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pilferingapples · 4 years

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Shoelace Fandom!!! Shoelace Fandom!!! Aaa okay, Nerval or Borel? Or if you want, Feuilly for Les Mis? :D

He Just oh wow Many Lots , thank you for the distraction!

Borel:

First impression: I’m certain it was just reading someone mention on a post that he was something of an inspiration for Bahorel’s character. I thought “ oh, I love Bahorel, that’s so funny , I should look into that.”

Impression now- WELL GEE HE SURE AS HECK WAS I FRIGGING GUESS , who gave this fictional character a gateway into existing in real life?? how was this an actual person?? ..also, following on that: how did this apparently somehow For Real Actual Person who was, by the account of pretty much everyone who even saw him across a crowded theater just once, one of the loudest, most noticeable, most standout people in a movement full of incredibly noticeable people managed to just do a History Fade?? if it weren’t a few minor historical artifacts I’d be half convinced he was a persona the Young Romantics made up as a symbol and group pseudonym for their most controversial work!

Favorite moment: ...the guy is nothing but Alarming Stories By Friends but I think him demolition-ing his own construction project because someone wanted it to look Neoclassical is surely one of the best, even if it is apocryphal (and I don’t know that it is even!! we all know he would! )

Idea for a story: ...what could I even make up about him as a person/character that people don’t already say he actually diduh Sentaii AU? Sentai AU. The Jeunes France as a whole are so prime for it , anyway- they even color coded themselves! how often are historical groups that convenient for us, really XD

Unpopular opinion: definitely not uncommon in our tiny cenacle , but I think his role in the Romanticist /weirdo artist community is still underestimated--extremely so, even. but if I get into that more, this will get WAY too long for a three character ask game..!XD

Favorite relationship: ...dang it I really want to know more about him and Gerard , they seem to have been incredibly close for a while in a very particular way (and no I do not mean just ‘ probably they were sleeping together’ , that’s almost a given in this group, but they seem to have had a particular...I don’t know, Understanding Of Mutual Strangeness? , that really stands out between two people who were, yes,both notably Unusual but in very different ways)

Favorite headcanon- I appreciate how we all seem to have accepted that Petrus Borel Never Dies, he will Forever Appear Bearing Illegal Literature In Times of Social Disorder. It’s What He’d Want.

Nerval

First impression- this one I actually heard about outside of LM fandom first...as “ the guy with the lobster” . Well.

Impression now-- oh geez I’m super emotional about him, BUT: I think he’s been unfairly treated by even a lot of his post-death fans in being reduced to a Tragic Figure? Reading his own actual work, and even his personal letters, he’s strikingly funny, self-aware, and aggressively engaged with the world in a way I often find missing from writers considered to be more “ realistic” . I admire the hell out of how he managed to write out so much of his own vision of the world and stay so curious and involved in life while dealing with severe untreatable mental health issues and the nightmareverse that was the first-half-of-19C France.

Favorite moment- LET’S GO TO OLYMPUS , it’s just one God Mountain, how far can it be??

Idea for a story- ..listen if I could work out how I want a Magnus Archives AU to resolve--- ! but I can’t! but I keep thinking about it!!

Unpopular opinion- I really do not like the way he gets talked about as a Helpless Tragic Figure? He managed to have a full, independent life, travel, write, work with some of the most famous people of his day, and was a central figure in his own community,while dealing not only with the problem of his mental illness but the really terrifying situation of how people in the 19th century treated people with mental illness. I get exhausted dealing with ableism now, he was out there looking people in the eye who knew he’d been institutionalized and were openly surprised he was out again and he was still demanding respect. Badass.

Favorite relationship- see above, but I also want to know more about his relationship with his mother’s family, especially his aunt?

Favorite headcanon- He Just Turned Into a Bird And Flew Away, Okay

Feuilly:

First impression

“ ...why is he so hung up on Poland? Is he Okay?” (listen, I was 21, I am a USAn, my knowledge of international history was Not Super)

Impression now

We should cut all Gillenormand’s big speeches and give the pagetime to Feuilly to talk about International Affairs. No but seriously, he’s come to have such a distinct personality to me through his Symbolism and his tiny moments in the barricade sequence ! I love him, he deserves More Time-- and yet I realize if Hugo actually put More Time into writing a specific worker that would probably have been Not Great, so...good job knowing your limits on this maybe, Hugo??(also I remain baffled that an Orphan With A Mysterious Past in a sprawling 19C novel never has that past examined even a little , he’s just an orphan! we don’t know why! we never learn anything about his family! it’s practically daring.)

Favorite moment

His sense of betrayal at the barricade! It’s such an idealistic moment--even after 1830, he really expected the high-profile republican leadership to come through for them!-- and I really appreciate that at least one of the fighters there gets to be angry that they’ve been left out to dry (they were! they really were!) instead of needing to be Better Than That.

Idea for a story

..if I were going to try to write fic, I would probably try to write the series where Feuilly has Various Roommates, with Hilarious Results :D I’d also love more research-powered fic about him in his life outside the Amis group? the One Guy in the atelier (who’s not the boss/shop owner) is a really interesting hook!

Unpopular opinion

..I don’t think of him as a redhead, still :P --Is it still Relatively Unpopular to think that Feuilly is popular? I don’t think he’s an isolated person outside of Les Amis at all; he’s a community-minded guy who cares warmly about other people and seems like he’s especially concerned with the situation for immigrants, there are surely more invitations and requests for his company than he can ever answer on his schedule.

Favorite relationship

--with Enjolras, both for what (tragically little ) we see of it, and for the sheer Symbolism XD

Favorite headcanonPractically everything about Feuilly’s life is headcanon!XD-but probably my favorite is that he’s an oblivious Neighborhood Dreamboat with a dozen people swooning over him. He doesn’t mind! He doesn’t notice! He thinks it’s just great how everyone in his apartment is happy to talk about international justice!

#...well that took a while #but it's a lot of asks !#thank you!#long post #four people and a shoelace #aflamethatneverdies #answereds

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zhouxuns · 5 years

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thoughts on the finale

overall, s3 was quite good. but the finale makes it all feel pointless. and not just s3, but s2 and s1 as well. and i know the line about “the universe acknowledges you” was because of what was to come and was supposed to be some sort of comfort to the audience, but it wasn’t. at least not for me. legion never stuck the landing for their finales so this doesn’t surprise me. but i’m gonna rant anyways.

several things i didn’t like.

1) no acknowledgement whatsoever of the hallers who gave david a loving life. they retconned the hallers’ existence this whole season to push the idea that david never received love in his childhood and didn’t grow up looked after. despite the fact that we’ve seen throughout s1 how dearly important david’s childhood was and how important mama and papa haller were to him and how much he loved them and vice versa. i mean really, no acknowledgement of amy haller at all? the woman he cared about most besides syd? his sister? who was so important to him, we got a multiverse episode about how key amy was to david’s lives? not even an acknowledgement towards lenny when she killed herself inside amy’s body? and even worse, we’ll never know precisely why the xaviers gave david to the hallers in the first place. i found this retcon extremely insulting to david’s character, but to adopted families/foster families.

2) farouk’s redemption. how utterly insulting to the audience’s intelligence to redeem farouk with no recognition for his insidious actions and unrelenting vile choices. he possessed a baby, terrorized it for fun, abused a child, he sexually molested david every time david was frozen with fear to further suppress him, he raped lenny, a lesbian, whenever he felt like it, he stole people’s bodies because he felt like it, he killed endless amounts of people. and then they have this same farouk ask his younger self if he was really that hateful and petty as if the audience is supposed to forget that just a year prior to that conversation, that this same farouk brutally murdered an innocent amy haller to get at david and, as lenny said, raped her whenever he wanted. the same person who continued to plant the ideas in david’s head that he’s god and doesn’t have to regard the lives of other people. the same person that kidnapped syd and manipulated her into turning against david before he even betrayed her. like, for real? just retcon all of that to pretend like farouk had a change of heart and always loved david and wants world peace? all it takes is to share beer with your old enemy despite the fresh blood on your hands? wow. how embarrassingly bad is that on the writers’ behalf.

