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graceofagodswrath · 2 years

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Transformers x Humans Are Space Orcs - A Rant

Alright, I’m gonna complain about something I don’t see talked about enough. Maybe I haven’t found the people who do, so if you know em point me in their direction.

Transformers. I’ve been a long time fan. I’ve watched G1, Animated, Prime, Bayverse, RID, Rescue, WFC, and read all of MTMTE/LL, and I’m excited for the upcoming Earthspark. Course that’s only half if not less of all the content, but enough to prove I’m a fan. Love the characters and world building.

But unfortunately, the majority of not all the Transformers canon content suffers from one major factor that is common among entertainment featuring non-human beings: half-assed human characters. Humans described as wimpy little shits (except Agent Fowler from TFP that man has my eternal respect and love).

Usually the only reason human characters are inserted is to create a relatable character for viewers. But the majority of characters are already relatable, so it’s a moot concept I think we can all accept.

But I cannot for the life of me understand why one would have to give up a realistic, interesting personality for a human character, but give the non-human characters everything. Just take the human characters out for fucks sake!

If you’ve read my other posts, you’re aware I’m an avid lover of Humans are Space Orcs. This community is amazing at digging up mundane or strange facts about humans and turning those into shorts centered around terrifying aliens. That’s what I have always wanted to see in a Transformers story.

I hate the constant “don’t step on them, they’re squishy, gross organics, small and fragile, protect like little cute worm” shit. I’m so tired of it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m aware there are some badass human character sim the Transformers canon. But they are so far and few, and even then Transformers characters never give them their due.

And that is a main theme in the entire canon. Technoism, I think it’s called. Racism between inorganic and organic species. It’s a very real and moving part of the plot that I love and hate for its realism. Something that always gets me is how even the Transformers characters that are closest with humans (Bumblebee, Optimus Prime, Jazz, etc) still seem to treat humans like little primitive puppies that need their constant protection (this is more prominent in IDW than the more pg shows). And the human personalities don’t help.

The point I’m trying to make is, I want to see Transformers reacting to humans the same way we write aliens reacting to humans. Being confused, scared, in awe or disgust. If someone else doesn’t write it, I will.

Eventually.

I want Megatron to actually recognize humans as a threat. I want him to freak the fuck out when he sees what we can do. I want Optimus Prime to feel a little fear at some human tearing apart a transformer. Somehow.

One idea I’ve always loved is a scenario where a human is mass displaced to be just as big as an average Cybertronian. And they kick ass. They go absolute apeshit like I wrote a character going apeshit over his cat. I want to see transformers understanding just how lethal humans are when you pick on a bitch your own size.

If I get enough requests to do it, I might write it. But I’ve started so much other shit I need to continue, oh mah lawd. I don’t care. I needed to rant.

Thx for coming to my Ted talk.

#humans are space orcs #humans are deathworlders #humans are space australians #humans are weird #humans are crazy #transformers #megatron #optimus prime #tf mtmte #tf lost light #transformers prime #a rant by me #maccadam

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aceinacloset · 5 months

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FNAF SL REDUX

This whole Au is just self-indulgent for me, but you may like it, so still give this post a read if you're a fan of Fnaf sl, Fnaf aus, or both. Enjoy 😊.

This Au is dedicated to "rewriting" sister location to be more independent from the other fnaf games (*cough* *cough* FNAF 4) and to give a more unique perspective to SL'S story.

This Au is focused on the funtimes

I love these 4 sillies, I just love these 4 heck all the characters in sister location. I really wanted to have an Au that focuses on the funtimes and their struggles in the facility, focusing on that also allows me to delve into the very motivations that had them want to escape the facility in the first place.

The other animatronics in SL are also part of this Au, just not as prominent as the Skittle squad.

Elizabeth is also very prominent in this Au.

Elizabeth is another character in SL. I love a lot, so she's also very present. Since she experiences the same pain as Funtimes I through, I felt it really necessary.

There are lore changes.

Not really changes, more so add ons. These add ons are here to expand upon what Fnaf had built with Sister Location but never did anything with past SL. Some stuff in here are add ons just to indulge me.

William and Michael are here too.

While they're not as focused on as the characters previously mentioned, they do have their role and place in the story.

William is intentionally designed that way. While I do have a planned human design, I have a reason he looks like his 8-bit sprite. The reason is to show the rift he would unintentionally build with Liz after her death, and this rift would become so wide that she would no longer see him as her father let alone a person.

While Michael's look would specifically be keeped hidden through most of the story to show how the Funtimes and Elizabeth perceive him.

Oh yeah, Mrs. Afton is here too for some extra plot.

I don't have a complete design for her yet, so all I have are concepts of her design. I'm still working on her character (That's the fun of Mrs. Afton not being canon yet, I get to write her how ever I like.) But I want her to be someone who's kind and sweet but doesn't take shit and has the will to beat the shit out of those who deserve it.

A major plot point she is a part of is going down into the rental facility to find clues on what could have happened to Liz.

She would find answers, but at a price

Yeah, she would, um be killed by william. I'll go into further detail on this event at a later date.

Extra changes

Redesigned the facility's map

Changed some game events because I didn't like them or I felt they could have been better

Some new faces to really bring life to this Au

Unique character designs

More a focus on events prior to Sister Location (the game) events

Spooky stuff if I feel up to it.

Mult ending ideas

This Au may also touch upon and make content in association with other games and books in heavy relation to Sister Location (ex. FNAF 6 and fazbear fright story "Room for one more")

That's all the info I got so far, I hope to post more about this Au soon.

Bye-bye

-Jester 🤡

#fnaf #aceinacloset art #fanart #five nights at freddy's #circus baby #aceinacloset rambles #fnaf sister location #fnaf fanart #elizabeth afton #fnaf au #funtime foxy #funtime freddy #ballora #william afton #michael afton #mrs afton #this wont be all I post but I will post about this a lot #I cant wait to post more about this cause i have a lot planned #!FNAF SL REDUX!

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djsherriff-responses · 3 months

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Actually wait something else that supports my "Sarah's story is a parallel to Bullfrog's story" theory and my "Bullfrog's mother was an assassin" theory

Sarah looks nothing like Sam

From what I've gathered regarding Splinter cell lore is that , despite being important to the main character and mother of his child, Regan Burns never had a physical appearance in any games, her physical appearance is left more or less blank

In most media , Sarah is a white woman with dark hair while in CLH Sarah is a brown woman with silver hair

However in both games and CLH, Sam is a white man with dark hair

While Sam in CLH isn’t an exact copy of his video game counterpart, Sam and Sarah in the splinter cell series do have a much stronger family resemblance to each other than that of their counterparts in the remixed universe

That’s….. weird, right? Like , it’s an odd creative choice to have Sarah be so drastically different to her game version that even her race is different while Sam , her father, still resembles the character he’s originally remixed from

While concept art did explore other options regarding her hair eye, and skin colour, including pale skin and dark hair like her game version, Sarah having pale hair specifically seemed like a design element the crew felt strongly towards and wanted to use

Yes the Warden being Sarah Fisher, the daughter of Sam Fisher, is meant as a plot twist. HOWEVER, we don’t learn about Sam’s existence until Sarah explains her backstory , meaning the crew could’ve given Sam some traits to better reflect his blood connection to his daughter in this universe

Sarah’s lack of physical resemblance to her father may have some narrative symbolism to it, the most obvious being how drastically different she and her father’s morals are. However, I also think it ties back to my theory that Regan was a Templar and was the one who gave Sarah her beliefs in life that lead to her behaviour in the show proper

Sarah didn’t just inherited Regan’s Templar status and beliefs , Sarah also physically resembles her mother more than her father

I know this is completely random to bring up, but I’m making a Kingdom Hearts reference

Specifically, Xehanort, a villain whose prominent features is his silver hair and gold eyes combo

Now obviously Ubisoft has no rights to use anything Kingdom hearts related , and so I seriously doubt we’ll see a flashback of Sam making out with a Xehanorted Regan in season two (don’t ask what Xehanorted is if you never played KH, it’s hard to explain)

The reason I’m bringing him up is to point out that while Captain Laserhawk is a show about video games, it’s specifically an anime show about video games

I can’t find anything regarding his opinion on the KH franchise itself, though Adi did talk about how Rodger Rabbit was an inspiration for CLH, another massive crossover story owned by Disney. Considering how he likes to tip his toes into all sorts of geeky stuff, it’s unlikely he hasn’t encountered the Kingdom Hearts franchise

I think the Templars may be inspired by Xehanort to a degree

A majority of the human characters (both who have a narrative role and background role) shown in the CLH universe thus far have natural hair and eye colours

While there’s outliners such as Pagan Min and Mute having pink hair, those two are easily explained by the existence of hair dye

Sarah however, was born with gold eyes and silver hair

While I don’t think every member of the board of directors/templar order have a sun kissed complexion under those masks like Sarah does, I do think it’s likely that gold eyes and silver hair is a common trait they share under those masks

And we know from the manga that Eden is practicing some form of eugenics with how they specifically took Dolph from his own mother for having good genetics, it’s likely that the board keeps heavy tabs on people that have Templar DNA within them

“Okay so how does Bullfrog’s mother fit into this-“ you notice how Bullfrog is one of the more feminine looking male characters in the show?

It may have just been me who originally mistook him for being a girl before the show actually came out, but I don’t think it’s an accident that he has feminine/softer leaning design elements. It’s even pointed out by the crew they specifically designed Bullfrog to be cute , you can even see that reflected throughout Bullfrog’s concept art

So since Sarah parallels Bullfrog, and she both took her mother’s ideals and inherited most of her physical traits from her, than it’s likely Bullfrog not only took after his mother in her beliefs, but also has a very strong resemblance to his mother

Basically, Bullfrog’s mama was a cute assassin milf

#captain laserhawk #Bullfrog korvin junior #clh bullfrog #Splinter cell #sarah fisher #captain laserhawk spoilers #rambles #I don’t know if I’m onto something regarding Sarah and Bullfrog’s mothers #But the gold eyes and silver hair thing I’m probably strong on at least

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darkpoisonouslove · 9 months

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NOO! Griffins redemption arc could've had SO MUCH potential, the show runners doesn't even know about!!

