I may be starting to get a weeeee bit annoyed with people on the r/Hermitcraft subreddit.
Like, when I made the meme that is still getting an insane amount of notes (holy crap thank you so much I am super flattered), it was understandable that people didn't know what it was in reference to. I went, "ah, probably should have linked Cleo's vid!" and lived and learned, you know?
But Cleo's video has been out for a week. It's only twenty minutes long, and the moment when they and Grian meet up is five minutes into the video.
And like. Grian seems to really want people to see his friends' videos? Like when Gem's snail arrived, he deliberately left that plot thread dangling to be answered in Gem's video. The guy has made an eight hour video showing off the other Hermits' bases. I also highly suspect that one reason Grian is one of the last people to upload collab videos he's in is because his higher subscriber count means his video will automatically racket up to the top of the recommended page, and he wants his friends' videos to get a head start on him.
So the fact that there's this significant amount of Grian fans who won't even watch five minutes of someone else's video to get an answer that Grian left hanging is ... it's just super disappointing, ngl.
And just. Don't even get me started on that "continuity error" comment. I actually had a pretty long response to that on reddit. TL;DR: it's not a continuity error because there's perfect continuity as long as you watch Cleo's video.
Grian does not have to fill in the gaps, that's not his responsibility, nor should it be. The point of a series like Hermitcraft is that you get multiple perspectives. If you're upset that one perspective doesn't show everything, then you shouldn't be watching SMPs.
Okay, so I was looking through some past documents and stuff and found this rant/book review, and I kind of want to share it but I have no idea how to tag it, so I probably just ... won't. I don't want to accidentally put it in the tag the fandom uses and make people who actually like the book/book series upset.
But if non-fans are curious about my thoughts on "Bully" by Penelope Douglas, here:
(I compare Bully to some other media that do the things it wants to do right, so beware spoilers for Poison Study and A Touch of Power by Maria Snyder, As If On Cue by Marisa Kanter, Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare, Ao Haru Ride/Blue Spring Ride, Hana Yori Dango/Boys Over Flowers, and possibly some other minor spoilery things I'm forgetting. Also major spoilers for Bully itself.)
The other day I was going through my “borrowed” smart tag on the reading app Libby, which automatically tags any ebooks or audio books that you borrow from your library using the app. My goal was to add some manual tags to books I hadn’t bothered to tag before, so I could better find and reread books I liked and give myself reminders of what a book was about. Among the “borrowed” tag I found Bully by Penelope Douglas, with the manual tag “dnf” - “did not finish,” a tag used for books I disliked enough that I didn’t bother finishing them. I didn’t remember why I disliked it so much, so I figured, what would be the harm in trying to read it again to figure out why? I assumed that I would get to the part that got me to stop reading, stop reading again, and update the tags on the app so I would remember in the future. It was a reasonable assumption; I don’t usually hate-read something. If I don’t like it, I stop reading. As it turned out, though, this time Bully was an exception.
I got to the part where I stopped reading - when a cisgender heterosexual seventeen-year-old boy invades the girls’ locker room and it doesn’t end up with him getting suspended - and kept reading. I can’t tell you why. I think part of it was the mystery of why he was behaving like this that the book kept hinting at. Something changed the summer he visited his estranged father, and a nice, loyal friend had returned as a vicious bully. I think I had a suspicion that whatever the explanation was, it would be disappointing, but part of me still wanted to know. So I read on.
The book didn’t get better.
While Bully pretends to be set in our world and our time, with the main character talking about how she wants to go to Columbia, a character making weekend trips to Chicago, and a character driving a Mustang, I would argue that it is actually set in a dystopia. In Bully, the adult systems put in place to protect children either fail, are ignored by the narrative, or dismissed by the characters. Parents leave teenagers alone at home for every single weekend or even entire months on end. Loud parties keeping up the neighbors past midnight don’t have bystanders calling the cops, and the teenage girl next door is the only one who tries doing something about it. A teenage boy is able to use a key given by a teenage girl’s father while he was away to invade her home and terrorize her. When a teenage boy sexually assaults one of his classmates in public, it’s generally assumed that the girl he assaulted would get in trouble for retaliating with violence, not him for doing a literal crime in public view. And of course, the aforementioned instance of a teenage boy deciding to corner the girl he bullies in the locker room, while she’s changing, resulting in the school administration assuming they were having a romantic tryst and reprimanding the girl for it, and not taking action against the boy even after it was revealed it wasn’t what they had originally assumed.
In a book called Bully, none of the structures in place to prevent or stop bullying seem to exist. School staff are ignorant of it even when the entire student body knows about it. Parents assume their kids are still friends when they’ve had a hostile relationship for years. Supposed friends tell the victim of bullying that they should try to talk to their bully, because obviously they did something to make the bully hate them. Sexual assault, harassment, and even attempted rape do not get any response from anyone in a position of authority. An antagonist who illegally records people having sex and then uses a stolen phone to distribute the video to most of their high school classmates has no punishment from anyone in power, despite their own father being a police officer.
It’s a dystopia, and a bad one at that. Good dystopias tackle problems that exist in the real world, exaggerating them or taking them to their extremes. As a victim of bullying myself, this book didn’t feel like a critique of the systems, but rather seemed to imply that the systems were useless and shouldn’t be used. The cops won’t arrive in time to break up the party, so you may as well cut the power; you handled an attempted rape yourself, so there’s no need to report it to the cops; there’s no point in telling your dad that your childhood friend is now your tormentor; if the dean finds out you kicked a boy in the balls, you’ll get in trouble, so there’s no point in telling the staff that it was in retaliation for the boy groping you.
