if only kwon and tory met in a different timeline. cs kwon would have LOVED no mercy tory. her season 2 and season 3 absolute menace to society self.
still pissed tory didn’t have a friendship w him or yoon 🙁, anyway , idc it’s CANON to me that they were friends, sue me. gonna pretend like kwon didn’t dislike her, and yoon and tory’s friendship wasn’t short lived ! :)
also canon, that they’re a trio too.. (in my mind)
best ck trio w zero screentime ofc😉
today i wanna talk about the big brawl.. season 6, episode 10 and the sekai taikai.. basically how eye would change some things.
this is gonna be an extremely long post .. i like to yap. clearly. so yeah.
initially, when i first watched i loved it.. but rewatching that specific scene. it’s giving lacklustre? i mean the choreography was good that’s for sure but i don’t know.. i feel like it could’ve been done so much better .. also feel like it didn’t really have to end in kwons death either.
the reason why it fell short for me and felt a bit anticlimactic was because it was just random? russian dojo came back and punched gunther in the face, everyone else started fighting.. like okay💀
the thing is there was no reason too really. (have the massive brawl breakout THAT way) a brawl is fine, but the way it was carried out isn’t. also the actual tournament way too short.
i have an idea; so gonna share it here for you all! this might be dumb but i don’t like a lot with this season 6 part 2 after initial thought. anyways here we go 😖:
start off by saying sekai taikai was too short. like a world tournament only being around 30-40 minutes. i would’ve had the episodes longer with a runtime of an hour or over an hour.
i think CK could’ve benefited from longer episodes and more episodes anyway and better writers. but i digress
each international dojo is introduced through short videos or flashbacks as the teams all join together in the arena or whatever, showcasing unique abilities and talent.
cobra kai and miyagi do both face frictions with other teams in the tournament. an aggressive and brutal dojo accuses cobra kai of being frauds who can’t live up to their intimidation tactics (blame kwon for that one, him intimidating others outside of the mat.) leads to that sort of confrontation.
miyagi-dos defense style is mocked by other dojo who sees it as way too soft. tension brews between alllll the teams. it isn’t just a cobra kai and miyagi do thing against all, all dojos have issues w each other.
several preliminary matches are shown, including standout fights featuring (sam, hawk, devon) and (tory, yoon, kwon) other cobra kai teamates deserved to be mentioned more.
tensions rise between tory and another dojos female fighter. tory isn’t balanced and dealing with the grief of her mother still. this girl from the other team is aggressive and fast. forcing tory to become the same. letting out her anger and almost gets disqualified.
johnny and daniel struggle to keep the peace between miyagi do. they’re fighting well, but not as good as they possibly could be. they’re losing a lot of matches and the team becomes completely divided. one side saying to fight aggressive; other side saying to defend
things begins to get a lil heated OUTSIDE of tournament.. rival dojos begin sabotaging each other outside the matches. a lot of street fights if you will. or just them fucking with eachother. an example: miyagi do member is ambushed completely by another dojo.
sam is targeted by a rival fighter in a dirty off the matt attack. causing noticeable, bad injuries, miguel jumps in to defend her and makes himself a target for specific dojo.
the brawl: a rival dojo manipulates tensions between miyagi do and cobra kai. possibly spreading a false rumour. like cobra kai plotting to sabotage a miyagi do fighter by injuring them with an illegal move they could disguise as not an illegal move lol.
yada, yada, yada. something happens, someone could hit someone else, the big brawl happenes!
during big brawl, tory could intervene to protect devon and takes a severe hit leaving her threatened with life changing injuries.
let’s get to kwon real quick: instead of him being an asshole and just getting killed. it’s established that kwon is one of the best fighters on the tournament. during brawl kwon gets ambushed by a jealous rival dojo or just a rival who wants to quite literally take him outta commission 😵.
kwon could also have a personality, so just not an asshole.. or not an asshole all the time , so he’s NOT a bad person and his team actually fw him.
say the ambush is so bad it triggers people from cobra kai to try and rescue him.. another way tory could get critically injured trying to protect him.
