“Luke’s a bad actor!”

No, Colin is a bad actor. Luke did a great job playing a character pretending to be someone they aren’t.

started watching delicious in dungeon/dungeon meishi (sp?). or as i like to call it

~*AUTISM COOKING DUNGEON*~

dear god y'all have undersold this to me. and like i get it. spoilers and all that. but holy shit

our boy isn't like... "tee-hee little-bit of autistic, just a smidge" like you were all making me think. no no. no, this guy is DEEPLY autistic. we're talking "normally we only give THIS much autism to aliens and robots" kind of autism. the "i need an allistic translator for my social fubars" autism (rip your sister dude). the "i learned a thing! so now im not gonna shut up about it for at least an hour" autism.

and they gave this to THE ONE SINGULAR HUMAN IN THE PARTY. this guy is a HUMAN FIGHTER/KNIGHT-type that is like the MOST BORING/NORMIE shit in a d&d style setting. that is "why are you even playing a fantasy game?" level of normie shit.

and THAT is who gets to be The Party Freak(tm)

i love it. completely unironically/unsarcasticly i love it. they took the "that much autism isn't human anymore" bullshit thats so prolific its basically a trope and went NOPE FUCK THAT NOISE

what i find unforgivable though is that none of you mentioned he's a Kronk too.

boy sounds SO SO STUPID but is so so smart when you actually listen to what the fuck he's on about now (and think on why he's on about it right then). he's a big tank (literally in the fantasy class sense) that just wants to help everyone and do his little special interest shit on the side. and it is on the side because the other two seem like they had no idea it was more than trivia until he didn't have to help micromanage a massive party. like this shit has clearly been on repeat in his brain in the background for A WHILE but he was so busy helping/keeping everyone alive it got shoved aside of his outward behavior unless it was useful. he is a lovable dorky himbo and NONE of you mentioned this.

anyway, i'm also loving the way this whole show is basically only like this because him and senshi are vibing on the same wavelength and the other two are basically just along for the ride to save their friend/part member

the whole thing has a Green Eggs and Ham kind of thing going on with it too. but like...environmentalist about it? like it was more subtle about the whole "hey maybe work WITH your current environment rather than against it" bit and then we found out what senshi normally does and subtlety just went right out the fucking window on that front.

i'm also liking the way it both explores the horrors of dying in a world where being brought back to life is common, while also kind of...poking fun at it? like its reminding me of a thing i heard something like "the difference between comedy and tragedy is how far from it you are" kind of concept.

like they are so fucking ... how the fuck do you spell it blase? with the little "/" over the e. that. the story is so bland in how it handles how people came back from horrific deaths and yet when the characters have to face things that remind them of their own it gets heartbreaking very quickly. but like...chillchuck. goddamn. we get just enough from his perspective that its harrowing but the way its shown to us the reader/viewer is like a comedy skit

cause like...its both.

these guys keep dying/nearly dying to THE. SAME. FUCKING. SHIT.

mage elf is slimebait, chillchuck is basically Dungeon Canary with an emphasis on mimics, and himbro over here is gonna get himself killed trying to pet/eat a new monster no one else knows about at some point. probably why his sister seems to have specialized in healing magic.

i know the fandom is thinking once they get his sister back that she's gonna be Just Like Him but i think it would be much funnier AND more 'realistic' if they were classic autism-adhd alliance but siblings about it. like him being better at staying on a task and her being better at navigating social cues and shit. and both of them with their own little special interest energy. i'm betting her's is magic. and thats why even magic elf is like "omg shes so good at magic i'm no where near that level" about it. i mean its also the lesbianism but there IS more to that than thirst from what i've seen.

anyway i'm 6 episodes into what seems to be 12 available on netflix and i'm already hooked. might have to see if i can get my hands on the manga or something too

Caveat: I don't know exactly what the voters need to be looking for when judging this shit. And for all I know the paint blood F/X thing is more of a responsibility for the people behind the camera who want things to look good in the frame.

But really...I honestly cannot believe that this incongruous piece of shit makeup work from 'Woe What a Night' that I always point and laugh at when it's on my screen big or small won a goddamn Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Contemporary Non-Prosthetic Makeup...because shit like this exists in the episode:

In the earlier part of the scene, it's watery paint. We can see that, and we can see how it dripped onto Ortega's face in that thin film, full face coverage, then right after her vision, she zips out of the ballroom intent on getting to Eugene.

But then some ✨creative✨ thought that it would be cool to mix up actual stage blood and then dump it onto Ortega's clearly clean face, even though the paint didn't have that thicker consistency at all (because yanno...Stupid Viewers Are Stupid and Won't Notice, it's not important, so long as it looks okay! which I've never thought that it does 💀). I wouldn't take issue with this if they had just used the stage blood to begin with, but there are pro rules for that too, with professional makeup artists warning not to misuse stage blood:

"...Misusing fake blood can also quickly make a realistic design appear overtly fake. When designing a look, consider the optimal color and thickness of any fake blood you intend to use. It should closely resemble the wound or effect you are trying to create.

Pro Tip: To make a special effects makeup look more realistic, consider the direction that blood would flow from a wound, or how the blood would splatter. Don’t simply spray blood in every direction. In real life, this doesn’t happen NEARLY as much as you’d think."

I can't be the only one annoyed by the difference, SINCE WEDNESDAY EXPLICITLY SAID THAT SHE WAS DISAPPOINTED THAT THEY COULDN'T EVEN SPRING FOR PIG'S BLOOD. "IT'S ONLY PAINT." And it wasn't just on Ortega's clean face, it's on Ricci's clean face too:

✨But Tor, it LOOKS BETTER TH --✨

NO.

NO, IT DOESN'T.

This is just some bull💩 if the Academy thinks this was better contemporary makeup work than The Last of Us, AHS, or Picard. As much as I like and tolerate this show, its continuity is HORRENDOUS, as I've pointed out in Fuck Those Propmasters.

...So congrats(?) on casting some kind of spell over the voters for the win. I haven't even mentioned the CAKE on Ortega's face throughout that erases all of her freckles. Yes, I get it, she had to do whiteface since Wednesday is pale/dead looking, but there was just too much in some places that was really noticeable. (It's most evident when she talks to Enid at the beginning with her Murder Board and when Xavier makes her ask him to the Rave'N. But then it isn't caked during the Rave'N itself. It's actually not as caked on in other episode scenes, like when she's opening her snood gift. Perhaps the makeup of the Rave'N was a factor since it was nice, especially the Nightshade girls and Enid.)

Anyway, IDGAF if I sound like a raging cunt. I expect things that win awards to be legit worthy of recognition...this was not. Not for this, at least. Contemporary Costuming, fair, I guess (I mean...the Nevermore uniforms seem like an homage to Beetlejuice, the cat costumes Batman Returns, but otherwise, costuming seemed rather boring to me, but whatever, maybe it was the contrast between Wends and her colorful roommate that made it stand out). But not makeup, it was just way too inconsistent and there were better nominees.

ETA: I had to re-edit this because some of my other edits didn't save for some reason.

So another almost three hour video about TVD was made, and I started watching it because I never learn my lesson apparently. I agreed and disagreed in some places throughout the video, but at around the 59:00 minute mark, I lost my mind. I recommend you watch this small section (59:00-1:00:00) about the history of Doppelgängers. I agree with his overall point about why the Silas and Amara thing makes no sense, but he leads up to it by trying to explain what the show’s original doppelgänger mythology was before season 4 and 5. “Why does Klaus need the blood of the doppelgänger? I don’t know, and I don’t think the writers know either.” This infuriates me because I think the doppelgänger lore up until season 4 was very well put together. The same criticism was present in Jenny Nicholson’s video last year. I recommend rewatching (16:09-17:29) for full context. However, while talking about the Doppelgänger lore, she says, “And then in the spin off show, we find out that Elena and Katherine had another Doppelgänger whose name is Tatia. This adds nothing of value. It’s just one of those things that happens.” This implies that during her rewatch, Jenny missed Tatia’s backstory as well, and therefore, was not able to understand how the doppelgänger mythology fits into the narrative. I would have made a Tumblr post about this myself, but I wanted an opinion from you as well as all the other lovely doppelgänger lore lovers that typically interact on this blog. Why do you think so many people don’t understand the doppelgänger mythology? I know Tatia wasn’t mentioned a crazy amount in season 2 and 3, but her backstory fully explains why Klaus needs her blood to break the curse, and then later on, to make hybrids. Does anyone have any opinions or hot takes surrounding this topic??

whhhyyyyyyyyyyyyy do you insist on torrtttuurrrirnnnggg me with these videos you know they drive me insaaaaaaaaaane

also how did you make it 59 minutes in I would have melted into a puddle and just DIED

I agree with you that actually the doppelganger lore holds up until Amara is introduced; however, I think that the main issue is 1) a lot of these people making these videos are not actually hyperfixated on tvd the way we in fandom are and so miss big details/don't remember them because it's not haunting them and also I think watching a show week to week allows the viewers to assimilate information far more deeply than those who watch it marathon style because we simply had longer to absorb it and build on our knowledge base little by little as opposed to cramming it and 2) the doppelganger stuff isn't really SPELLED OUT, it's just that if you put some thought into it in terms of how TVD magic works it all makes sense (at least, I think so)

My basic take on the doppelganger thing is this:

Let's assume that Tatia WAS NOT a doppelganger but was the OG girl with that face. She gets used in the original blood magic to create vampires because basically Esther and Mikael have a personal grudge against her for tearing their sons apart/sleeping with both of them (/who cares that Tatia's fatal flaw is her polyamory?)

So. Klaus may be an untriggered werewolf, but once he gets turned into a vampire he cannot be both a werewolf and a vampire. The werewolf curse gets sublimated beneath the vampire curse. This all holds up so long as we ignore the retcon/incoherent and inherently flawed additional backstory that Klaus triggered his werewolf curse post-vampire curse and then an additional binding curse was laid on him by his mother. That makes no sense because TVD initially lays out very clearly that an entity can only be one type of supernatural being, and certain transformations negate previous states of being (for example, a witch who becomes a vampire is no longer a witch, and a doppelganger who becomes a vampire is no longer, mystically speaking, a doppelganger). So let's assume that the original timeline on Klaus is that he is a human with untriggered werewolf curse and potentially/probably untapped witch ability when he is turned into a vampire.

