#the fandom characterizations for the main players were pretty well-established

[somethingshifted]

i watched this video (put it off for all of 3 days because i get nervous watching video essays on my favorite things for some reason) and i loved it. it made me so happy. readmore cuz long post

even if the subject itself was how gorillaz nearly ended because of plastic beach's ambition, this video was so enjoyable. because i feel like getting an account of how people felt about the album release, at the time, from someone who was present is incredibly important for preservation? the extensive things fans have archived is important first and foremost as so much was personally privated by the band, but it's hard to get a pulse on fan feelings as a whole other than digging through wayback machine or knowing someone who was fandom present.

alongside this i'm appreciative of lady emily remarking on the landscape of releasing music at the time. where CD wasn't as huge, not as many people cared about vinyl, music channels were obsolete, and youtube was nascent even in 2010 when it comes to money making opportunities, especially for record labels forget about solo projects like lets-players. which just brings into perspective how taxing PB was to make. it's a beautiful project made off the failure of carousel to launch and didn't make as much of an impact as it needed to survive... which was something i personally was fully unaware of at the time. i just sat on youtube thinking that's where updates were mostly and relying on deviantart friends relaying info to me (i was very internet-dumb). carousel was insanely ambitious and destined to fail with how much they were expecting, and seeing the long list of projects that died out and the way the art being featured during tours became more of an after-thought was heartbreaking a bit so i can definitely understand why tensions blew up.

the idea of media (because PB isn't just an album even if that is the main skeleton veins and organs of it) being made for an era that doesn't exist is depressing, but her explanation to how it came to be and how different the climate is now is a great reminder to myself. because i keep asking 'why don't they do X Y and Z' and the truth is it costs SO much to do that, not to mention do it well AND have the artists and designers and so on be paid and treated well, and PB had so much going for it that didn't return profit. like the way the world is, passion itself doesn't reward you with a living which is sad, and appreciation and apt payment for visual arts doesn't get much better as the future moves on. and kind of humbles me to not have a stick up my ass for cracker island. KIND OF- i still feel my gears grinded when i see how sanitized some things are. major 'he wouldn't say that' feelings.

having reservations on gorillaz marketing behavior is fully allowed and honestly, needed because having a fanbase of only yes-men is detrimental, god forbid they thought NFTs would be well received. i feel hesitant to be a hater for newer stuff bc even if character writing choices annoy me so hard, i still find gems, and i still want to understand the full background of how much of what used to exist, can't exist the same way anymore as the world gets more expensive and a higher bar of quality is needed (outside the writing. that's more on current writers forgetting pretty well established easy characterization) idk if anything as wide-spread and ambitious as PB could ever exist today. isn't that sad? melancholy? i feel like being in your 20s during today consists of a lot of foot-in-one era, foot-in-the-other. the things you grow up with are impossible to go back to since technology is moving at a breakneck speed. but it being so expansive and story heavy was special and i'm learning more about that every day. as someone who's still iffy on the lore taking such a huge part of the overarching characters that it's still referenced at the end of the 2010's i really really do fucking love it. one of a kind. people who get very defensive of plastic beach have full reign to do so, just lemme stand behind you as a humanz defender

she also touched upon a feeling i thought was unpopular but i'm glad she did mention, and it's about how the story for the following albums were more self contained. i do feel though that wishing the band was a band and not characters milling about is a semi popular stance (?) i'm happy people recognize that because seriously my pulse on fandom feelings is sooooo lacking, even now as i venture to twitter and tumblr in 2023. anyways, even for how fantastical PB is and how much i love it, both the climate of the world not supporting projects like this and with gorillaz being self funded since 2019 (didn't know this and that is insane to me) gorillaz can benefit with the bar of expectations being lowered. multimedia projects are a rarity, with websites being sleeked and dumbed down for mobile users only, death of flash, social media being the hub for everything (why i get their reliance on it), singles needing to always be the strength of albums, and trends dying out faster than a mayfly, it's just hard. would i like to see them return to something like that, yes of course, but i sure as hell am not expecting it. unless some billionaire wants to dump their entire savings into their lap. the phases 1 and 2 performing well while being multimedia in the way of animation, interview, in-character and etc, is fantastic but there is no way that sort of MV quality would be passable today. and as a whole it was just less expensive AND way more new and fresh to make compared to making something in 2023 while also accommodating collaborators and managing the band. i guess it's difficult for me to hold a concrete stance. 'aw man why'd they do that... oh well...' times change ig. one thing i will shit on without feeling much guilt is the merch handling though like christ

i really want to hear her defend humanz like she said she might, like i'm on my knees... to wrap this up: very nice video if you want to hear about the behind the scenes of gorillaz all laid out in order. knowing the charting numbers didn't really hit for me till this video. and insight on how the band moved. there was a comment that said the flash games that are still archived today and she hearted it so you can check that out too, i've been going to that site archive for weeks now. i guess there was ONE thing which was i personally hated the way russel was used the entirety of that phase and i regard his mental break being phase 2 more than phase 3 so i raised my eyebrow at her depicting russel being cool and important, but like that's such a small bit, that i can understand why seeing him be a (silent) superhero was super cool. like yes he actually did do more actions on phase 3, bc even phase 1/2 he was, while well spoken gentle and wise, just there on the drums. i just want him to Say Something in phase 3 like that's his baby he's saving... well... ok. that's ok. don't get me started on my boy this post is already long e-fucking-nough

can i add. saying murdoc is the joker for gay teenage girls killed me

#i think at this point my re obsession mode is so heavy id pay someone to listen to me talk abt them for 4 hrs #text

[seyaryminamoto]

Hiiiiii - read your Iroh and Ursa metas, loved them. Might I ask if you've any equally Hot Takes on the fandom's favorite punching bags - The Great Divide and Avatar Day?

Uuuuh well.

If the hot take is expected to be “they’re GREAT episodes!”, I… I’m afraid I’ll disappoint :’D I dislike them both, but who knows? Maybe my reasons for disliking them are different than other people’s?

My problem with The Great Divide is a little personal: that was the first episode I ever watched of ATLA, and if only I’d caught another one, anything slightly more plot-relevant than that, I might have become a fan of the show much sooner. I watched it, found certain things entertaining, others not so much, and concluded ATLA was a “monster of the week” show masquerading as a show with a plot. Which… made it less interesting to me, by mere logic. I was also very much a teenager back then, and while I still had decent instincts as far as storytelling was concerned, they weren’t as polished as they are now. So I didn’t really see much of ATLA worth my while in The Great Divide, and so, from a personal point of view, it’s not at all amongst my favorite episodes.

