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tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons · 11 days

Note

I've been thinking about ROSEQUARTZ and RAZORQUEST again, and there's one particular note about them that I want to touch on - the character of Rose. The title character of ROSEQUARTZ "haunts the narrative", so to say. The story initially tricks you into associating your mother with your pacifist options; doing violence is going against what she explicitly wanted, the Crystal Gems commend you for acting like Rose when you find diplomatic solutions to your problems, and Homeworld gems likewise lament Rose's persuasive abilities. Rose represents the wholesome route and Bismuth, when she's eventually introduced, represents the cynical one.

But of course things turn out to be more complicated than that, as you get more hints about the backstory and dig into them deeper, across the game's routes. Rose's ideals were essentially a facade invented by a pathological liar and manipulator who was all things to all people. She luxuriated in the privileges available to her as Pink Diamond, and continued to exploit Pearl's subservient nature despite a pretense of freeing her. She may have actually cared about the Earth on some level (or it may have just been a random whim), but she did terrible things to everyone around her ("starting a fake war that kills countless real people" level terrible things) over, essentially, repressed family trauma, and it's hard to say that anyone knew the real her. She imprisoned Bismuth for thousands of years not because Bismuth was violent but because she had gotten too close to noticing the contradictions in her story.

The harder you look at her creation of Steven (the player character's canonical name per the game files), the less it looks like an act of love and the more it looks like a few thousand years of depression followed by an elaborate suicide. It's not exactly a reliable source of information, but at the end of the genocide route, a distorted vision of Rose (or at least her gem, or Nora, or Pink Steven, depending on which fanwank analysis you're reading) tells you as much; moreover, it tells you that she wouldn't care that you decided to simply wipe out Earth and Homeworld alike. The whole world was only a piece of disposable entertainment for her; she'd tried hard to find more in it of interest but gave up a long time ago.

And who can forget Spinel's words, buried in an obscure corner of the true pacifist route's ending:

Maybe... The truth is... Rose wasn't really the greatest person. While, [Steven]... You're the type of friend I wish I always had.

Generous readings of Rose's character suggest that the events of the true pacifist route were her plan all along, and that she deliberately created a successor to herself to act as a messianic figure and succeed where she failed in peacefully ending Homeworld's colonial empire. A popular and reasonably well-supported fan theory, NarraNora, suggests that all of the narration in the game is actually coming from the fragment of Rose Quartz remaining in Steven's gem, and that we can therefore analyze her character through the lens of Toby Fox's whimsical incidental writing. However, though these are sophisticated reads, they are certainly minority views in the fandom. As complicated as Rose's legacy is in-story, the game makes it very easy for fans to walk away from it hating her. The fandom stewed in this for years, building up a demonized image of Rose Quartz, after the release of ROSEQUARTZ.

(insert fanmade fight with Rose Quartz set to Megalo Strike Back here)

Then, out of nowhere, the first chapter of RAZORQUEST drops on Halloween in 2018. The character creator's got spooky vibes, it suggests you name your female character Rose, people are on edge, like, holy shit, what are we in for, what does this mean, is this a new game or what. And then the game just drops you into your apartment and you can quickly start piecing together from environmental details and context cues that you're in a setting that operates on very different rules, but is nonetheless an AU of ROSEQUARTZ - most notably, a human version of Rose is now your late grandmother, a demon-summoning witch who everyone already views with the same contempt that the fandom had developed for ROSEQUARTZ's Rose.

(Other "AU moments" later on include human versions of other assorted gems as background members of the Thorburn, Behaim, and Duchamp families, versions of Lars and Sadie operating a Tim Hortons in Jacob's Bell, and a version of Kevin as a cult leader the player character has a vague traumatic backstory with.)

Rose Diane Thorburn Senior is, for basically all intents and purposes, the same character as Rose Quartz, just with her posthumous character arc playing backwards. With RQ, we see her best side first, and then we pull back nightmarish layer after nightmarish layer and feel betrayed. With RDTS, we come in feeling betrayed already. Everyone already knows she's a toxic drama black hole who constructed an artificial conflict to set her family at each other's throats. She's sitting on an old mansion in a state of disrepair that's bringing down the value of the whole town, and she's doing her best to make sure it never gets sold, apparently out of sheer stubbornness and spite - a clear analogue for RQ's attachment to the Earth as seen from Homeworld's perspective. We aren't afraid that we'll be unable to fill RDTS's shoes; we're afraid that she's already fucked everything up for everyone.

It's only over time that we learn more about her and hints start to trickle in as to why she did what she did. We get a much closer look at her abusive childhood and how it affected her than we ever did for RQ; that was all left more implicit for her. We learn about the depths of the Thorburn family's magical debt (built up over numerous generations), and about the dangers posed to the world if the collectors were to come knocking. We find that it would be a fairly straightforward good for the Thorburn family to self-destruct in an organized and protracted fashion, and RDTS's actions come to make sense in this light.

It just really sucks that her plan for doing so involved doing... All That Shit to her grandson, the player character. You're fucked up bad. You've been magically carved into two incomplete people, one of them made in Rose's own image, so you could better serve as a guided missile to obliterate her family's legacy in her absence. That this plan will inevitably destroy you is really besides the point.

She is still the same character.

i do have to admit you have made me actively mad that i don't get to live in the universe where i get to read toby fox's pact that shit would be tight as hell

At the start of ROSEQUARTZ, you're asked to provide a name for the protagonist as a boy and a name for the protagonist as a girl. This ultimately amounts to a red herring; late in the game, you find out that Rose and Greg had both names in mind before they knew the protagonist's sex.

RAZORQUEST starts with a similar character creation screen, but, to put it mildly, the boy-name-and-girl-name setup is not a red herring this time.

#the scrambled timeline

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tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons · 11 days

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WHERE DO DWAYNE MCDUFFIE'S VARIOUS WORKS LAND IN THIS HYPOTHETICAL TIMELINE

especially since in this timeline the Tommy Westphall Universe hypothesis was postulated by him

Got his start as an editor at DC in the 1980s, where his first major work was The Suicide Squad, a miniseries positing that supervillains are incarcerated rather than killed because society seeks to exploit their labor. As a freelancer, he'd do most of his noteworthy work for Marvel; he sought to improve the poor state of minority representation in comics at the time, and created many of Marvel's best-regarded black superheroes, like 3-D Man, Storm, Static, and the Punisher, all of whom would eventually be incorporated into the main Marvel universe.