Now. The MOST KEY idea in TVD magic system is that Nature requires Balance. Call this the #1 Law of the Universe. Magic works basically by following this concept, and anything that breaks with this leads to breakdown in the universe and Very Bad Things Happening. Witches are Servants of Nature (I think this is literally stated in the show at some point) and part of their job is to strike this balance. Notice Good Witches use Spirit Magic which seems to keep the Balance, whereas Bad Witches use things like Expression which seem to take and take without giving, and look where that leads.

So, we have a curse, which has turned the Mikhailovich Mikaelson children into vampires. But part of there being a balance is that there must be a way to undo that curse, and specifically there must be a way to unlock Klaus's werewolf side. This is what generates the doppelgangers. The loophole demanded by the curse/spell so that the Balance can be maintained. I would argue that part of the curse Esther laid on her children was to generate the doppelgangers-- even if this was an unintended consequence. Or maybe she chose Tatia as her victim not just for revenge but because she assumed Klaus would be unable to go through with ritually sacrificing a woman who bore the face of his beloved.

The whole thing with the doppelgangers is that they're not just physically identical either-- they're metaphysically identical. Not reincarnations, but uncanny duplicates of Tatia. Identical face, identical personality, identical soul (but not shared-- just identical)-- just different experiences causing them to behave differently. (That's why Katherine is such an alarming warning of Elena's future-- she's exactly who Elena will be if she keeps going down the road the early seasons set for her.) This exact identicalness is necessary in order for them to be interchangeable in the sacrifice that breaks Klaus's curse.

Now, here is where it gets interesting. Nature/Balance may have demanded Katherine and Elena's existence, but their blood has a pretty wild characteristic-- as far as I can tell, the special property of their blood that allows Klaus to break the curse and become a hybrid, and then later to create the other hybrids, is that their blood can override the need for Balance and basically rewrite the rules for magic/reality. It's really, really wild.

Anyway, the show never bothers to state any of this, and most of this is conjecture based on overthinking this, but it also all follows until Amara/various retcons make it impossible. TVD's greatest weakness is that the writers don't know how to let good storytelling lie, and instead keep expanding and changing some great ideas until they're actually just awful or too convoluted to make sense. And that's how we get Stefan and Elena's vampire blood being used as doppelganger blood, and our good friend Tom the doppelganger who is apparently Stefan's descendant I guess.

Anyone else feel free to jump in with their thoughts on this!

Hi vvs guru. Many people at some points did not understand vvs. I understand why at the very beginning Puen included the actor with Talay. I understood why Talay, despite his obvious and surging sympathy for Puen, did not immediately accept and voice his feelings. But what I really didn't understand was the problem with the portkey. Why so much drama over this? So many grievances that the portkey could be another person. Portkey is not the same as love. A portkey is the one who will help you return to your universe. To put it bluntly, it's just a tool. I don't think many travelers became attached, friendl, or fell in love with their portkeys. Ofc it’s sad that one can return earlier, but thanks to the personal information left behind, finding a person in your universe is not a problem. Moreover, Puen and Tialay made a promise to each other to find eo. Idk, I think Talay's conflict with Portkey-not-Puen is a bit contrived. for him, portkey= love, which is absolutely false.

VICE VERSA GURU IM SFJSKGDKSGJDGS NOT SURE I DESERVE THAT TITLE BUT THANK YOU

honestly i do understand where you're coming from, but i personally don't find the portkey conflict to be that contrived, maybe because to this day i actually see a lot of people who watched the show linking portkeys to romantic partners and believing that the reason puen and talay were able to get back to their universe is because they fell in love with each other, which is simply not true

i think this misconception comes from the fact that the concept of a portkey is very similar to the soulmate one, which is still seen as inherently romantic, but that's not necessarily always the case, especially not in vice versa. like you said, a portkey is a tool: you travel between universe to learn a lesson and a portkey is the person that can help you learn that lesson. you do NEED that person in some way, but just because you need them at one specific point in your life it doesn't mean that you're gonna need them forever. it also doesn't mean that you need them in a positive way: sometimes the most important lessons we learn in life comes from people who affected it negatively

in my opinion the show did a good job in conveying this message without having to spell it out, but while it tried to make it clear to the viewers, it's way less obvious to the characters themselves. when it comes to talay in particular, there is a lot of confusion that comes from his own feelings for puen and how those alter the way he perceives a lot of things, and unfortunately puen only made it harder for him with his misguided attempts to express his feelings in episode 4. puen says "haven't it occurred to you that the key to finding the portkey is love?" and "what if to go back, you must fall in love with someone?" and eventually talay starts to believe it, like he starts to believe in puen's feelings, but then puen tells talay that everything he did was just for his screenwriting, and talay no longer knows what to think: he cannot name his own feelings for puen yet, he's no longer able to recognize puen's sincerity behind the facetiousness, all he knows is that PUEN believes that portkeys are related to love and that 'faking' it with talay wasn't enough. then they meet pang, someone who knows a side of puen talay is not privy to, and he thinks 'that's someone puen can fall in love with, that's someone who can bring him home'. this is why the end of episode 7 is so important, because when puen says 'i want us to be each other's portkeys' that's basically a confession: puen relates portkeys to love, and the fact that he wants talay to be his portkey finally makes talay understand that puen's feelings for him are real

not sure if this made sense in any way ;;;;;; but yeah sometimes love doesn't make us think clearly and gives us a whole lot of self doubts and makes things way more complicated than they actually are and it's just.. not that unrealistic imho ;;;;;;

Thanks for taking the time to answer my question. So there are other changes you say would benefit SEED? Do tell, please. I like reading your thoughts on the series.

Aw, thanks Anon! It’s nice to have someone who listens when I ramble, which… I do for a lot of things, not just Gundam.

But, down to brass tacks:

SEED’s plot structure is, at least at first, intended to very closely mimic 0079. In general, if I wanted to rewrite SEED, with the same overall themes and values, what I would do is start from the beginning and not do that.

I’d keep some of the same elements, the same characters overall, Rau’s general character, the friendship between Kira and Athrun, etc. All the things that make SEED the way it is. What I’d remove are some of the things that push it too closely into the territory of 0079, like Kira entering earth in the Strike.

Gundam SEED, I think shines most clearly when it starts stepping out into its own space, and when it does that, it does it really well.

I’m gonna take this prompt as more of me trying to revise the story rather than start over from the top, since I think that would be more interesting to read and less effort. (I have studying I need to be doing…) This is also, in addition to other changes I’ve brought up in your earlier ask.

First major change, I’d rewrite Rau in the first third or maybe half of the story. Basically, he’s a very compelling character, once you get past the initial period where he’s just a char clone but incompetent. In the anime, the reveal of what he’s actually after is absolutely fantastic, and I love that this sets him apart from other char clones, in that he is a product of pure trauma and hate.

I’d foreshadow that reveal more early on. A good reveal is one that half of the viewers see coming, and I think Rau being more cryptic and menacing early on leading up to that would make his first impression a lot more powerful. (now, if only he weren’t named after a high-end cookware mall store…)

Second Change: I’d focus more on how varying people survive instead of using jump cuts and non-sequitors.

I’m serious, how the heck does Kira survive the Aegis exploding at point blank? And then suddenly, jump cut to Lacus’ villa on one of the PLANTs. How the heck did he get there? Astray tries to explain this, but really only creates another loose end as Lowe finds Kira post-explosion, and for some reason his first instinct is “Oh yeah bring him into space, to that Idol girl’s place!”

I thought initially, that this was a case of Cross Rays stripping out details, but no. It’s just as jarring a transition in the anime, if not worse.

Waldfeldt (i keep spelling that wrong, i think) does this too. His BuCUE explodes with him and his wife/lover/??? inside, and then he just shows up again later, on the other side, and the woman is never mentioned. And he’s also just totally cool with Kira after that?

I’d have him have rigged the scenario. Basically, instead of him dying here, he fakes his own death. Foreshadow this during the talk with kira, that he has reservations about ZAFT, and then After the explosion, we get shown something that shows he and his ladyfriend are still alive, and this was his plan the entire time. (I’m serious, this goofball has mad skills, on par with Vash The Stampede, his death made no fucking sense)

Next, I would make the boosted men more sympathetic. Think about it. They’ve been taken from their families, had their identities scrubbed from the system, and stripped down to soulless killing machines, forced to become addicted to performance-enhancing drugs against their will.

That’s a tragedy in the making. I’d humanize them more, but also make it so that their situation is so fucked that the only way out for them is to die. (Hell, i might even be tempted to foreshadow the Extended in Destiny, and have them pick fights they know they can’t win on purpose during the final battle so they get killed)

Final change, the newtype thing with Flay at the end. Get it out. Take it away. It doesn’t make any sense in context.

If you want to do something SIMILAR as a metaphor, here’s what I’d do instead:

Earlier, Kira and Athrun reconcile things, personally. They talk about Tolle and Nicol. Instead of making a connection to Flay directly, Kira imagines himself talking to all the people that died as a result of Rau’s actions, starting with flay, and ending on Nicol.

This would make Rau’s death mirroring Nicol’s so closely so much more satisfying I think.

Anyway, thats a list of my thoughts currently. Just some opinions I have, though.