Upon rewatching the show in full, I was more forgiving of the Great Divide, not only because I understood the show’s dynamics better, but because ATLA actually has other episodes that, while featuring occasional relevant information and characters, could also feature not-so-relevant developments later on. So it’s not just Avatar Day and the Great Divide: the Fortuneteller, while a pretty liked episode, is honestly about as lacking in plot-heavy developments as those two are. Yet most people like that one :’) why’s that? Shippy reasons? Weeeell…

The truth is, if you ask me, that the Great Divide and Avatar Day and the Fortuneteller are episodes that allow the plot to slow down. This wasn’t so good in the early stages of Book 1, where slowing the plot too much actually made you forget there was a plot altogether… but when you watch the show as a whole, those moments of less tension, featuring Aang resolving problems and saving lives of completely ordinary people, were actually pretty good for what they were. That, in particular, is something I missed in Book 3: Team Avatar minus Zuko certainly do their best to help common people here and there through the first half of Book 3, but Zuko never does (and then when Zuko joins them, they never really do that again). What would I give for an episode where Zuko actually had to reason with the harm the war has caused not only to the Earth Kingdom, but to his own people… frankly, that oversight from the writing department is still absolutely absurd to me.

So, my problem with the Great Divide and Avatar Day isn’t that they weren’t plot relevant. My initial problem with the Great Divide, like I said earlier, was personal. But there’s also the feeling that not enough growth for the main characters takes place in these episodes: Aang resolved the Great Divide’s problem in the goofiest way he could. It was funny, creative and helpful, and kind of unexpected for your kind-hearted hero to lie to deal with a problem… though it also makes the situation more complex because of that, since he’s doing something ethically incorrect to establish peace between warring tribes. He did an objectively bad thing… for good purposes. So… it’s complicated, but it’s cool. It’s not half-bad as a concept that the show could explore. 

Nonetheless, you can’t feel a HUGE, PALPABLE CHANGE in the relationship between Sokka and Katara after this episode. You really don’t. They spend the bulk of the episode at odds with each other, and they set aside their problems later… but everything they do, post-Great Divide, really doesn’t look like they learned a lot from their clashing, such as how to see things from each other’s POV or being more fair with each other… I, at least, don’t feel much of a change. No idea if other people see it differently, but they continue to clash pretty wildly later on, particularly in Book 3. So, did they learn something at all? If not… then the episode does end up feeling rather pointless because it doesn’t feel like the characters really are impacted by what happened in it, right?

And that, beyond anything else, is what makes these sorts of episodes feel like filler content: The Ember Island Players WAS filler content, absolutely, but you have scenes such as Zuko talking to Toph about Iroh, or Aang and Katara’s catastrophic rejected kiss, and it feels like SOMETHING happened in the episode even if in general it didn’t do anything plot-heavy. But aside from these small scenes that offer characters a chance to make at least a little progress (whether forward or backwards…), you even get a chance to see how the Fire Nation views the war, how they see themselves, how they see their Fire Lord. Even there, the show is giving you information that helps in the worldbuilding of the show. This is absent in The Great Divide, where the two warring tribes are never seen or heard of again, and they’re not exactly relevant because of that. Do they add some diversity to what we ought to perceive of the Earth Kingdom? Yes. Is it useful for anyone other than the rare fic writer who decides to use these characters for something? (never really seen it but I bet it has happened) Honestly, no.

Now, Avatar Day is annoying to me for another personal reason, even if it connects with some of what I said above: I HATE the way Sokka is characterized in this episode. I have more than enough qualms with how he’s characterized for many episodes in Book 2, but this one takes the cake.

Sokka is usually sharper than everyone else, helpful, resourceful, even when no one is really acknowledging it. Often he’s the voice of reason, the one who figures out what’s going on (such as in the Cave of Two Lovers, where he realizes the tunnels are changing, just to name one thing), but Avatar Day decided to feature him obsessing with acting as an investigator, and he kept stopping Katara from making the big reveals because HE had to do it, and she just rolled her eyes at him all along (from the get-go too, since she goads him into investigating by spurring his ego and yet she still is shown visibly annoyed when he starts raving about how he figured out the seal jerky thing back in the Water Tribe). All of this is to make Sokka a punchline of the “Katara is the smart one” joke that doesn’t even work when you take the rest of the show into account :’) so… this particular thing will ALWAYS rub me the wrong way with Avatar Day.

From this episode, I do like that Aang has to deal with people who hate him because he’s the Avatar. I always complained about how LOK basically had everyone swooning and adoring Korra even if they hated her, everyone constantly in awe of her prowess and talent, and those who DIDN’T like her were constantly shown as unreasonable jerks, such as the kid who throws that snowball at her, and we’re supposed to feel bad when she calls Korra the worst Avatar ever :’) we are REALLY expected to feel bad and to dislike the kid… when we literally watched Aang dealing with a mob that sentenced him to boil in oil for his past life’s crimes, and who burned effigies in his image. Right. A spiteful little kid is so very harmful, so heartbreaking, so jarring. Wow.

What I like about Avatars dealing with people disliking them, be it for solid reasons or for stupid ones, is that it feels REAL. Because it makes sense that people wouldn’t have an unanymous opinion of the Avatar as the savior of all the world, it makes sense that there’d be people who are jerks because they don’t like him on principle (or lack thereof). It’s normal, natural, completely common in human beings to just see something popular and go “MEEEEH I’VE SEEN BETTER”. And that’s what Avatar Day gave me, as far as worldbuilding is concerned.

As for more worldbuilding, Avatar Day certainly offered more insight on Kyoshi, but while most people found that fascinating and the insight in question absolutely wonderful because oh woooow she bends LAVA, I found it damning instead. If you need to know why… feel free to read this post (seeing as you like my controversial opinions you might even enjoy the whole thing x’D). While there’s some new novels now about Kyoshi that shed more light on who she was and how she did the things she did, I have certain gripes with some of the ideas I’ve heard those novels bring up. All in all, though, they shouldn’t change what canon brings forward with Kyoshi’s behavior with Chin: just in case you didn’t read that ask, I’ll say that my problem isn’t that she killed Chin, if anything, my problem is that she only killed him when he only had two places left to conquer. 

She wouldn’t sit passively while he took her home. Because, uh, that’s the only place the almighty Avatar had to defend, I suppose. 