They could have do so much out of it! What lead her to Valtor in the first place (in my hc it has something to do with the diffrent teatment of dark and light magic users)? What happened that she left him in the end? What was that "change of heart"? Why did the CoL believed her when she came to them? The history of her and Faragonda that she vouched for her? And what happened AFTER the fight ok Domino that Faragonda and had that complicated relationship at the beginning of season 1?

And what did they? The gave her one, just ONE fu***** flashback scene and one scene with Valtor?! That lover to enemies plot was just got thrown out the window!!

Getting the entire Company of Light backstory was, for me, (one of) the best thing(s) on the show but for the writers was just a shortcut to creating personal conflict between Valtor and Griffin, Faragonda and Saladin so they can keep the action mostly contained to the territory of the schools and their surroundings. Sure, we go to other planets a lot in season 3 but the major battles with Valtor happen in CT, the Magix museum and at lake Roccaluce (and the final battle on Andros hardly counts either because the actual battle with Valtor was led inside his body).

Honestly, however you look at the Company of Light backstory, it just doesn't make sense. Griffin, Saladin and Faragonda were in the Company and then all proceeded to become heads of the most prominent schools in the Dimension? What are the odds of that actually happening? Especially considering Griffin's background. The fact that they apparently knew Bloom's parents but no one thought to tell her for... what reason exactly? Not to mention that Faragonda didn't appear to have a personal connection to the Dragon Fire and the Domino royal family in season 1 even if she started connecting the dots at some point. If she'd known Marion and Daphne, she should have instantly concluded what's going on the second she learned Bloom was having visions of Daphne and she would have suspected from the first moment she saw Bloom - an "Earth" fairy who's practically a copy of Marion with fire powers. Come on! And then you get to the timeline that just doesn't add up and the writers make that much worse every time they insist that the Company were the same age as Winx when they fought the Ancestral Witches, which is absolutely impossible because Marion and Oritel already had a teenage daughter at the time. The whole thing is just... Okay then. You know, a spin-off could fix most if not all of this. Just saying.

As for Griffin, same thing there. Like I said, I believe that making her Valtor's partner was to justify him taking over CT since that's where most of his battles with the Winx take place (and Bloom's talk with the Ancestral Witches that is questionable too - how are they connected to CT? Why can they be contacted through the crypt if they're not dead? If they can access this dimension, why haven't they tried to contact any of the witches in CT, especially back when the Trix were still students, so that they can get freed from Obsidian?). Plus, she's the only older witch character we have on the show, therefore she's the only one who would have served the forces of evil in her youth. Don't we all know that witches are just prone to seeking world domination? If you haven't grasped that yet, you clearly have not been watching the show carefully smh. /s

So they just slapped that backstory there. It's obvious that they didn't want to bother with it when you remember how stylized the entire flashback is. There was literally nothing in it to give you any concrete details about their partnership. It's basically an illustration of the concept that doesn't indicate anything specific about the characters and the relationship. And the offenses don't stop there. Griffin isn't allowed to do anything against Valtor, even though she should be the one person that knows him best and is therefore able to at least somewhat predict his moves aka would have the best chances to counter them. They let Faragonda fight him and blast him through a bunch of trees but Griffin gets nothing, even after he imprisoned her and zombified her students? The sheer indignity of that! And when you look at it, it's so clear why they did it - because they don't want anyone other than the Winx to be able to save the day. Winx save Andros, Winx save Alfea and Faragonda, Winx save CT (in 3x24). Never mind that Griffin has worked with Valtor under the Ancestral Witch that has illusion and darkness powers. Surely, she never would have considered he didn't just decimate CT but simply masked it. Especially since season 2 said CT is alive and both Griffin and the Trix could sense its energy and direct it to make the castle do what they want. Makes perfect sense! All the logistics in this show are a fucking joke.

I also believe that her joining Valtor had something to do with the issue of light vs dark magic. Even if we accept that there isn't outright hostility and bias against the witches everywhere (Magix is cool for example whereas other planets such as Eraklyon are more discriminatory against witches), I still think that light magic users are more propped up in the spotlight and respected. It would have bothered someone like Griffin and I can see her seeking out power to prove dark magic's place in the "ecosystem" is just as important. Tbh 1x08 kind of supports that and could give insight into the issue with Faragonda but I will get to that later. And from there I can see her getting close with Valtor based on the similarities between them. After all, Valtor is just as powerful as the Domino royals with their Dragon Fire but ignored and openly abhorred because of the darkness added to his power. He's not really considered a natural extension of the Dragon Fire (Faragonda calls him "a creature", which, I mean, fair but still). He's smart, cunning, ruthless, powerful. All things that would draw Griffin to him because she's so similar. It's not that hard to see why they'd work together, though the show would never admit to the superiority of light magic that is imposed on the world.

What's really annoying is the fact that the motivations for her betrayal are left up in the air. Again, Griffin is smart enough to have seen through the Ancestral Witches' plans. She would have known that they would bring about a lot of destruction. Why work for them only to decide later that she's not okay with it? If you consider the possibility that she's prideful enough to get herself into a mess like that, there would have had to have been a wake-up call for her to decide to switch sides similarly to what happened in season 1 with the Trix. But there she took measures against them before the catastrophe hit and she never suspected that they could try to take over the world - implying that she would not have waited around for the situation to get so dire to get herself out of it. Add to that that neither Griffin's, nor Valtor's words and behavior indicate that he (or the Ancestral Witches) did something out of their ordinary to alienate her. It's all worded as if one day she just realized out of the blue that she's helping a plan that could lead to the ruin of whole planets and she booked it. I am not buying that. Which leads to the only viable alternative - that someone else (Faragonda) changed her mind but that's also counterintuitive considering the situation in season 1. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it would have needed more backstory to stick properly. That's not my headcanon but it would work really well with what we already saw on the show. It would also bring in maximum angst for Valtor because she left him because of Faragonda, and maximum angst for Griffin and Faragonda because of the way things proceed to develop between them. All that to lead us to them being protective of each other as we saw on the show and to intensify Valtor's anger and bring out his feelings on the betrayal to the surface.

Imo it makes the most sense that the Company (without Faragonda) decided to keep Griffin purely from a strategical PoV - to use her information on the Coven. All of that helped by Faragonda's unwavering belief that Griffin is not just spying on them for Valtor. And with time they would be convinced that she truly wants to help for the sake of the universe and fixing her mistakes.

Honestly, I can see how they could have fallen out after the tragedy on Domino. Now the show implies that no one has heard of the Company of Light, which, again, doesn't make sense if they fought the battle that lead to the destruction of an entire planet but okay. It would make sense that they got their positions as heads of the schools in relation to their heroism, exhibited during their time with the Company. Except that Griffin was helping the Coven first; she was less standing up to a rising threat and more fixing her own mistakes, plus she's a witch. She's mostly an afterthought when it comes to the Company's "victory" if not outright ignored and that bothers her. It's a nagging in the back of her mind for over a decade until it starts to undermine her relationship with Faragonda. And that leads us to her lines in 1x08 about the alliance between Winx and the Specialists possibly changing the balance of power. They could have even saved her more questionable characterization in the beginning of season 1 if they had tried to tie it into her past and then draw from that to add drama to the conflict between her and Valtor.

Again, imagine the tension of him taunting her about having to bow to people that would have cowered before her if she'd just stayed by his side. Imagine her obsession with him leading to comments from, say, leaders of the planets affected by his actions asking how reasonable it is to let Valtor's ex partner in charge of the strategy against him. Even if she's successful in foiling him, that just proves that she's too good at thinking like him. Maybe it's all a big con and they have been working together the whole time. Or if not, they made up after she became obviously disgruntled with the treatment she received after her involvement with the Company of Light. Imagine Valtor, pissed off about the insinuations that he would trust her again but still not passing up a chance to mock her that if everyone thinks she's working with him anyway, she would have been much better off if she'd actually been working with him still, but she's not. Imagine the strain on her relationship with Saladin and Faragonda when they see in her more and more of the woman she was when she was working with Valtor because she's trying to get in his head to win their game of cat and mouse. For them it's like seeing the trauma of the past coming alive right before their eyes while for her it's more of the thing that alienated her in the first place - doing everything to help only to have her efforts questioned and doubted, only to be accused - whether implicitly or explicitly - of being evil.

I understand that the writers wanted to keep the focus on the Winx but in that case, they should not have introduced the backstory that Valtor has with Griffin, Faragonda and Saladin. Valtor is undoubtedly the type of person that would pursue revenge vehemently and not fitting that into the plot works against his character. Add to that the fact that they made him overpowered from the start and had to scramble to write in ways for Winx to defeat him but that only made him look more and more pathetic the closer we got to the point where they had to defeat him. That whole thing would have worked much better if instead of weakening him (I mean, really? He allegedly gets so many spells that he can't even hold all of them in his own form but he's afraid of fighting the Winx himself and he can barely save his own ass - not through magic, but through trickery? Gtfo), they would have written the Winx foiling his plans with help from Griffin. Having her in Alfea once he concealed CT (and doing that earlier, in 3x18 instead of him just leaving and letting Griffin come back) would have been the perfect opportunity and perfect motivation to make her be out for his head if she weren't already. That is already the point in which they start to weaken him so it would have worked perfectly with the plot. Just add a few more scenes with Griffin advising the Winx what to do, or in the very least make Stella (we all know it would be Stella, especially since she's the one who freed Griffin from her cell in CT) jab him about Griffin's information doing wonders for them and helping them ruin his day. I'm definitely thinking here of the "[we will win] because you slept with her and now she's mad" scene from the season 1 finale of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Anyway, pour one out for all this wasted potential.

