ExtraPenguin

In my opinion, the perfect comedy protagonist is someone who's unsympathetic enough that you don't feel too bad laughing at them, but sympathetic enough that a happy/okay ending is satisfying. If you make someone too sympathetic, you won't get the "lol" reaction from the audience when shit happens to them; if you make them too unsympathetic, your audience will be left :/ by a regular comedy arc with a happy ending. (Black comedy or other more toothy subgenres can have less sympathetic protagonists. In general, the more bad stuff you expect people to laugh at, the less sympathetic/heroic your protagonist must be.)

On average, this rounds to a sympathetic villain, with bonus points if there's something larger than life about the characterization. In Star Wars land, this is Maul – he's done enough bad stuff of his own volition you don't feel too bad laughing at him, yet he's enough of a victim of circumstance that a happy ending is satisfying (unlike for, say, Palpatine). TCW-era and beyond Anakin also works.

I came across some complaints about a trend in fic tagged as Anakin/Consequences where Anakin gets punished for his misdeeds by all his friends kicking him to the curb in an OOC fashion and started thinking about fics where Anakin faced actual, constructive consequences that include some restitution to the Tuskens. There's a lot of fic where his Fall is averted by a time-traveling Obi-Wan determined to do right by him this time, or in general someone else saving him, with a few fics where he himself wises up and reforms himself (mandatory plug for In Fire here), but I don't think I've ever come across a fic involving restitution to the Tuskens in the wild. I mean, I wrote one (though the Tuskens themselves are more of a side note), and one of the commenters outright said Also you’re the first author I’ve seen actually take a stab at having Anakin offer reparations to the Tusken people and then spell out what those reparations were, so kudos to you I at least thought that was really well done so I assume it's not a case of me being in a fic bubble of my own making wrt filtering and all the people writing justice for the Tuskens fic being, idk, Anidala OTPers.

(FTR, the official novelization states Anakin went personally lightsabering all the warriors/adult men, then came out of his murder fugue to discover he'd created a Force sandstorm or something that killed the women and children as well.) (ETA: This was the junior novelization. I have been lied to.)

Then I started thinking about what restitution the Tuskens could possibly be offered. Sing Dead the Dark (linked above) had Anakin vaccinate the Tuskens' banthas against a settler-brought virus. Parts 2b and 3 of the series of my current WIP of doom, All That is Solid Melts into Air, will have him negotiate some sort of peace treaty/land usage settlement so as to break the cycle of Tuskens and settlers killing each other out of vengeance. What else could he offer? Help rebuilding for the survivors of the clan he massacred, even if all the adults were at best complicit in torturing his mother to death? He might also go OTT in his personal penance out of guilt and, idk, shroud Tatooine in a perpetual sandstorm to get the Hutts and the moisture farmers and the like to evacuate the planet and leave it just to the Tuskens.

But the Tuskens also seem to have a completely different moral code to the rest of the GFFA. What if Anakin turns up on Tatooine, ready to make what amends he can and atone for his crimes, only for the general Tusken opinion to be "Oh, they were torturing your mother to death? Massacring them was 100% the right thing to do, gj on succeeding with it! Honestly you're an inspiration." Like, what does he do then? How does one make amends if the people one needs to make amends to see your severe crime as no big deal? At what point does wanting to make restitution become more about one's own comfort than morality and justice?

...because a bioengineering professor really should know how tech works.

Their childhood is easily explicable – Ma Gui and Fu You have some spaceship tech still there, with the salve and all, but that must've been restricted to the upper classes and Shen Wei and Ye Zun were poor homeless orphans struggling to survive; I don't think they'd ever have been in a position to access high-level tech as kids. Ye Zun's life went from bad to worse at the rebel camp, which doesn't seem to have tech, and Ma Gui and Fu You seem to have kept Shen Wei away from the spaceship tech, including the Hallows.

Fastforward 10k years. Ye Zun, sure, he's too busy seething in his pillar to really notice the proliferation of technology into Dixing (like the barkeep's sound system), especially if it was more recent, but Shen Wei? He lives on the surface, he's a professor of bioengineering, how the hell did he get his post if he can't submit funding applications online?

Thus, my theory: Shen Wei has a number of privacy/exposure-related concerns wrt mobile phones (they leave a log of their position) and went full on into the text-based hardcore security nut thing as camouflage of the real reason he doesn't want a mobile phone. He can't use Windows, but he has his own install of Tinhat Linux and runs everything 100% text-based. This means he's lacking a few of the things bystanders would class as tech knowledge signifiers (smartphone, ability to use Windows), so e.g. the SID all think he's a fossil from the time of the dinosaurs who can't use a single piece of technology. And he is a colossal troll who knows he can only correct this misconception once, so the SID will keep thinking he's just bad at tech ... until one day a case happens and he sits down at the suspicious Linux laptop and touch-types a terminal command without even looking at the references, ideally while in Envoy getup, and makes everyone's minds explode.

(Then Zhao Yunlan gives Shen Wei responsibility for configuring the wifi at home, and regrets it later when he realizes all the security measures Shen Wei slapped on.)

