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Shinichi genderswap doodles......👁️
tbh after thinking about it, I ultimately decided girl Shinichi would look exactly the same as normal Shinichi (except for the school uniform with a skirt maybe), but long hair DOES suit her +shrunk Shinichi getting lost in her own hair is funny to think about lol
I was too used to your company
Now let me accompany you in another way
Star Wars cosplayers *immediately* after tonight's episode of "Ahsoka"...
We always tease about Obi Wan being space jesus but guys.
Ezra became space jesus
Me when Sabine actually finds Ezra, even though the entire show has literally been about finding Ezra.
I don't think any of us expected it to happen this quickly, to be fair, although I'm glad it did: it means Ezra will have plenty of time to play a major role in this season, rather than us needing to wait for some other season/show to see what he's like in live action.
He would be a proud daddy of his little baby girl 😭
I've been acquainted with Grand Admiral Thrawn ever since I picked up Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire from the school library around ninth grade or so. He was such an interesting villain to me at the time, and that impression hasn't lessened with age. Being the key antagonist in one of the old Star Wars expanded universe's first big storylines, he's also kind of a major figure of the whole darn beyond-the-movies canon, in the same way that Darth Revan is. And he kind of filled a void that the Original Trilogy left gaping wide, in the sense that—apart from the fleeting presence of Tarkin in A New Hope, the Imperial military never really had any threatening and competent military leaders at the face of things... just Darth Vader and the Emperor.
I was thrilled to see Thrawn make his live action debut in Ahsoka, and though my first visual impression of the guy was a little underwhelming. The Rebels incarnation in particularly very much had that "a strong body feeds a strong mind" kind of character and a physique to match, along with a Sherlock Holmes hawkishness to his facial features. But as soon as he opened his mouth and I realized how on-point the performance here was coming off the back of his appearances in Rebels, I was sold.
It seems some people really are very skin-deep in what they find "imposing," though, because there are a lot of complaints about how "lame" he looks, because he's "fat," or whatever. It's true, you can see it if you look at his uniform: he's got a bit of a gut going on underneath his just-slightly-frayed-and-aging Grand Admiral dress whites.
I say: "So what?"
The appearance is still solid; discrepancies can be explained by, for example, Thrawn undergoing an extended recovery period from some unspecified injury he sustained when the purrgils warped him and Ezra through hyperspace into another galaxy. If you recall, Thrawn was actually in quite the predicament when that happened:
It might well even be that he hasn't been able to maintain a strong and healthy body in the way he used to, for example. Maybe he had to go through painstaking self-directed physical therapy to even get as far as he has.
More importantly, his performance is absolutely on-point. He has the same presence he did in Rebels, minus the exaggerated CGI-cartoon facial expressions that everyone had in that show. He moves, acts, and speaks in a way that I would absolutely imagine of him in the Thrawn Trilogy novels. And he hasn't really even had time to build tactical momentum yet. It's everything I could have wanted from a Thrawn portrayal.
So yeah, I say "So what?" So what if he's a bit "fat." He's Thrawn. The king has returned to Dark Side Minas Tirith, and it is glorious.
Sidebar: Ezra Bridger's live action return was also glorious, but I don't need to tell y'all that, do I?
dave filoni, you're paying for my therapy
Hearing Hayden Christensen call Ahsoka "Snips" was everything I ever wanted, and I didn't even know it until it met my ears.
Ya know, it's funny how no one can just be mildly critical of My Adventures With Superman. I only ever see people singing its praises or people decrying it as "woke" or "soy" or something.
Like, just for once, I'd like to see some of my less-positive, kinda-mild criticisms echoed outside of my own skull. Like: "You know, Clark being kind of a dork is fun but they lean into it a bit too much at times. 'Himbo' charm only goes so far before it becomes idiot irritation." And: "These episodes really are too short for the stories they tell." Actually to be fair I did hear the episodes-too-short criticism at least once, but you get what I'm saying, right? I hate this stupid "woke agenda" bullshit. It makes it so, so hard to talk about anything from a constructive-criticism standpoint because everyone else who wants to "criticize" a thing is frothing at the mouth about how the lizardmen are trying to brainwash us all into soy-slurping communists or something.
So a while back—a year or more back, actually—I went looking on Amazon for a book I'd read in grade-school English class. Call it a fit of nostalgia. Finding the book was a pain, because I couldn't remember the title. I couldn't remember the title because it's a transcendentally unmemorable title for a book: Running Out of Time.