Basically, Chin pulled a Kuvira with no opposition because the Avatar apparently didn’t care to involve herself in this particular problem until he was knocking on her door. Seriously? Best Avatar ever? Oookay then…

So, my favorite Gaang member, turned into a bad joke and unable to tell he’s been turned into a joke + the birth of a fandom-wide circlejerk around a character because she bent lava, nevermind the implications of her disregard for a tyrant’s conquest until it reached her doorstep + the worst point of Zuko’s theft spree = I don’t like this episode :’)

Avatar Day’s only redeeming quality for me, like I said, is Chin Village’s Avatar-hating ways, but ONLY as a concept. Even so, I wish they’d tackled that particular matter far more seriously than they did, because sure, Chin Village’s villagers were damn stupid, but hating the Avatar because she killed someone they idolized wasn’t exactly a far-fetched motivation. Where you’d think this could even serve as a sort of parallel between Zuko and Aang, where they both find themselves as the new heirs of their respective, long legacies, legacies full of people who did good and bad things, and the ones being held accountable for those bad things are THEM, however unfair it might be…? The show just turned the whole damn thing into a joke. And that’s just a real waste of screentime. I’m not against ATLA’s comedic episodes at all, not as a concept, and I really like the show’s humor in general… but this episode absolutely could have used less of it, especially when offering an opportunity for Aang to actually find out that his past lives aren’t at all as idealistic and righteous as he might have thought they were, or, at the very least, he could have reflected on the fact that they didn’t necessarily share his principles and beliefs. But nope. Missed opportunity, right there.

In short… I suppose people dislike Avatar Day because of similar reasons why I do, I can’t say for sure. I assume people dislike the Great Divide for its filler-nature and general irrelevance to the show, and that’s pretty reasonable? But in my opinion, the problem with so-called filler content is that it ought to be used to expand on characters, to further develop them, they should be a chance to slow down and offer introspection during a brief chance that opens up when heavy plots give the viewers, and the characters, a chance to pause and breathe for a while. Both Avatar Day and the Great Divide fail at this particular wishful standard I impose on fillers, though. And that, along with my personal reasons, is why they’d be part of my personal “least liked episodes of ATLA” list, if I were to make one. It isn’t to say there aren’t a few redeeming qualities in both episodes, I hope I made that clear… but that’s not enough to offset the negatives in this case.

Also, I brought up the Fortuneteller too as an example for a filler episode that actually doesn’t achieve much, same as these two don’t. I actually enjoy this episode quite a bit? The animation is really good and smooth here. But that’s neither here nor there :’) 

The Fortuneteller certainly emphasized Aang’s crush on Katara, it also expanded on Katara’s character by showing how she’s so quick to believe fortunetelling, as opposed to Sokka, who absolutely doesn’t believe any of it. This generated a ridiculous but fun dynamic between the three characters through the episode, and it added Meng to the mix as well by featuring her as the girl Sokka misunderstands Aang is pining over. There’s a lot of silly comedy, but it’s in a much nicer way (in my opinion) than the one presented by Avatar Day, especially as it emphasizes elements of the character’s personalities: Sokka’s unwillingness to believe in spiritual nonsense, DESPITE he has already been caught up in Spirit World shenanigans, Aang’s hopeless pining over Katara and Aunt Wu’s encouragement for him to find his own destiny instead of being trapped by whatever she told him, and Katara’s obsession with asking Aunt Wu about EVERYTHING in her life up until the point where she finds herself considering that the super powerful bender she’ll marry could be Aang.

In general, this episode does handle its filler qualities as best as possible. But, and this is a problem I’ve seen brought up by other people before, it’s also an episode that features Katara pondering maybe Aang could be her one true love… only for the next episode to absolutely forsake that plotline and go for a wholly different subject. Which is, of course, fine… the problem is, we could’ve had Katara treating Aang slightly differently if she found herself thinking of him in a new light. That she didn’t treat him visibly differently, if anything, makes it look like right after her “He really is a powerful bender…” reveal, she just went “NAAAAAH, no way it would be him” and just decided to push aside all romantic possibilities with Aang until the Cave of Two Lovers. Which, considering Kataang is the endgame couple, is honestly another fumble by the writing department, as following up on this development would have easily silenced all those detractors of the ship who have interpreted the whole show under the tried and tired guise of “but she’s just mothering hiiiiiim!”.

One great thing about romance is watching it grow steadily, gradually… and when you have such big moments you ought to follow up on them, to a fault. It didn’t even have to be acknowledged in any massive ways, but it could have been acknowledged by featuring Katara wearing the necklace Aang weaved for her during later episodes, or something like that. But… there’s nothing palpable. Nothing serious. And this isn’t to say Kataang is lesser for it, but it would have been greater if the next episode had addressed the pending elephant in the room instead of going around it and pretending it didn’t exist at all.

So, while the filler in ATLA in general is better than the frequent fillers from anime, for instance, or than fillers in certain liveaction TV shows… it’s not quite perfect, let alone is it always top-tier writing that, while slowing down the plot, allows proper character introspection and growth. I really do like the Fortuneteller, as usual Aang’s work to help of those who need him is probably my favorite thing about his character and it shows in spades in this episode. The comedy is really great here, and I love the way Sokka is portrayed here… as opposed to how he’s portrayed in the Great Divide and Avatar Day, where not only does it feel like he didn’t grow at all, it also feels like he’s reduced to slapstick comedy with zero respect for his character. So… yeah. I don’t really like those two episodes, not out of any genuine disliking of fillers for what they can be, but because, as far as chances to slow down plot and developments go, both Avatar Day and The Great Divide really didn’t do it the way I would’ve wanted them to.

#anon #... so tumblr didn't just change #it changed without dealing with problems #such as when you put a read more in an ask #and then post it #AND IT EATS UP THE READ MORE #so you end up plastering an insanely long post on everyone's dashboards #I am very sorry #*bows* #anyways #sorry if i disappoint #but I hope the answer is comprehensive enough

[nyxelestia]

I’ve talked a ton about what fandom spaces look like when Black woman steps into a racebent role, but not about what happens to Black men who play racebent roles in the same franchises.

If you think that things are any easier for Black men in fandom well…

You’ve thought wrong.

This installment of What Fandom Racism Looks Like will look at how the racism behind how the Smallville fandom treated Pete Ross – played by Sam Jones III – and how, over a decade later, the Supergirl fandom pulls from the same playbook in order to excuse heaping a ton of racism on James Olsen and the black actor that plays him, Mehcad Brooks.