As collected in the rewatchalongs of 2019:
Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4, Episode 5
Episode 6, Episode 7, Episode 8, Episode 9, Episode 10
Episode 11, Episode 12, Episode 13, Episode 14, Episode 15
Episode 16, Episode 17, Episode 18, Episode 19, Episode 20
Episode 21, Episode 22, Episode 23, Episode 24, Episode 25
Episode 26, Episode 27, Episode 28, Episode 29, Episode 30
Episode 31, Episode 32, Episode 33, Episode 34, Episode 35
Episode 36, Episode 37, Episode 38, Episode 39, Episode 40

On to the canon details!
( all the lists )

In the darkest hours of the night, I am more likely to lie awake in my bed than actually sleep. While this is bad for my alertness, I do get a lot of revelations about myself then. And when I say "myself", I mean "my fandom opinions".

A long time ago, there was a post, the comments of which touched upon what levels of sexual/romantic experience Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan might have. The fandom consensus is that Zhao Yunlan is experienced and Shen Wei isn't; a few commenters discussed the opposite case and expressed their love for the concept. I found myself squicked by it, and now, months later, my brain has decided to tell me why!

( complaining about the above plus characterization )

I've done all of today's IRL todo list, time to talk about Ye Zun! Spoilers through the whole TV series. I shall not touch the novel, since Ye Zun doesn't exist there.

( Read more... )

First of all, the horses are actually pretty decently animated! They look like horses, trot like horses, and canter like horses. Sure, they do weird shit when left alone, but at least they look like horses, not camels (oh, Assassin's Creed II, what did you think you were doing?). One quibble: when you get the intro horse (pictured), Horsemaster Dennet says "take that chestnut for starters", whereas the horse is clearly bay. Bad Bioware, gettin horse colors all wrong!
The reason I call the horse "she" is that I have extensively looked at the model and not spotted a dick, thus making the horse a mare (yes geldings have dicks, it's the balls that get chopped off).
( Random musings on the horses' colors )
Second, I kind of resent that the party is only 1/3 female. You can travel with 3 party members, and get to choose from 9: 3 of each class (Warrior, Rogue, Mage). There is one female party member in each class. Sure, you have three advisors (Connections, Secrets, Forces) that you can send out on missions and 2 of them are female, but it's kind of a bummer that so few of your party are women.
How I'd Fix This: I'd make Blackwall female! Now, in his current iteration he's one of the Love Interests that's female only (along with Sera), so I'd upgrade Cullen (Forces advisor, limited to female human and elven Inquisitors) to female-only LI, not race-locked. (Then I'd make Solas bi, so instead of him only being available to female elven Inquisitors, he'd be available to all elven Inquisitors [given lore re: elves in Thedas and spoilers, I'd say it's fair that he's only really interested in elves].) (Or perhaps make Solas female?)

( Blackwall spoilers )

Though if you're looking for a Fantasy Murder Hobo Simulator RPG, Dragon Age: Inquisition is an amazing example, since women can wear reasonable armor (unless they're Vivienne, in which case they have boob windows) and do loads of badass stuff like the men. I like the whole mage thing, but would warn you away from the archer spec.

I have recently played through the Mass Effect trilogy. The first game was amazing, the second was eh, and the third one was a movie. Spoilers abound for the whole series.

One of the first characters we're introduced to in Mass Effect 2 is Miranda Lawson. There are a lot of things wrong with her visual character design, as with all the non-Tali female squadmates in ME2, but I'll stick to talking about her character.

Miranda was designed by her father to be genetically smart, beautiful, and in all ways better than your average human. This is told to the player, not shown. In fact, nearly everything Miranda says is either irrelevant to the mission on hand or "Shepard, don't do (thing that has to be done to complete the mission)". The narrative actively undermines Miranda's competence at every step. As a result, she comes across as smug and incompetent. Miranda is the Cerberus character that is constantly wrong so that Shepard can be right.

For the purposes of characterization, it would be better to have Jacob being the character who says things like "I wouldn't take that krogan out of the tank, he might be dangerous. Your decision, though." It would establish Jacob as a cautious character (which is the vibe I got from him) and wouldn't undermine Miranda.

In Mass Effect 3, Miranda is largely absent, though you can talk to her and even meet her in person once. (Tip: talk to her about Kai Leng so she survives Sanctuary.) She's working to bring down her father, and comes across as much more likeable now that she doesn't have to constantly be wrong so that Shepard could be right.

On the whole "genetically engineered to be beautiful" thing, I just wished that Bioware had left that out. People's standards of beauty are varying, so people will probably be disappointed (or have their suspension of disbelief jarred) upon being told that Miranda's appearance is "perfect". I didn't find Miranda's facial features particularly appealing, and I'm sure others didn't as well. A better approach would have been to just remove all mentions of Miranda having a "perfect appearance" and just have her be genetically engineered to be smart, strong and capable.

First lines of the ten last fics I wrote, (order of descending recentness; newest at the top) then commentary.
Feel free to ask for DVD commentary on anything I've written in the comments.

( Here be stuff )

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