Kris’s validation and affection. Asriel seems to have a sort of similar tendency in constantly going to confession for KRIS’S sins and sobbing about them FOR you. I wonder if Ralsei is just Asriel’s dark world form in disguise, thus why he hid his face for so long from you and changed his name.

(If Ralsei is Asriel in disguise then that makes his behavior towards his sibling PRETTY WEIRD tbh)

Kris is such a weird edgy kid. I worry about them, haha. I don’t think it’s as simple as Kris being an antagonist to the player or the player being an antagonist to Kris. It’s definitely interesting that Kris is making the fountains and the player is the one sealing them (it specifically says its your soul doing it). At first glance, making more fountains does seem like it’ll plunge the world into darkness and chaos, but then again... Ralsei’s the one telling you that, and who knows. Maybe he has his own agenda. There was a lot in this chapter about how the dark world is better than the light one.

If the dark world versions are meant to reflect the lightner’s souls or innermost desires or idealized visions of themselves, then Kris’s soul/desire/vision of themselves is... a corpse-blue dead knight. Bit worrying.

Awful lot of scarves in chapter 2 that pushed for Ralsei to attack people. A lot of attack uppers for him. Even Spamton’s item is a weapon for him that mentions abandoning healing. I know Jevil dropped a weapon for Susie too, but I dunno.

The fact you can fuse the Thorn Ring with a Pure Crystal (wherever that is) to make a creepy sword makes me think Noelle is going to come back again. Unless you’re supposed to get the thorn ring and then take it off her and abort the run at Berdly, which you could do I suppose. Still, it makes me think you and Noelle are going to keep going down that path together.

(What if the Pure Crystal is frozen Berdly? D: Or even an item you get off of Noelle if you kill her?)

Also very interesting that the ending credit theme is a glitchy version of the first chapter end theme. Don’t Forget was reprising constantly through the first chapter, but only showed up rarely in the second one. I only remember hearing a snip of it once, come to think of it, and I can’t remember where.

Boy there was a lot of shipteasing in pretty much every direction, wasn’t there?

ANYWAY THAT’S ALL I GOT RIGHT NOW I’m going to keep thinking about it though.

#deltarune #spoilers #asks and answers #meta #walls of text

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whetstonefires · 3 years

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Reverse Unpopular Opinion: Naruto

Hm! Only Positivity huh? I still don’t know why this is defined as Reverse Unpopular; some of my least popular opinions are already Thing Good.

Okay I actually really liked how Naruto (the manga, which I followed week to week for most of high school lol, hurrah for scanlators and rip mangafox) carried off the Big Twist about Itachi. The followthrough could have been better, as is the case with basically every element of the story, but the basic sell of Itachi’s real motives just landed really successfully, in my eyes.

There are a few reasons for that--mostly that it was the endpoint of quite a lot of direct buildup, of weird choices by Itachi that seemed just like his weird personality at a glance but which added together made foreshadowing, plus actual foreshadowing, followed by his absolutely bananas behavior during the climactic fraternal battle and the panel comp for his last words. Which really got me in the heart before I even had context.

But also that it snapped into place with a lot of the story’s strongest existing themes and tied them together in what looked at the time like the potential for a strong wicker sort of framework.

About the harm their society did its people and especially its children by molding them for war, and how seductively meaningful that shape could feel, going back to Haku. About cut-throat intra-clan bullshit going back to Neji.

About the weird emphasis placed on the concept of genius and its enforced advancement, going back to either the early Chuunin exam arc with Lee or earlier with Sasuke’s basic characterization. And about the fuckery that isolation wreaks on the psyche and how easy it is for authority figures to take advantage of vulnerable children, going back to literally the first chapter.

A lot of the time these twist-reveals that some baddie was Actually A Victim All Along are really unsatisfying, because they tend to diminish the horror of their crimes and even argue they were Justified.

With Itachi, the true story of the Uchiha Massacre was worse. Konoha’s government or a subset thereof (it was never clarified who was complicit) actively coercing a thirteen-year-old child into helping to kill his entire family and taking all the blame so they (that is Danzou) could avoid the potential repercussions of a civil war in the worst way possible while eliminating the Uchiha as internal political rivals is so much more deeply horrifying than a genius just snapping. Systemic rot is so, so much worse than individual violence.

(That’s why we as a society are encouraged to view crime as an individual thing, after all, and the prototypical criminal mind as the serial killer driven by nothing but deranged psychosexual needs.)

The fact that everything Itachi put Sasuke through was out of love and a desperate need to keep him alive, because Sasuke was who he loved most and the only thing he loved that he was allowed to save, that is so much more awful than it being out of hate. That that very love was cynically used to corral this child into leaving the corner he’d been backed into at an angle useful to others.

It’s obscene, but it pulls so many elements of the setting and characterization together.

And even though Itachi’s scheme technically went off exactly as planned, the narrative does not embrace it as in any way a good plan that reflected good judgment or even sanity. Which was nice.

The new version of What Really Happened is worse and it adds dimension to the past events being retconned rather than flattening them, which is cool and honestly difficult to pull off.

Also I love the premise of Itachi being, by nature, a very gentle person. Because that hasn’t stopped him from being a mass murdering serial killer, when the correct pressures were applied. He hates violence. He hates people being hurt.

No one ever cared what he wanted. And his family pressured him into a particularly violent and traumatic version of their murder career extra young for the prestige. And that was why, when more pressure came from different angles, he was already someone who could shut down his personal volition and kill whoever he was supposed to kill, no matter how much it hurt him.

They made him into a knife and he was turned against them. I go wild for that. It wasn’t right or fair and so many people died who weren’t directly at fault, but it is a closed circle. Which I find narratively satisfying.

Itachi also played interestingly against Gaara, the series’ previous benchmark for its recurring theme of Utterly Broken Boy, because he was walked a steady path down from Being At All Okay by the demands of the adults in his life, then took a really big hit, then just kept getting worse and worse without ever really snapping completely, but also without anybody ever even coming close to saving him.

While Gaara was betrayed by his family much harder and faster and in many ways more comprehensively, went completely insane when the big hit came, and then with Naruto’s help pulled himself together and ascended to a position of power, and began making things better and having positive sibling relationships.

Another thing that always struck me about the Real Itachi Backstory is that, because the breaking of him was conducted so much within the system--without kidnapping or sand demons talking in his head or social collapse or abandonment or even overt abuse or torture, unsanctioned wetworks divisions and insane cousins impersonating insane great-grandfathers notwithstanding--he makes it much easier to see the parallels between the way the ninja world eats its brightest stars alive very young, and the abusive expectations the real, contemporary school system tends to lay on high performers.

Fugaku’s abuse of Itachi is in some ways understated for fiction but also utterly deranged, in terms of the kind of gore and horror he pushed his genius child into confronting at such a young age. But it’s still sufficiently normalized within his society that it looks enough like a normal dad demanding outstanding academic achievement at all times to be really...the opposite of trippy. Strangely grounded for a relationship whose core element is ‘refused to let son choose not to be a child soldier.’

I’m torn about the level of intentionality there.

Of course, salt incoming lol I can’t hold it back, praising this kind of thing in Naruto just brings attention to how the resolution of the story was unsatisfying, because it ultimately disengaged from all its major themes other than self-sacrifice and friendship being A Big Deal in order to bring a big finish and a firm conclusion.

Which...man looks like an even stupider decision in hindsight considering it now has a sequel. Hah.

#ask meme #naruto #uchiha itachi #kishimoto pulled this kind of twist a lot of times #a lot a lot #and i think itachi was the most successful #although the followthrough and payoff after that point was #utter pants #because the narrative lacked the courage of its convictions #as is common in this genre lmao #reverse unpopular opinion #a nonny mouse #ask #hoc est meum

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nonasuch · 4 years

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how I would fix star wars

inevitably, I have been thinking about How I Would Fix Star Wars, and make the parts of TRoS that displeased me into a more coherent story.

unfortunately, to do so will require the use of a time machine and veto power over the Lucasfilm Story Group. but IF I had those things here is what I would do:

I actually would not make a lot of changes to TFA. The main ones would be:

toning down Starkiller a bit as a threat, to a one-shot-per-planet deal but with a faster recharge time

slightly more stormtrooper stuff -- establish what Finn’s leaving behind and give Phasma a little depth.

if possible, put some kind of distinguishing visual marker on the trooper who marked Finn’s helmet.

a small background detail that isn't important yet: after the village massacre at the beginning, show stormtroopers collecting the bodies, trooper and villager alike. if possible, do this after every scene with a significant body count, throughout all three movies.

either give the knights of ren some actual stuff to do or cut them out entirely

show kyle chafing at snoke’s leash, maybe demanding to know more about some of snoke’s various Secret Projects, and being dismissed

give rey a little time to settle in with the Resistance before leaving to find Luke. we don't have to show it much, just make it clear that she’s making a home there and has bonded strongly with Leia

clean up some weird pacing and make the travel times/distances between planets more consistent

honestly other than that I wouldn't change much. I genuinely like TFA a lot and its strength is in how well it establishes the new characters.

for TLJ, some bigger changes but the bones of it I'd leave alone:

make it more clear why the tracking through hyperspace is a big deal and make the solution less of a fetch quest

I really like parts of the Canto Bight plot but I would probably swap it out for something with more stormtroopers in it -- let Finn interact with other troopers and remind us that there are individuals under those helmets

(a recurring joke: Finn can always tell troopers apart when they’re in uniform, and Rose can never figure out how. he thinks it’s because he was a trooper, but no, it's because he’s Force sensitive)

maybe get close to convincing some of them to desert, but either they fail last-minute or the deserters get caught and killed

Finn and Rose escape by the skin of their teeth thanks to a trooper who helps them, letting them know that even if they aren't brave enough to leave, there are plenty of troopers who aren't all-in with the First Order

again, after any major fight show the body cleanup. troopers carrying and stacking the dead in neat rows. start hinting that there is something more ominous here than fanatical tidiness

the Snoke stuff -- make it more obvious that Snoke is orchestrating stuff other than just running the First Order. maybe have Hux ask about the cargo ships they're sending to the Unknown Regions, and get shot down

make part of Kyle’s refusal to leave w Rey due to his burning need to Know All The Secrets, and conviction that as Supreme Leader he could really clean up the joint

once Snoke is dead, show Kyle getting access to his secret files/vaults; do NOT show what he finds there

I'd also want to clean up some wonky pacing and timeline/travel distance stuff, probably, but again I really like most of the movie so it’s nothing major

also keep Phasma around for the next movie! what the fuck, she rules, why would you not

okay so that brings us to TRoS, which… would need a pretty major overhaul.

First of all, we are working under the assumption that I have a time machine, so I made Carrie Fisher go to the cardiologist on the reg starting on day 1 of TFA rehearsals, and she’s fine and able to play the part as she was meant to.

with that in place, here’s how I would restructure:

we keep the Hammer Horror opening scene, but tweak the Emperor’s reveal. he’s much more corpse-y, without the tech umbilical keeping him alive -- a wraith animated by Dark power.

lots of grandiose claims about his unstoppable army and his impending dominion over the galaxy, ultimate triumph over the Light, etc

don't show the armada yet -- just kyle’s reaction, which is genuine fear.

news of the Emperor’s return isn't a broadcast, but a whisper. a transmission from a terrified First Order cargo pilot, who’s learned the truth about his one-way trip to the Unknown Regions. passed through the lower ranks by rumor and hearsay. eventually leaked to the Resistance by an unknown First Order source

I like the idea from the beginning of the movie, that Rey’s trying to speak to dead Jedi through the Force. but it’s not working, and she shares her frustration with Leia

make it clear that she and Leia have a deep, strong bond.

give Rey a Jedi artifact to hunt for. maybe there’s a place or a thing that she thinks will let her commune with fallen Jedi, and that’s what they go looking for.

that lets us keep some of the fetch quest, but the First Order’s not as actively on their tail.

they keep crossing paths anyway, and every time there are troopers doing something worse. maybe at one point they see troopers refuse to massacre civilians, and being killed themselves instead.

also they take Rose with them, because this movie needs more Rose

still have those post-battle scenes of body cleanup. now the cleanup crews are being killed once they’re done

this could be a good use for the Knights of Ren, actually. whatever is happening, they're part of it

Leia is more active throughout: she's on the move, recruiting allies for the Resistance, trying to figure out what's happening in the Unknown Regions

she has an actual scene with Lando, and he goes to Rey on her orders

tweak Poe’s backstory with Zorii. he worked with her while undercover for the Resistance, and left them in the lurch when the General needed him back.

he’d have recruited her, if there had been time, but now he's glad he didn't: most everyone Poe recruited to the Resistance died at Crait.

when Rey crosses paths with Kyle, he’s obviously rattled. he Knows Something that he won't or can't tell her and he's even more fatalistic than usual.

lean harder on the unease/whispers of dissent in the First Order as they're told to do more and more awful things. maybe a scene where someone -- not Hux -- disagrees openly, and Kyle says something that implies that he's getting orders from someone above his head.

this gives Hux a chance to snark at Kyle -- isn't he supposed to be the Supreme Leader, now? who's telling him what to do?

off Kyle’s reaction -- someone is telling him what to do, and he's terrified of them in a way he never was of Snoke.

(keep Hux-as-informant, that was done perfectly)

Rey’s artifact hunt still takes her to the Death Star wreckage, off rumors that Palpatine hoarded Jedi artifacts.

we meet Janna &co. Finn is so relieved and happy to meet other troopers who survived defecting. Janna tells him that there used to be more, that it used to be easier to get out, but more and more troopers have been killed in the attempt, without escaping.

by now it’s clear: there is Something Wrong With The First Order, beyond the obvious.

Rey fights Kyle in the Death Star ruins. Kyle tells her the Emperor wants to turn her to the Dark Side, that he can’t be refused or stopped, that even death won’t let her escape from him.

the fight plays out similarly, but Leia’s distraction doesn't kill her.

after Rey heals him, Kyle faces his fear and talks to Leia via Force bond. He tells her what the Emperor is planning, and it’s Ben Solo who leaves the ruins.

he can give Leia files or some other concrete proof via the same trick he uses with Rey in the movie, because that’s honestly very cool and it was used really well, so we’re keeping that

when Rey talks to Luke on Ach-To, he tells her that Palpatine used the Empire to sow chaos and fear, because that made the Dark Side stronger and gave him more power to tap into.

Luke says: “I think he would have been happy to burn the whole galaxy down, as long as he could rule over the ashes.”

Rey realizes she can’t hide from the Emperor, and knows he’ll never turn her to the Dark. she goes after him.

Leia sends the Resistance to back Rey up and sets out to rally the galaxy with Lando and Chewie

finally, it’s confrontation time! Rey faces Zombie Palpatine, and he reveals his plan in all its glory:

he’s built an army of the dead. ghost ships, crewed by all those bodies we've been watching the First Order collect for three movies.

some of them we recognize, if we’re paying attention: the trooper who marked Finn’s helmet, Lor San Tekka, Hux. there are long-dead clone troopers, little more than skeletons in filthy white armor. half-functional Separatist droids. Resistance fighters and First Order officers killed on Crait. countless civilians.

they’re all dead, all animated by Palaptine’s Dark Side powers, fueled by the strife and chaos he continues to sow throughout the galaxy

he doesn’t want to blow up any more planets. he wants to kill the shit out of absolutely everyone: the end of all life, and all Light. everyone in the galaxy a soldier in his undead army

he wants Rey to strike him down and become the new Sith Empress, ruling over an empire of ashes.

but we are discarding the granddaughter shit, because frankly it is not necessary and makes no sense.

he can just be like ‘ah yes, a feral desert child, powerful in the Force, with no inconvenient ties to hold her back. I've had good luck with those, mostly.’

now, a brief side trip: what is the First Order doing, in the midst of all this?

well, the rank and file are actually not super down with the ‘join the glorious army of the dead’ plan. half of them are in open revolt; some try to run, some seize control of their ships and decide to fight for the living

Phasma leads Team Living. yeah, I kept her for a reason! Gwendoline Christie is great at this!

