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riverdale-retread · 11 months

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Riverdale S7 E9 (Chapter 126) Betty and Veronica

Jughead Jones is mourning the death of Brad Rayberry. Even though he’s in his happy place, the Diner, all around him feels like a black void where he is cast in a chilly blue shadow. (I assume this is a reference to Joan Didion’s book about the death of her daughter, Blue Nights, published in 2011). He’s not so much as narrating the story to the audience as telling himself how he’s feeling in order to cope with the magnitude of his emotions. The soundtrack though is being breathtakingly unkind - it plays “Ain’t that a shame” over his grief. The lyrics are as follows: You made me cry when you said goodbye/ Ain't that a shame / My tears fell like rain / Ain't that a shame / You're the one to blame/ You broke my heart when you said we'll part.” Not the most tender, either in content or delivery. Poor Jughead.

Maybe like all intense life events, the death of someone important to you brings out whatever is your strongest (or possibly weakest) emotional color. Jughead is the saddest boy in the (television) world to ever be sad, so in grief he finds the world itself has a slow, sad rhythm, distorted and gooey, as even the big cupfuls of sugar he downs to try to make himself feel better don’t pep him up. He does look so very bereft. He’s reading all of his mentor’s work, maybe in chronological order, as his grieving process. (When I suffered the catastrophic loss of someone, I was not sad. I was furious. I’d be walking along, and suddenly remember they were dead, and then my vision would literally turn red, forcing me to stop walking for a bit because I was actually blinded by rage.)

Jughead is too disheartened to narrate, so the ‘show’ takes over.

Betty is sitting in a fetching red gingham dress dead center of the screen, facing off against Werther who is behind is big desk. Above her head flashes her name, Betty, in the famous Riverdale comics font - hot pink outline, pale pink innards.

Werther acts like he didn’t realize that cheerleading was a sexualized environment, which he might well have, I suppose. Werthers says that Alice agrees with him, which is very strange, because it was HAL who was the one to tell Betty she has to join the Vixens, and HAL was the one who called Clifford Blossom, who forced Cheryl to make room for Betty. It was Werthers, Hal and Clifford that decided to put Betty into the cheerleading squad to both her and the cheer captain Cheryl’s chagrin, and yet, when the time comes to recognize that this was a stupid thing to do when the goal was to force Betty to stop thinking about sex, somehow Alice is brought into it. Werthers disclaims responsibility for this little cheerleading foray, absolves the two other men for going along with his stupidity, and somehow foists the blame for this on Alice.

Betty thinks Werthers is a very silly man. She has a hard time keeping a straight face as Wethers says odd things. She questions her interrogator right back - How does Werthers see high school as an institution, if to him it’s not horny at all? “As an academic institution meant to provide a safe environment where students can challenge themselves intellectually…” blahblahblah - a holding cell to safeguard young people’s virginity, apparently. She isn’t even a bit abashed. I am in awe that her confidence seems so genuine. She thinks she’s talking to a silly, out of touch adult who is participating in the continued wasting of her time that her parents keep pushing her into. Werther is very annoyed about his failure to intimidate Betty, so he tries a different tack : You stripped in front of your window! You flashed your underpants on live television!

Betty’s glow does dim a bit at this attack, so he turns quite vicious. He calls her all the things Kevin Keller did - nymphomaniac, sexual compulsive, exhibitionist. Betty has been called these insulting things when it really mattered, so she’s insensitive to it now. She wants Werthers to get to the point. (Again, I am so in awe of her not being crushed by the weight of his disapproval. Catholic confuscian little old me could never have dared. But then, nobody thought I was especially sexual. This specific form of torture is being inflicted on Betty not just because she did those things, necessarily, but because she is beautiful and desirable to older men and so people like Werther want to talk to her about sex. If you’re not attractive and yet still horny, you get treated quite differently.)

Werther’s for example wants to know about Betty’s first sexual memory. Fortunately, it turns out to be just thinking her friend Archie is super handsome when they are playing Operation! together, but we all know that if it turned out to be something more upsetting, there is no way Werthers would have been able to cope. Betty lies and says she can’t remember, so Werthers moves on. “How often, Betty, would you say that you think about sex?”

The show, that played the sarcastic music over Jughead’s grief, decides to play the Lollipop song that was the ring tone for when Betty was getting terrorized by the Black Hood i.e. her dad, who wanted to recruit her into being a serial killer with him in 2017. And she did just recently suddenly start with eating actual lollipops, didn’t she?

When Betty opens her curtains first thing in the morning, Betty has no choice but to look out across the way at Archie’s bedroom. She imagines him shirtless with rippling abs, and she imagines coming in from behind to wrap her hand around the back of his neck to kiss him good and proper. Her hallucination of early morning horniness includes her hopping onto his waist to be on top even as they’re standing. Betty Cooper likes to ride on top whatever the universe.

The day continues with her encountering a mint green gas guzzler of an American vehicle, which she gives an affectionate pat as she skips her way into school. On the steps is Fangs, who his combing his hair handsomely off his handsome face. Betty immediately imagines laying him out on the hood of the car she likes so much, to get on top and have her way with him. The Lollipop song’s opening is going on forever, but then it seems to have a POP! smooch! sound.

Betty is walking down the halls looking a bit freaked out as the song continues to play. She’s wearing a pink flower print dress with a tightfitting green sweater and a red belt. Here comes Jughead Jones, wearing the green vest over a pink shirt combo that he was so perfectly matched with Tabitha in on her first day back in Riverdale. Uhhh I guess this outfit really did it for all the ladies of Riverdale?!?! He starts out scowling, looking cranky, but because this is Betty’s fantasy, his faces relaxes as he sees her looking at him as they walk towards each other. In time with the lyrics “His kiss is sweeter than apple pie,” Betty grabs Jughead by the arm, spins him around, and they are in an embrace, lips locked.

This song is hyper sexual - I call him Lollipop! - like did everyone who liked this song know that this was a fellatio pun?

Then! In the girls’ changing room Betty looks up from lacing up her pure white sneakers to see Veronica Lodge, shiny of hair, red of lip, almond of eye, looking meaningfully over her shoulder at at her. This is artwork stolen straight from the cover of a pulp novel, except in this instance the blonde is the aggressor. Betty slams Veronica up against a locker before kissing her.

Back in the hall, Betty looks more unsettled than ever, when she slams into Reggie. And Reggie gets the steamiest fantasy of all - she’s right back in the shower room, making out naked with him under running water. This is actually how she and Archie have sex for the first time as adults in the future, so basically, they kept Betty’s favorite positions and sex locations consistent this season. Why the fantasy about Reggie is so much more advanced than her thoughts for the others? Maybe she just desires him more.

Then she walks into science class, where Dilton has set off a mini volcanic eruption.

Having made Dilton Long Duk Dong coded, the show can’t bear to give him a kiss scene with Betty. Lame!

And anyway, after that glowing fantasy with cheerful music, we are yanked back (with a record scratch sound) to reality with Werthers who keeps insisting on saying the word SEX to Betty. Betty tries hedging the answer to the question about how often she thinks about sex. An average amount → every seven seconds like Kingsley’s study concluded → “I think about sex all the time.” She’s pushed into saying things by Werther who really wanted her to give this answer, by goading her into it. He needs a number, he keeps insisting, so she gets annoyed and says she “thinks about sex all the time.” This is the same kind of ill judged, rebellious energy that had her doing the panty flashing to begin with.

But I also do this and have done this, just not questions about sex because this particular issue (being viewed as hypersexual) has never been a problem for me. I have, however, reacted this way about other things, so I’m inclined to generalize and say that most people would respond to this sort of aggravating stimulus in the same way. At some point when you push and needle and harass someone long enough, in a nasty enough way, they will give you what they think you want them to say, to just get you to stfu. Poor Betty. I can’t believe they’re taking her out of school for this, to have this conversation about sex with this crusty old man. (There is so much fucked up about Confuscian cultural heritage when it comes to gender and sex but THIS particular iteration - of having a young girl isolated with an old man to talk about sex explicitly - would never be permitted no matter what she’s done or what his qualifications are, so, uh, thanks for the small reprieves, I guess?)

But I mean - there’s a reason that Betty is in a way forced to think about sex all the time. She’s beautiful and sexualized by all the adults in her life well before she herself is ready. They’re doing this TO HER.

Werthers asks WHY she thinks about sex all the time - and the real answer is what I’ve written above. But Betty keeps answering in a straightforwardly honest way - She’s curious about how it feels.

Oh, the other solution to her horniness, assuming it’s genuine and self-produced, is to make her take tests constantly, publicize her rankings in school, train her to see all classmates of any gender as competitors, and put the terror of utter failure as a person by hinging success on acceptance into three university options and then make her do endless rounds of rote memorization punctuated by spot quizzes non stop from ages 10 through 18.. i.e. Give her a S. Korean college prep education. That really squashes the horniness out of your teenagers, lemme tell ya.

Betty wants to have sex for pleasure. Werthers snaps that sex is for reproduction only. (So in this way he’s very Catholic priest coded - a celibate gay man who hates women wanting women to suffer lots of unwanted pregnancies before dying young). (I joke about this but though I’m sure they’re cohabitants and gay together I doubt Werthers and Featherhead can actually bear to touch each other, hence celibate.) Betty snaps back about men’s use of pornography to question this “sex is for creation of heirs inside a marital relationship.”

The fact that the Coopers go to church at all is surprising to me, but that’s because I temporarily forgot this was 1955. The thing is, having the structure and community of church seems to have no steadying effect on Alice Cooper whatsoever. Her hankering for that kind of connection is what led her to keep shoving her daughters into the hands of the Sisters of Quiet Mercy and definitely what made her so susceptible to the Farm in Modern Times. In any case, Hal keeps his porno in his sock drawer AND

ALICE AND HAL DO NOT SLEEP IN THE SAME BED.

The girl on the cover of Prance has Veronica’s raven hair, strong eyebrows and her penchant for killer heels. The cover says “In Broad Daylight, A Nude Lighting Study” and “Twisted Sisters; Beverly Barry on her blasphemous defection from the convent.” Betty is very turned on by the centerfold of the dark haired girl, who is very gorgeous and looks very happy. (That’s kind of what I like too about these old Vargas style pictures. The women look so happy.)

Betty, ever quick on the uptake, retorts that she isn’t a child, either.

Werthers, as a celibate, is very not into talking about a person who has undeniably had sex with another person at least twice in his life (Hal Cooper), when Betty wants to talk about it. The reason he gives is that he is “a CHILD psychiatrist.”

She’s so smart.

That evening, Betty is sitting in a very uncomfortable posture on her bed, trying to get what looks like math homework done when the overly friendly looking Alice Cooper bursts in with a whole clutch of wedding magazines. At first, Betty thinks her mother is being silly. Possibly cute. But as Alice’s strongsuit is not subtlety, the comments she emits keep getting more pointed. “A girl can daydream about her wedding” and”When I see you in that white dress, standing at that altar, it’s gonna be the happiest day of my life.”

Because yeah - you wouldn’t really be asking these horrible slavering questions about “how often do you think about sex” to a child, would you? Once she has the advantage, Betty tells Werther that his attempt to enforce compulsive, correct (read, repressed) heterosexual norms on her have utterly failed. “I don’t think I want to get married.” When she says that she wants to have “an impact in the world” rather than “just have a family,” Werthers is so upset at the extent of his failure that he looks like he might cry. Betty Cooper is some sort of peak genius person, because to get ‘I want to have a career and possibly never get married’ from the weeks and weeks of slut shaming disguised as therapy is a rare accomplishment of historic proportions. Round 1 for Betty!