How can i watch season 6 of downton abbey for free

#HOW CAN I WATCH SEASON 6 OF DOWNTON ABBEY FOR FREE FREE#

Daisy is every bit as annoying as she was last season.And if you think you’ve heard the last of her … well, you may have. Dear sweet cankerless Lady Rose is reportedly “hectic and happy” in New York.I recognize Violet and Isobel need some new excuse to go at it, but health care consolidation?) Your pulse surely began to pound at the news that the Downton Cottage Hospital might be taken over by the Royal Yorkshire County Hospital, which, depending on whom you ask, could mean a decline in local autonomy or else greater bureaucratic efficiency, not to mention enhanced fund-raising capacity and … skyrrrxxjiklqrrxqv wbimo (… sorry, that was my head nodding gently onto the keyboard.being introduced to the refrigerator reminded me of the day George H.W. Carson: “Well, that was an awkward mission for you, if you like.” Mrs. Prudishness and discomfort blossom into gorgeous human comedy. Time to stiffen our sinews, Abbots.īest scene That delicious bit of marriage brokerage between Mrs. The bad news? Viewers can only hold on to “Downton Abbey” for one more season. The good news is that, as far as viewers are concerned, Downton has to hold on for only one more season. God, I’ll miss Baron Fellowes and his subtle underscorings. … I’m afraid we held on for far too long, and now there’s nothing left. “These are days of uncertainty,” intones Earl G., and lest we miss the point, the Crawleys are dispatched to a local estate auction, where the vacating squire informs them: “This life is over for us. Two housemaids, one hall boy, not a kitchen maid in sight, and who keeps an underbutler anymore? Footmen reduced to a third of their original number. Remember the old days when vacancies at Downton Abbey were determined by which actors had had their fill? (We still miss you, O’Brien.) Now it’s a Hobbesian thinning of the ranks. We will also cross fingers that the Carsons keep their jobs. We will give her points for erudition even as we question the wisdom of bringing up warts at a time like this. To quote Oliver Cromwell, ‘warts and all.’” Patmore replies: “Then keep the lights off.”Īfter some prodding, Carson sweetly spells out his intentions for his intended: “I want us to live as closely as two people can for the time that remains to us on Earth.” “Well then,” says Mrs. “I’m not sure I can let him see me as I am now,” she frets. Carson want their relations to be? And will he still love her au naturel? Hughes has a rather different problem: She’s found the right man, but would he rather be alone? How conjugal does Mr. Mary says she’d rather be alone than with the wrong man. Indeed she could clearly run the kingdom should she be called upon to do so.”īut we know that already, don’t we, just from the rather terrifying way she commands little Georgie to “run to Mummy.” If he’s still got dry undies by the time he gets there, I’d be amazed. concludes from this experience that “my eldest child is a child no more and quite tough enough to run this estate. If I refuse, I’m ruined.”īy episode’s end, she has opted for ruin - only to be saved at the last minute by Daddy, who sends the blackmailer on her way with just 50 quid and the threat of future prosecution. “If I pay her,” Mary reasons, “I have a bloodsucking vampire on my back for the rest of my life. Indeed, the only value of her past dalliances seems to be their ability to come back to haunt her.Įnter Miss Bevan, a saucy chambermaid who attended to Mary and Lord Gillingham during their Liverpool tryst and now wants a thousand pounds to keep quiet. Green thread and shows even less sign of resolution. Her post-Matthew love life has been drawn out even longer than the Mr. “Can this really be the end of it?” Lady Mary wonders.

#HOW CAN I WATCH SEASON 6 OF DOWNTON ABBEY FOR FREE FREE#

Anna walks free when an unidentified mystery woman confesses to the crime, and loyal viewers, after all this time, may be inspired to follow the Downton example and break out the gramophone and Veuve Clicquot. So it is with a song in my heart that I announce: Our long trans-Atlantic nightmare is over. Green business is over?” you will be pardoned for shrieking: “Yes! Yes! Devoutly yes!” Bates is still “on tenterhooks,” and when Bates asks, “Do you ever think of a time when we’re told the whole Mr. As the episode begins, Anna is still out on bail, and Mr. It’s true, my meter sprawled a bit at the finish, but that’s nothing to how “Downton Abbey” has elongated this particular plotline. We must first clear the hurdle of the World’s Longest-Lasting Murder Investigation.Įndless months, wondering when the hell it would end? “We’re off.”Īnd with that, the final season of “Downton Abbey” comes charging out of the gate. “Right,” says the Earl of Grantham, drawing back the reins of his steed. This recap contains spoilers for Sunday’s episode of “Downton Abbey.”

I would absolutely love to read an essay about the acephobia in the Good Omens fandom bc I know nothing about it (the fandom acephobia not good omens) BUT ONLY IF you use every relevant tag you can think of, thats 100% required

(I better get an A+ bc I used literally every tag that came to mind, my friend. Also I churned this out in five hours and did not edit it, so if there are spelling errors pls forgive.)

Good Omens: An Exploration of Internalized Acephobia

The year is 2019 and the six-part adaptation of Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter has just been released on Amazon Prime and is kicking up controversy amongst Christian moms. The show is critically acclaimed and is nominated for several awards. Headlines cycle through the news for a while--everything from speculating on a season 2 to the hilarious petition Christians sent to Netflix to take the series down--but after awhile the buzz settles down and everyone moves back to scarier headlines like next year's presidential election or that worrying virus cropping up across the world. YouTube continues to monetize Ineffable Husbands compilations, but that’s the most you see of it on public social media platforms.

Except for on Tumblr.

Six episodes of David Tennant being slutty mcslutty demon slut and Michael Sheen being a refined asshole (affectionate) disguised as an innocent do-gooder is apparently enough to keep Tumblr happy for a good long while. Supernatural isn’t doing so great on that gay content, Game of Thrones just ended as terribly as the non-derranged viewers knew it would, and Doctor Who is doing kind of ok, but the fandom is winding down as it approaches the next regeneration.

Everyone goes batshit insane over Good Omens because this show has everything. Enemy to lovers, PINING, m u t u a l pining, sacrifice, EXISTENTIAL CRISISES, recontextualizing your faith, GOD IS A WOMAN, you name it and the fandom has it. Thousands of incredible fanfics on faith and religion and existence start pouring out. The ex-catholics are Thriving. Even Supernatural fans are hopping on this train. Everyone’s having a grand ol’ time with our queer metaphysical beings.

And then it happens.

As it does with every large fandom.

The acephobia is born.

Neil Gaiman Gets Canceled

Okay, to be really canceled, it has to happen on Twitter. Which is where the inciting incident started, however, the majority of the explosion was contained on Tumblr and--to an extent--Reddit. There was some backlash on Twitter, but the real shit went down here.

So everyone is going crazy over Ineffable Husbands, and of course word gets round to Neil Gaiman who has to address that there are mountains of queer subtext in the show.

“Particularly the way that Michael plays Aziraphale just as a being of pure love, I think that gave us something very special, because people of every and any sexual orientation and any and every gender looked at Crowley and Aziraphale and saw themselves in it, or saw a love story that they responded to, and that was completely unexpected.

“Things like this, you can’t manufacture, they have to happen from a fandom.”

And the fandom lost its mind.

Fandom Response and Internalized Acephobia/Transphobia

The backlash was disappointing, but unsurprising. Here are a few favorites:

“[...] IDK how to tell y'all that the complete desexualization of these characters is homophobia regardless of what you think their gender is.”

“good omens is queerbait. full stop. it is a show deliberately crafted to have just enough doublespeak and easily interpretable looks to both have plausible deniability, and appeal to the story’s largely queer audience. creator confirmation outside of canon, much less on twitter, doesn’t cut it. this show came out in 2019 on amazon prime. people had been making their interpretations of aziraphale and crowley’s relationship known for decades at this point. there was utterly no excuse not to have them clearly be in a relationship, at least by the end. but a queerbait was more profitable, and no press is bad press, so they didn’t. insisting otherwise is both disingenuous, and displaying a profound lack of ability to be critical of the media you enjoy.”

I really just can’t get over how breathtakingly bad “this person dresses like a man, uses male pronouns, and is physically exactly like the average man except they don’t have a dick and so they’re not a man” is. This is not woke nonbinary rep folks

And this is where things get really….weird. The majority of these takes are by blogs that are run by fellow ace/trans folk and yet all of these takes still reek of queerphobia.

Have another one for good measure:

“I feel like good omens takes queerbaiting a step further, what with Gaiman’s honestly excessively aggressive statements that they couldn’t possibly be gay. Like if you wanted nb characters write nb characters, writing a fairly romantic relationship between two men-as-default characters and then attacking people who read it as gay by framing us as the villains who are denying the poor nb and asexual people their representation feels like a specifically malicious type of queerbaiting.”

A truly lovely take on that last one. Apparently it's the transphobes who are the victims for bullying the non-binaries who are taking away their representation.

So to summarize, fellow greyace/greygender blogs are all up in arms because Neil Gaiman “desexualized” Crowley and Aziraphale.

They claim nonbinary characters who still use male pronouns and physically presents as a male is bad rep, the show queerbaited--even though Neil Gaiman went on record as saying it was a love story--and the poor naysayers who want to be victimized via queerbaiting throw the blame on Gaiman for the blatant homophobic takes they're spewing online.

The internalized queerphobia reveals itself once again.

Additionally, just because you are nonbinary or trans doesn't mean you speak for the whole community. Queer people are not homogeneous and there is a wide range of perspective and experiences to be taken into account.

The internalized acephobia that emerged is not surprising. Disappointing. But not surprising.

Why These Are Objectively Shitty Takes

There are plethora of takes on Tumblr that could be chosen for this part. The one's that will be addressed, however, are the previously cited quotes.

Aziraphale and Crowley Didn't Kiss

Or, to put it more eloquently, the desexualization of Good Omen's man characters is homophobia "regardless what you think of their genders."

The implication that two characters have to be sexual with each other on screen to be queer is LAUGHABLE. Why, you may ask? How about I direct everyone's attention to the C-Drama Sensation The Untamed (2019).

The Untamed features a queer story about two tragic lovers receiving a second chance at their relationship. Because the show was created and produced in China, they had to tone down certain aspects of the books to get it past censorship. This means exactly zero onscreen implications of a sexual relationship between their main characters beyond the insanely well crafted subtext.

Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are a study in desexualizing queer characters. I could write a thousand meta analysis on this show alone, but that's a different post.

The Untamed, in short, is a love story.

Good Omens, in full, is also a love story.

Both have main characters who are "desexualized" and both shows ends with both ships as explicitly canon as Milo and Kida at the end of Atlantis the Lost Empire (sorry that was the first film that came to mind that did not include a kiss between a m/f ship).

The implication that two characters can only be in a relationship if they are sexual onscreen is fucking insulting at best, homophobia at worst. Actually it is good ace rep to have your two main leads not show sexual interest in each other. Actually it is excellent queer rep to have your characters be romantically in love, but show exactly zero desire toward each other or any other character on screen.

And that last line? The "regardless of what you think of their gender"?? Yeah, that reeks of transphobia too. Because Neil Gaiman confirmed that angels/demons in his work are canonically nonbinary/genderqueer and the implication that two nonbinary persons can't be in a relationship without it being sexual is super bigoted.

Good Omens Is Queerbaiting

Queerbaiting is a marketing technique for fiction and entertainment in which creators hint at, but then do not actually depict, same-sex romance or other LGBTQ+ representation. They do so to attract ("bait") a queer or straight ally audience with the suggestion of relationships or characters that appeal to them, while at the same time attempting to avoid alienating other consumers.

-Wikpedia, Queerbaiting

The marketing for Good Omens itself gave the impression that audiences would be getting a story about two enemies who gradually become reluctant friends by the end of the series. A buddy-cop story on an inter-dimensional scale. Instead, Good Omens is about two incredibly old friends too in love with earth and each other to let the apocalypse happen.