Ben shows up as before, fights the Knights, does the cool lightsaber trick with Rey. he fights with Leia’s saber.

when Palpatine drains their life force to restore himself, though, something happens differently:

it’s actually Leia’s life force. she gives up her life for her son and for the daughter of her heart, willingly and gladly, knowing she has rallied the galaxy to their aid. she tells them, before she goes, that help is on the way

the giant fleet that arrives to fight Palpatine has First Order ships in it. finally, everyone is on the same side. Palpatine has been playing both sides against each other since Episode 1, but it won't work anymore, now that they know what he wants. the long con is over. they're united against him.

Rey beats Palpatine the same way, Ben revives her the same way, but Leia’s sacrifice means he has enough juice left to survive it.

idk about the kiss; I am Reylo-agnostic

but he’s going to try to shepherd the First Order into something that builds and protects, instead of destroying.

people like Janna and Finn, who got out, and Rose, who lived under their heel, will show him how.

Finn is Force sensitive, and so are some of the other former troopers.

some of them want to become Jedi

Finn wants to follow Leia’s path: do the training so he understands how to use the Force, but he's not meant to be a Jedi. he's going to be a leader -- not a general, hopefully, but a leader for peacetime.

so like. they won! hooray.

Rey takes the name Skywalker, still. Ben is fine with this: he’s a Solo-Organa.

there can be a touching Force ghost reconciliation, or not, whatever

so. that is how to fix star wars. you’re welcome. if anyone out there has a time machine and an in with Lucasfilm, hit me up I guess?

#star wars #spoilers #star wars spoilers #purely notional fiction #long post

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fizzingwizard · 4 years

Text

Digimon Adventure: Ep 19!

Wow! That certainly was an Episode!! It was pretty fun from start to finish, though nothing mind-blowing, but it was definitely the ending that made me gasp. Not wholly unexpected to an old turnip like me, but promising lots of fun (and angst!).

Picture of the week: MIKO, THE TRUE STAR OF THE SERIES!!

no for serious are the writers reading my reviews? they keep giving me what I want. within reason I guess. They seem to have an extremely limited budget as usual x’D

but Miko is still adorbs

ok I’m really looking forward to recapping this one so let’s get to it!

So last week I thought the kids sans Taichi and Yamato were abducted by Devimon, but apparently that either isn’t the case, or it was, but then Devimon decided it’s best just to dump the kids back on Earth and hold on to their partners. Because that’s the current situation. While concerning that the kids are separated from their partners, it’s probably best this way, since Devimon appears to be sending Gesomon(?) and Parrotmon(?)

to the human world, if I remember right. It’s hard to remember what happened in the first fifteen seconds kay So when the kids find their partners it will probably be in the human world and they can fight back.

Meanwhile Taichi and Yamato are alone and very Confuse

Taichi tries frantically to contact Koushirou. The others too... but especially Koushirou.

Finally he gets him!! He’s so happy!! My Taishiro heart flutters!

But I was fully expecting it to be a trap. When I saw this still here, my first thought was “Devimon’s forcing him to tell Taichi a lie by threatening him with a gun!!”

of course thats not whats happening. Koushirou is relatively fine and there are no guns (yet). What’s happened is the other kids have been sent back to the human world for reals this time!

This show is not even bothering to hide its Taiyama angle.

They spend the entire episode giving each other Significant Looks like this. The entire episode.

Now where’s Jou through all of this, you ask?

He went to talk to the police. He’s shocked they don’t believe his story about monster attacks and the world ending (well, at least Tokyo ending). I freaking love how taaaaall Jou is. Though it makes Koushirou look like a bean x’D

Jou = beansprout / Koushirou = bean

Koushirou has a much easier time dealing with the news that the police don’t believe them. He’s a denizen of the Internet. He knows how people’s minds work. And he has tons of chat logs to prove it.

People are chatting and spreading gossip and disbelief and complaints, but my favorite is the comment that just says “It’s a flood of fake news” xP

The home team runs into Mama Yagami! Who Sora literally calls Mama Yagami! x’D I mean I know that’s how kids generally refer to their friends’ parents but I still lol’d.

So un... Jou is almost as tall as Mama Yagami. LMAO. I’m gonna assume she’s short. Jou might indeed be quite tall for his age but Sora and Mimi are pretty close to Mama Yagami’s height too. I guess we haven’t seen Taichi standing next to his mom yet! With his hair he’s probably taller than her.

So Mama Yagami is HILARIOUS and I’m so glad that’s a continuing thing in the reboot! She was already that way in 99 Adventure, but we’re just seeing a lot of it now - like every time she’s around. (And we didn’t see it in Tri so I missed that.) Basically she seems like a basketcase. Not a totally irresponsible one, more like just... generally the carefree go with the flow type. Which is not bad. She just also seems a bit, uh, ditzy?? I think Taichi probably grew to be so serious by necessity. Dad’s busy with work and someone’s gotta make sure mom doesn’t leave the house without her keys!

The way Sora just stares at Hikari like “explain??” after Mama Yagami thrusts Miko at her and runs off to get her car with a big smile as if they hadn’t all nearly died recently... bahahaha.

also I love how she doesn’t even bother asking her son’s good friend if she knows where he is after not seeing or hearing from him for three full days

^The face of a boy shouldering the weight of nuclear family life and all its batshitness

Taichi and Yamato determine their priority is find the Holy Digimon. I wish they were a little more concerned with what happened to their friends’ partners, but I guess this is the only goal with solid clues. Anyway before they can do anything they are attacked by Bulbmon Looks like subtitlers went with Valvemon which also works, who looks like a Lego monster creation by an eight year old (and probably is).

He has the Domo face. Grrraaah

Domo is NHK mascot by the way. bahahaha

Next these guys come swarming out of Valvemon. (And if we didn’t already get it, apparently Digimon can construct other Digimon as we’ve seen before.) Nothing is quite as freaky as gas masks. They are commanded by Minotaurmon/Mintaromon whatever.

They too have the aim of Stormtroopers though so our heroes will be fine...

... probably...

... then Leomon finally shows up!! Yay! He looks good! All beefy and scarred and sounding exactly like Zaraki Kenpachi. Uhh. Is it the same VA?? Nothing comes up in the Google search so maybe not but it sure sounds like him. (Minotaurmon and Ogremon also sound like Leomon... while it’s normal for VAs in kids shows to voice multiple characters esp minor ones, it literally sounds like Zaraki Kenpachi is the voice of all the characters in this episode besides the main ones. And Mama Yagami of course because that would be weird.)

Leomon may look cool, but his ride... and his friends... uh, less cool x’D I want to strangle that ostrich thing with its own scarf somehow it inspires violent emotion in me

In the smallest, most shocked voice, Yamato says, “Leomon...?” It’s honestly kind of adorable. He’s clearly remembering what Neemon said about Leomon leading the resistance way back when.

Leomon helps them escape. Taichi very considerately and cutely helps Agumon aboard the fashion disaster ostrich emu thing.

Yamato also considerately helps his partner but rather less cutely xD

Leomon takes them to his hideout and gives them your standard fare of weird-looking Digi fruit. He then proceeds to tell them about Devimon and that he is trying to infiltrate Valvemon yadda yadda.

Taichi is freaking ADORABLE, immediately concerned that by saving their asses, Leomon’s battle plans have been ruined. Leomon waves that aside though. Yamato is equally adorabibble when he asks after Neemon and gets told that they made it to Leomon safely.

Leomon plans to try to get into Valvemon again because he knows Devimon’s put something related to the holy Digimon in there. Taichi is determined to join in. He doesn’t have much of an argument as it why they should be allowed when they just got their butts kicked so easily, but he has a trick up his sleeve: the Burning Eyes of Fiery Passion.

Not to be outdone, Yamato shoots off his Icy Eyes of Cold Determination.

Faced with this twin assault, Leomon has to give in. Ahh, I remember last week when we saw the trailer for this ep and I naively thought Leomon would train them like Piximon did in 99 Adventure. Nope. They’ve just met and they’re already spy buddies.

Okay, okay, yeah Leomon does seem to have some knowledge of the “Chosen Children” and that’s his real motivation. Still.

They break into Valvemon and we get the excellent invention of Agumon riding on Garurumon. I assume because of Garurumon’s advantageous speed. That seems to be recurring thing in this show.

Idk I just capped this because he’s so darn cute

I don’t know why I capped this one though.

They enter some sort of central space where Leomon tells them something relevant to the holy Digimon is being kept. (Lol I already forgot the details of what he said.) There are two protectors, Minotaurmon and Bullmon. Leomon tells the kids to take Bullmon while he faces down Minotaurmon. These guys might have been somewhat intimidating if we hadn’t already got Perfect level evolutions mastered, not to mention the occasional Jogress :P Sooo I didn’t feel too worried.

... uh, never mind x’D Taichi what are you doing

Yamato saves his idiot butt and almost gets in a bind himself. Once again I’m just wondering why they are sticking at Adult level. Whatever. They win of course

Leomon uses his Fist of the Beast King to maim Minotaurmon. His brilliant one-liner? “I have more than one first.”

Bully: *punches you*

You: ow

Bully: *smirk* I have more than one fist.

You: That’s funny, I only have one, but it’s made of titanium *You punch the bully straight through the stratosphere* Quality over quantity!!!!

*cough*

Our heroes approach the secret compartment supposedly holding something to do with the holy Digimon... Yamato gets a look inside and gets the black shadow of true terror over his eyes

becaue floating inside like some kind of Weapon X experiment is... Takeru!!!

Hold on while I put in my ear plugs. Okay, ready, screech all you want now.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!

So... okay. First of all, baby Takeru is sooooooo cute <3 I had two predictions about what happened to Takeru last week. Either he ended up in the digital world and was now on his own, or he got abducted by Devimon. I thought the former was more likely, but in hindsight, it should have been obvious that it was the second. This show misses a lot of points where I feel like they could have developed some relationships or thrown in some drama, but it never passes up a chance for Yamato angst.

So yeah, this is pretty much gonna destroy Yamato xD Not only is the baby brother he wanted to protect no longer at home where he can easily protect him, he’s now in the digital world and in the enemy’s clutches.

I BETTER SEE REALLY TRAUMATIZED YAMATO NEXT WEEK. Of course, I expect him to be cool-headed enough to try to save Takeru, but I will be very disappoint if this goes off with no break downs at all. Takeru is always Yamato’s number one priority!

Super exciteddddd

So I give this ep 7.5/10. The .5 is pretty much for ending with a killer cliffhanger. My one real complaint about this ep is how highly plot-based everything is - we finally got the team all together only to split them up, and on top of that, once split up, we don’t even get all that many character moments between Taichi and Yamato. As I said, they give each other lots of Signifcant Looks, but man cannot live on bread alone. However this is par for the course for this show and I know I should stop mentioning it every week because I doubt it’s changing. We will get the big shockers when we get them and not a moment before.

I just want Yamato to cry in front of Taichi and make him all uncomfortable x’D That’s what made 99 Adventure so great bahahaha

Some cool bits from next week’s trailer:

Surprise surprise, Angemon is the holy Digimon! Or one of, anyway. And he is indeed trapped. This makes the “Angemon is Devimon” theory less likely. Let’s not forget that our heroes’ Digimon partners were evidently a band of powerful warriors in the past, but they’ve forgotten much of it. I won’t be surprised if the result of that war played a part in Angemon’s abduction.

Next week they’ll have to fight to save Takeru from being drained, I guess.

And then!! Digi egg! Excite. Also I only just noticed that his hate says TK!!!

Takeruuu <3 My first fav when I was 10. Though my heart has belonged to Taichi for many long years, I still have a special spot in it for Takeru only <3 Even if he does dress like a celery stick

#digimon adventure 2020 #digimon adventure:#digimon adventure reboot #digi spoilers #digimon #fizz watches digimon 2020 #i made edits lets see if they save for once...

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goose-books · 4 years

Photo

(original image credit to @/theyshane on unsplash)

a month or so ago the wonderful and very sharp-fanged @yvesdot said i should make a post about the process of Working On A Podcast - what, exactly, does that entail? and so today i set down upon your table a long post about the process of this podcast, its unique struggles, and What Comes Next!

for those of you who are new here: a modern tragedy is my podcast-in-progress, a loose retelling of three of shakespeare’s plays (romeo&juliet, hamlet, and macbeth) set in a modern-day high school. or, alternatively, “so so much drama localized inside a few overlapping friend groups of gay* people”

post under the cut!

tag list (ask me to be added/removed): @piyawrites @harehearts @bisexualorlando @guulabjamuns

*well. gay people and indrajit “macbitch” chopra. never let it be said i don’t have cishet rep 😤

what i mean when i say “podcast”

sometimes when i say, “i’m writing a podcast,” people get the wrong idea - they think i’m going to sit down, maybe with some friends as guest stars, and talk into a microphone for an hour. what i really mean is that i’m writing a fiction podcast - something like an audio drama, if you will.

i’ve had this story concept for a long time (since i realized i was gay, actually. sometime around my coming out i was like “...sapphic romeo and juliet. oh i’m a genius”), but it never really worked as a novel. my inspiration for making it a podcast was the penumbra podcast! which i am not caught up on but which dragged me shirt-collar-first into the world of podcasts. [blowing a kiss to mars] for juno steel.

i will admit that i actually... haven’t listened to a ton of podcasts. mostly because my incredibly helpful attention-deficit brain said listening to things is impossible forever. but let me tell you that starting to write AMT in script format worked immediately. and in hindsight? it makes sense. i mean, i am retelling some of the most famous plays of all time... why not get a little theatrical with it?

the process so far

the podcast is drafted! all 16 episodes of it. all... 176k words of it... only took me a year and a half...

i have my main cast together! AMT has a lot of side characters, not all of whom are cast yet, but my main recurring squad is gathered and i love them all VERY dearly. (also, the population of people i know irl is 75% theater kid. so i think i will be able to figure out the side character thing.)

within the group of voice actors, i also have three assistant directors, a term i use loosely because mostly i just mean… those are my right hand men. the main folks i bounce ideas off of and the main folks i have helping me organize all of this. i’ve said multiple times that i’m just the keyboard monkey and would be hopelessly out of my depth without my beloved assdirectors. (shoutout to @asimpleram, the only one who uses tumblr, you are my best friend and i love you oh so much)

i also have two “bootydirectors” who gave themselves that name and that’s just the people who know the most about recording technology and acting. thanks kings

right now the scripts have been sent out to some sensitivity readers and i am currently editing! (both with regards to sensitivity reader feedback, and also just editing the plot and character arcs in general.) (if you want me to send you AMT and you’re willing to give me your thoughts i will straight-up send it to you honestly just know it’s LONG)

i actually did not consider that writing this might be uniquely hard before i started

fun max tip: if you look too far ahead down the road and realize the breadth of the project you’re taking on you’ll freak yourself out so just dive into things headfirst without checking both ways or considering your actions!!! [i am giving you a double thumbs up from behind my monitor]

i have never written anything like AMT before! it has been an experience! there have been some unique struggles!

working with other people is harder than i expected! which is not about my group, all of whom are lovely people. it is about me and my little OCD rat brain that hates letting go of control. even though... an inherent part of writing a script... is that at some point other people will be involved... wild, i know.