Super generic, yeah? But the story had stuck with me, so I spent some time tracking the book down (I couldn't remember the name of the author, either) and ordered a paperback copy.
I never got around to re-reading the thing until just this morning, though, when I plucked it off my bookshelf to kill time during a video-export.
Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix is about a girl who lives in a "historical preserve," a town that's supposed to be a living replica of the 1800s. All the kids are ignorant of this fact, but the adults are in the know; they're the ones who signed up for it, after all. But lately a sickness has been sweeping through the village population and it seems like whatever organization runs the place won't let the village use modern medical techniques or even quarantine signs to combat the spread.
Our heroine is young Jessie, the sharp-witted and intelligent daughter of the village midwife, who has stealthily taken over as the "real" doctor in town by night after the official doctor stopped sneaking medicine into the folk remedies. Not knowing what else to do, Jessie's mother tells her the truth about the place and tasks her with the potentially dangerous mission of going out into the modern world and getting help.
It's an interesting little story. One of those kinds of books I appreciate a little more as an adult than I did as a kid, I think, because I can see beyond the protagonist's youthful point-of-view narration to all of the details she doesn't quite comprehend. Short, but sweet. I recommend it.
Since I got Baldur's Gate III via Early Access and didn't really pay attention when the "Deluxe Edition" stuff dropped into my Steam account, I completely forgot there was an art book and complete game OST folder in there. Well, that's all on my phone now. Guess I know what's playing on my radio when I go out for a Lyft/Grubhub session tomorrow.
full offence but it should be illegal to use flashing or strobing images in adverts like straight up if a company has paid to force strobing shit in front of people then they have paid to directly hurt and potentially kill disabled people and whatever company they paid was fine with it. go to fucking jail and rot there.
SAY THAT!!! the amount of artists that use strobing effects is ridiculous, same goes for theatre shows and musicals. you need to say that shit up front and loudly or even better DONT INCLUDE STROBES AT ALL.
multiple times i’ve gone to see something that’s allegedly seizure safe with a photosensitive person and ended up having to tell them when it’s safe for them to continue watching the show they paid to see, its fucking horrible.
I have epilepsy, and one bad seizure can kill me. My husband has had to resuscitate me TWICE.
When Riverdance was doing their final tour, I saved money for MONTHS to see them live. I checked everywhere I could to find out if they use strobe lights, and found nothing. Yay! It's safe! Got my ticket and waited. Day of, I went to the theater and...there's a piece of printer paper with 16 pt font on the door stating their are strobe lights.
I had paid for the ticket months prior. The theater refused to give me refund and suggest I just cover my eyes. So I took my seat, and asked the woman next to me if she would mind letting me know when the strobe lights stopped. It was winter, so I used my coat to periodically cover my eyes, and this woman let me know when it was safe.
Why tf did they need strobe lights? Why wasn't there any warnings? If no sign had been posted, I wouldn't have been prepared! I could have DIED!!!
I haven't been to a movie theater in years. I saw the second Hunger Games film in theaters and had a seizure. Prior to that, the third Harry Potter film...and had a seizure.
Streaming new releases during lockdown was the only time I didn't have to blacklist films. No need to avoid spoilers. All the lights on, subtitles on, ability to take frequent breaks. Fucking amazing.
The first Spiderverse film required I be in a separate room for the last half hour or so because it was all strobe lights. I can't watch animated stuff in general because they tend to get really flashy, especially new stuff.
I can't stream most TV shows because of the dangerous ads. I can't watch YouTube anywhere but my PC because I have to use an ad blocker. No music videos because they all seem to be using strobes now.
There need to be laws requiring this shit be limited, that warnings be put up for at least 30 seconds before any music video, show, etc if they have flashy effects, and ads cannot have strobes or flashy fuckery.
Mm, this is a societal issue that's stuck around for a while. The rest of us totally-non-photosensitive people have a tendency to roll our eyes at the issue because it's not something we've personally experienced, but it seems like the only place where the law has pushed people to include photosensitivity warnings is... videogames, which, like, yeah, holy wow, a completely unpredictable and player-controlled series of image-lights gets a photosensitivity warning. I feel like they forced it on only the absolutely-most-obvious possible seizure-risk product and then said, "Great, we've solved epilepsy. Let's go get lunch, guys."
Another example of "normal" and "abled" people being a little too willing to put problems other people have out of their minds, I guess.