#winx club #winx griffin #winx valtor #griffin x valtor #company of light #winx faragonda #winx headcanons #meta #ask #anon

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filmmakerdreamst · 1 year

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The Problem with Lyra

Just to be clear, I think Dafne Keen is a terrific actor. This is in no way criticising her or her abilities. It’s more to do with the direction and the way her character was put together.

Adaptations of characters change according to the actor, or the vision the writer has i.e. There are different versions of Lizzie Bennet. I don't have a problem with a different vision of Lyra.

The problem I had was the Jack Thorne shaved away her prominent flaws - yet mentioned them at the same time. At the start, and throughout its mentioned that she's a liar, but we don't see it or rarely experience it. So when we do get moments where the storyline mentions that "she has to tell the truth", it doesn’t hit as hard as it should.

The whole concept in the 'Land of the Dead' sequence was her telling the dead true stories, but those story beats don't land as well because she's already truthful.

It was like the storyline wanted it both ways with her.

For example, comments that characters made in the show like "you are insufferable" "you don't apologise easily" or "LIAR" don't make sense because TV!Lyra is nothing like that.

And another thing, Lyra’s dislikable qualities are important to the story. 'His Dark Materials' is mostly driven by characters emotions and motivations rather than the plot. So things like, her lying, her selfishness, her rudeness even her EMOTIONS being toned down effects the entire story.

Lyra is first and fourmost an EMOTIONAL and impulsive person. She wears her heart on her sleeve. She doesn't filter herself. So her leaving Pan on the doc in the TV Show, kind of seems unnecessarily mean since we've never seen her do anything like that before. Which brings me to another point that I have.

Shaving away Lyra's flaws doesn't make her a kickass amazing character, it dehumanises her. I've seen this with other adaptations before. It presents a major problem that media has. "That women are just pawns to be pushed from one scene to the next. Their own agency never truly factoring in"

Lyra in the books undergoes through a massive character growth. Take her lying for example. She first lies to do wrong. She lies to save herself. She lies for good. Then she finally learns to tell the truth in the land of the dead. The whole irony of her being given the compass, is that it’s something that "tells her the truth".

So the TV show presented all these plot points to her, but none of the development or emotions to go with it.

So her character development is..I don't know really.

#had to get this off my chest #this is my only qualm with the series really #lyra belacqua #lyra silvertongue #bbc his dark materials #his dark materials #hbo his dark materials #tv show #analysis #critique #review #dafne keen #jack thorne #writing #they sucked out lyra's soul in this adaptation #which is ironic #really

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bawfulio · 7 months

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of "I think too much on how both Steven Universe and Star vs were influenced by their creator's backgrounds and how it respectively helped and hindered their messages"

Rebecca Sugar, the creator of Steven Universe, is a Jewish nonbinary woman. Steven Universe not only contains themes of queer love and acceptance but it's two most well known themes (change and forgiveness) are heavily rooted in the Jewish concepts of there being no point where change is impossible and in teshuvah

Teshuvah, meaning "repent"/"return", involves performing self-examination, engaging with the person they've wronged, confessing to them and expressing regret for their action, doing everything they can to right the wrong they did and actively abstaining from doing that wrong again when presented with the opportunity

This is best shown with the Diamonds arc in Change your Mind. They each are confronted by how their actions hurt both Pink/her son Steven/the Gems: Blue on how she and the other Diamonds were treating Steven the exact same way that they treated Pink, eventually driving her away. Yellow on how she and the other Gems on Homeworld are chafing under the pressure of conforming to White Diamond's laws. White herself on how she is just as flawed and infallible as everyone else and that the rules she set up based on her past view of herself are wrong

They each work to fix the damage they caused: healing the corrupted gems, restoring the shattered/gem clusters back to their original states, disbanding their armies, liberating their colonies, using their powers to help Gems instead of punishing them, up to outright dismantling their own empire and allowing a democracy to take it's place. And they each refuse to go back to their old ways, even when it's clear that Steven won't live with them or go full contact because he is still uncomfortable with them. Even when he and many of their former subjects will likely and understandably never forgive them

Star vs the Forces of Evil was created by Daron Nefcy, a white woman from Los Angeles. Star vs starts out as an episodic comedy about a rebel princess, her best friend and their wacky inter-dimensional adventures fighting monsters. As the show goes on, Star realizes that the monsters are actually victims of the systemic racism that her family had been implementing and benefiting from for years. The show then transitions to focus on the themes of fighting against racism, implementing systemic change and fixing the damage done by those in power in the past

These themes in Star vs are shown by Star, the princess from another dimension that looks exactly like a white girl, being one of the only advocates for ending the oppression against the monsters. They are not shown to have their own culture or history to give credence to them as a species instead of a vague monolith. None of them even get a chance to speak out for themselves on how poorly they are treated. They are just by the show as passive victims for Star to "save".

There are only a handful of prominent monster characters. Buff Frog is the first monster that Star befriends and is shown to have to only be able to afford food for his family by getting jobs that are considered evil because of the oppression he lives under but he never once brings up this issue to Star. He is appointed as the Royal Monster Expert but never gets an episode focusing on his new role before he is written out of Season 3. Even after he returns in Season 4, he only appears as a minor character with no role in the anti-racism plot

Toffee is a major villain starting from Season 1 who's plans and motivations are never fully revealed even after the show ended. He is hinted to have a connection to Moon and an agenda against magic, likely because of how the Butterfly's use it to oppress monsters. All this amounts to is him apparently killing Moon's mother Comet before the signing of a peace treaty (the exact terms of the treat are never revealed, Comet has referred to monsters as "beasts of the forest" over them not savoring food, referred to then-monster king Batwin as a soft and made multiple other condescending remarks regarding monsters in her chapter) and him being graphically killed off as a villain for trying to drain magic only for Star to decide at the end of the series to destroy magic with it being as her doing "the right thing"

Glogbor is Eclipsa's infamous monster husband who is confirmed to have eaten people in the past only to stop because Eclipsa "redeemed" him. After he is released from his crystal, he is a major character in one episode before being shifted to the background as Eclipsa's loving wife and nothing more. His daughter Meteora, who half mewman but her monster traits were never hinted at or shown until after the reveal, gets a tragic backstory and a chance to start over as an infant with a happier life despite her having abused children and worked to uphold the racist-status quo as Miss Heinous.

Solaria, the Butterfly who is responsible for the racist status-quo, who actively wants to kill out all monsters and created an army of unstable super soldiers to do so, who genuinely thinks that they would be happier DEAD, gets a quick moment in the series finale to look disapprovingly at Mina (one of said unstable super soldiers and is only still around due to Solaria's spells) and smile approvingly at her half-monster-but-mostly-looks-mewman grandaughter. Hekapoo, the most mewman looking of the Magic High Commission, gets a moment to "redeem" herself despite not only having no regret for her actions up to that very moment but also being actively complicit in Solaria's plans as shown in The Magic Book of Spells

Steven Universe works because Sugar's background allowed them to tell their story to it's fullest even with CN executives sabotaging it

Star vs failed because Nefcy's background influenced her tell her story at it's weakest even with Disney executives giving it every opportunity to succeed

#Steven Universe #SU #Star vs the forces of evil #svtfoe #other stuff #anyway if any of you call Sugar a “nazi apologist” or say anything to try to justify Solaria the Genocidal I will eat your kneecaps :)

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literary-illuminati · 1 year

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Book Review 10 - The World We Make by N. K. Jemisin

I’m generally a huge fan of Jemisin, so of course I had to read this as soon as I realized it existed, even if I really didn’t think The City We Became needed a sequel on pretty much any level. And yeah, it didn’t!

Like, I’ve already posted about my issues with this book extensively, so will try to keep this relatively succinct. But broadly – there were about twice as many POVs as the wordcount could actually support with their own subplots, Ry’leh and her minions had all the threat and grandeur of a Saturday morning cartoon villain, the broader metaphysics/plot didn’t actually much sense at all , basically every actual problem the characters had was resolved as soon as they actually tried, and, generally, the book’s highest aim really seemed to be more engaging in some cathartic effigy-burning of various political analogues than it did really telling any sort of coherent story.

The book has virtues – the sentence to sentence prose is very good when it doesn’t read like a DNC campaign mailer, and the characters who actually get screen time and internal conflicts are all very compelling (somewhat unfortunate that half of them are the villains). But just – it’s impossible to really feel like you’re rooting for the underdogs when the protagonists start the book in a commanding position with everything they need to win and nothing that happens over the course of the entire story actually puts them on the back foot for a couple of hours? Or I mean, I tell a lie, technically the entire book is a race against the clock of impending universal extinction, as caused by...Fox News and right-wing twitter running a bunch of anti-New York smear campaigns? Which was just so obviously arbitrary and driven by the needs of plot it was impossible to take seriously.

Just, generally, there is a real upper limit to how far you can stretch ‘the divine avatars of quite possibly the richest and most politically powerful metropolis in the world fight proud boys and a no-hope Trump wannabe running for Mayor’ into something that compelling. The literal global capital of financial capitalism, not an easy sell as ‘scrappy underdog’! Especially when the dominant tone used to talk about any of the human opposition is just sneering contempt. Which I mean, very true to life, but doesn’t do a great job establishing a sense of threat. Especially when the sneering contempt is just entirely justified, and every action on the part of the enemy basically just happens to allow one of the avatars to do an incredibly self-indulgent New York-themed bit of magic, probably humiliating an obvious analogue for some prominent right wing figure or archetype (trucker convoy, proud boys, etc) in the process. It’s just, so incredibly cheesy. At one point a city councilwoman is revealed to be a friendly acquaintance with Beyonce and able to call her in to help with her mayoral campaign. Wretched of the earth these are not.

But okay, to try and make this a bit more analytical and a bit less me ranting – I really don’t think the book’s conception of the soul or character of New York really coheres? It’s New York, but, like, the nostalgic fantasy of pre-Guliani New York mixed with the parts of it that modern progressives take pride in. At no point does the book explain in any even close to satisfactory way why the transparent Trump analogue winning would be more spiritually damaging than Bloomberg (or hell, Moses) was – we’re just supposed to take it as read that being the beating heart of progressive America is at the soul of what it means to be New York.