9 main characters! AMT has 9 main characters. this is somewhat excusable because the whole thing is episodic and more like a season of a tv show than a novel. but still. 9 main characters. why did i do that

i’ve never written episodically before, so i’ve had to figure out how to fit the plot into appropriately spaced intervals. there are three running plotlines (one for each play), and they’re all parallel and eventually convergent. so everything’s happening at once and it’s… hard to make episodes that aren’t just “max threw a bunch of scenes together because they were happening at the same time.” (i will admit i’ve defaulted to chronological order when spacing episodes, so the timeline doesn’t get confusing. but i hope each episode is cohesive on its own.)

balancing the tragedy and comedy in tragicomedy has been… interesting. i do to some degree feel like AMT’s gone darker than i initially imagined it; while it’s a high school retelling of these plays (and thus there’s no. there’s no murder. the only person who dies is isaac’s dad and that’s six years precanon), all three plays deal to differing degrees with suicide, among other things, and it felt… disingenuous not to write about that from a modern high schooler’s perspective.

i can guarantee a long-term happy ending for AMT! i cannot guarantee much about what’s in the middle. (there are sixteen episodes; one of my directors likened episode 7 to a five-act play’s third act, when things really start to… hit the fan. he’s right and i’m obsessed with thinking about it that way)

the massive amount of time i have been working on the thing: i started writing this podcast in january 2019. i finished writing it this past summer (2020). that’s two summers that have passed without my recording it (which is obviously easier to organize in the summer… or it was before covid but you get my point). this is… a little disheartening? i don’t know; oftentimes i underestimate how long writing projects will take me. what it comes down to is my urge to put out content vs. my urge to make it perfect…

…especially since i’m technically competing with one william f. shakespeare. (the f is for fucking.) i mean, dear old billy shakes DID write the plot out for me ahead of time, which i appreciate, but still…

AMT is absolutely consumable if you don’t know the first goddamn thing about shakespeare’s works. that said. i assume some of the people who will listen to it are shakespeare enthusiasts, casual or otherwise, and that’s a little terrifying! AMT is a shakespeare retelling, but i’ve made these characters very much my own, and i suppose i worry about how others will approach that, and whether they will disagree with my interpretations, or the way i’ve adapted the plots, and so on and so forth... i just have to live with this one, honestly. i think i could edit AMT for a thousand years and probably still find something to change about it, so i will simply have to get over myself.

that said, i don’t regret the amount of time i’ve spent on it! i think the time i’ve taken to draft and edit these episodes has been well worth the wait; i’m genuinely very happy with what i’ve created, and whether or not you agree with, say, my interpretation of a modern hamlet family dynamic, i hope it’ll still be enjoyable!

so what’s next?

as i said earlier, the scripts are currently in the hands of sensitivity readers, and i’m editing!

over the summer, the cast met on zoom frequently to read through and rehearse scenes. and i will not lie it was the most fucking fun i’ve had this entire wretched interminable year. i am constantly charmed and befuddled by the feeling of Listening To My Words Read Out Loud By A Human Voice and also i love my friends so very much

we have a tentative plan to gather the cast (socially distanced and responsibly, of course) over thanksgiving break to make some actual stabs at recording! i am too afraid to concretely promise AMT Episode 1: Fortune’s Fool by the end of 2020 but like… i’m not NOT promising it! send me your finest vibes. we’re close.

#max.txt #amt tag #the amt cast has a blursed discord server which i have not posted a link to publicly because it’s mostly people i know irl #but if you're one of the folks who's read all of amt which is... a few of you... and you want into the server... dm me #we used to use it to organize rehearsals but now that school's started it's mostly just been me complaining about editing i won't lie #max shouts into the void in his personal liveblog channel while 90% of the cast is offline #anyway i reread this post like three times to make sure it makes sense because i'm illiterate <3

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goprosuite-2021 · 3 years

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popculturebuffet · 3 years

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The Color of Friendship Review (Commissioned by WeirdKev27): A World of People

Happy Black History Month! Another day, another comission from longtime supporter of the blog Weird Kev and like a good chunk of his-non duck asks, he asked me for something outside my usual wheelhouse. In the past this has meant an episode of the short lived fox show whoops in which we found out how Santa dealt with the end of the world, didn’t know how doors worked, and interacted with some characters so thin you could remake the episode with just Mick Foley in a santa suit and carboard cutouts playing the characters lines and it’d be about the same, and earlier this month Sorry Wrong Meeting, an episode of a sitcom i’d never seen an episode of the Jeffersons about the KKK. So unsuprisingly his big comission for Black History Month was the 2000 Disney Channel Original Movie, The Color of Friendship.

I couldn’t find much on the making of the film, which dosen’t entirely suprise me as at the time this came out, Disney was releasing around 10 a year and whlie that stopped shortly, it still was a whopping 6 a year for some time, ocasionally more ocasionaly less, slowly dwindling down to the two of year we have now. Though it’s still an ongoing concern and has been since the channel started in 83, closing in on 40 years ago, so it’s still impressive Disney hasn’t just outright phased them out. Then again the popular ones make them a lot of money and some like High School Musical and the Descendants Trilogies have broken out so big they’ve lead to spinoff books, tv series in the latter’s case, and all that stuff making them money hand over fist. So making some cheap movies that MIGHT end up making them rich and usually star people that are already on shows they have or were at one point is a no loose proposition, especially now they add an extra release to the Disney Plus callender twice a year. And while the library has it’s gaps and i’ve griped about them enough.. I will say it’s stil la damn good library and it’s nice to be able to watch a film like this, as the dvd was LONG out of print and likely horribly expensive, and while renting it was an option, it would’ve chipped into what I got commissioned for the film. Still would’ve done it it just would’ve sucked to loose money on the deal, if only two bucks, for something I had no control over. Still would do that over adding it onto the comission fee. Point is stuff that’s not been easy to get for some time is now just a few clicks or taps of the remote away, and having the VAST majority of disney’s long and storied history from theatrical to dcom to weird tv oddities like.. this thing

I don’t know what Fuzzbucket is, and frankly I don’t want to know.. I mean I will for a comission or something but i’m not going to go out of my way to find out what that thing is and if it can give me scabies through a telvision screen despite being fictional and proabably long dead. At least I tell myself it’s long dead so ic an sleep at night without worrying about that thing breaking into my house and watchnig me while I sleep changing “SOON JACOB, SOON”. So yeah while you’ll hear me complain about the gaps in DIsney Plus’ library a lot on this blog.

I will give credit where it’s due, and what is on there is pretty expansive and now includes the Muppet Show, which I give them full credit for as that probably took a LOT of work and money to make happen. Plus WandaVision is fucking fantastic, especially now i’m finally all caught up.

But while as I said I couldn’t find much on the making of the film I did find a bit on it’s inspiration: It was inspried by a short story wrtten by Piper Dellums, a writer, poet and activist, and daughter of Ron Dellums. Dellums is a notable congressman who fought against apartheid and constantly fought for a bill to divest from South Africa, something that SHOCKINGLY, Ronald Regan tried to veto because he was a racist disney anamatronic what did you expect, and all in all seemed pretty awesome. He sued Bush SR to try and prevent Desert Storm, in his earliest days in office had an exibit near his phsyical office of vietnam war crimes to try and hold them acountable and in general seems to be a fascenating, hardworking man who constantly and religiously fought for the people and against war.

The story was a real life account of the Piper’s experince housing a South African Student, Marie, who the Delums Family expected to be black.. but turned out ot be white. During Apartheid, south africas racist as hell and horrifying goverment system of segregation that wasn’t abolished till the 90′s. As expected she was racist, but as a proudct of the horribly racist country she came from and much like with her fictional counterpart in this film, slowly grew to realize how fucked up her homeland was and by the time she went back, became an activist She and Piper were very close but her story ends tragically as eventually Piper stopped hearing from her after she was arrested and despite attempts to talk to her.. it was clear by the silence, and by the fact Piper visited South Africa post-aparthied to help and likely would’ve seen her.. that she was likely quitely killed by the state. But her story thankfully lives on, so join me under the cut to see how a 20 year old disney movie aired during black history month handles this difficult real life story, racisim and the 70′s.

The Cast: Quick bit about the cast since I usually do this for first episodes of an animated show and wish i’d done so for my other film reviews so far. Though to keep things simple, i’m only doing the main four cast members, especailly since frankly outside of Mahree’s parents the rest are more supporting roles that don’t have a lot of screen time and in hte case of the south african embassy workers, are just there to be racist card board cutout villians. Piper, who keeps her name from real life is played by Shadia Simmons, who eventually retired from acting to become a High School and Acting Teacher. During her career she was in a bunch of Disney Channel Original Movies, including the first two Zenon Movies, and was in a major role in a bunch of live action childrens shows: I Was A Sizth Grade Alien, Strange Days at Blake Holsely High, and Life with Derek, the only one of which i’ve seen and even then barely so I can’t comment on the rest of her work. Simmons does a decent job in the film, and does shine in the more dramtic scenes, not the best part of it but certainly not bad at all.

Lindsay Haun plays Mahree, and had more of an acting career after this one, having a small recurring role on True Blood as Hadley, while also directing some smaller films. Haun is easily one of the two highlights of the movie and the best of the two main tween actresses by a mile. More on that in a bit.

Next we have Carl Fucking Lumbly as Congressman Ron Dellums. Carl has had a long and storied career and the fucking is because of what I best know him from: Playing the Martian Manhunter Jon Jonzz on Justice League. And let me not undersell it: his version of Jon is waht made me LOVE the character, still do to this day, being the first time I encountered any version of Jon and the one I still love the most, a stoic man who tries to adapt to a world he feels he can never be a part of, adding shades to his stitled demeanour to show off his emtitons and in general being the heart and soul of what made this verison work and made me love the character with his performance. He’s done other stuff too including Cagney and Lacey, Doctor Sleepand what have you.. but he’ll always be Jonn to me and that’s not a bad thing in the slightest. Unsuprisingly he’s the other standout here.

Finally we have Penny Johnson as Ron’s wife and Piper’s Mother Roscoe, who played Captain Sisko’s love intrest on Deep Space 9 and was one of the leads on castle. Haven’t seen either of those but she does seem awesome and does a terrific job here.

Moving on to the film itself.. it’s really fantastic. It has some awkwardness and goofy bollocks as you’d expect from a disney channel original movie in 2000, but it handles a really heavy subject, race relations, gracefully and clearly with the goal of educating an audience with a lot of white kids in it about race. So I can praise what it does right i’m going to be handling the parts that are a bit wobbly first so I can get to the good stuff

Awkwardness and Goofy Bollocks:

First the out and out criticism: The films TV Movie roots show in places, as this film lacks the polish these films would have later this decade, with the film barely having an opening title sequence and just sorta throwing you in, though to their credit it does open with the utterly awesome Back in Love Again, because 70′s.

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That slaps and that’s an undeniable fact. What’s also an undenaible fact is the film dosen’t try the hardest to be very 70′s in it’s sets and what not, though it does do it a little with the clothes and that not being the case with Mahree is intentional, as her family while wealthy is from another culture and one literally and metaphorically behind the times.

I will also say Shadia Simmons is a decent actress, but is mildly weak in comparison to the other 3 in the leads, but its more the result of putting a pretty standard child sitcom actress up against two experinced actors who know what their doing and one whose about as experinced as her, but simply has a LOT to work with and goes above and beyond. It’s less that she’s bad and more that she’s simply not as good as what’s around her, and in general I tend to go easier on child actors since it’s not an easy job for a grown adult much less a teenager, it’s very pressurey and there’s a reason a LOT of them bottom out as they get older or retire all together.

I will say though that Piper’s brothers are awful and I feel are only there because she actually had brothers. The actors try, i’m not pinning this on them but writing wise their just two little shits who contirbute ntohing of value to any scene their in, being generally way to young to get into the heavy topic at hand, and mostly being there for unfunny shneanigans. They aren’t in the film too much otherwise they might’ve ruined it for me, but if Shadia struggles a bit agianst sttronge perofrmances imagine who younger actors with the stage direction “Be the bane of my existence” and you’ll MAYBE see the problem.

The film also loves cheesy time passing montages, including an actual factual shopping montage, easily the goofiest, but it’s something you’d expect from a dcom and helps lighten the mood. That’s a running theme outside the brothers there really isn’t anything too silly.. until the last act. See in the last act, the film tackles the real life death of Steve Biko, a South African activist against apartheid who was captured by the state and very transparently murdered in jail. with the government claming he killed himself which no one bought because why would they, and it sparked riots worldwide and finally got the US to take Apartheid seriously according to the film. Though as I mentioned earlier Regan did not in case you thought the republican party being terrible and deeply racist was a brand new thing. It was not. Guys like Tucker Carlson and Former President Trump are a symptom, not the disease.. though they certainly look and feel like some form of plauge. Point is Mahree is breifly taken by the embassy.. whose staff who take her feel like the Disney Channel Original Movie form of Nazi’s. The heavy accents, the way they compose themselves... I half expect an elderly indiana jones to show up to whip the piss out of them. And dont’ get me wrong, the only diffrence between these pricks and a nazi is the fact they don’t call themselves nazis, this isn’t a nuanced horrifying racist to be scared of but a saturday morning cartoon version.

While white supremacists in real life can be cartoonishly evil, again see trump and carlson, it does kind of undercut the seriousness and nuance of things to have your villians be cold, cackling cutouts who are 5 seconds away from saying “You are part of the rebel alliance and a traitor take her away” to our heroine, especailly since Mahree’s reaction to being taken away and confusion at everything and at being treated like a prisoner by her own people are very painful and very well acted. I do get showing them as monsters, because they were, but given Mahree’s father who as a south african police man was DEFINTELY ONE and even outside his racisim doubts and downtalks his own daughter, still feels like an actual person, if not a GOOD person, they could’ve done better and did in the same film.

But that stuff aside.. I really can’t find much that’s honestly that silly or bad and as you can tell what little I did was more a product of being a tv movie. So now i’ve got the negatives out of the way

This Film Is Pretty Good: It truly is, for a lot of reasons. But the biggest is the nuance. It could’ve been easy to just have Maree as some racist kid needing to learn a lesson who was openly cruel and easy to jeer at.. but the film went iwth the reality: that she was instead an extremley privlaged and insulated girl who simply NEVER knew better. To her her very racist and segregated world is just the way the world worked for her and she dosen’t even consider when the Dellums come to pick her up minus Ron these aren’t servants and her own servant’s words fall on deaf ears, as the poor woman tries to make it clear how miserable her life is and how much she deseprately wants this child to do better. Marhee is never actively malicious even when, due to the shock of her all black host family, she baricades herself in Piper’s room. It’s obnoxious sure and CERTAINLY hurtful and the film makes no bones about it and Piper rightfully calls her out on it. The film dosen’t let her get away with any intetnional racisim like that and after Piper calls her out, she realizes she’s been selifsh and makes a genuine effort. And even then the film makes a good choice in not making it an easy road to realization. Mahree makes a genuine effort in the first place not because of any big revelation or anything, but because she simply hears her dad in her head telling her she’d give up after a week and that, coupled with Piper’s words, makes her see herself as a selfish brat. Even after she’s floored by a mall where black and white people stand side by side aand casually talks about horrors like ID Cards like i’ts a GOOD thing, because that’s what she’s been taught by her dad. That black people are happy being told where they can and can’t go when no they weren’t they simply had no chocie in the matter. And while we do see early on when an asshole at a restraunt assaults a waiter for an accident that Mahree clearly isn’t okay with the more horrifying side of things, she still dosen’t quite grasp WHY that happened, simply that it’s something that does reguarly she dosen’t like. It’s excellently, and unsuprisingly called back when they visit an ice cream place in the states and something similar happens.. but the guy takes it in stride, even ordering a sundae, to Maree’s confusion.

It’s what makes the film work and all the more striking: As Roscoe makes clear to Ron, whose admant about nto having a racist in the house, this is not her fault. While the film makes it clear Mahree’s behavior at first was not okay and her prejudiece is not okay, it also makes it VERY clear she’s a product of a terrible system and terrible parenting from people who choose to benneift from the system instead of challenge it. She’s only like this because she hasn’t had a reason to ever think diffrent and just took her parents at face value and no mater the country, this is something that sadly happens far too often: Someone hating a group or thinking discrimination is okay because that’s how they were taught and that’s all they’ve known and the only way to change that is to challenge that opinon and try to get them to have some empathy and see the other way and as this film shows it’s a struggle.. and at the end of the day while the Dellums make a concentrated effort, Maree is the one who has to realize what her parents taught her is bad and her country is inherently flawed and NEEDS to change, just like ours did, and STILL badly needs to.

And that’s where the nuance kicks in as the good congressman is understandable in not wanting a racist in his house... but his wife is equally right that Maree is not some easy symbol of his hatred towards south africa, but a girl who grew up knowing nothing more than the fucked up system, and eventually he comes around, realizing , especially after she apologizes for him even thinking she’d use a racial slur on piper after a very powerful conversation with the two and piper accidently saying she used the South African N Word, almost accidently getting her friend thrown out, that she simply hasn’t been outside her shell and gently guides her to keep reading roots, even letting her take it with her if she wants back home. The film shows the full pain of the situation but also shows change is posisble. Again it’s not easy, Mahree has a panic attack waiting in an almost all black line in school and it’s shown to be as horrible a thought as it is., but she DOES change and it comes off as real, as someone realizing the system they grew up with is broken and needs to be fixed and she can’t just sit back and let it.