‘why tory?’ you may ask.. and why not? kwon was just introduced. it gives off more shock factor that a main character got hurt instead of him.
the impact of tory’s injury:
shock factor- tory being critically injured instead of kwon would exceed expectations.. like NO ONE could’ve seen it coming. her injury would create an emotional gut punch for characters like devon, sam, robby.
next, a full tournament arc. this would give the series time to delve into each fighting style, all the dojos. here’s how they could do it:
establish rivalries. cross-dojo friendships and betrayals .. this one could be interesting. inner team drama.
different fights during the sekai taikai:
tag team matches.
weapon kata demonstrations
survival matches
free for all battles
team relay matches
speed challenges
lastly, activities that the captains of each dojo would have to do or all the kids in the comp:
1. leadership seminar; captains are required to give speeches or participate in discussions about their dojos philosophy, training style, discipline, skills.
2. demonstration matches; captains are required to participate in matches to show their skills and set an example.
3. coaching workshop; leadership skills between the captains would be tested. captains would have to try and coach fighters from the other dojos.
as you can see if you’ve read up to this point, there’s A LOT .. i am a professional yapper. relaying back to my point. all this couldn’t fit into 5 episodes between 30-40 minutes, that’s why everything should’ve been bigger, longer.
CK doesn’t have the budget im aware so most of these are just headcannons unless someone wants to write a fic and do a whole rewrite.. which I might be up to do.. however i cant write for shit😭
uhm yeah 👌
So recently, i've been rewatching Httyd: Rtte, and have noticed something about Heather that I wanted to comment on, even if other people have, too. While I feel that emotionally, Heather was ready to be a spy for Hiccup and the Riders, strategically, she was not for a multitude of reasons. She had been out on her own and away from people for a good period of time, and even when she had been around Hiccup and the rides in DoB (or RoB can't remember when she was introduced), her people skills were quite lacking, and she had never been in a trade where strategy and lying are quite common. On Berk, for the most part, Hiccup and the Riders were very straight forward with her. She was very guarded with her information, unlike Johann who had carefully crafted a persona to distance his actual self from Hiccup, and give information away quietly. Heather was not quiet about information that she dropped. She told them every single mission, and that itself was a huge indicator that she was the mole. Take Viggo when he's introduced in "Maces and Talons, Part 1". When I first watched the show, I didn't notice it, but coming back and watching the way that Viggo introduces himself to both Heather and Dagur (because while he may have had more suspision towards Heather, her and Dagur are still siblings, they could both be in on it) he immediately clocks in on the fact that at least one of them is lying about their allegance. "They say there are two ways to be fooled: One is to believe what isn't true, the other is to refuse to believe what is." He knows. He knows that one of them is lying. The way that he's framed, the way that he looks back at Heather and Dagur, there's an immediate sense of unease that comes with that situation, and any viewer can feel that with the music and the way that Viggo speaks. Coming back around to Heather, I believe, at least to a certain extent, that she knew that Viggo was onto her. I mean, the man took her out onto the cliffs and talked about weeding out the "wrong-doer in our midst" which is inherently a set up that neither Heather nor Hiccup realized. During Viggo and Heather's talk, I found myself paying attention to Viggo and the way he was talking to Heather. His body language is very calm and somewhat comforting given the circumstances. He puts his arm around her, and immediately is open and honest with her- at least, that's what she thinks- he calls her "my dear," and trusts her with this big mission of apparently finding out the mole, which in Heathers mind is proving to him that she's trustworthy and can handle information. He's giving her a chance to prove herself, or prove to him that she's the mole.
It's brillant, in a way- because who else besides Heather knew the information about the Flightmare? In his own words, Viggo told her to "keep it to ourselves," and Hiccup and the Riders just so happen to know exactly where they are exactly when they're coming? It was very obvious. And, if this had been played right with Hiccup and Heather, they could have avoided this situation all together. If, quite frankly, Hiccup and the riders had let Viggo have the Flightmare, they could have exponentially gained more information because, at least for a little bit, Heather had proved herself to Viggo. So, Tdlr, Viggo is the best written villain of Httyd because of the way that he critically understands people. I truly think about what would could have been if Viggo had been the one to mentor Hiccup. I know that this is probably obvious, but I did want to word vomit about it. So, uh, bye!
