Over Thinking It

A blog for rambles, analysis and headcanons (Adult-They/Them) inbeautifulwriter on AO3

[avatarsymbolism]

Zuko going into an angst coma because he made the right decision.

[elledix]

That moment when you make so many bad decisions in life that your body thinks it’s a virus when you finally do the right thing.

[filmbuehne]

More like: When your father has told you that everything you’ve done is wrong and that one time you thought you were in the right he burned off half your face and banished you, so you start going into panic mode when you’re right for once because you’re mentally bracing yourself to experience violence again.

[sexy-necromancing-bird]

Oh

[megashadowdragon]

#GODS YES THANK YOU #like ok yes all the ‘lol zuko fell into an angst coma cause he did the Right Thing’ jokes are funny #but so many people obviously don’t look beyond that #to the underlying trauma #which is WHY he goes into an angst coma #his body just fucking shuts DOWN #the last time he followed his conscience his father brutally mutilated him #the last time he allowed himself to make a compassionate decision he was LITERALLY MAIMED #of COURSE he’d struggle with being reminded that he’d just done something that #if his father witnessed it #would’ve gotten him horrifically hurt #again #by someone he loved and trusted 

[praise-suns-and-chill]

God, also imagine how worried Iroh must have been.

[polarity-disturbed]

I saw someone call Doctor Who (2005-) “lost media” because it got removed from streaming in the US, and no. Absolutely it is not.

It is inaccessible via streaming in that specific region. We still have it. It exists. On DVDs. On Blu rays. In digital libraries. In archives. On streaming in other countries. In the hands of thousands of people who own physical copies. Nothing about that is lost.

This is especially baffling coming from the Doctor Who fandom, a fandom that contains one of the most well known and well documented cases of actual lost media. There are episodes of Doctor Who that genuinely do not survive. No master tapes. No home recordings. No official copies. Entire stories that exist only as audio, telesnaps, or reconstruction efforts because the video is gone.

That is what lost media means.

Calling New Who lost media because it is not currently available on a streaming service in your country muddies that distinction and makes the term meaningless. It erases the reality of material that is truly gone and cannot be recovered in full.

There is a real conversation to be had about accessibility, regional licensing, and the increasing fragility of streaming based media access. But that is a different conversation. Inconvenient to access is not the same thing as lost.

Please do not flatten those concepts into the same thing.

[myfandomrambles]

Am I the only one who doesn't think Clara & 12 are the hybrid? Like, I thought that the point was that the hybrid doesn't exist and all this torture was for nothing. Like, I truly believe that the conversation with Ashildir/Me was that it was stupid and worth nothing. It's all just something you can fuck around and spitball about. And that The Doctor's obsession with Clara is unhealthy but also petty.

There isn't a hybrid. the Time Lords believe in a fairy tale. The Doctor & Clara aren't special like I thought that was the point. Clara & Twelve shouldn't get to break the laws of time. Becuase their fucking ordinary just like everybody else. The Hybrid isn't real, prophecy isn't real. They aren't fated to do anything. They are just people.

[natnormalatall]

roald dahl was antisemitic and misogynistic. george orwell was openly homophobic. edgar allan poe married his 13 year old cousin. dr seuss cheated on his wife (and was racist as well as antisemitic!). hp lovecraft was racist as fuck. anyways they’re fucking dead it’s not like you’re enabling their behaviors in the afterlife or something. then again I think they bleed into the books so uh keep an eye out for that

the difference between these old white guys and jk rowling is that the former group is all dead. jk rowling is alive and using your money to oppress trans people

[truestoriesaboutme]

I need people to stop blaming the death of movies on “quips”. A quip is just a funny line of dialogue. That’s all. Like I just saw a post talking about quips and the death of movies and brought up Pirates of the Caribbean as an example of a better movie and yes it is but also that movie is FULL OF QUIPS. I just rewatched The Princess Bride. It’s all quips. Every single line. And it’s a masterpiece.

Movies suck when people don’t care about the art they’re making. That includes them not caring about their quips. Which is why a lot of comic relief dialogue ALSO sucks now. But the problem isn’t that funny dialogue exists.