Static, or Miles Morales, was especially popular, and got his own four-season show, Static Shock, which aired on Cartoon Network. This was the start of a long series of Cartoon Network writing and directing credits that Dwayne McDuffie received; he was a leading figure in multiple highly-regarded Spider-Man shows, they brought him on to run all three Inspector Gadget sequel series (interrupted only by his death), and he even had a presence in reboots of The Avengers and Crazy Train. He died suddenly in 2011, relatively early in what surely would have otherwise continued to be a productive and prolific career. He is still remembered very fondly today, and has inspired many memorials and tribute characters.

As for "Six Degrees of the Queen of the Asteroids", it was a blog post that McDuffie wrote in 2002 for defunct comics site Slush Factory. In response to questions about the continuity of his own comics, Static Shock, and Bruce Timm's AMU, McDuffie reflects on the attitude that working in comics has given him about canon, crossovers, and shared universes. As a reductio ad absurdum, he points out the extensive network of Easter eggs that Pixar likes to use to link their films together. (There were only four at the time, with Shark Tale still on the way.) He then goes into a series of strange rationalizations you would need to make to explain how they could all be set in the same universe, if you were applying the same attitude to them that many fans try to apply to superheroes. Unfortunately, the internet generally disregarded the context of McDuffie's argument, and accepted the ideas he had intended to be ridiculous at face value. The so-called "Pixar Theory" remains a frequent subject of braindead fan discussion to this day, with each new release from the studio prompting a new round of speculation as to how it could be shoehorned into a shared universe.

#the scrambled timeline

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tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons · 16 days

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Appendix D: Some Pig/One More Final

The first three posts in this series are here.

Undertale was a slightly postmodern children's fantasy movie produced by Jim Henson's Creature Shop in the '80s. Noah Hathaway played the protagonist, Frisk, who went on a long quest to escape from a magical prison inside Mt. Ebott; Frisk's father had thrown them into the mountain, known to be full of monsters, in an attempt to kill them. However, it's suggested that as a human, Frisk is inherently more of a protagonist than a monster can be, and has a vague sort of magical power over them. Toriel's death, which Frisk accidentally causes early in the movie, is commonly listed as a Peak Sad Childhood Moment.

George Orwell wrote The Writing In The Web, a political fable about a cult started by a well-meaning spider. E. B. White wrote Snowball's Farm, a whimsical children's tale about a farm whose animals decide to take over.

Infamously, Emmanuel Goldstein's monologue fills dozens of pages, takes at least three hours to read aloud, and brings the plot of Ayn Rand's 1984 to a screeching halt.

Short story collections and anthologies often keep the same title, author, and spirit, it's just the stories that are swapped out. For example, classic episodes of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone include A Wonderful Life, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, Miracle On 34th Street, and The Sixth Sense. 1983's The Twilight Zone Movie includes segments based on classic episodes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (directed by John Landis and given anti-war themes), Cocoon, The Poltergeist, and In Search of the Twelve Monkeys (the original starred a young William Shatner). Candle Cove is an episode of Black Mirror.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a 1999 Ben Stiller comedy about a team of low-rent superheroes who theme themselves after public domain characters because they cannot afford licensing fees. The film was well-reviewed, but a box office bomb. It was actually the first film to use Smash Mouth's One Week - the One Week music video is actually cross promotion with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - and it would remain the film most associated with the song until Dreamworks' Happily N'Ever After hit theaters two years later.

The Amazing Digital Circus was a virtual pet game and toy line that struck when the iron was hot on that niche, before being bought out by Hasbro and rebooted a few times in different forms and mediums. Lauren Faust created a long-running television cartoon of it that was a huge smash hit with fandom culture despite the show's clearly very young target audience. The property's canon is all very light kiddie fare; the scariest thing about The Amazing Digital Circus is that for a brief and touchy stretch of time in the early 2000s, it was owned by the Peoples Temple, which was seriously considering turning it into a recruiting platform.

Your cringe unpublished works that you gave up on were almost certainly swapped around with other people's cringe unpublished works that they gave up on. There's lots of upwards and downwards mobility to the scramble, but not usually that much. Exceptions are very rare - like a beggar suddenly being made king, or a god being reincarnated into an ant - but they do occasionally happen. For example, what you know as the land of Oz exists only in the head of a young Milwaukee stoner, who suddenly came up with the idea for an epic graphic novel one day in the 2010s while sitting on the bus, and spent a couple of years absolutely convinced she would eventually make it. (She cannot draw.) Conversely, L. Frank Baum's children's fantasy series, Enormia, which has been adapted and reimagined many times, most notably as audiences' introduction to color film, exists in your world only as a different Milwaukee stoner's overly elaborate backstory for his jerkoff sessions. This kind of thing is much more the exception than the rule, and even such exceptions are almost always much smaller in scope - an obscure stillborn project getting swapped around with an obscure out-of-print novel, or an obscure direct-to-video z-movie.

The True Detectives forum and its many schismatic spinoffs, all of which are devoted to discussing mystery fiction, host literally thousands of Wind fanfics. Many of the writers - perhaps most of them - have never actually read Wind, just other fanfiction of it; next to none of the fics are worth reading. Most Wind fics reuse the original protagonist, Rorschach, but treat him as a generically relatable blank slate. The most common fic format by far is the "altdunnit", a form of what-if scenario in which the mystery that sets off Wind's plot is different in some way.

Rorschach is held by a substantial portion of the fandom to be an egg (a trans woman who has not realized it yet). Wildbow has never endorsed this interpretation, and it doesn't seem to be much on his radar. In recent years, the trans Rorschach portion of the fandom has grown; they don't tend to look especially kindly on Warn, much of which Wildbow wrote as a response to fans (like those on the True Detectives forum) he felt had been too inclined to take Rorschach's side in Wind. Flame wars over Warn's content were constant throughout its serial publication, and made it easily the rockiest experience of Wildbow's writing career.

Some noteworthy and relevant podcasts include Jonathan Sims' The Dresden Files, the Ranged Touch Network's Scott Pilgrim Made The World, Doof Media's Winding Down (later Warning Down), and the McElroy family's The Adventure Zone (an actual play podcast which has currently had three major campaigns, two anthology series, and various one-shots). Film Reroll is still an actual play podcast that runs the basic setups of movies (and occasionally other media) as short tabletop campaigns; occasionally, their version of a movie will be much closer to ours than it is to the version of the movie in their own universe.

Xenobuddy was an early childhood public access show, originally created for the BBC in the late 1990s but later aired internationally. The title character is a small alien puppet who lives on a futuristic spaceship staffed by children (who speak a vague conlang akin to a dollar store Esperanto). At the end of every episode, it gets lost and is found, usually by (harmlessly) bursting out of one of the children. It was very popular with its target audience and much loathed by parents. Edgy ironic fanart depicting the titular Xenobuddy as some kind of dangerous parasite abounds.

