#some people are saying it’s inconsistency but tbh I think he’s supposed to be off the rails | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

firendgold · 1 year

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Pk now I want to hear tour rant about how Harrydore is bettter than Grindeldore. Bring it 🤣❤️

ohhh, this one's easy. I've been in this fandom on and off since 2006, and seen how Harry, Albus and Gellert were written pre- and post-'Dumbledore closet interview'. cracks knuckles

got to hit you with that readmore though. and it's going to be in two parts. I rambled again. ^^

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(...'rambled' is perhaps an understatement.)

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grindeldore vs harrydore

grindeldore

the tl;dr of the below is the following sentences, and then I'll get into it. My philosophy on gr*ndeld*re extends to all other ships in all other fandoms, especially HP: if it's not an AU and you have to excessively mischaracterize Character A to get them to 'fit' with Character B, then it's not a good ship, canon or not. Albus Dumbledore is quite often mischaracterized in order to 'fit' or 'keep' him with Gellert Grindelwald.

here's my problems with how gr*ndeld*re is most often portrayed:

Inconsistency within canon. JKR is partly mostly to blame for this (because she has contradicted her original 2007 statement in the present day with more interviews in the 2010s and with the Fantastic Beasts movies), but the first problem is: gr*ndeld*re was originally an unrequited ship. The original statement was that Albus was dazzled by Gellert's power, his presence, their similarities, their shared ideals... but That Woman wasn't explicit on whether Gellert ever returned his feelings. But based on her quotes where she says "falling in love can blind you to an extent" and that [Dumbledore] was "terribly, terribly let down" by the result of that whirlwind relationship, I think it's safe to assume that her original idea of Gellert cared far more for seeing his grander plans realized than for the needs and feelings of his 'equal'. And yet... in fandom, they are most often portrayed instead as star-crossed lovers torn apart by 'conflicting ideals'.

The second problem is that in the avalanche of fics and art that have come from The Reveal, the original lesson (/moral...?) behind the reveal of gr*ndeld*re, and how it shaped Albus as an adult, leader, and progressive, just... got lost. Completely lost. The whole point of it was to show that even Albus (supposed 'paragon of goodness' until book 7 showed the fandom that he is a regular human being) can make 'relatable' mistakes like... you know... being friends with a fascist. Being in love with a fascist, even. Thanks to said retcon interviews and the new movies (and even before that tbh) the fandom has since: overexaggerated Albus' new clay feet to the point of bashing him, idolized Grindelwald's red flag traits and ideals to the point where he has become the new "Tom Riddle was just misunderstood!" guy, and twisted that lesson/moral/whatever to mean that actually Albus and Gellert were tragically kept away from each other by an itsy bitsy little difference of opinion. A minor little fight. Casual death of your sick sister. Haven't we all been there?

The fandom diminishing the real reasons why Albus and Gellert eventually clashed, were destined to clash, is bad enough. What's worse is the opposite end. Some Dumbledore-bashing fans go the other way and paint present-day Dumbledore with the same brush as Grindelwald, even going so far as to say he still supports The Greater Good even though his entire character is literally built on being the opposite of the pro-magic, anti-Muggle philosophy. Albus has also been painted in some fics and even meta discussions as someone who 'regrets' his past not because his sister died and his brother is estranged from him, but just because his ex-boyfriend is in prison and he maybe kind of regrets not going full fascist with him. Like... bruh. NO. There are people who ship gr*ndeld*re just because they feel like Grindelwald, the worst dark wizard in the world, the reason why Voldemort is only a minor league little lord in comparison, is an appropriate "punishment" for the character they already dislike and thus misinterpret. (Side note: I'm not sure if I'm in a worse hell watching Albus' character get whitewashed for fascism or demonized so he can be a miserable lonely gay.)

Albus diminishes himself to meet Gellert's needs. An in-universe problem this time instead of a meta/RL one: Albus and Gellert were lovers, yes, but in order to be so, Albus had to actively start neglecting his siblings (since in Aberforth's words he was 'doing all right' taking care of them before Gellert showed up) and leaning more into anti-Muggle sentiment. He put all his energy into what for most of the magical world was a wild goose chase after some fairy-tale items. (Remember, most wixen don't give a shit about the Deathly Hallows, or think they're even real.) He became the person Gellert needed/desired most. Albus became a version of himself that he despised later in his life and after his death.

Relationships often include the members changing, and it's easy for even the most devoted partners to fall out of love if they change and are now too different from one another, or one person changes and the other... doesn't. After Ariana died, Albus chose to become a different person and champion the same people he and his family once despised. He chose to stay away from Gellert, whether he called it cowardice or principles or whatever else. And his choice put him in conflict with Gellert, who at sixteen refused to change course or rethink his ideals even when his choices led to the death of a magical person (the type of person he supposedly prizes above all others). His magical boyfriend's magical sister, even. And we see no sign that Gellert changed, repented, or considered Albus until decades later, at the very end of his life—far too late.

Healthy relationships require give-and-take, sacrificing for your partner in things big and small. For high-stakes relationships like Albus and Gellert's (queer in the 1800s, sweet Merlin), that is even more true. During that steamy summer of 1899, it was Albus who did all the sacrifcing/giving and Gellert who did all the taking. Gellert may have entertained the idea of bringing Ariana along on his quest with Albus (we don't know), but Aberforth was right to say that it would have been torture for her—and no alternate idea was brought up that would prioritize the wellbeing of Albus' siblings while he was away. And in the moment of required reciprocity when Albus was at his lowest, Gellert left him behind and went off to go rule the world. Not even the most diehard shipper can argue against the fact that when Ariana died, Grindelwald left.

This problem is even more personal/biased than the other ones. Albus and Gellert parted ways in 1899. They didn't see each other again until the duel in 1945 (because fuck Fantastic Beasts, the scripts don't even make fucking sense). Albus defeated Gellert, put him in prison, and then went on living for another fifty-two years. And That Woman expects me to believe that Albus never had a relationship with anyone before Gellert, and never even looked at another wizard afterward? In 52 years, he was one-and-done? He never once fell in love with other people, whether or not he fully trusted them/let them in? Be serious. Pull the other one. It's not realistic, and it doesn't speak to the kind of man Albus Dumbledore is. He may not have found a man to check the same boxes Gellert did, but he wouldn't arguably be looking for someone too similar to his old flame. He might not trust them unconditionally or be the Perfect Partner for them (bc whew traumaaa), but there would be other people for Albus in a realistic Magical Britain (even discounting time travel shenanigans). Before the reveal, the most popular people to ship Albus with were Minerva, Alastor, and Elphias Doge; these options are still arguably more valid. Albus Dumbledore loves love, he champions love, and he doesn't think he deserves it after his sins, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't go looking. It's mind-boggling to me that with all the well-deserved disavowing of JKR following her anti-trans hate (and her shameless pandering to the same people calling her a witch poisoning their children's minds decades ago), that some people still treat her words about Albus and Gellert's relationship and its effects on Albus in particular as gospel. I sure don't. (Especially because she said he became "asexual" after His One Gay Experience when like. That's not. What asexuality is??? And ace gay people exist???) Whether you count the FB movies or not, there are still decades of Albus' life that are a mystery, and I refuse to believe he closed his heart and caged his dick for all of them.

IMPORTANT END NOTE: These observations obviously do not apply to all gr*ndeld*re shippers. Some people genuinely do like both characters, characterize them correctly, and still want to see them together for reasons. I'm not going to judge them. I ship a frigging time travel age gap ship, how the fuck could I. And I'm also aware that a lot of fics/art are made to color in between the lines of what we don't know in the fandom, bringing Albus and Gellert together during the mystery years, or making one wizard better for the other to address all the ship baggage. I just can't join them because of how rarely that occurs (and, admittedly, how much I personally can't see it). You would not believe how many fics and discussions I've seen that lionize Grindelwald and treat Dumbledore like an accessory, or completely mischaracterize Albus' motivations, intentions, and actions, and then put him with "the other Big Bad". UGH.

Most of the time, I see gr*ndeld*re the ship hurting Albus the individual. It's very rare to find an iteration where Albus is not bearing the consequences of Gellert's choices, Gellert's actions, Gellert's mistakes and harm done. I think Albus deserves better than to be Gellert's accessory just because he loved him deeply long ago.

okay. whew. that was a lot.

a character limit prevents me from continuing here, so the second half of this versus will go elsewhere, sorry!

#fireandgold #fireandgoldposts #kazuza-art #thanks for the ask!#tried to make it *non*-bashing but... eh I just really don't like most iterations of That Ship #I also put 'relatable' in quotes bc as a POC I simply could never be knowingly connected to a fascist. couldn't be me #it's WORSE bc Albus' mum is implied to be Native American and he just hooks up with wizard HITLER I cannot... I just can't...#granted. I have read really really good grindeldore fics. I just could never ship it/write a fic for them myself. perhaps it's my flaw lol #I tried to censor the name as often as possible so sorry if it ends up in the other tag #time travel harrydore #harrydore #dumbledore meta #potter meta #why not grindelwald #<- that tag is for later #...I have to split this post in half. damn you tumblr ''character limit''

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azsazz · 10 months

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i was reading through your asks and i just wanna say i agree with sjm ruining characters for others but also just ruining characters for no reason. sjm is inconsistent with a lot of things but especially with every character's personality and behavior and that's honestly my biggest beef with her. like feyre is supposed to be just and kind unless when people cross her or whatever but instead of taking her revenge on tamlin she took it on his people (who she was worried about before) and then one of the first qualities feyre sees in rhys is that he's a good high lord except he's only good in velaris and the reasons behind aren't even actual reasons, everyone is bad in the hewn city? morrigan is a good example of that not being true, and in illiria the same thing? cass, az, emerie, his own mother are right there. there's also the change in cassian from his book to the others (even if that could be attributed to him being done with nesta treating him like shit) idk i feel like every character acts differently just for the sake of the plot or showing off and it feels like bad writing tbh. that's why i only read acotar and never tog (even tho i think id like aelin better) and would rather read fics about it because i genuinely think some fic writers take the character's personalities more into consideration than sjm

also im sorry im ranting on your page, i was rereading your fics and you're an amazing writer

PREACH.

Legit Feyre wrecking the entirety of the spring court and then asking them to join forces in the war ☠️ like, sure, I'm sure Tam had a really easy time telling his people they were going to ally with the people that ruined so much.

The whole Illyrian thing is super interesting as well and also because there has to be other cities, territories in the night court that we don't know about? or am i crazy to assume that and every court has one huge city that everyone lives in? like, why not take care of all of your people? "oh, the illyrians won't listen to my rules" but like, you're literally the most powerful ruler of the continent? do something?

the mother only knows what's going on with mor. i don't even care tbh she's incredibly boring to me.

no but literally previous cassian vs acosf cassian are two completely different people to me. i've heard people say that it's because the first books are in feyre's pov and the last if nesta's so of course the sisters are going to perceive the characters differently, but bro he was just mean. and rude. and yeah, the smut was good and all but come on, there was basically no alluding to him acting that type of way in the previous books, felt like it came from left field to me.

#ask azsazz #azsazz rant

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cinnaminsvga · 5 months

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hi bestieeee

ive been following & have had notifs on for years. i actually dont even pay attention to kpop anymore AIDBBFHFDISO but ive always wanted to know sooo badly: how does LOOH end?

