#*mine: meta

[partiallypearl]

hi hello. i’m back to cornplate aka do what i do best which is to complain about the fashion and hairstyle choices on cobra kai. my victim today? samantha larusso step to the stand again please.

sam is generally one of my biggest offenders, since the costuming team seems to have either forgotten she is a teenager or they sincerely struggled to adapt to mary’s body type and potentially her weight gain due to her diabetes. (WHICH!! to make it clear, i am not shaming mary in anyway and will not tolerate it on this post please and thank you.)

so as a result, a lot of sam’s outfits are cute, but they read as a kid playing dress up in adult clothes on the best of days or flatout childish on others. the outfit im scrutinizing today reads more like the first than the latter. so welcome sam in S5EPS8/9, this is your day on trial.

this outfit honestly isn’t that bad. sam’s wearing a rebecca taylor pink wrap dress that originally retailed for about $390 based on what i found thru google, and a pair of pink chuck taylors that are clearly every day shoes. it’s an outfit which you would expect a teenage girl to wear, especially to a house party. i think honestly, it fits sam, especially where she is in her storyline thus far.

my biggest grievance is that it looks like she’s trying to emulate her mother (which again, fits for who sam is rn) and that her hair in this scene makes me want to commit crimes. multiple.

so lets start with what is in my opinion, the worst offence. her hair.

mary mouser has gorgeous curls. if i were to type them, i’d say they fall between 2b and 3a, with some curls falling closer to the former than the latter as shown in the below images.

you can see that she has a mostly wavy curl pattern but there’s a few curls which imo fall more into a ringlet shape, especially in the picture on the left where her hair is a shorter length. for whatever godforsaken reason, for whatever crimes against diet coke that mary committed, they have her hair in this scene do the most odd bump? hump? idk what the hell it is.

it’s ugly and i hate it. it seems like it calms down thru the scene as she walks into the diaz-lawrence apartment, but mary’s hair in this scene is just… mind boggling.

like what is happening here. continuity be damned i guess.

so pearl, you may be asking, what would you do to sam’s hair in this episode? GREAT QUESTION!

i'd go for an updo to counteract the casualness of the dress. something like the following images (a mix of hairstyles mary herself has done plus a few from pinterest)

any of these imo would be better than whatever they did to her hair in this ep. personally, i think the pigtails or space buns (either version) are my fav choice.

now onto the dress. again, it's not a bad choice. sam has worn wrap dresses before as evidenced multiple times in s1/s2 like here:

Post by @coldasyou · 9 images

💬 0  🔁 72  ❤️ 120 · Samantha LaRusso fashion appreciation

the wrap dress works for her. but i think it makes her look... how do i say this. like she's playing dress up in her mommy's clothes. this may be bc amanda also frequently wears wrap dresses as shown here

are they the same dress? no. but the similarities are there enough for me to feel meh about it.

so what would i have sam wearing? i'm glad you asked! going off the fact that season 5 of cobra kai takes place roughly summer 2019 i had to go look into my middle school pinterest boards to see what i feel like sam would have worn.

something flowy and still summery but more teen girl!

overall, of all the seasons, s5 actually has the least offensive sam outfits for me. it’s still fun to critique tho

[chevalier-tialys]

When you write Lee, how do you do his dialogue/internal monologue? I'm trying to write him, but I can't seem to get his voice right. Texan accent or no? And if yes, how do you convey that on the page? (a long answer would be great. the more help the better :))

Anon first of all you have to know that this ask is like a literal dream, I love when people ask about my writing process!

I totally get you about Lee’s voice! I was struggling with it too when I first tried to write HDM fic but eventually it became pretty natural as I got used to writing him. I wasn’t sure about what parts of HDM canon to use and which parts to alter, but since I wrote my first Lee fic around midway through the first season, I had the original trilogy, Episodes 4 and 5, and Once Upon a Time in the North. That last one has been the biggest help for when I need to get into Lee’s mindset at any time - it’s a novella and very Lee/Hester centric, and he’s 24 at that point so a lot closer to show!canon.

This gets pretty long, so the rest is under a cut :D

Thinking about his motivations kind of helped - I wrote the scene first, then the dialogue (in my first draft at least), so I had to get into his headspace more than his tone of speech. In both the books and the show, his #1 motivation is to help Lyra with her mission. He’s not sure what it is, and doesn’t really want to be involved in a war, but he doesn’t want to leave her helpless when it’s laid out to him that she’ll be in the thick of all the action.

Ergo, most of his thoughts are centered around his potential adopted kid.

Next, we can branch that out to his loyalty to his friends and loved ones - in the episode Armour, he heads for Trollesund to help Iorek, well, retrieve his armour. He’s a lot more outspoken and brash there than in Northern Lights but the same sentiments lie in that he wants to help. In NL, it’s stated that he was on some sort of expedition but got stranded there last-minute, but that could be to cover for wanting to free Iorek.

