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silversatin2105 · 3 years

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Shaman king Fan fic : A Case of mistaken Identity

This fic has two ends to read to the bottom, This covers a scenario between a Fem- Reader deciding their future list of characters featured below.

Yoh Asakura

Hao Asakura

Anna Kyoyama / Asakura

Fem- Reader

Now with that out of the way enjoy the fic

Main scenario: The ribbon of Destiny

You had been friends with Yoh for four months, Ever since you met him on monument hill one fateful night as you were there to attend to the grave of one of your ancestors, It would have been a brief conversation until you said “By the way can you see that samurai” with those words Yoh’s interest was peeked, For the rest of the night Yoh and you talked He explained that he was a shaman and the samurai explained that he was Amidamaru who had became Yoh’s spirit ally when their goals aligned.

You agreed to meet with Yoh on a nightly basis and so you did, It was a month into these evening meet ups that you noticed you were beginning to have feelings for him however you knew about Anna and she knew about you, Anna did not like these meet ups I mean she really didn’t like them as she punished Yoh for meeting up with you like that, Even though he assured her that it wasn’t like that.

Everything came to a head the night after the comet of destiny appeared, Anna caught you confessing your feelings to Manta, The next thing you felt was the sharp sting of a hand across your cheek and the harsh words that were spoken “I forbid you from seeing Yoh ever again, I will let you go with just this but if you show your face here again I will make sure you suffer in your afterlife”

With these harsh words you broke into tears, Nothing could console you and you knew this would be the only outcome for not dampening these feelings, you KNEW that Yoh and Anna were meant to be but stupidly you held up hope that he would reciprocate those feelings, After that you dropped out of the school you all attended and started attending a school in your district, Any spirits you made friends with in your brief moments in Yoh’s life you ignored and for the most part you returned to the world you came from.

Half a month had passed since you had saw Yoh and you were back to your old life, You studied in your free time for your finals and you focused yourself on getting into a good college as you went back to your primary goal of getting a degree in (Insert what you want to do here), It was late as you left cram school and you knew it was your turn to pick up ingredients for the evening meal as you left the store with meat and rice for the dinner you spot a familiar face, It couldn’t be, Yoh ?

Without a moments thought you ran towards the familiar figure “Yoh, are you alright?, Its been awhi” your words were cut short as you dawned on your mistake, The person in front of you did indeed look like your one time crush but he was different, You could not see warmth in his face and as you looked into his face you noticed a deep sadness, Your thoughts trailed on as you had noticed you hadn’t spoke since the hick up you only snapped back when the figure in front of you began to speak.

“Hello miss you seem to have spaced out there, Are you okay?” He enquired as you stepped back from him; you collected your self and did a bow of apology.

“I’m sorry you look a lot like someone I used to know” You managed to speak out, your face turning red as you hid in the folds of your scarf, Something must have amused the familiar stranger as he burst into a mocking laugh, He gripped his sides as he continued to laugh.

“Wow the people in this country really are polite” He remarked whilst regaining his composure, Soon after he stopped laughing he introduced himself as Hao, The future king , this statement you found strange but you put it to the back of your mind as one of his eccentricities.

He asked you to meet him tomorrow night at the same time to which you agreed with caution, You made your way home to which you were scolded for being back late after your apologies and a bath you went to bed with so many questions on your mind.

Throughout the next day you couldn’t focus at school, Were you actually going to meet up with that Hao guy or were you going to go straight home and forget your encounter with him, Every hour that passed you flitted between your going and your not going with one final decision and out of actual curiosity you agreed to meet up with Hao.

Walking thought the darkening streets you found your way back to where just a day ago you met Hao, He waited there for you and offered you a sat by him, After a brief conversation in which you asked him the important questions of why he asked to meet you and what was his intentions he stood up and brushed himself off.

“If you want to know, Walk with me” Hao spoke out whilst walking away from you as you stood to follow and within no time the streets turned into woodland, If you weren’t curious about what he had to offer, This would be the part where you would book it and go home but still your curiosity still had a hold on you.

After walking for what felt like an hour you both came to a clearing that was far from town, Hao stopped walking and turned to face you with an eyebrow raised as he crossed his arms and sat on the floor.

“Before I tell you what I have to say I must find out if I can trust you, What are your intentions with the one called Yoh” He questioned in a tone that you knew if you answered with anything less that the truth would lead to dire consequences.

“I bare Yoh no ill will, I used to have feelings for him but I knew that it was stupid to, we have not spoke since his fiancé told me to back off, I went back to my life and that’s, that” you answered looking Hao dead in the eye, Your heart pounding in fear of what could happen, Its true that he looked like Yoh but you could sense he was a different kind of person, With Yoh you knew he’d never hurt you but with this person you were sure he’d kill you if you put a toe out of line.

“I see, So you have no ties to him at this moment in time” He asked.

“No like I said I have not seen him since Anna scolded me” You replied.

Hao then stood up and paced around looking deep in thought “Usually id kill any outsider that would be threat to my plans, But I find you interesting so ill let you live, Spirit of fire, this girl isn’t to be touched” you wondered what he meant with that, You were about to enquire when before you appeared to be a red demon cloaked in flames offering its hand to Hao.

“Now if you wish to know more, Meet me here tomorrow night If not go back to your life and I assure you we will not meet again” Hao remarked before disappearing from your sight, You found your way back to town and went home to mull things over.

I could not decide on what the reader would decide so to end the argument I will dedicate a page each to 2 sub scenarios 1 in which the reader doesn’t follow Hao and 1 where she does and you can decide which 1 you like the best

Scenario diverge: Plume of white Daisies.

(This scenario covers the reader’s choice in remaining at home and the results of this action)

There was no way you could go with him, Hao may have spared your life but that did not mean you owed him anything, You owed it to yourself to put this whole incident behind you and be content that for a brief time in your life you were a minor character in something important.

The next day at school all who knew you were shocked out of speaking, You walked into class and took your seat as one of your classmates broke the silence.

“why did you cut your hair? (insert name),I thought you were growing it” they asked as you looked at them with a warm smile and replied whilst opening your text book.

“I Just fancied a change of pace”

Years passed and the brief time you spent as part of the shaman world had faded from your mind, You were now an adult and now worked in the field of your dreams and were engaged to your S/O who you met whilst studying for your (insert field) Degree, You no longer lived in your hometown as you had to go where the work was however you returned every summer and winter for a week.

During one of your returns to your hometown you decided to visit the grave of your ancestor, not much had changed since your last visit there other than the fact that the grave looked to be attended to frequently and that Daises had began to grow upon the grave.

As you left the old graveyard, You spot a familiar face in the distance approaching a group of people, You came to recognise the tallest one as your long lost school crush and the other as you presumed right now wife, A little boy clings to the legs of his mother.

With a slight nod to them both you make your way back to your parents home, Petals of daises fill the air as you walk towards the future.

End Scene

Scenario Diverge: Scent of hibiscus

(this covers the readers choice to follow Hao and the results of this action)

The morning after you were given the ultimatum from Hao, whether to remain in your world or follow him into the dangerous world of shamans and spirit fight, your mind was made up, You would follow Hao and learn what you could of the world he lives in.

It was early morning as you checked downstairs to make sure the house was empty, It was as your parents had left for work, You began packing a bag of the things you thought you would need and you wrote letters to your loved ones explaining that you were okay and that you didn’t want to be found.

When night approached you stood where Hao told you to meet him, you held you packed bag on one shoulder as you paced waiting for him hoping it wasn’t a trick, hoping that you didn’t need to go home and awkwardly say that your letters were a prank.

“Ahh you showed up, Right choice” You heard a familiar voice say as you turned to face Hao.

“Yes I did now show me what’s to be done”

You spoke out before you both disappeared into the night.

Years had started to pass, In that time you had trained under the watch of Hao and had become his Itako, You both travelled from place to place brining spirits (usually by force) to his side, You did go home from time to time al though meet ups with your family usually ended in arguments, Your parents accused Hao of derailing your path to success and that you could have been more than you are right now.

You didn’t care, You never regretted your actions not even when Yoh looked at you with suspicion when he saw you at the tournament nor when Anna accosted you intending to tell you the truth, The shock on her face was priceless when you told her you knew and didn’t care.

one night whilst sitting down for a cup of tea, you and Hao spoke of the past and the night you both met, he joked of your embarrassment before giving you a bouquet of aromatic hibiscus that to your shock had a ruby ring on one stem, that moment he got down on his knee and smirked.

“Well will you be my queen?”

“You need not ask my king”

End Scene

#shaman king #asakura hao #asakura yoh #yoh asakura #hao asakura #anna kyoyama #anna asakura #reader x character #fan fic #writers gonna write

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princeescaluswords · 3 years

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Invalidating Interpretations

I’ve been on a tear recently about my view that people’s belief in ‘all interpretations are valid’ not only misrepresents what interpretation means but also serves as a cover for racism, sexism, and other immoralities. Fandom has lionized the idea that the consumption of media can be solely an emotional exercise which comes with no responsibility whatsoever. On a certain level that’s true -- when a person sits in their home and thinks ‘wouldn’t it be cool if Stiles Stilinski was actually a god’ it has no consequence beyond their own entertainment.

But the problem is that it doesn’t remain there. People are shaped by the media they consume, unless you don’t think any politician has allowed media’s representation of life in the 1950s to inform their vision of how the world should be. I don’t think it would be very hard to find real examples of people’s ideology conforming to a fictional representation. How many people’s ideas about the colonial-era relationship between European settlers and indigenous natives were formed by the story of the first Thanksgiving?

We are influenced by the stories we consume, and we influence others by the stories we tell. That bears with it responsibility, whether the story is on MTV or AO3 or Tumblr or any other public space. This means that the interpretation of those stories should not simply depend on emotional response. Anyone can tell canon to go f*ck itself, but that action brings with it commensurate responsibilities depending on what they do afterwards.

Let me give you two examples of what I’m talking about from my own fandom and use it illustrate this.

Derek Hale held the act of turning someone into the werewolf in high regard -- “The Bite is a gift” -- which made Scott forcing him to Bite Gerard especially heinous. This interpretation is not only unsupported but it is also used as a cover for racism and abuse apologism.

The phrase was uttered three times on the show -- once by Derek in Wolf Moon (1x01), once by Peter in Visionary (3x08), and once by Scott in The Benefactor (4x04). Every single time it was used to manipulate others, and none of them were sincere. Derek used it to try to get Scott to help him find the person who murdered his sister; Peter used it to get Derek to ask Ennis to bite Paige; and Scott used it to try to repair the damage he did to his and Liam’s relationship by panicking after Biting Liam in Muted (4x03). None of them meant it.

Derek did not believe that the Bite was a gift, because his actions didn’t treat it as a gift. When telling Scott how cool being a werewolf was didn’t make Scott do what he said, he abandoned the gift approach and told Scott how being a werewolf would endanger everyone he cared about. If the act of the Bite is something solemn and sacred, why did he charge Jackson like a horror-movie villain and then how did Jackson get in the lake? When Jackson rejected the Bite on his way to Kanima-dom, why did Derek abandon him? Why did he not get angry when Scott accused him of Biting Jackson to kill him? Why did he give the Bite to some kid he met in a graveyard when chasing an omega? Why did Derek not even check on Lydia until Venomous (2x05), six episodes after Peter gave her the gift? Why did Derek Bite Victoria in the middle of a battle? Derek didn’t treat his betas as if he had given them a gift. He didn’t object when Peter described the Bite as “increasing his power and numbers?” There is not a single instance where born-wolf Derek treated the Bite as special.

Why then is the interpretation that Derek held the Bite as a sacrament so popular? Because it justifies their racist condemnation of Scott as hero and justifies Peter’s and Derek’s abuse of Scott. Scott’s antipathy toward lycanthropy is not a reasonable reaction of a teenager who had been told that not only his life is now and will forever be in danger, but he will also become a threat to everyone he cares about, but instead it becomes ingratitude. And of course, it allows them to dismiss the reality that Scott had little agency in that scene in Master Plan (2x12), that he was being forced to do Gerard’s bidding, and to concentrate on intensifying the violation of Derek (when they aren’t busy trying to turn it into rape).

It also a defense for Peter’s and Derek’s abuse of Scott. Scott’s lycanthropy stops being something horrible that happened to him, and starts being a reciprocal obligation he has to Derek and Peter. Derek isn’t stalking and manipulating Scott into helping him find Laura’s killer, he’s punishing him for being ungrateful. Peter didn’t ruin a teenager’s life and then gloat about it; he gave him a gift. If you treat Scott’s Bite as a “monkey’s paw” scenario -- as one racist anon did -- then he’s simply got what he wanted and is unhappy about it. Derek and Peter shouldn’t have to waste time being kind to this selfish prick. Derek lying to Scott about the cure isn’t that bad if Scott insulted the Gift that he no longer wanted.

The above interpretation is unsupported by any actual scene or any actual script excerpt or anything really, but it does serve the purpose of excusing Hale-style abuse and undermining Scott’s position as heroic protagonist.

Scott McCall had a strict no-killing possibility which was a result of his own sense of moral superiority and a black-and-white view of the world. This interpretation is not only directly contradicted by canon but it is a fundamental aspect of the racist idea of the Left Hand, by which is meant that White Men Can Kill Whomever They Want.

Scott McCall didn’t have a strict no-killing policy. Not in Season 1, not in Season 6. He didn’t get upset at Derek for killing Peter (he got upset because Derek deceived him about the cure) or mourn Kate’s death, in Season 1. He didn’t stop Derek or Peter from killing Gerard in Season 2. He did object to Derek executing Lydia and Jackson for things that were beyond their control. His rise to being a True Alpha in Season 3A wasn’t due to him not being willing to kill; his rise to True Alpha was partly due to his refusal to let others manipulate him into killing. He was certainly willing to threaten Gerard and Jennifer with death. He didn’t argue that killing the Oni was wrong in Season 3B; he did argue that killing Stiles was wrong. He didn’t hold his father in contempt for killing the Chemist, or get upset about dead Berserkers, or tell Satomi, Chris, Derek or Braeden not to use lethal force again the hunters-turned-assassins. His objection in Season 5 was about -- once again -- killing those taken and turned against their will into monsters. The show literally addressed this in The Beast of Beacon Hills (5x19):

Scott: Deucalion? You shouldn't trust him.

Theo: And you're the one who let him live.

Scott: I'm not a murderer.

Theo: You still think you're gonna get through all this without killing anyone?

Scott: I didn't say that.

He didn’t say that. He never said “no killing, ever.” Derek had killed. Chris had killed. Theo had definitely killed, including him. Stiles had killed. He didn’t consign them into the outer dark. He didn’t refuse to work with them or listen to them.

This ‘interpretation’ is about nothing less than justifying Peter’s murderous behavior and Derek’s attempted imitation. By pushing Scott’s moral stance to an unrealistic extreme, they try to demonstrate it as unworkable and arrogant, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. The problem is that they’re not doing this to ask serious questions about when it is a valid option to kill; they’re doing it to justify Peter’s and Derek’s and Stiles’s supposed (but not real) and Theo’s and sometimes even Deucalion’s casual approach to murder. They re-interpret a nuanced position about the value of every individual life into a some sort of arrogant white knight platitude.

And they will do this, even if they have to discard 90% of canon, if that is what it takes to enable Sexy White Men (and only Sexy White Men -- they never use this to justify Kali, or Monroe, or Gerard, or the Doctors) to be treated as the heroic protagonist in their tales. That’s why, mysteriously, in all those Steter fictions where they execute Scott for not being willing to kill (in one of the most ironic tropes in history, which has become quite popular), they never have Stiles or Peter kill police officers for objecting to their murder sprees. They never have Stiles shoot down deputies saying “you would stop me from protecting who I love, you must die!” Weird, isn’t it?

It’s not weird at all. These interpretations are not meant to be serious investigations of the production; they’re meant to serve emotional needs which if they admitted openly might subject them to censure, and rightly so. In conclusion, not all interpretations are valid.