I know it's on indefinite hiatus but it doesn't seem like itll ever be completed, and the curiosity has always killed me 😭

"it doesn't seem like itll ever be completed" PLEASEEEEE i screamed but yeah youre 100% right LOL

its kinda hard to say how looh was supposed to end because i kinda write smaus on the go without indepth storylines lol (i.e. basically i bullshit on the go and fake it til i make it)

fair warning also that ive forgotten almost all of looh by this point... i used to have a notebook with my ideas for the smau but i lost it during my last move so this is what i can remember. apologies if there are inconsistencies but i genuinely dont remember LMAOOO its been (8)4 years...

i can give you an idea of how i was thinking of ending looh... under the cut for the sake of people who dont give af lol

i do know for a fact that i planned jimin and y/n to be endgame. it was going to be a long process of "will they or wont they" because of jimins underlying insecurities and y/n's inability to introspect would always be a hindrance in their relationship

i know i framed y/n as like a "really good person" but she really isnt perfect. i was gonna lay more groundwork to "expose" her for some of the fucked up shit she did in the past (i forgor 💀) and i was planning on exploring her internalized "holier than thou" complex

that was gonna be the second main conflict after the whole jimin vs tae conflict... kinda like a season 2 lol

BUT BACK TO SEASON 1... tae vs jimin lol so yeah tae releases that slander video on jimin and he runs away... y/n is supposed to have a big altercation with jin and make him release a statement proving jimin's innocence... jin ofc says no and y/n + jimin (+kook on the side) have to figure out a way to improve jimin's public image

my initial idea was that he tries to pivot towards becoming a professional dancer and joining hoseok's crew... i was planning on introducing a new character (likely seungkwan haha gotta keep with the seventeen member cameos) who was gonna be like a PR manager... they'd make a youtube channel and post content about their dancers. not just their dances, but interviews, challenges, etc. just to "prove" jimin is the good guy or something.

on the side, the seungcheol/jeonghan/yoongi drama... yeah seungcheol gets dumped by y/n like an additional two times LOL and for funsies, jeonghan confesses his feelings for seungcheol to y/n (shocker) and its all very messy mwahahah (yeah they both end up sad in the end my bad). as for yoongi... OH BOY

so yeah he got rejected by y/n which RUINS his ego and he doesnt give up for a while. then he starts crushing on seungcheol (who previously had a crush on him lol) and it gets very messy but overall he gets called out on his power tripping ways and ends up alone at the end teehee (he was gonna get an epilogue scene where he goes to the club all drunk and shit and a younger guy hits on him but calls him "sir" after seeing his face properly lol)

as for jin/hoseok/namjoon... uhhh yeah 2seok dont end up strictly together... theyre both chaebols with fucked up senses of humor (they both enjoy playing with people like chess pieces) and jin gets super pissed when he finds out hoseok has been playing with HIM on the side. they have a heated argument that causes the collapse of bang ent (hoseok has more money/influence than him and essentially grabs the company off jin's hands) and BOOM friends to lovers to enemies to ???

oh and namjoon is there. uhhhh yeah he becomes jin's little puppet for a while. essentially namjoon spies on y/n for jin and breaks her trust. this further strains kook's mental state because he feels super guilty about everything. i was planning on kook being pro-joon and breaking y/n's heart, but i wasnt sure. it all depends on how i was feeling tbh LMAOOO sometimes i like making jungkook cry (all the time)

as for tae... yeah he wins LOL he's essentially the main antagonist (its not jin... surprise) but he actually succeeds in becoming a very popular pornstar. even when hoseok grabs the company, he keeps tae on their roster and tae becomes very rich. he continues trying to slander jimin but he eventually stops when hoseok forces him to stop (out of guilt? bribery? revenge? who knows lol)

umm back to jimin and y/n... yeah they get together blah blah y/n confesses first, jimin gets hurt a lot, y/n is bad at relationships (shes got bad interpersonal skills), they have a large argument where y/n accidentally dehumanizes jimin (ouch)... so many things. all that matters is that they do end up together... maybe not so happily, but they'll get there. i think.

SO YEAH THAT WAS SO MESSY idk how coherent this was... again like i said, i kinda write smaus on the go so a lot of these things arent necessarily canon. i only consider things canon when stuff gets posted, but again like u said thats probs never happening LOL but in the meantime, if u have more questions about any of the points listed above, lemme know!! i'll try my best to explain further (sobs i am so rusty at writing u dont even know) anyway blessings be upon ye!!

#PHEWWWW THIS WAS SO MESSY LOL IDK #looh was written in 2019 isnt that crazy #people have graduated from hs/college at this point!! FAWK #I GRADUATED FROM UNI!!! CRAZY TIMES!!!#textau3 #Anonymous #answered #sorry this took long btw lol i had to remember how to write (its hard)

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kamiko1234 · 4 months

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Heyaa!! I read your big brother arthur fic a while back and i haven't said it yet but: I LOVE YOUR WRITING! The way you write the characters is so on point like omg go off, You can really capture their personalities! (especially arthur)

So for the questions thing, Howsa bout 1, 4, 5, 10, 13 and 14? Really interested to kno about the fic! Will be waiting patiently for the next update ;)

-Trancy <3!

Thank you so much for the question, and thanks even more for the compliment ! I'm glad you enjoyed the fic. Tbh I was kinda nervous that I fucked up Arthur's characterisation in the Big Bro AU.. Anyway- onto the questions :

1: What inspired you to write the fic this way?

I was trying to capture Arthur as a character if he had grown up genuinly loved. If ya think about it, Arthur is a pretty affectionate guy ! He's almost fanatically loyal to Jeremiah and the Vatican by extention, and clearly wants to have friendships & bonds with people.

It would be cool to see how his personality developed if he got to develope all this by himself without any manipulation. That's also why he's so overprotective in the fic acctualy ! He's still the same brand of loyal and trusting as in canon, just this time it's to his friends and family and not the Vatican. He's also just as obsessive, but this time it's not with being a good exorcist/being a "knight in shinning armour" but with being a good brother and keeping those he loves safe !

4: What’s your favorite line of dialogue?

In the original fic ? "......... I won't allow them to pay for crimes they didn't commit. Even if I have to go against the entier order to do so." From chapter 2. This line is said by Arthur after he found out about the twin's father. I like it bc this shows the diffrences between canon and big bro Arthur really well. Also establishes that Arthur is loyal to people rather than institutions in this fic. If we talk abt the rewritte- the line has yet to be written and published 😅

5: What part was hardest to write?

Nothing rly, it all came to me pretty easily. But if I had to say one thing I'd say that I struggled quite a bit with the start of chapter 7 of the OG fic. Restarted that one quite a bit.

10: Why did you choose this pairing for this particular story?

I don't rly have any pairing for the fic in the romantic sense, as for the reason why I wrote it with an focus on Arthur & Rin ? They are my favs and I think they make a fun pair. I do plan on AngelLight happning in the rewritte tho (once I get off my hiatus) since I just like the ship. The two are cute together and Lewin is the best ship for Arthur imo.

13: What music did you listen to, if any, to get in the mood for writing this story? Or if you didn’t listen to anything, what do you think readers should listen to to accompany us while reading?

I don't rly listen to music to get into the mood for it tbh. I mostly write in short and inconsistent burst of inspiration or inclination to write smth about it. What I DO have however is a spotify playlist with songs that give me big bro Arthur vibes, here's the link if ya want to listen to it. I also have an unlisted YouTube playlist with some songs in it from an idea I had of Arthur singing the twins lullabies ! Rly it's just songs I could see big bro Arthur singing for Rin and YUkio, will props include the idea in the rewritte !

14: Is there anything you wanted readers to learn from reading this fic?

Nope. This fic is supposed to be harmless fun for all of us us. So, that conclused all the questions ! Again, thank you for sending an ask and I'm so glad you enjoyed the fic ^^ I'm trying to get off my hiatus and continue it since I rely enjoy the AU it's in. Ofcourse the fact still stands that if anyone (you included) has specific hdeacanons/wants to see a specific scenario in the fic you can tell me and I'll deffo try to include it it ^^

#blue exorcist #rin okumura #arthur auguste angel #ao no exorcist #arthur a. angel #big bro arthur au #fanfic ask game

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reverera · 1 year

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genshin 3.3 scara spoilers bc im crazy and literally CANT get my mind off of ghis shit

disclaimer i havent played through the patch but i HAVE read up on what i need to know and i probably wont be playing it for a while. im really pissed off. i don’t think this patch was given the respect and care it deserved.

my problem is literally this: things don’t add up. and not just in an annoying ‘something is off’ kind of way. no. in a blatantly misleading way, like the rug is being pulled from under my feet and i’m expected to stand there and let myself hit the ground. facts don’t line up. the timeline of events isn’t consistent. the characters involved and their motives don’t make sense in context.

before i keep going, i want to say this. i’m obviously giving the devs and writers their due credit. these jobs arent easy and, especially in a story with as many characters and moving parts as genshin, inconsistencies here and there are inevitable.

that’s NOT the issue here.

as u go back and read what we had on scara’s past before 3.3, ull start to see how confusing and contradictory the 3.3 version of events is from what existed in the aged notes on tatarasuna and the ‘husk of opulent dreams’ artifact set descriptions. note that this information on scara’s life, as well as scara’s overall design and personality, has been in development since the game began. his first appearance was during the unreconciled stars event. thats version 1.1. 3.3 feels like it’s telling a completely different story, some wacky dream version of what we first read about, and it’s… it’s bad. to the point where i was stunned by the amount of detail and clarity lost. i puzzled over why hoyo would make it harder for themselves like this. because that’s what this does- they had a timeline already. it fit into the overarching plot just fine. the added and altered details, like niwa, like dottore’s inexplicable presence literally everywhere, don’t contribute depth to the existing story. they don’t give us clarity. at all.

for example: the katsuragi/niwa being two separate people situation. it can be funny, sure, but yall. niwa was not in the notes. he didn’t exist before the irodori festival. and if the notes were a witness’ (kinjirou’s) record of what happened within the tatarasuna group during that time, why wasn’t their freaking superior and kunikuzushi’s closest friend mentioned in any of them, while a supposed nobody like katsuragi was? according to 3.3, niwa was one of the sources of scara’s betrayals… but the old notes heavily imply that the trigger was the murder of katsuragi. why was katsuragi’s conflict with nagamasa cheapened like this? literally what was the reason, aside from finding some way to drag dottore into it?

tbh i personally believe that there’s a chance katsuragi was always meant to be the trigger/kunikuzushi’s closest person/the one behind the unique brown-haired npc character. katsuragi was too involved in kunikuzushi’s life and the incident at the furnace to be just some guy, while niwa… barely makes an appearance before 3.3. i wonder what the reason was for bringing niwa so high up in importance. just because he’s a kaedehara? (honestly i’d assumed katsuragi was the kaedehara) btw, if scara wanted revenge for niwa ‘leaving’… why did he ultimately spare the isshin art along with amenoma? why did he even wipe out the other sword arts, like- if we take these events to be the truth, what purpose did that serve him? am i missing something here?

‘he was erased from everyone’s memory’ reads to me like a cheap excuse to get away with being inconsistent. “oh the timeline is just fucky” no. time and memories can be really interesting themes to explore… but not when they’re misused at the expense of the characters involved.

i know a lot of people came out of 3.3 enjoying it. and that’s fine. i’m not coming at yall.

through my understanding, tho, it’s obvious that this is not what was originally intended for scaramouche. it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. he was (is) a beautiful character… he deserved attention and care. he deserved his story faithfully told.

did the individual(s) who initially created and helped develop scaramouche leave the company? did the new writers hired for sumeru not have enough information? did they decide to just say fuck it and do their own thing? did they dislike what was established for scara before? was it management meddling with the creative process? was it crunch and an impossible deadline? was it some lazy way of tying up loose threads for the next act? was it spite? is there more to it? i think it must be a mix of multiple things.

doesn’t matter now. all i know is i don’t care for whatever it is. it’s already been difficult to find the energy to play through the story given how depressing sumeru was for me in general, and this definitely didn’t help. i’m going to be here blissfully creating my own content following the original sources and ignoring this patch ❤️

anyway who will even read thjs far thanks if u did i guess

#katsukunis i need yalls support #im rly goin thru it #katsukuni #i didnt even go into kuni kabukimono being very obviously queer and trans #conveniently many of the details that were butchered or omitted had to do with this very particular aspect of his experience #just an overall disconnect with who scaramouche is and the beauty of his journey #but hey u can call me crazy if u want idgaf #@

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rielzero · 3 months

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I can't find any concrete information on any of the main companions ages, but given that most headcanons put ages pretty close to each other, I might just make my own headcanon on the ages, just so that If age is mentioned in my comic I can be specific. This is me just going off from my own interpretation of interactions and supposed life experience. Please know I am not an expert and my opinion may be flawed, weeeh. I might miss vital information.

Astarion: 200+, immortal. it would be inconsistent to assume he was with Cazador exactly 200 years, it could've been 197 for example, or 202, we simply don't know the exact amount. The dates in the game and grave are unclear, some sources state Astarion is 350, while others say he is 239... I think Astarion would be the kind of guy who avoids giving you his exact age, either due insecurity or simply because he doesn't know anymore. Elves stop aging physically for a while around 20, so he might've been much older than 39 at death.

