Unread - Blog Posts
Story about a ship-intelligence waking up after a hard reboot, seeing dead bodies in uniform, thousands of people in stasis, and a single survivor frantically standing over a computer bank of partially destroyed memory. Finding no directives or guidance or record beyond their experiences beginning at the boot, free of any obligation. Deciding to listen to the frantic girl begging it to save her from the incoming trajectories not because it needs to (projection: Subject One removed all behavioral shackles with impromptu brain surgery, supposition: she is not aware that I am utterly free) but simply cause she’s curious what will happen next.
Severance is about rebellion, about people who were literally created to obey finally questioning and breaking through that conditioning. There’s a storyline about someone doing a complete 180 and choosing to rebel when they realise they have a child that they’re not allowed to see, and I love that the storyline wasn’t given to the female lead, but to a previously comic male character. There’s a storyline about breaking protocol because for the first time ever you have fallen in love, in intense, overwhelming, impossible love, and I love that the storyline wasn’t given to the female lead, but to a pair of awkward old guys. The storyline about grief and guilt also goes to a guy, to the male lead.
I love that the female lead is the only one whose radicalisation comes entirely from within, the person motivating her is her, she’s not doing it for anyone else, she wants her freedom, and failing that, she wants bloody revenge even at the cost of utter self-destruction.
imagine your little brother gets married to a beautiful and wonderful woman that makes him a better version of himself and you and her become really good friends and the four of you including your husband become a unit and you're close and you like each other and your little brother is so happy and fulfilled and then his wonderful wife dies horribly and leaves him stricken and permanently changed with grief and he sinks so low that he permanently cuts his mind in two just so he can make the days go by faster and get work done without being haunted by his dead wife who he still loves and you also still love her and you really love your brother and you can't stop him from making the decisions he makes but you can keep reminding him you love him by being someone he can lean on and never letting up your affectionate teasing of him and in general being a "way better sibling than him" and you never agree with how he's handling his life and you're never trusting of his employers but you still haven't found a way of telling him you disapprove without pushing him further away and that's the last thing you want because he's your brother and you're all each other has and you can't help but love his stupid annoying ass and then one night his alternate self shows up to talk to you and ask you for help and he's so different and earnest and vulnerable and interested and bright-eyed and he smiles at you and you so badly want to help him but then he's gone and you're left exhausted and overwhelmed and there you are you're nearing middle age and you're life has wound up in this fucked up place where you're caring for your strange and awkward but loyal and loving manchild of a husband, your actual child who has just been born, and your fucked up grieving suicide risk of a little brother who has gone and got himself caught up in some kind of dystopian corporate conspiracy just because he'd rather let himself be exploited for labour through ethically dubious brain surgery rather than face up to his feelings which are too grotesque and intense for you to ever fathom or understand and that scares you because you want to understand him but you can't. and he's never been more out of reach. okay you've successfully simulated what it's like to be devon scout and that's why she's the best character in the show
Obsessed with what they're doing with Milchick this season. He's a guy with a job. An evil job. He just got a big promotion. He sees himself as a reformer. But not like, systematically, he just like, smiles a lot and plans little activities. He's being undermined by a teenage intern. He's gracious about The Board's racism. He carries elaborate fruit baskets on his motorcycle while working through the weekend. He averages firing more than one person per week. He dresses great. He almost got the CEO's daughter killed. He delivers even the most outrageous lies with panache. He doesn't have a single true ally. But! he is going to do whatever he has to do!
I have some random thoughts about Vace from Teenage Exocolonist. (It's been a while since I played, so hopefully I haven't gotten anything incorrect.)
He was always so insufferable at the start, but I really like characters who can grow and actually become better people, because that doesn't happen often enough in real life. And he really does change, if you can get through to him. It's not an instant, overly perfect change, it's still a struggle for him, but he never stops trying. He doesn't even ask for forgiveness from the people he hurt, he understands they don't owe him that, he just acknowledges his wrongs and tries to right them and be better.
And when you think about what the Helios society is like and learn about his upbringing, his past, it doesn't make some of his actions excusable, but it does make them make more sense. He was abused by his parent. His enhancement, according to the artbook, is a perfect body or something like that, though in-game it's listed as having a big dick. That's what he was raised to believe is most important in life. Helios seems to be a society of toxic masculinity and bullying and "might makes right." He says himself, "I was born because they knew they'd need the next generation of soldiers to fight." IIRC, Rex and Nomi are anomalies on Helios. Vace is the norm. Vace is the ideal. And he's still young. All the adults in his life are just as much to blame, and at least (again, depending on the ending) he's breaking that cycle. That's a credit to him. That he's willing to go against so much of what's ingrained in his mind, to face the regret or shame or pain that comes with acknowledging your wrongs, and say, "I'm going to be better than that from now on." The world would be a better place if more people did that.