What makes this happen, besides the aformentioned kidnapping by saturday morning cartoon racists, is Piper confronting her after a friend from south africa forces Piper to acccept that while her and Mahree are friends, Mahree might not seee her as equal and Piper in turn in a heated argument and easily Simmons best performance of the film, that things are broken and wrong and that her “firend”, her nanny/servant back home, is not happy. It leaves Mahree crying and Ron telling her the honest truth: Change was, and again still is but this was 2000 and while we should’ve had this talk disney channel wasn’t ready for it, needed to make things better here.. and tha’ts what south african’s doing> Fighting for equal rights at last. It’s some powerful, heavy as hell stuff you woudln’t expect from a line of movie that also include a robot house, before that was an actual thing, a merMAN dad MerMan, a boy slowly turning into a leprechaun, and at least two diffrent movies centering around wacky kidnappings. It’s a nuanced and hard look at race, as hard as late 90′s jsut turned into the 2000′s disney could get mind, aimed at kids and the film, whiel stilted really has my utter praise. It’s genuinely moving, well acted and teaches a valuable message that while not eveyrone can change.. it dosen’t hurt to try and help them, as well as the equal message that change start with YOU. someone has to WANT to be better and learn and actually let other people in to help them. And I wont’ lie and say this is the most naunced or subtle film.. at time’s it’s about as subtle as a ralph wiggum throught he window

But sometimes you don’t need to be. It also taught kids about apartheid, not me as I barely saw the film, but many learned of something ghoulsih that had barely ended at the time of the film’s release, something I only learned about as a teen via bloom county and a diffrent world, which has an utterly awesome apartheid episode “A World Alike”. Seriously check it out if you have prime, as it shows that america isn’t the only country with a deep history of ingraned racisim. And was it an easy way to have an anti racisim narriative without fully confronting america’s own racist history? Yup. Just.. yup. Can I blame Disney Channel for it when they clearly, while equipped to tackle racisim, weren’t ready to tackle something that dense or heavy, and while Proud Family later would there’s a diffrence between a 20 minute one off episode of a cartoon and 90 minutes of film? Yeah. For what it is and for what the time period is, I applaud this film taking on such a heavy topic with grace. Some goofyiness here and there yes and some lack of subtly.. but still grace. For what it is is, it’s pretty good and i hope to show it to my nieces one day soon. It has i’ts heart in the right place and thus has a place in my heart. See you next rainbow.

#the color of friendship #disney channel #dcom #disney channel original movie #black history month #black lives matter

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hlupdate · 4 years

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Here he comes, one of the planet’s most conspicuous young men, stepping out of the London drizzle and into a dusty suburban pub. If there was an old vinyl record player in the place it would scratch quiet. Instead, the two-dozen punters turn hushed and intent, as if a unicorn has just trotted in off the street, and nobody wants to scare it off. “That’s frickin’ Harry frickin’ Styles,” whispers a young man at the bar, “in this pub.” The pop star is asked what he wants to drink and in a voice already inclined to undertones, quietly orders a cup of tea.

A former teen star who is now 25, a happier and rockier solo artist since his boyband One Direction split a few years ago, Styles has hidden himself inside a large, swamp-green parka. He’s tall, around the 6ft mark, and carries himself with a slight stoop. If Styles could only do something about his appearance from the neck up (elfin brow, wide Joker smile, a face that’s recognisable across multiple continents) you sense he could drink in pubs like this anonymously enough. As it is, cover blown, he removes the parka. A woolly jumper beneath has a picture of the planet Saturn on it. Maybe they’ve heard of Styles there, too.

We take a seat in the corner. On nearby tables, conversations start to sputter as people try to keep their own talk ticking along on autopilot while straining to hear what Styles says. I ask him about the sheer strangeness of this and other aspects of fame. Full stadiums, swooning admirers, an excess of opportunity and cash. Why isn’t Styles an absolute ordeal of a human being by now? Keith Richards, at a comparable stage, imagined himself the pirate leader of a travelling nation-state, unbound by international law. Elton John was on vast amounts of cocaine. Meanwhile, here’s Harry, known in the music industry as a bit of a freak, medically, having maintained abnormally high levels of civility in his system.

Styles tilts his head, flattered. There are others, he promises. “People who are successful, and still nice. It’s when you meet the people who are successful and aren’t nice, you think: What’s yer excuse? Cos I’ve met the other sort.”

Styles read Keith Richards’ autobiography a while back, and he recently finished Elton’s, too. (“Soooo much cocaine,” he marvels.) We talk for a bit about whether extreme dissolute behaviour and artistic greatness go hand in hand. Styles, who has just released his second solo album, Fine Line, the penultimate track of which is called Treat People With Kindness, has to hope not. “I just don’t think you need to be a dick to be a good artist. But, then, there are also a lot of good artists who are dicks. So. Hmm. Maybe I need to start scaring babies in supermarkets?”

A couple of lads hustle over to offer drinks. A photo is requested; they say they’ll wait. I’m weirdly anxious about Styles’s phone, which is slung on the table in front of him. What must be the black-market value of that thing? If fans were to get hold of it, would they want to open Styles’s music app first, to listen to tracks from the new album, or rush to see his messages and calls, to find out who Styles has been flirting with late at night? The interest in his music has always run at a ratio of about 50/50 with the interest in who he is dating.

It’s a ratio Styles tries to adjust in favour of the music by being vague about his ex-partners, real and rumoured (Taylor Swift, Kendall Jenner, Parisian model Camille Rowe), diverting to discuss his songs about failed relationships. A year ago, when Styles was floating around near this pub in north London, where he lives, and California, where he tends to record, looking for inspiration for the new album, his close friend Tom Hull told him: “Just date amazing women, or men, or whatever, who are going to fuck you up… Let it affect you and write songs about it.”

Styles, who writes in collaboration with Hull and producer Tyler Johnson, sounds as if he took the advice. The new album, Fine Line, is at its best when capturing late-hours moments, drunk calls, “wandering hands”, kitchen snogs. A golden-haired lover recurs. There are up tracks, down tracks, some with the trippy delirium of harpsichord-era Stones, others with the angsty Britpop swell of strings. While I listened, I couldn’t help scribbling down names, possible subjects. On the lyric “There’s a piece of you in how I dress” I wrote: maybe Kendall? In a song about a lover “way too bright for me”: surely Taylor.

Styles says he keeps to a general rule: write what comes and don’t think about it too much afterwards. The only time he worries about an individual lyric is if it risks putting an ex in a difficult position. “If a song’s about someone, is that fine? Or is that gonna get annoying for them, if people try to decipher it?” Has he ever got that judgment call wrong and taken a bollocking from an angry ex? Styles raises an eyebrow. “Maybe ask me in a month.”

I quiz him on something I’ve often wondered about. Why are the very famous so inclined to hook up with the very famous? From the outside it looks twice the hassle, with twice the odds of ending badly. “Don’t we all do that, though?” Styles asks. “Go into things that feel relatively doomed from the start?” I ask him why he doesn’t date normals. He seems tickled: “Um. I mean, I do. I have a private life. You just don’t know about it.”

Styles doesn’t particularly like being asked about his love life, but is amused all the same, as he is about most things. When I ask about the logistics of someone as well known as him dating someone anonymous (“Do you need to give them, like, some sort of primer?”), Styles snorts with laughter.

“Uh-h-h. Like any conversation, I guess, it’s easier if you’re honest. But I try to let it come up when it comes up. Cos that’s a weird thing to talk about, y’know? If you’ve just started seeing someone, and you’re, like: [he adopts a throaty, mission-briefing voice] So! This is what’s gonna happen!” Styles holds out his hands: no, ta. “I don’t wanna have that conversation, man. It would be fucking weird.”

And not very sexy, I say.

“Not sexy,” Styles says, “no.”

A quick aside about his accent, which is hard to capture in print. (“Nat sexy, no.”) After a workout in a hotel gym recently, Styles says he was taken aback (“taken abeck”) to be asked by a stranger whether he was speaking in a fake voice. He was appalled. But after so long crossing borders and time zones, living and working between England and the US, the accent has undergone a jazzy remix, and tends to get farthest from its Cheshire roots when he’s around strangers. Once Styles begins to get comfortable in the pub, the flatter, no-nonsense sounds of his youth return. Nowpe he says, for nope. Fook, for fuck.

“What the fook are they?” This was the response of his childhood pals, he remembers, back in the village of Holmes Chapel, when little Harry had the gumption to show up in the playground wearing Chelsea boots instead of the approved chunky trainers. Styles’s parents had separated when he was very young, but there is no origin-story trauma: he has always stayed close to both. His mother, Anne, would praise his singing voice in the car, and when Styles was 16 it was agreed he could audition for a singing contest on TV.

“The craziest part about the whole X Factor thing,” says Styles, who auditioned for the ITV reality show in 2010, “is that it’s so instant. The day before, you’ve never been on telly. Then suddenly…” Suddenly you’re a piece of national property. “You don’t think at the time, ‘Oh, maybe I should keep some of my personal stuff back for myself.’ Partly because, if you’re a 16-year-old who does that, you look like a jumped-up little shit. Can you imagine? ‘Sorry, actually, I’d rather not comment…’ You don’t know what to be protective of.”

By the winter of 2010, Styles was a fan favourite, a key member of One Direction, a five-piece that enjoyed enormous national exposure and gathered millions of fans before any music had been released. Cameras filmed every part of their rise. There wasn’t any time in the dark to practise, test things out, mentally brace. “We didn’t get to dip in a toe,” Styles says. “But, listen, I was a kid, all I knew was: I didn’t have to go to school any more. I thought it was fucking great.” He remembers having a lot of fun, and being well taken care of. He jokes: “Maybe it’s something I’ll have to deal with a bit later. When I wake up in my 40s and think: Arrrggh.”

In February 2012, One Direction were feted at the Brit Awards, hours before they were due to fly to the US for the first time. On TV that night they looked young, silly, chuffed – on the precipice of something huge, and with no clue at all. Their subsequent wonder-run (five platinum albums, four world tours) had its foundations in their ridiculous popularity in the States. Right away, Styles remembers, “We were fuelling a machine. Keeping the fire going.” He remembers it as a stimulating time; maybe overstimulating. “Coming out of it, when the band stopped, I realised that the thing I’d been missing, because it was all so fast paced, was human connection.”

I first met Styles in 2014, around the time the lack of human connection was starting to bite. One Direction were promoting their penultimate album and I’d been commissioned to write about themthe Guardian. Management felt the boys were so exhausted that my minutes in their presence had to be strictly counted. Inside a circle of cripplingly hot lights, while someone ran the stopwatch, we interacted as humanly as we could.

I remember how jaded the best singer in the group, Zayn Malik, seemed. (Malik was weeks away from quitting.) I also remember how flattered and bewildered the others were to be asked a few grownup questions – and not what Louis Tomlinson would later describe to me as “who’s-your-favourite-superhero… all that shit”. Styles was watchful and quiet that day. By total chance, a week later, we were in the same London cafe and he tapped my shoulder. He was having lunch with friends. “Will ya join us?”

t struck me as a quietly classy move. I was fascinated to see him interact with mates he’d chosen for himself. Styles was dry and funny, older than his years. After lunch we said the usual things about keeping in touch, and followed each other on Twitter. I kept an eye on his updates, about leaving One Direction, releasing an impressive, self-titled debut album in 2017, playing for 36,000 people in Madison Square Garden in New York, acting in Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-nominated war movie Dunkirk. Meanwhile, I did my best to manage the mess that had been made of my own account after Styles’s Twitter follow ignited a small explosion of teenage longing in my mentions. For at least a year I received weekly, sometimes daily, pleas from people who wanted messages conveyed to “H”. Still now, every few days, fans in America, Asia and Europe follow me to “see what H sees” in their timeline.

He has around 50 million social media followers, and with that comes the ability to ripple the internet like somebody airing a bedsheet. I’ve noticed, though, how rarely Styles directs people to support specific causes, last doing so in 2018, when he encouraged people to join a march against gun violence. Why don’t you use your influence more, I ask? “Because of dilution. Because I’d prefer, when I say something, for people to think I mean it.” He runs his fingertips across the table. “To be honest, I’m still searching for that one thing, y’know. Something I can really stand up for, and get behind, and be like: This Is My Life Fight. There’s a power to doing the one thing. You want your whole weight behind it.”

It’s one of the things that sets Styles apart, the way he puts his whole weight behind the different aspects of this strange job. If you watch footage of him as a guest host on Saturday Night Live last month, Styles plunges in, fully inhabiting the silliness of every sketch. He has good songs in his repertoire (2017’s ballad Sign Of The Times stands out), and would probably admit to some middling songs that attest to his relative inexperience as a writer. But whichever of his songs Styles performs, he goes all-in, trusting that his zest and energy will hold an audience’s attention. He approaches this interview in roughly the same spirit, not enjoying every question, fidgeting, pleading for clemency once or twice, but giving everything due consideration.

I bring up something Styles joked about earlier: the possibility of waking up in his 40s with deferred mental health problems.

“Mm,” he says

Have you thought about therapy, I ask, to get ahead of that?

“I go,” he says. “Not every week. But whenever I feel I need it. For a really long time I didn’t try therapy, because I wanted to be the guy who could say: ‘I don’t need it.’ Now I realise I was only getting in my own way.” He shrugs. “It helps.”

Lately he’s been reading a lot (Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women stood out). He’s watched a lot of Netflix (crime thrillers and music docs). He recently cried through Slave Play on Broadway. I sense in Styles, at 25, a pent-up undergraduate hunger, maybe a desire to make up for lost time. “I’ve definitely been wanting to learn stuff, try stuff,” he says. “Things I didn’t grow up around. Things I’d always been a little bit sceptical about. Like therapy, like meditation. All I need to hear is someone saying, ‘Apparently, it’s amazing’, and I’ll try it. When I was in Los Angeles once, I heard about juice cleanses. I thought, yeah, I’ll do a juice cleanse.”

How messy were the results?

“You mean…?” Styles raises an eyebrow, recalling the poos. “They were all right. I was just hungry. And bored.”

One notable feature of Styles’s solo career has been his headlong embrace of unconventional clothing. A 2017-18 tour could have been sponsored by the Dulux colour wheel: mustard tones in Sydney, shocking pink in Dallas. In a more serious sense, some of Styles’s choices have fed into an important political discussion about gendered fashion. In May, as a co-host at the Met Gala in New York, he stepped out in a sheer blouse and a pearl earring. One evening’s work challenged a lot of stubborn preconceptions about who gets to wear what.

He says: “What women wear. What men wear. For me it’s not a question of that. If I see a nice shirt and get told, ‘But it’s for ladies.’ I think: ‘Okaaaay? Doesn’t make me want to wear it less though.’ I think the moment you feel more comfortable with yourself, it all becomes a lot easier.”

What do you mean, I ask?

Styles is leaning forward, hands folded around his cup of tea. “A part of it was having, like, a big moment of self-reflection. And self-acceptance.” He has a habit, when he’s made a definitive statement, of raising his chin and nodding a little, as if to decide whether he still agrees with himself. “I think it’s a very free, and freeing, time. I think people are asking, ‘Why not?’ a lot more. Which excites me. It’s not just clothes where lines have been blurred, it’s going across so many things. I think you can relate it to music, and how genres are blurring…”

Sexuality, too, I say.

“Yep,” says Styles. “Yep.”

There’s a popular perception, I say, that you don’t define as straight. The lyrics to your songs, the clothes you choose to wear, even the sleeve of your new record – all of these things get picked apart for clues that you’re bisexual. Has anyone ever asked you though?

“Um. I guess I haaaaave been asked? But, I dunno. Why?”

You mean, why ask the question?

“Yeah, I think I do mean that. It’s not like I’m sitting on an answer, and protecting it, and holding it back. It’s not a case of: I’m not telling you cos I don’t want to tell you. It’s not: ooh this is mine and it’s not yours.”

What is it then?

“It’s: who cares? Does that make sense? It’s just: who cares?”