Static is a supernatural slasher franchise created by Wes Craven, with the first film, also simply titled Static, released in 1984. The movies concern a group of gibbering neotenous ogre-fae who wake up in the modern day after a long sleep, incorporate televisions into their bodies, and start eating people by sucking them into hellish pocket dimensions. The Screen-Guts collectively are probably in the top five antagonists most people think of when they think of slasher horror.

Toby Fox's ROSEQUARTZ is especially known for its meta take on video game morality systems. The game has a mission-based structure; throughout it, the player is encouraged to take on a pacifist playstyle, championed by the player character's late mother, the title character. However, the Crystal Gems give the player enough autonomy that you are entirely able to take a much more violent tack; doing so has a rippling effect on the game's writing in countless immersively-integrated ways. If the player goes out of their way to be as murderous as possible - the so-called "genocide route" - the differences from the main route grow much more extreme, and rather than gaining allies, you start to lose them, as the Crystal Gems realize what you're doing and one by one turn against you. If you manage to shatter Garnet - it's the hardest and most iconic fight in the game, Megalovania is playing, her Future Vision gets used for all it's worth - then you use your knife to slash at the cosmos, erasing Earth, Homeworld, and everything else. This, Toby Fox is saying, is apparently all you want out of a video game - another toy to break.

Warner Bros still did Space Jam with Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes, it's just that the Looney Tunes in question were Mickey Mouse and friends. They also still did a second one with LeBron James, which was, by God, somehow worse. They put Ms. Frizzle in it.

Walt Disney made his squeaky clean reputation on the back of adaptations of things like Rudyard Kipling's adventure novel The Call of Cthulhu, P. L. Travers' Thomas the Tank Engine, and Erich Kästner's feel-good coming-of-age kidnapping tale about the power of perseverance, Lolita, originally done with Hayley Mills and later remade with Lindsay Lohan.

Nabokov's extremely controversial literary classic that has defined the idea of the unreliable narrator is Father's Trap, from the perspective of a man who plots to obtain custody of both of his daughters for nefarious purposes. Most publishers ignored Nabokov's instructions not to depict the twins, Lisa and Lottie, on the cover. Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne have directed mediocre film adaptations, and songwriting team Lerner and Loewe did a musical that was a legendary flop.

The Japanese fashion movement is Gothic Pollyanna, after an otherwise-forgotten series of penny dreadfuls about a cute, cheery, rules-minded young girl who is, despite appearances, an insane criminal. Minor character Bonesaw in Alan Moore's Worm Turns also clearly hearkens back to the Pollyanna stock character.

The DEA was a prime-time soap opera about the ongoing "war on drugs"; it ran for eleven seasons from 1982 to 1993. Its plot focused on federal agents working at the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and especially partners Hank Schrader and Steve Gomez and their families. It is mostly remembered today for its downer ending (in which the treachery of late-show villain Walter White, or "Heisenberg", gets the leads killed, and he escapes from justice), and for its far-more-acclaimed spinoff series Better Call Saul, which also ran for eleven seasons from 1993 to 2004, functioning as a prequel, midquel, and sequel to The DEA.

Between The DEA and Better Call Saul, Kelsey Grammer played crooked lawyer Saul Goodman for twenty consecutive years of primetime TV, first as featured comic relief and later as a leading man. (He also guest-starred on the mostly-forgotten Mall Cop, establishing that it, too, was set in the world of The DEA and Better Call Saul.) Better Call Saul won more than a dozen Primetime Emmys. Peri Gilpin received several of these for her performance as Kim Wexler.

St. Elsewhere was a film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan in the late 1990s; it was highly acclaimed and successful, and established Shyamalan in the public eye as a skilled auteur with an affinity for twist endings. The film's final scene reveals that its main setting, St. Eligius Hospital, exists entirely within the imagination of an autistic boy, Tommy Westphall, as he gazes into a snowglobe. The so-called "Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis", which posits that this same twist applies to most of fiction due to a network of crossovers, was invented by a Saturday Night Live sketch shortly postdating the film's release, in which an amnesiac Charles McGill (from Better Call Saul) wakes up in St. Eligius, attended to by a cast of characters who are more concerned with their own nonexistence.

After rising to prominence as a writer, storyboarder, and composer for Pendleton Ward's Science Time (where she established the Summer/Jessica relationship that would come to define later seasons), Rebecca Sugar got to make her own cartoon, Henry Ichor. Set in a recently post-apocalyptic but strangely cheerful world, Henry Ichor concerns a young teenage boy who is conscripted as a mech pilot due to his rare and innate ability to link to the powerful Evangelion mecha. (His preferred Evangelion is eventually revealed to be a form of his late mother, the reason he can do this in the first place.) Henry turns out to be a vital asset in protecting humanity from the monstrous "Angels" that frequently threaten it, and is surprisingly emotionally mature for his age. However, the adults around him (especially his father, Gennady) frequently push him too far, especially considering his generally noncombative and pacifistic nature. There is much interpersonal drama and much singing about it, with a very vocally trained cast. After several seasons of slow buildup, the show was forced to suddenly rush to its ending in only a few (infamous) episodes after an arc where Henry had a romance with an Angel in male human form. Henry Ichor The Movie and an ensuing miniseries, End Of Henry Ichor, helped bring the show to a more thematically satisfying conclusion.

Although he has played a creative or consultant role in many animated projects, Alex Hirsch is best known for the one he was actually the showrunner for, Disney Channel's smash hit Sunnydale. Focusing on a small California town constantly plagued by supernatural threats, Sunnydale generally followed a simple monster-of-the-week format, but kept audiences on the hook with teases at a deeper underlying mystery. The show almost didn't get a season two, as Hirsch found working with Disney very tiring, but he was eventually persuaded; season two ran through the rest of Hirsch's ideas at a faster pace, and concluded the show with the leads graduating from Sunnydale High.

For a brief historical moment, Daron Nefcy's show, Ender vs. the Space Bug Army, looked like it would become the successor to Sunnydale, keeping Disney Television Animation prestigious after Sunnydale ended. However, though Ender drew in a big crowd, and lasted almost twice as long as Sunnydale, it was not ultimately as well-received. EvtSBA is a children's space opera, wearing its Starship Troopers (Joss Whedon) inspiration on its sleeve, but also clearly copying some (superficial) notes from Philip Pullman. Set in a future where mankind has come into violent conflict with bug-like aliens, the show follows unbearably smug boy supergenius Ender as he is sent to military school to prepare for interstellar warfare. The show has an extremely cutesy and hyperactive tone; typical filler episodes include the one (generally taken as meta about fandom drama) in which Ender's siblings' futuristic internet arguments prove instrumental to the survival of the human race. Later seasons get a bit more serious, but focus heavily on shipping. The show is infamous for its ending, in which Ender, for his final exam, destroys the Formics' home planet and releases a psychic signal that eradicates the Formic race. Although the show explicitly notes that this includes many individual Formics who we have previously known as sympathetic characters, it is nonetheless played as a happy ending in which a hostile colonial power is defeated. Ender has ended the war; he has beaten the Space Bug Army.