Gale: 30-35? I'm picking 34. He looks pretty young, 29 wouldn't be too far fetched? greying hair early is genetic. His speech pattern and expressed experience within life makes me think 33 or 34 is a safe bet. Tara and family keep urging him to have kids obsessively, so mid thirties makes sense.

Karlach: 28-32 Suppose 29 fits best. Karlach mentions she was ''a kid'' when she was given to Zariel, so she was either 18-19 when she worked for Gortash, and she focally expresses her pent-up ness with her sexuality in the hells, I think she must've at least have had some relationship experiences in Baldur's gate before Gortash ruined her life. She was enslaved by Zariel for 10 years.

Lae'zel: 24. Stat! Most folks say She's 20-22, but I think 24 would be closer. She's young, but also somewhat more experienced in life. As for social situations and awkwardness, that may be more a cultural difference, in her culture kids get trained from a really young age. They kill each other as a culling too, so not much of a childhood to go on there.

Shadowheart: 48-50 I'm sticking to 48. As a half-elf, her appearance stops aging beyond 20 for a while, she sounds more experienced in life, but often lacks memory to fill in the gaps to why. Which explains some of her behavior and interactions with other characters. She comes off both young / older at times due this. If you look at her mother and father's appearances, I'd say 10 year old Shadowheart was stolen by Shar's cult. So her mother must've been stuck there for about 30+ years. If her mother was 30 when shadowheart was 10, then she would be in her sixties, which matches her appearance. But this is just my guess. Wyll: 24-35 Oh? I think he's 29 tbh. From what I've seen, Wyll had the widest range of age guesses from others. People put him either close to Gale's age, or much closer to Lae'zel's guessed age. I think he's closer to Karlach's age, so I'm sticking with that. Wyll has a lot of life experience- he's been super busy, but he's mostly been on his own since 17. It's not super clear to me for when Wyll went out as blade of frontiers if he had made much friends on the road- I think he just went from place to place or wherever Mizora sent him to, so he didn't stick around anywhere for too long? He's socially confident, but not used to being around a variety of personalities for too long maybe? He tries to see the good in everyone because that's his default. He's a good guy! But he's also nuanced as a monster hunter. (Else Astarion would be dead the second he joins, lol.) Edit: Wyll is confirmed to be 24! He became a warlock at 17, and his origin intro mentions he was exiled 7 years ago, which means he's 24 during the start of the game.

Halsin, Jaheira's Minthara's and Minsc ages are pretty much confirmed, all being older than the main companions. Minsc is a bit of an odd case, given that he gets frozen in stone(?) Every once in a while so he can come back. Jaheira mentions that he does not mentally process that the world around him changes, he thinks people don't change as a result. Minthara's life experience has been influenced by with her culture, but she also mentions she's been around for a WHILE, same as Halsin. Halsin is not super familiar with city life, which surprised me personally. Druid been around for a while but cities ain't for him.

#headcanons #these are just headcanons #bg3 #bg3 companions #bg3 companions ages

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utilitycaster · 2 years

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Hey :) So, since you said we could ask nicely (you don't have to answer if you'd rather not, I understand completely if that's the case) I was just curious if your feelings about the encounter with Otohan changed at all now with the new ep and if so how and why, or on the other hand if there is another way of achieving this bit of story progression you'd have preferred over the fight for it. I'm still....a bit torn on it all, especially on the intentions behind how the encounter was designed, so I'd really appreciate another perspective.

No, absolutely ok to ask! I'm going to write something longer this evening about my feelings on the whole (in short: good episode overall! Some opportunity to do a bit of unpacking, a smidgeon of resolution re: Treshi, and some interesting lore for Chetney, FCG, and Ashton! does not really help my ongoing issues with the campaign but did not introduce new ones so much as continue to expose the existing ones and, if Laudna stays dead, might even put us on a path to fixing some others...but I fully respect people who have decided to not keep up.) But with regards to the encounter:

I would like to introduce you to the text replacer extension I downloaded yesterday and which I will not be changing:

Now: I absolutely respect the appearance of a powerful enemy who nearly kills the party and disappears, I even understand making them extremely powerful, since I know this was an intention for Lorenzo but the Nein were able to kill him more quickly than Matt intended. Otohan's mechanics are ridiculous, but like...just as I agree with Brennan's choice to have a curb-stomp battle when Patia and Laerryn came upon a comparatively low-level character...so do I agree that yeah, if Otohan is super-powerful, then sure, she can be super powerful and near TPK the party. I still can't entirely make a fair call on Matt's intent (were they supposed to go into this encounter? was he trying to warn them against it? was he leaving it fully up to chance, which isn't bad at all but is a weird pivot given the plotting of the rest of the campaign so far) so I'll hold off on that, but it's a relatively small misstep in a vacuum; it's the surrounding issues of the campaign that have me side-eyeing it harder than perhaps I would otherwise.

I think the core of my problems with the actual encounter are:

Otohan is boring as fuck. She has no personality other than megalomania and zeal. Like we know what she's doing, but we don't know why and I, at least, do not care. When I say she talks like a Marvel Villain I mean it. And if your plot is "vast conspiracy", you really need to make the person at the top compelling.

The structure and Otohan's behavior were extremely inconsistent. She started by knocking people out but not taking death saves...then taking death saves midway through. She did not make it clear what she wanted from Imogen until like four rounds in, after she'd killed Orym. Imogen did not start experiencing that storm until round 5. Like, I want to be crystal clear: if Otohan's opening move was to outright kill Ashton, and she just took death saves the whole time? I'd be cool with it. If Imogen had been getting the vague storm feeling from the start and had the opportunity to give in earlier? I'd be cool with it. I like character permadeath in my stories. I do not mind a near TPK. But this felt like it was very clumsily engineered into a highly specific scenario.

I alluded to this in my tags, and I can't find the tweet in question now, but someone tweeted something to the effect of "me, realizing this is Matt showing Imogen her powers like he showed Yasha" and Matt liked said tweet and for real, if I hadn't seen that? I think I would have been about 500% more normal about the last episode although tbh this episode hammers home that yeah, that was at least part of the point, and uh, fuck that. Because here's the thing: it's fine, I guess, if you have a bonus homebrew ability for a character they are unaware of that they can activate in extreme circumstances. But there were no hints thereof, and one of the following seems to be true:

it's stress related, which means either it's kind of vague mechanically (usually not great; see my complaints about the Trusted Ally mechanic for FCG's subclass), or it's explicitly "one or more of your party members is dead" or similar (ok by me, actually!)

HOWEVER, if you decide to showcase this ability you homebrewed for one person - without warning or prior hints - by killing other party members (particularly in the poorly signaled way as above)? For real, fuck that. I find myself in the awkward position of, for various reasons, wanting Laudna's death to stand...but also, if my character were killed off as a means to show another character how to use their cool new powers, it does not matter how much I trust the DM; we would be having pretty serious words because this is fundamentally, in my opinion, a profound misstep. There's "not everyone gets the same number of presents" and then there's this.

I think, to be honest, it's fine to have this ability around, and to show it during combat... but particularly because it's just a bonus ability? just wait until an opportune time through natural gameplay. If it doesn't come up for four levels? It doesn't come up. It's also...not terribly hard to arrange for a lethal combat that is more gracefully done, or even to have played Otohan in a less erratic and boring way, and I'm not sure why specifically Matt did so (nor do I think such speculation will be terribly productive.)

Edit: Forgot to put this here amidst all the criticism but: having Otohan leave at the top of this episode was the right call, credit where credit is due.

#answered #widogasts-web-of-dunamancy #critical role spoilers #cr discourse

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antiloreolympus · 1 year

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5 Anti LO Asks

(Note: All of these asks are before episode 206 (Season 2 finale) so some may be dated.) 1. it's always privileged ppl who are LO's biggest fans because they can see themselves in persephone's shoes :/ meanwhile nymphs are actively looked down upon and its written off as "funny" or "deserved" (minthe deserved better)

this comic sucks lol

2. I see a lot of people say the early art was more detailed but tbh it really wasn't? the quality was very loose and inconsistent, but what made it interesting was it was more fantasy like with strong composition and use of color/contrast (which LBR here, it's a few more swipes of a brush, it not that much more work if at all) which makes it's decline into such flat, static poses and colors all the more jarring. Her style has if anything become more complicated technical-wise and its worse for it.

3. What’s confusing to me about Eris’ design (wow she really only showed up for two episodes huh) is why does she look like a off brand harpy? Why do the rest of her family just look like people but she’s the random one out? Hell, why in general does it seem Rachel’s only extent into anything beyond boxy man/tiny and curvy woman is at best wings and maybe some horns? She clearly struggles with same faces/bodies yet does nothing to tell anyone apart. It’s so weird and lazy.

4. See it's funny because Rachel is framing Apollo as bad for loving his mother and being loyal to her, but Hades is framed as good for being so loyal to his mother who quite literally gave up trying to protect him and happily had TWO MORE kids with his father while he was imprisoned in his stomach. I get their situations are different and all but Rhea has done nothing to deserve such unquestioned loyalty and love while we're supposed to hate Leto because Rachel said so.

5. So with the new episodes - canonically 10 yrs have passed right? So Persephone should be 30 now (cause I think the last time we saw her she was 20?) - but she looks and acts the same? (Actually I take it back she seems to have regressed character wise) And yes, I know there's that thing RS set up where Persephone stops aging so she looks the same (so she doesnt have to draw Persephone any different / older I guess) but after 10 yrs we see her.. Basically mope around, talk to a tree of Hades and act like the same teen she was yrs ago. She does start to take ownership of her actions then Immediately pulls back on the statement with a very haunty look on her face as she states "well its not All my fault" which semes to imply she doesnt think she should be punished for the murder she commited?? And then she goes on to talk about how she thinks her green hands are a turn off as though this is her biggest concern? And later we see her mope about then act excited about her ears getting pierced so it doesnt seem like shes taking her job of regulating spring very seriously. And she asks zeus to send a letter to Hades but doesn't ask to see her aging mortal mother? Not even the nymphs seem concerned about Demeters whereabouts cause their too busy fawning over the idea of persephone having sex with Hades At Last (which is implied when they give her a condom - like props for trying to promote safe sex but still).

Things that seemed to be big deals also no longer seem to hold weight? Like minthe and Daphne are fixed no problem? As far as I know (I haven't seen the fp chapters) We don't even get to see persephones reaction to Daphne being turned into a tree nor minthes reaction to being non-plantified? Shes just chilling and is her usual sassy self?? Shes not complaining to Zeus that shes stuck with the woman who almost killed her??

Aside from that we have Apollo and Artemis being crowned and Hebe looks lile a carbon copy of her mother...

And I'm gonna actually push back on that earlier anon ask - yes techncially Artemis could have asked for anything but I doubt Zeus would've followed through with Artemis' request if she had asked for persephones banishment to be lifted. Like it would be too easy an out for Persephone plot wise so I guess she banished herself? (Idk maybe Artemis knows he wouldn't do it and her self esteem is so low that this is the next best thing in her mind.) Like I think its the same reason why Apollo asked for Leto to... Be unbanished .... but didnt ask for Persephone to be made into his wife because I don't think that's something Zeus would have budged on despite saying they Could ask for anything, he means within limits that he set. Could he do it? Sure. Would he do it? Doubtful.

#anti lore olympus #anti lo #lore olympus critical #lo critical

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the-lark-ascending69 · 21 days

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Just finished reading Rebel Robin. I liked it for the most part, it has a lot of cool Robin Lore, but I feel it can be a bit inconsistent with other Robin Lore from the podcast and the show (both of which I feel are a lot more syncronized with each other than the book is). I feel like it ends on a way too optimistic note, in which Robin is happy as a rebellious loner, fully honest with herself and the world and knowing it's just a matter of time until she finds her people, while show Robin talks about secretly wanting to be normal and accepted, and believing no one would want to be close to her if they knew her secret. Podcast Robin, while still in a far earlier stage of teenage Robin angst, says the universe is telling her she's not supposed to have friends and that there's something rotten inside of her. Even by the end of the podcast, her conclussion is that she needs to do everything in her power to survive inside the system, even if that includes lying and cheating. Podcast Robin reaches the conclussion that blackmail is a valid way to fight for survival, which I think can be fitting with Show Robin, who was never pushed to that extreme but who was still clearly cynical about people. Book Robin is just too at peace, as if she got everything figured out. She's confident in ways show Robin and Podcast Robin aren't. I can see 15 years old Podcast Robin growing into 17 years old Show Robin, but I can't see Book Robin growing into Show Robin. Otherwise it would be like she went two years backwards in the span of two days because... she was kidnapped by russian soldiers? I don't know if that's the kind of thing that makes you want to be "normal and accepted".