When I was in first and second grade, I had some pretty intense bullying happening from the boys in my classes. I didn’t tell my parents at first. After first grade, I begged my parents to put me in a different school, but they said I should try another year. In second grade, I finally caved; a boy I sat next to drew a picture of me falling off a building and blowing up, and I finally told someone. The response felt immediate and decisive. The boy got in trouble, my parents were furious, and I went to a different school for third grade. While the system did fail to notice what was happening by itself, actually stepping forward and pointing out what was happening let the system spring into action and protect me. The system isn’t perfect, but it’s there, and it helps.
A similar thing happened in seventh grade. After spending third through sixth grade at a private school, I had returned to public school, and a fellow student had decided, after finding out about my previously being in private school, to follow me around with her friends. I was freaked out and convinced that they were making fun of me. I still don’t know what their intentions actually were, but the fact was, I didn’t feel safe. I went to the school staff and explained the situation. They talked to the girl and she agreed to stop following me around. Just like that, I didn’t have someone with questionable intentions following me around, making me feel off-balance and uneasy. The system worked.
In Bully, the protagonist is a seventeen-year-old girl named Tate. Her former best friend, Jared, took a trip to visit his estranged father a couple years ago and came back mean. Like a switch flipped, the kind boy she loved became her worst enemy. He tormented her to the point where, in the opening scene, she’s reluctant to give up her keys because they’re a safety line so she can leave a party when she wants to, and he validates that reluctance by having one of his friends steal her keys and chuck them in a pool. Throughout the story, various people who know about Jared’s behavior toward her, including her grandmother and her best friend, try to encourage her to talk things out with him. He couldn’t have changed that much without something causing it, after all. Some characters, like Tate’s best friend and Jared’s best friend, even imply that Tate must have done something to make Jared act like this.
Spoilers: she didn’t. Jared’s behavior is a maladjusted trauma response where he’s displacing anger he feels toward his father and shoving it on Tate instead. Counseling would fix this, but no one suggests counseling to Jared. In the sequel which goes over the events from Jared’s point of view, we find out that counseling was offered to him, but he refused. Given the choice between counseling or visiting his abusive, exploitative father in prison every weekend, he takes forced visits to the father who traumatized him over talking to a professional about his feelings.
There’s a weird trend in Tate and Jared’s stories where people assume they should just talk things out with their tormentors. In Tate’s story, it’s people telling her she should give Jared yet another chance. In Jared’s story, you get the system being actively stupid. Jared’s dad is abusive, and one day after his dad hurt his half-brother, Jared beat him up. The cops came and as punishment, Jared needed to either go to counseling or visit his abusive dad in prison every weekend - as if those two things are in any way comparable. The system seems to think that talking things over with his dad will help them get to some understanding, but this doesn’t remotely reflect the reality of how abusers function nor the reality of the real world system this is supposed to be a fictionalized version of. In the story, the system has documented proof that Jared’s father abused him - Jared literally has the scars to prove it. In the real world, child protective services would be doing everything in their power to keep Jared’s dad away from him, but instead the legal system has decided that the correct thing to do is for Jared to talk things out with the man responsible for his trauma.
The worst part is, in Tate’s case, this “just talk things out” attitude actually yields results. She had to get aggressive to get the information out of Jared - after all, this is a guy who’d rather deal with his abusive father than sit in a counselor’s office one a week - but she is able to get him to admit what’s happening. Once he admits it out loud, Jared is forced to admit it’s not Tate he’s angry at, that bullying her just gave him a sense of power when he felt powerless, and that it was an effective way to be angry at her but still stay important to her. With that out of the way, our couple can finally get together.
This is stupid.
I had a huge falling out with my high school best friend. It started as us just growing apart, but I was determined to save our friendship. She became closer and closer to her girlfriend, who had nothing in common with me and seemed to not like me, and any attempts I made to befriend her girlfriend failed. Our relationship kept getting warning signs that something was going very wrong, and I kept trying anyway. My friend didn’t invite me to her new apartment; I let her know I felt bad I hadn’t been invited yet, and she gave me an invitation. On the way a mutual friend made an off-hand comment about how she’d been there many times. In a chat between my friend, her girlfriend, our mutual friend, and me, we started speculating on future weddings and my friend’s girlfriend made a passive-aggressive comment about “why do you think you’ll be at [mutual friend]’s wedding?” Our mutual friend defended me, but my friend stayed silent even though her girlfriend had just implied the friend I’d had since middle school (this happened after college) wouldn’t stay my friend. (Spoilers: she has. It’s been years since that conversation, and my mutual friend and my ex-best friend grew apart, but she and I didn’t.) All of my attempts to save this friendship probably only made the situation worse. The final “break up” between my ex-best friend and me was dramatic, especially on my end. I had gone into that discussion thinking we were finally ironing out the issues in our friendship, but my ex-best friend had gone in knowing she was going to formally end our friendship. It hurt. My ex-best friend justified ending our friendship by targeting the two things in my life I was most insecure about at the time - my job and my single status - and the only reason it didn’t deal a significant blow to my self esteem is that I knew her well enough to know she was lying. The real reason - one she never admitted to - was that for whatever reason, she thought she needed to choose between her girlfriend and me, and she picked her girlfriend. Saying that would make her sound like a jerk, though, so she framed it instead as a failure on my part. Even though I know she was just saying it to make herself feel better, it’s something I don’t think I’ll ever forgive her for.