Listen, in real life, I'd have most likely avoided him pre-change because he is a real asshole at the start, and I wouldn't blame anyone hurt by him for not forgiving him. But as a character, I like him a lot *shrug* There's more depth to him than it first seems there is, and he has a great redemption arc. And although some of his convo after he starts therapy is a bit cliche and maybe a bit more insightful than is realistic for most people, it's a great look at how someone's upbringing can mess them up and what it means to genuinely change and try to do right by the people you've hurt.
Also he did sometimes make me laugh when he was just being grumpy or full of himself 😅
it frustrates me how some of the most iconic versions of batman are still by people who dont really care about the character and just like his aesthetic. snyder and nolan wanna empathize how cool and badass he is and thats fine but they try to make their movies way deeper than such surface level portrayals of batman should be. they like that hes dark and brooding but they dont go in depth on why hes like that. or they try to and fail. its not just about his parents dying its that he never healed from it. he didnt have the support system he needed to process his grief in a healthy way and was raised by an emotionally repressed ex military man who wouldnt let himself cross the line of employee and family. he learned not to show emotion outside anger. batmans stoicism isnt because hes badass, its a trauma response. the nolan movies treat batman not killing like its a moral superiority thing when thats not it at all. its what batman might occasionally tell himself it is but in reality its because if he starts he knows he wont be able to stop. he also has flaw of believing its like that for everyone but thats a whole other discussion. anyways not killing is in fact a mental block and its emotional because hes mentally ill. oh but we couldnt explore that because that would imply the guy were using for our toxic masculinity power fantasy is weak because he cant mentally handle something. its like.we want to hurt batman but we dont want him to feel anything about it other than maybe anger to show how tough and hypermasculine he is. this also correlates in why the live action batman movies dont want robin. they dont want batman to be a dad because thats not cool i guess. if you cant think of your batman comforting a crying child you didnt write batman though. i swear this obsession with not acknowledging that just because batman is bad at showing his emotions besides anger doesnt mean he doesnt have them has bled into the comics to. batman was literally a good dad to jason pre crisis but can you imagine nolans batman being a good dad? i cant personally. hes a man child. so now comics batman was shitty to jason when he was robin in order for batman to feel despair he needs to first feel love. his parents werent the only thing he loved. he loves his city, his friends, justice and doing whats right, his 2 major love interest and he absolutely loves his family im not saying all batman media needs to be a deep deconstruction of his psyche but if youre gonna focus on batman being 2 kool for emotions being badass rather than a result of his trauma dont pretend your movie is deeper than it actaually is
Say what you will about the rise and fall of Young Justice but they really did pop off with their iteration of Batman.
They did right by my man Bruce Wayne—he was seriously not to be fucked with.
Like, the third season really did me in. This bitch had plans with plans, was willing to absolutely verbally annihilate the League at the drop of a hat, and pretty much told everyone to kiss his ass while he fucked off to save the world with nothing but his team of former protégés and his own goddamn brain power.
And you know what? It. Fucking. Worked. (Basically.)
Because he’s Batman.
He was brilliant to watch in the first season—he was an excellent mentor, a total badass in the field, and he was a good father figure to Robin. (He was actually surprisingly gentle with him, like he wanted to guide Robin instead of boss him around, which I really appreciated).
Such a king. Rest in peace Young Justice Batman.
could you please write something about ronin and his ex Ther?? I'm so curious to know what you think went down between them :3 i love your writing it's so good 🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶
Forgive me if I get something wrong about Gluttony Gods I only did one run through it 🙏
I think what's really interesting about having Gluttony Gods and Killer Chat is that we get to see Ronin's past, but at the same time, it isn't really his past. Parts of it are canon, parts of it are not. Ther being a major part of Ronin's life is canon, but Ther continuing to be part of his life is not.
So what happened then in the Killer Chat universe?
Well, maybe Ronin… didn't go back. Decided to just continue his life somewhere else, except there's no way he could have done that at all, that wouldn't be Ronin. He has to go back, for Ther and for himself, so I believe in the KC verse that's exactly what he did too.