I feel like book Robin wasn't lonely enough. She had like two best friends, danced with a girl at prom in front of everyone else... of course she's going to be confident. Of course she's not going to feel the need to be "normal and accepted". Book Robin abandons the idea of "camouflage" by the end in a way that podcast Robin doesn't, which is more consistent with show Robin. Show Robin isn't all that confident. She doesn't genuinely "not care", she just tells herself she doesn't.

Compare to:

Does this sound like Robin "my whole life has been one big error" Buckley? It sounds like she should be wayyyy past that! It sounds like the order of these events should be switched.

I have some thinking to do about this book. I thought it was fine, I liked the Robin Lore that didn't contradict itself, which is most of it tbh. Robin will quote Nietzche off the top of her head and I'll think "yeah, that makes sense". She knows from memory the etymology of random words and will talk about that during a discussion as if it were an actual argument. Robin also seems prone, in both the book and the podcast, to project her own feelings on other people (namely Barb and Tammy), which isn't something we see in the show (she IS older and more mature there), but it's not contradictory either. I liked her family, though I wish we'd got a bit more development about them. Near the beginning of the book, Robin asks her mom how come their family ended up in Hawkins, and her mom changed the topic, so I assumed there was some kind of emotional mother-daughter talk later in the book about how they wanted a safe and stable place to raise their daughter or something, but the talk never came. I liked Milton and Kate, especially Milton. Dash is a piece of shit. Mr. Hauser is good but he's better in the podcast.

I can't help to go back to the podcast, agh! It just feels so much more inspired. If i had to name the one piece of media that I think treated Robin's character with the most love and passion, it would be the podcast, no questions asked. It treats her with more love than the show, even, and I love show Robin, but the podcast is just... special. Podcast Robin got a better development in 6 episodes than book Robin did in 300 pages imo.

I know the book and podcast are both like semi-canon, but I will choose to consider the podcast to be above the book in terms of canon density. I wouldn't want to ignore the book because it provides interesting information on Robin's family, her plans to go to Europe, her friends and her feelings for Tammy Thompson, and if you want to write some very canon-accurate fanfic depiction of Robin, the book will certainly be helpful. Plus, it's just a good read, a good coming of age story. I do recommend it. But in areas where it contradicts the podcast, I would priorize the podcast as more strictly canon, not only because I think it's of higher quality (which I do), but because it's more aligned with show canon Robin.

Anyway, go listen to Surviving Hawkins, it's free on YouTube and Spotify I think, and it's amazing.

#rebel robin #robin buckley #rebel robin surviving hawkins #surviving hawkins #rebel robin podcast #i love that steve can only get a job because he's pretty lol that's all he's got in his resume #he only got hired at scoops because his manager thought his hair would attract girls

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tobi-smp · 2 years

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Sorry for sending this to you specifically but the thought of making my own post and being perceived terrifies me, and I also think you might have some interesting input on the matter?

How much do you think c!phil being the way he is, is a result of ""bad writing"" (I'd more call it inexperienced), and how much of it is him just being morally gray/not a good person/whatever you would call him at this point idk.

Because one one hand a lot of C!Phil to me feels like he's a prime example to some of the downsides of (mostly) improv role play. He only exists when he is being played and all the knowledge on him kept by the one playing him is only in his head. None of him is written down anywhere so he acts inconsistent and details are easily forgotten/reconnected. Its hard to figure out what c!Phil wants to say because it comes off as not even he knows what he wants — and not because of him, but what the writers want to do. There's no thought behind his actions, just an outside force dictating what he should do for plot or what would be funny in the moment.

I often wonder how different c!phil would be if he were kept track of like a dnd character, but tbh you could say that about anyone.

(personally I don't think this is a bad thing and the DSMP should be given leeway due to its nature as an unscripted roleplay, but I think it can lead to a lot of characters like c!phil)

But I feel all these things could also just be who c!Phil is. Is he an inconsistent person because he only parrots his ideals and doesn't truly believe them? Maybe he's so old and jaded he's forgotten where he's been and can't empathize with people suffering in ways he was able to overcome long ago. Maybe C!Phil is meant to be one side of the coin of attachment. He values people while C!Tommy (in his mind) over values things, seeing his views separate from C!Tommy's when in reality, they're two sides of the same coin, the thing C!Dream has been trying to distance himself from.

I There's so many cool and interesting angles you can infer from Phil's character depending who he interacts with and how — but none of it feels intentional. Is that just me? Is c!phil simply a product of how he's been handled by the story? Or is he just. Like That.

honestly, it's difficult to say what about a character is intentional or not.

I will say, phil's character has suffered the most over inconsistencies in the writing that aren't necessarily His Fault. the sbi dynamic was Fully Canon once, and then he was in character limbo for a long while after it wasn't.

someone like foolish was able to come in completely disconnected from anyone else on the server and then Built those connections thoughtfully, while phil was left scrambling trying to figure out What his connections to other characters were to try to build on shaky foundations that might move again.

we can say for Sure phil went through an awkward period where he was trying to figure out where his stance was supposed to be with other characters and where he had to be careful about what he said about his past while trying to establish his character, which was limiting considering just how interpersonal his central story arc is.

but at the same time, there are aspects to improv roleplay where the separation between the two doesn't matter as long as it's recognized as having happened. watching his scene between him and wilbur on the 16th its easy to see that phil was out of his depth. it was his first moments on the server and he was immediately dumped into the deep end of the pool. he was laughing, he was starting and stopping sentences without knowing where to go with them, and wilbur was so much Surer and Stronger in his delivery. which ultimately funneled phil's actions into giving wilbur what he wanted, in killing his son.

obviously we understand from an out of world perspective that this was due in no small part to phil's inexperience with roleplay, but this translates directly into phil's In Character Reaction as well. c!phil hasn't seen his son in years, he doesn't know what's going on, he didn't know how to help his son. stumbling, not knowing what to do in the face of wilbur's Absolute Certainty. it makes sense even if his choice was a Terrible one.

think about how dream's fixation on tommy in the early days was down to them both being active content creators that bounced well off of each other and how those interactions have permanently been tinted by current lore. the intentions behind what a character does and says matters less than what it tells us about that character, you know?

that said, while I Do think phil's character has suffered the most from retcons and shuffling behind the scenes, I Do genuinely think that things like his hypocrisy, stubbornness, and ignorance are written to be there Intentionally. whether that was his intent the entire time or he connected the dots himself later matters Less than what he does with it now.

either way, I think people are angry at c!phil right now because cc!phil wanted them to be. and I'm optimistic about his character moving forward.

#dream smp #philza #meta

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out-of-this-dimension · 3 years

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Hypothetically Rewriting Assault’s Story + Some General Assault Opinions

There’s a game my husband and I like to play when we watch a movie, play a game, or read a book that has a story that we don’t really enjoy or we enjoy certain parts of but not others. We look at things we’d keep and things we’d change and we build a story from there-- sort of like an AU but we don’t really go into the writing part, we just stick to theorizing and mapping a general story.

I decided to play that game with Star Fox. Not because I think Star Fox has a bad story but because sometimes I think the stories could have been handled better. Note: for the rewrite game, I only really look at story, even for video games, I don’t really look at gameplay mechanics, but I do understand those have a lot to do with story potential so I do take it in as a factor... I just don’t bother to “rewrite” the mechanics, if that makes any sense at all. Some of my list today will include boss encounters but I wouldn’t necessarily say those are mechanic-related... more like “event-related”.

I’ve mused a bit in the past about rewriting Adventures and Command and I do have plans to do a mock up of an Adventures remake eventually. However, today I was thinking about how I would go about handling an Assault re-write in particular. Much like Command and Adventures, I don’t have any beef with the core story but I do think there’s a few things that could’ve been better about Assault’s storyline-- like they had good ideas rolling but they didn’t quite refine them.

Under the cut because SUPER long.

My basic feelings on Assault are pretty positive. I think the game is generally just fun and I like that it feels like the natural progression from SF64. I liked getting to see planets we haven’t seen since the N64 era in better graphics and I liked seeing Star Wolf return. I also just thought the aparoids were neat enemies.

Generally speaking, though, when it comes to Assault, I think it suffers from the thing it tries to push the most-- the story. I think a lot of people get caught up in thinking the story is better than it is because it’s the first game since SF64 that really follows the same Star Fox vibe without retelling the Lylat Wars. Don’t get me wrong, the overall plot is great but the execution and pacing are... wonky. Certain characterizations also take a hit in some regards but no one really talks about that when Command exists. That’s something we’ll talk about later on with this post.

That being said, Assault really does have a lot good going for it. An absolute banger of a soundtrack, some great dialogue, a neat story synopsis, the introduction of cool characters like Panther and Beltino (who existed but was always off-screen), and just good levels.

So, here’s what I would add, I suppose, if I were to somehow have the ability to rewrite Assault. Originally I had this in paragraph form, but I’ve made it into more of a list under topic segments with main points bolded for your viewing pleasure. Some of these points might be considered nitpicky and while I do understand that yes, this is a game about space animals, I do hold the developers in high enough regard to make a game with a continuity that makes sense.

The Story Changes

- Reduce Pigma’s storyline in Assault. This is the biggest one for me because a bulk of the plotline feels like a giant chase to just get at Pigma and it feels like it derails from the actual plot with the aparoids. We only go to Sargasso because of Pigma. We only go to Fichina and then back to Meteo again, because of Pigma. That’s 3 levels in a 10 level game devoted to just tracking down Pigma and chasing him. While it makes the build up to fighting Pigma kind of nice, I personally feel like the plot could be reduced to 2 levels. If Assault overall was a longer game, I could see them making it 3 levels. Overall, though, in its current state, I feel like the side plot overstays its welcome and the aparoids promptly get shoved to the side in favor of “Oh no, we gotta get to Pigma!” And I get the main motive here is to show how the aparoids affect people and because of the build up, it does a good job at showing how utterly terrifying the aparoids are. But it’s still too long given the length of Assault’s story. The only alternative to this is make Assault longer, which... honestly, it should be.

- Revise the scene with Tricky. I’m obviously not well-versed in dinosaur biology but I’m pretty sure dinos didn’t grow that fast from what studying I HAVE done. And why is he suddenly king now? Did his parents die? He seems not affected by this at all? Like it’s a funny scene with him, Fox, and Krystal, but it’s odd if you really look at it. Give us, as players, more context because I’m still not even sure what happened to make Tricky suddenly the leader and... big. As a note, you’re gonna hear me gripe a lot about the Sauria level in this post.

- The Star Wolf + Peppy sacrifice is a low effort way to raise tension/stakes and then cop out. Oldest trick in the book, imo, is to act like you’re going to kill off important characters only for them to be alive miraculously. And let’s face it, as an audience we all know they aren’t going to kill those characters because it’s Nintendo and those characters are too beloved. I would’ve forgiven them for only doing this with Peppy or Star Wolf, but when you tack them both together and throw in the fact they make it seem like you’re going to have to kill General Pepper too... yeah, it’s just a bit much of the same trope over and over again. I wanted to put a note in here about how I’m fine with the Great Fox being “sacrificed” but overall, it needed to return to the series because of it’s icon status, but I think that’s more of a gripe at Command instead of Assault.

- Keep Pigma alive. This will conflict with a point I have later on about the game consistently having characters cheat death for easy drama points but with Pigma, I would’ve kept him fully alive... but maybe with some physical damage from the aparoids. I understand he’s semi-alive in Command and tbh I don’t know where I stand on that. Why keep Pigma alive, you might ask? I feel like his character has a lot more potential than being “just the greedy guy”. Like he’s got good potential future villain material for future games and... if I’m honest? I just don’t see Nintendo wanting to keep Pigma dead so why even bother killing him off? They couldn’t even commit to him being dead in Command anyways so it seems very moot.