I suppose my only question, then, is about the stuff that looks like clue dropping. Because if you don’t want people to care, why hint? Take the album sleeve for Fine Line. With its horizontal pink and blue stripes, a splash of magenta, the design seems to gesture at the trans and bisexual pride flags. Which is great – unless the person behind it happens to be a straight dude, sprinkling LGBTQ crumbs that lead nowhere. Does that make sense?

Styles nods. “Am I sprinkling in nuggets of sexual ambiguity to try and be more interesting? No.” As for the rest, he says, “in terms of how I wanna dress, and what the album sleeve’s gonna be, I tend to make decisions in terms of collaborators I want to work with. I want things to look a certain way. Not because it makes me look gay, or it makes me look straight, or it makes me look bisexual, but because I think it looks cool. And more than that, I dunno, I just think sexuality’s something that’s fun. Honestly? I can’t say I’ve given it any more thought than that.”

In our musty corner of the pub we’ve somehow passed a couple of hours in intense discussion. We’ll lighten up, before Styles heads home, with some chat about clever films (Marriage Story), stupider viral videos (the little boy who’s just learned the word “apparently”), that favourite-superhero stuff that, after all, has its place. He talks about the curious double time scheme of a pop star’s life – those crammed 18-hour days and then the sudden empty off-time when Styles might find himself walking miles across London to buy a book, afterwards congratulating himself: “Well, that’s an hour filled.”

Before we stand up I ask if he’s minded any of my questions.

He pushes out his lips, possibly recalling them one by one, then shakes his head. “What I would say, about the whole being-asked-about-my-sexuality thing – this is a job where you might get asked. And to complain about it, to say you hate it, and still do the job, that’s just silly. You respect that someone’s gonna ask. And you hope that they respect they might not get an answer.”

I tell him I do.

“Cool.”

Styles has to find those lads who wanted a photo. He scoops his phone off the table and flicks his thumb around the screen. Lately, he says, when he messes around on his phone in an idle moment, it’s mostly to look at videos – clips that his friends have sent him, in which their kids sing along to music he’s made. “Never gets old,” Styles says, beaming.

A few years ago, when he emerged from the boyband, blinking, shattered, he set himself three tasks: prioritise friends, learn how to be an adult, achieve a proper balance between the big and the small. Full stadiums, provocative outfits – Styles genuinely loves these things. “But I guess I’ve realised, as well,” he says, “that the coolest things are not always the cool things. Do you know what I mean?” He grabs his parka and his phone and, a little stooped, heads for home.

#harry styles #the guardian #stunt mention #131219

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gingermcl · 4 years

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Weaponization of music

Did you know that the standard music frequency is 440 hz and this is an unnatural frequency? A 440 hertz frequency disrupts the mind and the body. 432 Hz resonates with 8 Hz, same as the Schumann resonance, the documented fundamental electromagnetic “beat” of Earth. 432 Hz simply feels better.

Research shows music tuned to a 432 hertz frequency is easier to listen to, is brighter, clearer, and contains more dynamic range. Music with this tuning does not need be played at high volumes, thus reducing the risk of hearing damage. However by the 1950s the worldwide music was tuned to 440 hertz instead of 432 hertz.

If musical performances were going to sound the same all over the world, standardization was required. Having a universally accepted tone is why a piano in Toronto sounds exactly the same as a piano in China. There is nothing wrong with standardization, it is the choice of 440 Hz that was strategically calculated to disrupt the psyche of humanity as a whole.

In 1885, the Music Commission of the Italian Government declared that all instruments and orchestras should use a tuning fork that vibrated at 440 Hz, which was different from the original standard of 435 Hz and the competing 432 Hz used in France.

In 1917, the American Federation of Musicians endorsed the Italians, followed by a further push for 440 Hz in the 1940s by Nazi Germans.

In 1953, a worldwide agreement was signed. Signatories declared that middle “A” on the piano be forevermore tuned to exactly 440 Hz. This frequency became the standard ISO-16 reference for tuning all musical instruments based on the chromatic scale, the one most often used for music in the West. All the other notes are tuned in standard mathematical ratios leading to and from 440 Hz.

432 Hz is said to be mathematically consistent with the patterns of the universe. Studies reveal that 432hz tuning unifies the properties of light, time, space, matter, gravity and magnetism with biology, the DNA code, and consciousness. When atoms and DNA start to resonate in harmony with the spiraling pattern of nature, our sense of connection with nature is magnified. The number 432 is reflected in ratios of the Sun, Earth, and the moon as well as in the precession of the equinoxes, the Great Pyramid of Egypt, Stonehenge, and many other sacred sites.

So what’s the big deal? It’s just a difference of 8 Hz. It’s actually quite a nefarious plan. The recent discoveries of vibratory or oscillatory nature of the universe that happened recently show that this contemporary international pitch standard may actually generate an unhealthy effect or anti-social behavior in the consciousness of humans.

There is also a theory which says that the change from 432 Hz to 440 Hz was dictated by Nazi propaganda minister, named Joseph Goebbels. He used it in order to make people think and feel a certain manner, as well as to make them a prisoner of a certain consciousness. 440 Hz is an unnatural standard tuning frequency, is removed from the symmetry of sacred vibrations, and has declared war on the subconscious mind of Western Man.

The powers that be are successfully lowering the vibrations of not only the younger generations but of all of us. Such destructive frequencies turn thoughts towards disruption, disharmony, and disunity. 440 Hz also stimulates our brain – the controlling organ of our body - into a disharmonious resonance, which ultimately creates disease and war in the world. All disease is a disruption in frequency. Atoms are made of waves and vibrations. Therefore everything is sound. A disruptive or unhealthy frequency can cause big problems in a world made of sound waves!!

Both vibration and frequency hold a critically important yet hidden power to affect us, our lives, health, society; our whole world. The science of Cymatics, the study of visible sound and vibration, proves that frequency and vibration are the master keys and the organizational foundation for the creation of all matter and life on planet Earth.

When the sound waves move through a physical medium, such as sand, air, water, etc.; the frequency of the waves has a direct effect upon the structures that are created by the sound waves as they pass through that particular medium. The same will happen with cells in the human body.

Frequency isn’t the only way music affects our civilization. Music lyrics are known to cast spells on the masses. Modern society may not treat music as a magical thing now, but once music was considered to be one of the highest forms of magic. If we look back to ancient times, drums and other instruments were used to celebrate holy-days, invoke trance-like states, or announce the start of a battle. The people in ancient times who sang, danced, and made music were once thought of as spiritually-gifted individuals.

Music magick is still alive and well in modern times. We might not see it in the mainstream music industry, but it’s there if we dig a little deeper. First – think of the way music makes you feel. Music is known to rouse energy and stimulate emotions. Given that energy is what magic is all about, music is a fantastic tool for spellcasting!

A spell is defined as

1- A form of words used as a magical charm or incantation.

2- A state of enchantment caused by a magic spell.

3- An ability to control or influence people as the one had magical power over them.

The intention of any song could very easily be spell casting and the masses would have no idea. The term MC stands for Master of Ceremonies. Concerts are ceremonies. Ceremonies are where ritual magic is done. Are you seeing what is happening here? The masses are being placed under spells and casting negative spells on themselves via their favorite music all the time! They’re also generating energy for these celebrities satanic ritual abuse ceremonies! I’m not saying that you don’t need to listen to music but I am saying you must be very mindful of what you do consume in every way. That includes what material you let into your consciousness. There are apps in every App Store one can download that will switch your music to 432 Hz. I advise everyone to do this. Increase demand could mean more and better apps that convert music to the proper frequency.

One simple song can invoke feelings of joy, sorrow, laughter; essentially every emotion under the sun. One song can whisk us away to a past moment in our lives, good and bad. Music can be used in mental and physical therapy to aid in healing the body, mind, and soul. One can use the emotions felt through music and its unique, fluid energy in magic. Intention can and does make music witchcraft.

Witches can help improve or focus their magic by incorporating music into spells and rituals. Lyrics aren't the only consideration. Beats, measure, instruments, etc. can also be used in music magic.

Music is also used on the people as a form of mind control. Mind control techniques have been noted throughout history dating as far back as Ancient Egypt. Mind control did not enter the realm of modern science until the 1930’s when a physician by the name of Josef Mengele brought it into full practice within Nazi concentration camps. The majority of Mengele’s research within mind control remains classified to this day, however some has slowly come to the surface including the recognition of it being the basis for the covert CIA research program MK Ultra.

Joseph Mengele sounds like a psychopath by all accounts and his mind control programs are nothing short of inhumane. The number of crimes committed against humanity by those in power is too many to count. All celebrities are forced to undergo MK Ultra programming to some degree. This programming breaks down the human spirit and can create alter egos. It is done in order to brainwash these people into doing anything their masters and “fame” requires. Several celebrities have begun speaking out about the torture and programming they endured at the hands of the Hollywood and music industries.

Symbolism is used heavily in mind control programming. The all-seeing eye, demons, and baphomet are just a few of the reoccurring themes that love appearing in entertainment; often in completely unrelated ways to the content. These themes can be noted throughout music videos, movies, and TV shows. The existence of this symbology is one thing I feel can be stated as fact. The symbology is clearly there. Watch see any of the following music videos and then tell me the symbology and themes are a mere coincidence or are directly related to the songs content:

* Lil Wayne – Love Me (Explicit) ft. Drake, Future

* Ke$ha – Die Young

* Lady Gaga – Alejandro

* Katy Perry – Wide Awake

* Britney Spears – Hold It Against Me

If you truly feel that the symbols were fitting and not purposely placed, I will respect that opinion. However I encourage you to search for a breakdown of the above listed videos in order to make sure you are made aware of symbology and themes. There may be some you missed or may not be aware of. It’s also worth noting that these 5 videos are not the only videos out there, they are simply a handful of the hundreds (if not thousands) of music videos that feature these symbols to some degree.

Assuming that these symbols/themes do recur, the question becomes why? Is it a level of programming that they are attempting to inflict on us the viewers? Could it be to desensitize us to their existence and placement throughout society? Or could it simply be artistic coincidence? The answer to these questions lie within. Let this article be a starting point for your own research and findings on all of the aspects of 440 Hz, music magick, and Monarch mind control programming (MK Ultra.) There is a lot of information and well-formulated opinions out there, many worth considering.

Once you have done your research, see what resonates with you as true and don’t be afraid to stand by it even if it isn’t in-line with popular opinion. No matter which side of the spectrum you stand on having an awareness towards this subject is important, and that’s why I felt inspired to write this article.

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animalpetcel · 5 years

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Ideal RHATO

Okay, so I’ve done some thinking. While Red Hood and the Outlaws was an interesting concept; give Jason friends and a team of his own, get him out of the Batfam Shadow, it’s been bogged down by L*bdell spotty writing and questionable Editorial decisions. So I’ve taken the time to think of what I would personally want the Outlaws to be.

First of all, I don’t believe that Jason would be better of if he remained solo. While he does deserve a good solo run other than UtH, the idea of permanently sequestering from creating meaningful, recurring relationships with other heroes is just repulsive to me. He should be allowed to have friends and people to talk to outside of the Batfamily guys, there’s only so many adventures he can have by himself before they all start sounding the same. You could even have him gaining friends as part of his character development.

Okay! So let’s begin

In my version, the Outlaws would be a more obvious antihero team. They take cases by those who feel that regular heroes can’t help them, that they won’t go far enough to achieve justice. The Outlaws won’t kill often, but it would usually be awful criminals like drug dealers, traffickers or those in charge, but if they don’t kill, they won’t be above dissing out harsh, lasting punishments to those who cross them. There could be the possibility of them being a team looking for redemption, but I’ve never really thought about them going in that direction.

Btw: This will be a hard reboot, everything from New52 to Rebirth regarding RHATO will be completely retconned, because Lobdell wrote almost all of them and despite what people want to believe most of it is bad save for some barely passable moments

Outlaw Members

Jason Todd

Can’t have the Outlaws without their infamous leader. Like I said above, I believe that having his own team can be a good thing for Jason, he can establish a history disconnected from his history with Bruce and actually start to move on. I’d imagine him being a reluctant leader, preferring to work alone but admitting that having people to rely on has made his mission a lot easier. He’s a very driven and calculated person, and after reading Arkham Knight Genesis, I have no doubt in his leadership skills and his ability to turn a ragtag group of antiheroes into a team to be reckoned with.

Idk if I’d keep his All-Caste stuff. I know that it was probably created to give his backstory something that stands out, since he’s the third Batfam member to have the League of Assassins in his backstory and isn’t the only one that’s died before, but he barely uses the All-blades or brings up the All-Caste to the point were you can omit it and don’t really have to do that much to replace it. At this point, I’d accept Talia making him train with Brother Blood over the All-Caste.

I’d probably say that the Lazurus pit Talia used to bring him back was kinda special, giving him a minor healing factor and increasing his strength, idk, something small.

Eddie Bloomberg

(I hate Tom King and this dialogue too but I wanted a recent image of him)

Did you know that unlike Roy Harper, Eddie was actually Jason’s best friend pre-reboot? Most people don’t because DC doesn’t care about using pre-established canon or developing its less popular heroes! 🙃

Okay, I used to be a huge fan of Jason and Roy’s friendship in New52 RHATO, but then I learned that Roy was originally Dick’s friends, that his personality was dumbed down for New52, Roy actually hates mercenaries and would never become one, they only used Roy because he was more popular and that most Titan/Roy friends actually hate his New52 counterpart and friendship with Jason. While I believe that Roy and be both friendship with Dick AND Jason (but in different ways. Dick is more of a close friend while he and Jason should have a more big brother kind of relationship), I have to admit that DC dropped the ball here, and it would be easier to just scrap everything instead of trying to make it work.

Eddie’s personality is actually quite similar to New52 Roy’s, and he and Jason already have unexplored history, so switching Roy with him won’t mess anything too much.

And now, I hear you ask “Ani, what about the Outlaw’s being an antihero group? Wouldn’t that make Eddie stand out?”, and I will reply “Don’t worry, I have a plan!”

Back when Eddie first got his powers, Neron, the king of hell at the time (?) wanted Eddie to be his protege, but Eddie refuses. But what if Neron was more forceful? Eddie could be offered, now powerless again because of the events of TT (but his death is retconned to just getting badly injured), to become Neron’s protege once again. With nothing left to lose (his relationship with Blue Devil is still in the fritz, Teen Titans no longer seem to give a damn and Rose & Jaime is still off doing their own things), he takes it. I guess he’s probably look different with more of Neron’s power coursing through his veins, but the point is that Outlaws become a “Fall from grace” for him. He’s trying to still be a hero, but as Neron’s influence continues to grow, his ability to tell right from wrong gets more and more clouded.

He’s the one to approach Jason with the idea of being a team, wanting to relive the “Good Ol’ Days” when they were younger and less bogged down with personal trauma. While Jason is reluctant, he admits that since being self-exiled from the Batfamily that it’s been kinda lonely, so he agrees, but only short-term. Eddie then segways into the next member of their burgeoning group–

Rose Wilson

While pre-reboot, Rose and Jason did not have the friendliest interactions, with her holding a blade to her throat while his brothers threatened him with a crime he never committed. Post-reboot, he and Rose seem to have a more “friendlier” relationship, but the Wilson family have been rebooted at least theee times in both New52 and Rebirth, so who knows if they even still know each other now,

Rose and Eddie were very close friends in Teen Titans, and I think that getting Rose away from the madness of her family and father could be good for her character.

Eddie manages to convince her to join the “Outlaws”, but like Jason, she goes into it thinking that it’ll be a one-time thing. She cares a lot about Eddie, and sticks with the team to make sure that he’s doing alright. She probably could have an arc were Nightwing confronts her on her work in the Outlaws (since the other heroes see them as white-hat mercenaries) since he mentored her in being a hero, so it could be about dealing with what other people expect of her.

Essence

While L*bdell might be basically a shit writer, he does create interesting concepts. With a better writer, Essence could be a very interesting character, watching from the shadows and judging whether or not the Outlaws are actually “good” people, before she eventually starts taking a more active role in helping them punish criminals.