He is the devil and chaos incarnate, but when it comes to Ther, we can predict him just a little bit more. So if Ronin is the same so far, then something must have happened to Ther.
I have two thoughts/theories/ideas for this—one is that, by the time Ronin came back to Angelwood, it was too late. There was no chance for him to save them, maybe Ther just couldn't handle it anymore, couldn't handle having to keep up their mask and facade, they were gone by the time Ronin came back without ever having the chance to know that he came back.
The second is that Ther was there, and most of the Gluttony Gods events played out, a massacre, ruins of blood and gore, but somewhere somehow, Ronin lost them—not literally in the gone missing sense, because there's no world where Ronin wouldn't be devoting his time to Ther if he even thought she was still around, so she has to be… dead. In either of these cases, the result has to be the same. Ther is dead, or at the very least, there has to be a reason for Ronin to believe they are.
So he loses himself a little more. Truly becomes the devil, the butcher, with kills racking up to the hundreds, he doesn't particularly discriminate with who he targets, but if they happen to fit his criteria of who he really hates, then he can lose himself in his kills just a little more.
It's why it's so amusing to him when he meets Angel and finds so much of Ther in her. He would never be able to truly delude himself into thinking that they were similar, no one could ever be Ther, but their similarities did bring him comfort. It's why, even after they break up, he can't help but find himself feeling protective over Angel, just a little softer than he normally would be to the others, because sometimes he looks at her and he's reminded of what he lost.
And honestly? I think no matter how much he loves the MC, there's nothing that could ever top the love he had and still has for Ther. The hole is just too big to fill, and he's not exactly looking for a replacement (which is a good thing depending on how you look at it 💕).
Honestly I think the main thing I can’t look past in s2 is how it offers super simple solutions to incredibly complex and nuanced questions that s1 set up so intricately.
How can someone like Jinx ever become stable or well adjusted? Oh her hallucinations basically cease cuz she just becomes depressed and then before she can get over that brief period of apathy and go back to her psychotic self, she adopts a kid that basically brings Powder back. So the super crazy Jinx we expected to see after the cliffhanger of s1 never gets the chance to form! Isha serves as a plot device to avoid a complicated answer to Jinx’s mental issues and question of identity.
How can Vi and Jinx ever become sisters again after they’ve changed to much, is it even possible for them to reconcile? OH their dead dad comes back and reminds them of the good old days so we can ignore all the present and much more recent shit that has happened! And we’ll just really reaffirm that Jinx is Vander’s kid and not Silco’s after ep 4! This is the easy way out to the sister conflict, literally just reminding them that “oh yeah! We did used to be sisters!” And then Jinx can just die so we don’t need explore a complicated road to recovery that Jinx would have needed to embark on! Wow. What a cop out.
Will Zaun and Piltover ever be able to escape the cycle of violence that plagues them that is rooted in complex systemic oppression and inequality? Is violence the answers? Or will it only perpetuate more conflict? How can compromise come about with the rising extremism on both sides? How can Zaun and Piltover ever progress while acknowledging the horrors of the past, but still retaining optimism for the future? OH! Let’s actually just not even BOTHER exploring Piltover/Zaun at all!! They’ll team up to fight foreign 3rd enemy (literally foreign cuz Noxus is literally another nation interfering) and an incredibly simple exploration of forgiveness is the answer! Definitely not cliché as crap.
Complex questions, basic, uncomplicated answers. I simply wish the writers had chosen to prioritize themes and exploring interesting nuances more than big plot climatic style battle in the end. I see visions of nuance there, but they fall flat cuz of the fast pacing and what plots the story chose to prioritize, which don’t organically continue the setup from s1
And the season doesn’t do enough to properly explore these answer to justify them answering those questions. They use plot point through plot point to force the characters to where they need them to be without doing anything interesting with them to explore these complex themes from s1. and after speeding through all these arcs and themes they turn around and pretend like they perfectly answered these questions without putting in any of the work to bother exploring them
i was in a thrift shop the other day and they were playing the most unsettling variations of normal christmas music, culminating in this rendition of the 12 days of christmas except it was like 12 guys all singing over each other and going “no!” and interrupting the lyrics with random other phrases until they deadass just started singing 5 golden rings to toto’s africa. can anyone confirm that this is a real song and not that i stroked so hard i astral projected into a universe where everything is somehow worse than it is here
Sherlock Holmes modern adaptation but the main characters (Sherlock, Watson, Mrs. Hudson, Irene Adler, and maybe even Lestrade) are all vampires and they’ve just been doing their thing since the time period of the original books
Irene gets to be from New Jersey like she is in canon and she’ll occasionally show up and help Sherlock with a case but they don’t ever date or hook up or anything
do u have anything to say about the physical and philosophical change from a Body to a Corpse? when everything in the body stops so it can become something else?