[kurozu501]

#it’s not the quips it’s the complete and utter fear of showing any kind of sincerity#honestly it’s almost the equivalent of saying ‘no homo’ after a moment of being genuine

[headspace-hotel]

The Princess Bride is almost all quips, but it’s all sincerity. Every aspect of the plot is ridiculous and yet no movie dialogue has ever gone as hard as “I want my father back, you son of a bitch”

[comicaurora]

people recognize the problem contained within Whedon-style quippyness without knowing the term for the actual issue so they say “quips” when they mean “bathos”

[roach-works]

another problem with quips that’s a little harder to analyze and explain is the quips are all in the author’s voice, NOT the characters’.

steve rogers, natalia romanoff, james barnes, tony stark, pepper potts, and bruce banner are people from radically different walks of life, and should therefore have extremely different styles of communication, despite all off them nominally speaking the same language (english). they should have different senses of humor, different senses of where the boundary lies between irreverence and insult, different boundaries, different sore spots, different goals as well as different methods of communication.

the fact that all these characters banter the exact same way, i.e how joss whedon thinks is funny, is incredibly shallow and grating.

steve grew up as a challenging little shit, who was also very small and poor, and he did it in 1920′s-30′s brooklyn new york. he regularly got his ass kicked. tony stark is also challenging and provocative, he’s a shit stirrer, but he grew up rich as all fuck. no one was beating the piss out of him in a dirty alley. tony has grown up surrounded by sycophants, rich enough to get away with whatever amount of bad behavior he wants to pull; steve grew up poor and disabled in a society that openly advocated for the death and degradation of the weak and unfit. why the fuck would they enter a conversation the same way? why would they deliver a snappy retort the same way? natasha romanoff is a spy, she’s manipulative, she’s always watching to see how a joke lands, she’s always conscientiously tuning herself this way and that to get results. she doesn’t have the luxury of casual defiance, or unthinking obnoxiousness, or even standing by her principles and pissing off someone she hates. again, why would she be tossing off little asides the same as tony, or even the same as steve?

the princess bride is sincere, and the characters still banter in their own voices. fezzik is cautious and methodical, inigo is weary and incredulous, vizzini is desperate to impress everyone with his own intelligence and in so doing often sounds like a complete twerp, buttercup is so incredibly pissed off she doesn’t have any brain cells to spare for joking around, and westley is here to ruin everyone’s day. and it works! the characters have great banter because they’re striking sparks off each other, not meshing like identical cogs in a machine.

humor is about subverting expectations, about breaking up patterns, about confrontation and absurdity. you can’t get that from a blandly uniform pulp.

[blueflameking]

I have never heard anyone summarize Westley’s character so perfectly in a single line

[macabre-muses]

truly wonderful to see people call anakin "disability coded" when he is very very explicitely disabled. like i get what you mean. but he is actually disabled. he doesn't have an arm. why do people forget he doesn't have an arm. honestly it's a shame how his physical disability isn't really considered in fandom conversations around him. that's also why I really fw brotherhood and the wild space novel. they finally give some insight as to how he felt about losing a limb, and also what that meant for him considering possible negative jedi views about having a mechanical arm and a bit on how he recovered. I can't speak for people with that kind of disability but I wish that anakin's mechanical arm wasn't just treated in a "oh! too bad he lost an arm! well he can just get an exactly identical one except now he wears a cool glove and nothing else changed!" way cause it definitely did impact his character a lot. same for luke in many ways. I get where people are coming from and I don't mean this maliciously at all but also they ARE disabled people forget that a lot.

[anaxaphronon]

really difficult to convey to some people that you are absolutely allowed to dislike a character, but you should also pay attention to and understand why the POC character or woman is disproportionately targeted by fandom (for, often, innocuous reasons)

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

honestly yall just gotta be comfortable reading books that make you feel stupid

[myfandomrambles]

Started you weren't meant to be human! Its really going headfirst! Having a terrible time! Exactly what I signed up for! :D

[wrigglewormz]

I'm perfectly fine with people criticizing my favorite stories and frequently do it myself but can you stop being so boring about it

[wrigglewormz]

"This scene made me so uncomfortable" given the subject matter, it would be really, really badly written if it wasn't.

[jamiemoonymarks]

Normalize leaving unhinged comments on ao3 fics you like. I'm tired of being the only one brave enough to write "I am chewing on this fic" in the comment section. Be weird. Authors will love you for it

[fieldbears]

If I didn't want readers to chew on it, I wouldn't have spent all that time on the mouthfeel

[penny-anna]

being a 60s Dr Who fan is so hard. like hello I'm writing a fanfiction to explore this character's trauma. Yeah his trauma from when he was imprisoned on Mechanus. From when he was imprisoned on Mechanus by the Mechanoids. Stop laughing at him.