This is Riverdale being (intentionally? accidentally?) brilliant. The loveliness of the wedding, the joy of wearing a pretty dress and having everyone fuss over you and celebrate you on that day, is a recruitment tool for the female side of the marital union (legally speaking, the female side of marriage has always been absolutely shit, you know it has, even if the union itself is happy and fulfilling and loving), exactly like how really gorgeous army uniforms (the ones that are recycled and referenced even now in high fashion and consumer items!) were a major way to get young men to sign up to be exhausted canon fodder. Moreover, it’s not the enticement of the clothes and the ceremony itself that suffices - there needs to be a concerted societal effort to brainwash the hapless participant into truly believing that joining up has immense meaning. Without this concerted effort, marriages don’t happen and neither do military volunteers.

At school the next day, Veronica Lodge, is promoting her theater by giving out free tickets to a showing of a James Dean double feature: East of Eden and Rebel without a cause. She’s flanked by her two gay boyfriend minions, who are dressed the same - checked shirts covered up with a Mr. Rogers style cardigan with contrast piping. She keeps wearing purple, and her clothes are still quite demure, for Veronica. A dark purple dress with a full skirt below the knee, high neckline, short sleeves, and a big bow sash at the waist. You can see what a tiny human she is by how gigantic the girls and boys who are getting their free tickets look next to her.

With a KSHH! sound, the ‘show’ tells us that this is Veronica’s arc by writing her name across the screen in Archie Comics font - ice blue edges outlining a bright white center. Cheryl, as ‘president of the James Dean fanclub’ want to know what all this is about. She’s rather irked that Veronica has decided to do this celebration of James Dean without involving Cheryl. Riverdale is as much a hick town as Veronica has already called it, because they’ve been waiting months for a chance to see East of Eden. When Veronica says she has a print of East of Eden, Cheryl counters that she prefers the screen at nearby Greendale because it’s larger. She also coins a new term, too, does Cheryl- Deanizens - to denote her posse. Veronica offers her free passes, which Cheryl jumps for, so Veronica attaches conditions: The club has to spread the good word about the Babylonium. (Wealthy Cheryl jumping to clutch free tickets is very apt commentary on the wealthy).

Cheryl is ultra powerful - she can deliver the James Dean Fanclub, the Vixens and the Bulldogs. Archie when trying to console Veronica back in earlier episodes that Cheryl is “just like that” and “nobody listens to her” were all lies. Like truly - she is the most powerful girl in this school, and it’s not just money either, because Julian has access to (or possibly, is considered the sole true heir because the Blossoms hate women throughout time) the same money and yet he’s routinely punched in the face and overridden by others, and constantly has to bring up his daddy and his money.

Veronica refuses to concede influence of this magnitude to Cheryl. The competitive energy between Cheryl and Veronica in this universe - which was set up and dissipated almost right away in the OG universe - is sort of funny. Veronica is so obsessed with Cheryl that she is willing to throw business interests to the side to win a mere conversation. She should examine the intensity of her feelings about Cheryl a bit more closely.

Kevin because he’s stupid as well as hated by me dares to question Veronica’s tactic of giving away tickets to the movie for free (even as he’s been participating in doing this for some time). She explains that the real money is made at the concession stand, not via box office. Clay and Kevin together want to know why she entered that dick measuring contest with Cheryl over inviting the Bulldogs - “Is it all the Bulldogs or just one Bulldog in particular?” they ask.

See, this is the problem with gay boyfriends in fiction - they goad the girls they befriend into going out on risky limbs in wonky ways. Actual gay boyfriends tend to make you sit down and examine yourself closely.

Veronica has taken it upon herself to break into the boy’s locker room to distribute her free movie tickets. This is some gender outlaw behavior to me. I had to try to uh, rescue a very upset little boy who got overwhelmed by his first solo trip to the men’s room (because his mother, my relative, was preoccupied with a nasty diaper disaster in the women’s bathroom) and even though the boy was visibly standing there in the middle of the bathroom crying every time a man went in or out and I was clearly there to fetch him, I found it too terrifying to actually GO INTO the men’s room, and instead eventually coaxed him out by cooing at him from afar (my throat almost collapsed from the strain.). I just couldn’t do it.

Anyway, so she’s in there, timing her visit to meet the boys just as they would be done with practice. There’s like, barking noises the guys are making at each other as they enter because that’s normal human behavior (Sports people are SO WEIRD). Fangs, Archie and Reggie are shirtless, displaying their obviously oiled bodies that scream that none of these guys ever eat carbs, but they initially looked comical to me because their shorts seemed hiked up eunuch high. Then I paused the screen because I am a horny bitch and I realized that they were just super high waisted shorts. Oh OK .

Fangs is just a ridiculous, charisma free dumdum and doesn’t know the difference between Twinkle and Tinsel. Veronica offers him a free pass to the Babylonium James Dean evening anyway. Well, she offers his tits the tickets - eyes are on his face when she says “I want to personally” but at the word OFFER they go right downwards. She does the same to Archie (talk to his face out of manners but looks down because she can’t not and really truly, Veronica is a girl after my own heart in so many ways). She gives Archie less attention though, because she’s seen all that before.

Fangs is so pleased with himself for no reason that he does a walk like a 5 year old who has pooped his pants and is trying to pass it off as something cool (Dude WHAT is that WALK).

Reggie is one cool customer. He knows that Veronica is there for him and only him, so even though all the other guys move immediately to their lockers for their free tickets, Reggie keeps still, in his pec poppin’ pose, allowing Veronica’s approach. Veronica channels Lauren Bacall to ask Reggie if he knows what James Dean used to do in high school (it’s really the same tone as “You do know how to whistle, don’t you Steve?” aimed at Bogie). He was a basketball player, is what she tells Reggie, who apparently did NOT know (oh but yeah, because his town didn’t have a theater and he didn’t own a tv). Veronica is so cute when she singsongs - “a basketball star, just - like - you!’ I’m fascinated that she does NOT look down at Reggie’s pecs, keeping her bright eyes on his face the whole time. (Well done Veronica.).

Something about Reggie’s face indicates that somehow this gambit worked, when all the other ones have not at all, to date. Is it because she said the words basketball and star within 3 words of ‘you’?

Reggie shows up to the double screening, buying a quarters’ worth of popcorn. Veronica, instead of taking his money, suggests that he could treat her to a milkshake after her work is done. Reggie admires her - “You just keep shooting, don’t you?” is what he says, which is pretty neutral, but his face is fond. I also think it’s hilarious that someone as gorgeous as Veronica , complete with her knowing tone of voice, is supposed to be working this hard to get some dude (even one with Reggie’s face) to ask her out, but it’s television so I’ll let it pass. He says Sure, to the date, but then pays anyway. Oh what a great egg.

Kevin bursts Veronica’s bubble of happiness by summoning her to the projection room. It turns out these three children who are running this movie house didn’t check that the movie reels they were going to load into the projector for this big screening at this ‘sold out’ showing. I have no idea how movie reels and all that are supposed to work so if I am wrong about the projectionist capacity to check that the reels he’s received are in good working order before the day of the actual showing, please do let me know. (I suspect not, however, because Veronica didn’t seem like she was lying when she told Cheryl that she already had the films in hand for her double feature earlier on in the day (or week).

Veronica is someone who never lacks for courage, so she marches right down to her patrons to announce that there is, in fact, a problem. She’s trying to warm up to telling them the bad news when Fangs is the first to interrupt to tell her to hurry up. I hate Fangs second only to Uncle Fucking Frank. Cheryl knows what’s coming as soon as Veronica says ‘technical difficulties. Cheryl stands up to immediately demand a refund, and having received the tickets for free counts as nothing, because Cheryl knows how the movie house makes its money - through its concession sales. Again, Cheryl the wealthiest teen in Riverdale making this much of a fuss about money is saying something about the moneyed class and though it’s at Cheryl’s cost, I think it’s true to life. Veronica tries to parry by offering vouchers, but this ploy is so transparent that even Fangs catches on that it’s worthless. The audience starts pelting Veronica with the popcorn they want refunds for, with Cheryl adding the cherry on top of the turd: It’s like Jimmy Dean died all over again!

(If only she knew that Veronica was indirectly responsible for Jimmy Dean dying the first time! Apparently, 1950s Archie is not one for kissing and telling.)

As the last person gets their refund, Reggie, who has been patiently waiting all this time, approaches Veronica. She regretfully tells him that she just can’t do a thing today, but she wants to still go out with him. Smiling all cute, so cute I wanna jump up and down to try to reach his cheeks to pinch him, Reggie makes a graceful exit.

In the executive suite at the movie theater, where it looks messy enough for Veronica to be running several businesses, Veronica is on the phone taking the film distributor to task. The old fart on the phone is all oily, offering his “deepest apologies for this mishap.” She is not to be mollified - Veronica actually wants the prints of East of Eden. When she pushes he says there are no available prints. With her two boyfriend lackeys listening on the other line, Veronica has to endure a lecture from someone who sent her defective prints that as the owner, “it’s always your problem.” Clay finds it extremely suspicious that a studio would simply ‘run out’ of prints for its biggest release of the year. Kevin is useless because of course he is.

Veronica is in a very fetching seriously business colored navy dress. She wants the boys to work the phones, and somehow they are able to get all these apparently big-wig executives on the phone. She is hunting for something “exciting, fresh” unlike the crusty old East of Eden. She wants To Catch a Thief, or Oklahoma, or Night of the Hunter, but as one guy puts it, “Riverdale isn’t a market we’re interested in cultivating.”

This made me laugh. Riverdale, formerly not really in America somehow, is too cruddy for capitalist entertainment to be interested in its money. She’s also told that her particular theater is too small, so “please don’t call us again.” At the end of this very long series of discouraging phone calls, Veronica is finally given the hint: It’s her parents that have caused her to be blacklisted by every major studio in Hollywood. The Lodges of this universe want “to see everyone but themselves fail, including their own daughter.” The Lodges’ idea for what to do with this real estate of the theater is a nice Joni Mitchell reference but not a very good business idea - lack of parking does not seem to be a problem that Riverdale’s residents have ever complained about even in the future. What need is there for a parking lot in a town that’s surrounded by vast swatches of woodland?

Clay has an idea because he’s useful as a human. He suggests trying for independent films i.e. B movie studios. Veronica doesn’t even know what the names of these “small studios are” but it’s always so nice to see her perfect little face light up with the possibility of business revival.

In super tight close ups, which is glorious when it’s Betty and ovary-imploding when it’s Werthers, the two are at it again. This time, Werthers wants to know what Betty’s sexual dreams are. I think Betty answers because grotesque as her interrogator and this whole situation is, there’s really nobody else for her to speak frankly about sex with.

Betty dreams about being a teacher who molests Archie Andrews. This is apparently a score that the show’s makers still feel very salty about six years later. I suppose it’s hard to be confronted with the fact that you are Old and the Youngs have evolved beyond set ups that you were wrongly raised to think was hot in the ignorant before-times. School teacher Betty of her sex dreams (these aren’t so much dreams as her actual sex fantasies, I would think?) wears very tight fitting clothes that display bra straps and cleavage. And glasses, for some reason (Oh -because Grundy was bespectacled. Which as a spectacles wearer I object to, sigh. It’s bad enough being four-eyes, RAS.) She would slithery-sexy with Archie and Jughead, but she would beat Fangs with a stick and I am ALL FOR THIS. So, Archie, Jughead, Fangs, Reggie (who looks like he can’t believe his luck) and then - Veronica.

Veronica.

VERONICA??

So, to bookend how the show started, we are shown Archie as a minor making out with a teacher, except physically the actor playing him isn’t any older than he is (by much) and he himself looks the actor’s physical age. The soundtrack insists HE’S IN LOVE!! DOO-DOO-DOO as Betty-Teacher and Archie-Student make out in the sunlit classroom of Betty’s dream. The dream progresses to the Teacher laying Archie down on the desk to undress him and kiss his tit like we’re in some sort of gender-and-consent-flip schoolgirl hentai.

Look, Roberto, you were wrong to think anyone would find the Grundy-rapes-Archie storyline hot. I know that to you, the fact that much of the fandom would simply know to use the correct word - rape - when the ‘situation’ involves a pretty older woman predating on a handsome minor who is both taller and bigger than her, but you should’ve just taken your lumps. Because you were wrong. Your middle-aged-man self using Betty Cooper in her I’m a Sexualized Pretty Teen Girl Arc to insist that WE ALL have this teacher-rapes-a-child fantasy is actually quite ugly.