We’ve established two strong bonds with Lyra and Iorek; now we can go to Hester.

The thing about Lee is that he’s overwhelmingly happy with who he is as a person. At no point of time during canon does he have an identity crisis or major realisation of his character, and we can tell because he loves Hester completely without a doubt of her settled form. In NL, Lyra has a conversation with another minor character about settled daemons and what it means for people to be disappointed with them - it amounts to not being satisfied with your identity, and Lee exhibits the exact opposite of that for the most part.

I say ‘the most part’ because then we get to the new Extended Backstory(TM) in Theft and find out that at one point, he probably did have self-worth issues. I haven’t really explored that, but I think that the most likely aftermath of the childhood abuse meant that he went through a lot of introspective periods soon after and decided to shatter that cycle of abuse. Even if he doesn’t like people much, he treats them with a bare modicum of respect, and is generally completely in control of himself and his reactions to things that might aggravate him.

Meanwhile, he’s one of the few adults we see who talks with their daemon - and Lee does not stop talking with Hester, which is something unique to him alone. He’s incredibly close with Hester in a way we don’t see with other adults, and it’s incredibly refreshing to see how at ease with each other they are. Because, really, that’s just a shorthand for self-actualization, kind of.

With that, I’m going to conclude with my approach to his personality with my approach to his personality - I try to bridge the gap between the show and the books as a default, and OUaTitN is my go-to reference for that.

Now, I tend to lean towards book dialogue more than the show’s, because Philman’s got a good thing going with Lee’s turns of phrase and I adore his lines in TSK. As a whole, I like to approach his dialogue from a calm space - he’s not easily roused to fight, but ready to defend himself in a pinch - and that works with speech as much as with his general self.

For the way he sounds, I try to go with less emphasis on the phonetics of his speech and more the way his lines are written - they’re not formal, but they’re not supremely casual, and that’s something I originally borrowed from the books that keeps evolving with my own writing.

About the Texan accent - I occasionally shorten an “ng” ending with “n’” (ex. lootin’ instead of looting), and use “ain’t” every so often, but I don’t pay too much attention to making him sound specifically Texan so much as try to emulate those vibes. I do try to read my dialogue in such an accent, though, and if it doesn’t sound quite right, it’s up for a rewrite on occasion.

For reference, this is how I first wrote Lee, and my most recent fic - it’s definitely evolved with the added context I’ve got over the second season, with all the extra deep dives I’m taking with the characterisation and backstory interpretations.

Hopefully you found this helpful, and good luck with writing Lee!

[denkilightning]

how many students ua has??

this is just some random meta dont mind me lol info taken from bnha wiki btw 

so hero department - 2 classes, 20 people per year - 40 students x 3. 120 students.

gen ed - 3 classes, 18* people per year - 54 students x 3. 162 students.

support dep -  3 classes, 18 people per year - 54 students x 3. 162 students.

management dep -  3 classes, 18 people per year - 54 students x 3. 162 students.

per year its 202 kids. that’s 606 students, overall.

*yes, 18. hero dep has 20 people per class because of 2 recommended kids for class.

[stevebuckythyla]

I get why Bucky and his goats thing took off, but what I don't get is why Bucky and the Wakandan children thing didn't take off. I mean they are clearly right there playing in the tree next to Bucky watching him work. The Wakandans trust Bucky with their children's lives. How are more people not seeing how huge that is?

I suppose because when you see commentary like that regarding actual people it’s usually meta. And Bucky and his plums/goats is just something you can quickly shitpost about?? 

But I agree. It’s definitely a big deal that they trust Bucky around their children like that and I like to think it reminds him a bit of when he had his own younger sisters around. I think it’s equally important too that the children themselves feel comfortable around Bucky, enough so that they tease him and do things like making that immaculate manbun he had in BP.

[kylosrehn]

My unpopular opinion: daisy is kinda annoying

strongly agree | agree | neutral | disagree | strongly disagree

i’ve discussed this with several people actually. i absolutely loved her when she was first introduced as skye - she was funny and quirky, just an ordinary girl next to door looking to make a difference and find a place to belong. same with season 2. and then she went through terrigenesis and i was like, okay let’s see where this goes. she’s afraid of what she’s become, afraid to hurt people she loves and cares about. and then she slowly starts to accept this part of her, learns to get her powers under control and use them for good. she becomes the hero she talked about way back in 1x01. it was nice, it was interesting. i think the whole jiaying/afterlife thing was the first time i felt really and truly annoyed with her - but then again, you kind of have to forgive her, right? she finally found the biological family she’d been searching for all her life. jiaying accepted her and showed her how to hone her abilities and taught her that inhumans are not abominations. and on top of that, she’s her mother. of course she’s inclined to take her side, believe that shield is in the wrong (because okay sometimes they kind of are, but that’s beside the point). she realizes her mistake and corrects her error, helping to defeat jiaying. she’s a more wholesome character by the end of it all, accepting her heritage and coming to terms with who she is - and her taking on daisy as her name is symbolic of that. that’s fine. that’s to be expected. she’s still an agent of shield though - still very much the girl we met back in season 1, only with powers and familial closure.