3) syd. not only did syd have a mere handful of lines in this episode, but yet again, it’s as if the writers changed their minds about syd’s feelings/characterization. she’s got to be one of the most jerked around characters on this show. she used to be consistent up until the latter half of s2 when the writers decided to make syd ooc for the sake of plot (you know, the david is evil crap). syd just episodes prior expressed that she felt it was worth it to have been with david and that she wouldn’t change it. she didn’t regret their love, she regretted their downfall. in her final moments, she’s back to bitter snark, borderline defeating the whole empathy episode. i loved the bit about saving baby david, but loathed the “i am” in response to david saying she’ll be extraordinary without him around. it retcons the entire value of syd’s history, her life choices, her self perception. syd, who ALWAYS believed she was extraordinary, given by her famous quote “who teaches us to be normal when we’re one of a kind”, suddenly will be a “better” person w/o having known david? when it was through him she found summerland, found mutant allies, found freedom, found a second childhood. and then what is the purpose of saying her new life will be distinctly amazing if we don’t even get to see it? not even an epilogue paragraph of what syd became in her new life? it felt like such an impersonal send off for her. she’s the female lead but yet again she ends up on the reduced end of things.

4) no consequences. the entire theme of s3 was, time traveling can change the past, but it can’t change who we are. there were no consequences in sight for any of these people. all those awful things david did, murdering and orphaning people, causing his best friend/sister’s suicide, drugging those hundreds of women, none of it mattered when legion pretended like it was supposed to. we didn’t really see david grow. we didn’t truly see him redeem his self. we didn’t see him express any true regret or remorse for all he did on the way there. right up until he end he remained in his entitled tantrum state. all it did was justify everything he did. because the past got rewritten. david got his second life and the people he sacrificed to do it don’t matter. and really? “sorry” was all he could say to the woman he raped and hurt the most? big yikes. legion’s faux commentary on make entitlement and sexism went absolutely nowhere. it’s absolutely bull crap. further proof that rape should’ve never been part of this show, let alone trying to do commentary on rape culture.

5) disjointed elements. switch turning out to be a time god felt so last minute and so lazy. she suffers and endured all this abuse from david because she was meant to “grow up” into her celestial clock form. sure it’s better than just her dying, but it feels as if her screentine was dedicated for a disappointing surprise. given how much screentime switch took up, i expected better. this is my main problem with shows adding more characters to the main plot. it causes the original characters to be neglected which results in less screentime for the originals (syd and the loudermilk twins) or being killed/written off (lenny, ptonomy, the birds) and usually the pay off isn’t good.

6) the severe lack of follow up. we will never know what oliver’s 1 + 1 plan was. we will never know what ultimately became of the birds. what became of ptonomy, who they turned into a flash drive and gave all of 3 lines to for the whole season, we’ll never know what the 3 years from now event change ptonomy calculated turned out to be, or what became of summerland or division 3. we’ll never know why they showed 616!legion in the desert. we will never get a true apology from syd to david and vice versa. we will never get an actual explanation for why farouk was allowed to roam around freely and unchecked despite him being the root cause for david’s demise.

7) the impersonal approach to mental illness. what’s the deal? legion had such a sensitive despite clinical approach to mental illness in s1. they handed the diagnoses with such care and the themes involved with it. in s2 it’s all but abandoned, and in s3 the theme returns, but with no personal touch whatsoever. ah gabrielle has the sickness, it runs in the women in the family, okay mental illness is hereditary for david, understandable. how come this is something david never reconciles his self with? how come they never give david’s true diagnosis? we know he has dissociative identity disorder, but david doesn’t. david is expressly in denial about being mentally ill, even saying he’s not “crazy” to his mother. yet he has a system of alters he works with. they all say “i am legion” which we know is what his collective of alters are called, but that’s it. one of the things david wanted to change was his mental illness. is he ever going to learn he can’t change that because he was sick all along because of his mother? his mental illness is such a huge aspect to her character yet in s3 it just feels like a post it note stuck to his chest. no one regards it with sensitivity. no one accepts responsibility in exacerbating his condition. nothing. legion used to be about mental illness. then they shed it for social commentary which held no weight, and destroyed the characterizations for an outcome that was ultimately inconsequential.

overall, this just proves to me that legion needed more than 3 seasons. easily 4-5 seasons would’ve worked better for this. legion doesn’t even leave things up for interpretation, it just leaves most of what they set up unanswered. i felt since s2 that it had been too soon to develop the story they were developing and i was right. choosing a 3 seasons arc where 2.8 out of the 3 seasons the male lead is a sympathetic and genuinely good character to make him evil and narcissistic and apathetic? makes no sense. or when the female lead used to be this complex morally grey character and at her last hour becomes isolated once more and is quoting things straight out of 2014 tumblr? i mean really? wtf.

the other characters didn’t get to do enough across these seasons. they were cannon fodder for david’s story/development (or lack thereof) more than anything else. once they were less proximal to david, they were less relevant to the writers too.

syd and david’s relationship didn’t last nearly long enough before they were thrust into ghastly new territories. and the same goes for everyone else’s dynamic on the show. far too much offscreen development occurred. farouk having a change of heart? you truly couldn’t pinpoint any point where farouk ever felt sorry for david or cared about anyone else but his self. he’s been nothing but condescending, sadistic, manipulative, and countless other atrocities. d3 and the summerlanders being comfortable with farouk with no mind control at play at all? get real. kerry and syd’s friendship was nice tidbit but we didn’t see it develop at all. it would’ve been important to see these female mutants develop a relationship. it’s the most frustrating thing aboutall of this. clearly more time was needed.

we needed more time for these things to feel truly earned. but noah was way in over his head because of how busy he became by the time s2 swung around and decided to cut the show short. i don’t buy for one minute that 3 seasons was the plan all along. everything about legion’s story progression beyond s1 screams improvisation and a messy one at that. there wasn’t enough time for these characters to breathe, too much characterization and story had been retconned to get the ending over with, and legion choosing to end where it began, except all the characters we loved are gone, all the things that made the show most important to us are gone, feels more depressing than i thought it would.

it’s going to be difficult rewatching the show especially from its flawless premier season, knowing none of it happens at all. it’s literally unfathomable to think that 3 years later this is where we’d be. i’m so disappointed.

#legion fx #david haller #sydney barrett #amahl farouk #lenny busker #text post

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spnfanficpond · 5 years

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May Angel Fish Awards

Every month all of you fantastic writers work your asses off to post some truly incredible stories. Our Angel Fish Awards are the way for all of us, as a community of writers and readers, to lift each other up and give praise to those who have captured our attention and deserve a few kind words.

The monthly Angel Fish Awards are peer-nominated, meaning ANYONE IN THE POND CAN NOMINATE ANY POND MEMBER’S FIC. While the Pond was founded to support the Guppies, everyone in this community deserves to be showered with love and feedback, and we hope that by opening this up as a Pond wide system, we’ll be able to share the love as far as it can go.

NOTE: WE’VE BEEN HAVING OCCASIONAL PROBLEMS WITH ASKS GOING MISSING. Please use the Submit button when submitting your nominations and make sure you’re signed into Tumblr or your URL won’t show. (If the form asks for your name and email address, then you’re not signed in.) If you like, you can also send a message to Michelle or Mana to check and make sure we got your submission.

WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, HERE ARE MAY’S ANGEL FISH AWARDS!

Nominated by @mrswhozeewhatsis

The Things We Don’t Believe In by @thecleverdame

This series has more drama than a soap opera! It’s an ABO Sam AU where the Winchesters own a huge company and are stupidly rich. Then Sam meets his true mate, who is working at a grungy bar as a bartender. Worlds collide, and not in a good way! This is a great story well told and everyone should read it!