While she would at first interact solely with Jason, asking him questions about his deeds and ordering him in what direction she feels is best, she would eventually introduce herself to the rest of the group. I think she’d get along best with Komand’r, while the others might test her absolutism, Black-And-White morality a bit.

Rankorr (Jack Moore)

I know that there’s some people who want Guy Gardner to be Jason’s lantern, but what about a lantern who is close to Jason in age and actually fits the Outlaw theme?

Jack Moore is a Red Lantern, not only a Red Lantern, but the first human lantern who is also the first Red Lantern to be capable of creating constructs. He struggles with his rage, and deep down, he wants to enjoy a normal life on earth.

Maybe after Red Lantern (retconning Lobo or if not, he’s brought back using Red Lantern Blood Magic), he decides that the RL’s are a bit too cult-like for him and tries to lay low on Earth, finishing his literature degree and opening up a small bookstore somewhere in London. He’s close with Guy, but still can’t/refuses to let go of his rage, so Jack is still a RL

Of course, keeping his rage at bay is hard work, and after witnessing police brutality one more time, he loses control.

The Outlaws were hired by the family of the victim to make the officers see justice, but after seeing Jack work, they realize that this might be their easiest case yet.

Afterwards, Jack tries to downplay the entire thing (before resorting to threats when the Outlaws won’t listen), but Jason eventually convinced him that his talents would be wasted just being a civilian (and that his rage will only get worse if he continues to just let it boil without an “outlet”) so he joins the team

Blackfire

I’ve read Komand’r’s backstory, I know how bad it looks. However, in a medium where retcons and reimaginings are features instead of bugs (and can benefit a character’s story if done right), I really think it could be possible to make her work.

After reading New52 RHATO, I began thinking that it could be so much better if not only Eddie took Roy’s spot, but also if Komand’r took Starfire’s, since I feel like she had more potential beyond “Kori’s evil disabled sister”, “War Criminal” and “Struggling queen of Tamaran”

First, I’d change her pre-reboot backstory so instead of taking over the Gordanians, she is instead captured by them after Starfire frees her from the Psions (Komand’r still hates her sister and refuses to follow her). Through her clever mind and manipulations, she manages to earn favor with Lord Damyn, feigning romantic interest. Of course, given Komand’r’s nature, she ends up killing and replacing him, but her rule doesn’t go over well and she is again recaptured, but this time she’s brought to Earth.

Realizing that she’s now trapped on the planet whete her sister has become a successful and popular hero, Komand’r is at first angry, and then conspires to free herself and take revenge on her sister (who she still blames for everything despite that not being the case).

The Outlaws bust the alien trafficking ring, and Komand’r, seeing her chance, decides to show off and make nice with them to eventually use them for her revenge.

She finds Eddie and Rankorr easy to manipulate, but she bumps Heads with Jason whenever she tries to take his role as leader away from him and finds Rose’s mind to be “weak”. Overtime however, she bonds with Jason over feeling inferior to their siblings, realizes that her anger shares Rankorr’s intensity, and grows a genuine friendship with Rose and Eddie

Oh yeah, and maybe she tries to make things right with Kori

Artemis Grace

What would the Outlaws be without the greatest Amazon to have ever lived? Nothing, that’s for sure.

While I don’t agree with Jaytemis (at least not yet), I have to admit that Jason would be a fool not to like her. She’s a cool, confident character with a lot of interesting lore behind her.

Her joining will probably be pretty close to canon. The Outlaws are tasked with going after Black Mask, and Jason decides to go undercover, as the Red Hood still has his fingers in various criminal pies. While investigating, he runs into Artemis, who is looking for the Bow of Ra, and rest is history.

I feel like she’ll get along really well with Rose and Komand’r and maybe she’ll date one. She’ll definitely view Eddie a bit dismissively, and she isn’t a huge fan of demons. Rankorr would probably come off as stuck up to her.

Bizarro

Anyone who knows me will know that I’m am not a huge fan of Bizarro clones. I consider them to be an overused concept (that sometimes feels as if it relies on gene superiority, but idk if I’ll ever fully process my dislike for them), and the fact that as the time I’m writing this, there are at least four currently in continuity does not enamor me with the concept more.

However, after re-reading RHATO a few times, I’ll admit that the Outlaws’ Bizarro has grown on me. Since he already kinda has a unique name (Bizz), all I think he needs is a more visually distinct costume (doesn’t even have to directly reference Superman, but I can go 50/50 on the backwards “S”)

The Outlaws getting Bizz is exactly the same as canon. I’d imagine that he and Eddie would be as close as brothers. While Rankorr might find Bizz’s way of thinking and speaking to be annoying, I’d think that Rankorr will eventually warm up to him and probably teach him how to read and help Artemis teach him. Komand’r and Rose will probably be less receptive to him, but who knows

August Heart

I’m a Godspeed fan first and human second, we’ve been knew.

In all seriousness, Godspeed is the perfect Rebirth era character for RHATO and the fact that he and Jason still haven’t met is why DC doesn’t have any rights.

Okay okay, but he’s honestly a perfect fit. Like Jason, he also kills when dealing with crimes, but he isn’t so good and knowing who’s guilty and who isn’t just yet.

This will probably be after Death of the Speedforce, with August finally making things right with Barry, but still not forgiving himself for everything that happened. Deciding to self-exile himself rather than go back to Iron Heights, August travels, trying to figure out what do to do next, trying to follow Barry’s rules (which he finds to be very wishy-washy) to the best of his ability.

Eventually, he learns that Black Hole is still running, and against his better instincts, he goes after them.

His trail of lightning destruction catches the eye of the Outlaws.

Barry, realizing that his best-friend might need someone who can actually be there all the time to help reign him in, Barry goes to the Outlaws and asks them if they can help him once they catch up to him

They do in the form of offering a spot on the team.

August is very self-assured (even if it is hiding a softer, more emotional center), but has proven to be able to work with others, so I can see the other Outlaws coming to like him. They might find him a little cocky/early to jump the gun, but still a trusted and valued member of the team.

Since every Robin has their own flash, it only makes sense to finally give Jason (and have them date) a speedster of his own, and it should be someone who fits his morals, and who else could Then the speedster fans literally call “The Red Hood of the Flashfam”?

Final Thoughts

Other possible members I would consider/accept are

Eradicator Superman

Koryak

Vanessa Kapatelis/Silver Swan lll

Simon Amal (Crux)

Danny Chase

Clone!Roy Harper

Connor Hawke

Orm Marvius

Man O’ War

Lagoon Boy

Scarlet

Zachary Zatara

Thomas Merlyn

Ragman

Bleez

Walter West

Even with a cast as sizable as the one I just listed, with a good enough writer, there could still a few minor side characters. I would personally want the them to be

Scarlet: Jason’s former sidekick. She could be either a civilian who he talks to get experience some normalcy or the leader of her own version of the Outlaws made of up the Generation Outlaws we meet in RHATO #37-40. Either way, it could contrast with Bruce and the way he (mis)treats his own sidekicks and family

Zachary Zatara: Eddie’s old friend who helped him get his devil powers. Zachary would definitely be worried over Eddie once again accepting Neron’s power and will want to try to help. Whether he suceeds or not will depend if the writers want to go in that direction

Isabel Ardila: She’s a nothing character, but there’s a small chance that with a better writer, she might gain an interesting personality or an actual purpose in RHATO

Talia Al Ghul: before the reboot, Talia was Jason’s mentor figure and even gave him a cool dagger. It would be so cool if we can bring that back and erase Morrison’s problematic charactization of her. Maybe the dagger she gives Jason could be an All-Blade or smth. They’d definitely take a few cases from her however

Batfam, Titans and respective groups: it would have to happen eventually. It could lead to some interesting, angst filled conversations. And who knows, maybe they’ll actually make progress with their issues

But this post has gone on long enough. I just really wanted to talk a bit about my ideal Outlaws team that I will never see anywhere except for my dreams because mass media hates me and DC still thinks that Lobdell deserves to write Jason 😔😭

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pitiless-achilles-wept · 4 years

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Better Living Through Surgery: Life with Less Cancer!

[Originally posted August 13, 2020]

Hello from Penn Hospital!

Not to worry - I haven't been here the entire time since my last post, although I did end up spending an entire week in the hospital. Right now I'm sitting in the outdoor section of the cafeteria, which might be a mistake given that I'm not allowed to eat anything until after my CT scans at 1pm. The CT scans are part of my preparing to resume treatment for the rest of the cancer that's still in my body. The last time I had chemo was June 23rd and I've now hit the sweet spot of being a month past my mastectomy (so, mostly recovered) and out of other treatment long enough that I'm not suffering side effects any longer. It feels...almost like I don't have cancer at all.

Two Surgeries for the Price of...Two!

Let me back up a bit to the surgery though. I'd like to report that everything went totally smoothly...and it sort of did! Except that I had to have two surgeries because it also sort of didn't. As usual, what happened to me was super rare (less than 1% of cases!) and I would like to submit a formal retraction of any wishes I had to be exceptional. I've read "The Monkey's Paw." I know to be careful what I wish for. (Although, actually, I'm lying because I still plan to be the exception to the median life expectancy of those with my particular type and stage of cancer. If I have to be in the 1% of cancer cases it ought to be a good thing at least once.)

I had two surgeons for the two parts of my first surgery: one for the mastectomy (removing that incredibly stubborn initial tumor) and one for a "flap reconstruction," which used my own tissue (from my stomach - free tummy tuck!) to build a replacement. When they do that second part, they also take a blood supply so that a substantial part of it is vascular surgery. The reason that the reconstruction ever fails is if something goes wrong with the blood supply. If that happens, it's nearly always (99% of the time!) within 24 hours. What happened in my case was that everything went well with the surgery, even though it took about 7 hours, and I was recovering well and quickly. I was set to go home after my third night in the hospital (so, on Thursday).

Overnight on Wednesday, however, something went wrong with the blood supply. The new tissue was filling but not draining. What they later learned, once they rushed me back into the OR, was that the vein in it had a blood clot. They were able to fix it by taking a vein from my ankle to replace it. So basically that reset the clock on my recovery so that I ended up having to stay an additional three nights, going home on Sunday. (My initial surgery had been on a Monday.) It's actually extremely lucky that I was still in the hospital, despite how sad I was at having to stay. If I had been at home, far away from experts and surgeons, the tissue probably would have died and the reconstruction would have failed. It was a close thing since I was set to go home.

Anyone who has ever been in a hospital doesn't need a reminder of how, despite everyone's best intentions it is pretty terrible. I hadn't spent a night in the hospital since I was a newborn, despite all my various treatments, so I didn't know. Now I do and I never want to go back. The hardest part is that they have to wake you up almost constantly for vitals and to assess how the blood supply is doing (listening for arterial and venus sounds). For the first day after each surgery this was every 30 MINUTES, then every HOUR, then finally (on my final night) every 2 hours. And I'm the kind of person who's AWAKE as soon as I wake up. So I essentially didn't sleep more than an hour at a time until the bitter end when a nice nurse got a nice doctor to give me some kind of sedative so that I was able to sleep through the checks. I don't have a kid, so let me just say that this level of sleep deprivation was like nothing I had ever experienced. I see why the CIA used it as a form of torture. I'm a veteran of being tired and of many different kinds of fatigue but never have I been unable to get into REM sleep for so long. I am eager to avoid it at all costs again.

I had been more worried about the boredom than the lack of rest (because, at least on paper, the hospital seems like a place where you would mostly be resting/recovering) and it was indeed very boring. I was SO tired that I wasn't able to really do anything like read a novel, knit, or even really watch TV. I did binge a few podcasts, return to some more "Buffy," and attempt to chat to my parents when they could be there. The COVID visitor policy made it even more isolating and lonely than it would usually be. I was only allowed one "designated visitor" per day so my mom and dad switched off on who that was. Visitors could only be in the room and, once you left, you were gone for the day. So, for example, it's not like my mom could say hi in the morning, pop out and get us lunch, and then come back. All visiting was consolidated for the day. That meant that I tried valiantly to be good company for a few hours, but I imagine mostly I was too exhausted to accomplish that.

I took laps around the hallway (in my mask), which was actually a big achievement especially given the four surgical drains that I had (and left the hospital with). It's amazing how quickly you can lose conditioning in your muscles...and also how exhausting it is for your body to have been, essentially, assaulted and be dealing with wounds. That said, I've been super impressed by my body's healing capacity. I got the drains out within a week for one set and 10 days for another. After that, it was much easier to feel like I was healing and returning to normal. I'll have to rebuild my abdominal muscles, since that part of the surgery involved cutting them (and a new hip-to-hip "smile" scar), and for now I still can't bend all the way over, stand up totally straight (did I ever?), or lift anything heavier than a gallon of milk (because of the reconstruction). I'll probably need some physical therapy, but the ability my body has shown to heal is incredible.

Also incredible is the difference it has made to my mood and anxiety. In the hospital, they kept asking me for my pain number (which is kind of a useless exercise anyway, in my opinion) and I kept sort of shrugging and saying "2? 3?" to their disbelief. After all, I had open wounds! I had two major surgeries! But the pain of the tumor itself (and especially of the fluid-filled cyst on top of it) had been constant, increasing, and worrying. The pain of the tumor had meant my treatment was failing me and that my cancer was getting worse. The pain of the surgery meant I was healing so I embraced it. I still get tired more easily than I expect and am sure that the recovery period for this is going to turn out to be longer than I anticipate. But it is a huge relief.

That Bastard Tumor

Now, sadly, they don't actually save your cancerous tumor for you to look at after the surgery. (Honestly sad about this. I wanted to look it in the eye!) But they did send it off to a pathologist. The results made me feel very vindicated in my persistent sense that something about this bastard of a tumor was just DIFFERENT (and worse). They found that it had areas in it that were metaplastic, meaning (essentially) that the cells are hybrid, aggressive, and chemo-resistant. Here's what Johns Hopkins has to say about it:

"Metaplastic breast cancer is a rare form of breast cancer, accounting for fewer than 1% of all breast cancers. It differs from the more common kinds of breast cancer in both its makeup and in the way it behaves.

Like invasive ductal cancer, metaplastic breast cancer begins in the milk duct of the breast before spreading to the tissue around the duct. What makes a metaplastic tumor different is the kinds of cells that make up the tumor.

When the cells of an invasive ductal tumor are examined under a microscope, they appear abnormal, but still look like ductal cells. Metaplastic tumors may contain some of these breast cells, too, but they also contain cells that look like the soft tissue and connective tissue in the breast. It is thought that the ductal cells have undergone a change in form (metaplasia) to become completely different cells, though it is not known exactly how or why this occurs.

Metaplastic breast cancers can also behave more aggressively than other kinds of breast cancers.

Metaplastic tumors are often, though not always, “triple-negative”, which means that they test negative for estrogen and progesterone receptors, as well as for the HER2/neu protein.

Metaplastic tumor cells are often found to be high grade, which means that they look very different from normal cells and are dividing rapidly.

Metaplastic tumors are, on average, larger at diagnosis.

More often than in other kinds of breast cancer, women with metaplastic breast cancer can have metastasis (when the cancer has spread beyond the breast) and may be more likely to recur (come back later in another part of the body)."

Sounds familiar, right? I can tell you, it feels good to get that out of my body! I want to be clear, though, that it was only **some** of the tumor that was this nasty metaplastic cancer. It was, as I described it to the amusement of my surgeon, "like chocolate chips in ice cream." (Way less fun than chocolate chips, obviously.)

That is actually good news too, because it means that there's a pretty high chance that the metastatic sites are NOT this nasty form of cancer. It wasn't noted in the original biopsy back in January 2019, nor in the spinal tumor biopsy in Feburary 2019, nor in my biopsy from July 2019. Metaplastic cells are fairly distinctive so they would have been noted if they were there. At some point, metaplastic regions appeared in the bastard tumor, probably a reason that it stopped responding to treatments that worked elsewhere (including PARP inhibitors and the chemo/immuno combo that I'm currently on). If those treatments, or others, can work on the remaining sites that are NOT metaplastic it becomes much more possible to imagine living with this as a chronic disease. We won't be able to tell until I get today's scans and we see how the next 8ish weeks of treatment go. But still, I think cautious optimism is warranted.