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
#friendly reminder that I once put my statistics degree to good use and did some calculations about ship ratios#and yes considering the gender ratios of characters#the prevalence of gay ships is completely predictable (via sarahtonin42)
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. :)
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.
When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.
Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.
If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…
And then we will ship an OT3.
I’m going to bring up (invent?) the concept of subjectification.
As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.
In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.
And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.
And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.
When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.
And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.
It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.
They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.
And when that happens, well. Surprise, surprise, that’s where the shipping goes.
Yeah I don’t really ship but I do write a fair amount of fanfic, and in most franchises working with the female characters is a chore.
You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.
The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.
That you don’t have to unearth and piece together like some sort of volunteer archeologist coming up with theories way more complex than the available artifacts truly support.
Guys read this this is an amazing breakdown of it
ALWAYS reblog.
Going back a few posts—make the significant other significant in a buddy cop scenario and you get an OT3?
Absolutely what happened in White Collar.
I dunno, I have to question the "it takes so much more work to flesh out the female characters" bit, on account of nobody actually caring whether or not their ships work or are characterized well or are anything other than a long list of AO3 fetish kinktags that will come up in searches and get a lot of kudos.
Articles trying to overthink the slash-shipping "phenomenon" are one thing, but trying to overthink why people slash-ship is just as silly. They do it because it's their kink. And that's okay.
The people who want a male/female or female/female ship in a franchise with underdeveloped female characters absolutely WILL just fill those characters in themselves, or, if the fanbase has already done so, will happily use the "fanon" interpretation of that character.
I love this weird-ass revisionist idea of lightsabers where lightsaber impaling was only ever done to censor them, as if Qui-Gon wasn't impaled literally two seconds before Maul got cut in half. The reason people get impaled with lightsabers more often in the live-action shit is because it's easier to portray in live action without it looking super fucking hokey and requiring judicious use of CGI and camera-cuts.
Or without a character spreading their arms and going "OH NO MY ARM'S CUT OFF" while Count Dooku misses the timing and cuts his arm off on a slight delay—but I digress.
It's just funny to me how people suddenly have a problem with lightsaber impalement as if it's not a well-established thing that even bad guys with lightsabers do, because they aren't audience members with videogames on the brain drooling for the next cinematic Mortal Kombat Fatality, and getting salty at "Disney" for not being brutal enough.
But you know, even "Disney" did get fairly brutal from time to time, so methinks this is more a case of people who already dislike Disney Star Wars looking for things to attribute to Disney so that they can keep complaining about Disney. Which, I mean, fair play: Disney is always worthy of complaining about, but let's be intellectually honest about it, too.
I mean, the reason Disney Star Wars has issues isn't because the lightsaber's aren't brutal enough. In The Last Jedi, Kylo Ren cuts Snoke in half, cuts the top of some guy's head off, impales someone and kicks them into a grinder that spits out chunks of their armor to make sure you know they got grinded up, and then flash-impales some dude's face. Meanwhile back in Revenge of the Sith, the film's idea of a bad guy going full lethal force on a bunch of enemies is just a bunch of guys in costumes going "ARRRRRGH!" while the camera cuts away because all they were willing to show was the lightsaber maybe passing close to the general vicinity of someone's torso.
Disney is maybe overusing the relatively easy-to-special-effects impalement in their dramatic twists, but then, George Lucas overused shit dialogue, and that's way more annoying.
Hang on, wait a tick. What I said earlier about it being Brainiac instead of Zod.
There was that line about "kneeling." Could it be...
...Brainiac... and Zod...?
I like to think that the reason Mr. Mxyzptlk took this weird blue elf-eared form is because he, like us, is up to his eyebrows in Baldur's Gate III right now and loving every second of it.
Just imagine him playing as a little blue-skinned mage-gnome. There, now you see it.
So some people were theorizing that the whole "Zero Day" thing was building up to General Zod. While it hasn't been totally confirmed yet, it is now almost absolutely certain that what it was building up to was Brainiac. I'm kinda glad, to be honest; I find Brainiac way more interesting as a Superman villain than Zod, and Zod really only has impact as a villain once Superman is already established.
I loved the finale, by the way. A perfect climax with Parasite and then an epilogue with the ship and the General.
Also, I tell ya what: using the audience's knowledge of who the General ALMOST CERTAINLY WAS to turn the "reveal" here into a comedic build-up and punchline was just... *chef's kiss* ...perfectly up to temperature.
