u/Mzuark

Imagine living next door to a group of people that don't age and can apparently live forever without having to worry about disease, mental impairment, or even getting fat. Whenever these guys do die, they're just factory reset and have the option to come back to life and hang out in paradise. Then when you ask if you can get some of that immortality, you're told a bunch of vague gibberish about it being a curse and that you're the lucky one.

Add onto that that at least one human did become immortal at some point through random chance because he got invited to sail West.

I've been thinking about it a lot recently. I know the moral lesson of Numenor is to not let pride and envy become your master, but the Elves just seem like they got a better deal overall than most humans. It's not even just immortality, they're more in-tune with nature and can manipulate natural forces without having to destroy them like we do.

https://preview.redd.it/wrmqcq3cpqhh1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=892fbb81bb48adb47c313d87606eb46451bd0324

• She puts herself in danger constantly, then gets mad at Peter for bailing her out.

• She resents him for being Spider-Man, not because he puts himself in danger, but because he takes all the attention away from her

• She always has these snide little comments and jabs that she throws at him. Sometimes it's just banter, but other times they just feel weirdly personal

• She outright has no respect for him. This goes with point 1 and getting herself into trouble, but also she just outright disobeys him when he asks her not to do something.

That's not even getting into how passive aggressive and tense all their interactions are. Yuri, Black Cat, and Silver Sable (who actively tries to kill him) all had better chemistry with Pete than his own love interest. Hmm, I wonder why they were all missing or had way less screentime in the sequel.

Can't have any competition for the emotionally abusive shrew now can we?

I've been replaying Elden Ring again (got 500 hours I think) and I'm having a blast. But as I move into the character storylines, I'm just reminded that I think they're some of the weakest we've seen from Fromsoft. The questlines themselves get a lot of shit for being a little...arcane and difficult to figure out without guides but I think a lot of them just end really poorly.

Blaidd: Dead

Alexander: Dead

Goldmask: Dead

Sellen: Horribly mutated

Melina: Dead

Bernhal: Dead

Blaidd and Melina are okay, because a major part of their storylines is fate and Blaidd especially cannot exist unless he fulfills his role. Something you've just taken from him. Alexander decides to challenge you to a fight, that's okay I guess. At least he goes out on his own terms. Sellen's just feels like they're trying to hit a quota because we don't even know who turned her into a graven school. You just come back one day and she's a fucking rock. Goldmask and Bernhal both just feel like afterthoughts, especially Goldmask since he just turns up dead for some reason. Fromsoft gets a big pass on this since they don't exactly make story heavy games but they're worse than Game of Thrones with the "Death = Good Writing" shit.

This all leads me to Millicent. Oh Millicent, dear Milly, born a wee little toxic baby and perfect clone of Malenia. Her story is one of my favorites because she's a traveling NPC and you meet her randomly because you're both ultimately heading to an endgame area. But then, literally 10 feet away from the boss door to Malenia, she decides that she's had enough of being alive and wants to pull out the needle that's keeping her horrible space disease from coming back. Now she says that she doesn't like what she's turning into but that just doesn't feel like enough of a justification to throw away your life. Moreover, we're robbed of an interaction between Malenia and her little rot baby, which would probably have been good since Malenia is a surprisingly layered character despite only having 4 lines of dialogue. You want to talk about unfinished, you want to talk about cut content. That storyline is it. Unlike Melina, you don't even get more breadcrumbs later in SOTE since Malenia and the Haligtree are nonentities in that DLC.

I'm reminded of Lucatiel in more ways than one, espcially since Lucatiel was also a few feet from her goal before she bowed out of the story. But her quest felt more conclusive since you knew exactly what was happening to her and the good ending is that if you had summoned her those 4 times that she's not going hollow just yet. Millicent doesn't get that, you're just forced into a bad ending out of nowhere. Is it that it's a bad ending that bothers me? No, it just feels like a wasted opporunity. If, for example, Milly died during the boss fight and then we see her one last time after. Or even that her needle gave you some kind of actual gameplay advantage against Malenia in some way, that would feel more thematic or earned.