#teen wolf meta #teen wolf racism #scott mccall defense squad #teen wolf fandom problems #fandom problems #fandom racism

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violethowler · 4 years

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The Things That Matter

I’ve talked a lot over the last two months or so about the many different ways that the characters, story, and themes of the Kingdom Hearts series align with the framework of the Heroine’s Journey. For the final chapter in this series of essays, I’d like to talk about what it means for this series to follow this narrative formula. Because the fact that Kingdom Hearts fits into this storytelling pattern is critically important now more than ever.

The three most recent series I know of that aligned with the Heroine’s Journey framework all ended up missing the landing in various ways. Two of the three - Voltron: Legendary Defender and the Star Wars sequel trilogy - abandoned the formula in their final installments, while the third one - the Frozen movies - managed to fit into the formula almost completely, but suffered in the second movie from a lack of clarity as to which of the two leads is the main protagonist and which is the Animus. Two of these were under the Disney umbrella, and all three have had evidence found that executive meddling or other behind-the-scenes conflicts over story direction played a role in how the final installments ended.

As I mentioned in my essay “Into the Unknown,” when a story deviates from the structure it appears to be following, it produces a visceral sense of wrongness in the audience. In stories which up toward the end aligned with the Heroine’s Journey, that effect is amplified. The framework of the Heroine’s Journey was designed to uplift the experiences of identities outside of what society considers the default option in storytelling. The lived experiences of those identities are mirrored in the narrative’s themes. So when a story set up around calling out prejudices and double standards about those identities that are ingrained into the audience’s culture deviates from that formula, the result inevitably ends up reinforcing those biases instead, on top of the brokenness of the narrative in general.

In terms of how this applies to Kingdom Hearts, Sora and Riku’s individual character arcs have been noted by many LGBTQ+ fans to have notable parallels with elements of their own lived experiences:

Riku’s arc of learning to accept his darkness as something natural that’s a part of him and which he can express in a positive way mirrors how many LGBTQ+ people grow up with the idea that same-sex attraction is “sinful” and “unnatural” and have to unlearn that mindset in order to realize that there’s nothing wrong with them. Likewise, Mickey’s line in Re:COM about how spending time with Riku has positively changed his opinion about Darkness can be read as an analogy for straight people who are initially unsure of or hostile to LGBTQ+ identities changing their minds with education and first-hand interaction to become staunch allies. Esmeralda’s talk with Riku about how “There are just some things we need to keep separate from the world at large, at least until we have time to figure them out”[1], while on one level is referencing Riku’s Darkness and his inner turmoil relating to Ansem, can also describe the common LGBTQ+ experience of being in the closet and hiding that part of yourself from the people around you[2].

As for Sora, in Kingdom Hearts III he responds to Davy Jones’ comments in The Caribbean about the romantic relationship between Will and Elizabeth by saying that “I still have a lot to learn about love[3],” indicating he lacks understanding of his own feelings in the area of romance. This is supported by the official Kingdom Hearts Character Files book published by Square in February 2020. Short stories in this book featuring Sora’s POV depict him as actively confused about what romantic love is[4], and struggling to define the nature of his relationship with Riku[5][6]. This can be a common experience for LGBTQ+ youth growing up surrounded by media that only ever depicts romantic relationships as one boy, one girl. Many people who grew up like this—myself included—have had similar experiences of struggling to understand our own feelings about someone of the same gender because for our entire lives up to that point we had little or no exposure to the idea that being romantically interested in someone of the same gender as you was an option.

Sora and Riku are each written in ways that speak to common LGBTQ+ experiences, and the fact that so many things—the canon parallels to Disney romances, the match with how love interests are portrayed in the Heroine’s Journey, the fact that one of the series’ Lead Event Planners Michio Matsuura was described by the Co-Director Tai Yasue to be “head over heels for the bond between Riku and Sora’s hearts[7]”, in connection with his enjoyment of “pure love dramas[7]”—are all pointing to the conclusion that these similarities did not happen by accident, but by design.

It makes so much sense for Heroine’s Journey narratives to be used to tell LGBTQ+ stories because there are so many ways that homophobia and transphobia overlap with and are rooted in the very same gender and cultural norms that the framework challenges. Many countries have come a long way towards public acceptance of LGBTQ+ identities, but in terms of the stories that we tell, mainstream fiction is still skewed in favor of stories with protagonists who are straight and cisgender. Storylines with straight romance are treated as a society-wide default, while creators in countries like the U.S. who want to include even the smallest background references to LGBTQ+ relationships have had to fight and push back against corporate pressure to remove them.

This is especially true for media aimed at children and teenagers, as the fact that being openly LGBTQ+ is still widely considered problematic in many countries is frequently used by entertainment executives in ostensibly more progressive countries as an excuse for censoring LGBTQ+ storylines and characters. Multiple creators working on animated shows for Disney and/or its competitors have spoken out in recent weeks about the resistance they faced to including LGBTQ+ relationships[8][9][10] and how they were told that openly acknowledging characters as non-straight was too controversial or “inappropriate for the channel"[9].

As a consequence of this environment, creators wishing to depict non-heterosexual relationships have had to resort to creative methods of getting the implications past the censors in a way that LGBTQ+ audiences would recognize while still maintaining plausible deniability so that the executives could make money off the story in anti-LGBTQ+ markets. The downside to this is that because these efforts are more subtle, most straight audiences will either not notice the implications, or else dismiss them as an accident. Some will go as far as coming up with alternate explanations to justify why any potential LGBTQ+ subtext about a character or relationship could not possibly have been put there by the creator intentionally.

This extends not only to audiences, but also to people who interact with these stories in a professional capacity, such as translating and marketing a story’s international release. Animated shows that feature same-gender relationships have had international dubs change the gender of one character in the pairing to make it straight, for instance. Or there's the infamous example of how the English dub for Sailor Moon in the 1990s changed two girls from lovers to cousins in order to provide an explanation for their closeness that didn't involve acknowledging that the characters were not straight. In terms of the Kingdom Hearts series, the English localization has routinely downplayed LGBTQ+ subtext in the series while in some cases adding romantic undertones to interactions between a male and female character that did not exist in the original Japanese script. Kingdom Hearts III was one of the most egregious examples of this:

Hercules’ recollection of how he dove into the River Styx to save Megara’s soul in KH2 is thematically connected to Riku sacrificing himself for Sora at the Keyblade Graveyard through the phrase taisetsu na hito (literal meaning: “precious person”) when Hercules is talking to Sora in Olympus and when Mickey is talking to Riku in the Realm of Darkness at the beginning of the game. The English version translates this as “person I love most” for Hercules, while changing it to “what matters” for Riku and Mickey to call back to his meeting with Terra in Birth by Sleep, which the scene includes a flashback to. While Mickey and Riku’s original meaning can still be deduced from the conversation around it, especially with Mickey saying "sometimes you care about someone so much," changing the line for the sake of a callback downplays the evolution of Riku’s goals from protecting “things that matter” to protecting “the *person* who matters”.

Donald and Goofy’s teasing Sora in the scene at Galaxy Toys where Sora comments on how much he or Riku resemble Yozora is framed in the English version as “Riku would be a great action figure because he’s cool, unlike Sora.” However the original Japanese indicates that the teasing is centered around the fact that Sora said a character who looks like Riku was good-looking.

When Kairi offers Sora a paopu fruit, she says in the original Japanese that it’s simply a good luck charm so that they don’t get separated, while in the English localization, she says “I want to be a part of your life no matter what, that’s all.” While “that’s all” still fits with how the parallels to Winnie the Pooh indicate her connection with Sora has weakened and she wants to maintain it, the first part of the English line calls back to the legend of the fruit introduced in KH1, which was openly referred to as romantic by Selphie in the original and localized versions of the first game. As a result, this adds romantic implications that contrast with Sora’s unreceptive body language and facial expressions[11] as he reacts to the initial offering of the paopu fruit.

In the original Japanese, Riku’s words to Sora before his sacrifice at the Keyblade Graveyard translate to “I believe in you. You won’t give up.” The English localization changed it to “You don’t believe that. I know you don’t.” Not only does it remove a callback to the original game, but this phrasing dowplays Riku’s faith in Sora and ignores Sora’s very clear feelings of inadequacy.

During the scene where Sora and Kairi are floating through the dark tunnel toward the Keyblade Graveyard, Sora’s line in English, “I feel strong with you,” was originally an acknowledgement of Kairi’s strength that called back to how he wouldn’t let her come along on the return trip to Hollow Bastion in the first game because he thought she’d “kind of be in [his] way”[12]. Removing this callback takes the focus away from Kairi’s growth and brushes aside one of the ways the game shows that Sora’s view of her has changed over the course of the series.

Some fans defend changes such as these insisting that the development team had to have approved of them. However Testuya Nomura himself feels strongly enough about the subject: he stated in a 2018 interview several months before KH3's release that “an incorrect or defective translation risks compromising the comprehension of the whole story,” referring especially to the Kingdom Hearts series[13], and the English localization of Re:Mind—which was much more accurately translated than the base game—directly references the original meaning of Kairi’s words during the paopu scene in one of the DLC’s Kingstagram posts. This all indicates that changes such as these that remove important connections or change the meaning of the conversation are ones that the development team very much do not approve of.

LGBTQ+ fans of Kingdom Hearts who recognize their own experiences reflected in Sora's and Riku’s journeys know that Disney has not had a good track record when it comes to depicting LGBTQ+ characters in properties they are affiliated with. The most we ever get in their movies are background moments or nameless characters that are only there in one scene that easily can be cut out for distribution in countries with heavy anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. And that’s if the character’s orientation is even mentioned out loud in the film at all instead of simply being confirmed by interviews before or after release but never acknowledged on-screen. Television has fared better, but until recent years we never had any main characters who were confirmed in-show to be anything but straight. But things are slowly starting to improve. Within the last few years shows like "Andi Mack" and "The Owl House" have depicted major characters as openly interested in others of the same gender[14], and Pixar recently released a short as part of their Sparknotes program called “Out”, which openly centers on a man worrying about telling his parents he’s gay.

This is why it is so important that the Heroine’s Journey of Kingdom Hearts follow through to a structurally appropriate conclusion, with the development team being given the freedom to tell their story in full without restriction or censorship. Deviating from the formula this late in the series would represent a continuation of the recent trend of Heroine’s Journey narratives being structurally broken by inference from forces other than the main creative team. But if the Kingdom Hearts story is able to complete it’s Heroine’s Journey without executives or localization teams getting in the way of the intended story, then the LGBTQ+ themes already present in Sora and Riku’s journey will break so many barriers,challenge people’s expectations of what is possible, and convey powerful messages of self-discovery and acceptance—just like the framework was designed to.

Sources

[1] Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance; Square Enix; 2012.

[2] Tumblr post by @blowingoffsteam2; December 3, 2019. https://blowingoffsteam2.tumblr.com/post/189461796759/blowingoffsteam2-dont-mind-me-over-here-just

[3] Kingdom Hearts III; Square Enix; 2019.

[4] Translation of KH Character Files Beast’s Castle story by @lilyginnyblackv2; February 3, 2020. https://lilyginnyblackv2.tumblr.com/post/611420864489062401/character-files-beasts-castle-story-english

[5] Translation of KH Character Files Arendelle story by @lilyginnyblackv2; March 3, 2020. https://lilyginnyblackv2.tumblr.com/post/611490139845345280/character-files-arendelle-story-english

[6] Translation of KH Character Files Arendelle story by @notaseednotyet; March 1, 2020. https://twitter.com/notaseednotyet/status/1233993459670765569

[7] “Message from the KINGDOM” Updates!; April 11, 2012. https://www.khinsider.com/news/-Message-from-the-KINGDOM-Updates-2427

[8] “”Steven Universe” and “She-Ra” creators on Representation”; Paper Magazine; August 5, 2020. https://www.papermag.com/rebecca-sugar-noelle-stevenson-2646446747.html

[9] Twitter thread by Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch; August 9, 2020. https://twitter.com/_AlexHirsch/status/1292328558921003009

[10] Twitter thread by Owl House creator Dana Terrace; August 9, 2020. https://twitter.com/DanaTerrace/status/1292321440029478917

[11] Frame by frame analysis of Sora and Kairi’s body language during the KH3 paopu scene by @notaseednotyet; September 14, 2019. https://twitter.com/notaseednotyet/status/1172774158167506944

[12] Kingdom Hearts; Square Enix; 2002.

[13] “Nomura stresses the importance of direct translations on story comprehension, and talks about world development as well as the Gummi Ship;” August 27, 2018. https://www.kh13.com/news/nomura-stresses-the-importance-of-direct-translations-on-story-comprehension-and-talks-about-world-development-as-well-as-the-gummi-ship/ [14] Disney’s The Owl House Now Has a Confirmed Bisexual Character; August 9, 2020. https://io9.gizmodo.com/disneys-animated-series-the-owl-house-now-has-a-confirm-1844665583

#kingdom hearts and the heroine's journey #kingdom hearts meta

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wolf-mask · 4 years

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Why Borderlands 3 is Disappointing

Borderlands 3 is a fun game mechanically. I’ve spent almost 6 plus DAYS worth of hours playing the game. I finished every side quest and every collectible. The only thing I haven’t done is collect all the echo logs, but I’ve listened to all of them. The only complaint I have with the game is the story. I’ve ranted to my friend about this and, like they said,

“it feels like great writers set up a world and cast with a ton of potential and plans laid out, and then halfway through a different team of writers took over and there was 0 communication between the two groups.”

There was so much potential for Borderlands 3 to be good, but instead it came out “Meh.” and that seems to be what everyone thinks. After watching multiple reviews, there are 4 points of BL3’s story that people pick out as detrimental to the story.

If I’ve forgotten anything, or something sticks out to you that can be explained away by canon, please let me know.

More under the read more

1. The Calypso Twins

I have 2 complaints about the Calypso twins: their unexplained motivations and the writers’ choice of focus.

This is my own personal complaint, but why do the Calypso’s have these motivations? Sure, I get it. Tyreen wants to open the Great Vault because she thinks its her birthright as the daughter of the first vault hunter. But why become a God? I understand the whole wanting to be the most famous person thing but she could’ve just opened the vault to do that, look at Lilith and the other Vault Hunters. So why become a God? How did she come to that conclusion? Why build up an army? Why cause galaxy wide pandemonium when you could just become a Vault Hunter like the current and past playable characters? She even says herself they came to Pandora to be Vault Hunters! So why start a CULT? None of that is really answered by the game. Instead we’re given surface level villains with a surface level backstory. We never find out how their mother died.

The main complaint I’ve seen in these reviews is the story’s focus on the villains. Tyreen is never given screen time. We never learn more about her nor does she undergo any kind of character growth to become a good villain, yet she becomes the Final Boss. Instead, Troy gets most of the character development. Troy is the main focus out of the two villains, he gets the character growth after taking Maya’s powers. Troy is the more compelling villain out of the twins. He starts from the bottom, forced to rely on his sister to live but she sees him as nothing more than a parasite. He’s constantly forced into the background, be a follower, kept under his sister’s heel as she gets what she wants.

After taking Maya’s powers, however, he figures out he doesn’t have to depend on Tyreen. He starts crawling away from Tyreen’s shadow to stand by himself. The cultists start to worship him just as much as Tyreen, he starts hijacking the echo calls, he starts disagreeing with Tyreen’s leadership. The scene in Jakobs mansion makes it seem like Troy is scheming on his own. All of this focus, compounded with Tyreen’s comments during Troy’s boss fight, hints that TROY will become the Final Boss. But instead of having a compelling villain who’s crawled out from under his sister’s shadow, we kill Troy and we’re left with the less interesting villain. If they HAD to go with Tyreen as the main villain, they should’ve given her character growth to make her more compelling. You’d think she’d show some sort of growth after having her brother killed and killing her father, but nothing ever from that. She just stays a one dimensional character throughout the main plot.

2. Maya’s Death

Maya’s death was severely mishandled in Borderlands 3. In the context of the story, Maya had to die eventually, but that doesn’t mean her death couldn’t have been pushed back though.