You could also tie in two other common tropes with the whole “Superman-esq is trying to contain all these guys” which is the whole no kill rule everyone follows and how villains constantly break out
Basically the Superman knock off purposely enforced the no kill and purposely tries to make containment not a priority so that way there’s always villains to keep the hero’s distracted so they can’t start enacting facist coups or whatever but it’s a ticking clock of hero’s getting fed up and just putting people down and villainy getting less popular until there aren’t enough villains to keep this system going and it all comes crashing down
sorry for random addition just an idea that popped into my head based around this
A few years ago, there was a thread on r/asksciencefiction where someone was fishing for a superhero story with an inverted Omni-Man dynamic, or a setting where Homelander's initial presentation is played straight- a setting where the Superman figure actually is the paragon of morality he's initially presented as, but no other superhero is- a situation where you've got one really competent true-blue hero standing head-and-shoulders in power above what's otherwise a complete nest of vipers.
Someone in the thread floated My Hero Academia; while I haven't read it, my understanding is that that's not really an accurate read of what's going on with Stain's neurosis about All-Might being the only "real hero," that the point of that arc is that Stain's got an insane and unreasonable standard and that taking an endorsement deal, while bad, isn't actually grounds for execution. My own contribution to the thread was Gail Simone's Welcome to Tranquility, where a major part of the backstory involved the faux Justice-League's Superman analogue having a little accident because he's the only one who thought they were morally obligated to go public with the secret life-extending macguffin that the rest of the team is using to enforce comic-book time on themselves and their loved ones; while only a couple members of the team are directly in on it, the rest are conveniently incurious. And Jupiter's Legacy gets tantalizingly close to this- The Utopian, a well-meaning stick-in-the-mud, ultimately gets blindsided and couped by his scheming brother who creates a superhero junta staffed by a Kingdom-Come-style glut of third-gen superheroes, who are framed as fundamentally self-interested because only came onto the scene after most of the situations you legitimately need a superhero to handle have been neutralized. (The rub, of course, is that the comic is also highly critical of the Utopian's intellectually incurious self-righteously 'apolitical' approach to superheroism- if for no other reason than that it left him in a position to get blindsided by a coup!) While Jupiter's Legacy gets the closest, all three of these are only loosely orbiting around the spirit of the original idea, and there's something really interesting there- particularly if the Superman figure isn't hopelessly naive in the same way as Utopian. Because first of all, if you're Metaman or Amazingman or whatever brand-name alias the writer goes with, and you really earnestly mean it, and you put together a team of all the other most powerful heroes on earth in order to pool your resources, and then with dawning horror you gradually begin to realize that everyone in the room besides yourself is a fascist or a con artist or abuser or any other variant of a kid with a magnifying glass eyeing that anthill called Earth- What the hell is your next move?
Do you just call the whole thing off? Can you trust that they'll actually go home if you call the whole thing off? I mean you've put the idea in their heads, are you sure that they aren't going to, like, start the Crime Syndicate in your absence? Do you stick around to try and enact containment, see if getting all of these people on a team makes them easier to keep on a leash? But that's functionally going to make you their enabler pretty quickly, right? Overlooking "should you kill them-" can you kill them? You're stronger than any individual one of them- are you stronger than all of them? The first time one of them really crosses a line in a way you can't ignore- will that be a one-on-one fight? Are they the kind of people capable of putting two-and-two together and pre-emptively ganging up on you if you push back too hard? Do you just start trying to get them killed, or keep them at each other's throats so they can't coordinate anything really nasty? Can you squeeze any positive moral utility out of them, or is that just a way to justify not doing the hard work of taking them down? There've been works where the conceit is to question the default assumption that Superman in specific would be a good person, and there've been works where the conceit is to question the default assumption that superheroes in general would be good people. Something to be done, I think, with questioning the default assumption that everyone Superman becomes professionally close to would be good, and to explore how he'd handle it if they weren't.
i think it could be interesting to have Taylor interact with a Mark who’s early in their career and only just starting to learn Taylorisms to see her as what he might end up as.