On a similar note – there’s a real ambiguity to what Ry’leh is supposed to, like, be, thematically? Or I mean, not really. She’s gentrification, not necessarily in the social displacement sense (but that too) as in the way that every central business district in every major city in the world increasingly looks the same, in the way that identical chain stores replace local small businesses, the tendency of modern capitalist development to erode the difference between places until a city is a city is a city, no matter what continent you’re on. Local restaurants bought out by numbered holding companies or international franchises and getting their menus and recipes from a focus group in California. Which is a great, meaty association for your villain! But, like, isn’t especially well served by also being specifically alt-right and Trumpist American right-wing politics (very, very much not the same thing!). And as soon as we get into what she and the Ur actually want everything just kind of stops making sense entirely. (She’s also just so, like, cartoonishly evil and constantly talking about wanting to end the world and make things worse that it’s impossible to take seriously and she just ends up one of the most endearing characters in the entire story.)

Anyway, yeah, Neek and Manny and Ry’leh and Aislyn were all great, but otherwise The City We Became really didn’t need a sequel.

#book review #the world we make #n. k. jemisin #sff

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branzinos · 9 months

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The ending of Sarah Z's new video essay about queerbaiting articulated so much of what I feel about fandom's need for things to be canon to be legitimate that I really needed to transcribe a copy of it here:

The more I think about the concept of queerbaiting, the more I think we should just retire it. When we come to the point where the term has come to encapsulate like, 500 things – real people being closeted, real people being bisexual, censored gay relationships in TV, ships people like that aren't canon, the actual use of queerness as a marketing tactic with the intent to decieve a queer audience, etc. – I think the term has ceased to be useful. [...]

I think the deeper root of this issue is this concept of "representation". A lot of young people, my age and even younger, teenagers and whatnot, have really grown attached to the phrase "queer rep": "Is this Marvel character good gay rep?", "I want to support this lesbian singer because I want more lesbian rep in media", "I don't like this character because they're bad bisexual rep."

I do think it is very good and natural to want to see people who are like us. I don't think I need to make a case here for the myriad reasons it's good to see prominent gay people in real life and in fiction. But I do think we've lost the plot a bit when we talk about these things only in terms of how well they "represent us". What we're looking to, in the vast majority of cases, are for our own lives to be reflected back to us by large corporations and the art they produce, or by celebrities. And I think that's never going to happen, because we're looking in the wrong places.

When we assume that for a story to be given value it needs widescale legitimacy, we're assigning too much importance to corporate entities to determine what is meaningful.

So, for instance, we've come to believe that a fictional relationship being recognised as "canon" somehow elevates it above all the rich interpretations and personal resonances readers can draw from it.

Like, think about people hassling Neil Gaiman for decades about whether the guys in Good Omens are gay or not. Why do we need this answer to make the readings we do legitimate? Why would some official stamp of canonisation from an author hold more weight than the myriad connections audiences have made with the work?

Is the middle-upper-class gay couple in, say, Modern Family, a more meaningful queer story than queer readings derived from other stories [in other media] by fans simply because it's canon? Why do we let corporate or authorial validations dictate the value of our personal connections to art? [...]

I'm not saying these stories aren't valuable, or that they don't reflect queer life to some extent, but in the end we're going to be disappointed if we keep looking to massive media outlets and rich celebrities for meaningful reflections of our lived experience. There is such a massive wealth of queer art out there that I think does something more meaningful than be "queer representation". Instead, they are queer stories: indie webcomics, smaller scale novels, games, things made by individuals that reflect their own lived experience without corporate oversight or any particular need to be palatable to a whole audience so that it can be used as marketing material.

In my opinion, there does not exist any hypothetical Marvel movie with a bisexual woman character that could meaningfully "represent" me in the same way independent art not made to be distributed by like, Amazon, would. That's not to say the latter shouldn't exist, or has no value whatsoever, but should celebrities and large-scale corporate art be the sole yardstick we look to in order to tell our stories? I don't think so. And I think this whole notion of desperately looking for validity through celebrities confirming their sexualities and TV networks deeming gay couples "canon" is somewhat misguided.

Beyond the harm that the queerbaiting narrative can do to closeted people, I think it reflects that we're looking to the wrong people to give our experiences value.

Sarah Z: I Was Wrong About Queerbaiting

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antisocialxconstruct · 2 years

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I didn't like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners but I can't think of a clever heading

Okay every time I come back to work on this my thesis changes a little bit so I'm just going to start like this: full disclosure, I went into Edgerunners mostly out of morbid curiosity and I was prepared not to like it very much. I have no real love either for CDPR's game or for Pondsmith's source material, and this show would have needed to bring some pretty show-stopping, foundation-shaking ideas to the setting in order to win me over. It did not do that. That said, also in the spirit of full disclosure, there were moments where I did find myself genuinely kind of enjoying watching it. It's a good looking and well-acted show that has some high points, especially around the middle of the series, although in the end they mostly just leave me wishing that those high points could be transplanted into a different, better story.

(Also I will be spoiling major plot points as well as the finale. Read at your discretion.)

Ultimately, I was never going to actually, genuinely like Edgerunners for the simple fact that I hate "cyberpsychosis" as a concept. In fact I'm comfortable saying it's by far one of the worst tropes the cyberpunk genre has been burdened with and patently refuses to examine, right up there with the gratuitous orientalism and weird contempt for sex workers. I don't know that Pondsmith was the very first to introduce the idea into the genre, but I think it's safe to say that Cyberpunk (the ttrpg) had enough of a hand in popularizing it to solidly lodge transhumanist discussions in the ditch of "but what if cybernetic enhancements made you CrAzY" for the last thirty years.

Not only is the idea that "psychosis = indiscriminate violence" just pure, uncut ableism (psychotic people are statistically far more likely to be the victims of abuse and violence than the perpetrators), but from a narrative standpoint, assuming that extensive cybernetics are just an automatic ticket to losing your mind and dying in a rain of blood and viscera is lazy. It's boring. It depends on a complete disinterest and refusal to engage with the nuances of individual characters' personalities and mental states, or the way societal bias and pressure might impact someone's perception of themself or other modded people.

The most frustrating thing to me is that Edgerunners feels like it almost manages to actually have something to say on this subject, but I don't think it's self-aware enough to commit to it. The first episode presents us with a pretty clear thesis: the only way to survive and succeed in Night City is to be enhanced; and an equally clear antithesis: being too enhanced will inevitably destroy you. This feels like a potentially really interesting dichotomy, but while these ideas will both prove to be true and central to the plot, it's mostly just in the sense that... they are both true statements. There will be no examination of why, or how those two contradictions interact with each other, or what creates and influences this reality.

And it's not like there isn't room to interrogate this concept in a nuanced way. The kinds of cybernetics most prominently on display in the show are disproportionately combat-focused--things explicitly designed to make a single person better at hurting and killing. So you could argue that the mental degradation could have less to do with the physical reality of being modded, and more to do with the baseline personality required to electively turn your own body into a weapon, or the pressure placed on the human psyche by realizing you now have the ability to kill, easily and indiscriminately, in a way you never could before. But this is not what the universe's lore tells us. If it was, there would have been no reason for Maine (the obligatory seasoned mentor/father figure) to succumb to cyberpsychosis when he was clearly incredibly grounded and invested in the safety and wellbeing of his team, and cybernetically enhanced for the demands of the work he did rather than for the simple glee of violence. If it was about individuals, there would be no reason for characters to remark often throughout the series about the novelty of David being able to withstand the Sandevistan, a single implant that really does nothing more than make him exceptionally fast but is apparently so powerful and taxing on the body that it alone could make the average person into a "cyberpsycho" (ugh). If it was about individuals I would have sooner expected a villain arc from the classmate tormenting David in the first few episodes (whose name I don't remember because he quickly becomes completely irrelevant) who seemed to delight in the sheer fact that he had muscle augments that made bullying easier and more violent.

So maybe the show gets a little closer to saying something about SocietyTM? After all, the first episode does a great job of establishing how utterly desolate it is trying to exist in Night City without money (it's actually one of the few aspects of the show I genuinely liked). Then it's reinforced multiple times that the average person's only choices for survival are the endless grind of climbing the corporate ladder (as David's mother wanted for him before she died) or the endless urban warfare of being a mercenary (as he chooses for himself), with the ultimate irony being that the mercs still work for the corporations anyway. I think I would probably argue that this is the central theme of the story, which ends with David as a pawn in an arms race between two major corporations, which had no real bearing on his life and still rather dramatically, literally, tears him apart. And in the end, he still convinces himself that he chose this, that it was something noble that he did for someone else's sake, rather than something he was driven into both by direct manipulation and by societal circumstances far beyond his control. The corps push cybernetics on everyone, indiscriminately, convince them that it's the normal and desirable way of life, and don't care that they're creating monsters and causing massive and constant losses of human life. It's not a bad premise, and it's woven through the narrative effectively enough that I had to sit with it a bit to piece it together but came away feeling like it came through clearly.

My problem with that is that at best, "cyberpsychosis" adds nothing to this premise except shock value and an excuse for gratuitous violence. At worst, it skews the message into something far more hurtful and less compelling. Capitalist society does create monsters, but it's the ultra-wealthy and ultra-powerful who lose any capacity to sympathize with the rest of humanity. Within the Cyberpunk universe, "cyberpsychos" feel far more analogous to addicts and petty criminals--the idea being that some people just choose to put something into their body that makes them worse, that makes them dangerous, that they're not "good enough" to know their limits, and they should be feared and hated for it. But addicts are people who are desperate, lost, and grasping for any scrap of power and control they can wrest from their own circumstances, even at the expense of their own health and wellbeing, or that of the people around them. They are victims, and creating a universe where their analogues are presented as monsters, as indiscriminate mass-killers who can only be stopped by militarized police aggression, is disgusting.