Plus I’ve been a teenage girl and NO WE DON’T. (Yes, I speak for all women who want to have sex with men and I am right.) NO WE DON’T! NONE OF US HAVE THIS FANTASY, IT’S NEVER EXISTED EXCEPT IN YOUR MIND. You were wrong the first time, and got defensive, and though you seemed to finally learn that this might have been a harmful, traumatic experience for Archie (and not just because Grundy was murdered by Betty’s dad), you’re regressing to your pre S1 creator self and honey, don’t do that!

Anyway, Betty says that her dreams get hot and heavy, until she realizes that everyone is watching. Everyone are: Reggie, who wants a better look, Cheryl frozen solid, Veronica wistful, Jughead looking very grim, Dilton fascinated, Kevin with his hands tensely clenched, Fangs open mouthed and Clay wondering why he has to be here and when he is expected to ever learn actual biology. (There is no Toni nor Tabitha.) There are eight more extras that I don’t care about. Betty-Teacher is at first a bit startled, but then decides this is also a turn on, and proceeds to molest her student some more.

Riverdale seems to think that a girl keeping a diary is a bad idea when her mother is Alice Cooper. Betty is really weird about her diary. It’s like she’s proud of keeping one, though those tedious women who wanted to marry the important Ernest also kept diaries and were ridiculous people. Even though she knows - or has good reason to suspect - that she is not being granted any sort of patient’s rights in this ‘therapeutic’ relationship she has with Werthers, she still nevertheless mentions that she puts all her sex fantasies /dreams into this diary. Is this a desire to be known better by her mother??

Werthers, after sexualizing Betty 1:1 all this time, has the temerity to ask HER where HER urge to be seen in “a sexualized way” comes from. Betty Cooper with her beautiful eyes looking right at me and saying what the narrative, the show, or maybe RAS wants her to say - that she’s doing all the things she’s done in S7 so far because she wants “to be seen, period” and also “as a person with autonomy and desire and self determination.”

OK so up until this point I felt very hypnotized because Betty is really so intriguing but then comes this asinine statement that means the middle aged men putting this show together are still trying to justify - and even worse - anticipate in advance the avalanche of negative reactions, ranging from mild distaste all the way to rage and bitter disappointment, of making Betty Cooper, sufferer of serial killer DNA, unwitting bearer of her mother’s trauma, survivor at the hands of an evil father, expert basher of people’s skulls - a kind of sex doll for this final season. “What better way to understand a person than to understand their desires?”

Oh get the fuck away from me. People waste time on all sorts of desires that have nothing to do with what they quote unquote really want from life. This feels unnecessarily condescending, and they are still trying to have the last word in this world where no creator can have that expectation. As soon as you release this thing, makers, it’s ours to pull apart and recook as we see fit. And you’re wrong. This arc that you’ve put Betty on where she acts out sexually in ways that give her no clitoral contact and hence no satisfaction but gives lots of voyeuristic unilateral pleasure to men (and mostly men) both in the show and I guess in the audience who are into that sort of thing TAUGHT ME NOTHING ABOUT BETTY WHATSOEVER.

Veronica goes to the Diner and she runs into Jughead, who still looks very sad and teary eyed. She calls in Holden Caulfield again, but he is too depressed for quips. She runs her only available movie idea by Jughead, and he says he loved the cool monster, “Mr Rayberry loved it too.” One of the things I really love about Jughead is that he freely shares a lot of ideas with women in his life. He was all about solving Betty’s mysteries for her, then ceding credit to her so she thought she solved it. Now, he nicely suggests, without mansplaining or other forms of condescension, that Veronica try a neat little 4D gimmick, name dropping “William Castle.” The Tingler had electric shock distributions under the seats. Veronica understands him immediately - “Sell the gimmick, not the movie.”

Betty comes home from doing a 1:1 with one gross wrinkly old man to be confronted with another one sitting with her mother. He’s here to hear her confession and uh, do an exorcism if need be, Har Har. It turns out that Werthers ‘prescribed’ the reading of her daughter’s sexually explicit journals to Alice which is - really, Alice is not my favorite, but erotica written by virgins tends to be REALLY TRULY very wild, so I can only imagine the afternoon that Alice has had. Betty suggests that Alice might be better off coming to therapy with her. Alice has a wonderful line - “I’m a grown woman, I don’t need therapy!” She thinks what her mother did was ‘breaking and entering’ rather than ‘violation of privacy’ or just, you know, ‘betraying my trust.’

I thought it was really very strange phrasing, until of course, Betty storms out of her home, muttering, ‘breaking and entering’ to herself like no person has ever done in the history of ever, and decides to ‘break and enter’ into Werther’s office. She manages to get his desk open, and finds comic books, slingshots, and a copy of Lolita. Any sort of hidden book she finds - starting with Ethel’s copy of the ‘sex book’ - Betty feels compelled to read, so she takes it. She clearly doesn’t know what it is.

She goes to the diner, where basically Jughead is making like Lucy Van Pelt at her therapy booth. He is just sitting and reading all of his mentor’s works one by one. He’s been having a sort of one man wake for his buddy the dead writer. I love Jughead for things like this. Brad Rayberry seemed like an exceptionally solitary, friendless person, so he must be very pleased in the afterlife that he made this much of an impact on this one kid. Betty calls Jughead a bookworm, then sidles in to ask him about Lolita.

Jughead knows exactly what it is. ‘Holy moly!” He calls it salacious, then describes the plot. When Betty hears exactly how young Dolores Haze is, she immediately draws something very close to the right conclusion. What she says is, “So it’s a book for perverts?!” but of course, the truth about Lolita is that it’s a book misread by perverts. Jughead says the silencing thing that men always say about things that get them off, especially if they know it’s objectionable on human rights grounds (i.e. on the grounds that female humans are fully human like men are): “Passing moral judgment on a work of art is a slippery slope.”

No, it isn’t, but I have no space to get into it here. Though this discussion intrigues Betty, what Jughead has to say about a book in which an adult ‘professor’ man ‘has an affair’ with a 12 year old child makes her not want to talk to Jughead too much, so she skips (literally runs) away, book in hand, to go find out for herself about this ‘work of art.’

Under her sheets, Betty is reading Lolita under a flashlight.

At school, Veronica is trying to sell the experience of watching “The Crawling Eye” at her classmates. She’s wearing blue check gingham, and Cheryl, who can’t keep her legs closed and keeps swinging them when she’s in Veronica’s vicinity, is in red check. This has to mean something. Veronica says that it’s playing for one night only Cheryl calls the film “dreck” as well as old (“came out a few years ago”). The depth of Cheryl’s film knowledge is startling to Veronica, but she soldiers on, stoutly touting that her film will be shown in 4D, insisting that it’s not 3D but a fourth, new dimension. At this moment, Long Duk Dong with an American accent (that is to say, 1950s Dilton, who I dislike 3rd after UF Frank and Fangs) bursts out with some dorky factoid that time is the 4th dimension. Cheryl approves of this, smiling smugly down at Veronica from her leg swinging perch. Veronica swats Dilton down with a simple “Shut up, Dilton.” She has her boys handout novelty eyeballs, which Cheryl wants nothing to do with, but they pop it into her little bag anyway.

Then Veronica forces Clay and Kevin (Klay? Clevin?) to cover their balls with newspaper. She actually says this, and says they have to dry the balls completely so she can do the “paint job.” She says these things like they’re some sort of sexual innuendo, but thank god, no. Then she goes to wait for Archie and Reggie, who she knows have to go home together because they sleep in the same room. Archie is extremely animated as he talks to Reggie, almost skipping ahead of him. “Just the two strapping he-men” she wanted, Veronica says. She’s there to hire them as performers for her 4d experience.

Archie immediately demurs - “We’re not actors!” they have KJ Apa say. He looks whole-milk wholesome and goofy as he says this, but then, as Reggie remains deadly serious, he alters his face entirely to imitate that weighty look, even lowering his voice a register or two, so find out “what exactly” he and Reggie are being asked to do. Archie has never been as adorable to me as he is this season, but if any one of the S1-6 Jugheads saw this he’d totally have done a murder suicide right there on the school steps. Veronica wants to compensate them handsomely for two minutes of work. Reggie can’t say no to an offer like that, so Archie is also down for the count.

Betty is just walking down the school corridor, and tells Werther that she will not be attending their session this day because she’s too busy reading something very interesting, which will be discussed tomorrow.

So it’s like I thought - she doesn’t necessarily HAVE TO do this. She kind of wants to do it, because he’s letting her at least think about and talk about sex as much as she wants, even if it’s for really grotesque reasons. She needs an outlet, but the call of Nabokov turns out to be stronger.

At the showing of the movie, the eyeballs they have as novelty gifts are truly very gruesome. Dilton has somehow been roped into volunteer duty handing out flyers. Cheryl shows up, and Veronica practically leaps over to accost her. Cheryl’s very presence is a victory for Veronica, you see. She shows off for Cheryl’s benefit, telling her oh, she might die of fright and if she merely faints, there’s a nurse on duty! No matter what she says, she just looks so pleased that Cheryl is there that fails to come off as threatening or mean.

The nurse on duty turns out to be Midge in a jokey nurse costume. Cheryl is annoyed that she wasn’t invited to be a part of Veronica’s campaign, so she takes it out on Midge instead (“I am extremely disappointed in you!”) before whipping around to tell Veronica that if this experience sucks, she will use her crowd rousing powers to make sure Veronica loses money this night as well. Veronica is quite nervous.

The 4D experience turns out to be (1) 3d glasses (2) a fog machine and (3) archie and Reggie in really fantastic eyeball with tentacles costumes feeling people up in the audience with those costumes.

Midge is into tentacle porn. Her willingness to fuck Fangs is now fully explained to me. The emergence of these tentacle monsters makes Midge plant one on Fangs.

Cheryl is having a wonderful time. She’s laughing joyfully. The crowd begins to chant, “Go Eyes! Go Eyes!” while Veronica, up in the projection booth, is very pleased by her own success.

Betty goes barging into Werther’s office to toss Lolita on the desk to demand what he’s doing with that book. He is an absolute candidate for a summary execution. He says that by learning about Lolita’s mind, he was hoping to better understand Betty’s.

Which only proves he didn’t read the book, because Humbert Humbert never understands or even thinks that Lolita has a mind. He just wants to (and does) fuck her barely pubescent body, because that’s the kind of thing that gets him off sexually. At the description of Dolores as “a sex crazed young woman” (he really hasn't read the book) Betty goes off. Her rant - all of which is perfectly correct - ends with “I no longer feel comfortable being alone in a room with you.”

This has all the hallmarks of the kind of movie that Aishwarya Rai has made, where she is oppressed and put upon until she erupts in a long interrupted speech of righteous indignation. Then she stomps off.

The thing is, Betty making the leaps that she makes in Werther’s terrible so-called therapy were completely unconnected to what was actually said during them, and that book Lolita suddenly giving Betty all this, uh Betty Friedan type of insight is also ludicrous. This has the feeling of shoving in pseudo-feminist points because what the show makers really wanted to do was accuse all of us of having their personal hot-for-teacher fantasies. (No, we don’t).

The next night ,Veronica is amazed to see the blockbuster crowd at her theater. Unfortunately, it turns out that Reggie and Archie don’t want to service her balls anymore. She thinks they’re angling for a raise, but they genuinely don’t want to do this anymore. Archie because he wants to look at Reggie play with balls and give him balls and things like that, and Reggie because this form of after school Arbeit is too undignified for him, and he doesn’t like being an employee of the girl he has a crush on. As soon as Archie delivers the form of notice that Reggie has clearly made him do, Reggie asks out Veronica a second (or is it third?) time, but Veronica is yet again too busy, this time because her show is a success. They’ll try again tomorrow, she says, after she’s called Variety to let her parents know that they haven’t beaten her yet.