If I had just let us grow apart, let her change into a person who wouldn’t be my friend, let us go our separate ways - then that epic friend “break up” wouldn’t have happened. I wouldn’t have spent a ton of my time and energy trying to fix something that was already damaged beyond repair. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that after our “break up” suddenly my life took a change for the better - I got new career goals, briefly got a girlfriend of my own, went back to school for a different career path, got a job I liked a lot better than my old one, and reconnected with friends I’d been neglecting who were far more supportive and generally more fun to talk to. I had been wasting my time on a doomed friendship, and without it weighing me down, all of a sudden I had a bunch of energy for things that made me feel good about myself.
So when, in Bully, Tate is told from various sources to give Jared a chance, despite the fact he had already crossed lines my ex-best friend had never crossed, it seems ill-advised, to say the least. Jared has, in many ways, gone past the point of no return. The book starts with Tate having a ton of anxiety over going to a party and Jared showing the audience that every bit of anxiety she had was justified. Late in the book, Jared and Tate go to a party at the same house, this time as a couple, and upon crossing the threshold Tate freezes. Even if he never intended it, Jared gave Tate trauma, and the two of them never really address that. Toward the end of the book he even gives her a cute charm bracelet with her safety nets as charms, like keys and a cellphone. It’s supposed to be him acknowledging he messed up, I suppose, but it seems hollow at best and reminiscent of abusers at worst - yes, I hurt you, but here, have a gift instead of an actual apology and a genuine attempt to make myself a better person.
There are pieces of fiction out there that do a good job of dealing with some of the topics that Bully tries to handle, and male characters struggling with internal issues and taking it out on their loved ones is one such topic. In Blue Spring Ride (also known by its Japanese name, Ao Haru Ride), the love interest pushes away the protagonist out of grief and survivor’s guilt, despite being in love with her. The problem isn’t solved by her discovering the source of his change of personality; that only marks the beginning of his process of healing. He takes steps, slowly but surely, to get better. Even then, he makes mistakes which further push away the protagonist, and by the time he’s ready to start a relationship, she’s moved on (albeit temporarily) to dating a really nice guy. They’re still friends, she’s still there for him and he for her, but his pushing her away had actual consequences, which further the plot and start up a new chapter of his character arc. Another example is Hana Yori Dango, which like Blue Spring Ride started as a manga, but while Blue Spring Ride got a season of an animated adaptation, Hana Yori Dango got a few seasons of a live-action Japanese drama and later an adaptation into a Korean drama, where it goes by its English translation of Boys Over Flowers. I’m most familiar with the Japanese drama, so that’s what I’ll be referring to. Like in Bully, Hana Yori Dango has a female protagonist who is bullied by the character who becomes her love interest. Unlike Bully, the consequences of that bullying end up factoring heavily into the plot. The systems that allow the bullying to happen are repeatedly exploited by antagonists, often as retaliation against the love interest who was the main driving force of those systems before. The tools he used to hurt the protagonist become an antagonistic force themselves, and we learn that even before his change of heart the system had escaped his control. Like Jared, he did not intend for sexual assault to be a part of the bullying, and like Jared, is upset to realize that some people decided to take it that far. The difference is, Hana Yori Dango deals with his growth as a person and his attempts to dismantle systems that he’s built in order to protect the people he cares about. No such thing happens with Jared. The closest thing is Jared’s ex-“not a girlfriend” tormenting Tate out of jealousy, and that’s framed as her being jealous and mean, not the consequences of Jared’s actions catching up with him.
Bully actually has a problem with women on a whole; Tate is, according to Jared, different from other girls, which makes her special and superior to them. All other girls are desperate for male attention, vapid, or both. Even Tate’s best friend’s characterization suffers for the sake of injecting artificial drama. When she finds out her boyfriend of several years is cheating on her, she starts hooking up with Jared to make her ex jealous - without telling Tate that’s what she’s doing. From Tate’s point of view, Jared is using her best friend to get at her (which she overhears him admitting to), and her best friend is choosing Jared over her and lying to her about their involvement. Her friend even gets passive-aggressive about Tate insulting Jared, acting like she’s insulting her by association. Piper, Jared’s non-girlfriend, has no motivation other than having sex with Jared and staking her claim on him. As Tate points out, she doesn’t know even basic information about Jared, like his favorite color. She’s willing to break the law in order to get revenge on Tate for getting together with Jared, having someone record the two of them having sex and then texting the video from Jared’s stolen cell phone, so it looked like it was him who did it. She doesn’t even silence his phone, leaving it to be found by its distinctive ringtone in her locker. (She does not get punished for this in any meaningful way, by the way). The girls in the locker room that Jared invades just let him shoo them out, then later take pictures of Tate in a towel and spread them around school. No girls stand up for Tate, even her best friend, and the only additional friends she makes along the way are boys - including the guy who grabbed her butt and made lewd comments about her. Despite Jared and his best friend being the most promiscuous characters in the book, it’s Piper and the other background female characters who are called “sluts” or “slutty”, never Jared or his best friend.
Again, it’s easy to compare this to Blue Spring Ride. While Blue Spring Ride’s protagonist is shunned by other girls for being “too cute”, with them convinced she’s looking and behaving a certain way to get attention from boys, and even has a former friend abandoning her because they were afraid she would pursue the boy they liked, the narrative questions this. The protagonist, after changing to be as “uncute” as possible, sees her new friends giving a different girl grief for the same thing she used to be bullied for, and she stands up to them even though it costs her their friendship. She even befriends the girl they had been bullying. When she and her new friend realize they like the same boy, instead of tearing each other down they are honest with each other and stay friends.