What Lies Beneath by @thewhiterabbit42

It took me through most of my first reading of this one shot to figure out what’s going on (because I’m slow on the uptake, sometimes), but once I did... WOW! I had to go back and read it all again to appreciate it! No spoilers, but this is an awesome idea well executed and everyone should read it!!

On My Mind by @girl-next-door-writes

This is SO CUTE!! I love me some flustered Sam, and this is cute, flustered Sam at his best. So freaking adorable!

Nominated by @risingphoenix761

Blood in Bed by @slytherkins

There aren’t nearly enough Drowley fics out there, and this one hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves. Tara has a gift for snark, which is a must-have for writing Crowley, and she nails demon!Dean with smug, cocky finesse. A nice, cheeky, angsty look into what could have happened while they were howling at the moon, and an appropriately moody ending. I love the banter. I love the pining. I need more people to read this!

Just a Bug by @impala-dreamer

This was a surprise, even with what I’ve come to expect from Beka. It’s short and sweet with a shot of blech and so fluffy. So fluffy!!

When In Rome by @slytherkins

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: there aren’t enough Drowley fics to be had. Which makes this one twice as satisfying! Tara nails Crowley being Crowley and it’s glorious, but what really blew me away here was Dean. Holy smokes! I didn’t know whether I wanted him to keep fighting or give in, his perception was so well handled. It would have been very easy to get something wrong with his character here, but that never happened. And read the warnings for sure… This one’s DARK.

Nominated by @emilyshurley

Dear Dean by @purpleskiesandcherrypies

I don’t have enough words to describe how much I adore this fic. At first i wasn’t sure if I would like a WWII story but I fell in love with how cute Bambi and Dean are together.

Nominated by @manawhaat

Dear Readers (drabble) by @atc74

THESE. WORDS. ARE. SO. IMPORTANT.

This is not only a very believable letter to readers from Journalist!Jared, but it’s also something so JARED in character. The message, the sentiment, the way he’s so open with the fandom, how encouraging he is...all of that incredible shit that Jared is is echoed in this letter. It’s so well done and so beautifully honest. The message in this is so important, and I really hope that it can be shared so people can see it.

Lost In The World (drabble) by @girl-with-a-fandom-fettish

This is short and sweet and meaningful. Dad!Dean is always a thing that tugs at my heart strings, and the kind of hope and strength he portrays in this, even if it’s quiet and coupled with worry and uncertainty, is so Dean and so important for people struggling with mental illness. Finding hope, solace, and comfort in fanfiction is a powerful thing, and that light and support shines through in this sweet little gem!

Insomnia (oneshot) by @rowdyhooliganism

This is one of the sexiest Benny fics, hell, one of THE sexiest fics I’ve read in a while. There’s wit and sass and an undeniable pull and tension between them. The heightened vamp senses and the way they play into this kills me. I’m a sucker for a big fucker and the way Benny is portrayed in this really showcases the big brute’s size. Seriously, it’s just fucking good so go read it okay?

Tell Sam (oneshot) by @kittenofdoomage

I’m a slut for dubcon, for rough!Winchesters, and this portrayal of purgatory!Dean really fucking delivers on so many levels. Rhi’s characterization is spot on, as always, and it all feels so dangerous and gritty. It’s painful and scary and heartbreaking and riveting and makes you feel guilty for wanting it so badly.

Nominated by @fictionalabyss

The Broom Is Not A Toy by @sorenmarie87

When the idea for it hit me, I was so happy to hand it off to her and see what she could do, and she didn’t disappoint with it. Adorable panda cubs refusing to let Dean just do his work? perfect. I really want to join in on the panda habitat fun now.

Love Shouldn’t Hurt by @sorenmarie87

HEED THE WARNINGS. It’s a tough subject, the likes of which we don’t normally see from Dawn, but she did great with it. I had the pleasure of being her beta for this piece, and it not only came out fantastic, but really shows her growth as a writer.

You’re Mine by @coffee-obsessed-writer

I happened across this one this morning and damn near died. It’s so well written and I’ve never wanted a dom!Jensen more in my life.

Nominated by @wi-deangirl77

Standing Here by @plaidstiel-wormstache

I want to nominate this fic by @plaidstiel-wormstache because she does something wonderful with the age old trope of someone pining for the person they can’t seem to have. It’s brilliantly written and incorporates the perfect song to encapsulate the theme of the fic. It’s all the angst, but it’s beautiful angst.

Nominated by @girl-with-a-fandom-fettish

His Property (series) by @negans-lucille-tblr

What can I say about this story other than it’s freaking amazing?! I binged the first five chapters before I got added to the tag list and as I said AMAZING! Love the way the characters are being written and the change in POVs is being handled beautifully! Keep up the fantastic work and I can’t wait to see where this story goes!

House of the Rising Sun (series) by @kittenofdoomage

Oh. My. Gosh. What can I say about this story except that I will be rereading it and reblogging it to explain just how much I love it. The first time I read it I truly forgot to hit reblog (because I am a horrible person) but I was so lost in the story and the intricate world that had been woven by dark queen Rhi that the real world kind of escaped me. Please accept my most humble apologies.

Check and Mate by @kittenofdoomage

WOW! I’ve been on a dark!Sam kick lately so this story is perfection!! I loved everything about it, I don’t even think I could narrow it down to a favorite part, although, “bathe in the rivers of destruction” is a brilliant line!

Outside the Iron by @kittenofdoomage

As I told Rhi “who gave you the right to give me this many feels?! I am not ok and was not expecting to feel this much so early in the morning, so, ya, thanks for that. But really, that was a freaking **work of art** and I loved every word of it! She is a freaking genius writer and everything she writes gives me some kind of feels.

Bed of Roses (series) by @crispychrissy

What doesn’t this fic have? mob fic (a personal favorite of mine)? check. most genres of fan fic? check. a kick butt reader that I dream of being? check. spot on characterization? check. Basically a recipe for an amazing story, which it is!

You’re Mine by @coffee-obsessed-writer

This was so good in oh so many ways! Love me some Dom!Jensen and this story is great as a stand alone or a great intro to a (mini) series. Not sure what the author has in mind but I am happy either way.

The Mobster’s Girl (series) by @fictionalabyss

I have been following this series for a long time and have loved seeing the journey of the reader and Sam, both separately and together. I think my personal favorite would be the original Mobster’s Girl set, seeing Sam try to win her over, and then eventually just exert himself as the mobster he is was fantastic.

Songs of a Caged Bird by @manawhaat

I love a good twisted Winchesters story and Mana did a fan-freakin-tastic job of portraying the boys as twisted while still keeping them in character. Her portrayal of them just felt so spot on to me and I just adore this fic!

The Moonlight ‘Verse (series) by @thecleverdame [link is to George’s masterlist where you can find the links to all of the parts)

So many good stories in this 'verse but A History of Violence Parts 1 & 2 are my two favorites because everybody gets a little bit sassy and that’s always fun! The characters and the settings are very well written and I enjoy reading anything written by George!

Thank you all for the awesome work and great feedback!

As with the BFAs, these are not actual awards! This system is set up so everyone in the pond has a chance to share the love and promote a fic/author that has grabbed your attention. The more people that participate, and the more everyone remembers to submit their own fics after posting, the better this will be :D

THANK YOU ALL AGAIN, KEEP UP THE AMAZING WORK, AND AS ALWAYS, HAPPY WRITING!

#spn fic rec #afas #angel fish awards #afa masterlist #fic rec #spn #supernatural #spn fanfic #spn fanfiction #supernatural fanfiction #Supernatural fanfic #spn fan fiction #supernatural fan fiction

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elyvorg · 5 years

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Celeste Chapter Nine is out and WOW. Just. WOW. so much character development! a bunch of stuff happened in the timeskip! it's a lot about the bird! it's so good! anything else would probably be spoilers!