Compare Maya’s death in Borderlands 3 to Roland’s death in Borderlands 2. In BL2, Roland’s death had more impact because we spent more time with him (Over half the game to be exact, 11 out of 20 story missions), he spent most of the game guiding the player, and we got to see him interact with other characters as well as see how his death affected other characters.

With Maya we spend less than a fourth of the game with her (4 out of 23 missions. She should’ve been introduced earlier and killed off later), we barely interact with her and we don’t see her interact with any other characters aside from Ava and Lilith. One of the things I loved about BL2 was being able to see the old Vault Hunters interact with each other in Sanctuary. When Maya dies, her funeral is played off as a joke, Lilith is blamed by Ava, and that’s as far as acknowledgement goes. No one besides Ava ever acknowledges Maya’s death. It’s as if her death is totally ignored.

Did Maya have to die though? Yes, but not immediately. When Tyreen drained Lilith, Lilith didn’t die. But when Troy drained Maya, why did she die? She didn’t have to at that moment. Throughout the story, Maya’s powers are an important plot point. Her powers are what allow Troy to experience some independence for the first time in his life. When Troy drained Maya he could’ve just stolen her powers and left her alive. This would have left her the potential for character growth.

So why did Maya have to die? Because Ava had to become a Siren eventually. I don’t mind Ava, I think she’s fine as a character, but if her purpose was to show how Siren powers are transferred, we already have Tannis for that. They practically shove in Ava to replace Maya as soon as she dies. It’s like taking a child’s favorite toy and shoving a new one in their arms, expecting them to like the new toy immediately. They should’ve let Ava become a Siren later down the line instead.

3. Ava’s Characterization

As I previously said, I don’t mind Ava. I think she’s an alright character as she is right now. Most people don’t think that though, and I can see why. Ava is directly responsible for Maya’s death. She disobeyed Maya’s directions and came to the Promethea Vault on her own. Due to her disobeying orders, Maya is forced to put Ava’s well being above hers. Ava further escalated the situation, leading to Maya needing to save her. This ends in Maya’s death.

Instead of taking responsibility for her actions, Ava blames Lilith for Maya’s death and claims that they need to rush in without thinking. And later on she’s praised as being right for the same thought process! When Lilith goes to sacrifice herself, she basically tells Ava she’s right. Not only that, she gives leadership of the Crimson Raiders over to a 13 year old child with no experience who got her mentor killed. At no point is she forced to face the consequences of her actions, she never goes through a character arc. Ava has the potential to be a likable character but her characterization was so botched that most people hate her now. They player should’ve been allowed to slowly learn more about Ava and watch her grow before taking over Maya’s role. Hopefully the DLC that focuses on her will do her better.

4. Ignoring the Player

The BIGGEST sin of BL3 is how it treats the player character. The achievements of the player are constantly undercut and we are consistently ignored by the narrative.

The whole game made me feel like I was the side character to the Sirens. All the other Borderlands games have focused on the Player as the main character. In BL1 the Vault Hunters killed the Destroyer, in BL2 the six vault hunters defeated the Warrior and defeated Handsome Jack, in TPS those six beat the Sentinel and helped Jack rise to power. In BL3, it feels like none of our achievements matter. As soon as we accomplish one thing, something bigger happens and that needs to be focused on. You got to Tannis after that pain in the ass fight with the Agonizer? Welp looks like Tannis is a Siren and you practically did that shit for nothing! We defeated Tyreen the Destroyer? Welp looks like Elpis is going to crash into Pandora and now Lilith has to go stop that. The only times I really felt like I was making an impact was when I wasn’t doing missions for the Sirens.

At the end of the game Ava is more acknowledged than the player and given command of an entire army. This should’ve gone to the player! The character who’s busted their ass off to bring the Raiders back from the brink of disbandment, who’s done all the heavy lifting! Hell, before going down to Promethea Lilith asks YOU to take over field operations while she’s powerless.

But what ticks me off the most is how the narrative ignores the player. Unlike the cut scenes in other Borderlands games, you are ignored. Nearly all of the cut scenes are in third person and you are NOWHERE to be seen. Maya being killed by Troy, Tyreen absorbing Troy and trying to crush the other Sirens, Tyreen killing Typhon, and Lilith’s sacrifice. We’re NEVER seen in those cut scenes. Compare this to the cut scenes in previous games, which are almost always in 1st person and if they aren’t, the 3rd person view is used when the cut scene isn’t important. In BL3, almost all the cut scenes are in 3rd person. The only time the player is acknowledged is when Troy phaselocks the player in the Jakobs Mansion, which makes this issue all the more frustrating.

Conclusion

Borderlands 3 is a graveyard of missed potential. The story could have been so much better than it came out as. I love the game from a gameplay standpoint, it’s so fun to play, but the main story is a drag to get through at this point. I don’t think it’s worth re-playing at this point and I’m going to wait for DLC to come out before playing more of it. Again, if I missed anything or you think something could be can be explained by Canon, please let me know! I have other little nitpicks I might talk about later but for now these are the main things that I think are wrong with the main story of Borderlands 3.

If you’re interested, these videos helped me in pinpointing what felt so wrong about BL3. They’re good videos to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-ws6VRYEDw&t=431s (Tina vs Ava)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO2qmhaRmcc (Main problem with BL3)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lL0fAxjZnc (Wasting Maya)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibOPCU2adkE (Why Borderlands 3 is Disappointing)

#Borderlands #Borderlands 3 #BL3 #tyreen calypso #troy calypso #maya the siren #ava the apprentice #ava the siren #my post #my rant #they could have done it so much better

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thelakesuite · 3 years

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more musical rambles. not entirely concepts but whatev.

definite songs (not necessarily the titles): the house, finding love, the staircase/the elixir, the fortune teller, the search, the family band/voodoo, the war hero/the trenches, the well pt. 1, the treasure/the stars/the graveyard (the timepieces basically), the last dance (reprise of the family band), roots

definite scenes: the uncle, child's play, fertility, the clock, masks, the swing, the wedding photo, the painting, the lying game, the brood, communication

could be either: the well pt. 2 (reprising part 1), checkmate (it'd be a lil short tho)

major changes: childbirth (we don't see her giving birth but ya do see the babies. still unsure about this one, might decide to just cut it), the wake (doesnt really happen, james just gets his tongue cut out and we move to child's play), masks (happens after clock, emma tries to support al saying he doesn't need to cover his face etc., sam introduces al to ida. pretty much completely different), the brood (no frank. leonard interrupts and finds out his uncle is more a wacko than he thought. detailed this before. straight transition into war hero), communication (the main level stuff happens yes, but leonard comes in afterwards n bonds with rose a bit. asks about his parents, or maybe just their mother, maybe you can talk to them too, etc. tender stuff man), the bathroom (0 idea here man but i do not want frank nakey in the tub. or nakey at all really. he’ll get some pants on in the well i promise. i'd love to cut it, but that's where the hair gets collected so i can't really. might even move it to just after the well. i do want a scene of al meets frank and is like "if it isn't the consequences of my actions" but you can't really incorporate the shaving into that.)

added scenes: i’d love to have one of albert recovering in bed after the beehive like kanman did but that requires a bed. odds are anyway i’ll have mary come out during child’s play to bandage up albert and scold sam and emma a bit anyway (so much for putting that in the major changes) // between the lying game and the family band, albert makes his voodoo dolls and monologues, onlooked by mr. crow. mary might also come out to try to calm al down after what happened in the lying game (the timeline’s lowkey fucked anyway might as well) and make sure he doesnt hurt anybody (not successfully ofc). unfortunately a crystal-ball-smashing scene can't be sustained to my knowledge. those bitches kinda expensive. // rose explains to frank and leonard what the reincarnation plan is to her best knowledge. still don’t have too much for this one but i’ll burn that bridge when i get to it

- for each level a sacrifice is collected (except for emma's tears and rose's blood), a corrupted stagehand comes down through the house and places a jar front center just before the scene/song starts. capture that feeling of dread yaknow. for emma and rose the vials are brought onstage as props by william.

- no samuel is not changing costume every scene like in the game. we can't do costume changes between family band and voodoo (ok maybe it's possible but it really isn't worth it). same goes for ida

- detailing the war hero/the trenches: starts with leonard solo workin on the motorbike, singin bout finally leaving albert behind (tho he'll miss rose), maybe finding purpose on the warfront, etc. he rides off, the mechanics of which i'm not sure yet. it’d be funny to have william just push him along but being funny ain’t the goal here. the basement background is dropped, the lights dim (like a lot) (also if we can get a fog machine or two for here, fortune teller and maybe roots that'd be dooope), leonard comes out again lookin all soldierly and a bit dazed (frontish center). sam and ida in their wedding garb (and eyepatches lol) slowly walk on in the background n cross the stage, maybe holding a lantern?, sing to him about missing home (he responds a bit to all of these), then albert in his deer skull comes on the same way (from the opposite side), same singing bit but about Pain and Suffering or whatever al's on about, Thing will Only Get Worse Out Here etc.. then mr crow comes out (again opposite side) hands behind his back like "we need you, you do have purpose, you'll find out soon enough". then fucking. throws the grenade at him! leonard investigates like a dumbass, lights go off completely as the explosion cuts the music. i have settled on him losing a hand instead, mostly so it's actually visible he's Disabled bc a pegleg isnt feasible. just put one of those morphsuit types over his hand patterned like a prosthesis n leave the rest to the actor ig? discretion of the costumer. fourish beats after the music's over, a spotlight comes on center stage to show william putting leonard's hand into one of the jars, then cuts. set transitions to outside the house as the lights come back on and leonard comes home hooray. part of me wants to have different actors for pre- and post-war leonard but there’s not much point to that. maybe it’s the facial hair that’s pricking me but we gotta pull that off for samuel too and he didn’t stir me so idk what it is. age probably? since that actor’d be introduced as leonard in the family band and he’s meant to be a teen there. high school tv shows pull that shit all the time tho i’m sure it’ll be fine (and once again the timeline is fucked up)

- oh btw i’m thinking the deer skull won’t be a full thing but instead treated like those face shields welders wear? like al just lifts the thing up to the top of his head when he needs to instead of taking it off. might be more trouble than it’s worth esp since i’m not actually sure how those face shields work (if it needs a bar across the forehead i ain’t doin it)

#im coked on ideas lately but i can't write that much yet bc i've gotta learn the drowsy chaperone stuff for my theatre class #two musicals in my brain at once would be too much for me #which sux since fsa testin for juniors is this week so i have all the time in the world. better things to do tho #sorry for the trenches being a pain to read i've got. a lot.

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thisblogisalsoboundforglory · 3 years

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WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING LATELY

Kage Baker’s Company Series

In the Garden of Iden

Sky Coyote

Mendoza in Hollywood

The Graveyard Game

The Life of the World to Come

The Children of the Company

The Machine's Child

The Sons of Heaven

The Empress of Mars

Not Less than Gods

Nell Gwynne's On Land and At Sea

Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers

Gods and Pawns

In the Company of Thieves

Ø Science Fiction written by a woman with Asperger’s. Wildly uneven. Main protagonist is female, but there are lots of POV characters, male and female.

Ø Big ideas.

Ø Lots of adventure, some action.

Ø Small doses of humor.

Neil Gaiman

Good Omens (with Sir Terry Pratchett)

Neverwhere

Stardust

American Gods

Anansi Boys

The Graveyard Book

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Ø Neil’s books are a road trip with Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and a baggie full of sativa.

Ø Ideas are incidental. The Milieu’s in charge.

Ø Adventure happens whether you like it or not.

Ø Cosmic humor. The joke’s on us.

Connie Willis’s Oxford Time Travel Series

Firewatch

Doomsday Book

To Say Nothing of the Dog (and the novel that inspired it – Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat)

Blackout/All Clear

Assorted:

The Last of the Winnebagos

Ø Connie loves her historical research. Blackout/All Clear actually lasts as long as the Blitz, but anything in the Oxford Time Travel series is worth reading. Doomsday Book reads like prophecy in retrospect.

Ø One idea: Hi! This is the human condition! How fucking amazing is that?!?

Ø Gut-punch adventure with extra consequences. Background action.

Ø I’d have to say that Doomsday Book is the funniest book about the black death I’ve ever read, which isn’t saying much. To Say Nothing of the Dog is classic farce, though. Girl’s got range.

Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash (After the apocalypse, the world will be ruled by Home-Owners Associations. Be afraid.)

Cryptonomicon

Anathem

Seveneves

Ø Neal writes big, undisciplined, unfocused books that keep unfolding in your mind for months after you’ve read them. He’s a very guy-type writer, in spite of a female protagonist or two. Seveneves, be warned, starts out brilliant and devolves into extreme meh.

Ø Big. Fucking. Ideas.

Ø Battles, crashes, fistfights, parachute jumps, nuclear powered motorcycles and extreme gardening action. Is there an MPAA acronym for that?

Ø Humor dry enough to be garnished with two green olives on a stick.

Christopher Moore

Pine Cove Series:

Practical Demonkeeping

The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror (Okay, yeah, Christmas. But Christmas with zombies, so that’s all right.)

Fluke (Not strictly Pine Cove, but in the same universe. Ever wonder why whales sing? They’re ordering Pastrami sandwiches. I’m not kidding.)

Death Merchant Chronicles:

A Dirty Job

Secondhand Souls (Best literary dogs this side of Jack London)

Coyote Blue (Kind of an outlier. Overlapping characters)

Shakespeare Series:

Fool

The Serpent of Venice

Shakespeare for Squirrels

Assorted:

Island of the Sequined Love Nun (Cargo cults with Pine Cove crossovers. I have a theory that the characters in this book are direct descendants of certain characters in Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.)

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (So I have a favorite first-century wonder rabbi. Who doesn’t?)

Sacre Bleu

Noir

Ø Not for the squeamish, the easily offended, or those who can’t lovingly embrace the fact that the human species is pretty much a bunch of idiots snatching at moments of grace.

Ø No big ideas whatever. Barely any half-baked notions.

Ø Enthusiastic geek adventure. Action as a last resort.

Ø Nonstop funny from beginning to end.

Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London Series

Rivers of London

Moon Over Soho

Whispers Under Ground

Broken Homes

Foxglove Summer

The Hanging Tree

The Furthest Station

Lies Sleeping

The October Man

False Value

Tales From the Folly

Ø Lean, self-deprecating police procedurals disguised as fantasy novels. Excellent writing.

Ø These will not expand your mind. They might expand your Latin vocabulary.

Ø Crisply described action, judiciously used. Whodunnit adventure. It’s all about good storytelling.

Ø Generous servings of sly humor. Aaronovitch is a geek culture blueblood who drops so many inside jokes, there are websites devoted to indexing them.

John Scalzi

Old Man’s War Series:

Old Man’s War

Questions for a Soldier

The Ghost Brigades

The Sagan Diary

The Last Colony

Zoe’s Tale

After the Coup

The Human Division

The End of All Things

Ø Star Trek with realpolitik instead of optimism.

Ø The Big Idea is that there’s nothing new under the sun. Nor over it.

Ø Action-adventure final frontier saga with high stakes.

Ø It’s funny when the characters are being funny, and precisely to the same degree that the character is funny.

Assorted:

The Dispatcher

Murder by Other Means

Redshirts (Star Trek, sideways, with occasional optimism)

Ø Scalzi abandons (or skewers) his space-opera tendencies with these three little gems of speculative fiction. Scalzi’s gift is patience. He lets the scenario unfold like a striptease.

Ø What-if thought experiments that jolt the brain like espresso shots.

Ø Action/misadventure as necessary to accomplish the psychological special effects.

Ø Redshirts is satire, so the humor is built-in, but it’s buried in the mix.

David Wong/Jason Pargin

John Dies at the End

This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

What the Hell Did I Just Read?

Ø Pargin clearly starts his novels with a handful of arresting scenes and images, then looses the characters on an unsuspecting world to wander wither they will.

Ø Ideas aren’t as big or obvious as Heinlein, but they are there to challenge all your assumptions in the same way that Heinlein’s were.