So, I don't know. Am I asking too much from a 10-episode shonen anime that mostly exists as a video game tie-in? Maybe. But then maybe the 10-episode video game tie-in anime should have focused on something less lofty.

#maybe I need a tag for like... reviews and actual genre analysis #anyway I'm not gonna actually put this in the show's tag that would be gauche #rom speaks

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weird-tea · 1 year

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The more I think about it the more BBC's Merlin feels like the bazaro mirror dimension of Arthurian lore. A good chuck of that is the struggle of adapting primarily Medieval to Victorian literature with all its themes and motifs to a TV show for a modern audience, but it's still just hilarious to me that this process just flipped the canon so hard.

Right for the start - it takes the core Arthurian plot point of Merlin removing Arthur from Uther's care so that he can be raised ignorant of his birthright and taught how to be a good leader and flips that by having Arthur raised by Uther to be an entitled brat and Merlin coming in and undoing Uther's bad parenting to reveal the good king buried underneath.

Morgana is Arthur's paternal half sister not his maternal. They are raised together meaning they share childhood trauma instead of Morgana's childhood trauma being caused by Arthur's conception and birth and him basically getting away scot-free on the childhood trauma department being the cause of their feud.

Agravain jumps two generations on the family tree going from Nephew to Uncle.

Gawaine and Percival are like best friends, they are even a popular fanon ship, when their families have a blood feud in a lot of Arthurian lore.

Merlin reciprocates the lady of the lake's affections and she's not an antagonist to him even a little bit.

None of the major female characters are mothers, unless you count Hunith & the ghost of Arthur's mum. And Igraine & Gwen are the only two explicitly married. Women in Arthurian lore are nearly always wives and mothers, even characters like Morgause and Morgana. The lady of the lake even raises Lancelot & his cousins. The complete lack of married women and mothers in the show is honestly only just hitting me and it's vastly different from the source materials treatment of female characters (I am not complaining at all about this it's actually pretty neat as an adaptation choice,).

Also while this isn't exactly a full flip since merlin is the one to put the sword in the stone in a few prominent versions it will never stop being silly to be that show Merlin did it like the scene before Arthur pulls it out and tells him this whole story about how ancient it is. Arthur pulling the sword from the stone goes from him proving to others that he is the true heir and worthy of the throne to him proving to himself that he is worthy, and I love that I do, but merlin making the whole thing up in like a day when it's such a key part of the Arthurian mythos is just wild.

#bbc merlin #merlin #king arthur #arthurian literature #arthur pendragon

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sourestcandy · 1 year

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if i had a nickel for every game i've played whose entire plot is picking up the pieces of a story that's already been told, i've have two nickels. which isn't a lot, but i'm surprised that this is even a trend. though, honestly? good! because games where the player is piecing together something that's already happened is really, really interesting.

(very very late night ramblings below: heavy spoilers for omori and ultrakill)

what even kicked this off is when i realized ultrakill isn't about the player character. in fact, it would be the same if v1 were completely removed from the story. layers of hell are still being purged by machines and heaven is still in mass hysteria because god has literally fucking left the picture. the only real difference is how gabriel would experience his character arc, as v1 specifically would not be antagonizing him. even then, it's possible v2 would take its place as its only major difference is having regular plating instead of blood-absorbent plating.

the story has already happened. whatever story is left would have been played out anyway. gabriel was eventually going to realize that he had committed various atrocities for an entity who had abandoned him. both prime souls have the outcomes of staying trapped in a fleshy prison, roaming a wasteland that's been torn to pieces, or dying (of which is undeniably the best outcome for them). the only people who are "happy" in this story are the residents of heaven, and even then, they're not exactly thrilled knowing their ruler has abandoned them.

why does it matter? because you have zero influence on the story. you have no say in what happened or what will happen. everything will play out the exact same with or without you. you're just there to pick up the pieces of what god had left behind. at most, you're an archangel's plot point, which could have easily been filled in by another machine or by time itself. despite being unique, you're expendable. this isn't a concept that's explored very often: usually the player character is given a very prominent role and has notable feats nobody else could possibly achieve. not ultrakill, though. you're just trying to survive, albeit in a manner that's unique compared to other machines (remember that v1 is the only known model to absorb blood the way it does).

omori, on the other hand, does give the player character a prominent role and notable achievements. after all, sunny is a one of a kind individual. he played violin and he is very creative, as made evident by the sketchbook in white space and the existence of dream space. he's made friends and has left an impact (both good and bad) on the people around him. unlike v1, sunny is a whole-ass human being doing human being things. you cannot have the story of omori without the character sunny.

like ultrakill, you the player are only there to piece together a story that's already happened. unlike ultrakill, there's still things to be explored, as every character in the real world experiences growth in some form. you're witnessing something that wouldn't have happened if sunny just didn't participate in the story (yes, hikikomori exists, but it's late at night and i don't feel like making that fit into the post).

the most interesting part, really, is how these games show the player that they're late to the story in drastically different ways. ultrakill never says it outright; you're told that mankind is dead, blood is fuel, hell is full, guns shoot bullets, and everything bleeds. you're never directly told that you're in the midst of a fruitless venture. you're never told that other machines will rip hell apart with or without you. you're never told that there's nothing to gain after hell is completely cleaned. as of right now when Back to the Cyber Grind is the newest update, you have to go out of your way to find this out - and when you do, it's a punch to the gut. in a good way.

and then there's omori.

omori tells you right out the gate - in fact, from the "about this game" section on steam - that the story is already done. you're playing a murder mystery where you're the murderer and you don't know it. you're not setting out on a grand adventure and embarking on a quest - you're hanging with friends, spending what little time you have left with them, settling low-stakes disputes, and unearthing memories that were once buried. you're just a fuckin' dude living your life when suddenly memories of killing your sister start invading your dreams. you're not part of a new story, you're reliving an old one.

now i hear you asking, "sour, what the hell are you blabbering about? why does it matter that two games show the aftermath of stories that already happened? who even gets excited about not being directly shown the real story of a game?" and honestly, it's 4:03 AM, i just watched an ultrakill theory video on one of my precious days off, and i'm gonna have to admit that i don't really have a point to be made. i just really like it when games do this. these games are what it feels like when you're late to a class but someone lets you read their notes. i like that and think more should exist in the world. that's all.

now if you'll excuse me, i need to slip into a 48 hour coma.

#omori #ultrakill #omori spoilers #ultrakill spoilers #sour speaks #im not proofreading this we die like warriors

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kkgore · 1 year

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Book Review for: In the Lives of Puppets

By: TJ Klune

Setting

This book takes place in a world of robots. We are introduced first to Giovanni, who has built himself a tree-house settlement deep in the woods, and there he lives with two other robots, Nurse Ratchet and Rambo, and his human son Victor. The fairytale-esque opening gives us a good overview of a world where humans are both rare and facing some sort of persecution, and a sense of the threat that the wider world may pose to this family. I found the setting instantly legible and explicable. It had a logic to it that made it both exciting and yet pleasantly predictable. That logic was coherent throughout the novel, and so there was never any moment where I felt like I truly did not understand this world or where it was taking me, and as such I was eager to carry on with the journey.

Plot

The plot takes liberally from the most prominent plot points of the Pinocchio story, as well as some seasoning from Shelly’s Frankenstein. The plot follows a fairly typical hero’s journey model, with a couple of twists which are in no way obtuse and more a revelation of a building suspicion than an actual twist. On the whole I really enjoyed how Klune managed to hit all the major allegories with Pinocchio, although some seemed a bit on the nose. The Monstro-Whale/Terrible Dogfish-Dirigible analogy was there but felt more wedged in than placed with consideration, unlike the tension within Victor, who at various times takes on the role of both Geppetto and Pinocchio, Victor Frankenstein and his Creation in ways that are skilfully woven into the plot of his journey.

My main problem with the plot is that it follows a trend in storytelling where the Hero makes large, world changing decisions on the behalf of whole nations or races and then… dips. Just leaves, and we get no more than a few lines where he hopes that the revolution has turned out well but no actual insight into what this post-revolutionary world is going to look like or how it is going to be built. There is some thematic justification to this decision in this book, it parallels decisions Vic’s father made at the beginning of the tale, but I still find it somewhat unsatisfying that in a book about how everyone deserves to be fixed in the end we only really care about two specific people being fixed and everyone else is on their own.

World Building

The world building in this novel is done organically and in a way that consistently adds to the feelings of foreboding that Klune skilfully builds throughout the novel. Klune is also very good at using his worldbuilding as an opportunity to draw parallels with, and make commentary on, our current culture. The Coachman, who runs a Museum of Human Curio’s and Curiosities, tells the Hero and his companions of the ancient human tradition of gender reveals. His utter misinterpretation of both the form and the function of gender reveal parties is a wonderful way not only to make a commentary on how history gets distorted by the victors in a conflict, but also to expose the artifice that lies in the gender reveal party as a concept.

The worldbuilding in this novel was not necessarily new, we have seen similar worlds in many sci-fi films and books such as Robots (2005) but the whimsy and charm with which it is built makes this an inviting world to spend time in.

The worldbuilding also felt purposeful, particularly when done through conversation between the characters. As we learned more about the world, we also learned more about the main thesis of the book; that everyone deserves a chance of redemption. Again, it’s not so much that Klune does anything new with the worldbuilding, but that he uses the worldbuilding as a way to talk very directly about the morality of the story, and to engage in meaningful meditation on the nature of humanity and forgiveness and individuality and so on.

Characters

The characters are the real highlight of this book. It is incredibly character driven, and it is delightful how Klune treats each character with a tenderness and empathy that is deeply compassionate towards their flaws without ever excusing them. All of the robots can be read as representative of some form of disability or neuroatypicality, and Victor is quite clearly meant to be understood as autistic. I felt this worked well, particularly as an overarching analogy for how disability is context dependant and how often the experience of disability is more to do with how society lacks accommodations necessary for a life fully lived, than it is to do with the material fact of the disability itself. I also think this worked well as a way to explore how individuals can work to maintain healthy relationship despite conflicting needs.