Oh boy! I was aware that chapter 9 was coming out around nowish, but I wasn’t in a super hurry to check it out immediately, because… well, because from what I’d read, the gameplay in it was going to be ridiculously hard. So I thought that if the game’s creators had any sense, any story locked behind that level of difficulty would be not particularly important or momentous, for the sake of those of us who aren’t good enough at the game to ever have a reasonable hope of reaching it. Thanks for letting me know that apparently I was wrong to think that! I went to check it out straight away thanks to this ask, and damn that is indeed some Good Stuff there. So before I go into that a bunch, let me just grumble about how frustrated I am that such substantial bits of story are contained within gameplay so difficult.

Celeste basically has two entirely separate target audiences - people who are into the kind of psychological story it tells, and people who enjoy challenging themselves with ridiculously difficult platformers, the harder the better. And only some people are going to be both of those! The assist mode the game has is great, because it allows people who aren’t so good at hard platformers but are still okay at games in general to get to play through the game anyway and see the story while experiencing Madeline’s struggles to climb the mountain as the gameplay is meant to represent. But the much harder B- and C-sides (and even Chapter 8’s A-side) are such a spike in difficulty to the point that if you’re someone who needs assist mode for the main story chapters, there’s very little chance you’ll be able to get through much of these without having to probably just resort to the invincibility option for a lot of it. Those chapters aren’t for the people who are just here for the story and not interested in a huge challenge - which is appropriately represented by the fact that there’s almost no story in them anyway (and the small chunk of story that chapter 8 does have can be accessed without doing any of the difficult parts).

But putting an actual significant story behind things that difficult? I would really rather they did not when they never did before. Sure, assist mode exists, and I could theoretically use it if I wanted to get through chapter 9 just to see the story. But the difficulty level is so high that I’d probably be having to use invincibility and infinite dashes for the majority of the screens, and at that point, I’m not really even playing the game any more and might as well just watch the story from a playthrough on Youtube as if this was never a game that I could handle myself. Which is precisely what I did. (Turns out that actually the first couple of sections of the chapter don’t look so bad and I’d probably have a challenging but fun time playing those, but then there is a noticeable difficulty spike and everything after that gets increasingly insane. Anyone at my level of skill who doesn’t just want to invincibility their way through and doesn’t have the patience to get good enough would be able to get a certain way in and then would just hit a massive wall, leaving them with an incredibly unresolved story.)

(I’m also not saying that the difficult gameplay is inherently bad - it all looks incredibly fun for people who are good enough to not die on it to such an extent that they’d get frustrated, or patient enough that that wouldn’t bother them - I just wish it was an optional bonus thing and not required to see the whole story.)

So yes anyway, rargh rargh grumble grumble this was a bad way to package this that is inconsiderate to people like me who aren’t good at platformers, but the actual story is great and here are some initial thoughts!

My immediate reaction when Madeline said that the bird is Part of Granny was that I FUCKING CALLED IT. I never actually mentioned this anywhere, but that’d always been a pet theory of mine since the bird always seemed to be near the old lady. If she’d been living on the Mountain for long enough and was clearly on good terms with her Shadow - but not still sometimes at odds with her, if her comments about the Mountain keeping her sharp mean anything - then maybe her Shadow just decided to take the form of a bird and hang around with her. Mr. Oshiro was also clearly having conversations with his Shadow at certain points, after all, even though he was much less well-adjusted about it.

(oh, right, for those not familiar with my other long Celeste post, for ease of phrasing I’m going to be calling those Parts of Someone “Shadows” here, thanks to Jungian psychology and Persona 4.)

…Then it turns out that actually the bird may still not be the old lady’s Shadow after all, because this was all Madeline’s dream and we never saw the real bird at all in this chapter. So maybe I didn’t actually call it. But hey, Madeline had the same theory as me! Which is to say that the possibility that the bird was Granny’s Shadow was something that the game’s creators did have in mind even if they wanted to leave it ambiguous, and that’s cool.

I was actually kind of looking forward to learning more about the old lady through her Shadow, during the point at which it seemed like things were going to be about that. It must take a hell of a person to decide to live in a place that shoves that kind of thing in your face every day, and it would have been cool to explore that more and get to see her as more of her own character with her own issues and not just a mentor figure for Madeline.

But, to be fair, this game has always been primarily about Madeline and her issues, mostly using Celeste Mountain and the other characters to help tell her story, so it makes sense that this ended up really being entirely about Madeline facing more issues as she struggles to deal with grief.

I have to admit, it was a little hard for me to properly empathise with Madeline’s grief and feel as sad for her as I feel the story wanted me to, because we’d never really seen how much Granny had come to mean to her. By the end of chapter 7, it just seemed like Madeline was grateful to the old lady for her help but nothing much more than that, so it was a lot of catching up to do to suddenly see that Madeline really loved her and was so broken up by her death. There must have been a lot of correspondence between them offscreen in the however many years it’s been, in which Madeline slowly came to see her as like a mentor-slash-grandmother figure (Madeline never called her “Granny” in the main story, after all). Presumably Madeline would often ask her for advice with her problems and get responses that were kind of blunt and mean but also exactly what she needed to hear, to the point that she began to really feel like she was relying on Granny and couldn’t imagine her being gone. I wish we could have seen more of that, that would probably be pretty adorable - but it’d be hard to do that when this game is a platformer and story can only be shown to us in situations where Madeline has a reason to do some platforming.

Maybe the grief aspect of the story would resonate more with people who’d personally experienced a difficult bereavement and could already automatically relate, though, and maybe that’s more who it was written for. The main story is after all especially relatable for and geared towards people who are also struggling with a mental illness like Madeline is.

Personal relatability aside, though, my own favourite thing about Celeste has always been the existence of Shadow Madeline and the way that having a part of Madeline’s psyche be an actual character in her own right lets them tell the story of Madeline overcoming her problems in a very unique way. So it was still some Very Good Celeste Content to watch Madeline’s clashes with her Shadow as she struggles to deal with this. I am almost certainly going to write another post about specifically this sometime in the future because I am all about analysing characters’ interactions with their Shadows and this in particular was a really interesting role reversal as compared to the main story - buuuut not right now because that was a Lot and I still need to process it all and let my thoughts on it properly solidify.

One thing I will mention for now is that at the beginning when I saw Shadow Madeline still looking her usual purple creepy self, I was sad that apparently my idea that she wouldn’t look so creepy these days now that she and Madeline have been getting along had been debunked. But actually that’s not necessarily the case, because, A, they were never really on the Mountain in this chapter so maybe this is just how Madeline remembers her Shadow looking last time she saw her there, and B, Granny’s death messed her up enough to set her at odds with her Shadow again to the point that maybe she would have reverted back to picturing her as bad and monstrous.

(One of my absolute favourite parts was during the gloriously ridiculous tutorial when the tutorial text spitefully added, “–And Part of You won’t help –(she’s the worst)”. My immediate reaction to that was all “What!? No! She’s not the worst, we established that last time! Who thinks this???” It seemed very notably out of place, since even Madeline herself had eventually concluded during the main story that Shadow Madeline isn’t so bad after all. At the time I still assumed the bird was Granny’s Shadow, so I figured the whole tutorial presentation was her doing and thought it very interesting that another fellow Shadow would think that about Shadow Madeline (suggesting maybe this hypothetical Shadow Granny also thought that about herself?). But then, no, this was all just Madeline dreaming, so of course those words were from Madeline all along and this was a sign of her having taken a step backwards into hating and blaming her Shadow again because of her difficulty in dealing with this.)

And there was some Theo too, yay! I was worried he wouldn’t show up at all, but it is lovely to establish that he and Madeline are still in contact and still good friends, as you can also infer from Theo’s Instagram. Madeline’s whole thing of “I didn’t contact you because stuff happened and then I felt bad about that and then it kept snowballing” is a very sadly relatable mood, and Theo being so completely chill about it is Very Good of him. (Also he calls her “Strawberry” as a nickname and that is too cute.)