Another example that is an example of things Bully tries to do which handles them better is Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare. Like Tate and Jared, Beatrice and Benedick have a history. Like Tate and Jared, that relationship turned sour. Like Tate and Jared, they trade barbs and say they don’t like each other, even though they actually do. Unlike Tate and Jared, the responsibility for reconciliation does not fall on the shoulders of one party. No one tells Beatrice to give Benedick another chance, nor do they try to tell Benedick to ease up on Beatrice. Their friends and family, realizing the two of them actually have feelings for each other, work together to trick both of them into thinking the other is pining for them. Unlike Tate and Jared, Benedick also has to deal with what is implied to be the reason things turned sour between them - his “bros before hoes” attitude. When Beatrice’s cousin is unjustly publicly humiliated and disgraced, Benedick is forced to admit his friends were in the wrong, and not only helps come up with a plan to make things right, but also agrees to duel them on Beatrice’s behalf. It shows a degree of character growth that Jared never does.
I think what Bully really misses the mark on is that it wants to have the childhood best friend trope and the enemies to lovers trope, but it doesn’t understand either one and so neither is executed very well.
Enemies to lovers, when pulled off well, has the two characters starting from stances opposed to each other and throughout the book circumstances cause them to sympathize with the other and find common ground. A good example of this is A Touch of Power by Maria V. Snyder. In that story, a plague broke out that healers couldn’t heal, and Prince Ryne accused the healers of causing the plague themselves. As a result, healers are very rare, and when found, they’re put to death. Avry is a healer who has survived by being constantly on the move, but this time she stayed too long and got caught. A man called Kerrick rescues her, but not without a reason: he wants her to heal Ryne, who is sick with the plague. Avry refuses to help, both because she blames Ryne for the deaths of her fellow healers and also because she knows healing the plague will kill her. The book follows them as Kerrick tries to persuade her, often being rough and rude about it. From his perspective, Ryne is the only one who can stop a tyrant that threatens everyone. Over the course of the story, Avry comes to see Kerrick’s side, and she does eventually heal Ryne – and Kerrick is horrified when he finds out that the action will kill her. Another example comes from another Maria V Snyder book, Poison Study. Yelena is secretly a mage, while Valek is well-known as a mage-killer. He’s also the one training her on how to detect poisons, a job that she was forced into as punishment for a crime. Over the course of the story, Valek learns more about Yelena and her story, and she discovers more about him. As it turns out, the two have values that aren’t as opposed as they first thought, with Yelena helping Valek save the commander he serves and Valek helping Yelena find justice. Both A Touch of Power and Poison Study are good examples of enemies falling in love by finding common ground between them, including clearing up misunderstandings, admitting mistakes, and coming together to work toward a common goal. For a non-Maria V Snyder example, As If On Cue by Marisa Kanter is a story about a couple who grew up together, but their friendship turned to rivalry because protagonist Natalie feels like love interest Reid stole away her father’s attention. The two are forced to find common ground between their extracurricular activities because of limited funding. Natalie later finds out that the interest Reid has in music started because he wanted to spend more time with her, and he relies on her father’s support because his own family doesn’t support him. Meanwhile, Reid realizes how hurt Natalie has been by the situation and does his best to remedy it. Again, common ground.
Bully does not have that. There is no common ground that can be found between Tate and Jared; Jared was lashing out, so he was in the wrong, and rather than working toward forgiveness it is up to Tate to trust that he is “fixed” by his confession and forgive him. Penelope Douglas wants us to believe that Jared was covering for her at certain points, like telling the dean that his friend tripped, but that’s a lie. His friend assaulted Tate; any reasonable adult wouldn’t blame her for defending herself, and even an unreasonable adult would need to get both Tate and Jared’s friend in trouble unless they wanted a lawsuit. The only “redemptive” moments Jared has are all like this - his invasion of the locker room is okay because he defused rumors that he and Tate were having sex there, he tells her father about the situation with the video of him and Tate having sex, he didn’t actually sleep with Tate’s best friend and was just helping her make her boyfriend jealous, etc. It is an incredibly low bar, but we’re expected to take these actions as equivalent to, say, Valek refusing to carry out an order to execute Yelena from the man he swore loyalty to, or Kerrick’s despair when he realizes Avry sacrificed herself, or Benedick challenging his friend to a duel for what they did to Beatrice’s cousin.
As for the childhood friends trope, it feels like in a lot of ways it doesn’t even factor into Bully. A lot of childhood friend stories deal with the friends having to overcome the status quo of their friendship in some way, or alternatively, reconciling after something pulls them apart. In We Can’t Keep Meeting Like This by Rachel Lynn Solomon, the first attempt the love interest makes to confess his feelings fails because the protagonist assumed the flashy confession he was showing off was for someone else, as she is familiar with his past of doing similar confessions to people he has a crush on. In the anime/manga Tomo-chan Is A Girl, the protagonist struggles to get her childhood friend to see her as something other than “one of the boys.” She is trying to break the status quo. Childhood Friend Complex is a webcomic where the lead couple are in denial about their feelings for each other because they grew up together, even as they are obviously attracted to each other; they don’t want to admit the status quo between them has changed. Omega Complex is a webcomic where alpha-beta-omega dynamics complicate the situation of the main couple; the love interest had past trauma with omegas, so when the protagonist discovers he’s an omega, he goes to great lengths to hide it. He is essentially trying to pretend the status quo is still in place when it’s not, leading to him avoiding and lying to the love interest. The childhood friends genre is all about fighting against the status quo, or the status quo getting in the way of the main couple getting together. There are some examples where the status quo is changed by one part of the couple leaving for a period of time and returning noticeably more attractive, but that, too, is a kind of threat to the status quo. Another alternative way of the childhood friend trope manifesting is when circumstances shift their dynamic from friends to rivals or even enemies, such as in As If On Cue, but those stories aren’t usually advertised as friends-to lovers. As If On Cue’s description on Libby starts with a quote from Rachel Lynn Solomon calling it “enemies-to-lovers rom-com.”