"Meugh-Neigh. 'Meugh' like the cat, 'neigh' like the horse." "Does it mean something?" "No answer; none at all."

Orson Scott Card is an extremely prolific author of speculative fiction. Although it isn't as close to his heart as the Steel Gear series, in which he got to flex his military sci-fi muscles and allegorically retell stories from his faith, he is undoubtedly best known for Ishtar's Curse. Initially a short story and later expanded into a full novel, the plot concerns young Princess Ishtar, or Star, heir to the heathen fairy kingdom of Meugh-Neigh. (In later novels, she changes her name to Bethlehem Diaz, or Beth.) Spoiled and destructive but magically talented, Star is sent to twentieth century Earth so she can develop the wits and the strength of character to be a viable wartime leader for her people - or at least so she can be kept out of the way. After several years of personal growth and magical misadventures with companions she met on Earth, a more grounded Star devises a spell to erase the magic that makes up the bodies of most of her throne's enemies. This plan works, and merges Meugh-Neigh into the Earth as a small and ordinary European country. However, though her subjects are eager to celebrate her for this, Star is devastated when she realizes that she has killed trillions of innocent spirits, and, seeking to atone, she takes on the title of Speaker for the Dead (also the title of the book's first sequel). Although it's frequently ranked highly in lists of fantasy novels of the twentieth century, Ishtar's Curse has received some harsh criticism, with the standard line being that Star is an idealized fantasy of a repentant Hitler figure, and that the text presents excessive justifications for her actions. The story has also been called a reactionary response to Wilde's The Little Mermaid. After more than twenty years, a film adaptation of Ishtar's Curse was released in 2009, starring Dakota Fanning, to mixed reviews. The box office took a further hit due to a boycott campaign, after Card's views on homosexuality (and, relatedly, his membership in the LDS Church) became widely known. In the end, it lost the studio a lot of money.

Hideaki Anno is best known for the classic smash hit anime he made for Studio Gainax, Einstein Goliath Nestorian, a psychologically intense deconstruction of martial arts shonen like Yoshiyuki Tomino's Dragon Ball. Einstein Goliath Nestorian concerns a mystery man known only as Saitama, who finds that he has become dissatisfied with life and alienated from the world after only three years of training have enabled him to easily surpass any physical challenge. The original series is known for its sudden, surreal, and clearly budget-driven ending, although this was quickly alleviated with a similarly surreal but more definitive finale movie. Although many Western anime fans often think of Einstein Goliath Nestorian as pretentious and ultra niche, it was actually a huge mainstream hit in Japan, with a colossal franchise of adaptations, merch, and spinoffs (notably including a series of Retrain films, which began as extremely close shot-for-shot remakes of the original series but wound up spiraling into a very different updated timeline).

Previously most noteworthy for his 2003 visual novel Oreimo, Gen Urobuchi was tapped by Shaft for their extremely successful and acclaimed anime Ohayou Hana!, hailed as a deceptively dark deconstruction of the teen idol genre. The plot concerns a girl, Saionji Mayuri, who leads a double life, being of little note at school, out of costume, but spending much of her time as #1 idol Hana. Her mental stability begins to deteriorate as she realizes that the adults in her life - especially her father, himself a former idol - have groomed her to serve as a drugged and hypnotized propaganda mouthpiece for a shadowy conspiracy. She winds up in the worst of both worlds as her ensuing breakdown, and her handlers' response to it, destroys both of her lives and brings ruin to those she cares about. In addition to the popularity of the actual anime, many of its songs became decontextualized J-Pop hits. The idol anime genre would then receive a glut of edgy lesser imitators, like Love Live: School Idol Project, Cheetah Girls, and magical girl fusion Symphogear. Although the original Ohayou Hana! was a self-contained twelve-episode story, it received a sequel movie shortly thereafter, Ohayou Hana! Rebel!, which ended on a cliffhanger that has still not been resolved over a decade later. The upcoming Ohayou Hana! MK Ultra! is expected to get things back on track. An abridged series originating on 4chan, focusing on cropped screencaps from Ohayou Hana!, called the title character "Miss Ohio", producing the memetic tagline "being Ohio is suffering".

Zack Snyder first came up with the idea for Madoka around 2000, a long time before he'd actually get to make it; he put the project on hold in 2006 to make his adaptation of Worm Turns. He developed the idea with his wife Deborah and a cowriter, Steve Shibuya. Inspired by the Disney Princess phenomenon, as well as Naoko Takeuchi's Pretty Cure (one of the few anime that had already become a hit in the States), Snyder wanted to tell a coherent story about fights between magical girls who could make anything happen, who could make any fantastical world or visual appear. In Snyder's film, we follow Madoka Kaname, a teenager attending a Catholic school in Los Angeles. Madoka and her friends are approached by a strange young woman who goes only by "Mommy", and her animal companion (a CGI-ed up squirrel-cat thing), QB. They offer to make the teens into "magical girls", granting them one wish each in exchange for a life devoted to spiritual warfare. (Another mysterious new girl, Lilly, urges them not to take the deal in the strongest possible terms.) This turns out to be a scam; QB is pitting the magical girls against one another for his own reasons, and in the end, every magical girl and her wish gets corrupted. Despite much of the film's plot being a horrific bloodbath - the MPAA demanded a lot of cuts to get it down to a PG-13 rating - there is a happy ending; Madoka finally makes her own wish and uses it to topple QB's whole system. Madoka isn't often discussed nowadays but it was a major discourse bomb when it came out in 2010, alternately being called misogynistic Orientalist trash and a subversive feminist masterpiece. Snyder, for his part, often notes that QB is intended as an allegory for exploitative forces within the entertainment industry that treat young women as disposable resources with an expiration date; this is already clear to anyone who's watched the film, which is not exactly subtle in its symbolism. He also explains that the film sexualizes the girls in an effort to shame the audience, to get people to understand that they are objectifying the characters in the same way that QB does. The soundtrack's got a really cool ethereal cover of Nine Inch Nails' King Nothing on it, which is probably the most remembered part of the film today.