The dynamic between Nurse Ratched and Rambo reminds me a lot of the dynamic between Scamper and Brian in Igor (2008), and I found the way they both bounced off of each other delightful. They were a wonderful example of a relationship that is fully accepting of the other, warts and all. The fierce loyalty between these two and Victor was a strong theme throughout the novel, which worked well as a supporting thesis for the main themes of forgiveness and redemption. Ratched was well placed as a nurse droid to explain concepts like asexuality in a dispassionate manner.

That said, I did find towards the end that Ratched and Rambo’s continual conjecture of the nature of the relationship between Vic, who is canonically both asexual and somewhat sex repulsed, and Hap to become more and more uncomfortable as it became clear that this aspect of their behaviour was never going to fully be addressed. I had hoped that there would be some sort of commentary on the intrusive and voyeuristic nature of looking at real relationships through the lens of “shipping” but we didn’t really get any thing in regard to a resolution of the conflict there.

Hap is an interesting take on the Creature from Frankenstein. It is lovely to see what might have happened if the Modern Prometheus had been met with love and admiration rather than fear and shame. I really appreciate that Hap is allowed to still be a generally grumpy person, right through to the end of the novel, and that this is seen as a character expression, rather than a character flaw.

Vic and Hap have a very tender relationship, which is a joy to watch develop.

Vic himself is a thoroughly enjoyable hero to read. He grapples with deep emotional and ethical questions which are hard to resolve, without ever tipping over into either self-pitying or self-aggrandising. His reactions feel very natural and his motivations and insights are intelligent.

The supporting cast of Gio, Vic’s father, The Coachman and The Blue Fairy are all well drawn characters whose conversations with Vic offer some very poignant and insightful meditations on the main themes of this book. The only somewhat disappointing character was the Coachman, who’s motivational 180 was a bit too convenient and just bugged me for a few chapters after it happened.

Prose

The actual prose of this book is delightful. It flows incredibly well; it’s well paced and it was easy get into a groove of reading it. The only point where I was fully thrown out of the text was early on when there was mention of a “camming device” with no explanation of what that was. I don’t think this is a particularly ubiquitous piece of climbing equipment outside of the climbing enthusiast’s world and so could probably do with some explanation.

The main criticism of the prose I would give is that Klune has a habit of introducing motifs he then doesn’t really do anything with. For example, the Authority (the robot overlords) use the symbol of the cat and the fox, which is immediately identifiable as an allusion towards the Disney cartoon but doesn’t do anything beyond being that allusion. It gives no deeper insight into the Authority and if one were not aware of the Disney cartoon then there would be no clear reason why this symbol is being emphasised repeatedly. When he does use symbolism, like the motif of the clockwork heart that works its way throughout this novel, he does it spectacularly well. There is a richness to his use of symbolism that is so enchanting that it is even more disappointing when there is then such empty symbolism alongside it.

Finally, I would add that the first part of the novel could do with a few paragraph breaks. I did not find the long run-on nature of the opening to be particularly ADHD friendly and that was the only part of the book where I regularly found myself going back to reread a passage to make sure I had the right of it.

Conclusion

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I found it engaging and charming and thoroughly enjoyed the dialectical explorations of personhood, forgiveness, redemption and friendship. I found the meditations on these themes insightful and inspiring and had more than one flash of insight into my own WIP as a result of reading this.

That said I was somewhat dissatisfied with the ending. This may be a personal thing as a bit of a policy wonk, but I really would have appreciated even just a little more about how society was going to move forward after the hero’s completed their quest. That is not to say that the ending was not beautiful, it was a wonderfully understated and tender way to end the story, but I could not help but be distracted by thoughts of all the others whose lives were impacted and the uncertainty of their fate.

I would recommend this book to those who enjoy imaginative retellings of classic literature, as well as anyone who enjoys somewhat whimsical sci fi settings. I think this would be a marvellous book for a 14–16-year-old, although it does have some strong language and sexual references that not all parents will be happy with, and it is the sort of book a weird little 12-year-old who already reads beyond their reading level (like me) and hides copies of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere under their bed (like I did) would absolutely devour and obsess over for years to come.

#book reviews #reviewing is an art #In the Lives of Puppets #TJ Klune #4 out of 5 stars #writeblr #creative writing #writing #fiction writing #writer community #writer things

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hershelwidget · 4 days

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hmm.

through it being Pride Month and everything now I've noticed that I accidentally self projected like. Every identity I've ever had in my life onto Several characters of mine.

And I don't just mean "oh at [w] point I was [x] so this character will also be [x] and we're done"

I mean "At [w] point I was [x] and I expressed myself with it like [y] & [z] and I want to remember that feeling of self expression so this character will also be [x] with those same feelings and methods of expressions (occasionally tweaked to fit the actual character)"

So here's some examples of that under the cut :]

Theatre - Identifies as a Woman. Uses He/Him & Play/Plays/Playself pronouns. Lesbian. Aromantic. Non-Binary. (The general idea is that Theatre believes your identity is whatever the fuck you want it to be, which reflects my philosophy) [I consistently flip back around to "butch lesbian" as a default identity and that was one of Theatre's building blocks as a character :) This is especially prominent with plays "true self", Lance, who is More Obviously a Butch Lesbian]

Silon - Identifies as a Man. Uses He/Him & They/Them pronouns. Has Breasts. Looks and Acts Feminine. Asexual. Queer. (Silon's sort of a literal representation of what I looked like and acted like when I was a bit younger and finding myself out) [I used to just think I was bisexual and didn't question further why I was so uncomfortable in skirts {which led to me realizing I was aspec}, but as I got educated and witnessed my siblings find themselves out I got more comfortable in my own skin and realized I just wanted to be Myself]

Rina - Identifies as a Spider. Uses She/Her pronouns. Transgender. Lesbian. (Rina was my first ever transgender character. Even at the young age I was when I first started writing her {twelve} I didn't want her being transgender to be a plot point or a conflict, I just wanted it to be something she was alongside being a spider) [Now as I look back on her existence I think I added her being trans down the line because after my eldest sibling came out I was trying to familiarize myself with the concept the best way I knew how, and in the present day she's been a really helpful reminder that queer people in general come in all different shapes and sizes]

Viktor - Viktor is Viktor. (I don't mean that as a alternative to saying "Non-Binary", that's genuinely Viktor's identity as a person. She doesn't care what pronouns you use for him, it doesn't care what you think is under their dress {purely biologically speaking... don't sexualize Viktor though}, Viktor is Viktor.) [Viktor really emphasizes the "be what you want" philosophy I have, in a way that's more subtle than Theatre ... Yeah, Viktor wears dresses and skirts and has cute pink-fading brown hair and has a high pitched voice and doesn't bat an eye when people call her "daughter" or "miss" or "young lady". It's a one to one visualization of every single thing I did when I was growing up, and even today! I'm not a girl most days anymore, yet on those same days I'll still wear skirts and dresses and if I feel daring, some makeup. Viktor is as close as I've ever gotten to myself as a fictional character]

I have a LOT of other examples but I'm sure you get the point. Honestly I should make like a chart or a spreadsheet... And 3/4 of the examples I've already listed also have disabilities that I have or people close to me have that are major parts of their characters for all of the same reasons, sometimes more. I'm going to do a similar thing for Disability Pride Month.

Anyways... As of writing this section I'm doing exactly as I stated I sometimes do in Viktor's example; I'm wearing a pink skirt, pink eyeshadow, blue striped socks, white shirt... Transgender flag colours, all to symbolize I'm a trans man as of this very moment. How cool is that?

#pride month #personal post #i've seen a lot of discourse lately on what identities ''count'' (ew)#so this is also a reminder that truly honestly #You Can Be Whatever You Want. Forever And Ever #theatre's ''contradicting'' facts about playself is my favourite and best example of this.#happy pride month everyone #love yourself enough to project onto your ocs #love your friends and your family who are queer alongside you #love your allies love your partners your homies your idols #Love Yourself.#love being queer love being surrounded by queer. it fuckin sucks sometimes but We'll Make It.#god that is a LOT of words but heyyy i made my point <3

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reanimatedcourier · 4 years

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How to Write Indigenous Characters Without Looking like a Jackass:

Update as of December 26th, 2020: I have added a couple new sections about naming and legal terms, as well as a bit of reading on the Cherokee Princess phenomenon.

Boozhoo (hello) Fallout fandom! I'm a card-carrying Anishinaabe delivering this rough guide about writing Indigenous characters because wow, do I see a lot of shit.

Let's get something out of the way first: Fallout's portrayal of Indigenous people is racist. From a vague definition of "tribal" to the claims of them being "savage" and "uncivilized" mirror real-world stereotypes used to dehumanize us. Fallout New Vegas' narrated intro has Ron Perlman saying Mr. House "rehabilitated" tribals to create New Vegas' Three Families. You know. Rehabilitate. As if we are animals. Top it off with an erasure of Indigenous people in the American Southwest and no real tribe names, and you've got some pretty shitty representation. The absence of Native American as a race option in the GECK isn't too great, given that two Native characters are marked "Caucasian" despite being brown. Butch Deloria is a pretty well-known example of this effect. (Addendum: Indigenous people can have any mix of dominant and recessive traits, as well as present different phenotypes. What bothers me is it doesn't accommodate us or mixed people, which is another post entirely.)

As a precautionary warning: this post and the sources linked will discuss racism and genocide. There will also be discussion of multiple kinds of abuse.

Now, your best approach will be to pick a nation or tribe and research them. However, what follows will be general references.

Terms that may come up in your research include Aboriginal/Native Canadian, American Indian/Native American, Inuit, Métis, and Mestizo. The latter two refer to cultural groups created after the discovery of the so-called New World. (Addendum made September 5th, 2020: Mestizo has negative connotations and originally meant "half breed" so stick with referring to your mixed Latine and Indigenous characters as mixed Indigenous or simply by the name of their people [Maya, Nahua].)