It is a fact of fandom that Black characters of any gender are treated poorly in comparison to non-Black characters. When you take gender into consideration, misogynoir leaps out and the anti-black and anti-woman violence leaps out, but that doesn’t mean that Black men have ever been beloved in fandom.

Some Black men/male characters are liked a little bit more than Black women in similar shows or properties, but can you actually name one that is treated on the same level as a white male character or performer?

Can you name one that’s actually beloved?

We’re now in my fifth year of running Stitch’s Media Mix and one constant that I’ve talked about is the way that the Star Wars fandom maligns, dismisses, and makes weird shit up about Finn and his actor John Boyega.

Folks across various fandom spaces don’t limit their ire just to Finn’s existence and creating fanworks (fiction, art, and meta fandom analysis) that turn him into a villain or kill him off so that Kylo Ren could succeed as the “real” hero of the franchise.

No.

I’m talking about folks deciding Boyega has to be homophobic because he’s Nigerian-British and because his father is prominent in their church and things like the time folks flooded his mentions calling him a misogynist and sexist and even @-ing Lucasfilm/Disney over a video of him dancing during carnival.

What Finn and John Boyega go have been going through since in 2015 is what Mehcad Brooks and James Olsen go through in 2019.

It’s an updated version of what Sam Jones III and Pete Ross went through a decade ago.

Looking back now, it’s obvious that the Smallville fandom was predictable in the same ways that many other superhero fandoms are now.

The most popular ship for the fandom was between two white male characters – Lex Luthor and Clark Kent – frenemies for life.

It’s a fandom that often treated white female characters and characters of color as obstacles in the way of the main slash relationship – instead of like Lex Luthor’s everything. It’s a ship with a fanbase that pretty much cut out or ignored the relationships either white male character had with white women or people of color in order to portray their relationship as the most important one across the series.

With that much predictability, it’s not that difficult to look back at fanworks from when the Smallville fandom was at its highest and draw connections between what fandom did over a decade ago and what it continues to do now.

Pete Ross wasn’t the first sidekick or friend in a superhero drama to be racebent.

In Smallville alone, biracial Chinese-American Kristen Kreuk was cast to play a racebent version of Clark Kent’s teenaged sweetheart Lana Lang. (And Dean Cain’s Clark Kent on The Adventures of Clark Kent and Lois Lane in the early Nineties was visibly not white.)

However, the fandom’s response to this newly Black Pete Ross was… different.

When folks in fandom deigned to write him, they wrote him as a shucking and jiving stereotype, an approximation of what they think Black men were like In 2002.

Back then, longtime fan writer teland aired one hell of a grievance about the way that folks in the Smallville fandom insisted on writing Pete Ross when the series first aired, writing that:

If I *never* see another story where Pete fucking ROSS goes around speaking stereotypical JIVE again it will be too soon. What the fuck is *wrong* with you people? Do you *watch* the show? Has Pete *ever* been anything but a normal smartass teenaged boy with a crush on Chloe and a lust for every other woman his eyes have lit upon? Has he *ever* expressed an interest in the poetry of Amiri Baraka? Does he cruise the streets of Smallville in his low-rider and do drive-bys with his do-rag arranged in Criply perfection?

 No?

 Then why the *fuck* do you write him that way, numbnuts?

This fannish insistence on writing Pete Ross as hella hood despite the fact that there are next to no other Black people in Smallville – much less a “hood” of any kind – was one of the ways that the Smallville fandom made it very clear that they didn’t actually see Pete Ross as a character. He was a bad blank slate, one that they could overlay not with the nuanced characterization that white blank slates got –

But with stereotypes about Blackness.

There is no “hood” in Smallville, Kansas.

Outside of a few racebent characters, the small country town is pretty darn white. There are several episodes of Smallville where Pete is the only character of color with dialogue. He’s frequently the ONLY black character on-screen and his dialogue and motivations aren’t exactly hard to parse –

So why was fandom’s “go to” for Pete Ross a hella hood version that dropped slang and exhibited a frankly offensive stereotype of Black existence that didn’t even apply to him?

Simply put?

The Smallville fandom, like many fandoms when faced with having to interact with or write a Black character for the first time in ages, gravitated towards what they knew from their limited interactions with Blackness and Black people. Their biases shone through because it was, for them, the only way they knew how to conceptualize Black people.

(You can see this replicated in more modern fandom with how the MCU fandom tries to turn Sam Wilson into a hard hood stereotype in fanworks or that one horrible headcanon where Miles shoplifted to get art supplies – despite his solidly middle-class existence and strong views of right and wrong.)

If you know nothing about Black people outside of what like… Fox News and your elderly grandparents in the Midwest tell you about Black people and have no interest in seeing us AS PEOPLE or doing the work to unbuild those biases, your fanworks that reference or even center Black characters will hold those beliefs.

Pete Ross was on Smallville for three seasons. In those three seasons, the fandom pretty much decided that he was set up to sit in one of two roles. Either he’d be a supportive sidekick to Clark and company, or he’d be a villain. And either way, when they wrote him, they often gravitated to writing him as a hood stereotype.

Again, there are next to no other Black people in Smallville on the seasons Pete Ross is one of Clark’s closest friends.

Smallville is a picture of white Americana right down to how the show and town takes a Highlander-esque approach to diversity where only a few characters of color are even allowed to inhabit the same space at any given time.

Unlike many of the other Black male characters that set fandoms afire with their ire, Pete Ross wasn’t a threat to established ships or character arcs. He was gone before he really had a chance to shine, written off and moved out of town as other characters took his spot at Clark’s right hand.

What happens when a Black male character is in the way of one ship or poses a threat to another?

Well, for the answer to that, we need to fast forward over a decade to the Supergirl fandom and how it treats Mehcad Brooks and his character on the show, James Olsen.  From the start, racebending Clark Kent’s most famous sidekick didn’t go well. His casting was met with frustration from all corners of fandom from folks that hated that he was a) Black and b) potentially in a relationship with Kara.

Then season two on The CW happened and the fandom kind of… started mutating in the worst way.

Certain parts of the Supergirl fandom will have you believing that James Olsen is the worst character on the show and that Mehcad is the most problematic person to ever work on a CW show.

They cite Mehcad’s (admittedly offensive) Instagram username, his championing Lena/James as a ship on instagram using a hashtag commonly associated with LGBTQ people, and a comment about how his girlfriend at the time told him that he’s “a lesbian trapped in a football player’s body” made to a trans reporter.