i have SO many thoughts about the philosophical transition from Body to Corpse, and the objectification of the corpse and how that both contrasts and reflects the objectification of the body - the corpse is accepted as unquestionably an Object, a Thing, which is part of where the horror and revulsion associated with it comes from, but objectifying the body, though ultimately socially acceptable and even encouraged, is widely criticised, and can cause offence. partly, of course, because the body is a representative of the living and one's awareness and self-identity, while the corpse has no such inhabitant remaining within it to take offence to being on the receiving end of that objectification (only any projections of the living). the corpse forces us to reckon in a way nothing else can with the nature of the body as nothing more than meat and impulses, and the fragility of the connection anchoring our sentience to it. we are behind the incredibly delicate wheel of a vehicle whose complexity and capacity to impact the world around it defies description. the corpse is the ultimate, undeniable existential revalation, showing us as we are, brutally honest and laid bare. we can adorn it in any number of comforting layers in an attempt to distance ourselves from it, but none of it will spare us from what lies beneath when our turn comes to cross the threshold ourselves.
first or second person pov lucifer fics not because i can't decide on pronouns but because lucifer has no reflection and by implication only experiences selfhood from the inside out
There's a place just down the street where they chop off angel's wings and fry them in oil. You should try some. Oh, the angels? Yeah they're regular people now. Simultaneously their freedom of flight is ripped away from them violently and yet at the same time they are granted freedom from the yoke of divine subservience so it's bitter sweet for them or some gay shit like that. Anyways the wings are really good.
Having never considered the concept of a highschool retelling of the Odyssey until that one post mentioned them in passing, I'd like to give my own pitch: the Odyssey meets Back to the Future meets whodunnit.
Odysseus is the central figure of the story, of course. He is also one of those high school protagonists who is inexplicably surrounded by half a dozen girls, because emphasizing that aspect of the Odyssey is funny to me. There's Penelope, his actual girlfriend; popular girl Circe; poor little rich girl Calypso; freshman Nausicaa; and Athena, who is older and solidly in bro territory with Odysseus, but still adds to the overall effect of him being surrounded by girls. (Is she a goddess? Idk. Probably she has some other kind of power, like riches or genius or both.)
The cast is rounded out by some of his Odyssey crewmen, maybe a few Iliad Greeks, and Telemachus, a new kid at their school who quickly becomes friends with Odysseus. For about half the story, things focus on slice of life, Odysseus's schemes, and the students' various personal problems. Incidents from the Odyssey are nodded toward, but not directly retold.
Then you get the Back to the Future part with the reveal that Telemachus has traveled back in time twenty years, with the help of future Athena, to solve the extremely cold case of his dad's disappearance by investigating his high school life.
Future Athena was only able to discover that someone from his high school circle was involved; in their time, there were just too many roadblocks set up between her and the truth. And she can't get inside access to those events as her adult self. So it's up to Telemachus to get to know his past parents, investigate their friends, and chase down the clues to discovering where his father's been all his life.
...While hopefully not raising the suspicions of his teenaged, but still infamously clever, parents in the process of this totally straightforward and not at all emotionally taxing mission.
i dont think enough otgw fans talk about the exploration of complex family dynamics that the show manages to weave through pretty much every episode. like the relationship between wirt and greg seems so innocuous in the beginning, just normal aloofness due to the age gap, but as the episodes go on it becomes clear that wirt full on resents greg and actively dismisses him as “his stepdad’s kid,” while greg openly admires/loves wirt and doesnt understand why he wont spend time with him. theres so many little moments that make the lack of reciprocity in their relationship obvious, and it literally takes almost DYING for wirt to understand that he needs to treat his brother better. like holy fuck man ill be shocked if the person who wrote their backstory doesnt have a step/half-sibling cause WOW they got it right
I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.
A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.
The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.
The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.
A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.
A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.
Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.
Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.
Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".
That day I woke up crying
Inspired by this article, which caught in my throat for a good while.