As a note, not every mixed person is Métis or Mestizo. If you are, say, Serbian and Anishinaabe, you would be mixed, but not Métis (the big M is important here, as it refers to a specific culture). Even the most liberal definition caps off at French and British ancestry alongside Indigenous (some say Scottish and English). Mestizo works the same, since it refers to descendants of Spanish conquistadors/settlers and Indigenous people.

Trouble figuring out whose land is where? No problem, check out this map.

Drawing

Don't draw us with red skin. It's offensive and stereotypical.

Tutorial for Native Skintones

Tutorial for Mixed Native Skintones

Why Many Natives Have Long Hair (this would technically fit better under another category, but give your Native men long hair!)

If You're Including Traditional Wear, Research! It's Out There

Languages

Remember, there are a variety of languages spoken by Indigenous people today. No two tribes will speak the same language, though there are some that are close and may have loan words from each other (Cree and Anishinaabemowin come to mind). Make sure your Diné (you may know them as Navajo) character doesn't start dropping Cree words.

Here's a Site With a Map and Voice Clips

Here's an Extensive List of Amerindian Languages

Keep in mind there are some sounds that have no direct English equivalents. But while we're at it, remember a lot of us speak English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese. The languages of the countries that colonized us.

Words in Amerindian languages tend to be longer than English ones and are in the format of prefix + verb + suffix to get concepts across. Gaawiin miskwaasinoon is a complete sentence in Anishinaabemowin, for example (it is not red).

Names

Surprisingly, we don't have names like Passing Dawn or Two-Bears-High-Fiving in real life. A lot of us have, for lack of better phrasing, white people names. We may have family traditions of passing a name down from generation to generation (I am the fourth person in my maternal line to have my middle name), but not everyone is going to do that. If you do opt for a name from a specific tribe, make sure you haven't chosen a last name from another tribe.

Baby name sites aren't reliable, because most of the names on there will be made up by people who aren't Indigenous. That site does list some notable exceptions and debunks misconceptions.

Here's a list of last names from the American census.

Indian Names

You may also hear "spirit names" because that's what they are for. You know the sort of mystical nature-related name getting slapped on an Indigenous character? Let's dive into that for a moment.

The concept of a spirit name seems to have gotten mistranslated at some point in time. It is the name Creator calls you throughout all your time both here and in the spirit world. These names are given (note the word usage) to you in a ceremony performed by an elder. This is not done lightly.

A lot of imitations of this end up sounding strange because they don't follow traditional guidelines. (I realize this has spread out of the original circle, but Fallout fans may recall other characters in Honest Hearts and mods that do this. They have really weird and racist results.)

If you're not Indigenous: don't try this. You will be wrong.

Legal Terms

Now, sometimes the legal term (or terms) for a tribe may not be what they refer to themselves as. A really great example of this would be the Oceti Sakowin and "Sioux". How did that happen, you might be wondering. Smoky Mountain News has an article about this word and others, including the history of these terms.

For the most accurate information, you are best off having your character refer to themselves by the name their nation uses outside of legislation. A band name would be pretty good for this (Oglala Lakota, for example). I personally refer to myself by my band.

Cowboys

And something the Fallout New Vegas fans might be interested in, cowboys! Here's a link to a post with several books about Black and Indigenous cowboys in the Wild West.

Representation: Stereotypes and Critical Thought

Now, you'll need to think critically about why you want to write your Indigenous character a certain way. Here is a comprehensive post about stereotypes versus nuance.

Familiarize yourself with tropes. The Magical Indian is a pretty prominent one, with lots of shaman-type characters in movies and television shows. This post touches on its sister tropes (The Magical Asian and The Magical Negro), but is primarily about the latter.

Say you want to write an Indigenous woman. Awesome! Characters I love to see. Just make sure you're aware of the stereotypes surrounding her and other Women of Color.

Word to the wise: do not make your Indigenous character an alcoholic. "What, so they can't even drink?" You might be asking. That is not what I'm saying. There is a pervasive stereotype about Drunk Indians, painting a reaction to trauma as an inherent genetic failing, as stated in this piece about Indigenous social worker Jessica Elm's research. The same goes for drugs. Ellen Deloria is an example of this stereotype.

Familiarize yourself with and avoid the Noble Savage trope. This was used to dehumanize us and paint us as "childlike" for the sake of a plot device. It unfortunately persists today.

Casinos are one of the few ways for tribes to make money so they can build homes and maintain roads. However, some are planning on diversifying into other business ventures.

There's a stereotype where we all live off government handouts. Buddy, some of these long-term boil water advisories have been in place for over twenty years. The funding allocated to us as a percentage is 0.39%: less than half a percent to fight the coronavirus. They don't give us money.

"But what about people claiming to be descended from a Cherokee princess?" Cherokee don't and never had anything resembling princesses. White southerners made that up prior to the Civil War. As the article mentions, they fancied themselves "defending their lands as the Indians did".

Also, don't make your Indigenous character a cannibal. Cannibalism is a serious taboo in a lot of our cultures, particularly northern ones.

Our lands are not cursed. We don't have a litany of curses to cast on white people in found footage films. Seriously. We have better things to be doing. Why on earth would our ancestors be haunting you when they could be with their families? Very egotistical assumption.

Indigenous Ties and Blood Quantum

Blood quantum is a colonial system that was initially designed to "breed out the Indian" in people. To dilute our bloodlines until we assimilated properly into white society. NPR has an article on it here.

However, this isn't how a vast majority of us define our identities. What makes us Indigenous is our connections (or reconnection) to our families, tribes, bands, clans, and communities.

Blood quantum has also historically been used to exclude Black Natives from tribal enrollment, given that it was first based on appearance. So, if you looked Black and not the image of "Indian" the white census taker had in his brain, you were excluded and so were your descendants.

Here are two tumblrs that talk about Black Indigenous issues and their perspectives. They also talk about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia.

However, if you aren't Indigenous, don't bring up blood quantum. Don't. This is an issue you should not be speaking about.

Cherokee Princess Myth

"Princess" was not a real position in any tribe. The European idea of monarchy did not suddenly manifest somewhere else. The closest probable approximation may have been the daughter of a chief or other politically prominent person. But princess? No.

Here is an article talking about possible origins of this myth. Several things are of note here: women from other tribes may have bee shoved under this label and the idea of a "Cherokee Princess" had been brought up to explain the sudden appearance of a brown-skinned (read: half Black) family member.

For a somewhat more in depth discussion of why, specifically, this myth gets touted around so often, Timeline has this piece.

Religion

Our religions are closed. We are not going to tell you how we worship. Mostly because every little bit we choose to share gets appropriated. Smudging is the most recent example. If you aren't Indigenous, that's smoke cleansing. Smudging is done in a specific way with ceremonies and prayers.

Now, a lot of us were forcibly converted. Every residential school was run by Christians. So plenty of us are Catholic, Baptist, Anglican, Lutheran, etc. Catholicism in Latin America also has influence from the Indigenous religions in that region.

Having your Indigenous character pray or carry rosaries wouldn't be a bad thing, if that religion was important to them. Even if they are atheist, if they lived outside of a reserve or other Indigenous communities, they might have Christian influences due to its domination of the Western world.

Settler Colonialism and the White Savior Trope

Now we've come to our most painful section yet. Fallout unintentionally has an excellent agent of settler-colonialism, in particular the Western Christian European variety, in Caesar's Legion and Joshua Graham.

(Addendum: Honest Hearts is extremely offensive in its portrayal of Indigenous people, and egregiously shows a white man needing to "civilize" tribals and having to teach them basic skills. These skills include cooking, finding safe water, and defending themselves from other tribes.)

Before we dive in, here is a post explaining the concept of cultural Christianity, if you are unfamiliar with it.

We also need to familiarize ourselves with The White Man's Burden. While the poem was written regarding the American-Philippine war, it still captures the attitudes toward Indigenous folks all over the world at the time.

As this article in Teen Vogue points out, white people like to believe they need to save People of Color. You don't need to. People of Color can save themselves.

Now, cultural Christianity isn't alone on this side of the pond. Writer Teju Cole authored a piece on the White Savior Industrial Complex to describe mission trips undertaken by white missionaries to Africa to feed their egos.

Colonialism has always been about the acquisition of wealth. To share a quote from this paper about the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples: "Negatively, [settler colonialism] strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event. In its positive aspect, elimination is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence. The positive outcomes of the logic of elimination can include officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations. All these strategies, including frontier homicide, are characteristic of settler colonialism. Some of them are more controversial in genocide studies than others." (Positive, here, is referring to "benefits" for the colonizers. Indigenous people don't consider colonization beneficial.)

An example of a non-benefit, the Church Rock disaster had Diné children playing in radioactive water so the company involved could avoid bad publicity.

Moving on, don't sterilize your Indigenous people. Sterilization, particularly when it is done without consent, has long been used as a tool by the white system to prevent "undesirables" (read, People of Color and disabled people) from having children. Somehow, as of 2018, it wasn't officially considered a crime.

The goal of colonization was to eliminate us entirely. Millions died because of exposure to European diseases. Settlers used to and still do separate our children from us for reasons so small as having a dirty dish in the sink. You read that right, a single dirty dish in your kitchen sink was enough to get your children taken and adopted out to white families. This information was told to me by an Indigenous social work student whose name I will keep anonymous.

It wasn't until recently they made amendments to the Indian Act that wouldn't automatically render Indigenous women non-status if they married someone not Indigenous. It also took much too long for Indigenous families to take priority in child placement over white ones. Canada used to adopt Indigenous out to white American families. The source for that statement is further down, but adoption has been used as a tool to destroy cultures.

I am also begging you to cast aside whatever colonialist systems have told you about us. We are alive. People with a past, not people of the past, which was wonderfully said here by Frank Waln.