Toting Ineffable Husbands as part of their marketing scheme didn't really start until after queer fans started coming out of the woodwork. Is this queerbaiting...eeeeeehhh. Honestly this argument is iffy.

There is also the fact that Sheen and Tennant explicitly played their characters as in love and people working on the show shared that vision. They were telling a love story, albeit a very non-conventional one.

There are several articles out there on queercoding vs queerbaiting, how queer isn't just gay, and author intent that could be cited at this point, but I'm going to go easy on this section and just say this:

“Whatever Crowley and Aziraphale are, it’s a love story.”

-Neil Gaiman

Everyone screams "death of the author" until it's inconvenient for them, and this is certainly the case for Good Omens. Suddenly, author intent matters because Neil Gaiman refused to assign a direct label to his characters.

And why should he? They're his creations. And actually they're damn good representation without the label. The fandom collectively forgot nonbinary queers existed or decided that Neil Gaiman was representing the wrong kind of nonbinary queers.

Final Thoughts

Good Omens is not the first fandom to have rampant acephobia strewn throughout nor will it be the last. Homophobia of all types will always rear it's ugly head, especially in larger fandom spaces where there are statistically more shitty people to go around.

Even if the naysayers were right, the creators of Good Omens, actors and original writers intents were...well, good. It's a charming little story about two close beings who make very little impact on the end of the world, but still somehow find their happy ending.

This is a bit of a sweeping statement, but people love to be victimized in fandom. The truly magnificent gatekeeping that happened on Tumblr circa 2019 is likely going to run a repeat when season 2 releases. Hopefully most on here will figure out how to turn their critical thinking skills on and remember that the block button exists, but it's doubtful.

Let some rep go around for the greyace/greygender queers please. It's not a competition for who's the most victimized, but we would like some solid rep every once in a while without the bigots crawling out of the woodwork.

Look the series ends with a love song playing over them on a date and telling each other how much they LIKE EACH OTHER WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME-

Owl House said fuck capitalism

So this episode was interesting. Lilith pretty much killed her sister. Why the fuck would she do that?

Even more interesting: why is Belos like that? How did Hooty put his head through one of those guards? Who the fuck is the Titan, and why does everyone like him? And how are these all tied together?

This episode was a metaphor for capitalism

...and another delicious step towards radicalizing the youth into dismantling this fucked-up neo-feudal system.

We’ll start with Belos. 

Emperor Belos is a weird name, don’t you think? We all thought it was spelled “Bellows,” but it wasn’t. In fact, it’s five letters, starts with Be, ends with os, and describes a megalomaniac emperor that restricts people’s freedom in order to accumulate wealth for himself.

Sound familiar?

Emperor Bezos Belos created capitalism. He saw the beauty of magic and decided to make himself the most powerful.

Belos created a system that destroys the masses and boosts his power.

 I’m dipping into fan theory a little, because the fan theory fits. We know that people get branded with coven magic that makes it so they can only specialize in one area. We know that Belos is the most powerful witch in the Boiling Isles. We know that the excess magic, magic created by restrictions, has to go somewhere.

It’s the same system that many viewers see all the time. A job takes up all your day and tires you for the night, so you can only do one skill for the rest of your life. Jeff Bezos is the most powerful man in the United States. Excess money, money taken by restrictions, has to go somewhere.

The magic goes to Belos, like how the money goes to Bezos. Belos created capitalism, and he won it.

The guards aren’t real. 

Look, we’ve never seen their faces. They’re all the same. Why would you work so hard to get to the top, just to become a nameless, faceless killing machine?

Oh, also Hooty stuck his face through one. There is nothing under the armor.

Why? Well, it’s the same reason you see all those celebrities going around flaunting their wealth and bragging about how hard they worked. Like all those songs about how they grind every day and work harder than everyone else while you’re out clubbing, and that makes them dope. And then you take a closer look at them and see that they had a small loan of a million dollars fueling them, or an entire talent agency behind them, or their dad was a famous country star in the 80′s. 

They’re fake. They’re hollow. They’re a ploy created by the capitalist emperor to try to delude you into working harder. 

Let me put this into perspective. I guarantee that every single one of you has heard stuff like this: “Hard work makes you successful.” “I put in the work, and that’s why I’m successful.” “If you work hard enough, then you can be as successful as Mark Zuckerberg.” 

And unless you’re a robot or really lucky, I’m sure all of you have failed at this. Maybe they told you that hard work would make you good at math, so you spent 22 hours a week working on calculus, only to pass it by 3 percentage points and have it destroy your perfect 4.0 GPA. Maybe they told you that if you talked to people enough, then you would make friends, so you spent a lot of time talking to people, only to end up lonely and friendless. Maybe they told you that if you did well in school, you would get a good job, so you spent all your time working hard to be a good student, and then ended up in a soulless, dead-end job.

The guards are there to delude you. Look, who really gains from you being productive? The answer is the ruling class, the CEOs, the government, the bourgeoisie. It has always been that. All you get from working is a paycheck that lets you survive. They get a paycheck that lets them get rich. Just like Belos gets the magic and productivity of the specialized coven witches.

The guards are there to trick you. The truth is that nobody can join the Emperor’s Coven. It’s just there to make you think that hard work will make you successful. Then you spend your entire life working hard, trying to prove to the person in charge that you’re worthwhile. You give your whole life to the Coven, and they give you nothing. 

Magic is supposed to be something you pursue for fun. Being skilled at things, being good at something beautiful...that’s supposed to be something you do because you want to. But they took that and made it into a source of productivity. It doesn’t matter if you make good content. All people fucking care about is if you upload the day of premiere, if you make a lot of content quickly, if you maintain a million different conversations with strangers who expect you to be the most interesting person in the room. They don’t care how it hurts you. They don’t care how you crack from the stress. How you cry when you think no one can see you, and then you check your phone and someone can see you, someone did see you, and you have to put on your face and be the charming, magnetic person they want you to be. (oh by the way that’s why I wasn’t online much last week)

And it ruins it. Suddenly you can’t watch The Owl House without being stressed. You can’t make any content. You can’t make spells as powerfully as you want to. Your passion is replaced by perfectionism and insecurity, a voice telling you to keep being the best at what you do, or else they’ll forget you and let you die.

There’s also the Titan. 

So nobody has mentioned him before, because in addition to the Boiling Isles being a hellscape full of witchcraft and queerness, it’s also full of atheists. 

But suddenly we have people saying all this shit about him? Shit like, he gave witches the gift of magic, and then they learned to use it in a civilized manner, since being uncivilized was disrespectful?

I mean, first off, that’s fucking wrong. The island gives people magic. The island, which just so happened to be shaped like a titan-sized human. But the island/titan gives everyone all types of magic. Hell, even Luz gets to use magic, and she’s human. 

It sounds really fucking familiar. (tw for discussion of homophobia and colonialism and misogyny). It sounds like when the news is on and they show some Tr*mp supporter talking about how fetuses have more rights than people and it is their holy duty to take away a woman’s control over her body and force her through unbearable pain and into an 18-year commitment she didn’t want to make. It sounds like all the times people tried to say homosexuality should be illegal, citing a single line in a book written two thousand years ago and heavily edited by a European king. It sounds like all the times people said God wanted them to conquer, to own the entire earth, to force the other races into pain to support them.

This is that bullshit thing people do where they commit awful sins and justify it by citing the will of God. 

Or, it’s the Coven using religion as an excuse for evil.

Look, the Emperor’s Coven is clearly colonizer-coded. Saying that people’s original form of magic was wild (and showing a picture with the same joyous, rowdy energy of an 18th or 19th -century Black or indigenous party), and that it was God’s will for them to be “civilized?” Sounds like that thing that powerful white people did where they went and murdered people and forced them into their twisted capitalist system. God, gold, and glory, is what they said, because history books just love to omit the gore.

Lilith is passing the abuse cycle along. 

You know, like a good little colonizer. God I fucking hate her. She’s a MILF, in the sense that she’s a Mother I’d Like to Fling off a cliff. 

Ah, enough screaming about how much I want to drown Lilith in a tub of Hooty’s mucus. Let’s go into why I want to do that, and how she took the evils of capitalism and just...adopted those.

So, Lilith is sick and twisted for what she did to her sister. But, uhh, that’s the point. You see, there are so many other people out there like Lilith who would do the exact same thing, if given the chance. These are the people who do mean things when the teacher isn’t looking, and then act nice and try to frame you. These are the people who will hate you if you’re better than them. These are people who would do anything to bring you down, if you dare outperform them.

It’s greed, my friends. The mental illness that capitalism blesses us all with.

Lilith herself said it: she dedicated her entire life to the Coven. What she wanted was to be the best. And she almost was...except for her own sister. Someone who lived with her, annoyed her at home, bested her at school. Someone she could never beat, no matter how hard she worked. And her sister was younger than her, too! How insulting was that? Lilith wanted to be the best, and someone in her exact situation did better than her.

Lilith was insecure. And it consumed her.

But why? Why does insecurity consume her? I mean, no one can be motivated by insecurity forever. Well, not unless someone conditions it into you.

The lovely thing about the capitalist system is the morals it teaches you. Things like: “You’re only useful if you’re the best.” “Being school smart makes you smart, while being social smart or sports smart or creative smart or fandom smart is worthless.” “Your worth can be quantified by numbers and is based off arbitrary measures like your income or your grades.” Things that can and will drive us crazy if we let ourselves believe them.

And it did drive Lilith crazy. She got so twisted by a society that said being good at magic is her only worth. Look, Lilith used to be good at things, probably. She was good at sports. At times, she slips up and does an okay job of being Eda’s sister. She has a powerful presence when she’s in a room. And she’s wicked good at manipulating people. 

But that didn’t matter. Lilith bought into the lies. She let herself believe that magical skill was the only way to measure her worth. And since she needed to be the best, she hurt Eda for it.

The beautiful thing is, Eda didn’t buy that. "It’s my power, kid. And before you showed up, I spent my whole life wasting it.” Is what Eda said, as she used up the last of her power, the last of her life, to save Luz. In her final moments, she proved that she’s not like them. She’s stronger than them.

None of this matters. Not magical prowess. Not the hierarchy. Not the promise of joining the Coven and having more power than anyone else.