The Lodges communicate via press releases, apparently.

Speaking of communication: Back at the Cooper house, Alice is mad that Werthers ‘giving up’ on Betty. (Werthers realizes that Betty might end his career, so he’s officially ‘fired’ her as a client.) Alice very much wants someone to ‘fix’ Betty but I guess not spend any money on this problem, so she’s about to call Werther’s back when Betty Cooper really does become Betty Friedan. She diagnoses her 1950s picture perfect housewife mother (who moreover has some species of career) with being unhappy with a nameless, unnameable problem. When Betty hits that sore spot, Alice turns around and says immediately that perhaps therapy for Elizabeth is a bad idea after all. “Talk to me,” Betty begs. “I’m right here.” She also asks if Alice is afraid FOR her or afraid OF her. Before the conversation can get anywhere worthwhile, they are interrupted by the patriarchy, in the form of the doughy Hal Cooper, emerging from his deep dark hole to call Alice a wonderful mother and wife who has sacrificed so much, just sooo much, for Betty. He summarily sends Betty to her room when Betty wants to know exactly what was sacrificed on her behalf.

The next morning, Betty wants to try reconciling with Alice, to “try to find a path forward.” The thing is, Alice Cooper in all universes has a hateful relationship with the truth, and since Betty told her not one but two major truths (she is afraid OF Betty, and she is otherwise unhappy) she lashes out by disowning Elizabeth altogether. Alice Cooper, I’ve said before, is someone who should be a very serious free-abortion-on-demand advocate because that’s what she should have done. I wonder if Riverdale knows that this is the character portrayal they are putting out - an illustration of a woman who should’ve had an abortion each time she got pregnant, and didn’t get to, and what happens to her in the aftermath. “Marveolous” is what Alice says at the prospect of a teen daughter who doesn’t need or want the kind of mother (castrating. p.s. Oh hey, Germaine Greer’s “Female Eunoch” reference) Alice wants to be. She also hates the task of being a domestic worker if any kind - “You can make your own damn breakfast” she says.

The smokey eyes on Alice first thing in the morning make her eyes bewitchingly cat-like.

That evening, Reggie is waiting for Veronica with a sweet bouquet of flowers. It’s already been half an hour. Kevin turns out to be an amazing retail worker, diligently wiping down the counters while Veronica is back on the phone with that Roth guy, the one who failed to get her the proper prints of East of Eden. She’s managed to get the Variety reporter to take dictation:

“Boffo B.O. for Babylonium: Riverdale Exhib Draws Eyeballs with Crawling Eye.” That alliteration plus strange word choice is Veronica Lodge through and through. Her gambit to use Variety as the platform to announce her resurgence in the world is turning out very successful.

In a bit of fanservice (rather than show maker masturbation which is the whole Grundy non-apology using Betty), Roth says he’s “always been a fan of Riverdale. Great town. Superb audiences!” to which Veronica says, “It’s like no place else Mr. Roth.” She’s now going to get a proper print of East of Eden. She’s wearing a pinstripe print, to mark her success. Later on, we see that she is wearing a black belt with a rhinestone buckle and a string of pearls with this. It looks amazing.

By the time Veronica has wrapped things up with Peter Roth and come down to meet her date, Reggie has left because he was tired of waiting. He’s left the bouquet for Veronica, because he’s a gentleman. Veronica is pensive over the fact that she has managed her time badly. Because that’s what it means, right? They’re not doing that stupid thing where they are saying a woman who has to try to lift her business of the ground has to choose between having a persona life and success, right?

When Veronica tries to go home after a long tiring day, she finds that her locks have changed. Smithers, who is loyal to no one other than his own paycheck, has changed the locks on her, so as to be able to report her genuine distress to her parents properly I guess, and also informs her that her parents deeply resent her roarin’ success. Veronica never loses her equanimity, so she says “a crawling eye for a crawling eye.” She is going to move into her own theater, to live there homeless while she gets her business fully launched. This has happened to her, of course, in other universes. Even though Veronica is always wealthy, ridiculously so sometimes, she also suffers consistent bouts of being ‘unhoused’ as the show calls it, same as Jughead.

The song the soundtrack plays is about how sometimes you’ve “got to start at the bottom.”

Unsurprisingly, we transition over to Jughead, who has finally gotten to the end of his wake for Rayberry. He’s finished the last word on the last published work by the authors, so he’s ready for the check now. Jughead says that “Time passes. Seasons change. Life moves on, you know?” as well as “I’m ready to move on.” Of course, as a Jughead and Riverdale fan I can’t help but hear something meant for me in the “I’m not done mourning, but I think I’m done wallowing.” I mean. Jughead’s version of wallowing while mourning was to read all of Rayberry’s work. I’m retreading all the episodes, in one form or another. But the show is wrong. I don’t want anyone involved in the show to move on. I want all y’all to be trapped in Riverdale forever and ever and ever.

Pop’s is glad to hear that Jughead is ready to get on with his life.

But of course, Riverdale the town won’t let him move on with anything ever. Keller comes in with sirens blazing (why?) to tell Jughead that he is going to need help ‘solving’ Rayberry’s suicide.

So much for moving on, Jughead says, sardonically.

#Riverdale recap #riverdale episode summary #riverdale s7 e9 #riverdale episode 126 #lolita mention #riverdale opinion #too many thoughts about riverdale #riverdale s7 recap #riverdale s7 #riverdale episode recap #Riverdale s6

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docholligay · 1 year

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Jackie vs Taissa

Hello! This is about the pilot of Yellowjackets, and ONLY the pilot of Yellowjackets. I have not seen beyond the first episode, at all, and know NOTHING about this show. Please do not spoil it for me. Things that are spoilery in nature, for me, include: saying things like “Just wait!!” confirming or denying anything I put forward, outside information about the cast interviews or creator statements, leading questions like “Do you think “blank moment” means anything?” etc. Remember that Y’ALL HAVE SEEN THE SHOW AND I HAVE NOT. This informs the way you talk about things relating to the show. Just be really careful is all I’m asking. Also: If there is LITERALLY any stance I could take on this show or character that would make you upset, please just fucking block the tag

If you WOULD like to discuss the show and my takes on it, the Discord is right here! I don’t go there, so it’s a great place to get every emotion out.

Please thank @sailorsunspot and @moonlight-frittata for backing this odd way of doing a liveblog, and remember my tip jar is always open!

I LOVE the Allie backstory bit. I love everything about it--we see that Taissa is a leader, but a political one.

A politcal leader? Doc what the fuck do you mean by that? I mean that Jackie is also a leader, but Jackie is not a leader on the basis of making hard decisions. I mean Christ her solution to the girls wanting to beat each other’s asses is to have them say something they love about each other, and while I’m not even necessarily opposed to that in a broad view, it’s very much a leader for a certain moment. She’s a peacetime, more or less leader. She’s not Winston Churchill, here, who absolutely sucked in anything that didn’t involve London being directly bombed, but I will DIE on the hill that he was good at that. A man for a moment.

AND, that’s Jackie too. Jackie is a pretty, nice, talented girl, that all the other girls more or less get along with. They respect her, in a time when all of the above matters.

We see the coach say that she has influence. “When things get tough out there, the girls are going to need your guidance.” The show is, with a wink, nodding at everything that’s going to happen out there, but I call hot bullshit. In fairness, I don’t think the show is trying to mislead me, because if the show was trying to mislead me, I don’t think it would have the girl who dies before we see anyone else show up wearing Jackie’s necklace. Now Doc, you may say, when you were watching the first episode you noted that they were going to just play musical chairs with the necklace. Oh, and, I still think that. It wants to toy with us. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think the necklace being seen on the absolutely brutalized dead girl is just a red herring. I think it’s a symbol of how Jackie’s mindset and manner of leadership is fundamentally dead outside of the very safe suburban environment.

Anyway, back to Allie and Jackie and Taissa.

So Jackie’s a INSPIRATIONAL leader. She influences by being the sunniest and brightest and whatever.

But Taissa? Tai sees a problem, and she is going to solve it without Jackie’s buyin or approval. She is RUTHLESS. The ends justify the means, for Taissa. I do believe her, that she didn’t mean to hurt Allie, but I do also believe that she never really thought about it as a possibility or a problem. Allie freezes up under pressure. Allie needs to be dealt with, and if that means Taissa has to scrimmage with the JV squad to put some real aggressive pressure on her, she’s happy to do that. I think she saw that line between A and B and if there were things in her way, they were irrelevant. She was planning on freezing her out, in a backroom deal--CUTTHROAT, by the way, and we love it--until that didn’t work out, and then she moved straight to force. When one of the girls says Jackie won’t like it, she says not to tell her. She doesn’t give a shit what jackie likes, she gives a shit about what it takes to win. TAISSA is the kind of person who could become a leader out there. Now, it’s EXTREMELY early days, so Io reserve the right to change my mind about this, but I think two things are not without notice:

Taissa is the one girl about whom coach doesn’t get to finish his sentence when talking to jackie’

Tai is the one who actually goes into politics. “Bring out us out the wilderness into economic prosperity” MY GOD.

I also really love Tai’s “Everything works until it doesn’t” and her telling Natalie she smells like a fucking drunk. Anyway, Taissa as a leader versus Jackie as a leader, I think decisive action versus kumbaya is going to come to a head, and I know who I’d stand behind.

#Doc watches Yellowjackets #Yellowjackets S1 E1

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serendertothesquad · 3 months

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"Wordsville" and the Problem with Cash-Cow Copies

[note original day of creation was February 15, 2024. just...just for reference. trust me bro.]

Hello.

Tonight I am in a silly mood fueled by sleep deprivation.

That means you all get an introspective blog that I will complete within a week and then ask "why'd I write that?"

So here's what's on Seren's lovely table of discussion tonight...

Put...put away the glasses. You don't need your glasses. This is the highest-quality thing I can get.

But et voila. A little project in the works called Wordsville.

Now, at this point you might be asking why I'm referencing "cash-cow copies" in the title. And whoo-hoo...oooooh...well, I don't want to make this some kind of clickbait blog, so I might as well perfect the atomic bomb in five minutes and land it on you folks.

What if I were to tell you that this is a blatant, shameless, slap-a-digital-coat-on-it-and-call-it-a-day copy of Odd Squad?

Ahhh, see, now I have you intrigued. Hopefully. If you are, then peep down below and let me discuss things a little more in-depth for you non-believing hacks asking me if I'm borderline insane.

So to put things in perspective, allow me to explain what Wordsville is, starting with my own personal summary.

Wordsville is an up-and-coming episodic (not to be confused with serialized, that's a whole 'nother ballgame) TV series that is produced (and will later be distributed) by Sinking Ship Entertainment and is made with assistance from WNET, a PBS station located in New Jersey, and TVO Kids, PBS Kids's girlfriend from Canada that's definitely real.

It was announced back in October of last year with a press release from Kidscreen, which didn't give much info aside from the following blurb:

Wordsville stars two child detectives on the hunt for missing words that are causing chaos in their town.

Sounds a little familiar, don'tcha think? Two kid detectives, finding something missing...and that "something missing" is causing chaos where they live?

Oh, but if you think the similarities end there, then no. No the absolute fuck they do not. I've got my bathing suit on and God damn it if I'm not gonna jump all the way in the pool instead of dippin' my little toes in there.

Doing a little bit of digging reveals more tidbits from a casting call for the series. It's rather wordy (ayyyyyy I did a funy), so let's take it piece by piece and discuss accordingly.

Wordsville is a town populated entirely by kids

A town that is populated entirely by children? Now c'mon, surely that doesn't ring a be-

...Ah. Whaddya know. Yes it does.

And with the adults as useless and idiotic as they are, it might as well be a town full of solely children. Next question.

and it’s a place where words matter. A lot. Every kid citizen has a special connection to words. And that means that if something happens to a word, there are far-reaching consequences.

A special connection to words? Like how there are children who have a special connection to normalcy? Stopping, oh, I dunno, hypothetically speaking...