Ø Classic action/adventure for anyone raised on Scooby-Doo.

Ø Occasional gusts of humor in a climate that’s predominantly tongue-in-cheek.

Jodi Taylor’s Chronicles of St. Mary’s Series

Just One Damned Thing After Another

The Very First Damned Thing

A Symphony of Echoes

When a Child is Born*

A Second Chance

Roman Holiday*

A Trail Through Time

Christmas Present*

No Time Like the Past

What Could Possible Go Wrong?

Ships and Stings and Wedding Rings*

Lies, Damned Lies and History

The Great St Mary’s Day Out*

My Name is Markham*

And the Rest is History

A Perfect Storm*

Christmas Past*

An Argumentation of Historians

The Battersea Barricades*

The Steam Pump Jump*

And Now for Something Completely Different*

Hope for the Best

When Did You Last See Your Father?*

Why Is Nothing Ever Simple*

Plan For The Worst

The Ordeal of the Haunted Room

Ø The * denotes a short story or novella. Okay, try to imagine Indiana Jones as a smartassed redheaded woman with a time machine and a merry band of full contact historians. I love history, and I especially love history narrated by a woman who can kick T. Rex ass.

Ø The ideas are toys, not themes. Soapy in spots.

Ø Action! Adventure! More action! More adventure! Tea break. Action again!

Ø Big, squishy dollops of snort-worthy stuff.

Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell Series

The Beekeeper's Apprentice

A Monstrous Regiment of Women

A Letter of Mary

The Moor

Jerusalem

Justice Hall

The Game

Locked Rooms

The Language of Bees

The God of the Hive

Beekeeping for Beginners

Pirate King

Garment of Shadows

Dreaming Spies

The Marriage of Mary Russell

The Murder of Mary Russell

Mary Russell's War And Other Stories of Suspense

Island of the Mad

Riviera Gold

The Art of Detection (Strictly speaking, this is in the action!lesbian Detective Kate Martinelli series, but it crosses over to the Sherlock Holmes genre. If you’ve ever wondered how Holmes would deal with the transgendered, this is the book.)

Ø Sherlock Holmes retires to Sussex, keeps bees, marries a nice Jewish girl who is smarter than he is and less than half his age and he’s mentored since she was fifteen in an extremely problematic power dynamic relationship that should repulse me but doesn’t, somehow, because this is the best Sherlock Holmes pastiche out there. Mary should have been a rabbi, but it is 1920, so she learns martial arts and becomes an international detective instead. Guest appearances by Conan Doyle, Kimball O’Hara, T.E. Lawrence, Cole Porter, and the Oxford Comma.

Ø Nothing mind-expanding here, unless the levels of meta present in a fictional world that is about how the fictional world might not be as fictional as you thought come as a surprise to anyone in the era of tie-in books, films, tv, interactive social media and RPGs.

Ø If these two geniuses can’t catch the bad guys with their dazzling brilliance, they will happily kick some ass. Adventure takes center stage and the action sequences are especially creative.

Ø Amusement is afoot.

Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next Series

The Eyre Affair

Lost in a Good Book

The Well of Lost Plots

Something Rotten

First Among Sequels

One of Our Thursdays is Missing

The Woman Who Died a Lot

Ø In a world where Librarians are revered and Shakespeare is more popular than the Beatles, someone has to facilitate the weekly anger-management sessions for the characters of Wuthering Heights, if only to keep them from killing each other before the novel actually ends. That someone is Thursday Next – Literature Cop.

Ø Mind-bending enough to give Noam Chomsky material for another hundred years.

Ø Adventure aplenty. Action? Even the punctuation will try to kill you.

Ø This is a frolicsome look at humorous situations filled with funny people. Pretty much a full house in the laugh department.

Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Series/City Watch Arc

Guards! Guards!

Men at Arms

Feet of Clay

Jingo

The Fifth Elephant

Night Watch

Thud!

Snuff

Raising Steam

Ø If this were a game of CLUE, the answer would be Niccolo Machiavelli in Narnia with a Monty Python. Everything you think you know about books with dragons and trolls and dwarves and wizards is expertly ripped to shreds and reassembled as social satire that can save your soul, even if it turns out you don’t really have one. Do not be fooled by the Tolkien chassis – there’s a Vonnegut-class engine at work.

Ø Caution: Ideas in the Mirror Universe May be Larger Than They Appear

Ø The City Watch arc has plenty of thrilling action sequences. Some other of the fifty-million Discworld novels have less. Every one of them is nonstop adventure. Most of the adventure, however, takes the form of characters desperately trying to avoid thrilling action sequences.

Ø Funny? Even though I’ve read every book in the series at least ten times, I still have to make sure I have cold packs on hand in case I laugh so hard I rupture something.

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asiryn · 4 years

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so, i just started playing the ffvii remake! it’s taken me a while to get going on this, despite my HYPE, bc i couldn’t order it physically online, so then i had to download it, which took days, plus general physical disability stuff, but i’ve finally got to sit down with it!

i’ll be talking about some of my thoughts and initial impressions behind a cut, just so i don’t spoil anybody. i’m currently towards the beginning of chapter 3, but i’ll probably mention full original ffvii spoilers, so if the remake is your first time with this story....beware of that :P

i got to say, i’m loving this experience so far. here’s a list of Thoughts:

- one gripe that i have is that i HATE that the attack button is square, when in most ps games it’s the x button (especially since the kh3 dlc was the last console game i played), so like....that muscle memory is biting me in the ass with this game, lmao. i’ll have to be careful to not play any other ps game while i’m playing this, so i can get into the rhythm of this battle system, and not keep tripping myself up (.....and then after i’m done with this game, that new muscle memory’s going to trip me up in the next game i play, probably XDD)

- one thing that i’ve noticed, at least so far, is that there aren’t that many new things, but rather....it’s just expanding on what was already there. like, the fact that what avalanche did in bombing reactors wasn’t necessarily a good thing, and that had drastic consequences for the ppl of midgar, was definitely an element in the original game, and cait sith even called barret out on it towards the end on the highwind, but bc we saw so relatively little of midgar, and bc of the hardware and graphical limitations, you never truly felt much of that impact. most of it you had to pick up from npcs, and you had to deliberately talk to them (bc everything was text boxes, back in yonder year) to get that dialogue. in the remake, tho....it’s all fully realized and reflected in the environment, and even if you don’t seek out the npcs, you’ll still hear snatches of their conversations as you go by them, so you can’t completely tune it out

- building off of that last point, we’re also spending much more time with jessie especially, but also biggs and wedge, and it’s taking the time to allow them to dwell on the consequences of their actions, and you can actually see them struggling with the weight of that. they’re trying to keep faith in their higher cause of saving the planet (which they are more right about it than even they know), and yet they’re having to ask themselves whether the ends truly justify the means

- and the scene on the train with barret and those managers really helps to show why they don’t come across so good to others; even tho i know for a fact that shinra’s evil, even i was like....barret, this is why ppl are so willing to believe the picture shinra’s painting, you’re not exactly covering yourself in glory here

- also, avalanche.....could you guys be any more obvious that you’re behind it all?

- with that initial scene of heidegger and president shinra....it’s interesting that they’re incorporating a bit of the ffvii compilation canon, w/ there being a different avalanche that tried to assassinate him before. makes me wonder how tf nibelheim’s going to go down, bc i swear, it was different in every version

- also, interesting that they had president shinra order to make that reactor explosion worse. there was nothing of the sort implied in the original game, but considering that this is the guy who will order the sector 7 plate to be dropped onto the slums and frame avalanche for it, it’s definitely in-character

- this whole ‘ghosts’ subplot seems to be new, and i can’t think of anything that it’s building off of from the original, unless if we count the fact that there were enemies called ghosts that you could fight in the train graveyard, so.....?? intrigued to see where it’s going

- i also LOVE that they’re showing just how clearly cloud is traumatized, and by nibelheim especially, and that he’s getting realistically triggered by things, like the fires in sector 8

- i still don’t really know what’s going on with the seph hallucinations (are they hallucinations?? it can’t be jenova in the guise of seph yet, can it??), but i’m very curious

- also, they’re adding in the seph clones even earlier, and i’m also loving how this is unfolding so far (i stopped just after that encounter, right when cloud’s getting up the next day after the reactor bombing). i also loved that they used the “trail of blood” music, as it’s a nice hint that it’s connected to sephiroth. and at least in this case, cloud seeing seph in that clone makes a lot of sense

- in general, they seem to be adding in more realism, like tifa finding cloud a place to stay for the night, instead of him just....sleeping in the corner of avalanche hq XD

- i love that we’re getting to see more of barret being a good dad to marlene 💖💖💖

- i also love the little hints they’re dropping about how something’s Not Right with cloud....first him not knowing his own age, and also tifa being confused when he said that it’s been 5 years (when of course, from her perspective, it’s been 7), and then there was the shinra guard who clearly recognized him. even tho square had to know that probably a lot of ppl have already played the original game, they’re still not skimping on laying out those clues

- this game is utterly breathtaking, btw. like, man, being in the slums, and then looking up at the sky and only seeing the plate, is seriously creepy. not to mention the brief glimpse of nibelheim that we got in that little flashback!!! i know this is only supposed to be part 1, and just going through all the events in midgar, but MAN i can’t wait to see the rest of the world realized like this. no wonder this game’s gonna be too big to fit on one disc, it’s so massive, especially to recreate it on this scale

- i love aerith forever, she’s so beautiful i’m cry 💖😭💖😭

- also....curious that a seph hallucination showed up when cloud met aerith, and interacted with her a bit.......hmmm

i think that’s all my thoughts for now. loving the way this is expanding the game so far, and can’t wait to see where it goes (and even tho i do know the major story events....can’t wait to see them done justice)!

#kiryn's adventures in gaming #kiryn plays final fantasy vii remake #kiryn plays ffviir #ffviir #final fantasy vii remake #ffvii #final fantasy vii #compilation of final fantasy vii

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drsilverfish · 5 years

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Dean’s Jungian Shadow Arc in S14 - Confronting the Internal Father (2x22 to 14x20)

“This meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is”

(Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious 1991: p21)

Jung believed that the psyche was composed, in part, of a relation to “archetypes” (shared human psychic formations). One of these is the archetype of the father.

He distinguishes between the actual father (i.e. your Dad) and the “imago” of the father (a term he borrowed from Freud). That means, the psychological internalised construct of the father, which partly resides in the unconscious, and which is not identical to your real Dad, because it’s about your childish and foundational perception of them, but, also, for Jung (not Freud) it is linked to the archetypal (or mythic) father. The father archetype (for Jung, who has a gendered perception of the world rooted in his time-period) is about power and control. And when someone subconsciously over-identifies with the father-archetype, this results in out-of-control power fantasies:

"The danger is just this unconscious identity with the archetype, the more a father identifies with the archetype, the more unconscious and irresponsible, indeed psychotic ... he ... will be"

(Jung, 1906-1916 writings collected as Freud and Psychoanalysis: 1961:p316).

So, subconsciously over-identifying with the father-imago has negative consequences for a person, and those around them.

Let’s talk Dean, The Shadow and Dean’s Daddy Issues.

Remember this? (Gods but the colour palette was gorgeous back then).

This is Dean shooting Azazel, the yellow-eyed demon who killed his mother, Mary Winchester, with the Colt in 2x22 All Hell Breaks Loose Part II.

He does it with his father, John Winchester’s spirit’s help (released from Hell):

But, when I say help, remember that, symbolically, John has also been mirrored to Azazel, by means of Azazel’s possession of John (1x22 Devil’s Trap):

Hooboy - Daddy issues right out of the gate. That’s not news to any of us. The whole show is about “wayward sons”, after all.

Fast foward twelve years, and this is Dean (in the role of The FatherTM) almost shooting Jack, his own adopted Nephilim son (who also represents his child-self) with the Hammurabi, the mystical gun Mark II, which Chuck forged and named after an ancient Babylonian law which codifies “an eye for an eye” (i.e. a “Revenge Gun”TM):

Jack the Nephilim, whose eyes glow yellow when he is in his power, and who has (apparently) killed Mary Winchester (again):

(Jack in 13x14 Good Intentions)

Notice that both scenarios - Dean, mystical gun, yellow-eyed supernatural being who killed his mother - take place in a graveyard.

Mary is dead twice (at least as far as Dean is concerned) and her death haunts the scenes.

Chuck has deliberately set up the second scenario to mirror the first (he is, in my view, testing Dean, the way he tested Abraham).

At this moment, in Moriah, we could say Dean is possessed by his Shadow, in the form of the father archetype, the Ghost of John Winchester, in his subconsious. He is ready to act out John Winchester’s revenge quest redux, and in doing so, to do violence all over again to his child-self, in the form of Jack, who symbolises child-Dean in this moment.

A repetition of the damage done to Dean himself as a child; who was forced, by the tragedy of Mary’s death, and his own father’s traumatic revenge-quest, to grow up too fast, is playing out before our eyes.

Jack-the-mirror, who lost his own mother at birth, and looks twenty-something but is only two, kneels, a willing sacrifice, in the role of child-Dean, before his father, adult-Dean, who is shadow-possessed by John’s Ghost, ready to be murdered, just as John “murdered” Dean’s childhood.

“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.”

(Carl Jung, Collected Works “Christ: A Symbol of the Self”).

Jung suggests we are subject to “fate” (i.e. our own unconscious forces taking control of our actions) when we do not confront our Shadow.

Ties in beautifully to Supernatural’s larger theme of fate vs free will, right?

Now, back then, when Dean shot yellow-eyed demon No 1, Azazel, Dean was (as his subconscious taunted him at the time) “Daddy’s blunt little instrument” (3x10 Dream a Little Dream of Me)....

Back then, Dean obeyed his father and called him “Sir”, “...following Dad’s orders like a good little soldier” (Sam in 1x10 Asylum). Sammy was the rebellious one.

When Dean stood up to his Dad, it wasn’t for himself, it was to protect Sam:

(1x20 Dead Man’s Blood).

Dean’s obedience was linked to his angel-engineered role as the Michael vessel (God’s obedient son) whilst Sam’s rebelliousness was linked to his equally engineered role as the Lucifer vessel (God’s rebellious son).

They ripped up that script and wrote their own ending in 5x22 Swan Song, but, while Sam said “Yes” to Lucifer (his Shadow-self) and beat the Devil, Dean said “No” to Michael.

S14 is the season in which Dean, having said “Yes” to AU!Michael in order to beat Lucfier (again) in 13x23 Let the Good Times Roll, undertakes his own Shadow-work.

Dabb’s Ouroboros narrative is in full swing.

Back then, John’s revenge quest, to get the yellow-eyed demon who killed Mary Winchester, became Dean’s mission too. He internalised it (even before he knew about Azazel). Sam wanted to get out of hunting, Dean was driven to follow in his father’s footsteps (whatever his real feelings and desires were, he buried them to follow the “family business”).

Here is Young!Dean in Bad Boys (9x07) looking out of the window at Young!Sam in the Impala, about to give up his happiness at Sonny’s and his young love with Robin in order to put his Dad’s way of life (hunting/ revenge), and his brother (who needs him) first:

One way a child deals with a parent who is hurting them is to want to become them, to idolise them and to believe that they’re right (Dad’s car, Dad’s music, Dad’s machismo, Dad’s heterosexuality, Dad’s way of drinking and squashing down emotion).

DEAN: “We have the coolest Dad in the world. He’s a superhero.” (3x08 A Very Supernatural Christmas).

Jung would say Dean internalised a strong identification (partly conscious, partly unconscious) with the father imago.

Dean’s been on a long, long journey to get out from under his father’s shadow. We’ve seen that struggle over many seasons.

AU!Michael in Dean’s head in S14 represented the repressive ghost of John Winchester embodied as a destructive archangel in Dean’s mind, i.e. serious crunch time for Dean’s psyche - things coming to a real crisis point for him, psychologically.