The only thing that matters to Eda is her family. Her real family. Her Luz, King, and Hooty. And by extension, Willow, Gus, and Amity. Those are Eda’s real reason for fighting, for dying: to protect them. Look, there’s no way she would’ve come out of that fight alive. She has a family, and her love for them is stronger than greed or jealousy or capitalism. 

Lilith never understood that. She thought the water of the womb was thicker than the blood of the covenant. Or, that the water of the womb and the blood of the covenant are stronger than the bonds of found family. She thought it didn’t matter if Eda loved, her, only if the Emperor loved her. Fucking bitch.

And now, a little something to worry about, before we go. Amity Blight. The girl who wanted to join the Emperor’s Coven more than anything, who dedicated her whole life to doing well in school, to being the best, to being perfect.

And then she met Luz. She fell for Luz. Now she’s in a tricky place, where habit and conditioning want her to join the Emperor’s Coven, but her heart wants her to do the impossible and destroy capitalism.

She wasn’t in this episode. Funny that being injured and unable to work ended up saving her from watching her future mother-in-law die. So she bought some time.

But Luz’s true mom is dead. This is the second mom she has lost, and she’s only fourteen. As powerful as King and Hooty are, Luz needs Amity. Luz needs Amity to support her and help her get back her mom.

So Amity has to make a choice. Fear and insecurity, or love and a high chance of death? 

She’ll probably choose death. Because that’s the message that this family-friendly show is giving us kids. Fuck capitalism. All you need in life is to do what makes you happy and be with the ones you love.

PART 1 of 6 of the Owl Deity Hooty Theory

[NEXT PART]

[OWL DEITY HOOTY THEORY MASTERPOST] (in development)

(TLDR at bottom of post)

Over several long months of research and analysis since March of 2020, I have been following an utterly fascinating thread of potential misdirection and subtle details throughout The Owl House, and today, I would like to start weaving together of what I believe could become one of the biggest and most cleverly disguised twists in the entire show.

To begin, let’s take a look at the B plot of Understanding Willow:

On first glance, it’s an ultimately inconsequential sidestory with the sole purpose of justifying an excuse to keep Luz and Amity in Willow’s mind, as well as providing some well-needed room to breathe and release tension after the veryemotionally charged confrontation with Inner Willow. After half an episode of Eda and King outdoing the other in ridiculous ways to win Gus’ vote and Gus running off in frustration at the end of the episode from Hooty’s inane rambling, it’s easy to laugh off Gus’ pick and assume that nothing/of value was said when he closed the door for the interview.

However, if one pays close attention to that very scene, Hooty actually canstill be heard (if faintly) underneath Eda and King’s grumbling, interestingly talking about how “It all started with a hunt. Blood red skies. That’s right, I was created-.”

Now, while it may seem silly to focus on dialogue from Hooty of all characters, this A) tells us that there was an event in the past involving blood red skies and a hunt of some kind, B) that Hooty had been created close to said event, and C) implies that what he knows but can’t tell as a story worth a damn is EXTREMELY important to be included and be hidden in such a manner.

For comparison, the only other instance of dialogue being tucked away in the background in the entire show is in Wing It Like Witches:

During the lecture at the beginning of the episode, the history teacher openswith lore on Belos appointing a head witch to each coven over 50 years ago, immediately cluing in the audience to try and decipher the rest of the lecture as it moves to the background. Adding to this is how the musical sting when Luz shows off her movie obscures what he says even further, making it even more of a intriguing puzzle that the creators clearly intended for viewers to pick up on and attempt to solve.

In contrast, the hidden dialogue of Hooty’s interview is much shorter and not as hard to decipher as the teacher’s history lesson, but at the same time, there are few to no indicators whatsoever in that scene to clue in the audience to even check for something like that. It comes at the end of an episode where most viewers would have been paradoxically tired out and driven abuzz by the revelations of Amity and Willow’s relationship, doesn’t attempt to draw much attention to itself, and frames itself as a comedic subversion of audience expectations with neither the “greatest witch who ever lived” or the self-proclaimed king of demons being picked by Gus.

Instead, he picks someone that the show portrays constantly as an oblivious and gullible idiot after being described as a “state of the art defense system” at the very beginning of the series. Someone who, despite it being played for laughs, is scarily capable of casually subduing Lilith offscreen one episode and then beating her and an entire squad of Emperor’s Coven members without even the slightest change in personality or temperament.

Someone who, due to being the Owl House itself, could be considered the titular character of the entire show, yet is taken for granted by those who inhabit him and barely gets any respect from even the cutely patronized King - including when Hooty could be interpreted as having potentially been full on DEAD for a time given the use of extremely cartoony X eyes and a lack of vital signs in The Intruder.

And someone who Eda at best tolerates and at worst abandons in personal interactions and only occasionally acknowledges him when he’s actually doing his job. Yet at the same time is so implicitly trusted beyondprotecting her home to the point where - when up against the closest person Eda has to an equal outside of likely Belos - the only actually recognizable spells Eda used in combat were 1) stereotypical energy blasts, 2) a single shield spell in Covention, and 3) a noticeably large reliance on imitations of Hooty above any other spells she could have decided to use instead.

In short, the show repeatedly tells us he is just an idiotic gag character through and through, but at the same time demonstrates he has immense power through both onscreen and offscreen demonstrations, implicitly tells us his importance ahead of time through Eda’s imitations in actually serious situations, and treats his interview and origin story as - if not even more- important to keep secret than a long lore dump about how Belos’ reign works.

After all, there being only two instances of hidden background dialogue in the entire season is already intriguing on its own, but for one to get plenty of clues to draw in people’s attention and for the other to be treated as just another gag about a “mere comic relief character” - aka a good way to draw away attention and lower one’s guard - heavily suggests a far deeper significance buried under layers of misdirection, comedy, and conditioned audience expectations.

I mean, when Eda bragged about being “a bad girl living in a secret fortress,” Hooty followed with a remark about how “I’m the secret.” While that line may sound like Hooty simply being confused as part of a one-off on the surface, it’s an odd dialogue choice for the writers to pick when you think about all the other reminders of his nature as the house itself throughout the season. With the precedent these moments set, it would have been much more appropriate for him to latch onto the “fortress” side of “secret fortress” AND it would have been just as equally funny of a joke about his awareness skills, but instead, Hooty broke away from the established trend to say something that would make people suspicious were it to come from anyone else.

In a way, this reminds me much of the many subtle bits of foreshadowing strewn across the show, like Luz unknowingly describing Amity in Witches Before Wizards and Eda burning a hole through Luz’s coven type quiz that coincidentally selected the same track she had taken at Hexside as “a punky potionist.” At the time of airing, these initially seemed like one-off jokes, but eventually came back in full force several episodes later with Amity’s hidden sensitive feelings and love for the Azura books becoming clear in Lost in Language, and the reveal of Eda’s school track in Something Ventured, Someone Framed with her school misdemeanor pictures.

That said, compared to these individual bits of minor foreshadowing, the jokes about Hooty in Understanding Willow appear to simply be the most obvious pieces in a giant puzzle, implicitly and outright telling attentive viewers that there’s a major mystery to be uncovered here.

In fact, I feel bold enough to say that we could be looking at a twist on a similar scale to that of the Pink Diamond/Rose Quartz and Stanford Pines twists in Steven Universe and Gravity Falls respectively, what with this particular puzzle piece coming from how Gus wanted to make THE greatest interview of all time, and how he was looking for someone who was “interesting, accomplished, AND noteworthy:”

Note the emphasis on the ‘and’ here, as Gus had made a big deal that “people aren’t meantto be all those things” at the beginning of the episode, so as a result, stripping away all the comedic framing of his subplot leaves the intriguing implication that whoever - and, perhaps, what- Hooty is, they really are the most interesting, accomplished, AND noteworthy person out of everyone.

I could go further and talk about why I suspect the mystery surrounding King’s origins, whether true or not, is partially meant to misdirect us from paying attention to Hooty, or how the TOH crew’s could be disguising legitimate clues to his nature among made up and highly meme-able joke answers in order to proliferate said concepts throughout the fandom - thus letting us do all the dirty work of getting ourselves used to the ideas and used to dismissing them at the same time - but to bring things to a close for now, I’d like to leave you all with a question that I’ll start answering next time:

What does it mean when both the most powerful and notorious witch on the Boiling Isles and the possible actual king of demons/the Titan itself/something don’t match up to a house? And what do you think it is that makes him so special to warrant such misdirection?

TLDR: Between Eda’s golem spells, the show stressing his nature as the titular house, his implicit strength, and the odd dialogue and structure of Understanding Willow‘s subplot in relation to him, I believe I have good reason to suspect the show has been giving us many hints towards Hooty being much, much more important than it would like us to currently believe or even joke about. Particularly, through clever uses of comedy to establish and enforce a strong audience bias against looking closely at him or unironically taking him seriously, and to potentially plant the seeds for something I will start exploring in Part 2.

Nothing exposes the people who drop everything deemed “problematic” without even trying to understand the themes or what the story is actually trying to say than Fullmetal Alchemist, and it is genuinely so disappointing and infuriating

Every time I see someone say something along the lines of “actually FMA is bad and meant to make the viewer sympathize with fascist ideals because most of the main characters work in an imperialist military” I want to scream. It’s proof you gremlins can’t think for yourselves and think depiction = this is good and right. 

Are the vast majority of FMA characters part of a horrible, imperialistic country? Yes. Are some of them awful, horrible war criminals? Also yes. The series does not try to hide this, and it’s not bad that it also makes these characters likable, charismatic, and sympathetic. Claiming that makes it irredeemable and that it’s supporting imperialistic/fascist ideals is proof that you either can’t understand anything unless it’s clearly spelled out for you (though how you somehow managed to miss it in FMA I’m still not entirely sure), or you got three episodes in and immediately dropped the series because it didn’t come right out the gate with “Mustang and Hawkeye are bad people.” 

Mustang and Hawkeye both know and acknowledge they did horrible, unforgivable things. Hawkeye has canonically said that their goal is to reform the country from the inside out (because that’s the only way it will get done), make it democratic again, and then eventually be executed as war criminals. 

Scar is only framed as a villain in the first part of the series because his actions are shown through other characters’ POVs. Specially, characters from this European-based, imperialistic country. This is a narrative technique, and as the series goes on and we learn more about Scar and see him through different characters’ POVs, he is not a villain, and the series is very clear about that. 