Resting and Recovering

My parents were able to stay with me for another 10 days after I went home and it was so wonderful to have them taking care of me. It made me realize that, actually, I have done the bulk of this cancer treatment without that particular kind of support. I mean, I knew that intellectually, but the difference between having someone looking after me and not was something I almost couldn't fathom on an emotional level. They lived with me for the first 3 months after my diagnosis in 2019 but--thanks to how long was spent getting various tests and seeing doctors--that only included a few weeks of chemo. They would obviously have stayed longer--would be glad to drop everything and rush out whenever I want!--but it's been my choice to continue as much as I can with my "regular" adult life. Being forced not to try was actually quite a favor to me. I'm left with a lot of thoughts about how I ask for help, offer it, accept it (or don't), and how I feel about it. I'll save those for another time, though, and just thank both my parents and my wonderful and tireless group of friends for giving me their support in whatever ways they can.

It's almost time for me to go drink some delicious barium and get a CT (bringing me a couple steps closer to lunch), so I'll just conclude by saying that I felt so good post-surgery that I forgot, for a while, that I still had cancer at all. After all, it was that tumor that I could actually see and feel and that was causing me daily pain and anxiety. Taking it away felt like taking away all the cancer. But, of course, it's still there: in my lungs, my lymph nodes, my bones, and my liver. It's a systemic and chronic disease, but I do at least feel more like I've been given a fighting chance again.

Hope you're all doing as well as can be right now. Be well and be kind.

Love, Bex

#my life as a cancer patient #treatment update #august 2020 #covid and cancer #mastectomy #metastatic breast cancer #mbc #stage 4 #triple negative breast cancer #tnbc #clinical trials #scanxiety #metaplastic cancer

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a-coda · 3 years

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Advent of Code

As a child, advent calendars always added to the sense of anticipation in the lead up to Christmas. In my day you would be lucky to get a small picture behind each of the doors. These days, children expect chocolates or sweets. My wife has once even had a "Ginvent Calendar", with gin behind each door.

This year I marked Advent by having a go at the "Advent of Code" which has Christmas-themed programming puzzles posted each day. Most days are in two parts, with an easier puzzle followed by a harder one. Traditionally, I've posted a (mostly ignored) programming puzzle to our development team each Christmas. Last year I just recycled one of the Advent of Code puzzles, but this year I suggested we attempt the whole thing. The puzzles are so well thought out, in comparison to my efforts, that it seemed pointless to compete.

In the end, several of the team had a go. Some of the puzzles were harder than others, but I managed to solve them all by Boxing Day. What follows are some personal anecdotes from the various days with some general thoughts at the end. Note that there are some spoilers and the notes won't mean much if you've not done the puzzles. So in this case just skip to the end.

a sum-finder. I implemented the search tree via recursive calls. I drifted into using Python right from the start. It just felt like the easiest way to hack the puzzles quickly. In the past I had thought about using the puzzles to learn a new language. A colleague had done that with Rust in a previous year. Despite these good intentions, expediency took a firm hold. That said, in several puzzles I would have liked immutable collections or at least Lisp-style lists.

a pattern counter. Not that interesting except patterns were emerging in the programs themselves. Regular expressions got used a lot to read in the puzzle data. I learnt about things like match.group(1,2,3) which returns a tuple of the first three match groups, so you don't have to write (m.group(1), m.group(2), m.group(3)).

a grid tracer. The first interesting one because it was unfamiliar. Some other patterns started emerging: problem parameters got promoted to command line arguments, and data structure printers got hacked to help debugging. These two were often added between part 1 and part 2 of each problem.

a data validator. This felt like a bit of a slog. It was mostly about capturing the validation rules as code. Even though I made a point of reminding myself at the start that re.search doesn't match the whole string I still forgot it later. Duh.

an indexing problem. I patted myself on the back for realizing that the index was a binary number (or pair of binary numbers as I did it). At this point the solutions were still neat and I would do a little code golfing after the solution to tidy them up a bit and make them more concise.

another pattern counter. Pre-calculating some things during data reading kept the later code simple.

a recursive calculator. This was one of those puzzles where I had to reread the description several times to try and understand what it was asking for. It entailed a slightly tricky recursive sum and product, which was again made easier by creating more supporting data structures while reading the input data.

an interpreter. Probably my favourite individual puzzle because it was so sweet, especially after a bit of refactoring to make the language more data-driven.

another sum-finder. I found I didn't particularly like these.

an order-finder. This was the first one that made me pause for thought. An overly naive search algorithm from part 1 hit a computational complexity wall in part 2. I beat the problem by realizing that the search only had to be done on small islands of the data, but a colleague pointed out there was a better linear solution. The code was starting to get a bit ragged, with commented out debugging statements.

the game of life. The classic simulation but with some out-of-bounds spaces and some line-of-sight rules. It helped to print the board.

a map navigator. I liked this one even though I forgot to convert degrees to radians and that rotation matrices go anti-clockwise. I even introduced an abstract data type (ADT) to see if it would simplify the code (I'm not sure it ever did - I mostly used lists, tuples, strings, and numbers). The second parts of the puzzles were starting to get their own files now (usually bootstrapped by copying and pasting the first part's file).

a prime number theorem. I actually got stalled on this one for a bit. It eventually turned out I had a bug in the code and was missing a modulus. In effect I wasn't accounting for small primes far to the right. I left the puzzle and went on to complete a couple of others before coming back to this one. I checked what I was doing by Googling for hints, but in the end I had to take a long hard look at the data and find my own bug.

some bit twiddling. Part 1 felt like I found the expected bitwise operations, but part 2 felt like I was bashing square pegs into round holes.

a number sequence problem. Another pat on the back, this time for keeping a dictionary of recent occurrences and not searching back down the list of numbers each time. Another recurring pattern is evident: running a sequence of steps over the data. I liked to code the step as its own function.

a constraint solver. A nice one about labelling fields that satisfy the known constraints. Half the code was parsing the textual rules into data.

another game of life simulation. This time it was in more dimensions. I generalized from 3 dimensions to N instead of just doing 4. This made it more of a drag. I started naming auxiliary functions with placeholder names (social services should have been called). Also, I tacked on extra space along each dimension to make room at each step. This felt very ugly. I should have used a sparser representation like I did for day 24.

an expression evaluator. I used another actual ADT and wrote a simple but horrible tokenizer. The evaluator was okay but I hacked the precedence by inserting parentheses into the token stream. Don't try this at home kids.

another pattern matcher. Probably my biggest hack. My code compiled the pattern rules into a single regular expression. This was cute but meant the recursive rules in part 2 needed special treatment. One rule just compiled into a repeated pattern with +. Unfortunately, the other rule entailed matching balanced sub-patterns, which every schoolchild knows regular languages can't do. Perhaps some recursive pattern extensions might have worked, but I assumed there would be no more than 10 elements of the sub-patterns and compiled the rule into a large alternative of the possible symmetrical matchers. Yuck.

a map assembler. I did this one the most methodically. It had proper comments and unit tests. Overall it took the most code but perhaps it was just dealing with all the edge cases (ba dum tss). But seriously, it seemed to take a lot of code for rotating and flipping the tiles even after knowing how they must be connected. So probably there was a better approach. It was still satisfying the see the answer come out after all that work. Curiously, this one involved little debugging. I wonder if perhaps there is some connection between preparation and outcome?

a constraint solver. I tried a dumb approach first based on searching all the possible bindings. That didn't look like it was terminating any time soon. So I reverted to a previously successful technique of intersecting the associations and then then refining them based on the already unique ones.

a recursive card game. This card game playing puzzle seemed to be going okay, but the real data didn't converge for part 2. Had a quick Google for a hint after battling with it for a while, and the first hit was from someone who said they'd misread the question. Sure enough I had too. My recursive games were on the whole deck instead of the part dictated by the cards played. Duh. The description was clear enough and included a whole worked game. I just hadn't read it properly. It still seemed to need some game state memoization to run tolerably fast.

a circular sequence. Took three attempts. A brute force approach using an array was good enough for part 1, but no way was it going to work on part 2. Even optimizing it to use ranges was still 'non-terminating' for the array-based solution. So I Googled for a little inspiration and found the phrase "linked lists" and slapped my forehead hard. I switched to a dictionary of labels to labels and the solution popped out very easily, without any further optimization. Embarrassing. Was it time to ceremonially hand in my Lisp symbol and fall on a sharpened parenthesis?

another game of life. This one sounded neat because it was about a hex grid, but I didn't know how hex grids are usually indexed. So for the first time I did a little bit of general research at the start. Turns out there are a bunch of ways to index a hex grid. I opted for using 3-axes as that seemed natural despite the redundancy. The map itself was just a dictionary of locations. I should have looked up how to have structured dictionary keys in Python (implement __hash__) but I couldn't be bothered so I (look away now) serialized and deserialized the locations to and from strings. I still had a bug which I couldn't find until I hacked a crude hex board printer and realized I wasn't carrying the unchanged cells over from one iteration to the next.

a cryptographic puzzle. Came out quite short but only after some faffing around. Main trick seemed to be to keep the transformation ticking along instead of recalculating it from scratch each time. There was slight disappointment (tinged with relief) that there was no part 2.

Some general lessons I felt I (re)learned:

Read the questions very carefully, then reread them.

Try and use terms from the questions. Don't invent your own terminology and then have to map back and forth.

Make the trace output exactly like the examples to help comparison.

Next time I'd consider using BDD to turn their examples directly into tests. Next time.

Try the problem for a while by yourself, then think about it offline, and only then Google for hints.

Next time I'd consider using some form of source control from the start, or just a better set of file naming conventions.

Regular expressions go a long way, but can then they can get in the way.

Next time I'll consider doing it using a language I'm learning.

Sometimes when you get stuck you have to start again.

During some low moments it all felt like make-work that I'd inflicted on myself, but in the end it was a nice set of training exercises. I'd encourage others to have a go at their leisure.

"Practice is the best of all instructors." -- Publilius Syrus

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gascon-en-exil · 4 years

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"I could go on a long tangent here about this and why it irks me that the Eagles have the fandom reputation for being the “gay house,” but that’s a major digression." please spill the tea, as someone who finds the eagles "gay house" thing byleth-centric and kind of stupid

Ok, I’m back in town now and able to write out a response to this properly.

In an interesting coincidence, there’s been some back-and-forth in my corner of the fandom this evening about how the nations of Three Houses are not sufficiently distinguished from one another, with the concession that of the three Faerghus easily fares the best in this regard thanks to its cold and unforgiving climate just ignore that there’s no snowy maps in this game and its strong tradition of knighthood that heavily prioritizes Crests and Relics above and beyond the other nations and also encourages deeply intimate bonds between men that come into play in almost every relationship between the Lions characters as well as in the development and themes of Azure Moon as a whole. The Empire and Alliance are comparatively lacking in both worldbuilding detail and characterization through lines that would make these nations more readily distinguishable. The most common descriptor of the Eagles in fandom is that they’re the gay house, with almost every Byleth same-sex S support coming from their ranks or from originally Adrestian characters like Mercedes and potentially Yuri. Moreover, they’ve got the most same-sex paired endings not involving Byleth overall, so quantitatively the Eagles come off as the most queer-friendly house.

But what does that tell us about Adrestia? Even one of my critics who complained that I’m too dismissive of the value people place on Avatar romances was willing to concede that I had a point in the post linked above about Faerghus’s homosocial culture, so can you apply a similar approach and learn something deeper about the Empire from its many same-sex pairings? These being:

A conquering emperor who is Hot for Teacher on all routes, possibly because they have the same Crest as her

Pride and Prejudice if Elizabeth was a man and Darcy was an unrepentant murderer and vampire cosplayer

Thespians who swing both ways for the right price, or because they fear being old and alone

FE10 if Ike and Soren had no chemistry but still ran off together, or Ike and Ranulf if they still had no chemistry but they raised cats together instead of one of them being a cat

A lesbian nun - haven’t heard that one before

A catatonic serial killer into bloodplay wants to kill and/or have sex with someone because they have a certain sword

Whatever Yuri’s deal is, and with the caveat that as it stands it might also include Balthus

Even if you toss out the Byleth pairings and narrow all that down to the core Eagles there’s nothing in the way of a unifying theme to all that. The closest I could come when writing that down was that most of these pairings have a certain amount of deliberate artificiality to them. Ferdibert ignores the war and Hubert’s...everything in favor of genteel letter-writing and tea dates, Caspar’s two same-sex pairings run entirely off allusions to Radiant Dawn, Dorothea and Manuela are borrowing from a rich and storied tradition that spans multiple cultures of theatrical performers being sexually flexible - of sex being part of their careers (which FE dabbles in too via the dancer class) - and of course all of Byleth’s romance options feel artificial when the self-insert can’t speak or express any kind of personality...and that goes double for the canon-favored Edeleth backed by some kind of subconscious Crest bond. The Mittlefrank Opera provides the most frequently recurring looks into same-sex relationships as they exist in the Empire, but that’s not saying all that much when it accounts for so few of them altogether - and even then the Doropetra ending in particular says more about the culture of Brigid than of Adrestia.

I will say that the lack of a cohesive cultural context for the Eagles’ gay pairs makes them easier to slot into AUs than those of the Lions, as so many of the Lions characters are defined by their martial upbringings and wartime trauma that it bleeds over into their relationships with one another. Not so with the Empire; in fact, if I had to guess Eagles AUs are probably a bit more popular than canon fics so as to sidestep some of the less pleasant realities of Crimson Flower and its dubiously happy ending...and also Hubert being Hubert. One can only imagine how Ferdinand sleeps at night knowing the truth of his lover’s personal body count and the running checklist of all the war crimes he still needs to commit.

#Fire Emblem #FE16 #Fire Emblem Three Houses #Black Eagles

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todomitoukei · 4 years

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Twice’s Fate: Reading Between the Lines

Chapter 266 - what a bitch. Before everyone starts to prepare Twice’s tombstone, how about we talk about his chances of still being alive. Don’t get me wrong, everything in the chapter indicates his death - minus one tiny detail: We didn’t actually see him die. So let’s talk about - realistically and objectively - what his chances are.

In general, when thinking about a character’s chances when their life is on the line, we have to take 3 factors into consideration:

1: Who is the author and how do they usually deal with their characters and possible character deaths?

2: What is the story that the character whose life is currently on the line like and how does the story usually deal with its characters and possible character deaths?

3: Who is the character whose life is currently on the line, what is their role in the story they are a part of and what would their death mean?

So let’s take a look at these three questions in regards to Twice:

1: The Author

Horikoshi has written a couple of one-shots, two of which are early beginnings for My Hero Academia, namely Tenko (2007) and My Hero (2008), as well as two series prior to My Hero Academia: Oumagadoki Zoo (2010-11) and Barrage (2012). Neither series include character deaths, which might not say much, aside from them both being on the light-hearted side. All we can draw from that is that so far, death hasn’t been a primal part of Horikoshi’s stories.

2: The Story

Let’s talk about My Hero Academia since an author can write varying stories. Generally, the story is kept relatively upbeat. Multiple characters have suffered/continue to suffer through trauma, abuse, and discrimination, still the story is filled with vibrant colors and jokes. The aforementioned darker themes of the story are often more hinted at, rather than explored to a deeper extent, possibly due to Horikoshi wanting to keep the story for a wider audience.

How does the story handle character deaths?

While several characters have died thus far, the majority of those deaths happened prior to the story. These types of deaths are usually part of a character’s backstory (like Shigaraki’s) and only briefly shown in flashbacks.

In this case, death can be used as a catalyst for a character’s motivation or role in the story. For example, had Shigaraki not killed his family, he most likely wouldn’t have met All For One, therefore never becoming a villain and thus the leader of the League of Villains. Although it’s impossible to say with certainty that he wouldn’t have become a villain, either way, he certainly wouldn’t have become the exact same person he is now.

Another example of this is Kota, whose hero parents were killed in the line of duty by Muscular, which led to Kota despising heroes (kind of like Shigaraki’s father hated heroes after Nana left him).

While Kotaro Shigaraki’s hatred toward heroes led to Shigaraki becoming a villain by being taken in by All For One, Kota’s hatred toward heroes serves as a plot tool to have Deku understand that people have different views and also showing Kota why heroes do what they do.