Like Cecil has Taylor working for him cause Contessa saw the only way for her to stay put was if she had a job and so she gets put on babysitting duty when Mark first starts to work for Cecil and Mark see this woman with some sort of mysterious past who’s sorta a vague mentor figure who says things he’s been thinking in the back of his mind which scares him and makes him wonder about the role he’s going down
Hey so, thought exercise, how do you think Taylor would fare if she got dropped into the invincible universe? For the sake of mechanics let's say she literally gets dropped in via doorman portal or something.
So one thing about Invincible is that I think it's setting is protagonist-centric in a way that Worm's isn't. To the extent that Invincible's setting has worldbuilding- worldbuilding that isn't, like, ported in from the books's early association with the confederated Image Comics shared universe- it's worldbuilding that exists to convey the impression of a big-two-flavor universe. Here's our spin on the undersea kingdom, here's the riff on the Martians, here are our riffs on SHIELD, on Gotham, on Themyscira, on 70s blaxploitation-adjacent heroes, and so on. This is the entire ethos underpinning the Guardians of the Globe in particular- piggybacking on pre-existing audience affection for the Justice League to convey that it's a Big Fucking Deal when the guardians get blendered in issue 7.
You have flashbacks demonstrating that there was capital-S Superhero Stuff going on in the seventies and eighties, or as far back as the thirties with Immortal, you create the impression of a status quo, a big pond in which Mark is a little fish. And to Kirkman's credit, some effort clearly went into making sure that the non-Mark capes are sufficiently fleshed out that you can believe that they've got other stuff going on in their lives. But at the end of the day, it's the Invincible universe. You don't see a lot of people talking about the Guarding the Globe spinoff. Many of the most interesting characters- Cecil being a big example here- are interesting because of the ways in which they bounce off Mark specifically, the ways in which he chooses to deal with them. The universe is less of a character in the story the way that Earth Bet is- it's just the place where Mark's story, specifically, is happening. If there's a codified setting bible, I'll eat my hat.
Now of course the world of Worm is, in many ways, equally Taylor-centric, because that's what it means to be the protagonist. But owing in part to the themes of the story, and in part to the sheer number of false-start protagonists Wildbow played around with before settling on Taylor, it's very good at conveying the idea that there are many stories happening in this setting and Taylor's is just the one this particular work happened to focus on. There's an actual point to doing OC worldbuilding for what the superhero scene looks like in Wormverse Denver or Seattle or whatever- whereas you can come up with superhero teams for Invincible-verse Denver, but what actually ties them to that universe? What are you getting out of putting them in Invincible specifically, that you wouldn't get from whipping up a barebones MASKS setting to support your OCs? Anyway. This is a really long way of getting to my real point, which is that I think the question is less "how does Taylor bounce off the Invincible setting" and more "How does Taylor bounce off Invincible the character, around whom the setting orbits even when it pretends not to."
This I'm unsure of, because where do you stick her in his life where you get an interesting dynamic? One thing that's interesting here is that Mark's overall character arc already involves learning a lot of taylorisms- the strategic ruthlessness, the shift from a good-evil dichotomy to a helping-not-helping dichotomy-so what about his arc is going to change if they spend time together? Why would they spend time together? Given the different power levels on display, what would differentiate her, in his experience, from the dozens of filler capes that exist for him at the level of "vague acquaintance?" This is assuming she's active as a cape at all, which she might not be if this is Post-GM. Mutual association through Cecil and the Global Defense Agency might be a hook- maybe they're paying for her new arm or something- but would she latch her cart to Cecil's wagon in the first place, barring some obvious crisis situation? Hard to say. If she's depowered, and present in his life somehow in a civilian context, well, that's a fast-track to not being part of the story anymore either, given how Mark's civilian connections slowly fading away was kind of a quiet plot point.
There's some configuration of these pieces that could be interesting, but I'm not quite sure what they are. Soliciting input here.
okay this is really cool, does Bioshock Infinite with its multiverses and lighthouses fit into this idea, and if so, how?