The whole point of FMA is that imperialism and fascism is bad, it just expects the reader/viewer to come to that conclusion on their own by showing them the horrible, awful repercussions of imperialism and fascism. It doesn’t treat its audience like it’s stupid and needs it spelled out. Unfortunately, you people who refuse to accept anything unless it’s spelled out got your hands on it, and claim it’s pro these things simply because it depicts it in a nuanced light and doesn’t make every character who participated in it a horrible, unlikable person (because, and I’m sorry to break this to yall, bad people are not always unlikable, and expecting that just proves you’re naive). 

FMA did a very good job of depicting these subjects, through multiple different viewpoints, but yall just think that depiction means it’s supportive of those ideals. 

Idk, I just think that if you’re going to get on your high horse and claim the series is pro-fascism, you should at least have enough reading comprehension to understand the fucking series, and you’re only reasoning shouldn’t be “Well they made Mustang a likable character and made Scar a villain” because uh... now you just sound like you can’t understand basic themes or think for yourself

The Anti-Mercer Effect

On the Accessibility of D&D, Why Unprepared Casters is so Fun, and Why Haley Whipjack is possibly the greatest DM of our generation.

(Apologies to my mutuals who aren’t in this fandom for the length of this, but as you all know I have never in my life shut up about anything so… we’ll call it even for the number of posts about Destiel I see every day.

To fellow UC fans - I haven’t listened to arc 4 yet, I started drafting this in early August, and I promise I will write a nice post about how great Gus the Bard is once I get the chance to listen to more of his DMing).

Structure - Or, “This is not the finale, there will be more podding cast”

So, first of all, let’s just talk about how Unprepared Casters works. Because it’s kind of unusual! Most of the other big-name D&D podcasts favor this long, grand arcs; UC has about 10 hours of podcast per each arc. And that’s a major strength in a lot of ways: it makes it really accessible to new listeners, because you can just start with the current arc and understand what’s going on!

And by starting new arcs every six or seven episodes, they can explore lots of ways to play D&D! Classic dungeon delve arc! Heist arc! Epic heroes save the world arc! Sportsball arc! They can touch on all sorts of things!

And while I’m talking about that: Dragons in Dungeons, the first arc, makes it incredibly accessible as a show - because it lets the unfamiliar listener get a sense of what D&D actually is. (It’s about telling stories and making your friends feel heroic and laugh and cry, for the record). If I had to pick a way to introduce someone to the game without actually playing it with them, that arc would definitely be it.

And I’d be remise not to note one very important thing: Haley Whipjack and Gus the Bard are just very funny, very charismatic people. Look. Episode 0s tend to be about 50%(?) those two just talking to each other about their own podcast. It shouldn’t work. And yet it DOES, its one of my favorite parts, because Haley and Gus are just cool.

And a side note that doesn’t fit anywhere else: I throw my soul at him! I throw a scone at him - that’s it, that’s the vibe. The whole podcast alternates between laughing with your friends and brooding alone in a dark tavern corner - but the laughs never forced and the dark corner is never too dark for too long.

Whipjack the Great - Or, the DM is Also a Player!

I think Haley Whipjack is one of the greatest Dungeon Masters alive. The plots and characters! The mechanical shenanigans! The descriptions!

Actually, let’s start there: with the descriptions. (Both Haley and Gus do this really fucking well). As we know, Episode 0 of each arc sees the DM reading a description - of a small town, or the Up North, or the recent history of a great party. And Haley always strikes this tricky balance - one I think a lot of us who DM struggle with - between giving too much description and  worldbuilding, and not telling us anything at all. She describes people and events in just enough detail to imagine them, but never so much they seem static and unreal - just clear enough to envision, but with enough vagueness left to let your imagination begin to run wild.

While I’m thinking about arc 3’s party, let’s talk about a really bold move she made in that arc: letting the players have ongoing control of their history. Loser Lars! She didn’t try to spell out every detail of this high-level party’s history, or restrict their past to only what she decided to allow - she gave them the broad outlines, and let them embellish it. And that made for a much more alive story than any attempt to create it by herself would have - but I think it takes a lot of courage to let your players have that agency. Most Dungeon Masters (myself included) tend to struggle with being control freaks.

And the plots! Yeah, arc one is built of classic tropes - but she actually uses them, she doesn’t get caught up in subverting everything or laughing at the cliches. And it’s fun! In arc 3, there really isn’t a straight line for the players to follow, either - which makes the game much more interesting and much trickier to run. And her NPCs are fantastic and I will talk about them in the next section.

Above all, though, I think what is really impressive is how Haley balances mechanics, and rules as written, with the narrative and rule of cool - and puts both rules and story in the service of playing a fun game. And the secret to that? She’s the DM, but the DM is a player, and the DM is clearly having fun. Hope Lovejoy mechanically shouldn’t get that spellslot back, but she does, and it’s fun. The changeling merchant in Thymore doesn’t really make some Grand Artistic Narrative better, but wow is it fun. And she never tries to force it one way or the other - the story might be more dramatic if Annie didn’t manage to banish the demon from the vault, but it’s a lot cooler and a lot more fun for the players if Annie gets to be a badass instead - and the rules and the dice say that Annie managed it.

Settings feel like places, NPCs feel like people, and the narrative plot feels like a real villainous plot.

Anyway. I could go on about the various ways in which Whipjack is awesome for quite a while - she’s right, first place in D&D is when your friends laugh and super first place is when they cry - but I’m going to stop here and just. Make another post about it some other time. For now, for the record I hold her opinions about the game in higher esteem than I do several official sourcebooks; that is all.

Characters - Or, Bombyx Mori Is Not an Asshole, And That Matters

Okay, I said I would talk about characters! And I will!

Just a general place to start: the party! All of the first three parties are interesting to me, because they all care about each other. Not even necessarily in a Found Family Trope sort of way, though often that too. But they generally aren’t assholes to each other. The players create characters that actually work together, that are interesting; even when there’s internal divisions like SK-73 v. Sir Mr. Person, they aren’t just unpleasant and antagonistic all the time. Listening to the podcast, we’re “with” these people for a couple hours - and it isn’t unpleasant. That matters a lot. (To take a counter-example: I love Critical Role, but the episode when Vox Machina pranked Scanlan after he died and was resurrected wasn’t fun to listen to, it was just uncomfortable and angering and vaguely cruel).

All of the PCs are amazing, and the players in each arc did a great job. If you disagree with me about that, well, you have the right to be incorrect and I am sorry for your loss. Annie Wintersummer, for one example: tragic and sad and I want to give her a hug, but also Fuck Yeah Wintersummer, and also her familiar Charles the Owl is the cutest and funniest and I love him. And we understand what’s going on with Annie, she isn’t some infinite pool of hidden depths because this arc is 7 episodes and we don’t have time for that, but she also has enough complexity to be interesting. Same with Fey Moss: yeah, a lot of her is a silly pun about fame that carries into how she behaves, but a lot of how she behaves is also down to some good classic half-elven angst about parenthood and wanting to be known and seen and important. (Side note: if your half-elf character doesn’t have angst, well, that’s impressive and also I don’t think I believe you).

There are multiple lesbian cat-people in a 4-person party and they both have requited romantic interests who aren’t each other. This is the future liberals want and I am glad for it.

Sir Mister Person, the human fighter! Thavius, the edge lord! Even when a character is “simple,” they’re interesting, because of how they’re played as people and not action-figures. And that matters a lot.

In the same way: the NPCs. There really aren’t a lot of them! And some of them come from Patreon submissions, so uh good work gang, you’re part of the awesomeness and I’m proud of you! The point being, the NPCs work because enough of them are interesting to matter. It’s not just a servant who opens Count Michael’s door, it’s a character with a name (Oleandra!) and a personality and history. They’re interesting. Penny Lovejoy didn’t need to be interesting, the merchant outside the Laughing Mausoleum didn’t need to be interesting, but they ARE! And Haley and Gus EXCEL at making the NPCs matter, not just to the story but to us as viewers. I agree with Sir Mister Person, actually, I would die for the princesses of the kingdom. I actually care about Gem Lovejoy of all people - that wouldn’t happen in an ordinary campaign! That’s the thing that makes Unprepared Casters spectacular - and, frankly, it’s especially impressive because D&D does not tend to be good at making a lot of interesting compared to a lot of other sorts of stories.

And, just as an exemplar of all this: Bombyx Mori. Immortal, reincarnating(?), and described as the incarnation of the player’s ADHD. I expected to hate Bombyx, because as the mom friend both in and out of my friend-group’s campaigns, the chaos-causer is always exhausting to me. And yeah, Bombyx causes problems on purpose! But! She is not an asshole.

And that’s important. Bombyx goes and sits with the queen and comforts her. Bombyx gives Annie emotional support. Bombyx isn’t just a vehicle to jerk around the DM and other players; Bombyx really is a character we can care about. To compare with another case - in the first couple episodes of The Adventure Zone, the PCs are just dicks. Funny, but dicks. Bombyx holds out an arm “covered in larva” to shake with a count, and robs him of magical items, but she also cares about her friends and other people! She uses a powerful magical gem to save her fertilizer guy from death! Yeah, Bombyx is ridiculous, but she’s not just an asshole the party has to keep around for plot reasons; you can see why her party would keep her around. And one layer of meta up, she’s the perfect example of how to make a chaotic character like that while still being fun for everyone you’re playing with, which is often not the case. And I love her.

The Anti-Mercer Effect - Or, “I think we proved it can be fun, you can have a good time with your friends. And it doesn’t have to be scary, you can just work with what you know”

The Mercer Effect basically constitutes this: Matthew Mercer, Dungeon Master of Critical Role, is incredible (as are all of his players). They’re all professional story-tellers in a way, remember, and so Critical Role treats D&D like a narrative art-form, and it’s inspiring. Seeing that on Critical Role sets impossible standards - and people go into their own home games imagining that their campaigns will be like Critical Role, and the burden of that expectation tends to fall disproportionately on the DM. And the end result, I think, of the Mercer Effect is that we get discouraged or intimidated, because our game isn’t “as good as” theirs. (And I should note - Matt certainly doesn’t want that to be our reaction).

So the Anti-Mercer Effect is two things: it’s D&D treated like a game, and it’s inspiring but not intimidating. And Unprepared Casters manages both of those really freaking well. Because they play it like a game! A UC arc looks just like a good campaign in anyone’s home game. They have the vibes of 20-somethings and college students playing D&D for fun because that’s who they are (as a 20-something college student who plays a lot of D&D, watching it felt like watching my friends play an especially good campaign). They’re trying to tell a good story, sure, and they always do. But first and foremost, they’re trying to have fun, and it shows, and I love the UC cast for it.