None of those things are great, let’s be very real here.

I don’t actually like or support a lot of how Mehcad Brooks carries himself. I don’t need to like him in order to be very aware of how he’s treated by the fandom from even before he was deemed Problematic.

One of the things I’ve been hyperaware of in fandom is how celebrities and fans of color are shunned for problematic thoughts and behavior in a more… permanent way. There are non-Black CW stars who are problematic – some of them are even on Supergirl – and who’ve presented themselves in ways that aren’t great.

But for the most part, they don’t have people calling for them to be fired or for their character to be killed off.

They don’t have folks pretending to care about marginalized people to cloak their anti-Blackness.

Which is one of my biggest issues with the way that Black male characters are treated in fandom spaces: the way that folks use social justice rhetoric and a vague “desire for representation” to excuse unsubtle racism towards these male characters and their performers.

I know we covered that folks performing wokeness is in the minority of Things That Happen In Fandom, but let’s be clear: this is one occasion where it’s frequent and obvious.

One of the ways that Black characters and performers are subject to racism from fandom is in the way that non-Black fans will reframe them as “too problematic to support” (which therefore allows them to be dehumanized by the fandom that dislikes them). If folks in fandom can claim that they really don’t like a Black character because they need to protect marginalized (white) fans from their existence, then they can’t be called racist.

Because they’re doing it for (white) queer people.

Or (white) women.

But it’s terribly transparent.

After all:

Someone celebrating (with champagne and all) that James Olsen has been shot and that Lex Luthor called him a dog does not actually give a shit about representation for people of color.

Someone fretfully worrying that John Boyega, thanks to his father’s role in their church, is a homophobe that doesn’t actually want Finn/Poe to be canon, doesn’t actually care about queer people.

Someone positing that a Black male character is actually harmful for a non-Black character – and that’s why the fandom has to distrust and dislike them – doesn’t actually care about Black people.

And if you’re out here championing a non-canon (fem)slash ship because #RepresentationMatters at the same time that you’re out here actively wishing evil on a Black performer and hoping that their character gets killed off… you can’t possibly care that much about representation for anyone but white queer people.

It continues to boggle my mind how non-Black fans seem incapable of understanding that we can see their tweets and tumblr posts. They seem incapable of understanding that we know the script as well as they do because we’ve seen them use it across the years of fandom and that we see it put into play, we’re not going to fall for it.

Hell, we’re going to call that crap out.

Pete Ross wasn’t the first Black male character to be mistreated by a white fandom. We’ve got years of evidence of Black male characters being rewritten and misrepresented and torn down in order to lift up non-Black ones. Name me a Black male character in a franchise or fandom and I’ll probably be able to tell you at least two ways that fandom mistreats them.

As we can see with James Olsen, the disgusting way folks in fandom treat and talk about Black male characters and performers. is just going to continue until non-Black fans step up and throw away the script they’re adhering to so hard.

#star wars #john boyega #fandom racism #fandomshatepeopleofcolor #fandom meta #on fandom

[ejm513]

THE BIRTH OF A VILLAIN- A LOOK AT ERNESTO DE LA CRUZ

Hello my lovelies!! As you all know I’m slowly working on a fan fiction about Coco going to the Land of the Dead instead of Miguel-and of cores Ernesto has to be involved. However there is one issue I’m having-his characterization. You see not only can I not stand Ernesto, but I find it very hard to not focus on the fact that he is a murder and plagiarizer and just portray him as that-a cartoony bad guy. That’s not fair to Ernesto-because even though I despise what he did he is still a fantastic villain. A vital reason why I think this is because Ernesto has more layers than an ogre. It’s important to understand what made him this way-especially someone like me who is trying to write a story with well rounded, three dimensional characters.

So this is not only an experiment for me to gain a better understanding Ernesto, and a way to start a discussion about what may have caused Ernesto to do what he did.  So please don’t be afraid to comment your ideas and opinions-I’m quiet curious!

Let’s start shall we!

Nothing is known about Ernesto and Hector’s early days, besides that they had been like brothers for a long time. The fandom has many theories floating around-the most popular being that they were both in an orphanage together. This make sense considering the time period and what was going on in Mexico at the time-the revolution. I’m going to be upfront with you all-while I am a history minor (formally a major) my main focus was modern European history-specifically German and Russian history-and American. So needless to say I know VERY little about Mexican history beyond the barest of bones that I learned in Spanish class years ago, but I’m trying to learn. So in order to not make myself look like a fool and intentionally spread wrong facts I’m not going to go into great detail about the Mexican Revolution at least until I know a lot more and feel comfortable with the material. What I do know from research and studying history in general is that revolutions tend to be quiet brutal and violent, so it would make sense that something happened to their parents that resulted in the two boys ending up in an orphanage.

They probably became really close during their time at the orphanage. They bonded not only over their loss and lack of a family, but their love of music. They both can sing-though admittedly Ernesto is the better of the two (no shade to Hector he has a lovely voice but it’s true) and fill their time practicing and singing to the other kids. Then someone-maybe a local musician or whoever-comes and teaches some guitar. That’s another way they bonded-but just as Ernesto was the stronger singer Hector was the better guitar player. Through all of this they became such close friends-like brothers even. They became the family they so lacked.

It’s because of this that Ernesto becomes possessive of Hector. I don’t think he does intentionally-at least at first. He just knows it really upsets him when Hector is playing or hanging out with other kids. He’ll try to inject himself into whatever Hector is doing to make himself important and remind Hector who is his real best friend is. It’s kind’ of like what I did when my brother was born-I was five when my brother was born and since I’m 22 going on 23 in about three months I was told this story. Apparently I would always come into my parents room and tell my mom to check on the baby. This was apparently my way of keeping my place in the family or something like that.  I obviously grew out of that-the problem with Ernesto is that he did not.

As they get older Ernesto will not only interject himself when Hector is with another group of people but he’ll also put his arm around Hector’s shoulder. No thinks anything of it-especially Hector who let’s admit it is a little naïve. Hector unintentionally  begins to pull away from his other friends and spends most of his time with Ernesto practicing and dreaming of sharing their music to the world.

Then Hector gets a little *cough cough* completely massive *cough cough* crush on Imelda and Ernesto finds this very amusing and decides to have some fun at his friends expense. He allows her into his little circle as a joke, but despite Imelda constantly claiming she finds Hector annoying they became friends. Not a real problem though. Then when Hector is about fifteen almost sixteen he encourages him to admit his feelings to Imelda-again this is all a big joke to him because he doesn’t think someone like Imelda would even considering feeling the same way about Hector.