In Bully, the status quo of them being friends was very much an illusion, one that neither seems interested in maintaining. Jared admits he basically fell in love at first sight, and Tate freely admits that she was in love with him before he changed. Throughout the book, it’s obvious that they’re both attracted to each other. Even when they’re enemies, Jared tries to coerce her into giving him a lapdance, and a good portion of his “pranks” seem to be about sabotaging her love life with other guys. Them being friends in the past creates no obstacle at all for them falling in love; if anything, it helps it, because it is constantly used by various characters and seemingly by the narrative itself to remind us that Jared does care for Tate, and that his change to an enemy is strange. Their past as friends has no negative impact on their ability to become lovers. Their reconciliation is only possible because of their past as friends. As a friends-to-lovers trope, this fails because the status quo is not an obstacle at all.
Ultimately, Bully is a story that doesn’t know what it wants to be, and so it just falls flat on all counts. It wants to be set in a high school, but also wants its protagonists to live independently without parental interference. It wants its characters to be teenagers, but also be able to have sex without parents getting in the way, drink without any adults objecting, and bully people without any school staff interfering. It wants to be enemies-to-lovers without the enemies finding common ground. It wants to be friends-to-lovers without the status quo getting in the way. It wants to have a bully as the love interest but doesn’t want to deal with the topic of bullying in any significant way. It wants its protagonists to have trauma without the trauma actually needing any work to be fixed. It doesn’t know what it wants, which leads to it being an absolute trainwreck. A story needs to know what it is trying to accomplish if it has any hope of being good, but Bully doesn’t. The only thing it seems to know it wants is for Tate and Jared to get together - and judging by reviews for other books in the series, that desire doesn’t even stick around. It’s entirely uninterested in the story it’s trying to tell, so it ends up feeling hollow and fake.
I started rereading on of my favorite HTTYD fics from back when I was in the fandom, and while reading it's been fun, it's also just. Reminded me of how frustrating the HTTYD fandom was. And since I'm sick and thus my brain is foggy, what better time to rant about it?
Seriously, at one point the rampant Heather hate had me like. Analyzing fan reaction to female characters just to figure out wtf was going on. Like, the spinoff shows sucked in a lot of ways (RTTE especially), but I would argue that Heather was one of the good things that came from them. But no, according to the fandom, she's evil and/or a Mary Sue and/or [insert other criticism here].
Which ... can I just say, those attempts to analyze fan-behavior toward female characters made me very cynical towards most depictions of female characters in media. One of the conclusions I came to, iirc, was that media underrepresents female characters so often that in certain circumstances, an additional female character is seen as a threat to other female characters' screentime. It also made me accutely aware of how more often than not, a piece of media will only have two female characters, and those two female characters will be polar opposites, even if they're best friends. Animorphs did it with Rachel and Cassie, who are best friends despite having nothing in common. ASoIaF did it with Arya and Sansa. (I actually tried to explain to a friend of mine who was an ASoIaF fan why the relationship between Arya and Sansa annoyed me and kind of failed, and I think this is part of it - I have seen this "two completely opposite female character" trope so many times that it's gotten annoying af.) Harry Potter sort of did it, with the three most major female characters each having a kind of trope associated with them which would put them in different social circles: the bookworm/nerd (Hermione), the jock/cool kid (Ginny), the weirdo/outcast (Luna). Like, female characters just .... aren't allowed to be similar, They aren't allowed to be in the same social circles, or have the same interests. And that's weird as fuck.
I seem to recall some serious negativity toward Valka, too, because how dare she abandon her family - never mind that she was only twenty at the time, the same age Hiccup was when he's running off because he finds the possibility of being chief. And her husband was ten years older, iirc, which never seemed to come up as a "wait what" point in the discussion.
As I've gotten further away from the fandom, I've started liking the storyline of HTTYD2 less, and think Valka's role in it is kind of weird, but that's from the perspective of it in terms of storytelling/theme/etc. If we're operating from inside the story and looking at Valka's actions, while they aren't great, they're not horrible either. She was just as isolated as Hiccup was, possibly even moreso, and despite being a pacifist she got married to the best dragon-fighter in the entire village, who was ten years older than her. She had a baby before she was old enough to legally drink in modern America.
If we accept that Hiccup, at fifteen, felt so out of place that he wanted to run away, why don't we accept that when Valka was carried off, it was reasonable for her to assume she shouldn't go back? Just because she had a child? A child that had an older, arguably more responsible, more respected adult still available as his other parent? The impression that I had with Valka is that she stayed away because she literally thought that was best for everyone, including Hiccup. She'd finally found a place where she felt like she could be herself, and it wasn't in Berk. I don't fault her for that (nor would I fault Hiccup and Stoick if they were mad that she left, which they weren't).