And that’s the other half of it: it’s inspiring! It’s approachable; you can see that Haley and Gus put plenty of work into preparing the game but it also doesn’t make you feel like you need hundreds of pages of worldbuilding to run a game. Sometimes a cleric makes Haley cry and she gives them back a spell-slot from their deity! That’s fantastic! It’s just inspiring - listening to this over the summer, when my last campaign had fallen apart under the strain of graduation, is why I decided to plan and run my new one!

That quote from Haley Whipjack that I used as the title for this section? That’s the whole core of this idea, and really, I think, the core of the podcast.

The Mercer Effect is when you go “that’s really cool, I could never do that.” But Unprepared Casters makes you look at D&D and go “wow, that looks really fun. I bet I can do that!” And I love the show for it.

And I bet a lot of you do too.

The way they are ruinung the 118 dynamic adding a character nobody gives a fuck about, go kristen destroy everything that once was good

Mood. There was no reason to bring her on at all because Ravi is already there covering for Eddie, and Buck has shown he can be reckless at work all on his own so if they wanted to show that he's spiraling, they could have just had him being more risky at work like he was after Eddie got shot. Plus, there was no indication from any of the interviews that this is SUPPOSED to be Buck spiraling, just that he was unhappy with tay kay and L made him feel alive again (imagine how tired we are).

Diehard fans can make the argument for it to explain his behavior, but the casual viewers clearly aren't getting that vibe because they all think it came out of nowhere and is character assassination. I mean, there were still casual viewers asking what happened with tay kay and with ana because the relationships were good and they were "so cute together" despite that....not being the case at all. They're just casual viewers and don't always pick up on stuff like that, and having a hetronormative view that any man and woman who share a scene together have to get together probably doesn't help. People were criticizing Oliver for being bad at acting because he always looked miserable with his gf, TOTALLY missing that that was the entire point. But by not allowing him to TALK about it with anyone until 5x09 and then swerving to an ILY, then back to being weird about Christmas gifts only to do a "cute" gift scene, most people just wrote it off as no actor chemistry instead of them not being a good couple. It's the same thing with this whole L thing. There is only so much Oliver can do with his face and body language if the writers don't spell it out for the casual viewers which means they will miss the point, and quit watching and tank the ratings because NO ONE wants to watch a cheating arc with a fan fav character who already made it clear back in season one that he might have been a fuckboy having casual sex but he wasn't a cheater or stringing women along. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I can't imagine why anyone thought this would go over well or that anyone would still want this new character that there was no reason to have in the first place STILL being around even when the supposed need for her has past. And given the deeply negative response, they might make some changes and it might be fine, or they won't and people will hate it and they'll have to pull out something amazing in the finale and course correct for season 6.

The main thing making me angry right now though? Is the way she's supposed to be a "reckless daredevil" to challenge Buck, but she's also supposed to have a good head on her shoulders about it all which earns the respect of the team. So which is it? Is she pushing Buck and making him worse? Or is she solid and amazing and Bobby respects her for being grounded? What a slap in the face to Buck who has bent over backwards trying to earn respect, risking his life to save others at the expense of his own and having everyone misunderstand his motivations, even now when they should know better (a fault in the writing, especially in 4x14 which kr is responsible for), only to have someone new pulling the same shit but for personal kicks regardless of putting other people in danger, and being "respected" for it.

Hopefully they'll make some changes, but I'm not holding my breath and I don't expect to enjoy any of the dynamic she brings to the team unless/until Bobby's words about how putting the wrong person in place can tear everything apart come into play. Which is a shame because I enjoyed Lena's arc and was looking forward to this one, but at this point given what we know from what kr and ak have said in the interviews, I don't want to see any of that 🤷🏻‍♀️

Klaus never told his siblings about the fact he’d summoned Ben - it was more of a plot point in s2, but the siblings clearly didn’t know about Ben in s1 either (best example being when he tried to tell them in the bowling alley & they didn’t believe him)

I don’t really know what to make of this, since Ben clearly missed his siblings a lot and Klaus knew that, and vice versa (ie Diego/Vanya & Bens interactions)??

(Also when Ben & Klaus argue, all the things Ben says are valid: as much as I disagreed with Ben possessing him then kissing Jill, Klaus also slept with her knowing Ben liked her, all while pretending not to even know Jill’s name, which isn’t exactly good behaviour on his behalf either)

I spend a lot of time trying to un-sugar-coat this relationship, and I feel like these characters are too often let off the hook for their treatment of each other, but I’m gonna try to be fair to them both here.

I’m not sure if Klaus never tried to tell the others about Ben. I’m not sure he’d hear the end of it from Ben if he kept it to himself, and he might try just to shut him up. It’s been many years since then, as opposed to the few days he keeps Ben hidden from them on the show. That could be a lot of years of heartfelt pleading Klaus would have to be some kind of sociopath to ignore. He couldn't even handle Ben badgering him about Dave for five minutes without caving. I don't think Ben would have given up easily if it had been his siblings.

The others may not have believed Klaus at the bowling alley, or the first hypothetical time he told them about Ben, because Klaus tends to run off at the mouth. Things Klaus has alluded to that probably aren’t true include dating twins more than once, sleeping with multiple Baldwin brothers, and waxing his ass with chocolate pudding. Addiction also brings out the liar in you pretty strongly. Moreover, what Klaus was saying seemed impossible—a ghost saved Diego’s life and punched him in the face. We’re not talking about them not believing he can see Ben. We’re talking about them rejecting his entire story because of details that make no sense.

I don’t think Klaus knew Ben liked Jill until the morning he tried to confess to the rest of his cult. Before this point, Ben was being extremely vague about why he wanted to remain with the cult, and the most specific he ever got was that “I have unfinished business.” While Klaus is doing yoga, Ben slips up and starts describing Jill’s “almond-shaped eyes you get lost in” in a dreamy voice. Klaus immediately sits up, his entire face lighting up like this is simultaneously the cutest thing he has ever seen and something he is sooooo going to start teasing Ben about. If this reaction is anything to go by, Klaus had no idea he’d slept with Ben’s crush.

Even then, I don’t think he knew. The implication is that Klaus has so much indiscriminate sex that he doesn’t remember which of his followers is “Jill.” I don’t think he was obfuscating here.

Lastly, the whole possession thing seems to be a metaphor (which is subjective as fuck and is going to depend on the viewer’s interpretation) for the lack of boundaries Klaus and Ben have. But as much grief as Ben gets for this episode, they did explicitly negotiate the rules around sex. I say negotiate, but it was Ben being quiet and letting Klaus set the limits. And to his credit, once those ground rules were set, he followed them.

Their struggle to gain control over Klaus’ body is where I see boundaries being crossed, but like…that’s kind of the point of the metaphor. Unless things are spelled out between them, any gray areas are fair game. Usually when they do try to set boundaries with each other, it's spur of the moment and the follow-through isn't always great. Before this, Klaus fully expects Ben to be a last-minute accomplice to stealing a truck just so he doesn’t have to wait for a bus. This moment, as well as the “Your business is my business!” scene, are great examples of one setting boundaries and the other getting pissed about it.

But let’s be real, I’m not sure these kids were taught about boundaries. Even if they were, they tend to go right out the window in a relationship as codependent as this one. Still, even though they’re very bad to each other sometimes, they’re not monstrous.

why blippi is rotting yr children's brains

preface: i literally expect no one to read this. it is an essay length, strong opinion piece critiquing a niche youtube-based children's show that i don't expect most of y'all to even have knowledge of lol. but like, i promise that even if you know nothing about what i'm talking about, in my incredibly, super humble opinion, it's a good piece of writing and interesting nonetheless. anyway if you read this whole thing for some reason yr really hot and we should kiss.

i thoroughly vet everything my child watches before he watches it, episode by episode. and we rarely watch youtube for entertainment; we usually just look up educational videos when he has a question about something and wants more detail than i can provide him. and that's mainly because children's content on youtube is so fucking troubling and distressing. i don't judge parents who give their children a tablet at a restaurant at all bc i've been there and sometimes it's easier on everyone to just put on a video and avoid a giant scene, but i do judge parents who just leave their children alone with youtube kids on autoplay.

take stevin john, a literal millionaire who got famous from dressing up as a silly character called blippi and going on tours of places like aquariums, zoos, construction sites, etc and posting it on youtube. this has branched into a whole empire of blippi videos, hulu shows and specials, live shows and tours (that he outsources to another character actor), merchandise and so on. this 30-something year old man cites his main influence as being mr. rogers, but i question if he's ever even seen an episode of that program.

mr. rogers had no background in early childhood development or media production, but he revolutionized the world of children's media, because he respected his audience and didn't shy away from real world situations, all while creating a show with an enormous heart. mr. rogers begins his episodes by inviting the viewer in, literally changing his attire to be more comfortable, and talking about/doing things he genuinely cares about. whereas mr. rogers calmly and maturely addresses the viewer, blippi puts on a high pitched, contrived voice, interjecting every other sentence with a forced exclamation such as, "teehee! we're having so much fun!"

i don't find it a coincidence that john (blippi) is a veteran, either. his videos are completely devoid of the absurd, abstract, childlike thinking that makes children's media fun, creative, and entertaining. his thinking and process is methodical, devoid of emotion, and very superficial. this line of thinking clearly shows the kind of creative sterilization and emphasis on sameness and conformity instilled in the military. blippi simply observes things and interacts with them in a stale, matter-of-fact way. "this ball is purple! this ball is pink! anyway... what's over there? teehee! a car! vroom, vroom!" objects are colors, toy cars don't do anything but drive, curiosity is simply not encouraged.