#celeste #celeste game #celeste chapter 9 #celeste spoilers #shadows #ramble #so basically chapter 9 is great and you should all go... watch it. not necessarily play it #and thank you anon for wanting to tell me in particular about this #that means a lot!#Anonymous

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wearejustvisiting · 6 years

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Doki Doki Literature Club: Review

So I finished Doki Doki Literature club a few days ago and took some time to stew on it. And I can definitely say that the end result is...not the great, deep, powerful psychological thriller that everyone is talking about. (did I play a different game or something?) But before we go on, I need to mention that this review is going to contain a massive amount of spoilers. Doki Doki Literature club is not something I recommend wasting our time with, but it is something I recommend looking into for yourself. Also, I am gonna have to say that if you are easily disturbed, stop reading. The game gets dark, almost to a hilarious degree.Good? Let's get going.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________ Doki Doki Literature club is a dating sim which has the problems of all other dating sims. You have skinny white girls of varying heights and busts all after your body in what can be described as some sort of disturbing fantasy, where the girls are awarded to you for sitting through the proper dialogue trees and clicking the right buttons. Make no mistake, the girls in this game aren't characters. They're trophies.

Well, for the first three hours anyhow. Then, in an actually surprisingly touching scene, it is found out that your childhood friend Sayori has...depression. I just want to say as someone with bipolar, depression is hard to get right in a game. But these guys, they got it right. Way right. Like, if the player character's "i know what's best for you" dialogue wasn't so damn creepy I might actually have thought that part of the game was worth a damn. But no. No it wasn't. Turns out that this, that Sayori having depression, is a preamble. An introduction to what this game thinks is creepy: Shock value.

If I were asked what the main problems of this game are, it would be:1: Characters.The characters are not good. Hell, not even their weird post-game-gets-fucked-with versions are any good. We have Sayori the dull, Natsuki the obnoxious, Yuri the shy, and Monika. She's evil. And you'll be able to tell within the first hour of the game (don't worry about pacing, I'll get to it)

To go a little more in depth with the characters, we should look at Sayori first. SAYORI: SCAPEGOAT OF THE AGES

Sayori is a ditzy childhood friend of yours with a good heart, who ends up killing herself at the end of act 1 for nothing more than shock value. Her In game death contributes to nothing. You could have just had her disappear, or have the death happen off screen. But no. Dan Salvato, the mastermind behind this, thought it was important, it was NECESSARY to make us sit through this. To go into her room and to look at her hanging, dead body. Dan seems to be a bit of a necrophiliac, since he sure does love making us look at dead people. Like...a lot. Let's be real, Sayori's death is just shock value. The game wants to seem more important than it actually is, so it throws a dead girl at the screen and hopes it creeps us out. To the point where in the back of the literature club's classroom, whenever something spooky is about to go down, a picture of Sayori's hanging body can be seen. They use this girl's death like a silent hill siren, and it doesn't make any fucking sense. THis is some sort of revolutionary psychological thriller, and yet all it's doing is using the suicide of some girl as a shocking little extra. It's heinous.

But Sayori's disappearance, the fact that she is NO LONGER AROUND is necessary. Because it launches us into a timeline split that...well, that I need to explain.

SIDE NOTEThis game's timeline splits when Sayori dies. Weird things start happening in game in an attempt to jumpscare you. We will be referring to the events before the death of Sayori as Timeline 1, or T1 for shor, and everything after that will be referred to as Timeline 2, or T2 for short. As Sayori dies in T1 in a pre-rendered, predetermined, stupid looking NIN ripoff cutscene, we won't be talking about her in T2...but that leads us into talking about:

YURI: AIN'T CREEPY GIRLS JUST THE CUTEST?

So in T1 we're introduced to Yuri, who is shy and sad and reads books and is just the most annoyingly boring garbage. She's kinda considered the brooding member of the party, the one who doesn't really talk much. She's got a rough exterior, but inside she is just such a sad, soft, lonely little bird! Isn't this how ALL shy, reclusive women are!?

T1 Yuri is kinda boring, but she's the one I got stuck with due to arbitrary choices I made during the beginning of the game which I now kind of regret making. She's not really an interesting character, though the game definitely tries hard to make her interesting in T1.

It's revealed that she likes weird books. One book, which isn't a real book, is about humans being experimented on while they're still alive and conscious. Which, now that I think about it , is kind of symbolic for the game in and of itself. As in, you feel like the government is testing how long you can stay awake. I nearly failed the experiment. Multiple times.

This is supposed to add depth to the character. We're supposed to think she is more interesting than she actually is. This is furthered by the fact that she likes collecting knives. It's seen as this weird, horrifying thing by the game's plot, but...I mean, it's a knife collection. It's nothing to be afraid of. Unless we're talking about T2 Yuri, that is. T2 Yuri is about as threatening as a 4 year old pretending to be a police officer. Sure, she's got a brand new yandere coat of paint recklessly shellacked onto her, but it's not creepy apart from like...a jumpscare or two.

SIDENOTE: Yandere is this stupid anime trope that essentially makes a girl 'crazygonuts' for you to the point where she's willing to kill or be killed for you. It's stupid, I know. But apparently to people who don't know how obsessive personality disorder works, this is hot. Or something. It sure as shit ain't compelling.

T2 Yuri is one of this game's many failures of good character building. This character COULD have been interesting. She could have bee a character fighting with her obsession against the Monika character (She's my least favorite, we'll get to her) and had really honest, gut-wrenching scenes about fighting with her inner self.

But literally, in the game, the most disturbing thing T2 Yuri does is masturbate with a pen you dropped. That's it. That's as weird as it gets. Sure, there is stuff that's supposed to be more disturbing. She self harms, and you are forced to look at the results of that self harm. Because Dan Salvato thinks that if you're forced to look at it, you're going to somehow be really freaked out by it.

Once again, someone's mental illness and self harm is used not as character development, but as shock value. You are not supposed to feel for Yuri, you are supposed to be scared of Yuri. Anyways, she kills herself in the middle of a conversation with you and you're forced to sit through the worst paced scene in gaming history. But Pacing is a totally different section of the review. We'll get to it. Trust me.

NATSUKI: DEATH OF CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

Due to the fact that I was arbitrarily handed over to Yuri in the first timeline of the game, I don't know too much about T1 Natsuki. I know that she's cranky and that she's got a bloodsugar problem, or something.

To be fair, she actually starts out as a great character. We're drip-fed hints through dialogue and poems about her that are giving us hints about her life at a deliciously teasing pace. It draws you in you get interested. But in T2, I can tell you EXACTLY the line that made me give up on her. The EXACT PIECE of dialogue, it will be etched into my brain for years to come. The line that told me 'wow, these writers have NO fucking clue what they're doing'

"My father would beat the shit out of m if I found out"

...Okay. Not only do we later find out that she wasn't actually the one who said this line later in the game. Not only is it disrespectful to people who have gone through that trauma. But it kills this character's good writing.

Let's take a step back and learn how to write trauma.

SIDENOTE: Good writing of a traumatic character comes down to how the character behaves due to their trauma. For example: Nick Wilde from Zootopia is an untrustworthy kind of guy, who never puts stock in anything unless it's proven to work. He's also the victim of (what is essentially) a racially motivated hat crime. This doesn't excuse his actions, but it explains them. The trouble with Natsuki is that it's revealed too early on. If we had figured out with Nick Wilde that that stuff happened to him, say, five minutes after meeting the character, that would be total bullshit. But with T2 Natsuki, we learn too early what's going on. It kills the ability to figure out the character for yourself, and it destroys the buildup to what would have been a better reveal later in the game.