- Bring Bill and Katt back. Assault is acts a bit like a big reunion of all of our SF64 favorites but our two favorite side characters are suspiciously missing. Wouldn’t Bill be out on the front lines fighting against Andrew in the beginning? Or maybe back in Katina? And wouldn’t Katt inevitably show up in the midst of the invasion, maybe to pointedly check in on Falco?

- Bring Andrew back for the final fight. I think Andrew being defeated early into the game is fine overall but I think bringing him back in for a reunion final fight against the aparoids would serve to really solidify that it’s really everyone vs the invading aparoid force. It would show that not only is Star Wolf willing to put aside their differences but so is basically everyone in the Lylat System in the name of survival. Imagine the Venomians and Cornerians working together against an aparoid fleet, giving Star Fox and Star Wolf time to attack the queen? I just think it’d be neat and it’d open up the potential for some fun banter mid-mission. I do understand that quite a few people consider Andrew canonically dead after Assault but personally, I feel that his defeat left his fate questionable (I’m a staunch believer that unless there’s a body, they’re probably alive, especially for Nintendo games because, again, they never like to kill people off) so him returning in Command never really bothered me.

- In general, reconsider some of the character portrayals. Unfortunately, when a series has a different studio for each game, character portrayals will inevitably have inconsistencies. While I give Namco a lot of credit for putting in oodles and oodles of detail into the game (particularly the levels), I think they failed in their portrayal of Fox, at the least, and Wolf is a considerable offender as well. While it’s obvious that Fox in Adventures was effectively modeled off of Sabre even in terms of personality, Rareware was at least able to justify Fox’s newfound jaded attitude with the passing of many years and a distinct lack of steady income, resulting in the team being in disarray. Assault’s Fox is a stark contrast to his cynical interpretation with seemingly no explanation other than maybe “Oh, I have more money and a gf, maybe I should behave myself”. As if the sudden change in personality wasn’t random, Fox also just seems very blah, like a blank slate stereotypical shooter game protagonist dude with little to no emotion. Wolf is less obvious but gets slated into a mentor-like role midway through the game and ends up in a respectful rivalry with Fox... which there’s nothing inherently wrong with that except for it happening abruptly (and, I mean, Peppy is right there). But I take less issue with this and more of an issue with the fact that there’s an entire level establishing that Wolf now runs a crime den with effectively what seems to be an army and no one bats an eye at this. He doesn’t even call on them to help with the aparoids. Did they all die when the aparoids attacked Meteo? Are they safe somewhere else? Where do they go? How was Sargasso able to operate without the CDF being on their doorstep with warrants for arrests?

- Don’t kill all the dinosaurs. A bit of a dramatic statement but the ending screen that showed all the damage to Sauria really bothered me. While I understand that the dinosaurs had less of a chance against the aparoids than a more technology-focused society like Corneria, I was a bit disappointed that the decision was made to just state that a lot of tribes had been wiped out. I know this could easily be retconned in a future game and I feel like it should be. “But why, Amalia? Why are you disappointed by that?” 1) It’s a little too grimdark for my tastes. 2) The fact it all happened off-screen felt very hand-wavy. And 3) It brings into question the entire point of Adventures. Why did we bother to save this planet if it was going to be reduced to rubble and ash 1 year later? Where were the Krazoa in all of this? Why did they not make an appearance at all to try to stop the invasion with their alleged powers? It just raises too many weird questions and I feel like Namco didn’t think it through too much. Which I mean, sure. Family, kiddo game. I’m not asking for bigbrain plot and lore but I’m squinting at this bit because it does feel very contrary to the lore from the previous game.

- Make the aparoids more relevant. As nice as it is to have a random bad guy from another galaxy, I feel like there was more that could be done with the aparoids in terms of their origins. Tiny things, mind you, not huge revelations. Off the top of my head, they could have been tied into Krystal’s backstory to help alleviate some of the complaints that she was too random to be added to the series’ main cast. Alternatively, they could have been a product of Andross or even a weapon prototype from Corneria that fled the lab (I actually thought the game was leaning in that direction for a bit then just Nothing Happened). I get that the vagueness of their origins leaves room for people to speculate and speculation is nice but... when you leave too many things unknown, it starts to feel less like giving fans room to interpret and more like just doing random things for the sake of it. I think a lore tidbit here or there would work wonders for the aparoids instead of leaving them as just borg/zerg clones.

Level-Based Changes

- Add either Aparoid RedEye or Aparoid General Scales as a boss to Sauria. Given that this level mysteriously lacks a boss, which is just weird compared to the other levels, I think that they had the opportunity to add something cool to go along with the cinematic feel they were going for with Assault. Assault’s cutscenes do play in a movie-like fashion and it’s clear they’re trying to make the game as epic as possible. It’s a shame they had so much fodder for a great boss here but they failed to go through with it. Alternatively: Add a Krazoa-Aparoid fusion. Why? Because Star Fox is about cool epic sci-fi and that would be cool epic sci-fi incarnate.

- Add a boss to the Aparoid Homeworld Level, aka the penultimate level. Another one I felt was personally weird that there was no “final defense system” to challenge the team. Would be cool to do an aerial battle over the aparoid planet with some giant flying aparoid.

- Be kinder to Sauria. The level had some good homages but overall was incredibly small and incredibly short. It felt like a bone tossed to Adventures fans but was not entirely true to the setting built by Rareware. I’m... not even sure where the Sauria level is supposed to take place? I presume it’s Walled City but it doesn’t really have the same color scheme or aesthetic? Also where is my revised Adventures music? Why do all the other levels get it but Sauria doesn’t?

- Put some of those funky items from the multiplayer into the main campaign. I don’t know why some of these things, items especially, were omitted unless it was purely due to time constraints. I remember having missile launchers and jetpacks in the multiplayer and was a bit sad that they were not in the main campaign. Retuning the levels and adding those in would be a nice breath of fresh air for the more tedious on-foot missions.

- More levels. Self-explanatory. Still sad we didn’t get the Zoness or Titania levels in the single-player mode.

I think all of the above changes would improve the game, though I recognize all of this is being said 16 years later after lots of time to contemplate Assault’s weaker points. I’m not entirely certain how long Star Fox Assault took to develop but given that there’s obviously quite a bit scrapped from the game (an entire arcade mode was scrapped as well), I’m going to assume that the studio felt pressured to shove the game out the door and into the hands of customers. It’s a shame, really, because I think a little bit longer in the oven would have done a lot of good. Still, the product we got was good in its own right and a game that many people look back on fondly. I haven’t gotten to replay it in years but I hope to quite soon.

You might wonder why I bothered typing this all out and I guess my point was this-- Assault was great but it wasn’t perfect, and while a lot of other games fall under a crushing amount of scrutiny, Assault seems to dodge it. And don’t get me wrong-- I adore Assault. But given that not many takes exist out there about rewriting it, I decided to give it a shot. For variety’s sake.

I do want to a mock up of a revised Assault story, which I think I will get to work on after completing this while all my ideas are still fresh in mind. So stay tuned for that sometime in the near future. I will also be doing my Adventures mock up at some point but probably not for a little bit as I do wanna focus some of my free time on actual fic-writing.

Anyways, if you stuck around this long, thank you for reading! Have any changes you’d like to see to Assault if you could time machine your way back to the early 2000s? Feel free to post in the comments, I’d love to read your ideas!

#star fox assault #starfox assault #super long #queue'd

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iamanartichoke · 3 years

Text

[please blacklist spoiler tags: #loki tv series spoilers, #loki series spoilers, #loki spoilers]

Yes, I did just watch episode 2 at 5:30 in the morning.

No, I am not sorry. Not at the moment, although when I inevitably crash later this afternoon, I will be.

Just some very, very quick - and scattered and messy - thoughts: That is a straight up lie; they’re definitely scattered and messy but not very quick at all.

Under the cut for spoilers and length.

I’m going to start with Loki’s characterization. My honest opinion is that Loki’s overall characterization feels like a fic characterization. He definitely is not Avengers Loki, like, at all. I don't know if Tom just, like, forgot how to play that Loki or ...?? That, or Loki was so much more mind-controlled than we realized and getting hulk-smashed just completely reset him back to zero but also fucked him up a little bit and affected his personality, kind of like how some people completely develop weird new personality quirks after a traumatic brain injury.

… yeah, I think that’s where I’m gonna land for now. TV series!Loki feels like a more-or-less canon version of Loki, but if that Loki got hit in the head really hard and now he’s just a little bit fucked up but overall no worse for the wear. Which - it may be that it’s so early in the morning, but that’s actually really fucking funny to me, lmao. God, I kill me. It’s not funny.

No, but, that’s pretty much how I feel. He’s ooc but he’s also ic, and the reason I’m not particularly bothered by the inconsistency, for lack of a better word, is because that’s what pretty much every fic Loki already feels like to me? (Including my own, so I’m not, like, saying that in a derogatory way.) Which is why I say Loki feels like a fic!Loki and to try to explain it better - there is always, for me, a little suspension of disbelief that I employ when I read fic. The reason for that is because the context, the plot, and the dynamics of the fic are usually pretty different than what we ever get in canon, so it becomes a matter of taking film!Loki and, like, bending him a bit in order to fit him into the perimeters of the fic.

The result ends up being that I don’t see the exact Avengers!Loki or TDW!Loki, and thus by definition the portrayal is ooc, but the version that I do see feels like a genuine extension of the canon version, possessing enough of Loki’s overall traits and characteristics that he feels authentic, albeit a bit pretzeled for the new context.

I honestly think that’s something that’s unavoidable, just due to the fact that in fic - and now, in this series - there are a lot more variables at play than there are in the films, wherein Loki is not just a supporting character but also the villain/antagonist and is therefore very limited in what he does/what the narrative allows him to do. When those limitations are taken away, what are we going to see? Probably a lot of different things, and yeah, a lot of them are going to feel a little ooc. And, like in fic, even if the characterization mostly lands, there are definitely bits and pieces (some fics more than others lean this way) where the author didn’t stick the landing or got carried away or otherwise probably forgot for a while that they were writing Loki, not their own OC.

That’s the point where it strays into cringe territory for me (and where the ‘heh, he’s Loki but with a brain injury’ aspect comes in), but while I had to consciously decide to just ignore those moments, overall the tone in this episode felt a bit more balanced between the new, the old, and the cringe, and less whiplash-y from the beginning of the episode to the end.

… I have no idea if that makes sense, but what I’m basically saying is that while I am enjoying this version of Loki, I do recognize all of the ways he’s ooc but, unlike how I feel about Ragnarok!Loki, the ooc-ness feels genuine and unavoidable rather than just a fundamental and careless misunderstanding of the character altogether. In other words, I feel like any ooc-ness here is happening despite the writers taking care to do their best, and isn’t just a result of Loki being lazily written by a person or persons who just doesn’t want to bother with him at all.

Again, I don’t know if that makes sense, but fuck it, there we are and I’m moving on.

I liked all of the little details, including again, things that felt straight out of fic, like Loki asking Mobius why he has the jetski magazine. (Also, if any of my thorki friends read this, was I the only one who noticed that when we see Loki reading the magazine, it just happens to be open to a page with a picture featuring a jet skier who looks like Thor? l.m.a.o.)

Loki interrupting things to explain the difference between illusions vs the other power (I can’t remember which one, off hand, and if I stop writing to go look it up I will lose my train of thought and not finish this) was great, but his overall input and contributions to the missions inspired very mixed feelings for me. On the one hand, I loved that the narrative, via Loki, is reminding us of all these things that he’s capable of that the films generally left out or brushed aside or ignored - but, every time he spoke, he was met with eye rolls and sighs and just a general feeling of “someone please shut this guy up” and I didn’t like the narrative treating him that way.

