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lj-writes:

Season 2 of The Good Place was AWESOME

Spoilers up to the S2 finale so if you ain’t seen it fork off

I will cry from now until the end of time over Chidi and Eleanor’s kiss ohhhh my sweet babes and they were broken up again the moment Chidi returned her feelings 😭 But then they meet again but they DON’T KNOW idk how to feel 😍😰❤️😢 Like TALK about star-crossed omg omg

I’ve been looking at my own tgp tag and my initial thought that the system is absolute shirt turns out to be validated–by a demon, yes, but still someone who has a solid basis in ethics and knows the system inside out, just like he knew his torture victims.

I like how the story doesn’t gloss over the difficulties of living an ethical life and how thankless it can be. Sure, our quartet worked their way toward being better people in the afterlife–where, despite being in literal Hell, they didn’t face money or housing pressures, weren’t dealing with too many other terrible people, and, as the Judge pointed out, didn’t know about life after death. It was realistic and sympathetic to see Eleanor backslide, and heartening to see her do what she did hundreds of times before: Find Chidi.

Season 3 hasn’t updated yet and Korean Netflix is late in updating as usual, so we’ve decided to ration ourselves on the newest episodes. It’s good to be reasonably caught up, and I can’t wait for more!

I can’t believe I never thought to put a wildfire in my WIP when literally all my characters are dragons that live near enormous forests

jewishcomeradebot:

lj-writes:

The flying fire hazards! On the flip side, periodically burning underbrush and strategically setting contained fires to deprive the main conflagration of fuel are valid firefighting tools, too. These could be interesting ways for dragons to fight fire with fire, or to use forest fires as proxy wars with grounded populations caught in the middle.

I just had a stray though. How would dragons and dragon fire – including the hazard of wildfire – affect the local ecology? Like even in our own world there are plants that can only procreate if there’s wildfires, the shells of their seeds are too thick and hard to crack naturally and need to be exposed to the intense heat from a wildfire to crack open and plant themselves. Plus the ashes from a wildfire is actually an excellent fertilizer.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, I’ve just never really seen touched upon how dragons or any other kind of magical beasty might have an impact on their environment and how plants and animals might have evolved along side them due to these effect. Like, do dragons have birds who do their scale and skin maintenance for them like some large mammals on earth?

Omg that’s awesome! Plants that only sprout after dragonfire, called dragonflowers. Heat resistant birds eating bugs and detritus off the dragons’ scales and teeth, with the dragon’s mouth wide open for the latter procedure and the birds flitting in and out without fear. A hedge witch diagnosing an area’s ecology and determining that what they need is a resident dragon–too much underbrush that needs clearing, too few birds that depend on dragons to clean and are also adept pest eaters and pollinators. They haven’t had a dragon since that blundering hero (the mayor’s great-grandmother, who afterward settled down with a local girl) killed the local dragon. It falls to the mayor’s daughter to go find one for the town.

The Good Place spoilers up to S2E06

So I’m very happy that the plot is currently following what I saw as the most viable and interesting path, bettering the protagonists rather than submitting them to eternal torment. I did not expect Michael to be included in the package in their little asylum plan, however, and watching him trying to grasp ethics is both hilarious and moving. My husband thinks Michael is the protagonist of Season 2 where Eleanor was the protagonist of Season 1, and so far the season seems to validate him. If that’s the schema of these seasons I wonder who’d be the protagonist in Season 3. I hope it’s Chidi, in conjunction with real-time (and not surreptitiously videotaped by a creepy coke addict) Eleanor/Chidi. Theirs is one of the most endearing slow burns I’ve seen in a while, and they are both hilarious and heartwarming together.

I loved the idea of Tahani/Jianyu from the first, too, and Tahani/Jason makes even more sense in a weird kind of way. Now let’s see if it actually lasts. I’m still 50/50 on Jason finding out he was married to Janet and going back to her, but I hope he and Tahani last because they are so different and yet get along so well together. While both my husband and I swore out loud when Jason proposed, I can also understand him here. He’s had so little stability in his life and people to hold onto, so I can see why he would make an impulsive proposal when he sees a chance at that. And I don’t think it’s technically bigamy? My very own Florida Man heartthrob, I just want him to be happy. He’s my favorite bro character since Josh Chan from Crazy Ex Girlfriend, and the character is getting a whole lot more respect than Josh which is great.

On to more cerebral matters, I not only respect Michael’s thinking out of the box, I think his idea inevitably sprouted the seeds of reformation over punishment. (God, those Criminal Law and Criminal Policy classes from 20 years ago…) His method was tailored specifically to the prisoners’ lives, and the psychological torture forced them to reflect back on their vanities, hypocricies, and hurtful actions in life more effectively than butt spiders ever did. The nature of the punishment also gave the prisoners, especially Eleanor, something to aspire to–the vision of heaven, and also her friends imperfect as they may be. That’s way more clever and meaningful than an eternity of sadistic, gleeful torture. It may not have been Michael’s original intent to induce self-reflection and growth, but that was the result precisely because he devised a better punishment than the way Hell had been doing things.

My current theory is that this is exactly what the hitherto-unseen denizens of The Good Place intended. I think the endgame of the angels, gods, bodhisavattas, administrators or whatnot that are in charge TGP is for everyone to learn to be better and come to Paradise, and Michael’s scheme is just the foot in the door they needed and wanted. I think they wanted him to take a Good Place Janet, too, to build a more convincing Good Place neighborhood and for him to learn the value of selfless service and friendship.

One twist I’d love is if Michael is actually the origin story of the Archangel Michael. I mean that’s who I thought he was back when I thought he was an angel, and what’s a little thing like sequential time to transcendent beings?