I don't dislike Meli, I think she's a cool character but I feel that her narrative purpose is that she's a deconstruction of the Merlin archetype. She's Stannis' wizard advisor who has almost consistently given him bad advice.

With that in mind, it's weird seeing people postulate on her visions with any kind of sincerity. Everything she says has only been true from a certain POV. Now the show leaned into her being partially wrong and used that for character development but obviously TWOW will probably go a different way.

This is going to be less of a rant and more of semi-coherent stream of conciousness.

You know happy endings? When the hero wins, the villain is defeated, and peace is restored to the land, at least until the sequel? Every story can't have a happy ending, or at least shouldn't have an ending that goes against the tone that was set. Should something ever have a bad ending? Sure if you can make it feel satisfying.

A good example of a bad ending is The Mist. The heroes have escaped the store now controlled by a cult and are driving out into the unknown, hoping to escape. In the movie, the main character mercy kills his group to spare them from the monsters, only to find that the military was seconds away from rescuing him. So the world is saved but it feels like a loss.

A bad example of a bad ending is Repo Men, because the entire second half of the film did not happen. You feel cheated at the end because literally nothing has been accomplished. That's not satisfying. I once heard it described that the story of a hero is the downfall of the villain and as obvious as that might sound, I thought it was profound. If the antagonist of a story wins at the end and suffers no real lasting consequences, then the story is incomplete, it needs another hero. If the hero dies, that's perfectly fine a lot of stories do that, but if the hero fails then that's just abominable, it's the antithesis of a narrative. Even removing an antagonist, a story should end with a conflict being solved. It can't just stop or else it's incomplete. Actual human reality works like that, you may die in a war but the war will eventually end with someone who considers themselves to be good claiming victory.

So many stories end on "Happily ever after" not because they're immature or simple, but because it's just the natural conclusion. They get to the point.

Kagurabachi is actually quite good, you know it is because you very rarely see a rant about it on this find subreddit. But I've decided to rock the boat and talk about something that has been bothering me for years.

That something is the character of Hiyuki Kagari. We meet Hiyuki fairly early into the story, like right after Sojo has been dealt with. She's presented as one of the strongest fighters the Kamunambi have and they want her to apprehend Chihiro. So they have a fight and it's established that her flame bone power is pretty potent. We see glimpses of that over the next couple arcs but we never really get that moment where it really feels like she's a big deal. What I'm saying is that Hiyuki has not really shown why we should be so impressed by her, which is fine. It's still early in the story I suppose. But then she sits out the Kamunabi Raid, which is clearly the most significant part of the KGB. Contrary to the memes, she's not literally sitting it out, she's udner orders to protect anothr sword bearer, but that's just it: When your hero group is keeping it's big gun away from the action, it feels less like they're a big gun and more like they're a backup plan at best and a liability at worst. Hiyuki's been getting a lot of glaze in the most recent chapters because it turns out she's a once in a millenia prodigy from a big wig sorcerer family and might actually be the most significant person in the story who doesn't have a sword.

I hate to do this, but I must reference Gojo seeing as how she's the closest analogue in the story and, let's face it, JJK and Kagura have the same readerbase. Gojo fought Jogo in chapter 13 of the manga, and before that he had fought Sukuna and embarassed both of them. Gojo's powers and why exactly he's considered the strongest and most capable sorcerer are established right out the gate, so now the story has the freedom to work around that and show the consequences of such a person existing. Hiyuki does not have this. She had a play fight with the main character in chapter 20 and then very briefly got to smack around some goons and aura farm on Yura during the Rakuzaichi, but otherwise she's just kinda there. The narrative is telling me she's important but not showing how.

I've always felt like the problem with Kagari is that she feels like the main character of a totally different story whose making cameos in this one. I think she's too overpowering a presence to share the spotlight with. She's apparently too strong to be apart of the plot and has to be written in absence to maintain drama but she's also a key figure that keeps getting her can kicked down the road. "Oh next arc she'll be there" "Next part will be very important for Hiyuki" "She's going to be important at the end."

On the bright side, the manga isn't ending anytime soon so one day we'll all look back at times like this and laugh...I hope.