he uses the "it's educational!" excuse to hide the fact that his show lacks everything that makes media a valuable resource for children to consume in the first place. further than identifying colors, numbers, and the occasional letter or shape, there is just this total lack of children's need for social and emotional development. when mr. rogers breaks the fourth wall to address the viewer and let them know they're special, it feels authentic and natural, because we've spent the last half hour building whole worlds with diverse characters and unique stories in a pretend neighborhood, learning about and enjoying different musical instruments, being exposed to and making friends with (even if parasocially, it is still a real bond to children when done properly) children who are similar to us in character regardless of physical or environmental differences, feeding the fish, making art together, and so on. when blippi tells the viewer, "you are very special, and i enjoy spending time with you!" it falls completely flat and feels unearned, because the last half hour was spent running around a soft play center pointing at bright, colorful objects, visiting interesting locations like farms or fruit production factories while failing to acknowledge the humanity of the humans actually working there (everything is machine or product focused; the human workers are simply an extension of the machine), learning "fun facts" about elephants that just list attributes of elephants, not taking the opportunity to inform the viewers of elephants' intelligence, or diet, or matriarchal society. it is a loud, sensory overwhelming display of a man so disconnected from the social and emotional needs and desires of children that he assumes they're stupid, easily entertained idiots who only need some silly dances and fast-moving cartoon graphics to give their attention (meaning time and desire to purchase products meaning $$$). john clearly views his audience as a means to gaming the algorithm and ultimately a paycheck by the hollow way he addresses them.

the show is so narcissistic, so focused on all the fun blippi is supposedly having, but he lacks any of the character traits that make individual children's show hosts memorable, so much so that he was able to have someone else who doesn't even vaguely resemble him dress as blippi and impersonate him and host the show or appear at live shows, and it went unnoticed by most of his toddler and child audience. the show is so formulaic and the character of blippi is so unmemorable that instead of taking the blue's clues route of developing a story of the host leaving for college and his brother now stepping in, or making some sort of believable excuse for the change in actors, they can simply swap him out with some random guy and not acknowledge it at all. although a comedy show for older children, the amanda show in no way could or would try to replicate the show with the same name but swapping out amanda bynes with a random teenage girl who is clearly not amanda bynes. it's weird and nonsensical and shows that his character is so much of a farce put on for a paycheck that not even his dedicated audience is affected or even cares when he is replaced by a random, unknown person.

this is completely garbage content made by an opportunist with no experience with children who saw his nephew watching children's youtube content, took it at complete surface level and still hasn't realized that while children's content only looks and feels so easy, entertaining, and enriching because it is so hard to do well. even with outsourcing his music, that aspect of the show still sucks. famous and successful children's musician, raffi, is known for his song describing the life of a little white whale, called "baby beluga." it opens with a calm strumming of his guitar, followed by the lyrics, "baby beluga in the deep blue sea/swim so wild and you swim so free/heaven above/sea below/and a little white whale on the go." is it silly and kind of pointless? yes, but the point is that he is captivating children and showing them the fun of listening to music, dancing, singing, and appreciating art. the "excavator song" featured in an episode of blippi about construction vehicles opens with what sounds like a default garageband loop and the flatly sung lyrics, "i'm an excavator/i'm an excavator/hey dirt, see you later/i'm an excavator." i don't feel i have to meticulously analyze the aforementioned lyrics; the stark contrast should speak for itself.

i have a million more criticisms about both blippi specifically and youtube children's content as a whole, but this is already so long and i doubt many people will get this far anyway. it's an issue i was completely apathetic towards until i had my own child and had to wean him off these kinds of junk food shows because i realized the fast-paced visuals and bright colors and repetitive songs/lyrics were putting him in this spaced-out, fugue state, and he thought he could demand this show or that show whenever he wanted. the moment he started regularly yelling things like, "watch! cars!" or "no! click it!" i knew i had to be a lot more invested in the things he watched even if just for entertainment or as a soothing message. i showed him an episode of mr. rogers yesterday and feared it would be too slow to hold his attention, but he was mesmerized, greeting and interacting with mr. rogers verbally, asking me, "what's that?" to different objects on the screen. since purging this low-brow children's entertainment, he has had a noticeable increase in attention span and concentration, can focus on a task for longer amounts of times, is more likely to "read"/look through books without me initiating it, and doesn't throw a fit when the tv/my laptop is off.

i just know that for me, growing up with so much unsupervised internet access definitely led me to real-world pain and consequences, and it seems like now children are born with an iphone as an extension of their arm. if my child is going to be consuming videos, i'm definitely supervising every second and am going to be highly critical of the videos and the credentials (or lack thereof) of the creators and team behind it. but i also know, from pure observation admittedly, that parents letting youtube kids autoplay parent their children for hours at a time is not an uncommon occurrence. and it worries me that a generation of children are being raised on videos that rely on being as loud and bright and superficially enjoyable as possible. what's the use of a child knowing their colors and alphabet if they don't know how to treat people with kindness and empathy and respect? there is something wrong for a children's show host to plug the spelling of his name at the end of his videos ("well, that's the end of this video. but if you wanna watch more of my videos, just type in my name! can you spell my name with me? b-l-i-p-p-i!") after essentially rotting his audiences' brains for a half hour. there's something so insidious about the prioritization of naming different parts of construction vehicles over honest depictions of and conversations about dealing with feelings, or why someone with autism may act differently than you, or what to do when you feel lonely, or ways to make art and express yrself creatively. also, not to mention the blatant police propaganda and outright worship is seriously jarring; as a black mother to a visibly non-white child, i cannot sit there and watch blippi show kids how to be a bootlicker for the shittiest profession on earth, but that could be a whole essay in and of itself.

anyway, thanks for reading, if yr looking for quality children's content, i recommend, in no specific order: mr. rogers, sesame street, the electric company, molly of denali, daniel tiger, bluey!, blue's clues, the odd squad, word party, trash truck, puffin rock, uhh... that's definitely not an extensive list but that's just off the dome!!! ok bye y'all <333

when i started watching harley quinn TV, about the last thing i expected of it was to be feminist in any way. i mean, it's an adult comedy cartoon. it's based on 2016 suicide squad's take on harley. the poor woman doesn't even wear any pants. but man, the more i think about it, and the more i consume other dc content featuring those characters, the more appreciative i am of its takes on its female cast.

let's talk about ivy. i watched the btas episode 'house and garden' today, and was honestly appalled by how blatantly male it all felt. in this episode, ivy 'rehabitilates' herself by getting released from arkham, marrying her therapist (which nobody even pointed out is illegal?!), taking care of his two kids from a previous marriage, and basically living the perfect suburban housewife dream. when batman suspects she's up to some shit, she tells him she's never been happier, and no longer has any need for crime. of course it turns out to be an elaborate ruse, but the ending reveals that she wasn't completely insincere -- she does, in fact, dream of having a husband and children, something she cannot accomplish due to the infertility caused by her powers.

unfortunately, this episode must have had a serious impact on ivy's characterization, as the book 'cycle of life and death' from 2016 is heavily founded on it. in my humble opinion, it's terrible. i mean, i get it, it was the nineties and written by men, and tv writers only really started picking up on how to write women as complex multilayered beings in recent years, but damn.

ivy's original character is already rooted in a very male, distorted perception of women. she's a textbook femme fatale-- she's dainty, gorgeous, scantily clad, and her powers are seducing men into doing her bidding. and to pile further on top of her misogynistic foundation, the only way they could think to humanize her is by forcing more of their stereotypical male perception onto her-- how do we show she's a sympathetic character? by making her deep down a 'normal woman', who has normal woman dreams of being a housewife with children. the rather blatant subtext that she turned to a life of villainy because her infertility denied her that dream -- a failed woman that has turned into a despicable monster -- only makes this depiction all the uglier. i'm actually amazed this take on her character managed to survive all the way to 2016.

but then you have hqtv ivy, who takes all that and unceremoniously dumps it in the trash. it rethinks the basics of ivy's personality and attitude from the ground up. she's a misanthrope -- the only company she seeks outside of her plants is harley -- why would she make a villain career out of seducing men? why does she have to be sensual and coy? no. instead, she's awkward, stoic, and anti social. she dresses a whole hell of a lot more practical, she's blunt to a fault, and wastes none of her time trying to appeal to men.

the sexual element of her powers has been removed, or at the very least severely limited-- no more poison kisses or seducing men to do her bidding. the only scene that incorporates that element at all is when she has to peck a bunch of dweeby 12 year old boys on the mouth to reverse the effect of her toxin that's been slipped into their bar mitzvah punch bowl by mistake. it's ridiculous, it's absolutely mortifying for her, and it's funny. nothing about it is remotely sexy.

as for her dreams of becoming a housewife... well, ivy very clearly doesn't know what she wants for her future. or rather, she's so repressed that she doesn't allow herself to want. she always saw herself ecoterroristing it up solo-- but then harley happened, and she found herself going soft, and opening up to other people through harley's influence as well. she allows herself to acknowledge that she's lonely, and that she does crave human connection. specifically, she craves harley -- but that's a part of her she had to seal away, out of fear of ruining their friendship. this leads her to pursue a relationship with kite man (or rather: be pursued by him), even though at every step of the way she pretty obviously has to force herself farther into it.

it's not that she doesn't like kite man. the opposite. she can tell he's a good guy, he treats her so well, he cares for her so deeply. for someone like ivy, coming from a life of abuse and isolation, that's rarer than rare. and that's why she forces herself to overlook all their differences, all the aspects of their relationship that clearly aren't working, and clings on to it regardless. finally, someone genuinely wants her, cares about her. she'd have to be stupid to let that go, right?

but she doesn't want it. that's spelled out the most blatantly on their wedding day-- while he's reciting his dream future of them living in a nice house with a white picket fence, a dog and three kids, ivy is horrified. unlike btas' ivy, who would've surely been delighted, it's completely removed from anything this version of ivy ever wanted for herself. and in that moment, she realizes she fucked up. she locked herself into a life she never wanted because she thought it was the best she could hope to get.

and then their wedding goes up in literal flames, kite man calls it quits, and ivy finally lets herself pursue what she really, truly wants: harley.

it's such a great, fresh take on ivy's character. she's written as a woman, but not some male writer's narrow view of one, but an actual honest, human woman. her struggles and insecurities are incredibly relatable to me as a female viewer, because she's allowed to breathe and grow and have depth outside of the list of stereotypes female characters are so often shoehorned into. she's aloof, she's cynical, she's a loner; she's carrying years of trauma that's made her insecure and closed off, and she's just starting to grow past that; she's desperate for love but forces herself to settle for tepid affection because she's too scared to pursue anything more; she's a genius biochemist and a badass with the power to control all of plant life, but she's fucking chickenshit and wishy-washy and doesn't know how to be honest with her feelings, leading her to hurt those she cares about. and the fact that they took btas' ivy's dream of getting married and having a family, and used it as a stepping stone-- subverted it as part of ivy's self-realization and growth-- that's just the icing on the cake.

hqtv ivy is hands down the best take of this character i've seen to date. god bless, i cannot wait for season 3.