...oddness?

Okay okay, I'm reaching just a wee bit here, but you can't read this and not tell me it echoes the funny kids math show to some degree or another. If an odd thing happens to a person, the whole town suffers. You've seen it. I've seen it. It's been the basis for many an A and B-plot. Must I elaborate? Good, because I don't plan on it. Continuing.

If the Main Street Baker bakes delicious donuts and they all mysteriously disappear, nothing else in Wordsville can taste good until they are returned.

Town Baker walked so Main Street Baker can sprint while blowing their lungs out.

If the Town Doctor’s soothing medication gets swiped, the whole town gets uncontrollably itchy until the medicine-napper is uncovered.

Ignoring the incredibly dark implications of this as well as the implications of this shoddy knockoff town having only one single doctor...

Dr. O walked so the Town Doctor can sprint while blowing their lungs out...over their massive paycheck.

(I technically could have also put New Dr. O too, but I'd like to spring for iconic OG's here. New Dr. O is neither iconic nor an OG.)

And let me remind you that "Torontonians get uncontrollably itchy due to something odd" would, by technicality, classify as an odd problem. Because...I mean, y'know...the cause is something odd happening. Doing shit with words is odd. This needs absolutely no explaining.

If the Local Scientist does an experiment with electricity and all the lights in town go out, they won’t come back on until the experiment wrecker is revealed.

Yep, I've taken shots of every IPA I can. We nearly hit the main character quadfecta, if you discount Dr. "bro thinks she's part of the team" O. All they needed was a bit about a high governing body and we'd round out the quad squad in proper with Oprah!

There's also a sneaky lil' crumb in the form of that blurb relating to Oona, who did, indeed, experiment with electricity in one episode and wound up proving why she can never take up Crossfit.

Hmmmnnnnext!

In each crime, the episodic word disappears and can’t return until the mystery is solved. The impact of the missing word is felt all over town.

This is another one of those things that I gotta wrench a hammy for in terms of comparisons, because about the only thing I can reasonably compare Odd Squad to is the second sentence.

See, here's the thing. You get oddness that happens to a person. Oftentimes, that oddness spreads to other people, whether directly (in the form of diseases and disorders) or indirectly (like the Town Baker's cakes being split in half, which wouldn't please Torontonians poppin' in for a whole cake and eyeing the display to get a feel for one). In a sense, normalcy disappears and, well, it can't return until [insert partner pair here] solve the case. It's kinda the entire schtick of Odd Squad as a franchise. It's formulaic, just like how Wordsville's "words disappear and nothing can be normal until the word returns" schtick is formulaic.

Is it a stretch? Perhaps. Mileage may vary. I think it's a bit of a stretch, personally. But hey, I'm a grown adult critiquing a ripoff of a kids STEM show. I shouldn't be talking. But I didn't start this fandom nearly 10 years ago just to let Sinking Ship's piss-poor attempt at really capitalizing on one of their biggest franchises sliiiiiide right by me on a floor smooth enough where I'm falling on my ass every 10 seconds.

Luckily, best friends and partners Sage and Chase are on the case and run the only detective agency in town. These tech-savvy sleuths solve mysteries entirely virtually because their reading, listening and digital literacy skills are their greatest strengths. Sage and Chase always catch their culprit and make sure everything is right with the word.

Now where in the McFuck do I start with this one? The PAW Patrol catchphrase thrown in complete with shared name? The fact that there is only one detective agency in the entire town? The fact that Sage and Chase are best friends as well as work partners? Or the pun that made me actively cringe in a way I haven't felt since Whitney told James she wanted to go on the lake?

I mean...this is about Odd Squad, so...I guess the second one sounds most plausible.

But that doesn't need explaining either. There is only one detective agency in town. There is one Odd Squad precinct per city or per state.

No, neither does the third bit. I already referenced Olive and Otto above. You should know what's up.

(I've also read that blurb five times now and...well...we'll get to the digital stuff in a bit. That just needs a whole side-set of word vomit.)

-------------------------------

In my digging of this series -- which, well, wasn't all that much -- I managed to find a few blurbs on our two main characters. The casting call for them, funny enough, called for, and I will quote this exactly, "talent to look 9."

As in, they want the actors to physically look 9 years old.

Which puts that qualifier in the same ballpark as Odd Squad UK's "talent must be Canadian but live in the UK". But at least that prerequisite actually had a legitimate earnest reason behind it, which is that the production needed to be Canadian in a lot more than just the "Canadian prodco works on a British series" sense. Hiring kids who have to physically look 9 years old and will probably be yoted onto the street the second puberty hits them like a truck is a practice not even the most egregious bosses of family-owned-and-operated businesses could pull off.

But enough about the qualifiers. Let's get started on our character comparisons and civil cidiscussion! (Oh the irony...)

And remember this: the casting call was handled by Larissa Mair Casting, who previously did casting for Odd Squad. So that means there will be tinny lil' crumbs of bonus material for me to dissect and discuss! Huzzah! Aw God why can't this happen for Odd Squad UK...man, I'm gonna have to go into my sobbing corner...

First up, we have Sly Sleuth, originally referred to as "Sage" here. I'll also be referring to him as "Sage" in this blog.

Sage is a great detective; thoughtful, extremely logical, and talented at getting information out of people.

Thoughtful of others. Logical. And can wrench information out of suspects like a badass.

Yep, we got an Olive that got hit with an Olando-fied beam. (And because half of you don't know who Olando is: Sage is meant to be a male Olive. I hope that clears things up for you.)

What else?

Nothing related to vocabulary or literacy gets by this investigator. Suspects can underestimate Sage but that is always a mistake. Sage doesn’t scare easily and won’t take no for an answer, traits that make an excellent detective.

You could tell me this was how Olive was meant to be written in "My Better Half", word for word, and I would honestly believe you. Right down to asking, "Her name was Sage in pre-production?"

About the only place I can draw the line here is at Olive not scaring easily. We don't know Sage's backstory -- and once again, this is an episodic series, so don't expect much in the way of plot, backstory included -- but Olive, at least, has a legitimate reason for all the times she covers her ears at loud noises or sharply reacts to something startling.

The former is because of The Censor-Friendly Bullet Massacre of '15.

The latter is because Dalila Bela marched straight out of a viewing of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and never looked back.

I...can't really say either applies to Sage. At least not yet. We'll have to see if Sinking Ship decides to bring Wordsville into its lil' multiverse that Odd Squad and Dino Dana and Endlings and Playdate already share.

Sage is also wise, which is why the name “Sage” is completely appropriate.

Sooooo does that mean his name is Sly because he's cunning like a fox?

Well then in other news, Olive is named such because she was inspired by the famous Law and Order character Olivia Benson. I have fifteen folders that back me right the hell up. Also I contacted Sinking Ship the other day, they explicitly told me.

No, no, but in all seriousness. Olive, too, is very wise. Historian buff, knows her shit about Odd Squad, doo-dah, doo-dah.

Anyway, next up we have Chase, who was renamed to "Gabby Gumshoe". (I'll be referring to her as Chase in this blog, as well.) Let's see what's on the chopping block for her in terms of our favorite food-loving, hella tall, crazy silly blorbo.

Chase is a fantastic detective, but is also goofy[,] funny, visually oriented, and, like the name suggests, loves the “chase”.

Now there's a man who got hit with a yassified beam, right there.

I'll leave it up to you folks whether you consider Otto to be "visually oriented". But in terms of "loving the chase"...yeah, I'd say that fits.

To lay it down: Otto is a rookie agent. Common sense would lead anyone to assume that he has an absolute blast solving odd cases and absorbing every bit of knowledge about Odd Squad that he possibly can. He finds out a villain's on the loose? He's right there, by Olive's side, workin' to catch 'em. He finds out oddness has run rampant throughout the town? He's right on that shit.

Chase, on the other hand, is someone I wouldn't call a rookie. It's made quite evident that she is, for all intents and purposes, seasoned. Seasoned enough that she manages to keep the detective agency she works for afloat and get approval from the others in Wordsville, Sage included. This, perhaps, is because she's not really meant to be an audience surrogate in the same way Otto is. Otto, at least for the first few episodes, serves as a way to ease the audience into Odd Squad and show them what the organization is and what they do without yoting them into it and leaving them asking "Where am I?" more times than a drunkard. Chase doesn't fill that role, because it could be argued that such a show like Wordsville doesn't really need an audience surrogate. Whether that's true, though, remains to be seen.

People tend to underestimate this investigator, but Chase often notices things like a chocolate stain when someone said they didn’t like chocolate or a squiggle of icing that turns out to be the antonym of the word they’re tracking.

Y' take Otto's...Otto's love of food...and y' put it in a gorl...and BAM you got a character.

...

That isn't a joke. It's dead-on serious. Even the casting call script pins Chase as a kid with a sweet tooth! It's just Otto but with a less diverse palate! Otto eats everything! This kid eats sweets! God sakes, give her some juice, make her Oprah, I don't give a shit, fucking hell I'm driving 50 minutes to Burger Ki-

Chase is also great with computers and incredibly artistic. A graphic note taker[,] Chase loves to draw, has a great eye for details, is a big fan of the “zoom in” function, and really enjoys creating animated re-enactments of Word Mysteries.

All right, we finally have somewhere we can draw the line.

No, not at being tech-literate. With being artistic.

Otto's artistic talent kind of varies throughout the franchise. In drawing on paper, he's pretty solid for an I-just-recently-turned-10-please-praise-me-year-old. In making paper airplanes, he's solid enough to take down a grown-ass man and rock his sunglasses when he's done for.

In computer drawing...well...if you can believe it, concepts like Ibispaint and Photoshop don't exist in the world of Odd Squad. (Okay, maaaaybe Photoshop does. I don't think it does. But it could be a good in-universe justification for it.)

We don't know Otto's digital artist merit because we never see him make any digital art. All of his art is solely non-digital. On Chase's side of things, she lives in an era where digital drawing is, like in real life, the norm. It's a contrast that might be one of the more glaring ones when it comes to comparing these two shows.

Now, as for the "creating animated re-enactments" schtick...if that isn't an excuse for Sinking Ship to work their animation magic after the Sandy Cheeks movie, then I honestly don't know what is. If you wanted to make the show animated, you could have made it animated. Would've been cheaper, too!

(And "Word Mysteries"...it's not as grating as Wild Kratts's "Wow Fact", but it's edging pretty close. I blame WNET. That's solely a PBS thing right there. TVO Kids would never.)

----------------

So we've gotten the discussion about the two main characters out of the way. Now we can dive into the heartier meat. The kind where's it's purple on the inside but you still digest it anyway.

I'm talking, of course, about the sample scripts- script. Singular. There is one script. Uno.

Now, lemme give you a bit of a rundown: casting calls for Odd Squad -- really, most shows, but this is a blog about Odd Squad -- often come with sample scripts. This is so talents can read their parts aloud for the camera and have the tape submitted to the casting agency for consideration. Odd Squad in particular has had quite an interesting ride with sample scripts, from entire episode plots being adapted into final products (with a bit of tweaking) to characters having names different than what they're named in the final product (which is the case with both Sly and Gabby). They're nothing on the scale of ABC Me dropping episodes earlier than PBS or shorts getting dropped as an alleged April Fools prank, but they're pretty damn good crumbs to chew on.

The sample script starts out with Sage and Chase on, of course, a video call. (Sinking Ship made a Zoom reference once. Pray they do not make another by the name of a friendly drug called "Speed" or that term for peeing known as a "Whiz".) Chase explains that she just gave her office chair's wheels a tune-up, which, of course, makes her hungry. Hungry enough that she declares a "cookie break" and immediately takes out a ginormous cookie from hammerspace that just made the European bakery down the street from me start sobbing. (Look, they make good cookies. Giant cookies. Cookies I need two hands just to hold properly. Trust me, it's- it's massive.)

However, when she bites into the cookie, she finds that it tastes absolutely gross -- "not sweet, not even sour". While she ponders if her body has forcefully rejected one of the best sweet treats known to humankind, Sage begins to grow suspicious and asks if it's a Word Mystery they need to solve.