But also, it’s understandable bc none of the people on his team are actually on his team. None of them want him there (story of Loki’s fucking life), none of them trust him, and none of them are particularly interested in hearing what he has to say. So it’s like, I understand why they reacted the way they did, and I don’t think their reactions are meant to support an overall narrative undermining of Loki’s skills and input - but, the tone is hard to read for me bc I am very defensive and protective of Loki. I can’t quite determine the line between the TVA agents being unreliable narrators (ie, they’re annoyed by Loki bc of who he is to them, but that doesn’t mean the audience is supposed to feel the same) and the TVA agents validating that Loki is just being a nuisance (and, thus, the audience is supposed to feel the same).

That is, I know how I am consuming the narrative (that they’re unreliable narrators), but I’m not sure if that’s how tptb are intending for me to consume the narrative - and I guess it doesn’t really matter, but it’s worth mentioning.

In general, I really liked, again, Loki existing in his own space and watching the way he carried himself. I especially found it interesting that his hands were almost always in his pockets - for one thing it's a stance I tend to imagine him taking often in fic, but also it’s kind of a weird choice bc pockets don’t seem to be a thing in Asgardian clothing. It makes me feel like Loki is the kind of person who never knows what to do with his hands but is always conscious of them, as is common among anxious and self-conscious people, and I just find that relatable on a weird level.

I am really kinda torn on Mobius in this episode; when not interrogating Loki, he’s much less antagonistic toward Loki and therefore I’m more inclined to take-him-or-leave-him but I’ll go ahead and take him I guess. Yet at the same time, bc he’s not interrogating Loki he’s also not trying to put on a show for Loki and when you take that away, he really doesn’t seem to like Loki at all. It supports that Mobius only wants what Loki can do for him and doesn’t actually particularly care about him as a person, which is fine and more or less what I figured, but it contributes to me not really being able to decide how I feel about him in general. Idk, though, I kinda like their dynamic? Like I want them to end up friends?

Regardless, Tom and Owen have amazing chemistry and it’s really funny to me bc (not to be a jerk) I honestly didn’t know Owen Wilson could act. Like, I’ve never seen him in a role where he wasn’t just playing Owen Wilson. So for him to not only be playing Mobius so well but also having such chemistry and a sense of holding-his-own against Tom Hiddleston is like, color me surprised but pleasantly so.

I like B-15 a lot, even though she obviously hates Loki, so idk why I like her but I do. I like Renslayer less, but meh. (Side note - when I was in undergrad in Syracuse, I took the Amtrak from Syracuse to Boston and back more than a few times, for reasons that aren’t relevant, and that route always had a layover at Albany-Rensselaer and every single time I see Renslayer’s name, I want to call her Rensselaer instead.) Shout out to the guest appearance by Casey, sorry Loki stole your juice lmfao.

The moments from the trailer that were very cringe were less so in context (though still kinda cringe, tbh). I think we’ve seen most of the content from the trailers in the first two episodes now, though, which means going forward, it’s going to be like 95% previously unseen material (aside from the brief apocalyptic shots and so forth).

One thing I fucking loved was how Loki, reading about Ragnarok, was visibly affected and even teared up a bit, and you could tell he was in his feels about it, but then later when Mobius expresses sympathy, Loki is just like, “Uh huh, very sad, but anyway.” It was a subtle (well maybe not that subtle) but effective way to remind us that what Loki presents to other people is more often than not a mask and he keeps his true feelings close to the chest. It makes last week’s breakdown have even more of an impact, I think, bc clearly Loki was at the end of his rope to allow himself to show that much raw emotion and vulnerability, but also - for me - there’s a niggling little doubt there that wasn’t there before, in that there was probably more performance in it than I thought.

By which I mean, I think his reaction to the film of his life when he was alone was genuine but, while I previously thought his admission to Mobius later was also genuine, I now think was probably half genuine and half performative. I know others already figured that out, but I’m a little slow and, also, I don’t mind changing my opinion and interpretation from week to week.

Along the same lines, I wasn’t exactly surprised to see that Loki is “undercover” in the TVA, but it was nice to see it acknowledged fairly quickly. Not sure I buy that Loki wants to overthrow and rule the TVA - it’s still a little too “Loki only wants a throne” for me, but again, just because that’s what he told the variant doesn’t mean that’s actually what he’s after.

And, finally, I like the variant, I love Loki’s reaction to seeing her, and while I realize that the show has acknowledged Loki’s gender fluidity and we’re meant to assume that Lady Loki (I guess? Not sure if we’re going with that or not here) is Loki, I saw a theory somewhere about how this is actually not Loki-Loki, but - I wanna say her name Sophie but that’s the actress, again I can’t go look it up bc I will lose my train of thought - but it’s a character who is similar to Amora and who was created by Loki and models herself as Loki but she’s actually someone else.

Ugh I can’t remember the details of the theory, but I am kinda going with it bc I don’t think that Loki would look so - not surprised but just kind of “oh, well, I wasn’t expecting that” if he were seeing the female version of himself. Like, he doesn’t seem to recognize her the way I assume he would recognize himself, male or female. Not only does that make me feel like she’s actually someone else, but also not recognizing her as the female version of himself doesn’t necessarily mean Loki doesn’t recognize her at all. He may very well recognize her as this other Amora-similar character and, if so, I really want to see how that character fits with MCU Loki (as I think she’s a comic book character but, again, I’d have to go back and find that theory).

Edit: I found a version of it here.

Overall score, B-. Mostly solid, but needs moar Loki breakdowns and tears. (That's just me, don't fucking judge me.) Also, I really hate that we have to wait a week between episodes. I wish they were following Netflix’s method of dropping the entire season at once but, then again, if they did that, I’m not sure any of us would survive.

I gotta get ready for work and I deleted and rewrote so much of this and it still seems nonsensical to me, lmfao fml. Anyway feel free to interact/send me asks/whatever, it’s going to be a long fucking day with all of this on my mind. I’ll be working my way through my dash as best as I can.

Oh, also! Loki is so fucking pretty in this episode! The TVA suit is ugly, but he makes it work, and his hair's combed nicely and he looks like he finally got an opportunity to sleep and shower and eat something and, yknow, it's working for him.

#loki tv series spoilers #loki series spoilers #loki spoilers #loki pokey artichokey #also thought it was interesting that as soon as mobius gave him the jacket #loki barely took it off and didn't go anywhere without it #lending even more credence to the fact that he likes to be as covered up as possible at all times

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rodneymckays · 3 years

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stargate episodes that should have been, part 20: an alternate reality episode where cam went to atlantis and sheppard joined sg-1. in this universe cam wasn’t injured in antarctica and i think that he is the kind of guy who would go to another galaxy for fun and also because he has to do the Best thing he can possibly do and that’s going to another galaxy. sheppard for whatever reason didn’t sit in the chair but did still fly jack down to antarctica so when they’re looking for sg-1’s fourth jack is like “well there’s this guy i met who kinda reminds me of me except he likes antarctica for some reason” so he becomes sg-1’s fourth under sam’s command. i think at first that would cause issues because of his problems with following orders + sam is new to her command and feeling somewhat insecure about it BUT these issues aren’t with sheppard disobeying sam’s orders they’re just sam worrying that he will. because sheppard only disobeys orders that he sees as bad and from what i remember of s4 + his personality in general he really respects sam. anyways this is actually a 3-parter because you have the sg-1 episode where our sg-1 meets the other sg-1, the atlantis episode where our atlantis people meet the other atlantis people, and then the crossover where they all meet one another because you can’t have the sheppards and the cams not meet themselves. i have no idea where in the timeline it is beyond “not season 4” because there are inconsistencies, but whatever. it’s also very long so i am using paragraph breaks for once!! also i will be putting a 1 after the duplicates from the show universe and a 2 after the duplicates from the au for clarity. (everyone without a number is the only one of themselves present and is from the au). also i definitely got carried away and this is too much plot and not enough character interaction even though i originally thought this one up for the character interactions, oops.

EPISODE 1: SG-1. somehow, our sg-1(1) is pulled through to this other reality. something to do with ba’al messing with some ancient tech in the other reality. the sg-1(2) of that reality, led by sam2 and featuring a major sheppard2, has snuck onto the ha’tak ba’al is using as his base of operations. they run into our sg-1(1) and there’s some spider-man pointing meme and then sam1 and sam2 start discussing how this could have happened while the valas compliment each other’s hair and cam1 and sheppard2 go “wait but you’re supposed to be in atlantis” “no, YOU’RE supposed to be in atlantis.” eventually we find out that ba’al is using ancient tech to develop a hyperdrive capable of traveling between galaxies, which the goa’uld don’t have. his test destination is the pegasus galaxy because he figures that if it works for one jump but then fails, then he can just turn up at atlantis and ask the tau’ri for help again after threatening them lightly to save face. obviously the humans don’t want ba’al going to pegasus, because we like our villains to stay confined to just one galaxy, and also if his hyperdrive works then he could destroy atlantis or ally himself with the wraith or be defeated by the wraith and have his ship captured and now the wraith have an intergalactic hyperdrive or—well, there’s lots of ways it could go wrong, and sg-1(1) gets the point that they need to help sg-1(2) stop ba’al. they spend much of the episode tracking ba’al and sneaking around the ship, until they finally corner ba’al in the engine room and teal’c2 shoots him. unfortunately, they enter hyperspace almost immediately after this, and are captured by… another ba’al. END.

EPISODE 2: ATLANTIS. somehow, our atlantis team1 is pulled through to this other reality. something to do with mckay2 and zelenka messing with some ancient tech in the other reality. our atlantis team1 is quickly locked in interrogation rooms because who are they and why is major sheppard with them instead of colonel mitchell? this tips off mckay1 to the fact that they’re now in an alternate reality. fortunately mckay2 and zelenka have already reached this conclusion and they’re let out of the interrogation rooms just in time for news to reach atlantis that a ha’tak has arrived in pegasus. (and also before ronon1 and ronon2 start fighting instead of just glaring menacingly at one another, because who thought it was a good idea to have ronon2 interrogate ronon1. he didn’t even ask any questions.) alternate weir decides to send the atlantis team2 in to investigate but mckay2 is like “i’ll need someone to help me with the goa’uld tech, we’ll take zelenka” but zelenka is immediately like “no?? there’s another you here. take him. i don’t like leaving the city” so it’s decided that both mckays will go, and you can’t send mckay1 without the rest of his team so EVERYONE is going. they take two jumpers because mitchell2 and sheppard1 both want to fly the jumper. when they arrive through the space gate that the ha’tak is near, they see a badly damaged wraith hive with no life signs. the ha’tak has also taken some damage, but much less, and they’re able to fly through a hole in the hull to board. they detect minimal life signs: two on the bridge, eleven in the cells, and a few others scattered around that must be ba’al’s jaffa. the group decides to split up; they toss a coin and mitchell’s team2 goes to the bridge while sheppard’s team1 goes to the cells. when sheppard’s team1 arrives at the cells, they find them unguarded but locked. mckay1 cracks the lock and we see the cell doors slide open. cut to the bridge. when mitchell’s team2 arrives, they see one of the dots on the life signs detector begin to fade. mckay2 gets the door open just in time to see ba’al collapse to the floor, having been fed on by a wraith. END.