You also had people being saying things like "when you're young, you sympathize with Hiccup, when you become an adult you sympathize more with Stoick." Which, um. No. I'm in my mid-thirties now, I just rewatched the first movie because the fic got me feeling nostalgic, and I still don't think Stoick was in the right. Sympathetic? Sure. But the dude crosses some serious lines, and for all he says Hiccup never listens, the worst non-listener in the entire franchise is him.
I mean, let's just take a moment to review, shall we? Your son, who last night was talking about how he's a born dragon-killer, comes home from who knows where and you tell him, "You get your wish. Dragon training. You start in the morning." Your son then tries to say that no, he doesn't want to fight dragons. He says he won't, he says he can't. Instead of thinking this is weird, you ... I guess assume he's joking? And you press on. Your son says stuff like "Can you not hear me?" and "this conversation is feeling very one-sided," but you press on. And all this when you know from the beginning of the conversation that there's something he wants to tell you.
Stoick also just. Flat out ignores warning signs when it comes to Hiccup, and more specifically how isolated Hiccup is in the village. He literally uses "looking after Hiccup" as a threat. When he gets back from a journey and everyone is telling him "everyone is so relieved" "the village is thinking about having a party to celebrate" etc., he's like, "wait, Hiccup's gone?" without making the connection that if that's people's reaction to Hiccup being gone, something is deeply fucked up.
Then, when Hiccup is in the ring with the Nightmare, it's Stoick banging on the bars of the arena which startles the Nightmare into attacking. He knows dragons are sensitive to noise, but in that moment he was too angry to care, and Hiccup nearly dies because of it. Afterwards he says Hiccup was the one who put everyone in danger, which is patently false. Hiccup didn't antagonize the Nightmare, and Hiccup didn't summon the Night Fury. Stoick antagonized Hookfang and Toothless came to the arena because he heard Hiccup scream. Toothless saved Hiccup's life.
During the discussion that follows, Stoick engages in some of the worst listening of the entire franchise. Hiccup is literally telling Stoick a ton of useful information, but Stoick only processes the information which allows him to find the nest. When Hiccup tries to tell him it's more dangerous than he knows, he ignores him, and when Hiccup grabs his arm and begs him, "for once in your life, would you just listen to me!" he literally pushes him away and disowns him.
So yeah, no. The older I get the more I see how Stoick failed in his responsibilities as a parent, even if I can see why it happened and can sympathize with him. Between Hiccup and Stoick, Stoick is the adult and the parent, and I expect him to act as such.
Don't get me wrong. I think the relationship between Hiccup and Stoick is one of the most compelling in the series. They illustrate the disconnect between them very well, and actually find a way to bring it to a satisfying conclusion. That said, that conclusion does not actually involve them meeting in the middle; it involves Stoick admitting he was wrong, and even getting a taste of what could have happened to Hiccup because of his actions.
There's also this like. Weird relationship the fandom had to the books, which. To be fair, the movies/show also had a weird relationship to the books. I read the books after seeing .... I think the first two movies? Definitely the first, at least. And while the books are cool in their own way, they very much are a different thing than the movies. The first movie is kind of a homage to the books more than an adaptation, and the second movie goes completely off the rails from anything remotely resembling the books. Yet, aspects of the books show up in the fanfic, and also in the early parts of the RoB show. The movie creators were determined to leave the movies where the books left off, even though they didn't start where the books started. (This btw was my first reason for not watching the third movie - the promotional materials making it look extremely silly only strengthened that conviction).
One of the things that I remember people complaining about was that they added Heather but not Camicazi, for example. And I just ... guys. Cami is already in the series. She's Astrid. The kick-ass girl with all the skills of a "proper" Viking, given a less anachronistic/appropriative name, and put in a context that worked with the movies only focusing on one Viking tribe. The differences Cami and Astrid have are because the differences in the books' Viking culture and the movies' Viking culture - the books put stuff like piracy and being sneaky among "proper" Viking skills, while the movies make "proper" Vikings more of the traditional straightforward warrior.
Like, if you're going to argue Cami and Astrid are different characters, I'm going to argue that book!Fishlegs and movie!Fishlegs are different characters. The movies do weird stuff moving certain aspects around and naming some things after book stuff which has nothing to do with the book counterpart. Book!Fishlegs and book!Hiccup merge together to create movie!Hiccup, movie!Fishlegs has literally nothing in common with book!Fishlegs besides his name, movie!Hookfang belongs to Snotlout instead of Stoick, movie!Toothless is a Night Fury instead of a Seadragonus Giganticus Maximus, the Green Death is now the Red Death, Alvin the Treacherous is basically completely different from book to show, etc. Like I said, the books and the movies have a very weird relationship.
aaaand I have run out of steam. :thumbsup: TLDR version, HTTYD fandom is weird, or at least it was when I was in it.
Okay but I saw that someone was saying that Cordovan was right and Ruby was wrong and I’m sorry but no, and I must rant.
Cordovan is in charge of a military base that is supposed to protect one of the largest cities on Remnant. That should be her number one priority - protecting the city. The only thing that should top that is is something comes up where all of Remnant is in trouble and she can help.
A group of kids shows up and without hearing them out (which would have made her realize that Remnant was, in fact, at risk), she immediately shuts them out. They come back with more kids and two adults. She again refuses to listen to them.
So this group ends up stealing on of her ships. Qrow immediately points out what the protocol is for this: scrambling the fighters to get the ship back. But that’s not what Cordovan does. Instead, she brings out a big, clumsy, overpowered giant mech to take them out, seemingly not caring that the only thing that mech can do is destroy the ship (which she knows has Weiss Schnee, daughter of the CEO of the largest company on the planet, on it). She does not care about bringing back her ship. She doesn’t care about the safety of the children she knows are involved in the theft. All she cares about - by her own admission - is putting the them in their place and showing them that the Atlesian military is nothing to be trifled with.