I interpret the first two Bioshock games as a cosmic horror story that the protagonists are just glancing off the outer edges of. Slugs don't do that to your genetic code, for one thing, and genetic code has very little bearing on pyrokinesis or teleportation or the ability to grow swarms of bees inside yourself. It's also mighty convenient that Ryan happened to have picked the one spot in the ocean that happens to have The Slugs That Can't Do That- it's obviously part of the mythmaking of Ryan Amusements that they put such a fine point on where he abruptly stopped the boat and declared that he was going to put down the foundations of Rapture, and there's a dash of narrative anthropic principle on top of that, but it's still very convenient. And In terms of aesthetic and narrative outcome Rapture from 1960 onward is certainly checking all the boxes; madness, mutation, moisture. Impossibly grandiose societies brought down by hubris, science run amok, "look upon my works ye mighty", horrible familial truths, the whole shebang. And of course you have that brilliant light below Persephone.
The story doesn't necessarily parse as cosmic horror immediately because it fronts the impression that there's a grounded explanation for every insane thing that happens. You're supposed to just take it as part of the premise that they can build something like Rapture with human technology in 1945. You mostly hear about plasmids from professionals doing practical research and development with them, so you get the impression that there's a well-understood body of science here that just happens to be outside of your personal understanding. But for every Professor Armitage who understands the whole shape of the Dunwich Horror, there are a hundred Massholes who just saw a barn explode for no reason and now have to cope with the very real invisible something laying waste to the countryside regardless of the full truth of the matter. And from within the exploding barn of Rapture it doesn't matter to Jack or Delta whether the foundations were laid down atop Rl'yeh or whether ADAM is actually the extracted blood of a Great Old One or whatever the fuck. Maybe there's someone down there who understands the deep lore and went mad from the revelation in the genre typical way. But nothing about the situation requires you that you dig that deep to develop a working understanding of what's going on. Rapture's downfall is totally legible as a mundane death spiral of bad leadership, shoddy ideology, economic pressures and bog-standard human greed. Impossible weapons swung in careless arcs by human hands.
I’m just saying this could’ve worked great in The Clone Wars since it did have that balance of kid show and showing pain of civilians in war.
Like I’m thinking specifically something like the Ryleth or Ondelon with War in Teo fronts where we see the civilians and can understand where they’re coming from while also having it be fucked up to stab this would be redemption in the back
Basically, we need a new clone wars aka a kids show that actually is able to get away with exploring things like this
There are, like, a lot of very good reasons this couldn’t be done in an animated children’s show, but a plot beat I’ve always wanted to see in an animated show is that you’ve got, like, the typical animated show set-up, plucky and idealistic rebels against a massive and nebulous evil allegorical empire, you’ve got all the archetypical characters who show up in shows like that, you’ve got obvious implications atrocities are being committed by the bad guys but you never hone in on it beyond the general signifiers like burning buildings in the background. (yes I am thinking about She-Ra here.)
You’ve got your peridot type or your Scorpia type or potentially your zuko-type. The clearly-antagonistic-but-obviously-engineered-to-be-likeable-enough-to-get-a-redemption-arc type of character. You have them slowly go through the motions of realizing the empire is bad, or realizing the power of friendship, or having a moment of connection with the protagonists and realizing that they aren’t Thriving ™ under the oppressive system.
So they do what these sorts of characters usually do and defect to the protagonists side, and the protagonists chalk up another win for team principle and compassion, and they accept the defector with open, if cautious, arms…
And then a supporting character pulls out a gun and shoots the would-be redemptee in the head, because their entire family was in one of the buildings that the redemptee set on fire in the background during a previous one-off episode.
And, to be clear, this wouldn’t just be a mean gag or a one-off commentary on audience sympathies or out-of-universe discourse on redemption arcs. Episodes going forward would deal with the fallout of such a nakedly ruthless act of retaliation.
It’s now next to impossible to deal with would-be defectors in good faith anymore because it’s been proven the heroes can’t stop acts of vengeance in their own homes, its not clear who among the heroes is even extending the olive branch in good faith to begin with or if it was always a trap. If things ever turn in the heroes favor, Bad guys are now escalating the stakes and fighting to the last man, because they know they aren’t gonna be forgiven if the nicest person in their ranks couldn’t be forgiven. There’s internal political tension about what to do with the assassin (nothing, they need the manpower) and how to go about disavowing the action when half the group doesn’t even want to disavow it- the redemptee might have been nice, but they also burned buildings full of innocent people, a lot of people are just glad they weren’t the ones who had to pull the trigger. Friendships end over this.