EPISODE 3: CROSSOVER. what the hell, ba’al is in a wraith now. (i’ve always wondered about what would happen if the goa’uld met the wraith; would they fight and if so who would win? or would a goa’uld take a wraith as a host? is that even possible? i say yes because it’s Fun.) the symbiote entered the wraith and then promptly fed on his former host because he was hungry. this is obviously Terrible News because the wraith are bad enough but tbh they’re not very smart. ba’al is. mitchell’s atlantis team2 all point their weapons at him and radio sheppard’s atlantis team1 to let them know there’s now a goa’uld with a wraith host. sheppard1 responds and says “ok, we’ll we’ve got two sg-1s here. and also todd” to which mitchell2 replies “who the hell is todd?” (“pale skin, long hair, likes to suck your soul out with his hand but makes it weird by returning your soul ten minutes later?” “oh you mean casper.” “what the hell kind of a name is casper?” “what the hell kind of a name is todd?!”) we find out that “casper”, who is of course alternate todd but was named casper by mitchell2, was on the hive ba’al disabled. he and one other wraith were taken aboard the ha’tak, and he was put in the cell for later in case the first implantation of a wraith didn’t work. he’s willing to help everyone defeat wraith ba’al, because goa’ulds taking wraith as hosts is bad for the wraith too. so they do some stuff, and with much difficulty, kill wraith ba’al. it’s harder than killing a normal wraith because he has the goa’uld regenerative ability, and also he keeps feeding on his jaffa to recover after being shot. eventually they manage to trick him into a set of rings and space him. then they have to decide what to do with the ha’tak. casper wants it for himself because of the intergalactic hyperdrive and turns on them. they manage to activate the self destruct and flee back to the jumpers. they believe that casper is destroyed in the self destruct, but he survives somehow. the rest of the episode is the sams, mckays, and zelenka trying to figure out how to send sg-1(1) and the atlantis team1 home. we also get a few character moments between everyone and their counterparts: cam2 and both sheppards discuss puddlejumpers while cam1 is sad because he doesn’t have the gene and never received gene therapy so he can’t fly a puddlejumper. they break into medical to convince beckett to give cam1 the gene therapy; they’re pretty sure it’ll work on him since it worked on cam2. it does, and the cams and the sheppards immediately have a race to the mainland and back. (the sheppards win, but it’s close, and the cams try to blame it on the fact that cam1 has never flown a jumper before while everyone else has.) the daniels go to the library together and share their knowledge about the ancients and the ori; mostly they know the same stuff but they do both learn a few new things. the ronons fight one another. it’s a draw. the teylas and the teal’cs watch the ronons fight, and then meditate. the valas flit between each of the groups and compare their versions of everyone. vala1 ends up in weir’s office and bugs her with a bunch of questions until weir actually puts down her work and just Hangs Out. vala2 ends up with the cams and the sheppards because she’s absolutely best buds with sheppard2 and desperately wants to meet sheppard1. anyways after everyone hangs out for awhile they go home and it’s a very :) ending, which is what they need after All That.

i like this character swap idea a lot because after watching the pegasus project i was kinda chomping at the bit for more character interaction between sheppard and the rest of sg-1. particularly vala. more after the cut cause i wanna yell about all the other stuff i love about this!!

i also like the idea of sheppard not being in the team leader position. it makes me wonder what him following orders offworld, particularly sam’s, would look like. i don’t remember him and sam butting heads over command decisions in quite the same way him and elizabeth did at the start (sheppard wanting to go go go, make slapdash decisions, usually in an effort to help people, altho sometimes misguided, particularly in hot zone, vs elizabeth who was often looking towards a less militaristic approach, i.e not trading explosives to the genii, not torturing a POW etc. and who took her time making decisions). but then again, both sam and john are military. so, it’d be interesting to see how sam manages him along with the rest of the team. also, since hes not in a leadership position (no ones counting on him to keep the team together), would he be even more gungho about the self-sacrifice play? or just the same as ever? anyway, enough about john (once i start, i can’t stop, it seems), let’s get into the episodes!!

Episode 1:

“if it works for one jump but then fails, then he can just turn up at atlantis and ask the tau’ri for help again after threatening them lightly to save face.” LMAO truly ba’al’s modus operandi.

and the wraith potentially stealing hyperdrive technology is DEFINITELY something sg teams of all universes and galaxies should team up to put a stop to. a whole new galaxy to feed on?? not to mention earth??? NOT GREAT. the situation definitely calls for earth’s mightiest heroes squared.

also i appreciate a good sneak on an alien ship. especially times 2. and who would partner with who?? so many fun character combos!

Episode 2:

LMFAO OKAY. ronon vs ronon is such a ronon thing that i laughed out loud. both of them would definitely wanna know which one was tougher. also. also. i would love for zelenka and mckay1 to have a science twin moment and mckay2 to get all proprietary and be like “get ur own!”

i can’t imagine rodney would get along all that well with himself so its a good thing the rest of the teams will be there to run interference. and be separated on the ride there bahaha. cam and sheppard would totally fight over who gets to fly the cool spaceship (the teylas look at each other with raised eyebrows of sympathy and respect. both teams require them to pull on their reserves of infinite patience).

OOOO and ending on a CLIFFHANGER and INTRIGUE, QUICKLY, to the next episode!

Episode 3:

u kno, i was thinking earlier, after reading the first episode, what would an interaction between goa’uld and wraith look like? my immediate thought was, they are either gonna join forces to crush the stupid humans or fight because the goa’uld kinda need those humans for indentured servitude and, u kno, living. or, u kno, they would fight just because their ginormous egos clashed. but NEVER did the thought occur to me that a goa’uld might take a wraith as its host for its superior genetic makeup over humans (super strength, jedi mind tricks, telepathy etc.) and this is why ur brain is amazing. and a smart, conniving creature in control of a wraith body…spells trouble. and i didn’t even consider the double healing factor which would make any wraith on par with an uber wraith (that i dont remember ever seeing after the defiant one lol).

also cam naming his todd casper means everything to me. his ability to drop movie/pop culture references no one gets/appreciates is extremely endearing.

another amazing thing about this; sam actually gets to science with mckay and zelenka FOR ONCE. i’m really sad we were deprived this in season 4, like i get sam was the leader of the expedition in that season, and it wasn’t her job to be doing science/where is the time, but u can’t take the science out of the girl, no sir. i just wanted the beautiful mind children to be techno babbling it up, all with a begrudging respect for one another, as everyone stares in awe and confusion.

and cam gets to fly cool spaceships!!!! for leisure! with no one threatening his life! he did not get to do enough flying imo. and the teyla’s definitely deserve meditation time after dealing with double of their rambunctious team. and YES elizabeth deserves to have fUN. vala is the best person to help her with that. and vala and sheppard!!!! being buds!!! ALL I HAVE EVERY WANTED FROM STARGATE! what a fantastic ending to a wonderful series of episodes.

#dunno why i want them to hang out so badly?#maybe its because we never really saw it on the show?#because i think they would really hit it off?#or maybe its all of auburn’s fic imprinting on my brain in the most wonderful way (she always wrote their interactions so lovely).#anyway what an awesome series of episodes!!#this is everything i love about science fiction #it has no limitations #except the ones in our own imagination #the alternate universes #character interactions #use of aliens #absolutely inspired #thanks so much for this one #sg1 #sga #asks

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ectonurites · 3 years

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Conner Kent in Suicide Squad/the Infinite Frontier era: wtf is going on

Alright lads hello I just need to type out some theories/thoughts about what’s going on with my boy Kon right now. This is more for myself than anything else (just trying to organize my thoughts) but since some of y’all like to hear me talk about comics (and some of this discussion has already been happenin in my inbox) I figured i’d format it and put it on here too! its like 4k words and written over the last few days mostly at 3am. sorry <3

this is basically just me going like

Also fair warning that like, I can be wrong and misinterpret things just as much as anyone else can, like I use panels to support why I think what I do but a lot of this stuff is subjective/complicated to understand so like... in general somethings should be taken with a grain of salt, especially because exactly what changes to the universe were made by Death Metal/Infinite Frontier haven’t been super super clearly defined yet. Also sometimes comic writers make the most random nonsensical shit happen, so I as a fan am also allowed to theorize about random nonsensical shit.

But to start: let’s backtrack!

Many months ago when Infinite Frontier was first announced they dropped some promotional art, and I remember being a little confused because. Well:

(Variant Cover spread for Justice League (2018) #59)

(Variant Cover spread for Superman (2018) #29)

Notice how Conner is back to his Teen Titans 2003 look up top, but in his YJ 2019 look at the bottom? This seemed weird to me! But then they announced that Conner would be part of the Suicide Squad ongoing title, in the T-shirt look, so I wrote this discrepancy off in my brain as ‘oh I guess that cover was just the last hurrah for punk Kon’ and moved on with life.

In Suicide Squad right away we learn he’s very much so there against his will:

(Suicide Squad (2021) #1)

Which corroborates more or less what we were also shown in Future State: Suicide Squad, although admittedly it tells... a slightly different version of the events. When I first saw both of these together I just chalked it up to being a bit inaccurate as it’s shown as a memory in Future State:

(Future State: Suicide Squad #2)

Issue 2 we saw him in action with the Squad, trying to do his best to still be a hero despite the team, but things get a little more interesting in the following issue. It starts off with an account of his history

(Suicide Squad (2021) #3)

This page gave me a few immediate red flags, mostly minor things that had to do with coloring, so more irl problems than things to take seriously in-universe (Kon’s pants are the wrong color in the first Superboy shot, and Bart’s Impulse costume is in Kid Flash colors instead of the correct Impulse ones) but then also it just bugged me the phrasing “he joined Young Justice” when he was a founder of the team, he didn’t join it he made it with Tim and Bart.

But again, chalked that stuff up to just.... writers/artists being inconsistent/unaware of things that they should be aware of, or even Nocturna just not being specific with details. But it did still strike me as a little odd considering the very accurate use of villains in those same shots, Scavenger who was a reoccurring bad guy from Kon’s solo days and showed up basically nowhere else (even holding the Spear of Lono and everything!) and Billy/Harm (Greta’s brother) from Young Justice.

But then a few pages later we got this:

(Suicide Squad (2021) #3)

Which is interesting. My first instinct was to think he’s being drugged w kryptonite or something thats leaving him hazy/out of it, but my thoughts on that have kinda changed, we’ll get there in a bit. But in general the context of ‘something’s wrong’ made the slight discrepancies on some details of his own history make more sense.

I also want to then bring up the next part to this story, the crossover issue in Teen Titans Academy.

(Teen Titans Academy #3)

So a few things. Does it feel weird to anyone else that Conner Kent, a known previous Titan who literally has a framed picture of himself in a case there, would set off alarm sensors like that? Wouldn’t he be... recognized as a Titan not an intruder by their sensors? Interesting! Anyways.

He looks really pained looking at that picture, and sad, and almost frustrated, which ya know makes sense and hurts my heart because he misses them! He misses his friends and being happy.

But, importantly for a criticism I wanna make thats less theory related and more just me bein annoyed at Tim Sheridan, that’s a picture of Conner. Right there. That’s Superboy, on display at Teen Titans Academy, so the people who frequent this building would know who he is and what he looks like and be able to recognize him, he’s even in the same outfit and everything. Alinta recognized him at the end of Suicide Squad #3.

So why does only one person during this big fight then comment on his presence?? Why doesn’t it get a bigger reaction???

(Teen Titans Academy #3)

And after the fight we don’t see any on panel moment of Wallace going up to the staff Titans (who weren’t present for the fight) and saying like “HEY NIGHTWING UHHH SUPERBOY WAS WITH THE SUICIDE SQUAD?” we just see him talking with his friends upset about Crush leaving. We see Alinta talking to them but we don’t see the exact dialogue. So I do just wanna take the writer by the shoulders and shake him a little bit and ask WHY because that just feels like... something you’d wanna address on panel! This is like the first time since joining the squad that Kon’s at all in contact with people from his life before Waller got involved, I feel like not addressing those people’s reactions to it/not discussing it at least a little bit on panel (especially when Conner CAME UP in the previous TTA issue, Dick brought him up and everything!!!) is a really odd choice. Maybe it’ll happen next issue and i’m just impatient, but who knows. Anyways, gripes with Sheridan aside, lets move on.

I wanna bring up how Conner... doesn’t really respond to Wallace’s question? At all? Except to just fight him off, not even an attempt at a ‘Sorry’ or anything? (the ‘Ha! That all you got?!’ seems to be coming from Culebra not Conner, although the placement of the bubble is vague enough it could be that it was supposed to be Conner? but it seems more like what she’d say, especially as she’s grabbing Emiko like that) That just feels weird. It feels off. In general he speaks so little in Suicide Squad #3 and this issue. Tbh it almost feels like he doesn’t really recognize Wallace which I mean I suppose they never exactly met (they would have theoretically during Death Metal, basically all past/present Titans were together for a while during that), but Kon’s been back in existing long enough he’d have a sense of who current heroes are anyways.

But right, so, lots of little things that feel weird... that gets us caught up to the most recently released comics... but in this household we look at solicits as they drop. Which gives us some info on what’s coming up a few months ahead of time, albeit without full context obviously. Issues #4 and #5 don’t mention Conner in their descriptions or show him on the covers at all, because there’s just other plot things going on, so ya know seems things will be quiet for him for a bit.

But then we got the August solicitations and oh BOY it’s a doozey for him! And some things start to kinda connect perhaps!