Which is, coincidentally enough, when the Main Street Baker calls in a fit of hysteria, explaining that their "delicious donuts" are gone. And because we can't take enough from Odd Squad, we get a bit of "literal humor" in the form of the donuts both being delicious (probably) and them spelling the word "delicious" prior to their disappearance. After Sage explains what "delicious" means as well as what synonyms are, it's shown that the culprit also struck other pastries, up to and including gingerbread people, which Sage absolutely takes personally because he's a kid of pure culture who gives a big "fuck you" to holiday-specific treats being enjoyed only during said holidays.

Chase, in true Otto fashion, decides to take more bites of her cookie and instantly regrets it. Sage, in true...well...Clint Eastwood fashion (I shit you not, that's literally what it says in the script), declares that they need to find the word "delicious" and fix the pastries.

And...yeah, that's about it. Like I said, there's really not much to go on with casting call sample scripts. Especially not ones from Larissa Mair.

My conclusive thoughts on it, you ask? Well...they can try to hide it, but all it's doing is enforcing my point. From the Main Street Baker having donuts missing similar to how the Town Baker had bagels missing in "Soundcheck", to Chase being an idiot who is obsessed with food the same way Otto is (right down to his willingness to drink Odd Todd's pickle juice when it tasted gross in "Bad Lemonade"!), even down to the "literal metaphor" kind of humor as it applies to singular words. Am I stretching? Perhaps. But these supposedly insignificant pieces are just part of the bigger picture, the larger issue at hand in this long-winded piece.

------------------

The digital aspect of Wordsville is one of the ways they decided to put a twist on the precedent that Odd Squad set. And it's so blatant and in-your-face that it's on par with shoving a red flag in someone's eyes to blind them.

But here's the thing. The digital aspect been done. Amusingly enough, by the same company.

Lockdown is a show that fits right in with the others at the Shows-Made-During-the-COVID-Pandemic-About-the-COVID-Pandemic club. It was a way to capitalize on something in society that probably will never be relevant again until around 2050. Maybe even earlier than that, at the rate we're going.

I haven't seen it, so I can't speak much about it, but from my side of things it looks a lot like Unfriended if it took place during the pandemic and wasn't a horror movie and involved teens and not young adults/adults/I haven't seen the movie in many years bite me.

But the main difference between Lockdown and Wordsville, relevant to this editorial, is that Lockdown has a legitimate reason to be shot entirely on electronic devices. It's part of the plot. It works, I'm sure. For Wordsville, it makes no sense for the outline and isn't just limiting, but is downright insulting for something "rooted in the 21st century". It's good to be unique when making a show, but there's such a thing as trying too hard to be unique to the point where it's detrimental to your show's quality. Making the show be a digital-only angle isn't a smart move, especially for a detective procedural.

And if it's trying to differentiate itself from Odd Squad...well, do I got some bad news for you.

The show already did an entire Zoom parody in the span of an 11-minute episode.

And I still hate it with all the vitriol of an old woman who hates kids playing with beach balls in the yard pool. It sucks ass. It's entirely unneeded when you have three children sitting around the same table. I could vomit on you all day about it. But at least it's far more justified than Wordsville having its entire formula based on it. You can rip off a show without being limiting.

(don't. seriously. don't.)

------------------

Before we get to the conclusion, I need to dive deep into Odd Squad's own popularity and explain it a little more beyond just little "trust me bro" tidbits.

If you've been following it for as long as I have, then it's no secret that Odd Squad is one of Sinking Ship's cash-cow franchises. You've got the main series, six different spinoffs, a live show, a book...and I didn't even provide a whole damn list! Point being, it's huge. It doesn't have many roots in pop culture, but from a certain angle, it is an absolutely massive franchise that continues to grow, even in spite of its controversies.

Unlike works such as SpongeBob or Bluey, Odd Squad isn't popular enough to get bonafide ripoffs. The formula is relatively easy to copy, and if anything there are shows that have a similar premise but aren't even close to ripoff territory (K.C. Undercover, for example). It's just that, for all the ripoffs people have done of shows and movies over the years, the motivation for industry bigwigs in taking Odd Squad and running with it just...isn't there. I can connect it to Disney or Dreamworks or Viacom all I want, but at best they have a vague awareness of it that only goes as far as "oh, that's a thing, I guess". At worst, they see it as a pile of shit that would never turn a decent profit.

It could be argued that Sinking Ship wasn't all too well-known in the entertainment sphere up until Odd Squad came around. Looking at their resume doesn't show all too much in the way of what's popular. This is Daniel Cook, Roll Play, Playdate...they don't stick in your head, right? Yeah, none of them stick in my head either. Odd Squad was their first big hit for them, something that really helped them gain ground as a company. It's the one that's pretty much linked with Sinking Ship in news articles. Like husband and wife, but for the TV industry.

But to Hollywood bigwigs, that means about as much as finding a stick on the ground. I guaran-goddamn-tee Bob Iger is not going to put his grubby little hands on the funny kids math franchise and twist the hell out of it. The only way that's happening is if you run "Odd Squad, but make it Disney" through an AI generator. (Which, for the record, I have not done. You can't really replicate Odd Squad characters in animation without making them look like they walked out of yet another Law and Order spinoff that's far more kid-friendly.)

However, even with Odd Squad's varying popularity, there are shows that go just a little beyond having a similar premise to it but don't dive into ripoff territory. Sort of like a next step up.

A long time ago, a few friends and I in an Odd Squad Discord server were discussing the show Numberjacks. You know, that show that Jacknjellify may or may not have used as inspiration for Four's design? Yeah, that's the bitch.

The show has a few similarities to Odd Squad. You've got the focus on math, a system for exiting the couch headquarters that's similar to the tube system, and even the existence of kid agents and incredibly odd villains, one of which, need I remind you, Twitter tried to make into a sexyman for all of two days to varying degrees of success.

I will admit, I haven't seen Numberjacks in several years. In fact, the last time I saw it was when it was brought up as an Odd Squad ripoff. If I recall correctly, the episode that I picked to watch on a whim was "Seaside Adventure", wherein a few numbers take a vacation and trouble occurs. Or something like that. I really can't remember many details.

One thing I do remember, though, is distinctly thinking that I could see the Odd Squad similarities, but...it's not a ripoff. The series premiered in 2006. By that point, Tim McKeon and Adam Peltzman were off on their own ventures as they wrote for cartoons and other things. Thus, Odd Squad hadn't been birthed yet. If anything, Odd Squad took cues from Numberjacks, not the other way around -- but even with the existence of Odd Squad UK, we don't know that for sure. I don't even know how popular Numberjacks was in the UK. I'm a dumb lil' American, not a Daphne-Moon-esque English woman.

Since then, I haven't found anything that has come close to what Wordsville aims to accomplish. Granted, though, I have not looked very hard. I'm moreso keeping an eye on PBS to see if they're going to try and rip off Odd Squad rather than keeping an eye on any random B-lister studio. (And no, I'm not talking about WNET. They are a PBS station, but I'm referring to PBS as a whole entire network, not a sole affiliate.)

------------------------

So the question remains: is Wordsville an Odd Squad ripoff?

Yes. On multiple counts. Right down to the name inspo. Guilty as charged. Right to jail.

From it being for the 4-7 demo not unlike Odd Squad's own 4-8 demo, to Sage and Chase being referred to as "Word Detectives" in lieu of "agents", to it being a detective procedural not unlike Odd Squad and its spinoffs, to the synopsis of the show being described as having "a case rooted in a vocabulary lesson" similar to Odd Squad having episodes rooted in STEM lessons, to it actively encouraging the audience to solve mysteries along with Sage and Chase...to Sage and Chase having alliterative theme naming...

Yeah, safe to say, we've got ourselves a ripoff.

There's no denying that Odd Squad is a fantastic franchise. Even through all of its issues, including financial controversies, heavy criticism, and mistreatment from PBS, it has remained strong for nearly 10 years, and will stay strong for many more. Maybe one of these days, it will plant roots deeper into pop culture and become one hell of a phenomenon. We'll have to see.

But the fact that Sinking Ship Entertainment has to resort to borrowing a concept that is unique in its nature, a concept that has already been done, a concept that has been given life and creativity by the people who birthed it, and then try to pass it off as its own original IP is not a good look on them. It's been done similarly before with their other big franchise, Dino Dan -- key word being "similarly" because it's one show and three spinoffs focusing on different characters. That isn't the case with Wordsville, though.

Put it this way: it's a company ripping off not someone else's IP, like many other companies have done and continue to do. It's a company ripping off their own IP.

And really, it doesn't matter how it's done. Stealing is stealing. At the end of the day, all it shows is a complete lack of creativity and a complete craving for the almighty dollar. More so if it's a company stealing from themselves and passing it along as okay.

In spite of this, however, I am perfectly willing to give Wordsville a shot when it comes out. Not so much to see if it's good (though my curiosity is piqued), and definitely not to hate-watch (which has the opposite intended effect on a show or movie), but to see just how far Sinking Ship is willing to push the envelope in affirming viewers and industry buddies alike that this is not, by any and all accounts, a copy of Odd Squad. I want to spot similarities. I want to take whiskey shots until I can do a zoom-zoom to a hospital and then ask if they've got a bottle on board the rig. I want to give a full, I-watched-this-show-now-here-are-my-overall-final-thoughts addendum on the entire issue.

As of now, Wordsville has no narrow timeframe. All I know is that it's releasing this year, likely on TVO Kids in Canada. Whether PBS as a whole will adopt it into its roster -- and if anything, it'll be WNET-exclusive, otherwise we would've heard something about it at the TCA Winter Press Tour a few days back -- for American audiences remains yet to be seen. Rest assured, though, that I'll be keeping an eye on it and rushing to it as soon as the first episode drops. After that, I'll give a proper addendum so I can finally put this issue to bed. Along with myself. Revenge bedtime procrastination is a bitch.

Thanks for reading. This honestly started out as something silly, but then I became analytical. So you got a mix of both in this one. This may or may not be the norm. Day-by-day, y'know?

Seren out.

#seren speaks #odd squad pbs kids #odd squad #wordsville #sinking ship entertainment

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saundersdaphne · 8 months

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[cisfemale and she/her] Welcome to Aurora Bay, [DAPHNE SAUNDERS]! I couldn’t help but notice you look an awful lot like [FIVEL STEWART]. You must be the [TWENTY SEVEN] year old [UNEMPLOYED/FREELANCER]. Word is you’re [SELF-ASSURED] but can also be a bit [HEADSTRONG] and your favorite song is [HEAD CHEERLEADER BY POM POM SQUAD]. I also heard you’ll be staying in [AURORA BAY DRIVE]. I’m sure you’ll love it! @aurorabayaesthetic

━━ BASICS.