BUT then in season 3 she starts…really rubbing me the wrong way. i don’t like how the show potrays her growth. i understand that she’s trying to help inhumans, wants them to find that self-love and acceptance within themselves that she herself did, wants them to see themselves as potential heroes and not monsters. but she takes the whole thing way too far and does some seriously questionable things even before being “hived.” but she’s potrayed as the hero of the story - possibly the most central character, right after coulson. so she can do no wrong, right? even if she uses questionable methods, it’s clearly “for the greater good”, and therefore justified. we’re encouraged to cheer for her, support her, even when she’s crossing the line - because hey, the end justifies the means. this is especially jarring in 3x14 where she believes she’s entitled to be the jury, judge and executioner against the watchdogs. mack calls her out on it and openly disagrees with her, but she goes through with it anyway - and drags fitz into it, too. you can see how uncomfortable he is with her blatant display of power and willingness to use violence as she sees fit, but he doesn’t say anything, mostly because he’s afraid to. i don’t know, it just feels so wrong to me, like they suddenly dived off and made her into a completely different character. i didn’t like it at all. and this is way before hive corrupts her. this is all daisy. 

and then it continues into season 4. all she does is hunt the watchdogs, sometimes going about it very carelessly. she believes she’s atoning for her sins that way, that she’s paying tribute to lincoln’s sacrifice in some way. the goth “kill me, i deserve it” vigilante thing completely doesn’t work for me. she just takes the whole thing to such extremes in s3/early s4 that it makes her borderline unlikeable. she gets all these hard edges, becomes so cynical and cold. i think of all the characters she makes the biggest leap from s1 and not necessarily in a good way. no other character feels this far removed from who they they were when they were first introduced. case in point: for some reason i will never understand, jemma is the one to hack the framework to allow for them to enter the framework. which irks me so much because it makes no narrative sense at all. first of all, how does jemma have the skills to perform such a (presumably complicated and complex) hack with no prior experience or engineering background (that we know of). second of all, it completely erases daisy’s pre-terrigenesis storyline of her being a hacker, a large and important chunk of her identity. you’ve literally got one right there, use her. that one fitz line is so meta, even if it’s spoken as a joke: “too much punching, not enough hacking.” she relies on her powers too much to use her wits sometimes and that bothers me. which is why i’m personally glad that (for some time anyway) she didn’t have her powers in the framework and had to resort to actually figuring things out and using the skills she previously acquired as a spy and hacker rather than just mindlessly quaking every obstacle she’s faced with.

it’s gotten better now since we left the watchdogs storyline behind halfway through s4, but i don’t know, personally i feel jaded. and it’s sad because skye was my favourite character, and now sometimes it’s hard for me to be excited about daisy. i know this is so unpopular because the majority of the fandom loves her development and yeah, personal growth is important, but. the execution of it really rubs me the wrong way and yeah.

tl;dr: yep, i totally agree with you

[partiallypearl]

hi hello. i decided to torture myself emotionally and rewatch s4 ep8 of cobra kai and once again found myself sighing in distaste at sam and tory’s prom outfits.

now to the credit of the show and the costume designers/costuming team, i do think their outfits are cute! they follow the narrative that both girls are in, and how they are viewed by the audience and the people around them in universe.

sam’s dress, which btw retailed for $500, in my opinion looks like what a child would imagine wearing to prom. which. considering how infantilized sam is in the show is fitting.

it appears to be slightly tailored and hemmed in the show - most likely because of the fight sequence that occurs later in the episode but it’s virtually the same dress otherwise

now do i think this dress fits sam’s aesthetic and style? yes. it’s more juvenile than the other dresses we see the female characters wearing in this episode (and the show overall in my opinion.)

i mean for christ’s sake, it has bows on the shoulders.

it fits the image that the larussos want for their daughter, this sweet docile girl who isn’t purposefully trying to start fights and antagonize the girl who assaulted her the previous school year.

but is it sam? i don’t know. i think sam’s the kind of girl who has had her prom and her graduation and wedding dresses picked out since she was a little girl. she’s the kind of girl that would be incredibly excited and happy about those events.

but i think we can all agree that this bubblegum pink dress, for a lack of better words, doesn’t fit her. at least not at the moment in her life she’s in.

so pearl? you may be asking, what would you choose as sam’s prom dress?