Selena Gomez became a star by playing Violet Parr on Disney Channel's superhero sitcom The Incredibles. While the show was initially a very throwaway villain-of-the-week affair whose leads had to keep their powers hidden from the public and their caped escapades secret from the government for self-explanatory comes-with-the-genre reasons, it would eventually unfold that the show was set in something of an X-Men-style dystopia where superheroism had been outlawed and supers oppressed by the government as a potential societal fifth column.

Brad Bird directed one of Pixar's most celebrated films, Wizards of Waverly Place; it was Pixar's first film with a predominantly human cast. Disney was hungry for a fantasy property after losing a bidding war for the Luz Noceda rights. It had strong populist anti-eugenic themes, with an elaborate wizarding hierarchy of antagonists who seek to remove the Russo family's magic as part of an effort to curb wizard overpopulation. The sequel came more than a decade later, and wasn't nearly as good.

In addition to Worm Turns, Alan Moore is notable for the heavily metafictional comic Pagemaster, about a boy, Richard, who finds a magical library that contains all stories that have ever been or could ever be told; he becomes lost and imperiled in assorted pieces of historically noteworthy literature (initially ones in the public domain, though later volumes would start using legally safe serial-numbers-filed-off versions of modern stories). The 2003 film, in which Sean Connery played the librarian in one of his last film roles, is widely regarded as a terrible, deeply-toned-down adaptation that didn't grasp the tone or themes of the original story at all; it only covered the first half of the first volume, in which Richard meets "genre spirits" who wish to sort all stories into rigid categories. In a later volume, Pagemaster Millennium, an aged Richard Tyler, who has since taken on the mantle of librarian himself, meets a teenage girl, heavily implied to be Luz Noceda, who has also become lost in the library. She has become corrupted by an eldritch book, or "Necronomicon", written by "the Wrong Author", heavily implied to be the devil (and/or Hugo Astley, an Aleister Crowley caricature from W. Somerset Maugham's The Winged Bull). Flushed with demonic power and enraged by what she's become, a monstrous Luz tears through the library in a blaze of hellfire, seeking to destroy all of literature and the world. It is only through the intervention of the Fat Controller - heavily implied to be God - that Luz is defeated; he mercifully erases her by hitting her with a train, and laments what she became.

#self reblog

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tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons · 17 days

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I'm really curious about where exactly Doctor Who & spinoffs fit in to the 'scrambled universe' framework

So it's 2012. After a series of mental health events, Dan Harmon is on the rocks with his sitcom The Big Bang Theory, and is looking for a new project to do. He decides to call up his old friend Justin Roiland, who he met almost a decade earlier running Channel 101, and asks if he has any ideas for a cartoon. Roiland decides to file the serial numbers off of his old shock comedy short Miss Wonka, and the result is Adult Swim's Ms. Frizzle. Dan Harmon brings the systematic approach to story structure he honed working on The Big Bang Theory to elevate the project to something with some actual redeeming value someone could care about. The show premieres the next year, in 2013. It is acclaimed and beloved, and for a brief and golden moment in history it isn't even considered cringe.

It's 2018. Year after year, season after season, Harmon's people have edged out Roiland's people in the Ms. Frizzle writing room. Roiland has grown bored and disruptive; the show's staff only really see him anymore when he comes in to record the voices, or when he decides to play some inscrutable Epic Funny LOL Prank on them and waste their time. Meanwhile, Disney's main streaming platform, Hulu, is looking for exclusives that might draw people to subscribe, in a streaming environment that's quickly and unsustainably growing bloated. They have an easy time convincing Roiland to divert his attention to a second project. Roiland announces Dr. Who in an interview; it's the first Dan Harmon has ever heard of it. Mike McMahan (also getting picked up around this time by CBS All Access to do There And Back Again: Gollum) is the cocreator this time. Roiland has learned various bad habits while stagnating on Ms. Frizzle, so he won't put much effort into Dr. Who either, but he will at least get it going.

It's 2020. Granted a sort of captive audience by the recently-started coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Who premieres on Hulu. At a glance, it's a low-effort off-brand version of Ms. Frizzle; Roiland isn't even bothering to do a girl voice this time. If given a deeper look, there is something worthwhile there. It's a riff on an old subgenre of soft sci-fi TV, the idea of an immortal celestial time guardian figure - you see it in the BBC's long-running Quantum Leap, in Constance M. Burge's A Wrinkle In Time, and there are even elements of it in Ms. Frizzle, though they're much more concentrated in Dr. Who. The show is very episodic, though there are more serialized subplots and hints of a deeper-running plot; like Ms. Frizzle, the show is full of undisguised references to other media.

It's 2023. A legal case in which Roiland is accused of domestic abuse becomes widely publicized, followed by the dissemination of various inappropriate text messages he had apparently sent to fans. It becomes common knowledge that Roiland is a nightmare to work with, and every single project he's involved with drops him nearly simultaneously as a brand liability, even the video game development studio he founded to make Gone Home.

Every unaired project on which Roiland was set to do a voice comes up with a different strategy to replace him. Science Time: Rita & Morticia hires a new up-and-coming voice actor to play assorted versions of King Tommy, without comment. Season 7 of Ms. Frizzle replaces Roiland with Jinkx Monsoon; it's a very noticeable change, but she's still basically playing the same character, she's just doing a better job.

Dr. Who is the lesser-known knockoff living in Ms. Frizzle's shadow, so it has less to lose; it decides to make a meta joke out of the whole thing, and whips up a new sketch to start off season 4, in which the Doctor trips, falls down the stairs, and dies in front of his companion Rose Tyler. We are thereby introduced to the just-invented openly-bullshit process of "regeneration", in which the Doctor can come to the brink of death but dramatically cheat it, with the only consequence being that he'll now look and/or sound like a different guy. So, as of the opening scene of season 4, the Doctor is now voiced by Dan Stevens.

And that's how the Doctor on Dr. Who became British.

#the scrambled timeline #credit to zedalpha for the There And Back Again idea

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tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons · 18 days

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Appendix D: Some Pig/One More Final

The first three posts in this series are here.

Infamously, Emmanuel Goldstein's monologue fills dozens of pages, takes at least three hours to read aloud, and brings the plot of Ayn Rand's 1984 to a screeching halt.

"Meugh-Neigh. 'Meugh' like the cat, 'neigh' like the horse." "Does it mean something?" "No answer; none at all."

#queued post #the scrambled timeline #I tinkered around with the ordering of these entries so much that I guess this is a scrambled post for the scrambled timeline #credit to hieronymous-botch for the Alex Hirsch's Sunnydale idea #credit to Lorelei for the Orson Scott Card's Steel Gear idea

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tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons · 26 days

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APPENDIX A: AUDIENCE CHOICE

Dipper/Mabel is infamous for obvious reasons, but it doesn't really crack the top five most troubling canon ships in Tamsyn Muir's Gravity Falls.