[penny-anna]

& his fellow companion who has trauma from being held hostage by whatever this thing is

[73chn1c0l0rr3v3l]

#When you try to share your trauma at the companion meet up but all your traumatic stories sound like something from 60s scifi [sad face emoji] #steven @being-of-rain

[sunsetconcert]

theres a billion funny things about sophie and nates relationship but the best one is literally the first scene they share

because nate is SO REPRESSED that for the entire first season his entire background is Dead Son, Bitter Alcoholic, and Worked At IYS. you dont even find out about his wife until the season finale. this man is not giving ANYTHING away. you learn more about *elliot goddamn spencer* than nate in season 1, and elliot is a fucking government black ops spook

but then in the first episode hes like "we need a new face, we need somebody the mark doesnt know... omg lets go get sophie <3 shes so wonderful and amazing shes the best criminal youve ever seen" just bragging about his Not-Wife to anybody who will listen

and sophies like No No I'm Honest Now

and nate says I'm Not

and sophie has this little headtilt of like. holy shit he wants to break the law i HAVE to fuck him now. and the conversation goes on and nate asks if shes in and sophies head fucking VIBRATES from how hard shes nodding her agreement

and meanwhile parker hardison and elliot have to pretend theyre not watching their boss have weird grifter mindgame sex in a dirty alleyway

[ilynpilled]

a character being a perpetrator does not negate their victimhood and neither does their victimhood negate being a perpetrator. u can accept and reckon w both dimensions in ur analysis

[ilynpilled]

there is nothing morally purifying about suffering or victimhood, it is not something that inculcates “goodness.”

one’s character has no impact on whether they were/are a victim or not, victim status is not something that is only afforded to the palatable.

it also does not = absolution.

[ilynpilled]

ppl cant handle this in cartoons made for teenagers lets not get ahead of ourselves

[jae-writes-stuff]

Ruby Sunday: watches the man who traumatized her get a happy ending while being gaslit and abandoned by her best friend, but it's all okay in the end because she has a baby brother to take care of.

Belinda Chandra: starts off strong-willed, ready to challenge the Doctor on his bullshit, but completely loses it over the course of the series to the point where she barely blinks an eye at the man she said was "dangerous" torturing a man, then ends up locked in a box for most of the finale and eventually has her entire life rewritten to become a single mother.

The Rani: entire plan revolves around the fact that she's mad that Time Lords can't have babies anymore.

Anita: shows up six months pregnant because she was so broken-hearted by finding the Doctor with someone else that she hooked up with the first guy she met.

Kate Stewart: nearly loses her goddamn mind because her boyfriend that randomly spawned into existence died.

And people actually think that RTD would do a better job writing the 13th Doctor than Chibnall did?

[atreeinthemoonlight]

Don’t tell me "it’s all just a choice" They had the choice, and they chose not to let Kate shine.And don’t tell me "they’re just fictional characters, why take it so seriously" Even with fictional characters at their mercy, they still won’t write Kate as truly capable. And don’t feel offended, I didn’t mention any of you at any point. Don’t feel that just because you’ve accepted the writers’ choices, your own choices are being disrespected, or that those who have an issue with it are coming after you personally.

A female leader who’s held a high position for years can only have a personal life in shambles. She can only bury herself in work to an obsessive degree, unable to break free. A woman who is fully, healthily invested in her work — who faces difficulties and crises with resilience, refusal to give up, calm composure, and effortless grace, retire with honor after success, or continue to contribute from within her role — could never exist.

Literature is all made up anyway, so why won’t they ever write a woman like that? They simply don’t believe such a female leader could exist, even in their wildest imagination.On top of that, they seem unwilling to let a charismatic supporting character naturally and effortlessly outshine the leads.They don’t create real work scenes for Kate, instead they use her as filler to pad out the runtime, and exiling her into a trendy "older woman, younger man" romance instead.

The writers lack the skill and are severely deficient in imagination and patience, to the point of falling into a fixed pattern of dependency. When there’s a ready-made, assembly-line template they can just copy, saving time and effort, why would anyone put in the work to actually craft a proper storyline for Kate?

And that’s still the better scenario. What’s worse is that they are unwilling to portray such a female leader as an inspiring icon worth emulating and following, whether for women in real life or for female characters within the story, they just want to watch her keep falling. They aren’t drawn to emotions that are positive, uplifting, or inspiring. What they seem to want is sympathy, sorrow, and pity.

In their eyes, is Kate simply not worthy of being that kind of radiant, accomplished woman? Are they not willing to allow such a woman to exist in television? What kind of people are the ones controlling the high ground of cultural and value output these days🙄

[thenotoriousscuttlecliff]

Still tired of people saying companions during RTD1 having relatives showed they have life beyond the Doctor. Rose didn't have a life beyond the Doctor. She had a life before the Doctor and Jackie was living proof of that and it is even brought up that once Jackie is gone Rose would have no reason to ever come home again.

Amy, Rory, Clara, and Bill all had actively come lives, they had jobs, hung out with friends, went on dates, Bill even had to put her foot down once to tell the Doctor when he was being too clingy that there were parts of her life he just wasn't involved in. We might not have seen their relatives regularly, but we regularly saw them living lives away from the Doctor and often how difficult it could be to live such lives while knowing the Doctor (like how you can't go on a date without the risk of the Pope or UN Secretary General showing up).