There are also some minor character deaths that happened shortly after said character is being introduced, like Miyashita.

In this case, his death is served to quickly introduce another character - the killer. Miyashita gets killed by his boss, not knowing he’s the supreme commander of the Meta Liberation Army, after criticizing the book by said organization, stating that they are criminals that just mask their crimes by calling it liberation.

Due to this, without knowing much about the Meta Liberation Army just yet, we can tell that those people clearly don’t accept other viewpoints and do not shy away from killing anyone that rebels against them.

Another character that dies shortly after being introduced is Motor Ed Snatch, who gets killed while trying to escort Overhaul to the villain hospital but is then stopped by the League.

What is the purpose of Snatch? Realistically, a hero needs to accompany Overhaul’s transport for safety reasons. Said hero would also need to be taken down in order for the League to get to Overhaul and snatch haha, get it? … anyway... the Quirk-destroying product from him.

But why does he really die; couldn’t the League just knock him unconscious?

This might be a far reach, so feel free to disagree, but generally, Snatch’s death is associated with Dabi, which is odd, considering that it’s more of a team effort between Dabi and Mr. Compress - the latter compresses Snatch along with Dabi’s fire and since Snatch is only able to turn his upper half into sand the fire would eventually kill him inside the marble.

There are a few reasons as to why Snatch’s death is associated with Dabi, though. First of all, Dabi doesn’t have a lot of action scenes. He is, relatably so, kind of a lazy character in the sense that he doesn’t involve himself in fights too much. Not only that, he sometimes can’t even be reached by anyone as shown by Giran asking Twice of Dabi’s whereabouts in chapter 115:

Don’t get me wrong, he does help out when necessary, but he sure likes to be other places. Anyway, prior to his death, Snatch asks Dabi whether he ever stops to think about how the families of the victims feel. This question doesn’t get an answer until after his confrontation with Endeavor in the Pro Hero Arc, where Endeavor recognizes Dabi as the one responsible for Snatch’s death. Dabi doesn’t remember Snatch at first, but later on remembers the question again, resulting in him giving the answer to himself, saying he thought about it so hard he went crazy (or “overthought things,” which implies the same).

Did Horikoshi kill off Snatch to give us some more evidence for our Dabi is Touya theory? We can’t say for sure, but I’m sure the above panels come to mind for most of us when thinking about Snatch.

What about characters that were introduced to us and then killed off at a later point?

Well, there are - so far- only two characters this applies to, both of which, funnily enough, happen in the Shie Hassaikai arc (so do the deaths of Miyashita and Snatch!)

Let’s take a look at them:

The first bigger character to die in the story is Magne. So why did she die?

Magne dies right at the introduction of the Shie Hassaikai arc.

Twice originally introduces Overhaul to the League because Overhaul told him he wants to join forces. Once inside, however, he explains how due to the Kamino Incident, neither the light nor the dark side is currently having the upper hand, wondering who will have the upper hand next.

Shigaraki feels provoked by this, declaring he will be the next ruler and questions Overhaul’s true motive for meeting up with them, which Twice is shocked by, immediately worried that he made a mistake.

Overhaul then questions Shigaraki, asking why he didn’t have a problem sacrificing powerful chess-pawns (Stain, Muscular, Moonfish) and whether he even has a plan. Right after, he reveals that he didn’t come to join them.

Once Overhaul states that he wants the League to work for him, Magne refuses, telling him they didn’t join the League to become someone’s subordinates. As she tries to attack Overhaul, he gets her with his quirk first, resulting in a brutal on-screen death.

This establishes the hatred the League feels toward Overhaul on a personal level.

While they were already disagreeing about their principles and goals, the reason why Magne dies adds fuel to the fire.

Firstly, it gives us a reason to sympathize with the League. Aside from the many other factors, the story gives us over and over again to sympathize with them, in the end, they hold a grudge against Overhaul because of the fact that he killed Magne (and destroyed Mr. Compress’ arm). So when at the end of the Shie Hassaikai arc, the League obliterates Overhaul’s hands, it’s an act of revenge for their killed friend. Despite the cruel act, it’s without a doubt easier to sympathize with them than with Overhaul.

In addition, while the entire League despises Overhaul for this, Twice blames himself, which shows us that he is the heart of the group, the friend-type, and someone that trusts too much because he is a kind person, something that is brought up again in the current manga arc.

The other death that occurs at the end of the Shie Hassaikai arc: Sir Nighteye. One might argue that his death was for the drama or the shock factor alone, but some characters are only introduced for a single purpose.

Sir Nighteye is one of the few people who know about One For All, therefore part of All Might’s/Deku’s storyline. Once All Might’s sidekick, Sir Nighteye eventually ended that relationship, because All Might refused to retire despite Sir Nighteye’s warning about All Might’s death, which he predicted with his Quirk.

Even though his Foresight, later on, shows him that he and Deku would be killed by Overhaul, Deku refuses to believe this and ends up proving Sir Nighteye wrong, much to his surprise.

His death could mean various things, though one of them would be to underline Deku’s determination to save people, even when fate has other plans.

So what can we generally say about the meaning behind character deaths in the My Hero Academia story based on the aforementioned deaths?

Character deaths are used either for a character’s backstory (which explains the character’s current self), mainly when the deceased character died prior to the events of the story, or serve as motivation for a character/characters when the death happens during the story (which explains why they change/do certain things after the events of said death).

How does that apply to Twice? Let’s see!

3: The Character

Twice’s parents were killed when he was in middle school, which led to him being an orphan until he found a job that offered him shelter and food. After an accident when he was 16 in which he hit someone with his motorcycle, the police released him to give him another chance.

Because the victim was a recurring customer of the shop Twice worked at, his boss fired him after a complaint by said customer, which put him back on the streets.

This led to him creating multiple doubles of himself since he felt like he couldn’t trust anyone but himself. The doubles got out of control, eventually leading to them fighting each other over who was the original, which in turn led to Twice himself not being certain whether he even was the original or just another double.

While for a long time he felt like he was alone, Giran eventually showed him otherwise and introduced him to the League, where he finally felt accepted.

Generally, Twice’s goal has been to find and accept himself. He found like-minded people in the League of Villains and during the Meta Liberation Army arc gets the confirmation that he is, in fact, the original instead of just another double. He reached his goal there, so why didn’t he die right then and there, then? I’ve seen plenty of people use the argument that his story is over now etc. to justify believing his death, but that’s just an easy way to accept the obvious when the truth is he could’ve died a lot sooner if the reason for his death was him having reached his goal.

So let’s take a look at the current chapters.

First of all, this all started in chapter 263/264, when we first see Hawks cornering Twice. Hawks reveals his true intentions and offers Twice a fresh start once he pays for his crimes.

This is a nice parallel to Twice’s origin, where the police made the same offer, only this time Twice refuses the offer, as he now knows there is no such thing as a fresh start in that society.

All he cares about now is the League, aka his family.

In chapter 265, this conversation continues, and Twice is shown to fight Hawks despite having a breakdown over the broken trust.

At one point, Hawks says “Why do you think I prioritize speed when taking down villains? Because it’s the ones who don’t give up, who heroes need to fear the most.”

This means Hawks recognizes that Twice doesn’t give up. Twice believes in the League and his goal is to protect them.

Generally, selfless acts are seen as something that makes people invincible, whereas acting just for oneself doesn’t give people that same perseverance.

He continues by saying: “Experienced villains with wills of steel refuse to get knocked out.”

Hawks acknowledges that Twice isn’t beaten easily, so while it may seem like Hawks has the upper hand right now by threatening Twice with his feathers, Twice isn’t going to back down immediately.

Hawks is convinced that “someone has to die” when “neither side gives up,” which is why he then changes his attitude of merely threatening to arrest Twice to threaten to kill him.

Twice then goes on about how people like Hawks aren’t people, whereas his friends have been kind to him through everything, while he just kept endangering them, yet he has to protect their happiness, nonetheless.

Moving on to this week’s chapter, 266, when Dabi joins the scene with a huge fire blast.

Hawks saves Twice, just as Dabi expected him to.

This is also when Twice completely turns against Hawks, telling Dabi to “burn him good!!”

Dabi does as he is told, to which Twice reacts with a “Hot! Cold!”

- the flames hit him, but not enough for complete damage as he still stumbles past Dabi and out the door.

Just as Hawks gets ready to strike at Twice, Dabi calls out his real name, which catches Hawks off guard enough for Twice to get past him.

Twice, now out on the corridor, thinks about how he has to protect his friends and sends doubles to do so.

This is when we get the panel of Hawks getting ready to backstab him. Literally.

Next, we see Twice’s double fall down onto the concrete.

Said double then saves Mr. Compress and Toga, before thanking them for having been his friends.

He then goes to tell them that he can’t make any more double because “I got dropped down onto the concrete from up there.”

After returning the handkerchief to Toga, the double once again thanks her for having saved him as he melts away in her embrace.

Now, don’t get me wrong, everything about this last chapter indicates that he died.

But weren’t we all taught to always read between the lines?

I’m ready to put on the clown mask, but let’s think about this for now with all the information gathered so far.

First of all, while my gut just kept telling me that Twice didn’t die there, it’s difficult to argue how Twice would survive falling down on the concrete.

However, after the official translation came out yesterday, I decided to head over to Twitter and look at the trivia for this chapter written by Caleb Cook, who is the official translator for My Hero Academia. According to him, it was actually the double we see at the end of the chapter, who fell down. Granted, he does say “I fell down,” but at first I figured the doubles would even refer to the other doubles or the OG Twice as “I” - as it turns out, in this case, it was the double, though.

This means the last panel we get of OG Twice is the one where Hawks is ready to backstab him once and for all. The thing is, we don’t actually see him stab Twice.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t just accept the thought of a character having actually died unless I see it or it’s otherwise concretely (I’m sorry) confirmed in the story, instead of simply being implied.

Let’s think about some of the other instances, in which a character has died:

Magne? We saw that. It was one panel in the manga and a couple of seconds in the anime, where we are explicitly shown Magne’s body being destroyed. Can’t argue that.

Snatch? We see Dabi blasting his fire to him and then Mr. Compress compressing him. When Mr. Compress tells Dabi that fire doesn’t burn sand, Dabi confirms that, if Snatch hasn’t died yet, since only the upper half that can transform into the sand, the lower half is still trapped inside the marble with the flames, leading to Snatch’s inevitable death sooner or later.

Sir Nighteye? First, the doctors tell Deku there is nothing they can do to help him due to the severity of the wounds. After Sir Nighteye says his goodbyes to Deku, All Might and Mirio, we see the heart monitor go flat. I’m not an expert, but people usually don’t survive this (unless you’re getting reanimated, but, again, the wounds were too extreme for him to make it).

So what about Twice? Much like Sir Nighteye, Twice says his goodbyes to his friends. His last wish is to protect them, and he does, by saving them from the hero that corners them. What else could he want?

Well, the problem is simply this: We don’t see Twice actually die. His double disappears, yes. But if we focus back on the OG Twice, he supposedly gets stabbed by Hawks. What about Dabi, though?

The last time we see Dabi in this chapter is right after he sends another wave of his flames to Hawks after calling out his name, leaving Hawks to wonder who Dabi is.

Right after, we see Twice catching his breath outside the room after his successful exit.

While he thinks about how he has to protect his friends, we see neither Dabi nor Hawks.

We do see flames coming out of the room, so Dabi probably once again pushed Hawks outside.

While a lot of fans like to hang on to that whole “Dabi has a ‘C’ for his intelligence stat”, he is good at people. We see countless examples of this throughout the story, but to just focus on recent events: he knew that Hawks would protect Twice from the flames at the beginning of the chapter and he knew he could distract Hawks by saying his name. He also mentions that he never trusted Hawks to begin with.

Right now, it’s still hard to say how Dabi knows this nor do we know why Dabi let him join the League despite never trusting him. The fact remains that he understands enough about Hawks.

Earlier on in the chapter, when he first launches Hawks out of the room using his flames, he’s surprised when Hawks spins around and flies back into the room so quickly.

So would Dabi make that same mistake twice? Honestly? I doubt it. Sure, we still don’t have enough information on Dabi to say anything for sure, but the fact that he uses the same attack twice in the same fight sounds like he wants to use what he learned the first time around, instead. And because after the panel of Hawks supposedly backstabbing Twice for good, there is a cut gotta stop with the puns to Twice’s double, we simply don’t know whether Dabi possibly rushed out to somehow save Twice or not.

Aside from the fact that we don’t actually see Twice die, regardless of everything being laid out for this being a final goodbye, let’s focus on what his death would mean for the future of the story and its characters.

As mentioned before, while it’s sometimes difficult to say for sure why a character dies, it’s usually to introduce us to the people responsible for the character’s death (like with Magne to introduce the Shie Hassaikai or Miyashita to introduce the Meta Liberation Army) or to serve as character’s motivation moving forward, in whatever way that would be.

So who would Twice’s death affect?

First of all, we got the League. These are the people who genuinely care about Twice, meaning his death would lead to them mourning and then most likely also being fueled with anger. Additionally, this would also put Hawks’ life on the line, meaning Twice’s death would also heavily affect Hawks.

Let’s think about Hawks and his character for a while and see how that is connected to the League.

Who is Hawks as a character?

Hawks is someone who got taken in by the Hero Public Safety Commission as a child due to him saving a family from a car accident. They recognized his strength and decided to turn him into a hero.

This leads to some nice parallels between him, Shigaraki and Dabi:

While Hawks got taken in by the Commission and groomed into becoming a very cold-thinking hero, Shigaraki was taken in by All For One and groomed into becoming a villain. These two, therefore, form two sides of the same coin - two children who got taken in and turned into something without their choosing. Then, we have Dabi, who was (assuming he is Touya Todoroki) born specifically to become a hero. Granted, not much is known about Touya, but the fact that Endeavor knows that Touya’s flames were too strong for his own body tells us that he most likely trained him; we just can’t say for how long. At some point, Touya “died” and at some point, Dabi was born. This makes him similar to Hawks in terms of being pushed to heroism at a young age; the difference between them, though, is that Dabi broke free, while Hawks subjected himself to the hero side.

Many of us have already suspected that at some point Hawks would come to realize that the heroes are flawed and not as heroic as the world likes to believe - and who better to make him realize that then Dabi? What better way to shatter Hawks’ world than by telling him the truth about his childhood hero.

Again, this is just speculation, but what is Hawks’ role in the story, if not that of a hero whose views are being challenged to the point where he breaks free? What would the point of this be, if he continued playing hero?

And here’s the thing: If we look back at Overhaul, the League won’t ever forgive him for killing Magne. So if Hawks actually kills Twice, they would never forgive him, either.

But he hasn’t learned the truth about Endeavor yet. Would Dabi really still care to tell him, if Hawks killed his friend? If Hawks killed Twice, the League would turn against him and he would most likely die as a result. But what’s the point in that? Couldn’t Dabi just have killed him right there? Remember how after chapters 264 and 265 we all feared for Hawks’ life? Hawks survived and clearly, Dabi has some kind of reason for letting a spy into their group.

At this point in the story, Twice’s and Hawks’ fates are too intertwined for Twice’s death to make sense moving forward in relation to Hawks’ story.

The fact that Dabi admits to knowing about Hawks seems like a good indicator that Twice doesn’t die - at least Dabi doesn’t appear overly worried over the situation. Since we are talking about the Number Two Pro Hero, it seems only fair to assume that Dabi doesn’t underestimate him to the point where he let’s Hawks go as far as to kill his friend.

Clearly, we won’t know for sure what happened until the next time Horikoshi focuses on these characters; next time, because knowing Horikoshi’s twisted mind, the next chapter(s) will focus on other characters again, leaving us to wait for more than just a week.

This is also by no means saying that Twice is definitely still alive, but from a story/writer point of view, his death would not make sense in this constellation, even if he has reached his goal of saving his friends one last time.

I am 100 % willing to accept that I am wrong about all of this, but, depending on how Horikoshi handles this, it wouldn’t strike me as very plausible/great story writing. Not because I don’t want Twice to die (obviously I don’t, though), but because it feels like an unnecessary character death that would be added to the story for the drama/shock value alone, which disrupts other character’s storylines more than it supports them.

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