Yudkowsky inspired a whole genre of imitators, fanfic writers set on writing "Boolefic". Some noteworthy examples include Alexander Wales' With Great Power and Iceman's The Amazing Optimized Circus.

In James Frey's book A Million Little Pieces, initially sold as a memoir, he recounts a supposed incident in which, while he was homeless, a kind young woman approached him and handed him a twenty dollar bill. Another man immediately stepped in, assaulted him, stole the money, and shoved it back at the woman, trying to teach her not to give to beggars. Frey describes being forced to perform a humiliating dance in order to shame the stranger into leaving. It is doubtful that any of this ever actually happened; so many key details throughout Frey's "memoirs" have been called into question or outright disproven that they are now considered hoaxes. Random House offered full refunds to any customers who were outraged by this discovery.

APPENDIX B: LISTS AND MISCELLANEA

Philip Pullman's Methods Of Rationality trilogy:

Stargazing (sold in North America as The Man Of Light)

The Three Hallows

The Subtle Thread

Methods Of Rationality has been adapted numerous times, but the most ambitious and notable among these are the 2007 film and the 2020 BBC show. 2007's The Man Of Light was a failed franchise starter; it was a glossy adaptation, but far too cautious in its content. Cutting the film short before the Azkaban heist did something to lighten its tone (a dubious benefit at best), but also left it bereft of a climax. The material was softened considerably, and it's doubtful that the studio ever actually intended to produce subsequent films, which would inevitably have been darker. BBC's show is generally considered a pretty faithful and complete adaptation. Lin-Manuel Miranda plays Professor Quirrell.

Although Peanuts has a hard-won reputation as edgelord bullshit, Lucy van Pelt in particular stands out as an embodiment of this, easily representing all of her creators' worst impulses. Even the other characters can barely stand her. Infamously, in one of the show's darker moments, she gaslit her client Frieda into murdering her entire family, as part of a petty revenge scheme. On a more day-to-day level, she espouses all manner of bigotries, and of course much of the audience loves her for this without irony. The internet is full of uwuified in-name-only art of her, much of it yuri with the other girls on the show. She is canonically nine years old.

Andrew Hussie's MS Paint Adventures:

I Want To Play A Game

Grailquest

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

I Want To Play A Game was hardly a structured narrative at all, just a forum full of people fucking around not really trying very hard to escape from some kind of surreal serial killer barn. However, it did introduce some concepts and visual motifs that Hussie would frequently go back to (like Billy the Puppet, or the jigsaw pieces). Grailquest got unceremoniously dropped early on after Hussie realized that the gimmick he'd chosen - a classic branching choose-your-own-adventure type story - would be too much work. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is generally regarded as the one where Hussie came into his own. And of course Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is the huge sprawling one that everyone's at least heard of.

After years of fans demanding a sequel to Worm Turns Arc 1, HBO announced that they were developing a television series simply titled Worm Turns. In fact, this series, created by David Lindelof, would be an original sequel to Moore's graphic novel, focusing on a therapy group led by Victoria Dallon (the heroine formerly known as Glory Girl). Alan Moore has refused to comment on this. The show was lauded by critics for its socially aware themes, and for a time, discussion of it flooded all Worm Turns fan spaces. Many fans were fans of the HBO show exclusively, and among these, many were unaware that the show was even based on any preexisting material.

Die Hard franchise:

Die Hard

Die Harder

Die Hard 3

Die Hard With A Vengeance

Die Hard Vs. Terminator

Die Hard Vs. Terminator: Reboot

Nakatomi

Die Hard: Protect And Serve

James Cameron was only involved in the second movie, which really abandoned any sense of restraint the original had. Protagonist Jane McClane infamously dies at the end of Die Hard 3, leaving the franchise at something of a dead end. Joss Whedon's poorly-regarded Die Hard With A Vengeance simply proceeds with a new lead on a revenge quest, although it also makes heavy use of flashback as an excuse for the big-name star to still be in the movie. The Die Hard Vs. Terminator films are crossovers set in an alternate timeline in which time-traveling androids from Paul Verhoeven's Terminator franchise intervene in the original Die Hard. They couldn't actually get Sigourney Weaver back, so they settle for a close-enough recast. Nonetheless, these crossovers are weirdly consistently validated as canon to both franchises. Since the crossover period, the Die Hard films have gone full prequel, abandoning the idea of pushing the series' timeline forward.

As of season seven, the title character of Ms. Frizzle is being voiced by Jinkx Monsoon. It's a bit of a jarring change, but she's really knocking it out of the park!

J. K. Rowling's Luz Noceda series:

Luz Noceda and the Lying Witch

Luz Noceda and the Gromethean Sacrifice

Luz Noceda and the Heroine of Stone

Luz Noceda and the Missing Person

Luz Noceda and the Great Unifier

Luz Noceda and the Final Victim

Luz Noceda and the Watcher of Rain

The Luz Noceda books' titles follow a pattern where the second half of the noun phrase can be taken to refer to at least one non-Luz character, but also to Luz herself. For example, Luz Noceda and the Missing Person is the book where Luz worries that she's gone missing on Earth and it must be worrying her mother. However, the title more obviously refers to a vague unnamed character in contact with Luz's mentor Eda; this "missing person" is fading from reality due to a time anomaly. At the book's climax, this ethereal being serves as a deus ex machina, shielding Luz and her allies from harm before vanishing completely. In subsequent books, after a misadventure through time, Luz blames herself for this. The "missing person" is frequently considered another representation win for Luz Noceda, as it's suggested that they were once a romantic partner of Eda's, but their gender remains ambiguous. However, though Rowling has sometimes teased in interviews at the idea that this figure might have been a woman, she has generally held firm that as their identity was erased, everything about them is intended to remain open to interpretation.

Ariana Grande played Vriska in the Homestuck movie. This isn't a big deal. Vriska isn't a big deal. She doesn't stand out as any particular discourse magnet. Any discourse that does arise is poorly-veiled discourse about the actress. She looked cool and had a cool fight scene and sung a cool song and that was about it. Historical footnote. End of post.

There is now another appendix here.

Terrible Visions

A scrambled timeline is a timeline that has proceeded much like ours, except that some particular facet has been mixed up all over the place. For example, in the scrambled timeline we will consider today, our world's fictional stories have been told by different people, and in different ways.

Bryan Lee O'Malley, in this alternate timeline, is best known as the cartoonist responsible for Homestuck, a popular comic series about a group of children who become embroiled in a cosmic-scale video game known as Sburb. Although Homestuck is probably most often associated with the cult classic Edgar Wright-directed film adaptation released in 2016, the comics themselves are highly-regarded, and the film brought a new audience to them. Netflix has commissioned an animated continuation, The Homestuck Epilogues, which is due to be released soon.