Dark!Kaia makes the parallel in 14x03 The Scar (just hear “John Winchester�� for “him”):

KAIA: “You’re no different from him. Threats, violence anything to get what you want.” DEAN: “I am nothing like him.” KAIA: “Yeah you are: you always have been!”

You can read some of my previous meta on Dean’s struggle with AU!Michael as his repression/ the Ghost of John Winchester here (which also emphasises that one aspect of John’s repression of Dean is, in subtext, the repression of Dean’s queerness):

Queer Gods and Monsters (14x02)

https://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/179226151009/queer-gods-and-monsters-14x02

14x03 The Scar - Dean Confronts Dark!Kaia (Dopplegangers, Mirrors and John Winchester’s Ghost)

http://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/179463975289/shirtlesssammy-14x03the-scar-meta-writers

AU!Michael and the Closet (14x10 Nihilism)

https://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/182120562849/aumichael-and-the-closet

Jung and Dean’s Journey Towards Self-Integration in 14x11 Damaged Goods

http://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/182299438269/jung-and-deans-journey-towards-self-integration

In 14x02 we get this shot of Dean facing his mirror-self, AU!Michael, and Michael tells him, “I own you!”

In 14x10, Dean, desperate to contain AU!Michael, manages (with Sam and Cas’ help) to lock him in a fridge-locker in his own mind:

And he says, “I am the cage!”

Dean then builds a Ma’lak box and intends to lock himself in it and throw himself (and AU!Michael with him) to the bottom of the ocean. Yikes. At the start of 14x12 Prophet and Loss, he dreams that he is alone, and terrified, in that very box:

Sam says to him about this plan (14x12 Prophet and Loss): “But what you’re talking about is far worse than death. Michael’s an archangel. He could literally keep you buried in a coffin, alive, forever.”

Remember Dean also described his possession by AU!Michael as like “drowning” over and over (14x03 The Scar):

DEAN: “I don’t remember most of what Michael did with me because I was under water. Drowning. And that I remember. I felt every second of it - clawing, fighting for air. I thought I could make it out but I couldn’t: I wasn’t strong enough.”

Now hear what is happening, psychologically...

Dean’s subconscious, his Shadow-self (aka AU!Michael representing the Ghost of John Winchester) i.e. Dean’s own self-repression and over-control, both inherited from John’s impact on him, is saying to Dean “I own you” and “I am the cage”, you will be buried in a coffin, alive, with me forever. You are under water and you can’t make it out.

That’s pretty scary right? Dean is trapped by himself (by the traumatic internalised impact of his past and his consequent over-identification with his father).

If this were IRL, we’d have given Dean the name of a good therapist, a long time ago. But it’s Supernatural, so instead Dean gets to confront the ghost of his father, John Winchester, in the flesh, in 14x13 Lebanon. He wishes on the magic pearl to get “Michael out of my friggin’ head” and lo and behold John Winchester magically appears before him (cemeting the symbolism of AU!Michael in Dean’s head representing/ mirroring John Winchester).

Dean gets to hear his Dad say, “You are a grown man and I am incredibly proud of you.” Dean gets to say to Sam, that he wouldn’t change anything: “I’m good with who I am. I’m good with who you are. ‘Cause our lives – they’re ours.”

He gets to tell his father he “has a family”, not a conventional one - “an angel and Lucifer’s kid”, but it’s good:

An Angel, and Lucifer’s Kid? Queer-Coding and Dean’s “Found Family” in 14x13 Lebanon

http://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/182794294534/an-angel-and-lucifers-kid-queer-coding-and

And he gets to choose to let his Dad go, with love. What beautiful psychological progress, huh? AU!Michael is out of his head and so is the controlling Ghost of his Father, replaced by a loving one!

But, it’s not that simple. When the pearl is destroyed, time is reset and AU!Michael is still installed in Dean’s noggin. It’s only when Dean and Cas have been whammied by the Queer Gorgon, that AU!Michael (Dean’s repression, remember) finally gets out of his mind (14x14 Ouroboros):

The Kiss of the Queer Gorgon in 14x14 Ouroboros

http://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/183323000224/the-kiss-of-the-queer-gorgon-in-14x14-ouroboros

Jack (Dean’s child-self mirror) kills AU!Michael (John’s repressive ghost mirror) but, the burden is great and the cost is (at least part of) his soul.

Moreover, when Mary is subsequently “killed” by Jack (you all know by now I have a theory she’s been fake re-fridged, and she’s actually been blasted into an AU, and we’ll see her again), Dean regresses. He goes back into uber-controlling mode, over-responsible mode, as a way of dealing with the fact his world has fallen apart again. Psychically (as many of you clever people have already pointed out) he’s been taken back to the trauma his 4 year old self experienced when Mary died the first time.

So, Dean puts on his control-mask, the one he learned from his Dad, and (just like John did) he focusses on dealing with the yellow-eyed “monster” who killed Mary, to contain the pain. He refuses to listen to Sam or Cas. He tells them to get on board with his (suicidal again) plan or get lost. HE is the one who instigates locking Jack (remember, also a representation of his child-self) in the Ma’lak box:

And he is the one who won’t listen to his loved ones, but jumps all over and obeys without question, the Word of God (the Law of the Father) that the only way is to shoot Jack with the new mystical gun (Colt Mark II) when Chuck shows up with it.

Displaced-in-time John said, in 14x13 Lebanon (having been filled in by his sons):

JOHN: “I-I went out takin’ out Yellow Eyes. I mean, that was the point, right? I mean, get the thing that killed mom.”

Chuck offers Dean the same choice (and, again, I think it’s a test).

Remember, as well as being the Revenge GunTM, the Hammurabi is also know as “The Equaliser”, so whatever happens to the person who is shot, also happens to the shooter. A perfect, perfect metaphor for the way in which John’s revenge quest rebounded on his sons (compounding the emotional trauma of losing their Mom).

If Dean’ follows in his father’s footsteps and shoots the yellow-eyed “demon” who killed Mary, his own adopted son Jack (who, did I mention, represents his child-self) he will die - literally, according to the “law” of Chuck’s mystical gun, but also symbolically.

Because symbolically, that choice represents the fact that Dean has been crushing the life out of himself, for a long time, thanks to the internalised Ghost of John Winchester in his head (demanding that he be a substitute-parent to Sammy, that he stay “on mission”, that he perform a certain kind of masculinity, that he is responsible for everything and everyone, that he constantly fails [because he is trying to live up to an impossible standard]).

And at the last, Dean passes the test. He says, “No,” to the ultimate Father FigureTM (God) who is shouting at him to pick up the gun and pull the trigger.

He says “No” even when Chuck promises to bring Mary back from the “dead”.

He does not repeat the cycle of his father’s revenge quest. He lowers the weapon of RevengeTM and of Re-bounding Suffering/ DeathTM.

He (finally) has compassion for Jack and thus (hopefully, hopefully) for his own child-self mirror.

On symbolic Mount Moriah, Dean confronts his Shadow-self, the part of him that is “just like” his father, the part that keeps controlling or pushing away his key relationships (with Sam and Cas and now Jack) the part that finds safety in orders, and in a black-and-white view of the world where monsters are monsters, and in which revenge is the answer.

Confronting the Shadow, as I wrote before 14x20 aired, can release us from “scapegoating”:

The Scapegoat: Speculative Musings on S14′s End (Moriah) (Linked to the Season’s Jungian Themes - Scapegoating and the Unacknowledged Shadow)

https://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/184068368304/the-scapegoat-speculative-musings-on-s14s-end

So, Dean says, “No” to God, the ultimate father-figure, and in doing so he is released from his Shadow-possession by the father-imago in his unconscious

DEAN: “No, my Mom was my hero, and I miss her, and I will miss her every second of my life, but she would not want this.”

As a counter-point, he embraces the feminine (his internal anima, according to Jung). He evolves.

And so, the mirror is broken through between the self and the Shadow-self, the ego and the id. AU!Michael/ the Ghost of John Winchester/ the Voice of God are out of Dean Winchester’s head. They can no longer control him: he has faced them all.

Now, Dean has to learn to be himself, a whole new final chapter in the journey.

“The shadow, when it is realized, is the source of renewal ... no progress or growth is possible until the shadow is adequately confronted and confronting means more than merely knowing about it. It is not until we have truly been shocked into seeing ourselves as we really are, instead of as we wish or hopefully assume we are, that we can take the first step toward individual reality” (Connie Zweig, Meeting the Shadow, 1990).

And, if you’ve been following the thread in the links to my other meta on Dean’s Shadow here, on how John’s repression in Dean’s mind was depicted (in subtext in S14) as, in part, Dean’s repression of his queerness (the Ma’lak box and the fridge-locker in Rocky’s mind-bar being symbols of the closet) then this culminating confrontation with the repressive image of The FatherTM in the form of God himself, as symbolic of Dean’s own controlling, self-repressing, self-closeting, Shadow-self, does seem to clear the way for... interesting developments (dramatic irony claxon - Dean still doesn’t know God is, in fact, himself bisexual).

However, as always, I caution that the overtly homoerotic denoument is more than likely to remain closeted at the last, in favour of the “familial”.

#Supernatural #14x20 #Moriah #SPN meta #Meta #Dean Winchester #The Ghost of John Winchester #AU!Michael #Fate vs free will #Jung in S14 #Ouroboros narrative #Dean is bisexual #still subtext #But subtext IS part of narrative

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whitewolfofwinterfell · 5 years

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Daenerys - the “Mad Queen”?

I understand why some are frustrated with the pedalling of Daenerys as the “Mad Queen” in The Last of the Starks (8x04). Personally, I saw signs of this arc developing a long time ago (as did many others), but this episode seemed to hammer it more intensely than ever before despite it probably being the most emotionally vulnerable we’ve seen her in a long time.

I don’t have a problem with Daenerys’ arc taking a dark turn, I think it’s fitting and interesting for her character, but I do have an issue with the way in which the narrative is framing her “madness” (I don’t approve of the word “mad” to refer to Dany, because I think it’s derogatory and unfair, hence the quotation marks). So let’s boil this down to the main points shall we:

Daenerys is not the “Mad Queen” for wanting to be queen of the Seven Kingdoms

Daenerys is not the “Mad Queen” for smiling in 8x01 when her dragons flew overhead the northerners

Daenerys is not the “Mad Queen” for being concerned about Jon’s claim to the Iron Throne

Daenerys is not the “Mad Queen” for being pissed off at Sansa’s behaviour towards her

Daenerys is not the “Mad Queen” for wanting revenge on Cersei for breaking her promise to march her armies north to fight in the Great War and murdering Rhaegal and Missandei

Daenerys is not the “Mad Queen” period

She’s a young woman who displays human emotions - loneliness, doubt, insecurity, anger, hurt, annoyance, arrogance, love, grief, vengeance, ambition - and is inherently flawed. She makes mistakes and at times her judgement is clouded by her tunnel vision, but she is not a bad person and certainly not “mad”. However, she does have certain qualities that are problematic and that suggest she may not be completely fit to be queen.

Note: This is a critical analysis of Daenerys that seeks to uncover the complexities of her character. It defends her, but there are also parts that criticise her. Therefore, hardcore Dany stans may not like to read. Just thought I’d give that heads up.

We heard a lot of characters in the 8x04 - Tyrion, Varys, Arya and Sansa - question Daenerys’ ability to be queen (and not for the first time) and their doubts are valid. On numerous occasions this season we’ve seen Dany act in ways that lean more towards tyranny than fairness and impulsiveness than logic. She exercises kindness to those around her until they question her or say something she dislikes, and suddenly her whole demeanour changes. We’ve seen this in scenes she’s shared with Sansa, Jon and Tyrion. Her decision to legitimise Gendry was unexpected and although on the surface was a kindness to him, it was rash decision that made everybody uncomfortable and anxious. Increasingly, she seems unable to hear criticisms or acknowledge the advice of others. Her relationship with Tyrion has been tense for a while now because of his “mistakes” (forgive me if my memory is just foggy, but I genuinely can’t recall any advice Tyrion has given her that’s had disastrous consequences). She also flat out dismissed Varys when he looked her in the eye and told her he believed she was making a mistake by going to Kings Landing. When Sansa rightfully pointed out that their men needed time to recuperate following the Battle of Winterfell, Daenerys was visibly annoyed. The problem with this is that not only does it show her rejecting perfectly reasonable and sound advice, but it also suggests that she has little consideration for the well-being of her own armies or consideration for the bigger picture. Little details like this are often subtle, but all contribute to the idea that Daenerys may not be an ideal queen for the Seven Kingdoms. Furthermore, although the northerners have been defined as stubborn and hardened loyalists to House Stark, her inability to develop any kind of positive relationship with anyone in Winterfell (even Sansa and Arya, who are Jon’s sisters) is alarming. A queen doesn’t have to be liked or loved by all, that’s an impossibility, but an ability to forge alliances and connections, even with those that may not like you, is crucial. Dany said it herself in her conversation with Jon, “ I saw the way they looked at you. I know that look. So many people have looked at me that way, but never here. Never on this side of the sea.” Isn’t it alarming to Daenerys that she wants to rule a land where the people reject her and are so cold towards her?

What has become clear to me so far in season 8 is that Dany has become so fixated on her goal of sitting on the Iron Throne that she’s lost sight of everything else. She gracefully agreed to put her quest for the Iron Throne on hold to fight alongside the north in the battle against the dead at great personal cost, but the way she’s framing her involvement in the war doesn’t make sense. She admitted that she agreed to fight because she loves Jon and has referred to it as being “his war”. This is problematic because unlike her battle against Cersei for the Throne which is 100% led by personal gain and desire, the war against the dead was much bigger than that. It was to save humanity, to quite literally save the world. The two wars are hardly comparable. As a queen, Daenerys should be willing to lay down her life to protect the realm, irregardless of love and should not be viewing her participation in the Great War as part of an alliance whereby the north now owes her a favour. If she hadn’t of fought in that war, it would’ve been lost and as Jon said in 7x03 her being queen of the Seven Kingdoms wouldn’t have mattered because she would have been ruling over a graveyard.

We also see her fixation on the Throne in her relationship with Jon. Despite claiming that she travelled north because she loves Jon, the second she found out he was a Targaryen that love seemed to pale in comparison to her desire for the Iron Throne. So far the interactions we’ve seen between Jon and Dany about his parentage are about Dany’s the threat Jon’s claim to the Throne poses to her. She’s shown no compassion or empathy towards Jon, given no consideration how such a huge revelation has completely turned Jon’s world upside down. All she wants is for him to keep his mouth shut so that she can be queen and continue her romantic relationship with him as before. What was most striking to me in the scene between them in 8x04 was the way Dany quite literally begged Jon to stay quiet. It’s rare that we get to see Dany plead like that and it really hit home how desperate she is to sit on the Throne. What she said about Jon telling others the truth about his parentage destroying them may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that this was her threatening him; the man she supposedly loves. Now, I don’t begrudge Daenerys for this. It’s understandable that after working so long towards that one goal that she’d be hurt and afraid about the consequences that Jon’s claim could bring. But what it does show is that in some ways her ambition has grown out of control and she’s become fixated on that one goal at the detriment of everything else, including her relationship with Jon. And this fixation, this obsession with the Throne is what I see as being the root of Daenerys’ dark arc, along with her power and dragons, which I’ll discuss more in-depth later.