Because there are SO MANY BETTER REVEALS to Natsuki having an abusive father later in T2. But no. Once Again, Dan Salvato didn't want to let his writing about traumatic events slip past you. It tells us something when he doesn't even expect the player to pick up subtext that becomes surtext later on in the game. What I'm trying to say is that if Natsuki's abuse had been revealed later in the game, the character would have felt more compelling. But here we are, in the middle of T2, getting all these AMAZING hints to something that we already know. Because Dan Salvato does not think you're smart enough to get it yourself.

As for T2 Natsuki's death, it's...I mean it's there. Her eyes bleed, her neck snaps, she jumpscares you...It's not creepy for more than like three minutes. But what irks me is they have the balls to NOT actually kill her. She lives. She's back five minutes later.

Her death wasn't even a real death. This entire character was just a waste of time. All because Dan Salvato REALLY wanted to get another creepy silent hills death in there.

MONIKA: FLOWEY, BUT LESS INTERESTING

They say behind every great villain is a great motive. Which is why Monika's Motive sucks. She sucks as a villain, and yet EVERYONE seems to like her for some reason. I liked her better when she was flowey and the game was undertale and we had actual goddamn GAMEPLAY.

SIDENOTE: So in Undertale, the 2015 Toby Fox masterclass in indie game making, there's this character called Flowey who is fully aware that undertale is a game. He is fully aware of it. And he is REALLY GOOD at messing with the player. Deleting saves, crashing and bricking the game, etc. But Flowey is also good because of his motive. He only wants to kill you because he has grown tired of time and time again sitting through the same thing over and over, he got tired of having no feelings. So he started Killing. Monika has a...somewhat similar makeup.

Before we go on, I want to say that Monika being the villain is haphazardly revealed in like the first hour and a half of the game or something. On the second day of T1 she starts talking about saving the game and reloading the game, but then hastily backtracks over herself. Sure. Sure you don't know what that means.

Whereas flowey got a good introduction and good development (and a neat theme song) Monika gets (along with lumbar scoliosis) a fisher price version of villainy. She's really just a cold hearted monster with no development or any REAL motive. Her actions are cowardly at best.

Monika will 'delete' characters from he game, even though she doesn't really. She also messes with the games settings to get things going her way. Why is this? What is her motive to coding herself into the game like this and taking it over?

She wants to date the Player. Not the player CHARACTER, mind you, but the player themselves.

THIS IS THE MOST STUPID SHIT I HAVE EVER HEARD WHY THE FUCK WOULD ANYONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND

Let's analyze the two big problems with this:

1: She knows she's inside a game (and insults YOU, the PLAYER, for not knowing it was a game even though you obviously do) so why would she want to date the PLAYER if she knows she can't get into the real world?

2: People have pointed this out as a joke, but if she wanted to date the player so bad, then why didn't she just code herself a playable path? She's proficient enough at manipulating the game to supposedly get to the game's command line. Can she not just...give herself a path?

We also learn that Monika is manipulating the other characters to say things to try and scare the player character off. But if she REALLY wanted the player, why even bother? Just write into a poem that that's what is going on. Don't pussyfoot around it either, just straight up tell me. Natsuki got to tell me something was wrong with Yuri, so why couldn't Monika just at the beginning of the game be like 'yo I wanna get jiggy with it'??

I've heard people describe DDLC as a game that insults the tropes of dating sims and trivializes them. But...if the villain's motive is to, in the end, date the player, that kills it as a piece of subversive narrative. It further approves the idea that every character in a dating sim wants to sleep with you and ONLY you. Even the ones you can't normally get with in the game.

There are other problems with this game; However, the second biggest problem is definitely 2: Pacing So a former developer for Maxis games and former writer for Gamepro, Soren Johnson, describe fun in games like this.

Total fun=meaningful decisions/time played

Essentially, this means that the amount of fun a player has ins equal to how many decisions the player makes over the time they play. In a fun game like Skyrim, you make a lot of meaningful decisions in a little amount of time. So even though Skyrim is longer (Hell, I've probably sank at least 800 hours into that game across two whole platforms) I have a lot of fun with this game. DDLC's crimes against pacing are egregious. This game doesn't start getting to the creepy stuff that its fans tout as groundbreaking until FIVE HOURS into the game. Imagine getting a horror game, but having to sit through a schooday's worth of just tensionless, boring nothing.

While T1 has a pacing problem with slowness, T2 has one with quickness. It seems like after that first barrier of a character death got broken, DDLC decided to blow its load all over the damn place. Creepy thing after shocking thing until you just become numb to it. It's either too slow or too fast. And then...then there's the final weekend. As mentioned earlier, Yuri kills herself in T2. Now, you would expect a normal person who just saw a woman kill herself in front of them go to the police, or scream for help, or run all over the building in terror. What do you do? What happens?

You sit there. With the corpse. For THREE. IN. GAME. DAYS. YOU'RE EXPECTED TO SIT AND CLICK A SCREEN WITH A SLOWLY DECOMPOSING BODY ON IT FOR 45 GODDAMN MINUTES.

I legit thought my game was broken. I had to look it up and make sure, and if you have to LOOK UP a solution to a dating sim, that's just...that's just bad design. Monika writes this off, saying that the 'script of the game' is broken, but we know the deal. Once again, Dan Salvato thinks that forcing you to sit through a traumatic event is going to scare you even more.

But after having sat through three hours of 'ooky spooky' bullshit, I didn't care. I wanted the game to be broken because I wanted to be done.

3: Was there anything good? There were two good things about this game, and both of them are easy to explain. So forgive me.

Credit where credit is due, some of the jpeg and music manipulation was good. It wasn't nearly enough to save the game, sure, and I still wouldn't reccomend it since you can find all these creepy effects the game pulls on the internet. Bu some of the manipulation techniques were legit kinda creepy.

And the file manipulation in the computer, outside of the game, blurring the line between diegetic and non-diegetic (Diegesis referring to what is and isn't in the universe of a piece of media, e.g. background music in non-diagetic but dialogue is diagetic) was really cool. I haven't seen stuff like that since Imscared back in 2013, and that game was legitimately terrifying. I felt like a genius trying to figure some of this stuff out.

Other than that, I mean...I guess the game IS free...i doesn't take up TOO much space on my hard drive...

4: CONCLUSIONit feels like the people who wrote this game wanted to write a creepy pasta. I can imagine this being some creepy story passed around forums i 2014, being talked about. Having its own little mini fandom on tumblr, maybe a stupid living tombstone song about it. I can imagine people making fangame versions of this creepy pasta, even down to bloody eyes and hyper realistic blood and all those little creepy pasta tropes. If this had been like Sonic.exe, a fad that we all forgot about and eventually brought into the realm of parody? That would at least be more entertaining than what we got.

Instead we got a bunch of writers who can't write and artists who watch too much anime to know how real clothes and breasts work, who in all honesty probably didn't want to hang out with nerdy game programmers and Just didn't put in their all. The programmers obviously wanted this game more than the writers did.

This game isn't worth the $0.00 it's charging for the standard product.

If you just want to play a piece of good metafiction, stop playing DDLC, get a job, and go buy a PS2 with Metal Gear Solid 2 on it.

If you want a good 'game about games' just bite the bullet and spend $15 bucks on undertale.

If you want a free indie horror game that really gets under your skin, go get Yume Nikki. Trust me, that one's a real ride.

I also have problems with he music of this game, but that's a rant for another time. All I want to say is that you can do better.

You can do so much better.

Let this be a reminder that just because a game is free and has cute anime girls and a weird premise, doesn't mean it will all be good.

No matter how much it wants you to believe it is.

#Mari rambles #DDLC #tw blood #tw death mention #tw suicide mention #Mari reviews

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banjodanger · 4 years

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X-Men 3:The Last Stand(2006). This Is The Worst One, Right?

Wow.

Like, this was bad. I knew it was going to be bad, like over the years when I revisited this movie it got worse. It was never as good as it was seeing it in the theatre, I knew that. I told myself this. But I was not prepared for how much my opinion would change.