Well… boy was he wrong!! Not only does Imelda return his feelings but they get married!!

That is what Ernesto considers to be step one in Hector’s plan to ruin everything. Not only does he have to share Hector now, but he is no longer his only family. No matter though Imelda can be worked around and Ernesto can handle Imelda… or at least he thinks he can. At first it seems like having to share Hector wont be a massive problem. He’s able to get Hector to go on a short tour (AND by short I mean as many months as he can squeeze out of this) and Imelda is fine with it-if only because it will give a needed boost to their income.  

(Side note I know I already put a head cannon on how Hector reacted to finding out Imelda is pregnant and while I still enjoy that another, much more developed idea formed and I like this better-will write the detailed version later)

But three and half months later Hector gets a telegram saying that Imelda is very sick and needs to come home as soon as possible. So of cores Hector rushes home, leaving Ernesto to follow behind a day or two later. When Ernesto comes home a few days later he doesn’t know what to expect- something must have been very wrong for someone to have taken the time to figure out where they were and to send Hector a telegram. What he didn’t expect was for them to be all smiles and practically glowing with happiness-especially Imelda.

What he didn’t expect was to find out that Imelda wasn’t sick-she’s pregnant.

Step two in Hector’s plan to ruin everything-now Ernesto really won’t be Hector’s family or the most important person in his life. He can handle Imelda but a baby-there’s no way of getting around that. The only thing in this situation that gives Ernesto any sort of hope is that the baby could be a boy-and if you ask Ernesto the baby will absolutely be a boy. Both Ernesto and Hector could teach the boy how to play the guitar and sing-and in his twisted mind if they teach the boy to love music, it’ll make it easier to drag Hector away for tours. And eventually the kid could join the act as well-disregarding the fact that the likely hood of Imelda going along with this is zero to none.

But then… oh but then… the baby ends up being a girl.

A girl.

Step three in Hector’s plan to ruin everything.

That my friends is when everything changes. Ernesto does understand that a baby changes EVERYTHING, but he doesn’t also understand the love a parent has for a child-especially for a girl because let’s face it Ernesto is a very typical man of his time who would want and prefer sons over daughters. He can’t understand how Hector would rather spends his home nights cuddling with a living blob (because babies are a very blob like when they’re first born) instead of playing in various bars and cantinas with him. Ernesto can’t understand why Hector would rather learn to how to braid hair than improving his guitar skills. He can’t understand why Hector would want to be so involved in his child’s life-let alone a daughter’s life! As far as Ernesto is concerned that is Imelda’s job-especially since Coco is a girl.

I think it’s when Coco is born and he sees how much Hector loves her that Ernesto snaps and begins to think of doing some pretty awful things. He doesn’t act on them right away, but he does by the poison (presumably arsenic) and keeps it, waiting to decide when and what he’s doing to do with it.

The scary thing about Ernesto is I don’t think killing Hector was a plan. I think he wanted to keep  Hector  in order to not only have his brother and companion but keep their fame going once it truly started. Oh I think his initial plan could have been to make sure Hector had nothing to keep him tied to Santa Cecilia or make him go home… if you know what I mean.

Considering the fact he almost tried to kill Miquel-a twelve year old TWICE-to keep his reputation clean and not lose his fame-which his is second motivation for doing what he did, I would not put it past Ernesto to kill Imelda or Coco to have complete control over Hector and continue their path to fame.

Next to being the most important person in Hector’s life the obsessive desire for fame and glory is what drove Ernesto.

Ernesto wanted money, he wanted popularity and he wanted the world to love him. This probably steams from the fact he didn’t have any of that growing up. He was an orphan so he had no money and no one to truly love him (except for Hector). Considering how charming he his Ernesto was probably popular among the other children and just as he fed off of Hector’s friendship he fed off that popularity and wanted more and more. Both boys love music, but Ernesto’s motivation for touring and singing were vastly different from Hector’s. It’s pretty well established cannon that Hector wanted to make music and Ernesto wanted to be popular.

In the movie Hector claims that Ernesto was not talented at writing music. This is reinforced by how Ernesto claimed he couldn’t go on with the tour without Hector’s music. So no I don’t think Ernesto wanted to kill Hector at first because simply put he needed him-both as a friend and as a musician. At this point he went from being a genuine friend to using and trying to control Hector-with his so called “insurance policy” ready if the time ever came.

So now we get to the big question-why did Ernesto kill Hector and not go through with what I think was his first plan?

I think it was a sprue of the moment decision. As far as Ernesto was concerned Hector had chosen Imelda and Coco over him-which once again he still can’t understand why. He was not only losing control over Hector but he was losing his ticket to fame. I think at that moment, when Hector was about to walk out of that door, he decided to change his plan.

Instead of taking away Hector’s reasons to stay at home-he’ll just keep Hector from going home at all.

#coco #coco spoilers #pixar coco #Ernesto de la Cruz #Hector Rivera #imelda rivera #exploring motivation #what makes a villain

[gascon-en-exil]

A Not Actually Definitive Ranking of Fire Emblem Games

So after a lot of deliberation I’ve decided not to revisit last year’s Zelda ranking project on a full scale for FE, but that doesn’t mean it’s not something I really wanted to do. 2018 is the year we’re going to get alternatively hyped for and disappointed by FE16, after all. With that in mind have an abbreviated list that will end up being one very long post. I’ve got games to gush over and an anon or two (and very likely actual followers…eep) to piss off, so here we go.

The “personal favorites of the series, love revisiting them” Tier - FE10, FE2/15, FE4

I’m never going to argue that Radiant Dawn is a perfect game or even just a perfect FE game, but damned if it doesn’t manage to do so much right all at once. An extremely ambitious story that builds off its mostly conventional predecessor in a variety of interesting ways, deconstructing a bunch of series narrative standards (life in a defeated country kind of sucks and there are people that don’t warm that quickly to young and inexperienced rulers, go figure) and taking an eleventh hour hard right at Nietzchean atheism as read by a Pride parade. Kind of falls on its ass by the end, but every experimental FE story does the same thing so I can’t fault this one. I love the army switching as motivation to try different units almost as much as I love the oh-so-exploitable growth and BEXP mechanics. Its Easy mode also hits a sweet spot for me of being challenging enough to not be a complete snore while also allowing the freedom for all manner of weird self-imposed challenges that don’t even require grinding. By all accounts Hard mode is one lazy design choice after another, but I don’t play at that level so no complaints here.