Andrew Hussie, on the other hand, is a figure you're likelier to know if you're overly online. His "MS Paint Adventures" series - most notably including Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, which is kind of like Homestuck but weirder and hornier - have firmly remained a fixture of obsessive Twitter fandom culture. It doesn't help that the best-known iteration, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, is infamous for stretching thousands of pages of meandering digressions out of a simple and focused narrative starting point. Scott Pilgrim fans have developed something of a toxic reputation, which is not entirely deserved - although of course Knives discourse is interminable, and back in the fandom's heyday there were reportedly incidents of fans assaulting each other "for being evil exes".

Scott Pilgrim fandom was very big back in the day, though, and consequently it was a nexus for other creative figures who would go on to surpass Hussie. Perhaps foremost among these is indie developer Toby Fox. He was literally living in Hussie's basement when he produced ROSEQUARTZ, a universally-beloved retro Goonies-like RPG about a human hybrid boy born to a race of gem-based aliens. He's now developing an episodic spiritual successor, RAZORQUEST, with more overtly dark themes. It revolves around an inheritance dispute among a demon-summoning family.

Other foundational figures in this timeline's internet culture include Alison Bechdel, who helped get the webcomic scene started. Although she's now more seriously acclaimed for her personal memoirs, her gaming webcomic Press Start To Dyke, which premiered in 1998, was once everywhere. It had a broad appeal, and at its height, it was common to see even straight guys sharing pages from it. Time has not been especially kind to it, though, and at this point its main legacy is test.png, a meme spawned by one of the comic's most ill-advised pages.

Then there's John C. McCrae, more often known by his pseudonym Wildbow. A prolific and reclusive author of doorstopping "web serials" - long-form fiction published online - McCrae's best-known serial is still his first, Wind, a noir superhero story set in an alternate history where capes are mostly just a subculture of unpowered vigilantes. Wind landed in a culture already rife with comic book deconstructions, like Alan Moore's 2002 graphic novel Worm Turns, but it nonetheless managed to stand out from the pack with its extensive cast of characters and its themes of coordination problems and the end of the world. Later McCrae web serials include Part (the first "Otherverse" serial; an urban fantasy story about a couple who die in a car accident and find that they have become ghosts), Tear (a "biopunk" story set in a collapsing underwater city), Warn (the controversial Wind sequel), and Play (the second "Otherverse" serial, set in a small Indiana town that helps hide a psychic girl from the CIA).

Last and perhaps least, we should discuss J. K. Rowling. Far and away the most famous of any of these authors, Rowling's name is inseparable from the YA series that she debuted with, the Luz Noceda books, which remain her one successful work. Although it was heavily derivative of older fantasy novels - like Jill Murphy's Academy For Little Witches, or Philip Pullman's Methods Of Rationality trilogy - Luz Noceda was still a monumental and unprecedented success in the publishing industry, and the film adaptations were consistent blockbusters. The final book, Luz Noceda and the Watcher of Rain, contained some allusions to a romantic relationship between Luz and her recently-redeemed associate Amity. Rowling confirmed that this was her intent in subsequent interviews and indicated that she had fought her publishers for it; the film would then go on to escalate matters slightly further.

There have been many lengthy and heated online arguments as to whether the references in the book itself constitute text or mere subtext. Whatever your stance on this discourse, a new complication has been introduced recently: although she has put out no official statement on the matter as of yet, it has become quite apparent from Rowling's shrinking network of contacts and her conspicuous silences that she is certainly TERF-sympathetic, and likely an outright TERF herself. For many, this is leading to a critical reevaluation of the social values inherent in the Luz Noceda series; others, to say the least, are holding off on that kind of reappraisal.

Anyway, Scott Pilgrim just beat Luz Noceda in a Twitter poll for Most Gay Media, and people are piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissed

#the scrambled timeline

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tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons · 27 days

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Considering the reactions to the recent polling, I think if someone ever actually tried to make Press Start To Dyke, it would quickly become something akin to PISSCHRIST for at least a plurality of this site's population.

👀

#the scrambled timeline

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tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons · 27 days

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Although Zack Snyder's directorial debut was a remake of Mad Max (1979), he probably arrived on most people's radar with his adaptation of the comic Gods Of Egypt. Impressed by audience feedback, Warner Brothers tapped him to direct their adaptation of Worm Turns, which they intended to be a film series. Although Worm Turns Arc 1 was a superficially faithful and generally popular adaptation, Alan Moore disowned it, as with all adaptations of his work, and moreover it underperformed studio expectations. The sequel, which was intended to adapt the second quarter of the graphic novel, died in development hell after negotiations with Johnny Depp stalled out. Anna Kendrick's casting as Taylor Hebert was always very love-it-or-hate-it; she would go on to become a frequent Snyder collaborator, playing Lilly Akemi in Snyder's original project Madoka as well as Natasha Romanova in Warner Brothers' ill-fated MCCU, which Snyder helmed. Most of Snyder's films have extended cuts that are very long and very different; it took much fan outcry to get the "Snyder Cut" for The Avengers (which Joss Whedon took over mid-production) completed and released.

Matt Groening is an American cartoonist best known for creating the long-running animated sitcom Married With Children. Although he started out his career with alt comic Fritz The Cat, he'd find much more mainstream success with the Bundy family, which he initially conceived of on the spot simply to avoid losing the Fritz rights. Married With Children was transgressive and countercultural when it premiered - it drew complaints from the president about its subversive content! - but as the years have gone by, it's become passe and is practically seen as a wholesome PG-rated merchandising staple. It's been outmoded by a whole industry of "adult cartoons" that seek to outedge one another, including similarly iconic long-runners Johnny Bravo (by Seth McFarlane) and Peanuts (by Trey Parker and Matt Stone). Groening may be better-respected for The Jetsons, a sci-fi successor to Married With Children; however, they're both undead shows, Married With Children being a zombie that's kept going long after it should have stopped and The Jetsons getting cancelled and picked back up over and over and never quite seeming to come back right. Groening's take on isekai fantasy, Amphibia, remains a relatively obscure Netflix exclusive.