I’m going to tear this movie apart pretty hard, but I’m going to be mature and admit that there were parts of this movie I liked, and that I thought worked, because there were things I enjoyed. I’m examining movies and not just shitting on them.

First off, Beast really struck a nostalgia chord with me. I’m not saying Kelsey Grammar turns in an Oscar-worthy performance, but man it touched that little kid part of my brain that used to light up when I watched the nineties cartoon. If you told me they ripped his character off of old episodes of Cheers, I’d believe you. The speech patterns, his mannerisms, every time he was on screen I was enjoying it. Nicholas Hoult is a great actor and he really made the character his own, but this Beast is ripped straight from the comics and it was a delight.

You know, in a dumb way, I enjoyed Vinnie Jones too, but in a different way. I don’t think he was a good Juggernaut, but he’s a specific actor who plays a specific role and I don’t think he tries to stretch beyond that. So this is basically Bullet-Tooth Tony running around smashing shit up. If it sounds like I’m struggling to find things to compliment, well, I am. But I’m nothing if not a raging masochist so let’s try for one more.

This film is called The Last Stand, and I don’t think this film lives up to that title, even a little. However, it does a pretty fair job of changing the team. Xavier and Cyclops are dead, Magneto, Rogue, and Mystique are all depowered, so in chronological order it sure looks like, whatever happens in the next movie, it’s going to be a different team and a different villain.

I guess if this post has a theme, it’s that time makes fools of us all.

There’s a lot wrong with this movie. That Juggernaut meme line, the way this movie introduces characters just to forget about them(go ahead, tell me how this movie would be any different without Angel.), the lab on Alcatraz. The X-men defend people that tried to cure them and then...nothing? There’s never a teaching moment, unless you count Angel saving his dad which...no. That’s not a teaching moment, the film practically treats this cure as a good thing. They’re keeping a mutant child under lock and key, distilling his power through god knows what means, and somehow they’re not the villains of this film. We’re just supposed to assume they stopped processing it, because now Leech is smiling next to Kitty instead of locked in what’s arguably a kinda rad room. Where the fuck did they get him? Is he an employee’s kid? They’re cool turning their kid out into a lab rat? I guess it doesn’t matter if they want that employee-sponsored health insurance.

Quick side-note, capitalism is destroying us all.

But what’s taking me so long to get at is I was struggling with this blog post for a while. I know this movie hates women. I’m not holding myself up as a paragon of feminism, not even close. I have a lot to learn and unlearn. But I think it is painfully clear that this movie treats just about every woman in this flick poorly. Take a gander.

Rogue: Despite that very emotional speech from Wolverine, Rogue takes that cure for a boy. She leaves after watching Bobby skate with Kitty, and he’s the first person she sees after she’s cured.

Kitty: Jesus, this movie might as well put a red A on everything she wears. She openly flirts with Bobby in front of Rogue, she argues for mutants being above morality with Xavier. Kitty Pryde in this movie is never anything more than a romantic rival. Oh, and I guess she gets called a bitch by Juggernaut. So there’s that.

Mystique: Here is a character that believes in mutant supremacy one hundred percent, she might even believe it more than Magneto. Her own family hated her so much they tried to kill her. She is a mutant and that is a huge part of her identity. It’s why she’s followed Magneto for years. She even takes a bullet(dart?) for the guy, and he thanks her by tossing her aside like garbage. He leves her naked and alone on a hijacked prison convoy and at least ten dead cops. So she wants revenge, and you know what? That’s absolutely in character, Mystique is not one to turn the other cheek, of course she’d go over and help the X-Men, they preach working with humans and surely they’d have sympathy-oh, she decides to work with the people that locked her up? The ones that arguably hold heavy responsibility for her current predicament? Well, that’s a decision too.

So this all leads us to Jean Grey. The Phoenix. They’ve been building up this transformation since the first movie. This is a plot that has been building up for six years. And this movie almost completely disregards it.

After Jean destroys her childhood home, a weird decision that I think only appears in this movie as a callback to the comics, or maybe because someone didn’t have enough confidence in that opening scene. She basically disappears until the movie is done cramming the cure plot down our throats. She threatens Magneto with a cure gun and Wolverine pays her a visit while apparently traveling across the entire contiguous United States in thirty minutes. Which is weird, because if the Phoenix is all “Pain and rage” like Xavier, then the wholesale slaughter that occurs directly in front of her should be driving her nuts. Hundreds of people are killed or depowered in front of her and her reaction is like watching paint dry. Just for the record, her reaction to making out with Cyclops is to evaporate all the water in a lake and disintegrate a human being. Her reaction to the collective agony of hundreds of humans and mutants and ripping up a major landmark is to wonder what is taking McDonalds so long to make a Big Mac. Her meltdown is literally timed to happen directly after Magneto is out of the way and Leech is safe.

But while all that is bad, and shows some definite plot holes, unfamiliarity with the source material, and maybe a knowledge that this movie was going to hit number one at the box office if they just filmed Hugh Jackman reading Wolverine fanfiction. But after giving this movie some thought, I realized what was really bothering me about this movie as a whole, but Jean Grey in particular.

Ok, so the whole thing about these X-Men movies up to this point is that they’re grounded in reality. They don’t wear colorful costumes and they call each other by their real names. They don’t have superhero names, they have nicknames. And, unlike the X-Men of the comic books, they don’t go to outer space. So it makes sense that they’re not going to make the Phoenix an immortal space bird from beyond the stars. Phoenix doesn’t eat planets in this movie, and honestly that’s a good decision. After two movies that more or less take place in our reality, why would you introduce a bunch of fantastical elements all of a sudden(Asking you, Spider-Man 3)? The answer is, you don’t. You make the Phoenix another, higher manifestation of Jean’s powers. The next step in her evolutionary process.

But, by doing that, isn’t the Phoenix a mental illness?

Follow my logic, Jean is losing control of her powers. Her powers are mind-related. Jean Grey is losing her grip on her abilities and her grip on reality, and as a result is a danger to herself, her friends and family, and others. Jean needs help.

Or she needs a guy that has an unrequited crush on her to stab her in the abdomen.

That’s how this movie solves mental illness. Violence. No real attempt to help their friend, just Wolverine saying a line that wouldn’t be out of place in bad romantic poetry and then stabbing her. Because she asked him to. In the comics, she kills herself as a heroic sacrifice. In the movie, a man has to do it, because even though she might be the most powerful mutant on the planet, she’s still got two xx chromosomes and according to Brett Ratner that means she’s weak.

I could talk about all the ways this movie fails its characters but honestly I feel like I’ve typed enough. Fuck this movie. Bring on X-Men Origins because I refuse to believe it is any worse than this.

(For the record, if you or a friend is suffering from a mental illness, please get them help. Don’t call the cops, call a doctor or a trained mental health professional.)