FULL NAME: daphne amelia saunders AGE & DATE OF BIRTH: twenty-seven & august 15th (leo) GENDER & PRONOUNS: cis-woman & she/her HOMETOWN: long beach, california CURRENT LOCATION: aurora bay drive, aurora bay OCCUPATION: unemployed FACECLAIM: fivel stewart CHARACTER PARALLELS: maeby funke (arrested development), ava daniels (hacks), charlotte hale (westworld), helly (severance), eleanor shellstrop (the good place)

━━ BACKSTORY.

part one.

california is full–they really don’t have a use for wannabe actors like daphne. to be fair, owning a restaurant was hard enough for the saunders family without their kid going off to try and make it in hollywood.

even if the saunders struggled to make ends meet growing up, daphne lived a relatively simple life. while her friends got new phones for birthdays, she was lucky to get hand-me-downs from her cousins. while kids at school took trips to cabo for the summer, daphne was stuck working behind the counter. more than anything, she learned quickly that she wouldn’t settle for the life her parents had carved out for her.

telling her family that she wanted to go into acting worked out as well as she had thought. in her mother’s words, it was a disappointment that daphne could so easily turn her back on the business that her family had sacrificed everything for.

lectures and disagreements went on for ages (and still do to this day), but it did little to stop daphne from attending a local community college for theater arts. she strived in her program and, despite no one attending her graduation, managed to land herself a job working as a production assistant at an independent studio.

it was the best she could do when producers and casting agents turned her away at the door. the job might have been stable enough, but daphne didn’t risk everything to be the person behind the camera.

she heard about the role from a friend–a new teen soap opera shooting in canada. it helped to have someone calm her nerves during the audition and even better to have made it through to the second round with them too.

but, she wasn’t an idiot. a spot in a show like that could be the difference between being an extra in a commercial and a blockbuster star on the walk of fame. and it wasn’t like her friend needed it, right? not as much as daphne did, at least.

the day of the audition, she made a call: the producers rescheduled. what’re the odds?

it wasn’t her fault. her friend should have checked for herself. as if you wouldn’t do the same. and so, with her competition out of the running, she was offered the role that very day.

without so much as a goodbye to her friends or family, daphne packed up what little she had and moved to canada for filming.

part two.

toronto is empty and far too quiet for daphne’s liking. still, it was where the show took her. you know, the show where she practically ripped out from under her friend’s feet? the one that got cancelled mid-production by the studio? once again, she was shit out of luck.

a few bit spots in local shows and some hosting gigs on the side were the only thing keeping her in canada. it would be hard getting back to california with all the bridges she burnt there.

daphne hadn’t bothered trying to find her way back into hollywood and instead settled into the life she built in the new city. it might have been a far cry from what she expected, but a part of her knew she wouldn’t fare any better if she’d left.

then, a call. if she’d known how much trouble they would get her into, she would have thrown her phone into the pacific. after years having gone without so much as a word from her family, her mother broke the news. that the restaurant had gone under and that she’d be moving into her sister’s. aurora bay–a town she could only barely pick out on a map.

daphne, realizing that the roles and callbacks were now few and far between, decided that a fresh start might just do her some good. no, it had nothing to do with her bank account running on empty and her landlord threatening eviction. but, it did help that her aunt had a cozy guest house just by the water. either way, daphne was just happy to be in a town where nobody knew her name.

part three.

aurora bay is nice enough. quaint, like something out of a hallmark movie. her mother disagreed, already missing the los angeles weather. it’d been years since they’d seen each other, but the two can still find something to fight about.

as far as low points go, daphne still believes she’ll find her way out of the hole she’d found herself in. never mind that she doesn’t exactly have a plan–doesn’t everyone need a break here and there?

until then, she’s happy enough to mooch off her aunt and uncle while she gets her feet off the ground. and if they're under the impression that she's there to reconnect with her mother, then so be it. it's not like she's hurting anyone.

daphne’s barely unpacked (knowing her, she might never finish), but a change of pace can’t come at a better time–so long as her family doesn’t drive her away first.

POSITIVE: ambitious, charismatic, self-assured, idealistic, perceptive NEGATIVE: disingenuous, conniving, melodramatic, entitled, self-destructive

#— about.#aurorabay.intro

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wildlygay · 1 year

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witch taeyang.

This just popped into my head ok? its a genius idea. basically Tae is from a family of witches, but his magic power is pretty low and he can barely cast any good spell, which lend to him constantly being bullied by Brady who is also a witch.The only good spell that he can use is that he can control rc cars with his magic wand, he uses that spell to solve cases and stuff with a rc car that he named speed. His family moved from a witch filled town to nav city and he promised to hide his powers, and brady also moved into nav city too. eventually, he finds galaxy weapon 1 and uses it for the first time, it gives him a MASSIVE magic upgrade as well being able to summon tobots. now he's not exactly a hero, he's more like a anti-hero.

His galaxy weapon can transform into a broomstick (it has a little basket for the tobots to stay in too :) ) and he flies around with it all the time. when team mayhem showed up, he thought that he was the proper ruler of the city, and now there constantly at odds with each other in a power war that only one side could win. his spells are themed around his tobot's specials, and when he has his uniform on, nobody could really tell it's him, its basically a alter ego. he becomes cocky, very reckless and still quite stubborn but also a bit sadistic, his tobots represent that. Speed, Monster and Rocket are basically likes the heathers, gossiping about others and using there magic staffs to assist there master in total city domination. The tobot rescue squad is the only actual 'good guys', saving citizens of nav city and using there water spells to put out fires, Troll and Big Trail are brothers and have their own broomsticks, the fronts of them having mammoth and bull mochiefs respectively. often the first ones to start chaos with their master, Commander Universe and Tank Man also are usually the first ones to start chaos and the four of em often get into arguments. Captain Police is usually the one who is actually enforcing the rules, trying to make Taeyang reconsider his choice of path, but Taeyang just disregards him and does whatever he wants. Master V isn't unlocked yet, so the others arent there yet.

the first spell idea I had was basically, the planet smasher is now like a powered mallet of sorts, which he uses to smoosh enemies. He can also use a smaller version of it to playfully or bashfully bonk others on le head, the power of the smaller is harshly less than the bigger one so nobody gets hurt. eventually, Rosie finds out about this from K.P who isn't very happy about the new pilot, Rosie isn't happy either but she is also a witch and is plotting revenge, she shows up, she's pissed. and she wants galaxy weapon 1, Taeyang refuses, rolling his eyes and sacrsicaly bowing and calling her princess. a chase scene then ensues with taeyang nyooming through nav city on his broom the fastest he can with Viking nine on his heels.

if this was a actual show, it would resolve around taeyang and team mayhem battling it out for control of the city while he also balances his home life and his friends. His family have no clue he's actually doing this and if they we're to find out he's the one causing chaos just to rule over a city it would be chaos. as well as rosie constantly trying to take the galaxy weapon from him and Taeyang pulling very elaborate pranks to shake her off.

#witch taeyang/tyler #tobot V au #witch tobot v au #tobot

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arustysnake · 8 months

Note

Meta: What is your biggest inspiration for your character? Has it changed over time? How do you think it might change?

Ollie's a real mishmash that came together on the run, and a totally new character to me, so I'm sure I'll find more inspiration to fold in! But really, the key thing is absolutely this group in general. Everyone's wild creative energy is just beautiful to behold!!! And I was browsing the lovely skeletons our majestic mod squad put together, and thought hey, I haven't written anything like that. Could be fun!

There's a crazy corkboard-with-string collection of things under the cut. We'll see where it all goes!

I actually cobbled Ollie's name together from some Irish folklore, because names are hard and I'm a hack - the Oilliphéist is an Irish water serpent (or serpents), and one of the more famous folktales about these creatures involves a character named Ó Ruairc, so! There you go.

Oilliphéist as a word is drawn from oll (great) and phéist (said something like faysht or paysht depending on dialect?) which seems to be used to describe anything on the wyrm-worm continuum of coiling/crawling creatures, from a "fabulous beast" like a dragon, sea serpent, etc. to a literal snake to a literal (or figurative) worm. Range. Love it.

The Oilliphéist(s) is a vaguely fae entity (or entities) - they have similar weaknesses, for instance - and so I've tried to work a little faeish whimsy and weirdness and unsettling, eerie stuff into his family's whole vibe. Natch, I've stolen some of that whimsy from people and places I've known; the O'Rourke house owes a little to my oma's old farmhouse and workshop, full of seemingly endless shelves of hoarded things and creaky architectural oddness and chaotic gardening.

And now for the snake-adjacent human sacrifice gods!! There's this beautiful Irish animated movie called The Secret of Kells - super recommend - and they imagined Crom Cruach, an ancient deity who's on the mysterious side, as this truly unsettling snake creature coiling endlessly in a dark, watery void. Wicked! Crom was something like "the dark/crooked god of the heap/mound," as in, a heap of offerings, a mound of the dead after battle, etc., and was supposedly defeated by Saint Patrick, who toppled his favourite monument at a place called Magh Slécht - the "plain of prostrations/monuments," a hilly area covered in stone tombs. Supposedly, this is where a historical High King called Tigernmas died mysteriously with many followers during some kind of bloody ritual for Crom. Wild!

Crom Dubh, another uncertain sort of god, seems to be based on Crom Cruach and maybe a pirate or highwayman or local chieftain - he also tangled with Saint Patrick, who supposedly turned Dun Briste, where Crom Dubh lived, into the seastack island it is today. Some stories say that's where Patrick sent those snakes/pagans he supposedly cast out of Ireland. And I just think all of that's pretty neat! What it has to do with Ollie and his family, well, maybe nothing! He's heard some very tall tales, lately...

#wr.anons

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archaictold · 1 year

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PERMANENT PLOTTER.

wowie, it has been a hot minute since i've done one of these!!! seeing as i've gotten into the groove with zhilan here in isola, i think it's about time i cast my reel into the pond and start developing some long-term plots for him. i'll preface this by saying we do not need to have threaded before for you to express your interest! if you think your muse can vibe with any of these ( or even if you have an idea i haven't covered here! ) , you're more than welcome to hop onto this plotter call. 'what does this do, exactly?' you might be asking. i'll tell you! by liking this, you can guarantee:

me hopping into your IMs to plot!

memes for meme day!

spontaneous starters! ( with your permission, of course! )

… and all things good for development! now! onto the real meat of this post!

RELATIONSHIPS. these are the bonds i want to see zhilan develop! some of these include—— FRIENDS. if you've been around zhilan for longer than 5 seconds, you've probably noticed that he is extremely friendly! zhilan has the personality of a sunbeam: it's bright, it's cheerful, it's warm and everything you would expect of a walking beacon of positivity. he's pretty talkative, even when faced with less talkative muses. he's also really trusting and believes the best in people, sometimes to his own detriment. he'd make a good friend to just about anyone, being a rather personable individual! plus, i think he ought to make some friends! the guy's kind of a hermit when it comes to his work. GEEK SQUAD. do you have a muse that's also super nerdy? you're in luck! they probably stand a chance of coming across zhilan in his natural element, that being his lab at the university or one of the libraries scattered about spirale. there is no greater joy to him than positing theories and discussing the nature of one's work. even if their fields differ, he'll want to hear all about it! ENEMIES. now, i feel like it's hard to get under zhilan's skin unless you're the absolute anarchy of humanity, BUT! i do think his optimism can rub people the wrong way, especially if they're more jaded. i'm not expressly looking for people to antagonize zhilan, but i do think it's impossible for him to get along with everyone. thus, i'm leaving this here! SPARRING PARTNERS. you wouldn't know it from zhilan's scrawny stature, but he does dabble a bit in martial arts! now that he's gotten his polearm back, he's actively looking to improve his combat skills… which are admittedly not that impressive, unless he's acting as a support. maybe your muse could act as a mentor, or even a fellow peer! THE MUSEUM. zhilan plans to take up a job position here! it's… kind of an odd choice, yes, but he doesn't exactly want to pursue an academic position at the university. so where better to put that treasure trove of knowledge to use than a museum! if you're visiting for any reason, you'll likely come across him among the gallery. just, er… not the abyssal gallery. he tends to keep out of there. YESTERYEAR. zhilan frequents this branch rather often, being to sort to gravitate to old dilapidated ruins and forgotten history. if you know a thing or two about this branch, he'll be incredibly interested to hear about it! who knows! maybe the two of you can explore it together… CASTMATES. zhilan might be a fandom oc, but i'm really keen on the idea of him developing some established bonds with his canon counterparts. ;v; their shared canon background already gives them a good basis for interactions, so i'd like to nurture some connections for him with his genshin fellows! aaaand that’s about it! of course this doesn’t cover everything, so if you’ve got an idea and you don’t see it here you’re free to hop on this post and shoot it my way! thanks for reading! :^)

#isola rp ad #isola plotting call #WOW this is huge gdjgfdjf #(posts it in the middle of the night bc ofc i do)

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megatraven · 2 years

Text

Lean On Us

For @wombatking!! I hope you enjoy it! This was my first time writing for Amphibia at all, but I had a lot of fun doing it! Sashannarcy fans rise up 💗💚💙

Rating: General Pairing: Sashannarcy (Sasha x Anne x Marcy) Summary: After fracturing her ankle during cheer practice, Sasha needs to find something else to fill up her time if she doesn’t want to die of boredom. Luckily for her, her girls know just how to help the time fly by.