But here’s the thing: she’s so eager to show them how awesome their tech is that she’s completely stupid about actually getting anything done. That mech is literally incapable of hitting multiple small moving targets, something Jaune immediately figures out. It moves slowly. It takes awhile to fire. It can only target one thing at a time. It wasn’t designed for this.
If she had scrambled the jets, the team would have been screwed. There would be too many targets with much better quality weapons than they have, and it would have been a serious struggle. With Cordovan’s giant mech, though? All they have to do is identify its weakness and then exploit the hell out of it. Ruby even gives Cordovan a chance once she realizes she can take it down, and Cordovan refuses, instead aiming a giant cannon at one seventeen-year-old girl.
So yeah, Ruby destroyed the cannon. Why wouldn’t she? Cordovan had shown a willingness to kill her and her friends multiple times. All Ruby and her friends were trying to do was stop her. It was literally self-defense at that point - even if you want to argue that they stole a ship, Cordovan had already shot the damn thing out of the air, so she had no reason to attack one lone girl at point-blank range.
So yeah, Cordovan brought out the wrong weapon just so she could show off, and the people she tried to use it against were able to disable it because it was a stupid move for her to make.
And then fate has a giant grim, who that weapon actually would have been helpful against and that weapon was actually designed to fight shows up and Cordovan is left utterly incapable of performing her main duty of protecting the city of Argus because she was a nationalistic douchenozzle who had to turn a bunch of kids stealing a ship into a dick measuring contest.
That is not Ruby’s fault. Ruby is literally trying to save the world. Cordovan just wanted to feel powerful, and because of that, she potentially doomed the very city she was supposed to protect.
Just because the creators have said there will be LGBTQ representation does not mean your favorite character will be gay/bi/etc.
A ship not becoming canon when the characters involved have barely interacted in several seasons is not queerbaiting.
Calling these kinds of things “queerbaiting” is obfuscating the term and making it more difficult to call out REAL queerbaiting, which exists and is a problem. I’m bisexual and this kind of shit is pissing me off. STOP IT.
Reactions to some Yuri On Ice stuff that’s been going around in fandom, including me kind of criticizing some tendencies of the fandom at large, under a cut because normally I would not post this publicly but after the week I’ve had I’m feeling less inclined to care about offending people who’d probably never read this post anyway.
So people are upset because Yuuri not going to college in Detroit for more than a year means he may have only known Phichit for only one year, and this is .... new information????? >__O
Guys. Guys. Let’s say Yuuri and Phichit both moved to Detroit for college. No idea why they would, when the only draw for them is Celestino as a coach, but let’s pretend.
Yuuri, at the start of the anime, is 23, having spent an extra year to finish college. He turns 24 is episode 9. His birthday is November 29th.
Phichit, at the start of the anime, is 20, and is currently 21 according to the wiki. His birthday is April 20th.
The normal age to go to college in the US is 18 going on 19. Classes start Septemberish and go to June-ish. (Yuuri, however, is done with school before April, which implies he’s on the Japanese school schedule of April to March. This also fits the 5-years-at-college timeline, because with Yuuri’s age and when he finishes, that implies being in a US school for over five years.)
If Phichit is 20 going on 21, he would have spent a maximum of three years at the college. This is dependent on a few things, though - 1) is the Wiki saying he is 21 as of the end of the current competitive season in YOI OR 2) did he turn 21 near episode 1, which is said to be in April? Seeing as the information from the anime saying he’s 20 takes place after April, I’m assuming that he turned 20 around episode 1. That means he had two years, max, with Yuuri - less, considering Yuuri was home in Hasetsu by April of the second year.
Which means that people are sad that less than a year was shaved off the time they could have known each other.
Guys - even before the whole “Yuuri didn’t go to college in Detroit for more than a year” thing - Phichit and Yuuri haven’t known each other that long. It’s one of the things that annoys me about fanfic portrayals of their relationship. Yes, Yuuri thinks of Phichit as the only other international skater he’s friends with, yes, Phichit refers to Yuuri as his best friend, but when you want a long-term friendship of Yuuri’s, the friend who has been there through it all, the one who canonically knew about Yuuri’s crush on Viktor (because fun fact, while Phichit may know about it the anime doesn’t tell us he does) - we have that friend! In canon! She exists!
(Or is that the problem? That Nishigori Yuuko is a she? Because Nishigori Takeshi also is Yuuri’s childhood friend, and we canonically see Yuuri confide in him more than he does in Phichit! Oh wait, I forgot - Nishigori is fat and very much not the bishounen that Phichit is. I’d like to think people are better than that, but I’ve also been in internet fandoms long enough to be very cynical.)
I’m just tired of people hyping up Phichit, making fanon!Phichit out to be a better friend than we’ve seen canon!Phichit be, all while ignoring the Nishigori family, who in my opinion have a lot more canon evidence for being better friends to Yuuri than Phichit.
I know, controversial words in the YOI fandom, but here’s the facts: Phichit is a social media junkie who cannot resist posting photos online, even if it might make Yuuri uncomfortable. He does it in the anime, with drunken Viktor all over Yuuri, and he does it in Yuuri On Stage, apparently leaking that Viktor is missing and causing an uproar among the fans who came to see him skate. And Yuuri is used to this, to the point where when people are wondering how it got out, Yuuri’s near-immediate response to finding out it leaked was “PHICHIT-KUN.”