#xmen xmenmovies x3 thelaststand moviecriticism mentalillness phoenix fuckbrettratner

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royalnovels-blog · 7 years

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MGA Chapter 1912

Chapter 1912 – Blood Devouring Killing Formation Nangong Longjian sensed that something in Chu Feng’s mental state seemed to be amiss. Thus, he asked, “Little friend Chu Feng, do you have something on your mind?” “Chu Feng, senior Duan Jidao and senior Yin Gongfu will not be that easily rescued. You must still consider this matter at length. Thus, it’s best to not be overly impatient and hurt your health,” Bai Ruochen thought that Chu Feng was worrying about Duan Jidao and Yin Gongfu. However, Chu Feng shook his head. He said, “Senior Duan Jidao and senior Yin Gongfu must naturally be saved. Merely, right now, I am more worried about the safety of the Cyanwood Mountain.” At that moment, Nangong Longjian and the others came to a sudden realization. It turned out that Chu Feng was worried about the Cyanwood Mountain. However, upon thinking about it, they felt that it was right for Chu Feng to be worried. When even Duan Jidao and the others had been ambushed, it was very hard to say that the people from the Cyanwood Mountain would not suffer the same fate. At this moment, Nangong Longjian revealed an expression of self-blame. He knew that Chu Feng, with his temperament, must’ve already thought about this. However, he had not directly proceeded to the Cyanwood Mountain, and instead stayed here for many days. Nangong Longjian knew that Chu Feng had done so because he was worried about his illness. “Little friend Chu Feng, I, Nangong Longjian, will go and check the Cyanwood Mountain out right away. If the Cyanwood Mountain is to suffer an unexpected calamity too, even if I am to dig three feet underground, I will still search out that Dark Hall and make them pay with blood,” Nangong Longjian said with an expression filled with seriousness. Hearing what Nangong Longjian said, Chu Feng’s heart was moved. Immediately, his previously-tense mind felt a lot more at ease. It was as if an enormous stone weighing down on his heart had finally fallen to the ground. Actually, Chu Feng had been able to immediately proceed for the Cyanwood Mountain after he finished curing Nangong Longjian’s illness. However, Chu Feng had not proceeded to the Cyanwood Mountain because his appointed date with Xian Miaomiao was approaching. As he had said that he would help, he must be loyal to that promise. Furthermore, most importantly, the Blood Devouring Armors possessed a time limit during which they could be used. After that time limit, the insects would die. Once the insects died, the Blood Devouring Armors would also lose their effectiveness. If Chu Feng were to proceed for the Cyanwood Mountain, it would take time for him to travel there and back. Although the time spent would not be enough to make the Blood Devouring Armors lose their effectiveness, there was no way to say that they would be able to journey into the Blood Devouring Killing Formation smoothly. If they ended up having to stay in there for some time, and the Blood Devouring Armors ended up losing their effectiveness during their stay inside, then Chu Feng and Xian Miaomiao would definitely end up dying in the Blood Devouring Killing Formation. Thus, Chu Feng did not wish to waste the limited time the Blood Devouring Armors had. However, he was also worried about the safety of the Cyanwood Mountain. And now, with Nangong Longjian declaring that he would proceed for the Cyanwood Mountain on his behalf, Chu Feng felt relieved. After all, Nangong Longjian was a rank six Martial Emperor, someone who was much more powerful than himself. “Thank you senior Longjian,” Chu Feng clasped his fist courteously. He was expressing his thanks from the bottom of his heart. “Little friend Chu Feng, do not say it like that. If it wasn’t for you, I would soon be dead.” “It is all because of you that I am able to obtain a new lease on life.” “It is all because of you that I am able to continue with my martial cultivation.” “It is also thanks to you that I am able to reunite with my family.” “Thus, this life of mine could be said to be given to me by you. The grace that you’ve shown me is something that I cannot repay in my entire life,” Nangong Longjian said. “Senior, you are being too serious. Not only has senior saved me, even if you hadn’t saved me, merely through the relationship that I have with Ruochen, I ought to give my all to help cure your illness,” Chu Feng said. “Enough, stop stirring up emotions. The top priority right now is to determine whether or not the Cyanwood Mountain is safe.” “As little friend Chu Feng still has things he must do, you needn’t proceed to the Cyanwood Mountain. Just leave this matter in the hands of Nangong Longjian and I,” The Compass Immortal said. Furthermore, as he spoke, he took out an item and said, “Little friend Chu Feng, leave an imprint on this. If the Cyanwood Mountain is fine, I will inform you of it.” Chu Feng looked to the item before him, and his eyes immediately shone. In surprise, he said, “Golden Flash Bird?” The reason for his surprise was because what the Compass Immortal had handed to Chu Feng was the nearly extinct Golden Flash Bird. “Indeed. That thing is something that I used a lot of treasures to purchase,” Seeing how shocked Chu Feng was, the Compass Immortal nodded in a very complacent manner. Then, Nangong Longjian and the Compass Immortal left for the Cyanwood Mountain. They were planning to see whether or not the people from the Cyanwood Mountain had managed to return to the Cyanwood Mountain safely. As for Bai Ruochen, Bai Suyan and Jiang Wushang, they continued to stay in the Purple Flames Blackmountain. Although the Purple Flames Blackmountain possessed an enormous pressure, the cave that they were in possessed a special spirit formation that nullified that pressure. On top of that, this place was a place that practically no one bothered to visit. As such, it was a rather safe location. That said, in order to protect against the unexpected, Chu Feng set up spirit formations outside to hide the cave completely. After he finished doing all that, Chu Feng directly proceeded for his appointed meeting with Xian Miaomiao. One of the Holy Land of Martialism’s Three Great Forbidden Areas, the Blood Devouring Killing Formation. The Blood Devouring Killing Formation was a very vast spirit formation that originated from the Ancient Era. When looking at it from the outside, it looked like an enormous mountain covered with mist. It did not appear to be strange at all. That said, in such a famous place, there was actually no sign of human habitation. In fact, not a single tree or blade of grass could be seen outside the mountain. As such, there was no need to mention buildings or living creatures. Other than the whistling sound of the wind, this place was so deathly silent that it was frightening. Standing here, Chu Feng felt a trace of chilliness. This place was truly qualified to be known as a Forbidden Area. “Paa~~~” Right at that moment, a pair of hands suddenly extended out from behind Chu Feng and covered his eyes. At the same time, an incomparably soft and gentle voice sounded beside Chu Feng’s ears, “Good sir, would you like a massage?” “Sure, where do you want to start massaging from?” Chu Feng said with a beaming smile. The reason for that was because he had managed to guess that it was that girl Xian Miaomiao the moment that pair of soft little hands appeared. “Aiya, you’re such a rogue,” Hearing what Chu Feng said, Xian Miaomiao immediately removed her hands and started pouting her little mouth. She was looking at Chu Feng with a gaze filled with disdain. “How am I a rogue? It’s you who asked me whether or not I wanted a massage.” “I journeyed all the way here and really do feel a bit tired. As such, so what if I want a massage?” Chu Feng said with a beaming smile. For some unknown reason, even though he was feeling extremely bad, his mood improved a lot after seeing Xian Miaomiao. “I said you’re a rogue, so you’re a rogue. Why the heck are you asking all these questions?” Xian Miaomiao said with an unyielding yet lovable appearance. “Oh you, you’re truly unreasonable,” Chu Feng felt helpless with Xian Miaomiao. Thus, he ended up taking out the Blood Devouring Armors and tossing one to her, “Here, put in on. Let’s go in.” Due to the fact that the Blood Devouring Armors were special, one did not have to change one’s clothes to wear them. Thus, Xian Miaomiao directly donned the Blood Devouring Armor Chu Feng had handed her. “Wow, it’s actually this well-fitting?” After donning the Blood Devouring Armor, Xian Miaomiao cried out in surprise. She felt so happy that she began to spin around nonstop. After Chu Feng’s amendment of the Blood Devouring Armors, not only did they become very well-fitting, their appearances also became much more beautiful. “I fixed it just for you. Thus, it will naturally be well-fitting,” Chu Feng smiled lightly. Then, he also donned his suit of Blood Devouring Armor. “Amazing. As expected of this Princess’s attendant,” Xian Miaomiao said. “Since when did I become your attendant?” Chu Feng revealed an expression of confusion. “You weren’t before, but you are now. Come, this Princess shall bring you along to experience the world and brave the dangers of the Blood Devouring Killing Formation.” “Wha!!!!” Xian Miaomiao began to run erratically into the Blood Devouring Killing Formation. She had charged into the boundless mist that covered the mountain. Seeing Xian Miaomiao acting like this, Chu Feng shook his head helplessly. Then, without any hesitation, he chased after her. Although Xian Miaomiao possessed very powerful strength, it remained that she was not a world spiritist. As such, Chu Feng was worried that an accident might happen to her. Previous Main menu Next Click to Post

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