James Cameron has a lot of big IPs to his name. He may be best-known for the RoboCop franchise he launched in 1984, but he's set the record for highest grossing film of all time twice, and both were unrelated to it. His Die Hard sequel, Die Harder, has generally overtaken the original in the popular consciousness; Sigourney Weaver reprised her role as Jane McClane. His 1997 historical epic Pearl Harbor made almost two billion dollars in its initial theatrical run; his 2009 space opera Star Wars made almost three. Cameron is still working on various sequels and prequels to Star Wars today, but he faces multiple severe problems in doing so. Although the original film was very successful financially, it left next to no impact on popular culture; most audience members simply enjoyed it as a tech demo for new-at-the-time CG technologies, and saw the characters and plot as a generic placeholder. Moreover, Cameron's perfectionism has gotten the best of him and produced an absurd thirteen-year gap between Star Wars and its first sequel, Star Wars: Into The Ice, giving whatever impact the original film had even more time to fade.

The MIB Wiki is a collective writing project originally born on Craigslist, although it moved to Wikia early on. It consists largely of (heavily redacted) in-universe immigration documents processed by the titular organization, which handles travel to and from Earth for all manner of extraterrestrial, supernatural, and otherwise abnormal entities. The Men In Black keep the peace and maintain the illusion of normalcy for the public. Per community consensus, they're generally depicted as the heroes, but their methods tend towards the darker end of morally grey. The site's early period is often looked back on now as an old shame, although it produced many of the most iconic passports; author avatars of moderators and power users, like Agents J and K, ran amok, "deporting" particularly unpopular new articles in overwrought takedown stories that eschewed the line between in-universe and out-of-universe drama. Writing standards are often said to have been lower back in the old days. Even the article that got it all started - "Jimmy the Weeping Angel" - hasn't aged particularly well. Its picture was taken from a real sculpture without the sculptor's permission - that was just the culture on Craiglist in the 2000s - and its general concept was clearly copied from an episode of Chris Carter's Foundation that had aired earlier that month.

Lightning round! The X-Files is a Netflix cartoon about conspiracy theories created by Shion Takeuchi, which was suddenly cancelled after a single (two-part) season and a cliffhanger. Inside Job is a YA anthology cartoon created by Owen Dennis for Cartoon Network, which got jerked around for four short seasons before being deleted from HBO Max by David Zaslav. Crazy Train is a much-rebooted Hanna-Barbera cartoon from the 1960s about a group of children who find themselves transported to a mysterious train. The Mystery Gang is one of numerous ghostwritten children's pulp adventure series from the early twentieth century; contrary to popular misconception, the dog did not actually speak in the original books. Daniel Handler created the popular Tom Swift series as a dark parody of this (already antiquated at the time) genre. Roald Dahl wrote A Series Of Unfortunate Events, and its villain Count Olaf has been portrayed by Gene Wilder, Johnny Depp, and Timothée Chalamet in assorted adaptations and spinoffs of varying quality. Willy Wonka is the beloved and charismatic star of a series of educational cartoons (originally picture books) from the '90s, The Chocolate Factory; in every episode he would put the children in mortal peril to illustrate some scientific point. Ms. Frizzle, originally voiced by Justin Roiland, is the title character of a popular adult cartoon about a manic schoolteacher with magical powers, and is largely a parody of Willy Wonka specifically. Pendleton Ward is best-known for creating one of Cartoon Network's most recognizable properties, Science Time, about a boy's adventures with his demented inventor grandfather. Ooo, Aaa, Eee, Uuu is a weird fantasy webcomic created pseudonymously by Abbadon, originally published as a quest on the MSPA Forums contemporaneously with later installments of Scott Pilgrim. Kiss Six Billion Demons is an indie horror game set up as a faux dating sim, created by Dan Salvato. Dana Terrace produced Doki Doki Literature Club for the Disney Channel, as a weeb-inspired postmodern take on older high school drama cartoons like Happy Days and As Told By Veronica Mars; despite its popularity it was cancelled for being too gay.

And so we return to J. K. Rowling. Certainly, when Luz Noceda and the Lying Witch first came out, it was immediately subject to intense censorship campaigns from religious watchdog groups; that's kind of just what you get by default for writing a children's fantasy novel where the oppressed inhuman creatures are called "demons", the central villain is a corrupt Christian zealot turned necromancer, and we are eventually introduced in later sequels to a background race of angels (not explicitly named as such, but symbolically obvious) who are shown to be cruel and xenophobic. However, these protests failed to prevent the series from becoming an international, culture-moving phenomenon. Billions of movie tickets were sold. A generation is nostalgic. Last year, Hexside Legacy made back its money on name recognition alone.

Nowadays, with the developing story on Rowling, relevant criticism of the series' content is much easier to find coming from a progressive direction. The Luz Noceda books lean heavily into the idea of the "Burning Times", a pop feminist and neopagan mythologization of the early modern witch trials as an exaggerated microcosm of all patriarchal oppression. Rowling essentially blames the witch hunts for all colonialism, and diagnoses the United States' particular problems as a consequence of its Puritan roots. When the books were new, it was common to see fans celebrate this stance as anti-colonial and anti-American; however, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that her actual intent was to absolve Britain, her home country, which she has always been something of a chauvinist for.

Although Luz Noceda was undoubtedly groundbreaking for gay representation in children's literature, it's very easy to overstate matters. It took five books for deuteragonist Willow Park's fathers to be confirmed gay in-text; an illustration in an earlier edition of Luz Noceda and the Heroine of Stone seems to have been under the impression that it was a divorce-and-remarriage situation. Although there is some foreshadowing for the Luz/Amity relationship - particularly in Luz Noceda and the Gromethean Sacrifice - it was almost universally regarded as deranged fanon before the final book, and a significant fraction of the audience didn't even get it then. Several antagonists are described in transmisogynistic terms, most notably Terra Snapdragon.

And as long as we're talking about characters who were written as offensive stereotypes, Tibbles is coded as a classic unscrupulous Jewish peddler caricature. Of course, many background demons and witches throughout the series are also incompetently appropriations of Native American lore. There is sometimes an attempt at AAVE with Gus. The narration repeatedly favorably compares Luz's appearance to Willow's because the latter is fat, and highlights Willow losing weight as part of her character arc.

And Adam Sandler did Austin Powers!

Terrible Visions

Anyway, Scott Pilgrim just beat Luz Noceda in a Twitter poll for Most Gay Media, and people are piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissed

#the scrambled timeline

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tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons · 28 days

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#thank you #the scrambled timeline

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tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons · 29 days

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i do have to admit you have made me actively mad that i don't get to live in the universe where i get to read toby fox's pact that shit would be tight as hell

RAZORQUEST starts with a similar character creation screen, but, to put it mildly, the boy-name-and-girl-name setup is not a red herring this time.

#the scrambled timeline

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tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons · 29 days

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Terrible Visions

Anyway, Scott Pilgrim just beat Luz Noceda in a Twitter poll for Most Gay Media, and people are piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissed

#the scrambled timeline

582 notes · View notes