Never played Gaiden, but to its credit around half of the unique gameplay mechanics I like in Shadows of Valentia were also in the original: the modest army size, the novel approaches to inventory management and magic, the pretty basic class system with just a hint of nuance. The remake threw in some hit-or-miss questing, dungeon exploration, and achievements, but all the rest was either a solid addition or a continuation of NES-era annoyances that I could live with. And the story…SoV makes me dislike the DS games even more just because this game does so much with so little. Even leaving aside the mostly great voice acting there’s a bunch of new content that characterizes almost everybody and makes half of them (the men, anyway, because this is a remake of a Kaga-era game and therefore misogynistic as can be) gay because why the hell not, and then some development that constitutes the only solid attempt at worldbuilding Archanea-Valentia-Ylisse has ever really gotten and also retcons some stuff from Awakening into making sense. It’s even got some solid DLC with lots of character stuff for the Deliverance, the least sucky grinding of the 3DS games, and probably the only context in which I’ll ever be able to comment on anything from Cipher.

No remake needed for Genealogy of the Holy War to make it competitive with the rest of the top tier - just an excellent translation patch and the standard features of an emulator. I’ve never watched Game of Thrones and probably don’t plan on it, but I gather that this game provides the same essential experience with less blood and female nudity and marginally more egalitarianism for all. I can forgive it for being the original Het Baby Fest since you’d be hard-pressed to find a single entirely healthy and well-adjusted individual anywhere on Jugdral and I relate to that just as much. Screwed up family dynamics for everyone! It’s also arguably got a more fun breeding meta than either of the 3DS games, lacking Awakening’s optimization around a single postgame map with very specific parameters or Fates’s high level of balance that ironically stymies analysis. This is another game for interesting inventory management and unit leveling that isn’t too obnoxious, which mostly makes up for the maps taking an eon to play through even with an emulator speeding through those enemy phases. This would be a strange game to remake, but if it got a localized one of the same caliber as SoV I fully acknowledge that this could climb to the #2 spot. SoV would probably have the queer edge though unless they do some strange things to the plot or just make Gen 2 really gay…but then again Gen 2 is the part that’s more in need of fleshing out as it is. (Also, this game has So. Much. Incest. That’s not even really a kink of mine especially as it’s all straight incest, but I just find that hilarious in light of how Tumblr’s purity culture speaks of such things.)

The “good games, but don’t come back to them as much” Tier - FE7, FE9, FE8

Blazing Sword is not here for nostalgia purposes, especially since when I first played the game at 14 years old most of what I like about it didn’t really register. It was just that game with RPG elements that I liked and permadeath that I didn’t, and it took a few games after that for me to become an established fan of the franchise. Massive props for putting such an unconventional spin on a prequel to a textbook FE; this is a game in a series about war in which no war is fought, how crazy is that? We actually get to see the backstory of FE6′s tragic antagonist, even as it’s completely tangential to the plot of this game and so just feels like random Jugdral-esque family drama without context, and on top of that we get the first hints of interdimensional travel and kinky human/shapeshifter sex several years before either of those became controversial talking points about how they were ruining the series. I am so there. Lyn doesn’t matter to the saga, but her character arc is distinct and self-contained and also she picked up a disproportionately large fanbase while being bisexual and biracial so go her. Eliwood is sympathetic and homosocially-inclined even if his growths frequently make me want to cry (at least he gets a horse unlike his similarly-challenged son), and I can live with Hector even if I could have done without his lordly legacy. Throw in some average-for-the-time gameplay with just enough variety across the two routes and even more good character work *waves at Sonia and Renault and Priscilla -> Raven/Lucius and Serra and…* and it’s all in all a solid experience. The ranking system can go die in a fire though, which funnily enough it did after this game. Yay!

Like most early 3D games - except on Gamecube so it’s even more embarrassing - Path of Radiance has aged terribly by every aesthetic measure aside from the soundtrack. It’s also painfully slow, and my computer can’t run Dolphin apparently so an emulator’s not going to fix that for me. Those obvious flaws aside, it’s still an entertaining game, and more importantly it’s the prologue that had the crucial task of setting up all the pins RD knocked over in stellar fashion, whether we’re talking about the basic storyline that actually isn’t or the many het relationship fake-outs (more so in localization…I guess we’ll never know if NoA was actively planning that when they pushed Ike/Elincia like they did). PoR is also a love letter to Jugdral in both gameplay and themes, albeit an occasionally critical one. The jury’s still out on whether Jugdral or Tellius succeeds the most (fails the least?) of the FE settings at developing a complete world with a nuanced and resonant saga narrative, but that Tellius manages to be competitive while being kind of clumsy overall with racism and shifting the series’s overarching motif of dragon-blooded superhumans to one of kinky interracial sex is pretty impressive. The less I say about Ike the better since it’s only his endings in RD that save him for me; suffice it to point out that his worldview and general personality were clearly designed to appeal to a demographic that does not include me.

And finally comes The Sacred Stones, truly my average benchmark FE as I like it but struggle to have any particularly strong feelings on it one way or the other. The story is standard but has a few intriguing quirks, like the light vs. dark magic meta, surprise necrophilia, and how the main antagonist’s sexuality sort of depends on which route you take (except he’s still never getting laid so does it really matter?). It also seems to have been the first game to have made a legitimate effort toward the kind of replayability that’s normal for RPGs, what with the branched promotions, the route split, and the actual postgame. That’s all much more engaging than just filling up a support log. The gameplay is also more polished and (I think?) more balanced than the other GBA games, if one is willing to overlook the minor issue of Seth. Let’s see…something something twincest that’s now an IS running gag, something something guys talking intimately about their lances, something something SoV did the whole dungeon crawling with monsters bit better but I can forgive SS for not taking it that far. Moving on….