AO3 || 2.3k Words

The phone rings almost endlessly on her nightstand, a constant, incessant reminder that she matters to people. Her hand slaps at it, poking around until she silences it.

With a sigh, she rolls onto her side, laying an arm over her eyes to block them from the sunlight streaming in through her window.

“Finally. Some peace and-”

Ring, ring, ring!

She groans, pulling her pillow over her head,

Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop her phone from trilling out. Knowing when to admit defeat, Sasha reaches for her phone and answers the call.

“GOOOD MORNING, SASH!” Anne yells, far too cheery for the morning. “Me and Marcy are gonna stop over soon, so be prepared, ‘kay?”

“What... don’t you guys have school?”

That’s where they should be, anyways. None of them have missed a single day since coming back from Amphibia- the need to find a routine again, to have a little bit of normalcy was too much for any of them to even think about skipping class. Of course, wanting to be at school didn’t mean much when you fracture your ankle and your doctor recommends bedrest.

Stupid cheer practice, she thinks, a little bitter that that’s what did her in.

Not fighting for a toad army, or going toe-to-toe with her best friends, or getting sliced by Darcy. Nope. Nothing cool like that at all.

Instead, one of her teammates dropped her. Not on purpose, and had it been at any other moment, Sasha would have easily stuck the landing. Unfortunately for her, it happened just as Marcy and Anne showed up to watch their practice, and Sasha was just distracted enough that instinct didn’t kick in until there was already a sharp pain travelling up her leg, forcing obscenities out through clenched teeth.

She only just got discharged from the hospital the day before, and now she’s home for a few days while she gets used to her crutches, bored out of her mind.

Or, she would be, if not for-

“What? No! It’s already 4 o’clock, dude!”

A quick glance at the time on her phone confirms it: she slept through the entire day.

“...Oh.”

A laugh comes through the phone- Marcy, for sure.

“Don’t worry, Sash, we’ve got your homework. And like 37 different apology notes and get-well-soons from the squad.”

“Oh, frog. I told them it was okay!”

“Yeah, but they still feel bad,” Anne says. “But don’t worry about that right now, we’re just gonna stop at our houses on the way to pick some stuff up.” A pause. “You’re at your dad’s, right?”

She hums in confirmation.

“Cool, see you in a bit!”

“Bye Sasha!”

“Bye, girls.”

The line goes quiet, and her room is silent again. Only now, that’s the opposite of what she wants- her girlfriends always know how to turn her mood around.

“Where’s Anne?” Sasha asks, hugging Marcy until she lets go. She came in alone, no Anne in sight, which was odd.

“We were almost here when she said she had a great idea! Don’t know what it is, but she looked really excited about it and pretty much took off! She said it’ll only take her like half an hour tops.”

Sasha snorts.

That’s become pretty typical of Anne. She’s always going out of her way to do something way too nice for Sasha and Marcy both. Something really meaningful that makes Marcy want to cry... and makes Sasha want to cry and hit something. In a good way.

“So... what’s all that for, then?” she asks, pointing down to the bag at Marcy’s feet.

“Oh my frog, I almost forgot!” Marcy squeals, picking it up and dumping its contents out all over Sasha’s bed. “I brought markers! So we can decorate your cast!” Swatting a few of them aside also reveals a couple of discs. “And I brought... our favorite movie! The cut and uncut version!”

“Oh, you mean your favorite movie?” Sasha teases. They’ve all watched it plenty of times since returning home, and though she won’t admit it, it actually was her favorite movie now. It doesn’t matter, though; Marcy and Anne see through her anyways.

“Yep, our favorite movie,” Marcy confirms with a smile. “But we should wait or Anne to start it. In the meantime...” A gleam enters her eyes as she picks up handfuls of markers. “It’s art time!”

“Woah, there. I dunno about that...”

“Awwww, come on, Sash! Pleeeeease? I promise I’ll draw lots of cool stuff!” She pouts, and plays up the puppy-dog eyes that Sasha absolutely can’t say no to.

Sasha puts both her hands up in surrender and sighs, though she can’t mind too much.

“Okay, okay. Have at it, Mar-Mar.”

There’s a battle happening on her cast.

What started off as little flowers and silly doodles of their Amphibia friends turned into a fully-fledged battle. Little spears and swords clashing against robots and vaguely Core-like entities. Sasha, Marcy, and Anne at the front of it all. Pink, green, and blue streaks mark them as powered up, ready to fight.

And that’s not to mention just how detailed it all is. Sasha was ready to throw the cast away the first moment she could, but now it’s too beautiful to ever throw out.

“This is... wow, Marcy. I’m like. Really, really impressed.”

Of course, Sasha knows how much work Marcy’s been putting into her art- she and Anne have been doing their best to be supportive of her interests. And that’s not hard to do at all when her art is so amazing.

Marcy, with her tongue sticking out, is too focused on finishing the giant green d20 to answer right away, but she sits back on her haunches when she’s done and admires her work. She looks so proud, and that makes Sasha happy, too.

“Yeah, you know, I think this is some of my best work!”

“Totally! Now you have to sign it, too. That way everyone knows I own a Marcy Wu original. You know, so I can brag when you’re famous.”

It’s enough to make Marcy blush, but she does finish the drawing off with a quick signature at the bottom.

“I feel kinda bad, I didn’t leave Anne any room to sign...”

“Well, what if we all sign our names next to where we’re fighting?”

Marcy lights up at the suggestion.

“Yes! Sash, you’re a genius-!”

“Hey, girlfriends!”

“Anne!”

“Anne, hey- woah. What, uhh... What happened to you?” Sasha asks, looking her other girlfriend up and down, from her muddied pants to her shirt with tears in the fabric, to her hair full of leaves- just like when she was in Amphibia. And just as odd, she’s only wearing one sock, while the other foot is bare.

“Oh, nothing,” she says with a bright smile. “Just had to go pick up something.”

From behind her back, she pulls out a shoebox that’s just as dirty as the rest of her. There are holes poked through the sides and top, and that’s enough of a tip-off for Sasha to know what’s inside.

“Anne, I love you, but you know frogs still aren’t really my thing...”

“What? No, I know that! That’s why I got you this guy instead!”

She takes the lid off the box and angles it so Sasha can see- revealing a big, plump toad taking his abduction into a shoebox pretty damn well. It makes her heart pang, and then the toad croaks and it sounds just like Grimesy that Sasha nearly begins to bawl.

“Aww, he’s so cute!” Marcy coos, looking into the box. “Can we keep him?”

“Yeah, Anne, can we?”

She’s sure she could convince her dad to get a decent habitat built for it. The money isn’t an issue, anyways, and her parents have been a little too clingy after her disappearance. She’s about to mention it when she notices the look on Anne’s face.

“Heh, probably not guys. He shouldn’t be out of his environment for too long. But, I just thought... I don’t know. I thought it’d be a nice reminder. Just for a little bit.” Her smile’s a little sad. “I was going to bring him back to where I found him when I left.”

“That’s... yeah, that’s for the best.” Sasha pulls her into a hug, careful not to jostle the box, and Marcy joins in. “Thank you, Anne. It was really cool getting to see him.”

“Anytime, Sash. You know you’re my girls.”

By the time they’ve all finished watching the cut version of the film, it’s dark outside. They’ve eaten way too much popcorn and sweets, their pillows are littered all over the room from an earlier pillow fight, and they’re all too wound up to even think about calling it a night.

“Okay, okay, let me just- I gotta go put this guy back, it won’t take as long as it did to get him. But then we’re putting on the uncut edition, and it’s over for the both of you,” Anne says, laughing at the other two.

Sasha’s got Marcy pinned underneath, her cast not slowing her down in the least. She looks up at Anne and grins, and Marcy mirrors the expression, not letting her upside-down view of the world ruin her fun.

“Come back soon! My dad ordered in pizza for us, and he’s also picking up some of those cupcakes Mar-Mar likes so much.”

Marcy gasps, sitting up so fast that it knocks Sasha off to the side

“The red velvet!?”

Snickering, Sasha rolls off of her completely.

“Yeah, those ones.”

“YES!”

She throws her fists up in victory- too fast for herself, this time, because it knocks her off balance and makes her fall onto her side, too.

They all erupt into giggles.

“Come back quickly, Anne! There might not be any cupcakes left if you don’t hurry-”

“Sasha!”

A pillow flies into her face, and Anne bursts into laughter all over.

“Hey, calm down girls, don’t have too much fun without me!”

“Never!” their voices ring out, Marcy’s muffled now that Sasha’s wrestled the pillow from her.

Resting her elbows on the pillow that is firmly set over Marcy’s face, Sasha winks at her.

“Be safe, okay?”

“Sure, Sash,” Anne says with a smile. “I’ll be back soon, girls.”

It goes like that, for the next seven weeks.

The girls come over every day after school, even after Sasha’s allowed to go back. They chatter about anything and everything, from the upcoming school dance- which they’re all going to with each other- to the cheer squad dedicating a brand new cheer to Sasha. Something about wanting her with them even when she has to sit on the sidelines.

It’s sweet, really.

But nothing helps the time fly faster than her girls.

Marcy brings over countless video games to play- ones where Sasha can just button-mash through the fights like she prefers, but also the strategy kinds where she really gets to sharpen her skills. She’s still got it, even if she’s no longer commanding Amphibia’s largest army.

Anne is always bringing over something homemade- usually food she helps her parents make, but also sometimes new song lyrics for them to try out. Not that the band is still going strong- they’ve hardly played a musical note together since the battle of the bands in Amphibia- but it’s fun to sing together and rock out in her room.

Not to mention the sheer amount of sleepovers they have, some spanning their entire weekends. They used to have sleepovers a lot back in the day, but it’s incomparable to how many they have now that they’re home and more open with one another.

In those seven weeks, Sasha learns more about frogs and toads and newts and olms than she ever imagines she would, but she loves hearing Anne and Marcy talk about what they love. There’s a passion that wasn’t there before- or maybe it was always there, and it just took their time in Amphibia for Sasha to wake up and notice it.

And speaking of passions... everyone at school loved her cast; there were times it was hard for her to get through the hallway because of all the people swarming their little trio. Marcy’s art was a major hit, just like she knew it would be, and Sasha didn’t miss a single chance to show it- and her girlfriend- off to the rest of the school.

A lot of people tried to sign it, or wanted to, but Sasha refused. The only names she wanted on it were hers, Marcy’s, and Anne’s. It felt too personal to let anyone else sign.

Other than that, school often dragged, not that she minded that much. The sense of normal that came from it was still nice, even if she couldn’t stay after school to join in cheer practice.

A couple of times, rather than her mom or dad picking her up, Anne and Marcy somehow convinced whichever parent to let them take her home. Which, of course, always resulted in a detour.

Once, to the park, where they squabbled over getting to push Sasha in the swing. (Sasha promptly shut that argument down by using her good foot to kick off and give herself a massive push.

Another, to that old antique shop, where everything started. That was a little bittersweet, she’ll admit, but it also meant a lot, considering how far they’ve come together.

Twice to Anne’s house, and once to Marcy’s.

Anne’s parents never let them leave without being full and bringing leftovers home. Plus her dad had a pretty fun fight with Anne using those fake sci-fi swords- Anne crushed him, though. He was a good sport about it.

Marcy’s mom, on the other hand, loved hearing about the girls and how their school was going, which was nice in its own way. She treated them to a delicious dessert and hugged each of them before they left.

And when the cast finally comes off, she takes it home with her.

Overall, those seven weeks weren’t too bad, Sasha thinks, remembering all of the little things her girlfriends did for her.

Not bad at all.

#amphibia #sashannarcy #sasha waybright #anne boonchuy #marcy wu #my fic

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