Compare to the Nishigori family in a similar situation. Yuuko and Takeshi find out the twins uploaded the video. Takeshi immediately calls Yuuri to apologize, while Yuuko lectures her children for doing so. They show a hell of a lot more respect for Yuuri’s privacy in episode 1 than Phichit does in all of canon.
We don’t see Yuuri confide in Phichit ever in canon. We see him geeking out over Viktor with Yuuko when they are kids, and he even talks about his feelings with her a bit when he shows her Viktor’s program. We see him complaining about Eros to Takeshi and having Takeshi be his exercise buddy. However, during his freakout at the Cup of China he doesn’t even think to talk to Phichit about it, and Phichit doesn’t approach him about it either. He doesn’t even call Phichit to just chat - he literally calls to ask for a favor, and while they’re definitely happy to be talking to each other, they didn’t call each other just to say hi.
Still don’t believe me? The honorifics Yuuri uses to refer to them also back me up on this. The honorific -kun is more formal/distant than the lack of honorifics he uses for Nishigori or the -chan he uses for Yuuko. Native speakers can get into this in a lot more depth than I can, but -kun is used for classmates, peers, or people younger than you, and adds an element of formality. According to the anime/manga I’m familiar with and the Japanese friend I asked about honorifics, the less honorifics you use the closer you seem to a person. It’s also worth noting that the Nishigori family feels close enough to Yuuri to refer to him without honorifics, despite them presumably speaking Japanese to him (unlike the international skaters, who I assume speak English with him.) It’s kind of cool that Yuuri does refer to Phichit with an honorific, as it implies they speak each others’ languages to each other to some extent, but the fact that Phichit is “Phichit-kun” to Yuuri does imply that they aren’t as close as fandom would like to believe.
And it’s just ... I get sick of people putting Phichit up on this pedestal while simultaneously forgetting the Nishigori family. While where Yuuri studied is an interesting tidbit, the fact people are getting upset because it lessens his relationship with Phichit really aggravates me.
If I had the gif-making skills, I’d be posting gifs of the Nishigori family being awesome instead of this rant, but sadly while I know gif-making basics I don’t have a good way of going through an episode frame by frame to get the stuff I need to gif a scene. Ergo, my rant which may offend YOI fans if they see it. =/
Data is about to fucking rant about some shit. So about a month ago I made an RP blog for Willow from Buffy because I’m a spazzy nerdy bisexual redhead with a love for fuzzy sweaters and cute boys who play guitar and shy girls who are secretly badass just like her and so I wanted to play her. THE ONLY FUCKING ISSUE IS THAT I CANNOT FOR THE LIFE OF ME MANAGE TO POST GIFS ON TUMBLR IN ORDER TO ACTUALLY RP AS WILLOW AND IT IS KILLING ME! I can’t figure out how to do it from my computer and every time I try to do it from my ipod the app crashes or it just tells me that there was an error but I can’t figure out what it is. This is pissing me off soooo fucking much and it’s also upsetting because cosplay is something I love to do and RPing is something i’m really interested in doing but it doesn’t feel right if I can’t use gifs and I really wanted this blog to become something constructive and positive that I could do with my free time because I love to dress up and become someone else for a little while and I would love to share that with people outside of my real life humans and it just feels like the universe is telling me to go fuck myself and just straight up refusing to let me even attempt to do something that I might really enjoy and it kind of makes me want to cry.
Alright rant over because I don’t want to actually start crying or something.\
Back to your insanity
Signed your down and out blog owner
-Data
p.s If anyone knows how to post my gifs to tumblr from my computer and could explain it me that would be awesome.
Hey guys, Data here to update you on the weird warning feeling situation. I’m sitting in my room trying to decide what to watch on shomi because I need a distraction but I literally cannot think of a single movie or show that I enjoy that will distract me for more than 10 seconds because I can’t decide what kind of thing I want to watch and I can’t decide if I want a movie or a show and I can’t decide on anything and it’s making me want to tear my hair out and scream for the next three hours. I hate not being able to rationally decide on things, and the things that are screwing with me right now aren’t even difficult decisions. I can’t decide what I want for lunch, I can’t decide what I want to watch, I can’t decide which color of socks to wear, I can’t even decide if I’m sad or angry or happy or numb and I’m cycling through all of them and it’s making me dizzy.
I wish my brain could just tell me what is going to happen so the foreboding feeling would go away so I could focus and make decisions and think like a person again but of course my brain won’t do that because that would be nice and my brain is an asshole. My stupid sixth sense needs to fucking stop before I lose my mind entirely, I can’t even fucking sleep easily because I’m pretty sure that all of my dreams are my premonition-type dreams and that freaks me out to an even worse degree because my premonition-dreams always happen way before the actual event and they never make any sense until they happen and it scares me because I don’t understand them at all so I can’t do anything about them.
I just want to be a normal person and not have other planes of existence and mystical shit screwing about in my head, I can barely handle my own thoughts in my head, why does the universe have to add its thoughts too? Why do I get stuck with the stupid warning feeling? Why do I have premonitions that I don’t understand? Why do I see spirits and have to interact with them because they stick to me like superglue? Why do I have to sense peoples auras and souls and shit? Why do I have to be connected to all this mystical shit? Why do I have to be an empath and feel other peoples emotions? Why me and not someone else? I love my gifts, I really do, but sometimes I wish I could get a fucking break and just relax and not have to think about all of this stuff. I just need a break...
Back to your insanity
Signed your sick and tired of mystical shit blog owner