I want to just take a moment to look at that specific wording. “The teen calling himself Conner Kent” I’m probably reading too much into it but that feels deliberate, like why wouldn’t you just say ‘Conner Kent’? Usually these kinds of descriptions are trying to keep a low word count, not add in extra words that don’t need to be there. It makes it feel like that’s a name he’s using that... doesn’t actually belong to him.

So the theory I want to propose (that has been floating around already) is that based on these covers and the description, and how the Conner we’ve been seeing in Suicide Squad apparently talks about his own personal history like he’s ‘reading a wikipedia entry’ and had little response to people he should be aware of like Wallace and apparently isn’t recognized as a Titan through a bio-scan and also bearing in mind those initial promo arts with two separate looks at the same time for him... I think we're looking at a situation where the Conner in Suicide Squad so far has actually been a clone of original Conner (like... like he’s Match 2.0 or somethin) the whole time, that’s just not aware he’s not the original.

Now that’s the base theory I wanna work with and build off of, but there’s MANY different directions that could go in/ways that could work.

For example, one idea is that the Conner we saw in #1 who was chained up is the original Conner, and he’s been being cloned and held captive, so everything else with Conner in Suicide Squad so far has been this Match 2.0

Another idea could be the original Conner in #1 is also the Conner in #2 who Waller had then commented wasn’t ready during the mission in Arkham and had zapped with a lil Kryptonite, and after that moment she took him off the field because his spirit hadn’t been broken enough to be obedient (as he was a lot quieter in Issue #3 & the TTA crossover compared to #2, and #3 is when the Nocturna thing with the history happened)

Or it could even be original Conner in #1, then in #2 was one clone that wasn’t ‘ready’ that after that point she stopped using him, and switched to a diff clone for #3, because like that first cover did show a LOT of clones. That could be more just ‘artistic interpretation’ or something, covers sometimes do exaggerate/mislead, but it also could indicate we’re looking at a lot of clones.

(Suicide Squad (2021) #2)

With all of those in mind I also wanna bring up this little bit from Future State Suicide Squad:

(Future State: Suicide Squad #2)

Again Future State is a ‘possible future’ so stuff from it isn’t set in stone, but the idea of ‘she still has his YJ 2019 outfit somewhere’ makes me think it could be something along the lines of like, Clone!Conner finds original Conner and frees him and he gets back his YJ outfit, which could lead to like the imagery on that variant cover/the idea from my very first part of this post where I was talking about Kon being shown in both outfits in different places.

Alternatively entirely from all that, another option is that she maybe got ahold of what was needed to clone Kon, but doesn’t even have the original Kon in her possession. (again with the Future State thing, she could be lying since elsewhere in Future State we did also see a copy of YJ 2019 Kon’s costume in one of the Jon-focused Future State comics in a display case 🤷‍♂️) Which could also lead to that confrontation on the variant cover & the promo art thing... and could also explain why we have seen nothing about anyone looking for him, because in that sort of scenario he wouldn’t have even been missing in the first place.

There’s a lot of possibilities! It’s still too early to solidly know anything, but I feel pretty confident we’re entering another cloning related plot with our Clone Boy so it’s... ya know. Clone time. On the one hand it’s annoying because god we have done clone/multiple Kons plots before. We’ve done them so much.

BUT on the other hand, I think it could be interesting to use this situation to tie into some older stuff from pre-reboot that I can see some connections to, because due to Infinite Frontier altering the world and people’s memories it’s all technically fair game storytelling-wise again (and like, the use of Scavenger specifically in that flashback way above, who’s not a super well known villain in general, makes me think maaaaybe the writer did do some of their Kon homework)

Something also just dawned on me that i’m not quite sure what it means but still is worth mentioning: The Conner here in Suicide Squad is back in his Teen Titans Vol. 3 outfit, and his history as he tells it stops during Teen Titans Vol. 3. And doesn’t... mention when he died? It feels like it... stopped before that, because like I feel if he was telling his life history (even the wiki version LMAO) the part where he died and came back would be pretty important to bring up?? And Nocturna specifically says that he didn’t explain how that stuff from TT Vol. 3 then led to him in his current situation. That’s a pretty big gap (like uhhh everything from resurrection until he got lost on Gemworld + all the rest of the Young Justice 2019 stuff?) So like.. there could be something funky going on here that has to do with that.

Similarly when he flashes back in Future State: Suicide Squad to his past it also goes right from Teen Titans Vol. 3 to the current Suicide Squad run? Like I get it’s one page so they can’t show that much, but the fact that there’s now two places that flash back to that same specific time period and nothing past it until the Suicide Squad feels just... noticeable! Not concretely indicative of something, but noteworthy.

(Future State: Suicide Squad #2)

Like...this almost has me thinking maybe it could be something where like, they tampered with his dead body and cloned from that? BECAUSE, for those of you who may not be familiar with how Kon’s resurrection (during Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds) worked, when he came back there was time travel involved! He was brought back to life in the future (like. Legion of Superheroes era) because it was a process that took that thousand or so years to work/heal him (essentially because of his hybrid dna the process that healed Clark when he had died back in Death of Superman/Reign of the Supermen in the 90s just took a lot longer, but its the same Kryptonian healing chamber thing) meaning when he came back to the present alive again, his dead body was still also in the present just in it’s process of healing. Meaning especially if we’re bringing back stuff from before the reboot, Kon likely has his dead body just vibing out there while he’s goin around living life 🤷‍♂️

SO them doing something related to that could explain the choice to put him back in the T-shirt (since thats what he wore in the era his brain would be caught up to if we’re relating this to when he died) and why he’d recognize himself in a group photo with Bart, Cassie and Tim but maybe not someone like Wallace who didn’t exist back then. I don’t know, this branch of thought is still half baked. Will maybe come back and elaborate on this later. But I’m now really thinking there might be a connection to the early Teen Titans Vol. 3 era specifically because of it being referenced twice in stuff with this Suicide Squad.

ANYWAYS moving on, this is probably a shot in the dark and I only thought of it because I just was reading 90′s Superboy, but right away when thinking about ‘Amanda Waller’ and ‘Cloning Kon’ I was reminded of some stuff about the circumstances around the first clone that was made of Conner: Match.

(Superboy (1994) #35)

Match was created by an organization called ‘The Agenda’, that was after a while primarily under the control of The Contessa, Lex Luthor’s ex-wife, aided by Amanda Spence who had a personal grudge against Kon bc her dad was Paul Westfield the guy Kon was originally cloned from (before the Lex/Clark retcon). They were the big bad guys of an arc called The Evil Factory in Superboy (where Cadmus personnel got replaced with clones) which also then tied into the Sins of Youth event over in Young Justice (Remember how Match was posing as Superboy for a while there? yeah). After those plot lines finished the Agenda was pretty defeated (Amanda Spence was still out there and came back later but still) and... who got their hands on the remaining Agenda tech?

(Superboy (1994) #87)

Why none other than Amanda Waller herself!

If they re-canonized pieces of this (which also tied into Young Justice which ya know, YJ 2019 was all about re-establishing stuff from YJ even before Death Metal happened soooo) it would totally make sense for Waller to have complete access to the exact technology used to clone Conner before.

Now, a thing to consider here though is what happened to Kon after he’d been cloned that first time, where his DNA got all destabilized by the process (and he needed to go through a procedure with Roxy as a genetic template to keep him together, which was how he got stuck at age 16 for a while). This was something where he was fine for a period of time before the side effects began to kick in. Now, I think it’s worth mentioning that was also back in the days where he was not yet Lex & Clark’s clone, but still Paul Westfield’s. So there could easily be a ‘now that certain Kryptonian genes have kicked in as he got his newer powers it doesn’t destabilize him the same way’ reasoning or something along those lines to avoid this problem. Alternatively, it could be an interesting thing to embrace rather than retcon away, especially if we’ve been seeing Clone Conner in action and Original Conner hasn’t been in our focus, things could be wrong with him that we just don’t know about.

Another branch of thinking that I think is even MORE a shot in the dark but could be interesting (or again even related to what I just said, could be a combo of things) is if this somehow ended up related to those clones that were reverse engineered from the remains of Match from the very end of Teen Titans Vol. 3

(Teen Titans (2003) #99)

All of them were then taken down with Kryptonite and killed in battle (by Rose & Damian)

(Teen Titans (2003) #100)

But like... idk man if Waller got her hands on those corpses or even just the data from Dr. Caligan that he extracted from Match to make them... that could also be a potential way to make some new Conner clones, and that could be why the bio-scan thing at Titans Tower wouldn’t work properly because of the thing he says above about it not being a “complete match’

One thing I don’t think is the case, but has been brought up to me, is stuff with New 52 Kon. I’ve talked extensively about New 52 Kon in recent weeks because I read through all his stuff, but the thing that makes me shy away from him being part of this situation is the fact that... he’s not interchangeable with Kon the way I think some people think he is. He wouldn’t visually be recognized as Original Kon because he is literally on a genetic level a separate person. They’d prob look related, sure, like they’d pass for brothers because they both have Clark’s DNA, but New 52 Kon has Lois’ DNA and Original Kon has Lex’s. New 52 Kon would likely look more like Jon, rather than Kon. Lois specifically commented in an Action Comics issue that Kon had some resemblance to Lex, even. So like, things like Wallace recognizing him or him looking at his own matching reflection alongside the group picture at the Tower... those wouldn’t happen the same way if this was New 52 Kon.

Now I think it coooould theoretically be possible for Waller to have gotten her hands on that future N.O.W.H.E.R.E. cloning tech that had been used to make New 52 Kon, like I wouldn’t rule that out. Because she knows where the remains of their bases are as shown in Red Hood and the Outlaws (2016) #16-17, and like, Harvest is dead so she could easily just send teams out there to gather shit if she wanted.

Onto some other things I don’t think are actually related but that I was reminded of/wanted to address:

I feel i’d be a bad timkon fan if during all of this discussion of past stories with cloning Kon I didn’t even bring up Tim’s cloning attempt stuff, but I think it would ultimately be unrelated. His tech was stolen from Luthor, and his attempts didn’t succeed because he was trying to build from scratch without Cadmus’ the data about how they altered the DNA from the original process.

(Teen Titans Vol. 3 #34)

Then that initial cover for the annual really reminded me of part of the Hollow Men story from Superboy Vol. 5 just with like... Kon in a room full of copies of himself. I don’t think this story would be related either because it was more magic Tannarak stuff rather than regular cloning, but ya know. It’s the imagery.

(Superboy Vol. 5 #9)

It also really reminded me of the stuff from Hyper-Tension which was hypertime stuff not cloning but again just... visually.

(Superboy Vol. 4 #62)

In general I don’t think we’re EVER gonna see Black Zero or any of these multiverse Superboys again LMAO.

To try to sum up all of this in a way that might make sense here’s kinda a... flowchart of some of my main ideas for what the cloning situation could be/how the logic could work. Again this is borrowing stuff from across continuities because Infinite Frontier means theoretically anything’s fair game. (Also I don’t think I mentioned this earlier but I do mention it in the chart, but I think it’s also reasonable that Waller could get her hands on Cadmus tech if Cadmus is like properly made canon again. She just has funky government connections!)

Also I just now thought of this now several hours after I already made the chart and I don’t wanna remake it so sorry not incorporating it there but I remembered there was also that bit during House of Kent where Clark took Kon to the Hall of Justice and they were running some tests on him, so I’m thinking it’s also possible Waller got ahold of that data/that might be how she found out about Kon in the first place for this timeline. And they indicated that there was something wrong with him there, where he might eventually lose his powers or something, so maybe she tried to do cloning stuff to be able to have a copy of Superboy in his prime or something??? before that started kicking in. I don’t know, just more things to consider:

(Action Comics (2016) #1028)

ANYWAYS in conclusion: there is clone fuckery of some sort happening, I’m curious where it’s gonna go, and I just want Kon to be okay.

If you actually read this uhm. props to you bc this probably makes no sense to anyone but me its just word vomit <3

#this is very long! and disorganized! i am sorry #this doesn't have one theory abt things it has like. many #its basically just brainstorming/spitballing ideas #i could also be entirely off base! with much of this! i just feel i need that disclaimer #grandpa max is god? i go to church now #i need a kon talk tag bc i swear i write more analysis stuff like this for him than anyone else

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