Topics to Avoid if You Aren't Indigenous

Child Separation. Just don't. We deserve to remain with our families and our communities. Let us stay together and be happy that way.

Assimilation schools. Do not bring up a tool for cultural genocide that has left lasting trauma in our communities.

W/ndigos. I don't care that they're in Fallout 76. They shouldn't be. Besides, you never get them right anyway.

Sk/nwalkers. Absolutely do not. Diné stories are not your playthings either.

I've already talked about drugs and alcohol. Do your research with compassion and empathy in mind. Indigenous people have a lot of pain and generational trauma. You will need to be extremely careful having your Indigenous characters use drugs and alcohol. If your character can be reduced to their (possible) substance abuse issues, you need to step back and rework it. As mentioned in Jessica Elm's research, remember that it isn't inherent to us.

For our final note: remember that we're complex, autonomous human beings. Don't use our deaths to further the stories of your white characters. Don't reduce us to some childlike thing that needs to be raised and civilized by white characters. We interact with society a little differently than you do, but we interact nonetheless.

Meegwetch (thank you) for reading! Remember to do your research and portray us well, but also back off when you are told by an Indigenous person.

This may be updated in the future, it depends on what information I come across or, if other Indigenous people are so inclined, what is added to this post.

#fallout 3 #fallout 4 #fallout 76 #fallout new vegas #fallout 1 #fallout 2 #fallout: new vegas #ozhibii'ige

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balillee · 3 years

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my unpopular dsmp opinions, some of which genuinely should be popular

c!dream has crossed the moral event horizon and is irredeemable. once you cross that threshold, you're no longer a 'morally grey' character.

pre-recorded, heavily produced lore killed the lore. it was cool, sure, but you completely misunderstand the magic that the smp had when people watched it initially. the story is improv and that's how we like it. we can tell the cc's have lost interest in it, you can admit that to us, we'll understand, just stop lying to me.

c!dream's pov isn't necessary to understand his character or his motivations. if you've watched literally any c!primeboys stream he's basically spelled it out for you.

i don't understand how fans can dislike l'manberg or have claimed to be against it since the beginning. i honestly don't get it. what's so bad about wanting your own spot where you make your own rules and skirt accountability that has been used to technically oppress you before - and, before someone who never saw the earlier streams tries to disagree with this, the og l'manberg crew were imprisoned for shit that everyone else on the server was practically encouraged to do. also, what do you have against fun and happiness?

i think some of you forget that 'hybrids' aren't a thing, discounting c!ranboo. there's no piglin hybrids, c!techno is just a pig. there's no avian hybrids, c!phil is just a man with wings. there's no creeper hybrids, c!sam is just a creeper who's indecently exposed from the hips down. canonically there's no hybrids, and therefore no hybrid discrimination. people ran with that concept too much.

the loss and the fanon rewriting of the early lore up until pogtopia has ruined fandom perception of c!dream and the og l'manberg boys. c!tommy is more morally white than you think he is, and c!dream has always been a villain - he massacres and he kills and he destroys and he schemes and he always has broken his own rules. no wonder the boys wanted their own space after how they were treated.

i think ranboo oftentimes forgets his own lore. he brings stuff up that c!ranboo may have done, such as exploding the community house to frame c!tommy, holding onto Cat, and it goes absolutely nowhere. we've gotten all of these developments in his story but they have never been expanded on, and we're nowhere closer to figuring out his relationship to c!dream and what his other side is and honestly i see no hope that we'll be any closer to knowing even by the end of the year.

your characters don't all have to be morally grey for the story itself to be morally grey. this is fiction - some people can be nothing but evil and others can be nothing but good. being purely good or evil doesn't mean that you're one dimensional, either.

c!dream apologists have ruined c!dream for me. he's not a good person. how about you let me enjoy a villain for who he actually is, rather for than your percieved woobified ragdoll you pass off as c!dream.

the story was better when there was a central writer. it was brilliant back when wilbur wrote it to be that the environment drives the characters and the story, and it was really good in early s2 up until techno's execution day when it was more character driven. since then, the amount of autonomy people have over their characters without any central 'director', as it were, has been a detriment to the story overall. there needs to still be one overarching figure or director or writer.

not everyone is a main character. just because they have a pov, doesn't mean they're a main character. some characters have such little impact on the overall plot and describing everyone as a main character oversaturates the story and makes some characters seem more important than they are.

the egg lore had so much potential up until it didn't. all that built up threat that we were expecting and we still don't even know what the egg wants really other than just controlling people. does it hatch?

genuinely, if there's no major plot developments by the end of the year (and let's be honest, it's a very big possibility at this point), a few of the more prominent members of the server should do a podcast style stream talking about where the story would have gone, because at least then we would have gotten somewhat closer to a conclusion.

c!techno is a villain and an asshole and a bad person. he stops caring for people once their interests don't align with his or if they look at him funny. he makes meta-jokes about his own tyrannical and oppressive nature. stop taking that away from him. he's a bad person. cc!techno does a fabulous job portraying that in a comedic manner and the balancing of him being a deeply flawed person with deeply flawed morals and ideas with his comedically-portrayed stubbornness and lack of willingness to hear out opposing viewpoints is incredible. i want to like characters who are arseholes for the sake of being arseholes, and who refuse to take into account the hurt they've caused either out of self-righteousness or because they don't care, so let me. he's the anti-peacemaker, LET ME HIM ENJOY HIM FOR THAT!!!!

i think tommy and wilbur's way of doing lore is my favourite. relies heavily on improv, voice acting, sprite acting and facial expressions. really shows off the acting props and they pull off the emotional moments well for the insanity of the creative medium.

i'm not a fan of fan-music. i find songs about media i'm into difficult to listen to. coincidentally i'm also not a fan of shit like slam poetry or live music/musicals/pantomimes.

the death of l'manberg killed people's motivation to go on the server casually. i've talked about it more in depth before, but destroying what was a central, driving environment for the story killed momentum and motivation. imagine in an episode of she-ra, the princess alliance just nuke the freight zone and all of the members of the horde just have to deal with it. that would be shit.

until season 3 has some momentum, i'm counting the end of the smp as january 20th. that had a conclusion. season 3 has... whores, technoblade and tommyinnit. that's about it.

i wasn't a fan of the development of c!tubbo joining las nevadas. i preferred snowchester and the walled city conflict. give c!tubbo some backbone and some badassery. also tubbo where's the fucking nuke bro if you're shelving that plotline just tell us on like an alt stream what the plan was i beg

add like 2 or 3 new people to the server so that michael mcchill has someone to talk to and so that there's something always happening on the server. it gives the og's more motivation to return if things are happening in and out of canon and it'll help with momentum, and who knows? maybe they can write their own story/stories.

i really think that c!sam is an underrated character. he's multilayered, extremely interesting, and the dichotomy of his loyalty to his job and how far down the rabbithole that's taken him versus the genuine love he has for his friends that drives him to do what he does out of wanting to do right by them is brilliant. i don't talk about c!sam enough.

STOP HAVING FUCKING VILLAIN ARCS!!! I'M FUCKIN SICK OF IT!!!! i want to see more characters who see everyone else being absolute selfish, abhorrent cunts and go 'if nobody else is going to be a good person, i fucking will'. GIVE ME SOME MORAL WHITENESS!!! IT'S INTERESTING AND MORALLY GOOD CHARACTERS ARE FUN!!!

let tommyinnit build cobblestone towers. everyone bullied him too much for how ugly they were and the one he built outside of the prison looked genuinely really nice. it gives the boy something to do.

i'm a fan of the revive book and the canon lives system. don't ask me why, but i think it might just be the morbidity of it. it adds to c!dream's god complex persona, and i think the fragility of death itself is a really fun concept. not enough fan cc's have made connections with that and c!mumza, and it could make for cool fanfic.

ranboo your house is fucking ugly. it's an eyesore

c!niki, and to some extent now c!jack and c!fundy, are boring me and ruining my mood. i think c!jack is the closest to being an actually interesting sympathetic villain, mainly because nobody else seems to realise that c!niki is a villain. not a good one imo, but she's a villain. c!jack just has the problem of starting a new project over and over and over and over again and because of the slow in momentum for the primary cast, there hasn't been a lot of recent development for him.

not really a dream smp opinion, but if philza went full geordie accent, i would love it. i want him to, in canon, say shit like 'me n ye' instead of 'me and you' and use geordie dialect. i want him to be physically unintelligible because it's funny.

i don't really know what's up with c!foolish but i think he's a dumbass. he had a while to think about c!q's proposal and then changed his mind about joining the guy to admitted to letting him die just because. moron

i wish there was more c!eret lore. i wish he was an actual king with an actual kingdom and actual subjects and royal advisors. c!eret is far too fucking cool to be the king of nothing and nobody. fatten up the kingdom and the castle with people who work with c!eret, and don't just make it tyrannical and dictator-y to prove the point of the server's 'anarchists'. make it a healthy working environment, please - if you want moral greyness, have 'anarchists' who claim to care about the welfare of the server oppose a kingdom of happy people under a fair and just ruler because their ideologies clash.

the server needs more characters who oppose anarchy in more peaceful ways, or passively wish for systems to be a part of. i think a chaos vs order conflict ending only in mutual understanding where everyone understands that they should just leave each other alone would slot nicely into the story that's been created so far.

you need to have watched all of the previous arcs to understand the story. i've seen people argue that they don't need to know about earlier lore to understand the prison, but that's the equivalent of only watching the final season of pretty little liars and expecting to understand the context of what's going on.

some characters aren't that morally grey. some characters, take c!tommy for example, are definitely on the whiter side for the morality scale, he's just an asshole. he's abrasive and rude and a dickhead but he also doesn't agree with terrorism, he's patriotic, he strives for a better world, he's apologetic, but he's also a fucking BITCH.

you can add onto this if you want, but not if you're a c!dream apologist. nobody likes your opinions

#dream smp #dsmp #esclaposhitpost

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