The “they have Problems” Tier - FE14, FE13

Probably qualifies as a fandom heresy, but yes I’m putting Fates first of these two. Fates is in every conceivable way for me the “You Tried” game, because I had such high hopes for it from the moment we got the earliest promotional content. I was expecting a World of Warcraft-style conflict between two morally grey factions with myriad convoluted grievances against each other messily resolving themselves one way or the other according to player choice (though note that this is already somewhat damning with faint praise as no one’s going to call WoW a storytelling masterpiece), with Conquest in particular a true villain campaign that I imagined might play out as European Imperialism: The Game. What we actually got was…not that, not at all, but amid all the complaints about plot holes and idiot balls and moral myopia most fans seem to have forgotten just how much there is to this game. It’s three full stories that together average out to be just about passable, with possibly the biggest gameplay variety in the series that fixed most of Awakening’s more broken elements (pair-up, children being unquestionably superior to the first generation) while also adding in new features that undoubtedly appealed to someone or other like Phoenix mode and the castle-building aspect. I can even mostly forgive the obvious growing pains Fates exhibits in terms of queer content, as they were pretty much inevitable once the developers realized that (almost) everyone was picking up on the subtext and that that approach just wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Again, they tried, and if the results included face-touching fanservice and plot contrivances left and right and two-way cultural posturing that inevitably crosses over into real world racism at some point I can still step back for a moment and acknowledge that Fates began as a distinctive, high-concept setting on par with Tellius and Jugdral that was willing to do something different with the narrative norm (for two of its routes at least, and even so I’m not begrudging Birthright its conventionality because that grounding is important overall). And who knows? Maybe a later game will come along and retroactively make this setting coherent.

Fates might have more sexual fanservice, but if there’s any FE that I feel ends up a slave to fanservice in a broader sense it would be Awakening. Yeah, I get that when it was in development everyone thought this would be the final game, so it makes sense that the finished product turned out to be a nostalgia-laden greatest hits piece. It’s still hard to forgive Awakening for feeling so insubstantial, doubly so since it ended up revitalizing the franchise and now it and Fates are everywhere. It’s got a plot that only makes some sense in light of SoV and possibly on a meta level (following my theory that the plot structure is meant to mirror FE1-3 in sequence), the first iteration of an Avatar dating game heavily coloring the characterization and support system, and a queasily feel-good atmosphere that allows almost no character to actually remain dead and centers everything around the self-insert and the power of friendship. So much for the series’s traditionally dim view of human nature and recurring theme of the inevitability of conflict. What’s more, in spite of its theoretically broad scope (including a criminally under-explored time travel plot with a bad future) and numerous call-backs to older games Awakening does surprisingly little for developing the series’s most frequently-visited setting. I think it was in large part how generic this game has always felt to me even before release that I never got very hyped for it and as a consequence was never very disappointed by it. It’s just….there, with its nostalgia and its chronic “no homo” and its host of hilariously broken mechanics. I wonder if we’d have ended up viewing Awakening more favorably if it really had been the last game? Eh, probably not.

The “needs a remake or needs a better remake” Tier - FE5, FE6, FE3/12, FE1/11

I don’t have a specific order for these, except that FE1/11 is almost certainly the bottom since 5 and 6 have remake potential and, lack of localization aside, New Mystery was a better remake than Shadow Dragon.

I still haven’t fully played Thracia 776, but I’ve watched and read through Let’s Plays and have read more than enough analysis and meta on the game to where I can definitively say that I wouldn’t enjoy playing it too much and don’t feel all that emotionally connected to the story except insofar as it relates to the overall Jugdral saga. The concept of a standard FE plot that ends with the playable cast losing is an intriguing one, though they really could have done better than the weird non-ending that is this game’s final boss. I’m also not as invested in Leif the fallen aristocrat as I usually am those types of characters, possibly because it’s a foregone conclusion that he eventually gets his kingship anyway. I would like a remake, hopefully one that smooths over some of the original’s mechanical roughness and also makes a bunch of characters gay because the material’s certainly there in places, but I also admit that I’d rather have a remake of Genealogy first. Or, for that matter….

Binding Blade doesn’t have the potential for an amazing story-driven remake that Thracia does; after all, it’s basically a soft reboot of FE1 with an equally bland lord saved by his Super Smash Bros. fanbase and possibly his weirdly large harem. That said, there’s a fair amount of character potential and worldbuilding opportunities what with the series’s first true support system and the content of its unorthodox prequel. Even by itself I feel like BB does more to sell Elibe as its own distinctive world than any of Marth’s games ever did for Archanea, and that’s even with the reality that like the Archanea games this playable cast is inflated with some really forgettable characters (that seem to have followed a semi-rigid numerical quota by class in this instance. It’s weird.). This game never really stuck in my mind as a good playable experience either, not helped by the fact that it feels simple and antiquated compared not only to the GBA games that followed it but to the Jugdral games that preceded it. Good on them for throwing out some of Thracia’s more unwieldy mechanics, but did they have to throw out skills, hybrid classes, and varied chapter objectives too? The space limitations of the GBA couldn’t have been that severe.

While I’ve been spending much of this post ragging on Archanea, I will say that (New) Mystery of the Emblem has some interesting character beats, like the resolution of the Camus/Nyna/Hardin tragedy, Rickard and the situationally bisexual(?) Julian, and some of the antics of Marth’s retainers. I did like bits of the remake’s new assassin plot even if most of it is cribbed from the Black Fang; Eremiya’s no Sonia, but Clarisse and Katarina have their moments. Also, Kris isn’t that offensive to me since I was never all that engaged in Marth’s inconsistent personality and from what I’ve seen his/her supports don’t all devolve into a dating sim. New Mystery has a broader array of characters than either the original or the previous remake, without requiring the player to kill off characters just to get some of the new ones. That said, the reclassing in the DS games is still broken and allows the player to strip even more character out of their personality-deprived units. I’m getting to the point where I’m having trouble separating the two actually, so I’ll just go ahead and remark that I think everyone can agree that Shadow Dragon is the worst of the three remakes so far, with no supports, the aforementioned killing of units, a prologue that adds to the story but only exists on Normal mode and also requires you to kill someone off (seriously, what is it with this game? Is it commentary on the necessary sacrifices of war that they tried forcing on the player for one game until they realized it was a terrible idea?), the needless removal of features from earlier games like rescuing even as others like weapon ranks and forging were left in, that first clumsy iteration of reclassing, and little to nothing that I can see as elevating the story above the standard fantasy adventure fare of Dark Dragon and the Sword of Light that might have been good in 1990 but didn’t look so hot in 2008. Archanea just feels so lifeless overall compared to every other setting in the franchise, to the point where I don’t even feel that guilty about putting the first game in the series way down at the bottom when over in the Zelda ranking I raised the NES games above ones I found more fun to play solely because of their historical significance. Isn’t FE1 arguably the first tactical RPG? I feel like I should appreciate it more, but I just can’t. *shrugs*

#Fire Emblem #Mostly serious but not entirely