Psychologically speaking it makes sense that Dany would become so overbearingly consumed by her desire for the Throne, particularly now after everything she’s lost. I can’t blame her for being so determined and ruthless to be queen. She’s put so much blood, sweat and tears into the fight and if she doesn’t achieve what she’s worked so long and so hard to achieve it will mean that all she’s dedicated and lost will have been in vein. As I said above, I do believe Daenerys’ fixation on the Throne is the core of her dark arc, but I still don’t think that she’s becoming the “Mad Queen” or that she’s becoming an antagonist. It frustrates me that most of the posts I read about Dany fall onto one or two sides - either they exaggerate her goodness or exaggerate her badness. Even with the dark arc D&D seem to be pursuing with her, Daenerys is not and never has been morally white or black, she’s grey. And yes, show!Dany may be significantly watered down in comparison to her book counterpart, but there is still complexity to her if you choose to see it. Even in 8x04, despite the narrative clearly pushing her to a darker place, in many ways it’s the most human we’ve ever seen her. People choose to focus on the scenes that pedal Dark!Dany and disregard the rest, but even when D&D are clearly pushing Dark!Dany to the forefront, she is still incredibly human. Throughout the 8x04 we saw her grieve for Jorah, in the Great Hall she experienced loneliness and isolation as she looked around at the smiling faces of strangers and the man she loved and realised she was an outsider, in her scene with Jon she showed vulnerability and fear as she begged him to fix everything, when Rhaegal was killed she showed rage and restraint and when Missandei was executed, her emotional response is what anybody else would feel in that scenario. Like I said, Daenerys’ emotional responses are not the problem and I hate that the narrative is insinuating that those reactions somehow make her the “Mad Queen”. The final shot of Daenerys showed her fury and hunger for vengeance after witnessing her best friend being beheaded. That does not make her the “Mad Queen”, and I know for many when they refer to her as being that they may not literally mean it and are just using it because it’s what her father was called, but I still don’t approve of it, because I think it undermines Dany’s complexity. Generally, I think there needs to be more acknowledgement of the complexities of Dany’s character and the breadth of emotions we’ve seen from her so far in season 8.

Just as it’s unfair to label Dany the “Mad Queen” and it’s also unfair to label her a tyrant based on some of her actions. Joffrey was a tyrant and we all know that Dany is not Joffrey. Dany will never be the kind of person that takes pleasure in psychologically manipulating or brutalising others like Joffrey did. She enjoys power, but she’s not so consumed by that power that she’s unable to show understanding and empathy to others. From my perspective, the concern that Varys and Tyrion have when it comes to Daenerys is not that she’ll become her father, but that she’s too powerful or that she will become too powerful if she sits on the Iron Throne. I’ve seen some claim that painting Daenerys as the “Mad Queen” is sexist because it implies women cannot wield power without it corrupting them. Part of me agrees with this, but I’d also argue that it’s less to do with sexism and more to do with the general theme of power and what having too much power can do to an individual. It’s a common theme in literature, film and television (Macbeth and Walter White in Breaking Bad are two examples that come immediately to mind). It’s a common and over-used trope, but it’s supported by psychological research - power does change people - and it can be applied to Daenerys. Here’s a excerpt from an article I read about the impact power can have on people: “Power reduces awareness of constraints and causes people act more quickly. Powerful people also tend to think more abstractly, favoring the bigger picture over smaller consequences. Powerful people are less likely to remember the constraints to a goal” (x). Dany has been demonstrating these traits for a prolonged period of time and they’ve become more prominent in season 7 and 8. Her decision to go to Kings Landing was rash and more time needed to be taken to develop a proper battle plan and for the men and women fighting to regain their strength. She’s so fixated on the big picture - sitting on the Iron Throne - that she’s neglecting the smaller details. She’s not considering what happens after she sits on the Throne and a particular conversation she had with Tyrion in 7x06 highlighted this:

Tyrion: You say you can't have children, but there are other ways of choosing a successor. The Night's Watch has one method. The Ironborn, for all their many flaws, have another.

Daenerys: We will discuss the succession after I wear the crown.

Tyrion: Your Grace, I saw hundreds of arrows fly towards you when you fought on the Blackwater Rush, and I saw hundreds of arrows miss. But any one of them could have found your heart and ended your...

Daenerys: You've been thinking about my death quite a bit, haven't you? Is this one of the items you discussed with your brother in King's Landing?

Tyrion: I'm trying to serve you by planning for the long term.

Daenerys: Perhaps if you planned for the short term, we wouldn't have lost Dorne and Highgarden. We will discuss the succession after I wear the crown.

Here we see Tyrion bringing up a perfectly valid issue of her succession. Daenerys is the only living Targaryen (or so they believe she is at this point), she’s unmarried and she’s unable to conceive children naturally. Despite being young Daenerys could die or be killed at any point, particularly since she’s about to go to war, and without planning for who comes after her, her rule will mean little to nothing. She has spoken about creating a new world, but that means nothing if you don’t have the right person to continue her legacy. Yet because she’s so fixated on sitting on the Throne, she refuses to acknowledge that it’s an issue that impacts the future of her kingdom.

Whether you like Daenerys or not, there’s no denying that the power she has developed over the seasons has changed her perspective on things and led her down a slightly darker path. This is only natural when we consider that at the beginning of the series she came from a position powerlessness. She was controlled and abused by Viserys, sold to Drogo against her will and slowly but surely her influence and power increased as she embraced her position as Khaleesi and birthed her dragons. It makes sense that she would embrace her new found power and seek more, but as the seasons progressed we’ve seen that Daenerys doesn’t just have power, she actively revels in having power. Being a leader and having so much power has led her to become more assertive and domineering. These are good qualities for queen since it’s important to be decisive, but at times those qualities have led to her behaving questionably. I know many defend Daenerys’ burning of the Tarly’s, and I think it would be hypocritical to claim Daenerys was wrong for doing it considering other characters have executed people. However, there’s no denying that that scene was purposefully written to show the subtle ways in which power had begun to corrupt her. Instead of listening to the reasonable advice of her Hand, she chose to burn two men alive because she could and later justified it by claiming it’s what all monarchs do in times of war and that it was necessary. The problem with this is that Daenerys has explicitly stated she doesn’t want to be like those monarchs, she wants to be better. Whether she was justified in her actions or not, that execution, the way it was framed and the context of it, was done in a way that was supposed to make us doubt her judgement. It wasn’t just her removing those that refused to kneel to her, it was a deliberate exercise of power. There were other options that Tyrion pointed out - imprisonment or sending them to the Wall - and even if she ultimately decided to execute them, she didn’t have to burn them. It was a brutal and inhumane method of execution that she chose because she wanted to assert her power. The look of satisfaction on her face when the rest of the soldiers got to their knees out of fear, only feeds into the idea that her motivations went beyond the practicalities of war. Another quote from the article above explains this succinctly: “People with power not only take what they want because they can do so unpunished, but also because they intuitively feel they are entitled to do so.” Daenerys had her reasons for executing the Tarly’s, but she also did it because she felt that was her right as a queen and because ultimately, she knew there would be no repercussions. Even when she faced Sam in 8x01, she still didn’t really have to face the consequences of what she’d done. Her position of authority as a queen meant that Sam couldn’t question her or show his anger, he had to submit and conceal his grief.

In addition to power, the other key aspect of Daenerys’ dark arc is her dragons and what they symbolise. A particular conversation between Tyrion and Varys in 8x04 summarised this perfectly:

Varys: I've served tyrants most of my life. They all talk about destiny.

Tyrion: She's a girl who walked into a fire with three stones and walked out with three dragons. How could she not believe in destiny?

Varys: Perhaps that's the problem. Her life has convinced her that she was sent here to save us all.

In season 1, for all intents and purposes, Daenerys was an ordinary young girl that was forced into awful situations and tried to make the best of them in any way she could. When Drogo died and the dragons were born at the end of season 1, her character arc entered a new phase. She was no longer simply a girl, she was the Mother of Dragons and that made her special and powerful. There’s been continuous emphasis on how special Daenerys is because she brought dragons back into the world and birthed a miracle. Three particular quotes from season 7 summarise this:

I spent my life in foreign lands. So many men have tried to kill me, I don't remember all their names. I have been sold like a broodmare. I've been chained and betrayed, raped and defiled. Do you know what kept me standing through all those years in exile? Faith. Not in any gods, not in myths and legends. In myself. In Daenerys Targaryen. The world hadn't seen a dragon in centuries until my children were born. The Dothraki hadn't crossed the sea, any sea. They did for me. I was born to rule the Seven Kingdoms, and I will.

I never thought that dragons would exist again. No one did. The people who follow you know that you made something impossible happen. Maybe that helps them believe that you can make other impossible things happen. Build a world that's different from the shit one they've always known.

A dragon is not a slave. They were terrifying. Extraordinary. They filled people with wonder and awe, and we locked them in here. They wasted away. They grew small. And we grew small as well. We weren't extraordinary without them. We were just like everyone else.

Like Varys said, Daenerys (and many others) believes she’s special because of her dragons. She said it herself, they make her extraordinary. The problem with this is that Daenerys is not special and the fact that she believes she is has not only given her a superiority complex but also distorted her perception of reality. And this isn’t an attack on Dany, because the point is that it’s not just that Dany isn’t special, it’s that nobody is special. People can be special in the eyes of others. For example, a parent looks at their child and believes they’re special or a person looks at their partner and believes they’re special. But that special-ness is rooted in what that person means to the person who regards them as special. In the wider world and the big picture, no one is special. We’re all the same. Some people have more power than others, like Daenerys; some have greater achievements than others, like Daenerys; some cause spectacular things to happen which some may regard as miracles, like Daenerys, but the fact remains the same she is not special. The fact that she believes herself that she’s special is very concerning, because that leads her to the belief that she’s different and that she can do stuff others can’t. Being special implies being an exception and allows someone to justify their immoral or illegal actions through the fact that they’re special. When you combine Daenerys’ belief that she’s special with the influence and power she has, it becomes even more problematic because she has the agency and licence to do pretty much whatever she likes and she can justify it because she’s special and because she’s a queen.

What’s most interesting about this is that 8x03 deliberately stripped Dany of her dragons and put her in a vulnerable position. She fell off Drogon and found herself in the middle of the battlefield alone and yet she showed great courage, picked up a sword and fought for her life alongside Jorah. Rhaegal also died in 8x04, which further stripped her of a large source of what she regards her power and special-ness. This demonstrates the complexity of Dany’s character. Narratively she’s constructed as a character that’s powerful and special, yet there are moments when that’s taken away and we see her show resilience and strength that comes from within her rather than from her external power e.g. her dragons and armies. Whilst I’m on this subject, I should say that I thought that Dany’s actions in 8x03 completely undermined the idea of “dark!Dany”, which is probably why 8x04 seemed like such a slap in the face to Dany stans. In 8x03 she was a warrior that showed bravery, courage and strength. It’s probably one of the first times that I felt like Dany wasn’t framed as being above everybody else. She was in that battle just as much as every other soldier and despite having Drogon, she wasn’t invincible as we saw from her fall from Drogon and she wasn’t immune from loss, as we saw with Jorah’s death. As someone that has been back and fourth about Dany’s character over the seasons, particularly given the way the D&D started implementing “dark!Dany” in season 7, this episode made me see again that she’s a deserving and capable queen.

The point of this whole post is to show how unfair it is to blackwash Dany and claim she’s wholly bad, because she has proved more than once that she’s capable of kindness, compassion, empathy and love. But on the other hand, it’s unfair to whitewash her and claim she’s wholly good because she has characteristics that are problematic. As I said at the very start of this, she’s not a bad person, but she is flawed. Therefore, it makes sense that she would take a path that we may consider “dark”. She’s endured so much throughout the seasons and it’s changed her, in positive and negative ways. Just like every other character on the show, the place she’s going to end is going to be very far from where she began. It would be naive to assume that she was going to remain the exact same person she always was or that her “special-ness” and power wouldn’t have repercussions. Her traumas and losses have hardened her; her dragons have made her believe she’s special and has a destiny that has detached her from reality; her victories and achievements have instilled her with a superiority complex and her position as a queen has made her self-assured in her decisions. She has absolute faith in herself and the betrayals she’s experienced mean that the only person she trusts completely is herself. Dany has tried to play fair multiple times - she’s put her quest for the Iron Throne on hold to fight the Great War, she’s given Cersei numerous chances to surrender, and each time it’s only resulted in more losses for her. It’s not hard to understand why her experiences would take her down the path she is currently treading. When someone has as much power as Dany has and has only had negative consequences for not acting on that power, why wouldn’t she then use it to get what she wants? Dany’s experiences of trying to be diplomatic and work in collaboration with others have rarely been successful. So far she’s lost Viserion, Rhaegal, Jorah, Missandei, Jon and there’s now a very real threat to her claim to the Throne, the one thing she’s been working towards for 8 seasons. All that she’s lost has only impassioned her to want the Throne more than ever before. Like Weiss said in Inside the Episode for 8x04:

“Emotionally, she’s alone in the world and she can’t really trust anybody. Unlike then, she’s extremely powerful and unlike then she’s filled with a rage that’s aimed at one person specifically [Cersei].”

She’s also realised after 8x04 that ruthlessness is the only way to get what she wants, particularly when facing off against Cersei. It’s clear that Cersei will never relent and that she doesn’t care about what destruction she has to cause to remain queen. The only way to meet such hatred and ruthlessness is to meet it with equal hatred and ruthlessness. It’s not about the “Mad Queen” or even “Dark!Dany”, it’s about Daenerys, the woman, who has suffered devastating losses and injustices using the power she has to fight back and take what she believes is rightfully hers with Fire and Blood. That does not make her a “Mad Queen”, that makes her human.

#game of thrones #daenerys targaryen #got s8 spoilers #got meta #daenerys defense squad #my meta #text post #i never know how to tag these posts #also i hope people actually read this #it took me so long to write

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diminuel · 5 years

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Re-watching 14x20 now!

It’s a long post behind the cut.

Disclaimer: I liked the episode. It was very enjoyable and it’s easily one of my favourite finales (maybe even tied with the S11 finale, though, no... it didn’t feature a Dean and Cas hug so S11 wins). But this is my reaction - venting post. It’s mostly me being my Cas!girl self and being offended when he’s hurt by loved ones (even though he seems to be able to take it much better than I do).

Read if you dare! I’d love to hear your thoughts on the finale too!

And here we are, right back in the scene, Dean, Sam and Cas facing the consequences of Jack breaking out of the box.

Dean, would it hurt you to be less aggressive to Cas? He’s still putting blame on Cas. ”He’s dangerous Cas and you knew it. You've known it for a long time.” So did Dean, but apparently that’s beside the point. What is the point, Dean? Are you trying to weasel your way out of Cas’ legitimate accusation that they manipulated Jack and decided that locking him away forever was acceptabe? And then that man has the audacity to say “but that’s okay. Me and Sam will find a way.” As if Cas hadn’t been looking for solutions to all problems surrounding Jack all of the time. As if he hadn’t fought and sacrificed for Jack. As if he were not capable just because he doesn’t agree with Dean. Just because he kept it from Dean that Jack killed the snake? (Again with the snake?!) Even though Dean himself kept from Cas and Sam what he had learnt from Donatello?

And then! (oh boy, I’m fired up) And then he says that Jack’s “just another monster”. To Cas’ face. This is Cas’ son, this is a person Cas loves, this is a person Cas trusted Dean and Sam to love too and to parent. They were family, they were in this together and that meant the world to Cas. And that dude has the nerve to say that to Cas’ face.

There’s no guilt or remorse on Dean’s face. I thought maybe the reason he was cruel was to get Cas out of the way. Maybe it was, but he clearly felt no remorse for it.

Dean’s idea for a soul bomb... Dean’s so focused on finding a way to kill Jack that he doesn’t care about consequences. Blowing himself up in the process? Pff, who cares, at least Jack is dead. His “he meant a lot to me too, he was family” speech is just empty words. Dean doesn’t even try to fix him. He’s so angry and focused on revenge for Mary that he can’t see past it. Never giving up on family is always hit and miss with Dean because he does give up. When they disappoint him he turns his back (or actively tries to kill them...). There’s always a turning point when he gives them a chance (even though he holds grudges like a champion), yes, but still. It’s rough.

Next scene, the Mirror Universe office.

In the car, it looks like Dean is waiting for Sam to validate the course of action Dean has chosen. After he made sure that Rowena was on “Team Kill Jack”, he said “she knows what he is capable of” (i.e. why he is dangerous and deserves to be killed) and looks to Sam. When Sam wordlessly gets out of the car, Dean’s reaction reads to me like he’s displeased to not have gotten an affirmation from Sam.