A lot of narratives about forgiveness in these kinds of shows are more about how it’s interpersonally healthy and beneficial to forgive and let people grow. I want to see a narrative about how that’s also, like, politically the only path forward if you don’t want to lock your society into an Orestian blood bath, which I have always found to be a much more compelling argument against revenge in general, just as, like, a rule utilitarianism thing. I want a bittersweet ending that’s essentially tracible back to that cathartic, unretractable decision to kill that one likable flunky.
Of course, it would be very difficult to set this up without telegraphing that this is the kind of show that does That Kind Of Thing, and the actual killing can’t really happen until season two at the earliest, so I’m having a hard time figuring out a way to execute this where it would maintain its punch.
I mean Twig has this in spades especially later on if you want to read it
A story structure Wildbow hasn’t yet attempted- which I would be very very interested to see him tackle- is the “Walking the Earth,” journey-focused Odyssey-type thing, where the protagonist and their gradually swelling band of hanger-on true companions travel from wacky side-adventure to whacky side-adventure in pursuit of some larger goal.
The parts of his writing I’ve read tend to be very sedentary, tied to a central location in some way, treating that location almost as a character in its own right (in the case of pale, he does so literally.) The beats on the heroes journey either come to the protagonists doorstep, or the protagonists go on Sorties to other plot relevant locations before eventually returning to home base. I’d love to see him handle a protagonist that’s genuinely, perpetually on the move, defined by their fleeting connections to lots of places, and the lessons learned in each.
you once told me that the best movies are never ‘good’
that movies you hate are the movies that are simply better than others.
when you showed me your favourite movie, i told you that i thought it was good.
and it was objectively good.
couldn’t it just be good?
but it didn’t matter that the movie was good or bad or that it was maybe just ‘ok’.
what mattered was that i had contradicted you.
you expected me to remember everything you said, memorise every rule and regulations you had set.
but i couldn’t remember every law that fell from your lips.
i couldn’t fathom every thought that you told me to think.
and now we’re sitting on your couch in silence, watching the credits roll.
the movie was good. and i’m sorry that it was.
Sanders Sides as Alice of Human Sacrifices.
Based off of listening to the song, I have determined that the sides can represent each of them, with the exception of one extra in one of the categories.
The first Alice. This one I feel like everyone thinks is Virgil or Janus, but personally I believe it would be Remus. I know everyone puts him and Roman as the twins, but Virgil being the first one isn't logical at all, he's fight or flight. Janus could possibly be the first one, but I still believe that Remus fits the role more.
The second Alice. This one I had a hard time deciding between Logan and Janus. I initially thought this role fit Logan more, but ultimately decided that this one could both of them. The song speaks of the man "spreading evil slowly with his voice" This, seems much more like a something Janus would do- and nobody would think he's doing anything bad. This also seems like something Logan would do, whether intentionally or not, and Logan was a harder one to place.
The third Alice, I came to the conclusion that this one would either be Patton or Roman. Roman, although more knight like, seems as though he wouldn't be very fit to be a king (Or queen, as the song goes). Patton seems like he could be a natural leader, with the correct guidance of course. Patton also seems like he would more likely be "lost within a crazy dream" As the song put it. I chose Patton as this Alice.
The last Alice, or Alice's, the twins. There are only two Sides left, Roman and Virgil. Roman seems to fit the role as the "stubborn older sister" While Virgil would seem to fit "the clever younger brother" Role more. Virgil being the clever younger brother, because of him being 'fight or flight" Making him able to determine which situation requires what, and being anxiety would make him think through most if not all of the possible outcome of each situation. Roman being the stubborn older sister because of his stubborn nature.
This is just what I believe all the sides would be in this song. I took like 10-20 minutes thinking up the idea (not original I don't believe), and then another 25 ish minutes typing and figuring it out which side would be which Alice and figuring out the evidence or reasonings.
I have so many thoughts and they all go to Tumblr