i’m glad you asked!

i think for starters i would go with a silhouette that would be more flattering for mary. love her dearly, but it’s well known that she is short. 5’3 according to google. the dress she’s in in my opinion makes her look short.

instead i’d go with a more a-line style. and tying into the fact that the larussos appear to be stuck in the past, i’d go for a late 90s/early 2000s style dress, something ala this:

it still is pink, which effectively is sam’s signature color, but it’s more elongated which will make sam not look so short and childish. and the 90s reference ties in!

plus imo, it’s almost reminiscent of daniel’s iconic blue suit in the karate kid 2.

like yeah. that’s the larusso fam’s love for pastel formalwear.

now if sam’s the madonna of this equation (which is fitting considering her east coast italian heritage), then tory is the whore. said with all love.

i mean. she shows up to junior prom is what i can only describe as a middle aged man’s wet dream. 80s style leopard (or is that cheetah? someone with better animal print knowledge than me, feel free to chime in) print, with the bounciest 80s style curls i’ve seen since the Golden Girls went off air.

i’m honestly surprised that she didn’t get dress coded immediately. i wore a dress very similar to sam’s dress to my gr 9 graduation (minus the bows unfortunately that would have made it A LOT cuter) and i was dress coded almost immediately and had to wear my leather jacket for the rest of the night.

but hey. maybe cali’s more relaxed than alberta about teenage girls having cleavage and high slits at their junior prom.

again, i think tory’s dress fits her narrative in the show perfectly. she is effectively becoming one of silver’s best students and thus is finding herself under his attention and eyes more frequently. it makes sense that her prom outfit would evoke him.

but is it tory? i don’t know. i think the argument could be made that it is. from her first appearance on the show, it’s been clear to audiences, that we the viewers (and more specifically the teenage boy viewers and fans of the show) are meant to view tory as being hot.

she’s the hot, mysterious violent girl in comparison to sam’s sweet girl next door.

and this outfit definitely symbolizes that.

but what would i have tory in? great question! i have two options.

the first is based on something that we learned about tory this season (and that gets further elaborated on in s6), that she loves mermaids, even to the point of playing one at a birthday party princess company.

now is the mermaid a clear knockoff of ariel? uh duh.

but i think it gives good symbolism for who tory is and what she wants from life.

she wants to escape the systemic poverty that she’s lived in, she wants to escape the feeling of not being good enough, of not being able to sustain her family, of being a girl from the “wrong side of the neighborhood”

she wants as ariel herself so eloquently put it to, be part of that world (world in this instance being the affluence she sees around her, and a world where her mother’s illness hasn’t taken over her life)

but that’s a lot even for our favourite karate soap opera, so instead i’ve looked at some dresses that popped up when i searched up ariel inspired prom dresses

i think any variation of these three would have been stunning on peyton, and paired with a seashell headband or an elaborate hairdo? i think it would have been everything out of tory’s mermaid dreams.

but alas in my pinteresting, i forgot that this is cobra kai. and we have characters shoved into certain boxes for a reason. so. if we do want to continue with the throughline of tory being the whore to sam’s madonna, i decided to go for what i felt was a more… age appropriate look.

still “sexy”, still very red which means it’s very cobra kai coded, but significantly more feminine and more school appropriate. her chances of getting dress coded in either of these dresses goes down to like 80% (albeit the dress on the right would probably be a no based on the spaghetti straps and the higher slit)

but yeah, what do you guys think of tory and sam’s prom dresses? about their narrative purposes? hell, about the choice from tory (and robby) to go to prom at all? yes it’s mostly silver’s doing, but they decide to actually go rather than to just take the money and car and lie about going. which is probably what i would have done in their shoes. their very expensive uncomfortable looking shoes.

alright enough cornplating, i’m gonna continue to rewatch and cry a little everytime miguel gets hurt.

[partiallypearl]

i think about frank zhang and his family and how shen lun fled camp jupiter to canada and the historical context behind it all and i shiver.

shen and his family, i imagine that they would have immigrated during the gold rush (after the san Francisco earthquake) which would be right during the chinese head tax

and the railway was constructed from 1881-1885, and that's when the government first started the head tax

so reasonably his family could have immigrated to canada during that time period escaping cj, and his relatives could have either been gold miners or railway workers

they would have attempted to bring more family members from china over only to be blocked by the head tax and the raising of the price

[partiallypearl]

i think of all the love interests on the show, camille has the most vitriol shown towards her. and some of it i think is warranted, the fact that she continues to hit and throw things at logan, and he tells her to stop and she does not. that is unacceptable behaviour.

on the other hand, you have people who hate her because she’s annoying and talks to much, but she’s a teenage girl? they are known for doing that lol.

and it's just fascinating that she's the love interest who gets the most vitriol.