The scene inside the building perplexed me on my first viewing. I mean it’s fun overall, but the light-heartedness kinda threw me off. That’s not to say that there can’t be moments of comedy in an angsty episode. I guess I simply didn’t anticipate it.

What I don’t exactly understand with the people can’t lie rule also compells them to tell the truth. “Stop lying” doesn’t mean “blurt out the truth where it’s not relevant”. Like the guy at the news station who tells the woman that he’s in love with her? Why does he need to say that in an inappropriate moment?

Next scene, Cas failing to get past the Hell bouncer.

I mean. What...? I get that Cas doesn’t have wings at the moment, so flying into hell and into the cage probably doesn’t work like it did when he went after S5. But I guess he would have found a way to get past her and into hell if Chuck hadn’t showed up.

The fake German in the radio makes me cringe. Just get a German person to say one sentence... Also, what do they mean purge? What purge? What’s going on in SPN universe Germany...? (Well, it’s very possible that Chuck made most of that shit up to impress the Winchesters or to enjoy the scene some more. Chuck’s writing is trashy after all. Lizard Queen is possible because this IS Superatural, but it’s still kinda too trashy, even for Chuck.)

Why doesn’t Cas understand Chuck’s explanation of how the gun works? He’s an angel, he should understand it. I like Cas being humanized, but not in that regard. If you had just given the “whatever happens to the person you’re aiming at also happens to you” line to Cas it would have made sense to me.

I think that Chuck is lying when he says that he cannot restore Jack’s soul. He created souls after all. He can alter timelines after all. He just wants to see the drama unfold...

And we’re back to Dean being an asshole! Cas is trying to do the thing Dean always preached: find the other way, trust family, save family no matter the cost. And he’s trying so hard and Dean? Dean just blocks it off, because he got the validation I mentioned earlier. He got someone to support his anger, hurt and need for revenge. And it comes from god himself.

But that he says that he doesn’t care about Cas’ feelings on the matter when it’s about Cas’ son? How heartless is that? Dean doesn’t have to be that cruel. And yes, I noticed that Chuck is manipulating Dean by shifting the discussion of restoring Jack’s soul to focus on the reason why Jack deserves to die/ is a monster (killing Mary). And Chuck is having a good time when Cas walks away when Dean gave him that choice between being on his Team. Sure, Dean didn’t like it when Cas walked away, but what the hell did he expect? I mean come on! What did Dean expect!! Sure, Cas always chooses Dean over everything, but this is not a choice between Dean and Jack, this is a choice between killing Jack and finding a way to keep Jack alive.

I love that scene between Sam and Dean though. I love that Sam gets to spell this out. I just wish that he would have supported Cas instead of being silent. But the most important thing is that he makes it clear that he does not support Dean’s plan and he also shares his emotions about it. Sam has been on a road of blind revenge before. Where all that mattered was killing the monster and he didn’t care about who died on the way there. But instead of making that same mistake again, he talks about what losing Mary and the situation with Jack does to him. And he reaffirms what Cas said: that them having a choice is the point.

But this whole scene makes me wish that Dean would be able to do that too. To talk about his feelings productively and work through them, expressing them and having his family validate them. He is looking for validation and support for the feeling he expresses even if they are negative, but the issue for Dean is that he only allows himsef to share anger, not all that sadness. We saw that, we saw him cry alone in the woods even though there were other people who were also hurt who would have supported his sadness too.

(And I just rewatched the scene. Love Sam, love SPN, love all those emotions I’m feeling watching this. ;w; And now back on track!!!)

I wonder what Dean was thinking or wanted to hear when he challenged Sam with a “whose fault is [Jack not having a soul]”. Who does he think is to blame? He certainly didn’t think that Sam was the answer. Does he think it was Jack’s fault? Or Cas’? What did he want to hear?

So, Chuck got Sam wrapped up in a conversation but sent Dean on his way to meet up with Jack. Maybe he wanted to be sure that Cas was present, maybe he didn’t think it was of any consequence (he doesn’t seem to think pretty much anything of Cas, he rather seems to see him as a tool/ extension of the Winchesters)...

Graveyard scene.

Cas has been very patient and supportive this season, especially with Jack, even though Jack continued to defy him. He still wants to protect Jack because he thinks it’s his job, because that’s the promise he made Kelly. It’s not like I think Cas’ priorities have shifted, I think the Winchesters are still the most important people in his life, but Cas is constantly looking for a purpose, and guarding Jack was a clear cut one. But it’s a thankless task...

Especially when Cas is willing to put himself between Dean and Jack to protect Jack and Jack decides to just swat Cas out of the way. What kind of.........!!!!!!!!!!!!! I lack words.

Also, why doesn’t Cas get up and get inbetween them? Why lie on the floor and watch. Ugh.

Some more interesting talk about Chuck as a careless writer, who does just like what Michael said; trash failed drafts. Chuck previously liked that the Winchesters chose family over the story. And yes, I know it was probably his chosen ending (the only thing kinda surprising him seemed to be Cas being part of the story. Maybe, maybe that way faked too, who knows). So why is he bothered by his characters defying him? Just because they don’t replay his classic epic tale? I don’t quite get Chuck but I probably also don’t have too.

And why doesn’t Cas get to cry? I wished he would have cried. I would have gladly exchanged the uncomfortable zoom into Jack’s burned out eyes for some Cas tears. :/ Or any sign of grief from the Winchesters.

Aaaand zombies.

#Supernatural #spoilers #14x20 spoilers

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tanoraqui · 5 years

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what’s baffling about the plan to have 5 Fantastic Beasts films is that it makes some of the writing choices for Crimes of Grindelwald just...bad. (Worse.) I acknowledge that not everyone cares about treating female and POC characters as real people worthy of attention - it’s wrong in a way that is both incorrect and immoral, but I acknowledge it - but at least we can all agree that writing should be good? Instead of planning a 5-film series set between 1926 and 1945 and the second movie takes place only 5 months after the first - what?? It made sense if it was the second of three - that’s how Endgame Time works; stakes are high and it all moves fast. So are the 4th and 5th movies going to be back-to-back, too? So when is the third film going to be set?? This is basic pacing; what are you DOING?

And Queenie. Oh, Queenie.

[irritated rewriting below the cut]

Getting back onto my “female characters are real people worthy of attention” horse, but...wow, what a character assassination. Way to strip an intelligent, practical, slightly ditzy but also magically sympathetic and capable of using that very feminine-coded power to help save her family and friends...to this helpless, overreactive woman persuaded to join the most notorious criminal/terrorist in the wizarding world on the grounds that he supports true love?? Wow. Okay. And not only is this a total (sexist) change from the first movie, but it isn’t even with the excuse that you’re hastily trying to set up a third and final movie in the series? You could have done this more gracefully over the span of films 2, 3, and 4, because unexpected side changes is a dramatic and compelling thing to go into the finale with?!?

Because that is true! I honestly fully respect the writers’ desire to have one of the main protagonist team switch sides to Grindelwald, to showcase how charismatic he and his espoused ideals are, and to emphasize how this whole thing wracked the wizarding community. And, you know, for character Drama(TM) - which I am tuning in to watch, because this is a story about characters and their drama! I would argue that the better candidate is Tina, known to make impetuous choices in the name of what she believes is Right, including risking the secrecy of the wizarding world, and in general much more vulnerable to a message of “there is injustice in the world and we need to take ACION to fix it, even if that means violence” - but Queenie would perhaps be more persuadable by the promise of eventual peace, so, hey. Three entire movies and well-written character development and you can convince me of anything.

IF ONLY THAT HAD HAPPENED.

Like, you wanna use Queenie? Fine. Here a couple rewrite options of that parlor scene, with varying degrees of antagonism. Making use of the fact that Queenie casually reads everyone’s surface thoughts all the time (see: weaponized [feminine] sympathy):

Wariest:

Grindelwald: I wish you were working with me now, towards a world where we were able to live openly. To love freely.

Queenie, wand raised, guardedly: You’re a very good Occlumens, Mr. Grindelwald.

(Ie, she can’t get a read on him. Grindelwald tips his head slightly in acknowledgement [part ego, party sympathy/apology, like he’s sorry he has to be guarded from her]. A slight pause.)

Grindelwald: You are an innocent. So go, now. Leave this place.

OR:

Grindelwald: I wish you were working with me now, towards a world where we were able to live openly. To love freely. (slight pause) You’re a natural Legilimens, aren’t you? You know I am not lying.

Queenie, guardedly but maybe lowering her wand slightly: Only surface thoughts, really. (Ie, she can’t be sure - he seems to be honest, but she knows she can be tricked. slight pause.) I don’t think I want a closer look at you. (implication: he’s a monster)

Grindelwald, almost like he’s agreeing: You are an innocent. So go, now. Leave this place.

OR:

Queenie, guardedly but maybe lowering her wand slightly: Only surface thoughts, really. (Ie, she can’t be sure - he seems to be honest, but she knows she can be tricked. No follow-up - less aggressive)

Grindelwald: You are an innocent. So go, now. Leave this place.

MOST CREDULOUS:

(Queenie lowers her wand slightly, giving a reluctant nod. She is wary, but cannot deny that he seems honest. Earnest.)

Grindelwald: You are an innocent. So go, now. Leave this place.

And then at the graveyard, Jacob apologizes and says he doesn’t think she’s crazy, not really, not at all, and Queenie apologizes for overreacting and for enchanting him and admits that the things people say and do are just as important as the things they think, and maybe that she loves about Jacob how even when he doesn’t understand things, he tries to be helpful and kind. All she does with Grindelwald is look back at him as they’re all running away, somewhere between wary and curious and wistful, showing that she’s still struggling with the thoughts vs. actions thing and it’s at least nagging at her, that his thoughts and actions (towards her specifically) were both kind and sympathetic, even though she knows that he also does terrible things. In contrast to when Jacob had mentally called her crazy even while supposedly trying to woo her! Check out that valid* reason to trust one and not the other!

*One example of a “terrible thing” Grindelwald does is that in that moment, he was trying to set her, her loved ones, and all of Paris on fire. Because he’s a wizard Nazi.

And then you build on that over the course of the next 2 movies, you godforsaken idiots.

Also while I’m at it: I actually respect the decision from a writing perspective to have Lena Do That, because I’m not sure this is what the writer(s) intended but I make sense of it as she partly was trying to seize a rare chance and partly committing suicide by dark wizard, which is a) gripping and b) plausible for what we’d seen of her character. HOWEVER, it very much runs up against that “treating women and POC with narrative respect” thing, and if Theseus could have delivered that “GRINDELWALD! STOP.” and “I love you” with as much emotion, it, too, probably would have fucked me up a little. First spend the movie setting him up as frustrated, with both his own inability to catch Grindelwald and his superiors’ often hypocritical orders for doing so - catch him immediately, all force necessary, even if it means injuring or even killing people you are supposed to protect. So the audience gets a slightly plausible split second of “wait, shit, are they joining Grindelwald?!” and then the desperate attempt to stop him/suicide by dark wizard also makes sense. And then Lena can have a sweet vengeance arc, that would probably get pretty dark, because she’s only been loved by like 1 person ever and Grindelwald killed him, and for a while the movies would just be Newt + animals + 3 very competent women with weirdly similar-sounding names (Tina, Queenie, Lena). I would watch that.

Yusef could stick around too, on and off, because I actually quite liked that whole sideplot - more characters of color, and consequences to Credence’s alleged identity completely separate from the Obscurial stuff! I’m not trying too hard to fix the way this film had way too many moving parts and leaned so much on flashback that it got confusing; I might as well keep what I like. And Credence’s whole plotline can stay the same (sans Nagini - see post on Perenelle Flamel), and the stuff with Dumbledore - it’s not my favorite, but, fine. It could be worse, both in terms of writing and character. I actually quite like both Dumbledore and Grindelwald’s characters, once I wearily accept that they are as important to the plot as they are. Credence I don’t really care about, but this all seemed reasonable. He’s just growing up, he can make bad decisions about allegiances early on in the movie series.

I hope the entire Movie 5 climactic battle is resolved because the Niffler yoinks the Elder Wand out of Grindelwald’s hand. Ten bucks on that.

#fantastic beasts #in which i have Opinions #and Suggestions #my fic #ish

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thesteadydietofeverything · 5 years

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Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales is so much more than a Gwent-based spin-off

I put about 150 hours into The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It’s probably my favorite game ever. I tend to think that I’ve more or less done everything in that game that there was to do, but there is one glaring exception to that: Gwent. I tried a couple rounds of the collectible card game in the beginning of the game, didn’t quite understand what was going on, and certainly didn’t care to learn when the rest of the game offered a big, beautiful world to explore, full of great stories created with near unparalleled writing. I had never really gotten in to card games within video games in general, really - I remember reacting to Final Fantasy VIII’s Triple Triad in much the same way. And I’ve certainly never attempted Hearthstone, or any such similar DCCG’s. This is all to say, I’m still a bit surprised at how thoroughly I fell in love with Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, a game built largely around Gwent.

CD Projekt Red’s newest game was released just a few weeks ago to disappointingly little fanfare. What reviews there are have been pretty strong, but let’s be real - this is an isometric RPG with visual novel elements whose combat is based around a card game, and it was released three days before Red Dead Redemption 2. It’s a shame, though, because the game really does offer so much to those who, like me, might be unsure about undertaking such an experience. It’s got a gorgeous, comic-book-esque art style that makes exploring the game’s detailed maps a joy. It’s very well written, with novelistic prose and strong characters delivered by Jakub Szamalek, one of the writers from The Witcher 3. Marcin Przybylowicz returns with another memorable and moody Polish-folk-music-inflected score. While combat is entirely based around Gwent, the rest of this game is devoted to exploring detailed maps and making hard, morally ambiguous decisions in the main story. In other words, the team behind The Witcher 3 made a brand new, full, deep RPG set in the universe of The Witcher, and you really should be paying attention.

Thronebreaker is a prequel-ish spin-off, set just before the events of the first Witcher game. It centers around Meve, Queen of Lyria and Rivia, and her quest to reclaim her land from a devastating Nilfgaardian invasion. The morally gray nature of The Witcher universe is an even more ever-present central tenet in this game than previous ones, as it deals explicitly with the inherent injustice of monarchical governance. Meve is, as queens go, a very good one. She’s brave, determined, and compassionate, willing to fight to the death for the good of her people. But war nevertheless makes for hard decisions, especially when you’re leading a small army with limited resources against a giant imperial machine, and attempting to navigate the complex politics of multiple lands.

The maps you explore in this game can include big cities and castles, but for the most part, you’re traversing through rural lands, passing by small villages and farms, grappling with the cruelty of feudalism. The peasants you meet have next to nothing to begin with, so often are they forced by the government you rule to give up their earnings, at least in part so that you can live in luxury. Now that war has come around, it only gets worse for them - you physically take resources from them for your army, and often conscript them to join. You stick your nose into local conflicts you don’t fully understand or appreciate. Mass inequality and injustice are everywhere, and try as you might to be a just and fair monarch, you can only go so far when your existence is one of the primary reasons for that mass inequality and injustice.

There are rarely “good” options to choose from in this game. A decision always involves a compromise, and no matter what, somebody is going to be made very unhappy by it - most likely including you. There are often more ostensibly righteous or noble options, but the consequences of those can sometimes have an effect that makes you wish you had chosen the other one. “You’ve chosen one evil over another” is a prompt that you get very used to popping up - it’s the game’s sole response to you making a story-altering decision. Sometimes this can feel pretty damn off. Sorry, game, but choosing not to kill a messenger when I’ve just been reminded of the rules of war, or saving an elf from a mob of racist humans attempting a public execution are just not evils, no matter how you look at them. The point of it is showing how your actions, even seemingly altruistic ones, have consequences, and the shades of gray thing works pretty well for the most part, but despite the game’s assurance to the contrary, not every choice you make is an evil one.

The more successful decision making comes when you really feel those consequences, either through a hit to your resources, or a bit of writing that explains what ended up happening. There’s a heavy dollop of Machiavellianism to these decisions, as it often comes down to choosing between what’s right and what’s successful. You need gold, people, and resources to survive. In the early parts of the game, you’re pretty desperate for all three of these things. So when you stumble across an already disturbed grave that has valuables in it, do you pillage it? You want to say no, and yet, you weigh the options - the only negative would be upsetting company morale, but morale is already high after saving a church graveyard from a monster, so pushing it down to normal isn’t a great loss in comparison to leaving behind gold. In that same section, you can chase down a group of bandits that stole gold from the church. After you retrieve it, you can either return it, or keep it for yourself. I returned it, but I didn’t feel quite as great about it as I expected to. Sure, I made a small group of nuns happy, but does this truly benefit the kingdom as a whole if we’re short on money to fight our enemies?

That’s not to say that the game encourages you to make the selfish choice. I’ve heard it claimed before that the Witcher games reward policies of non-interference and cynicism in the face of injustice, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Sure, taking the gold for myself would have made the game a little bit easier for me, but that’s temptation, not reward. There’s always a cost for getting involved, but it’s hard for me to see that as the game punishing me. There are consequences no matter what, and this is the rare game with a semblance of a morality system that often makes attempts at doing the right thing the most narratively interesting choice rather than the choice with the most practical reward. This becomes clear in the second chapter, where, after seeing the atrocities wrought by the opposition, you can’t help but become more willing to recognize the cruelty in yourself, to make decisions you never figured you’d make. This wouldn’t feel nearly as impactful if you didn’t start out trying to make Meve the most just ruler possible.

Though the game presents a complex world of bitter division and desperate cynicism, and thus engaging with it leaves little possibility of not getting blood on your hands, the writing rarely feels ignorant of the roots of injustice. The human lands that you spend most of the game exploring are deeply racist. The Elder Races - elves and dwarves, mostly, have been subject to countless pogroms across these lands, and even when they aren’t being straight up murdered, are never treated as equals to their human neighbors. So the fact that the Scoia’tael, a radical group of nonhuman guerillas, exist isn’t surprising, nor can you not have sympathy for their alliance with the invading Nilfgaard. Though the Nilfgaardians can be seen as a stand-in for any massive imperial force, from the Roman Empire to Nazi Germany, with all the delusions of racial superiority that tend to go with empire, their invasion of the Northern Kingdoms actually does seem to make life a bit easier for nonhumans - one of the chief complaints of the humans you meet living under occupation is how many more rights have been granted to elves and dwarves.

The Scoia’tael, fighting for Nilfgaard, thus become another enemy you must face. Some of them, justifiably thrilled at the prospect of overthrowing their oppressors, use the destruction of a kingdom like Aedirn as an opportunity to slaughter whole villages of humans as revenge. You see the mindless violence they’ve committed, then are faced with the threat of it yourself, and there’s really no other choice but to take the Scoia’tael down. It feels terrible. Every aspect of it. And I believe the game earns this trudge through moral quicksand. It recognizes the righteousness of the Scoia’tael, even as it forces you into opposition against them. It’s both awful, and a surprising relief from the social commentary video games so often fall into - the reductive and mischaracterizing Bethesda/Rockstar/Bioshock “both sides suck” approach. It recognizes the power differences at the root of the issue, and doesn’t hide from the ugliness that ensues.

That’s not to say that the writing is always perfect when dealing with this stuff. Cut a single corner with material this volatile and you can end up with a pretty off-putting scene, as Thronebreaker occasionally does. There’s one character, a human named Black Rayla, that joins your team in the second chapter. She’s a seasoned fighter of the Scoia’tel, and thoroughly racist as a result, and yet, she’s useful to your cause, so you allow her in. This is all well and good, and theoretically should make for some interesting internal conflicts, but there were several scenes where I was disturbed by Meve’s lack of response to Rayla’s nationalist bullshit. There was one scene where she was going down some real “I don’t have a problem with them, as long as they know their place” garbage, and I just decided to dismiss her at that point. I wonder what would happen if she stayed with my group till the end, if Meve would have more to say to her after she wasn’t quite as desperate for her help. I’d hope so, but considering the lack of mindful writing around her character I witnessed it, I wouldn’t exactly expect it.

For as fascinating as the narrative of this game is, the thing you’ll probably spend the majority of the game doing is playing Gwent, and for a solid two-thirds of my time with the card combat, that was something I was very happy to be doing. The system built for this game, similar to, but modified from its Witcher 3 iteration, is deep, strategic, and occasionally pretty challenging. It feels made for newcomers like myself, mostly unfamiliar with Gwent, or even the standard mechanics shared by most card games, in the way that it eases the player into it. The first hour or so of the game is the official tutorial, but really the whole first chapter feels like a fairly natural extended tutorial for beginners, starting you off with a fairly limited deck in order to solidify the basics. For the most part this is very well done, though there were some particular aspects of the game that didn’t seem to be entirely explained, and took me a pretty long time to pick up on exactly how they worked.

The biggest strength that the card game here boasts is real variety. So many of the battles have particular rules or cards in play that drastically change the way you have to approach your strategy. Many of these come in the form of “puzzles” - aptly titled special battles where you’re given a specific set of cards and there’s really only one solution that you have to deduce through experimentation and logic. These are largely fantastic, not only because they’re all unique and fun in their own right, but because they often serve as mini-lessons in how individual units work and the various strategic ways they can be utilized.

Then there are the standard battles, where you actually get to shuffle and draw your own deck. The designers clearly put a lot of effort into the variety here as well, so often do they throw in inventive special rules and objectives, a lot of which not only change the pace of battle in meaningful ways, but often weave narrative significance into play as well. One of my favorite feelings in this game was getting stuck on a battle because of its particular rules, banging my head against it for a little while, then just suddenly seeing it, and pulling a satisfying victory just before it would’ve started feeling frustrating.

For as much thought and care as was clearly put into the design, though, there’s really only so many ways to keep combat interesting and engaging through a campaign that can last as long as fifty hours. In the back half of the game, combat can too often feel like a grind. At this point, you’ve got a big, diverse deck with plenty of powerful cards that makes it too easy to brute force your way through most situations. I found myself repeating the same tried and true tactics over and over again to bring my game to a speedy end so I could just move on with the story, which I was still very much enjoying. It’s hard to know if more work could have been put in to truly keep the card game feeling novel - Gwent just generally loses its depth once you’ve got mastery over a sturdy deck. I think ultimately, the game is just too long - possibly by even as much as ten hours or so, honestly. That’s not to say that I outright stopped enjoying it at any point; this is unquestionably one of my favorite games of the year, but if I didn’t have to face that grind in the final couple chapters, it very well could have been a contender for the top spot.

It feels a bit too long in the narrative sense as well. Not necessarily the written aspect of the narrative - that all felt consistently strong and inspired throughout the course of this game. But the mechanics surrounding the narrative, in particular the hard decisions you have to make as a result of limited resources, fall flat once the in-game economy feels maxed out. By the final chapter, all my upgrade trees were completely filled and I found myself sitting on a growing surplus of funds, and suddenly making the “right” decision didn’t feel quite as hard.

Despite its cumbersome length, few games surprised and enchanted me this year as much as Thronebreaker. The challenging and compelling role playing, the satisfying card combat...hell, even if that stuff wasn’t as outstanding as it is, I probably would have been happy to spend a considerable amount of time in it for its art style and music alone, so thoroughly did it soak me in those intoxicating Witcher vibes. It made me very excited at the potential CD Projekt Red still has in it for finding innovative and novel approaches to fresh storytelling in a well-worn universe, and I just hope that potential can continue to be realized after the distressingly muted reaction to this game’s release. Here’s hoping that its recent addition to Steam, and its upcoming console release, allows it to find the audience that it deserves.

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sieben9 · 6 years

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“last rites” impressions

{Quick request to anyone reading: I’m watching OUaT for the first time, and I want to avoid spoilers. So, if you want to discuss something spoilery, I’d be grateful if you could start a new post for that. Thank you!}

::sigh:: God, what a mess.

No, not you.

::even longer sigh::

So, uh… I didn’t like this episode. Shocking, I know. I still have things to say about it, though, so if you want to read them, please read under the cut.

…

::the Longest sigh::

Honestly, did anyone come out of that episode happier than they were before? ‘cause I certainly didn’t…

I’d hear the argument that this is the bleak moment before the triumphant finale, but this Underworld-arc seems pretty much over.

the one (and possibly only) thing i will give zelena credit for.

I mean, it seems fitting that if you go down to the Underworld, bad things will happen, just as it seems fitting that you’d escape with your life and not much more. Not exactly a happy conclusion, but a thematically appropriate one. That the Underworld follows you back home and starts messing things up in the land of the living is just a dose of good, old-fashioned “Nice Job Breaking It Hero”, and I don’t mind that, either. But now, the villain is defeated, the damsel is out of distress (meaning Hook), and the newly dead are buried.

leaving behind an orphaned four-year-old and a literal baby. damn, show, just… damn.

Oh, but Robin isn’t “just” dead (because we have now established that being dead means nothing in this world), no, he’s been obliterated from existence. And for what? What was the narrative justification for killing him off? So that his daughter could have his name? Look, the guy may not have been the most dynamic character or most interesting love interest in the world, but he sure as hell didn’t deserve that.

Poor Regina. Poor Roland. In my ideal world, this ends with Regina adopting the little hobbit, but I don’t really see that happening. (If it does happen, that’s a spoiler I wouldn’t mind hearing, actually. I need happy news after this… mess.)

Observant readers will have noticed that I never cared all that much about Outlaw Queen, but I retroactively feel bad for all the people who were really invested. That was one hell of a brutal shipwreck.

While we’re on the subject, I will have to call shenanigans on the Other Novelty Dildo (first one being that glove Rumple brought back from Camelot)

so many jokes, so little time…

Look, I don’t actually mind the magical MacGuffins that crop up all over the place. But would it kill you to introduce them slightly earlier? Like, just as a rule: if you want to use a MacGuffin to solve a problem in episode 20, you have to introduce it in episode 17 at the latest. Now, if you want to use a MacGuffin to create a problem, maybe you don’t need that much advance warning. Though even that works better at the beginning of an arc than at its end.

And magic bullet aside… I get why Zelena killing Hades had more of an emotional impact. And I get why Regina had to be involved—she’s the only one Zelena would actually do this for. Regina worked all this half-season to forge a bond with her sister, and this is where that pays off.

What I don’t get is why Emma wasn’t involved even a little. No, seriously, go back and check. All she does is lure Hades and Zelena away for about ten seconds, so that Regina and Robin can get into the office to get the then-nameless baby back. And that was in no way integral to Hades’s defeat. So, basically, the person who kicked off the events that led to Hades being a threat in the first place had no part in getting rid of him. Well-bloody-done, show. That’s how you protagonist!

So… yeah. Kind of a disappointing villain-defeat. Although I have to say that the acting in that scene was on point. I mean…

My sincere respect for everyone in front of the camera, here, and especially Lana Parilla and Rebecca Mader. They really acted their hearts out here. I mean… you can see how much she wants to just kill Regina and that nagging voice inside her that says she’s doing the wrong thing, and then you see her change her mind. And then the dialogue tells you what just happened, but you can still see each distinct emotion on her face. ::sigh:: Dear Rebecca Mader, why couldn’t you be a character I liked?

Oh, and of course Rumple has the death-dildo now. Or at least a piece of it. Are we… are we doing this “Rumple as the backup badguy” thing again? Really? Fourth time in a row? The man just wants to wake up his wife so they can make an appointment with Archie for some marriage counselling, he hasn’t got the time to be sinister!

then again, that’s less of an action and more of a lifestyle

Oh, and because I’m frustrated and needed a break… have a gif.

I’m sure there was absolutely no other way to get that thing out of the pulverised Hades-remains. None at all. (I’m also amused that they apparently left the godly dustpile just sitting there for at least a full day. Nobody decided to come over with a dustpan? Really?)

Speaking of Rumple and his current troubles…

Moe French, I will beat you to death with the spikiest cactus I can find, and I will laugh while I do it. I think between nearly killing/personality-wiping his daughter because he didn’t approve of her choice in boyfriend and leaving her in a sleep of eternal torment, because he doesn’t like her husband, this asshole bumped himself all the way up to first place on the “shitty parents” list, which is quite an accomplishment. (To be honest, all the serious contenders for first place are equally shitty, Moe is just the most recent offender, so I’m most angry at him.)

My only consolation is that Moe’s kiss would never have worked in the first place, so while his decision is still deplorable, at least it’s not an actual complication. Shame Emma had to burst in so early, though.

Which brings up another point about Emma and responsibility that I’ll saying a bit more on later, but for this scene, just a quick aside: I don’t think Rumple was exactly right—not all of this mess was Emma’s fault. That he had to go to the Underworld? Sure, that’s 100% on her, but frankly, I’m not willing to absolve Hades and assorted assholes from blame here.

So, no, this mess isn’t Emma’s fault alone. But it is her responsibility. She started this mess, she’d better end it. By the way, guess what she didn’t do? (See above for that.)

::long sigh::

OK, let’s deal with the elephant in the room, namely, the almost-literal Deus Ex Machina.

Who though this was a good idea? Seriously, even if they did write themselves into a corner, this was possibly the worst way to do it. The method was bad, the explanation was bad, and the making out next to the coffin of the man who actually helped kill Hades was the worst.

And Hook didn’t help defeat Hades! Hook didn’t do anything except give Emma the hint about the crystal, and Emma didn’t help! I know I’m harping on this, but the longer I keep pulling on that thread, the more this episode unravels. It’s morbidly fascinating, really.

I discussed the main points on the graveyard-makout-session in the liveblog-post already, but to sum up: there’s a version of this scene that both shows Emma’s and Hook’s relief to be alive and together again without appearing entirely disrespectful to Robin’s memory, but this wasn’t it. This was about as tasteless as it could get without them boinking right there next to the coffin.

(My suggestion: let them go home before they take the train to make-out-town. Bam. Problem solved. They can have a really heartfelt hug on the graveyard; honestly, I feel like a hug would have been more emotionally honest, in any case, but what do I know, right?)

This kind of soured me on Emma as a character, too. I liked her better when she had to face actual consequences and took responsibility for her fuck-ups. And no, whining about how “this is all my fault”, only to get consoled by other characters is not the same as taking responsibility. That’s wallowing in self-pity, and it’s not a very attractive quality. (It’s also a cheap trick to tell the audience “see, the good people don’t think she did anything wrong, and so should you!”)

Oh, and just to close this out…

Yeah, this guy gets to be king of the Underworld now. Grrreat. We all still remember that he was a pretty shitty king while alive, right? That’s not just me? Then again, he’s got all eternity to figure out this gig, so who knows. Maybe he won’t be terrible in a millennium or so. (He’ll still be a douche, though. The douchiness is part of his molecular makeup, there’s really nothing to be done there.)

On a somewhat lighter note: Hook, my guy, we have to talk. You were in a position to, as I like to call it, “pull a Kelsier”, i.e. punch a god in the face. The rules declare that whenever you are in a position to pull a Kelsier, you are basically obligated do so. That fact that you didn’t is… look, I’m not mad. I’m just disappointed.

(In an attempt not to be too obnoxious about it: Kelsier is a character from a completely different fandom who did, in fact, punch at least two gods in the face. They kind of deserved it, too, even if Kelsier really had no moral high ground to stand on.)

And, while I’m on slightly lighter things:

Cruella’s face when she saw Arthur and Hook. I was wrong: someone definitely came out of this episode happier than they were before ::eyebrow waggle::

I have honestly no idea where the last two episodes are going to go, because… there’s really not much setup. Rumple still has a comatose Belle in a box, and she’s probably not getting out of there this season (because that’s not how babies work), so… what exactly is he planning?

I mean, I’ll find out, but I’d appreciate some hints, show!

#ouat #once upon a time #ouat last rites #sieben watches ouat #sieben talks #ouat writing critical #anti cs #anti hook #anti emma swan #(ouch)#mostly tagging to be safe #the writing is getting most of the flak #AND WITH GOOD REASON

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